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So what the heck is “metaphysics”?

Brian Leiter

Richard Marshall talks to Kit Fine.  This seemed to me the most striking bit:

KF:  I’m firmly of the opinion that real progress in philosophy can only come from taking common sense seriously. A departure from common sense is usually an indication that a mistake has been made. If you like, common sense is the data of philosophy and a philosopher should no more ignore common sense than a scientist should ignore the results of observation. A good example concerns ontology. Many philosophers have wanted to deny that there are chairs or numbers of the like. This strikes me as crazy and is an indication that they have not had a proper understanding of what is at issue. By recognizing that these things are crazy we can then come to a better understanding of what is at issue and of how the questions of ontology are to be resolved.

3:AM Experimental philosophy asks that philosophers leave their armchairs. So they would ask perhaps whether maths really is a priori, say, or whether principles of abstraction do work like Frege said they did, and then they’d experiment on the folk to find out. So what is your view about the role of non-a priori approaches to metaphysics?

KF: I am not especially enamored of my armchair and would be happy to leave it if I thought that it would be of help in answering the questions of interest to me. But I fail to see how it could be. Consider the question of whether mathematics is a priori or whether principles of abstraction of the sort proposed by Frege might provide a foundation for a significant part of mathematics. How could asking the folk possibly be of any help in answering these questions? Physicists don’t ask the folk to look down telescopes and mathematicians don’t ask folk to assess the plausibility of their axiom. And so why should it be any different for philosophy? Or, take another analogy. We don’t ask the folk to read X-rays since it takes skill and training to know what to make of them – to understand whether a particular blotch, for example, has any real significance. It is no different, it seems to me, in regard to the intuitions of philosophers. One needs skill and training to know what to make of them and it would be a terrible retrograde step to rely instead on the untutored judgments of ordinary folk.

Discuss.

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19 responses to “So what the heck is “metaphysics”?”

  1. Joshua A. Miller

    This seems especially problematic when the "folk" are mostly white, middle class undergraduates. Compare that to Schwitzgebel's studies of professional philosophers, like the one with Cushman that showed that professional philosophers can be manipulated into accepting or rejecting the doctrine of double effect on the basis of the order of presentation of thought experiments. Of course, for Schwitzgebel this is evidence that philosophers may be no better than the folk: skill and training enforce consistency but don't guarantee accuracy.

    Yet Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated that professional statisticians could be similarly manipulated using quick thought experiments, so perhaps we're learning less from this kind of study than we'd like to believe.

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  2. Robert H

    Are there criteria of identity for common sense? If so, are they easily distinguished from the criteria that good polling must meet?

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  3. Steven Hales

    Fine is offering a version of the expertise criticism of X-phi, which has also been defended by Williamson and (much more humbly) me. Weinberg et al. have criticized that defense.

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  4. Bence

    'Common sense' tells us that if we pour two glasses of transparent liquid together, we get a transparent liquid. But wait, that's false – as all Pastis-drinkers know all too well.

    'Common sense' also tells us that we are vividly aware of all parts of our visual field. But wait, this is also false – as the inattentional blindness experiments show.

    So what do we do if 'common sense' and science pulls in opposite directions? I'm going with science…

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  5. doris

    (1)
    "A departure from common sense is usually an indication that a mistake has been made."

    (2)
    "It is no different, it seems to me, in regard to the intuitions of philosophers. One needs skill and training to know what to make of them and it would be a terrible retrograde step to rely instead on the untutored judgments of ordinary folk."

    The Q&A format is probably not the best place to look for systematic theory, but I'd be grateful for guidance as to whether (1) and (2) form a consistent view.

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  6. Stephen Puryear

    Fine would have done better to say that *radical* departures from common sense, such as the denial that there are chairs, usually indicate a mistake. Most of the intuitions on which philosophers rely are not radical departures from common sense, if they are departures at all. The conclusions they draw on the basis of these intuitions (together with various auxiliary beliefs) are a different story.

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  7. Jason

    Surely there's no inconsistency in the following:
    (I) A departure from common sense is usually an indication that a mistake has been made.
    (II) Figuring out how the `data of philosophy' (intuitions of common sense) bear on questions such as whether mathematics is a priori requires skill and training.

    Reply
  8. Mark Phelan

    I worry that Fine’s central analogy is confused. Consider:

    “We don’t ask the folk to read X-rays since it takes skill and training to know what to make of them – to understand whether a particular blotch, for example, has any real significance.”

    But experimentalists interested in uncovering common sense (or folk intuitions) don’t ask the folk to conduct or interpret their experiments either, of course. I take it that would be the situation if Fine’s analogy were to hold. Instead, participant responses are themselves analogous to the X-ray and, when things are going well, they are being skillfully interpreted by the experts, the experimental philosophers, to yield accurate conclusions about common sense.

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  9. Michael Conboy

    Responding a bit to both Bence and doris:

    I take the linking thought to be roughly that there are certain issues on which common sense *is* the authority — for instance, on the subject of tables and chairs — yet common sense does not itself tell us what areas those are. Rather, we need to do philosophy (and science) to figure that out.

    This seems quite compatible with holding (a) that there are many issues on which consulting common sense is not helpful even if the latter has a lot to say, and (b) that science trumps common sense.

    Indeed, I'm not sure how the latter came up as a question in Bence's post. It's axiomatic for everyone that metaphysics must be empirically adequate. Metaphysical dispute only gets going once it's clear, e.g., that the theory which posits tables and that which posits only simples-arranged-tablewise are both empirically adequate. But again, at this point Fine will say (and I will agree) that common sense has yet to have its proper say.

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  10. Jeremy Shipley

    I once saw formalism refuted by a mathematician who held up three fingers and said "how many?" She wasn't clear on the distinction between properties and abstract particulars, and thus didn't quite understand what I was denying or what she was putatively proving. Among non-philosophers I would suspect that many haven't really thought much about distinguishing numbers from numerals, and that confidence in the existence of numbers may sometimes be an expression of confidence in one's ability to count.

    Moreover, the common sense position of some mathematicians in Frege's time (notably subject to Frege's philosophical critique) was formalism. Frege notwithstanding, that view was sustained in Gottingen by Hilbert and his school and was inherited by Bourbaki as their official foundational doctrine (Theory of Sets in fact gives a theory of terms!), and formalism continues to be the common sense view of many "working mathematicians". Of course, many are platonists too, though some of them speak of "emotional platonism" as a tendency to uphold a metaphysics that cannot be rationally defended.

    It would be comforting if one side or the other in a philosophical debate could be swiftly dismissed as in need of philosophical therapy or a return to common sense. However, I think that the suggestion that there is some kind of monolithic common sense of the mathematical community does little more than poison the well for the anti-platonist. There are philosophical arguments pro and con for the existence of abstract particulars. The recent tendency of some philosophers to suggest deference to some mythical, monolithic common sense of either the folk or the mathematical community strikes me as an abdication of philosophy's place in the academy. Imagine being a mathematician interested in philosophy of mathematics, only to pick up a philosophical text and read that we all must defer to common sense platonism! (Of course that's not what one does find, but I exaggerate to make a point about the peril of too-deferential philosophy).

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  11. Joe

    Fine's conclusion, "it would be a terrible retrograde step to rely instead on the untutored judgments of ordinary folk" seems to suggest that experimental philosophers run a bunch of surveys and then declare, "behold the theory of knowledge." I don't believe that's what most of the experimental work sets out to do. I recognize that there are different kinds of projects in experimental philosophy, but none of them say that the philosopher ought to accept the theory with which a majority of those surveyed agreed.

    Perhaps I'm being a little uncharitable here, but I'd appreciate some clarification from Professor Fine. If his argument rests on the view that experimental philosophers say a robust philosophical theory comes directly from data collected and, in fact, they don't do that, then Fine's worry is ill-conceived.

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  12. doris

    Jason:

    Your (I) and (II) are consistent, but it is not obvious to me they gloss Fine's (1) and (2), where (1) seems to take "common sense" as a (defeasible) constraint on philosophical theorizing, and (2) looks to caution against relying on "untutored judgments of ordinary folk" in theorizing.

    The appearance of inconsistency might come from my assuming "common sense" and "untutored judgments of ordinary folk" are more or less interchangeable, and it might be resolved by distinguishing them.

    But I suspect there's a tension here, one common to many appeals to "expert intuitions" in debates about Xphi:

    On the one hand, those who are tempted to take intuitions as "data" are confronted with a wealth of evidence suggesting that intuitions are subject to bias, fluctuate with minor contextual variation, and so on.

    On the other hand, if attempt be made to clean up the "data" by restricting it to expert intuition, the data starts to look not like data, but theory, shaped by whatever (tendentious) philosophical commitments the experts in question happen to hold (even if we generously suppose there's an unproblematic notion of "expert" ready to hand).

    In short, the worry is that the intuitions are unreliable data, or not data at all.

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  13. Nic McGinnis

    "Consider the question of whether mathematics is a priori or whether principles of abstraction of the sort proposed by Frege might provide a foundation for a significant part of mathematics. How could asking the folk possibly be of any help in answering these questions?"

    I feel this is a remarkably uncharitable characterization of what it is experimental philosophers take themselves to be doing. I am not aware of any published papers that attempt to do this sort of thing, or of any experimental philosophers who would argue that empirical methodology is adequate to the specific questions posed above.

    Everyone agrees that even a survey of experts would provide no direct evidence for the answer "whether mathematics is a priori", except to the extent that we trust experts (consider, analogously, whether I have evidence that Fermat's last theorem is true if I survey expert mathematicians: if there is consensus that Wiles' proof is sound, then I do have evidence, but Fermat's last theorem is true because of the proof, not because of the survey).

    The issue is, centrally, the epistemic worth of intuitions (however defined and however used, a literature in itself). Experimental work bears on this, for example, by providing evidence that intuitive judgements are unstable, even for 'experts'. Most experimental research, as a result, is done in philosophical areas where intuitions play a central role: in value theory (where the outcome of a thought experiment is taken to [possibly] invalidate a theory), in philosophy of language (where intuitions of semantic content [e.g., reference] both support and disprove candidate theories), and, yes, some metaphysics (where the purported 'conceivability' of some scenario provides evidence of metaphysical possibility). If it turns out that the intuitions we bring to bear in these areas are not reliable sources of evidence–because they are unstable or subject to sundry biases (framing effects, ordering effects)–a serious methodological discussion about how to proceed in these areas should follow.

    (Indeed, one can get a quick sense of the kind of projects taken taken up by experimentalists at the Experimental Philosophy group blog here: http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/. No one is asking the person on the street whether or not they think Peano arithmetic is consistent.)

    Over-reliance on intuitions, if unstable, is particularly troubling since there is no real way of independently 'triangulating' to facts here. An analogy with perception is difficult to sustain on the simple grounds that it is trivial to verify most percepts through other means ("is the straw really bent?" is a question we know how to answer). But the only means of access to the results of an intuitive judgement is, apparently, the judgement itself. There are no other means. Perfoce, evidence that intuitions are unstable should give us pause when absent the means of independent verification.

    Of course, one might also be interested in folk intuitions qua folk intuitions: surely this is not beyond the pale for philosophers of language, say, or moral philosophers. I worry that the kind of caricature presented by Fine (though the uncharitable example was first presented by Marshall, Fine seems to endorse it as a good example of what it is x-phiers do) is, unfortunately, common currency, and prevents a more serious discussion of the relevance (or lack thereof) of empirical work in philosophy. (And feeds into the sociological construction of the discipline by playing into discussions of what is, and is not, "philosophy"; see http://www.newappsblog.com/2012/03/reflections-on-academic-passing.html and subsequent discussion on NewAPPS).

    All this, of course, puts to the side excellent work about expertise defences and the like and the vigorous and illuminating back and forth between experimentalists and their critics (in the latter category I have particularly enjoyed reading Williamson, Weatherson, Deutsch, and Hales).

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  14. Ken

    Though I don't hold much of a brief for X-phi at all, I also don't hold much of brief for "common sense," whatever exactly that is. It seems to me that science has embarrassed so-called common sense many times over its history. Indeed, without those embarrassments, we'd wouldn't have the idea of inertia and might still be stuck with the medieval idea that continuing motion requires a continually active force. Nor would we have a clear grasp of the distinction between heat and temperature. And much much more, of course. I don't think science has suffered from lack of deference to common sense. Not at all sure why philosophy needs to show more deference to common sense than science does. Of course, I'm a hard-core card carrying naturalist who thinks that philosophy is broadly continuous with science and that it's methods are broadly empirical.

    I am willing to show common sense — though again, I'm not entirely sure what that phrase picks out — a certain degree of defeasible deference. But not much. What that comes to is that I take it that any theory that "flies in the face of common sense" does take on additional explanatory burdens. It needs to explain where common sense has gone wrong and, perhaps, why it has gone wrong in that way. Sometimes doing that will involve us in what might be called a deep philosophical anthropological investigation of where our common sense intuitions come from in the first place and exactly what shapes them. That sort of investigation I take to be a worthy philosophical enterprise in its own right — whether or not we take the deliverances of common sense to be true or false. Understood in one way, that may be what X-phi'ers are up to. But it's hard to tell since that enterprise is pretty radically under theorized, if you ask me.

    But anyway, I certainly wouldn't privilege common sense in the way that Fine seems to. So-called common sense is, I suspect, a mixture of the true and the false. Some of it is the result of predictable but inevitable illusions that may arise from the deep structure of the human mind, possibly built into us by natural selection. It's also possible that so-called common sense has its source in what are really historically contingent and culturally specific formations of one sort or another and is only "common" to us (for some extended us) here (in some extended place) and now (in some extended time frame.)

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  15. Christopher Hitchcock

    Kit Fine said:

    "How could asking the folk possibly be of any help in answering these questions? Physicists don’t ask the folk to look down telescopes and mathematicians don’t ask folk to assess the plausibility of their axiom. And so why should it be any different for philosophy? Or, take another analogy. We don’t ask the folk to read X-rays since it takes skill and training to know what to make of them – to understand whether a particular blotch, for example, has any real significance."

    By the same token, we don't judge the efficacy of Prozac by giving it executives of Eli Lilly and asking them how they feel. Rather, we test it on the folk, ideally folk who are ignorant about whether they are even taking it or not. So why should we test the adequacy of philosophical theories using the intuitions of proponents and opponents of those theories?

    It seems to me that there is more than one scientific analogy that is relevant here.

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  16. Tamler Sommers

    We may be making a mountain out of a molehill. As Nic notes, Kit Fine was just answering a specific question about whether it would help to ask the folk (1) whether math was a priori or (2) whether Frege's principles of abstraction can provide a foundation for mathematics. Fine says no, it would not help. Does anyone disagree with that? Fine doesn't claim that this is what X-phi people do. He doesn't endorse this characterization of X-phi. For all we know, he has no idea what experimental philosophers do.

    I think this exchange (pointed out to me by Josh May) is far more striking:

    3:AM: Are there any books or films outside of philosophy that you have found illuminating for your work?

    KF: No.

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  17. MVWedin

    Of note, perhaps, is the fact that none, or none I could plow through, of the criticisms (worries) launched against Fine's remarks makes any appeal to experimental procedures. They are reasoned, or unreasoned, considerations–just the sort of considerations I suspect would fit rather nicely with Fine's views on what we do when we do what we do best.

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  18. Mike Raven

    Some have wondered whether the following two passages from Fine are compatible:

    (A) "A departure from common sense is usually an indication that a mistake has been made."

    (B) "One needs skill and training to know what to make of [folk intuitions] and it would be a terrible retrograde step to rely instead on the untutored judgments of ordinary folk."

    I think they are compatible, and that their combination is less controversial than it might initially seem.

    To see how and why, it helps to take in the context in which (A) was stated: "…[R]eal progress in philosophy can only come from taking common sense seriously. A departure from common sense is usually an indication that a mistake has been made. If you like, common sense is the data of philosophy and a philosopher should no more ignore common sense than a scientist should ignore the results of observation."

    There are obviously ways in which common sense and observations are unlike. But Fine is stressing one way in which they are alike: common sense should not be ignored in the way that observations should not be ignored. This no more precludes rational departures from common sense than it precludes rational departures from the observations. It is rather that the burden of proof is upon those who would depart to make plausible their departure.

    In this light, (A) seems to say: Just as incoherence of observation with theory usually indicates theory’s failure to accommodate the observations (e.g. observations difficult to cohere with the separate existences of the electric and the magnetic fields supports the error of separating them), so analogously incoherence of common sense with theory usually indicates theory’s failure to accommodate common sense (e.g. the difficulty with taking my sitting on the chair to cohere with mereological nihilism supports there being an error in nihilistic arguments).

    Here (B) steps in: evaluating common sense (especially proposed departures from it) requires skill and training; it should not be left to the untutored judgments of ordinary folk. One important application of (B) is to not to take the folk (or critics of common sense) at their word for what common sense is.

    To illustrate, Bence (in order to discredit common sense) declares that common sense tells us (falsely) that: (i) combining two transparent liquids produces a transparent liquid; and that (ii) we are vividly aware of all parts of our visual field.

    These cases discredit common sense only if they are genuine cases of common sense which, nevertheless, are false. But I doubt that (i) and (ii) are genuine cases of common sense. Granted, both seem plausible in part because the untutored mind struggles to find immediate counterexamples. But once counterexamples are explained, (i) and (ii) have little residual allure.

    This contrasts sharply with: (iii) I am sitting on a chair. Like (i) and (ii), (iii) seems plausible in part because the untutored mind struggles to find immediate counterexamples. But, unlike (i) and (ii), the tutored mind struggles to make sense of counterexamples to (iii). Even when the mereological nihilist tells us that particles arranged chairwise explain our false but alluring belief in (iii), we remain torn:

    On the one hand, the nihilist's explanation for our false but alluring belief in (iii) is hard to distinguish from a justification for the truth of (iii). For what could be the difference between the existence of a chair and the existence of particles arranged chairwise? If there is no difference, then we have not been provided with any genuine counterexample to common sense.

    On the other hand, granting that the existence of particles arranged chairwise is distinct from the existence of the chair, one is left wondering precisely what a chairwise arrangement of particles is, and why its existence, identity, and persistence conditions are any less obscure than those for chairs. Without removing the sense of obscurity, the residual allure for (iii) will have hardly disappeared. Given (iii)’s status as datum, the inability to explain this datum away as an alluring falsehood might then appear as an indirect justification against mereological nihilism. Notice that this is not crudely to infer that mereological nihilism is false because it conflicts with common sense!

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  19. Kelly

    "Physicists don’t ask the folk to look down telescopes and mathematicians don’t ask folk to assess the plausibility of their axiom. And so why should it be any different for philosophy? Or, take another analogy. We don’t ask the folk to read X-rays since it takes skill and training to know what to make of them – to understand whether a particular blotch, for example, has any real significance. It is no different, it seems to me, in regard to the intuitions of philosophers."

    But there is a difference here. When the tech or doctor makes a claim about what a particular blotch on an X-ray amounts to, they don't say things like this in support of their claim: "In my experience, most people think that this blotch is a tumor." Of course they don't, because no one would claim that the judgments of laypersons have any bearing on whether or not we should accept the claim that the blotch is in fact a tumor. But philosophers often do make claims like this. Or, at the very least, they take a conflict with common sense to indicate that the burden of proof lies with their opponents. In some debates – free will is a good example – assessing where this burden lies can go a long way towards adjudicating between the merits of particular theories. And having empirical data on what the common sense view really is looks to be more valuable than simply asserting that one's own intuitions are obvious, or that most of one's undergraduates seem to share them in informal classroom polls. Whether or not the data is good is a separate issue. But, if we're going to assume that common sense or folk intuitions play a role in determining where the burden of proof lies for a particular debate, then leaving the armchair in an attempt to get a better idea of what people's common sense intuitions really amount to seems to be helpful. The X-ray tech and the physicist don't make this assumption, and so the fact that they're uninterested in folk intuitions fails to show that philosophers (at least in some areas) shouldn't be interested either.

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