From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Kant's pure intuition had a rough time in analysis. The rigorization of the calculus banished intuition from the notions of function, continuity, limit, infinitesimal, and all else that had elicited Berkeley's justified complaint. The arithmetization of analysis cornered the pure intuition of time into arithmetic, where Frege would soon deal it a death blow (Chapter 4). Mathematics was not just the theory of abstract magnitudes, numbers, functions, and infinitesimals, however. It was also the science of space, geometry, and here Kantians could rest assured that intuition would never be dethroned. Or so it seemed for a while.

During the nineteenth century, geometry was the battleground of two major epistemological wars. The first, the subject of this chapter, concerned the role of pure intuition in knowledge; the second, surveyed in Chapter 7, took it for granted that that role was nil and questioned the nature of geometric concepts.

The protocols of the Vienna circle sessions held in 1931 (RC 081-07, ASP) offer an image of conflicting attitudes toward Wittgenstein's thought, from Waismann's unswerving support to Neurath's thoughtless rejection. Carnap took the middle ground of critical interest, convinced that there were insights behind the confused message reaching him but unwilling to let the matter stand where Wittgenstein had left it.

One source of constant puzzlement was Wittgenstein's view that the best philosophy is meaningless and consists of certain strange things called “Erläuterungen” (clarifications).

It is natural to think that the meaning of ‘blue’ or of ‘the taste of a pineapple’ is an entity in the world with which we are sometimes acquainted, a color or a taste. For such cases it seems explanatory to say that to know a meaning is to be acquainted with what is meant. The same seems to apply also to proper names such as ‘Scott’; to know what is meant by them, in the “strictest” sense, is to be acquainted with those objects.

But this simple “museum” semantics does not readily extend to most other cases. A friendship and a promise are things that, in some sense, we can be witness to; but it no longer seems explanatory to say that to understand those expressions is to be acquainted with anything in particular. And what is it that we are acquainted with when after reading Jaeger's Paideia we have grasped the sense of that Greek notion? Indeed, the terms whose semantics are not plausibly explained through acquaintance are of both general and singular types.

When in his later years, recollecting his intellectual development, Carnap listed the major influences on his thought, the names he gave were those of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. But in 1920 he sent a very different list of names to Dingier. Kant, Riemann, Helmholtz, Mach, Avenarius, Poincaré, Natorp, Ostwald, Einstein, and Weyl were, he said, the people he was studying (Carnap's draft of a letter to Dingier, 20 September 1920, RC 028-12-11, ASP).

Carnap's Aufbau and Pseudoproblems display the first explicit statement of what seemed an unprecedented attitude concerning realism. Around 1930 Wittgenstein explained a related doctrine to audiences in Vienna and Cambridge. Under the pressure of these two authorities, the view became a characteristically Viennese product in that it was widely accepted in Vienna and widely regarded as absurd most everywhere else. Kaila was expressing a not uncommon reaction among the non-Viennese when he spoke of the “catastrophic results” of Carnap's philosophy on that particular issue and observed that Carnap's ideas, if correct, “are apt to deprive even empirical research of its élan” (“Logistic Neopositivism” [1930], p. 4). Planck had raised similar charges against Machian positivism in “The Unity of the Physical World-Picture,” and in the early 1930s he thought he was witnessing a revival of the attempt to deny the existence of the external world (“Positivismus und reale Aussenwelt”).

Shortly after Schlick moved to Vienna in 1922, he must have heard about a strange little book written by an obscure Viennese philosopher. The book was impenetrable, but it came with a remarkably favorable introduction by Russell, the philosopher who commanded more respect than anyone else among scientifically minded people. Hahn and Reidemeister were apparently the first to have been impressed by the logicomathematical doctrines of the Tractatus, and in 1926 it was decided that Schlick's circle should hold special sessions to discuss the book, sentence by sentence (see Menger, “Introduction,” p. xii; and Carnap, “Intellectual Autobiography,” p. 24).

It is easy to see why the Tractatus would have struck many scientifically minded Viennese as extraordinarily attractive.

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the semantic tradition took a turn toward ontology that would alienate those empiricists who, of course, wanted to avoid idealism, but not at the price of Platonism. A variety of issues were involved, all having to do with whether knowledge is independent of what is known: Are the objects of knowledge mindindependent? Is what we say about them mind-independent? Are their properties and relations mind-independent? These are very different questions, but the growing bias toward semantic monism tended to conflate them.

These questions elicited two separate developments widely regarded as the landmarks of a certain type of realism. The first centered around the notions of intentionality and denoting; the second around the rights and wrongs of holism. The links between these doctrines and what came to be known as “logical atomism” is the topic of the following two chapters.

The purpose of most people involved in these developments was to oppose the growing tide of German idealism and neo-Kantianism. Worthy as the project was, it was marred by an excessive reliance on psychologistic semantic categories and by a damaging confusion concerning the subject–predicate form. The former affected the semanticists' theory of empirical representation, leading to untold confusion via the so-called problem of our knowledge of the external world.

Non-complemental subordination

Subordination which requires either finite or verbal noun complementation was discussed in 11.1.2 and subordination involving agus ‘and’ in 11.1.8. Here other types of embedding processes are described. Inevitably matters of syntax and morphology intersect here as the embedding processes demand certain changes of mood, tense and aspect.

Relatives

Direct relatives

1. (1) D'imigh na daoine a bhí míshásta thar sáile (C)

2. ‘The people who were dissatisfied went abroad’

3. (2) Feicim an fear a bhí ag péinteáil na fuinneoige (C)

4. ‘I see the man who was painting the window’

Strictly speaking, a direct relative construction is where the subject [i.e. na daoine ‘the people’ in (1)] or object [i.e. an fear ‘the man’ in (2)] is explicitly represented by a noun phrase outside the embedded sentence or in other words when the relative clause functions as an attribute. However, the same construction is used (and traditionally referred to as a direct relative) following all fronting (see 10.3.5) and following agus/is ‘as’ (comparative), ná ‘than’, mar ‘as’. Furthermore, in the case of uair ‘hour, time’ and Erris an tan /tun/ ∼ /tən/ ‘when’, although we might expect an indirect relative [see 12.1.1(ii)], a direct relative is often (though not always) employed:

1. (3) Is i mBaile Átha Cliath atá sé

2. (lit. It is in Dublin that he is)

3. ‘He is in Dublin’

4. (4) Máire a bhí sásta

5. ‘It is Máire who was satisfied’

6. […]

Two verbs ‘to be’

There are in Irish two verbs ‘to be’: the copula is and the substantive verb tá; a distinction which bears some resemblance to, for example, Spanish (see Ó Máille 1912). Although this chapter is devoted to the copula, it will be necessary to describe some usages of the substantive verb, particularly where its intrusion on the copula system (see Ó Siadhail 1983) leads to variation among the dialects.

Forms of the copula

This account of the copula begins with a brief overview of the commonest forms and variants of the copula. Basically, it has two sets of forms: one which serves as a present or future and another which serves as a past or conditional. The past/conditional set is the more marked set in that it may not generally be deleted (see 10.4). The bracketed forms in Table 10.1 are used before vowels (or l or r following fh). In order not to complicate the table unnecessarily, the more marginal forms combining with cé ‘who’ and do ‘to’ and ó ‘from’ are omitted. An optional dob(a) (the past marker do + ba) rather than ba for certain Munster dialects has also not been included.

Although the forms in Table 10.1 for the most part occur in descriptions of Galway and Kerry dialects, this tabulation is somewhat idealized and neither reflects the multiplicity of forms which are recorded or offers a picture of the most frequently used forms in any given dialect.

General discussion

It cannot be said that these rules are the product of any particular grammatical function but they are, so to speak, simply ‘available’ for use in certain syntactic or semantic circumstances. This means that, on one level, these morphological rules resemble the phonological rules (see Part I) inasmuch as they are not directly connected with the syntax or with the semantics. In that sense, these rules might be regarded as phonological rules which have limited functions. Nevertheless, these morphological rules differ from the phonological ones in that they are not simply determined by the phonetic environment but are affected by grammatical and lexical considerations.

The general morphological rules are broadly similar in the various dialects, even though differences may occur in the way in which they are employed. They are discussed here under two main headings: firstly, initial mutations – those which affect the beginning of the first syllable – and secondly, final changes – those which affect word endings.

Initial mutations

General description

Initial mutations are shown in Table 6.1. There is obviously regularity in these phonetic changes. In the process of lenition plosives become continuants (the non-sonant dentals then become back sonants) and there is a loss of tension in laterals, vibrants and nasals. In the case of eclipsis, the rules involve nasalization of voiced plosives and voicing of voiceless consonants.

Many phonological rules discussed in Part I in effect alter the form of a syllable by increasing or decreasing it or by altering it in other ways, e.g.

1. (1) gorm ‘blue’ /gorm/ → /gorəm/

2. bóthar ‘road’ /boːhər/ → /boːr/ (Cf)

3. am ‘time’ /am/ → /aːm/ (→ /aːm/) (Cn)

It will be necessary to distinguish here between those phonological rules which are relatively superficial, applying often only in particular dialects, and those which are more fundamental and which affect the basic system.

Basic form of syllable

It is possible to predict certain relationships between particular vowels and their surrounding consonants and to note their distribution in disyllabic words (see Ó Siadhail and Wigger 1975:68-71); some such information will emerge in the discussion of the phonological rules concerning vowels.

A further contribution to the so-called ‘canonical form’ of the syllable is made by describing the permitted initial and final consonant clusters. The first consonant cluster in a word such as spleách ‘dependent’ gives us an example of the longest possible cluster in Irish. There is a maximum of three consonants in initial position (i.e. /s(′)/, /p(′)/, /I(′)/). The group at the end of a word such as bocht ‘poor’, which contains two consonants /x/ and /t/, illustrates the maximal cluster permitted in final positions.