Philosophical Destruction

 

The destructive impulse is particularly conspicuous in philosophy. We are forever refuting, criticizing, rejecting, disagreeing, ridiculing, dismantling, tearing down, cutting to pieces, grinding to a fine powder, annihilating, and otherwise smashing to smithereens (or sometimes mildly amending and carefully reformulating). We also construct and create, but a lot of the time our aims are less positive. Why is this? It doesn’t seem to be so in other disciplines, or at least not to the same degree: physicists and biologists don’t spend most of their time ripping each other to shreds, or even correcting and revising what others have to say. They are too busy in the lab or field, discovering things, contributing to human knowledge; but we philosophers always seem to be at each other’s throats. Thus critical acumen is much prized in our field—so-and-so is said to be very “sharp” and a demon with the deft counter-example. Reputations can be built around one “devastating” criticism. Entire philosophies can be primarily destructive: empiricism, positivism, ordinary language philosophy, Wittgenstein in both his periods, Quine much of the time, Berkeley’s idealism, Hume’s skepticism, existentialism, neurophilosophy. There is nothing wrong with that: philosophy really is a highly critical discipline. The whole subject is infused with negativity. Is it because philosophy is so hard? Is it that philosophical problems are so resistant to solution? It’s easier to criticize than to construct, destroy rather than create. We are frustrated by our chosen subject, but we can at least vent our frustrations in bouts of mutual destruction, otherwise known as civilized debate. This can be enjoyable enough, thrillingly ego-driven, and even fairly amusing—better than banging your head against a brick wall. I get a kick out of it anyway. The predominant feeling you have when trying to construct something in philosophy is a sense of vulnerability: someone is going to destroy what you have struggled to create, undermining your carefully constructed arguments, and gutting you intellectually. This is not a fun feeling; better to rip into someone else and watch the feathers fly. Yes, it’s faintly discreditable, a bit of a cop-out, but at least you are achieving something with your time (that arduous education has not gone completely to waste). Or you could just become an historian.

            But let us analyze the destructive impulse in philosophy further: what is philosophical destruction? What are you aiming to do, and for what purpose? The OED puts us on the right track (as always): “destroy” is defined as “put an end to the existence of (something) by damaging or attacking it”. We are informed that the English word derives from an Old French word destruire, which is constructed from de expressing reversal and struere meaning “build”. Thus “destroy” literally means, “de-build”. It is like “depopulate” or “desegregate” or “deactivate” or “deconstruct”. This suggests that you cannot destroy what has not been built (though that concept is quite flexible and is not limited to human artifacts): it sounds funny to speak of destroying a heap or a wreck or a mess or even a random chunk of rock—for none of these things bespeaks constructive purpose. You primarily destroy what has been created, generally with a purpose in mind: human artifacts, human lives, animals, plants, buildings, systems of thought, arguments. Destroying is the opposite of building. Also, according to the dictionary, it involves two elements: existence and damaging by attacking. First, the thing destroyed has to exist: you can’t destroy what has no existence (fictional characters, hallucinated rabbits, meaningless jumbles of words). Second, the destruction (the “putting out of existence”) is accomplished by means of an aggressive act—attacking and damaging. This latter point is important: there is no avoiding the involvement of violence in philosophical criticism. You can’t destroy (demolish, decimate) an argument or a position without doing violence to it—as you can’t destroy a material object without doing violence to it. We may as well own up to this and not pussyfoot around: philosophical destruction is inherently aggressive, necessarily a form of attack (not on the person, of course, but on the position being destroyed). The aim is to put that position out of existence, i.e. refute it—overtly and publicly. Ultimately this means that we want to destroy belief in that position: we want to take existent beliefs and put them out of existence. That is what it is to put a philosophical position out of existence—to destroy belief in it. If I am trying to refute a certain position, I am aiming to destroy whatever belief others may have in that position: I am trying to eliminate a part of the other’s mind, or a component of his or her mental state. This is why it is apt to speak of destruction in connection with philosophical (and other intellectual) criticism: criticism is not intended to leave your mind unchanged, your beliefs happily intact. Let me be a touch melodramatic: refutation is murdering beliefs—putting them out of commission, consigning them to the Big Sleep. It is outright belief annihilation.    [1] So there is always something pugilistic and gladiatorial at play in philosophical disputation: a life is at stake, namely the life of the participants’ beliefs (opinions, commitments). Something is liable to go out of existence during a philosophical argument. No wonder there is resistance, tension, risk, fear, self-defense, and an atmosphere of combat: something’s very existence is at stake, often beliefs that have taken a lifetime to arrive at (all that work and puff!). We can also note that there is something godlike about the activity: the creative artist is often compared to God on account of her ability to bring things into being apparently from nowhere, but the power to destroy is also a feat of existence alteration—putting things out of existence. God has this power too, in abundance, and we humans can exercise it ourselves in more limited ways. No doubt the literal murderer relishes exercising this awesome power. Just so the philosophical “murderer” can relish his power to destroy positions and belief in them: look how I just annihilated that poor shmuck’s position! We humans have power over existence (as existence has power over us) and philosophical creation and destruction partake of that power. Don’t you think the positivists relished the destructive power of their philosophy? They put those babbling metaphysicians to the guillotine! They didn’t have much constructively to put in its place (the dirty little secret of positivism), but they could certainly do a tremendous amount of damage to existing belief. Their weapon of choice was the verification principle: wielding this sharp-edged sword they could cut traditional philosophical thought to pieces. It was a rotting zombie anyway, in their considered opinion, so it may as well be put out of its misery. On a lesser scale of destructive euphoria, we have the work of Strawson on Russell’s theory of descriptions, Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, Gettier on the analysis of knowledge, Kripke on the description theory of names, and Grice on conversational implicature—to pick some examples pretty much at random. And there is nothing in principle wrong with such destruction (or purported destruction)–with such aggression and annihilation; as I remarked, it is an essential part of philosophy. Philosophy is supposed to be destructive (though not only destructive).    [2]

            And here we run up against a further category of philosophical destruction (perhaps my personal favorite): destroying the destroyer. The positivist gunman swaggers into town ready to do some serious destroying: in his sights lie all traditional metaphysics, much of morality, and a good deal of science. Then the wily sheriff (silent, gruff) steps nimbly forward to stem this tide of destruction, revealing the blustering stranger as a fake and a wimp—a no-account loud-mouthed nobody. His draw is slow and his aim shaky: he gets handily refuted before he can do much damage (though there was that unfortunate business with the town drunk in the saloon, poor old Jeb). This is what was so gratifying about Grice on implicature and Kripke on necessity: they destroyed the would-be destroyers. They wielded superior weapons and exhibited superior skills, and the opposition went down. In so doing they resurrected ideas deemed extinct, bringing traditional questions back to life. For it is never a happy moment when a philosopher kills off an idea that doesn’t deserve that fate; and we welcome the savior who restores to life what had been thought extinguished for good. Even the problem of consciousness has been thought extinguished, only to come roaring back to life once certain misguided ideas have been exploded. So we must always be on the lookout for opportunities to reverse previous acts of wanton destruction (or alleged destruction). I would say the same for a lot of what Wittgenstein has been thought to have terminated; ditto for Quine. So I particularly relish the dismantling of such would-be destroyers. Destruction sometimes needs to be destroyed in turn.

            We should distinguish two sorts of destructive philosophical act: destroying existing philosophical theories and destroying common sense (or possibly parts of accepted science). Philosophers are generally perfectly comfortable with the first sort of destruction, but the second is regarded as far more problematic. Preventing commonsense belief from destruction may involve destroying the arguments of anti-commonsense philosophers. It is, of course, controversial what counts as part of common sense (Berkeley’s idealism being a famous case), but we usually know if commonsense belief is being criticized. Overtly nihilist positions are typically destructive of common sense, intentionally so: asserting that nothing exists must surely count as destructive in this way. This is the analogue of destroying noncombatants in a war: other philosophers are soldiers in wars of mutual destruction, but ordinary folk are the equivalent of peaceful civilians. They are more likely to be invoked in the battle against opposing philosophers than made victims of destruction themselves. Scorched earth tactics against civilians are not most philosophers’ style, while the belief systems of other philosophers are considered fair game. If you go into philosophy, this sort of aggressive action is only to be expected. You can avoid it only by not sticking your neck out, possibly limiting yourself to destructive philosophy and never venturing anything constructive of your own (though you must cover yourself against destroyer destroyers). Frege is a good example of a philosopher who does the opposite: though he certainly offers criticisms of positions he is against (e.g. psychologism), he mainly tries to construct something positive. He erects an impressive edifice, systematic and precise, thus exposing his creation to possible destructive criticism (Russell’s paradox was surely a heavy blow). He is perhaps the most constructive analytical philosopher ever. Wittgenstein, by contrast, is relatively destructive. Russell lies somewhere in between. Quine is largely destructive, with occasional gleams of creativity. Kripke is a bit of both. Socrates was entirely negative. Plato and Aristotle leaned positive. And so on: each philosopher in the canon can be considered as a destroyer or as a creator. I myself am quite fond of a bit of philosophical destruction, but I also have a weakness for construction—so I am well aware of destructive efforts aimed in my direction (again, nothing wrong with that).    [3]

            What are the devices of philosophical destruction, its techniques and technology? They are well known to the trained philosopher: the detection of fallacies, the exposure of non-sequiturs (both subtle and gross), producing counterexamples, exposing use-mention confusions and type-token errors, and so on. With these weapons we carry out our destructive work, and valuable work it is. Logic is best seen in this light: it is a device of destruction, the equivalent of a deadly weapon of war. It isn’t used much for constructive purposes (not counting logicism and ascriptions of logical form), but it is the bread and butter of discursive demolition. Logic is what we wield when we set about demolishing a position—its main purpose is destructive. It is concerned with exposing logical fallacies rather than constructing logical arguments; its function veers negative. It is all about what does not follow. This should be built into the way logic is taught: it is a machine for winnowing out faulty reasoning. It isn’t a method for having new ideas but a device for destroying existing ideas (bad ones). I mean this in a broad sense of “logic”—not just propositional and predicate calculus but informal logic too (also induction and abduction). Logic is concerned with evaluating reasoning, and evaluation implies criticism, which implies destruction. Accusing someone of begging the question, say, is a destructive act: what the speaker just said has been reduced to rubble. Again, we should not pussyfoot around about this: philosophical expertise is like the expertise of a demolition man—both are good at destroying buildings, physical or intellectual. Both do valuable work, by clearing sites of rickety old buildings so that new ones can replace them. Philosophical destruction, recognized as such, is nothing to regret or feel ashamed of. It is the engine of truth.    [4]

 

    [1] There are echoes of Popper’s “critical philosophy” here—the emphasis on refutation and falsification instead of verification. Popper thinks that scientific progress occurs mainly by a process of elimination, much like natural selection: we don’t proceed by confirming good theories but by falsifying bad ones. Destruction of accepted theories is thus the engine of scientific advance. We might call this “discovery by destruction”. Philosophy, for a Popperian, is similar: the elimination of theories that fail to stand up to criticism. The counterexample is the engine of philosophical advance. Aggressive criticism is the means of achieving philosophical truth.   

    [2] Let me indulge in a medical analogy: it is part of medicine to destroy pathogens, the better to improve health. This destruction is essential to medicine and not at all sinister. Wittgenstein compared philosophy to therapy, which emphasizes improvement on the part of the patient; but he never explicitly drew attention to the point that destruction can also be part of the process (though he was himself flagrantly destructive). In fact, even Freudian psychotherapy has a destructive component, since harmful neuroses and repressions need to be destroyed (talking was supposed to do that). Isn’t psychiatry really concerned with the destruction of mental illness, using drugs, ECT, brain surgery, behavioral modification, and what- not?

    [3] If I ask myself what are my favorite examples of philosophical destruction, the answer comes back: Frege’s criticism of Mill’s theory of numbers, and Leibniz’s criticism of Locke’s theory of ideas. And who could not love Chomsky’s demolition of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (though this is not strictly philosophy)? These all contributed massively to human thought.

    [4] Of course, there is a psychology and sociology of intellectual destruction in academic culture that can only be described as deplorable. I cannot even bring myself to discuss this lamentable subject. Its chief defect is confusion(the harshest word in my vocabulary). 

 

 

Existence and the Variable

 

We are all familiar with Quine’s meme-like dictum, “To be is to be the value of a variable”, with its repetition of “to be” (redolent of Hamlet) and its hypnotic alliteration over “v”. We descend from the commanding heights of Being to the arid lowlands of the logical formula, savoring the exciting bathos (there is such a thing): is that all that being comes to? We have been handed the key to penetrating the obscurities of existence: just attend to the mechanics of quantification—the bound variable in its pristine rigor, its sleek minimalism. But is the view plausible? Is this a convincing analysis of the concept of existence? Methinks it not to be, Horatio: its charms are illusory, its promise empty. Existence is not to be elucidated by the variable.

Point number one: the dictum locates existence in a meta-linguistic fact—the having of a value by a variable. The value is an object, the variable a sign, typically an x or y (excuse my use-mention sloppiness). The object is assigned to the sign, in an act of momentary reference, the latter “ranging over” the former. It is like reference proper; and indeed we can conjure an alternative dictum as follows: To be is to be the reference of a singular term. That proposal too is meta-linguistic in form: it locates existence in a fact about language—the having of reference by a singular term. Both theories make existence depend on language: no words no existence. But that is clearly wrong: being is not hostage to speaking. Things can exist without signs existing—for example, the Sun existed long before symbols did. The Sun looks at the Earth and wonders how its existence could depend on what is going on linguistically on that planet’s surface. The variable, remember, is really just a smartened up pronoun: and the Sun does not owe its existence to the activities of pronouns. Intuitively, variables (pronouns, singular terms) are extrinsic to existential facts; they don’t inhabit the same space as the existent entities they distantly designate. Variables didn’t come along with the Big Bang; they are not inherent in being.

            Point two: the value of a variable needs to exist if it is to suffice for the existence of objects. It is no use ranging lustily over fictional entities, fantasies, and fairies; the assigned value must be an existent value. You will not bring the Sun into existence by assigning a nonexistent star to the variable x in “For some x, x is a star that lights up the Earth”; nor will you magic unicorns into existence by allowing them to operate as values of variables. Thus the dictum must read, “To be is to be the existent value of a variable”. Similarly for the variable itself: it too must not be merely fictional. So we must be understood to mean: existence consists in an existent object being the value of an existent variable. A double circularity therefore lurks within Quine’s dictum, just waiting to sprout an infinite regress. For how are we to analyze the existence of variables (letters of the alphabet) except by declaring them values of other variables? Variables ranging over variables are our only recourse–and so on till the variables comprise an infinite list. We can’t analyze the existence of one thing by invoking the existence of another thing that calls for the same analysis.

            Point three: which variable is it that existence consists in? There are many variables—in practice arbitrarily limited to x, y, and z. Does the existence of the Sun depend upon one of these letters but not the others? That seems arbitrary: why choose x and not y? Indeed, why limit ourselves to the conventions of logic texts, or English pronouns? Perhaps the Sun depends for its existence on x, the Earth on y, and Pluto on (say) r. This is like saying that Venus depends for its existence on the name “Hesperus” but not the name “Phosphorus”. This is nonsense: existence is the same thing no matter how the existent object is designated. Variables are conventional, unlike existence itself. This is what comes of trying to tie existence to language: all the conventionality and arbitrariness of language infects existence itself. If existence is meta-linguistic, then it must inherit the properties of human languages; but it resolutely shuns those properties. To be is not to be conventionally designated thus and so.

            A final point: presumably the sentences in which the variables occur must be true in order for existence to be assured. So Quine’s dictum must be expanded to assert that existence is equivalent to the truth of a sentence containing a bound variable. But then we are analyzing existence by means of truth: is that what we really want? Not that truth is somehow suspect or tacitly committed to existence, but it does seem extrinsic to existence as such. Truth belongs with the proposition, but existence is pre-propositional—a matter of reality in its primordial form. We would not wish to analyze being red, say, by invoking the truth of certain sentences (for an object to be red is for the sentence “This is red” to be true), so why do that for existence? Keep language out of it: eschew (another Quinean word) linguistic idealism! Existence as such has nothing intrinsically to do with variables and their values, pronouns and their denotations, or singular terms and their references; existence is what reality gets up to when left to its own devices. The variable is no doubt a fine invention, a valuable device of (formal) language, but let’s not confuse it with basic non-linguistic being. To be is to be completely independent of the variable and its values.  [1]

 

  [1] Similarly, not to be is independent of a variable lacking a value. Hamlet would never have said, “To be the value of a variable or not to be the value of a variable, that is the question”: that is not the question. The word “exists” simply doesn’t mean, “to be the value of a variable”.

 

 

Behavior

 

We are familiar with the doctrine of behaviorism and with the phrase “behavioral science”, but we are left in the dark about what exactly behavior is. What does it mean to say that the mind is reducible to behavior or that psychology is the study of behavior? One possible answer is that behavior is motion of the body: the body moves like other physical objects and behavior is simply that motion. But this is clearly wrong: the body moves with the earth’s rotation but that isn’t behavior, and a body can be knocked over without that counting as behavior. In addition, psychology could hardly be the study of the body’s motions, since that is already covered by physics—the laws of motion apply to human and animal bodies too. If behavior has anything to do with motion, it must be a more restricted type of motion than that. The natural next thought is that behavior is purposive motion: behavior belongs with action and conduct, both of which imply purpose. The OED defines “action” as “the process of doing something to achieve an aim”, and “behave” as “act or conduct oneself in a specified way”. So action and behavior are goal-directed (“conduct” gets defined as “the manner in which a person behaves”). This accords with ordinary conceptions: we speak of a person behaving loyally, ethically, selfishly, gracefully, greedily, etc. These adverbs all connote purpose, generally motive. They are psychologically tinged, not purely “physical”. All behavior is mind involving: action as it springs from psychological traits or states or processes. This already tells us that behaviorism cannot be a variety of reductive materialism, since the very concept of behavior includes psychological factors. But it still leaves us ignorant of what behavior actually is: is it perhaps something mental expressing itself in the body’s movement? What exactly is the relationship between behavior and movement?

            This is actually an obscure matter, which is perhaps why it is seldom explored. If a person generally behaves thoughtfully, is this always correlated with a certain type of bodily movement? Apparently not, since many types of movement can be deemed thoughtful. It seems reasonable to understand the relation as like what is called “multiple realization”: each episode of movement “realizes” the behavioral type behaving thoughtfully. We can think of the agent as selecting a given type of bodily movement in order to achieve his or her thoughtful aims (likewise, greedy, ethical, loyal, etc.). There is no one type of movement that corresponds to the behavioral type in question. So clearly no reduction of the latter to the former is going to be possible. But still, what then is the behavioral type? It appears to be a higher-order type involving quantification over movement types: behavior is that property of agents that involves a specific aim and which is such that some movement type realizes it. If I behave greedily, I am such that my greedy aim is realized in a specific (though variable) type of bodily movement. The behavior type is thus more abstract than the particular type of movement that realizes it, more tied to its guiding motive. It is like an action plan rather than a specific occurrence, a schema not a concrete event. A well-behaved person is someone whose actions conform to a certain abstract schema—not someone whose body moves in specific ways. If I behave loyally, I conform my movements to a certain principle or ideal or recipe—but what those movements are physically is as may be. I could behave loyally while lying paralyzed in bed so long as I fulfilled certain aims; I might not even be able to blink, but I could still make the right decisions (perhaps conveyed by a brain scanner). You can behave well without even moving your body (thus omissions count as behavior). A person might get out of jail from “good behavior” without ever moving his body in a helpful manner. But generally, there is bodily movement—though not of a fixed type. Movement is more like the means for behaving, whether well or badly; it is not identical to behavior. The very same movements might be performed by an insentient robot and no behavior would have thereby been evinced. So behavior is both mentally tinged and more abstract than movements of the body. This is why we say that someone behaved generously but not that his body moved generously. It is also why we tell someone to behave herself but not to move her body thus and so (a category mistake). This fits with an interesting feature of the dictionary definition: to behave is to “conduct oneself in a specified way”. It is not for one’s body to jerk or twitch or flow or fall—but for one to conduct oneself in a certain way. Behaving is self-conducting—the affinity with a musical conductor is apt. The conductor conducts an orchestra; the agent conducts himself using his own limbs etc. This is the idea of orchestration, control, and purposive order: behaving is conducting oneself so as to achieve a certain aim. And it has a lot to do with social setting: one typically behaves in a certain social context and this requires suiting one’s other-directed movements to one’s aims (like the conductor’s baton). Perhaps the origin of the concept of behavior lies in such social contexts; certainly ideas of comportment, grace, charm, and so on, belong there (behavior towards). This is now a far cry from the project of setting psychology on the road to materialist reduction, but it is what the ordinary concept of behavior actually involves. Behavior as commonly conceived is bound up with good behavior and bad behavior, where this is socially determined; so the concept is normative as well as psychological.    [1] It is no accident that the word “conduct” is the preferred term in legal contexts. Action, conduct, and behavior: all three notions are linked to psychological and normative considerations—and all are ontologically more rarefied than concepts for concrete bodily motions (“his arm went up”, “his lips curled”).

            Is it at all reasonable to suppose that the mind is reducible to behavior as so construed, or that psychology is the science of behavior as so construed? At least such claims are not vulnerable to anti-reductive sentiment: we can’t accuse the behaviorist in this sense of omitting the mind altogether, or of being a type of materialist. That would not be much consolation to the behaviorist motivated by a desire to reduce psychology to the physical sciences, but it might give behaviorism a new lease on life—now it can be claimed that behaviorism is non-reductive and psychologically informed. (Wittgenstein’s flirtations with behaviorism might be understood in this way.) Might the mind be explicable by means of this much richer notion of behavior–the kind of behavior we refer to by such locutions as “behave loyally” or “jolly decent behavior, old chap”? Maybe there was always an element of truth in behaviorism; it’s just that actual behaviorists misunderstood their own most central concept (not the first time that has happened). What if performance actually contains competence? What if courageous behavior logically implies the character trait of courage? What if the whole inner-outer dichotomy is misguided? Maybe the mind really is behavior once we allow behavior to extend beyond the realm of mere movement. However, attractive as that may sound, I think it is a forlorn hope. The reason is that behavior must always contrast with something non-behavioral. The deed may be the beginning, but it needs something else to co-exist with; it can’t be behavior all the way down, or from every angle. Compare biology: within biology we have the field of ethology (“the science of animal behavior”), but that is just one department of the subject. There is also biological history (evolution and ontogenesis), anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and genetics—all separate from the study of the behavior of organisms. In particular, animal behavior must be linked to animal anatomy and physiology: behavior comes along with composition and structure, as well as fine-grained functioning. Similarly, in psychology we must consider psychological history (evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology), the structure and fine-grained functioning of the mind, its basic constituents, and its genetic roots. Psychology would simply be missing out on all this if it confined itself to human ethology. From a philosophical point of view, behavior needs an underlying substrate and structure that serves its functional ends: it cannot be free-floating and self-standing. For example, pain behavior needs to be backed by actual sensations of pain, as assent behavior needs to be backed by actual beliefs. It cannot be that pain and belief are nothing more than the behavior associated with them, even when that behavior is characterized in psychological terms. Even if behavior is thoroughly mentally imbued, it is not the same thing as the mental states that give rise to it. Maybe the mental states intrinsically involve behavior, but still they are not just behavior. It is the same with animal behavior: feeding behavior, for example, is functional and even normative (an animal ought to eat), but feelings of hunger are not the same thing as feeding behavior. Behavior is the mind projected outwards, but the mind is not behavior injected inwards. The right thing to say is that behavior and the mind are part of a complete package; specifically, behavior should not be regarded as mentally neutral. In fact, the whole dichotomy of “mental” and “physical” systematically precludes us from grasping what behavior really is. It is really quite an elusive concept, which we vainly try to squeeze into two categories corresponding to the labels “mental” and “physical”.

            Much the same can be said about another concept favored by the self-styled behaviorists, viz. stimulus. Behavior is said to be elicited by a stimulus, but what is a stimulus exactly? It can’t be a physical impingement considered independently of the psychological subject—a stimulus is only a stimulus for a certain type of organism. The organism must be capable of responding to it in a certain way. The ordinary notion of a stimulus is psychologically imbued (OED, “something that promotes activity, interest, or enthusiasm”)—that is, what we find stimulating. This meaning is what makes us respond intuitively to the technical use of “stimulus”—we know quite well what it is to be stimulated by something outside us. But it turns out that this is not really what is intended (though it is traded upon); instead, the notion hovers uneasily between a purely physical meaning and the ordinary psychologically loaded meaning. In the ordinary and proper sense, a stimulus is something that evokes a psychological reaction—so it is defined by reference to the mind. It cannot, then, figure as part of a reductive definition, or as a plank in the materialist edifice. But it would also be wrong to suppose that its psychological meaning enables it to play a reductive role within the realm of the psychological: for stimuli need minds to stimulate—as behavior needs minds to express. What we have here is a tightly knit package of concepts: stimulus-mind-behavior. The concepts of stimulus and behavioral response are mentally imbued not mentally neutral; they are not physically definable. What counts as a stimulus? Answer: that which elicits a mental response.    [2] What counts as behavior? Answer: that which contributes to achieving an aim. There is no comfort for materialism in any of this. Both concepts have a role to play in psychology, but neither of them is suitable to act as foundational concepts in a science. It is not that behaviorism would have been good materialist science if it were true; the very concept of behavior is unsuited to play the reductive role assigned to it. It is not that it is clear but inadequate; it is unclear and inadequate (except as part of ethology). The concept of behavior, as behaviorists employed it, is an ill-defined concept, a mish-mash of inconsistent elements.    [3]

 

Coli

    [1] Of course it is possible to behave in solitude, even perpetual solitude (Robinson Crusoe), but that is consistent with allowing that the concept of behavior is tied to social relations: we extend it to the solitary case, possibly imagining a potential audience. We don’t call reflex movements or involuntary tics “behavior” precisely because they are not subject to social evaluation (they are not cases of behaving badly). 

    [2] Again, there can be stimuli that elicit non-mental responses, but this is arguably an extension of the ordinary notion of stimulation, which is tied to the mind.

    [3] We can keep on employing the concept of behavior in scientific and vernacular contexts, but we should acknowledge that it is not the concept of something materialistically acceptable. When we speak of economic behavior, say, we are committed to a psychologically loaded concept—and not one that wears its meaning on its face. It is not at all clear what behavior is. Like other psychology concepts an aura of mystery surrounds it.  

 

 

Philosophical Philosophy

 

Philosophy takes place within a social, political, and intellectual context. There is a surrounding culture or environment. Religion, morality, the arts, the sciences, war, peace, a general optimism or pessimism—all these factors impinge on the way philosophy is practiced during a particular historical period. The factors can vary over time, causing philosophy to vary over time (also place). A given period may be preoccupied with rival political systems (ancient Greece in Plato’s time) or with the advent of natural science (seventeenth century Europe) or with the arts and architecture (Renaissance Italy) or with war and religion (early twentieth century Europe) or with populism and social media (today almost everywhere). Philosophy is apt to be shaped by these preoccupations, leading us to suppose that philosophy is historically constituted: it is the intellectual treatment of prevailing cultural formations. Philosophy is the philosophy of this or that (non-philosophical) area of human endeavor, an essentially second-order activity, so that its content is fixed by the prevailing cultural concerns. It is, in a broad sense, political, using that word widely to connote societal movements and developments: it is politically engaged, politically formed. This is not true of other intellectual domains: physics and mathematics, say, are socially detached, apolitical. They have their own separate identity that transcends passing cultural moments; they occur in history but they are not of history. But philosophy, it may be felt, is inherently historical, and hence political in the broad sense. It feeds off history, societal context, and the affairs of the moment. It was different in ancient times and it may be different in the future; it may even be unrecognizable in the distant future. Philosophy is changeable and fluid, without any solid constant core—like literature, or politics itself.

            I think this view is profoundly mistaken, though I understand its appeal. Philosophy consists of a fixed set of core problems that are invariant over time and social context. These problems have a specific identity that is quite independent of political factors. A typical philosophy curriculum gives a fair sense of them: problems of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, mind, language, logic, aesthetics, etc. I need not list these problems—we are familiar with them. They often take the form “What is X?” where X might be causality, time, space, knowledge, justification, the right, consciousness, reference, necessity, beauty, etc. It is notoriously difficult to say what unites these many problems under the heading “philosophy”, but we know it when we see it: the problems strike us as peculiarly intractable, debatable, puzzling, confusing, and fascinating. We call this quality philosophical, as in “That’s a philosophical question” or “Now you are getting philosophical”. The quality does not normally belong to other types of questions—questions that are factual or empirical or straightforwardly answerable. We are reduced to saying that philosophy is like jazz—you know it when you hear it. It is not easy to define the scope of other disciplines either, but at least we have short adjectives that give some sense of what the subject is all about. What is physics about? Well, there are many branches of physics, quite heterogeneous, but we can say (though not very illuminatingly) that they all concern the physical. In psychology, too, we find considerable heterogeneity and many branches, but at least we can say that they all concern the mental—even though that term covers a wide variety of phenomena. But in philosophy we seem stuck with the adjective philosophical, which is especially unhelpful. We know the quality when we see it, but we find it hard to articulate it with any clarity (it is that quality—whatever it is–that gives rise to a certain sort of intellectual cramp or perplexity or bafflement). I don’t think this difficulty undermines the legitimacy of the subject—after all, philosophy includes pretty much every area of human endeavor—but it makes the question of the nature of philosophy hard to answer. We can say that philosophy is concerned with concepts, but that risks misunderstanding and is surely too narrow as it stands—and isn’t psychology also concerned with concepts? In what way is philosophy concerned with concepts, and to what end? What is the nature of its questions, and what method does it use to answer them?    [1] We can reply that it is concerned with concepts philosophically, or that it deals with philosophical questions about concepts, or that it uses the philosophical method to analyze concepts: but this leaves us where we started. It isn’t false to say that philosophy is concerned with concepts—in fact, it is perfectly correct—but it doesn’t give us much to go on. We do better to list the standard philosophical problems and say, “That is what philosophy is”. If you want to know what it is for a question to be philosophical, then acquaint yourself with some philosophical problems: then it will become manifest to you. These problems constitute the subject matter of what we call “philosophy”, and they are independent of time and context. They are self-standing, specific, and timeless. They transcend history.

            How do the problems of philosophy relate to science? I wish to say two things about this: (a) the problems of philosophy are not scientific problems, or pre-scientific problems, and (b) philosophy is itself a science, but of a special sort. With respect to (a) it has often been maintained that philosophy is “continuous with science”—that it does not essentially differ from the accepted sciences. Perhaps it integrates or summarizes the sciences, or perhaps it is just more general but in the same line of business. One often hears it said, particularly by scientists, but not only by them, that the history of philosophy is the history of parts of philosophy splitting off and becoming real sciences—as physics split off from “natural philosophy” to become the science it is, and as psychology is still in the process of doing. This is taken to be a good and necessary thing, as if the splitting off were a step towards intellectual respectability after a shady past. Thus it is assumed that all of philosophy will eventually metamorphose into science, and that what does not achieve this happy transition will be left to wither in peace. I think this view is completely wrong: philosophy is not continuous with science and its history is not a process of peeling off to become science. For philosophy consists of a distinctive set of peculiarly philosophical problems that are independent of cultural context, which includes science. The problem of skepticism, say, is not a scientific problem, and will never become one; nor is the mind-body problem a scientific problem; nor are the problems of ethics; and so on. Philosophy is just a different kind of subject—being concerned with problems of a philosophicalnature. It characteristically wants to know what something is (essentially is), or how a problematic phenomenon is possible (consciousness, free will, a priori knowledge), or how one thing is consistent with another (knowledge with fallibility, contingency with determinism, emergence with novelty). In a very broad sense, philosophy is concerned with logical questions—questions of definition, essence, entailment, and how things fit coherently together. It is about constructing a logically satisfying worldview. It aims to make things rationally intelligible (as opposed to discovering particular facts). It uses reason to make sense of things, and reason is an exercise of the logical faculties (not the sensory faculties). Philosophy is about the logical structure of reality.

            Regarding philosophy in this way, as a logical enterprise, opens the door for a salutary extension of the word “science”. Philosophy is a science—a logical science, a formal science. I like to call it “ontical science” by analogy with “physical science”: it is the general science of being. It is the science of what things essentially are, what their constitutive nature is; this is why definition looms so large in philosophy. What exactly is knowledge, free will, consciousness, moral goodness, necessity, causation, beauty, truth, the self, rationality, and so on? Philosophy approaches such questions in a scientific spirit, employing reason, careful reflection, logical deduction, and theory construction. It is not poetry or mysticism or propaganda or politics. Its results are checkable, rationally debatable, and intended to state the objective truth. One of its methods is the thought experiment—imagining possible states of affairs and asking how a given concept would apply in them. This is a genuine type of experiment—a procedure in which the outcome is not prejudged and which can be repeated by others. For example, imagine a situation in which someone has a true belief but no justification for that belief: does this person have knowledge? We can perform such experiments and obtain inter-subjectively verifiable results (which is not to say they are infallible—but what experiment is?). They can even be described as “empirical” in the sense that we can learn from the experience of performing them. I have discussed this in detail elsewhere and will not repeat what I have already said.    [2] The key (and encouraging) point is that there is nothing to prevent us from describing philosophy as a science, though a science with its own distinctive character. It is a science in its own right and will not devolve into another type of science: it is a sui generis science. Just as the formal science of mathematics will never turn into physics or psychology, so the “ontical science” of philosophy will never turn into any other science. Its problems are what they are and not some other thing. Thus we can say that the ahistorical subject of philosophy—that core of timeless philosophical problems—is a science in its own right. It is not “continuous” with other sciences in the sense of being just like them, or parasitic on them; rather, it is a science that belongs alongside the other sciences, an equal member of the club. We have the sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology—and philosophy. Philosophy is “being-in-general science” (an Aristotelian conception).

            To describe philosophy as a science raises expectations of progress analogous to the progress obtained by the other sciences. But does philosophy make this kind of progress? Doesn’t its lack of comparable progress undermine its title to quality as a science? My reply is that these expectations are prompted more by conversational implicature than by logical (semantic) implication. Strictly speaking, the question of scientific status and the question of scientific progress are logically independent: the former does not entail the latter. Non-science can make progress and science can fail to make progress. You can make progress writing a novel or a biography without those things being forms of science, and some parts of science can be mired in controversy and resistant to progress  (quantum theory, the origin of life, the psychology of creativity). Some sciences are simply more difficult than others; it is really a complete fluke that astronomy has made the progress it has (fortunately light travels very fast and preserves information). The question is controversial but I would say that philosophy has made impressive progress over the last 2,000 years, though large parts of it have not made the kind of progress we see in the other sciences. The reasons for this are debatable, but I think we can agree that central philosophical problems have not yielded to solution in the way many scientific problems have. One possible view is that philosophy bumps up against the limits of human intelligence—that it consists of “mysteries” not “problems”.    [3] In philosophy we are mapping the outer limits of our intellectual capacity, which must be finite and specific if we are evolved creatures with limited brains (like all other creatures on earth). We are using our science-forming capacities to do philosophy, as we do in the other sciences (empirical and formal), but these capacities have their necessary inbuilt limits—and philosophical problems tax these limits. This is no detriment to the idea that philosophy is a type of science; it is just an especially difficult type of science. If we imagine beings intellectually inferior to us trying to do physics, we can envisage that they are recognizably capable of scientific thought but their talents do not match our own—maybe they can get as far as Newtonian physics but then their brain engine runs out of gas. Just so there might be beings that can handle philosophical problems better than we can, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t really doing philosophy. Progress is a matter of contingent intellectual capacity; being a science is a matter of the intrinsic nature of the questions. Philosophy, considered as a set of questions, qualifies as a science, even though our capacities in doing it are less than stellar.  Or maybe every possible thinker would stumble over philosophical questions, given their intrinsic character; but that would just show that philosophy is a very difficult science. After all, Newton’s intellect was defeated by the nature of the gravitational force, as he admitted, but that doesn’t mean Newtonian physics isn’t really science. In fact, I would say that nearly all science is confronted by deep mysteries, some possibly terminal, but they can still describe themselves as science. Not all science is successful science.

            Philosophy is particularly concerned to get clear about things, so clarification is a central part of its mandate. It tries to make sense of things by clarifying them. It aims to render the world intelligible. The italicized words here are all redolent of language: words can be clarified, sentences can make sense (or not), and language is intelligible (though not always). This suggests that meaning is central to the philosophical enterprise: the philosopher is a student of meaning. We can understand this in two ways: the meaning of life, and the meaning of language. Both have been thought to come within the purview of philosophy, and properly so. It has even been maintained that philosophy is exclusively concerned with linguistic meaning–that its sole job is to clarify the meaning of words and sentences. “What does it all mean?” might be thought to encapsulate the philosophical quest.    [4] The narrow interpretation of this is that philosophy asks what words mean. This is not as narrow as it doubtless sounds, since word meaning brings in extra-linguistic reality, but so formulated the question leaves a lot out. I want to suggest, however, that it captures the essence of the matter: for philosophy is certainly concerned with intelligibility—though not only of language. Philosophy is concerned with the intelligibility of the world. It tries to make intelligible sense of the world by clarifying it. We want, for example, to understand the nature of causation (the thing not the word), so we try to clarify what it involves; perhaps it appears unintelligible to us and we need to restore it to intelligibility (as some have thought regarding causal necessity). We want to clarify its logic (essence, nature) so that it can meet our standards of intelligibility. We can do this by analyzing the word, or we can focus on the thing itself and try to discern its intelligible nature. Either way we are trying to achieve clarity by demonstrating intelligibility. The human mind wants to make sense of things, and philosophy is the tool for achieving this. So philosophy is a sense-making science—a science that aims at clarification, at rendering things intelligible. Sometimes it fails—as with rendering the mind-brain nexus intelligible, or the nature of free action, or a prioriknowledge. Sometimes it delivers respectable results: the analysis of definite descriptions, modal logic, and the nature of the good (though all three areas are not without controversy). The science of philosophy makes progress in matters of clarification; it increases the intelligibility of things. But even when it doesn’t succeed that is its ideal—it is intelligibility-oriented. Language is one domain in which the project of clarification can be applied; our conceptual scheme is another; and the world in general is a third area of potential clarification. Total clarity is the aim of every philosopher (or should be).

One particularly sharp way in which questions of intelligibility come up is in the shape of the logical paradoxes. These are peculiar to philosophy and vividly illustrate its essential character: philosophy generates them and then it tries to solve them. Philosophy is a paradox-obsessed subject. There are many such: Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, the Sorities paradox concerning vagueness, Russell’s class paradox, the semantic paradoxes, and others. In addition to these we have assorted “puzzles”—kinks in our thinking that resist easy resolution. Many papers begin “The Puzzle of…” Both paradoxes and puzzles threaten intelligibility: they make seemingly straightforward things into confusing and confounding things. To resolve them some clarification is required, but this is not always forthcoming—they can be infuriatingly persistent (puzzlingly so). When paradoxes spread (as with the Sorities paradox) they threaten to undermine the intelligibility of everything. They are the nightmare of reason, and they are particularly disturbing to philosophers: for they threaten to undermine reason from within. What this shows from a meta-philosophical perspective is that philosophy is in the business of securing intelligibility, which is a none too easy thing to do. We don’t even understand how paradoxes arise: is it from our language or our thought or the objective world? And the last thing a philosopher wants is to discover paradox at the heart of his favorite theory (as with Frege’s set-theoretic reconstruction of arithmetic). Paradox is the ultimate philosophical embarrassment.

Philosophy is also a subject of extreme contrasts, and this too is part of its identity. The disagreements within philosophy are vast: idealism versus materialism, Platonism versus nominalism, consequentialism versus deontology, dualism versus monism, realism versus anti-realism, reductionism versus anti-reductionism. These are not just disagreements of detail but of fundamentals. There are even disagreements about whether whole swathes of reality really exist: do minds really exist, do bodies really exist, do moral values really exist? If philosophy is a science, it is a remarkably contentious one. But again, though this certainly sets philosophy apart from other subjects, it is just part of the very nature of philosophical questions: for these questions precisely concern the most fundamental issues about the nature of reality. If a subject sets out to deal with such fundamental questions, we should expect large disagreements to show up—that is just what philosophy is. It isn’t that philosophers as a group are particularly argumentative or stubborn or dim-witted; it is just that the questions inevitably produce these kinds of extreme opposition. That is what philosophy is about—it is the science of deep disagreement. It thrives on lack of consensus. Scientists are sometimes critical of the lack of consensus in philosophy compared to their own fields, but really there is nothing at all surprising here—philosophy is designed to produce deep differences of opinion. This is part of what makes it alive and exciting. It would be terrible—the end of philosophy—if a dull uniformity were to set in. In any case, consensus is not the hallmark of anything deserving the name “science”. What matters are rational methods, objective criteria of cogency, clarity of formulation, and standards of quality.    [5]

Can philosophy ever come to an end? What would its end state look like? I think other subjects can, in principle, come to an end, and probably will before humans do. The sciences can end in one of two ways: all the problems are eventually solved, or some are not solved but never will be (at least by humans). There are only so many facts to discover, laws to state, and theories to be confirmed. But I think this is less clear for philosophical science: here it is not clear what the end state would look like. Can we imagine everyone deciding that materialism is true, say, and simply abandoning all other metaphysical theories as so much outmoded philosophical detritus? What could possibly lead to that result? It is not as if any new observations might be made that would settle the matter in favor of materialism. Or could it be settled once and for all whether consequentialism or deontology is the correct moral theory? Such debates seem internal to philosophy, part of what philosophy is. By contrast, disagreements in physics are hardly internal to it: they typically arise from lack of data or failure of theoretical imagination (or are really philosophical in nature). Neither of those diagnoses would seem to apply to philosophical disagreement. If anything could put an end to philosophy, it seems to be beyond our imagination—a literally inconceivable intellectual revolution. We don’t know what it would be for philosophy to end. Neither can we imagine the problems of philosophy being replaced by other problems hitherto unknown to the philosophical tradition: it couldn’t be that all our current philosophical problems are solved but news ones arise to take their place. What could these be? We have a pretty solid grasp of what the problems of philosophy are; it is hard to see how we could have missed a whole range of new problems. So our current problems are the ones that will stay in existence as the centuries pass by, probably never to receive definitive solution (short of a superhuman stroke of genius or a cerebral upgrade of some remarkable sort). Progress will no doubt be made on these problems, as it has been made in the past, but the idea of an end to philosophy seems impossible to fathom. Philosophy is really a very peculiar subject, quite unlike other subjects; the last thing we should do is to try to squeeze it into some other box. And its problems are what make it what it is, these problems having a unique character (“philosophical”). It may be rightly classified as a science (why not so classify it?), but that is not to say much about its inherent nature. Philosophy is about as puzzling as the problems it deals with. Meta-philosophy is as difficult as philosophy, because it is just another department of philosophy.    [6]

 

    [1] I discuss philosophy as conceptual analysis in Truth by Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2012).

    [2] See “The Science of Philosophy” in Metaphilosophy (Volume 45, Issue 1, January 2015).

    [3] I discuss this in Problems in Philosophy (Basil Blackwell, 1993).

    [4] This in in fact the title of a book by Thomas Nagel intended as an introduction to philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1987).

    [5] The OED gives two definitions of “science”: “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment”, and “a systematically organized body of knowledge on any subject”. Philosophy clearly qualifies under the second definition, but it arguably qualifies under the first definition too, once we allow for thought experiments and are not too restrictive about “observation”. For “observe” the dictionary gives “notice; perceive” and “detect in the course of a scientific study”: at a pinch we can make philosophical method fall under these definitions, since it may involve noticing certain things about concepts (or words) and it detects truths in its own way (sometimes called, misleadingly, “intuition”). Thus the philosopher may be said to “observe” (notice, perceive), for example, that knowledge is not just true belief. The operative terms in the dictionary definition are “systematic study” and “systematically organized”: rigor and system are the hallmarks of science. Academic philosophy qualifies; barroom chat does not.

    [6] Discussions of the nature of philosophy are often tacitly normative: the author is recommending a particular approach to the subject rather than simply describing its actual content. I intend my remarks here to be descriptive: this is the nature of philosophy as it has actually been practiced—though I daresay many people will contest my conception of philosophy. I certainly don’t think it is an easy question to answer.