Abstract
I start with some of the early challenges to the widely-employed philosophical method of cases—the very challenges that originally prompted the new movement of experimental philosophy—and with some fundamental questions about the method that are yet to have been given satisfying answers. I then propose that what has allowed both ‘armchair’ and ‘experimental’ participants in the ongoing debates concerning the method to ignore or repress those early challenges—and in particular Robert Cummins’s ‘calibration objection’—and to discount fundamental disagreements about those questions, is in large part ‘the claim of continuity’, which is the claim, or assumption, that there is no philosophically significant difference between whatever it is that we do when we give our answer to the theorist’s question of whether some philosophically interesting word ‘applies’ (positively or negatively) to some theoretically significant case, and our use of that same word in the course of ordinary, non-philosophical discourse. I then summarize the ordinary language philosophy (OLP) argument against the claim of continuity, and explain why answers to the theorist’s questions are vulnerable to the calibration objection in a way that our non-philosophical, everyday employment of the same words is not. This then leads me to question another widespread assumption, which is the assumption that the theorist’s questions—as raised in the theorist’s context—have clear enough sense and correct answers. I end by responding to a series of objections to my argument and to OLP more generally.
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Notes
I will sometime put words in quotation marks, even when not quoting anyone in particular (or mentioning words), to register the fact that those words, as used by those to whom I’m responding, are pieces of philosophical jargon, and in order to register my sense that, thus used, they cover up significant difficulties—as pieces of jargon often do. The philosophical talk of the ‘application’ of words to cases, for example, is problematic precisely because, ordinarily and normally, to apply a word, or anything else, is to put it to some use, whereas I’m going to argue that the philosophical ‘application’ of words to cases is, in an important sense, not a use.
Common ways of presenting and motivating ‘The Sorites Paradox’ also rely on inviting the philosopher’s audience to ‘apply’ words such as ‘heap’, ‘blue’, or ‘bald’ to a series of items apart from any context of significant use of those words.
Recent work in the philosophy and history of scientific measurement suggests that not even physical magnitudes are independent of our practices of measuring them and of the theories that inform those practices. I’m thinking in particular of Chang (2007), which shows that we have no idea what ‘[objective] temperature’ means, or could mean, apart from the historically evolving, empirical ‘operationalizations’ of the concept, and our historically evolving practices of measurement of temperature. As van Fraassen notes, what we measure when we measure temperature (for example), or what temperature is, is not separable from what we count as ‘measuring temperature’ (2008, p. 116). Here as elsewhere, contemporary analytic philosophers have tended to operate within a transcendental realist framework that is belied by recent work in the history and philosophy of scientific measurement.
I offer this anecdote, partly in order to point out, and call out, a tendency to resort to rather combative rhetoric in the recent debates concerning philosophical method, and partly in order to register a worry about increasingly smaller philosophical echo chambers. But beyond those sociological worries, I also find it philosophically interesting, and important, that we—and in this case, two white, male, Western, analytic philosophers—can be, by their own testimony, not merely in philosophical disagreement with each other, but philosophically incomprehensible to each other.
And it’s also worth noting that Williamson’s counterexamples to what he calls ‘epistemological conceptions of analyticity’ mostly consist of philosophers who, while in general competent employers of some word ‘x’, misapply it, or ‘misjudge’, in some particular case or range of cases, precisely because of their commitment to some ‘false’ philosophical theory of X (2007, p. 85ff.).
In Chapter 2 of Baz (2017), I argue that Williamson’s and Cappelen’s attempts to defend the method of cases boil down to the claim of continuity, and hang, and therefore also fall, with it. Frank Jackson’s reliance on that claim is even more explicit (cf. 2011). Others who have either made the claim or shown themselves committed to it, include Knobe (2003, 2010), Knobe and Nichols (2008), Nagel (2012), and Nado (2015).
It’s worth noting that some of the cases philosophers have used, and have disagreed about, are actually as simple and pedestrian as overhearing a traveller at the airport terminal telling another that some flight has a layover in Chicago (Cohen 1998).
Here it’s worth noting that even though Gettier’s original cases were quite peculiar, there is actually nothing that peculiar about Gettier-type cases as such; and, as Williamson has rightly pointed out, some Gettier-type cases may arise naturally, and be encountered, in the course of everyday life (2005, p. 12; 2007, p. 192). Those cases only come to seem peculiar, and philosophically bewildering, when the theorist’s asks whether the protagonist knows the proposition in question, and encourages us to suppose that his question has clear enough sense and a correct answer, and that, as competent employers of ‘know’, we should be able to answer his question correctly.
In Chap. 6 of Baz (2017), drawing on Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, as well as on some of the empirical work of Jerome Bruner, Michael Tomasello, Katherine Nelson, and others, I offer a social-pragmatic model of how children come to master the use of ‘know’; and I offer it as an alternative to the dominant representational-referential model that has underwritten both the practice of the philosophical method of cases and all of the attempts to defend it with which I’m familiar. For a recent survey of corpus studies and other empirical studies that support the social-pragmatic model, see Montgomery (forthcoming).
Nor, therefore, is there reason to suppose that those who answer ‘knows’ would generally fare better or worse in reading the minds of others, and in interacting with others, than those who answer ‘does not know’.
Travis has stood out among contemporary semantic ‘contextualists’ in seeing clearly, from very early on, the far-reaching, therapeutic implications of the context-sensitivity of linguistic sense for traditional philosophical difficulties. For a useful summary of those implications as Travis sees them, see Travis (1997). For a broader and more detailed discussion, see Travis (1989).
If, in such a context, the first person were to say ‘I know that such and such’, her ‘I know’ would reasonably be taken, not as describing or otherwise representing her as standing in some special, extra-strong epistemic relation to the proposition that such and such, but rather as an expression of certainty, or conviction, and perhaps also, as Austin proposes in ‘Other Minds’, as embodying the illocutionary force of urging the other person to trust her, or take her word for it.
In Chap. 4 of Baz (2012), I show that Travis seeks to illustrate the context-sensitivity of ‘know’ by means of an example that belongs in the first sort of context, but analyzes the example in terms that actually fit the second sort of context. To the best of my knowledge, the distinction between the two general sorts of context was first pointed out by Hanfling (2000). Hanfling does not put the distinction to the kind of diagnostic use to which I’m putting it here, however.
Note that my use of ‘know’ in this last clause, and elsewhere in this section, belongs with the first of the two general kinds of use I distinguished in Sect. 6.
I respond to this objection at greater length in Baz (2016a). The best response to this objection is still Stanley Cavell’s, in ‘Must We Mean What We Say?’ (In Cavell 1969) and, even more so in my view, ‘Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’ (also in Cavell 1969), in which Cavell compares the philosophical appeal to ‘what we say and mean’ to the aesthetic appeal as characterized by Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. I discuss the argument of ‘Aesthetic Problems’ in Baz (2016b).
For their useful comments, I thank the participants at the conference on ‘Philosophy’s Experimental Turn and the Challenge from Ordinary Language’ (Berlin, June 2022) that was generously supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. I also thank Herman Cappelen, Max Deutsch, Jennifer Nado, and other members of the University of Hong Kong Philosophy Department, for a useful discussion of an earlier draft of this paper.
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Baz, A. On philosophical idling: the ordinary language philosophy critique of the philosophical method of cases. Synthese 201, 83 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04070-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04070-0