Metaphysics, Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Language

In this chapter, the author offers a selective critical history in which he traces the difference between the tendency which Michael Dummett represents and the philosophers among whom Timothy Williamson is naturally placed to a difference in metaphysics which has much longer roots. He suggests that the ultimate source of the kind of role Dummett gives to thought is Hume's skeptical view of necessity, with its famous consequences for metaphysics. The philosophy of language is the key to the most fundamental philosophy. The author argues that the ordinary language tradition had its origins, at least, in anti-realism about modality, and continued throughout its history to take an attitude to philosophy in general, and metaphysics in particular, which is hard to justify without that anti-realism - even if it is characteristic of the philosophers in this tradition that they did not generally attempt to justify it.