Objects and Arrows

Shahid Rahman has initiated an important and very worthwhile project to translate some of the foundational classics of the past 50 years into Spanish.  Details to come soon.  The goal is to provide affordable texts (mostly from logic and its environs) for Latin American undergrads.  This could have really positive consequences.

I’ve agreed to work on the translation of Hintikka’s classic Knowledge and Belief with Elizabeth Pando.  It will be a fun project if we can get the bureaucratic details straightened out.

In ‘The Emperor’s New Intuitions’ Jaakko Hintikka describes how the current penchant for intuition in philosophy has at least some of its roots in an influential reading of Noam Chomsky’s early methodology. (Hintikka 1999) Philosophers and some linguists understood the goal of generative linguistics to be the construction of grammars that produce intuitively acceptable sentences as judged by competent native speakers. As Hintikka points out, this interpretation can be traced to Robert B. Lees influential review of Syntactic Structures. (1957) There, Lees describes the linguist’s own “Sprachgefühl, this intuitive notion about linguistic structure, which together with the sentences of a language, forms the empirical basis of grammatical analysis.” (1957, 379) According to Hintikka, philosophers began to use intuitive acceptability as a standard for the evaluation of their own endeavors by analogy with what they saw as a successful methodology in linguistics.

Hintikka’s reading of the history captures some important aspects of the rise of intuition-talk in philosophy and sheds light on the work of many important philosophers. By 1971, for example, Jerrold Katz made extensive use of intuition in his approach to language. Specifically, Katz lets his Sprachgefühl guide the characterization of the semantic relationships between concepts in the following passage:

Our linguistic intuitions that “unmarried bachelor” is semantically redundant and that “He is a bachelor again” is not semantically anomalous tells us that one component of this sense of “bachelor” is the concept of being in an unmarried state. Our linguistic intuition that “aunt,” “sister,” “mother,” “spinster,” etc., differ semantically from “uncle,” “brother,” “father,” bachelor,” etc., only with respect to the conceptual distinction between femaleness and maleness tells us that another component of the sense of “bachelor” is the concept of maleness. (Katz 1971, 102)

The role of linguistic intuition here seems to confirm Hintikka’s reading. Intuition provides the content for philosophical analysis. Katz’s assumption is that the job of conceptual analysis is to make our semantic intuitions as explicit and rigorous as possible. By the late 1960s worries about synonymy, so central to Quine’s critique of analyticity were no longer a serious concern for analytic philosophers. Instead, intuitions allow the mind to grasp synonymy relations. In place of Quine’s naturalistic scruples and extensionalist approach to semantics, intuitions had become familiar tools of the philosopher’s trade.

The triumph of intuition-talk is not fully explained via the desire to imitate linguists. For example, Hintikka’s diagnosis is less applicable in the case of his paper’s principle opponent – Saul Kripke. While Chomskian considerations may have played some role in Kripke’s thinking, Hintikka’s reading underplays the influence of ordinary language philosophy and particularly the role of common sense in late 20^th century metaphysics.