Referring to the World: Ken’s Final Work

Josh Landy
How can a human brain think about apples, birds and cars?

Ray Briggs
How can we talk about centaurs, Santa Claus and Shangri La when those things don’t even exist?

Josh Landy
If your idea of a dog is a dachshund, and my idea of a dog is a husky, are we really talking about the same thing?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco,

Josh Landy
continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the Philosophy and Literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about reference, specifically an opinionated theory of reference by our dear departed friend and longtime Philosophy Talk host Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
Just hours before he passed away in December 2019, Ken announced on his Facebook page that he’d finished a book called “Referring to the World.”

Ray Briggs
Later in the show, we’ll be talking to Robin Jeshion, from the University of Southern California, who worked with a group of Ken’s friends and colleagues to turn that book into reality.

Josh Landy
Yeah, it’s a great book, Ray. And one of the things I love about it is how cool and mysterious it turns out to be that we can refer to objects outside our minds.

Ray Briggs
Mysterious. Why is that mysterious? Look, my coffee cup is sitting right here in front of me. I point to it and say, here’s my coffee cup. Bam, I just referred to an object outside my own mind. And what’s the big deal?

Josh Landy
I think it is a big deal. I put it, it’s not just that you’ve managed to refer to your coffee cup, which I think is already pretty awesome. It’s that our listeners are now thinking about your coffee cup, too, even though they’ve never seen it, they’ve never interacted with it. They never even heard about it before. You can reach across space and time with the power of ideas. Isn’t that amazing?

Ray Briggs
Oh, of course, my coffee cup can have the effect that reaches across space and time. I mean, it can leave a ring on the table that will last for years, ooh and maybe someday steam rising from my coffee will cause a butterfly to flap its wings and set off an avalanche halfway around the world. So why can’t it also enter someone else’s mind? I mean, I still don’t see what the big mystery is.

Josh Landy
I don’t know. I mean, entering a mind versus leaving a stain, those are two completely different kinds of effect. It’s one thing for a coffee cup to affect my head, like if it fell off a shelf and, and bumped me on the noggin. But it’s a totally different thing for a coffee cup to affect my mind.

Ray Briggs
But your mind is just as much a part of the world as your head is

Josh Landy
Sure, but I can refer to things that will never affect either of them.

Ray Briggs
Like what?

Josh Landy
I don’t know, like the first flower that will bloom in the 23rd century. I’ll never be affected by that flower. I’ll die before it even comes into existence. But I can think about it. I can even think about things that will never exist, like unicorns, comprehensible French theorists, the Abominable Snowman?

Ray Briggs
Well, that’s a totally different kind of thought process. When we think about stuff that doesn’t exist, that’s not at all like responding to something real that you can see and taste and touch.

Josh Landy
Really? I’m not convinced the two types of thinking are really that different. I mean, suppose you’re an explorer, and you see some kind of shadowy figure in the undergrowth, and you’re wondering, Is that a real animal orr is it just a figment of your imagination? Either way, thinking about it kind of feels the same.

Ray Briggs
You really think there’s no difference between paying attention to the world around you and daydreaming about stuff that doesn’t exist?

Josh Landy
Well, I mean, there are some differences. Like, if you think someone’s a magician, and that person is David Copperfield, and your thoughts are matching up with the real world whereas I guess if the person you’re thinking about Merlin, your thoughts are not matching up. They’re matching up with a story, but not a true story. So yeah, okay. That’s the kind of difference, but either way, it’s the same idea. So and so is a magician, and either way, having the thought feels exactly the same.

Ray Briggs
But if it feels the same to be having a true thought as it does to be hallucinating, how do we know what’s real? How do we even get the concept of reality? Aren’t we all just trapped inside our own heads forever?

Josh Landy
Ken actually had a lot to say about his book, and I want to hear what he had to talk about it with us today.

Ray Briggs
Well, I know that Robin will do a great job of explaining it.

Josh Landy
I agree, and I’m super looking forward to our conversation. In the meantime, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter Holly J. McDede to learn more about Ken from the people in his life. She files this report.

Holly McDede
Ken Taylor first met Claire Yoshida back in 1977 at the University of Chicago. He was dating her roommate.

Claie Yoshida
And that sounds like it It must be a wonderful, you know, funny story, but it’s not that funny. They dated briefly and he used to hang out in our apartment, and we became friends. But it’s a good way for a relationship to start.

Holly McDede
Back then, Ken was shy and Claire was in library school.

Claie Yoshida
We have a memory of staying up all night one night working together on a logic problem. So, you know, major geeks.

Holly McDede
They married five years after they met. Ken was born in Sandusky, Ohio. Even as a kid he wanted to do everything and know everything. He wrestled. He played the trombone, the violin and was in drama club. His dad worked for Ford and his mom was a nurse.

Claie Yoshida
But his parents loved him and kind of just let him be him. So that’s how you grow up to be a philosopher.

Holly McDede
In 1995, he joined the philosophy department at Stanford. His son Kiyoshi is now 24 years old. He says his dad was like Uncle Phil and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Kiyoshi Taylor
You know, like, big, boisterous, you know, large presence. That’s how I describe him, a gentle giant.

Holly McDede
A gentle giant with infinite curiosity. The only thing cKennever seem to question lwas his doomed loyalty to Cleveland sports teams. Kiyoshi remembers his dad driving him to his baseball games, and they start to play what they called the why game. They pick any topic and see how long they could question it.

Kiyoshi Taylor
So yeah, it’d start from “why is the sky blue?” and it would end on, you know, well, this is why tractors run the way they do by just going through all the logical steps, you know, to do certain things like that.

Claie Yoshida
Whatever you have, whatever you answer, there’s always a question.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything except your intelligence. I’m John Perry. And I’m Ken Taylor.

Holly McDede
Philosophy Talk was like Ken’s second child, Kiyoshi and his mom would practice reading scripts for the show with him.

Kiyoshi Taylor
We’d read it, and he’d be like, no, you have to read it more like John. And I’m like, I’m not John! That’s not how I read it, you know.

Holly McDede
He loves to debate in the philosophical sense.

Anna-Sara Malmgren
We were both so into the conversation that we kind of just kept chatting each other.

Holly McDede
Anna-Sara Malmgren was Ken’s colleague at Stanford and his friend. She says he loved thinking about new ideas like they were new toys. She remembers one of their last conversations.

Anna-Sara Malmgren
It was was about what a man is. And I kept telling him that he didn’t know what a man was, which of course he thought was very funny. Now he was going to write something about that.

Holly McDede
Ken died in December of 2019 before the pandemic. Before George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis. Kyoshi and his mom Claire think a lot about what Ken would think. After his dad died. Kyoshi founded a group in his hometown of Los Altos called Justice Vanguard. He wanted to continue raising awareness and hosting events around racial justice.

Kiyoshi Taylor
Raising money for education, so we can have more Ken Taylors within the world.

Holly McDede
When you spend your life wanting to do everything, like the Ken Taylors of the world, there’s a lot you don’t get to finish.

Claie Yoshida
We just never had enough time for everything that he wanted to do

Kiyoshi Taylor
Except for us. Always had time for us.

Claie Yoshida
He did. That’s true.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that beautiful and moving report, Holly. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs. And today we’re thinking about Ken’s posthumous new book “Referring to the World.”

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Robin Jeshion. She’s a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, and author of “New Essays on Singular Thought.” She is also part of the team that brought Ken’s final work to fruition. Robin, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Robin Jeshion
Thanks for having me. It’s really a pleasure and honor to be here.

Josh Landy
So Robin, can you tell us a little bit about how you knew Ken?

Robin Jeshion
Well, I met Ken at Rutgers in the late 1980s and early 90s. I was a very young graduate student, and he was 10 years ahead of me, they were courting him for a job. And I remember that moment so well. We stayed in touch. Over the years, we intersected conferences, and we always just clicked in all of our conversations. We had a similar philosophical outlook about what was really valuable in the profession. And also, I think, a similar outlook on the profession itself.

Josh Landy
That’s lovely. And then of course, after Ken passed away, you were part of a team that edited his last book “Referring to the World” and got it ready for publication. What was that process like?

Robin Jeshion
Well, I had contact with John Perry, Mark Crimmins, and Anna-Sara Malmgren. And I expressed to them that I was really heartbroken, of course, they knew I was very close with him. And they invited me to participate in bringing his book to publication. We each took on the editing jobs, and it worked very smoothly. It was during the pandemic. And it was a remarkably fast process. I have to say, John and Anna-Sara really took the lead in making sure everything happened in a timely way. And I’m so happy that we’re able to do this for Ken.

Ray Briggs
That sounds like such a meaningful way to commemorate Ken. And so can you summarize for us the main idea behind Ken’s book?

Robin Jeshion
Well, you talked about mystery of reference. And that’s a word that Ken uses in the book repeatedly, especially when he’s introducing the main subject matters. So you can think about it this way. Words can be thought of as just these kinds of sounds. And when you say, there’s my coffee cup, you are referring to the coffee cup, but there’s my coffee cup is the sound and how is it that that is capable of being about this particular object in the world? When I talk to you all about Aristotle, or Maya Angelou, we’re talking about a particular individual, and we are not in contact with them. Aristotle lived centuries ago, how is it that we’re able to do that? And that’s really what Ken is trying to answer here. It’s a huge question. He’s trying to speak, he’s speaking about how words how with words we’re able to refer, but ultimately, he’s after how we do it in thought.

Ray Briggs
So one of the things we were puzzled about in the opening dialogue was whether thinking about somebody who does exist, like Aristotle or Maya Angelou, is different from or the same as thinking about somebody who never existed like Miss Marple or Sherlock Holmes. What did Ken think about that?

Robin Jeshion
Right, so the idea that we’re able to have like bonafide thoughts about Sherlock Holmes say, is an idea that led a lot of philosophers to think that we had to posit these inner representations, and that when we’re referring, we’re always, we’re always kind of trapped in our own minds. And that was something that Ken really resisted it. He thought that that’s not what it showed, what it showed was that there was a kind of commonality between how we can think about and refer to real entities like Aristotle, and how we can think fictionally. They’re not exactly the same, but they do share this one kind of objective feature, and that objective feature has to do is like the way that our mind is attuned to refrain. So my mind has this ability, it has the structure, to be able to use language in ways that refer to real world objects. Aristotle, speak about Aristotle. But it also has this form that enables me to talk about fictional objects. So for Ken, you’re not going to posit any real world entity that is or abstract entity that is Sherlock Holmes, or any kind of like, mentalistic thing. There’s just this name Sherlock Holmes, and you and I are able to share thinking about Sherlock Holmes, via using that word, and via our both having the same structure in our minds.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about Ken Taylor’s theory of reference with Robin Jeshion from USC.

Ray Briggs
How can you tell when two of your ideas pick out the same thing? What happens if you confuse Hegel with Schlegel? If you quote Aristotle, but you attribute the words to Martin Luther King, which one are you really thinking about?

Josh Landy
Puzzles, paradoxes and problems of reference, along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

Want to escape from your boring romantic partner? Why not try the very same person? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs and we’re thinking about Ken Taylor’s opinionated theory of reference with Robin Jeshion from USC, who helped bring Ken’s new book “Referring to the World” into the world.

Josh Landy
We’re finally back in the studio, but unfortunately not able to take phone calls. So if you got comments or questions, please email them to comments@philosophytalk.org, or come onto our website where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Robin, there’s something that’s always kind of puzzled me about the pina colada song, which we just heard. It’s a story about a guy who thinks his wife is really boring. So then he answers a personal ad by somebody he thinks is really exciting, and who turns out to be his wife? So does he somehow think that his wife is both boring and exciting at the same time? What would Ken say about that?

Robin Jeshion
How I wish Ken were here to answer that question himself. But I will speak for him. And I think he thought that you could think that, that in the story, yes. You think that your lady is boring and exciting at the same time, because they’re presented to you from two different angles. It’s like seeing maybe a rotten lemon. And on one side of the lemon, you’ve got this mold and the other side of the lemon, you’ve got this beautiful yellow quality to it. And in the song, you’re seeing your lady, all beautifully flashy and fresh, and lemony looking on the one side when she is a kind of describing herself in the ad. And in ordinary life, you’re seeing this mold, unfortunately.

Josh Landy
I think I can already imagine my next Valentine’s Day card, you know, darling, you’re you’re like a moldy lemon, but really good on the other side. So is the idea then that you know, when I think about something or some body, that that person or that object might be quite complicated and multifaceted. But I’m- but it’s still one thing that I’m thinking about, right? So when I think about a person who is exciting in one way, or boring, or another another way, to think about a lemon that’s rotten on one side, and great on another side, I’m still just thinking about one thing. And that’s kind of fascinating and cool and miraculous.

Robin Jeshion
Exactly. So yeah, that’s the answer that Ken would offer us. The people that he’s debating in the book would seems that you have to kind of posit two ways of thinking about the lemon. And it’s that that captures how you’re thinking. But for Ken, you’re actually just talking about the lemon. And there’s two different- you have two different angles in on that lemon, you have two different angles in on your wife. I think that another interesting question here is whether or not he and his wife were cheating on each other.

Josh Landy
Not Ken!

Ray Briggs
The guy himself! I’m a little bit puzzled about Ken’s view still. Basically, because I think I usually know what I’m thinking. And it seems like if, if my thoughts are latching on to something outside of me that has all of these other facets that I can’t see, it’s really hard for me to know what I’m thinking as completely as I thought I did. So like the guy in the song, hethinks like, I’m thinking about my wife. I’m thinking about somebody who doesn’t love pina coladas and hates getting caught in the rain. And then he’s kind of wrong. He’s like, deeply wrong about the objects of his own thoughts. So does this raise trouble for our ability to know ourselves?

Robin Jeshion
It raises trouble for our ability to be fully be able to identify what it is that we’re thinking about. So this guy might not know he is in fact thinking about his wife, when he’s thinking about the woman that he thinks of as liking pina coladas and making love at midnight. But he doesn’t recognize, he doesn’t make this kind of identification, that it’s his wife. And that’s a different thing from being able to know something about the thoughts that you think. So, I think that Ken would say that, yes, you do know that you’re having this thought about the person who likes pina coladas, but you’re not able to kind of identify that individual with your wife.

Josh Landy
Right. Interesting. Yeah. So. So one thing that I found really interesting in in Ken’s book, is that he’s, he’s a real defender of the idea that it’s perfectly possible for us to get things right about the world. So what would- you know, how does he defend that argument given that we can often be so wrong, right? So it seems like, you know, the, the guy in the song, the pina colada song, was clearly making a mistake, he thought that the person, you know, in the personal ad was a new person that he hadn’t met before. He was totally wrong! It turned out it was his own wife. Clearly, it’s possible to make mistakes when we’re thinking about the world. So why is Ken so confident that we can get it right?

Robin Jeshion
I think he would say that it’s just because we’re connected to the world. And we have these successful- through perception, were able to think about the world directly. But once language comes into the picture, that raises all these possibilities for making mistakes about the external world, but the fact that we’re having the possibility of making mistakes, doesn’t itself undermine the possibility that we can think about the external world. That’s the kind of line that he would take against people like Russell, and many other idealists.

Ray Briggs
So wait, what did Russell think?

Robin Jeshion
He thought that he was really worried about these possibilities of mistakes. So he thought that what we had to do in order to ensure that we were referring to anything, he thought that whenever I say, refer to the lemon, I’m actually referring to my inner image of the lemon. And that enables me to kind of have like something in my mind that I’m in fact referring to and not just, like, live with the potential that I’m not referring to anything, that I’m say hallucinating the lemon.

Ray Briggs
Right, so if I, if I’m referring to my inner image, like my vision of a yellow thing, and my lemony smell that happens somewhere in my nose, or like, in my mind, I’m not quite sure, thenI can’t be wrong about that. And so that, that makes my my knowledge of, of the external world safe. Great. Yeah. So why not do that? Why not secure like truth for all of my, my apparent beliefs? Like, what’s the downside?

Robin Jeshion
Well, a lot of people are pretty skeptical that you are, you do always have these inner sense data, things, as Russell call them, these inner images, Do I really have an image of Aristotle? Maybe all I have is that word, Aristotle, and that it’s that word that enables us to successfully refer in the lemon type of case. And having having this hallucination. That doesn’t mean that I have to posit for every act of reference, this inner image. So Ken was completely comfortable with allowing that sometimes we have like reference failure, you’ve got this word, or this hallucination, and you’re not in fact, referring to anything in the external world.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about Ken Taylor’s posthumous book about reference with one of the people who helped get it published. Robin Jession, from USC. And we’ve got a question from a listener, Nancy in Altadena, California. Nancy writes, the question how can the human mind represent something outside itself takes for granted the image inherited from Descartes and numerous other modern philosophers, that what is mental is somehow inside the person. But our knowledge is spread out in various ways through our bodies, for example, my fingers know where to go to hit all these keys. But if I were asked where a particular letter is, I couldn’t tell you. So what do you think about that, Robin? What do you think Ken would have thought about that?

Robin Jeshion
I think that Ken would think that he hasn’t really adopted this Cartesianism. I think that he would allow for the possibility that there’s different aspects of mentality that reside in your body in effect, and that they can contribute to your agency and to how you think but I don’t think that any of that impinges upon the idea that that our minds are what’s responsible for representations, I think that he would have stood by that, and not seeing them unnecessarily as in conflict.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, it’s really weird and surprising that physical objects like us, so if you think we’re physical objects, it’s still surprising that we can refer to things because like, rocks don’t refer to anything. And I don’t know like maybe some physical objects do like maybe thermometers refer to the temperature and books refer to a lot of stuff, but that still seems based on our minds.

Robin Jeshion
Yes, it is it is that I think that lots of animals, in effect are referring because they have certain sorts of representations of individuals. And I think that Ken would agree about that too.

Ray Briggs
Right, so I think Ken thought that our ability to use language was really important in our ability to represent like objects outside of ourselves and our ability to name things. And it seems like many animals have what looks like an incorrect representation of the world, but don’t have language. So like, my dog can think there’s somebody at the door, but there’s not. Can we square that with Ken’s views?

Robin Jeshion
So I think that Ken would think that we have a greater ability to misrepresent the world, through language, just as language also enables us like in a fantastic way to represent the world. So our dogs and cats can’t represent people that live thousands of years ago. We can because of language, language simultaneously gives us this enormous power, but also greater ways in which we can go wrong.

Josh Landy
I like the way you talk about the other, this sort of almost magical power of language. As I was saying earlier, to me, one of the things I love the most about the book is Ken’s sort of liveliness, his sense of the everyday miracles that are that are just around the corner, everything we do with this conversation that we’re having right now. You know, he says beautifully, that referring to someone long dead, like Aristotle can seem like a nearly magical accomplishment. I just love that. He has other things like the fact that, you know, we can understand essentially, a more or less infinite number of possible sentences. That’s amazing. You know, we can think correctly about things in the world. Even though as Ken puts it, you know, everything is just an energized sloshing of a vat of chemicals locked up in our skulls, and yet somehow that sloshing hooks onto the world, we can talk about things around us even though language is just a bunch of grunts and squiggles, you know, we can coordinate behavior even though words mean slightly different things to all of us. Is there one or more of these that that you, Robin, find mysterious and miraculous too?

Robin Jeshion
In spirit I am so with Ken, that I do find all of these questions absolutely mysterious, even while working so hard to understand them. They still are mysterious to me. And there’s a freshness about the book that I love, so I completely agree with you that Ken has a way of keeping the magic in the questions and he always loved the questions. In every subject matter, you could see his passion for all of the philosophical questions. One of the questions that jumps out at me is ways in which language is a social affair. That’s something that Ken discusses here. So how is it like to what extent are we relying upon others in securing reference to Aristotle? And like one of the things that Ken wanted to tackle in the book is to explain just that.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s lovely. I love the way he presents it almost like a benevolent spiral, where community helps me refer to things. And then reference helps us all build community. And so it’s this nice benevolent spiral that keeps everything sort of ticking along. So could you say a little bit more about that? Like, how does community, how do other people, help me talk about the world?

Robin Jeshion
So Ken starts off by thinking, imagining the scenario in which we’re all trapped in our own minds in effect. And I think that that was abhorrent to him. He did not want a world like that. He wanted a world where we were all onto the same objects. And we could talk about them. And he was this huge believer in the power of language to make progress in the world in so many different realms. And he thought that it was absolutely necessary that we do that. So for him, this power of having a common language to speak about specific entities that were common to us objective was what would enable us to communicate successfully.

Ray Briggs
One thing that that puzzled Ken, that he writes about in the book that that kind of puzzles me too, and amazes me, is our ability to communicate even when we don’t agree about things at all. So if I’m talking to a confused person who thinks that whales are a kind of fish, and I explained to them that whales are a kind of mammal, we might share very few beliefs about whales, but we can still both talk about the same subject matter. Like, isn’t that cool? And how is that?

Robin Jeshion
Right, this idea that another individual can have like a very different conception of something than you raises this huge puzzle about, like, what is it that you’re talking about? And for Ken, the fact that you’re both using the expression ‘whale’ shows that you have a kind of commitment to speaking about this particular entity, whales, even if you don’t have very much knowledge about what it is, about what whales are. So the idea here is that you and I, I am ignorant about what whales are, you’re in the know. And because I use the word whale, I’ve kind of made a commitment to having what it is that I mean by whales, whatever it is that the experts in my community say, whales are.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about Ken Taylor’s posthumous new book on reference, “Referring to the World” with Robin Jeshion from USC.

Ray Briggs
Why is it so bad to refer to people using certain terms? What makes slurs different from other descriptions? And should we reclaim or should we just abandon these kinds of degrading names?

Josh Landy
Words: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? Plus commentary from Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher when Philosophy Talk continues.

When we talk about each other, how do we get our words to be true? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Robin Jeshion from USC, part of the team that helped put together a final book by our dear friend Ken Taylor, “Referring to the World.”

Josh Landy
So our producer Devon has a question that seems relevant. He grew up in Canada, like all the best people. And in high school, he knew the names of two pretty popular bands, The Cult and The Cure. The Cure, we just heard a little bit from them a moment ago. But it wasn’t until he went to college in the States that he realized these were actually two different bands. Somehow the fact that their names were similar meant that either name evoke this one kind of indistinct band in his mind. So what’s going on there?

Robin Jeshion
So he’s a victim of what language can do to us. So he thought that these two words were similar. And he assumed that there was a common band that they were about, Ken says that’s completely possible. So basically, in your mind, you’re merging all your information about these two distinct groups, they happen to be distinct, you don’t know if they’re one in the same. That’s just one of the things that Ken says is possible if you adopt his view that says that you’re in fact talking about the real world when you’re using these expressions like names.

Ray Briggs
In Devon’s example, was he thinking about one of those two bands specifically? Or both of them? Or neither of them? And how do we figure that out?

Robin Jeshion
That’s the magical question that people take different sides on. How do you sort through these kinds of cases? So some people just say, in these cases, we’re not referring to anything, it’s just like bad stuff. We don’t want to take a spin on it. Some people referring to in fact, unbeknownst to you, I don’t think that Ken necessarily takes a stand on exactly how to sort these kinds of complicated cases.

Ray Briggs
Another thing that Ken was really interested in was the phenomenon of slurs, which are like derogatory words for whole groups of people. And he mentions them in the book. And can you tell us a bit about how his views about slurs connected to the theme of this book?

Robin Jeshion
He introduces one of his most interesting and original arguments in the book, where he’s trying to discuss and lay out the view as to why it is, when we refer we’re talking about the objects themselves, not our particular own individual representations of the objects. And he thinks that using slurs, and attributing beliefs to others with slurs shows that more generally, when we’re thinking about objects in the external world, we are- and attributing beliefs to other people with them, we’re always talking about the objects themselves, not the ways that people cognize. So there’s no really easy way for me to describe that particular argument. But it’s really interesting one. But Ken had a lot of other interests in general about slurs. I wrote to Claire Yoshida, Ken’s wife, recently to ask her for a copy of a paper that’s unpublished that Ken was presenting several years before he passed away. And in that paper, it’s called “Derogatory terms and resistance.” And Ken there discusses a certain sort of power that a lot of people have overlooked, he thinks. About how we can combat slurs. And so one of the themes in philosophical discussions about slurs is that when you hear a slur, it has a certain sort of power to make you feel complicit in being racist, say, and you can’t just say like, No, she’s not a whatever, that doesn’t do the trick. But he had more faith in the power of resistance with language, he just thought that you could use different sort of techniques to combat derogatory terms. And you could combat derogatory terms with another mode of designation, calling somebody else a racist, for instance, and a whole bunch of other additional resources. And that was one of his contributions, about slurs, but he had a really broad interest in their many features.

Josh Landy
Well, another thing that obviously people often discuss in relation to slurs is the question of reappropriation. The question well, you know, given that there are these many awful derogatory terms in our language, should we just jettison them? Or is it sometimes advantageous for an affected group to sort of repurpose a slur or turn it into something potentially positive? Like in the way that the word queer, you know, it was, for a very long time a derogatory term, but that got reappropriated and revalorize by the affected grou. So what what would Ken have to say about that question?

Robin Jeshion
Well, he thought that that was powerful thing that a group could do. And you could take ownership of how they’re perceived and gain strength, through expressions of pride, that was one very strong way that you could take back a word.

Ray Briggs
So if I have a slur that I don’t want to reappropriate that I hear somebody using, what are my other options that Ken was interested in?

Robin Jeshion
You could create an alternative word, to serve as a term of identity, and speak it loudly and champion it in a multitude of different ways and make it the term of choice. And but that takes like a lot of effort, both of them do take a lot of effort. It’s a political act. And the choice of which one to do is a complicated one, and it will probably depend upon which term it is, and who in the community thinks that you should do it one way or another. In fact, say the adoption of the word Black, as a term of identity during the 60s, was contentious. A lot of people wanted to stick with the term negro. And in fact, that term, for instance, is still on the Census. And you can choose that, as your term of identity was something that was political and debated, even within the in group.

Josh Landy
That’s really interesting, that sort of takes us back in a different way to the question of the communal aspect of reference, we were talking earlier about the sort of, you know, a way in which the community seems to help us refer to the world. This seems to be a case where maybe it sometimes helps and sometimes hinders, right? Because presumably, we’re a little bit vulnerable to a larger community, maybe, you know, a sub community might say, look, this is the word now, please, or, you know, either sort of demanding or or asking for that word to be, to be recognized the official word but, but that community is going to be vulnerable to other members of the larger community. So what do we do about that, according to Ken?

Robin Jeshion
So I didn’t talk about that particular question with Ken. I think he would say that the vulnerability is worth it. And that might have just been something about Ken himself. One of the wonderful things about Ken himself is that he had an amazing kind of combination of such strong fearlessness, which included a kind of ability to be vulnerable and strong at the same time. And I think that that kind of personality is actually ideal for these types of situations. But not everyone has it. So I completely agree with you that an individual’s personal vulnerability might not always be worth it in the particular situation so they might not get what they want. They might be hurt by their political interactions with others in their community when they’re debating these things.

Josh Landy
Right. Ken had that extraordinary, you said, that combination of strength, but also a great kind of softness and charity. I, you know, one of the lines I like the most is in the book is Ken saying, one can find part of the truth in many places, even very deep within the opponent’s camp, such huge generosity, right. He’s got a point of view. He calls his book opinionated, but he’s constantly saying, by the way, my opponent is right. I just love that.

Ray Briggs
Another kind of wonderful thing about Ken that I think comes through in the book is his belief in the power of our imagination. So the end of the book kind of decries people who believe that the only purpose of languages to name true things about the world, and talks about all of the uses that human beings can put our imaginations to. So we can tell stories, sure, but we can also do things like math, which Ken thinks is an exercise of our imaginations that doesn’t describe sort of real things that are numbers, but that helps us use imaginary things that are numbers to describe the world, or sort of collective identities where we all engage in collective acts of imagination. Do you have a favorite imaginative capacity from that part of the book?

Robin Jeshion
I have the favorite imaginative capacity that is something that Ken and I both shared. And I think that both of you share too. And that was the love of poetry. There aren’t that many philosophers that love poetry. And that love the stories that can be told in poetry. And there were so many conferences with Ken that involves snippets of poets. And I always felt comfortable with him sharing my favorite poets and poems. And our ability to appreciate that is one of the magical things that we can do with language. And it does partly involve reference, it involves also some of the ability of language to communicate beauty and meaning. And those were all things that Ken you know, so strongly believed in.

Josh Landy
Well, that’s a beautiful place to stop. Robin, thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you also for helping to bring Ken’s final work into the world.

Robin Jeshion
Well, thanks to both of you, Josh and Ray. It’s really an honor to be here to celebrate the publication of Ken’s book.

Josh Landy
Our guests has been Robin Jeshion, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, along with former Philosophy Talk host John Perry, she was part of a team that finalized Ken Taylor’s posthumous book, “Referring to the World” An Opinionated Introduction to the Theory of Reference.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
So our conversation at the end got me thinking about watching Ken pull off the one one of the most amazing teaching feats that I’ve ever seen anybody pull off, which was that he taught a class of undergraduates, there were like 20, or 30 of them. And some graduate students too, but about slurs. And this class involves like giving examples of slurs and arguing about them. And it made me really nervous because I thought, oh my gosh, if there’s one topic that’s going to get people to fight with each other, and just be mean, it’s this one. But that didn’t happen. They were extremely, first of all respectful of each other. But second of all, like really thoughtful about engaging with the ideas in the class and about philosophically disagreeing in a respectful way. And I thought this is just so emblematic of who Ken was.

Josh Landy
That’s wonderful. And also I’m not at all surprised. I you know, I was lucky enough to be able to teach with Ken in a couple of classes and, and those were really one of the great highlights of my academic career. All of his students adored him, rightly so, rightly so. We all adore him, and he has missed in so many ways. We are going to put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and get access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now a man with an opinionated theory of speed. It’s Ian Shoales, The Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. Ken Taylor’s book “Referring to the World” was written just before his untimely passing. Through it, I learned we’ve come a long way from Plato’s cave. When somebody says dog, we all know what that means. But do we all see the same dog? The dog a three year old might draw, a shadowy dog in the wall of a cave, my brain is teeming with dogs. I don’t even have one. The neighbor’s dog, a YouTube puppy, the dog that bit me when I was ten, the spaniel we had that was afraid of water. There’s an ever changing montage of canines triggered if I see a Boston Terrier in a bus. Did it with kittens, cars, Westerns, on and on, my brain is a hodgepodge from which I cannot wean. It’s a wonder I’m not insane. I am not alone. So much stuff in our brains. We know the poor house not a place, the White House a place, a doghouse not of place unless you’re a dog, but even then how many dogs outside of cartoons actually have a dog house? But that dog dish labeled Spike, the kitten in the big house, the grandma getting all the pet, Spike is stuck outside in the rain, poor imaginary pup, and he had dogs themselves are real though ever changing. If you were raised by wolves, for example, you think of dogs as wolves that don’t get shot from helicopters, not necessarily wrong. And then we remember Sarah Palin and wonder why she isn’t on that wildly trumped gravy train. Do we even know trains are anymore? Is Martin Buber at the new Sarah Palin? Many things refer to things we no longer have. Like backs, phonebook, photocopy, but words remain, now it’s animal control. Not dog catcher. Except in old cartoons. Of course, humans are still real, I think, and unique. As Ken Taylor says in his book, quote, the flow of energy across space time is ubiquitous. But it eventuates in outwardly oriented representations only in those peculiar regions of space time, inhabited by minds, unquote. Human minds make words to let people know there’s a dog if you’re too tired to point. Languages also slow motion analog telepathy that doesn’t always work as it should. We have words for things that don’t really exist. What’s an Iron Curtain, what’s Cold War? If somebody is named Carpenter because the family sawed wood once upon a time, or did a woman named Johnson marry a carpenter? What’s hammer and nails to her, maybe what’s too expensive and carpentry is all Superglue and space age plastic. What do I know? I’m a renter. Not to mention Santa Claus or Dracula. We know how to prepare for Santa. We know how to fend off vampires, yet we can’t be bothered to brush after every meal. What’s more real, Vlad the Impaler or the dentist? We know what a gravy train is, not a real thing. We know that slippery slope isn’t real. So yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Yes, Santa Claus, there is a Virginia, but no John Denver, no mountain mama. That’s the other Virginia also real but West. Remember Rome, founded by brothers Romulus and Remus, raised by wolves. Only one got a city. There was no Ream. There was no Remean Empire. There was no Holy Remean Empire. Anybody who says there is just selling you a wolf ticket, whatever that is, that trai ain’t running anymore. And if it is, it’s not stopping for you. Think of Bob. We know lots of people named Bob. Some of them are our friends. Some of them are Bob Hope, Bob Newhart, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, the motion of cork makes in the water. We can even imagine a bob town though it does not exist filled with Bobs. Roberts, Bobbys, Robertas, and lonely Dave or two yearning to bust out. Why so many Bobs? It’s in our nature, we want to give names that our kids fit in, or names like Lemuel, or Hildegard so our kids will stand out. These twin impulses are the Romulus and Remus of human nature. The other human impulse is of course, nameless dread, which ironically, is actually a name. My nickname in fifth grade actually. So there’s there’s a lot to understand and we’re a long way from that because the only tools we have are words and what are they? Slippery little critters, true some of the time, the rest of the time stuck in our throat or on the tip of the tongue. As the angry world goes back to sticks and stones, so move over Spike, any food left in that dish? Nice dog house by the way, is it UV resistant? I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2021.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
The senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the partners at our online community of thinkers.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed or misexpressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website philosophytalk.org, where you could become a subscriber and get access to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.