1st Workshop

1st Nagoya Meta-Philosophy Workshop

Date: 13:00 to 18:00pm, Oct 5, 2018

Venue: Liberal Arts and Sciences Main Building C4, 4th Floor

Program:

13:00 to 14:30pm

“Philosophy without Truth”

Derek Ball (University of St Andrews)

Abstract: Current discussions of philosophical methodology typically presuppose that philosophy is successful if it produces knowledge or at least true belief. But many philosophers of the past denied that truth was essential to philosophical success, and many philosophers of science deny that scientific theorising aims at truth. I offer a novel argument for the claim that philosophy does not aim at truth, and present possible alternative aims that better explain why we accept and reject the theories that we do.

14:45 to 16:15pm

"Expressivism by Force"

Seth Yalcin (University of California, Berkeley)

Abstract: The expressivist idea that normative language is different from assertion, and that it is distinctive in its force, can be developed in two ways, depending on how ‘force’ is understood. Traditionally it has been developed with an understanding of ‘force’ descending from the tradition of speech act theory. But there is another concept of force, widely used in formal pragmatics for thinking about presupposition and the dynamics of conversational update. I will describe an expressivist view built around this second notion of force, and suggest that it has some advantages.

16:30 to 18:00pm

"How Warranted is the Philosopher’s Belief in the Method of Cases?"

Masashi Kasaki (Nagoya University)

Abstract: Many philosophers today believe that the method of cases is the standard practice of philosophy, i.e., that philosophers often use intuitions about hypothetical cases to justify or falsify a philosophical theory. Hypothetical cases may be appealed to for the purpose of justifying or falsifying a theory, but they are used for other purposes in philosophy and science: (a) illustrating a theory and/or its consequences, (b) articulating the detail of a theory, (c) facilitating the development of a theory, (d) increasing or decreasing the explanatory force of a theory, and so on. The multiplicity of the purposes for which hypothetical cases are used raises a question of whether and to what degree the philosopher’s belief in the method of cases is warranted. In this talk, I approach this question in two different ways. First, I investigate how the belief in the method of cases was brought into the center stage of philosophical methodology in the history of analytic philosophy. Different philosophers tell different historical stories, and none of them fully warrants the belief at stake. Second, I argue that the chicken sexer case, an allegedly actual case philosophers appeal to in falsifying internalism about justification and justifying externalism about it, does not depend for its justificatory force on the features inherent in the case. For the crucial features that philosophers believe the chicken sexer described in the case to have are not exemplified by actual chicken sexers. This suggests that if the chicken sexer case plays a justificatory role at all, its justificatory force does not come from the case itself but from somewhere else. This point is generalizable to other actual and hypothetical cases. Hence, I conclude that the belief in the method of cases is not warranted to the degree to which it is often assumed to be.