(Roughly) Daily

Further in a fashion to last Wednesday’s post on Quality: James Wilson on ethics, and how we might best think about them. He starts by referencing Bernard Williams‘ (and here) take on ethical inquiry– that it is about sense-making, starting from what we already care about, and always local– which led Williams to discourage scientistic models of philosophy, and to argue that philosophy should be seen as “part of a wider humanistic enterprise of making sense of ourselves and our activities.” Wilson invokes Dewey’s pragmatism to suggest that what is required is less a shift from scientistic to humanistic conceptions of philosophy, than for philosophers working in value inquiry to better align their aspirations for theory with what it can actually deliver.

His introduction…

Philosophy is the oldest academic discipline, but where philosophy should be placed within the space of disciplines remains elusive. In the essay that inspired this special issue, Bernard Williams (2006b) is sharply critical of what he describes as scientistic approaches to philosophy, which assimilate philosophy to a model of science exemplified by physics or chemistry. In place of scientism, he offers a vision of philosophy as a humanistic discipline.

Williams says little about what it is for a discipline to be humanistic, but takes history to be a central exemplar. Humanistic inquiry is pursued, in Moore’s elucidation ‘by humans, from their unique position in the world, to make sense both of themselves and of that position’ (Moore 2017, p. 45). Humanistic inquiry focuses on forms of sense- making, and on articulating in human terms the meaning of texts, institutions, norms, events, and artefacts through interpretation, criticism and argument. In Williams’s words, viewing philosophy as a humanistic discipline is to view it ‘as part of a wider humanistic enterprise of making sense of ourselves and our activities… in order to answer many of its questions it needs to attend to other parts of that enterprise, in particular to history’ (Williams 2006b, p. 197).

Not all forms of inquiry are, or should aspire to be, humanistic. Williams was sympathetic to the motivations that lead some to hope that science will be able to attain to what he described as an absolute conception of reality. It is a virtue of physics that it aspires to (and has succeeded in) providing an understanding of the world, which abstracts to a very great degree from our ‘own perspective, our peculiar and local ways of apprehending things’ (Williams 2006b, p. 185). However, he was sharply critical of the assumption that abstracting away from specifically human forms of sense-making will invariably improve our cognitive grip on ethical and political questions. As Williams argued, ‘in seeking to understand ourselves—we need concepts and explanations which are rooted in our more local practices, our culture, and our history, and these cannot be replaced by concepts which we might share with very different investigators of the world’ (Williams 2006b, p. 185).

While humanistic scholarship remains crucial for self-understanding, the longue durée has seen an apparently inexorable decline in the prestige of the humanities in relation to the sciences, and a continued narrowing in the scope of the questions that are taken to be best answered with humanistic means. The result has been a profound shift away from the humanities and towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in the intellectual resources used to educate children and ready them for the workforce, and in prevailing assumptions about which disciplines bring the greatest social benefit. A sense of this long-term decline is already present in Williams’s text, and in the 25 years since then, there has been an ever-growing discourse on the decline of the humanities. The view that the humanities are in crisis has become ubiquitous even amongst their defenders.

How should philosophy position itself in this changing intellectual landscape? One obvious move is for philosophers to reframe their discipline as a science — a move that Williams disparages as ‘scientism’. Scientism, on Williams’s account goes beyond a philosopher’s ‘interest or involvement in science’, and involves a ‘misunderstanding of the relations between philosophy and the natural sciences which tends to assimilate philosophy to the aims, or at least the manners, of the sciences’ (Williams 2006b, p. 182). Williams is unusual in directing his concerns about scientism towards conceptions of philosophy, rather than, as is more often the case in philosophical discussions of scientism, the encroachment and/or overvaluation of science more broadly (Ridder, Peels, and Woudenberg 2018). Hence, unlike some who critique scientism, Williams does not disparage either the aims or methods of science. His goal is limited to providing a principled account of why questions relating to human self-understanding are not best interpreted as questions that can be answered using scientific means.

Williams presents two main objections to scientism in philosophy. First, philosophical writing needs to be reflective, and that reflection requires styles of writing in which the reader’s sense of what is important is engaged, rather than ignored or kept at a distance. Second, philosophy (or at least those parts of philosophy Williams is most interested in) is about sense-making. Sense-making is to a significant degree interpretive, historically situated and local. For both reasons, importing scientific methods, or assumptions that philosophers should adhere more closely to scientific methods, ends up obscuring or misinterpreting philosophy as an activity, rather than shedding light on it.

Williams’s wide-ranging essay takes for granted the intellectual landscape of the end of the twentieth century, and makes some deep and provocative claims about what philosophy is and how it should be done. My response starts from the somewhat changed intellectual landscape of the mid-2020s, is similarly wide-ranging, and also aims to say something novel and provocative about how philosophy should be done. I engage closely with what Williams says, but with the aim of thinking about what philosophy now should be, rather than providing an interpretation that takes up every strand of Williams’s argument or is definitive even in the interpretation of those elements I do discuss.

I am sympathetic to Williams’s reasons for reasserting the importance of the humanistic in philosophy, but will question some of the assumptions about disciplinarity that seem to shape his argument. In particular, I argue that it is a mistake to think that there is an overall answer to the question whether philosophy belongs with the humanities or the sciences. Rather, the philosophical methods that it is most fruitful to adopt depend on the research question to be addressed (a point that Williams’s own philosophical practice showcases, even if his metaphilosophy makes this less clear).

Williams’s objections to scientism are most persuasive in cases where the domain to be investigated is, at least to a significant degree, constituted by and through human self-understandings. Williams, of course, thought that value inquiry — whether in ethics or political philosophy — is such a domain. However, this is a point on which Williams and his moral realist critics sharply disagree, with both sides at times thinking the other’s position not only wrong, but hopelessly confused and obscure.

Williams’s views about the nature of ethics both support, and are supported by his broader humanistic conception of philosophy, while other philosophers’ views of ethics as being akin to science (or to mathematics) both support and are supported by their distinctive conceptions of philosophy. This might lead to the worry that there is something question-begging about Williams’ argument. I shall suggest that appearances may be deceptive: to the extent that there are deep-seated and apparently intractable disagreements about the ontology and epistemology of ethical values, this is evidence in favour of Williams’s view rather than his moral realist opponents. I argue that it is helpful to view such disagreements through the lens of a transdisciplinary epistemology, in which incompatible methodologies and ontologies, and how to reconcile them, are central themes.

Looked at from this perspective, philosophy is an outlier: no other discipline suffers such a mismatch between the level of confidence of its competent practitioners that there are correct and highly general answers to its research questions, and the power of the methods adopted within the discipline to resolve disagreements between these same competent practitioners. Philosophers working in value inquiry would do better to be more honest about philosophy’s limits and more modest in what they expect it to do. Looked at in this way, it is Williams’s humanistic view of ethics that better comports with the totality of the evidence. I close by reconsidering the role of cases and thought experiments in ethics, and arguing that a suitably refined version of Williams’s position in ethics has much in common with Dewey’s pragmatism…

Read on: How should philosophers approach ethics? “Williams, Dewey, and the nature of value inquiry“

(Image above: source)

* Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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As we think about thinking, we might spare a thought for Dōgen; he died on this date in 1253. A Buddhist monk, writer, poet, and philosopher, he was the founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan. Dōgen is known for his extensive writings like the Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, considered his magnum opus), the Eihei Kōroku (Extensive Record, a collection of his talks), the Eihei Shingi (the first Japanese Zen monastic code), along and his Japanese poetry, and commentaries.

Relevantly to the piece above, Dōgen’s perspective of virtue is discussed in the Shōbōgenzō as something to be practiced inwardly so that it will manifest itself on the outside– i.e., virtue is something that is both internal and external in the sense that one can practice internal good dispositions and also the expression of these good dispositions.