Allison (Ari) Koslow

I consider a class of cases sometimes said to exemplify the open texture of language. They resemble some cases familiar from the mid-20th century. Consider J. L. Austin’s famous example of a bird that looks for all the world like a goldfinch and then blows up like a grenade. Is it a goldfinch? A more realistic case involves the word “book” as used around 2000: were utterances such as eBooks are books true around this time? Hard to say. We can imagine a separation, where British speakers affirmed such sentences, and Americans denied them, without either appearing to misapply “book.” Is this kind of open texture some more well-studied linguistic phenomena? I argue, first, that such cases resist both metaphysical and epistemic explanations. Then I argue that openness cannot be identified with partial definition, vagueness, non-vagueness indeterminacy, or underdetermination. This provides reason to think that, if there is any such thing as open texture, it is sui generis and worthy of its own theory.

L. Susan Stebbing was a proponent of what came to be known as the Cambridge School of Analysis. She was also an advocate of the relevance of logic, and good reasoning, to concerns of public life. She is often remembered for one of her objections to physicist Sir Arthur Eddington’s so-called two tables problem. He argued that, although we normally represent material objects as solid, physics has shown that, in fact, they are not. For reasons like this, he distinguishes “the table of experience” from “the table of science.” Stebbing objected that science had shown no such thing. This paper returns to the two tables problem. If “solid” is, and was, context-sensitive, the force of both Eddington’s, and Stebbing’s, positions are somewhat undermined. One of Stebbing’s key arguments is what later came to be called a paradigm case argument. It faces familiar challenges but also fares better than some arguments with a similar structure. The balance of their dispute factors into a variety of seemingly remote concerns about what linguistic competence requires, reference determination, the bearers of sensible properties, and the relationship between linguistic meaning and non-linguistic aspects of experience.

Do novel usages characteristic of conceptual engineering and amelioration problematically change the subject? The worry that they do points to broader questions in the philosophy of language, but is not itself compelling. Like semantic variation in the wild, novel usages of the sort favored by these projects are unlikely to generate epistemic defects over shorter, or longer, time horizons. However, rhetorical bids to implement these projects in less than cooperative environments may do so, and be ethically assessable on that basis.

Is volitional conceptual change feasible? Answering that question requires a theory of semantic change, which is sometimes thought elusive. Fortunately, much is known about semantic change as it occurs in the wild. While usage is chaotic and complex, changes in a word’s use can produce changes in its meaning. There are several under-appreciated empirical constraints on how meanings change that stem from the following observation: word use finely reflects equilibrium between various communicative pressures. Much of the relevant work in linguistics has employed the methods of empirical pragmatics and diachronic semantics. In this way, the study of meaning change can be brought to bear on the conceptual engineer’s normative project. The picture that emerges tells against the sorts of engineering projects most likely to appeal to philosophers. Some may stand to succeed, but they have significantly different contours than the typical ones.