Person-centred attitudes and the analytic tradition: what should philosophy learn from therapy?

The Analytic Tradition in Western Philosophy has been unable to adequately deal with three important types of paradox: (1) Open Question paradoxes, (2) Goodman/Kripke Rule/Meaning paradoxes, and (3) ‘Moorean’ indexical substitution paradoxes. In this paper, I will outline these paradoxes and show how the difficulties they present are a consequence of a mistaken conviction that objectivity and proof are grounded in an impersonal, or ‘third person,’ perspective. I will argue that the first/second person context of our immediate conversation (the one you and I are having nowFootnote1) is the only intelligible ground of objective reasoning, and that person-centered attitudes play an essential role in that grounding. I will show that a recursive approach grounded in the ‘reliability’ of our present conversation allows us to circumvent the epistemological catastrophe they entail, and that the ‘Principle of Charity’ we apply when we treat each other as honest and competent interlocutors is strongly related to Carl Rogers’ core conditions.