Philosophy isn’t a discovering, it’s an ordering and rethinking, a confirming and smoothing - conceptual engineering. As such, it leaves everything untouched. And as such, it is necessary never complete; it has a permanently-evolving cultural base of concepts to reorder and redefine and synthesise, to discover the limitations and hidden dangers of, and to overcome. There are no boxes to tick, only conceptual frameworks to rearrange, in order to make the next step into the future.
Philosophers in this sense are not trying to find the Great Truth, or to impose their ideas on the world by force of reason and will, but think clearly, make sense and move on.
That makes some sense. There’s a reason we talk about foundationalism and coherentism, but never . Even if foundherentism might initially strike me as more sensible than either foundationalism or coherentism, it is at the same time less elegant and retains all the problems already present. Philosophical concepts form a kind of map we use to navigate reality. We may find that some small town in West Africa is the ideal place to live, given our circumstances and predilections, but does it make sense to boldly and in large text show that town on a world map?
I’ve only glanced at the article so far, but it looks excellent. I’ll read it when I can.
Ok, I’ve read it. I admit I don’t understand his attack on Nagel at all. I suppose he knows Nagel better than I do, and is attacking what he knows or suspects Nagel to be advocating (some form of dualism?), rather than what Nagel actually says so sensibly and straightforwardly in his famous paper. To me, the great irony is that so many people study something that they simultaneously dismiss. Nagel, very aptly, brings to light one essential aspect of what people involved in consciousness studies are actually studying.
No amount of thinking can lead to the clear understanding that there is nothing to understand.
If there is something to be understood about you, requiring struggle and effort, who said there was? If you believe whoever said it is right, then you are allowing yourself to be led on the wrong track.
To be yourself you don’t have to do or understand anything. You don’t have to use your will to be yourself, no effort at all.
I think people should at least study most things before they dismiss them. I haven’t read the Nagel paper, I’m just skimming a Googled copy now… I can see Hacker’s point. To “be like” something is comparative. Insofar as Nagel says that there is more to the mind than a simple reductionist description of the brain, I’d agree, and I am pretty sure Hacker would as well. But insofar as this indicates there is a mental essence at work, I don’t.
Driving a car is not reducible to the car manual. At the same time, there’s no “essence of car driving” at work, it’s just a different category of thing.
I think I might be on to something that deserves a new post, and at the same time I don’t think I’ve read Nagel’s paper well enough to attack anything other than my first impressions of it. I’ll be back
A conscious act of refinement. I would add character engineering as well, though I suppose that would likely follow from conceptual engineering. I think “Philosophy”, and subsequently “Philosopher”, hold a certain implication of nobility; one might say ‘virtue’. Perhaps we presume that the Philosopher must face himself with a certain penetrating honesty, which implies an act of good intention (‘will’).
I, myself, am guilty of that assumption, though I think some thinkers become dellusive when faced with the task. Maybe it is something of a natural defense mechanism that warns the dangers of questioning the very grounds of your conceptions. Objectivism seems like a good example of wary philosophy, in that respect.
Perfectly put. And it should, in my opinion.
This, I think, is a necessary realization when one begins to really get his hands dirty, so to speak.
This is why I say Hacker knows more about Nagel than I do, and maybe is arguing with something that I can’t actually find in the paper. In “What is it Like to be a Bat” Nagel brilliantly uses defamiliarization technique to call attention to what some people tend to take for granted. Yes, we can’t imagine what a bat experiences when it uses sonar, though it would be quite ungenerous to presume that a bat does not experience. Is there some part of the paper that makes it sound like there is a “mental essence at work”? If so, I have never noticed it. Nagel doesn’t seem, to me, to be asking what it is like to be a bat, when the bat isn’t experiencing anything - he is asking what it is like to have bat experiences. It’s like asking of a blind person what it is like to see. One could object that there is nothing it is like to see in the absence of visual objects, but is that really the kind of question Nagel is asking? I see no evidence of that. Is Hacker’s extended attack on Nagel truly based on subtle grammatical ambiguities? If so, that’s a pretty tricky business. Language is simply not that precise.
Looking forward to it.
Is Nagel trying to identify mind “essence”? If he is, I’ve missed that over and over again. But I’m no Nagel expert, I’ve merely read his most famous paper a couple times.
There must be a sense of self, in order for dualistic consciousness to occur. But does Nagel, anywhere, state that the sense of self precedes consciousness of other? Does he state that there is self-essence, i.e. “from its own side”, as Buddhists say?
It may be that Hacker is responding to a broader understanding of Nagel than is to be found in the bat essay alone, of course.
In turn, you know more about Nagel than I do. I’m rebrowsing and can’t find the passage that drew me to that conclusion at all. I can’t even find a couple of phrases I remember, so I’m not sure what I was reading. I shall retract any accusations of dualism unconditionally.
I think Hacker’s point that there is “nothing it is like to see red” stands as a criticism. I’m not sure I could grant that there is something it is like to be a human. I certainly can’t speak for the rest of you, mind. But when describing experiential things we automatically resort to metaphor and simile, for a reason. I don’t think this is just a lack of conceptual clarity or an insufficient toolbox.
True, the Ordinary Language approach can be unnecessarily and misleadingly restrictive. On the other hand, there’s more to philosophy than posing a vague andswer to an ill-defined question and assuming everyone knows what you mean.
There are some points that I certainly agree with Nagel on - that physical reductionism is not the way to describe mind, for example, and I really like the point that “X is Y” may or may not be true in the context of the “is”.
I’m not sure I understand your argument here. If I put lots of emphasis on the word something, then it seems like Nagel is substantializing experience. Is that your sense of his words? But if something is just a word that gets used because that’s how human beings use language, then he is really just stating the obvious - again, in such a way as to bring something to light that we might tend to ignore, just as I might not really notice how much I depend on the air I breathe until the air is so polluted that I can’t breathe properly.
I do think there is something it is like to be human. Is that something something that can be pinpointed in an atomistic sense? I don’t think so, I think it is an environmental sense. But I do have a sense of self, and that sense of self is typically or always present during any and all of my experiences. That sense of self itself has qualities - it is not a simple abstraction or idea, but is connected to my sense of my own body, my memories, my style of thinking and acting/reacting, etc. I assume that the way I sense my self is more or less similar to the way other human beings sense theirselves. The more foreign an animal seems to me, the more I assume their sense of self feels quite different. Fundamentally, I believe all we can say about what all sentient beings have in common is that we experience suffering - i.e. emotional attachment to qualitative discernment. We experience the color red, yes, but we also are attracted or repelled by that experience, we identify with our preferences, and we in turn manipulate ourselves and our environments in order to attempt to solve that ongoing problem.
I think if people were internally homogenous , it might not make any sense to discuss what it is like to be a human. Experience is duality - experience requires a subject and an object, which from a nondual point of view arise together - one can’t exist without the other. If people were internally homogenous, the only experience possible would be of an “external” differentiation - i.e. of the color red. But if people are internally heterogeneous, then we can experience what it is like to be a human being, or a person named anon, or Only_Humean. The confusion only arises when we attribute singularity, independence, and permanence to a particular bundle of experiences we call our selves. Does Nagel, in “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” substantialize the self, or the mind, in such a way? I’m not sure. But his paper made a lasting impression on me years ago when I stumbled onto it, and maybe I’ve conveyed a bit of how I understand it.
in this quote directly above , philosophres are actually and should be doing all of the above ( how does one think clearly and make sense without reason ? )
Humean,
Just what would constitute a book of scientific “facts”? I have studied scientific theories, hypothesis and so called “laws”. Where science limits itself to provisional statements, it is very much a branch of philosophy. Where it oversteps this bound and states what is absolute, it becomes a branch of theology, or a religion.
Philosophy lacks universal facts because it is not a practical endeavour. It’s objects of consideration, like religion, often include the hope to discover knowledge about good life, what is just, what is moral. However no facts can be provided because it lacks the ability to reduce such questions to mathematical form-- nor can they be.
Science deals a great deal in mathematics because it’s object of observation, mostly the inanimate universe, shows a consistency that allows for the leap of faith that it’s observed consistency is inherent and therefore they chop and package reality as a number or equation. Without that leap of faith, what do we really know? This again happens with religion. Without the belief that something is revealed in extraordinary occasions that is Great, then what knowledge can we claim?
Knowledge is ultimately a translation, a restatement of Reality. E=mc2 simply translates into mathematical form what is evident in observations. But Einstein is noted to have been after the mind of God and God’s language was mathematics. What was for Moses a burning bush, for Einstein was a set of observations that lent themselves to be translated. I think that the end is the same while the change do change from one to the next. What the burning bush was for Moses was also a translation of the same thing.
Now, science is highly dependent on mathematical translation where it claims knowledge. mathematics are the language of God. This elevation of mathematics to divine staus goes back to, yes, philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato. Science is a translation of Reality into Idea. This enterprise was highly dependent upon philosophy. And philosophy has been often defined by idealists who attempted to reduce animate aspects of reality, mainly the world of man, to an Idea of mathematical consistency. In this regard philosophy was and still is capable of offering what some hold as “knowledge”. The issue is that when something becomes “knowledge” it ceases to be philosophy and becomes something else. Mind you that the underpinnings of Law, politics, science, ethics and what each can claim as knowledge was at some point a philosophical debate. Philosophy itself, as it continues ahead is void of “facts” because a part of philosophy is scepticism.
The value of philosophy is in that it has few facts (I am not going to say that philosophy holds no facts because that would itself be a fact). It is a wind that carries forth the seeds of progress. Without it the rived would soon become aqua ferma, stale water. Sciences need facts, yes, but they also need debate and such debates are the legacies they contain within of their philosophical past.
A book of Northern European birds may well be beyond mathematical description but still contain many scientific facts and no philosophical ones. Mathematics is a root aim and tool of many, but not all, physical sciences.
With the exception of the big bang, science really only deals with ordinary occasions.
Religion is similar to science only insofar as it presupposes nothing and encourages enquiry. That’s the exception, as most religions go - in Christianity you have Quakers and Unitarian Universalists, in Islam certain branches of Sufism. But one of the principal appeals of religion to many is its lack of doubt and its presentation of certainty.
Science is similar to religion insofar as it develops dogmas and stifles debate. The idea is that that should be the exception too. As more people turn to the secular and away from religion, they seek certainty from science that they are missing elsewhere, unfortunately. And science becomes thereby an increasingly political tool.
If the burning bush appeared and spoke to everyone who cared to look for it as reliably as Einstein’s measurements have been and may still be duplicated and interpreted, I would certainly see more value in the holistic appeal you’re making.
As a rough guideline, I would propose: debates about the contingent scientific facts belong to science; debate about the status of the facts and their relation to things outside science, to philosophy.
I’ve only just had a chance to look at this article. I read the first few paragraphs carefully and scanned the rest. Where does the article attribute to Hacker the view that philosophy is ‘rethinking’, ‘engineering’, ‘reorder(ing)’, ‘redefin(ing)’ and ‘rearrang(ing)’? As far as I could gather, he says it’s just analysis.
Which of the quoted verbs does insightful analysis not contain in its purview? Honest question - my understanding of ‘analysis’ is probably much fuzzier than yours.
For quotes:
“Every deep philosophical confusion is held in place by numerous struts, and one cannot demolish the confusion merely by knocking one strut away. One has to circle around the problem again and again to illuminate all the misconceptions that hold it in place.”
“The philosophical problem, like all philosophical problems, is a confusion in the conceptual scheme. We’ve tied some knots, and the difficulty is finding the right threads to pull on in order to untie the knots.”
And as an indication that he’s more anti-systematic than ‘analytical philosophy’ has a reputation for, keeping an air of Wittgenstein’s messiness:
“The danger, of course, is that you over do it. You overplay your hand – you make things clearer than they actually are. I constantly try to keep aware of, and beware of, that. I think it’s correct to compare our conceptual scheme to a scaffolding from which we describe things, but by George it’s a pretty messy scaffolding. If it starts looking too tidy and neat that’s a sure sign you’re misdescribing things.”
All of them. Analysis is about elucidating concepts, not changing them. Remove ‘re-’ from the start of four of the verbs, and you’ll be closer.
I don’t think the confusions he’s talking about are supposed to be intrinsic problems with the conceptual scheme. Rather, they’re problems (or pseudo-problems) that arise when we abuse it.
I imagine you’re thinking of early analytical philosophy: Russell, the original Wittgenstein and the logical positivists. I’m sure there’s plenty of that still about, but a much more informal approach also abounds.
