[Bups-dis] A touch of the old meta-philosophy

[Duncan Crowe]

Meta-philosophy: yes, it's guilty and bit messy but everyone does it.

I have two relatively unrelated curios that I would like people's 
reactions to, if not necessarily their /answers /to, but they both fall 
under what might might be termed meta-philosophy.

I'm afraid all my anecdotes tend to take the long, genetic route. One of 
my friends joined a group on Facebook entitled 'Lianne Dauban, 19. 
Shipwrecked. Fuck me!' which appears to be a group for those who knew 
her back in Bristol before she was 'famous' to complain about what a 
terrible person she is. One of the commentators on the message board for 
the group asked if Lianne was "the one who didn't like black people" 
they were told she wasn't, and a link was posted to a news article about 
the other castaway in question: 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6293847.stm

I invite the reader to review the following and spot what disturbed me 
about it:

"Her parents, David and Nicola Buchanan from Edinburgh, issued a 
statement to "wholeheartedly apologise" for their 18-year-old daughter's 
remarks.

Channel 4 has said Buchanan is naive and will be seen changing her views.

The Buchanans added: "As Lucy's parents, we were both distressed to see 
her make such loose remarks which clearly have been, quite rightly, seen 
as wholly inappropriate and lacking in forethought."

The offending term is the word 'inappropriate'. This word is used to 
refer to her "remarks" which include such gems as "I'm for the British 
Empire and things. I'm for slavery, but that's never going to come back."

'Inappropriate' is a rather transparent term. It has nothing to do with 
the veridically or rationality of certain claims, but merely their 
aptness for expression at a particular time. In other words, the 
Buchanans' comment is not incompatible with the view "we think our 
daughter is correct, but we are aware that she not ought to be saying 
these kinds of things exposed to the wide audience of national 
television, but only in the secluded back rooms of the Tory party 
conference".

We'll give these people the benefit of the doubt and assume they aren't 
a family of happy little racists. The question is; why /choose /that 
word. What does that word choice - that emphasis - reveal about the 
thought process going on.

There appears to be two concerns here;

1) Slavery is wrong, and approval of it is incompatible with virtue and 
reason.
2) Slavery is unpopular, and approval of it will be met with negative 
public opinion.

If I prioritise 1 over 2 then my word choice for a chastising statement 
would probably be something like "she shouldn't have said what she said 
because it was wrong". If I prioritise 2 over 1 then my word choice is 
likely to be something like "she should have said what she said because 
it was inappropriate".

So, the meta-philosophical question you've all been waiting for: ought 
the second concern, that such-and-such a view is unpopular, even be on 
our radar /in so far as we are philosophers?/ I won't try to structure 
what follows so much as lob as many balls as possible in the hope one 
goes somewhere.

A) One of the few virtues that must be positively demanded of a 
philosopher is their diligence at following reason where it leads. I'm 
quite partial to Michael Dummett, and when I heard he was a Catholic it 
didn't bother me despite my being a devout atheist myself. After all, 
Wittgenstein was a Catholic, Anthony Kenny was a Catholic, Anscombe was 
a Catholic, Charles Taylor was a Catholic: religiosity and philosophical 
competence are at the very least not incompatible. However, I then read 
the interview he gave to Cogito, which includes the highly disturbing 
exchange

"*Cogito: */To lead you into a quite different area, we must ask whether 
as a Catholic philosopher you have ever found any cross-fertilization 
between your religious and your philosophical views./

*Dummett: */I should like such cross-fertilization to occur, but I can't 
really pretend that it has, and part of the reason for that is I've 
never succeeded in getting as far in philosophy as I should have liked. 
I certainly had the ambition to carry my investigations from general 
considerations into a whole lot of areas within philosophy. I can't say 
I have abandoned that ambition, but it's all taken me much longer than I 
thought, partly because of general teaching obligations. I had the 
ambition to write a book called Realism investigation a lot of different 
areas including much of what's traditionally called metaphysics. Natural 
theology, that part of philosophy which has to do with questions about 
the existence of God, is something to which I have never have properly 
contributed, partly because my own ideas about it are in a pretty 
confused state, I admit, and partly because I think it's almost the most 
remote area from the foundations. You have to get so much else right 
first become you can even begin to tackle that.

Because I think there is this hierarchical order within philosophy, it 
would e wrong to allow any preconception of how things ought to come out 
to influence what one does lower down. You have to follow the argument 
and see where it leads. I'm not saying that pursuit of these ideas about 
anti-realism would lead to atheistic conclusions, but if they were to do 
so, although it would be very uncomfortable to me, I don't think it 
would matter very much. My religious belief would tell me I must have 
made a mistake somewhere."/

Stop. Read that again. He says that if his ideas about anti-realism, 
which he acquired over a lifetime of careful reasoning led to a 
contradiction of his ideas about religion, acquired from his parents as 
an infant, he would take that as a proof against the /former. /I would 
appreciate comments on this, because this seems to me the philosopher's 
number one sin: you have to follow reason where reason leads. I'll 
accept that there are genuine neurological plasticity limits which 
prevent total revision of world views, but we're not talking about 
/actual /revision here, we're talking about a hypothetical revision. I 
suppose we could interpret Dummett sympathetically and say he /is 
/talking about actual revision of ones /weltanschauung /but that doesn't 
strike me as the most natural reading.
/
/I am reminded of a piece that David Papineau wrote for the 
Philosophers' Magazine about philosophical conservatism 
(http://www.philosophersnet.com/magazine/article.php?id=1005, excerpt 
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/07/philosophical_c.html); He 
goes a little further than I'd  everyone loves the fun of 'proving' that 
the external world doesn't exist, but too many seem to forget this early 
contrarian thrill and wind up saying generally agnostic things about not 
wanting to hurt anyones feelings etc. Surely philosophy /starts /from 
the idea that the answers you have aren't correct, and that you wish to 
think long and hard about them and see if you can come up with better 
ones. It does no good to, when you reach the top, say 'this can't be 
right; it doesn't match up with what I thought was true before the 
investigation', or else take a 'government house' perspective and when 
you arrive at unusual positions keep them to yourself because 'people 
cannot deal with them' or 'it will hurt peoples feelings' or other such 
patronising dribble.

To try and return a little to the original story: The reason not to 
express racist sentiments is because - to borrow from Penn and Teller - 
because racism is bullshit. It's not because racist views are 
'inappropriate'. If the views are right, it should matter whether they 
are 'appropriate' to express or not. If the views are wrong, it again 
should not matter because the reason they should not be expressed is 
because they are erroneous. Either way, the appropriateness does not 
enter into things.

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I worry when I read articles like the above 
(BBC article on Castaway) - it suggests we; as a country, not as 
philosophers; have slipped so far towards relativism as to be afraid to 
say rascism is wrong. An interesting test case is the debate over the 
Bell Curve. I have no wish to raise the argument about whether or not 
the results are accurate and I would fancy neither I nor the people on 
this list are either informed or qualified in the relevant areas to 
decide one way or the other either. What disturbed me about the debate 
was the number of people on the 'good'/ /side (i.e. not the ignorant 
neo-nazi types, but the well-educated liberally inclined individuals) 
who immediately rejected the claims of the researchers involved on 
ideological grounds. As if 1) Africans having on average a handful fewer 
IQ points than those from other parts of the world would lead to a) 
slavery, b) death camps, c) renewed rascism or d) all of the above and 
2) even if it would that makes any difference to what your reaction to 
the research should be.

There is a link, at least for me, to arguments about evolution and, 
especially, arguments about the evolution of morality. There seem to be 
an alarming number of people of the conviction that if morality turns 
out to simply be a loose assembly of natural inclinations developed via 
natural selection to promote the genetic fitness of the species that 
means 1) morality - the inclination to be moral - will disappear in a 
puff of smoke when you speak its true name ala Rumpelstiltskin or 2) 
that means we ought to deny evolution or at least obfuscate for 'the 
masses'.

There's a meta-philosophical debate that I don't want to weigh in to (at 
least not till David Papineau visits Cambridge later in February! :D) 
about whether philosophy is a science or not, but I will say this: as 
with scientists the highest concern of philosophers must always be to 
the truth. Morality will (generally) take care of itself. It should not 
be a concern of philosophers what the public opinion of a particular 
idea shall be (allowing for slight variations for rhetorical - in the 
Aristotlean sense - purposes), only whether or not it is true or - if 
one if feeling cautious about that particular word - reasonable.

The second (shorter) puzzler I wish to pose is this: I was talking to a 
languages student about why I was a philosopher. I argued that, at least 
for me, the motivation was to sort out what the right answers were. 
Someone else asked 'which philosophers [of the past] were right?' to 
which I had to reply that in my opinion /none /of them were. There are 
variations in 'wrongness' of course and, allowing for historical 
context, I'd be inclined to say Aristotle and Hume were a lot less wrong 
than many others, but really if I thought any philosopher thus far had 
got it 'right' I wouldn't be particularly motivated to keep going. (tbh, 
I find my level of adulation of Dan Dennett actually detracts from my 
enthusiasm for the philosophy of mind, but that's neither here nor 
there). The language student then posed the rather puzzling question 
'are you wrong'.

It seems quite obvious that even if you spent your whole lifetime at 
work on your philosophy you'd probably still not get it right. How 
should this perform practice (this is why it's meta-philosophical, see)? 
The temptation might be to go for the 20th Century Anglo-American 
approach of dealing only with particular sub-sub-sub topics one at a 
time without any focusing on 'the big picture' on the idea that it makes 
one less likely to get it wrong (or makes philosophy seem more like a 
science, or at least a subject about which there can be real 'expertise' 
- the opportunity for 'expertise' increases with the amount of arcane 
and esoteric knowledge out there to be found - but it doesn't seem 
particularly conducive to 'getting it right'. At the very least, it 
doesn't seem as much /fun /as working on a complete system.

It inclines me to re-echo one of Simon Blackburn's favourite quotes (the 
mark of which, I am right full aware, I fall long short of) "right not 
so that you can be understood, but so that you cannot be misunderstood" 
but I'd be interested in hearing people's reactions to the succinct 
version: given you are almost certainly going to get things wrong, what 
difference does this fact make to the way you ought to go about your 
philosophising.

My best to all,
Duncan Crowe.