Philosophy Without Arguments—Part I

Think Before You Think

Note from the Editor

Today’s post is the first part of a three-part article, which, among other things, introduces, and offers a synoptic view of, a few of the many key scientific breakthroughs and philosophical ideas on which the new epistemology and our minimalist approach to change—discussed throughout all issues of Change—are grounded.

In this first part, after critiquing how most academic philosophers were far too busy arguing with one another to notice the revolution in ideas taking place all around them, we introduce this still-largely-neglected, 20th-Century epistemological and scientific revolution. Along the way, we briefly survey the wide range of often surprising, interdisciplinary scientific investigations in which it was forged by a remarkable community of marquee names in science.

When Interchange Research began its scientific quest half a century ago to unlock the secrets of systematically catalyzing rapid, across-the-board transformation in large systems overnight, as we do today in the corporate C-suite, that quest was inspired by and built upon the body of work we briefly introduce here. Despite the title, these three posts will likely hold less appeal for us academic philosophers than for the rest of us, outside philosophy and indeed outside the academy, who wonder what on earth all those well-trained intellects are wasting time and energy arguing fruitlessly about.

—The Editors

---

Philosophy Without Arguments—Part I

Think Before You Think¹

“It ain't what a man don't know that makes him a fool;
it's the things he does know, that ain't so.”
— ‘Josh Billings’ (Henry Wheeler Shaw) 

A number of things have been bugging me about contemporary philosophy for some time—specifically, about philosophy’s place in the wider intellectual scene, and more to the point, the wider intellectual scene’s place in philosophy, or lack of it . . . and what we can all do about it. 

And when I say “bugging me,” I mean that these issues have been bugging me the way I might be bugged, not if an air conditioner started making deafening loud bangs when I’m sitting within earshot, but if an airplane did that when I’m sitting on it at 39,000 feet. 

In the Philosophy Department at Fordham University, where I first presented these thoughts a few years back in an invited lecture, there had been a rather older and more enduring tradition than at my own university, Oxford, of purposefully seeking agreement in philosophy, in preference to purposefully prolonging disagreements. So, to my delight and relief—and what a joy it was!—I was in many ways preaching to the choir. 

However, as we’ll see, it was actually an influential Oxford man who first proposed such a change of direction for philosophy over seven decades ago—sadly, without much take-up, or at least the take-up was not destined to last for long.

Philosophy is Serious Business

Whether philosophy should be a cooperative endeavour or a competitive one is not a trivial matter, unless philosophy itself is judged a trivial matter; and I, for one, believe philosophy is serious business, and certainly not at all—let alone “merely”—a sport. For the stakes are too high—or they once were, . . . and can be again, but only if we dare. 

I said philosophy is serious business, but what is the business of philosophy?  Well, I think you’ll agree that whatever else it may be, “philosophy is at least the study of the presuppositions of, and apparent contradictions in, our current ways of thinking.” 

The author of this rather Collingwoodian definition was the late great Oxford philosopher Justin Gosling, my mentor in philosophy for over half a century and whose memorial service, sadly, is this coming Tuesday. It is to his memory that this three-part article is dedicated.

Justin was always at pains to point out that the “at least” in his definition is important. We can, for starters, study the presuppositions of, and apparent contradictions in past ways of thinking, or proposed new ways of thinking about things. But in any event, on his definition, and for this purpose, clearly, philosophy requires not only methods but also content, and not merely content of philosophy’s own making. 

Like many philosophers, professional and amateur alike, I came to the study of philosophy not out of any fascination with the arcane, technical, often pseudoscientific matters that increasingly fill our drearier philosophy journals, but more in the spirit of that burning desire to which Goethe² famously gave these words: 

“That I may detect the inmost force
Which binds the world and guides its course;
Its germs, productive powers explore,
And rummage in empty words no more!”

Of course, here no single academic department has a monopoly on understanding the nature of reality—and it is most certainly not the exclusive preserve of philosophy departments, nor, for that matter, the preserve of any or all science departments either.

Philosophy and the Sciences

Those armed with Goethe’s burning desire who then chose “the high road” of philosophy over “the low road” of science may have personally never relished the scientist’s path, of coming to know more and more about less and less until in the end you know everything about nothing; but neither were they quite prepared for the philosopher’s path—of coming to know less and less about more and more until in the end you know nothing about everything.³ 

From the get-go, I chose to beat a path down both roads, myself, working in parallel in the sciences as well as in philosophy, and found that there was no shortage of exciting content out there to think about philosophically, and indeed that the most interesting content invariably came from outside philosophy. 

Yet “outside” the temple of philosophy, in the profane empirical world, was also where a philosopher’s skills turned out to be of greatest use—and less as a handmaiden to science, or handyman, but more as a partner in crime, particularly at the frontiers where the questions were always newer than the answers. 

But as always in philosophy, at least on my own tentative, career-long reading of the history of ideas, and as we learn from Andrew Lang’s immortal song⁴ to which I referred above, the one taking the low road will always get there “before ye”— that is, the new thinking tends to first make its appearance in science, or again, elsewhere in the humanities, or in law, and indeed perhaps most often in the fine arts, before it later gets taken up, recycled, refined, and further developed in philosophy. 

The voice of philosophy still needs to be heard amongst the other voices in the intellectual conversation of mankind, rather than philosophers just talking to, and writing for, other philosophers in a recondite language unintelligible to the uninitiated, and sometimes to the initiated too (and even, one suspects at times, unintelligible even to the writers themselves). 

The old joke has it that ‘philosophy is the systematic abuse of a terminology specially invented for that purpose’.  Sadly, too often these days, that jocular definition fits all too well. 

We may glibly dismiss mediaeval philosophers for disputing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but if you look at the philosophy journals over the past two or three decades (particularly, but by no means only, in my own, analytic philosophical tradition) you’ll see the Scholastics had nothing on us!  And at least they could remember, if asked, why the points in dispute might matter to anyone outside the Academy. 

Having been teaching philosophy for some decades, including the past two decades as an Oxford philosophy don, I have found that amongst virtually all my students who were drawn to philosophy, it was not because they relished the chance to compete and score points in byzantine technical games of sterile logic-chopping that no one can ever win. (The one notable exception was one brilliant young man who did, and unsurprisingly he became a philosophy professor.) 

Rather, most were drawn to philosophy out of a genuine desire to inquire after truth, seeking answers to the very real and live questions that begin where the answers proffered by science and other means of inquiry leave off.  It was the same for me when I set out in the field, and why I needed to stay in philosophy while still carrying on my principal research in the sciences.

Now my scientific colleagues, compared to my philosophy colleagues, seemed far more interested in ultimately reaching agreement than in winning at disagreements. Well, you may wonder, what is the fun in that?  If that’s what you’re thinking, you’ve spent too much time in contemporary philosophy.  You should get out more!  Nor, if that’s the case, will you like what I have to say in this short series of Substack articles here in Change. 

For my metaphilosophical admonition will be that philosophers have got better things to do than arguing with each other and, if we aren’t careful, we’ll otherwise miss, as philosophers, a window of opportunity to play our part in changing the world that only opens up once every few centuries at the very most—some would say, only once every 2500 years.

Studied Ignorance

In 1776, the year the American colonies declared their independence, the philosopher-scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg made his own declaration of independence when he wrote,

“I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.”⁵ 

Lichtenberg’s remark sums up one of the main thrusts of my discussion here. For I will be making a plea for ignorance, not the kind so beloved of the skeptic, but the kind characteristic of the cad—a plea to completely ignore, rudely yet (I hope) respectfully, those in philosophy with whom we find ourselves in fundamental disagreement, along with a plea to pursue agreement rather than disagreement in all our philosophical pursuits, where “agreement” most emphatically does not mean “agreement with me.” 

Don’t get me wrong:  for me, philosophy is about three things—“the arguments, the arguments, the arguments”—though I mean this in the sense not merely of establishing the formal validity of arguments (a comparatively trivial pursuit, which on its own never buys us anything at all outside the Logic classroom), but in the more full-blooded sense of establishing the soundness of substantive argumentation in context. 

This is the kind of philosophical argumentation I teach at Oxford. It’s not about debating skills and how to out-argue your philosophical opponent. It’s about establishing what is and what is not objectively the case. It’s about nothing less than probing the nature of reality itself.

Again, philosophical methods, like scientific methods, form only a very small part, albeit a vital part, of the world's broader intellectual armamentarium for establishing the reasonableness of substantive conclusions about the nature of reality, where there is no false opposition to be made between logic and rhetoric, or between the empirical and the conceptual. 

However, while the lifeblood of philosophy may well be ‘argument’ in the sense of argumentation intended to establish the reasonableness or otherwise of conclusions reached, ensuring that the arguments proffered have the body, force and above all the contextual salience required to carry conviction, at the same time I believe the progress of philosophy is only hindered by arguments in the sense of disputation, at least outside the classroom. 

Disputation is a great way to learn the philosopher’s craft, perhaps the only way, and undeniably it is essential drill for the tyro. But while the drills learned during military training will hopefully stand the soldiers in good stead in a combat situation, they’re not expected to keep running through their drills on the battlefield.

Missing Out:  Where the Action Was All Along

Sometimes, like in the cartoons and slapstick silent movies, we’re so busy scrapping with one another that we don’t notice the far more significant events taking place right around us. That is precisely what has happened to philosophy in our time. It was as if philosophers had been so busy arguing, as they have for centuries, over how they knew the sun would rise in the east again tomorrow, that they hadn’t noticed it had been rising in the west every day for the past 80 years. 

For an unfinished revolution in ideas—one you have probably never heard of—was taking place all around them, and was justly declared by the redoubtable Gregory Bateson in 1966 to be “the biggest bite out of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that mankind has taken in the last 2000 years,” but, he added ruefully, doubtless thinking of the academic philosophers, “most such bites out of the apple have proved to be rather indigestible.”⁶  His words proved prophetic.

While most philosophers were dutifully acting as unquestioning spokesmen for superannuated versions of the older sciences, or haggling with one another over comparatively parochial, recondite matters thrown up by a 400-year old view of the world, or continuing timeworn debates over the so-called Big Questions, they were too busy to notice the far bigger questions that meanwhile the avant garde in the wider intellectual world were asking.

A Revolution in Ideas

And after asking those genuinely New Big Questions the intellectual avant garde were coming up with some correspondingly Big Answers and were turning the world of ideas on its head.  What’s more, they were doing so on a scale and with a scope not seen since the Early Modern period.

Although it arguably constitutes the most sweeping transformation in metaphysics and epistemology since the Greeks, and though it seeks to tear asunder the broad intellectual consensus of the last 400 years, it has largely passed academic philosophy by, . . . and for over seventy years—a serious indictment of academic philosophy! 

Heralded by the Macy Conferences in the late 1940s, the most important intellectual upheaval since the 17th Century, building on stunning scientific and philosophical breakthroughs made mainly in the Germanies in the 1920s, but also in the United States and in Britain, progressed most rapidly in the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s mainly in Britain and the United States, and has once more, here and there, started regaining a little momentum in the second decade of the 21st Century, particularly in the biological and social sciences, and in perhaps unexpected places, like the University of Tartu (founded 1632) in Estonia.

This week, let me just give you a small glimpse of the kind of “revolution in ideas” we’re talking about, and what manner of men and women the revolutionaries were, before I turn to some of the ideas themselves in next week’s post, and follow-up in considering the wider philosophical upshot of it all. For the ideas I shall adumbrate amount not merely to some programmatic, philosophical take on things, a pious hope for a new metaphysics and epistemology awaiting development, one proposal amongst many, only more radical. Far from it! 

Rather, here was a scientifically grounded philosophical worldview, exhaustively worked out in all its concrete details—in rigorous scientific theorizing and exhaustive empirical research over more than a century, with dramatic technological, practical and clinical applications across a staggering array of fields of science.

Strange Bedfellows

Beginning a few years before, during, and in the decade just following the Second World War, some of the greatest thinkers of the 20th Century—a host of more-or-less maverick but highly distinguished scientists working across countless disciplines—were thrown together in the course of their work on various, apparently unrelated and usually practical problems, many or perhaps most of these initially in war work, and often far from their day jobs. 

This was work carried out, field by field of research, over—I shudder to think how many—perhaps some hundreds of thousands of man-years or more of tireless work by first-rate scientific investigators.⁷

Some hundreds of those who were most prominent in developing and promulgating the new thinking were among the 20th Century’s most distinguished names within the confines of their own disciplines, and they were to number amongst them a dazzling array of Fellows of the Royal Society and a prodigious number of Nobel Laureates and Nominees. For these were intellectual giants in an age of giants. And this work could only have been the work of giants, to be sure. 

Despite coming from wildly different scientific disciplines, they worked side-by-side in ever varying multidisciplinary groupings, labouring on the frontiers of their own fields and of Science writ large. 

Working together were the century’s most distinguished mathematicians and linguists, anthropologists and engineers, ethologists and ethnologists, physicists and physiologists, philologists and geneticists, chemists and biochemists, psychologists and zoologists, psychoanalysts and neuroscientists, anatomists and astrophysicists, quantum mechanicists and biosemioticians, mathematical logicians and ecologists, economists and computer scientists, statisticians and physicians, cognitive scientists and epidemiologists, information theorists and psychiatrists, and a bewilderingly diverse host of others. 

They published their results prolifically in the most prestigious, peer-reviewed scientific journals, now in one discipline, now in another (once one of them, who later regretted it, as we’ll see next week, invented the peer-review system), or else published their findings in Nature or in Science or in the new journals demanded by the new fields of study they were opening up.

A Cornucopia of Problems

They worked together on the most bewildering array of pure and applied scientific problems: the construction of reliable signal amplifiers from unreliable components, the chemical mediation of homeostasis, the eerie similarities in nerve-firing pattern between epileptic seizures and normal contraction in heart muscle, the mathematics of controlling antiaircraft guns, the phenomena of hypnotic trance and of psychotic hallucinations, fluid mechanics, the communicative behavior of dolphins, nervous system organization, the complex communicative significance of lighting someone’s cigarette, embryogenesis, the selection of army officers, the pseudo-mating rituals of groups of artificial turtles (each with two-neuron “brains”), the sophisticated chemotaxic navigational abilities of E. coli, the mechanics of frogs’ visual perception, psychopathology and psychotherapy, the training of guide dogs, the psychology and neurophysiology of laughter and humour, the organization of mental hospitals, communication between Down’s Syndrome children, the psychoanalytic treatment of schizophrenia, the interaction between ventriloquists and their puppets, family dynamics, the development of optical devices for the Apollo space program, the genesis of self-organizing dynamic systems, the word-salad of schizophrenics and the play of otters, along with such miscellaneous curiosities as the movement of circling-arm lawn sprinklers, as well as more central concerns such as the micro-dynamics of sub-cellular and inter-cellular processes and of human interaction-in-context—just to pick a handful of examples, more-or-less at random, of the divers problems on which they worked seamlessly together in multidisciplinary teams to make what were often groundbreaking discoveries. 

These scientists from far-flung fields of research, working in surprising combinations (strange bedfellows indeed⁸), with few exceptions⁹ become better known for their narrower, disciplinary contributions to their own fields, which very few of them saw as being their main contribution to knowledge.

Self-styled Revolutionaries

For the investigators I am talking about largely saw themselves and quite explicitly described themselves as part of a disorderly but unified global scientific movement¹⁰ and as working primarily across disciplines—in together making a scientific revolution on a scale and with a scope not seen since the 18th Century. They knew just how high the stakes were. Their shared rhetoric was in terms of “revolution,” a word they used frequently and without hyperbole. 

In an early, book-length review of this work in 1956, a sophisticated contemporary observer, Pierre de Latil in Paris, set out the new ideas and heralded them, with great prescience, as making for no less than “a revolution in metaphysics,” taking up where Kant had left off, he said. There was justice in the assessment, and some of Kant’s work had in fact been an important precursor to many of the key ideas. However, in fact, as it turned out, the new thinking would eventually knock Kant’s whole metaphysics into a cocked hat. 

One or two of these self-styled revolutionaries, such as Norbert Elias, throughout their life’s work quite explicitly took on Kant as their chief adversary, yet they numbered amongst them some distinguished Kantians and neo-Kantians. Others took aim, as the Newtonians once had, at Descartes. But one way and another, all were convinced that philosophy, let alone science, or technology or medicine, would never be the same again. 

---

© Copyright 2012, 2022 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted

---

Next week, this article continues in Part II:  We’ll consider the question, what’s the big idea? And why does it matter above all else to anyone and everyone attempting seriously to achieve change in the world, whether on a small scale or on a large scale?

1. The subtitle comes from a motto on the wall of Stafford Beer’s remote cottage in Wales, reported to me by Jack Martin Leith, an authority on methodologies of innovation, who visited there many years ago—a phrase which I duly adopted. It was a favourite saying of Stafford’s, and was much later also used as the title of a collection of some previously uncollected papers of his. It reminds me too of my late friend and longtime mentor and colleague, the philosopher Prof. Elmer Sprague, whose email signature read, “Please Think Responsibly.”

I am grateful to two dear friends and colleagues, Professor Esa Saarinen of Aalto University, Helsinki, my collaborator for many years in the ongoing development of new forms of Content Philosophy, for inspiring many of these thoughts in the first place and then inspiring me to set them down on paper, and L. B. Gutmann of the Department of Philosophy, Fordham University, who encouraged me to present them in this form, who read and commented on earlier drafts and improved the final text of this three-part article immeasurably when it was first presented as a guest lecture at Fordham, and to whom my Substack readers of Change are more indebted than they could possibly realize.

2. (1808) Faust I: Act I, Scene i. Bayard Taylor translation, 1871

3. an old joke, but one first told to me by the late Prof. John Ziman FRS in Brussels in May 1995

4. “The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond” (1746)… “So ye'll tak the high road, and I'll tak the laigh road, / An' I'll be in Scotland before ye…”

5. The Wastebooks, Wastebook E, Aphorism 33, emphasis in the original).

6. “From Versailles to Cybernetics,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, London: Paladin Books, 1972

7. Most were prolific polymaths including, amongst them, more than their fair share of former child prodigies—Wiener graduated from Tufts at age 14; Pitts at 13 was invited by Bertrand Russell to do a doctorate at Cambridge, or alternatively, Russell said in his letter, if he already had a PhD, to join him on the Faculty there, and so on, having no idea that he was corresponding with a schoolboy.

8. Despite coming from such widely disparate disciplines, and from both sides of the Atlantic, they actually came to know one another well, whether through conferences or correspondence, through universities and journals, babysitting one another’s kids or vacationing together every summer. 

9. Here, the main exceptions that come to mind at once are probably Harry Black, Kurt Goldstein, Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson, Warren McCulloch, Ross Ashby, William T. Powers, Humberto Maturana, Heinz von Foerster, Stafford Beer, George Spencer Brown, and Francisco Varela.

10. There were a few epicentres of the work, to be sure, including, amongst many others equally important to this scientific movement: Bell Labs and the University of Hamburg in the late ’20s and early ’30s; then Cambridge University and MIT; Harvard University and Stanford; the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois and the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington; Northfield Military Hospital and The Cassel Hospital, Richmond, Surrey; the Malvern Radar Establishments (both of them in fact) and Brunel University; Chestnut Lodge Sanatorium and Austen Riggs; and perhaps most pivotally, the Macy Conferences and the legendary Ratio Club, to name some more obvious ones. The connections get less surprising the deeper one digs into the history and traces and maps out the professional and social networks. I have been at work for many years now on researching and writing a comprehensive history of the movement from the First World War onwards, which also traces the all-important earlier history in considerable detail, going right back to the opening years of the 1600s, and with a particular emphasis on the physiological sciences in the Germanies throughout the 18th Century and early 19th Century.