Philosopher, With Stones

A few years back at as “parents’ day,” one of the philosophy professors at my school dressed up in a toga (I guess he thought Socrates wore a toga) and took questions from the multitude. One questioner asked:

Are there any questions that are regarded by philosophers as answered and if so, what are the answers?

I can’t remember my colleague’s exact words, but I think you could book it under (embarrassed silence). Perhaps what he meant to say was something along the lines of this from the great Jerry Fodor:

…[T]he problems philosophers work on have turned out to be much more subtle than we used to suppose them, and much more idiosyncratic. You have to do them one at a time, and the progress you make is generally inch by inch. For better or worse … almost nobody has ‘a philosophy’ any more. What one has, if one is lucky, is a glimpse of an insight into (as it might be) the semantics of intentional contexts; or the behaviour of modals in obligation ascriptions; or the way natural laws support counterfactuals; or whether knowledge is warranted true belief—and what, while we’re at it, does ‘warranted’ mean? After what seems in retrospect to have been a very extended adolescence, philosophy hs settled into workaday middle age. It comes to all of us sooner or later.

Almost nobody has ‘a philosophy’ any more. Of course, when Fodor says “nobody,” he doesn’t mean “nobody.” He means “none of my friends,” or, if we include his enemies, then “nobody I take seriously.” The more general crowd of lay preachers, football coaches, and assorted nobodies at the bar would be surprised to learn that they were living a lie, or at least a colossal mistake, like Donald Duck who runs off the diving board and only later discovers he is in mid-air.

Fodor makes this offering in opening a review (in the London Review of Books, 21 September, page 9-10) of Michael Frayne’s The Human Touch, and you are correct to infer that it ain’t gonna be pleasant. Fodor predictably chews him up and spits him out, but he does it in a particularly fiendish way: Fodor takes Frayne seriously as a philosopher and then (with a flick of the pinky?) demonstrates that it is all just a post-adolescent mishmash (“Piffle,” Fodor says, dismissively).

I have no particular purpose to defend Frayne who, I suspect, isn’t all that interested in Fodor’s opinion anyway. My purpose rather is to kick the can downfield a bit, onto the topic of “specialization” more generally. It certainly isn’t news to anybody in academic life that every discipline has become specialized. I wonder who was the last mathematician to know all of mathematics? Or economist, economics, or (fill in pet discipline here)?

But it is not only a matter of specialized knowledge. Stanley Fish (to name just one) has dined out for a generation on the idea that knowledge is a social enterprise—no, strike that, a set of social enterprises—no, strike that, a set of sandboxes, each with its own bullies and serfs. What counts as literature, economics, and, yes, I suspect even mathematics and philosophy, is what counts for the club.

Still nothing new here, but I am at last getting to my point: we expect something different out of philosophy. None of us expects to know all of mathematics, and not too many of us go to sleep fretting that we can’t parse Derrida. But we feel we have a right to a philosophy. We aren’t really happy when one of the poo-bahs tells us that it is all much, much, more complicated than we thought. We feel perfectly happy to go on philosophizing, either oblivious to the lions in the center ring or (as Frayne?) deliberately trying to catch the attention of the gawkers to our own little side show.

Remarkably, I have reason to suspect that Fodor understands this point, and feels a bit sheepish about the chasm that he may seen as widening. In the author blurb at the front of the LRB, he says “Everyone wonders why he is writing still another book about the language of thought.” Again, “everyone” is a word that perhaps needs nuance (I hadn't wondered). But I do think I can pick up a note of sheepishness about the way he and his colleagues appear to have kidnapped what we think of as our common inheritance. Except the riffraff will perhaps continue to philosophize whether he wants us to our not. Remember Carla from Cheers, Jerry, who used to say: Of course I’m a philosopher—I’m a Red Sox fan!