The Philosophical Lexicon (updated)
A commenter the other day used “chisholm” as a verb, reminding me that it has been a while since The Philosophical Lexicon has made the rounds (or so it seems to me).
Here’s the definition of “chisholm”:
chisholm, v. To make repeated small alterations in a definition or example. “He started with definition (d.8) and kept chisholming away at it until he ended up with (d.8””””).”
(click to enlarge)
The Philosophical Lexicon was created and edited by the late Daniel Dennett. In the preface to its 8th edition (only the 7th and 8th editions were available in a hard copy booklet form), published in 1987, he writes:
The Lexicon began one night in September of 1969 when I was writing lecture notes and found myself jotting down as a heading “quining intentions” I saw fit to compose a definition of the verb. In the morning I was ill prepared to lecture, but handed a list of about a dozen definitions together with the Introduction to my colleagues at Irvine. Joe Lambert promptly responded with several more definitions and sent the first batch to Nuel Belnap and Alan Anderson at Pittsburgh. Almost by return mail their first entries arrived, and within a few months we prepared a second edition, and then a third. The editions have been cumulative, but along the way a few entries have either been dropped as substandard or replaced by better definitions of the same term. Originally with Joe Lambert’s help, I have gathered, refined, combined, and edited as I have seen fit, with a few rules and little consistency. Originally, only twentieth century philosophers were considered eligible. but how could we resist the pronoun “hume”? The one unexceptioned rule is that no one has been permitted to define himself’—editors included.
The Lexicon was published by the American Philosophical Association (!) and if you wanted a copy you’d send them a check for $3.00 and they’d mail it to you. There’s a PDF scan of it here (and here).
There were 245 entries in the 8th edition. In 2008 a new version, co-edited by Dennett and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen, was published online with an additional 56 entries, yet I have not been able to locate a copy of it [JW: I have it now, see update below]. I’ll warn readers that the site “philosophicallexicon.com” is no longer home to the Lexicon, and that that address will redirect you to various spammy pages trying to trick you into downloading what is no doubt malware. Don’t click! But if you happen to have a PDF of the 2008 edition, send it along, and I will post it here.
UPDATE: The 2008 Edition of The Philosophical Lexicon is here (thanks to Victor Chung).
That is extraordinarily good 😮
It’s OK – chucklesome in parts, tedious and sycophantic in others.
The fact that it’s clear in places which terms got their definition because they’re an editor’s friend, and which terms got their definition because an editor actually wants to ridicule them…seems maybe more like something for a group chat than something for the APA to publish tbh.
For what it’s worth, at least for the versions that Dennet himself put together, for any entry about a living philosopher the philosopher was asked if they were happy to have the entry included. I’m glad to see that many philosophers are more willing to laugh at themselves than on-line discourse would sometimes make us think.
(This would have included, for example, the great entry about Lyotard, the good, but less good, entry on Rory, and the somewhat less good, but still a bit funny, entry on Derida.)
“Chucklesome in parts” is generous. The Lexicon blows, but I’m too lazy and stupid to figure out why exactly (but I’m definitely right, I know that much for sure).
the 2008 lexicon is archived here
https://web.archive.org/web/20090205172430/http://philosophicallexicon.com/
I find the concept of chisholming to be useful, but the term itself is to be bit too much of an in-joke. I instead tend to use Lakatos’ phrase “monster barring” for the chisholming of definitions in the face of iterated counterexamples. It carries on its face what it is. If the listener doesn’t know the work of the philosopher Horatio Monsterbar, I don’t have to explain the reference.
I do not mean this as a criticism, but a comical lexicon that requires you to be a true insider to find funny (or, at least I suspect the right kind of funny) might suggest, if not the need, that it would at least be a good service to provide a genuine “[Anglophone 21st century academic] Philosopher’s Lexicon”. There are many philosophical dictionaries that don’t really do the job of explaining what is meant, now, by a particular word in general usage deployed in an insidery way (when the general meaning, even the general undergraduate-level-education meaning, of the word differs in usage or connotation if not fully in definition). Sometimes it even seems like philosophers trained at certain clusters of departments have a micro-profession vocabulary that I can pick up on as someone at their periphery…but where other norms likely exist that I miss.
Here you go!
Thanks, Daniel: this is excellent.
I love “outsmart, v. To embrace the conclusion of one’s opponent’s reductio ad absurdum argument. “They thought they had me, but I outsmarted them. I agreed that it was sometimes just to hang an innocent man.”
New additions to a possible future Philosophers Lexicon with a slightly more Antipodean flavour. I have violated the rule against self-definition.
baier, n. An injudicious purchaser of dubious psychological claims. “Only a baier would pay out good money for Gilligan’s stuff about the feminine disregard for abstract justice.“
cassam, v. To display an epistemic vice or vices, especially conformism. ‘He’s been on a casssaming bender, writing a book, ignoring or misrepresenting much of the previous literature, designed to reinforce the conventional wisdom.’
currie, n. the experience of an imaginary meal, consisting of what you feel if simulating somebody consuming something hot. “I’ve had several curries today, but somehow they fail to satisfy.”
dentith, n. a medical professional employed to draw the teeth from dangerous doctrines. ‘Because of a riot of wanton cassaming, a lot of people think that conspiracy theories as such are intellectually suspect. We need to call in a dentith.’
dyke, n. A flexible (i.e. not tense) rampart against the flow of time. “Thanks to our dyke, Christmas will never come/never end.” [delete according to preference]
griffiths n. A small, articulate and exceedingly voluble Welsh griffin, noted for its emotional nature. A harbinger of either sex or death. “When I saw the griffiths, I did not know which affect-program to run – lust or fear.”
Grussell. Patent remedy for repairing inference-barriers. ‘It looked like there might be some seepage from premises about the past to conclusions about the future but we applied some Grussell and now the barrier works very well (except when it doesn’t). ‘
mack, v. To hack away at a non-empirical item with a blunt Occam’s razor. Hence mackie, adj. something that has been macked up. “Once John got to work on them moral values began to look a bit mackie.”
Mackie the Knife. Fictional gangster with no respect for moral values.
“On the sidewalk, Sunday morning
Lies a moral realist oozing life
Someone’s sneaking round the corner
Is the someone Mackie the knife?”
mulganize, v. to soften up excessively demanding moral theories. “I foolishly bought a brand of consequentialism from a wandering petersinger and it looked as though it would force me to sell all I had to give to the poor. But now I’ve had it mulganized it allows me to eat out at expensive restaurants and to make frequent trips to the opera.”
mulgan, n. a state of existential despair induced by the prospect of a broken world. ‘I was in a real mulgan and the only thing that kept me going was militant utilitarianism, and the belief in an impersonal cosmic purpose that does not care about us.’
pigdenite, n. Logical substance used in the construction of inference-barriers, as between “is” and “ought”. “A reason should be given for what seems altogether inconceivable – how I got by for so long without the aid of pigdenite [D. Hume, satisfied customer]“.
priest, n. custodian of a shrine to true contradictions (but not Christian ones). To be distinguished from a JC (derivation obvious): custodian to a shrine to true contradictions but especially Christian ones.
tichy, n. A unit of likeness to truth. “He messed around with the theory endlessly but he did not improve it one tichy.”
waldron, n. A strut or flying buttress designed to reinforce nonsense on stilts.
Here’s another:
Kripkenstein, n. a philosophical monster formed from the body-parts of the dead which sucks away the souls of unwary philosophers, into a vortex of boredom, futility and intellectual error.
Since “Kripkenstein” is defined functionally, would a purported Kripenstein (n.) have to Kripkenstein (v.) in order to count as a real Kripkenstein (n.)?
Well it’s a proper name for a particular monster so the ‘definition’ isn’t strictly speaking a definition, functional or otherwise (since proper names, as we all know, contain no intellectual content). Rather it expresses what might be called a characterising fact about the monster. It’s neither necessary not analytic but merely true that the monster sucks away the souls of philosophers into a vortex of boredom and futility. It might not have done so, but over the last forty-five years, that’s what it has been doing. This being so, we can form a verb from the noun that expresses this activity, just as we can form a verb from the name of any notorious practitioner of some activity even though they might not have engaged in it. To revert to the original Lexicon, we can define alvinize as to stimulate protracted discussion by making a bizarre claim even though there are possible worlds in which the original Alvin failed to do this. There are possible worlds in which he did not put down physical evil to the direct agency of Satan, which means that although God foresaw that he would, he was free not to do it.
Metaphysician: Was introduced to a “real” doctor.