Am I really an Analytic Philosopher?
I know that we love to hate him (and given that we are SPEP members, we are pretty much academic dirt in his view), but Brian Leiter can put some pretty interesting stuff on his blog.
Anyway, by following some links on his blog I came to an old post titled "What is Analytic Philosophy?," which contains Jerry Fodor's thoughts on that subject. In the post, Fodor says the following (this is long, but bear with me):
"there are a couple of theses that major US and UK philosophers have more or less agreed about (mostly implicitly, to be sure) over the last fifty years or so, and that have largely shaped the landscape of philosophical discussions...
"The first is semantic pragmatism: the idea that intensional content is to be explicated as some sort of `know how'... The typical avatar of this view is the thesis that concept possession is something like knowing how to evaluate inferences whose validity turns on the concept, and/or knowing how to sort things that the concept applies to...
The second is the methodological doctrine that philosophy does (or should) procede by the method of `semantic ascent'; that is by translating metaphysical questions (eg. how does perception work) into questions of conceptual analysis (`how do we use the word `see'; or `what is the concept of seeing'. The translation is supposed to underwrite the (putative) a priority of philosohical theses, and the (putative) fact that philosophy is a game that anyone can play (`you don't need to be a psychologist to understand how seeing works; we ALL have the concept SEE (and/or we ALL know how to use the world)."
Fodor then goes on to say that he disagrees with both, in rather dismissive fashion. Anyway, I think this is interesting, particularly when considering his first "methodological doctrine." Is it not the case, when we consider the general view described above, that the majority of 20th Century Continental philosophers are "semantic pragmatists"? Any existential phenomenologist (and most prominently Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) clearly is, I think. So have we actually been doing analytic philosophy all along?
The second "methodological doctrine", on the other hand, strikes me as being so asinine that I feel certain that Fodor is beating a straw man. It also strikes me as obviously not fitting with semantic pragmatism. If you really believe that "knowing that" is dependent upon some prethematic "know how", and that "know how" is really understood in a pragmatic sense as being related to some kind of doing or being in the world, conceptual analysis would have to be tied to some broadly empirical investigation, viz. the laying out (Auslegung!!) of that being in the world. Certainly only a hard-core Husserlian who believes in the most "platonic" interpretation of Husserl's "eidos" or "a priori history" would think that that "auslegung" could be wholly non-empirical (when "empirical" is taken in the most general sense).
Anyway, does this make sense? Am I possibly missinterpreting the quote from Fodor here? This is more to me than a passing question, I would say, insofar as I put a lot of importance on the idea of phenomenology being a kind of conceptual analysis based on a semantic pragmatism...
Anyway, by following some links on his blog I came to an old post titled "What is Analytic Philosophy?," which contains Jerry Fodor's thoughts on that subject. In the post, Fodor says the following (this is long, but bear with me):
"there are a couple of theses that major US and UK philosophers have more or less agreed about (mostly implicitly, to be sure) over the last fifty years or so, and that have largely shaped the landscape of philosophical discussions...
"The first is semantic pragmatism: the idea that intensional content is to be explicated as some sort of `know how'... The typical avatar of this view is the thesis that concept possession is something like knowing how to evaluate inferences whose validity turns on the concept, and/or knowing how to sort things that the concept applies to...
The second is the methodological doctrine that philosophy does (or should) procede by the method of `semantic ascent'; that is by translating metaphysical questions (eg. how does perception work) into questions of conceptual analysis (`how do we use the word `see'; or `what is the concept of seeing'. The translation is supposed to underwrite the (putative) a priority of philosohical theses, and the (putative) fact that philosophy is a game that anyone can play (`you don't need to be a psychologist to understand how seeing works; we ALL have the concept SEE (and/or we ALL know how to use the world)."
Fodor then goes on to say that he disagrees with both, in rather dismissive fashion. Anyway, I think this is interesting, particularly when considering his first "methodological doctrine." Is it not the case, when we consider the general view described above, that the majority of 20th Century Continental philosophers are "semantic pragmatists"? Any existential phenomenologist (and most prominently Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) clearly is, I think. So have we actually been doing analytic philosophy all along?
The second "methodological doctrine", on the other hand, strikes me as being so asinine that I feel certain that Fodor is beating a straw man. It also strikes me as obviously not fitting with semantic pragmatism. If you really believe that "knowing that" is dependent upon some prethematic "know how", and that "know how" is really understood in a pragmatic sense as being related to some kind of doing or being in the world, conceptual analysis would have to be tied to some broadly empirical investigation, viz. the laying out (Auslegung!!) of that being in the world. Certainly only a hard-core Husserlian who believes in the most "platonic" interpretation of Husserl's "eidos" or "a priori history" would think that that "auslegung" could be wholly non-empirical (when "empirical" is taken in the most general sense).
Anyway, does this make sense? Am I possibly missinterpreting the quote from Fodor here? This is more to me than a passing question, I would say, insofar as I put a lot of importance on the idea of phenomenology being a kind of conceptual analysis based on a semantic pragmatism...
Posted by J.C. Berendzen on
Tuesday June 14, 2005 at 4:34pm
but even that doesn't mean that there's no world to be investigated, only that the only way that we access it is through linguistic structures, etc. (is that even true? is all of our pre-thematic know-how (praxis or proto-praxis or whatever) linguistically charged? i don't know if i really do believe that, unless "language" means something much broader than what we normally mean by the word -- and i've wondered for a long time when the notion of "language," when it's expanded so far, becomes vacuous.)
on the first issue -- i mean, you could construe fodor's point so broadly as to include structuralism and post-structuralist thought all the way to foucault, too, right? that is, agency becomes a sort of vanishing point within the spider-web of language/power, and to be an agent (if there is one) only means having appropriated a certain kind of know-how that enables one to move things around in that spider-web on a micro-level. so it's hard for me to think of people in the continental tradition after your yellow-dog husserlians who would reject that.
but is this really all that defines analytic philosophy? that strikes me as a pretty weird claim. in fact, isn't there one of those performative contradictions joe loves here? :) i mean, here he is (presumably) offering an ostensively conceptual definition of analytic philosophy, but based on what he says, shouldn't he rather offer something like an analysis of what analytic philosophical method looks like? -- i.e. what analytic philosophers are doing, or how they are using language? (well, i guess not, if he is trying to argue against those points.) or is he doing this? am i missing something?
First, on Fodor's definition: I have read a few things by Fodor, by way of my interest in linking up inferentialism/semantic holism/etc. in "analytic" philosophy with continental philosophy, a la Robert Brandom. Fodor is the most noted critic of the "brandomian" point of view. Fodor also openly calls himself a "cartesian," insofar as he believes in a kind of semantic atomism--concepts are singular entities that we simply "hold" somehow, mentally. Based on this, I take it that his "definition" is really a (proabably straw-man) statement of the strands of contemporary philosophy he disagrees with. In this case he is not commitimg a performative contradiction so much as saying that he is not, in this sense, an analytic philosopher. You can decide yourself what you think about that (I will say that if Fodor is anything like his authorial persona, he is at least a crank, and possibly a jerk). As an aside, you should look for the leiter reports post mentioned in my post (it is linked in the second paragraph of a really recent Leiter post titled "The challenge of philosophical naturalism"). The discussion bears suggests that there is no real definition of analytic philosophy other than an "institutional" one.
Next point--am I right about construing continental philosophy as adhering to a kind of "semantic pragmatism"? Well, I certainly think I am right, and I agree with John's comments that apply that general issue to even more parts of continental philosophy than I mentioned originally. However, this is a debatable point--I anticipated Ammon possibly taking issue with it, insofar as it would give an overly cognitivist interpretation of much of continental philosophy. For example, should Heidegger, or hermeneutics, etc. really be interpreted as providing a "conceptual analysis"? I think so, but I could certainly see opposing views.
Finally, on Fodor's 2nd methodological requirement: I agree with John completely here as well. For what it is worth, I have been becoming increasingly dissatisfied with our general emphasis on the primacy of language, so I am in agreement with John's 2nd paragraph (which does not, of course, suggest that language isn't crucial). However, my post is perhaps a bit harsh on Fodor in this regard, insofar as recent analytic philosophy might sometimes actually do conceptual analysis is a way like he says. One beef I have with Brandom along these lines is that he claims to in some sense be a pragmatist, but he gives up the pragmatist ship--he shifts from emphasizing the material aspects of our inferential practices to investigating formal inferential properties (granted, he admits that these formal properties have material bases, but I think he should do more "phenomenology", i.e. more investigations into the lived basis of our conceptual activities). In this regard, I am really in favor of a recent essay by these cognitive science guys named Andy Clark and Jamie Prinz, wherein they attack Fodor in favor of what they call a "supercharged pragmatism", which, I think, would be a view that would mesh with my problems with Brandom...
Anyway, thanks! I welcome and urge more comments!
"So a consequence of this way of thinking about talking – and about thinking – is semantic externalism. The principal determinants of the content of my claims, including those I endorse without announcing that fact, lie outside me: in the actual facts about copper, in the public associations that tie the word ‘copper’ to copper, and so make my assertional use of the word ‘copper’ bind me to the inferential norms that constitute the concept copper. Those norms are administered by the linguistic community – for instance by
their deference to metallurgical experts in determining what I’ve committed myself to. But it is part of the language game of empirical claiming that we all take it that what I’ve really committed myself to is not constituted by what
even the experts think. It also answers to what the facts are about what I am talking about: what really follows from something’s being copper."
I think this passage fits well with what is at issue in our discussion. One downside to posting it is that it seems to make the last point in my last comment really wrong...