Comments on: Kvetching Retrospectively about Analytical Philosophy

By: vonmises

vonmises — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 21:12:38 +0000

The point of analytic philosophy is to make compelling arguments, where ‘compellingness’ is measured in how much an argument attracts critics and reformulations by other (analytic) philosophers. That’s essentially the whole ballgame. To be compelling, an argument’s conclusions don’t have to be (and largely aren’t—see David Lewis or Quine’s major theses) embraced by anyone. Compelling arguments are hit singles for philosophers. Arguments for conclusions that change one’s view of the way the world is, in some sense, have largely in the 20th and 21st centuries, come from outside philosophy: physics, linguistics (Chomsky), psychology, religion (fundamentalisms of various sorts). Who has had more of an impact on the way people experience the world, for better or worse: Rawls or Albert Wolhstetter, (on Wohlstetter, Rand theorist and mentor to Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, see http://www.rand.org/publications/classics/wohlstetter/index.html)

By: FaramirFan

FaramirFan — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 00:46:58 +0000

I think that “German Charlie” expresses most closely my own sentiment in debates like this one: “The philosophers have only criticized the world. The point is to change it.” They are fun to read, though!

By: Javier

Javier — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 22:30:04 +0000

Zizka, I apologize for my last post. It was condescending and snotty. Sorry, it just came off wrong. I think I won’t comment on your final post, as you already know what my position is and there is no point going on about it. But thanks for the interesting discussion, it at least helped me clarify my own position.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 19:04:29 +0000

Javier, your air of victimization is annoying. I’m the one who’s excluded, not you. I’ve reiterated this point several times. Rorty’s point (my cite was poor) was that Rawls’ own work was not done by analytic methods. He did give something for analytics to work on, and they did. If there were more Rawlses and even Nozicks, I might not be saying these things. Flipping through some journals tells a lot in any field. For example, I just spent a couple days flipping through world history and Asian History journals and was highly impressed. I also have a degree of contact with a local philosophy department, and with friends with various relationships to graduate schools, as I said, some of whom agree with me and some not. As I said, analytic philosophers seem to reflexively make problems smaller in order to make them more managable and more rigorous. The outward movement, which I rarely see, is equally valuable but is really not encouraged at all. I compare indie drivers, whose cars only can only turn left. I’m not against turning left (the analytic movement), I’m against always turning left. Werll, yeah, about the gatekeepers, but it’s not as if that’s a casual peripheral point, it’s my main point. Analytic philosophy is not good enough to have the dominance it does. And in my experience, analytic philosophers are unwilling and unable to consider ideas coming from elsewhere—many even are uninterested in and uninformed about their own intellectual ancestors before about 1950.

By: vivian

vivian — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 18:07:56 +0000

Zizka, It sounds like you’re opposed to analytic philosophers, not the philosophy. Your objection is to the narrow-minded individuals in groups who insult and stifle other forms of discourse and thought in journals and departments. It’s a criticism I share, many people share with you, and the world (and the ivory tower) would be a better place with more variety and more collegiality, and fewer petty bureaucrats concerned with status and gatekeeping than arguments and ideas. There are the same sort of narrow minds in other forms of philosophy, however, and other fields altogether. Although they often have much less power to enforce their dominance on the field, they are just as disappointing. I’d rather you judged the analytic style on its proudest achievements, not its most embarrassing gatekeeping, but hey, it’s your opinion, base it on what you like. But you have not yet convinced me that I should not try to write clearly on manageably-sized topics, aiming for incremental progress. As long as we defend our colleagues from other approaches, in faculty meetings and peer review. You (you of all people?) would really enjoy some Donald Davidson, however. He wrote clearly, but not reductively, on some extremely complex problems of language and translatability. He was also rather unpopular, partly because he did other things well, not just philosophy – screenwriting, for instance. Read one of the obituaries – he only died in the last year or so. There was even a link on CT as I recall.

By: Javier

Javier — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 18:05:59 +0000

This is irresistable, so I will allow myself one more comment: First, I seriously disagree with Rorty. What doe he expect someone like Rawls to do? By all accounts, Rawls has had an enormous effect on analytical political philosophy. Most analytic political philosophers developed their views through a critical engagement with Rawls’ work. So analytical philosophy would definitely not have been the same if Rawls had never published anything. Second, Davidson was a well-known analytical philosopher who developed a wide-ranging set of positions in the philosophy of language, mind, action theory, and so on. It is telling that you aren’t familiar with Davidson, especially given that Rorty has appropriated a great deal of Davidson’s work for his own purposes. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/davidson/ Flipping through a few journals won’t tell you much about the state of analytical philosophy. So I suggest you read up on the field before you attack it.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 17:07:15 +0000

Based on my reading of the journals I look at, they’re highly atypical. In the case of Rawls, Rorty said as much(“would have been much the same as if analytic philosophy never had existed”, paraphrase) , and I don’t see why it wouldn’t apply to Nozick (who in any case I do not admire). I’m unfamiliar with Davidson’s work.

By: Javier

Javier — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 16:38:06 +0000

Okay, one last post and then I’m out. I call an overwhelming analytic bias at the expense of any holism. (I actually do not count Nozick or Rawls as analytics, BTW, because they do NOT have this bias — Rorty said something like that about Rawls, BTW) So according to this, analytical philosophers are by definition focused only on narrow technical matters. And when an analytical philosopher takes a stab at “holism,” he or she ceases to be an analytical philosopher. Kind of stacks the deck against analytical philosophy, don’t you think? I think its far more plausible to say that Rawls, Nozick, Davidson and the like are analytical philosophers that attempt to articulate and examine the bigger picture.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 14:26:30 +0000

Thread still alive As I said earlier, analytic philosophy was probably a better thing when there wasn’t quite so much of it, and especially when it didn’t have the monopoly it does. I was never protesting the very existence of analytic philosophy, but its suffocating dominance. I REALLY do not think that, going into their third or fourth generation and master of all they survey, analytic philosophers can continue to make their pretenses of modesty, as if they were eccentric hobbyists under fierce attack from know-nothing populists. This is outgrowing the blog-comment format, obviously, but as for the analytic method, there’s what I call an overwhelming analytic bias at the expense of any holism. (I actually do not count Nozick or Rawls as analytics, BTW, because they do NOT have this bias—Rorty said something like that about Rawls, BTW). The method is to apply the most rigorous analysis to every part of a large argument, critiquing it and testing for possible problems with the goal of perfection, and then going down the line to the parts of the parts, etc. As a counterexample, in actual scientific theorizing (and analytic phil has a strong positivistic streak) the major argument is the important thing, and the imperfection of the parts is sometimes just tolerated. For two examples, calculus was used for something like two centuries while it still had a fatal flaw (the real infinitesimal, problem solved in the XIX c., as I understand, by Dedekind). The second is classical mechanics (astronomical physics), which really only ever worked well for two bodies (the Sun + the Earth, for example). Astronomers were unabashed and rolled right ahead, but then in ca. 1900 Poincare proved that the three-body problem was insoluble. All real calculations of planetary movement are (and always will be) done by kludgy, inelegant, but usable methods of approximation. Now my point is not that people shouldn’t have been thinking about the real infinitesimal and three-body problems. My point is that the holistic theorists (people using calculus and describing astronomical motions) were quite right to go ahead working with these defective, imperfect, and “untrue” tools. And to me (with exceptions such as Nozick and Rawls) analytic philosophers almost exclusively work at the “real-infinitesimal” end of the scale, rather than at the “using calculus, albeit imperfect” end of the scale. Incidentally, Meyers’ solution to the eliminativist dilemma would be to point out that ontology itself is the problem. It’s like the question of whether molecules are ontologically real, or are they just made up of atoms. The answer is that it depends on what you’re trying to say.

By: spacetoast

spacetoast — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 12:19:53 +0000

Ok, two more cents. I had my bit with philosophy as an undergraduate, and how that went was that I came in for the masturbation, got seduced by the possibility of “answers,” and became gradually disenchanted for reasons more or less like what people have already said. Ultimately I felt like philosophers were often more interested in cultivating intricate technical structures and objectioning about their logical features than in trying to develop more fine-grained conceptions of the things they claimed to be talking about. In the broad sense, I feel Nagel’s pain, I guess, although in my estimate it crosscuts the issue of “reductionism” (in the narrower sense), and Nagel’s book more or less makes an excuse of it for advocating a pretty garden variety “dualism by any other name,” which I don’t find congenial or illuminating. I find philosophy most interesting and/or useful where it’s in relatively the same debate-space as some discipline with established strategies for testing ideas against things besides reason and “intuitions”—cognitive science, biology, whatever… but anyway I wasn’t either clever enough for or tempermentally suited to games of logic and definition-mongering for their own sake, particularly having gone past the masturbatorial interest. My fundamental instinct, I guess, is to try to understand a phenomenon by going groping after it, whereas the philosophical MO, from my point of view, is to set logical traps and hope it comes along. I am ultimately glad though to have spent the time studying philosophy I did. I definitely had particular professors I admired the hell out of and learned a lot from, and I generally have a great deal of respect for what philosophers do, when I do, and I’m sure I’ll continue to maintain an interest in what they have to say about various things. By the same token, I’m pretty disheartened to see how some folks have responded to the allegation of masturbation here. “It’s fun” and “You never know what you’re going to get,” and other morals from boxes of chocolates, are just as good reasons for finger-painting and nose-picking, it seems to me. Pretty weak stuff, even for innernut fair, coming from actual philosophers. Another thing. I don’t find eliminativism at all attractive, and various things, particularly considerations about reference raised in Deconstructing the Mind, and by Stich and other writers in subsequent things, encircle and deflate eliminativism more or less to my satisfaction, but I think there’s a real complacency in saying it’s “obviously wrong,” which really ought to be (at least) “bad form” in serious philosophical discussions.

By: Nicole Wyatt

Nicole Wyatt — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 23:01:18 +0000

Two comments: First, the thing about academic disciplines is that it is notoriously difficult to identify ahead of time which esoteric problems will turn out to make a difference to peoples lives and which won’t. On the face of it, showing first order logic to be undecidable might well have looked like a pretty abstract problem that wouldn’t make a concrete difference in people’s lives—- and yet here I am, using a network of these computer things. Frankly, I’m glad Turing didn’t worry too much about making a concrete difference. Secondly, the best thing about modern civilization is that it creates free time to do possibly unimportant things. Frankly, the whole notion that everyone has an obligation to make a positive contribution to society strikes me as a left over religous impulse. Doing philosophy comes down to this for me: I enjoy it. I happen to be able to make a living doing it. Go me. Yeah, I know, I’m a social reprobate.

By: dan

dan — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 19:38:41 +0000

A few comments: zizka wrote: “The various philosophical styles are not ‘incommensurable’, but you do have to put some effort in.” This remark, of course, cuts both ways. As an individual studying “analytic philosophy,” all too often what I take to be an interesting and worthwhile academic pursuit is dismissed by “continental philosophy” sympathizers (if we stick with this dichotomy) as pure logic chopping, and that, as a consequence of adopting that particular approach to philosophical problems, my course of study has somehow lost its heart and soul. It may be worthwhile for one who is used to not having to identify and support explicitly the premises, inferences, and conclusions of their argument to try it out once in a while, just as it may be worthwhile for those analytically trained to step back from the minutia of detailed technical problems and take stock of the broader picture. As to fixing cars, I think that critique applies to most academic disciplines; it is not a critique unique to philosophy – analytic or continental. Also, most academics I know aren’t going hungry. Finally, calling any academic discpline “mental masturbation” is not an argument. If this crude characterization is meant to summarize the critique that academics are simply self-fulfiling self-indulgent individuals who make no contribution to society, then my response is simply: if, as a professor, I can help a handful of students in every class to think more critically about their beliefs and the world around them, then I think I’ve made a tangible and positive contribution to society.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 19:17:23 +0000

Nagel is sort of a fossil and IIRC has expressed some of his own doubts about analytic philosophy. My recent experience of the field has been limited to picking up half a dozen current journals in the library once or twice a year and glancing through them. In debates of this type, after “Continental philosophy” is suggested as the alternative to analytic philosophy, it is usually argued that analytic philosophers DO TOO write about big questions. Probably they do, but my big beef is that they mostly ignore anyone who doesn’t speak their dialect, and when they do address the non-analytics, they usually do so via a quick and not very careful paraphrase-translation into analyticspeak. The various philosophical styles are not “incommensurable”, but you do have to put some effort in.

By: Javier

Javier — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 16:40:30 +0000

Zizka, I’ve guess we’ve met very different analytical philosophers. And once again I disagree with your characterization—analytical philosophers do quabble over technical details, but at least a fair number are capable of grasping and articulating the bigger picture. In Tom’s original post, he critiques analytical philosophy but he praises Nagel. But Nagel is certainly an analytical philosopher and he seems to be one among several who can grasp the “bigger” picture and the intersection between subfields, along with Lewis, Davidson, Williams, Nozick and more that I can’t think of right now.

By: Lindsay Beyerstein

Lindsay Beyerstein — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 15:20:40 +0000

Anxiety over the answer:shmanswer ratio usually touches off ruminations about professional decay. I think we need a less puritanical attitude towards shmanswers. Ted was frustrated that so much of philosophical life is taken up in relatively frivolous battles of wits. That’s one way to look at it. But we can borrow another analogy for Dennett, that of flipping all the switches and pulling all the knobs. His advice to his grad students (the same seminar that became the guinea pigs for “The Higher Order Truths of Chmess”) was to play out thought experiments to the fullest. Endless Twin Earth spinoffs are an example of this systematic approach. If you want to know what to think about Twin Earth, play it out in every possible variation: moral Twin Earth, Twin-Swamp-Earth…. I think we should take a more tolerant and optimistic view of schmanswers. They’re what we toss back and forth, sharpening our skills and waiting for new inspiration to strike. They’re a combination of play and basic research. They keep us in the game. (P.S. How does CT’s followup/trackback feature work? I tried pinging the URL of the followups page, but to no avail.)