7.4 Mystical experience and revelation for The Philosopher’s Toolkit

Julian Baggini

is editor and co-founder of

The Philosophers’ Magazine

(www.philosophersmag.com). He is the author of several books, including

The Ethics Toolkit

(with Peter S. Fosl, Wiley-Blackwell, 2007),

Welcome toEverytown: A Journey into the English Mind

(2008),

Complaint

(2008) and

Should You Judge This Book by Its Cover?

(2009). He has written for numer-ous newspapers and magazines, including the

Guardian

, the

Financial Times

,

Prospect

and the

New Statesman

, as well as for the think tanks theInstitute of Public Policy Research and Demos.

Peter S. Fosl

is Professor of Philosophy at Transylvania University inLexington, Kentucky. He is co-author with Julian Baggini of

The EthicsToolkit

(Wiley-Blackwell, 2007) and is also co-editor of the

Dictionary of Literary Biography

(2002) volumes on British philosophy, as well as co-editor with David E. Cooper of

Philosophy: The Classic Readings

(Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Fosl’s scholarly publications address topics in scepticism,ethics, the philosophy of religion and the history of philosophy.

Praise for the ﬁ rst edition

‘

The Philosopher’s Toolkit

provides a welcome and useful addition to theintroductory philosophy books available. It takes the beginner throughmost of the core conceptual tools and distinctions used by philosophers,explaining them simply and with abundant examples. Newcomers tophilosophy will ﬁ nd much in here that will help them to understand thesubject.’

David S. Oderberg,University of Reading

‘. . . the average person who is interested in arguments and logic but whodoesn’t have much background in philosophy would certainly ﬁ nd thisbook useful, as would anyone teaching a course on arguments, logic, andreasoning. Even introductory courses on philosophy in general mightbeneﬁ t because the book lays out so many of the conceptual “tools” whichwill prove necessary over students’ careers.’

About.com

‘Its choice of tools for basic argument . . . is sound, while further tools forargument . . . move through topics and examples concisely and wittily . . .Sources are well chosen and indicated step by step. Sections are cross-referenced(making it better than the Teach Yourself “100 philosophical concepts”) andsupported by a useful index.’

Reference Reviews

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

JULIAN BAGGINI

AND

PETER S. FOSL

THE

PHILOSOPHER’S

A Compendium of PhilosophicalConcepts and Methods

SECOND EDITION

This second edition first published 2010© 2010 Julian Baggini and Peter S. FoslEdition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (1e, 2003)Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’spublishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medicalbusiness to form Wiley-Blackwell.

Registered Office

John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ,United Kingdom

Editorial Offices

350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UKFor details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information abouthow to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our web-site at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.The right of Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl to be identified as the authors of this work hasbeen asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrievalsystem, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears inprint may not be available in electronic books.Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trade-marks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks,trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associ-ated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed toprovide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It issold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional serv-ices. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competentprofessional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baggini, Julian.The philosopher’s toolkit : a compendium of philosophical concepts and methods / JulianBaggini and Peter S. Fosl. – 2nd ed.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4051-9018-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Reasoning. 2. Methodology. I. Fosl,Peter S. II. Title.BC177.B19 2010101–dc222009042655A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.Set in 10.5/13pt Minion by SPi Publisher Services Ltd, Pondicherry, IndiaPrinted in Singapore01 2010

For Rick O’Neil, colleague and friend, in memoriam

Philosophy can be an extremely technical and complex affair, one whoseterminology and procedures are often intimidating to the beginner anddemanding even for the professional. Like that of surgery, the art of phi-losophy requires mastering a body of knowledge, but it also requires acquir-ing precision and skill with a set of instruments or tools.

The Philosopher’sToolkit

may be thought of as a collection of just such tools. Unlike those of a surgeon or a master woodworker, however, the instruments presented by this text are conceptual – tools that can be used to analyse, manipulate andevaluate philosophical concepts, arguments and theories.The

Toolkit

can be used in a variety of ways. It can be read cover to coverby those looking for instruction on the essentials of philosophical reflec-tion. It can be used as a course book on basic philosophical method orcritical thinking. It can also be used as a reference book to which generalreaders and more advanced philosophers can turn in order to find quickand clear accounts of the key concepts and methods of philosophy. The aimof the book, in other words, is to act as a conceptual toolbox from which allthose from neophytes to master artisans can draw instruments that wouldotherwise be distributed over a diverse set of texts and require long periodsof study to acquire.For this second edition, we have expanded the book from six to sevensections, and reviewed and revised every single entry. These sectionsprogress from the basic tools of argumentation to sophisticated philosoph-ical concepts and principles. The text passes through instruments for assess-ing arguments to essential laws, principles and conceptual distinctions. Itconcludes with a discussion of the limits of philosophical thinking.Each of the seven sections contains a number of compact entries com-prising an explanation of the tool it addresses, examples of the tool in useand guidance about the tool’s scope and limits. Each entry is cross-referenced

Preface

2

BASIC TOOLS FOR ARGUMENT

a variety of ways using a number of techniques, some legitimate and somenot. Often one can discern the difference between good and bad argumentsonly if one scrutinizes their content and structure with supreme diligence.

Argument

What, then, is an argument? For many people, an argument is a contest orconflict between two or more people who disagree about something. Anargument in this sense might involve shouting, name-calling and even a bitof shoving. It might – but need not – include reasoning.Philosophers, by contrast, use the term ‘argument’ in a very precise andnarrow sense. For them, an argument is the most basic complete unit of reasoning, an atom of reason. An ‘argument’ is an inference from one ormore starting points (truth claims called a ‘premise’ or ‘premises’) to an endpoint (a truth claim called a ‘conclusion’).

Argument vs. explanation

‘Arguments’ are to be distinguished from ‘explanations’. A general rule to keepin mind is that arguments attempt to demonstrate

that

something is true,while explanations attempt to show

how

something is true. For example, con-sider encountering an apparently dead woman. An explanation of the wom-an’s death would undertake to show

how

it happened. (‘The existence of waterin her lungs explains the death of this woman.’) An argument would under-take to demonstrate

that

the person is in fact dead (‘Since her heart hasstopped beating and there are no other vital signs, we can conclude that she isin fact dead.’) or that one explanation is better than another (‘The absence of bleeding from the laceration on her head combined with water in the lungsindicates that this woman died from drowning and not from bleeding.’)

The place of reason in philosophy

It is not universally realized that reasoning comprises a great deal of whatphilosophy is about. Many people have the idea that philosophy is essentially about ideas or theories about the nature of the world and our place in it.Philosophers do indeed advance such ideas and theories, but in most casestheir power and scope stems from their having been derived through rational

BASIC TOOLS FOR ARGUMENT

3

argument from acceptable premises. Of course, many other regions of humanlife also commonly involve reasoning, and it may sometimes be impossible todraw clean lines distinguishing philosophy from them. (In fact, whether ornot it is possible to do so is itself a matter of heated philosophical debate.)The natural and social sciences are, for example, fields of rational inquiry that often bump up against the borders of philosophy (especially in inquir-ies into the mind and brain, theoretical physics and anthropology). Buttheories composing these sciences are generally determined through cer-tain formal procedures of experimentation and reflection to which philoso-phy has little to add. Religious thinking sometimes also enlists rationality and shares an often-disputed border with philosophy. But while religiousthought is intrinsically related to the divine, sacred or transcendent – per-haps through some kind of revelation, article of faith or religious practice– philosophy, by contrast, in general is not.Of course, the work of certain prominent figures in the Western philo-sophical tradition presents decidedly non-rational and even anti-rationaldimensions (for example, that of Heraclitus, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,Heidegger and Derrida). Furthermore, many include the work of Asian(Confucian, Taoist, Shinto), African, Aboriginal and Native Americanthinkers under the rubric of philosophy, even though they seem to makelittle use of argument.But, perhaps despite the intentions of its authors, even the work of non-standard thinkers involves rationally justified claims and subtle forms of argumentation. And in many cases, reasoning remains on the scene at leastas a force to be reckoned with.Philosophy, then, is not the only field of thought for which rationality isimportant. And not all that goes by the name of philosophy is argumenta-tive. But it is certainly safe to say that one cannot even begin to master theexpanse of philosophical thought without learning how to use the tools of reason. There is, therefore, no better place to begin stocking our philosoph-ical toolkit than with rationality’s most basic components, the subatomicparticles of reasoning – ‘premises’ and ‘conclusions’.

Premises and conclusions

For most of us, the idea of a ‘conclusion’ is as straightforward as a philo-sophical concept gets. A conclusion is, literally, that with which an argu-ment concludes, the product and result of an inference or a chain of inferences, that which the reasoning justifies and supports.

4

BASIC TOOLS FOR ARGUMENT

What about ‘premises’? In the first place, in order for a sentence to serveas a premise, it must exhibit this essential property: it must make a claimthat is either true or false. Sentences do many things in our languages, andnot all of them have that property. Sentences that issue commands, forexample (‘Forward march, soldier!’), or ask questions (‘Is this the road toEdinburgh?’), or register exclamations (‘Holy cow!’), are neither true norfalse. Hence it is not possible for them to serve as premises.This much is pretty easy. But things can get sticky in a number of ways.One of the most vexing issues concerning premises is the problem of implicit claims. That is, in many arguments key premises remain unstated,implied or masked inside other sentences. Take, for example, the followingargument: ‘Socrates is a man, so Socrates is mortal.’ What’s left implicit isthe claim that ‘all men are mortal’. Such unstated premises are called

enthymemes

, and arguments which employ them are

enthymemetic

.In working out precisely what the premises are in a given argument, askyourself first what the claim is that the argument is trying to demonstrate.Then ask yourself what other claims the argument relies upon (implicitly orexplicitly) in order to advance that demonstration. Sometimes certain wordsand phrases will indicate premises and conclusions. Phrases like ‘in conclu-sion’, ‘it follows that’, ‘we must conclude that’ and ‘from this we can see that’often indicate conclusions. (‘The DNA, the fingerprints and the eyewitnessaccounts all point to Smithers. It follows that she must be the killer.’) Wordslike ‘because’ and ‘since’, and phrases like ‘for this reason’ and ‘on the basis of this’, often indicate premises. (For example, ‘Since the DNA, the fingerprintsand the eyewitness accounts all implicate Smithers, she must be the killer.’)Premises, then, compose the set of claims from which the conclusion isdrawn. In other sections, the question of how we can justify the move frompremises to conclusion will be addressed (see 1.4 and 4.7). But before we getthat far, we must first ask, ‘What justifies a reasoner in entering a premise inthe first place?’

Grounds for premises?

There are two basic reasons why a premise might be acceptable. One is thatthe premise is itself the conclusion of a different, solid argument. As such,the truth of the premise has been demonstrated elsewhere. But it is clearthat if this were the only kind of justification for the inclusion of a premise,we would face an infinite regress. That is to say, each premise would have to

BASIC TOOLS FOR ARGUMENT

5

be justified by a different argument, the premises of which would have to bejustified by yet another argument, the premises of which …

ad infinitum

.(In fact, sceptics – Eastern and Western, modern and ancient – have pointedto just this problem with reasoning.)So, unless one wishes to live with the infinite regress, there must be anotherway of finding sentences acceptable to serve as premises. There must be, inshort, premises that stand in need of no further justification through otherarguments. Such premises may be true by definition, such as ‘all bachelorsare unmarried.’ But the kind of premises we’re looking for might also includepremises that, though conceivably false, must be taken to be true for there tobe any rational dialogue at all. Let’s call them ‘basic premises’.Which sentences are to count as basic premises depends on the context inwhich one is reasoning. One example of a basic premise might be, ‘I exist.’ Inmost contexts, this premise does not stand in need of justification. But if, of course, the argument is trying to demonstrate that I exist, my existence cannotbe used as a premise. One cannot assume what one is trying to argue for.Philosophers have held that certain sentences are more or less basic forvarious reasons: because they are based upon self-evident or ‘cataleptic’perceptions (Stoics), because they are directly rooted in sense data (positiv-ists), because they are grasped by a power called intuition or insight(Platonists), because they are revealed to us by God (religious philoso-phers), or because we grasp them using cognitive faculties certified by God(Descartes, Reid, Plantinga). In our own view, a host of reasons, bestdescribed as ‘context’ will determine them.Formally, then, the distinction between premises and conclusions is clear.But it is not enough to grasp this difference. In order to use these philo-sophical tools, one has to be able both to spot the explicit premises and tomake explicit the unstated ones. And aside from the question of whether ornot the conclusion follows from the premises, one must come to terms withthe thornier question of what justifies the use of premises in the first place.Premises are the starting points of philosophical argument. As in any edi-fice, however, intellectual or otherwise, the construction will only stand if the foundations are secure.

SEE ALSO

1.2 Deduction1.3 Induction

BASIC TOOLS FOR ARGUMENT

7

strike you as odd. If this is so, you haven’t taken on board the key word atthe start of this sentence, which does such vital work in the definition of deduction. The conclusion must be true

if

the premises are true. This is abig ‘if’. In our example, the conclusion is, we confidently believe, not true,because one or both (in this case both) premises are not true. But thatdoesn’t alter the fact that this is a deductive argument, since if it turned outthat Elvis does live in a secret location in Idaho and that all people who livedin secret locations in Idaho are miserable, it would necessarily follow thatElvis is miserable.The question of what makes a good deductive argument is addressed inmore detail in the section on validity and soundness (1.4). But in a sense,everything that you need to know about a deductive argument is containedwithin the definition given: a (successful) deductive argument is one where,if the premises are true, then the conclusion is definitely true.But before we leave this topic, we should return to the investigations of our detective. Reading his deliberations, one could easily insert the vital,missing word. The killer must surely be Dr Salmon. But is this the conclu-sion of a successful deductive argument? The fact is that we can’t answerthis question unless we know a little more about the exact meaning of thepremises.First, what does it mean to say the murder was ‘premeditated’? It couldmean lots of things. It could mean that it was planned right down to the lastdetail, or it could mean simply that the murderer had worked out what shewould do in advance. If it is the latter, then it is possible that the murdererdid not know where Dr Fishcake would be that night, but, coming acrosshim by chance, put into action her premeditated plan to kill him. So, itcould be the case (1) that both premises are true (the murder was premedi-tated, and Dr Salmon was the only person who knew where Dr Fishcakewould be that night) but (2) that the conclusion is false (Dr Salmon is, infact, not the murderer). Therefore the detective has not formed a successfuldeductive argument.What this example shows is that, although the definition of a deductiveargument is simple enough, spotting and constructing successful ones ismuch trickier. To judge whether the conclusion really

must

follow from thepremises, we have to be sensitive to ambiguity in the premises as well as tothe danger of accepting too easily a conclusion that seems to be supportedby the premises but does not in fact follow from them. Deduction is notabout jumping to conclusions, but crawling (though not slouching) slowly towards them.

BASIC TOOLS FOR ARGUMENT

9

recall, so people reason that it will probably rise tomorrow. (The work of the Scottish philosopher David Hume [1711–76] has been influential onthis score.) This sort of inference is often taken to typify induction. In thecase of my Roman holiday, I might have reasoned that the past experiencesof people with average cognitive abilities like mine show that the probabili-ties of winning against the man with the cups is rather small.But beware:

induction is not essentially defined as reasoning from the spe-cific to the general

.An inductive inference need not be past-future directed. And it caninvolve reasoning from the general to the specific, the specific to the specificor the general to the general.I could, for example, reason from the

more general

, past-oriented claimthat no trained athlete on record has been able to run 100 metres in under9 seconds, to the

more specific

past-oriented conclusion that my friend hadprobably not achieved this feat when he was at university, as he claims.Reasoning through

analogies

(see 2.4) as well as

typical examples

and

rules of thumb

are also species of induction, even though none of theminvolves moving from the specific to the general.

The problem of induction

Inductive generalizations are, however, often where the action is. Reasoningin experimental science, for example, often depends on them in so far asscientists formulate and confirm universal natural laws (e.g. Boyle’s idealgas law) on the basis of a relatively small number of observations. FrancisBacon (1561–1626) argued persuasively for just this conception of induc-tion. The tricky thing to keep in mind about inductive generalizations,however, is that they involve reasoning from a ‘some’ in a way that only works

definitely

or with

necessity

for an ‘all’. This type of inference makesinductive generalization fundamentally different from deductive argu-ment (for which such a move would be illegitimate). It also opens up arather enormous can of conceptual worms. Philosophers know thisconundrum as the ‘problem of induction’. Here’s what we mean. Take thefollowing example:1.

Almost all

elephants like chocolate.2. This is an elephant.3. Therefore, this elephant likes chocolate.

56

MORE ADVANCED TOOLS

Weakening the rule

How did Hume respond to this exception to his rule? Far from seeing it asdisproving his theory, he writes, ‘[this] instance is so singular, that it isscarcely worth our observing’. A charitable rendering of this remark mighthold that the exception reveals something about the nature of the rule. Thatis to say, Hume never put forward the rule as an absolute, exceptionlessdescription of all of nature. Rather, it is a rule that describes a general pat-tern in the overwhelming majority of cases – but not in all of them. Rulesneed not be absolute – they may sometimes admit exceptions.

Amending and defending a rule

Phenomena that don’t fit the pattern described by a rule are often called‘anomalies’ – literally non-lawful things. Weakening the rule to make roomis one way to deal with them. Another way of coping with anomalies is toshow how, properly understood, they really don’t break the rule in question.Consider the following example.Sometimes a survivor of trauma reports being unaware of the traumaticevents at the time they occurred, only to suffer extremely vivid flash-backs later. In such a case, the later idea (the recollection) might be thoughtto be more vivid than the original impression (the actual traumaticexperience).This phenomenon seems to violate Hume’s rule that perceptions of events are stronger than recollections of them. But perhaps Hume can savehis rule by showing that there is something extraordinary or ‘exceptional’about this case. For example, he might reformulate his rule such that itholds true

except

in cases where the resulting idea is modified by some addi-tional, supervening mechanism (such as a post-traumatic reaction).Similarly, Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) law of motion claims that a body inmotion will remain in motion –

except

in cases where the body in questionis acted upon by an external force.In short, the very fact that we can show that something which appearsto falsify the rule is in some important way different from cases wherethe rule normally applies shows that the rule is sound. Because we’vefound that the case of post-traumatic flashbacks is

exceptional

it doesn’tfalsify the general rule. By definition an ‘exception’ is something to

58

MORE ADVANCED TOOLS

2.6 Intuition pumps

Many ideas in science and philosophy are difficult to grasp. To help us onour way, both scientists and philosophers have made use of metaphor andimagery.Plato’s conception of ‘the Good’ in the

Republic

, for example, is extremely abstract and obscure, but by encouraging us to think of the Good as like thesun in Book 7 (507b–509c), we are enabled to get some kind of grip on theidea. Just as the sun is that which makes physical objects visible, we are told,so the Good is that which makes the world intelligible.More recently, the concept of ‘person-stages’ has been introduced to thephilosophy of personal identity. This is again an odd idea, but to help usunderstand it, we are often given a simpler analogue. Think of a carrot, forexample, which is a single object one can take a slice out of at any stage, thusseeing what that carrot is at a particular point in space. Imagine a person’swhole life in a similar way, as a single object extended in space

and

time; andat any one point in time, we are able to see what that person is at that par-ticular point in time by examining that ‘time-slice’ or ‘person-stage’.Both the carrot and the sun are examples of intuition pumps. They arenot philosophical arguments, but rather images, stories or analogies thatgive us something vivid and concrete to help us understand what wouldotherwise be obscure and abstract.

Use of the tool

But why call them ‘intuition pumps’ rather than just metaphors or analo-gies? The reason can be seen in the phrase’s origins. Like ‘Quakers’ and‘Methodists’, the perfectly dignified name of intuition pump owes its exist-ence to a piece of derogatory coinage. Daniel C. Dennett (1942–) intro-duced the term in a criticism of John R. Searle’s (1932–) famous ‘Chineseroom’ argument. Dennett’s claim was that, despite its name, this wasn’t anargument at all, it was a mere ‘intuition pump’. The point of the term is tomake clear the distinction between arguments that might make use of anal-ogies and analogies that aren’t in fact part of an argument at all but simply devices that assist our comprehension.It is extremely useful to be able to recognize and use intuition pumps, asDennett himself does with exceptional flair. When used well, they can be a pow-erful tool in aiding the understanding. The theory of functionalism, for example,

MORE ADVANCED TOOLS

59

in the philosophy of mind can be very hard to fathom when one hears itexplained in terms of inputs and outputs. But if we start thinking about thebrain as like a piece of computer hardware and the mind like the program thatis running in it, it is much easier to begin to see what the theory is getting at.

Problems

Intuition pumps, however, can lead us astray. Sometimes what is in fact nomore than an intuition pump may appear to us as an argument. This isarguably the case with a famous passage in John Locke’s work. Locke askswhether, if we had the souls of ancient Greeks, but knew nothing of theirlives, we would consider ourselves to be the same persons they were. On thebasis of their intuitions most answer this question in the negative, butnotice that

no argument has been put forward

that we are not, in fact, thesame persons as those ancient Greeks. All Locke has done is taken a ques-tion where people’s intuitions are not clear (‘Is memory necessary for per-sonal identity?’) and answered it with a hypothetical situation where theirintuitions are stronger. This makes the question under consideration muchmore vivid, but it is not to be confused with offering an argument. Bothreaders and writers can equally fall into this confusion.Being able, then, clearly to distinguish intuition pumps from argumentsis very useful. Equally useful is recognizing that intuition pumps are nomore than aids to comprehension or stimuli to further thought. They don’talways function as strict analogies. So, you have to be careful how you drawthe connection from the intuition pump to what is being explained.Perhaps the most notorious example of failing to do this is RichardDawkins’s use of the term the ‘selfish gene’. In calling the gene selfish, Dawkinsis merely trying to help us understand that the gene does not do what is bestfor the organism as a whole – it merely duplicates itself. But in taking theterm too literally, people have misunderstood both Dawkins and the conse-quences of accepting a gene-centred understanding of evolution. Perhapsthis shows that the intuition pump he chose was not a good one. At the very least, it shows the danger of employing this particular expository tool.

SEE ALSO

1.1 Arguments, premises and conclusions2.4 Analogies2.9 Thought experiments

MORE ADVANCED TOOLS

61

about the Renaissance, the Catholic Church or the United States, all of which are logical constructions that

comprise

various unproblematicmaterial things and events.

Type 2: the average Briton

The average Briton is a logical construction in a different way. Like AdolpheQuetelet’s original construction,

l’homme moyen

(the average man), in his1835

Sur l’homme

, the average Briton is a fictional person and an

abstrac-tion

, constructed from taking all the statistics about all Britons and findingtheir

mean average

. The average Briton cannot be used or engaged with asthe Internet or the Catholic Church can. Nevertheless, it is still a logicalconstruction, since facts about the average Briton can be described in termsof facts about a large number of real people, whose existence is unproblem-atic. Again, for convenience’s sake we can refer to this abstraction as a singleentity, although it is more accurate not to think of it as a single thing, but asa logical construction built up from many other things.

A complication

Although the idea of a logical construction may appear to be quite straight-forward, a little reflection shows that its introduction opens up a particu-larly wriggly can of worms. The problem is with logical constructions of thefirst sort – constructions rather than abstractions. The worry is that all sortsof things we don’t take to be logical constructions could, on some under-standings, turn out to be just that. Take a simple object like a table. Doesn’tscience tell us that there really doesn’t exist a single, simple entity such as atable? Rather, what fundamentally exists are mere atoms (which in turn aremere collections of subatomic particles). If science is right, then isn’t a tablea logical construction? While it may be convenient to talk about the table asif it were a single object, perhaps it is just a collection of many smallerobjects. Or perhaps theories about atoms and quarks are logical construc-tions we invent to explain something more fundamental: namely, the thingsthat compose our ordinary, common life-world. Might one even think of a human being or a ‘person’ as a logical construction? The distinctionbetween theory and the prior things that theory is about becomes difficultto maintain – perhaps for good reason.

MORE ADVANCED TOOLS

63

more fundamental phenomena of molecular motion. It is simpler, not inthe sense that it is easier to understand, but because it describes what hap-pens to the many parts that make up the more complex whole. Moreover,molecular motion explains not only boiling water but also the behaviour of many other phenomena related to solids, gases and liquids – for examplethe pressure changes in chlorine gas as it is heated and the expansion of concrete bridges. The appeal to molecular motion is more fundamentalbecause the molecular motion explains why the water boils, not the otherway around.

Application in philosophy

Reductionism has been extremely successful in science. But what is its rolein philosophy? There are several major philosophical questions for whichreductionist solutions have been offered. One example is the question of what knowledge is. Knowledge seems to be different from mere belief, butthe concept of knowledge itself does not seem precise enough to indicatewhat this difference is. One reductionist account of knowledge is that it isjustified true belief. Here, the single, amorphous concept of knowledge isexplained in terms of three, simpler constitutive features: knowledge com-prises a

belief

that is both

justified

and

true

. The reductionist can take thesefurther by giving reductive accounts of what justification, belief and trutheach in turn comprise. Moreover, where we began with two distinct types of thought (knowing and believing), reductionism shows how we may bedealing with various types of belief only.

The many and the one

Indeed, philosophy and science are often said to have begun in a reduction-ist moment – Thales of Miletus’s (c.620–c.555

bce

) famous assertion that‘all is water’. The genius of Thales’s claim is that it reduces the vast multipli-city of natural phenomena (leaves, animals, rocks, clouds, shells, fire, hair,etc.) to a single principle – what the ancient Greeks called an

arche

̄

. Whetherit appears in Thales’s philosophy, in Newton’s explaining the multifariouskinds of motion in the universe with a mere three laws, or in economics’laws of supply and demand, this reductionist gesture is basic to philosophy and science.

64

MORE ADVANCED TOOLS

Ethics

Reductionist accounts can also be found in ethics. ‘Good’, like ‘knowledge’, is aconcept that many do not think is self-explanatory. We have some idea of what goodness is, but there seems to be scope for disagreement among com-petent users of the word as to what it actually means. A reductive account of goodness may explain it in terms of simpler, more fundamental factors. So,for example, a utilitarian account is essentially reductive because it explainsgoodness in terms of what increases happiness and decreases suffering andpain. These features are all simpler than goodness, since there is greater clarity about their meaning: ‘increasing happiness’ has a precision of meaning that‘being good’ does not. It also provides an explanation for why good things aregood, in that we can all see why happiness is a good thing and pain bad.

Ordinary language opposition

Reductionism certainly has a good pedigree in philosophy, but it is also notdifficult to see why some oppose it. It is not at all obvious why all questionsin philosophy should best be answered reductively. Maybe you just can’tspecify what it means to know something by breaking the concept downinto its simpler, constitutive parts. Wittgenstein and the ordinary-languagephilosophers such as Oxford professor J. L. Austin (1911–60) argued thatwords like ‘knowledge’ are to be understood in terms of the way in whichthey function in communities of competent language users. But you can’tdescribe the functioning of a particular word in reductive terms. You canidentify certain general, recurrent features of the use of the word, some of which may even be more or less essential. But you cannot expect to be ableto boil down the list of rules for the correct application of a word to a finitelist of specific conditions. If you did this, something of the meaning of ‘knowledge’ would be lost – you would have, in short, failed to ‘save thephenomena’ (see 3.23).

A heuristic device

Interestingly, you needn’t always choose between reductive and non-reductiveapproaches. You can, for example, use reductionism as a

heuristic device

.Here, you would attempt the reduction, not because you believe that the

66

MORE ADVANCED TOOLS

both sides a great deal of use has been made of a curious literary-scientifichybrid – fictional thought experiments.Philosophers use fictions in analogies (2.4) and intuition pumps (2.6), butperhaps their most striking usage is to be found in thought experiments (aka

Gedanken

experiments). Thought experiments are aptly named since theiraim is to mimic the method of scientific experiments but in thought alone.

Experimental method

It is helpful to begin by thinking about what happens in a standard scientificexperiment. Imagine an experiment to find out how a certain laundry deter-gent bleaches. In normal use, there are several factors that may cause thedetergent to act in a certain way. These will include its active ingredients, thetype and temperature of the water in which the ingredients are dissolved,the materials being cleaned and the machinery – if any – used to do the laundry.Any experiment that could hope to discover what

caused

bleaching wouldhave to be devised in such a way as to ensure that the crucial factors wereproperly isolated from the other variables. So if, for example, the hypothesisis that it is the chlorine that does the bleaching, the experiment needs toshow that

if all the other factors remain the same

the presence or absence of the chlorine will determine whether the laundry detergent bleaches.Put more simply, then, the aim of a scientific experiment is to

isolate thecrucial variables

– the factors which, if present, cause a certain effect thatwould not occur in their absence and does occur in their presence.Thought experiments are based on the same principle. The difference isthat the variables being tested in a thought experiment need not or cannot,for whatever reason, actually be isolated. Rather, the variables are alteredmerely in imagination.

Possible worlds and Twin Earth

Some of the most outlandish-sounding examples of thought experimentsinvolve possible worlds. Perhaps the best-known argument that invokes apossible world is Hilary Putnam’s (1926–) argument about meaning andreference. Putnam asks us to imagine a possible world that he calls ‘TwinEarth’. On Twin Earth, everything is just like it is on Earth. There are humanbeings, they eat, drink, listen to Britney Spears and occasionally kill each

MORE ADVANCED TOOLS

67

other (not that those last two facts are in any way connected). But there isone difference: what Twin Earthers call ‘water’ is not H

2

O, but another com-plex chemical compound, which we can call XYZ.Some say that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like aduck, then it is a duck. But Putnam argues that, from our perspective, what-ever XYZ is, it just isn’t water. What we call water is H

2

O, and XYZ isn’t H

2

O.Therefore, though we may both have clear, refreshing liquids, which we bothcall water and that both function like water, Twin Earth water just isn’t Earthwater. Just because it has the same name it doesn’t mean it is the same stuff.

Mapping the conceptual universe

Putnam’s argument is intriguing and could be discussed at much greaterlength. But our interest here is simply with how the idea of a possible worldis used in the argument. The thought experiment alters one variable in thereal world – changing it so that the chemical compound for what functionsas water isn’t H

2

O – and seeing what the consequences of that are for themeaning of the word ‘water’. Scientists, too, have used thought experiments.Einstein, for example, used them thinking out his theories of relativity. Thedifference between the thought experiments in science and philosophy isthat those in science often lead to physical experimentation. For philoso-phers, however, in most cases physical experimentation is unnecessary because what one is exploring is not the terrain of the physical but the con-ceptual universe. Reasoning out the leads of our imagination is often suffi-cient for clarifying and understanding concepts.Some have argued that thought experiments do little more than test outour intuitions and that this is an unreliable method of doing philosophy.But despite these doubts about the reliability of thought experiments as anargumentative tool, they continue to fascinate and engage as few otherforms of philosophical argumentation can.

SEE ALSO

2.6 Intuition pumps2.10 Useful fictions3.26 Testability 7.6 Possibility and impossibility

68

MORE ADVANCED TOOLS

READING

Hilary Putnam, ‘Meaning and Reference’,

Journal of Philosophy

70.19 (1973),699–711A. I. Miller, ‘Einstein’s First Steps Toward General Relativity: GedankenExperiments and Axiomatics’,

Physics in Perspective

1.1 (1999), 85–104

★

Roy Sorensen,

Thought Experiments

(1999)Yu Shi, ‘Early Gedanken Experiments Revisited’,

Annalen der Physik

9.8 (2000),637–48

★

Julian Baggini,

The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher

(2006)

2.10 Useful fictions

Trail through the history of philosophy and you’ll find some interestingpersons and artefacts. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) talked about the‘social contract’, an agreement by which we all manage to live together. JohnRawls (1921–) introduced us to the ‘ideal observer’, the person who designedthe political arrangements of the world from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’, notknowing what position in that society the observer would occupy. FriedrichWilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) described the wondrous

Übermensch

(over-human), who would be able to overcome the nihilistic culture we endure andembrace the eternal recurrence, living this life again and again for eternity.There is no museum where the social contract or the veil of ignorance areon display, nor a gallery where faithful likenesses of the overhuman and theideal observer hang. These are all fictions – ideas that do not attempt todescribe anything in the physical world. So, what place do these have in adiscipline supposed to be all about truth?

Different from most thought experiments

Useful fictions can be viewed as a subspecies of thought experiment (2.9),but they have enough distinctive features to merit recognition in their ownright. Thought experiments are generally a means to an end, in the sensethat they are invoked as part of an argument, and, once the argument hasreached its conclusion, the experimenter moves on. Many useful fictions,on the other hand, serve a purpose beyond this.

MORE ADVANCED TOOLS

69

Take Rawls’s ideal observer – a device in part derived from AdamSmith’s (1723–90) fiction the ‘impartial spectator’. The point of thisfictional person is that, in order to design a just society, one must adoptthe viewpoint of an ideal observer. Rawls advances arguments forwhy this is so. If one accepts these arguments, one is left with theideal observer as a figure to which one must constantly return whendeciding substantive matters of what is just. So, for example, if one takesa Rawlsian line and wants to know whether the United States shouldincrease spending on social security, one needs to ask, ‘What would theideal observer say?’ The useful fiction must be maintained in order for itto do its work.Similar things could be said about the social contract. If one accepts thatthere is an implicit social contract and that there is a need for it, in decidingwhether the state is justified in acting in a certain way towards its citizens,one must consider whether such action is sanctioned by the contract. Likea lawyer, one needs to consult the clauses in the fictitious contract to see if it has been breached.

Use in explanation

Some useful fictions are maintained merely as explanatory tools. In evolu-tionary theory, for example, it can be useful to run with the fictions thatgenes act selfishly, or that features of an organism should be understood by reference to their purpose. Both of these are in a sense fictions, becausegenes can’t really be selfish, since they are not motivated by any interests atall, and what drives evolution is not a goal or purpose but random muta-tions and how these make the organism more-or-less fit to reproduce. Forexplanatory purposes, however, it can be useful to adopt the fictions of selfishness and purpose.

Caution!

Keep in mind that this kind of useful fiction is perilous. Whereas there is nodanger of any but the most foolish believing that the social contract or theideal observer really exist, too much talk of selfish genes or purpose in evo-lution can lead people to mistake these fictions for facts. Useful fictions aremost useful when they are most clearly fictions.

78

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

But the principle of the excluded middle is entailed by the principle of biva-lence, and there is a close relationship between the two.

Too simple?

The principle of bivalence plays a foundational role in logic. It has, however,come under sustained attack by critics who argue that it is just too simplis-tic to say everything must be true or false. Surely some things are partly trueand partly false. Forcing everything into the strait-jacket of bivalence seri-ously distorts the world.The problem is most acute in the case of

vague

concepts. Take, for exam-ple, the idea of thinness. For many people, it seems to be neither straight-forwardly true nor false that people are thin or not thin. We prefer to say that people are quite thin, or a bit on the thin side. What we don’t think isthat there are three categories of people, thin, fat and average, and thateveryone definitely falls into one category. Rather, thinness and fatness settwo ends of a spectrum, with many shades of grey in between.The plausibility of this view is shown in the

Sorites

paradox. Adapted toour example, the paradox is generated by considering a fat person. We canask the question of this person, if he lost 1 gram of weight, would he still befat? The answer is surely yes – someone does not go from being fat to not fatby dint of losing 1 gram. Now we can ask of this person who is 1 gramlighter, would losing a further 1 gram make him not fat? Again, it seemsabsurd to say that if there are two people who have only 1 gram differencein weight between them one could be fat and one not. But if we continuethis line of reasoning, we would eventually end up with someone whoweighed, say, 40 kg who we would have to say was fat.It seems that the two ways out of this are to say that there is, in fact, aclear boundary between fat and not fat, as absurd as that may sound. Thiswould enable us to preserve the principle of bivalence. The alternative is tosay that fat is a vague concept, and it is often not straightforwardly true thata person is fat or is not fat. But that defeats the principle of bivalence.

Fuzzy logic

In recent years, both solutions have had sophisticated champions. A wholefield of ‘fuzzy logic’ has developed which attempts to construct a logic that

80

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

In another example, he talks about a cricket match, where all the playersand their roles are described to another hapless foreigner. ‘I do not seewhose role it is to exercise

esprit de corps

’, she says. Her mistake is to thinkthat exercising team spirit is exercising a specific function in the game,rather than being a manner in which specific functions are exercised.In both these examples, the foreigner has made the mistake of thinkingof one kind of thing in the wrong terms. The university has been wrongly categorized by the foreigner as a building, whereas it is in fact an institution.Contributing to team spirit has been wrongly categorized as a specific kindof action, rather than a manner of performing a task or series of actions.

Mind and will examples

Ryle believed that a category mistake lies at the heart of a confusion over thenature of mind. On his view, the mistake made by Descartes, and countlessothers after him, was to think of mind as if it were a kind of object, ratherlike a brain, table or flower. Given that this object was clearly not material,in the way that brains, tables or flowers are, it was presumed that it had tobe a special kind of object, a ghostly substance of some sort. This, Rylebelieved, was a mistake. Mind is not an object at all. Rather, it is a set of capacities and dispositions, all of which can be described without any refer-ence to ghostly substances.Alleged category mistakes crop up elsewhere in philosophy. Ryle himself also talked about ‘the will’. He argued that it was a mistake to think aboutthe will as if it were a distinct part of ourselves, a kind of centre for decision-making where switches are flicked according to whether we choose some-thing or not. The will is not a thing or even a faculty, but shorthand for themanner in which a course of action is undertaken. We act according to oragainst our will depending on whether we resist or accede to the act, not onwhether some part of us comes down one way or another on a decision.One thing to bear in mind here is that to call something a category

mis-take

is to claim that the matter under discussion has been wrongly catego-rized. Of course, more often than not, it is unclear whether there has been amistake of this sort or not. Then, we have category

disputes

. For example, isgoodness something simple and indefinable, or can it be analysed in termsof other properties such as happiness, freedom from pain and so on? This isa question about whether the good should be categorized as a simple, inde-finable property or as a complex, definable one. To say one side in the

82

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

An experienced philosopher would probably assume that this thoughtexperiment contains an implicit

ceteris paribus

clause. That is to say, it isassumed that, apart from the changes that are specifically made by theoperation, all other things remain equal. For example, there is no differencebetween the health or gender of the bodies concerned, one is not uglierthan the other, one person is not on the run from the FBI. This

ceteris pari-bus

clause is important, because the purpose of the thought experiment isto focus the mind on the relative significance of our bodies and our brainsfor making us the individual people we are. For that reason, these factorsneed to be isolated from all other variables. Therefore, by declaring

ceterisparibus

, the devisor of the thought experiment can eliminate from consid-eration any other factor that is not relevant to what he or she is trying toconsider.

Limiting the unusual

When we talk about ‘all other things being equal’ we often mean no morethan ‘under normal conditions’. That is to say, we take it that there are nounusual circumstances in the situation we are describing that might affectthe reasoning. For example, if we are discussing mass-murder

ceteris pari-bus

, it is assumed that the murderer was not given an ultimatum statingthat if he did not kill 20 people by noon the whole world would be blownup. But the phrase ‘under normal conditions’ does not capture the full scopeof

ceteris paribus

, which, as we have seen, can be invoked in thought exper-iments where conditions are, by definition, not normal.

In decision procedure

The

ceteris paribus

principle has a use in assessing the relative merits of twoexplanations and deciding between them, even where there is no over-whelming evidence for either. For example, are all crop circles formed by aliens or hoaxers? The only sensible way to reach a conclusion is look at theavailable evidence and ask,

ceteris paribus

, which is the likelier explanation?Of course, in reality, all other things may not be equal – there may, for exam-ple, be as yet undiscovered evidence that would prove conclusive. But in theabsence of such evidence, we have to focus on what we do know and assumethat all other things are equal, until they are shown to be otherwise.

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

83

In counter-argument

Ceteris paribus

is also important in moral reasoning where the strength of acounter-argument is being assessed. For example, hedonic utilitariansbelieve that, in any given situation, the morally correct thing to do is thatwhich results in the greatest happiness of the greatest number. A commonobjection to the theory is to describe a scenario that, although morally repugnant, satisfies the utilitarian criteria of morally correct action. Onesuch case would be that of an innocent person accused of being a serialkiller. He has no family or friends, and if he is convicted the angry masseswill be appeased. If he is set free, there will be widespread fear and anger,with lynch mobs ready to dispense their own justice. This is all in spite of the fact that the serial killer has stopped killing and psychologists are confi-dent that the killing spree has ended. The utilitarian has to answer theobjection that, in such a situation, the best thing to do would be to convictthe innocent man, as that results in the greatest overall increase in happi-ness in the population. But this is clearly unjust.When faced with this dilemma, there is a great temptation to respond by pointing out some of the other possible negative consequences of convictingthe man – such as, that the real serial killer could possibly begin killing again.But the critic can insert a

ceteris paribus

clause, thus ruling that the only considerations should be the ones specified – all other things will remainequal for the purposes of this example. This forces the utilitarian to confrontthe central dilemma: if increasing happiness means denying justice, shouldthe utilitarian deny justice? The

ceteris paribus

clause thus keeps the focus of the discussion sharply on the relevant features of the argument.

Ceteris paribus

clauses are often implicit, but as ever in philosophy, it is agood rule of thumb not to assume that anything will be taken to be the caseunless it is clearly stated. So, whenever an argument assumes that all otherthings remain equal, insert a

ceteris paribus

clause and avoid potentialconfusion.

SEE ALSO

2.9 Thought experiments4.8 Entailment/implication5.7 Ockham’s razor

88

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

Some questions cannot be answered, or puzzles solved, because they justdon’t make sense. One can only debate, discuss or investigate possibilitiesthat are, in the first place, coherent. That’s why a theory of four-sided tri-angles would not get very far. The concept of ‘four-sided triangle’ is inco-herent, since it contains a self-contradiction. Once we realize this, we cansee that many apparently sensible philosophical questions about four-sidedtriangles are really red herrings. (It doesn’t quite mean that all such ques-tions are ruled out. For example, you might want to think about the rela-tionship of logically incoherent concepts to other abstractions orimpossibilities. You might even consider whether incoherent ‘concepts’ canbe concepts at all.)

Woman’s true nature example

Not all instances of logical incoherence are as obvious as four-sided trian-gles. Janet Radcliffe Richards, in her

The Skeptical Feminist

, presents a fineexample of a subtler form of incoherence. Her subject is the nature of women and she considers how the environment in which a woman growsup and lives affects her nature. What is clear is that the environment doeshave an effect on how women think and behave. But, she argues, it is a mis-take to believe that in such circumstances, we see women as they are not,and that if we were to take away these influences, we would find women asthey really are. Such a view rests on an assumption that something’s truenature is how that thing is in its ‘true’ environment, or, even worse, in noenvironment at all.Both these views suffer from conceptual incoherence. In the second case,it is obvious that all things have to be in some environment or another. Evena vacuum is an environment. So, to say that something’s true nature isrevealed only when it is examined in no environment at all is incoherent,because nothing could ever possibly be in such a situation.It is also, according to Radcliffe Richards, incoherent to think that some-thing’s real nature is revealed when it is in its correct environment. First of all, the whole notion of a ‘correct environment’ is problematic. Isn’t thenotion of what is correct relative to various concerns? The correct environ-ment for a salmon when cooking one is perhaps a heated oven. The correctenvironment for its spawning is something else again.But more importantly, to know something’s nature is to know how it is ina

variety

of environments. Iron’s nature, for example, is most fully understood

90

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

3.8 Counterexamples

In everyday life, we often find ourselves asking whether we have done theright thing. Was it right to tell my mother that I never drink, or was it only a white lie? Was it right to have had all those drinks, or did I have such agood time that it does not matter if I woke up the neighbours? When doingphilosophy, we are not concerned with only particular cases such as these.Our aim is also to discover more general truths, such as whether it can everbe right to tell a lie, or to find what it means for an act to be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’at all.This generality is what distinguishes philosophical questions from mostordinary questions. The answers philosophers put forward to their ques-tions commonly involve generalizations and universals. They are statementsthat are supposed to apply to every relevantly similar instance of lying, notjust the one in which you lied to your mother about your drinking. But it isbecause these answers are supposed to have universal or at least generalapplication that individual cases become very important again, for anexceedingly powerful tool in philosophical thinking is the skill in deployingparticular examples that undermine or at least qualify general claims. Froma logical point of view universal claims (e.g. All X are Y) are extremely vul-nerable to falsification because it only takes a single contrary instance tofalsify them (Here’s an X that is not Y). It is just this vulnerability that coun-terexamples exploit.

Good=pleasant example

For example, if we were to construct an argument to prove that ‘good’ actsare those that produce pleasure, we had better be sure that there are noinstances in which an act could be deemed good even though it did notproduce pleasure. If someone were to take us to task and produce such aninstance, he or she would have cited what is called a ‘counterexample’. Thechallenger might, for instance, suggest that giving money to charity is pain-ful since it leaves you with less money for the finer things in life, yet fewwould suggest that donating a portion of your salary to the blind would notbe a ‘good’ act. In this case, we will either have to renounce our hedonistictheory or else find a way for it to accommodate this counterexample.We might, for example, reply that although you will experience pain as aresult of your generosity, those who receive the donation will experience

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

91

pleasure. We will therein have made an important modification to our ini-tial position (we might alternatively claim that it is a mere clarification):namely, that the pleasurable consequences that make an act ‘good’ do notnecessarily have to be experienced by the act’s agent.In this way, counterexamples can perform the role of constructive criti-cism as well as being used to strike a theory dead. There was, of course, alsonothing to stop us from

biting the bullet

and maintaining that giving money to charity is not a ‘good’ act at all. This may or may not get us very far. In theface of successive counterexamples and the theorist’s responses to them,positions are honed until they are secure or else degraded until they areuntenable.

Importance of the strange

It should be noted that counterexamples can involve some very strangehypothetical scenarios, but although such situations may be unlikely tooccur in everyday life, this does not diminish their relevance in a philo-sophical argument. As a further counterexample to the hedonistic theory of goodness, it might be argued that there are individuals in the world – maso-chists – who achieve happiness by inflicting horrendous pain upon them-selves. In their case, an act that resulted in their pleasure might not beregarded as good. Such individuals are rare, but if they do indeed achievehappiness through agonizing means, then they present just as pertinent acounterexample as the case of charitable donations. In short, a propositionor theory must be shown to survive even under outlandish conditions if itis to claim universal validity.

Limits of modification

So far so simple, but thinkers must also take care to preserve the essentialnature of a position when subjecting it to trial by counterexample. Whetheror not the essential nature of a position has been preserved when presentedwith a given modification or hypothetical scenario is often controversial. Totake a famous example, the status of John Searle’s so-called Chinese Roomhas been hotly debated. Supporters of ‘strong artificial intelligence’ main-tain that a computer that passed the Turing Test (where computer responsescould not be distinguished from those of a human, native-language user

92

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

in a blind test) would not merely be running a simulation of consciousnessbut would actually count as a full-blown mind possessed of cognitive statesand the power of thought.Against this argument, Searle constructed a counterexample. He imag-ined a room in which sat a person who understood not a single word of Chinese. Through a letter box the man receives questions written in Chinesecharacters and responds by looking them up in tables and passing back thesymbols indicated by the table to be the appropriate answer. In essence, thisis what a computer that apparently ‘understood’ Chinese would be doing,and, by that rationale, since the man in the room does not understandChinese, neither would the computer. Both are functioning merely as mind-less manipulators of symbols.The ‘systems’ reply to the Chinese Room charges that Searle’s argumentchanges the nature of the putative possessor of any understanding. Theman in the room may not understand Chinese, but the man

and

the tableswithin the room taken as a system do. It is the whole room that should beregarded as the language user if there is to be an accurate analogy for asymbol-processing computer. Just as we would not normally locate under-standing in a special part of a Chinese speaker’s brain, neither should weexpect understanding to reside in the computer’s CPU, for example. Thoughthe whole, whether person or machine, may understand Chinese, any par-ticular part of it might not. Since the strong artificial intelligence position isnot committed to limiting the location of consciousness, it can be arguedthat Searle’s counterexample has altered the essence of the theory it wasconstructed to test. Defenders of Searle’s counterexample must show why this isn’t so.

SEE ALSO

1.8 Refutation2.5 Anomalies and exceptions that prove the rule2.9 Thought experiments

READING

★

John R. Searle,

Minds, Brains and Science

(1984)

★

Madsen Pirie,

How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic

(2007)

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

93

3.9 Criteria

There’s no great philosophical mystery about the meaning of criteria.A standard dictionary definition of a criterion is a ‘standard by which some-thing can be judged or decided’.In this sense of the word, philosophy is full of criteria. Some are expressed inthe form ‘if and only if’ (usually written ‘iff’) statements. So, if someone arguesthat a person has knowledge iff what she believes is justified and true, she isoffering criteria for knowledge. In other words, something meets the standardsof knowledge if it fulfils the conditions of being a justified, true belief.In other contexts, the language of ‘necessary and sufficient’ conditions isused. In the above example, if the holding of a belief is justified and true,then all the conditions necessary and sufficient for knowledge are in place.There is no good reason why, in standard English, either of the aboveshould not be described as setting out the criteria for knowledge. But in phi-losophy, as in other disciplines, you should become sensitive to facts aboutusage. There are contexts where philosophers tend to talk about necessary and sufficient conditions rather than criteria and following them in doingthis is advisable just because if everyone is using the same terms, everyonecan feel more secure that he or she is actually talking about the same thing.Philosophers form a community of language users, and this community functions most smoothly if the same words are used in similar contexts.There are dangers of ignoring this and seeing these conventions as littlemore than quaint pieces of academic etiquette. What you often find is thata perfectly normal word has become used in one corner of the discipline ina quite specific way. What then happens if you try to use it in another con-text is that confusion is created – are you using the word in its standard,English sense, or do you have the specialized usage in mind? Such is the casewith ‘criteria’. This word is now very much associated with the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951).

Wittgenstein and criteria

Wittgenstein’s work can be extremely gnomic, and sometimes it seems asthough no two people agree on what it actually means. In broad terms,Wittgenstein made use of the idea of criteria for the meaning and use of words. For example, part of the criteria for the correct use of ‘pain’ is that

94

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

a person suffering pain behaves in a certain way: by showing distress, forexample. The significance of using criteria here is that Wittgenstein is notsaying that pain just

is

a certain form of behaviour, nor that such behaviouris a

sign

of pain, which is a private, subjective experience. The idea of crite-ria implies neither of those things – it merely specifies the standards forcorrectly using the word ‘pain’.This, Wittgenstein believed, provided a way out of some old philosophi-cal difficulties: How can we know that other people have minds? And howcan I avoid solipsism – the idea that only I exist? These problems dissolve(rather than are solved) because the criteria for the correct use of words like‘pain’ and ‘minds’ are behavioural and social – even though that does notmean that pain and minds

are

only behaviours. Hence the idea of criteriaappears to be able to cope with the fact that the pains and pleasures of others are, in a sense, private, but that we have public rules for correctly using language about those aspects of our lives.The state of Wittgenstein’s scholarship is such that none of the aboveshould be treated as uncontroversial exegesis. Our key point is simply thatthe notion of criteria has both a special Wittgensteinian sense and an ordi-nary English sense. In the latter sense, ‘criteria’ seems to be a word that canbe used across a wide range of philosophical discussions. But because of theformer, it is wise in philosophical discussions to ration its usage, employingother words and phrases where they are available to avoid any confusionbetween the two. This is an important point, not just about criteria, butabout the way in which apparently normal words get associated with par-ticular philosophical positions. You need to be sensitive to this in order toexpress your arguments as clearly and unambiguously as possible.

SEE ALSO

3.2 Ambiguity 4.5 Conditional/biconditional4.13 Necessary/sufficient

READING

Stanley Cavell,

The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy

(1979)

96

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

ever think it to be flat. If we are to convince our opponents that the world isspherical, we must begin our case with the plausibility of their assumption.While we present the argument for our own view, we must build a supple-mentary account that explains how such a fact as the true shape of the Earthcould go unnoticed. Astronomers might argue about orbits of the planetsand the shadow the Earth casts on the moon, but more simplistic theoriestend to base themselves on less sophisticated, supposedly more obvious evi-dence. The sensation of walking on a flat surface looks like very compellingevidence for the overall flatness of the Earth, and takes some shifting. In theearly days of seafaring, claims that sailors had circumnavigated the globewere sometimes dismissed as hearsay, but one could also have added that,because of the Earth’s vast size, its curvature is too gradual to be noticedduring a walk in the park. This error theory shows that the view of the Earthas flat was a reasonable one on the strength of the best evidence that wasformerly available.

Plausibility not soundness

The effect is to demonstrate that both accounts, the old and the new, arebased on evidence in the same domain. An argument that the Earth isspherical can, of course, be a valid and sound one even if not accompaniedby an error theory. What the error theory adds is plausibility. By showingthat the new theory takes into account the evidence and concerns of the old,one hopes that the latter’s adherents will be persuaded to take a similar viewof the new theory.In this way, adding an error theory provides a powerful instrument toour philosophical toolkit, one that complements the principle of saving thephenomena. Just as our philosophy must preserve the subjective quality of our experience (the phenomena), so must it preserve (to an extent) thelogical force of any widely held arguments it overturns. Both practices helpphilosophers to avoid the charge that their theories simply do not deal withthe same material that concerns their opponents.

SEE ALSO

1.8 Refutation2.1 Abduction

98

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

Example: Austin and sensation

False dichotomies are more often found in everyday arguments than in phi-losophy. This is because presenting an either/or choice is a typical rhetoricalmove, employed more often with the aim of persuading people than with actu-ally constructing a good argument. But they do also crop up in philosophy.One interesting example of this comes in arguments concerning percep-tion. It has been observed that when we perceive an object it often appearsother than how it actually is. So, for example, a straight stick appears bent inwater. Given that the stick is straight, but what is seen is bent, surely in suchcases it cannot be the stick itself we are perceiving. From this basic observa-tion, the argument goes on to conclude that what we perceive directly arenot objects in the world but internal sense ‘perceptions’, or ‘sense data’.The details of the argument are obviously more complicated than this. Whatwe need to focus on is simply a pivotal point in the argument where we arepresented with a dichotomy. This dichotomy states (implicitly, if not explicitly)that an object is either perceived as it is, or it is not perceived directly at all. Thisis the principle that justifies the move from saying that we see a straight stick asbent to the conclusion that in such cases we do not see the stick itself at all.This is, arguably, a false dichotomy. Why should we accept that the choice isbetween accepting that an object is perceived as it is or not perceived directly atall? Why is it not possible to perceive an object directly, but incorrectly? What isthe meaning of ‘direct perception’, anyway? Is there anything with which this cancontrast meaningfully? Questions like these show how the dichotomy the argu-ment depends upon cannot be assumed to be true and on closer examinationmay fall apart just as easily as the ‘Jesus was a liar or a truth-teller’ dichotomy.

SEE ALSO

3.1 Alternative explanations3.3 Bivalence and the excluded middle3.14 Horned dilemmas

READING

J. L. Austin,

Sense and Sensibilia

(1962)Jeff Jordan, ‘The Many Gods Objection’, in

Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal’sWager

(1994)

★

Patrick J. Hurley,

A Concise Introduction to Logic

, 10th edn (2007), Ch. 3

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

99

3.12 False cause

Every time Joshua catches a cold, he drinks a special infusion of herbs, gin-ger and citrus fruits. A few days later, he always feels better. Obviously, theinfusion helps cure his cold.If you had reasoned that way you’d be guilty of an informal fallacy called ‘false cause’. Like many other fallacies, it’s given a Latin title:

noncausa pro causa

. Attributions of causation are a crucial component of sci-entific reasoning, but they are also important in philosophy. Causal issuesabound, for example, in philosophical investigations of the mind–brainrelationship. Debates about free will as well as physical change (e.g.Aristotle’s theory of a prime mover or movers) and the dynamics of his-tory also involve considerations of causation. Understanding some of theways causal reasoning can go wrong, then, can help in many areas of phi-losophy.As it turns out, there are many ways causal reasoning can go wrong. Hereare just a few sub-species of

non causa pro causa

.1.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

(‘after this therefore because of this’). Forshort, this is sometimes called just the

post hoc

fallacy. The example of Joshua above is an instance of this fallacy. Just because he starts to feel betterafter drinking the infusion doesn’t mean that the infusion caused him to getbetter. Yes, all causes precede their effects, but not anything that precedes anevent causes that event. Shortly after the Monarch butterflies migrate southevery year, for example, it gets colder and winter sets in. That doesn’t meanthe Monarchs’ departure causes winter. Similarly, Joshua could start to feelbetter after drinking the infusion because almost any time a person gets acold, they start to feel better after a few days.2.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc

(‘with this therefore because of this’).Sometimes, again, simply called the

cum hoc

fallacy. Just because colourtelevision became commercially popular in the United States at the sametime homicide rates began to climb doesn’t mean that colour televisioncaused the increase in homicides. The two events may be coincidental. Justbecause X occurs along with Y doesn’t mean X causes Y.3.

Ignoring a common cause fallacy

. More specifically, sometimes eventsoccur one

after

another or along

with

one another because they share acommon cause. Missing that common cause lands you in this fallacy. Forinstance, some studies suggest that divorced people are less happy than

100

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

those who stay married. But that does not necessarily mean divorce causesunhappiness. Rather, it may be that a bad marriage causes unhappiness,and in turn leads to divorce. In general terms, simply because X is corre-lated with Y, doesn’t mean X causes Y. There may be something else, Z, thatcauses both X and Y. As it is with the

post hoc

and

cum hoc

fallacies, remem-ber that

correlation does not necessarily imply causation

.4.

Oversimplified cause

. Sometimes phenomena occur not simply as theeffect of a single cause but as the result of a number of ‘contributing causes’.Attributing the effect to a single or a few contributors can lead to intoler-ably misleading distortions. When it does, you’ve committed the fallacy of oversimplified cause. Increases in childhood obesity rates are likely causedby a variety of factors, perhaps including the increased popularity of videogames. But while video games use has likely contributed to the problem, it’salso likely that other factors – such as changes in diet, in exercise and theorganization of children’s time – have also been significant.

Some metaphysical issues

Dig a little deeper beneath these fallacies, and you unearth some eventrickier metaphysical issues about just what it means to say somethingcauses something else in the first place. Some thinkers (for example ration-alists like Descartes, Spinoza, Samuel Clarke and Leibniz) have held thatcauses are linked to effects logically. In these terms, a causal sequence is likethe unfolding of a great idea or set of ideas. Others, like David Hume, haveargued that all we can meaningfully say about causes and effects is thatthey exhibit a regular, law-like spatio-temporal contiguity with one another.So, for Hume, in regular cases of spatio-temporal contiguity, certain formsof correlation are the only grounds for attributing causation. Kant arguedthat we cannot attribute causal relations to things as they exist

in them-selve

s, but as we

experience

or as they

appear

to us events must be under-stood causally.The position holding that there is some independent connection betweencauses and effects (logical or otherwise) can be called

causal realism

. The posi-tion that there is no such connection is, of course,

causal anti-realism

. (Thoserefusing to make a commitment either way might be called

causal sceptics

.)Another issue metaphysicians have explored is whether events can hap-pen without causes. Theoretical physicists, for example, have wondered

102

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

belief is not justified. Her reasoning may appear sound, but according toMorris R. Cohen and Ernest Nagel it is an example of the ‘genetic fallacy’ –confusing the origin of a belief with its justification. For while it may betrue that the origin of my belief is an unreliable one, I may still be justi-fied in believing it for other reasons. (If I were, however, to use the factthat the

Moon

reported it as the

justification

of my belief, I may be introuble.)In this example, my justifications may include the fact that, though the

Moon

is in general an unreliable source, I have since discovered that othermore reliable news services – for example, the

bbc

– had repeated its claims.It might also be said that, though in general the

Moon

is unreliable, it doesnot misreport deaths. (In this case, however, it might be said that the sourceis reliable after all – at least in certain respects.)The key point is simply that the unreliability of a belief’s origin is notitself sufficient to render that belief lacking in justification. (In this thegenetic fallacy is similar to the

argumentum ad hominem

fallacy, whichwould deduce whether a claim is true or not on the basis of the

person

advancing the claim. But just as unreliable newspapers may sometimesget things right, so may unreliable or morally problematic people.)Beliefs can be justified in many ways – by our sense experience, by theagreement of authorities, by reasoning from previously acceptedpremises and so on. The origin of a belief may have little to do withthese justifications. Certainly, the origin of a belief can form part of itsjustification, as, for example, when the

only

reason I have for believingsomething is that someone else has told me about it. But there is nonecessary link between origin and justification, so nothing can bededuced about the justification of a belief solely from facts about itsorigin. Sometimes generally incompetent or unreliable sources producetrue claims. In more prosaic terms, sometimes even a blind squirrelstumbles across an acorn.

General application

More generally, the genetic fallacy may be said to occur whenever some-one argues directly from facts about origins to facts about something’spresent nature. So, in a broader application of this fallacy, one may con-sider not only the truth of beliefs but also the properties possessed by

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

103

things in general. The fact, for example, that someone was born to a family of thieves does not prove that he or she is now, decades on, a thief. The factthat one’s original political commitments were left wing does not provethat they are so years later.

Example of evolutionary psychology

This tool is particularly useful when considering the various claimsof evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists increasingly claim to be able to explain how it is that human beings developed moralsense. Their argument is essentially that humans who learned how to co-operate and be kind to each other – without being taken advantage of –flourished more than passive ‘doves’ or aggressive ‘hawks’. They alsoclaim that typical differences between the sexes can be explained inevolutionary terms: it increases the survival value of a man’s genes if heis promiscuous, risk-taking and high-status-oriented, whereas it increasesa woman’s genes’ survival value if she is faithful, cautious and physically attractive.Such claims may or may not be true, but too many critics of evolutionary psychology have committed a form of the genetic fallacy by taking theseaccounts of the origins of certain features of human nature and society tobe saying things that are straightforwardly true of us now. For example,they argue that, since the bases of moral values emerged through naturalselection, ethics is about nothing more than genetic survival. But this isonly true if one assumes that the nature of ethics as it is now is entirely revealed by an account of its origins. Such an assumption seems false. Itconfuses the origin of ethics with its justification, it confuses the origins of moral attributions with their current status and it neglects the possibility that intervening factors such as critical reflection have had effects uponmoral values during the time since they originated.Similarly, some people believe that a genetic or evolutionary explana-tion for the different sexual behaviours of men and women somehow

justifies

the sexual double standard where men are forgiven for theirphilandering while women who behave in the same way are denigrated.But again, why should it be assumed that explaining the

origin

of atype of behaviour necessarily

justifies

it? The argument is at bestincomplete.

108

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

3.15 Is/ought gap

Children sometimes decide that stealing toys from their playmates is quickerand easier than saving up their pocket money to buy them. When they aretold that they should not do so, their response is sometimes to ask, ‘Why not?’ ‘Because stealing is wrong,’ is a perfectly good answer, but it will notalways satisfy them. Before resorting to threats of punishment, one mightgo into further detail: ‘It upsets Jimmy when you take his things.’ If thismight still not satisfy a five-year-old child, it’s also unlikely to satisfy a logi-cian or ethicist. The assertion ‘You should not steal Jimmy’s toys’ seems tocontain something absent from the observation ‘Stealing Jimmy’s toysupsets him.’ The latter is a statement of fact, whereas the former contains amoral prescription.

The logical point

If you were to construct an argument taking ‘Stealing Jimmy’s toys upsetshim’ as your first (and only) premise, it would not be a logically validargument that concluded, ‘Therefore, stealing Jimmy’s toys is wrong.’ Tomake the argument valid, you would need to add a second premise:‘Stealing toys is wrong’ or ‘Upsetting Jimmy is wrong.’ In both cases youwould have added something not present in your first premise – a moraljudgement or prescription. The necessity of this second premise is oftenheld to show that one cannot derive an

ought

from an

is

, or a value from amere fact.

The meta-ethical point

The above is true as a matter of pure logical inference. Some philosophers,however, have drawn the more substantive conclusion that ethics is ‘auton-omous’ – that the is/ought gap proves that moral facts are fundamentally different from any other kinds of facts about the world, and so deserve aspecial treatment of their own. The British philosopher George EdwardMoore (1873–1958) referred to those who conceive of ‘good’ as a naturalproperty of things as ‘naturalists’ and as committing the ‘naturalistic fal-lacy’. And philosophers who maintain that moral properties like ‘good’ and

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

109

‘bad’ can be understood without reference to subjective states like beliefs orfeelings (often conceived to be natural feelings) are called moral realists.‘Anti-realists’, ‘moral sceptics’ or ‘subjectivists’, on the other hand, com-monly derive their arguments from a section in Hume’s

Treatise of HumanNature

, where he notes that moralists ‘proceed for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning’ with regard to observations concerning human affairs,‘when of a sudden, I am surprised to find that instead of the usual copula-tions of propositions is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is notconnected with an ought, or an ought not’. He continues that ‘as this oughtor ought not expresses some new relation or affirmation ’tis necessary thatit be observed and explained; and at the same time a reason should be givenfor what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be adeduction from others which are entirely different from it’ (Bk 1, Pt 1, §1).This gap between an ‘ought’ and an ‘is’ is sometimes held to indicate afundamental distinction in the world between matters of ethics and any other matters of fact. Some might, for example, use the distinction to refutethe claim that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ can be reduced to subjective matters of pleas-ure and pain – these qualities being (naturalistic) matters that can bereferred to by purely factual statements devoid of value judgement.Although the logical distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ seems sound,critics have increasingly argued that, in practice, they are often more entan-gled. Many concepts, such as ‘proficient’, ‘murder’ or even ‘philosopher’seem to express values as well as facts. To say someone is a philosopher, forinstance, is not just a value-free description, but is in part a judgement thatthey have sufficient skill and knowledge to warrant the label. What logic canclearly distinguish, language often compounds. Hence the logical robust-ness of the is/ought gap may have much less relevance for philosophicaldiscourse than Hume thought.

Back to logic

The thought that conclusions containing an ‘ought’ cannot be deducedfrom premises not containing an ‘ought’ is not itself a meta-ethical claimbut a purely logical point for which matters of ethics present no specialcase. The same principle can be applied to all sorts of concepts, and not justethical ones. For example, conclusions containing reference to grapefruitscannot be logically derived from premises that do not refer to grapefruits,but this does not mean that there is a fundamental, logical difference

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

111

On this more precise version of the principle, in order to make the errorMohammed has to accept that if he knows who Tommy is, but not who themasked man is, then Tommy has a property –

being known by Mohammed

–that the masked man does not.

The property of ‘being known’

But can ‘being known’ by someone really count as a property of a thing? If so, it would be a very odd one. For example, it would mean that someonecould gain a property without having changed at all, simply in virtue of someone coming to know who she is. Consider someone like Diana Spencer(Princess Diana), who suddenly became very famous. What must it havebeen like to gain so many properties virtually overnight?A more attractive, alternative view is that what is known, thought orbelieved about an object does not count as one of its properties. Tommy may indeed be the masked man because what Mohammed knows abouthim is not actually a property of him. (On the other hand, you might try tosave the claim that ‘being known by’ is a property of things by showing howMohammed is guilty of the fallacy of equivocation. That is, you might try to show that his use of the word ‘know’ is semantically different in the sen-tences [1] ‘I know who Tommy is,’ and [2] ‘I don’t know who this maskedman is.’ For example, you might argue that while Tommy possesses thequality of being known face-to-face by Mohammed, Tommy does not pos-sess the property of being identifiable to Mohammed when wearing a maskat every moment of that masquerade ball.)The masked man fallacy, then, illustrates why it may be wrong to classify what we

know, think, believe

or even perhaps

perceive

of an object as a

prop-erty

of that object. This raises a whole nest of new issues about what exactly ‘properties’ are.

Descartes example

A noted example of the masked man fallacy appears in Descartes’s argu-ment that mind and body must be distinct substances. He reached this con-clusion by a simple application of Leibniz’s law. Consider first the propertiesof matter: it is spatial and temporal; has mass, size and solidity; and is divis-ible. Now, consider the properties of mind. It is not spatial. You can’t touch

112

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

it or measure its length. It has no mass or size. (How absurd it is to ask howmuch a thought weighs!) It isn’t solid, and it’s not divisible (you can’t sliceoff a piece of mind and place it in a drawer). Therefore, reasons Descartes,as mind and matter clearly have essentially different properties, they cannotbe the same thing. Hence mind and matter must be two different substances.(This is the doctrine of mind–body dualism.)One may resist this argument by appealing to the masked man fallacy.The fallacy shows that what we think, believe or perceive of something doesnot necessarily correspond to what the properties of that thing actually are.Certainly, mind does not

seem

(to us) to have mass, size or solidity; but doesthat necessarily mean it does not

in fact

possess those properties? Couldn’tmind be like the masked man – when we observe it from a certain point of view (as a brain) we don’t recognize it for what it is? Couldn’t the physicalstuff that is our brain still be mind? Spinoza in fact advanced a similar lineof criticism against Descartes.What the dualist needs to show is not just that mind does not

seem

tohave physical properties, nor matter mental properties, but that there is a

real

or complete distinction between two different substances. The dualistneeds to show why the apparent distinction between minds and brains isnot a product of the fact that we perceive brains and minds in differentways – or that we simply possess a confused conception of ‘mind’. Or, per-haps the burden of proof rests with the challengers. Perhaps it is the criticwho must show that the mind and body only

seem

to possess essentially different properties – that they are ‘wearing masks’.Perhaps answering these questions will depend on whether we take theviewpoint of the objective observer, looking on the brain, or the subject,thinking and feeling.

SEE ALSO

4.19 Types/tokens5.6 Leibniz’s law of identity

READING

★

René Descartes,

Meditations on First Philosophy

(1641), Meditation VIBenedictus Spinoza,

Principles of Descartes’s Philosophy

(1663)

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

113

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,

Discourse on Metaphysics

(1686)

★

Michael Loux,

Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction

(2006), Ch. 3

3.17 Partners in guilt

Kant once wrote that one should always treat persons as ends, never as means.Many people have agreed with him. Further, they have invoked this principlein arguments against their opponents. But in doing so they may have openedthemselves up to the objection that they are ‘partners in guilt’. To see why,consider the following, highly simplified philosophical exchange.Deontologists believe that actions are right or wrong, regardless of theirconsequences, whereas consequentialists, as their name implies, believe thatthe consequences of an action determine whether it is right or wrong. It isoften held up as a criticism against consequentialists that their principlespermit unacceptable wrongdoing. For example, what if it were possible, fora bizarre set of reasons, to save the lives of ten innocent people by killingjust one innocent person? Because the consequences of this one killing arethat one innocent person dies, and the consequences of not killing are thatten innocent people die, many consequentialists would say that the morally right action is to murder the innocent individual.Some deontologists object that this murder contravenes Kant’s principle:what we would be doing is using this innocent individual as merely a means toa greater good. In killing her, we are not respecting her life as an end in itself.The consequentialist, however, may try to turn this objection against thedeontologist. If we refuse to kill this innocent person, then are we not treatingthe lives of the ten innocent people who die as means rather than ends? We arenot respecting their lives as valuable in themselves, but treating them as meremeans to preserving our own moral integrity. Isn’t the way to follow Kant’sinjunction to consider all the parties involved equally and see what benefitsthe most, considering all the lives involved as valuable in themselves?

Strengths and weaknesses of the tool

The consequentialist is using the partners in guilt move as a

defence

againstattack. This means deflating the objection advanced and showing that it isa criticism that can equally be used against the attacker: ‘If your criticism is

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

115

find the water as agreeable as you do. There may be other, less obviousreasons for her delight than finding a retreat from the sun. Perhaps the riveris regarded as holy in her country, and she is visiting it at the end of a longpilgrimage, or perhaps she is performing a kind of baptism, or thinks thatimmersion in its waters will result in a healthy harvest for her crops or inhealthy children. Under the conditions as you know them, however, youmay well assume that she has the same motives as yourself.Now, if the woman had instead jumped into the cool water and immedi-ately climbed out muttering what you have picked up as a few of the localcurses, you would not normally assume that the woman did not like coolingherself down on hot days. Imagine that she explains (or appears to explain)that she had believed ‘S’ about the water. Given your ignorance of her lan-guage, S could mean just about anything; but as a reasonable person, youmight fancy that she had been expecting a hot spring in which to bathe, orthat she had thought the water was safe before spotting a crocodile on thefar bank. In being so reasonable, you would be obeying the Principle of Charity.

The main point

The ‘Principle of Charity’ states that interpreters should seek to maximizethe soundness of others’ arguments and truth of their claims by renderingthem in the strongest way reasonable. In other words, when there are differ-ent translations that could reasonably well explain an individual’s speech orbehaviour, the one that should be chosen above the others is (

ceteris pari-bus

) the one that renders it most rational under the relevant circumstances.These circumstances might include the physical backdrop to the case, thesubject’s wider set of beliefs or, in the exegesis of a philosophical text, otherwritings by the thinker in question. Accusations of such logical vices as bias,prejudice and blatant inconsistency should, if possible, be resisted unlessevidence compels them. More simply put, the Principle of Charity demandsthat another’s position or behaviour be portrayed in the best possible light.A related principle, the ‘Principle of Fidelity’, enjoins us to render otherpeople’s claims and arguments as accurately as possible – even when doingso may not be to our argumentative advantage.Judicious use of the Principle of Charity certainly keeps things simple,but in our example we may have had a further reason to discount the morefanciful interpretations of the local’s behaviour. Unless we take a well-grounded

116

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

alternative view of her country, we will be wary of imputing beliefs to thelocal person that we would ourselves hold to be wrong. The typical Westernerdoes not believe that a farmer can make her crops grow faster by bathing ina certain river, no matter how holy it is. The farmer may, of course, turn outto hold that belief nonetheless, but we would do well to regard the transla-tion as at best provisional until we have acquired a mastery of the farmer’slanguage. Similarly, we will rule out translations that cast her statements aswhat we would consider to be biased, prejudiced, circular or meaningless oras blatant self-contradictions, even though we may later find that thesevices riddle her speech.One might say that according to the principle of charity, others’ argu-ments are to be presumed strong, their views cogent and their behavioursensible and proper until shown to be otherwise.

Problem of interpretive imperialism

The sentiments that underpin the principle of charity might begin to seemfamiliar at this point. There are, however, many peoples who might regard‘charity’ as a misnomer. The principle seems to require the belief that allhuman beings share the same basic interests and desires, and this has beenthe assumption of many an imperialist. What counts as ‘the best possiblelight’ may, as a matter of fact, vary among cultures; and who is to say whichview is to be preferred? On the other hand, one might argue that the flaw of the imperialists was in not pressing the principle of charity far enough or inhaving a mistaken view of ‘the best possible light’.There is, for example, more than one way of respecting the dead. If onecame across a tribe that marks the passing of a loved one with cheerfulmusic and dancing, it might be celebrating the deceased’s entry into heavenrather than showing how glad its people are to see the back of him. Beforeknowing the facts, it would certainly betray a lack of imagination and a lessthan generous comportment to dismiss the tribe’s behaviour as vicious orobnoxious.

Avoids straw men

Indeed, forgoing the principles of charity and fidelity not only exposes oneto these sorts of moral and political charges; it also sets one up to commit alogical error called the ‘straw man’ fallacy – criticizing a silly caricature of

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

117

another’s position rather than the position itself. Moreover, keep in mindthat on purely tactical grounds it’s generally a good idea to cast the argu-ments of your opponents in the strongest possible light, because if you candefeat the strong versions of their arguments, then you can certainly defeatweaker versions. There seem to be, therefore, not only moral and politicalreasons but also logical and practical considerations for embracing thephilosophical tool known as the Principle of Charity.

Plato example

Similar considerations should be employed when approaching philosophi-cal texts. In his dialogue,

Republic

, Plato speaks of qualities such as ‘large’and ‘small’, ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ as ‘contraries’; and he says that it is character-istic of the objects we perceive in the ordinary world to present contrary appearances, sometimes simultaneously. There is, according to this account,a problem with the very nature of sensible objects in that they are some-times indeterminate and even apparently self-contradictory – both a thingand at the same time

not

that thing. Modern philosophers are wont to objectthat, in fact, the terms Plato scrutinizes are not strictly speaking contrary but relational. That is, it’s not that one object exhibits the property ‘large-ness’ and another ‘smallness’, but that the first is ‘larger than’ the second andthe second ‘smaller than’ the first.Critics then argue that if Plato had recognized this fact, he would haverealized that there is no contrariety involved – being larger than one thingis not contrary to being smaller than another. Certain decidedly uncharit-able commentators, citing additional evidence from another dialogue,the

Phaedo

, have gone on to claim that Plato believed that an object couldbe essentially ‘equal’ without at the same time being equal to any otherobject.If, however, we were to employ the Principle of Charity in this case, thenrather than trying to interpret Plato’s arguments in such a way as to makethem as implausible as possible, we would instead attempt to maximizetheir rationality – to interpret them in the way that makes them most, notleast, reasonable. Approaching the arguments with this charitable attitude,we might note that Plato, elsewhere in his works, shows a perfectly lucidfamiliarity with such relational concepts as ‘father’, ‘brother’, ‘master’ and‘slave’ (in, e.g., the

Symposium

and the

Parmenides

). Plato may have beenmistaken in dismissing the role of relations in favour of simple properties

120

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

Assumptions and implications

Whether or not this way of interpreting Descartes salvages his work fromthe charge of begging the question, it’s important to understand that if anargument does beg the question it quite clearly fails. Things do get a bitsticky here in the sense that valid deductive arguments are understood tohave premises that somehow do already contain, or entail, or imply the con-clusion (see 1.2). And so the question naturally arises: what’s the differencebetween an acceptable deductive argument whose premises legitimately contain or imply the conclusion and an illegitimate argument that begs thequestion? It’s precisely because that difference can’t be determined throughthe formal structures of arguments that begging the question is understoodto be an

informal fallacy

(see 1.7). A general rule of thumb here in assessingany particular argument is to consider what relevant and controversial mat-ters the argument may depend upon and whether any of them have beensomehow hidden or masked. Keep in mind that, taken seriously, a properargument should employ only acceptable and well understood reasons injustifying a conclusion. But if a conclusion has already been misleadingly assumed by the reasons offered, those reasons

provide no independent sup-port

for the conclusion. An argument of that sort should persuade only those who already agree with the conclusion!It should be noted that, as with so many philosophical terms and con-cepts, there are popular uses of this expression that are importantly differ-ent from its uses in philosophy. In everyday English, people often say, ‘Thatbegs the question,’ meaning ‘That leads to a further question.’ For example,someone might say that we need to cut carbon dioxide emissions to reduceglobal warming, and someone else might reply, ‘That begs the question:what should we do if we are not successful in cutting carbon dioxide emis-sions?’ Whether or not this is acceptable usage or not is a question that may vex linguists and grammarians. Whatever they decide, it is not the philo-sophical usage and should be clearly distinguished from it.

SEE ALSO

1.1 Arguments, premises and conclusions3.6 Circularity 4.8 Entailment/implication

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

121

READING

★

René Descartes,

The Discourse on Method

(1637)

★

Patrick J. Hurley,

A Concise Introduction to Logic

, 10th edn (2007)

3.20 Reductios

Hollywood loves what it calls ‘high concept comedies’. There’s an element of double-speak here, however, because by high concept they do not meananything highbrow or intellectual. Rather, a high-concept comedy is onewhere the whole film springs from a simple, comic premise. The whole filmcan then be captured in a single sentence with the suffix ‘with hilariousconsequences’ appended. So for example, ‘man dresses up as a woman so hecan work as housekeeper in his ex-wife’s home and see his kids, with hilari-ous consequences’. Or, ‘cast of science fiction TV series are mistaken by aliens for real intergalactic heroes, with hilarious consequences’.High-concept comedies do nevertheless share something with a form of philosophical argument known as

reductio ad absurdum

. While the come-dies start from premises that are possible or plausible; the philosophicalreductio starts with premises held by those whose position they undermine.From its initial premise, the high-concept comedy follows through the log-ical consequences to its (we hope) hilarious conclusions; the philosophicalreductio, on the other hand, follows through the logic of its premises totheir absurd, even if not humorous, conclusion. The comedy aims to enter-tain; the philosophical reductio hopes to show that, if the premises lead toabsurd consequences, the premises must be wrong.

A powerful tool

Plato was a master of the

reductio ad absurdum

. In Book 1 of his

Republic,

for example, his protagonist, Socrates, employs the technique in a discus-sion of justice. Socrates and his interlocutors consider there the view thatjustice may be defined as repaying debts. Socrates easily demolishes thisdefinition by showing that among its logical consequences is the conclu-sion that it would be just to return weapons you owe to a madman, even

122

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

though you know he’ll use them to kill innocent people. This can’t bewhat justice is, Socrates argues. Therefore, the original premise that led tothe conclusion – that justice is repaying debts – must be false (

Republic

331e–332a).The technique is particularly powerful because it allows us, for the pur-pose of argument, to grant for a moment what our opponent believes. Wesay, ‘Let’s suppose you are right. What would be the consequences?’ If wecan then show that the consequences are absurd, we can force the opponentto admit something is wrong in his or her position: ‘If you believe X, youmust believe Y. Yet Y is absurd. So, do you really believe X?’In our example, Socrates is careful not to read too much into his firststrike. He employs the Principle of Charity and assumes that his opponentcouldn’t possibly mean by ‘justice is the repaying of a debt’ that one shouldreturn weapons to a madman. So, he then goes on to interpret the princi-ple in a way that doesn’t lead to this absurd conclusion. This is a goodexample of how a reductio can encourage us not to abandon a position,but to refine it.

Complexities

Reductios are very commonly used, but they are not unproblematic. Thecore problem is this: How do we decide when to ‘bite the bullet’ and acceptthe ‘absurd’ consequence of our position, and when do we abandon ormodify the position? For instance, does Socrates’ argument really show thatjustice is not the repaying of a debt or that, contrary to our initial intuitions,it is just to return weapons to enemies and madmen? The problem here isthat we seem to have no other alternative but to rely on our intuitions todecide whether the consequence is absurd or just surprising.The problem is less acute if the consequence is a logical contradiction –this subspecies of reductios is called

proof by contradiction

(or

reductio adimpossibile

). If a set of premises has the logical consequence that roundobjects are square, that would show decisively that the premises are flawed.But reductios usually don’t work in this way. It is not a contradiction to say it is just to return weapons to madmen; it is merely counter-intuitive.Reductios are not usually conclusive, except in the case of proof by con-tradiction. Rather, they offer a

choice

: accept the consequence, no matterhow absurd it seems, or reject the premises. Often that’s a hard choice, butit is not strictly speaking a refutation.

124

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

argued that objects have primary and secondary qualities. Essentially, sec-ondary qualities are sense-dependent features like colour and smell. Theseare properties an object has only because the perceivers of those objectshave a particular way of sensing them. Primary qualities, on the other hand,are the properties objects have independently of how they are perceived.These qualities – such as mass, size and shape – do not change according tothe different senses of beings who perceive them.Berkeley’s argument against Locke was not to show directly that objectsdo not have any primary qualities, but to show that they were utterly redun-dant. Berkeley argued that what Locke called primary qualities were assense-dependent as secondary qualities. We do not need to worry here abouthow he did this, or whether he was successful. To see his strategy, we justneed to see where that leaves primary qualities if he was successful. Note thathe hasn’t shown there are no primary qualities. All he has shown is that thereis no need to think about the supposed primary qualities Locke has identi-fied as being any different from secondary qualities. This now leaves the ideaof primary qualities redundant. After conceiving our experiences in terms of secondary qualities, according to Berkeley, there is simply no work left forthe concept ‘primary quality’ to do. That should be sufficient to consign thewhole idea of primary qualities to the dustbin. If there is no longer a role forprimary qualities and the explanation of the properties of objects is com-plete without them, why persist in asserting that they exist? Their whole

raison d’être

has been removed, and so they too must be removed.On a more abstract level, philosophers following Frank Ramsey have beentaken to have gone so far as to argue that the very idea of ‘truth’ is redundant.After all, what does it add to a sentence, for example ‘X’, to say that ‘It is truethat X’? Is it any different to say that, ‘It’s true that Frankfort is the capital of Kentucky’ than it is to say, ‘Frankfort is the capital of Kentucky.’Of course, it is highly debatable whether Berkeley or any of those who fol-low Ramsey succeed in their arguments. Though he attempted to show pri-mary qualities were redundant, we should not assume he actually did so.Nevertheless, his strategy is instructive even if it failed, for it shows that you cando with redundancy many of the same things you can do with refutation.

SEE ALSO

1.8 Refutation2.1 Abduction

126

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

English. But how do we acquire our language of thought? If to learn any language we need already to possess a language already, then surely we canlearn the language of thought only if we already know another language,call it the pre-language of thought. But how do we learn that language? Wewould surely need already to know a language still prior to the pre-languageof thought and so on,

ad infinitum.

This is an example of an

infinite regress

. Such a regress occurs when thelogic of a position requires you to postulate an entity or process prior tothat position; but then this entity or process itself, by the same logic, requiresthe postulating of a still further prior entity or process and so on,

ad infini-tum

. Such a regress is extremely damaging for at least two reasons.First, because it multiplies entities or processes infinitely, it leads to highly implausible theories. We might grant Fodor one language of thought, butthe idea that there must be an infinite number of languages of thoughtnesting inside the mind is too preposterous.Second, when there is a regress the intended explanation is

deferred

ratherthan

offered

. The language of thought hypothesis, for example, is supposedto explain how we acquire language. But, if the hypothesis does lead to aregress, we do not, in fact, ever explain how we get our first language. We’rejust told that for any particular language, we must already have learned aprior one to acquire it. It does not explain how we acquired the first lan-guage in the first place.

The sceptical regress

Philosophers in the sceptical tradition have been very clever in using thisdimension of regresses to subvert various attempts to finalize philosophicalexplanations. One of their most successful strategies has been to useregresses to undermine the idea of established truth or justification. Inbrief, the strategy works like this: in order to determine any claim to be trueor any phenomena to be truthful, you have to have a standard by which toevaluate it – a ‘criterion of truth’ – for example, sense perception or reason(see 3.9). But what justifies the capacities of the standard? To use the stand-ard to assess itself would be circular (3.6). To use sense perception to assesswhether sense perception itself is truthful just won’t do. So, the standardrequires another standard, an independent standard. But then the nextstandard will itself require another, independent standard. And, clearly,we’re off on an infinite regress. While ‘infinitists’ have embraced the infinite

128

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

Dennett was being accused of breaking a cardinal rule of philosophy:that one must always ‘save the phenomena’. Whatever else a philosophicalexplanation might do, it must account for the way things ‘seem like’ to us.This principle presents us with a powerful tool of criticism.

The critical point

A theory of ethics, for example, is inadequate if it cannot account for ourexperience of moral behaviour and judgement. A theory of perception isinadequate if it cannot account for our ordinary experiencing of sights andsounds. Any philosophical doctrine that seeks to deny these phenomena willbe fighting a losing battle. The conclusions we draw from our experience canbe debated, but the very event of that experience must not be sacrificed orignored for the sake of theoretical interest. To paraphrase the physicistRichard Feynman: if your conclusions contradict common sense, then somuch for common sense; if they conflict with received philosophical opin-ion, then too bad for received opinion; but if they should deny the very factsof our experience, then you must consign your conclusions to the flames.This seems to be just the problem into which the ancient Eleatic philoso-pher, Parmenides (b. c.515

bce

) argued himself when he concluded thatnothing that changes, or that’s spatially divisible, or that exists in time, orthat we perceive with the senses, and not even sense perception itself, exists.Having pretty much thrown out every phenomenon we experience,Parmenides’s conclusions have seemed to many on the face of them absurd.

The demands of explanation

The necessity of saving the phenomena becomes obvious for anotherreason if we consider the relationship of an explanation with what itexplains – what is technically called its ‘

explanandum

’. In order for thereto be an explanandum in the first place, there must be some phenome-non that can be ‘picked out’ or ‘individuated’ in our experience and thenexplained. But if an explanation does not account for the existence of theexplanandum, or the possibility of our picking it out, then it cannotreally have explained it at all.In the case of ethics, one might start with twinges of conscience, feelingsof compassion and tugs of commitment, and then go on to formulate a

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

129

moral theory. But if that theory, in its final reckoning, finds no place forthese experiences for which it was initially produced, then we may be leftwondering just in what way it can be said to be a moral theory at all.

Limitations of the critical point

Sometimes, however, the accusation that phenomena have not been savedrings hollow. We can see from Dennett’s case that failing to mention thephenomena is not the same as failing to save them (though whether hefails to save the phenomena for other reasons is a different matter).Dennett responded to his critics by arguing that if an explanation is to liveup to its name, the phenomenon it explains cannot rightly appear in itsfull glory within the framing of that explanation. His point is a strong one.It would be as if you were to go about solving an equation for

x

and thenclaim to have succeeded, though the value

x

remained on both sides of theequation.Another illustration he uses is to imagine a box diagram that explainsconsciousness. If the explanation therein were complete, one would cer-tainly hope not to find a box buried somewhere within it labelled ‘con-sciousness’. If there were such a box, then we might as well dispense with allthe other boxes in the diagram as superfluous. Needless to say, if the boxthat then remained contained nothing but the phenomenon of conscious-ness, then the diagram would provide no explanation to speak of.

Levels of explanation

Whether or not one finds Dennett’s arguments convincing, one can allowthat there are different levels of explanation. An aspect of a phenomenonapparent at one level might not be apparent at another. The liquidity of water is not apparent in its microstructure, but that does not mean that thedescription of water as H

2

O is inadequate or mistaken, or that chemistshave failed to save the phenomena. There is no denial of the phenomenahere, because to ascribe a chemical structure to water is not to deny water’sliquidity – liquidity not being a property of individual atoms. Once we havedescribed that chemical structure, we can move to showing how a largebody of such atoms becomes a liquid at certain temperatures. As long asone’s theory can account for the move from microstructure to macrostructure,

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

131

not be true for everyone at all times and places. But the relativist’s principleis claimed to be true for everyone at all times and places. To assert the prin-ciple, then, is simultaneously to deny it. The position is thus self-defeating.Another famous example is a simple version of verificationism, whichstates that only statements that are verifiable by sense-experience aremeaningful – all others are nonsense. But if we apply this principle to itself,we’ll see that the principle itself is not verifiable by sense experience. Hence,according to the principle, the principle itself must be nonsense. So, if wetake the principle to be true, we find that the principle is undermined by itself.Alvin Plantinga (1932–) has recently attacked purely naturalistic evolu-tionary theory (which regards the evolutionary process as purely naturaland without intelligent guidance or purpose) as being self-defeating.Roughly, Plantinga holds that according to naturalistic evolutionary theory,humans have the cognitive faculties they do because they have conferred onus evolutionary advantages, namely, they help us to pass on genetic mate-rial. But Plantinga maintains – and this is crucial – that there is no reason,according to the naturalistic position, to think that these cognitive facultiescan reliably identify true beliefs. In fact, he thinks that for every true belief there are many, many false beliefs consistent with the survival of geneticmaterial. For example, while the true belief that tigers are dangerous willhelp human genes survive by keeping people at a safe distance from tigers,so will the false belief that the gods have commanded us on pain of damna-tion to stay away from tigers, even though they are harmless.If Plantinga is right about this, then we have no reasons for thinking thathuman beings have minds that tend to lead them to true beliefs. And thatmeans that most of the beliefs we have about the world are probably wrong,even though they confer some selective advantage. So, on the basis of thepremises of evolutionary theory, then, all of our beliefs are probably false.But, of course, naturalistic evolutionary theory

is itself a human belief

.Therefore, on its own terms, naturalistic evolutionary theory is probably false and thus self-defeating. (It should be said that most people rejectPlantinga’s argument. It is a good example of the structure and strategy of identifying self-defeating arguments, even if it doesn’t ultimately work.)Spotting a self-defeating argument is a bit like witnessing somethingspontaneously combust. It is so devastating because there is little room todisagree with a criticism if that criticism is based precisely on your owncentral claims. What may be surprising is how common self-defeating argu-ments are.

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

133

3.25 Sufficient reason

Anyone who takes up philosophy for any length of time will at somepoint meet at least one person who finds the whole idea of philosophy baffling. Quite often, this bemusement is directed at the philosophicalimpulse to explain everything. Sometimes it seems that philosophers arelike children who can’t stop asking, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ Exasperated non-philosophers are likely to say something like, ‘Not everything can beexplained’, surprised that you have failed to recognize this basic truthabout the universe.It is important to see the truth in this sentiment, but also to see how aproper understanding of the philosophical pursuit of explanations accom-modates this truth. One can do this by considering a very simple principleset out by Leibniz – the

principle of sufficient reason

: ‘There can be found nofact that is true or existent, or any true proposition, without there being asufficient reason for its being and not otherwise, although we cannot knowthese reasons in most cases’ (

Monadology

32). Or, following Schopenhauer:‘

Nihil est sine ratione cur potius sit quam non sit

’ (‘Nothing is without a rea-son for why it is rather than is not’).This principle succinctly captures the philosophical attitude to explana-tion. It also alludes to a basic question that is liable to strike us all from timeto time and which has motivated a great deal of philosophy. Why, after all,is there something rather than nothing?Sometimes the very fact that anything at all exists seems astonishing, andit seems as though there simply must be a reason for it all. Moreover, prop-erly understood the principle also contains within it the riposte to the criticwho thinks philosophers try to explain too much.It is worth focusing on the last clause of Leibniz’s formulation:‘although we cannot know these in most cases’. Leibniz accepts that weoften do not know what reasons there are. But this is not the same as say-ing there are no reasons. For example, for the millennia before AlbertEinstein’s general theory of relativity, people had no idea, or had wrongideas, why gravity pulled objects to the Earth. But pre-Einsteinian scien-tists and philosophers still believed, correctly, that there was some reasonwhy gravity worked. You can accept that there are reasons for the worldbeing the way it is while also accepting that you haven’t a clue what thosereasons are.

136

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

3.26 Testability

A common indicator of what someone most fears is what that person sayshe or she is most fervently opposed to. If this is true of philosophy, then inthe modern era it is arguable that philosophy has been most afraid of soph-istry: nonsense masquerading as sophisticated thought. Ever since Berkeley argued that we should abandon philosophical conceptions of material sub-stance not because they’re false but because they’re literally

meaningless

,philosophers have been engaged in an ongoing purge from their disciplineof all perceived nonsense.This fear that philosophy is contaminated with meaningless nonsensethat stands in the way of fruitful reflection peaked in the early part of thetwentieth century. The logical positivists and their successors in whatbecame known as analytical philosophy attempted to rid philosophical dis-course of nonsense by coming up with simple rules that would enable us tosort the coherent wheat from the empty chaff.One such rule was the ‘Verification Principle of Meaning’, a principleparticularly well developed by Alfred Jules Ayer (1910–89). The principleappeared in various forms. It may be roughly stated as:

only propositionsthat can be verified by reference to sensation are meaningful

.All others are not merely false, but literally meaningless. So, for example,the idea that there is an invisible, intangible pink elephant in this room ismeaningless, since there is no way, even in principle, that this claim couldbe verified by sense experience, as anything invisible and intangible is by definition unexperienceable. On this view, much of metaphysics, theology and ethics is meaningless and should be cast off by philosophy.Verificationism

as a principle of meaning

failed, however, because no onecould come up with a formulation that didn’t exclude what it was supposedto permit, or permit what it was supposed to exclude (see 1.10). More fatally,since the principle itself could not be verified by sense experience, it appearedto be nonsense by its own criterion (3.25). This, however, wasn’t simply aproblem with semantics. It also affected the philosophy of science.

Testability and science

Philosophers of science have undertaken to articulate the properties of goodexplanations, especially with regard to scientific theories. Testability isamong the most important of those properties. For example, the hypothesis

TOOLS FOR ASSESSMENT

137

that everything everyone does is done for selfish reasons is untestable(because it is consistent with all possible experimental outcomes, all possibleconduct) and hence cannot be part of a solid scientific theory (and is moreproperly a species of ideology). Rejecting speculative, untestable hypotheses,Isaac Newton is said to have proclaimed, ‘

hypotheses non fingo

’ (‘I feign nohypotheses’). Or, as more recently, Imre Lakatos might have said, ‘Testability is a property of good explanations and good scientific theories.’But if this is so, the verification principle seems a poor way of conceptu-alizing testability, in particular because it is impossible to verify completely scientific laws of nature. Scientific laws (e.g. Newton’s inverse square law of attraction) make logically universal claims – claims about

all

instances of certain phenomena across the entire universe, past, present and future. Butno one can verify such claims.

Falsifiability to the rescue?

To remedy this situation, in verification’s footsteps came

falsification

, KarlPopper’s thesis that it was the fact that a scientific generalization could befalsified that made it (in Popper’s original formulations) a good scientifichypothesis. Paraphrasing Popper, one might put it this way: science advancesby making conjectures (hypotheses), which are subsequently tested andperhaps refuted; if refuted, they are replaced by further conjectures untilconjectures are discovered that are not refuted by the tests.Universal claims such as scientific laws may not be completely verified;but they can be completely falsified. To falsify the claim that ‘all cometstravel in elliptical orbits’, you only need find a single comet that does nottravel in an elliptical orbit. In science, this process of conjecture and refuta-tion goes on and on, perhaps

ad infinitum

. There is, however, a logical costto the falsification interpretation of testing. The problem is that falsificationfails to work with logically particular claims such as ‘some swans are purple’.Examining a million swans and finding no purple animals among themdoes not falsify the statement, since there might possibly still be a purpleswan out there somewhere.

Relation of the two principles

Verification and falsification are not two sides of one coin. Verificationists likeAyer wanted their principle to apply to all philosophy, indeed all discourse,

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

141

4.1

A priori/a posteriori

When I was taught geometry at school, I remember a stage when I puzzledover the claim that internal angles of a triangle always added up to 180°. Fora while, what bothered me was that I couldn’t see how one could be entirely sure about this. Isn’t it possible that one could, one day, find a triangle,measure its internal angles and discover that the angles added up to only 179°, or a generous 182°?What I hadn’t yet realized was that the claim that the internal angles of atriangle add up to 180° is an

a priori

claim. That is to say, according to many philosophers, it can be known to be true independently of (or logically prior to) particular experiences. I was thinking of geometry as if it were abranch of

a posteriori

knowledge, where we only know if something is trueor false by reference to relevant, past (posterior) experiences.

A priori

knowledge

Why are geometric claims like this thought of as

a priori

? The reason is thatthe objects of geometry – triangles, squares and so on – are not, in a sense,objects in the ‘real world’. A triangle in the real world is never quite a perfectgeometric triangle, though it may resemble it closely enough for us to act asthough it is. For a start, we live in a three-dimensional world, whereasshapes like triangles and squares are purely two dimensional.Because of this, the properties of triangles in

general

can be known withoutany reference to particular experiences of the world, such as measurements of

particular

triangles. We don’t have to examine actual triangles; we need only tothink of what it is for something to be a triangle, and, given the definitions weuse, their properties can be derived by reason alone. (It may be, however, asKant argues, that we can know this about triangles as well as other bits of

apriori

knowledge only because we have the capacity for experience

in general

.)

Origin vs. method of proof

The distinction appears clear but the waters can become muddied, some-times unnecessarily and sometimes because of some serious furtherreflections.

142

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

Unnecessary muddying occurs when one misunderstands what is meant by ‘knowledge independent of experience’. If you are tempted to say that we knowonly what triangles are because of experience, since we were taught about themat school, you have misunderstood the sense in which geometry is

a priori

. Themeans by which we come to find out about things like geometry, mathematicsand pure logic (all of which are branches of

a priori

knowledge) is throughexperience. But what makes something

a priori

is not the means by which itcame to be first known, but the means by which it can be shown to be true orfalse. We may need experience to furnish ourselves with the concept of tri-angle, but once we have that concept, we don’t need to refer to experience todetermine what the properties of triangles are.

A priori

knowledge is thus dis-tinguished by its method of proof, not by how we came to acquire it.

A posteriori

knowledge

When we turn to things like hurricanes, however, much of our knowledgeis

a posteriori

. We cannot hope to discover many factual things about hur-ricanes by simply attending to the concept of hurricane or the meaning of the word ‘hurricane’. We have to see what actual hurricanes are like andlearn from that. Consider the following claims about hurricanes:1. All hurricanes are storms.2. By definition, all hurricanes have winds exceeding 85 mph.3. The behaviour of hurricanes is governed by natural law.4. The average wind speed recorded in hurricanes is 125 mph.Sentences 1 and 2 might be considered true by definition and hence not

a posteriori

but things that can be known about hurricanes without actually examining any. In order to know whether or not they are true, one needonly know the definition of ‘hurricane’. Sentence 3 might be thought of as aclaim based upon our

a priori

knowledge that all natural phenomena aregoverned by natural laws, but this knowledge is more plausibly categorizedas

a posteriori

. Sentence 4, however, requires actual measurement of par-ticular hurricanes and is therefore definitely an

a posteriori

claim.

Historical importance

But what use is this distinction? Over the course of philosophical history,thinkers have disagreed about how much of our knowledge is

a priori

and how

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

143

much is

a posteriori

. The distinction is a useful tool, therefore, in comparingand coming to grips with various philosophers’ epistemological positions.Many early modern philosophers – for example Descartes, Leibniz andHume – cleaved

a priori

from

a posteriori

truths along rather different lines.By introducing the distinction between ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’ judgements(or, rather, refining the distinction between ‘relations of ideas’ and ‘mattersof fact’), Kant added yet another wrinkle to thinking about

a priori

and

aposteriori

truths (see 4.3). Consider, for instance, the following true state-ments and the different way some of these thinkers have conceived them.1. ‘All experienced events have causes.’a. Descartes: analytic

a priori

b. Hume: synthetic

a posteriori

c. Kant: synthetic

a priori

2. ‘7 + 5 = 12.’a. Descartes and Hume: analytic

a priori

b. Kant: synthetic

a priori

3. ‘Paris is the capital of France.’a. Leibniz: analytic

a priori

b. Descartes, Hume, Kant: synthetic

a posteriori

The debate rages on today in new forms, particularly in the debate overnaturalism, which may be thought of as the project of trying to base phi-losophy in concepts, methods and data, like the natural sciences, definablein the terms of the natural world. The fact that this form of radical empiri-cism is resisted by many who would not consider themselves rationalistsshows that the question of where to draw the line between the

a priori

andthe

a posteriori

is a live and difficult question.

Critique of the distinction

The distinction between

a priori

and

a posteriori

knowledge has come underattack, and the general thrust of recent philosophy has either been to con-strue all knowledge as

a posteriori

or to look for a third way of understand-ing what is called knowledge. Just as Quine attacked the synthetic/analyticdistinction, he also claimed there was no such thing as

a priori

knowledgeby arguing that all knowledge claims are in principle revisable in the light of experience (see 4.3).

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

145

meantime, and so it is also 12 noon GMT everywhere else in the universe.If you clap your hands at 12 noon GMT, it is possible for someone else onAlpha Centauri also to clap his or her hands at 12 noon GMT; and the twohand-clappings will be ‘simultaneous’ in the sense of happening at the‘same time’ universally, for everyone everywhere. This was Isaac Newton’sposition.With his theory of ‘special relativity’ (1905), Albert Einstein (1879–1955)claimed that this common-sense view is wrong (and his view is now univer-sally accepted among physicists). Rather than an absolute time – one clockthat can be used to time all events in the universe – time is relative. That isto say, what the time is depends on how fast one is moving relative to thespeed of light and another frame of reference (or point of view). To answerthe question ‘When?’ you also need to know ‘how fast’. Strange as it seems,two events on opposites sides of the galaxy may therefore be simultaneousfrom one frame of reference but not from another – and we cannot privi-lege one point of view over the other. Both are right – relative to their ownpoints of view.Although Galileo and Leibniz, not to mention various sceptics, hadalready raised the issue of whether there is an absolute frame of reference,there is no clearer paradigm for the absolute/relative distinction thanEinstein’s work on space and time. It makes clear how the absolute requiresa single standard that holds good in all places and all times, while the rela-tive implies a standard that is context dependent. All other proper uses of the absolute/relative distinction follow this pattern.

Application: ethics and social science

In ethics, for example, an absolute conception is that standards of right andwrong hold good for all people and all times – perhaps, for example, becausethey are determined by God, or reason, or fixed by nature. If killing inno-cent beings is wrong, then it is wrong whether you’re a twentieth-century New Yorker, an Aztec farmer or a Han emperor. An ethical relativist, on theother hand, will say that what is right or wrong depends on where you are,when you’re there, or maybe even who you are. One reason relativists holdthis position is that they regard standards of right and wrong to be depend-ent upon or internal to particular societies, specific situations, or individuallives. Outside these, standards of right and wrong, good and bad, beautifuland ugly are simply inapplicable.

146

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

The absolute/relative distinction can also be used in other contexts.Economists, sociologists and political philosophers, for example, are con-cerned with the idea of poverty. Like ethical standards, poverty can have anabsolute or relative sense. Absolute poverty will be defined so that onestandard can be used, in modern-day Berlin and Calcutta, as well as first-century Rome and Jerusalem, to determine whether a person is poor or not.A relative conception of poverty, on the other hand, will allow for the pos-sibility that someone with a flat and a television in Paris could be consid-ered poor, even though he or she would, with that same amount of wealth,not be poor if transplanted directly to rural Chad.

Three cautions

When using the absolute/relative distinction, two cautions should be remem-bered. To describe something as relative is not, as these examples make clear, tosay that there are no standards by which to make judgements, or that ‘anythinggoes’. It is merely to say there are no

universal

standards. It cannot be assumed(though it is often argued) that to abandon an absolute standard is to be leftwith no standards at all. Rather, relativism means that there may be multiplestandards, none universally superior to the others but still in particular placesor with particular people still regarded as applicable, perhaps even rigidly so.Second, it is not always a case of choosing either an absolute standard ora relative one. Sometimes, it is just a matter of being clear which is beingemployed. So, for instance, one can employ both a relative and an absoluteconception of poverty but use them for different purposes. Here, what isimportant is being clear about which standard is being used, not making aneither/or choice between them.Third, it is instructive to remember that Einstein’s theory of relativity itself,like the speed of light, holds across all frames of reference. Not everything isrelative in the theory of relativity; and arguably, no relativity claim can beabsolute without undermining itself, for, if one were to claim ‘Everything isrelative’, that claim would apply to itself. But if ‘everything is relative’ is only relatively true, then that must mean that some truths are not relative.

Political import

The multiplicity of standards, none absolutely superior to the others, may be thought of as a type of equality. Because of this, people for whom

148

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

of the predicate is wholly contained in the subject. Hence the judgementsimply unpacks or analyses the subject to yield the predicate. For example:1. All bachelors are unmarried men.2. All barns are structures.In both cases, the predicates (unmarried men and structures) are already ‘there’ in the subjects (bachelors and barns). In Kant’s terms, the judge-ments as a whole do not go beyond what is already contained in the con-cepts that are the subject of the judgements (bachelors and barns).This sort of analysis may also be construed in argument form. Forexample, if you think that Charles is a bachelor and you then conclude he isnot married, you have made an analytic judgement, since in saying he is notmarried you have said nothing that is not already contained in the thoughtthat he is a bachelor.If, however, you think that something is water and you judge that it boilsat 100 °C, you are making a

synthetic

judgement, since nothing in the merethought that something is water can tell you what its boiling point is.(Leibniz, to the contrary, held that all true judgements about things areanalytic. A ‘complete concept’ of a thing contains all its properties.) Thejudgement about the boiling point of water goes beyond what is containedin the concept of water, whereas the judgement that a bachelor is unmar-ried does not go beyond what is already contained in the concept bachelor.In other words, the predicate adds something to the subject. Hence thefollowing claims are synthetic:1. The average lifespan of Scottish bachelors is 70 years.2. The barn on Hugo’s horse farm is white.That may seem clear enough. But things soon become more difficult.

Psychology or logic?

First of all, Kant’s definition can appear to depend on the psychology of the thinker rather than the logic or meaning of the concept. This is madeclear by Kant’s claim that 7 + 5 = 12 is a synthetic judgement. The idea of ‘12’ seems to be already contained in the idea of ‘7 + 5’. But psychologi-cally, one can have the idea of ‘7 + 5’ without having the idea of ‘12’. This

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

149

is even plainer in larger sums, where one can have the idea of 1,789 +7,457 without having the idea that the sum of the two numbers is 9,246,even though the sum contains all that is logically required to determinethe answer.Much then depends on how we unpack Kant’s idea that synthetic judge-ments go beyond a concept. We can understand this logically or psycho-logically, but also semantically – in terms of what the words mean.Sometimes analytic statements are said to be those that are true in virtue of the meanings of the words, regardless of what the speaker understands by them. So ‘a bachelor is an unmarried man’ is analytic, not because a speakeralready

knows

that ‘bachelor’ means ‘unmarried man’ (indeed he or she may well not know this if, perhaps, English is a second language), but just because‘bachelor’ objectively means ‘unmarried man’ (whether he or she knows itor not).The existence of these subtly different uses of analytic and synthetic isconfusing. For this reason it is advisable never to appeal to the distinctionwithout making it clear what you take the distinction to mean.These are important points, since they mark the difference between thesynthetic/analytic distinction and the

a priori

/

a posteriori

distinction. The

apriori

/

a posteriori

distinction is concerned with whether any reference toexperience is required in order to legitimate the judgements. The analytic/synthetic distinction is concerned with whether thinkers add anything toconcepts when they formulate their judgements, thereby possibly expand-ing rather than simply elaborating upon their knowledge.

Quine and containment

Quine pointed out in his famous essay ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1951)that it seems impossible to define adequately just what is meant by the meta-phor ‘contain’, which is found in the idea that in analytic judgements thepredicate is ‘contained’ in the subject. Just how does one concept ‘contain’the meaning of another? It seems that this can’t be spelled out in any gen-eral way that keeps the scope of the concept clearly defined. On the otherhand, surely there must be a distinction between simply explaining themeaning of a concept and connecting new information to it. (A similarproblem faces the concept of ‘entailment’.)The analytic/synthetic distinction may seem simple, then, but it doesopen up some difficult and fundamental issues in philosophy (see 5.4).

152

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

Oxford and heard the distinctive dulcet tones of Chas’s rendition of thePuccini aria coming from a man in a rabbit suit, who on closer inspectionindeed turned out to be Chas, he went up to him and congratulated him onhis promotion.‘Promotion?’ replied Chas. ‘You’re kidding! I’ve been sacked and now I’mbusking for a living.’Dirk’s mistake is an understandable one, and it rests on a confusionbetween two uses of the word ‘if’ in our ordinary language, which in philo-sophical parlance are the conditional and biconditional. The conditional isa simple ‘if’, whereas the biconditional means ‘if and only if’ (‘iff’). The dif-ference is crucial. Consider the difference between these two propositions:1. If I get promoted, I’ll do the bunny singing thing.2. Iff (if and only if) I get promoted, I’ll do the bunny singing thing.In each case, we can divide the propositions into two parts:The

antecedent

: the part immediately following the if or iff (‘I get pro-moted’)The

consequent

: what follows if the antecedent is true (‘I’ll do the bunny singing thing’).If 2 above is true, and you see Chas doing the bunny singing thing, you candeduce that he has been promoted. This is because in a biconditional state-ment the consequent is only true if the antecedent is true. Because it is ‘if

and only if

’, the consequent will not be true unless the antecedent is. So, youknow that if the consequent is true, the antecedent must also be true,because that is the only circumstance under which the consequent could betrue. ‘Only’ is, logically, a tremendously powerful word.In an ordinary conditional, however, this conclusion does not follow.Chas did not say he would do his bunny singing thing if

and only if

he gotpromoted. The possibility that the consequent could be true

for some reasonother than being promoted

remained open.A clear example of this is when my friend says, ‘If I win the lottery I’mgoing to take a long holiday in the Bahamas.’ My friend doesn’t mean thatshe will go on a long holiday in the Bahamas

only if

she wins the lottery. If she inherits a large sum of money, or comes into a large sum of money inanother way, for instance, she will also take that trip. Therefore, if some-one says, ‘If I win the lottery, I’m going to have a long holiday in the

154

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

trouble was, the famous rock singer he wanted to be wasn’t Jonny Dangerous. It was Mick Jagger.Dangerous illustrates the dangers of failing to uphold an obscure sound-ing distinction between

de re

and

de dicto

beliefs, desires or necessities. Takedesires first. Saying ‘Jonny Dangerous wanted to be a famous rock singer’ isambiguous, because ‘a famous rock singer’ could be

anyone

who is famousand a rock singer; or it could refer to a

specific

rock singer. If the desire is of the first kind, then it is said to be

de dicto

(literally ‘of what is said’). If thedesire is of the second kind it is

de re

(‘of a thing’). So, to give another exam-ple, if I say, ‘I want to buy a Porsche 911’, my desire is

de dicto

if any Porsche911 will do, but

de re

if I have a particular car in mind, perhaps the one my neighbour is thinking of selling at a knock-down price to avoid defaultingon her mortgage.

De re

and

de dicto

beliefs follow the same pattern. A conspiracy theorist,for instance, may believe that an FBI agent shot JFK. If she has no ideawhich agent it was, then the belief is

de dicto

. If she believes of a specificagent that he shot JFK, then it is

de re

.Religion is one area where the distinction can be critical. Take the belief that the Messiah is coming. A person who believes this

de dicto

has no ideawho the messiah is, he just believes that he (or she) is due down any minute.Apocalyptic Christians, in contrast, believe this

de re

, since they believe they know just who that messiah is: Jesus Christ.In cases of both belief and desire, whether or not they are

de re

or

de dicto

can be understood in terms of the scope of the belief or desire.

De dicto

: A believes that or desires x.e.g. Nessie believes that an FBI agent shot JFK.Jonny Dangerous desires to be a famous rock star.

De re

: There is an x such that A believes or desires it.e.g. There is an FBI agent whom Nessie believes shot JFK.There is a famous rock star whom Jonny Dangerous wants to be.

Necessity

The

de re

/

de dicto

distinction is also important in matters of necessity. Forinstance, if Grandma Mo is the oldest person in the town, in what sense, if any, is it correct to say that she is necessarily the oldest person in town? In

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

155

one sense, that is clearly false: it is always possible that an even older personmight have lived in the town. This is the

de dicto

sense of necessity. Inanother sense, however, the claim is true. Given that she is 107 years old,and no one in town is older than her, she is necessarily the oldest person intown. This is

de re

necessity.Everyday English does not capture these different ways of talking aboutnecessity very naturally. Formalized, the distinction can be made thus:

De dicto

: necessarily (Fa) (

Necessarily, a is F

)

De re

: a is necessarily FIt should, however, be acknowledged that even people with philosophicaltraining do not find the difference between ‘Necessarily, Grandma Mo is theoldest woman in town’ and ‘Grandma Mo is necessarily the oldest womanin town’ obvious.Nevertheless, the distinction is important. Consider, for example, theclaim that persons are necessarily identical with their brains and bodies.Understood

de dicto

, that would mean that there is no possible world inwhich persons could not have been identical with their brains and bodies.Understood

de re

, however, it simply means that, as a matter of fact, thepersons that actually exist in our world cannot be anything other thantheir brains and bodies.

De re

necessity is thus weaker than

de dicto

neces-sity, but it is necessity nonetheless, and so to assert it is still to make astrong claim.

Use and mention

A related, but somewhat more straightforward, distinction between wordsand things is between

use

and

mention

. A word is

used

when we talk aboutthe world by means of it. It is

mentioned

, when we talk about the word itself.For instance, in ‘Dark was the night’, the word ‘dark’ is being used; in ‘ “Dark”is an adjective’ it is being mentioned.An example of a simple mistake that can be made when blurring theuse/mention distinction is when it is argued that two plus two need notequal four, because ‘four’ could, if language were otherwise, refer not tothe number 4 but a colour, such as grey. This objection misses the point,because ‘four’ is being used in ‘two plus two need not equal four’, notmentioned.

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

157

Defeasibility and knowledge

The debate over which claims are defeasible and which are indefeasible is along-running one in philosophy. It is a central feature of the debate overthe status of knowledge. Some have argued that any claim to knowledgemust be a claim to apprehend something indefeasible. Really to ‘know’something is to hold something to be true that is in fact true. If somethingis true, it cannot turn out later to be false. So, to have knowledge is to pos-sess the truth, and since the truth can’t change (see 4.4), real knowledge isindefeasible.Opponents of this view argue that such a criterion for knowledge is toostrict. If knowledge must be indefeasible, then we just can’t have knowledgevery often, if at all. Hume, for instance, would have argued (though hewouldn’t have used these terms) that only simple truths like those of math-ematics and geometry are even in theory indefeasible – though in practice,given human weaknesses, mathematical and geometric inferences remaindefeasible. Any fact about the world is always open to revision in the light of sufficient contrary experience, and even in mathematics people are proneto make errors. In this century, semantic holists such as W. V. O. Quine haveargued that even theoretical judgements such as ‘1 + 1 = 2’ are defeasible,since we cannot rule out some new fact coming to light that would make usrevise this claim (4.3).The defeasible/indefeasible distinction is particularly useful now that the

a priori

/

a posteriori

distinction has been problematized (4.1). It is very use-ful to be able to distinguish between those claims that one believes to be insome sense provisional and those that are established. It is, however, some-what old-fashioned to believe that

a priori

claims are all indefeasible and

aposteriori

defeasible. The defeasible/indefeasible distinction allows us toseparate questions about the actual grounds of beliefs – experience or rea-son – from questions concerning whether or not those beliefs are in prin-ciple open to objection or not.

SEE ALSO

1.11 Certainty and probability 2.1 Abduction3.26 Testability

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

159

In standard propositional logic, the preceding argument is technically valid and sound. (Its form is called

modus ponens

, the ‘way of affirma-tion’.) But the trouble is that there’s no real connection between the sen-tence ‘green is a colour’ and the sentence ‘iron is an element’ – other thantheir both being true.

Relevance logic

would demand more of the firstpremise. In order to say that a conclusion not only formally follows fromits premises but is also

entailed

by them, relevance theorists demandsome additional connection. Consider how differently the concepts areconnected in this argument:1. If green is a colour, then it is visible to the human eye.2. Green is a colour.3. Therefore, it is visible to the human eye.Since there’s an internal connection between colour and visibility, here theconclusion would count in relevance logic (as well as in standard logic) asbeing entailed by the premises.

Implication

‘Implication’ contrasts with entailment in being a broader concept thatincludes not only various kinds of logical relations but also cases where oneidea connects to another in other ways. We might say that an implication isa property of

any true conditional

statement – statements of the form ‘If X,then Y.’ (Note that arguments can be cast as conditional statements where

if

the premises are true,

then

the conclusion is also true.)For example, ‘If you stand in the rain without an umbrella or otherprotective covering, you get wet’ is a true conditional statement. Thismeans you can say that ‘standing in the rain without an umbrella or otherprotective covering’ implies ‘getting wet’. But this is not because ‘you getwet’ is the conclusion of a valid argument of which ‘if you stand in therain’ is the sole premise. It is just that we see in the statement that gettingwet is intrinsically connected to being unprotected in the rain. Here theconsequent is implied by the antecedent because of a kind of causal con-nection, but there may be other reasons one idea connects to or followsfrom another.Of course, implications like this may serve as the basis of an argument –that is, a case of entailment. Consider the following:

160

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

1. If you stand in the rain without an umbrella or other protectivecovering, you get wet.2. You are standing in the rain without an umbrella or other protectivecovering.3. Therefore: you are getting wet.And perhaps you could argue that we recognize implications just becausethey can be used in entailment. What’s important to see, however, is thatsentence 1, by itself, presents

not

an argument but only an implication;premise 2 and the conclusion are required to formulate an argument.

Good advice

The problem with the distinction as set out is that it is all much, muchmessier than this. So much messier, in fact, that any attempt to tidy it up ina text such as this is bound to result in either an incongruously bloatedentry or utter confusion. For instance, philosophers have noticed thatimplication comes in various guises: such as ‘material implication’, ‘formalimplication’, Rudolf Carnap’s (1891–1970) theory of ‘L-implication’ andClarence Irving Lewis’s (1883–1964) conception of ‘strict implication’(which is also sometimes known as ‘entailment’).There are, however, several useful lessons that can be taken from thisbrief discussion. The first is to avoid using the terms ‘implication’ and‘entailment’ if an alternative, clearer way of expressing what you want to say is available. Talk about a ‘valid deduction’ or a ‘true conditional’, not aboutentailment and implication.The second lesson is that the simplistic distinction set out is a decent ruleof thumb. If you restrict your use of ‘entailment’ to valid deductions andyour use of ‘implication’ to true conditionals, you won’t go far wrong. Allyou’ll be doing is using two general terms that also have other, more specificmeanings, and you will, on some occasions, be using one where the otherwill also do. In neither case will you be wrong.

SEE ALSO

1.2 Deduction1.4 Validity and soundness4.5 Conditional/biconditional

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

161

READING

C. I. Lewis, ‘The Calculus of Strict Implication’,

Mind

n.s. 23.90 (1914), 240–7Alan R. Anderson and Nuel D. Belnap, Jr,

Entailment: The Logic of Relevance andNecessity

(1975; Vol. 2 1992)J. Michael Dunn, ‘Relevance Logic and Entailment’, in

Handbook of Philosophical Logic: Alternatives to Classical Logic

, ed. D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (1986),117–24Stephen Read,

Relevant Logic

(1988)

4.9 Essence/accident

The singer and actress Madonna is well known for her continual self-reinvention. In her career she has changed image from hip Brooklyn girl,through dominatrix to sexual-religious icon, Hollywood starlet and sophis-ticate and cowgirl, to name but a few of her personae.In Aristotle’s terminology, all these changes have, however, been merely accidental. This does not mean that the changes have not been planned –indeed, Madonna’s success is in all likelihood the result of very clever calcu-lation. For Aristotelians, though, the concept of ‘

accident

’ has a differentmeaning.An

accident

in Aristotelian parlance is a property of something that is notessential to that thing – that, in other words, can be changed without utterly destroying what the thing is. (Later thinkers also called such properties‘attributes’ and ‘modes’.)The

essence

of a thing, by contrast, is what makes something what it is; toformulate a thing’s essence therefore is to define it.An essence therefore remains in place just as long as the thing it definesremains in existence. Accidents, on the other hand, can come and go. Thisis why Aristotle related the essence of a thing to what he called its

substance

(

ousia

in Greek) – what literally substands (

hypokeimenon

) or stands underchange. For Aristotle, following but modifying his teacher Plato, the sub-stance of a thing is most basically its

form

(

eidos

or

morphos

). So, in theseterms, Madonna’s accidents include her clothing styles, her public perso-nae, haircuts and colours, while her essence is that she is a human being.Throughout all those costume changes, she’s remained a human; and if essence is particular, she has remained this human called ‘Madonna Ciccone’.

162

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

(Note that most philosophers in the Aristotelian and Platonic traditionshave thought that essence is not particular but universal.)

Historical modifications

The contrast appears in differing forms throughout the history of philoso-phy. Aristotelian natural science may be tersely described as the attempt todetermine the essential features of natural entities. (Modern natural sci-ence, by contrast, centres less on determining essences than on formulatinglaws describing the way natural phenomena behave.) We also see this searchin Descartes’s famous

Meditations on First Philosophy

, where he reflects ona piece of wax in an effort to determine the essence of the material world.Like an Aristotelian, Descartes examines what changes and what does not inthe wax as it melts. He concludes that the shape, smell, texture and hardnessof wax are all accidental properties, whereas its essence is that it is anextended thing (

res extensa

). Descartes goes on to consider himself, andconcludes that his entire body is not essential to what he is and that hisessence is that of a thinking thing (

res cogitans

).In Descartes we can see traces of a common variant on Aristotle’s distinc-tion. Descartes’s view seems close to the view that essence defines the sub-stance of which the thing is made. On the scholastic or Aristotelian model,accidents have no existence independent of substance, and in this sensethey are not substances themselves. Colour, for example, is an accident,since it is not a substance but is a property of substances. (Colour can’t existindependently but must always be the colour

of

something.)Descartes’s radical change in looking at these issues was to demand thatwhat’s of first importance in determining substances, essences and acci-dents is not what things are but how we must think about them. Hence forDescartes and Spinoza, as well as for a great deal of philosophy after them,what is substantial is what we must, when our thinking is clear and rational,

conceive

as existing independently. For example, in Meditation 6 of hisfamous

Meditations

, Descartes determines that the mind and the body arereally distinct from one another simply because he can clearly and distinctly

conceive

of the one existing without the other.Thinkers from Kant to Hegel to Wittgenstein to Husserl to Heidegger toDerrida have in various ways inherited this method but modified it in vari-ous ways – most recently by looking at the way

language

, rather thanthought, structures the way we understand what things are.

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

163

Metaphysically speaking, most philosophers today reject the idea of essences – at least on the ancient model. Substance doctrines largely crashedupon the shoals of empiricist and linguistic critiques, which have arguedthat traditional theories of substance involve metaphysical posits that can’tbe observed, that are unnecessary to understanding reality and that in fun-damental ways are meaningless (see 6.3).

Political uneasiness

Many recent thinkers have also rejected the notion of essences as artificial,confining and even oppressive. Existentialists are famous for the slogan‘Existence precedes essence.’ By this they mean that we are whatever wechoose to be and that neither God nor nature nor society determines whatwe are. Feminist philosophers have adroitly shown how various concep-tions purporting to define what it essentially means to be a woman havebeen used to keep women in a limited and subordinate position, excludingthem from all sorts of things supposedly not proper for them (such as vot-ing, higher education and owning as well as managing property; 6.4). Somethinkers have gone so far as to suggest that all determinations of the humanessence are to be rejected on these grounds (4.15).

A contextual approach

What is considered accidental and essential can also be thought of as con-text dependent. The colour of a metal may be accidental when the metal isan internal part of an automobile engine but essential in a sculpture. Intechnical terms, we can say that the metal’s colour is accidental

qua

engineparts and essential

qua

sculpture. One can qualify the use of accident andessence in instances such as these and sidestep broader, metaphysical issuesabout whether the distinction is a fundamental one or merely a usefuldevice. Linda Alcoff proposes a notion of ‘positionality’ along just theselines.Madonna is an apposite example of the debate over the essence/accidentdistinction, since many of her admirers claim she is the paradigm of thepost-modern person for whom there is no unchanging essence at all butmerely a sequence of accidents. If Madonna’s seemingly limitless ability totransform herself is taken seriously, then,

pace

Aristotle and Descartes,

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

165

Thought and meaning

‘Semantic externalism’ is the view that the meanings of words cannot bespecified purely by attending to what is in the mind of the person using them.Hilary Putnam argued for this position in his famous Twin Earth thoughtexperiment (see 2.9). Imagine that there is a planet, identical to Earth in every respect, except that what they call water is not H

2

O, but another compound,call it XYZ, that behaves exactly like water. What is going on in the heads of humans on Earth and Twin Earth who have no idea of molecular biology when they think of ‘water’ would be exactly the same. But, Putnam argued,clearly ‘water’ means different things on Earth and Twin Earth. And thatmeans that part of the meaning of ‘water’ must be outside of thinkers’ heads.The externalist view contrasts with internalism – which is probably thecommon-sense position – which states that when people use words, whatthey mean by them is in some sense entirely in their own minds.The idea that meanings ain’t in the head can be expanded to the notionthat

thoughts in general

aren’t in the head, or to put it technically,

mental con-tent is (at least in part) external

. Consider, for example, a person who has thefear that

there will be a flu pandemic

. Externalists argue that you cannot spe-cify the content of this fear unless you include things which may not be in themind of the person with the fear. For instance, you could have this fear, butnot know that influenza is a virus, or what constitutes a pandemic. Thesecritical facts are not in the mind of the person with the fear, and so their fearcannot be specified without reference to what is outside that mind.Internalists, in contrast, would argue that the fear is whatever the personwith the fear happens to think it is. If the person is ignorant about what fluand pandemics are, all that means is that their fear is somewhat vague. Butwe don’t need to know about any facts outside of the mind of the scaredperson to fully specify what the fear is.In practice, few philosophers are externalists or internalists about allmental content. The debate is rather between what kinds of mental contentare

narrow

(internal) and which are

broad

(external). This is not just a mat-ter of dividing mental content into two types: many believe that a singlemental content can have both broad and narrow elements.

Reasons

In moral philosophy, the distinction between internalism and externalismapplies to reasons. One has an internal reason to do something when that

166

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

reason motivates you. A reason is external when you can see that it is areason, whether it motivates you or not. For example, you might believethat it is objectively true that murder is wrong, and that therefore there is areason for you not to kill someone. But you may, nonetheless, find thisdoes not affect your motivations, and you want to murder someone any-way. In such a case, you would have an external reason not to kill, but notan internal one.An important debate in moral philosophy centres on the question of whether this distinction is tenable. Bernard Williams, for example, arguesthat reasons are only ever internal. In other words, it is not possible to rec-ognize that something is a reason for you to act in a certain way withoutthat affecting your motivations in some way. That does not mean you act onthat motivation, of course. You may genuinely believe that the wrongness of murder is a reason not to kill, but go ahead anyway. The point is simply that

if you are not in any way motivated

by the thought that murder is wrong notto murder, then you do not really think that ‘murder is wrong’ is a reasonnot to kill at all.

Justification

A third form of internalism concerns justification for belief or for knowl-edge. An internalist about justification maintains that everything that isrequired to justify a knowledge claim can be within the mind or, more gen-erally, can be brought to reflective awareness of knower or believer.(Sometimes we can be said to have a justified belief even if we aren’t think-ing about all the justifications.) To put it another way, if you wanted toknow whether a person’s knowledge claim was justified, you could find outsimply by attending to all the relevant beliefs and the chains of inferencethat have held among them – or, perhaps, could hold among them. Anexternalist, in contrast, maintains that there are elements of justificationthat necessarily cannot be in the mind, namely, states of the world. Suchexternalists argue that knowing what is in someone’s mind or awareness isnever enough, because you would always have to check the state of theworld itself to confirm whether that person had genuine knowledge of it.As you can see, the various forms of externalism and internalism are very different. But it is no coincidence that the same terms apply in each. Cut thepie anyway you like, for any type of externalist, something vital just ain’t inthe head.

168

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

Let’s put aside

savoir-faire

for the moment, since the real interest inAnglophone philosophy has been a distinction that has its roots in the con-trast between

connaître

and

savoir

(though none of what follows should betaken as a description of the actual meaning of these words in French).

Russell’s approach

Bertrand Russell made a philosophical distinction between two types of knowledge. The first form of knowledge (more closely related to

connaître

)is ‘knowledge by acquaintance’. This is knowledge we get of things by beingdirectly aware of them – that is, through direct observation rather than thereports of others. The kinds of things of which Russell believes we aredirectly aware are sense-perceptions (sounds, sights, tastes, smells and feels),memories, introspections, universals (general ideas such as circles, num-bers and brotherhood) and possibly our own selves.Knowledge by acquaintance is, for Russell, the root of all knowledge. Itmakes possible, however, a second kind of knowledge: ‘knowledge by description’. This comes in two forms:1.

Definite Descriptions

(

the

such and such – e.g. the cat) and2.

Indefinite Descriptions

(

a

such and such – e.g. a cat)In each case, ‘such and such’ will be a word or compound of words standingfor things we know by acquaintance.At this point, we part company from

connaître

, since, for Russell, toknow a person is to have knowledge by description. This is because whatwe are directly aware of is not a person, but sense perceptions of a body,a voice and so on. So, when we say, ‘We know the Queen’, ‘Queen’, like allproper nouns, is a kind of shorthand for a description that picks outonly a single entity and no other: ‘the woman with white hair we meetfor tea every week’. Note that this description contains only things knownby acquaintance.Put this together and Russell’s theory is basically this: we know by acquaintance sense perceptions and universals (white, hair, woman, etc.).From these, we can gain knowledge by description (the woman with whitehair we meet for tea every week). When these are definite descriptionsrather than indefinite ones, we can replace this description with a propernoun as shorthand (Queen Elizabeth II).

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

171

As an example of a necessary truth, consider any mathematical truth, say,2 × 2 = 4. This is traditionally seen as a necessary truth, since, given themeanings of ‘2’, ‘4’, ‘=’ and ‘×’, it must always be true that 2 × 2 = 4. It couldnot be otherwise. (Of course, it is true that we could have used the symbolsof ‘2’, ‘4’, ‘=’ and ‘×’ to stand for other things, but the necessity we ascribe inthis case is not that those particular symbols stand for what they do, butthat, given the meanings they have, 2 × 2 = 4 is necessarily true.)If, however, you consider a historical truth like ‘George W. Bush was thepresident of the United States from 2001 to 2009’, it seems perfectly reason-able to say that this statement is not necessarily true and that there’s noth-ing necessary about the state of affairs it describes. Had a few things gonedifferently in Florida before, during and after the US presidential electionof 2000, it would have been Al Gore who entered the White House as presi-dent, and it would just have been plain old Governor Bush. Because there isno necessity about it, the fact that ‘George W. Bush was the president of theUnited States from 2001 to 2004’ is a contingent truth.

Determinism, Spinoza and necessity

Conceptually, the distinction is therefore a clear one. As you can imagine,however, things become more controversial once you try to decide whatactually is necessary and what actually is contingent. For example, if you area strict determinist, then you believe that everything that happens is theinevitable consequence of what has gone before. There is no room for luckor free will. From this point of view, nothing is contingent, and all events arenecessary. ‘George W. Bush was the president of the United States from 2001to 2009’ would be a necessary truth, since as a determinist would see it thisfact could not be otherwise. Though it looked to us as though the electioncould have gone either way, in a deterministic universe the result was inevi-table. Along just these lines, the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza isfamous for holding that

everything

happens necessarily, and hence all thor-oughly true claims are necessary truths. Eighteenth-century philosopherImmanuel Kant tried to get around the problem by holding that from onepoint of view (that of human experience) everything that happens in thecourse of the world we inhabit occurs necessarily; while from another pointof view (that of a metaphysical world beyond our experience) human actionsare sometimes free and contingent. Other philosophers, sometimes called‘compatibilists’, have held that properly understood human actions can belegitimately described as both necessary and free.

172

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

Quine and contingency

At the other extreme, if you buy into W. V. O. Quine’s semantic holism (see4.3), then everything becomes contingent. It is always the case that what wejudge now to be true we might later judge to be false. Mathematical truthssuch as 2 × 2 = 4 appear to be necessarily true, but we can’t rule out the pos-sibility that facts or reasons will emerge about the meanings of the termsinvolved that will lead us to revise our judgement.So, although it is easy enough to define the difference between the neces-sary and contingent, it is much harder determining precisely which truth-claims belong under which category.

Example: the existence of God

The distinction crops up in many branches of philosophy, including argu-ments concerning the existence of God. Consider God as a hypothesis. If God exists, would God be a necessary or contingent being? God could surely not be a contingent being: it can’t be that God exists but might not havedone so. If God exists, God must be a necessary being, and the claim that‘God exists’ is a necessary truth. One way of conceiving God this way is tosay that it is part of the concept of ‘God’ that God necessarily exists. Whatsome philosophers have tried to argue is that this means God must in factexist, since a non-existent God would be a contradiction in terms: a neces-sary being who doesn’t in fact exist. Saying that God does not exist wouldbe as self-contradictory as saying that a triangle does not have three sides.This argument can be found in the work of rationalist philosophers likeDescartes and Spinoza. It has its principal roots, however, in the

Proslogion

of Anselm of Canterbury (c.1033–1109). Even some modern-day philoso-phers like Alvin Plantinga adhere to versions of it. A related theologicalissue is whether or not it was necessary that God created the world.

Problem: the future and the excluded middle

In section 9 of his text

Interpretation

Aristotle points out something interestingwith regard to our talk about the future. Consider the statement ‘A sea battlewill take place tomorrow’ (uttered by someone the night before the Battle of

174

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

Answers to them often set out what the necessary and sufficient conditionsfor being a person or having knowledge are. Sufficient conditions are whatis

enough

for something to be the case. Necessary conditions are what is

required

for something to be the case.We can see the differences and relations between them by considering afew everyday examples.Being a UK citizen is a necessary condition for becoming the prime min-ister, but it is not sufficient. It is required of the prime minister that he or shebe a UK citizen, but if this condition is satisfied other conditions still need tobe met to hold the office, among which are winning a number of elections.Investing an enormous sum of money in the country and lacking a crim-inal record are sufficient conditions for gaining a US green card, but they are not necessary conditions. This is because there are other ways of gaininggreen cards, such as being the spouse of a US citizen, or having certain skillsdeemed important by the US government.

One or many, joint or separate

Conditions may be singular or plural, and some conditions may be both nec-essary and sufficient. Being composed of H

2

O is a necessary

and

sufficientcondition for something being water. Something must be H

2

O to be water(

pace

Hilary Putnam, see 2.9), and if it is nothing but H

2

O that is sufficient tomake it water – no other conditions apply. But to be ice, a substance mustboth be H

2

O

and

at less than 0°C in normal atmospheric conditions, or theequivalent. These two conditions – of atomic structure and temperature –form the

set

of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be ice.

Application in definition

Specifying sets of necessary and sufficient conditions is a common philo-sophical method of defining a concept. For instance, it has been suggestedthat the necessary and sufficient conditions for ‘knowing that X’ are that(1) you believe that X, (2) you are justified in that belief and (3) X is true.To have knowledge you need all three components. Hence each condition

separately

is a

necessary

condition, though

together

they form the

sufficient

conditions for knowledge. This set of three, then, comprises both the neces-sary and sufficient conditions for ‘knowing that’ something is the case.

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

175

Concerning the issue of personal identity, there are several competingaccounts of the set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a person atone time to be the same person at another. Some claim that a form of psychological continuity is necessary and sufficient. On this view, just aslong as enough memory, beliefs and character continue to exist, so a per-son continues to exist. Others argue that this is necessary, but not suffi-cient, since you also need to be physically continuous: unless your body (or at least your brain) continues to exist, no amount of psychologicalcontinuity is enough for you to survive. The set of necessary and sufficientconditions for personal identity includes, therefore, both physical andpsychological continuity. Yet others claim physical continuity alone isnecessary and sufficient.But there are some philosophers who would reject the whole model of necessary and sufficient conditions, at least for some areas of inquiry.Wittgenstein thought it would be nonsense to seek necessary and sufficientconditions for something to be, for example, a game. Many things are gamesand what they have in common cannot be specified by a set of conditionsbut is, rather, a kind of ‘family resemblance’. The rules that govern the cor-rect application of the use of any word, including concepts like ‘knowledge’or ‘person’, cannot be forced into the strait-jacket of necessary and suffi-cient conditions. The world and the concepts that we use to engage it aresimply not that tidy. Instead, we have to rely on judgement and the observa-tion of the complex way words are used to determine whether someone hasgenuine knowledge or is the same person over time.

SEE ALSO

1.10 Definitions3.9 Criteria4.9 Essence/accident

READING

Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Philosophical Investigations

(1953)

★

Patrick J. Hurley,

A Concise Introduction to Logic

, 10th edn (2007)

★

Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn,

How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age

, 6th edn (2010)

176

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

4.14 Objective/subjective

Examinations may be the bane of a student’s life, but most people acceptthem because they offer the chance of an objective assessment of students’work, whereas a student’s own view of his or her work may be subjectiveand distorted.We make distinctions like this all the time. We talk about a news reportbeing ‘objective’ or, if the viewpoint of the reporter is too prominent, too‘subjective’. We talk about taste being subjective, but measurements of pol-lutants in the atmosphere objective. But do we have a clear understandingof what the objective/subjective distinction really is?When a judgement or point of view is rooted entirely in one individual’sown particular perspective on the world, we often call that judgement ‘sub-jective’. In doing so we signal that we suspect that the judgement is partial,probably doesn’t take account of all the facts, or fails to rise above the per-sonal viewpoint. When, however, a judgement takes into account all therelevant data, disregards personal prejudice and finds agreement with othercompetent and informed people, we say a judgement is ‘objective’. By thiswe signal that the judgement is impartial, well grounded in facts and risesabove the personal.The subjective is thus what pertains to the (individual) subject, con-sciousness or mind, while the objective is what stands outside or independ-ently of the (individual) subject. Of course, things get very complicated if there’s variation among subjects (say, between male and female, Asian andEuropean, or between modern and ancient subjects), variation amongobjects (different environments), or different relationships between sub-jects and objects. Can objectivity be achieved when variation is as great as itseems to be?

Objectivity and ethics

In any case, the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity is impor-tant in many areas of philosophy. Take ethics. If you say ‘Fraud is wrong’,can that ever be more than your own subjective judgement? Ultimately,aren’t all such moral judgements expressions of how an act seems subjec-tively to you? Others may agree, but this gives us only

agreement among agroup of subjective judgements

. Similar doubts arise in aesthetic judgements:

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

177

how can a judgement like ‘Picasso’s painting

Guernica

is a great work of art’be anything other than merely subjective?Some philosophers maintain that what is objective is nothing other thanwhat is common to or has been acknowledged through the agreement of acommunity of subjects. Others maintain that what is objective is whatstands against or independently of subjects, both individual and commu-nal. Yet others hold that what can be agreed upon by a community of sub-jects may not have the status of objective truth, but that such ‘intersubjective’truths, in practice, do the same work as objective ones. On this view, inter-subjectivity is what remains of objectivity once we disabuse ourselves of illusions of its independence from human subjectivity.

Knowledge, perspectivism and the hermeneutic circle

Not only value judgements have difficulties getting beyond the subjective.Consider knowledge itself. How can objective knowledge be possible? Wemay be able to rise above our individual viewpoints, but we seem still lockedwithin a specifically human viewpoint – and one that is, moreover, rootedin a particular historical and social milieu. The condition we seem to face of only being able to interpret new things on the basis of pre-existing valuesand beliefs is called ‘the hermeneutic circle’. Is it possible to transcend thehermeneutic circle to get a truly impartial viewpoint (see 3.6)?Thomas Nagel has written on this issue in a book with a title that cap-tures the essence of the problem:

The View from Nowhere

(1986). If subjec-tivity is the view from somewhere in particular, objectivity must be a kindof view from nowhere. But does it even make sense to talk about a viewfrom nowhere? Surely any ‘possible take’ on truth has to come from someperspective or another? This is the thought that lies behind what has cometo be known as the ‘perspectivism’ of Friedrich Nietzsche – the idea that allknowledge is always from a particular perspective and that thus there is noobjectivity.Nagel responds to the challenge differently. He invites us to see subjectiv-ity and objectivity not as flip sides of the one coin but as two extremes on aspectrum. At one end we have pure subjectivity: the point of view that isrooted entirely in the individual nature of the subject. At the other, we havea perhaps unobtainable objectivity: where knowledge is freed from all taintof particular perspective. But in between we can occupy positions that aremore or less subjective and objective. The less our knowledge depends upon

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

181

4.16 Sense/reference

Modern philosophy of language, it is widely agreed, began with GottlobFrege (1848–1925). Frege bequeathed to philosophy a distinction between‘sense’ and ‘reference’ in his influential 1892 essay ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’(‘On Sense and Reference’), and one hundred years later, it is still used, dis-cussed and debated.The basics of the distinction can be made clear enough using an exampleof Frege’s. Consider the two nouns ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’.As it happens, the morning star and the evening star are the same celestialbody (the planet Venus). In this case we have two nouns with two differentsenses but the same reference. They have the same reference because they refer to the same object. But they have different senses because what oneunderstands by each one is not the same: by ‘morning star’ we may under-stand a reflective body that appears at a particular point in the sky in themorning, and by ‘evening star’ one that appears at a particular point in thesky in the evening. We may even be able to use the terms meaningfully butnot even know they refer to the same object.Frege extends this account to apply, not only to nouns but also to wholesentences. He argues that declarative sentences (ones that state that suchand such is the case) should be regarded as nouns, and so have a sense andreference just as nouns do.

Not so easy

So far, so good, but the reader should be warned that virtually none of thisunpacks in the way one might expect. First, one might be tempted to thinkthat the sense is somehow subjective, especially since Frege says that thethought expressed in a sentence is its sense, not its reference. So sense issomehow equated with thought, which may seem to be subjective. ButFrege does not think thoughts, in this sense, are subjective at all. Indeed, itis the thought that one often wishes to communicate in language and thatFrege thinks can be communicated in language. But language is not subjec-tive. So thoughts and sense are most definitely not subjective.The most baffling part of Frege’s theory, however, is what he understandsthe reference of sentences to be. The notion of reference seems pretty straightforward in the case of nouns: the morning star is

that

, you might

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

183

what consciousness was, for example, you needed to understand what theword ‘consciousness’ means. And to do that, you had to understand what itis for any word to mean something.‘The linguistic turn’ as this emphasis on language was called, is nowviewed somewhat ambivalently. While so much energy devoted to the phi-losophy of language has certainly resulted in a better understanding of how language works (and fails to work), many now judge that languagewas given too central a role in philosophy and that philosophy’s linguisticobsession was at least as much an obstacle to progress as an aid. Whateverjudgement we make about the linguistic turn, it has left an inheritance tocontemporary philosophy that cannot simply be sloughed off.One key part of this inheritance is an awareness of the importance of thedistinction between syntax and semantics. Consider natural language first,comparing these two sentences:The yellow hatred kicked the malicious algorithm.My dog sick old to sleep needs to be put.In both cases something is wrong. But what is wrong in each sentence isvery different. The first sentence is grammatically a perfectly well-formedEnglish sentence. But what does it mean? Arguably, it means nothing.Algorithms cannot be malicious, and they can’t be kicked by hatred, whichitself cannot be yellow. The second sentence, on the other hand, is gram-matically ill-formed, but we can see what it probably means: ‘My sick olddog needs to be put to sleep.’The rules of language being broken in each sentence are thus very differ-ent. Whereas the first sentence fails to communicate meaning (the gram-mar is flawless, but the meaning absent), the second is badly formed (themeaning can be discerned, but the construction is awry).To put labels to these differences, we can say that the

syntax

of ‘The yellowhatred kicked the malicious algorithm’ is correct, but the

semantics

ismissing or confused: the problem is

semantic

. Likewise, the

syntax

of ‘My dog sick old to sleep needs to be put’ is wrong, but the

semantics

can bediscerned: here the problem is

syntactic

.In short, syntax pertains to the rules that govern the correct arrange-ment of words and sentences in language, while semantics pertains tomeaning.Sometimes the syntactic and semantic dimensions of language arereferred to as its

formal

and

material

dimensions, respectively. That’s

184

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

why logicians often talk about ‘formal’ logic. They’re not concerned withtuxedos and evening gowns!

Uses in logic

For the purposes of logic (as opposed to, say, poetry or rhetoric), syntax isabout the formal construction of language, whereas semantics concerns notsimply meaning but truth and falsehood. The non-natural, symbolic lan-guages frequently used in logic enlist the same distinction. Indeed, purelogic is entirely concerned with syntax: it is the study of which construc-tions in logic are valid and which are not. In a sense, there is no semanticsin pure logic. Although one can say, for example, A v B means ‘A or B’, thephrase ‘A v B’ alone is purely syntactic, as it does not mean anything par-ticular about the world. To say ‘A v B’ is an acceptable construction in logicis rather like saying ‘article + adjective + noun + non-transitive verb’ is anacceptable construction in English. Both are concerned purely with rightand wrong construction, not with meaning (truth or falsehood).

Importance in artificial intelligence

The distinction between syntax and semantics is particularly important indebates around artificial intelligence. One can get computers to processsentences according to syntactical rules in ways that appear to be meaning-ful. But what enables a language user to have a semantics is the subject of some debate, and many, such as John Searle, have argued that digital com-puters only have syntax, not semantics. A computer, therefore, unlike ahuman, cannot discern that ‘The yellow hatred kicked the malicious algo-rithm’ and ‘The big ugly thug kicked the terrified stranger’ are sentences of a very different kind. (Indeed, the grammar-checking software used by thecomputer on which this book was written discerns no problem with theformer sentence.) The heart of his position can be found in Searle’s ‘Chineseroom’ experiment (see 3.9).

SEE ALSO

1.4 Validity and soundness2.6 Intuition pumps

186

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

Another example of a thick ethical concept would be ‘deceit’. Deceit is amorally bad form of deception. Although we may disagree as to whether aparticular act should be classified as deceit or, say, a white lie, the term‘deceit’ itself carries with it both a clear enough idea of what it is and whetherit is morally good or bad.

Use in moral theory

The distinction is extremely useful in discussions about moral theory. Somedebates require thin concepts, some thick ones, and it is useful to be able todistinguish the two and identify which is appropriate. For instance, meta-ethics is the study of the general nature of ethics and ethical claims. Anexample of a meta-ethical question might be ‘Is ethics about objective fea-tures of the real world?’ To answer this question we need to consider whetherstatements like ‘killing is wrong’ describe facts about the world or some-thing else, such as our feelings about the world. In such discussions, thinethical concepts are all that are required, since we are not arguing aboutwhether this or that moral judgement is correct but about the nature of moral judgements themselves.When, however, we are discussing substantive issues in ethics, thickerconcepts are required. For instance, if you want to argue that assisted sui-cide is ethically unjustifiable on the grounds that the taking of a human lifeis always wrong, you need to be able to say why it is wrong and what spe-cifically you mean by wrong. To do this you need a substantive account of ethical concepts such as ‘wrong’ and ‘murder’. General conceptions of whatethics is and the use of mere placeholders won’t do.An advantage of the terms ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ over other distinctions (suchas meta-ethics versus normative or substantive ethics) is that they don’t pre-sume a sharp distinction. Thick and thin are not flip sides of one coin butopposite ends of a continuum, between which terms can be thicker or thin-ner. That means that this tool captures a difference between two end pointsof the spectrum while allowing for the shades of grey in between.

SEE ALSO

1.10 Definitions3.11 False dichotomy

188

TOOLS FOR CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS

Origins

The distinction has its formal origins in considerations of language. Any particular word is a single type and any particular appearance of it, inspeech or writing, a token. Hence when Hamlet murmured, ‘words, words,words’, he was uttering three tokens of the single type ‘word’.Plato clearly had something of this in mind in his theory of forms (

eide-

).There is a good deal of disagreement about just what this theory entails, butits central motivating idea is simple enough. If we ask, for example, ‘Whatis a triangle?’ it is not enough to point to any particular triangle and expectthat to suffice as an answer. A right-angled triangle is certainly a triangle,but there are many other triangles of differing size and with different inter-nal angles. But what makes all these different things triangles?Plato’s solution was to say that each of the ‘many’ different things of thesensible world ‘participates’ in a ‘one’ or a ‘form’ (

eidos

) that makes it what

sort

or

kind

of thing it is. There are many different triangles but only oneform of the triangle. This form contains the essence of ‘triangleness’ andparticular triangles are what they are because they somehow partake in theform of the triangle. So, although there are an infinite number of actual orpotential triangles, there is only one form of the triangle, and it is under-standing what this form is that enables us to recognize particular triangles.Plato sometimes seemed to suggest that he believed these forms were akind of non-physical entity that exist in some other, transcendent world.But put into type/token terms such metaphysical extravagance seemsunnecessary. All the particular triangles are tokens of the one type ‘triangle’.This ‘type’ need not be some weird, non-physical entity; it is merely theabstract concept under which particular geometric shapes can be catego-rized. Of course, this still leaves questions, in particular about the status of abstract concepts. But the type/token distinction has the merit of not initself implying anything metaphysical, mysterious or supernatural.

Identity

The type/token distinction is also important with regard to identity. Twothings that are the same in every respect, but which are not, in fact, oneobject, are said to be

type-identical

. Each type-identical object or personis said to be a token of that single type. When we have two terms – for

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

191

long, difficult treatises for its exposition? As one of our teachers remarkedin a pithy (perhaps self-refuting) aphorism, ‘Any philosophy that can be putin a nutshell belongs there.’

Not a trivial history

Perhaps. But as a matter of fact, the history of philosophy is littered withtexts of enduring importance that are composed of little more than apho-risms. The work of many ancient Asian thinkers, Laozi (sixth century

bce

,by tradition) for example, appears aphoristic. Although the ancient GreekHeraclitus (fl. sixth century

bce

) is said to have produced a ‘book’, it is quitelikely that the papyri composing it contained merely a collection of theaphoristic fragments through which his thought has survived – includinghis well-known remark that ‘you can’t step into the same river twice’.(Hippocrates (c.460–c.370

bce

), of course, is well known for his medical

Aphorisms

). Large portions of the early modern philosopher GiambattistaVico’s

New Science

(1725) comprise series of short remarks, some of whichhe calls ‘axioms’ – perhaps ironically, since they function in ways that bearlittle resemblance to the axiomatic, geometric methods of Euclid andSpinoza. Friedrich Nietzsche consciously composed substantial portions of hisworks in the form of aphorism and loosely collected remarks. In Section 51of

Twilight of the Idols

(1888) he tells his readers that ‘it is my ambition tosay in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone elsedoes

not

say in a book’. More recently, Ludwig Wittgenstein composed someof the most important philosophical texts of the twentieth century by care-fully arranging brief, often aphoristic, remarks such as the famous closingto his

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

(1922): ‘Whereof one cannot speakone must remain silent’ (# 7).

The pithy point

In some cases, the appearance of philosophical work in the form of apho-risms or short remarks may be simply accidental. Heraclitus wrote at a timewhen the philosophical treatise had not yet become a clearly defined, letalone dominant, form of expression as well as when philosophy had not yetfully distinguished itself from poetry (has it ever?). Anyway, if the Aristotelianeditor Theophrastus is to be believed, Heraclitus’s text seems to have been

192

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

unfinished. But in other cases – certainly in those of Vico, Nietzsche andWittgenstein – the aphoristic style is consciously chosen and highly pol-ished. What reasons might a philosopher have for presenting his or herwork in this way?For one thing, while many philosophers aspire to the presentation of asingle truth justified by clean lines of discursive argument, other philoso-phers have regarded this aspiration as well as the medium of treatises andessays to be misleading in what it suggests about truth, reality and thehuman condition. Nietzsche, for example, like Kierkegaard, rejected hispredecessor Hegel’s idea that reality is a single, whole, rational system. And,accordingly, Nietzsche (like the later Wittgenstein) refused the method of trying to describe reality in a single, true, rational philosophical system.Instead, Nietzsche seems to have embraced the idea that truth is plural anddifferent from different perspectives. Vico, too, thought that the humanworld is not well represented by an orderly, rational (especially deductive or‘geometric’) presentation of ideas and that trying to philosophize that way about the human world involves a kind of deep distortion. Vico puts it thisway in

The Ancient Wisdom of the Italians

(1710): ‘To introduce geometricalmethod into practical life is “like trying to go mad with the rules of reason”,attempting to proceed by a straight line among the tortuosities of life, asthough human affairs were not ruled by capriciousness, temerity, opportu-nity and chance. Similarly, to arrange a political speech according to theprecepts of geometrical method is equivalent to stripping it of any acuteremarks and to uttering nothing but pedestrian lines of argument.’Discursive treatises and essays, however, by their very nature indicate thatthere is a single truth and a rationally ordered reality, if for no other reasonthan that discursive philosophical treatises and essays argue from an orderly set of premises to a single conclusion. Short remarks, and especially apho-risms, by contrast suggest neither a rationally ordered system nor a singletruth. Because they are, especially when well crafted, dense with meaningsand irreducibly complex with ambiguities and connotations, aphorismsresist univocally presenting a single truth or an exclusive, definite order.The downside of aphorism and remark as a philosophical method, how-ever, is that it also tends towards vagueness, misunderstanding and justplain confusion. It’s with good reason that Heraclitus earned the moniker,‘the obscure’ philosopher. But whether philosophy employs aphorisms ortreatises, dense remarks or deductive arguments, as the critic MarshallMcLuhan aphoristically said in his 1964 book,

Understanding Media

, ‘themedium is the message’ – at least in part.

194

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

Immanuel Kant, among the most important in this regard, articulated notcategories of being but rather, more guardedly, twelve

categories of understand-ing

(divided into four groups of three). Instead of trying to map out how theworld is in itself, Kant was concerned to lay bare the most general concepts weenlist (that, in his view, we

must

enlist) to understand the world as we experi-ence it. Many recent philosophers have followed Kant in variants of this ges-ture, refusing to make claim to having demarcated the joints of reality, butinstead working simply to describe the general features of our conceptual orderand our languages or discourses. Still, some philosophers have persisted inpursing the metaphysical implications of categories. In working to determine

categories of meaning

, for example, Edmund Husserl attempted to describe notonly general features of consciousness but also conditions that make it possiblefor the world to show itself as it is. ‘Ordinary language’ philosophers, taking acue from J. L. Austin’s attempt to delineate categories of language usage, haveheld that among the conditions that make meaningful language possible mustbe a kind of fit or harmony between the world and language.This brings us back around to Aristotle and the question of what layingout a set of categories can achieve philosophically. For one thing, as a mat-ter of metaphysical science categories aim to articulate the most generalfeatures and structure of reality. That in itself is no small matter, and philo-sophical metaphysicians have laboured to produce a fuller and more com-plete understanding of reality than natural science alone can offer. Inaddition, apprehending these general features can help answer specific phil-osophical questions.For example, the difference Aristotle renders between the category of ‘sub-stance’ and other categories helps explain how it is that things both stay the

same

and also

change

, how sometimes when things change they become a dif-ferent kind of thing while at other times when they change they remain thesame thing. As Descartes points out in a famous thought experiment, a hunk of wax can melt, changing its colour, shape, texture, etc. and remain the same wax.But incinerate an apple, and the apple no longer exists, at least as an apple.Other philosophers have used categories in answering other questions.Kant’s categorical work aimed to explain how it is that the natural laws sci-ence formulates express

necessary

laws, as well as why certain metaphysicaland theological questions must remain unanswerable. Bertrand Russell for-mulated a ‘Theory of Types’, which differentiates various kinds and ordersof sets, in order to resolve a special paradox that he had identified in settheory (called, appropriately enough, ‘Russell’s Paradox’). Gilbert Ryle’swork on categories of language posed an answer to questions that have

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

197

in our conceptions of the world, and then trying to remove them. But forsome, such blockages serve an important function in their own right, andare not simply obstacles to be torn down.

Refutation and recognition

One way the

elenchus

functions is as a form of refutation. Either by usinghis interlocutor’s own premises or by culling new premises agreeable to theinterlocutor from uncontroversial examples, the Socratic

elenchus

showshow the interlocutor’s position is self-refuting. That is, the

elenchus

exposeshow the interlocutor’s position implies something absurd, unacceptable, orself-contradictory. So, for example, Socrates famously in the

Republic

refutesCephalus’s definition of justice as ‘giving what is owed’ by showing that itimplies, unacceptably, that you should return a borrowed weapon to itsowner even when the owner has gone mad and plans to do something badwith it. Shortly afterwards in the

Republic

, Socrates also refutes Polemarchus’sdefinition that justice is ‘helping your friends and harming your enemies’ aswell as Thrasymachus’s idea that justice is ‘whatever serves the stronger’ by showing that they lead to contradictions for which their positions seem tooffer no way out. The

elenchus

, then, serves the negative function, as it were,of cleaning out the Augean stables.But there seems to be a more positive function that the

elenchus

servesbeyond refutation. Plato’s Socrates also seems to enlist the

elenchus

to elicitfrom his interlocutors an acknowledgement of their lack of wisdom, of their not having all the answers. Along with this acknowledgement, Plato’sSocrates seems also to use the

elenchus

and the

aporia

that results to awakena desire to take up philosophy in order really to discover the relevant truth.In this way,

elenchus

and

aporia

can be used both as a method of plumbingthe depths of your ignorance and as a stimulus to doing something about itthrough more philosophy.

The discoveries of doubt

Sceptical philosophers understood Socrates and his claim that he must bewisest because he alone admits to not knowing anything in a rather differentlight. And their use of aporetic

doubt

is characteristically different, as well.While they agree with Plato that the

aporia

-like condition cultivates an

198

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

acknowledgement of ignorance, it doesn’t follow for them that the properresponse is to undertake a renewed desire to discover the truth once and forall. Sceptics embrace the possibility that philosophical

aporia

, rather thanjust opening the way to new philosophical inquiry, may also point to thevery limits and vanity of philosophy. By positioning conflicting arguments,assertions and observations, sceptics produce a confrontation with radicaldoubt about fundamental beliefs which sceptics have found leads to a posi-tive philosophical result. For the sceptics, that is, the wisdom that surfacesas a result of

aporia

is not to be found at the end of philosophical argumentin the form of a true, justified, well formulated conclusion. Rather, real wis-dom is to be found at the end of philosophical argument in the sense of accepting that philosophical argument may simply come to an end, or beput to an end, without determining a final, true conclusion. In this sense,

aporia

may function as the occasion not of more philosophical investiga-tion but as an occasion for an insight and acknowledgement about the fini-tude of philosophical investigation.

Aporia

and deconstruction

Something not terribly dissimilar to the sceptics’ use of

aporia

can befound in the work of Jacques Derrida concerning his project of ‘decon-struction’. In different ways, Derrida develops

aporia

in order to callattention to or elicit a sense of the instability and impossibility of theaspirations or claims of philosophy and other forms of speaking andwriting. Prior to and pervading every philosophical claim, argument andsystem there is always and already, Derrida tries to show, rulelessness,undecidability, incompleteness and a remainder of ignorance. For Derridathis condition and its priority are not principally apprehended throughphilosophical demonstrations but rather through the skilful philosophi-cal use of

aporia

. A philosophical impasse, therefore, may comprise muchmore than frustration and paralysis.

SEE ALSO

3.24 Self-defeating arguments6.2 Deconstruction and the critique of presence7.9 Scepticism

200

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

example, does not describe the world because it does not tell us anythingabout whether or not criminals exist, which people are criminals, whichlaws they have broken and so on. The sentence merely tells us somethingabout what certain words mean. To know that all criminals have broken thelaw is to know something about the meaning of the words used but nothingabout the way the world is.According to Hume, truths of mathematics and geometry belong in thesame category of knowledge as tautologies, a category he called ‘the rela-tions of ideas’. 1

+

1

=

2, for example must be true, because, given the mean-ing of ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘

+

’ and ‘

=

’, the statement must be true by definition. 1

+

1

=

2could only not be true if the numbers and symbols used meant somethingother than what they actually do, but in that case we’d be dealing with asemantically different statement. The truth of the sum, therefore, flows(whatever that means, as Quine might ask) inexorably from the meaningsof the terms found in it.Such arithmetic statements also share with tautologies the feature thatthey do not tell us anything about the way the world actually is. They donot, for example, tell you whether or not when you add one drop of waterto a second drop of water you get two drops of water, one big drop or some-thing else altogether. Knowledge of such things belongs to Hume’s secondcategory, ‘matters of fact’ – that is, things we learn by experience.

The second type

‘Reggie Kray is a criminal’ belongs in this category, because its truth orfalsehood cannot be ascertained simply by attending to the meanings of thewords in the sentence. To discover whether this statement is true, we have tolook at the world. If it is true that Reggie Kray broke the law, then it is truehe is a criminal. It is what goes on in the world that makes such statementstrue or false, not just what the words mean.‘Matters of fact’ are thus informative about the world in a way in which‘relations of ideas’ are not. They, however, lack the rock-sure certainty of truths yielded to us by ‘relations of ideas’. Whereas ‘criminals have brokenthe law’ must be true on pain of contradiction, there is nothing contradic-tory in saying that ‘Reggie Kray is not a criminal.’ Unlike relations of ideas,it is

always

logically possible that the opposite of a matter of fact is true.That is why so much ancient mathematics is still fundamentally sound(there was no way it could be wrong) and so much ancient science utterly

202

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

Gillian Russell,

Truth in Virtue of Meaning: A Defence of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction

(2008)

5.5 Indirect discourse

In a well-known Monty Python sketch, one man approaches another in apub and unleashes a stream of suggestive remarks: ‘Nudge, nudge. Wink,wink. Know what I mean, know what I mean? Say no more! Say no more!’A bit annoyed, the man accosted remains perplexed, indicating that hedoesn’t know (or at least feigns not to know) what the other is talking about.Soon passions rise, and it all ends with … well … a good laugh.Philosophy is most often conducted using the forms and devices properto formal essays and treatises. But sometimes the suggestive has been pre-ferred over the literal, the evocative over the analytic, intellectual nudgesand winks over explicit theorizing. Some philosophers have enlisted themethods of aphorism and remark, dialogue, confession, fictional narrativeand even poem. Many of these alternative techniques might be thought of as forms of indirect discourse. Still, why use indirect discourses, and whatdo they aim to accomplish?

Kierkegaard’s ‘indirect communication’

Many of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s books were publishedunder pseudonyms. For example, Kierkegaard’s famous 1843 book,

Either/Or

is composed of two parts, each attributed to two different authors, the anony-mous A and Judge Vilhelm. It wasn’t that Kierkegaard was afraid of reprisals,like so many early modern thinkers (John Locke, for example) who publishedtheir work anonymously. Nearly everyone knew that Kierkegaard was theauthor of the texts. Rather, Kierkegaard published his work pseudonymously,using what he called ‘indirect communication’ to make a philosophical point.A treatise that is written in a way that directly argues for a position typi-cally does so authoritatively, particularly when the author is a philosopherof great stature, as Kierkegaard was. It speaks with the voice of truth, as if saying, ‘This is how it is.’ Using a pseudonym complicates the authority of the text. It forces the reader to wonder whether the thoughts presentedare Kierkegaard’s own, or just those of his creation. It highlights the

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

203

reader’s responsibility for deciding what is worth accepting in any text.A pseudonymous presentation, especially a series of them, also raises theissue of whether each philosophical position is in some important sense theexpression of an individual person. By doing so it focuses the reader onthe existential choice that must be made in adhering to one philosophicalposition rather than another. Dialogues serve a similar function.For Kierkegaard, the use of pseudonyms had a particular importance.They were a way of both arguing for and demonstrating the idea that any particular world-view can only be fully understood or criticized fromwithin, and that there is no position of neutrality from which you can assessphilosophical positions.

What can be said and what can only be shown

Another reason for using indirect forms of discourse is that there may be philo-sophical matters that simply cannot be formulated adequately or clearly indirect ways of speaking and writing. Kierkegaard’s indirect discourse refuses theidea promoted by G. W. F. Hegel and other nineteenth-century German think-ers that philosophy ought to work towards presenting a single, unified, rationalsystem explaining ultimate reality. For Kierkegaard, systematic philosophy of that sort is both impossible and undesirable. The Austrian philosopher LudwigWittgenstein seems to advance a similar idea in his

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

(1921). Wittgenstein maintains there that some things can only be ‘said’, in par-ticular statements about the world and the facts that compose it. Other matterscan only be ‘shown’, the logical form of statements, for example, and other mat-ters that are, in Wittgenstein’s own terms, ‘mystical’: ‘There is indeed the inex-pressible. This

shows

itself; it is the mystical [

das Mystische

]’ (6.522).Wittgenstein further complicates matters by paradoxically indicatingtowards the end of the book that the reader who has really understood thebook will have gone beyond the book: ‘My propositions are elucidatory inthis way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, whenhe has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so tospeak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must sur-mount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly’ (6.54). Does thatmean that even this remark will be seen as senseless, too? Is what mattersabout the book not what it has said but what it has shown?Interpreters have puzzled over Wittgenstein’s remarks, suggesting forexample that what he intends to show is the limits of language (which cannot

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

205

identified in two ways, such as the planet Venus, which is called both themorning star and the evening star, or ‘Bill Gates’ and ‘the founder of Microsoft’. It is the latter kind of identity – where we identify two dis-tinct terms with the same person or object – that is the strictest form of identity and is the subject of Leibniz’s law. This philosophical tool isattributed to the German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm, Baron vonLeibniz (1646–1716), as he first formulated it in his

Discourse onMetaphysics

(1686).Leibniz’s law states in simple terms what must be true for X and Y to beidentical in this strict sense. In its classic formulation it states that:X is identical with Y

if and only if

every property of X is a property of Yand every property of Y is a property of X.This is similar to, but importantly different from, the

Principle of the

‘

Identity of Indiscernibles

’ (and, sometimes, the ‘

Indiscernibility of Identicals’

):X and Y are absolutely indiscernible,

if and only if

they are identical.This second principle defines identity in terms of how things are conceivedor grasped by the mind (if the mind can’t

discern

a difference, then they aren’t different), while the former defines identity according to the proper-ties possessed by the object itself (if the objects have the same properties,regardless of how they’re discerned, then they are really one). Which, if either, of these principles is used may imply different metaphysical andepistemological positions.In any case, for most practical purposes the principles seem obviously true, and do similar work. If, for example, it turns out that everything thatis true of the murderer of Mai Lin is also true of Sam Smith, then it must bethe case that Sam Smith is the murderer of Mai Lin.

Mind–brain example

Passing the test of Leibniz’s law, however, is not always that easy, and neitheris it always clear what passing requires. This has been most evident in thephilosophy of mind and the claim that mental states are identical with brainstates. This has been widely disputed for the reason that brain states – beingphysical states – by definition have only physical properties. Mental states,

206

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

on the other hand, are said to have mental properties that just cannot bereduced (see 2.8) to merely physical things. For example, one cannotdescribe the sensation of pain in purely physical terms. If this is granted, itis clear that according to Leibniz’s law mental states cannot be identicalwith brain states, as the former possess properties the latter do not. Frenchphilosopher René Descartes’s argument for a ‘real’ or metaphysical distinc-tion between thinking substance (mind) and extended substance (body) inMeditation VI hangs on a similar line of reasoning.The debate thus moves on. It might be concluded that the relationshipbetween mental states and brain states is not identity. Or it might be claimedthat, contrary to appearances, brain states can and do have mental proper-ties. Or perhaps a solution may emerge through future work clarifying whatthe requirement for the identity of all properties in Leibniz’s law really entails. In any case, whether or not the debate can be taken further, it is fairto say that no one really disputes the truth of Leibniz’s law, only what itsimplications are.

Space and time, different but indiscernible?

One potential vulnerability to the Identity of Indiscernibles, however, arisesamidst a controversy concerning whether, when we talk of properties here, wemust include spatio-temporal location as a property. If Jane and Mary are phys-ically identical and have the same thoughts and feelings, but Jane is in HongKong and Mary in New York, they cannot be identical. Hence it seems that thetime and place of X and Y must be the same if X and Y are to be identical.A thought experiment, however, formulated in 1952 by Max Black raisesjust the question of whether two different things, sharing every property except spatial location, can be thought of as indiscernible even though notidentical. Consider a single universe that contains nothing but two ironspheres A and B, that are identical in every way, except that they are in dif-ferent spatial locations. Why not say that the two are both different but yetindiscernible? Yes, A is a specifiable distance in front of B; but ‘in front’ is arelative description, and so B is also exactly the same distance in front of A.Likewise, A is ‘to the right of’ B, but B is also in an indiscernible but differ-ent way to the right of A and so on. Or, consider two distinct but absolutely symmetrical universes. Wouldn’t they be different (not identical) butnevertheless indiscernible? Or could it make sense to say that the self-sameidentical entity can be in different places at once?

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

207

Thinking about these and related issues has led some to follow themedieval metaphysician Duns Scotus (1266–1308) in concluding thatin addition to the various properties things have, there is somethingelse – pure ‘thisness’ or

haecceity

– which does nothing more than distin-guish one thing from another. If each thing, however, has ‘thisness’ and‘thisness’ is not a property, then it would seem possible for different thingseach to have all the same properties as one another but still have differentthisness. But maybe should ‘thisness’ be regarded as a property?

Problems of personal identity

Leibniz’s law can be seen in action in recent discussions about personalidentity. Many philosophers have argued that personal identity is deter-mined by psychological connectedness and continuity: a future person, X,is the same person as a present person, Y, if they are psychologically con-nected and continuous with each other. Put crudely, X and Y are ‘psycho-logically connected and continuous’ if person X has the same kind of continuity of memory, intention and personality with person Y that a nor-mal person has over time.If this is true, then it would seem that people can survive teletransporta-tion – the fictional mode of transport where one’s original body is destroyedbut all the information about it is collected and sent to, say, Mars, where abody having the same properties is recreated. If this process has the resultthat the person on Mars has the same kind of psychological relationshipwith the person who was teletransported from Earth as that person doeswith his or her past self, then psychological reductionists say that that they are all the same person. In other words, if you are teletransported and thebeing that appears on Mars remembers what you have done, shares youropinions, plans and personality, he or she is you.Critics point to a counterexample: What if the machine malfunctionsand creates two of you on Mars? In such a situation, it cannot be that bothpeople on Mars are you, as a simple application of Leibniz’s law shows. Callthe person prior to teletransportation ‘A’ and the two people on Mars ‘X’and ‘Y’. If A is X and A is also Y, then it would seem bizarre to say that X isnot Y. Since both X and Y would have to be identical in all respects withregard to A, wouldn’t they both be identical to each other? But X cannot beidentical with Y, because Leibniz’s law states that if X = Y then X and Y mustshare the same properties. It is clear that if X cuts himself, Y sustains no

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

209

Max Black, ‘The Identity of Indiscernibles’,

Mind

61.242 (1952), 153–64Derek Parfit,

Reasons and Persons

(1986)

5.7 Ockham’s razor

The pre-Socratic philosophers’ attempt to reduce the world’s diverse phe-nomena to a single basis or

arche-

(for example, Thales’s claim that ‘all is water’)shows that in a sense the principle known as Ockham’s razor is as old as phi-losophy. Named after the medieval monk William of Ockham (aka ‘Occam’;1285–1349), this fundamental rule of philosophical thinking holds that

enti-ties should not be multiplied beyond necessity

. In other words, philosophicaland scientific theories should posit the existence of as few types of entities aspossible. A second formulation of the razor is broader, focusing not just onthe number of entities, but the overall economy of an explanation: where twocompeting theories can both adequately explain a given phenomenon, thesimpler of them is to be preferred. Hence Ockham’s razor is also known as the‘Principle of Simplicity’. Ockham himself formulated the principle in variousways, among them ‘Plurality is not to be assumed without necessity.’Ockham’s razor has had so many applications in philosophy that it isoften not mentioned explicitly. Ockham himself used it to dispense withthe neo-Platonic notion of ‘ideas in the mind of the Creator’ that somephilosophers believed were necessary corollaries of objects in the world.Ockham argued that the corresponding entities in the world could sustaintheir own existence quite happily. Although often viewed as a ‘common-sense’ theory, Ockham himself used the razor to argue that there is no needto posit the existence of motion since a simpler explanation is that thingsjust reappear in a different place. This application, however, hardly providesthe best advertisement for the tool’s value.

Principle of method

Ockham’s razor is not a

metaphysical

claim about the ultimate simplicity of the universe but, rather, a useful rule of thumb or working principle of

method

. The fact that on occasion a more complex explanation is better istherefore no use as an objection to the general usefulness of the principle.At the very least, it is surely wise to look at the simplest explanation first

210

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

before considering more fanciful alternatives. Where, for example, we havefive points on a graph, which can be joined by a straight line, those pointscould alternatively be joined by an infinite number of squiggly lines. It is,however, accepted best practice in investigating scientific laws to assumethat the points have a linear relationship, at least until new data providespoints outside the straight line.

Metaphysical principle

Some philosophers, however, have taken the razor further, using it not just as amethodological principle, but to justify more concrete conclusions about theexistence or role of entities. For example, some behaviourists in the philosophy of mind argue that our language and behaviour can be explained withoutrecourse to first-person accounts of subjective mental states – the way thoughts,feelings, intentions and sensations feel or appear to those who have them. So,Ockham’s razor in hand, they deny these subjective states’ existence. Thisexplanation is simpler than the messy alternatives that try to reconcile physicalactions and brain states with non-physical subjective states. Critics have saidthat the behaviourist explanation is only plausible if you ‘feign anaesthesia’ – inother words, pretend that you don’t have any feelings or sensations.While it may be going too far to claim that subjective mental states do notexist, more moderate behaviourists argue that they simply have no role toplay in explaining our actions. The way things appear and feel to us is merely a by-product or ‘epiphenomenon’ of the physical processes that cause us toact. In this instance, the razor is not used to deny the

existence

of certain enti-ties or states, but to distinguish between

those that have a role in explanations

and those that do not. In another example of this

methodological use

of therazor, it is common to argue that, although God’s non-existence cannot beproved, there is no need to take him into account when we consider the way in which the natural world and human beings have come to be as they are.

Simplicity vs. completeness

The behaviourist example suggests a very important qualification. A simplertheory should not be a less complete one. A

complete

explanation will explainall the relevant phenomena. In the behaviourist case much of the rele-vant phenomena, such as human speech and behaviour, is explained. Their

212

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

consciousness and the world appear only together, ‘at one blow’, many phe-nomenologists follow Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) in enlisting a philo-sophical tool they call the

phenomenological epoche-

. The process and resultof the

epoche-

they call a

phenomenological reduction

or, sometimes, a

tran-scendental reduction

. The

epoche-

or ‘suspension’ (a term drawn from ancientscepticism) works by withdrawing those who engage it from the ‘naturalattitude’. While immersed in the natural attitude we see ourselves merely aspart of the ordinary world of natural things, related by natural causal laws,as objects among objects. The natural attitude also typifies the way psy-chologists understand the mind and natural scientists understand peoplegenerally.The phenomenological reduction does not, however, undermine thenatural attitude or the sciences. Through the

epoche

̄

questions of what existsor doesn’t exist, what is real or not real, are simply ‘bracketed’ so that thephenomenologist can focus on something else: the conscious, intentionalacts that underwrite our being in the world, including the acts by which weare conscious of the self. The field of phenomenological investigation, then,is taken to explore matters that we don’t usually notice, even in the sciences,but that are

transcendental

in the sense that they make possible the naturaland social sciences as well as, more fundamentally, the appearance of our-selves and our world.

To what end?

Through the phenomenological reduction and the putatively infinite fieldof investigation it opens up, phenomenologists claim to have discovered agreat deal about consciousness, about the world and about us who inhabitit. They argue that phenomenology shows that objects are always andalready, in an

a priori

way, the objects (

noema

) of conscious acts (

noesis

) of ‘intentionality’. ‘All consciousness,’ Husserl famously said, ‘is consciousnessof’ something. And, correlatively, all things can only appear as objects of consciousness. We are, as phenomenologist Robert Sokolowski says, ‘thedative’ of the world. So, a rock, for example, always and already appearsthrough acts of consciousness where we intentionally apprehend the rockas a physical object, as a paper weight, as a memento, as in my way, as my tool for pounding grain, as an object of disgust or desire, as a buildingmaterial, as a weapon, as carbon and silica, as a hallucination, or assomething you wish, imagine, want or dream and so on. Phenomenologist

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

213

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) went so far as to argue that the world of human existence is, in fact, primarily one where things are related to usthrough ‘care’ and our ‘concern’ for them as tools, artefacts, obstacles, fuel,etc. It’s only, for Heidegger, as a derivative abstraction that things becomethe objects of science.Among their other discoveries, phenomenologists point out that physi-cal objects, unlike minds, are only apprehended in partial view (you can’tsee every side at once). There is always a part of an object that remainsunseen. Objects furthermore, like thoughts, appear only against a ‘hori-zon’ of other objects in which they stand in various relations – causal rela-tions, spatial relations, etc. So, things are what they are only against ahorizon of what they are not. Objects also only exist as part of a whole, a‘world’, of which they are parts and which is greater than the sum of itsparts. Moreover things only appear temporally. Time itself, however, is nota series of present moments. Rather the present appears embraced by intentional acts of both prospection (expecting what’s next) and retro-spection (retaining what’s just happened), and the possible meanings of what can appear to us in the future are conditioned by those of the past,or more properly of history.In addition to the discoveries they promise to yield, investigations intothe content, structures and meanings of transcendental consciousness aretoday morally imperative, according to Husserl, for philosophers. WhereasWittgenstein saw in his work in the philosophy of language a ‘therapy’ forthe ‘bewitchment’ that has entrapped philosophy in ‘fly-bottles’ of non-sense, Husserl’s call to the ‘rigorous science’ of phenomenology was also arallying cry to answer the nihilism and scepticism he saw afflicting Westerncivilization.

What it’s like to be

In response to Husserl’s attempts to describe ‘eidetic’ intuitions of the‘essences’ of consciousness and world as it is universally given to us, phe-nomenologists working in Heidegger’s wake have instead insisted that puredescriptions of that sort are simply not possible. They instead characterizedthe work of phenomenology as producing different

interpretations

of whatit’s like to exist – albeit, however, in a supposedly deeper, more completeand even truer way than available to other kinds of investigation. Naturalscientists discover the stuff out of which we are made and the causal systems

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

215

painting’s humour, however, runs even deeper because, as Magritte himself pointed out, the sentence is not at all false or incongruous. After all, thepainting is not itself a pipe; it’s only the representation of a pipe.We might, similarly, speak of the treachery of language and, more broadly,of signs. A dollar sign (‘$’) is not itself money, and the ink marks, ‘dog’, arenot a dog. Yet, somehow those particular marks make it possible for us todescribe dogs and dollars, to point them out, to name them, to identify them and to distinguish them from cats and euros. The way the phonemesand marks called words operate in the creation of meaning has been thesubject of a great deal of philosophical semiotics and semiology: the study of signs and signification. Abstruse though it is, it’s important to have a feelfor the general contours of how the concepts ‘sign’ and ‘signifier’ are used inorder to enter these fields.

Peirce and Saussure: the science of signs

The American pragmatist C. S. Peirce (1839–1914) and the Swiss linguistFerdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) are among the most important figures inrecent semiotics. Each laboured to understand what we might call the mechan-ics of how signs work. Peirce’s theory of signs was triadic, where the complex of each sign includes: (1) the ‘representamen’ or sign itself, (2) the ‘object’ which issignified (something physical, imaginative, or even abstract, like ‘equality’) and(3) the ‘interpretant’ or meaning of the sign as the sign is interpreted or ‘decoded’.Saussure developed, in contrast, a dyadic model where language is composed of a hierarchical system of signs, arranged according to defined

differences

. Eachsign includes both the ‘signifier’ and the meaning ‘signified’. So, signs for, say,male and female include not only different physical signifiers (a skirt, highheels, a hijab) but also different orders of practice (who carves the turkey, drivesthe car, uses which toilet, consecrates the eucharist, tends the nappies).In neither Peirce’s nor in Saussure’s account do signs carry or containmeanings that are transported from one person to another in the process of communication. Rather, signs elicit meaning in those who read them. Oneconsequence of this is that meaning remains open-ended or indeterminate.Every given signifier establishes its differences only against the backgroundor horizon of a virtually endless system or sets of sometimes conflictingsystems of other signifiers. While of course the individual, subjective con-notations that different people bring to each sign are sometimes uniqueand different, signs more generally also receive signification from different

216

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

institutions, ideologies, class structures and customs – many of whichconflict. So, the interpretation of signs involves a continuing negotiationand refinement. (This is one reason why the debates about signs of maleand female are and will remain ongoing.) While Peirce thought both theobject and the interpretations determine the use of signs, Saussure regardedthe relationship of systems of signs to the independent world as arbitrary.Followers of Saussure known as ‘structuralists’ like the early RolandBarthes (1915–80), thought that indeterminacies of meaning are mitigatedby overarching rules (structures) that govern semiotic systems. Post-structuralists, however, like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault haveargued in response that there are no such structures and that semioticsystems are better described as rife with indeterminacy and difference or ascomplicated and ever-changing sets of micro-systems.

Baudrillard and Bakhtin: the politics of signs

Thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) have explored the political and ideological dimensions of signs. Bakhtinwas influential in arguing that ideology is pervasive in our lives, in not only our written and spoken texts but also in the ways we engage the materialworld, which can also be read as texts. While Marxian critics assessed the

usevalue

and

exchange

value of things in modern society, Baudrillard showedhow so much of our world functions as signs. A Rolls-Royce isn’t just a com-modity, it’s also a sign of wealth, power and status. A painting by Magritteone has just acquired isn’t just an aesthetic object, signifying a world of aes-thetic philosophies. It is also a sign of refinement. Being a ‘worker’ or a ‘pro-fessional’ or a ‘criminal’ isn’t just an economic or juridical affair, it’s also asign of a position in various power structures and social relations. AsBaudrillard would argue, our society has become so wrapped up in the sys-tem of signs that, for example, a worker’s compensation is determined less by the forces of supply and demand than by the system of signs (by being signi-fied ‘working class’ rather than ‘executive’, ‘management’ or ‘professional’).From our films, to our music, to our literature, to our government, to ourclothing and hairstyles, our lives virtually bristle with signification. Alongthese lines, Frankfurt School philosopher, Theodor Adorno, famously said,‘Lipstick is ideology.’ And, so, perhaps rather than through the natural andsocial sciences or through literature, our world is most basically understoodthrough the decoding efforts of semiotic philosophy.

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

217

Keep the terminology straight

It’s important to remember that the distinction between the ‘sign’ and the‘signified’ is different from the distinction between the ‘sense’ of a term andits ‘reference’ developed in the analytic and positivist traditions (see 4.16).While the ‘signified’ is similar to the ‘sense’ of a term as its meaning, the ‘sign’is the actual written mark or spoken sound (or other physical sign). Thereferent or reference of a term, however, is all the actual things to which theterm refers. The marks on this page, ‘morning star’, are a

sign

, while themeaning of the words ‘morning star’ (including the thoughts, feelings,memories, connotations and even personal perceptions associated with it)are its

sense

or what it

signifies

. The

referent

of those words is the planetVenus. When the reference of a term is understood by fully apprehendingthe term’s referents, the term is said to be ‘referentially transparent’. When it’snot the term is ‘referentially opaque’. The term ‘mother of Oedipus’, forexample, was referentially opaque to Oedipus when he married Jocasta, buttragically transparent when he later discovered that Jocasta was his mother.Similarly, don’t confuse ‘semiotics’ with ‘semantics’ or with ‘syntax’ (see4.17). While

semiotics

or

semiology

refers to understanding how signs oper-ate,

semantics

addresses the

meaning

of terms (and other signs) and

syntax

describes their grammar. The sentence ‘Green ideas sleep furiously’ is syntac-tically correct, but it is semantically nonsensical. The semiotics of how thatsentence functions as a sign in the discourses of philosophy (as an example,as a sign of philosophical sophistication, etc.) is yet a another matter.

SEE ALSO

4.16 Sense/reference5.2 Categories and specific differences6.2 Deconstruction and the critique of presence6.7 Lacanian critique

READING

Ferdinand de Saussure,

Course in General Linguistics

(1916)Charles Sanders Peirce,

Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic

, ed. J. Hoopes (1991)Jean Baudrillard,

For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign

(1972)

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

219

make the given possible

. Transcendental argument, then, tries to circumventscepticism by making its starting assumptions nothing more than the factsof experience – it makes no assumptions about the nature of these experi-ences, whether they are caused by an independent reality or so on. If suc-cessful, the sceptic’s ‘How can you be sure?’ challenges seem thereby to beside-stepped or found to be pointless.Despite its strength, there remain at least two significant limitations tothis strategy.

The status of the given

The first is that the sceptic can still ask, ‘How can you be sure you have theseexperiences or givens?’ One might construe this challenge as empty. Afterall, even if Descartes was wrong to conclude that he existed from the factthat he was thinking, he might have better observed, along the lines FranzBrentano (1838–1917) later would, that there is thinking or consciousness.As long as a transcendental argument genuinely starts from what is given inexperience and doesn’t smuggle in other assumptions, it is surely startingfrom incontrovertible premises. The problem, here, however, is that it’s notclear that there is any pure ‘given’ in experience. That is, all experience seemsto be interpreted experience, bound up with various assumptions aboutwhat’s going on. (Consider how many assumptions and interpretations areat work in calling an experience a ‘thought’ or a ‘perception’ – or even call-ing it ‘experience’.)

The quality of transcendental reasoning

Secondly, the sceptic can ask, ‘How can you be sure your reasoning from thefacts of experience is sound?’ Such scepticism about the very possibility of good reasoning is as fundamental a challenge to philosophy as one can get,and raises issues about the limits of argumentation. Kant himself empha-sized that his reasoning is not to be taken as a demonstration or deductiveproof of the truth of the transcendental claims he makes. Rather, he saysthat his ‘transcendental deduction’ ought to be regarded more along thelines of something that might persuade a law court. And even more weakly,he argues that even though we can’t be sure that he’s right we ought to thinkabout the world, ourselves and the divine ‘as if’ (

als ob

) his claims are true.

220

TOOLS OF HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND PHILOSOPHERS

At best, therefore, transcendental argument provides a limited victory overthe sceptic. That is, transcendental argument might be understood to estab-lish something only conditionally –

if

something given is the case, but per-haps not otherwise.

Copernican revolution

In Kant’s case, employing the method of transcendental deduction resultedin a major shift – a ‘Copernican revolution’ in metaphysics – in the way inwhich he saw the relationship between knowledge and the world. By start-ing with our experience, he shifted the direction of fit: whereas previously it was assumed that our understanding had to fit the way the world was,Kant argued it was the world that had to be made to conform to the natureof our understanding.Some have seen this shift as having exacted a tremendous cost. The tran-scendental method provided a response to the sceptic; it also resulted in arevision of our understanding of philosophy that some find just as threat-ening. Since Kant, many philosophers have been engrossed not in deter-mining the nature of the world and ourselves as they are

in themselves

but,rather,

how our experience of them is conditioned

by our cognitive faculties,our languages, our histories and our practices.Transcendental arguments continue to be employed by philosophers,Kantian and otherwise. For example, John Searle has offered what he viewsas a transcendental argument for external realism – the view that there is areal world that exists independently of our experiences in the same way ourexperience and thinking shows it to be. His argument works by taking as itsgiven the fact that ordinary discourse is meaningful. If, for example, weagree to meet at a certain place and time, that is meaningful. Searle’s argu-ment is that, since this is meaningful, and it is only meaningful if externalrealism is true, external realism is therefore true. Searle’s argument derivesfrom Wittgenstein’s famous private language argument, which holds thatlanguage can only be meaningful if we live in a shared, public world – sincelanguage is meaningful, we do live in such a world. Transcendental argu-ments, then, are very much alive and well and still a useful part of the rep-ertoire of argumentative techniques.

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

223

that philosophy and other elements of human culture develop through theaction of the thoughts, ideas and intentions of people, independently of theeconomic order in which they were produced. Marx and Engels challengedthis idea, contending instead that the mode of production (e.g. feudalismor capitalism) characteristic of a social order acts as a kind of ‘substructure’that grounds and determines the attributes of the cultural ‘superstructure’built upon it. For Marx and Engels it is not the dynamics of ideas that deter-mine society; it is the dynamics of the economic base that determine ourideas. This is what is meant by Marx’s claim that he righted philosophy afterHegel had stood it on its head (see 2.3).You might say that for Marx and Engels the economic substructure func-tions almost like the Freudian unconscious, determining the contents of our conscious minds without our even realizing it. Later class critics, how-ever, like Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) rejected the classical Marxian the-sis that this determination is one directional, maintaining that the culturecan affect the economic substructure too.In either case, how might you use such a tool in philosophical thinking?For example, you might argue (as many Marxist critics have) that theReformation was not fundamentally a religious innovation but a change inthinking demanded by the newly burgeoning capitalist institutions of Europe. Because capitalism needed to break the communal, local ties char-acteristic of feudalism, it developed new religious superstructures thatemphasized individual conscience over corporate, feudal church authority.Indeed, Marx himself is famous for arguing that essentially religion is a toolused by the ruling class to mollify those it exploits, and by the exploited classto dull the pain of the wounding it receives at the hands of its rulers. Religionis, says Marx in his 1844

Contributions to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

: ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world andthe soul of soulless conditions. It is the

opium

of the people.’Similarly, Marx argued that the masses of people in purportedly demo-cratic capitalist societies have been duped into various forms of ‘false con-sciousness’, such as the belief that liberal political rights – such as free speechand free assembly – were developed for them and are effectively enjoyed by them. In reality, says Marx, such rights were developed for the ruling class,are effectively enjoyed only by that class and in practice are truly only pro-tected for that class or its interests. The US Civil War, which Marx coveredas a journalist, was, therefore, not fought to end slavery but to clear the way for capitalist intervention in the American South. Similarly, a Marxist mightargue that US racial segregation ended not because of the political savvy

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

225

6.2 Deconstruction and the critique of presence

Nearly all conceptions of truth in the history of philosophy have centred onthe knower in some sense being

present

to the object of knowledge. Againstthis tradition, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), inspiration for the

deconstruc-tionist

movement (a movement often collected with others under the vaguerubric of

post-modernism

) regards the privileging of ‘presence’ to be one of themost profound shortcomings of Western philosophy. For Derrida, what’s

not

present is more important in our intellectual life. Moreover, he says, purepresence of the sort normally imagined in philosophy is never even achieved.Derrida took his inspiration from phenomenologist Martin Heidegger’s(1889–1976) call in

Being and Time

(1927) for a

Destruktion

of the Westernmetaphysical tradition. For Heidegger, the difficulty we have endured overmore than two thousand years of philosophical thought has been ourrepeated covering up of Being (

Sein

) by construing the meaning of Being assomething socially constructed, or posited through human agency, choicesand acts of valuing. Instead, says Heidegger, we should approach the ques-tion of Being by way of

Gelassenheit

(literally ‘allowingness’), that is by let-ting Being show itself as it is, by letting Being be. Much of Heidegger’s workcan be understood as the effort to produce concepts and language that real-ize

Gelassenheit

.For Derrida, however, the problem is slightly different. If for Heideggerthe error has been to think about Being as if it were

a being

whose meaningis

constructed,

for Derrida our mistake has been to think about truth andBeing on the model of ‘presence’, even a presence that shows itself through

Gelassenheit

. Construed as a matter of presence, what is true must be basedsomehow upon that which is or can be immediately, fully and transparently present to us – for example, a direct observation, sensation or impression(empiricism), a clear and distinct idea (Descartes, Spinoza), an intelligibleform or essence (Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas), the human voice or God.But Derrida maintains (using insights he had gleaned from Hegel,Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger) that closer scrutiny will show how noth-ing is or can be immediately present to us in the way demanded by pasttheorists. Although he aspired to a comprehension of the whole, Hegel rec-ognized that each assertion calls forth a ‘negative moment’ – asserting X issimultaneously to assert that it is not non-X. In Edmund Husserl’s termi-nology, meaning appears only against a ‘horizon’ or ‘world’ (or set of othermeanings) that differs from it.

226

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

Philosophies that claim a basis in the presence of the true and the real,therefore, are misleading (including Heidegger’s attempt to regain anauthentic and resolute comprehension of Being). In making this point,Derrida famously criticized past philosophy for privileging speaking overwriting, for holding that the spoken voice places us in the direct presence of the other and the meaning of his or her words in a way writing does not. ForDerrida, speaking can make meaning no more present than writing. Thecondition that both written and spoken meaning must endure in its failureto achieve pure presence, shorn of absence, Derrida calls

différance

.

Wider import

Derrida is also concerned about the social, political and ethical implica-tions of ways of thinking purportedly based upon claims to presence. AsDerrida renders it, claims to have grasped and privileged presence dependupon an exclusion of difference, impurity, absence and non-being. Thisexclusionary moment, for Derridians, quickly translates into acts of politi-cal and social exclusion, often violent ones. Because discursive practicetranslates into other forms of conduct, political appeals, for example, tonatural law, transcendent rights, the will of God, the will of the people, thedemands of history, or the dictates of reason, inevitably exclude, oppressand tyrannize.Although literary critics allied with deconstruction, such as Paul De Man,have used deconstruction primarily as a technique in literary criticism, thework of Derrida and Derridian deconstructionists has a broader scope. Itaims to guide us towards ways of thinking and acting that acknowledge

dif-férance

and eschew basing themselves on claims to pure, clear, univocal,universal, ahistorical, immediate presence.

Using the tool

In order to engage deconstructive criticism, ask these questions:1. Does the theory or practice with which you’re concerned base itself onsome claim to presence?2. Is there a way to deconstruct this theory, on its own terms, by showingthat the presence it claims does not and cannot be achieved?

228

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

do not. Their thinking about the philosophical implications of thisdistinction has led to the refinement of one of the most powerful criticaltools ever developed – the empiricist critique.The term ‘empiricism’ derives from the Greek word

empeiria

, meaning‘experience’, and the core of the empiricist critique is that philosophicalclaims departing from the realm of human experience are unacceptable. Ingeneral, this critique takes two forms: (1) a critique of meaning and intel-ligibility, and (2) a critique of truth.

Critique of meaning and intelligibility

One strategy empiricists have developed has been first to argue that state-ments are only

meaningful

or

intelligible

if they are about, or somehowbased on, human experience; and then, second, to go on to scrutinize vari-ous theories, terms and claims to see if they are, on this account, meaning-ful. If it is not about what humans can experience, it is unintelligible.Claims like 1 above are certainly about matters of experience – throughthe senses of vision and touch you can experience the cat curled up on themat by the door. Claims like 2 may not have been connected to actualhuman experience before the advent of telescopes, space travel and modernchemistry. But statement 2 was never

in principle

beyond human experi-ence; it was only beyond the experience of a specific historical moment.Statement 3 talks about something we don’t itself experience but whosepresence or absence is rigorously connected to the behaviour of iron filingsand various instruments – in other words, things we can experience.Claims like 4 and 5 are a different matter: they relate in no way to experi-ence and are therefore meaningless, according to some empiricists.Influential philosophers have also argued persuasively that statements like6 and 7 have little or no connection to experience either. Much of this hingeson the question of what precisely experience is. Do or can humans, forexample, have ‘experience’ of an infinite, eternal and transcendent being assome describe God?

Critique of truth

You might argue, and some have, that

all

of the above statements 1–7 aremeaningful. The problem isn’t really one of

meaning

but rather of

testing

. It

230

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

using gender and sexuality as categories of critical analysis. But how can youuse sex and gender as philosophical tools? Consider the following examples.Many philosophical theories of ethics describe the passions as unruly, dan-gerous and amoral forces that must be dominated, subdued, ordered or mas-tered by reason. Now, it is one thing to criticize such theories as being empirically baseless, full of incoherence and inconsistency, but it is quite another to showhow such theories reflect conceptions of male and female held by the culturesin which they originated. It is still another to show how they have been used by dominating males to keep females in subordinate positions. Can it be an acci-dent that in, say, Plato’s time when men dominated and controlled women,philosophical theories associated reason with men, passions with women, andmaintained that a proper moral life entails the dominance of the passions by reason? The pattern of male domination repeats itself throughout Westernsocial history, and so does the pattern of ethical theories demeaning the pas-sions and valorizing reason. Might the Western philosophical tradition’s con-ception of rationality function as an instrument of social control?

Wide-ranging implications

And so perhaps it goes with other dimensions of philosophical theory. Mightit be that various conceptions of justice bear a masculinist bias? Yes, saysCarol Gilligan. Perhaps the binary quality of so many philosophical catego-ries (good/evil, true/false, being/non-being, sense/non-sense) is itself mascu-line? Yes, says Hélène Cixous. Might our adoration of autonomy andindependence reflect something of the males who articulated these concepts?Yes, argues Nancy Chodorow. Might our gender relations somehow be caughtup with the dynamics of capitalist exploitation and alienation? Dead on, say Margaret Benston and Heidi Hartmann. Could we even say that our concep-tion of God and being functions in a narrow, masculine and oppressive way?Absolutely, says Mary Daly. What about various conceptions used in deter-mining truth, knowledge and science? Surely, they are free from the taint of gender or sex? Wrong, say Ruth Hubbard and Lorraine Code. In short, virtu-ally any field of human thinking may be subjected to feminist critique.

Using the tool

In using this tool ask yourself the following questions:

232

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

Archaeological method

In texts like

Madness and Civilization

(1961),

The Birth of the Clinic

(1963),

The Order of Things

(1966) and

The Archaeology of Knowledge

(1969),Foucault undertook to show how our words and concepts have fitted intohistorical layers of thinking and acting (sometimes called ‘discursive forma-tions’) that in many ways order our lives and thinking. This view has chal-lenged those who believe that it is the other way around – that it is we whoconsciously order and control those structures. In short, Foucaultian theory diminishes the importance (perhaps even the very existence) of the indi-vidual, human agent and self.Foucault’s view has also been controversial in its claim that it is throughthese multifarious discursive formations that power is exercised. Hencethrough the concept of ‘madness’, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social formations laying claim to ‘rationality’ excluded those who didn’t fitinto them. In the nineteenth century the concept of ‘madness’ was alsodeployed against those who did not adhere to norms of bourgeois morality,such as the promiscuous.How might other concepts and institutions of practice – such as family,woman, chastity, school, beauty, virtue, truth – serve as instruments of social order and control? Whom do they oppress or exclude or diminish inpower?

Genealogical method

In

Discipline and Punish

(1975) Foucault tried to show how the conceptsclustering around ‘criminality’ and the techniques of managing those called‘criminal’ have changed over time. In tracing out the history of a concept,its changes, and the purposes behind them, Foucault develops whatFriedrich Nietzsche called a ‘genealogical’ method – a method Nietzscheused to explore the concepts and practices of Christian morality. Themethod, however, is not simply historical. It is also subversive, for it aims touncover the trivial, petty, arbitrary and sometimes nasty, purposes andeffects of what it investigates. While, for example, many have seen changesin the criminal justice system as efforts to become more humane, Foucaultargues that those changes have, rather, been organized around developingnew, more effective techniques of social control. (Along similar lines, he

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

233

later undertook a genealogy of concepts and practices of sexuality;

History of Sexuality

[1976, 1984].)If we were to examine throughout history the motives, purposes andstruggles that determined the origin and development of apparently inno-cent and even widely admired concepts, institutions and practices, wouldwe find repellent devices for control, manipulation and oppression?

Microphysics of power

Unlike other forms of social critique, however (such as Marxism and psy-choanalysis), Foucault maintains that there is no comprehensive system of social order (like capitalism). Rather, Foucault argues that there are many,many different power systems interweaving and operating simultaneously,not always in consistent ways. Hence he himself eschews developing a singlecomplete system of social and conceptual dynamics, instead calling hisproject a ‘microphysics of power’.Among the most famous objects of Foucault’s scrutiny was philosopherJeremy Bentham’s plan for a modern prison called a ‘panopticon’. (One hasactually been built and put into use in Cuba.) The prison has no cells withbars. Instead it is constructed so that prisoners come to believe they alwaysare or may be under the surveillance of the guards – and as a result, they come to discipline themselves.Foucault challenges us to ask in what ways we live in panopticons of ourown making. How do credit cards, government and company records, phonelogs, computers, security cameras and various managerial techniques placeus under constant surveillance (including self-surveillance) or the fear of constant surveillance? And how does this affect how we think, act and feel?

Normalization

Another powerful tool of Foucaultian critique is the analysis of ‘normaliza-tion’. Foucault argues that in various ways orders of power seek to diminishthe range of human possibility by privileging certain beliefs and practices as‘normal’. Hence sexual practices, family structures, religions, ways of speak-ing and acting that differ from the ‘normal’ are called ‘deviant’ and throughvarious oppressive techniques are quashed, reducing individuals to the ‘doc-ile bodies’ needed to serve modern industrial and post-industrial society.

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

235

the meaning and uses of things. Philosophies that construe the meanings of things simply as ‘social constructs’ or the posits of language and culture, forexample, are guilty of this error. More destructively, through the varioustechnologies that have pervaded our ways of thinking and acting, we havecome to think of the world as transparent, under our control and as littlemore than a pile of raw material for us to appropriate, consume, buildthings from and burn as fuel for our machines. In this way, Heideggerspeaks to the many problems we face with the environment.

Forgetfulness of Being

Our condition, however, is not simply one of error. Before Plato we had aclearer (though never an utterly transparent) grasp of Being, so our cur-rent state is really a complex kind of forgetting. The very activities of ‘everyday’ living distract us from Being. And just as we may never really notice a hammer and our immersion in a world of human instrumentsuntil the hammer breaks, our distracting immersion in the world we con-struct for ourselves remains invisible to us until somehow it breaks down.But our incapacity is not complete. We retain through it all – buriedbeneath centuries of misleading metaphysics and the hiddenness intrinsicto Being – a ‘primordial’ understanding of Being. Heideggerian critique,therefore, has two objectives:1. To show us that our metaphysical traditions have been erroneous andforgetful.2. To help us retrieve, recover and remember Being itself.

Not a thing but no-thing

Being itself, as Heidegger interprets it, is not an entity or a thing. You mightsay, in a rather poetic way (and Heidegger does), that it is ‘nothing’ – or no-thing. (In fact, Heidegger suggests that poetic language may be the best way to express the meaning of Being.) Because it is no-thing, humans – at leastthose immersed in metaphysics – misconstrue the ‘event’ of Being and try noisily to cover it up conceptually, by placing their own inventions in itsplace. Generally they do this by trying to grasp something that is purportedly

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

237

6.7 Lacanian critique

To what extent does our language determine who we are and how we relateand fail to relate to one another? For French philosopher Jacques Lacan(1901–81) the answer is that it does so to a profound extent. Lacan devel-oped and modified the theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) in the lightof cutting-edge developments in logic, mathematics, physics and the struc-tural linguistics of the Swiss thinker Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) inorder to produce a new form of language-oriented psychoanalysis.For Lacan, in contrast to thinkers like Descartes, the ‘subject’ is neitherfixed nor transparent. Subjects cannot communicate with one another (oreven themselves) directly but only through the

signifiers

called ‘words’ inlanguage. As Philip Hill puts it, this is a bit like the way it is in legal negotia-tions. Clients (subjects) don’t communicate directly with one another butonly through the lawyers (signifiers) who represent them. Famously, there-fore, Lacan said, ‘The signifier represents the subject for another signifier.’Things, however, become more complicated for the following reasons.First, language doesn’t represent the subject passively but turns around andstructures the subject. In fact, the subject only comes to be within language.Second, the meanings of words are neither fixed nor even fully understoodby anyone. Third, repression is required for a subject to assimilate the rulesor order constituting a language – or what Lacan calls the ‘symbolic order’.The result of all this is that communication is never utterly clear and com-plete, that selves are both brought together and separated by language, andthat the subject is subject to ‘demands’ that remain unfulfilled and ‘desires’that are rooted not in the individual but in the symbolic order of which it isa part. Because the subject must suffer this condition, Lacan symbolized it asan S with a slash running through it from upper right to lower left S⁄. ForLacan, then, our language itself is our unconscious.

A critical tool

But how can these ideas serve us as a philosophical tool? There are a numberof strategies.When analysing a philosophical text, Lacan asks us to look beyond thesurface meaning of the words in order to assess the psychodynamics sub-merged in them. Since our desires are structured through the symbolic

238

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

order of which we’re a part, we can interrogate a text to assess what itpresents as objects of desire, need and fear. Consider how, for example,Plato seems to desire in his forms something fixed, something beyond thebody and the passions associated with it. Think of Nietzsche’s longing forthe

Übermensch

. Consider Sartre’s longing for good faith, for freedom, and,in a way, an absent God; consider how threatening women seem to him.What are the ‘desires’ animating and generated by the text? Are the imagesand doctrines of the text ‘symptoms’ of submerged psychic ‘demands’, guilt,shame or dread? Where is the secret, quasi-sexual pleasure Lacan calls

jouis-sance

hiding in this text? What here is the repressed ‘real’ – that is, what is itthis text would like to say but finds it impossible to say?Indeed since language and the symbolic order require repression, Lacaniancritique purports to offer us a way to discover just how the oppressivedynamics of our society work. Lacan’s identification of various features of the symbolic order as ‘phallic’ has offered feminist philosophers a point of leverage to destabilize masculinist institutions and practices. For example,Luce Irigaray (1932–) in

Speculum of the Other Woman

(1974) and

This Sexwhich Is Not One

(1977) has suggested that female

jouissance

includes formsof pleasure that are disruptive to masculinist ways of engaging the world.Because female

jouissance

cannot by definition be accommodated into theorderly, rule-governed ways of thinking, acting and feeling characteristic of the symbolic order, we can expect women’s ways of living to offer us modelsof liberation. Female

jouissance

points to polyclimactic poetics rather thanthe single climax around which works of art modeled on male orgasm arecentred. Women’s practices of sharing, consultation and non-hierarchicalorganization present insights into potentially more liberated forms of socialand political life. Contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek (1949–) haspicked up and modified the Lacanian approach to genealogy of culture.

SEE ALSO

4.14 Objective/subjective6.4 Feminist critique6.2 Deconstruction and the critique of presence

READING

Jacques Lacan,

Écrits: A Selection

(1977)

★

Elizabeth Grosz,

Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction

(1990)

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

239

★

Slavoj Žižek,

Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture

(1992)

6.8 Critiques of naturalism

Among the most important philosophical decisions you’re likely to make iswhether the natural world is all there is and whether human beings arecontinuous or in important ways discontinuous with the natural world. Inresponse to questions like this, philosophers have developed various formsof ‘naturalism’, and without a doubt naturalistic philosophies have beenamong the most important of recent centuries. Not everyone, however, hasaccepted naturalism, and a number of important philosophical critiqueshave been developed to oppose it. But what is ‘naturalism’?A philosophical position is naturalistic when it attempts to give anaccount of whatever it addresses by using words and concepts that can bedefined entirely in terms of the natural world. What the ‘natural world’comprises, however, has been over the course of philosophical history arather controversial affair. Aristotle, for instance, regarded the naturalworld to be composed of both matter and immaterial forms (see

Metaphysics

XII), while modern philosophers have typically denied that immaterialforms exist. Neo-Platonists, inspired by Plato’s

Timaeus

, posited the exist-ence of a ‘world soul’ or

animus mundi

that pervades the natural universe,but you’ll be hard pressed to find a natural scientist who includes the worldsoul in his or her theories today. In any case, so far as modern naturalisticphilosophy goes, it’s safe to say that naturalism works to provide a philo-sophical account of things in terms of (a) the causal order explored by thenatural sciences and (b) what can be observed (directly or indirectly) usingnatural human cognitive capacities. For the most part that means develop-ing philosophical accounts of things that appeal only to (c) the physicalworld, with no reference to the divine or supernatural. There have been avariety of critiques advanced against naturalism. Here we describe four.Note, however, that in the work of many particular philosophers these cri-tiques overlap.1.

Transcendental critiques of naturalism

. Immanuel Kant and EdmundHusserl, among others, have argued that the conditions necessary to makeany

experience

and

understanding

of nature possible include more than theobjects and processes of which nature is itself composed. Both Kant and

240

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

Husserl argue that beyond the natural world there must also be a free, self-legislating and conscious subjectivity or ‘transcendental ego’. By denyingthe existence of the transcendental ego, naturalism is accused of denyingthe very conditions that make it possible for nature to appear to us in thefirst place; so, naturalism is thus self-refuting (see 3.25 and 5.10).2.

Idealist critiques of naturalism

. Whereas transcendental critics are con-cerned with the conditions necessary for the appearance, intelligibility andexperience of things, metaphysical critics directly make claims about whatthere is. Metaphysical idealists critical of naturalism, in particular, oftenargue that physical reality itself is the manifestation of something deeperand non-physical (for example, Spirit, a metaphysical Will, or divine Ideas);and the non-physical basis of the physical world is governed, they maintain,not by the causal relations of the natural world but instead by a differentorder of reasons, thought, etc. Philosophers who might be described as ‘lin-guistic idealists’ do not present an alternative metaphysics to naturalism,but they do often chasten it by arguing that naturalism presents just onediscourse among many about the world, and we have no reason always andeverywhere to privilege the naturalistic discourse above every other.3.

Freedom critiques of naturalism

. Naturalistic accounts of human beingshave been criticized by holding that humans are distinct from the naturalorder because they possess a ‘free will’ or by maintaining that human con-sciousness is simply free of the determinations of the natural causal order.Morality itself would be senseless if everything people do is determined by causal necessities, and moral conduct would be impossible if people weren’table to choose freely what they do and don’t do. In response, it can be askedwhy we should assume that our apparent freedom is real. Or, you can retortthat it’s the idea of freedom that’s incoherent; according to David Hume, forexample, the idea of liberty, clearly understood, reduces human conduct tonothing more than chance or random events (see Hume’s

An Enquiry con-cerning Human Understanding

, §8). Claims by thinkers such as the existen-tialist Jean-Paul Sartre that we are just immediately aware of our freedom donot strike everyone as persuasive (see Sartre’s

Being and Nothingness

, 1943).4.

Religious critiques of naturalism

. Religious philosophers have arguedagainst naturalism by maintaining that reality comprises divine as well asnatural aspects. Human beings, for example, possess a supernatural soul aswell as a natural, physical body and the soul is not causally determined. The

242

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

For Nietzsche, we suffer under the burden of three philosophicaldemands, rooted deeply by Christian-Platonic philosophy in the way wethink, feel and act.Through claims to

transcendence

the Christian-Platonic tradition rendersthe value of this world derivative, as finding the source of its value in asuperior transcendent world – heaven, God, the forms, the ideal commu-nist utopia.This tradition demands that the weak be made equal to the strong, andit tears down the strong to achieve this under the guise of doctrines likedemocracy, socialism or egalitarianism. In its

will to truth

the traditionpropagates a desire and a longing for absolute, fixed, universal, literal,non-temporal, singular, unequivocal, complete, consistent and incorri-gible truth.What’s so bad about heaven, equality and truth? Well, the problem is thatthey are inhuman and unhealthy. They weaken us and undermine the forcesthat bring real power, joy, creativity and vitality to our existence.According to Nietzsche, believing in a never-present superior realm –that our world or society is somehow lacking because it doesn’t measure upto an ‘ideal’ world or society – inevitably leads us to devalue our world andthe human condition. Demanding that the strong be brought down destroysthose free, individual, creative spirits who sustain, invigorate and lead cul-ture. The impossibility of achieving a universal, objective, single truth forall humankind ultimately wears us out and leads us to reject truth and valueof

any

kind – even of a more human, provisional and partial kind. In short,Christian-Platonic culture leads us to self-hating, life-thwarting, world-consuming nihilism. For the nihilist, not only is God dead, but everythingelse might as well be dead, too.

The cure

Fortunately, for Nietzsche there is a cure – if only we can muster the tre-mendous strength necessary to adopt it. We must ‘overcome’ Christian-Platonic culture. There are three ways of doing this.The first is

amor fati

(literally, love of fate): We must reject appeals totranscendence and embrace this world itself, the body, nature, warts and all,including lusts, competition, pride and the fact that we will suffer and die.We must love our fate and reject transcendent ‘God’.

244

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

6.10 Pragmatist critique

On what basis should we accept or reject certain beliefs? Perhaps the mostcommon answer you might receive to this question would be, ‘On the basisof whether the belief is true or not, of course.’ But how are we best to unpackthe meaning of ‘true’ here? Traditionally, many people have answered thattrue claims somehow express or mirror the nature of reality, and reality iswhat it is independent of whatever we think or say about it. The job of phi-losophy and science, from this point of view, is somehow to produce the-ories that picture, capture, reflect or represent that independent reality.Pragmatists, however, think that there’s something wrong with this way of conceiving truth, philosophy and science. According to the pragmatists,closer scrutiny will convince you that little sense can be made of what itmeans to ‘mirror’ or ‘represent’ or ‘grasp’ an independent reality. Moreover,in reflecting back on the history of philosophy, one can see that this sort of

representationalist

position produces more problems than it solves.Early pragmatists (or, rather, ‘pragmaticists’) like C. S. Peirce (1839–1914)did think that the sciences would, like asymptotes, more and more closely converge and approach the independent truth. But a better option, say morerecent pragmatists, is to think of true claims as those that we agree are moreeffective in helping us get along in the world; and we should give up entirely worrying about whether or not they represent an independent reality.Accordingly, the theories of natural science are true not because they expressthe nature of independent reality but because they enable us to manipulateobjects in experiments, in technologies, and in ordinary life in ways that solveproblems. Moral theories are ‘right’ (that is, they ought to be believed) whenthey enable us to get along with one another, to act in ways that enable us togrow socially, and to live by the values we have chosen in what we think of asour wisest reflections. Aesthetic ideas join our felt experiences to our reflec-tive experiences and guide our thinking about the sensible dimensions of ourenvironments, both cultural and natural. In short, what we ought to adopt astrue is what we can formulate as propositions that have warrant because they solve problems for us and help us get along better in the world.Pragmatists think that we need not concern ourselves with how thingslook to God, or from some imaginary and unobtainable, ideal point of view.We no longer need to worry about what lies beyond or below our possibleexperiences and our engagements with the world. A lot of problems, say thepragmatists, can simply be left behind in this way.

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

245

Metaphysics and religion

Among those features of our intellectual life many pragmatists think we cando better without must be counted a good deal of metaphysics and much,perhaps all, of dogmatic religion. Many ordinary religious practices and beliefsfind support among pragmatists as useful devices for bringing meaning andcommunity to people’s lives. On the other hand, many also see religious doc-trine as failing to guide our emotional lives intelligently, making religion aneasy prop for justifying violence, division and intolerance. Whether or notGod is a trinity, whether or not the consecrated communion host holds thetrue presence, whether or not substantial forms exist, whether or not the Onedescends into the divine intelligence and the world soul, are questions whoseanswers serve no purpose and which have proven either useless or downrightharmful. For pragmatists, metaphysics is the activity of arranging the mostgeneral and reliable propositions in their proper functional order in ourthinking, while resisting the urge to give any proposition universal sway.

Using the tool

In assessing a philosophical theory through pragmatist terms of criticism,then, ask yourself the following questions:1. Considering all its implications and the practices actually associatedwith it, does adherence to this theory make our lives better?2. Is anything about this theory useless or, worse, an obstacle to living ina better way?Changing our thinking along these lines may at first seem strange. But, saysRichard Rorty (1931–2007), just as many Protestants have found religionperfectly acceptable and even superior having abandoned the doctrine of thereal presence of God’s substance in the Eucharist, so will we find philosophy and life generally acceptable and even superior when we abandon most meta

-

physics as well as thinking about truth as representation. Or perhaps, on theother hand, we will find ourselves inclined to take a position like that articu-lated by Catholic author Flannery O’Connor who exclaimed when told by afriend that the Eucharist is a beautiful symbol even if it doesn’t include thereal presence of God: ‘Well, if it is just a symbol, then to hell with it!’

246

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

SEE ALSO

6.2 Deconstruction and the critique of presence6.3 Empiricist critique of metaphysics6.5 Foucaultian critique of power

READING

William James,

Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth

(1907)Charles Sanders Peirce,

Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce,

ed. C. Hartshorneand P. Weiss (1934)

★

Richard Rorty,

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

(1979)

6.11 Sartrean critique of ‘bad faith’

Have you ever held something valuable – say a vase, a rare artefact, aninfant – in your hands and found yourself, for no apparent reason, terrifiedthat you would drop it? Have you ever stood on a high balcony or on theedge of a towering cliff and found yourself afraid you would fall off orsomehow go over the rail? Have you ever found yourself in the midst of aquiet and solemn ceremony and afraid you might shout out some horribleexpletive? If you have, you’re not alone. French existentialist philosopherJean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) sees something more than a psychological phe-nomenon in these common experiences. For him they point to somethingexceedingly profound about human existence: our absolute freedom.For Sartre, what’s terrifying about holding an infant or standing on a cliff is not simply that some external force or an accident might surprise us and

force

us to do something awful. More deeply, we are anxious because thereis literally nothing stopping us from freely dropping the child or freely hurl-ing ourselves to our deaths. The only thing that can stop us in such situa-tions (indeed, in any situation) from engaging in the most horrendous actsis ourselves – our own absolutely unconstrained

free choice

not to do so.The thing is, being absolutely free is terrifying to people, and in the faceof it we often feel emotions like

anxiety

(or what the existentialists call

angst

), nausea and dread. Because freedom can be anxiety-ridden, peopleflee from it and attempt to hide from their own freedom, maintaining that

TOOLS FOR RADICAL CRITIQUE

247

they are

not

really free. When people do this, when they try to deny theirown freedom, Sartre describes them as acting in

bad faith

(

mauvaise foi

).Bad faith, accordingly, characterizes many philosophical positions.

Examples

Those Marxists, for example, who argue that human behaviour at any giventime is determined fundamentally by the imperatives of history and thedominant economic relations of any situation, deny that history and theeconomy develop solely through acts of human freedom. Marxian eco-nomic determinism, then, is a philosophy of bad faith. (Keep in mind, how-ever, that Sartre thought Marxism could be reconciled with his philosophy of freedom, and he spent a great deal of effort explaining how – see his

Critique of Dialectical Reason

, 1960).Naturalism is also, typically, for Sartreans an example of bad faith. Many philosophers, such as Baron d’Holbach (1723–89), have maintained thathuman beings are continuous with the natural world. Since events in thenatural world are determined according to causal laws, and since, these phi-losophers argue, human actions are just natural events, human actions arenecessitated through causal chains, and we are therefore not free. For Sartre,however, human consciousness (what, following Hegel, he calls the

pour-soi

[for-itself]) is discontinuous with the natural world (what he calls

en-soi

[in-itself]). Consciousness

negates

and distinguishes itself from naturalobjects and processes. And pretending otherwise is bad faith.

Using the tool

Bad faith is, according to Sartre, never complete. In some fashion, peoplealways know that they’re free, and signs of this all-but-ignored self-aware-ness pop up from time to time. To use this critical tool, then, when scruti-nizing a philosophical position, ask yourself the following questions:1. How, if at all, does this philosophical theory express a denial or endorse-ment of absolute human freedom?2. If it denies freedom, how, despite its denial, does the theory – perhapsimplicitly and against its explicit intent – nevertheless affirm humanfreedom?

250

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

Variations on a theme

The idea of a basic belief has appeared in various incarnations. AncientStoics like Cleanthes (c.331–c.232

bce

) and Chrysippus (c.280–c.207

bce

)claimed that our thought and experience includes ‘cataleptic impressions’,whose veracity is self-evident. Later, René Descartes resurrected this gesturein his doctrine of indubitable ‘clear and distinct ideas’. A. J. Ayer talkedabout

basic statements

. He defined them as statements the truth values of which determine that of at least one further statement, but no other state-ments determine the truth value of them. In other words, a basic statementis one that can be invoked to show the truth or falsity of another statement,but no statement is or can be invoked to show its own truth or falsity.For Ayer, basic statements are typically observation statements. Weobserve that pure water is a clear, easy-flowing liquid, and this observationcan be used in arguments to show the truth or falsity of other statements.For instance, if someone drowned in a thick, opaque, muddy substance, ourbasic statement can be invoked to show that the person did not drown inpure water.More recently, Alvin Plantinga has defined

properly basic beliefs

as beliefsthat are not believed on the basis of other beliefs, but do themselves formthe basis of other beliefs. A belief is properly basic when (1) it is basic and(2) we are justified in believing it.Hence, following Plantinga, if you believe in fairies just because youdecide you’re going to, and use that as a basis for other beliefs, your belief isnot properly basic, for though it is not based on other beliefs you are notjustified in believing it.

Can God be basic?

There is clearly more than a passing resemblance between Plantinga’s prop-erly basic beliefs and Ayer’s basic statements in terms of how these beliefsfunction as foundations for knowledge. But the two philosophers differconsiderably in what they consider to be properly basic. For Plantinga,properly basic beliefs include more than just observation statements andself-evident logical truths. Perhaps most pointedly, Plantinga maintainsthat belief in the Abrahamic god is properly basic. It is not that you can’t bewrong to believe God exists, but that for some people the existence of God

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

251

is as evident as the belief that other people have minds, or that we see things,or that there is an independent world. In each case it is possible that thebelief is wrong, but that doesn’t prevent it from being properly basic.Infallibility, for Plantinga, is not a feature of properly basic beliefs.Plantinga’s argument exploits a common limitation in philosophy. DavidHume argued that we have no deductive, rational grounds for believing incause and effect; nor do we, strictly speaking, ever observe causation atwork. Nevertheless, we are compelled to believe and act as if causation werereal. Belief in causation is thus properly basic: it is not based on any otherbelief but is itself the basis of other beliefs, and people would accept that weare justified in believing in it. Plantinga aims to show that belief in God is,for many people, just the same. Atheists who argue that there are no groundsfor belief in God can be asked why they believe in causation, since there areno demonstrative grounds to believe in that either. The atheist may respondthat, on that logic, why isn’t belief in fairies properly basic? Moreover, there’swide variation in belief in God, unlike belief in external objects, so in whatsense can theological beliefs be basic? And so the debate will go on.Anti-foundationalist philosophers like the pragmatist Richard Rorty, thepost-structuralist Michel Foucault and the literary theorist Jacques Derridaargue that there are no such things as basic beliefs or statements. But any

foundationalist

approach to philosophy requires something that functionslike basic statements or properly basic beliefs. If you wish to pursue a foun-dationalist course, the difficulty is deciding what is a legitimate basic belief,given that, by definition, they are not grounded in any other beliefs.

SEE ALSO

1.9 Axioms4.15 Realist/non-realist6.2 Deconstruction and the critique of presence6.6 Heideggerian critique of metaphysics7.8 Self-evident truths

READING

Bertrand Russell,

An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth

(1940)

★

James F. Sennett, ed.,

The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader

(1998)

252

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

Julia Annas, ‘Stoic Epistemology’, in

Epistemology: Companions to Ancient Thought,

Vol. 1, ed. Stephen Everson (2001)Surrendra Gangadean,

Philosophical Foundation: A Critical Analysis of Basic Beliefs

(2008)

7.2 Gödel and incompleteness

The physicist Alan Sokal once said in an interview, ‘Someone, I can’t remem-ber who it was, said that he had a rule of thumb which was that wheneveranyone in the humanities or social sciences cites Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, that the person should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.I think that’s quite fair.’There is a tendency in philosophical writing, particularly by non-professionals and undergraduates, to pick up one of the great theories of science and draw specious philosophical conclusions from it. When profes-sors and tutors read words like ‘I will use Einstein’s theory of relativity toshow that …’ their hearts sink.The problem is that the big theories are usually much more complicatedthan they seem, and it is only when one takes the time to learn about themin detail that one can understand them well enough to draw any accurateconclusions. Sokal was personally vexed by the tendency people have todraw philosophical conclusions from quantum theory, which is particularly rash given that even professional physicists find quantum theory baffling.

Precisely what?

Philosopher of mathematics Kurt Gödel’s (1906–78) incompleteness theo-rem suffers from a similar fate. The reality is that, unless you’ve studiedmathematics at a very high level, you probably don’t understand whatGödel’s theorem means, let alone what its implications are for other areasof philosophy. For a start, there are actually two theorems, the second of which is a corollary of the first. According to Simon Singh in

Fermat’s Last Theorem

(1997), a mathematically accurate statement of the first theoremis ‘To every w-consistent recursive class k of formulae there correspondrecursive class-signs r such that neither v Gen r nor neg (v Gen r) belongsto Flg(k) (where v is the free variable of r).’

254

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

Michael Dummett, ‘The Philosophical Significance of Gödel’s Theorem’, in idem,

Truth and Other Enigmas

(1978)Ernest Nagel, James Newman and Douglas R. Hofstadter,

Gödel’s Proof

(2008)

7.3 Philosophy and/as art

See if you can place the plot of this thriller. ‘X first appears in possession of the throne, prescribing laws and imposing maxims, with an absolute sway and authority. Her enemy therefore, is obliged to take shelter under herprotection, and by making rational arguments to prove the fallaciousnessand imbecility of X, produced, in a manner, a patent under her band andseal. This patent has at first an authority, proportioned to the present andimmediate authority of X, from which it is derived. But as it is supposed tobe contradictory to X, it gradually diminishes the force of that governingpower and its own at the same time; till at last they both vanish away intonothing …’ You may be surprised that the plot is not from a novel or a filmbut rather from David Hume’s

A Treatise of Human Nature

(Bk 1, Pt 4, §1),where ‘X’ is none other than that old hero of philosophical narratives, rea-son; the villain is, of course, scepticism.

Philosophy as art

Hume’s summary of the relationship of scepticism and reason in the

Treatise

is, of course, a rhetorical device. But it does raise the question as towhether the interpretive techniques used to understand fictions, poems,films and even graphic arts and music can be used to understand philo-sophical texts. Texts like Plato’s dialogues and Augustine’s

Confessions

seemreadily accessible this way. Given the care of its craftsmanship, it seems allbut certain that Plato thought elements of setting, character, plot, symboland allusion relevant to understanding his work. The poetics of Augustine’sstory of fall and return, such as his use of gardens (alluding to Eden), seemundeniable.Indeed, it can be useful to think of the narrative dimensions even of more abstract philosophical texts, such as Kant’s

Critique of Pure Reason

.Attending to the poetics of philosophical texts – their metaphors, sym-bols, metonymies and other tropes – can yield insights into the meanings

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

255

of the texts, even the point of their arguments. Thinking of the author asa narrator creating a conceptual world and plotting what happens withinit can be taken too far, but can also serve as a reminder that even themost austere attempts to describe reality also, by their nature, shape itsrepresentation.

Art as philosophy

Philosophy, then, might be read as a form of literature. But can some artworks also be read philosophically, or as philosophy? There are two ways of doing so. One is essentially to treat the arts as sources of examples andillustration for philosophical argument. Novels like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s

The Brothers Karamazov

(1880) and Franz Kafka’s parable

Metamorphosis

(1915) have often been used in just this way, as test cases and thoughtexperiments. Films like Ingmar Bergman’s

Seventh Seal

(1957), FedericoFellini’s

Amarcord

(1973) and Woody Allen’s

Crimes and Misdemeanors

(1989) have similarly served as larders of philosophical examples. Musichas also been used, from the time of Plato, as an allegory for ideas of moralharmony and discord. In fact, a cottage industry of reading the philosoph-ical dimensions of all sorts of popular culture has emerged which illus-trates philosophical arguments with reference to everything from

SouthPark

to Metallica.There’s a second, deeper way in which the arts might be philosophical.Rather than just a source of examples, the arts may actually offer ways of

doing

philosophy. This could simply be because they sometimes containphilosophical arguments. The character of Ivan in Dostoevsky’s

Brothers

,for example, constructs some terribly powerful arguments concerningtheodicy (or the problem of evil). It may also be, however, that the artscan take our thinking forward in ways formal arguments cannot.Philosopher Stanley Cavell, for example, has written influential essays onthe way Shakespeare explores the issue of scepticism, not by putting phil-osophical dialogues into the mouths of his characters, but by literally dramatizing problems of scepticism and their solutions. Similarly, films,plays and novels may

show

us things about ethics more truthfully andpowerfully than they can be

told

. Robert Bolt’s

A Man for All Seasons

(1954), for example, shows us things about living life according to anethic of duty rather than consequences which, arguably, formal treatisescannot.

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

257

7.4 Mystical experience and revelation

Philosophy has had at best an ambiguous relationship to the mystical. Therehave been many thinkers generally known as philosophers whose life andwork has been centrally informed by mystical experience – thinkers like themedieval Meister Eckhart (1260–1327), Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1178)and Julian of Norwich (1342–1416). Even certain elements of some of themost prominent canonical philosophers may be described as mystical.A famous section of Plato’s

Symposium

called ‘The Ladder of Loves’(210e–211a) has inspired many as a description of mystical revelation – notto mention the way he describes the very uppermost activity of the soul inhis famous ‘Divided Line’ in the

Republic

(532d–534a). Along these samelines Neoplatonic philosophers like Plotinus (c.205–70), Proclus (410–85)and the Christian Saint Augustine (354–430) all appeal to mystical-likeexperiences in their philosophical work. Certain dimensions of the work of Martin Heidegger – such as the ‘

Augenblick

’ and ‘Call of Conscience’ as they appear in

Being and Time

(1927) – have been thought of as somehow mysti-cal. According to Wittgenstein the sort of ‘showing’ he talks about in his

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

(1921) reveals the mystical (

das Mystische

; cf.

Tractatus

6.44, 6.45, 6.522). And many philosophers who don’t overtly appealto the mystical nonetheless talk about ‘intuition’ and ‘intellection’, withoutmaking it clear how these are different from mystical experience and revela-tion. (See, e.g., Spinoza’s

scientia intuitiva; Ethics

, Pt 2, Pr. 40. Sch. 2.)

Hostility to mysticism

Despite, however, the quasi-mystical dimensions of many prominent phi-losophers’ work, in general, philosophy has not been warm to mysticismand there are good reasons for this. Broadly, we might say, philosophersreject mystical experience because it doesn’t seem well suited to underwriteexplanation or knowledge. In particular, it is accused of being unintelli-gible, unreliable and inconsistent.It is accused of being

unintelligible

because, by definition, mystical expe-rience is to some extent not fully understood, even by those who claim tohave had it. Mystical experience is typically described in vague terms asbeing beyond the grasp of sensation, public observation, intellect and rea-son. It is also frequently held to be

ineffable

or beyond language and its

258

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

capacity to describe or relate it. But how can something ineffable, privateand supra-rational count as a good explanation? How can it serve any explanation at all?Mystical experience is thought of as

unreliable

because it is almost alwaysprivate, personal and impossible for others to test or scrutinize. And indi-vidual personal experience has proven time and again an unreliable basisfor knowledge. One of the most important dimensions of establishingknowledge about matters of fact has been corroboration through objectivetesting and through subjecting knowledge claims to the scrutiny of others.Mystical experience seems impossible to correct or check in this way, butwithout this sort of disciplining literally anything goes.Mystical experience is also charged with being

inconsistent

becausetheories based upon mystical experience show very little consistency, asthe vast variety of religions and spiritual fads demonstrates. The theoriesof natural and social science show remarkable consistency and uniform-ity in comparison with those of religion and metaphysics. Few physicistsdispute the laws of thermodynamics. Few biologists dispute evolution.Where disputes arise in the sciences there seem to be agreed-upon andeffective ways of ending them. The belief systems based upon revelationand mystical experience, by contrast, have been wildly varying and con-tradictory. Consider, for example, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism,Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Ba’hai, Egyptian religion, GreekOlympian religion, native American religions and New Age channelling.Moreover, their disputes seem intractable and without well-defined pro-cedures for settling them. Doesn’t this show that mystical experienceought not to be relied upon as a guide in the search for knowledge andunderstanding of the world?Finally, mystical experience also seems to require

unnecessary metaphysi-cal complexity

. It seems to challenge Ockham’s principle of simplicity (see 5.7) in so far as it requires metaphysical commitments to a whole rangeof supernatural entities. Isn’t it better to explain the world in simpler, natu-ralistic terms – and perhaps even explain mystical experience itself as somesort of natural event?

What if?

On the other hand, mystical experience has been around for a long time.Many people have attested to its power. And if William James is right in his

260

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

Paradox type 1: when reason contradicts experience

The word ‘paradox’ derives from the Greek (

para

and

doxa

), which may betranslated as ‘contrary to belief’ or ‘beyond belief’. The first type of paradoxwe wish to look at, then, is generated when, using apparently flawless rea-soning from apparently true premises, a conclusion is generated that con-tradicts or flies in the face of what other common reasoning or experiencetells us.Classics of this type are the paradoxes developed by Zeno of Elea (b. c.490

bce

) to advance the doctrines of his master, Parmenides (fl. c.480

bce

).Consider this one: Imagine Achilles races a tortoise and gives the tortoise ahead start. The tortoise is slow, but it moves at a constant speed. Now, in thetime it takes for Achilles to get to the point from which the tortoise started(call it A), the tortoise will have moved forward and will now be at anotherpoint (call it B). In the time it subsequently takes Achilles to get to B, thetortoise will have moved forward a little more, and will be at point C. Andin the time it now takes Achilles to get to point C, the tortoise will havemoved on to point D. And so on. So, it seems that Achilles cannot overtakethe tortoise.This is a paradox because there seems to be nothing wrong with our rea-soning, but we know that, contrary to the conclusion, Achilles would over-take the tortoise. It seems, then, we either have to accept that our reasoningis wrong (even though we can’t see why) or accept that overtaking is impos-sible (even though it seems that it is possible). Both options defy experi-ence, reasoning and ordinary belief – hence a paradox.

Paradox type 2: when reason itself leads to a contradiction

Here’s a puzzling claim: ‘This statement is false.’ The paradox is generatedhere when we ask whether this sentence is true or false. If it is true, then itis false. But if it is false, it is true! (Another famous example is the Liar’sParadox, which takes the form of sentences like, ‘Everything I say is a lie.’)Given that a sentence cannot be both true and false, we find ourselves facedwith a paradox. There seems nothing about the sentence to suggest it isgrammatically ill-formed, but apply some simple reasoning to it and youget strange and perhaps quasi-contradictory conclusions (it is true if falseand false if true).

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

261

Another famous paradox of type 2 is known as ‘Russell’s Paradox’. Itpoints to a conceptual problem noticed first by Bertrand Russell that appar-ently subverts what’s often called in set theory the ‘Axiom of Inclusion’ (akathe ‘Axiom of Inclusion’ or the ‘Comprehension Axiom’). According to thisaxiom, everything and every property of everything is a member of someset (e.g. the set of all red things). Even sets are members of sets (e.g. the setof all sets that have more than three members – which is also, interestingly a member of itself). Some sets, of course, are not members of themselves(e.g. the set of all sets with fewer than five members). What Russell noticedis that there seems to be a specifiable set whose inclusion within a set isparadoxical: namely, ‘the set of all sets that don’t have themselves as mem-bers’. If this set

is

a member of itself, then it is

not

a member of itself. But if it is

not

a member of itself, then it

is

a member of itself! The set theorists arestill reeling.

Paradox type 3: when experience contradicts reason

The history of philosophy includes yet another use of paradox. Kierkegaardargued that the rationalistic aspirations of much of modern philosophy –especially those of Hegel – crash on the shoals of the Christian doctrine of theincarnation. According to Christian doctrine, Jesus Christ was/is simultane-ously the eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing God

and

a mortal, finite, limitedman. Logically, according to Kierkegaard, the very idea is absurd, self-contradictory and paradoxical. So, the incarnation of the Christian messiah isa condition that reason and systematic philosophy simply cannot grasp. This,however, is, according to Kierkegaard, not a flaw but rather a profound sourceof strength for the doctrine. For in reflecting on the incarnation, we can cometo see not only the exceedingly limited capacity of reason and system but alsothe power of faith. You cannot, therefore, reason your way into being aChristian; you can only do so by making an existential ‘leap of faith’.

The value of paradoxes

Why are paradoxes so interesting to philosophers? It is not usually becausewe take them to reveal something amazing about reality or logic we didn’tknow before. Few people think that the lessons of the paradoxes above, forexample, are that overtaking is impossible and that the same sentence can

264

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

for example, consider cases such as teletransportation and brain transplan-tation. Moral arguments sometimes consider scenarios such as being ableto destroy the entire world by flipping a switch or saving it by killing oneperson. H. Paul Grice (1913–88) put forward an argument in the philoso-phy of language that entertained the possibility that language users wouldswitch their usages of blue and green at an arbitrary future time.In each case, you can meaningfully ask whether the scenarios describedare possible or not. But you also need to decide how relevant this possibility or impossibility is. Sometimes it is argued that it doesn’t matter whether thescenario is physically possible or not; it just has to be logically or conceptu-ally possible.This is because one of the most important uses of philosophical tools isconceptual clarification and exploration, examining the meaning andimplications of a position, argument or concept. You can do this, arguably,by reflecting upon how the concepts under scrutiny apply to any logically coherent situation, irrespective of whether it is physically or practically pos-sible or not.On other occasions, however, you might argue that the contingency of our actual world is vital, and therefore any argument that goes beyond whatis possible in this world is irrelevant. For instance, returning to the philoso-phy of personal identity, it can be argued that we have to start from the factthat we are the kinds of physical beings we are. To argue from what

might

bethe case if the universe operated under different natural laws would there-fore be spurious. As human beings, we are constrained by the existing lawsof nature and, so this line of reasoning goes, it is irrelevant to consider howyou might, say, use the word ‘person’ if these laws were different.All these issues are complex and open-ended. What we need to do is to beclear about what sense of possibility and impossibility we are employingand to be sure of why we think, in any particular argument, the possibility of the situation being considered is relevant or not.

SEE ALSO

1.11 Certainty and probability 1.12 Tautologies, self-contradictions and the law of non-contradiction2.9 Thought experiments4.4 Categorical/modal4.12 Necessary/contingent

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

265

READING

Michael J. Loux,

The Possible and the Actual

(1979)David K. Lewis,

On the Plurality of Worlds

(2001)

★

Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn,

How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age

, 6th edn (2010)

7.7 Primitives

Once in Spain and with a poor grasp of the language, I (Julian Baggini)found myself in a restaurant confronted with a choice of desserts, one of which was

helado

. ‘What’s

helado

?’ I asked the waiter. He shrugged hisshoulders and replied, ‘

Helado es

…

helado

.’My

camerero

was premature in deciding he could provide no furtherdescription of what an ice cream is. But are there other words the meaningof which just cannot be explained by other words?Such words can be called ‘primitives’. They are primitive in the sense of being prime (or first), not old or undeveloped. They are words that cannotbe further analysed or defined in terms of other words. You either graspwhat they mean, or you don’t.

Example of ‘good’

In G. E. Moore’s moral theory, ‘good’ would be such a primitive concept.Moore believed that ‘good’ cannot be explained or defined in terms of otherproperties of the natural world, such as pleasure, pleasantness or beauty.Goodness is a basic moral feature of reality and to attempt to define it interms of features of the non-moral natural world is to commit what hecalled ‘the naturalistic fallacy’. Good is therefore a primitive conceptbecause it cannot be explained or defined in terms of anything else. Anotherexample Moore gave was ‘yellow’. The yellowness of a lemon cannot bedefined in terms of anything else, it is a basic feature of our experience.That is not to say that you can say nothing about what goodness is, orthat it cannot be defined at all. We can help someone to understand whatgoodness is by pointing out examples of it, explaining how it contrasts withbadness and so on. But in all these activities we are not analysing goodness

266

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

into its more basic constitutive elements. We are simply using other wordsor examples to help someone perceive or recognize goodness for what it is.It might seem that primitives are inevitable. After all, if there were noprimitive concepts, then any concept could be broken down into othermore basic concepts, which could in turn be broken down into others andso on,

ad infinitum

. At some point, it seems, there have to be some basicterms that admit of no further analysis. Without primitives, conceptualanalysis would go on forever, and we would never have an adequate founda-tion for our language (though maybe that’s just how it is).

Observation statements and ostensive definition

The empiricist view is that the most basic concepts are not primitives in thesense outlined but what Ayer called ‘observation statements’ (see 7.1). On thisview, at the foundations of language are words like ‘cat’ or ‘blue’, where themeaning is determined by observation. So, there should be no point at whichyou just have to shrug your shoulders and say, ‘X means just X.’ You haveinstead only reached the most fundamental stratum of language when youreach a concept where, to explain what the term means, you have to point tosome observation. (Some philosophers call this ‘ostensive definition’.)

Holism

There are in fact philosophical theories maintaining that there are no prim-itives.

Semantic holism

, associated with the work of W. V. O. Quine, is one.On this view, it is not the case that concepts invariably sit on top of othermore basic concepts, with primitive concepts providing the foundations fora vertically structured language. Rather, say the holists, words form a mutu-ally supporting web of interrelated meanings where the support structure ismore horizontal. Words have their meanings as part of a whole languagewhere no concepts are primitives but where all words both define and aredefined by other words in the language. One can only understand wordsand sentences in this language by being initiated gradually into the lan-guage as a whole. This introduces circularity to meaning, for sure, but notnecessarily of a vicious kind. Along these lines Ludwig Wittgensteinfamously said, ‘To understand a sentence means to understand a language’(

Philosophical Investigations

, §199). In the continental tradition, related

268

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

we need provide no further evidence or proof. If a proposition is a self-evi-dent truth it stands in need of no further justification because it is in someway self-verifying.Many philosophers have maintained that there are no such things as self-evident truths. Those that other philosophers wish to defend as self-evidentmay be divided into three categories: (1) the laws of logic, (2) analytic state-ments and (3) basic observation statements.

Laws of logic

Many have considered the laws of logic to be self-evident. For instance, theLaw of Non-contradiction, which states that something cannot both be Xand not-X at the same time and in the same way, is supposed to be one suchself-evident truth (see 1.12). If you have to ask why something can’t both beentirely black and not-black at the same time, you just haven’t understoodwhat it means for something to be entirely black.

Analytic statements

Analytic statements are also said to be self-evident. ‘All bachelors are unmar-ried men’ is an analytic statement, since ‘unmarried men’ is already con-tained within the meaning of ‘bachelor’. Therefore, to anyone whounderstands the meanings of the words in the sentence, ‘All bachelors areunmarried men’, the truth of the statement is self-evident (see 4.3).

Observation statements

A third candidate for self-evident truth has been basic observation state-ments. These include statements such as ‘I am seeing yellow.’ Such a state-ment, it seems, does not require any further justification; it makes littlesense to say, ‘How do you know you’re seeing yellow?’ If I were, on the otherhand, to say, ‘I am seeing a yellow canary’, my claim would not be self-evident,since it is possible that what I am actually seeing is a fake canary or a hal-lucination. So, observation statements are only self-evidently true whenthey confine themselves to the experience itself and do not make claims asto the real existence or otherwise of what is being observed. ‘I seem to be

270

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

★

Bertrand Russell, ‘On Intuitive Knowledge’, in idem,

The Problems of Philosophy

(1912), Ch. XIStephen Everson, ed.,

Epistemology: Companions to Ancient Thought

, Vol. 1(2001)

7.9 Scepticism

Philosophy has a constructive and a destructive side. The easiest side to geta basic grip on is the destructive one. There philosophy casts doubt onarguments, principles and beliefs. It takes great skill to do this well, butvirtually anyone can sound something like a philosopher just by learning afew key statements such as, ‘How can you be sure?’, ‘Not necessarily’, or ‘Butwhat if …?’Using these phrases allows one to play the sceptic. Scepticism has been agreat spur to philosophical progress and is sometimes used as a tool in itsown right. Descartes’s famous ‘methodological doubt’ consisted in consid-ering all his beliefs false until any could be proven true. He relentlessly sub-jected his beliefs to sceptical interrogation until he identified the one belief that he could not doubt and so could stand as the foundation of all hisknowledge: the fact that he existed. In Descartes’s hands, then, scepticismbecame a means to the positive end (in the sense of goal) of certainty.But the effect of scepticism can also be purely negative. The problem is(as Descartes demonstrated) you can ask a sceptical question about virtu-ally anything and not get a cast-iron rebuttal. How can you be sure you’renot a brain in a vat, wired up to make you think you’re living in the realworld? Does the fact that we perceive independent, material objects neces-sarily mean that such objects actually exist? What if we’re just dreaming?Can I be sure that what seem to be other people just like me have minds likemy own? Might they not be simple automata?Perhaps there is no decisive answer to any of these sceptical questions.Perhaps there is always room for the sceptic to pop up and raise his or herdoubts. If this is so, then maybe the challenge for philosophy is to recognizewhen it is appropriate to set aside sceptical doubt and when it has to betaken seriously. Or perhaps, rather than setting sceptical doubt aside, phi-losophers must learn somehow to philosophize within the context of doubt.Perhaps philosophers have to learn to live with the permanent possibility that the sceptic is right without either dismissing the sceptic too easily or

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

271

allowing the sceptical possibility to stand in the way of philosophy’s con-structive endeavours.

History

Scepticism has had a long philosophical history. Conventionally, it beginswith the figure of Pyrrho of Elis (c.365–c.273

bce

), though elements of sceptical thinking predate him – for example, in Socrates (469–399

bce

),who was said to have been wisest because he understood that he knew noth-ing (Plato’s

Apology

21a). In the ancient Hellenistic and Graeco-Romanworlds, scepticism attacked various schools of philosophical doctrine, espe-cially the Stoics. During the Middle Ages concern with scepticism receded,but one can find interest in sceptical problems orbiting around the issue of whether or how it is possible to know and talk about God. After scepticismproper resurfaced in the Renaissance it became woven into the early mod-ern project of building a new science and concerns about whether it is pos-sible to know the world. Recently philosophers have puzzled over thequestion of whether scepticism makes any sense at all, and sceptical ges-tures have pervaded many of the texts collected under the rubric of post-structuralism and deconstruction.Scepticism is often defined as involving the claim that knowledge isimpossible. But there is something problematic about this definition sincethe nihilistic claim that ‘knowledge is impossible’ is itself a

knowledge

claim.Perhaps scepticism is, therefore, self-refuting – indeed, the charge of self-refutation is a strong one to advance against a lot of sceptics. But many sceptics are more sophisticated than this.

Positive scepticism

Indeed, with regard to its more sophisticated versions, it is wrong to thinkof scepticism as nihilistic or as entirely negative. Sceptics have suggested ortried to cultivate a kind of wisdom, or appreciation, or acknowledgement of human finitude and the fragile character of human knowledge that’s notitself properly thought of as ‘knowledge’. Sceptics have also tried to providea kind of therapy for various philosophical pathologies that result frommisguided attempts to understand our relationship to the world, ourselvesand others exclusively as issues of knowing. In doing so sceptics have tried

272

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

to lead people to more moderate, tranquil lives and to make possible anappreciation of what it means to be part of the ‘common life’ in whichhumans exist.

The problem of the criterion

Although sceptical thought is extremely varied, nearly all is united inexploring what has come to be known as the problem of the criterion. Theproblem is this: are there any criteria by which we can, without doubt, dis-tinguish knowledge from error? It seems that every candidate for such cri-teria has withered under the intensity of sceptical scrutiny.One way this problem has been captured has been as a

regress

: if some-thing is to serve as a standard for knowledge, we must be able to justify itsuse as a standard. We cannot use the standard itself to justify it, since thatwould be circular. We therefore need a different, independent standard tojustify the first standard. But that second standard will itself require a dif-ferent, independent standard and so on,

ad infinitum

. If reason is presentedas the standard, what justifies reason? If perceptual observation is presentedas the standard, what justifies perception? For every claim to knowledge,the sceptic asks, ‘What is the basis of that claim?’ Could it be that the regresssimply ends with some sort of self-evident truth? Or perhaps it never ends(see 3.22 and 7.8).

Too high a standard?

One way philosophers have answered scepticism has been to argue that thesceptic has set standards of knowledge so high that they can never be met.As A. J. Ayer wrote in

The Problem of Knowledge

(1956), ‘Not that the scep-tic’s argument is fallacious; as usual his logic is impeccable. But his victory is empty. He robs us of certainty only by so defining it as to make it certainthat it cannot be obtained.’Ayer’s point is that the sceptic only wins if we accept his or her rules. Butwhy should we accept them? Shouldn’t we reject the sceptic’s standardsbecause they are necessarily unobtainable? It’s not just that we could obtainwhat they demand if we thought harder or were more intelligent. The scep-tic demands something unattainable. But perhaps rejecting scepticism onthese grounds is just arbitrarily changing the rules to suit us. Isn’t there

274

TOOLS AT THE LIMIT

What Quine does is to show that the relationship between knowledge andevidence is not so straightforward.On Quine’s view, evidence fits into our system of beliefs like a jigsaw puz-zle, and although it is natural to suppose that only one piece of the jigsawwill fit in any one place, the truth is that the jigsaw can be put together inany number of different ways – each of which will accommodate all thepieces.

Examples

Consider the sun example. It really is possible to maintain, in the light of allthe evidence, that the sun circles the Earth. What one has to do is simply tobite a few bullets. So, for instance, if you wanted to maintain the geocentricview, you might dismiss any counter-evidence challengers bring to you onthe grounds that the people conducting the research are servants of Satan,out to propagate the myth of a heliocentric universe. This may seem bizarre,but your explanation will fit the evidence. It just won’t fit it in a way thatothers find plausible. This is why conspiracy theorists and creationists areso hard to refute. They can always spin the evidence so that it fits theirtheories and they can always find ways of dismissing counter-evidencewhile remaining consistent.The same core point lies at the heart of Quine’s ideas about the indeter-minacy of translation. Consider an anthropologist observing members of aforeign tribe using the word

gavagai

whenever they see a rabbit. Quineargues that we can never know precisely and unambiguously what they mean by

gavagai

– whether, for example, they mean ‘rabbit’, ‘Look, rabbit!’,‘Sacred rabbit!’, ‘It rabbits there’, ‘undetached rabbit parts’, or even some-thing else. The problem is that the evidence will always be compatible withmore than one translation of

gavagai

. No matter how much we observe thetribe members’ behaviour and use of words, the possibility will remainopen that the translation we favour isn’t quite correct – or, perhaps all of them are.Perhaps the main lesson of the underdetermination thesis is that, justbecause a theory can fit the evidence doesn’t mean it must be right. ‘Fit withevidence’ cannot be a sufficient criterion for whether or not to accept atheory, since two or more incompatible theories can always fit the evidence.We will, then, need to use additional criteria besides ‘fit with evidence’ tomake our decisions about what and what not to accept as true.

Categoría	Libros: no ficción
Calificación:
Fecha de subida:	03/21/2011
Copyright:	Attribution Non-commercial
Etiquetas:	El documento no contiene etiquetas.

Documentos

Personas

Dejar un comentario

7.4 Mystical experience and revelation for The Philosopher’s Toolkit

Secciones

More From This User

Relacionados

The Philosopher’s Toolkit

moris_haim

Documentos

Personas

Dejar un comentario

7.4 Mystical experience and revelation for The Philosopher’s Toolkit

Secciones

More From This User

Relacionados

Otras opciones de inicio de sesión

Registrarse

¿Por qué registrarse?

Se inició sesión correctamente

Sign Up Successful

The Philosopher’s Toolkit

moris_haim