Taking conceptual impoverishment seriously

Twitter Tuesday #11

Consider this claim from Μ□ΧΙ∃ 🗽📚:

I am , Im just making fun of the lance bush types of anti realist .

…along with the exchange that followed. Jude replied:

The purposefully obtuse strand of anti-realism “I just don’t get it!” yeah well I do, just be smarter then

And Μ□ΧΙ∃ 🗽📚 ended with:

I like to say “ I’m sorry for you being conceptually impoverished “

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This last remark is an interesting claim. Some of those who criticize my claim that their conception of moral realism is unintelligible accuse me of being “conceptually impoverished.”

The claim seems to appeal to the more general observation that some people have certain sorts of concepts but other people don’t.

Most of us lack most concepts. I don’t know much about physics, chemistry, or engineering. There are doubtless many concepts in these fields that I don’t have.

In some of these cases, with the requisite time, dedication, and study, one could, in principle, learn about the relevant concepts and thereby come to have them.

However, for someone to be “conceptually impoverished” may indicate that they not only don’t have the concept, but have a distinctive difficulty with acquiring the concept, and they may even be incapable of acquiring it (short of substantial changes to how they think). For instance, young children may lack certain concepts, and may lack the cognitive capacity for obtaining those concepts until further cognitive development takes place. I suspect, for instance, that most two year olds lack at least some of the concepts associated with theoretical physics or organic chemistry.

The degree to which it is plausible that someone could persist in lacking a genuine concept (rather than a pseudoconcept) will vary depending on a variety of circumstances. 

1. The person may have not encountered the concept at all, nor ever thought in such a way so as to acquire the concept (even if they have no terms with which to lexicalize the concept in question). Sufficient study or discussion with those who understand the concept could cause the person to readily acquire the concept. These are the simplest cases of lacking a concept, and they can be readily remedied by exposure to the concept.

2. Related to (1), the person may be capable of acquiring the concept, but those attempting to explain it to them have not succeeded at prompting them to acquire the concept. This could be due to e.g., linguistic limitations or other communicative barriers.

3. Acquisition of the concept may depend on understanding one or more other concepts. For instance, one might not be able to understand certain more complicated mathematical concepts without understanding more basic concepts. Can someone understand what a prime number is if they don’t understand what a number is? A person may persist in failing to grasp a particular concept not because they’re incapable of doing so, but because they have failed to grasp one or more concepts that are necessary (or at least facilitate) acquiring the concept in question

4. Relatedly, the person may possess one or more concepts, or a broader philosophical stance which inhibits their ability to understand the concepts in question. This could include differences beliefs about the meaning of certain terms or concepts or broader beliefs about philosophical or nonphilosophical norms or facts  (If one can only conceive of something existing if it is physical, they may not only not believe in anything nonphysical, they may find this to be literally inconceivable)

5. The person may be a very young child, and thus not be at the appropriate developmental stage to be capable of readily acquiring the concept

6. The person may have brain lesions, agnosias, or some type of neurological difference that prevents them from acquiring the relevant concepts (For instance, it could be that there is a special region in the brain that only moral realists possess, and that enables them to understand the concept of irreducible normativity (the fusiform normativity gyrus, perhaps).

7. There may be more mysterious reasons why some people may not grasp the relevant concepts. Perhaps some non-physicalist account of the mind is correct, and these people lack certain mental or spiritual faculties that other people possess that enable those people to grasp the relevant concepts (For instance, it is possible that moral realists have souls, and one can grasp stance-independent moral truth only if they have a soul. Perhaps I lack a soul, and this prevents me from grasping the stance-independent moral facts).

There are other possibilities as well, for instance:

8. The person may have the concept, but not realize they have the concept.

9. The person may have the concept, and “realize” they have it in some unconscious or semiconscious way, but not consciously realize they have it. This halfway point of semiconscious understanding could prevent moving from not having the concept at all to conscious awareness of the concept due to cognitive biases such as motivated reasoning.

10. The person may have the concept, and consciously know that they have it, but persist in lying about this, publicly claiming not to have the concept even though they do.

There are likely more possibilities. If you send suggestions and they seem reasonable I can update this list or create a new one.

Assessing all of these possibilities in much depth would be difficult, so I’d like to give a lightning tour of their prospects in order in the specific case of my claim that I have no concept of irreducibly normative reasons:

(1L): We can rule this one out since I’ve encountered the terms that are supposed to refer to the concepts many times.

(2L): This is certainly a possibility. I doubt this accounts for the situation. If there was someone who could have conveyed the concepts in question to me in a way where I could acquire them, I suspect I’d have already encountered that person or their work.

(3L & 4L) Again, this is possible. If there are requisite concepts I’d be interested in finding out what they are. I can perhaps arrive at the destination if I can construct the right conceptual roadmap to get there. Again, though, I don’t think this is plausible. I study metaethics. I am not the degree of specialist in analytic metaethics as many of those working in the field for a long time are, but I’ve never been told, nor been given the impression, that intense specialization is necessarily or even commonly needed to acquire the concepts in question. 

These are supposed to be simple, straightforward concepts that most ordinary people have. And I don’t see people routinely insisting that if I studied this or that paper or book, or enough papers or books, then I’d finally understand. This doesn’t seem like the sort of situation where the concepts in question are sufficiently complex, and sufficiently dependent on a foundation of antecedent concepts that one would need to do a lot of intense study down well-worn academic paths to arrive there. One might say this is the case for understanding certain concepts in math or physics. I don’t understand different interpretations of quantum mechanics, but if I wanted to try to do so, I would have a reasonable sense of where to start, and many people could direct me to the appropriate sources. Only, with respect to irreducibly normative reasons, people have directed me to the sources in question to no avail. If these sources are out there, where are they? I’m sure there’s a lot I haven’t read. But many people apparently think throwing Future Tuesday cases at me for the thousandth time is sufficient. At least, many of those who claim to have the concepts find this sufficient. Why is it apparently sufficient for them, but not for me?

I also sometimes have people tell me my commitment to this or that philosophical view prohibits me from acquiring the concepts. Yet in most of these cases, the charge in question isn’t even true. If there’s a particular philosophical commitment I have that prevents me from grasping the concepts, I haven’t had anyone point out a reasonable candidate commitment yet. I’m certainly open to this possibility, however, and consider it one of the more likely reasons why it could be that there is a genuine concept that I lack.

However, I’m often told the concepts in question aren’t communicable because they are primitive, properly basic, bedrock, unanalyzable, etc. It may be that those who believe these concepts are meaningful also believe their meaning cannot be communicated, at least not in any direct or conventional way (they may think they can be conveyed by synonymy or ostension). Efforts to convey the concepts to me have consistently failed, and I don’t think the fault lies with me: synonyms for what? Examples of what? I’m never given any lexical or conceptual entrypoint into the seemingly impenetrable circle of equally obscure terms and phrases. I think there is something highly suspicious going on here, and I have yet to encounter any moral realists who could allay this suspicion, or even substantially diminish it. One of the most common reactions is to provide me with a list of supposedly similarly “unanalyzable” concepts that strike me as eminently analyzable, e.g., “consciousness” or “time.”

(5L) I am not a young child.

(6L) I am open to this possibility. If those who believe I am “conceptually deficient” as a result of brain lesions or the absence of a specific cluster of neurons in the left temporoparietal junction or whatever, I will happily support efforts to examine my brain and identify the hypothesized neurological lacunae. I’ll even assist efforts to obtain funding for this sort of research. If you genuinely believe the reason I think the notion of irreducible normativity is nonsense is because I got hit in the head with a brick (which I did, so it’s certainly a possibility!), great. Let’s explore that possibility. Perhaps neuroscientific research could assess differences in the brains of those who have and don’t have certain philosophical concepts, and we could identify neurophysiological data that could account for these differences.

My guess is that we won’t turn up anything noteworthy. I don’t know if people who’ve floated this possibility are being serious, though. Such suggestions may be largely tongue-in-cheek, or possibly attempts to insult me. However, I don’t find the suggestion insulting; I view it as a serious possibility worthy of exploration. I don’t find it likely, but it’s at least worth investigating.

(7L) I only include these for the sake of completeness. I don’t  think these possibilities are plausible. If someone else does, I’d be happy to discuss the possibility anyway.

(8L) This doesn’t seem plausible in my case. I’ve studied and thought about this long enough that I am confident I’d notice if I had the concept, if I had it.

(9L) I can’t rule out this possibility. I’m not sure how to assess how likely this is.

(10L) I’m not lying or pretending. If I am, I am an inexplicably good liar about this particular topic, but not much else. As my wife will attest, I (a) say the same things about metaethics in private as I do publicly, which would make my commitment to the lie very strong and (b) I am a terrible liar.

I take the hypothesis that I am conceptually impoverished seriously. Unfortunately, those who put this suggestion forward sometimes don’t seem to take it as seriously as I do. If I am conceptually impoverished, I’d like to explore why that is. So far, I have not heard any good arguments that would indicate that it’s likely that I am conceptually impoverished.

The primary argument I’ve encountered is that most analytic philosophers think the concepts are intelligible. Well, so what? I’m not the first to suggest that the field is riddled with conceptual and linguistic confusions. This suggestion was defended most famously by Wittgenstein (1965):

Now the answer to all this will seem perfectly clear to many of you. You will say: Well, if certain experiences constantly tempt us to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance, this simply shows that by these words we don't mean nonsense, that after all what we mean by saying that an experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions. Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance. That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. (p. 11, emphasis original)

People are welcome to dismiss my perspective on the matter. They are welcome to dismiss Wittgenstein. They’re welcome to dismiss anyone they want. But I would hope that dismissal is based on good reasons, and is underwritten by a genuine open-mindedness about considering my point of view and those like it. 

I suspect part of the reason why views like mine are dismissed is that people may not appreciate that my perspective is not new, nor uniquely my own, but is motivated by an metaphilosophical undercurrent that has been around since the inception of contemporary analytic philosophy. One can find substantive challenges to analytic philosophy’s methods, and by extension, its conclusions, in the works of pragmatists, quietists, ordinary language philosophers, and more recently in experimental philosophy. Unfortunately, none of these perspectives have many prominent representatives in contemporary analytic metaethics, and this may give the impression that perspectives like mine are extremely bizarre and implausible outliers. Yet views like mine are not without precedent in much of the rest of philosophy, and I think people may find much of interest in alternative metaphilosophies were they to examine them. Indeed, views like my own may have been fairly common until recently, and were expressed fairly recently by, among others, R. M. Hare and Bernard Williams.

Mackie remarks, in passing, not only on Hare’s own declaration to not understand the concepts in question, , but also attributes to Hare the claim that nobody Hare knows understands the claims in question, either. The same holds for Parfit’s remarks about Williams, which likewise allude to an unnamed coterie of philosophers who are equally baffled by Parfit’s notion of a reason. Did everyone just forget about this? Perhaps the contemporary metaethical landscape is in a sort of fugue state where it has quickly forgotten its recent history: my view is not unusual against the backdrop of the recent history of metaethics, and is in line with some of the most prominent analytic philosophers of the twentieth century; it may even have been a fairly common position at one point in time.

However, I don’t approach the questions central to contemporary metaethics as an analytic philosopher. I suspect there is something deeply awry in much contemporary analytic philosophy. I believe it has set itself on shaky methodological foundations, and is shot through with unquestioned presuppositions that have ossified into a whole undercurrent of dogmas that serve only to stifle the field and render its output increasingly isolated and obsolete. 

Yet I also  believe (or at least hope) that metaphilosophcial advances will eventually reveal, not that people like me were conceptually impoverished, but that the field of analytic philosophy had gone methodologically astray, and that its practitioners had dug themselves into linguistic and conceptual pits that it would take a philosophical forklift to extricate them from.

However, I also believe that much of philosophy’s methodological monopoly is maintained by mainstream analytic philosophy by way of subtle social pressure to conform to the edicts of those whose views are currently fashionable, and to the luminaries around which those fashions gravitate. This is facilitated by gatekeeping, adopting a dismissive attitude towards views too out of alignment with the field’s methods or established categories and distinctions, and by a mutual pact of studious disinterest in adequately exploring the efficacy of the field’s methods. 

Unfortunately, people who dismiss the unintelligibility thesis as absurd (by e.g., suggesting that I am conceptually impoverished) often seem more interested in, as this tweet explicitly put it, “making fun of the lance bush types of anti realist.”