Michael Hymers

Philosophers have often thought that concepts such as ”knowledge” and ”truth” are appropriate objects for theoretical investigation. In a discussion which ranges widely over recent analytical philosophy and radical theory, Philosophy and Its Epistemic Neuroses takes issue with this assumption, arguing that such theoreticism is not the solution but the source of traditional problems in epistemology (How can we have knowledge of the world around us? How can we have knowledge of other minds and cultures? How can we have knowledge of ourselves?) and in the philosophy of language (How can we know what our words refer to?).The author draws on Wittgenstein and recent neo-pragmatists (Putnam, Rorty, Davidson, Williams) to argue that analytical philosophy and radical theory alike stand in an ambivalent relationship with skepticism, which issues forth in varieties of ”epistemic neuroses” - manifested most clearly in the cases of metaphysical realism, relativism and causal theories of reference. Each of these projects is defined in terms possibilities that conflict with its own chances of cognitive success. Hymers explains not only the mainstream analytical philosophy of such figures as Devitt, Quine and Burge, but also structuralism (Althusser, Lacan), feminist theory (Seller, MacKinnon, Lugones) and critical theory (Marcuse), in an attempt to outline a therapeutic alternative to philosophical theoreticism.

The main interpretive claim of this book is that both Wittgenstein’s mature philosophical method and his much misunderstood critique of private language have their roots in his critique of the misleading metaphor of phenomenal space–that is, the misleading, figurative analogy between physical space, or space simpliciter, and phenomenal space, or the “space” of appearances. His critique of this metaphor extends from his rejection of sense-data (Chapters 2 and 3), to his investigation of the asymmetry between first- and other-person pronouns in conjunction with psychological vocabulary (Chapter 4), to his discussion of noticing aspects (Chapter 3), and, of course, to his revolutionary critique of the privacy of the mental (Chapter 3) and of the related, but more general, misleading metaphor of the inner and the outer. Wittgenstein’s critique of the idea of phenomenal space is, at the same time, the prototype for his new philosophical method–the method of grammatical investigation, which holds that many of the persistent problems of philosophy arise from failing to command a clear view of the grammar of various regions of our language and finding ourselves, as a result, vulnerable to misleading pictures of our mental lives, of our linguistic practices, of mathematics, and of countless fundamental elements of our world view(s), whose misunderstanding is the locus of the traditional problems of metaphysics (Chapter 3). Chapters 5, 6 and 7 argue for the continued relevance of Wittgenstein's critique of the misleading metaphor of phenomenal space by showing how it applies to contemporary discussions of first-person authority, recent attempts to revive sense-datum theories, and the ongoing debate about sensory qualia.

Tyler Burge says that first-person authority can be reconciled with anti-individualism about the intentional by denying part of the "Cartesian conception" of authority, which claims that I am actually authoritative about my intentional attitudes in counterfactual situations. This clause, he says, wrongly conflates the evaluation-conditions for sceptical doubts about the "external" world with the conditions for classifying intentional attitudes in counterfactual situations. This paper argues that the kind of possibility needed to understand external-world scepticism justifies the conflation and that Burge can reject the Cartesian conception only if he rejects either metaphysical realism or anti-individualism.

Some philosophers influenced by Quine's meaning-holism agree that metaphor matters for science and for language in general, but they part ways over whether metaphors are cognitive. Hesse holds that metaphors have special cognitive content, apart from the literal content of the expressions used metaphorically. Davidson and Rorty deny this. I offer a partial reconciliation, allowing that metaphor has a noncognitive dimension, but holding that there is no sharp boundary between the literal and the metaphorical, between meaning and use, or between the cognitive and noncognitive. This also answers the question: Where do dead metaphors gets their second literal meanings?