A Red Pill for Philosophy (Short Version)

Philosophy needs to be red-pilled.

Here is a shorter version of the idea. It's a lot to squeeze into a small space, but I will try * .

Philosophers keep themselves busy with a big stack of problems, many of which never get solved. A lot are about why we should believe the things we do. For example, we believe there's a physical world beyond what our senses reveal to us, but on careful consideration this looks not to be justified. Philosophers also care about language —specifically, about big questions like the nature of the truth of sentences and the meanings of words, and the connection between these things. They are interested, in effect, in why a person should understand what they do on hearing given words.

This stack of problems is a big part of philosophers' reality. It's how the world appears to them.

Some mid-twentieth century apostates (Austin, Ryle, Wittgenstein), noticed that philosophers' usual, strict criteria of justifiedness underlying many of these problems are not our everyday criteria. Their position was that our everyday criteria are good enough. This amounted to questioning the very fabric of the usual philosophical reality. But these critics arguably never really told a story as to why they are good enough.

Philosophers' attention to justifiedness generalizes to an interest in rationality, which in the main is a matter of having justified beliefs - believing what you ought to and only that. This is a good thing to care about, I agree. The prevailing understanding of rationality is individualistic. We, each of us, confront the world as fully-formed, autonomous, reasoning agents with thoughts and intentions. We eventually develop language to communicate our thoughts and thereby reason with other agents, but this is a secondary innovation.

The prevailing understanding can be up-ended. There is a detailed, comprehensive story to tell about people using language for communication prior to their having solitary thoughts -as a pre-condition for the having of solitary thoughts. This picture turns everything upside down (or right-side up). Its understanding of rationality is interpersonal. The idea is that we contrive and seek-out sentences because we find them valuable (for reasons that can be gone into). The amount of sentential value a person can get increases exponentially with interpersonal exchange. An implication of this is that being in harmony with others about which sentences are valuable takes on considerable significance, leading to an implicit contract. It's this contract governing the exchange of sentences which gives rise to truth and in turn to meaning. When we occasionally disagree about the value of a sentence, we have a practice of juxtaposing it against other sentences to try to persuade interlocutors of its value as we see it. The account of the motivation for, and dynamics of, this kind of exchange is a big part of the alternative story. As it happens, this understanding predicts that the criteria of justifiedness governing these practices are our everyday criteria - not philosophers' usual criteria. Rationality and logic in the first instance emerge from our justificatory practices, as the norms for the conduct of them.

The effect of transitioning to the alternate account of rationality is the deflation of many of philosophy's problems. The old account of rationality treats reason as, so to speak, atomizable, sort-of in the way the physical world is. This engenders the research project which fills much of philosophers' time. The alternate account rejects this. Science and common sense are the only explanatory idioms we can make sense of. In particular, there is no coherent idiom which adverts to inner states or faculties or other sub-components of our selves which explains why we do what we do.