Philosophy Without Arguments—Part III
Think Before You Think
Introduction:
Having set out in Part II of this article the epistemology on which our own work has always been based, here in Part III we explain why it is that in scientific and philosophical matters, there is little point in arguing with those who are operating from within a different, incompatible epistemology.
Instead, the best anyone can do is to pursue their own work and to discuss their findings only with those operating from within their own epistemology, and always with the ultimate aim of reaching agreement. It’s not about being right or wrong. It’s about getting it right, or getting it wrong. And this is where so much philosophical work of the past couple of decades or so tends more often than not to get it wrong.
—The Editors
Philosophy Without Arguments—Part III
Think Before You Think
Last week, I barely managed to begin to adumbrate for you the sweeping upheaval of science, metaphysics, epistemology and cosmology that constitutes this revolution in ideas on which our own work is based. This second scientific revolution had roots going back to the early Eighteenth Century (with a few precursors a century earlier still), and continued here and there, mainly in the Germanies throughout the 19th Century.
But it was mainly the fruit of more than half a century of scientific work on both sides of the Atlantic between the end of the First World War and around 1970. I have but hinted at the outlines. But I hope you managed to get the picture at least, the flavour, sufficiently to enable me to move towards my main point this week.
Progress in the new science, inherently interdisciplinary, was rapid in those more chaotic and far less bureaucratic interwar years and, even more so, for another 25 years or so following the Second World War. Those were heady days when everything seemed possible and permissible and urgent—all at the same time—for if we didn’t work together without blinkers on, or departmental identity tags, and hurry up and get it right, we’d all just go up in a mushroom cloud instead.
Yet the scientific work continues in this same tradition in isolated pockets, here and there, despite the highly unconducive, sometimes downright hostile institutional environment of the Academy, where the peer review system,1 rigid departmental organization and mechanisms for promotion and so on, along with the tragic end of unrestricted grants for scientific work increasingly conspired to hinder progress as the decades wore on, down to our own day.
Philosophy Operating in a Vacuum
To some extent, for a time, the revolution had stalled, the way revolutions often do. Yet, somehow, all the same, this vast and growing body of interdisciplinary work is these days accelerating once again in a number of fields (most notably in biosemiotics and epigenetics). But I ask you: after all this time, some nine decades on, where are all the philosophers at this transdisciplinary-party-of-the-century, or should I say, “of the millennium”?
Since when has academic philosophy declared itself to be an isolated discipline with nothing to say about work in other disciplines, and nothing to learn from them?
Yet, with the exception of a handful of philosophers whose work helped stimulate or consolidate the new thinking (Cassirer, Collingwood, Wittgenstein), or were stimulated by it or both (Richard Taylor, Toulmin, Craik) or were at least highly congenial to it (Austin, Ryle, Hampshire, Oakeshott), philosophers sitting in academic departments of philosophy were otherwise mostly conspicuous by their absence while all this interdisciplinary collaboration was going on.
If, compared to former times, the voice of philosophy has been eerily absent from the conversation of mankind at the cutting edge of 21st Century ideas, the reason is easily found.
Academic philosophy has lately made a fetish of arguments in the sense of disputation, and a more and more arcane, deliberately exclusive technical vocabulary in which to dispute has largely displaced a long tradition of philosophical writing accessible to those from other disciplines. Philosophers have increasingly been talking only to themselves, and in voices increasingly shrill.
Competition thriving on disagreement has replaced cooperation in the service of reaching agreement. Technical, often pseudoscientific logic-chopping and internecine disputes, spurred on by what Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences,” have replaced an overriding interest in cooperative engagement with colleagues outside philosophy, in the humanities and in the sciences.
Dogged by false oppositions between logic and rhetoric, the empirical and the conceptual, philosophers for the first time in modern intellectual history have found themselves operating in a vacuum. But where the philosophers’ disputes were not trivial or parochial or irrelevant, they were largely in vain.
Argumentation of any kind (for it is different in every substantive area of inquiry), valuable though it is, has very definite limits. In the first place, there is not much that we can find out about the world and how it works by the light of pure reason alone. Pure reason, if there be such a thing, might have its place. But while you may have the best arguments in the world, and while you are certainly entitled to your own opinions, you are not entitled to your own facts.2
Absolute Presuppositions
If science has taught us nothing else since The Year Dot, it has taught us that the world is highly unlikely to fit our preconceived models.3 “If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy,” wrote Lichtenberg nearly two and a half centuries ago, “I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.”4
But perhaps even more important, argumentation has most definite limits insofar as it is one thing to ferret-out and critique one's own and others' questionable tacit assumptions, but it is quite another thing entirely to engage in ultimately futile argument against others' unquestioned-because-unquestionable, ‘absolute presuppositions’, as Collingwood called them.
Every statement is an answer to an implicit question, which in turn involves a presupposition, which in turn is an answer to another question, and so on and on. Yet some presuppositions serve as a presupposition to many questions, but are never in turn answers to some prior question—and these Collingwood calls absolute presuppositions.
Examples of absolute presuppositions would be: “Everything that happens has a cause,” or “The universe consists entirely of matter and energy,” or “the science of physics, when complete, will be sufficient to account in principle for all physical phenomena,” or “human behaviour is not independent of the laws of physics and biology”—and I obviously chose these absolute presuppositions because all are rejected out of hand by the new epistemology as being risibly false.
Now a presupposition that is absolute for you may be relative for me, and vice versa, according to the views we both hold. If for Jane Doe something is an absolute presupposition, however, I won’t be able to argue her out of it, because it is prior to, and immune to reason. I had better save my breath to cool my porridge. As the Borg says in Star Trek, “Resistance is futile.”
Fruitless Disagreement
Now you’ll recall that the new thinking, this revolution in ideas we sketched out last week, abrogated the concept of cause-and-effect and found a place for purpose and design in the physical mechanics and dynamics of the universe. The final death-knell of reductionism, physicalism and determinism was sounded not by philosophers or theologians but by hardheaded scientists working on the frontiers of science. Their novel empirical answers—I am convinced after five decades in academic philosophy, science and the history of ideas—are destined to change everything in the world of ideas.
What a pity then, that philosophers who might have found powerful allies amongst the partisans of this intellectual revolution were meanwhile busy elsewhere, expending vast intellectual energies and philosophical talent in disputing vainly with the champions of 17th Century mechanism—opponents whom arguments will never convince, and rhetoric will never persuade.
There will always be other philosophers with whom no constructive dialogue is possible because we and they happen to be working from incompatible sets of absolute presuppositions, largely tacit, and again, immune to philosophical counterargument and indeed immune to rational refutation of any kind. So why bother talking to them?
A student in a doctoral seminar related the story of how he once answered the door to a Jehovah’s Witness who asked, “Would you like to have a discussion about Darwin’s theory of evolution?” The student replied, “Well, that all depends. How likely is it that you will leave our discussion with views different from the views you’ve come with?” The doorstep missionary, smiling proudly, answered, “Why, there’s no way at all!” —to which the student replied, “Then in that case, I would not like to have such a ‘discussion’ because it would not be one.”
There is no intellectual spectacle more ridiculous than philosophers engaged in a futile bout of duelling epistemologies. Much dialectical effort continues to be expended in crossing swords with materialists on their own terms, but why not just ignore them? For again, ‘absolute presuppositions’ are by definition immune to refutation. It is a waste of our time and effort to dispute with those who can never convince us nor be convinced by us.
Is it not more constructive and rewarding to cooperate with those who are our intellectual allies both within and outside philosophy, seeking agreement rather than disagreement, in order to make quiet progress subversively together where there is substantive scientific work to be done with the ultimate aim of human betterment?
Duelling Epistemologies vs Survival of the Fittest
Alan Donagan pointed out in his arch-Collingwoodian critique of Collingwood “from the left,”5 that although absolute presuppositions, unlike relative presuppositions, may individually be neither true nor false, whole rafts of such absolute presuppositions, whole epistemologies, can indeed be judged true or false notwithstanding. For they can be judged valid or invalid, according to their collective success or failure in making sense of the world, when compared to alternative, rival epistemologies.6
The new epistemology and metaphysics, taken as a whole, must in the light of the empirical evidence, and not least on grounds of theoretical simplicity, be judged to be true where the old reductionist, materialist, physicalist, determinist epistemology can now be discarded as entirely and egregiously false—not in detail but in principle. From the point of view of the new epistemology, the old epistemology is not a collection of small errors, but one great big whopping howler. And, of course, vice versa.
What is more, the dramatic and highly improbable, impressive practical results of the new thinking, above all, demonstrate the superiority of the new thinking over the old. Kurt Lewin remarked that if you want to understand how something really works, try and change it. Much human betterment has already come from the new thinking, which has led not only to the technological marvels of our age, but also, for example, to radical new methods for achieving major transformations in the world of affairs overnight through tiny, precisely pinpointed, minimalist interventions, and to dramatic breakthroughs in medicine, particularly in psychiatry.
Where philosophy should matter most, namely in the alleviation of human suffering and the uplift of our human condition, the new thinking actually works, succeeding impressively where the old thinking continues to fall flat on its face. And much human betterment will continue to come from this revolution in ideas, at least if we do not allow these gains in human knowledge to be lost.
For I estimate that at least nine-tenths of all scientific knowledge simply does get lost. We take ten steps forward and nine steps back. Knowledge still advances, but at the cost of much lost insight, and increase in human suffering, and sometimes only because the ideas happen to fall out of fashion, typically for quite adventitious reasons. As for philosophy, sadly, philosophy has always been more in thrall to fashion than the rag trade.
Those of us who are partisans of this revolution in ideas have our work cut out for us just in preserving and extending the new knowledge, as its custodians, without distracting ourselves by skirmishing with the opposition, whose views will soon enough simply be forgotten, falling out of fashion in their own turn, provided—but only provided—we do our own job well, and that meanwhile, in Harold Macmillan’s famous phrase, we “let sleeping dogmas lie.”
Here, please understand, I’m neither throwing down the gauntlet, nor raising a white flag. Milton Erickson relates that when a member of the Hopi tribe meets a rattlesnake in the Arizona desert, he says, “You go your way, little brother, and I’ll go mine.” What I am advocating is not Pangloss’s Leibnizian optimism that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,” but rather Candide’s response to him, qu’il faut cultiver notre jardin—“we must cultivate our garden.”
Let us begin the work of constructing a more coherent, more compelling, more effective and viable, superior alternative that stands in its own right and speaks for itself. And let’s do it by working together, seeking agreement, not disagreement, and in partnership with others in the sciences and in the humanities whose views we find congenial.
Getting on with the Work
I cannot emphasize enough that there is a lot of work to be done. How far would the Baroque metaphysicians have got in the 17th and 18th Centuries if they’d spent all their time on the defensive, in critical mode? How far would the 17th and 18th Century Newtonians have got in routing the then still dominant Cartesians if they spent all their time disputing with them about who was right and who was wrong, rather than getting on with the more fruitful but harder business of doing the hard science and providing that science with the requisite philosophical foundations? It is not for nothing that that was the great age of philosophical system building. There was a lot to do, and they just got on with it. And from now on we can do the same too.
Nor do the spectators, whom I imagine to include most of our readers of Change, need to pick sides. No one on the sidelines needs to vote, “the new epistemology is right and the old epistemology is wrong,” or “the old epistemology was right and the new epistemology is bunk.” Those who are interested can simply follow the twists and turns of the new thinking and the new science based on it, and see where it leads, and if they are so minded, experiment with seeing what happens when they think this way instead of in the mainstream, rationalist way. But it’s vital to think before you think.
I was perhaps fortunate in never having had to choose in the first place. I was a “new-epistemology native.” I stumbled upon this revolution in ideas when I was a callow youth of sixteen. I was hooked from the start, and by the time I was old enough to encounter, as an undergraduate, questions and debates about causality and whatnot, I already thought causality was a ridiculous idea. When I first learned about causality as a serious concept in philosophy, as opposed to a journalistic shortcut or an important, highly technical element in legal argumentation (where it bears little resemblance to the supposed the “common sense” notion of cause-and-effect, which is applied to scientific matters almost exclusively in popular journalism), well! I thought I’d never heard of anything so silly in my young life.
For I’d already been inoculated against it by having read Bateson as a teenager. I’m sure it’s the same for those of us, like many of you, I suspect, who in college or maybe even in high school, first heard about causality, and are only just now hearing about this incompatible, alternative epistemology which has no room for the notion of cause-and-effect. Why, it must sound a bit nuts at first!
In my plea for us all, along with academic philosophers, to avoid us-versus-them, who’s-right-who’s-wrong, “duelling epistemologies,” it may be objected that I am advocating preaching only to the choir; though personally, I’d sooner preach to the choir than talk to a wall. What I am advocating, however, is that philosophers and scientists alike should leave preaching to the preachers and quietly get on with their own work.7
I myself have never been able to sustain much missionary zeal for long, so I’ve never had the slightest interest in entering into philosophical controversy. Nor do I wish to provoke cries of, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!” by appearing to threaten a thriving philosophical industry in setting out my conceptual wares before an assembly of the cosmological competition, least of all on their own turf. What would be the point?
Saving Our Breath to Cool Our Porridge
Here again, I return to Lichtenberg’s remark I quoted in Part I of this article, “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.”
Only I, personally, don’t get a kick out of annoying anyone, any more than I have any interest in converting anyone, and I’d certainly make a lousy missionary. However, I do feel an acute responsibility to “bestow strength and courage on those” who are working from within the new epistemology and who may be feeling rather out on a limb when in reality they are not, and when, in my considered view, history is ultimately on their side.8
In any case, the history of ideas reveals plainly that where ideas have taken root and flourished and have ultimately proved fruitful is indeed where they have been sown on fertile ground. Surely, everywhere in the world, in every sphere, more gets done by people working with one another than working against one another? Can we leave picking sides to the football fans?
Since when is science, or the growth of human knowledge, best approached in a spirit of warfare, or even the spirit of a televised cooking competition? The first scientific revolution back in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, and the progress that followed, was the fruit of a spirit of collaboration, abandoning the comparatively stultifying mediaeval tradition of disputation. Those labouring then, as now, on the frontiers of science, found it more productive to just get on with it, and to do so collaboratively.
Much of the 20th Century revolution in ideas we have been discussing and whose history I have been tracing for many years, seems to have owed some of its most rapid progress to the interdisciplinary Allied war effort during the Second World War. I can’t at this moment recall any examples of their deliberately engaging in controversy with those who did not share their point of view.
Philosophy requires dogged persistence—such is the nature of analysis—and as an occupational prerequisite, or acquired occupational deformity, those drawn to it, and good at it, tend to be perseverative by nature, like the British pre-war Triumph motorcycle with the hard rubber tires, of which it was said at the time that if it ever got stuck in the tram tracks, it would go all the way to the end of the line. Philosophers, before you get stuck in, sleeves rolled up, check: what are you trying to do?
Please, in the immortal words of one of the revolutionaries, the cybernetician Stafford Beer, who had this motto inscribed on the wall of his study, “Think before you think”!
Are you arguing against someone or something, and if so, why? Why bother? If you’re arguing with your enemies, you are wasting your time; if you are arguing with your friends, with those on the side of the angels, shame on you! They’re on your side. Don’t waste your time and energy! An old Nato training manual admonished that just because it is humanly possible to push a pea up the side of a mountain with your nose does not mean that this is the optimal way to get it there or that the exercise is worth undertaking in the first place.
Think before you think—after all, that’s the most important thinking we all do in any case, the thinking that’s already presupposed before we start thinking. For tacit assumptions of any kind never have the look of explicit assumptions, only in dark glasses and false moustache. They look like rock solid reality. And those tacit assumptions that we take as absolute presuppositions seem solider still.
It’s like what laymen don’t always understand about hallucinations; a hallucination of a lamp doesn’t look like a ghostly version of a lamp; it looks identical to any other real, solid lamp. What do you take for granted? “Question everything,” was Lichtenberg’s motto, and he was no friend of skepticism. Think before you think.
Two Pleas for a Cooperative Endeavour
I referred at the outset to an Oxford man who had tried decades ago, without much take-up, to put philosophy on a more cooperative footing. I was referring to the philosopher J. L. Austin, who was demobbed from the British Army in 1945 with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and a string of the highest honours from the British, French and American governments for his life-saving intelligence work preparatory to, and subsequent to, the D-Day invasions.
His team had been faced by huge, complex, apparently intractable problems, which had nonetheless been definitively solved through the patient labor of hundreds of brilliant, trained investigators from many disciplines, persistently and systematically coordinating their inquiries and findings.
Would not the problems of philosophy, Austin reckoned, similarly succumb to such an approach? Are the challenging problems of philosophy not work for many independent but disciplined and coordinated investigators, no matter what their background, working collaboratively in the service of a pressing, common cause, on the model of his work in the Theatre Intelligence Section a few years before?9 Why on earth not?
By contrast, philosophy to Austin seemed shockingly, too often risibly, disorderly and inconclusive. “Argument among philosophers seemed to consist in perpetual wrangling and disputation, never-ending controversy and disagreement, perpetual refutation and counter-refutation,” almost pathetically unlike science.10
If you are serious about trying to reach valid conclusions in philosophy, what better way could there be, Austin reasoned, than to take your ideas on how to answer certain well-defined questions and try them out on other like-minded collaborators pursuing a shared goal, in cooperative—and decidedly not competitive—discussion? If after patient, convivial, disciplined discussion, a dozen or so of them actually agree, surely that is better than no agreement at all, and surely there is then at least a better chance that what seems unexceptionable to all of them might actually be valid.11
For Austin, the greatest satisfactions in philosophy were the joy of discovery, the pleasures of cooperation and the satisfaction of reaching agreement. They were also, in his view, and in mine, philosophy’s chief hope of contributing something of real value to human knowledge.
Rather than waste time and energy and eloquence in arguing with “the other lot,” let us leave them to their own dialectical devices, and address ourselves only to those with whom we can get along, where we do share much common ground, and from whom we can genuinely learn.
© Copyright 2012, 2022 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
whose paradoxical origins we related in detail in Footnote 25 last week.
I owe this phrase, used in much the same context, to my colleague the biologist Professor Peter Corning (2011, personal communication), currently Director of the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems.
As an undergraduate, what most struck me about Freud’s work and made it seem so intriguing, so serious and so worthy of philosophical attention, is that almost nothing he had to say would have seemed self-evident from first principles, let alone follow from logic or common sense. Freud did not, after the manner of many of our contemporary social scientists soi-disant, simply describe something, insert the word “because,” and then describe the same darn thing again (a formulation of the structure of so many so-called social sciences, which I owe to Bill Powers). Freud’s discoveries were surprising—they were genuinely discoveries. Quantum mechanics as a theory seems at first, as one scientist of my acquaintance put it scathingly, like witchcraft—with one apparently arbitrary assumption heaped upon another. But when a wide variety of entirely unexpected findings are then predicted and retrodicted down to the Nth decimal place, we have to be impressed. In everyday life and in pedagogy we explain the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar while in science we explain the familiar in terms of the unfamiliar (I believe it was Dr D J Stewart who put it this way); and as Harry Collins pointed out, science has been the major force for change in common sense.
The Wastebooks, Wastebook B, Aphorism 44, (Ca. 1768-71)
by which I mean, from a position more radically Collingwoodian than the more cautiously Collingwoodian position of Collingwood himself!
“The principle of theoretical simplicity enables us to subject not only answers to questions, but also whole complexes of questions and answers, to the verdict of experience. When one whole complex is rejected in favour of another, its absolute presuppositions are rejected along with it; and like the answers contained in that complex, they are rejected as false. Aristotle’s physics . . . was more remote from the truth [than Newton’s]; and so, where they differ from Newton’s were his absolute presuppositions. This conclusion . . . resolves some of the difficulties in Collingwood’s analysis of metaphysics.” Alan Donagan, The Later Philosophy of Collingwood, p. 82.
In fact, I suspect that much of the effort spent arguing vainly with the materialists has been motivated, consciously or unconsciously, by a kind of atavistic, quasi-colonialist, missionary zeal to “convert the heathen,” as if discovering an exciting new way forward in science or in philosophy could be tantamount to discovering the “one true religion” which must be imposed upon all to save their epistemological souls. The result has often been, as in the unbecoming analogue, understandable deep resentment unconducive to dialogue and out of keeping with a genuine scientific spirit. It may have been intended originally as a defensive counterattack by the anti-materialists, giving as good as they get, but the result was typically either for their constructive arguments to be ignored or to make outright sworn enemies unnecessarily.
You may be the only one in your department or company who thinks this way, that is, along the lines of the new epistemology, but remember: There are more than 25,000 universities in the world, and so there must be something on the order of magnitude of two or three million university departments at least. If for every ten university departments there were, on average, at most one lone member of the “new epistemology” community keeping their thoughts to themselves (and I’m sure that is a vast underestimate, probably by an order of magnitude), then you are still in good company, with a quarter of a million or so fellow academics who, like you, have already embraced the new epistemology and are pursuing their work on this basis. That’s not even counting the likely far higher number amongst ‘retired’ academics (many of whom are still working sedulously), for one or two generations ago the new thinking was in many fields verging on hegemony. And this doesn’t count the vast number of partisans working outside academia, where our community’s numbers have always been far larger, as far as I’ve been able to tell, over the half century I’ve been exploring these ideas with others around the world.
This is why we at Change are trying to build an online community of those who think this way—there are a lot of us, but we happen to be scattered far and wide. But in the age of the Internet, need that matter? And in the heyday of this second scientific revolution, the partisans were likewise scattered far and wide but managed, even without the Internet, to form a solid community through correspondence, visits, conferences, newsletters, journals, mailing lists, and so on.
The once burgeoning field of cybernetics, some five decades ago or so, probably housed the greatest number of partisans of the new epistemology. Nowadays, when few cybernetics departments remain, you’re more likely to find the partisans amongst the denizens of departments of biosemiotics. Before cybernetics, in the interwar years, the new thinking was most widespread amongst physiologists and psychologists in Central Europe. In the 1980s and 1990s I expect you would have found the largest concentration amongst family therapists. But in any case, you are always free to think for yourself, are you not? And if you’re a spectator rather than a participant and remain non-partisan, you are free, as I said, to experiment with thinking this way from time to time and just seeing how you get on. That’s how I myself started exploring these ideas as a teenager, and, being an empiricist by natural disposition, why I have kept going ever since, and never looked back.
See, for example, G. J. Warnock, “Saturday Mornings,” in Essays on J. L. Austin, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973, pp. 31-45, and G. J. Warnock, J. L. Austin, Oxford, London, Routledge, 1989, pp. 1-10
Warnock 1989, p. 7
Warnock, 1989, pp. 9-10