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The Sky over Canberra: Folk Discourse and Serious Metaphysics

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Abstract

I take up the task of examining how someone who takes seriously the ambitious programme of conceptual analysis advocated by the Canberra School can minimise the eliminative consequences which I argue the Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis recipe of conceptual analysis is likely to have for many folk discourses. The objective is to find a stable means to preserve the constative appearance of folk discourse and to find it generally successful in its attempts to describe an external world, albeit in non-scientific terms that do not reflect the nature of things. The view I settle on, quasi-fictionalism, is modelled on a modified descriptivist version of Kendall Walton’s account of prop-oriented games of make-believe.

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Notes

  1. The discourse is committed to the unique realisation of the generalisation.

  2. What I have to say in this paper will also bear on other sentences like ‘the sky sleeps furiously’ or ‘the sky drinks procrastination’, that aren’t part of sky-talk. I take it that it doesn’t matter what a theory says about them. Presumably, the only external way to isolate sky-talk will be statistical, in that out of the enormous multitude of well-formed English sentences containing those words, pretty much all and only the sentences that are actually used will belong to sky-talk. In any case, I’m going to assume you know which discourse I mean.Also note that the argument in this paper is language specific, but it might be of more general interest if it persuades in the case at hand.

  3. Some linguists have begun to use Google searches as an insight in to patterns of usage. See Zimmer (2005) for examples. The figures that follow come from searches done on 19/03/2008. Other occurrences: ‘extraterrestrial sky’ 66 ‘sky on other planets’ 5 ‘Saturnian sky’ 256 ‘sky on Saturn’ 4420 ‘lunar sky’ 8630‘Sky on the moon’ 8930 Caution is required however. As well as being very low figures for Google, some of these occurrences may be of homonyms, ‘alien sky’ is the name of a computer game, I believe, and a Google search would count a hit even if it came from the context of a sentence that ran ‘there is no such thing as a …’ The exercise serves to corroborate my native speaker intuition that we say this sort of thing.

  4. This is not supposed to be a commonsense platitude about sky-talk, of course!

  5. See Navarra (1979 p. 42) for 6000 mile claim.

  6. It could be objected that the air may be only very slightly tinted, too slightly tinted for it to be noticed on the things we see through it, which are mostly seen up close. Distant mountains are indeed bluish and so the blue of the sky might be thought to be blue as the cumulative effect of enormous quantities of air. The flaw here is that the sun is further away than any mountain, but it appears yellow or white (or red at dawn/dusk) and not in the least bit bluish.

  7. cf. Jackson on ‘knowledge’ (Jackson 2005, p. 125/6).

  8. Paradigm case arguments have a bad reputation. For a defence of the aims and validity of paradigm case arguments in general see Hanfling (2000), especially chapter 5. For a limited endorsement see Soames (2003, p.168).

  9. The classic papers by John William Strutt (i.e. Lord Rayleigh) were published in 1871.

  10. Here I cite my informant, Anne Haggerstone, an atmospheric chemist by training, who first stimulated my thinking on this topic.

  11. In fact, this is not an accurate statement of Walton’s own position. Walton’s account of propositions commits him to there not being any proposition that is the literal meaning of a sentence with a fictional proper name. Here, I’m conscripting his account and tidying it up in the direction of the global descriptivism of the Canberra school.

  12. See previous footnote.

  13. This is an acknowledged difficulty for the view. Walton would not accept the Lewisian descriptivist solution to the problem. For his attempt see chapter ten of Mimesis and Make-Believe, especially p. 402.)

  14. I’m not at all expert at astronomy or meteorology, so I don’t know how plausible the details of these prop specifications are, but I assume an expert could supply the correct details and that’s all the argument needs at this point. It would take an expert to provide proper prop statements. I am not claiming that these things are arrived at by a priori reflection.

  15. In connection with this, see Walton’s response to Van Inwagen on the validity of arguments in fiction (1990, p. 416-8, also 2005, p. 91-4), where he explains, “…what our paraphrases seek to capture is what speakers say in uttering the sentences cited, not what the sentences themselves mean or the propositions they express, if any. What speakers say simply does not have the logical forms indicated by the sentences they use.” (op cit.)

  16. I claim, of course, that as a competent user of sky-talk, I know which props underwrite and legitimate every commonly occurring sky-talk statement. But I know it in the way one supposedly knows obscenity: I know it when I see it, I don’t have a definition (i.e. I can’t formulate an explicit prop-statement for every case).

  17. Sky-talk is identified at the start of section “Sky-Talk: The Case for Elimination”.

  18. The citation is just to the beginning of a now enormous literature.

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Acknowledgement

This research was financially supported by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences. A version of this paper was presented at the Naturalism and Pragmatism conference at Tilburg University in 2008. Thank you to those in attendance, and grateful thanks, too, to Chris Mole and Jim O’Shea for discussion of the issues in this paper.

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    Andrew Kenneth Jorgensen

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Jorgensen, A.K. The Sky over Canberra: Folk Discourse and Serious Metaphysics. Philosophia 38, 365–383 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9204-6

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