a taste for desert landscapes

 

Like my hero David Hume, I have a serious problem with technical philosophy.

A lot of people don’t like to admit that, because if you have a problem with technical philosophy, the real problem might be that you are an idiot. (“Frankly, you are an idiot”, as Dr Peter King of Pembroke College Oxford reminded me in a private communication.) A lot of technical philosophy is allowed to pass for no better reason than that people tend to be defensive about their self-image, and so tend to be reluctant to ask: “What are you talking about?” (— “What? You don’t understand this technical stuff? — Why, you must be an idiot!”)

The ability to do technical philosophy is much like the ability of teenage X-Box users to reach the upper levels of Halo III. You need to find it interesting enough to put a lot of time into it. That involves a sort of “active idleness”, in which you squander time and resources to do something busily.

Some people embrace technical detail because they think arcaneness signals depth. But generally, acrcaneness signals lack of expanations instead.

No one doubts that technicality is sustainable in linguistic systems that have a foundational structure. For example, in any branch of mathematics (or in physics, say, or logic) new terms are formally introduced using stipulative definitions, and claims are established by showing that they can be derived from axioms or basic principles using rules of inference. There is no limit to the precision or abstractness of the terms that can be embedded in such a “foundational” structure. Quite a lot of scientific language has that structure. (Although some doesn’t: evolutionary biology, for example, is essentially the rigorous tracing of a narrative — literally “natural history”.)

However, most discourse does not have that foundational structure — and wherever it doesn’t, terms acquire meaning through custom or regular use. Claims are tentatively accepted as hypotheses rather than being “proved” by being derived from more basic claims. (If they do not seem like hypotheses at first sight, that is simply because they are not currently subject to scrutiny.)

Custom/use is much vaguer than stipulative definition. The precision of a term whose “meaning” is fixed in that way is limited in various ways — by the extent of agreement among users of the term, by degree of abstractness (i.e. how immediately a claim can be confirmed by observation), and so on.

Nearly all philosophical speculation uses discursive language that does not have the foundational structure described above. Technicality cannot be sustained in such a discursive medium. So again, like Hume, I’m inclined to think that the real problem lies not in “my problem with technical philosophy”, but with those who do not see that there is a serious problem with technical philosophy. They see a foundational structure where none exists.

Personally, I think it is “ironic” that this came up recently in a discussion about Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein couldn’t stand Hume, and so didn’t read much of his work, but the two great philosophers converged on roughly the same position: Hume with his distrust of “the abstruse reasonings of philosophers,” and Wittgenstein with his hostility towards “scientism”.

This intense distrust of technicality in discursive language is also found in the writings of Edmund Burke, who used the term of abuse ‘oeconomists and philosophers’ to condemn those whose judgements were so far removed from common sense and observation that they should not be relied on for political decision-making.