This post by Jacob Levy on the difference between political theory (as practices in poli sci departments) and political philosophy (as practiced in political philosophy departments) has been getting a fair bit of attention in the blogworld, and rightly so. (See this post for some follow up and links to discussions.) If you haven’t already, go read it.

I don’t know enough about either side to comment on this, but there were a couple of side comments I felt were worth making. First, it’s been a common thread through some of these discussions to say that political philosophy, and ethics more generally, is subservient in philosophy departments to (to use Jacob’s examples) “philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and epistemology”. By all accounts, this isn’t what it feels like from inside the philosophy of language camp. There is a lot of focus within analytic philosophy on what look like fairly linguistic approaches to questions in philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics and even ethics, but that doesn’t mean there’s much support for philosophy of language as such. One would want to be rather good (or rather lucky) going on the philosophy job market with a dissertation on, say, the syntax/semantics interface. And publications in, say, Linguistics and Philosophy or the Journal of Semantics will not do as much for a tenure case as publications in equally selective publications that concentrate on philosophy.

I was half thinking of trying to mimic Jacob and try and write a post on the differences between the way philosophers of language approach semantic questions and the way linguists approach those questions. But after a little reflection and even less research, I’m inclined to think the differences are not particularly significant. As Jacob notes in the politics case, where one does one’s PhD will normally affect what one knows outside one’s core area. And you might suspect in the philosophy/linguistics divide, there would be some consequences of this. Since linguists will know more syntax and phonology, they be more sensitive to syntactic and phonological considerations, while philosophers will be more sensitive to metaphysical and epistemological consideration.

That kind of difference in which things one is most sensitive to occasionally crops up, but it isn’t as pronounced as it appears to be over in political philosophy/theory. For example, consider how one might react to Davidson’s old theory that Jack buttered the toast has as its logical form There is an event e, and e is a buttering and e is by Jack and e is of the toast. One might expect someone with a metaphysics background to worry about the commitment to events here. Surely whether or not the toast gets buttered doesn’t depend on ontological questions about events? And one might expect someone with a syntax background to worry about the rather dramatic deviation between the surface structure and the logical form. But my rather slender observation hasn’t supported the idea that philosophers are more drawn to the first objection and linguists to the second. So I’m not sure there are enough differences here to write home about.

UPDATE: I edited this slightly to make it clear that I’m not really a philosopher of language – so the second paragraph isn’t meant to be about me. I don’t, for instance, have papers in L&P or the Journal of Semantics or anything similar. That’s not because I don’t think philosophy of language (or formal semantics) is interesting, it’s just that I’ve never had particularly many interesting thoughts myself about it. This might seem like splitting hairs, but I think it’s important to distinguish in this context between work on the nature of content, or on representation more generally, and work specifically on language. And most of my work falls into the former category. Now the theory of content is an area that’s central to philosophy, at least in the sociological sense that one can easily prosper working within it. (To continue the example from the text, a PhD on the language of thought hypothesis, i.e. on the importance of syntactic considerations to the theory of mental representation, will open up a lot more doors in philosophy than one on the importance of syntactic considerations to the theory of linguistic representation.) And as far I as can tell, this focus on representation and content is hardly a new feature of philosophy, in the way that the (apparent) centrality of linguistic concerns is (apparently) new to philosophy in the 20th century. I’m rather ignorant of these things, but from what I’m told theories of representation were fairly central to Locke’s and Hume’s philosophy, for example.