Although a good semantic account of “I” is not sufficient for understanding the nature of self-consciousness, it may still be necessary. To take one of Scruton’s examples, brilliantly suggestive though Hegel’s discussion of the first person in The Phenomenology of Spirit is, it is plausible that it involves a confusion between what Kaplan distinguished as character and content, as Alberto Voltolini has argued forcefully. Roughly, the character of “I” is the general rule that, as used in a given context with its standard meaning in English, “I” refers to its user in that context. That rule is constant across contexts. By contrast, the content of “I” varies across contexts; as used in a given context, it is the referent of “I” in that context, the very person who uses it. You and I use the word “I” with the same character but different contents. The distinction may seem elementary once made, yet numerous discussions go wrong because they neglect it. In particular, abstract talk of “the I” tends to muddle just that point.--Timothy Williamson, November 3, TLS, p. 18. [HT Leiterreports]
Tim Crane introduces a somewhat dour and dispiriting exchange between Roger Scruton and Tim Williamson on the nature of philosophy with the (vaguely Sellarsian) claims that [A] "Philosophy aims to outline the most general nature of things -- and if you understand "things" in the most general possible sense to, then philosophy is one of the "things" that philosophy aims to outline. " He then adds that this "inevitably means that philosophers will tend to disagree about the nature of philosophy." Crane thinks that philosophical disagreement is always a possible consequence of this understanding of philosophy in light of the genuine possibility that even the "best method" is open to challenge.*
It is a dispiriting exchange because very little is said in it that could not have been said at most moments during the twentieth century by some articulate protagonist writing in the aftermath of some version of the parting of ways. A different kind of spirit than me, would, perhaps, be dispirited because the previous sentence entails a lack of progress. Because I am mostly indifferent to the very idea of philosophical progress (although excited by technical innovation), that's not the source of my response. Let me explain a bit more fully before I return to the passage quoted at the top of this post.
Most of the exchange, Williamson refuses to show his hand. Rather, he has great fun at poking holes in the presuppositions and lack of clarity of Scruton's position (on the nature of the meaning of 'empirical world;' 'humanities' and 'science'); Scruton's sloppy terminology and the absurdities it commits him to (about various disciplinary practices inside and outside the humanities and science) are effectively ridiculed by Williamson throughout. I find witnessing such expert demolition dispiriting, too.
In fact, in his first response to Scruton, Williamson's makes no assertion about the nature of philosophy at all! He hints that he agrees with "making distinctions;" that one should focus on "easier cases and analyse them more deeply before building up to harder cases later;" and that philosophers (like Grice, Reichenbach, and Kaplan) have contributed to "science" and "scientific theorizing." In fact, in his third response, Williamson is careful to avoid conflating philosophy's contribution to science from philosophy itself. There such "contributions" are treated not as intrinsic to philosophy, but as one of the (extrinsic) things that "also" happens.
As an aside, against the textual evidence, in his introduction, Crane insists -- by quoting Williamson's "easier cases and analyse them more deeply before building up to harder cases later;" -- that Williamson here "epitomizes" the approach of "what is generally known as analytic philosophy." That may well be so for Williamson (and analytic philosophy), but in context Williamson is defending the fact that "mathematical decision theory" is an example of the possibility of "scientific study of points of view." That's not a claim about the nature of philosophy, but a method. Of course, it's possible that philosophy could be reduced to method, but that's not Williamson's position.
Rather, in his exchange with Scrution, Williamson seems to understand philosophy as a "discipline" (without telling us here what that is) with its "own questions" and "theories" with its "own ways of answering its questions" (including "thought experiments" and "mathematically rigorous formal models")** that "concern all possible instances of their subject matter, not just those that happen to have evolved in our species or on our planet." So, Williamson's understanding of philosophy is intrinsically about a species of generality not far removed from Crane's claim [A] about the nature of philosophy. (This is further evidence that Williamson does not treat contributing to science as really central to philosophy because some of the contributions he praises are really specific to our planet.) It would have been useful if Williamson had been asked to show his hand earlier in the exchange because then Scruton could have used the evident lacunae in Williamson's approach to articulate his own stance.
It's not that Scruton does not deserve being made fun of -- he does write [in the context of explaining that melodies are musical objects that belong to purely intentional realm and so could never be studied scientifically], 'no sounds could arise from the depths as the E-flat major arpeggio rises from the depths at the start of the Das Rheingold' --; the problem here is not just the dated example (and the logical triviality of the claim), but rather that he fails to notice that he is using it as example of "sounds...we as self-conscious beings hear them, under [particular, intentional] concepts" while simply assuming that his readers share his concepts; these days the prelude sounds like something you may hear as background noise while getting a deep tissue massage.*
Williamson's potshots at Scruton are a shame because Scruton also says some important things worth reflecting on.+ But I want to leave those aside (including a curious criticism of Foucault), and close with a reflection on the central philosophical disagreement between Scruton and Williamson that Williamson purports to settle in the passage quoted above. Throughout the exchange, Scruton tries to defend philosophy's role in articulating (what he at one point calls) the "standpoint from which self-conscious beings address the world, what Hegel called the Fursichsein....philosophy as the seamstress of the Lebenswelt" For, somewhat surprisingly, nothing Williamson says really undermines the viability of such a project. If anything, he can be taken to be saying that such a project requires, first, the long and proper development of the careful tools and distinctions of analytic philosophy: "Although a good semantic account of “I” is not sufficient for understanding the nature of self-consciousness, it may still be necessary." (Here, one may well suspect that Williamson himself is close to Carnap's position in the Aufbau.) So, somewhat peculiarly, while Williamson destroys Scruton in the exchange, he leaves his project standing (without, of course, drawing attention to this fact).
Now, one may object to the judgment at the end of the preceding paragraph and point to the paragraph quoted above. In it, strikingly, Williamson's appeals to authority. What's peculiar of Williamson's strategy in the quoted passage is (a) beside the fact that he refers to an otherwise obscure paper [although Voltolini deserves wider readership], that here, seemingly en passant, Williamson calls us back (b) to one of the central debates between Russell and Bradley that go into the founding myths of analytic philosophy in which the technically superior Russell philosophically destroys the out of date Hegelians. Given that legend, it is worth nothing (c) that while Voltolini is clearly on Russell's side, he actually shows that Russell's philosophy could not do the job it set out -- destroy Hegelian metaphysics -- because even on the limited question of the thesis of indexical reference to discrete objects, Russell's philosophy lacked the proper resources. [It had to await Kaplan.]
But Voltolini's argument is peculiar because (d) the very distinction between character and content [which is used by Kaplan to offer a good semantic account of "I"] is, to use a Kaplan style phrase, foreshadowed by Bradley himself in defense of the (neo-)Hegelian position (Voltolini himself quotes a passage from Bradley's Logic; I could also point to several passages in Appearance and Reality), although one may grant that it is not exactly Kaplan's version of it. I call this 'peculiar' because, again as (e) Voltolini correctly notes, Voltolini's Kaplan-style-rational-reconstruction of Hegel is not theoretically neutral. [In fact, and this is an aside, (f) Voltolini acknowledges -- but then fails to develop! -- that Bradley has further resources [cough, cough, his famous regress argument] to defend his Hegelian theory against the metaphysical thesis of discrete individuals.]
This lack of neutrality matters (if we return to the debate between early analytic and the neo Hegelians), because Kaplan's semantic approach, with its commitment to content presupposing context, actually requires the intelligibility of discrete individuals (in some sense or another) when applied to the Russell-Bradley debate by Voltolini. [For Kaplan assumes our ability to manipulate the conceptual apparatus of direct reference.] So, while one can admire Kaplan's achievement, even hold it up as an exemplar of the kind of contribution one may wish to aspire to, it is peculiar to trot it out as somehow providing useful evidence of muddled thinking in Hegel or Bradley (or Scruton).+
My dispiriting suspicion, and this gets me to the point today, is that Williamson probably knows that his appeals to Voltolini and Kaplan and the excursion into muddled confusions -- are a non-sequitur; he will get away with it because why would anybody who cares about the technical issues and, more important, cares for the health of philosophy be willing to come to Scruton's defense?****
* Perhaps, some other time, I return to Crane's position.
**One may well wonder if Williamson here ignores the philosophical fruitfulness of non-rigorous models.
***You can't be serious. Look, if we can't be playfully trivial about Wagner's vorspiel, then Nietzsche's Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft was written in vain.
+ Here's an example:
++To be fair to Williamson, Scruton himself seems far removed from the Hegelian-Bradley metaphysical thesis, and so may well be legitimate target here.
****[UPDATE:] Another way to put the point is that there is a sense in which Williamson refuses to acknowledge Scruton's project, while, in another sense, allowing it's possible to the discerning reader. Such lack of recognition is, in fact, an instance of epistemic injustice/violence because Scruton is revealed as spinning so many frictionless epicycles, and so Williamson shows himself the superior Hegelian. [I thank Liam Kofi Bright for discussion.]
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