Philosophy isn't disco

Twitter Tuesday #16

I suspect one of the main reasons that so few people have expressed similar concerns as I do about non-naturalist moral realism: namely, that it isn’t even false so much as it is rooted in conceptual confusions born of linguistic and conceptual mistakes, is that they haven’t engaged much with non-naturalists. 

Most people don’t read a bunch of metaethics or engage with contemporary analytic metaethics literature. Even if they did, it’s easy enough for those using terms and concepts in the field to paper over the problems those positions face when someone takes the time to dig at them. I suspect more people would reach similar conclusions if they engaged with the literature on moral realism or spoke directly with moral realists, especially if they asked them to explain what they meant by the terms and concepts that they used. I think it would become evident that the kinds of explanations one receives have all the depth of a puddle.

We see some indication of that here, with this post. The author of this tweet, Richard, states:

“I don't understand objective morality. @justinschiebs  @analyticatheism  @SpeedWatkins Please help me. Anything I can read? Anything I am obviously not looking at? It just does not click for me. My brain implodes.”

I spoke with Richard, who confirmed that realist notions like the idea of something being good in itself seems “nonsensical.” 

This is not a common reaction one will find in the academic literature. Yet this is not the first time I’ve encountered someone outside the literature who has had this reaction. A critic may suggest that this is no surprise: of course something will seem like nonsense to outsiders…what really matters is whether those within the profession understand the concepts.

This might seem reasonable, but I cannot stress how dangerous it is to incautiously grant that if specialists in a field insist something makes sense, then it probably does. This is a fairly safe heuristic if we’re talking about well-established empirical disciplines with track records of success and comparatively transparent methods. I don’t think contemporary analytic philosophy has earned such confidence, though.

I suspect with time we will see more people question whether certain forms of moral realism, and other notions in philosophy, are meaningful. Philosophers may continue to dismiss such worries as the ignorance of outsiders. I worry that this is a profound mistake. I suspect the sense of mutual understanding and consensus within the field is a product of selection effects and induction into the dogmas and presumptions of contemporary analytic philosophy, and that those who stick around are precisely those who buy into the field’s pretenses. After all, if we surveyed a bunch of Christian theologians about the intelligibility of the Trinity, we’d doubtless find pockets of unanimity not just in its intelligibility but its truth. I fear contemporary analytic metaethics has far more in common with Christian theology than with the sciences.

This week’s Twitter Tuesday is a buy one get one free deal, because we have a follow-up to Richard’s remark, as well. There were lots of helpful suggestions about various readings. This remark from Thomas Metcalf stood out, though:

“It strongly appears as if some things are good (and some are bad), regardless of what anyone believes about them, regardless of whether they benefit or harm you, and regardless of what culture you come from. More here:” (link)

This is a good example of a professional philosopher doing the thing I’ve objected to before: the underspecified appeal to intuitions/appearances/seemings:

It strongly appears that way…to who? To Metcalf? To people in general? Why don’t philosophers just clearly indicate what they mean when they say these sorts of things?

It’d be weird to appeal to how things appear to yourself alone in this context. If someone says “I don’t understand objective morality, please help,” responding with “it appears to me that there are objective moral facts” isn’t going to be very helpful. I suspect, however, that this remark isn’t simply an appeal to how things seem to Metcalf, but to…well…others? People in general? People who adequately reflect? Unfortunately it’s hard to say, because such remarks are unhelpfully underspecified. 

The importance of clearly specifying what you mean in contexts like these should be philosophy 101. It is really disappointing to see philosophers continue to communicate in ways that are imprecise and unnecessarily vague. Were such claims rendered less vague, that may simply present us with a new problem: the claims may be trivial or lack rhetorical punch (it appears that way to me) or they may be subject to empirical scrutiny (it seems that way to most people), and may turn out to be false. Vague claims are less vulnerable to these concerns because they’re ambiguous: I can’t object that “it appears that X” is false because it doesn’t appear that way to most people because you can always insist you weren’t making an empirical claim about how things appear to most people, for instance. I am tired of pulling punches: while underspecified in remarks like this may not  be intentional, i.e., a conscious and deliberate strategy to evade objections like these, I do think that analytic philosophy has cultivated a lot of convenient bad habits among its practitioners, habits that serve to obscure people’s claims in an armor of ambiguity that renders claims less vulnerable to criticism by creating a series of dialectical hurdles critics would have to cross, and for many, it’s simply not worth the effort.

I like naming things, and my first pass at naming this will be a bit alliterative. We can call these word walls. There are lots of ways word walls can work. Let’s consider a couple. 

First, suppose you could make two claims:

(1) A very precise claim. Its strengths and weaknesses are clear and unambiguous.

(2) A less precise claim. It is ambiguous between two readings: (a) and (b). Reading (a) has a strength in one area, but a weakness in another. Reading (b) flips this around: it is weak in the first way, but strong in the second. 

It can be strategically beneficial to opt for (2). Why? If you go for (1), someone may immediately point out the weaknesses in your claim. But if you go for (2), the ambiguity can conceal the weaknesses of your view. Is it weak because it is best understood as (2a) or (2b)? It’s not clear. If a critic wants to raise objections to your view, they’d have to press you to disambiguate (2) and resolve it in (a) or (b). First, you could equivocate or slide between the two views, serving as something similar to a motte and bailey, only in this case it wouldn’t be a motte and bailey so much as a kind of dialectical rock-paper-scissors. If they pull out the scissors, present a rock. If they pull out paper, switch to scissors. Repeat until they give up.

Yet even if you do resolve the ambiguity in accordance with (a) or (b), you still put up an initial barrier to entry. Many people may fail to notice the ambiguity, and let the claim go unchallenged. Those who worry about it may feel rude or impolite in pressing you to disambiguate. And you don’t have to immediately concede ground: you can hem and haw and kick up enough dust that it takes a whole conversation to get you to resolve the matter in accordance with (2a) or (2b) in particular.

This can exhaust people: at any point along the way, someone might simply give up and pack it in, and you can live to fight another day. This is the dialectical equivalent of guerrilla tactics. If they can survive the attrition long enough to reach your base, their resources will be depleted, and they may lack the forces or siege equipment to continue the battle. Again, you live to fight another day.

Finally, even if they somehow persist, you can simply deploy additional delay tactics long enough to make yet another move: the social discharge move. So long as you put up enough of a fight for long enough, you eventually earn the right to exit the conversation. You’ve answered their questions. You’ve done your work. It’s impolite for them to push you onto the defensive for so long. You have discharged your social responsibility to shoulder your side of the argument, to play defense, to explain yourself, and to humor their pestering inquiries. At this point, you can now exit the conversation without anyone thinking you were defeated, and they might even respect you for “giving ground.” This effectively hits a reset button on the conversation: in most cases if anyone wants to engage you on the same topic, you can deploy the same tactics all over again. Alternatively, you can now pivot to go on the offensive, and interrogate them about their views. This is the “the best defense is a good offense” approach: it relieves the pressure on your questionable views by focusing attention on the other person. One can then shroud their weak views behind a “fair” dialectic, where both sides symmetrically question one another.

The second example is one I’ve outlined before: a kind of terminological merry-go-round. I talk about one example here (it’s not metaethics!).  You ask what someone means by some term, A. They’ll tell you it means B. B is no more illuminating than A was: it may be a piece of jargon, some inscrutable metaphor, some obscure or unconventional turn of phrase, etc. If you ask what B means, you might already hit bedrock. You may encounter a reaction like this:  I already told you what A is, what are you going to do, keep asking ‘and what does that mean?’ forever? 

They may continue to humor you though. In this case, you may be told that B means C, which is yet another useless metaphor or turn of phrase. At this point, if you ask what C means, you may return to A, or the loop may continue: A is B is C is D is A is B…until you hopefully shut up and stop asking questions. Note that this word wall has many of the advantages of the previous word wall: it likewise allows you to socially discharge your responsibility to explain yourself. If someone asks what you mean by A, and you say “it means B,” then even if this is a totally unhelpful reply, you’ve created a dialectical hurdle for that person. An audience can be persuaded you didn’t just blow off your responsibility to explain yourself. If your answer is unhelpful and obscure, this may not be obvious to outsiders, who may assume that if someone asks what A means, and their interlocutor confidently says that it means “B,” then, even if they (the audience member) isn’t quite sure what B means, well, the person was confident, and it does sound like an answer. At this point, the person explaining A by appealing to B can leverage this fact to act like the person who asks what B means is being pushy and rude if they persist. They might put up a little resistance, but finally relent and explain B in terms of C. Now if the person persists in asking what C means, the person defending A can put a stop to this nonsense:

You asked what A means. I told you about B. You then asked what B  means, and I told you about C. What are you going to do, keep persisting forever? No. I’ve answered your questions. This line of inquiry has to bottom out somewhere and I’ve given you more than enough…

One can exploit the loop to create increasingly large hurdles, and trickle out frustration with further inquiries at each step, until one creates the appearance that any further inquiries are simply the other person being rude, or stubborn, or stupid. Note, too, that this can be combined with the first strategy above: one can explain A in terms of B, but B is extremely ambiguous. Now if a person wants to question you further, they have to spot the ambiguity, then have the audacity to challenge you on it, and ask you to disambiguate. How rude. Philosophers pull this kind of thing all the time, acting like asking them to simply clarify what they mean is some interminable chore, and you’re some kind of unwelcome tax collector shaking them down for more than they’re obliged to offer. So here are two word walls: strategic ambiguity and interminable definitional loops that will either hit a dead end or circle back on themselves in useless and impenetrable ways.

Sometimes philosophers will defend this by insisting all terms and concepts mire one in endless circular loops like this. This is rubbish. One doesn’t necessarily have to rely on verbal explanations alone, but let’s suppose one does. In that case, sure, any attempt to offer a verbal explanation for some term or phrase is going to present one with other terms and phrases, and someone might not know what those mean. But one’s goal should, in principle, to create a conceptual entrypoint where others can sync up what you’re saying with some terms or concepts they already understand to breach the circle. A person’s failure to do so may be their fault, but this isn’t necessarily the case: you might just be failing to communicate the concepts well, or, in some cases, it may  be that your concepts aren’t meaningful, and you’re presenting something that seems viciously circular because it is viciously circular. 

So while it may be that verbal explanations have this appearance of circularity, but that doesn’t mean that all explanations are in the same boat: some A → B → C → A descriptions lack sufficient integration with other terms and concepts for anyone who isn’t inducted into the loop’s vacuous confusions couldn’t enter the loop because there is no conceptual entrypoint. Others do have such integration, and running someone on the loop may eventually spark enough recognition, and build enough associations with existing terms and concepts, that one creates a conceptual port through which they can enter and integrate the concepts into the rest of their conceptual network. In any given case, it’s not obvious whether one’s concepts form a viciously circular and empty loop or not: meaningless nonsense and genuine and substantive notions may very well (and I suspect, do) largely feel the same way from the inside. It takes a lot of work to uncover the kinds of conceptual and linguistic mistakes. 

Unfortunately, philosophers are all too often impatient with this line of inquiry, giving far too little credit to the serious application of the insights of Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophers, and others, to how language can bog philosophers down in confusions. Philosophers weave a thousand spells of their own design, and are often so caught up in philosophical phantasmagoria that they develop what I suspect is a kind of addiction to the dialectic: it’s so fun, it’s so satisfying, to feel that one is plumbing the depths of reality, piercing the veil, and developing the most profound insights. Those of us who want to pop that bubble are party-poopers, naysayers, bitter, resentful, and unpleasant people who want everyone to turn the music down. 

I must confess that there is truth in this: I’m not one for disco balls and dance floors. I want to get shit done. Unfortunately, a great deal of contemporary philosophy strikes me as having far more in common with dance clubs and poetry recitals than it does with beakers and microscopes. I see this as a tragedy and an outrage. I suspect many philosophers either don’t see it this way, or see it and are quite happy with this state of affairs. I’ve encountered more than one philosopher who has sought to justify the field’s presence in the academy by insisting it’s fun or because they like doing it. This kind of frivolity repels me. I find work in the field satisfying, at times, but that satisfaction is predicated on my belief in the value, or at least potential, of what I accomplish, and of the field as a whole. I suspect that for far too many philosophers, the primary purpose of doing philosophy is recreation. The kind of word walls and other verbalistic nonsense I’ve described on this blog make a lot more sense if people are often motivated by a desire to play games.