Continuity, Realism, and the Objects of Philosophical Inquiry (co-authored with Tristram McPherson)

Abstract:

Consider the following three familiar philosophical issues: the nature of consciousness; what distributive justice requires; and what constitutes knowledge. These issues – as well as countless others throughout many subareas of philosophy – are object-level ones directly about certain relevant things themselves (e.g., consciousness, distributive justice, and knowledge), rather than representational-level ones about how we think and talk about these things (e.g., what our concept <consciousness> consists in, what people mean by the term ‘justice’, or what pattern of judgments about “knowledge” people have). How should one identify what such objects are that philosophers aim to study, and how are they related to descriptive, representational-level facts about how people think and talk? A lot of philosophical argument rests (often implicitly) on the idea that the objects of “object-level” philosophical inquiry are (or at least should be) things that we can smoothly identify using the intuitively corresponding words and concepts. For example, in epistemology, a common idea is that when philosophers study knowledge, they are (or at least should be) studying something that our current term ‘knowledge’ refers to. In this paper, we argue for an alternative view. On our view, objects of “object-level” philosophical inquiry are, in the first instance, tethered to facts about topics, rather than to facts about our words and concepts. We advance this view using a notion of topics that draws on our recent work about “topic continuity” within “conceptual engineering”, which, put roughly, concerns what it takes to preserve a given topic over linguistic and conceptual change. We advance our view about object-level inquiry in philosophy both as a descriptive and normative proposal. Roughly, we propose that it both helps us understand important existing parts of such inquiry and also provides a good model for how important parts of such inquiry should proceed. Our proposal has a number of important payoffs. First, it helps illuminate – and explain the substantive importance of – aspects of a range of meta-philosophical debates, including ones about realism, pragmatism, and the methodological role of conceptual analysis. Second, it helps illuminate interesting ways in which philosophical work on conceptual engineering connects to other parts of philosophical inquiry. Third, it helps provide an interesting framework for thinking about metaphysical debates (e.g., about such issues as realism, nihilism, and mind-dependence) across different subareas of philosophy, including in ethics, philosophy of math, and philosophy of race.