Folk Philosophy
Folk Philosophy
Is there such a thing as folk philosophy? We have heard of folk physics and folk psychology, but does philosophy have a folk version? Is there a determinate philosophy held by ordinary blokes (and blokettes)? Such a philosophy would have to be common to all (normal) human beings, part of human nature, possibly innately fixed. It would have to be ancient and indeed prehistoric—certainly not a result of formal education. People since antiquity might well share certain beliefs about the world, but would that count as a philosophy? They all believe in space and time, earth and sky, minds and bodies, right and wrong—but do they have a philosophy of these things? It has been supposed that they do: G.E. Moore believed in something called commonsense philosophy and P.F. Strawson believed in “descriptive metaphysics” (i.e., a study of a universal human system of metaphysical beliefs about reality).[1] If there were a folk philosophy in this sense, it would presumably cover the basic areas of academic philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, etc. Theories within academic philosophy could agree or disagree with the philosophy of the folk (“bloke philosophy”), so they could be complacent or revisionary (to use Strawson’s term): you could be a commonsense philosopher, sticking with what you have always believed as a human being, or you could be an anti-commonsense philosopher, out to correct the philosophical mob (“bespoke philosophy”). It would be like folk physics and folk psychology: you might insist that the folk are right about the physical and psychological worlds, or you might accuse them of error in the light of modern science (then you are a revisionary physicist or psychologist). You might applaud the folk bloke or you might condemn him (conceivably you might have a different “feminist” attitude toward folk blokette philosophy). For example, you might hold that the folk believe in naïve realism about perception, accept materialism about ordinary objects, and reject skepticism about our knowledge of the external world. Depending on your academic philosophical views, you would then either congratulate the folk or criticize them. What you would not do is deny that they have a philosophical opinion—an opinion about what is true philosophically. You would suppose that everyone is a philosopher at heart, as everyone is a budding (if fallible) physicist or psychologist at heart. Philosophical views are thus thought to be natural to us, part of being human (unlike other animals).
I think this view is false: the folk don’t philosophize, whether they be ladies or gentlemen. There is no such thing as folk philosophy or commonsense philosophy or “descriptive philosophy”. Thus, there is no such thing as revisionary philosophy (corrective, critical) if that means taking a negative stand against what the folk believe philosophically. There is no such thing as the “metaphysics of the stone age”, right or wrong—or the epistemology or moral philosophy of the stone age. No philosophical theory is either accepted or rejected by the unwashed mob, nor even by the refined aristocracy (kings and queens have no philosophy, unless instructed in it or are unusually academically inclined). The simplest way to see this is to consider animals and children: surely no dog or ape or strapping toddler believes any particular philosophical doctrine; no philosophical proposition enters their bright and breezy little minds. No lively preschooler is a naive realist about perception or a materialist about the external world. Here you might suavely protest my confidence: “But surely, my good man, even beasts and babes believe that objects continue in existence when you are no longer perceiving them—they are instinctual realists” (at this point the protestor looks around the room expecting to see a sea of nods). But this is completely wrongheaded (the nods are few and far between), because that commonsense observation does not demonstrate adherence to a recognizable philosophical theory; for it is quite compatible with Berkeleyan idealism. There is no commitment here to the materialism opposed by the resourceful bishop of Cloyne, or implicit rejection of his idealist alternative (the idea of a table persists in the mind of God). The cited belief is not a philosophical belief; it is neutral between metaphysical theories. Similarly, a belief in human fallibility is not an acceptance of the skeptical philosophy; nor is moral judgement the acceptance of a particular normative philosophical theory (say, utilitarianism or deontology). All that is at a different level—the meta level, we might say. Beasts, babes, and rednecks (I mean no disrespect) don’t dabble in philosophical theories and arguments; they just get on with life. Philosophy is for us nerds.
The point is not that your average tinker or tailor is never a freelance philosopher—he may well be of that turn of mind—but rather that he is not one simply in virtue of being a normal human. Everyone thinks about things that are of interest to professional philosophers (bodies, minds), but that does not imply that everyone thinks philosophically about these things. The folk may even think about things in a way that is relevant to philosophers, but that doesn’t make them philosophers either. The regular old cove down at the pub is simply not thinking about philosophy as he drinks his pint (or at any other time), any more than untutored stargazers are doing astronomy. Philosophy is not in the human genotype and not in the human environment either; it isn’t part of universal folk cognition. It arises from other sources. Just so, ordinary speakers are not closet scientific linguists consciously equipped with this or that linguistic theory (say, late Chomsky or early Chomsky); there is no folk linguistics (why should there be?). The fact is that the physical environment and the psychological environment present practical challenges to the imperiled member of Homo sapiens, but the “philosophical environment” presents no such challenge; you can live a perfectly healthy life and not give philosophy a second thought (I am talking about survival and reproduction). There are pressing reasons why folk physics and folk psychology exist (also folk chemistry), but they don’t go over to some supposed folk philosophy. No philosophy is “common sense” in the sense philosophers have intended by that phrase. Nor is there such a thing as folk neurophysiology or folk renaissance literature or folk Latin. These are all specialist studies not universal human competences. They aren’t part of general human biology. There is no philosophy instinct shared by all members of the human species: that is, there is no set of philosophical doctrines installed in us by our genes or our environment.
There is no natural ontogeny to philosophy either. Children don’t go through a dualist phase which they grow out of by age 8. They do go through developmental phases in their understanding of the physical world and other minds, but they don’t exhibit a maturational sequence in their grasp of philosophy (ditto astronomy and renaissance literature). So, let’s not overdo the whole mental module thing; some of the human mind is notmodular and not pre-programmed. Maybe in Vulcans philosophy has its own genetically fixed module with a specific set of beliefs built in: but we are not Vulcans. Philosophy arises in us from mysterious human capacities for reflective thought, probably triggered by conceptual snarl-ups and puzzling experiences (dreams, ethical dilemmas), and no doubt from matters of intellectual taste. There is no philosophy gene or philosophical environmental niche. I think people have supposed that there is such a thing as commonsense philosophy, or such a subject as descriptive metaphysics (describing the human conceptual scheme in its philosophical part) because they confuse general principles with philosophical propositions—as with the example of the persistence of unperceived objects. The whole idea of ordinary language philosophy really rests on the myth of commonsense philosophy, the thought being that such a philosophy must have withstood the test of time (or come from the hand of God); but if there is no such thing, then ordinary language contains no philosophical tenets or tendencies. It may furnish data for philosophy but not doctrines. There is no philosophical knowledge embedded in common sense or in ordinary language. Nor, by the same token, is there any philosophical error embedded in it, so no revision of such error is necessary. Ordinary language is all right as it is, philosophically, though it may not be all right ethically or politically or astronomically. Philosophical theories belong to philosophers not regular chaps and chappesses.[2]
[1] See my “Is Descriptive Metaphysics Possible?” for background to this paper.
[2] They may also belong to religions, but again these are not part of commonsense as understood by philosophers (e.g., the belief in immortality). For the record, I don’t think that common sense believes in free will as a philosophical doctrine; it just believes that people are often free to do as they please (they are not confined or in jail or some such). The folk have no view about whether or not this is compatible with determinism or whether there are other viable notions of freedom. Of course, it is quite possible for ordinary non-philosophical people to become philosophers relatively quickly; the intellectual ability was present all along. It is just that there is no philosophical doctrine embedded in what they ordinarily believe. They don’t have philosophical beliefs. Philosophy belongs in the classroom not in the billiard hall (or on the tundra).
“Such a philosophy would have to be common to all” is your starting assumption.
But – that not being apparent seems to be evidence of there not being a folk philosophy (forgive my complacence).
There are however, folk philosophies that different people hold to.
Some believe in an afterlife, some are atheists, others deists
Some say that we have free will, others are determinists.
Also if some are not philosophisers , that doesn’t exclude the fact that others are.
I asked a friend if I should accept an offer for a CD I was selling on eBay, or to ask for another 50p. She pointed out that I can’t even buy a chocolate bar for that 50p anymore
So we have innate philosophies of economics, decision theory, etc…
(The CD is still for sale, as my increased offer wasn’t accepted) .
The philosophical use of the idea of commonsense philosophy (Moore and Strawson) requires universality; you are talking about the vernacular use of “philosophy”, which is completely irrelevant.
well, you have brought folk psychology as an analogy, and folk psychology is not universal either.
But it is as psychologists understand it–an innate system of principles about belief and desire, basically. Same as folk physics. In philosophy it has to be universal because it is supposed to be a source of philosophical truth.
I was going to give an example of folk epistemology –
In England, people would often say “don’t believe everything you read in the papers” .
Not sure if it is innate, rather than local tradition.
Surely not innate, like “Look before you leap”.
I’m going to suggest something a bit risky, because I don’t know the answer. However, I have just read another of your reviews, on Searle’s Making the Social world – with his rejoinder, and then yours. Part of the debate there is how or why our brains create a social ontology, eg money, presidents, marriage, influencers etc. What he is saying, implies some sort of.. “innate” social ontology, which is akin to the folk philosophy under discussion here. I anticipate you will show that this is not the case, or that maybe there is some possibility of it fitting in..
I don’t understand this.
I have to work on presenting the argument in a better fashion… Gimme a few days
The article discusses the possibility of a folk or common sense philosophy, where regular people have some kind of grass roots descriptive theory about the world. There are then added certain qualifiers, namely, that these philosophical tendencies need to be innate and universal. That doesn’t mean they have to agree, but that we all have this tendency to philosophise.
I would propose some objections to this argument.
If look at the examples of a common thug or criminal. They would have some theory of risk and probability – the risk of being caught in robbing a shop or snatching a phone. They tend to modify their activities according to their perception of risk v reward. That means they have developed a theory of probability, risk, decision making etc.
An amateur footballer I knew was telling me about knowing when to foul an opponent, when you are out of the field of vision of the referee and linesmen. It is a philosophy, however crude it may be.
In the predecessor paper, “Is Descriptive Metaphysics Possible? , Dr McGinn discusses at great lengths the flaws in Strawson’s conception of Descriptive Metaphysics (DM). One of the arguments is that common sense metaphysics or philosophy does not deal with causality of counterfactuals for example. However, my plumber recently had to determine why I am not getting heat in some of my radiators. He had to determine the cause of the problem, if it was the pump or another part of the system, such as trapped air. He then said he would bleed the air out of the system and if this did not cure the problem, it would most likely need a replacement pump. So we have plumber who was quite smart, using counterfactuals as a heuristic for determining causality.
I mentioned the work of Searle – “Making the Social World”, which along with its predecessor “The Construction of Social Reality” proposes that we create various social institutions, which are very real, e.g. money is real, as is a policeman, an opera, or an exam committee that marks my finals. The direction of these creations is prescriptive, i.e. humans society creates their structure. There is good debate between philosophers of their exact mechanism. However, for lay people, they are also descriptive, i.e. I see a sign with the number 20 inside a red circle, and it is quite universal that I can/ or do not drive faster than 20 mph in road.
I am arguing that there are common sense philosophies of kinds, perhaps not strictly according to Strawson, but the general population engages with them, on some level, even if the most basic.
In his review of Searle’s “Making the Social world” , Colin writes:
“It is not that pushing the beers cannot be a speech act; it is that such an act need not be a speech act—yet it can establish property rights. Speech acts require complex communicative intentions (as H.P. Grice pointed out long ago), but not all intentional actions are speech acts. My point was that acts without such communicative intentions, such as pushing the beers across the table when you have no such intentions, can be enough to provide evidence of the agent’s wishes—which then confer property rights (“He wants me to have this beer”)”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/02/24/just-thinking-enough/
This comment is suggesting that even unspoken acts, such as passing beer, is predicated on a folk philosophy of transfer of ownership. It may not be the Strawsonian model, but in as far as there are philosophies of many disciplines, eg science, technology, economics, there are folk philosophies in every acts.
You have made a creditable effort here, but you are still not talking about philosophy in the sense philosophers have in mind. You need to be talking about idealism versus realism, dualism versus materialism, brains in a vat and skepticism, causation as constant conjunction or necessary connection, etc. No non-philosopher talks this way or thinks in these terms.
Thank you
It’s a complicated piece, and I’m still working on sharpening my analytical skills
Focus on the question of whether common sense believes in realism about physical objects or idealism.
The requirement of folk philosophy to be a complete replica of professional philosophy is an oxymoron.
The move eg from digital music to (extortionately priced) vinyl is not realism, it is out of nostalgia. But it is also about having something physical to touch rather than just digital memory on a hard drive or streamer
There are vestiges of philosophy rather than full analyses and symposia
It’s more that some philosophers have hoped to find universal philosophical truth in common sense untutored by philosophy.
Is religion natural or if not natural then universal and is religion what preceded philosophy? And a certain kind of linguist maps out some ur-language; can we detect a folk philosophy in the primordial language or languages? Perhaps you have an answer, but it had something to do with bodies and with spirit and natural objects or animals; what kind of philosophy would humans stuck with such a language possess or sport?