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The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy

GARY OSTERTAG

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1. Introduction
According to its dust jacket, the current volume1 is the second in a projected five-
volume series. The completed series is intended to supplant Soames’s two-volume
work, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (Soames 2003a, 2003b),
providing more comprehensive, detailed and sophisticated coverage of the topics
and figures there discussed (2014: xi). Volume 1: The Founding Giants (Soames
2014) covers Frege, early Moore and early Russell. Volume 2 is somewhat less
unified. Part 1, devoted to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Wittgenstein, 1922), is the-
matically continuous with the first volume. Parts 2 and 3 mark a cleaner break,
focusing, respectively, on the emergence of Logical Empiricism in the 1920s and
30s (with a chapter on the concurrent developments in logic) and on ethics in the
face of the empiricist criterion of meaning (the Moorean background covered in
Volume 1 looms large here).
Readers of the earlier work will be unsurprised to find that Soames’s approach to
the subject remains conservative. In general, but with some exceptions, the themes,
figures and works discussed are all familiar. Judging by this volume and its predeces-
sor in the series, someone looking for a reassessment of the overall narrative – un-
covering new lines of influence, incorporating related developments outside of
Germany and Great Britain (the volumes’ main geographical focus), introducing
a larger cast of characters – will come away disappointed. Still, the volumes provide
a valuable guide to the canonical themes and figures. And while they do not provide a
‘new narrative’, they do an exemplary job of clarifying and fleshing out the standard
view, providing painstaking and often illuminating reconstructions of central
arguments.2
In what follows, I will focus on Part 1, in particular the discussion of ‘The Single
Great Problem of the Tractatus: Propositions’. While this is in part due to limitations
of space, concentrating on an illustrative example better conveys the character of the
current volume than a detailed rehearsing of its several topics. In addition, the dis-
cussion relates directly to topics of current concern – indeed, topics to which Soames

1 The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy, Volume 2: A New Vision. By Scott Soames.

Princeton University Press, 2018. xiv + 424 pp.
2 The approach taken in these volumes is one of rational reconstruction, to use O’Neill’s
2007 terminology. On this method, the issues that are ‘philosophically central’ in the work
of a given period ‘will be those which most closely match our current philosophical
concerns, or which causally have led to our coming to have our current concerns’
(2007: 20). This contrasts with the method of historical reconstruction, which ‘take[s]
as central those issues deemed by the philosophers of the past to be the central ones’
(20). As O’Neill points out, the danger in adhering to the former model is that, ‘while it
can give us philosophical forebears, it frequently does so at the price of distorting the
views of past philosophers. It attempts to fit the complex reasoning of the past, which only
partly and haphazardly overlaps with current interests, into a contemporary mold’ (20).

Analysis Reviews Vol 79 | Number 3 | July 2019 | pp. 560–571 doi:10.1093/analys/anz044

 The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
 critical notices | 561

himself has made important contributions. I will return to general methodological

considerations at the end.

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2. The multiple-relation theory of judgement
For Soames, the ‘organizing premise [of the Tractatus] is Wittgenstein’s rejection of
the conception of propositions found in Frege, the early Russell and the early Moore,
and his replacement of that conception with a new analysis of meaningful, represen-
tational language’ (7). But as Soames notes in the earlier volume, by 1910 Russell
himself began questioning the idea he initially helped to promote – that judgement is a
relation between a thinker and a mind-independent entity – and developed an alter-
native approach, the multiple-relation theory of judgement. Moreover, while it is true
that Wittgenstein was writing in response to the Frege-Russell-Moore picture, his
more immediate target was the multiple-relation theory. Indeed, Soames discusses
this theory at length in the first volume, ‘with the aim of illuminating aspects of
[Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s] thought that would show up later in Russell’s 1918
lectures on logical atomism and in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’
(2014: 464). Coming to grips with the Tractatus thus requires that we briefly work
through the Russellian background.
While the idea that our thoughts have objective, sharable contents, contents whose
nature can be revealed to us by a process of analysis, was indeed revolutionary, it was
not without its difficulties. The process of analysis yields a set of propositional build-
ing blocks. But once a propositional whole is analysed, it becomes difficult to see how
to reconstitute it from its constituent blocks. As Russell noted, the suggestion that the
proposition that Brutus stabbed Caesar is composed out of Brutus, Caesar, and the
stabbing relation raises the question, what is it about the ‘propositional’ method of
combination, as applied to these elements, that somehow transforms them from a
mere sequence to a representational unity? While he raised the question, he had no
satisfactory response:
The verb, when used as a verb, embodies the unity of the proposition, and is
thus distinguishable from the verb considered as a term, though I do not know
how to give a clear account of the precise nature of the distinction. (1903: §54;
emphasis added)
Russell 1910 rejects the view espoused in the Principles, on which believing is a
relation between an agent and a proposition. Intuitively, what makes a belief false
should somehow involve an error on the part of the believer. But if the propositional
analysis is true, then what makes a belief false has nothing per se to do with the
believer or the state they are in. It is due to the fact that the proposition – the thing
believed – is false. As he writes:
Thus there will be in the world entities, not dependent upon the existence of
judgments, which can be described as objective falsehoods. This is in itself
almost incredible: we feel that there could be no falsehood if there were no
minds to make mistakes. (1910: 119; see also 1984: 109)
If we identify propositions with facts, then the concern is rather clear. On this as-
sumption, the proposition that Brutus stabbed Caesar is just the hanging together of
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Brutus and Caesar in a certain manner – indeed, in the manner in which they are in
fact related. But the proposition that Brutus stabbed Cassius is not a fact, since there
exists no hanging together of Brutus and Cassius in the relevant manner. But then we

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are without an account of false belief. It is, of course, open to us to introduce a realm
of fact-like entities whose constituents mysteriously hang together in some other way,
but now the illumination promised by the move to facts has been forfeited.
In addition to this concern, countenancing false propositions ‘has the further draw-
back that it leaves the difference between truth and falsehood quite inexplicable’
(1910: 119). If all propositions are by their nature unified, what explains the differ-
ence between true and false ones?
These considerations provide the motivation for the multiple-relation theory of
judgement (MRT). For Russell, to say that S believes that aRb is to say S bears a
multiple (i.e., many-placed) relation to its constituents.
When we judge that Charles I died on the scaffold, we have before us, not one
object, but several objects, namely, Charles I and dying and the scaffold.
Similarly, when we judge that Charles I died in his bed, we have before us
the objects Charles I, dying, and his bed. These objects are not fictions: they
are just as good as the objects of the true judgment. (1910: 120)

He concludes that ‘judgment is a relation of the mind to several other terms [i.e.,
individuals, properties, and relations]: when these other terms have inter se a ‘‘cor-
responding’’ relation, the judgment is true; when not, it is false’ (120). That is to say,
when these items have among themselves the relation that the judgement presents
them as having, the judgement is true; otherwise it is false.
As Russell was quick to point out, the fact that Othello, Desdemona, Iago and loves
are related in the relevant manner – allowing us to say that Othello believes that
Desdemona loves Iago – does not imply that Desdemona, Iago and loves are related
in the corresponding manner (i.e., such that Desdemona loves Iago). This allows us to
make sense of false judgements without any commitment to false things judged.
Russell’s preliminary statement of MRT’s account of truth and falsehood reads as
follows:
Every judgment is a relation of a mind to several objects, one of which is a
relation; the judgment is true when the relation which is one of the objects
relates the other objects, otherwise it is false. (1910: 120)
Notice that MRT doesn’t eschew facts: it just takes the fact of S’s believing that aRb to
be a complex that does not involve, as a constituent, a further fact – namely, that aRb.
This dispenses with the problem of unity: since there is no constituent corresponding
to the thing believed, the problem cannot arise.
For the same reason, MRT parts with the Principles view that truth and falsehood
apply primarily to propositions and only derivatively to facts. On MRT, these predicates
are properly applied only to judgements. As Russell writes in the Problems of Philosophy
(1912: 120): ‘if there were no beliefs there could be no falsehood, and no truth either . . . ’.
Although MRT no longer faces the unity problem, a related problem is not so easily
dispatched. This is the narrow direction problem (Stout 1911). We can’t say that
Othello’s believing that Desdemona loves Iago is simply the fact that Othello,
 critical notices | 563

Desdemona, Iago and loves are arranged thus-and-so, for the same entities in the same
arrangement also constitute Othello’s believing that Iago loves Desdemona.
Russell (1910: 123) was alert to this concern, writing that when loves occurs in the

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complex denoted by ‘S believes that a loves b’ it is with a certain sense, indicating the
‘direction’ of the relation, as proceeding from a to b. A complex  involving a, b, and
loves ‘corresponds’ to the judgement complex only if loves occurs in  with the same
sense it does in . With the notion of correspondence in hand, a more perspicuous
definition of truth and falsehood becomes available.
As he came to see, this solution fails. While a ‘relation relating’ may be said to
proceed from a to b, this orientation is absent when the relation occurs as an isolated
building block. That is, when we characterize the complex as one in which a, b and
loves are related in manner m – to consider the simplest case – the loves relation is, in
fact, ‘abstractly before the mind’; its directional sense is absent. (See Soames 2014:
471 et passim for relevant discussion.)
A related concern, voiced by Wittgenstein in his Notes on Logic, is how the MRT
can rule such out ‘cognitive Frankensteins’ (to borrow MacBride’s (2018) apt phrase)
as: ‘this table penholders the book’ (1979: 96; quoted in Soames 2014: 467). As
Wittgenstein notes, a theory of judgement must ‘make it impossible for me to
judge’ such a non-content (see also Wittgenstein 1922: 5.5422).
This problem is of course related to the narrow direction problem: one concerns pre-
cisely how the judgement relation works its magic, so that it avoids combining elements
that resist any natural unification. The other concerns how the judgement relation can
create distinct unities from one and the same collection of building blocks. As we shall
now see, Wittgenstein’s picture theory attempts to provide a solution to both problems.

3. The Tractarian conception of meaning and its problems

Soames sees his own recent work in dialectical opposition to contemporary theorists
of structured propositions in much the same way that he sees the Tractatus as directed
against the proposals of Frege, Russell and Moore. The following nicely captures how
he views the significance of that work:
The central insight behind Wittgenstein’s rejection of propositions as Frege,
Russell and Moore conceived them was that propositions are not abstract ob-
jects the representational nature of which, and truth conditions of, are inde-
pendent of their role in the cognitive lives of agents. Instead, he rightly took
their fundamental representational features to be, somehow, derived from
agents’ cognitions. This was an important advance. His starting point in articu-
lating this idea was also insightful. Focusing on certain human artifacts – pic-
tures, models, and sentences – he saw that our use of them to represent things as
bearing properties and standing in relations was crucial to understanding prop-
ositions as pieces of information. (49)
An important theme of Soames’s critique is that Wittgenstein fails to disentangle two
distinct notions – that of a sentence-as-used-to-predicate-F-of-a and that of the use of
a sentence to predicate F of a. The former describes a sentence-like entity that, by
design, has its representational properties absolutely and essentially. (As we will see,
Soames dismisses entities of this sort – of the x-in-relation-to-y variety – as ‘pseudo-
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entities’.) The latter is a type of ‘cognitive act’. While the use of a sentence to predicate
F of a has its truth conditions absolutely and essentially it is, unlike the sentence-as-
used, not ontologically suspect. The distinction will be clarified below.

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As indicated, Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning was developed in response
to the Frege-Russell-Moore approach. On Frege-Russell-Moore, sentences are
meaningful in virtue of bearing a certain relation to a meaning. In contrast,
Wittgenstein’s explanation of a sentence’s meaningfulness does not involve its bear-
ing a special relation to any such entity. Central to Wittgenstein’s approach is his
view that meaningful sentences, like the states of affairs they purport to represent,
are facts. Just as the fact that Brutus stabbed Caesar is the hanging together of
Brutus and Caesar in a particular manner, the (interpreted) sentence that Brutus
stabbed Caesar is also a fact – the hanging together of certain expressions in a
particular manner.3
For Wittgenstein, a picture ‘is a model of reality’ (2.12), presenting ‘the facts in
logical space’ (2.11). Soames provides a useful initial gloss of the analogy. Referring to
‘a courtroom model of a traffic accident in which toy cars stand for real cars’, he
writes:
In the model, putting the toy cars in a certain spatial arrangement represents
real cars as being in that arrangement. In this example the spatial properties and
relations of the model allow it to picture or represent spatial properties or
relations of the real cars. (25)
It is through sharing a form with a particular slice of reality that a picture is able to
depict it: ‘The picture can represent every reality whose form it has’ (2.171). Of
course, language doesn’t represent in quite the way pictures do. In particular, the
sequential arrangement of singular terms vis-à-vis a verb cannot, on its own, represent
how the entities referred to are arranged. Soames elaborates:
Still, Wittgenstein thought, an atomic sentence represents a nonlinguistic fact,
or state of affairs, only by sharing a common form with it. This common form
can’t always be a spatial one, as in the traffic model . . . Thus, he says that the
form shared by an atomic sentence and the state of affairs it represents must be
an abstract logical form. (26; note omitted; emphasis in text)
The central insight is that linguistic representation occurs due to a shared logical form
between language and reality. But this also raises the question, what does it mean for a
sentence to share a logical form with a portion of reality? Soames’s commentary here
is helpful:
When Wittgenstein says that an atomic sentence and an atomic fact share a
logical form, he means (i) that just as the atomic fact is a complex in which
objects stand in a relation R0, so the atomic sentence is a fact in which names
stand in a relation Rn, and (ii) that linguistic conventions stipulate which objects

3 The standard translation for Wittgenstein’s ‘Satz’ is ‘proposition’. This is slightly mislead-
ing, since he meant something closer to ‘interpreted sentence’. In the discussion below,
however, I’ll adhere to this practice, ensuring that the context makes clear that I am not
referring to propositions as traditionally conceived.
 critical notices | 565

are designated by which names, and which relation Ro the objects are repre-
sented as standing in by the use of Rn to relate the names. (27)

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It is in virtue of the manner in which ‘a’ and ‘b’ are related in ‘aR0b’ that the
sentence can represent a and b as being related with respect to R0. How does a
relational fact involving the relative positioning of words – a sentence – get to
represent a possible state of affairs? It does this in virtue of two sets of conventions,
first, those linking terms to their referents and, second, those linking (i) a verb to a
relation R and (ii) positions relative to that verb to a way of being related with
respect to R.
The Tractatus does not maintain that sentences on their own are the bearers of
truth conditions. (Whereas pictures can represent independently of particular conven-
tions, this is not true for sentences.) ‘Wittgenstein’s new approach took (something
like) meaningful sentences to be the primary bearers of truth and falsity, while insist-
ing that for a sentence to be meaningful was not for there to be anything that was its
meaning’ (34).
The mere fact that the words in ‘Brutus stabbed Caesar’ are arranged in the way
they are cannot, then, represent the possibility that Brutus stabbed Caesar. To use
Tractarian terminology, a propositional sign, a bare syntactic structure, does not
represent. Rather, the proposition represents, where a (Tractarian) proposition
is ‘the propositional sign in its projective relation to the world’ (3.12). In
Soames’s helpful gloss: ‘It is a sentence used ‘‘as a projection of a possible situ-
ation’’’ (28).
Soames, not unreasonably, takes the underlying point here to be that the represen-
tational vehicle – the Tractarian proposition – is a propositional sign ‘used in a certain
way’ – that is to say, used according to certain conventions. (This is in keeping with
Soames’s account of a shared logical form, quoted above.) Here is how he describes
the conventions pertaining to (1):
(1) Los Angeles is south of San Francisco.
Let the convention governing the relation R be that structures in which two
names stand in this [linguistic] relation are to represent the object designated by
the first name as being located to the south of the object designated by the
second. Given these conventions, one who uses (1) predicates being to the south
of San Francisco of Los Angeles, thereby representing the latter as being south
of the former. (33)
Again, the convention does not supply a relation per se, but a way of being related.
That is, it tells us how a and b must be positioned with respect to R. It is fundamental
to Wittgenstein’s view that the relation between the elements of a picture is not itself
an element of the picture. The convention that obtains with respect to a verb is thus
not quite like the convention obtaining between a term and its referent. Rather, the
convention that obtains here is one between the positioning of the terms relative to a
verb and the corresponding mutual ‘positioning’ of the referents.
This is made clear in 3.1432:
We must not say, ‘The complex sign ‘‘aRb’’ says ‘‘a stands in relation R to b’’’;
but we must say, ‘That ‘‘a’’ stands in a certain relation to ‘‘b’’ says that aRb’.
566 | critical notices

The point here is that a’s standing in R to b is conveyed by the syntactic relation
between the signs ‘a’ and ‘b’ as they occur in ‘aRb’. Crucially, it conveys this relational
fact without actually mentioning the relation itself.4

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We can thus see how the picture theory addresses both the unity problem and the
problem of cognitive Frankensteins. The above-mentioned insight – that the picture
represents a relational fact without having a relational constituent – enables us to
avoid the problem of unity. It is in virtue of the positioning of the elements in the
picture that the relation between their referents is expressed. No reference to a
relation need be added to the mix. This same feature explains how the threat of
unnatural contents fails to arise. That threat can only arise if we treat relations as
substantives. For if we do, then it at least becomes possible to ask: why can’t a non-
relation (a penholder) occupy the relation position in a proposition? Or, focusing
on MRT (the original object of Wittgenstein’s criticism): what rules out the exist-
ence of complexes in which such a non-relation is judged to hold of two
individuals?
Finally, the narrow direction problem disappears. On MRT, claims of the form ‘S
judges that aRb’ are eliminated in favour of claims of the form ‘S predicates R of a and
b’. Since there are two ways to predicate R of a and b, the analysis fails. The picture
theory encounters no such problem, since the position of the terms ‘a’ and ‘b’ relative
to a relational verb indicates not simply the relation they bear to one another but also
how they are related with respect to that relation.
Despite these apparent gains, Soames points out numerous ways in which the pic-
ture theory is inadequate: it fails to generalize in a natural way to truth functional
compounds (this it shares with MRT); it provides no account of that-clause reference;
and it is limited to linguistic representation – no account of belief is provided. But the
heart of Soames’s complaint is one that was referred to at the introduction of this
section, its failure to appreciate the distinction between S-as-used-to-predicate-F-of-a
and the use of S to predicate F of a.
As we have seen, Wittgenstein does not take the propositional sign to be meaning-
ful on its own. As Soames suggests, it is only relative to a convention of interpreting its
constituents that the sign has a meaning or truth condition. But this idea – of a
sentence relative to a use or convention – does not correspond to a recognizable
entity. We have moved away from the initial insight that Soames found revolutionary
in Wittgenstein’s approach – that of taking the bearers of meaning to be ‘human
artifacts’. Whatever might be said in its favour, a sentence relative to a use is not
such an artefact. If these, and not propositional signs, are to be the bearers of mean-
ing, then the theory’s promise of illumination starts to recede.
Of course, there is no obstacle to interpreting such artificial entities. ‘What those
who speak of S as used [relative to convention C] being true at w are really saying is
that when S is used [relative to C] it expresses a proposition that would be true were w
actual’ (52). But this hardly improves matters. What this shows is that if we shelve any
worries about what sort of illumination such pseudo-entities might offer, we are face-
to-face with the consequence that the notion of a meaningful sentence ‘presupposes an
antecedent conception of propositions’ (52). Thus Wittgenstein is committed to the
very entities his picture theory sought to avoid.

4 Here and in the preceding paragraph I am indebted to MacBride 2018, Chapter 9.

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4. The sentence-as-used versus the use of a sentence

A major theme of Soames’s discussion of the Tractatus is that Wittgenstein’s key

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insight – that we should attempt to make sense of meaning and representation in
terms of the use of human artefacts to represent, rather than appeal to entities that are
somehow intrinsically representational – was imperfectly realized.
As we have seen, the mere fact that certain terms are related thus-and-so in a
propositional sign is not sufficient for it to possess truth conditional content.
Precisely what more needs to be added is a delicate question. Much rests on what
to make of passages such as the following:
3.11 We use the sensibly perceptible sign (sound or written sign, etc.) of the
proposition as a projection of the possible state of affairs. The method of pro-
jection is the thinking of the sense of the proposition.
3.12 The sign through which we express the thought I call the propositional
sign. And the proposition is the propositional sign in its projective relation to
the world.
The idea here is that the Tractarian proposition cannot be identified with a purely
syntactic entity. The proposition is the sentence as it relates to objects and their actual
or potential arrangement. Thus Soames:
A proposition is a ‘propositional sign’, i.e., a sentence, ‘in its projective relation
to the world’. It is a sentence used ‘as a projection of a possible situation’. (28)
Soames continues:
To think of the sense of the proposition is to use the propositional sign in
accord with the conventions governing its names and the syntactic structure
in which they stand. These conventions determine what fact must exist if the
sentence, so used, is to be true. The language is obscure, but the idea isn’t;
linguistic conventions are somehow included in the proposition, qua meaning-
ful sentence, as what one must know to understand it. (29; emphasis added)
While the account suggested in 3.11 and 3.12 needs supplementation, it’s hard to
avoid the impression that the conventionalist idea emerges out of thin air. Yes, one
brings to bear some background knowledge on the propositional sign in order to
grasp the method of projection it encapsulates (i.e., its sense). But Wittgenstein no-
where says that this further knowledge is knowledge of linguistic conventions.
Moreover, as inevitable as it might seem to a contemporary reader, the suggestion
may well have been foreign to Wittgenstein. In addition, it is unclear why the require-
ments on grasping the sense of S are somehow also contained in S. Again, the sense of
S is the possibility it carves out in logical space – this is its projective relation to the
world. But why must the information required to decode this projective relation from
the propositional sign be somehow contained in the proposition itself?5

5 While I don’t think that in this particular case Soames is reading contemporary concerns
into Wittgenstein’s text (see the discussion of rational vs. historical reconstruction in
footnote 2), he is nonetheless guilty of viewing Wittgenstein’s specific proposal – and
the space of theoretical options available to him – through a contemporary lens.
568 | critical notices

It remains the case, however, that Wittgenstein’s remarks, on their own, fall short
of a complete proposal. In this respect, Soames’s attempt to work out a theory that is
Tractarian in spirit is useful, even if one has doubts about whether it captures

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Wittgenstein’s intentions. It is after all a question of genuine philosophical interest
how one might develop these remarks into a theoretical proposal – one that, if not
deriving from the remarks themselves, is at least consistent with them.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, the idea that truth bearers are sentences relative
to a convention won’t do the work it is required to do – even if we accept that there
are such entities.
Soames offers an alternative proposal, one that he claims coheres with
Wittgenstein’s anti-propositionalism while avoiding the pitfalls of the picture
theory. On this view, the bearers of truth and falsehood are not static entities but
‘cognitive acts’ of predication: ‘a particular type of use of a sentence to, e.g., predicate
a property or relation of an object or objects’.
Such a use is true at a world-state w if and only if, were the universe in state w,
things would be as the use represents them to be. What is the way the use of the
sentence represents things to be? If the use is to predicate being south of San
Francisco of Los Angeles, then the use represents Los Angeles as being south of
San Francisco. If the use is to predicate not being south of San Diego of Los
Angeles, then the use represents Los Angeles as not being south of San Diego. If
the use is to predicate being rational, if human of every object, then the use
represents every metaphysical simple as having that property (52–53).

As he adds, this idea avoids reference to conventions (or world states) and thus
avoids the crippling convention- or world-relativity of the alternative view.
It is, however, utterly unclear how this view handles the key desiderata that the
picture theory was intended to meet. While the approach is successful in explaining
the unity of the proposition – or, at least, how propositional elements combine to
form a representational whole – it comes up short in other respects.
First, the act-theoretic approach fares no better than the MRT in making sense of
the narrow direction problem. Predicating is south of of San Francisco and Los
Angeles can be done in two ways. Thus described, such an act cannot represent the
world as being in a particular state. It is therefore unclear how the act can be a
proposition (see further Ostertag 2013: 424–26).
One might argue, following Hanks 2011: 18, that I first predicate the relation, is
south of, of San Francisco, which act yields the property is south of San Francisco.
This, I can unequivocally predicate of Los Angeles, thus providing an act which pre-
sents the world as being such that Los Angeles is south of San Francisco. But the first
step not only sounds odd – how do I ‘predicate’ a binary relation of a single individ-
ual? – it ends up facing the same sort of difficulty we encountered when attempting to
predicate is south of of San Francisco and Los Angeles. There are two ways to predi-
cate the relation of San Francisco, yielding either the property of being south of San
Francisco or of being such that San Francisco is south of it.
In addition, the problem of cognitive Frankensteins remains unaddressed. This is a
version of what Collins 2018 refers to as ‘the wide direction problem’ (alluding to
Stout’s narrow direction problem). The problem here is: why are certain contents not
possible? With respect to Soames’s act-theoretic proposal, we can ask why predicating
 critical notices | 569

penholders of the table and book must produce nonsense. These were shortcomings
that Wittgenstein saw in MRT and sought to overcome – in particular, by eschewing
any reference to relations in his analysis. No attempt to develop Wittgenstein’s pro-

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posal into a viable theory can avoid these questions.

5. Conclusion
I have only scratched the surface of this volume. As I’ve indicated, Soames’s chief
concern is to develop and clarify a familiar picture. He avoids questions about his-
torical method and shows no interest in reinvestigating the boundaries dividing figures
like Frege, Russell and Moore on the one hand and (say) Husserl and Meinong on the
other. Yet, a reader might reasonably ask why certain themes and figures are chosen
over others. It is uncontroversial that analytic philosophy began with the work of
Frege, Russell and Moore and that the themes emanating from their early work set the
agenda for that specific approach (Soames 2014: xii). But this settles very little. It does
not tell us why Husserl or Meinong are excluded. They were both concerned with
topics that count as analytic by Soames’s criteria. Indeed, Husserl defended a view of
propositions that can be usefully compared with the MRT as well as Soames’s act-
theoretic approach (see Moltmann and Textor 2017: xv and Ch. 1).
There are also missed opportunities here. To name just two cases: during the period
covered by the volume, Russell’s student Dorothy Wrinch extended the MRT to
molecular propositions (Wrinch 1919) and Susanne Langer critiqued the Tractarian
account of propositional unity (Langer 1927). Wrinch’s paper appeared in Mind,
Langer’s in the Journal of Philosophy, neither of them obscure venues either then
or now. Incorporating the contributions of such figures into the debate would provide
a more inclusive cast of characters and, especially in the case of Wrinch, introduce
potentially useful strategies to address the limitations in Russell’s own approach. In
brief, Wrinch notes that the MRT treatment of ‘S judges that if Fa, then Gb’ cannot
take the form of a ternary relation among S, Fa, and Gb, since Fa and Gb are unified
and this is precisely what the MRT seeks to explain. Wrinch suggests that we take as
relata a ‘propositional’ (i.e., logical) form and an ‘evaluator’ – in effect, an assignment
of individuals and properties (F, G, a, b), to positions in the logical form (Wrinch
1919: 321). Thus – and simplifying greatly – ‘S judges that, if Fa, then Gb’ is true just
in case S bears a given relation to a conditional propositional form and an assignment
of values to variables in that form. Although the paper is avowedly technical (‘I shall
not attempt in this paper to give any answer to the question as to the truth of the
theory: I am only going to try to show how it might be made to work’ (1919: 319)), it
presents techniques that are well worth re-examining.
The idea that the history of philosophy concerns the writings of a pantheon of great
men – Soames’s ‘founding giants’ – is being superseded, at least among scholars of
early modern thought, by an alternative conception, one in which themes, not men,
dominate. This allows for a more nuanced understanding of the complicated devel-
opment of philosophical theories and, in addition, sheds light on the vital intellectual
connective tissue – minor figures and their writings – which the great man view
obscures. Soames’s approach is very much in the latter tradition. While this does
not diminish the value of the current volume or its predecessor, it needs to be said
that there are alternative, more historically accurate, approaches. These caveats aside,
570 | critical notices

the current volume is without question an important contribution to analytical phil-

osophy and its history and will be read with profit by students and scholars alike.6

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The Graduate Center, CUNY
New York, NY 10016–4309

Nassau Community College

Garden City, NY 11530–6793
gostertag@gc.cuny.edu

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6 Thanks to Ray Buchanan, Oliver Marshall, Christia Mercer and Consuelo Preti for helpful
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