Rationalizing Self-Interpretation

Abstract

A characteristic form of philosophical inquiry seeks to answer a ‘what is it?’ question. When philosophers ask such questions, they are looking for an informative analysis of the nature of the topic in question: what does it take for something to be knowledge? or a morally right action? or an instance of free will? or a member of a biological species? or the individual Barack Obama? or the logical function of negation? Different philosophical theories propose specific analyses of the nature of familiar but imperfectly understood topics. Alternatively, a theory will seek to show that, contrary to initial appearances, there is no single topic that we’ve been talking about with the relevant terms: contextualists about knowledge, for instance, argue that we pick out different epistemic statuses with the term ‘knowledge’ on different occasions of use, while incompatibilists about free will argue that our notion of freedom involves incoherent metaphysical commitments. In this chapter, we ask how philosophers do and should adjudicate debates about the correct answer to these ‘what is x?’ questions.