The Wipe

As a thorough amateur whose first intellectual love was and whose current work is in science, but whose real marriage remains to philosophy, this Anus took it upon itself to read again some analytic philosophy, after discovering James and Dewey late in life. Anal-lysis, it found, was rife with pragmatism. Now rife, it remains the dominant form of philosophy in departments across the country (the Anus’ alma mater was thankfully not so). So, it stands to reason this form of life, as Wittgenstein might call it, is the true inheritor of what might be Americas most important contribution to the Western humanities — pragmatism. The torch of pragmatism, it assumed, had been carried on by anal-lysis. What else, it thought, could this generation of self-declared pragmatists be doing otherwise?

The Anus was sadly mistaken. Previous experience should have warned it ahead of time (is it really possible grown men and women devote their careers to the epistemology of Gettier problems?!), but being a good empiricist, The Anus set those conceptions aside and tried anal-lysis again, hoping to find in the dominant tradition of his countrymen inspiration and tools to help answer some long standing questions about, as Sellars once said, “how things hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term,” with “no intellectual holds barred.”

Instead, it found Rorty, Searle, Putnam, Davidson and Quine, luminaries and stars one and all, and not even members of the legions of laborers who contribute the bulk of the normal literature, in the journals.

But oh my god…what is there to say that hasn’t already been said?

Well, from reading and writing about them over the past year or so, The Anus has learned to think better for itself, and from that effort it has learned two enduring lessons.

First, The Anus notes how unbelievably vapid some of the most popular work in anal-lysis really is. As just one — though perhaps the worst — instance[1]: in 1996, after thirty years of reflection and well into the investigation of language acquisition (The Anus once worked in an infant perception lab), Quine revisited the “Gavagai” problem, without realizing how the problem remains unsolvable as he posed it, and equally unaware that any attempt to solve it in those terms would only presuppose exactly what it seeks to explain, and therefore it would explain nothing.

Nevertheless, in “Progress on Two Fronts” Quine said: “let me pinpoint the problem.” Then he shows that common meaning, reference and therefore translation is possible after all (who knew?!). How? Because of “a pre-established harmony of standards of perceptual similarity, independent of intersubjective likeness of receptors or sensations.” And on top of this, he adds: this pre-established harmony is itself “explained by yet a deeper but more faltering pre-established harmony between perceptual similarity and the environment,” one established by natural selection (emphasis added).

So, in other words, what every speaking human being does and knows — i.e., refer words to objects in a translatable mutual understanding — they do because they are pre-ordained to do so, and they are pre-ordained to do so because the sensory apparatus permitting access to the things they name — despite being different across perceivers — are pre-ordained (most of the time!) to detect in the object the same ‘thing,’ at the same ‘time,’ in the same ‘way.’

Oh yeah, and natural selection makes this so.

Scientifically and philosophically speaking…well, no, just speaking at all…it’s completely idiotic, and that it took a lifetime of effort to say — an effort that spawned an entire cottage industry of “naturalized epistemology” — is, to put it mildly, an intellectual disgrace. That this disgrace comes, as it were, from “one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century”[2] defies belief.

The second thing The Anus notes is how much anal-lysis both loves and hates but nonetheless thrives on dichotomies extracted from everyday intuitions or derived from prior philosophy, which are then turned into mutually exclusive polar opposites, such that these become a pressing philosophical problem. Just to name a few: the coherence versus the correspondence of ideas and facts; the relativity of paradigms versus objective, cumulative knowledge; conceptual scheme versus bare content; the space of reasons versus the space of causes; epistemology versus hermeneutics; norm versus content; use versus meaning; or The Anus’ favorite, psychological nominalism versus ‘awareness like a thermostat.’

Careers have evidently been made exploiting the conceptual implications of these dichotomies — implications, however, that stem en masse from a common ‘fallacy,’ one observed by Dewey nearly a century ago: that of turning a functional, logical distinction into antecedently existing options — in other words, turning a functional, logical distinction into an ontological one, one that poses as alternatives two mutually exclusive options in need of reconciliation, when in fact they logically occur together.

Long ago, Dewey called this the philosophic fallacy. Today, it seems to drive anal-lysis.

For instance — to sketch the so-called ‘problems’ in their barest form…

…functionally, ideas and facts do correspond, but they do so with an eventual solution like a key corresponds to and opens a lock, not as a replica existing ‘in the mind’ corresponds to a template or an original existing ‘in the world,’ against which belief must be assessed. And on the flip side, ideas developed amongst themselves do cohere (that’s the whole point of developing their implications), even as this conceptual coherence reveals new existential subject matter (read “facts”) for resolving conceptual problems into unified explanations.

Or again…

…functionally speaking, ‘conceptual schemes’ organize ‘content’ into actual and potential avenues of research, even as ‘content’ gives ‘conceptual schemes’ something to organize and something to direct. Both work in conjunction to formulate the terms of a problem, and to indicate possible means of solution.

Or yet again…

…in functional terms, “paradigms” do determine both modes of scientific conceptualization and agendas of scientific research, even as new objective knowledge forces a re-evaluation of these prior, only partially incommensurate paradigms[3]…

And yet, yet again…

…words have meanings because of their uses, but their uses are also determined by their meanings. Logically, “use” and “meaning” are two sides a logical coin, functionally understood in terms of how language works.

And so on and so on, right up to perhaps the biggest bugaboo of all…

…. psychological nominalism, where functionally understood the awareness that comes with using linguistic symbols transforms the awareness of prior significance relations into new dimensions of discernment and manipulation, even as these prior significance relations remain — at least in part — that which this new awareness is about.[4]

The obfuscation in apparent aporias that occurs when the philosophic fallacy is committed can be seen over and over again in the false dichotomies that both plague and nourish anal-lysis. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, they generally turn a functional correspondence in concordant operations geared toward eventual use into mutually exclusive, antecedently existing options, thus transforming their collaboration into an irresolvable, existential paradox that in practice never arises.

Like with fleshing out the pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo and methodological question begging this is Quine’s “naturalized epistemology,” it would be rather straightforward to show that for a true pragmatist — one inspired by James and persuaded by Dewey — none of these dichotomies arise as philosophical problems. Rather, they emerge as functional distinctions that work in tandem in the process of deliberate inquiry; they have both their proper place and their “resolution” there. That this was postulated and partially developed nearly a century ago, decades prior to the rise of anal-lytic philosophy, is perhaps less an intellectual disgrace, as is the case with Quine, than a case of curious neglect: pragmatism was already far better developed than the directions taken in anal-lytic philosophy decades before that professionalized genre even got itself off the ground.

Or so at least The Anus maintains. While the sampling thus far is possibly too small and not representative enough to say for sure, The Anus suspects there is no worthwhile intuition in anal-lytic pragmatism that wasn’t pre-empted and better developed by the traditional pragmatists, just without all the rigmarole that comes with squeezing out the hidden implications in the conceptual fog committing “the philosophic fallacy” entails. Not only do the problems dissolve from the logical and functional point of view suggested by James and developed by Dewey; the decent intuitions that sometimes get caught up in anal-lysis — and there have to be some, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense even to its practitioners — find their real home there.

That that home was built long before the current tenants squatted in it is almost impossible to believe, but it is nevertheless quite evident from this Anus’ visit. So far it has found nothing worthwhile in anal-lysis that wasn’t already articulated in traditional pragmatism.[5]

The Anus could go on, but it has had enough. It has had its hopes dashed (or its expectations fulfilled, however one wants to look at it) often enough to just leave anal-lysis be. Life, it thinks, is far too short to spend it wasting time expositing a conceptual fog that no one but professionals in the field even cares about, even if it’s only to expose that exposition for what it is — just so much confusion. So much exciting work is being done in the study of language and cultural cognition; in the biological basis of cultural evolution, and that evolution separately; in norm and institutional analysis in economics; in the foundations of probability and statistical methods; in the neuroscience of mind/body, perception and consciousness; in philosophical scholarship generally…in virtually any field where practitioners are trying to obtain reliable knowledge of a domain of experience, be that lived or read — fields in which anal-lytic philosophers have presumed to judge and sometimes meddle.

Life is just too short set that work aside any longer to correct conceptual muddle, which is best just ignored.

Dewey once hoped for philosophy that it would become “a critical organ,” in effect “a messenger, a liaison officer, making reciprocally intelligible voices speaking provincial tongues, and thereby enlarging as well as rectifying the meanings with which they are charged.” To put it crudely — and what Anus can help being crude — through anal-lysis philosophy becomes a dumping exercise among very clever men, jockeyed within an insular self-importance built on pointless puzzles — or as Aristophanes said, so much “hairsplitting twaddle.” No one else seems to care, nor should they.

So, what should an Anus do? Having exposed some aspects of “hairsplitting twaddle” (it hopes!), The Anus is going to focus on trying to be more like the philosopher Dewey calls for — a liaison office. As examples it looks to works that might actually influence scientific practitioners, or other interested readers — several have come into its possession. [6] Perhaps, it hopes, even to write something like them on some topic one day.

But either way, the only thing for an Anus to do after having done its business with anal-lysis is to wipe itself, and having written this blog over the past few months, this one considers itself clean, hands washed and all. Now it’s time to get back to the real work that comes from the heart and mind, not the anus and its flexing…

[1] The Anus calls this the worst, but a closely competing second could be Warrant and Proper Function, the companion volume to the book summarizing “warrant” and its current debate (in a book by that name). Apparently Gettier is still making waves. As the author’s contribution to how we come to know, the entire book is devoted to the position that judgements can’t be reliable unless the means of judging itself is functioning properly. Seriously, a whole book. The Anus can’t decide what’s worse: that the author thought of that and wrote a whole book on it, or he could because apparently no one else had thought of that before.

[2] It would be wearisome and trivial in the extreme to show how at every conceptual joint Quine’s “naturalized epistemology” presupposes exactly what it seeks to explain; that at every joint the passage from “stimulus to science” he purports to develop imports either common sense through the back door, along with a bunch of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo; that this clandestine conceptual smuggling is all that gives his account its [sic] explanatory force. The Roots of Reference and Word and Object are just the tip of the iceberg — or perhaps a better metaphor, the roots of the whole rotted-out tree. But the Anus leaves that task to some would-be professional anal-lytic looking to grind out a career-making Ph.D. It could easily be done, and one wouldn’t have to presuppose the validity of the best current — or for that matter any current — theories of language use and language acquisition to do it. The thing would practically write itself from within Quine’s own terms, relying on only a cursory knowledge of behaviorism and neurophysiology — the kind one might get in their second year of undergraduate work (when the Anus in fact got its own).

[3] Since this one is likely to give many a reader pause (it seems so unlikely that something so obvious could be overlooked by so many), The Anus refers the doubtful to just one of the many popular college physics texts (like his own, Halliday, Resnick and Walker, Fundamentals of Physics) for accounts of how, for instance, the quantum theory of wave motion or the relativistic theory of time dilation are commensurate with traditional mechanics when certain conditions — all of which are objectively determinable — obtain. This is done both mathematically and conceptually for these and other examples of so-called “incommensurate paradigms,” in box notes. It’s really quite eye opening if one comes to the book saturated with paradigm talk, but it’s something physicists quite rightly take for granted.

For more advanced versions, the reader is invited to consult Wheeler, Misner and Thorne in Gravitation, where commensurability between classical and relativistic ‘paradigms’ are usually left to the student as exercises for demonstrating that he or she understands both.

[4] Dewey was not unaware that “prior” raises the question of priority, as in: which comes first, significance relations that get denoted or the meaning relations that do the denoting — a language/reality chicken or egg problem. His discussion and conclusion — that pragmatically the question is “rhetorical” — can be found in Chapter 3 of Logic: The Theory in Inquiry, p. 61.

[5] For the ‘source’ and ‘spirit’ of these functional distinctions, as well as some early explanations, readers can simply consult William James’s Pragmatism, The Meaning of Truth, and any number of his longer essays on epistemological and metaphysical issues. For specific details on how most (if not all) of the mutually exclusive antecedent dichotomies plaguing most (if not all) of pre-pragmatic philosophy actually play cooperative, functional roles in inquiry or experience, readers can examine Dewey’s Essays in Experimental Logic, Experience and Nature, The Quest for Certainty, and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, not to mention any number of his shorter papers on specific topics. It really is eye-opening to see the functional distinctions presupposed in the puerile wrangling of anal-lysis preemptively worked out when Sellars, Quine, and Gettier were probably still in grade school.

[6] To name just three: David Buller, Adapting Minds, Philip Kitcher Vaulting Ambition, and Samir Osaka Evolution and the Levels of Selection.