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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co host of the channel along with Sarah Tyson. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Amy Thomason, Daniel P. Stone, professor of intellectual and moral Philosophy at Dartmouth College. Her new book, Rethinking Metaphysics, is just out from Oxford University Press. The word metaphysics conjures up thoughts of very hard questions about reality and deep, perhaps unresolvable metaphysical mysteries. But is that the right way to think about the subject matter of metaphysics? According to Thomason, very clearly, no. In her new book, she argues that traditional views of metaphysics make the mistake of assuming that our concepts all function the same way. For example, example, that the job of metaphysics is to provide truth makers for statements about necessity and possibility, about morality, about numbers, and so on, when each of these different forms of discourse can have very different aims. Thomasson instead offers a deflationary view of metaphysics in which the job of metaphysicians is conceptual engineering, figuring out how our concepts and terms work in a discourse, what their various functions are, and what conceptual schemes we should adopt. Particularly if our current ones are leading us into metaphysical pseudo problems. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Amy Thomason, welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
- [02:55]
C
Hello. Thanks for having me.
- [02:57]
B
I'm super excited to be talking about your book Rethinking Metaphysics. No subtitle needed. So, yeah, I mean, this is a project that you've been working on for a number of years. So let's, let's first start with a little bit of background about you. I mean, how did you decide to become a philosopher and what led you to the writing of the book, which is, as you mentioned in the beginning of the book is actually third of a trilogy.
- [03:28]
C
Yeah. So I started as a philosopher just by taking a class. In my very first semester of college, I saw a class advertised as in Metaphysics and Epistemology. And I didn't know what those words meant, but the questions all looked like ones I'd asked myself my whole life. So I signed up and it was a small seminar and we read original classic works and I was just hooked and stayed on straight through that as far as getting to this topic. So I started out in my career really working on a lot of first order issues in metaphysics. My dissertation and first book were on a theory of fiction, fictional characters and works of literature, literature and what they are and how they're related to authors, readers, copies of the text. And then I sort of backed up from there to talk about other social and cultural objects. Did a lot of work in that area, ordinary objects like tables and chairs. But the more I worked on first order metaphysics and got pressed with questions about my views, the more I started to take interesting questions in sort of metametaphysics about what we're doing here, how we can do it, what are the criteria of success. So that led to. I started out some of that at work a little bit in my book Ordinary Objects. But I really started to lay out the metametaphysical approach more systematically in my 2015 book, Ontology Made Easy. So there I asked questions about like existence questions. What exists? Do numbers exist, do tables exist, do persons exist? Play a huge role in metaphysics. How can we answer these questions? How should we go about answering these questions in Ontology Made Easy? I propose a very carnapian deflationary answer to that that argued that we can answer these questions quite often by sort of trivial inferences from something everyone accepts. So that you can move from the barn is red to the barn has the property of redness to their properties. I conclude that There are properties. And in any case, what I wanted to push was the idea that nothing more mysterious is required to answer these questions than just conceptual and empirical work. This is metaphysics. You might think of as concerned with not just existence questions, but also modal questions. I aimed to also deflate modal questions in my 2020 book, Norms of Necessity, and show how those can be answered using nothing more obscure than conceptual and empirical work. Then if those two kinds of questions are suitably deflated, that leaves us with the question, what else can we do in metaphysics? Is there anything left to do? Or is it all just trivial, obvious, uninteresting, unimportant, as a lot of my critics thought I was saying?
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B
Right.
- [06:35]
C
So this book is to answer the sort of positive question. And for that reason, in a way, in my view, that's sort of the most fun and interesting part of what we can still be doing in metaphysics. And so in this book, I argue for reconceiving metaphysics as a kind of form of conceptual engineering, sort of writ large in a very broad understanding of that term. Okay.
- [07:02]
B
So why do you think that we didn't think it was trivial?
- [07:07]
C
Well, I think a lot of the, should I say, obsession with existence questions that has really played a core role in metaphysics since the 50s is kind of the aftermath of the influence of Quine. So, you know, of course, people thought that metaphysics was dead with the positivists, and then they thought that, I think, mistakenly, but never mind about that, that Quine had sort of revived and given room for metaphysics by thinking of it as of a piece with the sciences, as engaged in a total project of theory building and then figuring out what things you have to quantify over in your best theories. And I think that's really what put a lot of metaphysicians sort of back in the game and engaged in these drawn out serious arguments about whether we should really accept that there are tables and chairs or persons or numbers or properties or whatever. And then there are a whole lot of different criteria used among them sort of appeals to theoretic virtues, but. But other criteria too. And so I think that's when I came into sort of professional philosophy in the 90s. That was really prominent in metaphysical discussion was all of these debates about what exists or what really exists, and thinking of them as questions to be answered by serious metaphysical debate, not by just sort of empirical and conceptual means.
- [08:47]
B
Right, okay, so what is. We should probably get right on the table. What is conceptual engineering in your understanding of it?
- [09:01]
C
Yeah, Good. So it's a term that traces back to. Well, it's actually Richard Krieth's writing about Carnap. But Carnap's clearly involved in this project. The way it's usually thought of, and I'll come in a second to how I think of it more broadly is as a matter of figuring out what terms or concepts people go either way on that we should use and how we should use them, or designing new ones. Carnap was very interested with trying to develop concepts for use in the sciences and precisionify them and clarify their rules of use, terms like confirmation, probability and so on. I want to step back and understand it even more broadly than that. So that's going to be included for me in conceptual engineering. But if you think about an analogy to regular old, like civil or mechanical engineering, those engineers don't just try to design some new widget. Some of them do. But some of them are involved in assessing buildings after an earthquake and figuring out if they're still structurally sound and if we can go into them, or retrofitting buildings before an earthquake or hurricane and figuring out how they can now withstand better the kinds of weather that they'll be susceptible to. So if you think of or also some engineers involved in reverse engineering and trying to look at an ancient artifact or a piece of malware and figure out what it does, how it works, I want to bring all those projects into the fold of how I understand conceptual engineering to get a much broader view of it where we can think of it as involving both a kind of reverse engineering that involves trying to figure out what functions our concepts or terms serve and how they serve them, how they work, what rules they follow, what they do for us, and reconstructive and reparative work when they're not working as they should anymore, or not working in a new context and constructive work that says, what should we do with them now? So it's all these kinds of both sort of backward looking, understanding and assessment questions about our linguistic and conceptual scheme and forward looking questions about what we should do with it that I want to understand as part of conceptual engineering.
- [11:32]
B
Okay.
- [11:33]
C
Did that answer your question?
- [11:35]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's so many different directions to go in. So let me just. So. So backing off from, you know, thinking of metaphysical, you know, particularly ontological questions or somehow, you know, these deep, I don't know what metaphor you want to use, deep, thick, heavy duty, hard sorts of questions, you know, backing off from that, deflating, as you mentioned, to conceptual engineering, is there A sense in which there's, there is no. What do you say about, I mean, we are, we are limited beings, you know, conceptually, linguistically, and it would, it would seem that, that, you know, an old time metaphysician might say, well, there's more in the world than we can think of in our philosophy. Right. And so that would seem to imply that, yeah, we can do all this conceptual engineering with our conceptual frameworks and, or linguistic frameworks, but that doesn't exhaust the, you know, reality. Let's just, I'll just put it that way. So it seems like there's still work. There might be, I don't know, work that, that goes beyond what we can conceive of. Right. And what do you do with that?
- [13:07]
C
Yeah. Okay, so let me respond to that in a couple of steps. It's a really interesting question. I mean, I think the first thing I would do is to just sort of give a reminder of the relevance that this approach obviously can have to a lot of traditional metaphysical questions about properties, numbers, people, tables, whatever that are asked using extant terms of our language. So we still have problems about how to understand how those work, which I think we need to step back and answer before we do the metaphysical question of do these things exist now? Can there be things that we don't yet have terms or concepts for? Yes, sure. I mean, I think this can happen in at least two ways. We can make new empirical discoveries and then we'll need to introduce terms or concepts to refer to those things. A simple case, right, would just be like discovering a platypus. A more complicated case would be discovering a black hole or something like that. I mean, those kinds of cases, I think mainly happen in and are relevant to the work in the sciences. Then there's cases where there's, you know, things already going on all around us, but we didn't have a conceptual scheme to describe it. And that I think of as more distinctively philosophical work. Right. And that includes some social terms like, you know, sexual harassment was going on for a long time before the term was introduced in the 70s. Similarly, for things like what are some of the other recent ones like, you know, mansplaining and fig leafs. Right. That's Jenny Saul's term. Right. So some of the work in philosophy can involve sort of noticing an important phenomenon that nobody had quite picked out from the background before and thought of as important enough to give it a separate word, a separate concept to think about how we should understand it. And definitely that kind of work, I think can go on philosophically, not only in philosophy, but for sure in philosophy.
- [15:22]
B
Okay, so let me. So there's, you know, there's still a lot of very, you know, traditional, you know, not deflationary metaphysicians out there. You know, they're worried about, you know, you know, theories of time, you know, the A theory and the B theory, and they're worried about three dimensionalism and four dimensionalism and all kinds of things. So you, you discuss a number of different, you know, you know, more general projects than those. You know, the idea that, you know, metaphysics is about trying to find the truth makers of our propositions or.
- [16:04]
C
Right.
- [16:05]
B
Or, you know, discern, you know, some sort of structural realism, structure of reality, or the most, the more recent thing, the idea of, of somehow grounding, you know, the whole idea of grounding.
- [16:21]
C
Absolutely.
- [16:22]
B
As a. As a kind of an approach that. That metaphysics is about, I guess you call that. So what is. You talk about. They all have this metaphysical malady, what you call. I think it's the idea that there's just one sort of way in which our terms or concepts function. Could you say a bit about.
- [16:55]
C
What.
- [16:55]
B
These three or any other general projects or approaches to metaphysics? What the. Where they're getting things wrong, where they're going wrong.
- [17:08]
C
Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, so what I try to do in the first few chapters of the book is to give a kind of diagnosis of where many of these approaches go wrong. And the sort of unifying element of it, as you said, is I think that they typically go wrong by assuming that I'd say most successively all language, but more precisely, all the indicatives of interest in metaphysics, that these all work in the same way and all serve the same kinds of functions. The truth maker approach is a great example in this regard. The truth maker approach asks us to identify the truth makers for any indicative that we accept as true. And if you don't, if you don't sort of provide the truth makers for our moral statements or our modal statements or statements about our mental states. Right. But you still treat some of them as true, then you get accused of cheating. Right. This was originally a kind of accusation that David Armstrong brought against Ryle's treatment of dispositions, saying this is the ultimate sin in metaphysics, accepting truths without positing truth makers. And Ted Seider appeals to the idea of cheating a lot more recently. I always thought Armstrong just totally misunderstood Ryle, because Ryle's whole point is that this kind of discourse is doing something other than trying to describe features of the world that could make it true. It's his view of dispositions, licensing inferences, right? So in general, I think, like the truth maker approach assumes that if we say there's a possibility of rain tomorrow, or we have an obligation to care for our children.
- [19:02]
B
Or.
- [19:04]
C
The statue might not survive while the clay, when the clay is squashed, right? That in each case there must be like something in the world that makes it true. And this is what kind of feeds the rush to metaphysics, right? It's no accident that some metaphysicians who especially love this approach because they're like, okay, so what are the things? What are the modal properties or the moral properties or the possible worlds, right, that are out there to make this true. But I think that rests on a kind of unexamined presupposition that this discourse works in just the same way as discourse that would say things like, there are three glasses on the table or there's a coyote in my backyard, right? That really is trying to make contact with, represent and track features, sort of observable features of the world. So that's where I think that we get kind of misled into metaphysics. The assumption can go in different ways, right? I mean, the grounding talk also, at least as it's usually done, that's a huge area of discourse, as, you know, but, you know, insists that we find what are things are grounded in if we refer to something, okay, what are the features of the physical world that it's grounded in? Then you get problems with like, how could the modal properties be grounded in non modal properties if the statue and the clay have all the same, same non modal properties, but different modal properties? The quinine approach that asks us to consider explanatory power as a criterion for whether we should admit anything to our ontology also sort of assumes a slightly different version of functional monism, that the purpose of any of these sort of noun terms should be to be something we can to refer to things we can quantify over to help serve our explanations. And I want to say, wait, our moral terms might do very different things for us than trying deposit entities to explain what we observe or other things that we have evidence for. So it takes different forms. But overall, I treat the metaphysical malady as the sort of totally tacit assumption that all this discourse serves the same function and works in the same way. And I think that leads to faulty criteria for whether we should say that there are moral properties or modal properties or possible worlds or whatever.
- [21:34]
B
Okay, but you know, I'm wondering if dividing it up that way, I mean, there's certainly, there are certainly things we want to say, say with modal talk or moral talk, which we want to say are true or false. Yeah, right, absolutely. So it's. So it doesn't seem like. So I'm wondering how you're cutting up the territory. It's not that, like modal statements work one way, moral ones another, you know, and, and so forth, but that some, some are aiming at truth, some are aiming at, you know, social control, some are, you know, whatever, and those can appear in, in any of those different discourses. So I'm a little bit, I just want to clarify for myself, like, is, are the, are the different projects divided by, you know, sort of the topic of, you know, moral or modal or mathematical or whatever or, or are they just having different functions within each of those different domains?
- [22:48]
C
So let's see. In the first half of the book, I just want to press the idea that before you think you've got a relevant criterion for eliminating numbers or modal properties or whatever, first do the work of understanding the functions. And I don't really say anything there positively about the functions. Okay. That work comes, as, you know, in the second half of the book. And I think there are different functions served by moral discourse, modal discourse, mathematical. I mean, there's two big categories that I use to try to debunk some of the metaphysical problems. I think that the moral and modal discourse originates with kind of interpersonal functions, and the mathematical talk and talk of properties and other abstract objects originates with a function of serving as what the linguists call grammatical metaphors that enable us to generalize in certain ways. So those are some big categories. But just to come back to what you were saying at the beginning there, I do want to allow that discourse of any of these kinds can be true. And I try to talk in norms of necessity. I talk about, like, what are the rules for being entitled to say that a modal claim is true given its function? I don't give a theory of truth in this book, but obviously what we're not going to want if we're rejecting a truth maker approach to metaphysics is a view where you have a kind of correspondence theory that requires there to be for any truth features of the world that explain what makes it true and to which it corresponds.
- [24:28]
B
Right, Right. No, you'll, you'll, you kind of need a disquotational or deflationary theory of some sort, right?
- [24:36]
C
You can, yeah, absolutely. You can Start from there. And then I'm working on a paper on this now. So for disquotational or deflationary theory, you can easily become entitled to say these things are true. And then I also want to sort of examine the different roles that talk about truth plays in enabling us to make generalizations. Generalizations like we should always seek the truth, or truth is the goal of inquiry or whatever. So there's a few functions I would identify beyond those the deflationist does. But I'm on the same page as the deflationists in saying, look, we don't need to have truth as some magical glowing property that we're discovering the nature of. And that's there when we've got correspondence.
- [25:16]
B
Okay.
- [25:17]
C
And I do think there's different standards for holding like a moral claim true than holding a claim in everyday descriptive discourse true or holding a mathematical claim true.
- [25:28]
B
Okay, good. So you just mentioned, like standards. And one of the things, the themes that you raised earlier, actually the idea of standards of assessment of, I mean, there is this problem, you know, that you kind of raised, I think, at the very beginning of the book is just the idea that, you know, the sciences seem to progress and metaphysically still, still seem to be arguing over the same things and there doesn't seem to be any real answers. And that's one of the motivations, I think, for saying maybe we're doing, maybe we're going about it the wrong way.
- [26:03]
C
Yeah, we need to rethink what we're doing and how we can do it.
- [26:06]
B
Exactly.
- [26:08]
C
So.
- [26:10]
B
What, what is, I mean, to put it the way you, you, you said, you know earlier, what is success in metaphysics? Then on, on your deflationary view, on your conceptual engineering view, what would, what would, what would, what would success look like?
- [26:30]
C
That's an interesting question. There's probably different ways to succeed. One of the ways that I try to succeed and others will assess it in the book is to try to get rid of some pseudo problems so we're not wasting our time on them anymore. Eradicate some old confusions. That's one kind of success. Another is kind of forward looking. Right. And the view that I develop in the second half of the book, as you know, is to think of the work we often have done and can do in metaphysics as conceptual engineering. And so we'll make progress. I mean, I don't think success is final in metaphysics understood in these terms, but I think we can make progress by, for example, coming up with a better way of thinking about and understanding and defining freedom maybe than we had before. Right. If you're going through, I'm just teaching the compatibilist literature and there's clear progress in how we can think about freedom in a way that's consistent with the deterministic scientific world, but also enables us to make the kinds of distinctions we want to make in the courts and in daily life. Right. As you move from somebody like Hume up through Frankfurt, Wolf, Dennett, et cetera. So coming up with a better conception of freedom would be one example. Or coming up with a way of trying to reconcile. You mentioned time before, like our ordinary talk about time with what we get from physics. That would be cool. That would be progress. Right. Or I mean, even things like really applied issues like how should we understand privacy or intelligence now that we've got all kinds of technology that we didn't have when these concepts developed in human history? And we need a way to talk about intelligence in days of artificial intelligence. And we need a way to talk about privacy when we've got data that we're worried about and not just someone peeking in our windows. So concepts that serve us better for whether our legal purposes or trying to reconcile bits of our conceptual scheme, our traditional human scheme, with what we get more and more as we learn more about the brain, about physics, et cetera, and disentangling old problems, those are all at least some areas where I think we can see progress, at least, if not a kind of final success.
- [28:57]
B
What about, like, if you have rival conceptual schemes with rival criteria of better.
- [29:07]
C
Yeah, yeah. Then I mean, all I can do for that, and I think, you know, we need a good example, but to work through, my main claim is let's at least get those criteria on the table so that we can see what's at stake here and what's really going on. Right. And then we can more honestly decide it. You know, like you might need probably some of the debates about what is a woman are on these grounds, Right. There's many different purposes we have for this term, from medical to social to psychological. Right. And if we can at least get them on the table and see which kinds of ways of defining woman, if you want to even do that, serve which functions, that's at least some kind of progress. Similarly, like with another great example, from my point of view, is marriage. Right. So during debates about gay marriage, a lot of folks just wanted to say, marriage just is like, I've discovered the essence of marriage as one man and one woman. Right. And other people said, no, no, that's not the essence of marriage. You know, it's totally possible for two men or two women to be married. And. And rather than just putting it in these terms where it looks like you just get at a stalemate with each one claiming to have discovered their metaphysical truth, instead you can be like, well, hang on, what do we want a concept of marriage for anyway? And what are the reasons we can give for broadening or keeping narrow the criteria as proposed? And hopefully then at least we can be more transparent about what we're doing and maybe make some kind of progress.
- [30:42]
B
Okay. Okay, good. So that you mentioned the debate over the concept of woman or marriage. I was also thinking that. So, again, one of the issues that you bring up again at the beginning, and then it kind of goes through the whole book, is the idea that, you know, metaphysics, you know, conceived of traditionally as some sort of understanding of reality, you know, ontology, what. What there is puts itself in a, you know, as a rival with the sciences that are trying to also find out what's. What's real. And it's. And it's kind of, you know, another one of the motivations to say we don't. We shouldn't be competing with the sciences. We should be doing, you know, if we understand metaphysics in this different way, then we are not competing with the sciences. And that's a good thing, I take it. But one of the things that I thought was, well, the sciences do a lot of conceptual engineering themselves.
- [32:05]
C
Yeah.
- [32:05]
B
You know, they. They a lot of it. I mean, we, you know, often as, I mean, as a philosopher, science, I mean, I see this a lot. And so there's introducing concepts, you know, with theories, and there's revisions and there's, you know, all kinds. Everything that you talk about when you talk about conceptual engineering, both, you know, retrospective and prospective occurs in the sciences. And so it does seem like even if you retreat to, oh, we're just doing conceptual engineering, we're not trying to discern, you know, limb reality, as Quine would say. It seems like we're still trying to be rivals with the sciences. Unless. Unless there is some bit of the world that is purely, like, philosophical. Like, we have a vocabulary and nobody else has our vocabulary. And in that little realm, we can do our conceptual engineering. And we're not rival with anybody because it's just the philosophical discourse that seems like not a great idea.
- [33:26]
C
Yeah.
- [33:27]
B
So. So can you say a bit more about why you don't think this. Why this gets metaphysics out of being rivalrous with science?
- [33:40]
C
Yeah. Or.
- [33:41]
B
Or Any, you know, any, you know, sociology, I mean, which might be a science or, you know, religion or whatever discourse. There are people who are like, that's their discourse.
- [33:54]
C
Yeah, yeah. Good. So what I really want to do is not to provide, like, here's the proprietary project for the philosophers, and now we have our territory and, and it's safe. And I think, as you say, if you, if we try to do that, say, like, these are our concepts, then there's the real risk of it just becoming esoteric and disconnected and irrelevant to anyone's life. Anyway, what I really want to do is to call attention to two different kinds of project that we can be engaged in, actually, let's say three kinds of projects. So one is aiming to make empirical discoveries while using our extant conceptual scheme. That would be something more like probably CUNY and normal science. Right. Then there's a separate project of trying to figure out what conceptual scheme we should use. There's a third project, descriptive project of figuring out how our current conceptual scheme and linguistic scheme works. Part of what I want to insist is that the first of these, of making these kinds of really empirical discoveries, that's not really how we should think of the work of metaphysics. For the second, the what concept should we adopt? Absolutely. I think that, you know, the sciences are often involved in this, but then the kind of this, these are, broadly speaking, answering should questions like what concept of species should we adopt in biology or in evolutionary biology as opposed to some other branch of biology. Right. And so even there, I want to insist there's a real difference between, like, here's a species concept that we're going to use, and it's reasonably clear now how many species are in this portion of swamp, and we're going to try to figure out if there's endangered species before we engage in construction. Right. Versus the kind of step back theoretical, what concept of species should we use here? What are the options? What's going to be most relevant to the aims of, say, evolutionary biology and so on. For those latter questions, obviously, if they're questions about scientific concepts, scientists ought to be involved. They're the ones who know what we need. What are the aims of evolutionary biology or whatever? What are we going to need to do this work? But I think typically right there, we do see a lot of nice work where philosophers and the scientists work hand in hand. The philosophers of biology, they're on this. Right. And a lot of philosophers of physics are onto the relevant questions about what kinds of concepts we should use in physical science. So I Don't mean to suggest it's totally proprietary. Some of the concepts where engineering are much broader. Kind of are general human concepts, right, like person and object and right and wrong and so on. Right. These aren't exactly concepts of the sciences. And then probably the sciences won't be involved as directly that there may still be an impact. And I also don't mean to say that philosophers are the only ones who can do this, but you might hope that given the kind of training we have both on normative issues and on understanding conceptual schemes and how they fit together and inference and implication that we have some skills to bring to the table. Then there's that third project of like figuring out how our linguistic or conceptual scheme actually works. And we can talk about that if you want, but.
- [37:29]
B
Yeah, well, no, please go ahead. I was. That was the third one. Yeah, yeah.
- [37:34]
C
I just wanted to sort of, you know, confess that for that. I mean, that's something that I am trying to do. I think philosophers have tried to do it for a long time from the pragmatists through ordinary language philosophers, for example. I do think that potentially in the long run this should be done hand in hand with or just building on the results from psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, etc. And I try to draw a lot on research and linguistics in doing this here. So far I think those fields haven't always answered all the questions we have as philosophers, but where they've got relevant information. Yeah, absolutely, that's relevant. And I'm happy to think that one day that might be kind of taken over by linguistics, Cogsci, psychology, depending on which angle you take there for that descriptive work.
- [38:23]
B
Do you mean by taking, do you mean like eventually there won't be sort of a separate philosophy, there'll just be certain philosophical training that gets applied to different discourses.
- [38:38]
C
I guess the way I was thinking about it is the descriptive questions about how this say, area of discourse functions and what rules it follows and how it's introduced. That's going to be descriptive work for linguistics. They haven't done it all yet. I think the normative questions, what concepts or terms should we use? And how should we use a term like person freedom or whatever. Those are going to be more long lived questions for the philosophically minded, which of course doesn't have to be philosophers. But these sort of, these ought questions I think aren't going to be straightforwardly answerable by the empirical work of linguistics or any other science.
- [39:21]
B
Okay, well, since you've mentioned linguistics, one of the, one of the things you Mentioned you bring up. You have a whole chapter, in fact, at least, on systemic.
- [39:36]
C
Functional linguistics, which.
- [39:38]
B
Which is new to me. So. So what. What is systemic functionally? Is that a. Is that a area? I mean, is that a subspecialty within Ling.
- [39:50]
C
It is indeed. Yeah.
- [39:51]
B
Okay. Yeah, go ahead. No, I was going to say what. What is it? And what. What's its role in your. In your book? In your.
- [40:01]
C
Okay, great. Yeah. This was kind of a key discovery for me as I was planning out this book. I had planned a book on, you know, metaphysics as conceptual engineering. And I knew I. I've always been trying to take a kind of functional approach to conceptual engineering. And I kept running up against all these questions like, yeah, okay, how do you identify the functions of these relevant pieces of language? And I encountered a lot of skepticism and I thought, well, that's a question like, what are the functions of these bits of language that linguists must have worked on somewhere? So I started doing some research until I found an area in our library that had books that started to answer the questions that I had about the functions language serves in human life and how it serves them. So that's how I found systemic functional linguistics. So it's a branch of linguistics. The big founder of it was Michael Halliday, who was English but worked most of his career in Australia. There's a lot more people in that area in Australia and also in parts of Europe like the Netherlands and so on, than in the US which is part of why philosophers probably haven't heard of it. So it asks questions about. It's very influenced by work in anthropology, also influenced by some work like Husserl's systematic approach to language in the logical investigations. So that sort of was the systematic part, and the functional part comes from work in anthropology about the functions language serves in human life. The kind of breakthrough that Halliday had was to argue that any. Just about any clause uttered in a mature speaker's language will simultaneously serve three different types of function. Ideational, which us philosophers would put as expressing a propositional content that we can use for reasoning, communication, et cetera. Interpersonal, used for establishing social relationships of various sorts and expressing the speaker's attitudes, and textual, which shows how different parts of the text relate to each other. So this came from his thought that what language needs to do for humans is to enable communication. Yes, but it's also a social tool, and it's also something we need to sort of organize into these longer texts that enable us to have, you know, a scientific treatise for example, and he came up with this as a kind of hypothesis that would be the best explanation of the grammatical structure of language and the grammatical variability we have within a language. It's what his goals were, really, far from anything philosophical. He was interested because he thought that he was working with children who had either language delays or who were learning a second language Right. When they're in school or whatever. Right. And a disadvantage with respect to their peers. And his observation was that people who thought, oh, language is just to refer to things in the world to enable us to communicate, the approach they had to these children was, let's teach them more vocabulary. Right. And they just kept throwing vocabulary at them. But what he thought was, they don't understand all the deficits these children are facing. That is what they can't do by not having the same linguistic skills as their peers. So he was interested in it largely as a way of trying to identify what functions language has so we can see what we're missing if we haven't reached a certain kind of developmental level. So it's an approach to language that's been really influential in, like, education especially, and in anthropology, where people get concerned with those kinds of questions. But I think it's had far less uptake in philosophy. In fact, so far, I've only met one other philosopher who, before I started talking about it, said they knew about it. And that was someone who happened to have a master's degree in linguistics from a European institution.
- [44:12]
B
Okay. So I guess one thing that's striking me is the very human focus of this project, and that has two. Two interesting, I mean, sort of opposite issues. One is once you start looking, like, closely at the human, you know, our. Our concepts, then the question of what our.
- [44:50]
C
Who.
- [44:50]
B
Who that is becomes a real problem, like who, you know, says you, you.
- [44:59]
C
Know.
- [45:02]
B
And so, you know, this gets played out in different ways in different sciences, but in, you know, psychological research, it's, you know, individual differences research or cultural, you know, you've probably heard about, what is it, the weird, you know, populations, Western and, you know, industrialized people. We talk about. We. But of course, there's a lot of different. Different cultures and so forth. And so it seems like, on the one hand, if you go, if metaphysics is conceptual engineering, then it has to be really pretty local, at least. At least as local as some way of cutting up cultures, if not even more fine grain than that. And that seems not quite what, you know, metaphysic. I mean, if you might embrace that. Right, that. That metaphysic. Yeah. It's just a local way of, you know, developing a discourse. But that's not usually, you know, that's a much, much more restricted sort of way of thinking about it. On the other hand, there's just this idea that why, you know, metaphysics of course is, you know, again, this is traditional. The stuff that you're saying no to is that it's, it has nothing essential to do with humans at all. There would still be questions of metaphysics or there would still be metaphysical, you know, issues, reality, you know, even if like humans didn't ever exist and we never had any conceptual schemes whatsoever. So I'm just wondering. There seems to be like, you know, sort of two very opposite ways in which trying to translate or make, you know, reconfigure, rethink metaphysics as conceptual engineering is both too, requires you to go into a too fine grained direction or it's missing the boat in the sense that there seems to be that, you know, just focusing on humans is already kind of misses the target.
- [47:36]
C
Okay, yeah.
- [47:36]
B
Does that make sense? Those.
- [47:38]
C
Yeah, that's a, that's a really interesting challenge. So let me try to speak to that. Stepping back to is it a problem to focus on humans? The first thing I'd want to say to that is totally there are things that can exist and ways the world can be and was before humans, apart from human concepts and language, independently of us. But metaphysics isn't those things. Metaphysics is a, a practice of asking certain kinds of questions and trying to answer them. And as soon as we start asking questions, right, we can't do metaphysics just through like interpretive dance or something. We have to have questions to ask using language. And once we do that, then I think questions about how this language works, what functions it serves, what rules it follows, et cetera, become really relevant. And ignoring the relevance can lead people into a lot of pseudo problems. Now, does that mean it's all like super hyperlocal and too fine grained, as you were saying? I think some topics will be fine grained and local, but it's not obvious that all of them will be. So think about. Some of the perennial topics in metaphysics involve questions about what is possibility or causation or are there numbers or are there properties. These kinds of questions have been around, certainly the last ones since at least the Greek times in our tradition. And there are certain very general features of human languages that are at play in the development of these terms and how they work. And that's going to be broadly cross cultural and Cross linguistic. So, for example, as these linguists show, every language that they've studied and they've studied a lot involves what they call the capacity for grammatical metaphor. And that involves crossing grammatical categories and introducing terms of new grammatical categories. This would include things like moving from there are two cups on the table to the number of cups is two. Now we have a noun term instead of a determiner. Or from the barn is red as a predicate to there's a property of redness that the barn has. Right. Languages vary in terms of like how many of these they have, how dense they are, which ones are most common. But they all allow this kind of capacity for shift. Why? Well, they all allow this capacity for shift because that's what's going to enable us to introduce generalizations that we couldn't introduce otherwise and to even ask questions like what Property did the COVID 19 patients have in common? Or something like that. As the linguists show, this is. Having this capacity is essential to developing scientific theories and bureaucracies. So once we know that, that this feature of language, this is the language we use when we ask questions like are there numbers? Are there properties? Right. So they're already, it's already in play. We can figure out in general what terms like this do for us and how they work, whether it's a term in English or Greek or Mandarin or whatever. And then we can see why it's perfectly acceptable to say there are such things, why it's a mistake to think that they should be things that we're causally interacting with or able to observe, etc. So those kinds of sort of general historical, metaphysical questions, I think we can still get, get fairly general answers to. It's not going to be super local. Others, like some of the ones I was talking about before, like, you know, concepts of marriage or privacy or even art. Right. Those, I think will be much more locally sensitive to the local individual needs of a group of people's ways of life. And there we might well expect to get on the table different kinds of functions that we want them to serve in one culture and time versus another and to have to be responsive accordingly. But I don't think it makes everything just like totally parochial and local. Does that make sense?
- [52:00]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, that's good, that, that's helpful. So let me, you know, you've mentioned a couple times, you know, these sort of transformations, you know, pleonastic transformations of, you know, the house is red to. The house has the property of redness. And that's, you know, it's just a, you know, a conceptual linguistic, you know, shift from one, from way, one way of talking to another.
- [52:31]
C
Right.
- [52:31]
B
And there's nothing more to being a property than just, you know, being able to do that kind of, you know, translation. But how, how about some of the, you mentioned, you know, some things become, you know, pseudo problems. So what, what can you. So there's, there's, there's those sorts of transformations.
- [52:58]
C
Yeah.
- [52:58]
B
Which, which, which make ontological commitment, like not an issue anymore for properties, for example.
- [53:08]
C
Right, exactly.
- [53:09]
B
Or truth makers or whatever. But there's also like actual, like problems of, you know, debates, you know, I meant, you know, debates over the nature of time or debates over, I don't know, you know, I'm thinking of metaphysical debate, you know, three dimensional versus four dimensional views of objects and stuff. For. So are those, are those sorts of debates where it's, it's not just a matter of, oh, I can translate property talk, you know, I can translate this sort of linguistic form into, you know, sort of property talk. And that, that doesn't commit me to something, that's one thing. But then there's actual debates. Are they all pseudo problems or are there some of those that just have to be put into the key of conceptual engineering?
- [54:14]
C
Yeah, I think I would be tempted to go the latter route. I haven't worked on time discourse yet and I know that's really complicated, so I don't have something very helpful to say about that particular problem. But I do think that there are, you know, not all problems of metaphysics are pseudo problems. Some I think are easily answered.
- [54:33]
B
Right.
- [54:34]
C
Like existence questions about properties.
- [54:36]
B
Right.
- [54:36]
C
Some I think are pseudo problems or faulty criteria applied. Like we shouldn't accept abstract objects because we don't know how they would be grounded in the physical features of the world or how we could come to know them causally. But I think others, and I suspect that the time stuff is there, but as I said, I haven't put in the time on that yet. Is that there are problems of figuring out whether and if so, how our conceptual schemes can be reconciled, how we get the sort of conception of space time from physics and how does that relate to our conceptual scheme that we use when we sort of experience the flow of time. Right. Or when we speak about time in our daily lives. And these can be really hard conceptual problems. I think they're demystified if we think of them as conceptual rather than just in terms of discovering what time is. But I do think they can be, you know, a life's work for sure. And I think that work on these kinds of knitting together conceptual schemes and figuring out if they're consistent or not can be illuminating.
- [55:42]
B
Okay, good. Okay. So, I mean, I'm. We're kind of running. Running low on time, so I just want to kind of pull it all together. So this is the third of the trilogy, which we kind of started with. Is there another? So it's a trilogy. So that's it by definition. Is there. Are. Is there a next step to this that you feel you need to do to complete the trilogy plus one? Or. Or, you know. Yeah. Or is. Or is there, you know. Have you said all you want to say about this? Given the fact that you planned it as a trilogy or it's turned out as a trilogy, should it still be a trilogy? Or is there more?
- [56:42]
C
Yeah, I think this is going to be sort of a trilogy that stays as a trilogy. I hope these three sort of fit together nicely in a way that shows a total view. What I want to do from here is to go on to sort of further develop, defend, and apply the method I try to develop in rethinking metaphysics towards the end of how to analyze some philosophically interesting and problematic concepts. How can we use this to shed light on other old philosophical debates? So right now I'm working on a series of papers, and they might eventually coalesce into a book that does the kind of linguistics work and then talks about how we can do. I'm doing these kind of stepwise analyses of what functions are added at each stage in linguistic development, say, from.
- [57:32]
B
Could.
- [57:33]
C
To or might to is possible to possibility to possible worlds, for example. So I'm working on analyses of other bits of discourse using this approach. Modality, obviously, and I mentioned that one a bit in the book Moral Discourse. I've got a paper I'm working on truth, Truth talk. And in a way, as our discussion earlier sort of brought out, I kind of owe something to say about truth and how we can count these other forms of discourse as true without truth makers. Law. I've got a paper on the language of law that I'm working on, legal discourse, and I'd love one day to address different kinds of mentalistic discourse. I haven't really got there yet, and it's really hard and it's really complicated, but I'd love to be able to say something to that that would kind of develop some of the original insights behind. Ryle was trying to do a functionally alternative analysis of mental discourse. His book's really cool, but it Didn' really succeed. Right. But what can we say now with all this sort of work in linguistics about how different bits of mental discourse work? So something on truth, morality, modality, mind law, in a way that sort of applies this approach to venerable old philosophical problems. That's kind of where I'm going next.
- [58:48]
B
Okay, good. And I guess, you know, last sort of question is, how have more traditional metaphysicians responded to your deflating of their life work?
- [59:05]
C
Yeah, yeah, I don't get a lot of friends. I think a lot of the responses I have gotten have been much more just like, yeah, but here's why I like metaphysics. You know, there's been, I think, a lot of pushback about why we should care at all about language. So a lot of the metaphysicians I've talked to are just like, yeah, who cares about all this linguistic stuff? I don't care about language. I care about the world. Why should we care about language development also, which I spend some time talking about in the book? So I think a lot of my challenge to making evidence relevance will be to try to keep showing why this work on language matters and why it is something we should do before we leap into questions of metaphysics. But that's where I think I've gotten the most kind of general pushback so far.
- [60:03]
B
Good. Okay, well, we are just about out of time, so I usually, I like to end with a question about what you're working on next. You sort of given us a bit of a hint on that, but so it's just is, are you doing. You're doing more of this, you know, kind of rolling it out further, or are there other projects you're working on? I mean, what's on your desk at the moment?
- [60:29]
C
Yeah, I guess I jumped the gun a little bit on that question because. Yeah, what I'm working on now is this kind of series of papers of applying something like this approach to other core topics. And, you know, they're huge topics, so that's going to keep me busy for a while. Moral discourse and truth are sort of the central ones that are on my desk that I'm in the middle of trying to to revise these papers and show how what I'm doing fits in with the history of work there and how this linguistics approach can provide something new to the discourse that can help unravel some old problems.
- [61:03]
B
Okay, sounds good. I'm looking forward to seeing some of this stuff.
- [61:09]
C
Thank you.
- [61:13]
B
So, yeah, yeah, I guess I don't really have any further questions for you. So I think we should just wrap it up. And thank you for taking the time to talk about your latest book, rethinking Metaphysics. And I wish you luck with the, with the things that you're doing now to follow up and maybe tie some loose ends or create new ones or something like that.
- [61:45]
C
Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you for the, for the great discussion and really interesting questions, and thanks for having me on the podcast.
- [61:51]
B
Okay, great. Thank you. Bye. Bye.
- [61:53]
C
Bye.
- [61:55]
B
You've been listening to an interview with Amy Thomason, Daniel P. Stone professor of intellectual and moral philosophy at Dartmouth College. We've been talking about her new book, Rethinking Metaphysics, which is just out from Oxford University Press. I'm Carrie Figdor. This is New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I hope you enjoyed the podcast, and thank you for listening.