Yes, in my experience technical and artistic achievements are accompanied by distinct and irreducible sorts of pleasure.

Williamson and Soames are unusually parochial, but yeah, their point can't be denied.

The formalization of arguments is less interested than the formalization of logics, grammatical fragments, and so on. If you see philosophy as a sort of conceptual engineering, you can have genuine results, improvements, and so on. Arguments are a bit pointless because you can just deny a premise, or just create a new distinction to resolve a contradiction. But you can't deny the efficacy of a model in producing certain results – so as long as it's agreed that such a result is desirable, there's a metric of improvement, and so long as it's not clear what's desirable, there are no serious stakes anyway.

'Continental' methodologies are generally constructed to expand the palate, cause sea-changes in world-view, harmonize historical trends, and so on. That's fine and all, but it gets boring. You want to work with your hands, and you just can't do that with that sort of philosophy. There's nothing to hit resistance against, nothing to build.

The formalization, more than just explicitness, gives a sense that there are actual stakes to what's being done – because if you need your models to produce certain results, and they don't, you've failed, and in a concrete way, and this failure leads to a possible metric of improvement.

The modal realism is uninteresting precisely because it is informal – it's still not clear to me what motivates it or what it's trying to solve, and it seems to make mince-meat of the ordinary truth conditions of counterfactuals anyway. It seems to me a deeply confused position, but the beauty of it is that it's literally a position that doesn't matter, so it can be ignored, whereas the formal treatment of counterfactuals does.

Lewis himself was a modal realist, which is a bizarre metaphysics, but his formal treatment of counterfactuals probably could be adapted into any metaphysics. The moniker 'possible worlds' is unfortunate. You have to get a feel for what they do in the formalism to get what they are, and how to implement them in some metaphysical hypothesis or other.

The book I mentioned is for the most part a semantic/logical exercise. It's a lot more enlightening than abstract ruminations on the nature of possibility and truth are ever going to be. I would even say they make those ruminations look confused in retrospect – it's one of those works that can make people have conversion experiences to analytic philosophy. Worth a read.

I've myself wondered if a robust theory of truth such as the correspondence theory can adequately incorporate counterfactual statements into their stable (not to mention certain types of future-tensed statements). — Arkady

Counterfactuals aren't a problem for any theory of truth so far as I can tell. Modal truths are in a sense 'about' non-actual world states, but they are evaluated nonetheless relative to the actual world, and possible world-states 'accessible' from it, in the sense of modal logic. So it can be an 'actual fact,' for example, that something can or could happen, since what can or could happen is determined by the actual abilities of individuals, or metaphysical possibilities that are actually in place.

The counterfactual scenario is completely inaccessible. For example if I say "If the Germans had won WW2" How is it possible to say anything true about this scenario? There is no truth of the matter because X didn't happen. — Andrew4Handel

The classical view is that you can order possible world-states along some contextually determined relation of metaphysical similarity, and that any counterfactual with the antecedent 'If the Germans won world war 2...' would be true just in case the consequent is true relative to all of the worlds closest to the actual world in which 'the Germans won WW2' is true. The difficulty is then the determination of the similarity relation.

If you're interested in classic semantic accounts of counterfactuals using possible worlds, Stalnaker's 1968 Theory of Conditionals and Lewis' 1973 Counterfactuals will help.

Counterfactuals are interesting and difficult, but not mysterious. They can be given reasonable treatments that don't commit to bizarre metaphysics.

So: the least Kantian of souls would recognize that one thing always leads to another — csalisbury

The idea that things cause each other is grounded in everyday experience. The idea that they do infallibly according to necessary principles isn't. Anyone can tell you life has regularities and inconsistencies. The Enlightenment philosopher just sort of denies the latter as a matter of principle, not based on any evidence (and where the evidence seems to be against it, future theory will resolve the apparent inconsistency).

All of which is to say Hume is as steeped in artifice and inherited ideas as Kant, imho, but it doesn't seem like it because his prose is fun and avuncular. — csalisbury

I agree with this, and I'm not really sympathetic to Hume more than Kant. The point is just that when you have a problem, you can't bring in fantasies to solve it. Maybe we don't have Humean problems because Hume made some more basic mistake. For example, only if we have an impoverished view of perception are we tempted to think that we can't see one thing causing another.

Yeah, Hume tends to assume a kind of uncritical naturalism when it suits him, which is in tension with his anti-naturalistic epistemological views. But I wonder if this sort of thing can be seen from within – that is, from one's own case, one can come to know that we just tend to follow habits and impulses around without justifying them. Not a very satisfying way of thinking to someone with a Kantian soul, but if we're concerned with whether it's true or not, we need to be more careful.

I read Hume as given a psychological explanation for human behavior in the face of uncertainty, not a reasoned justification for it (his position seeming to entail that there is no reasoned justification).

An omission of ignorance isn't a failure of reconciliation. It's possible to believe in Newtonian mechanics because you take its effects to be observable, and not know why they obtain. In fact, if you actually don't know, no attempt to make up reasons that you know will make you know. So if Kant asks you 'how will you reconcile?' the right answer for the Humean is 'I don't know, but I do know that I won't lie.' We don't need, at any particular moment, to make sure we have an answer for everything – if we do that, we're going to do bad philosophy, because where we actually don't have an answer, a bad/wrong one will arise in the attempt.

I like David Stove's idea of a neo-positivism, where the philosophical tradition collects historical examples of bad reasoning to become slowly sharper in the sorts of arguments it makes. Kant allows us to understand the badness of a certain kind of transcendental argument, and why the impulse behind it is mistaken.

Is it the historical reconstruction that's compelling, or Kant's viewpoints in response to it? I'm willing to grant the former (though I don't know – the empiricist/rationalist divide is a little wonky, even in the terms you present it: for example, Berkeley is an 'empiricist' who believed in godly fiat and not pure habit, just like Descartes, and Malebranche is a rationalist who did away with the necessity of Newtonian causation, making it utterly contingent [on God's whims again]), but I don't accept the latter. If believing this story is supposed to make me more sympathetic to Kant, I just don't see it. For one, the Newtonian picture was invented to account for several phenomena, not the whole world (it never did and never has, and there are a lot of atrocious Enlightenment philosophers who just assumed it would extend to all human activities, and drew preposterous conclusions about morality and sex and so on from this). For two, it seems like an attempt to enshrine contemporary physics forever by fiat, instead of doing the reasonable thing, which is admitting that while explanatorily powerful, the Newtonian picture was without epistemic foundation (as Newton himself seems to have held). You cannot invent epistemic foundations out of thin air where they seem to be needed – they must actually be there. Yet this is precisely how Kant reasons in his 'analytic' deductions.

but I think it is wrong to say that Kant was accidentally re-doing Locke for an audience who didn't know him — csalisbury

I guess I don't think he was that innocent. Kant seemed to be engaged in a project of permanently entrenching certain prejudices (religious, scientific, or otherwise), and was apparently under the delusion that metaphysics would remain unchanged after the CPR (there is no humor in the CPR, so apparently he was not kidding – what possible psychological circumstances result in such an assertion?). I think that is ultimately what he was interested in: stopping time and inquiry at him, who would figure everything (in metaphysics) out. There is even a kind of mastery of time itself, by insisting that the mechanisms proposed literally cannot be subject to time, since time is subject to them. You can speculate about why I think philosophers have the impulse to do this – I don't have much new or kind to say about it.

We're always least kind to those positions we once held tenaciously but have recently come to disavow. It's a solipsistic kernel in Kant you're objecting, to, right? — csalisbury

I think solipsism is a consequence of transcendentalism, and Kant is far from alone in this. But I think transcendentalism comes from a desire to have the entire universe under control. That desire already might contain the kernel of solipsism. In Kant's case, the fear that the world was too big to know manifests in a desire to close off the world to a subspace of it, and say that this was really the only thing that we had ever been concerned with anyway (and its structure guarantees a kind of certainty within it). But then you still need German Protestantism to be true, so you leave some room outside for spooky stuff (stuff that rather than compounding uncertainty leads to even greater certainty, of salvation and so on).

Spook'd

What is the error that led Wittgenstein to think this? — Marchesk

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. He had a narrow philosophical upbringing, and those he learned from dealt with linguistic problems. He wasn't satisfied unless he had a tool to solve every problem, and the only tools he had were linguistic ones. Ergo, every problem must be a linguistic one (for if it weren't, I wouldn't be able to [dis]solve it).

The linguistic view of philosophy is stupid. Questions about the ocean are not questions about the word 'ocean' – why anyone would think this about knowledge, truth, and so on is something we should diagnose as a historical error in reasoning, not as a philosophical position we take seriously.

The best philosophy I've seen is that which accumulates a tradition and tries to respond to it as thoroughly as possible, like the Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Single authors that try to present sweeping visions tend to be disappointing. If it's true people aren't good at philosophy, we need to be aware of and catalogue banal mistakes and solve problems piecemeal over time. This isn't a new idea – it's just what Russell thought. And in truth, someone like Russell contributed a lot more with his technical developments, the force of which we still feel today, then say someone like Wittgenstein, who ultimately I think ended up wasting everyone's time by piling a series of retarded aphorisms on the tradition that now everyone has to write Ph.D. theses about, forever. Yet Wittgenstein is 'the genius,' and for that reason, more of an idiot.

One of the problems is I think that you get the sense from writers like Kant that they're convinced they're smart – Kant thought he had solved all the problems of metaphysics in one book! If, contra this, Kant wasn't that smart, because people generally are bad at philosophy, this revises the way we think about doing philosophy, so that it can be done with a little patience and rigor instead. The questions are all real, just hard – too hard, maybe, but I think we can tell that certain arguments are bad.

That the tradition prevents me from understanding Kant as he would have been understood in the 18th century I think is a very charitable way to look at it, and maybe we always should read charitably, even where the author doesn't deserve it, to make our criticisms as effective as possible.

But I don't think I actually believe it. Kant's comments, for example, on Locke and Berkeley seem to be outright misinformed – he either did not know, or was lying about, what Berkeley actually thought, and his case that he is doing something Locke has not with his notion of the thing-in-itself as opposed to Lockean substance is simply not convincing. The idea that the project of critiquing reason to find its limitations, and the panic over 'destroying metaphysics' in the process, etc. were things that Locke already accomplished, so far as I can tell. Maybe the German readership just wasn't familiar with these British developments? Locke's insistence that all things come form experience mirrors Kant's that all things begin in experience: and Locke's insistence on the shape of the mind forming the sorts of concepts one is capable of acquiring mirror Kant's discussion of the forms of intuition and thought. The thing-in-itself is then simply the Lockean 'I know not which,' which, well.

So my question is: if Kant seems on the face of it to be so ignorant of his own tradition, to which he is directly responding, why am I then to trust him to know what he's doing down the line? It may be of some use to treat such philosophers as if they were better reasoners than they actually were, to make the tradition less embarrassing. But whether they actually were good reasoners is another matter.

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One way of thinking about what I'm saying is that your reading of philosophy may be more fruitful if you do not approach a text with the presupposition that its author is a genius, as we're generally taught.

he thought professional philosophers should give his arguments more consideration than they have. — Marchesk

If they gave them any more, nobody would study anything but Wittgenstein.

That's just not true though. I gave reasons in my very responses to you.

Kant does not, so far as I can tell, have arguments for the position that we can't get outside of our faculties. To be sure that's something he says many times. That might be because of my unfamiliarity with, or lack of understanding of, the text. But I've read CPR, so if I'm too stupid even to find that there are arguments, I don't know what reading again would help me to do.

Kant's style is generally one of outlining and repetition – he's more like a world-builder than an arguer. He does provide a few arguments, such as the refutation of idealism, and some truncated syllogisms about why representations of things cannot be things in themselves. But the broad picture seems to be one of making a big frame, repeating it, and letting the reader acclimate themselves,.

That's my point, though. It doesn't seem like argumentation helps. It's not a convincing principle, yet psychologically people find it so. If you tried to state why you believed it, you wouldn't come up with any good reasons because there are none.

I guess I do hold out hope that these things are a matter of giving good or bad answers to genuine questions that reason can help work out. So it's not that the imaginative play has bad taste in what it imagines, so much as I think that Kant et al. are literally reasoning badly, in the most ordinary way.

I don't think it much matters what Kant's specific opinions are: the point is just that the 'we can't get outside our X' claim doesn't, so far as I can see, even have any initial plausibility. Yet, for me, at one point it did.

I think that is a very simplistic and problematical gloss of what Kant said. — Wayfarer

What if what Kant said was simplistic and problematical? Of course we don't want to believe that because we sunk a lot of time into reading him. But what if he just had no idea what he was talking about, and believed something stupid?

Again, just read that sentence back to yourself and ask, 'really?'

All change (at least what we can be aware of) occurs within our experience, doesn't it? — John

No.

This is a form of transcendence; an immanent transcendence, where we constantly become what we were not (and hopefully more than we were) previously. — John

There's nothing 'immanent' about it. There's no super-facultiy 'inside of which' it takes place. Anyway, this is getting off topic.

It's true that at any particular moment, our capacities will be whatever they are. But the passage of time allows them to be expanded, or changed, such that we do get outside of them.

To get outside of your faculties doesn't mean to be left with none; it means to have changed. And my claim is that this is perfectly commonplace.

Not that I can see. It's obvious that we can learn to think about things in new ways. So why isn't this getting out of our faculties to compare them to the world? The Kantian/etc. must answer 'because there is a yet higher-level unchanging generalization about the way we must think.' But we have no examples of such higher generalizations, and so as of yet no reason to believe in them. In fact a child has to maturate to acquire pretty much all of our conceptual faculties to begin with, which seems to be solid evidence against the notion.

And what could it mean for us to "get outside our faculties"? — John

It could mean, for example, learning something you didn't know before. We constantly acclimate to new ways of thinking due to outside influences shaping our thoughts.

Kant's claims are absurd once you begin to think about them a bit, and he himself starts to crack a little when he talks about the noumenon as negative, the solipsism he ends up being implicitly committed to, and the 'facticity' of the unchanging categories. As to the latter point, even the most basic questions are embarrassing: did human beings develop their faculties? In a sense, that cannot be, and the Kantian transcendentalist has the clever answer that of course time is contained within these faculties, so a Kantian perspective renders the question confused, since change happens within time and thus the very notion of the categories/form of intuitions 'changing' is ill-conceived. But it is Kant who is confused.

Some of the neo-Kantians, as I understand it, introduced a kind of historicism into the transcendental machinery and allowed for their development. But unless one posits an infallible logic as to how this development occurs, which amounts to positing a higher-order faculty of faculties, the problems repeat, and in order to truly solve them one needs to abandon the Kantian presuppositions. It is an interesting question why anyone was ever convinced by Kant, or any other such philosopher who makes similar such claims. It could be that the notion of a set of 'rules' by which everything works, and into which everything must fit, is inherently attractive to the ordering mind, and the equation of these rules with the operation of the mind itself, to ensure a closed circle of inquiry, is the logical end-game of any totalizing project of thought. But whatever it may be, it looks like a symptom of people just not being very good at thinking. Kantianism 'solves' a number of arcane and pointless puzzles while making ordinary existence utterly inexplicable.

What is interesting, then, is to go back to those little sentences philosophers write and ask, 'really?' Anyone who asks 'really?' to the Kantian dictum that we can't get outside our faculties I think won't return with a positive answer.

The problem is more just that we do get outside our conceptual schemes every day, and in fact it would really be hard to live ordinary life if we couldn't. Novelty expands what we're capable of thinking about and the terms we think about it in. We're always going beyond our conceptual schemes and comparing them with the world – we have to do it even just to mature ordinarily as biological organisms.

But entire traditions are built around not recognizing this obvious fact. As someone who was in the thrall of the position before, seeing how stupid it is now, I can't really articulate why it was convincing to me. My only explanation is that people sort of hear platitudes and are convinced by them.

Have you, though? We like to think we learn from philosophy, but after it's done it's hard to say what if anything we have. I think it goes double for political, which doesn't have any rigor.

I feel like saying that I've 'learned immeasurably' from any work of philosophy is serious hyperbole.

What are the possibilities of democratic politics today? What is a demos? What is political action? How is each constituted, sustained, and undone? What are the forces that shape a society, and how can one think political agency in and amongst those forces? — StreetlightX

I agree these are good questions, but IMO philosophy has nothing to say about them and generally serves as a propaganda arm for whatever the reigning political dogma is. People in philosophy just end up believing whatever lay people people, and for the same reasons. So it seems the discipline itself teaches nobody anything on the subject.

No, I'm really starting to think that humans are just not smart enough for it. Not by much – we can sort of grasp what a good argument is like, at least in principle, but it's just an empirical fact that even the professionals who spend their lives doing this sort of thing are no good at it. You can look at any major philosopher and find fallacies an undergraduate could point out in their works.

And it doesn't seem practice or intelligence within the scope of what's normal for a human helps. Philosophers seem to become more closely acquainted with a body of literature, and get better heuristics for sorting through certain kinds of arguments. But they don't seem to become good reasoners. A lot of the most apparently profound suggestions people have made are just stupid.

How many philosophers have an uncritical naive realist view of perception coupled with an epistemology that makes it impossible to defend? How many believe in some quantifiable notion of utility? How many believe some version of 'we can't get outside of our conceptual schemes to check them against the world?' These I claim are all stupid things to think, but the finest minds think them.

Maybe. But I think people just aren't suited to philosophizing. As a species, I mean – just a little too dumb for it.

On the contrary, if you read your Proverbs, folly is a form of self-lotahing.

Most of the questions I used to care about don't 'get under my skin' any more, but I think they're generally legitimate and difficult, as almost all the historical questions of philosophy are (contra the deflationists and quietists) – it's just the interest in them is more academic and patient now.

I generally think now that philosophy doesn't have the tools to help people in life. My main philosophical interest now is sort of meta-philosophical, why people are so bad at reasoning, why they are generally intellectually dishonest, incapable of distinguishing fine-grained positions, convinced by bad arguments, drawn to implausible platitudes, etc. and why intelligence seems to be no help in guarding against any of these.

HE'S AT IT AGAIN FOLKS