(Robert) Paul Ziff (22 October 1920 in New York City – 9 January 2003 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina) was an American artist and philosopher specializing in semantics and aesthetics.
He returned to New York in 1945 after serving in the United States Coast Guard to study art and philosophy at Cornell University, receiving his BFA in January 1949, and his Ph.D in September 1951.
His marriages include Pauline Pitkorchemna Ziff of Endicott, NY 1948-1965; Rita Nolan 1965-1973; Judith Trafton of NYC 1973-1976; Loredana Simpson of Verona, Italy 1978-2003.
He moved to Reidel in the 1980s because their managing editor, Jaakko Hintikka, offered to accept two of his book-length manuscripts and publish them as consecutive volumes in the Synthese Library series.
This paper is reprinted in other places as well, notably William Elton's famous collection Aesthetics and Language, which put aestheticians on notice that the analytics had shown up to clean house.
As I put it in my review in Metaphilosophy, "lacking in both current linguistic theory and philosophy of language is any useful conception of how people talk".
Zeno Vendler said that "in spite of Ziff’s own modest assessment of the results, it still represents the most interesting, and most important, recent work on the problem of understanding speech".
The reviewer for Philosophia was discouraged "to find later elaborations of Grice’s theory (e.g., Schiffer’s) failing to respond to this essay originally published in 1967".
Two essays are about how natural languages differ from formal languages, and how one should view talk about the logical structure of English sentences, which was in vogue then, in large part because of the hoopla about Chomskyan deep structures and a new interest (à la Davidson, Montague, and Parsons) in event sentences and indirect discourse.
The most important chapters - "What Is Said", "There’s More To Seeing Than Meets the Eye", and "Something About Conceptual Schemes" - are about, in their various ways, how levels of abstraction are involved in understanding what people say, as with Ziff's famous example of someone saying that a cheetah can outrun a man.
As far back as graduate school, he was thinking about the reasons why a work of art is either good or bad, and so he was interested in determining what the phrase 'good painting' means.
And then all the way to "an informal introduction to and sketch of a rigorous semantic theory" that would be adequate for "determining a method and a means of evaluating and choosing between competing analyses of words and utterances".
It brought ideas from structural linguistics (even some from the new generative grammars) right into philosophers’ discussions of what this or that word means with the goal of actually coming to a conclusion that could be sensibly defended.
Paul Benacerraf pointed out how it was "the first systematic attempt to write on these questions", and Jerrold Katz called it "a pioneer work, in that it is the first to propose an empirically based theory of meaning to deal systematically with the various topics that are part of the subject of meaning, and to attempt to fit such a theory into the larger framework of structural linguistics".
In a recent survey of the past fifty years of philosophy, Hilary Putnam makes a point of mentioning how important Semantic Analysis was, and remarks that the "Ziffian image of meanings as a recursive system" became part of "all of our philosophical vocabularies" in the early 60s, along with Chomsky's ideas about recursive syntactic structures.
Putnam adds, in a footnote, all of today's graduate students should also realize that it was Ziff, and not Donald Davidson, who came up with the recursive idea in semantic analysis.
The book had two big topics, and Ziff wrote in a more traditionally sustained and explicit way about one of them, anti-art and its spin-off, anti-aesthetics.
Paul Ziff was one of the few philosophers in the past fifty years - you can count them on one hand - who had a name both inside and outside of aesthetics.
Gilbert Harman called it a "brilliant, difficult book", "rich with insights about the passive construction in English, reference, hypostasis, evidence, and many other subjects", as well as "marvelously written, philosophical poetry".
Other reviews used words like "rich", "provocative", "iconoclastic", "bold", "subtle, interesting, inventive and stylishly written", with "a fascinating line of anti-skeptical argument" from an author of "undoubted acumen and insight".
It did not have any of the "justified, true belief" analysis and the search for a fourth condition to patch it up, or talk about varieties of foundationalism, externalism or internalism, let alone the merits of naturalizing.
Indeed, Ziff never mentioned Gettier or most of the usual crowd then - say Goldman, Harman, Dretske, Pollock and Unger; a few pages are on Nozick.
The book is subtitled "An Appreciation of the Cow with the Subtile Nose", which refers to Jean Dubuffet’s painting in the Metropolitan Museum.
"The Cow on the Roof" was an invited symposium paper at the American Philosophical Association's Eastern Division, and came out in The Journal of Philosophy, along with comments by Kendall Walton and Guy Sircello.
"Art and Sociobiology" was in Mind in 1981, and was another first: viz., a serious philosopher taking a biological view of aesthetic practices and ideas such as appreciating and intrinsic value.
Ziff combined the sociobiology with his notion of "aspection" and person-act-entity-conditions approach from his early paper, "Reasons in Art Criticism".