Philosophy Outside-In: A Critique of Academic Reason

257 Pages·2013·0.85 MB·English

by  Christopher Norris

PhilosoPhy
outside-in
A Critique of
ACAdemiC reAson
Christopher Norris
Philosophy Outside-In
A Critique of Academic Reason
Christopher Norris
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© Christopher Norris, 2013
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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Typeset in 11/13 Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 8455 7 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 8456 4 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 8457 1 (epub)
The right of Christopher Norris
to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 How Not to Defeat Scepticism: Why Anti-realism Won’t
Do the Trick 33
2 Great Philosophy: Discovery, Invention and the Uses of
Error 61
3 Under Which King, Bezonian? Experimental Philosophy
versus Thought Experiment 95
4 Outside the Box: On the ‘Extended Mind’ Hypothesis 124
5 Inaesthetics and Transitory Ontology: The Case of
Political Song 150
6 Speculative Realism: An Interim Report 181
7 Provoking Philosophy: Shakespeare, Johnson,
Wittgenstein, Derrida 205
Index 250
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For Shelley Campbell
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Introduction
I
This book is aimed squarely against the kinds of ultra-specialist
interest or ultra-professionalised narrowing of focus that have been
such a prominent and – to my mind – such a damaging feature of
much recent philosophical work. It seems to have come about largely
through the idea that philosophy could best lay claim to academic
respectability by pushing as far as possible in its emulation of the
physical sciences, or determining to tackle only those well-defi ned
technical problems that were sure to have some likewise well-defi ned
technical answer. Such was Thomas Kuhn’s description of how
‘normal science’ typically carried on during those periods of relative
calm between great ‘revolutionary’ shake-ups when it was business as
normal for most working scientists since any paradigm- threatening
obstacle – any discrepant data or empirical anomaly – could always
be put down to some observational error, imperfection in the measur-
ing apparatus or questionable choice of auxiliary hypotheses. I don’t
at all wish to go along with the popular misreading of Kuhn which
ignores his stress on the comparative rarity of full-scale scientifi c
revolutions and fi nds little or nothing of interest in the notion of
science as making progress through a placidly constructive engage-
ment with manageable problems. Still I would venture to say that the
discourse of present-day academic philosophy, at least in the analytic
mainstream, is ‘normal’ to the point of intellectual stagnation and
that this has chiefl y to do with the effect of an overly specialised
professional culture and an over-concentration on issues that lend
themselves to quasi-scientifi c formulation.
So one central aim is to recommend a more Aristotelian approach
to philosophy, or the idea that philosophers shouldn’t be so keen to
advertise themselves as philosophers of or experts in some closely
specifi ed subject domain. It may be replied, and justifi ably enough,
that we nowadays know a lot more than Aristotle knew about all
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2 Philosophy Outside-In
those multifarious topics (the natural sciences included) that he took
as falling within his investigative purview. Philosophers had much
better pick their specialism with an eye to current trends and should
defi nitely not – on pain of ignorance or amateurism – lay claim to
anything remotely like an Aristotelian breadth of interests. On this
view philosophy started out as a universal discourse of (purported)
knowledge and truth but was thereafter subject to a long history of
rifts, separations or independence-movements whereby its erstwhile
component disciplines achieved intellectual maturity and, along with
it, a new-found sense of autonomy. Probably the last one to go was
psychology, at least to the extent that empirically minded psycholo-
gists increasingly defi ned their discipline so as to exclude all reference
to epistemology or philosophy of mind, while philosophers were just
as keen to reciprocate by disavowing any taint of vulgar ‘psycholo-
gism’.1 At any rate there is general agreement that the exponential
growth of human knowledge across so many fi elds of enquiry has
produced a situation in which, for better or worse, it is no longer pos-
sible for anyone to claim expertise – or even a decent level of compe-
tence – in more than one such specialist corner of one such specialist
fi eld. This applies all the more in the case of philosophy since here,
so the argument goes, there is a standing temptation for some prac-
titioners (in particular philosophers of science) to issue large claims
on the basis of a knowledge that is often simply not up to the mark
in terms of the latest research. After all, if scientists themselves have
learned to respect these disciplinary markers – even as regards areas
of closely convergent interest such as molecular biology, organic
chemistry and genetics – then surely philosophers will be best advised
not to tread on such specialist turf. Or again, they should have the
proper modesty to do so only under expert guidance and without any
thought – heaven forefend! – of helping scientists to a better under-
standing of conceptual problems on their own turf.
As I have said, my book sets out to challenge that view of things
and put the case for thinking of philosophy as a discipline of thought
that can and should have useful things to say across a great range
of topics by way of addressing and (on occasion) resolving just such
problems. This connects with my second purpose which is basically
to offer a sequence of essays in philosophy that are also essays on
diverse topics which, for various mainly non-professional reasons,
have come to exert a special interest or fascination. In fact the two
purposes are really one and the same since it is a part of my argument
here that the problem of over-specialisation, or the cult of misplaced
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Introduction 3
expertise, has typically gone along with a depersonalised approach to
philosophy where assured command of ‘the literature’ associated with
some given topic has taken the place of anything resembling a per-
sonal and deeply felt involvement with it. This is everywhere appar-
ent in the choices of topic (narrowly prescribed), the tone of address
(briskly effi cient), the presumed readership or audience (a small
peer-group of like-minded specialists) and above all the manifest aim
(to move things forward by just so much as to make one’s distinctive
mark but not so much as to run the risk of offending one’s colleagues
or the academic community at large). That tendency is reinforced by
the periodic scourge of a research assessment exercise that encour-
ages savvy types to focus their efforts on short-term, ‘manageable’
projects of a suitably conformist, professionally sanctioned and often
intellectually unambitious kind. Moreover, it maintains an incentive
structure whereby those who have most thoroughly internalised such
habits of thought are then strongly placed, as subject panellists, to
ensure its effective passing on to the rising generation.
This is, to the say the least, a depressing scene and one that belies
the constant stress on ‘research’ in an academic culture where any
genuinely innovative work – any that raises a signifi cant challenge to
communal norms of belief, not to mention established reputations –
amounts to the equivalent of letting the side down (in this case one’s
departmental colleagues) in a crucial qualifying match. Meanwhile
the philosopher-specialists are apt to play themselves off the fi eld,
as did the logical positivists and logical empiricists before them, by
imitating science in a different fi eld of endeavour and thus inevita-
bly lagging behind by any measure of substantive (as distinct from
merely notional or intra-peer-group) contribution to knowledge.
This is nowhere plainer to see than in the current exchange of hostili-
ties – my topic in Chapter 3 – between ‘experimental philosophers’
who want to put things on a third-person empirical or observational
basis and thus eschew all appeals to apodictic or fi rst-person epis-
temic warrant and their opponents, the unreformed thought experi-
mentalists, who cleave to precisely those traditional (and, they would
say, philosophically indispensable) modes of enquiry. It also takes the
form of that perceived imperative, among philosophers of an ana-
lytic bent, to hitch their professional-academic wagons to the star of
what counts (again in their own specialist community) as a properly
scientifi c method. Just as the positivists mortgaged their enterprise to
the formal sciences on the one hand and the physical sciences on the
other – through their programmatic refusal to recognise as truth-apt
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4 Philosophy Outside-In
any statements other than logical tautologies or empirical observa-
tions – so philosophers in the present-day ‘core’ disciplines strive to
come up with results that would invoke either rational self-evidence
or else some kind of natural-scientifi c warrant. Hence the unfortu-
nate impression often given by exercises in, for example, philosophy
of mind or philosophy of perception that these are somehow hoping
to bootstrap their way by sheer analytical acuity to discoveries of
the sort more typically (and aptly) claimed by disciplines like neuro-
physiology or cognitive science. Hence also, more disturbingly, the
tendency among analytic philosophers in various specialist fi elds to
adopt a pseudo- or (somewhat less unkindly) a quasi-scientifi c rheto-
ric in order to dismiss any line of argument that fails or on principle
refuses to comply with currently prevailing philosophical modes of
thought.
This practice has been the stock-in-trade of analytic philosophers
since the heyday of logical positivism when its exponents delighted
in facile demolition-jobs on sundry ‘continental’ (i.e. typecast wild-
and-woolly-minded) philosophers and when standards for this kind
of knock-down rejoinder were, if anything, even less demanding
than today. Still there is a need to muster some resistance when
received ideas – or existing institutional mechanisms for preserving
them – are so heavily weighted toward the maintenance of a profes-
sional (rather than critical-philosophical) status quo that effectively
excludes or massively discounts anything too much out of kilter
with its own in-house norms of reputable discourse. The effect
of this is to render philosophy peculiarly impotent or tongue-tied
against the imputation of those, like Stephen Hawking in a recent
polemic, who proclaim its demise or chronic obsolescence in the
face of giddying scientifi c (or techno-scientifi c) progress. Hawking
fl uttered the academic dovecotes by writing – and repeating to an
eager company of interviewers and journalists – his opinion that
philosophy as practised nowadays was a waste of time and philoso-
phers a waste of space.2 More precisely, he wrote that philosophy
was ‘dead’ since it hadn’t kept up with the latest developments in
science, especially theoretical physics. In earlier times – Hawking
conceded – philosophers not only tried to keep up but sometimes
made real scientifi c contributions of their own. However, they were
now, in so far as they had any infl uence at all, just an obstacle to
progress through their endless going on about the same old issues
of truth, knowledge, inductive warrant and so forth. Had they just
paid a bit more attention to the scientifi c literature they would have
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Introduction 5
gathered that these were no longer live issues for anyone remotely
au fait with the latest thinking. Then their options would be either
to shut up shop and cease the charade called ‘philosophy of science’
or else carry on and invite further ridicule for their head-in-sand
attitude.
Predictably enough, the journalists went off to fi nd themselves a
media-friendly philosopher – not hard to do nowadays – who would
argue the opposite case in a suitably vigorous way. On the whole
the responses, or those that I came across, seemed overly anxious
to strike a conciliatory note, or to grant Hawking’s thesis some
measure of truth as judged by the standards of the natural-scientifi c
community while tactfully dissenting with regard to philosophy
and the human sciences. I think the case needs stating more fi rmly
and, perhaps, less tactfully since otherwise it looks like a forced
retreat to cover internal disarray. Besides, there is good reason to
mount a much sturdier defence on principled grounds. These have
to do with the scientists’ need to philosophise and their proneness
to philosophise badly or commit certain avoidable errors if they
don’t take at least some passing interest in what philosophers have
to say. Hawking had probably been talking to the wrong philoso-
phers, or picked up some wrong ideas about the kinds of discussion
that currently go on in philosophy of science. His lofty dismissal of
that whole enterprise as a useless, scientifi cally irrelevant pseudo-
discipline fails to reckon with several important facts about the way
that science has typically been practised since its early-modern (sev-
enteenth-century) point of departure and, even more, in the wake of
post-1900 developments such as quantum mechanics and space-time
relativity.
First is the fact that it has always included a large philosophical
component, whether at the level of basic presuppositions concerning
evidence, causality, theory-construction, valid inference, hypothesis-
testing and so forth, or at the speculative stage where scientists
ignore the guidance offered by well-informed philosophers only at
risk of falling into various beguiling fallacies or fi ctions. Such were
those ‘idols of the theatre’ that Bacon warned against in his New
Organon of 1620, and such – albeit in a very different philosophic
guise – those delusive ideas that, according to Kant, were apt to
lead us astray from the path of secure investigation or truth-seeking
enquiry. This was sure to happen, he warned, if the exercise of pure
(speculative) reason concerning questions outside and beyond the
empirical domain were mistakenly supposed to deliver the kind
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