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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And so I want to develop that theory much more about
when theoretical terms are deficient and maybe so deficient that they are completely meaningless.
I think it's a very ubiquitous phenomenon in philosophy.
Lots of terms are used in horrible ways, ways that are detrimental to inquiry.
But I don't want that book to be just critical in that way.
I also think it's part of a more broad project about how philosophy or language can be
critical and constructive at the same time.
Because what I just described was a sort of philosophy of language move that criticized and evaluated a linguistic practice, didn't just describe it.
And so I'm interested more generally in how philosophy of language can be evaluative of linguistic practices rather than just descriptive of them.
And it's connected to lots of works.
For example, work done by Sally Haslanger on terms like woman.
Yeah, so it has kind of wide-reaching implications.
And I think the historical precedence is enormous.
Everything that started philosophy of language and maybe analytic philosophy as we know it in Frege and Russell and Carnap, part of its central motivation was
the thought that certain parts of language were defective and that it had to be fixed.
So we've sort of completely given up on that somehow.
That has gone away, and all we're doing is descriptive semantics, but I think we should in some ways go back to their motivation, though in a very different way from how they were doing it.
think it's very interesting to think about different kinds of defects and different diagnostics for defectiveness and so on, and that whole field hasn't really been worked out, so I'm kind of thinking of this as a
very big project, as you say, for theoretical terms more generally.
Okay, thanks very much for talking to me.
Showing 401–420 of 421 · page 21 of 22
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