Two Dogmas in Retrospect

Extract

In retrospecting ‘Two Dogmas’ I find myself overshooting the mark by twenty years. I think back to college days, 61 years ago. I majored in mathematics and was doing my honors reading in mathematical logic, a subject that had not yet penetrated the Oberlin curriculum. My new love, in the platonic sense, was Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica.

I was taken with the clear, clean incisiveness of its formulas. But this was not true of its long introduction to volume 1, nor of some of the explanatory patches of prose that were interspersed through the three volumes. In those pages and passages the distinction between sign and object, or use and mention, was badly blurred. Partly in consequence, there was vague recourse to intensional properties, or ideas, under the disarmingly technical name of propositional functions. These ill-conceived mentalistic notions paraded as the philosophical foundation for the clean-cut classes, truth functions, and quantification that would have been a far better starting point in their own right.