PicoBlog

I just went to a conference where I spent 40 or so of 96 hours listening to philosophers talk. I feel like I can see through time. Aristotle and Plato have merged into a single figure, Arlato, and he is angry. I am certain I have developed telepathic powers, but only for people who have colored their hair grue. I met so many beautiful souls and one or two souls that maybe were having a bad day. As a result, I have Solved All Philosophy, and I will treat you now to a mere tincture of my amazing learning.

The reason why philosophers talk and read surprisingly little about metaphilosophy is connected to the reason many non-philosophers consider philosophers annoying. Philosophizing is considered an indulgence. It’s something you earn the right to do, for example, in physics, by being really successful at physics. Win a Nobel prize first, and then physicists will be interested in what you have to say about broad questions relating to the field as a whole. Or in business- make a billion dollars and then you can talk philosophy.

Philosophers are usurpers who claim for themselves the right to pontificate without first achieving spectacular success. This is why we bother people. This is why when you tell people you are a philosopher they give you an odd look, as if to say are you sure you have the right to call yourself that? This is why many of us don’t call ourselves philosophers at all.

And it’s why philosophers don’t talk all that much about metaphilosophy. Metaphilosophy is our equivalent of philosophy simpliciter- metaphilosophy is to philosophy as philosophy is to other disciplines. Just like other disciplines often aren’t interested in hearing some schmuck without the bona fides talk about philosophy, we philosophers often aren’t really interested in hearing some schmuck philosopher pontificate on metaphilosophy.

But that’s obviously a self-defeating attitude. Either we believe in philosophy, in which case what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and we should be doing philosophy about philosophy as well, or we don’t believe in philosophy, in which case, well, I won’t say stop doing it because maybe it’s your only career option at this point, but that’s certainly not ideal.

A lot of debates in philosophy are pretty obviously verbal, where I think we went wrong is in adding the adjective merely to verbal. There’s nothing merely about the verbality of these debates- or at least not all of them. A lot of ‘merely’ verbal debates are asking questions about central concepts that structure the way we see the world- trying to uncover patterns in some of the most important concepts we use. That matters.

Let’s use epistemology as an example, specifically the idea of knowledge. As a learned epistemologist put it to me at the conference, epistemologists who think ‘knowledge’ is something like a pre-existing natural kind we can access through intuitions are DOING METAPHYSICS. American philosophers in particular seem to love this stuff, probably because of Kripke.

Now accusing people of ‘doing metaphysics’ is a favorite pastime of 20th and 21st-century philosophers- Analytic & Continental- usually without much elaboration on what that means. So let me be clearer, the key way metaphysics happens in the sphere of epistemology is that people will talk about a concept as if there were facts about its essence separate from the concept of it we mere humans have. Knowledge is perhaps the ur example of this. Many epistemologists seem to believe Knowledge is a category that has a great deal of independence from our ideas of it.

This can come in two forms, one of which is worse in practice, but both of which are wrong in theory.

The first form is the basic form outlined above. Philosophers who say that they are not interested in the folk concept of knowledge, but knowledge in itself, a different thing from our mere concept of it, much like fire might be a different thing from what we think it is. To me, this seems like linguistic mysticism without some kind of story about why knowledge has a separateness from our ideas. Fire has a degree of autonomy from our ideas because it is a natural kind term- Knowledge isn’t. I’m also not sure how we could know the essence of knowledge if it were somehow separate from our ideas of it.

The second form is people who say that they are not interested in what knowledge ‘really’ is but ‘merely’ in the folk concept of it. This is sometimes phrased in terms of the Strawsonian formula: ‘descriptive metaphysics’. This is better than the above approach, but it still seems to me to make a frustrating error, it assumes a real ‘essence’ of a concept, say, knowledge exists apart from the way we use words. Knowledge itself will, presumably remain forever a mystery. [N.B., I am not saying Strawson endorsed this approach, just that people sometimes use his language for it.]

Both views seem to presuppose a view according to which the essence of knowledge might be quite different from our thoughts about it. As mentioned, the best model for this is natural kind terms. Consider the word ‘water’. What ‘water’ means is, famously, in part, seemingly due to things that are external to us.

But consider the word puvelwinkle. By puvelwinkle, a term I invented, I mean things that are green and round. To ask what puvelwinkles really are, apart from my views of them, would be completely nonsensical. My concept just stipulates what the Puvelwinkles are. My “intuitions” about Puvelwinkles are evidence about what Puvelwinkles are because those intuitions make Puvelwinkles what they are.

I think the word knowledge is more like “Puvelwinkle” than “Water”. I would suggest that the burden of proof is on those who think Knowledge is more like the term water. Water has a meaning that’s prima facie dependent on facts outside our head because it’s a natural kind (and this can be challenged, for example through two-dimensional semantics).

We have no equivalently developed theory for why the word “Knowledge” should be like this- especially not if we start from a default assumption of broad naturalism. One strategy, I suppose, is to say that it’s an epistemic normative category that exists apart from our concepts, but this doesn’t seem compatible with our status as meat living on a rock- naturalism. I don’t buy Quine’s whole program in Epistemology Naturalised, but he’s surely right about this.

My preferred account of knowledge and its relation to our language leaves no mystery about why our intuitions are evidence of what knowledge is. Our intuitions demarcate what knowledge is. They are evidence about what knowledge is, because they are truthmakers for what knowledge is. In approximate terms, if you were aware of all the facts in creation, the beliefs you would label knowledge are knowledge, and that’s what defines/stipulates knowledge.

The same story can be told about lots of metaphysical debates. This is a really good account of the relationship between intuitions and philosophical kinds. It’s not so much that I think it’s undefeatable, as that I think it’s the default hypothesis until shown otherwise. Maybe I’m wrong, there are definitely alternative approaches, but I find the sheer confidence with which some philosophers just take it for granted that of course there is more to, say, knowledge than our concept of is staggering. I think they’re worried their work is useless if a lot of these issues are about psychology and language, but why anyone would think that is a mystery to me?

To recap, I think that disputes about knowledge are, in this sense, verbal. To the extent there’s any metaphysics at all to be had here, it’s trivial. Glossing over ambiguities and contradictions in our concept of knowledge, metaphysics comes out as: “Knowledge is just whatever beliefs that our concept of knowledge picks out”. Or to put it a little differently, something like what a perfectly informed agent using our concept would call knowledge.

And we should reject the phrase “merely verbal”. There’s nothing in the slightest ‘merely’ about what we’re doing here The structure of these concepts reflects deep and important truths about the needs and viewpoints: of 1. Any possible agent 2. Homo Sapiens. 3. People with our particular histories and sociologies. Just because in a sense it’s a study in words doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.

But your straight-of-the-box “meaning is use” story is too simple due to a series of hard truths. These hard truths might undercut the laziest possible version of the metaphilosophy I’m articulating here- where we’re doing a kind of uncomplicated glossary of folk usage of philosophical terms- but the way to move beyond that is not too hard to see.

One difficult truth is that there’s not going to be a hard line between conceptual engineering and conceptual anatomy. Both projects have value, to be clear, but there’s no sharp line division because, among other reasons, even The Folk revise their concepts when you point out apparent inconsistencies. Despite our best intentions to be descriptive, we do a little prescription, and despite our best intentions of be prescriptive, we do a little description. There are no pure wild types for concepts.

Also, there’s no real line between a variation in usage and someone or a group of people just tending not to get a concept. If we found, for example, that children tended to use a concept differently from adults, would this indicate that children just haven’t learned it properly yet, or that they have their own conceptualization? I’d say it’s pretty obvious there’s no fact of the matter.

There’s also unlikely to be a hard split between pragmatics and semantics. Certainly, some aspects of usage are clearly pragmatic and some are clearly semantic, but there’s no magic line.

It is difficult in philosophy to avoid conceptual analysis. One learned philosopher at the conference was talking about their concept of control. They avowed at the start that they were not doing conceptual analysis in the sense of trying to conform to all existing intuitions. During the course of their talk though, certain intuitions were adduced against their position, which they aimed to defend their account against. Such projects usually end up not escaping conceptual analysis, but mixing it with other things- this is not to deny the usefulness of such mixtures- as we have already avowed there is no clear line between revisionary and descriptive work. I merely mean to express a view that we’re not getting out of intuition pumps and hypotheticals that easily.

This is probably already clear, but I’m not advocating the idea that we’re going to find necessary and sufficient conditions for folk concepts. Someone would have done that by now if it’s possible for a human (perhaps in the future AI will be able to complete such comprehensive analysis). Through attempts at conceptual analysis, we uncover rich truths about concepts, the failure to pin down a concept completely doesn’t mean we’ve learned nothing. We can think, for example, of the pre-Gettier Platonic theory of knowledge as analogous to Newtonian physics- a partially accurate description that works very well under most conditions.

If I’m right about the importance of studying ordinary people’s concepts experimental philosophy is, obviously, going to be critical. If we’re trying to find out the conceptual taxonomy we use to think about the world, then we need to know how ordinary people use concepts. Yet the two major programs in experimental philosophy seem a little wrong-footed in their emphasis to me. Both have value but my suspicion is that the negative program treats these concepts as more inconsistent than they really are and the positive program still wants to treat intuitions as something more like a philosophical observatory than the philosophical truthmakers. Perhaps their rivalry has deformed both.

I’ve came out pretty strongly for a view of how language works in relation to metaphysics here. On this view, intuitions give us knowledge about philosophical concepts because they tell us when we’re willing to use those concepts. However, I want to make the concession that it’s sort of all moot. If you want to say “knowledge doesn’t mean whatever is in line with usage, instead the meaning of knowledge is [e.g.] given by what would best play the knowledge role in society”. I can’t stop you. I feel that my concept of meaning here is closer to the normal usage of meaning- but hey, that’s a circular argument! The idea that one of us is right and the other wrong, about how to ‘really’ determine meaning seems to me to attribute a kind of magic to language. Also, again, revision and description blend into each other anyway.

It’s often claimed that philosophy is particularly good at teaching critical thinking. I am not sure if this is true, but let us say it is for now, why? All disciplines involve reasoning- perhaps philosophy a bit more than others, but I don’t think this is the crucial aspect here. I think philosophy has a special virtue in relation to critical thinking, it enables people not to cling so tightly to their concepts. Even philosophers who believe in Knowledge as a kind transcendent to our thought, for example, are a bit lighter in how they approach concepts than many non-philosophers.

Imagine a debate between two people about whether money buys happiness. One presents empirical arguments that, indeed, there is a correlation between money and happiness. The other responds “Ahh, but is that True happiness?” The debate continues for ages without either participant giving any information about what they mean. This is the kind of bollocks that philosophy is uniquely good at preventing.

Define thickly conceptual thought as thought that clings to a certain set of concepts. That takes a lot to rest on conceptual extension and thinks that, almost necessarily, a lot has been proved when one ‘shows’ that an instance does or doesn’t fall under a concept. It treats concepts as dictating thought rather than the needs of thought dictating concepts. At its worst, we can see absurdities like people trying to dictate social policy based on their conception of what a dictionary should say (anti-trans stuff- definitional table-thumping about the word “woman”) rather than careful consideration of human concerns.

Thickly conceptual thought also often clings to a certain set of normative evaluations of concepts. An example- imagine two people who are arguing about the morality of X. Rather than arguing about the specific costs, benefits, harms, affected rights, involved virtues and vices etc. of X, they end up simply arguing about whether X is theft. Philosophy, I think, can make people better at relaxing their grip on concepts. It can teach us to stop doing this bullshit.

I want to (trepidatiously) present an analogy between conceptual analysis and Koans. Hori writes of Koans:

Driven into an ever more desperate corner by his repeated futile attempts to solve what cannot be rationally solved, the practitioner finally breaks through the barrier of rational intellection to the realm of preconceptual and prelinguistic consciousness variously called pure consciousness, no-mind, without-thinking, or emptiness. This breakthrough is called satori or kensho. The cleverness of the koan consists in the fact that rather than attacking reason and logic from outside, the koan uses reason to drive itself into a self contradiction and cause its own destruction.

Such ideas of thought moving beyond concepts- (perhaps especially verbal concepts?) of course have their roots in Taoism as well as Buddhism. Historical and philosophical work has pointed to the shared concepts of Taoism and Zen, and the impacts Taoism had on the development of Zen.

It seems to me: 1. That some people are much more bound than others to a particular framework of concepts/word-meanings and other people are much less bound to such a framework. 2. Conceptual analysis because it always fails at least to some degree can be a pedagogical vehicle for teaching people to think without grasping so tightly to a particular set of concepts. 3. In this regard, conceptual analysis bears a certain purposive, and sometimes even rhetorical, similarity with the Koan.

In negative terms, what we’re trying to do is enable people to think without grasping too tightly to concepts. In positive terms, we’re trying to teach people to move flexibly between concepts, modify them, and explicitly explain their modifications and stipulations. I hasten to add that while this view is compatible with various anti-realisms, there is nothing in the slightest anti-realist about it. It has no connection with anti-realism about the external world, anti-realism about science, rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, or anything like that. Several readers seem to disagree with me on this, but so far I haven’t been able to understand where they’re coming from. Indeed thinking the world is best captured if we don’t stick too rigidly to a conceptual schema seems to be an archetypal realist thought to me.

Philosophy studying the topography of usage and concepts? Philosophy as escaping the bewitchment of language? Where have we heard this before? Haha! I’ve led you into a trap. We’ve arrived somewhere with more than just a ‘family resemblance’ to ordinary language philosophy. Fittingly, it also comports pretty nicely with the Canberra plan, we are, after all, in Australia.

Ordinary usage is ambiguous, and conceptual description, as we’ve already acknowledged, always involves conceptual reform- they can’t be split. There’s obviously a lot of literature on conceptual engineering at the moment, but I don’t think enough people have clearly prosecuted the case that the idea of conceptual engineering is in some respects a clarification of what many of us were already doing (though the point has been made- e.g. Chalmers). The explicit recognition of the idea of conceptual engineering creates more space for the activity- but it already existed. Indeed, to reiterate an earlier point, given the vagueness of usage, and the pragmatic concerns which often motivate usage, there is no clear gap between describing and engineering a concept.

Now to bring this round to morality and living the world.

I’m a compatibilist, but a higher level It’s always seemed to me, fundamentally, that if you want “free will” to mean such that humans have it, you will have this, and if you want “free will” to mean such that we do not have it, you will find this. Similarly, I believe in the psychological theory of personhood, but I’m sure if you really want to jig it around you can get either animalism or the psychological view to come out of the mess and be broadly compatible with ordinary usage.

So the question becomes which concept should we be trying to pull out of the mess? Freedom or unfreedom? Psychology or body as the essence of our survival? Above all, it seems to me like a question of values. Parfit clearly saw the importance of these questions in relation to personal identity over time, by emphasizing that the question that matters is not survival, but what should we care about. Parfit erred though in not being clear enough that what we care about is ultimately going to determine the metaphysics.

I remember reading about the too many thinkers argument:

And thinking that it was a kind of joke or category error. I am a psychological thread, a flow of qualitatively similar psychological states connected by the right kind of causal relations. This thread could become a dragon or an Aardvark. I know this because I would identify with a relevantly psychologically similar Aardvark or dragon which was relevantly similar to me for the right reasons. Since concepts are given by their use, there are no further facts about personal identity beyond the fact that I use the concept of the Aardvark or dragon. Of course, it’s going to come down to identification. The idea that fancy metaphysical footwork could force me to identify with a different entity (e.g. my brain-dead body) is comical. I’m always just going to jig the concepts around till they give the result in line with what I care about. All the too many thinkers’ argument shows, at most, is that we have a bit of conceptual cleanup work to do- a metaphysical spill in aisle 7. Braddon-Mitchell & Miller are surely right in at least the broad outlines of their view because even if they’re not quite right and personhood isn’t literally constituted by practical conventions, nevertheless our vague, flexible, and value-laden concept of ‘person’ is always going to move in line with what we care about.

Similarly with the concept of freedom. People are so invested in the idea of freedom that if it did turn out somehow that some clear feature of their concept of freedom was violated by the way things are (very unlikely) they’d simply change their concept of freedom. But in reality, we won’t even have to ‘change it’ because there’s plenty of wiggle room in the concept which means we’ll never allow ourselves to be cornered into admitting free will isn’t real. I remember some work that I can’t seem to find now- possibly also by Miller- which found that if you tell people to imagine the world is non-deterministic, they adopt a libertarian concept of free will, but if you tell people to imagine a deterministic world, they adopt a concept of free will compatible with that determinism. The free will comes first and the concept is molded to suit the relevant metaphysics and physics.

In this sense, values are always going to take precedence.

Krushil Watene during her speech, and especially in responding to questions, referred many times to K. Dobbs's claim that philosophers should be able to accept, as a discipline, that they have different work they want to do. I agree. But I think we need to walk a middle path that avoids two extremes:

We need lots of different threads of philosophy that interact extensively and sometimes critically, even at the risk of extreme clumsiness. However, we also need to not equate this with a demand for a homogenous ‘mainstream’ that shapes itself to be understandable by that mainstream [To be clear, I’m neither saying Watene would disagree with this formulation nor would agree with it.]

This is okay because philosophy as a discipline doesn’t have to get it right. Philosophy has worked historically not by getting everything right through scrupulous attention to detail, but by floating ideas. I would hate to see us lose this useful function of the creation of concepts, dreams, and half-baked plans just because A) We narrowed our conception of what philosophy is too much or B) Because we broadened our conception of what philosophy is, but narrowed our conception of what we had useful things to say about.

Philosophy as a discipline has tremendously high rejection rates for its flagship journals. This is a real shame because the publication of bad work in philosophy has fewer risks, and more upsides, than the publication of bad work almost anywhere else. That it has fewer downsides is easy to see- most philosophical work does not have a substantial empirical component that is not accessible to the reader to evaluate. This is unlike work in disciplines ranging from science, history, anthropology and even to literary studies where the reader has not read the works referred to. A bad philosophical argument can be spotted by the reader in a way that bad arguments in many other subjects cannot be. We use each other’s research, but we are not strapped to it, so if it goes astray, it’s not so bad.

We need more bad work in philosophy, because very important work sometimes (not always, but sometimes) looks like bad work, at least to some people. A lot of classical work in philosophy simply wouldn’t pass peer review now. Past a certain point, raising the reject rate encourages research that isn’t, in a certain sense, wild.

Nor should we always have to feel so bound to the prior work. One learned political philosopher I was speaking with had so many great thoughts on the literature concerning whether and why there is a general duty to obey the law. However, he felt the area was such a tangled conceptual mess he didn’t know quite where to start framing his thoughts on the topic despite voluminous reading. He was nervous because he wasn’t quite sure that he- or anyone! had pinned down what was at stake. He felt whatever he said someone could accuse him of missing the point. This wouldn’t be a problem in a way- except it was becoming a barrier to publishing. We should never feel like we need to unravel a whole field and put it into order before we can say something about it.

In many cases, these problems have led to a “higher order truths of chmess” situation where philosophers talk about topics that simply don’t matter that much so that they can avoid having to do unfeasible amounts of reading before they can write a paper.

Big ideas, more play. We should be arrogant in ambition, scope and fecundity but humble in our own estimation of actually being right.

There’s a standing question in philosophy about why philosophy doesn’t seem to make as much progress as our disciplines- it’s uncontroversial that philosophy makes less progress than the hard sciences, pretty hard to deny that it makes less progress than the social sciences, and plausibly it even makes less progress than the other humanities.

To illustrate this, consider Aristotle- we’re not at all talking about his views in Physics (outside of intellectual history), we’ve mostly moved on from the descriptive analysis in his Politics, and while his Poetics is still useful it’s definitely showing its age. On the other hand, there are still plenty of people saying his Metaphysics is straight-up correct.

I think the reason for this is fairly well known- philosophy is assigned the problems that aren’t soluble yet. Once progress has been made, the relevant bits of philosophy are broken off and given to other disciplines. Usually, this happens not because of gradual progress, but due to paradigm shifts.

But what is less observed is that this should motivate a certain kind of work in philosophy- specifically bold work. Our kinds of problems aren’t the kinds of problems on which incremental progress alone is likely to do the trick, they’re the sorts of problems where paradigm shifts are needed.

There’s another way of making the point that philosophy should be bold which also appeals to its nature- viz, philosophy is better at discovering possibilities than actualities. Not only is it better at this, but it’s also the function it serves in relation to intellectual life as a whole. Giving new perspectives and striking vistas on the space of thought is philosophy’s special function. Logical positivism was beyond overly ambitious when it was first articulated, but hey, Einstein found it useful. Once again, over much emphasis on intellectual caution is unlikely to be a fruitful attitude in relation to this goal.

I’m only giving one-half of the story here. A case could just as easily be made that philosophy must be more cautious, more trepidatious than any other discipline. But it seems to me the half of the story I’m giving here is, right now, the half that’s most neglected.

During Katie Steele’s talk she criticized the precautionary principle. According to Steele, the precautionary principle is an approach to risk-making grounded in risk aversion, in the sense that you should tend to avoid risks, even, at least to some degree, when the risky choice maximizes expected utility. She argued instead for risk neutrality as a principle.

One of the most interesting pushbacks Steele received to this argument was grounded in the observation that information received by the decisionmaker is not always neutral. An audience member gave the example of military decision-making by a civilian bureaucracy, where the military may bias the information they present to tilt the scales towards a hawkish response. Steele herself noted that sometimes decision-makers are prevented from considering certain kinds of information- for example, non-monetary impacts, or hard-to-quantify tail risks. She allowed that in these situations the rational, ethical policymaker might turn to ‘the precautionary principle’ to make the right decision by sleight of hand despite their bind.

Steele, therefore, allowed that her point only applied to decision-makers not working under such artificial constraints. A decisionmaker subject to political interference might be forced to use irrational arguments to nonetheless get the right result, and her point wasn’t about such cases. This is reasonable enough- but I want to suggest that there are restrictions on decision-makers which are much harder to avoid.

It is possible that humans, by nature, tend to systematically underestimate risk in certain ways, for example:

The precautionary principle might help with such risk blindness.

I put this to Steele, and her reply is that the agent should try to factor these things in. For example, Steele has worked in the past on decision theory when not all possibilities are known, and she suggests that we can include in our calculations the possibility of a negative and wholly unimagined event.

Certainly, a fully rational agent could do this. But it seems to me an empirical question whether discarding the precautionary principle is wise. It could well be that humans just can’t get the optimism bug out of our systems, and an effective way to deal with this problem is to have a standing precautionary principle- be more risk adverse than an expected utility calculation alone would suggest. This doesn’t come down to abstract arguments about optimal decision procedures. Instead, it comes down to the empirical question(s) of which procedure would be more successful over what range of situations.

This might seem like a strange inclusion in an essay on metaphilosophy, but I do not think so. I think that the field still has not internalized, in a deep sense, that the optimal framework F for person P to use in pursuing goal G, for all F, P, and G is at least partly an empirical question. The fact that an ideal agent would find the most success with F* is, at best, moderate evidence in favor of the proposition that an actual individual P* should follow F* if they want G*. This is a problem everywhere. Anytime philosophy prescribes action or a framework for choosing an action, the question applies. Whether one is prescribing best practices in science, giving public policy decision-making advice or theorizing about how one should make ethical decisions, in all cases, there are at least two questions- what is the procedure God would try to follow, and what procedure should we humans try to follow?

The issue has been mooted systematically in consequentialist ethics (and ethics generally) of course, but I don’t feel like there is a discipline-wide awareness of the dual character of advice for humans. It’s a real issue, if I tried to do what a god or superintelligence with my values would do, I’m pretty sure I’d be straight up dead within days or hours. That’s ignoring the fact that I couldn’t even figure out what I should be doing!

It’s tempting to think we should just approximate God’s decision procedure, but consider an analogy to the theory of the second best in economics:

Per John Leach:

“The theory of the second best states that if all of the distortions in the economy cannot be eliminated, all bets are off. Eliminating or reducing another distortion might raise welfare, but can just as easily reduce welfare.”

With the theory of the second best, economists found, essentially, that even in terms of their own highly idealized model, as soon as the economy is even slightly distorted- even a little way from being a perfect market- attempts to correct those distortions can make things better not worse.

Something analogous is true with decision-making. Eliminating the precautionary principle, to bring us back around to the initial topic- might take us closer to how a god would make decisions, but that might make us worse, not better at making decisions. It’s an empirical matter. We can’t know through theory alone. Certainly the idea that we should try to approximate God’s decision procedure is a reasonable guess about the ideal way to make decisions, but it’s only a hypothesis.

A lot of departments around the world seem to be cutting back their talks and collegiate events. This is a real shame because philosophy is fundamentally an oral discipline. This is true for many reasons, here are just some:

Oral culture in philosophy helps ameliorate many of the problems in philosophy I’m wringing my hands about here. Talking philosophy promotes boldness and discourages the search for higher-order truths of Chmess.

The learned epistemologist put it to me that ultimately, all arguments against skepticism are pragmatic arguments. I put it to him that this is not right. We can raise the skeptical possibility “How can you know that what you do isn’t the very thing that will lead you to your worst fears and away from your greatest hopes- and that your best bet is to cease action in indecisiveness?” After all the arguments about skepticism are made, all we can say is that we believe what we believe, and we have no way off Neurath’s boat. All we can say is: “In this view of things, I make my stand.” So it is not the pragmatist who has the last laugh, but the existentialist.

We’re all crying out for philosophy that can make life meaningful, and heavens know we’re all screwed up enough in the head now that we need something like existentialism. I’ve argued in the past that philosophy has a duty not just to find truth, but to give us aesthetic ways of seeing life, give us ways of seeing it as meaningful. I don’t think this is going to be the existentialism of Sartre, but that of Kirkegaard and Weil, of higher aspirations, [Nietzsche too has his place but in a different way]. Talking about Weil in particular at the conference, I could just about hear the rumbling in people’s souls, the craving for meaning.

Coming back around to our earlier comments on analysis, it seems to me that moving away from conceptual reification and moving towards an outlook on which what we value comes first in structuring concepts like freedom and personhood blurs the traditional barrier between existential and analytic philosophy in way. It makes our enterprise much more about humans encountering the world and trying to live in it.

It’s increasingly fashionable to talk about aesthetics in philosophy. But there’s a kind of aesthetic task that bridges aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy in general. That is the task of conceptualizing our lives in such a way as to enrich their meaning. I don’t say give them meaning because I think it’s somewhat arrogant to imagine that without professional philosophy people would be walking around with any sense of why their life mattered. We can take that aesthetic task in part through studying, understanding, structuring and restructuring concepts.

I suppose my overarching point is that given the (partial) indeterminacy of folk concepts, and their inseparability from values, a variety of roles that might seem wholly different- conceptual engineer, decision-making optimizer, anthropologist of thought, lexical semanticist, ethicist, existentialist and philosopher of life aren’t really distinct.

I want to stop here and, once again, emphasize that there’s nothing anti-realist about the project I’m describing. Thinking that “Free will”, for example, is a human concept, and we can fiddle with its knobs and dials according to our needs as beings in the world in no sense implies anything about the reality of stars, trees and leptons, or the rationality of believing in such. Nor does it require the rejection of the idea that truth consists in a correspondence between words and things. This openness to realism and the correspondence theory makes me reluctant to call the project pragmatist, although I suppose other people would.

During Krushil Watene’s address, a learned philosopher raised the question of power, if philosophy is to be decolonized, how and why would white (and non-indigenous people in general) be persuaded to give up their power? I thought it was a great question, so did Watene apparently since she invited the audience to comment. I responded that no class of people have ever given up power, but a group of people might be persuaded to join in a common project for their own and other people’s liberation. I felt kind of dumb saying it, because it’s a pretty basic, old-fashioned Marxist perspective- yet, to my surprise it transpired that many philosophers present, particularly in the Analytic tradition, had never heard anything like that propounded before.

I want to insist here on a philosophical distinction in political philosophy that is rarely made because one half of the distinction is all but empty (at least in the Analytic tradition). The vast majority of political philosophy- ideal and non-ideal- is outcome philosophy. It describes how, relative to some set of conditions, society or some institution should be arranged. A much, much smaller set of philosophy is agentive in the sense that it tells us what to do to improve our situation [Note: in calling it small in relative terms, I do not want to deny that in absolute/page count terms a fair bit of it has been written]. Though philosophy is rarely explicitly agentive it is far from innocent about assumptions regarding how agency is to be expressed. Rather those agentive assumptions come in through silence, and through simply riding along with dominant ideologies.

There are, I think, four broad problems with philosophy’s agentive side. Although Analytic philosophy is perhaps especially lax in considering these issues, it is not alone in these problems- the continental tradition is also guilty, and I have an inkling other traditions beyond Analytic & Continental might be too. Those four problems are are: linguistic idealism, moralism, elite-focus and individualism.

By linguistic idealism (idealism in the Marxist sense) I mean a perspective that overstates the importance of discourse, relative to material factors. It diminishes both the importance of material goals (e.g., redistribution, reducing incarceration) and the importance of material methods (e.g. strikes, direct action).

By moralism, I mean a perspective that prioritizes moral appeals to and bluntly, scolding a powerful ‘other’ (or what is thought to be a powerful other), rather than appealing to the mutual moral and material interests of a liberatory subject.

By individualism, I mean a perspective that treats the strategic unit as the individual and their choices, rather than a collective subject, e.g., the international working class. It plans in terms of individual behavior- individual speech, consumption and voting.

By elite focus, I mean a focus on relatively privileged layers of society. Boardroom feminism and anti-racism. Demanding more roles for gay celebrities. That sort of thing.

Let me try to illustrate what I mean through the conference. As far as I can tell, there was one talk that substantially related to incarceration, and even that did not have incarceration as its main topic. There were two abstracts substantially relating to income and wealth, one of which, I believe, was ultimately not delivered. There was one abstract substantially relating to labour, which I believe was not delivered. There did not appear to be any talks primarily on the topic of war. As a consequence, there were also no talks on the especially detrimental effects these have on marginalized groups within the working class- no talks on the wage gap, no talks on wages for housework, only one talk substantially related to the racism of incarceration and no talks on the Australian frontier wars, no talks on precarity. The politics of the conference was focused on symbolism & language, elites, celebrity and individual moral choice. This is not to say that these discussions were unimportant, but when such discussions are not combined with mass, material politics something is missing- at least if we are lovers of justice as well as wisdom.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone. My own talk was on a subject potentially related to mass politics, but I didn’t properly draw out the economic implications in the abstract. Again I should stress there was a lot of good work that was being done at the conference- the problem isn’t what was done and said, but what wasn’t done and said.

I suppose in some ways this essay could be parodied as calling for a return to the past. Ordinary language philosophy, existentialism, a heady dose of Marxism… in some deep sense I can’t point to, this seems to me all of one piece.

However, I should be very clear on something. This piece is by no means about a return to some uncritical and Edenic ‘better times’ politically. Even if I were some kind of crude ogreish materialist who only cared about war, money, work and prisons, calling for a return wouldn’t get that, because philosophy was never fully open to such things.

The working class is diverse and not without internal tensions our coalition will be tense. There are problems among us. There is no good in denying this and much harm. I’ve had my taste of that- severe mental illness, alienation from my own body, sexuality and gender identity in ways that are hard to convey, many experiences for which there is little language, and some that I just don’t want to talk about. We’re not going to form a moral community on the basis of homogeneity. But that’s what coalitional politics is like. Shared interests and, much more than shared interests, shared experiences of injustice if we will only seek to find them. It’s time to reinvigorate the Marxist tradition in philosophy, the Analytic Marxist tradition and the socialist tradition more generally.

A lot that I’ve written here is going to be unclear. Please sound off in the comments what you want clarified. At least for a little while I’ll try to make this a living document, responsive to questions and objections.

A lot of ideas in this essay came from other people, or arose in interaction with them. I have a deep, OCD based fear of not giving credit to people so I wanted to say something about that. But while, I believe in giving credit, but I also feel like quoting the ideas people presented at a conference might be unfair to them. In general, I’ve quoted people on (my recollection) of what they said during their keynotes because I think it’s a reasonable expectation that you’re willing to be quoted on what you say at a keynote at a conference.

People who deserve credit include:

Ainsley Phi, Bella Rose, Brigitte Everett, Bryan Mukandi, Bryson Ng, Callum Alpass Corey Mcabe, Danny McWardle, Graham Priest, James Norton, Katie Steele, Kramer Thomson, Krushil Watene, Levi Smith, Mitch Gilligan, Nick Willis, Rae Langton, Rasmus Pendersen, Rebecca Mann, Shalom Chalson, Shira Yechimovitz and Stephen Enciso.

It goes without saying that to the best of my knowledge none of these people agree with everything I’ve said here, and some of them probably agree with none of it.

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