Studies in Metaphilosophy

Morris Lazerowitz

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000421163
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Epistemology in Philosophy

First Published in 1964, Studies in Metaphilosophy presents and develop the hypothesis about the nature of metaphysical theories. Each study is a fresh attempt to improve our understanding of what a philosophical theory is and what its supporting arguments come to. Author argues that philosophical theories are nothing more substantial than linguistic chimeras and has the important function of pointing up the need for the examination of the whole subject. The volume discusses important themes like concept analysis, systematic doubt, the method of deduction from fact, logical necessitation, the nature of philosophical analysis, the nature of value, the metaphysical concept of space, Moore and philosophical analysis, the hidden structure of philosophical theories, and the relevance of psychoanalysis to philosophy. This volume will be an essential source for scholars and researchers of philosophy, logic, and metaphysics.

1

METHODS OF PHILOSOPHY

METAPHYSICS is an ancient discipline which has engaged the minds of the greatest thinkers, and one might, without being considered either unreasonable or frivolous, expect it to have borne some fruit, a collection of assured, uncontested truths, however small. But despite its long existence, which has certainly given philosophers ample time in which to assess the reasoning adduced for their theories, it has been utterly barren of undisputed results. The actual situation in metaphysics, as it is indeed in the whole of reasoned philosophy, is best given by comparing it with an imaginary situation in mathematics, one in which every piece of mathematical reasoning was countered by another equally cogent piece of mathematical reasoning, each having its convinced advocate. What is only a wild fantasy about mathematics is a sober report on the actual condition of philosophy. Certainly this condition should arouse our curiosity, to put it mildly. Indeed, it would be natural to think that it must be a matter of deep and constant concern to philosophers, no less than an uneducable child would be to its parents, but this is not the case. The surprising thing, if one stops to think about it, is how blithe philosophers are. They give the impression of fancying themselves to be in an intellectual paradise, the beauties and wonders of which they objectively report. This is the picture a philosopher has of himself and it is also the picture many outsiders have of what goes on in philosophy. To be sure, the picture one metaphysician has of a rival metaphysician is that of a Narcissus astride a swayback Pegasus. Philosophers who in recent years have become discontented with the unending and fruitless debates which are characteristic of metaphysics show no sign of being disconcerted by the barren disputation which pervades the special part of philosophy they have marked out for themselves, so-called analytical philosophy. Other philosophers, in quick debate with this writer, have put forward the claim that philosophy is not a demonstrative science and does not attempt to establish the truth-values of propositions. But these philosophers are unable to explain what it is that philosophers disagree about and what their chains of reasoning are intended to do, if not demonstrate propositions.

It must, in all fairness, be pointed out that on occasion some philosophers have become aware of the condition of metaphysics and have attempted to explain its complete poverty of results. Descartes laid the blame on the absence of a clearly formulated method in metaphysics. More than a hundred years later Kant took the position that metaphysical statements are about a domain of objects which the human mind, because of its structure, is incapable of investigating, and that to attempt to determine the truth-values of propositions about such objects is to chase a permanent will-o’-the-wisp. And recently a group of iconoclastic philosophers has maintained that metaphysical utterances are literally senseless and that in thinking themselves to be advocating and disputing theories metaphysicians have been the solemn dupes of a remarkable deception. As regards the Cartesian diagnosis, it is not necessary to say anything more at this point than that it took an astonishing amount of time before anyone felt that the condition of metaphysics was unusual. For that matter, if one looks a little below the surface even now, three hundred years later, one can discern the attitude that there is nothing unusual about the condition of metaphysics, that its anarchy of opinions is natural to it and is its normal condition which no method will change. As for the other two diagnoses, instead of producing the expected gloom, to all appearances metaphysicians have been only superficially disturbed by them and have on the whole continued their work with the placid security that characterizes chemists and algebraists, whose research reaches out from a secure base. The indifference of metaphysicians to the critiques of Kant and of Logical Positivists is readily understandable. Kant’s position is itself a thinly disguised piece of rival metaphysics. And the recent flamboyant diagnosis is obviously more designed to wound the pride of metaphysicians than to improve our understanding of what it is that they are doing. Behind the ‘elimination’ of metaphysics, which is nothing more than a dis-paragement of one kind of metaphysics, it is not at all difficult to see rival metaphysics being espoused, e.g., the phenomenalistic theory about ‘the nature of things’.

The condition of metaphysics is suited to a field in which there exist no rules of evidence, a field like religion, for example, in which there are no criteria for assessing what is offered as evidence for beliefs. The absence of such rules would, in the case of metaphysics, provide us with a possible explanation of its complete lack of results and also of the strange behaviour of practised philosophers regarding the considerations adduced for and against views. Not only do they divide in their appraisals of the strength of the considerations, but it is not a rare occurrence for a philosopher to change sides and then change back again. Such odd and apparently irresponsible behaviour might well be accounted for by supposing that metaphysics has, to quote Kant, ‘no standard weight and measure to distinguish sound knowledge from shallow talk’.¹ One commentator has observed that Parmenides ‘had an argument but no evidence’² for his position. His observation strikes something in our minds which is hard to identify and make explicit; but it does raise the question as to how a philosophical argument is different from a usual piece of evidence, empirical or a priori.

I. CONCEPT ANALYSIS

One thing that stands in the way of easily accepting the idea that metaphysics, as its intractable disputes would indicate, is an ‘anarchic dialectic’³ is that it is not without its professed methodologies, and hence is not without procedural rules and tests. What is puzzling is that they have not achieved their intended goal, viz., definitive solutions of problems. One method, which must leap immediately to everyone’s mind, is that formulated by Descartes, who described himself as possessed of ‘an excessive desire to distinguish between the true and the false’. As is well known, the riotous condition in which he found metaphysics led him to seek for ‘the true Method of arriving at all things of which [his] mind was capable’. He appears to have been satisfied that his method of systematic doubt brought order and scientific circumspection into the chaos of philosophy. Bertrand Russell describes the Cartesian method as the kind of procedure which is ‘the essence of philosophy’.¹

As a matter of fact, philosophy was not barren of methodology before Descartes introduced his own method. C. D. Broad has said, ‘Now the most fundamental task of Philosophy is to take the concepts that we daily use in common life and science, to analyse them, and thus to determine their precise meanings and their mutual relations’.² And not only is analysis of concepts, or what is the same thing, analysis of the meanings of expressions, a technique practised nowadays, but it was practised by Parmenides, Zeno, and by all the great philosophers up to the present. The surprising thing is that its practice has been to no avail. This makes it important to examine the various methods devised by metaphysicians with the following four questions in mind: whether the methods are actually different or whether they all reduce to the same thing, analysis; whether analysis is a technique which is capable of yielding the kind of information metaphysicians appear to seek; how it is that what a piece of analysis professedly shows can remain in permanent dispute; and finally, what a reasoned metaphysical theory comes to.

In addition to analysis and systematic doubt a number of further and seemingly different methods for dealing with philosophical problems have been described and used. There is the method which uses the criterion of consistency for determining the truth-values of rival answers to questions. Thus, F. H. Bradley has said that self-consistency is an ‘over-ruling test of truth’,³ ‘supreme and absolute’.⁴ There is the method which proceeds by a priori deduction from matter of fact to new fact. Various cosmological arguments for the existence of a Necessary Being are obvious examples of the use of this procedure. G. E. Moore has sometimes resorted to a procedure which might be called the method of ostensive proof. This method gives the impression of making an appeal to matter of fact, and indeed seems to supplement the preceding method by showing the existence of things of the kind it assumes. Some philosophers have described themselves as conducting an experiment in their minds, one which they invite others to make. Thus, one metaphysician has written, ‘When the experiment is made strictly, [the experiment of trying to remove from anything ‘all perception and feeling’¹] I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced’.¹ Philosophers have sometimes described the procedure they were using as consisting of careful scrutiny, whether by introspection or by sense observation. Hume’s classical considerations with regard to the self and things are illustrations of this technique. And Kant devised what may be called the test of a priori synthesis by which it could be determined both that certain propositions were true and also were about the world.

This list of methods is not exhaustive, but it is a sufficiently diversified sampling for the present investigation, which does not aim at completeness. Some at least of the methods of the list would seem to correspond to methods used in the various sciences, certainly in basic respects. But whereas in the sciences these have issued in a large body of results, experimental and mathematical, they have proved impotent in metaphysics, and in philosophy generally. The question as to why this should be so raises the question as to whether the methods are in fact what they are represented as being. It raises, furthermore, the question as to whether the philosophical problems investigated by them actually are what they appear to be about and whether philosophical answers make assertions of the kind they appear to make, e.g., whether the words ‘An absolutely perfect Being necessarily exists’ do in fact declare the existence of a being.

The method of analysis as it is practised in philosophy appears to be remarkably versatile in regard to the kinds of results its application is capable of producing. Analysis is usually viewed as a process of resolving ‘an unanalyzed whole … into its component parts’² and the correct analysis of a concept as being one which issues in a statement the negation of which is or implies a self-contradiction. A model example of an analytic statement is the statement that a father is a male parent, or, to give a less simple example, the statement that a paternal great-grandmother is the mother of a parent of either of one’s father’s parents. These paradigm statements, which fall under Leibniz’s characterization, ‘identical truths’, and under Kant’s characterization, statements whose predicates are ‘connected by identity’ with their subjects, are instances of what might be called ‘explication analysis’. And an explicative statement can readily be seen to be no more than one enumerating the features anything must have which counts as answering to its subject concept, features we somehow already know in possessing the concept. Perhaps the explanation is that being able to identify instances of a concept we have is largely independent of the conscious knowledge of the features which make them instances of the concept. Perhaps, to put the matter in G. E. Moore’s way, it is possible to know the meaning of a term without knowing the analysis of its meaning. Explication analysis may be a process of making conscious what we already know unconsciously.

Be that as it may, analysis would seem to be capable of more than concept explication. Perhaps all philosophers, and certainly many, have the idea that analysis is capable of yielding information about the existence or nature of various things. Thus Zeno and many important philosophers after him over a period of more than two millenia have had the idea that the analysis of the concept space shows the concept to be self-contradictory and shows therefore that space does not really exist. Leibniz, to give another example, seems to have had the idea that analysis could show the unreality of extended objects; and Hobbes thought that analysis showed that there are no unselfish desires. Analysis, in other words, is taken to be a method which is capable of demonstrating the unreality or non-existence of certain things.

It is also thought to be a method that can be used to establish the existence of certain things. The Anselmic-Cartesian argument for the existence of a theoretically greatest being, recently revived¹ and debated with the usual outcome, is a celebrated piece of what might be called positive analysis. Put briefly, the argument goes as follows. The concept of a being so great that a greater is inconceivable is the concept of a being lacking no attribute (e.g., omnipotence) the possession of which could conceivably add to its greatness. Analysis of this concept shows, in the opinion of some great reasoners, that such a being must exist: its existence is entailed by its nature. For the concept of a non-existent greatest conceivable being is the self-contradictory concept of a greatest conceivable being than which a still greater is conceivable, namely one which is existent. Hence the proposition that a greatest conceivable being exists is analytic, true a priori, its negation having been shown by the method of analysis to involve a contradiction.

Analysis of concepts, in certain cases, is also thought to be a suitable and fruitful method for discovering facts about the nature of various sorts of things. Some philosophers believe that its application to the concept of the self has shown that a self is...