We Need to Begin Again With Philosophy

A response to Tove at Wood From Eden

This post falls on the one-year anniversary of Things to Read. I began blogging on Substack with a recommendation that readers take a look at Anders & Tove’s blog Wood From Eden, and I want to end the year in the same vein, with a response to their latest post.

In Philosophy is the mathematics of language, Tove writes,

[P]hilosophy is the thinking that was left when the data-based sciences were formed. The residues that couldn't be organized into a science, came to be called philosophy. 

Yes. This is essentially true. But it doesn’t support the idea that philosophy is the mathematics of language.

We agree that philosophy is the residuum of questions remaining after science (and I think, mathematics) provided humanity with answers. But as David Stove has eloquently pointed out, the attempts to explore, clarify, refine, and resolve that residuum have produced almost nothing of value:

People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly.

The nature and quality of thought within philosophy can be best described as a colossal failure. And this is a real disappointment, because what really matters in life all lies within that residuum of philosophy.

I’m a physicist. I’ve studied the sciences for years like that drunk who goes looking for his car keys beneath a streetlight, not because the sciences give the real answers, but because there’s no light in philosophy. What is the purpose of life? What is the meaning of beauty? What are the principles of logic? What is the difference between good and evil? What kind of society should we advocate? These are the questions I’m really interested in, not whether aldehydes and ketones react with ammonia to form Schiff bases, or whether the time evolution of a physical system is described by solutions to the Euler equation for the action. But how do I find the answers to those interesting questions?

Don’t Worry, the Answers are Everywhere

Oh sure, individual philosophers have their individual opinions. Just take the question of what kind of society should we advocate and look at two philosophers, John Rawls and Ayn Rand.

Rawls says, “Oh, here’s the thing you need to do: You need to go back to the ‘original position’ which requires that you think about society from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ about who you actually are. And if you do that, then obviously you’ll conclude that there should be various things like fairness, equal rights, and a minimal standard of living for all citizens.”

And then Ayn Rand says, “No! Listen to what I’m telling you: You need to learn the tenets of ‘objectivism’ and internalize the principle of ‘rational egoism,’ which is that the moral purpose of your life is the pursuit of your own personal happiness, and then you’ll see that man is a heroic being, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute, and there’s no point worrying about inequality.”

You’d think that, given the obvious contradictions between their methodologies and conclusions, at least one of these two philosophers would just be wrong. But nobody laughed Ayn Rand out of the room the way they did with the folks who argued about cold fusion, and nobody dropped John Rawls like wet garbage the way they did attempts to turn lead into gold. Objectivism and Rawlsian liberalism are still around. They’re still being discussed in philosophy class—along with Plato, whom, I am reassured, all Western philosophers are constantly replying to, wandering in a perpetual fog without any hope of escape.

So while there are plenty of answers in philosophy, the answers aren’t compatible in a way that can offer us some coherent conclusion—philosophy as a discipline doesn’t provide clear answers to the important questions. What’s worse, I don’t have a very good idea about how I’m supposed to find the answers for myself, because philosophy doesn’t even have a clear framework thinkers can agree upon as a means to seeking the answers to those important questions.

In science, everybody agrees that when you come up with some idea, you check to see whether it’s true empirically. Just playing along with the rules of this game has been incredibly successful. This is the framework science has that allows you to find answers, and if anybody asks why you believe those answers, you say “Look, I checked, or somebody else checked, and that’s the way it came out.”

In mathematics, we begin with various axioms, and proceed from there using logical proofs. The axioms aren’t proven, they’re simply assumed to be true—but deciding they are true is, in many cases, an empirical process that we generally complete on our own during childhood.¹ Being honest, this is really the way I think of mathematics—not, ultimately, as a rational discipline, but as an empirical one.² So mathematics also has a framework that allows you to find answers, and if anybody questions those answers, you say, “The reason why I believe this is because I can prove it, or because I can follow the proof somebody else worked out.”

But what’s the framework in philosophy? Slog through an endless body of ideas recorded by other people who didn’t get anywhere, citing their various claims and occasionally making handwavey arguments against them, dissecting meanings and intentions, making appeals to intuition, proposing hypothetical situations and asking how we feel about them, and occasionally coining a few neologisms?

This isn’t a framework at all—it’s just a bad habit that nobody’s been able to shake.

The Missing Framework is the Heart of the Problem

I've often said that What is not nearly as important as Why.

A person may think they’ve achieved an understanding on a subject, that they "get the picture" about something. But wait a few years. If their picture is ever half-forgotten, or challenged by somebody else’s false picture, then understanding fades into confusion.

On the other hand, if you actually grasp the foundation, the underpinnings for your picture, the reasons why that picture has to be correct—if you have the pieces you need to put the picture together, it doesn't matter if you forget how the picture looks, or if someone else insists the picture looks a different way. Just check, just put the pieces together, and you'll get the picture again.

Mere What cannot stand on its own. But if you have Why, then it doesn’t matter if you lose What, because Why will always give What back to you.

And philosophy hasn't been able to provide that Why. There are no pieces in philosophy, just pictures, just claims, a whole sea of Whats floating adrift. Sun Tzu tells us there are roads which must not be followed, armies which must not be attacked, and commands of the sovereign which must not be obeyed; Lao Tzu tells us simplicity, patience, and compassion are the greatest treasures; Confucius tells us that shame (chi) is a cardinal virtue; Musashi tells us virtue lies in the void - that wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the way has existence, spirit is nothingness. These are only the words of a few Eastern philosophers that I find myself thinking about from time to time, but list them side by side and already they drift and jangle together without any substance.

Are they true? Are they false? Why?

The problem isn’t that we lack clear definitions for words. It isn’t that Wittgenstein, Carnap, or the rest of the Vienna Circle never showed up to rescue us from the vagaries of human language. It's that we lack any clear understanding of the concepts behind our words, and how to put those concepts together.

The problem is that, after hearing somebody say "This sentence is false," logicians were scattered into disarray, and can’t even agree whether the law of non contradiction (Either A or not-A, not both) is really a law. Trying to rigorously define the words won't help; contradictions can exist even within rigorously defined mathematical systems.

The problem is that the widespread failure of philosophy provides a rich source for humor. The problem is that I can easily define a moral system which works as well by intuitive standards as popular moral systems that remain widely discussed for centuries. The problem is that there are moral systems—plural—not in the way that relativistic physics provides tools for objects moving at high velocity, whereas quantum mechanics provides tools for solving problems of motion at a very small scale. Philosophy provides a plethora of broad, general moral systems that flatly contradict each other.

The problem is that that there are multiple philosophical schools, existing side by side, with their adherents and advocates and their petty disputes, all filling the air with a noise and bluster that has only one single unified theme, a cacophony that offers only one clear interpretation:

Who cares about the questions? They're all meaningless anyway!

Image from Thiago Matos

The only real wisdom that remains is the wisdom of Socrates: He is wise who knows that he knows nothing. This is what we really have. If it is even possible for philosophy to progress, it won’t do so by continuing to cite its greatest thinkers—all of whom are, largely, failures—but by starting over, if it can, from nothing.

Where to go from Nothing?

In raising these criticisms I’m struggling to express a sincere, passionate feeling that something really, really needs to be done. What that is, exactly, I’m not sure. And I’m really not even certain whether we can get anywhere at all. Maybe the residuum of philosophy exists because these problems are intrinsically insoluble. Maybe they could be solved, and we’re just nowhere near smart enough to do it. But the fact that everybody in STEM has gotten as far as they have suggests that there might at least be some reason for hope.

It seems as though mathematics and the empirical sciences have been able to progress because they employ a standard and accepted framework; but simply deciding on a random framework isn’t enough. And even deciding on some carefully considered axiom like “only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content” seemed to work really well for the logical positivists, until they realized that this axiom violated itself—you can’t verify it through observation or logical proof.

But I have at least the germ of an idea, which says that less handwavey argumentation is good. Being habitually suspicious about your conclusions, and taking care to look for ways of escaping a chain of reasoning seems similarly good.

I also suspect that more mathematical reasoning seems useful; or at least, I have a sense from past efforts that trying to improve rigor by using tools and strategies from mathematics is more effective than just making verbal arguments.

My instincts say that being able to frame arguments using symbols might help.

I also have a sense that being able to formulate arguments in terms analogous to a computer program could be useful. For example, playing with a python-style argumentation about Santa Claus:

import ConsensusReality

a = evaluate(“Santa Claus”) # returns 0 under ConsensusReality

b = evaluate(“I will get Christmas presents”) # returns .5, unknown

if a then b # has no effect, since the premise a is false, but the conclusion b may still be true

assume a = 0.5 # overwrites value from ConsensusReality to unknown

assume b = 0 # overwrites previous value

if a then b # sets the premise a back to 0, since the conclusion b is false

express(a) # prints “Santa Claus is false”

And lastly, my instincts also say that asking my readers for ideas may help. Does anyone have any ideas?

If you know anyone who might have some ideas, or might be interested in even discussing the situation, please direct them to this post.

1. Wells, R. B. (2006). Mathematics and Mathematical Axioms. The Critical Philosophy and the Phenomenon of Mind.

2. In other words, deep down I don’t think 2 + 4 = 6 because of the way set theory defines numbers; I think that every time I get 2 rocks, and move 4 more rocks next to them, it’s 6. The same for 3 + 5 = 9, and 2 + 9 = 11. And if this kind of process works, no matter what I do, for quantities below about 12, well what in the world would make me think it isn’t true for whole numbers greater than that? It’s a hypothesis that never gets falsified.