if chemistry had this ability, it would be able to respond to a physicist's attempt at reduction using only the arguments available to it qua chemistry — J

Makes sense. Reduction here would be an example of a strategy that one discourse might use to assert dominance over another.

Two quick points about reduction, then, one for my side and one for yours:

(1) If the physicist says he can explain anything the chemist can using only physics, the best response of the chemist is "Go ahead." It can't actually be done, and the idea that it can be done is a myth.

(2) A better approach for the physicist: listen to the explanation of the chemist of how something works, and at some point ask why something that doesn't happen doesn't happen. At some point ― we're assuming ― the chemist will have to drop down a little, say from how some complex protein works to how the building blocks of this protein work, carbon phosphate whatevers. Keep doing this. Eventually, the chemist himself will have to reach for physics, because while reduction is a myth, and the laws of physics are not enough to do biochemistry, biochemistry is constrained by physics and you can eventually reach a level where the explanation for what happens and what doesn't comes not from chemistry but from physics.

This, we believe, is true across the natural sciences. You cannot, even in principle, use only physics to describe the ecosystem of the Serengeti, but that description nevertheless must be consistent with our understanding of physics. Or, if you like, you could interpose many other sciences in between, consistent with biology, which is constrained by biochemistry, and so on eventually down to physics.

And there is no natural science which constrains physics.

But there is mathematics and logic.

And what constrains them?

(Will respond separately to the other post after I've eaten something.)

Interesting. What must not happen, or at any rate what we don't want to happen on pain of triviality, is the "flippant repetition" version. I think we need to be more precise. Did you mean your repeated "Why?" to be shorthand for "Why is what you just said a justification for what you said before that (eventually recurring back to X)"? Or does the "Why?" question change its character and possibly its reference depending on where we are in the chain of reason-giving? I'm trying to figure out if we're absolutely stuck with what we might call the "2-year-old's version" of "Why?" I think this makes a difference, but say more about how you were using the repeated why's. — J

Interrogating the question which can be asked repeatedly. What I was saying is that there should be a guarantee that the question preserves relevance of what it is asked of to its answer. That is, as much as an answer to it must be a good answer, the question must be a good question. What would make a good question to iterate is that it can be asked in any domain and makes sense in that domain.

"Why?" works because it always makes sense. But that doesn't have a clear termination in philosophy, like "How do you justify what you just asserted?" may.

Consider that if we can vary the questions asked, something must block our philosopher stereotype from doing this:

Person: 2+2=4
Philosopher: What would Kant have thought of that?

Which just trivialises the exercise, surely. The conceptual content of the philosopher's response does not seem to relate to the conceptual content of 2+2=4, it shifts the domain from without. It thus seems there needs to be a special sort of connection between the statement's content, the question's content and the answer's content in order to flesh out the idea that there will always exist a series of questions that terminates assertions in philosophy. Consider that people, like @Srap Tasmaner highlights, ardently resist what appears to be strictly philosophical probing IRL. Even if what they're saying is philosophical anyway.

IE, there must be something in the nature of questioning itself which allows it to alchemize any input into relevant philosophical concepts. And we'd need to put that in as a constraint on the series of questions to ensure the termination. What would it be?

There should also be a rejoinder to the claim that if a question takes an assertion to a strictly philosophical context, it should thus be seen as irrelevant to what it is asked of, like my example above. You might want to do that by expanding the scope of philosophy to cover all domains - and see my comment here about possible wrinkles with that prohibition.

Well, not quite that bad, but I think we have good reason to want to draw back from this conclusion. Before I talk about that, could you say whether your premises concerning relevance relations (3 - 7) are accepted logical truths? I don't know alternative logics well enough myself. — J

I don't believe they are. I stipulated them based on my intuitions. It captures a sense of relevance, but you might prefer to think of relevance differently. Like if relevance was thought of causally, you might want to relax symmetry (since if X is a cause of Y, then Y cannot be a cause of X, perhaps).

I don't believe they are. I stipulated them based on my intuitions. — fdrake

Thanks. Now I'll chew on it.

IE, there must be something in the nature of questioning itself which allows it to alchemize any input into relevant philosophical concepts. And we'd need to put that in as a constraint on the series of questions to ensure the termination. What would it be? — fdrake

Here again, a good way to re-ask the central question. And it relates to your post about relevance. I bolded the phrase above because it's that "something" that the TLT wants to rescue from triviality. I'm not yet sure that "Why?" is uniquely important here, but now I understand better what you're doing with it. More to follow.

And there is no natural science which constrains physics — Srap Tasmaner

Yet! It would be interesting to see what the state of play is in 2224.

@J

One more quick note, but then I'm occupied for the next few hours.

There is one quite well-known form of resisting being pulled into philosophy.

"How do you know that's a tree?"
"I speak English."

I believe Wittgenstein said there is nothing lacking in this answer, even though it is not at all the kind of answer that was hoped for. We might even say that the necessity of philosophy is one of the claims that he resisted ("one should be able to stop doing philosophy"), or at least a certain kind of philosophy.

Bonus note on questions that the questioner claims must be answered: this was Dummett's lesson to philosophers in the early seventies, that there was a pattern to a number of debates in philosophy, where one side was actually an anti-realist with respect to a particular class or issue. If you don't notice this, you keep getting boxed in by the realist, who insists that you agree or disagree with some claim, that there is or isn't some such-and-such, that you must have sat in the chair voluntarily or involuntarily (to use Austin's lovely example), and so on. But if your position is that there is no fact of the matter here, your being boxed in is an illusion, only philosophers kept trying to finesse their way out of questions whose legitimacy they should have straight up denied.

Anyway, there's some prior art on questions that carry with them a claim that you have to answer them, and answer only in the terms provided. Within philosophy, fighting over that is practically all philosophers do. For your thesis ― hey, at least it's philosophy!

Eventually, the chemist himself will have to reach for physics, because while reduction is a myth, and the laws of physics are not enough to do biochemistry, biochemistry is constrained by physics and you can eventually reach a level where the explanation for what happens and what doesn't comes not from chemistry but from physics. — Srap Tasmaner

It’s easy to say that in theory the higher order sciences reduce to an order below them, and all reduce to physics, but the reason this does not work out in practice is that the complexity of the phenomena which make the higher order sciences ‘higher’ in the first place tend to lead to innovations in theory which then eventually lead to an adjustment of the basic concept of the lower level science. For instance, until recently physics notoriously ignored the central importance of time for understanding the nature of physical phenomena. It took the influence of the ideas of evolutionary biology to trigger a transformation in thinking within physics.

Imagine that X is relevant to Y and that Y is relevant to some philosophical claim P, then X is relevant to Y, Y is relevant to P, then X is relevant to P. — fdrake

I don't think your sentence here is grammatically coherent. Not sure what it is supposed to mean. Same with your argument given earlier.

When you try to make substantial metaphysical points with a formalism or set theory, you are baptizing the formalism and the set theory into metaphysics. It is natural enough that by limiting your thought to such forms you limit your conclusions to formalisms. Philosophy qua thinking, as @J has described it, cannot be captured in terms of set theory or formalisms. What is probably happening in your posts is that subtle form of question-begging that we often see on TPF: Everything must be capturable in formalism (such as set theory or equivalence relations); what @J is saying isn't capturable or sensible when viewed through the lens of formalisms; therefore what @J is saying isn't substantial or sensible. This is the sort of petitio principii that tries to exempt certain methodologies from relevance or scrutiny, as if everyone would just agree that if it can't be captured in terms of equivalence relations then it must be insubstantial. (And yet I don't yet perceive validity or even grammatical coherence, which would need to come first.)

I don't think your sentence here is grammatically coherent. Not sure what it is supposed to mean. Same with your argument given earlier. — Leontiskos

Equality is transitive.

A) 2=1+1
B ) 1+1=4/2
C) Therefore 2 = 4/2

Similarly, when relevance is transitive.

A) X is relevant to Y
B) Y is relevant to Z
C) Therefore X is relevant to Z

Assume X isn't relevant to any claim whose context is philosophy, then X cannot be relevant to any Y which is related to a Z whose context is philosophy, since then X would be relevant to that Z through transitivity.

That is it. Are you not familiar with equivalence relations?

There are many other important and useful discourses besides the rational/philosophical. They may even lead to vital truths. — J

Even more to the point, there are many other useful
discourses WITHIN philosophy besides that of rationally generated consensus and the primacy of rationality itself.

Does this have to be an argument, if I can put it this way, that philosophical maximalism is equivalent to philosophical minimalism?

Does it also function as an argument that no boundary between philosophy and the sciences (and possibly other empirical disciplines, and possibly the arts, ...) is definable much less enforceable? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't see these as problems.

There are two conceptions of philosophical foundationalness in this thread. The first says that philosophical justifications are the linear foundation of all justification-claims. The second says that philosophy (in terms of logic or metaphysics) permeates all justification-claims or domains of study. The difference is very similar to Aristotle's difference between a per accidens causal series and a per se causal series.

I think both are defensible, but I am more interested in the latter.

What is the sort of characteristically philosophical claim that is required by the first conception of philosophical foundationalness? This would be a deep metaphysical or epistemological claim, such as the idea that reality is intelligible, or that motion exists, or that sense data is reliably informative. Even on this first conception, the philosophical claim has relevance to claims in other disciplines, but it is distinctly philosophical rather than simultaneously philosophical-and-something-else. In this case its relevance lies in constituting the foundation for more specific kinds of knowledge.

Assume X isn't relevant to any claim whose context is philosophy, then X cannot be relevant to any Y which is related to a Z whose context is philosophy, since then X would be relevant to that Z through transitivity. — fdrake

Sure, but why in the world would we assume that X isn't relevant to any claim whose context is philosophy?

1 ) Take a philosophical claim X which does not have relevance to a claim in any discipline. — fdrake

There is no such X.

Philosophy could be called highest because it is without presuppositions. — Leontiskos

I haven't been participating in this discussion, but I read this and was curious. What exactly do you mean? The philosophical definitions of "presupposition" I find use as an example something fairly trivial like this - The question "Have you seen John's new car" has the presupposition that John has a new car. In "An Essay on Metaphysics" Collingwood says that for every question there is at least one presupposition. Collingwood also talks about "absolute presuppositions" which are the underlying, often unrecognized, assumptions that are the foundation of a way of looking at the world. Is this what you're talking about?

If so, I still don't understand how this is applicable to philosophy.

Collingwood says that for every question there is at least one presupposition. Collingwood also talks about "absolute presuppositions" which are the underlying, often unrecognized, assumptions that are the foundation of a way of looking at the world. Is this what you're talking about? — T Clark

Something like that.

In every discipline other than philosophy there are unallowed criticisms of the form, "You are presupposing X, but I deny X." For example, Parmenides cannot go to the physicist and say, "You are presupposing motion, but I deny motion." To offer such a criticism is to have stopped doing physics. In philosophy there are no such unallowed criticisms. In philosophy there are no such presuppositions.

@Leontiskos

That gives you two choices about how disciplines are organised based on relevance. Either philosophy is related to all domains, and thus co-extensive with each of them it is related to. Or philosophy is not relevant to some domains - that is, philosophy is of no relevance to any claim in them.

But we don't get to decide which is which, based purely on the notion of relevance. If you can show that some claim is related to some claim which is relevant to philosophy, you would show that it is thereby relevant to philosophy assuming relevance is an equivalence relation. — fdrake

There are two conceptions of philosophical foundationalness in this thread. The first says that philosophical justifications are the linear foundation of all justification-claims. The second says that philosophy (in terms of logic or metaphysics) permeates all justification-claims or domains of study. The difference is very similar to Aristotle's difference between a per accidens causal series and a per se causal series.

I think both are defensible, but I am more interested in the latter. — Leontiskos

Arthur Koestler's definition of philosophy: "the systematic abuse of a terminology specially invented for that purpose."

Either philosophy is related to all domains, and thus co-extensive with each of them it is related to. — fdrake

This is a good example of the problematic set-theoretic assumptions you are working from. Is the engine car related to the train? Is H20 related to biological life? Relatedness/relevance is not a univocal notion, as you have made it.

In philosophy there are no such unallowed criticisms. In philosophy there are no such presuppositions. — Leontiskos

Are you saying that philosophy is different because everything is on the table - open to questioning? I'm skeptical of that, but I'll have to think about it more.

I don't believe they are. I stipulated them based on my intuitions. It captures a sense of relevance, but you might prefer to think of relevance differently. Like if relevance was thought of causally, you might want to relax symmetry (since if X is a cause of Y, then Y cannot be a cause of X, perhaps). — fdrake

- Yep, pretty much.

Either philosophy is related to all domains, and thus co-extensive with each of them it is related to. Or philosophy is not relevant to some domains - that is, philosophy is of no relevance to any claim in them. — fdrake

Note too how your logic here is invalid as it hitches up to your argument. "If philosophy is not relevant to some domain, then philosophy is not relevant to any claim in that domain."

You want this to support your:

1 ) Take a philosophical claim X which does not have relevance to a claim in any discipline. — fdrake

But irrelevance to some domains is different from irrelevance to all domains. In fact:

There is no such X. — Leontiskos

Arthur Koestler's definition of philosophy: "the systematic abuse of a terminology specially invented for that purpose." — Fooloso4

That's even better than my old favorite:

One might almost say that over-generalization is the occupational hazard of philosophy, if it were not the occupation. — Austin

Assume X isn't relevant to any claim whose context is philosophy, then X cannot be relevant to any Y which is related to a Z whose context is philosophy, since then X would be relevant to that Z through transitivity. — fdrake

Your argument seems to say something very different:

1 ) Take a philosophical claim X which does not have relevance to a claim in any discipline.
2 ) Take the collection of statements of which X has relevance to and call it Q.
...
7 ) Then anything relevant to X cannot be relevant to any philosophical claim.
8 ) Then all of Q is not relevant to philosophy. — fdrake

(7) does not seem to follow. Indeed the opposite would follow, where "philosophical" is replaced with "non-philosophical."

In fact there is a contradiction in your own proof:

1 ) Take a philosophical claim X which does not have relevance to a claim in any discipline.
...
5 ) Relevance is reflexive, X is relevant to X.
...
7 ) Then anything relevant to X cannot be relevant to any philosophical claim. — fdrake

From (1) and (5) we get <X is relevant to X, and X is a philosophical claim, therefore something relevant to X is relevant to a philosophical claim>, and this contradicts (7).

(I thought that in (1) the omission of "any other discipline" was innocuous, but it may not be. You seem to be involved in a contradiction in (1), for you are simultaneously treating philosophy as a discipline and a non-discipline.)

One might almost say that over-generalization is the occupational hazard of philosophy, if it were not the occupation. — Austin

The deeper truth here is Aristotle's mean. One can run from "over-generalization" to the opposite error, but the truth lies in neither over-generalization nor under-generalization. We have to look both ways before crossing the street, even if we are more fearful of the North.

One might almost say that over-generalization is the occupational hazard of philosophy, if it were not the occupation. — Austin

I like that one too. Wittgenstein says pretty much the same.

Here's my problem. I'm pretty interested in what I intuit as the substantive issue in this thread. I would like to get to discussing that, and I don't know what I would say ― which for me is a big reason to have that conversation.

But I keep getting stuck on what, in my mind, I'm still treating as "preliminaries," just trying to clear up your framing of the issue. That framing keeps failing to make any sense at all, so I keep putting off getting to the supposed substance, and I feel dragged into this sort of Wittgensteinian suspicion that there is no substance on the other side of the preliminaries, because the issue can't actually be framed cogently.

So here

What I was imagining, and trying to describe, was a refereed situation, so to speak, where each of the interlocutors agrees to the rules of rational philosophical discourse. Playing by these rules, the philosopher always trumps, and always wins. — J

What on earth are you doing? I'm not going to quote the OP, but the initial pitch was for philosophy as the ultimate backstop or bedrock, because philosophy can force any discipline ― or even any claim ― into a philosophical discussion, but once there, any further probing and questioning is just more philosophy. Among the many overlapping ideas in this setup was that philosophical ideas are simply impervious to any but philosophical counters.

If the bearded Viennese tries his "Interesting. Do you always . . . " response, the referee steps in and says, "Out of bounds. Please answer the question." — J

Only now it turns out you don't intend to show that this is so, but enforce it, by fiat. You just define the discussion as philosophical from the start. No effort or super-power needed from philosophy, and if you try to respond to my philosophical questioning with economics, say, I'll just rule you out of bounds.

What the hell?

This is like brothers fighting about a game ― one finds something easier than the other, so the other keeps complaining, "No! You're not doing it right!" It's hard for me, so it has to hard for you, or you're cheating.

You may recall that I wondered who even bothers to challenge philosophy. Here's one reason. Philosophers decide that they get to make the rules, interpret them, and enforce them. Yay! Can I play too? ― Most people are just gonna say, "Go run your little world." (( Counting on you to get that one, @J. Fuller version, from memory anyway: "I do the job; I get paid. Go run your little world." ))

we know what the rules are for rationality — J

Does the Freudian get to claim that his path is rational, that we are wrong about knowing the rules? — J

In short, the Freudian may be right, but what he can't do is justify a claim to being right, without engaging in more philosophy — J

So this was indeed the key word in the original post:

And what is your justification for asserting that such an explanation is true? — J

and this word is the private property of philosophy.

I keep having the feeling what you really had in mind was just epistemology. You mentioned somewhere an ascent biology → science → philosophy, which makes sense in terms of more and more general or abstract questions about knowledge. And thus justification of claims to knowledge. And justifying ― or being able to, or accepting the requirement to ― your claims to knowledge taken as a cornerstone of rationality.

I was hoping this thread was not about epistemology, so help me out here.

Are you saying that philosophy is different because everything is on the table - open to questioning? I'm skeptical of that, but I'll have to think about it more. — T Clark

Yep, pretty much. — Leontiskos

Ok, let's try this out. Back in the OP, @J wrote:

Suppose some surly neo-Freudian interrupts me at the point where I assert that “there’s nowhere else to go.” Nonsense, he says. “I’ll give you a psychological-slash-reductive explanation of why philosophers do what they do, and this explanation will have nothing to do with ‛ideas’ or ‛reasoning,’ and everything to do with culturally determined modes of expression mixed with individual depth psychology.” Ah, but I can reply, “Indeed? And what is your justification for asserting that such an explanation is true?” — J

I didn't say anything at the time, but this argument seems faulty to me. It begs the question. It judges psychology by philosophical standards and finds it lacking, which is irrelevant.

I think it is reasonable to say that philosophy is the study of thought, beliefs, knowledge, value, which are mental phenomena - the structure and process of the conscious mind. As such, it is a branch of psychology. Anything you claim as the province of philosophy can be trumped by a psychological interpretation. The overarching absolute presupposition of philosophy is that there is a mind which is knowable.

I think it is reasonable to say that philosophy is the study of thought, beliefs, knowledge, value, which are mental phenomena - the structure and process of the conscious mind. As such, it is a branch of psychology. Anything you claim as the province of philosophy can be trumped by a psychological interpretation. The overarching absolute presupposition of philosophy is that there is a mind which is knowable. — T Clark

Solipsism would be but one example of a philosophical position which denies the claim that there are independent minds, and therefore that there is any such thing as the field of psychology.

Here's my problem. I'm pretty interested in what I intuit as the substantive issue in this thread. I would like to get to discussing that, and I don't know what I would say ― which for me is a big reason to have that conversation.

But I keep getting stuck on what, in my mind, I'm still treating as "preliminaries," just trying to clear up your framing of the issue. That framing keeps failing to make any sense at all, so I keep putting off getting to the supposed substance... — Srap Tasmaner

I can sympathize with this. @J has an interest in how debates ever come to an end and how intersubjective agreement is ever established. These dialogical and epistemological questions are a heavier part of the OP than I first recognized. The trouble for me is that this "preliminary" topic is very difficult to maintain at a substantive level.

But there is a question of fact about whether the Freudian psychologist is making use of what @J would call "philosophical" thinking in order to deflate the philosopher's claim. I think it should be recognized that what the Freudian psychologist sees himself as refuting and what @J sees as "philosophy" are probably two different things.

The epistemological avenue reminds me of Nagel's Last Word, which @J introduced me to. I don't think what Nagel does in that book is unimportant, but it's hard to improvise over that vamp for very long, especially without someone to take up the contra.