Digressions&Impressions

On the General Hermeneutic; Quentin Skinner on the task of the Historian, part I

As Sam James’s debate with the great John Pocock showed, there are very special problems attendant on writing the history of the present, because you’re going to be writing about people who can answer back. I mean, I never had the problem that, when I explained the precise ideological orientation of Hobbes’ political philosophy, Hobbes will be able to publish an article in which he rubbished what I had said. But this, of course, was what John Pocock sought to do in this particular case. I’m not going to try to adjudicate; I thought that Sam James’s work was wonderful, and very challenging.

But what I want to say, on my own account, is that the approach that I’ve been trying this afternoon to sketch in talking to you purports to be a general hermeneutic. That’s to say, it’s generally applicable — applicable to the present, of course, because it’s generally applicable. So, it’s not just a story about how to get at the past. If you try to use it to get at the present, you encounter all the special problems of trying to get at the present, which I just alluded to. There are special difficulties, of course, attendant on writing contemporary history. And that’s not just because people can answer back; it’s also for a deeper reason, which we’re all familiar with, which is that it’s much more difficult to see our own concepts and our own arrangements as contingent. The goal of the historian, as I’ve been talking about this figure, is to show the contingency of the questions that are raised in the history of philosophy: the extent to which they can be understood if, and only if, you studied the circumstances in and for which they were written. But it’s very much harder, I think, to see your own concepts as having the same kind of contingency. If you see them as wholly contingent, it’s hardly going to be very easy to affirm their truth. So, I think that the history of the present has very great difficulties with attaining the kind of objectivity to which my approach aspires. I think that the historian can at least aspire to give you a sort of objective account — it might not be the account that the agent themselves will give of philosophical works in the past — [but] much more difficult to do it on ourselves.--Quentin Skinner (January 28, 2023) interviewd by Ming. [emphasis added--ES]

Perhaps because when I was younger I was rather polemical toward Quentin Skinner's methodological (and interpretive) historiographic positions an unusual number of people called my attention to the interview with Skinner I have partially quoted above. I had little interest in reading the interview because Skinner has been interviewed rather frequently, and by people who don't really challenge him. But because so many people suggested to me I should read it, I decided to take a look. Somewhat predictably it has triggered a new round of polite disagreement in me.+

I am happy I did so because the interview is fascinating; in it we learn a lot about the origins and development of the Cambridge Texts series that shaped how multiple disciplines could teach the past and how scholars could research it. In addition Skinner says insightful things on the frequently self-deceptive nature of autobiographical writing. And -- the piece has a lot of riches --for people who have just come to the Cambridge school he makes some helpful claims about its intellectual roots of it in twentieth century philosophy.* Go read the full interview yourself!

Now, the paragraph I quoted from the interview occurs in the context of a question about a debate between Samuel James and Pocock about Pocock's "earlier work." Somewhat oddly, during the interview with Skinner it is never stated that James is denying the purported unity of the Cambridge school (concluding there are at least two "strands" if not two "enterprises"). As it happens this is a topic that has already been broached during the interview because Skinner had already stated, "I don’t think it’s helpful to suppose that there’s a Cambridge School." And while there is a way to parse Skinner's claim that makes it distinct from James' argument it is quite at odds with Pocock's own claim (reiterated in response to James) to have helped lay the foundations for the Cambridge school that (on Pocock's telling) was invented by Skinner in his famous (1969) essay! That is, Skinner has already denied the terms of the debate between James and Pocock, so, if Skinner is right, there is no need to adjudicate it. There is, if one presses on this topic, much more such comedy running through the interview (not the least the status of Skinner's utterances on the nature of the Cambridge school in light of the "very great difficulties" diagnosed by himself.) Perhaps, I'll return to that some time.

But my present interest is in the status of a general hermeneutic that seems to be applicable in all circumstances. Now, what is striking and highly revealing in Skinner's formulation of such a hermeneutic, is that "The goal of the historian, as I’ve been talking about this figure, is to show the contingency of the questions that are raised in the history of philosophy." I leave aside the really tough question whether a general hermeneutic is really possible. Although to note skeptically that it reminds me of the hope that methodologists of science once had to discover a logic of induction or a general methodology of science.

Rather, here I focus on the oddity to posit this ["the contingency of the questions that are raised in the history of philosophy"] as the goal of any historian let alone the historian of philosophy for at least three reasons: first, shouldn't the purported contingency of the questions be established by historical enquiry and not be presumed? I don't deny that sometimes, perhaps often, this is a conclusion of historical research. Some historians allow us to celebrate such continency (think of Daston, Justin Smith, etc.). However, even if one denies that there are eternal questions, it is still possible, say, that bits of philosophy are institutionalized as authoritative in a context (think Aristotle and Thomas in the Catholic Church, or Mencius in the Chinese bureaucracy, or Buddhism in the Ashoka empire and its aftermath) that then shapes centuries of fairly constrained enquiry,

One need not be a structuralist to see that if one posits a trade-off between population and luxury spending (as Socrates does in the truthful city) the modeling space is highly constrained even if there are huge technological and demographic changes (as Malthus noticed).  Fill in your own example. I put it in terms of types of models because it is far more likely that there is going to be continuity between or rediscovery of those, even though the tokens have all kinds of external commitments unrelated to the trade-off under issue. That may sound like cheating, but often later authors (not just Malthus, but also Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Berkeley, Smith, and Mill) explicitly refer back to Plato's version. 

Back in 1969, Skinner linked the denial of the sameness of questions to the impossibility of learning from the purported "solutions" of past thinkers to our (perennial) questions or the ones we put to them. Fair enough. But this criticism cannot be directed at the idea that Plato's solutions (birth-control, enhancements, different property arrangements) are very much still explored in much greater depth in these types of two-factor models. (Not that I want to turn you into a population ethicicist or an anachronistic political economist.)** 

Second, shouldn't the historian of philosophy, especially, be allowed to focus on other goals (e.g., what happened, why did it happen, how did we get from then to now, which arguments are worth a second look, etc.)? I don't mean to be exhaustive here. There are a plurality of goals in the pursuit of historical enquiry as such and also in the history of philosophy. In a lot of these, the question of contingency may arise only side-ways. 

Of course, I don't mean to deny -- in fact it is highly salient -- that Skinner's position is articulated in, and received some of its plausibility from, the historical aftermath of what was thought to be the demise of the principle of sufficient reason (which is highly intolerant of contingency). This demise was marked by Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being and Russell's rejection of the PSR (alongside Bradley's idealism). But if historical fortune shifts, and the PSR is re-animated (as Della Rocca argues) then it's foreseable Skinner's approach will seem just special pleading.

Third, there seems to be an unstated assumption that if we understand a question in its proper context, it's contingency is revealed; but this, too, presupposes what needs to be argued or shown. Why can't the original context reveal that a certain question was over-determined? Once Hershell discovered the first binary star system and that they obeyed Kepler's laws, it was pretty predictable that questions about the nature and mechanism of action at distance would be re-openend. Of course, this debate was constrained by new theories and conducted in terms that were more mathematized than earlier versions. Even if one allows, as I do, genuine incommensurability between scientific theories, the continuity of and refinement in evidence creates the possibility of asking questions that are overdetermined and that are, in a certain sense, continuous with each other even if particular at a time. 

Skinner also seems to be claiming, in addition, that if the questions are contingent then it follows that the concepts used in answering them, including our own, will also be contingent. (I infer that from his implied claim we have to see our "own concepts as having the same kind of contingency.") But even if one grants that the questions philosophers have asked are contingent, it does not follow that the conceptual structure that are part of the answers to these questions are contingent. After all, given certain starting point X -- that, let's stipulate is contingent -- what follows from X, namely the answers or concepts Y, can be a kind of hypothetical or conditional necessity. And it would be odd to call Y 'contingent.' Certain questions can have only a narrow range of answers, not the least because earlier folk can shape the manner of later uptake.

Skinner is, thus, naturally read as claiming that his general hermeneutic is callibrated to show that all philosophical questions and answers are contingent. In fact, in the interview this is the view he attributes to Collingwood (something already present in Skinner's famous 1969 essay) as follows:

[Collingwood] and his numerous followers always insisted that the history of philosophy, and perhaps especially of moral and political philosophy, should be written as an account, not of how different answers were produced for a set of canonical questions, but rather as a subject in which the questions as well as the answers are always changing, and in which the questions are set by the specific moral and political issues that seem most salient, most troubling, at different times — and they will continually change and people will continually find that the pressures of their societies are operating in such a way as to raise new questions. 

This is indeed Collingwood's view in the Autobiography. The only sameness that Collingwood allows there is the process that gets one from one question to the next answer. But in Collingwood the claim is linked explicitly to a metaphysical claim, which is simultaneously a claim about metaphysics: that at any given time metaphysics just is what people "believe about the world's general nature" and the history of such beliefs. In fact, the whole Autobiography is almost a carricature, albeit an highly entertaining one, of late historicism. Back in 1969, Skinner Himself granted that it was "excessive" because according to Collingwood (and now I quote Skinner 1969): "we cannot even ask if a given philosopher "solved the problem he set himself."" 

Such historicism (and its valorization of the creative and wholly ideosyncratic genius lurking in it) may be true, of course, but it is odd to think that it can be safely presupposed in one's general hermeneutic today. Skinner himself is, of course, much more cautious than Collingwood and, as far as I know, does not rest his own case on such historicism or such claims about metaphysics. But once we remove it from this wholly skeptical position that only a history of beliefs is possible and no knowledge (not even partial of the world's general nature) there is really not much to say on behalf of the idea that "there are only individual answers to individual questions."

But -- you can probably see this coming a mile away -- while Collingwood's 'logic of question and answer' is fully intelligible, even anchored by, and part of a whole cloth that involves such a historicism (including commitments to the unity of epochs and cultures, the denial of the PSR, etc.), in Skinner it is just special pleading. While I will not assert that one's hermeneutic is always beholden to one's metaphysics -- if that were so no historical understanding would be possible --, it should also not be the case that one's hermeneutic settles metaphysical questions by fiat. 

Without Collingwood's broader metaphysical commitments, Skinner's focus on contingency seems arbitrary. That is, somewhat paradoxically, the general hermeneutic is itself best understood as more informative of the commitments of the Skinnerite historian, perhaps even revealing of Skinner's unwritten autobiography, and so best applicable to the recent present than the past.++

 

Mediating between Strauss and Dewey: the forgotten radical liberal Arnold Kaufman

In this paper political theory is regarded as properly serving an instrumental function. This view is elaborated, then defended against the criticisms of Professor Leo Strauss...
Political theory should be a guide to action. The political philosopher should provide those who make policy with principles which will aid them in the attempt to cope with specific sociopolitical problems. Instrumental theories of this type should have two roughly distinguishable components: (1) an ultimate ideal; (2) intermediate ideals in their relation to specific policy recommendations.--Arnold S. Kaufman (1954) "The nature and function of political theory." The journal of philosophy 51.1: 5-22.

This post originates in my interest in finding critical engagements with Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy in the post-WWII era (triggered by (recall here; here; here; especially this one; here; and here) an invite by Sander Verhaegh). The topic intersects with my continuing reflection (recall here; here; here; here; here; here) on Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, which convincingly shows that Rawls' Theory of Justice creates a kind of light-cone which does not allow us to discern events behind it. In fact, Forrester mentions Kaufman's work (in the 1960s) on civil disobedience, and treats Kaufman as "the New Left philosopher and intellectual founder of the “ teach-in.” (p. 52; see also p. 56; 61--in her footnotes she also alerts the reader to his views on Black reparations and participatory democracy.)

Kaufman died, June 6, 1971, aged 44 when his airplane collided with a military jet while traveling. Oddly, his supervisor at Columbia, Charles Frankel, who in the 1960s served the LBJ administration that Kaufman was battling from the left, died a few years later in an armed robbery in his home in Bedford Hills. In fact, while at University of Michigan, Kaufman was at the center of things at the founding of SDS and the Port Huron Statement (as Tom Hayden acknowledges), and was, as Forrester hints, alongside Marshall Sahlins and Rapaport one of the Michigan faculty key to organizing the first teach-in on the Vietnam War. (Sahlins was the supervisor of Graeber, who in some respects, is the heir to Kaufman.) Later, while at UCLA, he was (despite their non-trivial political differences) one of the most outspoken defenders of Angela Davis' appointment at UCLA and freedom to teach.

The (1954) piece I quoted at the top of this post was published before Kaufman completed his dissertation (on Hobhouse). It situates itself between Dewey, who is the advocate of instrumental political theory (but of whom Kaufman is also critical), and Strauss, and also wishes to draw from both. (How Kaufman draws from Strauss I leave aside here.)

One might well wonder why I treat Kaufman as an 'analytic' philosopher. I have two reasons for this: first, the later work from the 1960s is very naturally read as analytic philosophy.* Second, the early work I discuss here bears the imprint of Ernest Nagel (who was then at Columbia) because it anticipates some of the methodological claims of Nagel's 1954 presidential address (while still advocating a more activist stance).

While, in this post I can only leave this second reason as a promissory note, it's worth noting what Kaufman's two main criticisms of Dewey are: first, on Kaufman's  view there ought be also "a concern with theory, with logical interrelatedness, with the generality of political principles which would be anathema for Dewey." (21) In particular (and this very much echoes Nagel), Kaufman claims (while drawing on the analogy between natural and social science), "there is considerable evidence that attention to conceptual adequacy, to logical interrelatedness, and to the connections between a verbal structure and the events it was designed to help human beings control, will yield a rich reward." (22) And second, Dewey's political theory is too "programmatic in character. His formulations were extremely abstract and he always shied from the difficult task of linking those views to the "concrete" situations of which he was so fond of talking." (22; Kaufman acknowledges, of course, that Dewey also acted quite nobly in concrete situations of which he talked.)

While an older generation of political theorists and intellectual historians is definitely familiar with Kaufman, and there is some scholarship on him, to the best of my knowledge analytic philosophy has completely forgotten him in the post Rawlsian era. For example, in Jo Wolff's authoritative and fascinating survey, "Analytic Political Philosophy" (in the OUP volume on the History of Analytic Philosophy), Kaufman goes unmentioned (presumably because he made no impact on those collected in the series in Philosophy, Politics and Society. This is a shame because Kaufman quite clearly anticipates and pioneers the revival of advocacy (which is an important theme in Wolff's article). 

Kaufman recognizes that Leo Strauss is a fierce critic of the instrumentalist stance.** (He quotes Strauss' Review of Dewey 's German Philosophy and Politics, in Social Research.) And pieces together from scattered remarks in Strauss' writing an argument against the instrumentalist approach. Kaufman writes this before the publication of Natural Right and History (but he is aware that it is about the appear and hopes that in it Strauss will spell out some of the details of the argument that Kaufman attributes to him (see note 17 on p. 19)). Here's Kaufman's reconstruction of Strauss' criticism of instrumentalism:

[Strauss] argues (1) that it is possible and necessary for the philosopher to search for an objective political philosophy; (2) but one cannot be objective unless he escapes the influence of opinion; and, finally, (3) the instrumentalist, because he regards himself as a guide to action instead of as a discoverer of an objective external order, is influenced by opinion. Therefore, the instrumentalist cannot be objective and is unable to embark on that investigation which alone constitutes political philosophy.
This is the skeleton of the argument. (16)

Let's call this reconstruction of Strauss's position the 'contamination argument.' In my view it's quite plausible to attribute something like this position to Strauss. A weakness in the contamination argument is that it's quite possible for somebody to hold an instrumentalist view of theory without oneself engaging in action, and so creates an instrumentalist theory for others to use from the ivory tower arm-chair. And it is not obvious that such a theorist is necessarily influenced by opinion even if, let's grant this for the sake of argument, she must take it into account in how to move from principles to successful policy. (I don't quite return to this below, but see my final paragraph.)

Kaufman recognizes that (1) is connected to Strauss' criticism of relativism (historicism, positivism, etc.) and the Weberian fact-value distinction. He treats (1) as common ground between him and Strauss, and even Dewey by claiming that "Dewey does believe we can discover moral truths, these truths are relative to specific conditions." (17) It's left unclear if Kaufman actually agrees with Dewey's style of relativism. (Strauss would reject Dewey's position as stable.)

Most of Kaufman's criticism focuses on (2) & (3), which he treats jointly. A key issue is what is meant by 'objective' and why it's impossible to attain for the instrumentalist theorist. And Kaufman settles on the view that according to Strauss "no one engaged in political activity is in a position, no matter how carefully he attempts to make his investigations impartial, to acquire an understanding or a knowledge of political fundamentals, to determine the nature of the best regime." (18) In Strauss' platonic terminology in the 'cave' no real knowledge is possible.+

At this point, Kaufman goes on the offensive because rather than trying to figure out what would make the contamination argument stick (if that's possible), he starts criticizing (not unfairly) the lack of specificity in Strauss' position who leaves underexplained how 'understanding or knowledge of political fundamentals [is] acquired.' And Kaufman concludes his argument that it is very unlikely that Strauss' method "is continuous with that of the empirical sciences. This constitutes a decisive objection to his underlying theory." (19: emphasis added. Along the way, Kaufman implies that Strauss has no adequate response to Mill's criticism of relying on nature as a standard of adequacy.) 

Kaufman here instantiates what I call "Newton's Challenge to Philosophy," that is to argue from the authority of science to some criticism of an opponent. But this begs the question against Strauss who does not recognize that authority in political philosophy.

In fact, Kaufman has many astute and telling criticism of the details of Strauss' philosophy (including on Strauss' better known criticism of the distinction between facts and values). Kaufman is at his best, in fact, when he channels Hume to point that nature sometimes is itself a source of ungrounded action (this is the argument that eludes Oppenheim when he discerns that Strauss is relying on the PSR (recall here; here)). It is a shame (if you were to care about such matters that) for the reception of Strauss, that to the best of my knowledge no sober debate about these criticism ensued subsequently because unlike many criticism of Strauss they go to the heart of Strauss' project. And unlike a later generation of analytic critics, there is no lazy dismissal.

As should be clear from my comments, I do not view Kaufman's response to the contamination argument as fully adequate. He basically claims not to understand some of its key terms (and does show that Strauss has not clarified them properly), and so ultimately sets it aside. This is unfortunate because Strauss' criticism of the instrumentalist position has been echoed in recent times by analytic philosophers who claim that, say, feminist philosophy (and other 'activist' philosophies) is not really philosophy. (In fact, many of Strauss' apparently substantive positions have been quietly adopted by analytic philosophers in later generations.) Such claims against the instrumentalist conception have been met by vigorous rebuttal from (say amongst others) Dotson and in a number of papers, Srinivasan. But the recent analytic critics rarely dare to put their criticism explicitly in the elitist terms of Strauss (and generally fail to reflect on the nature of political philosophy). This matters not because one must agree with Strauss' return to natural right (and the ancients), or  his elitism, but rather because the most realistic interpretations (and justification) of our imperfect liberal democracies (as one can find in the writings of, say, Hume, Smith, Madison, Kant, and, say, more recently, Arendt) crucially suppose that political life is indeed ruled by opinion and so, if the argument isn't met, that such contamination appears to be inevitable for democratic theorists (broadly conceived). 

Kaufman himself falls in the wide gap between Marxism and Rawlsianism (even its leftist incarnation). With the demise of the New Left and the lack of students to take up his program it is no surprise that he left little mark on post Rawlsian philosophy. Yet, many of his papers from the 1960s have, given that they are the product of immersion in political activism, a sense of freshness and immediacy that I hope to share with you in later digressions. While I do not share in his politics or even his philosophic sensibility, one cannot help but be saddened that his life and career were interrupted just as he was developing his own systematic conception of what a liberal philosophy might be. To be continued.

On Throwing Out Philosophical Babies with the Bathwater

Newton's Corollary VI, however, is not in the Principia for mere ornament. Newton needs it to establish that to a first approximation, the system of a planet and its satellites can be treated as an isolated gravitating system if one ignores the shared orbital motion around the sun. Thus we have a case--treating the sun's gravitational field in the region of the system in question as essentially homogeneous--of what Einstein was to call the "principle of equivalence." Indeed, Newton's sixth Corollary (which deals with a homogeneous field of acceleration), and Huygens's discussion of centrifugal force (which deals with an inhomogeneous one), together adumbrate the principle, exploited so fruitfully by Einstein, that the dynamical states and behavior of bodies in no way distinguish between, on the one hand, a certain kinematical state, and on the other, a second kinematical state implying the same distances and rates of' change of distance, together with a suitable applied field of force. It is a little surprising that Mach, with his relativistic view of motion and his interest in seventeenth-century mechanics did not at all notice these things.--Howard Stein "Some Philosophical Prehistory of General Relativity." Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 8 (1977): 20.

Last week, after my digression on Harman's rediscovery of Adam Smith, I mentioned in a correspondence with Nathan Ballantyne, that Howard Stein also had documented a case in which a philosophical move/insight/distinction had been lost (and then recovered). And after stating this confidently, I thought it prudent to re-read the Stein piece I had in mind (and only belatedly realizing I had blogged about this material before--today's post is thus a retracing of steps). Before I get to the Stein piece a few words of introduction.

Let's stipulate that due to linguistic or geographic isolation or the (deliberate and accidental) destruction of sources sometimes philosophical moves or distinctions are not available at a later date. These may well be cases of linguistic injustice (recall), but do no present further philosophical challenges.

Then there are cases -- now known as Kuhn-losses -- in the sciences, where insights in a discarded paradigm are not ready-at-hand in a new ruling, scientific paradigm. I use 'ready-at-hand' in order to make clear that not all such cases of Kuhn-loss have to involve strict incommensurability.  The insight from the discarded paradigm may just be thought unintuitive or unlikely-to-work in a new paradigm. (This is especially likely to occur in complex policy contexts.) In so far as paradigms structure the availability of intellectual choices (we might call them theoretical affordances), Kuhn-losses are just a natural effect of the disciplining of an intellectual community by text-books and a shared sense of salient experiences (statistical regularities, decisive experiments, etc.). I say 'natural' because time and cognitive attention are scarce goods, and so at the margin there will be a trade-off between the cost of memory and the costs of advancing the paradigm (etc.). The previous sentence may seem abstract, but some such reasoning was (and is) often used to remove the history of the discipline from the graduate curriculum in a field of expertise/science. There is more to be said about such matters, but hopefully that's sufficient for present purposes.

Now, since philosophy does not have paradigms in the scientific sense, and since graduate education in philosophy is not standardized in the way the sciences and the discipline's history is preserved within the graduate curriculum, the existence of the philosophical analogue to Kuhn-loss in philosophy is prima facie a puzzle. Because Kuhn-loss is a term within the philosophy of science about science, and I both deny that philosophy is a science and -- more polemically -- think it a bad idea to think about philosophy in terms familiar from the philosophy of (Kuhnian) science (because unhealthy to the flourishing of philosophy), I use (after nudging from Ballantyne) 'throwing out the baby in the bathwater' when discussing prima facie puzzling cases of the loss of philosophical insight/moves, and distinctions.

And as I noted last week, Harman felt the force of the puzzle. As it turns out, in my reconstruction of the case, it was Sidgwick's strategy, to turn philosophy into a text-book-driven field with the aim of both (i) demarcating normative philosophy from empirical psychology and (ii) to treat ethics as aiming at (and now I use the felicitous phrase of Aaron Garrett) "comprehensive and coherent normative moral theories" that basically caused Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments to be dropped from quasi-standard reading lists in philosophy. And this entailed that some relatively cutting edge responses to objections to impartial spectator theories were not ready at hand when the topic was revived. This opened the door to what we may (in honor of Liam Kofi Bright) call historical arbitrage. 

I think such arbitrage is needed when whole eras of philosophy are treated with disdain in subsequent ages. It's pretty clear that the early moderns actively promoted disdain toward and a lack of acquaintance with scholastic philosophy. And this meant that lots of distinctions and concepts developed by the scholastics were removed from philosophical vocabulary or emptied from a lot of previous significance. And without wishing to raise a prejudice against the practice, we can see that post-Kantian university philosophy in Germany and later in Anglophone world re-introduces a lot of these distinctions and terms back into mainstream philosophy. (To what degree these are really the same concepts given shifting background metaphysics I leave aside.) 

Now, re-reading Stein (one of my doctoral supervisors) was instructive.  First, I was reminded that my own rejection of the ban on using anachronistic terms -- a ban common among certain historians of philosophy (inspired by a species of contextualism)--, is anticipated by Stein (whose paper I read in graduate school).  His version of the argument is instructive:

For the avoidance of anachronism, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to restrict conceptual vocabulary to that of the period under discussion. To impose such a restriction is to inhibit flexibility of thought without any important compensating guarantee against error. It is an intellectual stratagem analogous to that of the shallow empiricism in science that seeks security in rules for the construction of concepts, and achieves only a hobbling of theory. (p. 14)

Stein is explicit that Mach is an example of such shallow empiricism. (p. 14; recall also.) But perhaps forms of operationalism  may also be classified as such. Be that as it may, Stein is right that one can still be anachronistic in interpreting the past even if one only uses actor's categories. For, one may well add apply these categories in a way that is a-historical and at odds with the historical sources. I once claimed (rather too polemically in a NDPR review) that this had happened among scholars who polemically rejected looking at the past through the prism of contemporary issues, but who had tacitly projected a version of the fact-value distinction (in fact, I now understand it was Sidwick's) onto the past that was anachronistic. Moreover, as Daniel Schneider taught me, by using actor's categories, which may well be contested concepts, one is likely to take sides (without always realizing it) in past debates. So, Stein seems to me right that the deployment of anachronism can be illuminating of the historical actors' actual positions (etc.). Stein himself does this throughout the article.  

Okay, now let's turn to the baby with the bath-water. First, in the major key (as it were), Stein himself is an anti-Kuhnian. He concludes his essay with the the claim that "I see, from the seventeenth century up to today a profound community of concerns and a progressive development that has involved both cumulative growth and deepening structural understanding." (27) Stein does not deny a 'conceptual revolution' by Einstein (building on Riemann).

Second, in the minor key (as it were), but my present interest, Stein recognizes that within this profound community of concerns, historical cul-de-sacs and forgetting are possible. Mach really misses something that was available to Newton and Huygens. And while Stein does not  harp on this, plenty of folk influenced by Mach (even after the Einsteinian revolution) missed the point when describing seventeenth century relativity and its development. That the later folk do not see as clearly is especially striking because not only is the seventeenth century mathematical vocabulary is relatively impoverished relative to the later ones, but also there is intellectual continuity from late seventeenth century thinking through the nineteenth century. No major texts are lost and the philosophical vocabulary of the seventeenth and eighteenth century about physics and astronomy does not pose major difficulties to the nineteenth century mind. 

Now, while Mach's case happens within science (broadly conceived), it also involves what we may call the metaphysical principles of science and so, also part of (natural) philosophy proper. (Mach's own institutional position reflects this in his own shifts from mathematics and physics to becoming one of the first professors in the history and philosophy of science.) I put it like that because full awareness of the implications of the "principle of equivalence" seems to have been missed. Now I don't think of myself as an expert on 19th century physics, so take this with a grain of salt. But it's pretty difficult to test empirically the principle of equivalence and so was, perhaps, not of active concern to practicing physicists and natural philosophers. In addition, and this seems to me crucial to Stein's argument, later reflection on relativity was shaped primarily by Leibniz's views (who was treated as the standard bearer for relativistic thinking).

I think this happened in part because of the effect of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence on philosophical thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This displaced interest in Huygens' views (some of which were hardly accessible) and let people to miss that Newton himself had important stuff to say on the topic. While I am pretty convinced that Leibniz-Clarke shaped people's views of Newton's natural philosophy (to this day, alas), I also say this with some nervousness because I don't know if anyone has checked in a systematic way what folk did with or commented on Newton's sixth Corollary. Of course, and this I feel confident in saying, in many places people studied physics through text-books that while Newtonian in some expanded sense did not follow Newton slavishly at all. Even so, because Newton's achievements were culturally so central to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is really striking that some of his most profound insights were only appreciated in the development of a physical theory that surpassed his. 

At this point one may be impatient and suggest that in fact the case at hand while no Kuhn-loss is the effect of paradigmatic thinking in science, which can, in fact, obstruct the insights of (what we may call in homage to Kuhn) the scientific-legislator of the paradigm. And that by creating a division of labor in science (among different fields, but also among theory and experiment), it was left to relatively few to study relativistic theories while Newtonianism ruled. And, in fact, once Maxwell's equations and concerns about the ether opened the door, relativistic principles were explored by (say) Poincare in the late nineteenth century. So the critic may refuse to accept the example as a case about lost philosophical babies.

Fair enough. But, of course, one of the effects of the split between philosophy and science, and the relatively high status of physical science, is the tendency toward paradigmatic thinking in science and philosophy. And one may well conclude, as I do, that in so far as paradigmatic thinking and the prestige of science within philosophy as such shape philosophy we should expect the bathwater, even one nourished with the fruits of science, to carry away important insights. Of course, documenting such cases involves a kind of practical contradiction because in the very act of retrieval the baby is saved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Philosophy Being Political

The elimination of conscious fraud is seldom mentioned in formal discussions of the reasons for repetition in science. The quasi-mythological view that scientists are uniformly of higher moral standards than ordinary mortals is maintained, and subconscious bias is usually depended upon to explain the importance of independent repetition. To repeat, scientists are not much better than other men, and there certainly are at least a few among them who would fake experiments if there was something to be gained therefrom. The induced researcher has something to gain if he can get away with such a fraud. His income depends largely on the reputation he can develop, and this, in turn, depends on his “discoveries.” It is obviously easier to produce an important and exciting article if one simply invents the facts reported than if one is confined to reality. This being so, the prevention of fraud depends on a detection apparatus. Part of the detection apparatus involves repetition (Tullock The organization of inquiry [1966] 2005: 124).

Tullock considers economics, as we have seen, to be a discipline in which the possibility of concealment is greater than in what he calls science. Now, we consider what differential auditing possibilities do to Polanyi’s argument that scientific opinion is uniform. Long before Polanyi the uniformity of opinion had been viewed as a necessary condition for scientific status....

[In his 1962 “Republic of Science”] Polanyi asked what scientists believe and proposed that everyone believes the same thing. How could this be? With the division of labor, scientists in one specialization have no competence in another so why the unanimity? Polanyi appealed to an overlapping neighborhood of competence by which all problems in science is connected....All Polanyi needs is transparency.
Characterizing Polanyi’s argument as a special case of Longfield’s argument shows that we can use one principle to analyze the intra-community connections. This will be enormously helpful because the machinery which has been set in motion for one community can be applied to the other. Thus, [Adam] Smith himself discussed how monopolies form and create inequality within the labor market. A group keeping others out can enrich themselves. If we can move the argument across communities, what does monopolization look like among experts? We are using “experts” because following Tullock, we do not know whether they are “scientists” until we know something about the institutional structure in which they function.
Tullock, when he rehearses Polanyi’s argument, silently provides the missing step and thus fails to impress his delightful cleverness on the reader. To make the overlapping competence argument work, there must be data audits, results must be checked. He says this over and over again. This distinguishes economics and science. As Tullock writes, economics allows concealment. Therefore economics allows factions and it doesn’t have the Polanyi efficiency properties. Sandra J. Peart & David M. Levy (2012) "Tullock on motivated inquiry: expert-induced uncertainty disguised as risk," Public Choice, 171-3

The quoted paragraphs is from a paper, even research program, methodological analytic egalitarianism, that (as regular readers know) has long influenced me. I was inspired to go back to it by Liam Kofi Bright's recent, interesting argument that "all philosophy is political is a trivial consequence of the more interesting fact that all inquiry is...united." [HT Dailynous] Drawing on Neurath, Bright argues this unity is a regulative or normative ideal, "it is an achievement to be won, not a fact to be granted." Neurath's argument is also a bit self-interested because within the division of scientific labor, it gives philosophers, a new kind of philosopher, a special role, of (linguistic/conceptual) orchestration. (See here; I link to this piece because Neurath is especially clear about the anti-totalitarian political significance of the program.) Uncharacterstically, Bright does not quite mention this, but the general gist is clear from his presentation:

The unity of science consists in the fact that we may potentially bring the results, methods, and fruits of inquiry in one field to bear on all others, providing we take the time to formulate our claims in a way that can be mutually understood, and are sufficiently clear in stating logical or evidential relations. The unity of science is thus a kind of consequence of the attitude of seeking to be clear and assist one another.*

If it is remembered that 'We' here is 'we [new] philosophers' Bright's position is echt Neurathian. If the 'we' here is all of of us engaged in science, Bright has subtly added a set of virtues some epistemic some social to the practice of all science. Notice, and Bright is very good on this, that even if one rejects some such normative unity program, the attitude is useful because "we cannot ever rule out the potential relevance of any one field of inquiry to another." Bright gives some cute historical examples. I would just add that anybody who is engaged in debates in contemporary climate science will be struck how many different,and different kinds of sciences are brought to bear on each other all the time. So far so good.

Now, here's my observation, if we think of different sciences also as reflecting different interests, then we should not automatically assume that when two sciences are brought in communication/trade with each other they will automatically agree. As Max Weber pointed out, pluralism is a consequence of the division of labor and differentiated interests. It is, thus, to be expected that when two sciences or sub-fields within a discipline/science are made to communicate some disagreement is to be expected. (Obviously, it does not follow there will always be disagreement or even most of the time.) The claim in this paragraph is strengthened, perhaps a trivial consequence, of the idea that not all sciences rely solely on epistemic commitments (see Heather Douglas' now classic book). 

Of course, if we think of the ways in which sciences are brought to bear on each other, it is quite possible to come to agreement either by creating a third new science (which may well has its task of figuring out the discrepancies between the two sciences) or by transformation of one of the sciences (in dialogue with each other). [If you think not all disciplines are science, then follow Peart/Levy and substitute expert-disciplines where necessary!] This sounds abstract, but actually happens quite a bit in the history of science. 

I put the Tullock in, in part, to show that Tullock anticipates the debates over the replication crisis (in some bits of the academy) by several decades. And that is I want to strengthen Bright's argument (in his spirit, see here) by suggesting that even if one is doubtful of the desirability or feasibility of general unity of science that he (and I, with slightly different sensibility) embraces, there are additional reasons to embrace the idea of leaving room to keeping open, '"the potential relevance of any one field of inquiry to another." It reduces the incentives and possibilities for fraud and rents for members of autonomous disciplines. As we have seen, that is not just a hypothetical possibility.

But, and here I close, the idea of intellectual even disciplinary autonomy is very much part of the DNA of philosophy, perhaps uniquely so (with exception of 'pure' math) [recall this old post on Williamson]. To be an intellectual self-legislator, to have autonomous/foundational or self-sufficient reason, is an ideal that is a permanent temptation for philosophers (in ways not so for other disciplines within the division of intellectual labor)--go read Descartes, or even Kant. I think it is some such ideal that makes some philosophers also uneasy about the very idea of (what I call) a philosophical politics within philosophy or in its relationships with other disciplines. The Neurathian offers orchestration (and its modern successors) as a consolation prize to them (if orchestration seems like the wrong way to go, then see the program of synthetic philosophy!)

Of course, the would be autonomous philosopher can refuse to allow his philosophy to be scrutinized by outsiders. (Just as not all offers to trade are accepted.) The risk of such hermeticisms, of thinking philosophy pure and untainted by politics, is, in fact, to make philosophy a hiding place for charlatans and cultists.  It is amusing to see my own ilk, analytic philosophers embracing that risk.

 

 

On Hume's New Microscope.

Complex ideas may, perhaps, be well known by definition, which is nothing but an enumeration of those parts or simple ideas, that compose them. But when we have pushed up definitions to the most  simple ideas, and find still more ambiguity and obscurity; what resource are we then possessed of?  By what invention can we throw light upon these ideas, and render them altogether precise and determinate to our intellectual view? Produce the impressions or original sentiments, from which the ideas are copied. These impressions are all strong and sensible. They admit not of ambiguity. They are not only placed in a full light themselves, but may throw light on their correspondent ideas, which lie in obscurity. And by this means, we may, perhaps, attain a new microscope or species of optics, by which, in the moral sciences, the most minute, and most simple ideas may be  so enlarged as to fall readily under our apprehension, and be equally known with the grossest and most sensible ideas, that can be the object of our enquiry.--David Hume, first Enquiry, 4.7

In my interpretation, Hume's 'new microscope' represents (recall) a partial departure from his method in the Treatise. On my interpretation, in the Treatise, Hume embraces a normative theory of proper cognition (I have defended that here, here, and, especially, here). We can't really think without adequate ideas. I think this idea is represented best in this passage: "Tis impossible to reason justly, without understanding perfectly the idea concerning which we reason; and ‘tis impossible perfectly to understand any idea, without tracing it up to its origin, and examining that primary impression, from which it arises. The examination of the impression bestows a clearness on the idea; and the examination of the idea bestows a like clearness on all our reasoning." (1.3.2.4) In the Treatise, Hume presupposes what has come to be known as his 'copy principle.' And he suggests, I argue, that as part of genuine reasoning one must go, as it were, meta and introspect on the source of one's ideas. And then only so-called adequate ideas are "the foundation of all human knowledge." In my interpretation, Hume thinks (and I believe he is very indebted to Berkeley on this point) that much that passes for reasoning even in the sciences is a kind of ersatz-reasoning impressing the learned and gullible alike. 

But in the first Enquiry, Hume backtracks a bit. In particular, I think the normative theory of proper cognition with clear ideas is dropped as a general principle. This is not to deny that some of it is still presupposed; after all, Hume continues to rely on the fact that in normally functioning human impressions are faithfully copied into ideas. That is, the strategy of Hume’s science of man remains the same: trace ideas back to simple impressions (or original sentiments) and inspect these under the (mental) “new microscope.” However, the domain of application is now limited to the “moral sciences” and not “all knowledge” (as promised in introduction of the Treatise).

This last point is crucial. In the first Enquiry, Hume makes a distinction between the epistemology proper for natural philosophy and the one in the moral sciences. For, in the study of natural philosophy Hume allows that in “almost in every part of nature, there is contained a vast variety of springs and principles, which are hid, by reason of their minuteness or remoteness… that it is at least possible the contrariety of events may not proceed from any contingency in the cause, but from the secret operation of contrary causes.” (EHU 8.13)* The quoted sentence is very important in the so-called 'New Hume' debate, but here I ignore (as is my usual practice) that debate.** But Hume's claim entails that natural philosophy can almost never produce secure knowledge of hidden reality.

But according to the 'new microscope' passage, in social science+ “the most minute” ideas  can be made to “fall readily” under our apprehension. So, in one sense the scope  ofHume’s ambitions  have been dramatically curtailed. The science of man does not provide a mental microscope for all the natural sciences (nor natural religion and mathematics). But Hume continues to imply -- and here comes rather close to the kind of reasoning we now tend to associate with Vico -- that due to the mental microscope the moral sciences  are, in principle, in better epistemic shape than the natural sciences. Original sentiments are human, and so knowable. This is why the “true and proper province,” of “natural and unassisted reason” ends up being restricted to “common life.” The real target here is, as becomes clear in chapter 11 in the first Enquiry, the Newtonian attempt (as exemplified by Newton’s correspondence with Bentley and Clarke’s writings more generally) to make cosmogony  an integral part of natural philosophy, but that's for another occasion.

Garber vs Della Rocca, reviewed (I)

The present issue of the Journal for the History of Philosophy (JHP) has a two-tiered debate between Daniel Garber (Princeton) and Michael Della Rocca (Yale) over (i) the status of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) in Spinoza and (ii) the methodology of the history of philosophy. Both (i-ii) are connected to (iii) a more inchoate debate over what philosophy is. That Spinoza and the PSR would be the occasion of such a debate is no surprise; ever since Russell embraced brute facts (and rejected the PSR) and treated Spinoza as an exemplar of non-philosophy (recall), the place of Spinoza within analytical philosophy is not merely a historical question, but also a means at discerning the contested limits of philosophy and an open path toward renewing philosophy. The previous sentence is to side a bit with Della Rocca, who is very clear that "Spinoza’s philosophy can help us to learn or re-learn how to do philosophy in a more productive vein" (533ff) than the analytical status quo. (It is no surprise that much of the most influential Anglo scholarship on Spinoza (from Curley, Bennett, etc.) has been akin to rehabilitation projects in part by reinterpreting Spinoza into fashionable categories and problematics (and to downplay the mystical and therapeutic elements discerned by Russell)).

As an aside, the very same issue of JHP in which the Garber/Della Rocca exchange appears, also has two papers on Kant, one on Aristotle, one on Descartes--all on topics that reflect ongoing debates in scholarship (with undoubtedly fresh and important angles--I know several of the authors and they are all terrific). By contrast, the book-review section includes topics that are a bit more off-the-beaten-track. Obviously the sample size is small (N=1), and Jasper Reid's piece does not fit my claim, but (a quick glance at the other two issues of the present volume also confirm that) the pages of JHP represent a very conservative orientation toward the relevant subject matters of the history of philosophy. This orientation is a key feature of the PGR ecology in the field (recall this post). 

The core interpretive issue between Garber and Della Rocca is, at the surface, the status and content of the PSR in Spinoza. (I say "surface" because below it, they agree that rationalism vs empiricism has to be discarded as an organizing principle in the history of philosophy--about that deepy some other time more.) In Della Rocca's hands the PSR is both (i) the master-principle (hereafter MP) and (ii) has a very broad metaphysical scope--Garber denies both that there are any such MPs to be found in the text of Spinoza (and, thus ruling out the PSR's role as a MP) and that in so far as Spinoza embraces commitments akin to the PSR his texts support readings that are thinner in scope than Della Rocca allows. It is worth noting three features of their exchange: (A) that even if Della Rocca's view on (i) are wrong -- say because there is an alternative, perhaps even more fundamental MP, in Spinoza [say, that truth = existence (recall), or truth = being] from which the PSR follows, his reading of (ii) could still be defended. (B) That upon closer inspection, the debate between Garber and Della Rocca over (ii) really turns into a debate over the explanatory resources available to Spinoza in being able to account for the relationship between what follows from the essence/nature of Substance/God and particular infinite series of modes (and the concomitant metaphysical ruling out of some alternative series). (C) That both offer their readings in terms of fairly traditional textual hermeneutics (despite some of their self-presentation).*

On (B) in Garber's hands the problem is that the way God's nature is (and, thus, the way things follow from it) becomes a "brute fact" that violates the PSR. Della Rocca is right, I think, that there is a response to this complaint from within Spinoza's philosophy to be found in E1p33d (and also 1p16, which goes unmentioned by our protagonists, even though Garber (p. 515) quotes a passage in which Spinoza flags its significance for the debate). Della Rocca admits in a footnote that Spinoza's response is not very satisfying philosophically, but does not elaborate. As textual exegesis I am inclined to agree with Della Rocca, but see the next paragraph. (It is to my supervisor's credit that his students do not form a doctrinal or magisterial school.)

The judgment of the previous paragraph is the consequence of my study of Samuel Clarke's (1705) response to Spinoza (in his Demonstration); Clarke's philosophical views on the relationship between God's nature and God's existence puts him very close to Spinoza's position in E1p33 (about which another time more [recall]), but Clarke also noted that E1p33 generates  two important tensions with other features of the Ethics. First, Clarke discerned that Spinoza stipulates that the ratio of motion to rest in the universe remains the same, where the universe is taken as an infinite individual that keeps its nature or form (see E2p13L4 and E2p13L7). Keeping this ratio fixed is entirely compatible with variation in the actual motion of the universe. All the same, given that we are dealing with a ratio here, Clarke is right that at any given time there is an intelligible sense in which “there might possibly have been originally more or less motion in the universe than there actually was.” That is, if God's fixed nature is expressed in a fixed ratio, then very same substantial nature is compatible with different motions and this variation violates the PSR. So, Garber has discerned a genuine problem, but misplaces the location.

Second, Clarke (and all the Newtonians) can note that the PSR is too granular (and, again, this echoes the spirit of Garber's objection and, perhaps, explains why Della Rocca has to concede that Spinoza's position isn't so impressive); Spinoza is committed to there being sufficient reason for infinite variety in the modes (E1p16 and E1p28). But Spinoza's metaphysics lacks resources to explain the particular (confused though it may be) characteristics of the variety we observe--here Spinoza inherits some of the problems of Cartesian physics (despite his severe criticisms of Descartes) [for more careful account]; Newtonian physics can help explain observed accelerations and the evolution of (relatively) closed systems of bodies (in terms of abstract quantities) over time. Even if Spinoza is right to express caution about overconfidence here, Newtonian physics did put us on the road to a truer philosophy. 

Clearly, Clarke is a hostile critic, and he is reading Spinoza through his engagement with Toland. I would not claim that Clarke gets us (to quote Garber) "the historical Spinoza who lived and worked in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic." (As a historical aside, Spinoza also lived and worked in a the seventeenth-century Dutch Stadhouderschap!) But the proto-reading I have offered here is in some sense more historically grounded than either the one on offer from Della Rocca or, ironically, Garber! For, Della Rocca notes that his interpretation revives a historically important interpretation (associated with Jacobi and British Idealism). As it happens, I have considerable sympathy with that interpretation as a means toward articulating an important, enduring philosophical position (in the way that Garber allows (521)), but the jury is out if it is compatible with seventeenth century views available to Spinoza. (My quick and dirty judgment: no; Spinoza is closer to Averroes and a variety of neo-Platonism!)

One might think that I am being unfair to Garber here because he is very concerned with avoiding terms that are not actor's categories (511ff). But as Dan Schneider has pointed out, when one deploys terms from the past in describing the past, then one is often unwillingly (or unwittingly) siding with one side or another in a past debate. Schneider's observation is important because in philosophy often the key concepts are especially -- if not essentially -- contested. (Recall; see also here.) So, even if we are only trying to understand the past in terms of the actor's intentions (certainly not my program), we have every right, and sometimes a duty if we wish to understand the past, to introduce vocabulary unavailable to the historical actors. As Della Rocca notes, if we wish just to avoid (being a Borges's Pierre Menard and) merely replicate the past in the same words as itself, the business of historians of philosophy starts with going beyond the surface text in some way or another.

While we have made some progress on (i-iii), I have also made some promissory notes (about (A) among other things). So, to be continued...

On Descartes, Dennett, and Design (Cicero's Posidonian Argument, Reconsidered)

Imo indocti haec magna cum voluptate spectabunt et facillimo negotio ea quae nunc nullo modo capiunt, intelligunt.--I. Beeckman (1629), commenting on the effect of a planetarium.

Last week I had the good fortune to participate in Daniel C. Dennett's lectures, “Evolving Minds: From Bacteria to Bach and Back,” which he gave at the invitation of the Ferrater Mora Chair in the lovely town of Girona (see here for more info). During one of our breaks, we happened to discuss Dennett's "Descartes's Argument from Design" (Journal of Philosophy, 2008), in which he draws on Descartes's response to Caterus to make sense of Descartes's a posteriori argument for the existence of God (in Meditations 3). The key passage, which -- as Dennett notes (338) -- is repeated in Principles of Philosophy is, "if someone possesses the idea of a machine, and contained in the idea is every imaginable intricacy of design, then the correct inference is plainly that this idea originally came from some cause in which every imaginable intricacy really did exist, even though the intricacy now has only objective existence in the idea."

The argument from intricate machine to designer and then from most intricate design to perfect/godly designer would have been familiar to Descartes from various sources. But the most beautiful version of the argument is in Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods (recall), where a working planetarium (ascribed both to Posidonius and to Archimedes) is used to make the point. That Cicero may well be part of Descartes's inspiration is suggested by the significance of Archimedes's (planetary) sphere in both Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods (and some of his other relevant works, especially Tusculan Disputations [which is an important text in Descartes's development; see Menn]) and Descartes's Meditations (admittedly, Descartes is more interested in Archimedes as a mathematician than planetarium builder). [Above I link to Beeckman's treatment which is undoubtedly inspired by Cicero.]

Dennett, who has many astute comments on Descartes's argument, does not comment on the fact that at first blush, it would seem that Descartes innovates on the traditional argument by insisting that an idea or (judging by his description) an intricate blue-print can do the relevant work in the argument. It's one thing to take a working (or empirically succesful) planetarium "to Scythia or to Britain" where "no one in those barbarous regions would doubt that that planetarium had been constructed by a rational process," it's quite another point to a blueprint of an intricate machine and, say, see.

But the true novelty of Dennett's reading is that he ultimately interprets Descartes as claiming that Descartes, too, appeals to a working machine in the argument to design:

[Descartes] had used that very idea [of God] and no other as the sole foundation for his theory of... Le Monde...The fact remains that it was a huge theory, full of intricacy, remarkably self consistent, often fiendishly persuasive even in today's hindsight. Any idea that could generate such a stunning intellectual edifice would be a prodigiously fecund idea...because his idea is not just made of lots of good parts (ideas available to everybody), and not because his idea is of a wonderful thing? God; it is because his idea is (he thought) a stunningly well-designed engine of scientific discovery.

That is to say, on Dennett's reading, Descartes thinks he can point to his whole scientific theory as the working machine that represents and predicts the machinery of the universe. This is not the place to what degree pointing to Le Monde or the Principles of Natural Philosophy will really be more persuasive (in such a design argument context) than pointing to a working planetarium. Rather, my point here is that on Dennett's interpretation of Descartes, his scientific theory of the universe presupposes Godly design. Now the nature of this presupposition is, of course, a tricky matter -- and it took more than a century to work this out, including hard work by Toland, Clarke, Hume, Adam Smith, and Kant --, but we can represent the logical form of Descartes's argument, as interpreted by Dennett, as follows:

(I)                A condition of the possibility of (an intended) successful scientific representation of nature is that nature is not the product of chance, but (I*) design. &

(II)               Science is successful.[1]

(III)             ∴ There is a designer (or nature is designed).

I call this the transcendental version of the Posidonian argument. This argument became hotly debated in the eighteenth reception of Spinoza's and Newton's philosophies (often with a nod to Cicero and Posidonius/Archimedes) and I have been working on a short book on this topic. But if Dennett is right then the transcendental version of the Posidonian argument is not a by-product of the scientific revolution, but it's right there at the heart of that process that was once called the mechanization of nature. 

 

On Necessity in Clarke & Newton (and Spinoza), against Toland....

In his correspondence with (a then very youthful) Joseph Butler, Samuel Clarke writes the following:

Necessity absolute and antecedent in the order of nature to the existence of any subject has nothing to limit it; but if it operates at all (as must needs do), it must operate (if I may so speak) everywhere and at all times alike…. (Clarke’s “Answer to Butler’s Third Letter,” Dec 10, 1713)[1]

To put Clarke’s point informally: absolute necessity has the same impact everywhere and all times and should have the same consequence everywhere and all the time. So, if such necessity operates in some respect, Y, then we ought to expect Y to be homogenous in relevant ways. And if the most fundamental form of necessity operates in all (possible) respects, then we ought to expect general homogeneity.   

This view of necessity turns out to be a non-trivial principle that, surprisingly enough, is shared by Clarke and Spinoza, and, even in considerable part, by Newton. (Recall Newton's claim in the General Scholium (added to the third edition): “No variation of things arises from blind metaphysical necessity, which must be the same always and everywhere.”) I emphasize two features of Clarke’s position. First, according to Clarke necessity is the “formal cause” of God (Clarke’s “answer to sixth Letter to another Gentleman” [published first in 1738]).[2] That is to say, Clarke does not just allow the question, ‘what causes God?’ to be intelligible,[3] but it even has a proper response: in a certain sense, one can say that for Clarke God is the consequence of a species of necessity.[4]  There is, in fact, an unmistakable echo of this doctrine of the relationship between necessity and God in Newton's "General Scholium:" “’Tis allowed by all that the supreme God exists necessarily; and by the same necessity he exists [391] always and every where” (emphasis added). In the quote, Newton insists (i) that God’s necessary existence is common ground among all philosophers.[5] Newton, then, (ii) ascribes to necessity explanatory ‘power’ to help account for (at least some of) God’s properties. It’s this type of explanatory power that is captured by Clarke’s claim that necessity is a formal cause.

Second, Clarke uses the necessity as formal cause of God principle to rule out the existence of multiple substances (Clarke’s first response to Butler, 10 nov 1713, and see Clarke's A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, [hereafter Demonstration] VII). So, like Spinoza [(E1D1 & E1p7)] & (E1p5&E1p7), Clarke treats God as the only true substance.[6] In particular, in order to make credible substance monism, Clarke relies on the idea that absolute necessity does not just have the same impact everywhere and all times and should have the same consequence everywhere and all the time, but also that in the most absolute sense these consequences ‘displace’ the ‘instantiation’ of other hypothetical (but not genuinely possible) effects derived from hypothetical (but not genuinely possible) causes. [7]

If we attend to some of the further details of Clarke’s letter to Butler, we also learn something about the explicit target of Clarke’s argument:

On fetishizing Actors's Categories.

A preface (co-written with Zvi Biener), defending the title 'Newton and Empiricism,' has come under fire from the Otago-school (see this post by Kirsten Walsh). The Otago-school insists that 'empiricism' is anachronistic and that we need to use a distinction between experimental and speculative philosophers (they use the acronym ESD) in order to do justice to even Newton. Here's Walsh:

Over the last four years, we have provided many arguments for the superiority of the ESD over the RED. An important line of argument has been to show that ‘experimental philosophy’ and ‘speculative philosophy’ were the key terms of reference used by the actors themselves, and that they characterised their own work in terms of this division. For example, I have argued here, here, here and here that Newton is best understood as an experimental philosopher.

It's true there are features of Newton's enterprise that fit the 'experimental' paradigm (as understood by early modernists) nicely--the Opticks is characteristic this (as I.B. Cohen recognized a long time ago). The problem is 'Otago' has never come to terms to the fact that Newton's Principia is much better understood in terms of Huygens's Horologium Oscillatorium, which is presupposed in a lot of the technical discussions of the Principia. Huygens' book does not fit the ESD at all. Strikingly in her blog post, Walsh misses this point even though it was signalled in the very first paragraph of our introduction: "Newton...explicitly affiliated himself in the Principia with the mathematical-experimental tradition of Galileo and Huygens." That is to say, the ESD fits the mainstream in the Royal Society (say between 1660-1685) very well, but is un-illuminating in other respects.* Sure, it's legitimate to claim that in some respects Newton is a "development of the experimental philosophy," (emphasis in original) but if you systematically overlook the Horologium, you can't even begin to do justice to Newton's Principia. It's like discussing Virgil in the context of Roman poetry without ever mentioning Homer.

On the Carnap-Strawson debate and the soul of Analytical Philosophy during the Cold War

If the reader is shocked or offended by the two last-mentioned procedures, I hasten to assure him that they, occur, of course, only in the more barbarous regions, like America, where the sacrilege of tampering with the holy tradition of language is sometimes connived at.--Carnap "P.F. Strawson on Linguistic Naturalism" (937)

The distinction I used above between the way things happen in the world, and our own natures, is here, though vague, important. For it is a part of our nature that, things other than ourselves being as they are, it is natural for us to have the conceptual apparatus that we do have. But human nature is diverse enough to allow of another, though related, use of philosophical imagination. This consists in imagining ways in which, without things other than ourselves being different from what they are, we might view them through the medium of a different conceptual apparatus; Some metaphysics is best, or most charitably, seen as consisting in part in exercises of this sort...Of course, even when it can be so interpreted, it is not presented as a conceptual or structural revision by means of which we might see things differently; it is presented as a picture of thing as they really are, instead of as they delusively seem. This presentation with its contrast between esoteric-reality and daily delusion, involves, and is the consequence of, the unconscious distortion of ordinary concepts, i.e. of the ordinary use of linguistic expressions. So metaphysics though it can sometimes be charitably interpreted in the way I suggest, in fact always involves paradox and perplexities of the kind I first mentioned; and sometimes embodies no rudimentary vision, but merely rudimentary mistakes. Strawson (1963) "Carnap's Views on Constructed Systems Versus Natural Languages in Analytic Philosophy," (516; [emphases in original--ES])

Branden Fitelson wrote me a lovely, critical letter in response to viewing my lecture, "Anti-Mathematicism and Formal Philosophy" at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy available online. In it he reminded me of an exchange by Strawson and Carnap that he uses in teaching. The papers represent philosophical fireworks of the highest order--they are, as Strawson's title indicates, a debate over the very soul of analytical philosophy. The papers repay repeated re-readings, and both sides make many  insightful observations on the philosophical merits of formal philosophy (a topic I regularly post about, see here and here). In particular, one is reminded -- and this is especially noteworthy in a philosophical age in which the guide to graduate education provided by the PGR does not even consider expertise in philosophy of education as worthy of note -- that one of the central philosophical issues is the nature of philosophical education.*

As a speculative aside, prompted by some remarks by Jason Stanley, the displacement of philosophical education as worthy of any attention was, in part, due to the success of Strawson's and Carnap's students and their intellectual allies in discrediting the non-scientific wing of Pragmatism associated, say, with Dewey. Subsequently, even Plato scholarship was reconstituted as unrelated to philosophical education. (The Meno and Theaetetus are then taught as obviously belonging primarily to the history of epistemology, etc.)

To return to my main point, in his response to Strawson, Carnap construes the debate as one between (linguistic) "naturalists" (that is Strawson, although this is not Strawson's term) and "constructionists" (Carnap). This construction allows Carnap to recycle some of his anti-Quine-ean moves against an opponent that has fewer resources to respond. He then offers effective responses to most of Strawson's charges, showing that they rely on unreliable distinctions/assumptions, misrepresentations of Carnap's program, and, crucially, that even where Strawson's positive program has merit, the two programs can be mutually supportive. Now, due to Strawson's title and the way the dialectic is construed it seems that what is at stake is ultimately the respective roles of natural language (and empirical observations on use), and the role of formal languages (and the merits of explication).+ Because Carnap has the last word in the Schilpp volume, he also gets away ignoring a feature of Strawson's argument (the passage quoted above) that Strawson admittedly qualifies as not being "central," (515), but does characterize as "inportant" and "a wide field open to philosophical imagination." (516)

I have quoted Strawson's defense of the role of "imagining ways in which, without things other than ourselves being different from what they are, we might view them through the medium of a different conceptual apparatus." Now the first thing to note is that this is presented as an extremely modest enterprise. There is no sense that an alternative conception of reality might be a guide to action or generate a vision of reality worth attaining (see philosophical prophecy). Given that Strawson makes disparaging remarks ("grandiose plan of logical atomism") of Carnapian "planners," the conservative implications are deliberate here. Strawson's version of descriptive analysis and descriptive metaphysics, self-consciously leaves things alone (recall yesterday's post). No doubt there will be howls of derision from Oxford -- if they pretended to care about my digressions -- but this is (further) evidence of the ignoble effects of the cold war on philosophy's self-image.