Giraffemaxxing and the Semantic Punt

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

This post expands on a handful of recent notes I posted. You can see these here and here. I got some interesting replies to these, so thank you everyone for engaging.

1.0 I mean what they mean

Philosophers should be challenged when pressed to explain what they mean by some term, and they respond with:

I mean what the term ordinarily means.

Some people may find this response satisfactory. I don’t. A natural response to this would be to ask “Alright, and what does the term ordinarily mean?” Yet they may decline to answer further, stating that they’ve already addressed the question.

This should be called “semantic punting.” Semantic punting occurs whenever a person offers an indirect account of what they mean by a given term, such that it remains a potentially open question what the term means. They effectively defer, or outsource their answer to a further, unresolved question.

Before proceeding, I want to emphasize that the relevant context here is a philosophical discussion, not an everyday discussion. It would be tedious, unhelpful, and in some cases a form of disingenuous filibustering for someone to start nagging you about what you mean by ordinary terms in most ordinary contexts. What I am definitely not proposing is an exchange like the following:

Alex: Excuse me, you’re blocking the entrance to the hospital. I need to get in. Could you please allow me through?

Sam: What do you mean by need to get in? Unless you can give me a clear account of what “need” means, I’m afraid I am just going to keep standing here playing Candy Crush.

Sam is being obnoxious in this exchange. I am not talking about situations like these. Instead, consider a context where the term a person is using is central to a philosophical account they have just articulated, and it is important in assessing the merits of that account to have a solid understanding of the term in question. Furthermore, suppose they presented this account at a lecture, and are expecting and even seeking challenges from the audience.

Now suppose this person is a pragmatist, and they explicitly state that they reject correspondence and deflationary conceptions of truth, and instead endorse “a pragmatic account of truth.” It would presumably be appropriate at this point to ask them about what they mean by “truth.” If, at this point, they said “I mean what people ordinarily mean,” I hope it is clear why, at least in this context, this wouldn’t be a very helpful response.

With that context in mind, I want to highlight some common strategies people employ when pressed on what they mean by a term, following their use of semantic punting.

2.0 Mischaracterize questions as overly demanding

Sometimes they’ll interpret this as a demand for a complete conceptual analysis, or as a request to provide the sufficient and necessary conditions for the concept. This is not necessarily what the person is asking. It’s convenient to interpret people this way so you can then scoff and act like the person is making an unreasonable or impossible demand, without any good evidence that they’ve done so. In other words, one strategy is to mischaracterize an interrogator’s request for a substantive response as an excessive demand for rigor, then leverage this to depict the interrogator as making unreasonable demands you don’t have to meet.

3.0 Leverage social norms to turn audiences against the interrogator

Another thing such non-answers do is allow the philosopher to claim that they gave you an answer, which can make resistance to further inquiry appear pushy or annoying. It plays on the social norms associated with asking and answering questions. If someone asks a question, and technically you’ve given an answer, you can then leverage this fact to insist you’ve discharged your responsibility, so further questioning is pushy or inappropriate. When people can evade giving a substantive answer by giving empty non-answers, audiences can turn against the interrogator if they keep pressing for a more substantive response.

This is rhetorically useful. If you can plausibly convince audiences that you’ve already given the annoying interrogator an answer, you can punt on answering in a way that doesn’t appear (at least to some people) as obviously evasive as it is. For comparison, imagine if you asked someone: “Did you bring the money for the tickets?” and they said “Maybe.” Would this satisfy you? No. And it would also be ridiculous for them to complain about any further questioning by insisting that they “already answered you.” But if a philosopher asks a question in a debate, and the other person gives a technical-sounding but hollow response, audiences can be duped into interpreting them as having addressed the question. Then if the interrogator gets frustrated or continues to press them, the problem is with the interrogator, not the person who answered the question. The person employing this strategy can also appeal to conversational norms to insist it’s now “their turn” to ask a question, and then change the subject or put the ball back in the interrogator’s court.

4.0 You already know

Another thing people might do is insist that you already know what it means so there’s no point in asking. This sometimes manifests outside of more professional settings as mockingly asking something like “You don’t know what [term] means?” with a tone of incredulity, as if when you ask them this question you’re tacitly implying you aren’t competent at the ordinary use of the term. This is not an implication of such a question. The question is intended to prompt the person being asked to tell you what they think (and the person asking could in principle disagree). It’s not a statement asked in a context where there is a pragmatic implication that the speaker is ignorant of some shared notion, e.g., “What time is it?” The whole “You don’t know what [term] means?!” move should be treated with abject contempt. It is one of the more insufferable rhetorical moves people employ in debates.

In ordinary language, we often take the meaning of terms to be established. In contrast, philosophical discussions often turn to discussions of what our terms mean, with a recognition that different people will have different accounts of the terms they’re using. As such, asking someone what they mean is an entirely appropriate thing to do in many contexts. The goal is to figure out that person’s account, position, or characterization of contested terms or concepts. It is entirely appropriate to ask them what they mean. Simply put, in these contexts, people are not asking “What does [term] mean?” in an ordinary register, which pragmatically implies ignorance of conventional usage. Instead, they are asking “What do you mean by this term?” This is a different question, in a different context. Misinterpreting the “what do you mean” question as a “what does the term mean” question is a lazy way to evade the burden of explaining yourself. People who conflate the two are either incompetent (at least to that extent) or being strategically obtuse.

5.0 You’re a liar!

Alternatively, people may accuse you of lying or pretending to not know what a term means. This is a cheap and objectionable way to shift the focus of the conversation from their inability to convey what they mean by a term to a personal accusation against you. Many people will take the bait on this (myself included) and allow the conversation to shift into a conversation about whether they’re lying or not.

6.0 Ordinary and philosophical discourse is not the same

In any case, a substantive answer is rarely forthcoming. Ordinary language is flexible and the meanings of terms vary across contexts. It’s not very helpful to tell someone that you mean what people ordinarily mean. More importantly, it’s usually not plausible that philosophers are using terms in their ordinary sense.

Philosophers often speak as though they still have intuitions about philosophical topics they’ve thought and spoken about for years. They don’t. They might lean on the claim that they’re simply remembering their previous intuitions, but there is at least some reason to be skeptical of this. Research in political psychology shows that when people change their minds about political issues, this is often accompanied by memory distortion where they come to sincerely believe they held their new views all along. People will insist:

“I always thought gay marriage was acceptable!”

…When they definitely didn’t. This kind of memory distortion is more common when you’re a partisan that wants to remain aligned with a particular ideology or community, or when your identity is personally invested in a given view.

To the extent that philosophers closely identify with their specific philosophical views and wish to affiliate with particular communities, it is reasonable to hypothesize a strong likelihood that they, too, would be vulnerable to similar forms of memory distortion that impair their capacity to accurately recall what their pretheoretical intuitions were. Indeed, insofar as philosophers become convinced that people have pretheoretical intuitions, it is easy to see how they’d tend to interpret their pretheoretical ways of thinking through their current theoretically informed lens, and impose a theoretical commitment on their pretheoretical ways of thinking even if this isn’t accurate.

Once they start using those terms in more abstract, theoretical contexts, they often fix the meanings of those terms in comparatively rigid ways that carry philosophical presuppositions and other theoretical commitments which they have not substantiated as features of the ordinary use of the term.

Another problem is whether they take the meaning of ordinary terms to be empirical or not. If they don’t, that’s going to be a problem for anyone whose philosophical positions reject non-empirical accounts of meaning. If it is empirical, why not do the empirical work to figure out what people think?

Now suppose a philosopher says empirical work is unnecessary, because it’s obvious what people think. This will rarely make sense in the contexts in which philosophers are talking about alleged “ordinary meaning” because precisely what is in dispute is what the ordinary terms mean. Take metaethics. Are ordinary moral claims propositional or not? Do they contain implicit indexicals or not? Neither of these questions is obvious on introspection, and nobody is obligated to agree with anyone that it is unless they present compelling arguments for why it is. And if it is so obvious, then they should be able to answer the initial question about what a term ordinarily means without hedging by engaging in semantic punting.

If you ask someone what they mean by some term in a philosophical context, and they respond that they mean what ordinary people mean, there are situations where you should not accept this as a satisfactory answer. Specifically, you should question them when there is reasonable doubt about whether the way the term is used in ordinary discourse can be used in the specific ways that philosopher is using the term in the theoretical contexts in which they’re using it.

7.0 An example

I’ve seen philosophers and nonprofessionals alike make these sorts of claims. Here’s an example from Huemer:

c) I am not introducing a special usage of “seems”. I am, by stipulation, using “seems” in the ordinary English sense (whatever that is, even if I am mistaken about the nature of seemings).

Well, what is the ordinary English sense, and how does Huemer know he’s using it in that sense? And is Huemer assuming the term has one ordinary sense? If there are multiple, then which one is he using? If there’s only one, how does he know that?

Even if we grant that it is difficult to articulate what a concept means verbally, but we are still competent users of the term and so our knowledge of their use is implicit, this still isn’t going to help Huemer very much. This is because our competence only applies to the appropriate domain of discourse. A competent English speaker is competent at using the ordinary English term in ordinary language contexts. Competence in these contexts doesn’t automatically transfer to other contexts. And yet Huemer employs the term in philosophical contexts that are decidedly not instances of ordinary discourse; they are highly theoretical and occur outside the context of the everyday circumstances in which people ordinarily employ the term “seems.” If one’s understanding of the term is rooted in one’s competence with it in ordinary contexts, then transplanting the term to some other context and using it there may not make any sense. The result is that one might be using the term in ways that, if one is genuinely committed to using it to mean what it does in the ordinary sense, result in positions that are inconsistent or incoherent, while if one isn’t using it in the ordinary sense, one would have to revise their initial claim that they’re stipulating in advance that they’re using it in that way.

The latter suggestion raises a question I don’t know the answer to: is it legitimate for Huemer to stipulate that he’s using the term in its ordinary sense? It is one thing, in a theoretical context, to stipulate that all instances of a given term are intended to share the same specific meaning. But if meaning is determined in part by context and use, and you go around using a term in various ways outside that context and usage, it is not so clear that you can just stipulate what you mean.

In other words, suppose that the ordinary language term “seems” has a specific meaning, X. And suppose that it has this meaning in virtue of the conversational roles it plays in specific situations. These contexts partially determine what “seems” means, namely, that it means X, precisely because it is used to mean X in these contexts. Now suppose someone comes along and says that they are stipulating that when they use the term “seems” they mean whatever it is people mean in ordinary contexts. Naturally, in these contexts, it means X, because that’s how people use the term. But then suppose that the person who stipulated that they meant whatever ordinary people meant goes and uses the term in ways that are very different from how it is used in ordinary contexts. Well, if that’s the case, then they are not, in fact, using the term in the way it is ordinarily used.

Let me give an example. Suppose I say that by “giraffe” I mean whatever ordinary people mean when they use the term. And suppose ordinary people use the term to refer to this animal in ordinary discourse:

Photo by Jo Woods on Unsplash

However, I opt to use the term outside ordinary discourse and instead use the term “giraffe” in a theoretical context. I start saying things like this:

“It is more giraffe to help people than hurt them.”

“The fundamental goal of ethics is to maximize the amount of giraffe that you do.”

…and so on. Well, I stipulated that I mean what ordinary people mean. So apparently I mean:

“It is more tall ruminant artiodactyl mammal of the Giraffidae family to help people than hurt them.”

“The fundamental goal of ethics is to maximize the amount of tall ruminant artiodactyl mammal of the Giraffidae family that you do.”

These sentences aren’t even grammatical. It is not likely anyone who made the original remarks would, on reflection, maintain that they’re committed to the latter set of claims. But this is the sort of risk you expose yourself to if you punt on the meaning of the terms, and insist you mean whatever ordinary people mean, when you apparently don’t know what they mean (and when it is even possible they don’t mean anything in particular).

Ordinary language terms don’t typically have fixed meanings that can be employed in the rigid, consistent, theoretical contexts Huemer and others employ these terms in the first place. I think Huemer and others are already operating on misguided preconceptions about the relation between ordinary language and philosophical discourse, and that these preconceptions undermine much of their philosophical work for the simple reason that if you build your philosophical views on unstable foundations, it compromises the integrity of everything that follows.

I very much doubt that ordinary talk of “seemings” could be readily regimented in a way that would vindicate how Huemer uses the term in philosophy. But I don’t know, because I don’t know what exactly ordinary people mean by the term. That’s an empirical question. Perhaps if the answer is an important one, philosophers should spend more time engaged in comparative linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and other fields that would enable them to get a better handle on ordinary thought and language.