81 research outputs found
Metalinguistic Proposals
This paper sets out the felicity conditions for metalinguistic proposals, a type of directive illocutionary act. It discusses the relevance of metalinguistic proposals and other metalinguistic directives for understanding both small- and large-scale linguistic engineering projects, essentially contested concepts, metalinguistic provocations, and the methodology of ordinary language philosophy. Metalinguistic proposals are compared with other types of linguistic interventions, including metalinguistic negotiation, conceptual engineering, lexical warfare, and ameliorative projects
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Contrasting cases
This paper concerns the philosophical significance of a choice about how to design the context-shifting experiments used by contextualists and anti-intellectualists: Should contexts be judged jointly, with contrast, or separately, without contrast? Findings in experimental psychology suggest (1) that certain contextual features are difficult to evaluate when considered separately, and there are reasons to think that one feature that interests contextualists and anti- intellectualistsâstakes or importanceâis such a difficult to evaluate attribute, and (2) that joint evaluation of contexts can yield judgments that are more reflective and rational in certain respects. With those two points in mind, a question is raised about what source of evidence provides better support for philosophical theories of how contextual features affect knowledge ascriptions and evidence: Should we prefer evidence consisting of "ordinary" judgments, or more reflective, perhaps more rational judgments? That question is answered in relation to different accounts of what such theories aim to explain, and it is concluded that evidence from contexts evaluated jointly should be an important source of evidence for contextualist and anti-intellectualist theories, a conclusion that is at odds with the methodology of some recent studies in experimental epistemology
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Contemporary ordinary language philosophy
There is a widespread assumption that ordinary language philosophy was killed off sometime in the 1960s or 70s by a combination of Gricean pragmatics and the rapid development of systematic semantic theory. Contrary to that widespread assumption, however, contemporary versions of ordinary language philosophy are alive and flourishing, but going by various aliasesâin particular (some versions of) "contextualism" and (some versions of) "experimental philosophy". And a growing group of contemporary philosophers are explicitly embracing the methods as well as the title of ordinary language philosophy and arguing that it has been unfairly maligned and was never decisively refuted. In this overview, I will outline the main projects and arguments employed by contemporary ordinary language philosophers, and make the case that updated versions of the arguments made by ordinary language philosophers in the middle of the twentieth century are attracting renewed attention
Experimental philosophy of language
Experimental philosophy of language uses experimental methods developed in the cognitive sciences to investigate topics of interest to philosophers of language. This article describes the methodological background for the development of experimental approaches to topics in philosophy of language, distinguishes negative and positive projects in experimental philosophy of language, and evaluates experimental work on the reference of proper names and natural kind terms. The reliability of expert judgments vs. the judgments of ordinary speakers, the role that ambiguity plays in influencing responses to experiments, and the reliability of meta-linguistic judgments are also assessed
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Open and online experimental philosophy
Using empirical methods from experimental philosophy and psychology, philosopher Dr Nat Hansen teamed up with psychologists Dr Kathryn Francis and Professor Philip Beaman to explore how people talk about knowledge in everyday language. Following a pre-registered study protocol they used the methods and tools of open reproducible research to test and qualify findings from a published study
The Hope of Agreement: Against Vibing Accounts of Aesthetic Judgment
Stanley Cavellâs account of aesthetic judgment has two components. The first is a feeling: the judge has to see, hear, âdigâ something in the object being judged, there has to be an âemotionâ that the judge feels and expresses. The second is the âdiscipline of accounting for [the judgment]â, a readiness to argue for oneâs aesthetic judgment in the face of disagreement. The discipline of accounting for oneâs aesthetic judgments involves what Nick Riggle has called a norm of convergence: the judge aims to get oneâs audience to taste see or hear what the judge tastes or sees or hears in the object being judged. Because of the unmistakable difficulty in reaching agreement in aesthetic judgment, Riggle has denied that aesthetic judgment requires a convergence norm and has proposed instead that it requires âa kind of harmony of individualityâ (which Riggle calls âvibingâ). We argue that Cavell offers a version of the convergence norm that is distinct from those that Riggle criticizes, namely Kantâs demand for agreement and Andy Eganâs presupposition of similarity in dispositions in ânon-defectiveâ aesthetic conversations. Cavellâs version of the convergence norm is âthe hope of agreementâ. One can hope that oneâs audience will agree with oneâs aesthetic judgments even when one isnât in a position to demand agreement or to presuppose similarity in the dispositions that would make agreement more likely. Cavellâs distinct convergence norm avoids Riggleâs criticisms and contributes to a richer account of whatâs going on when we disagree about aesthetic matters
Stakes, Scales, and Skepticism
There is conflicting experimental evidence about whether the âstakesâ or importance of being wrong affect judgments about whether a subject knows a proposition. To date, judgments about stakes effects on knowledge have been investigated using binary paradigms: responses to âlowâ stakes cases are compared with responses to âhigh stakesâ cases. However, stakes or importance are not binary propertiesâthey are scalar: whether a situation is âhighâ or âlowâ stakes is a matter of degree. So far, no experimental work has investigated the scalar nature of stakes effects on knowledge: do stakes effects increase as the stakes get higher? Do stakes effects only appear once a certain threshold of stakes has been crossed? Does the effect plateau at a certain point? To address these questions, we conducted experiments that probe for the scalarity of stakes effects using several experimental approaches. We found evidence of scalar stakes effects using an âevidence seekingâ experimental design, but no evidence of scalar effects using a traditional âevidence-fixedâ experimental design. In addition, using the evidence-seeking design, we uncovered a large, but previously unnoticed framing effect on whether participants are skeptical about whether someone can know something, no matter how much evidence they have. The rate of skeptical responses and the rate at which participants were willing to attribute âlazy knowledgeââthat someone can know something without having to checkâwere themselves subject to a stakes effect: participants were more skeptical when the stakes were higher, and more prone to attribute lazy knowledge when the stakes were lower. We argue that the novel skeptical stakes effect provides resources to respond to criticisms of the evidence-seeking approach that argue that it does not target knowledge
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