Digressions&Impressions

Quining Quine, Dennett/Borges and Tocqueville's Spinosizing Spinozism

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I like to imagine that Dan Dennett started his celebrated (1988) "Quining qualia" as an attempt to publish a journal article in the manner of a comic, Borges story. (In fairness to my teacher, this was in the age before blogs!) How else to explain the erudite reference to Descartes in the first paragraph of the essay, and then the mock-ironic, scholarly reference to the eight (!) edition of "The Philosophical Lexicon (Dennett 1978c"--I love that well-placed 'c'!-- in the second paragraph. The give away, the tell, is the earnest claim that "I don't deny the reality of conscious experience" in the fourth paragraph. 

Perhaps because I tend to read "Quining qualia" as high comedy, I started to misremember the title as 'Quining Quine' in graduate school. As memetic evolution goes, this is minor slippage. Now, in the original 'to quine' means "To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant." But in my fictitious Quining Quine, 'to quine' means "to offer an immanent criticism and/or a reductio that turns out to be an extreme example of what's being criticized." {Look up it up in the fifteenth edition!}

I was reminded of these halcyon days by the sixth chapter of Russell Kirk's (1953) The Conservative Mind, which repeatedly reminds the reader that Tocqueville is a critic of the so-called system or "doctrine of necessity," (p. 197 & 201) that is, Spinozism. And Kirk hints at a neat argument -- a Quining Quine par excellence -- in which Spinozism is itself historicized. Before I allowed myself a further flight of fancy, I thought it useful to re-open Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and take a sober look at Volume 2, Chapter VII: "Of The Cause Of A Leaning To Pantheism Amongst Democratic Nations" in the Henry Reeve translation of 1840 (for any scholars complaining, it's the edition reviewed by J.S. Mill). 

The chapter is a very brief two paragraphs. For the sake of simplicity I just quote it:

I shall take occasion hereafter to show under what form the preponderating taste of a democratic people for very general ideas manifests itself in politics; but I would point out, at the present stage of my work, its principal effect on philosophy. It cannot be denied that pantheism has made great progress in our age. The writings of a part of Europe bear visible marks of it: the Germans introduce it into philosophy, and the French into literature. Most of the works of imagination published in France contain some opinions or some tinge caught from pantheistical doctrines, or they disclose some tendency to such doctrines in their authors. This appears to me not only to proceed from an accidental, but from a permanent cause.

When the conditions of society are becoming more equal, and each individual man becomes more like all the rest, more weak and more insignificant, a habit grows up of ceasing to notice the citizens to consider only the people, and of overlooking individuals to think only of their kind. At such times the human mind seeks to embrace a multitude of different objects at once; and it constantly strives to succeed in connecting a variety of consequences with a single cause. The idea of unity so possesses itself of man, and is sought for by him so universally, that if he thinks he has found it, he readily yields himself up to repose in that belief. Nor does he content himself with the discovery that nothing is in the world but a creation and a Creator; still embarrassed by this primary division of things, he seeks to expand and to simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole. If there be a philosophical system which teaches that all things material and immaterial, visible and invisible, which the world contains, are only to be considered as the several parts of an immense Being, which alone remains unchanged amidst the continual change and ceaseless transformation of all that constitutes it, we may readily infer that such a system, although it destroy the individuality of man – nay, rather because it destroys that individuality – will have secret charms for men living in democracies. All their habits of thought prepare them to conceive it, and predispose them to adopt it. It naturally attracts and fixes their imagination; it fosters the pride, whilst it soothes the indolence, of their minds. Amongst the different systems by whose aid philosophy endeavors to explain the universe, I believe pantheism to be one of those most fitted to seduce the human mind in democratic ages. Against it all who abide in their attachment to the true greatness of man should struggle and combine.

So, the first thing to notice is that Tocqueville is treating of Spinozism, which he associates with "the Germans" (Hegel, Schelling, etc.), not Spinoza. I return to that below. But writing in the nineteenth century, Tocqueville sees Spinozism as the rising ("most of the works") background ideology of the age.

Somewhat surprisingly, Tocqueville, who is purportedly critical of the doctrine of necessity, ascribes the rise of Spinozism not to chance (an 'accidental cause'), as one might expect, but to a structural (in his terminology a 'general') cause. To be sure, I am not accusing Tocqueville of a kind of inconsistency, because a general cause is compatible with the working of providence (itself the effect of the most general cause, after all). That is, Tocqueville is critical not just of Spinozism, but also the system of chance (Epicureanism). 

The structural cause of Spinozism is, in fact, egalitarianism (or democracy), or in Nietzsche's terms (which Tocqueville anticipates) the homogeneity or uniformity of last men. And because it eliminates all hierarchy of being (no angels, demons, superior men), Spinozism "fosters the pride, whilst it soothes the indolence, of their minds." The chapter closes with a call to arms (again anticipating Nietzsche) that against the false magnanimity of such Spinozisms those who wish to foster true magnanimity must organize ('combine') and fight (struggle).   

Now, it's a core commitment of Spinozism to historicize the holy texts inspired by revelation. And so, I joked on twitter that here Tocqueville is Spinozing Spinozism (in the manner of Quining Quine).

I could stop here, but as always the joke is on me.

In the "preface" of Spinoza's (1670) Theological Political Treatise (hereafter TTP) Spinoza claims, in aside, that already before his time all lead the same kind of life [vita eadem omnibus est]. Long before Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and (echoing Foucault [recall Lecture 5 on, 7 February 1979, pp. 113 and 117]) Sombart, and Marcuse, Spinoza diagnoses a flattening of human kind such that within modernity the differences among people become very narrow and track shallow exterior features, opinions, and religious practices. (See my paper on Spinoza.)* So, while Tocqueville may be Spinozing Spinozism critically, Spinoza got there first. Spinoza, too, understands his own era as an age of flattening homogeneity. And, in fact, the main point of the aside is the conclusion that the existing church has lost its way; nothing [nihl] remains of the religion; it's an empty shell with some adornment [externum cultum], lacking in inner refinement and substance.

Again, I could stop. But it is worth noting that in Chapter VII of TTP Spinoza explicitly alerts his reader to the fact sometimes, when dealing with "simple and most intelligible" matters (of the sort we find in Euclid) we don't need biographical and contextual knowledge in order to understand the intentions of an author. Geometrical entities lack power and have simple (generative) definitions, and so are simple and most intelligible in his terminology. In context, Spinoza seems to imply that in order to understand the author(s) of biblical texts "we need to know about his life, concerns and customs, or in what language, to whom and when he wrote, or the fate of his book, or its various readings, or how and by whose deliberation it was accepted." [VII.67] To be sure, in order to understand the moral teachings, which are also fairly simple and straightforward, of the Bible, such historicism is unnecessary Spinoza suggests.  Oddly, in the following chapter, Spinoza goes on to suggest that Ezra is the author of the (first main parts) of the Hebrew Bible and then goes on to historize Ezra who gave Israel the Bible as we have it in order to provide the re-founding of Israel with a religion that simultaneously teaches politics.

I have long thought that Spinoza invites us here to be alert to the circumstances of his own life and times, that is, to historicize his own text. And that's because unlike Euclid, Spinoza's works (even the ones in geometric order) do not merely deal with the simple and most intelligible matters. Spinoza is concerned with power and its differentiated effects. In fact, as an aside, in returning to Spinoza's text, I noticed that Spinoza introduces VII.67, with a proverbial remark that "For things which by their nature are easily perceived can’t be said so obscurely that they aren’t easily understood. As the proverb says: to one who understands a word is enough.” [VII.66] Caution ahead. Be that as it may, Spinoza is explicit that he is writing in a leveling age. 

Again, I could stop here. But I was reminded that Spinoza, too, hints at an account of greatness of soul in the Ethics. At E4p46, Spinoza writes, "He who lives according to the guidance of reason strives, as far as he can, to repay the other's Hate, Anger, and Disdain toward him, with Love, or Nobility." Now what Curley translates with 'nobility' is generositate in the Latin. In the glossary, Curley explains he avoided the use of 'high-mindedness' because it has negative connotations nowadays (in, we might add, our democratic, leveling age). Curley notes that Spinoza's generositas echoes Descartes' générosité, which in Descartes explicitly replaces magnanimity (see Passions of the Soul, paragraph 161).** In the Dutch translation of Spinoza in De nagelaten schriften, the connection with magnanimity is explicit because 'edelmoedigheit' (literally 'noble courageousness') just is the common translation of magnanimous. So, Spinoza, understands his own philosophy as a defense of magnanimity.

And, now we're back to Tocqueville. That Tocqueville understands Spinozism/patheism as a religious seduction of democratic man that is simultaneously a self-confirming projection of democratic man is compatible with (even Tocqueville being aware of  the fact that) Spinoza generates a project of Spinozism in order to make true religion, namely living under the guidance of reason, possible. However, my interest today is not to resolve to what degree Tocqueville and Spinoza are on the same side, or not. I leave that open.

Rather, I want to turn the knob one more time and return to a passage in Dennett that long intrigued me. It's from near the end of the book (chapter eighteen) that he taught in a seminar I attended while still in manuscript, Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

In chapter 3, I quoted the physicist Paul Davies proclaiming that the reflective power of human minds can be "no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless purposeless forces," and suggested that being a byproduct of mindless purposeless forces was no disqualification for importance. And I have argued that Darwin has shown us how, in fact, everything of importance is just such a product. Spinoza called his highest being God or Nature (Deus sive Natura), expressing a sort of pantheism. There have been many varieties of pantheism, but they usually lack a convincing explanation about just how God is distributed in the whole of nature. As we saw in chapter 7, Darwin offers us one: it is in the distribution of Design throughout nature, creating, in the Tree of Life, an utterly unique and irreplaceable creation, an actual pattern in the immeasurable reaches of Design Space that could never be exactly duplicated in its many details. What is design work? It is that wonderful wedding of chance and necessity, happening in a trillion places at once, at a trillion different levels. And what miracle caused it? None. It just happened to happen, in the fullness of time. You could even say, in a way, that the Tree of Life created itself. Not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly, over billions of years.

Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm's "Being greater than which nothing can be conceived," it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.

Amor fati! (Some other time I return to Dennett's life-long fascination with Nietzsche.) Several of us have noticed Dennett's flirtations with Spinozism before (see Huebner (2017); Schliesser (2018) here; Veit (2021)). Here Dennett assimilates Darwinism to pantheism. What's neat about Dennett's interpretation of Darwinism is that it explicitly, "chance and necessity," combines the doctrine of necessity (Spinozism) with the doctrine of chance (Epicureanism).  Dennett eliminates the need for worship altogether and displaces it with pure affirmation.

Dennett explains his Darwinism as a strand of pantheism through his own Darwinism. However, from Tocqueville's perspective Dennett's  Quining elimination of providence and any distinction in kind in nature is (anticipatorily) itself to be explained through social causes in virtue of the democratic age we live in. Do you place your bets on natural or a social explanation? Dennett and Tocqueville insist that there is a real choice here, but I prefer a Borgesian, skeptical solution in which, inspired by Escher’s Drawing Hands, the left hand and the right hand write each other. 

• This first appeared at: <Quining Quine and Spinosizing Spinoza; reflections on Dennett and Tocqueville (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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*Here's what Spinoza writes: "Long ago things reached the point where you can hardly know what anyone is, whether Christian, Turk, Jew, or Pagan, except by the external dress and adornment of his body, or because he frequents this or that Place of Worship, or because he’s attached to this or that opinion, or because he’s accustomed to swear by the words of some master. They all lead the same kind of life." (In Curley's translation.)

**"J’ai nommé cette vertu Générosité, suivant l’usage de notre langue, plutôt que Magnanimité, suivant l’usage de l’École, où elle n’est pas fort connue.
I have called this virtue ‘nobility of soul’, in keeping with the usage of our language, rather than ‘magnanimity’, according to the usage of the schools, where this virtue is not much in evidence." (Quoted from Michael Moriarty's chapter, "Cartesian Générosité and Its Antecedents.")

Stebbing on Analytic Clarification, with some Kuhn and Sellars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

On Susan Stebbing and Clarity (with some nods to Carnap, Quine, and Ernest nagel), Part I

[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 paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

When, back at NewAPPS, I first blogged about Susan Stebbing (1885 – 1943), a key figure in early analytic philosophy, there was almost no scholarship on her. Since then a fine entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy and a number of important scholarly papers and books have appeared. I take no credit for this joyous state of affairs!

My present interest in her work is to explore to what degree she helps us make sense of the nature of 'clarity' or 'clearness' so valued by analytic philosophers then and today. To do so, in this post I focus on Thinking to Some Purpose (1939), which was written for a wide audience (it was commissioned by pelican). This may bias our treatment of her views on clarity. But we have to start somewhere (and the book gives us some of her most detailed views on the matter).

The official topic of the book is announced in the prologue:

I am convinced of the urgent need for a democratic people to think clearly without the distortions due to unconscious bias and unrecognized ignorance. Our failures in thinking are in part due to faults which we could to some extent overcome were we to see clearly how these faults arise. It is the aim of this book to make a small effort in this direction.--Preface to the 1939 edition, pp. xxix-xxx*

It's worth noting that 'clear' and its cognates are used repeatedly through the book. Clarity here is a property of thought and perception. In what follows, I use 'cognition' as shorthand for both. Clarity seems to be a necessary condition for success at thinking (and action guided by it). In particular, clarity is the absence of distortions in thought and perception caused by bias and ignorance one is not aware of. Undoubtedly undistorted thought is what's being aimed at in describing something as ‘clear.’ But the suggestion is that known biases and and awareness of ignorance are not an obstacle to successful thought presumably because they can knowingly be controlled for. Crucially, clear cognition is a key ingredient for intelligence on Stebbing's view. (22)

It is an important question in political philosophy to what degree it really is necessary for a democratic people to have undistorted thoughts and even control for known biases. But I leave that aside here. (Well, I return indirectly to it at the end of the post.)

Presumably, Stebbing's interest in unconscious bias is prompted by the significance of political propaganda, demagoguery, and advertising (she groups these together as "rhetorical persuasion") and presumably also reflects the growing stature of Freudianism in the age. It is an interesting sociological-historical fact that interest in such bias was revived in recent decades in the context of concerns over racial discriminatory practices. However, for Stebbing an important example of such unconscious bias are (not the desires of our infant inner child, but rather) the "concealed contradictions" we acquire as members of a group. (p. 22) In fact, racial biases are one of the kinds she discusses.

Be that as it may, Stebbing's notion of clarity is not the only one that one can find in the analytic tradition. For Carnap (recall) clarity is an (aesthetic) property or by-product of formal systems, of constructed languages. Clarity in the hands of Carnap means to capture a kind of demand for transparency in one's inferential practices, one's commitments, and the use of terms (it very much hopes to prevent equivocation and polysemous use).  Carnapian clarity is really a second-order property of an otherwise esoteric, expert practice.

By contrast, Quine had a tendency, as Greg Frost-Arnold has shown, (i) to associate clarity with more general forms of intelligibility. In later years, Quine might argue that (ii) his program (developed in Word & Object) of the philosopher regimenting scientific language to exhibit its ontological commitments, may also be aiming at a species of clarity (about the 'ontology' of science), alongside systematicity.  He also (iii) came to think of clarity as a more general theoretical virtue of a system. 

What's important for present purposes is that neither Carnap's nor Quine's notions of clarity is aimed at or -- given that science is highly specialized -- apt for a democratic people. (I don’t mean to deny that Carnap was very interested in facilitating improved democratic life.) And while there are undoubtedly some family resemblances and overlaps between their notion of clarity and Stebbing's it's useful to keep them distinct (more on that below).

Interestingly enough, also in 1938, (recall) Ernest Nagel was concerned with the role of clarity in democratic life. For Nagel clarification is the development of canons of intelligibility and validity apt for (esoteric) special sciences, but also the making transparent of the methods and practices of science that generate warranted claims to ordinary people in part by showing how and the way terms/concepts hang together and function in a system of knowledge and forms of ordinary practice. In particular, the cultivation of clarity is a contribution to a democratic ethos that prevents mere reliance and dependence on authoritative experts and also ensures that calls to action are proportioned to the evidence on their behalf. (See here for a scholarly version of this claim.)

Again, while I don't want to exaggerate the differences between Nagel and Stebbing —they share in fact a pragmatist sensibility, and agree on the significance of proportioning belief to evidence and the important focus of the way we do things with reasonings --, it's important to see the contrasting notions of clarity at work here. In Nagel, clarity is something we do to specialist language and practices that, amongst other functions, can shape and diagnose features in ordinary life, whereas for Stebbing clarity can be immanent in and part and parcel of ordinary life. Not to put too fine a point on it, Nagel, Carnap, and Quine all share in the idea that there is some salient contrast between formal and specialist, regimented languages, on one hand, and ordinary speech, on the other. (How that contrast is characterized is famously a matter of substantive disagreement among them.) In this divide clarity is not to be found primarily on the side of ordinary talk. Stebbing is the outlier in thinking that clarity is not so restricted, but available, in principle, to us all. This is the first thing I wanted to establish today.

The second is that while Stebbing treats clarity as a property of thought and perception that is, in principle, widely diffused among ordinary people (she thinks we all have "some capacity to follow an argument" (21) and in a footnote hopes its not unduly optimistic (26)), she also treats it as a skill that can be acquired for one can be "trained to think clearly." (p. 4) Such training makes "rational argument and… reasonable consideration" possible. Stebbing's role in articulating a deliberative conception of democracy is worth highlighting.

Now what such training involves and who controls access to it are quite important, but I postpone discussion of her views to another time. What matters here is that the skill itself can, once acquired with "effort" (29), also be something that we control. (She emphasizes that have to wish to think clearly.) And, third, that a feature of the skill is logically sound argument (which should not be conflated with syllogistic reasoning).

In future posts, I want to make more precise and also explore some of the difficulties with Stebbing's conception of clarity. But it is worth noting two final features of it in this digression. Stebbing takes

for granted that to be clear-headed is worth while for its own sake. Without this assumption I should not have wanted to write this book. It is, however, enough if you will admit that muddled thinking ends in bungled doing, so that to think clearly is useful for the sake of achieving even our most practical aims. Unless you admit at least as much as this, there will be no point, so far as you are concerned, in what I have to say. Our points of view would be too different for discussion to be possible. (34)

The first feature is that clarity is not just treated as an instrumental value to democratic deliberative life. Stebbing values it as a private and presumably highly intellectual virtue or end in itself. (There are shades of Spinoza here whose work she knew well.) Fair enough, and not wholly surprising.

But it is a bit peculiar that she thinks her imagined interlocuter or reader must share in the commitment that "to think clearly is useful for the sake of achieving even our most practical aims." Admittedly, it seems odd for anyone to deny this in the most general sense. But it is not wholly unreasonable for such an interlocuter to also claim that clarity of cognition may often (perhaps always) be unnecessary to achieve our most practical aims (because relying on tradition, faith, instinct, testimony, or expertise/authority of others). And perhaps (admittedly there are shades of Hume and Nietzsche here) its our biases (or overconfidence) that help us acquire  our most fundamental, practical aims (which are always constrained by time and other resources scarcities). The real problem here is not the purported role of clarity in achieving our aims, but in Stebbing's insistence that muddled thinking must end in muddled doing. This has not been established. (It's hard to see how it could be established given how much has been achieved in conditions of ignorance and superstition.)

Now, what's odd is that in order to have discussion at all, Stebbing assumes assent on this very point of contention. And the reason it is odd is that in a democratic society we can't assume or stipulate agreement over such questions or ways of life including those that, to put it exaggeratedly, resist the clarion call of Enlightenment. My point here is not that one cannot help others see how useful clarity might be (and Stebbing is wonderful on this score), but rather that it must the potential effect of such discussion not its common ground.

• This first appeared at: <On Susan Stebbing and Clarity (with some nods to Carnap, Quine, and Ernest Nagel), Part I (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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.

 

The Epistemology of Discursive Authority (ah yes, foucault, Quine, and postmodernism)

What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with 'things'. To 'depresentify' them. To conjure up their rich, heavy, immediate plenitude, which we usually regard as the primitive law of a discourse that has become divorced from it through error, oblivion, illusion, ignorance, or the inertia of beliefs and traditions, or even the perhaps unconscious desire not to see and not to speak. To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance. To write a history of discursive objects that does not plunge them into the common depth of a primal soil, but deploys the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion.--Michel Foucault (1969) "The Formation of Objects" chapter 3 in The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith [1972], pp. 52-3 in the 2002 edition.

More than thirty years ago there was a buzz around Foucault and 'social constructivism' on campus. I don’t think I was especially aware of what this was about, but along the way I took a course in the ‘experimental college’ (a relic from the campus turmoil of an earlier generation) where I was introduced to the idea by way of the classic, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, then twenty five years old. (It was published in 1966.)

I never got around to reading Foucault as an undergraduate, but I was in graduate school studying with Martha Nussbaum when her (1999) polemic against Butler appeared. (I assume the essay was triggered by the second edition of Gender Trouble, but I am not confident about it.) This essay has a passage that nicely sumps up the general attitude toward Foucault that I was exposed to:

“These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways.”--Nussbaum "The Professor of Parody"

I was not nudged into reading Butler’s Gender Trouble during my graduate research (eventually when I became an instructor my own broad eduction started). However, I was confronted with the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought in works that now would be classified as foundational to STS, but that I was reading in virtue of my interest in the history of science such as Pickering’s The Mangle of Practice, which could generate heated debate among the PhD students. What made those debates frustrating was that we lacked distinctions so we often would talk passed each other.

A good part of those debates died down and were, subsequently domesticated after the publication of Hacking’s (1999) The Social Construction of What?, which we read immediately after it appeared. Hacking didn’t settle any debates for us, but allowed us to do more sober philosophy with it and while I do not want to credit him solely without mention of Haslanger, his book certainly contributed to the normalization and disciplining of the debate. Hacking and Haslanger also visited shortly thereafter, and so could ask for clarifications. Interestingly enough, in that book Hacking treats Foucault as a constructivist in ethical theory akin to Rawls, although he notes that others (Haslanger) treat Foucault as an ancestor to the idea that reality is constructed 'all the way down.'

As regular readers know my own current interest in Foucault is orthogonal to questions of construction. But I was struck by the fact that in his Foucault: His Thought, His Character, Paul Veyne treats Foucault fundamentally (not wholly without reason) as a Humean nominalist (and a certain kind of Nietzschean skeptic). And, in fact, the nominalism is itself exhibited by a certain kind of positivism about facts. (Deleuze might add quickly: a positivism about statements.) Veyne is not a reliable guide to matters philosophical, but I wondered if Foucault’s purported social constructivism was all based on a game of telephone gone awry in translation and academic celebrity culture.*

Now, if we look at the passage quoted at the top of the post, we can certainly why Foucault was treated as a social constructivist. The first few sentences  in the quoted paragraph do look like a form of linguistic idealism. And this sense remains even if one has a dim awareness that the passage seems primarily directed against a kind phenomenology [“presentify” is clearly an allusion to Husserls [Vergegenwartigung]], even (perhaps) trolling Heidegger (“primal soil”).

However, the point of the passage is not ontology. It’s method. (No surprise because that is sort of the general aim of the Archeology of Knowledge.) And this, is in fact instructive of Foucault’s larger project. In the passage, Foucault is, in fact, explaining that he will try to leave aside questions of ontology in his own project. This is not to deny he is interested in what we might call epistemology. But the epistemology he is exploring is what one might call discursive authority. And the effect of such authority is “the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse.” (emphasis added).

In fact, Foucault here is not far removed from Quine (but in a way to be made precise). In one of the most Whitehead-ian passages of Two Dogmas, Quine writes: “The physical conceptual scheme simplifies our account of experience because of the way myriad scattered sense events come to be associated with single so-called objects; still there is no likelihood that each sentence about physical objects can actually be translated, however deviously and complexly, into the phenomenalistic language. Physical objects are postulated entities which round out, and simplify our account of the flux of experience.”

Now, don’t be distracted by Quine’s ‘sense events’ or empiricism. For, what Foucault is interested in is the manner by which (to quote Quine again) ‘myriad scattered sense events come to be associated with single so-called objects.’ In particular, (and now I am back to Foucault) “the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse.” This body of rules is characteristic of an authoritative discipline. And in particular, Foucault is interested in what the social effects are of simplifications produced by postulated entities in the human sciences on these sciences and larger society. I don’t mean to suggest this is Foucault’s only game. He is also interested in the social structures that stabilize the possibility of semantics across disciplines in a particular age.

To be sure, in Quine the epistemology of discursive authority is only treated cursory (in the context of regimentation). Whereas Foucault is focused on how the sciences acquire and constitute (even replicate) such authority. But that is compatible with all kinds of ontologies in Quine’s sense or, to be heretical for a second, a metaphysically robust realism; notice Foucault’s own hint of a ‘rich, heavy, immediate plenitude.' One will not get more than hints from Foucault on what his answers might be to the kind of epistemological or metaphysical questions we are trained to ask. That, of course, is a feature not a bug of his project.

Foucault, Similitude, and Hume & Newton

As for similitude, it is now a spent force, outside the realm of knowledge. It is merely empiricism in its most unrefined form; like Hobbes, one can no longer 'regard it as being a part of philosophy', unless it has first been erased in its inexact form of resemblance and transformed by knowledge into a relationship of equality or order. And yet similitude is still an indispensable border of knowledge. For [in classical period] no equality or relation of order can be established between two things unless their resemblance has at least occasioned their comparison. Hume placed the relation of identity among those 'philosophical' relations that presuppose reflection; whereas, for him, resemblance belonged to natural relations, to those that constrain our minds by means of an inevitable but 'calm force'.

Let the philosopher pride himself on his precision as much as he will... I nevertheless dare defy him to make a single step in his progress without the aid of resemblance. Throw but one glance upon the metaphysical aspect of the sciences, even the least abstract of them, and then tell me whether the general inductions that are derived from particular facts, or rather the kinds themselves, the species and all abstract notions, can be formed otherwise than by means of resemblance. [20]

At the border of knowledge, similitude is that barely sketched form, that rudimentary relation which knowledge must overlay to its full extent, but which continues, indefinitely, to reside below knowledge in the manner of a mute and ineffaceable necessity.--Michel Foucault The Order of Things (1970) {1994, Vintage Books Edition} Translated by Alan Sheridan* (original Les Mots et les Choses, 1966), pp. 67-68

The position attributed to Hume by Foucault in the first paragraph above recalls Hume's claim (in the first Enquiry) that "it seems evident, that, if all the scenes of nature were continually shifted in such a manner, that no two events bore any resemblance to each other, but every object was entirely new, without any similitude to whatever had been seen before, we should never, in that case, have attained the least idea of necessity, or of a connexion among these objects." (EHU 5.8) Even so the view being attributed to Hume is also a bit awkward as an interpretation of Hume's accounts of natural and philosophical relations (a distinction articulated in the Treatise), and the role of resemblance and identity among them. I want to highlight three problems.

First, in his own voice, Foucault distinguishes natural and philosophical relations as follows: philosophical relations presuppose reflection. Now, in Hume reflection is a mechanism of the mind that turns ideas into new impressions. That is, "impressions of reflexion are only antecedent to their correspondent ideas; but posterior to those of sensation, and deriv'd from them." (Treatise 1.1.2.1.) The paradigmatic examples of impressions of reflexion are "desire and aversion, hope and fear." (Treatise 1.1.2.1.) That is to say, the passions and emotions. I mention this explicitly because on Foucault's interpretation, the elements or relata or building blocks of philosophical relations are impressions of reflection or the ideas derived from them. (And it would be surprising if the passions played a role in them.)

For, Hume does not explicitly claim that reflection is presupposed in any philosophical relation including identity (which is the one singled out by Foucault). After all he claims, "we extend it to mean any particular subject of comparison, without a connecting principle." (Treatise 1.1.5.1) So, it is strictly speaking false to suggest that in Hume philosophical relations require the operation of reflection.

But one may well think this is not the end of the matter. After all, Hume lists seven sources of comparison that can be "considered the sources of all philosophical relations. (Treatise 1.1.5.1, emphasis added.) These turn out to be viz. "resemblance, identity, relations of time and place, proportion in quantity or number, degrees in any quality, contrariety, and causation." (Treatise 1.3.1.1,) If reflexion is crucial to these (especially identity) than the spirit of Foucault's account can be saved. But none of them presuppose reflexion. In addition, Hume divides this list "into two classes; [first] into such as depend entirely on the ideas, which we compare together, and [second] such as may be chang'd without any change in the ideas." Crucially, again, reflexion is irrelevant to this. So, Foucault misrepresents Hume here on philosophical relations.*

To be sure, I don't mean to deny Foucault's claim that "no equality or relation of order can be established between two things unless their resemblance has at least occasioned their comparison." This is Hume's position, too: 

The first [philosophical relation] is resemblance: And this is a relation, without which no philosophical relation can exist; since no objects will admit of comparison, but what have some degree of resemblance.  (Treatise 1.1.5.3; emphasis in original)

But while it is true that for Hume identity is only a philosophical relation this is not true for resemblance in Hume. For, second, Hume recognizes two kinds or sites of resemblance, one is a philosophical relation and when it functions in a philosophical relation, although resemblance "be necessary to all philosophical relation, it does not follow, that it always produces a connexion or association of ideas." (Treatise 1.1.5.3) Only natural relations generate an association of ideas. And for Hume there are three such natural relations of which resemblance is one. (Treatise 1.1.4.1.) Which he does treat, as Foucault suggests, as a "gentle force." (Treatise 1.1.4.1)  [As an aside, Foucault's 'calm' force is almost certainly the effect of translation either from Hume's English to Foucault's French Hume or from Foucault's text to my translation, etc. For this reason, I am treating resemblance and similitude as synonyms here even though Hume does not really use 'similitude' in the Treatise.]

This, matters because, third, thus, in Hume's Treatise similitude/resemblance doesn't just reside mutely 'below knowledge' acting as a natural relation behind the scenes as it were constraining our mind, but it is also the content of knowledge (and so made explicit). So, here, too, Foucault is misrepresenting Hume's position.

Now, so far, I have skipped the material Foucault quotes and references with endnote [20] in the material I have quoted above. It's natural to read Foucault here as quoting Hume as evidence for his position. But Hume scholars may well wonder what the source of the quoted passage is. (It's not Hume after all.) In fact, the passage quoted by Foucault that starts with "Let the philosopher pride..." is not, first impressions notwithstanding by Hume, but rather is as endnote [20] indicates, a quote from Merian's (1767) Reflexions philosophiques sur la ressemblance, a book I had never looked at before.

Merian is a translator of Hume's first Enquiry and an important critic of Hume, which gave the world the term 'phenomenalism' in order to describe Hume (in 1793). See this (1997) paper by Laursen and Popkin for details (here). Sadly, their paper does not mention the Reflexions philosophiques. With help from Profs. Sophie Roux and Charles T. Wolfe, I located an online copy of the work, which is not very long. Merian does not seem to mention Hume or natural & philosophical relations in his Reflexions! So, Foucault's reading of Hume is not indebted to this work by Merian! (In fact, Merian merely seems here to be capturing Hume's insight of the first Enquiry 5.8 -- a work he had translated just a few years before -- that I quoted above.)

We can conclude then that here on Hume, Merian is not a source for Foucault, but that Merian is used by Foucault to articulate Hume's position (that Foucault recognizes in Merian's 1767 text). At this point one may well wonder if in the quoted passage above, Foucault is relying primary on the first Enquiry, but that would be curious here because he does directly refer to the Treatise (1.3.3 & 1.4.4--the latter a bit odd because it is Hume's account of the modern philosophy) in a endnote in a later chapter on the relationship between Hume's account of causation and its relationship to similarity.

To be sure I don't mean to suggest that you need to follow my interpretation of Hume's account of natural and philosophical relations. That's notoriously contested terrain. But rather that Foucault gets rather basic features of Hume's position wrong. Given that all the other references to Hume in The Order of Things are actually rather formulaic (and the kind of shorthand one may find in post-Kantian philosophy) one may well wonder how carefully Foucault read his Hume. (Oddly he never cites Merian again in the book.)

You may think that this is just scholarly book-keeping. That would be fine actually. However, the significance of this is that it undercuts Foucault's larger claim (which concludes the section) that "from the seventeenth century, resemblance was pushed out of the boundaries of knowledge, toward the humblest and basest of its frontiers." (71) This is, as we have seen, not true for Hume. I also would deny this is true of, say, of Newton's natural philosophy. If anything, one of the key issues in Newton's account of space and time is that Newton cane give a clear account of what Newton calls the 'species and magnitude' of the measure of space, but that he has a difficulty to do so for the measure of time. (See the postscript to my seventh chapter in my Newton's Metaphysics: Essays.) So the resemblance of spaces is much easier secured by Newton (and can do all kinds of work for him through geometric reasoning) than the putative resemblance of time. (This is no trivial matter if we look ahead to Einstein.) 

I actually suspect that in the background early modern empiricism (here meaning Locke, Newton, and Hume) in all their variety are tacitly assimilated by Foucault to 20th century (Carnapian) empiricism where resemblance is indeed foundational (although problematized by Goodman and Quine). But that's just a hunch.

 

 

Two Dogmas of The Image of Science

An image of science (recall these posts on Hume, Williamson, Spinoza) contains a list of characteristics that function as short-hand for representing science when these characteristics are used in debates where one side (or more) appeals to the (epistemic) authority of science to settle debate. Images of science can circulate within the sciences, in public discussion, and even in philosophy. Here are two dogmas in the contemporary image of science:

(1) While science may be a complex network of collaboration and competition, it also involves a self-correcting and free exchange of ideas.

(2) Consensus is the natural effect of a proper functioning mature science.

Within philosophy, these two dogmas are familiar from Thomas Kuhn's work. Within economics and formal decision theory the dogmas are linked (at least since Aumann (1976), where (1) helps generate (2)).

In some contexts such consensus within science is a species of higher order evidence and generally a cue to defer to the science. And this reinforces how science can settle debate, and thereby open space for public action (assuming that prior to action there is public debate). Lurking in the previous two sentences is the idea that science can provide (some) authority to public policy based on it. So it is no surprise that governments promote institutions that help discover or articulate such consensus. In practice, governments and science, while distinct from each other (and sometimes at odds), frequently lend each other (some) authority by presupposing and reinforcing the two dogmas. 

So far so good. 

But because settled science is so important to authoritative action [and consensus such an important proxy of it], this also creates incentives to generate or organize the appearance of consensus. And there is conceptual space for such organized consensus. For even if one grants that consensus is the natural effect of a proper functioning mature science, this is compatible with consensus also being the effect of malfunctioning science. Let's call the agreement that is the product of malfunctioning science 'ersatz consensus.' (And I'll use 'real consensus' when I distinguish a naturally occurring consensus from the ersatz type.) 

It's worth noting that, despite the way I have phrased it in previous paragraph, participants in malfunctioning science need not have the intent to produce an ersatz consensus. By this I mean two things: first, some strategic agents may well intentionally wish to promote deliberate confusion such that there does not seem consensus at all (think of the tobacco industry on the relationship between smoking and cancer; or the energy industry and man-made global warming, etc.). Second, sometimes an ersatz consensus is the product of the absence of proper exchange of ideas in science (because of bad replication or publication practices, or because of temporary embargoes on circulation of ideas [not uncommon in medical and defense sciences]). So, sometimes ersatz consensus is the effect of top-down organization, and sometimes it's the effect of bottom-up failures of process.

It's not surprising that for outsiders it's incredibly difficult to distinguish between an ersatz consensus and a real consensus, especially if the science is incredibly esoteric and/or interdisciplinary. But sometimes it is very difficult for insiders to know whether the consensus view is real or ersatz in their own science. There need not be anything nefarious about this; all that's needed is that because of say extensive cognitive division of labor even insiders may be unaware (of the nature and extent of) that the process that shapes the exchange of ideas within their own science is malfunctioning. 

Even though I have well known skeptical leanings, I don't want to exaggerate the claim in the previous two sentences. There are forensic techniques that provide signals about such matters. In addition folks in adjoining sciences may have the skill set to notice communicative problems I am hinting at. (In a way that's the story of how the replication crisis got tackled.) But it may take  time to sort such things out.

Notice that so far I have not touched the two dogmas of the contemporary image of the science (although I have hinted that (1) may be an idealization). What I have done is extrapolate some of their mutual entailments. 

As an aside, even without governments nudging us to accept a scientific consensus is authoritative, (2) has very deep roots in the intellectual culture. The Stoic sages and the Spinozistic wise are said to agree, and I am sure you can list a whole number of other examples. But -- pace Kuhn -- it is worth noting that there were scientific periods where within science persistent disagreement over many important issues was not taken to be embarrassing (I think this was common view of late nineteenth century physics if you go look at Poincare, Duhem, Hertz, Mach, etc.). 

For, it is worth noting however that (2) is not self-evident in all contexts. Sometimes different scientific research groups within the same scientific community rely on different auxiliary assumptions or computational shortcuts to generate (say) agreed upon predictions (go check out real-life examples of Quine-Duhem thesis). So even though at one level of description there may be consensus, at another level of description (including the auxiliaries) there is not. I suspect this situation is endemic in a lot of sciences. (Again, over time this may well be sorted out if the auxiliaries start to matter for some reason.)

In addition, in a very neat recent paper, Kevin Dorst has argued (on the Bayesian terrain of Aumann) -- in the context of trying to provide a mechanism for group polarization -- that if evidence is ambiguous we should not expect consensus. (He has a neat scientific example, so go read it.) My view is that in sciences with incredibly robust and mathematically refined background theories (and instruments) such ambiguity of evidence may well be rare, but that in many sciences ambiguity of evidence and, thus, lack of consensus is to be expected and rational. 

Let me stop here for now.

 

 

Canon formation within Analytic Philosophy

One of the perennial complaints of philosophy teachers has concerned the dearth of readily accessible and worthwhile reading material in modern philosophical analysis. As a first step toward improving this situation we have prepared the present volume of selections. Our idea was this: In the tremendous bulk of the periodical literature of recent decades, there is a small percentage of articles definitely worthy of reproduction in an anthology. This material required only proper grouping to provide a usable text for intermediate and advanced courses or seminars.
The project in preliminary form was presented by circular letter to about ninety teachers of philosophy in this country and in England. We asked for responses to our proposed selections, that is, endorsements or rejections of titles contained in a list of about 130 items. We also asked for recommendations of valuable material that we might have overlooked. We are pleased to acknowledge with sincere gratitude the enthusiastic and most helpful reactions received from an impressive majority of our correspondents. Because of the limitations of space we had to exclude, with a heavy heart, several excellent articles by authors from whom we had already obtained permission for reprinting.
With the exception of a very few cases in which it seemed clear from the beginning that an article belonged in our collection, we have pondered our choices seriously and long. In many instances it was extremely difficult for us to make up our minds. The exclusion of any article which was either on our original list or had been recommended by our friends was painful; and here, as everywhere, to choose is to exclude. Recognizing in the end that it would be impossible to make our choices coincide with the valuations of all prospective users of this book, we can only plead that within the given aims and limitations we have selected what, after countless considerations, comparisons and consultations seemed the most suitable body of material available for reprinting.
We have been guided in our selections on the whole by the reactions and suggestions of our correspondents. Since some of our own articles met with a very favorable reaction, we felt it would not appear presumptuous to include them. Generally our tendency was not to concentrate exclusively on the work of the great and the famous thinkers, but rather to select on the basis of didactic effectiveness. Clarity, pertinence, incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge, integration into the total pattern of the contents—these were the essential criteria for our choices.
The conception of philosophical analysis underlying our selections springs from two major traditions in recent thought, the Cambridge movement deriving from Moore and Russell, and the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle (Wittgenstein, Schlick, Carnap) together with the Scientific Empiricism of the Berlin group (led by Reichenbach). These, together with related developments in America stemming from Realism and Pragmatism, and the relatively independent contributions of the Polish logicians have increasingly merged to create an approach to philosophical problems which we frankly consider a decisive turn in the history of philosophy.
Although it is realized that there are no sharp lines of demarcation between this and other contemporary schools, we could not possibly have attempted to represent them all. Since the clearest and most helpful formulation of an idea is not always the first in order of time, or historically the most representative, we have paid relatively little attention to originality as a condition for inclusion. It was rather the penetration, the finesse, and the challenge of the work which counted most. In some instances we succeeded in grouping together divergent and mutually incompatible contributions around controversial subjects. We have tried to avoid definitely obsolete material. Certainly up-to-date-ness in any significant sense is not a mere function of date of publication. Frege, one of whose contributions we included, and Peirce, whose work is not represented because it is so amply available, have more to say to us than many who are writing today....
Courses and seminars in Principles of Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy, Philosophical Analysis, Theory of Knowledge, Logical Theory, Philosophy of Language, etc., should find ample material for reading and discussion in this anthology. Although some basic articles in Philosophy of Science, Modern Logic, and Theoretical Ethics have been included, we can conceive of additional volumes of selections, very much needed, in these special fields. We express the hope that others will consider work on anthologies along those lines. May we assure them that such work, while arduous, is at least intrinsically rewarding.--"Preface" by Feigl, H., and W. Sellars. in Readings in Analytic Philosophy." New York (1949), pp. v-vi. [HT Alan Richardson]

An informal social media exchange with Jason Stanley got me thinking about canon formation within analytic philosophy. In particular, I started to reflect on the (temporary, but not trivial) dominance of philosophy of language within analytic philosophy such that many analytic programs organized proseminars for entry level PhD students around familiarity with certain classics of that field (which also includes semantics and some bits of philosophical logic). 

While I don't want to claim that the dominance of such philosophy of language was a contingent fact, it's worth noting that as this dominance developed others who were recognizably influential at the time within analytic philosophy, were pushing for, say, philosophy of science as first philosophy (e.g. Ernest Nagel), and one can easily imagine some others to have pushed epistemology in a foundational role (and certainly in some a background empiricism or sense-data theory does play a non-trivial authoritative role). The reason I deny it is wholly contingent is that, for example, axiology or aesthetics cannot have been, then, the dominant core.

Alan Richardson suggested that it would make sense to look at the textbooks of the 1948-53 period as formative. In particular, it is worth noting that, as Alan reminded [Leonard was one of my teachers] me, Leonard Linsky's (1953) Semantics and the Philosophy of Language, A Collection of Readings, clearly anticipates much of the early canon of the philosophy (of language centered) proseminar. Linsky's book is not the definitive canon -- it lacks "On Denoting" (and has no Frege at all) --, but I hope to discuss it some other time. 

But first I want to focus on the Feigl and Sellars text-book, which explicitly sets the agenda for the other textbooks, and simultaneously helps consolidate, roughly, what counts as analytic philosophy (or in modern philosophical analysis) and not. And, pertinent for my present purposes, they do so by using a kind of partial, snowball sampling method to create a canon of texts worthy of inclusion.+ 

To be sure, their grouping of who is included in the "decisive turn" -- (i) the Cambridge movement, (ii) the Vienna Circle, (iii) the Berlin group, (iv) American Realism and Pragmatism, and (v) the Polish logicians -- is not original. We find this nearly exact combination already in 1936 in Ernest Nagel's two-part essay on "Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe."* And certainly there is some contingency in what gets passed on. They themselves note that Peirce would naturally fit their agenda, but with the benefit of hindsight, we see that as time passes on the opportunity costs to find a way to include Peirce into the fold grows so great that effectively -- with the exception of some of his informal essays in the philosophy of science -- he ends up terra incognita for analytic philosophers. 

The influential textbooks of the period are nearly all American. Presumably they were created there not just because it was at the time the wealthiest place around, but also because of the sudden demand due to expansion of Higher Education there. Feigl and Sellars are clearly anticipating fine-grained "courses and seminars in Principles of Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy, Philosophical Analysis, Theory of Knowledge, Logical Theory, Philosophy of Language" etc.! (And note these are not intended as introductory courses, but "intermediate and advanced courses or seminars.")

One interesting claim that Feigl and Sellars make is that they selected "on the basis of didactic effectiveness. Clarity, pertinence, incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge, integration into the total pattern of the contents—these were the essential criteria for our choices." This is a rare admission that the canon of analytic texts does not reflect originality, or historical priority, but didactic or pedagogic suitability. To be sure, I am not claiming this remains the case in analytic canon formation once analytic philosophy is suitably securely dominant (relative to "other contemporary schools"), but it is prominent at the start. 

And it is worth remarking that several of the features they explicitly mention are de facto rhetorical in character (e.g., "incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge.") That is to say, these are the texts that will persuade students of many different grades of competence of the pertinence of analysis. Of course, it's left vague what counts as pertinence (or clarity, which by no means (recall) means the same in, say, Quine, Carnap, Nagel, or Stebbing). 

One may suspect that the previous paragraph is written in the spirit of unmasking. But that's not the case. It is essential to our self-understanding that we recognize that many of the standard intellectual virtues we associate with analytic philosophy almost as our second nature are originally pedagogical in character. And that is, of course, to be expected of an intellectual school. To what degree their origin in pedagogical (and recruitment) needs generates intellectual problems today, if any, is something I shall consider an other time.

 

On the session where McDowell insisted that Taylor and Putnam had failed to understand him

This post was prompted by an exchange with the eminent philosopher, Michael Kremer, on Twitter on the prose style of John McDowell in Mind and World. My side of the exchange with Michael is not very edifying, but in reflecting on it, I realize I had been a kind of eye witness to a philosophical event that in the hands of myth-makers could easily match the Davos clash between Cassirer and Heidegger in world historical significance. 

 

As I note below, for various reasons I am not an ideal witness, and I certainly do not intend to comment on the merits of the philosophical debate or even the merits of the mutual evaluation. But after sharing an earlier version of this post on facebook (here), and after hearing from at least two other witnesses (both much closer to the protagonists at the time), I have come to believe that my memory of the event is not fatally skewed. What I didn't do ahead of this post is re-read Mind and World, and I have not tried to obtain the original manuscripts, if they still exist, of the papers presented at the Author-Meets-Critics session I am about to describe.

 

On Saturday, April 27 1996, in Chicago, at the Palmer House, there was an epic, bewildering Author Meets Critics session on McDowell's (1994) Mind and World with Charles Taylor and Putnam as Critics and John Haugeland presiding (see here for the program). It was near the end of my first year in graduate school, and more than 25 years ago, so I wouldn't trust by memory on fine-grained philosophical issues. However, at the time there were plenty of fans of McDowell in the Chicago philosophy department, which subsequently tried to hire him (while I was still a PhD student), and we did some kind of student  reading group on Mind and World that year. So, I was excited about the event, and prepped to be impressed. (Not everyone at Chicago was a fan of McDowell, for example one of Howard Stein's most beautiful papers is organized as a searing critique of McDowell's Mind and World.) 

 

Just to give you a sense of my stance then: while I was enmeshed in Quine, Davidson, and Putnam at the time (these had been staple of my undergraduate education), I found reading McDowell a frustrating experience; I constantly felt that when I finally grasped what he was claiming, I didn't see the pay-off relative to work put in. In preparing this post, I notice I am not alone in this, one of the protagonists of my story below, Hilary Putnam, actually starts his published contribution to Reading McDowell: On Mind and World (2002, edited by Nicholas H. Smith, London: Routledge) "I find Mind and World an enormously difficult book—as difficult as it is important." (174)*

 

What's unclear from the remark I have just quoted is whether this was Putnam's view before the session or an effect of the session. For, Putnam's chapter in Reading McDowell does suggest that the session itself transformed his understanding. He writes, "When I encountered Mind and World I naturally read it in the light of the direct realism that McDowell defended in such papers as his 1982 British Academy Lecture, “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge.” When I read an ancestor of the present essay to the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, to my surprise I discovered that McDowell regarded the issues as entirely independent." (177) There is an accompanying footnote (n. 5) that I will quote below. 

 

At the time, I was also a dogmatic naturalist (but not the “bald naturalists” that are McDowell's official target, but the more real patterns, take a stance, find robustness, kind of naturalist) -- think more Dennett/Wimsatt than the Churchlands -- , so unlikely to be sympathetic to his position in the exchange. Eventually I grew out of my dogmatic naturalism, but not in virtue of my exposure to McDowell. As it happens, my shift away was the effect of a reading group I did with John Haugeland on a manuscript copy of Dennett's Freedom Evolves, where befitting a fine teacher, John, made me (the Dennett group-y) take on the role of Dennett critic in our morning discussions of the manuscript at the Bonjour Bakery in Hyde Park. This forced me to question my commitments in a way that drove me into a species of skepticism.

 

The session attracted a packed room (Private Dining Room #9, which makes me guess there were about 75 people present, but it's been a few years since I saw the inside of those rooms at the Palmer House). To be sure, I think Taylor went first. (But the program says Putnam, and I do have a memory of him re-grabbing the microphone, so that makes sense, perhaps, too. ) It was the first and only time I saw Taylor in person. I found him genuinely charismatic and imposing, but it's possible my perception of him was colored by my exposure to Taylor's Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, which had appeared while I was an undergraduate student and which I bought before I graduated. I tried reading Sources before I went to graduate school, but I found it difficult because I was constantly reminded of my lack of knowledge. (At the time I was an Isaiah Berlin aficionado, and Berlin did not have this effect on me.) I don't think I ever sat down to read through Sources, but I have read many sections multiple times.

 

A few years after the events I am about to recount, in 2000, Taylor published a review of two of McDowell's collections, Mind, Value, and Reality and Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, in which he ascribes to McDowell "an extremely interesting and original philosophical position, one of the most subtle and penetrating on the contemporary scene" (The Philosophical Quarterly, 50(199), p. 243). And, in passing, he calls Mind and World, "a major recent book." 

 

Taylor starts his contribution to Reading McDowell, with the following praise, "I hardly know where to begin in commenting on John McDowell’s rich and interesting Mind and World. Of course, everything I say stands against a background of massive agreement with the main line of his thinking, and excitement and admiration for his formulations." (106) This understates how I remember Taylor's presentation.

 

For in my memory, Taylor seemed to offer huge amount of --world historical --praise for McDowell, and some modest criticism at the end. This effusion is not wholly absent in Taylor's contribution to Reading McDowell, because Taylor treats McDowell as making possible "a “fusion of horizons” [which] seems imminent" (p. 108). In my memory, at the session, Taylor was more adamant that the moment had arrived. And that we had taken the first steps in a world historical philosophical revolution in which Taylor and McDowell were joint agenda-setters (which would also bring together the analytic and continental traditions). But it is possible that I simply misunderstood him in my youthful enthusiasm. There is, however, evidence in his contribution to Reading McDowell that hints at a a reconsideration. For, in the paper Taylor notes himself "I’m genuinely not sure whether we’re dealing with a disagreement, or just a shift in emphasis." (p. 110; see also "some uncertainty in relation to McDowell’s argument" on p. 114)** McDowell's response to Taylor at the event was rather surprising to me (after so much praise), because he clearly suggested that Taylor (one of the best readers in the field) had seriously and simply misunderstood him. 

 

The exchange between McDowell and Putnam was stranger yet. I should say that at this point I had encountered Putnam a few times in person as a visitor to my undergraduate department (Tufts) and also somebody who one might bump into on the Cambridge (MA) streets if one was in the company with another professional philosopher and talk to. In order to prepare for graduate school I had, in fact, at the suggestion of Jody Azzouni read the three volumes of his collected Philosophical Papers, but strikingly little of work after 1990. As it happens at Chicago, Stein and Tait were relentlessly critical of Putnam, and I was busy learning that not everyone agreed about his stature. 

 

Putnam started his comments kind of granting that his own earlier criticism of McDowell was mistaken, that he had in fact underestimated the significance of McDowell's argument, but that he now was excited about McDowell for various reasons.*** McDowell's response pretty much implied that Putnam was wrong then, and now and that Putnam, too, had misunderstood him.

 

There is some evidence that supports my memory. As I noted above, Putnam comments on the exchange in footnote 5 to his contribution to Reading McDowell. I quote note in full:

In his reply to my APA paper, McDowell accused me of crediting him “with aims I don’t have, and not crediting me with aims I do have.” And he went on to complain that

Putnam evidently thinks my primary aim is to insist on “direct realism” about perception, to reject a picture in which perceptual experience makes contact with the world only at an interface. He talks as if this interface conception is simply there as a problem for us, because of how modern philosophy has unfolded. To defend “direct realism” in this sort of spirit, one would need to undermine all the rationalizations philosophers have concocted for the interface conception. That is why it bothers Putnam that I don’t go into the Argument from Illusion and all that. He thinks I make my book unnecessarily difficult by presupposing earlier work on such topics. (p. 188)+

In addition, there are various locutions in his chapter that signal caution about his interpretation of Mind and World (e.g. "if I do not misunderstand it"). I am pretty confident Putnam added these signals of caution after the APA session.

 

I think that after McDowell's response to Putnam, Haugeland tried to direct the discussion to the (somewhat stunned) audience, but that's when (in my memory) Putnam retook the floor and microphone, and offered a kind of complex ad hoc reconciliation of McDowell's response and his view. It was not a happy moment because Putnam was clearly aggrieved by McDowell's response.

 

A few years later, I audited a few seminars with Putnam. And there I learned that his practice inside the classroom and outside was to take on an extreme version of the principle of charity. He would always assume that his interlocuter -- student or peer -- was saying something massively important and insightful and he would run with it through intricate number of permutations. (I don't think he was always like this, but that's for another time.) But at this point of his life, I don't think there was anything that could have prepared him for McDowell's response.

 

The subsequent Q&A with the audience was kind of a hushed, disbelieving experience. Michael Kremer asked a question (I had not met him yet, so I would not have known it was him) Here's a link to his question: https://twitter.com/m_j_kremer/status/1519242943487479808 I do recall an audience member say loud enough 'if these giants didn't understand you, what chance do lesser mortals like us have' to elicit some chuckles in the back. (No it wasn't me!)

 

As I noted above, later I got to know Haugeland pretty well, and I have regretted not asking him what it was like to chair that session. In response to a draft of this post that I circulated on facebook, Professor Kukla, a former PhD student of Haugeland, who also witnessed the event, has reported it was an acutely "uncomfortable experience" for Haugeland.

 

Now, it is, of course, by no means implausible that both Taylor and Putnam misinterpreted Mind and World. (As I got to know Putnam better I thought this quite plausible, in fact.) And McDowell has, of course, every right to say that. I mention this because it's possible you may read this post as critical of McDowell. That's not my intention. To be sure, there was something in his response that to me at the time seemed to lack a generosity of spirit and undoubtedly that colors my memory. (After all, one can equally see in his stance a magnanimous self regard that does not require the approval of others!) But most of all, at the time I was surprised by his boundless confidence that the author knew the meaning of the text better than his accomplished readers. For students of McDowell, there may be interesting starting points for how his experience at Oxford shaped his philosophical persona (see Michael Morris' reflections here).

 

As I said above, obviously, you shouldn't trust my memory as the final word on this episode, but I do think there is a moral here. One that reiterates one I have peddled on digressions before (recall this post on Dennett on Bennett and this post on Wimsatt on Bennett). There is, after all, in contemporary epistemology and in the practice of so-called contextual history of philosophy a defeasible premise that peers (or epistemic peers) are in a privileged position relative to the rest of us. This may be true, but the solidity of that position may be more feeble than is commonly allowed.