Friday, December 9, 2011

"Just what I mean by the term"

Whether or not you think there are philosophically interesting facts about analyticity, normal people do respond to certain a) epistemic challenges and b) calls for scientific/philosophical explanation by saying 'that's just what I mean by the term'.

So I think any philosopher who doesn't want to accept massive error about justification and argument owes some account of what is going on here. What does this expression do?

Maybe one thing the claim 'x is just part of what I mean by the term' maybe does is diffuse the expectation that there is an interesting natural kind or scientific fact in the neighborhood. Here's what I mean...

Suppose I had a made a map with mountain ranges labeled and you said, how come all mountains have a slope of at least 1 percent (cf. wikipedia definition). If you said "how do you know that mountains all have a slope of less than 1percent?" or "why do all mountains have a slope of less than 1 percent" I might say `that's just what I mean by the term mountain'.

I *think* hearing this might helpfully lead us to rule out possibilities like the following: 99% of paradigm mountains are caused by a certain geological process, and this process always produces things that have a steep slope, and then reliably maintain this steep slope through the process of erosion. If there was some more natural kind in the neighborhood of "mountain" then there would be a less trivial answer to questions like 'why do all mountains have at least a 2% slope?' and 'how do you know that all mountains have at least a 2% slope.

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