What makes a date a date?

It is clear that the analytic philosophical community is failing to provide some of the basic services that the public has a right to expect from its local philosophical experts. Take the area of conceptual analysis, for example. Contemporary analytic philosophy will furnish one with countless attempts to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the concepts of cause, necessity, or knowledge.* But what of the concepts that really matter to us in our everyday lives?

For instance, consider the concept of a date. Surely this is one place where we face issues of conceptual analysis on a daily basis. "Was meeting for drinks last night a date?" "Did he just ask me out?" "I can't believe that he told you it was a date, but maybe it was?" Clearly these are questions we face all the time. And our confusion about them often involves a certain degree of confusion about just what should count as a date in the first place.

Here, then, is that rare creature: a case in which the methods of analytic philosophy are directly relevant to the problems that we all face in everyday life. So one might have thought that we would find analytic philosophers falling over themselves to offer accounts of datehood and to refute competing accounts of what makes a meeting a date. But so far as I can see, the analytic philosophical literature is shockingly silent on this issue.**

I don't intend here to fill this gap - for surely these issues are too serious to be dealt with in a blog-post. But, with the reader's permission, I will make some initial comments on the difficulties philosophers are likely to encounter in this area:

(1) It is clearly insufficient to make a meeting a date that both parties involved have romantic or sexual feelings for one another. Nor is it sufficient that both parties know of these feelings. For surely a sexually charged friendship does not consist of a series of dates.

(2) Moreover, it is clearly insufficient to make a meeting a date that both parties want it to be a date. Nor it is sufficient that these desires are common knowledge between the parties. For, even in the face of such common knowledge, it is plainly possible for these desires to be frustrated.

(3) What, then, of cases in which both parties believe a meeting to be a date? Plainly this is not a necessary condition on a meeting being a date - for it is surely possible to discover that one has been on a date only after the fact. But is it even a sufficient condition? Not necessarily. For we may both believe that some meeting is a date because we also believe that it satisfies some condition that it does not in fact satisfy. In such cases, it seems natural to say that although we both thought our meeting was a date, we were both mistaken.

(4) A more plausible condition on datehood, I would suggest, is teleological in character. For thinking of something as a date does involve thinking of it as having a certain aim - or, in other words, it involves thinking of it as having certain success conditions. For instance, when I think of a meeting with someone as a date, I think of this meeting as having as its aim further romantic or sexual interactions with that person of some sort. And, no matter how much fun a date might be on its own, if it fails to produce further interactions of this sort - whether on the night in question or in the future - there is an important sense in which it may be regarded as a failure.

I’m not sure this is correct, but it seems a more promising line of thought than those noted above. As such, it might provide us with the beginnings of a philosophical account of the essence of dating. But surely it is only a beginning.

* Not that any of these are worth a damn, of course.

** This, I take it, is one reason for the relative popularity of continental philosophy among a certain demographic. Whatever their faults, continental philosophers are certainly not afraid to address the issues I am discussing here.