Philosophical Propositions

An Introduction to Philosophy

Jonathan Westphal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415170536
• eBook ISBN: 9781134698219
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophical Propositions is a fresh, up to date, and reliable introduction to philosophical problems. It takes seriously the need for philosophy to deal with definitive and statable propositions, such as God, certainty, time, personal identity, the mind/body problem, free will and determinism, and the meaning of life.

1
The Nature of a Philosophical Problem

What Is Philosophy?

A
Introduction

Many introductions to philosophy do not define their subject matter. The best introduction to philosophy, some of them say, is philosophy itself, and the best way to learn what philosophy is is to get on and do some.

This bracing answer to the question presupposes that one already knows what it is that one is supposed to be getting on with. ‘Doing philosophy’ can simply amount to following erratically in the footsteps of the philosophical writer one happens to be reading.

Someone who genuinely has no idea at all what philosophy is, and wishes to know, surely deserves a genuine answer. Even some professional philosophers are in this deserving category. These philosophers have not come to a settled view of what their subject is, and they may be ashamed to confess it.

Or they may confess it freely. ‘What philosophy is is itself a philosophical question’, they say. This is of course true, but it is not the end of the matter, for even so, it ought to be possible to say what philosophy is as one understands it.

It has been said¹ that in philosophy ‘the difficulties and disagreements of which its history is full, are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer’. This is certainly part of the problem.

In what follows, a proposition or statement at the centre of a philosophical problem or problems, a ‘problem proposition’ as I will call it, will be given, and the downward arrow ‘↓’ used to mark the transformation of this problem proposition into one which does not raise the problem or problems, or to mark another proposition which replaces it and which does not raise the problem or problems. This has traditionally been called an ‘analysis’. The downward arrow will signify that the original proposition and the analysed proposition are equivalent, and it will also indicate the direction of the analysis, from the initial proposition to the analysed proposition.

Philosophical analyses can, however, not only fail to solve given specified problems. They can also generate new problems of their own.

I shall use the phrase ‘philosophical problem’ to refer narrowly to the kind of puzzle which a philosophical analysis resolves. But I shall also use this phrase in a wider way to refer to any large-scale intellectual problem whose solution depends on philosophical analysis. In this second sense a philosophical problem consists of a philosophical question and the attempt to answer it by means of a rational argument. It might be better to reserve the phrase ‘philosophical puzzle’ for a philosophical problem in the first and narrower sense. Or one could say that there are two kinds of philosophical problem. There is the chaotic and chronologically prior kind which consists of wonder and confusion, and there is the clear and logically prior kind which consists of organized puzzlement and resolution.

B
What Philosophy Is

As I propose to define it, philosophy is the attempt, by means of rational argument, to resolve those problems, typically of great practical importance or theoretical interest, which depend on the analysis of the basic concepts in the propositions in which they are stated. So the central activity of philosophy in this sense is analysis.

Consider the difference between two questions about time. The first one, ‘What is the time?’ or ‘What time is it?’, is answered by giving a number which marks a place on a fixed scale of hours, minutes and seconds. This point is determined by looking at a watch, or listening to the speaking clock, or following the sun in the sky. The second question, ‘What is time?’, cannot be answered by any of these empirical activities. What is at issue in the second question is not where on the fixed scale the present is to be found, but the nature of what the scale scales. G.E.Moore said that though he did not know what time is, finding it philosophically a very puzzling thing indeed, he did know that he had had his breakfast before his lunch.

The philosopher Rudolf Carnap generalized this point by distinguishing what he called ‘internal’ from ‘external’ questions.² ‘What time is it?’ is a question which can be answered within or using the scheme of concepts which includes the concept time. The second question, what time is, asks about the interpretation and application of the scheme of concepts itself, and it is ‘external’ to the scheme in Carnap’s sense. The second question demands an analysis of the concept, not an unanalysed application of it.

Or suppose that there is a question about what we see. Someone might answer the question simply by listing the objects in his or her field of vision. That would be an internal answer to the question. Taking the question externally, one might wonder about what seeing is, about whether one is ever really in direct contact with the objects which appear to be in the field of vision, or whether one is really only in contact with one’s own perceptions.

Or finally, to take one of Carnap’s own examples, the question of whether there is a prime number lying beyond one hundred is an internal question. The question of whether there are any numbers at all, as opposed to things like horses and men, and people counting them, is an external question, and it is a philosophical question. It concerns the whole category or concept of number.

Philosophy undertaken as analysis can, however, play a critical role even in the empirical sciences, for example in physical cosmology. Take the question of how the existence of the universe is to be explained, if it can be. Why does the universe exist? Some physicists have tried to give an account of how the universe arose out of nothing. It turns out, however, that their ‘nothing’ is actually a rather definite sort of something, namely a something which they describe as fluctuations in a sea of quantum gravity. So ‘The universe arose out of nothing’ is being given a very special sense, one in which ‘nothing’ also means ‘something’. Here a conception of the world hinges on a concept which cries out for philosophical analysis.

Philosophy also has a special role in the understanding of religion. Consider a classic problem about the creation of the world. There is a reason for everything, suppose. So there is a reason for the world. This reason cannot lie within the world, for then it would be a part of the world and not a reason for it. So it lies outside the world. It transcends the world. Call this transcendent reason or ‘creator’ God. But then what is the reason for God? Who or what created God? Or is there an infinite hierarchy of ascending ‘supergods’, as they might be called?

This is a question regularly asked by even quite small children. The answer involves an analysis or an understanding of what is meant by ‘reason’, ‘create’, ‘world’ and so on, which are the key concepts in the problem.

What is at issue in both the physics of cosmology and the theology of creation is the understanding of concepts, not just the discovery of new facts. Indeed, an uncritical and wholly factual way of thinking is in part responsible for the cosmological and theological problems. The problems are conceptual, not just factual.

I also very much respect the view that philosophy is the attempt to arrive at coherent, overall pictures of the world in which everything fits together nicely. On this view academic philosophy is the discussion which takes place when conceptions of the world, or basic beliefs, come into conflict with one another.

There is certainly much to be said for a view like this, though I think that it has more to do with a personal motivation for philosophy than it does with its public result. In practice, however, the view tends to turn into the view that philosophy is conceptual analysis. Pictures of the world are not all intrinsically philosophical; for example, the picture in which everything is made of little elastic balls, though this (Greek atomism) had its origin in metaphysics. Such views become philosophical only when their key terms are subjected to a philosophical or conceptual scrutiny driven by puzzles.

So we still need to know what a philosophical analysis is. What is meant by the phrase ‘analysis of the basic concepts’ in the definition of philosophy given above?

C
Two Model Problems of Philosophical Analysis

Consider the following propositions. I offer them as examples of propositions which embody philosophical problems and call for philosophical analysis.

The average American family has 2.6 children.

Why is this proposition a problem? Certainly it is true.

The Puzzle of the Average American Family

Yet how can it be? For there is no such thing as ‘the average American family’. Even if there were, there would be no answer to the question of where this family lives, or what it is called. The general problem is how a proposition like the problem proposition can be true when its subject does not exist. The problematic concept here is the average American family.

The Puzzle of the Divided Children

Yet how can it be? For there is no such thing as 2.6 children. The general problem is how a proposition can be true and a predicate like ‘2.6 children’ truly applied when the predicate does not refer to anything. The problematic concept here is 2.6 children.

Reflecting on the initial proposition, one might try to distinguish between the world of reality and the world of statistics. This raises further questions.

What is a statistical child, if not a child?

How does a statistical child differ from a real child, if it does?

What is the relation between the two types of child?

There is no real doubt about what the given proposition means, however, and it is interesting that this meaning is given by the calculation which establishes the statistic. Nor is there much doubt about what it does not mean. It does not mean that in an average state, somewhere, out there, probably in Ohio, behind a white picket fence, just off Main Street, there really does exist the average American family. And it has one dog and 2.6 children.

Disappointing as it may seem to those enticed by this picture, the proposition actually means that the number of American children divided by the number of American families is 2.6.

So we have,

The average American family has 2.6 children.

↓

The number of American children divided by the number of American families is 2.6.

This final proposition immediately resolves the puzzle of the average American family and the puzzle of the divided children. In it the word ‘average’ has disappeared. Indeed, it could be regarded as giving a definition of the word ‘average’, which explains why the word appears in the original proposition but not in its analysis.

The phrase ‘the average American family’ in the first proposition has been broken up, and so the final proposition does not even seem to refer to something called ‘the average American family’. ‘Family’ has been replaced by the plural ‘families’. The grammatical subject of the second proposition is ‘the number of American children divided by the number of American families’, not ‘the average American family’.

The phrase ‘2.6 children’ has been broken up, so that the final proposition does not even seem to refer to a group of children, 2.6 in number. ‘2.6’ no longer modifies ‘children’. Instead, it flanks the equational verb in the final proposition. For what this proposition says is that a number, the number of American children, divided by another number, the number of American families, is a third number, 2.6. There is nothing problematic about the concept that a number divided by another number is a third number, whereas there clearly is in the idea of 2.6 children something very problematic indeed.

The final proposition also avoids the three problems about the relation of the real to the statistical children. These problems are creatures of the unanalysed original proposition, and when it is replaced they too disappear. In this sense, they find their resolution in the final proposition.

The main mistake which generates the puzzles is thinking that the logical form of ‘The average American family has 2.6 children’ is the same as the logical form of ‘The First Family has 2 children.’ The grammatical subject of the first is not its real subject, whereas the grammatical subject of the second is its real subject. It looks as though the proposition about the average American family is about the average American family, just as the proposition about the First Family is about the Clintons, but this appearance is misleading. The first proposition really says something about the number of American children divided by the number of American families, not about a particular family.

Something can now be said about the phrase ‘basic concepts’ in the final definition of philosophy given earlier. ‘Basic concepts’ can be understood to be those concepts which do or could yield a philosophical puzzle. Thus in the initial proposition about the average American family, by this test, the problematic basic concepts are ‘average’ and ‘2.6 children’.

‘Has’ and ‘family’ would not count as problematic basic concepts in connection with the puzzles associated with the initial proposition. But they could well be counted as problematic concepts in the intended sense in other problem propositions or in connection with other puzzles; for example, those raised by ‘I have a pain.’ Does ‘have’ here mean the same as in ‘I have a question’ or ‘I have a cat’? Or what is a family? Do only nuclear families count? What if the parents of children 1 and 2 are divorced and marry the separated but unmarried biological parents of children 3 and 4? How many families are left? None (because the families have broken up); one (because it’s all one big extended happy family); two (because the facts of parenthood and the relationships of the parents to the children have not changed); three (because there are two original families plus one new grouping); and four (two old and two new)—these are all more or less defensible answers. And then what if the parents of children 1 and 2 are not their biological parents, but have adopted them, and are also themselves gay? Does a family based on a gay marriage count as a family? How about if it takes place in church? (How about if it doesn’t?) So here the concept families is beginning to look problematic, and there are serious philosophical questions involved in how to identify them and how to count them.

Consider another problem proposition.

Nothing is perfect.

Many people believe that this proposition is true. On reflection, some of them might imagine nothing as a large, quiet and frightening patch of nullity, rather like a fog. They might also imagine that it is perfect in its uncanny silence and its white purity. They would then be bound to understand the proposition to mean that there is something called ‘Nothing’, and that it is Perfect. This Nothing might also be blamed for the various phenomena of negativity in the world, including absences, illnesses and the like. (Then what of its perfectness? Perhaps it is jealous of the perfection of other things.) Such an analysis might even be thought to have theological implications.

The philosophical interest of the proposition therefore lies as much in its meanings—it surely has several!—as in its truth.

The Puzzle of the Existence of Nothing

The proposition appears to be about nothing, in the sense that its grammatical subject is ‘nothing’. Yet if it is about nothing, how can it be true? And if it is true, and it is about nothing, then there is after all something—nothing—which it is about. Then nothing is after all something. And so on.

The Puzzle of the Perfection of Nothing

Even supposing that nothing is a sort of eerie void, but still a something, how can it be, as the proposition seems to say, perfect? Is it not instead maximally imperfect, having as it does no redeeming positive characteristics whatever?

These two problems are based on a misunderstanding of the function of ‘nothing’ or ‘no thing’. The problematic concept in both puzzle...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1: The Nature of a Philosophical Problem
• 2: Some Basic Concepts of Logic and Philosophy
• 3: The Problem of Evil
• 4: The Existence of God
• 5: Certainty
• 6: Time
• 7: Personal Identity
• 8: The Mind-Body Problem
• 9: Freewill and Determinism
• 10: The Meaning of Life