Final Lecture for Midcoast Senior College Introduction to Philosophy Course

Spring 2021

Concluding Thoughts on Distinguishing and Characterizing Philosophy

     Copyright © 2021 Bruce W. Hauptli

In his Experience and Nature, John Dewey advances a conception of philosophy as criticism which is important:

...philosophy is inherently criticism, having its distinctive position among various modes of criticism in its generality; a criticism of criticisms….Criticism is discriminating judgment, careful appraisal, and judgment is appropriately termed criticism wherever the subject-matter of discrimination concerns goods or values.  Possession and enjoyment of goods passes insensibly and inevitably into appraisal.  First and immature experience is content simply to enjoy.  But a brief course in experience enforces reflection; it requires but brief time to teach that somethings sweet in the having are bitter in after-taste and in what they lead to.  Primitive innocence does not last.  Enjoyment ceases to be a datum and becomes a problem.  As a problem, it implies intelligent inquiry into the conditions and consequences of a value-object; that is, criticism.  If values were as plentiful as huckleberries, and if the huckleberry-patch were always at hand, the passage of appreciation into criticism would be a senseless procedure.  If one thing tired or bored us, we should have only to turn to another.  But values are as unstable as the forms of clouds.  The things that possess them are exposed to all the contingencies of existence, and they are indifferent to our likings and tastes.[1] 

...of immediate values as such, values which occur and which are possessed and enjoyed, there is no theory at all; they just occur, are enjoyed, possessed; that is all.  The moment we begin to discourse about these values, to define and generalize, to make distinctions in kinds, we are passing beyond value-objects themselves; we are entering, even if only blindly, upon an inquiry into causal antecedents and causative consequents, with a view to appraising the “real,” that is the eventual, goodness of the thing in question.  We are criticizing, not for its own sake, but for the sake of instituting and perpetuating more enduring and extensive values.[2] 

If a man believes in ghosts, devils, miracles, fortune-tellers, the immutable certainty of the existing economic regime, and the supreme merits of his political party and its leaders, he does so believe; these are immediate goods to him, precisely as some color and tone combinations are lovely, or the mistress of his heart is charming.  When the question is raised as to the “real” value of the object for belief, the appeal is to criticism, intelligence.  And the court of appeal decides by the law of conditions and consequences.  Inquiry duly pursued leads to the enstatement of an object which is directly accepted, good in belief, but an object whose character now depends upon the reflective operations whose conclusion it is.  Like the object of dogmatic and uncritical belief, it marks an “end,” a static arrest; but unlike it, the “end” is a conclusion; hence it carries credentials.[3] 

It is easier to wean a miser from his hoard, than a man from his deeper opinions.  And the tragedy is that in so many cases the causes which lead to the thing in question being a value are not reasons for its being a good, while the fact that it is an immediate good tends to preclude that search for causes, that dispassionate judgment, which is pre-requisite to the conversion of goods de facto into goods de jure.  Here, again and preeminently, since reflection is the instrumentality of securing freer and more enduring goods, reflection is a unique and intrinsic good.[4] 

  Here it is the connection between “criticism” and values that I want to draw attention to.  For Dewey values arise in experience and can be immediately/primitively experienced, and they can then be critically assessed and become more enduring and extensive values.  In both cases we have fact—something is valued and the conditions leading to such experiences are critically considered to allow for more of these valued experiences.  When these valuations are themselves critically examined and assessed, we come to have finally, however, critical reflection can assess the valuations “goods de jure”—that is, values reflectively credentialed.  When prehistoric persons first tasted meet which fell in their fire, it tasted good (a primitive good, sorry for the pun).  When they reflectively and critically perfected cooking such immediate goods became stable goods.  Finally, when the value of cooked food was reflectively and critically assessed we came to the level of a “reflectively credentialed good.”  Dewey would certainly point out, however, that critical reflection would surely show that there are good foods which should not be cooked.  I want to tie this discussion to our discussion of the nature of the philosophical activity, so let me ease into another point. 

  I believe that neither science nor philosophy arrives at answers that are final.  Instead, each finds   uncertain but acceptable stopping-points in a critical and tentative rational agreement amongst the participants.  While, ideally, the answers will be completely convincing to all, this ideal is rarely attained.  Nonetheless there are factors which mitigate against continuance of the critical process: the costs (economic, temporal, and or social) of further inquiry may be unsupportable, there may be a pressing need for action which constrains further inquiry, participant may be exhausted, etc.  In such circumstances if a decision needs to be made critical inquiry may need to tentatively end and the politics of decision-making will have to take over.  I won’t pursue this further except to say that here I am a fan of Dewey’s view that such decisions are best made within a process which is deeply democratic. 

  Moreover, as the quotation from Rorty at the end of Section 4 of my "What Is Philosophy?" supplement indicates, philosophic inquiry differs from scientific inquiry in that in the case of science rational agreement is often facilitated as the inquirers often concur regarding what the “criteria of success” are which acceptable answers must measure up to.  In philosophical inquiry however, Rorty notes “…intersubjective agreement is harder to get when the criteria of success begin to proliferate, and even harder when those criteria themselves are up for grabs [as they are, he suggests, in philosophy].”^[5]  The differences over the criteria can be intense, especially when they arise in the areas of ethical and social-political thought, and I’ll reiterate my comment about Deweyan democracy here.  But I want to veer in another direction as it is of central importance both to this point and to our understanding of how to characterize the philosophical endeavor. 

  One of the factors mitigating against agreements on criteria in philosophy is the prevalence of paradox in the problematic situations leading to such inquiry.  In his Working Without A Net: A Study of Egocentric Epistemology, Richard Foley maintains that:

…it can be rational for you to believe each and every proposition that you defend in your book even though it is also rational for you to declare in the preface that at least one of the propositions is false…. 

  Situations of this sort are not even uncommon.  Most of us have very strong but not altogether certain evidence for a huge variety of propositions, evidence that makes these propositions rational for us.  And yet we also have strong evidence for our fallibility about such matters, evidence that can make it rational for us to beliefs of a set of such propositions that at least one is false.  If it were always and everywhere irrational to be knowingly inconsistent, this would be impossible.  It would be impossible for us knowingly and rationally to have these kinds of fallibilist beliefs.  But it isn’t impossible, and any theory that implies otherwise should be rejected for this reason.^[6] 

We find our critical processes both stretched and unperturbed sometimes by such paradoxes, and rather than try and resolve them we often proceed with the particular inquiries rather than confront the paradox head on.  This, of course what fallibilistically-minded scientists would do! 

  A second factor mitigating against agreements on criteria in philosophy is best introduced and discussed with an insight from the Twentieth-Century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.  In his Blue and Brown Books he points to the philosophic danger of asking for and seeking explicit, simple, fully general characterizations of seemingly simple concepts.  Consider the question: “What is a game.”  Surely, one says, if we can concisely say what a triangle is, we can do the same with games!  Well…. 

  Wittgenstein thinks that there is a deep philosophical malaise which arises as one asks seemingly innocent questions as “What is knowledge?”  “What is right?”  “What is just?”  or “What is Philosophy?”  Instead of expecting, as Plato teaches us, that there should be a simple essence which can be identified through a dialectical process, Wittgenstein suggests we accept that there may, instead, be a family resemblance between games, distinct types of knowledge (deductive, perceptual, arising from testimony, etc.).  To motivate this he asks his reader to consider what happens if from 4 till 4:30 A expects B to come to his room for tea?  “If one asks what the different processes of expecting someone to tea have in common, the answer is that there is no single feature in common to all of them, though there are many common features overlapping.  These cases of expectation form a family; they have family likenesses which are not clearly defined.”^[7]  From this and other exercises he draws attention to the fact that:

...in general we don’t use language according to strict rules—it hasn’t been taught us by means of strict rules, either.  We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus proceeding according to exact rules. 

  This is a very one-sided way of looking at language....We are unable clearly to circumscribe the concepts we use; not because we don’t know their real definition, but because there is no real ‘definition’ to them.  To suppose that there must be would be like supposing that whenever children play with a ball they play a game according to strict rules.”^[8] 

  Now I want to build on his point here at we continue to address the question: “What is philosophy?”  Plato would want a clear-cut, concise, species-genus definition, and his influence upon subsequent philosophizing makes this a pervasive expectation.  Wittgenstein’s response is to say this is not how we learn our concepts and it is mistaken to expect that the search for such essences will be successful.  Suppose he is right, what are we to say, then, as we look at our introductory experience? 

  Plato’s early dialogues expose us to the general character of the process he attaches so much importance to.  Like Socrates, he devotes his life to pursuing and promoting the activity of philosophical inquiry believing it provides a path to knowledge, virtue, and the worthwhile life.  The Wittgenstenian side of me points out there surely are many sorts of worthwhile lives, and no reason to believe there should be one model for all persons, and, perhaps, no reason to believe that any individual should lead a life devoted to any single “good.”  As human beings intersubjectively reflect upon their values (primitive, reflective, and reflectively credentialed) while recognizing that there may be multiple reflectively credentialed goods each of which (individually or in combinations) may sustain lives well worth living, we may come to better understand the contributions philosophy may offer. 

Return to my webpage for the course. 

Midcoast Senior College Website

Bruce Hauptli Home Page

Email: hauptli@fiu.edu 

Last revised: 05/04/21