The Philosopher As Artist

It is common to view the philosopher as a kind of scientist, a view I call “the philosopher as scientist”. Philosopher as mathematician also has some traction, but then again mathematician as scientist is extremely popular itself, and so, by the transitivity of analogies, this is not really an alternative. In any case, through “the philosopher as scientist” we are encouraged to understand the task of the philosopher as basically the same as that of the scientist, but with a different subject matter, and with mental experiments (a.k.a. intuitions) in place of physical ones. Just as science is expected to strive towards some final and perfectly correct theory, so philosophy expected to tread on a similar path. Little good comes of thinking in this way, since philosophy bears little resemblance to science, and less to math. A better model – although deficient in its own ways – is see the philosopher as a kind of artist, and thus philosophy as art.

End Products

Let’s explore this analogy by considering how art is different than science, and then by thinking about which of the two is more like philosophy. Perhaps the most significant difference between the two is that science is an act of discovery, while art is an act of creation. Science is out to capture the facts about the world, and the closer it comes to reflecting those facts the better we judge it to be. Art, on the other hand, does not necessarily have to reflect anything. Some art is non-representational. Other works picture scenes that have never occurred outside of the artist’s imagination. In any case, every work of art adds something new to the world – even artistic photographs – while science succeeds only when it perfectly copies what is already there. Although some sculptors speak figuratively of their work already being present in the raw stone we know that this is not literally true. What art is adding is not something physical; science produces something new in this sense as well: new printed pages full of figures and theorems. What a work of art creates is some new perspective, some new idea, some new thought crystallized into physical form and inserted into the public sphere. This is how even a photograph can be creative – an act of creation – in the artistic sense; through the photograph some beautiful image is made physical and public that previously existed only privately in the mind of the photographer.

Philosophical activity, I claim, is better understood as an act of creation rather than an act of discovery. But what is philosophy creating? Art has largely emotional import and gives us new emotional perspectives on the world; it provides mainly emotional insights. Philosophy seems to do basically the same thing, but on an intellectual level rather than an emotional one; it provides intellectual or conceptual insights. The best philosophy provides us with new concepts, new intellectual tools, that let us understand the world in a novel way. Consider Sartre’s invention of “bad faith”, for example. Through the idea of “bad faith” Sartre describes self-deception as it never had been before; specifically as embracing a self-conception that runs contrary to our true natures – often our radical freedom. It is not the case that bad faith is the only valid way of understanding self-deception, and that every other theory is somehow a mis-characterization of it. No, bad faith is a new way of looking at self-deception, a new way of understanding its significance, and a new way of connecting it to other aspects of life. Self-deception existed before Sartre, but bad faith did not, just as beautiful women existed before Leonardo da Vinci, but the Mona Lisa did not.

Evaluation

Another substantial difference between art and science is that in science it is possible to order every theory from better to worse, and to speak about one theory improving upon or replacing another. But when it comes to art no such ranking is possible. There is good and bad art, but it is hard to draw such absolute comparisons between good art. And certainly one piece of good art does not replace or supersede another. A work by Monet does not supersede one by Rembrandt; after Monet Rembrandt’s work does not become a mere historical footnote in the development of art. But of course in science this happens all the time. General relativity theory replaces Newtonian mechanics, making the latter good only as an engineer’s approximation and for teaching students. But Rembrandt is not considered only an approximation to the “true” beauty captured by Monet, or vice versa. In art there is room for many different works of art, each of which can be a success in its own way. But in science where two theories deal with the same subject matter there is room only for one; eventually one of the two must be shelved as less correct.

Again, I think it is obvious that in this respect philosophy is more like art than science. Of course philosophers argue amongst each other as if philosophy was like science, and spend large amounts of time trying to “prove” that their position is “correct” and that those of their opponents are at best approximations to the philosophical “truth”. But if they really feel that this is how philosophy should be then they must also think that philosophy is an abject failure. We still teach and read Plato and Aristotle, and not as mere approximations; they still have interesting things to say to us. If philosophy is really like science where better theories are supposed to supersede worse ones then we haven’t made any progress in the last few thousand years, at least when it comes to the subjects Plato and Aristotle talk about. Obviously it would be absurd to say this. It is absurd even to think it. Philosophy makes much more sense when we understand it in basically the same way we understand art. Yes, there is good and bad philosophy, and some philosophy is better than others, just as there is good and bad art, and some art is better than others. But there is room for as much philosophy as we like on any subject, so long as each is adding some new interesting perspective none has to invalidate the others, even if they make contrary claims. Philosophers making contrary claims is like two artists paining the same scene in a different style; the fact that they differ does not mean that we have to throw out one of them.

The Creative Process

Art and science also have substantial methodological differences. In science new theories are motivated by experiments. Experiments yield data, and when that data conflicts with, or simply isn’t explained by, existing theories there is room for new science. The process of producing new scientific theories is a slow and incremental one because of this. First you have to find data that needs explaining. In light of that data you form a hypothesis. You then test the hypothesis with further experiments, which usually prompt revisions and thus the need to collect even more data. And eventually you end up with something that is worth being called a new theory. Art is nothing like this. Producing good art is not an incremental process. Sometimes the artist is simply inspired, and the very first thing he or she sets out to create is great art. Of course most artists aren’t so lucky, they spend many years developing technical skills, copying the work of other artists, starting projects that don’t turn out exactly as they would like, and in general waiting for inspiration. But, while all that effort may be necessary preparation, the great art that follows on its heels is not a continuation of it. Newton said that he stood on the shoulders of giants, and he was right in the sense that his work built upon what came before. But an artist cannot say the same thing. While art does not exist independently of its history, it does not build upon it, but rather exists in reaction to it.

Once more there are stronger parallels between philosophy and art than there are between philosophy and science. Philosophy does not appear to be an incremental process. There are no revised or improved versions of the Republic. Now I am not denying that philosophy changes over time. Often new philosophy will be developed in light of criticisms leveled against existing positions. But I think it would be a mistake to understand this process as analogous to the revision of a hypothesis in the light of new data. In general philosophers don’t revise their theories, they move on to new ones. Sometimes a criticism is met with change, but it is just as likely to be met with a criticism of the criticism. On the other hand, the process that produces philosophy looks a lot like the process that produces art. Like the artist, most philosophers spend the early part of their careers developing technical skills and imitating the work of other, more famous, philosophers. They don’t produce brilliant new ideas, they make small revisions and small objections to existing positions. This is a lot like the young artist who does his or her best to imitate a famous style, adding only a few flourishes of their own. This phase may never come to an end; there are both philosophers and artists who do technically proficient work but are never truly inspired. Some, however, are inspired. These lucky individuals make a sudden leap past their previous work and produce something new and original. It’s not an incremental improvement over their past work or the work of some other philosopher, it is something never before seen.

History of the Discipline

Finally let’s take a brief look at the historical “progress” of the arts and sciences. Of course “progress” is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to art, since art doesn’t improve as much as it finds new things to explore. This simply highlights the fact that art does not have a linear history; there is not a single narrative strand that ties everything together. Rather the history of art is characterized by a number of movements, many of which overlap. And within each movement there are usually a number of different schools and styles. Overall the history of art is one of diversity. Science has no room for this sort of diversity. The history of science can be understood as a monolithic enterprise. Although there have always been disagreements within the scientific community, it has always been the case that scientists everywhere have been doing the same thing. In other words, the history of science is not littered with movements that are largely incompatible with each other as the art world has been.

It’s hard to deny that the history of philosophy bears a striking resemblance to the history of art. The history of philosophy is littered with different schools or movements, such as Rationalism, Empiricism, Existentialism, and so on. Each of these movements is largely incompatible with the others, and each philosopher, or at least the major historical figures, tends to work primarily within a single one of them. The history of Chinese philosophy is an even better illustration of this similarity; in translation one of the early periods of Chinese philosophy is described as the time of the hundred schools. And the six major schools of this period existed largely contemporaneously with each other. It is hard to make sense of this within the scientific paradigm. Science just doesn’t have schools or styles. Or maybe it has exactly one style that all scientists share. If we were to really press the analogy between science and philosophy we would be forced to construe these schools as something like failed theories. But this hardly does them justice, both because some of them still have traction and because they were hardly monolithic, there are substantial disagreements within a single school of philosophy that makes understanding them as a single theory difficult.

So What?

All I’ve done so far is point out that there are more similarities between art and philosophy than there are between science and philosophy. By themselves these similarities show nothing, and we could choose to see philosophy as a kind of science in spite of them. But that choice would be a problematic one. Because if we continue to view the philosopher as a scientist in light of these dissimilarities with science we will be led to conclude that philosophy is defective. We would see the substantial number of ways in which philosophy is unlike science as ways in which philosophy has historically been a failure. You would feel the need to essentially start over in some radical fashion, to do philosophy in some new way that eliminates these “problems”. But then you are hardly doing philosophy anymore. What you would essentially be saying is that the vast majority of what has been called philosophy was a mistake, and that you would rather do something new, something different, but keep the old name. Isn’t that somewhat disingenuous? If you want to do something radically different it would be more honest to distinguish it from the long tradition you are reacting against.

I think that this is an attitude that you wouldn’t get far with. It is not clear what changes you could enact that would make philosophy fit into a scientific mold. And it is hard to have a positive attitude about philosophy if you see almost all existing philosophy as wrongheaded. This is why I think it is better to understand the philosopher as an artist. By doing so we are able to make sense of philosophy as we know it. The features of philosophy that have been described here are expected for art, and thus they don’t stand in need of correction. There is no need to radically revise philosophy, even if you would like to start a new movement within it. Of course if you adopt this attitude towards philosophy you will be dissatisfied with those who adopt the opposite, and who try to eliminate the artistic aspects of philosophy. But, from this perspective, seeing the philosopher as a scientist is just one movement among many, and no movement lasts forever.

Ontology as Metaphilosophy

Ontology is something of a fad in philosophy; sometimes it is regarded as the core and foundation of metaphysics, and at others it is held up as an example of what not to do. But what is ontology? Ontology, like philosophy in general, is an activity – something that philosophers do. The practice of ontology produces a system of categories, a division of the world into distinct kinds of things. What these categories are supposed to reveal is debatable. Many say that the category system sheds light on the nature of being by revealing what kinds of being there are. (This is where the word “ontology” comes from, it literally means the study of being.) Others of a less metaphysical bent say instead that the categories reflect fundamental divisions in the world. In any case the results are taken to be deep and important in some way.

Ontology as it is customarily conceived is a questionable practice. Focusing in the results rather than the process, as is common, some ask the ontologist “how do you know?” Where does the knowledge of how to divide up the world into parts come from? And what sort of reasons are there to favor one proposed category system over another? For there certainly are an abundance of them. The ontologist has no good answers to these questions. He has many bad ones of course – bad answers seem popular in the defense of philosophy. He might say that he has some special insight into the nature of the world that his ontology reflects. The questioner obviously lacks this insight, if he is raising such questions, and so this answer doesn’t go far. Since some special insight is about the only way to justify claims about the fundamental nature of reality that are not obvious to everyone the ontologist often retreats at this point. Ontology is presented as merely a study of concepts, or of language, or of the forms of experience. These answers are equally unsatisfying, this time because they make ontology significantly less interesting, and possibly not philosophy proper at all.

The root of these problems does not lie in ontology though, but in the ontologist and his questioner. And their problems are rooted in the history of philosophy. Before the modern era there was no such thing as philosophy, and no such thing as science. There was instead philosophy-science, which was called philosophy. Philosophy-science is both like and unlike philosophy as we know it, and like and unlike science. It is like both of them because it encompasses the topics and questions of both science and philosophy. Philosophy-science asks questions about ontology and ethics. It also asks questions about the nature of the heavens and the origins of life. But this does not make philosophy-science philosophy or science any more than the shaman is the same as a doctor just because they both may offer opinions about what made a man sick. Philosophy-science is different than philosophy and science because it uses methods appropriate to one to address the questions of the other, and vice versa. It treats their questions and problems as amenable to the same sort of solutions. It treats philosophical questions as matters of fact that we can discover answers to, and it treats scientific questions as things that we can figure out by reasoning about them.

Both science and philosophy came out of philosophy-science, but science made out better because science was seen as breaking away from philosophy, rather than the other way around. The first scientists still were burdened by the legacy of philosophy-science and assumed that the world made rational sense, and thus that they could discover scientific truths by uncovering what was rational. This was science as Descartes pursued it. This was often bad science. Scientists eventually were able to move beyond this, in part because they saw themselves as breaking away from the tradition of philosophy-science. This gave them sanction to challenge the paradigm they found themselves in, and eventually to reject many of the ideas they inherited from philosophy-science about how their questions could be answered. Philosophers, unfortunately, did not find themselves in this position. They conceived of themselves as still doing the same sort of things the philosopher-scientists before them had done, minus a few topics and questions that the scientists had taken as their own (an ever-growing list, in actuality). Indeed this is how most modern philosophers read authors such as Aristotle and Descartes: they read the bits and pieces of them that have to do with philosophical issues, and largely ignore the pieces that have to deal with scientific ones. This is a strange way to read these authors. They certainly didn’t see themselves as engaging in two very different sorts of activities; they saw their work as a single continuous project that involved the same investigative skills applied to different topics. Is it not strange to pick out only pieces of their work as properly philosophical, and worth reading, when the authors themselves didn’t make that distinction? Why should their work be philosophically respectable and enlightening some of the time and irrelevant at others?

In any case, the long and short of it is that modern philosophers carry with them a legacy from philosophy-science that leads them to view every philosophical question as a scientific one (i.e. one where there is a discoverable matter of fact) and to apply methods to answering them that turned out to be next to useless when dealing with those same sorts of questions about different topics. Once what they are doing has been framed in this way it seems impossible that anyone could take it to be a good idea, although I must admit that I myself once subscribed to it. So, to return to ontology after this lengthy digression, the problem at the root of ontology that leads to those annoying questions discussed earlier is the assumption that ontology deals with some discoverable matter of fact. With that assumption questions along the lines of “how do you know?” are more than justified, and obviously answers that appeal to the ability of reason alone or some special insight will be unsatisfying, since reason alone/special insight isn’t any good elsewhere.

Solving ontology’s problems requires coming to understand it in a way that doesn’t presuppose ontology is seeking to uncover some matter of fact. Rather than taking ontology to be an act of discovery we can take it to be an act of creation. If ontology was art it wouldn’t be the kind that attempts to capture some existing scene on the canvas, but rather that which aims to create some new beauty that has never before existed. Admittedly this doesn’t say much about what ontology is about, it just opens up new possibilities. Here is my suggestion: ontology is a kind of metaphilosophy – ontology sets up a framework or structure for other philosophy to be done within.

Admittedly, even that isn’t saying much. To explain why we need ontology allow me to describe some fictitious philosophy. Suppose someone presented us with an ethical theory that explained why we shouldn’t harm other people by appealing to the fact that they are featherless upright bipeds with binocular vision. In one sense this theory fits the “facts”, it picks out human beings in general as a class that gets special moral treatment. But is it a satisfactory explanation? Of course not; properties such as “bipedal” simply aren’t philosophically or ethically significant. On the other hand properties such as “rational” are. If someone said that people deserved special ethical treatment because they had the capacity for reason we would take their proposal seriously, even if we disagreed. Deciding which properties are philosophically significant is the task, or at least one of the tasks, of ontology.

Of course no ontology consists of a giant list with every property, each marked as significant or not. That would be both absurd and impractical. Ontologies tend to deal with the big picture, and more specific matters are left to common sense. For example, it is common to divide properties from substances at the top level of an ontology. This can be taken to indicate two things. First that it is philosophically acceptable to appeal to the fact that something is a substance or a property to explain something about them. For example, you could say that a chair is in at most one place because it is a substance (versus a property, which can be in many places at one time). Secondly it describes what needs to be explained (or at least what is worth thinking about). The aforementioned ontology would be holding up substances and properties as in need of explanation, meaning that some philosopher should come up with a theory about the nature of substances, and that another should come up with a theory of properties. This of course goes hand in hand with the first point, since what you can explain by appeal to substance or property depends on what you think is always true of those categories.

This process can be iterated to get down to more specific issues, such as whether “bipedal” is admissible in a philosophical explanation. By iterated I mean that each of the categories of the ontology can be given their own ontology, and so on. For example, we might give an ontology of properties and divide them into the mental and non-mental. We might then give an ontology of mental properties and divide them into the intentional, the qualitative, and so on. Just as with the most general ontology, each time we do this we commit ourselves to the divisions being philosophically significant (i.e. a good thing to give philosophical explanations in terms of) and we hold each up as being worth of philosophical investigation (into their nature, i.e. “what is the nature of non-mental things (such that they are distinct from the mental)?”). Given the unpopularity of ontology philosophers rarely do this; and given that each sub-ontology is less significant than the one that came before it there is a point where it doesn’t make much sense to. However, I think that in doing philosophy we often end up committed implicitly to ontologies with metaphilosophical import, which finds an expression in our selection of topics and problems that we consider worth theorizing about and in the kind of theories we bother to consider.

Perhaps this view can be best summarized by saying that under it ontology becomes a lot like an agenda for philosophizing. The ontology describes a grand plan which describes both what is philosophically important and what future work needs to be done. Then the actual work of philosophy can get started, inspired and directed by this ontology, which aims to give a philosophical treatment to every item in the ontology. When everything was said and done and compiled into one very large book the ontology would be the table of contents. For every item there would be a corresponding chapter that described its nature and philosophical import. This analogy also suggests that the ontology might come last. After the book has been written then the author or editor goes back over it, organizing it and dividing it into sections. This doesn’t make ontology, so understood, any less a metaphilosophical project. Metaphilosophy can, and often does, come last, prompted by the desire to reflect on and understand what has come before.

Analytic Philosophy And Phenomenology

Previously I described the framework under which phenomenology works (or, more precisely, a charitable reconstruction of that framework). With that in hand it is now possible to discuss how the analytic method is similar to the phenomenological method, and whether they are faced with common problems.

The easiest way to go about making that comparison is to see where analytic philosophy fits into the larger phenomenological framework. Under that framework each discipline studies a region, or some subset of a region. Thus we can begin by asking which region analytic philosophy aims to study. If we have the origins of analytic philosophy in mind it is natural to conclude that it studies the formal region. Originally analytic philosophy was defined, indeed named, after the a priori analytic truths it was supposed to capture: namely those tautologies sentences that follow from the meaning of words. (Note that other a priori analytic truths include mathematics. Since mathematics falls under the formal region it is extremely natural to conclude that analytic philosophy, as such, does so as well.) Thus we could say that the goal of analytic philosophy is to describe formal systems, almost extensions to logic, from which all the truths about, say, justice can be deduced.

The problem with this picture is that the conception of analytic philosophy as a formal discipline doesn’t seem to fit actual analytic philosophy. First, when it comes to formal disciplines right and wrong have a different kind of meaning than in philosophy. For example, a mathematician working on non-standard analysis (calculus) does not accuse those working on standard analysis of being in error. Error in the formal arena is not something that is said of a system as a whole, rather it is something that crops up only internally, often in the form of a faulty proof. If analytic philosophy was a formal discipline we would expect that there would be no disagreement regarding whether one analysis of personhood, for example, was better than another. As with calculus, all consistent systems would be accepted as non-competing variants. If one philosopher was to correct another it would only be to point out that their conclusions aren’t entailed by their premises. But this not how analytic philosophy proceeds; analytic philosophers are quite committed to the idea that there is some best theory about personhood, and to arguing against those they see as worse.

A second problem with taking analytic philosophy to be a formal discipline is that it appears to have a subject matter. And a proper formal discipline is ideal; it has no subject matter of its own, but may be applied wherever it fits. Now this is not to say that formal approaches are never conjoined with some subject. Indeed phenomenology itself is supposed to be a formal approach to consciousness. However, we would never bill phenomenology as a formal discipline, given that it applies its formal structures to consciousness (and develops them explicitly to fit consciousness). And, inasmuch as analytic philosophy applies its formal structures to things such as personhood, it cannot be described as a purely formal discipline.

So if analytic philosophy is not purely formal then we are left with the regions characterized by objectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. Since analytic philosophy is, as was noted above, apparently committed to the idea that there is some single correct theory about its subject matter it seems natural to say that it studies some part of the objective region. (Since the existence of one universally correct answer is characteristic of objectivity.) However, we already have a discipline that studies the objective: science. And there is only one correct (or, at least, optimal) way to study each region. Thus if we claim that analytic philosophy falls under the objective region we must bite the bullet and accept that analytic philosophy is a kind of science. This would in turn mean abandoning those intuitions that analytic philosophers are so fond of appealing to, because the scientific method rejects intuition. What we would be left with might resemble Kornblith’s work: an attempt to find natural kinds that we can label with the familiar philosophical terms. But, while Kornblith (and a number of other contemporary philosophers), may be satisfied with this, it hardly is representative of the majority of contemporary analytic philosophy. It would seem that we are better off rejecting analytic philosophy’s ostensible commitment to objectivity, and looking for some other region for it to fall under.

Next up is subjectivity, i.e. consciousness. I think it is safe to gloss over this possibility without giving it much consideration. It is true that some have characterized analytic philosophy as studying our concepts (through conceptual analysis), and it is at least possible to understand that as a study of how we conceptualize our own experience. However, this seems like an extremely bad fit for analytic philosophy. If analytic philosophy is the study of concepts as we find them in consciousness it would be hard to salvage anything from its commitment to there being better or worse answers to philosophical questions. Now, admittedly, phenomenology does seem to be equally committed to the idea that it has some of the right answers, and it does study the subjective. If we must we can rescue phenomenology by construing it as a study of common forms of subjectivity, and reminding ourselves that it is not in the business of providing necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness. But when we get into specific details of consciousness, such as how an individual is conscious of the personhood of a person it seems foolish not to expect that to vary greatly from individual to individual.

This leaves us with the intersubjective. And the most important members of the intersubjective region are senses. (Note that Husserl himself put senses as a third top level in his ontology, but I think he was wrong in doing so. Senses would not exist without thinkers and they are shared between thinkers, thus they appear to be prototypically intersubjective.) Taking analytic philosophy to be a study of senses does seem to be a good fit. Since senses often manifest in concepts or through language this approach is in general agreement with those who claimed that analytic philosophy was a study of concepts or of language. And it also manages to salvage some degree of the objectivity that analytic philosophers were after: senses are shared between people and so argument is possible about who is more accurately capturing the sense of a term. (This suggestion also agrees with one of the proposals I made in a previous paper concerning how the intuitions appealed to in analytic philosophy could be rescued from their apparent failure to capture anything objective.)

Certainly this clarifies the nature and project of analytic philosophy. But does it solve its problems? Or do its problems now apply to phenomenology as well, inasmuch as phenomenology deals with senses? In one way its problems are solved. Worries about whether intuitions are really reliable guides to things such as knowledge can be dismissed, since: a) intuitions are reliable guides to senses, and b) no one expects complete agreement about the intersubjective. However, new problems are created by this treatment of analytic philosophy, which I maintain are at least potential problems for phenomenology as well.

The first problem is that, with respect to many philosophical issues, we expect how things “really are” (how things in the objective region are) to have some bearing on philosophical matters. For example, whether we can have knowledge in a situation, one may expect, should depend on some objective facts about the world (such as whether the objective world actually exists, whether we are hallucinating or not, whether our senses are reliable, and so on). However, a subjective or intersubjective treatment of knowledge can never include such issues. It can only inform us about the conditions that we think must hold before we recognize some experience as providing knowledge. But this is not the same as asserting that those conditions must really hold. In other words, it can yield only an internalist account of knowledge. And similar issues can be raised with respect to ethics, the mind-body problem, and so on. These problems, however, can be solved. As I detailed in yet another paper, while phenomenology cannot address such issues, by its very definition, and neither can any other single-region discipline, the possibility for cross-regional disciplines exists. To summarize those conclusions: it is possible to develop cross regional theories, but only on the basis of completed theories about the regions to be bridged in this way.

In that way the traditional problems of philosophy, as conceived of traditionally (in ways that are inherently cross-regional) can be addressed, although not by philosophy alone (or at least not by analytic philosophy or phenomenology alone). Unfortunately there is still one large problem remaining that is not so easily resolved. So far all the approaches described here, both single regional and cross-regional, produce descriptive theories. With respect to the subjective and the intersubjective they report on how we in fact experience and conceive of things. And any cross-regional discipline is in the business of drawing correlations between the findings of different regions; it builds on “finished” theories about a single region, but it cannot go back and revise them. This puts us in a difficult situation, at least with respect to epistemology and ethics. In both of those fields there is the expectation that a good theory can correct what we think about ethics or epistemology. For example, a particular epistemic theory might revise the way we collect evidence. But a purely descriptive approach can never do that. If a particular subject experienced the magic 8 ball as providing evidence then a phenomenological analysis of the sense of evidence for this individual would, indeed must, sanction the magic 8 ball as providing evidence (because what it is reporting on is the forms of this individual’s experience, and would get those experiences wrong if it did not report the magic 8 ball as evidence providing). Could we fix things at the cross-regional stage? No. Certainly at the cross-regional stage it might be noted that certain natural kinds (such as reliability) are correlated with many of the individual’s experiences of events as evidence providing, except for a few oddballs, such as the magic 8 ball case. But this mismatch does not imply that there is something wrong with the magic 8 ball case; rather it simply indicates that what is experienced as providing evidence doesn’t correlate with a single natural kind, which is probably true of many senses.

Clearly solving this problem is trickier. One way to go might be to lean on the expectations that we associate with certain senses. Evidence, for example, we expect to be highly reliable; i.e. to experience something as providing evidence is to develop some specific expectations about which future experiences we will and won’t have (i.e. that we will have those that agree with the evidence and won’t have those that disagree with it). Then, building on the correlation between our experiences of particular facts and the way things objectively are, we could say that, with respect to the magic 8 ball, it is not the case that those expectations will reliably be fulfilled. Thus we go cross-regional and back again to demonstrate the experiencing the magic 8 ball as providing evidence is, in an indirect way, inconsistent with the sense of evidence (i.e. that evidence as experienced by this individual in internally inconsistent). Unfortunately while this is a step in the right direction it is not a complete solution. First of all it doesn’t motivate revision in a particular direction; in the case discussed here both ditching the magic 8 ball as providing evidence and relaxing the expectation of reliability are ways to resolve the problem, and this approach does not prefer one to the other. Secondly it is not clear that we will always be able to make this move. Even with respect to evidence I can imagine problematic pathological cases. For example, in the magic 8 ball case our subject may believe that there are malicious demons who change the way things are whenever he checks up on the information the magic 8 ball provides. Thus in the case of the magic 8 ball he does not form the expectations that we were leaning on. And I don’t think that there is any way around this. Now if we had a prescriptive approach we might point out to the individual that he might as well stop thinking about the magic 8 ball as providing evidence, given that he never acts on that information (since he believes that the demons will interfere if he does). The function of evidence is to prepare us to take action, and so it is effectively the same as taking it not to provide evidence if the evidence it provides can’t be acted on. Thus, for the sake of a simpler epistemological theory, he should revise his opinion of the magic 8 ball. But we do not have a prescriptive approach.

What Is Philosophy, And What Can It Do For You?

If there is one thing philosophers agree about it is that philosophers don’t agree about what philosophy is. You might think that philosophers would limit themselves to disagreeing with each other’s theories. But no, they go farther than that, and claim that other philosophers have not only reached the wrong conclusions, but that they have been going about philosophy itself in the wrong way. The best way describe what philosophy is, then, is not to present a single definition, but rather to treat the issue itself as a philosophical problem. In other words we will begin by thinking about intuitive or common sense answers to the question, and, on the basis of problems arising for those answers, motivate some of the more theoretical solutions that have been proposed.

Perhaps the simplest, and least helpful, answer to the question “what is philosophy?” is to point at famous philosophers – to say that it is whatever Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and so on did. And what did they do? Well they did ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, to name the big three categories. And maybe that could serve to answer our question: philosophy is anything that deals with ethics, epistemology, or metaphysics. But things are never so simple. The big three don’t exhaust the topics philosophers deal with. Logic, language, truth, mind, consciousness, aesthetics, the good life, ontology, politics, and culture are also topics that one philosopher or another has turned their attention to. And surely even that list isn’t complete; even if it covers everything philosophers have written about so far there it is likely that new philosophical topics will appear in the future.

But, for the sake of being charitable to this definition, let’s simply assume that we could list all the topics philosophy covers. Even so, it still wouldn’t be satisfactory. Consider the following: what makes religion distinct from philosophy? Religion covers many of the same topics as philosophy. The big three, for example, all find some reflection in religion. Ethics is clearly central to many religions, and inasmuch as they endorse faith and the existence of god they contain claims about epistemology and metaphysics, respectively. But clearly (or at least this is clear to philosophers, if not to the man on the street) philosophy is not religion and religion is not philosophy. The difference, to put it succinctly, is that religion is built on faith and dogma while philosophy is not. Philosophy embraces the idea that claims are to be argued for, or at least motivated in some way, and that every theory is subject to criticism and revision. Any satisfactory definition of philosophy will at least rule out faith and authority as a source of philosophical theories.

This motivates us to look for an understanding of philosophy that describes what it does rather than simply lists the topics it studies. This brings us the one of the oldest answers the question: philosophy studies the essence of things. Essence, in this context, is a fancy word to describe “what something is”, and explaining the essence of something often looks a lot like a definition. For example, a philosopher might describe the essence of a chair as “a thing that is for sitting on”. Essences have also been called forms, and occasionally concepts. But, whatever they are called, the idea is that they are abstract objects – they aren’t part of the physical world that science studies. Instead of having physical access to them we have intellectual access to them, it is claimed; we come to know the essence of a thing by reflection, by considering different examples, and by argument. This all sounds good in theory, but in practice problems arise. The theory implies that there is some one essence that all philosophers investigating a particular topic, such as justice, should be describing. However, there is widespread disagreement, not agreement, about what justice is among philosophers. This implies that, at the very least, our intellectual access to these essences is unreliable, and sometimes leads us astray. And, worse, since we have no other way of getting access to an essence, there is no way to tell which philosophers are successfully describing it and which are mistaken. And so the unfortunate consequence of this theory about philosophy is that, while we now know what philosophy is, we also realize that we don’t have any reliable way to pursue a philosophical inquiry or settle a philosophical dispute.

Obviously that’s not a happy situation for philosophy to be in, and wresting with such problems has motivated other understandings of philosophy. Some have seen the problems with the previous approach as stemming primarily from the way essences are disconnected from the physical world. Realizing that philosophy aimed at describing essences produces results that look a good deal like definitions, they suggest that philosophy is really about studying language and clearly defining terms of philosophical interest. This alleviates worries about the unreliability of our intellectual access to the subject matter, because it is clear that we can observe how words are used in a very mundane and ordinary ways. It also solves problems arising from disagreement among philosophers. That disagreement, they might say, is simply a sign that how words are used varies from person to person. But, ideally, the philosopher aims to give a definition that reflects the common understanding of the term; and there is only one right way to do that. Of course this approach is easily mocked by pointing out that under it Webster is the best philosopher, or at least the most comprehensive. Now that is not really a fair attack, there is room for those who subscribe to this approach to argue that the philosophically interesting terms are complex and that Webster’s simple and intuitive definitions miss how the words are actually used. However, when I entertain the idea that the goal of philosophy as being to write a better dictionary with respect to certain terms, it is not clear to me why we should care. People get along just fine without these precise definitions; and it is not clear to me how giving them a precise definition would affect their lives in any way besides changing how they use a term.* The end result of this theory then is that, while it is clear what the task of philosophy is and how it can be accomplished, it is no longer clear why we should bother.

Fortunately that’s not the only way to improve on the idea that philosophy studies essences or concepts. Another way to revise the theory is to move essences or concepts into the mind. Under the modified theory, then, philosophy studies essences (or concepts) that are revealed to us in experience. Again, this resolves both of the major problems facing the previous approach. It should be uncontroversial now how we have intellectual access to essences, since it is uncontroversial that we have access to our own experience. And it also explains why philosophers disagree: how we experience the world varies from person to person. As with the view that philosophy is all about language, the idea that some philosophy is better than others can be preserved under the assumption that the philosopher’s target should be a common form of experience, and not merely a reflection of their own idiosyncrasies. However, we also run into some of the same problems facing the view that philosophy is primarily about language, namely that it is not clear how it matters. It is true that how we experience the world does matter in some contexts: in understanding consciousness, in trying to communicate, and in producing art. However, it seems far too narrow for philosophy. And it also seems like a retreat from several important philosophical questions. For example, explaining why consulting a magic 8 ball is an objectively bad method for forming beliefs seems like the kind of question that philosophy should answer. However, if we confine ourselves to studying only our own experiences (or common forms of experience) the best we can say is that the magic 8 ball is not experienced as or conceived of as having the right qualities to serve as evidence. But this says nothing about why it really, objectively, is a bad idea.

I consider the three previous approaches to be failures in one way or another, as I have described, although this is far from a universally held judgment, and there are many philosophers who are willing to defend them and work under that conception of philosophy. What I see as the fundamental problem with those approaches, behind the specific problems with them, is their fixation on the idea that there is a right answer in philosophy, or at the very least that some philosophy is objectively better than others. If that is true then there must be something that philosophy aims to reflect or describe, such that it can capture it in a better or worse way. Essences, language, and experience are three possible such subjects. The problem with this, however, is that, if there is something worth studying that can be studied in a relatively objective** manner then science has probably gotten there first. Because that is what science does, it studies things in an objective manner as possible. This leaves philosophy either with subjects that no one cares to do a scientific study of (how words are used, the exact structure of experience) or with subjects that can’t be studied in an objective way (essences). Neither is any good.

But if we give up on right/wrong or better/worse in a universal sense then what is left? Wouldn’t moving away from these ideas leave us with an anything-goes approach to philosophy, where every theory, no matter how absurd or new-age, would have to be treated as equally worthy? Consider two hammers. Is there a sense in which one hammer is right and the other wrong, or a sense in which one is universally better than another? No. It is possible, for example, for one hammer to be better at hammering nails while the other is better at being a decorative item. One hammer may be more durable, the other may be a better prop for a movie. But, even so, it is not the case that simply everything is a worthy hammer. My shoe, for example, is not a suitable hammer in any way – of the things we expect of hammers the shoe is always the worse choice. My suggestion then is that we look at philosophy like a tool. Not a physical tool, like a hammer, but an intellectual tool.

But what is an intellectual too, exactly? This brings me to the second question: what can philosophy do for you? In the broadest sense philosophy is a tool for thinking – for thinking clearly and precisely, for drawing helpful distinctions, and for connecting different ideas via chains of argument. Of course while that is generally useful is also very broad, so broad that such skills could probably be learned by other means as well. To be more specific we would have to get into each of the specific topics that philosophers think about, and this isn’t the right place for that. Instead allow me to give just one example. A question that everyone thinks about, or at least should think about is: “what is a good life?”, where good ranges from ethical, to meaningful, to simply pleasurable. Only philosophy really addresses itself to such questions, and this is one way that philosophy can be useful. Many philosophical theories provide a perspective on what the good life is. And we can see that a particular perspective may be better or worse for someone, depending on the values they have, the situation they are in, and culture they are part of. Now you could read philosophy book after philosophy book to find the perspective on what makes a good life that is best for you. That’s probably better than not thinking about the issue at all. However, situations change, as do what people value. And so, just as one perspective on the good life won’t suit everyone, a single perspective on the good life won’t suit someone forever. And so what’s really important to take away from this class is not, for example, Plato’s opinion on how to live, but rather an understanding of how Plato addressed such questions, so that you have the ability to tackle such issues for yourself, as many times as you need to.

* Even when it comes to ethics. If you tell some authoritatively “this is what other people mean by the term ‘right’” and they accept that, and modify their usage of the term to comply, that doesn’t meant that they will also alter their internal measure of right and wrong that guides them, nor does presenting them with this definition give them any reason to do so. In other words, changing how people use terms does not necessarily change how they think about thing, nor is their reason to believe that correcting small deviations from the norm in the way a term is used is beneficial.

** By objective here I mean only that it is possible to come to an agreement, at least in the long run, about which theories are better and worse (i.e. as Peirce would have it).

Adapted from a presentation on 9/26

Putting Philosophy To Work: A Value Problem

Philosophers, and in fact people in general, spend a lot of time wrestling with values. The nature of values, however, is not much of a problem, unless you want to make it one. A value is something that is motivational for a person; a person that wants to be happy values their own happiness and a person who wants the world to be a fairer place values justice. Understood in this way a number of apparent problems often associated with values often evaporate. It makes little sense, for example, to ask “what values should a person have?” What someone should and shouldn’t do is bound up with what they value, such that they should do whatever promotes their values. Obviously other definitions of “should” and associated ideas of obligation are possible, but this is probably the best of the lot. Simply consider some other definition of what people should do that diverges from the proposed one. In that case there will be, by that standard, things that a person “should” do but which they have no motivation to, since it in no way promotes their values. Isn’t it a bit absurd to say that there are things a person should do but which we can’t provide any reason for doing them that will actually be motivational? If there were such cases it would negate much of the power of “should”. In conversation, “should” seems to stand in for the idea that “there are reasons you would accept to do this thing”. We tell people that they should do something in order to influence their behavior. If “should” could come apart from psychologically motivating power then it would be irrational of us to try to motivate some action by telling them that they should do it (instead we would appeal to things that do motivate them).

Anyway, back to the matter at hand, which was the idea that what a person should do is bound up with the values that they have, and thus that asking what values a person should have or which they should be motivated by is essentially to ask what values they value. Answering that question requires understanding how that person’s values interact, to see whether they conflict or whether there are additional values that are “implied” by their existing explicit values. Such work may be very interesting at an intellectual level, but it also misses, to an extent, why people care about values. People inquire into values, I think, because they are interested in advice and guidance concerning what to value and thus how to live. They are looking, essentially for philosophy that will interact with their existing values and change them. An intellectual inquiry into the nature of values or their interactions will never really satisfy that aim. At best it will reveal that some of their values conflict, but it will never say which value they should change or abandon, nor actually motivate such changes.

Now in one sense that unsatisfactory state of affairs is the best we can do. There is no absolute position from which values follow. At best we can make some guesses about what many people “should” value given assumptions about their situation and existing values that we hope apply to most people. But, as I noted previously, the inquiry into values is often a search for philosophy that will change their values, and this overly intellectual approach will never be satisfying, in part because it aims to describe the nature of values rather than doing anything with them. But how is it possible for philosophy, given that there is no absolute position to dictate values from, to do that? If we accept that then doesn’t it necessarily follow that it is not possible to construct a philosophical position that will change what someone values in one direction or another?

No, such philosophy is possible. But to find it we have to give up the notion that it will follow from these truths about value. Finding an argument or perspective that will change someone’s values has little to do with the facts about values directly. Rather it is more like constructing a tool that will interact with the person’s psychology so as to produce the desired changes. Although we may shape this argument so that it appears to be based on certain “facts” about values that appearance is there only to make the tool effective. This might sound heretical in a way. Am I saying that we should simply abandon the philosophical truths about value for applied psychology? Rest assured, I have nothing of the sort in mind. There are two reasons to understand such a psychological tool as genuine philosophy. The first is that the theory about the nature of values outlined above, while not directly useful, will probably play a role in constructing our tool. Specifically by realizing that values do not follow from some absolute position or principles we will not attempt to construct our tool along those lines (since it is thus vulnerable to certain objections and will become less effective), but will instead fashion it to work by playing one value off of another. The second reason to accept such a tool as philosophy is because, in this case, such a tool will probably take the form of a philosophical perspective; i.e. it will be a position that does not contradict any facts (which, again, would lead to it being rejected), but which will emphasize some facts and some ways of thinking about those facts, over others. Now if our tool was a string of meaningless words that affected an individual’s psychology as if we were programming a computer, then I would concede that it was not properly philosophy.

Perhaps the best way to explain this idea, and to defend it against the claim that it embodies a turn away from philosophy proper, is to illustrate it through an example. Anyone who is looking to philosophy to guide their values clearly thinks that there is some problem with their current values. Naturally there could be a number of reasons for this – let’s consider just one, that they often find themselves to be unhappy because they fall short of being able to live up to one of their values. And, to narrow things down further, let’s consider only the valuing wealth, fame, or praise as the cause of that unhappiness (these values are similar in that they require the participation of other people, and hence aren’t completely under the control of the individual). A person who places a high value on wealth, fame, or praise may often be unhappy because they lack those things, and because there is no simple way to get them. Thus such a person may turn to philosophy, looking for a psychologically motivating reason not to value wealth, fame, or praise.

At this point the overly intellectual approach would point out that which values we have are essentially arbitrary, and thus that nothing stops us from abandoning those problematic values for some other, better, ones. But obviously acknowledging that won’t motivate someone to actually give up a value. Could you give up on valuing your own happiness or you life simply because someone pointed out that you have no real reason to value those things? No, those values are so hard wired in, both by genetics and by our practice at valuing those things, that we cannot simply give them up. Similarly someone who has fallen into a “habit” of valuing wealth, fame, or praise can’t simply choose to give it up.

However, just because the overly intellectual approach fails us doesn’t mean that it is useless. If we take seriously that theory about values it becomes clear that to change someone’s values we need to leverage one value against another. In this case our lever will be their value of themselves. Everyone reading this values their own life, because if they didn’t odds are they would have taken a long walk off a short pier some time ago. Similarly being bothered by unhappiness also implies that you value yourself to some extent, since you take your suffering to be a bad thing. Now consider what valuing yourself means. To value yourself means valuing the person who you are now, not the person you were or the person you might be, since the person you are now is the only thing here to value. (Even valuing your potential is just another way of valuing who you are now.) And suppose you also value wealth, fame, or praise but are unhappy because you lack that thing. Valuing something is a double edged sword, not only does it mean endorsing that thing, but it means taking its absence to indicate some kind of deficiency. For example, if you value ethical goodness that means that you will naturally abhor ethical deficiencies. Consider what that means in the case of valuing wealth, fame, or praise – it means that you are also committed to believing that someone who lacks those things is in someway deficient (and perhaps that leads to your unhappiness). But this is not compatible with valuing who you are now. If you value who you are now then you don’t believe that you are in some way deficient. Valuing who you are now means being ok with not having wealth, fame, or praise, if you don’t have them. Thus the way to stop valuing wealth, fame, or praise is, whenever you find yourself thinking about those things on contemplating how to get them, to tell yourself that you are fine with who you are now, a person who is poor, unknown, and unappreciated.

There are a few logical flaws with that argument (I leave discovering them as an exercise for the reader; one of them is especially boneheaded). And it could equally well be run in reverse, to the conclusion that such a person should give up valuing their own life, although I doubt that version would have any effect. However, it is still effective. I know that from personal experience as I used a version to rid myself of a faulty value, even while fully aware of its deficiencies. And despite its usefulness as a tool to adjust values it still looks like philosophy. Indeed it could be argued that it only works as a tool because it is properly philosophy. On the philosophical level it offers a new perspective on a person’s pre-existing value of their own life and how that value interacts with the problematic value, one that motivates rejecting the problematic value. Of course the version presented here could be rightly criticized as being only a sketch of a full perspective. To embody a proper philosophical perspective more attention probably needs to be given to describing valuing oneself and its consequences. And the perspective needs to be considered in different situations and defended against what may seem to be absurd consequences (should a bad person, for example, really value themselves as they are?). But the point here is not to fill in all the details.