Venturing Beyond Analytic Philosophy's "Best" Arguments to the Implied Inadequacies of Its Metaphilosophical Intuitions

• Published in: The Southern journal of philosophy 2013-03, Vol.51 (1), p.97-111
• Main Author: Margolis, Joseph
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Gutting, Gary; Knowledge; Literary criticism; Philosophy; Validity
• ISSN: 0038-4283; 2041-6962
• DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12002

Gary Gutting argues, in his recent book What Philosophers Know, that analytic philosophy provides a sizable collection of exemplary arguments that effectively yield a “disciplinary body of philosophical knowledge”—“metaphilosophy,” he names it—that is, specimens that define in a notably perspicuous way what we should understand as philosophical knowledge itself. He concedes weaknesses in the best‐known specimens, and he admits that, generally, even the best specimens do not provide answers to the usual grand questions. I admire his treatment of the matter but argue that the metaphilosophical issues are, normally, of a much grander gauge than that of his sort of specimen; that they require a much more open, informal sort of inquiry and exchange than that of the distinctive rigor of the classic specimens themselves; that analytic philosophy, not uncharacteristically, tends to ignore the metaphilosophical issue or takes the validity of its method of argument for granted; and that the issue itself invites an appraisal of competing second‐order conceptions of how philosophical argument proves fruitful. I proceed by way of the examination of cases drawn from Quine and Kripke.