In my regular visits to Munich as an external member of the MCMP, a frequent item on my program is meeting with Peter Adamson, of ‘History of Philosophy without any Gaps’ fame, to talk about, well, the history of philosophy (there are still gaps to be filled!). So last week, after another lovely 2-hour session that felt like 10 minutes, Peter told me about a chapter of Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, where everyone goes to heaven and gets to do whatever they want for however long they want. After some years of pleasurable life, almost everyone then gives up and wants to die ‘for real’, but a particular group of people is remarkably resilient: the philosophers, who are happy to go on discussing with each other for decades and decades. They are the ones who last the longest in heaven. (I haven’t read the book yet, but coincidentally I was reading another one of Barnes’ books.)
Coincidence or not, a day later I came across an article by Nigel Warburton, of ‘Philosophy Bites’ fame, on how philosophy is above all about conversation. (Those podcasters like their talking alright.) The article points out that, while the image of the philosopher as the lone thinker, associated with Descartes, Boethius, and Wittgenstein, is still influential, it is simply a very partial, if not entirely wrong, picture of philosophical practice. Warburton relies on John Stuart Mill to emphasize the importance of conversation and dissent for philosophical inquiry:
[I]t was John Stuart Mill who crystallised the importance of having your ideas challenged through engagement with others who disagree with you. In the second chapter of On Liberty (1859), he argued for the immense value of dissenting voices. It is the dissenters who force us to think, who challenge received opinion, who nudge us away from dead dogma to beliefs that have survived critical challenge, the best that we can hope for. Dissenters are of great value even when they are largely or even totally mistaken in their beliefs.
The general idea of philosophy as a performative, conversational practice is of course as old as philosophy itself: (Western-style) philosophy was born out of the dialectical practices of ancient Greek thinkers, and achieved its first mature stage in the person of the ‘conversationalist par excellence’ Socrates. (In case it’s not clear: this is meant as an ironic remark, as Socrates seems to have been a royal pain to his interlocutors.) The extent to which dialectic is a proper method for philosophical inquiry is still debated among scholars of ancient philosophy, but there is no doubt (to me at least) that even if philosophy became ‘emancipated’ from dialectic at some point in history, it retained many features of its genealogical origin in dialectic.
And thus, I tell my students to think of the history of philosophy as well as of contemporary philosophical practice as a matter of large (and somewhat adversarial) conversations, with each historical figure responding to (and criticizing) the views of her predecessors. As such, it turns out that Grice’s conversational maxims apply rather well to philosophical conversations, and offer some guidance to my students who are in the process of learning how to participate in these conversations (both in writing and orally).
- The maxim of quantity: don’t take too long to make a claim or present an argument; make it short and ‘to the point’. (We all know those annoying people who go on and on at Q&A sessions…) This applies to written contexts too.
- The maxim of quality: don’t make claims if you have no arguments/reasons to support them. After all, the point is to enlighten yourself and your interlocutors. However, to demand truthfulness would be too strong, as often not knowing the truth about a given matter is what motivates a philosophical exchange in the first place.
- The maxim of relation: this is perhaps one of the hardest lessons to be learned by a philosophy student. A philosophical analysis should always be embedded in ongoing philosophical conversations; you’ll be responding to what someone else has said previously, which means that (presumably!) someone will want to listen. Otherwise, you’ll be talking in a vacuum, and that’s simply not what philosophy is about. (There are interesting issues with this aspect, in particular the extent to which philosophical practice is too tied to the ‘latest fashion’.)
- The maxim of manner: this one is (sadly) all too often forgotten, but precisely because of the importance of dissent in philosophical debate, ‘manners’ become even more crucial than in purely cooperative exchanges.
What is perhaps surprising is that Grice’s maxims are supposed to apply first and foremost to cooperative exchanges, while philosophical conversations as I’ve been describing them involve a fair amount of dissent and adversariality. But as I’ve emphasized in previous posts (and has often been misunderstood), the adversariality I am talking about is of a special kind, one which could be described as ‘virtuous adversariality’. Indeed, my current model to think about this notion is the one found in Aristotle’s Topics VIII, where he describes a virtuous opponent who engages in dialectical disputations in a non-cantankerous way. In a sense, what one finds in Topics VIII (though one also finds less noble advice there…) is a codification of what counts as Gricean ‘manners’ in a dialectical-philosophical debate: how to be a virtuous opponent. Now, these lessons remain just as topical now as they were 2,500 years ago.
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