Abstract
The following remarks have a personal character that I hope will be forgiven; its justification will lie in any light they might shed on Paul Ziff — and also in some small measure, in the tribute (and gratitude) that they are meant to express. Although presented from a single perspective — the one from which I see best — they give, I think, an objective account of certain important but under-appreciated aspects of a complex man. In this regard, I know that I speak for many.
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Notes
I believe that Hilary Putnam (and others) would corroborate the account that follows; but I have not sought that corroboration, leaving them free to disavow any portion with which they may disagree.
Bertrand Russell, “What is mind?”Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LV, No. I, pp. 5–12, 1958.
See especially his essay “The cult of `Common Usage”’, in Portraits from Memory, and Other Essays [London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1956], in which he gives his own five reasons for objecting to the philosophy practiced around him:
Because it is insincere;
Because it is capable of excusing ignorance of mathematics, physics, and neurology in those who have had only a classical education;
Because it is advanced by some in a tone of unctuous rectitude, as if opposition to it were a sin against democracy;
Because it makes philosophy trivial;
Because it makes almost inevitable the perpetuation among philosophers of the muddleheadedness they have taken over from common sense.“ (page 154). To be sure, these appear to be different from the objection cited in the text (which he covers under ”insincerity“). We also resonated quite strongly with his other points; and besides, who could pass up such an articulate ally over mere differences of style?
Small wonder (and this is not meant to diminish in the least Paul’s philosophical originality, only to give a small sense of his intellectual provenance): Paul had been cooked at Cornell, in the Malcolm/Black oven that was at that time England’s philosophical beachhead on the North American continent.
See my review of Semantic Analysis, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 193–4, for a brief account.
Recall that Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures, a cornerstone of the conceptual foundation of Ziff’s theory, although around “in the air” for a few years before, was published only in 1957. Ziff also acknowledged a large debt to Chomsky’s teacher, Zelig Harris. Of course, the Carnap of “Meaning and Synonymy in Natural Language” [Philosophical Studies, Vol. VI, No. 3, pp. 33–47, 1955], one of his replies to Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” [Philosophical Review, Vol. 60, pp. 20–43, 1951] was “politically correct” on the philosophical point, but insufficiently detailed and insufficiently grounded in contemporary linguistic theory to provide a credible foundation for empirical work on meaning (of course, it wasn’t taking on that challenge — but it was precisely the fact that Semantic Analysis was that made it seem so crucially “relevant”, at least to us).
Because it was at once careful and infuriating in its iconoclasm (“carefully infuriating” one is tempted to say), Semantic Analysis proved over the years to be, among other things, a wonderful tool for teaching graduate students how to read: It has engendered many a “refutation” of views not advanced in the text but “found” there by an impatient and inattentive reader.
For this fledgling, it was fascinating to watch the evolving interaction between Ziff and Putnam (who was then, and who will always remain, the dominant personal and philosophical influence in my own development — a fact that these remarks should not obscure), for each had much to learn from the other. From the start — and despite their many doctrinal differences — their interaction was characterized by a mutual respect that has endured their respective evolutions (something that need not be confused with an abiding respect for each others’ detailed views).
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Benacerraf, P. (1994). Paul Ziff, 1958–1960: A Reminiscence. In: Jamieson, D. (eds) Language, Mind, and Art. Synthese Library, vol 240. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8313-8_1
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