My last blog posts calling for a scientific turn in philosophy and the abandonment of aprioristic philosophy largely resulted in three responses. There were philosophers, who agreed, of course, but the main response was either:
- This isn’t even a debate. Philosophy is already scientific.
- Or philosophy should not be scientific.
The philosopher Liam Kofi Bright, who I previously responded to in an earlier essay, where I argued that naturalistic philosophy can provide us with the optimistic answer to his pessimism about traditional analytic philosophy, see here, offered an interesting assessment:
Is this debate over meta-philosophy really over?
No doubt, among philosophers of science, this debate may seem largely obsolete (it is not — see here). And Bright’s department, the LSE Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, is one of the most naturalistic ones in existence. Indeed, their very motto calls for the continuity betwen philosophy and science:
Because of that mission I applied and received an offer to pursue a PhD at the LSE, but I decided to go to Sydney where Paul Griffiths and Peter Godfrey-Smith as radical naturalists offered what I saw as the best place to write a thesis in naturalist biological philosophy, with a lab in a biomedical research centre. Nevertheless, I spend part of my PhD as a visiting PhD student at the LSE, so I’m not surprised that Bright doesn’t find this debate even arise in the circles he is in. It’s one of the (top 5?) most naturalistic philosophy departments in the world.
But, of course, many other philosophers vehemently opposed my call for scientific philosophy, so the debate doesn’t seem over quite yet. In part, the confusion may come down to how one conceptualizes naturalism.
Naturalism, the view that science and philosophy should be continous with each other, is sometimes said to have become the default view among analytic philosophers. Yet, that is far from true.
In the 2020 philpeople survey professional philosophers were asked about their metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?
Unfortunately, the label of naturalism has become more and more deflated over the years. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on naturalism begins by stating that: “The term “naturalism” has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy.” The naturalist philosopher Owen Flanagen traced dozens of alternative uses.
The weakest level in which one can be a naturalist as a philosopher is to insist that one’s philosophical views are not logically inconsistent with science. But that is not sufficient, for those, like myself, who consider themselves radical naturalists. Or alternatively genuine naturalists. For the radical naturalists, philosophy must be radically continuous with the sciences, become one with them, much like philosophy was once the term we used for both science and philosophy, before they’ve become culturally, institutionally, and conceptually separated. Some radical naturalists have claimed the label of scientism, once a pejorative, for themselves to avoid this linguistic confusion. And the debate over how science may supplant or replace philosophy is alive and well. Only this month, there was a big discussion on DailyNous (the news platform for philosophers) over whether experimental philosophy really counts as philosophy (see here). The philosopher Moti Mizrahi beautifully described this lively debate as a battle for the “soul of philosophy.”1 And philosophers keep writing books on the subject:
Evidently this debate on the soul of philosophy is far from over. For logical consistency is an incredibly weak criterion. An ingenious philosopher can make almost any set of ideas compatible. Indeed, logical consistency may not be the non plus ultra it is usually taken for.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a great deal of writing about radically naturalistic meta-philosophy out there that I find useful. One of my philosophical main influences, the late Dan Dennett, barely even bothered to write about his meta-philosophy. Luckily, this prompted Don Ross, Andrew Brook, and David L. Thompson to release a volume dedicated to trying to reconstruct it in Dennett’s Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment.
Almost all critics of Dennett’s work I’ve encountered over the years did not understand his naturalistic meta-philosophy, which was radically unlike their own. Thankfully, Don Ross offered an excellent explanation for Dennett’s resistance to aprioristic philosophy. He writes:
A philosophical thesis must mainly appeal to the virtue of consistency among beliefs we are already disposed to hold on the basis of experience. Most such beliefs have a property that must be grounds for suspicion to a radical naturalist such as Dennett: They will have been entertained for long enough (at least by somebody) to have grown comfortable. This implies both that they will have settled into our belief corpus through being domesticated by our intuitions, and that they will have had some influence on that corpus through the process of making themselves at home.
This fact about our psychology is rarely acknowledged by analytic philosophers. The very goal of analytic philosophy to strive for logical consistency invites the laundering of bad ideas we’ve culturally inherited:
As memes, they are both parasitic residents of minds and part-authors of those very minds. […] A philosophical system that tries to resolve inconsistencies among them will thus tend to conceptual conservatism. One of the best devices for removing local threats of inconsistency is to define concepts in such a way that their boundaries do not cross; and this, of course, is precisely the sort of move that calls forth Dennett’s skeptical tactics.
Here it’s worth recalling the founder of the LSE Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method: Karl Popper. While his falsificationist philosophy of science is largely abandoned today, its spirit remains alive and well among scientists. Scientists at least nominally purport to seek ambitious hypotheses and theories with a broader scope than previous ones. The more predictions your theory makes, the easier it will be to find evidence to the contrary. Analytic philosophy, however, due to its focus on logical consistency, frequently retreats not only to conceptual conservatism, trying to protect the concepts we’ve inherited rather than supplanting or updating them in light of modern scientific evidence, but also to making them immune to revision.
Psychologically, we are attracted to unfalsifiable theories. We want to protect what we already believe. It’s what led some (not all) Marxists to reconstruct Marxism in a way that turned it from a scientific theory into an unfalsifiable one. But that’s not actually a virtue. It’s a flaw that renders such theories less rather than more useful. It’s also what happened with theists who retreated from making any falsifiable predictions about a God who is part of the natural world to a concept of God that no evidence could possibly undermine. It’s a retreat towards conceptual conservativism, for the sake of protecting our inherited concepts. As Ross notes:
[Dennett] is a pragmatist about concepts (and here Quine’s influence shows itself at its most abstract level). Regimented concepts are useful precisely to the extent that they help us to investigate the nature of real processes that operate as they do independently of our conceptualizations […]. It is when he finds conceptual conservatism interfering with our ability to dissolve mysteries that Dennett reaches for his intuition pumps.
Philosophers, today, have also tried to preserve “philosophy” by conceptually divorcing it from science. Many analytic philosophers think of philosophy as being a purely conceptual enterprise, whereas science is exclusively concerned with empirical matters, but that’s a naive distinction, motivated by the vain hope to protect the status of philosophy with the strike of a pen. It fails to capture the richness of either science nor philosophy. It’s why experimental philosophers, who study the actual intuitions of people, are frequently attacked for not being philosophers. If you open up the conceptual boundary of philosophy, roughen its edges so to speak, it becomes assailable by science. Scientific methods could replace philosophical ones. Scientists could even replace philosophers. But the reverse is also true. Philosophers could find their homes in science departments, actively aiding the study of reality.
Thus, ultimately the genuine naturalists aims for a worldview that is maximally coherent. Not by artificially insultating pre-existing concepts into frictionless angels dancing on the pins of needles, but by giving them the rough skin and edges that reflect actual nature, allowing them to interlock with each other and allow for continual improvement. It is here that we can find the tension between traditional analytic philosophy, with the primary goal of logical consistency, and naturalist philosophy, with a primary goal of coherence.
If philosophers want to build the maximally coherent philosophical picture of the world and place within it, rather than just a logically consistent one (of which there are infinite!), they must become radical naturalists. There is no place for idle wheels. Our intuitions and common sense may be utterly ground to dust by the wheels of natural philosophy. If you try to protect them by placing them outside, no longer interlocking with any other wheels, you are no longer engaged in philosophy at all.
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Mizrahi, Moti. 2019. “The Scientism Debate: A Battle for the Soul of Philosophy?” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8 (9): 1-13. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-4n3.