So I’ve been reading A. D. Smith’s The
Problem of Perception recently. It has lots of nice features, so naturally
I’m going to blog about the bits that aren’t so good. I would try and write
something substantial but it’s late and I’m tired, so I’ll write something
snarky instead. From page 11:

There can be little doubt that the
Philosophy of Language, together with “Philosophical Logic” and more recently,
“Cognitive Science,” have come to overshadow all other areas of theoretical
philosophy within the analytical tradition, and that discussions in this area
are typically conducted in a manner that avoids any sustained confrontation
with the Problem of Perception.

Capitalisation and scare quotes in
original.

You
know, from inside the Philosophy of Language camp, it certainly doesn’t feel
like philosophy of language has taken over analytic philosophy. I’m certain
this isn’t what is meant, but I’m sure that if you did a quick search through
Jobs for Philosophers you’d find many more jobs for ethicists, historians,
metaphysicians, epistemologists and philosophers of mind than you would for
philosophers of language. What was presumably meant was that philosophy of
language was taking over all those other disciplines, especially metaphysics, epistemology
and philosophy of mind. Maybe that’s true, maybe not. Well, I’m too young to
remember what things were like before the linguistic turn, so my first-hand
judgements are presumably not veridical. But it certainly doesn’t feel like one
can get very far at a metaphysics or epistemology conference dropping clever witticisms about
the semantic import of focus, or about the relationship between polarity licensing
and implicature.

I
know a few people have, shall we say, issues with the term ‘philosophical
logic’, so perhaps the scare quotes are justified there. But ‘cognitive
science’ can’t be unselfconsciously used? Is it still a neologism that side of
the pond? We have entire departments of cognitive science. I’m even a member
(in a way) of one of them.