Making progress: pragmatism, conceptual engineering, and ordinary language

ABSTRACT

Pragmatists are interested primarily not in representing a purportedly unchanging Reality but in articulating prophetic future possibilities on the basis of the values most venerated by a culture/society in the present. This makes pragmatism sound a little like ‘Conceptual Engineering’. Conceptual engineers too are interested in transforming our ways of talking, which implies some notion of how such improvements are to be evaluated. Nevertheless, this paper argues that accounts of conceptual engineering that regard it as key to the project of elucidating an externalist semantics find it difficult to accommodate on their own terms the problem-phenomena taken to be of shared interest: regions of discourse where the demand for change are at their most pressing culturally. This difficulty takes the form of what I call the Conceptual Engineering Dilemma (CED), an inability to accommodate simultaneously the ethical and ameliorative dimensions of contestation. I argue that acknowledging the formalist commitments that undergird CED should make pragmatism more appealing to the practically-orientated analytic philosopher and conclude with a brief survey of some of the tools that it makes available for the pressing work of changing minds for the better.

KEYWORDS:

• Conceptual engineering
• metaphilosophy
• metasemantics
• ordinary language philosophy
• pragmatism

1. Change for the better

Pragmatists are interested primarily not in representing a purportedly unchanging Reality but in articulating prophetic future possibilities on the basis of the values most venerated by a culture/society in the present. Envisaging such futures is also a way of dramatising dangers to those values. This is not utopian in intent; rather, it’s an endeavour to work out how we need to talk about things (race, sex/gender, identity, intelligence, equality …) and how we need to change institutions to ramify those values and resist assaults on them. It’s an attempt to establish some degree of sovereignty over the question ‘where are we headed?’ by asking where we want to go and how we might get there. As presented this makes pragmatism sound a little like what some call conceptual engineering (CE). Conceptual engineers (CEs) too are interested in transforming our ways of talking,¹ and that implies some notion of how such improvements are to be evaluated. Likewise, just as pragmatism has a metaphilosophical dimension, the aspirations of at least some self-styled CEs² extend to the conviction that if philosophy is to engage in the amelioration business it must be alert to the need to ‘engineer’ an appropriate concept of philosophy itself. For that reason pragmatists and CEs alike spend more time talking about improving things than actually doing so, taking consolation from the thought that the latter embraces the former.

These similarities present the pragmatist with an opportunity to address in a fraternal spirit those philosophers who find CE intellectually engaging, and to try to convince them that they might better achieve their aspirations to practical significance by embracing a philosophical approach that from its inception was orientated towards solving social and political problems. To that end, this paper has two objectives. The first is to defend the claim that CEs find it difficult to account satisfactorily for the phenomena that they are interested in because formalistic constraints on possible accommodations to those phenomena rule out one or more of their characteristic features. The second objective is to indicate how, by the light of this negative conclusion, philosophical considerations might nevertheless be seen as relevant to the amelioration of social problems. Turning to that first objective, the phenomena in question relate to those regions of discourse where change and the demand for change in the way we talk are at their most challenging. And the key features of these phenomena are 1. Mind-changing and 2. Amelioration. Despite their centrality, these are not intended as theoretically-freighted concepts. Indeed, it’s crucial to both of this paper’s objectives that they be understood idiomatically. Our concern here is with what philosophy can contribute when, on occasions of public controversy, there are deemed to be improvements to how folk customarily describe or think about things (2), and we want them to describe or think about things in that improved way (1). To avow that CEs can’t ‘accommodate’ such controversies, then, simply means that the attempt to bring them within the ambit of a certain sort of theoretical understanding denudes them of one or more of the aspects that make them of interest to the practically-orientated philosopher in the first place.

Since I cannot consider all those who might willingly or otherwise have the label CE attached to their work, the ‘theoretical understanding’ I emphasise concerns attempts to fit mind-changing into an externalist metasemantic framework on the assumption that only the latter can account for the ameliorative element. Key here is the Strawsonian challenge. According to Herman Cappelen (2018, passim), this relates to how we can reassure ourselves that proposals for changing the ways folk talk about things can count as improvements rather than as mere changes of topic, and thus as productive contributions to the settlement of controversies. As such it constitutes the most pressing problem confronting the would-be CE. Cappelen is absolutely right here, insofar as what he calls Strawson’s ‘objection’ arises for those who operate with the formalistic constraint just noted. But the moral to be drawn is that it is a mistake to assume that bad ‘internalist’ metasemantics can be displaced by embracing good ‘externalist’ metasemantics. Indeed, I will argue that that very assumption directs us towards a more trenchant appreciation of Strawson’s challenge.

In pursuit of the first objective, then, I’ll begin by re-visiting the origins of the Strawsonian challenge. But this negative phase is not intended as quietistic or therapeutic in nature³; nor is the aim to promote a general scepticism about the phenomena in question. Since no grounds are being offered for a pessimism of the intellect I’m not advocating reliance on the will for optimism. The ambition is rather to show that a theoretically constrained way of thinking about controversies gets in the way of engaging with them satisfactorily on their own terms, and to make intellectually appealing as a consequence a more accommodating standpoint. The second objective, then, amounts to the promotion of a pragmatist alternative, and I’ll turn to that in the concluding section.

2. Explication and the Strawsonian challenges

Strawson’s challenge arose originally in response to Carnap’s account of ‘explication’, widely acknowledged as a precursor of CE. ‘Explication’ is an elaboration of what in the Aufbau is considered under the title ‘rational reconstruction’. In Meaning and Necessity it’s defined thus:

By the explication of a familiar but vague concept we mean its replacement by a new exact concept; the former is called explicandum, the latter explicatum. The task of … replacing … a vague or not quite exact concept used in everyday life or in an earlier stage of scientific or logical development … by a newly constructed, more exact concept, belongs among the most important tasks of logical analysis and logical construction. (7–8)

As Carnap notes, notwithstanding its importance the peculiarity of the method is that the very nature of the explicandum – as ‘familiar but vague’ – infects it. We cannot decide ‘in an exact way’ if a proposed explicatum is ‘right or wrong’, but only determine if it’s ‘satisfactory’ (1962, 4). The more comprehensive the specification of the datum the more satisfactory the explicandum of course, and Carnap makes clear that this requires attending to the way the targets of explication are used in practice (7). Having undertaken this descriptive work, however, the question returns: what general criteria can be used to determine the degree of correspondence between the explicandum and the explicatum? Carnap identifies four (whilst noting that since ‘Philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians make explications very frequently’ (7) these are perhaps ‘inexact’): similarity, fruitfulness, exactness and simplicity. Consider an example that Carnap gives: the replacement of the prescientific concept FISH (meaning ‘animal living in water’) by the zoölogical PISCES. The latter can be integrated into a broad family of concepts on the basis of empirical observation (fruitfulness); the rules of its use can be specified (exactness); it can be used in most cases in which the explicandum can be used (similarity). Simplicity is deemed of secondary importance, operating rather as a procedure for selecting amongst potential explicata that otherwise satisfy the first three criteria equally.

Now, it appears that whilst fruitfulness and exactness are the measure of the success of an explicatum, similarity constitutes its status as such. So in these Carnapian terms similarity is to be our guide to understanding the difference between amelioration and a change of subject. As Quine makes clear, similarity is ultimately ‘dictated by our interests and purposes’ (2013, 238), and this reliance on practical considerations makes the choice of language appropriate for the explicatum an ‘engineering problem(s)’ as opposed to a metaphysical one (Carnap 1946, 43). As a contribution to analysis, then, explication is science’s gift to philosophy: it’s the method that a ‘naturalistic’ philosophy in true dialogue with empirical inquiry should take as its own. As such, Carnap viewed it as ‘one of the most important tasks of philosophy’ (2003, v), extending from the domains of science and commonsense to the problems of philosophy themselves.

If Carnap’s name has become more common currency recently so has that of his keenest critic. As noted in the introduction, considerations P. F. Strawson raises in relation to the conception of explication as a (new, radical) philosophical method are held to present the most cogent challenge to the intelligibility of CE. But what is this challenge? According to Cappelen⁴ it relates to what we’ve identified as the ‘similarity’ concern: disambiguating a revision in our understanding of what’s been talked about from a complete change of topic. But this entirely general question has nothing to do with Strawson’s response to Carnap.⁵ As he makes clear even in the section quoted in defence of this reading of the objection (1963, 505), Strawson’s challenge is to the idea that a semantics appropriate to the formal definition of scientific terms can be used to illuminate non-scientific concepts. The reference to a threatened ‘change of subject’ is in connection with what Strawson takes to be this fundamental category mistake. Characterising programmes like Carnap’s as driven by the conviction that ‘concepts successful for some purposes must be adequate for others’, Strawson concludes that

From such attempts we may learn much; but not by their succeeding. Part of what we have to explain and free ourselves from, in dealing with them, is the undue fascination exercised by formal systems. (514)

This talk of ‘formal systems’ alludes to the distinction Strawson makes here and elsewhere between methods like rational reconstruction, which ‘prescrib[es] the model conduct of model words’, and those which look for philosophical understanding by ‘describing the actual conduct of actual words’ (503). Despite the differences, this resonates with Davidson’s (1967) judgement that while Tarski’s method of inquiry follows ‘from the formulation of the problem itself’ Carnap’s is characterised by ‘the self-imposed restraint of some adventitious philosophical puritanism’ (316). This suggests a way of presenting Strawson’s objection to the ‘model’-model that clarifies why it’s a genuine challenge to the varieties of CE under consideration. The thought here is that while its more methodologically ambitious proponents would reject the comprehensiveness of Carnap’s specific requirements for a genuine conceptual transformation they nevertheless share a presupposition that the philosopher has access to a stable framework of metalinguistic concepts (those of the ‘model’-model) that aren’t implicated in the messiness of ordinary language, and which might form the basis of an answer to a generalised ‘topic-continuity’ or ‘similarity’ problem.

There is much to be said both about Carnap’s exposure to pragmatist ideas,⁶ and to the link between his own ‘puritanism’ and his commitment to the demarcation of philosophy from science (and the general messiness) and the status of the analytic-synthetic distinction.⁷ I’ll return to these points in the conclusion. But the variety of pragmatism that I want to promote at present learned its own lessons from what Peirce (1986) calls ‘the enginery of modern thought’ (258), and indeed from that history of failed formalisms that Strawson alludes to. It takes more seriously the consideration that philosophy cannot exercise the sort of methodological restraint associated with Carnap’s semantic enterprise if it is to help ‘clarify men’s ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day’ and thereby contribute ‘to the aspirations of men to attain to a more ordered and intelligent happiness’ (Dewey 1988, 94). The Strawsonian challenge to CE is that a fascination with the sort of formalistic systems Davidson and Strawson associate with Carnap risks blinding the theorist to the ‘moral and social strifes’ of the day because, seeking to shape the problem to fit the method of solution, it fails to accommodate the features of the phenomena that make them of pressing concern in the first place.

To summarise this section, there is a genuine Strawsonian challenge to CE but this has nothing to do with topic-continuity/similarity. Indeed, thinking that there is a ‘speculative’ problem to be addressed by the theorist is one expression of the ‘puritanism’ that the Strawsonian challenge is a challenge to.⁸ But its principle manifestation is the failure to accommodate both the mind-changing and ameliorative aspects of the phenomena in question. Another way to present this failure is in terms of what we might call the Conceptual Engineering Dilemma (CED).⁹

• Conceptual Engineering concerns changing the way we talk about the world for the better. But we talk about the world using words and sentences the meanings of which are determined by the world so we have little or no control over such changes.

For CEs attracted to an externalist metasemantics, this is the pointy-end of the dilemma. But there is an internalist counterpart:

• Conceptual Engineering concerns changing the way we talk about the world for the better. But we talk about the world using words and sentences the meanings of which are determined by our mental representations so we have little or no sense of which changes are improvements.

As it stands we might conceive of externalist CE emerging in response to the ‘internalist’ horn of CED: the failure to foreground the need to determine if and when changes to the ways we talk constitute genuine improvements. That would in turn help account for why ‘topic-continuity’ comes to be seen as the essential (Strawsonian) objection to CE. Equally, we could anticipate that in an attempt to encompass both mind-changing and amelioration CE finds itself oscillating between the two horns of this dilemma, each promising to accommodate one feature of the phenomena at the expense of the other. Indeed, we may even predict the emergence of a certain pessimism about the scope or even the possibility of CE.

Setting prognostication to one side, what I now want to demonstrate is the externalist horn of this dilemma in operation. To that end we’ll begin the next section by looking at Cappelen’s Fixing Language. This serves a number of useful functions for our purposes. Firstly, it lays down a powerful challenge to CEs attracted by varieties of internalist metasemantics, challenges to which they and not the pragmatist owe a response. Secondly, it makes a cogent case for the importance of the Strawsonian objection to CE, and I have already suggested that this appears as a general problem because of the formalistic assumptions that lead to the dilemma. Finally, Cappelen’s intellectually conscientious scepticism about the possibility of actually carrying out CE successfully amounts to a de facto acknowledgement of the inescapability of the dilemma and thus provides compelling evidence for the pragmatist’s contention that it’s the assumptions that undergird the CED that need to be rejected if we are to take ‘social and moral strifes’ on their own terms.

3. The conceptual engineering dilemma

Fixing Language presents a scrupulously ambivalent vision of the project of conceptual engineering. On the one hand – and in keeping with Carnap’s view of explication – it’s held out as ‘one of the richest and most important fields in philosophy’ (x), encompassing revisionary efforts across the piece, from provincial attempts to change concepts within the discipline of philosophy to those constellating around large cultural movements. On the other hand, Cappelen is unapologetically sceptical about the role of intentions at all semantic levels in CE and apologetically sceptical about our ability to actively and intentionally improve our ‘representational devices’: CE is ‘a process we have little or no control over’ and it’s ‘not transparent to us when we engage in it’ (53); ‘Amelioration might happen, but if it does, it has little to do with our intentional efforts’ (201). Likewise, although he sees CE as ‘a topic so … multifaceted, and amorphous that it doesn’t lend itself to snappy slogans or tidy theoretical frameworks’ (53, fn. 1) he nevertheless attempts to construct an overarching metasemantic framework within which to situate it: the Austerity framework.

At a first pass a pragmatist could insist that the difference between ‘little’ and ‘no’ control is one that makes all the difference in and to the world. Indeed, it is a difference the significance of which is diminished by that contrastive reference to ‘transparency’, evoking as it does a Cartesian fantasy of absolute self-knowledge and control. But to make this a little more probative let’s examine how the attempt to account for a ‘multifaceted’ and ‘amorphous’ set of phenomena in term of an austere theoretical framework misses the phenomena it seeks to encompass by becoming impaled on the externalist horn of the CED. One way into this is through a quote from Rorty, which Cappelen employs not once but twice (69; 153–154):

[p]hilosophy is the greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of “changing the rules.” This game can be won by attending to the patterns by which these rules are changed, and formulating rules in terms of which to judge changes of rules. Those who take this view hold that philosophy in the old style – philosophy as “metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology” – needs to be replaced by metaphilosophy. Members of this school are, as it were, the metaphilosopher’s metaphilosophers: since any metaphysical, epistemological, or axiological arguments can be defeated by redefinition, nothing remains but to make a virtue of necessity and to study this process of redefinition itself. (Rorty 1961, 301)

In respect of it Cappelen makes 3 points:

1. ‘“[t]he process of redefinition” can itself change over time’.

2. (I) means that ‘the metasemantics itself can evolve over time’.

3. ‘Rorty is … saying that old school philosophy should be replaced by conceptual engineering’. (Cappelen 2018, 69)

To put these into context, note that Cappelen identifies two entirely general objections to the possibility of CE. We’ve already noted one: how can we can make sense of the very idea of amelioration if we cannot disambiguate a genuine improvement to our ‘representational devices’ from a (mere) discontinuity in inquiry (51–52 and passim)? The first step in its solution is to aver that (genuinely ameliorative) CE requires that semantic values change and that it is in this sense a metasemantic project, one engaged with the general problem of understanding what factors determine semantic value. The claim that redescription can be redefined (I), then, amounts to the claim that (II) metasemantics can change:

The significant element of contestation in many of the cases (think of ‘marriage’ and ‘rape’) contributes to changes in the metasemantics. Suppose those fighting for a change in the extension of ‘marriage’ were told: Sorry, the experts have discovered that a necessary condition for a change in extension is C, and C isn’t satisfied in this case, so we have to stick with the old extension. There is no reason this should stop those advocating for a change. They would and should just say: Okay, if it doesn’t satisfy the conditions for a change of extension, let’s change the conditions. There’s a significant element of contestation and open-endedness in these processes and those engaged in conceptual engineering aren’t forced to follow past patterns. Of course, we’re no more in control of these meta-metasemantic changes than we are in control of the changes in the semantics, but we should still think of both as being constantly in flux. (69–70)

Having made this a general problem, the second step involves adopting metasemantic externalism, according to which ‘the grounding facts for reference consist in part of various external, non-psychological facts’ (65). And to consolidate that shift towards a formalistic response, (III) ‘old school’ philosophy is itself redefined in a way that provides the remit for the Austerity framework:

[C]onceptual engineering should be seen as having as its goal to change [the ‘semantic values’] of [‘our representational devices’], and we should think of that process within an externalist framework. (61)

For Cappelen, then, the Austerity framework constitutes the condition of possibility of CE because it offers the only way of responding to the (purportedly Strawsonian) objection to the idea that changes in the way we talk can be genuinely ameliorative. CE is the future of philosophy – the true heir to the method of explication – but only insofar as at its ‘foundation’ (7) is an externalist semantic theory.

Cappelen is aware of course that his thoroughgoing externalism is problematic: the second of his two general objections to the possibility of CE is that it is inconsistent with semantic externalism precisely because the latter places the determinants of reference out with the sort of factors over which agents might exercise control. Recall that the phenomena we want to capture by theorising CE can be characterised as at the intersection of mind-changing and amelioration. Now, whether we choose to frame semantic changes in terms of ‘representational devices’, concepts, or ‘ways of talking about’, our targets are language users. But although mastering a language is an individual achievement, semantic norms (if such there be) are in some sense of the word ‘external’ to any individual’s control. To take a standard example, Mo may think he’s mastered the concept ELM, and that when he asks an arborist to chop down the elms he’s issuing a command over which he exercises semantic authority. But if he can’t tell an elm from a beech or an oak the arborist does not miscarry if she chops down only the former. She hasn’t failed to understand his request; rather, he has failed to say what he wanted to say. So if mind-changing is too easy – too ‘internalistic’ or ‘intentionalist’ – we confront problems raised by ELMS etc., which dramatise the historical co-development of expertise and semantic authority. It also becomes more difficult to see how changing minds can issue in the sort of coordinated social changes we are interested in. But if mind-changing is too hard it makes the whole idea of intervening to change for the better our ways of talking seem like an unsupportable conceit.

Cappelen thinks we can address the second objection, albeit with the observed proviso that we have ‘little’ or ‘no’ control over any change that ‘might’ occur. But note that what we see rehearsed in the previous paragraph is the temptation to oscillate between the internalist and externalist horns of the dilemma, both of which make it impossible to accommodate simultaneously mind-changing and amelioration. Although Cappelen is right to want to purge philosophy of internalist dogmas, then, the solution is not to flip the other way and embrace an externalism that reduces the intentionalistic to, as he says, the grains of salt that ‘might contribute to a massively complex dish’ (60). This attempt at a mitigated sceptical response to one horn of the CED arises as a result of the self-imposed constraint placed on possible accommodations to the phenomena under consideration by the insistence on seeing in Strawson’s response to Carnap a general problem that requires a theoretical semantical approach. The irony here is that the genuine Strawsonian challenge coincides with the ‘puritanism’ objection, which relates to the failure to take the phenomena on their own terms. By sacrificing mind-changing on the altar of amelioration Cappelen takes volition out of contestation and thus risks purging the ‘moral and social strifes’ of their ethical valency and thus of what motivates our interest in them in first place.

4. Groundhog day … 

In the previous section, I suggested that Cappelen’s attempt to square his externalist metasemantics with CE in order to preserve the ameliorative dimension of conceptual change threatens to deprive contestations and controversies of their ethical quality. This is an example of the felt requirement to avoid the ‘internalist’ horn of what I called the CED, and is seen in a clearer light by exploring Cappelen’s contention that the externalist challenge is much greater to a social constructionist like Sally Haslanger because there it bears on the very possibility of amelioration. So let’s explore a little more the relation between the ethical/mind-changing and ameliorative dimensions of changing ways of talking by comparing Cappelen with Halsanger.

In the film Groundhog Day, the misogynistic weatherman Phil Connors finds himself reliving the same eponymous day over and over again. At one point in the film the following exchange takes place:

Phil:

What are you looking for? Who is your perfect guy?

Rita:

First of all, he’s too humble to know he’s perfect.

Phil:

That’s me.

Rita:

He’s intelligent, supportive, funny.

Phil:

Me, me, me.

Rita:

He’s romantic and courageous.

Phil:

Me also.

Rita:

He’s got a good body, but doesn’t look in the mirror every two minutes.

Phil:

I have a great body, and sometimes I go months without looking.

Rita:

He’s kind, sensitive and gentle. He’s not afraid to cry in front of me.

Phil:

This is a man, right? (D. Rubin & H. Ramis)

Crudely put, Phil objects to the claim that Rita’s Perfect Man (RPM) is a man. So where Phil avows

• XY. RPM isn’t a man,

Rita demurs:

• ¬XY. RPM is a man.

According to Haslanger (2006) concepts fall into three classes: manifest, operative and target. The manifest concept is the one we think we’re using; the operative concept captures the way it’s used in practice; and the target concept is the one we should use. During the course of the film, Phil comes to realise that if he’s to seduce Rita he must track her manifest concept and that his recurrent failures are due both to his inability to operationalise it and the lack of mismatch between her manifest and operative concepts (she’s not shown to be in bad faith). Phil is estimated to take around 30–40 years to change his mind and therein lies the film’s ethical content. But the relevant target concept MAN isn’t ameliorated. Recall the case of Mo. We can only determine that Mo’s concept ELM does not mean what he thinks it means (or intends it to mean) because we have established taxonomic practices embodied in a culture of cognitive deference. What Mo means is what ‘we’ mean, where the scope of the ‘we’ is constituted by those deemed expert in the determination of the relevant arboreal facts. Likewise, Phil doesn’t have a different concept MAN from Rita when he avows XY. The target concept, which Rita is aware of all along, is already determined by the ‘cinematic world’ and once he changes his behaviour to align with the requirements of that (‘ideal’) stretch of social reality he is released from his eternal recurrence. In this respect the film scenario merely dramatizes the fact that to open up a gap between Phil’s manifest and the target concepts one requires a practice that carries the authority that scientific knowledge does to determine real meanings, but in the social realm of values. One needs something to do for MAN (‘metasemantically’) what botany does for ELM.

What, then, about cases where there’s a far more significant element of contestation and a corresponding lack of clarity about the metasemantics? Consider the following:

• XX. Trans-women aren’t women.

• ¬XX. Trans-women are women

On Cappelen’s account XX will turn out to be true or false depending on too-ing and fro-ing between shifting semantic and metasemantic rules that are too complex to identify until after it’s all over. In relation to Haslanger’s (2000) position this is a complicated case as her suggestion is that we ‘engineer’ the concept WOMAN to mean something like ‘targeted for subordination on the grounds of perceived features taken to relate to reproductive role’ (39). On one reading of that suggestion XX is false, then; but this serves to highlight one of the problems with Haslanger’s approach, for she takes it that part of the feminist project is to eliminate women. And if there’s one thing that parties on both sides of this argument will agree on it’s that they’re not fighting over a concept the extension of which they hope will wither to nothing.¹⁰ Their contestation involves positive content that is integrated into an identity. Notwithstanding that issue, Cappelen’s response is that Haslanger’s model of amelioration is ‘revelatory’ – rather than, say, ‘ampliative’ – because the social reality that gives concepts their ‘externalist’ credentials already exists in its ideal form. In other words, just as Phil finally comes to meet the pre-established standards of the Groundhog world (for MAN), when one goes from believing that XX to ¬XX (or vice-versa) the change involves the ‘revelation’ that this is what we really (ideally) meant all along (by WOMAN). For Cappelen, a change of mind involves amelioration if its target is not an agent’s beliefs about women but the ‘semantic value’ of WOMAN (so that, for example, it comes to include or exclude trans-women). Rather than a case of what we ought to mean being what we meant all along, here we come to mean what we ought to mean. Accordingly, on Cappelen’s diagnosis Haslanger sacrifices amelioration in order to wriggle out from under the ‘topic-continuity’ objection. Indeed, he maintains that she ‘changed her mind … somewhere between’ 2000 and 2006 and ‘in effect gives up the ameliorative project’ (13, fn. 3). Determining that WOMAN has in some sense always meant whatever the theorists of social reality deem it ought to mean, the (externalist) social constructionist guarantees that when SH goes from avowing XX to ¬XX (or vice-versa) she is still talking about women and so remaining on-topic.

What, then, are we to conclude from this? In ‘The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy’, Dewey discusses amongst other things the way in which philosophy has become misshaped by the felt need to respond to the ‘speculative problem’ of establishing ‘the existence of an “external world”’ (1917, 25). The more telling of the responses are those ‘objective idealisms’ that have resulted from ‘the historic alliance of empiricism and idealism’, which treat ‘“the real World” as a synthesis of sentient consciousness by means of a rational self-consciousness introducing objectivity’ (26). But ‘a world already, in its intrinsic structure, dominated by thought is not a world in which … thinking has anything to do’ (27):

Those … who are solicitous for intelligence as a factor in the amelioration of actual conditions can but look askance at any doctrine which holds that the entire scheme of things is already, if we but acquire the knack of looking at it aright, fixedly and completely rational. (28)

On the face of it we see here something akin to Cappelen’s response to Haslanger. Her constructivist attempt to accommodate both mind-changing and amelioration¹¹ requires that the relevant stretch of reality is already ‘fixed’ and available to those trained-up in the relevant disciplines. And since creative thinking has no contribution to make to the amelioration of conditions in such a ‘real World’, it’s unsurprising that it comes to take a back seat to mind-changing (with bringing thought into alignment with the ideal). In this mood, we might hazard that Haslanger’s problem is that her semantics is merely quasi externalist – that constructivism is insufficiently respectful of the independence of the real (it makes ‘change unreal’ (27)). But of course, Dewey’s point is avowedly not to promote realism over idealism as the solution to the ‘speculative problem’; rather it is to point out the futility of the dilemma that arises from it. On the interpretation I’m proposing, then, both Haslanger’s own purported change of mind and Cappelen’s response to it are best understood against the backdrop of the instability with which the CED confronts the metasemanticist. Whereas Cappelen jettisons the ethical along with the intentional, Haslanger strives to accommodate the ethical element (in the above example, SH is changing her mind on the topic). Fixing social reality in this way means that amelioration goes out of the window; but allowing on the contrary that it is the really real and not the merely (ideal) constructed real that fixes semantic values puts change of meaning or any other semblance of agential control seemingly out of reach.

Stepping back, then, we have a contestation between amelioration as ‘improvements to our representational devices’ and amelioration as ‘revelation of a preexisting (social) reality’. Or to sloganize, the choice is between Cappelen’s ‘amelioration without ethics’ and Haslanger’s ‘ethics without amelioration’. The pragmatist response to this is simple enough: it is a formalistic difference that makes no difference at all, deriving as it does from what Dewey calls ‘the technique of professional philosophy’ (27) and Strawson the ‘fascination exercised by formal systems’. Haslanger’s error is to model her externalist semantics of the social on the sort Cappelen would favour for the real simpliciter. Mo cannot intend ELM to mean what his use implies because the target for experts in the really real have the semantic content of their ways of talking ‘controlled’ by factors that are impervious to their intentions. Such practices ‘reveal’ the real rather than change it. Likewise, if an expert in values is to have any authoritative basis for her critique it is on the grounds that she too is describing social reality. But if one thing is clear it is that this stretch of reality has no such experts if what it is to be an expert is to be someone authorised a priori to carve it at its joints. However, if we efface the divide between social and ‘objective’ reality then the ideal/real just becomes the best that we’ve come up with so far. If the imperative is to get folk to think about themselves and others on the basis of that – with the proviso that that best can always be bettered – there is no tension between amelioration and ethics.

5. The ethics of controversy

The aim of this paper is to attempt to galvanise what I take to be an admirable practical turn on the part of some analytic philosophers, not to promote either a general scepticism or pessimism about philosophy’s role in changing things for the better, or the conclusion that (analytic) philosophy doesn’t require reform because it has all the tools it needs already at hand (Deutsch 2020). So what of that promised second objective, the positive proposal? How might we, as Dewey has it, articulate a position betwixt an ‘attachment to rule of thumb muddling and devotion to a systematized subordination of intelligence to preëxistent ends’? How might we determine a philosophy ‘which finds the ultimate measure of intelligence in consideration of a desirable future and in search for the means of bringing it progressively into existence’ (29)? My suggestions here will of necessity be provisional, but let’s approach the desired middle ground from the two extremes.

In Section 3, we looked at Cappelen’s use of a quote from Rorty to promote the idea that traditional philosophy should be replaced by his austere brand of CE, a position I argued that failed to take the phenomena of interest on their own terms. But when Rorty proceeds to identify the quoted position with Dewey’s metaphilosophical pragmatism he specifically associates this with what he calls an ‘ethics of controversy’ (1961, 302).¹² The point of redefining the rules is to prevent the sort of ‘systematized subordination of intelligence to preëxistent ends’ that Strawson rails against in relation to Carnap. It is to keep the conversation between philosophers going in the hope that human beings will come up with new ideas for how we might live better lives. This theme will find its fullest expression in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, where Rorty extends Davidson’s charge of ‘puritanism’ (against Carnap) to all those ‘model’-modellers ‘committed to the construction of a permanent, neutral framework for inquiry’ (1979, 8) that tries to shape the problem to fit the method of solution. But even back in 1961 Rorty was saying that ‘old style philosophy’ should be replaced by pragmatism, albeit on metaphilosophical grounds. The aim of metaphilosophical pragmatism is to keep the ‘metasemantics’ on the move by subverting the ambitions of those philosophers prone to taking their formalisms for genuine explanations and applying them across the piece.¹³ This is how to ward-off the danger of not taking problems at face value.

Rorty subsequently came to think that metaphilosophical reflections aren’t preeminent, but continued to cleave to the notion that if philosophy is to be of any use, it is in helping remove obstacles to the sort of revisionary thinking that may help us solve real problems by embracing them in their actuality. And that might involve anything potentially ameliorative from the ravings of poets to the protestations of climate-change activists. If this sounds too unguardedly prophetic even for Dewey, let’s reconsider explication. Recall that for Carnap this came in two phases: first we have as extensive a description as possible of the explicandum in terms of word-use; secondly, the evaluation of possible explicata against four criteria, amongst which similarity was the key (fruitfulness, exactness and simplicity being the others). For Carnap, of course, similarity is ultimately understood in terms of semantic rules whose independence of empirical fact is itself dependent on the analytic-synthetic distinction. There’s no great need here to rehearse the well-known criticisms of the ‘analyticity intuitions’ that underpin this approach, nor the distorting effect they have not just on the philosophical understanding ‘of how language relates to the world’ (Quine 2013, 60)¹⁴ but also on how philosophy is thought to relate to other ‘languages’. For Carnap, it is crucial for philosophy’s self-identity that we can distinguish changes in meaning (specified in terms of the semantic rules that determine which language is being used) from changes in belief (theories about the world expressed within the language) and thus analytic sentences (in which ‘meaning postulates’ or ‘semantical rules’ for the language are phrased) from synthetic sentences (expressive of our thoughts about the world). The point is that once we abandon Carnap’s austere view of the relationship of philosophy to other disciplines we begin to move towards Dewey’s middle ground. And that movement is accelerated if we embrace the post-Quinean contention that it is not just philosophy’s relationship with physics or the natural sciences that undergoes a shift but its relationship with (potentially) all word-employing activities.

It is against this backdrop, then, that we should construe a pragmatist view of mind-changing. When we accommodate Quine’s thought that explicative ‘similarity’ is to be understood ultimately in terms of ‘our purposes and interests’ to this expansion of the world of discourse, the range of purposes and interests expands accordingly. But this privileging of ‘messiness’ over speculative generality is no bad thing for the philosopher who wants to change things for the better. And it does not leave us without tools. One takes us back to Rorty. In ‘Verificationism and Transcendental Arguments’ (1971) he defends Strawson’s use of transcendental arguments against Barry Stroud’s (1968) charge of verificationism. More specifically, he argues that if one rejects the idea that they are motivated by the desire to establish necessities of thought and overcome some imagined gap between mind and world a new use becomes available: establishing dependencies between the words that people use in expressing themselves.¹⁵ Making recommendations for new and improved ways of talking, then, requires exposing and perhaps weakening old dependencies and proposing new ones on the basis of purposes and interests that can be identified as shared. This is not an easy business of course, but it points to a perhaps unusual resource and a promising reconciliation. In ‘The Meaning of a Word’ Austin describes as a ‘dogma’ the thought that every judgement is either analytic or synthetic:

When we consider what we really do want to talk about, and not the working-model, what would really be meant at all by a judgement being “analytic or synthetic”? We simply do not know. (1961, 31)

High-priests of ‘working models’ (like Carnap) are willing to sacrifice the ‘the facts that we really wish to talk about’ (ibid.) in order to hold on to their model, but the messiness of ordinary language confutes them at every step. According to Quine (1965), ‘Austin erred in limiting his philosophy to language study’ promoting the illusion that ‘philosophical truth is truth about language, when really it is continuous rather with scientific truth generally about the world’ (510). But this charge is short-sighted. As Austin notes, ‘when we examine … what words we should use in what situations … we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of … the phenomena’ (1961], 130). On this suggestion, then, approaching Dewey’s middle ground from this ‘ordinary language’ perspective does not bring it into conflict with pragmatism, as at least Quine’s (op. cit.; 2013, 240–241) attitude implies. On the contrary, when it comes to the myriad purposes and interests that we need to account for when offering the sorts of descriptions of explicanda relevant to recommending social and political change it appears that Austin’s ‘Linguistic Phenomenology’ (130) can make a critical contribution. And as Austin is at pains to make clear, ‘ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded’ (133). Elaborating and testing conceptual connections is a way of tracing out prophetic future possibilities on the basis of our most cherished values. But for pragmatists the key to understanding how to get to where we want to get – how we envisage supplementing and improving ways of talking – is understanding all the better where we are now. As Austin notes repeatedly, ordinary language may not be the last word. ‘Only remember, it is the first word’ (133).¹⁶

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Since it’s moot among CEs whether or not CE involves actual changes to (actual) concepts, in this essay I use ‘concept use’ and ‘ways of talking’ interchangeably. For some non-pragmatic considerations see Löhr (2020).

2 Cf. Eklund (2014), Cappelen (2018), Richard (2019).

3 The need to make this clearer was pressed on me by Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi and an anonymous referee.

4 Who identifies its acknowledgement in the work of CEs including Haslanger, Richard, Ludlow and Railton (to name a few).

5 For a more nuanced consideration see Pinder (2020).

6 Cf. Richardson (2007), Limbeck-Lilienau (2012).

7 For an overview with a useful bibliography see Leitgeb and Carus (2021), Supplement H.

8 Thomasson (2020) likewise recognises that Cappelen’s presentation of the Strawson objection amounts to ‘a generalized challenge … that we shouldn’t take … with high seriousness’ (442). Although I am sympathetic to her Pricean approach, my contention is that the ‘deepest, though not most direct’ (ibid.) response to Cappelen is to emphasise the pervasiveness of what for the pragmatist is Strawson’s most trenchant criticism: the lure of formal systems. Without that awareness Thomasson’s own defence of function risks degenerating into an empty formalism.

9 This way of presenting the problem was suggested to me by an anonymous referee. I should add that I found the positive engagement of the referee with earlier drafts of the paper extremely helpful, and would like to take this opportunity to thank them.

10 Presumably, for those who avow ¬XX the ‘disappearance’ in question relates to the concept TRANS-WOMAN, not WOMEN. In other words the desired change is expressible as “What people use to call ‘Trans-women’ are women”. Cf. Gascoigne (2016) for more on this ‘eliminativist’ response to Haslanger’s views.

11 For a constructivist response to Cappelen that tries to redeem mind-changing but at the cost of amelioration see Flocke (2020).

12 Another way to approach from the ‘rule of thumb’ end is via another piece associated with ‘the ethics of controversy’. In Sidney Hook’s article of that name he offers 10 ‘ground rules’ for dealing with controversies which express ‘the logic and ethics of scientific inquiry’ (1980 [1954], 122). Although Rorty doesn’t acknowledge it, it’s unlikely he was unaware of this piece: Hook was a student of Dewey’s at Columbia and a friend of Rorty’s parents (Rorty 1995).

13 According to Voparil (2014) this early text’s concern with the ‘moral seriousness’ of philosophical inquiry is evidence of the persisting centrality to Rorty’s thinking of ‘a conception of ethical responsibility, both towards other and for our choices and commitments as philosophers’ (83).

14 Cf. Quine 2013, 61, fn. 7 for a brief but informative overview of the various criticisms offered by Quine, Mates, White (1950) et al. throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

15 For more on the conceptual connection account of transcendental arguments see Gascoigne (2020).

16 A version of this paper was presented at the online workshop Conceptual Engineering and Pragmatism in July 2021. My thanks to the organisers Céline Henne and Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi and fellow participants for their responses.