A Red Pill for Philosophy
tl;dr
Philosophers' reality is in large part a set of problems occasioned by an obvious understanding of rationality and the human condition. There exists a more basic, underlying understanding of these things which defuses the problems. Philosophy needs to be red-pilled.
Philosophers' reality is in large part a set of problems occasioned by an obvious understanding of rationality and the human condition. There exists a more basic, underlying understanding of these things which defuses the problems. Philosophy needs to be red-pilled.
The idea that the world we experience is merely an appearance of a sort masking a deeper, quite different reality which explains why we see, feel and judge what we do, is nothing new. We encounter this idea, for example, in what physics tells us about the structure of matter, which we learn is almost entirely empty space at the atomic level despite giving the appearance of solidity (because electrons and protons etc. are so tiny relative to atoms). Within philosophy, the possibility of a disconnect between what we commonly take to be the case about the world and what really is the case is a familiar preoccupation. Possibly the clearest example is Rene Descartes' effort to prove to himself that the mundane surroundings he experiences are what he takes them to be, and not the product of some evil demon manipulating his senses.
The 1999 movie The Matrix helpfully crystallizes this idea. It describes a world where everything people experience is in fact a computer simulation, fed to them unbeknownst by a malign computer intelligence. The protagonist is offered the option, in the form of a red pill, to have his senses unveiled and so to leave the simulation for the true, underlying reality, or to take a blue pill and remain in the simulated world. Spoiler: he takes the red one.
What's at issue here for philosophy is not Descartes' problem, but rather the possibility that much of the apparent reality with which philosophers preoccupy themselves is itself a kind of illusion. There is a layering of conceptual reality, I'm claiming, which goes mostly unnoticed. Philosophy itself needs to be red-pilled
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The Specious Surface
Red pill scenarios start by noticing a layer of perceived reality commonly taken for granted. In the case of philosophers, this is a way of thinking about how we know and understand our world. The usually unquestioned view is that there is something substantial to understand about how we are able to reason and talk about the physical world and each other, as we apprehend it and ourselves. In daily life we encounter things and also people. Somehow, we mostly think, we are able to come to know facts about them, and to reason and talk usefully about them. Philosophers infer, admittedly not rashly, that there are important details to suss-out about how this happens -about how it can be rational for us to make the judgements we do. These details turn out to be elusive in a way which entrains a host of questions about a whole range of topics. These questions and attendant problems constitute the perceived reality philosophers inhabit, or at least a big part of it.
There is an important clarification to make, straight-off. I am not talking here about science. Scientists of diverse kinds investigate all manner of questions about the way the world is including the way our bodies and brains are. They investigate the brain mechanisms which cause us to process information as we do and to utter the words and make the bodily movements we do. All of this inquiry is worthy and in order as it is. What is in question here, rather, is our understanding of ourselves as rational agents, bound by logic and other norms of reasoning and speech
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My challenge, then, is to exhibit that this appearance, which animates philosophers, of missing knowledge or information -of something in need of explanation- is at bottom illusory. The problematic layer here is not the world of experience, as it was for Descartes, but rather the higher-order layer manifested in philosophers' thinking that there are hidden things to know and understand about our relation as rational agents to ourselves, to each other and to the world
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The Pill
The red pill is made available by Wittgenstein's problem about following a rule
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I'll spare you the details, and just say what I take to be its moral. The everyday judgements you make can be based on your experience of the world ("The strawberry is red."), they can be immediately obvious ("2 + 3 = 5"), or they can be deduced ("17 * 17 = 289"). In all cases, we suppose, they're things about which it's possible to make a mistake, but which we mostly think we're justified in believing. The moral of the rule-following problem is that none of the stories philosophers traditionally have told can make sense of the idea that we're justified in believing these things - in believing anything. It challenges the thought that there's any sense to make of the distinction between just being inclined to say something, and being right to say it. It threatens to evaporate the very concept of rationality
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The first step to a solution is to notice that language has two uses: as the medium of private reflection, and as the medium of interpersonal communication. As I compose this, I am thinking through my ideas, writing sentences and deleting or amending them as I go. No communication has happened, yet, but I am assuredly using language as I reflect. Ultimately, hopefully, you will read them, at which point the words will have served to communicate my thoughts to you.
The usual view —the one which gives rise to Wittgenstein's problem— is that we are, as rational agents, fully autonomous and independently capable of private thought. Learning a language involves attaching meanings privately available to us onto the words of (say) English. Reflection is prior to (more basic than) communication.
The alternative view is that language evolves gradually as a social mechanism and that truth and meaning evolve with it as properties in the first instance of exchanged sentences. It is only as speakers communicating with a language that we can make sense of ourselves and one-another as rational agents. Communication is prior to (more basic than) reflection.
So: swallowing the red pill is just swapping-in the alternative, communication-first view for the usual, reflection-first view. A lot changes when you do
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Digression: The Economic Analogy
Compare economic activity. A solitary person in a forgiving environment can do a lot to improve their circumstances. I am imagining a Robinson Crusoe or the like, building themselves a shelter and tools to catch fish, collect water, and so on. Compared to the benefits which can be got by joining the collective economic efforts of a large population of other people, however, such solitary accomplishments are minuscule. An economy is characterized by widespread cooperation among its participants to achieve jointly beneficial ends, combined with competition as participants each try to maximize their share, which in the end is their goal. This dynamically balanced cooperative and competitive activity, including the financial activity which comes to be layered on top of it, gives rise to whole new possibilities unavailable to isolated individuals. And the media of this activity acquire abstract properties of their own, such as monetary value.
The idea is that truth is in a way like monetary value. Rationality is a property of speakers a bit in the way financial savoir-faire is a property of participants in an economy.
The analogy is inaccurate, I admit - there are lots of ways money and sentences are not alike, and likewise rationality and financial savvy. But it hopefully makes vivid that our social interactions can give rise to complex systems with interesting, well-defined properties -systems for which there is in effect no solitary counterpart. The claim here is that language is just such a system, and that rationality itself emerges with it.
The Underlying Reality
Quite a few details are needed to make precise what the world looks like when we make this shift, swapping out the usual understanding of our rational selves and linguistic meaning. I will try to summarize the key points.
At bottom we have only two things. The first is our inclination to find congenial some sentences and to find discordant, others
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The second is the resource almost all philosophy discards, which is others' acceptance or rejection of these sentences.
The first outcome is that sentence truth/falsity is prior to word meaning. Word meaning is completely derivative. The second is that truth/falsity is in the first instance a property of individual, token sentences. Philosophers' propositions come to be understood as sets of token sentences whose internal words' meanings align (roughly speaking).
Truth and meaning get off the ground with the assumption that, to a first approximation, we are looking to maximize the number of those sentences-felt-congenial we encounter. These are our beliefs. The thought is that this policy ultimately facilitates maximizing the mundane goods life affords. It works out that this maximization process is vastly more productive if done collectively, by swapping sentences. 'True' in this picture is what we call sentences which belong in the collectively accepted set.
It's where we disagree that the effects of the red pill really start to kick-in. Speakers have an interest in maximizing that collective set and in staying consistent with it, but also, more immediately, in maximizing their own personal sets of sentences-believed. When these are in conflict for some sentence a speaker is entertaining, her best course is naturally to try to get other speakers to see the congeniality of her contentious sentence, and ultimately to have the collective set changed to include it. What does this look like? A plausible story can be told that the obvious approach would be to offer-up other, related sentences which, when considered together with the contentious sentence, reveal its congeniality. Significantly, this process could recur with those related sentences, if they turn out also to be contentious. The upshot is that this way of thinking about language naturally predicts a process which looks a whole lot like normal, context-bound justification - justification which "comes to an end" as we're accustomed to in everyday exchanges, and, pointedly, as it does not in typical philosophical exchanges
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This way of thinking about language also predicts that standards of good practice would naturally evolve for such exchanges. That collective set of sentences-held-true is a common good whose maintenance is speakers' joint responsibility. Salutary practice in the conduct of justificatory exchanges would be something to uphold and admire. Conforming to such optimal conduct, in this current, red-pilled way of thinking, is the substance of what it is to be rational
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Back to the Familiar World of Philosophy
The proposed picture shows how our each pursuing our individual ends within a social context leads to public language, to a practice of justification, and ultimately to rationality. Logic itself is the crystallization of rationality. It is the refined end-product given-rise to by the accumulation of the mundane, plodding interactions of many speakers over time. Justification begets logic, not vice-versa.
By the time we become sufficiently sophisticated to do philosophy and to notice rationality and logic themselves, a great deal is already in place, with the result that we lose sight of these origins. We naturally see them as rigid, self-sufficient structures and ourselves as their autonomous inhabitants. We come to see the principles of logic as the pristine Ursprung of justification. With this bokehed picture in place, it comes to be reasonable to ask of any judgement what justifies it, and so we get the problems of philosophy. Here are a few examples.
Semantics
A main problem-area for philosophy is the nature of word meaning, propositions and truth. In the familiar, individualistic picture, making sense of our ability to understand effectively any arbitrary, newly encountered sentence requires attributing to us a mental apparatus which allows us to infer to what's being said with the sentence, not to mention giving an account of the kind of thing that -the thing said- is. The picture also typically requires having something substantial to say about the relation between our words and the world, to ground the objectivity of truth. Without this apparatus, our judgements as to statements' truth would be arbitrary and unjustified. The history of work in this field and the persistence of disagreements which date back over a century, show this to be a challenging undertaking.
It will be seen that the recommended way of thinking completely defangs this problem. The concepts of meaning and proposition do no real work. Meanings are just (in effect) similarity sets of token words, defined in terms of their substitutability in true token sentences; propositions are just (in effect) similarity sets of token sentences defined in terms of meanings. Natural science can explain in non-semantic vocabulary all there is that's opaque about the acquisition and functioning of language.
An example of how this plays-out is the meanings of words in the contexts of attributions of beliefs and desires. Familiarly, conventional semantics is burdened with giving an account of the meanings of words in these problematic contexts, since it requires us to be able to infer to propositional content from word meaning. With the alternate conception, this problem effectively disappears. There is scope for a deflated account within the new picture, but our understanding of the truth of affected sentences is not waiting on it.
Perception and judgement
Visiting a farm one fine day, you come across what to all appearances is a pig. 'That is a pig', you say. Let's stipulate that your judgement is both true and justified. It's possible, though, for judgements to be justified but false - it might have been a clever pig decoy. And so, in the usual way of thinking, arises the philosophical problem of perception: two instances of the same judgement may be alike in their justifiedness but different in their truth. What exactly is it that they have in common? A frequent solution-strategy, motivated by a natural understanding of the mechanisms of vision, is to interpose between the pig and your judgement, a kind of mentally-available proxy - a 'perception'. Unfortunately, perceptions seem ultimately to compound the problem rather than to solve it. What is the relation between the judgement and the perception, and likewise between the perception and the pig or the pig-involving scene? These problems turn out to be difficult either to dismiss or to solve.
The problem here is bound entirely to the conception of justification we have seen our way past. With the proposed approach, if the pig is plainly in view and everyone accepts the judgement, 'That is a pig', then there is no question of justifying it. The practice of justification gets traction only where there is (context-bound) disagreement or doubt. And there is equally no question about how you come to your judgement. Scientists, of course, can study the fascinating details of what happens inside your eyes and brain on such occasions (not: in your mind), but none of that is relevant here. Similarly, if no-one is doing philosophy, and common sense is all that is in play, there is nothing to learn. The only real question in this case is about your conversational skills
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Consciousness
The closely related problem of consciousness concerns the status of our apparent, privately available sensations like the way a tickle feels to you or the way cardamom tastes to you. I have written about this elsewhere. The short story is that by flipping the explanatory priority of sentence-truth and word-meaning, we remove information from semantics. This is counter-intuitive, I acknowledge. But it means that, as a matter of semantic theory, the truth of a sentence like, say, 'There is a callus on my big toe.' is not properly explained in terms of a relation between the word 'callus' and some extra-linguistic thing
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And the truth of a sentence like 'I have a tickle in my big toe.' is similarly not explained in this way.
Extra-linquistic things as usually philosophically conceived cease to be available to theory. Our understanding of them outside of philosophy —in science, or common sense— remains unperturbed. But the fully private phenomena of consciousness —big-toe tickle sensations, as it may be— being animals exclusively of the philosopher's zoo, simply don't exist. In this way, the problem of consciousness is dissolved. There's a lot more to say, I acknowledge
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Sorites
Suppose there is a grain of salt on your table. Adding a second grain will not make a heap. Generally, adding a single grain of salt to a quantity will never make the difference between there not being a heap and there being a heap. And yet, there is some number of grains of salt which, if they were on your table, would rightly be judged a heap. This is the sorites paradox - at no point in the grain-by-grain addition to some quantity do you go from having a non-heap to a heap, and yet the process can result in a heap.
Non-philosophers, in my experience, will be underwhelmed by this problem. Philosophers take it seriously because, in the usual way of thinking, it reveals a contradiction in our reasoning - in what we take to be rational. The route from the individualistic conception of language and rationality to this problem is direct. With the usual thinking about meaning, a predicate like 'is a heap' must be either true or not true of any given thing. The objectivity of our talk is grounded in word-world relations, and requires it to be possible to make precise the terms of these relations. This forces the decision about a cut-off line which the paradox's main premise, trading on intuition, denies exists. There are other options, but within the basic framework none is obviously free of problems.
With the proposed understanding of language, token sentences are the autonomous bearers of truth. Only in a normal, circumstantially constrained speech context can a sentence be judged true or false, and by extension can the meanings of token words be fixed
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The rigidity of the bifurcation of sentences into true and false is seen to originate in the importance of the norms of justification and the sanctity of our shared stock of agreed token sentences. It is understood to lose its implacability in ill-defined edge cases. The insistence that there be an answer to such questions independently of a conversational context fixing the significance of heaphood is shown to be a mistake. Which is a good thing, because what counts as a heap of salt on the table very plausibly depends on why it's a subject of conversation for the people in the kitchen.
Concluding Thoughts
The basic claim here is that at least some of the main problems which animate philosophy originate in the individualistic conception of rationality which the alternate picture being proposed, supplants. Swallowing the red pill to see through to this alternate conception is in part about understanding how the natural process of justification, which emerges organically from language once we switch to the communication-first picture, gives rise to the rules of logic, rather than vice-versa. This may seem inconsistent with what Wittgenstein called the "hardness of the logical must"
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In non-philosophical contexts we sometimes find ourselves lamenting the pliability or impotence to do this or that of socially constituted norms or injunctions. Norms so-constituted may seem to be the wrong kind of basis to get us to logic. But I think we lose sight of the fact that participants in a practice can in some contexts collectively hammer patterns into formidably resilient structures. The moves in a game of chess or the performance of a complex symphony by an orchestra are simple examples. A musical score is just a set of rules for producing notes, but it can very clearly specify when the notes played are correct or not. And logic, of course, is the limiting case.