A lot of the milk into town and it was pretty crestfallen when you want or go on the road.

I don't have the paper in front of me (at work); you wanna do a search and tell me what Davidson says there about rules?

SO drop the notion of a share meaning. — Banno

No thanks.

Is this your reading of the paper?

1. Davidson's principles (1) - (3) are a good description of lexical meaning.
2. Davidson's argument shows that (1) - (3) cannot account for linguistic behavior.
Therefore
3. We lose nothing by giving up the idea of lexical meaning.

One.

I only meant to suggest the lack of an institutional motivation; I wasn't trying to justify not being curious about what goes on in the world.

Not clear. They're not where I would've started, I guess, but as long as you take seriously what it means for a method of interpretation to be shared by an entire community, maybe you'd be fine.

But even if we do reach a conclusion you could count as "the same" in some schematic sense, we obviously have different ideas about what the trouble is. Davidson thinks he has cast doubt on the role of convention in understanding language use; I think he doesn't have the faintest idea what convention is.

He hasn't given up anything really. He still sees communication by means of language as radical interpretation or radical translation: either you have a useless prior theory or no theory at all.

I wouldn't say we agree.

The stuff of mine you responded to, that was supposed to be uncontroversial summary.

In the rest of that post, and in the one before, and in the one that follows, I criticize Davidson's treatment of principle (2) as laughably inadequate.

Another way to see Davidson's agreement in a passing theory is as a sort of parody of convention, as a parody of agreement, in fact, because one side "gets away with it"; the speaker gets the audience to adjust their theory of the language to match the speaker's. You could say that the speaker wins the speech encounter.

If speaker and audience come to a speech encounter -- and honestly they do not -- with the options of (a) following convention and honoring the social contract, or (b) not, you could do just the sort of game theoretical analysis that Lewis does, starting with a simple four-quadrant payoff table.

Davidson doesn't do this. He starts his analysis with the speaker having already violated the principle of cooperation, and violated the social contract. It's a fait accompli. The audience then has to choose whether to let the speaker get away with it. Davidson has cases where the audience does this, so it's almost as if he's committing to flouting convention being a dominant strategy. (If you can get away with it, then you should.) At the theoretical level, that shows up as doubting or denying the role of convention.

This is all cockeyed though because language use is a cooperative game, not a competitive one.

Suppose you decide to test tens of thousands of people with a simple test: see if any of them can do significantly and consistently better than chance at the predicting the color of the next card drawn from a shuffled deck. Even if you got somebody with a verifiable ability to do this, what would you investigate next?

I think if you set out looking for a statistically significant correlation, you generally have some idea of the realm in which you could discover a mechanism to explain the observed correlation. My understanding is that medicine worked this way for a long time -- you can figure out that a drug is effective without knowing what the mechanism is, but you know what kind of thing someone else with better tech, better theories, and better experiments might someday show to be the mechanism.

If you could show that some individual has an uncanny ability to predict the colors of playing cards, what kind of thing do you imagine could be the mechanism for that? A lot of science is stamp collecting, but it is stamp collecting that contributes to much broader research programs, and if you can't even imagine what such a program would be, why bother collecting the stamps?

This raises the question of what it is that is shared. — Banno

I'm not offering to build a complete alternative theory.

These are the options I see:

(i) We have a linguistic competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, and this competence is adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3).

(ii) We have a linguistic competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, and this competence is not adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3). (Some principle must be added, or one of these principles must be modified.)

(iii) We have some other competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, not linguistic and thus not adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3), which describes a linguistic competence, whether or not it describes all possible linguistic competence.

I'm still not sure whether (i) is false, but it's what Davidson believes he has shown.

A version of (iii) might be:

But if we do say this, then we should realize that we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally. For there are no rules for arriving at passing theories, no rules in any strict sense, as opposed to rough maxims and methodological generalities — p. 265

(I think this is the bucket he consigns Grice to -- general principles and maxims.)

It's tempting to go along with this, but what was this boundary supposed to be? Driving a car is a specific skill that can be described abstractly to some degree, but even this abstract description will be incomplete if it leaves out all the other abilities and social conditions in which driving a car is embedded, and upon which it is dependent. We feel there must be something we can pick out as specific to car-driving -- and honestly that part's easy, being behind the wheel and operating the controls -- but what you pick out as specific to car driving only is not remotely all there is to driving a car.

So I wonder about the boundary. Language use is obviously social and dependent on a whole lot of other social abilities, as well as physical, and many of them are in turn dependent on language use among a community's members. So where was Davidson drawing the boundary in the first place and should I be pleased to erase it or not?

He seems to prefer (ii) because he still thinks something like (1) - (3) "must be true" and he decides the problem is (3): there have to be these theories, methods of interpretation, but they cannot possibly be learned in advance, therefore (3) is dead.

But we could note that the source of the friction is all related to the sense in which theories are shared or not. The bulk of the actual argument of the paper is laboring over the nature of prior theories, their insufficiency for speech with a specific audience, the generation of passing theories to make up for that, and so on.

But there is no "shared theory" here at all; there are only the theories of isolated individuals, their methods of interpretation. They may each have an identical copy of some theory, but there is nothing here that they could call theirs together, nothing that is actually shared, and certainly nothing that they share with an entire community.

I can easily imagine what such a thing would be: a Lewisian convention. It is something your behavior should be governed by, but also something you participate in shaping, not an external rule imposed by some authority.

It is possible that if you start with a richer sense of what is shared, you do not face the problem of radical interpretation at all. (And I believe Lewis said as much in the paper I mentioned way back at the beginning, but I only skimmed it to see if it might've gotten under Davidson's skin.)

Suppose the weak spot in the paper is not principle (3) but (2):

First meanings are shared. For speaker and interpreter to communicate successfully and regularly, they must share a method of interpretation of the sort described in (1). — p. 254

The concept of "sharing" a method of interpretation, or a theory, operative in the paper amounts to "each has a copy, their own copy". That's it. Language use is not an ongoing communal enterprise but an encounter between two people who may or may not each have a copy of the same theory:

In small, isolated groups everyone may know the names everyone else knows, and so have ready in advance of a speech encounter a theory that will, without correction, cope with the names to be employed. — p. 259

What a stroke of luck, if people in small, isolated groups turn out to know each other's names.

Isn’t it perfectly clear that the proposition that it’s going to rain is the object of Alice’s belief? — Tristan L

No, it isn't.

It is clear that if Alice is thinking it's going to rain, then we are entitled to say she's thinking something. What is not clear is how we should take the further claim that "there is something Alice is thinking". @Andrew M claims that the something Alice is thinking is a convenient fiction, and he calls this fiction an "abstract entity" without committing in any way to its independent existence.

If Bob is also thinking it's going to rain, we can say anaphorically that Bob is thinking the same thing as Alice, and here the convenience of @Andrew M's fiction becomes more apparent, for we may wish to talk about what they're both thinking in more general terms: anyone thinking it's going to rain has reason to take an umbrella, or, thinking it's going to rain is a reason to take an umbrella.

That you can translate what an Aristotelian, like @Andrew M, says, or what someone who may have stronger nominalist inclinations says, into terms we might call Platonist -- that is not at issue. Of course you can. But what do you say to convince us that there are Propositions? That there are Relations? Where does @Andrew M's way of talking or mine come up short?

It seems to me to be aimed at a mooted argument that there is such a thing as the meaning that can be derived in a fairly direct way from a set of words, exclusively by making use of a catalogue of conventions. — Banno

I told a typical story about the ambiguity of the word "Bob" as it appears in what I know about English: my theory has two entries and I rely on context to know which of the two conventional meanings I know to use.

I told a typical story about mis-speaking, saying "socket" when you mean "wrench": that might lead to a genuine impasse, if "socket" is exactly as reasonable a thing to say as "wrench", or you might be able use your knowledge of the context of the utterance to know that "socket" was simply the wrong word. I also suggested that an audience might see saying the wrong the thing as similar to thinking the wrong thing, for the remedies are similar.

(None of the speakers of British or Commonwealth English here complained about my use of "wrench", though if I were helping one of you lot you might have meant to ask me for a spanner, and you might have meant to ask me for a spanner by using the word "wrench" since you know I'm an American.)

In neither case do I see any challenge to the idea that the words being used are generally used in particular ways, that they play certain roles or serve certain functions we can think of as agreed upon, though without any explicit agreement, and that these ways of using words can be learned, that they are in these senses conventional.

It is plain that you can know everything there is to know about the conventions at play and still come up short if you know too little about the occasion of use, but where is the argument that there are no such conventions or that knowledge of such conventions, should they exist, would be useless? Everyone would grant that knowledge of conventions may be insufficient, but where is the argument that it is not necessary?

This talk of error or mistake is not mysterious nor open to philosophical suspicions. I was wrong about what a good dictionary would say, or what would be found by polling a pod of experts whose taste or training I trust. But error or mistake of this kind, with its associated notion of correct usage, is not philosophically interesting. We want a deeper notion of what words, when spoken in context, mean; and like the shallow notion of correct usage, we want the deep concept to distinguish between what a speaker, on a given occasion, means, and what his words mean. The widespread existence of malapropisms and their kin threatens the distinction, since here the intended meaning seems to take over from the standard meaning. — p. 252

Does Davidson show that the "seems to" can be substantiated as a "does"? Does he show that the distinction "threatened" is actually demolished? Does he show that the distinction between what a speaker means and what their words mean is demolished by showing that there is nothing on the right-hand side, nothing that the words mean?

Tell me again what the argument is.

Is it, for instance, that because a word might be used to say something different from what it is usually used to say, deliberately or inadvertently, therefore nothing can be learned in advance about how words are generally used? You either get exhaustive, exception-free and eternal rules governing usage, or you get nothing at all.

Is that the argument?

(The sentence Srap Tasmaner pointed out and I missed about making a distinction between what is "literal" and what is "conventional"... that is really odd, though. I'm not sure what to make of this.) — Dawnstorm

Once you know where the paper's going, it makes sense.

He's going to argue that we communicate by modifying the literal meanings of words as we go and agreeing, if only tacitly, on this usage, temporarily and for as little as a single exchange. If by "convention" you mean something that can be learned in advance, such "passing theories" are not conventional.

If there are two broadly different approaches to language -- langue and parole, formal and sociological, transcendental and ethological -- I believe Davidson is arguing that you cannot get to langue from parole. The only formal specification you'll ever be able to come up with is a one-off.

The "passing theory" theory is a reductio of the idea of deriving langue from parole because the only langue you can possibly come up with is not a language at all.

But note crucially that this all depends on claiming that what we do is determine lexical meaning as we go -- so we're not in Grice's territory at all. Where are we?

If you tell people that the lexical meaning of a word -- and for the sake of argument we, and that means Davidson, are assuming, unlike, I believe, @Banno, that there is such a thing -- is entirely determined by the utterances of the members of a speech community that include that word, whether you take yourself to be (i) a garden-variety lexicographer or (ii) a proponent of some version of Wittgenstein or even (iii) compiling a Tarski-style model with a whole bunch of sentences and the community-standard truth values assigned, the first and most predictable response is:

Then there's no such thing as misusing a word.

Somehow, for some reason, this seems to be the vineyard Davidson is working in.

((We could enrich the idea of convention; we could take a different approach to the formal model; we have a lot of options for trying to make progress, but I'm still just trying to nail down exactly what Davidson's own argument is.))

Are you okay?

Maybe take a little break from this place.

Except when you mistakenly ask for a socket and I know you meant to ask for a wrench (or should have meant to ask for a wrench), I know what object you actually need because my understanding is aligned with reality, despite what you said. If I were to describe my understanding, my semantic engine will produce "wrench", because it is aligned with -- my understanding? reality?

Oddly, I think sometimes people hear silent corrections: there is a not quite conscious memory, a trace, of the words they spoke, so that if I hand you a wrench without saying anything, you might very well say, "Thanks. I asked for a socket, didn't I? Geez."

Bonus:
That is, the words you actually said create an expectation of their own, one that competes with the expectation of getting a wrench, producing a double-take (sometimes) because you get what you (think you) asked for, but you have a feeling it's not what you expected.

Whereas my sense is that neither minds nor brains think about things; persons do.

The question is just how much philosophical hay can be made out of saying, if you're thinking about something, then there's something that you're thinking about.

You can take that as an innocent grammatical transformation, or you can take it as proof of another realm of non-temporal, non-spatial, ideal Things that are the object of our thought. I'm not making this up.

Which makes more sense to you?

I don't entirely object to the discussion. I do object to it interrupting other discussions.

presumption — Banno

The very word I reached for on page 1 of this thread.

There have actually been two claims:

1. Some of us would be doing more good if we were doing something else; if you measure the effect of your actions against the most good you could do, we are doing relative harm.

2. What some of us do leads others into the (1) scenario above, so that others are now doing less good than they might; thus there is a compounded relative harm.

I will absolutely be watching! Thanks for the tip.

I assume you've seen Douglas Rushkoff's The Merchants of Cool -- if not, highly recommended.

I take for granted, however, that nothing should be allowed to obliterate or even blur the distinction between speaker’s meaning and literal meaning. In order to preserve the distinction we must, I shall argue, modify certain commonly accepted views about what it is to ‘know a language’, or about what a natural language is. In particular, we must pry apart what is literal in language from what is conventional or established. — p. 252

Presumably this last sentence doesn't mean Davidson is going to deny the arbitrariness of the sign. Then what does it mean?

The trouble is that Donnellan’s original distinction had nothing to do with words changing their meaning or reference. If, in the referential use, Jones refers to someone who did not murder Smith by using the description ‘Smith’s murderer’, the reference is none the less achieved by way of the normal meanings of the words. The words therefore must have their usual reference. All that is needed, if we are to accept this way of describing the situation, is a firm sense of the difference between what words mean or refer to and what speakers mean or refer to. — p. 258

And I think "what words mean" is what Davidson means by a person's specifically linguistic competence, the prior theory. Here I believe Davidson is talking about Donnellan's example of the ambiguity of some definite descriptions, not of Donnellan's Humpty-Dumpty performance. I think he's saying that the former can be dealt with just fine (raising no questions about theories and competence) while the latter cannot. But I'm pretty sure we still don't know why not.

The speaker wants to be understood, so he intends to speak in such a way that he will be interpreted in a certain way. In order to judge how he will be interpreted, he forms, or uses, a picture of the interpreter’s readiness to interpret along certain lines. Central to this picture is what the speaker believes is the starting theory of interpretation the interpreter has for him. The speaker does not necessarily speak in such a way as to prompt the interpreter to apply this prior theory; he may deliberately dispose the interpreter to modify his prior theory. But the speaker’s view of the interpreter’s prior theory is not irrelevant to what he says, nor to what he means by his words; it is an important part of what he has to go on if he wants to be understood. — p. 260

I wish Davidson had been clearer throughout in what he means by phrases like "how the speaker wants to be interpreted". Remember that the lexical/literal/first meaning of the utterance is only relied on as the means to an end: Diogenes wants Alexander to understand that he wants nothing from him; to make this point, he says he wants Alexander to move a little, and Alexander needs to understand the literal meaning before he can get the point of Diogenes saying it. That means "how the speaker wants to be interpreted" is necessarily ambiguous.

Suppose Alexander stepped to the side a little and said, "Terribly sorry. Is that better? Now -- what boon would you wish from me?" Has Diogenes been interpreted as he wanted? That's obviously "yes" for the sentence meaning and obviously "no" for the speaker's meaning. (And Diogenes turns to the camera and says, "What a maroon.")

It's part of Grice's theory that "If you could step to one side a little" still means just that, that saying that in order to say "I want nothing from you" doesn't touch the sentence meaning at all; there's no claim that those words, even temporarily, mean "I want nothing from you". The whole point of the theory is that when a sentence, taken literally, violates the principle of cooperation (by violating a maxim), you are warranted to infer that the speaker means something different from what they are literally saying.

And the whole point, I believe, of Davidson's focus on malapropisms, is that there are cases when you cannot get the literal meaning at all, thus blocking any inference you're prepared to make that the principle of cooperation is apparently being violated.

That's a little odd though, right? I mean, speaking in such a way that the literal meaning is inaccessible, that looks like a prima facie violation of the principle of cooperation. You might as well speak French to someone who doesn't speak French.

Every deviation from ordinary usage, as long as it is agreed on for the moment (knowingly deviant, or not, on one, or both, sides), is in the passing theory as a feature of what the words mean on that occasion. Such meanings, transient though they may be, are literal; they are what I have called first meanings. — p. 261

And then right away we're here. Davidson explicitly endorses Grice's distinction between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning, but, he asks, what about deviant usage of a word? What about using a word with a nonstandard meaning?

(It's just not clear to me how a Tarski-style model was ever supposed to cope with novel or mistaken uses -- I suppose if I went through Davidson's earlier papers we'd find some handwaving to cover it, but maybe this is the first time he addresses it.)

But here we really need to slow down. Why does Davidson claim that deviant usage must be a change in the literal (or lexical or first) meaning of a word? We know there must be such cases, because the meanings of words change over time. But we also know that there are simple slips of the tongue that do not change what the word spoken means; the speaker is just taken to have said a different word from the one she meant to. That could lead to a change in usage, but needn't.

I think, again, he wants to say that a Gricean approach here doesn't save us. But what exactly is the argument? What does it have to do with convention?

Suppose you're helping someone working on a car engine, handing her tools as she asks for them, and she asks for a socket when she meant to ask for a wrench. The case Davidson is concerned with is where she "gets away with it" and you understand she must have meant "wrench" when she said "socket". What would it take for you to figure that out? Not to admit uncertainty and ask, "You mean the wrench?" and then agree on a fix for the defect in her sentence, but just to know for certain that's what she meant. There are, of course, slips of the tongue we correct without even recognizing we have done so, but let's suppose you heard this clearly and recognize "socket" was the wrong word and the word intended was "wrench". How could you possibly know that?

There are cases. Maybe (strangely) you don't have any sockets to hand and you know she knows that. That looks like an easy case. If there are sockets in the shed and she meant for you to go and get them, she would've said so, right? You can assume she's asking for one of the tools she knows to be ready to hand. But how do you know she hasn't forgotten you didn't bring the sockets out? We stipulated that this is not the case, that she does want a wrench, but how can you the interpreter be sure? If there just are no sockets she might have thought to be available to her (and that includes her bringing over her own set when she came to fix your car) then you're covered. Short of that, what?

Instead of staring at your phone between requests for tools, you could be looking over her shoulder and watching what she's doing. If she needs a wrench to get into a narrow spot where a socket won't go, you'll see that, and know she means "wrench" when she says "socket" -- if you know anything at all about tools and understand something of what she's doing. There's a related case where you correct not what she says but what she's doing: you watch her try to wedge a socket into position and suggest a wrench the same size instead. That might be a simple "Here" and a nudge and offering her the right size wrench. The point is that if you understand what she's doing and how she's doing it, you know for certain what the appropriate thing for her to say is, which tool she should ask for, regardless of what she says. She might, before trying, think she can get a socket in there, but you might see that it'll take a wrench and hand her the wrench instead, even when she knowingly but mistakenly asked for a socket. I think all of these cases are clearly related, and they all depend on you knowing what you're about as a team, what you would say if you were the one doing the work, and so on. If you're following her work very closely, and she knows it, she might not say anything, but just put down the tool she's using and hold out her hand for you to plunk the next tool needed in!

Where in this sort of story do we find the speaker's and interpreter's theories, changes to literal meaning, and where do we find Gricean inferences from violations of the principle of cooperation? Obviously the two share a prior theory that assigns unique meanings to "wrench" and "socket". Are we at any point tempted to say the literal meaning of "socket" has been enlarged to include the literal meaning of "wrench"? If not, are you the helper to take what the speaker under the hood said as a violation of the principle of cooperation? It's easy to see in the abstract that this could be how we correct slips of the tongue, but is that what happens here?

In the first variation, asking for something I can't give you seems to lead to an impasse: how can I be sure you don't think I can give you what you're asking for?

In the second version, I know what you should be asking for, so I know what your speaker's meaning should be; there are then subcases where your speaker's meaning is a mistake, and where your speaker's meaning is correct but your sentence meaning is a mistake. So how do we line up my knowledge of what your speaker's meaning should be with what it is and with your sentence meaning?

Perhaps more to the point -- what here will Davidson consider specifically linguistic competence and is he right to limit the range of that term? We certainly can understand what people mean without knowing what they should mean -- without there even being something like what they should mean. That's probably the normal case for conversation. (Coming back to this.) Davidson's question is not how we can possibly figure out what they mean, as speakers, given only what their words mean -- Grice's territory -- but how we can figure out what they mean, as speakers, when their words do not mean what they think they mean, or when they did not say what they think they said. But what kind of problem is that? Is it a matter of locating the source of uncertainty?

Can we deal with the case where there is no such thing as what you should mean by falling back on the principle of cooperation? That looks like not just yes, but an emphatic yes. The idea is that there is always some restriction on what you say next, always a some general constraint on the sort of thing you should mean: it should be appropriate to the point you're at in the conversation, should be truthful and relevant, on and on. So whatever you say is expected to fall within some limited range, and when it doesn't we presume you're engaging in conversational implicature and carry on.

But is that general constraint robust enough to carry us over slips of the tongue and malapropisms? All the evidence is that it is, right? Because we manage just fine, most of the time. The only question is still whether Davidson is right to say that whatever this is, it is not specifically linguistic competence. In my story, we can even leave out speech altogether! That suggests Davidson is right, doesn't it?

So what does this have to do with convention? In Davidson's hands, convention seems to mean the prior theory, and he takes himself to have shown that prior theory is not guaranteed to be enough on its own to get you sentence meaning, let alone speaker's meaning. If you have speaker's meaning in hand, or a sense of what the speaker's meaning should be, at least in general, you can reverse engineer, so to speak, the sentence meaning, but is Davidson's claim that this is non-linguistic or that it is linguistic but non-conventional?

In Marx a split occurred, philosophy was brought back down to earth, rescued from the games and error of the supernatural idealists. There have been lots of philosophers who labor in the realm of relevant theory, as opposed to abstract idealism. — JerseyFlight

Supposing I grant that the theory you have in mind is more "relevant".

Clearly he (( Russell )) thought this activity had value -- in contrast to what, mere theory? — JerseyFlight

What about Critical Theory: are you sure it's more than mere theory?

I can be convinced, but you have to point to something more than the subject matter.

I did my time as a Marxist, read lots of his writing, picked up Gramsci along the way and the cultural stuff. Spent a fair amount of time later in Foucault-Deleuze land, which is not Marxist but far from anti-Marxist, and I think aspired to be what we could call "materialist" in a Marxist sense.

I never did the Frankfurt school though, so that's a big gap for me, and your particular area.

But we're still by and large just talking about people's reading habits. Does Critical Theory make sure people are fed and housed and given the resources to flourish? Or is it mere theory?

Would it make the world a better place if I went back to reading Marx and talked about him all the time? I suppose if I really took your criticism to heart, it might assuage my guilty conscience; I could now claim to be focusing on my energy on things that really matter. But would that be true? There's plenty of reason to think Marxism is primarily a theoretical, and, to a substantial degree, academic, pursuit.

If you wanted to tell me every minute I spend talking about stuff on the internet is a minute I could have spent helping people -- that would just be true, I guess. But I'm not sure why it matters what I'm talking about on the internet. Would I be excused if I were talking about Adorno? Shouldn't I still shut up and go help people?

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Great philosophers don't argue — Burton Dreben

So what did you mean by saying the following? — Tristan L

That the analogy between "Sally kicks Steve" and "Sally thinks it's going to rain" ought to be examined more closely. It's reasonable to infer, from the fact that Sally kicks Steve, that there is an object Sally kicks; it is not clear to me that if Sally thinks it's going to rain then there is an object Sally thinks.

Your response is that I have simply picked out part of a phrasal verb, so I'm comparing the wrong things. "Sally kicks Steve" is in fact strongly analogous to

• "Sally thinks-that it's going to rain."
• "Sally thinks-of buying a guitar."
• "Sally thinks-about how much easier it used to be."

Now I can ask two sorts of questions:

1. Why does "thinks" have to be part of a phrasal verb when "kicks" doesn't? Why isn't there a "kicks-that", a "kicks-of", or a "kicks-about"?
2. If I'm thinking about Steve, it seems I'm thinking about the object Steve; therefore, if I'm thinking about how much easier it used to be, I must be thinking about the object how much easier it used to be. How convincing is that "therefore"? I can also kick or marry or talk to Steve; can I also kick or marry or talk to how much easier it used to be?

I cannot, I understand you to be saying, because how much easier it used to be is "not-spatial, not-tidesome (not-temporal), not-physical, not-mindly, and onefold (simple)". Steve is at least some of those things; when I think about Steve, am I doing the same sort of thing as when I think about how much easier it used to be?

Do you have any idea what the point of the example was?

I'm accused of playing word games but you're pretending to think that generations of philosophers were genuinely uncertain whether the non-existent king of France is bald.

Isaac Asimov once said that scientific discoveries begin not with "Eureka!" but "That's funny..."

did they find out in the end the solution to that little riddle, about whether that French king was bald or not? — Olivier5

Yes.

you're trying to argue that logical precision is credited to Analytical Philosophy. Then what did we have in the world before this school came into existence? — JerseyFlight

I'm really not saying anything that simplistic.

I think in the Chalmers survey from maybe a decade ago, David Hume won the sweepstakes as the favorite of English-speaking philosophers. What we value about Hume is not primarily, or at all, specific doctrines but his clarity, plain-spokenness and attention to logic. He's the spiritual founder of analytic philosophy, to me anyway.

The actual founder most would say is Frege, who of course was German. That Frege substantially improved the logical tools available to mathematicians and philosophers is, I hope, beyond question. That those developments had an outsize impact on English-language philosophy is a matter of historical chance. It means that analytic philosophers, broadly construed, expect you to be careful about issues resolvable by the use of formal reasoning. That's it.

We are people who understand that "four" in "The king's carriage was pulled by four horses" does not play the same role in that sentence that "black" plays in "The king's carriage was pulled by black horses." (The example is Frege's.) Understanding that is worth doing, but it is especially worth doing if that sort of analysis helps you better evaluate arguments that could directly impact human wellbeing.

I see ordinary language philosophy as more a refutation of AP and its obsession with logical propositions and perfect T-languages. A return to sanity, in short. — Olivier5

Well there was a fight between different camps that went on for a while. But if you read anything written after OLP's heyday, you'll see that everyone learned the lesson, that you need to be very careful how you treat linguistic usage.

I only mentored him because he's the de facto "official" historian of the analytic tradition, and a glance at the historical work might give you a sense of the bigness of the tradition's tent. I wasn't commending his work. I haven't read him. And I'm not about to defend every last piece of writing someone calls "analytic philosophy". You again seem to be struggling with how generality and particularity work.

You have an example of any clarity brought by the analytic tradition? Or, alternatively, of such rigorous modern philosophers? — Olivier5

I think so. You find Searle clear and you must know that Searle's work is based originally on very careful patient work done by J. L. Austin, published after his death as How to Do Things with Words. We probably wouldn't even have the concept of "speech acts" if Austin weren't so fastidious.

Here's a quote from a book intended as a popular treatment of political philosophy by Michael Sandel:

Is it wrong for sellers of goods and services to take advantage of a natural disaster by charging whatever the market will bear? If so, what, if anything, should the law do about it? Should the state prohibit price gouging, even if doing so interferes with the freedom of buyers and sellers to make whatever deals they choose?

I recognize this way of writing. There is an effort, even here in a work written for non-philosophers, to be quite precise in distinguishing the several different questions that may come to mind in talking about price gouging. Sandel intends to be rigorous, precise, careful. He's not talking about language and logic, but justice, and he is doing so in a way that owes much to the sort of care you can see at work in Austin's treatment of speech acts.

You could glance at Scott Soames's historical work to get a sense of how broadly the term "analytic philosophy" is usually taken. There's little point in us getting into the weeds about this here.

And again: insofar as philosophers range more widely than they did in the first three quarters of the 20th, they do so with a rigor that academic philosophy these days takes as a requirement, a rigor that was achieved through the analysis of reasoning and language carried out by our forebears.

(( phone double post ))

Are you confident that almost all English-speaking academic philosophers self-identify as analytical? — Olivier5

No, I'm confident they don't much care, certainly not for the last thirty or forty years, and I've been perfectly clear and repetitive about how I'm using the phrase, and it has nothing to do with how people self-identify.

almost all the academic philosophy in the English-speaking world in the 20th century — Srap Tasmaner

all the academic philosophy in the English-speaking world
— Srap Tasmaner

I have already that. They are quite a few academic English-speaking philosophers who don't define themselves as analytical philosophers. — Olivier5

Duh.

Who's making a sweeping generalization now? — Olivier5

Even when speaking loosely, and explaining how I'm using the term "analytic philosophy" as I go, a way of using the term I believe to be consonant with casual usage as when people compare "analytic" and "continental", even then I was still more careful than you're being by misquoting me. I mean seriously, leaving "almost" out of the phrase "almost all"? That was an oversight right?

If you didn't understand Hegel or didn't like what he had to say, that doesn't make him a fraud or a charlatan or a poseur. If you didn't understand Wittgenstein or didn't like what he had to say, that doesn't make him a fraud or a charlatan or a poseur.

You want to know what my standards are for discussing philosophy? They're higher than that. In fact, my standards for discussing anything are higher than that.

you made the guy who saved up enough money, purchased an item, read the instructions, and otherwise acts as a patient individual who knows the value of planning and research at first- into an arrogant, petulant, and unrealistically petty child- for no reason other than to do so. While the other man is for some reason valiantly humble and infinitely resourceful. — Outlander

I mostly agree and said as much -- it's what I called the resentment at the story level -- but there is still something to it, and the story is supposed to be about buying. People who don't have resources to hand have a motivation to be "resourceful". People who can buy what they like are privileged, and feeling privileged can readily lead to feeling entitled.

Should we say that philosophy was just the proto-form of those fields? — MSC

I tend to think this is how it's gone historically, though I'm lazy about the idea. In olden times, thinking about stuff was philosophy. Once you get the ideas cleaned up enough to start doing real research, you spawn off a science. There's no more "natural philosophy" like there was up until shockingly recently; now there's the physical sciences. We don't need Hume to do psychology for us anymore; we have actual psychologists. There was a brief period in the mid-20th when English-speaking philosophy was dominated by the "ordinary language" school, which more or less disappeared over night; it didn't disappear -- the work of Austin and Grice was a solid enough start on actual science that the entire field decamped to linguistics departments and renamed itself "pragmatics" to be studied alongside phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. A linguistics major is far more likely to be able to recite Grice's maxims (it was on the midterm!) than a philosophy major.