How to do philosophy

Should philosophy be a science?

Some people think the only way to make discoveries - to expand human knowledge - is to do science. If for example you want to find a cure for Alzheimer's what you do is to scan brains, study the way cell biochemistry works, try out possible new drugs etc.

It is the way of observation and experiment.

Is there an alternative?

Would it be any good hiring a really clever person who knew nothing about the brain or brain chemistry and sitting them in a room with a piece of paper and a pencil and asking them to see if they could work out an effective cure?

Empiricists say Absolutely not! To stand any chance you have to bone up on the laboratory work that has been done so far, then devise a new experimental or observational programme which you then have to pursue in the hospitals and/or laboratories.

It is possible that a person sitting on their own might come up with a good idea. But they wouldn't be able to check it out without leaving the study. They couldn't just sit there and work out that it MUST be the answer.

David Hume was one of those that said this. Through education and generally picking things up you could acquire knowledge, but in the beginning all of it, if it was knowledge, had to come from looking at the world and gathering information about it through the senses.

He thought there was a lot of pseudo knowledge about. (He was writing in the middle of the 18th Century.) People were writing books which pretended to tell you important things, things the authors pretended to know, but which were full of claims which had never been tested against the facts, full of claims indeed that couldn't be tested against the facts.

Dad as God Thanks to Luise Yacono

Claims for instance like that God wanted you to worship him or her. How could you check up on a claim like that? If you find a claim like that in a book, you can look it up on the internet and see if anyone else believes it, you can see what other books it is in, and you can ask people, for example a Cardinal, whether it is true. But none of that is a reliable way of finding out - is it? It might tell you that lots of people believed it was true, but it wouldn't help with the question whether it really was true - would it?

Hume thought that if there was nothing you could do to check up on a claim you could have no business with it. You should disregard it. And claims you couldn't check up on through some kind of sense experience couldn't be counted as knowledge, and could hardly be counted as meaningful at all.

He thought the books of his time were often full of such claims. They passed, most of them, for works of theology.

He said you should throw them out because they could tell you nothing.

You can't find out about the Universe and whether there is a Creator in it or behind it and what such a Creator is like and what he or she might be demanding of us. It's no good spending time in the study on these matters. That will enable you to read other people's books on the subject but if you stay in the study you won't be able to find out whether any of the books are true or not. To find out if a claim is true you have to get and look - engage in observation, perhaps carry out experimentation. But in the case of claims about God it's difficult to see what you can do to find out if they are true.

Anyway, Hume thinks books of that kind simply waste paper.

The other time we thought about geometry and Plato's suggestion that this was knowledge but not knowledge which we got through reading nor through observation. He thought we got it from a previous life - not making it clear how we acquired it in that earlier life and so leaving his ideas on geometrical or in general mathematical knowledge in a very unsatisfactory state.

Hume thought mathematical truths were all like the 'Brothers are male' example - definitional truths you might say. He thought it was OK to write books on mathematics. You could check up on what they said by working out the logical implications of basic mathematical concepts like the number one and addition and equality.

I want to leave that nest of worms on one side.

The question I want to put to you is: what about philosophy. Should we be doing philosophy 'scientifically' - ie through observation or lab experimentation? Or, if this sounds silly, how else should we be doing it?

How are we to discover new things in philosophy? How are we to check up on philosophical claims that we have read or been told?

So far I suppose in our discussions we have been sitting round talking, exchanging arguments. Is that appropriate?

Obviously what this raises is the question What exactly is philosophy? Answer that and then we might have a go at saying how we should do it.

I'm sorry but I think if we raise that question there is a real danger that we will end up thinking there is no longer any such thing. Philosophy used to include what is now called astronomy, and physics, and biology, and what is now called psychology. These have all detached themselves from philosophy in the Modern period (ie the period launched by the rise of modern science), setting themselves up as different fields of science, and it is a real question whether there is anything left.

Well, I suppose I had better say I am convinced there is enough left for there to be a very worthwhile university degree to be had in it! But within that very worthwhile study there is the question of what the study is, what exactly its questions are and how it should go about whatever it is that is its business.

If you look at Philosophy syllabuses today you will find the problems it thinks of itself as addressing:

• What is the relationship between mind and body?
• What is a cause?
• What is there besides our thoughts, if anything?
• Is there a God?
• How can some things be 'about' other things? (thoughts, sentences, symbols...?
• Are there actions, as well as physical movements?
• Is there such a thing as time?
• Ditto space?
• Is there a world outside our heads?
• Is there a field called Philosophy?
• What is morality and what our obligations as human beings?
• What if anything obligates us to obey the government?
• Do we have obligations towards other animals, or nature?
• How do we get knowledge? is there another way of getting knowledge besides using your senses?

This isn't comprehensive. Already it seems a very mixed list. How does one go about answering any of them?

One approach is to say they are a real ragbag. The only thing that puts them in the same bag is that there doesn't seem any agreed method of approaching them. It's not just that we have no agreed answers for them, we don't even have agreement on how to go about answering them.

We can easily think of questions which we haven't answered yet but for which there is broad agreement over how to try and get an answer. For example, Has there ever been any water on Mars? We recognise this as a scientific question, and there are a number of scientific techniques that might help get the answer.

But with philosophical questions it's not clear how the answer is to be pursued.

Different schools of philosophy have different beliefs about how it is legitimate to proceed with the philosophical questions they take up.

Let me outline two and a half of these.

The first is the example we have already studied, Socrates' handling of the question 'Can Virtue be taught?' in the Meno.

Socrates method of doing philosophy

Socrates leads the slave boy to see the the relationship between lengths and areas by asking him a series of pointed questions. They are what are called leading questions, and all the slave has to do is answer Yes or No. But Socrates thinks they show the slave is understanding the points that he is saying Yes to and understands that they follow from what has gone before. Socrates thinks this helps show that what is happening is that the slave is remembering what he knew earlier - in a former life.

This won't perhaps have much appeal in a context in which belief in reincarnation is rather unsupported. If you have to be persuaded first (against your prejudice) that souls migrate the job of persuading you that a priori knowledge is recollection of things known in an earlier life will be quite an uphill struggle.

What of the method we see displayed? Socrates doesn't lecture - as other teachers in the city at the time did - he engaged in conversation. Or at least in dialogue. He tried to get agreement a point at a time, and relied on his pupil's rationality to accept that if A and B and C were so, D must be too.

This was a commitment to reasoning things out. Contrast it with authoritative pronouncements - on a prophet's own authority, or on the part of a spokesperson for a religious authority, written or spoken.

Think of the ten commandments being handed down. You are just told: here are the rules.

Socrates way is not that. He argues for his points. Sometimes we may think not very well! But that in a way is something he can claim as a legacy. We don't say, many of us: That contradicts what is written in the Holy Book. We say: It doesn't follow.

So that's one thing, a commitment to reasoning things out.

Many people then identify another point. They say what Socrates does, typically, is to work towards a definition of the key notion at issue. In the Meno, for example, though he doesn't get there, his aim seems to be a 'definition' of virtue.

Some modern philosophers think that in doing so, Socrates is using the method they are committed to using themselves. they call it 'conceptual analysis'. Let me try and explain that first, leaving open the question of whether Socrates was the first, or an early conceptual analyst.

Conceptual Analysis

Normally we think of definitions as applying to words, but philosophers of the school I am talking about think of themselves as studying the definitions not of words but of concepts.

The idea is this. Understanding a concept (like 'respect') is knowing when it applies and when it doesn't. There must be a rule attached to a concept which says when it applies and when it doesn't. Studying the concept philosophically is a matter of getting clear about the rule that governs its application. So the outcome of a philosophical study of the concept of 'respect' would take the form, if successful, of a rule beginning: 'The concept of respect is applicable when the following conditions obtain...' This sounds as though it equates with a statement like this:

'A person deserves respect when the following conditions are met:

1. ...

2. ...

.

.

Some rules governing concepts might be really simple. Square might be an example.

You might suggest that the concept 'square' applies to all things which (a) have four sides and (b) adjacent sides are at right angles to each other.

Is this a satisfactory 'analysis' of the concept square?

Conceptual analysts will test this by trying to come up with counterexamples. They will try and find a case where something is a square even though it doesn't meet the criteria. Or something that isn't a square even though it does.

Some suggestions.

Philosophy as arising from confusion

The understanding of philosophy as conceptual analysis is linked historically at least with a very dramatic view of the nature of philosophy.

It argues that the problems philosophy traditionally addresses - like those on my list - are all of them bogus. They arise somehow from some kind of confusion entering into our thinking. Philosophy then turns out to be the exercise of removing these confusions. It doesn't provide answers to the questions. It just shows, when successful, that the questions are bogus ones.

Gilbert Ryle's brilliant and original study The Concept of Mind is I think an example here. Since Descartes, who in the 17th Century drew a new picture of the human being, insisting that they were to be understood as a partnership between two kinds of thing, body and mind, thinkers had thought that the philosophical question to pursue in this area was: What is the relation exactly between these two things? Ryle argued that the posing of that question involved a confusion of thought: the mind was not the sort of thing that could have a 'relation' to the body. In an analogy that has become famous he said that it was like asking how to get to the University of Oxford when you were already wandering about one of its colleges. If you were looking for some kind of central administrative building or 'reception' you might get a proper answer, but if you mean the University in the sense in which all the different colleges and the library and the labs etc are all parts of the University then it doesn't make any sense to think it is somewhere else when you are already in one of the Colleges. This is the University, a guide might say. And when you say: Nonsense! This is a College of the University. What I want is the University itself, you make it plain that you are making a mistake. you are thinking of the University as a building or building or place just like a College. But a University is not the same kind of thing as a college. You have misunderstood the concept of a University and its relation to the concept of a college. Ryle said you are making a category mistake.

Likewise Ryle argued that in asking about the relationship between the mind and the body you were making a category mistake, misunderstanding the concept of mind. It was not another thing to which the body might be 'related': it was a device for talking about people's behaviour and likely behaviour.

The 'problem' of the mind/body relationship is thus dispersed.

Can conceptual analysis sometimes answer philosophical questions?

What concepts would this guy need?

Suppose you had the project of getting a robot to move about freely and easily, avoiding obstacles and traps, able to fight, refuel, reproduce etc etc. You might conclude that you would have to equip it with the concept of a world in which it existed, a world in which there were other things like walls and doors and armchairs. Is there then a question Well how do I do this? How do i equip it with such a concept as that? And might not the answer go: well, in order to equip it with that concept you have to equip it with the concept of an object, and the concept of space, and the concept of time ...

That might be a type of conceptual analysis?

A scientific project, or what?

The point of dialogue for Socrates?

When Socrates (in Plato's presentation) engaged in dialogue and sought 'definitions' of key notions (I'm deliberately not saying words or concepts) it doesn't seem plausible to say he was seeking to boil questions away. It reads very much as though he wanted to answer them.

Or could philosophical discussion be an art form, like music or painting - a beautiful and rewarding thing when well done, but not a way of getting at any other kind of truth?