2 posts tagged with "metaphilosophy"

Alice: "I don't know what you mean by 'glory.'"

Humpty Dumpty: "Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"

Alice: "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument.'"

Humpty Dumpty: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

Alice: "The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things."

-- Lewis Carol, Alice in Wonderland

Introduction: What is Ordinary Language Philosophy​

I take Ordinary Language Philosophy ($OLP$) to be any philosophical program that claims that the problems of philosophy are best solved (or, in some cases, completely solved) by paying attention to ordinary language. As the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations says:

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.

(Though Wittgenstein spawned an era of $OLP$, it is arguable whether he himself was a through-and-through $OLP$ philosopher.)

An example of tackling a philosophical problem using $OLP$ might be as follows. We might wonder "What is triangularity?" Sure we see triangles, but we don't "See triangularity". In comes the $OLP$ philosopher to insist that looking for a "thing that we see" in place of triangularity is a mistake. We should, they will say, pay attention to how we use the word in ordinary language, and we will see that we have made what Gilbert Ryle would call a category error in assuming that our singular term "triangularity" should refer to something like "That balloon" does. They will say that we can avoid being so misled by sticking to our ordinary language guns and not letting language "Go on holiday".

In this short note, I hope to outline where I think $OLP$ goes wrong and why, and also what it gets right. I will argue that $OLP$ is correct in the following points:

and I will argue that $OLP$ is incorrect and should be polished up in the following points:

I think $OLP$ is an immensely powerful tool and like all powerful tools, it is prone to overuse and misapplication. Although I once believed it, I have long since abandoned the idea that all philosophical problems can be resolved by appealing to ordinary language.

What Does Ordinary Language Philosophy Get Right?​

You can't get semantics before pragmatics. Meaning is use.​

We cannot pick the meanings of our words out of thin air. So much the worse for Carol's Humpty Dumpty. They depend on learning sets of concepts. It often seems like philosophers are doing this when particular philosophical puzzles arise. An example that tends to bother me is when philosophers fall prey to the notion that we can sort of "mean things at will". They do so when they say, for example, "Maybe the red I see is what you see when I see blue!" How exactly do we mean "red" in that sentence? In the same way that we learn how to use the word "red"! And, if that is the case, then it seems like I cannot be meaning it "in some other way at the same time" that presumably only I could understand. Or if I am, then that way of meaning that just sits flaccidly alongside the pragmatically efficacious one (the one that has cash-value of meaning in our actions) and isn't really a part of communicating with others.

It is as if when I uttered the word I cast a sidelong glance at the private sensation, as it were in order to say to myself: I know all right what I mean by it.

-- L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations $\S$ 274

I don't have preconceptual, in this case prelinguistic, knowledge of what "red" is and so how could I possibly mean something by it that is directly out of accord with the pragmatics of that concept (How I learned to apply it). I might as well say, "maybe the feeling I get when I take a bath is the same as the one you get when you have a toothache".

$OLP$ is correct to steer us away from these illusory meanings and the knotty philosophical problems that come with them. I think it is correct, not by virtue of the primacy of ordinary language, but by focusing on what it is that gives our expressions meaning in the first place.

Theoretical meanings have to be related somehow to pragmatic meanings or they are useless.​

When we are giving some kind of theory, predictive, descriptive, synoptic, or prescriptive, the theory will have no use to anyone if it is not tied to a concept that has pragmatic value to us. I think the free will issue is illustrative of this kind of divorce of theoretical meaning from pragmatic meaning. My typical argument with the determinist who acts like they are the first person to discover that the physical world of science is causally closed goes something like:

It should seem peculiar to us that "real choices", on the determinist's view, turn out to be just the sort we don't have. The pragmatics of what is and isn't a "choice" have gone entirely out the window and with them the notion of what we are talking about having any material consequence. And so the conversation will circle back to "What is a choice?" and the determinist and compatibilist will disagree on that. But why should we care about this particular determinist's definition of choice? It seems like they have a big "So what?" to answer for next if we accept it. When we divorce theoretical "choice" from what practices and actions we take in knowing and deploying the word "choice" in real life, what importance does the theory really have?

$OLP$ is correct to keep us on a slightly tighter leash than we sometimes want to be on when philosophizing. We need to stay somewhat tethered to the common-sense concepts if we want our philosophizing to pertain to them.

If meaning comes from use, then meanings will be an imprecise hodge-podge because "doing" and therefore "use" is an imprecise hodge-podge. This is why "conceptual analysis" has never successfully analyzed a concept in the history of philosophy.​

We should assign an extremely low probability to the possibility of 'fully analyzing a concept'. In an effort to make the concept precise and immune to counterexamples, we will confine the concept to a tiny playpen and thereby commit the mistake of divorcing the concept from the vast landscape of actions and practices that give it meaning at all. We either have a chaotic hodge-podge of a concept, a fragile one to counter-examples, or one so surgically defined that it simply has nothing to do with the concept we sought to elucidate in the first place. I believe accepting the hodge-podge is the best play here.

That doesn't mean we can never have precision in more tightly bounded domains. It only means that precision across the board in every practice and context, as the determinist above thinks that can have with "choice", will likely be impossible and should not be expected. If meaning is determined by what we do, and what we do changes, how can we expect to ever catch up?

If meanings come from uses, then they must follow rules. For communication to be possible, some normativity must be assumed.​

As Wittgenstein (under some interpretations) and Kripke point out, in their rule-following paradoxes, applying a concept properly, learning a word, following a rule cannot be something that is done all by oneself in a vacuum. Kripke asks us to imagine a rule for a mathematical function called quus. Quus, $⊕$, is just like 'plus', $+$, except:

$x⊕y = x+y$

if $x, y < 57$

but

$x⊕y = 5$

if $x, y > 57$

Suppose I have been teaching you to add all the way up until we have gotten to:

$57 + 57$

What should you answer? $5$? or $114$? The point of the strange example is that it seems like nothing about how I have taught you to add so far has determined whether I meant quus or plus. There is no fact of the matter. The same skeptical challenge could be applied to any rule and so it seems that without some turning of the spade and reaching justification for the rule, this could go on ad infinitum. We reach an Agrippan trilemma of "rule following". It seems no rule can ever be justified merely by example or stipulation of how the rule should be followed because any action can be made to fit the rule and any rule made to fit my past actions. If we need rules for how to follow the rules, then how could a rule ever ground a practice? Wouldn't we then need "rules for following rules for following rules"?

I think the rule-following paradox terminates in doing. We don't learn rules by painstakingly memorizing instructions or "rules for following rules".

Someone says to me: "Show the children a game." I teach them gambling with dice, and the other says "I didn't mean that sort of game." Must the exclusion of the game with dice have come before his mind when he gave me the order?

-- L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations $\S$ 70

In this silly example, when the concerned parent says "Not that kind of game!" he didn't consult an inner rule or mental lookup-table of any kind in order to exclude gambling from the kind of games he meant. The meaning of the sentence and the rule that we were to follow was grounded in practice, in the pragmatic "doing of stuff", in habits and the innate nature of us as human beings.

Ordinary language is rough around the edges, does a million more things than state facts about the world, constantly changes, and is a reflection of what we do and what we fundamentally believe must be done. There is no playing the game of philosophy without language or concepts of some kind which set their roots in practice. Therefore, we have to philosophize while keeping in mind that those words and concepts are constructions of the practices and actions that give them meaning in the first place.

What Does Ordinary Language Philosophy Get Wrong?​

Ordinary use has no theoretical primacy. A term can grow to encompass more than its ordinary use.​

I am often frustrated reading $OLP$ philosophers say things like "This is a misuse of the word thought". I am all for taking the semantics as following the pragmatics. We cannot just mean whatever we want by words without getting the ball rolling through some kind of action in practice. If I want "thought" to mean "words I speak internally", then I am certainly allowed to adopt that as a technical term. It may not relate very well to the ordinary use of the word or concept, but maybe that isn't my goal in whatever particular mode of philosophizing I am doing.

$OLP$ philosophers have attacked neuroscientists' use of sentences like "The brain thinks X". They claim this is a misuse of "to think" as only persons can think. That's where the pragmatics come from they claim, and I agree. We learn to say "think" of someone based on how they are acting etc etc. However, I think it is silly to claim that this kind of metaphorical talk is "nonsense" full stop. We very frequently use intentional language as a proxy to quickly understand complex systems and that should stand on its own theoretical merit, not be judged by the stipulated authority of ordinary language.

What claims ordinary language sentences should/shouldn't,do/don't commit us to are not known implicitly. They must be accounted for theoretically.​

There seems to be a sentiment in $OLP$ that all philosophy should do is describe how terms are used. However, in reading some of these philosophers, Ryle particularly, I often noticed that they seemed to be doing a lot more than that. More specifically, I often notice that they argue for or take for granted certain theories of how we should account for a given way of speaking.

These supposed "mere descriptions" from $OLP$ philosophers are often just expedient theories of how something in the world works. Sometimes they are empirical and need evidence, sometimes they are empirical and don't need evidence (because they are so obvious), and sometimes they are synoptic/prescriptive accounts of how language should be viewed to work. Here's an example: Quine (another philosopher who puts pragmatics before semantics) gives the example of "sakes" as a word that takes the grammatical form of a singular term but does not refer to anything. There are no "sakes" to be accounted for. Did we automatically know that there weren't "sakes" by virtue of knowing how to say "for Pete's sake"? Is that question "nonsense"? Is Quine giving a theory of how our words should be viewed? I think he is and so is every $OLP$ philosopher who prompts us to focus on the ordinary use of a word to circumnavigate a philosophical problem. The theory is still a theory whether we got it from observations about ordinary language or from philosophical accounts after the fact. There is no theory-free observations of language that philosophy is entitled to. But don't get me wrong. I'm all in favor of eschewing "accounts of" something when the ordinary concepts will do just fine, as long as we acknowledge that that is also itself a theory.

We don't know all the implications of our claims just by virtue of making or being disposed to make them. Additionally, we don't always know how the ordinary concepts we use hang together, or how they relate to one another. We can be masters of the concepts of "inference" and "belief" without ever having thought about how they relate.

The pragmatic move is a good move, but it does not instantaneously give us a correct and satisfactory account of how our terms work, how their use can be more technically refined, or how they do/should relate to the word as science tells us it exists.

Not all philosophical problems are dissolved in ordinary language as it evolves and keeps up with science.​

Even in $OLP$ with a strong adherence to not extending ordinary terms beyond their common use, it isn't clear to me why all philosophizing is off limits by virtue of it not having some property that ordinary language has. I'd agree with Wittgenstein that lots of philosophical problems arise from our "bewitchment by language" (non-referring singular terms being a good example), but it is far from clear to me that we can say all of them are.

Philosopher David Enoch has a very fun example to illustrate this. In Pulp Fiction, Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield are having a little back-and-forth about why Jules doesn't eat pork.

So by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?

Enoch points out that both speakers are clearly philosophizing. It seems wrong to me to say that they just crossed the precipice of sense and were talking nonsense to each other even though they thought they weren't. On the other hand, I do think it is possible to philosophize in vain by playing games with words that are too far gone from their practical application for the inferences we might validly make about them to have any relevance at all. I take philosophizing to be a general extension of the basic human discursive practice of making our commitments to certain claims clear, whether to ourselves or to one another. That's what Jules is doing, and that is what I am doing now.

A scientist who ceases for a moment to try to solve his questions in order to inquire instead why he poses them or whether they are the right questions to pose ceases for the time to be a scientist and becomes a philosopher.

-- Gilbert Ryle, Philosophical Arguments

Intro​

I have too frequently heard skepticism expressed toward the usefulness (or worse: the epistemic viability) of armchair theorizing. The term "Armchair" is usually meant in pejorative sense to indicate that no real work could be done that way. I choose to just lean in to the term. Whether or not we take armchair theorizing to include mathematics, computer science, and logic this skepticism is unwarranted. There are a few subclasses of armchair theorizing that are usually in the crosshairs of those eager to criticize it. These typically include ethics, cosmology, analytic philosophy, theoretical physics, and much more. Given the amount of silly theorizing that goes on, the existence of criticism is unsurprising. However, I still see most of this criticism fall flat even when the analysis itself is not valid or useful.

Here I will argue that if we are going to accept any type of pure conceptual analysis as necessarily "Garbage in, Garbage out", which we should, then we are then committed to accepting it as necessarily "Gold in, Gold out". If we are committed to "Gold in, Gold out", then it follows that armchair knowledge can be generated and that should not be surprising.

Additionally, I will argue that the armchair toolkit consists of many useful tools that are not exhaustively described by 'listing facts', but nevertheless are indispensable in the furtherance of knowledge.

Naive Pure Empiricism​

Can we really generate knowledge from the armchair? How is that possible? I have myself been struck with a mysterious feeling around this question. If knowledge is about the world in some sense, how could I just sit here and come up with some? This may be an intuition only shared by those whom William James referred to as "hard-nosed empiricists" and they are mostly the target of the arguments here.

Philosopher David Chapman holds such a "hard-nosed" view with the only field allowed to generate armchair knowledge being mathematics:

If it were only this tweet where I had heard this sentiment expressed, I would likely just ignore it and move on. Indeed I would like to believe this position to be a straw-man I have invented, but sadly I have met many individuals who share this view, some deeply and some only on a superficial intuitive level.

I would like to interpret this charitably as "Don't speculate or try to reason abstractly too much about something that is best left to the domain of empirical research.", or maybe "We need SOME empirical content somewhere along the line to generate knowledge." I mostly agree with those and the second is something even most die-hard rationalists might accept. Chapman's words here invite a much stronger interpretation, even if maybe they are hyperbole. They espouse what I'll call Pure Naive Empiricism.

Let's slightly reformulate these claims while sticking to their cash-value as the formulation of Pure Naive Empiricism:

This claim is obviously false unless we adopt a rather extreme interpretation of what "empirical experiments" are. Pure Naive Empiricism appears to be a popular position among those not fond of abstraction that impinges on reality too closely. It would be a simple world if math and observations were all we needed for furthering knowledge.

Why is Pure Naive Empiricism entitled to stop at mathematics? (even if it is "mathematics plus some other stuff") If mathematics is an "acceptable" epistemic pursuit then why is formal reasoning about cosmology, ethics, metaphysics, or mind not? I suspect the Pure Naive Empiricist does not have a satisfactory answer to this question. We don't need to go poke anything to find out why either.

I will argue that there is no viable place to draw the line between "acceptable" and "not acceptable" analysis and so the distinction is bogus. Either all conceptual analysis of any kind (including mathematics) is capable of generating knowledge, if the premises are true and the rules are followed, or none of it is.

'Garbage In, Garbage Out' Implies 'Gold In, Gold Out'​

In learning elementary symbolic logic and my first programming languages I was taught a simple maxim of any deduction: "Garbage in, Garbage out." I believe this should uncontroversially apply to any formal language and indeed to everyday human languages in formulating and assessing arguments. Consider the following argument.

This is a valid argument but not a sound one. Nobody will ever care that Skrump is a Schmorg because it is a Blorg. We fed garbage in and we got garbage out.

What was not taught to me alongside this was "Gold in, Gold out". We usually don't have good reasons to care about this one because it is so obviously true. If we are writing a simple Python script that converts Celsius to Fahrenheit, we already know, trivially, that if it is 35^oC outside and my script says that converts to 95^oF, that this fact applies to the real temperature outside right now. We usually only need to be reminded of "Garbage in, Garbage out" when our analytical processes have generated an absurdity that we become convinced is true.

If the falsehood of at least one premise guarantees that a valid argument is not sound then all the premises truths guarantee that the argument is sound. We cannot rationally hold "Garbage in, Garbage out" without holding "Gold in, Gold out". If we have to hold both, then we cannot deny that the products of analysis are true. So, straightforwardly, if something is true and we have good reasons to believe it without other defeating reasons, we have knowledge.

If Armchair Knowledge Were Not Possible?​

Pure Naive Empiricism has extremely bizarre implications. For example, if all knowledge were generated solely by empirical experiments then we would have to know all of the conclusions entailed by our current beliefs, both the actual and conditional implications. We clearly don't know those. So either we claim that those somehow "are not knowledge" or we admit that Pure Naive Empiricism is a ridiculous view.

If armchair knowledge were not possible, how would we know what questions to ask to guide empirical inquiry? Should we be looking for consciousness in the brain? Do thoughts have a location? Can actual infinities exist? Could the universe be fundamentally random? Does it follow from space-time theory that space and time are not ontologically distinct? Is math real? Is everything we believe false because we only evolved to survive? Are these good questions at all? To find out if these questions are worth pursuing, we need armchair theorizing, even if it is speculative. We need to know that "this is the right/wrong question". The alternative is literally conducting an experiment to test every absurd hypothesis that we can come up with. Armchair theory, even speculative theory, can and does save us eons of unneeded experimentation.

Additionally, it is often overlooked by the Pure Naive Empiricist that not all knowledge-pursuing consists in the gathering of facts, deductively generated or discovered. We need to know the right questions and the right way to think about them to have success in any inquiry. Some ant colonies are complex systems whose behavior is best understood emergently. No listing of simple facts about these ants by itself, without the analytical armchair toolkit, would give us this insight.

What Armchair Theorizing Gets Wrong​

Some armchair theorizing is not worth the mental energy spent on it. If armchair knowledge can be knowledge at all, then it can be true, but what kind of armchair knowledge is useful? We should answer this question partially with reference to the two maxims above. I can say that I know that if "All Blorgs are Schmorgs and Skrump is a Blorg" then "Skrump is a Schmorg" but it is clearly of zero use whatsoever. The concepts we reason about, if we want to generate not only knowledge but knowledge that matters, must be clear and serve some end.

If we have some valid reasoning about minds, it is only as useful as the argument's concept of "minds" is related to the one(s) that we actually use. If we say minds are in rocks and atoms as well as in brains, then are we still talking about the same content anymore or have we made a move that makes our terms devoid of any of the predictive or explanatory power that made them useful? Perhaps in the future we will have some other theoretical reasons to shift the semantic ground away from the folk-concept of "minds".

Generally, we should be skeptical of armchair theorizing that overextends concepts beyond the scope of their reasonable usefulness. When that limit has been overreached is itself often a tricky philosophical question. Some philosophers believe that the Einsteinian notion of space-time should be scrapped because of analytic arguments about how time must be ontologically distinct from space. Though I cannot rule out these conclusions as false with a hand wave, we should be skeptical when armchair thinking has purportedly overturned a useful empirical framework.

What Can Armchair Theorizing Do?​

Every implication of our current beliefs, conceptual definitions, and strategies of inquiry is not laid bare before us just by having them. If that were the case, we would be supercomputers. That space needs to be mapped out and the edges of the map keep expanding. Useful armchair theory is not all pure deduction, sometimes it takes the form of reframing questions, guiding inquiry, and using the power of analogy to deepen understanding or see new possibilities. All of these modes and many more are indispensable to science and to good human lives.

Generally, useful armchair theory comes in the form of deductive arguments, clarifications of existing concepts, demonstrating the incompatibility of certain beliefs, the dispelling of illusory problems, the creation of new questions, meta-inquiry, and the discovery of unforeseen implications of currently known truths.

Conclusion​

I hope I have made it clear that outright denial of the possibility of non-experimental knowledge or 'armchair knowledge' is absurd. I have argued that it is irrational to reject the ability of analytical reasoning to generate knowledge and that it is wrong to limit the scope of the furtherance of knowledge to mere 'fact collection'. I think that the intuitions to the contrary are motivated by putting empirical inquiry on a pedestal while taking for granted the foundations that support it.

The analytic toolkit that can be accessed from the armchair cannot reach out and interface with the physical world, of course, but it simply does not need to in order to be useful, generate truth, and make lives better.