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What Does Originalism Have to Do with Philosophy of Mathematics?
Ewald, William
Ewald, William
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Abstract
Towards the beginning of chapter nine of Against Constitutional Originalism, Jonathan Gienapp makes the following observation about originalists’ use of philosophy: A growing stable of originalists are especially convinced that making sense of the Constitution is just a matter of figuring out language. For them, originalism has much more to do with understanding the
philosophy of language and linguistics or the relationship between things like semantics and pragmatics, sense and reference, communicative meaning and communicative intent, and explicature and implicature than it does with 18th-century constitutional history. They seem confident they can circumvent most of what happened or was said at the Founding through linguistic theory.
Gienapp elaborates on his criticism in two lengthy footnotes earlier in his book. He dismisses much of the philosophical theory deployed in the originalist literature, essentially for two reasons: first, it does not address the problem of conceptual change across historical time; secondly, it does not help reconstruct the constitutional practices of the founding. The relevance of these considerations to his own historical work should be clear. In The Second Creation, he faced three interlocking problems: to explain how the founding generation thought about constitutions, to make clear that its ways of thinking were very different from our own, and to explain how those differences arose historically.3 He recommends looking for assistance to a different group of philosophers, namely, the later Wittgenstein, Quine, and several thinkers Quine influenced (such as Kuhn, Davidson, Sellars, and Brandom).
That analysis seems to me correct, and I wish to elaborate on it. There is much to be learned from the philosophers Gienapp mentions, and I wish here to exploit a parallel between two topics in intellectual history that at first glance appear to have nothing to do with one another: the origins of first-order logic and the origins of the Electors Clause of the Constitution. It would be a mistake to expect such a juxtaposition to solve difficult problems of constitutional history. The most that can be hoped for is some clarification of what is involved and of the ways in which certain kinds of historical inquiry can go wrong.