My Honest Views II
My Honest Views II
I see that my innocuous post “My Honest Views” has rubbed some people up the wrong way. I confess I find this very amusing. Clearly, my little poem was meant as partly tongue-in-cheek and set to trap the unwary reader (I made a large catch). I notice that people don’t seem to object to the truth of my remarks, only to the person they think is making them—all about my “arrogance” etc. Who cares if I am arrogant—what skin is it off your nose? I confess too that I had been reading a lot of (and about) Nabokov lately, whose scathing views on hallowed writers were notorious and sometimes excoriated (but always bracing and largely correct). Also, I like to try out new literary forms of philosophical discourse designed to challenge and provoke. But let’s get boringly factual and prosaically pedestrian (there will be no backing down, I’m afraid). Everyone thought that David Lewis’s views on possible worlds were bonkers, as he explicitly recognized (those “incredulous stares” were genuinely incredulous). Now I don’t mind the consideration of bonkers views in philosophy and I thought his views on the ontology of possible worlds were well worth thinking about (I wrote about them seriously). But come on, really, they were completely bonkers. As to Quine, all the crack logicians (I’m thinking of Saul Kripke in particular) thought Quine was a pretty amateurish mathematical logician (Quine’s theorem anyone?). Outside of that he confined himself to a very narrow strip of philosophy and seemed to have little interest in, or knowledge of, other strips. He wasn’t what you might call a generalist. And his philosophical views were pretty out there and not exactly lucidly defended (I reviewed him once and also wrote about his attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction). Quine basically thought that most traditional philosophy was rubbish, and he said as much (see “Epistemology Naturalized”). He was an unreconstructed positivist and behaviorist. Hardly anyone agreed with him. Now consider Strawson, my dear teacher and friend: a very able and significant philosopher, but baffled by tracts of the subject. When I first met him as a student, he asked me how advanced my formal logic was; I said not very. He smiled broadly and said “Good!” He found that subject difficult (don’t we all?). I don’t believe he ever mastered Tarski’s theory of truth—all the rage in Oxford at the time. I don’t think he had much of a grip on large parts of the philosophy of language and mind, let alone existentialism. Fine, understandable; but a fact. He was no philosophical polymath. Dummett, for his part, knew very little about large areas of contemporary philosophy; I remember him being quite baffled when I brought up Jerry Fodor. And yes, Jerry Fodor: brilliant man, fast as a speeding bullet and just as deadly, but completely deaf to most of philosophy, which he thought was a total waste of time and shouldn’t even be taught. He was a psychologist without a lab. Academics are apt to be narrow, and can be pretty clueless outside of their specializations. And so with the other philosophers I concisely characterized. I’m not seeing the problem that my critics are so up in arms about; they just don’t like me saying it. I wasn’t writing an academic reference for these chaps after all, just giving my own sincere thoughts about them. You got a problem with that? Free speech and all that muck. I even gave an unflattering description of myself in the comments following my post. We all have our blind spots, our philosophical scotomas.[1]
[1] In case you think I am getting soft in my old age, let me add that the comments I have seen have been absolutely ridiculous (and so depressingly American). Why-oh-why do people insist on being so plain dumb? Is thought really that difficult?
I saw some of it. It was all very stupid and based on completely missing the semi-playful or ironic nature of the post. Also, the response is clearly motivated by insecurity. These people would like to continue to feel very smug for occupying an academic post despite the fact that they are objectively extremely mediocre. Your choice words about the leading lights of the discipline reminded them of their meagre abilities. The guy who sent out your blog post made his name in philosophy by writing on the philosophically trivial, culturally salient topic of “moral grandstanding” (the same concept as “virtue signaling” just with a different name).
Perceptive: these people are truly pathetic, but nasty too. Mediocre is the half of it.
It was actually quite good piece, or a very good piece. Even celebrated professors should not be beyond criticism, and there is a difference between this blog and an academic journal.
Even Searle, whom I’m a big fan of, once admitted he doesn’t know any (or much) Aristotle.
It’s more what professionals talk about behind closed doors. I don’t think Searle was much into the history of philosophy, but he did know some science.
on a slightly different note, I just read an exchange you had with Patricia Churchland, in the NYRoB a decade or so ago.
I don’t know much about her, except that she is well referenced in the books I’ve read about Mind. But it’s a great debate…
I’m glad you liked it; I never found her much use philosophically.
> I notice that people don’t seem to object to the truth of my remarks, only to the person they think is making them—all about my “arrogance” etc. Who cares if I am arrogant…
I don’t object to your alleged arrogance (that is not an option open to a fan of Frege), and I’ll accept your disapproval of narrow specializations, but I disagree with “middling,” “amateurish,” and perhaps “dimwit” applied to some of the logicians whose work I know best.
>> all the crack logicians (I’m thinking of Saul Kripke in particular) thought Quine was a pretty amateurish mathematical logician (Quine’s theorem anyone?).
The inconsistency of the first version of Quine’s ML was embarrassingly amateurish, but even though I object to the purer version (New Foundations) from from bottom (his restricted comprehension axiom and the motivation, if any, for it)† to top (bizarre cardinal inequalities), it has spawned interesting theorems by others, and his book using it (_Set Theory and its Logic_) struck me as quite professional, as did “On Frege’s Way Out.”
_ _ _
† See §7.1 of my “Closer Look at the Russell Paradox,” Logique et Analyse 2023.
_ _ _
>> I think Bertrand Russell was only interested in skepticism,
Russell’s works reflect an interest in nearly everything that matters. His main interest was originally “to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.” _A History of Western Philosophy_ is hardly narrow; it earned him a lot of money, and deservedly.
>> I think Michael Dummett was a dimwit outside of his narrow specializations,
If “narrow” is sufficiently broad, does this matter? He examined me wittily on my pseudo-Master’s thesis on Church’s Set Theory with a Universal Set, and lectured well on Frege’s _Grundgesetze_, philosophy of mathematics, voting theory, and even non-magical Tarot cards. His work on racial equality earned him a knighthood.
He was also scrupulous about keeping his religion distinct from his philosophy, so much so that I was unaware of the former until I saw him listed in a book on the subject. (I wish Plato and Descartes had been half as careful.)
>> I think Gottlob Frege was a middling mathematician with no other philosophical interests,
Frege was quite focussed, and, I feel, properly so. It’s not his fault that Sir Michael wrote a big fat book on what for Frege was a regrettable brush-clearing prerequisite (philosophy of language) to his real work, formalizing the foundations of mathematics, in which he achieved more than millennia of predecessors, even though he spent most of the rest of his life in despair. Richard Heck speaks well of the mathematics in the _Grundgesetze_, and the _Begriffsschrift_ taught us what proper rigor is. Frege’s formal proofs are anything but middling compared to virtually all other logic papers written before the advent of automated proof systems, almost none of which can make Frege’s boast:
Wenn etwa jemand etwas fehlerhaft finden sollte, muss er genau
angeben können, wo der Fehler seiner Meinung nach steckt: in den
Grundgesetzen, in den Definitionen, in den Regeln oder ihrer
Anwendung an einer bestimmten Stelle.
(If anyone should believe that there is some fault, then he must be
able to state precisely where, in his view, the error lies: with the basic
laws, with the definitions, or with the rules or a specific application of
them.)
_Grundgesetze der Arithmetik,_ §VII, Ebert & Rossberg translation.
(Thanks to Roger Janeway for pointing out, not completely in vain, excesses in the first draft of the above.)
Well, thank you for this detailed defense, but I don’t think it undermines my point. In the case of Quine, I am simply reporting the opinion of the top logicians (I have no competence to judge myself). He was more highly ranked in philosophy than in logic. He was narrow (and mostly wrong) in philosophy. In the case of Russell, I meant his interests in philosophy not more broadly; it all sprang from an obsession with skepticism (see my recent “Bertrand Russell and Me”). In the case of Dummett, I am reporting my own experiences of the man in Oxford: he was startlingly ignorant of current trends and not troubled by it. Yes, he had other interests, but in philosophy he was quite narrow and not too quick on the uptake (I am thinking of discussions at the so-called “Freddie Group”).
I think your defense of Frege is the most cogent, but here again in the pantheon of great mathematicians I don’t think he is widely celebrated. After all, logicism failed and was never really necessary. He is much more highly rated as a philosopher, rightly so, but not a wide-ranging philosopher. I simply don’t admire these people as general philosophers, though obviously they did good specialized work. Michael Ayers is much more impressive in scope and also depth–also Tom Nagel.
As the rich guy said to the character played by Jack Lemmon at the end of “Some like it hot”, “Nobody’s poifect!”
Not even Frege. In his survey of the evolution of scientific thought, focusing on the conceptual instruments that make it possible, Cassirer (in “Substance and Function”), said in his opening sentence, “The new view that is developing in contemporary philosophy regarding the foundations of theoretical knowledge is manifested nowhere as clearly as in the transformation of the chief doctrines of formal logic.” I’m guessing that he has in mind here mainly the contributions of Frege in his major works, with relation to the expression of thought in the purely formal contexts of logic and mathematics, and subsequent further contributions of people like Peano, Godel, Dedekind, etc. He goes on, in the following paragraphs, to suggest that this development is a significant watershed moment in the history of human thought, including thought about the world. That’s a pretty important contribution. But if you’re looking at Frege’s works with a view to understanding natural language in general and its attempts to make sense of the empirical world, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that he could well have gone further and grappled with these larger questions, but that he was held back by the fact that he was mainly focused on making contributions to the formal sciences, logic and mathematics. In other words, he failed to go on to address problems arising from the differences between formal language practice and the use of natural language in science and daily life, because he was not attuned to the larger context of concerns traditionally addressed by philosophy. For just one example, there’s his bonkers view that the referent of a sentence (actually of the sense of the sentence; this in itself a major breakthrough that even now is not fully appreciated) is a truth value. He comes here to an end of his inquiry, when he could have pushed further and realized that with natural language this idea doesn’t work out. But a solution to this problem is possible. So I say, everybody, especially those working on the larger problems, should get to know philosophy, as much as they can.
Frege was not interested in the general subject of philosophy (apart from in “The Thought”). He was really only interested in philosophy of mathematics.
If you’re suggesting that most of the so-called great philosophers of the last 150 years weren’t all that interested in philosophy, then we may have finally found a point of agreement. But I can’t help but wonder: what makes you think you’re different?
I said they had narrow philosophical interests not no interest. What makes me different is that my interests are a lot broader (see my publications).
Broad interests? That’s like a man, asked whether he loves his wife, replying: “Of course! I love her feet, her ankles, her calves, her knees, etc.” Loving the parts isn’t the same as loving the whole.
What are you talking about? I am interested in philosophy as a whole, obviously. I will not approve any more comments from you at this level.
Well, I asked you why you thought that you (unlike, say, Frege) were genuinely interested in philosophy. In not so many words, you answered that you’re clearly interested in many of its parts (as your publication record shows). To which I replied that an interest in the parts doesn’t necessarily entail an interest in the whole.
But it does if the parts exhaust the whole. Anyway, the question is about relative breadth not exhaustiveness. You are not making a relevant point. Do you know anything about philosophy? If so, what?
Either Harold is retarded or he’s intentionally being a nuisance. I suspect it’s a bit of both.
That’s what it looks like. I won’t approve any more nonsense.