Primitive Concepts and the Liar Gambit

When I ask non-naturalist moral realists what they mean by terms like "stance-independent moral fact," or "irreducibly normative," or "normative reason," they often respond that these concepts are primitive.

This seems to me to conversationally imply that they cannot tell me what these terms mean. However, a primitive concept is ostensibly one which cannot be explained by appealing to other concepts. We might draw a distinction, then, between atomic concepts, concepts which are not composed of, or reducible to, some set of other concepts, and compound concepts, or concepts which are composed of two or more concepts (such as "red hat") and could in principle be decomposed into their constituent concepts. Call the decomposition of a compound concept into its atomic conceptual components “conceptual reduction.”

It may be that when I ask people to explain primitive concepts that they interpret me to be asking them to provide a conceptual reduction of the primitive concept. This cannot be done, and this is why they say that the concept is primitive.

But this isn’t what I am intending to ask. Rather, I face a different challenge: when someone employs a term or phrase (e.g. “irreducibly normative”) we might assume they must be referring to some intelligible concept, that is, a concept the meaning of which is not self-contradictory, circular, or vacuous. Yet people can and sometimes do use terms that are self-contradictory, circular, or vacuous. When presented with a term or phrase, the meaning of which I don’t grasp, I cannot engage with or substantively entertain the truth, relevance, or any other feature of the concept unless I grasp the concept myself. In my experience, people employing philosophical terms often strike me as saying things that appear unintelligible. I am *not* willing to grant the assumption that they must be saying something intelligible. And, in any case, even if they are, the only way for me to be reasonably sure is to grasp the concept myself.

To do this, my interlocutor must communicate the meaning of the concept to me. This poses a dilemma for ostensibly primitive concepts: is their meaning incommunicable, or communicable? If it’s incommunicable, how am I supposed to engage with it? How did they acquire the concept? If it’s communicable, then hopefully they can communicate the concepts to me. Yet in my experience, moral realists have consistently failed to communicate what they mean by the various concepts they employ.

Unfortunately, when this occurs, I am often accused of being disingenuous, pretending, arguing for attention, lying, and so on. This is unhelpful. They are not mind readers. There is no way for me to refute such charges. I can insist that, if I were lying, it would be very strange for me to continue to lie to my friends and family outside public discussions, and to be so persistent and insistent on such a peculiar lie as this. It’s a strange accusation, that I suspect is born of impatience or frustration with an interlocutor who refuses to appease others by what would, in fact, constitute pretending: I will not claim to understand someone else’s philosophical notions unless I actually think I understand them. My obstinacy isn’t impolite or dishonest or rude: it is a forced move. If I don’t know what someone means by X, the only honest thing for me to do is to continue to assert that I don’t know what they mean by X. It does philosophy no favors for us to dupe ourselves into imagining that we understand one another.

I suspect norms of politeness have had a ubiquitous and deleterious impact on philosophical discourse: there are, I suspect, countless cases in which people misunderstand one another, in ways both subtle and grand, throughout the field, but people suppress their sense of doubt or discomfort. Think of all the times someone has said something in a conversation, only to end with a tentative, “...does that make sense?” only to have the person they are talking to, or in some cases, an audience at a talk, nod along or say “yes…” when those people are actually thinking anything from “I think I kind of understand…” to “I have the faintest clue what they are talking about, but it’d be rude to crush their noble efforts to clarify by telling them they still aren’t making any sense…” I’ve experienced and done this myself.

I will strive not to in the future, but when you are in an audience, you may pay a reputational cost if you are the one person that breaks with Asch conformity and responds with the impolitic, “Actually, no, despite you attempting to clarify for the third time, what you are saying still doesn’t make any sense. What’s more, I don't think it’s because of my ignorance. I think what you’re saying may, in fact, be complete nonsense.” You’re not likely to be invited to dinner parties, win awards, or have anyone reach out to you as a guest speaker if you have a reputation for impertinence, however honest it may be.

This points to a more general issue I suspect persists in philosophy: I suspect a lot of people don’t really understand one another, but it’s considered rude, annoying, pedantic, unproductive etc. to constantly work on clarification. People want to get to the good stuff: Is this premise correct? Is this argument sound? So they shy away from ensuring that they understand the premises in the same way.

As a result, vacuous, trivial, circular, or self-contradictory terms can proliferate within the field and entrench themselves, installing themselves in minds generation after generation. Such notions can be employed by esteemed thinkers, and published articles can involve extensive deployment of such concepts in superficially meaningful ways. The result is not just one illusion but a vast web of mutually reinforcing illusions, so wide and so entangled in one another, that it is difficult to see through them. And when eminent figures employ these terms and concepts, a skeptic may be dismissed as foolish: after all, they’re really expecting us to believe all these incredibly well-informed people are simply talking nonsense?

In the Forgotten Realms, a popular D&D campaign setting, elven high mages developed mythals. Mythals are intricate webs of enchantments that cover a wide area, such as a city. They may protect everyone and everything within the city by, e.g., detecting or preventing evil beings from entering, dampening the effects of magic or fire, and so on. My impression is that what we see in some academic circles is a kind of mythal: a wide-area, intricately woven set of terms and concepts that work like an enchantment, shrouding those within with the impression that their conversations are meaningful, because there so many other people discussing the topics with them who appear to understand them and to provide the kinds of responses that one might expect of a mutually intelligible exchange. These enchantments can serve to protect those within the mythal from outside interference. Those who don’t accept the legitimacy of the terms and concepts are barred from entry: the magic of the mythal repels them, plopping them outside the domain of the mythal dwellers, where they can safely pursue their research in peace and solitude.

Moving outside the metaphor, the result in the case of some philosophical disputes is that when someone comes along who, due to their philosophical disposition and views, challenges the intelligibility of the terms and concept in use, this skepticism is not met with an enthusiastic willingness to take up the challenge to persuade the critics. Instead, we are met with indifference, dismissiveness, hostility, impatience, and in some cases condescension and contempt.

I would like for this to change. Over the past few years, I have become increasingly confident that the notion of a “normative reason” is a philosophical invention that is, at best, vacuous. Maybe I am mistaken. But I’d at least like to have a discussion with those who believe the term is meaningful (and, for that matter, important and interesting) without the frequent accusation that I am lying or pretending not to understand what they mean.