Not to do metaphysics, according to Peter Hacker (Oxford/Kent). Discuss.
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11 responses to “Why study philosophy?”
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This is what I call Judge Judy philosophy – if it doesn't make sense to me, it's probably not true. I don't
think the universe is bound by Judge Judy's ability to comprehend.Hauling scientists before the "Tribunal of Sense"? I don't think I could keep a straight face saying to anyone I'm going to make them stand trial in the Tribunal of Sense with Honourable ol' me presiding. Sheesh.
Though he's not popular round here, I am reminded of what I think is a great Richard Feynman quote: if you don't like it, go somewhere else; to another universe perhaps, where the rules are psychologically easier, philosophically more pleasing. I can't help it, I can only tell you what it looks like.
I think it is arrogant and mistaken to suggest that everyone else gets on with their business, being too lazy or too stupid to even recognise conceptual problems in their own fields, let alone address them. Better call in the philosopher-auditors.
To be sure, I'm no enemy of philosophy and I've no axe to grind. But I think the 'arguers among equals' is a better approach than 'philosophers-as-conceptual-police-judge-and-jury', which is what I take to be Hacker's answer to 'Why Study Philosophy?'
I'd have much preferred an answer along the lines of: 'You spend several years working on a level with people from other countries, backgrounds and beliefs, on often contentious, current issues, where sympathetic readings are emphasised, evidence and argument are made paramount, learning to give and take criticism without giving and taking offense.'
I think that is much more valuable for fostering responsible consumers, citizens, employees, bosses, family members or friends, than learning to treat everything anyone says as an opportunity to show how they are conceptually confused and you are so smart you have spotted it instantly, and are now going to let them know.
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I took an MA in Philosophy and despite getting very good grades left the discipline as I felt unsure that philosophy actually had any methodological resources with which to fruitfully investigate its subject matter (and, anyway, it seemed that few philosophers knew exactly what their subject matter was). So I read programmatic pieces like this with interest.
Hacker's philosophers basically flag up instances of scientists saying more than their evidence so far allows them to say (Penrose, for example, was merely speculating – and speculative thought will always be a little unclear, a little confused, until empirical research has clarified matters). Fair enough, but do we really need a whole academic department, on a par with physics, chemistry, English, History departments, in order to do this? Can't critically minded physicists, chemists, historians do this sort of conceptual analysis themselves? I'm not sure what Hacker thinks he's bringing to the table as a philosopher. Scientists have a formidable array of methodological tools and skills which they use to conduct their investigations. To use these tools requires lots of training. Hacker needs to be much more specific and clear about what special tools a philosopher uses to analyze concepts (and, if he's to really defend philosophy's status in the academy, he needs to show that it really takes the same amount of time to become adept in their use as it does to become, say, a competent particle physicist).
I'm also not confident that many non-philosophers will be impressed by Hacker's analysis of the concepts surrounding neuroscience. He seems to be saying that to say the brain thinks is at odds with certain usages in natural language. But it seems to me that empirical discoveries gradually change the way that natural language is used (thus with the advance of neuroscience, the idea goes, words such as 'think', 'I', 'speak' will gain new meanings or, perhaps, will eventually simply be dropped altogether or replaced by new words with new meanings). If that's right then the philosophical analysis of natural language which Hacker advocates is pretty redundant; it can perhaps interestingly chart the course of meaning-changes, but it can't guide or restrain or correct scientific research or results.
Imagine you're a final-year high school student wondering what to study at university. You read Hacker on philosophy, and then you read a little about physics or neuroscience or history or whatever else. Which do you pick? Certainly not philosophy! The last few paragraphs of Hacker's piece are the clearest: Hacker's philosophers are pure skeptics with nothing positive to contribute; they merely nit-pick over the positive work of others. How very sterile a vocation. Of skepticism's important, but to make it into a discipline in itself? No thanks. Everyone knows that picking apart the work of others is easier than actually doing some work yourself.
On the other hand, I'm no advocate of metaphysics! Hacker is surely right in his first three paragraphs. The problem is that he offers no good alternative.
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I confess, I find nothing objectionable in this. I also think that there are multiple, nonequivalent (though largely overlapping) conceptions of philosophy lurking behind the work of contemporary philosophers — and that that's a good thing. My own conception of philosophy might be rather more encompassing than Peter's, but it certainly includes all that he describes in this piece. Moreover, as he well knows, just what philosophy is is itself a philosophical matter. So he should be (and, I know, is) as open to debate on this subject as he is on any other matter of philosophical interest.
I believe people are often put off by the rather imperious air of Peter's writing far more than they are by its content. Or better: folks would be less moved to protest the content of his work were it not expressed in the tone it is. That this is the case is reflected in the often hysterical tone with which his critics attack him.
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The question isn't why study philosophy. The question, rather, is whether humans can avoid engaging in philosophy.
There is a traditional discipline called "philosophy." One can avoid the people who work at it. Perhaps they aren't very helpful. But avoiding those people is not the same as avoiding philosophy.
There are indications that some questions are philosophical, such as the intertwining of methodological questions with the questions at hand. The lack of generally accepted methods for answering moral questions makes these into philosophical questions. Saying a question is unanswerable is one way of answering it, which is a rudimentary way of engaging in philosophy. Which questions are philosophical is itself a philosophical question. The traditional discipline of philosophy tries to put some order to these questions and methods, all of which come up repeatedly.
If one cannot avoid philosophy, then it may be a good idea to study it.
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I am sympathetic to this line of thought for some metaphysical questions, however I completely disagree with it for others. It is just not the case that all questions of metaphysics "are questions that are to be answered, resolved or dissolved by careful scrutiny of the concepts involved." The answers to many, many metaphysical questions depend on the nature of reality. Take David Lewis' Modal Realism for instance. Of course there is a fact of the matter whether there are concrete, living, breathing, talking donkeys! And we may reflect on our concepts all day, but we will never settle this existence question! In fact, the entire Quinean project in metaphysics about forming the most parsimonious, explanatory, and unified theory of reality in terms of the best combination of ontology and ideology is clearly "about the world" and not resolved by dissolving conceptual confusions. In many questions in metaphysics, both sides agree that the other side's view "makes sense" (of course in many this is not the case as well), but they disagree about the costs and benefits involved for endorsing such views. Debates about whether mathematical objects are really indispensable for our best physical theories, debates about the costs and benefits of humean vs nonhumean conceptions of laws and how they fit into scientific practice, debates about the competing merits of different views on composition (nihilism, universalism, monism, etc.), debates over presentism and eternalism, and debates on whether we need something to play the role of universals in our ontology (etc. etc. etc.) all need to be had. Furthermore, even deflationists views in metaphysics (that "there "is no fact of the matter" or "the answer is trivial" etc.) require a good meta-metaphysics. Ted Sider has excellently defended the view that disputes in meta-metaphysics really just are more metaphysics, because the answers in meta-metaphysics depend on whether the concepts in a certain metaphysical question "carve nature at its joints", which is itself a not-conceptually-settleable metaphysical question that is best solved by a Quinean methodology.
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There is more than an air of absurdity to P. Let us discard this foolishness.
Therefore not-P. -
The idea that good philosophy distinguishes sense from nonsense, and that most metaphysics falls squarely on the "nonsense" side of the divide, is of course a venerable view within philosophy, with distinguished adherents (Hume, Ayer, Hacker, to name a few). I used to be crazy about it in my twenties. These days, things seem less straightforward.
Here is why I am wary of such a view: Consider what it is for something to make sense. A good indication that something makes sense is that its implications are obvious, that it raises crisp, clear questions, that one decisively agrees or disagrees with it or knows how to find out whether it's true, that one knows how to act on the basis of it, etc (Hacker seems to rely on similar criteria in discussing his examples).
Now, all of these criteria of sense-making are strictly relative to the cognitive system doing the interpreting. Whether a differential equation makes sense to one, for example, depends on one’s mathematical fluency. So is there a notion of “making sense” that transcends the above criteria? If so, what is its content? An objective sense/nonsense distinction seems to me to be a piece of extravagant metaphysics, and if Hacker thinks it exists (as I think he must to talk the way he does), I'd like to hear the argument.
It seems to me that a better way to handle the examples Hacker discusses is to apply the principle of charity, come up with an interpretation that *does* make sense (to you), and if possible ask your interlocutor whether that’s what they had in mind. This may be the start of a conversation that allows both parties to make more sense of each other and therefore of the phenomenon under discussion. Such a fruitful meeting and integration between two conceptual systems seems to me to be a much better model for the activity of philosophy than the Tribunal of Sense model.
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Essays like Hacker's, and the replies in this comment section, seem to me to betray exactly why Wittgenstein took the approach he did with regard to the questions on which he focused. Rather than state a thesis and explain why it's right, which inevitably leads to objections based in the same explanatory model being questioned, a better approach would be to take the reader through a series of tasks that, when undertaken, show the folly or inability of someone using said model to get off the ground with it, so to speak.
Hacker, for all his veracity in Wittgensteinian philosophical technique, seems not to understand this and that's unfortunate.
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I'd say the problem isn't that he thinks philosophy should be about distinguishing sense from nonsense, but that he draws too sharp a dichotomy between the two. For example, he says that "brains think" is nonsense and the argument he seems to be alluding to is that it's taking concepts which exist in different conceptual frameworks and mashing them together. But you don't have to interpret it that literally. A wide variety of views on the relationship between cognition and neurology might be summarized as "brains think," depending on what sort of context the person is talking about.
What I'd say is that nonsense is a matter of degree. Statements can have different degrees of ambiguity or metaphor or other forms of linguistic messiness which allow there to be a gradual continuum between ideally clear speech and complete gobbledygook. So instead of the Tribunal of Sense making hard judgements one way or the other, philosophers have to be more flexible in how they interpret ideas.
But when you step away from his particular conception of what nonsense is, I think in broad terms philosophy can be well said to be about sorting out sense from nonsense. Some philosophers take the approach of trying to shun nonsense, others try to build up metaphysical theories which show how to "make sense of the world," others are actively comfortable letting sense and nonsense mingle a bit, but they do all seem to be engaged in the "pursuit of sense."
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"For example, he says that 'brains think' is nonsense and the argument he seems to be alluding to is that it's taking concepts which exist in different conceptual frameworks and mashing them together. But you don't have to interpret it that literally."
Hacker is not opposed to interpreting "brains think" (and other dubious expressions) non-literally – e.g., metaphorically or metonymically. He is justifiably opposed to interpreting them literally, which many philosophers, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, etc. seem to do. At any rate, many philosophers, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, etc. claim that brains think, so if they are employing the expression in a special technical sense, then the onus is on them to say so. Otherwise we may presume that they think of themselves as employing it in its ordinary sense, i.e., as claiming that brains literally think.
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I find Hacker's confidence that armchair analysis clearly tells us what words mean and how particular concepts work better than empirical investigation of people's word use, reasoning, group together of things in tasks set by lab psychologists etc.
I also suspect that the same complaint he rightly brings against metaphysics can be brought against the project of conceptual analysis: When has anyone ever successfully analyzed a concept in a way which has brought widespread agreement? Where is the textbook which records such results. Almost no one except Hacker is convinced by Hacker's claim that neuroscientists are conceptually confused in the way he suggests in the article. Perhaps he would say that we've been doing it for less long than metaphysics, but my guess is that the history of philosophers branding their philosophical opponents conceptually confused goes back pretty far.
Oh, and while this isn't a substantive criticism, I'm truly, truly baffled as to how anyone, except perhaps the crudest sort of verificationist who (probably wrongly) thinks 'God exists' is unverifiable and so meaningless, could possibly think the question of whether or not God existed was somehow 'conceptual' in any sense on which it was not the case that absolutely every question was conceptual, because you needed some concepts to understand it.
All in all, much prefer the modest and methodologically tentative (it'd be weird wouldn't it, if we could know very little first-order in philosophy and yet be justified in being as sure as Hacker is on methodological second-order issues) discussion of the failures of philosophy in the Chalmers interview that Brian posted a little after this Hacker piece. Hacker's justified suspicion about the track record of philosophical theorizing seems to not touch his confidence in either his own first-order opinions, arrived at through conceptual analysis, or his metaphilosophical views, in a way which seems odd given the reasons he gives for skepticism about metaphysics seem to apply straightforwardly to them too.
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