Response to Devitt and to Ichikawa, Maitra, and Weatherson

Our response is on line on PPR's website.

Comments

[Jichikawa]

It appears, in §1, as if you are signing up to both of these claims:

(1) A widespread method -- the method that Kripke embrasses in the relevant passages of NAN -- is bad.

(2) It may well be that Kripke's arguments against descriptivism in the relevant passages of NAN are just fine.

In support of (1), I find such passages as "In any case, what we have been really concerned with is the method that both Kripke and his opponents embrace: the use of intuitions about reference to identify or justify the right theory of reference." With respect to (2), you write things like "our goal has never been to challenge Kripke’s argument against descriptivism".

I find this combination of views a bit puzzling, largely because I would have thought that "the method that Kripke embraces" would be revealed by the arguments he gives. If for all you say the arguments might be wholly compelling, it's hard to see how the methods could be bad. Part of what Brian and Ishani and I (and Michael, I think) were up to was to suggest that "Kripke's method" and the methods of e.g. Boyd were more sophisticated than you were supposing. It looks to me like your embrace of (2) is sort of a way of accepting that point. Maybe we disagree about less of substance than I first thought.

The big question as I see it now is about (1), and what "the method" there is, if it's not a description of the way Kripke went about giving his arguments. Who is it who has inappropriately used the method in question, and where?

[Jichikawa]

(After posting that, I reminded myself that we sort of had this discussion last year: http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2011/02/in-two-recent-articles-ron-mallon-shaun-nichols-steve-stich-and-i-have-presented-evidence-for-cross-cultural-variation-in.html