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“Scientific” vs. “Humanist” Philosophy

Jason Stanley

Much of my blogging has been devoted to trying to figure out
which distinctions between kinds of philosophical approaches are merely
sociological (e.g. reflections of the personal connections and academic
credentials of particular philosophers) and which are genuinely substantive. I
do think there are rather fundamental distinctions between kinds of
philosophers, but (as I’ve been arguing this week) I don’t think they
correspond to any kind of “division between departments” or “nexuses” that
clearly divide two or three kinds of departments (such nexuses exist, but they
are considerably more sociological in character). Nevertheless, I think that
Brian Leiter has been on to something by his division of “naturalistic” vs.
“humanist” philosophy. I just don’t think that this division explains anything
about the sociology of department relations. I just haven’t been able to put my
finger on what it is. But this morning, I received an e-mail from the prominent Rutgers graduate Michael Strevens, which was a reply to
my grouping Fodor and Stich into a natural kind in the comments thread of a previous posting. Strevens’s
comment it seems to me comes as close as I’ve seen to describing an actual
natural divide between kinds of philosophers. It does so furthermore by
remaining within the space of Rutgers philosophy. I think this suggests that the actual divisions between philosophers (as opposed to the merely sociological ones) do not divide departments into distinct nexuses. Anyway, here is Strevens:

I was bemused to see the names of Fodor and Stich used
together to pick out a “Rutgers style” of philosophy. It seems to me that Fodor
and Stich are as different as it is possible for two philosophers to be. More
precisely: Fodor and Stich lie on opposite sides, indeed opposite extremes, of
the most important division in philosophy, which might as much as any be called
the humanistic/scientific divide.

Fodor is a humanist insofar as his work on the mind is
an attempt to vindicate our self-understanding, our human picture of the mind:
it is a law-governed, representation-involving, inference and planning machine
in which what is inferred from what depends on the content of the
representations involved. That is to put things in modern vocabulary, but the
general picture is familiar from way back, and constitutes, in the eyes of many
psychologists, the core of a “folk psychology” common to all humankind.
Philosophy, in Fodor’s hands, fights on the side of humanity, attempting to
justify our ways to the world.

Stich, by contrast, uses the tools of philosophy to
undermine our conception of ourselves, to alienate us from our own minds. The
aim is to produce discomfort, uncertainty, the sudden dropping away of
foundations that had seemed secure. This is genuinely “scientific” philosophy.
It fights against humanity, or at least against human culture, which it
conceives as an accretion or insulating layer of prejudice, misapprehension,
and half-truth. It is an attempt to undercut our ways by appeal to the way the
world really is.

For the humanist, philosophy ought never to stray too
far from common sense. For the scientist, “common sense philosophy” is about as
attractive as “biblical biology”. Humanists may very well perceive scientists
as shallow, because scientists distrust and therefore keep their distance from
ways of thinking that are central to our conception of ourselves. Scientists
may very well perceive humanists as obscure, because until their work is done,
humanists must point to aspects of our self-understanding without fully
articulating them, or deluded, because without justification or even
articulation, they commit themselves to the validity of this self-understanding.

Of course, both camps have equal disdain for technical
problem-solvers…"

Strevens’s comment raises a number of important points.

First, the use of logic or technical tools cross-cuts the
humanist-scientific divide described by Strevens. Many of the very best a
priori metaphysicians, such as Kit Fine, heavily exploit logical and technical
tools. But these tools are placed in the service of capturing our intuitions
about fundamental metaphysical facts having to do e.g. with modality and
essentialism. The appeal to “technical” in the recently much-abused phrase
“technical problem solver” distinguishes metaphysicians such as Kit Fine, who
makes use of such tools, from metaphysicians such as Sydney Shoemaker and Alvin
Plantinga, who generally do not use them. But this is an utterly superficial
distinction. In all substantive senses, Fine, Shoemaker, and Plantinga engage
in the same project (though with different conclusions). They take many our
common sense metaphysical categories at pretty-much face-value, and assume that
our intuitions about them are guides to metaphysical reality (though particular
intuitions may be explained away by clashes with other plausible a priori
principles).

Logic is most often used as a tool to represent points,
rather than a point in itself. Some people have great facility with this tool,
and others less facility. But use of logic or mathematics does not help make
any kind of distinction between kinds of philosophy or philosophers. 

Secondly, appeal to historical sources doesn’t help shed
light on humanist vs. scientific distinction. Fodor is clearly a humanist, and
Stich is a scientific philosopher, and neither makes central use of historical
sources (notwithstanding Fodor’s recent foray into Hume scholarship). Appeal to
history of philosophy is a tool to make a philosophical point, a source of
evidence, rather than a kind of conclusion.

Strevens’s distinction is reminiscent of the distinction
Strawson made between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics in the
introduction of Individuals. Revisionary metaphysicians think it is a
legitimate option to end up with conclusions that validate very few features of
our ordinary conceptual scheme; indeed, such philosophers assign no epistemic
significance to facts about our ordinary conceptual scheme. Descriptive
metaphysicians take the task of philosophy to vindicate central features of
that scheme. Strevens’s distinction between “humanist” and “scientific”
philosophy is similar, but not identical. First, there are strongly revisionary
metaphysicians who are motivated by considerations other than scientific ones
(think of Van Inwagen’s Christian motivations for his ontology). Secondly,
there are philosophers of science (think of Tim Maudlin) who undertake in their
work to justify central features of our conceptual scheme (but maybe this shows
they aren’t scientific philosophers in Strevens’s sense). I do think Strevens’s distinction explains certain
departmental proclivities (e.g. Michigan, when Leiter was a graduate student, minus Velleman, was mostly a “scientific”
department). But in general, I think each department, and indeed each area of
philosophy (even, as I’ve suggested, philosophy of science) contain representatives
of both attitudes.
                                                                        -Jason

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20 responses to ““Scientific” vs. “Humanist” Philosophy”

  1. kinakuta

    Maybe this should have been posted as a comment on the "Analytical/continental" post. But it strikes me that some sort of criterion for discriminating between the two might rest on a (albeit somewhat implicit) view of philosophy as a cumulative enterprise, in which progress, however slowly, can be made. I very much doubt that any "continental philosopher" would subscribe to what Williamson wrote in his "must do better" paper, viz. "… at least concerning the broad, heterogeneous intellectual tradition that we conveniently label ‘analytic philosophy’. In many areas of philosophy, we know much more in 2004 than was known in 1964; much more was known in 1964 than in 1924; much more was known in 1924 than was known in 1884." It seems that most "continental" philosophers (with the exception of Husserl, who is hard to classify anyway) would find, or have foubd, the idea of philosophical _cumulative_ (in a way that parallels advances in the natural sciences) progress, recognizable as such by the philosophical community, pretty ludicrous. So that might count as a definifng trait.

    Reply
  2. AngelP

    This characterization of Fodor can be misconstrued. Fodor's defense of folk psychology vindicates common sense and a "humanistic" picture of the world only de facto. His justification for folk psychology comes from the (contingent) fact that folk psychology predicts and explains. This is just standard scientific practice. You don't see Fodor defending folk physics or folk economics for example.

    Reply
  3. Kris

    The overall point seems pretty reasonable. Here are a few picky points:

    (1) Didn't Plantinga appeal to an awful lot of technical jargon and sophisticated metaphysical machinery, much more than Shoemaker, and about as much as Fine?

    (2) I'm trying to think of where in van Inwagen's metaphysical works his religious views played a role. I don't remember any argument in Material Beings, for example, turning on some point about christian doctrine; likewise for his work on meta-ontology, fictional objects, properties, possible worlds, etc. van Inwagen seems to keep a lot of his work in metaphysics more or less seperate from his work in "philosophical theology".

    (3) I think you are conflating what Strevens calls "scientific philosophy" with philosophy that's motivated by considerations stemming from science. Here's the quote again:

    "Stich, by contrast, uses the tools of philosophy to undermine our conception of ourselves, to alienate us from our own minds. The aim is to produce discomfort, uncertainty, the sudden dropping away of foundations that had seemed secure. This is genuinely “scientific” philosophy."

    There's nothing explicitly in this quote about using the tools of phyics, chemistry, linguistics, etc. So maybe van Inwagen is "scientific" philosopher in this sense after all?

    (4) I've heard the labels "humanistic philosophy" and "scientific philosophy" used before, but I don't think I've heard them used in the way that Strevens used them. The division that I thought these labels were supposed to mark isn't what Strevens called attention to. The division I'm thinking of was suggested by something Manuel Cabrera said in an earlier he post. He wrote:

    "This is just an example of the sort of argument you suggested a Nietzschean might undertake, one that focuses on what kind of culture a belief–say, in radical moral relativism–will result in. In my experience, freshman are much more open to this sort of argument than to the standard relativism-debunking arguments you can foist on them. Maybe this means that freshman are all naive Nietzscheans…"

    Scientific philosophers try to show that theories are true or false. The goal is determining what the correct ontological theory is, what the correct normative ethical view is, etc.

    Humanistic philosophers try to show what our culture, politics, art, literary style, "forms of life", or whatnot, would be like if we were to *adopt* said ontological theory, normative theory, etc. They aren't interested in the truth of the theories per se; they are interested in the consequences of adopting or accepting these theories. They are interested in the impact of these theories on those areas of life studied by the "humanities".

    Reply
  4. Jason Stanley

    Kris,

    You're absolutely right that Van Inwagen doesn't appeal to anything theistic in *Material Beings*, and perhaps we should take his philosophical theology not to be metaphysics. Nevertheless, I think of his position in that work to have certain connections to his theological views (though I'm aware he would vigorously deny it). Anyway, that was probably a bad example of a metaphysician who takes theology to motivate his views. There are however other examples in the contemporary literature.

    You're also right that appeals to (e.g.) Kripke semantics for quantified modal logic plays a much larger role in Plantinga's work than it does in Shoemaker's. Nevertheless, Plantinga does not create novel technical frameworks for his philosophical views, like Fine does (e.g. Fine writes general papers on essentialism, but also comes up with a logic of essence).

    You and Kinakuta are also right that the distinction(s) Strevens and I are discussing don't engage with the distinction between "philosophy as a field that can make progress" and "philosophy as a field to which the notion of progress is inapplicable", which is something you find repeatedly emphasized in e.g. the works of Richard Rorty (though Rorty also occasionally challenges the idea that science makes progress, so I get confused) and some of the posters on previous comments threads. I've wanted to write a post about this distinction too, and maybe I'll get around to it before tomorrow night. But it's a tricky distinction to make, as I've realized when trying to do so…

    Reply
  5. Manuel Cabrera

    The following may just be an addition to how Strevens' humanistic/scientific distinction doesn't map onto the descriptive/revisionary distinction: I'm not entirely sure.

    Strevens' is a useful way of thinking about distinctions between different kinds of philosopher. However, I think the labels 'humanistic' and 'scientific' might be misleading as labels for, respectively, philosophers who try to vindicate common sense self-understandings and philosophers who try to revise it: that is, if scientific philosophy is characterized as "undercutting our ways by appeal to the way the world really is". At the very least, I'd like to propose an example of one kind of philosophical approach that simply might not fit into Strevens' categorization.

    One approach that seems to fit in the revisionary camp is commonly found in the phenomenological tradition, where phenomenology is often employed in an attempt to revise common sense and reveal how the world *really* appears to us. This is a theme in, for example, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. In both, one finds a style of argument that tries to arrive at a metaphysical picture that explains the conditions on how we experience the world (in a very broad sense of the word "experience"). The trick, though, is that this (*real*) experience is, by their lights, something that is obscured by the ordinary ways in which we are likely to describe that experience (in commons sense, in the 'natural attitude'). It is a commonplace among such philosophers to make a claim akin to the following: common sense is a view on the world that is really a cultural artifact, or the result of a misunderstanding that is partly constitutive of being the kinds of experiencers we are, or something else that isn't trustworthy.

    My point is that not all who want to attack our self-understandings do so on grounds that are very much like those grounds appealed to in natural science. In the above examples, a distinction is made between two kinds of intuitions, which we might call knee-jerk common sense ones and deep ones, ones that need to be unearthed using–in this case–the phenomenological method. Philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are interested in vindicating the latter kind and excoriating the former. It does not seem to me that such styles of arguing (minus the reliance on the phenomenological method as the way of getting at deep intuitions) are entirely absent in the analytic tradition. Isn't it relatively common to find theories whose defenders claim have captured our fundamental intuitions, even while the relevant theory undercuts something which might have seemed to be common sense truth?

    Reply
  6. Jason Stanley

    Manuel,

    You write:

    "Isn't it relatively common to find theories whose defenders claim have captured our fundamental intuitions, even while the relevant theory undercuts something which might have seemed to be common sense truth?"

    Yes, it is very common. This is why I added the parenthetical comment "though particular intuitions may be explained away by clashes with other plausible a priori principles". So someone might come up with the surprising result that a certain common sense view is false (say, that vague predicates don't have sharp bounderies) by arguing that the common sense view violates deeper and more fundamental commitments of our ordinary conceptual scheme (say, our commitment to bivalence).

    Reply
  7. Matt

    There's certainly something to this distinction but one that seems more important to me, and that at least cross-cuts this one, is a distinction between "individualistic" and "socialistic" approaches. Both Fodor and Stitch fall clearly on the individualistic side, while McDowell, Brandom, Sellars, etc. fall clearly on the socialistic side. Sometimes this distinction works out in different ways in different areas of philosophy (you can see something similar, though w/ important differences, of course, in philosophy of biology, and in disputes between utilitarians and social contract theorists of a certain sort.) There is also something like this disction, I think, in continental philosophy, with, for example, the disputes between Sartre and Foucault. This distinction helps, I think, explain why there's a quite natural temptation to group Stitch, Fodor, etc. in one group and Brandom, McDowell, later Putnam, Sellars, etc. in another group, despite the in-group differences. (Of course, like any clasificatory scheme there will be problems, rough edges, and limits to explanitory powers.)

    Reply
  8. Tad Brennan

    "…to undermine our conception of ourselves, to alienate us from our own minds. The aim is to produce discomfort, uncertainty, the sudden dropping away of foundations that had seemed secure. This is genuinely “scientific” philosophy."

    Really? Just sounds like lame, po-mo, epater le bourgeois stuff to me.

    Reply
  9. Marcus Stanley

    I love Kris's comment above, as it defends exactly the point I was making in my previous post on Nietzsche, which I still agree with although it may not be totally relevant to some of the current sociological divisions in analytic.

    But Jason, if you really believe this statement, "For the humanist, philosophy ought never to stray too far from common sense." then that would mean Nietzsche is not a humanist! Lots of humanists have seen radical challenges to common sense as central to their work, they just don't do it in a "scientific" way, they do it in a more phenomenological way. Perhaps the problem is with the nature of contemporary humanists.

    Reply
  10. Jason Stanley

    O.k., something is emerging from these comments. Strevens and Strawson (now there is a conjunction for you!) find the distinction between *preserving the central features of our conceptual scheme* and *rejecting central features of our conceptual scheme* to be a fundamental distinction between kinds of philosophers, with Strevens using "humanist" as a label for the first, and "scientific" as a label for the second.

    But there are two very different kinds of reasons one might give for overturning some part of our conceptual scheme. One way to reject a part of our conceptual scheme is to appeal to science (physics says that there are no chairs, but just groups of tiny things, so we're wrong to think there are chairs). But another way to reject a part of our conceptual scheme is to appeal to history, literature, culture, or indeed a priori intuition about logical principles (as in e.g. Williamson's appeals to bivalence in his work on vagueness, or Linsky and Zalta and Williamson's appeals to the Barcan-Marcus and Converse Barcan-Marcus formulas in arguing that everything necessarily exists).

    Marcus's point is that someone who rejects central features of our conceptual scheme, but for (say) cultural reasons, is only uncomfortably called a "scientific" philosopher (but not knowing ANYTHING about Nietzsche, I can't say anything about the oddity of placing him in one category or another). Similarly, someone who rejects central features of our conceptual scheme because she thinks that there are a priori principles of metaphysics or logic that conflict with them also doesn't seem to be a "scientific" philosopher.

    So maybe we've got two orthogonal issues: first, preserving central features of our conceptual scheme vs. rejecting central features of our conceptual scheme, and second, supporting one's defense or one's rejection of such features by appeal to empirical facts in the natural sciences.

    Reply
  11. Tad Brennan

    "So maybe we've got two orthogonal issues…"

    Yup, and then the one I was suggesting too obliquely above, namely a willingness *after the fact* to allow the deliverances of science to trump pre-theoretical common-sense (which willingness can be anywhere from gleeful to rueful), as opposed to an explicit polemical agenda *before the fact* that aims to over-turn common sense. It is the idea of setting out to overturn commonsense (alienating ourselves from our self-conception etc. etc.) which strikes me as deeply *un*-scientific.

    As to the willingness after the fact, i.e. when our ordinary view of things runs up against problems and we have to decide whether to conserve or revise–
    well, how would you characterize the author of the following lines?

    "One question, two answers! An interesting answer, plausible to me on reflection but far from obvious…and a compelling commonsense answer, an unhelpful platitude that cannot credibly be denied…. If the two answers disagreed and we had to choose one, I suppose we would have to prefer the platitude of common sense to the interesting philosophical thesis. Else it would be difficult to believe one's own philosophy!"

    Reply
  12. Ralph Wedgwood

    It's a very good thing, I believe, that these metaphilosophical disputes — disputes about the methodology of philosophy — are now so much more at the forefront of philosophers' discussions than they were ten or fifteen years ago.

    Sometimes, one still encounters resistance to discussion of such metaphilosophical issues. This resistance sems to me utterly misguided. E.g., someone of whom I am immensely fond, a philosopher whom I greatly admire, made the following criticism of such metaphilosophical disputes, in the preface to one of his books: "The philosophy of philosophy seems to me among its least enlightening branches. In the sense in which astronomers are interested not in astronomy but in the stars, I am interested not in philosophy but in the various philosophical topics dealt with in this book – topics on which I find discussions of what philosophy is and how to do it shed very little light."

    This comment seems to me to fall into the category of the "memorably absurd". We would hardly be impressed by an astronomer who was interested in the stars, but had no interest at all in how telescopes worked. We should also, in my view, be disturbed at the number of medics and social scientists who have not thought carefully about statistics. But it seems to me that the situation is no different with questions about the methods of philosophical investigation.

    I certainly have views about whether or not (and under what conditions) we should trust "common sense", and whether we should expect philosophy to make some "humanistic" contribution towards helping us to see "how to live", or whether (as Marcus seems to think) any such humanistic aspiration is in extreme tension with philosophers' viewing themselves as attempting to discover objective truths. But at the moment, I want not so much to defend my particular views on these issues as to say how glad I am that we're having this conversation at all.

    Reply
  13. Martin Lin

    It seems to me that there are only two types of philosophers: good and bad. All the good ones share certain virtues and values. They're engaged in a search for truth using rational argument. If an historical figure has something to contribute, all good philosophers are willing, at least in principle, to consult him. If this sounds banal, it's meant to. To the extent that both Fodor and McDowell are good philosophers, they are sensitive to the same considerations and share the same goals. They probably start with different prior beliefs, but that isn't very interesting. That's true of any two people, and it shouldn’t make any difference in the long run.

    The bad ones manifest a bewildering variety of traits. Similarities among them are, however, of no interest. There are not, I believe, any interesting ways of grouping kinds of obscurity or non-sequitur.

    The Nietzschean project, as it’s been described in the course of this discussion, strikes me as bad philosophy. Not because the Nietzschean isn’t engaged in a search for truth. If the point of the project is to discover what consequences for human culture the adoption of a certain theory would have, then, while the Nietzschean might not be interested in the truth or falsity of the theory in questions, he better be concerned about the truth or falsity of the claim that such and such consequences would result. If he’s not then what he produces is just bad poetry, or worse, advertising slogans. The reason why the Nietzschean project strikes me as bad philosophy is that the resources that philosophers bring to bear on problems, i.e., intuition and analysis, don’t seem to be up to the task of discovering the consequences for culture that adoption of a certain theory would have. Surely such consequences are causal consequences, not logical ones, so I can’t see how intuition and analysis can tell us what they would be.

    The only difference between philosophy and science relevant to our topic is that progress is made at a much slower rate in philosophy. If a line of scientific inquiry doesn't result in progress it dies off. Same with philosophy. But since the progress comes much more slowly, unfruitful approaches hang around much longer.

    These remarks are meant to support Jason's claim that the differences between philosophy departments are more sociological than substantive.

    One more picky point about van Inwagen. I wouldn't have classified him as a revisionary metaphysician. In "Material Beings" for example, the method seems to be, propose a solution to the Special Composition Problem (or whatever he calls it) and then test proposed solutions against our commonsense intuitions. For example, the proposal that the x's constitute a y just in case the x's are stuck together fails because common sense does not judge two men whose hands are superglued together to constitute a single individual. This looks like the method of a descriptive metaphysician.

    Reply
  14. Kris

    I'm going to ramble for a bit. I'm sorry about that.

    I want to clarify the distinction between "humanistic" and "scientific" philosophers that I mentioned last time, in light of Ralph's recent comment. Ralph said, "I certainly have views about whether or not (and under what conditions) we should trust "common sense", and whether we should expect philosophy to make some "humanistic" contribution towards helping us to see "how to live", or whether (as Marcus seems to think) any such humanistic aspiration is in extreme tension with philosophers' viewing themselves as attempting to discover objective truths."

    As I see things, the "scientific" philosopher who is interested in *ethics* or *value theory* or *political philosophy* or *aesthetics* is hoping to make some contribution towards helping us see how to live. This kind of philosopher gives arguments with conclusions like: such and such ethical theory is true, this ethical theory says you shouldn't do x, so now you have some information on "how to live." Or: such and such theory of justice is true, so here is how we should live, how our society, system of government, laws, etc, should be structured.

    I don't see any tension betwee having this "humanistic" aspiration and viewing ourselves as trying to discover truths. One might want to discover truths about how one should live.

    —–

    The humanistic philosopher (as I'm understanding this term — and it's not a terribly precise term, I know, but I think my usage is roughly in line with how many other people who use this term) doesn't have the same goals as the scientific philosopher. The humanistic philosoper isn't interested in discovering the correct theory about how one should live; the humanistic philosopher is interested in discovering how one *would* live if one were to adopt some theory (be it an ethical theory, a metaphysical theory, or whatever), what our culture would look like if we all adopted the view etc. Or she's interested in why we do live in some way — it's partly because of the influence of Cartesian ontology, or whatever.

    The humanistic philosopher doesn't care (qua humanistic philosopher) about the truth-values of various philosophical theses. The humanistic philosopher (qua humanistic philosopher) cares about the consequences for culture, the arts, politics, "things of human concern", of *adopting* or *taking seriously* or *believing* or *living in accordance with* some philosophical theory.

    —–

    I think I can imagine why some humanistic philosophers might be impatient with scientific philosophizing so understood. Maybe they think that philosophical questions don't have determinate answers, or that they don't have knowable answers, or that they embody so many presuppositions or prejudices from times before that it's better not to try to answer them. So maybe they want to look at questions that they can make some headway with.

    I can imagine why some scientific philosophers might be unhappy with humanistic philosophizing so understood. Maybe scientific philosophers see humanistic philosophers as changing the subject, and so not really doing philosophy anymore. From the perspective of a scientific philosopher, humanistic "philosophers" are doing armchair, speculative sociology or psychology or anthropology or history, and aren't making a serious attempt to address their questions in a genuinely scientific way; since the questions that humanistic philosophers are interested in are questions about contingent, empirical sociological, anthropological, historical, or psychological fact, they should be studied by people trained as sociologists, historians, antrhopologists, or psychologists.

    —–

    I think that both the scientific philosophers' and the humanistic philosophers' questions are valuable. I wouldn't want either questions silenced or anything like that. Both kinds of questions seem to me to be very interesting. Maybe that's just me. I do believe that questions about ontology, aesthetics, political theory, epistemology, have real answers, and that we can have more (or less) reasonable beliefs about the answers. (I even think that we can have philosophical *knowledge*.) If I didn't think this, I think I'd give up on trying to determine the correct ontology, ethics, etc. But I think it takes a lot of work to convince the humanistic philosopher that this position is right, and I haven't yet brought myself to fault the humanistic philosopher for disagreeing. (There is a lot of wooly aprioristic speculation afoot in the works of some scientific philosophers!)

    I also think that you need some kind of philosophical training in order to capably adress the questions that the humanistic philosopher is interested in. If this is the case, it seems harsh to say that humanistic philosophers aren't "doing philosophy." On the other hand, it does seem to me that since the questions adressed are about contingent, empirical, and causal facts, in order to do a good job of answering these questions, the humanisitic philosopher also needs to "do sociology" or "do psychology" or whatnot. Insofar as many humanistic philosophers do not do this, the methodology is somewhat suspect.

    —–

    This is a long post. Again, I apologize. I want to make a few more poorly informed, under-thought-through remarks, and then I'll shut up.

    I don't think that the humanistic/scientific philosopher distinction I'm drawing matches up with the analytic/contintental philosopher distinction very well. Consider, for example, Being and Time, by Herr Heidegger. Surely that's a work of contintental philosophy. But Heidegger is not primarily interested in claims about the cultural consequences of views; he's interested in showing that the received ontology, inherited to us from, e.g., Descartes or Kant, is false, and he's interested in replacing it with something true. Most of Being and Time is a work of (as I'm understanding the term) scientific philosophy.

    Ok, i'll shut up. Sorry about the rambling…

    Reply
  15. Fritz

    Jason; you say:

    "Nevertheless, I think of his [van Inwagen's] position in that work to have certain connections to his theological views (though I'm aware he would vigorously deny it). Anyway, that was probably a bad example of a metaphysician who takes theology to motivate his views. There are however other examples in the contemporary literature."

    Who are your other examples in the contemporary literature? Can we find, say, *one* other example? [Dean Z? not from what I can tell and I think I know his papers pretty well…; Plantinga? hard to see it in his main works *in metaphysics*; Hud H? no way; Lynne Baker? again, "no"]. I ask simply because I can't think of an example and I'm pretty connected to the relevant people. I also ask because I'm *sure* you're right that van Inwagen is 'probably' a bad example here.

    Peter's position in *Material Beings* does, however, have "certain connections" to his theological views, and I don't think he'd deny it. The connection is this: the views are, in the eyes of many, prima facie in tension with his theological views. And for this reason he has in other work argued that the charge of "tension" or "inconsistency" is unfounded.

    I also wonder a bit about my grad school colleague Michael Strevens' claims about Fodor and Stich. I find myself agreeing with most, maybe even all depending on what some of it really means, of what Michael wrote. But the remarks seem to be consistent with Fodor and Stich *sharing an approach to philosophy*. The remarks suggest that they reach very different conclusions and have, perhaps, different "agendas" starting out. But where do the remarks suggest a different approach? [Note — I'm not saying they don't… because I don't know what to say about that just yet.]

    Lastly, the remark about Fine as technical in a way that Plantinga / Shoemaker are not seems to have shifted considerably. Initially it was about the "use" of technical tools. It shifts, under pressure about Plantinga's work, to a claim about the *creation* of "novel technical frameworks". Of course now, almost no philosopher is going to count as "technical" in this sense: so few "technical" (in the ordinary sense of "using serious technical machinery" metaphysicians) are going to count as "technical" in this extremely restrictive sense. Most logicians won't count either… nor will most philosophers of physics…. nor will…. well, you get the idea.

    Fritz

    PS – on the lighter side, though Michigan/Ann Arbor life seems fine even without you here, I'm sure it'd be an even better term if you were still around. Sorry I was out of town when you were back for the linguistics bash.

    Reply
  16. Jason Stanley

    Fritz,

    I think there are clearly a group of doctrines that Christian metaphysicians tend to be sympathetic to. In no particular order: dualism, libertarian free will, presentism, and three-dimensionalism. There are a number of salient examples of non-Christians attracted to each of these doctrines (e.g. old-school British people like three-dimensionalism, and Chalmers likes dualism). But still, it doesn't seem far-fetched to suggest that there are obvious connections there (again, I'm certainly prepared to remove the example of Van Inwagen). Anyway, my basic point was that it is an open possibility that one could reject common sense on grounds having nothing to do with science.

    As far as Plantinga goes, let me quote from pp. 20-21 of *The Nature of Necessity* (where Plantinga is responding to Kneale's objection to modality de re):

    "Kneale apparently means to ascribe something like the following definitional schema to the essentialist:

    D1 'alpha has B essentially' = def. 'The proposition that alpha has B is necessarily true'

    But this ascription is at best uncharitable as an account of what the essentialist means by his characteristic asssertions…[D1 commits the essentialist who accepts (18) to (19)]

    (18) There is at least one object x such that x is essentially composite.

    (19) There is at least one object x such that the proposition that x is composite is necessarily true.

    But of course (19) as it stands is grotesque; there is no such thing as the proposition x is composite; the words 'x is composite' do not express a proposition. The essentialist may be benighted, but he does not confound
    (18), which he accepts, with such a darkling hodge-podge as (19)."

    I have learned a lot from Plantinga; he is one of our great philosophers, and has certainly contributed enormous amount to our understanding of de re modality (if anything, his contributions are under-appreciated). But I find it hard to believe that someone who writes this passage is a master in the tools of quantificational logic. The advances Plantinga makes on our understanding of these notions are not due to any employment of logic. The fact that logical formulas appear in an author's work doesn't mean that they are using logic as a tool.

    In contrast, consider e.g. Kripke's explanation of the invalidity of the Barcan Formula and the Converse Barcan Formula in "Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic". It crucially relies on exploitation of a formal semantical framework. We had two very attractive formulas (from a syntactic point of view); they allow us to move quantifiers inside and outside of boxes. But we didn't have a clear understanding of what they meant. Kripke provided a formal semantics for quantified modal logic that allowed us to understand what BF and CBF meant. He then explained how, given the variable domain semantics, we could produce models in which both were false. The use of logic and semantics here is one enables the philosophical advance.

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  17. Kris

    I wrote my most recent post (prior to this one) I guess around the time Martin Lin was writing; I didn't see it at the time, but it does provide some sort of support for my thought about how some scientific philosophers view humanistic philosophy.

    I take it that Martin and I pretty much agree that there are worries about the methodology of humanistic philosophy, although I don't think that intuition and analysis are the only resources that philosophers do (or should) employ. (This second claim is suggested pretty strongly by Martin's remarks.)

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  18. Fritz

    Well, I guess I *sort of* see what you're getting at.
    [about Christian metaphysicians, that is, and not about "technical" work — on technical work, again, almost *no* philosopher is technical if this requires, as you say, the creation of novel technical frameworks..].

    But about the Christian or theistic metaphysicians, though I sort of see what you're getting at, the attributions still escape me. Here's your list:

    "dualism, libertarian free will, presentism, and three-dimensionalism"

    So far as I know, of the people I mentioned, only DeanZ clearly accepts all of those (though he hasn't really directly addressed the free will issue so far as I know). At least one person on the list I gave rejects all of them. Almost everyone stays silent on at least one of the 4 issues. Others accept some and reject others. This diversity of opinion mirrors that of the profession, or so it seems to me (*plenty* of non-theistic libertarians out there; presentists and 3-D-ists too). If Chalmers is a dualist in the relevant sense, then there are more dualist philosophers who are non-theistic than who are theistic.
    [The formal relation (if any) between presentism and 3-dimensionalism is, unfortunately, still apparently a matter of controversy so that might complicate a survey of who is committed to these various theses]

    But ok, your point wasn't to characterize what theistic philosophers do and what motivates our work…. it was, rather, that: "it is an open possibility that one could reject common sense on grounds having nothing to do with science" — and that point does seem correct.

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  19. Carl Gillett

    I am way late to this and should be grading my mountains of papers… but let me bash-out a very quick comment on Michael’s division between a Fodorian “Humanistic” approach and the Stichian “genuinely “scientific” philosophy”. Apologies for sloppiniess since I have to go fast. Given my understanding of the grad school I grew-up in intellectually, I simply am not buying these characterizations and I do see more of a commonality in the older-style “Rutgers Philosophy” of the nineties than Michael.

    First, I guess I always thought the older, more homogeneous Rutgers Dept. of the nineties was “naturalistic” in the broad sense. That is, putting the point crudely, it looked to the methodology and findings of the sciences for its lead on the central issues in philosophy. On this approach, the philosophy of science plays a key role, as opposed to the philosophy of language or analytic metaphysics for example, more on this below.

    Obviously such “naturalistic” philosophy is as broad a church as is the philosophy of science itself – thus “naturalistic” philosophers will disagree over all the issues that philosophers disagree over in the philosophy of science and its constituent elements, such as the philosophy of psychology.

    Thus, for example, the early Stich disagreed with Fodor over the shape of a scientific psychology (or psychologies) – Stich arguing that given our empirical evidence we would not retain entities like beliefs etc. On the other side, Fodor argued from empirical evidence, crucially key developments in cognitive science, that a future scientific psychology (or psychologies) would incorporate such entities like beliefs and other posits of our folk psychology. As far as I can see, both Stich and Fodor followed the basically “naturalistic” approach of arguing from empirical, ie scientific, evidence but saw this evidence and its implications differently (And we should frankly admit they are both making highly speculative bets about the future course of scientific psychology).

    To tweak Michael a little, it appears that for his conception of a “genuinely “scientific” philosophy” he looks to the model of the Positivists: one that rips down large swathes, the “foundations”, of the reigning intellectual world-views. But I simply do not see why we should assume good or genuine “naturalistic” or “scientific” philosophy should have any such feature. In effect, this is one of the issues that “scientific” philosophers have, and continue, to battle over – with philosophers like the early Stich on one side and those more like Fodor on the other. These look like disputes within “naturalistic” philosophy to me.

    Second, I think we can see the commonality of methodological approach, despite divergence of particular conclusion, by looking at who both Stich and Fodor disagree with methodologically. Stich is one of the deepest thinkers about meta-methodology in philosophy. In my opinion, he has offered what appears to be a powerful, and apparently largely unanswered, critique of the “analytic” philosophy, whether in ethics, metaphysics or whatever, which is driven by analysis of our folk or common-sense concepts. Basically, as I read him, Stich has argued that such “analytic” philosophy has no meta-justification, for we lack any reason why we should believe that OUR folk concepts (whether about the ‘good’, or ‘knowledge’, or ‘properties’ etc.) really mirror reality, rather the distinct concepts of other cultures, other socio-economic groups, or even other possible species.

    I take it this is a critique Fodor accepts – conceptual analysis of folk concepts is, for both Stich and Fodor, not the way to understand reality. How can we understand reality? Through well confirmed scientific theories – where Fodor has argued at length that we may plausibly assume that a scientific psychology is going to incorporate much of folk psychology and the early Stich disagrees. So, Fodor may well think our “Humanistic” self-conception should be retained, but he crucially argues this because he defends such a self-conception being incorporated into the sciences.

    Overall, I guess I do see, in the older Rutgers Dept., more of a common approach. And I do not think I am buying Michael’s division between ‘Humanistic’ and “genuine “scientific” philosophy” – that seems to beg a lot of ongoing, and very substantive, questions.

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  20. Mohan Matthen

    'For the humanist, philosophy ought never to stray too far from common sense. For the scientist, “common sense philosophy” is about as attractive as “biblical biology”.' This may be true, but only if it isn't about conclusions. G. E. Moore never strayed too far from common sense: yet, he believed in sense-data, and thus he strayed from the common-sense view that we perceive material objects. Isn't Fodor's case the obverse? True, he endorses folk-psychology, but doesn't he often use scientific premises in his reasoning? Couldn't a philosopher reinstate material-object perception using scientific premises? If philosophers go wherever their reasoning leads them, the real divide lies in what they credit as premises — "science" or common sense — rather than how counter-intuitive they are willing to let their conclusions be. (Of course, if a philosopher was not willing to stray even a little bit from common sense, then she would revise any reasoning that led to a surprising conclusion — but how many exemplars are so extreme?)

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