Re: Philosophy general debate

Yes, it's an interesting question as to whether "trees are plants" is a conceptual truth or an empirical one. I think that probably as a matter of historical fact people started calling things with a certain set of properties (or most of them) in common "trees" and called other things with a more general set of properties (or most of them) "plants." Maybe people discovered that everything they called "tree" was a "plant," or maybe some philosopher in his tower saw that the former entailed the later. Whichever, we now know that all trees are plants.

For the time being I don't care too much about whether this is a conceptual or an empirical truth. Perhaps this is a somewhat artificial distinction: our concepts are informed empirically to some degree, but I haven't thought very much about this. It is true that trees are plants (whether we know so conceptually or empirically). You can of course be sceptical about this, but only in the way that any sceptic might think that things are not as they seem to be. This is of course a problem, but it is a different problem. By calling it "semantic scepticism" you seem to be trying to get at something other than this general scepticism; perhaps you could clarify?

On 23 Aug 2006 20:02:59 +0100, djf500@york.ac.uk <djf500@york.ac.uk> wrote:

Hi,

I'm not sure what i've said about question-begging has been addressed.
Perhaps it is too controversial to call implicit question-begging by that
title. (I understand a form of implicit question begging to be where one
tries to counter a proposition - however false - by simply making a claim
that requires the denial of the presuppositions of that propositions. Those
presuppositions need removing via a separate argument.)

To get rid of what i'm saying someone has to argue either that an argument
following a form that I have called (following Wright[2000], amongst others
- try McKinsey[?1997]*) 'implicit question-begging' can suceed in being
cogent - that your opposition would be compelled by reason to accept it...

OR work out why someone might hold that 'not all trees are plants' and
argue (with due care and attention to question-begging issues) that those
reasons are spurious somehow. If they have no reasons, then as much as you
might convince the rest of the world, you won't convince the
tree-semantics-sceptic. You don't need to convince me because i've already
convinced myself and agree with you.

*I find AGs notion of empirical evidence quite astounding that we have
empirical evidence for the proposition that trees are plants - surely its a
conceptual claim? Perhaps he is trying to say that we have evidence that we
have evidence that people operate under acceptence of this conceptual claim
- he's not wrong. He and I do, and I suppose most do. However, all this
shows is that *we* hold a claim that is contra to the
tree-semantics-sceptic. This doesn't apply 'reasonable force' to the
sceptic to relinquish his (ludicrous) proposition - and that is surely our
aim.

Cheers,
Daniel

P.S. I get the impression (as yet not secure) that much of what is at stake
here has been found in Wittgenstein's PI and RFM by Kripke in 'Wittgenstein
on Rules and Private Language' (1982), and has been discussed since then by
McDowell, Petit, Wright and loads more.