On The End of History and the Displacement of Logic

Because we understand ourselves as forward-looking problem-solvers, and recognize with the sciences that through inevitable progress today's ruling views will seem quaint when the research frontier has shifted (as it will), analytic philosophers have no major investment in curating themselves as a tradition. Analytic philosophy has a sponge-like character in assimilating doctrines and techniques from without, and, as seen from a distance, appears to reinvent itself continuously. Because it is such a moving target external critics often seem comically out of date to knowing insiders whereas internal critics often end up being domesticated by subsequent generations (without, alas, getting credit for it). That it is a tradition is the effect of intellectual and sociological path dependencies that express themselves in certain aesthetic (clarity, transparency, rigor, etc.) and epistemic values, and the existence of bits of post Frege-Russell-Whitehead logic as a kind of (often tacit) lingua franca long after developments within logic stopped being a source of major disciplinary excitement or much utility elsewhere. 

The move from a logic requirement to a 'formal methods' one in Yale University's graduate curriculum [see here at Dailynous; here at Leitterreports] tracks and, as it will be copied, shapes a much larger set of shifts in professional philosophy. In what follows, I, first, say something about how this constitutes the discipline going forward, and, second, I close -- as the previous paragraph hints -- at what predictably will be lost.

The shift to 'formal methods' is often articulated in (broadly consequentialist) terms of what is useful to PhD students in their actual research or employment possibilities. It's anodyne to suggest that this actual work is interdisciplinary (with STEM/Social Sciency disciplines) in character in some sense. 

First, what it (really) signals is the shift toward three different projects (at a certain level of abstraction): (i) the projects that I have called 'synthetic philosophy' which, while using a particular technical/formal model/theory, brings together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both); (ii) the projects one can subsume under 'conceptual explorative research,' which amounts to developing concepts and techniques (including formal) that either are generative of scientific or social projects or help explain/understand perceived foundational problems in them; (iii) the continuous working out of inherited-as-philosophy puzzles. Presumably all three of these projects will involve collaboration with AI as coupled (human/machine/network) systems. With new base-lines, progress is possible. To be sure, the practice of wisdom does not require academic philosophy.

These three projects are at this level of generality not always at tension with each other, and because the fruits can be felt in disciplines outside of philosophy are not always zero-sum (job-wise). But we should expect near continuous hybridization and splitting and reconfiguration among such projects until a new political hegemon reconfigures higher education in the service of new ideals. (I am hinting at the fickleness of student-demand or donors as instruments of permanently shaping the discipline.) What I am, thus, stipulating -- perhaps rashly -- is that we should not expect hegemonic intellectual schools to re-emerge except temporarily. 

At this point one may object that 'argument' is missing in the previous paragraph. Perhaps, it will remain as constitutive element of philosophy. I am pretty skeptical about this possibility once formal logic is displaced from the intrinsic DNA of our professional formation. Yes, there are statistical arguments, but the skill one acquires is not argumentative, but something distinct. (What that is may be beyond my expertise, but I am inclined to say it is a skill at spotting differences that make a difference.) To be sure, I am a pluralist about the nature of 'argument' so it may be safer to predict that what will count as a paradigmatic argument will shift.

Now, before I mention some of the predictable 'losses' that follow from the shift under way, I want to prevent the misinterpretation that I somehow mourn the end of analytic philosophy (in the sense described by Liam Kofi Bright). I see nothing wrong in the fact that the half dozen departments (and the ones that mimic them) that train the influential PhDs of the next generation do not want to defend the intellectual path that got them there. The end of the unfolding history of analytic philosophy turns out to be a historical whimper. So I am using 'loss' analogously to or in the sense of 'Kuhn-loss'--the systematic forgetting of certain results and insights.

Second, it's predictable, for example, that as logic disappears as a (tacit) lingua franca much of the history of analytic philosophy will seem like strange territory and unmotivated to future students, and will become near unreadable. All kinds of moves that seemed obvious or intelligible -- think of the uses of regimentation, or Tarski's account of truth, bound variables, etc. -- will stop being self-evident. I had a glimpse of this when I read Quine's Word and Object a decade ago with Dutch undergraduates who were simply bewildered. 

In addition, I suspect that lacking such a tacit lingua franca, the three kinds of projects I mentioned will become increasingly at least partially estranged from each other and will, thereby, reflect the underlying social pluralism of our societies. That is compatible with each sharing in structural commonalities (including some that may well turn out to be politically or socially problematic). Unfortunately, that will imply that metrics and measures that are orthogonal to (intrinsic) philosophical worth, if there is such a thing, will be increasingly used for purposes of evaluation and advancement.