The subject of obscure writing came up on another thread, and with Steven Pinker’s new book on writing coming out next week, now is a good time for a thread on the topic.
Obscure writing has its place (Finnegan’s Wake and The Sound and the Fury, for example), but it is usually annoying and often completely unnecessary. Here’s a funny clip in which John Searle laments the prevalence of obscurantism among continental philosophers:
John Searle – Foucault and Bourdieu on continental obscurantism
When is obscure prose appropriate or useful? When is it annoying or harmful? Who are the worst offenders? Feel free to share examples of annoyingly obscure prose.
Pinker can be an expert on style because he writes well. That’s really the only qualification necessary or sufficient.
Now it is possible to be an expert on something and choose not to share one’s insights, and it is possible perversely, to hide one’s insights or to lie about what one knows. But no one accuses Pinker of being perverse.
There are plenty of people — possibly starting with Gamow — who have written lucidly about 20th century science and mathematics. One doesn’t learn quantum theory or general relativity from such texts, but one can certainly form useful expectations from them. And I think that’s important. After reading “One, Two, Three, Infinity, one should not be surprised that we have no time machine or faster than light travel. One might not fully follow the math, but one is informed about what is possible and what is not.
I know of nothing equivalent in philosophy or theology.
Oh, there are lots of such books in philosophy, starting with Russell’s _Problems of Philosophy_.
I can think of books that are accessible, but the problem would be, are they universally accepted as authoritative? Do they answer any of the questions they pose?
This is such a beautiful example of bombastic obscurantism that it brought tears to my eyes. After reading it, no one will be surprised that the book runs to 696 pages. The author is DG Leahy, who was at various times (I kid you not) a tenured classics prof, a research consultant to the Skin Sciences Institute, and a founder of the New York Philosophy Corporation.
I guess I don’t know of any philosophy book that’s accepted as authoritative except in the area of history of philosophy. Almost every issue in philosophy is controversial, so authoritativeness is hard to come by.
But do you think the Gamow book (which was recommended to me by a philosophy professor, and which I personally enjoyed) was accepted as authoritative?
It’s a distinctive feature of philosophy — and one that makes it one of the humanities rather than one of the sciences — that there’s no widely-agreed upon method or technique for dealing with its problems and puzzles. Philosophy is much closer to literature than it is to physics.
Western philosophy in the 20th-century began with two attempts at developing a method — something that would turn philosophy into a science: logical positivism and phenomenology. Both were contested within a generation of being proposed. Husserl’s most famous student, Heidegger, broke with phenomenology in the course of correcting the master’s errors, and something similar happens with Carnap and Quine.
Put otherwise, there is no “paradigm” — to use Kuhn’s term in its original sense — of philosophy, with the possible exception of Plato’s dialogues.
Russell and Ayer molded a generation of analytic philosophers. Personally, if someone came to me asking for a good introduction to philosophy, I would recommend something more like Our Practices, Our Selves — because of the kind of philosopher that I have become.
I would also recommend works by Alan Watts, Walter Kauffmann, or Ortega y Gassett for someone who wanted models of philosophical inquiry that were non-technical and accessible to almost anyone. All of whom are graceful, elegant writers, not at all pedantic, and remarkably wise in their distinctive ways.
Rather than physics, I’d compare philosophy with mathematics. Nietzsche comes closest to sheer literature, but otherwise philosophy is logical reasoning, like mathematics.
Postmodernism should never have been elevated to the status of a philosophy. As a philosophy, postmodernism is the clearest example of obscurantism that has ever been. Hopefully we won’t ever stoop that low again. Postmodernism, like modernism before it, only has some value as art criticism and should stay as such.
Though philosophy can involve argument, I suspect that the role of argument is easily over-stated, especially by those of pugilistic temperament. There are many tools in the philosopher’s tool-kit, and argument is put one of them. There are examples, thought-experiments, Dennett’s “intuition-pumps”, conceptual explications, phenomenological descriptions, and so on.
Even when arguments are important, the arguments seem quite importantly different from logic alone, since logic (and perhaps mathematics as well) deal entirely on inferential form, i.e. on syntax. By contrast, in philosophy meaning — especially conceptual meaning — is the very point. This is one of the reasons why some philosophical arguments that cannot be represented in the language of symbolic logic — most importantly, dialectical arguments.
Among the so-called “postmodernists,” the only ones I’ve read extensively are Foucault and Deleuze/Guattari. (I’ve read some of Deleuze’s stand-alone books but none of Guattari’s stand-alone books.) I’ve read maybe one essay by Derrida and nothing by any of the others.
My sense is that these philosophers are deeply engaged in a pitched battle with their teachers (much of philosophy is patricide!), and hence they are dealing in close terms with Hegel (esp. the Hegel of Kojeve and Hyppolite), Husserl, and Heidegger. If you know Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl extremely well, then what Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze are saying is largely intelligible. (Kant and Nietzsche are also crucial, of course, and many others.)
But when these texts are appropriated by literary theorists, who often lack the requisite background for understanding these dense philosophical texts, they end up playing with philosophemes without really knowing what they are doing. And it becomes very easy to just imitate the Masters rather than think with them and against them.
Well put. I have been trying to explain to my class how and why philosophy is different from all the other subjects. It’s a bit like literature as you say, but there are all these truth claims. And it’s a bit like science, except that nobody expects there to ever be consensus on anything. It really is sui generis.
I see nothing wrong with considering philosophy as an art rather than as a science.
To equate logic with formal logic must be an analytic tendency. In continental philosophy, logic is philosophy itself in the broadest sense. Logic is laws of thinking regardless how we express them. And I personally see mathematics the same way. If math were just syntax in the formal sense with a view to self-consistency and nothing else, then it’s worthless and useless. Rather, it’s about structure and meaning – consistently.
Of course, there was a point in history when all reasoned inquiry about the world (ie not mathematics) was called philosophy. But that changed with the invention of science; large parts of philosophy became scientific domains.
But is it fair to say that even in the last 200 years or so, philosophy has continued to be become more limited or constrained by developments in mathematics or science?
First, some philosophical topics have become formalized enough to be transferred to mathematics; for example, the work started by Cantor on infinity; and the work of Boole, Frege, Russel, Godel and others on formal logic.
Other branches of philosophy have become constrained by empirical science. I am thinking of metaphysics and quantum mechanics/GR/cosmology; philosophy of mind and neuroscience/psychology of consciousness; and ethics and the scientific studies of the natural sources of moral behavior and economic behavior.
So is philosophy destined to be either transferred to another domain or to become simply commentary on science in progress?
(And possibly literature-like commentaries on the human condition but I don’t know enough about this type of philosophy to say much about such a trend).
In what sense is mathematics about meaning?
I understand the practice of mathematics as being about proving theorems using other theorems and axioms. The mathematical community decides on which sets of axioms are interesting and productive and hence worthy of study.
There does not seem to be a role for meaning in doing mathematics.
Is meaning then something that enters into the philosophy of mathematics, rather than simply doing mathematics. For example, a mathematical realist could point to correspondence between mathematical theorems and the entities they refer to and develop and correspondence theory of truth and meaning.
Or did you have something else in mind?
I work in both analytic and Continental philosophy, so I use both idioms. Consequently I would not say that Hegel’s Science of Logic or Dewey’s Logic: A Theory of Inquiry are really about logic; they are about substantive (rather than formal) reasoning. As a friend of mine likes to put it, they are accounts of account-giving. If you want to call that “logic,” as distinct from “formal logic,” I won’t quibble.
I find it hard to share that view if Russell and Whitehead are right in saying that all of mathematics can be formally derived from set theory!
There is a view about the progress of knowledge in which branches of philosophy evolve into sciences. Quine had this view; somewhere (I believe) he remarks that the sciences are calved off of philosophy much as icebergs are calved off of glaciers.
I myself don’t share this view. Rather, I share the view of Deleuze and Guattari (in What is Philosophy?) that science, art, and philosophy are basically distinct enterprises, each of which is most vibrant and creative when it responds to the other two — but responds to them from within its own tradition and style of thinking. Neither science nor art will never put philosophy out of business. At the most, certain kinds of questions will cease to seem compelling in light of empirical discoveries or theoretical innovations.
For example, contemporary neuroscience strongly indicates a view of the mind-brain relation that makes substance dualism unsupportable, to the point that the causal interaction problem is no longer compelling to almost all philosophers of mind. It’s a historical curiosity. That doesn’t mean that questions about mental causation, agency, and reasoning go overboard as well!
As Michael Friedman nicely puts it in Dynamics of Reason, the job of philosophy is to pose the meta-scientific question, “what questions should science be asking?” That seems perfectly right to me. Of course a philosopher needs to know the relevant sciences extremely well in order to have a relevant and cogent suggestion!
Although the general statement that mathematics can be derived from set theory is true in some sense, my understanding is that the Russell/Whitehead approach failed.
Instead, not simply logic but instead other mathematical tools for studying mathematical derivation, like proof theory and model theory, are needed to show how the rest of mathematics can be derived from set theory.
Jump in any time, Neil….
That last sentence is my point: Science imposes limits on the nature and types of questions philosophy can ask (and what answers can be found by philosophy alone) and those limits continue to grow.
Your point and mine are quite different here, BruceS,
You seem to have a picture according to which science is encroaching on the territory formerly occupied by philosophy, and that the territory of philosophy will continue to shrink (down to nothing?) as science advances.
That is not my picture at all. Rather, my picture is that philosophy will continue to advance along with science, by remaining in close dialogue with. That’s Friedman’s picture, based on his work on the history of philosophy of science, and it’s also quite close to Deleuze and Guattari’s picture as well, though they (unlike Friedman) also think that philosophy should remain in close dialogue with art.
Here’s an example of the kind of thing I have in mind. I work on a particular problem in philosophy of mind that deals with whether or not “intentionality” can be “naturalized”. In particular, I’m arguing against Alex Rosenberg’s “eliminativist” argument against intentionality. Here’s Rosenberg:
To argue against this, I’m drawing on both a lot of philosophy of mind rooted in the “4EA” approach to cognitive science (mind as embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, and affective) and neo-pragmatist work in the normative pragmatics and inferential semantics of propositional thought. So I need to be familiar with the relevant science, though at the end of the day I’m advancing a philosophical claim against Rosenberg. No doubt I’d be in even better shape if I could talk with neuroscientists about this, and I intend to show my paper to philosophers of neuroscience (all of whom do have substantive background in neuroscience) after it’s done.
“Grow/shrink” was a poor choice of words on my part. Maybe better would be something like the shape and dimensions of the conceptual space that philosophy can explore are constrained by science (and not the reverse). The volume of that conceptual spacecould shrink or grow, I suppose, within those constraints.
How philosophy and art influence each other is a topic I have little knowledge of.
I will be interested to read your paper when you post it (or a draft).
KN,
It’s possible to write clearly about Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, and many people have done so; and even if some obscurity were required, deliberate obscurity certainly isn’t.
We’ve already seen that Deleuze is an obscurantist even when he’s writing about science. You can’t blame the 3 Hs for that. Foucault admits to obscurantism as a means of impressing his audience. And Derrida was aptly characterized by Foucault, as recounted by Searle:
KN,
To be fair to Rosenberg, he isn’t arguing against intentionality per se, just against original intentionality.
I completely agree that philosophy and science have different domains and that neither can nor should attempt to put the other out of business. But I don’t like the “handmaiden of science” picture. Metaphysics asks questions like what does it mean for something to be true, to be real, to be external, to be knowledge, to be valuable. No advancement in science or technology can address those.
But where they are actually talking about the same things, I think science always wins. So I do think Bruce is right that the ambit of science has grown–largely because philosophy has stumbled into areas where it shouldn’t have messed around.
Did you mean my paper, or has KN got one on that subject kicking around too?
I think BruceS was referring to my criticism of Rosenberg’s elimininativism about original intentionality (i.e “whatever Descartes thinks the mind has and Searle thinks the brain has”).
Jumping in. When this discussion started, I was busy doing software updates.
Then I replied. But a browser crashed wiped that before I posted.
I somehow have the impression that Gödel saw his incompleteness result as a refutation of Russell & Whitehead.
Rather than handmaiden, how about philosophy as the ace investigative reporter, digging up the dirt on the dark corners of science?
But ace investigative reporters who make up facts about dark corners have become fiction writers. That would be a different type of philosophy than the type I am familiar with.
On metaphysics: of course, questions can be posed, like “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”. But whether there is any meaningful way to answer them without involving science is the question that can be raised (mostly by other philosophers, I guess).
I am inclined to say that there are no laws of thinking.
The mathematical philosophy of formalism is more-or-less based on the idea that math is just syntax. Most mathematicians are not formalists, though some see formalism as a kind of fall-back position if other philosophies run into problems.
As for “structure and meaning” — I’ll grant the “structure” part. But meaning is too slippery a concept to expect mathematics to deal with.
Specifically to this sentence from your preceding post:
Oh! I’m not working on that as an actual paper — that’s just a view that I have about the purpose of philosophy in an age of science!
I have the impression that he saw the result as a refutation of Hilbert’s program, but I might be mistaken about that. The Incompleteness Theorem uses the language of PM — basically, he shows that any formal system rich enough to express arithmetic will contain true statements about itself that are not provable within the system. (This is in contrast with first-order logic, which is complete.)
Bruce:
Neil:
Gödel showed that their ultimate goal — the creation of a system from which all mathematical truths could, in principle, be derived — was unachievable. However, Gödel’s result applies to all such formal systems, including those based on set theory.
Bruce is referring to a different problem that applies specifically to Russell and Whitehead’s logicist approach. That is, the objection that two of R&W’s axioms are non-logical, and that logic by itself is an insufficient basis for mathematics.
Yes, I realized that, although it was not clear form the way I worded mypost.
I mean the paper against Rosenburg using 4AE. (And the reference to “draft version” was to cover the case where the journal in which it is published does not allow the author to upload final versions elsewhere).
I don’t know if you noticed it in the other thread, but I came across but the psycholgist L. Barselou seems to be leading a very active research program taking something like a 4AE approach to conceptual thinking (and other mental content). His 1999 paper “Perceptual Symbol Systems” seems to be the first general statement of his approach.
A late response to this.
As I read your quoted text, I had no difficulty disagreeing with Rosenberg. But I took some time to think about it before commenting.
Rosenberg seems to see the brain as a syntactic engine. That’s a common view. AI folk mostly share that view. And analytic philosophy seems to mostly take that view. If the brain is a syntactic engine, then intentionality would seem to needed to connect that syntax to reality, though Dennett (“The Intentional Stance”) seems to think you can get by with derived intentionality. And Rosenberg’s view appears to be along the same line as Dennett’s
By contrast, I see the brain as a semantic engine. This is probably why I often seem to disagree with philosophers. Thus I see syntactic operations, such as language, to be an add-on but not the primary function of the brain. Thus syntactic expression gets its aboutness from the fact that it is derived from the underlying semantics.
Likewise, I see science as growing out of that semantics. So I see science as primarily semantic, rather than syntactic. This is probably why I sometimes criticize philosophy of science. So I disagree with much of what Rosenberg sees as the implications of science.
And a note for others. The Rosenberg statement that KN quotes seems to come from “Disenchanted Naturalism”. If you google that title, you should find an online copy at Rosenberg’s page (at Duke U.).
As Rosenberg give no support at all for any of his claims, I’m guessing you’ll do alright.
I don’t think I fully understand that, but it’s a very thought-provoking suggestion. As usual, I’m not sure why you blame philosophy for the fact that some philosophers take positions you disagree with (even though others don’t), but I’m very interested in this particular metaphysical position of yours.
I don’t. But I guess I can see how you get that impression.
KN thinks that science and philosophy should complement one another. And I’m inclined to agree. But if philosophers and scientists cannot communicate well, then that’s going to be hard to achieve.
Neil, I appreciate your questioning here as to why philosophers are prone to treat the brain as a syntactic engine. This comes from two different sources, I think.
The first is that the rise of computationalism as a theory of cognition in the 1970s led a lot of philosophers to think that the function of the brain was to causally implement a Turing machine, and Turing machine operations can be defined in purely syntactical terms. And the second is that the relations between neurons seem to be describable in non-semantic terms, e.g. action potentials and firing rates, whereas connectionist networks seem to a good job of capturing something crucial about how brains work.
There doesn’t seem to be anything semantic about any particular axon-dendrite connection, and so there’s an “air of mystery” as to how a whole lot of axon-dendrite connections can give rise to semantic content (and likewise to consciousness).
From what I can tell, philosophers of mind fall into roughly four categories:
(1) the air of mystery will be eliminated once we have a good explanation, and that’s going to take a while because the problem is really hard, but we’re making good progress and there’s room for reasonable optimism (the Churchlands, Searle, Fodor, Dennett);
(2) the air of mystery is genuine — figuring this out is beyond our ability (Colin McGinn);
(3) the air of mystery is genuine — we need to posit consciousness as a fundamental law of nature in addition to those of physics (Chalmers);
(4) the air of mystery is an illusion, because consciousness and content are themselves metacognitive defects (Rosenberg, R. Scott Bakker);
(5) the air of mystery is an illusion, because of a deep conceptual muddle in the problem is being posed (Thompson, Noe, Rockwell, Chemero, me).
That’s an interesting taxonomy. I think I’m probably somewhere in the 2.3–2.6 area.
But surely that’s the wrong place. What matters is the relation between such a connection and the on-going interactions with reality. And then there’s the problem that semantics is subjective, and the arrangement of axons varies from person to person. So a reverse-engineering approach would be difficult. In a way, that’s why this is more of a philosophical problem than a scientific problem.
That seems about right.
But that, in itself, can be confusing. We are supposed to think of philosophers as the people who resolve conceptual muddles, not as the people who create them.
KN,
I wouldn’t bundle semantics together with consciousness. The problems are distinct, and in my opinion the problem of semantics is much easier to solve.
There was a thread started by KN which used the concept of “semantic engine”. He and Neil traded ideas on what it could mean. But there is also a lot of noise in that thread that you may not want to work through. You can just look at KN and Neil’s posts to get the gist, I think.
I’m assuming that both are still comfortable with what they posted there.
I agree that individual neuron level is the wrong place, but I’d introduce the concept of a mechanism. What matters is not just individual neurons, but how they are organized, inter-operate, and also how the resulting mechanism fits into the context of the rest of the brain, the perceptual and motor systems, and the world.
When comparing people, one would expect common mechanisms. But the details of the context for each person would differ, so in that sense there is subjectivity to concepts. But there is also commonality to concepts; how else could people successfully interact in societies?
On a related side note, I understand that Dennett thinks that one major error he made in his earlier writing on intentionality was not extending the intentional stance down to neurons since they are evolved form individual cells which dealt with the problems of survival in the world. Of course, he means “sorta” (ie simplified in some sense) intentionality for neurons.
That is humor, right? As in, we are supposed to think of mathematicians as people who show the errors in incorrect, published proofs, not the people who create such proofs.
The idea of a “semantic engine”, as distinct from a “syntactic engine,” seems actually quite problematic to me. Dennett uses it a bit, and McDowell follows suit (which is where I first got it from). But now that I’m getting into enactivist approaches to mindedness, experience, and cognition, I’m increasingly concerned that the very distinction between “syntactic engines” and “semantic engines” presuppose a computationalist or functionalist account of cognition. So I don’t know if I’d endorse it or not.
KN:
Neil:
Neil,
A neuron doesn’t know what its inputs and outputs mean any more than a logic gate does. That’s what people mean when they say that brains and computers are syntactic, not semantic, at the fundamental level.
Neurons and logic gates process their inputs and produces their outputs without regard to meaning. If you change the meaning of the inputs, the function will remain unchanged. It’s syntactic, not semantic.
I believe a computationalist account can also be enactivist.
I am thinking of the simulation approaches that some cognitive scientists endorse, where computation refers to simulation involving both the affordances of the current environment as well as mental representations. Further, the mental representations are not abstract symbols in some language of thought, but rather closely related to past perceptual states.
There is also recent work on what computation in physical systems means. This work proposes a mechanistic approach and contrasts that with semantic and syntactical approaches to defining computation (in the brain or any physical system).
ETA: I think there are enactivist versions of functionalism too. In his blog, Putnam said that he was now a “long-arm functionalist”, which I understand means a functionalism where the states reach out beyond brain and person and into the world.
I would say that meaning emerges as the evolved interaction between organisms and their environment. Brains continue evolution in a different substrate, at a faster rate.
petrushka,
I agree. I would also add that representations are always inexact, and that the ability to represent, once it has evolved, can be deployed to represent things that don’t exist in the environment, like unicorns.
There is no ethereal, metaphysical link from the representation to its referent, which is why I’m not disturbed by the fact that the referent of the word ‘unicorn’ doesn’t exist. For similar reasons, I’m not disturbed by the Twin Earth thought experiment in which the word ‘water’ means H2O on earth, while it means some H2O-like substance with an identical functional role but a different chemical formula on our sister planet, Twin Earth.
I lack both the patience and the intelligence to be terribly excited by the issues at stake in Twin Earth thought-experiments. No doubt that reflects rather poorly on me as a philosopher.
On the science/philosophy question, this from Anthony Chemero’s “Radical Embodied Cognitive Science” (2009):
In other words, philosophers have to get “out of the armchair” in order to say anything that bears on empirical reality. And that seems perfectly correct to me. All that can be done from the armchair, except for consulting one’s “intuitions” — and that doesn’t count for anything, because “intuitions” are nothing more than the accumulation of biological and cultural habits. They have no evidentiary weight or status of their own.