Get Your Hate On II: Against Simplicity, Research Time, 04/01/2018

I can understand why Gilles Deleuze would have been especially bitter about what pure Analytic Philosophy™ became. It started as a punk rebellion against pretentious Cambridge Hegelianism.

When I was studying the history of early Analytic Philosophy at McMaster University under Nick Griffin, he told me an amazing story about how that field came to be. G. E. Moore was a graduate student at Cambridge, talking with one of his senior professors, J. M. E. MacTaggart. During this casual lunchtime conversation, MacTaggart offhandedly remarks, “Well, of course, time isn’t real.”

Moore's reaction – “What the fresh fuck?!?!” Or the paragraph-long, overly-polite equivalent appropriate to 1890s England.

Of course, as soon as I thought of this example to update the Waverley
case, I had to throw on this album. More than a decade later, it's still
so good!

That punk spirit – the urge to overthrow an oppressive, beyond-the-world, pretentious Hegelian near-mysticism – animated the forge of Analytic Philosophy. But the school’s leaders focussed that spirit on reducing anything that could suggest the metaphysical away from philosophical thought.

What does that Waverley problem amount to today? Here’s an example better suited to the 2010s.

You remember when Untrue came out and no one knew who Burial was? So before 2008, when you talked about “Burial,” the reference of the name was mysterious, unknown. You could point to the album, listen to the music, but you couldn’t say what the real meaning of the name “Burial” was before William Bevan was outed.

It’s a mind-twisting problem to consider on its own terms. People still write essays returning to Bertrand Russell’s “On Denoting” to this day, more than a century later. But Deleuze’s critique still stands – Who the fuck cares? What does it matter?

In the specific context of mathematical logic, it makes perfect sense. But the extreme reductivism of Analytic Philosophy™ reduces philosophical thinking to these problems of word meaning and reference. Everything of wide or visceral relevance is abstracted from philosophy.

So here’s Deleuze’s argument for why Analytic Philosophy™ is to destructive to genuinely creative thinking.

Reason one. When you apply a problem of reference whose proper context is mathematical logic to all philosophical thinking, you end up reducing all of philosophy to logic. The doctrinaire rationalism of the American Analytics – I’m thinking in particular of Willard Quine and the many other thinkers he influenced – raises science to the ideal of thought.

I've come to think of Richard Rorty as having combined the most
profound errors of American Pragmatist™ thinking with those of
doctrinaire Analytic Philosophy™, delivered with all the smugness
of a lifelong Ivy League academician's style.
But that's another post.

But this reductive image of science isn’t even how science actually works. It’s that bizarre science of totalizing unification – the one true form of knowledge. This is why the sub-disciplines of philosophy of science that haven’t yet overcome the influence of Quine and Donald Davidson have become so moribund – their practitioners believe in a unified science that doesn’t exist.

Reason two. Philosophy turns into discourse alone. You exchange logical propositions and proofs – whether as symbolic logic or as propositions with the same simple framework – and evaluate them. Are the inferences valid? According to which system of logic?* A vibrant, creative tradition reduced to tiresome nitpicking.

* Even here, merely admitting that there can be more than one valid system of logic, all mutually incommensurable or irreducible, is more than the presumptions of doctrinaire Analytic Philosophy™ can bear.

Reason three. Philosophical conversation becomes mere debates over opinions. Is this a good argument? Are all your inferences valid? What are the facts and states of affairs that justify what you say?

Deleuze calls it Richard Rorty’s dinner table. Casual arguments over minutiae, tossed off with all the commitment of those who are never at risk from anything. As if conflicts over values, ethics, and ways of living have never killed anyone.

They never killed anyone as comfortable as Rorty, or most of the folks who think such arguments are philosophy’s central subject matter.

Get Your Hate On I: Problems of Reference, Research Time, 03/01/2018

Yes, I took the Xmas week off from writing on the blog, especially when I was in Montréal to visit my father’s side of the family. But I’ve kept up my research, of course, and I’ve been working through different ideas on how Gilles Deleuze’s thought affects my own thinking.

I want to talk, over the next day or two, about an argument that takes up the sixth chapter of What Is Philosophy?. Deleuze could find inspiration for his own projects in pretty much any field of the Western tradition. Except one.

It’s difficult to give a precise name to the tradition, because there were writers who called themselves and were called Analytic Philosophers whom Deleuze respected. Bertrand Russell was among them. Ludwig Wittgenstein, not so much.

My interpretive allegiances are a little different, because my own memories of having learned the great figures and history of Analytic Philosophy™ are very different. I was educated in North America, and my senior colleagues and teachers included people who thought almost all the work of Deleuze and others lumped under the near-meaningless heading of “Continental Philosophy” was nonsense and charlatanism.*

* Most of this comes down to writing style, but I want to leave questions of style aside. At least for a day or two.

Willard Quine, one of the most consistent reductionists in the
recent history of philosophy. It is no coincidence how boring his
books are.

But I do broadly agree that the tendency in self-identified Analytic Philosophy is unfortunate for actual philosophical creativity. Deleuze discusses it directly in What Is Philosophy?.

Let’s start from one important question. What is empiricism anyway? Deleuze calls himself an empiricist, but the major thinkers whose ideas defined typical Analytic Philosophy™ considered themselves empiricists too. And the latter would never have considered Deleuze a true empiricist. Marketer in obscurity, more likely.

To me, empiricism means that the ultimate purpose of creating philosophical concepts is building frameworks to understand the world. Deleuze would call it thinking immanently, where thinking is about understanding what you and everything else in the universe can do.

What are our capacities? What are our abilities? How can thinking in different ways open opportunities for understanding and action that wouldn’t have come about if we weren’t thinking in those ways.

The empiricism of Analytic Philosophy™ is very different, in Deleuze’s account of it. Under this model of thinking, being an empiricist means your concepts are always rooted in direct reference. Concepts are about meaning, and meaning is rooted in referring accurately to some part of the world.

I consider Willard Quine the arch-empiricist of Analytic Philosophy™, because he was so uncompromising in his brutal reductionism. Here’s a representative quotation, from his book of essays, From a Logical Point of View:

“As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience.”

You might find it a funny coincidence how so many of the most
esoterically dry and reductionist philosophers were white male
academicians from the upper or at least aspirational crusts of
their societies.
I don't think it's a coincidence at all – I think it's a possibility
condition.

Philosophical creativity becomes impossible when you consider the only purpose for thinking as correct reference. The only philosophical thoughts you can have legitimately, in such a framework, are the building blocks of quantificational logic. “There is,” “For all,” “For some,” and build from there.

Once you consider reference and the quantificational logic that grounds mathematics the only purposes for philosophy, philosophy becomes – relatively speaking – dead ground for thinking.

You can’t find meaning or meaningfulness in more complicated ideas or concepts than the frameworks for understanding truth conditions. So social, psychological, political, and moral concepts are out the window.** Even the energetic metaphors of scientific and mathematical thinking are gone because what matters is only truth conditions and reference.

** But there is an Analytic™ tradition of moral and political philosophy. Maybe so, but G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica reduces ethical and moral thinking to problems of reference – What acts and situations are good? As for the political, remember why John Rawls broke so big with A Theory of Justice – no one in philosophy departments had done original creative political thinking in decades because the Analytic™ model made it illegitimate. Rawls found a way that would work on that model.

Who wrote Waverley? What colour is this cup on the table?

I share Deleuze’s frustration here. Who cares? The school of Analytic Philosophy™ began with a lot of remarkable potential. But it was all squandered on the pursuit of problems irrelevant to people’s lives, as if those were the most important problems imaginable. What matters is what’s interesting. What’s needed.

It's About What Gets the Job Done – And the Job, Research Time, 21/09/2016

When I first read Cosmopolitanism, I wasn't impressed
by its very casual, seemingly superficial treatment of its
concepts. But underneath those long, almost nostalgic
fables of a casually multicultural world are some
very radical conceptual moves.

Despite my problems with Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, his book is filled with genuinely fascinating and useful ideas. They’re dealt with at a barely introductory level, but they're still very interesting.

One of these is Appiah’s pragmatism. I mean this referring to the tradition of philosophical thinking that began with that usual trinity of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey.* Appiah applies a pragmatism about the use of knowledge and frameworks of understanding the world to a globalist problem.

* Here’s another issue I have with academic philosophy in the English-speaking West. The widespread presumption that pragmatism isn’t a living tradition of thought, but that if you call yourself a philosophical pragmatist, all it means is that you write secondary material about James, Peirce, and Dewey. This irks me.

That problem is in one of the few directly useful examples in Cosmopolitanism. The encounter of a person familiar with scientific knowledge about infection and disease with a society of people who  believe primarily in witchcraft and evil spirits. 

It's an example that plays to just about every racist stereotype about indigenous people you can think of. That’s why, I think, Appiah chose it. I’ve heard quite a few well-educated, quite wealthy people use just these stereotypes to dismiss the validity of indigenous knowledge. 

Even what we think of as enlightened
progressive corners – like environmental
activists – indulge in such ridiculous
racist stereotypes of indigenous people
as "mystically in touch with the land."
As if they were magical spirit people
instead of people. It erases the real human
complexity of indigenous cultures as
the old horrifying adage about savages.

They say we have nothing to learn, for example, from indigenous medicinal practices because they’re based in oral tradition and inherited folklore instead of “the scientific method.” Of course, any basic reading in the history and philosophy is science shows that there is no such single “scientific method” applying to everything we call science. Apart maybe from “Pay attention!”

I came across this debate pretty frequently when I was researching for Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, because a major eco-activist narrative** is rediscovering indigenous American connections to the land that were overwritten and erased by America’s history of genocide.

** Crass oversimplification that it still is. . . . 

So Appiah’s example sets up a problem – a group of indigenous stereotypes*** believe that illness is caused by spirits and witchcraft. They also live near a polluted water source. They essentially need a boil advisory, but don’t know any of the science behind why you should boil polluted water before using it. So they still get preventable diseases.

*** Seriously, I don't think people like this have ever existed outside thought experiments like these.

Appiah's thoughtful Westerner explains, in as clear a format as he can, the germ theory of disease, and that boiling water can kill the bacteria that causes their sicknesses. None of this fits with any of the framework ideas of the community’s worldview, so they don’t understand it and don’t follow his good advice.

Then the thoughtful Westerner explains that the community’s water source has been infested with evil spirits that cause illness, and that boiling the water sends them away – see, the bubbles of boiling water are the spirits escaping. So the community is healthy again.

Above: The only person who deserves to be called a
savage. Jokes aside, Appiah smuggles into this very
light writing style an argument that makes an
audacious and brazenly unorthodox inference. He
reasons from a fact about the nature of knowledge
to an implication about ethics and politics. In this, he's
a real metaphysician.

You know, Appiah’s example doesn’t sound nearly so racist when he writes it in Cosmopolitanism. Ironic that a book whose purpose is explaining a political philosophy about embracing the infinite variety of humanity could fall into an example that trades in such condescendingly racist imagery.

The conceptual point is sound, though. We can solve most of the problems that constitute human life with a ton of different and incompatible frameworks for understanding the world.

Accept as fact that – following the research and concept-building of Claude Duhem and Willard Quine – reality under-determines how we understand it. It’s not a relativism, where there are many different truths. 

Now let your political and moral stances flow from this truth about reality. Even dealing with the types of people that confirm everyone of your racist stereotypes ignorant savages, they can still be your intellectual equals. They will look at the world differently, but their way of looking remains valid and practically sound.

Recognize as your fellow human even these people you’ve derided as ignorant savages for centuries. That’s the political implication of a pragmatist conception of knowledge.