The Irrelevance of Philosophy

Philosophy is irrelevant.

However, why is that a bad thing?

When we learn other subjects and other skills, we learn how to navigate the world. But it is not some reality-in-itself which we learn to work with; that would be far too much for a human to comprehend. We work within a construction, within a social model. We learn how to get a job; not just any job, but the jobs available in a given society, with given aims, run in given ways, for the purpose of making socially-established currency in order to achieve certain other aims, most of which are prescribed by the culture. We learn science and engineering, but not by merely observing the world. We have a framework which works and produces results, and we learn how to utilize that framework to make more experiments and technology.

Relevance has to do with making our way around these frameworks, with learning how to live in the world as it is. But the "world as it is" is a present phenomenon, without determining the "world as it could be". One could say that we should be content with the way things are and live with our feet planted on the earth in the real world. But we live in political systems and use technology that have resulted from people saying "Why can't things be different?"

Philosophy is irrelevant, because it calls into question our schemata of relevance. It is the process of questioning, "But why should we take it that way?" "What other ways could we do this?" "What fundamental principles can we re-examine?" It was common sense that a democracy could never work, and that people should adjust to the given power structures; then the American Revolution happened. Within time, the idea that government ultimately relies on the people became the new common sense. Or take Albert Einstein: he simply asked himself what time really was and what we actually meant when we say that two events were simultaneous. A simple questioning of principles which "everyone knew," an imagined train ride, and there was his theory of relativity.

This opening up of a place for questioning, of re-examining the gap between the "world as it is" and the "world as it could be", is the task of philosophy. And it isn't relevant to going along with the way "things really are." But for the sake of the future and everything we could accomplish, one cannot say that such thought is unimportant.

Thoughts on Machiavelli

I had read The Prince a while ago and have been trying to digest it a bit. It raises some interesting questions for politics. Now, Machiavelli has a name for advocating ruthlessness and backstabbing in order to keep power. But his project is actually much more than that.

First, he sets out to write about how politics actually work. Too many people have been writing about the politics of some ideal, morally perfect world, he complains. He wants to tell it like it is. He is not saying that one should be a jerk, he's just pointing out that, actually, many good Roman emperors who kept the peace were assassinated by their own soldiers for the very fact. Do what you want with that information, but at least face the world we live in.

Second, Machiavelli brings up ethical problems in ruling a state. You might think that the gentle ruler is better than the brutal ruler - but what happens when your region is in chaos? He gives some examples from Italy of his day of a ruler who was nice and all, but whose city then was conquered, which of course destroyed the social fabric. By contrast, he points out another ruler who was horribly brutal. But after a few well-placed executions, his city ran smoothly. The latter actually brought peace to his city, which means that the citizens actually lived better lives. The former actually lost that peace. And the goal of ruling is to procure actual peace, stability, and comfort for one's own citizens.

This bothers me about politics, by which I mean any attempt to bring order to a community of people. When is force justified? Not just force in war, but also in pushing through opinions that will actually improve the lives of people, even if they don't realize it (and may even be antagonistic to it). What do we do when ideals of justice don't actually lead to good consequences? The world works the way it does, and complaining about corruption and social inertia doesn't change their existence. Procuring peace at the price of justice won't secure that peace, but pursuing through only just ends might not get anything at all. And this is ultimately Machiavelli's point: not that one should do whatever it takes to get power for oneself (he actually doesn't care much for such people), but that one needs to do what it takes to improve ones community (in this case, the incessantly warring states of Italy).

Closing the School of Athens

Philosophy, as its own department in the university, should be shut down.

Now, let me clarify that. It is not that I think that philosophy is worthless. In fact, quite the contrary. Philosophy is too important to be left as a discipline that only philosophers study. Scientists need some basic study of the philosophy of science. Political leaders need to know something about political philosophy. Quantum physics already is speculative metaphysics half the time. Everyone could use some ethics. If philosophers were forced to join other departments, they would actually contribute to discussions.

At the same time, philosophers need to spend some time in empirical studies. One cannot do philosophy of mind without some knowledge of contemporary cognitive science. One cannot do social and political philosophy without a rigorous scientific background in contemporary sociology. I am not saying that one must agree with the reigning scientific paradigms, but rather that one must understand what they are saying even if only for the purpose of critique. And any philosophers who cannot deal with the rigor of science are doing creative writing, not philosophy.

Finally, history of philosophy could join, logically enough, the history department. This not out of a sense of irrelevance. I have learned more from in-depth study of ancient and medieval thinkers than from almost any other intellectual endeavor. History has a pride of place in the humanities, to my mind, as the best window we have into human existence as it is played out.

Without a separate philosophy department, other people will have to listen to philosophy, philosophers will have to listen to other people, and we can finally get rid of these inane journals where everyone writes merely to have written. We would be closer in spirit to the philosophers of past ages, who considered an empirical understanding of the world around them to be integral to philosophizing. Aristotle was the quintessential biologist. Kant pretty much invented geology. Descartes was influential in physics. Avicenna and Maimonides were pioneering physicians who have provided techniques that are still used today. Many Chinese philosophers were statesmen concerned with proper running of their country. If philosophy is to be more than logic chopping and self-absorbed poetizing, it must no longer consider itself an entity unto itself.

Are Beliefs Practical?

Beliefs are slippery little buggers. On the one hand, they are tools for navigating life. We believe certain things so that we can get around in the world. We need some way of dealing with the complexities of reality. I believe that western medicine by and large works and that it works far and away better than the alternatives. Therefore, I go to doctors trained in Western medicine rather than homeopathy or Ayurveda.

The belief is a means to an end: namely, my getting better. If I didn't need to get better, why would I worry about different medical practices? We have finite lives. We can't spend all of our time trying to make sure that our believes are correct, so long as our lives are running well. If I pick a shoddy medical practice that works for me, even as a mere placebo, I still feel better. What's the harm?

Sometimes, the belief can even change the result. William James talks about a person who is about to jump across a chasm. If this person believes that they can make it, they will have a higher chance of doing so than the persons that doubts themselves and hesitates. So believing something simply because we want it to be true can sometimes make it true.

But beliefs aren't merely tools. Having a belief means that we take something to be actually true about the world already. I take it to be the case that most of my sicknesses are caused by microscopic bacteria, viruses, and so on. The world is not made up of either 4 or 5 elements. Theories based on balancing these elements are just plain false, despite occasionally producing useful results. I can't believe that balancing the fire and water in my body will heal me without also believing that this is actually how things are; the very idea that I could is just nonsense, though some people have astonishingly high skill at self-delusion which allows them to get around this logical nicety.

So how can we take something to be true about the world and not care about whether it is true? How can we believe something, but then be unwilling to put it to critical analysis and to search out whether it is true? But is this really a problem? Why not just take it all with a grain of salt? Use beliefs as tools only. Believing something becomes like watching a movie – we suspend disbelief rather than take the plot to be actually true. It's a story to guide our actions, but merely a story.

This helps with local events: both local in space (affecting me and those closest to me) and in time (short-term goals). Sure, if I follow the medical tip from some random second cousin and it makes me feel better, then it works for me. I don't have to believe anything more than that it has been personally useful. However, it is not clear that this approach deals effectively with broader issues, such as those affecting other groups or calling for short-term sacrifice for the sake of long-term gain.

Take climate change, for example. There does seem to be some truth to the matter as to what will happen in the future if we continue to live as we do. Either humans beings are actually causing climate change, or we are not. Either this will produce a wildly out-of-whack world, or it will not. Either changing emissions in certain ways will help us deal with the problem, or it will not. (There appears to be little actual evidence against the notion that (a) there has been climate change over the past century of alarming proportions, and (b) that it is in large part caused by human beings. However, there is still a lot of discussion over what that entails for the future.)

There is potentially a disaster coming up within a couple generations, and adjusting ourselves to meet it could result in short-term sacrifices. We cannot merely look at what is practical for ourselves here-and-now in our own country to decide what would be better overall in the longer-term. Even if we were to decide that large-scale changes would not need to be implemented, it would have nothing to do with the fact that such changes would be hard right now – it would have to do with our best scientific research telling us that climate change won't be mitigated by our efforts. People arguing from local practical concerns alone, such as loss of jobs and increase in price of goods, completely miss the point, regardless of what our best plan of action will be.

I do not pretend to have an answer to this problem; I merely point out that there is a problem which must be dealt with based on matters of truth beyond what is recognizably practical to us now. (I thought I would give religion a break for a blog post, so I went with science instead.) So beliefs about what are practical to me and those close to me for the short-term can be decided through purely practical means, with little regard to overall truth. But those beliefs are also only suited for these very particular circumstances. Change the context, and the validity of such practical beliefs also changes. So for more far-reaching goals, concern over truth and the theoretical value of beliefs becomes more important.

Politically, this is problematic. Democracy and a democratic voting system is based on people being able to know where their interests lie, and trusting that people overall are smart enough to figure this out on their own. And this might be well enough for locally practical beliefs, for those that guide people through their own day-to-day experience. But people also vote based on issues impacting their communities, their country, and even the world, and it is not at all clear that their experience is useful here; in fact, it might even cloud their judgment in such matters without proper education showing them the bigger picture (and taking a couple science classes hardly instills scientific literacy).

Expert Knowledge - Part 3 of 4

In my last post, I argued that it does make sense to include certain people within the category of expert knowers and others outside as non-knowers. However, this raises the specter of unequitable power relations, with which I hope to deal in this post.

Someone may criticize this view as being elitist, and the concern seems to come up often enough that it should be dealt with. Is the attribution merely descriptive, or pejorative? If descriptive, then it probably fits; so what? If pejorative, then what exactly is wrong?

It is the denial of elitism that is problematic. On the one hand, it is harmful to deny one's own superiority in a given area if one clearly knows more. I rely on my doctor having more medical knowledge than myself; if she were to play humble and average Jane on me, claiming that she really doesn't know any more than I do, or any more than I could figure out on my own relatively efficiently, then she would have trouble curing me.

It also seems that a frank admission of elitism, that some people really do know more than others, that some people really are experts and this is something that it takes years of effort to achieve (and so is not open to the general public for scrutiny), is the ground on which we can even talk of oppression. If people are oppressed, they are actually oppressed. They are actually deprived of some good. To act as though we are all equal when we are not in actuality is to say that those deprived of an education have not actually missed out on anything; that is, they have not been oppressed, and we can all breathe more easily.

In addition, to deny elitism in this sense is to place either an undue burden on the individual, who must now shoulder all responsibility herself for everything she needs, or we must cheapen knowledge acquisition, as if understanding the world and the Other were a simple business. We live and learn communally, which entails our dependence on others who know better than us, even if dependence can be painful.

With that said, the problem with expert knowledge is deciding who the experts are. When we fill the concept of "rationality" and "expert" with content determined by the experience of white males, for example, then this perpetuates a cycle. Men do math, because men are good at math; they are the ones rational enough to do math. Which means that in the next generation, mostly men will be drawn to do math, which means that the stereotype sticks. Maybe a couple women are "unfeminine" enough to be mathematicians, but most women (and all the "real" women) stay out. And of course, examples could be adduced; it was the experience of privileged, rational, land-owning Whites who gave content to the Enlightenment notion of a person, for instance, such that it was a simply matter to consider black slaves as non-persons.

The problem here, it seems to me, is that we multiply the final causes (that is, the goals, that which unifies) of a discipline. We implicitly (since we dare not explicitly) hold both that medicine must work empirically, and that the doctors conform to our image of what a doctor should be. But what is it within each disciple that justifies it? We have our expert community pursuing a discipline; what justifies that community?

It seems important here that we can pick out some immanent criterion, something tangible and readily within experience. If we say that the certainty of math is what legitimates it, then the current experts are the ones who tell us what certainty is, and who can have it. This seems to me to be a way in which those experts in power continue their dominance against minority voices, perhaps illegitimately. But this problem is lessened if we look for a clear mark. What has distinguished the mathematical community of experts? Their unanimity. If a sizable body of people claiming to do math, and who have put in the requisite time for study, come to different conclusions, they could not simply be written off. This is because writing them off would both assume unanimity (which is why they must be wrong) and deny it (since not everyone has agreed). Therefore, this community must be admitted and their claims critically analyzed from within the community, perhaps leading to a redefinition of mathematics.

This can come about because communities are not static. Every expert community can have its common goals for the time being which unify that community. These may need to change; there is no reason to assume eternal essences to disciplines. After all, mathematics today is not the same discipline as of a couple centuries ago. Leibniz saw no need to have a mathematical basis for continuity, because everything in nature is continuous. Modern math doesn't care about the natural world, although it can be applied to it, and no principle can be left undefined. But the changes in math came about due to internal specifications of its goals, and internal processes changing those goals. When the goals split in different directions, we got two different bodies of experts: the mathematicians (favoring logical rigor) and the physicists (favoring description of the natural world). But both of these communities naturally grew out of earlier mathematics.

How does this relate to power relations? The goals of a community are what define the community; these in themselves do not seem to set up unjust power relations. If you don't want to empirically test medical techniques, you're simply not doing what the typical modern medical community is doing. Other aspects (to be covered below) may create injustice, but for the present we are simply defining the communities. Therefore, what creates the power imbalance is the community ignores its unifying principle, its form of life, for tangential concerns. If medicine is defined by being empirical, but we don't even bother to look at the empirical investigations of other sources of medicine or of medicine done by certain minority groups, then we have transgressed the inner life of the medical community itself. But racism within medicine is not to claim that medicine is set up such that minorities are bad doctors; it is to claim that the minorities would be good doctors but are prevented from being such by extrinsic concerns (if minorities would truly be bad doctors, they shouldn't be doctors, since they wouldn't be able to cure people well; I simply don't admit the starting hypothesis). Racism and sexism are problems precisely because they are at odds with the internal goals of the community.

So now the question might be: what keeps there from being a community which defines itself in terms of being white and male, and dedicated to preserved the white male culture? Nothing, really, and I'm not sure that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this. Kant and Plato said some good things, after all, and it would be a shame to lose them. But there should also be room for a community dedicated to preserving, say, black culture. There would be two reasons why our white male community could be problematic. First, it could dictate the concerns of other communities, preventing the black cultural community from existing, or at least flourishing. Second, and perhaps simply a variant of the first, such a community could create exocentric values; that is, values for those outside of itself (and poisoning individuals within, for that matter), which state that not only does the community have its own goals and processes and standards, but that these should be normative for others: people in general ought to study white male culture, since it is superior to other cultures.

Both of these points, though, seem to be illegitimate uses of expert knowledge. The specialist in white male philosophy is only an expert in that area, and so unless she is an expert in, say, black culture as well (and all expertise must be ratified by the community itself), she must defer to the experts in that field when making claims about it. Similarly, the mathematical community can say what it wants to about math, but mathematicians cannot in themselves set the value of math for everyone else (although they can extol the praises of why they themselves love math). There is a plurality of expertises, and experts in one field do not thereby have any claims in other fields until they have proven themselves again.

In summary, then, it would seem that a strategy for reducing unjust power relations in expert communities would be for such communities to a) pay attention to their own internal workings and to hold themselves to such internal standards, and b) respect other communities as being other with their own separate expertise.

Of course, this leaves other problematic issues. Do we say that Nazi Germany was free to abide by the inner life of its own community? It seems to me that political entities have their own problems, not least because the criterion of expertise is missing (there seems to be relatively little knowledge required for political behavior, other than how to gain power for oneself). At any rate, I do not claim to be solving all problems of injustice in this essay; I merely want to lay out some ways in which expert communities can keep their claims to expertise and their stratifications of knowledge-bearers, without thereby necessarily introducing concerns about race, gender, etc.

Now that I have something of a working theory, I would like to turn it to the problem of knowledge within religious communities as given through testimony.