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Wednesday, March 01, 2006
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Analytic Philosophy For Life: Fear Factor!
First, Sean’s new post, just down the page, is really interesting. And you shouldn’t miss it.
Second, John Emerson has a set of interesting posts up at the Weblog (first, second, third) in which he goes on one of his trademark tears against analytic philosophy, while offering some thoughts on what we should have instead. He’s been reading John McCumber, Time in the Ditch
Unfortunately, I can’t lay hands on the McCumber (I even ordered it for our library myself, but somehow it never showed.) But I’ve got a different McCumber book - Reshaping Reason
What I want to do with this post is ask John an utterly friendly question because, although he and I have had some good conversations about this before, they have been marred by rather tragicomic miscommunication over ‘analytic philosophy’. Obviously it’s a sort of family resemblance/genealogy mix. But I (very standardly) take Frege, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein to be the ‘founders’ of analytic philosophy, as well as paradigm samples of the what the thing is like (with appropriate qualifications - e.g. no one else writes like Wittgenstein); whereas John has (very non-standardly) taken analytic philosophy to be a post WWII development. Specifically, he sees analytic philosophy as significantly contemporaneous with developments in the post-war professionalization of the discipline. I am happy to debate about that, but am not willing to use ‘analytic philosophy’ in such a way that paradigm analytic philosophers turn out not to be analytic at all. Humpty Dumpty is right about how you can mean what you like. But in this case it’s way too confusing. I am also somewhat suspicious of John’s habit of turning analytic-pedigree philosophers he likes into non-analytics, thereby immunizing his case from immanent critique by counter-example. But if he’s moderately careful, I’m OK with a little of that. I need to know whether John has come around to my way of thinking about who is and isn’t ‘analytic’. If he hasn’t, he should tell me now.
The reason this is pretty important, above and beyond the desirability of transcending total terminological muddle, is that it touches a rather crucial question - nay, frayed nerve - of motive.
From John’s first post: “The red meat here is McCumber’s claim that analytic philosophy became dominant in the American university in part because of McCarthyism. During the Fifties the various sorts of accusers seemed to have especially focused on philosophers, and a number of careers were ended. Because analytic philosophy was politically innocuous, it was less dangerous and became more attractive both to individual graduate students and to departments.” John adds, regarding on particular victim of McCarthyism: “I think that it’s reasonable to wonder whether Copi would have been so resolutely apolitical without the motive of fear.” Now I don’t mind this sort of speculation. Academic philosophy was a small enough ecosystem that any significant hit could well have generated path-dependence effects we are still feeling today. Also, so long as you get the ‘in part’ in there you are probably in the clear. Example: if I say ‘John McCumber’s thesis may be advanced in part out of ressentiment against the intellectual strength of analytic philosophy,’ who is going to disprove me? You see the point: you get that tainted drop in the mix and it can spread pretty far pretty fast. What bothers me, as you would guess, is that this ‘in part’ - if it is just allowed to sit there onstage by itself, performing solo - seems to amount to overlooking the obvious: Frege, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein were not motivated by fear of McCarthyism (I’m taking this as a premise.) Later analytic philosophers who philosophized like Frege, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein plausibly had like motives to those of Frege, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein - i.e. the default presumption would be that they had similar perspectives, ideals, intellectual tastes and tendencies. So there is really no clear need to get all Fear Factored up about why people turn out analytic. Some people like the stuff. This is where, from what I have managed to lay hands on, McCumber seriously falls down. And it looks like another book John cites, Fashionable Nihilism
I harp on this in part because, so it seems to me, you get this a lot. A standard variant is the Derrida interview option. (You can get a longer but rather typographically odd version here.)
They philosophize as if nothing has happened. And so, there is perhaps in their resentment against deconstruction a certain bad conscience before a philosophy that asks the question of Europe ... So, it must be emphasized that disinterest in the Holocaust often co-habits in American academic culture, probably for reasons of a bad conscience, with a prosecutorial attitude towards the least offence committed by European intellectuals, as the de Man or the Heidegger affairs have revealed, that is to say that the Americans, who were basically strangers towhat happened in Europe, well, far away, American intellectuals and professors are often de-politicized, unlike many European intellectuals, they are shut up in their academic institutions, and they don’t have any space for political intervention ...
Derrida is pulling a Hope-Tipping in the context of the De Man wars, which tried to pin Nazi associations on deconstruction by proxy. He is understandably irritated at analytic philosophers, in particular, being disrespectful to him. But the fact is: it’s silly to assume that analytic philosophy is caused by bad conscience about the Holocaust, because that is certainly not what attracted Russell and Wittgenstein to it. Why assume that later analytic philosophers do not, broadly, share the motives and perspectives of early analytic philosophers? Isn’t this possibility worth considering? The polemical game is, of course, to presuppose that your opponent’s position has no positive attractions, then busy yourself clinically tut-tutting about what trauma could have led to this patent disorder. I hope I love polemic as much as the next man, but part of loving it is not actually being fooled by it.
One of the complex ironies of this particular polemical stance - broadly shared by McCumber and Derrida, I don’t know about Emerson - is that it is rather ahistorical in its understanding of analytic philosophy. (If I were a Hope-Tipping man myself, which I am, I would say with a straight face that what separates analytic philosophers from Hegelians is that the former tend to have highly sophisticated historical views, but you would see through that ruse quickly enough.) As I was saying, I don’t mean just that no one could be horrified by the Holocaust or fearful of McCarthyism as early as, say, 1905, when Russell wrote “On Denoting” - “that paradigm of philosophy,” Frank Ramsey called it. I also mean there is a tendency to pretend no one could possibly find an abstract, ahistorical, Platonic-minded (if you will) approach to philosophy positively attractive. You presuppose this could only be a feeble shelter from one’s own failure of existential nerve. Put it that way, and the objection to this presupposition has already been called by its proper name. In their rationalism and scientism, the early analytic philosophers are among the most orthodox of footnotes to Plato. Serious attempts to treat historical views as of the philosophic essence have to wait until Hegel, give or take. You can think what you like about ahistorical rationalism in philosophy, but making noises about needing McCarthy or the Holocaust to explain how such a view could gain currency is either disingenuous or parochial, mistaking post-Hegelian thought for the range of genuine intellectual possibility. To put it another way, McCumber and Derrida are deeply Hegelian in their approaches. But analytic philosophy is a rejection of Hegel. A very considered one, since Russell and Moore were taught by Hegelians (of an oddly potted, British sort.) They didn’t arrive at an ahistorical conception of philosophy by accident or out of fear. They were rebels on its behalf. For what it’s worth.
Final note. It is interesting to compare and contrast broad-bore critiques of analytic philosophy and Theory. I am not too concerned about being wrong-footed here, because my position is that the possibility of general critique should always be freely granted. Trying to pretend the target doesn’t exist, for example, is a tedious waste of everyone’s time. But it is true that you have to be a bit careful.
By the by, my old grad school colleague Josh Dever has an interesting project, a philosophy family tree, which currently contains 6501 philosophers, including myself. Here is my descent (which treats getting your highest degree as a reproductive sex act with your main advisor, which is a bit kinky, but - eh):
Holbo, John
Sluga, Hans
Dummett, Michael
Anscombe, Gertrude
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Ramsey, Frank
Russell, Bertrand
Ward, James
Lotze, Hermann
Weiss, Christian Hermann
(Wittgenstein ends up descended from Ramsey, even though Ramsey was younger, because Ramsey signed off on the Tractatus as W’s thesis. Most peculiar case.)
So I have the same ancestor as Heidegger. Kinda neat.
Heidegger, Martin
Rickert, Heinrich
Windelband, Wilhelm
Lotze, Hermann
Weiss, Christian Hermann
It’s funny. I don’t know a thing about Christian Weiss except that, googling around, it seems that he maintained that philosophy and the history of philosophy are separate disciplines. Which goes to show even Heideggerians have this in them.
Oh, and getting back to John Emerson: I’ll bet he’ll say I didn’t say enough about his Deweyan ideals. In fact, I am very sympathetic. But I wanted to clear up this ‘analytic philosophy’ stuff first.
Also, I have a complaint about that really historically wild Barbara Johnson preface to Derrida’s Dissemination, which John Ransom has been praising. What’s that about? But I’ll save it for another day.
Comments
I prefer philosophers who don’t descend from Frege and Russell. (I even count Husserl as a descendant of Frege, wrongly; I’m not a “continental”.) I have very mixed feelings about Wittgenstein. I know nothing about Moore, though I suspect him to be to blame for the second-ordering of ethics. Back in the day I actually liked Ryle and Austen, but their tendency seems to have diminished in philosophy and to have gone into sociology and psychology.
Wittgenstein is a very mixed bag and I like him mostly because of his non-analytic weirdnesses. Toulmin started as an analytic but feels that he was rejected, though I can’t document that from here. I don’t believe that I’ve appropriated any other analytics to my cause.
Defnition-wise, I have also been accused of using too broad a definition, rather than too narrow. Some say that analytic philosophy proper lasted from 1955 or so to 1980 or so, and was destroyed by ??Davidson?? ??Quine?? The definitions of schools are essentially-contested, and are sometimes banners of belonging and sometimes polemical smears.
During the fifties and sixties a wave of depoliticization and scientization swept through many academic disciplines, and many contemporary academics are fastidious about avoiding political engagement and popular writing, and contemptuous of anyone who behaves differently.
I’ll post again, but I do not object to the very existence of analytic philosophy, but to its dominance.
My objections to analytic philosophy itself are to: 1) the preference for second-order writing, 2) the reluctance to write for non-specialist audiences, 3) the fussy claims to a rigor which is attained at the cost of a crippling limitation of scope 4) refusal of political and ethical engagement, and 5) a preference for past-oriented descriptive, analytic writing over future-oriented, synthetic, constructive writing (several separate points which are closely related).
I do not regret the loss of synthetic philosophy a la Hegel. By and large I am not a “continental”. While I regret the lack of writing for general audiences, I do not wish that philosophers would write inspiring self-help books or ideological manifestos.
As far as the origins of early analytic philosophy, Popper, Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists seemed to have been motivated by the intention of defining a language of discourse on a scientific basis which would be rigorous enought to rule out a lot of the ideological writing which the objected to.
Europe between about 1890 and 1930 was washed with all sorts of looniness (at least as bad as the American Sixties), some of it purportedly scientifically based (e.g. Spengler)—along with a lot of other more sensible stuff which claimed to be scientific but wasn’t (Toynbee, perhaps). Wittgenstein in particular seemed to object to all attempts, including humane ones, to find truth-value in ethical or political principles, though what he actually wanted is seemingly unknown—I follow Toulmin on this.
The problem with the attempts to purify language is that they not only ruled out loony extremist ideology, they made any kind of primary ethical or political discourse difficult.
I think that McCumber made too much of McCarthy specifically. The “end of ideology” promoted by Popper and Daniel Bell was the real turning point, and along with this came a move toward specialized technocracy throughout most of the university.
I really don’t think anyone says analytic philosophy lasted from 1955 to 1980, so I just won’t let you use that one. You can’t make me! It is possible to maintain that analytic philosophy ended in about 1960 if you want to understand it as having been killed by Quine. (Quine wasn’t killing anything as late as 1980, although he was hanging on OK.)
Your objections look to me like statements of preference or, if they really are supposed to be objections, somewhat question-begging. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, but I think your approach - through the ditch of McCarthyism, courtesy of McCumber - doesn’t really help you much.
The second-order thing I’ll sort of give you. But I worry that it doesn’t come to much more than the thought that academics, after a while, tend to get their heads stuck in some cloud or other. Analytic philosophers are funny in this way, but I’m honestly not sure why you would pick on them as funnier than the others. (But do laugh, by all means. Good heavens, get it out of your system.) It’s just that the fact that this complaint was very eloquently made by Aristophanes militates against blame being lodged too squarely against McCarthy.
The limitation of scope is pretty much supposed to be a feature, not a bug. It’s a hard one to referee because - well, this goes to the point that you aren’t really saying anything is wrong so much as suggesting an adjustment to the ecosystem. You could hardly have generalists without specialists for the former to work their welcome generalizing upon. If everyone is a generalist, you just have a gaggle of dilettantes, albeit potentially ethically committed.
As to political and ethical engagement: do you find it really so problematic that Russell sort of separated his specialized philosophy and his general political activism. I’m not sure that’s such a bad model, really. Do you really want to advocate activism as a primary mode of operation within the context of a professional teaching environment? I find that sort of dubious.
As to writing for non-specialist audiences: I guess I don’t feel that there is such an awful lack. Quite a few authors seem to me to do OK in this vein, though there should be more.
Returning to the specialization issue: I feel this myself. That it turns into dry, boring scholastic twiddles suspicously quick, and I wish it wouldn’t. But the intellectual impulses that produce this seem to me very hard to fault in general. You start with some reasonable thoughts and methods and you end a raving scholastic. It’s a problem. I’m not sure that just objecting to the endpoint tells you how to break the cycle.
Dewey ... I just wrote a review of a new book by Hilary Putnam, “Ethics Without Ontology”. The latest bend in the Putnam river is full-on Deweyite Pragmatism. But it seems sort of thin so far. Partly this is a problem with the analytic route by which Putnam arrives. It seems to completely burn itself up as fuel, leaving one with the impression that there was no particular advantage to figuring out why Quine was wrong. Better just to IGNORE him and going straight to Dewey. On the other hand, Dewey and his ‘intelligent approaches to practical problems’ does not seem to me distinctively philosophical, although I like the guy alright. I sort of feel that this way lies many more Matthew Yglesiases. Which is something I think is really good. A general sort of rationalism let loose on practical policy questions. An experimental, fair-minded spirit. Matthew Yglesias seems to me like a fine example of a philosophical intelligence let loose on talking sensibly about practical problems. But are we supposed to stock our departments with folks like him, rather than with folks like the ones who taught him, i.e. analytic philosophers?
I meant ‘burn itself up as fuel, without actually getting you anywhere’, so you might as well have just walked to Dewey - who isn’t that far out - if that’s where you are ultimately supposed to be.
oh why even bothew wif hashing this out fuwthew. Fow Dewwida to have insinuated that Wusseww, say, was somehow unwiwwing to confwont the howwows of WWII is pwima facie evidence of Dewwida’s own ignowance if not idiocy. De onwy thing mowe nauseating than Gomewson’s sentimentaw Deweyesqwe twaddwe is HOwbo commenting on it.
Whenever x starts commenting on any post about Russell, I cannot resist putting him in the dialectric chair and setting it on ‘Fudd’. On a more serious note, since x, aka all those other names he uses, is manic-verificationist, and that’s pretty much it, I am allowing him one manic comment, and one verificationist comment, per day. Until I get bored with enforcing that policy. - the management
This one guy did indeed say that analytic came to an end at a certain point and that I was wrong for that reason. Honest.
When I say “analytic philosophy” I primarily mean “whatever it was that took control of American philosophy during the fifties and sixties, and whose hegemony was unsuccessfully challenged around 1980”. I’ll call it “banalytic bilosophy” instead, if you want a more specific label.
As always, I don’t abject to the presence of second-order ethic, for example, but the seeming lack of interest, or refusal, in first-order ethics. David Velleman came along right on time with an example of what I meant, and it was on his relevant political blog too.
On Russell, I very strongly regret that he didn’t continue what he started with his book “Power: a Social Analysis”. He was trying to do public philosophy of high quality, but his book was ignored. Most of his other stuff seems journalistic and second-rate to me. (A possible successor of Russell here was Ernest Gellner, who I believe was a Popperian too. Steven Lukes and others of his students have done a lot of interesting stuff, but they’re almost all British. He would count as an analytic, but not as a banalytic, since he rejected the later Wittgenstein and followed the “big-picture” style of Popper, who was a transitional figure.)
And my first comment crossed with John’s second, so - in blaming him for proceeding through the ditch - I hadn’t yet heard him say he didn’t like the ditch so much.
But if it’s ‘end of ideology’ technocracy you object to, why blame the analytics? That’s a much more general movement.
“The problem with the attempts to purify language is that they not only ruled out loony extremist ideology, they made any kind of primary ethical or political discourse difficult.” I agree with this, actually, but I don’t accept the form of argument. If you really want to address these issues, you have to think more about how these folks thought themselves into these positions, rather than just saying the results aren’t palatable. (If you are already sure what the right answers are, you don’t really need phiosophy anyway, and if you aren’t, why so much negative judging of analytic philosophy for ending up in the wrong place?)
"4) refusal of political and ethical engagement,”
John Emerson, do you consider Rawls to be an analytic philosopher or not? Just wondering.
The analytics were part of something bigger. Elsewhere I’ve also gone after neo-classical economics. It’s all over the place. One thing at a time.
I should have said “impossible” rather than difficult. If anyone insists on criteria for primary ethical discourse which would make it impossible, I’ll just reject them out of hand and go on without them. If they claim to be able to prove that primary ethical discourse is either unnecessary or bad, the ball’s in their court. Wittgenstein is very interesting on ethics, but as it stands his writing on this topic is so incredibly confused that what he says can only be stimulating or suggestive.
Rawls and Nozick seem to be the exceptions, if there are any. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty claimed that nothing that Rawls wrote required or assumed analytic philosophy. If Rorty was right, Rawls would be an original source then, not dependent or part of what came before.
How engaged was Rawls? I tend to agree with John Gunnell:
“Although John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), as well as what many consider to be its ideological and philosophical counterpart, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), could be construed as alluding to or reflecting, or in some way speaking to or about, politics, they were distinctly contextless works written by professional philosophers which lifted the perennial debates about liberalism and the ground of values to a new level of abstraction while apparently allowing academic commentators to believe that they were actually saying something about politics." (John Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory, Chicago, 1993, pp. 272-3.)
I don’t really understand what you want when you say you want academic philosophers - in their academic capacities - to be ‘engaged’. Writing about current events? Erecting barricades? Both? Neither?
Writing about political topics in the context of the issues of the day, and more important, looking at the world in a broad sense and trying to discern what the important issues are and bring philosophical insight to them.
There’s a very strong tendency to abstract political discussion from anything concrete and contemporary, and in many cases to abstract discussions from any concrete reality or history at all.
Well, the Gunnell quote, even if you agree with it, only refers to _A Theory of Justice_—not _Political Liberalism_ or _The Law of Peoples_. But really I think that you’re trying a time-honored rhetorical device with Rawls: redefine any group to not include the people who have the characteristics that would falsify your criticism. Refering to Rawls as one of the exceptions, as if he’s one out of an equally representative thousand, is just a bit comic—after all, on the “That Was Then” thread, there _A Theory of Justice_ is at number 12.
I don’t especially like Rawls, but if there were more Rawlses, I might not be saying these things. I have mixed feelings about Gellner and his people too, but if there were more people like them in the US, I’d probably feel differently too.
At one point the people whining about the American analytic-philosophy stranglehold included the Popperians, believe it or not. Popper helped bring the present situation about, but he was a big-picture guy and didn’t fit well into the analytic mold.
oops--that’s synthetic a posteriori. two things, however humble: do you mean to suggest there are alternatives to scientific materialism (which QUine upholds fairly consistently, with some platonic considerations perhaps) and denying the analytic/synthetic divide. Emerson is I believe a mystic at heart and all of this is sort of a ruse to put forth some new age or cypto-idealist view.
Frankly, given its goals, Left2Right seems like a justification of my idea that analytic philosophy isn’t very relevant to actual politics. I followed their thread on relativism awhile back, and it seemed terribly thin and far off the mark.
No, it’s relevant. You are again sort of thinking that AP is separate from scientific materialism. AP is generally the clarifcation of language; it’s meant to make sceintific language more precise. It’s really not so poetic or grand as say Nietzsche or Hegel and that is one reaosn why lit. types detest it, I believe. The symbolic language, quantifiers, predication, etc. are not about metaphysics; it’s about precision, and yes verification-- language and semantics as essentially mathematical.
The metaphysical claims or entailments are secondary. There is, say in the Tractatus, a denial of platonic essences (in some sense the Fregean abstract objects are NOT some essential aspect of AP). Language is thus referential, not “meaningful” per se; (empiricism itself a neglected part of AP). And what could be more important than logic and empiricism to some sort of reasonable politics? There is always to Emerson’s writing this idea that somehow empiricism has failed, that some quasi-mystical approach to politics and reality must replace it. That is not the case. THe problems are not with logic or empiricism; instead there is not enough attention to data, and verifying various claims about data: we need more biologists and chemists and empirical psychologists and far fewer armchair philosophers or artistes: or at least philosophers should have an interest in the physical sciences, in real ugly situations such as the oil business or commodity markets. There are no magical solutions to the oil crisis or transportation or corporate tyranny or housing insanities in LA and SF; nor are there dogmatic solutions via marx or xtianity or Hegel, etc.
Analytic philosophy also seems to be irrelevant to mental health issues.
Actually, while I think it is true that Derrida is responding to the analytics with a little tu quoque-ism, the question of the institutionalization of analytic philosophy does have to do, I think, with politics.
There’s a book by Phillip Morowski—Cyborg Dreams—that is writen in an absurd style, but that follows up his geneology of neoclassical economics with a very dense history of the “strategic” turn in economics—with the John van Neumann, the Rand corporation and the Cowles commission in starring roles. One of the things about Mirowski is that he appreciates WWII’s effect in creating command and control mechanisms and embedding a game theory mentality into organizations. It is hard not to think that something similar was happening in philosophy. We have learned to think of analytic philosophy as the linguistic turn—but I think a case can be made for thinking of it as the strategic turn, in tandem with the silent slowing off of old models in economics (those having to do with classical mechanics) and the new armature of game theory.
If analytic philosophy turned the pursuit of truth into a set of strategies—and I think it did—we can start understanding the real political import of analytic philosophy. There’s a suggestive coincidence between the technical academic support given to the Pentagon’s management of the Vietnam war, Quine’s own support for that war, and Rawls’ Great Society liberalism which should speak to historians who wonder why, as the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. developed a nuclear capacity and engaged in atom bomb testing that actually brought civilization to the brink of annihilation several times—and that was actually intended to, as a strategy—no American philosopher seemed to notice. Or, if they did, it was merely to teach Rand kids how to play with ever more sophisticated strategies. Surely there is something here to look at. Mirowski is interested in the conjuction of Neumann, Turing, and the introduction of new models, via Rand and the Military, into economic discourse. I imagine there are treasure troves there for the right philosophical geneologist.
oops. Sloughing. Sorry.
I think that the effect of the 50s wasn’t to make the university right-wing, but more to make it apolitical and technocratic (methodology instead of ideology). Many analytic philosophers and many of the RAND technocrats were far left politically by American standards.
A lot of the supposed treason in US government came when Americans in government became overly sympathetic to our WWII Soviet and Red Chinese allies. So there had to be a switch in 1948, and rather than switch to a rightwing anti-Communist ideology, in the university at least the switch was to technocracy, neutrality, objectivity, etc. That way there wouldn’t have to be a second switch when we changed alliances again (e.g. Nixon-China).
INteresting, but this all hangs on an assessment of WVO Quine’s politics, sir? what about Lord Bertie? He was anti-’Nam, as were some other AP types. If this is merely politics how about JPS and Simone De Beauvoirs’ hangin out with the maoists, Pol Pot in paree with some of the postmods (possibly Foucault), the de man thing, or the postmods and that maoist rag Quel Tel or whatever for comparison.
There are no moral “facts.”
Russell had an extraordinarily complicated political trajectory. Apparently he was a pretty hard-core anti-Communist after WWII.
Being an anti-Communist per se was OK, BTW.
I think goof put his finger on it. The difference between analytic philosophy pre-war and post war is all about the politics of Russell, Carnap, Neurath, etc—all sterling socialists. The institutionalization that came, post-WWII, forgot that history.
I’d rather disagree that the Rand types were leftwing. There was, aas Mirowski points out, a left wing—there were the Oppenheimers and the Norbert Weiners—and a right wing—the Tellers, the von Neumanns—and oddly enough, where these two parted company, in terms of economics, was over competition vs. efficiency. Competition, the old legitimizing theme in liberal economics, was supplanted (the way Mirowski tells the story) by efficiency, with the right forging an alliance between state that devoted immense sums to the military while adhering officially to a nostalgic standard of the smallest possible state and the justification of large corporations to fill out places in the capitalist economy as brokers of the most efficient markets. There was, in fact, intense debates between Hayek and Oskar Ryszard Lange, a Polish socialist who developed an economics in which small enterprises had more space to compete under socialism than under the efficient markets model.
All of which is a tangent. Sorry. The larger point is that, just as economists substituted efficiency for competition as the justification for free enterprise, analytic philosophers substituted infinite formalized epistemology—sciences of strategy—for the generalist tendencies of the earlier analytics. An excellent book (not one that is consonant with my thesis, but that contains some supporting material) is Alberto Coffa’s pretty magnificent The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap : To the Vienna Station.
I’m reading Mirowski. “Left-wing” would mostly be from an American perspective, and only for some (either in the RAND group or in analytic philosophy.)
I find Mirowski hard to read, not exactly because he uses a lot of technical terminology, but more because he doesn’t. In other words, he refers to fairly difficult concepts of game theory or economics on the assumption that you pretty well know what they are. It’s easy to read, but hard for a non-specialist to understand. Lots of fascinating stuff, though.
Roger, I disagree with a lot of that - “infinite formalized epistemology - sciences of strategy”, for example. For one thing, I don’t know what that means. For another, if I did, I suspect I would find that Russell’s theory of ramified types put him on the infinite side, thereby refuting your view. (Really I’m just hoping the troll will say ‘Russell’s ramified type theory’ so I can Fudd him again.) Basically the point about how some analytics are political activists and socialists and others aren’t just goes to show: analytic philosophy itself neither mandates nor precludes this sort of thing. So trying to get an angle on analytic philosophy from this political angle seems to me confused. That is to say, the ‘difference between pre and post war analytic philosophy’ you see seems to me like the difference between analytic philosophy in LA and in New York. Namely, it’s nothing really to do with the PHILOSOPHY. If you want to be a political activist, but you find analytic philosophy to be the most sophisticated, compelling sort, be a politically activist analytic philosopher. Where’s the obstacle? HINT: the problem is that there is a tendency to regard attraction to analysis as a character flaw, hence training in analysis as cultivation of character flaws. But look at Russell. Did writing Principia Mathematica keep him from thinking big thoughts? Not really? The ‘analysis is a character flaw’ move is just part of a common polemical strategy.
I don’t think that analysis is neutral between political involvement and uninvolvement; I think that it tends against involvement. And it does so in part because of its method, which makes it difficult to make usable first-order statements about political issues. I remember when Rorty mentioned in one of his books that philosophers don’t get appointed to big-issue committees on things like welfare reform, that I dreamed up the Pythonesque scenario of an other-minds debate breaking out.
If analytic philosophical methods were applied to political concepts and issues by someone with a deep involvement in the politics and the history involved, and if the philosophical tools were customized to the political work at hand, I could see value coming from that. But the stuff I end up reading always seems to begin by abstracting the discussion from concrete contexts right from the start, and carrying on a schematic and usually hypothetical discussion from there. The empiricist (or historical) idea that understanding profits from abundant contact with the data seems to be denied by analytics.
Incidentally, at Kotsko’s blog Dominic Murphy recommended a few books for me to look at to change my mind, and I’d be willing to be given the names of a few more.
Actually, John, I think the last part of your reply contradicts the first part—that Russell thinks ‘big thoughts” is what I was saying, no? And that the institutionalization of philosophy leads to the Gettier problem being a philosophy job multiplier is, uh, sorta my point. Jerry Fodor seems to find a dividing mark in the last fifty years too (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/fodo01_.html). If you read about poor Carnap’s last years in American universities, the whole encyclopedic endeavor of the Vienna school—and it did not chose to call itself positivist for nothing—is drained off in technical and, I would say, strategic questions. What does somebody else know about what you know?
I’m certainly not blaming analytic philosophy. That would be pointless, and besides, I like analytic philosophy. Besides which, really, if you compare, say, Tarski’s effort to find a way to purify truth from any semantic impurity and the way Heidegger (like some character out of Moliere) kept trying to find ways of saying Sein (Seyn, or maybe Seyn barred) that were divested of any meaning in life world around him, I imagine the set of motives here are pretty close. Which would make sense—really, I have doubts that two completely different philosophical schools would spring up in two close cultures, sharing a politics, an economics, and a common history.
When you say, “trying to get an angle on analytic philosophy from this political angle seems to me confused,” I am not really sure why that should be more confusing than trying to get an angle on, say, economics or climatology from a political angle. If you don’t think the latter can be done, look at the controversies roiling NASA right now. You might not want that to be the case, but that is not a claim about social reality, that is a claim about what you would like philosophy, or climatology, or cybernetics, or whatever to be.
ROger of LI shows up and humiliates even the great minds of the valve eh. There may be an issue about reductionism. QUine, like his pal skinner, was rather eager to dispense with much; positivism (and its stepchild behaviorism), does have political consequences, and Quine’s pro-Nam stance should be considered in the context of his anti-"mentalism" and opposition to any sort of traditional philosophy, and dare we say, humanist thinking. perhaps Russell’s own reluctance to embrace strict empiricism and physicalism had something to do with his political views…
hows that Johhny H., (sp. frauduli berkeleynanicus).
Roger, I’ve only got a few minutes before running off to teach. I’ll qualify one point: per the post, mostly what I’m objecting to is the rhetoric of only saying ‘perhaps this is in part due to professionalization’ and then not following it up with any other ‘in part’. I don’t deny that professionalization suited analytic philosophy, and this probably had something to do with its ascendancy. The point is more that the ideal of analytic philosophy as specialized attack on little problems is not only clearly prior and independent to the move to professionalization; it is also due more to Russell’s influence than anyone else’s. Which, given Russell’s character and professional situation, should be sufficient to establish that it is possible to find this view positively attractive. ‘All the Big answers are wrong. We need small answers.’ It isn’t the case that it only looks good if you are professionally deformed. This is shaving the point fine, because really what I am objecting to is a rhetorically illegitimate presentation of a point that, properly presented, deserves serious consideration. Fair enough. What the political angle doesn’t give you is any critical angle on the VALIDITY of the analytic point of view, but I think Emerson (and certainly McCumber) are sort of reaching for a way of critiquing the validity of the analytic point of view.
“Roger of LI shows up and humiliates even the great minds of the valve eh.” Roger isn’t trying to humiliate me, that’s a different game. (pats goof on the head. cute kid, but not exactly the brightest klieg in the ballpark.)
Mr. Emerson occasionally seems to hint at, intentionally or not--as do some of the postmod bloggers-- at teleology. (and delete this Herr Holboe if it offends ye). Heidegger produced a lot of muck but his Question Concerning Technology raises some interesting questions in regards to the “telos” of technik (and one might read it without subsribing to his thought in toto).
That’s not to suggest that Hei. has the right answer, but he does at least suggest that techne is not in itself valuable. The QCT is not simply criticizing technik because it is instrumentalism, but seems to suggest (in a somewhat Hegelian manner), that technik came into being, and is perhaps not completely consciously willed or intentioned--.There is sort of an issue there regarding the purposes and aims of science, of technology which I don’t think many AP types addressed (tho CS Peirce did write on some related and somewhat Hegelian issues--his “syncretism"--but does not seem to establish any sort of valid philosophy of history or progress--maybe that’s process philosophy to some degree, yet proc. phil would seem to need some type of foundation in teleology, and perhaps in probability---) Perhaps someone like Mr. Roger could flesh it out better.
But the fact is: it’s silly to assume that analytic philosophy is caused by bad conscience about the Holocaust,
Yes, it certainly would be.
OK, I’ll bite. What do you think Derrida’s argument is, Matt?
It would appear that analytic philosophy and literature have at least this in common: critics who insist it should stop being what it is--namely philosophy and literature--and become something else instead, namely politics. If you don’t really care for works of literature or works of philosophy that aren’t finally ways of “intervening” politically, then why not just leave them alone and go do politics?
I think Daniel is sort of right. John Emerson writes: “I don’t think that analysis is neutral between political involvement and uninvolvement; I think that it tends against involvement.” But this is trivially true of everything except PURE involvement. If you have a conception of philosophy on which the proper way to do it is not terribly politically engaged, although you yourself are a political activist, it is no good complaining that this way of doing philosophy is not properly engaged. (I don’t think it is right to dismiss politically engaged philosophy out of hand, because that might indeed be better. But the fundamental philosophic question is not ‘is this sufficiently politically engaged?’ but ‘does this make sense, is it insightful, perceptive, wise, intelligent?’)
Dan, because a lot of the philosophical tradition was political. Locke, Plato, Mill, and Dewey all wrote major works which were at least as political as they were philosophical. Plenty of others wrote works which were philosophical but also political. The little dividing lines you allege are figments of your obsession.
I do not demand that all philosophy be politically engaged, but I think that some should be, and I think that philosophy would be improved, philosophically speaking, by more political engagement.
John,
not that.
You’ll be delighted to hear that I’ve partly restored the original comment thread to Dylan’s post (Haloscan still had some of it). That discussion left me dissatisfied, however; I may try to say why exactly at some later point.
Dan,
For what it’s worth, I think the example of Sartre (which you implicitly caricature) is a plague (if you’ll pardon the pun) of sorts, unduly lingering and afflicting perceptions, even dignifying what are otherwise merely common prejudices. But then a lot has happened in the world of letters since then, though you wouldn’t know it from the BBC’s philosophy series, &c.
Dan, what critics are doing that? Because you argue that a certain way of doing philosophy in a certain system of institutions is political doesn’t tell you that it should be politically one way or another. When, in fact, a corpus of knowledge—what you should know—is shaped by a set of philosophers in a certain way for students of philosophy, they are simply doing politics. They might also be doing science. The two aren’t incompatible.
John, huh, I don’t read Russell’s career like that at all. In fact, I’d say the opposite—that Russell stopped doing philosophy because, in part, it became a series of technical problems. Russell’s willingness to stretch himself out—to contact behaviorists and economists—was in the best British liberal tradition, and I don’t think he understood or appreciated what happened after the war. The excitement went out of philosophy. And I think he did not like what he saw of Wittgenstein’s latter period partly because he didn’t like the whole notion of the language game. But I guess this depends on something you don’t accept—that there was a qualitative change in analytic philosophy after WWII.
Who knows, maybe it was all happening in 1920 and 1930, but I doubt it. I have read a lot of your average philo journal articles from that time on JSTOR, and they seem very different from the articles in the same journals in the 50s. I might be wrong. I’m no Russell expert, for one thing.
Phudd, I think the odd non-career of process philosophy—an outlier, although its roots in Whitehead’s stuff should be impeccable - is one of those problems in the history of philosophy that I bet I could fit into my sketchy little schema, given world enough and time. On the other hand, I gotta get to bed.
Matt, the comments don’t seem to be showing when I click the link. I would have linked to your thread if it had still existed when I made the post. I do think it was a very, um, DISsatisfactory thread, doomed to have no THERE there, given the starting point. I honestly don’t know what you think Derrida is arguing, but I really think it is very odd to try to rest any weight on what is, transparently, irritated snark from bottom to top. It’s an interview. I’m not going to hang the man for talking smack, off the cuff, about people who clearly irritate him. But he is.
The comments have been elevated to the post (the link, again).
It is just an interview, you’re quite correct.
You deny that Derrida, John McCumber, and John Emerson have anything on this topic on which to rest any weight?
Oh, and I am a descendent of Bakhtin.
Roger writes: “In fact, I’d say the opposite—that Russell stopped doing philosophy because, in part, it became a series of technical problems.” Russell, at all stages of his career, has a taste BOTH for the highly technical and the general; he’s a specialist and a public intellectual. He certainly has a taste for technicality early on: Principia Mathematica. I think his inability to see the value in Wittgenstein’s approach has a lot to do with personality clash - for which I mostly blame Wittgenstein’s rudeness to his old teacher. The anti-Russellian rhetoric of “Philosophical Investigations” would be pretty hard to swallow, if you were the target. An interesting example of a debate across the timeline is Russell rebutting Strawson’s (rather Wittgensteinian) criticisms of Russell. A very late piece by Russell (I don’t have it handy.) Russell does a very good job of standing up for the technical solutions he had been pushing since the teens. I consider myself a Wittgensteinian, pretty much (full disclosure.)
I do accept that there are qualitative changes - big ones - after the war. But they have to be understood as transformations of what came before, which leave a lot in place. Analytic philosophy talking itself into logical positivism, then positivism talking itself out of itself, leaving no clear ‘method of analysis’ standing. Rather awkward. Two dogmas and all that. Stuff starts to spread out after that. In insisting on continuity I was leaning too far out that way, in anticipation that Emerson might try to define all that stuff out of ‘analytic philosophy’. Sorry for the confusion. Process philosophy. That’s a funny one. I read a lot of Whitehead for about a month, once. It’s very interesting stuff.
Matt, I’ll just repeat my ‘in part’ point. If you just say ‘perhaps people become analytic philosophers in part out of fear’, even if you give that some weight by narrating real institutional history, it is still a bit of a rhetorical cheat IF you don’t consider any other ‘in parts’, and IF this is part of a larger effort aiming at philosophic critique. I am MORE than willing to consider a broadly ecological argument that McCarthyism plus professionalization bumped off some non-analytics, and discouraged some others, so a small ecosystem came to be dominated by one species, which then managed to breed and exclude competitors in an institutional sense. This is a path-dependence thesis. It could be true. I’m not really sure (and I haven’t been able to read McCumber’s book.) The problem is: I fear it is too tempting to play up the sense that this shows there is something wrong with analytic philosophy. Why should it show that? (You might say that it refutes the view that analytic philosophy could only rise to the top by being the cream. But, honestly, analytic philosophers don’t defend themselves with bad Darwinian arguments. So this isn’t much progress.)
On the political question. I think there’s a difference between arguing that philosophy departments should become, say, barricade manning departments of marxist agitation and thinking that there’s very little worldliness, right now, in philosophy departments and philosophical work…
It’s very popular - and at time appropriate - to say that literary humanities no longer speak to a broad audience, that’s the field’s become caught up in a private jargon that deals with in-house issues. But this critique goes double for AP, no? At least lit folks are trying - the spirit is willing, if the method is weak.
(A long time ago, I used on here an example thesis title from a AP guy that I knew from a interdisciplinary fellowship program, and somebody who knows both of us showed up to whack me over the head about it… (Said whacker and I used to be good buds - I wonder if he knows who I am...) Freaked the poop out of me, when this happened...)
So I’ll try mangling it a little further: the problem isn’t that I want you on the barricades, John, it’s that I wonder about work entitled “Should you eat a brick?”
When the McCarthy type stuff starts adhering, this sort of deliberate uselessness becomes, well, insistently interesting, but for all the wrong reasons.
(Sorry - one more thing...)
Quoting myself:
When the McCarthy type stuff starts adhering, this sort of deliberate uselessness becomes, well, insistently interesting, but for all the wrong reasons.
Just as the abdication of the Critical Inquiry brahmins in the wake of 9/11 (with the notable exception of Jameson, of course) is interesting, but for all the wrong reasons. “Sorry, the theory game’s over, and it has nothing to do with the New Normal.”
I for one enjoy the Holbo/Emerson encounters, as I have some sympathy with both. Maybe we’re all talked out now; but let me try.
First, I think the McCarthyism thing works better in explaining why “politically engaged Deweyan pragmatism” got zoinxed in the 50’s (for the right, Dewey’s name is mud even to this day - you know, the “progressive education” stuff) than it does the rise of analytic philosophy. John H is right that we can account for that in philosophical terms alone.
For all John E’s talk about resisting abstraction, his description of the state of philosophy strikes me as too ... abstract. Let’s look at the lay of the land (I’ll use names, but I don’t mean simply to drop them like bread crumbs leading out of the forest; I mean as well the things these people talked about.) I see a direct line (continuous surface?) starting with Frege/Wusseww/early Wittgenstein through Carnap to Quine. Naturally some of these connections are critical (e.g., famously, Quine of Carnap) as well as genetic; the point is, as John says, that these people were/are concerned with particular philosophical issues, like (for example) the concept of meaning in formalized and natural languages. Continuing on: no one could dispute the link between Quine and Davidson; and once you reach the later Davidson your immediate surroundings (somewhat to Davidson’s chagrin) are Putnam, Rorty, and McDowell. I just read Tom Rockmore’s recent Hegel, Idealism, and Analytic Philosophy (which I found annoying for reasons I won’t go into here), and he coins a term which may be useful: “analytic neopragmatism,” for the last three named (plus Brandom). (As the title of Rockmore’s book suggests, by the time you get to McDowell your immediate surroundings (ahead of you, that is; behind you are Evans, Peacocke, Wright, Wiggins, and Dummett) are (besides those already named) Kant, Hegel, Gadamer, and the later Wittgenstein (plus Sellars, but let’s not go there). And of course the later Wittgenstein is right next to his earlier self, right back where we started. (So our surface looks kind of Klein bottle-y.)
So far, as Rockmore’s term indicates, we’re still at least within hailing distance of analytic philosophy. Farther along still, however, we run into real Deweyans (actually, McDowell, unlike Rorty, never claims to be a Deweyan or even a pragmatist), who think “analytic neopragmatism” is too analytic and not Deweyan enough. They tend to endorse the phenomenological criticism (coming e.g. from Taylor and Dreyfus; see also Joseph Margolis for a more confusing version) of [*deep breath*] McDowell’s Kantian/Hegelian concept of “the unboundedness of the conceptual” realm, insisting instead on a notion of “non-conceptual content” which escapes the “rationalist” grasp in a realm of “pure coping” (you know the drill; Taylor’s written the same article about six times now - see e.g. the Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty). In Deweyan terms, this means extolling Dewey’s implacably non-dualist notion of “experience” against what from that perspective looks like yet another version of the Cartesian subject/object dualism (which, like all the other recent versions of same, swears up and down that it is no such thing). Rockmore actually calls McDowell a “metaphysical realist” - I kid you not. (Them’s fightin’ words!)
ANYway, my point is that we will never be able (for good Wittgensteinian reasons, as well as Deweyan ones, as John E says but does not show) to decide the issue of “what ails analytic philosophy, even the good kind [by Deweyan lights]” without actually jumping in and sharpening up that (as of now somewhat flabby) criticism of “analytic neopragmatism.” By my lights, the only thing keeping McDowell and his followers from cornering the market in contemporary anti-Cartesian hardware (attn: pragmatists – note the tool metaphor) is his (their) coyness about how they get to be Hegelians and Wittgensteinians at the same time. (Something’s gotta give.) It’s amazing that for a “Hegelian” McDowell himself has said literally almost nothing about Hegel, let alone the relation to Wittgenstein; though I understand there was just a conference about this in the UK.
And doing that jumping and sharpening – even if one means ultimately (or proximately) to endorse the “orthodox” Deweyan conception of experience – means reaching at least back (as McDowell himself does - see his key paper ("Scheme-content Dualism and Empiricism") in the Davidson Library of Living Philosophers volume) as far as Davidson’s criticism of Quine (and Quine’s of Carnap, etc.).
So one ends up (in this context, that of criticizing “analytic philosophy” for its lack of Deweyan “engagement") discussing the topics at the heart of analytic philosophy – precisely in order to (avoid undue abstraction and) engage with them! Sauce for the goose, eh?
For the record, my pedigree goes like this:
me
Akeel Bilgrami
Davidson
whoever Davidson’s supervisor was
etc.
Shall I split each hair in twain? Do I dare to eat a brick/’Grass is green’ iff grass is green, work my analytic schtick.
This brick of yours. Turns one all dreamy and poetical. The very thought.
Seriously, I think the impulse to say that silly titles are grounds for dismissing philosophy as useless is more dubious than making fun of silly MLA titles. Obviously what is being gotten at, in such a case, is some sort of paradox. Some account of reasons, specifically. Trying to gain insight into questions like ‘what do I have reason to do?’ by working odd paradoxes is possibly quite in order. Philosophizing via paradoxes is about as classic a method as any.
I think Davidson might have had Quine as his advisor. Davidson was almost as old, but he came to philosophy late, so he could have had someone his own age as an advisor, and I seem to have heard that somewhere. Before he got his Ph.D. he worked for a while writing jokes for TV. But don’t quote me about Quine being his advisor.
Of course “Should you eat a brick” MAY perfectly well be utter scholastic twiddling, CR. (Quite likely, on average.) I should have granted that upfront. The point is: insightful investigations of paradoxes looks much like idle twiddling, from a distance.
Dave M, thanks for that long, interesting comment. Our surface is klein bottle-y is apt. And so we address our critics (with a Wittgensteinian glare): we seek to show the fly the way into the klein bottle.
Why assume that later analytic philosophers do not, broadly, share the motives and perspectives of early analytic philosophers?
This is just a drive-by from someone whose “pedigree” consists of a couple of Umberto Eco books and a liberal UC Santa Cruz education, but it looks to me like what Derrida’s claiming is that it’s not possible, post-WW2, to share the motives and perspectives of those bygone innocent days ("everything’s different now"), without deliberately (and culpably) blinkering yourself. I don’t know if it’s true, but it seems like the sort of thing Derrida might say.
(It occurs to me that the problem with that is the implicit assumption that Russell, Wittgenstein, et al. were incapable of imagining the horrors that awaited mid-20th-century Europe and, had they been capable, couldn’t possibly have thought the things they thought. Which seems a bit smug.)
Ascertaining the worthiness of the “Weltanschaaung” of analytical philosophy-which, at least according to QUine, was not separate from science itself--would seem to require comparison to other Weltanschaaung’s: postmodernism, marxism, Darwinism, catholicism, etc. This may appear to be sort of unfeasible. At the very least, philosophers at some point seem to be driven to to system building, and then measuring the worth of the various systems; thus analytical ohilosophy is situated in the context of learning and knowledge as a whole, and in examined in regards to historical process.
The pragmatists attempted this sort of thing--CS Peirce discusses the possibility of a purely mathematical account of historical causality and necessity (determinism quantified, more or less), but realized that human freedom /intentionality made the task nearly impossible: yet determinism or determinisms (historical, biological, genetic, etc.) obviously have some role in system building. Thomas Kuhn perhaps another example of effective system building, and making use of many concepts of analytical philosophy, yet there is an a-historical aspect to Kuhn (as there is to QUine) and perhaps a somewhat naive view of scientific progress: (the shift from NEwtonian to Einsteinian physics may dazzle, yet what about the Manhattan project, if not WWII as a whole...). Russell too was not unaware of the syncretic issue, or the political and ethical consequences of scientism and scientific materialism, including Darwinism.
It does seem naive to assume that AP and/or “scientism” can be taken as sufficient without taking into account historical process and the uses (and misuses) of scientific thinking, mathematics, formal languages, etc.; . But the postmodernist’s innate distrust of scientism or technik may be itself as much a shortcoming as the AP agenda. For instance, many writers’ concerns with the shortcomings of either analytical phil. or post seem to implicitly or explicitly rest on views of intentionality; indeed on views of sanity. That is not an issue which either system really is capable of addressing, but it must be granted that science (biochemistry, brain science) is far more likely to produce a useful and reliable account of intentionality than say phenomenology will. And tracing the various neurological and genetic features of intention would of course have ethical applications, and be in some sense good, as psychoactive medications are good, and conducive to sanity.
...that is to say, psychology taken as a whole, and pathopsychology in particular, may be ultimately more important issues than logic, language and analytical philosophy. Contemporary philosophy people, analytical or continental, often seem afflicted with a type of “Panglossism” which prevents them from confronting psychological issues--literary professionals as well rarely include in their writing some actual empirical observations of humans; postmod’s aversion to empiricism and love for the conceptual and the hegelian itself a type of avoidance.... The psychological context, even Freud’s rather tentative speculations in Civilization and its Discontents seem quite more substantial than “language games” or endless rehashings of “On Denoting,” or the current infatuation with set theory. (later Russell had a keen awareness of pathopsychology as well, tho failing to reach any defeinite conclusions).
I’m not familiar with the Derrida piece except as paraphrased here, but what I’ve said amounts to saying that the anti-ideological, apolitical technocracy which rose during the late 40s and 50s was a strongly negative reaction to the grandiose semi-populist ideologies of the left and right. You can throw in Strauss and Adorno too, as anti-populists at least.
Derrida’s undertanding of the significance of the 1932-1945 period is different than the AP one, but you really can’t say that the AP founders didn’t respond or didn’t notice.
I don’t claim to be an expert on either AP or mainstream economics. I just note absences in contemporary American academic and intellectual life.
My objections to AP and mainstream econ are partly substantive, but they’re above all about opportunity cost. If we had 20% less of both and filled the space with Veblenian, Deweyesque people, the world would be a better place.
I do not actually propose that we throw the poor analytic philosophers out on the street along with their helpless, weeping children and their wan, swooning wives (or husbands). Occasionally I see a bit of role reversal here, where suddenly **I** am the repressive Stalinist proposing a purge.
If you do it right, writing about current events can produce great philosophy. Locke’s First Treatise was of-the-moment and it is now of purely historical interest, but his Second Treatise is both of-the-moment AND of enduring interest. In other words, his engagement in current events informed his philosophy.
And that’s one of my biggest beefs. In what I do read of analytic philosophy, abstracting the question from its actual context into an invented formal context is usually the first move. Once the question is formalized, then all work is internal to the formalization chosen. From that point, the possibility that the philosophical discourse will be informed by actuality or corrected against reality is zero. Learning from that source essentially stops.
And I often seem to see it being said that this sort of procedure is the best and only one, and that impure and corrupt methodologies (those allowing access to any kind of actuality) produce worthless results. Not just in politics and ethics, but lots of places.
The is pretty peripheral, but in analytic approaches to Chinese philosophy (I’m thinking especially of Allinson and Cua, and to a degree Chad Hansen) the first step is usually to sum up the Chinese work in analytical terms, and then work on the summarized version. Translating Chinese philosophy into analytical terminology loses about 99% of what’s there.
Vebwen, yes; Dewey, nyet. Vebwen had an undewstanding of societaw madness and its wewation to econ, uh-hah-hah-hah. , tho’ the evidence is not compwetewy convincing wegawding his ideas on “conspicuous consumption, uh-hah-hah-hah. “ But Vebwen is faw too cynicaw, empiwicaw, un-womantic and pwecise fow eithew witewawy fowks ow the Pangwosses of anawytica. Wit. peopwe don’t cawe fow twuth, economic, psychowogicaw, wogicaw ow othewwise-- that’s pawt of the joy of wit.; and AP pwofessionaws’ vewsion of twuf genewawwy has been puwged of any nasty empiwicaw ow physicawist bits. Oh, dat scwewy wabbit!
Davidson’s first teacher may have been Whitehead, believe it or not. In what I read he had nothing much good to say about Whitehead.
Incidentally, I’ve solicited suggestions of books to read to change my mind about analytic philosophy.
"there’s very little worldliness, right now, in philosophy departments and philosophical work…”
This is surely an exaggeration, but even if were not, why would this be a problem? Among all the disciplines, isn’t there room for at least one that isn’t “wordly”? Isn’t philosophy especially suited to be such a discipline?
a somewhat analytical, logical Adorno, or Adornos....not so hostile to say early wittgenstein or russell.....would be one who coudl bridge the TWo Culture divide (ala CP Snow), perhaps : what the world needs now....An Adorno who could prove the Culture Industry ...or at least give it a higher degree of cogency....
John E – I see what you’re saying about Chad Hansen, but given what he is saying his procedure seems appropriate, or at least not so inappropriate. (John H - see if this sounds familiar....) Hansen’s gripe is that interpreters of Taoism can see that famous opening of the Tao te ching ("the Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao” is a popular rendering) and take this to mean, well, that there’s this mystical truth beyond language which our feeble words can only gesture at, whereas in fact the Taoists, esp. Zhuangzi, had a sophisticated account of language that is not a crude mysticism (which Hansen derides as “yin-yang theories") but does indeed bear an interesting and fruitful resemblance to Western anti-dualistic philosophy of language like Davidson’s, as well as an anti-theoretical stance comparable to the (actual) Wittgenstein’s (although Hansen’s own reading of the relevant Westerners is not quite up to speed by my lights; otoh his book was written in the 80’s, so he has a good excuse). It’s not like he’s squeezing the juice out of it – not at all. In fact he’s telling us Westerners where to look for it. (And if what he – and we – is/are saying about language is right, then the fact that his own account uses theoretical language for its own purposes is no reason to discount it as pointlessly “rigorous.")
I don’t know what you mean when you ask for your mind to be changed about analytic philosophy (given your use of the term, which I don’t necessarily object to in the way John H does). After all, if you like something which has an analytic origin, you are free to say that it isn’t really “analytic” at all (e.g. Cavell; and btw you say you know Cavell but you might reread The Claim of Reason – to “change your mind” not about AP but about other important matters, like what philosophy is and can be). But if something is “analytic” by your lights, even a delightfully crisp and efficient takedown of this or that piece of Cartesian dogma will leave you free to say that it isn’t “synthetic” enough.
Instead, what you need is a realignment, by whatever means (and in this context why spurn the power of abstraction – which I might point out should *not* be equated, as you seem to do above, with “formalization” – as a means toward understanding?) of your (apparent) *first-order* conception of what it is for a word to mean something and what is happening when we speak and write (especially about speaking and writing). To do this at the same time as (or by means of) a second-order reacquaintance with the “analytic” way of talking may help cure you of the first-order/second-order dualism you share with your opponents.
So instead of recommending “analytic” works, I suggest you read the “Deweyan” criticism of “analytic neopragmatism” I talked about above. Rockmore is clear, if misguided; Margolis is more careful but idiosyncratic and impenetrable. Try David Hildebrand, Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists, which is loyally Deweyan in its flaying of Putnam and Rorty and their apostasy from the Deweyan faith, but doesn’t have much on Davidson (and nothing about McDowell). Once the issues are on the table, you can read the best attack on Rorty from (mostly) the other direction: Brandom, ed., Rorty and his Critics, and compare. Again, the point is not to show you that “analytic is better,” but to help make possible a further comparison between the “pragmatist” criticism you advocate and, well, different versions (say Wittgensteinian ones; but if W is a “pragmatist,” you didn’t hear it from me).
There’s something about the genealogical thread running through the comments; I guess once the question arises, the temptation to juxtapose ‘analytic philosopher’ with ‘begat’ is compelling. E.g.:
“There are no necessary and sufficient conditions for being an analytic philosopher. Any attempts at such a definition generate obvious counter-examples. With all due respect to Socrates, this is not because we don’t know what analytic philosophy is. Rather, and ironically, it is because the expression does not lend itself to a reductive analysis. Most present-day analytic philosophers would regard analysis as being just one tool at their disposal. The expression ‘analytic philosophy’ is best viewed in a Wittgensteinian manner as a family resemblance concept. Analytic philosophy itself can be considered as a ‘form of life’ and viewed in genealogical manner. Thus, it means philosophy in the tradition of such founders as Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. To push the family metaphor farther, one might say that Frege and Russell begat Wittgenstein, who in turn begat both the Positivists and ordinary language philosophy, the former of whom begat Quine, who begat Davidson and many others.”—preface to Contemporary Analytic Philosophy: Core Readings 2nd ed
Dave M, I liked Hansen’s first book. His second book, though, almost seemed to ignore the texts he was writing about.
Abstraction and formalization aren’t identical; I suppose that formalization is a further level of abstraction.
Between here and Kotsko I have about eight books and a dozen more authors recommended, so I’ll take a lok.
Among all the disciplines, isn’t there room for at least one that isn’t “wordly”? Isn’t philosophy especially suited to be such a discipline?
In what sense, exactly, is it especially so suited?
I have deleted some of the more repetitive contributions to this thread from x,y,z etc. When the signal to invective ratio gets to a certain point, I fail to see the point. But I did dialectize the comment about Veblen into Fuddish, which turned out wonderfully. Just look at it up there. Thing of beauty.
To put it another way: x, we have been quite tolerant of you, really. Sometimes your contributions are reasonable. Kindly confine yourself to contributing in a useful way, if you don’t want us to start trying to ban you more extensively.
I have just deleted another comment from x. I really don’t wish to fight with you, sir. Some of your comments are quite reasonable, and that is why I haven’t tried to ban you to date; but the abusive ones - well, we are used to them and we don’t mind so much. But I am concerned that unless we can maintain a more civil tone in comments, we won’t be able to draw more people into the conversation. (Of course you are not the only one who is ever uncivil, but sometimes you are REALLY uncivil.) If you can’t understand why I would be sincerely annoyed at some of the personal insults you direct at others, I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it that I am.
If you want to read my dissertation, by all means! (Actually, that reminds me. I need to put it back online.)
Davidson wrote his dissertation on Plato’s Philebus, and Quine couldn’t see the point (DD was Quine’s TA, not his advisee). I think Davidson’s offical doctor-father was actually C.I.Lewis.
Thanks Dominic. That rings a bell. Of course Quine wouldn’t have been a good advisor for a Plato Ph.D.
Since the dissertation was mentioned: Whatever happened to the Schopenauer stuff that it was going to be bundled with? I would happily read more in the Schopenhauer-and-Wittgenstein vein.
Daniel, do you mean you want to read the Schopenhauer bits of the dissertation, or you have read the dissertation and are wondering where the rest of the Schopenhauer discussion is - because I kinda end up not doing enough? If the latter, sorry I haven’t done more since. Except for the occasional book review. If the former, I’ll try to take the time to put the dissertation back online over the weekend.
Taking the Tractatus as a “Grundrisse” of what is known as analytical philosophy may not be entirely mistaken. Yet the core concepts of that Tractarian foundation--a propositional account of language, picture theory of meaning, nominalism, the denial of a causal nexus, and the emphasis on tautology and analyticity (yet those who have read the Tract. closely might have noted that Witt. denies a priori knowledge) ---are nearly as reductionist as Quine’s system (and QUinean nominalism seems quite related to Tractatarian ideas). Apart from the few slightly psychological suggestions, the Tract. is not so far from code: it leaves little or no room for metaphysics, literature or indeed any language other than propositions, operations, and functions.
I read the dissertation, and recall it saying something about the dissertation serving as half of a book, with the other half focusing on Schopenauer more specifically. I was curious what became of that. Maybe I misremember the relevant bits, but at the least I am sure I read something about it being made into a book.
As an aside, I originally found your dissertation through random googling (IIRC, I was looking up some detail about Kant’s Prolegomena). Google brought up chapter one only, but I liked it enough that I fiddled with the URL until I had found the rest of the chapters. Seperately, I had been reading your blog for a few months after so-and-so linked to you, with no idea that you were the author of the dissertation I’d found—I assumed it was just some random grad student’s work. Finding out that I had already been reading the guy who wrote it was a bit of a shock.
If you’re going to put the dissertation back online (which sounds like a good idea to me, since I know that some people do find such things through random googling), then you might want to put your name on it a bit more clearly. Looking at the PDFs, I’m not seeing your name in there anywhere. Probably a detail worth including.
Daniel: No need to add his name. We can all recognize John Holbo’s writing style after a few sentences.
John E: This is slightly off-topic, but a) I replied to one of your posts on The Weblog, and b) I’m dutifully reading the books you mentioned that critique neo-classical economics.
Schoepenhauer was not such a bad systematizer, and he charts out his arguments (and his errors) rather carefully; more than Kant could say. Yet those men who take Wittgenstein to be upholding some form of philosophical idealism are not paying sufficient attention to his ideas on naming and objects, for one: the objects are external; does he not also claim the world is independent of the will, contra Schoepenhauer? (in fact he does, 6.373). And W’s statement near the end (6.53) that one can speak of nothing but the “propositions of natural science” seems to indicate again a realism of a physicalist sort, tho W’s ideas in regards to the, well, ontological status of the “great mirror” of logic are a bit perplexing.
But I look forward to reading it, sir.
Walt, the intro to Collander / Holt / Rosser, IIRC, used the term “neo-classical” economics to mean orthodox-mainstream. Other heterodox-mainstream schools listed are Austrian, neo-institutionalist, neo-Keynsian, Marxist and (tokenism here) feminist. And outside that circle there were the real outsiders, I think.
I got the general idea but didn’t remember the laballing quite exactly. The whole tyopology seemed like a special-pleading balancing act, as if their three-way split was trying to isolate and stigmatize the too-orthodox while still not legitimizing the really bad guys outside the profession.
Mirowski’s “Machine Dreams” is easy to read but hard to understand if you don’t already know the stuff pretty well, which I don’t. I have Keen’s “Debunking Economics” on order.
Keen has a very complete web presence. I needn’t even have bought his book.
On the other hand, he sometimes uses the “comic” typeface, which is unforgivable except for very, very good friends.
http://www.debunking-economics.com/
Another of Johnny E’s Dewey-lite assumptions concerns that liberal chestnut, Duty. Philosophers and academics have a Duty to reform politics, to be decent altruists and socialists, and work towards that dreamt-of proudhonian Zion. (and postmods often seem to slip into this “thou ought” mode as well). A few perusals of the proto-analytic Hume’s writings on the fact/value distinction might have corrected E’s Sally Struthers’ tendencies (as would, say, Darwin and Malthus) . Russell himself admitted that he could not actually justify his politics more than saying that socialism would bring him more pleasure (more greater numbers of people more pleasure) than capitalism did. Or do you feel there are some transcendent, quasi-Kantian political obligations that millions of people are failing to perceive, Mr. E.?
:-)
Mirowski—to add to a dying thread—is best approached through More Heat than Light and the essays. There’s a symposium on him that is useful in Philosophy of the Social Sciences 22(1992).
Reading this thread well after the fact, it seems, is very strange to one like me, who has one foot firmly planted in theoretical syntax/"Chomskyan" linguistics and the other foot planted in computer science---but not that much of background in philosophy in se except a dilettante’s interest fueled by reading blogs and discussion boards.
My interest in language is explaining the character of the human capacity for language, and what people are calling “analytic philosophy” here is regularly alluded to in the linguistics literature, because it tends to impinge highly on the matter of the origin of the capacity for language. What’s typically called “continental” philosophy is never alluded to, because it doesn’t seem to say anything about such matters as far as I can tell. I mean, what linguists call Fodor’s “atomism” is of paramount interest in determining how the mind generates words in the context of sentences.
I wonder if this is why some of the linguists who lost the “generative semantics” warz went on to try to connect language and politics (Lakoff...). The Old Man himself (and by that I mean Chomsky), while being extremely politically engaged, is very disparaging of any such connection. And because we can use language to express both “good” and “bad” ideas, it’s very hard to argue with him.
When analytic philosophy succeeds, it turns into science and is absorbed by the science it contributes to. I’ve been assured by people I respecty that analytic philosopher does contribute to computer science, AI, and linguistics, and that would certaily be a success and a validation for AP, but the philosophy I’m interested is about history, politcs, and other macro areas of human life.
“Continental philosophy” is the Washington Wizards to analytic philosophy’s Globetrotters, or the Workers and Peasnt’s Party to the AP’s Communist Party. I’m not a continental (neither breakfast nor Lincoln).
Chomsky (as in Language and the Problems of Knowledge) seems nearly platonic in some of his thinking; he mentions language faculty as part of humans’ “biological endowment,” but the neurological mechanisms/functions of deep structure and syntactical transformations are not specified. Of course that sort of confirmation is not something that many theoretical philosophers or linguists are going to be very successful at.
The innateness concept of UG might be assailed as well, were some suitably motivated empiricists around (Prof. Dennett and his associates seem to be taking that on). There is (and has been for years) data showing that C’s ideas regarding the creative use of language are not as well founded as initially thought. In addition to environmental conditioning (which C. did not really refute), genetic determinism presents another complex, troubling issue commonly skirted by the UG language acquisition cadre.
But since Chomsky is assumed to be PC, many of his ideas seem to have carte blanche regardless if they are about equal in stature (and shall we say, residential listing) to the Platonic noesis…
I know a surprisingly large number of the leading present purveyors of Chomskyan syntax, and I know for certain that they firmly disagree with every point you make, but I myself only have one foot there, not both, so I won’t belabour the point by arguing with you this too long with you, except so say…
I will say that there is more progress being made on the neurological matter, even from the Chomskyan point of view, than you seem to be willing to admit, and I’ve been a very peripheral bystander in some of it. Psycholinguistics marches on. And one of my interests as a computer scientist in that matter is describing what transformations would actually need. And it’s very hard to refute that any system that produces human language requires more than the formal power of a context-free grammar. Any “empiricist” explanation must be able to explain the context-sensitivity (in a formal sense, not in the colloquial sense), otherwise it is an incoherent, and certainly any neurological one must do so as well.
Whether Chomsky “refuted” or didn’t refute operant conditioning is really besides the point. As I understand it, of course you can operant-condition anyone. It just doesn’t mean anything. It means you’ve invented the science of the prison, but that’s it.
And your “PC” attack is, well, to put it mildly, unfounded and makes your motives suspect.
When analytic philosophy succeeds, it turns into science and is absorbed by the science it contributes to. I’ve been assured by people I respecty that analytic philosopher does contribute to computer science, AI, and linguistics, and that would certaily be a success and a validation for AP, but the philosophy I’m interested is about history, politcs, and other macro areas of human life.
Well...once again we get back to what I think is part of John’s point here. It appears to be only a matter that you like something different from what analytic philosophers like. Et bien? I guess if your complaint reduces to one about the demographics of philosophy departments, then…
I guess I could be annoying and raise the Smarmy Scientist Geek’s Objection To Philosophizing About Fluffy Things. It’s always been a suspicion among us techie-er types that most of the humanities is just an excuse to talk about whatever you want, freed of a connection to verification. I mean, talking about the “big picture” stuff suggests a convergence with economics and other social science (itself fraught with problems I won’t raise here).
I’ve never concealed the fact that I was in the losing faction in a turf battle. There was pork to be controlled, and the analytics won. To me that finger points both ways. Money and jobs were at stake, and whatever else is true, the analytics got them.
I’m historically correct, though I’ve seen it denied recently, that the analytics enormously narrowed the range of philosophy compared to what it had been before 1950 or so. I have a number of other specific criticisms that I’ll make later.
It appears to be only a matter that you like something different from what analytic philosophers like. Makes it seem likes a matter of ice cream preferences. But what I object to is not the very existence of analytic philosophy, but its monopoly.
You are annoying, and your objection is a well-known cliche which happens to be a basic principle of analytic philosophy. IE, begging the question.
When a scientist says he can discuss the topics I raise better than I can, it’s up to him to put up or shut up. If he says that no intelligent discussion is possible about those topics, he’s just stupid. The verification criteria is very dodgy and obsolete, but overall you’re just begging the question, as I said, by taking the criteria of analytic philosophy for given.
“It’s always been a suspicion among us techie-er types that most of the humanities is just an excuse to talk about whatever you want, freed of a connection to verification.
Agreed. Then computational linguists should be consistent and apply a verification criteria to Chomsky’s ideas of an intermediate” mental grammar.” (and pay no attention to any zany Deweyans or postmods who say the verification criteria is obsolete in regards to induction). Claims about syntax are about brain functions, perception, sensation as much about language; language is part of the biological hardware, of neurology, and biochemistry--which is to say, it’s all hardware eventually, unless some bizarre “vector” account of mind were plausible.
Chomsky has for years been obsessed with rather Rousseauian concepts of freedom--as evidenced in his initial attacks on Skinner (which, even if to some degree correct in regards to language acquisition, do not refute behaviorism as a whole)--yet biologists and evolutionary psychologists have been telling a rather different story.
Those Rousseauian ideas of freedom that C. champions are not in themselves politically beneficial either. Not that stimulus-response theory or Skinner’s operant conditioning is the alternative, but there are many reasons to question romantic ideas of freedom (and really intentionality) whether in regards to language acquisition or politics.
Cognitivism and linguistics at some point has to deal with biological hardware and thus evolution and genetics: Chomsky seems to avoid that issue entirely. But then many naifs of the left--ignoring even Marx’s consistent materialism and anti-idealism--seem to think that biology is itself tainted. In his Language and the Problems of Knowledge, Chomsky makes no apologies for his classical rationalism, and pretty much takes platonic and cartesian attitudes throughout: it’s the return of Casper (the friendly ghost), but he has some powerful ivy league connections.
Cognitivism and linguistics at some point has to deal with biological hardware and thus evolution and genetics: Chomsky seems to avoid that issue entirely.
No, he doesn’t---at least him as the personification of his school of thought. Take a look at Juan Uriagereka’s book Rhyme and Reason for specific arguments that take most of your claims head-on, since all your arguments depend fundamentally on this belief that biology is “avoided”. There’s even a branch of psycholinguistic research that investigates some of these claims using what you might call “biological” brain-observation methods. Of course, it’s very difficult.
The Chomskyans ARE saying that linguistics as a study exists on an equal footing with biology, etc. That’s quite different from saying that they are avoiding it.
Emerson: note that I said “could”. I’ll have a fuller response later, but I’m busy listening to people bloviate in a classical rationalist cartesian linguistic analysis mode.
X’s bloviations are famous here and elsewhere, and are often ignored and often deleted. Feel no obligation to respond.
feel no obligation to respond to someone who, one, thinks John Dewey was a profound thinker, and two, claims verification has been rejected, and three, mistakes mahayana buddhism for philosophy…
Señor Madnos:
there’s another issue however: Chomsky’s UG converts all languages into european terms: nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. The mayan language “nahautl” did not have nouns and verbs, and the definitions and translations of the pictographs are hardly well-estlabished. It was converted into european terms. The homological structure of language thesis asserted by UG people has not been conclusivly determined. A hopi “agglutanive” word-sentence might include what are called nouns, verbs, and modifiers in one long morpheme. Yes, the western field linguist tries to break it down into nominal and verbal phrases, but that of course is a “gloss.”
Moreover there are unresolved semantic issues with UG (which QUine I believe raised at one point): the field linguist finds a hidden tribe and attempts to translate their language: how does he do that? Maybe by correlating some phonemes with various objects and events, but there is no “necessary” connection indicated. What if various tribesmen give different sounds for say the campfire? In some sense, the Sapir-Whorf issue was never fully dealt with, tho’ Panglosses of the Chomskyan school seem to think it was.
Sapir-Whorf is a quaint fossil, somewhat to my regret. There are Mayan languages still spoken; difficulties in deciphering the heiroglyphs are irrelevant. Dunno about Mayan, but Chinese doesn’t have distinguishable nouns and verbs either, but sentence structure tells you how a given word functions in a sentence (as part of a NP or a VP, for example). Quine was too fond of relativism.
No es posible determinar sustantivos o verbos de idiomas desconocidas simplemente por la forma. La correlación o la definición por la observación es necesaria.
un extracto:
“¿Qué es el náhuatl?
Llanamente, es un idioma indígena de México. Hoy, es la lengua indígena mexicana con mayor número de hablantes (alrededor de millón y medio). Además, es y ha sido un idioma valioso por su importancia histórica (de una civilización desarrollada lejos del viejo mundo), lingüística (es aglutinante no indoeuropeo), literaria y hasta nacionalista.
Ciertamente, toda lengua es un tesoro, un milagro abstracto, real y práctico. Aprender una nueva lengua, te ata inevitablemente al ser mismo de sus hablantes, por esto el acercarse al náhuatl es una forma de meterse en las raíces más antiguas y sutiles de la cosmovisión mexicana.
(Por eso he llegado a pensar que los amantes de la lingüística son los historiadores antropólogos etnólogos técnicos románticos más útiles que existen).
La influencia del náhuatl no ha sido pequeña. Hay reminiscencias del náhuatl regadas por aquí y por allá, en las palabras, en las formas de hablar y hasta en las de sentir y ver el mundo. Corresponde a cada uno darles el valor que se desee después de haberse topado con alguna de ellas.
(Y es aquí donde uno busca relacionar el sentido de la vida con la lingüística)
¿usted entiende eso?
bastante
* * *
Nahuatl was the Aztec language. Maya is different.
“No es posible determinar sustantivos o verbos de idiomas desconocidas simplemente por la forma. La correlación o la definición por la observación es necesaria.”
In some languages verbs and nouns can be distinguished in isolation by their morphology, but not in Nahuatl (or Chinese). Sentences still have a NP VP function, with the functions of individual words dependent of their place in the sentence. (See George A. Kennedy, “Word Classes in Classical Chinese”.
And it doesn’t matter anyway since they all have predication and asymmetric dependencies. You can call the constituents of predication what you like. I suggest “noun” and “verb” are convenient terms. The only real challenge you can make is to find a language that lack asymmetrical structures.
Also, I have a complaint about that really historically wild Barbara Johnson preface to Derrida’s Dissemination, which John Ransom has been praising. What’s that about? But I’ll save it for another day.
Oh, such modesty. Don’t hold back, really.
Hmmmm. What makes you think it was modesty holding me back?
This is the Stupidest thing I’Ve ever read you all you guys try to act all smart but your a bunch of idiots
Though it’s not particularly helpful, I recall Davidson’s lineage being dealt with in the introduction to the relevant volume of the Library of Living Philosophers, though I don’t rightly recall what it said and I haven’t a copy of the book to hand. I think you’ll find it’s someone odder than Whitehead - I’ll bet you dollars or donuts that it isn’t QUINE! - as his dissertation was actually on something Ancient; Parmenidies I believe, or possibly Plato’s Parmenides? He took an MBA at the same time as doing his thesis, and much of his early work actually seemed to come from that side of his education - e.g. the work on rational choice and so on which grew into his post-Quine work on language and mind. As I’d said; I’d expect it to be an ancient philosopher rather than Whitehead. ((Am I mad; wasn’t Whitehead Quine’s supervisor? Is that where you’re getting confused?))