Eric has been urging me to start new posts when I have significant comments to other ones, so I'll take that advice here. I'm following up on the post about Parfit, in which he says that his life would have been wasted if his ethical views turn out wrong. I don't really understand this claim. In fact, it seems so obviously wrong that I feel I must be missing something. How could the falsity of a philosophical approach entail either that the process of pursuing it did not help philosophy, or that the life was of no value?
By way of illustrative counter, I thought I'd pass on a story about Peter (Carl) Hempel, who counts as an analytic philosopher if anyone does. I took his last graduate course. It was our proseminar in the philosophy of science at Pitt. (Yes, in philosophy - not HPS - we had a required proseminar in philosophy of science.) The course was essentially structured around the rise and fall of positivism. We went through all the issues and approaches in a roughly historical manner. Hempel was a superb, smart, patient, clear teacher, even at around 80. At the end of the course, the conclusion was that it had all been wrong. He reckoned that they had not just been wrong in the particulars, but in the whole approach, the methodology, even asked the wrong questions often. But there was not the slightest hint of regret in this. His view was that no one could have possibly known that this approach didn't work unless smart people had given it a go, pushed it to the point where it was clear that it couldn't work. Now, he said, he was too old to try new things, but he knew that the young people around him would develop some other new approach - "maybe something building on Kuhn".
My every interaction with Prof. Hempel was like this. He just wanted to see what might be true. He didn't care if he thought of it first and if his views were wrong, well, that is sure interesting. (Here's another story. My friend Ken Gemes once put the following question to Prof. Hempel:"You guys always insisted that epistemic questions were normative. But on ethics, you were happy to be dismissive - maybe it is just boos and hoorays. So why not the same for epistemology: Boo astrology, hooray physics!?" Hempel thought a while, and said, "yes, I guess there really was no principled reason for the difference. We just had a sense that science was somehow more serious." I said - and this sounds awfully cheeky even now, but he was the sort of teacher who brought out directness - "So the demarcation problem is more serious than the holocaust?" He again thought a bit and said, "well, it does sound a strange and indefensible view when you put it that way. Perhaps we should have attended more to ethics.")
I guess what was most extraordinary in him - aside from being one of the nicest humans I have ever met - was that Hempel combined obvious intellectual passion that drove him to pursue ideas doggedly over the course of decades, with an ability to give them up without sadness or regret when they failed. That is rare, I think. Most are either frivolous in their attachment to projects, or egotistical in their dogmatism. Avoiding both is a kind of intellectual character that I think well worth emulating.
Of course this pairing of commitment and willingness to give up is reminiscent of Kuhn's Essential Tension, but the underlying idea is developed most deeply, I think, in John Haugeland's "Letting Be". But the discussion there is abstract. Haugeland details the way that we must be committed to broadly framing normative systems that stand as the grounds of the possibility of entities showing up for us, and goes into fascinating detail on the structure of those norms. He then discusses how we face a commitment to such norms and also a demand to give up on them when they fail. But whether this giving up of our ontological frame is taken as a tragedy, a bitter failure, or an exciting discovery - wow, so that doesn't work! I wonder what is next? - is not his subject. I think it takes concrete lives to really demonstrate the possibility of different orientations to our fundamental intellectual commitments, and it seems that in Parfit and Hempel we have two very different such lives.
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