From this, one might be tempted to heap scorn on philosophy. One might say we ought to just stop doing theoretical philosophy, since what it gets right is not distinctively philosophical, and what is distinctively philosophical is not right.

Refreshingly, Krämer does not travel this route. He acknowledges that philosophy crafts its arguments around certain general kinds of questions, and hence enjoys a degree of disciplinary autonomy — but also that it is ultimately studying the very same universe that the physicists are, and hence that it overlaps significantly with science. Krämer’s conclusion is even-handed. He concludes that the physicists can benefit from listening to the philosophers only so long as the philosophers keep focused on providing a critical understanding how the actual scientific methods are used. In contrast, if philosophers spend their time making armchair pronouncements about what counts as science, they ought not be listened to.

Like I said, I think Krämer’s got it right, and I think he said it well. And, I might add: my goodness, do philosophers need to hear it. Many of my colleagues and mentors are both actively involved in philosophy and in specialized sciences. They are, to a person, well acquainted with how things go on both sides of the fence, equally comfortable in graduate courses in cognitive science as they are in courses on philosophy of mind, or in courses on anti-realism as they are on theoretical physics. Yet I am heartbroken to hear that their work is often dismissed by reviewers in philosophy journals who have a simplistic normative conception of ‘how science works’. Instead of researching the diversity of methods that scientists actually use, many commentators working in the philosophy of science are interested in policing the boundaries of science through normative fiat. As a result, my colleagues have their papers accepted in top-notch science journals, and turned down by ostensibly top-notch philosophy journals.

One day, the philosophy of science may turn out to be of great importance to science. But that day will not come until philosophers prove themselves willing and able to read the contents of a bibliography.

Though I think Krämer has got most of it right, I do think that he has got one thing wrong. The fact is, the quips offered by theoretical physicists do not, by themselves, tell us anything about the relationship between philosophy and the sciences. It may be agreed that physics is the most developed among the sciences, and it may also be the case that all sciences will need to cash themselves out in physicalist terms. But even having admitted that much, it should also be agreed that physics is not the spokesperson of all the sciences — natural or otherwise. Even if it were true, you cannot conclude from the fact that ‘physicists don’t need theoretical philosophy quite so much anymore’ that ‘science doesn’t need theoretical philosophy quite so much anymore’. Mind you, it may indeed be the case that philosophy has nothing to say to any of the sciences. My point is that this inference needs to be demonstrated, and cannot be inferred from a single exceptional and arbitrarily selected historical period.

Sometimes progress in philosophy occurs in something like this way. Questions are not resolutely answered, once and for all — instead, sometimes an answer is proposed which is sufficiently motivating that good-faith informed parties stop asking the incipient question. Consider, for instance, the old paradox, “If a tree falls in the forest, and no-one is around, does it make a sound?” If you make a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, then the answer is plainly “No”: for while sounds are observer-dependent facts, the vibration of molecules would happen whether or not anyone was present. If you rephrase the question in terms of the primary qualities (“If a tree falls in the forest, and no-one is around, do air molecules vibrate?”), then the answer is an obvious “yes”. A new distinction has helped us to resolve an old problem. It is a dead (falsidical) paradox: something that seems internally inconsistent, but which just turns into a flat-out absurdity when put under close scrutiny.

Interesting as those examples are, it is also possible that linguistic analysis can help us resolve perceptual illusions. Consider the image below (the Muller Lyer illusion, taken from the Institut Nicod‘s great Cognition and Culture lab). Now answer: “Which line is longer?”

Fig. 1. Which line is longer?

Most participants will agree that the top line appears longer than the bottom one, despite the fact that they are ostensibly the same length. It is an illusion.

Illusions are supposed to be irresolvable conflicts between how things seem to you. For example, a mirage is an illusion, because if you stand in one place, then no matter how you present the stimuli to yourself, it will look as though a cloudy water puddle is hovering there somewhere in the distance. The mirage will persist regardless of how you examine it or think about it. There is no linguistic-mental switch you can flip inside your brain to make the mirage go away. Analytic philosophers can’t help you with that. (Similarly, I hold out no hopes that an analytic philosopher’s armchair musings will help to figure out the direction of spin for this restless ballerina.)

However, as a matter of linguistic analysis, it is not unambiguously true that the lines are the same length in the Muller-Lyer illusion. Oftentimes, the concept of a “line” is not operationally defined. Is a line just whatever sits horizontally? Or is a line whatever is distinctively horizontal (i.e., whatever is horizontal, such that it is segmented away from the arrowhead on each end)? Let’s call the former a “whole line”, and the latter a “line segment”. Of the two construals, it seems to me that it is best to interpret a line as meaning “the whole line”, because that is just the simplest reading (i.e., it doesn’t rely on arbitrary judgments about “what counts as distinctive”). But at the end of the day, both of those interpretations are plausible readings of the meaning of ‘line’, but we’re not told which definition we ought to be looking for.

I don’t know about you, but when I concentrate on framing the question in terms of whole lines, the perceptual illusion outright disappears. When asked, “Is one horizontal-line longer than the other?”, my eyes focus on the white space between the horizontal lines, and my mind frames the two lines as a vibrant ‘equals sign’ that happens to be bookended by some arrowheads in my peripheral vision. So the answer to the question is a clear “No”. By contrast, when asked, “Is one line-segment longer than the other?”, my eyes focus on the points at the intersection of each arrowhead, and compare them. And the answer is a modest “Yes, they seem to be different lengths” — which is consistent with the illusion as it has been commonly represented.

Now for the interesting part.

Out of curiosity, I measured both lines according to both definitions (as whole lines and as line segments). In the picture below, the innermost vertical blue guidelines map onto the ends of the line segments, while the outermost vertical blue guidelines map onto the edges of the bottom line:

Fig 2. Line segments identical, whole lines different.

Once I did this, I came up with a disturbing realization: the whole lines in the picture I took from the Institut Nicod really are different lengths! As you can see, the very tips of the bottom whole line fail to align with the inner corner of the top arrow.

As a matter of fact, the bottom whole line is longer than the top whole line. This is bizarre, since the take-home message of the illusion is usually supposed to be that the lines are equal in length. But even when I was concentrating on the whole lines (looking at the white space between them, manifesting an image of the equals sign), I didn’t detect that the bottom line was longer, and probably would not have even noticed it had it not been for the fact that I had drawn vertical blue guidelines in (Fig.2). Still, when people bring up the Muller Lyer illusion, this is not the kind of illusion that they have in mind.

(As an aside: this is not just a problem with the image chosen from Institut Nicod. Many iterations of the illusion face the same or similar infelicities. For example, in the three bottom arrows image on this Wikipedia image, you will see that a vertical dotted guideline is drawn which compares whole lines to line segments. This can be demonstrated by looking at the blue guidelines I superimposed on the image here.)

Can the illusion be redrawn, such that it avoids the linguistic confusion? Maybe. At the moment, though, I’m not entirely sure. Here is an unsatisfying reconstruction of the Nicod image, where both line segment and whole line are of identical length for both the top arrow and the bottom one:

Fig 3. Now the two lines are truly equal (both as whole lines and as segments).

Unfortunately, when it comes to Fig. 3., I find that I’m no longer able to confidently state that one line looks longer than the other. At least at the moment, the illusion has disappeared.

Part of the problem may be that I had to thicken the arrowheads of the topmost line in order to keep them equal, both as segments and as wholes. Unfortunately, the line thickening may have muddied the illusion. Another part of the problem is that, at this point, I’ve stared at Muller-Lyer illusions for so long today that I am starting to question my own objectivity in being able to judge lines properly.

[Edit 4/30: Suppose that other people are like me, and do not detect any illusion in (Fig. 3). One might naturally wonder why that might be.

Of course, there are scientific explanations of the phenomenon that don't rely on anything quite like analytic philosophy. (e.g., you might reasonably think that the difference is that our eyes are primed to see in three dimensions, and that since the thicker arrows appear to be closer to the eye than the thin ones, it disposes the mind to interpret the top line as visually equal to the bottom one. No linguistic analysis there.) But another possibility is that our vision of the line segment is perceptually contaminated by our vision of the whole line, owing to the gestalt properties of visual perception. This idea, or something like it, already exists in the literature in the form of assimilation theory. If so, then we observers really do profit from making an analytic distinction between whole lines and line segments in order to help diagnose the causal mechanisms responsible for this particular illusion -- albeit, not to make it disappear.

Anyway. If this were a perfect post, I would conclude by saying that linguistic analysis can help us shed light on at least some perceptual illusions, and not just dismantle paradoxes. Mind you, at the moment, I don't know if this conclusion is actually true. (It does not bode well that the assimilation theory does not seem very useful in diagnosing any other illusions.) But if it did, it would be just one more sense in which analytic philosophy can help us to cope with our illusions, if not lose them outright.]

Those posts attempted to think about the ideal character types of some excellent philosophers. I did not make many specific references to the contemporary institution of philosophy, or to the great lumpenprofessoriat that staff university departments across the world. But, actually, it is misleading to characterize a discipline by showcasing its best members; not every golfer is Tiger Woods. Philosophy is not just a scholastic curio bequeathed to us from a bunch of dead icons. Philosophy is a living practice, performed by real people, and done for a point. The point of philosophy is personal growth — to try to become wiser, and to live better lives.

So I would like to start to set the record straight, just in case the record needed straightening. I’d like to use the ‘four virtues’ framework to talk about the self-image of philosophers in general, both professional and otherwise. In particular, I would like to articulate some of the different ways that philosophers have thought that their education helped to affect their development as persons. In this, my aim is both critical and reverential. Each metaphor describes a disposition or skill-set that is evenly balanced between virtues and vices. [**]

The point can be made clearest by drawing analogies to people and practices that we are already acquainted. In this post, I examine four metaphors for philosophers as people: you can think of philosophers as intellectual detectives, as rational therapists, as curious children, or as devil’s advocates. I might examine other metaphors in a future post, assuming readers do not heave this post overboard as they would a dead sailor at sea.

I think I can see why Wittgenstein loved detective stories. On some occasions, I am tempted to think of the philosopher as a kind of intellectual detective. Like storybook gumshoes, the philosopher has a problem to solve, and has to rely primarily on their wit and sense of reason to come to a solution. Like the detective, the philosopher needs to have a healthy acquaintance with forms of reasoning in order to try to resolve their problems — namely, the use of deduction and inference to the best explanation.

Although he never explicitly compares the philosopher to a detective, I think the following passage from Barry Stroud [***] gives expression to the general idea:

“The philosophers I admire most possess [a] kind of acute sensitivity to philosophical difficulties. They are open to potential philosophical riches, and they find them, in what look to most of the rest of us like very unpromising places. And, what is equally important, those philosophers I admire most know how to keep searching when they know they haven’t really found the right thing yet. This is not the only kind of philosophical ability there is… but for me, those I most admire have a firm foothold in reality and a “nose” or feel for real problems, along with the patience to unfold the detail of what has to be overcome to achieve the kind of understanding that can mean the most to us.”

This analogy gains strength when we think about how some epistemologists think in earnest about philosophical problems. The philosophical detective has a few intuitive questions — a few real hum-dingers, a pocket full of paradoxes — and she believes that any philosopher that is not attempting to find the correct answer to these questions is not doing philosophy at all. The detective wants to actually get to the bottom of philosophical worries, and not just settle for a lingering sense of satisfaction with basking in the aura of the big questions. And many of the greatest philosophers of our time have arrived at systems of intuitions which indicate that finally, at long last, the great questions have either been solved or mooted.

The detective metaphor is a healthy source of motivation for the independent thinker. If you think you have good reasons to believe you have arrived at the truth, then there is usually no fault in saying so. The truth is out there and sometimes the truth is frickin’ awesome.

But, that having been said, the metaphor of the intellectual detective is sometimes misused when it only serves as a smokescreen for dogmatism. The author linked [here] is right when he makes just this narrow point. On occasion, students of philosophy will sometimes treat the informal fallacies as if they were falsity-detectors, divining rods which lead the philosopher to strike pay-dirt. But actually, any competent teacher of logic will tell you that a skill for critical thinking does not by itself confer the expertise to determine which conclusions are true and which are false. Rather, part of the value of critical thinking is that it helps the good-faith reader and listener to figure out for themselves how they stand in relation to arguments put before them.

***

When I lived in Toronto, the subway commute was generally unpleasant. The Toronto subway was decorated with advertisements for a sketchy new-age institute that branded itself as a school of Philosophy. I experience similar feelings of grouchitude when I walk into a bookstore and notice that the Philosophy section is invariably bookended by sections on Religion and Spirituality. Any student of analytic philosophy will reliably try to avert their eyes when exposed to commercial efforts that conflate philosophy and spirituality, else be forced to suffer through the minor indignity of being audience to false advertising.

Well, whatever. To some extent, the philosophical tradition has it coming. One of the worst kept secrets in analytic philosophy, and philosophy in general, is that part of the point of learning philosophy is to learn how to cope with living. When conceived in this way, the philosopher functions as a kind of rational therapist, who attempts to persuade people to accept palliative insights. With few exceptions, modern professional philosophers are generally quite lousy at providing such consolations. (It is instructive that De Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy ended with two 19th century philosophers, both of whom were by reputation inconsolable.)

But even so, this is not a reason to disbelieve that many philosophers throughout history have done what they do in order to learn how to live in the right kind of way. And on some occasions, the enterprise can be productive. After you read Nietzsche, Arendt, Russell, Nussbaum, or JS Mill, you may come away a different kind of person. Anyone who receives a philosophical education without reading and reacting to any of these figures is someone who has received an education unfulfilled. Certain strains of philosophy have been influential as vehicles that help to live the everyday life: for example, according to its adherents, the technique of cognitive-behavioral therapy owes a debt to the writings of the Stoics.

This is not necessarily to suggest that even the best rational therapists are always good at it. I might as well share a personal anecdote to illustrate the point. We all have difficult times in our lives, moments where we look for guidance and for wisdom. One night, after a stressful day, I laid in bed, shivering from melancholy. Thinking he could help, I plucked a copy of Meister Eckhart‘s writings from the shelf. Eckhart was a Dominican philosopher with a (mostly deserved) reputation for deep, probing insight. I am not much of a believer in the divine, but occasionally Eckhart is able to pin down an idea with such honesty that it is difficult not to admire him.

So I opened the book to a random page. I read this passage:

All that [perfect detachment] wants is to be. But to wish to be this thing or that — this it does not want. Whoever wants to be this or that wants to be something, but detachment wants to be nothing at all.

…and then I threw the book across the room and opted for sleep. I’m sure the contradiction in that passage can be resolved, but the only time you should try is in the light of day.

***

Increasingly, professional philosophers will try to paint themselves as expert reasoners, capable of handling difficult problems using sophisticated logical techniques. But this is a feature of the modern academy. In the past, it was more often said that the philosopher is like a curious child, constantly engaged in dialogue, asking questions that others think too obvious to contemplate.

Consider: Why is there something rather than nothing? If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and good, why is there evil? These are highly general, entirely reasonable questions, and you do not need any special authority to ask them. All you need is humility, and to seek to persuade others to be humble in kind. Socrates is maybe the most obvious example of someone who pretended to be a curious child, a patient rational inquirer who was given to constant self-effacement when interrogated. The Socratic Method is also meant to be intellectually egalitarian: hence, the intuitions of Socrates and the slave child Meno are supposed to be on the very same level.

There is nothing wrong with approaching a subject afresh, as if you were the first Martian anthropologist put in charge of understanding the people of Earth. Actually, there is quite a lot that is right with this approach.

But the trouble with innocence is that there is only a finite supply. When the would-be philosopher has thought about some subject matter for a significant length of time, they must either claim that they have found a special form of expertise, or else persist in assuming a pretence of innocence and hope no-one will see behind the ruse. Nietzsche may have been a mean old man, but he puts the point in an amusing way: ”What’s attractive about looking at all philosophers in part suspiciously and in part mockingly is not that we find again and again how innocent they are… but that they are not honest enough in what they do, while, as a group, they make huge, virtuous noises as soon as the problem of truthfulness is touched on, even remotely.”

To think through difficult issues philosophically often means making an attempt to dump one’s prejudices as far as it is possible, and to let inquiry guide you to the right solution. But the elimination of prejudice must not come at too high a cost. The elimination of prejudice should not be used as grounds for undermining a capacity for good judgment.

***

[Updated 4/14]

Finally, I’d like to consider the likeness that some philosophers have to devil’s advocates.

When we hear that term, the position sounds, well, devilish and contrarian. But actually, it is not so simple as all that. The devil’s advocate is a colloquial term used to describe the position of being appointed by the Catholic Church to argue a case against the canonization of would-be saints. For a long time, the official title of the devil’s advocate was “Promoter of the Faith”. The task of the devil’s advocate is not to formulate a consensus opinion, or even to speak from honest conviction. Instead, the devil’s advocate is supposed to cast doubt on the proffered argument in a rigorous way.

Devil’s advocates are intellectual attorneys at heart. They are people who are annoyed by salespeople who only give one side to the story, and who want to hear the other side before coming to judgment. In their way, they are motivated by a kind of charity: they want to hear the strongest case that can be made for the other team, so that the final synthesis does not end up being dull and short-sighted. Devil’s advocates are not as interested in getting at the facts of the matter (like the intellectual detective), or exploring the mystery of life (like curious children), as much they are interested in getting an alternative point of view out there. Like the contrarian, the devil’s advocate is motivated in reaction to other peoples’ arguments. But unlike the contrarian, the devil’s advocate actually has an intellectual spine. They can put forward an argument that holds together on its own merits.

The devil’s advocate is, at the end of the day, a kind of sophist. In principle, the sophist is the arch-enemy of the philosopher, and the accusation of a would-be philosopher of “sophistry” is supposed to be a slap in the face. Hence I would wager that consensus opinion in professional philosophy would have it that the metaphor of ‘devil’s advocate’ is a truly degenerate metaphor. The worry is that if we accept that the devil’s advocate is doing philosophy, then it would signal that the discipline is hopelessly corrupt.

But it would seem that professional philosophy does not practice what it preaches. The fact of the matter is that many undergraduate philosophy programs primarily teach their students to be able to think on either side of an issue, and to argue for it in a critical way. Moreover, the ability to think of opposing arguments is exactly one of the skill-sets that are used to sell students on the practical value of an education in philosophy. So, to the extent that one believes that the value of philosophy consists in its ability to produce a supple mind that is able to think around curves, one is saying that the value of philosophy is in its value of teaching how to be a devil’s advocate. If philosophers are to be more honest, and more coherent, they must be able to come to terms with the fact that the devil’s advocate is not necessarily doing bad philosophy.

I do think that there is a problem with this kind of sophistry, but the problem is not that the position of devil’s advocate is essentially corrupt or degenerate. Rather, I think one ought not be satisfied with advocating for the devil, unless it is as a means of first advocating something that really matters — for the truth, or for the good, or whatever. In other words: anyone who is satisfied with a life of being a devil’s advocate, is someone who is settling for philosophical mediocrity. But while the charge of mediocrity is a potent one, it does not uniquely belong to the devil’s advocate. After all, as a matter of fact, I have already shown that the accusation of mediocrity can be levelled against every single one of the metaphors in this post. For a good enough definition of ‘mediocrity’ is, “Someone who is split equally between virtues and vices” — as they all are.

About the author

[*] The first post received a welcome debugging from Eli Horowitz over at Rust Belt, whose focused attention forced me to think about how I can improve the presentation of the argument I’m trying to make. Still, whatever its faults, I think the basic thrust of the first post was defensible. And the second post received attention from diverse quarters, so I guess I got something right (or at least got something wrong in an interesting sort of way).

[**] It is easy to sell philosophy by characterizing it in terms of one kind of trope or another, or to mock philosophers for their ostensibly unearned pretentions. By looking closely at each metaphor, and finding the imperfections of each, we are in a position to appreciate the best philosophers as ones who cannot easily fit into a caricature.

[**] Hat-tip to my friend and colleague Olivia Sultanescu for the quote.

(Then come back here, obviously.)

In that post, Little argues that the very idea of authenticity is grounded in the idea of a ‘real self’. “When we talk about authenticity, we are presupposing that a person has a real, though unobservable, inner nature, and we are asserting that he/she acts authentically when actions derive from or reflect that inner nature.” For Little, without the assumption that people have “real selves” (i.e., a set of deep characteristics that are part of a person’s inner constitution), “the idea of authenticity doesn’t have traction”. In other words: Little is saying that if we have authentic actions, then those actions must issue from our real selves.

However, Little does not think that the real self is the source of the person’s actions. “…it is plausible that an actor’s choices derive both from features of the self and the situation of action and the interplay of the actions of others. So script, response, and self all seem to come into the situation of action.”

So, by modus tollens, Little must not think there is any such thing as authentic actions.

But —- gaaah! That can’t be right! It sure looks like there is a difference between authentic and inauthentic actions. When a homophobic evangelical turns out to be a repressed homosexual, we are right to say that their homophobia was inauthentic. When someone pretends to be an expert on something they know nothing about, they are not being authentic. When a bad actor is just playing their part, Goffman-style: not authentic.

So one of the premises has to go. For my part, I would like to take issue with Little’s assertion that the idea of authenticity “has no traction” if there is no real self. I’d like to make a strong claim: I’d like to agree that the idea of a ‘real self’ is an absurdity, a non-starter, but that all the same, there is a difference between authentic and inauthentic actions. Authenticity isn’t grounded in a ‘real (psychological) self’ — instead, it’s grounded in a core self, which is both social and psychological.

If you ever have a chance to wander into the Philosophy section at your local bookstore you’ll find no shortage of books that make claims about the Real Self. A whole subgenre of the philosophy of the ‘true self’ is influenced by the psychodynamic tradition in psychology, tracing back to the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott.

For the Freudians, the psyche is structured by the libido (id), which generates the self-centred ego and the sociable superego. When reading some of the works that were inspired by this tradition, I occasionally get the impression that the ‘real self’ is supposed to be a secret inner beast that lies within you, waiting to surface when the right moment comes. That ‘real self’ could be either the id, or the ego.

On one simplistic reading of Freud, the id was that inner monstrosity, and the ego was akin to the ‘false self’.* On many readings, Freud would like to reduce us all to a constellation of repressed urges. Needless to say (I hope), this reductionism is batty. You have to be cursed with a comically retrograde orientation to social life to think that people are ultimately just little Oedipal machines.

Other theorists (more plausibly) seem to want to say that the ego is hidden beneath the superego — as if the conscience were a polite mask, and the ego were your horrible true face. But I doubt that the ego counts as your ‘real self’, understood in that way. I don’t think that the selfish instincts operate in a quasi-autonomous way from the social ones, and I don’t think we have enough reason to think that the selfish instincts are developmentally prior to the selfish ones. Recent research done by Michael Tomasello has suggested that our pro-social instincts are just as basic and natural as the selfish ones. If that is right, then we can’t say that the ego is the ‘real self’, and the superego is the facade.

All the same, we ought to think that there is such a thing as an ‘authentic self’. After all, it looks as though we all have fixed characteristics that are relatively stable over time, and that these characteristics reliably ground our actions in a predictable way. I think it can be useful, and commonsensical, to understand some of these personality traits as authentic parts of a person’s character.

On an intuitive level, there seem to be two criteria for authenticity which distinguish it from inauthentic action. First, drawing on work by Harry Frankfurt, we expect that authenticity should involve wholeheartedness — which is a sense of complacency with certain kinds of actions, beliefs, and orientation towards states of affairs. Second, those traits should be presented honestly, and in line with the actual beliefs that the actor has about the traits and where they come from. And notice that both of these ideas, wholeheartedness and honesty, make little or no allusion to Freudian psychology, or to a mysterious inner nature.

So the very idea of authenticity is both a social thing and a psychological thing, not either one in isolation. It makes no sense to talk about authentic real self, hidden in the miasma of the psyche. The idea is that being authentic involves doing justice to the way you’re putting yourself forward in social presentation as much as it involves introspective meditation on what you want and what you like.

By assuming that the authentic self is robustly non-social (e.g., something set apart from “responses” to others), we actually lose a grip on the very idea of authenticity. The fact is, you can’t even try to show good faith in putting things forward at face value unless you first assume that there is somebody else around to see it. Robinson Crusoe, trapped on a desert island, cannot act ‘authentically’ or ‘inauthentically’. He can only act, period.

So when Little says that “script, response, and self all seem to come into the situation of action”, I think he is saying something true, but which does not bear on the question of whether or not some action is authentic. To act authentically is to engage in a kind of social cognition. Authenticity is a social gambit, an ongoing project of putting yourself forward as a truth-teller, which is both responsive to others and grounded in projects that are central to your concern.

In this sense, even scripted actions can be authentic. “I love you” is a trope, but it’s not necessarily pretence to say it. [This possibility is mentioned at the closing of Little's essay, of course. I would like to say, though: it's more than just possible, it's how things really are.]

* This sentence was substantially altered after posting. Commenter JMRC, below, pointed out that it is probably not so easy to portray Freud in caricature.

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Consider the following propositions:

1. A state is any organization that successfully upholds the possession of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

2. It is legitimate to defend against tyranny by the use of force.

Both premises look to be pretty plausible. The first is Max Weber’s definition of the state, which is widely influential. The second is a commonsense construal of the Second Amendment, once you formulate it in a way that is consistent with the Constitution [and other founding documents].

But what follows from these two premises? Well, anyone who makes a legitimate claim to the use of force, and who is not a part of the government or acting as a party to its laws, cannot help but be seeking to disrupt the state’s monopoly on the use of force. Hence, those who recognize the validity of this commonsense reading of second amendment are de facto advocates of vigilantism. Even if you are a centrist or left-libertarian who advocates gun control, so long as you recognize (2) is a plausible reading of the constitution, you are stuck moonlighting as an advocate for vigilantism. This is remarkable.

Obviously, many of us do not want to come to that conclusion. So there must be something wrong with one or both of these premises. Perhaps (1) is a vulgar statist formulation which pretends that ‘legitimacy’ equals morally rightness. So you might think that the difference between (1) and (2) trades on an ambiguity in the meaning of the term ‘legitimate’. But this critique does not seem destined for success. ‘Legitimacy’ seems to be a non-moral normative phrase, meaning something like, ‘is commonly recognized to hold a certain status’.

It’s a distressing and difficult puzzle, made all the more frustrating by the fact that it is so easy to formulate. Needless to say, quite a bit rides on the answer to the question. But whatever the answer is, the first step in a good conversation is for everybody to recognize a problem as a problem.

Something feels wrong with the state of philosophy today. From whence hast this sense of ill-boding come?

For this month’s Carnival, we shall survey a selection of recent posts that are loosely arranged around the theme of existential threats to contemporary philosophy. I focus on four. Pre-theoretic intuitions seem a little less credible as sources of evidence. Talk about possible worlds seems just a bit less scientific. The very idea of rationality looks as though it is being taken over by cognate disciplines, like cognitive science and psychology. And some of the most talented philosophers of the last generation have taken up arms against a scientific theory that enjoys a strong consensus. Some of these threats are disturbing, while others are eminently solvable. All of them deserve wider attention.

1. Philosophical intuitions

Over at Psychology Today, Paul Thagard argued that armchair philosophy is dogmatic. He lists eleven unwritten rules that he believes are a part of the culture of analytic philosophy. Accompanying each of these dogmas he proposes a remedy, ostensibly from the point of view of the sciences. [Full disclosure: Paul and I know each other well, and often work together.]

Paul’s list is successful in capturing some of the worries that are sometimes expressed about contemporary analytic philosophy. It acts as a bellwether, a succinct statement of defiance. Unfortunately, I do not believe that most of the items on the list hit their target. But I do think that two points in particular cut close to the bone:

3. [Analytic philosophers believe that] People’s intuitions are evidence for philosophical conclusions. Natural alternative: evaluate intuitions critically to determine their psychological causes, which are often more tied to prejudices and errors than truth. Don’t trust your intuitions.

4. [Analytic philosophers believe that] Thought experiments are a good way of generating intuitive evidence. Natural alternative: use thought experiments only as a way of generating hypotheses, and evaluate hypotheses objectively by considering evidence derived from systematic observations and controlled experiments.

From what I understand, Paul is not arguing against the classics in analytic philosophy. (e.g., Carnap was not an intuition-monger.) He’s also obviously not arguing against the influential strain of analytic philosophers that are descendants of Quine — indeed, he is one of those philosophers. Rather, I think Paul is worried that contemporary analytic philosophers have gotten a bit too comfortable in trusting their pre-theoretic intuitions when they are prompted to respond to cases for the purpose of delineating concepts.

As Catarina Dutilh Novaes points out, some recent commentators have argued that no prominent philosophers have ever treated pre-theoretic intuitions as a source of evidence. If that’s true, then it would turn out that Paul is entirely off base about the role of intuition in philosophy.

Unfortunately, there is persuasive evidence that some influential philosophers have treated some pre-theoretic intuitions as being a source of evidence about the structure of concepts. For example, Saul Kripke (in Naming & Necessity, 1972:p.42) explained that intuitiveness is the reason why there is a distinction between necessity and contingency in the first place: “Some philosophers think that something’s having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of it, myself. I really don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking”.

2. Philosophical necessity

Let’s consider another item from Paul’s list of dogmas:

8. There are necessary truths that apply to all possible worlds. Natural alternative: recognize that it is hard enough to figure out what is true in this world, and there is no reliable way of establishing what is true in all possible worlds, so abandon the concept of necessity.

In this passage Paul makes a radical claim. He argues that we should do away with the very idea of necessity. What might he be worried about?

To make a claim about the necessity of something is to make a claim about its truth across all possible worlds. Granted, our talk about possible worlds sounds kind of spooky, but [arguably] it is really just a pragmatic intellectual device, a harmless way of speaking. If you like, you could replace the idea of a ‘possible world’ with a ‘state-space’. When computer scientists at Waterloo learn modal logic, they replace one idiom with another — seemingly without incident.

If possible worlds semantics is just a way of speaking, then it would not be objectionable. Indeed, the language of possible worlds seems to be cooked into the way we reason about things. Consider counterfactual claims, like “If Oswald hadn’t shot Kennedy, nobody else would’ve.” These claims are easy to make and come naturally to us. You don’t need a degree in philosophy to talk about how things could have been, you just need some knowledge of a language and an active imagination.

But when you slow down and take a closer look at what has been said there, you will see that the counterfactual claim involves discussion of a possible (imaginary) world where Kennedy had not been shot. We seem to be talking about what that possible world looks like. Does that mean that this other possible world is real — that we’re making reference to this other universe, in roughly the same way we might refer to the sun or the sky? Well, if so, then that sounds like it would be a turn toward spooky metaphysics.

Hence, some philosophers seem to have gone a bit too far in their enthusiasm for the metaphysics of possible worlds. As Ross Cameron reminds us, David K. Lewis argued that possible worlds are real:

For Lewis, a world at which there are blue swans is a world with blue swans as parts, and so a world with round squares is a world with round squares as parts.  And so, to believe in the latter world is to believe in round squares.  And this is to raise a metaphysical problem, for now one must admit into one’s ontology objects which could not exist.  In brief, impossible worlds for Lewis are problematic because of how he thinks worlds represent: they represent something being the case by being that way, whereas his opponents think worlds represent in some indirect manner, by describing things to be that way, or picturing them to be that way, or etc.

And to make matters worse, some people even argue that impossible worlds are real, ostensibly for similar reasons. Some people…

…like Lewis’s account of possibilia but are impressed by the arguments for the need for impossibilia, so want to extend Lewis’s ontology to include impossible worlds.

Much like the Red Queen, proponents of this view want to do impossible things before breakfast. The only difference is that they evidently want to keep at it all day long.

Cameron argues that there is a difference between different kinds of impossibility, and that at least one form of impossibility cannot be part of our ontology. If you’re feeling dangerous, you can posit impossible concrete things, e.g., round squares. But you cannot say that there are worlds where “2+2=5″ and still call yourself a friend of Lewis:

For Lewis, ‘2+2=4’ is necessary not because there’s a number system that is a part of each world and which behaves the same way at each world; rather it’s necessary that 2+2=4 because the numbers are not part of any world – they stand beyond the realm of the concreta, and so varying what happens from one portion of concrete reality to another cannot result in variation as to whether 2+2 is 4.

While Cameron presents us with a cogent rebuttal to the impossibilist, his objection still leaves open the possibility that there are impossible worlds — at least, so long as the impossible worlds involve exotic concrete entities like the square circle and not incoherent abstracta.

So what we need is a scientifically credible account of necessity and possibility. In a whirlwind of a post over at LessWrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky argues that when we reason using counterfactuals, we are making a mixed reference which involves reference to both logical laws and the actual world.

[I]n one sense, “If Oswald hadn’t shot Kennedy, nobody else would’ve” is a fact; it’s a mixed reference that starts with the causal model of the actual universe where [Oswald was a lone agent], and proceeds from there to the logical operation of counterfactual surgery to yield an answer which, like ‘six’ for the product of apples on the table, is not actually present anywhere in the universe.

Yudkowsky argues that this is part of what he calls the ‘great reductionist project’ in scientific explanation. For Yudkowsky, counterfactual reasoning is quite important to the project and prospects of a certain form of science. Moreover, claims about counterfactuals can even be true. But unlike Lewis, Yudkowsky doesn’t need to argue that counterfactuals (or counterpossibles) are really real. This puts Yudkowsky on some pretty strong footing. If he is right, then it is hardly any problem for science (cognitive or otherwise) if we make use of a semantics of possible worlds.

Notice, for Yudkowski’s project to work, there has to be such a thing as a distinction between abstracta and concreta in the first place, such that both are the sorts of things we’re able to refer to. But what, exactly, does the distinction between abstract and concrete mean? Is it perhaps just another way of upsetting Quine by talking about the analytic and the synthetic?

In a two-part analysis of reference [here, then here], Tristan Haze at Sprachlogik suggests that we can understand referring activity as contact between nodes belonging to distinct language-systems. In his vernacular, reference to abstract propositions involves the direct comparison of two language-systems, while reference to concrete propositions involves the coordination of systems in terms of a particular object. But I worry that unless we learn more about the causal and representational underpinnings of a ‘language-system‘, there is no principled reason that stops us from inferring that his theory of reference is actually just a comparison of languages. And if so, then it would be well-trod territory.

3. Philosophical rationality

But let’s get back to Paul’s list. Paul seems to think that philosophy has drifted too far away from contemporary cognitive science. He worries that philosophical expertise is potentially cramped by cognitive biases.

Similarly, at LessWrong, Lukeprog worries that philosophers are not taking psychology very seriously.

Because it tackles so many questions that can’t be answered by masses of evidence or definitive experiments, philosophy needs to trust your rationality even though it shouldn’t: we generally are as “stupid and self-deceiving” as science assumes we are. We’re “predictably irrational” and all that.

But hey! Maybe philosophers are prepared for this. Since philosophy is so much more demanding of one’s rationality, perhaps the field has built top-notch rationality training into the standard philosophy curriculum?

Alas, it doesn’t seem so. I don’t see much Kahneman & Tversky in philosophy syllabi — just light-weight “critical thinking” classes and lists of informal fallacies. But even classes in human bias might not improve things much due to the sophistication effect: someone with a sophisticated knowledge of fallacies and biases might just have more ammunition with which to attack views they don’t like. So what’s really needed is regular habits training for genuine curiosity, motivated cognition mitigation, and so on.

In some sense or other, Luke is surely correct. Philosophers really should be paying close attention to the antecedents of (ir)rationality, and really should be training their students to do exactly that. Awareness of cognitive illusions must be a part of the philosopher’s toolkit.

But does that mean that cognitive science should be a part of the epistemologist’s domain of research? The answers looks controversial. Prompted by a post by Leah Lebresco, Eli Horowitz at Rust Belt Philosophy argues that we also need to take care that we don’t just conflate cognitive biases with fallacies. Instead, Horowitz argues that we ought to make a careful distinction between cognitive psychology and epistemology. In a discussion of a cognitive bias that Lebresco calls the ‘ugh field’, Horowitz writes:

On its face, this sort of thing looks as though it’s relevant to epistemology or reasoning: it identifies a flaw in human cognition, supports the proposed flaw with (allusions to) fairly solid cognitive psychology, and then proceeds to offer solutions. In reality, however, the problem is not one of reasoning as such and the solutions aren’t at all epistemological in nature… it’s something that’s relevant to producing a good reasoning environment, reviewing a reasoning process, or some such thing, not something that’s relevant to reasoning itself.

In principle, Eli’s point is sound. There is, after all, at least a superficial difference between dispositions to (in)correctness, and actual facts about (in)correctness. But even if you think he is making an important distinction, Leah seems to be making a useful practical point about how philosophers can benefit from a change in pedagogy. Knowledge of cognitive biases really should be a part of the introductory curriculum. Development of the proper reasoning environment is, for all practical purposes, of major methodological interest to those who teach how to reason effectively. So it seems that in order to do better philosophy, philosophers must be prepared to do some psychology.

4. Philosophical anti-Darwinism

The eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel recently published a critique of Darwinian accounts of evolution through natural selection. In this effort, Nagel joins Jerry Fodor and Alvin Plantiga, who have also published philosophical worries about Darwinism. The works in this subgenre have by and large been thought to be lacking in empirical and scholarly rigor. This trend has caused a great disturbance in the profession, as philosophical epistemologists and philosophers of science are especially sensitive to ridicule they face from scientists who write in the popular press.

Enter Mohan Matthen. Writing at NewAPPS, Mohan worries that some of the leading lights of the profession are not living up to expectations.

Why exactly are Alvin Plantinga and Tom Nagel reviewing each other? And could we have expected a more dismal intellectual result than Plantinga on Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos in the New Republic? When two self-perceived victims get together, you get a chorus of hurt: For recommending an Intelligent Design manifesto as Book of the Year, Plantinga moans, “Nagel paid the predictable price; he was said to be arrogant, dangerous to children, a disgrace, hypocritical, ignorant, mind-polluting, reprehensible, stupid, unscientific, and in general a less than wholly upstanding citizen of the republic of letters.”

My heart goes out to anybody who utters such a wail, knowing that he is himself held in precisely the same low esteem. My mind, however, remains steely and cold.

Plantinga writes, “Nagel supports the commonsense view that the probability of [life evolving by natural selection] in the time available is extremely low.” And this, he says, is “right on target.” This is an extremely substantive scientific claim—and given Plantinga’s mention of “genetic mutation”, “time available,” etc., it would seem that he recognizes this. So you might hope that he and Nagel had examined the scientific evidence in some detail, for nothing else would justify their assertions on this point. Sadly, neither produces anything resembling an argument for their venturesome conclusion, nor even any substantial citation of the scientific evidence. They seem to think that the estimation of such probabilities is well within the domain of a priori philosophical thought. (Just to be clear: it isn’t.)

Coda

Pre-theoretic intuitions are here to stay, so we have to moderate how we think about their evidential role. The metaphysics of modality cannot be dismissed out of hand — we need necessity. But we also need for the idea of necessity to be tempered by our best scientific practices.

The year is at its nadir. November was purgatory, as all Novembers are. But now December has arrived, and the nights have crowded out the days. And an accompanying darkness has descended upon philosophy. Though the wind howls and the winter continues unabated, we can find comfort in patience. Spring cannot be far off.

Issue No.147 of the Philosopher’s Carnival will be hosted by Philosophy & Polity. See you next year.

About the author

Andrei and Leila were on a walk when they came upon a sign.

When the rabbits stopped for pause, Andrei was ready to opine:

“I do not know who made this ugly thing”, said Andrei (with quite a fuss).

“Who says we ought not walk on the grass? How come the grass is not for us?”

“I do not know,” Leila said, ready at his wing.

“I suppose that we could go ahead and ask the author of the thing.

…But I do not know the author’s name, address, or anything even close.

For all I know, the author may have been a god, a man, or maybe even ghost.”

“That I doubt,” said Andrei. “And perhaps we do not even need to know,

who it was that wrote this sign and put it up for show.

The only thing we need is to know what makes it true.

And I say that — if the sign’s advice is correct — it is good for me and you.

Perhaps the grass is where the farmer hides his bombs and dynamite.

The sign is there to decrease our harm and increase in our delight.”

Satisfied, the rabbits continued walking, and got further down the way.

As they walked, a brand new sign was by the road, looming large in the mid-day.

But lurking below the sign was a low-down dirty thief,

Eavesdropping upon the rabbits, prepared to give them grief.

“Consolation for my victims, yes — and hence, these signs are true;

they are well suited for the credulous, for idiots, and for buffoons.

But I am no fool, so I will keep acting in whatever way I think is best,

So I will ignore these quaint suggestions, and let loose upon the rest.”

“It is plain enough,” said Leila, “That your victims suffer.

They lose the things that they once had, and this makes their lives much tougher.”

Leila wavered then, haunted by his words.

“But I see your point — why should anyone be moral if being moral is for the birds?”

“Ah,” says Andrei, “Well, I guess it depends on who you are.

If you are an anti-social goon, these signs will not take you very far.

So whenever a psycho nutter says, “What is morality to me?”

They do not have a need for trust, so no answer can be gleaned.

But if our new friend has a social bent, we say another thing:

‘Your reason to not steal is that you are a social be-ing.’”

“Hmm,” said the thief. “Alright, I admit that there’s some reason not to steal.

I just don’t know why you believe reasons obscure less than they reveal.

But perhaps, to see my point, you’d best follow me further up the hill,

To meet a friend of mine, whose name is Jack-Bill.”

On and up the hill they went, the three marched all in a line,

And at the top they met a creature that made the rabbits want to hide.

The thing they met was an abomination, a fluffy monster with two heads,

And either head spoke the contrary of what its neighbor said.

Said the thief to the creature: “Hullo, Jack-Bill — what say you to stealing?”

“It makes me giddy,” said the head of Bill. “No! Never!,” said Jack, “It leaves me reeling!”

“So you see,” said the thief, turning back to the troupe.

“All your talk of reason-this and reason-that? It’s just a lot of goop.

Despite their frightening looks, Jack-Bill is very nice.

We can call him “moral”, “pro-social”, or whatever you would like.

So moral claims aren’t really ‘true’ or ‘false’ when you get down to the brass tacks.

When we say a thing is moral we mean “hooray,” and when immoral, “boo to that”.

—

“Alright,” said Leila. “There’s no need to get too pensive –

Jack-Bill is incoherent, his capriciousness offensive.”

“Well, look,” said the thief, increasingly distressive.

“Like I said before, in words which you did not find impressive:

for me to say a moral claim is true, is to say to it that I consent.

For otherwise, I would have to defer to those whose brains are daft and bent.”

Andrei was quiet for a time, as if he were imitating mice:

and said, “That’s just fine, my new friend — but would you go to them for advice?

If not — if their lack of due deliberation makes for over-wrought demands –

Then they are not to be trusted, they can give you no commands.

So you trust yourself as final arbiter, when in the company of fools,

But that is only reason to make sensible friends, not to abandon all the rules.”

At this point, Jack-Bill roared as loud as seven oceans.

“I have ears, you know,” Bill said. “You hurt my emotions!”

Just then, the thief looked at Jack, waiting patient with a smirk.

Unexpectedly, Jack stared their way and said, “Actually, I agree with Bill — you’re all jerks.”

With that, they both breathed fireballs, and the other rabbits ran away.

Though later on, something happened in the coldest hours of the day…

Jack-Bill talked more to himself, exploring his sense of rational will,

And by degrees Jack-Bill split into two, creating Jack and Bill.

While before they had been united, when both indulged their inclinations,

Now, they found that talk in reasons made for healthier relations.

As time went on, it was not so hard for each to have their own perspectives,

Where earlier each were caught providing in rudderless correctives.

—

The trio ran and ran, into the forest deep,

and along the way, as they ran, Andrei and Leila lost the thief.

Andrei was bewildered at the canopy, and shivered at spooky sounds,

While Leila (made of sturdy stuff) offered to look around.

Alas, getting lost herself, the dark and dank surrounded,

The owls screeched out in hoots of despair, her direction was confounded.

She looked to and fro, and everywhere, the world looked all the same,

On the left there was little light; and to the right, the same.

Presently, however, she glimpsed a burning light:

A fairy, bright and blue, kept darting in and out of sight.

“Psst,” said the fairy, with a no-nonsense business sense.

“If morals are just good advice, it only works when between friends.

But out here in the darkness, the forest is unkind,

It picks off little strangers who are lost, unwary, and blind.

If moral claims are true, they would not be much good,

They would apply to your relations with your friend, but mean nothing in these woods.”

—

“Help me, then!” cried Leila. “We could really use a hand!”

“I would be glad to help,” the fairy replied. “My services are in high demand.”

“Indeed, for a low price of nine dollars and thirty cents,

My associates and I can get you out of this predicament.

So would you like to pay by cash, or cheque, or credit card?

Keep in mind, the offer is limited, so be sure to think fast and hard.”

“But I have no funds,” said Leila. “We’re lost and all alone!

Can’t, from the kindness of your heart, you just direct me to a phone?”

—

But no: the fairy receded back

into the inky black.

And Leila was left there waiting in the cold canopy,

And the leaves twisted back and forth, as if a dark conspiracy.

The dusk settled upon the land,

And two wayward rabbits sat alone, each waited for the end.

—

And whatever happened next,

depends mostly on you.

What makes the fairy wrong?

What can the rabbits say or do?