Michael Devitt (1938–) is an Australian-born philosopher whose long and still on-going career has made him known as a proponent of a realist, naturalist approach to the philosophy of language. In September 2025, he visited Tampere by an invitation of his long-lasting friend, Professor Panu Raatikainen. I had the honour of interviewing him in Panu’s presence at Tampere University. Our conversation discloses the central themes in Devitt’s philosophy through his recently published collection of articles Reference and Beyond: Essays in Philosophy of Language (Oxford, 2025).
Jaakko Reinikainen (JR): We can start with the question of how you met Panu and how your friendship began. I understand this happened at the University of St. Andrews in 2004, where you met over some whiskey tasting.
Michael Devitt (MD): That’s not quite right. We met in an extraordinary conference on truth and realism; extraordinary in several ways. It had a preconference which was meant to make the issues presentable and clear to undergraduates. When I met Panu, I don’t remember how exactly, early on I realised we had similar views on realism. But it is true that since this happened in Scotland, of course, instead of wine-tasting or a beer-tasting we gathered around for a whiskey-tasting. Panu and I had a great time chatting about whiskey and just generally bonding and drinking.
JR: Do you have anything to add, Panu?
Panu Raatikainen (PR): No; that’s the story. We started corresponding and after a while I visited Michael in New York.
MD: And also: I’m a great traveller, Panu is a great traveller. We met in all sorts of places like Buenos Aires, for example. I’ve been to countless conferences with Panu by now.
JR: I can only imagine. Can I ask if you have other long-term contacts in Finland, besides Panu?
MD: That’s an interesting question. Panu, do you think I have any?
PR: Well, if you count Jussi [Haukioja], but he’s in Norway now.
MD: That is absolutely true. I’ve known Jussi for at least 20 years. I first met Jussi in some conference and we had a dinner or two together. We’ve really had a lot to do together since. Nowadays we’re both doing experimental semantics and have been in correspondence a lot. Everyone in experimental semantics is – it’s a family. We’re struggling and disagreeing all the time. It’s a very productive family.
JR: As it happens, Jussi was the opponent of my dissertation.
MD: Oh really? So, you have someone nominated to be the opponent?
PR: Yes: that’s part of the public defense for us.
MD: That’s a very interesting idea. It’s not what you get in America or Australia: there’s no opponent.
Reference and Beyond
JR: Moving on, you have a new book that’s just come out, Professor Devitt: Reference and Beyond: Essays in Philosophy of Language (Oxford 2025): ”a selection of published papers in philosophy of language, accompanied by many new footnotes and postscripts,” like the abstract has it. Could you shed light on these footnotes and postscripts? Do they include any key changes to your existing views?
MD: The postscripts seemed like an obvious thing to do when producing a collection of old papers. You don’t mess with the papers themselves, that’s just going to confuse everyone. You confine the minor things into the footnotes, and there’s a lot of that. If you’ve got something major to say, put it in the postscript. I did enjoy writing them.
Take the oldest article in the collection, ”Singular Terms” (1974).1Michael Devitt, Singular Terms, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 71, No. 7, 1974, 183–205. It wasn’t my first publication, but it was the first in a proper place, as it were. I’m still quite proud about a lot of it, but it suffered from something which a lot of work in those days suffered from, including the work of Keith Donnellan. We didn’t acknowledge this crucial Gricean distinction between speaker-meaning or speaker-reference and semantic meaning or semantic reference.2Grice distinguished between two senses of sentential meaning: what the speaker meant by the sentence and what the semantic meaning is. The semantic sense is close to the literal meaning of the sentence, whereas the speaker-meaning means the use of the sentence in context. For example, the sentence ”Grass is green” literally means that grass is green, but some speaker might use it in context to mean that the summer is not over yet. So, you can read ”Singular Terms” with that distinction in mind and wonder which of these meanings and references I’m talking about, and the unhappy truth is I’m sometimes almost talking about them both at once. Mostly I’m talking about semantic meaning and reference though. The failure to make that distinction was a flaw, so, in the footnotes, I’ve made clear when the distinction is important to make, and in the Postscript I present a theory of speaker-meaning. I reject the Gricean theory of speaker-meaning which, as you know, is a very complicated theory based on the speaker’s communicative intentions. That is a mistake already, but it is compounded by the incredible complexity of the intentions.
In my dissertation I made the first attempt to give a unified account of what are often called ”singular referring expressions”, like proper names and demonstratives, and arguably, following Keith Donnellan, referential descriptions as well. I prefer calling them designational expressions. I gave a sort of causal theory of them all. In the first Postscript, I really wanted to clarify that theory. ”Singular Terms” was predominantly about names, so I wanted to be absolutely clear where I stood with demonstratives. In recent years, I have come to think of demonstrations as an independent referential device; I’m talking about gestures, pointings, and so on, which often accompany referential phrases, most notably demonstratives. So, I might say, ”that is a cat” while pointing at a cat, and in my view what you’ve got here are two linguistic devices both of which designate the cat, if all has gone well. There’s the demonstrative ”that” and then there’s the demonstration. I wanted to give a theory of demonstrations too, and since I’d recently written about that I wanted it extracted and put in the Preface. So, my unified theory of referential devices now covers proper names, definite descriptions, demonstratives and demonstrations.
Another postscript that I had wanted to write for 50 years originates from the time when I was so influenced by Saul Kripke, the first time I heard him lecture in Harvard in 1967. Around that time, Gareth Evans came to Harvard too. We were friends and associated with each other quite a lot. Gareth had of course heard all about Kripke’s ideas3Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, originally held as a series of lectures in 1970, started a revolution in the philosophy of language and beyond by criticising the previously dominant descriptivist theories of reference and meaning. According to descriptivism, the meaning of an expression, such as a proper name, are based on the descriptions commonly associated with the referent of the name. For example the meaning of ”Aristotle” would be something like ”The teacher of Alexander the Great”. Kripke showed in several ways how the name’s reference and meaning are independent of such descriptions, and wrote a very excellent, very insightful paper criticising Kripke. Panu, you know the name, what was it called?
PR: ”The Causal Theory of Names.”4Gareth Evans, The Causal Theory of Names. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Supplementary Volumes. Vol. 47, No. 1, 1973, 187–208.
MD: This was after he and I had left Harvard. At the time Evans was writing that, I was writing my ”Singular Terms”. My paper is presented as a development of Saul’s, and Evans’ paper is presented as a critique of Saul’s views. What had always struck me from the start was that quite independently Evans and I had come up with quite similar ideas. So, what I wanted to do in the first Postscript, what I had in a way wanted to do for fifty years, was to draw out the similarities and resemblances between Gareth’s 1973 paper but also his 1982 book5Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1982., where he went much more against Kripke. I did enjoy doing that. That covers the Postscript for that era.
Another thing that I like doing in the volume is giving the broad outline of the views that pop up in the book, to gather them together. Other Postscripts deal with criticisms that some of the papers have met. Take the paper ”Rigid Application”. Saul famously introduced the notion of rigid designation which he explained like this. A term is a rigid designator if it designates the same object in every possible world in which that object exists. (Actually, there are a lot more subtleties going on here as became clear when Saul and David Kaplan started arguing about it, but that’s a clear enough basic idea.) Saul then extended in his Naming and Necessity lectures the use of this term to what he called natural kind terms like ”gold” and ”yellow”, ”heat” and ”tiger”. So just as proper names were rigid, so were many sorts of general terms. But how could they be rigid designators? They don’t seem to be designators at all!6Rigid designation” was one of the key technical terms which Kripke coined in the revolutionary lectures of Naming and Necessity. Roughly, a term is a rigid designator if and only if it refers to the same thing in every possible world in which the referent exists and never refers to anything else.
That was a problem everyone faced, and there is quite a literature trying to deal with this. Some people tried to accommodate Saul’s original idea by saying that the general terms are rigid designators, but what they designate are abstract entities. I thought that’s a very bad idea, and it was criticized by a number of people in the literature; this criticism I endorsed and added on.
So, how can we extend Kripke’s idea of rigidity to general terms and mass terms? Well, we move away from designation to application, I thought that is the way to go. A singular term like a proper name or a demonstrative designates a certain object, but general terms like ”tiger” or ”atom” apply to many objects. Application is a one-many relationship. That seemed to me like helpful terminology for semantics generally. The good idea, or truth, behind Saul’s notion of the rigidity of general and mass terms could be captured with the idea of rigid application. If a term rigidly applies to an object, it applies to that object in every possible world in which the object exists. Even if Saul didn’t have that in mind, it seemed to me like something he should’ve had in mind, because that would be the sort of notion of rigidity that could serve his theoretical purposes. What were his theoretical purposes? He wanted to use rigidity as another weapon to beat description theories, and rigid application does that job just as effectively for general and mass terms as rigid designation does for singular terms. Of course, there has been a lot of disagreement about this; in the Postscript to ”Rigid Application”, I took up some criticisms of this suggestion. But that is probably enough about the Postscripts.
JR: That is plenty indeed. May I ask what you would consider to be your most important, or favourite, idea in this book?
MD: Oh, I’ve got to tell you, Jaakko, ever since I was a child I’ve hated questions with superlatives, like ”who’s your best friend?”. So, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to answer.
Naturalism
JR: Perhaps a more encompassive question, then. You have become a famous defender of naturalism in many, if not all, areas of philosophy, most importantly in the methodological sense. But how far and deep does naturalism reach? Is it really the only game in town?7”Naturalism” in philosophy means roughly the view that philosophical theories should not only seek to be compatible with the findings of empirical sciences but also seek to conform to their methodologies and worldview as much as possible.
MD: I wish!
JR: Perhaps it’s better to ask whether naturalism should be the only game in town for philosophy? Are there other legitimate methodologies beyond naturalism?
MD: This raises a very interesting general question which I’ve had to confront over my career. I do believe in naturalism and think it’s the right way to do philosophy. Do I think therefore that it’s not respectable to do anything else? I’m a great believer in the idea that you should let a thousand flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend. That was Mao’s slogan which, of course, Mao didn’t follow. So, I’ve always been in favour, while pushing naturalism, for it having to exist in a dialectic with people who are not naturalists, in order to make progress. I don’t think it’s healthy that people should be cocooned from their opponents.
JR: I see. Well, moving on, you just said that you don’t like superlatives. Might I still dare to ask if there is any philosopher whom you’d consider naming as your most worthy opponent?
MD: I’m not going to do it. I mean, I’ve been opposed to some enormously important philosophers, like Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century. He made these enormously important contributions to the theory of language, generative linguistics. I disagreed with him, not about the idea that generative linguistics is the way to go, but the sort of metatheory he had behind it, which was that a grammar is all about the mind – not about a system of representations that exists outside the mind like I think.8Noam Chomsky is famous, among other things, for being for one of the founders of generative grammar theory, which displaced the previously popular behaviorist views about language. According to Chomsky, language is not only based on biology, but in a sense biology itself is linguistic, and language exists in the brain. Devitt has criticized this view by claiming that we shouldn’t confuse linguistic competence, which does require a brain, with language itself, which exists primarily outside individual minds.
I also argued at great length against Michael Dummett, who seemed to me obviously to be an extraordinarily smart and able philosopher who had terrific influence. Far too big an influence in my view because I basically thought his views wrongheaded, but I still have a great admiration for the seriousness of his work, the simple intellectual force with which he presented his views. Before the interview began you mentioned Davidson. I don’t have the same sort of admiration for Davidson as for Dummett.
There are a lot of people I took things from while disagreeing with them. I used to regard myself as in a way being a sort of Gricean, even though I did not go with certain important thoughts of his.
And then there’s my old teacher, Hilary Putnam. Well, there were actually many Putnams. The Putnam of my youth was a really important figure for me when I was at Harvard. He didn’t make me into a realist. I’m a Sydney boy, you know; we’re realists. Brutal realists. So, I was already a realist when I met Putnam. I hadn’t even thought about realism so much because it had always seemed so obviously true and I was worrying about more important things like epistemology and semantics and so on. I wasn’t worrying about it at Harvard, either, when Hilary was famous for his arguments to do with realism, including mathematical realism, and I was very impressed with his arguments like the inference to the best explanation for scientific realism.
It is really true to say that it was Putnam who converted me thoroughly to naturalism. It wasn’t that I wasn’t a naturalist before; I was a bit at sea. You see, I was brought up like everyone else those days, surrounded by a priorism. I mean, that’s what philosophy was. There was the Wittgensteinian a priorism, the ordinary language philosophy a priorism, the positivist a priorism… The whole history of philosophy. And so, I was sitting in an undergraduate class where Putnam was talking about epistemology and the history of philosophy from Descartes onwards. He was a wonderful teacher. And then, in a few deft strokes, after presenting what the French call the sceptical problematic, he solved it by presenting Quine, basically. I mean, I’d read Quine at Sydney, but I’d always been focused on the language stuff, and hadn’t really absorbed his naturalistic picture. When Putnam presented it, it was like a road to Damascus experience for me. Everything fell into place, I can remember.
Then, what happens in the mid 1970’s? Suddenly, Putnam goes anti-realist, abandons left-wing politics, and becomes religious all in a few weeks. It was a terrific shock to me, and I spent a lot of time, probably more time than I have spent on anyone else, arguing against Putnam’s new stuff; I was antithetical to what we might call the middle-Putnam. To give an idea of how opposed I was to what was happening then – you probably couldn’t pull this off these days – I published two critical notices9Michael Devitt, Critical Notice of Meaning and the Moral Sciences by Hilary Putnam. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 58 (1980), 395–404; Realism and the Renegade Putnam: a Critical Study of Meaning and the Moral Sciences by Hilary Putnam. Nous 17 (1983), 291–301. of Putnam’s book Meaning and the Moral Sciences (1978)10Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences. Routledge, London 1978.. I was appalled by what was in that book. Not just by the anti-realism, but also the terrible mess that was made of what realism was. It just seemed to me to be spreading confusion around. I was absolutely, terribly bothered by what had happened to Hilary. A lovely man, but not reliable in keeping his views. Surely a worthy foe if there ever was one.
Quine, of course, is an interesting case. Like I said, thanks to Hilary I went and read Quine very carefully, and did my dissertation with Quine. But I don’t agree, as many people don’t, with his behaviourism about the mind or his deflationary view of meaning and reference.
Friendship with Kripke
JR: Moving on to the end of the interview, I was hoping you might shed some light on Saul Kripke, from whom you’ve not only gathered inspiration for your work but whom you also knew as a friend. For example, there is a nice anecdote that I learned from Panu related to what you have called ”the shocking idea about meaning”. Briefly, the idea is that at least for some theoretical purposes, the notion of Fregean sense could be identified with a certain non-descriptive, causal-historical mode of presentation of a term’s referent.11One of Kripke’s most famous ideas is that the meaning and reference of a proper name is not determined by an associated description, but rather by a causal-historical chain of borrowing the name from other speakers, some of whom down the chain have been in contact with the referent. Devitt has argued that it is possible to understand the meaning of the name as constituted by such a chain. Many have considered this idea shocking, and that’s how Devitt has named it in his published works. Now, in the 1972 version of Naming and Necessity, Kripke had a footnote which Panu brought to my attention. The footnote goes like this: ”Hartry Field has proposed that, for some of the purposes of Frege’s theory, his notion of sense should be replaced by the chain which determines reference.”12Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity. In Semantics of Natural Language. Ed. Donald Davidson & Gilbert Harman. Reidel, Dordrecht 1972, 253–355 (346n22).
This footnote, however, is missing from the 1980 book edition. Panu reports that: ”At the 2013 Buenos Aires workshop (where both Devitt and I were present), Kripke explained that he had deleted the note simply because someone had informed him that he should have credited the idea to Devitt and not to Field.”13Panu Raatikainen, Theories of reference: what was the question? In Language and reality from a naturalistic perspective: Themes from Michael Devitt. Ed. Andrea Bianchi. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020. 69–103 (99n65).
I always thought this anecdote gives sort of an odd picture about Kripke. Could you elaborate the context here?
MD: I don’t know why you think it gives an odd picture about Kripke. Actually, there is a lot in this. First of all, notice that it is Panu who had to point this out. You’d think that I’d know about Kripke’s stuff, having thought about it from the 1960’s onwards, yet that footnote had never registered with me. But Panu is so much a better scholar than I am, so he drew my attention to it as well.
So, Saul said that. First, let me be clear about my view on the ”shocking idea”. I think the meaning of every expression – barring perhaps some syncategorematic expressions14Syncategorematic expressions include words such as ”and”, ”or”, ”if” and ”because”. They are used to connect sentences together. – should be understood as the mode of presentation of the reference. In the traditional Fregean view, the mode was descriptive. Sometimes it may indeed be. But what I think we should learn from Kripke is that the mode is not descriptive for many terms, like proper names. So, if Kripke’s ideas about borrowing are right, then the meaning for these terms is a certain type of causal chain. Something like that has got to be right. We can’t simply suppose that the meaning is the reference, because then we’re unable to explain a whole lot of things, most strikingly the informativeness of identity statements, the truth of negative singular existence statements and so on. We can’t explain them with direct reference. We’ve got to have something richer as the meaning than reference, and Frege got it right – it’s the way the reference is presented. When that isn’t descriptive, it has to be something else, and it seems to me that at least sometimes the something else has to be the causal way. That will do the job that Frege rightly thought the sense, or meaning, has to do.15Frege noticed that two different names, though they refer to the same person, can have different ”meaning” in the sense that someone might not know that one name (e.g. ”Robert Zimmerman”) refers to the same as the other (”Bob Dylan”). Frege then thought that the difference in meaning must correspond to some difference in the descriptions associated with the names. Since Kripke’s criticism of this view in Naming and Necessity, Devitt urged the ”shocking idea” that the mode of presentation of the name can be non-descriptive, which is in opposition to so-called ”direct reference” theories, according to which the meaning of a proper name just is the referent. Such views have problems explaining the apparent meaningfulness of empty names and the apparent truth of negative existential statements.
So, who came up with the shocking idea? Well, I’d been urging it for forever from my dissertation onwards. The question of who originally came up with it has always been sort of uninteresting to me. Hartry and I, from the moment when we first sat in – we’d only been in Harvard for a week or so – Saul’s lectures in 1967, started talking about it. And we talked about it forever. We explored everything. So, God knows who first came up with the shocking idea.
The real truth about the shocking idea is that Saul said that I was the one who made a fuss about it. I don’t know if Hartry ever mentioned it at all except in conversations with me and Saul.
JR: So, if I get that right, the reason why Kripke omitted the footnote in the later version of Naming and Necessity is that he didn’t think much of the shocking idea?
MD: No, I think it is because he first attributed the idea to Hartry, then came to think it wasn’t Hartry’s idea. I mean, Saul hated to say anything that wasn’t right. He was obsessive about saying only things which he was certain were true. That isn’t to say it isn’t true that Hartry came up with the shocking idea; like I said, Hartry and I talked so much, I don’t know who really came up with it.
The shocking idea itself wasn’t so shocking to Saul, I think. That doesn’t mean he embraced it. But if you know the history of direct reference, you know that people influenced by Saul, notably Nathan Salmon and Scott Soames, went down this direct reference route in which the meaning of a proper name is simply its referent. The history of this idea is really weird, because many people attribute it to Saul. (For anyone who’s interested in this, I tell the history in the book.) But Saul never embraced that view. And neither did he embrace my view. He sat on the fence. And no one could get him off the fence. As you said, I was friendly with Saul, and I would tease him quite a lot. I remember one conference in the CUNY Graduate Center, sometime in 2005 or 2006, when we were all gathered in honour of Saul. Nathan was there, Scott was there, and I was up on the podium talking about something I don’t remember, and Saul was sitting there too. I said to Saul in front of everyone: “So, you’ve heard Scott, Nathan, and me. Now it’s your turn: time to get off the fence.” No response. So, no one knows where Saul stood on this.
PR: I’d like to add that I recall a discussion with Saul where he insisted that he definitely didn’t believe in direct reference in Naming and Necessity. He admitted he came at least quite close to it in the late 1970’s, but my impression is that he regretted that phase. The problem with Saul was that if he wasn’t absolutely confident that this is the way something is, if he was even a little bit uncertain, he didn’t say it.
MD: Panu is speaking words of wisdom here. If Saul wasn’t absolutely confident, he wouldn’t say his view. He was mortified at the thought of ever saying something false. He was obsessive about this. Do you want to hear a personal anecdote?
JR: Please!
MD: Saul didn’t do a great deal of travelling, but he did do a little bit, of course. And when you travel around the world, you often get presented with various forms. For example, it at least used to be that, when returning to America you have to fill in a form, and you have to say a whole lot of things about what you have and have not done. It would take Saul hours! Because he would think about every section. ”Have I been near a farm or not?” and things like that. ”Well, I did go about half a mile away from one… But on the other hand…” And so on for every single question. He just couldn’t bear to say anything false, even on those silly forms.
JR: Well, that sort of answers my second question, which was why Kripke never developed a rigorous theory of language, meaning and reference based on the many ideas he had. Instead, it was left to you, among others, to build a theory out of the ”better picture” which Kripke presented. Kripke himself says in Naming and Necessity that he was ”sort of too lazy” to do it16Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (MA) 1980 (93)..
MD: That’s just a joke though. One thing Saul wasn’t, was lazy. I mean, he was thinking all the time; it was a chronic condition which prevented him from sleeping.
If you want to explore this more, you might wonder what’s the sort of personal difference between me and Saul that left me to develop the better picture into a theory, as you said. A key thing, and we’ve already touched on this, is naturalism. Now, Saul was never a naturalist. He didn’t approve of naturalism. I already said that he wasn’t shocked by my shocking idea, but he was shocked by my naturalism. And he made this very clear on many occasions. For example, I published a textbook on philosophy of language.17Michael Devitt & Kim Sterelny, Language and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language. Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1987. You might’ve thought that Saul would really love this textbook because it’s a sort of ”hooray for Saul!” for many chapters. It’s a setting-out of the Kripkean revolution in the theory of reference in a very supportive way. But Kim and I also had to confront the awful problem of writing a textbook in the philosophy of language, and we thought right from the beginning that there was no way we could write, as it were, a neutral book. We were just going to present the philosophy of language from a naturalistic perspective, as we say in the beginning. Even the blurb on the back says this.
Saul was outraged at this. He complained about it to me – you couldn’t mention the textbook without him going ”You even say it in the blurb it’s not neutral. This is not a textbook!” He was so funny. You didn’t want to have a thin skin if you dealt with Saul.
There were only two comments that I ever got from him on the book. I never got a thanks from him for presenting the revolution, but he did criticise the naturalism. So far as I know, there was only one bit of critical stuff on Saul in the book, and that was the discussion on ”Kripkenstein”. He did not like that at all. And he would always come to that, too. ”You say I don’t have an argument?” He’s a riot; I do miss him a lot.18The term ’Kripkenstein’ refers to Kripke’s ideas based on the thoughts of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1982 Kripke published a book on Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Harvard University Press) which is rivalled in fame only by Naming and Necessity. In the book, Kripke attributed a sceptical challenge about meaning to Wittgenstein. The textbook by Devitt and Sterelny discusses the challenge briefly and somewhat dismissively.
JR: Was Kripke’s opposition to naturalism part of his general unwillingness to commit to a view he was uncertain about or was it something more specific?
MD: I don’t know. I mean, that’s a very deep question. Why do so many philosophers have anti-naturalist positions? We know the consequences of this: they believe in the a priori; Saul said he believed in the a priori.
JR: Really?
MD: Oh God, yes. Oh yes.
PR: He even believed in contingent a priori.19A priori knowledge means knowledge not based on empirical knowledge. Prior to Naming and Necessity¸ it was common to think that if something is known a priori, it must be necessary, and that if something is necessary, it must be knowable a priori. Kripke criticized this connection between necessity and a priori and introduced, for the first time in the history of philosophy, the notions of contingent a priori and necessary a posteriori.
MD: We naturalists are really a minority. So, if you ask why Saul wasn’t, you need to ask that about humans in general. The whole history of philosophy seems to me to demonstrate a tension between naturalistic approaches and a priori approaches. Right the way through you see both. You see science being brought into philosophy and then philosophers going off and doing their own thing. My favourite example of this is John Locke. See his discussion of realism. It’s just a wonderful interplay between good empirical science and old a priori philosophy. And I think this ran right through philosophy until Quine. I mean, there were always naturalistic elements and a priori elements. One of the many contributions that Quine made was to make this stark and clear, because he laid down, with his vivid metaphors, what philosophy should be. It made so well the distinction that needed to be made. I think the whole subject moved forward just by being clear about this.
I hope you don’t think this is terribly rude, but I think that if we could understand the appeal of religion, we might understand the appeal of the a priori. Do you think that’s a bit overboard, Panu?
PR: You are famous for your shocking ideas.
* * *
JR: One last question, again a personal one. Are there any research topics that you’ve wanted to pursue but haven’t found the time to? Any blind spots?
MD: I like that question. I think one of the great things about philosophy is that there’s no end to interesting topics. There are lots. There’s virtually no broad area of philosophy (except the philosophy of religion) which I don’t find interesting. Let me just take one that I’ve never done anything in. I have done a very small amount of work in moral philosophy – I wrote a paper on moral realism20Michael Devitt, Moral Realism: A Naturalistic Perspective. Croatian Journal of Philosophy 4 (2002), 1–15. – but I’ve never done anything in aesthetics. And this doesn’t mean I don’t think that is interesting.
When I was in Maryland, I got roped at once into being on a committee for a student writing her dissertation in aesthetics. Actually, I can remember her name: Monique Roelofs. Monique’s dissertation, I thought, was fascinating. Really insightful. I got quite engaged with the issues: ”Gee, I’d love to work on this.” But I’ve never done it. That’s just one example. You just never run out of topics.
JR: That is a sentiment easy to agree with. Thank you for the interview, Professor Devitt.
