Philosophy & Rhetoric

The following seems to be perfectly obvious: it is generally an undesirable state of affairs when interlocutors talk past one another. Admittedly, there are various potential phenomena that one may have in mind when one claims that two philosophers (or any two interlocutors, for that matter) are talking past one another (or persist in talking past one another), but whatever the phenomenon lurking behind any particular usage of this expression is, we can be assured that it is not a good thing overall.

The phrase "talking past one another" is highly metaphorical and suggestive of an idiom. There are in fact a number of plausible interpretations of the expression, and some of these may simply be resistant to any sort of rigorous analysis; others may not be worthy of any such analysis at all (i.e., some usages suggest a colloquialism with a trivial or philosophically uninteresting sort of meaning). What I wish to investigate in this paper, however, is a usage of "talking past one another" that crops up often in philosophical contexts that points to a phenomenon that should be of interest to both the philosopher and the rhetorician—a phenomenon that deserves a careful, rigorous treatment. I have in mind here a sort of phenomenon that, by its very nature, automatically thwarts any attempt by interlocutors to make intellectual headway on whatever philosophical issue is under discussion. It is the sort of situation that would guarantee that the interlocutors are, in a philosophically important way, failing to communicate.

The philosophical literature contains an abundance of "talking past one another" charges. And the further claim that is never far behind is that it is the very presence of this sort of misunderstanding between interlocutors that is thwarting any sort of progress on the issue at hand. Let us begin by stipulating, then, that some sort of progress-hindering communication failure will be the meaning of the expression "talking past one another" throughout this paper. [End Page 311]

So, when do philosophers talk past one another? When is this charge warranted, and hence, when does making such a charge really help us to diagnose some failure to make philosophical progress? Can we identify in the literature an account of this phenomenon? What is the proper account? Answering these questions is the goal of this paper.

It seems that there is a natural, common-sense account that can be identified in the philosophical literature—an account that usually comes bundled with the very charge that philosophers are in fact talking past one another. This is the sort of account suggested by the following passages:

If the internalism/externalism controversy [within the theory of knowledge concerning the justification condition on knowledge] is seen as essentially a controversy over the nature of knowledge, the debate over J-internalism vs. J-externalism would appear to be a case of talking past each other. J-internalists and J-externalists simply intend justification to achieve different things. They each operate with a different concept of justification. (Steup 2001; my emphasis)

Parties in the debate over the definition of death have employed different concepts of personhood and, thus, have been talking past each other by proposing definitions of death for different kinds of things. (Lizza 1999, 439; my emphasis)

The concept of cultural pluralism is broken down into three major uses—anthropological, political/economic, and ordinary language. This analysis can be used to avoid discussants talking past one another as they use the same term, but for different ideas.

(Pratte 1972, 61; my emphasis)

The account suggested by the above passages, and the account that virtually all of the philosophical commentators making this charge (at least, all of those whom I have come across) seem to have in mind, then, is something like the following: philosophers talk past one another when each has a different meaning or concept in mind for a term that is crucial to their discussion.¹ But this sort of simultaneous interpersonal equivocation comes in at least the following two forms. In one sort of situation, the interlocutors may perhaps be perfectly aware that the other has a different meaning or conception...