Knowing Who We Are and What We Mean

Abstract

Can philosophy's a priori methods deliver knowledge about how we make sense of the world? This challenge is historical, though it has its contemporary counterparts in the growing number of philosophers now practising ‘experimental philosophy’. An early iteration of this debate came about when Cavell was challenged by his colleagues to defend the methods of ordinary language philosophy. In recent articles, Hansen and Sandis have been explicit in their attempts to reconnect with Cavell and his interlocutors. Both think Cavell might have an answer for his critics but disagree over what that answer is. I argue that Cavell does indeed have an answer, but neither Sandis nor Hansen fully capture it. While Hansen suggests that Cavell's best defence of his methods is to focus his project on how we should make sense (not how we, in fact, do), I suggest it is the potential for conceptual divergence that is crucial to recognising why philosophy survives the empiricist critique. It is through the work of philosophy that we establish who ‘we’ are and how we make sense. I finish by showing how this conception of philosophy can explain a weakness in Williamson's argument from disagreement against the epistemological conception of analyticity.