Williamson - Po P - Ch 1
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Summary - overall: looking at what’s involved in the linguistic/conceptual turn and how that relates to what is held to be analytic philosophy The linguistic turn (LT) - ~language as purely as subject matter (i.e. not just linguistics) - Dummett’s characterisation (following Frege): - 1. Goal of phil is to analyse structure of thought - 2. Study of though distinct from psych. study of thinking - 3. The only method for analysing thought is language — note that language here is necessarily public, used to filter out subjective thinking stuff and focus on intersubjective thought - LT neither necessary nor sufficient for analytic phil (consider Derrida and later Witt. for e.g.) - Fodor influence led some to deny 3 above since thought itself is then thought of as a language The conceptual turn (CT) - accept the first 2 points in Dummett’s characterisation regardless of views on 3. - intentionality becomes centrepoint - note phenomenology conforms with requirements for CT - two views: - a. phil. studies only concepts - b. only concepts exist — relation between them and CT? — one could endorse a Russellian view that entailed b and yet oppose CT on basis that other types of structure other than conceptual (e.g. mereological) are worthwhile investigating — one could argue (a la McD) that extra-conceptual is actually just subjective psychological chaff that should be thrown away in accordance with 2 above — i.e. no outer conceptual boundary: “when one thinks truly, what one thinks is what is the case” — ~ this on basis that thinking is individuated at level of sense whereas what is the case is individuated at the level of reference — also relies on assumption that reality does not contain elusive objects - no reason why phil should be the study thoughts themselves rather than what those thought are held to refer to — {[green unless one holds this view of thoughts to be flawed… ]} - why take the CT if it implies one cannot deal directly with the subject matter of the natural sciences (e.g. phil of bio)? — {[green does it though? can’t scientists be dealing with concepts too? (of course this will probably favour the “no clear distinction” point that W wants to make eventually ]} - indeed much contemporary metaphysics does not take the Lt or the CT (cf. essentialism) - this seems like it’s going to be a key claim (going back to the introduction’s stuff on starting points): “What there is determines what there is for us to mean. In knowing what we mean, we know something about what there is.” - ~ Dummett’s approach to metaphysics on basis that discovery of truth of sentences is key under this conception but this doesn’t mean that linguistic/conceptual analysis is the best way to get at the truth — {[green is there some sort of semantic ladder assumption at lay here? probably… ]} - ~ analytic phil as unified by “shared essential properties,” much more complicated than that
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What do I think? - we’re still in quite “hand wavey” territory here with promises being made that we’ll get down to the nitty gritty next chapter - is W’s claim of elusive objects that “we might know them by their collective effects while unable to think of any single one of them” really plausible? — at the very least it must rely on some strict interpretation of what it is to think of an object (otherwise understanding the above sentence itself constitutes thinking about the supposedly elusive objects) — surely understanding their “collective effects” already involves understanding the elusive objects in some sense — it could be argued that the only truly elusive objects are noumenal ones and then W’s claim that “we should adopt no conception of philosophy that on methodological grounds excludes elusive objects” seems a lot less plausible - does what I call the potential “key claim” above really get us outside of the conceptual realm in the way that W seems to think it does? — why can’t the “what there is” part just be held to be conceptual (although possibly not subjectively so)?
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