In a recent solicited note on the future of philosophy (which Brian Leiter found interesting), Matti Eklund is committed to three very unfortunate (even pernicious to philosophy) doctrines (some of which are widely shared, I fear, which is why I am blogging about them). I discuss them in descending order of severity:
(i) We should think of philosophy as a kind of scientific enterprise that operates as a normal Kuhnian science ("Without borrowing wholesale Kuhn’s picture of science, I think some ideas Kuhn introduced are important to keep in mind when considering the trajectory of philosophy. Research programs are adopted, consciously or not, by a certain part of the philosophical community:").
Now, from 1900 onward, when various "scientific philosophy" movements started to gather full steam, this approach is always motivated by the desire to get rid of-the-embarrassing lack of consensus within philosophy (as opposed to some idealized version of science, where consensus is supposed to be normal). [This is also true of various social sciences, economics especially.] Often the means toward finding consensus is some privileged method or some technical inferential decision procedure. Often some arbitrary problem or result is taken as a baseline from which progress is possible, even desirable [I have analysed this in terms of "Newton's CHallenge"]. (And predictably, here's Eklund: "And while this [the normal science thing--ES] may not immediately constitute progress, a means to progress is to keep looking for where there is interesting research to be done and progress to be made." Think about the logic of that sentence for a while!)
But as Feyerabend and Popper realized such a Kuhnian model is itself a way to de-legitimatize criticism and disunity. For rather than being responsible to critics, one is now working on problems that may further progress. Eklund unintentionally confirms this when he happily admits that "It has been known for some time that modal notions cannot be used to draw all distinctions that can intuitively be drawn; it was just that a time came when it seemed to many more fruitful to look at what can be said about fundamentality, grounding, etc. than to stick with the old framework and try to use only modal notions for serious theorizing."
Of course the outside-the-paradigm-folk that had pointedly complained about the fact that modal notions can't do all the philosophical work could simply be ignored until the "many" (I am not making this up) decide it is time to move on. Here's not even an attempt to disguise how self-serving this rhetoric is. It is an exercise of naked power if you can choose to ignore systematically sound objections. (I have never met Eklund. I am sure he is a nice guy, and very open-minded, etc. I am characterizing an all-too-familiar habit of thought.) Now this whole approach to philosophy reduces philosophy to mastery of technique to solve problems. It is a taming of philosophy to puzzles and a completely uncritical stance toward power structures, etc. (It became popular in context of McCarthy witch hunts, after all.)
Here's a further reason why all of this is pernicious from the point of philosophy-an-sich (some other time I will explain why it is also a bad bet on the future given certain inconvenient sociological facts):
Finally, a mere historical point (iii): Eklund offers a firm embrace of the rather misguided claim that Carnap and Kuhn are basically alike, if not compatible ("As for Kuhn, it has now been well-documented that Rudolf Carnap, the most famous logical positivist, was quite positive about Kuhn’s project.)": a line I often heard muttered by Howard Stein at Chicago and advocated quite strongly by Michael Friedman in a famous 2003 book chapter that draws on George Reisch's lovely discovery of two letters from Carnap to Kuhn--Carnap's polite encouragement is taken as enthusiastic endorsement.
In Eklund's hands the argument takes this shape: "while Kuhn presented an account of actual history of science, the positivists discussed science under a certain idealization." These are, of course, compatible.
But this hides two inconvenient facts: first, Eklund is recycling the Positivists distinction between context of discovery (Kuhn) and justification (the positivists) in slightly different labels. But the upshot of Kuhn's approach is that this distinction should be dropped. So this is begging an important question. (An earlier generation of informed philosophers took Kuhn as having changed the terms of debate; it is very illustrative to read Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Alisdair MacIntyre in the 1984 Rorty, Schneewind, Skinner volume--they are very confident that Kuhn has started philosophy on a properly historical approach (to be completed by their individual programs)).
Second, for Carnap and Kuhn philosophy is a very different enterprise (something that Friedman does not disguise)! To simplify: Carnap was always unsympathetic to doing philosophy historically, and Kuhn was never sympathetic to explication. (And for those who have forgotten that these were not pleasant disagreements: it is worth remembering the way Kuhn was shunned by the philosophical establishment at Berkeley and MIT. [I am not implicating Carnap the person in the shunning.]) So, while at some level of abstraction there are doctrinal similarities, this hides fundamental disagreement. It is only when you take a certain approach to philosophy for granted that these disagreements become insignificant. When you feel in charge sociologically you are wont to this.
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