Troubles with the Canberra Plan
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Troubles with the Canberra Plan Panu Raatikainen1 Received: 9 October 2018 / Accepted: 19 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract A popular approach in philosophy, the so-called Canberra Plan, is critically scrutinized. Two aspects of this research program, the formal and the informal program, are distinguished. It is argued that the formal program runs up against certain serious technical problems. It is also argued that the informal program involves an unclear leap at its core. Consequently, it is argued that the whole program is much more problematic than its advocates recognize. Keywords Canberra Plan · David Lewis · Conceptual analysis · Ramsey sentences
1 Introduction The general approach commonly called “the Canberra Plan” is a rather influential research program in philosophy. At its core is a very specific view of the method of philosophy and philosophical analysis. The program is inspired by the systematic thought of David Lewis, and it gives an important role to the formal technique of “Ramsey sentences,” also known as “the Ramsey–Carnap–Lewis method.” The program’s name derives from the fact that many of its central figures have had connections with the Philosophy Program of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.1 1 In fact, the label (“the Canberra Plan”) was first introduced by critics (namely, O’Leary-Hawthorne and Price), and its original tone was not exactly flattering: “Canberra’s detractors often charge that as a planned city, and a government town, it lacks the rich diversity of ‘real’ cities. Our thought was that in missing the functional diversity of ordinary linguistic usage, the Canberra Plan makes the same kind of mistake about language.” (O’Leary-Hawthorne and Price 1996, p. 291, n 23) The advocates of the program have, however, adopted the expression and now use it to name their approach. Accordingly, it is no longer necessarily a negatively loaded name (cf. Nolan 2010).
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Panu Raatikainen [email protected] https://www.tuni.fi/en/panu-raatikainen; https://philpeople.org/profiles/panu-raatikainen; https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=p4gs2R4AAAAJ&hl=fi Faculty of Social Sciences, Pinni B4147, Tampere University, 33014 Tampere, Finland
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Schematically, the program can be described as proceeding, in the case of any particular concept or family of concepts to be analyzed, in three steps.2 First, the theory essential for the concepts at hand must be identified. In the case of theoretical scientific concepts, one focuses on the scientific theory (“the canonical theory”) in the context in which these concepts are first introduced (“defined”). In the case of common sense or philosophical concepts, the “platitudes”3 concerning the concepts of interest are collected together; these are the relevant truths about the topic that most competent speakers (perhaps implicitly) believe. They constitute the “folk theory” of the area. The idea in either case is that the relevant theory “implicitly defines” the conc
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