Re: What does a philosopher do?

[Robert Charleston <rc3673@student.open.ac.uk>]

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Hi Jeff,

That's a nice idea, but can it really work?

> You're right that philosophers "do what other people do some of the
> time." Philosophers analyze the nature of the world at levels deeper
> than most, and with methods more reliably truth-indicative than most.

I have heard people talk of philosophy being about a 'deeper level' before 
- but what does it mean? There only seem to be a handful of alternatives, 
and I'm not convinced by them. First it might mean that - literally - 
there is a deeper level of the world, and extra layer in the ontological 
strata of things, that philosophers get at, and others do not. Or at 
least, paying proper respect to the way you phrased the above, *most* do 
not. Well, I wouldn't want to defend this position in a tutorial on 
substance dualism, let alone trying to build it into 'what a philosopher 
is', being a monist. But more importantly, since I take it I can be a 
monist and be a philosopher, it doesn't seem to be a good idea. So bad 
interpretation.

Of course, we might also interpret the 'levels' idea as being a 
reductivist one - that maybe there are more levels in the world that - 
although not metaphysically separate, may still be accessed through 
knowing how things reduce into component parts, like language or semantics 
and syntactics, presumably. In which case I think physicists do more 
reducing than most philosophers. In fact there are plenty of 
non-reductivist philosophers, who say the correct ontology of the world is 
at the level of objects most people talk and think about. I think this 
layered sense of levels can't be what philosophy is about, even though a 
lot of philosophy uses it.

Perhaps it means 'looking at things more carefully, clearly, logically,
paying more attention to detail than others.' That would fit in with the
claim that philosophers use better 'truth indicative' methods than most.
But do they? Most philosophy papers I read skate over the detail of whole
tracts of the material they use. Scientists are regularly cited as 'now
thinking that...' or - worse - the phrase 'it turns out that...' is used
to introduce an idea taken from 'New Scientist' or a daily paper.
Philosophy does seem to pay more attention to the valid structure of
ideas. But so do speech writers. I want to know if there's anything that
philosophers do that is different from re-labelled speech writing.

And as for our techniques, well they are definitely better than most for 
avoiding error, but there are a lot of people who would look at the 
limited progress we have made in our subject over the last 2,500 years, 
relative to - say - the progress made in physics over the last 100, and 
would say that truth-indication has been sacrificed on the stone of 
error-avoidance. We are not indicating very many truths in relation to the 
number of errors we are pointing out. Which seems a good, but rather 
limited, role?

Are we any further forward because we talk of deeper levels?

Rab.


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