The Politics of Philosophy is not just escapism from the other politics, but also a species of so-called meta-philosophy, which happens to be one of my scholarly interests (although most of my meta-philosophical views are reserved for the blog). Today my interest is in a way of doing meta-philosophy in which ‘moves’ or ‘arguments’ developed in philosophy of science in order to analyze the sciences are applied to debates within philosophy by contending philosophers. As regular readers know I am also fascinated by the uptake of philosophy of science by the sciences themselves (and that’s lurking in the background of today’s post).
Let me set the scene. To the best of my knowledge, I ‘met’ Amie L. Thomasson (Dartmouth) only once about twenty years ago, when I was a postdoc at WashU (St. Louis) and she visited in order to give a paper that I very much enjoyed and remember as a kind of neo-Carnapian critique of Quine. But I have not followed her work since. As it happens, when I was at WashU, I met the late Adam Morton, and when over drinks I asked him about the field, it became clear that Timothy Williamson (Oxford) was a person to watch according to him. When I then moved to Syracuse, familiarity with Williamson’s work was kind of assumed, and I realized I needed to read him if I wanted to know ‘what was happening in philosophy.’ So, while I have met Williamson no more than Thomasson, I have read quite a bit of his work and (as very regular readers know) have been provoked to polemicize about it more than occasionally (and have also used it in more sober scholarship.)
I have almost set the scene. A few weeks ago, Williamson published a review at NDPR (here) of a recent book, Rethinking Metaphysics (OUP), by Thomasson, which I have not read. Whatever one may think about the review (and my views will become clear below), it started to circulate on social media and also provoked a response (here) by Thomasson which she shared on Bernard Kobes’ Facebook page, and then she added a brief follow up (here). Lots of other professional philosophers chimed in on Kobes’ page so if you want to have a sense of how informed spectators might respond it’s worth reading through all of them. Thomasson’s response does not really touch on the angle I wish to pursue below, so she may not think of what I am doing as a defense of her work.
Williamson starts his review by identifying Thomasson as “a leader of a programme.” In the next sentence we are informed that “she locates this programme within a broad neo-pragmatist tradition.” Somewhat oddly the other leaders (notice that ‘a leader’) nor the programme (or its “project and updates”) itself are named at any point although some features are described. In the concluding paragraph, Williamson returns to these themes in order to claim, “as a sample of neo-pragmatism at its best, the book left me with a strong sense of a degenerating research programme.”
Now, the terminology of ‘sample’ is nicely neutral (and even has a pseudo-scientific ring to it), but I was a bit taken a back by that use of ‘a leader.’ While — let’s stipulate — it was intended as an expression of respect, it betrays an oddly hierarchical conception of the character of research programmes in philosophy.1 The implication is there are leaders and followers in philosophical practice. I tend to associate this with Continental philosophy (sorry friends there), especially in its German variants. I am open to the suggestion that this is de facto true in analytic philosophy, but it goes against the otherwise useful fiction that within analytic philosophy we are in it together and that within our equitable division of labor each of us is as good (okay, point taken, and as bad) as our last argument or distinction.2
Be that as it may, the terminology of ‘a degenerating research programme’ is derived from Lakatos. Lakatos himself used it to refine Popper’s philosophy of science with features he derived from Kuhn’s philosophy of science; the aim is to distinguish (now I am quoting Lakatos 1968) “good, progressive normal science” from “bad degenerating normal science.” (p. 167) One nice feature of Lakatos’ approach is that unlike Kuhn’s, whose approach suggests only space for one hegemonic paradigm at a time, his view of normal science is compatible with competing research programmes side by side. Keep that in mind.
Now, in Kuhn there is a fairly stark contrast between philosophy and normal science. Philosophy is fundamentally associated with the pre-paradigmatic disunity and heterogeneity of approaches; but also, and this was emphasized by the late Michael Friedman, philosophy could prepare the way for a new paradigm that would become the new leading edge of a scientific revolution.
By contrast, Lakatos applied his own framework to the history of mathematics (in Proofs and Refutations) and to the philosophy of science in his (1971) “History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions.” It is, however, worth noting that according to Lakatos, “It is very difficult to decide, especially since one must not demand pro gress at each single step, when a research programme has degenerated hopelessly or when one of two rival programmes has achieved a decisive advantage over the other.” (p. 101) And as Lakatos acknowledges, this feature of his view also attacked critical attention (from Kuhn and Feyerabend amongst others; see the note on p. 105).
From Lakatos’ practice of applying philosophy of science to philosophy, it is but a small step to Williamson’s application of Lakatos’ idea to meta-philosophical debates in (to follow his preferred jargon) metametaphysics. When I first read in Williamson the passage that is the pull-quote at the top of this post, I thought his use of ‘non-natural science’ really is what the Germans mean by ‘Wissenschaft.’ (On repeat reading I stick with that.)
So, if metaphysics is indeed a kind of Wissenschaft then it’s okay for Williamson to use philosophy of science style arguments within his metaphysics. But Williamson reports that Thomasson would reject the claim that metaphysics is indeed a science, and then it is by no means obvious on Lakatosian grounds that he is entitled to this move in his arguments against Thomasson’s project. For Lakatos it’s wholly natural to have competing research programmes side by side, and these may well have different kind of success conditions. I have never read anything by Williamson that he is at ease with such pluralism of methods or programmes, so his appeal to Lakatosian tropes may be more than a bit ad hoc or self-serving.
For, unfortunately, Williamson also echoes the least compelling feature of Lakatos’ approach to such matters by attempting to adjudicate different research programmes from one’s own (partisan) perspective in his NDPR review; he recognizes the point when he notes that his “review will no doubt leave neo-pragmatists feeling equally untroubled.”
There are two other interesting echoes of Lakatos in Williamson’s piece. First, for Lakatos philosophy of science and history of science are intimately connected connected (see 1971: 91). For Willamson, “metametaphysics is hard to separate from metaphysics.” But again, it is not obvious that if one has a different kind of competing reseach programmes in metaphysics — and treating it as a Wissenschaft or not is a big difference — one is entitled to apply the same philosophy of science. To what degree Williamson is open to a tight connection between metametaphysics and history of metaphysics is an interesting question. Williamson’s older paper, “How Did We Get Here From There?” is suggestively affirmative about the options he is willing to consider.
Second, Williamson returns to his familiar defense of the use of abduction in metaphysics (at least I have been familiar with it since his book on Modal Logic as Metaphysics. Somewhat oddly Williamson does not refer to his own work or any other here.) As Williamson put it in his review of Thomasson “On one version of this view, metaphysics works by inference to the best explanation; its explanations are constitutive rather than causal.” I have to admit that I don’t see any necessary connections between these two claims. Williamson himself partially elucidiates what he has in mind (although I don’t see any reason in what he says to think inference to the best explanation must generate constitutive rather than causal explanation.) Here’s what he writes:
Axioms and first principles of logic or set theory are not self-evident, nor are they conventional stipulations; genuine non-verbal disputes rage as to whether they are true or truth-preserving. Their theoretical standing depends on their abductive virtues—simplicity, strength, and fit with evidence, including the capacity to unify what is already known in the field without collapsing into absurdity—or lack of them. The theorems of such an abductively confirmed logical theory are good candidates for principles of a structural core of metaphysics.
This is super interesting, of course. They recall suggestions by Putnam that certain kinds of experience and use confirms the status of a logic. (Putnam defended this in the context over debates over quantum logic.) Obviously, the details and spirit of Williamson’s approach are very different (and I am not suggesting that Williamson’s evidence is empirical in character.) I have nothing against calling this procedure ‘abduction’ or ‘inference to the best explanation’ (although I prefer ‘indirect confirmation’) as long as we note that there are LOTS of ways of operationalizing ‘abductive virtues.’
In fact, one of the great joys of Igor Douven’s recent The Art of Abduction is that both the scoring rules and kinds of abductive virtues can be operationalized and automated in all kinds of ways with non-trivial precision (in certain Bayesian contexts). I mention this not because I think it bears on the debate between Williamson and Thomasson, but to suggest that how one goes about characterizing the abductive strength of the ‘confirmed’ principles of the core of one’s metametaphysics can vary quite a bit. Williamson’s idea that there is a singular structural core that is the result of abduction is itself a bit of wishful thinking about the nature of abduction.
