Justin Fisher --- Meanings and Methodologies

[New Waves in Philosophy of Mind]

Meanings and Methodologies

Justin Fisher

This paper charts relations between (a) views in philosophy of mind and language regarding the correct application conditions or ‘meanings’ of our words and concepts and (b) methodologies that people have proposed for doing philosophy, especially methodologies that have aimed to uncover the meanings of philosophical concepts like knowledge, freedom or justice.  I identify three broad classes of theories of concept-meaning.  Two of these classes – descriptivist and causal/informational theories – correspond closely to familiar philosophical methodologies – intuitive conceptual analysis and ‘naturalized’ analysis.  A third class of theories of meaning – teleo/pragmatic theories – has many adherents in philosophy of mind, but does not yet have a well-known corresponding philosophical methodology.  To fill this gap, I describe a general methodology that I call Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis; I highlight a few instances of this methodology in action in work by Edward Craig, Sally Haslanger and Jim Woodward; and I argue that this methodology enjoys distinct advantages over more familiar philosophical methodologies.

Interactive Overview of Paper: http://www.justin-fisher.com/presentations/Fisher--Meanings-and-Methodologies.html

A PDF of the paper is ready to view and download in the attachment below. 

A direct link to the PDF: http://goo.gl/gyTjF

[Carrie Figdor]

Hi Justin,

Interesting discussion and somewhat difficult to comment on because it is clearly part of a larger project that would answer my starter question of "What itch are you scratching?" Also you may have already read Cappelen's book Philosophy Without Intuitions; I don't think it forces substantive changes in your characterization of the 'intuition' category but it is clearly about methods that fall there.

One comment I do have though is the fact that you emphasize the benefits in the pragmatic view. What about detriments? Take the concept GAY. Someone with this concept will (a) have certain verbal behavior/snap judgments/intuitions expressed in language and (b) certain behaviors towards those categorized as such. In some cases the behaviors are detrimental, not beneficial. So I guess my question is the extent to which the pragmatic analysis is just a categorization-behavior analysis as opposed to one that yields beneficial outcomes of categorization behavior. (the homophobe can be quite successful in his categorization-behavior). 

Best,

Carrie

[Bence]

Hi Justin, good to see that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis strikes again. 

I think my question may be a version of Carrie's (and something I'm sure I asked you about years ago). So what's wrong with free-standing theory construction? Difficult to get off the ground - true. Lacks conceptual anchors - also true. But one could construe the latter as an advantage (if one thinks that our conceptual apparatus is rubbish for certain things). And one could deny the former as long as there is enough empirical basis for the theory that would justify abandoning the existing concepts. 

I vaguely remember that years ago in Vancouver I raised a version of this point and you slapped it down with a devastating objection, but I've forgotten what the objection was...

[Justin Fisher]

Hi Carrie,

What itch am I scratching?  I could give a lot of answers, including an itch to better understand the pros and cons of different methodologies I see philosophers using, and an itch to see how well these methodologies match up to our best understandings in Philosophy of Mind of how it is that concepts refer to things or kinds in the world.

But perhaps more helpful would be a bit of auto-biography.  I got into this project by noticing that Intuitive Conceptual Analysis would be a pretty good methodology if Descriptivism were right.  But most of us think Descriptivism is wrong, and I, being an old Ruth Millikan student, am attracted to a teleo-semantic approach instead.  So, I asked myself: if a teleo-semantic account is correct regarding what our concepts refer to, then what sort of philosophical methodology would make the most sense to discover these facts about concept-reference?  And that's what led me to Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis.

Regarding concepts like GAY, the crucial question for Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis will be: how has it made a difference that we have counted some things/people as "gay" but not others?  Obviously a very big part of the answer here is that this concept has changed our expectations about the romantic interests of people -- we expect "gay" people to be more interested in the same sex than the opposite sex, and vice versa for non-"gay"s.  And of course, being able to predict who someone will or won't be attracted to often turns out to be very beneficial.   So, at least attending to these uses, Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis will tell us to adopt an analysis of GAY upon which men who are attracted to men count as gay, and men who are attracted to women don't.  So far so good, I hope.

But you worry that maybe there are some detrimental uses of this concept too.  For these to matter to Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis, it would need to be that there is some sort of systematic variation -- that counting one sort of thing as "gay" rather than "non-gay" consistently leads to detrimental effects.  If so, then PCA will encourage us to count that sort of thing as "non-gay".  (E.g., thinking of clearly straight people as "gay" is surely almost always less beneficial than thinking of them as "non-gay", so PCA urges us to count straight people as "non-gay".)   It seemed like the detrimental effects you had in mind wouldn't vary systematically in this way, so I'm not sure they would enter into the calculus at all for PCA.  (Or maybe you could plausibly argue that thinking of young kids as "gay" is always more detrimental than beneficial, in which case PCA would urge us to adopt an understanding of GAY upon which it is not applicable to young kids.)

Incidentally, I should emphasize that PCA is just a tool for figuring out which things in the world a concept is correctly applicable to.  It does *not* tell us whether or not a concept is worth keeping.  PCA can tell us what referent has been underlying whatever successful practical uses a concept has given us, but it might still be that it just isn't worthwhile to hold onto to a concept for such uses anyway.  In the paper, I mention PHLOGISTON as a potential example like this.  Some fairly radical feminists (incuding me, a few days of the week) think that various gender and sexual-orientiation concepts like GAY do as much harm as good, and hence should similarly be relegated to the dustbin of history.  It's not the job of Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis (nor Intuitive Conceptual Analysis for that matter) to make such decisions -- but PCA *can* give us a better sense of who has been benefitting from a concept and how, which can certainly be a valuable precursor to radical critiques of that concept.

-Justin

[Justin Fisher]

Hi Bence (greetings, and hope all's well!),

I'm actually a big fan of Free-Standing Theory Construction, which is a good thing, because (as I noted in a footnote) I think of this paper itself as an exercise in Free-Standing Theory Construction.  I'm very happy that our grand division of labor includes some free-standing theory builders.  Without cranks and crackpots and radicals and dreamers, we'd miss out on discovering a lot of good stuff, so it's good that we have a few of each of those.  (But only a few.)

On the other side, I also think that a lot of our existing concepts are pretty good, and with a little honing, can be made even better.  For that reason, I think it's vitally important that our grand division of labor also includes philosophers who work on clarifying and improving existing concepts, and I think Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis is an especially good methodology for that task.

-Justin

 

[Bence]

Thanks, Justin, this is a very nice and inclusive picture you're painting. And it's good to know that we don't disagree except for this very big picture issue of how much we should trust our existing concepts. I know you're a fan of Dennett, so I wonder how you can respond to the usual Dennettian worry that our conceptual apparatus did not evolve in order to track the truth (the exact truth in all situations), but in order to make it possible for us to talk about the world (relatively roughly and in a very narrow set of situations). So wouldn't it be surprising if our concepts were spot on? 

I'm also not sure that it is fair to describe the free-standing theory-builders as 'cranks and crackpots and radicals and dreamers'. The way I think about this project is that for the free-standing theory-builder, distinctions emerging from the empirical sciences often trump distinctions enshrined in our terribly unreliable conceptual apparatus. I think that's just plain good sense, not being 'cranks and crackpots and radicals and dreamers'. 

[Justin Fisher]

Hi Bence,

I agree that not every free-standing theory builder is a crank, crackpot, or dreamer, though some certainly are, and it's good that we have a few of these for precisely the same reasons that it's good to have free-standing theory builders.  I will stand by "radical" though, as what's characteristic of free-standing theory building is the insistence that existing concepts aren't sufficient, and that we need new concepts to appropriately understand some phenomenon, which is an inherently radical proposal.  Admittedly, it may not be as radical as throwing bombs or demanding universal healthcare, but that doesn't mean it isn't at least somewhat radical.

As for the Dennettian worries, the first point I should make is that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis allows that we may be wrong about a lot of things in our ordinary conceptual usage.  E.g., it allows that people can have a concept of H2O even without a correct understanding of chemistry, and even with lots of mistaken beliefs about water (including, Thales mistaken belief that rocks are made of water, or modern homeopaths mistaken beliefs that water has a sort of memory of things that have been in it long ago and that this memory provides restorative powers).  Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis tries to determine what has underlain what regular successes a concept has enjoyed, and that's compatible with there also having been a whole lot of failures and random shots in the dark.

So PCA allows that there might be a whole lot of errors involving a concept.  But you're right that it doesn't allow (very easily) for systematic or uniform error.  As long as there is some method to the madness -- some way in which our application of a concept regularly returns benefits -- Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis will identify a referent that sustains those successful uses.  The closest we can get to systematic error for a concept is if it hasn't had any beneficial uses, or if whatever beneficial uses it has had have been completely haphazard without any regularities underlying it.  However, evolution isn't likely to select for concepts like this, so we don't get any strong worries that evolution is likely to produce a lot of meaningless concepts.

We can worry, however, that evolution may well systematically bias our usage of concepts in certain ways.  E.g., we may have concepts that are regularly used to identify high levels of competence at various activities, but evolution might reward being biased towards applying these concepts to ourselves and to our children.  Hence, a vast majority of people believe they're among the best drivers, and in Lake Woebegone all the children are taken to be above average.  These limited departures aren't enough to change the practical ideals that we have been tracking through our usage of these concepts, but they do lead us to sometimes be predictably mistaken in our application of these concepts.  So, in that limited sense, we should worry that evolution might lead us to make some systematic sorts of mistakes, but such mistakes must always be against a broader background of systematic success.

-Justin

[Corey Maley]

Hi Justin,

Very interesting paper! I’m sympathetic to the idea that we should make explicit the methodologies used in philosophy (if nothing else, I like being able to tell non-philosophers what it is that we do!).

One thing I’d like to hear more about is what counts as “beneficial.” I see the point with respect to, say, free will: there is a sense in which it is more beneficial to classify sleepwalkers as not having it, to classify awake and competent adults as having it, and to use its presence or absence as, say, a mitigating factor in punishments for crimes. However, it also seems to me that it is beneficial to discover that our most well-thought out notion of free will does not apply to anything in the natural world. As you mention, the sensible thing to do (at least for now) is then to use some other, nearby concept, as Jackson advocates. But why can’t we have an everyday notion of free will which does the everyday work we want it to, as well as our more theoretical (or well-thought out, or strict) notion of free will, which might turn out to not exist?

Another example might be “happening simultaneously.” Quite useful in an everyday sense, but not ever true in a strict sense (except with qualification beyond what’s needed—or maybe even available—in the everyday sense). Or (so I’ve heard) “reptile,” which is again useful in the everyday sense, but non-existent in the biological sense (if you want to both exclude birds and include crocodiles, or something like that). Or “soul,” which I think many would take to be quite useful, but may very well not exist.

Perhaps what’s beneficial may need to be decided from case to case, or is relativized in some way, but I’d like to hear what you think.

[Justin Fisher]

Hi Corey,

I think there are multiple ways of cashing out 'beneficial' that lead to interesting and useful versions of Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis.  I'll talk briefly about two.  (If you're interested, I can point you to places where I've written a lot more on this.)

One way is to equate 'beneficial' with whatever we have reason to pursue.  I don't have an official view on what we do have reason to pursue, but it probably involves something like happiness, pleasure, satisfaction, well-being, or the like.  Defining beneficial in this way yields the desirable consequence that we'll have *instrumental* reason to adopt the explications that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis delivers, as a means towards delivering pursuit-worthy benefits.

A second way is to instead equate 'beneficial' with whatever is dynamically self-stabilizing in the processes that shape our use of concepts (genetic evolution, cultural evolution, individual learning).  Note that this is 'beneficial' in precisely the same sense that Dawkins' "selfish genes" are working toward their own benefit.  Defining 'beneficial' in this way yields the interesting consequence that the explications that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis delivers will be explanatorily useful, as they will capture attractors for the dynamical processes that shape our concept usage.

One can hope that these two ways of understanding 'beneficial' will work out not to be that different from each other -- i.e., that the dynamical processes that shape our concept usage aren't tragically leading us to focus our concepts upon something other than what we actually have reason to pursue.  Insofar as these two (classes of) notions of benefit coincide, we can get the interesting benefits of both out of a single version of Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis.  But if they do tragically differ, then we may want two versions of Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis: one to help us to achieve the things we want to pursue, and another to help us explain why people (perhaps tragically) persist in using concepts in the ways that they do.

Another thread in your questioning had to do with why we couldn't hold onto a stricter theoretical notion of (for example) free will, alongside some more lenient concept that's capable of doing the work we've traditionally been using our concept of free will to do.  I'm generally a fan of letting people coin new terms and stipulate whatever meaning they want.  So, e.g., you could call your theoretical notion "Impossibly Free Will (TM)" and knock yourself out theorizing about it.  However, my guess is that you'll find that Impossible Free Will (TM) isn't really all that interesting or useful of a concept, and that we may as well stick with a compatibilist understanding of free will that does the work we call upon a concept of free will to do. 

-Justin