When one reads Quine, or Carnap, or Wittgenstein one encounters virtually no references to literature, or, indeed, to the arts. Yet certain themes in literature have a striking resemblance to themes in analytical philosophy. Thus Carnap celebrates the conventional, the artificial, the planned; Wittgenstein the natural, the organic, the traditional (although Wittgenstein's celebration of the traditional has a distinctively modern quality; it is the traditional without any of the traditional premises that he wishes us to retain). A deep examination of the notion of convention is one of the great contributions of analytical philosophy. In this essay, I want to review that contribution. At the end, I shall return to the remark that themes in the discussion have echoed themes in literature, and permit myself to speculate on what that shows about philosophy itself.

The conventional versus the natural

The nature of logical and mathematical truth has been a problem for empiricism from the beginning. Hume's explanation of logical necessity, that it has to do with one idea ‘containing’ another, presupposed the atomistic and sensationalistic psychology which he helped to found. ‘All bachelors are unmarried’ is analytic (true in virtue of the relations among our ideas) because the idea of being unmarried is contained in the idea of a bachelor; but does this mean simply that my mental picture of a bachelor happens to be a picture of an unmarried person? Kant retained some of the flavor of Hume's verbal formulation while giving up the identification of ideas with mental pictures or anything like mental pictures.