Liveblogging: UT Methodology Conference Day 2
It’s lunch break during day two of the UT Austin Methodology conference and I’m trying to find some organized way to reflect on the topics that have been presented. They’re at varying levels of meta-ness, and intertwined in ways that make it tricky to see where to grab the thread to untangle the knot.
One topic is the role of language, in particular ordinary language data, in analytic philosophy. Has the field taken a linguistic turn for the worse, so that we’re investigating ‘freedom’ rather than freedom, for example? How important is it to grapple with ordinary language semantics when dealing with, say, metaphysical claims about whether statues and clay are the same object or two different ones? And how do we do it? The panel discussion (David Beaver, Jeff King, David Sosa) ranged over responses to X-Phi’s interest in ordinary language to ways to incorporate kinds of linguistic evidence in philosophy to the above metaphysical claim as an example of language playing a role in other fields.
This discussion winds up being connected to our understanding of intuitions–which, of course, we’re still talking about what they are and what role they play. Do they have an unevaluable justificatory role, similar to visual perceptions? Or, does it turn out that what we think of as ‘intuitions’ really just are beliefs that have no justificatory basis, or dispositions to such beliefs? So, assuming we can hash out some understanding of what intuitions are and what role they play, how important would reports of folk intuitions be?
In terms of my own interests, I’m now curious to go back to Mahayana texts and look closely at how they use ordinary language data in the form of various examples (there are dialogues between the Buddha and interlocutors where he asks them for such data) and how that is related to metaphysical claims. I want to get more clear on the debate about linguistic idealism (ontological realism versus ontological anti-realism) and see how to situate emptiness into this taxonomy, as it seems to resist reduction to either side.
There are similarities, though, between some of the claims of linguistic idealists that certain ontological questions are shallow–we come back to conventional language once we recognize that reality is empty, would be perhaps the other way of putting it. Of course, I worry about the linguistic idealist claim that “There are tables” must be something to defend and keep in one’s ontology based on language use, immune from the metaphysicians. Here, I wonder if the tetralemma might be helpful.
The last session today is Marc Moffett on epistemic conservatism. Later tonight, perhaps I’ll have more detailed reflections, but I still have a bit of moving in to do. They’ve also got a plethora of activities planned for us, so there’s no guarantee on what the evening holds.
Arbitrary Chatter:
Aaron Boyden: Well, back when I was an... Aaron Boyden: The evaluation of historical... Loden Jinpa: thanks Richard: Thanks Colleen — let me just add... Loden Jinpa: >Finally, I just read the draft...