Ohtani Hiroshi

<title>Abstract</title> Dominant interpretations of Plato's <italic>Crito</italic> attempt to reconstruct the text deductively, taking the arguments in the famous Laws’ speech as consisting solely in the application of general principles to facts. It is thus conceived that the principles and facts are grasped independently of each other, and then the former are applied to the latter, subsequently reaching the conclusion that Socrates must not escape. Following the lead of Cora Diamond, who argues against this ‘generalist interpretation’, I argue that the Laws’ speech essentially involves an exercise of our moral imagination through which both principles and the facts to which they apply are grasped. This is not to say that a deductive argument is absent from the Laws’ speech. Rather, for the first time, we understand how the deductive arguments in the Laws’ speech can function through imagining a life in which these arguments make sense. The <italic>Crito</italic> is an attempt to exercise the readers’ imagination, thereby presenting ethics that is both personal and objective. Understanding the Laws’ arguments essentially requires the readers’ imaginative involvement with Socrates’ personal story, but they still have objective import.

<title>Abstract</title>This paper provides new tools for philosophical argument analysis and fresh empirical foundations for ‘critical’ ordinary language philosophy. Language comprehension routinely involves stereotypical inferences with contextual defeaters. J.L. Austin’s <italic>Sense and Sensibilia</italic> first mooted the idea that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from verbal case-descriptions drive some philosophical paradoxes; these engender philosophical problems that can be resolved by exposing the underlying fallacies. We build on psycholinguistic research on salience effects to explain when and why even perfectly competent speakers cannot help making stereotypical inferences which are contextually inappropriate. We analyse a classical paradox about perception (‘argument from illusion’), suggest it relies on contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance-verbs, and show that the conditions we identified as leading to contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are met in formulations of the paradox. Three experiments use a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to document the predicted inappropriate inferences, in English, German, and Japanese. The cross-linguistic study allows us to assess the wider relevance of the proposed analysis. Our findings open up new perspectives for ‘evidential’ experimental philosophy.