Digressions&Impressions

On The End of History and the Displacement of Logic

[I will phase 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 free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

Because we understand ourselves as forward-looking problem-solvers, and recognize with the sciences that through inevitable progress today's ruling views will seem quaint when the research frontier has shifted (as it will), analytic philosophers have no major investment in curating themselves as a tradition. It has a sponge-like character in assimilating doctrines and techniques from without, and, as seen from a distance, appears to reinvent itself continuously. Because it is such a moving target external critics often seem comically out of date to knowing insiders whereas internal critics often end up being domesticated by subsequent generations (without, alas, getting credit for it). That it is a tradition is the effect of intellectual and sociological path dependencies that express themselves in certain aesthetic (clarity, transparency, rigor, etc.) and epistemic values, and the existence of bits of post Frege-Russell-Whitehead logic as a kind of (often tacit) lingua franca long after developments within logic stopped being a source of major disciplinary excitement or much utility elsewhere. 

The move from a logic requirement to a 'formal methods' in Yale University's graduate curriculum [see here at Dailynous; here at Leitterreports] tracks and, as it will be copied, shapes a much larger set of shifts in professional philosophy. In what follows, I, first, say something about how this constitutes the discipline going forward, and, second, I close -- as the previous paragraph hints -- at what predictably will be lost. The shift to 'formal methods' is often articulated in (broadly consequentialist) terms of what is useful to PhD students in their actual research or employment possibilities. It's anodyne to suggest that this actual work is interdisciplinary (with STEM/Social Sciency disciplines) in character in some sense. 

What it (really) is are three different projects (at a certain level of abstraction): (i) the projects that I have called 'synthetic philosophy' which, while using a particular technical/formal model/theory, brings together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both); (ii) the projects one can subsume under 'conceptual explorative research,' which amounts to developing concepts and techniques (including formal) that either are generative of scientific or social projects or help explain/understand perceived foundational problems in them; (iii) the continuous working out of inherited-as-philosophy puzzles. Presumably all three of these projects will involve collaboration with AI as coupled (human/machine/network) systems. With new base-lines, progress is possible. To be sure, the practice of wisdom does not require academic philosophy.

These three projects are at this level of generality not always at tension with each other, and because the fruits can be felt in disciplines outside of philosophy are not always zero-sum (job-wise). But we should expect near continuous hybridization and splitting and reconfiguration among such projects until a new political hegemon reconfigures higher education in the service of new ideals. (I am hinting at the fickleness of student-demand or donors as instruments of permanently shaping the discipline.) What I am, thus, stipulating -- perhaps rashly -- is that we should not expect hegemonic intellectual schools to re-emerge except temporarily. 

At this point one may object that 'argument' is missing in the previous paragraph. Perhaps, it will remain as constitutive element of philosophy. I am pretty skeptical about this possibility once formal logic is displaced from the intrinsic DNA of our professional formation. Yes, there are statistical arguments, but the skill one acquires is not argumentative, but something distinct. (What that is may be beyond my expertise, but I am inclined to say it is a skill at spotting differences that make a difference.) To be sure, I am a pluralist about the nature of 'argument' so it may be safer to predict that what will count as a paradigmatic argument will shift.

Now, before I mention some of the predictable 'losses' that follow from the shift under way, I want to prevent the misinterpretation that I somehow mourn the end of analytic philosophy (in the sense described by Liam Kofi Bright). I see nothing wrong in the fact that the half dozen departments (and the ones that mimic them) that train the influential PhDs of the next generation do not want to defend the intellectual path that got them there. The end of the unfolding history of analytic philosophy turns out to be a historical whimper. So I am using 'loss' analogously to or in the sense of 'Kuhn-loss'--the systematic forgetting of certain results and insights.

Second, it's predictable, for example, that as logic disappears as a (tacit) lingua franca much of the history of analytic philosophy will seem like strange territory and unmotivated to future students, and will become near unreadable. All kinds of moves that seemed obvious or intelligible -- think of the uses of regimentation, or Tarski's account of truth, bound variables, etc. -- will stop being self-evident. I had a glimpse of this when I read Quine's Word and Object a decade ago with Dutch undergraduates who were simply bewildered. 

In addition, I suspect that lacking such a tacit lingua franca, the three kinds of projects I mentioned will become increasingly at least partially estranged from each other and will, thereby, reflect the underlying social pluralism of our societies. That is compatible with each sharing in structural commonalities (including some that may well turn out to be politically or socially problematic). Unfortunately, that will imply that metrics and measures that are orthogonal to (intrinsic) philosophical worth, if there is such a thing, will be increasingly used for purposes of evaluation and advancement. 

• This first appeared at: <On The End of History and the Displacement of Logic (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

On the Polemics against Religious Philosophy in Analytic Philosophy

The views which have been noticed thus far attempt to limit the scope of scientific methods on the basis of considerations that are at least nominally scientific in character. The criticisms of science to which attention must next be directed do not even pretend to adduce scientific grounds for their claims, and are frankly based upon explicit theological and metaphysical commitments for which no experimental evidence is invoked. The chief burden of their complaints is that science offers no ‘'ultimate explanation” for the facts of existence; and their chief recommendation is the cultivation of “ontological wisdom” as the sole method for making “ultimately intelligible” both the order of the cosmos and the nature of the good life.

Some citations from recent writers will exhibit more clearly than would a paraphrase the unique mixture of pontifical dogmatism, oracular wisdom, and condescending obscurantism which seems to be the indispensible [sic] intellectual apparatus of this school of criticism. Ernest Nagel (1943) "Malicious Philosophies of Science" reprinted in Sovereign Reason, 37.

One of the sad spectacles of our age is to see otherwise mild-mannered and virtue-seeking religious philosophers cheer on the at times intemperate polemics of, say, Anscombe, Geach, and Plantinga. To say that it not to deny their philosophical contributions and skill in many contexts. And since I am not a stranger to polemics (and willing to grant I make fewer contributions to philosophy), even ill-tempered ones on the role of religion in philosophy, I am not casting stones that couldn't be thrown harder at me! 

It took me a long time to recognize that the championing of philosopher-brawlers (which is still endemic in wider analytic philosophy despite moves toward niceness), and the not infrequent closing of factional ranks, was itself a reflection of the sense of beleaguered-ness. And the reason I found it so hard to enter into that mind-set is that it seemed so self-evident to me that in the wider culture, Stateside, Christianity was by no means going extinct. But in riper age, I have come to recognize that behind all the aggressive political bluster, Christianity today exhibits all the signs of a world-historical implosion in the wealthier parts of the world. (That's compatible with phenomenal growth of Christianity elsewhere on the Planet.)* If I were Hegelian, I would say that the recent joyous flowering of analytic Christian, metaphysics is a sign of this! 

But I am not Hegelian. One oddity, however, is that if one goes over the classics of analytic philosophy, there is little explicit engagement with the status of theology and the role of religion in philosophy. Even Russell, who clearly was no friend of organized religion, claims, in a surprising moment of candor (not the least for the willingness to admit to an esoteric/exoteric distinction), that were he "speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God." ("Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic? A Plea For Tolerance In The Face Of New Dogmas," 1947.)

And while I do not deny that verificationism undoubtedly also had an anti-Christian element to it, it was, as philosophical doctrines go, short-lived. Even so, it may well have reflected a broader climate that was very slow to disappear. One telling data-point for this thought, and to get a sense of that philosophical climate, it is notable that Gödel never published his ontological proof even after safely ensconced at the Institute for Advanced Studies. 

Okay, with that in place, I return (recall) to Nagel's "malicious philosophies of science." (See also, this post on the role of its companion piece, "Recent Philosophies of Science," in the displacement of dialectical materialism.) The role of 'malicious' in the title of the paper, gives a sense of its tenor. 

Nagel's paper itself has many virtues. He shows that many philosophical discussions -- which are still familiar -- about the purported gulf between mind and world; or how to make the qualitative nature of experience compatible with the purportedly mathematical character of modern science; or  the ways in which mechanistic (and/or deterministic) and physicalist science are taken to be incompatible with an orientation toward (emergentist) life or mind, all tend to rest on impoverished conceptions of the nature of science and the practice of experimentation in which much of science is rooted. 

But, it is notable, in the quoted passage above, that Nagel simply assumes that "experimental evidence" is required to ground or justify "explicit theological and metaphysical commitments." And while one can grant Nagel that science itself need not offer "ultimate explanation" for the "facts of existence" -- and, perhaps, in his day wisely does not try to do so [modern cosmology is frequently not so self-limiting] --, it follows straightforwardly from the undeniable possibility that experimental evidence may not settle all philosophical questions.+

The previous paragraph is not to excuse pontifical dogmatism or oracular wisdom. It's Thursday, and I carry my analytic membership proudly today. Nagel goes on to quote a number of eminent neo-Thomists (Gilson, Maritain and, although no neo-Thomists, Whitehead). I have to admit I do not find what they say especially puzzling or obscure. (But you may disagree.) What these positions have in common is a demand for (i) forms of explanation that go beyond efficient causes; (ii) an ultimate ground for existence beyond experience; (iii) and some connection between (i-ii) that conforms to cannons of intelligibility and a PSR.

The more interesting point I wish to make is that when Nagel shows, correctly, that science itself often goes beyond efficient causation, and even offers answers to 'why' questions, he himself notes that these (tentative) scientific answers are not themselves based on direct experiment: "in science the answer to the question "why" is...always a theory, from which the specific fact at issue may be deduced when suitable initial conditions are introduced." (SR: 29) And Nagel grants that these initial conditions are going to be arbitrary or brute in some sense on so at odds with (iii). (In addition, the theory may well go beyond the experimental evidence that helped generate and confirm it.)

That Nagel recognizes the significance of (iii) is itself made clear when he insists that the appeal to causa sui is itself "mystery." (SR 30) And while I have some sympathy with Nagel's point -- which echoes, in a curious reversal, Clarke's Newtonian response to Spinoza -- that there is something unsatisfactory, especially to those familiar with science's ability to explain surprising difference makers in the world, about the fact that "no matter what the world were like, no matter what the course of events might be, the same Ultimate Cause is offered an "explanation,"" (SR 30) it is a mistake to charge this 'explanation' with mystery. That something is relatively bad at explaining particulars does not make it oracular or mysterious. 

I do not mean here to re-litigate Nagel's polemics. But it is easier to understand that in an intellectual milieu dominated by ideas like, and presumably influenced by, Nagel's a certain kind of counter-polemic may have been welcome. 

Now, so far I have done little to make the animus behind Nagel's position intelligible. But there is no mystery there. Nagel fundamentally objects to two ideas: first, that "only one conception of spiritual excellence is valid." (SR 33) And Nagel clearly believes, not without reason, that his targets promote such (ahh) spiritual monism. And, second, he rejects the dogmatism about such spiritual monism ground in a kind of intellectual hierarchy. The second point is more implied (but see what he says about Maritain).

For, Nagel the two ideas he rejects have no standing because they are not "based upon objective measures of well-being." (SR 33) And such measures must, according to Nagel be ground in careful experimental practice. To be sure it is in virtue of his commitment to this that he lets the reader grasp that shares with the neo-Thomists a rejection of the utilitarian tendency toward eugenics (SR 32). So, unlike many friends of science and experimental practice, Nagel does not deny that science is implicated in many contemporary problems. But he believes that a kind of anti-scientism, "rejects the one instrument from which a resolution of these difficulties may reasonably be expected." (SR 33)**

Of course, even somebody sympathetic to Nagel, like myself, may note that he has no experimental (or historical/conceptual) ground to suppose there is just "one instrument" that can offer such a resolution. He smuggles a lot into what is 'reasonable' to expect. 

Let me wrap up. So while Nagel's heart is in the right place -- after all in line with (recall) his pluralism, he is defending the diversity of spiritual excellence! --, Nagel's argument goes off the rails because he thinks that the neo-Thomists (and other fellow travelers" unfairly take advantage of the fact that in "“in the midst of actual and impending disaster” and in “period of social crisis, when rational methods of inquiry supply no immediate solution for pressing problems” people are to listen to those that disparage or stress the limitations of the sciences. (SR: 18; see also “the mounting economic and political tensions of our age,” further down the page). That is to say Nagel echoes the epicurean and Humean polemic against superstition that it takes advantage of fear. But we don't need to be Yoda, to recognize that countering polemic with polemic is no path to wisdom.

 

 

 

Before Arthur Prior was the pioneer in intensional logic; and on the philosophical politics of Australia

Whether or not it was intended as such, this article of Professor Ryle's has functioned in fact as a blow on the side of Melbourne in a battle between Melbourne and Sydney which has, I understand, been a feature of the Australian philosophical scene for many years, and which was certainly in evidence at the 1951 congress. Professor Anderson, it would seem, has always found someone to cross swords with in the southern University. In an earlier period the Victorian Sassenachs were predominantly ' idealists ' of one sort or another; but now there is a strong representation there of the current British tendency to regard the main task of philosophy as the unravelling of mental and verbal tangles generated by the endless complexity and changefulness of ordinary language. An admirable example of this technique was given at the congress by Dr W. D. Falk, in a paper on ' Prescriptive Speech '. It is often held by those who reduce philosophical to linguistic problems that statements about what we ought to do, as well as statements about what is ' good ', are just a subtly disguised manner of ordering people about. As far as ' ought ' is concerned, this is of course the Andersonian view too. It is not Dr Falk's view; but he attacks it, as he says, 'from within'. The greater part of his paper was something that could almost have come from a good novel -an extremely polished and painstaking account of the various ways in which the speech of one person leads to action in another. The main dividing-line, he argued, is not that between utterances in the indicative mood and utterances in the imperative, but that between utterances which merely draw a person's attention to some circumstance which would have moved him to action had he known of it independently (;'If you don't go now you'll miss the last bus ') and utterances which themselves bring into being a motive for action which was not previously present (' If you don't get out now I'll throw you out'). There are of course an infinite variety of intermediary cases, and cases of the one form masquerading as the other ; and Dr Falk discussed a number of these with great insight and humour. He then went on to consider cases in which we say 'You ought to do X', and came to the conclusion that these are more like the first sort of case than the second. In the Andersonian view these exhaustive and sometimes exhausting discussions of linguistic usages are a waste of philosophical time ; what little value they have is as a prelude to the exposure of 'bulldozing'. It also seems to be the Andersonian ' line ' that philosophers who are endlessly preoccupied with linguistic conventions, and with what people mean rather than with what is the case, are generally  on the side of the conventions socially too, and have abandoned ethics for etiquette. I have concentrated on these ethical and semi-ethical issues because they are probably of most general interest, but the congress had its teeth into other things also. A paper, for example, by Professor J. J. C. Smart of Adelaide on Logical Paradoxes. These are tricky things, but it is worth while trying to outline one of them and Professor Smart's manner of dealing with it, as I am not very satisfied either with his solution or with any other that I have thought of or come across, and would be interested to see some philosophical amateur who  reads Landfall chip into the discussion. (He couldn't easily do worse than the professionals have done with this subject.)--A.N. Prior "This Quarter" The Landfall March 1952, pp. 51-2

Causing and then knowing of my recurring fascination with the 'pioneer in intensional logic,' A.N. Prior (recall), the economist, David M. Levy, has repeatedly called my attention to A.N. Prior's writings in the New Zealand periodical, The Landfall, and decided to reduce my search costs by adding a link to the archived PdF copies. Among the gems to be found there are fascinating reviews of Popper's Open Society and C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man.(I intend to return to these.) The essay from which I quote above -- a kind of impression of a "single event" (p. 49) then bi-annual Australasian Association of Psychology and Philosophy in august 1951 -- is written just at the point of Prior's first publications as a formal logician.

What caught my attention is Prior's description of the transition, at the University of Melbourne, from an Idealist-centric department to a department oriented around ordinary language philosophy (exemplified by W. D. Falk, who is, in fact, himself a fascinating thinker). Both the earlier idealists and the then dominant ordinary language philosophers are opposed by Sydney's John Anderson. (Part of the joke is that Anderson was born a Scot.) Anderson's philosophy is characterized by his fondness for a flat ontology and embrace of a certain species of atheism (and rejection of ontological hierarchy).

In almost Swiftian fashion, Prior describes the Lilliputian "battle between Melbourne and Sydney which has, I understand, been a feature of the Australian philosophical scene for many years." The battle is a product of geography and, apparently, the force of Anderson's personality. Part of the comedy of Prior's report is that Prior recognizes that he is thought by others, including the eminent J. J. C. Smart,  to belong to Anderson's school, but not by Anderson ("Professor Smart, who is of the Ryle-Melbourne faction, called me an Andersonian. Later on Professor Anderson did his best to put him right about that). Prior's thoughts on his club identity are left obscure. 

At the start of his essay, Prior grants that there are no "subtle reasons why this event should loom larger in our thoughts than the election (N.Z.), the election (U.K.), the referendum (Australia), the sedition bill (N.Z.), the armistice negotiations (Korea) and the rest." But philosophical politics clearly can be as absorbing as the great politics of states and dominions. I return to that shortly.

I don't mean to suggest that the satire is devoid of seriousness (or that I can read all clues on the  Trans-Tasman relations). The essay is structured along three contraries: as the quote (midway through the essay reveals), one of these is the contrast between philosophical "professionals" and "amateurs." The other is the contrast between 'pure' and impure/applied philosophers, that is "psychologists." These had been part of the same professional association, the Australasian Association of Psychology and Philosophy, but had recently split, with the pure philosophers. ["Australasian psychologists now have, I think, a periodical and presumably an association of their own, and the association now being considered has come to cater more exclusively for ' pure ' philosophers."]

Somewhat strikingly, it's the professionals -- presumably people like Smart and Prior himself, and especially John Anderson, employed at university -- come off looking faintly ridiculous, but not without fondness. The upshot Anderson's critique of ordinary language philosophy, in particular, is spelled out: "that philosophers who are endlessly preoccupied with linguistic conventions, and with what people mean rather than with what is the case, are generally  on the side of the conventions socially too, and have abandoned ethics for etiquette." Whole uncharitable, it is not devoid of significance (and in some ways precedes Isaiah Berlin's line of attack). The third contrary is the contrast between philosophical "factions" (p. 53) and the impartial lover of truth. 

And this leads me to a closing speculative observation on the opening line of the essay. ("I PROPOSE in all shamelessness to devote these pages to the consideration of a single event, and one, moreover, which did not take place in this quarter, but rather in the one before it-a congress of philosophers which met in Sydney last August.") My interest here is in the self-identification of shamelessness. Regular readers of Landfall, had already been informed by Prior, in his review of Lewis, that he is predisposed toward a form of sentimentalism in the vein of Adam Smith ("disinterestedness should...be made the defining characteristic of ethical sentiments, as it has in fact been made by the more circumspect subjectivists from Adam Smith onwards.") In fact, in the review of Popper, Prior also embraces Smith's philosophy. (Smith plays a central role in Prior's Logic and the Basis of Ethics.)

What's odd is is that shame is a very important sentiment in Smith's moral philosophy. But, at no point, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, does Smith embrace shamelessness. Smith suggests that a "real lover a truth" even feels shame at any unintentional falsehood conveyed in careless gossiping. But,while Gulliver is often ashamed, the more rational (would be philosopher-kings) Houyhnhnms reject shame. But perhaps, the shamelessness consists in recognizing that in so far as all events are located in time by means of tenses, even belated ones, from a certain logical point of view all events are on par. The high and the low collapse into a flat plane, which is, of course, the Swiftian move par excellence. And, to add for good measure, so Smart was not all wrong in discerning the drift of Prior's philosophical leanings.

 

On Freud, Rawls, Rose, the contrast between Analytic/Continental Philosophy, and Lewis-Kripke

Behind one half of Ferrante’s pen name, Elena, is a tale from Greek mythology. According to a relatively little-known version of the story, Zeus rapes and impregnates, not Leda the swan, but Nemesis, who turns herself into a goose to escape him. She then lays an egg, found by a shepherd and handed to Leda, who nurtures it and out of which Elena is born, who is then raised by Leda, in Ferrante’s suggestive formula, as ‘her daughter-non-daughter’.4 It must be one of the earliest stories of surrogacy, as well as offering a model of motherhood without vested interest because it has embraced a stranger.--Jacuqeline Rose, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, p. 146.

One important feature of the distinction between analytical and continental philosophy is that analytical philosophy is when not outright hostile to Freud/Freudianism, in its indifference to it, purportedly untouched by it.* This is most evident in the brief spectacle of the late twentieth century flowering of analytical Marxism--these hard-nosed men (it was really a boys club), which self-consciously set itself against the mushy forms of Marxism found in Paris and Frankfurt (and elsewhere). What's conspicuous about their (the analytical marxist) work is not the elegance and wit of their writings, but their inability to make visible how oppression as a social phenomenon generates, through violence and lies/ideology, the deformation, material and psychic, at the heart of of everybody's lives.+ (Of course, one can state and argue this without Freudian theory, but often without fertility.)

I think I can explain what I have in mind: John Rawls (to be sure no analytical Marxist), who read more widely than most analytic philosophers, discusses Freud briefly several time in Theory of Justice in the context of the significance of moral education. For Rawls Freud is somebody who, first, offers cautionary warnings about taking moral sentiments at face value due to their being rooted in processes of "conflict and stress" (TJ, 459); second, he treats Freud as, we may say,  a Nietzschean, who offers a kind of error theory for the sense of justice (and, in so doing, mistakenly conflates envy and resentment). (Susan Moller Okin has also noticed the first passage. She treats it as evidence of Rawls's blindness to Freud's sexism.) Rawls treats the grounds of the "conflict and stress" as mere psychological process to be overcome in adulthood (with the help, surprisingly enough, of "sound principles" that is, political philosophy) and not as expressing the effects of (ahh) a badly functioning basic structure(s) of society.**  

I have come to think it's not Freudianism's dubious character as a science that accounts for analytic philosophy's hostility/indifference (or early analytic philosophy's flirtation with behaviorism), but rather something that G.A. Cohen mislabels as "acid Freudian skepticism:" that all given identities are at once (too) robust in their fixity and fragile in their vulnerability to fracturing. The effect of this acid is that identity becomes liquid. Such liquidity is played with in Derrida and embraced by Deleuze, and treated at arm's length in the analytic mainstream. For, while one may think that political philosophy and moral education are at the margin's of analytic philosophy's self-understanding -- despite the fact that (recall) the Strawson-Carnap debate pivots on it-- identity is central. I can't, of course, prove this point to you.

However, I think I can make it arresting. I hope you will forgive me if I use Kripke as a representative agent, as an exemplar. I want to return to Kripke's response to Lewis's counterpart theory. This response exhibits more than dispassionate philosophical disagreement. I reproduce most of the relevant footnote from Naming and Necessity:

Lewis's elegant paper also suffers from a purely formal difficulty: on his interpretation of quantified modality, the familiar law (y) ((x)A(x) ⊃ A(y) falls, if A(x) is allowed to contain modal operators. (For example, (∃y) ((x) ◊(x ≠y) is satisfiable but (∃y) ◊ (y ≠ y) is not.) Since Lewis's formal model follows rather naturally from his philosophical views on counterparts, and since the failure of universal instantiation for modal properties is intuitively bizarre, it seems to me that this failure constitutes an additional argument against the plausibility of his philosophical views. There are other, lesser, formal difficulties as well. I cannot elaborate here.

Strictly speaking, Lewis’s view is not a view of ‘transworld identification’. Rather, he thinks that similarities across possible worlds determine a counterpart relation which need be neither symmetric nor transitive. The counterpart of something in another possible world is never identical with the thing itself. Thus if we say ‘Humphrey might have won the election (if only he had done such-and-such), we are not talking about something that might have happened to Humphrey but to someone else, a “counterpart”.’ Probably, however, Humphrey could not care less whether someone else, no matter how much resembling him, would have been victorious in another possible world.
Thus, Lewis's view seems to me even more bizarre than the usual notions of transworld identification that it replaces. The important issues, however, are common to the two views: the supposition that other possible worlds are like other dimensions of a more inclusive universe, that they can be given only by purely qualitative descriptions, and that therefore either the identity relation or the counterpart relation must be established in terms of qualitative resemblance.

Many have pointed out to me that the father of counterpart theory is probably Leibnitz. I will not go into such a historical question here. It would also be interesting to compare Lewis's views with the Wheeler-Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. I suspect that this view of physics may suffer from philosophical problems analogous to Lewis's counterpart theory; it is certainly very similar in spirit.

Notice that Kripke repeatedly treats Lewis' position as bizarre. (It is quite amazing, actually, to see a formal difficulty itself be explicated in terms of what seems intuitively bizarre.) The one other time (right at the start) in Naming and Necessity where Kripke treats a view as bizarre is  the denial of the indiscernability of identicals. (Notably he treats the denial of it as on par as the denial of the 'law of contradiction.') My point here is not to claim that Kripke's critique of Lewis isn't well motivated or un-argued.++ Kripke is not cheating. And my present purpose is not to defend Lewis (although regular readers know I think counterpart theory grasps something fundamental about self-identity.)

Rather, I am marking that Kripke's hostility (the repeated bizarre) expresses something that goes beyond mere disagreement. As Freud notes in a very different context (dreams, etc.), treating something as bizarre is a mechanism by which we allow ourselves to ignore something important. It's to Kripke's credit that he explains why Lewis' position must be set aside. Kripke says that the most important point (of disagreement) is that for Lewis the identity relation, including self-identity, must be established in terms of qualitative resemblance.*** Kripke's emphatic ''bizarre" betrays how he recoils from the (ahh) instability this generates. 

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. 

 

On the absence of Method(s) in analytic (Political) Philosophy

1. People like me, who have been trying to do philosophy for more than forty years, do in due course learn, if they’re lucky, how to do what they’ve been trying to do: that is, they do learn how to do philosophy. But although I’ve learned how to do philosophy, nobody ever told me how do it, and, so far as I would guess, nobody will have told you how to do it, or is likely to tell you how to do it in the future. The most charitable explanation of that fact, the fact, that is, that nobody tells philosophy students how to do philosophy, is that it is impossible to explain to anybody how philosophy is to be done. The only way to teach people how to do it is by letting them watch, and listen, and imitate. The least charitable explanation of the self-same fact, the fact that we don’t teach you how to do philosophy, is that those of us who have learned how to do it struggled so hard to get where we now are that we’re now selfishly reluctant to give you some of the fruit of our struggle for free: we think you, too, should suffer. Probably there’s some truth in each explanation.--G.A. Cohen "How to Do Political Philosophy" 225. [Edited by Mike Otsuka]

I am unsure if Cohen would have wished for these remarks to appear in print, but I am pleased Mike Otsuka included them in his edition. There is much in this short essay to ruminate on, and I hope to return to it again before long.

Once upon a time, Cohen teaches, professional (analytic) philosophers* were not trained in method. These days there are handbooks to philosophical method (edited by leading philosophers), even one on the methods (note the plural) in analytical political theory (which I am toying with buying). So, it may become hard to imagine to some readers what analytic philosophy was like in the days when its methods were not articulated yet. The previous sentence is deliberately equivocal between the scandalous thought that in earlier times [A] analytic philosophy was free of methods and the equally scandalous thought (the one G.A. Cohen entertains and considers plausibly true) that [B] the methods were kept quiet. Cohen adds to B the further rationalization/explanation [B*] that people may have thought -- perhaps because they repeatedly read the Meno or Protagoras -- the methods of philosophy cannot be explicitly taught/said, but have to be shown via example/exemplars. 

Before I say more about [A-B-B*] and [C] the more sadistic-survivor-syndrom interpretation [recall "those of us who have learned how to do it struggled so hard to get where we now are that...we think you, too, should suffer"] as well as its close cousin [C*] the ungenerous interpretation ["we’re now selfishly reluctant to give you some of the fruit of our struggle for free"], it is worth marking three features of Cohen's position (and again, for all I know he may well have not wished to publish this). First he is surprisingly immodest in his willingness to assert that he is now a proper exemplar who has "learned how to do philosophy." (I am not suggesting he is wrong.) Second, in the paper, he associates philosophy primarily with arguments. Much of his initial, primary advice is about how to think of one's arguments and what to aim for in them. In fact, these two features of Cohen are connected, in a sense, because what Cohen wishes to promote, it seems, is an understanding of philosophy as a kind of hyper-self-consciousness about the nature, aims, targets, and status of one's argument. (That is, the connection is not one of entailment; but Cohen seems to suggest that because he is in control of argument he can have  a proper estimation of his own status.)**

And, third, it is a bit odd that if Cohen thinks philosophical method is about argument that (a) it was not taught and (b) that it would be all that difficult to teach. (That's compatible with few getting good at it.) I actually think this shows that the focus on argument is a bit of a red herring. For, Cohen also allows that

Sometimes one senses that a consideration has some sort of bearing on a controversy...and it is nevertheless worthwhile bringing the consideration forward, if only because it may provoke a discussion that leads to a clearer idea of the polemical significance of the consideration, that is, into which box(es) in our matrix it falls. One should aspire to clarity, but one should not avoid possible insight for the sake of avoiding unclarity. A bad way never to make a mistake is to shut up and say nothing. (226)

I am not suggesting  Cohen is defending here the worth of argument-free insight, but he does seem to think that acquiring a certain amount of clarity and insight may be worth the price of argumentative muddle. I think Cohen is, in fact, rather skeptical about what arguments can achieve because he is extremely aware that what grounds (forgive the property metaphors) the occupation of philosophical territory is the commitment to a "point of view" (232) as "obvious." (It's not that arguments for these point of views don't exist; they do exist and can be refined and clarified greatly.) In this essay, Cohen does not say much more, I think, about how one comes to find oneself to occupy a philosophical territory, so we'll leave it at that. (One senses it's not so much Carnapian voluntarism as it is to be explained, if there is one, in an emotional commitment to certain values as non-relinquish-able.)

I do want to close with two alternative suggestions. I think the most charitable explanation of that fact that the methods of philosophy were not taught is that, to restate, [A] analytic philosophy was free of methods. (This is different from the claim that [D] the methods of (early to middle) analytical philosophy were not unified.) Now, I am aware that, at various point early analytic philosophers certainly discussed the methods of sciences; they also often claimed to be following a "method of analysis" or a methodized "logical analysis" or a "method of rational reconstruction."++ And their writings are full of proposals (for others) to follow some method or another, but it's by no means obvious that there was a method. (There are, rather, lots of attempts at articulating some method or another; recall my exchange with Dennett and his response on analysis; and also this post on the Strawson-Carnap exchange) .) To say that there was no method is not a criticism. 

But it does lead me to the most uncharitable explanation of the silence over method: (recall) [E] it is a form of boundary policing. Under such a regime, outsiders are permanently mystified about the rules of the game because they don't know what move to make to acquire standing. [To put this in terms of a bad joke: insiders have Wittgenstein to explain the game to them; outsiders get bullied.] Obviously, the least charitable explanation need not be true. But there are plenty of incentives that are compatible with the truth.

If the least charitable explanation has some truth then it's a good thing that philosophy is being methodized. Of course, it need not follow that following philosophical method teaches you how to do philosophy.

 

 

A.N. Prior on Philosophical Regress

The clarifications achieved through ethical discussions of the eighteenth century were largely forgotten during the nineteenth, except by one or two, such as Archbishop Whately, who carried no great weight in the field of Moral Philosophy. But towards the end of the century we find the older and clearer language being spoken again by a moralist who commanded the attention of his fellows, namely Henry Sidgwick.--A.N. Prior (1946) Logic and the Basis of Ethics (Oxford), p. 36.

Prior here notes two phenomena: first, philosophical regress is genuinely possible even without the circumstances political or revolutionary destruction of the institutions of collective and professional memory. (Undeniably, there were serious changes between the eighteen and nineteenth century in Britain, but there was also great deal of political and pedagogical continuity.) Nor did he think that such regress is only possible prior to the modern research university. His favorite examples of philosophical regress come from the writings of E.F. Carritt (largely unfamiliar to me). Second, that even at a given time the market of ideas need not be efficient; who remembers or rediscovers X makes a great deal of difference: not all of us command "the attention" of our peers.

That the market in ideas need not be efficient is also clear from another commitment: that Whately (who was a fine economist, too) ought to have commanded more attention not just from his role of remembering the right things, but from the quality of his thought more generally. This his clear not so much from Prior's praise of Whately as a practitioner and popularizer of "the traditional formal logic which has come to us from Aristotle," (ix)* but from the closing line of his book, "Nor need any more be said in order to the establish the fact that Professor [G.E.] Moore's achievement has not been to work a revolution in Moral Philosophy, but simply to help keep alive, in our own age, the eighteen-century tradition of sanity and logical rigour which Sidgwick (with Huxley the agnostic beside him and Whately the Archbishop behind him) kept alive in his," (107) In particular, Whately's use of the argument from trivialization against Paley is analyzed in detail.

As an aside, the denial of a revolutionary status to Moore's writings in Moral Philosophy is undoubtedly a response to the overblown claims about Moore's role in founding a new kind of philosophy -- analytical philosophy. (Prior, a student of Findlay, who was educated in New Zealand, was not sociologically invested, as many are, in overpraising the founders of analytical philosophy.)  

Given that Prior thinks that regress in moral philosophy is possible it is not surprise that Prior thought that revolutions in philosophy and other intellectual inquiries are impossible. While discussing the autonomy of ethics from other scientific enterprises, he cites with care (p.43) the work, The Scope and Method of Political Economy, of J.N. Keynes (Sidgwicks's "younger associate at Cambridge," the father of the economist, although Prior treats J.M. Keynes as a logician not an economist). This work by the elder Keynes lays out (recall) the Kuhnian analysis of scientific revolutions including the movement from immature to mature sciences (without the use of incommensurability thesis).

Prior does not really explain the causes of philosophical regress. He may not have a general theory of philosophical regress: "the tendency to fall into fallacious modes of reasoning is rather like an epidemic that breaks out during war." (26) It's pretty clear -- reading between the lines -- that he thinks that (Kantian or) Hegelian jargon is to blame for some of the lack of clarity of the nineteenth century. But he also thinks that certain kinds of regress can also set the stage for an improvement in theory:

"In Sidgwick there is far more than a revival of old positions; he develops them with a new subtlety, no doubt acquired in the process of threading his way through denser obscurities (in the work of his contemporaries) than any eighteenth-century writer had to cope with; but the positions which he thus develops are the old ones, and quite consciously so." (37)

I don't think that Prior thinks it was a good such (a la cunning of history) as such that Sidgwick had to plow through obscure stuff. But it turns out, perhaps, to have been salutary for Sidgwick in order to develop more fine-grained distinctions that helped diagnose errors in others. 

It should be clear from the last few quoted passages, that Prior -- who is one of the greatest historians of philosophy -- tends not to see much novelty. Rather he evaluates other thinkers in light of their commitment to maintain clarity and expose fallacies in moral reasoning in others--"a task which it seems to be necessary to perform anew in every age." (x) While it's an interesting fact that when he wrote these lines, Prior was not yet known as a logician, the use of 'necessary' here points to a larger historical duty (and thus thesis about the nature of learning throughout history). Prior clearly thinks that without great vigilance most of what's done in philosophy is sub-optimal. This is the basis of his praise of Moore: "The unoriginality of Professor Moore, for example, on which I have laid some stress in the following pages...does not alter the fact that he has done more than any other single individual to promote clear thinking on ethical subjects in the present century" (x).

If Prior is right, that regress is always a live possibility and that claims to originality tend to rely on a lack of historical background knowledge (or perhaps party-line propaganda), then it's right to write a history with the tools of logic to praise the restorers of clarity and rigor (and provide detailed analysis of their actions) and thereby provide others a further incentive not to be forgotten by philosophical posterity for good reasons. Of course, the fate of an Archbishop's afterlife is probably better served by higher powers.

 

On Hume and Smith Being a Systematic Philosopher

This is the Hinge of your system.--David Hume on The Theory of Moral Sentiments to Adam Smith, 28 July 1759

In his forthcoming intellectual biography of David Hume, James Harris points out that after the youthful Treatise, Hume does not self-describe his own writing(s) as 'systematic' or a 'system' in his works (even though he continues to describe other people's writings in those terms). This is surprising given how important this feature is (see here for an approach). For example, Hume writes in the Introduction: "to explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a compleat system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security." Some other time I explore what follows from Harris' observation (including Harris' interpretion of this).* Even so, it is worth noting that Hume is reported (including by Adam Smih) as battling other people's "systems of superstition" to the end of his life; so, even if Hume is no longer himself a systematic philosopher after the Treatise, he remains concerned with the effects of systematic thought on human affairs.

Recent literature, inspired by Hayek's concerns over social planning (in part), on Adam Smith has paid considerable attention to Smith's criticisms of the "man of system" who is "apt to be very wise in his own conceit" (see, for example, here). And if you start reading The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), you quickly encounter Smith's concern with how "the judgments of mankind [can be] perverted by wrong systems." And a few pages later, he implies in a deflationary matter that a "system of philosophy" as such (so not its consequences) is not a matter of much interest.

But as is also well known, Smith also notes that, as a matter of fact, the "love of system" can activate the most "noble and magnificent" political and philanthropic projects, and "public spirit," even though he is aware that such love can become excessive and then turns into a (problematic) "spirit of system" among other problems (recall this post). So, presumably Smith must approve of systems that can generate the right sort of love, and avoid the excessive kind. In fact, in the final edition of TMS, Smith specifies that one feature the right kind of systems have in common is that they promote caution about implementation (here's why: "to insist upon establishing, and upon establishing all at once, and in spite of all opposition, every thing which that [systemic] idea may seem to require, must often be the highest degree of arrogance.") And in Wealth of Nations, Smith himself promotes this gradualist feature in his own system on grounds of humanity and fear of "disorder" (see here for discussion).

At the start of the last edition of TMS, Smith remarks that:

In the last paragraph of the first Edition of the present work, I said, that I should in another discourse endeavour to give an account of the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions which they had undergone in the different ages and periods of society; not only in what concerns justice, but in what concerns police, revenue, and arms, and whatever else is the object of law. In the Enquiry concerning the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, I have partly executed this promise; at least so far as concerns police, revenue, and arms. What remains, the theory of jurisprudence, which I have long projected, I have hitherto been hindered from executing, by the same occupations which had till now prevented me from revising the present work. Though my very advanced age leaves me, I acknowledge, very little expectation of ever being able to execute this great work to my own satisfaction; yet, as I have not altogether abandoned the design, and as I wish still to continue under the obligation of doing what I can, I have allowed the paragraph to remain as it was published more than thirty years ago, when I entertained no doubt of
being able to execute every thing which it announced.

So, Smith clearly thought that his works were part of a larger system. In that "last paragraph," (of TMS) Smith is explicit that Grotius falls short by not being systematic enough.

As an aside, to be sure, Smith recognizes that being systematic is not itself (to use an understatement) truth-conducive. As he puts it in Wealth of Nations: there are many "systems of natural and moral philosophy" whose "arguments" rest on "very slender probabilities, and sometimes [are] mere sophisms." In fact, Smith argues that concern over how the appearance of systematicity can mislead, explains the origin of logic. (As is well known, Smith's "History of Astronomy" has a very finegrained analysis of the social epistemology of the revolutions among scientific systems.)

Be that as it may, unlike Hume, Smith, who was a careful student of Hume's writings, was eager to call attention to his own aspirations to systematicity even (as we have seen) in "advanced age." This strikes me as an important starting point for any appreciation of their relation.

 

Montaigne, Collier and Painting (and Spinoza?)

Having considered the proceedings of a painter that serves me, I had a mind to imitate his way. He chooses the fairest place and middle of any wall, or panel, wherein to draw a picture, which he finishes with his utmost care and art, and the vacuity about it he fills with grotesques, which are odd fantastic figures without any grace but what they derive from their variety, and the extravagance of their shapes. And in truth, what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrous bodies, made of various parts, without any certain figure, or any other than accidental order, coherence, or proportion? [Que sont-ce icy aussi, à la verité, que crotesques et corps monstrueux, rappiecez de divers membres, sans certaine figure, n'ayants ordre, suite ny proportion que fortuite?]—Montaigne, Essays: Of Friendship.

The Vanitas Still life with Works of Montaigne represents in addition to a globe and several symbolic reminders of the brevity of life, a representation of the Dutch edition of Montaigne's Essays in Glazemaker's translation. The painting is signed "Charles Field," but Dror Wahrman persuasively argues in his Mr. Collier's Letter Racks that it was painted by Edward Collier (recall this post); in fact, the painting is one of four nearly identical paintings that Collier almost certainly had more than a hand in: one with Collier's signature, one without signature, and two with signatures ascribed two others, although all four paintings have Collier's initials ("E.C.") inscribed in them. The Glazemaker translation appeared in 1672 (The Dutch "disaster year"), but in all four paintings the represented date does not correspond to any known editions of Glazemaker's translation. (In the "Field," the fake date is given as 1753, and Wahrman notes that "53" is a "fairly accurate" reversed "E c" as "digits allow." (152)) Collier's Vanitas plays many of the same games as his Trompe-l'œils, creating the illusion that the depicted objects are really, well, real, while at the same time constantly undermining the stability of identity with elaborate games and hidden messages. In one's logic one might assume that A= A, but upon closer inspection you can't be so sure.

Wahrman does not link Collier's art to the contents of Montaigne's Essays, which is a shame given Collier's more general skepticism about identity. So, I started paging through my copy and my eye fell on the opening of the essay "Of Friendship," which I have reproduced at the top of this post. There Montaigne claims about his own craft that (against Plato's injunctions) he will happily imitate the method of a certain kind of painter. Montaigne's imitation is partial; by this I do not just mean that Montaigne seems to skip the content of the painter's picture altogether, but also, and more importantly, that Montaigne seems to be imitating (methodologically) only the stuff outside the frame of the carefully crafted picture frame!

Can one be funny in analytical philosophy?

IT is sometimes said that the world might itself be vague. Rather than vagueness being a deficiency in our mode of describing the world, it would then be a necessary feature of any true description of it. It is also said that amongst the statements which may not have a determinate truth value as a result of their vagueness are identity statements. Combining these two views we would arrive at the idea that the world might contain certain objects about which it is a fact that they have fuzzy boundaries. --Gareth Evans

"Is Gareth Evans (the philosopher) funny?" I ask myself in reflecting on his famous "Can There Be Vague Objects?"*

By this I do not mean the kind of funny in which one uses a principle denied by the opponent as an undisputed premise in one's argument against them.** This kind of funny is generally an expression of situational power--one can assert and get away with it. It is a byproduct that accompanies the clever in a certain milieu.

I also do not mean the kind of funny that presents itself as rigor, yet does not axiomatize or stipulate the rules of the sentential operator.*** In fairness to Evans, there is funniness here because Evans might respond that this problem, while real, is really his unnamed opponent's problem. It's not clear that the principled metaphysical indeterminatist has a right to a definite logic of vagueness.