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A Regress of Judges?
Jan. 30th, 2007 08:34 pmIn certain branches of philosophy, philosophers are tempted to explain why some things are right and others are wrong by appeal to what a "reasonable" or ideal judge would determine to be right. Two examples are (1) John Stuart Mill's invocation of "competent judges" in "Utilitarianism" and (2) Charles Travis's invocation of "reasonable judges" in The Uses of Sense. In Mill's case, competent judges are those who have experienced both the "higher" and the "lower" pleasures. Mill is convinced that such persons would always judge the higher pleasures to be more desirable than the lower pleasures. In The Uses of Sense, "reasonable judges" are used to fix the meanings of words and the truth or falsity of propositions: "for an item to have a semantic property P is for it to be so that a reasonable (informed) judge would take it to have P" (48). There are facts about what reasonable judges will say that underwrite the "semantic properties" utterances have. Travis puts the judges to other, similar, uses--keeping skepticism at bay by determining what doubts are "conceivable" and therefore relevant in given situations, for example.
Appeals of this sort seem to me to fall victim to a dilemma. Either they are circular, or they involve us in an infinite regress. If these judges are being used to tie the meanings of words (and the truth of propositions, the relevance of doubts, the superiority of some pleasures to others) to facts--to "ground" these judgments in fact--this appeal is circular, or at least doesn't serve to explain normativity. What we want to know is how we are able to make judgments about things like values or word meanings that don't correlate with what we are used to thinking of as objective facts. The trouble is that judges make judgments. So we are in no way explaining the weight of certain judgments by appealing to non-normative facts. There may be facts about the judgments these judges make--but that does not solve the problem, because the judgments themselves are embedded in those facts, unreduced.
What really bothers me about appealing to judges to fix the meanings of terms is that it seems like passing the buck. If in order to be sure of what our terms mean we must continually appeal to others' consensus on how they are inclined to use them, there is the threat that the appeal will never end. Of course, we can set limits; and in real life, we certainly don't think we need to poll every speaker of English before we use a word. But these are practical considerations, not philosophical ones. Philosophically, the "passing the buck" criticism boils down to two distinct problems. If what confers a certain meaning on our utterance is what a certain number of judges take our words to mean, the question as to (a) what the meaning of our utterance is is potentially unresolved, and the question as to (b) where the meaningfulness of our utterance comes from remains comepletely unresolved. 'A' might be problematic if it were always possible for more judges to arrive on the scene and alter the balance of the decision as to what we meant. And if these judges were different enough from us, the meanings they attribute to our words might seem wrong. This problem could be addressed by stipulating that these theoretical judges share a certain background with us. This, I suppose, is alright. (It should be said here, though, that I'm not sure at present how to judge or understand attempts to settle what the meaning of a term is philosophically.)
The real problem is (b). If we're trying to explain how semantic properties arise out of non-semantic ones, a theory that presupposes judges making judgments will not serve. It casts the transformation from non-semantic to semantic farther into the distance, but does not explain it.
Appeals of this sort seem to me to fall victim to a dilemma. Either they are circular, or they involve us in an infinite regress. If these judges are being used to tie the meanings of words (and the truth of propositions, the relevance of doubts, the superiority of some pleasures to others) to facts--to "ground" these judgments in fact--this appeal is circular, or at least doesn't serve to explain normativity. What we want to know is how we are able to make judgments about things like values or word meanings that don't correlate with what we are used to thinking of as objective facts. The trouble is that judges make judgments. So we are in no way explaining the weight of certain judgments by appealing to non-normative facts. There may be facts about the judgments these judges make--but that does not solve the problem, because the judgments themselves are embedded in those facts, unreduced.
What really bothers me about appealing to judges to fix the meanings of terms is that it seems like passing the buck. If in order to be sure of what our terms mean we must continually appeal to others' consensus on how they are inclined to use them, there is the threat that the appeal will never end. Of course, we can set limits; and in real life, we certainly don't think we need to poll every speaker of English before we use a word. But these are practical considerations, not philosophical ones. Philosophically, the "passing the buck" criticism boils down to two distinct problems. If what confers a certain meaning on our utterance is what a certain number of judges take our words to mean, the question as to (a) what the meaning of our utterance is is potentially unresolved, and the question as to (b) where the meaningfulness of our utterance comes from remains comepletely unresolved. 'A' might be problematic if it were always possible for more judges to arrive on the scene and alter the balance of the decision as to what we meant. And if these judges were different enough from us, the meanings they attribute to our words might seem wrong. This problem could be addressed by stipulating that these theoretical judges share a certain background with us. This, I suppose, is alright. (It should be said here, though, that I'm not sure at present how to judge or understand attempts to settle what the meaning of a term is philosophically.)
The real problem is (b). If we're trying to explain how semantic properties arise out of non-semantic ones, a theory that presupposes judges making judgments will not serve. It casts the transformation from non-semantic to semantic farther into the distance, but does not explain it.
