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Race, Gender, and the History of Early Analytic Philosophy. Matt LaVine
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isbn 9781498595568
Автор произведения Matt LaVine
Издательство Ingram
Given this rhetorical advantage internal critiques have, I will place my focus there. In particular, I will argue that there are some internal oddities to several of Soames’ and Burgess’ responses such that, even if we accept some of what they have to say, we can still support the claim that Marcus has been underappreciated and underrecognized. These oddities will be part of the case that there is something in need of explanation for which discursive injustice will serve as explanans.
Soames
Turning to that internal critique, it is important to note that Soames admits that a combination of three to four of these six theses (namely, a combination of T1, T3, T4, and T5) originated in Marcus’ work. That is to say, the individual theses—T1, T3, and an implicit acceptance of T5—do not originate with Marcus. Soames holds that Smullyan and Fitch also argued for T1 and T3, while also implicitly endorsing T5. Even on Soames’ picture, the combination of these with T4—the necessity of identity (on the variables, not proper names, reading)—is original with Marcus’ views, though. This is significant on its own. If Marcus can be uniquely credited with more than half of the six theses connected to NTR in the debate, shouldn’t she receive more credit than she has? This is especially the case given that there is the additional oddity that Soames’ hesitation to give complete credit to Marcus on T4 is at odds with Kripke, who says “Marcus says that identities between names are necessary” (Kripke 1980, 100).
Of course, one may obviously respond to this that Soames admits that Marcus, Smullyan, and Fitch, “deserve a degree of recognition that they are often not given” (Soames 1995, 200) and “should be praised for their prescient insights” (Soames 1995, 208). This is not a completely satisfactory response, though. Part of Soames’ point in connecting Smullyan and Fitch to T1, T3, and T5 seems to be that there is something odd about Smith’s singling out of Marcus. Given that Marcus clearly did much more with respect to T4 than Smullyan or Fitch, this is at odds with Soames’ own points. Furthermore, Soames himself gives further reason to single out Marcus as having been particularly wronged in the lack of credit and recognition she has received. As mentioned earlier, part of his justification for saying Marcus is not deserving of “founder” status is that her discussion was not long and detailed enough. That said, Soames also admits that “although Marcus’ discussion of these points is brief, it is more detailed and explicit than those of Smullyan and Fitch” (Soames 1995, 197). Again, putting Soames’ own views together, this would mean Marcus is significantly more deserving of recognition than Smullyan or Fitch.3
While I think the preceding gives reason to believe that Marcus’ contributions to NTR clearly deserve more recognition if T1–T6 is a good way to carry out the debate, more needs to be said about this antecedent. Remember, this is the main thrust of Burgess (1998)—that Smith’s (1995a, 1995b) methodological errors set us out on the wrong trajectory to begin with. So, in order for my responses to Soames (1995) to have as much weight as I would like them to, we will need to have something to say in response to Burgess’ (1998) R1–R4 as well. Again, given its rhetorical advantages, I will focus on internal critiques of Burgess’ thoughts on these four reasons. In particular, I will argue that R1 and R4 are inconsistent with his praise of Soames’ historical work, whereas R2 and R3 are problems that Burgess’ own work falls prey to. Given this, Burgess cannot consistently say we ought to dismiss Smith’s work while promoting his own and Soames’.
Burgess
Starting with those reasons that I claim Burgess’ own work falls prey to, remember that Burgess argues for R2 on the grounds that Smith did not include some of Kripke’s most important contributions to NTR. In particular, Burgess criticizes Smith for not having recognized the importance of Kripke’s causal historical theory of reference—the idea that names and their referents are passed on from user to user after an initial baptism by being causally connected to the initial bearer. Given that Burgess is criticizing Smith for not having sufficiently looked into his interlocutor’s views, this is a strange claim to make. This is because Smith brings up the causal historical theory of reference multiple times in his work, even explicitly saying “[o]f course some of the ideas in “Naming and Necessity” are genuinely new, such as the causal chain picture of the reference of names, the idea that natural kind terms are rigid designators and the theory of the necessity of origins” (Smith 1995a, 186).
One might still complain that, while Smith recognizes this, he does not sufficiently connect it to NTR since he leaves it out of T1–T6. This seems to be part of what Burgess is saying when he says “[t]he result is that he omits from his list important novelties of the ‘new’ theory” (Burgess 1998, 126). That said, while it is a controversial decision, the causal historical theory of reference does not have nearly the support that T1–T6 do. For starters, theorists have offered compelling arguments that being causally connected to the object of an initial baptism is neither necessary nor sufficient for being the referent of a name. For instance, despite the fact that our current uses of “Madagascar” are causally connected to an initial baptism of part of Somalia, the referent of “Madagascar” is Madagascar—the island off of East Africa (Evans 1973). Furthermore, despite none of us being causally connected to abstract objects, we refer to them quite regularly.
Perhaps even more important for our discussion is that subscribing to the causal historical theory of reference is neither necessary nor sufficient for subscribing to NTR. For instance, causal descriptivists who hold that the description that gives the meaning of a name contains reference to such a causal historical chain subscribe to a causal theory without being New Theorists and Gillian Russell subscribes to NTR without holding on to the causal theory. Russell adopts all of T1–T6, much more of Kripke’s and Kaplan’s work, and was a student of Soames as well as Burgess. That said, she does not accept Kripke’s causal historical theory of reference because she is “uncomfortable with the idea that the reference determiner for an expression might be different for different speakers.” Rather, Russell offers a plausible alternative that “it is the condition specified by the baptiser (using a description, or by pointing) and used to pick out a referent for the name when it was introduced” (Russell 2008, 47).4
Of course, one might still, as Burgess does, worry that without contributions above and beyond T1–T6 “the views of Kripke do not emerge clearly” (Burgess 1998, 126). This is no doubt true, but I do not think it bears on what should be our proper concerns. As mentioned earlier, I do think that Smith, and subsequently Soames and Burgess, made this debate far too much about Kripke. Our concern should be Marcus and her relationship to NTR. Kripke has many views which go beyond NTR shared by “Kripke, Kaplan, Donnellan, Putnam, Perry, Salmon, Soames, Almog, Wettstein and a number of other contemporary philosophers” (Smith 1995a, 179). With our proper concerns in mind, it is no longer such a sin to have left out some of Kripke’s views—even those that are wildly important and novel.
Turning to R3, Burgess holds that it is problematic for one to claim that somebody has introduced something just by endorsing that something because it very obviously could have shown up earlier in the literature. And, as has been mentioned multiple times now, several of the theses in T1–T6 were earlier endorsed by Smullyan and Fitch, among others. Here, though, we find a potential clash with R1 because, again, “the importance of a complex theory consists at least as much in the interconnections it establishes among its novel elements” (Burgess 1998, 125–26). And, while T1, T3, and T5 may have shown up in Smullyan’s and Fitch’s works earlier, these in connection with a formal proof of T4 were new to Marcus’ work. Furthermore, Smith argues that “[t]his modal argument [T3] goes back to Marcus’ formal proof of the necessity of identity