Philosophy is kinda autistic (/hj /pos)

Unsystematic remarks on systematicity

Although the “extreme male brain” theory of autism has extreme sour vibes, it does seem clear that—especially in the popular imagination—autism is associated with systematization: “the drive to…derive the underlying rules that govern the behaviour [sic] of…anything that takes inputs and delivers outputs” (Baron-Cohen 2002: 248). I argue here that systematicity is important to philosophy, which—like science—is centrally about searching for powerful generalizations. Fairchild & Hawthorne (2018: 74) put it well.

The wine-maker who crafts a highly rated wine may not get very far at all with general principles – this or that combination of fruits and tannins and oakiness needs to be evaluated on its own merits. […] However, by contrast, particularism in physics would be an intellectual disaster. Imagine if earlier generations had thought: ‘Things sometimes go up, sometimes go down, they sometimes get hotter and sometimes cooler, but the search for general principles that explain these vicissitudes is inappropriate.’ This attitude would have led to intellectual sterility and ignorance. Our view is that metaphysics, including ontology, is much more like physics in this respect than wine-tasting. (Fairchild & Hawthorne 2018; emphasis missing in the original)

The comparison with physics is an appropriate one. In contemporary academia, what goes on in philosophy departments occasionally overlaps with foundational aspects of disciplines like mathematics, physics, economics, or linguistics. There are specific areas of study that naturally sit near the boundaries—like set theory, quantum theory, decision theory, or semantics—and there are fairly well-known philosophers with doctorates in those allied disciplines—like Joel David Hamkins, David Wallace, John Broome, or Paul Elbourne.

Two Philosophical Traditions

One often hears about the continental–analytic divide within philosophy. The easiest way to draw the distinction might just be by ostention: continental philosophy has heroes like Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Deleuze, Camus, Derrida, Nietzche, Sartre, and de Beauvoir; meanwhile, analytic philosophy has heroes like Frege, Russell, Quine, Lewis, Kripke, Rawls, Nozick, Parfit, Chalmers, and Williamson. One might try to distinguish by location (France and Germany versus the UK and the US), or by the dispositions of practitioners (latex fetishism versus LaTeX fetishism); but ideally, we’d like to draw the distinction along methodological lines: here’s a caricature.

We enlightened analytic philosophers run experiments—just like scientists—except we do it with our massive brains; from the results of these “thought experiments”, we make deductive arguments—just like mathematicians—for various theories. By contrast, those dirty stupid continental philosophers sit there drawing pretty little pictures, and then make sweeping claims based on them; adherents of continental philosophy then just pick the prettiest one to believe.

Despite the em-dashed asides, the caricature of continental methodology is actually closer to a description of broad scientific methodology than the caricature of analytic methodology is. In science, deductive argument proceeds not from observations to theories, but from theories to observations: insofar as broad generalizations can predict the evidence, those generalizations gain support. This also describes the methodology of analytic philosophy, whether or not analytic philosophers are actively aware of it: research programs may rise and fall—as in science—funeral by funeral.

Thought experiments

But what should we make of thought experiments? It is true that philosophy relies on them. But famous research programs making heavy use of thought experiments—like the one sparked by Gettier’s famous 1963 note—might look rather un-systematic: one attacks a theory by rolling out convoluted hypotheticals, and defends a theory from such attacks by folding in complicated ad hoceries.

Firstly, while such patterns of development may signal that the particular research program is degenerating, it is instructive that the philosopher’s defensive instinct is still to complicate her theory rather than to restrict its scope by complaining about implausibility or irrelevance. Her theory is intended to be a very systematic generalization, holding not only in obvious cases but also in far-flung possibilities.

Secondly, insofar as the questions of philosophy are less contingent than those of adjacent sciences, armchair reflection on what would happen in hypothetical situations—rather than realizing those hypotheticals in laboratories—is precisely what is needed. One’s faculties for judging whether some condition of philosophical interest obtains in some particular situation apply just as well in the imagination as in real life.

(An aside: there is an instructive analogy with AlphaFold2, a Nobel Prize–winning model that determines the 3D shape of a protein—with accuracy rivaling traditional laboratory methods—using just its amino-acid sequence. As its widespread usage attests, contemporary biologists have no qualms about making some observations virtually rather than running costly laboratory experiments.)

Although such counterfactual observations do not fit the experimental stereotype of a randomized controlled trial, neither does most experimentation in natural sciences like astronomy or chemistry. The very general procedure—stress-testing a theory's predictions about what happens in different situations—is the same across astronomy, chemistry, and philosophy. The more particular methods of astronomy would be inadequate for the questions of chemistry, and vice versa; it is unremarkable that the more particular methods of philosophy would be inadequate for questions of the natural sciences, and vice versa. The primary difference is merely that the armchair—from which astounding progress has been made in, notably, mathematics—still seems far less impressive than the wet lab or the telescope.

Metaphysical possibility

Of course, when running a thought experiment, not anything goes. Not only do we need to be able to judge counterfactuals (what would happen in these cases), but we also need to judge whether the set-up is possible in the first place. Possible in what sense, though? Certainly not any sense sensitive to the guise under which things are presented, such that the truth is subject to framing effects and the like. Rather, what is needed is a more objective modality (what linguists call “circumstantial modality”)—familiar examples include nomological possibility (is it possible for humans to survive in outer space?) and immediate practical possibility (is it possible for you to subscribe to Offhand Quibbles?).

Following Kripke (1980), one useful tool for thinking about objective modalities is metaphysical possibility: something is metaphysically possible if, and only if, it’s possible in any objective sense. Thus, metaphysical modality is something like the broadest objective modality (though see Clark-Doane 2017). With metaphysical modality in hand, we can go back and characterize the more specific objective modalities more theoretically as well: for instance, something is nomologically possible if, and only if, it is metaphysically possible for it to obtain while the actual laws of nature hold.

We started with a pre-theoretical working grasp of the objective modalities; they enabled us to build out the ideology of metaphysical possibility, from which we built a more theoretical understanding of the objective modalities. In general, it may be a good idea when trying to reason in a very systematic way about some phenomenon to consider the most general case.

The broadest X

Something similar is supposed to be going on with knowledge-first epistemology. We start with a pre-theoretical working grasp of factive attitudes, like seeing or hearing or remembering something. (These attitudes are supposed to be factive because you can’t see that p if p is false—you at most seem to see that p.) Then, knowledge is just the broadest factive attitude, an attitude one holds if one holds any factive attitude. However, such attitudes are meant to be states rather than processes (so forgetting doesn’t count), and purely mental (so truly believing doesn’t count).

It’s not obvious to me how true belief is supposed to be not purely mental in a way that knowledge is; certainly this isn’t the most convincing route to knowledge-first epistemology, which is through abductive comparison with the alternatives (notably belief-first and credence-first epistemology—although the best versions of the latter are, I claim, implicitly knowledge-first).

Another case—also from Williamson—is that of quantifiers: we might like to treat cases of restricted quantification as, well, restricted versions of quantification over absolutely everything.

What other areas of philosophy might benefit from regimentation in terms of the broadest version of the phenomenon? One might try causation as something like the broadest version of what’s going on in causal verbs (for instance, “kill” is roughly synonymous with “cause to die”), or moral value as something like the broadest version of agent-relative value, or beauty as… something. I don’t know. But it’s an interesting tool for one’s philosphical toolbox.