Every now and then I find myself perusing Owen Anderson's blog. I happened to do so today and encountered the following post. Anderson claims that to Know with a capital 'K' is different from knowing with a lowercase 'k.' He claims that the former refers to having certainty and the latter is more probabilistic.
As I hope is clear by now, I think this represents a really shady approach of doing philosophy that is ubiquitous in the Gangadeanian approach.
In effect, Anderson acts as if he has something like the dictionary of the world or the dictionary according to God--i.e., that he has special access to the true definition of words. Of course, no such lexicon actually exists. The key issue is this---why should anyone trust that Anderson has got his definitions right? Maybe he just thinks he's right about what these words (and many others) mean, but he may be mistaken. So why should we trust him? Especially since lots of people would disagree about what we mean by the verb to 'know.' Moreover, a lot of people would disagree with Anderson about the idea that there are two sense of 'know' (i.e., the upper case denoting epistemic certainty and lower case denoting something comparatively weaker).
Now I'm not against making claims about what the meaning of a word in natural language is, I just think that one needs to tread lightly and freely admit that it's a lot of guess work. We should also appeal to empirical methods when available that give us some evidence about what competent language users seem to mean when they use certain words in ordinary conversations. And I don't think we can be absolutely certain about the meaning of a word in a given language--even though we can have good reasons to form beliefs about the matter. The meaning of words is conventional. It is developed by communities of people that in some way, over time, identify a sound or series of sounds and symbols with things (in the broadest sense to include concrete and abstract entities and everything in between). But it's a communal effort and it's also dynamic. It isn't as if one person sat down and dictated a natural language for everyone else. Moreover, words change in meaning over time. You might be thinking, well can't we just turn to a dictionary? You could, but if your desire is to build a philosophical argument to prove something on the basis of definitions that you derive from a dictionary, then your theory is going to be limited---you will have to say for instance, "know's" according to this lexicon at this time means X. More importantly though, you haven't actually settled the matter about whether the word as defined in the dictionary is correct. Dictionary's aren't infallible either since they are composed by a select group of persons who are trying to figure out what a given word means. So it turns out that trying to figure out what a word like 'knows' means, is a really tricky matter. (The reader may be starting to ask, what makes something the "correct" definition in the first place? Is there even such a thing? These, I think, are important questions).
But these facts don't seem to be appreciated by Anderson and Gangadean. Both think that you can just sort of think about a word and come to have infallible access to its meaning. They simply ignore the possibility that they may be mistaken and certainly don't provide anything like an deductive argument for why they've got the right definition of their key terms. So you just sort of have to take them at their word. The idea is that we have a priori access to the meaning of words. This is highly controversial view and I think it's quite wrong.
Interestingly they do this for a number of other words. For instance the same goes for words like, 'God', 'free will', 'eternal' 'being' 'reason' etc. They just say things like, "reason is the laws of thought.' 'God is a spirit, infinite, eternal unchanging in his being...' In fact, the very next post on Anderson's blog distinguishes between what he thinks is the definition of 'reason' vs. 'reasoning.' But same old trick. He just proclaims his definition of reason and distinguishes it from his definition of reasoning.
Likewise, 'free will' just means the ability to do what you want to do (rather than the ability to do otherwise). Again this approach is in effect assumes some infallible awareness of the meaning of a word but why should we grant that to Gangadean and Anderson?
What is worse, they build all sorts of arguments (that are supposed to provide certainty of their conclusions) on the backs of these presumed definitions. So their views are contentious from the very start, built on shaky foundations.
This is just bad philosophy for someone after absolute certainty and also for those that purport to be "rational presuppositionalists". It's nothing more than semantic chauvinism and certainly not an instance of critically examining one's most basic beliefs for meaning. After all, any argument where they have as premises, definitions of words, presupposes answers to the various questions about how we could begin to know/verify/grasp the true meaning of a word and what it is that makes for a true definition (and even if there is such a thing). So they should address these presuppositions on pain of consistency.
