Philosophers be like, "?"

In the Science of Discworld books the authors postulate Homo Sapiens is actually Pan Narrans, the storytelling ape. Telling stories is, they suggest, a fundamental way in which we think. Similarly in Hogfather, in which there's a finite quantity of belief in the universe : stop believing in something and you have to belief in something else instead. It's not that you have any choice about it. You just will, because that's how human beings work. 

I suppose it's Nietzsche++, in a way... God is dead, and we have killed him, and that's why we're believing in Jewish space lasers and all the other increasingly boring conspiracy theories.

But I digress. No doubt there's much to be said about the conservation of belief but I leave that for another time. Instead, here's a nice Aeon piece about the nature of philosophy which examines the role of storytelling in philosophy. Is it art ? Is it science ? Is it something else ?

Early proponents of the ‘analytic’ method in philosophy such as Bertrand Russell saw good philosophy as science-like and were dismissive of philosophy that was overly poetic or unscientific. Russell, for example, took issue with the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who was something of a bête-noire for early analytic philosophers. Bergson’s theorising (Russell thought) did not depend on argument but rather on expressing ‘truths’, so-called, arrived at by introspection.

For Macdonald, philosophical theories are very much like ‘pictures’ or ‘stories’ and, perhaps even more controversially, she suggests that philosophical debates often come down to ‘temperamental differences’. For example, whether you are willing to believe (in accordance with thinkers like René Descartes) that we have an immaterial soul will come down to more than just the philosophical arguments you are presented with. Your view on this matter, Macdonald thinks, will more likely be determined by your own personal values, life experiences, religion and so on. In this way, she thinks, temperamental differences account for many philosophical disagreements.

Well, surely temperamental differences have to play a role in which theory you like best (see also this post). Science can make rational and objective judgements about the world, this is true. Facts are facts. Facts don't care about feelings, and of course feelings don't care about facts. Since you will never have all the facts, you're going to have to rely on irrational factors to determine which interpretation suits you best. Like the need to tell stories and believe in things, this isn't something we can directly control. We can mitigate it as much as possible (that's what science is for), but not to zero. That's impossible, in the strong sense of the word.

So this seems pretty solid so far : we can't help being ourselves. Of course this applies universally, but the specifics are where it gets interesting :

Macdonald subjects philosophical enquiry itself to scrutiny, analysing the sorts of ways that philosophers talk and write – especially in comparison with scientists. This kind of linguistic analysis is a way of taking a step back and taking a look at the practice of philosophy itself. It involves answering questions like: What do philosophical disagreements involve and what do philosophical theories look like ? What do philosophers mean when they talk about philosophical ‘theories’? And is it the same thing that scientists mean when they use the word ‘theory’? Macdonald’s answer is a categorical ‘No’.

This of course raises whether philosophical ideas can be tested. Macdonald says no, that philosophy only provides new interpretations, not new data : "Every philosophical theory of perception is compatible with all perceptual facts", she says, or as Aeon puts it, "philosophical theories, unlike scientific theories, are not in the business of discovering new facts."

Before I tackle whether I agree with this or not, in the finest Aeon tradition, the author immediately produces an analogy which seems to me to be deeply flawed. I don't know why they do this, but I suspect some contractual obligation in order to drive site engagement. At least, that's the best reason I can come up with.

Two opposing positions in the philosophy of perception are direct realism and indirect realism (I’m going to oversimplify both here). Direct realism is the view that we directly perceive external objects in the world around us. When I look out of my window, I directly see a tree – and the nature of my perceptual experience informs me (directly) about the nature of the tree. Indirect realism, on the other hand, is the view that I only ever indirectly perceive objects like trees. What I directly perceive are mental representations – i.e., ideas of trees – that are produced in my mind when my sense organs (eg, my eyes) are stimulated in the right way and send signals to my brain. 

Right. It seems to me that direct realism is self-evidently mad. When we see a tree, we don't experience the same thing as when we hear or touch a tree. That would be utterly bonkers. Of course, our sensory data must correspond with something external that induces the sensory data, because most of the time we don't see things that aren't there (i.e. perception from one sense can be validated with others). The alternative is idealism, that ideas about things are all there are, but that in my view is just as weird. 

So yeah, in this case I think some philosophical ideas can be tested, without calling them science. You don't need empirical measurements for any of this. You can contrive an interpretation from existing data and discard it because it's clearly wrong or incoherent. Or maybe you can't, in which case you need to find more data...

(I have of course waxed lyrical about this many times before, not least of which can be found here, so I won't dwell on this again. Either you believe what I'm saying is tickety-boo, or you probably think I'm a loony. It's fine either way !)

Both the direct realist and the indirect realist agree that, when I look out my window, I see a tree. What they disagree on is what it means to say that ‘I see a tree’ – they disagree on the mechanics of what is going on, or how best to explain the fact that I see a tree. Most importantly, for Macdonald, there’s no empirical test available to draw a line between the two theories. We can’t run an experiment to test for the truth of either theory because, on the level of experience, both parties agree that it’s true to say: ‘I see a tree.’

Okay, bad analogy aside, this seems to do a decent job of getting to the key issue. But, why can't it be both ? Why can't some philosophy issues be testable and others be purely interpretative ? Moral philosophy doesn't seem to me to be the same as philosophy of mind, yet alone philosophy of science, so why the need to pigeon-hole these disparate fields together ?

Macdonald claims that philosophy’s value is much closer to that of art, literature or poetry than science. She explains that the arts inform us that ‘Language has many uses besides that of giving factual information or drawing deductive conclusions.’ A philosophical theory may not provide ‘information in a scientific sense’, she writes, ‘but, as poetry shows, it is far from worthless.’

A good work of poetry, art or literature, Macdonald explains, can ‘enlarge’ certain aspects of human life to help us see and think about them differently. For example, Shakespeare’s Othello encourages us to think about jealousy by making it the centrepiece of the play. Or consider the emphasis on humanity’s relationship with nature in Romantic poetry. In both cases, the artist has ‘zoomed in’ on, or ‘enlarged’, an aspect of life – in a way that it is not typically enlarged in real life – to encourage the audience to reflect on it.

To re-use one of my favourite Guy Consolmagno quotes, "The importance of poetry is that it carries you into a place where ordinary words can no longer carry you." Art is not philosophy, and philosophy isn't art, but surely, like science, they are all forms of creative processes. They just operate with different (but not always mutually exclusive) intentions and constraints. A scientist must be creative to interpret the data in new but testable ways, and cannot allow themselves to imagine the data is wrong just because they wish it was. A philosopher has fewer constraints, and the artist perhaps none at all : they express emotions and seek to invoke them in others for its own sake. They may or may not attempt to convince their audience of any wider point.

Art is probably the least constrained or defined field of human endeavour there is. It doesn't distinguish itself neatly from other fields because you can be self-expressive in science and engineering, though only to a degree. You can't really express much by assembling a catalogue or galaxies or measuring the length of a bacterium. But you do get a measure of self expression in how you choose to communicate this to others, which facts you think are pertinent to your interpretation and which the reader doesn't need to know, how you choose to visualise or express the data to convey the message you think is correct.

This may sound a little manipulative, even sinister, but it's not so. In true art emotion is selected consciously. In other fields – all other fields, to varying degrees – emotion plays a role, but only at the subconscious level. Science acknowledges that these factors are at work and actively tries to eliminate them, always probing issues from new directions to see if the established interpretation still holds up. It's not that scientists are actively trying to make their work into Ciceronian invective, far from it. But they do acknowledge that human biases are at work. The overlap with art in the deliberate sense of emotional self-expression comes at the front end, in presenting ideas to the audience once that idea has been established, not in formulating it to begin with. Scientists use creativity to solve problems and express their ideas, but they don't consciously decide to use a particular sort of barometer because it's a lovely shade of pink.

For Macdonald, the job of a moral philosopher is akin to that of an art critic: both are in the business of defending or justifying certain judgments or preferences. It’s not, as Russell says, as simple as liking one image more than another. There’s an onus on being able to justify or rationalise that preference.

I suppose that's fine (though I don't think I've ever encountered a critique that's changed my mind about any sort of work of art at all), but I would say : what need for categorisation ? It won't change how anyone does anything. It might be interesting to think about and perhaps useful as a rough guide, but that's about it. It's completely fine that there are overlaps between the fields. It's completely fine that scientists need to be philosophical in determining their own biases, and it's completely fine if some philosophical theories are quasi-scientific in their testability. And it's completely fine that art, science, philosophy and innumerable other fields all employ human creativity. None of this in any way invalidates anything whatsoever.

Which I suppose makes this post a complete waste of time. Oh well, my brain is fried from a seemingly endless of reports to write, and I physically needed to do something more expressive than suggesting which bit of the sky to look at next.