This is the fifth in a series of guest posts* by Elijah Millgram (Utah) based on themes from his new book, The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization. (Here are the first, second, third, and fourth entries.)
Metaphysics as Intellectual Ergonomics
by Elijah Millgram
There’s an old Harry Harrison short story, “A Tale of the Ending,” in which the characters come to realize that, although they think of themselves as human, they belong to an alien species that has very, very quietly replaced humanity. Let’s imagine that’s actually happened. The humans, who formerly led simple lives performing a handful of stereotyped functions—as farmers, hunters, fishermen, warriors and, occasionally, merchants—have vanished. In their stead are pod creatures with a much more complex form of social organization; as in Harrison’s story, they are much, much, much more specialized. If the displacement has gone unnoticed, the pod creatures seem likely to assume that the philosophical problems they face are the ones that preoccupied the humans of old.
Suppose they do. Would they be right? Well, suppose that metaphysical problems are philosophical if any are. And suppose that metaphysics isn’t after all the enterprise of producing peculiar theories about impossible-to-observe features of the universe; suppose instead that, unbeknownst to most of its declared practitioners, it’s really an engineering science. (I know, it’s a lot to swallow all at once; work with me on this.) And suppose further that its turf is the design and implementation of intellectual devices that facilitate effective reasoning. If their more complex form of life made demands on the pod creatures’ reasoning that the humans hadn’t faced, maybe they’d need better such devices.
Let’s take a step back, and try squinting at one or two traditional metaphysical topics, seeing them, if we can, as products of (and occasions for) intellectual ergonomics. Metaethics is the metaphysics of ethics, and metaethicists discuss oughts; oughts seem to have a cognitive function. When I declare that you ought to do it, I’m marking a course of action as supported, while screening off the support. That is, I’m signaling that there’s an argument (or maybe something on a par with an argument) for doing it, but without telling you what it is. You can see why we might have such a device in our repertoire; screening of this kind is anyway a time saver for bosses (and parents) who like to supply reasons on a need-to-know basis.
Or again, necessity is a metaphysicians’ staple, and it plausibly has a cognitive function also: it tells you to ignore, anyway for the purposes of theoretical reasoning, anything outside a given range of alternatives. So it’s an attention management device. Teaching people that two plus two has to be four is a huge time saver, sparing them all the thought and energy that would have gone into doublechecking whether, this time, it’s maybe five or three.
Let’s keep supposing. Suppose something like all of that is right. Might the pod creatures need to do some rethinking of the humans’ philosophizing?
The aliens have experts who deliver information and advice that’s supported by considerations the clients can’t actually understand—not without picking up extra PhDs. So there’s room for repurposing some older oughts: they’ll serve to mediate the transfer of practical expertise across disciplinary boundaries, by announcing that the expert’s instruction is supported—even though he can’t explain how to laymen (or lay-aliens).
Back in the early human world, it was pretty much the same necessities for everyone. But when it’s specialists guiding outsiders, the pod creatures need a way of confining attention decisively and permanently to a specified range of alternatives. When one expert is talking to another, he can often explain, with a good deal of nuance, what’s worth paying attention to and why; when it’s an outsider, he can’t explain, and so he just says that it has to be like that. Evidently there can be some repurposing of the necessities, too—and in The Great Endarkenment, I also consider other ways necessity can be used within a specialized field.
That went by pretty fast, but keep on supposing. Suppose we’re right to conclude that—if we grant all those assumptions—the pod creatures are ready for a metaphysics upgrade. That is, it’s a good idea to review whether these cognitive devices are working well as is, or whether they need adjustments to suit them to their new applications. If so, we are about due for some new metaphysics. In Harrison’s story, the space aliens realize that there’s been that big change when they notice that humans used to have only five fingers on a hand. But to a philosopher, the change that matters isn’t the number of fingers; it’s the specialization. And so if the imaginary pod creatures need to rethink their intellectual ergonomics, so do we.
Metaphysics isn’t rarefied, useless theory. The Great Endarkenment is making the case that it’s an enormously important, fully practical enterprise. We’d better get working on that upgrade.
Metaphysics as praxis is a grand, old idea. Glad to see EM stumping for it. But a *new* metaphysics? It seems to me that reaching a-historically for a new metaphysics is part of the problem. The history of metaphysics is resplendent with options that will be *new* enough for EM’s purposes.
Hi Professor Millgram, I wonder if you could respond to a difficulty that seems to face this sort of account.
B.Williams (2002) complained that Richard Rorty often fell into a certain trap, that of claiming that a certain belief is expedient or pragmatically useful while ignoring that an account of *why* the belief is useful will probably have to mention the fact that the belief is actually true. Indeed, in the huge majority of cases, beliefs have to be useful because they’re true: to think otherwise is to launch oneself down a now-familiar skeptical rabbit-hole, since evolutionary forces select-for practical usefulness, not truth, and if there isn’t a strong correlation between usefulness and truth, we seem to lack justification for most (or all) of our beliefs.
Now, you say that “Teaching people that two plus two has to be four is a huge time saver, sparing them all the thought and energy that would have gone into doublechecking whether, this time, it’s maybe five or three.” But a question looms: isn’t it a huge time-saver *because* 2+2 is necessarily four, because people will never inhabit a possible world in which you can add two things together and get anything other than four? And if that’s so, isn’t it impossible to try to “upgrade” this belief, to search for a belief which does a *better* job at screening off bad options? Ex hypothesi, this belief is doing the best job it possibly can. I’m very attracted to broadly pragmatist metaphysics, but I’ve never quite been able to see my way past this sort of problem. Forgive me if these comments are based on some misunderstanding of your intentions in this post.
Here’s my attempt to see how some of the pieces of these illuminating blog posts fit together.
Elijah Millgram’s philosophical programme seems to be an aposteriori sort of thing, at least when conceived from a realistic and modern point of view. While our intellectual ancestors engaged in this thing they call apriori reasoning, they thought they were discovering something about reality itself. But we moderns know better than our ancestors; we know the tricks and tomfooleries that can potentially afflict even the most rational of minds. So when we moderns try to engage in the kind of reasoning that our ancestors called apriori, we find it strange to think we are carving the noumena at the joints, and are more inclined to say that we are attempting to rediscover and justify the general policies we consider to be important parts of our intellectual lives. Much of the modern apriori involves a kind of game of feigned amnesia, a game of pretence that reflects a sort of ironic stance towards the central questions in philosophy. By being more honest about what we are doing, and dropping the ironic attitude, we discover that the thing we call “metaphysics” has been a way of coping with the world: constructing representations of it, and adjusting those representations so that they fit.
I don’t dispute the claim that philosophy is largely intellectual ergonomics, in the sense that it involves some kind of mixture of adaptation and construction. It is an attempt to make things fit; how things all “hang together”, in Sellars’s broad sense. The engineering metaphor is also a good one, I think. (The principle of bivalence as regards truth, for example, seems like an apriori posit in intellectual ergonomics. Though pace Millgram, I do not think there is any such thing as a half-truth properly speaking, Millgram’s “Hard Truths” has helped me to see just how this apriori posit is non-obvious.)
What I want to call attention to is the idea that the model of “forgetting”, here, seems to be ironic. The relevant informed and rational moderns don’t literally forget; instead, they pretend to know less than they actually do about the nature of what they’re doing. This is noteworthy because it seems to me that if we really did forget where our apriori posits came from, then we’d have no obvious basis for saying that these were general policies as opposed to structures of the mind-independent world or as opposed to conventional ways of talking about meaning. We forgot, after all. If we are true amnesiacs about the source of our apriori musings, then the best we can do is try to piece the puzzle together afterwards, like the protagonist from Memento, by way of inference to the best explanation. The difficulty is that there are always at least two candidates for “the best explanation” of any given phenomenon, and one of those candidates is always the skeptical explanation: that we don’t have a generally satisfying story about what’s going on. When one of the great old dead said “All is water”, a better explanation of ‘it all’ might very well have been, “All is something, and we have no idea what that is.”
On the other hand, if Millgram is indeed being ironic about forgetting, then modern-day philosophers would seem to be left doing a kind of unified cognitive science, philosophy of science, and critical theory. That outcome is one I find congenial. What I find problematic is the ironic approach towards the notion of “forgetting”, because this approach alienates us from a source of insight that, whatever its imperfections, at least has the potential virtue of standing adroit from modern institutions of thought that potentially dominate and constrain the intellectual imagination.
Professor Millgram, if I get your orientation correctly (please correct me if I don’t), you seem to be saying that, since we have become so “hyperspecialized” in our complex society, it is now impossible for the average person, or even the highly educated person who has been educated only very narrowly in a highly specialized field, to have a grasp of “the big picture” or to understand what’s going on well enough even to appreciate why he or she “ought” to do what he or she is charged with doing, i.e., what the effects of that sort of activity are within the “big picture” and why it’s a good thing to do (deciding about this, apparently, is the job of metaethicists, just as presenting a version of “reality” that fits within a certain “specified range of alternatives” of ways for things to be is the job of metaphysicists, or perhaps metaphysicians). I find this picture quite chilling, although I think perhaps it does describe the way that many social processes that have gone on for centuries if not millennia operate–individuals being told they “ought” to take up arms and go to war in some distant land where they will kill other human beings whom they do not know and possibly die themselves for reasons they do not comprehend, for example, although now one might say something similar about the crews out drilling for more oil in the Arctic while it melts because of the combustion of fossil fuel we are already burning, “crews” broadly defined to include the engineers designing the rigs and the investors funding the enterprise, with everyone following a “metaphysics” and “metaethics” that directs them to pay more attention (they have their attention “managed,” as you say) to the supposed dictates of a deterministic economic scheme and the elites who constructed it than to the workings of the actual, concrete, really existing Earth system that actually, really, supports their lives. I reject this as an intelligent way for human beings to live, and if choosing an alternative future requires us to forego some of the specialization and decentralize into more bioregionally contained societies, so be it. This may not be necessary (if one’s attention is not so deftly “managed” as to make it seem a “necessity”), however, if instead we decide to rewrite our metaphysics, not in the direction of this kind of increasing abstraction and fragmentation, but rather in the direction of recognizing the fundamentals of certain kinds of real commonalities, like the possession of life itself, and the the things that are really needed to maintain and enhance it–which are not all that difficult to understand, as long as we don’t have a “meta” elite compressing human thought into a preselected box–so that people can begin to make sense of why they do what they do once again. Do you really want to defend our marching voluntarily into a collective “endarkenment,” or have you just resigned yourself to living within a “specified range of alternatives” not of your own choosing because you neglected to acquire a broad enough understanding of “the big picture” when you were getting your own education?
I do not quite understand the article, but I would strongly endorse an upgrade to metaphysics. The sooner the better.
Ronnie Hawkins wants to know whether I “really want to defend marching voluntarily into a collective ‘endarkenment’” — so perhaps it wasn’t clear enough, and is worth reiterating, that the point of explaining how the Great Endarkenment is encroaching, and why it’s so hard to resist, is precisely to resist it. However, if the argument is on target, doubling down on anything like our previous ways of managing less extreme forms of specialization isn’t going to work. No shared college curriculum will solve *this* problem, even if such curricula were reasonable responses to its predecessors.
If so, we have to find a different way of managing our collective affairs. Metaphysics, understood as intellectual ergonomics, is going to be a very important part of that, as will revisions to our moral theorizing. But I don’t propose — as Hawkins perhaps thinks I do — that we all take marching orders from metaphysicians or metaethicists. Designing better ways to manage the transfer of information and recommendations across disciplinary boundaries shouldn’t be the same thing as bossing people around.
Joe, as well as Cathy Legg (in a belated response to a previous post), identifies the approach of the book as pragmatist. Now, I’m much too cautious to claim the label myself. Pragmatism was a tradition with its own distinctive modes of argumentation, its own conceptual apparatus, and its own evolving problem space. While I do read Peirce and James and Dewey (and also Wittgenstein, as Legg suggests, though I’m not sure I see him as belonging to that same tradition), I’m ethnically an analytic philosopher, and I wouldn’t want to try to pass — I mean, as a member of this other philosophical ethnicity. Just for one thing, I don’t control or deploy the central pragmatist forms of argument. But I welcome the idea that there are affinities between some of the pragmatist projects and this one.
Joe is worried about a criticism that was leveled against an analytic philosopher who did convert to pragmatism — or maybe, tried to pass as a pragmatist. He says: “isn’t it a huge time-saver *because* 2+2 is necessarily four, because people will never inhabit a possible world in which you can add two things together [with another two] and get anything other than four?” This isn’t the place to consider whether the objection sticks to the native pragmatists rather than the converts; and also I’ll skip retyping my full response to the objection. (You’ll find the objection stated on p. 199 of The Great Endarkenment, and the response starting on p. 206.) But here are a couple of shorter thoughts. It’s absolutely right that if you think necessity is attention management signage, you’d better not explain the placement of the signage by insisting on the *necessity*. It’s also no doubt correct that if you thought that *everything* — not just certain aspects of modal cognition — was signage, your circumstances would be philosophically bewildering. Here’s how someone of the school of Comte or Duhem (a positivist, but not a *logical* positivist) might handle such a concern: what we know is that two plus two *is* four, again and again and again… (but not that it *has to* be). That’s enough to warrant letting the thought that, maybe next time, two and two will come out five — letting that drop off the radar, permanently. But I’m not a positivist either, so for the somewhat more complicated story, again, let me direct you to The Great Endarkenment.
Decisively confining your attention to a newly narrow range of alternatives normally has literal rather than ironic (as BLS Nelson puts it) forgetting as a long-term side effect. Or anyway, looking around at writing by contemporary analytic metaphysicians, that seems to be borne out: there have been exceptions, but the self-understanding of old-school metaphysics doesn’t strike me as “pretend[ing] to know less than they actually do about the nature of what they’re doing.” Instead, it looks like plain and simple forgetting, and I’d like to endorse the very nice image that Nelson came up with; old-school metaphysics is a lot like the character in a somewhat slower-paced version of *Memento*, trying to explain to himself what he’s found himself in the middle of doing.
Of course that’s not to say you can’t also find Nelson’s other sort of forgetting within philosophy. But the forgetting I’m focused on in The Great Endarkenment is a side effect of the correct use of the cognitive tools we have in our current repertoire, not just a pose.
Going back to a comment by Yet Another Anon Grad Student, on the previous post: the objection was that you can’t sidestep old-school metaphysics by turning to, say, policies, because we need a metaphysical analysis of policies. Yes, it’s good to have a grip on what you’re using to manage your affairs, but if you get fixated on what a policy *is*, it becomes very easy to lose track of a very important practical question, which is, in this case, when we should rely on policies, and when we need to turn to other expedients. (This particular question gets discussed in ch. 10 of The Great Endarkenment.) Policies themselves are best thought of as having been once upon a time designed and implemented as a solution to an ergonomic problem. If so, what we need is a design understanding of policies, one that allows us to design alternatives to them.
I just wanted to say at this point that Elijah Millgram’s posts here, as well as his comments, reflect a kind of exemplar of doing philosophy admirably. I’d bound over in effusive praise, except I know that kind of sentimentality never quite transfers properly over the internet. (More importantly, for what it is worth, I find myself constantly looking for ‘The Great Endarkenment’ in bookstores.)
Still, a small correction: it is a fact that “the self-understanding of old-school metaphysics” is not “pretend[ing] to know less than they actually do about the nature of what they’re doing” — but that was exactly my point. The feigned forgetting of the ironic modern-day LEMM philosopher (names redacted to protect the living) stands in contrast with the more innocent amnesia of the great old dead (Kant or Hegel). I thought that was clear, but if my prose led readers to other interpretations, I apologize. (I may have gotten things wrong, but I didn’t get that wrong!)
Dear Professor Millgram, thank you for responding to my post, and for setting me straight; I’m glad to hear that your aim is not to promote “The Great Endarkenment” (other than to sell the book, of course, which I look forward to reading) but rather to resist it. I must apologize if my earlier post sounded a bit snarky; there are some aspects of the mindset–and yes, the narrowness that I perceive–of certain (many) philosophers that I’m still trying to understand, along with their reasons for choosing to become so “hyperspecialized.” I have had the good fortune to have been educated in biology and medicine before I got my PhD in philosophy, and the ability to look at certain “problems” from the viewpoint of two different disciplines is, I think, a valuable one that may be helpful in a joint effort to resist the “endarkenment.” I have spent most of the last 20-30 years focusing on environmental philosophy because I see our human situation as rather dire at this point in our history; we are a choice point with respect to how much farther we will continue along on our present trajectory, and to my way of thinking, “philosophy,” as a discipline and as an endeavor, has been badly letting us all down (and by “us all,” I mean humanity, and perhaps most of the extant lifeforms on Earth that our human activities now threaten) by not helping us to “see ourselves” and change course. I used to think of myself as working in environmental ethics, because I somewhat naively thought that our collective failure to orient appropriately to what we have been doing was an ethical failure, but of late I have come to think that the problem is “upstream” of that–the problem seems to lie with the way people understand the world they live in, what it’s like and how it “works.”
Presumably this would come under the purview of metaphysics and (or?) ontology (and precisely how the two should be differentiated, I would very much appreciate having laid out on the table)–at least within philosophy as an endeavor; exactly what those within the “profession” think they are doing when they say they work in these areas, I would also like to understand, because it seems to fall far short of what is needed. I’m afraid I have very little patience with those who indulge in talk of “possible worlds” when our one real world is in such bad shape, and when “thought experiments” run so far afield of what is actually possible on a scientific view of reality, I am not impressed in the slightest by this sort of intellectual creativity; some of the “intuitions” are so embarrassing that I have to cringe. I have sat on thesis committees where issues of “free will” have been debated as if 18th-century science still adequately described our world; the complexity of living organisms still remains to be integrated into the “worldview” of most philosophers, analytic and otherwise, yet it has important ramifications for this and so many other supposed “philosophical problems.” And while I think a certain kind of “progress” is being made in areas that focus on such things as cognitive science and social ontology, it still seem to be far short of getting across certain crucial messages–like the difference between the kind of existence an organism or an ecosystem has and the kind of “existence” a dollar bill, a credit score, one’s “student loan debt,” or “the United States of America” has. These kinds of “metaphysical/ontological” issues aren’t really difficult to understand, not for other academics and not even for the “average” student or citizen. But it seems that, rather than making an effort to integrate what we now “know” about the “really important stuff,” professionally self-identified metaphysicians/ontologists take a kind of pleasure in talking and writing about intentionally designed obscurities and irrelevancies which, while they may serve to reinforce the walls of the subdiscipline’s ivory tower, tend to further impair (if they are noticed at all by anyone outside their very narrowly enclosed language community) our (humanity’s) ability to make heads or tails of the world we live in. Please show me that “it ain’t so”–I’d love to hear some straight talk about the issues I’m trying to raise here.
Professor Millgram responded to your worries, but I thought I might too – in a different vein.
I would just like to point out that philosophical “because”s are slippery: the sense of “because” in a philosophical explanation can be hard to pin down. You wonder whether it might be the case that two and two are four every time *because* two and two are necessarily four, or whether it might be the case that a belief is useful *because* it’s true. Now, I wonder whether the sense of “because” in these two purported explanations might be more like the “because” in “She’s my first cousin because she’s my mom’s sister’s child” or “the crows are annoying because they’re noisy.” In these sentences, the “because” functions as something like “insofar as.” The (purported) explanans in each is not picking out something that is logically (conceptually, constitutively) independent of what the (supposed) explanandum is picking out. The explanans is making a claim about what the explanandum-referent consists in, or is making explicit something significant or interesting about what the explanandum is picking out (where significance and interestingness are purpose-sensitive features).
So, to take your Rorty example, we could perfectly well say, “A belief is useful because it’s true,” but that “because” could be signalling that calling a belief true is just a way to redescribe the idea that a belief is useful – being true and being useful *come to the same thing* and are not logically independent of each other, even if conceptualizing things in different ways might prove useful for different purposes (we might call something true when we want to give it high praise, or call something merely useful when we wish to denigrate it, e.g.). So, selection for the usefulness of certain noises may, on this conception of “because,” *just be* selection for the truth of certain noises; the difference is one in description only.
I’m not saying that this is what “because” means in the context of your worries. I’m just saying it’s not always clear what’s going on when a philosopher uses “because.” So the demand for the kind of explanation that assumes the explanandum and explanans are logically (conceptually, constitutively) independent of each other (like the kind of evolutionary story you rehearse and the skeptical problems it gives rise to) may not always be apt. You are not automatically rationally required to play along with a “because”-claim that assumes the logical (conceptual, constitutive) independence of the explanandum from the explanans.
Elijah,
I’m having trouble seeing how your remarks on pages 199-206 (and beyond) address Joe’s objection. It looks like the argument you do present is a kind of error theory. Which is to say, it seems like you are trying to say that metaphysicians have simply made a mistake in assuming that necessity means that a particular truth claim could not have been otherwise, albeit a very understandable mistake. This mistake occurs because the signage was designed to make us forget about something entirely, such that the designated range to be forgotten soon seems to be the only thing visible to us as potential alternatives become entirely invisible. It is from here that we erroneously conclude that it could not have been any other way. This might be the story, but it strikes me as a straightforwardly empirical claim that is open to objections from the history of mathematics.
I am also just unconvinced that this explains away our powerful intuition that there are these types of analytic or necessary truths. This is because you could give us all this history about protoarithmetic, counting, and number theory to explain how we only came about necessary truths by way of evidence, signage, policy-making, and practice, but still fail to capture what I think motivates our intuitions behind necessary truths. As a conceptual matter, I simply feel *unable* to imagine how 2 plus 2 could equal five. These types of claims are very much unlike other empirical claims in that we can actually imagine the physical world being different ways (I can imagine myself being a different height, for instance), but I can’t imagine *how* 2 plus 2 could be something other than five. This even casts doubt on the historical claim in that it seems unlikely to me that protoarithmeticians were at some point able to do this imaginative mental gymnastics in a way that I simply am not. (Note that I’m not necessarily linking conceivability to possibility here, but just trying to draw a relevant psychological difference in what occurs when we go about making empirical and analytic claims).
Izzy – Thank you for your second paragraph above. It makes a clear objection to a common view that I’ve never been able to make clearly, and now I can just steal your words.
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It seems to me that the imagination is highly responsive to the beliefs you hold. You have to spell out what you believe or intuit about the relevant domains (e.g., arithmetic, counting, number theory) before we can ask you about whether or not something is imaginable. Keeping with the theme set out by the OP, maybe this just-so story would be helpful.
Suppose that at some point in our historical development, we did not recognize that there was a difference between quantities and kinds. Suppose that before that point we reasoned about the contents of numerals in the way that we reasoned about colors. e.g., we say that indigo is a kind of violet, even though it is hardly the ideal form of violet, and indeed is transitioning away from violet into blue; similarly, suppose at the time we said that two-and-a-half is a kind of two, albeit one that is in the process of transitioning away into three. Genuine addition would have been impossible in this system, since addition only works with quantities; but when we performed something like addition of two-and-a-half and two-and-a-half, we arrived at five. Then at some point we grew up, and decided that numerals must designate numbers and quantities, and must be additive.
When confronted with this story, I feel like I am able to make sense of the statement that two and two are sometimes five. Yet I think the proposition “2+2=5” is both false and necessarily false. And if asked whether it is imaginable whether or not “2+2=5” is true, my imagination can pull at the nearest possible truth, which is something like “two-and-a-half and two-and-a-half is five”. If my imagination is chastised for wandering away from the literal meaning of “2+2=5”, one can rightly respond to the accuser that they have misunderstood what it means to imagine things.
On the other hand, one might read the just-so story I provided above as totally off the mark, and that at each point I wrote “Suppose…” the only appropriate reply is “No thanks”. In those cases, the imaginative conclusions I arrived at in the penultimate paragraph will probably never be reached. They will seem psychologically very silly. So it all depends on where your beliefs are at.
BLS Nelson,
I would not chastise your wandering imagination. To the contrary, I found your thought-experiment quite enjoyable to read, but I would still in any case conclude that one has misunderstood what is meant when we say 2+2=4. The just-so story may be relevant for kinds, but if this imaginative difficulty exists for quantities, then we still have some (at least intuitive) basis for analytic and/or a priori quantitative reasoning. This is all the analytic metaphysician really wants.
To put it another way, I would just say, even if you can conceive of 2+2=5 under certain theoretical conditions, I would posit that it seems inconceivable with respect to quantities, which is the thing we’re interested in discussing. It would also seem that something about this psychological phenomenon renders a level of certainty and/or confidence in a truth-claim that isn’t afforded by everyday empirical reasoning. Now at this juncture, we may find ourselves facing Quine again, taking us back to square one, but 60 years of Quineian objections haven’t really seemed to slowed analytic metaphysics down any. Or at least not very much.
Thanks Peterj!
I’m very sympathetic to the frustration Ronnie Hawkins expresses with philosophers’ obliviousness to the achievements of other fields. (Of course, no one can know everything, but it can, as he says, sometimes feel like philosophers are stuck with the science of some previous century.) For what it’s worth, I think it’s important not to let the frustration get in the way of, first, diagnosis, and then figuring out effective remedies. “What’s *wrong* with them?” is only productive if it’s not a rhetorical question — but then it turns philosophically really interesting.
Here the diagnosis seems to me something like this. What looks like 19th-century science is mostly a picture that those philosophers picked up in, typically, undergrad intro physics classes, which was the last physics they took. That is itself an effect of an older decision to teach everyone little bits of everything: an intro class in physics, in sociology, in whatever, until the distribution requirement is satisfied. As it turns out, when universities have to concoct such classes, what goes into them tends to be a caricature of an outdated state of the field. Or anyway, that’s my guess: that the crudest forms of, especially, physicalism are side effects of decisions made in our educational system about how to deal with the growth of specialized scientific knowledge. The lesson seems to me to be that when we ask people to become fluent in areas outside their primary specialization, we should try to get them to really be fluent: double-majoring, or an extra masters degree, is a better path than those distribution requirements. (Or so argues The Great Endarkenment.) But yup, I’m mildly envious of the bio/med education Hawkins has.
Izzy Black’s pushback to my response to Joe has two distinguishable prongs: first, there’s the very understandable assimilation of the view to a Mackie-style error theory; and then there’s an appeal to the strength of our modal intuitions and the limits of our imaginations.
Under the first heading, when the modal signage makes us forget (and even makes us unable to imagine) alternatives, Black takes the next step to be that “we erroneously conclude that it could not have been any other way.” But what exactly is the error? That it couldn’t have been any *other* way is just a different way of saying that it’s necessarily in *this* range of alternatives. If we posted the signage correctly (thoughtfully, intelligently…), that’s not “erroneous”. The error has to do with an old-school metaphysical construction we’re putting on the signage; and as Eric suggests, there’s nothing wrong with saying that, in this case, it’s necessarily like so because it couldn’t be any other way, as long as you don’t take that “because” to mark out an independently available, prior modal fact.
Under the second heading, I’m on BLS Nelson’s side in thinking that imagination gets shaped by, among other things, modal guidelines. (Oh, and thanks for the props, and also apologies if I misread your earlier comment.) And I do think that appealing to the strength of intuitions, or the incapacity of the imagination, doesn’t advance the argument when both are claimed to *confirm* the view you’re inclined to oppose. (I.e., the sort of forgetting described in The Great Endarkenment is supposed to produce strong intuitions and imaginative incapacity of just the sort you’re appealing to.) We need to find neutral ground to argue from… but meantime, let me suggest that your intuitions aren’t as strong as you think. Suppose I tell you that six plus eight is two; unimaginable, right? But then I say, well, it is on a clock (it’s modular arithmetic); you can absolutely imagine *that*. You can also imagine a society in which things that work like clocks are much more common in daily life. (Maybe *so* common that the inhabitants of that society think of arithmetic with the natural numbers as a peculiar limit case: the limit, as the modulus goes to infinity; of course, that itself would be tricky for them to wrap their minds around.) We can imagine that their default assumption is that when you mention arithmetic, it’s modular arithmetic; they claim to find it unimaginable that if you add the right large enough number, you don’t get back a *smaller* number. And when you remind them that not everything is a clock, they’re surprised; they hadn’t meant *that*.
So the necessity of 6 + 8 = 14 arose (inter alia) from excluding the clocks; they weren’t what you had meant. (You can perfectly well imagine them, but adducing them as a counterexample would be on a par with responding to a puzzle involving a goat, a wolf, a cabbage and a boat across a river by saying that you’d call a cab.) If you were to add into our own history (not that it went this way) a decision to exclude the clocks because we were going to make them the business of a caste of timekeepers, then we’d be edging over toward the phenomenon that The Great Endarkenment is interested in: necessity that arises out of division of labor.
Going back to BLS Nelson’s thought experiment, if I’m reading the texts right, something fairly close to it is there in that part of the historical record carefully preserved by us philosophers. When Aristotle introduced substances, he was doing a bit of logical regimentation that, among the many other purposes it served, permitted counting certain things off precisely. A horse is exactly one horse, no matter how scrawny or how overweight, and even a foal is exactly one horse; so a scrawny horse and a foal are exactly two horses, not 1.536 or so horses. I’m not sure how we count “heaps,” even now, but once you start parsing parts of the world as substances, one horse plus one horse *has* to be two horses — it *couldn’t* come out any other way. Aristotle’s spectacular round of intellectual ergonomics took — we pick up this apparatus early and use it routinely — and so it’s hard for us to project ourselves imaginatively into the world of the presocratics, or into Plato’s vision of the ordinary world. (Though we can still tell that it was experienced as an intellectual emergency — one bad enough to give rise to such desperate expedients as the Forms.) And so it’s hard for us to say exactly what the Greeks, before Aristotle, thought *could* happen. But the modal signage was evidently a lot more loosely placed for them, in some respects, than for us. And so they were up to imagining (without special mental gymnastics, as far as I can see) a great deal we can’t.
Elijah – “I’m very sympathetic to the frustration Ronnie Hawkins expresses with philosophers’ obliviousness to the achievements of other fields…”
I am not even aware of it, and would resent being accused of it where a scientific achievement is relevant to philosophy. What I am aware of is philosophers’ obliviousness to achievements in their own field, and science’s obliviousness to philosophy in general.
Izzy -” It would also seem that something about this psychological phenomenon renders a level of certainty and/or confidence in a truth-claim that isn’t afforded by everyday empirical reasoning. Now at this juncture, we may find ourselves facing Quine again, taking us back to square one, but 60 years of Quineian objections haven’t really seemed to slowed analytic metaphysics down any. Or at least not very much.Would it be possible to slow down analytic philosophy?”
This seems an important point as it links discursive philosophising with intuitive knowing. An approach that ignores one or the other seems bound to fail. It also suggest that Aristotle was right, there are laws of thought. But slow down analytic philosophy? Would that be possible?
Peterj,
By saying analytic philosophy has not slowed down any, I don’t mean to imply that there has been “progress” in analytic philosophy, whatever that should mean. I’m talking about a particular approach or trend in contemporary metaphysics. I suppose I was using “analytic” in a somewhat technical sense, then. I only mean to say here that Quineian objections to a priori / analytic style metaphysics has not really deterred these philosophers from engaging in that style of philosophy. Rather, metaphysics as practiced by analytic philosophers in the academy has only relied more on a priori style reasoning (or at least, not any less) than the kind of empirical/pragmatist approach to metaphysics that Quine envisioned would revolutionize philosophy (and that finds precedent in Wittgenstein). Whatever we make of Quine’s objections, most metaphysicians either seem to have been unpersuaded by his arguments or have largely ignored them. In other words, it’s business as usual in contemporary metaphysics.
In response to PeterJ (“What I am aware of is philosophers’ obliviousness to achievements in their own field, and science’s obliviousness to philosophy in general”), and in the spirit of “enlightening” those of equal scholarly qualification if not equal (hyper)specialization who might care about both what’s going on in the (real) world and what philosophers could contribute to it, I would like to ask any who are still following this thread what they think ARE the “achievements” of contemporary philosophy in that regard and WHY science should pay attention to any of it. I’m also curious–if analytic philosophy cannot be “slowed down,” can you say, Peter, where, precisely, you think that it is heading?
Ronnie,
That remark came out sounding rather more inflammatory than I intended, so I understand your note of irritation, but I’ll stand by it. You ask about the achievements of contemporary philosophy. I assume that by this you mean professional academic philosophy. In my view there are none. I don’t think science should pay any more attention to it than it does already and I’d vote for less. When I queried whether analytic philosophy could be slowed down it was because I could not see how it could go any slower. By ‘analytic’ I mean nothing technical, just the analysis of philosophical questions as it conducted in the academy. I very much doubt that anyone here is ‘of equal scholarly qualifications’, let alone less, but the situation is there for anyone to see.
Peter, thanks for the clarification; I did think your intention was to defend professional academic philosophy against all comers. I will give an example of what I consider an important contribution, seemingly all too little discussed, with important ramifications for the world we live in: John Searle’s distinction between the ontologically objective, that which exists independently of our human representations, and the ontologically subjective, that which exists only because we all believe that it exists. It should be an obvious distinction, of course, but in this day of fragmentation and hyperspecialization, with most human endeavors increasingly devoted to “making money,” it apparently is not. Becoming aware of this crucial distinction could have important ramifications for the way we think about the global economic system, something ontologically subjective that is currently incentivizing the destruction of the biosphere, something ontologically objective, as well as for the way we orient to the modern “national security state,” in the interests of maintaining which many people are being convinced to yield up their own moral agency. Searle had many interesting things to say about economics, particularly in the wake of the 2008 crisis, but I have found very little in the literature taking up where he left off. I recently came across mention of an article by Amie Thomasson addressing Searle’s ontology, which I have so far been unable to obtain; I did get ahold of a copy of Ontology Made Easy, however, and found it greatly disappointing–not only was there no mention of Searle, I could discover nothing in the book that seemed helpful or in any way pertinent to the real world.
Thanks for the response Elijah.
It still seems to me that you’re presenting a case where we might mean something other than standard arithmetic using natural numbers when we say “2+2=5” rather than identifying a counterexample to a priori reasoning (which you seem to even acknowledge). That we might imagine different results when our terms mean different things should not be surprising. The history of mathematics is one of constant development and evolution. No sensible person would deny that. There are different ways of counting and ordering numbers, different logics and non-standard arithmetics, various forms of notations, and so on. Some of these practices often do result in ambiguity and miscommunication, even as mathematics typically maintains a higher level of standardized consistency and rigor in notation and language than other domains.
None of this, however, addresses the fundamental imaginative difficulty of how two plus two could be anything other than four. Yes, I can imagine 6 + 8 = 2 on a modular arithmetic 12 hour clock, but I can’t imagine how, say, 6 + 2 = 13 on a 12 hour clock. Indeed, once the meaning of our terms has been set and once we agree that we are talking about the same thing, psychological constraints on what we can imagine emerge. It seems to be moving the goal posts on the discussion to suggest that alternatives might become imaginable once we consider our terms under different meanings, and at that point, you’re effectively talking past the analytic metaphysician.
As for the imaginative capacities of the ancient Greeks, again my suspicion is they weren’t very much different from our own. I’d say the Pythagoreans, Plato, Euclid, and Nicomachus were more rigid in their conception of mathematical truths than even some of the most ardent contemporary mathematical realists. I’m hard pressed to believe the ancients could conceive of 2 + 2 = 5 scenarios any better than us. It also does strike me that a lot of this conjecturing and guesswork about the history of mathematics, however, is insufficient for grounding robust conclusions about the way we should do metaphysics.
Ronnie,
“I did think your intention was to defend professional academic philosophy against all comers”
An unfortunate misunderstanding. I am in the critic’s camp.
Is Searle saying anything new? And even if it is new, does it take us forward? And then, is there such a thing as an ‘ontologically objective’ phenomenon? It would be impossible to prove. And didn’t Baudrillard deal with the same issues? This sort of philosophy is not deep enough to mean much in my view. Ontology should be telling us what exists and not taking anything for granted. I’ll be impressed when Searle falsifies Nagarjuna’s proof that there is no such thing as an ontologically objective phenomenon or, depending on definitions, at worst no more than one. This would be one of those philosophical achievement that is usually ignored.
Peterj,
By saying analytic philosophy has not slowed down any, I don’t mean to imply that there has been “progress” in analytic philosophy, whatever that should mean. I’m talking about a particular approach or trend in contemporary metaphysics. I suppose I was using “analytic” in a somewhat technical sense, then. I only mean to say here that Quineian objections to a priori / analytic style metaphysics has not really deterred these philosophers from engaging in that style of philosophy. Rather, metaphysics as practiced by analytic philosophers in the academy has only relied more on a priori style reasoning (or at least, not any less) than the kind of empirical/pragmatist approach to metaphysics that Quine envisioned would revolutionize philosophy (and that finds precedent in Wittgenstein). Whatever we make of Quine’s objections, most metaphysicians either seem to have been unpersuaded by his arguments or have largely ignored them. In other words, it’s business as usual in contemporary metaphysics.
Hi Izzy, I think there’s a lot I could say on all the broader subjects, and I have a lot of different views and policies (many of which are close to Elijah’s). But my interest in my reply to your previous post was only to make a point about the fruits of the imagination as a psychological faculty, since that was what you’d asked about. So all your metaphysical objections (about conceivability, etc.) can certainly follow through. My quarry was smaller.
You might still be concerned that I still haven’t even shown you that 2+2=5 is imaginable, because even if one grants me the stories I told, then all I have done is told a story about kinds and not quantities, and hence said something strictly irrelevant. My attempt to pre-empt this criticism was to say that this accusation misunderstands what it is to imagine things. I elaborated by suggesting that the imagination will pull for the nearest possible truth.
I think the point might be made clearer if I am more candid about what this entails. The imagination will grasp at proverbial straws, and will cry “success!” even if on reflection it pulls the shortest one. In other words, the imagination demands the right to free play, which means being able to set up the conditions of success according to its own terms.
BLS Nelson,
In your earlier post you said we have to spell out one’s background beliefs about the relevant domain of inquiry before we can find out what is imaginable. I think this is right, and it’s partly what I feel like we are engaged in here as we try to clarify exactly what we mean when we are talking arithmetic.
My only concern here is that both you and Elijah seem to be trying to draw out examples of imagined alternatives by exploiting a miscommunication between parties. Each example seems to turn on an equivocation of what is meant when we talk about addition. If someone were to say that they can imagine two plus two is five by pulling from the nearest possible truth, or half truth, or what have you, then you’re basically conceding that they aren’t really imagining what their interlocutor is challenging them to imagine. They’re doing something else, maybe something similar.
We can help correct for this kind of recalcitrance by better refining our terms. For instance, when I say imagine how three plus two could equal six, I don’t mean take the sum of approximately three and six, but take the sum of two whole numbers whose exact quantities are three and six respectively. We might say that more precise language leaves little to the imagination to “play,” as it were. At some fundamental level, mathematics hopes to constrain precisely just such imaginative wandering.
Izzy – Yes, I see what you’re saying about progress and Quine.
Miscommunication need not be the issue, I think, since I can perfectly well see and understand the distinction between addition and quasi-addition, quantity and kind, while still potentially recognizing the point about what we can imagine. Instead, I think the matter depends on whether or not you think the appropriate representation of linguistic contents needs to be the same as what was recovered in speech. In most cases our thoughts should follow the trains of inference involved in speech, but when it comes to the imagination, thoughts may or may not need to follow those strictures.
Mind you, all of this is said against the background of my belief that 2+2=5 is inconceivable in some relevant sense (to the extent that conceivability involves setting a higher standard than imaginability), is necessarily false in some relevant sense, etc. So you might be able to be an analytic metaphysician and still see the point. (Indeed, if the truth of analytic metaphysics was so contingent upon facts about mere imagination, it would prove to be a house built on sand. But I think metaphysicians are trying to do something more than that.)
“Is Searle saying anything new? And even if it is new, does it take us forward? And then, is there such a thing as an ‘ontologically objective’ phenomenon? It would be impossible to prove. And didn’t Baudrillard deal with the same issues? This sort of philosophy is not deep enough to mean much in my view. Ontology should be telling us what exists and not taking anything for granted. I’ll be impressed when Searle falsifies Nagarjuna’s proof that there is no such thing as an ontologically objective phenomenon or, depending on definitions, at worst no more than one. This would be one of those philosophical achievement that is usually ignored.”
Peter, this comment seems to show that you did mean some of what you said in your earlier post about philosophical “achievements,” and it also illustrates beautifully what it is that has me virtually gaping in astonishment at the degree to which the thinking of analytic philosophers has become detached from reality (and any relevance to our larger society). Take, as an example, an item from this evening’s news–BP has reached a settlement with the Gulf states for a certain number or billions of dollars to “close the books” on the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. The oil gusher spewed “before our eyes” for almost 3 months, releasing around 5 million barrels of crude oil and 2 million gallons of toxic dispersant chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico. According to a 2014 interdisciplinary science conference report, “oil remains in deep-, shelf-, and coastal sediments, and thus has the potential to continue to contaminate relevant fish and invertebrate species”; some species for which there is concern about impacts on larval stages include menhaden, bluefin tuna, red snapper and others; “increased body burdens” of oil have been documented in some species, and efforts are underway to analyze various organs and tissues for levels of (carcinogenic) polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). According to Searle’s ontology (and mine), the crude oil and associated chemicals that can be found on the sea floor, in various sediments, and in the tissues of vertebrate and invertebrate marine animals would be “ontologically objective”–it really exists, independently of whatever you and I and the political pundits might want to believe about it. Moreover, if you just happen to develop a cancer from consuming your favorite seafood regularly over the next few years (or if you happen to be one of the unfortunate Gulf shrimpers and fishers who does because he or she can’t get away from the stuff), well, that cancer is going to be “ontologically objective” whether or not Searle has failed to falsify Nagarjuna’s proof. Or would you disagree with this? (Perhaps you could impress your oncologist by pulling the “proof” out of your pocket when she shows you some disturbing images of a vital organ or two.)
I’m not particularly impressed by whatever number of billions of dollars BP is planning to hand over, either, because those “dollars” are ontologically subjective–they’re just symbols, in fact, symbols that can be “amassed” abstractly to yield a numerical quantity, but a “quantity” of something that doesn’t really exist except in our heads. Yes, given that most people continue to “believe in” the existence of this “thing” we call money, the social system we have set up will continue to function in a certain way, such that certain activities might get carried out–but in fact, in this case, there’s no way any quantity of “dollars” transferred will negate the existence, or eliminate the effects, of that oil. A similar striking comparison can be made between what is produced by the Earth’s green plants carrying out photosynthesis over the course of a year (known to ecologists as the the NPP) and what is “produced” by the calculation of compound interest on some quantity of “dollars” over that period of time–one really exists (whether or not the now-highly-charged word “objective” is applied is purely semantic), the other “exists” only in our heads (though our continued belief in it may have real-world effects).
I’m not quite sure why Searle’s ontology would bring to mind Baudrillard (although I think he had some differently interesting ideas about our human situation as well), but I would say that Searle’s forthrightness in “telling it like it is” about this stuff is both “new” and quite a breath of fresh air in a room filled with the stuffiness of academia. In Making the Social World (2010), he says “it is, for example, a mistake to treat money and other such instruments as if they were natural phenomena like the phenomena studied in physics, chemistry, and biology. The recent economic crisis makes it clear that they are products of massive fantasy. As long as everyone shares the fantasy and has confidence in it, the system will work just fine. But when some of the fantasies cease to be believable . . . then the whole system begins to unravel” (201). I would add to this, of course, when the effects of our acting in accord with this collective fantasy start to impact the reality of living systems, including our living human bodies, in a massively negative fashion–as the effects of more and more oil spills really start to add up, for example, along with the gazillion other “separate” little harms we are doing to our “environment,” coupled with that big daddy of them all, climate change–then the whole economic system of course will unravel, since it depends on the hugely complex biophysical system that maintains LIFE to keep it all going (or perhaps philosophers, along with economists, have failed to notice this?).
Does recognizing this incredibly important distinction between two kinds of existence “take us forward”? Well, the obvious thing about our “ontologically subjective” kind of reality is that we humans can decide to change it in major ways–maybe not individually, but if the degree to which “the emperor has no clothes” would sink in with enough of us, together–then we might be able to head off a truly catastrophic ecological “state shift” that some scientists are already predicting. And Searle goes into quite a bit of detail about how our creation of social reality “works”–detail that may allow those who would make some necessary changes to get quite a bit of traction on it, perhaps a consequence not intended by Searle himself. So yes, I would say much more could come of working with Searle’s ontology than quibbling about whether or not someone could “imagine” 2 + 2 to make 5.
Ronnie – I see that Searle has something to say but this is a metaphysical discussion and so the phrase ‘ontologically objective’ is dangerous. He seems to use it to mean something like ‘intrasubjective’ and appears to be discussing economics and sociology rather than metaphysics.
He writes in respect of money and ‘other instruments’, “The recent economic crisis makes it clear that they are products of massive fantasy. As long as everyone shares the fantasy and has confidence in it, the system will work just fine. But when some of the fantasies cease to be believable . . . ”
A metaphysician could rephrase this as, “The recent existential crisis makes it clear that ontologically objective phenomena are products of massive fantasy. As long as everyone shares the fantasy and has confidence in it, the system will work just fine. But when some of the fantasies cease to be believable . . . ”
I’m not knocking Searle, just querying whether he is contributing to metaphysics rather than the social sciences.
(I don’t want to interrupt, but just to clarify: by “ontological objectivity” Searle means mind-independent existence. It’s in contrast to epistemic objectivity, which means something like “something we can learn true things about through science”, unlike, e.g., art. In some remarks on Habermas he has said that he thinks “intersubjectivity” is a confused idea.)
BLS N – Yep. That’s how I was reading Searle. I’d see it as a kind of naïve realism.
Yes, Peter, one COULD rephrase Searle’s statement in that way–but would it be true? Of course, “true” has become another of those “dangerous” terms, so prodded, molested and abused by recent philosophical musings as to be roped off with bright red flagging tape, further impoverishing the vocabulary of those of us who initially started off aspiring to be “lovers of wisdom.” There for a while I seemed to catch someone in this discussion standing up for a sense in which 2 + 2 = 4 was to be accorded some sort of respect not applicable to 2 + 2 = 5, but even this conversation seems to have bogged down in the mire of obscurantism.
I was drawn into this discussion because Professor Millgram’s short pieces here piqued my interest, and because I have of late been giving more and more thought to the area of intellectual exploration that SHOULD be demarcated by the heading “metaphysics/ontology” but that appears currently to be something of a black hole, not only devoid of life itself but, by appropriating the words once available for serious discussion of such important matters and sucking all of the meaning out of them, blocking the path of anyone who would attempt to put together a way of thinking about “reality” and “existence” that would be of value to academics in other fields and even perhaps to humanity at large. I was hoping that by participating in the discussion and engaging some of the contributors in conversation I would be able to make connection with some of the “growing tips” of the field, and that my overall impression of it would improve. But this seems not to have happened. I notice, for example, that every time I tried to introduce a concern of mine, and of many people in the real world–concern about climate change, for example, or about pollution-induced cancers–the topics are politely ignored, my naivete met with an embarrassing silence (one might ask, embarrassing to whom? I’m not embarrassed by it, I’m just saddened to find my initial impressions reinforced; rather, it is those who have nothing to say to whom I think the term should apply). Frankly, I find the subdiscipline to be a real mess, and I’m now on the verge of suggesting that the term “metaphysician” be reclaimed by those who would dare to have something to serious to say about things like “reality” and “existence” again (being educated as a physician myself, as well as frequently engaging in thinking that goes beyond, or is “meta” to, what has been learned via the sciences while integrating that knowledge into it, I feel myself at the very least qualified to inquire as to the justification of those who would apply the term to themselves while neither of these considerations seem to apply).
I introduced the name of Searle in hopes, again, of making some sort of connection, since Searle has been developing his thoughts about our “social ontology” for over a decade now, and I thought some here might be aware of his work and, if critical of it, could at least provide some insight as to why (in light of the Baudrillard remark, however, I see I must rethink some aspects of this assumption). Yes, Searle does actually seem to have educated himself well enough in the sciences to be able to attempt to formulate “a more or less continuous story that goes from an ontology of biology to an ontology that includes cultural and institutional forms” (1995, 227), and he notes that the questions he addresses “have not been satisfactorily answered in the social sciences,” though he also evidences familiarity with “great philosopher-sociologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” like Weber, Simmel and Durkheim (ibid, xii). I have some of my own criticisms of Searle, stemming from perspectives gained from yet another field, specifically the neuropsychology of our hemispheric specialization, and the connections between it and historical shifts in western thought as detailed by Iain McGilchrist. But Searle follows in the footsteps of earlier philosophers in seriously trying to address the question “how does it all hang together?”–an effort I respect but that, sadly, many of his contemporaries seem to have abandoned. The rarefied world inhabited by those who would presume to call themselves metaphysicians and/or ontologists today, however, seems to correspond quite closely, in fact, to the “world” constructed by the left cerebral hemisphere acting in strict isolation from right-hemisphere input, a world of “increasing specialisation and technicalising of knowledge” (McGilchrist 2009, 428-429) as described by Millgram, one that ends up being a “hall of mirrors” with no access to lived reality, only to representations and re-presentations of representations, interposing “a simulacrum between reality and our consciousness” (ibid, 402–perhaps this is where considerations of Baudrillard appropriately come in?). If philosophy at large does not reinvigorate itself and reclaim some of the territory that, paralleling our common ecosphere, has become fragmented, desertified and dramatically impoverished of life, I fear that humanity surely will be embarking upon another “great endarkenment.”
Ronnie – Fantastically well put. I’m with you all the way. We have lost the plot and our vision of the goal, and sometimes perhaps even our wits.
“…one COULD rephrase Searle’s statement in that way–but would it be true?”
I would say that metaphysics proves it is a much better idea than the idea it is false. Nobody has ever made sense of the existence of mind-independent objects. It leads to well-known metaphysical conundrums. But empiricism would have to be the final arbiter.
BLS Nelson,
Thanks for the reply. I appreciate the distinction between conceivability and imagination, but it wasn’t my intention to suggest that I was talking about anything other than conceivability.
I agree with Chalmers (2002) and Yablo (1993) that conceivability falls under the rubric of imagination. It was my intention to qualify a standard of conceivability in our capacity to imagine alternatives to mathematical truths by specifying the requirement that the conceivability of 2+2=5 as a true proposition requires us to imagine how it is true. (I find this view consistent with Yablo/Chalmer’s account of “positive conceivablity” that requires coherently imagining a world or situation that ‘verifies’ the claim). I was hoping that my specification of “how” would be a non-technical specification of (something like) this requirement. Now, certainly you could push back on my suggestions about imagination and conceivability. I just don’t think your counter-examples really targeted my suggested criterion. Rather, they seemed to require a shift in the meaning of our terms.
A modestly better counter-example would be to invoke some complex math problem such as Goldbach’s conjecture. For instance, it might seem conceivable to non-experts that Goldbach’s conjecture could be false. There is a relevant sense in which we can imagine “how” Goldbach’s conjecture could be false, which would be imagining a group of math experts announcing that it is false. It would be rational for us to accept this claim made by math experts as true. In this case, I would be pushed to clarify my specification of “how” to require that we must actually imagine how Goldbach’s conjecture is false for mathematical reasons (rather than merely epistemic reasons). This counter-example still seems to rest on a shift in linguistic practice, but at least what we mean by Goldbach’s conjecture and how to solve it does not change. Rather, our epistemic standards for truth-verification shift when entertaining certain math problems, which requires me to offer further clarity on my “how” condition such that it meets appropriate levels of reflective verification.
It’s in this way that there is a sense in which Goldbach’s conjecture is conceivably false and another in which it is not. It’s the latter, stricter sense that I think links to notions of metaphysical possibility and necessity (and I think whose requirements are better captured by basic addition problems), but so far, I haven’t attempted to offer any argument that secures such a link. I have only wanted to suggest what’s psychologically distinctive about modal reasoning that I think poses some worries for the pragmatic signage analysis.
Yes, Searle defends what he calls “external” realism–“the view that the world exists independently of our representations of it” (1995, 153); “the view that there is a way that things are that is logically independent of all human representations”–it “does not say HOW things are but only THAT THERE IS A WAY that they are” (155, emphasis added)–as well as the correspondence theory of truth. His position is hardly a “naive” realism; he does not claim to have “proved” realism to be “true,” but rather claims that it is “a background condition of intelligibility,” something “presupposed by the use of very large sections of a public language” (194). Moreover, he admits to believing that philosophical positions on such things are far from being a matter of indifference: in his view, “the rejection of realism, the denial of ontological objectivity, is an essential component of the attacks on epistemic objectivity, rationality, truth, and intelligence in contemporary intellectual life” (197).
But please let me ask, in view of what you say above–since I “naively” prefer simple, straightforward talk–what is your position vis-a-vis the existence of the planetary biosphere? Are you willing to admit that there is something referred to by that term that exists independently of the various different ways that we humans might represent it to ourselves, such that THERE IS A WAY THAT IT IS, a “fact of the matter” with respect to whether or not, for example, anthropogenic climate change is occurring? Or–to stay a little closer to home–suppose your doctor examined you and told you that, in her opinion, you appeared to have developed cancer of the colon. Would you consider that there might be a “reality” to the state of your colon–A WAY THAT IT IS, independently of her preliminary belief regarding it, in which case you would likely decide to have a colonoscopy and tissue biopsy performed to “verify” or “rule out” the existence of a cancer, or would you, rather, comfort yourself with the notion that “ontologically objective phenomena are products of massive fantasy” and so go cheerfully on your way, or perhaps make an effort to find another physician who would deliver a more sanguine opinion, holding fast to the idea that there’s ultimately nothing “mind-independent” about what’s going on with your colon, in and of itself?
I must admit that I have trouble understanding what it must be like to live in a world where “reality” is taken to be up for grabs, but then I’ve been trying to understand the phenomena occurring within and around myself for a very long time, utilizing not only what’s personally empirically observable but what seems to have held up under the focused observations of others and, perhaps more importantly, what “makes sense” within the holistic, context-sensitive construal of my right cerebral hemisphere and not simply the abstract, armchair-only musings of my left–I find the latter sort of game-playing gets to be very tiresome after a very short while.
Ah, I see. I had thought that your initial intention was to speak just about the psychology or phenomenology of the imagination, not about a metaphysical posit about conceivability. So you spoke of the contents and aetiology of intuition (“I am also just unconvinced that this explains away our powerful intuition that there are these types of analytic or necessary truths” and our motivations for intuitions behind necessary truths), talked about imagination in general (“*unable* to imagine how 2 plus 2 could equal five”, emphasis mine), and warned that you are not necessarily interested in talking about the metaphysical project of “linking conceivability to possibility… but just trying to draw a relevant psychological difference”. These all led me to interpret you as talking about the psychology of the imagination in general. It’s only on that narrow question that I was willing to stick my neck out in favor of a narrow substantive claim, i.e., that there can be faultless disagreement over what is imaginable where there might be faulted disagreement over what is conceivable.
(Mind you, I do have an essentially Quinean picture of where modal intuitions come from that is broadly informed by and consistent with the view of the imagination that I tried to elaborate above. Unfortunately, my view on the aetiology of rational intuition is so spectacularly unpopular that only my mother could love it. So I’d rather see what Elijah has to say.)
Yes, well, my intention actually was to speak about the psychology of imagination, and in particular, the psychology of mathematical conceivability. My point about not linking conceivability to possibility was to say that I was trying to present a challenge to what is conceivable without making the further commitment that this bare inconceivability alone secures the necessity of certain claims. I wasn’t actually staking out any ontological commitments about modality in this respect. Although I certainly wanted to suggest that this was the sort of thing metaphysicians are basing their arguments on when they talk about necessity, or in any case, the kind of thing that informs our ordinary intuitions about necessity.
I feel I should comment on this polemic against analytic philosophy that seems to be the trend of the more recent discussion, especially since I take it that I’m included (if not singled out) in Ronnie Hawkins’ point that “There for a while I seemed to catch someone in this discussion standing up for a sense in which 2 + 2 = 4 was to be accorded some sort of respect not applicable to 2 + 2 = 5, but even this conversation seems to have bogged down in the mire of obscurantism.” If I am not who is being referred to here, then I don’t know who is, but let me just say a few things.
1. Analytic metaphysics is but one branch of contemporary analytic philosophy. Although popular, it is not at all representative of either the whole or majority of the discipline. Indeed, according to Philosophy News, since 2000, the most popular area of specialization in philosophy for graduate students at Leiter/PGR ranked philosophy departments is ethics (13% of all graduate students). Metaphysics comes in at second (12%) followed by epistemology (10%) and social and political philosophy (7%). A whopping 30% are unknown.
2. Many of these subdisciplines strive to make meaningful contributions to larger social and political issues. Whether it’s work in the philosophy of mind that has informed the rise of public secularism, philosophers of race and feminism tackling police brutality and transgender rights, the relevance of deontological and utilitarian ethics to globalization, or philosophers working on issues in free will and responsibility to help come to terms with phenomena such as drug addiction, among other psychological disorders, philosophy is actively engaged in at least trying to make sense of the world’s problems.
3. Each subdiscpline of philosophy has become more and more interdisciplinary over the past few decades. Alongside the rise of X-Phil, philosophers have been working more and more closely with related disciplines, such as ethicists and philosophers of mind with psychologists and neuroscientists, philosophers of science and metaphysicians with physicists and biologists, and so on. You can find many new books on the recent shifts in methodology in analytic philosophy toward a more empirical, interdisciplinary based approach. X-Phil on the whole is an outright reaction to armchair M&E. Although a priori analytic metaphysics hasn’t slowed down, as I argued above, the pressure to pay attention to the sciences has been aggressive and more progressive, and the discipline as a whole has become more responsive to these concerns.
Nevertheless, I think much more could be done to make academic philosophy more accessible and less arcane. But while I think specialization has increased, I think so has interdisciplinary strategies to resolving philosophical problems. Philosophy has actually become more collaborative over the years, due in part to specialization. And I personally think that this is the right response to specialization, or at least one of the right responses, perhaps the most important one, and a welcome upshot more generally.
Lastly, I don’t think analytic metaphysicians or philosophers of languages working on nuanced, technical areas of philosophy necessarily have a moral duty to work on broader issues. They can fulfill their civic responsibilities in other ways, especially if there is important work being done on these issues in philosophy anyways. I know several philosophers of language, for instance, who simply enjoy thinking about things like indexicals and proper names for their own sake. And they’re fantastic people who do a lot of great work outside of their research in teaching and promoting social issues and causes.
Ronnie – In your quoted remarks Searle is speaking as a scientist or layman would, from inside a wysiwyg universe, and not as a metaphysician would.
It is the core of my objection to the current state of academic philosophy that it takes no account of Nagarjuna’s proof or more globally mysticism’s claim that there is no such thing as a mind-independent object. By reduction there would be no such thing as a subject or object. Nothing would truly or independently exist. That’s what I call an ontology.
The ideas of Searle you quote above are so far from being profound that for me they are not even metaphysical. It is surely perfectly obvious that we could never prove or empirically verify the existence of mind-independent objects. We have trouble enough doing it for mind-dependent objects.
Given that solipsism is unfalsifiable the idea of mind-independent objects seems to justify the tag ‘naive’, as in ‘naive’ set-theory. Even teenagers watching the Matrix could work out that observed phenomena are in our mind and we cannot prove that they are anywhere else. The producers obviously thought it was not a difficult idea. Ontology asks us to examine what exists, this is the job, not to take the existence of everything for granted and start from there.
You talk earlier of a ‘black hole’ in philosophy that everyone skirts around. I would agree with what you said. In my view this would be metaphysics, the most carefully avoided area of philosophy.
Izzy – .Just 12% of graduates specialise in metaphysics? That’s an interesting statistic. To me that is like saying that 12% of graduates want to work on important problems. It seems to both prove that something has gone wrong with the discipline and explain what it is.
PeterJ,
There are important problems in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of race, philosophy of mind, etc; So I can’t say I share the sentiment. Apart from that, 12% is a fairly high number relative to the other subdisciplines, but overall there is considerable parity given the range of disciplines in philosophy. I think that’s a good thing.
I’m hard press to read anything alarming into these statistics. There are a lot of serious and difficult issues in the profession, but I don’t think what’s going on in contemporary metaphysics really ranks among them.
Izzy, I thank you for finally addressing my comments, if only to dismiss their relevance; I was not intending to “single you out,” and perhaps “obscurantism” was not the proper word for me to have used. I did find Professor Millgram’s example of how 6 + 8 might equal 2 if one’s default assumption is that of employing the “modular arithmetic” of a 12-hour clock to be most interesting, and in light of the concerns about worsening ecological conditions that I continue to carry around with me (sorry, I seem to be unable to sweep them under the rug) I can’t help but think that there are largely uncognized “default assumptions” at the heart of much of contemporary philosophy that are making it well nigh impossible for us to grasp what we’re doing wrong, as a species, and change our trajectory. I must respond “yes, of course” to all of your main points above; of course many subdisciplines strive to make meaningful contributions to larger issues, some of them are becoming more interdisciplinary, and yes, some people “simply enjoy thinking about things like indexicals and proper names for their own sake.” But what I have gathered from Professor Millgram’s brief missives is that all is not well on the western front: “Metaphysics isn’t rarefied, useless theory. The Great Endarkenment is making the case that it’s an enormously important, fully practical enterprise. We’d better get working on that upgrade.” My original, humble suggestion was that we give some thought to re-centering our metaphysics upon LIFE, a phenomenon that is the foundation of all of our existences, that which underwrites all of our philosophical speculations, all of our social institutions, all of our individual and collective strivings (yes, even the impulse to “make money”), something that is still incompletely understood by science (and so offers plenty of room for “meta” considerations), and yet that is so taken for granted that we generally fail to “see” it, as well as the effects of our many actions that impact negatively upon it. Such a move would still get my vote as something to consider including within the “upgrade.” But perhaps I should have known better than to intrude upon such well-defended, self-contained territory.
A quick note to PeterJ–With respect to your disavowal of “mind-independent objects,” I happen to hold with a kind of panpsychism–I would say that “mind” goes “all the way down,” or at least as far “down” as LIFE goes (and “matter” has to be capable of supporting life). Recognizing this and working it through should have important ramifications for our notions of agency and embodiment (or, in the terminology of the “old” metaphysics, the “free will” problem and the “mind-body” problem).
Although I would not attribute such a metaphysical position to Searle, his definition of realism holds that there is a reality (or a way that things are) that is independent OF OUR HUMAN REPRESENTATIONS of it (or of the way that they are); it does not proclaim a “mind-independent reality” per se. What I think is most important about it is that he recognizes that “things” like money and nation-states are not independently existing things like physical objects or biological organisms, they are rather representations “all the way down”–they’re just gatherings in our collectively shared systems of beliefs, and hence much more malleable, even dispensible, should we decide to make some radical changes in our thinking. Most people do not seem to be aware of this distinction, however, and seem to be quite willing to wreak all kinds of harm upon the real, living beings and systems of the planet in their haste to chase after “money” or supposedly to defend what they’ve come to think of as “national security” (and unfortunately this seems to be true of many philosophers as well). If they would “take the red pill” (as the Matrix so nicely put it) and wake up to what’s really going on–and cease and desist with these LIFE-destructive actions–then yes, I think the change would indeed be “profound.”
Ronnie,
I appreciate your contribution to the discussion. You shouldn’t think of my non-response to your initial posts as a slight. Like you, I was only hoping to communicate my own personal reaction to a point in Elijah’s very provocative and compelling post. From there, I’ve mostly just been trying to field objections to the worries I raised. I did read your posts, but you initially seemed to be addressing Elijah and not my comments until what struck me as backhanded comment about my attempt to make sense of the analytic metaphysician’s position.
As for implicit biases of contemporary metaphysicians, I’ll only say that I don’t think that metaphysics has arrived at its current place by way of default assumptions. This is related to some of the points made by PeterJ. The current new wave of a priori style metaphysics is actually a recent phenomenon in analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein and the logical positivists rejected metaphysics in the early 20th Century. Then Quine, Sellars, and Kuhn tried to usher in an era of empiricism, naturalism, and pragmatism. It’s only been in the past few decades that analytic philosophy has recovered from years of attacks on metaphysics, and has actually returned to the long abandoned metaphysical projects began by the likes of Plato and Kant. You can find neo-Platonists and neo-Kantians all around these days.
As for the concerns raised by Elijah and the The Great Endarkenment, he’s right that the rise of specialization in and of itself results in a set of dilemmas. I imagine that many of his recommendations ably handle the way interdisciplinary work can be more fruitful. It just isn’t clear to me that metaphysical accounts of necessity are incorrect, nor is it clear to me that our conception of necessity is justifiably amendable to pragmatic revision. I am overall sympathetic to the project of striving to make metaphysics more relevant to practical affairs and more commensurable with interdisciplinary approaches, however, but I don’t think there is a grand crisis in contemporary metaphysics that is fundamentally crippling philosophy in the academy (nor do I think Milgram is suggesting this).
Ronnie – “…quick note to PeterJ–With respect to your disavowal of “mind-independent objects,” I happen to hold with a kind of panpsychism–I would say that “mind” goes “all the way down,” or at least as far “down” as LIFE goes (and “matter” has to be capable of supporting life). Recognizing this and working it through should have important ramifications for our notions of agency and embodiment (or, in the terminology of the “old” metaphysics, the “free will” problem and the “mind-body” problem).”
Okay. I see your point and half agree. For me your idea would be a big step in the right direction. But still it isn’t deep enough for metaphysics. Mind may ‘go down’ a lot further than life, but for me it would not go all the way. The Mind-Matter problem cannot be solved by making one of them fundamental, that idea has never worked.
The main issue for me would be this. Why do we dismiss the metaphysics of Buddhism, more generally mysticism, when we have nothing better to put in its place after two millennia of searching? This philosophical discussion is one of the best I’ve been part of anywhere thanks to some wonderful contributions and I want go back a read some of the later posts again, but it would seem naive on a Buddhist forum. It is as if nobody has examined metaphysics.
Izzy writes – “….but I don’t think there is a grand crisis in contemporary metaphysics that is fundamentally crippling philosophy in the academy.”
I find this an astonishing remark given the state of philosophy in the academy. If it is not fundamentally crippled I can’t think of another explanation. When did it last solve a problem? Footnotes to Plato for the most part and no progress for centuries. Scientists and even quite often layfolk see this but philosophers seem to miss it. For specific evidence of the dire state it is in I would cite the fairly recent Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics. It is as if philosophers have given up on the problems and decided to make it more and more complicated instead.
This all goes back to the idea that philosophers should pay attention to developments in other fields. I feel that they do this well enough, but that they could pay a lot more attention to developments in their own field.
Izzy – My first reply to you disappeared so this may end up as a duplication.
“There are important problems in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of race, philosophy of mind, etc; So I can’t say I share the sentiment. Apart from that, 12% is a fairly high number relative to the other subdisciplines…”
But metaphysics is first principles! 12% of philosophers studying first principles suggests that 88% are theorising on the basis of no principles, which does seems to be the case. The result is predictable.
“I’m hard press to read anything alarming into these statistics. There are a lot of serious and difficult issues in the profession, but I don’t think what’s going on in contemporary metaphysics really ranks among them.”
Is something going on in contemporary metaphysics? How are we doing with freewill, origins, consciousness, God, Matter, Mind, space, time, ethics, epistemology? Where’s the progress? Would it be better for a student to read contemporary writers or the ancient Greeks, and would it make a difference?
The traditional and ongoing problems of academic philosophy cannot be solved by ignoring them and they all have their roots in metaphysics. If they are not solved in metaphysics they are not solved.
I suppose this is fighting talk but the situation does not seem ambiguous. Philosophy is in trouble and, as I think Ronnie notes above, this means that the whole of academia and the whole of society is in trouble.
I appreciate your posts, Izzy and Peterj, and I think this has, all in all, been a very interesting discussion. There seems to be, at least, a shared sense of something being amiss, running from Prof. Millgram’s original missive throughout, although maybe with greater and lesser degrees of wrongness-sensing depending on the person.
Hyperspecialization is certainly one characteristic of the world we live in now, and unless there is more interdisciplinary integration of knowledge and method there is a very real danger, I think, of the “best educated” human beings of the present and future generations possessing a great deal of very detailed knowledge about one tiny fragment of the world and otherwise helplessly following orders or conforming to group norms without the ability to exercise informed judgment about where society overall is headed–which should raise serious concerns about where it IS headed, and who’s leading the charge.
I have mentioned the work of Iain McGilchrist because I think it’s quite pertinent to this phenomenon of hyperspecialization, of which Millgram writes. McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2009) is a 462-page tome with so many notes that you have to get the complete set from the Yale website if you buy the paperback; the first part details the neurological/psychological findings that have emerged over the last half-century or so of studying the different specializations of our two cerebral hemispheres, the last part applies these findings to the shifts in thinking that have played out in western philosophy since the time of the ancient Greeks–the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Romanticism, Industrial Revolution, Modernism and Postmodernism–with McGilchrist’s thesis being that our culture has become increasingly dominated by the cognitive style of the left cerebral hemisphere–language and linear logic, abstraction, attention to detail at the expense of seeing the whole picture, a use-orientation toward whatever is “other” to the self rather than an “I-thou” orientation–characteristics that do seem to be notably prominent in contemporary life and that do head us into increasing specialization in a feed-forward process. I know the first part of the book is solid because I was involved in some neurological research into hemispheric asymmetry when I was in medical school, and the effects of “losing” the function of half your brain can be quite dramatic–stroke patients that draw a clock face with all 12 digits crammed into the right half of a circle, for example, or unable to “attend to” the left half of their bodies or identify their own left arms; I enjoyed being brought up to speed on the continuing research in this area.
But it is McGilchrist’s careful application of these findings to the development of western thought that would be of interest to most philosophers, especially those who might be growing concerned about our hyperspecialization. He sees a “sudden efflorescence of the left hemisphere” in the ancient world, with the codification of laws and the beginning of systematization of knowledge, Plato and the development of abstract mathematical and philosophical thought, the ability to stand back and “objectify”–but this latter was balanced by the right-hemisphere ability to build bridges, reconnect, and integrate. By the time we get to the Enlightenment, however (with some shifts in between), these tendencies have been taken much further, and with Descartes we see an extreme sort of detachment, the human individual abstracted and “reduced” into a single, atomic point-mind, wondering whether all the living beings around him, human as well as animal, might really be automatons. McGilchrist writes, “Descartes experiences the world as a representation” (334); he can arrive at “certainty” through his a priori thought processes, but at the expense of any sort of felt connection with the messy, changing, world of living human relationships.
The processes of left-hemispherization become even more marked as we reach the present day, with an extreme reductionism and growing emphasis on control and exploitation of people as well as of nature, bureaucratization, abstraction and emphasis on quantity over quality (which I see especially in our current fixation on reducing everything to “money,” although McGilchrist doesn’t push this point too hard). But to get back to metaphysics now, I’m afraid that the “default” metaphysical picture that most westerners carry around in their heads is still Cartesian. “Mind” somehow exists in a separate realm from “body” or “matter,” just as humans are thought of as having an absolutely different ontology from that of all other living beings (conveniently leaving all of the rest of nature open to us for exploitation and even destruction–since how could our separate souls be affected by anything that we do to mere “matter”?). All this flies in the face of what we have learned over the last century in biology–and especially over the last few decades, with complexity theory beginning to appreciate “whole” living organisms, genetics and molecular biology demonstrating the fundamental commonality of all lifeforms at the biochemical level, ethological studies demonstrating startling abilities of many different kinds in nonhuman animals, etc. But instead of putting all this together–integrating our knowledge, a right-hemisphere function–most philosophy programs that I’m aware of still teach “metaphysics” in such a way that most students, at least, still come away “puzzling” over free will or mind-body issues as if Descartes’ way of carving up the territory still holds sway.
The way you describe the back-and-forth swings in 20th century metaphysics, Izzy, also seems to reflect some of this shifting between hemispheres; the logical positivists were impelled to “purge” philosophy of some of the excesses of the overexuberant holism that had developed by the turn of the century, an effort that went too far and thus spurred a correction with a return to empiricism and pragmatism, and now it seems there is a leap into the abstract realm again. I suppose the process could go on and on within intellectual life, except for the fact that what filters down into the world of real life, where people put into practice their latent beliefs about how the world works, is making things more and more disjointed, unpleasant, and downright dangerous as a way for humans to live. So we now have a world where nature is bulldozed, drilled, fracked, poisoned and headed for the boiling point while nobody notices because they’re all obsessed with chasing after an abstract symbol that doesn’t really have any “existence” outside of their heads and so detached from real connectedness with other beings that they amuse themselves taking “selfies” all day long. Descartes would have loved this place!
Peter, your “why not Buddhism?” is well taken. The philosophies of the East tend to be holistic rather than reductionistic, just as the Buddhist/Hindu/Jain orientation toward nonhuman life is more “I-thou” than “I-it,” or at least it was until western capitalist exploitation began making its inroads. And why do we have to employ a cognitive methodology of “reducing” everything down to subatomic bits interacting in mechanistic fashion, such that some of our most distinguished philosophers purport to refute the possibility of “emergence” of new phenomena (i.e., LIFE!) at higher levels or even try to pretend that their own consciousness is nothing but an epiphenomenon? McGilchrist observes that we need to use both of our cerebral hemispheres in a coordinated fashion, with analysis and synthesis complementing each other, but the correct order of processing is R > L > R; we start out with an overall right-hemisphere approach to something (the right hemisphere is the “master” of the title, and the left his “emissary,” threatening to usurp him, taken from a story in Nietzsche), then shift into an analytic mode, discovering detail after detail of “what it’s like” (something science has become very good at in recent years), and then, importantly, PUT THE PIECES BACK TOGETHER AGAIN, integrate our knowledge so we come away with a much more sophisticated understanding of THE WHOLE. If we would do that at a global level, as the human species coming into greater awareness of reality and its own place in it (yes, I know, echoes of Hegel, Bradley, and a spur to the forces wielding reductionistic knives to scrape it all down to the bones again–but maybe we need to take stock of the flesh that needs to stay on them first), it might, just might, be enough to make us get off of our self-destructive course into ecocide, which those who study such things most closely seem to think that we’re on. And if “metaphysics” is really “first principles,” some of our new appreciation of how we fit into the overall scheme of things ought to make it into them. Or so I believe.
PeterJ
The question of progress in philosophy is challenging and widely discussed. Much of it hinges on our analysis of what we mean by “progress” and what would mark instances of it. Here’s my own view of the situation. One of the common explanations for why philosophy has lacked significant progress in the sense of there not being wide consensus on various problems in philosophy is high premise deniability. There are few starting assumptions or principles that philosophers can agree on that would allow for the possibility of significant conclusions that could lead to wide spread agreement. Philosophers can always deny the key premise of an argument without too much cost. I think this is right, but in my view, this is actually a good thing. It’s one of the great virtues of philosophy that there are scarcely, if any, starting assumptions or premises that are accepted without scrutiny. Whenever there is vast agreement about starting principles and consequently conclusions about methodology, you aren’t really doing philosophy anymore. Indeed, you’ve arrived at a body of knowledge that can be it’s own self-sufficient discipline. In light of this, I would suggest that the problem of progress in philosophy is due to the fact that I think philosophy has been too successful. Philosophy has successfully given rise to nearly the entire body of knowledge that we call the academy. Physics, linguistics, logic, psychology, and economics is all born out of philosophy. At lest one sign or marker of success in philosophy, in my view, is when it has produced a discipline of knowledge that is itself not a branch of philosophy. It is for this reason in part that I think hyperspecialization has emerged in the discipline to complicated effects.
Philosophy, on principle, is a kind of intellectual regulatory committee in the academy that monitors and analyzes work in the sciences and humanities. According to this view, philosophy serves as a kind of checks and balances on the academy. It achieves progress by offering argumentative and critical thinking tools to advance those fields. This is because once a discipline in the academy has been produced, it has limited resources to question its own fundamental assumptions and principles. Indeed, science is functional because at some level certain assumptions and principles about method need not be, and ought not be, seriously challenged, else it would fundamentally undermine the essence of the discipline. This is what philosophers do. The task of philosophers is to develop ideas, arguments, and concepts, and rigorously test them for their strength, plausibility, and rhetorical force or value. Philosophers, on principle, are the architects of theory, methodology, modes of discourse, critical thinking, and principles of rationality in the academy. On this view, the developments in philosophy “trickle down” into the academy and into the public sphere. This doesn’t just apply to the oversight and/or production of disciplines or bodies of knowledge in the academy, but also public discourse on complex moral, ontological, and social issues. The sophisticated arguments about the existence of God, capitalism, gender rights, gay marriage, abortion, racial identity, and so on are typically refined and developed by philosophers, and eventually find their way in the hands of the populace. It’s not the task of philosophers to reach agreed upon conclusions on these issues, nor could they, since there aren’t really any “first principles” philosophers share. Rather, they test the very best arguments possible for dissemination in the academy and general public.
Mind you, this is how philosophy should operate on principle. In practice, however, there are of course many problems in the discipline, as I mentioned, but metaphysics isn’t really an important one of them. The biggest issue for intellectual matters is how to better ensure that philosophers are communicating with the public and other disciplines in a way that is accessible and not alienating. I do think that in some areas of the academy, philosophy is gaining more among respect among scientists (neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists), but I still think there are some challenges in bridging the gap with physics, as public remarks on philosophy by Lawrence Krauss and Neil DeGrasse Tyson would attest. But the most pressing problems in philosophy have to do with hiring, peer-review, gender bias, discrimination, sexual harassment, the abysmal job market, and so on. There are fundamental institutional problems in the profession that are far more pressing than practices in metaphysics.
“But the most pressing problems in philosophy have to do with hiring, peer-review, gender bias, discrimination, sexual harassment, the abysmal job market, and so on. There are fundamental institutional problems in the profession that are far more pressing than practices in metaphysics.”
But don’t most of these problems apply to most professions, even those outside of academia? I do think the “professionalization” of philosophy has had a detrimental effect on its fundamental purpose (if one may bravely try to speak of such), because it ultimately serves to “institutionalize” thought, promoting conformity, limiting what’s written about to topics that have been published on before, even if they are hardly the most interesting or stimulating to new thinkers, inhibiting impulses to “rock the boat” or criticize sources of funding, etc.
Again, thinking about “professionalization” and the institutions that we have (to some degree haphazardly, to some degree in response to unacknowledged vested interests) constructed, I return to what for me is the “profound” distinction made by Searle (and some others), the difference between the reality that we humans did not create and the one that is our handiwork. We don’t have to take for granted the “abysmal job market” or the “massive student loan debt” or the role of the United States government as it currently wields its power around the world (and increasingly in our private lives; happy 4th of July!). We may not be able to change these things through individual action, but there is surely nothing “fundamental” about them, and if Searle is even partly right about our institutional reality being maintained largely through deontic powers that “lock into human rationality” (2010, 124), and that, as such, it is largely linguistically constituted (169), then it is also open to being un-constituted or re-constituted, particularly if we can get some leverage on what’s wrong with it via cognitive processes that reply less on linguistic function. Whether the appropriate discipline for investigating the construction of such institutional structures–which we take for an increasing part of our “reality”–is properly ontology, philosophy of mind and language, or social psychology, or perhaps some combination of the above, seems less important than that it be done. And, speaking for myself, I find that there is something very disappointing about colleagues who stay the “expected” course within “the profession” as laid out for them, without ever seeming to think deeply about how it got to be the way it is, or how it is maintained.
Philosophy is particularly bad in these areas relative to other disciplines. It’s particularly bad in gender and racial representation (you can see other threads on DN discussing this very topic), and particularly bad in terms of job prospects and hiring. It’s in really, really bad shape with respect to these issues, and it seems there are a lot of complicated reasons why this is the case. Professionalization is just one of many. I’d recommend checking out some of the other topics out on the subject. It seems to be the top subject on the blogs these days, and a lot has been written about it.
I do think there is some self-awareness and self-criticism about these issues in the field, but there could be more, and more to be done to resolve them. I agree with you that there is nothing fundamental about these problems and they should be changed. It is precisely for this reason why I think they are the most important issues to address.
I should clarify I think that these issues are fundamental in terms of being more general and basic, not that they are objective and mind-independent and we can’t do anything about it. It’s just that these are deep problems we need to address.
Ronnie – I should stress that I would nor expect ‘academic’ philosophers, (scholars rather than meditators), to know much about Buddhism as a religion or practice. They are quite rightly concerned with analysis. What is increasingly astonishing to me is the time it is taking for them to get around to studying the metaphysical scheme of Buddhism and the perennial philosophy. It would work as a solution for all philosophical problems and it is poorly known. How is this possible? I think the rest of us have a right to be critical of this failure of scholarship.
Izzy – For once I can agree with very little of your latest comment. I see no obstacles to a communal agreement on the answers for metaphysical questions. Yes, premises are required for a formal answer to them, but we can simply use the same premises that we used to formulate the questions in the first place. As questioners we can hardly complain about this.
PeterJ,
We can agree on premises. This is how shared knowledge is possible. My only point was that there is a sense in which we’re no longer doing philosophy once we’ve established a body of knowledge. Statistically, it’s hard to find much consensus on issues in the history of philosophy, but that’s because a consensus on knowledge claims is typically exported out of philosophy and becomes a science or independent discipline.
I should point out that there are antirealistics in analytic philosophy. Not only about the ontology of objects, but about morality and aesthetics. They have been around for a long time. In addition, several leading philosophers advocate views similar to panpsychism and dualism. Most dualists these days are property dualists rather than substantce dualists, however.
*anti-realists