From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 13 2004 - 21:07:56 GMT
Wim,
Wim said:
Yes, intellectual agreement requires a shared vocabulary. But didn't you define 'philosophy' as something like 'finding out how everything hangs together'? Doesn't that make "philosophical analysis" different from simple "analysis"?
Matt:
I appropriated Wilfrid Sellars' definition: "seeing how things, in the broadest sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term." The difference I see between your from memory paraphrase and what Sellars is offering is the word "finding" in place of "seeing." On a pragmatist count, philosophers have been trying to make a big deal out of a difference between the words "finding" and "making." In this case, "seeing" gets hung with "making" because pragmatists are interested in us creating pictures of the world that work better than other pictures, not in finding the one picture of the world that was antecedently put out there waiting to be dug up. There isn't anything special about philosophical analysis because pragmatists don't see anything really that special about philosophy. It is too wide a discipline with too many people doing too many different kinds of things to fit them all together. How do we say that Hegel, Frege, Heidegger, Foucault, Geert
z, and Bloom all have the same method? Yet, at turns, we would want to call all of them philosophers.
If you can explain to me how philosophical analysis is different from regular, plain old analysis, then we might be able to make a start. Its what pragmatists have been waiting for for a while now.
Wim said:
The question I asked you was, whether (you agree) we need a shared vocabulary (or even philosophical vocabulary) to get (more) 'social stuff' done (like feeding, clothing and educating people).
Matt:
I don't remember the context of our dialogue at all, but if your question is simply "Do we need a shared vocabulary to get 'social stuff' done?" then yes, of course we do, specifically a shared political vocabulary. We predominately have a shared political vocabulary, its just the propositions phrased in that vocabulary that we sometimes have trouble agreeing on.
However, I doubt that was your original question from our former dialogue, or at least the context of the dialogue shaped my answer differently. Otherwise you wouldn't have had to ask it again, I would have answered it already.
Matt
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