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Explication as a strategy for revisionary philosophy

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Abstract

I will defend explication, in a Carnapian sense, as a strategy for revisionary ontologists and radical sceptics. The idea is that these revisionary philosophers should explicitly commit to using expressions like “S knows that p” and “Fs exist” (or “There are Fs”) differently from how these expressions are used in everyday contexts. I will first motivate this commitment for these revisionary philosophers. Then, I will address the main worries that arise for this strategy: the unintelligibility worry (that we no longer understand the issue that the philosophers are addressing) and the topic shift worry (that the philosophers are addressing the wrong issue). I will focus on the latter worry and provide a solution that makes use of a distinction between practically and theoretically oriented beliefs (beliefs-1 and beliefs-2). On my view, the revisionary philosophers who admit to departing from the everyday language can still criticize everyday knowledge and existence claims, by arguing that while the language embedded in these claims is suitable for beliefs-1, it is not suitable for beliefs-2.

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Notes

  1. I do not here refer to the perhaps most famous contemporary denier of the existence of tables and chairs, van Inwagen (1990), because he has himself disavowed the aim of challenging ordinary belief (arguing that his position is compatible with ordinary belief) and so it is unclear whether he counts as a revisionary philosopher in the relevant sense.

  2. This is a condensed version of Unger’s argument in “The Problem of the Many” (Unger 1980).

  3. The idea that the pursuit of theoretical virtues will lead to a joint-carving way of speaking (or conceptual scheme or theory) is, of course, neither uncontroversial nor unproblematic. One may suspect, for example, that the supposed theoretical virtues, like simplicity, just reflect something like our aesthetic preferences and have no evidential value. Further, philosophers are known to have a hard time agreeing on which competing conceptual scheme (or theory) embodies the theoretical virtues the most; and this contributes to the impression that ascertaining theoretical virtue is not even just a matter of contingent human value judgments, but individual value judgments. On the other hand, the claim that empirically equivalent theories can only be compared by appeal to pragmatic (but not evidential) criteria is also a strong and unobvious one.

  4. McDaniel proposed that talk of degrees of being could be understood as a notational variant of the talk of different existence concepts carving at the joints to different extents; or the idea of degrees of being may even be prior and thus more crucial for understanding what philosophical ontology is about. Regardless of whether McDaniel’s suggestion is otherwise on the right track, the important point here is that the idea that revisionary ontologists investigate what exists to an especially high degree does not help us understand how they can challenge everyday existence claims.

  5. Wright suggests that vague predicates (roughly, those governed by the rule that if the predicate applies to x, then it applies to things that only differ from x minutely) may be useful because the vagueness of these predicates makes it easier to determine, on casual observation, whether the predicate applies: “single changes too slight to be detected by casual observation cannot be permitted to generate doubt about the application of such a predicate” (Wright 1975, p. 337). This feature of vague predicates seems to be needed for making quick judgments about the environment and acting on those judgments. Yet, vague predicates also give rise to many of the problems with ordinary existence claims like “Chairs exist”, problems that are revealed when these claims are subjected to the kind of questioning characteristic of revisionary ontology.

  6. Hawthorne and Stanley say about such cases that “one violates the fundamental norm of practical reasoning but in an excusable way” (Hawthorne and Stanley 2008, p. 582).

  7. One may wonder how this applies to philosophers’ beliefs about normative or applied ethics: it may seem that these beliefs are formed for the sake of epistemic excellence and the beliefs come with action dispositions that are not limited to research actions. I find both of these claims disputable individually, but their conjunction is especially dubious: if ethicists indeed form beliefs in normative or applied ethics just for the sake of epistemic excellence, then I would expect the connection of these beliefs with their non-research actions to break down.

  8. One might wonder whether this kind of metalinguistic repudiation of the everyday claims is also consistent with the previously discussed degree-modifier analysis and strictly-speaking analysis of the “Yes, but not really”. That may indeed be the case. The important point, however, is that those analyses, as stated, do not by themselves provide an account of how revisionary philosophers can repudiate the everyday claims. This does not preclude combining these analyses with the prescriptivist analysis and the idea of metalinguistic repudiation that it involves. The strictly-speaking analysis could perhaps even be understood as a way of expressing the prescriptivist analysis.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the audiences of the workshop on Philosophical Methods at the University of Duisburg-Essen and of a summer work-in-progress seminar at the University of Tartu, where I presented previous versions of this article. I also thank Daniel Cohnitz and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. This research has been supported by the University of Tartu ASTRA Project PER ASPERA, which is financed by the European Regional Development Fund, and by the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies (European Union, European Regional Development Fund), and is related to research project IUT20-5 (Estonian Ministry of Education and Research).

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Kitsik, E. Explication as a strategy for revisionary philosophy. Synthese 197, 1035–1056 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1774-z

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