Williamson's final paragraph begins: "In making these comments, it is hard not to feel like the headmaster of a minor public school at speech day, telling everyone to pull their socks up after a particularly bad term". I cannot speak for the participants at the conference, but my own reaction to being compared to a wayward British schoolboy was: So who died and made you headmaster?--Tim Maudlin
Yesterday, David Auerbach reminded us that Timothy Williamson is a serial dismiss-er. In this piece (it appeared in 2006, but it self-plagiarizes stuff that appeared in the 2004 Leiter volume), Williamson rails against sloppiness in...analytical philosophy: " Much contemporary analytic philosophy − not least on realism and truth -- seems to be written in the tacit hope of discursively muddling through, uncontrolled by any clear methodological constraints...We who classify ourselves as ‘analytic philosophers’ tend to fall into the assumption that our allegiance automatically confers on us methodological virtue." (11; see also p. 4)
I much prefer searching self-criticism than kicking the outsider. So, I was about to start really liking Williamson. But it turns out, Williamson is not above kicking down. For the very same passage continues: "within the analytic tradition many philosophers use arguments only to the extent that most ‘continental’ philosophers do: some kind of inferential movement is observ able, but it lacks the clear articulation into premises and conclusion and the explicitness about the form of the inference that much good philosophy achieves." (11) Okay, so the point is: most analytical philosophers think they are superior in philosophical virtue to continental philosophers, but they are as bad as the legitimately despised continental philosophers. Yes, in context Williamson says he is deploying "crude stereotypes," but he is not disowning the stereotype about continental philosophy! (Cf. "Much even of analytic philosophy moves too fast in its haste to reach the sexy bits." (15; emphasis added--ES)) The main point of Williamson's piece is to double-down on the stereotypical virtues of analytical philosophy: "precision" and "rigour" (15), and to do so in opposition to the despised 'other.' In fact, the un-argued hostility toward Kant, which I noticed yesterday, is a trope in Williamson: "if we aim to be rigorous, we cannot expect to sound like Heraclitus, or even Kant: we have to sacrifice the stereotype of depth." (15; logically that allows Kant to rigerous, of course, but if you sound like Kant, etc...) [Doubling-down is not the whole story, but about that more tomorrow.]
Williamson is like an addicted gambler, who after a full century of analytical philosophy, embraces Dummett's founding myth of 'Frege-our-Father': "Even if Frege’s exceptional clarity and rigour required innate genius − although they undoubtedly also owed something to the German mathematical tradition within which he was educated − after his example they can now be effectively taught." (12) So, how come us lucky ones have fallen short after such an auspicious, genius start? (Is a pre-occupation with genius an Oxford thing?) The answer is blindingly obvious [hint: it's them]: "Some graduate schools communicate something like his standards, others notably fail to." (12) Given that in his piece Williamson is scathing of Dummett and the kind of philosophy promoted by Dummett, I take it his own alma mater does not get a passing grade (which makes one wonder where his confidence about other graduate schools comes from).
Bad graduate training is not the only reason for the collective sloppiness. Drawing on economic metaphors, Williamson writes: "producers and consumers have simply not taken enough trouble to check the details." (15) Oddly, it is unclear how editors and referees fit into this market-exchange conception of philosophy. It would have been nice if Oxford's Wykeham Professor of Logic had (as the consummate insider) shared some of his genuine insights about, say, how incentives in our discipline discourage quality control (recall my notes about citation practices, say, here and here).Okay, let's leave aside Williamson's rather thin institutional analysis of how after a century analytical philosophy tolerates so much sloppiness in our midst. His core faith can be discerned in the following arm-chair philosophy of science:
Consider a dispute between rival theories in natural science...We may predict that if the standards of accuracy and conscientiousness in the community are high enough, truth will eventually triumph. But if the community is slightly more tolerant of sloppiness and rhetorical obfuscation, then each school may be able to survive indefinitely, claiming empirical vindication and still verbally acknowledging the value of rigour, by protecting samples from impurities a little less adequately, describing experimental results a little more tendentiously, giving a little more credit to ad hoc hypotheses, dismissing opposing arguments as question-begging a little more quickly and so on. (13)
First, note the moralized language (conscientiousness, tendentiously, etc.); on Williamson's view genuine scientific disagreement is, in part, a consequence of a moral failure (of at least one of the parties to the dispute). In this view character failure translate into epistemic failures. Williamson does not allow for genuine, honest disagreement (even in the natural sciences). I consider this not just an intolerant, but a pernicious view! For, in this picture, scientific and philosophical communities ought to have "eventual convergence" (14) on the truth (in the long run, etc.). When I worry about the philosophy as normal science (PANS) view, it's this moralized conception of expert-unanimity that I campaign against.
Second, Williamson's arm-chair view is far removed from genuine scientific controversy. (Admittedly, 'genuine' is a bit of a weasel-word.) Sometimes (often) the world is just messy with conflicting and limited data. (I learned this by carefully exploring the empirical reasons that drove a man of great scientific integrity, Christiaan Huygens, to reject Isaac Newton's account of universal gravity.) Now, it is true that as a regulative ideal, scientific communities expect that empirical disagreements can be resolved eventually--under the influence of Kuhn's philosophy of science (I have told part of the story), there are few scientific communities left that institutionalize the expectation of disagreement.
So, here's a moral: don't be fooled by methodologists (or meta-philosophers) who offer you arm-chair (or text-book) philosophy of science (or romanticize their undergraduate discipline).
Now, despite the nods to scientific practice, Williamson is an advocate of mathematical philosophy: "we can often produce mathematical models of fragments of philosophy and, when we can, we should." (16; I have expressed reservations about this approach in my pre-NewAPPS days.) This fits his idea of philosophy being a "theoretical discipline." Oddly, Williamson never explains what philosophy is a theory of/about and what philosophical theory is for. In the piece he does not tells us. Instead, he offers a contrast between those that deny that philosophy is a theoretical discipline and those that affirm it. (Yes, I know he wrote a book--will get to blogging about that in the near future.) But this is not fine-grained enough. One can think that philosophy is (justly) a theoretical discipline, yet deny that mathematical models are (always) the right way to theorize in it.
Granting (as I do not), Williamson's distinction: he rhetorically suggests that his view could be defeated if the anti-theorist could "argue convincingly that the long-run results do not constitute progress." (18) Progress toward what? Williamson does not say. But one gets the impression that he means to equate progress with unanimity. And, indeed, mathematical inferential devices are very good at producing unanimity. One example of such 'progress' reveals this stance: "We know much about the costs and benefits of analysing possibility and necessity in terms of possible worlds, even if we do not yet know whether such an analysis is correct." (4) One gets the distinct impression that Williamson prefers such (efficient) agreement over correctness. (Yes, I know that he gets the cost/benefit terminology from Lewis.)
Finally, Williamson deploys political metaphors throughout the piece. He likes "law and order" (17), especially the order part, and -- as long as he gets to decide where "the bulk of our research effort [is] to be concentrated" (12) --, law, too. (Cf. Maudlin at the top of this post.)
Tomorrow, we look at the most important metaphor in Williamson's "sermon:" discipline.
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