[Bups-dis] The Purpose of Philosophy

[Duncan Crowe]

Hi,

I think it might help to go back to the original question.

Sophie's question, as I read it, was what the relationship was between 
philosophical problem solving and real life problem solving. The 
challenge being that if there isn't a clear relationship between the 
two, philosophical problem solving seems like a kind of passing whimsy. 
The challenge here I'm taking from Sophie's second post on the thread 
where she remarks (I'm paraphrasing): 'suppose we say 'the purpose of 
philosophy is to resolve certain rational paradoxes', we might then ask 
'well, what is the purpose of /that?'/

In the grand tradition of taking a quote out of context I have to object 
to another remark she makes, in a manner which may be illustrative; "I 
think all philosophy should be /directly /practical."

Doesn't that seem a tad unreasonable? Suppose I say to the pure 
mathematician 'why are you engaged in studying this abstruse part of 
number theory?' 'I enjoy it.' he says. But suppose I press 'what is the 
good of it for society; why should we fund you to do this?' 'Ah' he says 
'we know in the past that advances in the purest of techniques can be 
used in more applied parts of mathematics which may in turn have 
application for future advanced physics'. Do we know this for a fact? 
No, but it /might /be true - and it's very likely to be true of /some 
/pure mathematicians. And mathematicians are cheap and needed to train 
other mathematicians anyway so.... Philosophers, it is worth mentioning, 
are fairly cheap as well. For an activity to be practical in some easy 
to track 'able to justify funding' kind of way, it doesn't need to be 
/directly /practical, it merely just needs to justify that it could be 
/indirectly /practical. Now, can philosophy do that?

The Wittgensteinian 'justification' of philosophy has it that philosophy 
is essentially a form of mental illness. The people that get involved in 
it are compelled to do so, perhaps from an inability to know when to 
quit in looking for reasons. There is a certain kind of honesty in this 
view, in so far as it seems philosophers /do /become philosophers as a 
result of a kind of compulsion (maybe as simple as finding the kind of 
task involved enjoyable... maybe something more complex) however 
implicit in the Wittgensteinian view is the idea that philosophy is a) 
generally useless and b) a compulsion to do it is something those who 
have it would profit from the lack of.

We don't need to be concerned about (b), I don't think. In a liberal 
democracy we tend to let most compulsions be unless they're obviously 
harmful on a state level, and on a personal level I suppose it's a 
rather aesthetic matter. If /you /feel compelled to encourage young 
philosophers to take up manual labour then I suppose we can't stop you. 
But I don't see any prima facie reason to do so. It seems a better hobby 
to have than football.

The challenge of (a) is the one we need to worry about. As I see it 
there are a couple of questions which need answered:
    1) Does the presence of philosophy within the academy give any gain 
to the academy? (We take it as read that the academy /in general/ is 
useful to society).
    2) Do those who have studied philosophy profit from that study? (As 
Luis claims, but has apparently not outlined how feeling paradoxically 
that philosophy /isn't /of practical benefit).
 
(1) is a very strange question, and if you read EO Wilson's interview in 
the ironically (given the interview) titled 'What Philosophers Think' 
you will get the view of someone whose clear answer is 'no'. He also 
appears to confuse the reality with theory as he appears to argue that 
philosophy could not be of any use because current practitioners are 
ignorant of advances in biology and neuroscience. Alternatively if one 
happens to read certain neuroscientists (I will not mention who I am 
thinking of, but out of love I should specifically say I am NOT thinking 
of Gazzaniga, Ramachandran or Damasio who are the picture of 
philosophically astute scientists) one gets a clear view of what the 
consequences of a lack of a philosophical education might be. More 
generally, however, it is a strange question because all (or nearly all 
- theology, history and mathematics might be exceptions) the academic 
disciplines /grew out /of philosophy. Once the scientific method is 
relatively stable it can be left to the 'morlocks in the labs' to fill 
out the details while the philosophers get on with other things. It 
seems blatantly false that purely empirical studies (though I'm willing 
to attempt an argument if someone wants one) - which we take to be what 
science is engaged in - cannot comprise the whole of human enquiry. If 
there are conceptual disputes to be had, then, doesn't it make sense to 
think conceptual disputation to be 1) a relatively specialized skill 
which takes ability, training and practice like any other and 2) for it 
to be advantageous to have the tasks of empirical studies and conceptual 
disputation relatively separate, though of course it's vital for both to 
pay attention to what the other is doing.

Philosophy: We figure out what the hell you're talking about so you 
don't have to.

As for (2), having gone right around the houses, I take it this is what 
Sophie was originally asking about: a) does the study of philosophy have 
any practical benefit to us as individuals? b) do we use philosophy in 
our day to day lives?

To tackle (b) first, I think it might be useful to steal a distinction 
Dennett gave in his Tanner lecture on ethics (available online). We can, 
in any practice, distinguish between first aid and proper full-blown 
treatment. The distinction is simply between rules of thumbs we apply 
which are cost-effective in the short term, and those we use when we 
have considerably greater resources, man power and time at our disposal. 
I would propose that day-to-day reasoning is of the former, first aid, 
variety while more rarefied philosophical (or scientific, for that 
matter - or academic historical, or legal forensic) reasoning is 
analogous to a House MD-style full battery of tests. I think anyone 
would agree that there is both a) a close resemblance between the two 
but b) non-identity between the two.

Armed with this metaphor I think we can begin to see where the practical 
benefits might come from. I am, by nature, a very superstitious person. 
I am, philosophically, a very /non/-superstitious person. That is to say 
I find by my emotional nature - even /since /coming to the conclusion 
they couldn't possibly be true - I find talk of the afterlife, tarot 
card readings, random day to day coincidences, 'psychic powers' and so 
on very convincing. I similarly do not doubt that had I been presented 
with the Monty Hall problem prior to encountering it philosophically I 
would have stuck with my choice of door. The point here is that by my 
study of such things as the philosophy of mind, the logic of 
probability, fatalism and so on I have gained a certainty (or I'm sure 
that I think it; which on my reading of epistemology is the same) that 
there's nothing in such phenomenon. Now, do I sit down whenever I see 
Jon Edwards on TV and say to myself 'but Ryle makes the point...'? No; I 
remember what conclusions I've come to about what is and isn't the case 
as a result of careful reasoning, and I allow those conclusions to 
influence my behaviour. The same, I think, is true of the relationship 
between my political philosophy and my political views: indeed it can be 
rather confusing when I find people 'on my side' who have come there on 
the basis of very different and often (to my mind) fallacious reasoning. 
For example, as an atheist when I encounter a liberal who might 
otherwise be conservative but for their strong views on the divine 
sanction for charity should I address the subject and 'share my 
disbelief' or let it be? I think I'm like most people in saying 'let it 
be' but anyone who wants to tell me how intellectually cowardly I am as 
a result is welcome to do so.

The one area, ironically I think, where the influence of academic 
philosophy is /less /obvious is ethics. The reason as I take it is 
simply that most of the debates which go on within analytical ethics are 
at a very theoretical level. But we can think of some examples where - 
perhaps it's more the case that certain philosophical positions will 
influence behaviour versus other positions:
    * The most obvious case is if I was a utilitarian of the Peter Unger 
or Peter Singer stripe I would probably give a good deal more money to 
charity than I do. Indeed, for an interesting more directly accessible 
example of this check out the journal of a recent BPhil graduate called 
Toby Ord who writes about his amazing decision to give all but £10,000 
of his income to charity - his life has certainly been changed by his 
philosophical reasoning.
   * Applied philosophy is an obvious example. Many of the positions 
(maybe, I suppose it depends on how you feel about particular issues) 
which seem to be the 'default' on a number of issues seem to rest upon 
religious metaphysics. If you ignore the religion, and you find yourself 
opposed to the metaphysics this will change the way you feel about 
practical issues. For example: even if we all agree that in a liberal 
society it ought to be the case that women have the choice whether or 
not to have an abortion; I suspect there is likely a trackable 
difference in the metaphysical views of women with unwanted pregnancies 
who choose to have an abortion from those who don't.
   * I still think one of the best things I've ever heard at BUPS was 
Andrew Goldfinch's paper on Machiavelli last September. Now if might 
just be because I'm not very conversant with Machiavelli's views, but in 
any event I was very interested in some of the ideas and have been 
mulling them over since. We come away from Aristotle with the view that 
there is a broadly right course for the virtuous person to take at any 
one time. Machiavelli then comes along and says 'no, look - if the goal 
here is to promote your ends (which are not necessarily 'selfish': 
utilitarian ends are ends) then a certain flexibility is called for: you 
don't know what is going to happen in the future, so you have to adopt a 
careful, prudent stance'. Now what kind of stance is that? I don't know 
- but I can't help but thinking it's an avenue of practical reason which 
doesn't seem to get explored much. The idea of time being a dimension in 
decision theory is well ingrained now; but I've not come across anyone 
(though I'd wager there's a good number of 'business experts' who do) 
who account for the fact that future promotion of goals could be 
contingent upon the adoption currently of suboptimal strategies not 
because of /known /confounds (as in game theory) but because of the 
possibility for unknown confounds.
   * There's bad philosophy as well. Suppose I'm a... what does Williams 
call it? A vulgar relativist? Suppose I am espousing a view that it is 
morally unacceptable to judge the moral standards of those in other 
cultures. Now you, being sensible, take issue with me over this and say 
'Duncan, that's nonsense - your norm is an Ishmael statement: why are 
all norms culturally relative /except /that one? It makes no sense.' We 
can see quite plainly that - assuming I 'put my money where my mouth is' 
in both cases - that there might be a difference in the way I react to, 
say, 'female circumcision' in Africa before and after you set me straight.

I suppose I roughly endorse what Luis is saying: the study of philosophy 
in principle acts as a whet stone for the mind. The quote on my door and 
my facebook profile from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 comes from a much 
longer passage. The protagonist meets a man who has made the enhancement 
of his mind his chief concern in life, and gives him this advice; "Man, 
when I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people's faces - and they 
beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument have 
been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance no 
one will hit you and you'll never learn." I think it's fair to say the 
study of philosophy can, as a consequence, give one a finer cutting 
tool. Now, I'm not sure what you'd /use /it for, aside from philosophy 
(or, as Luis points out, humiliating others. I'm not entirely sure how 
to turn philosophical nous to vast profit: if you do, please drop me a 
line. Wine presses don't cut the mustard these days) but there does seem 
to be something of an intrinsic value to it. If you want to ask me 'are 
the cognitive skills acquired from the study of philosophy superior in 
value to those which would be acquired from the study or science or 
economics?'... well... I'm really not sure. I'm not sure it ever really 
comes up. It does appear that, to the right kind of mind at least, a 
well honed philosophical tool can be of as much enjoyment as a well 
practiced musical ability. Now, I accept there is an extent to which 
those aspects of philosophy - what one might call a 'philosophical 
disposition - are not what we teach in philosophy courses, but there 
does seem to be an extent to which it as arrived at by osmosis.

What am I missing. I suppose I am missing out something we have 
discussed on the BUPS board before, which is the distinction between 
applied (ethics perhaps, political philosophy, aspects of metaphysics 
with more obvious practical applications, philosophy of science and 
whatnot) and 'pure' (more abstract metaphysics, philosophical logic, 
mathematical logic) areas of philosophy. It might seem we have justified 
only the former. But I want to bring up the discussion of /indirect 
/practicality again, along with the idea of distribution of tasks. I 
will concede it is not obvious what the practical consequences of the 
work of, say, Kripke are, however it does not seem like to much of a 
stretch of the imagination to believe Kripke's views have influenced 
either those who work on practically applicable parts of philosophy or 
those who have influenced in turn those who work on practically 
applicable parts of philosophy. I should restate, I really think the 
demand for /direct /practicality is unreasonable and (for that matter) 
not something followed by more 'respectable' disciplines.

----

This is not to knock - I think I've made it clear the extent to which 
I'm troubled by metaphilosophical issues just like this - but I was 
troubled recently by the following fact: English students in the main, 
and music and history students especially, never seem to worry about the 
/use /of studying their discipline. Why is it such a concern of 
philosophy students, but apparently something which goes uncommented by 
those in other humanities subjects? I will say this: I honestly and 
ardently believe the academic subject 'philosophy' is many many times 
over more valuable to society than the academic subject of 'music'. 
Where are all the hand wringing musos?

All the best,
Duncan Crowe.

P.S. - Good lord, I do go on a bit don't I?