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Linguistic Legislation and Psycholinguistic Experiments: Redeveloping Waismann’s Approach

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Friedrich Waismann

Part of the book series: History of Analytic Philosophy ((History of Analytic Philosophy))

Abstract

Fischer holds that Waismann developed a distinctive metaphilosophy, which combines a dialogical method of linguistic self-explication with appreciation of the philosophical relevance of unconscious and automatic cognition. Waismann’s philosophical approach is first developed theoretically and is then provided with new empirical foundations, through a case study on the “problem of perception”. Fischer shows how psycholinguistic experiments can help dissolve philosophical puzzles based on analogies forged by polysemy, and unravel underlying paradoxes and recalcitrant intuitions. The chapter forges fresh links between Wittgensteinian ideas, as developed by Waismann, and experimental philosophy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For exceptions, see Baker (2004a) and Fischer (1997), respectively.

  2. 2.

    Waismann’s notes on discussions with Wittgenstein and materials directly derived from them were published as Waismann (1967) and Wittgenstein and Waismann (2003, VW).

  3. 3.

    ‘Textbook examples’, since the relevant entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (‘Mental Causation’, ‘Free Will’, ‘Problem of Induction’, ‘Descriptions’) all conceptualize at least key versions or components of these problems in a manner consistent with the above characterization of reconciliation problems. https://plato.stanford.edu/. Last accessed 31/10/2018.

  4. 4.

    See Fischer (2011, 2018a) for discussion of how adoption of such ‘problem-dissolution’ as guiding aim can turn philosophy into a ‘therapeutic’ effort (cf. Baker 2004b).

  5. 5.

    Such metacognitive insight—so the key thought of some cognitive therapies (Nelson 2005)—also helps thinkers distance themselves from disquieting conclusions of automatic inferences they cannot control. Metacognitive insight into how fallacious automatic inferences drive philosophical problem-formation can thus enable philosophers to give up pursuit of ill-motivated questions and stop worrying about them—the behavioral and emotional components of ‘problem dissolution’ (cf. Fischer 2011, 2018a).

  6. 6.

    https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/see_1. Last accessed 22/11/2018.

  7. 7.

    http://www.oed.com/. Last accessed 22/11/2018.

  8. 8.

    Following up this claim involves analogous explication of further verbs used in alternative formulations of the underlying arguments and diagnostic analysis of further versions of these arguments.

  9. 9.

    In priming experiments, participants are presented with a ‘prime’ word or short text and then a ‘probe’ word or letter string, and have to, e.g., read out the word or decide whether the string forms a word. That the prime activates the conceptual structure probed is inferred from shorter response times (Lucas 2000).

  10. 10.

    Those findings also support and develop the related, more recent suggestion that some ‘philosophical puzzles … emerge because of quirky features of the relevant lay concepts, of which philosophers are unaware’ (Machery 2017, 221).

  11. 11.

    E.g., philosophers committed to the case intuition ‘But there is something that Macbeth sees’ may rationalize the problematic inference in arguments from hallucination with this variant of the ‘Phenomenal Principle’ (Robinson 2001): ‘Whenever it looks to a subject like there is an F, there is an F of which the subject is aware’ (cf. Dokic and Martin 2012, 534).

  12. 12.

    For helpful comments on previous drafts, I thank Dejan Makovec, Severin Schroeder, and the audience at the Waismann conference at the University of Vienna, September 2016. For first introducing me to Waismann’s work, I am grateful to Gordon Baker, who supervised my DPhil work in the 1990s and co-taught a summer course on philosophical method with me in 2001.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

    Eugen Fischer

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  1. Eugen Fischer
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Correspondence to Eugen Fischer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Dejan Makovec

  2. Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Stewart Shapiro

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Fischer, E. (2019). Linguistic Legislation and Psycholinguistic Experiments: Redeveloping Waismann’s Approach. In: Makovec, D., Shapiro, S. (eds) Friedrich Waismann. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25008-9_10

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