onegoodmove: Philosophical Conservatism

The Tyranny of Common Sense

Sometimes I despair of my philosophical colleagues. They are so conservative. I don't mean this in a political sense. In conventional party-political terms, most professional philosophers are probably well to the left of centre. As a group, they have a strong sense of fairness and little commitment to the social status quo. But this political open-mindedness doesn't normally carry over to their day jobs. When it comes to philosophical ideas, they are inveterately suspicious of intellectual innovation. In their eyes, a good philosophical theory is one that agrees with the views found on the Clapham omnibus. Few philosophers, in the English-speaking world at least, think of philosophy as a source of radical new ideas. Rather they view it as way of systematising the everyday reactions of ordinary people.
What a dispiriting ambition. If I thought that this was all philosophy could do, I would quit straightaway. Common sense is boring enough to start with, even before it is dissected by analytic philosophers. When I came into philosophy in the late 1960s, I thought of philosophy quite differently. I saw it as a way of making everything new. It would cut away the dead trees of outmoded tradition and replace them with innovative insights. This was surely what the great philosophers of the past had achieved. They hadn't just codified the views of ordinary people. Rather they had opened up whole new avenues of thought. It was a surprise and disappointment to me to discover that many other philosophers, far from sharing this ambition, saw things just the other way round. For them, philosophy's job isn't to clear away the dead growth, but to preserve it. . . .

When I complain to my colleagues about this kind of underlying philosophical conservatism, they often respond that it is unavoidable that philosophy should defer to everyday intuitions. After all, how else are philosophical views to be tested? In science the ultimate test of a theory is its empirical match with experiment and observation. But philosophy, argue my colleagues, has no empirical data to call its own. Philosophers don't conduct experiments to see whether their predictions are accurate. Rather their theories are tested in a different way. Where scientists compare their theories with empirical observations, philosophers compare theirs with pre-theoretical intuitions. Given this, it is inevitable that the best philosophical theories will be those that match everyday common sense as far as possible. Or so at least my colleagues argue.

I don't buy this at all. It can't possibly be a good idea to assess philosophical theories by the extent to which they preserve everyday intuitions. The trouble is that everyday intuitions are often nothing more than bad old theories in disguise. Any amount of nonsense was once part of common sense, and much nonsense no doubt still is. It was once absolutely obvious that the heavens revolve around the earth each day, that the heart is the seat of the soul, that without religion there can be no morality, that perception involves the reception of sensible forms, and so on. If philosophy had been forced to respect these everyday intuitions, we would still be in the intellectual dark ages.

One of the defining principles of the modern world view which emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was that tradition on its own carries no weight in argument. The mere fact that past authorities endorsed some proposition is no reason to believe it. All claims should be assessed on their merits, against the tribunals of observation and reason. It is highly ironic that twentieth-century English-speaking philosophy, supposedly the paradigm of rational investigation, should have forgotten this basic lesson.

Comments

Tommi | July 18, 2006 3:01 PM | Reply

What a great "forward" to a college phil101 text book. I guess. -tgs-

Thermidor | July 18, 2006 5:40 PM | Reply

As interesting as pure philosophy is, this kind of thing makes it seem less relevant than ever. No wonder philosophy and self-referential wanking are constantly confused.

civitas | July 18, 2006 9:11 PM | Reply

Philosophy has pretty much ceased to be an important part of the sciences and of intellenctual thought. Old philosophers are still consulted for their insights, but present "philosophical" figures consist of people who have a much more defined field like anthropology, sociology or psychology, for the fact that they have an objective in their field which is relevant to present times. Philosophers used to be also scientists, and they not only interpreted what they saw, but also came to specific conclusions of how it should be seen. Science has a lot to owe to figures like **, but after they took over, philosophy lost it's structure to transform into something entirely different: the interpretation of everyday experiences and the reality of "reality." As such it took a very wide array of roles and became esoteric. It lost social relevance because common people could not understand it. instead, it is substantially important as a subject to be studied by intellectuals and people in the social sciences. Presently by itself, the greatest merits have come from writing books on morality, interpreting the philosophy of Buffy, and becoming inspired for great stories like the Matrix.

But I think (going back to the post and away from my ramble) that not only are present-day philosophers victims of intellectual apathy. So do other people in other fields who (in the best of cases) need to think and be innovative. Social responsabilities with oneself and with others demand that we follow a status quo and conform. Even academic environments are more demanding in the political and bureaucratic aspect than in the pursue of discovery. The way I see it, it's at least less competition.

Plisko | July 18, 2006 11:47 PM | Reply

I have always said that common sense is what tells a man on a hill that the world is flat.

What I think you are talking about here is ideals verses orthodoxy.

I have come to believe that the mission of idealism seems to be observing the world with the goal of improving upon what already exists. Orthodoxy, on the other hand, is observing the world with the goal of confirming that the existing ways are already perfect.

R*S | July 19, 2006 1:01 AM | Reply

Is this not the fundemental problem of academics? With the exception of Derida and his followers in literary critisism, all academic persuits are non-inventive and referential. Even the sciences which are held of as institutions of discover are more about the traditions of institution. It is in the crass comercial fields and the amateurs that come up with new and out of place discoveries (though those people may not understand what they did. Somone who teaches or studies philosophy does not do much to create philosophy only to document it and examine the details.

It is possible to be both a philosopher and an philosophical researcher, but it is hard and the tendancies from being a philosopher inhibit your ability to advance in the academic strucutre.

The academic tradition is slow, because it is based on incremental changes that can be synthisized with tradition. The academic tradition is also conservitive in that it is based on promotion though a self selected group with no external or absolute criteria, so appealing to the existing experts is the most important activity needed for advancement.

So become a philospher and wake people to radical ideas and drop the shoud of academics!

Pulmon | July 19, 2006 9:28 AM | Reply

Consider, for example, JL Austin..."...embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing...in the lifetimes of many generations; these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound...than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon.”

Great! Let's close the patent office!

WVO Quine...(believed) "that sometimes the replacement of outmoded ideas cannot be avoided. But any such changes should be kept to a minimum."

Quine was an epistemologist and metaphysician.

I hope he accepts Metacare.

Robert A Heinlein viewed the profession of philosophy as a way to "earn" money by gazing at ones navel. Seems he was right!

russell | July 19, 2006 10:42 AM | Reply

There is a fundamental, American adversity to the discipline of Philosophy that is based on a feverish, sociological predisposition for product i.e.: commerce. Americans only respect something if their is an immediate, tangible result. This is why the two pillars that divide this country are science and religion. Philosophy has not been involved with “proving” reality (or religious conviction) since Kant. It has been predominantly involved with thinking about how we think about reality, existence, politics values, morals etc. The benefits of philosophy do not come in prescription. Philosophy can enrich many things, mostly on the level of providing an awareness with how we think and perceive. An acute understanding of these processes can lead to better decision making in the real world.

Americans also have always had a contentious relation with continental philosophy... mostly because the continentals are able to have WAY more fun. They have the spirit of fancy and invention, that often goes awry, but can lead to brilliance. In the United States we have to have RESULTS MAN. Get that product out there! Don’t waste too much time thinking, you need to compete in the market place in order to be respected. That is why we are turning into a country of A.D.D. inflicted, retarded bullys.

Gelf | July 19, 2006 11:47 AM | Reply

The major reason for philosophical conservatism, if you want to call it that, is that if you want to be completely rigorous and "cut away" all the "dead trees of outmoded tradition," you're trapped by your own intellectual honesty into nihilism, which, despite the best efforts of existentialists to bite the bullet and accept it, remains deeply and terribly uninteresting.

Descartes nailed it in one Meditation: we don't really know much of anything, and in a strictly rigorous sense we can't even theoretically know much of anything. Sucks to be us. (He then spent five additional Meditations essentially trying to keep from getting his butt excommunicated by building up an ad hoc framework that allowed him to tack on, "oh, and God. Of course we can know there's a God, so please don't arrest the nice philosopher." Clearly commonsense considerations have always had their place.)

Philosophers of my acquaintence seem to go through three stages. To begin with, they unknowingly share Papineau's sentiments with a sort of manic, idealistic naivete that, to the more seasoned, falls somewhere on a spectrum between amusing and annoying.

Later, frequently when it's too late to switch majors, it dawns upon them that the hard problems of philosophy are called hard problems not because we're waiting for some young genius to step up and solve them, but because of a perfectly reasonable expectation that they cannot be solved by anyone, ever. The problem of the Criterion is utterly indissoluble. You can talk your way around it, invent reasonable-sounding fudges, but it remains the elephant in the room of epistemology.

Many philosophy students bail on the entire subject at this point. Those who continue find they have to stop deconstructing and begin constructing. That means admitting to some commonsense notions without which the entire exercise falls to bits. You have to stipulate to certain first principles. You wind up being the "conservative" philosopher who stands in front of a class and tells the new kid, "yes, of course solipsism is a consistent position, but in practical terms it's not very useful and only a crazy person believes it." The new kid thinks you're being insufficiently imaginative, but he'll get it eventually.

That's not to say it isn't useful to revisit one's first principles from time to time, and certainly intuition can lead one astray. Personally, my intuitions have never fully accepted that a valid consequence of the two statements "the square is blue" and "it is not the case that the square is blue" is "the moon is filled with whipped cream." Regardless, I think it might be an exaggeration to suggest that philosophers are conservative because they always and only attempt to justify their own intuitions. Perhaps that's the case among British philosophers (who can tell, with the nested negations in their arguments), but it certainly has not been exclusively the case in my experience.

stipe | July 20, 2006 11:21 AM | Reply

there are no hard philosophical questions.

Jo Ann | July 20, 2006 5:22 PM | Reply

Well, Stipe, I came to read the thread on philosophy per you recommendation. All I find from you, though, is the comment, 'there are no hard philosophical questions', which serves to confirm the notion that Americans are so immersed in religious drivel, that we are sniffing the dust of our European compatriots, who have an indepth education as concerns philosophy. We are here responding with one-sentence comments or arguing about ID vs evolution. How sad!

stipe | July 20, 2006 7:11 PM | Reply

ive never been to america or europe and i never mentioned any limitation on subject matter. my statement was as open a philosophical viewpoint as it is possible to have.

trust me .. the easiest answers in the world defeat the most convoluted questions. an american child can beat up a european philosophy professor and have time to finish his milk .. no worries.