Cesare Cozzo

Professor Von Wright is a prominent analytical philosopher who has written about the very notion of analytical philosophy. Other analytical philosophers are present here and they have their ideas on this notion. As for me, I believe that it is not at all an obvious notion. Sometimes it seemed to me that analytical philosophy does not exist, or at least that there is no single common feature shared by all so-called analytical philosophers and only by them, though there are many family resemblances. Therefore I thought I might take the opportunity of this meeting in honour of Professor Von Wright and propose as one of our themes for discussion, precisely the question: “what is analytical philosophy?”. The natural start is Professor Von Wright’s description of analytical philosophy.

Alberto Coffa used the phrase "the Copernican turn in semantics" to denote a revolutionary transformation of philosophical views about the connection between the meanings of words and the acceptability of sentences and arguments containing those words. According to the new conception resulting from the Copernican turn, here called "the Copernican view", rules of use are constitutive of the meanings of words. This view has been linked with two doctrines: (A) the instances of meaning-constitutive rules are analytically and a priori true or valid; (B) to grasp a meaning is to accept its rules. The pros and cons of different versions of the Copernican view, ascribable to Wittgenstein, Carnap, Gentzen, Dummett, Prawitz, Boghossian and other authors, will be weighed. A new version will be proposed, which implies neither (A) nor (B).

This is an introduction to Michael Dummett’s philosophy. Unlike other books on Dummett, this work considers the historical development of his philosophical thought: 1) Dummett in Oxford in the Fifties; 2) the discovery of Frege and the context principle; 3) a critique of realism in 1959; 4) theories of meaning; 5) truth-conditional, realist theories of meaning; 6) justificationist theories of meaning; 7) philosophy of time; 8) philosophy, science and religion; 9) Chronology of life and work; 10) History of the reception of Dummett’s philosophy; 11) Bibliography.

The problem I address is: how are cogent inferences possible? In § 1 I distinguish three senses in which we say that one is “compelled” by an inference: automatic, seductive-rhetorical and epistemic compulsion. Cogency is epistemic compulsion: a cogent inference compels us to accept its conclusion, if we accept its premises and we aim at truth. In §§ 2–3 I argue that cogency is intelligible if we consider an inference as a compound linguistic act in which several component acts are related to one another by a commitment that the premises support the conclusion. Non-automatic inferences are primarily public acts in an intersubjective context. But cogency arises in special contexts described in § 4, epistemic contexts, where the participants care for truth, i.e. are intellectually virtuous. An inference is cogent in an epistemic context if it stands up to all the objections raised in the context. In § 5 I consider three different kinds of cogent inferences. In § 6 I argue that in all three cases cogency is fallible and propose a fallibilist variety of inferentialism. In § 7 I distinguish context of utterance and contexts of evaluation. Cogency is relative to epistemic contexts of evaluation. However, validity, i.e. stable cogency, is transcontextual.