Ah, I hadn’t noticed that. I should go back and read that thread. I tend to agree that the 200 facts aren’t the critters I’m hunting, but it’s interesting to try to say why not, why they don’t add up to the “big questions” of philosophy.
Yes, that’s an attractive viewpoint. It locates the problem at philosophy’s attempts to “extend the reach of environment-based agreement.” Thus, if we want agreement and resolution, we should do what the other environment-based inquiries do, and stick to whatever facts are available.
I’m not clear whether you think that is in fact possible for philosophy, or whether you think philosophy’s questions are doomed from the start, because they don’t seem amenable to finding factual evidence to support a position. I’m guessing the latter? In which case philosophy is either largely useless, or else its use is confined to other areas, as many on this thread have suggested.
The problem, of course, is that to give reasons of this sort for why philosophy hasn’t done what other disciplines have, is to engage in philosophy. So the “level-up” problem returns to haunt us: Can we reach agreement on this sort of diagnosis? Is it “environment-based”? Similar concerns were raised about logical positivism.
Not quite that, I think, but you can take steps to strengthen the connections between layers, institutionalize them, make sure there’s a process for descent to facts as well as ascent to theory, and so on. A structure like this requires a lot of active maintenance, and the occasional renovation.
That certain sorts of debates, albeit with considerable rejiggering along the way, have been going on for hundreds or even thousands of years, I take to be not a good sign, no.
I have some ideas about what philosophy might do instead, which probably don’t belong in this thread.
That “of course” comes from a certain view of philosophy I do not share. It’s only a trap if you think it is.
Fair enough. Can you say more about that? It’s quite important to the themes of this thread.
I don’t think there’s a neutral ground, and I don’t think we should aspire to occupy it. A theory of error that explains disagreement without itself being contestable would have to stand outside the field of disagreement. But that begins to look like a search for something like transcendent certainty. Why should that be possible, and why should it be something to strive for? Kant’s own theory of error, as a philosophical theory, generated disagreement. It is transcendental, not transcendent: it does not claim to stand outside or above all frameworks. How could it?
It seems to me that you, on the other hand, are looking for a theory of error that’s either guaranteed to be true, or guaranteed to be so compellingly true that disagreeing will look like a mistake. And I think that’s asking too much. And not because the sad truth is that we cannot reach such a desirable certainty, but because we’d be wrong to desire it in the first place. What criteria do you expect to use to assess candidate theories? How can you shield those criteria from disagreement? And so on to infinity.
The so-called hard sciences do it by using a conventionalized, abstractive vocabulary designed to mask the rich variety of interpretations which jostle with each other under the umbrella of the ‘facts’. Many would argue that the Copenhagen and Many Worlds interpretations, QBism, David Bohm and Lee Smolen’s perspectives are optional for the average working physicist. They don’t need to draw from any of these interpretations in order to do physics and understand what they are doing. I disagree.
Whether one adopts something like one of the above-named approaches or not, one is always doing physics on the basis of an interpretation. Put 10 physicist in a room together, and each of them will approach the ‘same’ physics through a different interpretation. But the mathematitized language of physics hides these differences well enough that it seems as though it achieves a consensus on facts unavailable to philosophy. Philosophy’s mode of discourse is designed to be sensitive to and pick up precisely these differences that the vocabulary of the hard sciences flattens and conceals.
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I mean, there’s probably a pretty good way to reconstruct the sentiment there, but what I’m resisting is the idea that philosophy is foundational, and specifically that it can provide, and only it can provide, the proper foundation for other knowledge producing disciplines.
They already have the only foundation they need: we are living organisms that share an environment, and are capable of sharing attention and intentions toward features of that environment.
Yes, you’re right. Do you think that we have such a theory in other fields, though?
For now let me leave aside the part about whether we’d be wrong to desire it in the first place, and concentrate on the possibly sad truth that we can’t reach such certainty. I think your two questions, above, address that, yes? You’re asking what criteria we could use to assess candidate theories of error, and also how those criteria could be agreed upon in such a way as to resolve the question of what criteria to use when evaluating a theory of error. So aren’t we inviting an infinite regress of agreements about agreements about agreements . . . ?
Actually . . . let me stop right there and ask if I’ve got this right. I have some responses but I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
OK. I think “foundational” can be taken in two ways, one of which I would argue against, the other in favor of.
I don’t think phil is epistemologically or insightfulogically (!) foundational, such that without a firm foundation in philosophical truths (and this view usually asserts that such truths are available) we can’t properly pursue any important inquiries.
I do think that rational dialectic ends with philosophical questions. At a certain point, all other disciplines can be asked questions that can’t be addressed from within their disciplines using only the framework and vocabulary of those disciplines. Hence, the discourse might go from science to philosophy of science, from art to philosophy of art, etc. Philosophy, in contrast, can’t be “exited” to have a question posed to it that is answerable without recourse to further philosophy. “Philosophy of philosophy” is just more philosophy. This is a quirk or oddity about dialectic, not necessarily a feather in phil’s cap and definitely not a “foundation” in the first sense. In fact, a better metaphor might be “ceiling.”
That’s a fair response, although I think you can see the risk in later liberal theologians (generally post-Hegel) whose theology became so unmoored from their Christian background that it could no longer justify participation in Christian praxis and culture (once it became in a sense “optional”).
But the critics I’m most familiar with are downstream of Nagarjuna in China, so their criticisms might just be at far remove. They were quite fond of Indra’s Net, but then radically reformulated it with their own notion of the Absolute as plentitude over emptiness (more like Eriugena’s “nothing on account of excellence”).
For correctly diagnosing error or for building consensus? Personally, I don’t think these are at all the same question, nor do I think a lack of consensus is particularly strong evidence for universal error. For that we would need an assumption to the effect of:
“If anyone knows, then they must be able to bring everyone to the same understanding (even if, for various, reasons they do not desire this).”
But there are plausible reasons for thinking this is not the case.
How so? It makes sense to me that it could be deleterious to pursue certainty if it was unattainable (or perhaps too costly to attain), but I am not sure why it would be bad in itself. Or at least it seems quite beneficial to gain true knowledge about many topics in philosophy, if it exists (the old adage about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing not withstanding).
My question is about why some (qualified) practitioners might be said to be in error; it’s not about universal error. Not even sure what that would mean.
So, how do we bring people to an understanding within philosophy? Traditionally, we offer arguments, justifications. Or we might explain why a particular understanding isn’t available through philosophy – but in giving that explanation, we’d be couching it in philosophical terms involving justification for our position, otherwise it would be unlikely to convince.
Must it be the case that this method will succeed in achieving resolution? No indeed. And that’s precisely why what I’m calling a theory of error is wanted. A philosopher could look at your phrase “for various reasons, they [those who disagree with me] do not desire this” and ask, reasonably, why not. The resulting explanation, if they can come up with one, would be a theory of error in my sense.
I’m tempted to return to the somewhat jocular language of my OP: “If I’m so right [the philosopher asks him- or herself] why can’t I get these people to agree? What is wrong with them – or me?” Again, an attempt to answer that choleric question would be a theory of error.
Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that widespread lack of resolution within philosophy doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as knowledge. That would be taking it way too far.
Philosophy is a discipline that seeks to capture a totality (such as reality, for example) within its framework. There is a systematic drive that causes a position on one subject to lead to a position on another subject that may seem quite distant. For example, an ontological thesis may lead to an ethical thesis. But I do not believe there is any system that can answer all philosophical questions. And that is why, whenever a philosophy is unable to encompass reality or the world (or whatever) within a single system, there will be a second philosophy that is capable of accounting for the unthought and, in doing so, reconfiguring the entire system—changing the questions, or eliminating them, or even answering them, but also shifting the perspective on the issues, and so on.
This all-encompassing attitude makes a philosophy highly sensitive to ‘failure’, if by failure we mean leaving questions unanswered, or failing to grasp the questions directly within the system (be it a large or small system), leaving issues open, etc. An unanswered question or a new question reverberates throughout the entire system. What one philosophy fails to see is fodder for another philosophy to expand upon. And there is always a remnant that is not subsumed by a philosophy, which, as I have said, causes the entire system to resonate and the failure becomes total.
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A better way to put it is that all knowledge-producing disciplines, in their own right, on the basis of their one methods and vocabularies, generate and operate within philosophical presuppositions. They don’t need to read works by those officially dubbed ‘philosophers’ to do so, but this does not mean their ideas are not continuous with, and interlaced with what philosophers do.
I agree with all this – very well said. But my use of “failure,” “error,” “unresolved” etc. in this thread is much more modest. I’m only pointing to the more or less typical situation of two good philosophers, both intelligent and well-read, who engage each other on an issue and fail to find agreement. They may in fact share a larger common framework – analytic phil, say – but remain unable to show which position deserves acceptance. My “theory of error” is just a question about how Philosopher A explains the situation, and how Philosopher B might reply.
The status that Kant gives to teleological explanations is structually similar to Richard Dawkins ‘appearance of design’. Organisms appear to be driven by purpose, but we can’t empirically discern actual purpose in nature.
From Matthew David Segal:
Knowledge production is always such that anyone with sufficient training should be able to grasp it and to reproduce it. Artistic genius, however, cannot be taught. Its products remain forever beyond the reach of mere skill or education. Artistic geniuses gain aesthetic insight into nature, but fail to provide any scientific knowledge of nature. Scientists, according to Kant, can catch no cognitive sight (i.e., they have no intellectual intuition) of the hidden cause of nature’s self-organizing processes.
“It is quite certain,” writes Kant,
“that we can never adequately come to know the organized beings and their internal possibility in accordance with merely mechanical principles of nature, let alone explain them; and indeed this is so certain that we can boldly say that it would be absurd for humans even to make such an attempt or to hope that there may yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered; rather, we must absolutely deny this insight to human beings” (section 75).
John Vervaeke notes in his episode Aristotle, Kant and Evolution, that what Kant was lacking was the Aristotelian concept of final cause – the reason for something to be as it is. He notes there is something akin to that in Alice Juarrero and that this broadly ‘neo-aristotelian’ attitude is now becoming quite prevalent in philosophy of biology e.g. Deacon, Levin, and others.
Totally with you on that. Whether Nāgārjuna was nihilist (which he strenuously denied) there are doubtlessly nihilist readings of his texts. When I used to be a member of Dharmawheel, I felt that many of the contributors there tended towards a subtle kind of nihilism and that nihilism is something of a trap for Buddhists. A similar distinction shows up in Shentong-Rangtong disputes in Tibetan Buddhism (Ref).
I’m really not sure what we’re up to now.
On the question of agreement in philosophy, my claim is that philosophy does not have the resources that other disciplines rely on in stabilizing agreement, and nothing comes to mind that could substitute.
From my point of view, that nothing is ever settled in philosophy (we’re speaking broadly here) is a clue that philosophy is very different from other disciplines; once you see how it differs, it’s no surprise that nothing is ever settled.
I also think it indicates a problem, not because agreement is itself so important—at least I’m not assuming it is and working from that—but because the lack which prevents philosophy from settling anything is itself troubling, at least to me: the disengagement from quotidian reality.
Other people may not see that as a problem.
To be clear, I brought up other disciplines for comparison, because philosophy seems to have an issue that other fields do not. The relation of philosophy to other fields was not part of my argument.
Truth and certainty are all well and good, but I was talking about absolute certainty. I was saying that the aspiration for a position that’s somehow immune to disagreement is not a coherent one within philosophy.
Maybe another way to look at things is to see that there might be a negative convergence in philosophy. Many theories have been mostly rejected. How about these:
- Strong verificationism
- The descriptivist theory of proper names
- Strict behaviourism
- Dogmatic rationalist system-building metaphysics
- Incorrigible self-knowledge
- The picture theory of language
- Sense-data and sense-data foundationalism
Many of those have been largely abandoned, although in most cases I find the SEP saying things like, “but in recent years there has been an attempt to revive the theory …”
Yes, it contrasts with the way of science, which we refer to as the ordinary way of seeing the world. It was philosophy that actually raised the question of existence and reality. Science has taken reality for granted, and this is not a criticism against science. Rather, it’s a commonsensical way of seeing things. Things are a given.
It was philosophy that argued for representation and realism that challenged our unconditional acceptance of the perceived world. Like, who has the nerve to ask “what is real?”
Not so much an infinite regress of agreements as an infinite regress of criteria for agreement. Any criteria we use to evaluate a theory of error will themselves be impossible to settle definitively, and there’s no higher, neutral ground from which to survey them all at once (this would be a kind of “view from nowhere”).
So even if you appeal just to something like a more-or-less intersubjective compromise agreement to settle a problem and move on, the standards governing this agreement will always be contestable.
Any theory of error will become part of the field of disagreement it attempts to explain.
I forgot to reply to this question. I think some other fields have them as working theories, enacted in practice. But my question is why these should stand as models for any kind of epistemic success. Surely this applies only if the objects of philosophy are the same as those in the other fields?
Let’s look at the empirical sciences. The thing is, they deal with objects given under the conditions of possible experience, whereas philosophy deals with those conditions themselves, and the concepts, norms, and presuppositions that determine and structure them. Put another way: you want to take as a model the investigation of things under specific, empirical conditions and apply it to the investigation of things seen in the most general light, i.e., where the very meaning of investigation, object, and condition are in question. Why should that be appropriate? (I’m not saying there is no legitimate answer to that, btw)
But what about other fields? You brought up music before. I claim that music criticism, and also literary theory, and to some extent even history, are valuable, truth-seeking endeavours in which questions remain unresolved in a way that is not merely temporary and regrettable, but structurally bound up with the kind of practices they are and the kind of objects that are being investigated: matters of meaning and value, of interpretation and normative weight.
By the way, history is particularly interesting because it seems to be a unique blend of empirical and interpretive: historians use evidence, but many of their claims are not reducible to or settled by it. For example, there are as many proposed causes of the First World War as there are historians—and there is no amount of evidence that will change that.
Maybe what it comes down to is that in philosophy as in some other fields, interpretation partly constitutes the objects of enquiry, i.e., interpretation isn’t just a way of accessing independently subsistent objects.
And that leads me to another sense in which these fields, including philosophy, cannot be held to the same standards as empirical science: they are immanent to human self-understanding. The investigator’s own concepts, values, and historical situation are part of what is being investigated. This is not the case in empirical sciences, even if the scientist’s presuppositions are actually operative; they are bracketed in the practice itself, because scientists aspire to, in a sense, cancel themselves out, at least as a regulative ideal. (And this is a very important question in the philosophy of social science.)