Over at Philosophy, Et Cetera Richard had up a post on ten things everyone should know about philosophy. I didn't agree with some of the claims. (Indeed it seemed wishful thinking to call them knowledge) But it was an interesting topic. What ten things do I think people ought know about philosophy? It's harder to answer than it first appears. That might be partially due to my not thinking philosophy is that useful to people. Still I have my list. (In no particular order)
1. Philosophy isn't just about opinions or views. Why you hold them is very important. I certainly agree with Richard on this point. Indeed the reasoning is far more important than the view. Some might say that it is in the reasoning that philosophy is most like art. Coming from the physics traditions that deeply admires the aesthetics of some equations, I can really appreciate that view. Yet I think the public, by and large, doesn't put much emphasis on reasons. In the world at large sophistry rules.
2. In Philosophy one should be inquiring and not just finding justifications for what one already believes. (Once again I agree with Richard) I think one has to admit fallibilism and constantly be interrogating both oneself as well as others. In a way, one might say that the search is more important than the belief. Of course in practice things are much muddier. Look at the place of intuitions in philosophy.
3. Contextualism isn't Relativism. Dang but I hated when people confused this. This was especially true in my debates in college with non-philosophers on what might be broadly considered ethics. Far too many people at large think that if it isn't true for any person in any circumstance that one is led inexorably into relativism.
4. Social Structures to Knowing isn't Relativism. Related to (3). But people tend to see neo-Kantians like Kuhn or people who emphasize the social constructions inherent to our knowing as entailing relativism or even sollipsism.
5. You Can't Escape Philosophy. People think that if one doesn't have formal philosophical commitments that there somehow magically aren't philosophical assumptions to ones knowledge. I've been reading Davidson of late, and he brings up the point that a lot of philosophy is trying to discern the philosophical commitments inherent to what sentences people take as true. But this pops up especially in science where there often is a strong anti-philosophy bias. They think that by avoiding philosophy they can avoid philosophical issues. Instead all they do is adopt uncritically and unanalyzed philosophical assumptions.
6. Thinking is Inherently Helpful. Just as exercise is just naturally good for you body, I think that thinking carefully about issues is also inherently good. Just to keeping our mind exercised if nothing else. But people seem much more willing to value a trip to the gym for an hour than they are someone thinking about abstract issues for an hour. It'd be nice if that attitude in our culture changed. I don't think I can buy the stronger claim that philosophy is inherently useful for ethical policy or behavior. But I do think that philosophy can make us wiser, although it doesn't necessarily do this.
7. There is a logical problem between libertarian free will and foreknowledge/determinism. Come on. Just accept it. One can adopt a different view of free will. But there really is an inherent problem.
8. See how people's philosophical assumptions determine what answers are acceptable. This is something I do think inherently useful about philosophy. It's related to (5) but more explicit. In many disciplines, especially in the soft-sciences and humanities, there are standard approaches to what is acceptable that depend upon philosophical premises. Many people buy into this acceptability without knowing the groundwork for why it is acceptable. Often these philosophical assumptions are quite at odds with individuals assumptions. They just aren't aware of it. I don't mind that people disagree with me on these issues. But at least be aware of the assumptions. Make them manifest. So much scholarship has unacknowledge biases of these sorts. Philosophy as seeing this "history" or genealogy of the ideas out there in politics, religion, and history is well worth knowing.
9. It's really difficult to know when something refers. I've been meaning to post on this since discussing Derrida and truth with Matthew Mullins. I just haven't had the time. But the old problem of God and reference pops up in many (if not most) issues of reference including truth. The problem is that my descriptions may fall short of what I attempt to reference. But what I may be attempting to reference may thus not be what I think it ought be. So what is privileged, reference or description? There is a fundamental undecidability to it.
10. Reason has limits. I suppose this is old hat now, after 80 years or more of criticism on the issue. Still I think I meet many people who think reason can know everything in and of itself. But by the same token, limits don't imply that reason can do nothing. There is an odd balance between the openness of existence to reason and the what reason can't do. Far too many people fall on one side or the other.
one is led inexorably into contextualism
I really expected that to say relativism. Maybe I confuse the two--if so please explain.
Oops. I'll fix that later tonight.
Eighty years? Kant revolutionized the field with the publication of *Critique of Pure Reason* in 1781, two hundred and twenty five years ago. And the Greeks were no slouches either.
I do not doubt that "relativist" is not the proper term to describe Kuhn's philosophy of science. However, there are few places where science is viewed in a dimmer light than in the writings of Kuhn and his fellow travelers. What do scientists do? They come up with successful paradigms. What makes a paradigm successful? Political considerations, mainly. Is the current paradigm more accurate than the last? Impossible to tell. So is there such a thing as scientific progress? In sociological terms, yes, in scientific terms, no.
No doubt there are a handful of scientists who share this view. I doubt that the rest would go to work in the morning if they really believed it, though.
I think it's fair to disagree with Kuhn. (I disagree with him myself) But I'm not sure it is right to call that relativism. To say that we understand in terms of the social or even in terms of power relations does not say that the knowledge is arbitrary.
I agree with you there Clark. William of Ockham is still being criticized on similar grounds seven hundred years later.
It is one thing to say that the world of ideals or universals as we know them is largely socially constructed, and another to say that they have no correspondence or no convergence with underlying reality. The former is a sophisticated realism, the latter is either outright skepticism or severe epistemological pessimism.
Science, as a method and a field of study, makes no sense divorced from some conception of natural laws or universals. Ockham knew that well, but the leading lights of scientific philosophy from Hume onward generally deny the existence of any natural universals, and hence the validity of induction, probability, and the scientific method.
The real question is why is such skepticism so attractive, when the evidence is abundant that scientific realists (of whatever stripe) have a much better case, theoretical shortcomings notwithstanding?
Well, your list is much more to my taste than Richard's, I must say. I'll take a crack at it myself tonight. Not like I agree with everything you say either, though.
re #2: Careful with your fallibilism - that way lies skepticism (long story). We have seen your skepticism before.
re #3: Right, but don't forget perspectivism, which is neither relativism nor contextualism, nor skepticism either for that matter (another long story).
re #4: Okay, but in the wrong hands (pro and con) "social construction" does indeed mean relativism.
re #5: Hear, hear. But if you're a scientist (or any practitioner) you can't just sit around examining your presuppositions. For example, realism is often fine for doing science.
re: #7: Of course; and let us indeed "adopt a different view of free will," so that the problem does not arise.
re: #9: Keep reading Davidson.
Also, I have to disagree with Mark's uncharitable reading of Kuhn. It is revolutionary scientists who "come up with successful paradigms" (as well as all the unsuccessful ones). Who decides what is "successful"? Other scientists, by using a new paradigm to solve the problems which it allows us to reformulate more perspicuously (a process hardly dominated by "political considerations," unless you're Lysenko or something Ð but then you're hardly doing science). Paradigms themselves are neither "accurate" nor "inaccurate," just like the metric system (although I grant we must step carefully here if we are to avoid relativism, as this example shows). Of course we make progress: modern chemistry is much better than alchemy. And once the revolution is complete, we do indeed describe this situation by saying that "the phlogiston theory (or whatever) is false." And so it is. Kuhn's point is just that we don't decide these things in one step, by holding each paradigm up to reality (i.e. independently of the statements and problems formulable in it) and seeing which one "matches" it. This is not an epistemological point (i.e. that "we can't know which is right"). See Clark's #5 and 8. And Davidson's "On the very idea of a conceptual scheme," which is perfectly compatible with my account here (if not with that of some other "Kuhnians").
Dave M (#6), I would say rather than "realism is just fine for doing science", that realism is necessary for science to have any significance at all.
What makes modern chemistry better than alchemy save its accuracy or predictive power. Short of simple coincidence, the only way a scientific theory can have any predictive power is by approximating a natural law. There are modern scientific theories that accurately predict sub-atomic phenomena to better than twelve decimal places. We guide space probes, sight unseen, with enormous accuracy using physics that is nearly 400 years old. And yet somehow many scientific philosophers insist that the enormous practical success of science is not the result of inductive discovery of approximations to natural law, but rather is sheer accident. That Newton's law, or Schroedinger's equation keep working by coincidence, and that it is irrational to believe that there is even a statistical probability that they will hold true from moment to moment. According to Karl Popper, it is irrational to believe not only that the sun will come up in the morning, but to believe that there is a probability the sun will come up in the morning. That is a nearly unimaginable level of skepticism.
If predictive power is left out of science, what then can explain the success of a scientific theory except social consensus - e.g. political, economic, or aesthetic considerations, factors which dominates nearly any field of science wanting for hard experimental evidence, including broad stretches of the social sciences as well as string theory, origin of life biology, and so on.
As far as Kuhn is concerned in particular, I think the problem with his philosophy is the untenabilty of his theory that scientific theories or paradigms are incommensurable. In actual practice, a new paradigm is only rarely adopted by comparative experiment that demonstrates not only the commensurability of the new theory to the old one, but its absolute superiority as well. This is such a glaring weakness that it makes it hard to take the rest of what he says seriously, i.e. as a description of the way science really works, rather than as one of those theories notable primarily for being both widely held and ridiculously wrong.
More later, I'll just say that it is incommensurability that I see as a big problem, although I'm not at all convinced that in practice this ought be a problem even for the neo-Kantians of the sort Kuhn typifies. That gets back into the issue of reference.
Whoops. I'd meant to respond to Dave M. and forgot.
re re #2. I don't think fallibilism entails skepticism. I think that's true only if one adopts a kind of internalism ala Descartes. Indeed I think Descartes artificially created what we today think of skepticism. (Which isn't to deny the classic skeptics, of which I think Socrates is at least tied to) Put an other way, I suspect, not all skepticism is bad.
re re #3. Whoops. Yeah, I obviously was thinking about perspectivism given my background. I forgot to type it in when I brought up contextualism. I suppose though that contextualism, broadly considered, includes perspectivism.
re re #4. I certainly agree with the "wrong hands." My point is that since people tend to only encounter the wrong hands its important to realize that there is more to it. So let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
re re #5. I think part of science is examining ones presuppositions, even if those presuppositions are just the way ones experiment is conducted. Clearly this can't be all that one does. But the bubble fusion which may have had its empirical results contaminated by some nearby Einsteinium is a great example of why we have to do this. If modern science has a flaw it is that it doesn't do this enough - especially with regards to expected results. Part of that is due to the publish or perish mentality that is also tied to interesting research. i.e. the kind of replication and criticism essential by science isn't valued by either publishers nor tenure boards.
re re #9. I should point out that despite saying I buy into more Davidson than most, that there are many places I end up disagreeing with him. (Although even there I think one can often repair his arguments) If I get time to go back to that book on Davidson a lot of that will come out, although they sadly don't get much into questions of mind or agency but focus primarily on his theory of language.
re "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" One of my favorite essays of his. I plan on getting to that. My post on Heidegger and Kuhn from yesterday is, in its way, a setup for this.
Mark (#7), it seems to me that an empiricist who is thus anti-realist about scientific statements can answer the claims of predictive power quite well. While I obviously have strong realist leanings I just don't think the approach you take answers the empiricist. I'm not even entirely convinced it answers the instrumentalist.
Empiricism is definitely often accompanied by agnosticism towards metaphysical structure, sure. But an empiricism that goes beyond such agnosticism to outright denial of an underlying metaphysical consistency has no explanation for the predictive power of scientific statements beyond outright coincidence. That is a pretty impoverished (if not totally unworkable) perspective, on my view.
The case for instrumentalism is similar - a scientist does not need to worry if his models have a direct correspondence with the metaphysical substratum, as that is well nigh impossible to determine. But certainly the fact that some models have much greater predictive power than others is very strong evidence that some correspond to the time invariants of natural reality more directly than others, because without time invariants there could be no predictive power of any consequence. An anti-realistic science is an oxymoron.
I think the empiricist would simply say that there is a reality but we can't know it. Sort of an extreme version of Kant's things-in-themselves. Thus assertions about what that real structure is tend to be pointless. We can't talk about whether electrons are really fluids, particles, quantum fields, or so forth. We can only really talk about our sense data and patterns in the sense data. When we start talking about what things really are we've gone astray.
Now clearly I disagree. But I think my disagreement is due to generally seeing Internalism as an approach to knowledge as problematic. I think philosophy has been suffering from Descartes divorcing the mind from the world for several centuries now. Kant made some progress (especially over the empiricists IMO) by imposing transcendental structure. But there was always that problem of the thing-in-itself that was still unknowable. I much prefer the route taken by Externalists like Heidegger or Peirce which avoids this.
I'd add that I think the problem with scientific realism (the formal position) is that one can't really characterize realism terribly well when all one has is Internalism. Thus the claim that we're converging on the truth seems dubious at best. (And really ends up entailing far less knowledge than even the instrumentalist, neo-Kantian or empiricist)
But certainly even the instrumentalist and empiricist wouldn't deny there is a reality. They simply disagree that scientific statements refer to that reality.
My point is that unless one adopts an impractically narrow definition of reference (which begs the question), all theories with significant predictive power give a description of underlying of underlying reality that is accurate in fundamental respects, even if wildly different in a multitude of other aspects either unknown or unknowable.
It doesn't matter - it is a counterproductive sophistry to deny that modern scientific theories do not correspond in fundamental respects with the structure of underlying reality. A hard ("atheist") anti-realist asserts that any such structure is incidental - i.e. that there are no natural laws. A soft ("agnostic") anti-realist asserts that such structure is unknowable.
Both positions fly in the face of everyday experience, and more particularly in the face of reams of scientific evidence. It is a defeatist perfectionism that says that unless we are intimately acquainted with an object (something that is by most accounts impossible) we must conclude that our beliefs concerning it are incidental or false in all respects.
A sophisticated scientific realism doesn't naively assume its representations of reality have some sort of mystical string tying them to objects in the outside world, but simply that there is a measurable degree of correspondence between the two.
The basis for this belief is consistent expirimental repeatability - a condition that by all evidence has prevailed everywhere and everywhen. To believe that such consistency could be the result of anything but something universally real is a disorder bordering on solipsism. To believe that our overwhelming ability to transform the world through science and engineering doesn't involve any actual knowledge regarding it is almost as silly, but perhaps more the result of a semantic malfunction.
Or rather, instead of redefining a common word to accord with one's phenomenological predispostions and then proceeeding deductively from there to the most ridiculous conclusions imaginable, scientific philosophers should work inductively backwards from actual practice, either adopting the terminology of science, or inductively modeling the actual phenomenology of science, before jumping in with a priori conclusions about how science really works. No scientist could ever get away with such carelessness, why should scientific philosophers?
Or at least, if they want to get away with it, scientific philosophers should admit that their claims are far more tenuous than those of the scientists they are studying - a fact that every college student knows with regard to philosophy in general, but which scientific philosophers have somehow managed to avoid, as if their philosophy of science was actually "scientific".
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