(Philosophy Talk, 2016)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Example 1: Analytic Philosophy
3. Example 2: Materialism or Physicalism and Naturalism
4. Example 3: Skepticism and the Limits of Philosophy
5. Conclusion: Where To Now, Philosophy?
The essay that follows will be published in five installments, one per section; this is the fourth installment.
But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of the essay, including the REFERENCES, by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.
The Limits of Philosophy: Its Disenchantment and A Case for Epistemic Humility
Conflict over the attention space is a fundamental fact about intellectuals. It follows that intellectuals produce multiple competing views of reality. And this disagreement will go on in the future, as long as intellectual networks exist. (Colins, 1998: p. 876)This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy. (Wittgenstein, 1969: p. 61e).
[There] is simply no avoiding the conclusion that the human race is mad. There are scarcely any human beings who do not have some lunatic beliefs or other to which they attach great importance. People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth of generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the most powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic. (Stove, 1991: p. 184)
W.C. Fields once said that scientists have discovered that the universe is composed of three elements: oxygen, nitrogen and horse manure. Philosophers have not neglected this third element in their quest for a general description of the universe. (Sorensen, 1991: p. 184).
4. Example 3: Skepticism and the Limits of Philosophy
The general aim of Western philosophy has been to produce rationally justified arguments for either general philosophical positions (realism, anti-realism, freedom of will, determinism etc.) or systems (materialism, idealism etc.) or more modestly, in support of solutions to specific philosophical puzzles and paradoxes. It has also been held by the vast majority (but not all) Western philosophers that Clifford’s principle–“it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”—if not true in general, then at least applies to philosophical all arguments and theses (Clifford, 1879; Fogelin, 1994: pp. 114-115). So, in philosophy, reasoned arguments rule and beliefs cannot be accepted as true because of cultural convention, practical utility, or “faith.” All beliefs must be subject to rational scrutiny, including very basic ones such as, for example, the principle of induction, the justification of reasoning from the observed to the unobserved or from the known to the unknown, a fundamental metaphysical presupposition of science itself, as many contend (Vetter, 1969; Stove, 1986; MacNamara, 1991; Rosenkrantz, 1992; Cargile, 1998; Pargetter & Bigelow, 1997; Foster, 2004). The premises of an inductive argument might move from the statement that all observed Xs have been Y, to the conclusion that all Xs are Y or will be Y. But not all Xs have been observed. How do we know that the laws of nature, such as the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics, will not undergo a radical transformation? To assume that nature is uniform is to beg the question at issue, namely, why is nature uniform? We are presupposing what we have to prove, namely, the principle of induction. Or so the argument goes. Many philosophers believe that this problem alone challenges the rationality of science; as David Papineau puts it:
The problem of induction calls the authority of all these laws [i.e., laws of nature] into question. For if our evidence is simply that these laws have worked so far, then how can we be sure that they will not be disproved by future occurrences? (Papineau, 2007: p. 287)
No satisfactory formal theory or justification of induction has been generally accepted after two millennia of research.
The rationality of philosophy, dominated by the hyper-rationality of Clifford’s principle, has been questioned by an array—although still a minority—of skeptical, relativist and nihilist philosophers, from the skeptics of the ancient world (e.g. Sextus Empiricus, 2nd century AD) to philosophers critical of system building like Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) , and philosophers of minor or insignificant status in the great multiverse of philosophical “superstars,” such as myself, who is glad to be insignificant in the great cognitive whirlpool (Smith, 1986). Postmodernism in particular, as well as associated movements such as feminism, deconstructionism, and environmentalism, have all presented challenges to the hyper-rationalism of 20th and 21st century Analytic philosophy.
Postmodernism, for example, is difficult to define, for as Frodeman observes, postmodernism is a movement “that celebrates its own schizophrenia, embracing pastiche and spontaneity and renouncing self-classification” (Frodeman, 1992: p. 308). However, common to all postmodernist thinkers is the rejection of the modernist idea that there is a unified account of what makes an inquiry scientific and rational; there is a death of “metanarratives” constituting “universal” human history (Lyotard, 1984). Lyotard puts it this way: “there is no longer any horizon of universality, universalisation or general emancipation to greet the eye of postmodern man” (Lyotard, 1992: p. 89). Postmodernism has rejected epistemological foundationalism (i.e., the thesis that knowledge can only be justified by obtaining a secure grounding), the referential theory of language (i.e., the thesis that language has meaning through by virtue of the representation of the objects referred to) and the correspondence theory of truth (i.e., the thesis that sentences or statements are true by virtue of “corresponding” to reality) (Lynch, 2009). However, the rejection of those conventionally accepted, but controversial philosophical theses, has produced something of a “reality problem” (Chalmers, 1985, 1989; Martin, 1989; Clendinnen, 1989; McArthur, 2006; Wray, 2008), and also since the 1960s it has yielded a wide intellectual debate about the doctrine of relativism (Burke, 1979; Hugley & Sayward, 1987; Edwards et al., 1995; Norris, 1997a, 1997b; Fairlamb, 1997; Shogenji, 1997; Kuna, 2005; Zimmerman, 2007; Boghossian, 2007; Pritchard, 2009; Wright, 2008).
The doctrine of relativism has been debated by philosophers since at least Plato’s discussion of the classical relativist Protagoras in the Theaetetus, where Socrates says that Protagoras proposed that “[m]an is the measure of all things, alike of the being of things that are, and of the not-being of things that are not” (Plato, 1985: p. 856). Since that time, the definition of the word “relativism” has been subjected to perennial philosophical dispute, with some philosophers arguing that the position is itself incoherent or self-refuting (Bearn, 1985; White, 1989; Fox, 1994; Hales, 1997; Benningson, 1999; Lockie, 2003), and others attempting to make logical sense of the notion (MacFarlane, 2005, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009). Informally stated, relativism about some knowledge-claim P is the view that there exists a plurality of standards and principles about P, which vary between people, cultures, “forms of life,” frameworks, times (and other phenomena whereby beliefs can vary) and there is no single, neutral (with respect to alternative, incompatible principles and standards) method of choice between these standards and principles (Siegel, 1987: p. 6). The knowledge-claims P could include various claims to scientific knowledge or to knowledge in general (epistemic relativism), ethical knowledge claims (ethical relativism), legal knowledge claims (legal relativism), or philosophical knowledge claims (philosophical relativism), or even metaphilosophical knowledge claims (metaphilosophical relativism), the idea that “no metaphilosophy is objectively best” (Double, 1996: p. 37; Ellis, 2001). In addition to relativism about truth-claims, relativism can also be about the justification or warrant for beliefs, about conceptual schemes (conceptual relativism) (Davidson, 1984), or about what exists (ontological relativism) (Quine, 1969). Relativism can also be supported by a number of arguments from considerations about the sociology of knowledge (Morrow, 1985; Tibbetts, 1986; Katz, 1989; Slezak, 1989, 1991, 1994; Bunge, 1991; Pickering, 1997; Demeter, 2009), from social constructivism, as in “we collectively invent the world rather than discover it” (Kukla, 2000: p. ix; see also Fine, 1996; Craib, 1997; Hacking, 1999; Burr, 2003)) and from epistemological considerations about anti-realism (Fine, 1991; Nelson, 1994; Okasha, 2000; Lewens, 2005).
At the center of the relativism debate is a challenging problem that Paul Boghossian in Fear of Knowledge (Boghossian, 2006) has likened to a Kant-style “antinomy of reason”: on the one hand, epistemic relativism is allegedly self-refuting, but on the other hand, epistemic objectivism (the denial of epistemic relativism) is allegedly logically circular, and hence philosophically unjustified. Even if epistemic relativism were not self-refuting, the “circularity” problem itself challenges both epistemic relativism and objectivism alike. The diallelus problem, as stated by Sextus Empiricus in Outlines of Pyrrhonism, is as follows:
[I]n order to decide the dispute which has arisen about the criterion, we must possess an accepted criterion by which we shall be able to judge the dispute; and in order to possess an accepted criterion, the dispute about the criterion must first be decided. And when the argument thus reduces itself to a form of circular reasoning the discovery of the criterion becomes impracticable, since we do not allow them [the dogmatists] to adopt a criterion by assumption, while if they offer to judge the criterion by a criterion we force them to a regress ad infinitum. And furthermore, since demonstration requires a demonstrated criterion, while the criterion requires an approved demonstration, they are forced into circular reasoning. (Sextus Empiricus, 1976: II, 20)
Although the problem of the criterion—all epistemic norms are of equal standing—has been advanced in support of epistemic relativism (Sankey, 2010: p. 6, 2011, 2012)), the point of the diallelus problem is that all epistemic norms are equally unjustified, including epistemic relativism itself, applied self-reflectively (Talvinen, 2009; Schwab, 2013; McCain, 2014).
Fries’s Trilemma says that the rational justification of a theory of knowledge (or justification) would be either (i) question-begging, (ii) lead to an infinite regress, or (iii) be viciously circular (Nelson, 1965; Haller, 1974; Kekes, 1975, 1976; Johnson, 1976; Berkson, 1979; Apel, 1976). This problem of the ultimate justification of reason itself has been regarded as “one of the most important and one of the most difficult of all the problems of philosophy” (Chisholm, 1982: p. 61), subject to continuing philosophical dispute (Mercier, 1906; Coffey, 1938; Rescher, 1980; Huby & Neal, 1989; Amico, 1993; Floridi, 1996), with influential philosophers seeing the challenge of rationality skepticism as unmet (Hiley, 1987; Fogelin, 1999; Landesman, 2002: p. 202). Landesman sees the criterion argument as the most powerful skeptical argument and concludes that
there is another basic claim of global skepticism that is, I think, quite correct, namely that we cannot prove that we have knowledge without using knowledge already in our possession. So arguments intended to prove that we actually know something beg the question because they must rely upon background information. (Landesman, 2002: p. 202)
Landesman thus accepts a position of epistemic humility, uncommon in philosophy, a discipline not known for its modesty:
skeptical arguments do justify the verdict: not proven. Like Hume, we should enter the affairs of life with that verdict in the backs of our minds, recognizing our fallible condition and being wary of speculative claims. Our claims to knowledge should be constrained by an understanding of the limits of our ability to prove the reliability of the procedures we use to get in contact with the external world. (Landesman, 2002: p. 202)
The problem of ultimate justification has led to the school of critical rationalism, which rejects the justificationist framework and holds that “our knowledge consists of unfalsified hypotheses” (Miller, 2006: p. 254). Critical rationalism involves “the total repudiation of any attempt to use arguments to support the hypotheses that we adhere to” (Miller, 2006: p. 78), but “critical rationalists have not abandoned truth; only the pretensions of justified truth” (Miller, 2006: p. 80). Sextus Empiricus would perhaps regard such a position as skepticism posing as rationalism, for would not Occam’s Razor (i.e., do not multiply entities beyond necessity) also require one to abandon truth, once justified truth is abandoned with all attempts of verification? (Derksen, 1980; Hauptli, 1991).
Graham Priest in Beyond the Limits of Thought discusses Sextus Empiricus’s criterion argument applied to the question of distinguishing veridical from non-veridical perceptions (Priest, 2002). Priest rejects the claim that to have reasonable grounds for belief one needs a criterion and claims that experience itself is a defeasible reason for believing that the world is a certain way. This response seems to assume a realist theory of perception; as D.A. Kaufman, has noted, if a non-realist theory of perception is adopted, then one is on the road to Hume’s (and Sextus’s) problem (Kaufman, 2002). For a critique of the direct realist theory of perception, see (Smythies & Ramachandran, 1997). Priest also claims that skepticism is self-refuting, even if the criterion argument succeeded:
If Sextus’ arguments worked then they would show that skepticism is rationally acceptable, contrary to his committed position that they are not. (Priest, 2002: p. 47).
As Priest says: “To assert something involves taking on the commitment to support it with rational grounds for supposing it to be (objectively) true if challenged” (Priest, 2002: p. 47). The question of whether or not global skepticism is self-refuting has been discussed in the literature: see, for example (Gallois, 1993; Michael, 1995; Gemes, 2009, 2010). These arguments cannot be evaluated here, but it can be noted that even if global skepticism is self-refuting, this alone does not refute the skeptical arguments advanced against rationalism, such as the criterion or regress arguments. What would follow is another Kantian-style antinomy of reason, namely, that both global skepticism and the negation of that position are false, which would not have been surprising to a paraconsistent logician such as Priest.
The power of the criterion argument can be illustrated by a brief reconsideration of the role of intuitions in philosophy, as an important part of philosophy’s methodology. As Timothy Williamson has observed in The Philosophy of Philosophy:
[T]he current philosophical mainstream has failed to articulate an adequate philosophical methodology, in part because it has fallen into the classic epistemological error of psychologizing the data.… The picture is wrong; we frequently have better epistemic access to our immediate physical environment than to our own psychology. … Our understanding of philosophical methodology must be rid of internalist preconceptions. (Williamson, 2009: pp. 4-5)
Be that as it may, intuitions, as I discussed earlier, are a core part of Analytic philosophy’s methodology: “intuitions involve or somehow reveal what our concepts are,” Mark Fedyk says, and
the basic idea is that an intuition is about the salient features of a case, it has propositional content, and the propositional content of an intuition is obtained in some way from the implicated concept. (Fedyk, 2009: p. 56)
Williamson on the other hand, while agreeing that intuition, “plays a major role in contemporary analytic philosophy’s self-understanding,” also says that
there is no agreed or even popular account of how intuition works, no accepted explanation of the hoped-for correlation between our having an intuition that P and its being true that P. Since analytic philosophy prides itself on its rigor, this blank space in its foundations looks like a methodological scandal. Why should intuitions have any authority over the philosophical domain? (Williamson, 2009: p. 215)
For example, it is widely held that Edmund Gettier presented intuitive counterexamples to the justified true belief account of knowledge, but empirical evidence indicates that these “intuitions” are not cross-culturally valid (Weinberg et al., 2001; Nisbett et al., 2001; Alexander & Weinberg 2007; Vaidya, 2010). Feltz has argued that psychological evidence indicates that intuitions are not a reliable source of evidence for epistemic justification (Feltz, 2008). A lively debate has occurred about this issue (Greenman, 1987; Bealer, 1992, 1996, a, b; Sosa, 1996, 2007; De Paul & Ramsey eds, 1998; Jackson, 1998, 2005; Pust, 2001, 2004; Rescher, 2001; Stich & Weinberg, 2001; Weatherson, 2003; Laurence & Margolis, 2003; Levin, 2004; Hales, 2004; Williamson, 2004; Jackson, 2005; Bishop &Trout, 2005; Sandin, 2006; Boulter, 2007; Symons, 2008; Earlenbaugh & Molyneaux, 2009; Chapman et al., 2013). The debate cannot be resolved by appealing to intuitions, for that would be begging the question, since the “intuitions” of the anti-intuitionists are clearly in conflict with the intuitions of the intuitionists. Intuitively, the debate does not seem capable of resolution, for the reason mentioned by John Woods in his book Paradox and Paraconsistency. (Woods, 2003). For any philosophical argument A, “Philosophy’s Most Difficult Problem is that of adjudicating in a principled way the conflict between supposing that A is a sound demonstration of a counterintuitive truth, as opposed to seeing it as a counterexample of its premises” (Woods, 2003: p. 14).
A challenging examination of the epistemic status of intuitions in philosophy has been presented by Steven D. Hales. In his 2000 essay “The Problem of Intuition,” he argues that the problem of intuition is that philosophy is only possible (that is, “traditional a priori philosophy” (Hales, 2000: p. 145), if the proposition that “nothing is self-justifying” is rejected, for justifying the use of intuitions via intuition is not only circular, but logically contradictory according to an argument developed by Hales. Hales’ argument is as follows:
The problem of intuition:
1. If a proposition is epistemically justified, then it is justified either a priori or a posteriori.
2. If a proposition is epistemically justified a priori, then its justification depends on the method of intuition justifying some propositions.
3. If the proposition “the method of intuition justifies some propositions” is epistemically justified, it is not justified a posteriori.
4. “The method of intuition justifies some propositions” is epistemically justified.
5. Nothing is self-justifying.
From 1, 3:
6. If “the method of intuition justifies some propositions” is epistemically justified, it is justified a priori.
From 2, 6:
7. If “the method of intuition justifies some propositions” is epistemically justified, then its justification depends on the method of intuition justifying some propositions.
From 4, 7:
8. The justification of “the method of intuition justifies some propositions” depends on the method of intuition justifying some propositions.
From 5, 8:
9. Thus “the method of intuition justifies some propositions” is not epistemically justified.
From 4, 9:
10. “The method of intuition justifies some propositions” is and is not epistemically justified. (Hales, 2000: p. 139)
Thus, either “ ‘the method of intuition justifies some propositions’ is epistemically justified on the basis of nothing other than the method of intuition itself” or else “philosophy grounded in the use of rational intuition is bunk” (Hales, 2000: p. 145).
In his book Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy, Steven Hales goes even further and argues that:
1. there is no reason to think that rational intuition is a better means of discovering which philosophical propositions are true than Christian revelation or even the ritual use of hallucinogens; and 2. the truth values of philosophical propositions are relative to doxastic perspectives, and may be true in one perspective and false in another. (Hales, 2006: p. 184)
Hales believes that there are three live options to the problem outlined in 1. above: (1) skepticism: there is no philosophical knowledge, (2) nihilism: there are no philosophical propositions and (3) relativism: the truth of philosophical positions is relative to perspectives. He attempts to prove the relativist position by eliminating both skepticism and nihilism. In particular, he claims that skepticism is self-refuting, so there must be a method of obtaining knowledge about philosophical propositions, and if there is one way of getting knowledge of philosophical propositions, there must be at least two, so there must be conflicting philosophical truths, so relativism is true (Hales, 2006: pp. 120-121). As critics have pointed out, this argument is highly questionable and even if accepted, skepticism seems to be the “natural” position to adopt, not relativism (Jackson, 2008: p. 255). Hales, however, relies on this self-refutation argument against skepticism:
(1) If skepticism about philosophical propositions is true, then we cannot know the truth of any philosophical proposition.
(2) Skepticism is a philosophical proposition.
(3) Therefore, if skepticism about philosophical propositions is true, we cannot know it. (From (1), (2)).
(4) Proposition (3) is a philosophical proposition.
(5) Therefore, if skepticism about philosophical propositions is true, then we cannot know it. (Hales, 2006: pp. 92-93).
In his brief discussion of the problem of the criterion, Hales says that the skeptic is offering either particular items of knowledge, such as the skeptical argument itself, or asserting the validity of methods such as non-question-beggingness as a criterion for knowledge (Hales, 2006: p. 150). Bueno has replied to Hales on this often-made point against skepticism, saying that the (Pyrrhonian) skeptic is not advancing a position but “only pointing out that, according to the dogmatist’s standards, the dogmatic philosopher lacks knowledge” (Bueno, 2008: p. 252). Skepticism is a reductio of dogmatism, rather than a positive position. In any case even if the notion of “philosophical propositions” was defined so broadly as to include such negative positions, the skeptic could accept that if skepticism about philosophical propositions is true, then we cannot know it. This on its own does not undermine the claim that we cannot know the truth of any philosophical proposition, but instead supports it. Further, using Hales’s own argument that I discussed above, philosophical skepticism would follow on his own terms if the proposition “the method of intuition justifies some propositions” is not epistemically justified on the basis of nothing other than the method of intuition itself. The critique of philosophical intuitions as a method in philosophy would yield at least a robust form of philosophical skepticism.
We are thus led to the position described by philosopher William Lycan, which says that intuition as a method for philosophy is “feeble and of very little epistemic authority” and that “philosophical theorizing per se is itself feeble and of very little epistemic authority” (Lycan, 1996, 143). Indeed,
[i]n particular, what of philosophical method taken as a whole? There is a corner in which the philosophical track record is good: logic. Otherwise, the history of philosophy is a disgusting mess of squabbling, inconclusion, dogma and counter-dogma, trendy patois, fashionable but actually groundless assumptions, vacillation from one paradigm to another, mere speculation, and sheer abuse. Nothing in that sordid history can be called progress, except what derives directly from developments in logic or in science, and consensus has always been limited to what are really very small groups of people confined in small geographical regions over short periods of time. If we use consensus production as our yardstick, then—and again, I know no other—we find that as between science, common sense and philosophy, science and common sense do very well while philosophy comes in a pathetically weak third. I take this seriously. And I believe that a felicitous explanatory coordination between common sense and science is the best that philosophy can hope to achieve. (Lycan, 1996: p. 149).
This seems to be a very grim situation for the discipline of philosophy, so it is natural to ask: where to now, philosophy?
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