Digressions&Impressions

Nancy Bauer vs Timothy Williamson (I)

    The point is that anyone who takes an interest in the Sorites paradox is going to do so not because life calls for a theory of vagueness but for reasons that are completely internal to a certain way of proceeding in the practice of philosophy. Despite its ancient history, however, the reasons people worry about the Sorites are not as deeply entrenched as philosophy students these days may be led to believe. It may surprise those who find the Sorites and other problems and paradoxes of vagueness unavoidable to learn that we find no discussions of these issues throughout most of the history of Western philosophy, from Aristotle until the early twentieth century. (I will not speculate about the reasons for this absence but will point out only that it indicates that the problem of vagueness did not exercise humankind for at least two of it’s 2.5 millennia existence.)
   Williamson’s agenda in his Mars paper renders unsurprising the revelation that what revivified the problem was the development of predicate logic, which allows you to cast the following argument in formally valid terms (and in various forms of those terms):

Premise: One grain of sand does not a heap make.
Premise: If x grains of sand do not a heap make, then x + 1
grains do not a heap make.
Conclusion: Therefore, 100,000 grains of sand do not a heap make.

The conclusion here seems obviously false. But where does the argument go wrong? The first premise seems indubitable. But if we reject the second premise, then we are committed to the implausible claim that there is some precise x such that x – 1 is not a heap but x, x + 1, x + 2...x + n are. A nonphilosopher might find this problem to be of a certain intellectual interest. But for a contemporary philosopher of language, it constitutes a threat. The reason is that the contemporary philosopher of language is interested in coming up with a formal theory—that is, one that works with predicates with precise extensions—that explains how natural languages do what they do. Because there are lots and lots of vague predicates in language, the Sorites looms everywhere. So if we can’t solve the Sorites, then the theorizing enterprise appears to be threatened.
    The early logicians—Bertrand Russell in particular—did not feel this threat because they had more modest aspirations than do contemporary philosophers of language. Frege and Russell had no interest in generating a formal semantic theory of natural language. Their goal was to use logic to develop an ideal language. In his 1923 paper “Vagueness,” Russell says,

In an accurate language, meaning would be a one-one relation; no word would have two meanings, and no two words would have the same meaning. In actual languages, as we have seen, meaning is one-many. (It happens often that two words have the same meaning, but this is easily avoided, and can be assumed not to happen without injuring the argument.) That is to say, there is not only one object that a word means, and not only one possible fact that will verify a proposition. The fact that meaning is a one-many relation is the precise statement of the fact that all language is more or less vague.

    For Frege and Russell, then, the Sorites problem was a nonissue. Of course (thought they) expressions of natural language are vague. But if you aspire to use logic to come up with a general theory of natural language, then the Sorites will loom large for you.
    This brief discussion of the Sorites suggests that for contemporary philosophers of language the interest in the vagueness problem is a function of a deeper interest in the project of using formal logic to generate a general theory of natural language (and not a function, that means, of various particular real-world interests in the history of Mars, the age of consent, hirsuteness, and so on). But now the impatient person that Williamson has in mind has reason to ask why he or she ought to find this project interesting. Nancy Bauer (2015) "What is to Be Done With Austin?" in How to do Things With Pornography, pp. 111-112.

The quoted passage is the end of chapter 6 of Bauer's lucid, adult, and all-round excellent book, which has a surprising amount of meta-philosophical meat. I know it's par for the course in feminist writings, but I did not expect it in a book with 'pornography' in its title (my bad). 

In order to avoid confusion, Bauer does not deny that in "real-life" vagueness is often very important.  What she denies is that a generic treatment of the sort that Williamson advocates will be salient in "real-life." Williamson here stands in for those who pursue philosophy as a theoretical, scientistic enterprise--those that "attempt to describe and explain phenomena systematically in internally consistent way that mandates or predicts what should will happen in relevant future cases." (106) And Bauer takes on Williamson's exemplary question whether "Mars always [was] either dry or not dry?" (108)

In his paper, Williamson calls this the 'original question.' And indeed Williamson treats it as a proto-philosophical question, and he stipulates that "a philosophical account of vagueness that did not tell us how to answer the original question would thereby be incomplete." And he later informs us that people "under the influence of the later Wittgenstein" are his targets. So, it's not wholly surprising that Bauer (who might be said to be shaped by later Wittgenstein in some sense) responds.

But it is worth noting that nothing Bauer says turns on (I am still quoting Williamson) "a premature and slightly facile pessimism" about the possibility of a formal semantics as such. Bauer might well grant, for the sake of argument, that a complete formal semantics of natural language is possible and worth developing. Her point, if I understand it, is two-fold: (i) drawing on Austin, she argues that such a formal semantics always leaves something out in the manner of language use (and while this is partially captured by pragmatics it is not wholly so captured). And (ii) the Williamson justification of formal semantics on offer is blatantly inadequate: that we really don't need to formal semantics to answer the original question. For, according to Williamson in order to answer that original question we must develop logical or metalogical theories (or, to use Williamson again, "complex, technical, metarepresentational theories"). 

In my view Bauer is right to criticize Williamson's claim that formal semantics is necessary to answer the original question. And she is also right to criticize his "contempt" for those that disagree with him. (108) He does not make a good faith effort to meet the concerns of those influenced by later Wittgenstein (note that this does not involve me--I have always been unmoved!) And I think a lot of folk who admire him for good reasons tend to offer equally bad arguments in the vicinity of this area (treating metaphilosophical critics of Williamson as if they are continental philosophers). And she is right to criticize the idea that somehow philosophy could be justified when it can offer formal semantics as a gift or exemplar to non-philosophers. On Bauer's views cases of vagueness are resolved in "real life" not by generic theoretical improvements, but are "invariably specific" (109) and often relatively arbitrary (110); thinking "about vagueness in general gets us nowhere." (109) However, I don't think Bauer needs these particular claims in this extreme form (not to mention that she is helping herself to "real life" without much argument). She could easily concede without undermining her argument that in some scientific or technical areas, the formal semantics of vague predicates may be very useful or could with minor adjustments be tailor-made to be very useful. (These areas may not count as sufficiently 'real-life' for her.)

Now, I have to admit I was a bit surprised by her claim that the Sorites paradox was (ahh) a dormant philosophical puzzle for very long stretches of philosophical history. In her excellent entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Diana Raffman places the revival of interest slightly earlier than Bauer does: "the paradox attracted little subsequent interest until the late 19^th century. Marxist philosophers in the neo-Hegelian tradition, like Plekhanov (1908 [1937: 114]), cited the paradox as evidence of the failure of “customary” logic and the utility of the ‘logic of contradiction’." Even so, Raffman, too, notes the dormancy.

But it does not follow that phenomena that instantiate a Sorites paradox are not common in the history of philosophy. This is, in fact, in accord with Bauer's insight that problems of vagueness are not treated as generic problems of vagueness or a general Sorites paradox. So, I have argued in print that some elements in Hume's description of the missing shade of blue actually turn on a Sorites style paradox, and one can find other places in the history of philosophy and science where Sorites paradoxes are lurking but without them being treated as a general paradox. In my own case, I learned about the structure of Sorites paradox from Poincare (writing in late 19th century) before I ever took a class in metaphysics or sementics.

More important, one can agree with Bauer that something goes badly off the rails in Williamson's defense, while still granting (as I would, but she not) that (i) Martian history buffs could be made to see and find interesting that the original question is an instantiation of a general philosophical problem (108); (ii) that formal semantics is worth doing for intrinsic philosophical reasons; and (iii) that not all generic theories are equally bad. That is to say, while I think Bauer is right to think that certain kind of philosophical theories are being oversold with poor justification, it is not true that generic theories don't have a fruitful place in bringing philosophy into contact with all kinds of areas of special application. 

As regular readers know (recall here; here; here), I am a fan of a species of generic theories, synthetic philosophy, by which I mean a style of philosophy that 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, policy, or other philosophical projects (or both). Now the generic theories of synthetic philosophy (I have used as examples game theory, information theory, Darwinianism, actor-network theory,  etc. ) are developed within and in conversation with special sciences and need not be topic neutral in a general way. Yet, these generic theories are not just useful in the special sciences, but often can be made action guiding in non-trivial ways. In fact, given Bauer's feminist desire to transform the world (xi, 11 (etc.), she should not wish to throw out such generic theories. But I have gone on long enough, TBC.

 

 

 

 

 

On Kitcher (vs Schliesser) on Synthetic Philosophy

Dewey’s vision is one of “synthetic philosophy.” The philosopher’s reading is not limited to the writings of contemporary specialists in their home sub-branch of the academic profession, but should draw widely from many areas—as the greatest figures in the history of the subject, from Plato to Rawls, have all done. The first task is to understand the questions posed for us by the circumstances of our lives and by the conditions of contemporary inquiry, and that task is unlikely to be undertaken by those whose attention is confined to what a handful of specialists have said about some technical issue. Digging deeply into a particular place can have large and important rewards—but before you choose where to dig (and, perhaps, after you have started but before the treasure has been found), you would do well to reflect on why that specific location is so promising. The fact that generations of predecessors have been excavating in the neighborhood is not a conclusive reason—indeed, you might well reflect on the record of successes they have, or have not, achieved.--Philip Kitcher (2012), Preludes to Pragmatism, ("Introduction"), p xi

By synthetic philosophy I mean a style of philosophy that 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, policy, or other philosophical projects (or both). In particular, the synthetic glue tends to be a general theory or theories. When I first started blogging about synthetic philosophy, Max Hayward noted that Philip Kitcher had also used  the term in a lovely, polemical interview (reproduced here). Since I made it clear I traced my use back to Spencer, I did not think more of it. Synthetic philosophy is a potentially powerful meme, and it is no surprise it would infect both Kitcher and me. After my Biology & Philosophy (hereafter B&P) piece went viral, more people mentioned Kitcher's use in somewhat accusatory tones. And I realized he had been using the phrase for a while. So, recently (in a forthcoming Dutch piece), I decided to think through our contrasting uses.+ 

Before I get to the differences, I want to emphasize that one can be a synthetic philosopher in his (Deweyan) sense and my own at the same time. So, there is a clear family resemblance between the two notions, and sometimes -- for the Darwinian synthetic philosophers this is not trivial -- one can trace the same lineage of thinkers and problems back. In particular, both approaches feed on the impulse that within philosophy we should be reading widely and aspire "to know a lot of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives."

First, for Kitcher, "synthetic philosophy" ought to "replace" analytic philosophy.  I don't think that necessary at all; they can be reciprocal and mutually supportive enterprises. As I noted in B&P, synthetic philosophy can provide analytic philosophy with the data/input that enter into its arguments. Analytic philosophy can provide a home to and train would-be synthetic philosophers and, more important, be a place where would-be-synthesizing theories are tried out and developed. The previous two sentences do justice to the recent history.

I do not mean to deny that the ambitions of synthetic philosophy are a response to the cognitive division of labor and specialization within the sciences that contrast to those characteristic of analytic philosophy response. To simplify: analytic philosophy has both tried to become scientific and a specialist discipline, and it has tried (in Neurath's orchestration and Quine's regimentation) to propose being steward of a specialist language that might unify the sciences (and metaphysics). Synthetic philosophers aspire to play a more a more activist role in the sciences (and beyond).

Second, Kitcher strongly identifies synthetic philosophy with "naturalism." (That's in the next paragraph after the one I quoted above.) But as I clarified (or conceded) in response to a fine post by Martin Lenz, I don't think that necessary. All that is required is that there is a body of knowledge that can be taught, shared, and criticized (in neighboring fields) by others. This is, in fact, compatible with anti-naturalism, and the kinds of projects one can find in continental philosophy, what the Germans call geisteswissenschaft, and theology. None of this is far removed from what Kitcher writes about embracing the 'methodological canons of science of the day'; but he is adamant it rules out all kinds of beasts (e.g., Aristotelian essences, a priori truths, etc.) to be found in ''the philosophical zoo." And my kind of synthetic philosopher probably shares a lot of Kitcher's suspicions, but nows that its tasks are too urgent and difficult to rule out, a fortiori, useful tools and approaches.

Third, and most important, I think the synthetic 'glue' in synthetic philosophy is provided by one or more generalist theories (e.g., Darwinism, Bayesianism, information theory, game theory, actor network theory, etc.) Such theories provide a form of unification and explanation, and frame the kind of puzzles and research questions that can be pursued within the special sciences, a new synthetic special science, and/or philosophy (and public policy). They also provided a species of discipline (for reasons Timothy Williamson has emphasized in a different context). Kitcher quite clearly rejects the very idea (he calls it a "myth") of philosophical "expertise" (219, and elsewhere).* 

Why do I emphasize this? Kitcher's version of synthetic philosophy risks trapping philosophy in the great man of genius syndrome, where the synthetic glue is an act of creative synthesis; it is no coincidence that Kitcher quotes Dewey's gloss on "great innovators" (xi-xv; 172) confronting the problems of their own times approvingly. This is distinct from mastering skills and the (sometimes fine) drudgery of working through and becoming comfortable of a theory within the give and take of academic discussion (as Liam Kofi Bright would say, #noheroes). I am the first to admit that understood like this I am more likely to be (somewhat self-aggrandizing and delusional) synthetic philosopher in Kitcher's sense  and not my own (and that Kitcher clearly could be quite excellent as a synthetic philosopher in my sense)! The synthetic philosopher as I understand her responds to the division of labor among the sciences, by standing within and among them.

To be sure, I do not mean to deny the possibility of intellectual freedom in the synthesizing process. Nor do I mean to reject the hybrid and sometimes eclectic nature of the cosmopolitan, synthetic philosopher (who rejects nativism in all forms). Like Kitcher, I value the possibilities of roaming free exploring desert landscapes and the rich aquatic life below.

A reader sympathetic to Kitcher, and impatient with mine, may note that Kitcher's reasons for rejecting philosophical expertise are ethical. Kitcher's motives are egalitarian, and he wants to block a cognitive hierarchy in which philosophers are superior in the joint ethical practice we must engage in. Regular readers, familiar with my views on methodological analytic egalitarianism, would expect me to agree. But for Kitcher ethical practice (on the value axis) is orthogonal to synthetic philosophy which operates on a "knowledge axis" (xxv; 214ff). By contrast, fourth, I do not see the axes as opposed, and more important, synthetic philosophy can operate at sites where knowledge and values intersect in complex fashion (and draw on expertise in ethics and metaethics and other value-apt sciences). How to do so responsibly is no simple matter and Kitcher himself has important things to say on the topic.

Fifth, there is a more subtle distinction (connected to the third) between Kitcher's approach and my own. The way I understand synthetic philosophy, it is really about the construction of a scientific image that may influence the development of the special sciences, philosophy, public policy, or the manifest image, and in turn be influenced by these. Integrating the various scientific and manifest images into a single picture, let's call it integrative world-making, probably goes beyond synthetic philosophy. I don't deny that some synthetic philosophers -- think of Dennett's use of the universal acid of Darwinism -- may aspire to such a project. In Kitcher's hands integrative world-making (systematic philosophy) is constitutive of synthetic philosophy: "Setting aside any further ventures in philosophical midwifery, societies and individuals continue to need an integrated picture of nature that combines the contributions of different areas of inquiry, and different fields of investigation can be assisted by thinkers whose more synthetic perspective can alert them to missed opportunities and provide them with needed clarification." (215)

Since I like the sentiment in these last words, I think in practice, this may be merely a matter of emphasis. But the way I understand a synthetic philosopher, she may, in principle, more comfortable with a dappled, disunified, and pluralist world  than Kitcher's integrative world-maker.  While I personally feel the pull of a Jamesian reconciliation between the scientific and manifest image, I do not see why this should be the mission of synthetic philosophy. Kitcher (and Kitcher's Dewey) also deny that this should be the main project. But they do continue to embrace integrative world-making.

Finally, for Kitcher synthetic philosophy belongs to pragmatist philosophy. And pragmatism in its beautiful, broad variety does involve non-trivial philosophical commitments about the purpose(s) of philosophy and the nature of  meaning and truth. I don't see why synthetic philosophy must involve commitment to pragmatism understood in a doctrinal sense even if I grant that synthetic philosophy of all stripes can thrive in such a variety. 

On Polanyi, Spontaneous Order (yes, Hayek and Kuhn)

The next example of dynamic order will be our main subject, Science. Every scientist in search of discovery is faced with the scientific results and opinions of all other scientists up to that date, both living and dead, which are summed up in text books or-for more recent work-in current publications and public discussions. The scientist differs from the judge in that he is not given his case to decide, but has to select his own problem for investigation. Early in life he specialises on certain branches of science which fit his own personal gifts and his own strongest inclinations. Then he looks out for an opportunity to apply his particular knowledge and gifts; and finally he selects a special problem by the pursuit of which he expects to achieve the most important results. In the setting of his problem and in the way he seeks its solution, he is applying the traditional methods of science and the particular procedure of his own branch: with such possible modifications as he may desire to attempt. His judgment, through which his results are expressed, is based on accepted scientific standards of reliability and precision: again, possibly, with some personal variation of his own. Discovery in the end will be largely based on thousands of previous discoveries; and though the new addition will always modify the previously prevailing ideas to some extent, and sometimes may cause revolutionary changes in outlook, the essential unity of science will be maintained. Scientific discoveries are published without delay, since each scientist desires to get the credit for his own achievements. Discoverers will often defend their claims emphatically against criticism and seek to assure their acceptance by the scientific public.

Science is thus seen to be growing by the characteristic process producing dynamic order. New scientific claims are made in due consideration of all previously established ones; and the results thus obtained continuously modify the previously achieved positions of science.

In the way a scientist, intent on a problem, consults the results and opinions of scientists who worked before him, he resembles a judge referring to precedent. But in the way in which he looks out for a problem to which to apply his special gifts to the best advantage, and later, when discovery is achieved, puts his claims before his colleagues and tries to gain their acceptance for them, he acts rather like the business man, first seeking the most profitable application of his resources and then soliciting the consumers' approval for his goods. We see here a variation in the nature of the methods of adjustment ("internal forces") that are operating in the formation of the dynamic order. Between different judges the adjustments are of a purely consultative character; between business men they are largely competitive ; while between scientists they show combinations of both types.--Michael Polanyi (1941) "The Growth of Thought in Society, "Economica, 8(32): 437.

When I was a PhD student, Mary Jo Nye visited and emphasized the significance of Michael Polanyi. I dutifully read Personal Knowledge, and found it useful to refer to his account of the role of passions in science. But suggestible as I am, I know how the sociological winds blow in analytic philosophy; I am not the first to notice (cf. Stephen Turner) that when the big guns of contemporary analytic philosophy went after know how, Polanyi's account and examples of tacit knowledge simply got ignored

The context of the quoted passage is Polanyi's attempt to graft on the "spontaneous ordering" (432) of "mutually adjusting units" (in context he is appealing to molecules in equilibrium) a description of a "kind of liberty that goes far beyond the claims of personal freedom." (438) The point is that "individuals, participating in the building up of a dynamic order, all act independently," in light of their own judgment. This judgment is not in the service of "the satisfaction of the desire to be left alone, or to do as you please" but rather ""to make discoveries that are important in science-as important as possible....[and to] see these discoveries accepted by science and credited to himself." (445) From this motive they serve the collective endeavor of science. This understanding of freedom Polanyi calls "public liberty." (438) Such public liberty is according to Polanyi constrained by one's own convictions and the judgment of others, and social "incentives" (444).

As an aside, Polanyi uses the reality of simultaneous discovery in science as an illustration of the existence of shared incentives and judgments and to downplay the influence of individual idiosyncrasy (445). This is a bit peculiar because he also treats individual conviction as a necessary feature of the efficiency of science; it's individuality that allows the possible search space to be explored (see Logic of Liberty, p. 34).* 

Be that as it may, the two main examples of a spontaneous or dynamic order Polanyi develops at any length are science and law. But he is quit explicit there "exist many other systems in the intellectual and moral sphere" that blend cognitive and normative features, including the economy. It is well known (see Caldwell) that these remarks appealed to Hayek. And I am not the first to wonder how much Polanyi shaped Kuhn's ideas. What I didn't previously appreciate is that Polanyi develops these ideas in order to combat both communist and fascist conceptions of science which presuppose social (including democratic) control of science. For me, at least, this makes more intelligible the idea that the initial reception of Kuhn was, in fact, facilitated by the cold war context.

I want to close with two observations. First, Polanyi treats the existence of Knightian uncertainty as real and as a ground to doubt the possibility of planning of science: "The main difficulty in handling men according to a pre-arranged plan lies in the fact that the outcome of human endeavour is mostly uncertain and is often worth while only to the extent to which it is uncertain." (433) It is notable that Polanyi treats the very worth of agency as presupposing uncertainty.

Second, I find it amusing that the image of science (recall) that Polanyi presents is itself grounded in a system studied by science. There is, thus, a fractal like quality to his thought.

On Starting a (Philosophy) Blog

About three or four times a year I get asked for advice on how to start a philosophy blog. (My first thought is always, haven't they heard blogs died?) So, this post is meant for those who wish to start such a blog or who like, so to speak, a peak behind the curtains.  I have organized my notes along some topical headers, but obviously they interact with each other. (Also, this post on the nature and risks of being a public philosopher provides important background.)

• Audience

The only good reason to start a blog is because you wish an audience for your ideas and have a desire to see them discussed. (Sometimes you are nudged into it because some grant agency or department chair wants to see more outreach.) Journal articles are controlled by others (and in philosophy have insanely low acceptance rates), have very restrictive form, length, and content requirements, and even when you get through all the gate-keepers have limited audience size. Newspaper editorial pages have huge audience, but have very restrictive word and style limits. Even so, the first thing to reflect on is who are you, or do you imagine, writing for? You can pitch the blog to your academic peers in your area of specialization, your students, the profession at large, or the academy, or an even wider public.  That is, your intended audience will constrain not just the topics you will discuss as well the the manner in which you do so. Of course, they can become moving targets and change, but to develop a blog you need to have an intended audience in mind (even if only philosophers of the future.)

Every audience presupposes different background knowledge and are more or less forgiving of different kinds of (specialized) writing styles. I admire Bleeding Heart Libertarians because while they write for a non-academic, rather politicized (and large!) audience, they simultaneously are interesting and accessible to academics who do not share their shared background commitments. But I also admire Brian Weatherson, when he was still blogging actively; Brian's blog was generally rather technical and he did not compromise on this. But he writes clean, lively prose and made you see the point of the apparatus while you were sitting in on a seminar he was virtually having with his peers and graduate students.

The bad news is most blogs, even well written and designed ones, have small audience size. That is sometimes a matter of  bad luck [just as you publish a neat post on modality, a film clip of Timothy Williamson is shared on youtube, etc.] or bad marketing (you need to use social media, link to other blogs, that is, become a node in a lot of discussions), or an unwillingness to talk about sex scandals or share professional gossip. The main problem with most blogs is that they lack voice or what I call persona.

• Persona

The hardest problem is to figure out what persona you will project in order to connect with your audience given the ideas you want to discuss. I tend to suggest that you need to project and magnify a part of you that inspires a response in one's would be audience. (Of course, if you are Kierkegaard you can develop many different kinds of such personae.) For those of us, who are self-conscious teachers, we do something similar with our class room persona, which we use as a means to facilitate learning, to provoke reflection, or generate discussion. I know quite a few shy people, who qua blogger present a persona they would like to be in other parts of their life.

Now, it  is significant that if your blog takes off, this blog-persona has consequences how people will interpret and see you. So, you have to be willing to live with such consequences, even unintended consequences sometimes due to selective attention to only few utterances or posts. It surprised me, for example, albeit  it was an entirely foreseeable consequence, that I have come to be understood by some readers as a shrill social justice warrior (despite my skeptical sensibility).

• Form and Content

Most philosophy blogs are brief reads (250 words) or short reads (800-1200 words). It's not as if long reads (over 1500 words) are impossible, but life is short and few people are eager to pay attention to you for extended periods of time. Personally, I would love to see more use of graphics and video-moving content in philosophy blogs. While the best blogs  -- through the use of hyperlinks -- create an oeuvre, a system, a privileged set of conversation partners, or a pathway into different ways of thinking, by nature blogs are (recall here and here) ephemera. 

Some content restrictions and style structures follow from the blog provider you use. You should really research different kind of blog providers--not just their fee structures, but also their permissible templates, the capacity of the templates to do what you want to do with the blog, and the explicit restrictions of speech they impose. Some blog providers give you a discount but then plaster advertising on your otherwise clean house look.  This is a big decision because once you go with a particular provider you kind of lock yourself in, and when you switch you may have trouble to carry the archive of your past blogs with you. 

Academics are disciplined into forms of cautious and pedantic writing that are tedious to read. Like all non-disciplinary  writing any given individual blog post needs a hook--the first few sentences are key. On average, a blog needs to state its point or conclusion in the first paragraph. Luckily analytical philosophers are trained to state their thesis in the first sentence, and glorify polemics, so  the transition to blogging is not so difficult, provided -- and here our training pulls in the other direction -- one is not a perfectionist of a certain sort.  That is to say, analytic philosophers impose on ourselves a demand of disambiguation against any kind of uncharitable misreading. That makes for a great satirical blog post, but destroy whatever conatus (in the Spinozist, not the Hobbesian or Cartesian sense) a blog post may have. 

That is to say, most good blogs have in addition to a provider who delivers a range of container templates, they (the blogs) also have an implicit and regular template in which the content is articulated. The simplest one is three-fold: (i) hook [thesis/point]; (ii) argument/evidence; (iii) polemical restatement of the thesis. (For others, recall here and here.) Of course, over time one learns to play with different structures to present one's point.

• Frequency

The most important point about frequency is that it needs to be fairly regular--certainly while you are developing your blog and audience. The audience should want to expect one, even if they can't receive a new piece when they wish. But once a blog is established that's compatible with extended downtime. Schwitzgebel's The Splintered Mind and Helen de Cruz, who divides her blogging activities among different sites, allow quite a bit of down-time in between posts. But their pieces are received with great interest. 

Few academics have the time to do a daily post and it is really unnecessary to draw a regular audience. In fact, it may reduce one's audience because people really don't want to spend that much time with you (we academics are not that fascinating to others). The other, more frequent problem is that many blogs start with a gush of activity (often drawing on ideas and posts that motivated setting up the blog in the first place), and after a few weeks or months they run out of steam and die down. Some people really don't have a lot to say and become aware of this in a timely fashion. My only suggestion is to think about blogging as producing a series, some of these are open-ended and some a circumscribed.  Of course, it's okay if blogs die. 

• Comments Policy

One of the most important decisions that you'll make, which will influence your audience size, audience engagement, and your health is your comments policy. If you allow automatic (un-moderated) anonymous commenting you will probably have  larger, even loyal readership and more comments than otherwise would be possible. You will also allow your  blog ro be hijacked by, and in a certain sense you will be responsible for providing a platform for, some of the worst and unsavory ideas out there.  If you want to produce the end of times, go for it.

That leaves either moderated commenting of anonymous comments or moderated comments of owned comments. The former is extremely time-consuming, the latter reduces the number of comments significantly. If you want to be a forum for discussions you probably need to allow anonymous commenting because so many people worry about reputational costs of their comments, have legitimate concerns about being targeted by some lunatic or anonymous website, or concerns about employability or tenure-ability. Either way, write a good comments policy, so you can re-direct the aggrieved to it. 

• Time management

I hinted at the significance of time management. It is very easy to have one's blogging become all-consuming. Drafting a piece and moderating comments, not to mention an obsessive eye on readership numbers and flows, can be a time-sink. Obviously this is more true of very high profile blogs, and the odds of your blog becoming high profile are -- time and attention are  scarce goods -- low. Even so, it's good to set some rules for yourself about when you post and when you check comments (etc.). If you care about audience size you'll also learn when are good times to post a piece. Timing really matters.

Group blogs can be very time consuming because they require quite a bit of coordination behind the scenes. But they do allow taking quiet breaks from blogging without much disruption to the blog.

• Professional Risk

You have to think hard about this. Lots of peers think blogging is not serious and not philosophy. Almost certainly your blogging will not meet exacting professional standards of, say, an Analysis article. Alternatively, when you do get an audience, you run the risk that they know your blogging work better than your scholarly work.

A lot of people use their blogs to promote the scholarly views they have developed in print. That's a dissemination model of blogging. That's relatively low risk because you have already done the hard work and understand (presumably) the scholarly landscape. Of course, if you cut scholarly corners you are giving more visibility to your would-be-enemies/critics to hunt you down.

Alternatively you can use a blog to develop or discover a position. However, if you use a blog to develop new ideas or new interests, you run the risk of looking like an amateur or worse. 

Okay, this is just over 1800 words, so I have gone on too long. But maybe you found it helpful.

 

On Wanting To Be A Public Philosopher

• Do you actually want to? 

  • ...nobody should have to be a public philosopher. Although it can be valuable, it can also be risky, and it isn't suitable for every kind of philosopher or for every kind of philosophical work.
  • If you are only here in response to external pressure in this direction, and this is not something you're motivated to do for your own reasons, or for its own sake, IMO you're within your rights to resist that pressure citing the risks and/or the inappropriateness of this kind of work for your situation.

• Be aware of the risks.

  • Online hate and abuse are disproportionately directed at women, POC, LGBTQ people and other groups who experience discrimination, but anyone can be targeted. There are psychological, emotional, legal, financial, and other risks involved in public-facing work. They are often unpredictable.
  • Hate and abuse do not only occur online, even if they begin there. If you become a public figure your personal safety may be put at risk through e.g. doxxing, stalking, and dangerous physical mail. Academics are typically easy to target as our work addresses and phone numbers are posted freely online by our universities and our physical office spaces are often accessible to anyone.
  • If you belong to a university or other institution, find out what support and protections they provide. If nothing (or too little) is available, you might want to suggest/request/demand that they do better. Especially if your institution, department, or funding agency is actively encouraging you to engage in the risky business of public scholarship, they should support and help you when you do.
  • Some colleagues, in philosophy and elsewhere in the academy, do not respect public-facing scholarship. Some will even view it as evidence that you've lost interest in—or failed at—"real" philosophy. This can be an issue in securing employment as well as for promotion, tenure, and other forms of assessment.
  • Even positive experiences in the public arena can be exhausting and unpredictable. For example, media interest tends to come in viral waves, the timing of which can depend on all kinds of factors beyond your control and won't respect your teaching schedule.

• Have something to say.

  • It should be something you care enough about, and that enough people will want to hear, to make your efforts worthwhile. If you are going to make a serious investment of time, emotional energy, research funding, and other things into public work, you need to believe in your project and your message.
  • I started to do public-facing work in earnest when I started to research the philosophy of love. My work on the epistemology of arithmetic is no less important to me, but it isn't suitable for the same kind of public audience, and that's OK (see above).

• Consider who you want to be in the public arena.

  • If you develop a public profile, you will almost certainly be judged both positively and negatively for pretty much anything you do. Under these circumstances, integrity is challenging but essential. I recommend thinking carefully in advance about your intended public image, persona, personal brand, or whatever you like to call it.
  • I created a list of features I would aim to embody in my public-facing self. You don't need to be that explicit about it, but it helps to have a sense of direction and personal ethics to maintain consistency as you build a platform and audience.
  • Think ahead about your preferences with respect to privacy, as well as those of people around you (such as family members, collaborators, and colleagues). Keep these conversations current—people and situations change.

• Know that you will need different skill sets.

  • Philosophers trained in a typical contemporary philosophy PhD program are not trained to be public philosophers. Don't expect it to be easy to transfer what you already know into the public sphere. Although often ignored, trivialized, or disparaged, everything listed in Part 2 below is an achievement.

  • I've found learning to write and speak for public audiences very challenging. I experienced a steep learning curve. I'm still learning rapidly...--Carrie Jenkins " So You Want To Be A Public Philosopher?" [HT DailyNous; all emphases in original]

I warmly recommend Carrie Jenkins's post to would-be-public philosophers, their would-be-peers and evaluators, and people that love public philosophers (for whatever reason). The piece is full of important insights and suggestions (there is a lot more than I quoted above), and I would echo her focus on integrity (recall). In particular, I really like how she calls attention to the significance of advance planning. Importantly, Jenkins calls attention to the responsibilities of institutions, not the least universities and grant agencies, that encourage public philosophy, but often provide shamefully few resources to support colleagues that are being threatened or abused/harassed from various angles or become targets of political campaigns. (The previous sentence draws on my experiences of my departmental colleagues and myself.) In addition, Jenkins is right to call attention to the reputational risks of doing public philosophy. We do have a lot of colleagues who fail to respect public-facing scholarship, but use it, as she suggests, as a proxy for lack of philosophical ability.

I like how Jenkins speaks of "public-facing" work/scholarship. It is clear that she tries to make it symmetrical with, let's call it, peer-facing scholarship. She is right to emphasize that they draw on different skill sets, and that our professional training does not really prepare us for public-facing work. (Having said that, European universities and grant agencies are increasingly offering seminars to address some of the required skill set as part of graduate training.) Her underlying (tacit) model, however, is that of publicizing insights she developed through her peer-facing expertise.  That is, for Jenkins some peer-facing expertise is suitable for development to a public audience (and some not). That is, this is really a matter of (to use European technocratic-speek) disseminating peer-evaluated research findings to a wide audience.

To be sure, Jenkins's model is compatible with skipping publication in peer-facing outlets (journals) and hybrid versions (publishing some material for fellow experts and other material only in public venues, but with expert-quality documentation available--Piketty did a version of this and, perhaps, also Jenkins in her work on love). But my point is that public philosophy so conceived has an implied directionally from peer-facing expertise to public-facing exposure. There is nothing wrong with this conception. But it is not the only possible conception of the genre (for more of my views on public philosophy, recall here, here on Dotson's service philosophy, and here on some blogging as public philosophy).

Before I get to to that, it is worth noting that even in Jenkins's model of public philosophy, the person, who is a philosopher, and who faces the public, may well change. Jenkins hints at this by calling attention to the many skills and new dispositions one acquires by doing public philosophy. Even leaving aside (due to opportunity costs) that one may not be able to participate with the same dedication and attention to peer-facing philosophy, one may become a different kind of philosopher entirely. Here the metaphor of face is not innocent; by professionally facing others, one also becomes -- go read your Levinas - part of their community. A public-facing orientation generates duties, loyalties, and obligations and these when taken serious, in turn, transform the person. I don't mean the previous sentence to be my last word on it (it's not the first), but as the Hypatia debacle revealed (recall), research ethics are not fully developed within professional philosophy yet.

And this gets me to another possible conception of the genre. It is quite possible for public-facing philosophy to influence or displace peer-facing philosophy. (To give a standard example: Socrates undoubtedly talked quite a bit to Plato, one hopes, but quite possibly spent a lot more time talking to non-philosophers.) By this I mean that public-philosophy entails a receptivity toward the risk that one's peer-facing philosophy is not just influenced by one's engagements with public others, but, more importantly, shaped by one's public-facing activities. For example, and it's not my area of expertise, but it is my sense from reading Judith Butler that gender theory was shaped by (no doubt, theory-mediated) encounters with lived experience that in certain respects ran well in advance of gender theory. (Some such analogous transformative experience occurred to me through my engagements with professional economists--I didn't go native [despite being employed in a social science department], but I look very differently at my own profession and its history now. I am confident plenty of philosophers of mind, say, were changed by their immersion in some of the cognitive sciences.)

The way such public-facing work can shape peer-faced work is unpredictable. Some will start muttering about lowered standards and lack of seriousness--and, indeed, there are genuine risks. But the would-be-shaping of peer-faced scholarship is, in fact, a central argument in favor of public-facing work. As I have noted before, analytical philosophy has low barriers to entry and little in the way of doctrinal or even (much) methodological expertise. At its best, it has a sponge-like capacity to constantly rejuvenate itself -- some would say be disciplined -- by way of outward engagement with mathematics, the other sciences, history, and even the arts, etc. There is no reason to end rejuvenation by way of facing-other-expert-areas. But, in addition, if we are being encouraged to face and transform the public, we should not be afraid to be transformed by it.

Responsible Speech after Hypatia

I am persuaded that this tension exists not merely because traditional speculative philosophy frequently cultivates mystification and conscious irrationalism in matters of strict philosophy, but because it has repercussions upon social theory and practice, as recent events have amply shown. Analytic philosophy has thus a double function: it provides quiet green pastures for intellectual analysis, wherein its practitioners can find refuge from a troubled world and cultivate their intellectual games with chess-like indifference to its course; and it is also a keen, shining sword helping to dispel irrational beliefs and to make evident the structure of ideas. It is at once the pastime of a recluse and a terribly serious adventure: it aims to make as clear as possible what it is we really know.--Ernest Nagel (1936) "Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe. I" Journal of Philosophy, 9.

In the wake of the Hypatia debacle there is a renewed interest in the role of care in scholarship (see this discussion prompted by Lisa Miracchi at Dailynous). I have seen it said that analytical philosophers are clueless about research ethics and that they treat the people they write about as objects not as interested parties or ends in their own right [fill in your favorite egregious example]. (Apologies for not citing any given person in particular.) Often such comments are accompanied by praise of critical theory. Now, it's true that there are strands of critical theory which, in conversation with some of the social sciences (especially anthropology and sociology), have developed fairly sophisticated reflexive practices and research methods that allow for the development of species of responsible speech.* (Medicine and psychology have also developed such practices.) Together with professional economists (but cf. De Martino), analytical philosophers do seem, at first glance, to stand out for a lack of interest in responsible speech. But it does not follow that analytical philosophy lacks interest in responsible speech and lacks (historical and conceptual) resources to engage in it.

Before I get to that, by responsible speech I mean to talk about the circumstances in which philosophical speech, in the well-intentioned pursuit of truth, may foresee-ably harm others and one tries to prevent such harm(s). This is especially a matter of concern when those harmed are vulnerable members of society which lack resources or access to participate on equal footing in philosophy (and policy environments influenced by philosophical speech). In recent scholarly (broadly analytical) literature such issues are not unfamiliar and they are discussed by philosophers of science  in terms of inductive risk (Heather Douglas) and by epistemologists in terms of epistemic injustice (e.g., Miranda Fricker) and (Spivak's notion) of epistemic violence (Dotson). One indirect consequence of such harm, and which  generates an enlightened self-interest in it, is that the institution of philosophy may, fairly or not, come into disrepute (I call this the Socratic Problem).

The nature and practice of responsible speech is a traditional concern within and of philosophy. Arguably it goes back to the many layered charges against Socrates who is said to have corrupted the young (politically). If one pays attention to it, concern over it is present in most philosophical epochs. Even Enlightenment thinkers (who may have thought be rather optimistic and irresponsible in such matters--fill in your favorite egregious example on race and empire) show an interest in it. Recall my treatment of Žižek's interest in Kant's taboo articulated in Die Metaphysik der Sitten on inquiry in the historical origin of states; while that Enlightenment hero of free speech, Voltaire, opposed the diffusion of atheism among the ruling classes on prudential-political grounds.

As regular readers know, I tend to think (inspired by Gregory Arnold Frost) that Ernest Nagel is responsible for putting together the elements of the image of analytical philosophy that became widespread in North America (among analytical philosophers and scientific pragmatists and their critics).+ As the quoted passage above reveals, analytical philosophy has two functions: first, it's a place of refuge where certain intellectual skills are practiced and developed. As an aside, the idea that philosophy is like an intellectual game "with chess-like" features has been re-animated by Dan Dennett in his paper, Higher-order truths about chmess. Let's call  the first function, analytical Stoicism. The second function is an enlightenment project in which "irrational beliefs" are dispelled (the military metaphor is self-conscious in Nagel) and to make "evident the structure of ideas." Presumably, Nagel's idea is that when the structure of ideas is clarified we know what we really know and, thereby, can unmask irrational beliefs.

And, in fact, the second function of of analytic philosophy is aimed at a species of irresponsible speech that is said to be cultivated by "traditional speculative philosophy" which "frequently cultivates mystification and conscious irrationalism in matters of strict philosophy," and "has repercussions upon social theory and practice, as recent events have amply shown." (9) Now, Nagel does not explain how the mystification and irrationalism influences social theory and practice. But he takes for granted that his readers are familiar with the tenets of "romantic irrationalism that have "engulfed Europe." (5)

The concern with responsible speech is not limited to Nagel. In the debate with Heidegger, it becomes clear that Carnap's voluntarism, which is most majestically expressed in the free choice of a stipulative language, is, as Abe Stone+ has shown, an expression of our freedom to take "responsibility" for the choice of language, for own "self-legislation as a rational (i.e., speaking) being." That is, Carnap's theoretical philosophy is, in part, rooted in a practical concern.  This Carnapian stance is accompanied, as Stone emphasizes, by a second species of responsible speech: "outside the borders of theory... [speech] may be attempted in brief hints." (Stone quoting the Aufbau). Theory is the realm of Nagel's clear ideas, but it is not the only realm of interest to humans (Carnap knew his Nietzsche and Lebensphilosophie). Such obliqueness can be discerned in the tradition from Carnap all the way to Williamson (see Liam Kofi Bright). The characteristic virtue of speaking obliquely is self-command.

Such self-command is not characteristic of Nagel's image of analytic philosophy. However, Nagel is not unaware of such self command within analytical philosophy. He explicitly presents Wittgenstein's reluctance to publish, Wittgenstein's unwillingness to grant "permission to attend his lectures" (17) to outsiders (like Nagel), and the generation of an "esoteric atmosphere" in Wittgenstein's circle (17). Whatever one may think of such esotericism (not to be confused with the Straussian kind), it is also instantiates self-command. Here the Stoic refuge becomes a safe house almost inaccessible to society and with extremely indirect, if any, impact on society.**

None of this ought to be surprising because the routine rhetoric that surrounds analytical philosophy is often filled with humdrum, consequentialist appeals often warning against alternative approaches (a recent Meme given wide circulation by some remarks of Dennett's [HT Dailynous] is that postmodern philosophy is responsible for alt-facts or pernicious relativism, etc.). Such consequentialist appeals are legitimate (even if often partial and not sufficiently reflexive.)

Now, one may think that that the functions of analytical philosophy, the Stoic and the Enlightenment project, have in common the encouragement to speak the truth come what may. Surprisingly enough that's not true of either function. The Stoic project is not oriented toward truth, but toward cultivation of skill (widely understood) at the (serious!) game. This is why in the seminar room and many of our publications, analytical philosophers have enormous tolerance for false thought experiments and unrealistic examples. It's also not true of the Enlightenment function of the project. For, its aim is to help dispel irrational beliefs in order to produce better "social theory and practice." (This is an expression of Nagel's pragmatism;*** I return to this below.) Truth is a means here not the end. To be sure, it does not mean that on this picture analytical philosophers wish to promote the false as a means to good ends (we're not in the realm of Government House Utilitarianism or Platonic noble liars), but it does mean that we can evaluate the project of clarification and analysis in light of an interest in responsible speech including the harms to vulnerable others because the business of analytical philosophy is, in part, to promote better practices. 

Now, the history of analytic philosophy is, in part, the blurring of the two functions (or an over-emphasis of the Stoical one--recall Isaiah Berlin's critique) which also got accompanied with both a retreat of interest in the social theory component of analytical/scientific pragmatism as well as a loss of interest in an ongoing meta-reflection in responsible speech. This is nicely illustrated with a google-ngram [but please treat such data with caution!] on Inductive Risk, which peaked in the 1960s-70s, and then almost disappeared. Somewhat alarmingly, this period of retreat was accompanied by great professional success (at the expense of other schools). It's an open question if such forgetting was a necessary (Kuhnian) condition for this professional conquest. Even so, there is no intrinsic reason why analytical philosophy can't engage in responsible speech; the question is rather if it wishes to learn from the practices developed across many disciplines and wishes to live up to its highest aspirations. 

On hints of a unified Perspectives on the world

I really value the ability to produce such an emotionally coherent philosophy in humanistic thinkers. One -- not the only, nor even the most important, but one -- valuable thing I think we can offer as humanists is placing facts, arguments, perspectives, into such a light as they provide a kind of unified perspective on the world, that they can shape and guide a coherent approach to life's many problems and joys. I don't think this need be the explicit subject matter of what is done, indeed I think it is often best done kind of obliquely as one focuses on more immediate or precisely formulated problems. Indeed, a lot of what I say here is shaped by my reading of Carnap, who I think also deliberately did this obliquely, and ends up painting a very different picture from Williamson. But some of my favourite thinkers are such precisely because they have the ability to conjure in me a window into their lifeworld. I think analytic philosophy has greater potential to contribute to this kind of humanistic project than even some of its own practitioners admit; and as I develop as a thinker I aspire to have such a vision emerge from my own work.

Eric Schliesser's post... does a great job of not just pointing to Williamson's lifeworld but also exemplifying what it would be to live in it. One gets the sense that even in the face of personal and social catastrophe, even where others cannot be brought to see it, there is still a value to be found in discovering the world as it is and acclimatising to it, terrible tough it may be. The determination to gain that knowledge and comport oneself accordingly just is a good, and that value is invariant across the waxing and waning of fortune---The Sooty Empiric.

In the concluding paragraphs of his generous* and insightful post, Liam Kofi Bright boldly proclaims (in partial response to my post) that he wishes to develop a unified perspective on the world, which will be, perhaps, obliquely available to his discerning readers as well as "shape and guide a coherent approach to life's many problems and joys." He will reveal this perspective as he addresses other philosophical challenges. Articulating such an aspiration is a means of binding future selves -- assuming these selves value internal consistency over time --, and an invitation to witnesses to become complicit or co-constitutive of the enterprise. It is, however, not mere consistency, but also a claim to a kind of existential philosophical integrity, which, demands from us not just (recall) that our the way(s) in which one's professional arguments, professional credit, and public utterances and comportment cohere, but that these (public philosophical integrity) are anchored in what he calls an "underlying emotional basis for their work."

It is worth noting that systematicity and an embrace of obliqueness both have a complicated status within analytical philosophy. Systematicity bumps up against the tradition of conceiving philosophy as puzzle-solving in the context of an intellectual (and non-hierarchical) division of labor (#noheroes); while deploying hints offends our fondness for clarity and direct/assertoric speech and our distrust of polysemy. For most of my education it never even occurred to me that obliqueness would be deployed in the pale gray threads of our intellectual elders until I learned from Abe Stone the significance of hints in Carnap (recall and in David Lewis, who -- together with Jody Azzouni (recall) -- may be the only major systematic philosopher analytical philosophy has produced).

One way, I think, to distinguish analytical hinting or obliqueness from vulgar Straussianism (which is verboten) is precisely the demand to adhere to the  two-fold coherence that public and existential philosophical integrity demand from us. By contrast, a Straussian is allowed to embrace a noble lie or an esoteric doctrine that contradicts the exoteric doctrine.

It was especially kind of Liam Kofi Bright to note that I was aiming to convey even exemplify what it would be to live in Williamson's lifeworld. Recall that I quoted him as follows,  although language is a human construct, that does not make it transparent to us. Like the children we make, the meanings we make can have secrets from us. One can recognize this while holding on to (recall) the ideal of clarity as a kind of property or by-product of formal systems, of constructed languages, that is, to aim for transparency in one's inferential practices, one's commitments, and the use of terms (etc). In fact, Williamson could have said (but didn't) although formal language is a human construct, that does not make it transparent to us even if it simultaneously can be a means to greater transparency in many respects. When we construct languages we gain control over some matter, but we also (often unintentionally) produce secrets for ourselves. A continental philosopher would be inclined to start talking about  hidden-ness, but here I'll resist that temptation.

There is quite a bit more to be said about Williamson's remark. But here I wish to close by noting that I have often found my analytical training a hindrance to the task of (to quote Liam Kofi Bright) placing "facts, arguments, perspectives, into such a light as they provide a kind of unified perspective on the world, that they can shape and guide a coherent approach to life's many problems and joys." By this I do not mean that analytical training is a hindrance in constructing such a lifeworld for oneself or close peers (I think it is not); rather I find my training and the intellectual and emotional dispositions that accompany them a hindrance in recognizing the lifeworlds of others with a different orientation (recall also this post). (This is especially so if I am correcting another person's fallacy also generates an incapacity to listen to the emotional basis of his words.) One way one can understand these daily impressions is as hard exercises in placing other people's "facts, arguments, perspectives, into such a light as they provide a kind of unified perspective on" their "world," which they may, or not, share with others.

 

On Putting a Child on this world; Does Philosophy's Show Must Go On?

Imagine a heap of sand. You carefully remove one grain. Is there still a heap? The obvious answer is: yes. Removing one grain doesn’t turn a heap into no heap.--Timothy Williamson "On vagueness, or, when is a heap of sand not a heap of sand?" @Aeon 15 November, 2016 [HT Dailynous]

When I went to bed, in Amsterdam, around 2:30am the night of the US Election, I concluded after seeing the Indiana returns (where the Democrat was not being as competitive as expected in the Senate election), and carefully watching Florida and North Carolina returns, that it was not going to be a Clinton landslide, but a close election. (At that time I had no idea about how Pennsylvania and the rest of the Midwest were unfolding.) When I awoke three or so hours later, I could not resist to check the election results and by then it was clear that Trump was going to be the next President. Much to my own surprise, my first thought was How could I have put a child on this Earth?*

While the day before election, I had written that "I have no idea what happens if Trump wins," my reaction betrayed my sense of unease. Throughout the year, as I have shared in these musings, I have been concerned about Trumps's embrace of an illiberal, Jacksonian/authoritarian (misogynist, etc.) political stance. While I did not overlook the fact that the Clinton campaign deliberately and mistakenly had turned the election into a referendum on Trump's character, I had watched enough of the debates and his speeches to have come to independent, preliminary unsettling conclusions.

But I recognized a deeper source of unease; my whole childhood I had been told, by my refugee-traumatized parents, to treasure my US Citizenship and passport as a kind of backstop or security blanket to whatever craziness or worse would occur in Europe. While most antisemitism I encountered locally was nonthreatening during childhood, there was always a quiet daemonic voice reminding me that the parents or grandparents of nearly all the people I encounter were complicit, or worse, in Nazi-crimes, or too servile to do anything. (And genuine xenophobia has become socially permitted again.) I always found it reassuring that the Dutch, and our neighbors, were protectorates within an American empire. Of course, I recognized that American exceptionalism was a myth, but we all need to embrace some fictions to live by.

My second thought was, there is no place to run.* America's reach is global. I felt a panic swell up, and I reflected on familiar names of exiled and refugee philosophers; I paused to reflect on their friends, forgotten names, who never got out on time. As regular readers know, these daily musings are a form of therapy. When I logged in to start a post, while the election results and commentary were being announced on the background, I found myself staring blankly at a screen--a fatigued paralysis. I am not much prone to writer's block, but I had no desire to remain frozen in my feelings. Philosophy can be a form of escapism, a means not to feel (recall). I call this false philosophy. By contrast, in true philosophy the thoughts are felt and, thereby, owned. I was too fragile, so opted for false philosophy (this piece on Bayesianism), despite the risk that such intellectual running would just hasten the onset of depression.**

Not everybody responds to fear in the same way. Some are thrown into panic; I have that with heights, airplanes, snakes, and some forms of social embarrassment. But to my own surprise after I completed the post, I could sense a decision: I really don't know what will happen; I am a witness to the unfolding events and devote my efforts to understanding them. I joked, to no body in particular, that I should rename these daily digressions, notes toward a post-apocalyptic liberalism.

A few days ago, when Dailynous linked to Williamson's piece, my first thought was, he's still minutely working his way through yet another sorites paradox. Just as I was about to start a satirical mental rant, I noticed how he was making the argument for relevance: "More important legal and moral issues also involve vagueness." Yeah, vagueness really does matter, and not for the last time I agreed with him that vagueness is not a problem about logic. (I tend to think sometimes it's an ontic problem, but I am happy to concede it is often merely epistemic.)

Much to my surprise I was vehemently annoyed at Williamson for making the case for the social significance of his work on vagueness. I wanted him to double down on contingently non-concrete objects, and forego selling philosophy to an indifferent public; it's degrading. In reflecting on my irritation, I recognized that precisely because political events demand our attention, we should not sacrifice all the noble ends that justify life. If the only proper end becomes the political fight, then the bad dudes have won and even conquered our inner sanctum. I made a mental note to check if one of my bourgeois heroes, a Havel or an Arendt, had made the point somewhere about the significance of defending (philosophical) art for art's sake.

And, then suddenly, I am not even sure I was still even reading the words, I had made it to the final paragraph of Williamson's piece, and stumbled across these lines:

Although language is a human construct, that does not make it transparent to us. Like the children we make, the meanings we make can have secrets from us.

If analytical philosophy could reach maturity, perhaps I could live without my security blanket.

 

 

Genius and the Herd in Analytical Philosophy

In saying that analytic philosophy now has only a stylistic and sociological unity I, am not suggesting that analytic philosophy is a bad thing or that it is in bad shape. The analytic style is, I think, a good style, and the espirit de corps among analytic philosophers is healthy and useful. All I am saying is that analytic philosophy has become, whether it likes it or not, the same sort of discipline that we find in the other humanities departments--departments where pretensions to rigor and to scientific status are less evident. The normal form of life in the humanities is the same as that in the arts  and in belles lettres: a genius does something new and interesting and persuasive, and his or her admirers begin to form a school or movement....
Rather, we should relax and say, with our colleagues in history and literature, that we in the humanities differ from scientists precisely in not knowing in advance what our problems are, and in not needing to provide criteria of  identity that will tell us whether our problems are the same as those of our predecessors. To adopt this relaxed attitude is to let the institutional tail wag the pseudoscientific dog. It is to admit that our geniuses invent problems and programs de novo, rather than being presented with them by the subject matter itself or by the current state of research.--Richard Rorty (1982) "Philosophy in America Today" The American Scholar, 189.

Rorty assumes that the opposition between (a) a given-problem-solving discipline with extensive division of labor and (b) a herd-like-Genius-following discipline (with constantly invented new problems) is exhaustive (in Rorty Kripke is the exemplar of (b)). The analytic herd is, on this account, defined by an "argumentative" style, that turns us into "quasi-lawyers rather than quasi-scientists." (198)  On Rorty's approach this style is what distinguishes us from other folk that call themselves 'philosophers' and from other disciplines. While Rorty's own trajectory moved him away from this style, it seems he was happy to recommend it to others.

Rorty, then, sugests that philosophers should reconcile themselves (in the Kuhnian terms which he also uses) to permanent crisis or to being in a pre-paradigmatic stage with an "increasingly short half-lives of philosophical problems and programms." (198) As MacIntyre noted in his response to Rorty (recall yesterday's post), Rorty's position relies on a pseudo-history in which the Positivists turn out to be philosophy's last chance (to turn itself into a scientific paradigm).

As Williamson (2014) notes, Rorty ignores David Lewis, who was "Rorty’s colleague at Princeton since 1970;" thereby "Rorty’s radar had missed a serious threat, the central figure in analytic philosophy for the coming decades. Rorty was out of sympathy with most new wave philosophy of language, and the metaphysics that increasingly accompanied it," (33; in context, Williamson is discussing Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature. Recall my posts on Williamson's piece here , here, and here).

As an aside, Wiliamson's treatment of Lewis is respectful on Lewis's professional achievement, but also includes this odd sketch:

The central, most influential figure in the development of analytic metaphysics over the final quarter of the twentieth century, and the contemporary philosopher most cited within recent analytic philosophy, is undoubtedly David Lewis, also known as ‘the machine in the ghost’ for his eerie computational power, mechanical diction, faint air of detachment from ordinary life, and beard from another era (by contrast with ‘the ghost in the machine’, Gilbert Ryle’s summary description of the immaterial Cartesian ego in the clockwork Cartesian body).

Perhaps that passes as funny in Oxford?

 

Be that as it may David Lewis’s system with its peculiar and original mixture of modularity and systematicity generated, as the Healy data showed, a kind of cohesion for a considerable chunk of analytical philosophy. The cohesion is not complete (recall this post, and also this one), and as Rorty already recognizes, for example, A Theory of Justice does not fit this larger cohesion; in fact, it (TJ) "is not a triumph of analytic philosophizing. It is simply the best update of liberal social thought that we have." (188; Rorty ignores the fact that Nozick's Anarchy is more clearly a work of analytical philosophy.)

 

However, it is now likely that analytical ideology studies (recall) and analytical existentialism will in this Lewisian-era, link (to quote Rorty!) "the so-called central areas of philosophy"  to "moral and social philosophy." (188)  And I expect that before long that developments in analytic ideology studies and existentialism will drive technical results in formerly 'core' areas.

David Lewis’s system with its peculiar and original mixture of modularity and systematicity generated, as the Healy data showed, a new kind of cohesion for a considerable chunk of analytical philosophy. The cohesion is not complete (recall this post, and also this one). - See more at: http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/#sthash.9cfulkk6.dpuf

 

Our Lewisian-era also offers us an alternative option to the ones on offer by Rorty [recall: (a) a given-problem-solving discipline with extensive division of labor and (b) a herd-like-Genius-following discipline]. In his writings, Lewis, who did not pretend to excessive modesty, himself eschewed the great-man approach, and (in Australia) he found interlocutors (e.g. Armstrong) that facilitated the presentation, if not development, of his own views. In doing so, he did not put himself above criticism, and he developed his own views along the way.

 

In Rawls and Lewis, then, analytical philosophy of the 1970s (and the decades thereafter) spawned two wildly successful schools in which the founder is open to criticism (and is not conceived as a Genius-legislator; by contrast, Cavell flirts much closer to such a magisterial approach). But the difference between the two schools is also notable: the Rawlsian school has considerable cohesion on doctrinal matters (and its conception of the history of philosophy), whereas in the Lewisian school, respecting the modularity of the 'system,' Lewis's individual papers (and books) are key reference points for discussions, but few people working in it treat any of it as dogma. (If there is consensus it is not over doctrinal matters.) The lack of such dogmas allows new ideas and even new methods to be assimilated along the way (this sponge-like ability has always been characteristic of the best of analytic philosophy).

 

In conclusion, the Lewisian school should also be contrasted with the original mold of scientific philosophy with an intellectual division of labor that makes progress on technical questions from a settled core [Rorty's (a)]. While undoubtedly some Lewisian elements can be found in and assimilated by some such programs (e.g., Williamson's modal logic as metaphysics), it is, in practice, distinct from these.  That is to say, in addition to genius/herd & the we-are-all-workerbees models,* non-reverential schools (that do not exhaust the possibility space) are also possible within analytical philosophy. There is, in fact, nothing to prevent the existence of such schools alongside each other. while I doubt I could self-identify with a school, I think such a possibility is a good thing.

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

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

“How Did We Get Here From There?”

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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