Naturalism and Quietism.

Thesis
Philosophy is no longer relevant to people outside of the discipline because it no longer addresses problems of our current culture. Rather than continuing to try to address classical philosophical problems, philosophy must shift its view to a more quietist perspective. 1. In the modern era philosophy had a pivotal position in working to increase secularization. However, with the increased acceptance of these ideas, these debates become less relevant. This has caused philosophers to change the topics that they discuss.(147-148) Several groups of philosophers have begun to approach philosophy as an extended armchair research program. They attempt to analyze various basic units of reality specifically Experience and Language. (148) Another group of philosophers, who tend towards holistic understanding, are skeptical of these types of research programs. This group is referred to as quietists, and they see philosophy as attempting to resolve important cultural issues. (149) The former groups, who sees philosophy as a research program, are known as naturalists, and they believe that the traditional problems of philosophy are problems that are important and still need to be addressed.(149) Another way to make this distinction is to see the former group (naturalists) as object naturalists, who believe that all there is, is the world studied by science, and to see the latter group (quietists) as subject naturalists, who believe that humans are natural creatures, and if the claims and ambitions of philosophy conflict with this view, then philosophy needs to give way. (151) Subject naturalists focus specifically on individuals and how they relate to their culture and environment. Object naturalists on the other hand focus on isolated elements of reality(154) This distinction is helpful in illuminating the root of many contemporary philosophical debates. For example, McDowells debate with Williams about whether or not there is a gap between what we know and how the world is, can be seen as a debate between subject and object naturalism. (155-156) Another place where these different orientations lead to different understandings is in the contemporary debate between inferential and representational semantics. (157) Brandom, arguing for inferentialist semantics, claims that language is not the process whereby I somehow get the representations in my mind into your mind, but rather that language keeps track of our interlocutors commitments to perform certain actions in certain conditions. Fodor argues that this inevitably leads to the claim that no two people ever mean the same thing by what they say. (157-158)

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10. Quietists want philosophers to stop discussing great big things like Experience or Language and hopefully doing so will eventually result in the evacuation of core areas of philosophy. (159)