Abstract
In this paper I will argue that there is a bi-directional relationship between philosophy and meaning such that doing philosophy can change the meaning of terms. A rhetorically powerful work of philosophy that garners widespread interest has the potential to change how people use a predicate. This gives rise to three concerns. First, one’s conclusion can become right in virtue of one doing a particularly good job arguing for it. Second, it may be implausible to take philosophy to be a primarily descriptive enterprise. Part of the job of the philosopher is to proselytize about the correct usage of a word. Lastly, and most worrisome of all, the age-old method of the dialectic, a centerpiece of the philosophical project for thousands of years, threatens to plunge a range of domains of philosophical discourse into incoherence.
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Notes
There are other interpretations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle whereby the mechanism behind the principle is something rather more mysterious than mere causal interaction between the tools of measurement and the properties one is attempting to measure. Discussion of these other interpretations is well beyond the scope of this paper.
If you have any doubts on this matter, put either of the following set of search terms into Google Scholar: “methodological artifact” and “experimental artifact.”
Most plausibly, analytic philosophers do a little of both. We can understand the descriptive debate to be a debate over which method accurately describes the preponderance of analytic philosophy.
Though I have not discussed the two-stage meta-philosophy Jackson endorses in From Metaphysics to Ethics, it should be clear that any concerns that arise for purely descriptive meaning analysis also arise for his view. Jackson holds that a version of purely descriptive meaning analysis should be the first stage in philosophical inquiry (Jackson 1998).
The following considerations are closely connected to issues raised in Fume ton’s “The Paradox of Analysis” (Fumerton 1983).
On the traditional view, philosophy is a priori. Consequently, insofar as one takes abduction to be a posteriori, one should not treat Sam’s claim that sentimentalism offers the best account of the meaning of moral terms to be an attempt to explain common usage. Be that as it may, facts about meaning had better play some role in an explanation of how people use language. Thus, even on the traditional view, for Sam’s view to be correct, it should play a role in some best explanation. There is, of course, nothing which prevents philosophers from abandoning the traditional dogma that philosophy is a priori, even while embracing views on philosophical methodology that are keeping with the spirit of the traditional view (see, e.g., the view Fumerton develops in The Paradox of Analysis).
It is not implausible to suppose that most speakers, when using technical terms in philosophy, aim to mean the same thing as professional philosophers do when philosophers use the term. If one is an internalist about meaning, one may share with a certain sort of externalist the view that for lay speakers the meaning of certain sorts of technical terms is fixed by the use of a small community of experts.
It is worth noting that widespread agreement amongst experts regarding the use of the theoretical terms of the sciences plays an important role in Putnam’s account of how the meaning of non-experts’ use of the terms get fixed. (Putnam 1973) One may doubt that such agreement is present with regard to philosophers’ use of technical terms. Thus, one might think it implausible to suppose that the meaning of philosophical terms gets fixed in this way. I suspect that this worry is rather overstated—with regard to many technical terms I take it that there is widespread agreement about how they ought to be applied. Furthermore, even if there is widespread disagreement about how to use technical terms, it is not clear to me that this constitutes a black mark against the account of how the meaning of a term gets fixed. Instead, it may tell us something substantive about meaning. For more on this, see Sect. 6.
The point is entirely general. As Loeb’s discussion of chairs and tables illustrates, there is nothing specific about moral properties that lets the argument go through.
One might think that there is nothing special about the philosophical study of properties that drives this worry. If the worry exists equally for, e.g. physics, one might think that it is of less philosophical significance. This would be a mistake for two reasons. First, it is important to keep in mind the primary project of this paper: demonstrating that methodological artifacts are relevant, not just to the empirical sciences, but to philosophy as well. Pointing out that methodological artifacts are a problem in the empirical sciences does nothing to undermine this conclusion. Furthermore, there is an important sense in which this instance of methodological artifacts—in the form of meaning change—is unique to philosophy. The scientist is guided to the object of study via observation whereas the philosopher is guided to the object of study via language. It is plausible to think that, prior to the nineteenth century, the word “whale” failed to refer, as it was taken to apply to a kind of fish. The marine biologist set out to study a family of amphibious mammals—call the animals what you will. No one thinks that research on, e.g., the breeding patterns of whales was invalidated by the change in meaning of the word “whale.” The same cannot be said of the philosopher. The philosopher set out to study, e.g., moral properties. The philosopher identifies these properties by their relation to our language. Philosophical work into morality is invalidated if it has been established that the philosopher has been studying schmoral properties all along. The object of empirical study is identified by sensory experiences. The object of philosophical study is identified via language.
It is worth noting that there are a variety of views one might accept whereby discovering truth is not a central aim of the dialectic. Such views are, however, a poor fit for the meta-philosophical views under consideration here. Both meaning analysis and ontological analysis are committed to a philosophical methodology that is, at core, descriptive.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks are owed to Ian O’loughlin and Ryan Cobb for their help in the conceptualization of this project. I am also grateful for the feedback provided by Christopher Pynes, David Haugen, and Jason Decker. Above all, I owe thanks to Richard Fumerton—without his guidance this paper would not exist—and to Jessica Schwartz—without her support I would never accomplish anything.
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Graber, A. Creating truths by winning arguments: the problem of methodological artifacts in philosophy. Synthese 192, 487–503 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0580-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0580-5