It is now a more or less biennial event: a professional philosopher, employed in an Anglophone philosophy department, publishes a book denouncing “analytic philosophy,” the predominant mode of the discipline in which they work.
I very much appreciated your LARB review. If I may comment on it here:
I've always found the worry about intuitions somewhat surprising. But I have philosopher friends who are quite worried. They explain their worry this way: No one in their right mind should deny that you have to stop arguing at some point. So it's not their status as premises or resting places that's the problem with (what get called) intuitions. It's the "seeming true" or "being intuitively true" part. The worry is: what explains the seeming true to the author and readers? Their status as elites able to fluidly navigate the systems of privilege? Their status as imbibers of Western philosophy and Western philosophy only? Their having grown up in a relatively affluent, industrialized, rights-granting-and-protecting republic? You get the idea.
When we try to figure out why I'm comfortable with intuitions and they are not, it almost always comes down to our differing ideas of what philosophy properly aims at. To be rough and reductive: I'm comfortable trying to discover, explore, and clarify the things that appear to us because of our point-of-view-ishness, our being human; they think if we're not trying to break through to something extra-human, something underneath all of this, we're not aiming for what's true.
Thanks for this comment! You are right that there are deep epistemic questions about our basic premises, taken as attempts not just to map our own thinking, or the human perspective, but the objective world. I'm inclined to think that doubting our reliability about objective truth leads to a wider scepticism (since we can't quarantine the problem) and so we have to resist it. But there other ways to go, and yours is one.
I'm not sure how far we need to get into these depths to make the point I was pressing in the review. For that, it may be enough to note, pragmatically, that any finite bit of writing must start somewhere (not every premise can be argued for), a point that is fairly noncommittal epistemically. Philosophers who use "intuition" and "intuitively" to mark premises they won't argue for right now (but that they are asserting, not just stating hypothetically) may take a range of different views in epistemology. Crucially, they needn't think that appeals to intuitions or what is intuitive or what we or others happen to believe do any epistemic work.
What do you mean by the term ‘true’ that is not question begging and not reducible to logical consistency of the system of meanings (which would then be formally provable)? This is a crucial question if ‘truth’ is the standard of judgment.
I am partial to Aristotle's definition: 'To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.'
Frank Ramsey spells out a related view in "Facts and Propositions": '"it is true that Caesar was murdered" means no more than that Caesar was murdered, and "it is false that Caesar was murdered" means that Caesar was not murdered.'
As Ramsey, notes, it's trickier when 'the proposition is described and not given explicitly ... for we get statements from which we cannot in ordinary language eliminate the words "true" and"false."'—e.g., 'Everything she said was true.'
But, as Ramsey argues, this is a linguistic quirk: 'suppose we put it thus "For all p, if he asserts p, p is true," then we see that the propositional function p is true is simply the same as p, as e.g. its value "Caesar was murdered is true," is the same as "Caesar was murdered." We have in English to add "is true" to give the sentence a verb, forgetting that "p" already contains a (variable) verb.' There would be nothing wrong with a language in which it is grammatical to omit "is true"—as we do informally when we affirm 'What she said!' 'True' can be eliminated.
To a first approximation, that's how I think about 'true'. 'Objectivity' is another matter!
I agree with you and Ramsey, whose position as stated here seems aligned with Frege in that nothing is added to the sense of a proposition by declaring it true. This makes ‘true’ not a basis for judging the validity of an argument but a designation of how a premise ought to be logically integrated with other premises in an argument.
Nevertheless, you do seem to use the term as a normative standard (of objectivity) rather than a logical operator, by presenting counter-claims that are premised to be true rather than proven, which would require a standard of ‘true’ that is logically sufficient and relevant (more than an operator). I would argue that such a standard cannot be satisfied, which of itself could be a logically sufficient refutation to arguments whose validity is conditional on the ‘truth’ of opinions without logical grounding.
I think Ramsey's point means you can state the normative standard without using 'true,' e.g. it's correct to believe that other people have mental states if and only if other people have mental states; it's correct to believe that justice is a virtue if and only if justice is a virtue; and in general, it's correct to believe p if and only if p. (The last clause is ungrammatical, but like Ramsey, I think only superficially.)
Is the standard in question distinct from non-circular proof? Yes, except where the following schema holds: 'p if and only if there's a non-circular proof that p'. And that doesn't always hold, e.g. with 'justice is virtue'. (I mean: it's not the case that [justice is a virtue if and only if there's a non-circular proof that justice is a virtue].)
I still think objectivity is separate. Nothing I've said so far speaks directly to that issue, which takes us into even deeper waters.
If “it's correct to believe p if and only if p” then the correctness of belief that p is still conditional on p, hence it is p that must be grounded/proven to prove validity of the belief. What makes p ‘true’ in the standard sense (since self-implication does not, as it applies to every proposition)?
It is the grounding of p that the standard of ‘truth’ or ‘existence’ or ‘objectivity’ implicitly appeals to without justifying, and this is problematic. A conclusion of validity/correctness that fails to satisfy sufficiency of reasons (by a logical proof) implies that anything can be validly concluded without a proof, including its opposite…
This is what makes the definition of ‘truth’ as a standard of validity interesting to me, because it is typically logically inconsistent, and yet so entrenched in public discourse.
Yes, this is a tangent. Apologies if this is not interesting or seems irrelevant. Feel free to disregard.
Not uninteresting or irrelevant! If I'm following, we can agree that the standard of truth (even stated without using 'true') isn't useful or applicable as a standard of justification or warrant; we can also agree that, when I prove q on the basis of p, an opponent who rejects q can consistently keep doing so, even while accepting the proof, by saying 'in that case, not-p'. Proofs are only a guide to consistency. (This is something Plato grappled with in his theory of recollection, which is supposed to explain why, when Socrates shows that common sense is inconsistent, we tend to gravitate to the true resolution and reject the false.)
The point on which we may not agree is the suggestion (again, if I'm following) that not being able to establish justification for our final premises with non-circular proof "implies that anything can be validly concluded without a proof, including its opposite." My view is that there are some things we are justified in believing without non-circular proof (or reasons), where the opposite conclusion cannot be justified. (For instance: that justice is a virtue.) The fact that I don't have an argument for p doesn't mean you're equally justified in believing not-p, even though there may not be anything I can say to persuade you. (I defend this in relation to ethics in my book, 'Knowing Right From Wrong'.)
Your summary of the problem (which sounds about right to me) seems to now converge on ‘consistency’ as something that we aim for. I agree with this. I understand that by ‘consistency’ you mean logical consistency. If this is right then proofs are demonstrations or models of local consistency, which extends only to their premises. If a person would prove that a premise of another proof is internally inconsistent, this would imply that the supposed proof is inconsistent, therefore not a proof. An arbitrary rejection or acceptance of a premise may itself be an inconsistent position (because of insufficiency of reason). The question then is what premises we ought to ‘gravitate’ to, as ‘true’. Would you agree that we aim for ever more systemic consistency, seeking to integrate all our premises and local proofs into a network of meanings (which includes the meaning of experiences) that makes more sense and can be consistently affected by our actions? This would be aligned with my position. It also implies that we are not rudderless in a sea of opinions, because consistency, or the conditions of consistency (laws of sense), are the rules that ground the entire system of meaning and dictate what we may take for ‘truth’.
A minor point: where you say ‘we are justified in believing p’ I would say ‘we are justified in assuming p, because it makes more sense than any alternative, even if we lack certainty’.
"Analytic philosophy" is a term like "organic chemistry". Its original intension (as far as there was one) picks out nothing that exists, yet everyone knows what its extension is supposed to be, and we could use a descriptive term that didn't imply members had any essential properties in common.
Viz. "Carbon compounds not including gaseous oxides and mineral carbonates"; "Academic philosophy written in English that is not primarily commentary on 'continental' sources."
I haven't read Schuringa's book, but it sounds like the very short introduction to continental philosophy is trying to something similar, and it's very good.
"Wittgenstein flirts with paradox: the ostensible philosophy of the Tractatus cannot be expressed by its own lights." Relatively few Wittgenstein scholars writing today would put it like this. Many of them would instead suggest that what the ostensible philosophy of the Tractatus is, was expressed by the lights of the Tractatus by you yourself here in this post of yours. There are passages in the Tractatus (e.g. §3.328 or §5.4733) which already seem to express the kind of unapologetically thoroughgoing conventionalism which it has traditionally been far more common to attribute to the later Wittgenstein, and which only happen to have a misleadingly aside-like appearance in the context of the book as a whole.
The idea that the philosophy of the Tractatus cannot be expressed by its own lights originated in Russell's imtroduction to the book, which Wittgenstein disliked intensely, and which he basically only allowed to be attached to it in order to ease its way towards publication. Later, when Wittgenstein defended the Tractatus at Cambridge as a PhD dissertation and Russell as his examiner offered this same reading as perhaps his main objection, Wittgenstein reportedly said "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it".
I came here after reading your (very insightful) review in the LARB. I enjoyed this follow-up as well. I have to confess to an embarassing bias against analytic philosophy owing to what I now see as an undergraduate misconception of the extent to which logical positivism played in its foundation.
I'm not a professional or academic philosopher by any means, just someone who happens to read philosophy books from time to time. I have a friend in a doctoral program, however, who recently told me he thinks of the analytic/continental distinction as being more of an administrative tool (made so administrators can say "at this campus, we're ANALYTIC"/"at this campus, we're CONTINENTAL"), as opposed to being a necessary divide in philosophical methodology or interest. I'm curious what you think of the view, that the analytic/continental divide arose mirroring a shift in the organization of higher education and philosophy faculties, and that it actually has little to do with philosophy?
At this point, it's partly administrative, for sure; and I do think it arose in the 50s as a coalition of analysts, positivists, ordinary language types, and fellow travelers captured the major institutions of Anglo-American academic philosophy. But Schuringa isn't wrong that there were substantive intellectual divergences in the historical background. So both/and, maybe.
You say that what characterizes early analytic philosophy is “the conviction that what you believe (the object of thought), when you believe the truth, is literally a fact.” Is this not what post-Kantian idealists (Hegel specifically) thought as well: what you know, when you know, is how the world is—thought and being are brought into a kind of alignment or identity.
I don't know enough about Hegel or other post-Kantian idealists to answer this with confidence (Schuringa isn't wrong about their relative neglect in "analytic" philosophical education). But my speculation, by way of John McDowell, is yes: the identification of facts with true thoughts is a surprising point of convergence between Hegel and the early analytics, where this identity can be developed in more idealist or more realist directions. The story then treats Hegel as an outlier among post-Kantian idealists, who lost his insight and returned to versions or variations of the veil of concepts.
This is splendid
The link to your review in LARB is broken.
If someone is reading this, and Prof. Setiya has not yet corrected it, here's the correct link: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-politics-of-apoliticism/
Thanks for catching that! Now fixed.
I very much appreciated your LARB review. If I may comment on it here:
I've always found the worry about intuitions somewhat surprising. But I have philosopher friends who are quite worried. They explain their worry this way: No one in their right mind should deny that you have to stop arguing at some point. So it's not their status as premises or resting places that's the problem with (what get called) intuitions. It's the "seeming true" or "being intuitively true" part. The worry is: what explains the seeming true to the author and readers? Their status as elites able to fluidly navigate the systems of privilege? Their status as imbibers of Western philosophy and Western philosophy only? Their having grown up in a relatively affluent, industrialized, rights-granting-and-protecting republic? You get the idea.
When we try to figure out why I'm comfortable with intuitions and they are not, it almost always comes down to our differing ideas of what philosophy properly aims at. To be rough and reductive: I'm comfortable trying to discover, explore, and clarify the things that appear to us because of our point-of-view-ishness, our being human; they think if we're not trying to break through to something extra-human, something underneath all of this, we're not aiming for what's true.
Thanks for this comment! You are right that there are deep epistemic questions about our basic premises, taken as attempts not just to map our own thinking, or the human perspective, but the objective world. I'm inclined to think that doubting our reliability about objective truth leads to a wider scepticism (since we can't quarantine the problem) and so we have to resist it. But there other ways to go, and yours is one.
I'm not sure how far we need to get into these depths to make the point I was pressing in the review. For that, it may be enough to note, pragmatically, that any finite bit of writing must start somewhere (not every premise can be argued for), a point that is fairly noncommittal epistemically. Philosophers who use "intuition" and "intuitively" to mark premises they won't argue for right now (but that they are asserting, not just stating hypothetically) may take a range of different views in epistemology. Crucially, they needn't think that appeals to intuitions or what is intuitive or what we or others happen to believe do any epistemic work.
Now do “Empty Ideas”!
Tim Williamson did that already, in the TLS:
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/philosophy/contemporary-philosophy/everything-new-is-here
open access: https://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/assets/pdf_file/0004/36148/Unger.pdf
What do you mean by the term ‘true’ that is not question begging and not reducible to logical consistency of the system of meanings (which would then be formally provable)? This is a crucial question if ‘truth’ is the standard of judgment.
I am partial to Aristotle's definition: 'To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.'
Frank Ramsey spells out a related view in "Facts and Propositions": '"it is true that Caesar was murdered" means no more than that Caesar was murdered, and "it is false that Caesar was murdered" means that Caesar was not murdered.'
As Ramsey, notes, it's trickier when 'the proposition is described and not given explicitly ... for we get statements from which we cannot in ordinary language eliminate the words "true" and"false."'—e.g., 'Everything she said was true.'
But, as Ramsey argues, this is a linguistic quirk: 'suppose we put it thus "For all p, if he asserts p, p is true," then we see that the propositional function p is true is simply the same as p, as e.g. its value "Caesar was murdered is true," is the same as "Caesar was murdered." We have in English to add "is true" to give the sentence a verb, forgetting that "p" already contains a (variable) verb.' There would be nothing wrong with a language in which it is grammatical to omit "is true"—as we do informally when we affirm 'What she said!' 'True' can be eliminated.
To a first approximation, that's how I think about 'true'. 'Objectivity' is another matter!
I agree with you and Ramsey, whose position as stated here seems aligned with Frege in that nothing is added to the sense of a proposition by declaring it true. This makes ‘true’ not a basis for judging the validity of an argument but a designation of how a premise ought to be logically integrated with other premises in an argument.
Nevertheless, you do seem to use the term as a normative standard (of objectivity) rather than a logical operator, by presenting counter-claims that are premised to be true rather than proven, which would require a standard of ‘true’ that is logically sufficient and relevant (more than an operator). I would argue that such a standard cannot be satisfied, which of itself could be a logically sufficient refutation to arguments whose validity is conditional on the ‘truth’ of opinions without logical grounding.
I think Ramsey's point means you can state the normative standard without using 'true,' e.g. it's correct to believe that other people have mental states if and only if other people have mental states; it's correct to believe that justice is a virtue if and only if justice is a virtue; and in general, it's correct to believe p if and only if p. (The last clause is ungrammatical, but like Ramsey, I think only superficially.)
Is the standard in question distinct from non-circular proof? Yes, except where the following schema holds: 'p if and only if there's a non-circular proof that p'. And that doesn't always hold, e.g. with 'justice is virtue'. (I mean: it's not the case that [justice is a virtue if and only if there's a non-circular proof that justice is a virtue].)
I still think objectivity is separate. Nothing I've said so far speaks directly to that issue, which takes us into even deeper waters.
If “it's correct to believe p if and only if p” then the correctness of belief that p is still conditional on p, hence it is p that must be grounded/proven to prove validity of the belief. What makes p ‘true’ in the standard sense (since self-implication does not, as it applies to every proposition)?
It is the grounding of p that the standard of ‘truth’ or ‘existence’ or ‘objectivity’ implicitly appeals to without justifying, and this is problematic. A conclusion of validity/correctness that fails to satisfy sufficiency of reasons (by a logical proof) implies that anything can be validly concluded without a proof, including its opposite…
This is what makes the definition of ‘truth’ as a standard of validity interesting to me, because it is typically logically inconsistent, and yet so entrenched in public discourse.
Yes, this is a tangent. Apologies if this is not interesting or seems irrelevant. Feel free to disregard.
Not uninteresting or irrelevant! If I'm following, we can agree that the standard of truth (even stated without using 'true') isn't useful or applicable as a standard of justification or warrant; we can also agree that, when I prove q on the basis of p, an opponent who rejects q can consistently keep doing so, even while accepting the proof, by saying 'in that case, not-p'. Proofs are only a guide to consistency. (This is something Plato grappled with in his theory of recollection, which is supposed to explain why, when Socrates shows that common sense is inconsistent, we tend to gravitate to the true resolution and reject the false.)
The point on which we may not agree is the suggestion (again, if I'm following) that not being able to establish justification for our final premises with non-circular proof "implies that anything can be validly concluded without a proof, including its opposite." My view is that there are some things we are justified in believing without non-circular proof (or reasons), where the opposite conclusion cannot be justified. (For instance: that justice is a virtue.) The fact that I don't have an argument for p doesn't mean you're equally justified in believing not-p, even though there may not be anything I can say to persuade you. (I defend this in relation to ethics in my book, 'Knowing Right From Wrong'.)
Your summary of the problem (which sounds about right to me) seems to now converge on ‘consistency’ as something that we aim for. I agree with this. I understand that by ‘consistency’ you mean logical consistency. If this is right then proofs are demonstrations or models of local consistency, which extends only to their premises. If a person would prove that a premise of another proof is internally inconsistent, this would imply that the supposed proof is inconsistent, therefore not a proof. An arbitrary rejection or acceptance of a premise may itself be an inconsistent position (because of insufficiency of reason). The question then is what premises we ought to ‘gravitate’ to, as ‘true’. Would you agree that we aim for ever more systemic consistency, seeking to integrate all our premises and local proofs into a network of meanings (which includes the meaning of experiences) that makes more sense and can be consistently affected by our actions? This would be aligned with my position. It also implies that we are not rudderless in a sea of opinions, because consistency, or the conditions of consistency (laws of sense), are the rules that ground the entire system of meaning and dictate what we may take for ‘truth’.
A minor point: where you say ‘we are justified in believing p’ I would say ‘we are justified in assuming p, because it makes more sense than any alternative, even if we lack certainty’.
"Analytic philosophy" is a term like "organic chemistry". Its original intension (as far as there was one) picks out nothing that exists, yet everyone knows what its extension is supposed to be, and we could use a descriptive term that didn't imply members had any essential properties in common.
Viz. "Carbon compounds not including gaseous oxides and mineral carbonates"; "Academic philosophy written in English that is not primarily commentary on 'continental' sources."
I haven't read Schuringa's book, but it sounds like the very short introduction to continental philosophy is trying to something similar, and it's very good.
It was in 1959 that Ernest Gellner's book came out and caused debate; 1968 is merely the date of the Penguin paperback.
I will try to get that fixed!
"Wittgenstein flirts with paradox: the ostensible philosophy of the Tractatus cannot be expressed by its own lights." Relatively few Wittgenstein scholars writing today would put it like this. Many of them would instead suggest that what the ostensible philosophy of the Tractatus is, was expressed by the lights of the Tractatus by you yourself here in this post of yours. There are passages in the Tractatus (e.g. §3.328 or §5.4733) which already seem to express the kind of unapologetically thoroughgoing conventionalism which it has traditionally been far more common to attribute to the later Wittgenstein, and which only happen to have a misleadingly aside-like appearance in the context of the book as a whole.
The idea that the philosophy of the Tractatus cannot be expressed by its own lights originated in Russell's imtroduction to the book, which Wittgenstein disliked intensely, and which he basically only allowed to be attached to it in order to ease its way towards publication. Later, when Wittgenstein defended the Tractatus at Cambridge as a PhD dissertation and Russell as his examiner offered this same reading as perhaps his main objection, Wittgenstein reportedly said "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it".
I came here after reading your (very insightful) review in the LARB. I enjoyed this follow-up as well. I have to confess to an embarassing bias against analytic philosophy owing to what I now see as an undergraduate misconception of the extent to which logical positivism played in its foundation.
I'm not a professional or academic philosopher by any means, just someone who happens to read philosophy books from time to time. I have a friend in a doctoral program, however, who recently told me he thinks of the analytic/continental distinction as being more of an administrative tool (made so administrators can say "at this campus, we're ANALYTIC"/"at this campus, we're CONTINENTAL"), as opposed to being a necessary divide in philosophical methodology or interest. I'm curious what you think of the view, that the analytic/continental divide arose mirroring a shift in the organization of higher education and philosophy faculties, and that it actually has little to do with philosophy?
At this point, it's partly administrative, for sure; and I do think it arose in the 50s as a coalition of analysts, positivists, ordinary language types, and fellow travelers captured the major institutions of Anglo-American academic philosophy. But Schuringa isn't wrong that there were substantive intellectual divergences in the historical background. So both/and, maybe.
You say that what characterizes early analytic philosophy is “the conviction that what you believe (the object of thought), when you believe the truth, is literally a fact.” Is this not what post-Kantian idealists (Hegel specifically) thought as well: what you know, when you know, is how the world is—thought and being are brought into a kind of alignment or identity.
I don't know enough about Hegel or other post-Kantian idealists to answer this with confidence (Schuringa isn't wrong about their relative neglect in "analytic" philosophical education). But my speculation, by way of John McDowell, is yes: the identification of facts with true thoughts is a surprising point of convergence between Hegel and the early analytics, where this identity can be developed in more idealist or more realist directions. The story then treats Hegel as an outlier among post-Kantian idealists, who lost his insight and returned to versions or variations of the veil of concepts.