Leiter asks, considering this Kristof piece:
Why do members of the educated public think that it is an objection to philosophical inquiry that it is unintelligible to them (or that it does not have immediate application to the quality of life of pigs, say), whereas no one would think to put such objections against esoteric work in the natural sciences? Are other humanities subjected to this same expectation of “practical relevance and intelligibility”?
From discussions with other colleagues in the humanities, they are subject to the same expectation, one as old as the hills, or at least the Gorgias: how is that going to make money and benefit society? (I think philosophers get more questions about pot.) Yet I think there’s an explanation specific to philosophy in the answer to the first question.
Esoteric work in the natural sciences is very difficult to understand, and such work does often get dismissed as impractical. (See: Rush Limbaugh on cow farts, comments on NASA every time it pops up in the news.) But a weaker thesis seems to be true, that this kind of complaint comes up much less for a practicing scientist than it does for a professional philosopher, even if the scientist’s work is unlikely to yield immediate practical results, or even if the scientist has no practical everyday aim in mind. Purely theoretical science gets a pass because it occurs in close proximity to practical science. (Literally. Down the hall.)
But to focus purely on the practical results of science as an explanation misses an interesting aspect of Leiter’s question. Most people don’t understand quantum mechanics; most people can’t. Most educated people can’t understand the Big Bang or the mathematics behind theories of time, but most educated people can mumble something about probability and Schroedinger’s cat and singularities. People who study physics or mathematics professionally, therefore, are doing that. That hard thing, that’s like this other thing that I know about, you know, but harder.
So what about philosophy? I don’t think the problem is with content, or at least if it is, the problem doesn’t map onto traditional intradisciplinary turf struggles. (Besides, enrollments are up in many, many philosophy departments; the students seem to like something that we’re offering…) Rather, I think the problem is with chronic underexposure. Most people who do learn philosophy don’t do so until college; and most people can get through college without ever taking a philosophy course.
It’s not common for high schools to have sequences in philosophy, so unlike history, literature, and the sciences, there’s no simple mental projection of what a professional philosopher might be doing. Not that people generally understand what historians do (as eric and ari would certainly point out) or get it wrong in entertaining ways. (The only real history concerns WWII. And kings and battles.) But I think people think they *get* history or chemistry or neurobiology in a way they don’t get philosophy, and I think it’s because they had a history or chemistry or biology class in high school.
Moreover, as a profession, we’ve dropped the ball in marketing our discipline publicly for the educated layman. I read A Brief History of Time when I was fourteen or fifteen. I have, practically speaking, no clue at all what the current issues are in theoretical physics, and couldn’t leap over the mathematics involved with a running start and a tailwind. But I’d probably pay attention to a news article about the age of the galaxy just because I read that book. I could go to the bookstore and read lots of popular-but-smart titles about history, even if the scholarship makes historians cringe. Philosophers tend to write for each other, and what passes for popular philosophy consists nearly entirely in books with the titles “X and Philosophy,” where X is some flash-in-the-pan pop culture phenomenon.* And books on parapsychology.** And academic books that are hard to understand, or accessible academic books that aren’t marketed well.*** (Someone like Singer has been so successful in part because he is very easy to read.)
I’m not sure how to fix this perception problem, or even if I have the problem diagnosed properly. And I’m curious to others’ perceptions. I tend to think philosophers have it worse than some of the other humanities. Not that this is a competition, but it goes to my half-baked theory that lack of familiarity prompts the “you’re majoring in what?” reaction.
*I don’t have a problem with the fluffy titles in the abstract, but I do occasionally worry that my mother thinks that philosophers mostly write about the ethical dilemmas in television and movies.
** We need to get the term “metaphysics” back from the new age crystal snugglers.
*** I’ll readily admit that I lost my sense of what is an accessible philosophy book to the educated layman years ago. And there’s probably no hope for some subdisciplines.
41 comments
April 14, 2009 at 12:32 pm
ben
Who cares if they care?
Most people who do learn philosophy don’t do so until college; and most people can get through college without ever taking a philosophy course.
Moreover, most people, even those who have taken a few philosophy courses, are (rightly) completely uninterested in how many tropes can be collocated on the head of a pin.
April 14, 2009 at 12:39 pm
dana
The thing is, analytic metaphysics isn’t the whole of philosophy. Not even close. Which is why I don’t think the answer to ‘why does no one care?’ lies in questions about the prominence of various sub-disciplines (even if we grant for the sake of argument that intro classes are about tetchy trope problems.)
April 14, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Erik Lund
(The only real history concerns WWII. And kings and battles.)
..And putting on genuine authentic costumes and floating along like a low-lying, menacing taffeta storm cloud/hitting each other with sharpened metal sticks. Don’t forget that part.
I see philosophy being done all over the wackier bits of the Internet by earnest young folk. They are dead serious about it, struggling for logical clarity. The failure to achieve that clarity certainly arises from the fact that they’ve had little exposure to how it’s done, but just how that ignorance is maintained is a real question. _Introduction to Political Philosophy_ is surely no harder to read than _Atlas Shrugged._
I think it comes down to grand opinions being at least as important to young folk as the way the steering wheel works is for a person driving a car going very, very fast.
Smartypants philosophy-talking dudes are slick. They’re trained to argue. And have you noticed [social discontent of preference?] That’s because someone has been out mystifying the situation. This particular “someone” is an evil genius of discourse, and would be equally dangerous in the driver’s seat of that car. Best to avoid them and build your argument up out of nothing. Can’t be that hard, can it?
“Philosophy is too important to be left to the philosophers.”
April 14, 2009 at 1:53 pm
dana
hitting each other with sharpened metal sticksPVC swords, you mean!
April 14, 2009 at 2:01 pm
ben
No, it isn’t the whole of philosophy, or even the whole of analytic philosophy, but I think there’s an impression even within the discipline that it’s part or one of the parts of analytic philosophy that is the most philosophical: when you hear “core analytic”, what do you think? If you’re like me, language, mind and metaphysics, and the greatest of these is metaphysics. (Maybe you aren’t.) They also set the tone for other areas, something that may be lurking in the background (or maybe even the foreground, I only ever skimmed it) of Setiya’s article “Does Moral Theory Corrupt Youth?” (emphasis in the title on “theory”).
I think that Authority and Estrangement could be an accessible philosophy book with only minor revisions. Likewise much phil. science, probably. (I mean, Kuhn’s little book sold like hotcakes.)
Anyway, I’m not sure the post really addresses Leiter’s question as excerpted at its head, which isn’t, why do people have so little idea what philosophers are up to, but rather, why do people, when they find out (the formula of) what philosophers are up to, take it to be an objection that they find it of no import or unintelligible? Which was why I alluded to Babbitt, with a sneer that perhaps didn’t come through. Babbitt’s perspective only makes sense if you think that music really is like math and that there’s progress in music quite apart from how the stuff sounds (even apart from how it sounds to those in the know), whereas the person who complains that it sounds like cacophonous noise thinks that music is for being listened to and ought to give some aural pleasure. Presumably someone who, discovering that McX passes all his time pondering modal logic, finds this worthy of complaint, thinks that philosophy is supposed to be for something in everyday life: not necessarily making money but, say, providing guidance concerning that for which one may hope or what one ought do, and who doesn’t see how little boxes is going to help with that.
I would guess that other humanistic disciplines face this sort of criticism much less, since there’s probably much less presumption that literary criticism is going to answer that sort of question.
April 14, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Jason B.
Another problem might be that people who try out philosophy in college get turned off by Intro courses that are set up more like The History of Philosophy than anything that engages with the process or ideas of philosophy. They think it’s history without events.
April 14, 2009 at 2:24 pm
dana
I did mean to answer Leiter directly. The claim is that people take the unintelligibility criticism seriously (when they don’t in theoretical physics) because they have no idea at all about what philosophy does (whereas they have an inkling about physics, and know that it’s supposed to be hard after a certain point.)
And I know what “core analytic” means, but if I think of a typical intro sequence it’s mostly full of ethics and history (ancient & modern), on the topics more of interest to the educated layman. All of those touch on MEM (L is out in the cold, on the grounds that they bore other philosophers to death, too), but boxes and diamonds are usually in the upper-level major sequence, not the sort of thing for an intro course.
So I’m skeptical that the public perception of philosophy is coming primarily from encounters with modal logic or core analytic (when they expected applied ethics.) I don’t think the question even gets far enough to ask what a philosopher does.
And I’m not sure what the right answer would be; plenty of people think that history that isn’t about wars isn’t real history, but I don’t think that should cause a historian to give up studying demographic trends in 16th century England.
April 14, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Barbar
Are other humanities subjected to this same expectation of “practical relevance and intelligibility”?
I find the scare quotes hilarious.
I notice that no one seems to respect me very much. Are other people subjected to the humiliation of having to earn other people’s respect, rather than simply receiving it on the basis of mysterious inherent merit?
April 14, 2009 at 2:30 pm
dana
I was surprised more that Leiter couldn’t immediately answer that question in the affirmative.
April 14, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Barbar
I believe the most popular class at Harvard is Michael Sandel’s course on justice. According to Wikipedia, over ten thousand students have taken the class over the past two decades (probably about a third of the student body).
I actually think some of the perception problems in philosophy are not derived from its mysteriousness but from its familiarity. Scientists tend to be contemptuous of philosophy of science, for instance. People without philosophy degrees still manage to have strong opinions about morality and politics. For philosophers to be relevant, they have to say that ordinary people get important things wrong; but at this point a lot of people will think that they’re sophists who make fallacious arguments.
April 14, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Anderson
not derived from its mysteriousness but from its familiarity
I think that’s exactly right. People who think at all about what philosophy does, probably break it into two categories:
(1) bullshit (is the table real? isn’t all morality just relative?); and
(2) shit we already knew (what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s real).
Certain trends in Anglo-American philosophy have tended to trickle down and reinforce this categorization in the lay mind. The locus classicus is Dr. Johnson, kicking the stone.
April 14, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Carl
My dad the professional philosopher addresses the question this way. When you’re part of an elite guild of especially smart people who have been asking the same questions for about 2500 years:
*without arriving at answers convincing to any significant majority of your peers
*without even significantly advancing the terms of the discussion, such that
*the original savants continue to be relevant as inspiration and authority,
you’d do well to develop a thick skin about the disrespect of others whose efforts are more immediately productive, say, in the hundred-year range.
April 14, 2009 at 4:22 pm
silbey
plenty of people think that history that isn’t about wars isn’t real history
Ahem.
April 14, 2009 at 4:42 pm
ekogan
I remember reading a part of Descartes’ “The Description of the Human Body”, in which he tries to discover human anatomy through pure reason and gets things hilariously wrong, and becoming convinced that any field of inquiry which is not informed by experimental results is useless because its conclusions can’t be trusted. That killed any interest I’ve had in philosophy
April 14, 2009 at 5:18 pm
politicalfootball
I actually think some of the perception problems in philosophy are not derived from its mysteriousness but from its familiarity.
Right. And what Anderson said, too.
I feel as though I’m missing something important here, because I can’t work out what the complaint is from Leiter (and, by extension, dana).
Here’s Leiter, talking about the glamorous philosophical realm of animal rights, and comparing it to other neglected areas of public inquiry:
Why, though, is “our moral obligations to pigs” deeemed a “fascinating” question? What about our obligations not to launch criminal wars of aggression against other countries? Or to prevent vast inequities of wealth and life fortunes? Or to view Palestinians as human beings with equal moral claims on freedom, bodily integrity, and opportunity? Is it that our moral obligations to pigs do not present much threat to the Manhattan bourgeoisie, whereas the other questions would be especially unsettling?
Since when have these questions been neglected by the “educated public”?
April 14, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Anderson
That killed any interest I’ve had in philosophy
Jacob Bronowski had a similar experience, I think, reading Hegel on why there were exactly seven planets.
As Dana says, there is not much new on kicking philosophy since the Gorgias:
Callicles: Philosophy, as a part of education, is an excellent thing, and there is no disgrace to a man while he is young in pursuing such a study; but when he is more advanced in years, the thing becomes ridiculous, and I feel towards philosophers as I do towards those who lisp and imitate children. For I love to see a little child, who is not of an age to speak plainly, lisping at his play; there is an appearance of grace and freedom in his utterance, which is natural to his childish years. But when I hear some small creature carefully articulating its words, I am offended; the sound is disagreeable, and has to my ears the twang of slavery. So when I hear a man lisping, or see him playing like a child, his behaviour appears to me ridiculous and unmanly and worthy of stripes. And I have the same feeling about students of philosophy; when I see a youth thus engaged,–the study appears to me to be in character, and becoming a man of liberal education, and him who neglects philosophy I regard as an inferior man, who will never aspire to anything great or noble. But if I see him continuing the study in later life, and not leaving off, I should like to beat him, Socrates; for, as I was saying, such a one, even though he have good natural parts, becomes effeminate. He flies from the busy centre and the market-place, in which, as the poet says, men become distinguished; he creeps into a corner for the rest of his life, and talks in a whisper with three or four admiring youths, but never speaks out like a freeman in a satisfactory manner.
April 14, 2009 at 6:07 pm
beamish
I remember reading a part of Descartes’ “The Description of the Human Body”, in which he tries to discover human anatomy through pure reason and gets things hilariously wrong, and becoming convinced that any field of inquiry which is not informed by experimental results is useless because its conclusions can’t be trusted
That book was actually the product of a lot of dissection and observation. I don’t suppose this fact undermines your confidence in dissection and observation.
April 14, 2009 at 6:21 pm
JPool
The parallel to history is perhaps even more direct. People misunderstand the Santayana line and ask, “So if you learn enough about history, we’ll never have to repeat the past again. Oh! Or, only the good parts.” Worse and perhaps more common they say, “So, you’re a historian. Tell me what the future’s going to be.” When you tell them that’s not how it works, they ask “What good are you then?”
Bearing in mind that I don’t know nothing about nothing, another challenge for philosophy, might be a corollary to the professional practice of “applying the thinking of philosopher x to problem y.” This can be very interesting and lead to a richer intellectual life, but it has, among other dangers, the risk of becoming “Chris in the Morning.”
“What a crazy, complicated thing. You know, A would say this, while B would claim that, and C would say the other. Me? I sure don’t know.” Come on, so some philosophizing.
April 14, 2009 at 7:46 pm
dana
I am not endorsing the rest of Leiter’s complaint.
in which he tries to discover human anatomy through pure reason and gets things hilariously wrong
I’m pretty sure Descartes cut things up. Not that he didn’t get things hilariously wrong when he tried to figure out why things looked the way they did (o hai, pineal gland), but the popular portrait of the guy in the armchair never noticing the real world isn’t the whole picture.
April 14, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Michael Turner
I’m not sure how to fix this perception problem, or even if I have the problem diagnosed properly. And I’m curious to others’ perceptions.
I’m not an academic, but I also don’t think I can speak quite as an “educated layman” either. See further on.
To the extent that I’m a layman, here’s what I can say: For the most part, philosophy appears to me as a forbidding (or perhaps trivial) mountain of impenetrable books. Maybe that’s my fault. Maybe I just haven’t approached those books in the right order. Nietsche wrote with enough verve to hold my attention when I was young, but I can’t say I ever figured out when he was pulling my leg, which must have been at least some of the time. And that was about it, for a long time.
Here we are at “further on”:
Recently, I’ve started reading J.L. Austin, which I don’t think your average educated layman ever does, despite Austin’s relative accessibility. I’ve finished Sense and Sensibilia, and am whittling away at How to do things with Words. The first book seems to be largely a smackdown of somebody named Ayers, with a few swipes at somebody named Price and finally at another guy named Warnock who (amazingly) gets to smack himself down in the third person, as the editor of a book assembled posthumously from Austin’s lecture notes.
Now, I can tell you, when somebody quipped on that thread over at Leiter’s that the name Ayers would only evoke a “who?” from most laymen (even those laymen who might recognize the name “Wittgenstein”), that was dead on.
Here’s the question raised by my reading of Sense and Sensibilia: must I now also read Ayers, so that when I defend Austin’s POV by reference to his smackdown of Ayers, I can speak with that much more authority? (Or perhaps so that I can suss out how Austin might’ve been subtly wrong about Ayers, or at least understand those who might’ve defended Ayers against Austin?)
I suppose I would read Ayers if I were–or were aiming to be–a “professional philosopher.” But that term translates in my mind to “philosophy professor, on tenure track, at least”. At this point in my life, that’s not going to happen. “Amateur philosopher”? That’s redolent of circular arguments with people living on SSI, over bad coffee in dingy cafes. At least, that’s the sense of it in my old hometown, and that hometown would be (cringe): Berkeley. Life is also too short for that. Way too short.
How did I get to J.L. Austin in the first place? Hold still for this: I came to Japan with the idea of a career change — learn the language, and turn my engineering knowledge to use in technical translation. After doing a certain amount of technical translation, it struck me as very mechanical. Being a former software engineer, I began thinking of it as how to rigorously transform a string of bits into another string of bits. That got me interested in machine translation, and why it still sucks. Naturally, that led me to semantics. The core problem in MT — as recognized even by its earliest pioneers — is that computers don’t know what we’re talking about. Even when we use words like “know” (and for that matter words like “words”).
Pondering the muddle of semantics in machine translation, I began to wonder: is there an irreducible semantic core common to all languages? That led me to a school of thought in linguistics (somewhat fringe I’ll allow), called Natural Semantic Metalanguage. And the leading light of that school quotes and cites Wittgenstein, Moore and Austin — usually, but not always, approvingly.
Austin looked easiest, so I started there.
Note another transit: I’m now more interested in how to explicate culture-bound and value-laden Japanese terms like “omoiyari”. I am much less interested in how to mechanically (but also accurately) translate passages in patents about correcting for chromatic aberration in optical scanner lenses, from not very good Japanese, into acceptable technical English (and vice versa). Maybe I’ll get back to that someday. If not, well, good riddance. And I mean it. But what do I mean by “mean”?
OK, so I’m interested in what meaning is, and how meaning happens, through language. Can you philosophers help me out? Which one of you do I trust? Which ones are, by contrast, measuring their value to the field only by citation index, which might only be an indication of how many stupid arguments they’ve been able to start by feverishly propagating misunderstandings?
In some ways, reading Austin hasn’t been very encouraging for this quest.
But I try. I’ve gotten interested in counterfactuals. In Natural Semantic Metalanguage, these were a proposed semantic universal, which got dropped because somebody claimed (absurdly, I find) that counterfactuals always carry an “adversative” emotional tinge in Japanese, while forming more freely in other languages. (This echoes an old and equally absurd debate about Chinese lacking lexical exponents for counterfactuals and whether this “explained” why they lagged so long in science while developing so much as a civilization in other ways). AFAIK, nobody has challenged this account of counterfactuals in Japanese, and it’s now getting echoed in some once-over-lightly language universals treatments. For the first time in some years, I feel a publication coming on.
But I want to do my homework first, so I try to look into what philosophers say about counterfactuals. One of the first few I bump into is a certain David K. Lewis. As far as I can make out, I’m supposed to buy his account because it features elegant mathematical economy or something. Yes, but it also seems to require that all counterfactuals actually happen in some parallel universe.
Admittedly, a near-majority of physicists of sound mind do buy the Many Worlds resolution of otherwise unknittable branches of physics. However, as far as I can tell, these physicists are still talking only about physically possible futures, and don’t allow for (or even bother their heads with covering the absurd case of) physically impossible pasts. If I understand Lewis correctly, those are fine with him.
And yet, it seems Lewis is one of the foremost philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. Is it true that some professional philosophers say he’s a major figure for that entire century? Maybe so. I’m just not persuaded that anything he wrote can help me with understanding counterfactuals, and the question of whether they are semantically a language universal.
Don’t worry — it’s not something I think will ever lead to more economical translation of consumer electronics user manuals. There’s no taint of the merely practical, here. I just want to know. For the sake of knowing. Could understanding Lewis help me? How much might I have to plow through to even get a credible answer to the question of whether it’s worth plowing even further to understand what he said on the subject?
Over on Leiter’s comments, someone mentioned the Chomsky Test (wryly noting that some would now say Chomsky’s Minimalist Program would no longer pass.) Can you explain what you’re trying to do in your field to an educated person over a leisurely lunch? Well, if it means accepting that when someone says, “if donkeys could talk . . .” that person is referring to a real universe in which donkeys talk, I’m not sure it would be so good for my digestion. Maybe I’d prefer to have lunch at my desk. Gut feelings are, of course, no guide to the truth of a counterfactual proposition, else we probably wouldn’t have science. But if there’s too much “swallow this!” in a field, and rather a lot of what appears to be vomiting-up in the resulting literature, with little sense of general progress on major questions, an educated layman might understandably feel there’s not much there worth his time.
Sure, linguistics has its own problems, and within linguistics, semantics has problems in spades. Still, I can at least potentially say, “Here’s demonstrable everyday use of non-adversative counterfactuals in Japanese; moreover, if you’d like to attribute this to the latterday import of scientific conceptualizations from the West, here’s some more everyday use of counterfactuals in Japanese, from Tokugawa Era texts, during a time when the government was actually shielding Japanese culture from western science and technology. I can go further back if you want, even if the record gets hazier the further back we go.” It’s not absolute disconfirmation, but you can make a proposition dramatically less probable.
Donkeys can talk in some parallel universe? Yeah. And with God, all things are possible. Philosophy, gimme some traction or get outa the way.
April 14, 2009 at 8:09 pm
dana
Plenty of philosophers disagree with Lewis even while finding talk of possible worlds useful. But whatever the merits of his view, he’s addressing a different kind of question than the question it seems you need for your translation work.
April 14, 2009 at 8:14 pm
politicalfootball
I am not endorsing the rest of Leiter’s complaint.
I don’t see how to separate the parts of Leiter’s complaint. You appropriately quote his final paragraph, which (I think) draws on the content of the rest of the post.
In the part that you endorse without examination, Leiter says that the general public is biased in favor of practical philosophical arguments – arguments, for example, “that … have immediate application to the quality of life of pigs, say.”
Every part of this seems wrong to me. Philosophical arguments are deeply implicated in many public policy matters, and are discussed that way by Leiter’s “educated public.”
But that’s not all. Maybe you and Leiter hang in different circles than I do, but animal rights arguments just aren’t that prominent among philosophical arguments that I hear. I think Rich is correct that those arguments have become more prominent, but still, they are not that prominent – and, contra Leiter, they aren’t that practical either. Killing and/or eating animals without thinking about it is a practical approach to this issue.
I’m just not getting what the complaint is – your post assumes the validity of the complaint in order to examine the reasons for it. But I get stuck on the first step – I just don’t get the validity of the complaint.
April 14, 2009 at 8:31 pm
dana
Philosophical arguments are deeply implicated in many public policy matters, and are discussed that way by Leiter’s “educated public.”
But that’s not his complaint. His complaint is that people dismiss quite a lot of philosophy because it seems hard and irrelevant, and even in this comment thread we have a few examples of that kind of complaint. By “practical”, he means to pick out arguments that bear on decisions made publicly and privately, applied ethics or policy stuff, not “what people generally do.”
April 14, 2009 at 10:53 pm
Michael Turner
Plenty of philosophers disagree with Lewis even while finding talk of possible worlds useful.
The salient point was in how he (and they) talk about impossible worlds. Or did you (again) not really read what I wrote?
[Lewis] is addressing a different kind of question than the question it seems you need for your translation work.
I don’t need it for any translation work, and I made that pretty clear, dana. I’d rather you just didn’t comment on my contributions at all, if you can’t take the time to read them.
Whether Lewisian approaches to the counterfactual might have some bearing on my (admittedly amateur) linguistic researches, is something I haven’t figured out yet. My intuition at this point is this: if philosophers are trying to assign true/false values to counterfactual statements with impossible antecedents, they are straying so far from ordinary natural language senses of “true” and “false”, “if” and “then”, as to be arguing about things that nobody outside their field could possibly care about. Such insularity would be fine, I suppose, if these were statements in some abstract mathematical system being developed for its own sake, as is the case in most pure math. But these statements they discuss ad nauseum are couched in natural language, and seem to be about the real world; no surprise, then, that the “educated layman” you hope to entice will at first try to take them as such, only to come away very put off by either the vacuity or the opacity (or both) of what’s actually going on in the argument.
If Lewis wants to say that a statement like “if there is a largest prime p, then all pigs could fly” is “trivially true”, because it “can’t be confidently denied,” well, it may be mathematically true as a sort of translation from the terms of a particular, apparently self-consistent, axiomatic logic system into English, but it doesn’t accord much with any natural sense of truth — or any other sense of truth but its own.
And you wonder why the educated layman is disappointed, or simply not interested, in philosophy? He expects you to be concerned with truth as he expects doctors to be concerned with cures — after all, you’re professional philosophers, aren’t you? For that educated layman, the question of whether pigs fly if there’s a largest prime is necessarily going to take a back seat to the question of whether pigs suffer in any sense worth thinking about. And that’s if he even wants such babbling in his back seat in the first place.
People might not so much require that knowledge be useful as that it simply be really about something. That’s why some biology result about slime molds that’s vanishingly unlikely to have any bearing on human affairs gets a pass: at most, you might get the educated layman saying, “Huh. That’s weird”. But at least it’s about something.
I believe there’s a genuine universal human thirst for understanding, irrespective of usefulness, even if that thirst is more strongly felt in some than in others. It’s commonly thought that “primitive” peoples don’t philosophize. Yet the Stone Age Papuans I brought up in the last thread believed that pigs have something like souls, as humans do, a meaning they expressed as “seed of song”, even as they also slaughtered and ate them, and engaged in elaborate conflicts over ownership of them. I simply can’t imagine a culture evolving in that way — and especially arriving at that particularly resonant term for “soul” — without thought and discussion of what it means to be conscious, to suffer, to communicate thoughts and feelings, to have intelligence and emotions. For all we know, their ways of thinking about what sorts of rights their pigs had, by virtue of the class of consciousness those animals seemed to manifest, might have been more sophisticated than ours — or Peter Singer’s.
What made it matter to them in the first place? Did some tiny group of proto-theologians work out the calculus of it, in idle speculation, then lay it down as religious dogma, accepted henceforth by the tribe, without question? Or was it a topic wrangled from one generation to the next, with the pigs-have-souls conclusion sold and re-sold by appeal to the intuitions of the “educated layman” of their society, who might have taken a few minutes in the morning to think about such things, before putting the bone through his nose and going off to work? It might be unknowable, but I’d hope for the latter. If you’re serious in your inquiries about layman perceptions of philosophy, dana, I think you’d have the same hope. If you’re not serious, well . . . respect is a two-way street. Don’t demand too much more than what you have on offer.
April 15, 2009 at 6:15 am
dana
You said you took up reading Lewis on counterfactuals because of some interesting feature of counterfactuals in Japanese. (“AFAIK, nobody has challenged this account of counterfactuals in Japanese, and it’s now getting echoed in some once-over-lightly language universals treatments. For the first time in some years, I feel a publication coming on….But I want to do my homework first, so I try to look into what philosophers say about counterfactuals. One of the first few I bump into is a certain David K. Lewis.”) Lewis is dealing with a different set of problems about counterfactuals; I was noting that I would be surprised if his work helped with your researches (as you seem to agree in your third paragraph here), which I apparently misdescribed as being concerned with translation.
But no matter.
Such insularity would be fine, I suppose, if these were statements in some abstract mathematical system being developed for its own sake, as is the case in most pure math.
They are, sort of. Logic is its own subdiscipline, and it’s a lot like pure mathematics. Every philosopher knows that the “if-then” of basic logic doesn’t capture the sense in which we’d use it in English. It’s just too simple a system (it can’t handle counterfactuals, which is one common way we use “if” in English, and it doesn’t account for implied conceptual connections), even though it can be remarkably powerful in ordinary reasoning. In basic logic, if-thens with false antecedents come out trivially true (note that doesn’t mean the consequent is true), but no one thinks that captures the ordinary English sense perfectly.
Lewis is trying to do the same for talk of possibility, and so, yes, his view doesn’t map onto the ordinary English sense of possibility, though he thinks if you want the ordinary sense of possibility, you just restrict the possible worlds that you consider to a smaller set of more similar worlds. So I think he’d agree that when we normally talk about whether it’s possible for me to wear a different shirt today, we’re ruling out Flying Pig world automatically because it’s not going to have much to tell us. His analysis still has room for Flying Pig world, though, even if it never comes up.
None of this makes his view less weird.
April 15, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Carl
Following up on Callicles, if there are to be teachers of philosophy to the young I suppose there must be adult practitioners of philosophy. And since the unweird stuff has had all those years to get worked through, what’s left must by default be pretty weird indeed.
Michael, I really enjoyed reading about your sensible investigative process. Thank you.
April 15, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Dan
I tend to think philosophers have it worse than some of the other humanities.
Probably not worse than theologians, where the problem is that everyone who goes to church thinks they know theology (they don’t), and those who don’t go to church dismiss theology completely without even knowing what theologians actually do (yes Virginia, there are humanist and atheist theologians, and no that is not a contradiction in terms).
And at least you philosophers can always point out that an undergrad degree in philosophy is a great pre-law degree.
April 16, 2009 at 3:55 am
Michael Turner
You said you took up reading Lewis on counterfactuals because of some interesting feature of counterfactuals in Japanese.
Not quite. But at least you’re getting warmer. :-(
I said I’m interested in counterfactuals because they were proposed–then dropped, perhaps too hastily–as a language universal, in a particular school of thought in (linguistic) semantics. Japanese came up only because they were dropped in response to an inaccurate appraisal of them in Japanese (and only because of that appraisal; these people take apparent disconfirmation pretty seriously, even in some cases where they shouldn’t.) I happen to know Japanese well enough to see that the disconfirmation of this disconfirmation was exceedingly flimsy.
I brought up this muddle with counterfactuals here because I’d supposed that (linguistic) semantics was a field that was not merely adjacent to the Phil of L, but substantially overlapping. I was certainly encouraged in that belief by NSM researchers, whose agenda harkens back to Leibniz in some ways, and who continue to mix it up with philosophers, especially when challenged by them. I’d thought that if J.L. Austin had had some good things to say that increased the linguistics/philosophy overlap in semantics back in the 50s, then the collaborative picture might have improved since that time, at least in some ways. Now I’m not so sure.
They [these weird statements] are [mathematical statements], sort of. Logic is its own subdiscipline, and it’s a lot like pure mathematics.
“Sort of” and “a lot like” — big red flags, to me. Ichthyologists only study whales to the extent that whales matter in a fish’s ecosystem.
It’s not that I harbor some bias against mathematical treatments of logic. Actually, I think they are kind of cool. (And this is despite my having felt somewhat ill-used at one point by a particular U.C. Berkeley math professor, and I wasn’t the only hapless undergrad to feel that way. In particular, I will forever hate him for putting us within a few days march of a proof of Goedel’s incompleteness theorem, but then inexplicably wheeling off in some other direction–one of several random pivots that term–leaving it to some course later in the same math sequence, one that I couldn’t take. As one math major friend of mine shuddered, “Those foundations people–so weird.”) I even got a little ways into modal logic at one point, albeit motivated more by a computer science agenda than a mathematical or philosophical one. Does that count toward street cred in philosophy?
The thing is, though, if mathematical logic is what you’re really doing, and what you’re doing doesn’t really apply to natural language, why not just say so, and why not just keep natural language out of it? If you’re doing ichthyology, why keep showing off these strange warm-blooded fish that bear their young live, not in eggs, and feed them milk? Aren’t fish interesting enough for you? Isn’t taking on marine mammals as well loading your plate a little high? And isn’t conflating the two when convenient and denying that when it’s not, somehow . . . fundamentally . . . well . . . dishonest?
I want you to understand I’m not coming at this issue from some curmudgeonly desire to reject as nonsense anything I can’t (or don’t want to try to) understand. I am certainly not here to insist that philosophy be always and everywhere for your “educated layman” masses. There are those who have demanded something like that of philosophy, even at the cost of making it “mystical” and even “existential”, egalitarian by way of equally inaccessibility for all. (I’m looking at you, John Emerson, you who unilaterally declared Wittgenstein to be far outside the analytic tradition, but apparently just to get attention so that you could make another point in your typical trollish way.) Nor is my objection rooted in an insistence on practical relevance. After all, I’ve talked with some “educated layman” friends of mine about why I, as another “educated layman”, would be interested in counterfactuals as a language universal, and I have seen their eyes glaze over when they realized that settling the question probably wouldn’t make much difference in how anybody does anything useful. (I think one of them actually objected that it all sounded too much like–yes–”philosophy.” I suppose he’d see us here as only arguing from different ends of the same drifting lifeboat.)
No, my concern is just this: is it too much to ask that philosophy always be about something? Or that when it isn’t really about anything but itself, that it avoid pretending otherwise? At least the pure math people are clear to us, when that’s the case for them.
I can see where someone might actually say “If there’s a largest prime p, pigs have wings”. But only to elicit harsh laughter, directed at some unusually dense holdout, in some semi-drunken argument about elementary number theory. The communicative pragmatics, at least, of such utterances in such human contexts is something to talk about. [*] I’d certainly say so, anyway. But only at the expense of the (apparent) modern philosophical logician view: It is the very absurdity and communicative impracticality of such counterfactuals (counterpossibles) that endows them with their illocutionary force. Nobody would ever say something like that simply because it’s “true” (“trivially”, in the mathematical sense) and “can’t be confidently denied.” It’s not anything someone would say in dead earnest, which is how one conventionally treats mathematical statements. So to talk about it as if it were a mathematical statement, well, that’s like trying to talk about the truth-conditional value of “Go home!”, or like analyzing “Have a nice day!” as an actual imperative simply just because the syntax matches. It’s Rain Man English–and I don’t think we, as a species, would have evolved language in the first place if we’d all been congenitally autistic. It is to talk about nothing, a nothing that’s all dressed up but with nowhere to go, and in any case certainly not likely to land a date with (much less get laid by) Mr. Educated Layman.
[*] Getting Gricean here, which reminds me: I suppose I have read more Phil of L than just Austin, and had similarly agreeable experiences, if you count papers by, and articles about, people like Paul Grice and Kent Bach (and if you count them as philosophers; maybe some of you don’t, I wouldn’t know.)
April 16, 2009 at 3:59 am
Michael Turner
“disconfirmation of this disconfirmation” -> “disconfirmation”.
Various tag closure failures, argh.
I should get a life instead.
April 16, 2009 at 6:34 am
dana
Two quick points: of course Grice is a philosopher.
And indeed, Grice can help you out of this problem: “Nobody would ever say something like that simply because it’s “true” (”trivially”, in the mathematical sense) and “can’t be confidently denied.” One thing the logician could say: “of course we don’t normally say things like “If pigs could fly, the sky would be purple” on good Gricean pragmatic grounds. We don’t normally deny them either. Why would we? We’d be making no sense. But our system still has room to analyze such sentences, just like the system of alphabetization could tell us where “jutyrym” would go, even though there’s no such word.” The logician, or Lewis, isn’t pretending that they’re just talking about ordinary English usage, which is much more complicated. (Shorter me: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics are different things.)
(I said “sort of” because mathematicians do a lot of things that I don’t know about. But the proof structure is similar. You proved Goedel’s incompleteness theorem in a math class. I proved it in a philosophy class. People who do proofs in logic will be expected to prove it within a formal system.)
So the logician uses “if-then” and “possible” in a way that sometimes maps onto English usage and sometimes does not (in part because of the pragmatics of assertion in English.) I don’t think that’s enough to establish that the logician is “pretending to be relevant”, any more than the evolutionary biologist is pretending when she says “evolution is a theory of how species came to be” and then, when the fundamentalist critic says “well, if it’s just a theory, I have a theory, too, and so does my little brother”, replies by explaining that “theory” has a technical meaning in biology. So whence the pretense?
I’m not going to claim that higher-order logic and analytic metaphysics are directly relevant to ordinary life, of course, but I don’t think Lewis is claiming to just analyze only sentences that are spoken in English (he’s not an ordinary language philosopher, certainly), or that logicians claim that the material conditional is the ordinary English “if-then.”
April 16, 2009 at 7:11 am
Anderson
And at least you philosophers can always point out that an undergrad degree in philosophy is a great pre-law degree.
It worked for me, though I didn’t have that in mind at the time.
Truly, after reading Kant and Hegel, one finds that the law hath no terrrors. People would complain about reading Supreme Court cases. Crybabies, all.
April 16, 2009 at 10:12 am
Michael Turner
So if I understand you correctly, dana, what logicians in philosophy are ‘implicating’ (if you will), when they offer laughable interpretations of sentences that are nonsensically out of context (or that have no imaginable context in the first place), is not something I should take as deceiving anyone that they are addressing how real meanings are conveyed using real languages from real minds to other real minds. No, it’s just that they need this blatant absurdity to habitually emphasize to each other how far they still are from that goal. It’s a way to keep themselves honest about how inadequate logic still is.
Have I got it?
If so, I can’t express how suprised I am. I hadn’t realized the field was so drenched in humility. That’s certainly not the impression I got from reading Leiter, with his wrinkled nose in the air about these crass requirements of relevance recently spotted in the popular press.
April 17, 2009 at 2:11 pm
herbert browne
*I’ve gotten interested in counterfactuals. In Natural Semantic Metalanguage, these were a proposed semantic universal, which got dropped because somebody claimed (absurdly, I find) that counterfactuals always carry an “adversative” emotional tinge in Japanese, while forming more freely in other languages*
This “claim” reminded me of a similar “claim” about Chinese… ie that of the 5 most common ways of expressing Gratitude, each one also implied Resentment (but whether it was resentment at having to express gratitude or at actually feeling grateful was never clear to me).
^..^
April 18, 2009 at 11:36 pm
George McKee
Referring back to one of the earlier comments, as someone who’s done cell biology, neuroscience, and psychology in the past, and who has studied enough of it to be able to read the primary literature in quantum field theory and follow it not too vaguely, I can support the assertion that scientists are contemptuous of the philosophy of science. The science that philosophers write about has next to nothing to do with the way scientists have worked for the past hundred years or so.
The relevance issue is part of the disconnect: when physicists study identity and differentiation, they use an assumption that particles are irreducibly indistinguishable to produce Bose-Einstein statistics that turn out to be essential in understanding the way superconductors work. When philosophers study identity, nothing perceptible happens. When a convention on consciousness has a panel discussion with distinguished philosophers on philosophical issues in the field, the brain is never mentioned, nor is the fact that every human traverses the path from unconsciousness to consciousness and back at least once every day.
The explanation I’ve finally arrived at concerning why philosophers are so useless (Daniel Dennett notwithstanding), is partly methodological, and partly economic. Methodologically, philosophy is hamstrung by the fact that it has no criteria for progress.
Mathematicians have theorems, scientists have experimental predictions, but philosophers don’t seem to be able to identify novelty in their field. Everything important was already known to Plato or Kant or Husserl or Wittgenstein or whoever was the founder of the particular school that launched your field. The philosophical method is to identify a position on some issue and then to defend it by any and all means, as long as it’s done with sufficient density of reasoning to be impressive to other philosophers. Some of the most famous and respected philosophical papers in my field have been nothing more than extended riffs on “I can’t imagine how X is possible; I’m a smart person; therefore X is impossible”.
The economic problem is what economists call “perverse incentives”. At one conference of philosophers, the audience was asked to choose which of two papers would be more worthwhile, one that solved an important problem once and for all, or one that stimulated significant discussion, re-evaluation, conferences and workshops, but didn’t actually move the issue in any particular direction. The majority of responders selected the second. While this may be a fine recipe for obtaining tenure, it’s also one for content stagnation.
Maybe this is just another corollary of Sturgeon’s Law, but I don’t think so. Philosophers need to start keeping score. They need to develop techniques of tracking argumentation that work beyond the scale of books and monographs, and can distinguish spiral expansion from circularity. But that would mean becoming a technical discipline with databases and algorithms and precision of expression and exposure of assumptions, which would be frowned upon. Oh well…
April 19, 2009 at 3:53 am
Michael Turner
Well, wait just a doggone second there, George. Let’s not go too far. For one thing, philosophy can be a thrilling source of insight. Take this passage from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on Supervenience:
April 19, 2009 at 3:54 am
Michael Turner
I must surrender. There’s something about this subject that cripples me with respect to tag closure, for one thing.
April 19, 2009 at 4:54 am
John McCreery
A bit of genealogy for the arguments just advanced. From William James, Lectures on Pragmatism
April 19, 2009 at 4:57 am
John McCreery
Or, looking back a bit further. From Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics 3.
April 19, 2009 at 7:11 am
Michael Turner
Thanks, John. Those quotes set the stage for some things I really wanted to say. Let me (sort of) take the other side of it, against George, who really does (slightly) overstate how disastrous things are.
When I look at a paper like “Varieties of Conventional Implicature:
Evidence from Japanese” (in draft, posted just days ago), I see much to like: yes, McReady notes an old problem going back to Aristotle (p.6, footnote 5), but in a footnote, and moves smoothly past it in a Jamesian manner. The problem area is implicatures, a rough framework first coalesced in the early 60s by language philosopher Paul Grice, but since modified, and also excavated by, Larry Horn, who uncovered foundations for the concept in Frege and even further back, among others who have worked in this area. Implicatures remain a work in progress, but I think there’s been real progress. Sure, an accomplished and practical computational linguist like Frederking will piss all over this stuff, but (notwithstanding what I wrote recently at Dead Voles), even if Frederking’s conclusions were right, his analysis was mostly wrong. Which he might be made to admit, if he saw the progress that’s been made since 1996, and the errors he made in 1996.
What I see McReady doing in the above-linked paper is moving implicature in directions I think even George could be made to approve of. Where Grice talked loosely (but not unproductively) about what was “likely”, McReady is carefully refining, getting downright Bayesian; there’s logic, necessarily, but it’s not of the weird navel-gazing variety I see in David K. Lewis’ supervenience program. And he’s analyzing some expressions from Japanese. Why, it’s almost as if languages other than English actually mattered, in studying the philosophy of language. Imagine that!
If McRready can make this sort of thing work, he might be well on his way to a theory with predictive power. Which would surely get him drummed out of the ranks of philosophers, assuming he has any status of membership to begin with. After all, what if he were to decisively settle some question or other? It could be career-ending for some people!
OK, maybe I didn’t take the other side of the question after all. Still, I think the day could come when we read of relief workers relying on real-time computational language interpretation to eke out useful conversations with refugees about their needs and problems, and say of it, credibly, that some philosophers of language helped make it possible, or at least easier.
April 19, 2009 at 3:46 pm
herbert browne
*Why, it’s almost as if languages other than English actually mattered, in studying the philosophy of language. Imagine that!*
Really… to be able to express that “there’s nothing New under the Sun” in more than one superficially unrelated language might just be the emmenagogue that one’s zeitgeist requires… ^..^
April 19, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Jed Harris
Leiter’s plaint might be the beginning of wisdom, though I’m not optimistic.
I agree with Michael Turner’s complaint that the analytic philosophy of language is at best weakly relevant to the actual phenomena of human language (if that’s a fair restatement). Papers certain claim to discuss the meaning of English sentences (and occasionally those in other languages as a garnish) but justify their empirical weakness by reference to pragmatics or the beauties of the abstractions.
On the other hand philosophers like Dennett, Millikan, etc. integrate fruitfully with cognitive science, biology, etc. The problem isn’t philosophy in general, it is how a lot of philosophy is done — really certain (sub)disciplines, especially high analytic metaphysics, and their internal norms.
The various absurdities that Turner pillories are warning signs. Philosophical zombies for example require a very heavyweight conceptual apparatus if you take the trouble to trace it out, but they generate almost no conceptual return — at most they muddy waters that cognitive science has managed to largely clarify. The same is largely true for Montague semantics, many worlds interpretations of counter-factuals, supervaluation as an account of vagueness, etc.
In reply to Leiter I’d ask “What are the five most impressive results from the arcane abstractions that have dominated analytic philosophy in the last forty years?” In physics you wouldn’t have a problem answering that — and the answers wouldn’t be “practical” but they’d be impressive even to lay people. Considerable explanation might be required, but then lay people seem interested in those explanations — some popular but challenging books about arcane physics issues have sold pretty well.
So I think the root of Leiter’s problem is simply lack of real accomplishments. The questions I can’t answer are why analytic philosophy is stuck in this particular rut, and how it will get out of it. Psychology got stuck in a similar rut during the hegemony of behaviorism, and I don’t know that we understand even now why that hegemony gained and lost power (I’m familiar with the standard stories about that).