Digressions&Impressions

Dennett as Synthetic Philosopher.

There is much more to be explored in this evolution of cultural evolution and its role in creating our minds, but first we should look more closely at how it got started. Like the origin of life, this is an unsolved problem, and a very difficult one. Our minds are in some regards as different from other minds as living things are from nonliving things, and finding even one defensible path from our common ancestor with the chimpanzees is a challenging task. There is no shortage of competing hypotheses, and we will consider the best (by my lights). Which came first: language or cooperation or tool making or fire tending or stone throwing or confrontational scavenging or trade or . . .? We shouldn’t be surprised if there proves to be no single “magic bullet” answer, but rather a coevolutionary process with lots of contributing factors feeding on each other. The fact remains that we are the only species so far that has developed explosively cumulative culture—yet another replication bomb—and any speculative story that explains why (both how come and what for) we have culture must also explain why we alone have culture. Culture has obviously been a Good Trick for us, but eyesight and flight are also obvious Good Tricks, and they have each evolved several times in different species. What barriers have stood in the way of other evolutionary lineages developing the same Good Trick?--Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back; The Evolution of Minds, 149.

The evolutionary origin of language is an unsolved, but not insoluble, problem, and both experimental and theoretical work has made progress in formulating testable hypotheses about gradual, incremental evolutionary processes, both cultural and genetic, that could transform the more primitive talents of our ancestors into the verbal dexterity and prolixity of modern language users. The arrival of language then set the stage for yet another great moment in evolutionary history: the origin of comprehension.
In the next chapter we will see how, as linguistic competence grew, it not only accelerated cultural evolution; it permitted the process itself—the process of cultural evolution—to evolve into something less Darwinian, less bottom-up, paving the way for top-down comprehension, one of the most recent fruits on the Tree of Life, and the inauguration of the age of intelligent design. The creativity of individual human beings can be seen to echo, at high speed and in concentrated forms, the R&D processes that created it.--Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back; The Evolution of Minds, 281.

Despite Dennet's training in philosophy (at Oxford, no less, under Ryle), his appointment in a well-regarded philosophy department, and his continued self-identification as a philosopher ("Philosophers, like me" (407)), I suspect that many professional philosophers find Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back, if they read it all with any care, barely philosophy. Dennett offers few structured arguments (with carefully numbered premises), no clear dilemmas/trillemas (etc.) nor the apparent paradoxes that are the staple of our profession nor does he deploy the conceptual distinctions that populate, say, recent philosophy of mind. With a few notable exceptions (Peter Godfrey Smith, Ruth Millikan, Dan Sperber, Bryce Huebner, Jody Azzouni, etc.) Dennett rarely mentions other living philosophers whose work he draws upon.

In some respects Dennett is a legacy philosopher, our intellectual celebrity in the world of public intellectuals, admired or reviled (due to his association with New Atheism). One can easily imagine that Dennett's latest work shares the fate of Rorty's late work: mainstream professional philosophers recognizing the name, and paying respectful lip-service to his importance while ceding engagement with his ideas to other disciplines and TED audiences. This would be a mistake. Dennett's late work is brimming with new ideas (developed in more scholarly publications for over a decade) and insightful changes of heart. (Some other time I offer examples; but recall here.) Along the way, Dennett has become an exemplar for an entirely different way of doing philosophy. I call this (recall here and here): synthetic philosophy.

Synthetic philosophy is the enterprise of bringing together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a theoretically (reasonably) unified, coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both). It may, in turn, generate new research in the special sciences or a new science connected to the framework adopted in the synthetic philosophy. I am not going to define a complex system, but I operationalize it by suggesting it is, in turn, studied by multiple sciences. 

Synthetic philosophy, which shares kinship with what was once known as 'natural philosophy,' is made possible by, and a response to, the intellectual division of labor within and among the scientific disciplines.  It is, thus, a modern phenomenon of the last two centuries. I call it 'synthetic' in order to distinguish it from analytic philosophy.

In Dennett's case, Darwinisms provides the synthesizing glue. This is no coincidence because Darwin himself is the hard-to-classify (among the) last natural philosopher(s)/naturalists or (among) the first synthetic philosopher(s) (if Spencer had not jumped ahead of him). Darwin had brought together insights from a whole number of distinct sciences (geology, botany, paleontology, morphology, entomology, animal husbandry, climate science, etc.) and, in turn, self-consciously revolutionized them with his ideas and opening up new avenues for research. Dennett draws on some of Darwin's own examples or very cleverly recasts them. For example (of the latter), as I noted a few days ago (recall), Darwin deploys a trope from Mandeville and Hume in which the slowly evolved complexity of a ship stands for the unintended functionality of bottom up effectiveness of the division of labor; this example is recast by Dennett in an extended analysis of Leslie Groves top-down design of the Manhattan Project, which involved thousands of competent workers who had no comprehension of what they were contributing to.

A reader, familiar with my fondness for coining fancy new memes, may well suspect that I am at odds with Dennett's self-understanding. This would be no objection to my purposes -- we all have a right to use Dennett's writings  for our own ends --, but as it happens while Dennett does not use the term 'synthetic philosopher,' his self-understanding (or the project's) fits the concept:

[One may object that:] genes can’t explain adaptations (structures, organs, instincts, etc.). That’s true; that’s why we need molecular biology, physiology, embryology, ethology, island biogeography, and all the other specializations of biology if we are going to explain how particular adaptations work and why they are adaptations. We also need these other fields to explain how parasites exploit their hosts, how spider webs are cost-effective food traps, how beavers build their dams, why whales vocalize, and all the rest. Similarly, [in memetics] we need psychology, anthropology, economics, political science, history, philosophy, and literary theory to explain how and why cultural features (good and bad) work the way they do.....Pre-Darwinian natural history at its best was well-developed, systematic science, with hypotheses to test and explanations galore, but Darwin enriched it with a host of questions that put all its generalizations in a new light. My overarching claim in this book is that the evolutionary perspective in general and the memetic perspective with regard to culture transform many of the apparently eternal puzzles of life, that is, meaning and consciousness, in ways inaccessible to those who never look beyond the manifest image that they grew up with and the disciplines they are trained in.-- From Bacteria to Bach and Back, 242-3 [additions in square brackets added by Schliesser].

That is to say, Dennett brings Darwinian theory to bear on and connects existing work in offering empirically informed, but still speculative accounts of the origins of mind, language, and life (most of which already deeply influenced by Darwinism) and to open up a new meta-science of culture, memetics, that can draw upon and re-orient existing cultural studies and human/social sciences. The focus on (hard to know) origins is not just the philosopher's sly tactic to avoid empirical refutation, but it is the application of Darwin's own claim that "all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking," (Chapter 13, The Origin of Species.)

 As Dennett himself admits (see the quoted passages at top of this post), his book is a list of as-of-yet unsolved problems. There is an irony lurking here; in the philosophy of mind, Dennett is known for being quite critical of the mysterians (373; Searle, Chomsky, etc.) and the folk who embrace variants of the explanatory gap (p. 20; e.g., Levine) or hard problem (p. 318, Chalmers, etc.). In a way, his main criticism is not that they give up too early or too easily (although surely he believes that as well as that they have underappreciated how much he has done toward explaining consciousness), but rather that the difficulty of the problem of consciousness is, in fact, under-appreciated because it involves not the characterization and location of some dividing line, but rather many multi-dimensional problems about how our embodied and (linguistically and materially) en-cultured competences -- many, but not all, without comprehension hang together in various not-so-seem-less (even if the gaps are often obscure to the first person) ways. And despite the famous title of Dennett 1991, at best Dennett has sketched the contours of a possible explanation (in part by telling a plausible origin story and by relating our kinds to other kinds of minds).

How, then, does one judge the merits of synthetic philosophy? Ye shall know them by their fruits, that is, not just by how synthetic philosophies instantiate various  theoretical virtues, but primarily by the new cognitive tools they supply for the special sciences and philosophical reflection, including (ahh) the development of useful new myths.*

A Minor Debate: Kripke vs Dennett

As will be seen immediately, inversion in this sense is a devise for reversing priorities. William James summarized his famous theory of emotions (The Principles of Psychology)...by the assertion, "...the...rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry...not that we cry...because we are sorry. (p. 450). Many philosophies can be summed up crudely (no doubt, not really accurately) by slogans in similar form: "We do not condemn certain acts because they are immoral; they are immoral because we condemn them." "We do not accept the law of contradiction because it is a necessary truth; it is a necessary truth because we accept it (by convention." "Fire and heat are not constantly conjoined because fire causes heat; fire causes heat because they are constantly conjoined" (Hume). "We do not all say  12+7-19 and the like because all grasp the concept of addition; we say we all grasp the concept of addition because we all say 12+7=19 and the like" (Wittgenstein).

The device of inversion of a conditional in the text achieves the effect of reversing priorities in a way congenial to such slogans. Speaking for myself, I am suspicious of philosophical positions of the types illustrated by the slogans, whether or not  they are so crudely put." Saul Kripke (1982) Wittgenstein on Rules, pp. 93-4 note 76. [HT Jody Azzouni]

In the "preface" to Wittgenstein on Rules, Kripke informs the reader "with "emphasis" that "in this piece of writing" he does not "attempt to speak'" for himself, "or, except in occasional and minor asides, to say anything about" his "views on the substantive issues." (ix) Thus, the present topic is perfect for a Digression.

The quoted passage is a footnote to a restatement (and elucidation) by Kripke of an interpretation he has just given of a politically salient element of Wittgenstein's view as understood by Kripke. (At this point of the overall 'argument' Kripke is presenting Wittgenstein's 'skeptical solution' to the rule following  'paradox.') A deviant individual may be "judged a madman" by the community if his responses do not accord with the community's in enough cases. To be mad by the community's lights is to be (thought) to follow "no coherent rule at all." And then it excludes him from some transactions "such as the one between the grocer and the customer." (93)  On this view, ordinary commercial life presupposes, for example, being a member in good standing of a community.* Somebody whose behaviors can be relied upon.

An impatient reader may be annoyed that I call the discussion 'politically' salient here. On this picture of communal life, from within the community there is almost no difference between the madman, the outlaw (recall this post on Azzouni's aesthetics), the dissident, and the political revolutionary (until she usurps power successfully). A philosopher at odds with her own community better remain silent.

To return to the main point, or better Kripke's footnote, Kripke treats inversion as a device to shift attention and "reverses our priorities." (94) It is notable that Kripke, speaking in his own voice, strictly for himself (and, one may hasten to add, on nobody's authority) does not treat inversion as explanatory at all. Not to put too fine point on it, and to speak crudely for a moment, Kripke sees himself as unmasking a louche gimmick that is widespread in philosophy--William James is famous for some such trick, and so are Hume and Wittgenstein.** 

As it happens, James's version of the inversion is Spinozistic in character: "Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. . My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion." (I am not claiming that James is committed to attribute-parallelism here.) And it is notable that the one of the unnamed slogans [we do not condemn certain acts because they are immoral; they are immoral because we condemn them] is also Spinozistic (and Hobbesian).+ What James and Spinoza have in common is a willingness to treat our natural way of thinking as something that can be shown to be illusory even if there is also a sense in which this way of thinking, a manifest image of sorts, can not be eliminated fully from ordinary life. 

One reason why Kripke is unmoved by the inversion, is that he sees in it merely a logical point, after all "a conditional is equivalent to a contrapositive." (94) (P--> Q); (-Q --> -P).  In such instances, to treat the contrapositive as special and more worthy of our attention seems (ahh) crude no better than a slogan. (Of course, a slogan may well be true!) 

But, that's not the end of the matter. Another influential reader of Wittgenstein, Daniel Dennett, treats such inversions as potentially explanatory. And that's because he does not treat them as merely logical. For we can represent how Dennett thinks of the inversions in the following way:

1. You may naturally think that some basic property X is required for the explanation of (observed) properties Y.
2. Where X exhibits some intelligence/mindedness/intentionality and Ys typically do not.
3. But in reality properties Y are needed to explain X.

Throughout his writings of the last decade, Dennett attributes some such strange inversion of reasoning as a key moment in Darwin (natural selection), Turing (computing), Hume (causation), and David Haig (content). It is undoubtedly the case that Dennett has a tendency to say, 'don't look there, look here.' And philosophical critics often trouble themselves with understanding what the point of Dennett's writings are. (Kripke does not mention Dennett, so if you are the sincere type, you can treat the title of my post as click-bait.)

But in Dennett (and James, Hume, etc.) the shift of attention is not the end of the matter, but a heuristic toward a better explanation of the thing (mind, computers, emotions, morality, natural selection, causation, etc.) we're trying to understand. And a key step is to give up, or forego, a natural way of thinking about the issue at hand. To do so frequently is indeed mad. But the first step to a better understanding may well require a willingness to be thought mad by one's community/peers. 

 

Poetic Philosophers; (or on Harman on Aristotle and Fodor)

By far the greatest thing is the use of metaphor. That alone cannot be learnt; it is the token of genius [εὐφυΐας]. For the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances.--Aristotle, Poetics 1459a (translated by W.H. Fyfe.)

 Warum ich so weise bin.
 Warum ich so klug bin.
 Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe.--F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

I was reflecting on Graham Harman's and Jon Cogburn's responses to my earlier post on Harman, when I caught another point by Harman:

There is a reason why Aristotle calls metaphor the greatest gift of genius, the one that cannot be taught. He doesn’t say “being able to eliminate fuzziness and speak in clear propositional terms is the greatest gift of genius,” because it isn’t. Fuzziness and lack of precision are relatively minor intellectual problems in comparison with premature or hasty literalization of the world. (Editorial comment: analytic philosophy, for all its achievements, still doesn’t grasp this point, and that’s why it does not produce many impressive writers even though it produces industrial-scale numbers of clear ones. Jerry Fodor once called himself and his friends better writers than Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, which just proves how much the point is being missed.)--Graham Harman.

I understand the temptation felt by Harman (and W.H. Fyfe) to translate Aristotle's εὐφυΐας as 'genius;' context makes clear that Aristotle is trying to convey the idea that being good at coining metaphors is a skill that cannot be taught, but somehow a natural talent, that is, it exhibits having fine natural dispositions. One reason to resist the (Romantic sounding) use of 'genius' here is that only a few pages before (1455a), Aristotle had written [διὸ εὐφυοῦς ἡ ποιητική ἐστιν ἢ μανικοῦ:] that is why poetry needs either a naturally well disposed nature or being a manic, and here the inspired ‘manic’ [μανικοῦ] evokes our genius. For somebody with a good disposition may still need a lot of endurance or practice to get good at the skill.

One might think that Harman is just wrong to channel Aristotle on metaphor and apply it to philosophers because, in this context of the Poetics,  Aristotle is discussing tragedy, not philosophy. But, as it happens Aristotle is generalizing about a skill. In fact, the ability to see sameness within difference is, indeed, also a philosophical one.* So, one way to read Aristotle is to suggest that to be a very good philosopher means to have an important skill in common with a very good poet.

As an aside, in context of his post, Harman is engaging with B.P. Morton (a blogger at the new group blog, Philpercs), and it's not quite clear to me what prompts Harman's aside about analytical philosophers and the bon mot put-down Fodor (who, like many not quite great analytical philosophers is a great, entertaining polemicist, but whose stock has been plummeting since his ill-advised, anti-Darwin book not to mention ordinary developments in cognitive psychology).

Perhaps it's because of my analytical training that my first quiet thought in response to Harman’s ‘’ analytic philosophy…does not produce many impressive writers even though it produces industrial-scale numbers of clear ones,” was it's better to produce industrial-scale numbers of clear writers than to produce considerable number of bad poets.+ But I caught myself, because I know that in our time, re-activating  the polemic between analytic and continental philosophy prevents genuine thought. By now we ought to judge these philosophical traditions not by the many, but either by the best or by the potentially enduring contributions they produced (about which some other time more).

Yet, analytical philosophy does not weed out truly great writers: Russell (who won the 1950 Nobel in Literature), Quine, Iris Murdoch, Dennett (go re-read Elbow Room), and Jody Azzouni are all excellent examples.** Even Fodor has quite a few memorable lines when he is not being a polemicist. (I leave aside her the good polemical writing at which we analytical philosophers excel.) This is not to deny that the joy one can find in reading them is different in character from the joy, if it is joy, one experiences in reading Nietzsche or Kierkegaard.

Even if one agrees, as I am inclined to do, that "Fuzziness and lack of precision are relatively minor intellectual problems in comparison with premature or hasty literalization of the world," it does not follow (even if I, upon considerable reflection, agree that the 'literalization of the world' should not be undertaken in haste—it took me a while to understand this phrase) that we should praise or promote fuzziness and lack of precision for their own sakes (although I note that one can deploy fuzziness in precise and skillful ways).

Anyway, I close with this observation (which echoes Benardete on Quinean poetics): while clarity is a core virtue in the self-understanding of analytical philosophers (recall this), the dirty secret of our poetic genius is that we have an enduring love for well-chosen metaphors: for example, content (as in mental content); grounding (as in metaphysical grounding); stance (as in the intentional stance), and, more controversially, analysis (as in analysis is the method of analytic philosophy), etc. That is, like all great philosophical movements, analytic philosophy, too, combines clarity and poetry.

 

Winners and Losers in Philosophy; Williamson on Recent History of Philosophy (II)

History is often said to be written by the winners. In the case of analytic philosophy, however, there is a danger that history will be written predominantly by the losers. One reason is that analytic philosophy is a somewhat anti-historical tradition, especially where it most resembles a science, in aspiration or achievement. For there it tends to be oriented towards the future rather than the past, in the manner of a science – hardly surprising when progress is expected. Those who do not like history cannot complain when their history is written by people who are not like them. A second reason is that recent analytic philosophy seems to subvert the global narratives it might otherwise be tempting to tell about the history of the subject – most notably, in the resurgence of realist metaphysics, often unashamedly concerned with things in themselves. For those sympathetic to Kant or Wittgenstein or Dewey, it must be tempting to see much recent analytic philosophy as an insignificant anomaly, a passing throwback, in the long march of philosophy.--Timothy Williamson,

“How Did We Get Here From There?”

“How Did We Get Here From There?” (33)

As noted yesterday, Williamson's receptivity toward history appears to represent a change of heart. It is notable that the reasons he offers to do philosophical history are not themselves, well, philosophical. Rather, while he still thinks that philosophy is scientific enough to be progressive, he now thinks it is dangerous to decouple the present from the discipline's history. The danger he correctly seems to discern is that history is written by those that reject the status quo. Even so, Williamson's imagination deserts him because he only seems to recognize one kind of dimension on the status quo: you either represent the vengeful 'losers,'' and, thereby, probably mistakenly -- because of a lack of technical competence -- buy into a global narrative at odds with the philosophical present, or you represent, the technically more competent, 'winners' who embrace the status quo.

 

For Williamson the mission of history is to explain the internal -- as it were, causal sequence -- development of a series of doctrinal as well as methodological disputes and technical innovations that can explain how the philosophical status quo (as represented by, well Williamson in the Lewisian-era) came about from some arbitrary starting point. Interestingly enough, the starting point is given by unnamed "opponents of analytical philosophy" (7)--the very first words of the article!

 

In fact, one can welcome the status quo, write history that is philosophically competent and yet be distrustful of the narratives we tell ourselves. For these narratives may efface not just figures from the past, but also historical resources that can help us improve on the status quo. Let's grant -- for the sake of argument -- Williamson his claim that philosophy is like a normal, progressive science (with a commitment to abduction and in which theoretical disputes are adjudicated with appeal to theoretical virtue); then the unfolding of philosophy will generate Kuhn losses along the way. The philosophical history of philosophy would then be committed to recovering lost insights that may help improve the path forward from the status quo. Williamson's recognition that Bradley was not all wrong about the role of metaphysics in motivating anti-metaphysics is a nice case in point. It is, after all, no surprise that some of the most exciting contributions to recent work in history of philosophy are by Jonathan Schaffer, Michael Della Rocca, and analytical feminists like Eileen O'Neill (and those of us inspired by them), all of whom present new large-scale narratives without much fondness for Kant and Kantianism. Recovery projects simultaneously fill-the-gaps and allow us to imagine alternative futures to the present status-quo.

 

Of course, Williamson's own narrative undermines the idea that philosophy is akin to a mature science. He recognizes "the power of fashion in philosophy." (34) Now, in this piece, he aims to defuse the observation, by insisting that philosophy is relevantly akin to mathematics (which he claims is also fashion-driven). One need not be a Kuhnian to recognize that Williamson has few resources to marshall against the person who, accepting that philosophy aims to be scientific, points at the same phenomenon and argues that this is evidence that philosophy is in a pre-paradigmatic stage.* 

 

In a pre-paradigmatic stage, losers can hope to regroup and fight another day. For example, just a generation ago, 'friends-of-Carnap,' who chafed under a Quine-ean orthodoxy, united in a then-marginal intellectual society (HOPOS: History of the Philosophy of Science) to help nurture a better appreciation of Carnap's enduring contribution to philosophy. They did so both by providing a better understanding of the Kantian, Nietzschean, and logical roots of Carnap's philosophy and by articulating the ongoing virtues of the Carnapian program as well as by encouraging new Carnapian projects that have vindicated the original faith. If you don't like the previous example, consider the fate of McTaggart--sadly unmentioned by Williamson; once thought outdated in light of Quine's technical sophistication on ontology, yet his way of framing the issues in the metaphysics of time has endured (for good and ill).  

 

I close with a methodological (that I then use to make a new point and reinforce my philosophical-historical claims) observation: that opponents of a tradition (as analytical philosophy is) have a stereotypical, perhaps even misleading, image of a tradition is no surprise. For such an image to be effective rhetorically and even intellectually, it must contain enough grains of truth, but the work it does is designed to de-legitimate an opposing approach. In this case the image also has plenty of resonance within analytical philosophy in the ways it conceived and taught itself from the 1950s onward. This self-understanding is often captured by a succession of names Carnap-Quine-Kripke-Lewis (both [recall] by those within analytical philosophy that contest the received interpretation [see Price] and those like Putnam that wish to insert themselves into the tradition).

 

Now, when images and concepts are contested one ought to be alert. For example, even in the early ages of analytical philosophy some central players (not the least Russell) had non-trivial metaphysical aspirations. Once alerted to this, one can recognize other previously forgotten metaphysical projects within analytical philosophy (e.g., Stebbing [recall]). Stebbing was taken to have 'lost' the debate with Max Black, but as I have argued, history may well judge otherwise. (Certainly Stebbing's vision of a public role for analytical philosophy is now warmly being embraced by all kinds of figures.)**

 

In fact, Williamson himself admirably broadens the standard story considerably; he pays serious attention to the roles of Cook Wilson, A.N. Prior, and Strawson. Of these three, Wilson and Prior are not really analytical philosophers. Prior has been so assimilated, but he himself insisted that historical commentary was a key philosophical enterprise (something that certainly does not fit Williamson's understanding of analytical philosophy). Outside of formal logic, one of Prior's main contributions to present metaphysics (see the work by Jessica Wilson) is the influential restatement of W.E. Johnson's distinction between Determinates and Determinables. Johnson (neither an Idealist nor an analytical philosopher) is commonly effaced in narratives that insist that analytical philosophy successfully rebelled against British Idealism and vanquished it.  

 

Mind the Gap! (On the alarming neglect of ordinary language philosophy)

While it has been fashionable for several decades to ignore Sartre's work... .--Alan Schrift in this review.

This 'conceptual cartographical' approach (a description I prefer to 'ordinary language') has all but disappeared in Europe. More alarming, as Laugier points out, it was hardly ever visible in America.--Julia Tanney in this review.

These two NDPR reviews both lament gaps. Schrift's lament criticizes the book under review and a more general philosophical attitude. I am inclined to think that if Sartre's work is really being ignored for several decades now, we should stop calling it a 'fashion' and more a 'firm trend.' That, of course, is a matter of taste on one's preferred time-scale--cf. the famous joke by Zhou Enlai about the French Revolution, which, it turns out, was not a joke but a misunderstanding. Such trends can start as fashionable jokes, of course. The naturalist in me wondered, however, has Sartre really become passé? Judging by google Ngrams, Schrift's lament is premature: Sartre mentions in scholarship are in extremely genteel decline. What has happened, is that he has been overtaken by other luminaries, including parvenus like Derrida and Foucault (see this Ngram) A decline in relative status can feel like a reversal in fashion.

Tanney's review is in agreement with the book reviewed. It is possible that 'ordinary language' was not very popular Stateside; having said that I am pretty sure that Austin's Sense and Sensibilia was taught in my undergraduate epistemology class taught by Jody Azzouni (early 1990s) at the top-ranked MA program, and when I arrived at The University of Chicago (mid 1990s) one could take multiple graduate courses taught by folk sympathetic to Wittgenstein or Austin's American followers (e.g., Cavell). Of course, as regular readers know, I later realized that my education also facilitated a certain ignorance in some of the main trends in recent professional philosophy.  But as it turns out, bookish interest in Wittgenstein is growing (undoubtedly facilitated by the re-presentation by Kripke and the uptake of Wittgenstein in other Humanities disciplines). This even turns out to be true of J.L. Austin (at very low levels) and, shockingly, ordinary language philosophy. Obviously NGrams are coarse instruments and, for all I know, they are lagging indicators tracking -- to use Schrift's technical term -- past fashion.

Leaving aside data, let me know get to to the reason for writing this post which is my attempt to work out why it is thought 'alarming' that a 'conceptual cartographical' approach did not make the American headlines (and, thereby, become 'visible')? This is not quite clear from the review. That there are "neglected insights" lodged in a tradition is not uncommon; time and attention are scarce (even in the land of opportunity), after all. Only if one is a true believer in the efficient markets in ideas will all insights worth having been assimilated. (I hasten to add that at that moment one may as well abolish the history of philosophy as a professional philosophical enterprise!) But perhaps it is a professional deformation (I have been working in the Weberian state for a while now), I tend to see in neglected insights opportunities (to write a paper, a blog post, to propose a grant project, etc.). Of course, it would be alarming if in virtue of a neglected insight humanity were suffering (needlessly). It may even thought -- switching from the world-historical to the parochial -- to be alarming if philosophical culture were debased in virtue of the systematic neglect of certain philosophical options. There is a hint of this latter thought in the sense that ordinary language philosophy somehow has missed out on its "rightful place" in the "current debate." That is, it ought to be fashionable, but it is not.

In reading and re-reading the review I came to discern what may be the cause of "alarm." This, it turns out, is not the deflationary anti-Platonizing account of meaning (one I happen to share) that is the focus of the start of the review, but a particular conception of language (discussed at the end of  the review). I quote Tanney's review:

[Language] derives, as Austin maintains, from 'the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men. (Austin, Philosophical Papers; cited in Laugier, 66).'

 

Language should be construed, not as a body of statements or words, but as the [inherited--ES] place of agreement on what we should say when. [Emphasis in original--ES]

This conception of language has a history (in the prudent Scottish Enlightenment) with a certain political resonance.  The conception of language is opposed to seeing language as an immediate gift from the divine as much as it is opposed to the constructivist idea that language can be made (say, by stipulation). It is one of the core ideas behind the political tradition that embraces good judgment ("acumen") of cautious wisdom against mystical insight or revolutionary fervor as much as the technocratic, scientistic expert that merely measures. It's the common law tradition against the Napoleonic code (not to mention people's tribunals). In other words, it's the philosophy of language that is proper to (slow) spontaneous order or natural law, embraced with a hungry ardor by Viennese exiles (not just Wittgenstein, but also Hayek and, I think, Popper).* (Despite Austin's manly talk of 'men' it presumably makes space for women's experience, too.)

Here, language is understood as a set of agreed norms that we submit to because it is inherited.  It turns out, then, that so understood ordinary language philosophy shares with much of twentieth century philosophy an obsession with consensus. But rather than trusting the experts, the consensus is inherited in a way that is taken to be immune from political revolt not the least because it is normative and thus immune to empirical challenge. A dictator or a revolutionary tribunal can try to control language, but it would be self-defeating to aim at abolishing it! (Who would praise the new order if we were condemned to silence?)

Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that this model of language is true. Is it alarming that it is (relatively) neglected? Do Americans, especially, or their philosophers, need to recover this understanding of language, which, we are told helps us see that language is 'part of experience' and that 'the speaking of a language is part of an activity or a form of life'?

The alarmist language is not in accord with the doctrine proposed. Even if the doctrine were entirely forgotten, if it is true then it is the case that language keeps on being the repository of experience and acumen of many generations, it keeps on providing the norms that constitute activities even forms of life. Thus understood, language will take care of itself, unattended by any philosophy, providing the normative ground of (a part of) lived experience. That is to say, the talk of 'alarm' betrays an anxiety not in accord with the doctrine espoused, but rather, I conjecture, with a despair that a certain form of belonging, a permanent agreement (and the quiet stewardship required of it), is not found among the cacophony exhibited today. 

On Disciplinary Princes and Princesses

The superior gods laugh--'David Hume' [Suppressed by Adam Smith]

Look who thinks he is nothing?--From an old joke.

1. Lewis, David (214)
2. Quine, W.V.O. (164)
3. Putnam, Hilary (131)
4. Davidson, Donald (120)
4. Rawls, John (120)
6. Kripke, Saul (117)
7. Williams, Bernard (104)
8. Nozick, Robert (96)
9. Nagel, Thomas (94)
9. Nussbaum, Martha C. (94)
11. Searle, John (93)
12. Chisholm, Roderick M. (92)
13. Armstrong, David M. (87)
14. Fodor, Jerry (86)
15. Dummett, Michael (84)
16. Dennett, Daniel (83)
16. Harman, Gilbert (83)
16. Jackson, Frank (83)
19. Strawson, P. F. (82)
20. van Fraassen, Bas C. (77)---From The 266 Most-Cited Contemporary Authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [Compiled by The Schwitzgebel family; HT Newapps]*

In accompanying posts, Eric Schwitzgebel has already noted the analytical/anglo slant of the Encyclopedia and the dramatic exclusion of anybody not 'white male' from the the-Schwitzgebel-SEP-top-266-list. Anybody familiar with the patterns of intellectual, cultural, and personal exclusion in the profession is not surprised by this.  Even so, it is -- forgive the pun -- instructive to note that the list is also a testament to the successful emancipation of Jewish men in the Anglophone world. Many of the  most important educational institutions had policies/quotas restricting Jewish access through the 1950s. (I am too young to remember any of this, of course, but when I would visit my grandfather in Forest Hills (Queens) in the 70s, he would show me the grounds of the (once) famous Tennis stadium and tell me about the exclusion of Jews.) One finds echos of these days not just in the cherished anecdotes about Morgenbesser, but also, more subtly, in some of Nozick's self-fashionings (walking around Brooklyn with Plato). {For more on such themes, see Robert Paul Wolff's memoir.}

Much of my philosophical life is a struggle against my inner high-school-teacher-to-be, and so I resist getting too close to the-list-making philosophers (Aristotle, Kant, you know the type). Of course, I love lists and stared at the-266 longer than I should. I was pleasantly surprised that two (Nussbaum and Dennett) in the top-20 were my teachers once. I was pleased that my supervisor (Garber) made the list based not just on his strength as a scholar, but also for his youthful contributions to decision theory. I know that Leonard Linsky (who did not make the list) would have been proud of his Bernard.  I am startled that one of my graduate school peers, Jesse Prinz, is about to crack the 'top 200' (and he has time to watch movies).

Is there anything else to say about the Schwitzgebel-SEP-top-266-list other than my name-dropping?