Questioning the Method of Cases Fundamentally—Reply to Deutsch

Abstract

My ambition, when I wrote the texts to which Max Deutsch is responding in ‘Avner Baz on the “Point” of a Question’, was to engage mainstream analytic philosophers on their own turf and, as much as possible, in their own terms. I was trying to issue a genuine invitation for a serious conversation on the nature and underlying presuppositions of much of the work done within mainstream analytic philosophy. I had good reason to worry, given historical evidence, that the tendency would be to dismiss the invitation as already familiar and known to be misguided; and I made every effort to disarm that tendency. At the time, making the effort seemed to me better—both for my own philosophical progress and in terms of my contribution to present day philosophy—than continuing to converse with those whose philosophical orientation (which for present purposes may be described as broadly Wittgensteinian) was similar to mine, as if mainstream analytic philosophy was either too foreign to engage with fruitfully, or too obviously wrongheaded to be worth engaging with. I found myself unwilling to acquiesce in the mutual shunning of these two philosophical perspectives. (I should note that in no way do I regard myself as the only broadly-Wittgensteinian philosopher who has tried to engage seriously with mainstream analytic philosophy.) Up until now, all of the published responses to my work—by which I will henceforth mean only the work to which Deutsch has responded—have come from people who more or less share my philosophical orientation. Deutsch’s is the first published response from a representative of the philosophical perspective that is under critique in my work. In this respect, I found his response gratifying. Judging from his response, however, I have failed miserably in communicating myself to those whose perspective he represents. His paper misrepresents my thoughts beyond recognition, at every turn and on every