How plausible is it that, for every philosophical position to which we’ve given a name, there is a corresponding proposition such that to align oneself with the position is just to assent to that proposition?
Philosophers have lots of positions that have earned names (see here for a partial list of isms, though not all of them philosophically interesting). It seems unlikely that these positions are static through time, and there is often disagreement about what ascribing to a particular position commits one to. If the disagreement goes on long enough some sort of qualifier is introduced, or an entirely new position splits off from the original. Keeping track of these positions is often enough to make one’s head pound, especially when different philosophers use a single designation in different ways, or a designation becomes so widely used that, without additional context, it covers a vast swath of the conceptual space. Realism seems to be like this, for instance.
As to the original question, I’m not sure whether figuring out what propositions are attached to what labels is anything more than a finitely useful heuristic for keeping track. It might be helpful to think that if I consider myself a fallibilist it’s because I am willing to assent to the following proposition: “Certainty is not required for knowledge.” But this commitment is likely embedded in a whole complex of other beliefs and commitments, and so singling out the proposition may not be terribly useful or interesting. It might even be that the positions themselves represent complex, interrelated beliefs, methodological commitments, arguments, and/or conceptual apparatus. In which case we should expect wildly diverging views about just what a given position commits us to.
Still, the view that philosophical “isms” can be thought of as assent to a proposition might be an ideal limiting case, and we can use this as a standard to judge just how much agreement there is across the aisle with respect to the meaning of our terms. There’s no doubt that philosophers use these terms, and if we are using them in wildly different ways then we should at least be aware of it.
I think there are two questions to ask here. First, can we come up with a plausible proposition for each philosophical “ism” that is commonly used in current philosophical discussion? Second, are actual philosophers on both sides of a given position willing to assent to (or reject) that proposition?
If we can accomplish the first, then we at least have a starting point from which to analyze the positions and determine whether or not they are true or useful. If we can answer the second, we can takes steps towards determining to what degree philosophers talk past one another when discussing the questions that the proponents of these positions are responding to.
I’d be especially curious to see how much agreement we get about terms like “Platonism” or “reductionism.”
Yeah, Zach, that’s a big part of it. Generally the worry is just that philosophers go around using these terms like they have a (mostly) shared meaning and I just really doubt that they do. Even if we set the context, I think that saying that I am an infallibilist tells you virtually nothing about what I believe, except that maybe it’s roughly similar to the beliefs of other people who also describe themselves as infallibilists.
I’ve always thought of these position phrases as technical terms in philosophy, but I think as technical terms they’re especially bad. As I see it there are two ways to circumvent this: (b) treat all -ism language as local to individual persons or even papers, so that you basically have to spell out each time what you mean when you describe yourself or your argument with an ‘-ism’: “I’m an infallibilist, which means I believe that x,y,z.” or (a) we make a deliberate effort as a discipline to get some consensus on what most of these mean by assigning particular propositions to them, and then make it hard to just introduce new ones on a whim.
I may just be complaining about a general issue with technical terms in a highly organized body of knowledge, but I think that we could stand to be more careful when describing ourselves and our work with these sorts of terms.
I’m fine with technical terms, but you’re right that in many cases we have to accompany use of an ‘ism’ with a little crash course explaining what we mean by it.
This doesn’t seem like that big of an issue as long as we aren’t pretending we all mean the same thing. This happens in everyday life too, having to explain what we mean by our abstract names for things.
So yes, let’s be more careful. I can get on board with that.
I read this but there was a lot of stuff so I wanna make sure I understand. The worry is that philosophers could be having merely verbal disputes because say, realism, means like 10 different things depending on the sub-discipline?
This idea seems initially plausible to me, though there certainly might be worries about semantic holism and trying to understand what a view amounts to by isolating a single proposition that is, as you say, embedded in a much larger web of propositions (and perhaps non-linguistic forms of representation).
Here are my ideas for the “ism” propositions associated with “Platonism” and “reductionism”:
Platonism: “The abstract world ontologically precedes the concrete world.”
Reductionism: “Higher levels of complexity, in a given domain, reduce to descriptions at lower levels of complexity.”