“Hoping for a big tent in which it is understood that disagreement is the price to be paid for exploring important ideas.”
This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon.
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Discord Invitation
The EEA of Cognitive Evolution
Transcendent Thought.—That a state of affairs is incomprehensible is for us no objection to it. The human imagination is not a metric by which to distinguish reality from appearance, the true from the false, the sacred from the profane—with degree of reality presumptively corresponding proportionally to degree of comprehension. We can determine clearly enough the conditions under which the human imagination took shape—the environment of our evolutionary adaptedness, which, in the case of cognitive evolution no less than biological evolution, is ongoing. As with transitional forms of life, all forms of thought are transitional with the exception of the final form, which is the penultimate form of extinction. The incomprehensible is our spur to thought that transcends familiar categories of understanding, and so it places all previous thought in a more comprehensive perspective—with perfect irony, the incomprehensible is a necessary condition to attaining comprehension of a higher order. On occasion, the higher order of comprehension is revealed to us in an intuitive breakthrough in which a novel conception suddenly opens a new perspective on our familiar understanding of the world. Perhaps more often, it is our slow, incremental reconciliation with the counterintuitive, forced upon us through repetition with increasing clarity, that gradually extends our ability to conceptualize the incomprehensible, bringing that formerly beyond our scope within the purview of the human mind. The strangeness of the world forces itself upon us, and we must respond with equally strange forms of thought and understanding.
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Educational Advice from an Autodidact, Part V: Developing Your Ideas
In my previous post in this series, Taking Notes, I already touched on a number of methods for developing ideas: writing down the smallest and simplest ideas, developing their connections to other ideas while the new idea is still fresh in your mind, and dating note book entries, inter alia.
One practice that has turned out to be very fruitful for me personally in developing my ideas is that I always carry a digital recorder with me (I started with a microcassette recorder). Since almost everyone today carries a smart phone that includes a recorder, almost everyone has a digital recorder ready to hand at any time. Availability and ease of use are important. If you always have a recording device with you, it can be much easier to record a thought while engaged in other activities – like driving or walking – when it would be inconvenient to write down a thought in a note book.
One of the good things about audio recordings is that I can ramble in a way that I would not ramble in writing things down. Not all rambling is productive, but sometimes it keeps me focused on an idea and that keeps the development of the idea moving forward. One of the bad things about audio recordings is that I rarely get around to writing them down. I hope someday to transcribe my recorded material, but at present that rarely happens. It takes time to listen through long, rambling recordings in order to extract whatever is valuable in them. (If money were no object I would hire a transcriptionist to do this.)
I’ve been recording my ideas for several years now, and, as with taking notes in a note book. it took me some time before I got into the habit of remembering to always mention the date when making my recordings. I find that having an ongoing audio record of my thoughts helps me to return to an idea and pick up the thread again. When I set out on my daily commute, I listen to the ideas I’ve recorded over the past few days and this immediately puts me back on the trail of whatever I’ve been pursuing recently, and I usually have fresh thoughts on the same theme.
Returning to an idea time and again to develop it is important, and in addition to using an audio recording device, I have developed another cognitive technique that I find helpful. This may sound a bit artificial, but it developed very gradually over time, mostly unconsciously. If you were to listen in on my thoughts while I am driving, as a kind of point-of-consciousness narrative, you would find that one of the things I do most frequently is to imagine explaining an idea to someone for whom that idea and even its context would be completely unfamiliar. So I begin from the most basic principles, and give a somewhat systematic exposition of an idea from the ground up. I do this repeatedly with the same idea that interests me, and I have found that I am almost always afforded new insights by this method, even though I start out from pretty much the same point, and try to do the same thing, each time. (I suppose teachers do this every day, giving a basic exposition of some idea to their students from the ground up.)
Generalization of an idea is also a powerful technique, especially in terms of the development of philosophical ideas, which usually converge on the utmost generality. (The generalization of an idea often involves finding the most abstract expression of an idea that is possible.) I find that most ideas occur to me in a particular context and are formulated in terms of a particular subject matter. Once this idea in its “native surroundings” (as it were) has been captured, one can make the effort to ascend to higher levels of generality. This can be much more difficult than it sounds. We are usually unaware of how parochial and provincial our ideas are, and it takes a real mental effort to pursue the Copernican imperative to find a larger context in which we can see the parochial idea as a particular expression of a core idea that applies much more generally.
If you can find the core idea, usually an abstract idea, hiding within your parochial idea, you will find all kinds of connections to other ideas, because the core idea is an umbrella conception under which many other ideas will fall. Expressed in perfect generality and abstraction, an idea can be a perspective from which an exposition of the world entire can be given. This points to the relationship between ideal generality and “big picture” ideas. When you see matters in terms of “big picture” ideas you see the connection of your idea to other ideas, so it is useful to always keep a number of “big picture” ideas in mind as the ultimate context of thought.
My short list of “big picture” concepts includes the
Overview Effect, the
Drake Equation, Big
History, astrobiology,
Existential Risk and Global Catastrophic
Risk, the Fermi
Paradox, and the Anthropocene
epoch. All of these concepts can serve as lenses through which we can view an idea in order to get a sense of its broader implications. If an idea doesn’t touch on any of these concepts, then it’s probably not something I am thinking about, but even these big picture concepts are flexible and can illuminate almost any less comprehensive idea. For example, in my post A Natural History of Overview Effects I mentioned
Esther Quaedacker’s “little big histories,” and in this connection we can note that virtually any idea could be made the focus of a little big history, and so be assimilated to the framework of big history.
It is also useful in developing ideas to return to older note books (or earlier audio recordings) in order inform your present ideas with your past ideas. Your own ideas that you have forgotten will usually come back to you quite quickly, since they are ideas that you worked on because they were intrinsically interesting to you, and you will probably find that over the years (and indeed over the decades) that your thought has a certain unity, so that the earlier ideas, even consciously abandoned ideas, can be useful in the development of later ideas, which often grew out of the earlier ideas. By returning to earlier ideas you are, essentially, returning to the sources of your current ideas, and this helps to perform the cognitive exercise I described above of undertaking an exposition of an idea from the ground up.
Educational Advice from an Autodidact
- Educational Advice from an Autodidact, Part I:
Pick one story and follow it tirelessly
- Educational Advice from an Autodidact, Part II: Binge on a Period
- Educational Advice from an Autodidact, Part III: Reading Difficult Books
- Educational Advice from an Autodidact, Part IV: Taking Notes
- Educational Advice from an Autodidact, Part V: Developing Your Ideas
…there is nothing more inspiring than an empty notebook…
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On Finding Your Calling as an Intellectual
I will assume that there is such an individual as an intellectual, and that such individuals lead meaningful and valuable lives by investing their energies in scholarly pursuits.
Understanding that you are an intellectual – that is to say, that you will devote yourself to the life of the mind – is only the first step. The next steps involve finding the work that will animate your best years of thought, when your mind is still youthful and vigorous and flexible and alive to the possibilities of the world.
One trains oneself on small problems, not necessarily trivial problems, but problems of no great scope of scale that can be satisfactorily resolved in hours or days or weeks. From these small problems one learns how to assess a problem and the extant intellectual and scholarly resources that might be brought to bear on a problem, how to focus, how to acquire the habits of diligence and application in order to bring a project to conclusion, and so on. This is a spiritual preparation for the great work that will define one’s life.
Perhaps, so far in your life, you have been a pupil at the foot of a master (I am speaking metaphorically here), and it has been your master who has been setting problems for you. But at some point, you must set problems for yourself. Only you will know your inner strengths and your now only nascent capacities for intellectual labor. You must set your own problems for yourself with increasing difficulty in light of your self-knowledge, until you reach a problem so difficult that that problem can be the worthy object of your life’s work.
The value of your life as an intellectual will be measured by the problem you have set for yourself as your life’s work: too easy a problem, and you cheapen your own life; too difficult a problem, and you will never solve it. The nature of the problem must be intrinsically consonant with the interests of the individual, so that one will not tire of it, and that, as the problem becomes clearer with years of study, and one glimpses a way to a solution, one’s pleasure in thinking only increases as one approaches the cognitive equivalent of the holy of holies: the moment of intuition in which the object of thought is grasped in its fullness and the solution of the problem is apprehended in the mind’s eye.
There is no more invigorating experience than realizing that one has found a problem that is worthy to be the object of one’s life’s work – a problem upon which one might expect to labor for years, if not decades, but which one is confident that one can eventually produce a satisfactory answer. This is when the real work of life begins, and one throws oneself into the work with an appetite – an appetite sharpened by the anticipation of the heady insights to come.
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The Vacuous Identity Principle
Constructivism without Constructivism
While I was recently in Uruguay I wrote a post on constructivism – Constructivism without Constructivism – in which I proposed a way of thinking about constructivism that I have since realized can be generalized as a distinct principle of reasoning.
Agreeing in Principle
We all know what it is like to “agree in principle” even while continuing to disagree over facts and details, and indeed disagreeing about everything other than the principle under consideration. This was the approach that I suggested for thinking about constructivism: that we might agree in principle that imposing limits on formal thought in order to ensure the consistency and coherency of such thought, even while not agreeing to the particular limitations proposed by contemporary constructivism.
Constructivism and Kantian Discipline
Constructivism seeks a more disciplined approach to formal reason than that of classical eclecticism (the latter term I have taken from Torkel Franzén). To speak of discipline in connection with reason immediately suggests Kant’s characterization of discipline near the end of the Critique of Pure Reason:
“The restraint which is employed to repress, and finally to extirpate the constant inclination to depart from certain rules, is termed discipline.”
But to understand the formal discipline advocated by constructivism through the lens of Kant’s conception of discipline is problematic, since constructivistic thought itself can be understood as a deviation from classical rules of logic (intuitionistic logic is sometimes identified as a deviant logic), so that discipline might be required to restrain the impulse to depart from classical rules of reasoning (such as tertium non datur, or P or not-P).
Yet the spirit of Kant’s conception of discipline, and its essentially constructivist character (in harmony with Kant’s oft-noted proto-constructivism), is revealed in the immediately preceding sentence to that quoted above:
“…where the limits of our possible cognition are very much contracted, the attraction to new fields of knowledge great, the illusions to which the mind is subject of the most deceptive character, and the evil consequences of error of no inconsiderable magnitude—the negative element in knowledge, which is useful only to guard us against error, is of far more importance than much of that positive instruction which makes additions to the sum of our knowledge.”
The constructivist’s focus on limiting classical eclecticism to a more disciplined subset of formal reasoning techniques is clearly an instance of, “the negative element in knowledge,” and, in so far as discipline must be employed in order to extirpate the tendency to depart from the constructivistically acceptable rules of formal reasoning, just so far is constructivism disciplined.
Constructivism and Cantorianism
Given that limitation is the essence of constructivism, it is no wonder that Cantorianism is the bête noir of constructivists, with Cantor’s transfinite numbers as symbolic of the epistemic hubris of non-constructive thought that recognizes no limits, no boundaries, and no intrinsic finitude to human cognition.
Set theory and transfinite numbers have long been singled out for particular execration by constructivists. Cantor himself was personally singled out. Kronecker called him a “corrupter of youth,” which puts Cantor in the excellent company of Socrates. Cantor felt the opprobrium leveled against him no less than did Darwin, not withstanding Cantor’s sincere piety and his sincere efforts to make his thought theologically palatable. Both Darwin and Cantor knew that they were offending to the intellectual pieties of their time, even as both transcended the limitations of their time.
Despite the great many differences among constructivists themselves, and the many paths proposed to constructivism, all can agree that Cantorianism is beyond the pale. Intuitionists, predicativists, finitists, all hold in common their rejection of infinitistic reasoning. (Just as many of Darwin’s contemporaries agreed in principle about evolution, but rejected the mechanism of natural selection.)
Do constructivists really completely reject Cantorism? The story of constructivism since its inception has been a story both of the growing sophistication of constructivist methods, and the growing number of non-constructively discovered results that can be reproduced by constructive methods. But I will leave this aside for the time being, perhaps to recur to this interesting observation at some future time (a time not specifically identified and therefore a non-constructively identified time).
The Constructivist Consensus
Given that the many different schools of constructivism, which are legion, and which are, many of them mutually incompatible, agree in principle that non-constructive and infinitistic reasoning is fatally flawed, there is something more to constructivism that mere limitation – or perhaps I should say that constructivism is essentially concerned with the kind of limitations to formal thought that yield finitistic reasoning.
Well, I can even go this far in agreeing in principle with constructivism. Logic and mathematics must be thought by finite human minds, and yet I still reject that particular constructivist constraints placed upon formal thought.
Introducing the Vacuous Identity Principle
This possibility of agreeing in principle without agreeing in fact I will call the Vacuous Identity Principle. When two or more individuals agree upon a principle, but agree about nothing other than the bare principle itself, they accept the identical principle, but without instances in common the principle is vacuous.
From the standpoint of pragmatism, the vacuous identity principle is no principle at all. If in logic and mathematics, as elsewhere, we are to observe the principle by their fruits ye shall know them, and the formal fruits of two logicians or mathematicians who assent to the vacuous identity principle but agree on nothing else, remain distinct, then we cannot “cash out” the identity of principle.
To turn this around, we can see how much of our thought, even in purely formal matters, is pragmatically driven, given that a purely formal assertion of agreement in principle may have no practical consequences.
Vacuous Identity and Vacuous Distinction
In formulating the vacuous identity principle I realize that I have previously come across the contrary of this principle, and this was an assertion by J. L. Austin that, “A distinction which we are not in fact able to draw is — to put it politely — not worth making.” (a line I also quoted in my post Of Distinctions, Principled and Otherwise)
These principles – my Vacuous Identity Principle and Austin’s rejection of vacuous distinctions – are two sides of the same coin, and if we recognize the validity of the vacuous identity principle, we also ought to recognize the validity of distinctions that make no difference, i.e., that have no practical consequences – in other words, the Vacuous Distinction Principle.
The vacuous identity principle is a principle of generalization, while the vacuous distinction principle is a principle of formalization.
An Indispensability Argument for Vacuous Concepts
An identification without identity is an identification not worth making, one might say, as one might also say that the distinction without a difference is not worth making – except that I think it is worth making. Thus in asserting the Vacuous Identity Principle I am asserting the legitimacy of vacuous concepts, and I think this is important to recognize, since vacuous concepts often play a significant role in formal reasoning.
The distinction made between a unit set and its only member is dismissed by some as a vacuous distinction, and an overly-subtle distraction in set theory, but I don’t see it like this at all. I think it was Frege who pointed out that the concept “natural satellite of the Earth” is a set with one member, while the concept “natural satellite of Venus” is a set with no members, and therefore, in a sense, a vacuous concept – but a perfectly legitimate concept.
Any concept of which we can predicate the number zero is a vacuous concept, but contemporary mathematics could not get by without the concept of zero. Therefore there is an indispensability argument for vacuous concepts, and therefore also, presumably, for both vacuous identities and vacuous distinctions.
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What survival does to us
Every day when I wake up I say to myself, “Nothing matters but the work.” It is a way – one way among many – that I try to stay focused on what matters, and what truly matters to me is the continuing development of the ideas that I am working on, and communicating the progress of my research here and on my other blog in the event that anyone else might be interested in any of my formulations.
The reason for a reminder to stay focused on work is, of course, that it is all too easy to become distracted by the blandishments of the world. Worse than the blandishments of the world – i.e., a greater threat to staying focused on what matters –are the necessities of the world. The blandishments we may avoid, but the necessities forces themselves upon us.
One of the great things about civilization is that it has turned many of the necessities of life into marvelous diversions. Thus the need to eat and drink has been turned into the art of fine dining, and the need to clothe ourselves has been turned into fashion and accessories, while the need for shelter has resulted in architecture that is a pleasure to view regardless of whether one has the opportunity to be sheltered by it. All of these things make life more genteel than it would be otherwise.
It should be obvious, then, that civilization transforms onerous necessities into blandishments, and so there is a relationship between the distractions that are forced upon us by necessity and distractions that seem to be mere entertainment that prevent us from doing the real work of life. What this means is that one of the not-so-great things about civilization is that, in unifying its distractions and necessities, it makes them all the more unavoidable.
Because of this transformation of necessities into luxuries, it is possible to enjoy the benefits of civilization while satisfying basic bodily needs that would, in an uncivilized condition, do nothing for our edification and elevation. Spinoza seems to have realized this, and offered an explicit defense of enjoying the good things in life in his Ethics (Part IV, proposition XLV, note to corollary 2):
Assuredly nothing forbids man to enjoy himself, save grim and gloomy superstition. For why is it more lawful to satiate one’s hunger and thirst than to drive away one’s melancholy? I reason, and have convinced myself as follows: No deity, nor anyone else, save the envious, takes pleasure in my infirmity and discomfort, nor sets down to my virtue the tears, sobs, fear, and the like, which axe signs of infirmity of spirit; on the contrary, the greater the pleasure wherewith we are affected, the greater the perfection whereto we pass; in other words, the more must we necessarily partake of the divine nature. Therefore, to make use of what comes in our way, and to enjoy it as much as possible (not to the point of satiety, for that would not be enjoyment) is the part of a wise man. I say it is the part of a wise man to refresh and recreate himself with moderate and pleasant food and drink, and also with perfumes, with the soft beauty of growing plants, with dress, with music, with many sports, with theatres, and the like, such as every man may make use of without injury to his neighbour. For the human body is composed of very numerous parts, of diverse nature, which continually stand in need of fresh and varied nourishment, so that the whole body may be equally capable of performing all the actions, which follow from the necessity of its own nature; and, consequently, so that the mind may also be equally capable of understanding many things simultaneously.
Spinoza offers an interesting perspective here, and one that we do not often find among philosophers, which almost amounts to an endorsement of Epicureanism by a philosopher whom many of us think of as being austere to the point of severity in his own personal life.
Even when gentled by civilization, the need to survive places severe constraints upon our activities – and these constraints are no less severe in industrial-technological civilization than they were during hunter-gatherer nomadism or agriculturalism. Indeed, survival even comes before reproduction in the evolutionary calculus of differential survival and reproduction. There is nothing else that trumps staying alive. But survival comes at a brutal cost – something I was just reflecting on in The Brutal Reality of Sustainability.
Political life in contemporary civilization, like evolution, is focused on short-term survivability. Anything that survives for the long term, must first survive for the short term. (One of Rumsfeld’s Rules is, “The tension between the short term and long term can be constructive, but there is no long term without a short term.”) And who would possibly
And there is, of course, this famous quote from Thucydides about personal survival in time of war:
“War takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes.”
Civilization, in its essential relationship to war, is scarcely any less a rough master, and rough masters are likely to coarsen our attitudes in turn. We think of civilization as edifying and uplifting, but at least as often it is brutal and demeaning, since civilization makes possible forms of oppression and dehumanization that cannot exist in a state of nature. War and its survival must be counted among the dehumanizing forces of civilization.
Need I even discuss economic survival in times of economic difficulty, when macroeconomic structures larger than any individual can control – or indeed larger than any institution can control – seem to heartlessly crush the struggling masses whose best effort is not enough to overcome impersonal forces indistinguishable from what the ancients called Fate?
Survival, in or out of civilization, exacts a price that makes us compromise our ideals or despair over them.
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The Ghost of Paradoxes Past
A good paradox, like a good aphorism, is harder than the gnawing tooth of time; it cannot be dispelled – fully dispelled – by the efforts of generations, and if it is dismissed because it cannot be dispelled, it lingers yet, like a ghost.
One could imagine a philosophical re-writing of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in which a crotchety philosopher is woken up at night abed, and made to walk abroad with ghosts of paradox past, paradox present, and paradox future.
It is not at all unusual for a philosopher to consider the paradoxes of others mere humbug, but when shown the paradoxes of others in a sympathetic context and with a compelling and poignant human interest story, even the most Scrooge-like positivist, given to denouncing pseudo-problems, may ultimately get the “spirit of paradox.”
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Thought Experiment Second Thoughts
After I recently posted A Thought Experiment on the Relative Value of Nature and Culture I received two responses. I asked how respondents would fill a shipping container with the sole surviving artifacts of 1. human civilization, and 2. the whole world, inclusive of both nature and civilization, and question 3 was to compare the two.
This is the first response I received...
1. Music, art, pictures 2. Plants, recordings of birds, rocks, water, pictures of nature 3. We have just been here for an instant.
…and this is the second…
Without taking into account regional bias, my answer would be a set of samples from human culture, and a set from the realm of biodiversity.
Ah, but which samples, in a world full of samples? And, in the second shipping container, what proportion of samples of culture to samples of nature? Would one want to employ, say, ninety percent of the second container with samples of nature, with the ten percent remaining going to human artifacts?
When I formulated my thought experiment in relative nature/culture axiology, I had in mind a detailed list of particular items, such as Michelangelo’s Pieta, Rembrant’s The Night Watch, a Stradivarius violin, the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, Einstein’s papers, and so forth, and so on. Neither of the responses involved any such kind of list, but I learned something important from both responses.
In an actual scientific experiment we would attempt to watch one or a few variables while minimizing the role of other variables. The other variables are controlled, while the variable we are watching for the data of our experiment is subject to change. Thus the other set of variables, not being watched as part of scientific observation, are called controlled conditions.
Thought experiments have much to learn from scientific experiments, and one of the things that can be learned is the role of controlled conditions. When we solicit the input of others for a thought experiment – essentially, experimenting with the thought processes of others – we learn what assumptions we were making in formulating the thought experiment, so that in future iterations of the experiment we can add conditions and qualifications that will control for the independent variable that we wish to elicit as a result of the experiment.
When I thought more about what I myself would include in a shipping container as representative of life on Earth, I thought that it might be a good idea to have a complete collection of, say, butterflies or beetles, in order to show the diversity of a single genus of life on Earth. Then it occurred to me that it would be even better to include as complete as possible of a line of evolutionary descent to show the development of life on Earth.
In terms of insects preserved in amber, we could a long way toward documenting insect evolution, however it would also be highly instructive to include a sequence of marine mammal skeletons, since they first came out of the water before they were mammals, evolved into mammals while living on the land, and then eventually returned to the water again, making their evolutionary history particularly interesting. (The PBS evolution documentary Episode 2, “Great Transformations,” made me aware of the fascinating sequence of whale fossils discovered in the Egyptian desert.) Unfortunately, there would not be enough room inside a shipping container for a complete sequence of dolphin ancestors, much less whale ancestors.
And this was a point I was trying to make in my thought experiment: limited space would force choices. If you include a complete collection of beetle species, there probably wouldn’t be room for much else, because there are almost half a million beetle species on the Earth. One must be selective in preserving some remnants of Earth against its ruin, and a selection implies a principle of selection.
What principle of selection ought to be employed in a limited archive of nature or culture on Earth? Any principle, it seems to me, would need to be an axiological principle. That is to say, it would be a principle of value.
However, just throwing together a number of valuable objects that would all fit inside a shipping container would not give any kind of vision of life or culture as a whole – even if comprehensive, it wouldn’t be coherent. We would want the assembled archive to represent more than the sum of its parts, which is what led me to consider an evolutionary sequence of fossils and specimens.
What principles might we appeal to in making a selection of artifacts from human culture that would give something of a unified and comprehensive picture of human experience, and do so within the confines of a single shipping container?
What principles might we appeal to in making a selection of samples from nature to give something of a unified and coherent picture of life on Earth?
And then what principle, if any, might we appeal to in determining the relative proportions of nature and culture in the second shipping container?
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In Pursuit of Definitive Formulations
This post is an adaptation of a comment that I made on Heath Rezabek’s blog, in response to Heath’s comments about one of my blog posts. Since the topic is of some interest to me, I have here reformulated my comments to try to make them stand on their own.
Most philosophical writing today is technical, strewn with jargon, sometimes with arcane symbols, and at times impenetrable. There is a reason for this: it takes careful and patient reasoning to find one’s way to the truth, or to some near approximation of the truth. But once one has pursued one’s subtle philosophical inquiries as far as they can be taken, the philosopher who has not entirely lost touch with the big picture, or with the vital connection that perennial philosophical questions have to the daily life of ordinary folks, needs to look back over the ground traveled and be able to give some kind of account both of the journey and of the result of the journey, that is to say, the ground upon which one stands at present.
Some contemporary philosophers are dismissive of even the attempt to speak the language of the untutored who lack both the technical vocabulary and the concepts that the technical terms represent. Here is a quote from the Introduction to Richard Cartwright’s Philosophical Essays:
“Except for beginners who want to learn and who try to say what they really think, I do not like talking philosophy with nonphilosophers and avoid it whenever I can. In response to inquiries from fellow travelers on airplanes, I say I’m a mathematician. So far I’ve gotten away with it, for it appears that people who travel on airplanes never were any good at mathematics. I ease my conscience with the thought that, anyhow, nonphilosophers would expect a philosopher to be something I’m not.” (pp. xxi-xxii)
And in tribute to Richard Cartwright, Judith Jarvis Thompson wrote this in her Preface to On Being and Saying, a collection of essays dedicated to Cartwright:
Richard L. Cartwright is a philosopher’s philosopher. He gives no public lectures, he reviews no books for the popular press, and to the extent of my knowledge he has never declared himself on the crises of Modern Man or Modern Science. Like G.E. Moore he is provoked to philosophize not by the world but by what is said or written by other philosophers. It is to the problems that the world makes for other philosophers and to the problems philosophers make for each other that he has devoted his professional life. He has done so with a love of craftsmanship, with a hatred of the shoddy and shabby, the windy and woolly, and with a passion for the truth – a passion simply for getting things right – that are unmatched in current philosophy and that have perhaps been matched by no one since Moore himself, whose philosophical manner and attitude Cartwright’s so much remind one of.
Some contemporary philosophers take a certain pride in refusing to simplify technical matters, not unlike scientists who explicitly defend their right to do basic research with no immediate or obvious application. And, of course, there is such a thing as basic philosophical research, and it can be as distant from ordinary experience as basic scientific research.
I do not reject either this position or the attitude it represents, but it is not my view. I am sympathetic to those “literary” philosophers like Sartre and Camus who not only expressed themselves to the public, but did so in such a way as to be too compelling to ignore. Just as basic scientific research eventually finds an application in technology, so basic philosophical research eventually culminates in insight into, and understanding of, life. Philosophy is, in a sense, the technology of wisdom as much as the love of wisdom.
I have long considered it the true test of a philosopher’s mettle whether or not they can explain themselves in a handful of short, clear, concise, and intuitively accessible sentences. I distrust claims that this cannot be done as Thoreau distrusted enterprises that require new clothes.
Sometimes in my posts I mention that I have or haven’t yet arrived at a definitive formulation of a given problem or theory. I recently said this in my post on The Genealogy of the Technium, in which I remarked that I lacked a definitive formulation of the distinction between generalization and formalization, despite having worked on the problem for many years.
Firstly, why do I formulate this problem of philosophical formulations in terms of, “a given problem or a theory”? One cannot propose a definitive theory to solve a problem until that problem has first been stated definitively. Much of the philosophical struggle to understand the world takes the form of simply finding the right question to ask.
I guess what I have meant by this claim of having or not having definitive formulations, without yet having made myself fully explicit, is that I believe myself to have arrived at a definitive formulation, I believe myself to have thought the problem or theory through until I am satisfied with my grasp of the matter at issue, and it is only following that technical and theoretical work that I am then able to return to it in another frame of mind and re-state everything in intuitive and non-specifically-philosophical terms.
So, to put this in clear and simple terms, if I have a definitive formulation, that means if you stopped me on the street and asked me to explain myself while standing on one foot, I could do it. Lacking definitive formulations, the attempted explanation would go on a little too long to be comfortable (or safely balanced) on one foot.
But all of this is genuinely hard conceptual work, and that work usually means formulating a comprehensive theory. Generally speaking, you’ve got to strain and sweat over the tough stuff until you can make it look easy, if indeed you can ever make it look easy. And the final step of making it look easy can be just as difficult as the earlier steps that brought one to an insight that one now attempts to frame intuitively.
The initial tough part of the philosophical effort involves generalization and formalization in a fully theoretical context, and the way to do this (or, at least, one way to do this) is to create a formal system (i.e., construct an artificial language). That’s where the new vocabulary – linguistic and conceptual – comes in. So the coining of terms and the creation of concepts is a stage of theory that in most cases, I think, can be overcome in the long run. To employ Wittgenstein’s image, one can throw away the ladder after having climbed up on it.
Here is the quote from section 6.54 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
“My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.”
This is the second to the last section of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and of course the very last section is the famous line that has since be quoted as an aphorism taken out of its (theoretical) context:
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.”
Wittgenstein looked to a mystic calm and quietude in the wake of philosophy, and said elsewhere (section 6.521) in the Tractatus:
The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)
Plato had a different idea. For Plato, the philosopher who had ascended from the cave of shadows had an obligation to return to the cave in to order to tell those still chained below of the light of the good, and the Forms above that they have experienced only as dim and transient shadows.
To return to the cave of shadows, one must speak the language of those still trapped below. That means making the attempt to express the truths grasped in philosophical reflection in a language innocent of the process of reflection and the insights it has yielded. This means, essentially, redefining the terms of ordinary language, using them differently than is customary, perhaps verging on nonsense as one seeks to distill years of thought into a few pithy remarks.
Great literature often serves a similar function, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, on the author’s part, and in so doing creates a de facto technical terminology by re-defining familiar terms. But it can take an entire novel having its own way with language before you can get to the point of having your readers on your side and being able to speak to them in a language that both you and they understand.
In a conversation, one does not have the time to carefully stage meanings as the novelist can do at his leisure. One must appeal directly to familiar intuitions or the engagement with the other is a lost opportunity to convey the practical value of philosophical thought.
Philosophers often use thought experiments to refine and clarify their ideas, and thought experiments can be introduced without much technical terminology in a way that can be immediate appealing in ordinary conversation, and, if formulated carefully, can spur the other to think unfamiliar thoughts simply by asking a searching question or two.
But one cannot expect others to take away from a thought experiment that lesson that one derived oneself from the exercise. A probing question will elicit diverse responses from different individuals. The thought experiment becomes the ground of a distinction, not necessarily an illumination that equally enlightens all in the same way.
Language, perhaps, has a similar role: we use it to explore concepts as well as to express ourselves, but once we have constructed concepts and expressed them to others, we do not necessarily in virtue of that effort equally “enlighten” others all in the same way.
In fact, one of the great things about human intellectual effort is that everyone takes up whatever interests them and uses it in their own way, and from so simple a beginning, endless ideas most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Note added 27 October 2012: Since writing the above I have given a particular example of a definitive formulation in A Definitive Formulation of Temperament.
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Cognitive Mereology
How do the simple folk think?
We have all heard that it is a gift to be simple, but what kind of gift is it exactly?
Sometimes it is the simplest minds among us who see matters whole, and are thereby closer to the truth, only because they have no idea how to analyze the larger wholes of experience into their constituent parts.
Never having attained to abstract thought, such minds have always and only the concrete, undivided whole of experience before them.
Those who are too clever by half, and aspire to live by their wits, have mastered the art of cognitive mereology and can easily decompose a whole into simpler parts, but, like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men who couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again, they lack the art of reassembling an integral whole from the now sundered parts.
Thus the superficially clever are too clever for their own good, and think themselves into trouble but cannot think themselves back out again. They understand the world less than the simple folk who never think to tear the world limb from limb.
It is wisdom beyond mere cleverness that understands both how to take the world apart and put it back together again. But one must be something of a tinker to do so; it takes many attempts before one is successful. One begins as an intellectual bricoleur of sorts, and only later, with practice, can one bring art, grace, elegance, and effortless style to the task.
Kierkegaard has expressed this in terms of simplicity rather than holism:
“…is it not the case that what is most difficult of all for the wise man to understand, is precisely the simple? The plain man understands the simple directly, when when the wise man sets himself to understand it, it becomes infinitely difficult. Is this an indignity visited upon the wise man that his person is so emphasized that the simplest things become the most difficult things, because it is he who is concerned with them? By no means. When a servant-girl weds a day-laborer everything passes off quietly, but when a king weds a princess it becomes an event. Is it derogatory to the king to say this about him?”
The same point might be made again in terms of the abstract: in all these cases – the whole, the simple, the concrete – the simplest minds possess without a struggle that which the philosopher must challenge himself to attain.
The philosopher must overcome that which Kierkegaard has observed has become infinitely difficult, and in so doing gains a facility with the indirect approach to the world. Thus a non-constructive (indirect) method is of the essence of philosophical thought, as a constructive (direct) method is of the essence of cognitive simplicity.
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