Michael Dummett | |
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 Dummett in 2004 | |
| Born | Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett (1925-06-27)27 June 1925 London, England |
| Died | 27 December 2011(2011-12-27) (aged 86) Oxford, England |
| Burial place | Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 7 |
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| Education | |
| Education | Christ Church, Oxford (1947–50;[1]B.A., 1950) |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
| Institutions | |
| Doctoral students | Peter Carruthers Eva Picardi Timothy Williamson Crispin Wright |
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Origins and context
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Sir Michael Anthony Eardley DummettFBA (/ˈdʌmɪt/; 27 June 1925 – 27 December 2011) was anEnglishacademic described as "among the most significant British philosophers of the last century and a leading campaigner for racial tolerance andequality."[3] He was, until 1992,Wykeham Professor of Logic at theUniversity of Oxford. He wrote on the history ofanalytic philosophy, notably as an interpreter ofFrege, and made original contributions particularly inthe philosophies of mathematics,logic,language andmetaphysics.
He was known for his work on truth and meaning and their implications to debates betweenrealism andanti-realism, a term he helped to popularize. Inmathematical logic, he developed anintermediate logic, a logical system intermediate betweenclassical logic andintuitionistic logic that had already been studied byKurt Gödel: theGödel–Dummett logic. Invoting theory, he devised theQuota Borda system of proportional voting, based on theBorda count, and conjectured theGibbard–Satterthwaite theorem together withRobin Farquharson; he also devised the condition ofproportionality for solid coalitions. Besides his main work inanalytic philosophy, he also wrote extensively on the history ofcard games, particularly ontarot card games.
He was married to the political activistAnn Dummett from 1951 until his death in 2011.
Born 27 June 1925 at his parents' house, 56,York Terrace,Marylebone, London, Dummett was the son of George Herbert Dummett (1880 – 12 November 1969), later of Shepherd's Cottage,Curridge, Berkshire, a silk merchant andrayon dealer, and Mabel Iris (1893–1980), daughter of the civil servant andconservationist SirSainthill Eardley-Wilmot (himself grandson of the politicianSir John Eardley-Wilmot, 1st Baronet).[4][5][6] He studied atSandroyd School inSurrey, atWinchester College as a scholar, and atChrist Church, Oxford, which awarded him a major scholarship in 1943. He was called up for military service that year and served until 1947, first as a private in theRoyal Artillery, then in theIntelligence Corps in India and Malaya. In 1950 he graduated with a first inPolitics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford and was elected a Prize Fellow ofAll Souls College, Oxford.[7][8]
Dummett was a research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford until 1979, and also Reader in Philosophy of Mathematics at Oxford University from 1962 to 1974. In 1979, he becameWykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, a post he held until retiring in 1992. During his term as Wykeham Professor, he held a Fellowship atNew College, Oxford. He has also held teaching posts atBirmingham University,UC Berkeley,Stanford University,Princeton University, andHarvard University. He won theRolf Schock prize in 1995,[9] and wasknighted in 1999. He was the 2010 winner of the Lauener Prize for an Outstanding Œuvre in Analytical Philosophy.[10]
During his career at Oxford, Dummett supervised many philosophers who went on to distinguished careers, includingPeter Carruthers,Adrian Moore,Ian Rumfitt, andCrispin Wright.
Dummett's work on the German philosopherFrege has been acclaimed. His first bookFrege: Philosophy of Language (1973), written over many years, is seen as a classic. It was instrumental in the rediscovery of Frege's work, and influenced a generation of British philosophers.
In his 1963 paper "Realism", he popularised a controversial approach to understanding the historical dispute betweenrealist and other non-realist philosophy such asidealism,nominalism,irrealism.[11] He classed all the latter asanti-realist and argued that the fundamental disagreement between realist and anti-realist was over the nature of truth.
For Dummett, realism is best understood assemantic realism, i.e. the view that every declarative sentence in one's language isbivalent (determinately true or false) andevidence-transcendent (independent of our means of coming to know which),[12][2] while anti-realism rejects this view in favour of a concept of knowable (or assertible) truth.[13] Historically, these debates had been understood as disagreements about whether a certain type of entity objectively exists or not. Thus we may speak of realism or anti-realism with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such asnatural numbers), moral categories, the material world, or even thought. The novelty of Dummett's approach consisted in seeing these disputes as at base analogous to the dispute betweenintuitionism andPlatonism in thephilosophy of mathematics.
Dummett espousedsemantic anti-realism, a position suggesting that truth cannot serve as the central notion in the theory of meaning and must be replaced byverifiability.[14] Semantic anti-realism is sometimes related tosemantic inferentialism.[15]
Dummett was politically active, through his work as a campaigner against racism. He let his philosophical career stall in order to influencecivil rights for minorities during what he saw as a crucial period of reform in the late 1960s. He also worked on thetheory of voting, which led to his introduction of theQuota Borda system.
Dummett drew heavily on his work in this area in writing his bookOn Immigration and Refugees, an account of what justice demands of states in relationship tomovement between states. Dummett, in that book, argues that the vast majority ofopposition to immigration has been founded on racism, and says that this has especially been so in the UK. In the book, Dummett argued in favour of open borders and mass migration, except when states were "under special threat" and could therefore refuse entry.
In 1954, in Germany, Dummett studied what had survived of Frege'sNachlass.[16][17] He later recounted how he had been deeply shocked to discover from diary fragments that the man he had "revered" as "an absolutely rational man" was, at the end of his life, a "virulent"anti-Semite of "extreme right-wing opinions".[18][16]
In 1955–1956, while inBerkeley, California, Dummett and his wife joined theNAACP. In June 1956 he metMartin Luther King Jr. while visiting San Francisco, and heard from him ofAlistair Cooke providing the British public with what King defined as "biased and hostile reports" of theCivil Rights Movement and specifically of theMontgomery bus boycott. Dummett travelled to Montgomery and wrote his own account. However,The Guardian refused to publish Dummett's article and his refutation of Cooke's version of the Montgomery events, even in a shortened account as a Letter to the Editor; theBBC, also refused to publish it.[19]
Dummett andRobin Farquharson published influential articles on the theory of voting, in particular conjecturing that deterministic voting rules with more than three issues faced endemicstrategic voting.[20] The Dummett–Farquharson conjecture was proved byAllan Gibbard,[21] a philosopher and former student ofKenneth J. Arrow andJohn Rawls, and by the economist Mark A. Satterthwaite.[22]
After the establishment of the Farquharson–Dummett conjecture by Gibbard and Satterthwaite, Dummett contributed three proofs of theGibbard–Satterthwaite theorem in a monograph on voting. He also wrote a shorter overview of the theory of voting, for the educated public.[citation needed]
Dummett was a scholar in the field ofcard-game history, with numerous books and articles to his credit. He was a founding member of theInternational Playing-Card Society, in whose journalThe Playing-Card he regularly published opinions, research and reviews of current literature on the subject; he was also a founder of theAccademia del Tarocchino Bolognese inBologna. His historical work on the use of the tarot pack incard games,The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City, attempted to establish that the invention of Tarot could be set in 15th-centuryItaly. He laid the foundation for most subsequent research on the game oftarot, including exhaustive accounts of the rules of all hitherto known forms of the game. Sylvia Mann goes as far as to say thatThe Game of Tarot "is the most important book on cards ever written."[23]
Dummett's analysis of the historical evidence suggested thatfortune-telling andoccult interpretations were unknown before the 18th century. During most of their recorded history, he wrote, Tarot cards were used to play a popular trick-taking game which is still enjoyed in much of Europe. Dummett showed that the middle of the 18th century saw a great development in the game of Tarot, including a modernized deck with French suit-signs, and without the medieval allegories that interest occultists. This coincided with a growth in Tarot's popularity. "The hundred years between about 1730 and 1830 were the heyday of the game of Tarot; it was played not only innorthern Italy, easternFrance,Switzerland,Germany andAustro-Hungary, but also inBelgium, theNetherlands,Denmark,Sweden and evenRussia. Not only was it, in these areas, a famous game with many devotees: it was also, during that period, more truly an international game than it had ever been before or than it has ever been since...."[24]
In 1987, Dummett collaborated with Giordano Berti and Andrea Vitali on the project of a great Tarot exhibition atCastello Estense inFerrara. On that occasion he wrote some texts for the catalogue of the exhibition.[25]
In 1944, Dummett was received into theRoman Catholic Church and remained a practising Catholic. Throughout his career, Dummett published articles on various issues then facing the Catholic Church, mainly in the EnglishDominican journalNew Blackfriars. Dummett published an essay in the bulletin of the Adoremus Society on the subject of liturgy,[26] and a philosophical essay defending the intelligibility of the Catholic Church's teaching on theEucharist.[27]
In October 1987, one of his contributions toNew Blackfriars sparked controversy by seemingly attacking currents of Catholic theology that appeared to him to diverge from orthodox Catholicism and "imply that, from the very earliest times, the Catholic Church, claiming to have a mission from God to safeguard divinely revealed truth, has taught and insisted on the acceptance of falsehoods."[28] Dummett argued that "the divergence which now obtains between what the Catholic Church purports to believe and what large or important sections of it in fact believe ought, in my view, to be tolerated no longer: not if there is to be a rationale for belonging to that Church; not if there is to be any hope of reunion with the other half of Christendom; not if the Catholic Church is not to be a laughing-stock in the eyes of the world."[28] A debate on these remarks continued for months, with the theologianNicholas Lash[29] and the historianEamon Duffy among the contributors.[30]
Dummett retired in 1992 and was knighted in 1999 for "services to philosophy and to racial justice". He received theLakatos Award in thephilosophy of science in 1994 and theRolf Schock Prize for logic and philosophy in 1995. He was elected Fellow of theBritish Academy in 1968, resigned in 1984, and was re-elected in 1995.[6]
Dummett died on 27 December 2011 aged 86, leaving his wifeAnn (married in 1951, died in 2012) and three sons and two daughters. A son and a daughter predeceased them.[31] He is buried atWolvercote Cemetery, Oxford.[6]
Notable articles and exhibition catalogues include "Tarot Triumphant: Tracing the Tarot" inFMR, (Franco Maria Ricci International), January/February 1985; Pattern Sheets published by theInternational Playing Card Society; with Giordano Berti and Andrea Vitali, the catalogueTarocchi: Gioco e magia alla Corte degli Estensi (Bologna, Nuova Alfa Editorale, 1987).
For more complete publication details see the "Bibliography of the Writings of Michael Dummett" inR. E. Auxier and L. E. Hahn (eds.)The Philosophy of Michael Dummett (2007).
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