That pretty much already happened – being a 'Wittgensteinian' is now just one more historical specialty. It's like Rorty said, the philosophical literature goes out of date every 10-20 yrs.

I don't know if it's the first document to use truth tables, but those are a really great device.

I think that the idea of knowing when to be silent is good – it's just that here it's too obviously tied to present theoretical prejudices.

If it were just the two of them creating a new thread on here, sure. But it's been an ongoing debate among many philosophers for several decades now. So if it were just a conceptual confusion, you would think someone would have pointed that out by now, and all the rest of the philosophers engaged in the debate would have been like, "Oh yeah! How did I not see that? Moving along ...". — Marchesk

I don't think so. There could well be systematic reasons why some conceptual disputes can't get cleared up, because we lack the cognitive ability to understand how we're confused, or to see how people think differently from each other, or use words semantically blindly. In fact that seems plausible, since lots of conceptual disputes just sort of go on forever.

Alternatively, it could be that only questions that are conceptually confused in this way in perpetuity are labeled philosophical, so by definition philosophical questions are conceptually confused without resolution.

Even as an account of the natural sciences it's dumb, and the 'everything' beyond this shades in and out of intelligibility with language, and so does 'science' anyway. It's not a plausible account of how words work, and is best read as a reflection of the theoretical prejudices of the moment.

I think the question of intelligibility is interesting, but how words come to mean things, and what they mean or can mean, is a complicated topic not seriously addressed by the Tractatus. The analytic obsession with the conditions on sense-making was a good one, but clearly the answers given in the 20th c. are primitive and silly.

I'm not sure I follow. "The length of S at t" is a non-rigid designator, and "one meter" is (supposed to be) a rigid designator.

That doesn't have to do with the distinction between de facto and de jure rigidity. Both de facto and de jure rigid designators are rigid.

I'm not sure what you're asking, or what about that text shows that 'Kripke is saying that de jure and de facto rigidity sometimes interchange.'

The Tractatus is a lot like any other work – the technical development that was lying around at the time was taken for a key to the universe. This time, it was the truth-functional propositional calculus.

Seen in retrospect it's a profoundly silly thing, but then I guess most things are.

I'm sympathetic to the old positivist idea that both the affirmation and denial of idealism have no cognitive content. I can't prove it, but I think it's right.

If that's so, then acting like an idealist or not might be an external question, with emotive consequences. Certainly ordinary people (and philosophers!) really don't like idealism, and it's a fascinating psychological question why.

It may be cultural: in India, regular people are often idealists, in my experience. This is especially interesting if it's really true there's no cognitive content there. Why then do people get so upset? My guess is that it really is cultural, and hearing an idealist thesis triggers deep feelings of alarm at having one's culture questioned.

Well, I can't commit a priori to not accusing you of it, because you have to actually do something different...

Don't you think it's weird no one can do anything but say the same thing over and over again, though? Don't you think that's a sign of a stale defense, or a discipline whose only recourse is to fall into pointless ruts again and again?

Why aren't there any novel or interesting ways of defending something that is clearly so defective? Why are its practitioners so complacent and boring? Aren't they supposed to be good at 'thinking?'

There's also the odd thing that it's not even true – it's like a robot shorting out and running a default message, even if it has nothing to do with what the interlocutor is actually saying. I mean, come on – 'a historical examination of the relation between rhetoric in the Athenian legal tradition as it relates to sophistry? That's just more philosophy!' It's not even a coherent objection!

Never heard of him.

Come up with another response!

I like the Graham article. I don't agree with all of it, and I think he exaggerates the extent to which philosophical texts are unintelligible (he may not be the best reader). And I don't agree that the notion of a controlled experiment is metaphysical, etc. That experiments had to be performed was dragged kicking and screaming from the philosophers, and people have had to drag a lot of good things kicking and screaming from them.

But I like the idea that the inclination to philosophy doesn't match its aims – if it really were about the most general truths, or about how the world as a whole hung together, and it delivered on learning about those things, how exciting it would be! Who wouldn't be motivated to learn things like that! But no one in their right mind actually gets excited about philosophy in that way because it's apparent it doesn't actually do any of those things – I think even to people who practice it.

No, I'll look at it, thanks.

I think Rorty is in the analytic mainstream, but that the analytic mainstream had an anti-philosophical wing, for about 30 years or so. I like Rorty too, 'spiritually,' I guess, but he's a sloppy thinker, which I think hurts the cause, because the 'anti-philosophy' view gets associated with that sloppiness. It would also be nice to eventually have people do this who were never in the philosophical tradition to begin with.

Rorty is not a particularly radical figure, and he didn't see himself as such. His trajectory is clear from the tradition of Moore through the late Carnap & Wittgenstein. He's firmly in the mainstream analytic tradition.

You're just doing #2, though. All I've recommended is historical – if it's within the tradition, why have I never seen anybody doing it?

So it's important to recognize how far down the dialectic we are. This is in response to a version of the #3 defense of philosophy: it may not do anything interesting itself, but it does (at least) produce other things that do. I take it this is the idea – correct me if I'm wrong.

We've admitted this because you haven't objected to the claim that contemporarily, Descartes' geometry or mechanics, and any of Newton's work, are not considered philosophy. They do not employ primarily philosophical methods; philosophers, in general, lack the competence to read and understand them (unless specially schooled in a particular historical period, or in a particular branch of the philosophy of science); they are not the subjects of textual introductions to philosophy; they are not taught to philosophy undergraduates; contemporary philosophers do not engage with them argumentatively, or attempt to refute or augment them. There is no reasonable criterion on which, then, these works are philosophical in any contemporary sense. Notice that none of the above is true of Descartes' Discourse on Method, or Meditations: philosophers can understand those, they do argue with them, they do write about them in textbooks and teach them to undergrads, and so on.

The reason for this is clear – the methods employed in the Discourse and Meditations are different from those employed in the geometry. And what's more, these methods match the methods of prior works of philosophy, all the way back to the Platonic dialogues, and later works, all the way to articles in the journals today. So it is clear at present that there is a continuity between these works, precisely the ones you are not willing to defend as interesting natural science, and philosophy, but it is not clear that there is any interesting continuity between those works you are willing to defend as interesting natural science and philosophy.

So you must be making some weaker claim – they are not philosophy as contemporarily understood, but maybe at one time they were thought to be? Or maybe even though they're not philosophy in any sense, at least they resemble philosophy in some interesting way? Or what I think you are likely saying, and which is really what #3 is getting at: historically, they developed out of philosophy in some interesting way, though they're distinct.

Unfortunately, this is a much harder historical claim to prove. It is obvious that works of philosophy develop out of each other, because they cite each other, and their sole reason for existing is the fact that the author read some other works of philosophy. This is not at all obvious for Newton's work, because, as you admit, most of it has little to do with what philosophers were doing at the time, or even had done in the past. Are a couple principles appealing to notions like 'cause' enough to establish a historical connection? I would hope not – or else philosophy 'wins' by default, since it talks about everything, so everything is philosophy (#2).

So let's ask a more productive question – what led Newton to write the Principia? What methods did he employ in framing the principles he did? Was reading philosophers the primary motive behind this? Would the work have been writable in the absence of those philosophers? Are his goals or results philosophical in any interesting sense, by either contemporary standards or 17th c. standards? And no, it's not enough to say 'ah, but Newton had so many philosophical implications!' etc. This is because since philosophers can talk about anything, this move can be used to trivially claim that anything is philosophically relevant and therefore philosophy (#2).

We also need to ask why, even if somehow we thought this was 'philosophy turning into something else,' philosophy's historical core always defaults to what's present in the Platonic dialogues, and nothing else.

I did, but I'm going to wait before responding. I don't want to make the post too long, because it just encourages yet longer posts (with a lot of blind alleys). So I'm trying to find a way to respond that's actually productive and cuts through the noise.

It's literally in the title. — fdrake

You need to stop that.

But this is just talking about a word – yes there were positions in 'natural philosophy,' and yes Newton's work has the word 'philosophy' in the title. But consider:

(1) Newton's work is not considered a work of philosophy generally, so if popular classification matters, this should tell us something;
(2) The methods of that work have nothing to with philosophy as traditionally practiced;
(3) In philosophy programs, the work is not typically assigned or read by philosophy students, whose training would not equip them with the skills to read and understand it anyway (since philosophers do not learn the principles of mathematics or mechanical motion that would make them conversant in 17th c. physics, or any era of physics).

Note the same for Descartes – his philosophy, what is read by philosophers and taught in philosophy programs, actually is fairly well cordoned off from his scientific work, which is not read in philosophy departments (nor is his geometry), and which philosophy students would not be able to understand, since their disciplinary training doesn't teach them any mathematics either.

So if you're serious about this line of thought, you should ask yourself – why, if there really is a progression between the two, is this progression not, against your insinuation, institutionally reflected, in what anybody thinks philosophy is, or in the way anyone practices it?

This book is of interest for those interested in the history of sophists, and how they interacted with the philosophers:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-sophists-9780715636954/

There is also an article in there that discusses the historical origin of the idea that the sophists and philosophers were distinct, which is said to be introduced by Plato, and to have little grounding. Interesting for how the notion that philosophy was a domain of inquiry grew out of the tradition of teaching rhetoric (which included courtroom defense for educated young men in Athens).

The point is it doesn't matter. It's just a definitional issue. If you want to talk about history, do so.

That's a historical claim, yeah. fdrake's arguments are just shuffling about definitions to try to make it seem like 'natural philosophy' is 'philosophy,' analytically, I guess. But obviously you can't establish anything historically by doing that.

You're just playing with definitions.

And it's not philosophy, it's the history of how a certain social practice arose.

Sure! I'd like to see what you've written on it. — fdrake

I don't write on it, since I'm just a layman that thinks about this as a hobby (I 'believed in' philosophy when I was younger, got a degree in it, and later slowly came to my present views on it), but I wouldn't mind discussing it. I'm interested in the history of how philosophy arose, and think the Greek rhetorical tradition (as traced through the quasi-legendary Corax of Syracuse, in his bid to school landowners to defend their claims from Syracusan tyrants) is an interesting place to start. I also think people ought to know more about the sophists and their contribution, and I think a historical survey comparing the Greek legal tradition to the earliest philosophical dialogues could prove fruitful (to see how the actual rhetorical techniques are employed similarly or dissimilarly in each case).

A really ambitious person would, I think, then compare the Greek socio-historical situation to analogous ones in India, and so on, to see whether there are certain social conditions that precipitate the rise of something like 'philosophy.'

I don't think you can get very far explaining what philosophy is without this historical angle on it, but 'histories of philosophy' simply take for granted its own internal mythology about what it is, so we don't have that (as far as I know – I would be delighted if anyone could point me in a promising direction as to a 'real' history).

I'm not responding to the rest of the post – can't I just leave it as an exercise for you as to why it doesn't work? [Again, deductive arguments that don't involve historical facts can't make historical claims.]

Defective as compared to what? — fdrake

History, chemistry, linguistics, asking where the bus stop is, learning to play chess, beauty school, football coaching...

Besides the lack of historical justification you're using to make a historical claim, — fdrake

Do you want to go into the history, then?

to the extent that styles of reasoning are commonplace and shared, the courtroom is those shared norms of reasoning; expectations of behavioural conduct and belief propagation given a starting point. In that regard, the only difference philosophy has from reasoning simpliciter when understood as a historical tradition (we do have to learn how to reason after all) is a mild constraint on topics of interest (just enough so that philosophy doesn't become something which is not philosophy) and a historical particularity. — fdrake

This is not true, though; philosophy is removed from ordinary reasoning by that fact that it has no subject matter, nor any method other than conversation, and that conversation does not run up against anything, because it has no empirical content, and does not track anything outside of itself.

or understanding something as a folk tradition for philosophical purposes, won't make sense outside of a philosophical context. — fdrake

It's not for philosophical purposes (you just did #2).

(2) Something which is a historical fact: natural philosophy did produce efficacious results (in the specified sense of providing a predictive and instrumental understanding of nature). — fdrake

So your argument is that natural philosophy = science = philosophy? That's not how words work, I'm afraid!

This is a complex historical question, but you can't address it like that. The claim that natural science somehow 'came from' philosophy is probably not right, though I don't think we can address the issue adequately here.

Surely you can see the contradiction. — fdrake

Your line of attack, you see, was to catch me in a contradiction, without historical evidence – but how, one might think, can this be possible? How can I be shown to be in error on a historical matter, with no appeal to history? If we look back through the conversation, we find the answer – your 'argument' turns on an equivocation, and you slipped from 'philosophy' to 'natural philosophy,' which is an old-timey word for science.

And so the illusion that you've discovered something continues. Do you see how it works?

Also, there are three reactions that almost invariably arise when people defending philosophy are confronted with the fact that it doesn't work:

1) "I was just pretending to be retarded" – Philosophy doesn't actually seek interesting substantive answers to question, but does something else more esoteric / rarefied / unfalsifiable, or actually serves some ill-defined function in "the questioning itself."

2) "Everything is philosophy, actually" – Philosophy is necessary because even questioning or trying to be critical of it is a philosophical move.

3) "Everything else came from philosophy" – Historically, the natural sciences / engineering / having sex / hair trimming / etc. came from philosophy.

I think all these are awful attempts at a defense, and you employed #3. It's a historical hypothesis, and in my opinion, not true. I guess we could argue about specific cases if you really wanted to.

#1 is a coping mechanism used by religious beliefs, as I noted above; #2 is a vacuous 'transcendental' move that is symptomatic of a discipline just not being able to see anything outside itself, and merely reiterates, rather than shows, that everything must conform to its own flawed techniques.

I have seen all three of these responses so often that I'm used to all the ways they occur and how people bring them up and defend them. Surely there's something better than that!

So philosophy doesn't get at how things are. This failure doesn't derive from insufficient similarity to the natural sciences or engineering/technology. — fdrake

I'm not some kind of chauvinist for the natural sciences, no. I think plenty of areas of inquiry ask and answer interesting questions. Philosophy does not, and it's not unique in this regard (neither does New Age, for example), but it is also its own historically contingent thing, defective for its own historically contingent reasons.

It does involve itself in semantic confusions, but I think this has more to do with its origin and survival. I doubt it would be efficacious even if it did not (what would it do, exactly, even if it dispelled these confusions? There is nothing for it to do).

You're right, there's no necessary reason why any inquiry in any style should yield substantive/efficacious insights. — fdrake

The point is that philosophy doesn't really inquire – it mimes inquiry through a kind of conversational ritual that mimics the courtroom, but without witnesses, evidence, or point.

Actual inquiry involves observation, participation in a skill, past experience, showing by example, feedback from successes and failures, and so on. Philosophy doesn't have any of these, and so lacks the hallmarks of ordinary effective inquiry.

Part of the answer seems to me to be that efficacious reasoning in the above sense usually gets described, and is involved institutionally, with science, engineering and technology. — fdrake

Not at all. I think, for example, that many historians ask questions of no technological value, and with no obvious utility. But nonetheless, those questions are real ones that can receive interesting answers.

what is it about philosophy as it is currently practiced that ensures it lacks efficacy? — fdrake

It attempts to inquire about 'anything' by a conversational method, and there's no reason at all that just talking about basic features of the world should yield any insight into them.

You can think of philosophy as a kind of ritual miming of serious inquiry. Doing what it does no more gets at the basic features of the world than playing house supports a family, or doing a rain dance makes rain fall.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that the Socratic method invariably involves itself in linguistic confusions, too, but I guess that's a separate hypothesis. You'd need a more sophisticated metasemantics to understand why philosophy in particular is so ripe for linguistic confusion, but I think it is (and I think this fact is not only part of why it survives, but also why it arose in the first place – out of sophistry, which was a way of exploiting linguistic confusions for profit in court, to impress people, etc.).

A word on aporia above:

It's possible that aporia was used as a clever literary and intellectual device by Socrates, and to some extent maybe by Plato as well (though as I said above, I think Plato is largely disingenuous in using it, and any decent reader will see he clearly favors a side, or has an agenda distinct from the options presented, and which he intimates quite heavily).

But it's important to realize that there is a foundational reason why philosophical debates end in aporia, regardless of the literary use to which that result is put: it is because philosophical reasoning does not work. In other words, aporia is the only option for a philosophical dispute, and while one might think this is because of the grandeur or mystery of the subject matter, it is more likely because the technique simply doesn't inquire into things in an effective way or yield any results. In other words, you have to use aporia like this, because you have no other choice, since you cannot get anything but an aporia using the method, by design.

I should also note that in practices, especially religious practices, where an initial bold claim is made, and then falsified, its practitioners often retreat to some other claim rather than abandon the belief. They will often say the claim really did come true, just in some non-obvious way, or insist they never really meant the original, but that the original was proxy for some more esoteric thing. This tends to happen with philosophy: it purports to answer substantive questions about which people are curious, and failing this retreats, claiming that the aporia reached has its own value, was the point all along, or the real point is for philosophy to act as a 'multiplier of thought,' or whatever. Compare the Jehova's witnesses saying the world did end in 1914, but what we meant by that was... This is a classic pattern of these practices that don't have any efficacy.

Definitely. I think that part of the fun of doing philosophy is that its participants implicitly know they aren't really arguing about anything, so it allows them to do this claim-staking purely: it is pure verbal skill or show of intellectual force, unhindered by the world bearing on its claims or conclusions.

It's worth noting that, through the mouth of Socrates, Plato pleads that philosophers are different from lawyers because they have as much time as they want to talk.

This shows that (i) there was some debate, or public perception, that philosophers were using lawyers' methods, such that the philosophers themselves needed to address this perception, or likely were even confused themselves about what the difference is; and (ii) the answer was precisely that philosophy was lawyering freed of material constraints (which also, though, defeats its purpose and possibly its effectiveness). Lawyering can work on a witness – it's not clear that reality is a 'witness' that can be cross-examined in this way, but that's basically what the Socratic method tries to do (in early Socratic dialogues, the witness is confused – is it reality, or is it the interlocutor?).

I also suspect that the very idea of a syllogism, or any kind of deductive argument set out in premises that implies a conclusion, has its roots in courtroom procedure. People noticed in getting people to make statements, that multiple statements, due to their natural semantics, had commitment relations to each other, and noticed that if you said one thing, you then had to say another, on pain of contradiction. This then became a model of reasoning.

Yeah, philosophy is closely related to rhetoric and sophistry. It's not even really clear that there is a clear distinction between the three – the idea that there is comes from a public relations campaign on the part of early philosophers, but the public (perhaps rightly) never saw it that way in Athens, and thought of the philosophers as sophists and rhetoricians.

Is this an epistemological position you are putting forward here, as in the limits of knowledge, or, I don't know, the limits of talking with regards to learning, I do not understand. Or are you just criticising philosophical methods? — Pussycat

No, it's a social / historical claim about what philosophy actually is, how it developed, & what it does.

Right, cause StreetlightX made me think it in terms of peasants and peasantry, — Pussycat

That's off the mark – but then, it's not like there's anything wrong with peasants.

So if it's not that (the general inquiry), what is it then? — Pussycat

It's a kind of conversational play plus cognitive loop that was discovered due to the litigious nature of Greek society and the idea that one defended oneself by talking. This got transposed to the world, so that anything could be defended against, or questioned, by talking about it. It comes from the sophistical notion that one can 'talk about anything.' Roughly, the idea is that the techniques of the courtroom get transferred to the world, so that it is 'questioned' or 'put on trial.' This results in the quasi-magical belief that anything can be learned about by interrogating it in a conversation.

Something like that.

Ah, it's been days since his last appearance, maybe he was eaten alive by snakes?? But I am still not sure what he means by "folk tradition", why doesn't he just say "tradition", what are these little folkers doing there? — Pussycat

A folk tradition is highly particular to a certain civilizational circumstance, that's all. There is nothing derogatory about the term.

The reason it's important for phil. is because it often imagines itself to be something else (concerned with 'general inquiry,' and so on, which is untrue). So it's a substantive fact about what the discipline really is (something different from what it imagines itself to be).

If asked to give an answer as to what philosophy is, and what it studies, those in the folk tradition will give answers provided by that very tradition (the 'believer' can only argue from within). But those answers will not be the same as the answers given by those outside of it, who don't need to adhere to that tradition's idiosyncratic cultural boundaries.

I guess I believe in something like that, but that it's not worth discussing with other people.

Where would you place, say, Thales, in the litigation>rhetoric>sophistry>socrates development?Unrelated question, do you think the dialogue between Job and his interlocutors has any similarities to ethical philosophy? — csalisbury

Thales doesn't have much of anything to do with Socrates. The only connection seems to be that in the Phaedo Socrates fictionally reports purchasing a scroll written by Anaxagoras. And then Aristotle mentioned Thales. There is a retroactive tradition assimilating them, but I'm not really sure why, other than this tenuous link.

Job is wisdom literature, which is its own thing, a genre at least as richly developed as philosophy in the ancient Near East, and way older. There aren't really philosophical arguments in Job. There is just suffering, and some way of making peace with it in terms of societal wisdom (and poetry). Wisdom literature in the Abrahamic traditions tends to be pessimistic, but ultimately to require placing a (futile?) trust in God.

-I think 'intellectual intuition' in German Idealism is a placeholder for the kind of practices that actually provide the emotional satisfaction and spiritual understanding people often mistakenly look for in philosophy. 'intellecutal intuition' got a lot of scorn heaped on it, but I think, if anything, it's a useful talisman or touchstone reminding that this stuff only goes so far. Maybe they needed that placeholder more because of how systematic things were getting. — csalisbury

German idealism is a genuine nightmare, and I have seen people's brains actually get fried by it, much in the way people's brains get fried by neo-nazism, Marxism, flat earth conspiracies, or whatever. As in, once they get enough into it, they lose some of their cognitive abilities, and can't think / speak / reason like they used to. So I can't really cheer for it. Maybe there's some romantic yearning there. But I doubt it's real food for the soul.

t occurs to me that the litigious society of ancient Athens was a byproduct of their democracy: because nobody can just pass down unilateral judgement, it is necessary to argue and persuade people to agree. The resemblance of philosophy to Athenian litigation then makes perfect sense as a consequence of the democratization of knowledge: as soon as you stop taking authorities at their word and start questioning everything, you need to argue and persuade people to get consensus on what is true. — Pfhorrest

I think this survives in the way 'western civilization' in general seems to simply value talking, even to no end. There is some bizarre idea that no matter what is being discussed, and no matter to what end, discussion is a kind of good in of itself. We're always 'having conversations,' and 'democracy' is sacrosanct even beyond any material benefits it might provide or fail to provide.

If philosophy is a thoroughly contingent practice, it feels like it makes sense it would be this hybrid monster of things, that lurches its way forward. Just like Midrash or the short story or haikus or professional wrestling or painting or any other tradition. — csalisbury

It is a thoroughly contingent practice, because it only developed a few times worldwide. Nothing demands that it happen.

And sure, it's a hybrid, and has elements of mystery cults, ancient cosmological speculation, hucksterism, and primitive mathematics thrown in (these are all around today in some form under the umbrella of 'philosophy'). But there is a central thread, so I claim, which is what really drives it and causes it to survive. That thread runs through the rise of litigation, to the development of rhetoric, to sophistry, to the Socratic method (where it roughly stops developing).

It looks like we disagree.

People don't know where to begin, how to continue, or where it might lead. This is a failing on the part of philosophers, partly. But the ideas always attract people. — StreetlightX

I think the pre-thoretical ideas are attractive, sure, which is part of why philosophy 'happened' in the first place. But I don't think philosophy itself addresses the hunger people have in an interesting way. To the extent it promises to, that's a false promise, and instead funnels genuine curiosity into a kind of sterile cognitive loop, again based on lawyers' tricks from ancient Greece.