How Do I Figure Out What To Think? (guest post by Martin Lenz)


“Picking a side helps you to play the game. But it doesn’t help you in figuring out what you should think. In other words, in order to work out what to think, you don’t have to pick a side at all.”

In the following guest post*, Martin Lenz, professor of philosophy at the University of Groningen, takes up the question of how, if at all, one should go about determining which positions to take on philosophical issues. A version of it originally appeared at his blog, Handling Ideas.

Victor Vasarely, “Novae”

How Do I Figure Out What To Think?
by Martin Lenz

Which view of the matter is right? When I started out studying philosophy, I had a problem that often continues to haunt me. Reading a paper on a given topic, I thought: yes, that makes sense! Reading a counterargument the next day, I thought: right, that makes more sense! Reading a defense of paper one, I thought: oh, I had better swing back. Talking to others about it, I found there were two groups of people: those who had made up their mind for one side, and those who admitted to swinging back and forth just like I did. I guess we all experience this swinging back and forth in many aspects of life, but in philosophy it felt unsettling because there seemed to be the option of just betting on the wrong horse. But there was something even worse than betting on the wrong horse and finding myself in disagreement with someone I respected. It was the insight that I had no clue how to make up my mind in such questions. How did people end up being compatibilists about freedom and determinism? Why do you end up calling yourself an externalist about meaning? Why do you think that Ruth Millikan or Nietzsche make more sense than Jerry Fodor or Kant? I thought very hard about these and related questions and came up with different answers, but today I thought: right, I actually have something to say about it! So here we go.

Let’s first see how the unsettling feeling arises. The way much philosophy is taught is by setting out a problem and then presenting options to solve it. Sometimes they are presented more historically, like: Nietzsche tried to refute Schopenhauer. Sometimes they are presented as theoretical alternatives, like: this is an argument for compatibilism and here is a problem for that argument. I had a number of reactions to such scenarios, but my basic response was not: right, so these are the options. It was rather: I have no idea how to oversee them. How was I supposed to make up my mind? Surely that would require overseeing all the consequences and possible counterarguments, when I already had trouble getting the presented position in the first place. I went away with three impressions: (1) a feeling of confusion, (2) the feeling that some of the views must be better than others, and (3) the assumption that I had to make up my mind about these options. But I couldn’t! Ergo, I sucked at philosophy.

In this muddle, the history of philosophy seemed to come to the rescue. It seemed to promise that I didn’t have to make up my mind, but merely give accurate accounts of encountered views. Ha! The sense of relief didn’t last long. First, you still have to make up your mind about interpretations, and somehow the views presented in primary texts still seemed to pull me in different directions. My problem wasn’t solved but worsened, because now you were supposed to figure out philological nuances and historical details on top of everything else. Ergo, the very idea of reporting ideas without picking a side turned out to be misguiding.

Back to square one, I eventually made what I thought was a bold move: I just picked a side, more or less at random. The unease about not seeing through the view I had picked didn’t really go away, but who cares: we’re all just finite mortals! Having picked a side gave me a new feeling: confidence. I had not seen the light, but hey, I belonged to a group, and some people in that group surely had advanced. Picking a side feels random only at the beginning: then things fall into place; soon you start to foresee and refute counterarguments; what your interlocutors say matters in a new way. You listen not just in an attempt to understand the view “an sich”, but you’re involved. Tensions arise. It’s fun, at least for a while. In any case, picking a side counters lack of confidence: it gives your work direction and makes exchanges meaningful.

For better or worse, I would recommend picking a side if your confusion gets the better of you all the time—at least as a pragmatic device. It’s how you make things fall into place and can take your first steps. However, the unease doesn’t go away. At least for me it didn’t. Why? Let’s face it, I often felt like an actor who impersonates someone who has a view. Two questions remained: What if people could find out that I had just randomly picked a side? This is part of what nourished impostor syndrome (for the wrong reasons, as might turn out later). And how could I work out what I should really think about certain things? While getting a job partly helped with the first question, a lot of my mode of working revolves around the second question. I got very interested in questions of norms, of methodology, and the relation between philosophy and its history. And while these issues are intriguing in their own right, they also helped me with the questions of what to think and how to figure out what to think. So here are a few steps I’d like to consider.

Step one: You don’t have to pick a side. It helps to look more closely at the effect of picking a side. I said that it gave direction and meaning to my exchanges. It did. But how? Picking a side means to enter a game, by and large an adversarial game. If you pick a side, then it seems that there is a right and wrong side just as there is winning and losing in an argumentative setting. Well, I certainly think there is winning and losing. But I doubt that there is right and wrong involved in picking a side. So here is my thesis: Picking a side helps you to play the game. But it doesn’t help you in figuring out what you should think. In other words, in order to work out what to think, you don’t have to pick a side at all.

Step two: Picking a side does not lead you to the truth. As I noted, the way much philosophy is taught to us is by setting out a problem and then presenting options to solve it. The options are set up as better or worse options. And now it seems that picking a side does not only associate you with winning, say, a certain argument, but also with truth. And the truth is what you should think and be convinced of, right? But winning an argument doesn’t (necessarily) mean to hit on the truth of a matter. The fact that you win in an exchange does not mean that you win the next crucial exchange. In fact, it’s at least possible that you win every argument and never hit on any truth. It’s merely the adversarial practice of philosophy that creates the illusion that winning is related to finding the truth.

Now you might want to object that I got things the wrong way round. We argue, not to win, but about what’s true. That doesn’t make winning automatically true, but neither does it dissociate truth from arguing. Let’s look at an example: You can argue about whether it was the gardener or the butler who committed the murder. Of course, you might win but end up convicting, wrongly, the gardener. Now that does show that not all arguments bring out the truth. But they still can decide between true and false options. Let me address this challenge in the next step.

Step three: In philosophy, there are no sides. It’s true that presenting philosophical theories as true or false, or at least as better or worse solutions to a given problem makes them look like gardeners or butlers in a whodunit. Like a crime novel, problems have solutions, and if not one solution, then at least one kind of solution. This is certainly true of certain problems. Asking about an individual cause or element as being responsible or decisive is the sort of setting that allows for true and false answers. But the problems of philosophy are hardly ever of that sort. To see this, consider the example again. Mutatis mutandis, what matters to the philosopher is not mainly who committed the crime, but whether the gardener and the butler have reasons to commit the murder. And once someone pins down the gardener as the culprit, philosophers will likely raise the question whether we have overlooked other suspects or whether the supposed culprit is really to blame (rather than, say, society). This might sound as if I were making fun of philosophy, but the point is that philosophers are more engaged in understanding than in providing the one true account.

How does understanding differ from solving a problem? Understanding involves understanding both or all the options and trying to see where they lead. Understanding is a comprehensive analysis of an issue and an attempt to integrate as many facts as possible in that analysis. This actually involves translating contrary accounts into one another and seeing how different theories deal with the (supposedly) same facts. Rather than pinning down the murderer you’ll be asking what murder is. But most of the time, it’s not your job to conclusively decide what murder is (in the sense of what should count as murder in a given jurisdiction), but to analyse the factual and conceptual space of murder. Yes, we can carve up that space differently. But this carving up is not competitive; rather it tells us something about our carving tools. To use a different analogy, asking which philosophical theory is right is like asking whether you should play a certain melody on the piano or on the trombone. There are differences: the kinds of moves you need to make to produce the notes on a trombone differ vastly from those you need to make on the piano. Oh, and your preference might differ. But would you really want to say there is a side to be taken? Ha! You might say that you can’t produce chords on a trombone, so it’s less qualified for playing chord changes. Well, just get more trombone players then!

I know that the foregoing steps raise a number of questions, which is why I will be dedicating a number of posts to this issue. To return to swinging back and forth between contrary options, this feeling does not indicate that you are undecided. It indicates that you are trying to understand different options in a setting. Ultimately, this feeling measures our attempts to integrate new facts, while we are confronted with pressures arising from observing people who actually adhere to one side or another. For the time being, I’d like to conclude by repeating that it is the adversarial style that creates the illusion that winning and losing are related to giving true and false accounts. The very idea of having to pick a side is, while understandable in the current style of playing the game, misguided. If there are sides, they are already picked, rooted in what we call perspectives. In other words, one need not worry which side to choose, but rather think through the side you already find yourself on. There are no wrong sides. Philosophy is not a whodunit. And the piano might be out of tune.

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Old but still naïve
Old but still naïve
4 years ago

I thought we were all on the same side, the side of wisdom? And, having been taught by our great predecessors time and again how limited our ability is to achieve that, we should at least aspire to humility, caution, and to avoiding premature settled views? – Or are we not the heirs to Socrates? (Substitute other philosophers for Socrates in the other philosophical traditions)

A Research Associate
A Research Associate
4 years ago

I used to feel that uncomfortable feeling of flipping back and forth as well. But now I realize that I’m not flipping back and forth. Instead, I appreciate that argument 1 for position x is pretty good. Then I appreciate that argument 2 against argument 1 is also pretty good. But argument 2 isn’t just the claim that ~x, it’s a claim about a weakness in argument 1. That claim could be true, even if x is true, and even if argument 1 is pretty good. Then argument 3 comes along. Again, it turns out that what I like about argument 3 is it’s treatment of argument 2, and THAT’S what I think it gets right, not it’s claim about x. Thus, I’m not flip flopping on x. I’m just enjoying a number of clever arguments about parts of arguments, all of which can be right, regardless of my view on x.

We can think of this process as generating greater understanding of x if we want to. But I don’t think we have to.

Martin Lenz
Reply to  A Research Associate
4 years ago

Many thanks for your comment! Yes, I agree that your proposal presents a viable and helpful way of approaching the issue, too. It allows us to think of the swinging back and forth without assuming we’re contradicting our own former beliefs, while retaining the idea that we are in agreement with contradictory arguments. – There is further food for thought there, though: You speak of “enjoying a number of clever arguments about *parts*”. It’s the reference to parts that gets us off the hook there, isn’t it? – But wouldn’t we still have to wonder whether that changes our view on the matter or whether we are ‘repairing’ the initial argument?
As to whether we “have to” see this process as ultimately enlarging our understanding of x, I agree that we don’t. That I understand it this way, is owing to my fairly holistic and certainly defeasible take on what an idea of x is.

A Research Associate
A Research Associate
Reply to  Martin Lenz
4 years ago

My pleasure! And now we begin to instantiate the issue your post was meant to address 🙂

I think you’re right that it’s possible that a counter-counter argument could defeat a counter-argument and therefore repair the original argument. But my impression is that most counter-arguments do usually identify some real ambiguity in the original argument. Thus, a successful counter-counter argument wouldn’t automatically repair the original argument; more is usually needed. And in this case, we have a new argument for x, a patched up version of the original, but not the same. And that fits the picture I suggested above.

One of the things I love about philosophy is how it takes an apparently simple issue, and draws it out into an ever expanding dialectical phase space. (Of course this is what creates the impression that philosophers do nothing more than draw distinctions). If we’re doing this by making arguments against parts of arguments, this makes sense. And it’s why we teach issues historically. You can only be an indirect epistemological consequentialist if you argue against direct epistemological consequentialists, and then against epistemic non-consequentialism, etc.

(Of course it’s possible that my intuitions are simply due to my feeling that none of the big philosophical issues (that cause us to “take sides”) can be established or disproven. Thus, we better not *really* be arguing over x, because we’ll never know whether x is true or false. It’s better to argue over arguments for and against x, to explore the possibility space around x).

Joseph Gerencser
Joseph Gerencser
Reply to  A Research Associate
4 years ago

Hello! Is a goal, if it can be expressed, in what you do (in the plural if you wish) : to, eventually, outdo our selves?
If that seems be an outcome of speculation in general, simply because it can be thought, by someone (me), does that entrain contingency being at all a part of consideration in this case, in name only? Or do present circumstances dictate an other “what”…..
Nonsense doesn’t need nonsense to be, it already is. So, if the final result is nonsense because it has always existed there exists no rationale.
I would think that that is contingency.

Martin Lenz
Reply to  A Research Associate
4 years ago

Thanks again! Yes, what you say about hitting on a “real ambiguity” strikes me as right. This is how we move from arguments about x to arguments about how we phrase x. I guess that is where most philosophical exchanges happen: not about about phenomena, as it were, but about our talk (or conceptualisation, to use a fancy name) of phenomena. – I’d be intrigued to look into examples of real ambiguities, not least to figure out whether such ambiguities should be seen as a categorical matter or a question of degree. (It’s the latter I suppose). The way you phrase this you seem to draw a clear line between argument repair and a new argument, which raises the question of what the identity of arguments consists in. Anyway, I’ll be looking for examples and hope to pick up on this at some point.

Joseph Gerencser
Joseph Gerencser
4 years ago

Comments seem to be the only option regarding anything. Nuance is kind of off-limits vis-a-vis language’s inherent limitlessness(es).
And, also, there is the conundrum concerning “intelligence” itself. Ours. The scale (“genius” to “vegetative”) suggests that we are only here in reality, when the evidence indicates that it is “otherwise” : Other x Other x Other……. (in the Lacanian sense, adding Georgio Agamben on top of
Lacan’s oeuvre). Throw in Antonin Artaud too, and Charlotte Delbo, and Hannah Arendt, and…………

Kuldip Singh
Kuldip Singh
4 years ago

The Philosophy of Thought- what the mind likes, the mind accepts.
If I read an article on the big bang- if my mind likes what I read, my mind will say big bang happened.
If my mind does not like the article I read, my mind will say big bang never happened.
This from my Spiritual Master, Saint Scholar Giani Naranjan Singh Ji of Guru Nanak Ashram, Punjab.

Philer
Philer
4 years ago

Choosing a side can be a matter of credences. You might in principle be 51% confident side 1 is right, and 49% confident side 2 is right. Of course, one needn’t choose (which I assume isn’t ordinarily psychologically required).

Choosing requires voluntarism about belief. It’s not obvious that many of our beliefs are ones we can choose. At any rate, maybe the best way to think about this is to consider the value in identifying one’s relative interests in exploring certain views rather than others?

Competition in the defense of ideas can be valuable much as competitive sports are. Olympic sprinters bring the best out of each other by presenting good challenges.

None of this is to say that philosophy is ultimately about winning or competition. That seems plainly false, and the belief therein pernicious or at least mistaken.