There is a kind of relentless contrarian that is very smart, has voracious reading habits, is funny, and ends up in race science and eugenics. You are familiar with the type. Luckily, analytic philosophy also generates different contrarians about its own methods and projects that try to develop more promising (new) paths than these. Contemporary classics in this latter genre are Michael Della Rocca’s (2020) The Parmenidean Ascent, Nathan Ballantyne’s (2019) Knowing Our Limits, and Elijah Millgram’s (2015) The Great Endarkenment all published with Oxford. In the service of a new or start (sometimes presented as a recovery of older wisdom), each engages with analytic philosophy’s self-conception(s), its predominate methods (Della Rocca goes after reflective equilibrium, Millgram after semantic analysis, Ballantyne after the supplements the method of counter example), and the garden paths and epicycles we’ve been following. Feel free to add your own suggestions to this genre.
Millgram and Ballantyne both treat the cognitive division of labor as a challenge to how analytic philosophy is done with Ballantyne opting for extension from what we have and Millgram opting for (partially) starting anew (about which more below). I don’t think I have noticed any mutual citations. Ballantyne, Millgram, and Della Rocca really end up in distinct even opposing places. So, this genre will not be a school.
Millgram’s book, which is the one that prompted this post, also belongs to the small category of works that one might call ‘Darwinian Aristotelianism,’ that is, a form of scientific naturalism that takes teleological causes of a sort rather seriously within a broadly Darwinian approach. Other books in this genre are Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back (which analyzes it in terms of reasons without a reasoner), and David Haig’s From Darwin to Derrida (which relies heavily on the type/token distinction in order to treat historical types as final causes). The latter written by an evolutionary theorist.* There is almost no mutual citation in these works (in fact, Millgram himself is rather fond of self-citation despite reading widely). C. Thi Nguyen’s (2020) Games: Agency as Art may also be thought to fit this genre, but Millgram is part of his scaffolding, and Nguyen screens off his arguments from philosophical anthropology and so leave it aside here. So much for set up, let me quote its concluding paragraphs of Millgram’s book:
Perhaps eventually an overall Big Picture will emerge—and perhaps not: Hegel thought that the Owl of Minerva would take wing only at dusk (i.e., that we will only achieve understanding in retrospect, after it’s all over), but maybe the Owl’s wings have been broken by hyperspecialization, and it will never take to the air at all. What we can reasonably anticipate in the short term is a patchwork of inference management techniques, along with intellectual devices constructed to support them. One final observation: in the Introduction, I gave a number of reasons for thinking that our response to the Great Endarkenment is something that we can start working on now, but that it would be a mistake at this point to try to produce a magic bullet meant to fix its problems. That turns out to be correct for yet a further reason. Because the approach has to be bottom-up and piecemeal, at present we have to suffice with characterizing the problem and with taking first steps; we couldn’t possibly be in a position to know what the right answers are.
Thus far our institutional manifesto. Analytic philosophy has bequeathed to us a set of highly refined skills. The analytic tradition is visibly at the end of its run. But those skills can now be redirected and put in the service of a new philosophical agenda. In order for this to take place, we will have to reshape our philosophical pedagogy—and, very importantly, the institutions that currently have such a distorting effect on the work of the philosophers who live inside them. However, as many observers have noticed, academia is on the verge of a period of great institutional fluidity, and flux of this kind is an opportunity to introduce new procedures and incentives. We had better take full advantage of it.–Elijah Millgram (2015) The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization, p. 281
I had glanced at Millgram’s book when I wrote my piece on synthetic philosophy, but after realizing that his approach to the advanced cognitive division of labor was orthogonal to my own set it aside then. But after noticing intriguing citations to it in works by C. Thi Nguyen and Neil Levy, I decided to read it anyway. The Great Endarkenment is a maddening book because the first few chapters and the afterward are highly programmatic and accessible, while the bulk of the essays involve ambitious, revisionary papers in meta-ethics, metaphysics, and (fundementally) moral psychology (or practical agency if that is a term). The book also has rather deep discussions of David Lewis, Mill, and Bernard Williams. The parts fit together, but only if you look at them in a certain way, and only if you paid attention in all the graduate seminars you attended.
Millgram’s main claim in philosophical anthropology is that rather than being a rational animal, mankind is a serial hyperspecializing animal or at least in principle capable of hyperspecializing serially (switching among different specialized niches it partially constructs itself). The very advanced cognitive division of labor we find ourselves in is, thus, not intrinsically at odds with our nature but actually an expression of it (even if Millgram can allow that it is an effect of economic or technological developments, etc.). If you are in a rush you can skip the next two asides (well at least the first).
As an aside, first, lurking in Millgram’s program there is, thus, a fundamental critique of the Evolutionary Psychology program that takes our nature as adapted to and relatively fixed by niches back in the distant ancestral past. I don’t mean to suggest Evolutionary Psychology is incompatible with Millgram’s project, but it’s fundamental style of argument in its more prominent popularizations is.
Second, and this aside is rather important to my own projects, Millgram’s philosophical anthropology is part of the account of human nature that liberals have been searching for. And, in fact, as the quoted passages reveal, Millgram’s sensibility is liberal in more ways, including his cautious preference for “bottom-up and piecemeal” efforts to tackle the challenge of the Great Endarkenment.+
Be that as it may, the cognitive division of labor and hyperspecialization is also a source of trouble. Specialists in different fields are increasingly unable to understand and thus evaluate the quality of each other’s work including within disciplines. As Millgram notes this problem has become endemic within the institution most qualified to do so — the university — and as hyper-specialized technologies and expertise spread through the economy and society. This is also why society’s certified generalists — journalists, civil servants, and legal professionals — so often look completely out of their depth when they have to tackle your expertise under time pressure.** It’s his diagnosis of this state of affairs that has attracted, I think, most scholarly notice (but that may be a selection effect on my part by my engagement with Levy’s Bad Beliefs and Nguyen’s Games). Crucially, hyperspecialiation also involves the development of languages and epistemic practices that are often mutually unintelligible and perhaps even metaphysically incompatible seeming.
As an aside that is really an important extension of Millgram’s argument: because the book was written just before the great breakthroughs in machine learning were becoming known and felt, the most obvious version of the challenge (even danger) he is pointing to is not really discussed in the book: increasingly we lack access to the inner workings of the machines we rely on (at least in real time), and so there is a non-trivial sense in which if he is right the challenge posed by Great Endarkenment is accelerating. (See here for an framework developed with Federica Russo and Jean Wagemans to analyze and handle that problem.)
That is, if Millgram is right MacAskill and his friends who worry about the dangers of AGI taking things over for rule and perhaps our destruction by the machine(s) have it backwards. The odds are more likely that our society will implode and disperse — like the tower of Babel that frames Millgram’s analysis — by itself. And that if it survives mutual coordination by AGIs will be just as hampered by the Great Endarkenment, perhaps even more so due to their path dependencies, as ours is.
I wanted to explore the significance of this to professional philosophy (and also hint more at the riches of the book), but the post is long enough and I could stop here. So, I will return to that in the future. Let me close with an observation. As Millgram notes, in the sciences mutual unintelligibility is common. And the way it is often handled is really two-fold: first, as Peter Galison has argued, and Millgram notes, the disciplines develop local pidgins in what Galison calls their ‘trading zones.’ This births the possibility of mutually partially overlapping areas of expertise in (as Michael Polanyi noted) the republic of science. Millgram is alert to this for he treats a lot of the areas that have been subject of recent efforts at semantic analysis by philosophers (knowledge, counterfactuals, normativity) as (to simplify) really tracking and trailing the alethic certification of past pidgins. Part of Millgram’s own project is to diagnose the function of such certification, but also help design new cognitive machinery to facilitate mutual intelligibility. That’s exciting! This I hope to explore in the future.
Second, as I have emphasized in my work on synthetic philosophy, there are reasonably general theories and topic neutralish (mathematical and experimental) techniques that transcend disciplines (Bayesianism, game theory, darwinism, actor-network, etc.). On the latter (the techniques) these often necessetate local pidgins or, when possible, textbook treatments. On the former, while these general theories are always applied differently locally, they are also conduits for mutual intelligibility. (Millgram ignores this in part.) As Millgram notes, philosophers can make themselves useful here by getting MAs in other disciplines and so facilitate mutual communication as they already do. That is to say, and this is a criticism, while there is a simultaneous advancement in the cognitive division of labor that deepens mutual barriers to intelligibility, some of this advance generates possibilities of arbitrage (I owe the insight to Liam Kofi Bright) also accrues to specialists that help transcend local mutual intelligibility.** So, what he takes to be a call to arms is already under way. So, let’s grant we’re on a precipice, but the path out is already marked.++
This post was published first at D&I with modest changes.
*Because of this Millgram is able to use the insights of the tradition of neo-thomism within analytic philosophy to his own ends without seeming to be an Anscombe groupie or hinting darkly that we must return to the path of philosophical righteousness.
+This liberal resonance is not wholly accidental; there are informed references to and discussions of Hayek.
** Spare a thought for humble bloggers, by the way.
++UPDATE: As Justin Weinberg reminded me, Millgram did a series of five guest posts at DailyNous on themes from his book (here are the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth entries.) I surely read these, and encourage you to read them if you want the pidgin version of his book.
{ 39 comments }
Douglas Weinfield 02.15.23 at 11:59 am
Thanks for this.
As a non-expert in nearly all these fields, I comment from outside them. To me, these increasingly insular disciplines, particularly in academia, seem driven often by a need to claim new (or old!) turf, rather than a primary interest in expanding understanding, or adding to the common good. From that perspective, the hyperspecialization that you describe provides a benefit-fewer opportunities for criticism, increased academic prestige, etc. it’s nearly neoliberal, or at least capitalistic.
I see an interesting potential parallel with Internal Family Systems, in clinical psychology. IFS argues against a monolithic personality; positing instead a group of “parts”, such as the Judge (inner critic), Firefighter (rescuer), etc.
Jake Gibson 02.15.23 at 8:31 pm
Way too much of this went over my head.
Apparently The Great Endarkenment refers to more than Counter-Enlightenment. Speculative Fiction writers from time-to-time have suggested a generalist field to connect ever more specialized academia. I don’t know if such a thing would be practical. But perhaps we need some form of thar.
J, not that one 02.15.23 at 11:27 pm
I find the idea that specialization is itself somehow illiberal to be fascinating and I appreciate recommendations for good books on why that might be — and why it often seems that some forms of specialization are good and others are bad. Specialists in the humanities don’t consider themselves to be using the common culture when they do their actual work, but still differentiate themselves from the sciences whom they see as being specialized in a bad way. (Even though it could be argued that scientists and engineers describe the world in more common-sense ways than humanists, or at least theorists, do.)
Scientists and engineers are often all too quick to accept that they, personally, are separated from the common run of humankind by virtue of their specialized and almost Faustian professionalization – and can be naive about what the linguistically oriented types actually do in their work.
So the books in the first paragraph sound like they could be interesting – thanks.
JPL 02.16.23 at 3:43 am
As a philosophile linguist, I always look to philosophy to learn how great minds have grappled with big questions, such as Putnam’s “how does language hook on to the world?”, and I rely on those working on the minutiae “downstream” to point out where I’ve gone wrong, to inform me of what I’ve neglected, to tell me who has already solved that problem, or dealt with it in the history of philosophy, because I’ll never be able to read all of that literature. That’s the division of labour in action. But discourse between different research traditions is different from discourse within a research tradition: in the former it’s important to clarify technical terms used and to make explicit any implicit assumptions that are shared within a tradition.
But what interests me in your presentation of the problem of hyperspecialization (I think Russell complained about this too) is Millgram’s assessment of the phenomenon to which “hyperspecialization” was judged to be a contributing factor, namely the state of “analytic philosophy”: “The analytic tradition is visibly at the end of its run”. Why did he say that? You indicate that he may have some problems with the way “semantic analysis” is done in the analytic tradition; what is wrong, specifically, with the way philosophers have been doing what he calls “semantic analysis”, such that it signals an imminent bankruptcy of approach? I mean, I have specific critiques of the way philosophers understand language, meaning, reference, etc., and if you tell me what Millgram’s concern is, I might be able to help; but on the other hand, I’ve always found a much deeper and more thorough treatment of these issues in philosophy than in linguistics. For example, I’ve found Dummett’s treatment of these problems insightful and valuable, much more than anything in the history of linguistics or its present practice. (E.g., in Origins of Analytic Philosophy and Frege: Philosophy of Language; in fact, the former work seems to consider analytic philosophy’s advances in the understanding of language to be its main contribution to the philosophical quest.) So I don’t know what Millgram is dissatisfied with, and in fact I wouldn’t put the main blame for the shortcomings I’m aware of on hyperspecialization, but rather on some typically philosophical obsessions, linguistically ill-informed assumptions and conventional thinking that has not yet been questioned dating from earlier eras. (One is that research into the problem of meaning, what is expressed in language use, has to be psychological, done in the field of psychology: I would disagree with that, and even some prominent philosophers historically have disagreed with that.) One notion that I would like to know more about, and that only philosophers can inform me about, is ‘normativity’: what are “norms “? Some of them would presumably have to take the form of principles; principles are instantiated in concrete actions, which means that they are internally differentiated in response to contexts of application, and thus have the structure of categories. So how are norms constructed historically, what is the mechanism? I know from philosophy about “relativized constitutive a priori principles” (Reichenbach, Michael Friedman); is the manner of construction of these different in kind from the historical construction of the meanings of lexemes (lexical items considered as members of the lexicon of a linguistic system)? So I’m not so pessimistic as Millgram; I don’t see any threatening endarkenment.
JPL 02.16.23 at 3:52 am
A correction: I meant the parenthetical sentence that begins, “(One is that research into the problem of meaning …)” to say, “(One is that empirical research into the problem of meaning …)”, because I also want to exclude approaches within the tradition of formal language practice, which are not empirical in nature.
Eric Schliesser 02.16.23 at 8:30 am
Hi JPL,
Millgram has a number of chapters dealing with how to think about normativity and normative language. (Much of the book is, in fact, on meta-ethics and the chapters on Mill and Bernard Williams are salient to that, too.) On normative language his position is summarized in the post: normative statements involving oughts, musts, shoulds, represent alethic certification in the past. This makes sense once you see him focusing on the function of such language (as distinct from semantic analysis). And there is a Darwinian hint here in so far as such certification tracks past conditions; so, on his view new alethic certification may be required. (I was struck that he is not interested in conceptual engineering, but that may be a way to go for him.) On the nature of normativity I am less confident I understand his position. I hope this helps.
LFC 02.16.23 at 2:32 pm
There are a few comments I could make, but in the interest of time I will say only that I have no idea what “alethic certification” means, and I don’t have time right now to look it up.
Rob Chametzky 02.16.23 at 6:32 pm
On ” ‘Darwinian Aristotelianism,’ that is, a form of scientific naturalism that takes teleological causes of a sort rather seriously within a broadly Darwinian approach” one might/could/should add Justin Garson’s 2022 “Madness: A philosophical Exploration” (Oxford UP).
On “analytic philosophy” in general, the late (great) Jerry Fodor:
Everybody knows that somethng is wrong. But it is uniquely the achievement of contemporary philosophy–indeed it is uniquely the achievement of contemporary ANALYTICAL philosophy–to have figured out just what it is. What is wrong is not making enough distinctions. If only we made all the distinctions that there are, then we should all be as happy as kings (Kings are notoriously VERY happy.)
Or, even bettter (if longer), his “Water’s water everywhere”, a review of a book (that he thinks is quite good) on Kripke in “London Review of Books” 21 October 2004.
–RC
Eric Schliesser 02.16.23 at 8:31 pm
Hi Rob, thank you for alerting me to Garson’s book.
LFC 02.16.23 at 9:45 pm
from the OP:
…a form of scientific naturalism that takes teleological causes of a sort rather seriously within a broadly Darwinian approach. Other books in this genre are Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back (which analyzes it in terms of reasons without a reasoner)
The phrase “reasons without a reasoner” sort of reminds me of “order without an orderer” (in Waltz, Theory of International Politics), but I think the similarity is superficial rather than in any way substantive.
John 02.17.23 at 4:20 am
For something completely different please check out the work of Jeffrey Kripal who is easily the most interesting philosopher working in the multi-dimensional field of religion and its relation to culture altogether. His latest work titled Superhumanities is especially interesting – the long introduction is available online.
http://jeffreyjkripal.com
Brett 02.18.23 at 2:28 pm
Thanks for the reference to Millgram. I can’t see the index from google preview, but I’ll be a little disappointed if there is no reference in Millgram to the Dialectic of Enlightenment :-)
J, not that one 02.18.23 at 4:42 pm
I just looked up “The Parmenidean Ascent”and it sounds like a mechanistic view of 19th Pragmatism. (I’ve read some things suggesting James was influenced by Darwinism in his ideas about belief change, but I think Pragmatism tracks with a very genteel anti-mechanistic strand in US culture for the most part.) Probably interesting but requiring a large time investment for me and in a different direction than I’ve been reading recently – analytic philosophy does seem usually technical enough that its issues don’t seem accessible to a non-expert.
Eric Schliesser 02.18.23 at 7:35 pm
J, no it’s a lot more like 19th century British Idealism.
J, not that one 02.18.23 at 9:03 pm
Wasn’t Dewey very influenced by Idealism, though? I’d define Pragmatism roughly, not as the simplistic “whatever is useful might as well be true,” but as “whatever lets you cope in society (i.e. what’s accepted as true and/or seems to adequately explain what people do) is true, regardless of whatever trivial objections the wrongly educated might make.” Which often does seem to be the true American philosophy, especially in certain self-consciously genteel circles. And in practice it generally means something “language is more important than mere mechanistic materialism,” which could be seen as a kind of vulgarized Idealism.
oldster 02.19.23 at 1:10 am
Whenever I hear the phrase, “19th century British Idealism,” I reach for my Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
LFC 02.19.23 at 5:24 pm
oldster,
You win the funny/clever award for the thread, for sure.
J, not that one:
I would tend to be a little cautious about too close a connection between the American pragmatists and the “language (or discourse) is (almost) everything” view. In her brief survey of U.S. intellectual history, The Ideas That Made America, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen draws a connection between the American pragmatists and what many people now call postmodernism, but after reading her (highly compressed) account, I wasn’t totally convinced.
LFC 02.20.23 at 4:15 pm
Postscript: In that connection, her main example is Rorty; esp. considering the book is very short, he gets a fair amount of space toward the end.
MisterMr 02.20.23 at 4:53 pm
“pragmaticism” is the theory by C.S. Peirce, who was a postkantian.
The theory is that all our knowledge is made of interconnected symbols (semiosis) and therefore there isn’t really a “referent”, semiosis only stops at “habitus”, that is at action (I had to study Peirce while studying semiotics at university).
In other words, all our knowledge is a model of the world, and a model works or doesn’t, hence “pragmatism”. Later on James, who was a friend of Peirce, made his version of “pragmatism”, which was different enough from Pierce’s that Pierce changed his theory’s name to “pragmaticism”, but I don’t know much of James’ version of the theory.
Pragmaticism (and I assume also James’ “pragmatism”) therefore are theories about cognition, they are not the attitude that we usually in common language call “pragmatism”.
Alan White 02.21.23 at 6:42 am
LFC– I agree on oldster
But–Rorty first made that connection between postmodernism and pragmatism, right?
Mike Huben 02.21.23 at 1:19 pm
Allow me to suggest that if you are using two terms in your title that you do not really define (except by reference to book-length sources) and that are not listed in Wikipedia, you are probably not getting to very much audience here.
TM 02.22.23 at 8:44 am
I remember Russell’s beautiful essay on pragmatism…
https://bertrandrussellsocietylibrary.org/br-pe/br-pe-ch4.html
J-D 02.22.23 at 9:04 am
If the following representation is accurate, CS Peirce was in fact rejecting this view–
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/115
–but I wouldn’t know, maybe the preceding representation is not accurate.
J, not that one 02.22.23 at 12:27 pm
LFC – I don’t think postmodernism is what I was getting at in that comment. By “language” I just meant the humanities as opposed to math and science, conversation as opposed to logic and calculation.
LFC 02.22.23 at 3:48 pm
Alan White:
I don’t know whether Rorty was the first to make that connection, but he certainly made it (or so I gather mostly at second hand).
But when an intellectual historian (in this case, Ratner-Rosenhagen) “draws a connection” between X and Y, of course it typically means something different than when a philosopher draws a connection. The philosopher will typically be making, or trying to make, an original or quasi-original philosophical argument of some kind, whereas an intellectual historian is typically doing something else, like analyzing, synthesizing, and constructing a narrative about what others have written. That distinction is something of a caricature, but it’s not totally off. Anyway, in R-R’s short book she has no interest in making original philosophical arguments; that’s not what she’s doing. So in this context, her drawing a connection betw pragmatism and postmodernism simply means she’s doing what an intellectual historian writing a brief “popular” survey and cramming two-plus-centuries into fewer than 200 pages would do: namely, she’s looking at a few selected thinkers and texts and saying: there’s a connection. That’s precisely why she gives Rorty that much space and doesn’t bother to mention lots of other equally if not more important modern American philosophers. This is not necessarily a criticism, because to cram that much time into that little space she had to be very selective and she clearly focused on what she thought was significant and fit her narrative. But someone else covering the same ground could probably write a quite different narrative.
Sorry to have commented on this at such length, but since you (A.W.) are a philosopher and I’m not, we should try to make sure we’re not talking past each other.
MisterMr 02.22.23 at 4:34 pm
@J-D 23
I think the description is accurate, the “useful” part refers to what Peirce called “habitus”.
Let’s put it this way: I read somewhere the word “dog”.
This word “dog” is a sign that leads to an idea in my head, the idea of “dog”.
But what is this idea? It is not a real dog (that wouldn’t fit in my head anyway), the idea itself is just another kind of sign, that refers: to other ideas, like animal, four-legged etc;, to perhaps some images of dog I saw previously, to perhaps memories of some smells or sounds etc..
But what are those other things? thy are again signs, both the other ideas and the memories of sensations.
So we have a continuous chain of signs pinting one to another, called “unlimited semiosis”.
But all this stuff has to end somewhere right? Peirce said that this stuff ends with “habitus”. There are various interpretations of this “habitus”, I’m referring to one (from Umberto Eco, don’t ask me from what book) that says that “habitus” is practical action.
I think that this interpretation is correct; so from this point of view all knowledge is a model (a set of signs linked and explaining each other) that works for practical action.
Note that Peirce meant this also inside the head of a single person, so it is a very early description of a “neural network” model of cognition.
In addition to this “inner” meaning, that is IMHO the main point in Peirce, he also saw “culture” as a bigger set of symbols interpreting each other, so he had this view of the whole of history as the development of this unlimited semiosis on a grand scale; from this point of view he went close towards Hegel IMHO.
The strip on existentialcomics IMHO is correct on the whole explanation of Peirce’s philosophy, but has the defect that makes this “pragmatism” idea sound like some sort of truth-relativism, whereas the problem is different, it is just that “thruth” is not conceived as a metaphisical thing but just as a model that works better (this is clearer from the neural network interpretation I think).
Tm 02.22.23 at 5:50 pm
MisterMr, J-D: “all our knowledge is a model of the world, and a model works or doesn’t”
Isn’t the crux how you recognize whether your model “works or doesn’t”? Apparently according to (some version of) pragmatism, if believing in God helps you feel good about your life, then you are obliged to assume that that your model “works”, hence your belief is “true”. That’s a bit different from saying that relativity theory is a good model of the world if it fits empirical observation. This is Russell’s criticism so not sure whether it’s fair. See ref above.
J-D 02.22.23 at 11:50 pm
Wait. Stop right there.
What makes you suggest that the idea is in your head? Has anybody ever looked inside your head and seen that idea there, or listened to your head and heard that idea there?
Is it, though? What is the basis for that suggestion?
Do we, though? I don’t observe that.
But there is a difference between what you write here, that all knowledge is a model, and what you wrote earlier, that all knowledge is a model of the world. On the face of it, it seems at least possible that somebody (for example, CS Peirce) might hold that all knowledge is a model but deny that it is a model of the world.
MisterMr 02.23.23 at 1:46 am
@TM 27
My (dubious) understanding is that Russell ‘s criticism applies to James’s version of pragmatism, but not to Peirce’s version, exactly because they have in mind different concepts of “works”.
My understanding is that Peirce’s idea is that by “works” he means something more low level, something like the theory of relativity “works” because it can predict some stuff that among other things let us create nuclear reaction, or deduce how stars work etc.
James instead uses the idea of “works” as in “is advantageous”.
Peirce however AFAIK (I did read one book of his but not all that he wrote) didn’t really define ‘habitus’ in detail. Peirce was basically a neokantian so his concept of habitus was a way to solve the problem that we can’t ever know the thing in itself, so habitus act as a limit to a continuous process of approximation basically.
James (that I didn’t read) at best of my understanding used the concept of pragmatism in the way Russell says, and this is the reason Peirce did not recognize James’ theory as consistent to his own.
However, while I intuitively understand that they are using two different concepts of “pragma”, I find it difficult to define where one starts and the other ends.
JPL 02.23.23 at 6:52 am
The problems of hyperspecialization and necessary division of intellectual labour in the modern (as opposed to classical) scene is probably the reason for the prominence of the genre of review articles or survey articles in highly developed fields like biology. This general function is filled quite effectively in philosophy, in my experience anyway, by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. They generally do a very good job of presenting the problems, clarifying the terminology, tracing the historical development and indicating the “state of the art” for the question at hand. I mentioned “normativity” above, and this post made me check out SEP on the topic, and I found two new entries that were not there a little while ago, on “Normativity in Metaethics” and “The Normativity of Meaning and Content”. I haven’t read them carefully yet, but I see so far that the kind of categories (e.g., meanings of lexemes) and propositional schemata considered on the level of the systems historically constructed by speech communities (as opposed to the cognitive systems of individual speakers) that I was talking about above are not quite the same phenomenon as what philosophers seem to be calling “norms”, even the “meaning-determining norms”. If these speech community level structures, as descriptive linguists regard them (and they are sometimes spoken of as “norms”), are empirical intentional objects with the property of objectivity, then they would have to have been constructed historically, but linguists apparently don’t have a theoretical account of how this happens or even of their supposed mode of existence. But the SEP entries are the best help so far.
BTW, I don’t know how we got onto it here, but I was never interested in American Pragmatism until I read Cassirer’s critique of Dewey (in several different places). The combination of pragmatism with Neo-Kantianism, as almost also taken up by the Vienna Circle philosophers, such as maybe Morris and others, would seem to make possible a naturalistic approach to the problems of the Kantian “transcendental” program. (Kant always used a term that is always translated as “concepts”; but I want to talk about “categories” that have a definite logical structure and that belong to the world, just not (or not only) the psychological world. (BTW again, we linguists also study pidgins and creoles and “language contact phenomena”, so we should be sensitive to what happens to categorical systems when different speech communities interact for any length of time.)
TM 02.23.23 at 8:33 am
J-D: “On the face of it, it seems at least possible that somebody (for example, CS Peirce) might hold that all knowledge is a model but deny that it is a model of the world.”
I think you are right to make this distinction.
MisterMr 02.23.23 at 11:30 am
@J-D 28
“What makes you suggest that the idea is in your head?”
I don’t understand the question. Do you think that ideas walk around with their own legs? Or that they exist in a hyperuranium? Unless we think that “ideas” are something that have an independent existence from people they have to be in my head (or in my hearth or other body part of preference that represents the mind, which is still inside of me).
I’ll just assume that we are not going into the “hyperuranium” thing that is only slightly different than assuming that the world is a dream of God or something like it.
“Is it” [the idea just another kind of sign] ” , though?”
On Peirce’s definition, a sign is “something that refers to something else”, so for example if my idea of dogs refers to something else (dogs outside my head) it is a sign. Here comes the problem though: how can an idea (inside my head) refer to a reality (outside my head)? This is what we generally call a “referent”, but by calling stuff outside my head “referents” we are just sidestepping the problem. In Peirce’s view this “dog” idea refers to other ideas/signs that ultimately come into contact with reality through this “habitus” thing.
“Do we [have a continuous chain of signs pointing one to another], though? I don’t observe that.”
Maybe we do but you don’t recognize it as such. If you look at Wikipedia, for example, as an analogy for human knowledge/tought, you will see that there are many pages (ideas) that explain one another pointing to each other through links. It seems to me that it is a reasonable analogy for human tought/knowledge. (Peirce didn’t have Wikipedia so I can’t know if he would have agreed).
“On the face of it, it seems at least possible that somebody (for example, CS Peirce) might hold that all knowledge is a model but deny that it is a model of the world.”
If you see thongs from a kantian perspective, there is a subject that is trying to understand/know “the thing itself”. The “thing itself” can also be called “external reality”, “the world”, “stuff that is outside my head” etc.; so each model is an attempt to understand “the world” or “the thoing itself”. Note that: (1) the model can be wrong; (2) from this point of view, even “God” or other similar metaphysical entities are part of the world (or the thing itself, or the not-I etc.); (3) even if I’m thinking about myself (and thus looking at myself as an object) the myself I perceive is part of “the world”.
In this sense, I don’t really understand how a model can be not a model of “the world” (or part of it).
MisterMr 02.23.23 at 4:41 pm
Reworking my wikipedia analogy, I think that Peirce’s conception of the mind, and a “neural network” concept of the mind, can be analogised toa sort of wikipedia, but with this important difference:
In Wikipedia, each page has a content that explains something, plus a bunch of links that link to other pages.
In Peirce’s model “ideas” are just a nest of link that link to other ideas, which ultimately lead to action, but each ide has no other content than the links.
I should note that Peirce also worked out a set of logical relationship of ideas one to the other, with IIRC 12 cathegories that now I don’t remember but are stuff like implication, abduction etc. (these cathegories are IMHO irrelevant for the argument as a whole).
MisterMr 02.23.23 at 4:47 pm
@JPL 30
“The combination of pragmatism with Neo-Kantianism, as almost also taken up by the Vienna Circle philosophers, such as maybe Morris and others, would seem to make possible a naturalistic approach to the problems of the Kantian “transcendental” program. (Kant always used a term that is always translated as “concepts”; but I want to talk about “categories” that have a definite logical structure and that belong to the world, just not (or not only) the psychological world. ”
My understanding is that the whole point of pragmatism is that the idea of categories that have a logical structure but pertain to the world and not to our mind is illogical, so we have to admit that logical structures pertain to our mind, which means that our ideas are models of the world created with logical categories that come from our mind and we just project on the world, but are not immanently there; this is the reason the ultimate erbiter of the model is whether it “works” (it is true in a limited sense), not if it is true in an absolute sense, which makes no sense.
J-D 02.23.23 at 10:41 pm
It is not the case that everything must either walk around with its own legs, exist in a hyperuranium (whatever that means), or be in a head. These are not the only possibilities; excluding two of them does not leave only the third.
I am not sure that ideas are the kind of thing that need to have a location.On Peirce’s definition, a sign is “something that refers to something else”, so for example if my idea of dogs refers to something else (dogs outside my head) it is a sign. Here comes the problem though: how can an idea (inside my head) refer to a reality (outside my head)?I am not sure that ideas do refer. I know that people sometimes refer; I know that words sometimes refer; I don’t know that ideas do.
When I observe Wikipedia, I observe a network of links, not a chain. I don’t know how good an analogy Wikipedia is for the way human thinking works.
I wouldn’t say that I’m trying to understand/know ‘the thing itself’; I would say I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. If that means my pespective is non-Kantian, I don’t care and don’t think anybody should.
Being a model of part of the world is not synonymous with being a model of the world.
Alan White 02.24.23 at 6:59 am
I’d only note that pragmatism of any variety has an inherent value component of what truth is, guided and defined by some function(s) of human action and knowledge teleologically evaluated by that value component as successful. Pragmatism is thus (i) relative to human consciousness, (ii) relative to human references to reality in consciousness, and (iii) relative to human value(s) of what constitutes success in terms of human action. Pragmatism is inherently anthropocentric, but given our epistemic station, what else is left?
J-D 02.24.23 at 8:08 am
In the case of Wikipedia, it’s easy to distinguish between two linked pages and a single page, but we can’t do that just from the content, because the content of two linked pages could be combined into a single page, or the content of a single page divided between two linked pages. If it is suggested that my knowledge, my thoughts, or the contents of my mind (or anybody else’s) is a network of interlinked ideas, then I wonder how anybody can distinguish between two linked ideas and one complex idea: how do we justify adopting the analysis of my mind/thoughts/knowledge as a network of linked ideas rather than a single complex idea?
However, even adopting the suggestion that my mind/knowledge/thoughts are a network of linked ideas, it doesn’t automatically follow that it’s not linked to anything outside itself; Wikipedia is a network of linked pages, but it’s also linked to things outside Wikipedia. If it’s difficult to suggest exactly how my mind/knowledge/thoughts is/are linked to anything outside itself, I observe firstly that we understand much less about how our ideas are linked to each other than we do about how Wikipedia pages are linked to each other (and should therefore be reticent about drawing conclusions where our understanding is so limited, and secondly that the obvious way to start investigating our how our ideas are linked to anything outside themselves is to investigate sensory perception. If you adopt CS Peirce’s view, what do you have to say about sensory perception?
The idea that our cognition is influenced by what our cognitive capabilities are like is plausible on the face of it, but the idea that it is influenced by nothing but our cognitive capabilities and that our cognitive capabilities alone determine everything about our cognition is not so.
MisterMr 02.24.23 at 12:28 pm
@J-D 35
“It is not the case that everything must either walk around with its own legs, exist in a hyperuranium (whatever that means), or be in a head. These are not the only possibilities; excluding two of them does not leave only the third.”
Please tell me where do you think ideas are.
“I wouldn’t say that I’m trying to understand/know ‘the thing itself’; I would say I’m trying to figure out what’s going on” and “Being a model of part of the world is not synonymous with being a model of the world.”
The sum of your models of parts of the world is your model of the world as a whole, aka the thing itself, aka what’s going on. The “thing itself” or the “not-I” are not metaphysical entities; the problem is that when we refer to things we are forced to refer to them through our conception of them; terms like “thing itself”, “not-I” etc. are ways to convey the idea that we are referring to stuff before we create our conception of them. A pack of chips is part of the thing itself.
“hyperuranium (whatever that means)”
This is actually the whole problem.
If you see things from a religious point of view, you can immagine that there is a God, this God tought of reality, and the reality we perceive is just the manifestation of God’s tought (the Logos). This is a conception that has a long history (or prehistory): for example the egyptian god Ptah, according to legend, emerged from the sea of chaos on a lotus (IIRC) and named things, and as he named things the things differentiated from the promordial chaos and came into being.
Genesis also has some similarities to this, and the neoplatonic idea of the creation of the world through various eons (god/angel like entities) also has some similarities.
When this sort of theory has such a long story I believe it reflects some general psychological tendency.
If we look at Plato’s theories, he believed that thera are entities (ideas) that reside outside of our perception, at a deeper level of existence (called hyperuranium, “above the sky”), and that for example if we perceive something as beautiful we perceive the idea of beauty (the abstract, eternal idea of beauty) through the thing.
There is some doubt about how much we should read Plato in this mystical, semi-religious sense and how much we should read the ideas just as abstractions; I think the mystical sense is there, but not because Plato whas particularly mystical but because, as I said previously, this kind of ideas come from a natural psychological tendence (and therefore were already around in religious terms).
This tendence is the tendence of perceiving in the world our own conceptualisations as objective facts, whitout realizing that we are perceiving a projection of ourselves.
For example, if I perceive a painting as “beautiful” I’m projecting my own sense of beauty and my own expectations on the painting, but my immediate impression is that the painting itself is beautiful, as if “beauty” was an immanent characteristic of the painting.
This projection, when shared with other people, creates the impression that there is a “beauty” thing that comes at us from the painting or other part of the world. So the difference in interpretation of Plato hinges largely on the question of how seriously we should take the concept of the hyperuranium: if we take it seriously, there is a deep religious/mystic streak in Plato; if we don’t, we have to assume that the ideas are inside our heads and Plato only used a weird metaphor.
A lot of philosophy of the middle ages, the nominalist vs. realist question, also hinges on the same question; more or less all the problems of Aristotele also come from the fact that, while Aristotle rejected Plato’s concept of ideas, he conceived of immanent qualities that aren’t really all that different from Plato’s ideas.
Now if we pass to modern philosophy, the question is if modern rationalism is exempt from this mystical streak or not: apparently this kind of mysticism is not fashionable, but there is a problem because the idea that the world can be explained rationally seems to imply that the world follows the laws of rationality, and those laws, where do they come from? Are they a projection? Are they immanent in the world and we just learnt them from the world? etc. (the same questions apply to math).
Pragmatism offers a way out from this because it does away with the problem of “essence”.
J-D 02.25.23 at 12:55 am
I don’t know. I don’t even know that ideas are the kind of thing that need to have a location.
That doesn’t have to be so. If I had models of six RAAF planes and I put them all together, that wouldn’t be my model of the RAAF.
That’s not the way it appears to me.
I don’t know whether there are any such things as laws of rationality, and if there are such things it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the kind of things that have to come from somewhere.
The questions ‘How do our minds work?’ and ‘Why do they work that way?’ make sense to me, but I don’t know the answers to them. I think people have been trying to figure our some answers, and I think they may have made some progress, but I think there’s probably a lot of scope to make further progress. I think they are questions much more worth investigating than ‘Where do the laws of rationality come from?’, which seems to me to be much more likely to lead enquirers down blind alleys.
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