Comments on: Hypothetical questions

By: Lawrence Krubner

Lawrence Krubner — Wed, 19 May 2004 18:41:41 +0000

At a recent city council meeting here in Charlottesville, Virginia, a woman stood up at question time and directed her remarks at one of the Republicans on the council. She spoke for 5 minutes criticising every policy he had ever supported, and everything he’d done, and everything she even knew about him. When she stopped to draw a breath he said, “But what is your question?” and she replied, “Hypothetically, isn’t there something wrong with your personality?” The whole crowd laughed.

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Tue, 18 May 2004 18:11:36 +0000

Really?! One of the Gettier questions is based on old (possibly WB) cartoons?? That’s so cool if it’s true. I don’t recall the cartoon myself, despite being a passionate fan of the WB oeuvre (hem hem).

By: Ginger Yellow

Ginger Yellow — Tue, 18 May 2004 12:07:25 +0000

Rumsfeld is the worst for this. He was quoted as saying (about pre-war planning), that there was no point in planning for anything because he couldn’t know exactly what would happen. He clearly doesn’t understand the concept of contingency then.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 18 May 2004 10:47:44 +0000

Similar to Ophelia’s point, I have a half draft of an article which I may complete on what is particularly pernicious about philosophers’ hypotheticals; that they encourage habits of thought which are bad when thinking about choice under uncertainty. In particular, by ruling out of the question secondary effects and possibilities which the poser of the question believes to be incidental, it encourages people to think that they are incidental in real world applications.

By: VJ

VJ — Tue, 18 May 2004 08:01:51 +0000

‘A familiar example’ [of] ‘A dog cunningly disguised as a sheep in a field’… Hypothetical Hell! This was the premise behind a whole series of Very funny WB (?) cartoons that probably predate the RoadRunner by some years. Further demonstrating that there’s lots of lost classical arts going on in those old cartoons! It was sort of staged like a work site too, with the coyote/wolf getting to the field in question right after Ralph the sheep dog clocked in. Both would take lunch breaks too, announced by a loud factory like whistle. One of Ralph’s many crafty disguises was a zipped up sheep’s suit he would use to lure Wiley E in for a pounce.

By: Lee

Lee — Tue, 18 May 2004 02:28:13 +0000

Rea, yes my objection is to bad hypotheticals and not to hypotheticals in general. But my other point is that in most political discussions, it seems to me that most of the hypotheticals are bad hypotheticals intended for brute persuasion, not enlightened discusion and discovery.

By: Tom Grey

Tom Grey — Tue, 18 May 2004 01:30:10 +0000

No hypotheticals is pretty stupid—how can you learn any lesson of history without imagining a better decision? Like no Munich Betrayal in 38, or like regime change in Baghdad in 91? Or like continued support of Saddam in 03?

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Tue, 18 May 2004 01:08:17 +0000

Imagine a world with no mental laziness. Nah, on second thought, don’t bother.

By: a different chris

a different chris — Tue, 18 May 2004 00:18:19 +0000

>Mental laziness is a rather common trait these days. I feel this to be true. Yet for some reason I just haven’t felt inclined to work out why… :>

By: Jonathan Lundell

Jonathan Lundell — Tue, 18 May 2004 00:04:43 +0000

Vaguely similar: “I can’t comment, becasue there’s a lawsuit pending.” Change “can’t” to “won’t” and it’s an entirely legitimate thing to say.

By: DJW

DJW — Mon, 17 May 2004 23:12:56 +0000

Harry, a pessimistic but fair interpretation. One result of my blog-reading habit is that I’m reading much more political philosophy than I used to, in large part because the blogosphere as I encounter it contains more political philosophers than political theorists. As a consequence, I’m thinking more about how these different bodies of literature relate to each other and how they might better make each other richer. I’m not ready to give up yet. epist, thanks for the reply. I agree that one of the difficult issues we face is how we move from the actual to the ideal (and back), and hypotheticals certainly can highlight the key issue that can than be used to shed light on empirical phenomenon. I we all need to be careful to watch out for those cases in which it doesn’t do that, though. I suppose one of the things I like about the general approach of political theory is that we’re* scavengers. We borrow and converse with pol philosophy types, but we also draw from political science (the rest of it), social theory, literary theory, geography, fiction, theology, and lots of other disciplines. To some, it makes us look like an incoherent and undisciplined bunch, and not without reason. I think what we’re looking for, though, is how to move from the ideal to the actual and back, and we’re not satisfied with being limited to a particular method. *I really shouldn’t purport to speak for political theorists.

By: epist

epist — Mon, 17 May 2004 22:46:21 +0000

djw- I’ve heard the complaint you voice before, and, as a political philosopher (in training, mind you), let me try and reply: Firstly, let me say that of course some improper oversimplification occurs in the course of philosophical research. Philosophers are no more exempt from the temptation to ‘look where the light is good’ rather than looking at the entire hairy problem than anyone else. That being said, many political theorists, especially those who do work on the basic concepts (equality, liberty, rights, etc) are engaged in a more, er, sophisticated form of simplification, awkward as that sounds. By this I mean that these theorists are interested in ‘ideal’ models as fecund explanatory stories that serve as a basis for further sophistication. In this way, they are much like theoretical scientists. Physicists, for example, are (or were, at one point) interested in the ideal model of, say, objects in motion. They represented this with balls rolling down inclined planes, and they ignored (or abstracted away) all of the pesky details (friction, heat, quantum effects) that attend actual ball-rolling. These idealized conditions are used in a theory about objects in motion. This theory, in turn, helps us understand the actual complex events it is meant to explain. Now, the jump from the ideal to the actual can be quite distant, and there are many points in the process where things might go wrong. But the method of idealized abstraction is very useful for the sort of theoretical work that philosophers (and scientists) do. And it needn’t be merely looking away from difficult aspects of the problem.

By: Jo Wolff

Jo Wolff — Mon, 17 May 2004 22:44:08 +0000

I was told the following. I don’t know if it is true. UCL wanted Stuart Hampshire for the Grote Chair, but didn’t want to make him an offer if he wasn’t going to to accept. So the Provost sent him a letter asking whether, if he were offered the Chair, he would accept. It is said that Hampshire wrote back saying ‘For reasons of economy of thought, I would prefer not to consider this hypothetical.’ As he ended up with the Chair, presumably a non-hypothetical version followed. Incidentally, I have been sitting on a committee preparing a report on animal experimentation. A draft went out to review. A senior scientist (non-academic) objected to the inclusion of the line ‘It would be a better world if we could achieve our scientific aims without experimenting on animals’ on the grounds that we will never be able to do this.

By: ian

ian — Mon, 17 May 2004 22:37:46 +0000

There is a similar ignorance of the concept of hypothesis and theory in physical and biological sciences – ‘evolution is only a theory’

By: harry

harry — Mon, 17 May 2004 22:32:48 +0000

djw and Ophelia; This might capture the diference between political philosophers and political theorists. Political philosophers are over-reliant on hypotheticals, too concerned to map out the conceptual space, not sufficiently concerned to think about how the principles apply in real world circumstances, fail to see how feasibility concerns might have real normative consequences. Also unscholarly so tend to reinvent the wheel. Political theorists (in US political science departments, not UK ones)are overreliant on real world examples, blinded by them about what is actually feasible, under-sensitive to the different consequences of conflicting principles which happen to point the same way in the contingent circumstances they are focussed on; also bogged down by scholarship and the need to contextualise in ways that are normatively irrlevant at best. Both prone to myopia. Could learn more from each other. Or, more sinisterly, can’t learn much from each ohter but could both learn more from each other’s colleagues (philosophers should read psephologists, not political theorists; theorists should read epistemologists, not political philosophers). My random thought for the day.