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The Cambridge School and Kripke: Bug Detecting with the History of Political Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2019

William Bosworth  and
Keith Dowding
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Abstract

We propose a two-step method for studying the history of political thought roughly in line with the contextualism of the Cambridge School. It reframes the early Cambridge School as a bug-detecting program for the outdated conceptual baggage we unknowingly accommodate with our political terminology. Such accommodation often entails propositions that are inconsistent with even our most cherished political opinions. These bugs can cause political arguments to crash. This reframing takes seriously the importance of theories of meaning in the formative methodological arguments of the Cambridge School and updates the argument in light of new developments. We argue the new orthodoxy of Saul Kripke's causal theory of meaning in the philosophy of language better demonstrates the importance of contextual analysis to modern political theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 81 , Issue 4 , Fall 2019 , pp. 621 - 642
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2019 

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Footnotes

This paper was given at APSA in San Franciso in 2017 we thank the audience for their comments. We also thank Ruth Abbey, Signy Gutnick Allen, Sophie Fehlberg, Jonathan Floyd, Anne Gelling, Ian Hampshire-Monk, Edmund Handby, Christopher Meckstroth, Kari Palonen, Marija Taflaga, John Uhr, Ryan Walter and the four anonymous reviewers.

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