Thursday, July 17, 2014

The future of analytic philosophy

This is a post to take with a pinch of salt because my starting point is Peter Unger's book Empty Ideas, which I haven't read, and in particular the response to its publication, which I haven't read in its entirety either. So why bother? Unger suggests that contemporary analytic philosophy is empty and he seems to have hit a nerve. That, really, is my point. If mainstream analytic philosophers feel insecure about what they are doing this does not prove that their work has no value, of course, but it strikes me as being interesting enough to warrant a blog post.

The initial responses to Unger's interview about his book accused him of being a hypocrite, of being obnoxiously rude, of saying things that have been said before by Rorty and others, and of overlooking all the work in philosophy that is not mainstream analytic philosophy. What struck me was the difficulty people seemed to have in coming up with obviously non-empty or non-trivial work to present as a counter-example. My favorite response was this:
The idea that contemporary academic philosophy (n all of its roots and branches; for instance, political philosophy), when compared to the diverse fields of the sciences (physical sciences but also mathematics, cosmology, biology, applied sciences such as medicine and biomedical research, technology, engineering, psychology, neuroscience, the social sciences, information theory, computer programming, etc.) fails to make clear, unambiguous contributions to our stock of knowledge about the world, only makes sense if one first assumes that science itself is primarily about clear, unambiguous advancements to knowledge. Yet clearly a great deal of science itself fails to make any such contribution.
Philosophy is like science because a great deal of science fails to contribute to our knowledge, and so does philosophy! Actually, though, the point of the comment is right (so I retract my snark): whatever value contemporary philosophy has is surely outside the scope of unambiguously producing new knowledge. But this means that we need to give up the idea of philosophy as being like science. 

Several comments mention Gary Gutting's book What Philosophers Know, but this (a book that I have read) does not deal with unambiguous advancements to knowledge made by philosophers. It deals with the ideas of people such as Quine, Rawls, and Rorty, that is, people who have certainly been influential and have many admirers but whose ideas are neither universally accepted as true nor universally rejected by other philosophers. It should perhaps be called What Many Philosophers Agree On

Brian Leiter writes:
I want to second the recommendation of Gary Gutting's book. Another possibility, of course, is that there are relatively few substantive results reached by so-called analytic philosophers, but that its value resides elsewhere: in intellectual hygiene, one might say, clarity of thought and reasoning, something in short supply in many other fields (as physicists are endlessly reminding us with their pronouncements).
This is surprisingly (to my mind) Wittgensteinian, although of course there is room for different ideas about what counts as clarity. And Wittgenstein comes up also in this response by Marcus Arvan (who I don't think of as a Wittgensteinian, which is why this is relevant, although I can't say I know his work well):
I've been thinking more and more lately about a worry about analytic philosophy that traces back at least to Wittgenstein, and which is enjoying a resurgence (see e.g. Millikan's Dewey Lecture, Avner Baz' recent paper which I commented on here, and Balaguer's paper on compatibilism and conceptual analysis, which I commented on here). The worry is simply this: analytic philosophy is, by and large, predicated on a systematic misunderstanding and misuse of language. 
We have also seen John Searle describing contemporary philosophy as being "in terrible shape." He calls it boring and lacking in insight. People have been saying this kind of thing for as long as analytic philosophy has existed, but could a new stage in its history be about to begin? Or will these complaints be soon forgotten? I wonder. I don't think we're about to witness a new golden age of Wittgensteinianism, but it might be more Wittgenstein-friendly than what we've seen in the last few decades. Or, of course, nothing much at all might change.

15 comments:

  1. when I see analytic philosophers working&commenting on non-technical (in the sense of being of their research on logic and such) issues, even those they are intimately involved in like say peer-review or grading, I have to say I see no evidence that they have some means/mode of thinking available to them that lay people somehow are lacking and the ones I have known socially are not better equipped to manage the day to day affairs of life than any other profession that I have seen, no more rigorous/rational/etc.
    -dmf

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    1. Me neither. What I have seen is non-philosophers, often very intelligent ones, getting into philosophical issues and either making huge logical mistakes or else simply scratching at the surface of issues that seem to interest them quite a bit. Studying philosophy can make you better at philosophy, and many people would like it if they were better at philosophy. The problems are that: 1) studying philosophy isn't guaranteed to make you better at it, 2) probably not everybody would like to be better at philosophy, 3) those who would often don't realize that what interests them is (what is called) philosophy, and 4) philosophy can be both hard and boring. But lots of people, in my perhaps non-representative experience, care (at least from time to time) about whether we have free will, whether we can prove that God exists, whether evolution makes ethics meaningless, and so on. Look at people like Dawkins, not to mention political philosophy and debates about "contemporary moral issues". I really do think that philosophy can help people understand issues and debates like these much better.

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    2. certainly are examples of people doing bad/amatuer philosophy and I can see how many of the issues that you raise could be framed philosophically but I don't think that most lay people are looking in these cases are looking for philosophical answers and I think in many cases Witt is trying to steer us away from making such a kind of category error.
      -dmf

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  2. i haven't made my way through it yet, but i think mark wilson's book seems like a genuine non-empty contribution (which would be kind of funny given its critical aims).

    i might put brandom in there too, since i became acquainted with his work i've always wondered why wittgensteinians weren't working harder to engage with it (besides the obvious problem of MIE being ginormous).

    and i think a lot of work in philosophy of science is likely to be pretty congenial to wittgensteinians and not empty, but most of it will probably always generate questions about why it's not being done in other departments. the philosophy of science students in my graduate program (phil-sci heavy) had to face 'how is this philosophy?' questions about as often as wittgensteinians. in fact, i'd be inclined to suspect that other areas subject to that question, like feminist philosophy or critical race theory, would be good places to look for non-empty philosophy.

    contrarily, any subfield where it can taken for granted that the work is philosophical seems interestingly rife with empty work.

    (and even, say, quine raises the question of whether he's not somehow just doing natural science, and if so how could that be, because it doesn't really seem like natural science or logic. successors that are just willy-nilly into naturalizing stuff, with less exposure to that kind of what-are-you-doing? question, seem as if they must have taken a wrong step somewhere back in responding to quine.)

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    1. I hadn't heard of Mark Wilson before, so thanks for the tip. Assuming I've got the right book (Wandering Significance), it sounds like a must-read.

      Yes, there is plenty of non-empty work around. What is interesting is the prospect of lots of people deciding that what they have been doing is empty and changing to something else. Books like Unger's seem to be pushing people that way, but it's too early to tell whether this will become a trend, and, if it does, what the effects will be.

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    2. http://www.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/BrandomPPPG.pdf

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  3. Reading the Unger interview it strikes me as an example of whistleblower chic which seems to be part of the Zeitgeist. He is being fashionably contrite. That said, it seems neither to recommend his character or intelligence (of which he himself speaks so highly, I mean, if the interview is anything to go by, there is only one person smarter than him and even he is too stupid to know better than Unger). If it is true that he knew all this from reading the PI back in the sixties and proceeded to carve out a career based on what he knew was empty and meaningless only to go back on it and expose the entire scam that served him so well in the safety of his dotage. It would be like Bernie Maddox not getting caught and then writing about "the failures of the system" from his mansion on some non-extraditing offshore tax haven. Should one commend Unger for his honesty? or for being smart enough to cash in on both the bubble and the crash? Who is he: the Warren Buffett of philosophy?

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    1. He doesn't come off very well in all this (from what little I've read), it's true. But the reaction is interesting, I think. If more people start talking the way he and Searle do, and if enough people are hard pressed to defend the work being attacked, then something good might come from it.

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    2. Definitely. Just saying that as an exercise in spin it's pitiful. He needs to get some professional advisers. White House calibre preferably, of the "known unknowns" level of competence. Pricey, but hey ... you gots to pay what you gots to pay in market economy.

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    3. He might need help with public relations, yes, but then again he's got people's attention. Perhaps that's what he was going for.

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  4. Also, he and the folks at 3QD seem to think he comes off as positively heroic. But you're right, it is symptomatic of a shift of sorts. To what and where it ends I'm not sure. But it's clear that here's a member of the old guard trying to get in on the grounding of the new order.

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  5. Whenever this kind of discussion surfaces in a popular medium it makes me a bit desperate. It is quite probable that Unger is doing here more harm than good, even if we were to agree that a lot of current analytic philosophy will end up being quite irrelevant.

    For one thing, I'm not so sure that academic philosophy has been so irrelevant. I'm not an expert on the history of science, but let's look at more recent examples. Take linguistics, I think it would be hard to deny that philosophy has had an impact on recent developments, and has provided a space for debating ideas that were not yet accepted as normal science.
    Another obvious recent example is logic. The development of logic by mathematicians, philosophers and mathematicians turned philosophers has certainly had a major impact on science, and computer science would not look the same without these developments.
    Take cognitive science (whatever one thinks of it), it would be hard to deny that philosophy has had an impact (think of computational theories of mind and things like that).

    These are all relatively recent developments, and have something to do with analytic philosophy.
    It's of course even easier to come up with of examples like this from the not so recent past.
    And it is easier still to point to influential scientists who were apparently directly influenced by philosophers and philosophical ideas.

    I'm not sure what to think of these kinds of examples, or even how accurate they are, because the actual development of science is a messy process. But at the same time, it is a bit strange that these issues are often completely ignored.

    Secondly, when Unger makes his claims about "analytic philosophy" (and I'm not sure that "continental philosophy" is in a better shape), most people just hear "philosophy". So he ends up giving people more excuses to ignore serious philosophical thinking. To benefit from philosophy you have to actually read it. You don't have to study medicine to cure your illness with pills and you don't have to read books on programming to have fun with your iPhone.

    Wittgenstein certainly realized that this age is hostile to philosophical thinking. The way analytic philosophy has developed is probably partly a failed (?) attempt to adapt to a hostile environment.

    Johannes

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    1. I think he means to attack not all analytic philosophy but only a particular part of it, and I don't think this part includes, for instance, the work in logic that has influenced computer science. (Although, as I say, I haven't read his book.)

      But you are absolutely right that there is a real danger that his work will be used as an excuse to denigrate all philosophy. I'm trying to focus on the silver lining here, but I don't mean to ignore the cloud. Thanks for pointing it out.

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