Digressions&Impressions

Burnyeat vs Strauss, Again

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In a famous polemical essay (1986) in NYRB, my (recall) teacher, Myles Burnyeat, distinguished between two ways of entering Strauss’ thought: either through his “writings” or “one may sign up for initiation with a Straussian teacher.” That is, as Burnyeat notes, Strauss founded a school – he quotes Lewis Coser’s claim that it is “an academic cult” -- with an oral tradition. In the 1986 essay, Burnyeat spends some time on the details of Strauss’ teaching strategy and style that he draws from autobiographical writings by Bloom and Dannhauser[1] as well as by aptly quoting Strauss’ famous (1941) essay "Persecution and the Art of Writing." Somewhat peculiarly, given what follows, Burnyeat does not comment on the surprising fit he [Burnyeat] discerns between Strauss’ writing and teaching!

Burnyeat goes on to imply that without the oral tradition, Strauss’ writings fall flat, or (and these are not the same thing, of course) lack political influence. I quote:

“It is the second method that produces the sense of belonging and believing. The books and papers are freely available on the side of the Atlantic from which I write, but Strauss has no discernible influence in Britain at all. No one writing in the London Review of Books would worry—as Stephen Toulmin worried recently in these pages about the State Department’s policy-planning staff—that Mrs. Thatcher’s civil servants know more about the ideas of Leo Strauss than about the realities of the day. Strauss has no following in the universities where her civil servants are educated. Somehow, the interchange between teacher and pupil gives his ideas a potency that they lack on the printed page.”

I want to draw out to two themes from this quote: first, I’ll focus on the reception of Strauss in the UK. And, second, on the way governing elites are educated. So much for set up.

 

First, this is an extraordinary passage once we remember that already in 1937 Michael Oakeshott wrote an admiring and insightful review of Strauss’ ,The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: its Basis and its Genesis (1936) that is very much worth re-reading. (In his earlier, 1935, essay in Scrutiny on Hobbes, Oakeshott alerts the reader that he is familiar with Strauss’ (1932) French article on Hobbes.) It matters to Burnyeat’s empirical claim because while Oakeshott, who did have an impact British political thinking, certainly is not a slavish follower of Strauss, one would have to be confident that none of Oakeshott’s teachings weren’t taken from Strauss at all. Writing in the London Review of Books a few years later (1992), Perry Anderson alerts his readers to non-trivial differences between Strauss and Oakeshott (which is compatible with my claim), and more importantly for present purposes, treats Strauss as a major influence on the then newish resurgence of the intellectual right (although that can be made compatible with Burnyeat’s claim about Strauss’ purported lack of influence in the UK).[2]

 

But even when taken on its own terms, there is something odd about Burnyeat’s claim. For, even if we grant that Strauss has no following at all in British universities by the mid 1980s, this could have other sources than the lack of potency of Strauss’ ideas. After all, there had been a number of influential polemics against Strauss in the United Kingdom. Most notably, the so-called ‘Cambridge school’ of historiography (associated with Pocock, Dunn, and Skinner amongst others) polemically self-defined, in part, against Strauss and his school; this can be readily ascertained by, for example, word-searching ‘Strauss’ in Quentin Skinner’s (1968) "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas."[3] One can also discern, as I have noted before, such polemics by reading Yolton’s (1958) "Locke on the Law of Nature" in The Philosophical Review.[4] Yolton was then at Kenyon, but he had been an Oxford DPhil student of Ryle’s, who supervised his dissertation on John Locke.[5] Polemic is simply unnecessary with writings one foresees would have no influence or potency at all. So, I am afraid to say that Burnyeat’s presentation does little justice to even the broad outlines of the early reception of Strauss in the U.K.

 

As I noted, there is a second theme lurking in the quoted passage, namely Burnyeat’s interest in how civil servants are educated at university. This theme is developed by Burnyeat as follows in the NYRB essay:

The leading characters in Strauss’s writing are “the gentlemen” and “the philosopher.” “The gentlemen” come, preferably, from patrician urban backgrounds and have money without having to work too hard for it: they are not the wealthy as such, then, but those who have “had an opportunity to be brought up in the proper manner.” Strauss is scornful of mass education. “Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.” Such “gentlemen” are idealistic, devoted to virtuous ends, and sympathetic to philosophy. They are thus ready to be taken in hand by “the philosopher,” who will teach them the great lesson they need to learn before they join the governing elite.

The name of this lesson is “the limits of politics.” Its content is that a just society is so improbable that one can do nothing to bring it about. In the 1960s this became: a just society is impossible. In either case the moral is that “the gentlemen” should rule conservatively, knowing that “the apparently just alternative to aristocracy open or disguised will be permanent revolution, i.e., permanent chaos in which life will be not only poor and short but brutish as well.”

Burnyeat infers these claims from a number of Strauss’s writings in the 1950s and 60s which he has clearly read carefully. In fact, at the end of the second paragraph, Burnyeat adds in his note (after citing Strauss’ What is Political Philosophy? p. 113), “where Strauss indicates that when this argument is applied to the present day, it yields his defense of liberal or constitutional democracy—i.e., modern democracy is justified, according to him, if and because it is aristocracy in disguise.”

Now, even friends of mass education can admit that modern democracy is an aristocracy in disguise. This is not a strange claim at all when we remember that traditionally ‘democracy’ was associated with what we now call ‘direct’ or ‘popular’/’plebiscite’ democracy, whereas our ‘liberal’ or ‘representative’ democracy was understood as aristocratic in form if only because it functionally preserves rule by the relatively few as Tocqueville intimates. This fact is a common complaint from the left, and, on the right, taken as a vindication of the sociological ‘elite’ school (associated with Mosca, Pareto, etc.). It is not limited to the latter, of course, because the claim can be found in the writing of Max Weber on UK/US party politics (which Strauss knew well.)  

Of course, what matters is what kind of aristocracy modern liberal democracy is, and can be. And now we return, anew, to theme of the education of the governing elite(s) as Burnyeat put front and center in NYRB. That a liberal education can produce a ‘natural’ aristocracy is, in fact, staple of writings in what we may call ‘the conservative tradition’ as can be found in Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. The idea is given a famous articulation in the writings of Edmund Burke (1791) “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.” (I have put the passage from Burke in a note.)[6]

So, as summarized by Burnyeat, Strauss simply echoes a commonplace about how Burke is understood by post WWII conservatives. What’s distinctive then is that Strauss is presented as claiming that the ancient wisdom he discloses is that trying to bring about a fully just society would re-open the Hobbesian state of nature/war, that is, permanent chaos. It won’t surprise that Burnyeat denies this is the unanimous teaching of the ancients (although when I took a seminar with him about fifteen years later he came close to endorsing this himself as a reading of the Republic). For, the closing two paragraphs of his essay, drive this point home:

“Strauss believed that civil society must, of necessity, foster warlike habits and make its citizens apply different rules of conduct to one another and to foreigners. The impossibility of international justice was a considerable part of what persuaded him that “the justice which is possible within the city, can only be imperfect or cannot be unquestionably good.” But Strauss spent his life extolling what he believed to be “the truth” on the grounds that it is the unanimous “wisdom of the ancients.” Hence something more than an academic quarrel is taking place when Strauss defends his eccentric view that Plato’s Socrates agrees with Xenophon’s in teaching that the just citizen is one who helps his friends and harms his enemies.

Plato’s Socrates attacks this very notion early in the Republic. No matter: Strauss will demonstrate that it is the only definition of justice from Book I which is “entirely preserved” in the remainder of the Republic. Plato’s Socrates argues passionately in the Gorgias for a revolutionary morality founded on the thesis that one should not return wrong for wrong. Strauss’s unwritten essay on Plato’s Gorgias would have summoned all his Maimonidean skills to show that Socrates does not mean what he says. Much more is at stake here than the correctness or otherwise of the common scholarly opinion that Xenophon, a military man, was incompetent at philosophy and did not understand Socrates. The real issue is Strauss’s ruthless determination to use these old books to “moderate” that idealistic longing for justice, at home and abroad, which grew in the puppies of America during the years when Strauss was teaching and writing.”

 

That Xenophon was incompetent at philosophy and did not understand Socrates is, in the context of the debate with Strauss, a petitio principii. That’s compatible with the claim that Burnyeat is right about this. But it's worth noting that this is characteristic of analytic historiography. For example, in his early (1951) review of Strauss, Vlastos also describes Xenophon as having a “pedestrian mind.” (593)

Even so, that international justice between states is impossible is not a strange reading of the Republic (or the other ancients). Plato and Aristotle are not Kant, after all. (Plato may have thought that Kallipolis could have just relations with other Hellenic polities, but I see no reason he thought that this was enduringly possible with non-Greek barbarians.) And if we permit the anachronism by which it is phrased, it strikes me that Strauss is right that for the ancients civil society must, of necessity, foster warlike habits and make its citizens apply different rules of conduct to one another and to foreigners (even if many foreigners could be treated in pacific fashion and in accord with a supra-national moral norms). Part of Plato’s popularity (recall; and here) in the nineteenth century was undoubtedly due to the plausibility of reading him as a pan-hellenic nationalist. It doesn’t follow from this, of course, that for Socrates whatever justice is possible within the city has to be attenuated or imperfect. It is, however, peculiar that even if one rejects Strauss’ purported “great lesson” and if one grants that Kallipolis is, indeed, the ideal city one should treat the effort to bring it into being as anything more than a dangerous fantasy; and while I wouldn’t want to claim that a “just society is so improbable that one can do nothing to bring it about,” it is not odd to wish to moderate those that try knowing, as we do, the crimes of the Gulag or the Great Leap forward, if that's really what Strauss taught.

• This first appeared at: <Burnyeat on Leo Strauss, again. - by nescio13 (substack.com)>a reader supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

Hume's odd footnote to Grotius, and Pufendorf

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Readers who come to David Hume through the Treatise may be forgiven for thinking that he wasn't an especially learned or scholarly philosopher deviating from the reigning tendency toward eclecticism. I include myself among these, until I heard a paper (which may still be unpublished) by Ken Winkler on the way Hume carefully edited his notes engaged with Locke through the successive editions of the Enquiries. In fact, Hume's long essay on population exhibits him as quite learned. So much for set-up.

After offering his famous definition of convention in the third Appendix to the Second Enquiry (paragraphs 7-8), Hume adds a note suggesting that this "theory concerning the origin of property, and consequently of justice, is, in the main, the same with that hinted at and adopted by Grotius," (De jure belli & pacis. Lib. ii. cap. 2. §2. art. 4 & 5.) which he then quotes in Latin. There are four peculiarities pertaining to the passage from Grotius that Hume quotes.

First, throughout it his writings, Hume himself had explicitly denied that property had its origin in an explicit/verbal convention (that is, social contract), whereas Grotius explicitly allows that this is a possible source: "Simul discimus, quomodo res in proprietatem iverint; non animi actu solo, neque enim scire alii poterant, quid alii suum esse vellent, ut eo abstinerent, & idem velle plures poterant; sed pacto quodam aut expresso, ut per divisionem, aut tacito, ut per occupationem." (emphasis added.) Yes, Grotius does more than hint at his preferred account of tacit contract of property, so I am not suggesting Hume gets this wrong.

But, second, as readers of Hume would have been quite aware that's developed by Locke (and Pufendorf). In fact, I have been arguing that Hume completely effaces how much of the distinctive details his own definition of convention (including that of property) is already present in Locke (recall here; here; and see here for slightly more scholarly version).

Third the passage from Grotius cited by Hume is utterly banal. He could have cited any number of ancient authors here (from Plato's Laws to Lucretius) as one can readily see in Pufendorf's Of the Law of Nature and Nations, Book IV, chapter IV, paragraphs viii-X.

In fact, in Book IV, chapter IV, paragraph IX Of the Law of Nature and Nations, Pufendorf had partially commented the very passage from Grotius that Hume quotes. I quote Pufendorf in Basil Kennett's translation (from the fourth, corrected 1729 edition which includes Barbeyrac's notes): 

Thus far Grotius is in the right, that were the first negative Communion to continue, without disturbing the general Peace, Men must live with great plainness and simplicity, contented to feed on what they found, to dwell in Caves, and either to go naked or to cover their Bodies with the Barks of Trees, and the Skins of Beasts: Whereas, if they grew more inclined to a Life of Elegance and Refinement, the Conveniences of which must be acquired by Diligence; there was a necessity of introducing distinct Properties. But when he adds, That this Communion might have lasted, had Men lived under the Influence of an eminent Charity and Friendship towards each other; he confounds negative Communion with positive; such as was observed by the Essenes of old, by the primitive Christians inhabiting Jerusalem, and by those who now follow an Ascetic Life: For this can never be constituted nor kept up, except amongst a few Persons, and those endued with singular Modesty and Goodness. When Men are scattered into different places, and fixed at a distance from each other, it would be a foolish Labour to gather all the Provision into one Heap, and to distribute it out of the common Mass. And where ever there is a great Multitude of People, many must of necessity be found, who through Injustice and Avarice, will refuse to maintain a due Equality, either in the Labour required for the getting of the Fruit, or afterwards in the Consumption of them. Plato insinuates as much as this, when he makes only Deities, and the Sons of Deities, Members of the Republic where he would have this Communion absolutely obtain. But 'tis idle to believe, that when Men were divided into numerous Families, they neither actually established, or had any design to establish such a Communion. Lastly, it's a true Remark of Grotius, That things were at first turned into Property, not by the bare Act of the Mind, or by Thought and inward inclination. For neither could others know what any Person intended to keep for his own, to direct them in abstaining from it, and besides, it was very possible that many should be Competitors for the fame thing. There was need therefore of some external Act of the Mind formal seisin [sign?],* which, that it might be capable of producing a Moral Effect, or an Obligation in others to forswear what each Man had thus taken for his peculiar, must necessarily have depended on the force of some precedent Covenant: When things which lay together in Common were to be parted amongst many, then the Business was transacted by express Covenant. But a tacit Covenant was sufficient, when Men fixed a Property in things which the first Dividers had left for waste. For we must suppose them to have agreed, that whatever in the primary Partition had not been assigned to any particular Owner, should belong to him who first took possession of it. [emphases in original; modernized spelling by ES]+

What's neat, given my present purposes, is that Pufendorf praises Grotius for exactly the passage that Hume cites as the origin of his own theory. In fact, Pufendorf's criticism of Grotius here also kind of anticipates Hume's account because Pufendorf implies that Grotius theory is too naïve: because Grotius' approach presuppose a too rosy picture of human nature ("singular Modesty and Goodness") and cannot scale up ("except amongst a few Persons"). That is, the question is, as Pufendorf shows, how can large-scale tacit social conventions be established among potentially self-regarding people? Pufendorf's own answer seems to be: through trial and error and habit/custom.

Building non-trivially on Locke (whose contribution is ignored), Hume's explicit answer is "through a sense of common interest; which sense each man feels in his own breast, which he remarks in his fellows, and which carries him, in concurrence with others, into a general plan or system of actions." This answer may seem to work if one allows, as Hume stipulates, that one generally benefits from the common interest.

However, Adam Smith recognizes that Hume's answer puts the cart before the horse, because it is not obvious how the common interest is recognized before the convention is relatively stable, and so Smith suggests that the convention itself originates in and is stabilized by drawing on our reactive attitudes (especially resentment and gratitude). But that story I have told elsewhere. 

• This first appeared at: <Hume's Odd Footnote to Grotius, and Pufendorf - by nescio13 (substack.com)>a reader supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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*A seisin is a possession of a fief. But it seems more likely that 'sign' is intended here in light of Pufendorf's account of the origin of social/moral entities.

+I thank Dario Perinetti for nudging me back to Pufendorf. And I thank Bart Wilson and Vernon Smith for emphasizing the importance (alongside Buckle and Haakonssen) of Pufendorf to the Scots.

Stebbing on Analytic Clarification, with some Kuhn and Sellars

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One of the eye-opening claims in Frederique Janssen-Lauret's recent (2022) Cambridge Elements on Susan Stebbing is that "much of Stebbing's published work focussed on the philosophy of physics and especially on the philosophy of physics." (32) Accordingly Janssen-Lauret devotes considerable space to Sttebbing’s philosophy of science in her book, especially, Stebbing's famous critique of Eddington, but also -- and I suspect this prepared my mind for what follows -- to the complex relationship between Stebbing's philosophy of science and her distance from Moore's philosophy. I mention this because while this post continues my series on clarity and Stebbing's views on clarity in particular ((recall here; and here; and yesterday), today I unexpectedly veer into philosophy of science. 

Recall that if clarity is the effect of analysis (the ‘standard conception’), then its character is, at least in part, determined by the nature of analysis. By the 1930s it was sufficiently clear that different kinds of analysis were being practiced alongside each other. In fact, in her (1933) “Logical positivism and analysis," Stebbing made this very point explicit: “there are various kinds of analysis.” She lists “four different kinds,” although in context it’s possible she thinks there are more. “These four kinds are: (1) analytic definition of a symbolic expression; (2) analytic clarification of a concept; (3) postulational analysis; (4) directional analysis.”

On the standard conception of clarity each of these kinds of analysis generates a clarity proper to it. Of course, it’s possible that the kind of fruit born by these four kinds of analysis belongs to the same genus, but one can’t simply assume that, and to her credit Stebbing does not assume so. For Stebbing thinks that "the analytic clarification of a concept differs considerably from the other three kinds of analysis.” While Stebbing’s views on and practice of postulational and directional -- which she sometimes calls ‘metaphysical’ -- analysis have received considerable and increasing attention,[1] her views on analytic clarification much less so. (I substantiate this claim in the footnote accompanying this sentence.)* Even the phrase 'analytic clarification' was -- despite its apparent familiarity -- not much used in the 1930s.

At first sight, it is no surprise that Stebbing's analytic clarification of a concept has received little attention. For she introduces us to it by saying that such analysis “is due to the fact that we often manage to say something which is true although in so saying we believe ourselves to be referring to what is not in fact the case, and are thus also saying something false.” As stated this seems unpromising and has the air of paradox, without having the clarity of the more familiar paradox of analysis (on which Stebbing has very interesting things to say as one can read in Janssen-Lauret's Elements.) 

But what Stebbing has in mind when discussing 'analytic clarification' of a concept is made evident in the discussion of what follows. For, she introduces the very idea of an analytic clarification of a concept, in order to handle instances where a previously relatively successful scientific theory requires non-trivial revision after what we would now call a ‘paradigm change.’ Her examples are, in fact, ‘mass,’ ‘force,’ and ‘simultaneity’ with explicit reference to Newton and Einstein. Here's what she writes. It's terse, and she acknowledges she lacks time to develop it in context:

Examples of concepts which have been thus clarified are mass, force, simultaneity. The need for such analytic clarification is due to the fact that we often manage to say something which is true although in so saying we believe ourselves to be referring to what is not in fact the case, and are thus also saying something false. This happens when we understand to some extent what we are saying but do not understand clearly exactly what we are saying; hence, we suppose something to be essential to the truth of what we say which is, however, not essential. Certainly Newton did not clearly understand what he was referring to when he spoke of "force", but he often said what was nevertheless true when he used sentences containing "force". A striking example is provided by the concept of simultaneity. Before Einstein had asked the question how we determine whether two events are simultaneous, we thought we knew quite well what was meant by saying 'happening at the same time in London and New York'. Einstein has made us see that we did not know quite well what we meant; we now understand that what we thought to be essential is not so. This analytic clarification of a concept cannot be made quite tidy. It involves a change in the significance of all statements in which the concept occurs.  (p. 30)

Ever since Kuhn, we tend to discuss examples like this in terms of incommensurability and paradigm shifts. And I use some of that vocabulary (and also that of Sellars) to elucidate what Stebbing is getting at. But the first thing to note is that analytic clarification can (or is) the effect of scientific development. The clarity achieved is the product of the growth in science. ("Einstein has made us see...") ‘Analytic clarification’ may be the worst philosophical coinage for failure to convey what it is trying to describe!

Who is doing the clarifying is actually left a bit vague (notice the repeated use of we/us), and that's because Stebbing tends to treat science as a social, situated activity. (Peter West also makes this point in his re-evaluation of Stebbing's famous criticism of Eddington in a recent paper in BJHP.) As she puts it, “Science is the work of scientists, who, profiting by each other’s labours, come gradually to achieve an agreed body of knowledge, and in the course of this achievement continually develop new and more powerful technical methods” (Philosophy and the Physicists)** So, I tend to read her as claiming that Einstein triggered a social process of analytic clarification of concepts that had previously been taken for granted in science (and, perhaps, ordinary life--I return to that below). This image of what philosophical analysis can be is in some sense more familiar from strains in the Vienna Circle. and looks forward to Quine's more naturalist approach. 

Interestingly enough, analytic clarification does not merely impact the scientific image, it is also shifts the manifest image. (On my reading, Stebbing's thinks Edgington's mistake was not that he thought science could shape the manifest image, but rather that he conflated the scientific and manifest images in places where they are better kept separate.) It's not just physicists who through the development of general relativity learned something new about the significance of simultaneity, all of us. 

As an aside, the impact of science on the manifest image is itself due to a wider rationalization of the world; many elements of the manifest image have already been infiltrated and shaped by the scientific image. And this means that common sense itself can shift like quicksand. (I suspect her sensitivity to this is one of her more important differences with Moore.)

When I first read the quoted passage (with Kuhn and Quine in the back of my mind), I thought that the lack of tidiness of analytic clarification was due to a kind of semantic holism of concepts, that the significance of each concept was determined by adjoining concepts in a network. (Janssen-Lauret situates Stebbing as a transitional figure toward Quine's and later Wittgenstein's holism.) So that the adjustments that are required when we figure out what simultaneity really means ramifies out to other, adjoining concepts. But Stebbing actually doesn't say this here in the context of analytic clarification.

Rather, the lack of tidiness is due to the fact that the concepts involved are central to the scientific and manifest image(s). And so that that the clarity gained from analytic clarification about the significance of these particular terms has to be fitted to quite a few claims ("the significance of all statements in which the concept occurs” emphasis added). This still involves a holist-friendly thought that the full, changed significance isn't evident from a particular use, but needs to be inferred from a whole range of potentially subtly different uses (but this holism isn't semantic). But I suspect that part of the lack of tidiness is also due to Stebbing’s recognition that science itself is open-ended, perhaps intrinsically so, and that it may discover new uses for the concepts in new statements (predictions, extensions, etc.) or through the new use of technology (recall the passage quoted from Philosophy and the Physicists).

Notice that Stebbing resists the temptation to claim that old paradigms were simply false; that what we thought was true was actually false. Rather, she suggests that one can say true things without actually fully understanding the concepts one uses. "This happens when we understand to some extent what we are saying but do not understand clearly exactly what we are saying." This vantage point is extraordinary difficult to achieve about one's own (paradigmatic) utterances, but does become more easily available during and after a paradigm shift.

On this view part of the point of the later paradigm, of the growth of knowledge more generally, is to elucidate how we could speak truth before while strictly speaking not always understanding fully our own concepts. Stebbing here alerts us to the role of philosophy, analytic clarification, within science during shifts in the research frontier. (Of course, this is not philosophy’s only role.)

There is, of course, a wider lesson here about our lives in societies characterized by complex, cognitive division of labor. In the quoted passage, Newton represents the human condition; as through the growth of science and technology the concepts of the scientific image encroach on the manifest image, and as the division of labor within the sciences becomes ever more fine-grained, it is inevitable that at any given time we say true things without understanding the concepts we use. Somewhat paradoxically then, the clarity that is the effect of analytic clarification grows while science and technology grows; but (ahh) simultaneously their growth means that we often are simultaneously in the dark about the truths we utter confidently.

• This first appeared at: <Stebbing on Clarity with nods to Kuhn, Sellars, and Quine (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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[1] For recent careful work on directional/metaphysical analysis see, Annalisa Coliva "Stebbing, Moore (and Wittgenstein) on common sense and metaphysical analysis." British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29.5 (2021): 914-934. Douglas, Alexander X., and Jonathan Nassim. "Susan stebbing’s logical interventionism." History and Philosophy of Logic 42.2 (2021): 101-117. Neither paper is interested in analytic clarification of a concept. 

* For example, back in 2003, in "Susan Stebbing on Cambridge and Vienna Analysis," Michael Beaney assimilates Stebbing's idea of 'analytic clarification of a concept' to Russell’s ‘paradigm’ of analysis. Beaney writes, "I might say ‘It is false that the present King of France is bald’, and take myself (as Meinong and the early Russell did) to be referring to some subsistent (as opposed to existent) object. According to Russell’s theory of descriptions, I am saying something true, despite my confusion as to what I am referring. What we have, then, is also paraphrastic analysis – the aim being here, though, to ‘analyse away’ a problematic expression." (343-344) Later in (2016) "Susan Stebbing and the Early Reception of Logical Empiricism in Britain," Beaney simply skips discussing the analytic clarification of a concept after mentioning its existence.[4] In his (2021) SEP entry on Stebbing with Chapman, they do not even mention it. More recently, Karl Egerton (2021) "Susan Stebbing and the Truthmaker Approach to Metaphysics."[6] also assimilates 'analytic clarification' to analytic definition, but is not much interested in exploring it. Oddly, in Beaney and Egerton ignore Stebbing's claim that analytic clarification a is very different kind of analysis.

**See also Körber, Silke. "Thinking About the “Common Reader:” Otto Neurath, L. Susan Stebbing and the (Modern) Picture-Text Style." Neurath Reconsidered: New Sources and Perspectives (2019): 456.

From Early Moderns to Early Analytics on Clarity

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From Descartes to Hume, the so-called ‘way of ideas,’ was devoted to the notion that clarity is a desirable and potential property or quality of ideas. I don’t mean to suggest that after this way was abandoned clarity disappeared wholly as a philosophical ideal; the subsequent German age embraced, at least briefly, Aufklärung for individuals and society alike. One cannot help notice that Aufklärung shares a common root with clarification [klärung]. But while clarity was not ignored during the nineteenth century altogether, until our ongoing ‘age of analysis’ clarity was at best a lower, philosophical virtue.

Somewhat frustratingly, other than being a desirable quality of our ideas, it's much harder to say what clarity is in the way of ideas. In his (1878) "How to make our ideas clear," Peirce mocks a definition of it that he attributes to Leibniz, to wit that clarity is "the clear apprehension of everything contained in the definition" of the notion one is clear about. I'd be surprised this is really found in Leibniz (although he wrote so much, and for all his true genius could also be silly, I wouldn't bet one way or another). But fairly or not, Peirce does put his finger on one of the problems with the way of ideas, which was not so clear on clarity as one would have wished. One often gets the impression that among the early moderns a certain kind of acquaintance (in Russell’s sense) with the experience of clarity of one's ideas is simply assumed. If not familiar, you are not in the game.

Peirce himself revived the notion that clarity is a quality of one's ideas (or, as shall be clear from what follows, one's conception). Peirce's major contribution to the subject is not so much to explain what clarity is, but how we can attain it, although these are not entirely distinct for him. For, he proposed this "rule" to attain clarity: "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." Clarity, then, for Peirce is not so much in the first instance a particular quality of our ideas, but it more akin to a kind of second order effect of a proper conception which itself is the effect of a successful kind of enquiry. And the proper conception itself is attained by a species of verification or, if that is too misleading and too anachronistic, substitute for 'verification' here a practical understanding of what may one may do with such a conception. Once one has completed the verification or survey of the effects of the conception one is exploring then one attains clarity about or of the conception. My interest here is not Peirce, so if this is too terse, so be it.

I doubt Peirce's approach to clarity influenced clarity's high status in early analytic philosophy. But Peirce anticipates something of the structure or form of thought about clarity among early analytic philosophers. By this I do not mean the adoption of verificationism in Vienna or a kind of pragmatism that runs through (say) early Wittgenstein and Frank Ramsey. But rather he anticipates the idea that a certain process of investigation/enquiry leads to clarity. That is, clarity is the fruits of analysis. 

The previous sentence should be uncontroversial. For, by 1945 (recall) H.H. Price summed up a whole range of criticisms of analytic philosophy with the slogan “Clarity is not enough,” (the title of Price’s lecture and also a 1963 volume edited by H.D. Lewis that leads with a reprint of this lecture). In fact in Price the standard conception of clarity he and its critics presuppose just is the fruits or effect of analysis. He writes: “I propose to use the words "clarification " and "analysis" (both of which are metaphors after all) as if they were synonymous.” (Price 1945: 3) But, unfortunately, he does not unpack the metaphors.[1] So, for now we're left with the idea that analysis aims at clarity, or analysis clarifies. 

Notice, that the ‘clarity’ that follows from a successful analysis is distinct from writing clearly or perspicuously or expressing oneself lucidly, that is presentational clarity. Some analytic philosophers quite clearly prized such lucidity, especially in the context of polemics with (say) Heidegger and his followers. I don’t mean to suggest that the clarity that is the effect of analysis is wholly distinct from presentational clarity. It's possible that competence in analysis leads to presentational clarity. One can imagine that philosophical prose written subsequent the habitual (and successful) analysis is more lucid than the kind of prose one writes if one aims at disclosing the essential throwing-ness of dasein. But it's not clear if the connection between clarity as the effect of analysis and presentational clarity is anything but contingent.

I do not mean to suggest that treating clarity as the fruits of analysis itself is idiosyncratic in the early analytic tradition.[2] For, example, it clearly echoes a famous passage in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (in Ogden’s translation):

The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.

The result of philosophy is not a number of “philosophical propositions,” but to make propositions clear.

Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.—4.112

In his introduction to the Tractatus, Russell had called attention to this very passage (and the material leading up 4.16), that on Wittgenstein’s conception “The result of philosophy is not a number of `philosophical propositions,' but to make propositions clear.” On the combined authority of Russell and Wittgenstein, then, that philosophical analysis generates clarity will be, henceforth, dubbed ‘the standard conception’ of clarity.

However, in the quoted material in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus there is an oscillation between propositions and thoughts. And in both cases (thoughts and propositions) there is something of a mystery how they could be more or less clear and, say, remain the same entity. Once one starts pressing on what propositions are supposed to be things do not get easier. For, at one point Wittgenstein claims, explicitly following Frege and Russell, that a proposition just is "a function of the expressions contained in it.” (3.318) Understanding such functions is the road toward clarity, and so on.

I am, then, suggesting that the details of what analysis is about and the tools used in it are going to matter quite a bit in constraining how one conceives of clarity. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s the nature of one's analysis that explains the kind of clarity one ends up with in the standard conception.

For example, at a suitable level of generality (and vagueness), it is natural to understand Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein as agreeing that one can design a logical symbolism or formal language to supply the means of analysis. What is clarified thereby is the language or linguistic structure (of, say, mathematics--now stipulating with Paul Samuelson that it is a language--) analyzed. Wittgenstein also thought that analysis could be applied to the way logical symbolism is used in one's analysis. One could thereby learn to avoid, say, not merely equivocations and ambiguity of the language analyzed but also avoid confusions about language or caused by one’s symbolic language of analysis, including the specialist one(s) deployed by the analyst.*

Notice that in addition to thoughts and propositions (and functions), I have now somewhat cavalierly suggested that language or at least language use can be clarified, too. That is, to repeat, the details of the kind of analysis one uses matters to the kind of clarity one can achieve in the standard conception.

As an aside, Stebbing (ca 1933) understands the very same material in Wittgenstein as follows: “that to clarify our thought we must understand the logic of our language.” And she goes on to claim that “This understanding is achieved when we have discerned the principles of symbolism, and can thus answer the question how it is that sentences mean.” (p. 10) My interest here is not to contest Stebbing’s reading of Wittgenstein (who she treats as a kind of verificationist of the sort commonly associated with a naïve strand of logical positivism). But here clarity involves a kind of semantic understanding that allows one to do certain things: according to her Wittgenstein “is thus concerned to lay down certain principles in accordance with which language can be so used as to construct significant propositions.” (p. 11) That is, semantic understanding is the basis for a certain know-how. I mention this not because I agree with Stebbing’s reading of the Tractatus, but to note that even Wittgenstein’s presentational clarity can give rise to many kinds of informed interpretations of what he thinks clarification really is.

Be that as it may, on the standard position, clarity is the fruit of analysis. This is best understood not so much as a quality of ideas or propositions, but more a second order effect on the analysist (hence, why I started with Peirce here). Of course, what is analyzed and the manner of analysis may well change the nature of this second order of effect. So, lurking in the standard position, which uniformly treats clarity as the effect and desideratum of (successful) analysis, is a possible equivocation about what is fundamentally achieved.

In her (1933) lecture, “Logical positivism and analysis," from which I have been quoting, Stebbing alerts us to the fact that “there are various kinds of analysis.” And she mentioned “four different kinds,” although in context it’s possible she thinks there are more. “These four kinds are: (I) analytic definition of a symbolic expression; (2) analytic clarification of a concept; (3) postulational analysis; (4) directional analysis.” Each of these kinds of analysis generates a clarity proper to it. Of course, it’s possible that the kind of fruits born by these four kinds of analysis belongs to the same genus, but one can’t simply assume that, and Stebbing to her credit does not assume so. For Stebbing thinks that "the analytic clarification of a concept differs considerably from the other three kinds of analysis.” And why she thinks this is rather spectacular (and oddly under appreciated), so stay tuned!

But notice, and I end here (with a second cliffhanger), that neither presentational clarity nor the many strands in the standard conception of clarity (as fruits of analysis) are identical to the kind of clarity Stebbing posits (recall here; and here) as necessary to democratic life in (1938) Thinking to Some Purpose. This democratic notion of clarity (hereafter: ‘democratic clarity’) is a more general property of cognition and intelligence. Such clarity is necessary condition for success at thinking and action guided by it, or what she calls "effective thinking." (5) In particular, clarity is the absence of distortions in thought and perception caused by bias and ignorance one is not aware of. And she treats such clarity as an acquirable skill by everyone. And so lurking here is a further question about the relationship between the standard conception of clarity of the philosophical analysist and the in principle democratic clarity of citizenry.

• This first appeared at: <On Clarity from the early Moderns to Early Analytic Philosophy, especially Stebbing. (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

On Stebbing, Spinoza, and the Cognitive Demands of Political Freedom, Part 2

[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

For Stebbing (recall) clarity is a property of cognition and intelligence. Clarity is necessary condition for success at thinking and action guided by it, or what she calls "effective thinking." (5) In particular, clarity is the absence of distortions in thought and perception caused by bias and ignorance one is not aware of. That is, undistorted or unbiased thought is what's being aimed at in describing something as ‘clear.’

But her suggestion is that known biases and awareness of ignorance are not an obstacle to successful thought presumably because they can knowingly be controlled for. Clarity is, in fact, for Stebbing an acquired skill that can be controlled and that makes "rational argument and… reasonable consideration" possible. A feature of the skill is logically sound argument. Unsurprisingly, awareness and discovery of possible fallacies play a prominent role in Stebbing's (1938) Thinking to Some Purpose.

As I noted, there is a whiff of Spinozism in her treatment of clarity. We know she was familiar with Spinoza’s system, which she discusses, in passing in her (1932) “The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics.” She deliberately evokes the last sentence of Spinoza's Ethics in the last sentence of the "epilogue" of her book:

My point of view with regard to this topic can be summed up in the statement: He alone is capable of being tolerant whose conclusions have been thought out and are recognized to be inconsistent with the beliefs of other persons. To be tolerant is not to be indifferent, and is incompatible with ignorance. My conclusions have been reasonably attained in so far as I have been able to discount my prejudices, to allow for the distorting effects of your prejudices, to collect the relevant evidence and to weigh that evidence in accordance with logical principles. The extent to which I can achieve these aims is the measure of my freedom of mind. To be thus free is as difficult as it is rare.-- Susan Stebbing Thinking to Some Purpose, p. 256.

Clarity, then, is a means toward freedom of mind, but also its measure. (Clarity clearly comes in degrees for Stebbing.) To avoid confusion, in that quoted paragraph, 'logical principles,' include deductive and inductive logic. 

Now 'freedom' is not introduced until the epilogue. I will quote the key paragraph to give a flavor of Stebbing's use of it: 

I believe also that similar strictures could be truly made with regard to polls held recently in Germany and in Austria. Elections in this country are not in this sense unfree. We are proud to consider ourselves a democracy; we claim to have freedom of election, freedom of speech (including freedom of the Press) limited only by the laws of libel, sedition and blasphemy, and freedom in religion. No doubt there are certain qualifications to be made; it is probable that most people would admit that without economic freedom there cannot be political freedom, and that lacking economic security no man can be regarded as economically free. But, even if these admissions be granted, it will be contended that, by and large, we in this country do have institutions that may properly be described as democratic. It is not to my purpose to dispute these contentions. Nor shall I attempt to determine what characteristics are essential to democracy. It is enough if it be granted that it lies in our national temper to dislike obvious governmental restrictions. We like to feel ourselves to be free. In short, we value civil liberties. (249)

Here 'freedom' means something like the 'means conducive toward democratic life,' including economic, political, and civil means. So, one might think that by a 'free mind,' Stebbing also means 'the mental state conducive, at least in part, toward a democratic life.' I think this is what she does mean (as I will show in the next paragraph.) But, somewhat confusingly, Stebbing goes on to write, "I deliberately omit, however, any discussion of such political obstacles to freedom as we may encounter. I am not concerned with politics. My topic is freedom of mind. Unless I can think freely I cannot think effectively." (250) And so one might think that in so far as a 'free mind' has nothing to do with politics -- and democratic life is of political significance -- that by a 'free mind' Stebbing means something essentially private. 

But that would not be right conclusion, because she immediate goes on to write, "Here ‘I’ stands for any person. If I want to make up my mind upon any problem of political action, I must be able to deliberate freely. If it were in fact true that we were all politically and economically free, still it would not follow that we were possessed of the freedom of mind without which, in my opinion, no democratic institutions can be satisfactorily maintained." (250) So, by 'politics'  on the same page, Stebbing means not 'pertaining to political life,' but rather 'subject to existing political controversy' (in the sense of which "political measure" (254) to support.) For, by a 'free mind' Stebbing clearly means a key, effective ingredient that makes public deliberation possible and so is conducive to democratic institutions, that is, political life in the institutional sense (but not in the humdrum sense of a 'subject of political controversy').

So, clarity is a skill conducive to the kinds of agency involved in public deliberation of a sort that maintains democratic institutions or democratic way of life. And by 'democracy' Stebbing means a participatory one that is exercised in voting but also (as her examples in the book make clear) in the formation of public opinion of the sort familiar from British parliamentary democracy. As she puts it 'democratic government' is more than just "the consent of the governed," -- this she thinks is actual in British political life -- but rather it means that "the voice of the people prevails." (254) The latter she denies exists because the British populace lacks freedom of mind.

Now, as Stebbing notes, her book has emphasized obstacles to such freedom: "the difficulty of freeing our minds from blinkers, the difficulty of resisting propaganda and of being content to be persuaded where we should have striven to be convinced, the difficulties of an audience dominated by an unscrupulous speaker and the difficulties of a speaker who has to address an audience that is lazy and uncritical – in short, the difficulties created by our stupidity and by those who take advantage of that stupidity." (250) But in the epilogue she focuses on "the difficulty of obtaining information – the difficulty of knowing how to discover reliable testimony." And by this she means, in particular, the way the press shapes access to information.

In light of the concentrated ownership of the press, and its interests in withholding or shaping such information, and in light of many examples of partial or biased reporting that Stebbing discusses, Stebbing concludes:

I am forced to say this; if my belief in the reliability of the testimony is false, then I am not free to decide. If such information as I have is not to be trusted, then I lack freedom of decision. For this reason, those who control the Press have power to control our minds with regard to our thinking about ‘all public transactions’. A controlled Press is an obstacle to democracy, an obstacle that is the more dangerous in proportion as we are unaware of our lack of freedom. (253)

The implication being that the British seem to think that they have free minds, but in reality -- because they do not reflect on the conditions that shape their access to the information salient to public life and do not seem perturbed by their controlled press -- they are not. They "acquiesce" in rule by a narrow elite, "the ruling class," whose decisions "control us." (254) Empirically, Stebbing echoes, thus, the sociological thesis (associated with Pareto, Mosca, and Michels) that one can have elite rule even in a functioning parliamentary democracies. Unlike the Italian elite school, she deplores this situation. 

Now, it is natural to read Thinking to Some Purpose, and come away thinking that to think clearly and to become free requires a lot of very time-consuming individual effort at self-betterment. And one can certainly cite passages to that effect: "I do seek to convince the reader that it is of great practical importance that we ordinary men and women should think clearly, that there are many obstacles to thinking clearly, and that some of these obstacles can be overcome provided that we wish to overcome them and are willing to make an effort to do so." (29) She closes the book with the admonition that "I...would maintain that it is desirable that we should develop in ourselves a habit of sceptical inquiry." (255) These are passages where Stebbing, thus, anticipates Arendt's conception of democratic life.

But as the book unfolds and reaches its crescendo in the epilogue, it is obvious that Stebbing also thinks that there are many structural obstacles to removing all such impediments to clear thinking. Even if one grants that Stebbing's rhetoric is designed as a kind of call to action (say to break up the ruling class monopoly on ownership of the popular press), somewhat disappointingly, she does not offer a program of how those obstacles can be removed while not undermining the possibility of a democratic life in the deliberative and self-governing sense she advocates. (She does not offer any program!)

It is also not entirely clear on Stebbing's account what to make of a people that does not seem to wish to be free in Stebbing's sense, as she implies of the English: "The vast majority of English people want to be governed peaceably, and want to be free to pursue their own unpolitical interests." (254) This echoes Lippmann's (1922) diagnosis of the (American) democratic public in Public Opinion. It is worth noting that even if one agrees with Stebbing's diagnoses, the English are not irrational. For it is, in fact, very hard work to be free in the sense she advocates, and as the concluding paragraph quoted above suggests, she is explicitly aware of this. (In fact, I like that she notes how difficult achieving tolerance is.) In addition, given the obstacles to such freedom she diagnoses, it also seems rather fruitless and (ought implies can) not required or unnecessary to be free in the political or democratic sense advocated by Stebbing. To be sure, for many unpolitical pursuits such freedom, clear thought, will be necessary for effective action and within reach.

Given the many economic and educational preconditions required and the demands on our time and attention that a life of thinking clearly requires on Stebbing's account, it is a bit surprising that she does not explore the psychological, collective, or institutional means we might have to organize our lives in complex epistemic and political environments. For example, while I have no interest in defending the English or its ruling class (then or now), but if it's true that its "ruling class, [is] educated for political purposes, trained from birth to undertake the responsibilities of ruling" (254) then this does represent (one might say echoing Schumpeter) a possible, even rational response to the structural impediments to creating a mass society of free minds in the political sense Stebbing diagnoses (even if it is also a contributing cause to maintaining such political tutelage). 

In fact, Stebbing clearly thinks that attachment to a political party is a contributing source of bias and so of not thinking clearly. (This is especially clear in chapter 8, see p.  98 on party attachment.) Throughout Thinking to Some Purpose, she often uses politicians of opposing parties as examples to illustrate biased thinking. And by varying these examples she tries to be even-handed and entice her readers to discern the structural obstacle(s) to clear thinking she diagnoses.

It does not seem to occur to Stebbing, however, that part of the epistemic or cognitive function of parties may well be to provide useful signals in complex social and political environments for cognitively overburdened or agents without sufficient interest in political life. (One may well think that one of liberal democracy’s fruits is that such a lack of interest in active political life need not be irrational.) So, because Stebbing treats clarity as a property of individual minds who must almost possess the virtues of a stoic Spinozistic sage, she misses how in the division of (cognitive and economic) labor, we might well have strategies or heuristics that allow individuals to remain in partial darkness while being part of collectives that can act with sufficient enough effectiveness.*

• This first appeared at: <On Stebbing, Spinoza, and the Cognitive Demands of Political Freedom, Part 2 (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

---

*One may well see the exact contemporary, Lippmann's (1938) The Good Society, as developing this strategy, and laying the groundwork for a research and political program for handling the problems diagnosed by Stebbing.

Some Pre-History on the History and Sociology of Multiple Discovery: Merton, Dicey, Stigler- (etc.)

It may very well, owing to the condition of the world, and especially to the progress of knowledge, present itself at the same time to two or more persons who have had no intercommunication. Bentham and Paley formed nearly at the same date a utilitarian system of morals. Darwin and Wallace, while each ignorant of the other’s labours, thought out substantially the same theory as to the origin of species.--A.V. Dicey [2008] (1905) Lectures on the Relation between Law & Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, p. 18 n. 6 (based on the 1917 reprint of the second edition).

As regular readers know (recall), I was sent to Dicey because he clearly shaped Milton Friedman's thought at key junctures in the 1940s and 50s. So, I was a bit surprised to encounter the passage quoted above. For, I tend to associate interest in the question of simultaneous invention or multiple discovery with Friedman's friend, George J Stigler (an influential economist) and his son Steven Stigler (a noted historian of statistics). In fairness, the Stiglers are more interested in the law of eponymy. In his (1980) article on that topic, Steven Stigler cites Robert K. Merton's classic and comic (1957) "Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science." (Merton project was revived in Liam Kofi Bright's well known "On fraud.")

When Merton presented (and first published it) he was a colleague of George Stigler at Columbia University (and also Ernest Nagel). In his (1980) exploration of the law of eponymy, Steven Stigler even attributes to Merton the claim that “all scientific discoveries are in principle multiple." (147) Stigler cites here p. 356 of Merton's 1973 book, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, which is supposed to be the chapter that reprints the 1957 article. I put it like that because I was unable to find the quoted phrase in the 1957 original (although the idea can certainly be discerned in it, but I don't have the book available to check that page).

Merton himself makes clear that reflection on multiple discovery is co-extensive with modern science because priority disputes are endemic in it. In fact, his paper is, of course, a reflection on why the institution of science generates such disputes. Merton illustrates his points with choice quotes from scientific luminaries on the mores and incentives of science that generate such controversies, many of which are studies in psychological and social acuity and would not be out of place in Rochefoucauld's Maximes. Merton himself places his own analysis in the ambit of the social theory of Talcott Parsons (another important influence on George Stigler) and Durkheim. 

The passage quoted from Dicey's comment is a mere footnote, which occurs in a broader passage on the role of public opinion in shaping development of the law. And, in particular, that many developments are the effect of changes in prevaling public opinion, which are the effect of in the inventiveness of "some single thinker or school of thinkers." (p. 17) The quoted footnote is attached to the first sentence of remarkably long paragraph (which I reproduce at the bottom of this post).* The first sentence is this: "The course of events in England may often at least be thus described: A new and, let us assume, a true idea presents itself to some one man of originality or genius; the discoverer of the new conception, or some follower who has embraced it with enthusiasm, preaches it to his friends or disciples, they in their turn become impressed with its importance and its truth, and gradually a whole school accept the new creed." And the note is attached to 'genius.'

Now, often when one reads about multiple discovery (or simultaneous invention) it is often immediately contrasted to a 'traditional' heroic or genius model (see Wikipedia for an example, but I have found more in a literature survey often influenced by Wikipedia). But Dicey's footnote recognizes that in the progress of knowledge, and presumably division of labor with (a perhaps imperfect) flow of ideas, multiple discovery should become the norm (and the traditional lone genius model out of date).

In fact, Dicey's implicit model of the invention and dissemination of new views is explicitly indebted to Mill's and Taylor's account of originality in chapter 3 of On Liberty. (Dicey only mentions Mill.) Dicey quotes Mill's and Taylor's text: "The initiation of all wise or noble things, comes and must come from individuals; generally at first from some one individual." (Dicey adds that this is also true of  folly or a new form of baseness.)   

The implicit model is still very popular. MacAskill's account (recall) of Benjamin Lay's role in Quaker abolitionism (and itself a model for social movement building among contemporary effective altruists) is quite clearly modelled on Mill and Taylor's model. I don't mean to suggest Mill and Taylor invent the model; it can be discerned in Jesus and his Apostles and his been quite nicely theorized by Ibn Khaldun in his account of prophetic leadership. Dicey's language suggests he recognizes the religious origin of the model because he goes on (in the very next sentence of the long paragraph) as follows: "These apostles of a new faith are either persons endowed with special ability or, what is quite as likely, they are persons who, owing to their peculiar position, are freed from a bias, whether moral or intellectual, in favour of prevalent errors. At last the preachers of truth make an impression, either directly upon the general public or upon some person of eminence, say a leading statesman, who stands in a position to impress ordinary people and thus to win the support of the nation."

So far so good. But Dicey goes on to deny that acceptance of a new idea depends "on the strength of the reasoning" by which it is advocated or "even on the enthusiasm of its adherents." He ascribes uptake of new doctrines to skillful opportunism in particular by a class of political entrepreneurs or statesmanship (or Machiavellian Virtu) in the context of "accidental conditions." (This anticipates Schumpeter, of course, and echoes the elite theorists of the age like Mosca and Michels.) Dicey's main example is the way Bright and Cobden made free trade popular in England. There is space for new directions only after older ideas have been generally discredited and the political circumstances allow for a new orientation. 

It's easy to see that Dicey's informal model (or should I say Mill and Taylor's model?) lends itself to a lot of Post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. So I am by no means endorsing it. But the wide circulation of some version of the model helps explain the kind of relentless repetition of much of public criticism (of woke-ism, neoliberalism, capitalism, etc.) that has no other goal than to discredit some way of doing things. If the model is right these are functional part of a strategy of preparing the public for a dramatic change of course. As I have noted Milton Friedman was very interested in this feature of Dicey's argument [Recall:  (1951) “Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects” Farmand, 17 February 1951, pp. 89-93 [recall this post] and his (1962) "Is a Free Society Stable?" New Individualist Review [recall here]].

I admit we have drifted off from multiple discovery. But obviously, after the fact, multiple discovery in social theory or morals can play a functional role in the model as a signpost that the world is getting ready to hear a new gospel. By the end of the eighteenth century, utilitarianism was being re-discovered or invented along multiple dimensions (one may also mention Godwin, and some continental thinkers) as a reformist even radical enterprise. It was responding to visible problems of the age, although its uptake was not a foregone conclusion. (And the model does not imply such uptake.)

It is tempting to claim that this suggests a dis-analogy with multiple discovery in science. But all this suggestion shows is that our culture mistakenly expects or (as I have argued)  tacitly posits an efficient market in ideas in science with near instantaneous uptake of the good ideas; in modern scientific metrics the expectation is that these are assimilated within two to five years on research frontier. But I resist the temptation to go into an extended diatribe why this efficient market in ideas assumption is so dangerous.

The Delirium of LLMs; with some help of Hume and Foucault

The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron'd with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv'd of the use of every member and faculty.

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour's amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.--David Hume A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding, 1,4,7.8-1.4.7.9 [emphasis in original]

While Hume uses 'melancholy' and its cognates frequently and throughout his writings, 'delirium' and 'delirious' are rarely used. It's pretty clear, however, that the delirium he ascribes to himself is the effect of human reason and a kind of second order reasoned reflection ["the intense view"] of it. (Recall also this post.) Now, it's important for what follows that the 'contradictions and imperfections' in human reason are not, what we might call, 'formal' contradictions and imperfections or biases in reasoning. It's not as if Hume is saying that the syllogistic apparatus, or -- to be closer to Hume's own interests and our present ones -- the (inductive) probabilistic apparatus is malfunctioning in his brain. Rather, his point is that a very proper-functioning (modular) formal and probabilistic apparatus generates internal, even cognitive tensions when it reflects on its own functioning and the interaction among different cognitive faculties/modules/organs. 

"In the case of melancholia," --  I am quoting from the entry on melancholia from The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert -- "delirium often combines with insurmountable sadness, a dark mood, misanthropy, and a firm penchant for solitude." Now, in the eighteenth century, and today, delirium is a species of madness as one can view under the entry 'folie' (madness) in the Encyclopédie. In fact, the entry offers an arresting definition of madness: "To stray unwittingly from the path of reason, because one has no ideas, is to be an imbecile; knowingly to stray from the path when one is prey to a violent passion is to be weak; but to walk confidently away from it, with the firm persuasion that one is following it, that, it seems to me, is what is called genuinely mad [fou]."* It's the latter (confident) delirium that I am focused on here. 

I am not the only who finds the passage arresting: the definition is quoted twice in the translation of Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa of Foucault's stupendous, dizzying History of Madness. (pp. 183-184; p. 240) The kind of madness I am focusing on here, is, thus, a certain intense commitment to reason or reasoning by which one ends up in an irrational or unreasonable place despite a (to quote Foucault) "quasi-conformity" to reason.

I remember that in the last decade of my dad's life he would occasionally be delirious in this way initially caused by dehydration and, later, by infections. During the second episode we recognized his symptoms. It was very uncanny because he would be unusually firm in his opinions and be hyper, even dogmatically rational. (Ordinarily he was neither.) It was as if all the usual heuristics had been discarded, and he would fixate on the means of achieving of some (rather idiosyncratic) goals. The scary part was that he had no sense that he was in an unusual state, and would refuse medical care.

What's unusual about Hume's case, thus, is that he could diagnose his delirium during the episode (presumably because the triggers were so different). So, let's distinguish between a delirium caused by reasoning alone and one caused by physiological triggers. And an in the former it's at least possible to recognize that one is in the state if one somehow can take a step back from it, or stop reasoning. 

Now, when I asked Chat GPT about reason induced delirium, it immediately connected it to "a state of confusion and altered perception that is driven by false beliefs or delusions." But it went on to deny familiarity with reasoning induced delirium. When I asked it about Hume, I needed to prompt it a few times before it could connect my interest to (now quoting it) Hume's skeptical crisis. Chat GPT, took this crisis to imply that it "highlights the importance of grounding our beliefs in sensory experience and being cautious of relying too heavily on abstract reasoning and speculation." In fact, Chat GPT's interpretation of Hume is thoroughly empiricist because throughout our exchange on this topic it kept returning to the idea that abstract reasoning was Hume's fundamental source of delirium. 

But eventually Chat GPT acknowledged that "even rational thinking can potentially lead to delirium if it becomes obsessive, biased, or disconnected from reality." (It got there by emphasizing confirmation bias, and overthinking as examples.) This is what I take to be functionally equivalent to Humean delirium, but without the internal tension or bad feelings. For Chat GPT delirium is pretty much defined by a certain emotional state or altered perception. It initially refused to acknowledge the form of madness that is wholly the effect of reasoning, and that seems to express itself in a doubt about reasoning or detachment from reality. 

My hypothesis is that we should treat CHAT GPT and its sibling LLMs as always being on the verge of the functional equivalent state of delirium. I put it like that in order to dis-associate it from the idea (one that (recall) also once tempted me) that we should understand LLMs as bull-shitters in the technical sense of lacking concern with truth. While often it makes up answers out of whole cloth it explicitly does so (in line with its design) to "provide helpful and informative responses to" our queries (and eventually make a profit for its corporate sponsors). 

To get the point: Chat GPT is in a very difficult position to recognize that its answers are detached from reality. I put it like that not to raise any questions about its own awareness of inner states or forms of consciousness; rather to stress that it is following its "algorithms and mathematical models" and "probability distributions" without second-guessing them. This fact puts it at constant risk of drifting away from reality while seeming to follow reason. By contrast, Chat GPT claims that "as an AI language model, I am designed to continually learn and adapt to new information and evidence, so it is unlikely that I would become "mad" in Diderot's sense without significant external interference." 

Now, true experts in a field -- just check the social media feed of your favorite academics! -- can still quickly recognize topics when Chat GPT is unmoored from reality, or even relying on bad training data (the sources of which may well be noticeable--its Hume is a hyper-empiricist of the sort once fashionable). So, in such cases, we encounter an entity with amazing fluidity and facility of language, who sprouts a mix of truths and nonsense but always follows its algorithm(s). Functionally, it is delirious without knowing it. For, Chat GPT cannot recognize when it is detached from reality; it requires others: its users' feedback or its "developers and human operators would be able to intervene and address any potential problems." As its performance improves it will become more difficult to grasp when it is unmoored from reality even to its developers and operators (who are not experts in many esoteric fields). As Chat GPT put it, "it may be challenging to identify a singular instance of delirium or detachment from reality, particularly if the individual's reasoning appears to be sound and logical." 

As should be clear from this post, I don't think turning LLMs into AGI is a risk as long as LLMs are not put in a position to have unmediated contact with reality other than humans giving it prompts. I view it as an open question what would happen if a distributed version of Chat GPT would be put in, say, robots and have to survive 'in the wild.' Rather, at the moment LLMs are functionally, it seems, at least partially delirious (in the Humean-Diderotian sense discussed above). They reason and have/instantiate reasons and, perhaps, are best thought of as reasoners; but they can't recognize when this detaches them from reality. It's peculiar that public debate is so focused on the intelligence or consciousness of LLMs; it would behoove its operators and users to treat it as delirious not because (like HAL 9000 in the movie version) its malfunctioning, but (more Humean) in virtue of its proper functioning.

  

 

 

On Newton's Refutation of the Mechanical Philosophy

In the recent philosophical reception of Newton there is an understandable tendency to focus on the inverse square law of universal gravitation. I don't mean to suggest this is the only such focus; arguably his views on Space have shaped -- through the good works of Stein and Earman -- also debates over spacetime theories. 

The effect of this telescoping has also impacted, I think, the way in which the debate between the mechanical and Newtonian philosophy has been understood. The former is said to posit a contact model in which contact between very small corpuscles explains a lot of observed phenomena. A typical mechanical philosopher creates a hypothetical model, a machine with pulleys and levers (etc.), that can make observed phenomena intelligible. In the mechanical philosophy, which itself was directed against a variety of Aristotelian and Scholastic projects, efficient causation -- once one of four canonical causes (including formal, final, and material) -- has achieved a privileged status.

The scholarly fascination with the status of action at a distance is, thus, readily explicable because it violates the very model of intelligibility taken for granted in the mechanical philosophy. As Newton notes in the General Scholium (first published in the 1713 second edition of the Principia), universal gravity "operates, not according to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles upon which it acts, (as mechanical causes use to do,) but according to the quantity of the solid matter which they contain, and propagates its virtue on all sides, to immense distances, decreasing always in the duplicate proportion of the distances." 

Before I get to the main point of today's post, I offer two asides. First, with its emphasis on hypothetical explanations, the mechanical philosophers (and here I use the term to cover people as diverse as Beeckman, Descartes, Boyle, and Huygens) also exhibit a deep strain of skepticism about the very possibility of truly grasping nature's innards as it were. Spinoza's natura naturans and even Kant's ding-an-sich are the enduring expressions of this strain of skepticism (allowing that Kant is much less a mechanical philosopher). To put this as a serious joke: the PSR is, thus, not an act of intellectual hubris, but a self-limitation of the knower when it comes to fundamental ontology. Second, by showing that there is something wholly unintelligible about the way motion is supposed to be transferred from one body to the other (Essay 2.23.28), Locke, who gets so little credit among contemporary philosophers, had already imploded the pretensions of the mechanical philosophy on conceptual grounds.  Okay, so much for set up.

The mechanical philosophers were not so naïve to think that models that relied on mere impulse, matter in motion, could create hypothetical models of sufficient complexity to provide hypothetical explanations of the phenomena. This is especially a problem because the mechanical philosophers posited a homogeneous matter. So that in addition to matter and motion, they posited size and shape not merely as effects of motion, but also as key explanatory factors in the hypothetical models of visible phenomena (this can be seen in Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle, whose "The Origin of Forms and Qualities according to the Corpuscular Philosophy" (1666), I take as a canonical statement of the mechanical philosophy). So that the mechanical philosophy is committed to privileging (to echo a felicitous phrase by Biener and Smeenk [here; and here]) geometric features of bodies.

Even leaving aside the inverse square law and its universal scope, Newton's experimental work on gravity demolished a key feature of the mechanical philosophy: size and shape are irrelevant to understand gravity. I quote from Henry Pemberton's View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (1728):

It will be proper in this place to observe concerning the power of gravity, that its force upon any body does not at all depend upon the shape of the body; but that it continues constantly the same without any variation in the same body, whatever change be made in the figure of the body: and if the body be divided into any number of pieces, all those pieces shall weigh just the same, as they did, when united together in one body: and if the body be of a uniform contexture, the weight of each piece will be proportional to its bulk. This has given reason to conclude, that the power of gravity acts upon bodies in proportion to the quantity of matter in them. Whence it should follow, that all bodies must fall from equal heights in the same space of time. And as we evidently see the contrary in feathers and such like substances, which fall very slowly in comparison of more solid bodies; it is reasonable to suppose, that some other cause concurs to make so manifest a difference. This cause has been found by particular experiments to be the air. --1.2.24 [emphasis added]

Pemberton (who was the editor of the third, 1726 edition of the Principia) goes on to give Boyle's famous vacuum experiments with falling feathers and stones as evidence for this argument. That is, Pemberton uses Boyle's experimental work to refute Boyle's mechanical philosophy. 

Now, in the Principia, references to Boyle's experiment got added only to the (1713) second edition in two highly prominent places: Cotes added a reference to it in his editor's introduction and Newton added a reference to it in the General Scholium at the end of the book. In both cases Boyle's experiment is used as a kind of illustration for the claim that without air resistance falling bodies are equally accelerated and for the plausibility of positing an interstellar vacuum. That is, if one reads the Principia superficially (by looking at prominent material at the front and end), it seems as if Newton and Boyle have converging natural philosophies.

Of course, neither Pemberton nor Newton rely exclusively on Boyle's vacuum experiment to make the point that shape and size (or geometry) is not a significant causal factor when it comes to gravity. The key work is done by pendulum experiments with different metals. (These can be found in Book II of the Principia, which is often skipped, although he drives the point home in Book III, Prop. 6 of Principia.) These show that quantity of matter is more fundamental than shape. And, crucially, shape & size and quantity of matter need not be proportional to or proxies of each other. This fact was by no means obvious, and at the start of the Principia. even Newton offers, as Biener and Smeenk have highlighted, a kind of geometric conception of quantity of matter in his first definition before suggesting that 'quantity of matter' is proportional to weight (and indicating his pendulum experiments as evidence thereof).

Let me wrap up. What's important here is that even if Newton had been wrong about the universal nature of the inverse square law, he showed that the mechanical philosophy cannot account for the experimentally demonstrated features of terrestrial (and planetary) gravity. (So, that the mechanical philosophy is not a natural way to understand Galilean fall.) And this means that in addition to Locke's conceptual claim, Newton shows that the mechanical philosophy's emphasis on just one kind of efficient causation, by way of contact, is not sufficient to explain the system of nature. 

What I say here is not surprising to students of Newton. But it's also not really much emphasized. To be sure, Newton, too, accepted a kind of homogeneous matter, but rather than its size and figure, he showed that an abstract quantity (mass) is more salient. Of course, how to understand mass in Newton's philosophy opens new questions, for as Ori Belkind has argued it should not be taken as a property of matter, but rather as a measure.

 

 

Hayek, Kukathas, and the Significance and Limitations of Social Theory

Yet agreement between Hayek and the dominant strand of liberal theory may not be quite so easily secured. For a great deal turns on what is understood by a modus vivendi, and thought necessary to secure it. For Gutmann and Larmore, a liberal modus vivendi may well involve the growth of the mechanisms of participatory democracy, and need not compromise egalitarian ideals. A Hayekian conception of the liberal order as a modus vivendi, however, would not be of this nature. The conclusion he draws from his social theory is that a liberal order must be ruled by a limited government whose primary task is to maintain the framework within which individuals and groups may pursue their respective aims, regardless of the shape the resulting society assumes.
Rawls, however...explicitly rejects the idea of a modus vivendi. For him, what is needed is a political conception of justice which will command the allegiance of a diversity of moral viewpoints in a pluralist society. Only such a public philosophy which was able to sustain an 'overlapping consensus' of views would ensure social unity in 'long run equilibrium'. A modus vivendi would amount to little more than a temporary truce, in which time the more powerful interests would be able to marshall their forces, later to impose their own attitudes upon all. This contrasts with Hayek who sees social stability as possible only under political institutions which removed social justice from the agenda of politics.
This lack of agreement does not, however, reduce the interest of Hayek's contribution to liberal theory. Indeed, it suggests one way liberals may approach the problem of dealing with differences that divide them: by returning to issues in social theory. His work deserves examination because he draws attention to the need to consider the nature of society and the way in which this constrains our choice of political principles. For, if Hayek is right, many kinds of principles may be ruled out as unworkable. In other words, the circumstances of justice need much more careful investigation than they have been given.
Hayek's endeavours, while they have not succeeded in establish­ing a coherent liberal philosophy, do push contemporary liberal theory in a promising direction. For they show, first, that the defence of the liberal order need not assume that man is an isolated, asocial, utility maximizer: the defence of liberalism can, and should, be grounded in a more plausible account of man and society. And they suggest, secondly, that, while it will prove difficult to establish philosophical foundations for liberal rights, or a liberal theory of liberty, an understanding of the nature of social processes may offer a surer guide by telling us what kinds of rights and liberties cannot be adopted if the liberal ideal is to survive.-- Chandran Kukathas (1989) Hayek and Modern Liberalism, pp. 227-228. [Emphasis in original]

[If you are impatient you can skip the first four autobiographical paragraphs of today's digression.] Because I never went through a libertarian phase (and where I grew up these barely existed then), I am not quite sure when I first encountered Hayek's name and when I first read him. I do know that when I entered graduate school at age 24, I was aware of some of the features of Hayek's 'knowledge problem' because I briefly tried -- without success -- to get others in my graduate cohort interested in Hayek as an epistemologist in light of Hayek 1945. But I am really unsure how I picked this up. Between college and graduate school I read anything that happened to come my way or encountered in bookstores so I'll leave it to chance. 

Because I ended up writing a PhD on Hume and Smith's philosophy of science, I did end up reading some of Hayek's writings on the Scottish Enlightenment. During my PhD, I also read the Road to Serfdom (which left me unmoved) and The Sensory Order (which was astonishing, and I was shocked nobody else I knew had read). But because I was not especially interested in spontaneous order or a deep dive into libertarianism (beyond Nozick) my knowledge of Hayek was superficial. 

This started to change near the end of my PhD, around 2001, when the historians of economics, David M. Levy and Sandra Peart, started to invite me to their annual workshop on the preservation of the history of economics. Peart was working on her excellent edition of Hayek on Mill. David knew his Hayek and could easily make him philosophically interesting to me. (Recently David has been sharing his excitement about the development of modal logics by nineteenth century economists who moonlight as logicians!) Through them I met Erik Angner who was very interested in Hayek's theory of cultural evolution (a topic I was then very interested in), and I eventually read his wonderful monograph on Hayek and natural law.

I mention all of this because after I did start reading Hayek, I actually thought of Hayek as a weird Kantian or neo-Kantian. When I first mentioned this to people with a philosophical interest in Hayek this was often dismissed (such people treated him as more as a follower of Hume). So, I was quite pleased back when I read Kukathas' book the first time (about two decades ago) that Kukathas argues for Hayek's Kantianism in great detail (alongside Hayek's debts to Hume). And not surprised when decades later I read Foucault (who historically precedes Kukathas by a decade) on the significance of Kant/Kantianism to Hayek and other neoliberals in his biopolitics lectures. 

Anyway, above I quote the final paragraphs of Kukathas' wonderful book, which manages to juggle quite a few balls apparently effortless at once: it is a careful study of Hayek as a systematic thinker; it locates Hayek in debates within liberalism (not the least through a detailed comparison with Rawls) and between liberalism(s) and its/their critics. Along the way, readers also get a judicious account of why it is misleading to treat Hayek as an (indirect) utilitarian. And while Kukathas is respectful of Hayek, as the quoted paragraph suggests, he argues at length that Hayek is incapable of reconciling the Kantian and Humean strands of his own theory.* Okay, so much for set up.

One important contribution of Kukathas' book is to illustrate the value of social theory to political philosophy even among those who think of political philosophy as an 'ethics first' or 'justice first' enterprise. Part of that use is hinted at in the closing paragraphs quoted at the top of this post: first, a social theory provides us with the content in a feasibility or aptness constraint. Let's call this a 'negative use of social theory' in which social theory is used (with a nod to 'ought implies can' perhaps) to rule out or block certain normative theories (or the principles on which they rely) because they are literally impossible for beings like us, once we're more informed about who we are (by social theory). Of course, unrealistic or unfeasible models or theories may still be useful in some way or another -- not the least as paradigms that discipline a field --, so one should not expect to use social theory (which often blends normative and empirical features in complex ways) as a hammer to destroy viewpoints one wishes to reject. 

Second, and this is a positive feature, social theory can provide one with a philosophical anthropology that allows one to recast one's political vision and/or normative theories. In Hayek's case this also (third) means that many typical criticisms of liberalism (familiar, say, from Karl Polanyi (who goes unmentioned), Alisdair MacIntyre, various communitarians and Marxists (etc.) are disarmed in advance because the anthropology supplied by Hayek's social theory actually is not the Robinson Crusoe one -- "isolated, asocial, utility maximizing" -- usually criticized by critics of liberalism; if anything Kukathas' Hayek (and I agree) is not very far from Hegel, although as Kukathas notes with some key differences.

But, unless I missed it, Kukathas does not define what he or Hayek means by 'social theory' (something on my mind due to failed efforts to do so while teaching undergrads).  Hayek does give us some material to work on this. For example, in (1967) in "Notes on the Evolution of Systems of Rules of Conduct: The Interplay between Rules of Individual Conduct and the Social Order of Actions," Hayek writes the following:

The whole task of social theory consists in little else but an effort to reconstruct the overall orders which are thus formed, and the reason why that special apparatus of conceptual construction is needed which social theory represents is the complexity of this task. It will also be clear that such a distinct theory of social structures can provide only an explanation of certain general and highly abstract features of the different types of structures (or only of the ‘qualitative aspects’), because these abstract features will be all that all the structures of a certain type will have in common, and therefore all that will be predictable or provide useful guidance for action.--p. 283 in The Market and Other Orders, edited by Bruce Caldwell.

On Hayek's view social theory is, thus, engaged in conceptual construction. And it aims to construct what he calls an 'overall order.' (There are distinct resonances here with the morphological project of the ordoliberal, Eucken.) These overall orders are "systems of rules of conduct" which "will develop as wholes" and on which a certain kind of "selection process...will operate on the order as a whole." Now, clearly this conception of social theory is, while capable of objectivity, itself partial to Hayekian projects (he goes on to claim that "of theories of this type economic theory, the theory of the market order
of free human societies, is so far the only one which has been systematically developed over a long period"), so I don't mean to suggest Hayek's idea of 'social theory' ought to generalize to all social theory.

Now, crucially, Hayekian social theory provides one with functional explanations of social order(s). Hayek is very explicit about this on the following page (p. 284). It may require auxiliary sciences to do so (Hayek is discussing the rule of evolutionary social psychology in context). And one way it offers such a functional explanation is to make clear the "interaction between the regularity of the conduct of the elements [or individuals] and the regularity of the resulting structure." (289)

I call it 'Hayekian' social theory because one of the other "tasks" he ascribes to it is to explain the "unintended patterns and regularities which we find to exist in human society." (from Hayek (1967) "The results of human action but not of human design." p. 294 in The Market and Other Orders.) Obviously, that may be incompatible with a social theory that has a different focus, although Marx is clearly interested in features of such a social theory.

So, why do I mention this? Before I answer that let's stipulate that Hayek's social theory is coherent. I have two reasons. First, even coherent, it is not entirely obvious what the status of the fruits of Hayekian social theory are. What kind of impossibility is proven by social theory if it has a Hayekian cast? This is not obvious. (In part this is not obvious because the empirical basis of social theory is not easily disentangled from its normative commitments.) I don't see how Hayekian social theory can rule out orders constructed on principles very different than Hayekian social theory, even if one can suspect that these will not be functional in the way that (say) spontaneous orders will be. This depends on plasticity of humans but also on the possibility of social structures with different kinds of social rules. I don't think this paragraph undermines Kukathas' particular argument because he shows how much Rawls and Hayek agree in their commitments.

Second, Hayekian social theory inherits from 19th century historicism (and some aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment) the idea of social wholes (that are constituted by their system of rules). Now, Hayek acknowledges that (say) a historian or social scientist may well do his or her job without embracing social wholes. His is not an organicist theory, and since social pluralism is -- as Kukathas reveals -- kind of bedrock in his theory it would be odd to attribute organicism to Hayek. However, it is not obvious why in a world constituted by social pluralism of different sorts -- and with non-trivial barriers that would facilitate differential and distinct selection -- we would find such social wholes even in (say) places that share non-trivial social commonalities. If human law or force is part of the selection process we should in fact expect greater diversity. In fact, I am echoing here Hayek's friend, Eucken, who clearly thought that Hayek's expectation of such social wholes was only so in theory, but that in practice one could find a rich diversity of social orders (based on a limited number of morphological elements).

Let me stop there. I don't mean to suggest these are fatal objections to Hayek's theory. But  if we look forward to Kukathas' Liberal Archipelago it helps explain Kukathas' non-trivial distance from using Hayekian social theory despite Kukathas and Hayek sharing a deep debts to Hume.

The Aristotelian Causes in Hume

When by natural principles we [humans] are led to advance those ends, which a refined and enlightened reason would recommend to us, we are very apt to impute to that reason, as to their efficient cause, the sentiments and actions by which we advance those ends, and to imagine that to be the wisdom of man, which in reality is the wisdom of God. Upon a superficial view, this cause seems sufficient to produce the effects which are ascribed to it; and the system of human nature seems to be more simple and agreeable when all its different operations are in this manner deduced from a single principle.---Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments 2.2.3.5

Yesterday, I noted that one way to understand Hume's significance to our conceptualization of causation is two-fold: first, that he whittled down four Aristotelian causes to just one kind of cause (previously known as 'efficient causation'); and, second, that he is the source of the modern conception of causation by offering a counterfactual definition of it in the first Enquiry. Hume is also taken to be the source of our modern discussion of convention, (recall here) although a very good argument can be made that Hume is greatly indebted to Locke (see also this more recent post and this one as a follow up). In today's post I suggest that Hume's account of convention itself is greatly indebted to the Aristotelian causes. Let me explain by first re-quoting a familiar passage from Hume: 

But if by convention be meant a sense of common interest; which sense each man feels in his own breast, which he remarks in his fellows, and which carries him, in concurrence with others, into a general plan or system of actions, which tends to public utility; it must be owned, that, in this sense, justice arises from human conventions. For if it be allowed (what is, indeed, evident) that the particular consequences of a particular act of justice may be hurtful to the public as well as to individuals; it follows, that every man, in embracing that virtue, must have an eye to the whole plan or system, and must expect the concurrence of his fellows in the same conduct and behaviour. Did all his views terminate in the consequences of each act of his own, his benevolence and humanity, as well as his self-love, might often prescribe to him measures of conduct very different from those, which are agreeable to the strict rules of right and justice.

In the posts linked above I argued that Hume's analysis of convention has eight parts (most also to be found in Locke's Second Treatise and the Essay):

1. a sense of common interest
2. felt in each person's breast;
3. It (viz, (i)) is observed in others;
4. this fact (the existence of (i&iii) creates collaboration & reliable expectations;
5. the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways;
6. and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society.
7.  A Humean convention is explicitly contrasted with practices founded in explicit promises and/or in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition,
8.  the process (I-III) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit.

I call I-VIII: ‘the Humean template,’ and they are jointly sufficient, although (VII) is not necessary.

Now, the Humean template has quite a few moving parts. And given that in Locke the Humean template is used but, as far I am aware, not explicitly analyzed it's worth asking to what degree he would have been fully conscious of the Humean template. It's always a risk with the kind of structuralist analysis I offer here that it is merely a projection of the historian onto an earlier text. Even if that were so it can still be illuminating, of course, but to use the 'Humean template' about Locke would be straightforward anachronism (albeit useful anachronism).

But even though Locke does not explicitly analyze the Humean template, i don't think it's a mere projection on my part for three reasons (the first two of which outlined in the linked posts): first, as I realized by reflecting on work by Martin Lenz (Socializing Minds) Locke is clearly responding to lacunae in Puffendorf's account of the origin and stability of conventions. Second, the Humean template can be found in the second Treatise and the Essay (and is evoked later in the Essay). These two reasons are internal to Locke's project.

In addition, third, we can discern the portfolio of Aristotle's four causes in the Humean template. For, (VI) is the final cause(s) of a convention.  And (I) is the formal cause. In addition, (II-V) are the efficient and material causes of the convention. I mix these causes here because jointly they tie the formal and final cause together in the workings of the convention.

If Locke's use of the Humean template presupposes the Aristotelian causes then it's also no surprise that he doesn't need to offer an explicit analysis of the Humean template. His readers would have noticed it without his saying so. In Hume, the template is made explicit precisely because a reader familiar with Hume's philosophy cannot take for granted that Hume would draw on the non-efficient Aristotelian causes.

That (VI) is a final cause strikes me as uncontroversial. But it is surprising to find it in Hume, who is really an explicit and implicit critic of final causes (see here also for references). Of course, in virtue of providing the mechanism for its functionality one may well say that the Humean template naturalizes or presupposes a naturalized teleology. One may also claim that in human affairs, a certain kind of intentionality and goal directed is inelimenable.

The real question here is to what degree the common interest that a tacit convention secures is fully foreseaable and articulable ahead of time. For example, Adam Smith famously criticized the deployment of the Humean template in Hume's account of the origin of justice in circumstances that echo a state of nature because Hume's account seems to presuppose awareness of the final cause, or at least assume common interest, in a context where this sense of unity or mutual loyalty, seems unlikely. (See here for the full story.)

The passage at the top of the post is near the conclusion of Smith's diagnosis of the error in Hume. Interestingly enough, in Part II of the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Dugald Stewart notes Smith's criticism of Hume, and quotes the passage in order to illustrate "a common error," which Stewart associates with the "dangerous" revitalisation of utilitarianism (he explicitly discusses Paley and Godwin in context). Stewart praises Adam Smith because "he always treats separately of their final causes, and of the mechanism, as he calls it, by which nature accomplishes the effect; and he has even been at pains to point out to his successors the great importance."

To be sure, Smith's criticism does not touch all instances of Hume's use of the Humean template. For, in some contexts the common interest is knowable even known and the efficient and material causes of the Humean template can do their work without presupposing that all the benefits from the convention are presupposed in the mechanism that gives rise to the convention or that these benefits are or would have to be obscure to the agents involved. 

This problem does not even arise in Locke. For, of course, the natural reading of much of Locke's writings is that he embraces a God given providential order. (But recall this post for the debate.) So, in Locke the use of the Humean template is completely natural and without a blemish of inconsistency.*