#peter hacker

To illustrate with a simple example, we may ask ‘What does “bachelor” mean?’, ‘What’s the concept of a bachelor?’, or ‘What’s a bachelor?’ But despite appearances, these questions are not about different things as such (word, concept, and thing respectively), since the answer to one gives the answer to the others. For if ‘bachelor’ means ‘unmarried man’, then the concept of a bachelor is the concept of an unmarried man, and furthermore, a bachelor is an unmarried man. And why should we privilege one mode over the others? The Linguistic Turn did not herald a change in subject-matter for philosophy, but only a clearer recognition that answering traditional philosophical questions articulated in the material mode requires paying attention to language.

The analogy between the rules of language and of chess has its limits. Chess rules are learned explicitly and give clear guidance for all the (formally limited) states of affairs which can arise in chess. The situation with the ‘rules’ of language is more complex. Consider the method – of no small importance in philosophy – of using thought-experiments to investigate concepts by considering what we would say in some scenario, and note that the scenarios are often highly unusual or even physically/technically impossible.

Consider a down-to-earth example: a Gettier case. Smith looks at his previously-reliable watch and comes to believe, at 2pm, that it’s 2pm. Little does he know that his watch stopped at 2am last night. Does Smith know that it’s 2pm? Here we can’t simply recall what is generally said in these and similar situations, because we may never have encountered them, and they are curiously different from what we are familiar with.

We are left to judge for ourselves whether knowledge extends to this case. Given its novelty, we can’t simply recall what we actually say in such situations (‘marshal what one already knows’), but must judge what we would or should say (the question of what determines these judgments is an important one). These judgments are then called ‘linguistic intuitions’. Is this so inappropriate?

Nevertheless, Hacker’s conception of philosophy as a sui generis, a priori exercise in conceptual clarification restores to philosophy a dignity that has often seemed under threat from recent conceptions of it which blur the line between philosophy and science. But it also seems overly narrow. It is unclear, for instance, whether conceptual clarification is the panacea for all the problems and concerns which arise across sub-disciplines such as logic (formal and informal), philosophy of religion, science, and history, let alone ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of education, and Eastern philosophy, where thinkers are often concerned with normative and practical questions of what it’s right to do, how we should arrange society, how we should live, and what is of value.