I would find it helpful—and I think several of the other posters here would as well—to see one reduction on some nontrivial question carried far enough for us to see that the process can be made to work. If I understand right, your approach requires that speakers, or at least many speakers much of the time, can reduce from disputed, loaded, moral terms to reasonably well-defined and fact-based terminology. That’s the point I’d most like to see you spend your space budget on in future posts.
Definitions are good. Precise definitions are usually better than loose definitions. But I suspect that in this context, loose definitions are basically good enough and that there isn’t a lot of value to be extracted by increased precision there. I would like evidence that improving our definitions is a fruitful place to spend effort.
I did read your post on conceptual analysis. I just re-read it. And I’m not convinced that the practice of conceptual analysis is any more broken than most of what people get paid to do in the humanities and social sciences . My sense is that the standard textbook definitions are basically fine, and that the ongoing work in the field is mostly just people trying to get tenure and show off their cleverness.
I don’t see that there’s anything terribly wrong with the practice of conceptual analysis—so long as we don’t mistake an approximate and tentative linguistic exercise for access to any sort of deep truth.
I don’t think many speakers actually have an explicit ought-reduction in mind when they make ought claims. Perhaps most speakers actually have little idea what they mean when they use ought terms. For these people, emotivism may roughly describe speech acts involving oughts.
Rather, I’m imagining a scenario where person A asks what they ought to do, and person B has to clarify the meaning of A’s question before B can give an answer. At this point, A is probably forced to clarify the meaning of their ought terms more thoroughly than they have previously done. But if they can’t do so, then they haven’t asked a meaningful question, and B can’t answer the question as given.
I would like evidence that improving our definitions is a fruitful place to spend effort.
Why? What I’ve been saying the whole time is that improving our definitions isn’t worth as much effort as philosophers are expending on it.
I’m not convinced that the practice of conceptual analysis is any more broken than most of what people get paid to do in the humanities and social sciences.
On this, we agree. That’s why conceptual analysis isn’t very valuable, along with “most of what people get paid to do in the humanities and social sciences.” (Well, depending on where you draw the boundary around the term ‘social sciences.’)
I don’t see that there’s anything terribly wrong with the practice of conceptual analysis...
Do you see something wrong with the way Barry and Albert were arguing about the meaning of ‘sound’ in Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory? I’m especially thinking of the part about microphones and aliens.
I agree that emotivism is an accurate description, much of the time, for what people mean when they make value judgments. I would also agree that most people don’t have a specific or precise definition in mind. But emotivism isn’t the only description and for practical purposes it’s often not the most useful. Among other things, we have to specify which emotion we are talking about. Not all disgust is moral disgust.
Value judgments show up routinely in law and in daily life. It would be an enormous, difficult, and probably low-value task to rewrite our legal code to avoid terms like “good cause”, “unjust enrichment”, “unconscionable contract”, and the like. Given that we’re stuck with moral language, it’s a useful project to pull out some definitions to help focus discourse slightly. But we aren’t going to be able to eliminate them. “Morality” and its cousins are too expensive to taboo.
We want law and social standards to be somewhat loosely defined, to avoid unscrupulous actors trying to worm their way through loopholes. We don’t want to be overly precise and narrow in our definitions—we want to leverage the judgement of judges and juries. But conversely, we do want to give them guidance about what we mean by those words. And precedent supplies one sort of guidance, and some definitions give them an additional sort of guidance.
I suspect it would be quite hard to pick out precisely what we as a society mean when we use those terms in the legal code—and very hard to reduce them to any sort of concrete physical description that would still be human-intelligible. I would be interested to see a counterexample if you can supply one easily.
I have the sense that trying to talk about human judgement and society without moral language would be about like trying to discuss computer science purely in terms of the hardware—possible, but unnecessarily cumbersome.
One of the common pathologies of the academy is that somebody comes up with a bright idea or a powerful intellectual tool. Researchers then spend several years applying that tool to increasingly diverse contexts, often where the marginal return from the tool is near-zero. Just because conceptual analysis is being over-used doesn’t mean that it is always useless! The first few uses of it may indeed have been fairly high-value in aiding us in communicating. The fact that the tool is then overused isn’t a reason to ignore it.
Endless wrangles about definitions, I think are necessarily low-value. Working out a few useful definitions or explanations for a common term can be valuable, though—particularly if we are going to apply those terms in a quasi-formal setting, like law.
I would find it helpful—and I think several of the other posters here would as well—to see one reduction on some nontrivial question carried far enough for us to see that the process can be made to work. If I understand right, your approach requires that speakers, or at least many speakers much of the time, can reduce from disputed, loaded, moral terms to reasonably well-defined and fact-based terminology. That’s the point I’d most like to see you spend your space budget on in future posts.
Definitions are good. Precise definitions are usually better than loose definitions. But I suspect that in this context, loose definitions are basically good enough and that there isn’t a lot of value to be extracted by increased precision there. I would like evidence that improving our definitions is a fruitful place to spend effort.
I did read your post on conceptual analysis. I just re-read it. And I’m not convinced that the practice of conceptual analysis is any more broken than most of what people get paid to do in the humanities and social sciences . My sense is that the standard textbook definitions are basically fine, and that the ongoing work in the field is mostly just people trying to get tenure and show off their cleverness.
I don’t see that there’s anything terribly wrong with the practice of conceptual analysis—so long as we don’t mistake an approximate and tentative linguistic exercise for access to any sort of deep truth.
I don’t think many speakers actually have an explicit ought-reduction in mind when they make ought claims. Perhaps most speakers actually have little idea what they mean when they use ought terms. For these people, emotivism may roughly describe speech acts involving oughts.
Rather, I’m imagining a scenario where person A asks what they ought to do, and person B has to clarify the meaning of A’s question before B can give an answer. At this point, A is probably forced to clarify the meaning of their ought terms more thoroughly than they have previously done. But if they can’t do so, then they haven’t asked a meaningful question, and B can’t answer the question as given.
Why? What I’ve been saying the whole time is that improving our definitions isn’t worth as much effort as philosophers are expending on it.
On this, we agree. That’s why conceptual analysis isn’t very valuable, along with “most of what people get paid to do in the humanities and social sciences.” (Well, depending on where you draw the boundary around the term ‘social sciences.’)
Do you see something wrong with the way Barry and Albert were arguing about the meaning of ‘sound’ in Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory? I’m especially thinking of the part about microphones and aliens.
I agree that emotivism is an accurate description, much of the time, for what people mean when they make value judgments. I would also agree that most people don’t have a specific or precise definition in mind. But emotivism isn’t the only description and for practical purposes it’s often not the most useful. Among other things, we have to specify which emotion we are talking about. Not all disgust is moral disgust.
Value judgments show up routinely in law and in daily life. It would be an enormous, difficult, and probably low-value task to rewrite our legal code to avoid terms like “good cause”, “unjust enrichment”, “unconscionable contract”, and the like. Given that we’re stuck with moral language, it’s a useful project to pull out some definitions to help focus discourse slightly. But we aren’t going to be able to eliminate them. “Morality” and its cousins are too expensive to taboo.
We want law and social standards to be somewhat loosely defined, to avoid unscrupulous actors trying to worm their way through loopholes. We don’t want to be overly precise and narrow in our definitions—we want to leverage the judgement of judges and juries. But conversely, we do want to give them guidance about what we mean by those words. And precedent supplies one sort of guidance, and some definitions give them an additional sort of guidance.
I suspect it would be quite hard to pick out precisely what we as a society mean when we use those terms in the legal code—and very hard to reduce them to any sort of concrete physical description that would still be human-intelligible. I would be interested to see a counterexample if you can supply one easily.
I have the sense that trying to talk about human judgement and society without moral language would be about like trying to discuss computer science purely in terms of the hardware—possible, but unnecessarily cumbersome.
One of the common pathologies of the academy is that somebody comes up with a bright idea or a powerful intellectual tool. Researchers then spend several years applying that tool to increasingly diverse contexts, often where the marginal return from the tool is near-zero. Just because conceptual analysis is being over-used doesn’t mean that it is always useless! The first few uses of it may indeed have been fairly high-value in aiding us in communicating. The fact that the tool is then overused isn’t a reason to ignore it.
Endless wrangles about definitions, I think are necessarily low-value. Working out a few useful definitions or explanations for a common term can be valuable, though—particularly if we are going to apply those terms in a quasi-formal setting, like law.