Abstract
This chapter tries to elucidate the complex relationship between ordinary language philosophy (OLP) and experimental philosophy (X-Phi) from the perspective of the contrast between the positive and the negative programs of X-Phi. I will first show the relevance of language to the various fields of contemporary philosophy, through what I call the Argument from Cross-Linguistic Diversity and the Argument from Intra-Linguistic Variance, together with empirical data. This will partly vindicate OLP, which is generally thought to be obsolete today. I will then examine the reasons for the demise of OLP, and show that the contemporary meta-philosophical debates over X-Phi are in fact a revival of the debates in the heyday of OLP. This will then also indicate a parallel between Wittgenstein’s negative program, called quietism, and the negative program of X-Phi, especially Stich’s. The positive program of X-Phi can no doubt contribute to science, but the question of whether it is philosophy may depend on our conception of philosophy. The negative program of X-Phi is no doubt philosophy, but the question is whether it can make any positive contribution to philosophy, let alone science. I will answer “yes” to it, by sketching a radical negative picture of philosophy in general.
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Notes
- 1.
Knobe and Nichols (2008) considered three goals of X-Phi in their Experimental Philosophy Manifesto: (1) investigate the psychological sources of our intuitions and determine whether or not they are warranted, (2) sort out intuitions that are universally shared from those which are not, varying with culture, language, gender, and other demographic factors, and (3) study patterns in people’s intuitions about cases to investigate how the mind works. In the present context, (1) may determine whether intuitions can be explained by the underlying relevant concept(s) or not, and if they are, the cross-linguistic studies we shall see in the following sections are of what we shall call Type-1 below, belonging to (2), whereas if they are not, such studies are of what we shall call Type-2, corresponding to (3).
- 2.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing up this point. Note also that, this approach covers both Type-1 and Type-2, though traditionally its typical application has been to Type-1 studies.
- 3.
David Bordonaba-Plou pointed out that, although the most natural Spanish translation of “know how” (“Sabe esquiar”, in the case of “She knows how to ski”) seems akin to the English verb, the literal translation (“Sabe cómo esquiar”) is similar to the Japanese one, being likely to be made true by the possession of a description of how one ought to do it, while there is no literal translation of “Sabe esquiar” in English. This is a very interesting case worth further considerations, but in the case of Japanese, there is no such gap between literal and natural translations.
- 4.
Throughout this paper, the effect size is φ, where the effect size is small when φ is 0.1, medium when 0.3, and large when 0.5.
- 5.
Note that the same effects were replicated in our subsequent online survey with a larger sample size, using participants with sufficient age variance (rather than using university undergraduates as in Mizumoto, 2018a).
- 6.
One worry here is that the difference found here is wholly due to a pragmatic, rather than semantic, effect. See, however, Mizumoto (2021).
- 7.
Even among experimental philosophers, Turri (2018) holds such a view, based on his data and his primatological approach to epistemology. Obviously, however, such a concept cannot specify all the details discussed in contemporary epistemology, and if so, it will even support the negative program we will discuss in later sections.
- 8.
- 9.
Similarly, whether something is a rigid designator or not is arguably determined by use as well. (Cf. Glock, 2003, Chap. 3.6). I owe this reference to Simon Vonlanthen.
- 10.
Note that conventional implicature is counted as part of semantics, but the point here is the cross-linguistic variance of what is said, which can easily be generalized to the variance of the semantics/pragmatics boundary.
- 11.
A twist here is that, in the same study when he used a morally neutral vignette (with the analogous utterance with “but” that has this time has no moral-political implication), the cross-linguistic difference completely disappeared in the results. This does not affect our argument here, as long as there is (huge) cross-linguistic difference in truth judgments about some utterances.
- 12.
In fact, though we cannot discuss in detail, Davidson’s argument against the idea of conceptual scheme (Davidson, 1974) heavily uses this assumption. His formulation of the idea was “largely true but not translatable”. But instead, we have a dilemma: “if taken to be true, not translatable, but if translatable, not true”.
- 13.
Devitt (2012) argues that experimental philosophers implicitly assume what he calls the Voice of Competence (VoC) view (Devitt, 2006), which he argues is wrong. But if his preferred view, the “Moderate Explanation” (ME), is correct, it follows, according to him, that expert intuitions better serve as evidence than folk intuitions (but see Machery, 2012, p. 227). We cannot go into the detail here, but Devitt seems to assume that in either view the competence in question is innate and prior to usage (the latter being a mere result of the former), whereas what we should point out in this context is that this Chomskyan notion of competence is now replaced by the notion of I-language, or innate, internal and individual language (cf. Chomsky, 2000), as opposed to “shared, public language”, or E-language. What we are concerned with here is the competence of E-language, and Chomsky would agree that the use is constitutive of competence (especially conceptual competence) in this sense, though he is (with Davidson) skeptical of the very existence of E-language.
- 14.
Granting that even English speakers admit that a professional skier knows how to ski, even if she has a broken leg at this moment, though such a case does not constitute evidence against the radical linguistic difference between English and Japanese we saw above.
- 15.
But see the response by Cavell (1958).
- 16.
See Mallon et al. (2009) for a criticism of the use of this method to support a theory of reference, which is based on the X-Phi data of the cultural variance of intuitions.
- 17.
- 18.
See Horwich (1998) for a defense of the use theory of meaning, as part of which he lists 22 (!) objections to it and answers all of them one by one.
- 19.
Note Wittgenstein’s qualification about this thesis at PI 43, “For a large class of cases”. This is why it is not a theory that aims to be universally valid. It should in particular be conceived in the context of his negative program, as we shall discuss later. In any case, the thesis above should hold for many philosophically important concepts.
- 20.
Though some defenders of OLP explicitly criticize X-Phi (e.g., Baz, 2012), which will be briefly discussed in a later footnote of this section.
- 21.
Though it is a matter of controversy whether we can treat Wittgenstein as an ordinary language philosopher, the point here is that OLP was generally reluctant to constructing a theory, and Wittgenstein was no doubt at the center of such a trend.
- 22.
Famously, Kripke (1982) explicitly mentioned the Chomskyan competence/performance distinction in his discussion of the rule-following considerations. And note that the radical skepticism about meaning (which Kripke thought would follow) does not follow from such considerations, on which almost all commentators on Kripke’s book agree.
- 23.
For example, when Baz (2012) criticizes X-Phi for assuming that “answers to the theorist’s question question—be they the philosopher’s or the layman’s […]—are our indispensable and best guide when we seek to elucidate our concepts and the phenomena they pick out” (pp. 91–92), he assumes that X-Phi is trying to answer theorists’ questions, and thereby contributing to theory-constructions. In other words, he has in mind the positive program of X-Phi there.
- 24.
See Stich and Tobia (2016) for what the negative program of X-Phi does, and see also Weinberg (2016) for its positive contribution to philosophy, through what he calls the “wheat-from-chaff” project. Weinberg’s is however much more positive in spirit and is possibly even inconsistent with our picture here.
- 25.
Engaged in (2) of the three goals of X-Phi in Nichols and Knobe 2008, mentioned in footnote 1 above.
- 26.
Note however that this assumes that there is only one rational attitude to the totality of evidence, or uniqueness (Kopec & Titelbaum, 2016). In the present context, insofar as one assumes uniqueness (whether conciliationists or steadfasters), one is committed to a massive error theory about either one’s own linguistic community or the other community, implausibility of which arguably leads to skepticism about the subject matter. On the other hand, the denial of uniqueness (permissivism) here corresponds to pluralism (I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to elaborate this point). Indeed, the results we reviewed earlier seem to suggest not only pluralism about specific philosophical concepts, but pluralism about philosophy itself. This kind of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies may therefore strike even anti-philosophical. We shall discuss this implication in the last section.
- 27.
Though this conception of scientific theory is certainly naïve, other conceptions like instrumentalism are generally compatible with the claim that it is a heuristic device.
- 28.
Richard Rorty once contrasted philosophy-as-discovery with philosophy-as-proposal (Rorty 1992), and this conception of philosophy (philosophical theory) loosely belongs to the latter category (proposals about how we should talk and think about the world), in which Wittgenstein’s quietism is also included.
- 29.
- 30.
They think “know” is an exception, but see Mizumoto (2021).
- 31.
This term appears in Chomsky’s writings (e.g., Chomsky, 2000), but he seems to use it to refer to scientific studies of folk theories (such as folk psychology and folk physics). Our use here is rather to refer to cognitive science as part of social sciences like anthropology, though this may still be consistent with Chomsky’s usage.
- 32.
In this sense, Stich and Wittgenstein are in fact good friends, even though Stich may not like this picture.
- 33.
I would like to thank Joachim Horvath, Simon Dominik Vonlanthen, and Stephen Stich, as well as participants in Einladung zum Vortrag im Institutskolloquium at Ruhr University of Bochum and Dianoia Seminar Series at Australian Catholic University, and also David Bordonaba-Plou and anonymous reviewers, for their kind and helpful comments and suggestions.
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Mizumoto, M. (2023). Experimental Philosophy and Ordinary Language Philosophy. In: Bordonaba-Plou, D. (eds) Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 33. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28908-8_3
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