Читать книгу The Philosophy of Philosophy - Timothy Williamson - Страница 13

What can be pursued in an armchair?

Every armchair pursuit raises the question whether its methods are adequate to its aims. The traditional methods of philosophy are armchair ones: they consist of thinking, without any special interaction with the world beyond the chair, such as measurement, observation or experiment would typically involve. To do justice to the social and not solely individual nature of philosophy, as a dialectic between several parties, we should add speaking and listening to thinking, and allow several armchairs, within earshot of each other, but methodologically that brings philosophy little closer to the natural sciences. For good or ill, few philosophers show much appetite for the risky business of making predictions and testing them against observation, whether or not their theories in fact have consequences that could be so tested. Without attempting to define the terms precisely, we may put the difference to a first approximation thus: the current methodology of the natural sciences is a posteriori; the current methodology of philosophy is a priori. What should we make of this difference?

Opposite reactions are possible. Crude rationalists regard philosophy’s a priori methodology as a virtue. According to them, it makes philosophical results especially reliable, because immune from perceptual error. Crude empiricists regard philosophy’s a priori methodology as a vice. According to them, it makes philosophical results especially unreliable, because immune from perceptual correction.

Few contemporary philosophers have the nerve to be crude rationalists. Given the apparent absence of a substantial body of agreed results in philosophy, crude rationalism is not easy to maintain. Many contemporary philosophers have some sympathy for crude empiricism, particularly when it goes under the more acceptable name of “naturalism.” However, that sympathy sometimes has little effect on their philosophical practice: they still philosophize in the grand old manner, merely adding naturalism to their list of a priori commitments.

A subtler response to naturalism, or empiricism, is to scale down the ambitions of philosophy. Holding fixed its a priori methodology, one asks what it could be good for. Not for answering ordinary factual questions, it is claimed: that is best left to the natural sciences with their a posteriori methodology. Nevertheless, what we already have in the armchair is the intellectual equipment we bring to a posteriori inquiry, our conceptual or linguistic competence. Perhaps philosophy can find some sort of legitimate employment by investigating, from within, what we bring to inquiry. Rather than trying to answer ordinary factual questions, it seeks to understand the very possibility of asking them – in some way, yet to be properly specifed, that does not involve asking ordinary factual questions about the possibility of asking ordinary factual questions. The “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century philosophy comprises a variety of attempts in that general spirit. Since confinement to an armchair does not deprive one of one’s linguistic competence, whatever can be achieved through exercise of that competence and reflection thereon will be a feasible goal for philosophy. If one regards thought as constituting a more fundamental level of analysis than language, one may generalize the linguistic turn to the “conceptual turn,” and consider what can be achieved through exercise of our conceptual competence and reflection thereon, but the outcome will be broadly similar: philosophical questions turn out to be in some sense conceptual questions.

Crude rationalists, crude empiricists, and linguistic or conceptual philosophers (those who take the linguistic or conceptual turn) share a common assumption: that the a priori methodology of philosophy is profoundly unlike the a posteriori methodology of the natural sciences; it is no mere difference between distinct applications of the same underlying methodology. One apparently distinctive feature of current methodology in the broad tradition known as “analytic philosophy” is the appeal to intuition. Crude rationalists postulate a special knowledge-generating faculty of rational intuition. Crude empiricists regard ‘intuition’ as an obscurantist term for folk prejudice, a psychological or social phenomenon that cannot legitimately constrain truth-directed inquiry. Linguistic or conceptual philosophers treat intuitions more sympathetically, as the deliverances of linguistic or conceptual competence. Of course, the appeal to intuitions also plays a crucial role in the overt methodology of other disciplines too, such as linguistics.

One main theme of this book is that the common assumption of philosophical exceptionalism is false. Even the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori turns out to obscure underlying similarities. Although there are real methodological differences between philosophy and the other sciences, as actually practiced, they are less deep than is often supposed. In particular, so-called intuitions are simply judgments (or dispositions to judgment); neither their content nor the cognitive basis on which they are made need be distinctively philosophical. In general, the methodology of much past and present philosophy consists in just the unusually systematic and unrelenting application of ways of thinking required over a vast range of non-philosophical inquiry. The philosophical applications inherit a moderate degree of reliability from the more general cognitive patterns they instantiate. Although we cannot prove, from a starting-point a sufficiently radical skeptic would accept, that those ways of thinking are truth-conducive, the same holds of all ways of thinking, including the methods of natural science. That is the skeptic’s problem, not ours. By more discriminating standards, the methodology of philosophy is not in principle problematic.

Some may wonder whether philosophy has a method to be studied, especially if it is as methodologically undistinctive as just suggested. Forget the idea of a single method, employed in all and only philosophical thinking. Still, philosophers use methods of various kinds: they philosophize in various ways. A philosophical community’s methodology is its repertoire of such methods. The word “method” here carries no implication of a mechanically applicable algorithm, guaranteed to yield a result within a finite time. On this loose understanding of what a methodology is, it is disingenuous for a philosopher to claim to have none.

Another main theme of this book is that the differences in subject matter between philosophy and the other sciences are also less deep than is often supposed. In particular, few philosophical questions are conceptual questions in any distinctive sense, except when philosophers choose to ask questions about concepts, as they may but need not do. Philosophical questions are those philosophers are disposed to ask, which in turn tend, unsurprisingly, to be those more amenable to philosophical than to other ways of thinking; since the philosophical ways of thinking are not different in kind from the other ways, it is equally unsurprising that philosophical questions are not different in kind from other questions. Of course, philosophers are especially fond of abstract, general, necessary truths, but that is only an extreme case of a set of intellectual drives present to some degree in all disciplines.

In most particular cases, philosophers experience little difficulty in recognizing the difference between philosophy and non-philosophy. Being philosophers, they care about the difference, and have a professional temptation to represent it as a deep philosophical one. But just about every institutionally distinct discipline acquires a professional identity, and its practitioners experience little difficulty in recognizing the difference between what “we” do and what “they” do in most particular cases. They care about the difference, and have a professional temptation to represent it in the terms of their own discipline. But such temptations can be resisted. The distinction between the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Linguistics or the Department of Biology is clearer than the distinction between philosophy and linguistics or biology; the philosophy of language overlaps the semantics of natural languages and the philosophy of biology overlaps evolutionary theory.

The unexceptional nature of philosophy is easier to discern if we avoid the philistine emphasis on a few natural sciences, often imagined in crudely stereotyped ways that marginalize the role of armchair methods in those sciences. Not all science is natural science. Whatever crude empiricists may say, mathematics is a science if anything is; it is done in an armchair if anything is. In no useful sense are mathematical questions conceptual questions. If mathematics is an armchair science, why not philosophy too?

Most philosophers are neither crude rationalists nor crude empiricists nor, these days, linguistic or conceptual philosophers. Many would accept the theses just enunciated about the methodology and subject matter of philosophy. But a third theme of this book is that the current philosophical mainstream has failed to articulate an adequate philosophical methodology, in part because it has fallen into the classic epistemological error of psychologizing the data. For example, our evidence is sometimes presented as consisting of our intuitions: not their content, since it is allowed that some of our intuitions may be false, but rather our psychological states of having those intuitions. We are then supposed to infer to the philosophical theory that best explains the evidence. But since it is allowed that philosophical questions are typically not psychological questions, the link between the philosophical theory of a non-psychological subject matter and the psychological evidence that it is supposed to explain becomes problematic: the description of the methodology makes the methodology hard to sustain. Again, philosophy is often presented as systematizing and stabilizing our beliefs, bringing them into reflective equilibrium: the picture is that in doing philosophy what we have to go on is what our beliefs currently are, as though our epistemic access were only to those belief states and not to the states of the world that they are about. The picture is wrong; we frequently have better epistemic access to our immediate physical environment than to our own psychology. A popular remark is that we have no choice but to start from where we are, with our current beliefs. But where we are is not only having various beliefs about the world; it is also having significant knowledge of the world. Starting from where we are involves starting from what we already know, and the goal is to know more (of course, how much more we come to know cannot be measured just by the number of propositions learnt). To characterize our method as one of achieving reflective equilibrium is to fail to engage with epistemologically crucial features of our situation. Our understanding of philosophical methodology must be rid of internalist preconceptions.

Philosophical errors distort our conception of philosophy in other ways too. Confused and obscure ideas of conceptual truth create the illusion of a special domain for philosophical investigation. Similarly, although perception clearly involves causal interaction between perceiver and perceived, crudely causal accounts of perceptual knowledge that occlude the contribution of background theory create the illusion of a contrast between world-dependent empirical beliefs and world-independent philosophical theory.

Clearly, the investigation of philosophical methodology cannot and should not be philosophically neutral. It is just more philosophy, turned on philosophy itself. We have the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of economics, the philosophy of history; we also need the philosophy of philosophy.

The rethinking of philosophical methodology in this book involves understanding, at an appropriate level of abstraction, how philosophy is actually done. Philosophers of science know the dangers of moralizing from first principles on how a discipline should ideally be pursued without respecting how it currently is pursued; the same lesson applies to the philosophy of philosophy. The present opposition to philosophical exceptionalism is far from involving the idea that philosophers should model themselves on physicists or biologists. The denial that philosophical questions are conceptual questions is quite compatible with a heavy emphasis on issues of semantic structure in philosophical discussion, for the validity or otherwise of philosophical reasoning is often highly sensitive to delicate aspects of the semantic structure of premises and conclusion: to make our reasoning instruments more reliable, we must investigate those instruments themselves, even when they are not the ultimate objects of our concern.

That philosophy can be done in an armchair does not entail that it must be done in an armchair.¹ This book raises no objection to the idea that the results of scientific experiments are sometimes directly relevant to philosophical questions: for example, concerning the philosophy of time. But it is a fallacy to infer that philosophy can nowhere usefully proceed until the experiments are done. In this respect, philosophy is similar to mathematics. Scientific experiments can be relevant to mathematical questions. For instance, a physical theory may entail that there are physically instantiated counterexamples to a mathematical theory. A toy example: one can specify in physical terms what it takes to be an inscription (intended or unintended) in a given font of a proof of “0 = 1” in a given formal system of Peano Arithmetic; a physical theory could predict that an event of a specified physically possible type would cause there to be such an inscription. Less directly, psychological experiments might in principle reveal levels of human unreliability in proof-checking that would undermine current mathematical practice. To conclude on that basis alone that mathematics should become an experimental discipline would be hopelessly naïve. In practice, most of mathematics will and should remain an armchair discipline, even though it is not in principle insulated from experimental findings, because armchair methods, specifically proof, remain by far the most reliable and efficient available. Although the matter is less clear-cut, something similar may well apply to many areas of philosophy, for instance, philosophical logic. In particular, on the account in this book, the method of conducting opinion polls among non-philosophers is not very much more likely to be the best way of answering philosophical questions than the method of conducting opinion polls among non-physicists is to be the best way of answering physical questions.

Although this book is a defense of armchair philosophy, it is not written in a purely conservative spirit. Our ideas about philosophical methodology, however inchoate, are liable to influence the methodology we actually employ; bad ideas about it are liable to tilt it in bad directions. A reasonable hypothesis is that our current methodology is good enough to generate progress in philosophy, but not by much: ten steps forward, nine steps back. Nevertheless, we can improve our performance even without radically new methods. We need to apply the methods we already have with more patience and better judgment. A small increase in accuracy of measurement may enable scientists to tackle problems previously beyond reach, because their data lacked sufficient resolution. Similarly, small improvements in accepted standards of reasoning may enable the philosophical community to reach knowledgeable agreement on the status of many more arguments. Such incremental progress in philosophical methodology is a realistic prospect, for current standards in the profession exhibit large variations significantly correlated with differences between graduate schools. Philosophical methodology can be taught – mainly by example, but fine-tuning by explicit precept and discussion also makes a difference. For instance, the level of rigor in philosophical statement and argument which Frege achieved only by genius (with a little help from his mathematical training) is now available to hundreds of graduate students every year: and we know how to do even better. That is not to imply, of course, that we must strive for maximum rigor at all times, otherwise this impressionistic introduction would be self-defeating. At any rate, if the philosophical community has the will, it can gradually bring up a much higher proportion of practice to the standard of current best practice, and beyond. Such progress in methodology cannot be relied on to happen automatically; not all of us love the highest at first sight. Although the envisaged incremental progress lacks the drama after which some philosophers still hanker, that hankering is itself a symptom of the intellectual immaturity that helps hold philosophy back. No revelation is at hand; any improvement in accepted standards of philosophical discussion will result from collective hard work and self-discipline. One hope with which this book is written is that by contributing to the current tendency towards increasing methodological self-consciousness in philosophy it will play some role, however indirect, in raising those standards. Philosophizing is not like riding a bicycle, best done without thinking about it – or rather: the best cyclists surely do think about what they are doing.

This book is an essay. It makes no claim to comprehensiveness. It does not attempt to compile a list of philosophical methods, or of theories about philosophical methods. It touches on historical matters only glancingly. Instead, it explores some interrelated issues that strike me as interesting and not well understood. It starts by inquiring into the nature of philosophical questions. It proceeds in part by detailed case studies of particular examples. Since all examples have their own special characteristics, generalizations from them must be tentative. But many long-standing misconceptions in philosophy are helped to survive by an unwillingness to look carefully and undogmatically at examples, sometimes protected by a self-righteous image of oneself and one’s friends as the only people who do look carefully and undogmatically at examples (some disciples of the later Wittgenstein come to mind).

It is difficult to displace one philosophical picture except by another. Although discussion of philosophical methodology is itself part of philosophy, it is less often conducted with a clear view of the theoretical alternatives than is usual in philosophy. David Lewis once wrote that “what we accomplish in philosophical argument” is to “measure the price” of maintaining a philosophical claim; when his remark is cited as an obvious truth, it tends not to be noticed that it too is subject to philosophical argument, and has its price – not least the danger of infinite regress, since claims about the price of maintaining a philosophical claim are themselves subject to philosophical argument.² Another hope for this book is that it will clarify an alternative to widespread assumptions about the nature of philosophy.