A Practical Perspective on the Study of Words in First-Order Philosophy

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How much do words matter? Is it necessary to examine what the terms "knowledge" and "terrorism" really mean in a philosophical debate about knowledge or terrorism? In this inquiry, I discuss how this question arises in a number of contexts such as the location problem for certain metaphysical and epistemological projects, the idea that changes in meaning change the subject under discussion, when evaluative terms like "terrorism" are contested and hinder normative debates, and when a dispute might be merely verbal. Views on the role of words in first-order debates fall roughly into two camps. Some philosophers acknowledge the need to examine the actual meaning of terms in order to settle the subject matter of an inquiry, and they do so by either conducting conceptual analysis or using empirical methods. Meanwhile, others claim that it is largely unnecessary to analyse the meaning of terms when we are interested in the nature of things. I argue that for all of the cases considered, an updated version of Carnap's method of explication is the most promising method for settling the subject matter of inquiry. On this approach, we revise pre-theoretic terms guided by our aims. For a clearer view on what the subject matter of a debate is, I draw on David Lewis's notion of the subject matter of a statement. My methodological approach has considerable advantages over traditional as well as more recent forms of conceptual analysis. Moreover, it promotes considering important terminological matters that are underrated by opponents of conceptual analysis. The upshot is that the ordinary meaning of words used in first-order inquiry does not matter much. The more important question is how to adjust and refine the meaning of these words in the light of our aims. How we decide this question has epistemic, ethical and pragmatic implications.