(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.
Life and career He was born in New York City in 1920 to William Ziff and Bessie Goldstein Ziff. His brother Morton was born three years earlier. He studied art at Columbia University and New York's Master Institute of Arts in 1937–1939, and was a practicing artist, partially subsidized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation until 1942. 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.
He spent two years at the University of Michigan, as a research assistant in the Language and Symbolism Project, and as an Instructor, before taking a post as instructor at Harvard University, becoming an Assistant Professor, in 1954. He remained at Harvard until 1959, taking two periods of leave, to study at Oxford University in 1955, and to teach at Princeton University in 1958.
From 1959 until 1964 he was assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Between 1962 and 1963 he studied in Rome on a Guggenheim Fellowship.
From 1964 to 1968 he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and from 1968 to 1970 was a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago before settling at the University of North Carolina as William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor from 1970 until 1988 (professor emeritus until 2003.)
The "Robert Paul Ziff Distinguished Professorship" was established at University of North Carolina in 1994. He died in 2003 of natural causes.
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. His surviving children are Matthew D. Ziff, distinguished teacher of interior architecture, retired from Ohio University, father of Benjamin Ziff, councilman in Athens, Ohio; Georgina S.A. Ziff, an English professor at California State University and nearby community colleges, mother of Samuel Peter Ovenden and Matthew Ovenden; Andrew P. Ziff, a successful real estate developer in New York City father of Brianna, Isabelle, and Serena Ziff.
Philosophical and other works
Articles Paul Ziff started publishing in graduate school in 1949, doing book reviews for The Philosophical Review. He kept on publishing for 41 years, his last article appearing in 1990 in a special issue of the European journal Dialectica. No doubt he was asked to contribute a paper to that issue since it was dedicated - both the issue and his paper - to the memory of his former teacher at Cornell, Max Black.
Ziff published six books, 38 articles, five discussions, and 14 reviews. His first four books were published by Cornell University Press; his last two were published by Reidel. When he published with Cornell, it was one of the best university presses for philosophy. 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.
Ziff's articles appeared most often in The Philosophical Review, Mind, The Journal of Philosophy, Analysis, and Foundations of Language (which became Studies in Language sometime in the late 70s). He was invited to contribute to various conference proceedings and collections, and fifteen of his articles and discussions appeared in these - some of them high-profile collections in their area at the time, including Katz and Fodor's The Structure of Language (1964) and Harman and Davidson’s Semantics of Natural Language (1972). Most of Ziff’s articles (29) show up in his books. One that did not, "About Proper Names" from Mind, was selected as one of the best philosophy articles of 1977 and reprinted in The Philosopher’s Annual. Ziff published mainly in the areas of philosophy of language, philosophy of art, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, but also had articles in philosophy of religion and ethics. He even had three about Wittgenstein’s views, and one about his own take on philosophy.
"Art and the 'Object of Art'" was originally in Mind in 1951, and takes apart the claim, made by prominent philosophers in the 1930s-1950s, that "the painting is not the work of art." 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. "The Task of Defining a Work of Art" has been anthologized at least three times. It is the most sophisticated of the "you can’t define art" papers in the apply-Wittgenstein/ordinary language analysis years. "Reasons in Art Criticism" was in the two best aesthetics anthologies of the 60s, the ones edited by Kennick and by Margolis. It was also in the Bobbs-Merrill Reprint Series in Philosophy, which was a selection of the most talked about articles in the 50s and 60s. George Dickie devoted a chapter of his book Evaluating Art to Ziff's view about reasons why a work of art is good, and, 30 years after it was first published, he said it "remains one of the few truly stimulating pieces by present-day philosophers on the theory of art evaluation."
Many students know Paul Ziff from the philosophy of mind papers in Philosophic Turnings. "The Feelings of Robots", in which Ziff argued with his typical panache that robots could not have feelings, has attracted the most attention: viz., replies, reprintings, and inclusion on course reading lists. It went from Analysis in 1959, along with replies by Jack and Ninian Smart, to Alan Ross Anderson’s volume Minds and Machines in 1964, which was part of Prentice Hall’s Contemporary Perspectives in Philosophy Series, and the first "can machines think" collection. People who have written on this topic, such as Keith Gunderson, invariably bring up Ziff's short paper. It eventually showed up in introductory anthologies as well.
"About Behaviorism", another Analysis paper, discusses two bad arguments against philosophical behaviorism in order to show the difference between, as Vere Chappell put it, crude and refined behaviorism. Chappell included this paper in his anthology The Philosophy of Mind, which came out in 1962 and was the first collection of readings on that area of philosophy. "The Simplicity of Other Minds" comes from The Journal of Philosophy. It was originally an invited symposium paper at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting in 1965. The commentators were Sydney Shoemaker and Alvin Plantinga. Ziff went at the other minds problem by taking it as a question about picking the best explanatory hypothesis. According to Hilary Putnam, Ziff was extending the "empirical realist reply to skepticism." In his 21-page paper about Ziff's view, "Other Minds" (1972), Putnam discussed both Ziff's argument and his commentators’ criticisms, and said that he and Ziff were in "essential agreement" on how to solve the other minds problem, and in "common disagreement with the modish treatment in terms of" criteria, analogies, and language learning.
"Understanding Understanding" came out in 1972, Ziff's second year at UNC. It has eight papers, all of them concerned with what had now become his main topic in the philosophy of language: viz., "how one understands what is said." He had, to some extent, written about this in his previous book, where three essays took up how to handle deviant, ungrammatical, and ambiguous utterances. Ziff was, before cognitive science came around the bend, virtually the only one working on how people really speak. Claims about truth conditions, reference, and speech acts were the center of attention back then. 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". "Understanding Understanding" began to develop such a conception, factor by relevant factor. 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".
Two essays are criticisms, taking on Grice’s original attempt to connect what a sentence means and what a speaker intends, and then Quine’s concept of stimulus meaning. The former was first in Analysis, the latter in The Philosophical Review. A. J. Ayer thought the paper on Grice was one of the better critical pieces he had read in a number of years. 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. In "Understanding", Ziff presented an analytical data processing-systematic synthesis view of understanding what people say. 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. Ziff was the first philosopher to appreciate this phenomenon.
Books Semantic Analysis came out in 1960, and by 1967 it had gone through five printings in hardbound and was also appearing in paperback. The book goes back to Ziff's work in aesthetics. 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. From there, he went on to determine what the word 'good' means in English: viz., "answering to certain interests". 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". In short, for confirming claims that a word had this meaning or that, like the word 'good'. This "sketch" did not strike everyone as all that informal since he ends up at a set of conditions under which a morphological element has meaning in English, and it does so, for openers, in terms of the distributive and contrastive sets for the element.