Herman Cappelen
speaker
421 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2013
last heard Jan 2013
Herman Cappelen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I mean, in a recent book on this, Peter Ludlow, a book that just came out this year, Ludlow describes the entire Chomskyan program without talking about intuitions at all,
He just talks about competent speakers' judgments about grammaticality.
And I guess that's my preferred way of thinking about it.
Of course, then, there's a story in Chomsky about the connection between those judgments and the language faculty, and you could spell that out in various ways, but no matter how you do that, there isn't a similar story to be told about what happens...
to our judgments about, say, Perry's case.
Even if you could tell a story like that in the grammar case, it doesn't generalize in the required way to philosophy.
So I'm open to the thought that in other disciplines, maybe in mathematics, maybe in syntactic theory, people do something that's well-described.
as relying on intuitions at a certain level.
I mean, I'm a bit dubious, but that wasn't the topic of the book.
So if it turns out that that's true about mathematics, say, or about syntax, all it shows, as far as I'm concerned, is that in that respect, those disciplines differ from philosophy.
Yeah, I think it's fairly easy to put.
So just as I think many very, very good philosophers are mistaken when they describe their activity as being based on intuition, I think also very, very good philosophers mistakenly believe that what they engage in is
properly called conceptual analysis.
I mean, there are many levels to this criticism, but one is the more purely empirical approach that I was talking about earlier, and that mirrors the thing I was talking about with respect to intuitions.
Roughly speaking, tell me what the characteristics are of something like conceptual analysis, and let's go and look at philosophical texts and see whether that's what's really going on.
And the conclusion...
here's my hypothesis, what you will find is that isn't what's going on.
Whatever you think conceptual analysis is, you'll be surprised to see that that really isn't what goes on.
People appeal to evidence of all kinds in all these important debates.
There isn't an attempt to restrict oneself simply to judgments made relying on nothing but conceptual competence.
Showing 341–360 of 421 · page 18 of 22
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