On Argument, Systematicity, and Consideration: some notes on Bright, Stoljar, David Armstrong, and Nelson.
I suspect most sub-fields in professional philosophy have a version of the following sociological phenomenon: a group of people that look quite mainstream and central and, yet, simultaneously doing something distinctive (a shared technique or method, a background commitment, a style, etc.) Often in such cases, but not always, there is a common influence through a supervisor or a charismatic person in the field.
A few decades ago, I realized that many of my favorite interlocuters among fellow early modernists (folk who work on the era between, roughly, Descartes and Kant) were trained by Alan Nelson (now at UNC). I was initially a bit puzzled by this because while I loved Alan’s work in the philosophy of economics (which he had abandoned doing by the time I met him), my (then not very deep) acquaintance with his work in the history of philosophy made me think he did a kind of rational reconstruction of arguments that I associated with Jonathan Bennett (who I did admire, but thought hopelessly ‘'outdated’ now that we had undergone — as Christia Mercer called it more recently — the contextual revolution). How could I so admire the students, but not the teacher? (Yes, I know: lots of plausible answers.)
But as I got to know Alan and his work much better he taught me I had fundamentally misunderstood his work and projects: he was interested in systematic positions and much less so in arguments. I subsequently edited a lovely paper (here) by him that explains his methodology; the impact of this experience on me is quite visible if you look at the title of my (2017) Adam Smith book.
I had to think of Alan’s stance toward doing the history of philosophy when I read Liam Kofi’s Bright widely read blog post, “Arguments in Philosophy” (here). It starts with the following claim(s):
One thing that is supposed to be distinctive of analytic philosophy is the dedication to providing rigorous argumentation in favour of clearly stated theses. Arguments here being understood as articulated premises whose joint plausibility, and demonstrated logical relationship to the conclusion, significantly raises the plausibility of that conclusion -- ideally deductively entailing it….On the whole I think it is a genuine intellectual good to try very hard to make people understand what you are saying and why it might be worth believing….I have always been a little bit uncomfortable with the role of argumentation in analytic philosophy,
One reason Liam offers for his discomfort is that when he goes through some exemplary philosophers he admires, “articulating the positions was in each case an important contribution, particular arguments that may or may not have been deployed in their favour much less so.” In addition, as he notes many of the arguments one finds throughout history seem unimpressive by our lights. He concludes that “good positions are interesting in and of themselves.”
Liam doesn’t address much what makes good positions (well) good. But, in passing, he does offer two considerations: (i) that they are inspiring…”capturing the hearts and minds of many intellectuals;” (ii) that they played “a major and productive role in the history of science.” These are both consequentialist and sociological in character. On (ii) he goes on to offer Democritus/Lucretius and Gödel as examples.
As an aside, I am unsure whether Liam treats either (i-ii) as a sufficient condition (or whether they are jointly necessary and sufficient). As stated (ii) can be thought rather restrictive. Why not count the impact on art or wider society? There is also a more interesting issue lurking here: what about works that misunderstood the science of their own day (and are strictly speaking false at all times), but nevertheless had a productive role to play? Arguably, Plato and Hume are exemplars.
Now, unlike most professional philosophers I am fine with sociological arguments in philosophy. But it would be nicer if we could also offer some intrinsic reasons for thinking that a position is good. Alan’s work on systematicity is very useful here because it suggests that positions need to hang together in the right sort of way—it’s not merely coherence as a side-constraint. (One may also read Leo Catana fruitfully for the history and historicity of that ideal.) Systematicity is not unconnected to the principle of sufficient reason (a topic explored by Della Rocca and his students), so there is something deeply satisfying about positions that are systematic and obey versions of sufficient reason.
Liam goes on to qualify his discomfort with the role of arguments in philosophy, and the considerations he offers are quite important (so don’t read me as rejecting these), especially the third one:
Third, and most importantly, arguments reveal content. What arguments do at their best is map out logical space, telling you what commitments can be jointly held, or what one takes on board over here when one was only trying to make moves over there. This isn't just good for working out what to believe, but what one does in fact believe. Positions are indeed what is interesting, but they are opaque. We don't have access to the full contours of a philosophical view simply by having its presuppositions and concepts laid before us. Through argument we come to learn what it is we are saying. So arguments play some role in illuminating the space of positions currently open, and thereby hint at where we may travel next.
Let’s stipulate that Liam is right about all of this. (I qualify this at the very end.) One might even add that in virtue of these features arguments are also a good way to transfer, teach, or communicate views to others—something I learned from Catarina Dutilh Novaes. (Somewhat more perniciously, arguments may also be means to silence others, but that’s for another time.)
Liam’s position generates a puzzle. For it suggests that the inspiring and productive positions of the past were, in a certain sense, intrinsically opaque. So Liam admires works he fails to grasp! Knowing Liam’s modesty, he may well agree. Yet, I want to tackle this puzzle by making two suggestions.
Before I get to those, many — say inspired by Descartes and Hobbes on the scholastics; or Carnap on Heidegger; or anyone on Hegel — would bite this bullet. Only we are clear. (As it happens, I am circulating a draft paper (here) that suggests that what we mean by ‘clear’ is itself rather varied, and has itself evolved during the history of analytic philosophy.) If you adopt this position, the past is a strange, foreign land and at best we can be mere disaster tourists or spiritual voyagers. (Not just the past, also philosophical cultures that don’t play by our rules.) But these positions cannot really be genuinely understood.
Be that as it may, first, as implied in my discussion of Alan Nelson at the top, one may also understand systematicity as providing a sort of understanding by the way and manner things (say explanatory principles) are related, and the way they interact. <If you like your Kant, mumble ‘architectonic’ here.> I don’t mean to suggest argument is irrelevant in systematic thought; but downstream entailments may be more significant. These entailments are not necessarily made visible through argument, but through place in the system. In fact, systematic philosophers sometimes note a drawback of relying on argument; as Hume notes, arguments are also fragile, because a weak link or step in the deduction may undermine the whole edifice.
Second, what counts as an argument or argument pattern (and rigor and clarity) has shifted over time. (That’s phenomenologically familiar if you have gotten comfortable reading medieval scholastic philosophy. Or mathematical proof from any age prior to the nineteenth century.) Almost a decade ago, Lije Millgram made this point in a talk on Austin (that he has not published yet). For me this was an ‘aha moment.’
In 2005 or so I taught a philosophy of mind class in Leiden with a syllabus of classic (analytic) papers from Turing to the 1990s. And I noticed two things: first nearly all the older papers could not stick to a single topic. Second, the arguments were really underdeveloped (and often not transparent), so that in class I often had to spent time reconstructing these (something that does not play to my strength). Now, obviously, one need not be fully transparent if there are shared background-commitments or if one knows the rules of the (sociological/disciplinary) game. Nagel, Fodor, Putnam, Armstrong, Millikan, and Dennett understood each other all too well. (Well, arguably, Millikan was not initially understood!) But my undergrads had a very hard a time. (I don’t mean to suggest these characters never offered an argument in our sense back in the day!)
In a lovely interview of Daniel Stoljar published at the Workbench, which you should all read religiously, conducted by Nathan Ballantyne, there is a remark by Stoljar that converges with my own experience:
The distinction between consideration and argument is a useful one. (I have used it above.) I wish Nathan had asked Stoljar to define a ‘consideration.’ In the context of philosophy, I think of a consideration as an elaborated reason. But, I suspect (I have never done the hard work to make this stick) that in many intellectual cultures other than our own certain sophisticated considerations would have counted as an argument. (Maybe this is self-evident to students of pragmatics and communication/rhetoric.)
Interestingly enough, if I am right, then in many cases of sophisticated consideration they carry information that point away from what we would call the purpose of the argument (reaching the conclusion in a perspicuous and transparent manner), but toward information salient to understanding or evaluating it. If you think of philosophy as a holistic (pertaining to one’s whole life) or systematic inquiry this is eminently rational way of proceeding. (Of course, sometimes considerations are more akin to throwing things at the kitchen-sink and see what sticks.)
Notice that the previous paragraph is not itself a decisive consideration to give up on our standards of argument. That would be silly. But some more self-awareness of the costs and risks of focusing on arguments would make analytic philosophy wiser.
Stoljar’s mention of Armstrong and Liam’s mention of Quine (which my students used to find unreadable), and Hanno Sauer of everyone suggest that there has been a dramatic shift in philosophical presentation even in my own lifetime. I suspect the full story on that has to await analysis of journals and the outsized influence of graduate education at some places (like Princeton, MIT, ANU etc.). I hope some historian of philosophy gets to work on it!
I could stop here, but as readers of Stoljar’s very clear book Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism (and my very regular readers) know Stoljar’s appeal to “a three-premise argument from which some conclusion was supposed to follow” is not ad hoc. He thinks that argument (pattern) conceived in this way also provides a clue to understanding the nature of progress. To simplify: if we have such an argument with plausible premises and an entirely unpalatable seeming conclusion (which we may reformulate as a seeming paradox or a trilemma), we progress when and only when we as a community learn either why one of the premises is flawed or why we have to swallow the conclusion. Then we move on.
In my work on synthetic philosophy (here), I have used Stoljar’s book in constructive fashion. But regular readers know I dislike the soft-Kuhnian framework of progress and revolution as applied to philosophy. (Simple version: it incentivizes firmly nudging us into consensus, and it makes us have an instrumental attitude toward our own history.) This is not just a matter of taste: Stoljar earnestly thinks Hume’s problem of induction has been solved; I grimly think it has been wished away to create the illusion of progress. [I may have blogged about this already, but can’t find it.]) And again, if you think Bayesianism is truly the only game in town, you may lack resources when the environment you operate in has suddenly shifted dramatically.
To close, and to return to Liam’s post one more time. At one point he writes (I have quoted it above), “We don't have access to the full contours of a philosophical view simply by having its presuppositions and concepts laid before us.” This is surely correct. (Perhaps, if the stories are to believed, David Lewis is an exception.) Liam then adds, “Through argument we come to learn what it is we are saying.” And the implicature is that argument is the necessary (and perhaps) sufficient cement here.
But I don’t think that’s right. If we look at the long list of exemplars he uses to illustrate his piece, many of them are master story-tellers or excellent at creating imagery, thought experiments, and even myths. Of course, as is familiar by now — think of Dotson’s famous piece — or Lisa Shapiro’s essay, itself a major contribution to the contextual revolution —, in our philosophical culture these are either ‘not-philosophy’ or barely qualify as philosophy. If we have a such restrictive understanding of argument and of argument as constituting excellent philosophy, this and the ungrounded patters of exclusion they generate are unavoidable; as are the endless cycle of Kuhn losses we must suffer.
Arguments are about persuasion, no less in professional philosophy than in any other discipline. Convincing others that some claim is true or not true. Taking a side in a conceptual dispute, hoping to prevail, or at least sign on to the right side of history. Something like that.
It seems odd to me that denizens of academic philosophy gloss over, if not outright ignore, that ritualized systems of argumentation have their origins in the operation of courts, in the actual practice of the law. (I'm not an attorney, by the way.)
Formal rules of pleading, citation of authority, standards of evidence, elevation of learned jurists. Have you noticed the robes of office for judges worldwide look suspiciously like the robes worn by professors and those graduating from university studies? Guild concerns aside, philosophy and law have overlapped as long as human societies have existed:
http://www.barcouncilofindia.org/about/about-the-legal-profession/legal-education-in-the-united-kingdom/
// India has a recorded legal history starting from the Vedic ages and some sort of civil law system may have been in place during the Bronze Age and the Indus Valley civilization. Law as a matter of religious prescriptions and philosophical discourse has an illustrious history in India. Emanating from the Vedas, the Upanishads and other religious texts, it was a fertile field enriched by practitioners from different Hindu philosophical schools and later by Jains and Buddhists. //
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If philosophy involves reasoning about 'how best to live', this is operationalized in the design and implementation of laws. Both statements and actions that deviate from community standards of conduct, embodied in the laws of the community, are subject to standards of justice, in the 'justice system'. But what is justice? What constitutes sound evidence? How do we say whether testimony is true of false? The law, the law, the law. [Insert preferred lawyer joke here.] But also, this is the stuff professional philosophers have claimed as their turf since time immemorial. (There was this fella, Socrates, who made philosophical arguments in a court of law. He was served a Hemlock Margarita for his efforts. By order of the court.)
Right now, today, across the US and around the world, individuals are awaiting execution because of morally suspect laws, faulty evidence, and specious arguments. Rights are under continuous attack. The very design, operation and purpose of systems of justice are the subject of violent dispute, and vicious argumentation.
These are things that should concern us all, including professional philosophers.
Th study and practice of argumentation matters. A lot.
At least if the focus of such study bears some relation to the real world, the lives of real people.
So maybe a little less abstruse and esoteric abstraction is in order. A little less inside baseball kibbitzing and club membership posturing.