Abstract
In this article, I draw an important distinction between two kinds of inquiry. “Framed inquiries” take for granted and use a conceptual framework in order to ask and answer questions, while “framing inquiries” require the creation, revision, or expansion of the conceptual framework itself in order to address the problem at hand. This distinction has been largely ignored in epistemology, and collapsed by two radically opposed philosophical camps: representationalism and antirepresentationalism. While the former takes all inquiries to be in the business of discovering mind-independent facts, the latter takes all inquiries to be primarily governed by pragmatic considerations. Against the objections raised by both camps, I defend a pragmatist and substantive distinction between framed and framing inquiry, inspired by Rudolf Carnap’s distinction between internal and external questions and reformulated in terms of John Dewey’s theory of inquiry.
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Notes
See, for example, Imbert and Gancel (2004).
As should be clear from this, the idea of conceptual frameworks at play should not be confused with the idea of a global conceptual scheme that stands between us and the world attacked by Davidson (2001). My notion is closer to what Michael Lynch calls the “neo-Kantian, broadly Wittgensteinian” notion of conceptual framework, which he argues is not liable to Davidson’s attacks (Lynch, 1997); see also Baghramian (1998). I also follow Carnap (1950a) and Teller (2021) in using a local notion of conceptual frameworks, although like Teller, I do not assume clear-cut boundaries or identity conditions for conceptual frameworks. What we take to be the scope of a conceptual framework depends on our unit of analysis, which itself depends on the problem we are concerned with, or what practice or discourse we want to describe and explain (Teller, 2021, S5018).
For the sake of simplicity, I will be focusing on linguistic representationalism, which is most widespread today; the same argument can be made for a kind of representationalism in which language is only secondarily representational, and thoughts or ideas are the primary representational stuff.
Rorty, who contributed to the definition of representationalism by attacking it, placed the idea of the normativity or authority of the world is at the core of representationalism (Rorty, 1999b) More recently, Dasgupta (2018) argued that realism consists in two independent claims: one of “pure metaphysics,” concerning the word-world relations that obtain objectively, and a “value-theoretic claim,” “to the effect that the metaphysical posit functions as an objective standard against which our theorizing is to be assessed” (Dasgupta, 2018, p. 283).
Sawyer makes a distinction between (linguistic) meaning and (representational) concept, which is inspired by Frege’s distinction between sentence and proposition, language and thought (Sawyer, 2020a).
Beyond the expression of disbelief, arguments have been formulated against subjectivism, idealism, and relativism. For an overview, see Boghossian (2013).
I cite one such passage in Sect. 7.
Rorty himself drew the parallel between the rejection of external standards for action (“the Will of God”) and belief (“the Intrinsic Nature of Reality”) (Rorty, 1999b, p. 7).
As Friedman notes (2002, p. 176), Quine sometimes misleadingly equated the analytic/synthetic distinction with the distinction between truths that are immune to revision, and truths that are revisable in light of experience.
Lewis’s view is much more subtle than Quine’s reading suggests. In fact, some of his statements could have been written by Quine himself: “Conceptions, such as those of logic, which are least likely to be affected by the opening of new ranges of experience, represent the most stable of our categories; but none of them is beyond the possibility of alteration” (Lewis, 1923, p. 177). Misak (2013, 2022) shows how much Quine owes to C. I. Lewis, who was his teacher at Harvard.
I leave open the possibility that different accounts of conceptual frameworks are capable of fulfilling these requirements.
Following Robert Brandom (1994), the pragmatist or inferentialist reverses the representationalist order of explanation: inference is prior to representation, pragmatics are prior to semantics, linguistic use is prior to conceptual content. This means that the pragmatist rejects the strong form of representationalism introduced in Sect. 3, which Price calls “(big-R) Representationalism” (Price et al., 2013, p. 24). However, note that in the formulation of my account, I prefer the appellation “nonrepresentationalism” to distinguish it from the “antirepresentationalism” introduced in Sect. 4, since the latter suggests the rejection of the very notion of representation.
All references to John Dewey’s work are to the critical edition The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 (Vols. 1–37), edited by Jo Ann Boydston (1969–1991). Citations give the volume abbreviation, followed by volume and page number. For example: LW4, p. 45.
The former can be likened to Ramsey’s “variable hypotheticals,” themselves interpreted as “rules for judging” (1990, p. 149), C. I. Lewis’s pragmatic a priori, i.e., the “network of categories and definitive concepts” with which we “interrogate experience” (1923, p. 175), or Arthur Pap’s functional a priori (1946).
An interesting illustration of this prescriptive function is found in some versions of Heracles’ apotheosis, according to which the demigod became immortal only when his human part was burnt away: “[Heracles] cast off whatever of the human he had from his mother, and soared up to the Gods with his divine part pure and unalloyed, sifted by the fire” (Fowler & Fowler, 1905).
This is not to say that framing inquiry cannot end with descriptive propositions, but some of these propositions will involve a modification of the concepts that are used to state them.
More generally, my account is perfectly compatible with current trends in philosophy of science which emphasize the importance of practice over theory, activities over propositional knowledge.
Nevertheless, I disagree with Brandom’s suggestion that every claim is framing with respect to its outcome: “There is no such thing as ... the mere application of a previously determinate conceptual content” (Brandom, 2000b, p. 157); “Every claim and inference we make at once sustains and transforms the tradition in which the conceptual norms that govern that process are implicit” (Brandom, 2000b, p. 177). When I make claims about the temperature of the room, or many other ordinary claims, I am merely applying concepts, not transforming them.
As James notes, “Satisfactoriness has to be measured by a multitude of standards ... and what is more satisfactory than any alternative in sight, may to the end be a sum of pluses and minuses, concerning which we can only trust that by ulterior corrections and improvements a maximum of the one and a minimum of the other may some day be approached” (James, 2000, p. 148).
I say more on how truth and standards of correctness more generally should be conceived for framed and framing inquiry in Henne (2022).
Carnap could still interpret them as “internal” questions in the sense that they are using their own linguistic framework, that of linguistics or anthropology, in order to study their object, which happens to be a linguistic framework.
Carnap does acknowledge the contribution of theoretical knowledge to practical external questions (Carnap, 1950a, p. 23). Nevertheless, he emphasizes the theoretical and practical as two completely separate kinds of questions. Another major difference is that for Carnap, practical questions are non-cognitive, i.e., their answers cannot be true or false, while for Dewey and most pragmatists, practical and theoretical judgments are true or false in the same way, namely, in a pragmatist sense.
For reasons of space, I cannot compare my account with all of its predecessors. However, it is worth noting that my account exhibits important similarities with Kuhn’s distinction between normal and extraordinary science, as well as with recent discussions of the relativized and constitutive a priori by Friedman (2001) and Stump (2015). Creath characterizes their approach to (scientific) knowledge as a “two-tier” approach, inspired by Kant: beliefs at the “A-level” are “not empirically tested in any straightforward way,” while beliefs at the “B-level” require the A-level for their “intelligibility, identity, and testability” (Creath, 2010, p. 494). Contrary to Kant, all these authors believe that the A-level is revisable. While Kuhn maintained a pretty sharp distinction between what he called revolutionary and normal science, Friedman, Stump, and Creath stressed the continuity and overlap between different phases of scientific practice. For example, Creath points out that “No period has been free from debate on fundamental methodological issues” (p. 502). Because of the context of discussion, and given their focus on constitutive principles, these authors still tend to focus on a limited set of examples in which a scientific framework is evaluated, or the core principles (usually belonging to geometry, arithmetic, logic) in a scientific practice are replaced. My distinction covers more ground, first because it is not exclusively focused on scientific practice, and secondly, because it can accommodate the evaluation and revision of core constitutive principles as only one special case of framing inquiry. Additionally, other uses of the metaphor of framing in philosophy cannot be discussed here but deserve to be mentioned, including recent ones by Haslanger (2015) and Chang (2022). I develop such comparisons in Henne (2022).
From which Rorty concluded that realist intuitions are not worth saving (Rorty, 1995, p. 298).
If one wants to maintain a strong distinction between causal and normative relations between our inquiries and the world, one might appeal to Brandom’s feedback (Test-Operate-Test-Exit) cycle in accounting for the contribution of things in correcting our descriptions (Brandom, 2008); for a discussion, see Levine (2019). Other alternatives include Davidson’s concept of triangulation (Davidson, 1982); Putnam’s pragmatic realism in combination with conceptual relativism or pluralism (Putnam, 1990), for a discussion, see Case (2001), Button (2013); Price’s distinction between e-representation, conceived as world-tracking, and i-representation, which is inferential and internal to language games (Price et al., 2013); and more recently, Teller’s perspectival realism (Teller, 2018, 2019, 2021), according to which our perspectival, framework-bound access to the independent world provides us with inexact yet practically adequate knowledge of how things are.
Dewey describes a similar process in the Logic (LW12, pp. 274–276).
On the transparency of linguistic frameworks, see Burgess and Plunkett (2013) and Teller (2021). As a reviewer pointed out to me, there are framed inquiries in which the conceptual framework is taken for granted but not settled or widely accepted, either because it is newly invented and hence still controversial, or because it is being questioned by other groups. Such inquiries are locally framed, because they take for granted and apply a conceptual framework which, in a larger context, is being questioned and/or evaluated (among other things, through its use in locally framed inquiries).
Despite Paul Thagard’s (1990) call for distinguishing between belief revision and conceptual change and integrate the latter as a topic of its own in epistemology, the situation has not changed since. In fact, his paper was heavily cited in science education or learning theory, rather than in analytic philosophy journals. This does not mean that philosophers are not interested in conceptual change. However, conceptual change is mostly discussed in philosophy of science or in philosophy of language, where the issue is often set in representationalist terms: How can scientists talk about the same things, or how can reference be stable, if the meanings of the terms themselves change with major theory changes? Although the issues raised often belong to metaphilosophy or philosophy of language, the field of conceptual engineering has recently revived the interest in the importance of conceptual change and improvement. For an overview, see Isaac et al. (2022).
See Brandom (2000a, p. 117): “Epistemology is usually thought of as the theory of knowledge. But epistemological theories in fact typically offer accounts of when it is proper to attribute knowledge.”
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Acknowledgements
I thank Hasok Chang, Huw Price, Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Oscar Westerblad, Bobby Vos, Matteo Santarelli, and Cheryl Misak for their feedback, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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This work was supported by a Ph.D. studentship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Cambridge Trust (Award Ref: 2090146).
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Henne, C. Framed and framing inquiry: a pragmatist proposal. Synthese 201, 60 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04059-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04059-9