Between Therapy and Armchair Science:

The Philosopher as Jedi Knight

Giuseppina D’Orog.d’oro@keele.ac.uk

https://keele.academia.edu/GiuseppinaDOro

Motivation for the paperThere has been a backlash against the linguistic turn

This backlash has resulted in a return of “serious” metaphysics (Devitt, Lowe, Heil etc.)

This means that if you do not Accept that our best scientific theories should define our ontological commitments

Practice a certain kind of armchair ontology which competes with science in determining what there

Then you are not doing serious philosophyWhere does this leave descriptive metaphysics?Even if one does not practice a certain kind of constructive metaphysics there is still sthg. positive for philosophy to do.

Jedi Knights

trained to guard peace and justice in the universe

Goals:To explain Collingwood’s appropriation of Kant’s reform of metaphysics and the nature of his idealist metaontology

To show where Collingwood’s own version of a metaphysics of experience sits in relation to the contemporary metaontological debate

To argue that it offers an interesting and neglected picture of what philosophy does... which appropriates some Kantian insights.

This view of the role of philosophy sits between a conception of philosophy as therapy and armchair science

Collingwood’s idealist metaontology

Philosophy keeps the peace amongst world views.

How? By showing that contrasting and incompatible ways of considering reality are made possible by different absolute presuppositions

What are Absolute presuppositions?Sometimes construed as “what people believed” in e.g. Middle ages

Here construed as: what must be logically presupposed in order for a certain form of enquiry to be possible

Causation is an absolute presuppositionDifferent forms of enquiry have different presuppositions.

History (understood as a hermeneutic science) and the practical and the theoretical sciences of nature absolutely presuppose different senses of causation.

Causation in the practical sciences of natureIn the practical sciences of nature, sciences such as medicine and engineering, a cause is an

“event or state of things by producing or preventing which we can produce or prevent that whose cause it is said to be.”

No self-respecting car mechanic, doctor or engineer, could operate without presupposing that this sense of causation captures what it means to provide an explanation. For without presupposing that nature can be manipulated to produce certain results (wind to generate electricity; vaccines to prevent illnesses) their form of enquiry would not be possible. (Collingwood, R.G. 1940, p. 296-7).

In the theoretical sciences of nature such as physics, the sense of causation is deterministic and abstracts from human purposes. Thus a cause is not a handle that can be manipulated to obtain certain desired effects but an unconditional antecedent condition such that if the cause obtains the effect will follow

In history a cause is not an antecedent condition but a motive which conceptually entails the action that it explains. Explanations of actions relieve us of our puzzlement by showing us what the point of acting in a particular way is.

Absolute presuppositions determine subject matter/regional ontologiesThe subject matter of history is actions (means not that historians investigate what human beings do, but that action is that which investigated by the historical method

In this technical sense (not in the everyday sense) Action is a category of Collingwood’s metaphysics.

Equally the natural sciences study events in the technical sense of that which is investigated inductively in some.

Method determines subject matter

Absolute presuppositions as hinges

AP are like hinges on doors that open onto different conceptions of reality

The hinges are invisibleWhere are they hidden?You will find them in forms of inference

How do you discover these inferences?They are implicit in the kind of statements made by the practitioners of the first order disciplines

Task of the philosopher is to oil the hinges when the door gets stuck on one conception of what is real.

C’s metaphysics of experience and nature of philosophical problemsTask of metaphysics: to uncover the presuppositions which are normative for different forms of enquiry

Philosophical problems arise when we hit certain hinges

Philosophical problems are neither ontologically deepNor something that we can overcome (a peculiarly bad episode in the history of philosophy)

This is a distinctive position in the contemporary. metaontological debate

Two ways of characterizing philosophical problems in contemporary metaontology

The metaontological debate is polarized between two ways of characterizing philosophical problems

Philosophical disputes are merely verbal

Therapeutic conception of philosophy

Philosophical disputes are ontologically deepThis position is underpinned by a revisionary conception of metaphysics and leads to Eliminativism/nihilism

Collingwood’s metaphysics lives in a twilight zone

Takes philosophical problems to be conceptual problems which arise AP disclose mutually incompatible conceptions of reality

Denies that they are “ontologically deep”

Intermediate position between a therapeutic conception of the task of philosophy and “serious” metaphysics.

Philosophical problems are substantive not merely verbal and yet not ontologically deep

Philosophical disputes are verbalConsider on the one hand two persons disagreeing about whether something is a mug or a glass. If, on closer examination, one established that the first person used the term “mug” to mean a drinking vessel made of ceramic whilst the other used the term to mean any drinking vessel with a handle, there would not seem to be anything substantive at stake in their disagreement. In spite of appearances to the contrary the disagreement is not ontological; it is not about the way things are but about what linguistic conventions to adopt. Such a disagreement is no more profound than that between an Englishman who says, this is an eggplant, and a Frenchman who rebuts, “Ceci n'est pas une eggplant, c’est une aubergine”.

Philosophical problems are like this, nothing deep there. (Hirsch, Thomasson)

If philosophical disputes are verbal then...There is no genuine disagreementAnd there is no genuine philosophical problem

Just a misunderstandingPhilosophical problems are to be dissolved

The conception of philosophy is mostly therapeutic

Example of a dissolutionJust as anyone who knows that there is a left hand glove and a right hand glove also knows (by analytic entailment) that there is a pair of gloves, likewise anyone who knows “that there are molecules arranged baseballwise” knows (by analytic entailment) “that there is a baseball”. And just as anyone who grasps the analytic entailments between the claims “there is a left hand glove and a right and glove” and “there is a pair of gloves” would not say “there is a right hand glove, a left hand glove and a pair of gloves”, likewise anyone who grasps the analytic entailments between the claims “there are molecules arranged baseballwise” and “there is a baseball” should not say “there are molecules arranged baseballwise and there is a baseball”.

These conversational prohibitions undermine the idea that it is necessary to eliminate ordinary macroscopic objects in order to avoid causal rivalry between scientific and common sense explanations.

For, if it is illegitimate to conjoin the claims “there is a baseball and there are atoms arranged baseballwise”, it is also illegitimate to conjoin the claims “the shattering of the window was caused by the baseball and by the atoms arranged baseballwise”. Making such analytic entailments explicit defuses the problem of explanatory exclusion and eases the pressures that have driven contemporary metaphysicians to advocate a kind of nihilism (Thomasson 2007)

Philosophical disputes are ontologically deepConsider the disagreement between two persons over whether a certain celestial body is a moon or a planet. Even if, on closer reflection, one established that the two persons have different linguistic conventions (one person has a moon-exclusive concept of a planet whilst the other person’s concept of a planet includes both bodies which orbit around a star and bodies which orbit around another celestial body), the dispute would not, as a result of this discovery, be unmasked as purely verbal. For whether we call a celestial body which revolves around another one a planet or a moon is a matter of linguistic convention, but whether the Moon revolves around the sun or around Earth is not. Altering our linguistic conventions does not, after all, change the orbits of celestial bodies any more than naming something an aubergine or an eggplant determines whether it is a fruit or a berry.

Revisionary metaphysicians: philosophical disputes are like this, not verbal, more like scientific disputes.

If philosophical problems are ontologically deep then...The dispute is genuineThere will be winners and losers.If the scientific image wins, then the manifest image looses and we must revise our ontology accordingly:

There are no statuesI do not existThere are no chairs

Neither/nor

Collingwood:

philosophical problems are substantive yet not ontologically deep

Collingwood on the nature of philosophical problemsPhilosophical problems are

unlike the aubergine/eggplant case. Not merely verbal. They are inherent in the structure of thought

Not like the moon/planet case. Philosophy is not a form of armchair science.

Consider the debate between causalists anti-causalists

Causalists maintain that all events are causally explained and that since everything that is or exists is an event, actions too are (covert) events to be explained causally: they are events with a particular type of causal history, one that is internal (a brain process) rather than external.

Anti-causalists, by contrast, maintain that to explain an action is not to explain it causally but to understand it rationally as an expression of thought or by invoking a practical argument which explains the action in the hermeneutic rather than the causal sense of “explain”.

If this were a debate between “serious”/revisionary metaphysicians

The “serious” ontologists on either side of this divide would argue that a revision of our ontological commitments follows from a methodological endorsement of either causalism or anti-causalism.

Much as the nihilist would claim that there are no ordinary objects, the causalist would claim that there are no actions, iff by “actions” one means something that has an irreducibly non-causal explanation.

Causalists may not demand any linguistic reform as a result of the ontological commitments entailed by the endorsement of their preferred conceptual framework, but since their view is that what really/genuinely/truly rather than apparently exists are events, strictly speaking there are no such thing as actions, at least not in the sense of action espoused by the anti-causalist. So whilst we may, outside the philosopher’s study, be allowed to speak with the vulgar, any talk about actions is at best a façon de parler.

For Collingwood by contrastThe disagreement between the causalist and the anti-causalist is not ontologically deep: the causalist and the anti-causalist are disagreeing about the categorial framework that is normative for practitioners of the natural and the human sciences.

The disagreement is not verbal either. In a purely verbal dispute there is nothing substantive at stake; the dispute arises because the two sides are using certain terms differently whilst granting that they mean the same thing, as in the aubergine/eggplant example. But the causalist and the anti-causalist do not mean the same thing when asserting or denying “this is an action”. When causalists speak about actions they simply use the term to qualify the type of event that is being described; for the causalist the term action denotes a species of the category event in the way in which “Siamese” qualifies the genus “cat”. For anti-causalists, by contrast, action is a category sui generis that is logically or conceptually independent of the concept of event.

The causalist and the anti-causalist are therefore disagreeing about whether the concepts of “action” and “event” are or are not concepts sui generis and whether the mode of enquiry which is concerned with actions is/is not an autonomous discipline. This is not trivial.

What is at stake in the causalist/anti-causalist debate

Not mere nomenclature but the explanandum of the human sciences and whether or not they enjoy methodological autonomy with respect to the natural sciences.

Since on Collingwood’s proposal the concept of action and event are analytically independent sui generis categories, the dispute between the causalist and the anti-causalist cannot be deflated by claiming that anybody who states “there is an action” ought to accept “there is an event” in the manner in which anybody who accepts “there is a house” ought to accept “there is a building”.

The dispute between the causalist and the anti-causalist cannot be deflated by showing that anti-causalists have a limited or partial grasp of the concept of action and were they to have a complete grasp of this concept they would see that “there is an action” entails “there is an event”, much as someone with a full grasp of the concept of a triangle would be able to see that the Pythagorean theorem is entailed by it. The claim that the human and the natural sciences have different explananda is premised not on an argument from ignorance, but on the view that the concept of action and event do not stand to one another as the species to the genus.

Substantive yet non-ontologically deep disagreementsSubstantive but non-ontologically deep philosophical disagreements arise when logically independent categories come into contact and clash.

The task of philosophy is precisely that of locating these logical or conceptual joints. This occurs when the sui generis nature of certain concepts is acknowledged.

When this is done our conceptual map is refined and enriched. Philosophical advances are made when we come up against a new logical joint and as a result make more nuanced distinctions.

Not a midwifery view!On the midwifery view, when philosophical questions are refined and become more concrete a new science is born and philosophy gradually loses territory to a new discipline. Thus, for example, metaphysics gives way to physics and philosophy of mind to neuroscience.

On Collingwood’s view, when further distinctions are made our conceptual grasp becomes more fine-grained and multi-faceted. Our understanding of the situation becomes more nuanced because a further determination, which was previously overlooked, enables us to articulate more clearly the complexity of the situation. The philosopher (and I do not mean the academic philosopher) is the person who can view reality under these different descriptions, who can acknowledge, for example, that a painting may be beautiful and yet morally repugnant, that a person may be causally responsible and yet morally innocent, depending on the kind of judgment which is called for. The philosopher is the person who makes the relevant distinctions and does not see things in black and white.

This is a positive not a merely therapeutic role for philosophy to play

More locating in metaontological debateThe shopping list objection: if our ontological commitments are dictated by the way in which we use language than the list of metaphysical categories will be a very long shopping list. (Jackson)

This is just another deflationary strategy! For the dispute to be substantive it would have to be settled by establishing what there really is in some presuppositionless sense of being.

Reply to the shopping list objection

Collingwood is not so much defending the existence of middle sized goods such as tins of tuna fish, baked beans and such like, as vindicating the kind of reality within which objects can be revealed in a particular way.

In the tradition of Kantian metaphysics, rather than that of ordinary language philosophy, he is concerned not with middle sized goods but with the nature of the judgments which are at work in various domains of experience, theoretical, practical, aesthetic etc. The categories of his metaphysics are determined by the form of the inferences we adopt. The list may be difficult to draw but unlikely to be a very long shopping list.

Reply to “this is just deflationism” objection

Collingwood does deny that the conflict is ontological in the sense of “ontological” required by the serious metaphysician. For once it is acknowledged that the human and the natural sciences have different explananda, and that there is no explanandum for God, the conflict is somehow deflated since it is no longer construed as being about whether reality (in some presuppositionless sense of the term) can be both causally and rationally ordered, but about whether reality can be simultaneously described as being both causally and rationally ordered.

But Collingwood’s approach is not straightforwardly deflationary. For he does hold that there is a genuine conceptual tension between the explanatory practices of the human and the natural sciences even if the tension is not in the things, but in the way in which we represent them. The task of the philosopher is not to get rid of the tensions (for example by reducing or eliminating the mental, or by denying that there are any aesthetic properties strictly speaking) but to allow them to be by exposing the multi-faceted character of reality. The role of the philosopher, like that of the Jedi knight is to keep order in the universe by restoring balance to the force when the scales tip too heavily on one side.