Description, Analysis, Explanation, and Philosophy

Description, Analysis, Explanation, and Philosophy

I invite you to indulge with me in some loose reflections on the nature of philosophy. There will be no test or harsh judgment. We are doing this as friends at a kind of philosopher’s party. We can take the brakes off for a while. There are three kinds of philosophy in the world today: analytical, Continental, and mysterian. The analytical kind analyzes, breaks down, dissects. The Continental kind describes lived experience without smashing it into parts. The mysterian kind identifies and classifies mysteries, while recognizing non-mysteries. The important point here is that the third is a distinct type of philosophy on a par with the other two: it has a distinctive methodology and mind-set. The analytical school suspects what it cannot analyze; the Continental school despises what cannot be experienced; the mysterian school insists on the real existence of what is mysterious. They each have their likes and dislikes: the analytical likes necessary and sufficient conditions and dislikes the unanalyzable; the Continental likes pretentious obscurity and dislikes simplicity and rigor; the mysterian likes clarity and explanation and dislikes human hubris. That is their public image anyway, but like all public images it is oversimplified and caricatured—a collocation of cliches. So, let’s dig a bit deeper (but not too deep).

We can distinguish descriptive philosophy, analytical philosophy, and explanatory philosophy. This three-way division cuts across party lines, but it corresponds roughly to the usual classification outlined above. The descriptive approach can take in the mind, language, and reality: it limits itself to the surface, the evident, the manifest. The analytical approach seeks to penetrate beneath the surface where the treasure is buried: it revels in the surprising, the challenging, the esoteric. The explanatory approach looks for causes, deep laws, generalizations: it loves a good explanation, but it accepts the absence of one. It regards the other two approaches as superficial and intellectually cowardly. Each approach has its nemesis: description fears the ineffable; analysis fears the unanalyzable; explanation fears the inexplicable. If the world is ineffable, unanalyzable, and inexplicable, those approaches are all doomed. For then reality cannot be described, cannot be analyzed, and cannot be explained—and all of these have been maintained, partially or wholly. Experience is ineffable, concepts are primitive, facts are mysterious. All we can do is name things and admit defeat: language is descriptively limited, analytic methods are inadequate, explanations are inaccessible. For every success there is a failure. It’s all hopeless. The bright new hope peters out in triviality, if not absurdity. We can’t even describe what a pain is, we can’t get beyond Russell’s theory of descriptions (“the” for God’s sake), we can’t figure out how the mind and body hang together. Hence, philosophical pessimism. Each school has its naysayers, and disappointed champions. The explanatory mysterian is just one member of a gang of pessimists: the limits of descriptive language, the limits of conceptual analysis, the limits of explanatory reason. Pain, knowledge, the mind-body problem (to name but three).

It would not be far off the mark to say that philosophy has a tendency to retreat in the face of felt failure. First, explanation runs into a brick wall; then we retreat to analysis, only to find it stymied; so, we retreat further to mere description, but find ourselves lost for words (language can only take you so far). The explanatory mysterian is not the only depressing naysayer. What to do? My own view is that none of this negativism is a cause for despair: it’s all interesting and informative. In the first place, we should happily employ all three approaches not stick to one of them: we can describe, analyze, and explain. If we find ourselves running out of steam, we can always declare victory: we have discovered that X is ineffable, Y is an unanalyzable primitive, Z is a total mystery—interesting! No one ever said our methods are omniscient, our minds infinitely capacious. Even if it turned out that nothing can be properly described, nothing can be fully analyzed, and nothing can be truly explained, that would be a discovery of great moment—the world escapes our best efforts! Okay, let’s settle for a pragmatic approach: all we can really know is what is useful to us, what enables our survival, what is subjective. Other animals live happy lives without understanding much, so why can’t we? Maybe we should concentrate on ethics and having fun. We don’t need to be gods to be good, or to have a good time. Anyway, that is hardly the predicament in which we find ourselves: there is a lot of worthwhile philosophy to do. We can cheerfully go on describing, analyzing, and explaining—while accepting that these activities have their limits. I regard myself as a Continental describer, an analytical-philosophy analyzer, and a scientific explainer—while accepting the indescribable, the unanalyzable, and the terminally mysterious. For me, philosophy is in pretty good shape considering (philosophers are another story).[1]

[1] I am a Continental analytical scientist in philosophy, and trained as such. But I am also a mysterian, conceptual primitivist (about some concepts), and experiential ineffabilist. I don’t recoil from the epistemically impossible.