Solutionism

Solutionism

I will define solutionism as the doctrine that all philosophical problems have solutions that are in principle available to us. It is the opposite of mysterianism. It characterizes an attitude or mindset with respect to the problems of philosophy—the solubility attitude or assumption. It deserves to be called an ideology. I can best explain it by way of example; so, let’s return to our beloved bats and their echolocation sense. Suppose we become interested in the abilities of bats and notice that they fly by echolocation. We hypothesize that they have sense experiences rather different from ours that involve echoes of their own shrieks—E-experiences. Intuitively, we regard these as mysterious—we suppose that we can’t (fully) grasp the nature of such E-experiences. They might even be cited by philosophers as examples of natural mysteries (possibly in the course of an argument against materialism). The mysterian philosopher will say that this is a genuine mystery: we just don’t know what it’s like to have E-experiences, adding that we may never know, or even will never know. He might regard this as a necessary truth—we must remain ignorant of such experiences. By contrast, the solutionist philosopher will reject such mysterianism (a mere meme, he will explain) and suggest instead some method by which we can know the nature of E-experiences. This method may vary, depending on the predilections of the solutionist: it may be because the experiences are actually just like our auditory experiences or our visual experiences or a combination of both; or because they are reducible to bat behavior; or because they are nothing but bat brain states; or because there are no such experiences in reality and hence there is nothing to know; or because the whole talk of “what it’s like” is just meaningless babble framing a pseudo-question. There is nothing mysterious about bats, he will insist. Nor, he will add, is there anything in sighted humans that is a mystery to blind people. Alien experiences, so called, are never mysteries; for we always have a solution to the (apparent) problem they pose. The question always has an answer, perhaps because to understand the question you must already be able to understand the answer and have it close to hand. The solutionist is ideologically committed to denying the existence of such alleged mysteries. He might even say that the infinite potential of natural languages guarantees that solutions can always be found. In any case, his attitude—his stance—is clear enough, and clearly distinct from that of the mysterian. If a problem can be formulated, it can be solved.

It is also clear that the solutionist response is unconvincing, indeed obviously false. It is unrealistic ideology. It is a dogma. The only real question is what explains the mystery of E-experiences: is it their intrinsic nature or is it something about us as knowers? It can’t be the former for obvious reasons, so it must be the latter; and clearly it has to do with the fact that we don’t share such experiences with bats. Bats don’t find them mysterious and neither do other echolocating creatures—the mystery is a relative mystery not an absolute mystery. Once this is understood we can generalize the point: it is often true that the experiences of others are mysteries to us; we might even say that the minds of other animals as a whole are mysteries to us, to one degree or another. In fact, other people are often mysterious to us: those of a different sex or a different age or a different culture or are differently motivated. Mystery is everywhere in inter-personal relations, a universal fact of life. I might even be a mystery to myself! Once this is accepted, we can move on to other things that seem mysterious: space and time, the nature of matter, causality, meaning, consciousness, knowledge, human voluntary action. A solutionist might propose a solution for each of these, thus producing a philosophical (or scientific) school: time is clocks, space is matter, matter is extension, causality is constant conjunction, meaning is conditioned response, consciousness is higher-order belief, knowledge is a faint copy of experience, voluntary action is causation by beliefs and desires, etc. Philosophy is full of such solutionist solutions: doctrines that are prompted more by ideology than by intrinsic plausibility—the need to have something to say, however unsatisfactory. The mysterian can live without solutions, preferring realism over forced intelligibility (to himself or humans in general). In truth, he finds the desperate contortions of solutionists somewhat comical. They are in denial, as psychologists say.

And now we reach a psychological question: what is the mindset of the solutionist—where does his solutionism come from? This is where I think we need to apply some tough love, otherwise known as a reality-check. For it is clear that some sort of psychological syndrome is at work here—some sort of phobia, in fact. A solutionist psychology is not a healthy psychology. It is impatient, self-centered, hysterical, narcissistic, unrealistic, needy, panicky, immature, primitive, anthropocentric, and rife with cognitive dissonance reduction. Sorry, but it’s true. It belongs with nyctophobia (fear of the dark), obsessive-compulsive disorder, an urge to control, a pathological reluctance to acknowledge ignorance. Animals don’t suffer from it; they don’t fret over their ignorance of nature, seeking to deny it. They are not constitutional know-it-alls. I speculate that for us it goes back to our childhood fear of the dark: we can’t see what is going on out there in the dark and it troubles us. There may be monsters lurking, prowling predators, waiting to pounce. This is perfectly rational: not being able to see is an obvious handicap. We don’t like the mysterious dark night with those dangerous beasts and sharp obstacles. Imagine living on a planet with no light at all only perpetual darkness! Terrifying. But ignorance is like darkness—dangerous, scary. We prefer the light of knowledge to the dark of ignorance. Thus, we are alarmed by the unknowable—the deep dark sea, outer space, aliens of various stripes, the foreign, black holes. The solutionist would rather accept comforting fictions than face alien facts; he is afraid of mysteries. The inscrutable bat gives him the willies, so he tries to render it familiar, a miniature version of himself perhaps. Better to think of E-experiences as familiar physical stimuli than inner mysteries. Better to think in terms of stereotypes than unfathomable individuals. Better to contemplate clocks than moments of pure time. Better not to think of infinite space at all. Mysteries must be kept at bay at all costs. Mystery-phobia thus leads to reality-underestimation.

This is where religion rears its falsely comforting head: it is solutionism at its most basic. Nature strikes early man as full of mysteries that threaten his well-being; he solves these problems with a religious theory. The sun is a god, etc. This takes the form of rampant anthropomorphism, which promises to relieve the fear and frustration of unknowing. It enables our ancestors to predict the future, to tell us what happens after death, to placate hostile forces. Religion is anti-mysterian in inspiration, if not in practice. Solutionist philosophers are like primitive religionists—desperate to find some sort of answer to life’s mysteries (maybe bats are the pets of the gods). We all have this tendency within us, tracing back to ancient times; it doesn’t just go away with modernity. We love the light and we hate the dark. We love transparency but not opacity (matter is so inscrutable, so hard to see through or into). Religion isn’t a type of mystery-mongering; it is a type of mystery-avoidance. The contemporary solutionist is deep down a religionist—a lover of comforting dogma. Socrates was the first anti-solutionist; for him everything was a mystery—he famously had no positive views of his own–but was only too happy to demolish the views of others. Popper too is properly seen as an anti-solutionist: no dogmatic solutions only cautious conjectures, hitherto unfalsified. Popper was a hard-boiled mysterian! Perhaps he was the ultimate mysterian (remember his views on the mind-body problem). For Popper, scientific theories are not solutions to tough problems, but acknowledgements of natural mystery; they can’t be known to be true, only known to be false when falsified. This is what epistemology looks like when you give up on finding solutions; nature is a vast ocean of mystery that we can only formulate conjectures about that may one day be refuted. It’s bat experience all the way down.

You might wonder why solutionism exercises such a hold on us, given that animals don’t suffer from it (they are immune to this human malaise). Why do we assume we can solve any problem we can recognize? This is an excellent question with no obvious answer (a mystery of biological nature?), but I have a theory which has not so far been falsified. Language. Languages give rise to illusions of omniscience: we think the infinite combinatorial potential of language will provide a sufficient resource for expressing everything about nature. If there are facts of the matter, our language is able to capture them intelligibly, even neatly (hands up who thinks this). But a moment’s reflection reveals the hollowness of this flight of fancy: do you think a blind man’s language will cure his ignorance of what color is? Do you think a person with mental retardation will be able to learn every lesson just because he can speak? Of course not (yet some people appear to believe this, unbelievably). It depends on the extent of the language’s lexicon and the intelligence of its speakers. Language is indeed a powerful instrument of thought, but it is not all-powerful; a child has language but is not capable of dispelling every mystery in the world. Still, it seems to give us delusions of cognitive adequacy. Animals don’t suffer from this source of error about the possibilities of knowledge, so they don’t parade around boasting of their cognitive supremacy. You have heard of confirmation bias; well, this is cognitive bias abetted by linguistic competence. We have an overly favorable opinion of our own cognitive capacities. Language has given us a big head (but not big enough). Solutionism has been encouraged by linguistic ability. Having a wordfor E-experiences is not enough for knowing what they are; knowledge isn’t the same as talking proper. Language expresses knowledge; it doesn’t create it. Language isn’t a magical searchlight into the darkness. I suggest pondering the question, “Am I a solutionist?”[1]

[1] To my surprise, I did not invent this word, nor the concept it expresses. It has a positive meaning and a negative one. Positively, it is someone who comes up with innovative solutions instead of being weighed down by hard problems; negatively, it is someone who wrongly thinks that all human problems have technological solutions. I have not seen it used in the way I do here, as a way of describing a certain philosophical attitude or stance. I came up with it by asking what the antonym of “mysterian” would be. It is interesting that our image of knowledge is that of a circle of light surrounded by darkness. The solutionist is someone who can’t bear the darkness and prefers to bask in false light.