philosophical specialization and general philosophy

METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 24, Nos. 1 & 2, January/April 1993 0026-1068

PHILOSOPHICAL SPECIALIZATION AND GENERAL PHILOSOPHY

DAVID O’CONNOR

It is widely claimed nowadays that hilosophy in America today has entered into a post-analytic phase,P that a new ethos is emerging. Understanding of this claim is complicated, however, by the fact that “post-analytic’’ means different things to different people. If there is a common denominator in the various descriptions of this new stage it would seem to be a consensus that the grip upon the institution of philosophy in this country of the “arrogant ideology”’ of analysis has loosened considerably, perhaps even broken. In light of contemporary American philosophy’s having become decentered in this way, a question arises concerning the fate of general philosophy and “the problems of men,”3 as Dewey put it, in the developing philosophical environment. The context for my examination of this question here is set by the two following points,

1. that, to its detractors, analytic philosophy has represented many ills - the arrogant ideology alleged, severe technicality, professional disdain for the notion that, as philosophers, philosophers should have something to say about “the problems of men,” and a narrowness of vision exemplified by an acute specialization that simultaneously has reflected and bred uninterest in the large questions of meaning, existence, truth, and value that traditionally have been the province of general philosophy,

’ In addition to Richard Rorty’s writings of the last dozen years or thereabouts, especially Philosophy arid The Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1979) and Consequences of Pragmatism (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1982), see, for example, Richard Bernstein’s Presidential Address to the APA, “Pragmatism, Pluralism and the Healing of Wounds,” Proceedings & Addresses of The American Philosophical Association, Vol. 63, No. 3, Nov. (University of Delaware: Newark, DE, 1989); .4fter Philosophy: End or Transformation, eds. K. Baynes, J. Bohman, & T. McCarthy (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1987); Post-Analytic Philosophy, eds. J. Rajrhman & C. West (Columbia University Press: New York, 1985); Redrawing The Lines, ed. R. W. Dasenbrock (University of Minnesota Press: Minne- apolis, 1989); and Hao Wang, Beyond Analytic Philosophy, (MTT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1986). Although there IS no consensus as yet regarding the precise meaning of “post- analytic,” it may be suggested that post-analytic philosophy is less accurately thought of as just a successor to analytic philosophy than as a contemporary rival to it. For, at a minimum, obituaries for analytic philosophy may be premature. ’ Bernstein, op. cif . , p. 13.

John Dewey, “The Need for A Recovery of Philosophy,” The Philosophy ofJohn Dewey, ed. John J. MacDerrnott (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1973), p. 95.

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114 DAVID O’CONNOR

and

2. Bernstein’s warning that the emerging pluralism may turn out to be a

. . . the centrifugal forces [have] become so strong that we are only able to communicate with the small group that already shares our own biases, and no longer evcn experience the need to talk with others outside of this circle.4

Richard Rorty has expressed a convergent, although possible somewhat less pessimistic, view. As he puts it,

fragmented one wherein

[Even] [i]n the interlocking “central” areas of analytic philosophy - epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics - there are now as many paradigms as there are major philosophy department^.^

This view seems less pessimistic than Bernstein’s insofar as Rorty likens the present state of philosophy to a “jungle of competing research programs,”‘ and competition betokens at least some interaction. But, even if there is this difference between Bernstein and Rorty on the point in question, i t does not upset the consensus that philosophy in America today is becoming increasingly sub-fielded.

To the degree that Bernstein believes that general philosophy should not be expected to fare differently in the post-analytic future than in the analytic past, I agree with him. But this is a relative matter, and therein lies my difference with Bernstein. For it will be a bleak prediction to make about general philosophy that it may not fare better in a post- analytic than in an analytic environment only provided general philosophy’s lot was not a happy one in analytic times to begin with. But the idea that, through specialization and technicality, analytic philosophy stunted the big questions about meaning, truth, value and so on seems to me much exaggerated. In support of this belief I shall argue for the propositions, first, that specialized philosophy (whether analytic or post-analytic) is quite compatible with general philosophy and indeed contributes to it, and second, that specialized philosophy both retains access to the intellectual culture at large and contributes to it in useful ways. I will argue for these propositions in Parts I and I1 respectively.

I. Technicality, Specialization, and Comprehensiveness in Analytic Philosophy

In order to keep what is a large issue within tolerable bounds, I shall use

Bernstein, op. cit. , 15. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy in America Today,” Consequences of Pragmatism,

p. 216. ‘ Ibid.

PHILOSOPHICAL SPECIALIZATION AND GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 1 15

the example of Russell’s practice and conception of philosophy both for access to the present topic and as a model of what I mean. The following are the main features of his approach to philosophy that did most to speed the growth of virtually autonomous sub-fields in the subject:

3. his conviction that philosophical inquiry should be practiced piecemeal, and, more importantly, his own fidelity, by and large, to this in his own work; in practice this means that philosophical topics are divided into sections and addressed sectionally, a policy implicit from the start in Russell’s avowed pluralism, minimalism, and associated conception of analytical method

and

4. the highly technical nature of the apparatus employed in some of those piecemeal analyses of issue-sections, together with the then inevitable highly technical formulation of whatever section is being focused upon.

The former bears much of the initial responsibility for the widespread specialization that occurred within subsequent analytic philosophy, as the latter does for the considerable increase in its technicality.

If looked at in isolation, Russell’s theory of definite descriptions - famously described by F. P. Ramsay as the paradigm of good analytical philosophizing, and arguably the single most influential theory in philosophy in this century - is arcane, and quite possibly would strike the layman’ as either of only remote relevance to the great questions of meaning, truth, arid existence traditionally the province of the philosophers, or as a trivialization of philosophy’s proper work on those questions.8 Furthermore, the often strict technicality of analytic philosophy, together with the penchant among its practitioners for plain, even trivial-seeming, examples, as well as their fairly common practice of testing a hypothesis by trying to devise counter-examples to it - traits plainly evident in the theory of Russell’s mentioned, and thus in analytic philosophy from the beginning - has led its detractors to the supposition that analytic philosophy has become mere logical exercising, a barren scholasticism.

But, taking technicality first, there is no incompatibility in principle between technicality and comprehensiveness. After all, Russell was a schemer of philosophical schemes no less grand and universal than any imagined by any of’ his predecessors. In Our Kmwledge Of The External World, to take just one instance, he put the primary task of philosophy

“Layman,” as used here, is deliberately equivocal, being open to interpretation as meaning either non-philosophers or non-analytic philosophers, or indeed, analytic philosophers outside a given sub-field. ’ Legend has it that the editor of Mind in 1905 implored Russell not to insist upon publication of the paper containing the first formulation of the theory, the paper in question being “On Denoting.”


as the systematic effort to discover what kinds of facts there are and how those kinds of facts are related to one another. In this way of putting it, the main goal of philosophy is to take inventory of reality considered as the ultimate network of facts. So conceived, the philosopher’s ambition is the large-scale one of seeking “the broad outlines of the whole system of the world,” as W. V. Quine has put it.’ Nor is there any trace in this conception of that despair of philosophy which would come into vogue with the logical positivists in the 1930’s, and then subsequently, although in a changed and more comprehensive form with the second phase of Wittgenstein’s work, and again more recently through Rorty’s influence. In short, Russell’s philosophical program was quite tradi- tional, and continuous in that respect with those of most philosophers from Plato on down.

In the construction of general philosophical theories Russell was ever mindful of the need for those theories, no less than their counterparts in the sciences, to be tightly argued, with careful attention to each step in an inference. The analogy here might be with the design and construction of a building, for, if either is flawed, even in detail, the whole may be at risk for the life of the flaw. Applied to the large questions in philosophy, Russell’s use of technical means was in service of this aim of tight, precise, economical construction, the greatest possible clarity, and, something he was convinced was a product of such construction, the minimalization of error. However, while for Russell the new techniques were intended to be, and in actual fact were, significant aids to clarity and rigor in addressing, formulating, and solving the main problems of philosophy in an integrated and comprehensive way, the successful employment of this technical apparatus also had the (perhaps ironic) effect of steering many subsequent journeyman analytic philosophers away from comprehensiveness and towards specialization.

But in thus admitting that a byproduct of Russell’s perceived successes with the technical equipment of logic was an increased specialization in philosophy, have I not contradicted myself and defeated my purpose in this paper? I don’t think so. Let me try to find the balance of compatibility between the two points.

In large part the key lies in sociology and demographics, not in philosophy itself. For a major factor explaining the proliferation of specializations, indeed even sub-specializations within specializations, is the large growth in the numbers of professional philosophers.” Of the

“The Ideas Of Quine,” Men of Ideas, ed. B . Magee (Oxford University Press: New York, 1982), p. 143.

“’ On the evidence of the membership list of the American Philosophical Association published in its Proceedings, Vol. 64, No. 1 , September 1990, there are w e r 6,500 members of that organization. The actual number of academic philosophers in this country is a good deal higher than that however.

PHILOSOPHICAL SPECIALIZATION AND GENERAL PHILOSOPHY 117

many philosophers engaged in research and writing only a small number have both comprehensive ambitions and acknowledged success in achieving them. In analytic philosophy of recent times, W. V. Quine, Michael Dummett, David Lewis, Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke, and a few others, might meet both specifications. Those are the philosophers whose work and influence has constituted the front line in recent analytic philosophy. Each is master of formal logic and none shies from using it in his philosophical work. Much like Russell, their efforts at comprehensiveness have emerged from specialist work in one segment or other of philosophy, for instance Quine in logic and the philosophy of logic, Dummett in the philosophy of mathematics, and so on. In their work we find the construction of comprehensive theories plus detailed studies in miniature of some specific, narrowly cut, questions, often with the latter opening up avenues into the former. In their work, as in Russell's before them, the technical proficiency, the self-contained analyses of specific topics, and the general ambition to illuminate the big questions of philosophical interest belong together, however not all the time at the surface of attention, and not in each particular piece of philosophical work.

Among the remaining philosophers, the overwhelming majority of the profession at any given time, by and large it is less ambitious schemes that are schemed. The research work of these journeymen philosophers" tends to be in one, or perhaps two, sub-fields, and this work remains specialized simply because they do not sufficiently explore, or forge, links between the various specialties, as do Quine, Dummett and their ilk.

The situation I have been describing may be summarized in the five following points:

5. compared to philosophy in the past, there is just as much interest now as before in the large, general philosophical questions about reality, meaning, knowledge and so on;

6. in terms of numbers of analytically-minded philosophers of sufficient ability to make useful contributions to the general network of philosophical problems as such, there are arguably no fewer now than at any time past, indeed, quite possibly there are more;

but

7. overall there are many more philosophers now than at any time in history

I am thinking here of their work that is either published in the journals or that issues in papers read at scholarly conferences. Thus the fact that some journeymen philosophers write introductory textbooks, which is to say works that are certainly general in aim and scope, does not disconfirm my point.


and

8. a significant proportion of them contribute to the literature in the subject, and, in the case of analytic philosophers, their writing is conditioned by their having been schooled in symbolic logic and the other technical instruments prominent in Anglo-American philosophy in recent decades.

Obviously then ,

9. the bulk of the publications in analytic philosophy at any one time will have been contributed by the journeymen and not by the elite in the profession, thus they will tend to be both technical and narrow.

The net effect of these five points is that much philosophical writing is inaccessible to the non-specialist in a particular sub-field, and the field as a whole seems scattered. Some interpret this to mean that there is no hierarchy of issues within the subject any more and that no work at once fundamental and comprehensive is being done. And among analytic philosophy’s detractors the culprit of choice for this purported lack of depth and scope is the increase in technicality that begot the increase in specialization.

But that interpretation is mistaken, for the upshot of my five-point list is that there is as much depth and scope in recent analytic philosophy as ever in philosophy past, but that there is also a great deal more philosophical work going on now than ever before. It is the sheer quantity of this work spread among thousands of academic philosophers that gives the appearance of a subject without core problems, or large theories. But this appearance belies reality.

The mix of technicality, specialization, and comprehensiveness to be found in analytic philosophy seems comparable to the state of research in physics. There are certain problems which physicists would regard as the basic ones. But, among physicists, there are few theoreticians of sufficient ability to do large-scale pioneering work on those. Most research in physics is conducted by journeyman physicists specializing in a particular sub-field of the subject. The various sub-fields do indeed connect up with the core problems and thus with each other, although it is only rarely in the life of a piece of actual research that this would need to come up for explicit mention or exploration. And so it is too in analytic philosophy as that is reflected in the professional journals.

There is one further dimension to the mix of technicality, specialization, and comprehensiveness that is worth noting here. That is this: between technical means, on the one hand, and general philosophical programs and theories, on the other, there is an asymmetrical relationship. This particular relationship is neither new nor unique to twentieth-century analytic philosophy by any means, but it is made


acute therein by the greatly increased level of formal technique. For it happens quite often that a piece of the argumentation surrounding or supporting a general philosophical proposition can profitably be examined (for its logic, say) out of context from, and without need of reference to, the supporting role it plays in relation to that general proposition or theory. However, to consider the latter, that is the general proposition itself, alone and in separation from its support- system of detailed formulation and argument, could easily make it appear to be either something utterly platitudinous or utterly farcical. An example of such seeming platitudinousness might be Wittgenstein’s claims in the Tractatus that “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” and ‘,‘The world is all that is the case,” and an example of seeming farce mip,ht be Descartes’s claim in the Meditations that he may not really have a body at all. For who would ever suppose anything other than the former, and who would ever suppose the latter? In context, though, these are neither trivial nor silly, but instead crucial and plausible points in elaborate systems of thought that do not accede to casual dismissal, nor indeed to unreflective endorsement.

Let us now broaden this discussion to include relations between technical, sub-fielded philosophy and the general intellectual culture.

11. Trickle-down Philosophy

In opposition to the view that analytic philosophy, given its specialist and technical bent, is irrelevant to issues in real life, to the general education of the undergraduate population, and to the intellectual culture at large, I will offer a model that displays such relevance and involvement, although neither is immediate or direct. I will call this the trickle-down model of analytic philosaphy , and I acknowledge its name to be a parasite upon that of a much-disputed recent economic theory, about which I have nothing to say, beyond noting that the fortunes of the two models are quite unconnected.

My point can best be developed analogically. Research in the natural sciences is conducted by being parcelled out in narrowly conceived, tightly focused problems. Groups of scientists, in different teams at different research centers, work on those problems. After time findings are formulated, criticized, published, tested again, perhaps established. These research efforts, failures, and findings are almost certainly entirely unintelligible to the layman. Furthermore they are, for the most part, equally uninteresting to him. The presentation of results in the various specialist journals that serve the biochemical community, for instance, forbids casual reading, or even concentrated reading, by laymen. They are the writings of the specialists, written for other specialists. The lay public is utterly uninvolved and unheeded in this


enterprise. But this lack of lay comprehension and interest does not mean that such technical, specialized work has no ramifications or value beyond itself. For, although the average general medical practitioner does not keep up with this literature, some of the results published in the specialist journals find their way to him. And through him these acquire a certain relevance to the public at large, although not in any shape that requires or promotes general interest in, or access to, the original research itself. Let this be a sketch of the trickle-down procedures of medically related scientific research, and let it be accepted as a proxy for the general practice of science and for the route of its introduction - to the extent that it becomes introduced - into the general intellectual culture. Let us turn back now to philosophy and to the analogy I have in mind.

Among analytic philosophers in recent times there has been much interest in supervenience, the alleged indeterminacy of translation, counterfactuals, rigid designators, convention T , anomolous monism, speech acts, universals, possible worlds, proper basicality, and much more. Each of these, together with the tangle of issues in which it is embedded, would be quite inaccessible to the average layman or non- philosophy major, if either happened across them. Futhermore, some of them are probably also relatively inaccessible to professional philosophers, even other analytic philosophers, whose particular research interests lie elsewhere. Thus, a low-level, general, undergraduate philosophy class which dwelt upon the specifics of reference-theory , for instance, or Tarski-style theories of truth, would probably leave most of the students un-enlightened, restless, possibly dumbfounded. Yet Quine and Davidson and Kripke and Austin and others have re-shaped issues in metaphysics, semantics, and epistemology in ways that can - in the kinds of general terms that we use to familiarize our undergraduate students with Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel and so on - be passed along as recent emendations to, or sometimes reformations of, long-discussed issues.’* And in that way

’’ Hcrc arc somc cxamplcs of what I mean. In ”On what there is” (1948), Word and Object (1960), and “Ontological Relativity” (1968) Quine adds new dimensions to philosophy’s ancient debate over what, in the final analysis, is real. The views he defends derive an important part of their power and interest from the manner in which they invite us to reconsider certain theories of Plato’s, Aristotle’s, the medieval logicians’, as well as of philosophers of more recent vintage. Furthermore Quine’s “Epistemology Naturalized (1968) re-directs us to a key assumption in epistemology since Plato (originally) and Descartes (more recently), namely, the assumption that pure detachment from epistemic committments is, first, possible, and second, necessary for epistemology to be done. His “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) challenges the distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact that has been a virtual philosophical orthodoxy since Leibniz. In Sense and Sensibitia (1962) Austin casts serious doubt upon another long-accepted inheritance from the 17th and 18th centuries, the incorrigibility thesis, so close to the heart of all


those recent philosophers’ work is just as relevant to undergraduate general education as Aristotle’s or Kant’s or Hegel’s, for none of their writings offers smooth sailing to the unfamiliar either. Thus, recent work at the front lines of analytic philosophy, while largely indigestible in its raw state by the undergraduate population, can yet be made as palatable to them by good teaching as can the work of any philosopher of antiquity or nineteenth-century Germany. And so, both in this way as well as through the publication of general books about developments in current philosophy -- Passmore’s excellent Recent Philosophers being but one case in point, or the series of discussion-cum-interview books edited by Bryan Magee - acquaintance with the ideas of recent important philosophers will, perhaps, gradually develop in the main- stream of the general intellectual culture.

While Bernard Shaw’s jibe that “all professions are conspiracies against the laity” is true enough, it is no more true of academic philosophy than any other profession, nor more true of philosophy now than past, nor of analytic than of non-analytic philosophy. For, just as the medical practitioner and medical journalist are the conduits of certain esoteric matters in biochemistry, immunology, and so on to the general public, so too is the philosopher, in his classroom as professor and, in some cases, as the writer of general-audience books, the bearer of tidings from the front lines of his subject. Futhermore, on the terms of my analogy, those who expect or demand that philosophical thinking and writing, at all levels of specificity, be directly accessible to either the undergraduate or lay publics are being unreasonable, although the separate expectation that, in more general terms, philosophical writing and thinking should be accessible both to non-specialists in a given field, and even to non-philosophers, is not unreasonable.

The upshot is that, if the trickle-down analogy holds, analytic philosophy, nothwithstanding its technicality and specialization, should not be deemed irrelevant, or at least no more irrelevant than other philosophy, to either undergraduate education or to the intellectual culture at large. While its place in that culture is not the Olympian one often claimed in bygone days as rightfully the philosopher’s, neither is it insignificant. And perhaps we may detect in the repudiation by some so- called philosophical pluralists of analytic philosophy as educationally

subsequent empiricist and positivist thinking about knowledge and experience. Davidson, in “Mental Events” (1970) and “The Material Mind” (1973), significantly reformulates materialist thinking about the mind and, by extension, the whole debate over mind and matter that traces back at least to Spinoza, Deseartes and Hobbes. That same debate was no less stirred up, although in a way much less hospitable to extant materialist descriptions of mind, by Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1972). That book also sends us to a reconsideration of both Kant, via Kripke’s defense of necessary a posteriori truths, and Leibniz, via his version of possible worlds semantics and ontology. These are not the only examples by any means.


and culturally unworthy a trace of nostalgia for those imperial days of yore and of hope for a restoration to come. If so, that would be irony indeed. l3

Seton Hall University South Orange, NJ 07079 USA

l3 I read a version of this paper at the Spring 1991 meeting of the New Jersey Philosophical Association. I am grateful to my commentator on that occasion, Lowell Kleiman, for interesting observations. I am grateful too to Terrell Bynum and to Metuphilosophy’s anonymous reader for their suggestions.

philosophical specialization and general philosophy

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