Communities

Yesterday I watched Roger Federer being inducted into the tennis Hall of Fame. He gave a likably lachrymose speech and was his usual urbane self. He talked about how much he loved the game of tennis and especially tennis balls. Many professional tennis players attended. Roger’s wife Mirka gave a touching introductory speech. A nice occasion. It made me glad to be a tennis player and part of that community. But then I reflected that I used to be part of the philosophy community, but that came to an abrupt end fourteen years ago—rather as if RF himself had been cancelled (just imagine it!). The philosophy community used to be my community, but no more. I never imagined such a thing could happen, but it did. Of course, I still have some philosophical friends, but not here in Miami and very few in other parts of the country. But the point I want to make is that one community has been substituted for another: my tennis community knows nothing of my erstwhile philosophy community and couldn’t care less. For them, I am that tennis player they see on the courts; my old occupation is of no concern to them. No one ever mentions it or even knows about it. My social identity is tennis centered. I was always ambivalent about my philosophical social identity, but now it no longer operationally exists. My philosophical self is more or less private; my tennis self is the self I present to the world (see E. Goffman). Nowadays people want to play tennis with me not ask me philosophical questions.

American Philosophy

I take a distant, almost forensic, interest is the state of American philosophy. It is not what it was. It is nowhere near as good. It verges on the bad. All the excellent departments are in decline and soon will be mediocre at best. Once the last of the older faculty, now in their eighties, are gone the younger remnants will not compare to their illustrious forbears. Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, UCLA, Rutgers, NYU (I could go on) will soon be pale shadows of their former selves (they are already). The people in these places are just not as smart, not as original, not as literate as their predecessors (sorry, but it’s true). Many, in my view, are just plain useless–glorified graduate students at best. Relative to their contemporaries, they might seem okay, but judged more absolutely, they are a bunch of nobodies—dull, inept, uninspiring. Why is this? Philosophy has never been richer money-wise, teaching loads are lighter, the technology is greatly superior—it’s the people. To me they seem philistine and uneducated, callow and conformist. Is it the general state of the culture—people have just become less intelligent? Is it the internet? It can’t be television (that old scapegoat).

I think it is a combination of factors: entertainment culture, the decline of reading, fear of the new, and the abandonment of meritocracy. I think of my younger colleagues in days past: dull, institutional, narrowly careerist, unoriginal, boring, limited. Add to this the drive towards “diversity”, which is dangerously close to being anti-meritocratic. With it we have a loss of respect for objective intellectual values. Here feminists (so-called) have a lot to answer for. The Left has grown increasingly anti-rational and anti-truth. The right has always been pure ideology and rabidly anti-intellectual. People have become (more) spineless and brainless. What is the solution? There is none, except to bleat on about how things used to be and could be again. We are entering the philosophical dark ages. It has been a long time since I heard anything interesting from anyone under sixty (or even seventy). Philosophy is in a bad state, and I wonder how long it can last. It has always been under suspicion and now the chopping-block looms.

Against Possible Worlds

The phrase “possible world” has become ubiquitous in philosophy, but it is a meaningless phrase, a linguistic monster.[1] It derives from perfectly good uses of the word “world” while departing significantly from those uses. That word can mean planets, regions, cultures, habitats, professions, hobbies, religions, and more; but it can’t mean the totality of reality or maximal sets of propositions or some such technicality. Nor is there such a thing as “the actual world”, because this phrase is entirely unspecific about the kind of world intended. The problem isn’t that the doctrine of possible worlds is ontologically extreme—the objection that these things don’t really exist—it is that the concept is faulty (meaningless, empty). A “possible world” isn’t really a world in any intelligible sense. When someone says they live in the real world, they don’t mean the whole of reality (whatever that may be); they mean something like the world of money or hard labor or the daily grind. No one ever refers to what the philosopher purports to refer to; his meaning is far removed from the everyday meaning of the word. It is pure invention. When some intellectual speaks of the “best of all possible worlds” they don’t mean what the contemporary metaphysician means by that word; they mean something like the best human society or moral order (“the moral world”). The metaphysician’s use of the word is unprecedented and unexplained, a kind of pseudo-word living off another word’s credentials. There are no “possible worlds”; that word is not a genuine sortal.

To be sure, there are possible dogs and lifestyles and hairdos, because these are sortals in good standing; but there are no possible worlds, construed as real individuated entities out there. For how can they be counted, identified, named, tracked, sorted? Have you ever had one (and only one) in mind, or remembered it, or attended to it and not others? You can picture possibilities, but not entire worlds of them—unless you mean possibilities of a specific type of world, such as a planet or country or culture or profession. You have been tricked into thinking you mean something when you say that necessity is truth in all possible worlds, picturing some nebulous giant chunk of reality. When Wittgenstein speaks of “everything that is the case” he is not denoting an entity at all; that is not really a singular term denoting a maximal object of some sort. When someone speaks of a “brave new world” he is not speaking of one of these spectral super-beings coming to exist; he simply means (say) a new political system. These putative worlds are not like places and times that can be located, ordered, measured, and experienced; they are a theoretical construct created to enable modal words to be fitted into standard quantificational logic. They have no other ontological standing. They are just the postulated values of variables in logical notation (“for all worlds w”); they aren’t denizens of reality in any other sense. That’s why attempts to explain their meaning invariably fall back on the vernacular use of “world”, which is entirely legitimate in itself. We don’t quantify over possible worlds because they exist; they exist because we quantify over them—or pretend to. They are a pseudo-ontology. And don’t say they are merely formal devices equivalent to “set of propositions or sentences”; such things are not worlds at all but descriptions of worlds. The whole story is a put-up job, a kind of con. The philosophy profession has been conned into accepting a bunch of nonsense, literally. Not a bunch of exotic non-existent objects, mark you, but a nonsensical concept. You might as well use the word “wardrobe” to refer to the objects in question, as in “in all possible wardrobes, p”. To repeat, a world (vernacular) is not a “world” (technical): we would never say “in all possible worlds, p” meaning “on all planets, in all professions, in all cultures and habitats, p”.  A wardrobe is a wardrobe, as a world is a world—not some sort of super-duper-world (super-duper wardrobe). This is a misleading metaphor at best. As I say, a con job, not an interesting ontological discovery; a kind of metaphysical shell game (now you see it, now you don’t).

Possible worlds metaphysics and possible worlds semantics are therefore a horrible hot mess—confusion piled on solecism, a pyramid of nonsense. And isn’t it quite preposterous to suppose that when an ordinary person uses the word “necessary” or “must”, they are referring to a vast multiverse of these rebarbative pseudo-entities? It is just not credible that this is a good analysis of these ordinary words.  Possible worlds must have been resorted to for want of anything better. Before them we had only the theory that necessity is analytic truth, which is far too narrow. So, we are left with no theory at all. We have only a bonkers theory or a lame theory. We can, of course, take our modal vocabulary as primitive, using it to formulate our favorite doctrines—the idea that names are rigid designators, essentialist claims, and rejections of materialism. But this is hardly satisfactory; so, we hanker after the illusory charms of “possible worlds” (the quotation marks are compulsory now). Better that than nothing, you might say. But it’s worse than nothing; it’s a fantasy, a piece of nonsense on stilts dressed up as rigorous logic. I think people will look back on it as one of the more embarrassing episodes in the history of analytical philosophy.[2]

[1] See my “Counting Worlds”.

[2] Look, I know I am being excessively harsh here, but I am criticizing my earlier self too (and it is kinda fun). Seriously, it’s hard not to see the fashion for possible worlds as an infatuation with formal systems and the prestige attaching to them. Someone has to point the trembling finger at the naked emperor. It was a fun game while it lasted, but let’s move on. (Note that I name none of the main culprits.)

Analytic A Posteriori

Three distinctions have dominated the last four hundred years of philosophy: necessary-contingent, a priori-a posteriori, analytic-synthetic. It used to be thought that these are all equivalent or at least convergent, but this was an error. It is now generally accepted that such a view faces clear counterexamples, notably the necessary a posteriori and the contingent a priori.[1] But it has appeared that no such counterexamples can be found with regard to the analytic-synthetic distinction; in particular, there are no cases of the analytic a posteriori. We have cases of the synthetic a priori and even the analytic contingent (“I am here now”), but there are no truths that are both analytic and a posteriori—all analytic truth is a priori. I will question this. Granted, the view has powerful intuitive appeal; it even seems like an a priori necessary truth that all analytic propositions are known a priori. How could that not be so? You don’t need to look outside your concepts to see that all bachelors are unmarried males; you don’t need to undertake a perceptual examination of actual bachelors to know this. True, you might come to know that “Bachelors are unmarried males” is a true sentence on empirical grounds, but that is not the same as knowing the truth of the proposition expressed; that you know independently of experience, if you know it at all. You don’t need to open your eyes and ears to know that the concept bachelor implies the concept unmarried male. How can you fail to know that just by grasping the concept bachelor? The idea of the analytic a posteriori seems contradictory.

On the other hand, it seems odd to suppose that you can’t introspectively examine a concept and see that it has such and such a composition, as you can introspectively examine a pain or emotion. A concept is a mental state of a person so it should be possible to inspect this state inwardly. Couldn’t you empirically discover truths about it, introspection being an empirical faculty akin to an external sense? Something has to give, apparently. A concept is an empirical particular so it should be capable of empirical examination. I think I know what is going on here and it is not without obscurity; this is a dark corner of our mental life, though not entirely impenetrable. The following claim seems true: if you stipulate a meaning for “bachelor” as “unmarried male”, you know automatically and a priori that “Bachelors are unmarried males” is true, i.e., that bachelors are unmarried males. Nothing needs to be added to the stipulation to arrive at the truth; you have stipulative knowledge, which doesn’t require empirical experience to possess. But is that the only way you might acquire the concept of a bachelor? Is it the usual way? I can think of two other ways: genetically or socially. You could be born with the concept, or you could pick it up from someone else (as a child typically). Suppose you possess it innately: then it will presumably enter your conscious thought at some point in time, perhaps slowly and partially (not all at once). It might be obscure at first, having been unconscious heretofore. The process of becoming explicit might be gradual and halting—a bit at a time. Thus, you would not have complete conscious knowledge of the concept until somewhat late in the game; you might not consciously realize at time t that it includes being unmarried as well as maleness. That bit of the concept only pops up in the fullness of time. It was eventually discovered not simply stipulated, perhaps requiring some introspective effort. It would be a posteriori—after, posterior. It would be a bit like discovering your animal instincts, which is surely a posteriori (e.g., sexual instincts). It has always been in you, but it took some excavating. The knowledge isn’t trivial or automatic or stipulative. Knowledge of analytic truths can be something of a revelation. Innate concepts don’t leap to the inner eye all at once, inevitably, suddenly, completely. Similarly, if you acquire the concept of a bachelor from someone else, there might be a similar process of increasing access: you hear the word spoken, get some vague idea of its meaning, but don’t fully grasp it. Later, hearing how it is used by the community, you piece together its full meaning; you used to think “bachelor” meant “jolly young guy” and only later cotton onto the marital status business. The concept you are using could be the socially defined concept (social externalism[2]), but you don’t initially have a full grasp of it. You now know by experience that bachelors are males who aren’t married (who knew?). Thus, your knowledge is a posteriori, despite the fact that the proposition you know is analytic. Given social externalism, you won’t necessarily know everything about a concept you possess; so, when you acquire this further knowledge, you do so a posteriori (after the fact). We have it, then, that it is possible, even commonplace, to know an analytic truth a posteriori.[3]Of course, this requires us to accept that not all a posteriori knowledge is based on ordinary sense experience; some is introspective knowledge, or testimony knowledge. But that is the correct view anyway, given that we generally know our mental states a posteriori. You can know analytic truths by stipulation, and hence without using your empirical faculties, but you can also know them by a posteriori means, and typically you do.

It should be obvious that this position has nothing to do with Quinean ideas about traditional a priori knowledge, to the effect that there isn’t any, still less skepticism about the analytic-synthetic distinction. But it does make the point that, contrary to tradition, knowledge of analytic truth is not characteristically or necessarily a priori, which is surprising. The philosophical tradition has adopted the stipulative model of knowledge of analytic truths uncritically, ignoring the role of innateness and the social environment. For both these sources of analytic knowledge imply the possibility that such knowledge may arise from empirical procedures of a special sort, thus extending the concept of the a posteriori. We have had an overly simple and monolithic conception of the a posteriori; there is such a thing as inward empirical knowledge (introspective knowledge). We can therefore add the analytic a posteriori to our list of possible combinations of the classic threefold division. We already had the synthetic a priori; now we have the analytic a posteriori. These are certainly the odd ones out, but that may be a function of novelty rather than intrinsic improbability. There are indeed real questions about how both are possible, but actual they appear to be.[4]

[1] See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity.

[2] See Tyler Burge.

[3] We could also add a Fregean theory of concepts in that there is room here for the idea that conceptual knowledge arises from some sort of perception of abstract entities that may be partial and grow over time. This would be quite a stretched notion of the a posteriori, however.

[4] The subject of the nature of our knowledge of concepts is an underdeveloped field in epistemology. We clearly can’t model it closely on our knowledge of material objects, but what alternative model do we have? The picture of the inner eye perusing its conceptual treasure drove is enticing but is hardly theoretically satisfactory. Knowledge of analytic truths is therefore puzzling and befuddling, the deep dark sea of the knowing mind. Is it perhaps closer to feeling than seeing? We grope for such knowledge. Certainly, conceptual analysis is not easy-peasy. Imagine if it turned out that analytic knowledge is characteristically a posteriori and synthetic knowledge is characteristically a priori! What if the latter kind of knowledge had nothing essentially to with experience as such but was mediated subconsciously and mathematically? Empiricism for analytic knowledge and rationalism for synthetic knowledge. That would be a turn-up for the books.