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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

How Can Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Publish Nonsense Like This?

Brian Leiter

I want to start by saying that Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews is a wonderful resource, for which the whole profession is indebted to Gary Gutting who runs it so well.  I am also a member of the editorial board, but have responsibility, as it were, for only a limited number of topics.  But something has gone wrong when absolute nonsense like this appears in a review, in this case of a book on Derrida by Jason Powell; the review is by Professor Nancy Holland at Hamline University.  After noting some "weakness in the account of…analytic philosophy in the U.S. context," she offers this example:

One wonders, for instance, about the statement that philosophy in America "has the role of legitimating the US government and the scientific enterprise" leading to the suggestions that analytic philosophy "has as its telos the establishment of a universal culture for a static, totalitarian universal civilization" (pp. 124-125).  Intriguing, and possibly even largely justified, but surely in need of much more argument. 

"Intriguing, and possibly even largely justified"?  How about sophomoric prattle befitting a bad undergraduate’s blog?  Since "analytic philosophy" does not even exist, how can it have a telos–let alone the telos in question?  Since most so-called "analytic philosophy" is consumed by other philosophers, how does "it legitimate the US government"?  (When was the last time you saw an "analytic" philosopher on Fox?)  And how exactly is it that "analytic" philosophers like Alvin Plantinga, George Bealer, Hilary Putnam, Michael Rea, and John McDowell, among many others, are "legitimating…the scientific enterprise"?  (Maybe the author was thinking of that famous "analytic philosopher" Descartes who was interested in "legitimating" the scientific enterprise?)

In any review, there is room for reasonable disagreement about many matters.  But NDPR, as an exemplary on-line service, really should not publish irresponsibly silly comments like those in Professor Holland’s review.

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14 responses to “How Can Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Publish Nonsense Like This?”

  1. harry b

    Surely the phrase "Intriguing, and possibly even largely justified, but surely in need of much more argument" is just a kind way of saying "sophomoric prattle befitting a bad undergraduate's blog", at least when set after a claim that is patently silly and un-arguable-for. I can imagine writing something like what she wrote while meaning something like what you would rather she wrote!

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  2. harry b

    I should have continued by guessing that she has just read a lot of Grice.

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  3. Brian Leiter

    I'm not sure even Derrida would find that a plausible reading of the "real" meaning!

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  4. harry b

    You underestimate Derrida! (in one respect only, I hasten to add).

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  5. P.D.

    I'm with Harry on this.

    It seems like a genteel but nonetheless scathing review. The nicest thing the reviewer has to say about the text is that the author's admiration for Derrida is almost palpable. Palpable admiration is a disturbing image, and hardly substantive praise.

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  6. Brian Leiter

    I didn't dispute that the review is overall fairly critical. But I find it incredible that describing nonsense as "intriguing, and possibly even largely justified" is a way of signalling that it's nonsense!

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  7. Charlie Huenemann

    Well, it is "intriguing," isn't it? If someone claimed to have a good argument for the claim, I know I'd want to hear it. (And here we are all talking about it without even having read the book.) "Possibly even largely justified"? Well, sure, "possibly," I guess, in the same sense that possibly I'm deceived by an evil demon. "In need of much more argument"? You bet.

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  8. Tad Brennan

    as a former student of George Bealer's, I'm afraid I have to rat him out on this.

    The fact is, he was *constantly* legitimating the U.S. government. "The US government is totally legitimate!" he'd say. "Never question the legitimacy of the US government!"

    Every now and then he'd say something about the bankruptcy of set theory or the ineliminability of propositions in the ontology. But if you questioned him about whether that was really the best set of primitives to work with, he'd get all, like, "you're questioning the legitimacy of the US government! Don't question the legitimacy of the US government!" And then he'd make us say the Pledge of Allegiance again.

    As for the telos of his views being a static, totalitarian civilization, I mean, yeah, probably, but I never took his advanced course. I got scared off by people saying it was really hard-core and techie–a lot of manifest destiny and exceptionalism, shining-city-on-a-hill stuff and all.

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  9. Aaron Preston

    I agree with you, Brian, that, in a sense, analytic philosophy does not exist (see my recent _Analytic Philosophy: the History of an Illusion_), and I also agree that what is usually called “analytic philosophy” is so eclectic as to be incapable of actively and purposively supporting any overarching telos. However, I think that there is a solid point behind *some* of this “sophomoric prattle”, which makes it very difficult for me to simply sweep it aside without further consideration. What we need to do is perform something like Moorean analysis on the prattle, and see what in it, if anything, can be restated in less-prattlish terms.

    For instance, take your rejoinder: “how exactly is it that "analytic" philosophers like Alvin Plantinga, George Bealer, Hilary Putnam, Michael Rea, and John McDowell, among many others, are "legitimating…the scientific enterprise"? ” This seems to presuppose an interpretation (or analysis) of “philosophy in America has the role of legitimating … the scientific enterprise” as meaning that all analytic philosophers individually and purposively have committed to doing this by expressly endorsing “scientism” or views amenable to scientism. To that claim, your list would provide significant counterexamples.

    But there is no reason to take the claim in this way. The author gives us a holistic claim about a social institution, about the character and social role of the institution of American academic philosophy in the analytic tradition, not about the views of its practitioners. Indeed, most people who have made similar claims (like John McCumber in his _Time in the Ditch_) or who have made claims about the quasi-scientific flavor of analytic philosophy (such as Nicholas Capaldi, David Cooper, Neil Levy, and even Bruce Wilshire) have based them not on the supposition that there are certain doctrines universally or even widely endorsed in analytic philosophy, either on the individual or the corporate level, but upon there being certain tendencies in analytic practice, prevalent enough to color AP “on the whole”, that suggest a kind of “methodological scientism”. And this would be enough to sustain a charge of legitimating science by emulating it.

    The perception that AP emulates science has been with it since the beginning. Upon reading Principia Ethica, Lytton Strachey wrote to Moore:

    it has not only laid the true foundations of Ethics, it has not only left all modern philosophy bafouée—these seem to me small achievements compared to the establishment of that Method which shines like a sword between the lines. It is the scientific method, deliberately applied, for the first time, to Reasoning. (in P. Levy, _Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles_, p. 234)
    The impression that the analytic manner of philosophizing was more scientific that literary or humanistic was only augmented by the application of mathematical logic to philosophical problems, and the development of “ideal-language philosophy”. And even though, as you note in the PGR, the early analytic “research programs” oriented around a linguistic conception of philosophy have long since collapsed, they continue to influence contemporary analytic practice in the sense that they established norms of practice that are still held in place by certain “paradigms (in the Khunian sense) of philosophy”, and by certain “stances” (in the van Frassenian sense). (On the presence of such norms in contemporary analytic philosophy, see Tyler Burge’s 1999 Presidential Address to the Western APA.)

    Now, it would not be too hard to argue that many of these norms are well-enough embodied in the work of folks like Plantinga, Rea and Bealer (etc.) to see even them as participants in the analytic dance of legitimation by emulation.

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  10. Robert Johnson

    “Methodological scientism”. I've heard that charge before. But I haven't been able to evaluate whether it might be true since I have never understood exactly what the charge was supposed to be, what the flaw was. But whatever it might mean, what connection could that possibly have to being an institution, in the required sense, and then further "legitimating the US government", in whatever sense that it is supposed to do that (in any sense, doing a piss poor job of it presently) ?

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  11. Litowitz

    I would suggest that the derogatory claim about analytic philosophy has a pedigree in continental philosophy. The first place to look is Herbert Marcuse's discussion in One Dimensional Man, where he criticizes analytic philosophy in general and ordinary language philosophy in particular for political quietism and complicity in existing structures of domination. His argument was that analytic philosophy – with its emphasis on empiricism, proof, and facts — is not sufficiently 'Hegelian' to transcend and see the way that facts are conditioned, the limits of our existing way of life, the contradictions beneath the surface etc, and instead we end up with thought experiments about whether the desk in front of me is really real, etc — while rejecting any talk of 'classes' or 'mass society' as meaningless. The second source is Derrida's essay White Mythology where he says that philosophers have invented a mythology (really just a serious of metaphors) which privileges the West as representing 'man' and 'culture' and then seeks to impose this universalism on the world. Traces of this argument can be found in Baudrillard's recent book on terrorism where he says that it is a response (like a retrovirus) to the demand for a totalitarian universal civilization with no 'outside.' Put all this together with other examples — available upon request! — and you get the argument to which she is referring. I don't personally think that the charge is accurate, but I think it can be traced and has some resonance with Derrida's texts.

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  12. John Protevi

    I'd be happy if all philosophers injected a little nominalism into their thinking about the profession. "Analytic philosophy" and "continental philosophy" are grotesque abstractions and should be replaced by more concrete targets: individual philosophers or, maybe, with great care, schools of thought — but always, in both cases, with reference to specific texts. The comment by Litowtiz goes a long way in that salutary direction.

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  13. Dave Maier

    re: Aaron Preston's comment – there's no question that the early analytic philosophers thought of themselves as "emulating science"; but that doesn't mean that they were trying thereby to "legitimate" it. Rather, I think they thought of themselves as legitimating *philosophy*, in providing it the sort of methodological rigor which might allow philosophy finally to achieve success comparable to that of science, success which was and is already perfectly evident and so not in need of any legitimation. Now of course we might (and I do) object to this idea, say on the grounds that the sorts of "rigor" involved are not comparable in that way (certainly not enough, at least, for such a crude methodological transplant to be of any use). But again, even if this "scientism" fails on philosophical grounds, the legitimacy of science itself was never in any doubt. (Right?)

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  14. Aaron Preston

    “the legitimacy of science itself was never in any doubt. (Right?)”

    That depends. Legitimacy for what purpose, or in what capacity? Surely science is a legitimate way of finding new technologies, but beyond that I do think things are in doubt. Scientific anti-realism, the problems of induction and empirical equivalence, and the sociology and psychology of scientific “discovery” all suggest that science may not be a legitimate source of knowledge about the world and, a fortiori, that it is by no means the best or only source of such knowledge. And the worries intensify as we consider the idea that science might be a source of moral knowledge, an idea widely embraces in the American university system by the early 1900s. As a purveyor of ethical knowledge or of superior knowledge of the world, the legitimacy of science is very much in question, I’d say. But I know of no better way to find new vaccines or alternative energy sources and corresponding technologies, so science is legit in that role, at least.

    As to your observations about the early analysts, I agree with most of them. I would point out two things, however. First, just as the fact of emulation doesn't imply a conscious attempt to legitimate science, so the lack of a conscious effort to legitimate science does not imply that the emulation did further confirm the legitimacy of science, and in that sense further legitimate it. Think about what would have happened if all the best philosophers had risen up against the scientism that was beginning to prevail in culture. Surely this would have undermined or at least weakened the legitimacy of science vis-a-vis some of the roles that were being claimed for it at the time (like supreme purveyor of knowledge about the world). If that would have weakened it legitimacy, then it seems the opposite would have to count as strengthening its legitimacy, even if it was merely adding a few drops to an already swollen river.

    Second, It seems to me that the issue of legitimation is more significant in later and even contemporary analytic philosophy. To the extent that elements of the original methodological scientism still prevail in AP, it continues to legitimate not merely science but scientism in an era that, given the emergence of the issues noted above, should be (and slowly is) moving beyond scientism.

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