When I used to teach students about Descartes and the Scientific Revolution, I would distinguish between the scientific dimension of the revolution â i.e. the revolution in physics â and its epistemic dimension, by which I mean its rejection of an epistemology grounded in the authority of great traditions, institutions, and texts, in favor of one grounded in the faculties of the individual human mind and particularly, perception and reason. Descartes is quite explicit about this in the Discourse on Method, employing both arguments and metaphors to make the case that both as individuals and as a civilization, we must critically examine our intellectual inheritance if we are to ever have confidence that we are in possession of the truth, in science or elsewhere.
Descartesâ focus was primarily on science and on providing it with epistemically sufficient foundations and a sound method by which to proceed from them, but as I would explain to my classes, in the century after Descartes this epistemic revolution was exported from the scientific context to the moral and political arenas, resulting in what is commonly known as âthe Enlightenment.â As one would expect, what followed was a sea change in both areas, for just as an authority-based epistemology quite naturally supports aristocratic politics and divine command morality, a (small ârâ) rationalistic approach to knowledge tends to support liberal, democratic political ideas and deontological and consequentialist ethical ones.
It is in this context that I would take up Kantâs essay with my students. It begins as follows:
Enlightenment is manâs emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use oneâs own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!
This strong opening would give me the opportunity to extend the discussion beyond philosophy and into our personal lives. While Kantâs point is meant to be applied to whole civilizations, it resonates at the level of the individual as well. Indeed, one can think of the processes by which a civilization matures and by which a child comes into his or her own maturity as parallel, along the axis set up by Kant and by Descartes, whose Meditations, written in an intimate first person, also provide an opportunity to personalize the relevant message. Civilizational and individual maturity both involve the adoption of a critical attitude towards our intellectual and sociopolitical inheritance, which not only is the means by which we develop ideas and practices that are genuinely our own, but is the way in which we become autonomous and capable of self-governance.
Kant maintains that in the modern era, when we refuse to accept epistemic authority and reject self-governance, the reasons, typically, are laziness and cowardice.
It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me.
He also makes it clear that his case should not be confused with the advocacy of a kind of knee-jerk defiance. The soldier shouldnât disobey his commanding officerâs order to attack the enemy, and the clergyman, while conducting services, oughtnât express his opposition to the practices of his religion. Accepting external authority in such circumstances is entirely consistent with the idea of epistemic independence and self-governance since the soldier, when in the voting booth, can vote for candidates who will cease his countryâs war-making, and the clergyman, when engaged in scholarship, can make his case for reforming the faith. As autonomous, individual people, considered separately from our official roles and professional functions, we retain ultimate epistemic authority and have both a right and a duty to question and challenge. In an age of enlightenment â in a modern age â there can be no unquestionable dogmas and no incontrovertible practices.
Kant directly relates the imperative to self-governance to social and political freedom, and I would explain to students that he makes a parallel connection between metaphysical freedom and morality, the only action having any moral worth being that which comes from a free and rational will. It is Kantâs view that this epistemic authority and the self-governance that follows from it reflects the fundamental, intrinsic value of the individual; indeed, that it is from the individual that all authority and value ultimately flow. This represents a powerful, secular way of articulating fundamental human rights and grounding morality, and it is worth noting that twice in the essay, Kant says in the strongest possible terms that to deny human beings the capacity to critically examine and judge the beliefs and practice under which they live, is to violate their most fundamental rights.
One age cannot enter into an alliance on oath to put the next age in a position where it would be impossible for it to extend and correct its knowledge, particularly on such important matters⌠This would be a crime against human natureâŚ
[I]t is absolutely impermissible to agree, even for a single lifetime, to a permanent religious constitution which no-one might publicly question. For this would virtually nullify a phase in manâs upward progress⌠[T]o renounce such enlightenment completely ⌠means violating and trampling underfoot those sacred rights of mankind.
With some notable exceptions, philosophers claim to eschew rhetoric; those uses of language whose aim is not to persuade by means of appeal to a personâs rational consciousness but by way of the sensibility and emotions. The arguments are what should count, we say, and we should follow them wherever they lead. This is supposed to be a part of our unwavering commitment to Truth and Justice, which overrides our personal preferences, allegiances, and causes.
That this is self-serving fiction is not something I am going to try to convince anyone of. There are more than enough instances of philosophers publicly displaying their partisanship, ideological motivations, and political capture to demonstrate this to anyone capable of being convinced. That it is a pointless aim, representing an overestimation of the conclusiveness and force of arguments, is also something I wonât take up here, as Iâve addressed it on multiple occasions including in my recent essay, the âDiscourse Delusion.â
My subject, rather, is the actual rhetoric philosophers use â such as it is. If you want to understand why we command so little social or cultural authority or respect today, part of the reason is that (a) our views are often unpopular; (b) our arguments are almost always tendentious; and (c) and our rhetoric is godawful.
One particularly awful thing we do is deploy the rhetoric we use inside the profession â a kind of performative hyperbole whose aim is to achieve discursive dominance â in our interactions outside of it. We announce that we are âastonished,â âbewildered,â âaghast,â âstunned,â âperplexed,â and the like, and when in person â at conferences or colloquia or other public events â we supplement these verbal ejaculations with eyerolls, gasps, frustrated fidgeting, exaggerated head scratching, and every other mode of visually conveying distress. (During one colloquium at the CUNY Graduate Center, back in the 1990âs, I watched Jerry Fodor exhibit how much torment one person could express while sitting in a chair.) These sorts of performances have long been a feature of philosophical rhetoric, going back at least as far as G.E. Moore and the Bloomsbury Group, as Alasdair Macintyre recounted in After Virtue:
[A]s Keynes tells us, what was really happening was something quite other: âIn practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility’ and Keynes goes on to describe the effectiveness of Moore’s gasps of incredulity and head-shaking, of Strachey’s grim silences and of Lowes Dickinson’s shrugs⌠An acute observer at the time⌠might well have put matters thus: these people take themselves to be identifying the presence of a non-natural property, which they call âgoodâ; but there is in fact no such property and they are doing no more and no other than expressing their feelings and attitudes, disguising the expression of preference and whim by an interpretation of their own utterance and behavior which confers upon it an objectivity that it does not in fact possess.
Why this sort of thing has ever been effective with those whose charge is to engage in deep and critical thinking is a mystery, but it is more popular today than ever, and philosophers employ it not just against one another, within the confines of the Academy, but out in public and especially on social media platforms. Of course, hyperbole is rampant in these places too, but the philosophical version comes across as twee and disingenuous, and I can imagine Joe Public thinking: Really, Dr. Genius? Youâre âaghastâ that people eat hamburgers? âBewilderedâ that everyone hasnât become a socialist? âAstonishedâ that bloody atrocities provoke ferocious responses? Spare me, please.
Hyperbolic speeches and performances are only effective when the people you are engaging with are as ginned up as you over whatever it is youâre going on about, and most people are not as ginned up about the things philosophers are going on about as the philosophers are. The average person isnât losing sleep over what some stranger had for lunch or being driven to apoplexy over the fact that people in other countries, thousands of miles away, fight with and kill one another (inasmuch as this is always the case), or rending his or her garments over the fact that people like having money and enjoy material luxuries. (That people may be reasonably concerned about such things is an entirely different matter.) Outside of the Academy, then, the philosopherâs histrionics are more likely to annoy than to persuade. The people we might encounter on the internet or pass on the street are unfamiliar with our dominance rituals, which means that the gasps and groans and gestures and cries come across as grownups acting out (and acting badly), rather than the deliberate, peacockish performances they are. Itâs not good for philosophy that the apt response to so much of our public engagement is: âgrow the f*#k up.â
Things donât improve when we switch from the accusatory mode to our favorite alternative: smarmy, backhanded ingratiation. Responding to our interlocutorsâ objections with, âGood, good, good!â while nodding vigorously, thereby cultivating the impression that we are talking to some insecure freshman; starting off what one knows will be a tense exchange with a chirpy, âHi [insert first name]!â and continuing to do this with every reply over the course of the conversation, even as one shifts to berating and insult; referring to a loathed opponent as âmy good friend,â while endeavoring to eviscerate him in front of an audience; all are transparent and duplicitous; all are juvenile; and all contribute to the unflattering public image of philosophy and philosophers.
We also have made the mistake of adopting social-media born expressions and mannerisms in our public and professional interactions. Prefacing a controversial proposition with âfun factâ; interjecting an insincere consideration of evidence with âchecks notes”; asking people to âImagine ɸ-ing,â where ɸ is something you may think is appalling, but about which many if not most people are relatively unperturbed; this kind of snark is barely tolerable when coming from a sixteen year old, but when employed by highly educated, adult philosophers regarding things that we have deemed Matters of Great Importance, it makes us seem unserious â to one another and to everyone else.
Both the academic and vulgar uses of these kinds of rhetoric rest on the idea that one can create the reality one prefers merely through the use of words and gestures: that a minority view can become a majority one by calling it a âfun factâ; that a perfectly reasonable position can be made ludicrous by gasping or making faces; or that something most people are fine with â or at least, willing to tolerate â can be made beyond the pale by gesturing at some moral theory or other and pronouncing the thing âimpermissible.â In this regard, our rhetoric very much follows the logic of marketing and advertising in the commercial and political arenas, where creating hitherto non-existing realities â customers from non-customers, political supporters from non-political supporters â is the entire point. There is, however, one key difference: corporations and politicians spend enormous sums of money to hire people who have expertise in the area of human motivation and behavior in the relevant arenas (in these cases, the marketplace and the polity) and employ sophisticated techniques involving both overt and covert forms of manipulation to achieve their desired results. Philosophers just behave like a bunch of excitable teenagers, without a secondâs thought as to what might actually persuade other people to see or do things our way. And given how little is at stake â unlike in the area of commerce or politics, where successful persuasion translates into profits or electoral and legislative victories, nobody really cares about what philosophers think or do (aside from other philosophers) â this state of affairs is unsurprising though perhaps, lamentable.
The rise of modern physics and biology yielded a picture of the world that had many philosophers thinking: âEverything is made of the same stuff and operates under the same principles.â Where human beings once had been thought to occupy a separate ontological category, due to our minds and capacity for thought (which led Descartes to declare a âdualism of mind and bodyâ), the discovery of our primate origins and advances in our understanding of neurology and the brain undermined this idea, notwithstanding the cultural and political pushback against evolutionary biology which culminated in the (in)famous Scopes Trial.
In philosophy, this new way of thinking was expressed through the idea of the âunity of the sciences.â If everything ultimately was made of the same stuff (atoms and subatomic particles) and governed by a common set of scientific laws (however one construed them), then we should expect to converge upon a single, unified explanation of the world: the macro will be explained in terms of the micro; the organic in terms of the inorganic; and the social in terms of the psychological, biological, and finally, the physical.
âReductionismâ represented a formalization of this idea. Laws of âhigher levelâ sciences (sociology; economics; political science; psychology; etc.) would be demonstrated as being âequivalentâ (however one construed this) to laws belonging to âlower levelâ sciences (biology; chemistry), culminating in laws of physics. Without getting into the weeds (I discussed it in some detail here), intertheoretic reduction was supposed to be accomplished by way of âbridge lawsâ which âreducedâ the laws of a higher-level science to those of a lower level one, and this required that the âkindsâ of each higher-level science be âequivalentâ (again, however one construed this) to those of the lower-level ones and ultimately to the kinds one finds in physics.
Jerry Fodor burst this aspirational bubble in 1974, with the publication of his paper, âSpecial Sciences (Or: the Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis).â He observed that the relevant kind-equivalencies could never be established because the kinds one finds in higher-level or âspecialâ sciences are multiply-realizable. To take just one example, currency — a kind in economics — can be ârealizedâ in paper, metals, gemstones, electronic signals, etc., and the long, diverse disjunction of material kinds this involves — âpaper or metals or gemstones or electronic signalsâ — is not identical with or equivalent to any kind that one might find in a lower-level science, and certainly not in physics. Where metaphysical unity goes, explanatory unity follows, since where there can be no reduction of kinds there can be no reduction of laws, and where there is no reduction of laws, there is no reduction — and thus, no unity — of explanation.
Fodorâs critique was directed towards a specific version of the reductionist thesis, and as one might expect, resistance came in the form of philosophers proposing one variation or another that purported to get around the objections. Some denied the necessity of bridge laws or reconstrued them in such a way as to avoid Fodorâs critique. Others advanced non-reductive versions of Materialism. Regardless, it all quickly descended into a fog of endless variations and backs-and-forths (as philosophical disputes are wont to do), until the forest was lost for the trees. As a result, the expectation that metaphysical monism and explanatory unity would prevail largely remained intact, albeit more vaguely and tacitly. What not enough philosophers realized, however, is that the Unity Project had already been dismantled a decade before Fodorâs âSpecial Sciencesâ and in much more general terms that did not depend on any particular version of Reductionism; specifically, by Wilfrid Sellars, in his paper, âPhilosophy and the Scientific Image of Manâ (PSIM) (1963).
Iâve already gone into some detail on PSIM, so a sketch will suffice. Sellars describes two fundamental âImagesâ (i.e. pictures; conceptions) of âman-in-the worldâ: the âscientificâ and the âmanifest.â The Scientific Image describes the world in entirely quantitative terms, in which we figure purely as organisms, while the Manifest Image describes the world in both quantitative and qualitative terms, in which we also figure as persons with aims and ends and points of view and all the things that follow. At the center of the Manifest Image are people and the social institutions, spaces, and forms of life that we create and which are defined by individual and collective goals that are only articulable in terms of values and ends. This means that while explanations in the Scientific Image are rigorously and exclusively causal, any account of the goings-on of people and institutions in the Manifest Image are going to be teleological and axiological. As Sellars puts it:
[T]he conceptual framework of persons is the framework in which we think of one another as sharing the community intentions which provide the ambience of principles and standards (above all, those which make meaningful discourse and rationality itself possible) within which we live our own individual lives.
To think of a featherless biped as a person is to think of it as a being with which one is bound up in a network of rights and duties. From this point of view, the irreducibility of the personal is the irreducibility of the ‘ought’ to the ‘is’.
That values and purposes cannot be reduced to facts and causes is well-understood, and modern science has long excluded teleology from its explanatory frameworks, with the biological treated as teleonomic rather than genuinely purposeful. In contrast, the teleological is not separable from the personal or the social, but rather, fundamental to them. One can give an account of the heart or the liver entirely in terms of physiology and evolutionary theory, without ascribing literal purposes to these organs, but for any credible account of peopleâs actions or social institutions, values and ends are basic, unavoidable, and irreplaceable. Indeed, at one point in the paper, Sellars warns against the sort of âpiecemealâ reductions of bits of the Manifest Image to the Scientific Image that are so common in analytic philosophy; in formulas like: âThe mind is the brainâ or âmental states are neurological states.â
Given the irreducibility of the social to the physical, of values to facts, and of purposes to causes, we have essentially two choices. We can double down on the Unity Project and insist that the social, axiological, and teleological donât exist or are âillusionsâ or some other such thing, a category of response known as âEliminativism,â or we can accept a fundamental disunity in explanation and âbeingâ and embrace metaphysical and explanatory pluralism.
Though the interpretation of Sellarsâ paper is fraught and has resulted in warring camps — he is claimed as an inspiration by eliminativists and pluralists alike — I am firmly on the pluralistsâ side, taking my lead both from this line from PSIMâs final paragraphs — â[T]he conceptual framework of persons is not something that needs to be reconciled with the scientific image, but rather something to be joined to itâ — and from Sellarsâ invocation of stereoscopes, several pages earlier:
[T]he most fruitful way of approaching the problem of integrating theoretical science with the framework of sophisticated common sense into one comprehensive synoptic vision is to view it not as a piecemeal taskâe.g. first a fitting together of the common sense conception of physical objects with that of theoretical physics, and then, as a separate venture, a fitting together of the common sense conception of man with that of theoretical psychologyâbut rather as a matter of articulating two whole ways of seeing the sum of things, two images of man-in-the-world and attempting to bring them together in a ‘stereoscopic’ view.
A stereoscope is a device in which two separate images are combined to form a single one, and the idea here is that a complete picture of the world can only be accomplished by combining its elements, since they cannot be assimilated to one another. It seems unlikely, then, that Sellars was an eliminativist or that his view is sympathetic to Eliminativism. The eliminativist âsolvesâ the alleged problem of the irreducibility of the Manifest Image by simply deleting it, which leaves nothing to reconcile. By introducing the metaphor of the stereoscope and by maintaining that a complete picture of the world can only be one in which the Scientific and Manifest Images are brought together, it is clear that Sellars thought absurd the suggestion that the social universe and everything in it doesnât exist — that there are in fact no persons, states, laws, economies, goods, bads, rights, wrongs, etc. — and believed that one cannot have knowledge of the world, when entire categories of things that demonstrably exist are left out.
The pluralist view doesnât require us to deny any part of the world and only becomes more compelling when one realizes that philosophersâ resistance to it depends entirely on uniquely philosophical hang-ups: that pluralism drives us to Dualism or Platonism or other such metaphysical extravagances, because otherwise, we canât make sense of what minds and thoughts and countries and parking regulations are âmade ofâ; that the fact that these sorts of things are not physical saddles us with âinteraction problemsâ (âHow do non-physical persons ride bicycles?â); that lacking unity of explanation, human knowledge is left with no âfoundationâ; etc.Â
Fortunately, these hang-ups have little credible basis — I exposed many of them for the thin stuff that they are, once again, here — and neednât (and mostly donât) trouble us. We can only hope that eventually, the philosophers will come around.
When it comes to philosophies of art â theories about what art is or what defines âartâ â I have distinguished between âtraditionalâ theories and what I call the âNew Wave.â The former, which includes Representationalism (art is âmimesisâ), Expressivism (art is the communication of emotions by way of media), and Formalism (artworks are things that have âsignificant formâ), define art in terms of its observable or manifest characteristics. But, then came the Avant Garde. If abstraction stripped art down to its most fundamental observable characteristics, meaning its formal properties, artists like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol went beyond the observable and presented ordinary objects as artworks: in Duchampâs case, an actual urinal (and in another instance, a snow shovel) and in Warholâs case, simulated Brillo Boxes, which were made and displayed so as to be indistinguishable from those one would find in a store.
These posed a problem for the philosophy of art. If the aim is to develop an account that distinguishes art from non-art, then what happens when one and the same thing can be an artwork on one occasion but not another? What distinguishes Duchampâs urinal, which is art, from another perceptually indistinguishable urinal that is not? In the business, this is known as the âProblem of Indiscernibles,â and it produced a crisis in 20th century philosophy of art; one strong enough to convince a generation of philosophers that âartâ could not be defined. These philosophers tended to be Wittgensteinians, who included âartâ alongside other concepts that seemed to defy analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and who were inclined towards âanti-essentialismâ in metaphysics more generally. In their view, whether or not something is art is a matter of whether it bears sufficient âfamily resemblancesâ to those things that are already deemed art; nothing more and nothing less.
It wasnât long, however, before people began to wonder whether this was all a bit hasty. After all, one can easily think of terms that cannot be defined with regard to the manifest or observed qualities of their referents, but which are definable nonetheless and require no foray into family-resemblances. Uncles, for example, may be fat, thin, tall, short, hirsute, bald, etc., but this doesnât mean that âuncleâ is undefinable or that whether or not someone is an uncle depends on whether he suitably resembles other uncles. This is because âuncleâ is defined relationally, in terms of being a male sibling of oneâs father or mother. Indeed, this was precisely the point Maurice Mandelbaum made in his 1965 paper, âFamily Resemblances and Generalizations Concerning the Arts,â and it led to a new crop of theories: the aforementioned âNew Wave.â
Rather than define art in terms of observable or manifest characteristics as traditional theories had done, these new accounts did so in terms of artworksâ relations: to institutions (the âInstitutional Theory of Artâ); to history (the âHistorical Theory of Artâ); or in Dantoâs case to interpretations, which effect what he calls âtransfigurations of the commonplaceâ (in his 1981 book of the same name). And it is this notion of transfiguration and the way in which Danto employs it that I think has a broader significance for metaphysics.
For Danto, what distinguishes the art-urinal from urinals that are not art is that the former is interpretable, while the others arenât. The same is true of Warholâs art-Brillo boxes versus the ones you find in the store. And in the case of two things that are artworks, but which are perceptually indiscernible, what makes one the artwork that it is and the other the artwork that it is are their respective (and distinct) interpretations. At the beginning of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Danto imagines an exhibition consisting entirely of perceptually indistinguishable red, square paintings. We are told that one is a still life â âRed Tableclothâ â another is a psychological portrait â âKierkegaardâs Moodâ â while a third is a âclever piece of Moscow landscape,â named (of course) âRed Square.â How perceptually identical things can have entirely different interpretations and the constraints on those interpretations are subjects that Danto takes up in Transfiguration of the Commonplace and also in its follow-up, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986). I have argued for metaphysical pluralism (in contrast with monism and dualism) on the grounds that our social ontologies (things like persons, institutions, and states) demand it, and it occurred to me that Dantoâs metaphysics of art points in the same direction and in a clarifying fashion. To see this, let’s take an example, the Florentine Pieta, by Michelangelo.
Michelangelo, The Deposition [aka the âFlorentine Pietaâ] (1547-1555)
Suppose I point to the right shoulder of Nicodemus, and say âthat is Nicodemusâ right shoulder,â which seems obviously true. Yet, the following is also true: âthat is a piece of marble.â And of course, âshoulders are not pieces of marbleâ is true as well. Now, this would seem to violate the law of noncontradiction, but Danto suggests that it is the result of a peculiarity in the logic of the âisâ of artistic identification. That logic is transfigurative, rather than indicating a simple identification, as âisâ does when used in other contexts.
âTransfigurationâ is supposed to be evocative of âtransubstantiationâ, which belongs to Catholic theology and refers to the turning of the wafer and wine into the body and blood of Christ during the Eucharist. Itâs not as if the wafer, upon blessing it, materially turns into one of Christâs arms or legs or the wine into a cup of blood. Ostensibly, they remain wafer and wine. Between them and unblessed wine and wafers of the same type, there are no perceptible differences. Nonetheless, they belong to entirely different ontological categories: the blessed wafer and wine are Christâs flesh and blood (in Catholic tradition, this is not understood as a metaphor), so they both are and are not Christâs flesh and blood; they both are and are not wafer and wine.
Danto wants (partly) to analogize the âisâ of artistic identification with the âisâ of transubstantiation, and he gives the effects of this âisâ the name âtransfigurationâ. Itâs not as if through Michelangeloâs efforts, the marble turned into a flesh, blood, and bone shoulder. Yet, it is a shoulder â Nicodemusâ shoulder â and this is not a metaphor, anymore than the claim that the entire statue is Nicodemus is a metaphor. And yet the shoulder â and the whole statue â is also a piece of marble. In the case of transubstantiation, the mechanism of transformation is God magic, while in the case of transfiguration, it is interpretation. It is because the whole is interpreted as Nicodemus that it is Nicodemus, and it is because of the place the part occupies in that whole that the part is Nicodemusâ shoulder. But whatever the mechanism of ontological change, what is important for our purposes is that it occurs without any alteration of substrate.
In myProlegomena for a Pluralist Metaphysics, I maintained that ontological commitment is not hypostatic; that to say âthere is a such-and-suchâ is not to say that such-and-such is a discrete object or substrate; that existence does not imply âthingness,â but has only to do with the truth-conditions of relevant statements. And we can see this very clearly in the case of artworks, as conceived by Danto. There are all sorts of things one can truthfully say about Fountain — or Brillo Box or The Deposition — as artworks that cannot be truthfully said about the urinals one finds in bathrooms, the Brillo pads one purchases in stores, or the hunks of marble one may find in quarries, regardless of what the latter may look like. And none of these truthful statements require that artworks be Forms or Fictional Objects or mereological sums of mental states or whatever other strange entities people think they must countenance in order to make sense of things existing that are not what philosophers call âmaterial objectsâ; i.e. tables, chairs, buildings, mountains, and the like.Â
For some, the idea that language and thought can have this sort of ontological efficacy is mystifying, requiring an extraordinary explanation or account. How does a bunch of people talking âbecomeâ a law or a regulation? How can merely thinking something about a snow shovel âmakeâ it a work of art? How can drawing some lines on a map âturnâ a region into a municipality or a state? But such things are only mystifying to a person who is already mystified. There is no magic involved in employing the existential quantifier. Saying âthere is a ____â is not an incantation that conjures substances or substrates from some insubstantial ether. Using modal operators doesnât generate alternative versions of planets, people, or palm trees. (Regardless of what the David Lewis acolytes might think.) So, far from being mysterious or âqueerâ (to employ a Mackieism), a pluralistic metaphysics is exactly what one would expect given the myriad things there are in the world, and the only people who seem to be tripped up by the idea are philosophers and those who one might describe as philosopher-adjacent, like theologians.
The thesis of Ontological Relativity â that what exists is relative â is only intelligible if one first understands Quineâs arguments for the indeterminacy of translation, presented in his book, Word and Object (1953), and summarize4d briefly in the early sections of âOntological Relativity.â Â
Quine takes as a methodological assumption that our only real evidence with respect to what a person is talking about or means when he speaks is his observable behavior and the speaking environment. He is thus a kind of linguistic behaviorist, although it is not clear that this essentially evidential behaviorism is refutable along the lines of Chomskyâs take-down of B.F. Skinnerâs more robust version of the doctrine.
Quine asks us to imagine a âradical translationâ scenario, in which we are confronted with a foreign language that has never been translated before and for which there are no bilinguals. We are trying to understand a particular utterance, âgavagaiâ, that is spoken on a number of occasions by people in the village we have been visiting.
After a good deal of controlled observation, we conclude that âgavagaiâ is uttered when and only when a rabbit is present. The question, Quine then asks, is whether we would be justified in translating âgavagaiâ as meaning ârabbitâor as referring to rabbits?
The problem is that whenever a rabbit is present, undetached rabbit parts are also present, as well as a time-slice-of-rabbit, which Iâll call a ârabbity moment.â These perverse (from our perspective) translations are equally consistent with the totality of the available evidence, and it would seem that there is no further evidence that could narrow things down further. Even acts of ostension â pointing â will not help, as every time one points at a rabbit, one is also pointing at undetached rabbit parts and rabbity moments. The reference of terms is thus, ultimately, âinscrutableâ as Quine calls it, and translation is consequently indeterminate. Â
âRabbitâ, âUndetached rabbit partsâ, and âRabbity momentâ are extensionally equivalent; that is, they pick out the same portion of the spatio-temporal world. Where they differ is with respect to their principle of individuation, which is to say that they represent different ways of slicing and sorting the things in the world. It is tempting to think, then, that if we could just figure out which principle of individuation the speaker is employing â if we had a warranted âanalytical hypothesisâ regarding the speakerâs slicing and sorting and logic and grammar, we could give a single, determinate translation for âgavagaiâ. Itâs also tempting to think that we could figure this out, if we could ask the native questions like âIs this gavagai the same as that one?â and âIs there one gavagai or two?â the answers to both of which would help us with regard to choosing or ruling out ârabbity momentâ as a translation.
Quine sees no hope along these lines, but not for the obvious reason that if we arenât even to the point of being able to translate âgavagaiâ, we certainly are in no position to ask complex questions about counting and sorting. This would render the problem a purely practical one, but for Quine the problem is conceptual and deeper: namely, the analytical hypothesis itself is subject to the indeterminacy of translation.
[I]f one workable over-all system of analytical hypotheses provides for translating a given native expression into ‘is the same as’, perhaps another equally workable but systematically different system would translate that native expression rather into something like ‘belongs with’. Then when in the native language we try to ask, ‘Is this gavagai the same as that?’, we could as well be asking ‘Does this gavagai belong with that?’ Insofar, the native’s assent is no objective evidence for translating ‘gavagai’ as ‘rabbit’ rather than ‘undetached rabbit part’ or ‘rabbit stage’.
This is why Quine maintains that the indeterminacy of translation does not just apply to alien languages in radical translation scenarios but âstarts at home.â Our own speech is subject to it. For there is nothing in my own speech behavior and speaking environment that recommends one analytical hypothesis â and thus, one determinate translation â over another, equally well-supported one. Thus, whether by ârabbitâ I mean rabbits, undetached rabbit parts, or rabbity moment, is itself indeterminate.
The transition from this indeterminacy of translation to ontological relativity is smooth and seamless. For if there is no difference between referring to rabbits, undetached rabbit parts, or rabbity moments, other than a system of counting and sorting, then what material difference could there be between being a rabbit, rabbity moment, or undetached rabbit parts?
We seem to be maneuvering ourselves into the absurd position that there is no difference on any terms, interlinguistic or intralinguistic, objective or subjective, between referring to rabbits and referring to rabbit parts or stages; or between referring to formulas and referring to their Godel numbers. Surely this is absurd, for it would imply that there is no difference between the rabbit and each of its parts or stages, and no difference between a formula and its Godel number. Reference would seem now to become nonsense not just in radical translation, but at home.
At this point, Quine takes his lead from the relativistic treatment of position and velocity. Imagine that you and I are looking at two people, from opposite sides of the room. I ask you whether person A is to the right or the left of person B. You answer, âto the left,â while I say, âto the right.â Who is correct? Well, it depends. Given a certain frame of reference, person A is to the right of person B, but given another frame of reference, person A is to the left of person B. The totality of the evidence is consistent with both answers, with the only thing differentiating them being the frame of reference.
In the same way, given a certain way of sorting and counting and given a certain logic and grammar, we can speak of rabbits or their parts or their existence at a particular moment and over time. Given those things. And we can imagine other ways of sorting and counting and other sorts of logical and grammatical particles, which would make it possible to speak of things in a very different way. But it makes no sense whatsoever to ask what there is really â whether there really are rabbits or undetached rabbit parts, or rabbity moments â just as it would make no sense to ask whether person A is really to the left or right of person B.
This is why Quine says that there isnât much point to talking about what the objects of a theory are. Rather, we should focus on the ways in which one kind of talk about objects is interpretable in terms of another kind of talk about objects. What is interesting are the equivalent â mutually interpretable — ways of speaking about the world, not any one of those ways, in particular, as no one of those ways is privileged in any meaningful sense.
[T]here is no absolute position or velocity; there are just the relations of coordinate systems to one another, and ultimately of things to one another. And I think that the parallel question regarding denotation calls for a parallel answer, a relational theory of what the objects of theories are. What makes sense is to say not what the objects of a theory are, absolutely speaking, but how one theory of objects is interpretable or reinterpretable in another.
In his remarkably short article, âIs Justified True Belief Knowledge?â (1963), Edmund Gettier succeeded in casting doubt on what had been one of the most widely accepted ideas in philosophy: that to know something is to have a belief that one can justify and which is true; a theory that goes at least as far back as Platoâs Theaetetus and which has been called the âTripartite Theory of Knowledgeâ (TTK).
Gettierâs case against TTK is made via counterexamples. Gettier presents us with cases in which a person has a belief, P, which is true and for which he has justification, but which he nonetheless does notknow. The cases are ingenious and rely on just two assumptions, both of which seem uncontroversial: (a) one can be justified in believing something that turns out to be false; (b) justification is transitive, such that if S is justified in believing P and Q follows logically from P, then S is justified in believing Q.
Gettier presents two cases that are needlessly complicated, so others have come up with âGettier-styleâ cases that are simpler yet perform in precisely the same way as the originals. You can easily check out the original Gettier cases in the article, but here are two simpler cases that make the same point, which come from Jonathan Dancyâs Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology. (1985)
(I) Imagine that we are sitting together in a sports bar, watching the Wimbledon final between John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg, and suppose that we see John McEnroe win the match. As a result, we believe that John McEnroe has won Wimbledon and certainly are justified in that belief (if asked, we will say that we just watched him win on TV). Also imagine, however, that this yearâs Wimbledon TV feed has gone down and that unbeknownst to us, we have been watching a rerun of last yearâs much. Suppose also that John McEnroe won this yearâs Wimbledon as well. Under such circumstances it would seem that even though we have a true, justified belief that John McEnroe has won Wimbledon, it would be very strange to describe us as knowing that McEnroe won.
(II) Imagine that we are driving through the countryside and observe a lone sheep on a distant hilltop, and as a result, we believe that there is a sheep there. But suppose that what we have seen is not a real sheep but rather a mock-up of a sheep. Suppose, in addition, that there is another sheep on the hill, behind it, that we cannot see. Once again, we have a belief that we are justified in holding and which is true, but it would be awfully odd to say that we know there is a sheep on the hilltop.
These cases â as well as Gettierâs originals â reflect two very common and well-understood facts about us and our âepistemic conditionâ: that we may stumble upon the truth entirely by accident or even by way of misleading information; and that what may seem, by every measure, to be the best reason in the world for believing something, may in fact turn out not to be a good reason at all.
There was an explosion of activity in the epistemological community after the publication of Gettierâs article. One prominent strategy was to add a defeasibility condition: S knows P, if S believes P, P is true, S is justified in believing P, and there are no defeating conditions (i.e. no statements that would overturn Sâs justification). [1] This would render Gettier style cases harmless for TTK, for in each case, there is some statement that (hadthe person known it at the time) would have defeated the justification for the relevant belief. The trouble with this is that itâs not easy to define what countsas a defeating statement and furthermore, one can never be sure whether some further information might not come along that would defeat the defeater and render the original belief justified after all. [2] In taking into account such considerations, it becomes apparent that no belief could ever really be justified on this view, because no one could ever know whether there might be some potentially defeating statement of which one is not yet aware. Â
Another prominent strategy involves building a causal condition into our definition of knowledge, in the manner suggested by Alvin Goldman not long after Gettierâs paper was published. [3] For S to know P, his belief that P must â in some âappropriateâ sense â be causally connected to P. (p. 369) This proposal avoids the Gettier counterexamples, because in each Gettier-style case, having the relevant true belief is lucky, rather than the result of being causally connected to the truth-maker. Itâs not the sheep that makes me believe there is a sheep on the hill, but rather, a mock-up of a sheep. That there is an actual sheep is sheer luck. Itâs not McEnroeâs win this year that makes me believe that he won Wimbledon, but rather, a rerun of last yearâs match, which he also won.
The one downside â if it is a downside â to Goldmanâs response is that it abandons a long and widely held view of justification: namely, that oneâs justification for believing P ought to be some reason one has or reasoning one has engaged in. That is, justifications should consist of reasons held by the believer. This raises a much larger issue regarding the very nature of justification itself, one that has become a major topic of epistemological investigation in its own right under the name, âThe Internalism/ Externalismâ debate.
Notes:
[1] Keith Lehrer and Thomas Paxson, Jr., âKnowledge: Undefeated Justified True Belief,â The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 66, No. 8 (Apr. 24, 1969), pp. 225-237.
[2] This is the idea behind the âTom Grabitâ case, in Lehrer and Paxson (1969).[3] Alvin I. Goldman, âA Causal Theory of Knowing,â The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 64, No. 12 (Jun 22, 1967), pp. 357-372.
When I was still teaching, I used to spend several class sessions in my Philosophy of Psychology course on Gilbert Ryleâs The Concept of Mind (1949). It could be rough going at times. Some students found the idea of a disposition obscure, while others found it hard to conceive that our mentalistic vocabulary could refer to anything but mental states and events. Most difficult for them was the idea that the respective languages of our natural sciences and our folk-psychologically inflected social sciences might have radically different grammars, in the Wittgensteinian sense of the word: meaning, roughly, conditions and implications of use.
I wouldnât discuss the whole book with them, but only the first chapter â in which Ryle articulates his critique of what he calls âthe official doctrineâ on the mind and body â and the last, in which he describes the nature of psychological inquiry. He distinguishes between two types of dualism, both of which he criticizes, but the latter of which is the more interesting target and which usefully connects his thought with that of Wittgenstein, Wilfrid Sellars, and others.
The first is the substance dualism most commonly identified with RenĂŠ Descartes. The mind is alleged to be a non-physical substance, while the body is a physical one, with the same being true of their respective activities: bodily movement involving physical activity and thinking, involving mental activity. Descartes never tells us what a non-physical substance is — only what it is not — and offers no account of how mental activity is supposed to affect bodily activity, other than a story about the pineal gland which, even were it not false, would fail to address the issue insofar as the gland is itself physical. To be fair to Descartes, he was âbacked intoâ substance dualism because of the conception of physicality prevalent in his day: âphysicalâ meant âmaterial,â and âmaterialâ meant âsubstantial and taking up space,â characteristics that minds and thoughts seemed to lack. Â
The second is what Iâll call âexplanatory dualism,â the idea that our mentalistic and bodily vocabularies denote discrete variables that are related causally to one another: i.e., that mental states/activities cause bodily states/activities and vice versa. It is a kind of Newtonianism applied to behavioral science. Just as one body colliding with another causes the latter to move, so believing, hoping, wanting, hating, fearing, and other âmental statesâ are supposed to cause us to attest, pursue, attack, flee, and engage in myriad other actions. This second part of the dualist thesis survived the discrediting of its substance-dualist component and is actually dominant in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science today. And with Ryle long gone, it has been Oxfordâs Peter Hacker who has been leading the charge against it, referring to it as âCrypto-Cartesianism.â
Ryle says that this picture arises from what he calls a âcategory mistake,â in which we ârepresent the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category, when they actually belong to another.â Ryle gives several examples of the sort of mistake he is thinking of, but the last is the most apt with regard to understanding the category mistake involved in explanatory dualism:
A foreigner watching his first game of cricket learns what are the functions of the bowlers, batsmen, the fielders, the umpires, and the scorers. He then saysâŚ, âI see who does the bowling, the batting, and the wicket-keeping; but I do not see whose role it is to exercise esprit de corps.â [I]t would have to be explained that he was looking for the wrong type of thing. Team-spirit is not another cricketing-operation supplementary to all of the other special tasks. It is, roughly, the keenness with which each of the special tasks is performedâŚâ
The most important lines in the example are the ones that come at the end:
[P]erforming a task keenly is not performing two tasks. Certainly exhibiting team-spirit is not the same thing as bowling or catching, but nor is it a third thing such that we can say that the bowler first bowls and then exhibits team-spirit or that a fielder is at a given moment either catching or displaying esprit de corps.
Ryleâs âinsight,â then — or at least, the insight that I have taken on board — is that our mentalistic vocabulary and grammar, while superficially resembling that which we use in describing bodily and physiological activity in terms of âsurface grammarâ — viz. âJohn wants to go to the storeâ; âJohn goes to the storeâ; âThe muscles in Johnâs legs do such-and-suchâ — actually represent a fundamentally different kind of discourse. Now, Ryle takes mentalistic language to be essentially dispositional — âJohn wants to go to the storeâ really means something like âJohn is likely to do things like walk or drive to the storeâ — but, I think that when we employ mentalistic forms of language, we place our neurological activity and bodily movements in a sociocultural/axiological framework in which they have a specific significance and role; in which actions are individuated by their relevant aims and ends, rather than by the motor movements they involve. So, while I take my lead from Ryle in thinking that the traditional treatment of mental states in the philosophy of mind involves a category mistake, I depart from him with regard to what the mistake is. Ryle thinks we mistake what is really a behavioral disposition for a kind of mental âactivity,â while I think that we mistake what is really a teleologically framed discourse — one of aims, means, ends, goods, and bads — for the language of cause and effect.
Identical motor movements — say, for example, my hand opening and dropping a piece of paper into a bin — may constitute entirely different actions. On one occasion, it may be throwing something out, while on another it may constitute voting. Different aims are involved and the two actions have different standards of success and failure. In the first, I succeed if the paper lands in the bin and is subsequently taken by the garbage collector and fails if I miss and it remains uncollected, while in the second, I succeed if my vote is logged and counted and fail if it is not.
The framework I am describing is one in which we are persons who act, rather than simply organisms that move, and it is the one in which all of our social, civic, and moral forms of life take place. Physiological events are socially, morally, and politically significant qua actions. As mere motor movements they are not. Hands opening and closing and dropping pieces of paper into bins have no social, moral, or political significance, per se, but disposing of oneâs trash and voting do. What makes a hand opening and closing and dropping a piece of paper count as one action or the other, is a matter of it being interpreted as a means to one end or another, with the ends being represented as distinct goods. And all of this, as Wittgenstein has taught us, depends on a network of social agreements and understandings. Our account of hands opening and closing and dropping things may be of the Newtonian âA-events make B-events happenâ variety, but our account of voting and trash disposal and the like are not.
This entails no dualism of substrate, as Descartes thought, but it does entail a multiplicity of âlanguage gamesâ and of explanations; a fundamental âdisunity,â as Jerry Fodor put it in his 1974 paper, âSpecial Sciences (or the Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis),â among the various frameworks (explanatory and otherwise) that we employ to engage with human affairs. And as Wilfrid Sellars observed, these frameworks cannot be reduced to or eliminated in favor of one another, but must be joined together in order to provide a complete, “stereoscopic” picture. From his paper, âPhilosophy and the Scientific Image of Manâ (1963):
To think of a featherless biped as a person is to think of it as a being with which one is bound up in a network of rights and duties. From this point of view, the irreducibility of the personal is the irreducibility of the ‘ought’ to the ‘is’. But even more basic than this (though ultimately, as we shall see, the two points coincide), is the fact that to think of a featherless biped as a person is to construe its behaviour in terms of actual or potential membership in an embracing group each member of which thinks of itself as a member of the group.[T]he conceptual framework of persons is the framework in which we think of one another as sharing the community intentions which provide the ambience of principles and standards (above all, those which make meaningful discourse and rationality itself possible) within which we live our own individual lives. A person can almost be defined as a being that has intentions. Thus the conceptual framework of persons is not something that needs to be reconciled with the scientific image, but rather something to be joined to it. Thus, to complete the scientific image we need to enrich it not with more ways of saying what is the case, but with the language of community and individual intentions, so that by construing the actions we intend to do and the circumstances in which we intend to do them in scientific terms, we directly relate the world as conceived by scientific theory to our purposes, and make it our world and no longer an alien appendage to the world in which we do our living.
I want to talk about the final reading for the version of Introduction to Philosophy that I taught towards the end of my career: three chapters from A.J. Ayerâs Language, Truth, and Logic, which originally was published in 1936 and was responsible for bringing logical positivist ideas from the European continent to the English speaking world.
Because the work is somewhat technical â and certainly is experienced that way by a general education audience â and the last thing students had read was J.S. Millâs Utilitarianism, I spent an entire lecture just on background and especially on the question of the positivistâs targeting of metaphysical statements. Without this frame of reference, the apparatus of the Verification Principle appears motivated by nothing more than a narrow scientism, so I took some time to explain to my students the logical positivistsâ concern over the role played by metaphysical and mystical statements coming out of 19th century Romantic nationalism in the fascist politics that were spreading across the continent in the early 20th: âBlood moves the wheels of historyâ and âThe folk is rooted in the soil and bound together by its common bloodâ were just two of several examples that I gave of the sort of thing I wanted them to think about. Of course the positivists also were motivated by a more general empiricist anti-metaphysical attitude, in the spirit of Humeâs famous statement from the Enquiry, which I also discussed with my students:Â
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion
The Verification Principle
I explained that the anti-metaphysical strategy employed by the positivists and by Ayer involves demonstrating that metaphysical statements are meaningless. Now, for those who have studied philosophy for some time, saying this would be a sufficient prelude to introducing the Verification Principle (VP), but I was concerned that students might find the notion of meaninglessness involved obscure, so I spent some time on two different ways in which a sentence might be meaningless: (1) if it is ungrammatical or ill-formed, such as âUncle purple rains Wednesday toâ; and (2) if it involves bogus â in the sense of non-existent â words, like Lewis Carrollâs âTwas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe,â from Jabberwocky.
Ayer proposes a third criterion for meaningfulness and that brings us to VP, which says: A sentence is meaningful if and only if one could, in principle, explain how one would go about showing it was true or false.
Notice that even sentences which are not currently verifiable can satisfy this criterion: âThere are caves on Plutoâ is not a sentence that we can verify currently, but we know how one would verify it. However, sentences like âGod is eternal loveâ and âThe folk is rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond of its common bloodâ are not like this, for not only are we not currently capable of verifying them, we could not even explain how one would go about doing so.
Mathematical Statements
It might appear obvious that VP is far too narrow a criterion for linguistic meaningfulness, insofar as there seem to be perfectly ordinary sentences that clearly are meaningful, while not being verifiable in the manner described by Ayer. âThree plus two equals fiveâ is a sentence that is obviously meaningful â I suspect every person reading this both understands and believes it â and yet, it is not empirically verifiable. One may have learned the truth of the statement by counting pebbles or blocks, but no amount of such counting could ever confirm or disconfirm it. As I pointed out to my students, if they counted the pebbles and got âsix,â we wouldnât conclude that âThree plus two equals fiveâ had been disconfirmed. Rather, we would insist that they had counted wrong, and I pointed out that we would say the same thing even if thirty people had counted them and got âsixâ as a result.
So what does Ayer do with mathematical statements? They clearly arenât meaningless, and yet they seem to fail the verification test. Ayerâs answer here is interesting, but is no longer considered viable today, insofar as it depends on a now-defunct program.
Ayer argues that mathematical sentences are in fact analytic, by which he means that they are logical truths. âThree plus twoâ and âfiveâ are alleged to be synonymous, so even though mathematical sentences are not empirically verifiable they are, in a sense, linguistically verifiable, which explains their meaningfulness.
Our knowledge that no observation can ever confute the proposition â7 + 5 = 12â depends simply on the fact that the symbolic expression â7 + 5â is synonymous with â12â, just as our knowledge that every oculist is an eye-doctor depends on the fact that the term âeye doctorâ is synonymous with âoculistâ. And the same explanation holds good for every other a priori truth.
Of course, this depends on being able to demonstrate that mathematical statements are in fact truths of logic, a claim that was made by those pursuing the logicist program in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The overwhelming consensus is that this program was a failure, which, if correct, means that Ayerâs way of handling mathematical statements will not work, and he is left with the problem of their meaningfulness unresolved.
Moral Statements
The other great challenge to VP lies in the area of moral discourse. Sentences like âSnatching that guyâs wallet is wrongâ are clearly meaningful â again, I think it safe to assume that everyone reading this both understands it and will agree with it â but they are not verifiable, either empirically or linguistically. There are no observations that are going to confirm or disconfirm the wrongness of the wallet-snatching, and the truth or falsity of the sentence cannot be determined just by examining the meanings of the words.
Ayer takes this objection seriously and makes a serious effort at responding to it, one that has had legs far beyond the Verification Principle itself in the form of ethical Emotivism. What he says is that moral terms are actually performatives: they donât refer, but rather do various things â approve, condemn, command, plead, and the like. Thus, when we say, âSnatching that guyâs wallet is wrong,â what we really are saying is something like âDonât snatch that guyâs wallet!â or âSnatching that guyâs wallet, BOO!â The verificationist can thus avoid being saddled with the view that moral statements are meaningless, because he doesnât think they are statements at all, but rather expressions of feeling, commands, etc., whose meaningfulness is not a function of their verification conditions.
The main difficulty with this move is that if correct, it should follow that there can be no moral disputes, as only statements â sentences that express propositions â are disputable. If I like vanilla ice cream and you canât stand it, we donât have a dispute, as evinced by the fact that the difference between us cannot be settled by appeals to evidence or arguments. Consequently, if moral sentences are not in fact statements but expressions of feeling or commands they too cannot be matters of dispute. The trouble, of course, is that they are. More than that, they are some of the most heavily disputed of all the things we say.
Ayerâs take on this is ingenious and persuasive, to a point. Often, a conflict in attitudes or feelings is grounded in disagreement over relevant facts. Years ago, when the issue of gay marriage was being debated, those on the pro- and anti-sides certainly had conflicting attitudes, but they also disagreed substantially on the facts: specifically, as to whether allowing gays and lesbians to marry would do damage to the institution of marriage. It seems reasonable to think, moreover, that had there not been these sorts of factual disagreements, there likely would have been less conflicts in attitudes. Of people growing up, living, and working in the same society it seems reasonable to expect similar attitudes in reaction to similar facts.
When someone disagrees with us about the moral value of a certain action or type of action, we do admittedly resort to argument in order to win him over to our way of thinking. But we do not attempt to show by our arguments that he has the âwrongâ ethical feeling towards a situation whose nature he has correctly apprehended. What we attempt to show is that he is mistaken about the facts of the case. We argue that he has misconceived the agentâs motive: or that he has misjudged the effects of the action, or its probable effects in view of the agentâs knowledge; or that he has failed to take into account the special circumstances in which the agent was placed. Or else we employ more general arguments about the effects which actions of a certain type tend to produce, or the qualities which are usually manifested in their performance. We do this in the hope that we have only to get our opponent to agree with us about the nature of the empirical facts for him to adopt the same moral attitude towards them as we do. And as the people with whom we argue have generally received the same moral education as ourselves, and live in the same social order, our expectation is usually justified. (p. 70)
But this analysis is only somewhat persuasive. For one thing, itâs not clear that every moral conflict sits astride a dispute over facts, and for another, weâve all had experiences in which no amount of agreement on the facts eases a conflict in values, even with people who are from our own communities or even our own families. And so while of all the elements of Language, Truth, and Logic, Ayerâs Emotivism has remained relevant the longest, there are a number of problems that strongly tell against its being a satisfactory treatment of moral language and discourse.
If you were to pinch the nearest analytically trained philosopher and ask him for the worst, most obviously fallacious argument in his tradition, he might very well tell you that it is the so-called âproofâ for the existence of the external world that G.E. Moore gives in his 1939 paper, âProof of an External World,â originally delivered to the British Academy. And if you tried to push back â and if your interlocutor was sharp â he might refer you to two papers by Crispin Wright â his 1985 âFacts and Certaintyâ (also delivered to the British Academy, interestingly enough) and 2002 âAnti-Sceptics Simple and Subtleâ â which really put the boot in, as far as Moore is concerned.
This is not to say, of course, that there are no people in the business who think Moore was on to something. Iâm one of those who do, and if I find myself alone at a wine-and-cheese, surrounded by Moore-haters and feeling a bit vulnerable, I can always point out that Wittgenstein has my back, having thought Mooreâs thesis so interesting that he was motivated to write an entire book â On Certainty â on the arguments and theses presented in âProof of an External Worldâ and âIn Defence of Common Sense,â which, according to Elizabeth Anscombe, Wittgenstein thought was Mooreâs finest work.
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Of course, Moore doesnât always help himself. He begins âProof of an External Worldâ by referencing Kantâs remarks in the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783) that it is a âscandalâ that no proof of the external world has been given. What Kant is referring to, of course, is the skepticism of the Enlightenment and especially the kind articulated in Descartesâ (in)famous âDreaming Argument.â The trouble is that by evoking Kant in this way, Moore gives the impression that his proof will be relatively straightforward â that it will take on the skeptical challenge head-on, as it were. And it is precisely this impression â and it is really a misimpression â that has led so many people to think that Mooreâs essay is little more than an embarrassment.
So, what does the proof consist of? This is what Moore says:
I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand “Here is one hand” and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left “and here is another.”
Now you might immediately think, âWait a minute. The statement âthe external world existsâ is entirely absent from this proof, when it should be featured, prominently, as the conclusion,â but if youâve read the entire article, you know that Moore addresses this point. By showing that the individual member of a class exists, one has thereby demonstrated the existence of the class itself. It does not require a separate proof of its own. In this case, the class in question is the class of things that belong to what we are calling âthe external worldâ; which have, as Hume called it, âcontinued and distinct existenceâ; and to which Moore refers as âthings to be met with in space.â
If you have proved that two plants exist, or that a plant and a dog exist, or that a dog and a shadow exist, etc. etc., you will ipso facto have proved that there are things to be met with in space: you will not require also to give a separate proof that from the proposition that there are plants it does follow that there are things to be met with in space.
This on its own, however, is unlikely to make critics any happier. âWait another minute,â they will likely say. âHow does Moore know that he has two hands? Wasnât the entire point of Descartesâ Dreaming argument to show that we cannot justify beliefs like these? Doesnât Moore owe us a refutation of Descartes, before he carries on with his proof?â
The criticism doesnât stop there. As already mentioned, Crispin Wright, in a number of essays, has absolutely skewered not just Mooreâs proof, but any effort like it to demonstrate that the external world exists.
Consider the following apparently valid argument â
1. Jones has just kicked the ball between the white posts.
2. Jones has just scored a goal.
Therefore
3. A game of soccer is taking place.
â as well as this one
1â. Jones has just placed an X on a ballot paper.
2â. Jones has just voted.
Therefore
3â. An election is taking place.
A careful examination of both cases reveals a common flaw. The first premise only counts as a reason for thinking the second premise is true, if one already has independent reason to believe that the conclusion is true. After all, itâs only if a game of soccer is taking place that kicking a ball between two posts counts as scoring a goal. And it is only if an election is taking place that putting an âxâ on a piece of paper counts as voting. So, one cannot justify the claim that soccer is being played or that an election is taking place, on the grounds of premises like 1 and 2.
Once we realize this, itâs a short step to seeing that Mooreâs proof takes exactly the same form â
1ââ. My experience is in all respects as of a hand held up in front of my face
2ââ. Here is a hand
Therefore
3ââ. There is a material world (since any hand is a material object existing in space)
â and that consequently, the same result follows. One cannot determine that the external world exists on the basis of sensory evidence, because sensory evidence only counts as a reason for thinking there are things âoutside us,â if we already assume that there are.
___
While these sorts of critiques are valuable in their own right â and Wrightâs, I think, really does uncover the underlying structure and logic that makes arguments like the Dreaming argument so powerful â they are ultimately misapplied to Mooreâs proof. Now, of course, this is easy to say â âI was misunderstoodâ is the common excuse of many a scoundrel or fool â but in this case, I think it is sustainable. For, immediately after delivering his proof, Moore admits that he has not refuted the Dreaming argument and moreover, that he cannot refute it. And it is precisely this that must make us stop and wonder if what Moore is doing is as straightforward as it seems at first glance. The unfortunate reference to Kant notwithstanding, I think that the only conclusion one can reach is that Moore does not intend straightforwardly to prove that the external world exists; that in fact, his strategy for dealing with this most global of skepticisms is something much more subtle and indirect. And it is this that Wittgenstein picked up on and explored in far greater detail in On Certainty. In a way, On Certainty can be read as developing the epistemological ideas that one finds in embryonic and often implicit form in âProof of an External Worldâ and âIn Defence of Common Sense.â
The skeptic who doubts whether our belief in the external world is justified does so on the grounds that we might be making a mistake; indeed, that we often do make such mistakes. Descartesâ appeal to dreaming in making this point is so strong, precisely because dreaming is such a common phenomenon. But, here Wittgenstein makes an important observation. What does the skeptic mean, exactly, when he calls something a âmistakeâ or says that we are âmistakenâ? For example, astronomers might have been wrong about the number of moons orbiting Saturn. Instruments may have failed or images delivered from telescopes and probes may have been misinterpreted. So, when an astronomer says âSaturn has 53 moons,â he might be making a mistake. The number might really be 52 or 55.
But what about a slightly different statement â âThere are moonsâ? The skeptic wants to say that this also is something we can be wrong about; about which we can be mistaken. He may even appeal to the Dreaming argument in order to make that very point. But would we be wrong here in the same way that we might have been with respect to the previous case? Would this be the sort of thing we would even call a âmistakeâ? Consider the following excerpts from On Certainty.
74. Can we say: a mistake doesnât only have a cause, it also has a ground? I.e., roughly: when someone makes a mistake, this can be fitted into what he knows aright.
257. If someone said to me that he doubted whether he had a body I should take him to be a half-wit. But I shouldnât know what it would mean to try to convince him that he had one. And if I had said something, and that had removed his doubt, I should not know how or why.
We only can understand something as a mistake, against a background of things that are not mistaken. It is because I know that Saturn has moons â and that there are such things as moons â that I can make sense of the notion of being mistaken about the number of moons it has. Moreover, if I get the number of Saturnâs moons wrong, I have some idea of how I might go about correcting my mistake, with the hope of getting it right the next time. But none of this is the case with respect to the proposition that there are moons. If the skeptic tries to claim that this is mistaken, there is no backdrop of not-mistaken things concerning moons, against which the idea of its being a mistake makes any sense, and if it was a mistake I wouldnât have the faintest idea of how to go about correcting it.
Wittgenstein makes the same point with respect to the common practice of calculation. Certainly, I can make sense of the notion of making a mistake in adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and the like. I can make an error in multiplication that leads me to believe that 6×7 is 48, rather than 42. The notion of a mistake here makes sense, again, because it occurs against a backdrop of correct calculation, and because itâs quite clear how one would go about correcting it â i.e. one would âcheck oneâs workâ and do the calculation again. When the skeptic suggests, however, that we might be mistaken about calculation generally â that we might never calculate correctly â the notion of making a mistake makes little sense, and what it would mean to correct it has become utterly obscure. How should one check the checking and how many times, in order to be persuaded that checking works? This is why, at one point, Wittgenstein says:
77. Perhaps I shall do a multiplication twice to make sure, or perhaps get someone else to work it over. But shall I work it over again twenty times, or get twenty people to go over it? And is that some sort of negligence? Would the certainty really be greater for being checked twenty times?
To say that something is mistaken or could be mistaken, then, only makes sense against the backdrop of a whole number of other things that not only are not mistakes but which are fixed â or which, as Wittgenstein puts it, âstand fast.â And without those things, the notion of a mistake or being mistaken or of justification and being justified or unjustified becomes obscure to the point of incoherence, because it lacks any fixed point of reference. As Wittgenstein observes:
115. If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.
and
105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. [It is] the element in which arguments have their life.
What the skeptic demands is not just proof for a proposition, but proof for all proofs, and it is here that he goes off the rails; that he ceases to play the game that the rest of us are playing, which is why, rather than being wrong, his critique is essentially beside the point. I can use a proof to justify an arithmetic proposition, and if I get it wrong, I can check my proof and try again. But all of this only works, because it is done against a backdrop of beliefs that stand fast; that are beyond doubt; that are taken as certain; most important among them, the belief that arithmetic proofs, in general, work. And that this is precisely what Moore is getting at is revealed at the end of the essay, where he says:
[A] reason why some people would feel dissatisfied with my proofs is, I think, not merely that they want a proof of something which I haven’t proved, but that they think that, if I cannot give such extra proofs, then the proofs that I have given are not conclusive proofs at all. And this, I think, is a definite mistake.
I wholeheartedly agree, which is why I have little use â or time â for skeptics. Or at least, those who really mean it.
Descartesâ self-described aim in the Meditations is to engage in a systematic examination of his belief system so as to be assured that it rests upon solid grounds. In the earlier Discourse on Method (1637), he compared systems of knowledge to buildings, which he said were always better when designed by a single architect and built from scratch than those which developed piecemeal over time. When confronted with the second sort of building, it is better to tear it down and rebuild it than it is to try and repair it, and we should think of our knowledge in the same way. Rather than try to root out all the false and half-baked beliefs weâve accumulated over the course of our lives, we should start entirely anew.
The buildings which a single architect has planned and executed, are generally more elegant and commodious than those which several have attempted to improve, by making old walls serve for purposes for which they were not originally builtâŚ
In the same way I thought that the sciences contained in booksâŚ, composed as they are of the opinions of many different individuals massed together, are farther removed from truth than the simple inferences which a man of good sense using his natural and unprejudiced judgment draws respecting the matters of his experienceâŚ
As for the opinions which up to that time I had embraced, I thought that I could not do better than resolve at once to sweep them wholly away, that I might afterwards be in a position to admit either others more correct, or even perhaps the same when they had undergone the scrutiny of reason.
He begins this task in The Meditations by entertaining a series of skeptical considerations, each one more far-reaching in scope than the last, and by the end, he has managed to cast doubt on every possible variety of belief, whether grounded in sensory experience or in deductive reasoning.
Whichever of Descartesâ skeptical scenarios we choose and whether we are talking about the justifications we offer for empirically grounded beliefs or for those based in reason, there is a common underlying logic to the critique offered. So letâs examine each in turn.
[1] Belief: Itâs raining outside.
[2] Justification: I am looking out of the window, and I can see that it is raining.
In his famous âDreaming Argument,â Descartes points out that we can have exactly the same experience in a dream that we have while awake and that from within the experience, there is no way to distinguish one from the other. Thus, I can dream that I am looking out a window and seeing rain and that experience can âfeelâ identical to the experience I have when I am actually looking out the window and seeing rain.
Consequently, [2] is not sufficient as a justification for [1]. Indeed, it only provides such a justification, if I can also justify the following:
[3] Belief: I am not currently dreaming, but really looking out of the window.
The trouble, of course, is that this belief cannot itself be justified by appeal to other sensory experiences â since it is the validity of my sensory experiences that is under question â but it also cannot be deduced or otherwise justified via reason: there is no way to prove that I am not currently dreaming.
Now, let’s turn to knowledge in mathematics.
[1a] Belief: 2+2=4.
[2a] Justification: Some deductive proof.
In his âMalicious Demonâ argument, Descartes maintains that it is possible that our minds are being manipulated by a powerful, malicious being, such that we sometimes â or always â reason incorrectly. Consequently, [2a] is not sufficient as a justification for [1a]. It only provides such a justification, if I can also justify the following:
[3a] Belief: I am not reasoning incorrectly.
The trouble, of course, is that this belief cannot itself be justified by appeal to reasoning â since it is the soundness of my reasoning that is under question â and it also cannot be justified empirically, insofar as mathematical statements are not knowable a posteriori.
When confronting these arguments, many have focused unduly on Descartesâ somewhat exotic examples, but they really are entirely dispensable and only serve an illustrative function. What both arguments rest upon is recognition of the inherent fallibility of our faculties and of the problem of trying to verify the sound exercise of those faculties, by employing the very same faculties.
Notice something else. To the extent that our common belief in the external world and an objective reality â that is, in a world and reality that exists independently of our minds, thoughts, and experiences â is grounded in beliefs that come from sensory experience and reason, we clearly are engaged in circular reasoning. After all:
[1b] Here is a hand. (Holding out my hand)
only provides evidence for
[2b] The external world exists.
if I already presuppose the external worldâs existence. If I am a disembodied consciousness, living in a perpetual dream, then seeing a hand is no evidence at all that there is an external world.
Precisely the same argument can be made on the âreasonâ side of the ledger. And so what we are left with is this â precisely the things that we take as evidence that an objective reality exists only count as evidence if one already presupposes that realityâs existence. Descartesâ solution to these problems, in which he appeals to the Divine and the perfection associated with it and its creation, is unacceptable for obvious reasons. If we canât even justify the belief that there is a hand, we certainly canât justify believing there is an invisible, perfect superbeing. My own view is that problems such as these have no solutions and that the value in engaging with them is rather to disabuse us of various notions we may hold about what we know, how well we know it, how good our reasons really are for the things we claim to know, and the like.
The Meno is a text I added to my Introduction to Philosophy course not long before my retirement, and it was something I hadnât read in probably twenty years. Coming at it relatively fresh, then, I was struck by: (a) just how many topics it covers (as well as how scattered and meandering it is); (b) how irritating Socrates is; (c) how terrible some of the positions are, not to mention the arguments for them; and (d) how abruptly and unsatisfyingly it ends. And yet, like so many of Platoâs works, it has an ineffable quality, a combination of elements, not the least of which is its literary merits, that not only earns it serious consideration, but repeated visits. I mostly disliked it ⌠and taught it again the next time. As philosophy, Platoâs work strikes me as inferior to that of his greatest student, Aristotle, but when thought of not only as a part of the history of ideas, but of Letters, it looms larger. It is interesting to wonder whether this perception would hold had we the actual written works of Aristotle, cataloged by biographers like Diogenes Laertius, as opposed to the collections of lecture notes that make up the Aristotelian corpus we have today.
The Menoâs ostensible subject is whether virtue can be taught or whether it arises from nature or is acquired in some other way. Yet, this is not what the bulk of the dialogue is about. Rather, Socrates and his interlocutors discuss the nature of virtue, whether anyone really ever desires whatâs bad, whether the pursuit of knowledge is even possible, the bizarre â and dumb â âtheory of recollectionâ (which is introduced by way of a seemingly endless — not to mention fallacious — argument, based on a discussion with a slave boy about the properties of a geometric figure), and only then finally get back to the question of whether virtue can be taught, whereupon it is quickly determined that it cannot and thus, must be a âgift from the gods,â about which I can only say, âoy vey.â
Nonetheless, reading and working through all of this is quite satisfying. Socratesâ transparently disingenuous protestations of ignorance, combined with his repeated references to the charms of âpretty young gentlemen,â conveys a wonderful sense of eccentricity in a modern context that makes the challenging parts of the dialogue easier to digest. And the order in which the topics flow is of a sort that does, to a certain extent, successfully mimic the not entirely directionless, but haphazard course that a real conversation takes.
After beginning with the question of whether virtue can be taught or whether it arises from nature or by some other means, the topic almost immediately shifts to what virtue is, as Socrates protests that he does not know. Meno says that there are many different kinds of virtue, depending on the kind of person one is talking about — men, women, children, etc. — but Socrates complains that he has not asked for individual examples of virtue, but rather, what all virtues have in common. After going round and round a bit, Meno offers something along the lines of: the virtuous person is the one who loves and acquires that which is honorable.
Socrates asks whether to love that which is honorable is to love that which is good, and Meno agrees, whereupon Socrates spins off onto his first tangent. Doesnât everyone love that which is good, and if so, how can the love of whatâs good differentiate the virtuous person from the non-virtuous one? Meno sees no reason to think that everyone loves the good â people do bad things all of the time â but Socrates wonders whether there isnât something strange about suggesting that people choose the bad, because they think it is bad. After all, if something is bad, itâs going to hurt you, undermine your plans, cause you harm in some way or another, etc. Do (rational) people deliberately do such a thing? No, Socrates suggests, it seems much more likely that when people choose bad, they do so, because they mistake the bad for the good. Evil and vice, then, are products of ignorance regarding the good rather than of a will that is oriented towards the bad.
This leaves the virtuous as the person who actually acquires honorable/good things, but Socrates also sees a problem with this. Surely it matters how one acquires what is good â we wouldnât call someone virtuous who steals things, even if he has âacquired that which is goodâ as a result. Meno admits that attaining the good is only virtuous if done justly, but Socrates observes that in that case, the account of virtue is circular, as justice is itself a virtue.
At this point, Meno has a bit of a meltdown and wonders whether it is possible to engage in inquiry at all. If we know something, then there is no need to inquire about it, but if we donât know something, then even if we do inquire, how do we know that what weâve found is what we were looking for? And here, rather than give the sort of pragmatic answer that would immediately occur to most of us â such thoughts lead to nothing but paralysis; we just muddle through; obviously some of our inquiries result in knowledge, as evinced by the fact that we become more proficient and competent at myriad tasks, as time progresses â Socrates instead goes off on a second tangent that is supposed to demonstrate that âknowledge is recollection.â
Itâs a bizarre move to make. For one thing, itâs not clear how it serves as any sort of response to the question. Even if knowledge is something we rediscover rather than discover, Menoâs problem would still seem to apply: Given that I donât remember what I used to know, how would I know, upon supposedly remembering it again, that the thing I am remembering is the same thing that Iâd forgotten? For another, the argument that Socrates provides in order to show that knowledge is recollection does nothing of the kind. That argument involves tedious rounds of Q&A with a slave boy over the properties of a geometric figure, in which Socrates coaxes a number of true geometrical propositions out of him, despite the fact that he has never been taught geometry. Aha! You see! Since he was never taught it, and now he knows it, he must have already known it and forgotten! A less silly, more modern version of this line of thought might be that the experiment shows that some knowledge is innate but needs to be brought out in conversation or by way of prompts.
Itâs all nonsense, of course, but the most glaring thing is that the conclusion Socrates draws from his interactions with the slave boy is a wild non sequitur. That a physically and intellectually sound person can, in response to prompts and questions, deduce various things that he did not previously know simply demonstrates that he possesses a (perhaps innate) capacity to reason. It demonstrates nothing about what he allegedly once knew.
Once past the question of whether knowledge is possible, we find ourselves back with the original question. As an opening move, Socrates suggests that we approach the question as a hypothetical: Suppose virtue is something that is teachable â are there people who teach it? If it seems impossible to identify anyone who might be a moral instructor, then it would seem unlikely that virtue is something that can be taught. A bit logically suspect â from the fact that there are no teachers of virtue, it doesnât follow that virtue canât be taught â but letâs go with it. If we keep a count of all the non sequiturs in the Meno, weâll be here longer than anyone wants to.
After disposing of the idea that the Sophists might be moral teachers â a suggestion that causes an outburst on the part of another one of Socratesâ interlocutors, Anytus â it is agreed that if anyone should be a teacher of virtue, itâs those who are virtuous themselves. Socrates then inquires about (then) widely-accepted exemplars of virtue and whether they have virtuous offspring, the answer to which is invariably, âNo.â But, if virtue is teachable, Socrates asks, wouldnât we expect the virtuous to teach it to their offspring? And since they clearly do not â as their offspring are not virtuous â does this not show that virtue is not teachable, by Modus Tollens? (He doesnât actually say âModus Tollens.â)
Again, the reasoning is atrocious. It never occurs to Socrates that something could be teachable yet one might nonetheless fail to teach it, no matter how proficient one might be. Or that the assumption that the virtuous will always teach virtue to their offspring might be wrong. Or even that the cases the men are talking about might not be representative. But this is nothing compared to the conclusion he draws: Given that morality isnât natural in the sense of being innate (nothing but an assumption, it is worth noting) and also isnât taught, it must be a gift from the Gods. At this, the dialogue ends, and while I was teaching it, I found myself thinking, Jeez, this is much worse than I remember.
Nevertheless, the students really enjoyed it. And as Iâve thought more about it, I realize that the logical clunkers not only contribute to the dialogueâs charm, they also provide some key teachable moments. For the sorts of mistakes that Socrates and his interlocutors make are common mistakes â very easy to make (except for the âknowledge is recollection partâ) â and encountering them in a somewhat casual, dialogue-centered format, makes them easier to see, discuss, and ultimately overcome. Beyond great literature and sometimes good philosophy, then, the Platonic dialogues are outstanding teaching-pieces.
Some years ago, over at the Daily Nous, a much-read insider philosophy blog, David Velleman, who enjoyed digs in the worldâs #1 ranked philosophy department, posted his version of a Modest Proposal: Philosophy journals should no longer publish papers written by graduate students, and tenure and promotion committees should stop counting papers produced while the candidate was a graduate student.
The problem, as Velleman described it, is a âpublishing arms raceâ that has flooded philosophy journals with publications that they are not equipped to process properly. (The problem is even worse today than it was when Vellemanâs Modest Proposal was published.) Refereeing philosophy articles and serving on the editorial boards of philosophy journals is almost entirely unpaid work, and itâs hard to get people to do it. Greatly increase the supply of papers, and you either get superficial editorial judgments or greatly increased review times, which already are far too long. Velleman described other negative effects (e.g., encouraging graduate student publishing engenders undesirable specialization and a narrowing of focus in young philosophers before theyâve even entered the profession), but itâs the publishing arms race itself and its effects on journals that are the primary problem.
The proposal is a good one, but itâs actually too modest. For not only are philosophy students publishing too much, but philosophy professors are as well, including our most distinguished. Indeed, our excesses in this regard far outpace anything graduate students could ever accomplish.
Consider that Thomas Hobbes published six philosophical works. John Locke, eight or so. John Stuart Mill, ten, give or take a few. David Hume published two, plus a dialogue on religion and a small essay collection. G.E. Moore published three books and a normal-sized volumeâs worth of collected papers. Gilbert Ryle published four philosophical books and papers that fill two average-sized volumes. In contrast, todayâs top philosophers publish scores upon scores of articles and books, and at the highest levels the numbers stretch into the hundreds. Now ask yourself the following question: Do we need more papers and books from, say, David Chalmers than from Gilbert Ryle? Or from David Velleman than from John Stuart Mill? Or from Jason Stanley than John Locke; or any of the current crop of philosophical big shots? The answer (for anyone who isnât crazy or cynically invested in the current system) is obviously âNo.â If Moore and Ryle were dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants like Hobbes, Locke, and Mill, then our current philosophical royalty are fleas, living in the beards of the dwarfs.
The dirty game into which this all figures quickly becomes evident, when one peruses the discussion thread that followed Vellemanâ Modest Proposal, to which graduate students and recent graduates naturally responded with alarm. After all, the reason why doctoral students are feeling greater and greater pressure to publish is because of the hyper-competitiveness of the current job market, which is about the worst itâs ever been, filled as it is not only with newly minted PhDs, but with people who have been out in the wilderness for years, drifting from one temporary job to another. For an impression of the situation, consider that my own small, undistinguished undergraduate degree-program, in a middling university, in a not-particularly-desirable location, received over 200 applications for the last tenure track job we posted before I retired. This is not a normal or healthy or ethical situation.
Now the obvious solution to a grossly oversaturated profession is a moratorium on new PhDs, for as long as it takes for those already in the system to find work, and several people in the discussion â including me â suggested this. In response, Velleman wrote the following:
PhD students are an essential (and inexpensive) source of teaching. Replacing them is bound to raise the already excessive cost of higher education. Iâm not saying that I like the arrangement; Iâm just saying that I donât know how to change it. Moratoria on admissions are not a possibility.
Why are PhD students an âessential source of teachingâ? NYU â where Velleman is now Emeritus â has twenty-seven full time philosophy faculty and another eleven faculty that are âassociated and affiliatedâ with the philosophy department. (This is not even counting satellite institutions like âNYU Abu-Dhabi.â) Surely, this is enough people to teach the departmentâs undergraduate curriculum, including general education courses. The department from which I retired had only five full-time faculty members, one full-time instructor and a handful of per-course faculty. The teaching load is four per semester, with a reduction to three, if one keeps up a regular publishing schedule, which in my department is defined as at least one peer reviewed article every two years. It was not uncommon for me to teach 200 undergraduates in a semester. And while NYUâs undergraduate enrollment is larger than ours, itâs not that much larger and certainly not seven times larger. So, again, why are PhD students an âessential source of teachingâ?
The answer is that the leading lights in our profession donât want to do very much undergraduate teaching and certainly not introductory-level teaching or grading, which is labor intensive and for the Great Minds of philosophy, tedious. (Even as a full professor, two-thirds of my teaching load was introductory-level teaching, and I did all of the grading myself.) They do not teach 4/4 or 3/3 loads but even smaller ones, and sometimes they do no undergraduate teaching at all. Some of this has to do with snobbery and a sense of entitlement â I was both an undergraduate and graduate student at top programs and saw plenty of this â but itâs mostly because they want to publish those scores upon scores upon scores of papers and books that I talked about earlier. Four books and a volume of articles were enough from Gilbert Ryle, but we are supposed to believe that we need to keep enrolling graduate students who wonât get jobs so that our philosophical royalty can publish several hundred articles and books apiece.
There is something particularly obnoxious about the initial suggestion, then, given the source. After all, itâs our disciplineâs royalty that created this toxic cul-de-sac in the first place. Flooding the market with PhDâs for whom there are no jobs, so that they barely have to teach undergraduates themselves and can endlessly riff on the work of their predecessors (and betters), and then, when the unpleasant consequences of this self-serving exercise begin to play out and graduate students begin publishing articles themselves, so as to eke out some tiny advantage in the desperate race that getting a tenure track job in philosophy has become, the royalty complain about an oversaturation of journal articles and propose banning graduate publishing. Itâs the sort of thing that is so outrageous that you either burst out laughing or punch holes in the drywall of your house.
Beyond the exploitation of graduate students that the excessive publishing engaged in by todayâs professional philosophers both engenders and relies upon, the practice has also had the effect of diminishing the discipline itself, as it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and value of the humanities and serves no purpose other than that of professional advancement and prestige. This sort of cynical professionalism on the part of people working in the humanities â and itâs not limited to philosophy â is something that the university and broader public will tolerate less and less, as the financial disposition of higher education in its current form becomes more and more stressed, in its decades long transformation from a system designed to educate elites into one of mass education.
The purpose and value of the humanities and of arts and letters lies in the deepening of human experience and the enrichment of human life; the enhancement of our ability to contemplate the significance and meaningfulness of our lives and activities, once the sciences and engineering and medicine and business have attended to our material condition. Philosophyâs role in this is to provide us with a number of cognitive and linguistic tools, as well as a set of distinctive starting-point style questions that will enable those who are reflective and thoughtful to address a number of deep, fundamental issues that occupy a lifetimeâs contemplation. What is beauty? What is knowledge? What is justice? Who are we? What is our purpose? Are we free? Are we responsible? Why does any of this matter to us? And as anyone who hasnât been stricken blind and stupid by professional concerns should recognize, these are not the sorts of questions that will ever admit of conclusive answers. The value of posing and attempting to answer them lies in the engagement itself and in the life-enriching effects such engagement engenders.
You would never know this, however, from reading contemporary, professional philosophical literature, much of which is done in a mode that suggests that these are questions that admit of conclusive answers. The endless pushing of the umpteenth version of utilitarianism or deontology or realism or materialism or compatibilism or whatever-the-fuck-ism is nothing but an exercise in ever diminishing returns. An entire fieldâs worth of philosophers spent decades trying to solve the Gettier cases. There is value in the initial round of questions and in enough iterations of formal discussion of that initial round of questions to fully bring out all of their significant dimensions. But to go beyond this point and to increase the level of technical apparatus brought to bear and to engage in an obsessive-compulsive regimen of citation is to change the nature of the activity itself; to turn it from the starting point for individual, personal contemplation of timeless questions into a grotesque mimicry of scientific investigation. Â
Discovered a genuinely interesting new question that should be added to the history of great questions that will enrich and endure over the course of peoplesâ lives? Write about it. Have the ability to develop an existing question in a way that facilitates its capacity to enrich and endure? Do it. But otherwise? Teach your students. Grade their papers. Venture into or create public forums, in which you bring philosophyâs enriching and enduring questions to your friends and neighbors and fellow citizens. Just stop playing philosopher-scientist. And stop filling your departments with graduate students for whom there are no jobs. You created the damned publishing arms race that youâre complaining about. You can stop it by ceasing to engage in it yourselves.
That the personal is political is a bit of wisdom from the 1960s which suggests that we should not ignore domestic affairs in the political arena. That the personal is philosophical is an idea that goes back to Antiquity and to Platoâs Socrates, who says in the Apology that âthe unexamined life is not worth living.âÂ
The first is almost certainly a sound idea: wage equity; the right to divorce; spousal abuse; women’s right to own property; child labor; all are appropriate objects of legislation and regulation. Iâve long wondered about the second one, though, and after three decades teaching philosophy and being a part of the community of academic philosophers, Iâve come to think it is as unsound as the first is sound; that philosophy, as studied and written about by professional philosophers, when applied too directly and intimately to oneâs life, makes a mess not just of it but of the lives of the people around you. And if youâve sometimes wondered why the more publicly-facing philosophers often seem like such strange people, itâs in good part because they examine their lives far too much, with far too little discretion, and in all the wrong ways.
I say this, in part, because it runs opposite to the conclusion that Crispin Sartwell draws in his recent essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, âThe New Hellenism.â To summarize (roughly): There was a âstriking change,â around 2010, whereupon some philosophers âbegan to write a lot more personally; they tried to show how philosophical ideas had affected and might affect their own lives,â and for Sartwell this is an unambiguously Good Thing. For one, philosophy will no longer â[fill] in the corners [rather] than answering the Big Questionsâ and for another, the new, more personal philosophers are â[bringing] the field ⌠much better writing and ⌠much more pleasurable reading.â Indeed, so excited is Sartwell about this development that he thinks it may solve the existential crisis facing philosophy and the humanities in the contemporary university.
[A]s philosophy as an academic discipline is again endangered by budget cuts and considerations of prestige and practicality, there is no doubt that the new philosophy has brought in its train a much-needed renewal of urgency, energy, and sense of practical purpose.â
Now this is an essay on whether the personal is philosophical, not on Sartwellâs LARB entry, but so much of what he says there goes directly to the question, so itâs a useful place to start. Sartwell thinks the personal is philosophical. He thinks it should be philosophical. And he thinks the best thing that could have happened to philosophy is that contemporary philosophers are telling everyone about their personal lives (and those of their intimates) in the most public venues. I do not. Sartwell may find Agnes Callardâs disclosures in the New Yorker, New York Times, and comparable venues ârollickingâ (his word) and her philosophically inflected provocations and titillations âsurprising,â but I suspect that most people will think them tediously familiar expressions of bourgeois rebellion, which in the age of social media are a dime a dozen. And if Sartwell really is concerned about the future of philosophy in the University, then a bunch of high-profile exhibitionists from tony institutions poncing about and exposing themselves and their families is the last thing he should celebrate.
One problem lies in the fixation on âanswering the Big Questions,â as Sartwell puts it. For anyone who has been paying attention, it should be apparent by now, several thousand years after Plato, that these kinds of Big Questions are not the sort for which there are answers, at least not if what one means by âanswersâ are solutions around which there will be overwhelming or even substantial consensus. Metaphysical Realists and anti-Realists have disagreed about âthe fundamental nature of realityâ since Antiquity and still do. Ditto for moral Realists and anti-Realists. Materialists and Dualists have disagreed on the ânature and relationship of mind and bodyâ since Antiquity and still do. Objectivists and subjectivists have disagreed on the status of beauty and other aesthetic values since Antiquity and still do. Ethicists have disagreed about whether intent or consequence are morally overriding since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and still do. I could go on, but hopefully, youâve got the point.
The idea that if we just write even more papers and books, weâll arrive at answers (in the aforementioned sense) on these topics should be absurd to anyone reflecting on this history, so itâs interesting that so many philosophers think precisely that. The reasons are many, though I suspect that two are central: (a) professional considerations â In the competitive environment of the University, it is easy to understand why it would seem a bad idea to those who are professionally invested in philosophy to admit that the kinds of questions we investigate have no determinate answers; and (b) conflating the questions we ask in philosophy with those we ask in other disciplines, due to a superficial similarity in form and a lack of imagination on the part of philosophers. (I discuss this issue in greater depth in âDefining Philosophy.â)
Besides the obvious problems with these sorts of conflations, thinking that youâre in the business of Answering The Big Questions engenders a very philosophical sort of hubris: the belief not only that there are determinate answers to questions of Meaning, Purpose, Flourishing, and the like but that you are going to find them. Worse, if you think you already have found them â âI know what justice is!â âI know what flourishing is!â â and then apply them to your life in the crude and ham-fisted ways philosophers tend to, you can do a lot of damage to yourself and to the people around you. Only thus could someone like Callard think not only of her behavior but of her public exhibition of it as âaspirationalâ (her word) and part of some exercise in human flourishing. And only someone in the grip of a theory could think, as Derek Parfit apparently did of his hermetic, ritualistic asceticism, that he is engaged in a project of âsaving morality,â as a recent biography described him. Someone who thinks that âif morality is not objective, life is meaningless,â as Parfit did, is not thinking clearly or soundly or rigorously, for that matter. Something has gone wrong. And in part, itâs that philosophers have misunderstood the kinds of questions they are asking and have failed to understand the status of the answers they are getting, leading to weird and dysfunctional applications of those answers in their real human lives.
Another problem is that of the general vs. the particular. Philosophy is steeped entirely in the former, while well-lived human lives are largely determined by the latter. The formulas that come out of moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the like are the result of a ruthless process of abstraction, de-contextualization, and âedge-smoothingâ that renders them largely useless in the navigation of oneâs daily affairs. Worse, they may actually hinder us, offering an illusion of simplicity and serving as a basis for frustration when that illusion is shattered. Reading Callardâs account of her domestic goings-on â for Sartwell, the most notable and admirable example of the current trend towards âpersonal philosophyâ â all I could do is wonder about the process that takes a person from philosophy to some conception of âaspirationâ that is so strong that it overrides the pained silences; the devastated looks; all of the myriad, immanent âparticularsâ that would give an ordinary person (i.e. one who didnât live so much in his or her head) serious pause. As Aristotle understood, but as few philosophers today seem to, a well-lived life depends essentially on practical wisdom, and practical wisdom is not primarily a matter of intelligence or ratiocination, but of experience, perception, and habit. The âNew Hellenismâ isnât much of one.
Rather than the personal being philosophical, Iâd say that being philosophical is what happens when the personal goes on holiday. Itâs when, as Hume described it, we retreat from the Street into the Study. And the trouble with so many philosophers is that when they return to the Street, they forget that the two are very different places; that the Street is not the Study and that what goes on in the Study is only indirectly and oftentimes only barely relatable to what goes on in the Street. Hume understood this. Aristotle did too. But far too many philosophers past and present have not.
Finally, when it comes to the âExamined Life,â philosophers have a blinkered conception of what such a thing properly involves. Human beings are mammals; living creatures with cognitive, conative, emotional, and other such capacities. We are not minds captaining organic robots. Reasoning is only one of the means by which we figure things out and fruitfully navigate the world, and oftentimes it is not the most important or even the second or third most. We are not transparent to ourselves, nor do we think especially clearly or well when we are too much in our own heads. As a result, self-examination, improvement, and well-being are not productively pursued through solitary ratiocination (with or without the aid of articles or books) and depend heavily on social intercourse, physical activity and immersion in physical environments, and sometimes even psychotherapy.
Philosophical examination, in contrast, is rationalistic and operates entirely at the level of conscious thinking. It is Platonic/Cartesian in logic and spirit, if not ontologically, and this is why when philosophers self-examine, it is more reminiscent of Data, the android character in Star Trek The Next Generation, trying to figure out âwhat it is to be human,â than of any real, serious, individual human pursuit of personal development, growth, and well-being.
Iâll close with an excerpt from my contribution to How To Live a Good Life (Vintage: 2020):
[P]hilosophical theorizing can only provide us with a general, largely abstract, and ultimately incomplete guide to something as complex and steeped in particularity as a good human life. We should be suspicious, then, of philosophies that instruct us too much and in too great detail. If a philosophy purports to tell us specific things we should or shouldnât do in particular situations, then it is likely one that misunderstands the extent to which philosophical theory can inform practice. (p. 75)
That philosophy is a primarily argumentative business is, I trust, evident enough that I donât need to expand on it much. Iâm not denying that there are philosophical satires or poems or essays that may stray from this otherwise common mode. I sometimes write in that vein myself. My point simply is that professional, academic philosophy, as it is generally practiced, is argumentative in nature.
As a formal matter, the point of an argument is to demonstrate the truth of something or the falsity of it. As a practical matter, the point of an argument is to persuade someone of the truth or falsity of something. (With regard to arguments in normative and applied ethics, replace âtruthâ and âfalsityâ with ârightnessâ and âwrongnessâ.) To this second end, a rhetorical dimension may be added, but the idea is that the arguments should be doing the real work.
The presumption, then, is that philosophical positions, theories, accounts, etc., are the sorts of things that are true or false. Arguments for Utilitarianism are supposed to demonstrate that it is true, and arguments against it that it is false. Or at least, they are supposed to count for or against its truth or falsity. The same goes for arguments for and against Kantian ethics; metaphysical Realism and Anti-Realism; Freewill and Determinism; Nominalism and Platonism; theories of personhood; and others.
As people who are familiar with my work will know, I am inclined to think that these sorts of positions suffer from indeterminacy. I donât think there is an independent fact of the matter with respect to the things that metaphysical realists and anti-realists, Kantians and Utilitarians, or nominalists and Platonists disagree about. When two people disagree as to whether or not a seven-month-old fetus is a person, for example, there is no fact the discovery of which would settle the matter one way or another. There may be advantages and disadvantages to thinking about things in one way or another (and which ways are advantageous, and which are disadvantageous will depend on the context), but there is no independent fact as to which way of thinking about them is correct or incorrect. Indeed, the very idea of correctness and incorrectness, truth and falsity with regard to these sorts of issues and disputes is inapt.
Iâm not going to rehearse all of the reasons I think this, as Iâve discussed them at some length in a number of venues, including at the Cathode Ray Zone. Suffice it to say here that the persistence over millennia of the same disagreements with no sign of resolution or abatement and the lack of any material or otherwise substantive impact of holding one view or another are two of my more prominent reasons. One would think that were there some determinate fact as to whether Platonism or Nominalism is correct, we wouldnât be having the same debate about it today that weâve been having since the Middle Ages, and as far as I can tell, metaphysical realists and anti-realists donât take their morning coffee any differently, and both libertarians and determinists will thank you for passing the mustard. [1]
Even where it seems like there must be some substantive, differentiating impact of holding these respective views, a few momentsâ examination reveals it to be illusory. Yes, if you are a nominalist regarding mathematics, then mathematical truths are not going to be ânecessary,â but rather, contingent, and if you are a Platonist, the opposite will be true, but nothing about how one does math or which mathematical statements are true or false is affected by it: two and two still make four, and the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is still 180 degrees, the modal status of such statements notwithstanding.
Even the difference between Utilitarians and Kantians, which one would think should have a significant impact on a personâs actions, is essentially abstract. I would be very surprised to find a utilitarian behaved as if peopleâs intentions had no moral significance, and I would be equally surprised to discover a Kantian who behaved as if no amount of death or destruction carried any moral weight. And at the end of the day, both approaches ultimately stand or fall under the scrutiny of the same set of common, pre-theoretical intuitions that cut across every possible axiological orientation and category, which means that the ultimate conditions of adequacy for Utilitarianism and Kantianism alike lie in a set of already existing, axiologically heterogeneous sentiments. This is articulated by W.D. Ross in The Right and The Good, and though some, like Peter Singer, have tried to resist the idea, their efforts have been less than convincing.
If most or at least a great many philosophical positions are subject to this kind of indeterminacy, then how should we think about philosophical arguments? In answering this, let me first be clear that I think many if not most philosophers get it wrong. They believe that philosophical questions/positions are determinate â that there is a fact of the matter as to whether Utilitarianism or Kantianism or Nominalism or Platonism, etc., is true or false, correct or incorrect â and that consequently, the purpose of philosophical argumentation with respect to these positions is to demonstrate their truth or falsity, correctness or incorrectness. Iâve argued elsewhere that this is part of the reason why far too much philosophy is being written and why far too many philosophical arguments are pursued well beyond the point of any positive return. So, the question becomes: How should we understand philosophical arguments, in light of the fact that they couldn’t do what arguments normally do?
The idea of philosophy as diplomacy stems from the thought that in many cases, philosophies are more akin to preferences of outlook and lifestyle than to positions in science: views and positions in which a person may feel greatly invested and which render the world and our practical affairs from specific points of view and with particular foci, yet which have no really tangible effects.
At times it may be fruitful to focus on the role that we play in forming and shaping the world â which may lead us to take on board the sort of constructivist anti-Realist ideas that Nelson Goodman offers in Ways of Worldmaking â while on other occasions, it may be more apt to think of the world in thoroughly, even ânaivelyâ Realist terms. In certain circumstances, it may make sense to think of morality in terms of the violation of othersâ personal sovereignty, in the way that Kant does, while in other situations, it may be more useful to think of it in terms of the material harms with which Bentham is most concerned. Depending on the point of the investigation, it may be useful to conceive of human beings as physiological systems, operating under a strict set of natural laws, but other sorts of inquiry may benefit more from thinking of us as agents, acting within a complex social network of prerogatives and obligations. As Hilary Putnam once observed, the level and type of description under which we should engage with something is inquiry- or activity-dependent, rather than one-size fits all. [2]
Such preferences may sit uncomfortably with one another on occasion, or there may be strong disagreement as to which among competing philosophical approaches is more apt given the circumstances. When this happens, arguments are pointless and frustrating. Negotiation is what is called for, and negotiation is the main instrument of diplomacy. Hence, the idea of philosophical arguments reconceived as a kind of diplomatic activity.Â
Negotiation is a skill that has largely fallen out of use and needs rehabilitation. In our public discourse, it has been replaced with threatening, demanding, coercing, blackmailing, dogpiling, and the like, more often than not under sway of values that are treated as factual and demonstrable, rather than as requiring negotiation themselves. Think, for example, of the bloodletting over the question of whether or not âtrans women are women,â where what is at issue is not reproductive class membership, regarding which there is an independent fact of the matter, but rather, gender identity, regarding which there is not. Like the debate over whether fetuses are persons, this dispute is unresolvable by way of arguments, given that it is about how individuals are best regarded and not about some material or otherwise demonstrable fact about them. It also is motivated by axiological commitments and judgments that are in tension with one another and which are equally unresolvable by way of arguments. Such cases are precisely where negotiation is needed; where what we must do is figure out a way to coexist, in spite of our disagreement remaining unresolved.
In philosophy, negotiation is rejected in favor of endless rounds of arguments or presentations of evidence, each becoming more insistent and heated, as it begins to dawn on the participants that they will not be dispositive. As with their counterparts in the public discourse, these disputes may be motivated by underlying axiological disagreements â in philosophy and many of the social sciences, the same kinds of emotionally charged, value-laden subjects are taken up as are in the public discourse â which also will need to be negotiated, rather than won or lost. And we can all see what happens when they are not, as the state of these sorts of disagreements, today, is no better in the Academy than it is in the public arena.
Ultimately, principles of successful negotiation must come from psychology and disciplines relevant to or informed by it, but philosophically speaking it seems to me that wisdom is likely to be found in those areas having to do with matters of sensibility rather than reason. In Aesthetics, especially, there is a sophisticated and substantial literature having to do with how one âgets someone to see what one seesâ in a painting or sculpture or performance, in light of the fact that the presence of particular aesthetic qualities cannot be demonstrated by the application of criteria and are not rationally scrutable. [3] Given that so much of philosophy has to do with how we, our activities, and the larger world are or should be best regarded, a lot of insight can be gained from this particular and rich philosophical sub-discipline. [4]
Notes
[1] The âthank you for passing the mustardâ observation comes from G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908):
…you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will. But it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not free to raise, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge, to punish, to resist temptations, to incite mobs, to make New Year resolutions, to pardon sinners, to rebuke tyrants, or even to say “thank you” for the mustard.
[2] See his discussion of trying to explain why a round peg doesnât fit into a square hole. Hilary Putnam, âPhilosophy and Our Mental Lifeâ (1975).
[3] This line of inquiry began with Frank Sibleyâs landmark paper, âAesthetic Conceptsâ (1959).
[4] I would also suggest that metaphysics and ontology could learn a lot from work in Aesthetics, where people like Arthur Danto have offered sophisticated analyses of how there can be substantially different ontological categories, despite there being but one (material) substrate. I discuss this in the penultimate essay in this collection.
**Throughout, I intend âmaterialâ to contrast with âconceptualâ.**
[1] What does it mean to âdemonstrateâ something, in the philosophical sense of the term? Is it just to show that something is true?
[2] Does successful demonstration require securing agreement? How much and from whom?
[3] What is the significance/status/standing of an argument whose validity can be demonstrated, but whose soundness cannot?
[4] You are presented with an argument that is deductively valid, but the premises of which are either speculative, dependent upon perspective, or otherwise unconfirmable. How impressed are you?
[5] An externalist boasts that his epistemology avoids Gettier cases. An internalist counters that the idea that one could know something without having a good reason for thinking it is at odds with what we ordinarily mean by âknowâ. What makes one argument better than the other?
[6] A platonist tells you that numbers are âabstract objectsâ that exist neither in time nor space. A nominalist maintains that numbers do not exist in this sense. Regardless of which position you hold, arithmetic and other activities involving numbers remain identical. What is the significance of the dispute?
[7] A Utilitarian says that we ought to maximize happiness. A Kantian says we ought to act in ways that treat others as âendsâ rather than âmeans.â Suppose that both have valid arguments for their respective views, but neither can demonstrate their soundness. What is the status of their disagreement?
[8] Have philosophers ever demonstrated anything besides the truth of certain conditionals?
[9] That I ought to maximize happiness is supposed to be based on the âfactâ that happiness is the âsupreme good.â How would one demonstrate this alleged fact, beyond some stipulation as to the meaning of âgoodâ?
[10] Suppose that happiness being the supreme good is, in fact, demonstrable. In the spirit of H.A. Prichard, might we not ask why we should think that âthe good ought to be the caseâ? And could one answer that question other than by way of some stipulation as to the meaning of âgoodâ?
[11] If meaning is conventional — i.e. a matter of common use — and may vary âlocallyâ or over time, what is accomplished in philosophical arguments by appeals to meaning(s)?
[12] Imagine that for whatever reasons, everyone agrees that âthe general happiness ought to be maximized.â What is added by demonstrating it?
[13] Suppose that âthe general happiness ought to be maximizedâ has been demonstrated but for whatever reasons, no one accepts it. What is the significance of the fact that itâs been demonstrated?
[14] Is there an independent âspace,â in which demonstrated truths âfloat,â exerting some kind of force over peopleâs thoughts and actions?
[15] Is there a common and generally accepted standard of reasonableness?
[16] What is the aim of identifying things as âright,â âwrongâ, âobligatory,â âforbidden,â and the like?
[17] Empirical investigation tells us what is or is likely (or unlikely) to be the case. Philosophical arguments tell us what could possibly be the case, what must be the case, and what couldnât possibly be the case. What is the relation of the latter to the former?
[18] Suppose that an empirical phenomenon, X, has never been observed, under any conditions. A philosopher tells you that X is âpossibleâ? What significance does this have?
[19] Descartes deduced that because thoughts have no extension, they cannot be physical and consequently, mind/body dualism must be true. Is the chief problem with this that some of his premises were false?
[20] Is there a way to express the so-called âHard Problemâ of consciousness, without employing metaphors, impressionistic language, or distinctly philosophical terms, such as: âdirect accessâ; âqualiaâ; âintrospective awarenessâ; âseemingnessâ; âthereâs something itâs like to be a ___â; etc.?
[21] Panpsychists argue that elementary particles must be conscious, because assuming that they are solves certain problems in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. Can one discover material things about the natural world this way?
[22] Everything our sciences tell us about consciousness suggests that it is born of nervous systems. Panpsychists maintain that philosophical arguments demonstrate it is a property of elementary particles. What would settle their disagreement?
[23] Philosophers like David Chalmers say that they can imagine âzombiesâ with identical nervous systems to ours, but lacking consciousness. What is the significance of this?
[24] Suppose someone told Chalmers that she couldnât imagine such zombies. What then?
[25] Aside from cases where there is an outright logical contradiction — P and Not-P — how would one demonstrate that something is impossible other than by deeming it âunimaginableâ?
[26] In the absence of any logical contradiction, on what grounds would a person call something possible, other than that it is âimaginableâ?
[27] People are evenly split — 50/50 — as to whether P is âimaginable.â What would determine which camp is right?
[28] Is imaginability an âobjectiveâ or unwavering quality?
[29] Aside from philosophy, appeals to âtranscendental argumentsâ — X is necessary for the possibility of Y — are mostly found in theology. Does this tell us anything?
[30] What seems more likely? (A) Philosophers can successfully deduce material facts about the natural world, irrespective of or in contradiction with well-evidenced scientific accounts; or (B) philosophers can deduce things about certain concepts we might sometimes employ in conceiving of the natural world, which have no bearing on what the natural world is or is not like?
The âLaw of the Instrumentâ is a common bias that involves excessive reliance on a familiar tool, even when it is ill-suited to the task at hand. As Abraham Maslow characterized it in 1966, âIf the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.âÂ
In the social media age, discourse has become such a tool among the general public. For professional philosophers, it has long been so. We â professional philosophers and âlayâ people alike â overestimate the aptness and efficacy of discourse, especially in online environments. In terms of the âlaw of the instrument,â if the only tool you have is talking/writing, it is tempting to treat everything as if it was an argument. And if you spend a lot of time in places where discourse is the dominant means of engagement (and obviously, social media platforms are such places), then you will develop an overly disputational view of human interaction. Even in those online exchanges where the point of conversing would seem to be to share common enthusiasms, whether for music, food, movies, television, or the like, the âdiscourseâ almost always devolves into arguments and browbeating, as if one really is going to make another person (usually a stranger) stop listening to 1980âs glam metal, cease consuming and enjoying hamburgers or pizza, halt knitting a shawl or pot holder (there is such a thing as âknitting discourse,â alas), or desist in wearing certain Halloween costumes, because one has announced that they are â___-ist,â âproblematic,â âculturally appropriating,â etc.
Philosophers have long suffered from this bias, which is why we are overly impressed by claims that this, that, or the other is âwarranted,â âjustified,â âimpermissible,â âobligatory,â and the like. Underlying this are (at least) three mistakes that philosophers routinely make.
The first is presuming that discourse, by itself, has some sort of intrinsic force. Philippa Foot once noted this, saying that â[p]eople talk ⌠about the âbinding forceâ of morality, but it is not clear what this means if not that we feel ourselves unable to escape,â and in âModern Moral Philosophy,â Elizabeth Anscombe described the force of mere moral utterances, absent any tangible sanction or real potential for it, as âmesmeric.â Iâve written about this myself, asking inSome Questions About Obligation, âWhat is the significance of a negative moral judgment for which there is no sanction of any kind that matters to the accused?â the answer to which is âzero.â
The second is thinking that the claims we make in the imperative mood enjoy substantial consensus. They do not. For one thing, moral imperatives depend on the conception of obligation one is working with â Utilitarianism and Kantian deontology, for example, will often yield contradictory imperatives â and there is nothing resembling consensus on this front. (My own view is that all such positions suffer from indeterminacy.) For another, there often is little to no consensus on the first-order judgments themselves. Not that long ago, in a discussion over at Daily Nous (a popular philosophy insiders blog), someone asked the following â
Why arenât more philosophers vegan (or at least vegetarian)? What are the real reasons for not being so? This directly relates to academic conferences and talks when there are meals: Philosophers are increasingly concerned about the climate/environmental impacts caused by flying to conferences, etc. So (in addition to allowing virtual options for attendance and the like), why not have all meals be vegan? Whatâs honestly so difficult about that?
â which, given that 95+% of the population is not vegan, is rather out of touch. One participant in the conversation observed that perhaps âthe arguments for veganism arenât as compelling as vegans believeâ to which, well, yes, quite.
Beyond moral obligatoriness and permissibility, justification or âwarrantâ are philosophersâ favorite notions to throw around, but here too there is nothing resembling consensus and once again, different views will yield contradictory judgments: something that may be justified or warranted on a traditional âinternalistâ view of justification â having good reasons under some or other conception of âgoodâ â may not be under an âexternalistâ view, according to which being warranted means being properly connected to the truth-maker, regardless of what reasons one may have.
An unstated â and largely unexamined â assumption among philosophers is that people care an awful lot about consistency, rationality, and a number of other related intellectual virtues to the exclusion of other considerations. More: that they care about these things as they are conceived by and figure into the preoccupations of professional philosophers. They do not and neither do philosophers in our unguarded or honest moments. Like everyone else, we care about satisfying the sort of âreasonable personâ standard that one finds in the law and in ordinary life, for reasons of sociability, getting along, and getting things done. But the sort of justification one regularly encounters in academic philosophy is not something anyone cares about in daily life and when demanded is largely performative and of dubious utility.
Which brings us to our third mistake and that is failing to see where our professional activities end and regular life begins. David Hume wrote in the Enquiries that one should âbe a philosopher, but amidst all your philosophy be still a man,â a sensible, practical guidance that professional philosophers seem to have difficulty following. Our entire business consists of argumentative discourse, and because it is often directed towards the elements of ordinary life, it is easy to forget that an overlap in subject matter entails nothing about the aptness of a particular approach to it. What is an appropriate level of epistemic and other forms of ârationalâ scrutiny in the context of doing academic philosophy may not be appropriate in oneâs other interactions and engagements. It would be inapt to raise general skeptical considerations during the course of a scientific investigation â imagine if every scientific inquiry was held hostage to skeptical arguments concerning the existence of the external world â and it makes little sense to drag philosophical notions of warrant or theories of obligation into ordinary conversations about someoneâs Halloween costume, crocheted pot holder, music preferences, or lunch. Even in philosophical investigation âreasons come to an end,â as Wittgenstein observed, and they certainly do â and much sooner â in oneâs daily commerce, at least if one prefers not to be a pest.
In the political arena, discourse is often contrasted with violence, and it has been to the benefit of modern political and civic life that the former has replaced the latter as determinative of political contests in the liberal democracies. It is worth noting, however, that âdiscourseâ in this sense involves negotiation as much as it does disputation and argument, because (a), as just observed, reasons come to an end â as often as not without resolution of the issue at hand â and (b) the relevant discourse takes place within a framework of shared purpose, namely that of self-governing. When this shared purpose collapses and with it, the inclination to negotiate, the âdiscourseâ simply becomes a kind of discursive violence, with the real thing perpetually on the cusp. And in online, social media environments, where there is rarely if ever a shared purpose, due to the indiscriminate, global character of such interactions, negotiation is essentially non-existent and frustrated disputation leads straight and swiftly to discursive knife fighting. Add to this the fact that participants may be more interested in playing to an audience than persuading their interlocutors â there is an ever present, global audience in online interactions â and the limits to productive argumentative discourse should be obvious.
âTake people where you find themâ is a well-worn bit of psychological wisdom and is essential to successful friendships, intimate relationships, business, and more casual interpersonal engagements. You are unlikely to change people very much, especially with regard to their fundamental sensibilities, values, and epistemic norms, and will have to decide for yourself what you will and wonât tolerate from your friends, associates, and lovers. This remains doubly â triply â true when one is talking about strangers online or anywhere else. After all, if you arenât going to change the mind of your co-worker, best friend, or wife, what chance is there that youâre going to change the mind of a random stranger passing by or on some social media platform? Part of acknowledging the sovereign autonomy of other independent adults is understanding that they have their own sensibilities and orientations and views, whatever you may think of them, and that no one has deputized you to put them straight or âcall them out.â And while there are some circumstances in which arguing with others â even strangers â can be a productive activity, when the reasons have run out, the dispute remains unresolved, and the desire to live with or negotiate over whatever is at issue has evaporated, it is best simply to walk away. The alternative is a discursive Forever War and all that entails.
Iâve written a lot about the confusions that plague academic philosophers, and one of the things we are the most confused about is the sort of expertise our education and work confers.
A doctor of veterinary medicine is an expert on animal physiology and health. A medical doctor has a similar expertise, but with regard to human physiology and health. A botanist is an expert on plants. An astronomer is an expert on stars, planets, and nebulas. And so on.
Philosophical expertise is nothing like this. Ours is the mastery of aliterature, not the things that literature is about, which means that our expertise is discursive through and through. We have mastered a certain way of talking, conceptualizing, and analyzing and become experts in a body of work produced in that idiom.
Certainly, vets and doctors and botanists and astronomers master a literature and discourse (a mastery that includes significant empirical investigation), but the expertise that follows is not simply in that literature or discourse, but in the subject matter itself. By studying the literature and being involved in botanical discourse and experimentation, the botanist becomes an expert on plants. By studying the literature and engaging in the discourse and experiments in chemistry, the chemist becomes an expert on the properties and behaviors of chemical compounds. Do philosophers acquire a comparable sort of expertise through our studies and work? I donât think so.
What would it mean to be an expert on morality? Presumably, to behave really well; better than most. And yet, the study of moral philosophy confers no such benefit, as evinced by the fact that moral philosophers behave as well or as poorly as everyone else.
How about knowledge? What would it mean to be an expert on that? While more obscure than the previous question, it seems a similar answer is in order: To be an expert on knowledge would be to have mastered the methods of knowledge-acquisition, which means that one should be really good at knowing, across the different subject areas; better than most. Alas, the study of epistemology has no such effect, and philosophers seem as knowledgeable â and as ignorant â as everyone else (suitably qualified).
Value? Beauty? Expertise with regard to these suggests that a person is in possession of superior sensibilities and tastes. Do philosophers who have mastered the literature and done research in axiology or aesthetics have better sensibilities or tastes than anyone else? Of course not.
And what about reality; the subject of metaphysics? What would it mean to be an expert on that? At this point, our questions have crossed over into the weird and nonsensical. I have no idea what being an âexpert on realityâ consists of or even means and I doubt anyone else does either. Whatever the study of metaphysics provides a person, then, it isnât that.
It should go without saying that mastering, say, the literature on just-war theory does not make a person an expert on actual warfare or international conflicts, but watching philosophers on social media opining â often with great conviction and fervor â on the latest conflict in the Middle East reveals that many of us think it does. Knowing the literature and publishing in political theory entails nothing about what one may or may not know about contemporary politics and government, but youâll find philosophers publicly pontificating on these subjects nonetheless. Having mastered the literature on Smith or Marx wouldnât seem to give a person the sort of expertise required to speak authoritatively on matters of real world micro- and macroeconomics, and yet, once again, many philosophers act as if it does.
Far too many of us think that our course of study and work makes us experts on everything that our literature speaks to. When talking to one another in exclusively philosophical spaces, this is harmless â a kind of mutual admiration society that has no impact on anyone else â but once it breaks out into the public or finds its way into spheres populated by those with genuine expertise in these areas, it becomes quickly evident that we are no better informed than anyone else (again, suitably qualified).
The reasons for this confusion about our own expertise are many and varied and include selection effects â i.e. the profiles of the sorts of people whom academic philosophy tends to attract â which means that any serious analysis would require its own separate treatment, so Iâll just say a few things about them here.
Iâve said that philosophy, at its core, involves the mastery of a toolset and an idiom, but many of the positions that have been most popular among philosophers suggest that our discipline confronts a reality beyond human discourse and activity. Bernard Williams may have thought philosophy a âhumanistic disciplineâ â and so do I â but an awful lot of philosophers think theyâre talking about stuff other than us.
With regard to these positions, the biggest culprits are the realisms and rationalisms: realisms, because they claim an âindependent realityâ â understood in a peculiar, distinctly philosophical sense of the expression â for the things one is talking about, and rationalisms because they claim a universality for oneâs talking. If you are a moral realist, for example, and think that rightness and wrongness exist and operate independently of human attitudes and activity, then you may very well think there is a thing out there to be expert about, just as animal bodies are things out there for vets to be experts about. Ditto for âmetaphysical realists,â who get to be experts about the ding an sich or Forms or whatever else they think is ârealâ in this strange philosophical sense of the word. And letâs not even get started on the unfortunate âmodal realists,â who think that logical possibilities are akin to âdistant countries,â as Kripke characterized the view in Naming and Necessity. (1980) Those who have read and digested the message of AustinâsSense and Sensibilia (1962) might wonder why anyone still goes for this sort of thing, but here we are.
If in addition one is a (small ârâ) rationalist, then one also expects universal agreement, in the sense that one views consensus on such matters as a norm, albeit perhaps an aspirational one. The canons of deductive and inductive inference are universal, after all (sort of), and as philosophical theories about obligation, knowledge, reality, and the like are created by way of ratiocination of one kind or another, if the relevant inferences are sound, they should enjoy universal consent. That they do not is obvious to everyone, but for the rationalist, this lack of agreement is a sign of some defect, either in the arguments or on the part of the interlocutor, and consequently is not perceived as indicating anything about the nature of our discipline itself.
I would point out to those who hold views like these that disagreements over these subjects are irresolvable. And itâs not just that people are stubborn or thick-headed and refuse to see the âtruthâ or ârealityâ or whatever it is, but that the kinds of positions we trade in by their nature suffer from indeterminacy. Itâs not just that we canât resolve disputes over them; they are not the kinds of things over which one can have resolvable disputes.
Whether utility or the dignity of the personhood of others is overriding of all other considerations â or whether anything is generally overriding in the manner utilitarians and Kantians say things are â is not resolvable. Whether epistemic warrant is âinternalâ or âexternalâ is not resolvable. Whether American style democracy or European style constitutional monarchy is the more âjustâ system is not resolvable. Whether there are discrete selves or Humean âbundlesâ is not resolvable. Whether ârealityâ is âconstructedâ or âmind independentâ is not resolvable. Whether Aristotelian âflourishingâ or Epicurean âcontentmentâ constitute the good life is not resolvable. I could go on, but surely you get the point. These are not the sorts of questions for which there are determinate answers, and when people disagree over them, there lies a point of inevitable stalemate, beyond which further arguments and evidence are useless.
In part, this is because every one of these positions is consistent with the relevant facts: no fact is going to decide between Internalism and Externalism, Utilitarianism and Deontology, or Metaphysical Realism or Anti-Realism. (It isnât as if, for example, being a metaphysical anti-realist will give you trouble when trying to kick stones, whatever Samuel Johnson might have thought.) Itâs also because there are good arguments for all of these positions and determining which ones are sound and which ones are not is undermined by the fact that many of the core premises cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed other than by way of further arguments, which will suffer from the same problem.
Philosophy operates within what Wilfrid Sellars called âthe Manifest Image,â the space of reasons, representations, persons, and ends. Scientists study different aspects of the natural world, while philosophers examine the different ways of conceiving and thinking about that world, including by way of the sciences, which is what gives us the philosophy of science. We inhabit various types of environments â natural, social, civic, and the like â and philosophers investigate the ways in which we stand in relation to them, which informs everything from social and political philosophy to the philosophy of mind. All of us value things and feel obligated to do some things and not do others, and philosophers are experts in the different ways in which one might think about what we are doing when something matters to us or when we moralize, which gives us ethical and axiological theories.Â
Or at least in a subset of those ways. What philosophy offers is a rational reconstruction of the things we think and do, and this provides us with neither a complete nor a fully satisfying account of them.
Many of us â even some of the best â have gotten this backwards and think that philosophy doesnât offer a partial, rationalistic treatment of human activity and practice, but is in fact fundamental; that everything we do, at bottom, is philosophy: when we value things, we are doing philosophy; when we feel obligated we are doing philosophy; when we wonder about who and what we are or how we should live, we are doing philosophy.
Mary Midgley meant something like this, when she said, âPhilosophy, like speaking prose, is something we have to do all our lives, well or badly, whether we notice it or not.â But given philosophyâs (small ârâ) rationalism, this cannot be the case â we are mammals, not rational minds inhabiting bodies â and given the built-in un-falsifiability â Everyoneâs doing philosophy even if they donât notice! â and obviously self-serving quality of the thought â We are experts on what everybody does all the time! â it is safely rejected. Much more apt is Stanley Rosenâs take, according to which philosophy involves extraordinary, technical discourse that is built upon our ordinary language and practice, rather than the other way around. (Austin observed how this can go terribly wrong in metaphysics and epistemology, in the already-mentioned Sense and Sensibilia, and Wittgenstein famously observed that âphilosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.â) As Rosen describes it in Metaphysics in Ordinary Language (1999):
My thesis is not simply that there is an ordinary language, reflective of the common stratum of human nature⌠I also claim that this ordinary language is retained as a basis⌠of all technical dialects. It is this basis that serves as the fundamental paradigm for the plausibility or implausibility of theoretical discourse and particularly of philosophical doctrines.
Philosophical expertise, then, is ⌠philosophical. It is not an expertise in morality, but in a certain kind of moral thinking and talking. It is not an expertise in knowledge, but in certain ways of understanding and thinking about it. It is not an expertise in ârealityâ â whatever that might mean â but in certain ways of conceiving of the world and our relation to it.
So, the next time a philosopher lectures you about the Arab/Israeli conflict or runs off on a rant about capitalism or âneoliberalismâ or tells you that certain kinds of lives donât constitute âflourishingâ or that muons are conscious or deems your bologna sandwich or linguine con vongole morally âimpermissible,â just remember that he likely doesnât know any more than you do about whatever it is the two of you are talking about. And while the particular framework from which he approaches these subjects may be illuminating and useful to your own understanding of things, it also may not be, in which case you should feel free to ignore him.
Of all the virtues of H.A. Prichardâs âDoes Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?â (1912) — and there are many — its greatest is in revealing the mischief the term âreallyâ has played in philosophy, as in: âIs X really a duty?â âDoes Y really exist?â âDo we really know that P?â That sort of thing.
In common parlance, the term has its uses and does no harm. We might reasonably ask about an advertised product, âIs it really the best at getting rid of stains?â insofar as advertisements exaggerate, and whether or not a claim about a product is hyperbole is generally determinable. After drinking too many beers at a party and making out with someone, one might fairly ask oneself the next day, âWas she really as good looking as I thought she was?â given that consuming excessive amounts of booze can distort a personâs perception, and whether or not one finds a person attractive is easily confirmed.
In philosophy, the term has no useful function and the capacity to do tremendous harm. Indeed, I would say that it has fueled the disciplineâs most fruitless lines of inquiry in ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and other areas. It has done this by stoking two distinctly philosophical forms of hubris: first, that there are special methods of verification and demonstration, beyond the ordinary ones, that are the special province of philosophers; and second, that there is a grand finale at the end of the investigative rainbow. There arenât and there isnât, but this hasnât stopped people from building entire careers on the basis of these two conceits.
Feeling obligated can be onerous, and who among us hasnât wondered on occasion whether we really are duty-bound to do whatever it is weâve been contemplating? We may think about the person to whom we feel obligated and why we feel this way. Maybe he has done us a kindness or perhaps we have wronged him. We may reflect on the nature of our relationship more generally. We may even take into consideration the times that he has failed to do something that we thought he was obligated to do. All of this is natural and common, and may lead us to change our minds about our current feelings…or not.
A certain kind of philosopher, however, takes this unremarkable and universal human experience as calling for a theory. He may come up with an account of what constitutes âthe good,â then work through whether the action in question âmaximizesâ it, and conclude that he âreallyâ is obligated after all. This may offer a certain frisson, as he basks in the confidence that his unruly and unreliable feelings have been brought under the steady and elevated light of reason, and if has a penchant for social media and is of an excitable disposition, he may even lecture strangers about it online.
Alas, itâs all so ephemeral. Inevitably, some people wonât be impressed and the glow of righteous certainty will quickly give way to contention. The philosopher will discover that whatever he may think and however much he might believe heâs âprovenâ it, he has no capacity to make others agree with him or do whatever it is he has deemed âobligatoryâ and that lecturing people just makes them cranky. Another philosopher may weigh in, armed with an entirely different theory that yields a contradictory judgment for which she claims the support of reasonâs steady and elevated light, and our aspirant moralist will find himself in never-ending rounds of arguments over which theory is âreallyâ the correct one. More frustrating still, a clever dick like Prichard may come along and point out that what he thought heâd proven hadnât really been proven after all; that it actually doesnât follow from âx is goodâ that âone ought to do x,â unless one presumes that âwhat is good ought to be the case,â which means that he simply has grounded one obligation in another obligation (philosophers love âgroundingâ) and thus, accomplished nothing.
In epistemology this kind of dysfunctional use of âIs x really ___?â begins with Descartes, where it takes the form of âdo I really know this thing I thought I knew?â The point is not that there were no radical skeptics before him (the ancient Pyrrhonists birthed the genre), but rather that it was with Descartes that the thing took the form of a “Quest for the Holy Endpoint”; for some âultimate warrantâ that would render whatever knowledge weâve obtained immune from future contradiction or disconfirmation; and that regardless of the subject matter, human understanding could be modeled on geometry; that…
…all things, to the knowledge of which man is competent, are mutually connected in the same way, and that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only we abstain from accepting the false for the true, and always preserve in our thoughts the order necessary for the deduction of one truth from another. [1]
As you might expect, the project was doomed from the start. Finding the Holy Endpoint (or the Holy Starting Point, depending on how one looked at it) turned out to be really hard. The doubts Descartes offered were toughies — even if you flat-out see something, directly in front of you, it could be a dream or an hallucination, and even something as solid-seeming as a deductive mathematical proof might be marred by one persistently âmis-deducingâ — and none of the available responses seemed up to the task. Hume and Reid saw the inherent rot in the thing (that something could be the case, unmoored from any tangible possibility, seems a poor motivation for serious doubt of any kind) and deemed the Search for the Holy Endpoint a fool’s errand, while those who were committed to seeing it through descended into ever deeper spirals of esoteric weirdness. Kant declared it a “scandal to philosophy” that no proof of the existence of the “external world” and introduced the âtranscendental argument,â in which one basically just took whatever was being doubted and then contrived to âdemonstrateâ that it was ânecessary for the possibility ofâ some other thing that everyone already agreed on. Meanwhile, Descartesâ own âsolutionâ tacitly admitted defeat (without actually admitting it), by invoking Godâs âperfectionâ as a reason to think human beings couldnât be so broken as to always get things wrong. If you are wondering how you could reasonably doubt something youâd seen with your own eyes but nonetheless know that God exists and has all these perfect attributes, youâd be right, but the idea of the grand finale at the end of the investigative rainbow and of philosophersâ uniquely tasked with finding it make for a heady and intoxicating cocktail.
I could tell nearly identical stories across the philosophical landscape, but these are enough to make the point. By and large, philosophers have an antipathy for uncertainty, open-endedness, conflict (and conflictedness), indeterminacy, fallibility, hesitation, and any number of other related âstatesâ that largely define the human condition. In short, many philosophers are intensely uncomfortable with their humanity, and rather than trying to get better at being human are involved instead in trying to transcend it. This is not a humanistic program, but a quasi-religious one, and should be anathema to a discipline rooted in rationality and being reasonable.
How else to explain the refusal to accept the very clear and obvious answer to the âIs X really___?â question, with which Prichard concludes his short and pithy essay? If I wonder whether Iâve added or multiplied correctly, I do the sum or multiplication again. If I wonder whether Iâm really obligated to do something, I revisit the thoughts and feelings and circumstances that made me feel obligated and see if they do so again. This is all that one does, and it is all that one can do, and notice that even after doing it, the doubts may remain or one may change oneâs mind later. This is a feature of human thinking and feeling, not a bug, and is something that can’t be fixed and doesn’t need fixing. There are no special means of verification beyond the ordinary ones, and because they are inconclusive by nature, there is no grand finale at the end of philosophical investigation. The questions and hesitations and doubts go on in perpetuity. That so much of philosophy has devoted itself to opposing this healthy, grounded self-understanding is remarkable from a psychological perspective, but from the standpoint of inquiry, it is the reason why we come across as so obsessive, dogmatic, and downright weird to ordinary people and to those in the Academy whose disciplines are more accepting of human nature.
Notes
[1] Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. (1637)
Surveys suggest that most professional philosophers think that the aim of philosophy is to arrive at true positions on subjects ranging from Morality to Knowledge, Reality, Mind, and the like. They think there are determinate answers as to whether moral realism or anti-realism is true or whether the internalists or externalists get knowledge right or whether [or how] we retain our personal identity over time.
Those who are familiar with my work will know that I have questioned this, but who am I to stand against this consensus among my distinguished colleagues? So, here are the correct answers to all of philosophyâs most fundamental questions.
[1] Why is there something rather than nothing?
Why shouldnât there be something?
[2] Where do words get their meanings?
From people.
[3] Are meanings âin the headâ?
No.
[4] What determines the reference of a term or expression?
Talking and pointing.
[5] What does ââSnow is whiteâ is trueâ mean?
It means that snow is white.
[6] Does God exist?
Of course not. Have you looked around?
[7] What are the foundations of morality?
People care about things.
[8] What are the foundations of value?
People like and dislike things.
[9] What is the ground of being?
Being isnât a thing and doesnât have grounds.
[10] What is the supreme principle of morality?
There isnât one.
[11] What is the standard of beauty?
There isnât one.
[12] How can we reconcile the subjectivity and normativity of taste?
We canât. The fact that we wish others would like the same things that we do doesnât make our wishes normative.
[13] Are values âmind-independentâ?
No. Just imagine that there never were any people.
[14] Is reality âmind-independentâ?
Minds are part of reality. What else would they be a part of?
[15] What justifies our beliefs?
Many different things, depending on the context.
[16] What are persons?
Friends; family; neighbors; compatriots; etc.
[17] What is the standard of personal identity?
It depends on the context.
[18] What is the nature of mind and body?
Ask the psychologists, neuroscientists, physiologists, anatomists, etc. What would philosophers know about it?
[19] Is there Free Will?
Thereâs no âwill,â so it canât be free.
[20] What makes agency possible?
People do things for reasons.
[21] What is the best system of government?
Liberal democracy.
[22] What is Justice?
Sometimes itâs fairness. Sometimes itâs desert. Sometimes itâs something else. It depends.
[23] How do we know we arenât brains-in-vats?
The same way that we know we arenât goats.
[24] What does human flourishing consist of?
It depends on the human.
[25] Is there purpose in nature?
Yes, for those things that can form intentions.
[26] Do we survive death?
No. Death is what happens when we donât survive.
[27] Could there be philosophical zombies?
What are you talking about?
[28] Is it immoral to eat a ham and cheese sandwich?
Of course not.
[29] What is âfirst philosophyâ?
There is no âfirst philosophy.â
[30] Is the unexamined life worth living?
Whether a life is worth living is determined by the person living it, so it depends.
Whenever I am asked to give a definitive characterization of philosophy, my reply typically takes the form of listing a number of representative philosophical questions, like this:
What are good reasons for believing something?
How do sounds, marks, gestures, and the like represent things in the world?
What does it mean to say that a statement is true or false?
What is the relationship between the mind and the body?
What makes actions morally right and wrong?
How should a person live his or her life?
From where does political authority derive?
The upside of doing things this way is that one avoids the too-neat formulas and tidy definitions that inevitably count too many or too few activities as philosophy. The questions approach is more modest in its ambitions, saying: âThere are a number of questions that every student of philosophy will encounter. If we examine them closely, we can get a sense of what the discipline is about.â
The downside is that the form these questions take gives the impression that they are of a type that they are not. âHow?â âWhat?â and âWhy?â questions appear to be the sort for which there should be conclusive answers, but philosophers have been asking these questions â and many more like them â for millennia and seem no closer to a consensus now than before. This suggests that philosophy makes no real progress, an idea that has fueled criticism of philosophy by a number of prominent scientists and science-popularizers, as well as anxiety on the part of philosophers themselves.
The questions I listed above have a great capacity to mislead, as their surface grammar masks the sorts of questions they really are. Philosophy is a distinct intellectual activity: not at all like science; barely like logic or mathematics; and much more like literature or the fine arts than many philosophers like to think. Â
Itâs easy to read the listed questions as seeking straightforward answers. âHow should a person live his or her life?â looks like it should receive an answer of the form, âA person should live his or her life this way,â where âthisâ indicates some specific lifestyle. âWhat is the relationship between mind and bodyâ seems like it should receive an answer similar to the kind one would get in response to a question like âWhat is the relationship between the heart and the circulatory system?â i.e., in terms of some causal connection.
We read these questions in these ways, because we live in a culture that treats science as a model of intellectual activity. (It is worth noting that this is a relatively recent feature of post WWII thinking, and that classical learning was dominant in our top academic institutions for most of the history of higher education, scientific education being considered somewhat plebeian.) In science, when we ask âHow,â we are looking for a mechanism. When we ask âWhat,â we are looking for an empirical characterization or description. When we ask âWhy,â we are looking for a cause. So, when we see these words at the beginning of questions, we interpret them in the manner that we would if they were being asked in a scientific context. And when I say âwe,â I mean an awful lot of us, including many philosophers, who not only are not immune to the influence that science has over our intellectual imagination, but are complicit in its having that influence.
But philosophical âHowâsâ and âWhatâsâ and âWhyâsâ are not scientific ones, and the benefit we derive from asking them does not lie in any specific, concrete, consensus-demanding answers that we might receive which, in any event, are not forthcoming. Unlike science, then, in which the primary benefit of asking these questions lies in their answers, for philosophy, it lies in the enduring quality of the questions themselves and in re-engaging with them again and again over the course of our lives.
The moment one begins to explore the philosophical versions of these questions, it becomes clear that they are not typical âHowâs?â âWhatâs?â and âWhyâs?â âWhat are good reasons for believing something?â immediately unpacks into any number of further questions. What do we mean by âreasonsâ and why should we characterize some as good and others as bad? What do we believe for â that is, what is the purpose of believing? Do we believe in order to acquire the truth? Do we believe in order to paint an appealing picture of the world? Do we believe for reasons at all? What are the respective roles of reason and sentiment in the human template and which is normative with respect to belief? Is there a single account of what constitutes good reasons for believing something or will the accounts vary, depending upon the type and purpose of the belief in question? Or the type of person whose belief it is? Or the context in which the belief arises?
âWhat is the relationship between the mind and the body?â likewise unpacks into any number of further questions. What do we mean by âmindâ? Is the mind a thing, as the body is? If the mind is a thing, is it a physical thing? Is the mind the brain and in what sense? As a matter of literal identity? Of material equivalency? Of some other relation? Should we identify persons with their minds and thus (on this view) with their brains? Can we have minds/brains and also be our minds/brains? Do minds/brains do various things or do people do them? Are thinking, believing, feeling, hoping, and the like discrete events, in the same sense that chemical reactions, biological processes, and the like are discrete events? And so on.
I can do this with every question listed, but you get the point. What look like straightforward questions are quickly revealed to be anything but, and when they are treated as such, they are treated badly. Instead, much of what philosophy seems concerned with is providing an account of ourselves and of the world we inhabit as we conceive them in ordinary language and as ordinary people. (Iâm not suggesting that philosophy doesnât engage with formal material or technical dialects, as we obviously do, only that it is not our main preoccupation.) Personhood, rationality, perception, representation, belief, action, agency, responsibility, citizenship; these comprise some of the chief ingredients out of which our common conception of ourselves is built. And it is a conception that is shot through with normativity; with the idea that human life, activity, and civilization have meaning, significance, and ultimately, purpose. In short, Philosophy primarily concerns itself with what Wilfrid Sellars called “the Manifest Image” and sometimes, with the ways in which it intersects with the “Scientific Image.” (Sellars will appear regularly throughout this collection.)Â Â
So, when we ask âHow?â âWhat?â and âWhy?â questions in philosophy, we are not looking for mechanisms, empirical descriptions, or causes, within a neutral intellectual space, but for a compelling, resonant, apt picture of ourselves, the world, and our place in it. Philosophical questions are not the sort that we pursue until we find an answer and then move on. Rather, we revisit these questions again and again, because what counts as a compelling, resonant, apt picture of ourselves, our world, and our place in it changes as we change. By this point in my life, I have taken up the questions listed above many times: as an undergraduate; as a graduate student; as a new professor; as a mid-career professor; as a senior faculty member; and now as a recent retiree. Of course, this also means that I have taken them up as a teenager, a young man, and in middle-age. Each time I have come to very different conclusions, which have meant very different things to me and played very different roles in my life. In earlier years, I held quite strict views on epistemic warrant and morality and justice, as they supported a picture of humanity and of the world as I would have liked it to be; one that maximized ideological and intellectual consistency and purity. The passing years and the experience that comes with them have led me to different, looser, more contextually sensitive, even somewhat open-ended views on these subjects. Certainly, along the way, I learned any number of arguments for and against the various positions, and certainly these have had an effect on the course that my own views have taken. But unlike the sciences, where evidence can tell decisively in favor of or against a particular view, none of these philosophical arguments are even remotely conclusive; every position has a pile of arguments for and against it; every one of those arguments has critical premises that are contested; and very smart people can be found representing virtually every position on the map. The philosophical views one holds, then, are as much a matter of who one is at a particular time and in a particular place as they are about what has been satisfactorily demonstrated or proven. Â
As much as the pursuit of philosophical questions is part of an effort to paint a certain kind of picture of human life, it is also very much an expression of that life, and this is where philosophy and the arts reveal their great affinity. And just as Socratesâ dialogue with Parmenides and Rousseauâs Confessions and Gettierâs strange cases reward our reading them again and again, so the greatest works of art sustain repeated viewing, reading, and listening, over the course of a lifetime.
There is more philosophy today than there ever has been and itâs certainly more complex. Whether itâs more comprehensive is a bit tricky, as contemporary philosophers are less inclined to build grand systems of the sort that one finds in Kant or Hegel, but taken as a whole, the discipline certainly covers more ground than it used to. As to whether we are more satisfied with the picture of ourselves, the world, and our place in it that philosophy provides today than people were in, say, the 18th Century, I have no idea and suspect that thereâs no way to find out.
Regardless, I donât see how any of this translates into philosophy being âbetterâ than it was before, and to say that something has progressed is to say that itâs gotten and continues to get better. But, is Kripke better than Aristotle? Quine better than Kant? Epistemology today better than the epistemology of the Enlightenment? Itâs difficult to compare personalities, because philosophical problems are sliced into much smaller pieces today, so no contemporary philosopherâs mind or body of work is going to have the scope of those of the philosophers of Antiquity or the Enlightenment. But even at the level of the work itself, itâs not clear that one can characterize contemporary philosophy as better than it was in its preceding phases. For one thing, so much of philosophy today consists of the development of â in the sense of tinkering with â older ideas. The dominant moral theories of our age, for example, are little more than refinements of 18th and 19th century moral philosophies. For another, all of the work is equally of use to us, in our current philosophical investigations and meditations. Plato and Aristotle and Descartes and Hume and Kant are as useful to us today as are Quine, Putnam, Kripke, Rawls, and Nozick, in a way that ancient Greek physics and medieval cosmology and 17th century medicine are not of use to contemporary scientists and doctors.
Of course, the more philosophical history we have available to us in constructing a worldview, the better off we are, so I am philosophically better off than my medieval counterpart in the sense that I have more philosophical resources upon which to draw in constructing a picture of myself, others, and the world we share. But this is very different from saying that philosophy itself progresses, and here, once again, we see similarities between philosophy and the arts. Certainly artists at later periods of time have more resources from which to draw inspiration and instruction than those at earlier periods of time, and for those who form artâs audience, the more art there is, the more there is to play the role that arts play in our development as individuals and as human beings. But like with philosophy, itâs just incorrect to say on the basis of this that contemporary art is better than the art of previous eras. The development of linear perspective in the Renaissance gave artists more tools with which to work, but one cannot say that art became better as a result. Raphael paintings that employ this new tool are not âbetterâ than Van Eyck paintings or medieval illuminations that do not. Indeed, art critics of a formalist bent, like Clive Bell, may even be of the view that art became worse with such developments. As Bell wrote in his book, Art (1914),âBefore the late noon of the Renaissance art was almost extinct. Only nice illusionists and masters of craft abounded.â
Progress involves betterment at both the âobject levelâ of attaining a superior position with respect to a possible end state or in terms of a final goal and at the âmeta-levelâ where these states or goals are themselves conceived as forming a progressive hierarchy. Science clearly progresses in this sense, as it not only accomplishes goal after goal, but each accomplished goal itself represents progress along a hierarchy of goals. Logic and mathematics might. Philosophy, however, does not. Its value, as weâve seen, is of an entirely different, far more contemplative variety.
