Philosophical Method and the Introduction to Our Themes

If you pay attention to a variety of different kinds of discussion, you will likely note that the same terms are often used in slightly, and sometimes even in radically, different ways. This often won’t be troubling to participants who are already involved in the discussion, but it can be a source of confusion and error to people who don’t yet understand these terms. It can also be a source of misunderstanding and grief to people who think they already understand the terms because they are familiar with their use in some other context.

In order to distinguish between cases of real, substantive disagreement concerning important matters, on the one hand, and misunderstandings and disputes that occur due to habits of linguistic usage, on the other, philosophers will often begin with an attempt to achieve clarity and consensus concerning the terms used in asking and answering important questions. This turns out to be more difficult in practice than we might imagine it will be.

While we generally have several options concerning how to ‘pin down’ the precise meaning of a term, each of these will be likely to ‘fly away’ upon closer scrutiny. In some cases, each of the available meanings will have some features that render them very useful for some contexts, but that leave out something that is important to their use in other contexts. In all cases, each of the available meanings will be articulated through the use of other terms. We generally try to do this by using other terms that are more commonly known and easier to grasp, but the same general issues can present themselves with respect to these terms as well.

(As one example of this general problem concerning the precise meaning of terms, think about the term ‘game’. Assuming that you are familiar with the term, try to specify its meaning in such a way that all things we commonly call games will qualify and only things we commonly call games will qualify. If you think you can do that, post your definition of the term ‘game’ below in the ‘Reply’ box, and we will see if others agree that it passes the test. If you think that was easy, now try to distinguish between the activities properly referred to as ‘sports’ and other activities that resemble sports in some ways but really aren’t.)

If we were to reject each of the various articulations of the meaning of the term on the basis of these difficulties, it is not clear where we could go from there. What terms do we have that are clearly understood by all and about the use of which there can never be any misunderstanding? Whether or not there are any such terms, it seems that we would never get back to addressing the real issues we were concerned to address in the first place, if we had to make sure our use of terms was absolutely clear to all before we could proceed to ask and attempt to answer our difficult questions.

What we start with, then, are (i) a variety of common usages, (ii) a presupposition that these usages wouldn’t be so common if they didn’t capture some aspect of the thing in question well (at least for certain purposes), and (iii) an openness to the possibility that none of these common usages completely captures all aspects of the thing in question that might be relevant for some purposes.

This is a fairly common starting point for the kinds of discussion that tend to get labeled as ‘philosophical’. Whether we think these discussions can or ought to lead eventually to the kind of clarity and consensus that was lacking when we started, or we think they serve rather to make us more flexible and able to deal with its lack, this is a good place to start in learning about philosophical method. We will start to get some practice in applying this method by looking at some common usages of the first term that appears in the title of this course (i.e., ‘Persons’), discussing their sources and the contexts in which they are used, and thinking about their implications for how we think about the other terms (i.e., ‘Moral Values’, and ‘The Good Life’).