[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
But why suppose that the interesting account that physicalists must give of how and why the physical account of our
world makes true the psychological account (or the economic or the geographical or . . . ) of our world must involve
conceptual analysis? The answer to this question turns on the importance of defining one's subject, and a certain view
about what is involved in doing this.
Deðning the Subject
Although metaphysics is about what the world is like, the questions we ask when we do metaphysics are framed in a
language, and thus we need to attend to what the users of the language mean by the words they employ to ask their
questions. When bounty hunters go searching, they are searching for a person and not a handbill. But they will not get
very far if they fail to attend to the representational properties of the handbill on the wanted person. These properties
give them their target, or, if you like, define the subject of their search. Likewise, metaphysicians will not get very far
with questions like: Are there Ks? Are Ks nothing over and above Js? and, Is the K way the world is fully determined by
the J
31
See e.g. Paul Churchland, Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes , Journal of Philosophy, 78 (1981): 67 90, and Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained
(Boston, Mass.: Little Brown & Co., 1991), Appendix A (For Philosophers) .
THE ROLE OF CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS 31
way the world is? in the absence of some conception of what counts as a K, and what counts as a J.
How then should we go about defining our subject qua metaphysicians when we ask about Ks for some K-kind of
interest to us? It depends on what we are interested in doing. If I say that what I mean never mind what others
mean by a free action is one such that the agent would have done otherwise if he or she had chosen to, then the
existence of free actions so conceived will be secured, and so will the compatibility of free action with determinism. If I
say that what I mean never mind what others mean by belief is any information-carrying state that causes
subjects to utter sentences like I believe that snow is white , the existence of beliefs so conceived will be safe from the
eliminativists' arguments. But in neither case will I have much of an audience. I have turned interesting philosophical
debates into easy exercises in deductions from stipulative definitions together with accepted facts.
What then are the interesting philosophical questions that we are seeking to address when we debate the existence of
free action and its compatibility with determinism, or about eliminativism concerning intentional psychology? What we
are seeking to address is whether free action according to our ordinary conception, or something suitably close to our
ordinary conception, exists and is compatible with determinism, and whether intentional states according to our ordinary
conception, or something suitably close to it, will survive what cognitive science reveals about the operations of our
brains.
The Role of Intuitions About Possible Cases
But how should we identify our ordinary conception? The only possible answer, I think, is by appeal to what seems to
us most obvious and central about free action, determinism, belief, or whatever, as revealed by our intuitions about
possible cases. Intuitions about how various cases, including various merely possible cases, are correctly described in
terms of free action, determinism, and belief are precisely what reveal our ordinary conceptions of free action,
determinism, and belief, or, as it is often put nowadays, our folk theory of them. For what guides me in describing an
action as free is revealed by my intuitions about whether various possible
32 THE ROLE OF CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS
cases are or are not cases of free action. Thus my intuitions about possible cases reveal my theory of free action they
could hardly be supposed to reveal someone else's! Likewise, your intuitions reveal your theory. To the extent that our
intuitions coincide, they reveal our shared theory. To the extent that our intuitions coincide with those of the folk, they
reveal the folk theory. Thus the general coincidence in intuitive responses to the Gettier examples reveals something
32
about the folk theory of knowledge in the sense of revealing what governs folk ascriptions of knowledge. I have
occasionally come across people who resolutely resist the Gettier cases. Sometimes it has seemed right to accuse them
of confusion they haven't properly understood the cases, or they haven't seen the key similarities to other cases
where they accept that subjects do not know, or the key differences from cases they accept as cases of knowledge but
sometimes it is clear that they are not confused; what we then learn from the stand-off is simply that they use the word
knowledge to cover different cases from most of us. In these cases it is, it seems to me, misguided to accuse them of
error (unless they go on to say that their concept of knowledge is ours), though they are, of course, missing out on an
interesting way of grouping together cases the way we effect with the term knowledge that cuts across the
grouping effected in terms of true justified belief, and which has its own distinctive role to play in epistemology.
Extracting a person's theory of what counts as a K from intuitions about how to describe possible cases, and taking it
to reveal their concept of K-hood, is not a peculiarly philosophical business. Child psychologists are interested in what
young children understand by x goes faster than y , and they argue from the fact that, up to a certain age, children say
that x goes faster than y whenever x gets to some designated destination before y, regardless of where x and y start
from, that young children's concept of faster than is
32
I here take the controversial view that folk conceptions should be thought of as amalgams of individual conceptions. Thus, my intuitions reveal the folk conception in as
much as I am reasonably entitled, as I usually am, to regard myself as typical. But the argument to follow does not depend on taking the order of determination to be from
individual to folk. It depends on taking intuitions about possible cases to reveal folk conceptions and it is hard to see how this could be denied except by taking the view
that it is better to say what is counterintuitive than what is intuitive.
THE ROLE OF CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS 33
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]