Dogmas of analytic philosophy, part 2/2

www.swarthmore.edu

by Massimo Pigliucci

[Part 1 appeared here]

So, we were talking about an interesting article by University of Waterloo philosopher Paul Thagard, about what he sees (and I largely agree) as eleven dogmas of modern analytic philosophy. As you may recall, I’m interested in this within the context of a broader project I am pursuing about the nature of philosophy and whether the discipline makes progress over time (the thing will soon become a new book published by the University of Chicago Press). In particular, I’m with Thagard when he calls for moving forward from analytic (and, I would add, continental) philosophy to something he calls “natural philosophy” (a term with which I quibble, given its historical association with proto-science), basically the sort of philosophy that most people outside of a small cadre of hyper-specialist academics actually think of as “philosophy” anyway.

Let us therefore move on to:

Dogma #7. “Reason is separate from emotion.” 

No, it ain’t. And there is plenty of good evidence to that effect that has accumulated from modern neuroscience. A functional human being better be somewhere intermediate between Spock and McCoy, avoiding the equally perilous extremes of the Scylla of hyper-logicism (which affects analytical philosophy) and the Charybdis of hyper-emotionalism (which, mixed with a high dose of obfuscation, may be said to be one of the problems of much continental philosophy). To put it otherwise, Hume was closer to the mark than Plato.

Dogma #8. “There are necessary truths that apply to all possible worlds.” 

This is a criticism to the (admittedly out of control) Kripke-style talk about possible worlds, (logical) distances between possible worlds, and so on. While I’m with Thagard on thinking that much of that stuff isn’t particularly useful, indeed veering perilously closed to neo-scholasticism, I stop short of abandoning the concept of logical necessity. Let’s just agree that it is of less use than a number of philosophers have historically thought it to be and leave it at that.

Dogma #9. “Thoughts are propositional attitudes.” 

Thagard doesn’t like thinking of thoughts in a formalistic way, as of relations between abstract “sentence-like” entities. But when he says that we need to “accept the rapidly increasing evidence that thoughts are brain processes” he makes the same mistake already noted vis-a-vis Dogma #6: thoughts are the result of brain processes, but they do — sometimes — refer to abstract entities, so that the two views aren’t at all in contrast. What we need, then, is a broader conception of thoughts than is allowed by a rigidly formalistic analytic philosophy, without however reducing the whole thing to mere neuroscience.

Dogma #10. “The structure of logic reveals the nature of reality.” 

This is the assumption underlying the old rationalist program in philosophy, going back to Plato and that should have been abandoned once and for all at the least after the abysmal failure of Descartes’ cogito. I agree with Thagard that one cannot infer metaphysical conclusions from pure logic, but he is also correct when he says that logic is one of the areas “relevant to determining the fundamental nature of reality,” and therefore still an important player.

Dogma #11. “Naturalism cannot address normative issues about what people ought to do in epistemology and ethics.” 

To which Thagard wishes to substitute “a normative procedure that empirically evaluates the extent to which different practices achieve the goals of knowledge and morality.” Yes, although — again — let’s not push it. The naturalistic fallacy is still a fallacy, in my opinion, and while we most certainly want to bring facts (empirical procedures) into both ethics and epistemology, I think the problem with said dogma is that it reflects too narrow (Quineian?) a conception of naturalism. As I pointed out before, there are more fecund varieties of naturalism that have no problem incorporating reasonable (and empirically informed) metaphysics, ethics and epistemology.

What picture of philosophy emerges from Thagard’s analysis, with or without my ancillary notes? A very reasonable one, methinks. What he calls natural philosophy is the kind of reflective enterprise that is informed by empirical evidence (science, personal experience, common occurrences in everyday life), and deploys a battery of logical (both formal and informal) tools to make sense of the world and our place in it. Natural philosophy stays away from the often sterile micro-focus of much of analytic philosophy, while at the same time rejecting the frequently obfuscatory rhetoric of much continental philosophy. It’s the kind of philosophy that people from Aristotle to Hume have taught us to practice, and that would be a welcome antidote to much irrelevance and nonsense coming out of modern academy. [1]

______

[1] Repeat of the same note that appeared in the last post: 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...