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On Strawson’s critique of explication as a method in philosophy

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Abstract

In the course of theorising, it can be appropriate to replace one concept—a folk concept, or one drawn from an earlier stage of theorising—with a more precise counterpart. The best-known account of concept replacement is Rudolf Carnap’s ‘explication’. P.F. Strawson famously critiqued explication as a method in philosophy. As the critique is standardly construed, it amounts to the objection that explication is ‘irrelevant’, fails to be ‘illuminating’, or simply ‘changes the subject’. In this paper, I argue that this is an unfair characterisation of Strawson’s critique, spelling out the critique in more detail and showing that, fully understood, it is not undermined by extant responses. In light of both the critique and extant responses, I close by making some substantive comments about what explication can, and cannot, be used to do in philosophy.

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Notes

  1. See International Astronomical Union (2006).

  2. See e.g. Carnap (1947, 1950).

  3. See Strawson (1963).

  4. See e.g. Brun (2016): p. 1219, Novaes and Reck (2017): p. 202, Justus (2012): pp. 170–171, Loomis and Juhl (2006); Maher (2007): p. 332, Olsson (2015): p. 69 and Schupbach (2017): pp. 683–684.

  5. Here and below I use small capitals to denote concepts.

  6. This is not best interpreted in terms of the extensions of explicanda and explicata. Rather, it is better to construe similarity as requiring an explicatum to be suitable for performing at least the theoretical work performed by the corresponding explicandum (and perhaps more). For example, as Brun notes (2016: p. 1221), one might explicate the concept proposition with the concept set of possible worlds, even if one thinks that the extension of proposition does not contain any sets of possible worlds. Here, the concepts are similar in the sense that, relative to the specific context in which the explicatum is used, the explicatum “performs the explicandum’s function” (Brun 2016: p. 1222).

  7. See e.g. Brun (2016): p. 1218.

  8. Suggestive comments along these lines can be found in, for example, Maher (2007), Schupbach (2017), and Strawson (1963).

  9. Strawson distinguishes two additional, interrelated types of philosophical problem. The first is “the attempt to explain [\(\ldots \)] why it is that we have such concepts and types of discourse as we do” (pp. 515–516). This is not a historical inquiry, but rather an inquiry into why, given our natures, it is natural for us to have the particular conceptual framework that we do. The second is the “examination of current concepts and types of discourse [\(\ldots \)] with no particular therapeutic purpose, but for its own sake” (p. 517). Herein, I focus on paradoxes and perplexity.

  10. Thanks to an anonymous referee for helping me to see this.

  11. See Kripke (1980); Putnam (1975).

  12. Cf. Williamson (2007).

  13. I put aside the exegetical question of whether Carnapian explication (so defined) is Carnap’s conception of explication.

  14. An anonymous referee suggests that there might in fact be two concepts denoted by ‘warm’: one that tracks an objective property, and one that tracks a subjective property. If this is right, then, on either reading, the argument used to set up the warmth imbalance is obviously unsound: on the objective reading, there is reason to say that just one of Jessica and Luke is wrong; on the subjective reading, warmth and coldness are not incompatible. This insight would potentially allow us to resolve the warmth imbalance (without appealing to Carnapian explication), by explaining why the two distinct concepts are sometimes conflated. For expository purposes, however, I put this possibility aside; I assume that ‘warm’ denotes a single concept.

  15. Cf. Carnap (1963).

  16. As things stand, \(\textsc {warm}^\prime ,\) and \(\textsc {cold}^\prime \) are probably not sufficiently precise to count as candidate explicata. The theorist of the example would need to provide more precise definitions—perhaps defining the sensations demonstratively, providing a more concrete account of ‘the typical healthy human’, and so on.

  17. It is also inessential that we are talking about Oppenheimian explication rather than Carnapian explication. Strawson could accept that, if Carnapian explication were relevant to a philosophical problem, it would nonetheless be the explanation of how it is relevant that would ‘give life and meaning’ to any subsequent solution.

  18. See, e.g., Loomis and Juhl (2006); Maher (2007): pp. 323–323, Olsson (2015): p. 69 and Schupbach (2017): p. 684.

  19. As an anonymous referee notes, it is essential to this response that we have put aside semantic externalism—and that we are interested in concepts (the pocketknife) rather than the extra-conceptual world (bacteria). See the comment in Sect. 3.1, and see Sect. 5.3 for further discussion. Cf. Williamson 2007.

  20. A similar point is made by Brun (2016: p. 1219) and Schupbach (2017: p. 685).

  21. See: Brun (2016): p. 1219, Maher (2007): pp. 333–334, Olsson (2015): pp. 69–70 and Schupbach (2017): p. 691.

  22. This objection was raised by an anonymous referee.

  23. Strawson’s critique is also explicitly tied to similarity by Brun (2016: pp. 2018–2019) and Novaes and Reck (2017: pp. 202–203).

  24. Although Schupbach is not explicit about this, I understand the idea to be that the ‘properties’ in question include, in particular, extension in various (everyday) actual and hypothetical scenarios, and inferential connections with other related concepts. If this is right, then Schupbach’s understanding of simplicity differs from Carnap’s (see footnote 6).

  25. The mean residual corresponding to a measure of explanatory power is the average difference between the value of that measure and the participants’ judgements of explanatory power. The participants recorded their judgements by placing a mark along a line, with one end of the line representing an extremely poor explanation and the other end representing an extremely good explanation; these marks were later converted to numerical values (between −1 and 1) for analysis. See Schupbach (2011) for details.

  26. For this reason, Schupbach only sees his approach as being relevant to Oppenheimian explication.

  27. For example, this seems to be how Brun conceptualises the method. See his 2016: p. 1220.

  28. For example, see Novaes and Reck 2017: p. 199.

  29. See Pinder (2017a).

  30. See e.g. DeRose (1995); Lewis (1996).

  31. This is not to say that contextualism about knowledge solves the problem of scepticism as standardly construed. See e.g. Kornblith (2000).

  32. Something like this seems to be the idea in Olsson (2015), although Olsson does not explicitly discuss scepticism.

  33. See e.g. Williamson (2007).

  34. See, e.g., Churchland (1981) and the discussion thereof in Pinder (2017b).

  35. See Kitcher (2008) for a discussion of how explication may lead to pluralities of concepts in broadly this way.

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Acknowledgements

I thank two anonymous referees for this journal, one of whom in particular provided very helpful and insightful comments. I thank the organisers and participants of the Philosophical Methods workshop held in Essen in June 2016. As a result of the excellent papers and discussion at that workshop, my approach to Strawson’s critique has evolved significantly from the paper presented there. I particularly benefitted from discussion with Magdalena Balcerak Jackson, Georg Brun, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Anna-Maria Asunta Eder, Hannes Leitgeb and Timothy Williamson. I also thank Nick K. Jones and Jonah Schupbach, whose comments on other projects have significantly influenced this work.

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    Mark Pinder

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Appendix

Appendix

Summary of results of discussion in Sect. 5 (Table 1).

Table 1 Summary of the role that explication can play in philosophical methodology
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Pinder, M. On Strawson’s critique of explication as a method in philosophy. Synthese 197, 955–981 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1614-6

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