Dogmas of analytic philosophy, part 1/2

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by Massimo Pigliucci

If you asked me whether I consider myself an analytic or a continental philosopher, I’d immediately say analytic, but with some regret and much qualification. This particular dichotomy reflects the unfortunate way in which modern academic philosophy is divided. (Very) roughly speaking, post-Kant philosophers have either dedicated themselves to writings of broad concern, a la Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Focault and Derrida (continentals), or of a very narrow and technical sort, a la Russell, Quine, Kripe and Lewis (analyticals). The major point in favor of continental philosophy is that it tries to matter, with many of the authors in that canon addressing important social and political questions, as opposed to the all too-often legalistic, almost neo-scholastic (and I don’t mean that as a compliment), hair splitting of much analytical philosophy. Then again, most people with a PhD in philosophy can read and actually comprehend an analytic paper, while the same cannot so easily be said of much continental output — especially from the likes of Heidegger and Derrida. [1]

My new book project, which will likely be published some time in 2014 by the University of Chicago Press, deals in part with these matters, the overarching goal being that of addressing the question of whether, and if so in what sense, philosophy can be said to make progress. (Hints: yes, of course it does; no, it’s not in the same sense as progress in science; indeed, it has more to do with progress in logic/math and in literary criticism — now you figure out what the latter two have in common...)

If both analytical and continental ways of philosophizing have serious problems, what is a philosopher to do? Recover the best of both traditions and go back (or forward!) to the way people were doing philosophy before the split, i.e. up to (and including) Kant. One such suggestion comes from a recent column by Paul Thagard, a philosopher at the University of Waterloo and columnist for Psychology Today. Thagard calls this approach “natural philosophy,” and writes that it is nothing new, as it “has been practiced in various ways by such distinguished philosophers as Thales, Aristotle, Epicurus, Lucretius, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Mill, Peirce, Russell (after 1920), Dewey, Quine (after 1950), and Kuhn.” The term natural philosophy is perhaps not the best choice, historically speaking, since it usually refers to proto-science (the sort of thing that Bacon, Galilei, and Newton were doing), but I guess it will do for now.

The main body of Thagard’s essay is a step-by-step examination of what he terms 11 “dogmas” of analytic philosophy, a reference to Quine’s famous “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” paper. (Thagard doesn’t deal at all with continental philosophy, though I’d be surprised if he had a more positive take on it than the one I hinted at above.) It’s worth going through the list, to which I will add my brief commentary, as my position is very close to, but not exactly the same as, Thagard’s.

Dogma #1. “The best approach to philosophy is conceptual analysis using formal logic or ordinary language.”

The criticism here is addressed at an over-reliance of analytic philosophy on formal logicisms, which has produced, among other regrettable things, the rigidity of early 20th century logical positivism. Thagard suggests that philosophy should be in the business of theory construction, not conceptual analysis, but I’ll stick with the latter, as long as we understand it not in the narrow analytical sense of the term, but as an investigation into the “concepts and theories developed in relevant sciences” (and in other branches of human endeavor, I would add).

Dogma #2. “Philosophy is conservative, analyzing existing concepts.” 

The point, according to Thagard, is “not to interpret concepts, but to change them” (a veiled reference to Marx’s famous phrase about philosophy itself?), but I think a better take is that philosophers should be both into interpreting and changing — when necessary — the concepts deployed by philosophy itself and by other disciplines.

Dogma #3. “People’s intuitions are evidence for philosophical conclusions.” 

Ah, intuitions! They have been at the center of some interesting debate already here at Rationally Speaking. I’m certainly with Thagard when he says that intuitions need to be evaluated critically. But intuitions — in science just as in philosophy — are a good initial source of understanding, and the cognitive science literature on the role of expert intuitions (as opposed to a generic, and non-existent “intuitive sense”) is quite clear: if you spend years or decades thinking or doing X, your intuitions about X are much more likely to be correct than a layperson’s intuitions about X. X, of course, can be philosophy or one of its branches. Still, intuitions are the starting point, not the end of the matter.

Dogma #4. “Thought experiments are a good way of generating intuitive evidence.” 

No, they are not, as Thagard points out. But here too one need not go too far. First off, remember that even scientists use thought experiments (Galilei, Einstein). Second, I guess I take the point of thought experiments to be different than some of my colleagues do: when I read about Searle’s Chinese room, or even — god forbid — Chalmers’ zombies, I don’t think these exercises prove anything about the real world. What they do, however, is to make explicit the way we reason about certain things, our intuitions (see above) about a given issue. Then we can poke at the thought experiment and see what is wrong with it, sometimes even using empirical evidence!

Dogma #5. “People are rational.” 

Clearly, they (we) are not. We have more than enough evidence from cognitive science that people come equipped with all sorts of biases in the way they think about all sorts of things, from probabilities to the value of anecdotal evidence. This, however, is sometimes taken (often by psychologists) to mean that psychology has superseded philosophy (even Quine was guilty of something along these lines when he proposed to replace epistemology with psychology!). I’m with Thagard here, where he says that philosophy is needed to educate people, a task that is made more, not less, urgent by the awareness of widespread cognitive biases.

Dogma #6. “Inferences are based on arguments.” 

Thagard objects that instead “inferences operate as parallel neural processes that can use representations that involve visual and other modalities.” Hum, yes, but this strikes me as confusing the process with the mechanism (you know, like my frequent target, Sam Harris does when he thinks that a neural understanding of moral decision making is the same as answering moral questions). I’d say that inferences are a type of argument — and as such they better be logically constructed — but one that involves not just pure logic (the analytic fallacy), but also representations, observations, and so on.

Tune in next time, for the last five dogmas of analytic philosophy.

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[1] While in this essay I join the common sport among philosophers of criticizing philosophy, those among my readers who are scientistically inclined better not snicker too much. Science itself could use quite a bit more self-doubt and internal probing. When I was a practicing scientist I saw first hand how the overwhelming majority of scientific research is just as useless and self-centered as the majority of any other academic enterprise — with the difference that science is a hell of a lot more expensive to conduct than philosophy or literary criticism! But that’s another story, and possibly another book project...