ISBN : 9780198801887
Avner Baz presents a critique of much of the work within mainstream analytic philosophy in the past five decades or so, and in particular of the recent debates within analytic philosophy concerning philosophical method. In the first part of The Crisis of Method Baz argues that what has come to be known as the philosophical 'method of cases' rests on substantive assumptions about language acquisition and use. In the second part of the book Baz challenges those assumptions, both philosophically and empirically, and presents and motivates a broadly pragmatist conception of language on which the method of cases as commonly practiced by both 'armchair' and 'experimental' philosophers is fundamentally misguided-more fundamentally misguided than even its staunchest critics have hitherto recognized.
Introduction: Armchair Philosophy, Experimental Philosophy, and the Minimal Assumption
1 Methodological Confusion in Armchair and Experimental Philosophy
2 Internal Difficulties in Defending the Method of Cases, and the Claim of Continuity
3 The Method of Cases and the Representationalist Conception of Language
4 Contemporary 'Contextualism' and the Twilight of Representationalism
5 The Alternative Conception of Language
6 Acquiring 'Knowledge'-An Alternative Model
7 Conclusion: On Going (and Getting) Nowhere with our Words
Appendix: Phenomenology and the Limitations of the Wittgensteinian Grammatical Investigation