Abstract
The linguistic turn provided philosophers with a range of reasons for engaging in careful investigation into the nature and structure of language. However, the linguistic turn is dead. The arguments for it have been abandoned (for good reasons). This raises the question: why should philosophers take an interest in the minutiae of natural language semantics? I’ll argue that there isn’t much of a reason - philosophy of language has lost its way. Then I provide a suggestion for how it can find its way again.
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Notes
More on the difference between natural language semantics and philosophy of language below. For reasons of simplicity, the focus in this paper is on the role of semantics in philosophy. Much (if not all) of what I say applies directly to most work in pragmatics. It shouldn’t be too hard for the reader to apply at least many of the lessons from this paper to work on, say, scalar implicatures and presupposition projection.
When worked out in a more detail, this becomes the philosophical analogue of what’s sometimes called ‘the institutional theory of art’ - of course the two theories differ in what histories and institutions are appealed to.
In other words: We can’t go straight from the observation that semantics is done in philosophy departments to the conclusion that semantics is philosophy because the observation doesn’t tell the whole story. The whole story is that semantics is done in philosophy departments and in linguistics departments.
This a version of The Division of Labor Argument above. Speaking loosely: To do cutting edge research on issues in e.g., economics, you need a PhD in economics. Without that, you’re likely to be wasting your time. Of course, all of this is compatible with there being exceptions - either because of special skills of individuals or peculiarities of a topic.
In this paper I’m interested in the question of whether the study of natural language semantics should be part of philosophy and whether it is of more relevance to philosophy than it is to a number of other disciplines. I’m not here focused on questions about the structure of thought. Williamson, in The Philosophy of Philosophy, moves back and forth between talking about the structure of language and the structure of thought. My focus here is exclusively on linguistic structures. My view is that the structure of thought is best studied empirically by psychologists, but I won’t argue for that claim here.
Could Williamson reply that philosophers are more interested in and concerned with validity of inference than others who argue? I think not. First, that’s not a true generic – it’s patronizing towards non-philosophical thinkers and talkers. Second, even if there are others who don’t care as much about validity of their arguments, then they should be more concerned with it. As a matter of fact, this is crucial to their work, even if those doing the work don’t recognize it.
I say we can so understand it, not that Carnap so understood it – though there’s some evidence that Neurath understood it in this way. See Carnap ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, p23, in Schlipp (1963).
Figuring out just what happened at this time and what motivated what I think of as ‘the descriptivist turn in philosophy’, will, I predict, be a central challenge for those trying to write the history of philosophy in the twentieth century. If the rough outline I have sketched here is correct, then this was a pivotal, but poorly understood, juncture in the evolution of philosophical thought.
One such contingency could be: these people are now doing good work, so leave them alone for awhile.
And that’s a different question from how to think about the organisation of particular academic institutions.
Thanks to Alexi Burgess, Robyn Carston, Josh Habgood-Coote, Matthew McKeever, Dilip Ninan, and Seth Yalcin for helpful comments.
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Cappelen, H. Why Philosophers Shouldn’t Do Semantics. Rev.Phil.Psych. 8, 743–762 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0340-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0340-9