Philosophical Discourse As Continuous Not Discrete

—-

Just a rough idea

The idea here is to look at instences where philosophers have tried to make a discrete break between cases and when this does and doesn’t work. The idea arose from thinking about some of the views of Quine and Carnap, in particular Quine’s denial of the (discrete) analytic/synthetic distinction and Carnap’s linguistic frameworks (formulated by Carnap as discrete but a more accurate picture might be of a continous flow between and overlapping of frameworks). It seems that there is a general philosophical move one can make by highlighting where a false discrete distinction has been made and replacing the ditinction with a continuum. It would be interesting to look at the conditions under which this sort of move was and was not feasible.

Some discussion with Jason lead to another idea along these lines: things don’t need to be stricty continuous in order for us to have to treat them as such in an linguistic analysis, they just have to be complex enough to make any attempt to deal with things on a case by case basis infeasible.

—-

Chris Wilcox