Seminar with David Plunkett (Dartmouth College)

Adventures in Topic Continuity

The seminar will be a hybrid meeting. It will be held in room 28 on Grodzka 52, Kraków and Teams on May 11, 2023 (Thursday, 17:45 GMT+2). 

Abstract.

In recent years, philosophers working on “conceptual engineering” have discussed the idea of “topics” and “topic continuity”. Put roughly, the idea has been that appeal to “topics”, and facts about their continuity, can help explain when, how, and why “conceptual engineering” projects can succeed at changing the meanings of words or concepts while still allowing people to think and talk about the “same things” as they did before these changes in meaning. Herman Cappelen has given one of the key arguments on behalf of this broad idea, and, since then, a number of philosophers (including ourselves) have developed ideas about what topics and topic continuity consist in. Extant work on “topic continuity” has mostly focused on the significance of this idea for conceptual engineering projects. In this paper, we argue that taking the idea of topic continuity seriously can have striking implications for how we understand philosophical inquiry more broadly. We illustrate this idea by exploring four sorts of possibilities that some theories of topic continuity (including our own) make salient: a) the possibility of preserving meaning (at the level of thought or talk) without preserving topic, b) the possibility of understanding nihilism in ways tied to topic, rather than meaning, c) the possibility of preserving topic across a change from using language in a “descriptivist” way to an “expressivist” one (or vice versa), and d) the potential role of topics in orienting us in metaphysical inquiry, such as inquiry into the real definition or essence of things (e.g., mind, meaning, law, knowledge, etc.).

This research was funded by the Priority Research Area Heritage under the program Excellence Initiative – Research University at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow