Kvetching Retrospectively about Analytical Philosophy

This is probably coming from a lack of education, but philosophy always struck me as silly. It could never be applied, and always got in the way of actual discussions.

For example, someone once engaged me in a debate about the necessity of being kind to other people. I argued, in various ways, that we had a responsibility to be altruistic. Eventually, he told me, “But why be good to people? You don’t even know whether they exist.” Probably not the best example of applied philosophy, but I like to argue from extremes.

A better example might be the political debates I have with people. Any system can be opposed by some philosophical theory—a philosophical theory that is completely untested, completely untestable, and likely without any bearing on reality. It becomes frustrating to argue philosophy in what should be a discussion about reality.

(I’ll brace myself for the incoming blows now. This still strikes me as an ignorant position to take.)

{note: most of the people who I talk too about these issues actually have less magnificent beards than myself. The beards referred to above are metaphorical beards. Beards of the Brain, so to speak. And I think I’ll stop there, before I do myself a mischief)

How do eliminativists like the Churchlands account for the existence of orgasms? I’ve wondered about this for a long time.

Coming out on Tuesday at Blockbuster: Cold Mountain, starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman!

If anything, orgasm is a relatively easy case for the reductionist because the physiological basis of orgasm is so well-understood and its causal and functional roles are relatively clear cut.

It’s much harder to explain what physical property all kinds of pain have in common, given all the different qualitative types of pain (scalding, aching, stinging…), all the different causal and functional roles of pain, and so on.

Functional accounts leave me feeling unsatisfied, too. With them, I get some inputs and some…uh…outputs, as well as the representational content of the orgasm. Where’s the ecstasy at?

First of all, for the sake of full disclosure, I’m not even yet a grad student, so it’s quite possible that what I’m about to say some “Beard stroker” might simply brush off, but a few points I should raise here.

First of all, as for the view that philosophy is a lot of fiddle-faddle, “Dan Shannon” should feel himself brave for asking the question.

The answer is, of course, for the most part, no. And while a history of philosophy wouldn’t help anyone here, I’ll just point out that philosophy, in fact, has had a major effect on the history. A fairly widely accepted notion of Utilitarianism, a (for the most part) functional view of truth as opposed to a fairly strange metaphysical one, many exceedingly important developements to early computer science… and the list goes on.

The biggest that, for many, philosophy seems so dubious is that it’s hard to see where it has had an effect. But it has, and an analysis of the history reveals it.

Secondly, as far as feeling uncomfortable at the idea of of all things being explained by brain states, many philosophers – as well, for that matter, neurologists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and whoever else, feel the same way. There’s simply no consensus on what the mind might possibly be. There are many good ideas, and many silly ones, and progress is being made, but, in reply to a couple posters above…
yah, many agree.

Thirdly, however, there is something a bit suspect about the direction philosophy has taken since world war II (At least for we anglophones). Certainly, the Analytic movement isn’t entirely bankrupt, but I think, if I may be so bold to say, that many philosophers are starting to realize it’s not all it seemed cracked up to be. And that, since many good forms of philosophy, not to mention vaguely popular ones, have been left at the wayside, I do think that the movement is largely responsible for the idea of academic philosophy as a tenured circle jerk.

But I think it may be chagning. Anyone agree?

The only philospher of any interest in my experience is Daniel Dennett. And it is all about the questions. He has the courage to dismiss some questions as being meaningless or uninteresting.

One can argue about whether his answers are correct, but he’s asking the right questions …

I think that Nagel is being unfair on Moore, and latter-day Mooreans here. The point isn’t necessarily to turn one’s back on the abyss. Rather, you start off making the rather mundane observation that we are in fact on the other side, so we must have got here somehow, and that tells you quite a bit about how the abyss can be crossed.

(Or, more precisely, how to end up on the other side. We could just have been born here. I’ve been reading Peacocke recently and sometimes his rationalism comes across as the view of someone born on epistemic third base who assumes they must have hit a triple.)

Anyway, noting that we have ended up across the abyss doesn’t prevent quite careful, and I think quite informative, investigation into what a crossing must look like. It does mean that epistemological questions become less pressing, and hence cease to be at the centre of philosophy, but I think that’s mostly a good thing. (And I say that as a sometime epistemologist.)

The point about eliminitavism, on the other hand, seems completely fair. I think the eliminativists have raised interesting questions about the scope of error theories, but for anyone with the faintest Moorean tendencies it is hard to take the view seriously.

I think that orgasms are easy for eliminativists to deal with. As I understand, the orgasm center of the brain has been located and can be triggered by science.

Tom wrote, quoting Nagel that:

“Reductive theories grow out of skeptical arguments. Assuming that we do know certain things, and acknowledging that we could not know them if the gap between content and grounds were as great as the skeptic thinks it is, the reductionist reinterprets the content of our beliefs about the world so that they claim less. …”

Reductivism, characterised in this way, seems pretty heroic to me. It doesn’t seem trivial or uninteresting to say something like:

“Here’s some cherished set of beliefs, some set of intuitions that give me comfort and security in the face of doubt and uncertainty… and I will reject these beliefs and accept, in the name of intellectual rigour and honesty, some smaller, less comforting but more defensible set of claims.”

Perhaps it’s just a difference in character but, personally, it seems like there’s something admirable in that. There’s something of the spirit that you find in Sartre and other existentialists when they reject theism and embrace choice and the weight of the responsibility that comes with it.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t things wrong with analytic philosophy as currently practiced. If one wanted to get all quasi-Kuhnian one could point to the influence of paradigmatic papers like Gettier — short, apparently decisive pieces that invoke some sort of elegant thought experiment to refute or destroy some widely held view — and question whether this kind of paradigm has a pernicious effect.

And sometimes the proliferation of that kind of work — which at its worst degenerates into ‘chmess’ type game playing and cheap point scoring — might make it hard to do some kind of large-scale systematic work or to undertake a fundamental rethink of some area of study. But it doesn’t make it impossible and it seems to me that there’s lots of good work being done and lots of good work still to be done while still working within the domain of ‘analytic’ philosophy.

If Rorty is right that philosophers are just technicians of argument, and that there are no foundations that must be built on (i.e. you do not ultimately have to justify your views according to materialism or Kantianism or Marxism or Hegelianism, etc.), then Mooreian common sense can easily be attained by stupulations within the question put up for argument. Stipulations could either assert an answer (“Granted that the physical world exists….”) or bracket it out (“Whether the physical world really exists or just is a perception in our minds…..”

This is a different thing than Moore’s claim to be able to answer questions that way. Just put them “out of question”.

This, BTW, is how Michel Meyer handles these things.

The early mathematical logician Hao Wang, who was closely associated with Goedel, proposes using the brute facts of reality as we know it as a starting point and working from there. It amounts to requiring bold new thinkers to actually justify their proposals, rather than allowing them to claim that counterintuitivity is a virtue.

The big revolutions of science were less counterintuitive than people think; the heliocentric view, for example, makes a lot of immediate sense when confronted with a lot of our immediate experiences. It’s really a reshuffling of common sense in an anti-dogmatic way, rather than a rejection of it.

I think that a lot of analytic philosophy stuff was much more interesting when there was less of it, and when it was an option rather than an obligation.

Javier

Check out Stephen Toulmin and Michel Meyer.

Zizka,

I’m familiar with some of Stephen Toulmin’s work, though not Meyer’s. I still am not quite sure what philosophy would look like if we all went along with Toulmin’s pragmatism. Would it simply become applied ethics? In that case, count me out.

I think that analytical philosophy’s subfields such as metaphysics and philosophy of mind do attempt to answer interesting questions and we should refrain from giving that pursuit up. Of course we may never arrive at a undisputed answer to such questions, but that hardly constitutes a reason to stop trying. And if we are going to try, then we should do so as rigorously as possible, which is what analytical philosophy is all about.

So I need to disagree with the view that questions such as “Are values objective?” or “can we explain consciousness within a naturalistic framework? ” are uninteresting and unimportant. Perhaps they won’t put food on the table or fix my car, but who cares? They are intrinsically interesting and that’s enough for me.

Analytic philosophy is clear and rigorous? That’s a laugh. I’ve found some analytics who live up to their marketing claims, but if the philosophical positions themselves are intrinsically obscure, no folksy or slovenly presentation is going make up for it (I’m thinking specifically of Saul Kripke here)

If the sort of thing Zizka is writing about “isn’t philosophy,” then so much the worse for philosophy!

Curtiss Leung,

I would just have to say that although individual works of analytical philosophy can be obscure and unrigorous, I would fall far short of condemning the whole tradition for these crimes. I’m thinking of the contrast between the people like Gadamer and Davidson or the early Habermas and Rawls. Perhaps you would disagree, but I see a big difference in clarity and rigor in the works of these authors, and their respective traditions. That doesn’t mean Gadamer and philosophers such as Heidegger have nothing interesting to say, only that there is a clear difference in the presentation of their points.

Zizka,
Perhaps we are talking past each other. I’m thinking of Brian Leiter’s characterization of analytical philosophy: not a substantive research program, but a style of doing philosophy.

“Analytic” philosophy today names a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views. Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic; and often identify, professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics, than with the humanities.

http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/analytic.htm

And one other note: I object to the characterization of analytical philosophy as having jettisoned the history of philosophy. Take a look at most flagship analytical philosophy departments and there are plenty of historians of philosophy who also contribute to current debates. For instance, people like Korsgaard and Rawls are very far away from having jettisoned the history of philosophy. But maybe you don’t consider these philosophers to be analytical philosophers…

Perhaps they won’t put food on the table or fix my car, but who cares?

Exactly.

Oh, you meant “who cares about fixing the car?” Lots of people, generally. People with broken cars, for example. I know a couple of those, perhaps I should introduce you.

As I read on another blog today (I have forgotten where, perhaps it was even this one, and I’m far too lazy to find it now) intellectual masturbation is, like all other forms of masturbation, a lot of fun. When I was eighteen and excited by my newly developed intellect I had a lot of fun asking imponderable questions. I still enjoy, sometimes, sitting with new people and seeing if I can make them say things by suggesting the right questions and leading them down the philosophical paths I want them to go down — it’s a game I play with myself, so intellectual masturbation in the truest sense!

In my day to day life, however, I’m not an academic philosopher, so I gain no benefit from proving to myself or others how frightfully clever I am. I find these days that the question I ask more frequently than any others is “So what?” To misquote William James, “what concrete difference will the answer to this question make to my life?” To you, the unanswerable questions are interesting, and I am sure that you and I could have a jolly afternoon or two hashing over them. However, the idea of devoting more than an afternoon’s worth of time to these questions, especially were I forced to do it without a beautiful barmaid serving me beer (or an ugly barman, for that matter), seems incredibly tedious to me. Masturbation is a leisure activity, and those who do it for a living generally create porn, rather than fundamentally life changing works on the nature of humanity.

As I said earlier but should perhaps reiterate, I don’t believe for a second that all academic philosophy is in the waffly grip of the strokey beards, nor that strokey beards are in any sense restricted to the philosophy departments of our universities. Politics is fraught with them, and economics suffers from, in my experience, an overabundance of that dangerous creature, a strokey beard who believes that he is genuinely addressing a real world problem, when in fact he is presenting an imaginary solution to a fictional problem based on a fantastic cotton candy world.

Even professions which should produce grounded individuals capable of understanding that, whether the hammer is real or not, it still hurts when you miss the nail and hit your thumb, have their fair share of the “thinking” chap on the site, working his way through the works of Sartre and generally endangering everyone around him. Generally, they go off to become novelists or serial killers or televangelists, leaving the simple, “unthinking” people to get on with the boring and tedious task of digging stuff out of the ground and turning it into aeroplanes and computers.

Which, when you think about it, is pretty amazing. Not to disparage the meaning of life or anything, but in my opinion when we work it out it’ll have to be something pretty spectactular to be more interesting than turning sand into pornography, intellectual or otherwise.

In my contact with analytic philosophers, I have not found a concern for “finding whether their beliefs are true”.

What I HAVE found is a desire to be the one who gets credit for establishing some sub-truth, or sub-sub-truth, or sub-sub-sub-truth. So if you end up definitively refuting Smith’s conjecture about Jones’s solution to Clark’s natural-kinds dilemma, then you get points.

The underlying myth is that at some point the detail work will add up to something big and rigorous, but the direction of movement is toward ever-smaller rigor. Every once in a long while someone proposes something big (by analytic-philosopher standards) but as soon as that happens (rarely) the dissection begins.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!