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PHILOSOPHERS’ THINKING
THEORIZING AND PHILOSOPHIZING (VOLUME 1)
ULRICH DE BALBIAN
Meta-Philosophy Research Center

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2952293

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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2952293

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CONTENTS

PREFACE 4
INTRODUCTION 5
THEORIZING AND PHILOSOPHIZING (VOLUME 1) 6
HEURISTICS AND PROBLEMSOLVING (VOLUME 2)
IMAGINARY EXPERIMENTS AND METAPHORS
EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND METHODS
(LOGIC AND ARGUMENTATION) REASONING
MEANING, COMMUNICATION, UNDERSTANDING
COGNITIVE BIASES AND FALLACIES

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PREFACE
I intended to deal with the different sections or chapters in one volume, but as
certain sections or chapters are very long, like chapter 1, THEORIZING AND
PHILOSOPHIZING (VOLUME 1), I divided some of them into separate
volumes, chapter 2 HEURISTICS AND PROBLEMSOLVING (Volume 2) and
chapter 3 IMAGINARY EXPERIMENTS AND METAPHORS (Vol 3).

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INTRODUCTION

In Volume 1 THEORIZING AND PHILOSOPHIZING (VOLUME 1) I show

that and how (the different features, steps and stages of) philosophizing resemble
the processes of theorizing.
I deal with a number of basic approaches that philosophers employ to do
philosophy. These approaches form part of the traditional methodologies of all
Philosophy.
The processes and techniques of doing philosophy resemble the techniques and
methods one finds in different steps, stages and features of the processes of
theorizing, theory development and construction. As many philosophers lack meta-
cognitive awareness of what they are doing (namely theorizing) and how they are
doing it (the techniques of the different steps and stages of theorizing) they do not
complete the entire process of theorizing and theory development, but instead
concentrate on only certain features of it.
The different features, steps and stages of theorizing are explained and the doing of
philosophy is compared with them.

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THEORIZING AND PHILOSOPHIZING

PHILOSOPHIZING THEORIZING

1
Until now during centuries of the history of western philosophical ideas the discourse of philosophy has lost aspects
of its traditional objects or subject-matter as other, new disciplines became differentiated from philosophy, as new
socio-cultural discourses with their own original areas of specialization and related practices developed. Join us in
this new adventure developing the ancient paths of philosophical method/the way.. of doing philosophy and discover
new fields, levels, dimensions and areas of it as you enter the reality of theorizing – the levels, features, dimensions
and processes of theorizing.

But now, during the last decades, we have seen and experienced something completely different. This time the
differentiation does not concern subject-matter and the socio-cultural specialization does not merely represent
practices of new, original disciplines. No, this new, or rather not so new development as it commenced some time
ago as those involved in the archaeology of epistemology or knowledge are aware, does not concern the subject-
matter or objects of investigation of philosophy.

In all disciplines or discourses we find an area, if it is not, already, explicit, an explicit subject-matter of study, then
it is at least an assumed and underlying dimension, a tacit level, an essential implicit assumption or pre-supposed
transcendental. This ‘area’ concerns the methodology of, the discipline’s philosophy and assumptions concerning its
‘theorizing’.

Many disciplines focus on teaching students and others that are initiated into the discipline ‘theories’ (the contents of
theories) and more restricted ‘models’ being employed in the discipline. Few disciplines, if any, concentrate on the
processes of how such theories come about, the ways, the styles, the processes how such models are developed. In
other words the processes involved in (different types of) theorizing, the steps and stages in or of this theorizing,
their nature, features, characteristics, levels and dimensions.

To be informed about some of the details concerning theorizing please see the articles I wrote about this topic here –

https://www.academia.edu/30547224/Meta-Philosophy_Philosophizing_resembling_Theorizing_

The title speaks for itself.

Other articles that should be read as background to this suggestion can be found here –

https://independent.academia.edu/UlrichdeBalbian In some of them I deal with philosophy and cognitive science

and X-Phi or experimental and practical philosophy, as philosophy, philosophers (desperately) seek for new subject-
matter or objects of investigation for the philosophical enterprise.

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To return to section 4, above. After having investigated the awareness of the processes of theorizing, theory-building
and –construction (or more restricted models) in a number of disciplines, I noticed that most, if not all students and
even practitioners are unaware of the nature of the processes of theorizing. My suggestion is that these things should
be explored and taught as one of the basic of any discipline.

As explored by myself and some of those explorations as stated in the articles above, it seems to me that there exist a
strong resemblance between the doing of philosophy and different aspects, steps and stages of the processes of
theorizing. What is assumed as philosophical methodology and practised as philosophical methods and techniques
resemble certain features and aspects of theorizing, as particular steps of theorizing (for example brainstorming,
brain dump of data to be investigated), the continued analyses and development of concepts and new terms (during
most of the processes of theorizing), the drawing of conclusions (and working suggestions or hypotheses)
concerning these and other things, the development of problem statements to be investigated, simulations and
imaginary experiments with concepts and other phenomena, etc.

Philosophers select one or a few aspects of the processes of theorizing and treat them or employ them, in isolation,
as (if they are) the methods, the techniques, the tools and skills of doing philosophy.

These are some of the reasons why I suggested that the doing of philosophy, the processes of philosophizing,
resemble different aspects of theorizing, the processes of theorizing.

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And, these are the reasons why I suggest that, philosophy, the doing of philosophy, philosophizing, now lost not
merely another aspect of its subject-matter or an object of philosophical investigation, but its rationale, the reason
for the existence of the discourse of philosophy, its methodology, methods, techniques and tools. These things
resemble, are features of, are employed by and as, and constitute the processes of theorizing. The new discipline that
is the transcendental of and underlies as implicit epistemological pre-supposition and ontological and
methodological assumption all disciplines.

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The different steps or stages of the processes of theorizing overlap and they do not necessarily occur in a fixed or
linear order, as several of them can operate simultaneously. In the preceding sections for example I stated that I am
concerned with the collection of data, not all of which might be relevant to the present discussion. Thus the selection
of relevant data might occur at later stages, and I was already occupied with problem statements. That is exploring
which problems are relevant to this exploration and what the most appropriate ways are to express them and
therefore what the most meaningful concepts, notions, ideas or terms are to assist in the conceiving of these
problems. But, already a number of implicit assumptions were made and employed, as well as all sorts of pre-
suppositions and other types of transcendentals were operating so as to enable me to make express the propositions
and make the statements that I have been making.

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Some issues or ‘problems’ might be of primary importance while others occurring in the same context and
simultaneously might be of secondary or tertiary importance, while in other contexts and at other stages theorizing
the importance might be reversed. However, whatever the degree of importance the different issues must be dealt
with there and then. For example during the collecting of relevant data to identify and express the problem
statement/s, heuristically related issues might need to be considered. But that does not mean that such issues could
be dealt with once and for all, as they might recur in many other contexts and stages of theorizing.

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Here are some features of heuristic techniques* that need to be kept in mind. “A heuristic technique
(/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any
approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to
be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals. Where finding an optimal solution is
impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a
satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a
decision. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive
judgment, stereotyping, profiling, or common sense.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic

*Heuristics in judgment and decision making

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristics_in_judgment_and_decision-making

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules which people often use to form judgments and make
decisions. They are mental shortcuts that usually involve focusing on one aspect of a complex problem and
ignoring others.[1][2][3] These rules work well under most circumstances, but they can lead to systematic
deviations from logic, probability or rational choice theory. The resulting errors are called "cognitive biases"
and many different types have been documented. These have been shown to affect people's choices in
situations like valuing a house, deciding the outcome of a legal case, or making an investment decision.
Heuristics usually govern automatic, intuitive judgments but can also be used as deliberate mental strategies
when working from limited information.

Contents
 1 Types
 In their initial research, Tversky and Kahneman proposed three heuristics—availability,
representativeness, and anchoring and adjustment. Subsequent work has identified many more.
Heuristics that underlie judgment are called "judgment heuristics". Another type, called
"evaluation heuristics", are used to judge the desirability of possible choices.[9]
o 1.1 Availability
o 1.2 Representativeness
o 1.3 Anchoring and adjustment
o 1.4 Affect heuristic
o 1.5 Others
o https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias
o https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
o https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Heuristics
o
 Control heuristic
 Contagion heuristic
 Effort heuristic
 Familiarity heuristic
 Fluency heuristic
 Gaze heuristic
 Hot-hand fallacy
 Naive diversification
 Peak-end rule
 Recognition heuristic

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 Scarcity heuristic
 Similarity heuristic
 Simulation heuristic
 Social proof
o
 2 Theories
o 2.1 Cognitive laziness
o 2.2 Attribute substitution
o 2.3 Fast and frugal
 3 Consequences
o 3.1 Efficient decision heuristics
o 3.2 "Beautiful-is-familiar" effect
o 3.3 Judgments of morality and fairness
o 3.4 Persuasion
 4 See also
 5 Footnotes
 6 Citations
 7 References
 8 Further reading
 9 External links

Contents

 1 Overview

Heuristics are strategies derived from experience with similar problems, using readily accessible,
though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in human beings, machines,
and abstract issues.[1][2]

The most fundamental heuristic is trial and error, which can be used in everything from matching
nuts and bolts to finding the values of variables in algebra problems.

Here are a few other commonly used heuristics, from George Pólya's 1945 book, How to Solve
It:[3]

 If you are having difficulty understanding a problem, try drawing a picture.

 If you can't find a solution, try assuming that you have a solution and seeing what you can derive
from that ("working backward").
 If the problem is abstract, try examining a concrete example.
 Try solving a more general problem first (the "inventor's paradox": the more ambitious plan may
have more chances of success).

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, learned or hard-coded by evolutionary

processes, that have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments,
and solve problems typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information.

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Researchers test if people use those rules with various methods. These rules work well under
most circumstances, but in certain cases lead to systematic errors or cognitive biases.[4]


 2 History
o 2.1 Theorized psychological heuristics
 2.1.1 Well known
 Anchoring and adjustment – Describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the
first piece of information offered (the "anchor") when making decisions. For example, in a study
done with children, the children were told to estimate the number of jellybeans in a jar. Groups
of children were given either a high or low "base" number (anchor). Children estimated the
number of jellybeans to be closer to the anchor number that they were given.[17]
 Availability heuristic – A mental shortcut that occurs when people make judgments about the
probability of events by the ease with which examples come to mind. For example, in a 1973
Tversky & Kahneman experiment, the majority of participants reported that there were more
words in the English language that start with the letter K than for which K was the third letter.
There are actually twice as many words in the English Language that have K as the third letter as
those that start with K, but words that start with K are much easier to recall and bring to
mind.[18]
 Representativeness heuristic – A mental shortcut used when making judgments about the
probability of an event under uncertainty. Or, judging a situation based on how similar the
prospects are to the prototypes the person holds in his or her mind. For example, in a 1982
Tversky and Kahneman experiment, participants were given a description of a woman named
Linda. Based on the description, it was likely that Linda was a feminist. 80–90% of participants,
choosing from 2 options, chose that it was also more likely for Linda to be: a feminist and a bank
teller; than just a bank teller. The likelihood of two events cannot be greater than that of either
of the two events individually. For this reason, the representativeness heuristic is exemplary of
the conjunction fallacy.[18]
 Naïve diversification – When asked to make several choices at once, people tend to diversify
more than when making the same type of decision sequentially.
 Escalation of commitment – Describes the phenomenon where people justify increased
investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence
suggesting that the cost, starting today, of continuing the decision outweighs the expected
benefit.
 Familiarity heuristic – A mental shortcut applied to various situations in which individuals
assume that the circumstances underlying the past behavior still hold true for the present
situation and that the past behavior thus can be correctly applied to the new situation.
Especially prevalent when the individual experiences a high cognitive load.

 2.1.2 Lesser known
 Affect heuristic
 Contagion heuristic
 Effort heuristic
 Fluency heuristic
 Gaze heuristic
 Peak–end rule
 Recognition heuristic
 Scarcity heuristic

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 Similarity heuristic
 Simulation heuristic
 Social proof
 Take-the-best heuristic

o 2.2 Cognitive maps
 Heuristics were also found to be used in the manipulation and creation of cognitive maps.
Cognitive maps are internal representations of our physical environment, particularly
associated with spatial relationships. These internal representations of our environment
are used as memory as a guide in our external environment. It was found that when
questioned about maps imaging, distancing, etc., people commonly made distortions to
images. These distortions took shape in the regularization of images (i.e., images are
represented as more like pure abstract geometric images, though they are irregular in
shape).
 There are several ways that humans form and use cognitive maps.
o
 3 Philosophy
 "Heuristic device" is used when an entity X exists to enable understanding of, or
knowledge concerning, some other entity Y. A good example is a model that, as it is
never identical with what it models, is a heuristic device to enable understanding of what
it models. Stories, metaphors, etc., can also be termed heuristic in that sense. A classic
example is the notion of utopia as described in Plato's best-known work, The Republic.
This means that the "ideal city" as depicted in The Republic is not given as something to
be pursued, or to present an orientation-point for development; rather, it shows how
things would have to be connected, and how one thing would lead to another (often with
highly problematic results), if one would opt for certain principles and carry them
through rigorously.
 "Heuristic" is also often used as a noun to describe a rule-of-thumb, procedure, or
method.[20] Philosophers of science have emphasized the importance of heuristics in
creative thought and constructing scientific theories.[21] Roman Frigg and Stephan
Hartmann (2006). "Models in Science", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN
1095-5054
 (See The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and philosophers such as Imre Lakatos,[22]
Lindley Darden, William C. Wimsatt, and others.)

 4 Law
 5 Stereotyping
 6 See also
 7 References
 8 Further reading

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I already dealt with the loss of subject-matter or objects of investigation by philosophy in a previous
articles. As I wish to make out a case that philosophizing, the doing of philosophy resembles theorizing
and therefore philosophy no longer has a methodology of its own or unique methods, techniques, tools

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and skills, but share these things with all theorizing, if referred the reader to my previous articles on
theory-construction and the processes of theorizing. Just a few last words on these topics .

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/models-science/

 Models are of central importance in many scientific contexts. The centrality of models
such as the billiard ball model of a gas, the Bohr model of the atom, the MIT bag model
of the nucleon, the Gaussian-chain model of a polymer, the Lorenz model of the
atmosphere, the Lotka-Volterra model of predator-prey interaction, the double helix
model of DNA, agent-based and evolutionary models in the social sciences, and general
equilibrium models of markets in their respective domains are cases in point. Scientists
spend a great deal of time building, testing, comparing and revising models, and much
journal space is dedicated to introducing, applying and interpreting these valuable tools.
In short, models are one of the principal instruments of modern science.
 Philosophers are acknowledging the importance of models with increasing attention and
are probing the assorted roles that models play in scientific practice. The result has been
an incredible proliferation of model-types in the philosophical literature. Probing models,
phenomenological models, computational models, developmental models, explanatory
models, impoverished models, testing models, idealized models, theoretical models, scale
models, heuristic models, caricature models, didactic models, fantasy models, toy
models, imaginary models, mathematical models, substitute models, iconic models,
formal models, analogue models and instrumental models are but some of the notions that
are used to categorize models. While at first glance this abundance is overwhelming, it
can quickly be brought under control by recognizing that these notions pertain to
different problems that arise in connection with models. For example, models raise
questions in semantics (what is the representational function that models perform?),
ontology (what kind of things are models?), epistemology (how do we learn with
models?), and, of course, in general philosophy of science (how do models relate to
theory?; what are the implications of a model based approach to science for the debates
over scientific realism, reductionism, explanation and laws of nature?).

 1. Semantics: Models and Representation
o 1.1 Representational models I: models of phenomena
o 1.2 Representational models II: models of data
o 1.3 Models of theory
 2. Ontology: What Are Models?
o 2.1 Physical objects
o 2.2 Fictional objects
o 2.3 Set-theoretic structures
o 2.4 Descriptions
o 2.5 Equations
o 2.6 Gerrymandered ontologies
 3. Epistemology: Learning with Models
o 3.1 Learning about the model: experiments, thought experiments and simulation
o 3.2 Converting knowledge about the model into knowledge about the target
 4. Models and Theory
o 4.1 The two extremes: the syntactic and the semantic view of theories

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o 4.2 Models as independent of theories

 5. Models and Other Debates in the Philosophy of Science
o 5.1 Models and the realism versus antirealism debate
o 5.2 Model and reductionism
o 5.3 Models and laws of nature
o 5.4 Models and scientific explanation
 6. Conclusion
 Bibliography
 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structure-scientific-theories/

The Structure of Scientific Theories

First published Thu Mar 5, 2015

Scientific inquiry has led to immense explanatory and technological successes, partly as a result
of the pervasiveness of scientific theories. Relativity theory, evolutionary theory, and plate
tectonics were, and continue to be, wildly successful families of theories within physics, biology,
and geology. Other powerful theory clusters inhabit comparatively recent disciplines such as
cognitive science, climate science, molecular biology, microeconomics, and Geographic
Information Science (GIS). Effective scientific theories magnify understanding, help supply
legitimate explanations, and assist in formulating predictions. Moving from their knowledge-
producing representational functions to their interventional roles (Hacking 1983), theories are
integral to building technologies used within consumer, industrial, and scientific milieus.

This entry explores the structure of scientific theories from the perspective of the Syntactic,
Semantic, and Pragmatic Views. Each of these answers questions such as the following in unique
ways. What is the best characterization of the composition and function of scientific theory?
How is theory linked with world? Which philosophical tools can and should be employed in
describing and reconstructing scientific theory? Is an understanding of practice and application
necessary for a comprehension of the core structure of a scientific theory? Finally, and most
generally, how are these three views ultimately related?

 1. Introduction
o 1.1 Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic Views: The Basics
o 1.2 Two Examples: Newtonian Mechanics and Population Genetics
 2. The Syntactic View
o 2.1 Theory Structure per the Syntactic View

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For the Syntactic View, the structure of a scientific theory is its reconstruction in terms of
sentences cast in a metamathematical language. Metamathematics is the axiomatic machinery for
building clear foundations of mathematics, and includes predicate logic, set theory, and model
theory (e.g., Zach 2009; Hacking 2014). A central question of the Syntactic View is: in which
logical language should we recast scientific theory? According to the Syntactic View, which
emerged mainly out of work of the Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism (see Coffa 1991;
Friedman 1999; Creath 2014; Uebel 2014), philosophy most generally practiced is, and should
be, the study of the logic of natural science, or Wissenschaftslogik (Carnap 1937, 1966; Hempel
1966). Robust and clear logical languages allow us to axiomatically reconstruct theories,
which—by the Syntacticists’ definition—are sets of sentences in a given logical domain
language (e.g., Campbell 1920, 122; Hempel 1958, 46; cf. Carnap 1967 [1928], §156, "Theses
about the Constructional System"). Domain languages include “the language of physics, the
language of anthropology” (Carnap 1966, 58).

This view has been variously baptized as the Received View (Putnam 1962; Hempel 1970), the
Syntactic Approach (van Fraassen 1970, 1989), the Syntactic View (Wessels 1976), the Standard
Conception (Hempel 1970), the Orthodox View (Feigl 1970), the Statement View (Moulines
1976, 2002; Stegmüller 1976), the Axiomatic Approach (van Fraassen 1989), and the Once
Received View (Craver 2002). For historical reasons, and because of the linguistic trichotomy
discussed above, the “Syntactic View” shall be the name of choice in this entry.

2.1 Theory Structure per the Syntactic View

Some conceptual taxonomy is required in order to understand the logical framework of the
structure of scientific theories for the Syntactic View. We shall distinguish terms, sentences, and
languages (see Table 1).

2.1.1 Terms

Building upwards from the bottom, let us start with the three kinds of terms or vocabularies
contained in a scientific language: theoretical, logical, and observational. Examples of theoretical
terms are “molecule,” “atom,” “proton,” and protein,” and perhaps even macro-level objects and
properties such as “proletariat” and “aggregate demand.” Theoretical terms or concepts can be
classificatory (e.g., “cat” or “proton”), comparative (e.g., “warmer”), or quantitative (e.g.,
“temperature”) (Hempel 1952; Carnap 1966, Chapter 5). Moreover, theoretical terms are
“theoretical constructs” introduced “jointly” as a “theoretical system” (Hempel 1952, 32).
Logical terms include quantifiers (e.g., ∀,∃

) and connectives (e.g., ∧,→

). Predicates such as “hard,” “blue,” and “hot,” and relations such as “to the left of” and
“smoother than,” are observational terms.

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2.1.2 Sentences

Terms can be strung together into three kinds of sentences: theoretical, correspondence, and
observational. TS

is the set of theoretical sentences that are the axioms, theorems, and laws of the theory. Theoretical
sentences include the laws of Newtonian mechanics and of the Kinetic Theory of Gases, all suitably
axiomatized (e.g., Carnap 1966; Hempel 1966). Primitive theoretical sentences (e.g., axioms) can be
distinguished from derivative theoretical sentences (e.g., theorems; see Reichenbach 1969 [1924];
Hempel 1958; Feigl 1970). CS is the set of correspondence sentences tying theoretical sentences to
observable phenomena or “to a ‘piece of reality’” (Reichenbach 1969 [1924], 8; cf. Einstein 1934, 1936
[1936], 351). To simplify, they provide the theoretical syntax with an interpretation and an application,
i.e., a semantics. Suitably axiomatized version of the following sentences provide semantics to Boyle’s
law, PV=nRT: “V in Boyle’s law is equivalent to the measurable volume xyz of a physical container
such as a glass cube that is x, y, and z centimeters in length, width, and height, and in which the gas
measured is contained” and “T in Boyle’s law is equivalent to the temperature indicated on a reliable
thermometer or other relevant measuring device properly calibrated, attached to the physical system,
and read.” Carnap (1987 [1932], 466) presents two examples of observational sentences, OS

: “Here (in a laboratory on the surface of the earth) is a pendulum of such and such a kind,” and
“the length of the pendulum is 245.3 cm.” Importantly, theoretical sentences can only contain
theoretical and logical terms; correspondence sentences involve all three kinds of terms; and
observational sentences comprise only logical and observational terms.

2.1.3 Languages

The total domain language of science consists of two languages: the theoretical language, LT

, and the observational language, LO

(e.g., Hempel 1966, Chapter 6; Carnap 1966, Chapter 23; the index entry for “Language,” of
Feigl, Scriven, and Maxwell 1958, 548 has three subheadings: “observation,” “theoretical,” and
“ordinary”). The theoretical language includes theoretical vocabulary, while the observational
language involves observational terms. Both languages contain logical terms. Finally, the
theoretical language includes, and is constrained by, the logical calculus, Calc, of the axiomatic
system adopted (e.g., Hempel 1958, 46; Suppe 1977, 50-53). This calculus specifies sentence
grammaticality as well as appropriate deductive and non-ampliative inference rules (e.g., modus
ponens) pertinent to, especially, theoretical sentences. Calc can itself be written in theoretical
sentences.

2.1.4 Theory Structure, in General

Table 1 summarizes the Syntactic View’s account of theory structure:

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Table 1

Theory Observation

Sentence Type TS

CS

OS

Term (or vocabulary) Theoretical & logical Theoretical, logical & observational Observational & logical

Language LT

LT

& LO

LO

The salient divide is between theory and observation. Building on Table 1, there are three
different levels of scientific knowledge, according to the Syntactic View:

{TS}=

The uninterpreted syntactic system of the scientific theory.

{TS,CS}= The scientific theory structure of a particular domain (e.g., physics, anthropology).
{TS,CS,OS}=

All of the science of a particular domain.

Scientific theory is thus taken to be a syntactically formulated set of theoretical sentences

(axioms, theorems, and laws) together with their interpretation via correspondence sentences. As
we have seen, theoretical sentences and correspondence sentences are cleanly distinct, even if
both are included in the structure of a scientific theory.

o
o 2.2 A Running Example: Newtonian Mechanics
o 2.3 Interpreting Theory Structure per the Syntactic View
o 2.4 Taking Stock: Syntactic View
o To summarize, the Syntactic View holds that there are three kinds of terms or
vocabularies: logical, theoretical, and observational; three kinds of sentences: TS, CS,
and OS; and two languages: LT and LO. Moreover, the structure of scientific theories
could be analyzed using the logical tools of metamathematics. The goal is to reconstruct
the logic of science, viz. to articulate an axiomatic system.

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 3. The Semantic View

o 3.1 Theory Structure per the Semantic View
o Some defenders of the Semantic View keep important aspects of this reconstructive
agenda, moving the metamathematical apparatus from predicate logic to set theory.
Other advocates of the Semantic View insist that the structure of scientific theory is
solely mathematical. They argue that we should remain at the mathematical level,
rather than move up (or down) a level, into foundations of mathematics. A central
question for the Semantic View is: which mathematical models are actually used in
science?

The link between theory structure and the world, under the Syntactic View, is contained in the theory
itself: CS

, the set of correspondence rules. The term “correspondence rules” (Margenau 1950; Nagel 1961,
97–105; Carnap 1966, Chapter 24) has a variety of near-synonyms:

1. Dictionary (Campbell 1920)

2. Operational rules (Bridgman 1927)
3. Coordinative definitions (Reichenbach 1969 [1924], 1938)
4. Reduction sentences (Carnap 1936/1937; Hempel 1952)
5. Correspondence postulates (Carnap 1963)
6. Bridge principles (Hempel 1966; Kitcher 1984)
7. Reduction functions (Schaffner 1969, 1976)
8. Bridge laws (Sarkar 1998)

Important differences among these terms cannot be mapped out here. However, in order to better
understand correspondence rules, two of their functions will be considered: (i) theory
interpretation (Carnap, Hempel) and (ii) theory reduction (Nagel, Schaffner). The dominant
perspective on correspondence rules is that they interpret theoretical terms. Unlike
“mathematical theories,” the axiomatic system of physics “cannot have… a splendid isolation
from the world” (Carnap 1966, 237). Instead, scientific theories require observational
interpretation through correspondence rules. Even so, surplus meaning always remains in the
theoretical structure (Hempel 1958, 87; Carnap 1966). Second, correspondence rules are seen as
necessary for inter-theoretic reduction (van Riel and Van Gulick 2014). For instance, they
connect observation terms such as “temperature” in phenomenological thermodynamics (the
reduced theory) to theoretical concepts such as “mean kinetic energy” in statistical mechanics
(the reducing theory). Correspondence rules unleash the reducing theory’s epistemic power.
Notably, Nagel (1961, Chapter 11; 1979) and Schaffner (1969, 1976, 1993) allow for multiple
kinds of correspondence rules, between terms of either vocabulary, in the reducing and the
reduced theory (cf. Callender 1999; Winther 2009; Dizadji-Bahmani, Frigg, and Hartmann
2010). Correspondence rules are a core part of the structure of scientific theories and serve as
glue between theory and observation.

Finally, while they are not part of the theory structure, and although we saw some examples
above, observation sentences are worth briefly reviewing. Correspondence rules attach to the
content of observational sentences. Observational sentences were analyzed as (i) protocol
sentences or Protokollsätze (e.g., Schlick 1934; Carnap 1987 [1932], 1937, cf. 1963; Neurath

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1983 [1932]), and as (ii) experimental laws (e.g., Campbell 1920; Nagel 1961; Carnap 1966; cf.
Duhem 1954 [1906]).

o
o 3.2 A Running Example: Newtonian Mechanics
o 3.3 Interpreting Theory Structure per the Semantic View
o 3.4 Taking Stock: Semantic View
o In short, committing to either a state-space or a set-/model-theoretic view on theory
structure does not imply any particular perspective on theory interpretation (e.g.,
hierarchy of models, similarity, embedding). Instead, commitments to the former are
logically and actually separable from positions on the latter (e.g., Suppes and Suppe
endorse different accounts of theory structure, but share an understanding of theory
interpretation in terms of a hierarchy of models). The Semantic View is alive and well as
a family of analyses of theory structure, and continues to be developed in interesting
ways both in its state-space and set-/model-theoretic approaches.
 4. The Pragmatic View
o 4.1 Theory Structure per the Pragmatic View
o Finally, for the Pragmatic View, scientific theory is internally and externally complex.
Mathematical components, while often present, are neither necessary nor sufficient for
characterizing the core structure of scientific theories. Theory also consists of a rich
variety of nonformal components (e.g., analogies and natural kinds). Thus, the
Pragmatic View argues, a proper analysis of the grammar (syntax) and meaning
(semantics) of theory must pay heed to scientific theory complexity, as well as to the
multifarious assumptions, purposes, values, and practices informing theory. A central
question the Pragmatic View poses is: which theory components and which modes of
theorizing are present in scientific theories found across a variety of disciplines?

The Pragmatic View recognizes that a number of assumptions about scientific theory seem to be
shared by the Syntactic and Semantic Views. Both perspectives agree, very roughly, that theory
is (1) explicit, (2) mathematical, (3) abstract, (4) systematic, (5) readily individualizable, (6)
distinct from data and experiment, and (7) highly explanatory and predictive (see Flyvbjerg
2001, 38–39; cf. Dreyfus 1986). The Pragmatic View imagines the structure of scientific theories
rather differently, arguing for a variety of theses:

1. Limitations. Idealized theory structure might be too weak to ground the predictive and
explanatory work syntacticists and semanticists expect of it (e.g., Cartwright 1983, 1999a, b;
Morgan and Morrison 1999; Suárez and Cartwright 2008).
2. Pluralism. Theory structure is plural and complex both in the sense of internal variegation and of
existing in many types. In other words, there is an internal pluralism of theory (and model)
components (e.g., mathematical concepts, metaphors, analogies, ontological assumptions,
values, natural kinds and classifications, distinctions, and policy views, e.g., Kuhn 1970; Boumans
1999), as well as a broad external pluralism of different types of theory (and models) operative
in science (e.g., mechanistic, historical, and mathematical models, e.g., Hacking 2009, Longino
2013; Winther 2012b). Indeed, it may be better to speak of the structures of scientific theories,
in the double-plural.
3. Nonformal aspects. The internal pluralism of theory structure (thesis #2) includes many
nonformal aspects deserving attention. That is, many components of theory structure, such as

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metaphors, analogies, values, and policy views have a non-mathematical and “informal” nature,
and they lie implicit or hidden (e.g., Bailer-Jones 2002; Craver 2002; Contessa 2006; Winther
2006a; Morgan 2012). Interestingly, the common understanding of “formal,” which identifies
formalization with mathematization, may itself be a conceptual straightjacket; the term could be
broadened to include “diagram abstraction” and “principle extraction” (e.g., Griesemer 2013,
who explicitly endorses what he also calls a “Pragmatic View of Theories”).
4. Function. Characterizations of the nature and dynamics of theory structure should pay attention
to the user as well as to purposes and values (e.g., Apostel 1960; Minsky 1965; Morrison 2007;
Winther 2012a).
5. Practice. Theory structure is continuous with practice and “the experimental life,” making it
difficult to neatly dichotomize theory and practice (e.g., Hacking 1983, 2009; Shapin and
Schaffer 1985; Galison 1987, 1988, 1997; Suárez and Cartwright 2008).

These are core commitments of the Pragmatic View.

It is important to note at the outset that the Pragmatic View takes its name from the linguistic
trichotomy discussed above, in the Introduction. This perspective need not imply commitment to,
or association with, American Pragmatism (e.g. the work of Charles S. Peirce, William James, or
John Dewey; cf. Hookway 2013; Richardson 2002). For instance, Hacking (2007a) distinguishes
his pragmatic attitudes from the school of Pragmatism. He maps out alternative historical routes
of influence, in general and on him, vis-à-vis fallibilism (via Imre Lakatos, Karl Popper; Hacking
2007a, §1), historically conditioned truthfulness (via Bernard Williams; Hacking 2007a, §3), and
realism as intervening (via Francis Everitt, Melissa Franklin; Hacking 2007a, §4). To borrow a
term from phylogenetics, the Pragmatic View is “polyphyletic.” The components of its analytical
framework have multiple, independent origins, some of which circumnavigate American
Pragmatism.

o
o 4.2 A Running Example: Newtonian Mechanics
o 4.3 Interpreting Theory Structure per the Pragmatic View
o 4.4 Taking Stock: Pragmatic View
 The analytical framework of the Pragmatic View remains under construction. The
emphasis is on internal diversity, and on the external pluralism of models and theories, of
modeling and theorizing, and of philosophical analyses of scientific theories. The
Pragmatic View acknowledges that scientists use and need different kinds of theories for
a variety of purposes. There is no one-size-fits-all structure of scientific theories.
Notably, although the Pragmatic View does not necessarily endorse the views of the
tradition of American Pragmatism, it has important resonances with the latter school’s
emphasis on truth and knowledge as processual, purposive, pluralist, and context-
dependent, and on the social and cognitive structure of scientific inquiry.
 A further qualification in addition to the one above regarding American Pragmatism is in
order. The Pragmatic View has important precursors in the historicist or “world view”
perspectives of Feyerabend, Hanson, Kuhn, and Toulmin, which were an influential set of
critiques of the Syntactic View utterly distinct from the Semantic View. This
philosophical tradition focused on themes such as meaning change and
incommensurability of terms across world views (e.g., paradigms), scientific change
(e.g., revolutionary: Kuhn 1970; evolutionary: Toulmin 1972), the interweaving of

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context of discovery and context of justification, and scientific rationality (Preston 2012;
Bird 2013; Swoyer 2014). The historicists also opposed the idea that theories can secure
meaning and empirical support from a theory-neutral and purely observational source, as
the Syntactic View had insisted on with its strong distinction between theoretical and
observational vocabularies (cf. Galison 1988). Kuhn’s paradigms or, more precisely,
“disciplinary matrices” even had an internal anatomy with four components: (i) laws or
symbolic generalizations, (ii) ontological assumptions, (iii) values, and (iv) exemplars
(Kuhn 1970, postscript; Godfrey-Smith 2003; Hacking 2012). This work was concerned
more with theory change than with theory structure and had fewer conceptual resources
from sociology of science and history of science than contemporary Pragmatic View
work. Moreover, paradigms never quite caught on the way analyses of models and
modeling have. Even so, this work did much to convince later scholars, including many
of the Pragmatic View, of certain weaknesses in understanding theories as deductive
axiomatic structures.
o
 5. Population Genetics
 6. Conclusion
 Bibliography
 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-naturalized/

The discussion to follow describes some of the dominant claims, commitments, and forms that
naturalistic epistemology, so understood, has taken, and specific examples of such naturalistic
views. As well, both the principal motivations for and the major objections to NE will be
discussed. Finally (and, in some cases, along the way), we will briefly consider the relation
between NE and some other recent and important subjects, positions, and developments—some
of them just as controversial as NE itself. These include externalism, experimental philosophy,
social epistemology, feminist epistemology, evolutionary epistemology, and debates about the
nature of (epistemic) rationality.

 1. General Orientation
o 1.1 Some key features of TE
o 1.2 NE: Some key forms and themes
o 1.3 NE: A brief note on the pre-Quinean history
 2. “Epistemology Naturalized”
 3. Critical Reactions to Quine
o 3.1 Five objections
o 3.2 Some responses, and further clarification of the issues
 4. Epistemology as “Thoroughly Empirical”
o 4.1 Knowledge and Epistemology
o 4.2 Epistemic Normativity
o 4.3 Intuitions and the A Priori
 5. A Moderate Naturalism
o 5.1 Conceptual Analysis, Intuitions, and Epistemological Methodology

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o 5.2 Intuitions, Norms, Experiments

 6. Other Topics and Approaches
o 6.1 Social epistemology
o 6.2 Feminist epistemology

6.3 Rationality debates

 Bibliography
 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lawphil-naturalism/

The “naturalistic turn” that has swept so many areas of philosophy over the past three decades
has also had an impact in the last decade in legal philosophy. Methodological naturalists (M-
naturalists) view philosophy as continuous with empirical inquiry in the sciences. Some M-
naturalists want to replace conceptual and justificatory theories with empirical and descriptive
theories; they take their inspiration from more-or-less Quinean arguments against conceptual
analysis and foundationalist programs. Other M-naturalists retain the normative and regulative
ambitions of traditional philosophy, but emphasize that it is an empirical question what
normative advice is actually useable and effective for creatures like us. Some M-naturalists are
also substantive naturalists (S-naturalists). Ontological S-naturalism is the view that there exist
only natural or physical things; semantic S-naturalism is the view that a suitable philosophical
analysis of any concept must show it to be amenable to empirical inquiry. Each of these varieties
of naturalism has applications in legal philosophy. Replacement forms of M-naturalism hold that:
(1) conceptual analysis of the concept of law should be replaced by reliance on the best social
scientific explanations of legal phenomena, and (2) normative theories of adjudication should be
replaced by empirical theories. These views are associated with American Legal Realism and
Brian Leiter's reinterpretation of Realism. Normative M-naturalists, by contrast, inspired and led
by Alvin Goldman, seek to bring empirical results to bear on philosophical and foundational
questions about adjudication, the legal rules of evidence and discovery, the adversarial process,
and so forth. An older form of S-naturalism in legal philosophy, associated by H.L.A. Hart with
Scandinavian Legal Realism, seeks a reduction of legal concepts to behavioral and psychological
categories. More recent forms of S-naturalism, associated with a revival of a kind of natural law
theory defended by David Brink and Michael Moore (among others), applies the “new” or
“causal” theory of reference to questions of legal interpretation, including the interpretation of
moral concepts as they figure in legal rules.

 1. Varieties of Naturalism
 2. Replacement Naturalism I: Against Conceptual Analysis
 3. Replacement Naturalism II: American Legal Realism
 4. Normative Naturalism
 5. Substantive Naturalism
 Bibliography
 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources

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 Related Entries

14

Please be aware, take note of the fact, that when you do conceptual analysis you actually are involved in the entire
process of theorizing, but that you do it selectively by concentrating on only one step (and its intra-contexts), and
just one of the activities that constitute theorizing, theory-making or –constitution. So please be aware of the
existence of the entire process of theorizing, - building or –construction. The same does for those who are involved
in Continental philosophy. You skip many steps or stages of theorizing and go straight to expressing different types
of claims, remarks, statements and the drawing of conclusions. You for example skip many steps in the process of
theorizing, for example surveying the field of relevant concepts, the creation of problems statements, testing such
statements, the development of alternative hypotheses or generalizations etc.

In a sense one can conceive of the different stages from the conception and statement of the problem to the drawing
of conclusions, testing hypotheses etc as lying on a continuum. But the continuum or continuums in this case lies on
many levels and criss-cross between these levels and contexts on them. Simultaneously the continuums consists of
or involve many dimensions, with their intra-contexts, that you will be involved in even though you might be
unaware of it. And, please inform yourself about the intricacies of a) heuristics and b) the differences between
models and theories, as you will have to know about these things when you are involved in the doing of
philosophizing, nay theorizing.

15

I already dealt with the subject-matter of the socio-cultural practice of philosophy in another article and the fact that
over time during Western intellectual history the philosophical discourse lost many of its fields of study or areas of
its subject matter. I will therefore not deal with this subject again in detail, but quote a few references.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/problem-of-many/

And what holds for clouds holds for anything whose boundaries look less clear the closer you look at it.
And that includes just about every kind of object we normally think about, including humans. Although
this seems to be a merely technical puzzle, even a triviality, a surprising range of proposed solutions has
emerged, many of them mutually inconsistent. It is not even settled whether a solution should come
from metaphysics, or from philosophy of language, or from logic. Here we survey the options, and
provide several links to the many topics related to the Problem.
http://tar.weatherson.org/2014/04/01/arbitrary-boundaries-in-academia/

“I’ve beenthinking a bit about the arbitrariness of the boundaries around philosophy. This is part
of my general concern with trying to think historically (or sociologically) about contemporary
philosophy.

I think it’s beyond dispute that there are, as a matter of fact, some boundaries. For instance, work
in sports analytics isn’t part of philosophy. I wouldn’t publish a straightforward study in sports
analytics in a philosophy journal, and I wouldn’t hire someone to an open philosophy position if
all their work was in sports analytics. And I think just about everyone in the profession shares
these dispositions.

In saying all this, there are a number of things I’m not saying.”

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He then states fields that he considers to be related to philosophy. “Posted on 1 April, 2014 by Brian
Weatherson

Arbitrary Boundaries in Academia

I’ve been thinking a bit about the arbitrariness of the boundaries around philosophy. This is part
of my general concern with trying to think historically (or sociologically) about contemporary
philosophy.

I think it’s beyond dispute that there are, as a matter of fact, some boundaries. For instance, work
in sports analytics isn’t part of philosophy. I wouldn’t publish a straightforward study in sports
analytics in a philosophy journal, and I wouldn’t hire someone to an open philosophy position if
all their work was in sports analytics. And I think just about everyone in the profession shares
these dispositions.

In saying all this, there are a number of things I’m not saying.

1. I’m not saying that philosophy is irrelevant to sports analytics. Indeed, some of the biggest
debates in sports analytics have been influenced by familiar epistemological arguments.
2. I’m not saying that sports analytics is irrelevant to philosophy. If someone wanted to use a
case study from recent debates in sports analytics to make a point in social epistemology, that
could be great philosophy. (I’m sort of tempted to write such a paper myself.) But something can
be relevant to philosophy without being philosophy. (As a corrollary to that, I’m not saying that
there couldn’t be any point to a course on sports analytics in a philosophy department. Perhaps if
it was a great case study, more philosophers would need to learn the background to the case.)
3. I’m not saying there could not be something like philosophy of sports analytics. I don’t know
what such a thing would be – it feels like it reduces to familiar applied epistemology – but
someone could try it.
4. I’m not saying work in sports analytics is no good. Indeed, I think some of it is great.
5. I’m not saying sports analytics doesn’t belong in the academy. As a matter of fact, there isn’t
anywhere it happily lives. But if David Romer and others succeed in making it part of
economics, or Brayden King makes it part of management studies, I’ll be really happy.
6. And I’m not saying there is some special thing that philosophy timelessly or essentially is that
excludes sports analytics. Indeed, the rest of this post is going to be sort of an argument against
this view.

But even with all those negative points made, I think it is still pretty clear that philosophy as it is
currently constituted does actually exclude sports analytics.

That’s all background to a couple of questions I would be interested in hearing people’s thoughts
about.”

He then states fields that he considers to be part of philosophy or at least inter-disciplinary -

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“1. What are the most closely related pairs of fields you know about such that one of the pair is
in philosophy (in the above sense), and the other is not?
2. What fields are most distant from philosophy as it is currently practiced, but you think could
easily have been in philosophy in a different history?

My answers are below the fold.

For 1, I have two answers:

 Decision theory (in) – Game theory (out)

 Semantics (in) – Syntax (out)

Of course both game theory and syntax are relevant to philosophy, and are influenced by things
that are parts of philosophy. But I don’t see many people in philosophy journals, philosophy
departments, or philosophy conferences, doing straight up work in those fields.”

He continues on game theory and then turns to syntax and semantics – “I won’t go over the point
at the same length, but I think the same is true of syntax and semantics. Loads of philosophers
(including me!) do work in semantics. And much of that work is inspired, or guided, by work in
syntax. But very few philosophers (at least to my knowledge) have made contributions to syntax,
or have written papers that would happily appear in a syntax journal.

To be fair, that last paragraph does rest on a somewhat arbitrary drawing of the syntax/semantics
boundary. We could draw that boudnary so that Jason Stanley’s work on unarticulated
constituents, or Delia Graff Fara’s work on analysing names and descriptions as predicates as
contributions to syntax. I don’t think there’s any sharp line, or natural joint around here. But I do
think that as you go along the continuum between clearly semantic work, and clearly syntactic
work, the representation of philosophers drops dramatically.

These are meant to be dated observations. Perhaps in five or ten years time, the world will look
very different. And perhaps I’m wrong that the boundaries here are arbitrary; maybe there is a
good reason why we philosophers should be interested in decision theory but not game theory, or
the meaning of ‘the’ but not the conditions of well-formedness for questions in various
languages. But they seem like pretty arbitrary distinctions to me.”

To me these problems or issues are not merely the ‘fault’ of philosophy but involve socio-
cultural factors. Philosophy alone does not draw limits or boundaries to what is included or
excluded in its discourse, there are many other factors involved. Some of them might well
concern the self-definition or – perception of philosophy, its nature and subject-matter. He then
concludes his questions concerning the boundaries of philosophy by mentioning Shakespeare –
“Question two is harder, but here’s my wildly uninformed guess: Shakespeare. I think it’s easy to
imagine a world where historians of ideas were very interested in Shakespeare’s implicit theory
of mind, and theory of virtue, and on how this influenced other writers on these topics, especially
English-language writers. And in that world, we might see much more discussion of Shakespeare
as part of the discussion of the bridge between medieval and early modern philosophy. (Of

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course, this would require more discussion of this bridge than some departments are prepared to
engage in, but that’s another matter.) But as easy as this world is to imagine, it’s not our world.

So, what do you think? Where, if any, are there sharp but arbitrary boundaries drawn around the
discipline? And what accidents of history have left us as a profession far removed from fields of
study we might otherwise have been in greater contact with?

UPDATE AND CORRECTION: Klaas Kraay pointed out that I’m wrong about how far
removed from academic philosophy the study of Shakespeare is. In fact, there is an upcoming
conference on Shakespeare: The Philosopher. I didn’t expect to be so dramatically wrong about
that answer!’

The above concerns the subject-matter to be included or not to be included in the discourse of
philosophy. My concern in this article is less about philosophical subject-matter and more about
its methods, techniques and tools, but I present ideas of a few other individuals on this subject,
concerning the object of investigation of philosophy.

Different or a plurality of worlds, that the author considers to be a monstrosity, but what about
multiverse/s? http://tar.weatherson.org/2004/02/14/lewis-and-strauss/ “Lewis’s masterpiece On
the Plurality of Worlds to be an argument for the plurality of worlds. And this clearly is the
exoteric meaning of Lewis’s text. But could a thinker of Lewis’s quality really have believed in
this metaphysical monstrosity? It is hard to credit. The real meaning must lay deeper.

For a long time I thought that the book was obviously an argument for the existence of God.
Lewis conspicuously fails to discuss theological ersatzism – the view that ersatz possible worlds
are really constituents of the mind of God. Given the devastating attacks Lewis launches on rival
theories, and the utter implausibility of Lewis’s preferred alternative, I thought the esoteric
message was clear. Philosophy needs a theory of modality. Theological ersatzism is the only
viable theory of modality, the others being disposed of in Lewis’s book. Theological ersatzism
needs God. Hence God exists. A fittingly impressive argument for a great thinker’s masterpiece.”
“The clue I missed was from the paper Putnam’s Paradox. Lewis ever so clearly lays out
Putnam’s ‘paradoxical’ argument for anti-realism. And then, in his customary fashion, provides a
solution so outlandish that the trained scholar is clearly meant to reject it. He even acknowledges
that the solution bears the trademarks of medieval scholastic corruption of Greek thought.

This paper poses a puzzle though. Why, if Lewis thought Putnam’s argument was sound, is he so
hostile to Putnam in the paper? Returning to Plurality makes everything clear. As the title of Part
2, “Paradox in Paradise…” indicates, Lewis thinks the paradox spreads throughout paradise, and
infects all talk related to modality. And as he says in Part 1, ever so slyly using the literal voice,
this covers all manner of things philosophers care to think about. Putnam’s error, Lewis is
saying, was to not see how far his anti-realist argument spreads. Plurality, when read in light of
Putnam’s Paradox argues for anti-realism about modality, and hence for all of metaphysics.

This clearly rebounds on the theological argument above. For if God exists, then theological
ersatzism is true, and hence a (reductive) realism about modality is correct. But we should be
anti-realists about modality, so we must be anti-realists about theology.

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That line of reasoning seemed compelling, but it was delicate enough that I would have expected Lewis to offer
some kind of confirmation that it was correct. And he does in Evil for Freedom’s Sake. There he argues that the
various realist positions on God, classical theism and atheism, are reduced to an indecorous squabble over burdens
of proof. The clear message is that the Putnamian anti-realism he defended in Putnam’s Paradox and expanded upon
in Plurality should be extended to theology.” David Lewis, Putnam's paradox - PhilPapers
philpapers.org/rec/LEWPP

Putnam's paradox - MIT

web.mit.edu/rvm/www/.../Lewis%20-%20Putnam's%20Paradox.pdf

Perhaps Putnam has chosen to underplay his hand. Perhaps he does think of the model-theoretic
argument as showing that our total accepted theory cannot be false, whether or not it is ideal (unless it
is inconsistent, or the world is too small).

[PDF]Putnam's Paradox - Princeton University

https://www.princeton.edu/~fraassen/abstract/PutnamParadox-published.pdf

by BC van Fraassen - Cited by 40 - Related articles

David Lewis isolated one argument and called it "Putnam's Paradox".2 That argument is clear and
concise; so is the paradoxical conclusion it purports to demonstrate; and so is Lewis' paradox- avoiding
solution.

Skolem's Paradox (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-skolem/

Jump to Putnam's Model-Theoretic Argument - Putnam's general goal in the model-theoretic argument
... has three connections to Skolem's Paradox.

A Quick Reply to Putnam's Paradox - Mind

mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/109/434/195.full.pdf

by T Chambers - 2000 - Cited by 11 - Related articles

A Quick Reply to Putnam's Paradox. TIMOTHY CHAMBERS. The aim of Putnam's model-theoretic
argument—dubbed “Putnam's Par- adox” by David Lewis—is ...

[PDF]Lecture 5: Leibniz equivalence and Putnam's paradox - Oliver Pooley

www.oliverpooley.org/uploads/7/7/5/9/7759400/handout5.pdf

O Pooley, HT 2003. Lecture 5: Leibniz equivalence and Putnam's paradox. 5.1 Recap: Responses to the
hole argument. Let M1 = 〈M,g,T〉 and M2 = 〈M,d. ∗ g,d.

Rietdijk–Putnam argument - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rietdijk–Putnam_argument

In philosophy, the Rietdijk–Putnam argument, named after C. W. Rietdijk and Hilary Putnam, ... The
"paradox" consists of two observers who are in the same place and at the same instant having different
sets of events in their "present moment".

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Putnam's Paradox - Neurath's Boat

protagoras.typepad.com/adrift_on_neuraths_boat/2006/03/putnams_paradox.html

Mar 9, 2006 - In his discussion of Putnam's paradox, David Lewis wonders briefly why Putnam supposes
that only an ideal theory is guaranteed reference ...

What is Putnam's Paradox?: Philosophy Forums

forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/what-is-putnams-paradox-50929.html

Philosophy Forums · Forums | Articles | Links | Gallery. ☰ Options Members Calendar Latest Chat Help
Log In Register. Username Password Login Forgot your

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lewis_(philosopher) He is probably best known for his

controversial modal realist stance: that (i) possible worlds exist, (ii) every possible world is a concrete
entity, (iii) any possible world is causally and spatiotemporally isolated from any other possible world,
and (iv) our world is among the possible worlds.

http://protagoras.typepad.com/adrift_on_neuraths_boat/2006/03/putnams_paradox.html

Putnam's Paradox

So I've been thinking about this recently for some reason (I guess I'm always thinking about issues surrounding
realism and anti-realism). In his discussion of Putnam's paradox, David Lewis wonders briefly why Putnam
supposes that only an ideal theory is guaranteed reference and truth, when a version of the model theoretic argument
can show that any theory is guaranteed reference and truth. He supposes that Putnam is assuming that our theories
are forward-looking, so that their intended interpretations are as according to some future ideal theory.

This seems obviously right to me. However, I think it shouldn't have been that hard to get to that point. The lesson
Lewis ultimately draws from Putnam's paradox is that global descriptivism can't work; the meanings of the entirety
of our language and theories can't be determined by picking what would make them as true as possible, because a
cunning interpretation can make virtually any theory true of virtually anything. This is despite Lewis's enthusiasm
for local descriptivism; for individual words and concepts, it is a good approach to interpret them to refer to
whatever makes the most, or at least the most important, of our beliefs about them true.

That strikes me as absolutely the point of Putnam's paradox. We can always interpret some part of our theory in
light of other parts of our theory. This is surely why Putnam only draws the conclusion that an ideal theory must be
true. Any less than ideal theory can always be interpreted in terms of future, more extensive theories, and can turn
out to be partly wrong on the basis of that latter interpretation; only a theory that is as inclusive as possible is
immune to being so interpreted by further theory.

Of course, from the conclusion that global descriptivism is false, Lewis moves on to maintain that we need some
constraints on interpretation beyond making our theory, whatever it is, come out as true as possible. Infamously, he
maintains that theories should be interpreted as much as possible as referring to his perfectly natural properties and
things which are built out of them. The Canberra Credo maintains that Lewis was right about pretty much
everything, except modal realism. If I were to construct a credo, it would say that Lewis was right about pretty
much everything, except perfectly natural properties.

Instead, I would say that it makes no sense to try to interpret a complete, ideal theory; all interpretation is internal to
our theorizing, and whenever we're evaluating some theory, it is always in light of some further theoretical
commitments. I take it that this was the real point of Putnam's internal realism, as well as the old Logical Positivist

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rejection of metaphysics (I assume Putnam's "internal realism" terminology came from Carnap's distinction between
internal and external questions; Carnap of course rejected external questions).

I should probably look up van Fraassen's paper on Putnam's paradox as well. I'm usually in sympathy with van
Fraassen.

March 09, 2006 in Metaphysics | Permalink

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam

For a time, under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, he adopted a pluralist view of philosophy itself and came to
view most philosophical problems as nothing more than conceptual or linguistic confusions created by philosophers
by using ordinary language out of its original context. Putnam, H. (1997). "A Half Century of Philosophy, Viewed
from Within". Daedalus. 126 (1): 175–208. JSTOR 20027414.

See the following article for subject-matter taught as/under philosophy at Michigan -
http://tar.weatherson.org/author/brian-weatherson/

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy

Oxford University Press, 2014 - Analysis (Philosophy) - 258 pages

Peter Unger's provocative new book poses a serious challenge to contemporary analytic
philosophy, arguing that to its detriment it focuses the predominance of its energy on "empty
ideas."

In the mid-twentieth century, philosophers generally agreed that, by contrast with science,
philosophy should offer no substantial thoughts about the general nature of concrete reality.
Leading philosophers were concerned with little more than the semantics of ordinary words.
For example: Our word "perceives" differs from our word "believes" in that the first word is
used more strictly than the second. While someone may be correct in saying "I believe there's
a table before me" whether or not there is a table before her, she will be correct in saying "I
perceive there's a table before me" only if there is a table there. Though just a parochial idea,
whether or not it is correct does make a difference to how things are with concrete reality. In
Unger's terms, it is a concretely substantial idea. Alongside each such parochial substantial
idea, there is an analytic or conceptual thought, as with the thought that someone may believe
there is a table before her whether or not there is one, but she will perceive there is a table
before her only if there is a table there. Empty of import as to how things are with concrete
reality, those thoughts are what Unger calls concretely empty ideas.

It is widely assumed that, since about 1970, things had changed thanks to the advent of such
thoughts as the content externalism championed by Hilary Putnam and Donald Davidson,
various essentialist thoughts offered by Saul Kripke, and so on. Against that assumption,
Unger argues that, with hardly any exceptions aside from David Lewis's theory of a plurality
of concrete worlds, all of these recent offerings are concretely empty ideas. Except when
offering parochial ideas, Peter Unger maintains that mainstream philosophy still offers hardly
anything beyond concretely empty ideas.

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http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/36148/Unger.pdf
http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/09/02/analys.anv069

I have already dealt with Philosophy and X-Phi , philosophy seeking for subject-matter in the
‘fields’ of experimental philosophy, so I merely lists a few references here. I quote the entire
firat article as it sums up for those new to the ‘subject’ much of what is going on there.

Should Philosophy Be Experimental? – The Brains Blog

philosophyofbrains.com/2006/03/09/should-philosophy-be-experimental.aspx

Mar 9, 2006 - Experimental philosophy is a recent philosophical movement. In spite of the

name, its proponents do not attempt to do philosophy by ...

Should Philosophy Be Experimental?

Gualtiero Piccinini March 9, 2006 academia / Miscellaneous

Experimental philosophy is a recent philosophical movement. In spite of the name, its

proponents do not attempt to do philosophy by conducting experiments. Strictly speaking, they
don’t conduct experiments at all (at least in the literature I’ve read).

They conduct surveys, however, in which they ask for subjects’ opinions on a variety of
philosophically relevant subjects. Examples include whether certain actions are intentional or
which of two people a name refers to (e.g., assuming that the true discoverer of the
incompleteness of arithmetic was not named “Gödel,” does “Gödel” now refer to the person
who stole the theorem’s proof and who was named “Gödel” or to the proof’s true author?).
The results of these surveys may be used as data for theories of people’s concepts and
cognitive processes. They may also be used as data to test philosophical accounts of various
folk notions, such as reference and intentional actions. So far, this sounds like a careful
methodology for conceptual analysis (a traditional philosophical enterprise) or cognitive
science (an enterprise to which philosophers traditionally participate).

Some experimental philosophers draw stronger conclusions. They reject conceptual analysis.
For folk intuitions appear to be more variable and less stable than is often assumed. In other
words, different people have different folk notions, or they easily change them depending on
contextual factors. Hence, some experimental philosophers maintain, philosophers have little
business in offering conceptual analyses of folk notions and drawing philosophical
conclusions from them.

(Of course, there are philosophers who reached similar conclusions about the instability of
certain intuitions without conducting rigorous surveys (e.g., Peter Unger, in his book
Philosophical Relativity). But at the very least, it’s good to replace softer data with harder
ones. When it comes to folk intuitions, experimental philosophers’ data are harder than most
other philosophers’.)

Given all this, experimental philosophy is controversial, and for good reasons. I, for one, have
heard exaggerated claims about the consequences of their work. (For instance, by my friend
Edouard Machery when he gave a talk in Barcelona.)

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The rejection of conceptual analysis may be taken too far. Even if folk intuitions are unstable,
there is still room for analyzing concepts, provided that one is careful about what one is
analyzing and what follows from it.

A perfect example of an overly strong conclusion drawn from conceptual analysis is David
Chalmers’s dualism. Chalmers argues that phenomenal consciousness cannot be physical, and
an important premise in his arguments is that our folk notion of consciousness cannot be
analyzed in physical (or functional) terms. But at most, this argument shows a limitation of our
(current) folk notion. It doesn’t show anything about consciousness itself. If folk notions turn
out to be variable and unstable, it is all the more dangerous to draw strong metaphysical
conclusions from their analysis.

Nevertheless, experimental philosophy does not undermine more modest analytical projects.
In fact, the work of experimental philosophers may be used as a more sophisticated evidential
basis for certain kinds of conceptual analyses.

Whether or not you agree with any of the above, I hope this brief discussion shows that
experimental philosophy is interesting and valuable, and cannot be summarily dismissed.

But recently, experimental philosophy made it into a Slate article. You may want to forgive
the journalist for not capturing every wrinkle in the philosophical debate. But the article ticked
off David Velleman, who posted an unpleasant comment on Left2Right. Velleman wrote,
roughly speaking, that experimental philosophy is trivial, and it’s not even philosophy. Since
Velleman is a professional philosopher who should know better, you may want to be less
forgiving towards him.

Of course, experimental philosophers quickly responded with a comment posted on Leiter

Reports. Here are some other comments and links. In their response, experimental
philosophers point out that Velleman is not well informed on their work.

In a comment on the experimental philosophers’ response, Velleman seems to suggest that

experimental philosophers should find jobs outside philosophy departments. He writes:
“Should departments have slots for faculty in the sub-field of experimental philosophy?
Should we take time to train our graduate students in experimental design and statistics? As I
said in my post, I believe that philosophy needs to inform itself about empirical matters. It’s
less clear to me that the relevant empirical research should itself be considered philosophy or
should take up time and resources available to the discipline.”

This purism about what constitutes philosophy gives me the creeps. Does Velleman know how
to draw a principled line between philosophy and other disciplines? If so, he should let us
know. While we wait, I hope that other philosophers, of all people, will welcome those who
disrespect so-called disciplinary boundaries.

Ironically, in his original post Velleman mentions Aristotle as someone who (unlike
experimental philosophers, in his opinion) treated folk intuitions appropriately. But Aristotle
spent much of his time developing empirical theories of the natural world. By Velleman’s
standards, Aristotle shouldn’t seek employment in a philosophy department.

I quote the following invitation because I explicitly show how Analytic Philosophy is seeking
new applications, subject-matter and methods by being involved in X-PHI.

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Experimental Philosophy – The Brains Blog

philosophyofbrains.com/category/experimental-philosophy

Teorema invites submissions on all aspects of experimental philosophy. We will consider both
papers within the experimental philosophy movement as well as ...

Call for Papers, special issue of Discipline filosofiche

Philosophical Analysis and Experimental Philosophy

http://www.disciplinefilosofiche.it/?lang=en

Over the last decades, a renewed interest for metaphilosophical issues has prompted many
philosophers in the analytic tradition to ask questions on the epistemic status and the
methodology of philosophical inquiry. Reflection has focussed especially on the nature and
reliability of intuitions, on the notion of a priori and on the plausibility of the idea that
philosophical knowledge can be gained, as the phrase goes, from the armchair.

This attitude stems from various sources, such as the cognitive turn that has shaped a
consistent part of recent Anglophone philosophy, the revival of metaphysics encouraged by
Kripke’s rehabilitation of de re necessity, and the formulation of new accounts of analyticity
and a priori knowledge. In part, however, metaphilosophical issues have become so urgent for
today’s analytical philosophers as a result of the increasing attraction of so-called
‘experimental philosophy’.

Upholders of experimental philosophy are driven by the idea that philosophical inquiry cannot
afford to ignore the data gathered by empirical sciences. Considering the tendency to discount
empirical results to retreat into the domain of the a priori as a relatively recent development in
philosophical methodology, they advocate a return to an earlier idea of philosophy, conceived
as the study of the deepest questions raised by the human condition, a study necessarily open
to the contributions of various empirical disciplines, such as psychology, cognitive sciences,
social sciences and history.

In the last fifteen years or so, practitioners of experimental philosophy have thus collected
several sets of empirical data, from which they wish to draw significant consequences about
the plausibility of various philosophical views concerning, for instance, linguistic reference,
the nature of knowledge and issues in moral philosophy. Many of these philosophers believe
that empirical research can enhance our understanding of several important philosophical
notions and issues. But some are more radical: they argue that the results of empirical research
show that the traditional way of doing philosophy, with its reliance on counterfactual
reasoning and intuitions generated by mental experiments, is intrinsically unreliable. As one
would expect, this more radical position has sparked serious concern among practitioners of
traditional philosophical analysis. Thus, they have variously reacted to the challenge by
questioning the soundness of the methodology employed by experimental philosophers in
collecting their data, by denying that such empirical data can have any genuine bearing on
philosophical research, or by refining their own view of the nature of the intuitions employed
in conceptual and/or philosophical analysis.

The aim of this issue of Discipline filosofiche is to collect papers representing a wide range of
approaches and positions on the many issues raised by this clash of metaphilosophical
paradigms.

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The issue will host two opening contributions by two well-known exponents of the opposite
sides of the debate: Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University) and Jonathan Weinberg (University of
Arizona).

Submissions are invited on both the experimental side – promoting new ways of pursuing
philosophical inquiry – and the traditional side – defending classical philosophical analysis.
Papers may be theoretical or experimental in character, either discussing broad methodological
questions (the role of intuitions, the value of mental experiments, various conceptions of
naturalism, etc.) or elaborating on experimental studies concerning particular concepts. Papers
assessing the merits and limits of both attitudes, either in general or in specific research fields,
will be particularly welcome. Submissions will be considered in all the philosophical
disciplines or subdisciplines: epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and
cognitive sciences, philosophy of mathematics and mathematical cognition, reasoning and
philosophy of logic, ethics, aesthetics, etc.

Guest Contributors

Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University)

Jonathan Weinberg (University of Arizona)

Psychology and Experimental Philosophy – The Brains Blog

philosophyofbrains.com/2008/01/18/psychology-and-experimental-philosophy.aspx

Jan 18, 2008 - We also welcome critical discussions of experimental philosophy. ... What
should be the role of experimentation in philosophy, and in particular ...

CFP: Philosophical Analysis and Experimental ... - The Brains Blog

philosophyofbrains.com/.../cfp-philosophical-analysis-and-experimental-philosophy.a...

Jan 20, 2015 - Upholders of experimental philosophy are driven by the idea that ... They
should be prepared for anonymous refereeing and sent by email ..

I include the article as neuroscience, cognitive sciences is another field where philosophers
attempt to look for new subject-matter and methods. I have already dealt with this topic in a
previous article..

Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will : Nature News

www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html

Aug 31, 2011 - Scientists think they can prove that free will is an illusion. ... The experiment
helped to change John-Dylan Haynes's outlook on life. ... Philosophers aren't convinced that
brain scans can demolish free will so ..... Jamie @ blog.

Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will

Scientists think they can prove that free will is an illusion. Philosophers are urging them to
think again.

The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes's outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a
neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people
into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters 1. He told
them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge,
and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The

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experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real
time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.

"The first thought we had was 'we have to check if this is real'," says Haynes. "We came up
with more sanity checks than I've ever seen in any other study before."

The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but
the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many
as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems,
their brains had already decided.

As humans, we like to think that our decisions are under our conscious control — that we have
free will. Philosophers have debated that concept for centuries, and now Haynes and other
experimental neuroscientists are raising a new challenge. They argue that consciousness of a
decision may be a mere biochemical afterthought, with no influence whatsoever on a person's
actions. According to this logic, they say, free will is an illusion. "We feel we choose, but we
don't," says Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London.

You may have thought you decided whether to have tea or coffee this morning, for example,
but the decision may have been made long before you were aware of it. For Haynes, this is
unsettling. "I'll be very honest, I find it very difficult to deal with this," he says. "How can I
call a will 'mine' if I don't even know when it occurred and what it has decided to do?"

Thought experiments

Philosophers aren't convinced that brain scans can demolish free will so easily. Some have
questioned the neuroscientists' results and interpretations, arguing that the researchers have not
quite grasped the concept that they say they are debunking. Many more don't engage with
scientists at all. "Neuroscientists and philosophers talk past each other," says Walter Glannon,
a philosopher at the University of Calgary in Canada, who has interests in neuroscience, ethics
and free will.

There are some signs that this is beginning to change. This month, a raft of projects will get
under way as part of Big Questions in Free Will, a four-year, US$4.4-million programme
funded by the John Templeton Foundation in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, which
supports research bridging theology, philosophy and natural science. Some say that, with
refined experiments, neuroscience could help researchers to identify the physical processes
underlying conscious intention and to better understand the brain activity that precedes it. And
if unconscious brain activity could be found to predict decisions perfectly, the work really
could rattle the notion of free will. "It's possible that what are now correlations could at some
point become causal connections between brain mechanisms and behaviours," says Glannon.
"If that were the case, then it would threaten free will, on any definition by any philosopher."

Haynes wasn't the first neuroscientist to explore unconscious decision-making. In the 1980s,
Benjamin Libet, a neuropsychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, rigged up
study participants to an electroencephalogram (EEG) and asked them to watch a clock face
with a dot sweeping around it2. When the participants felt the urge to move a finger, they had
to note the dot's position. Libet recorded brain activity several hundred milliseconds before
people expressed their conscious intention to move.

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Libet's result was controversial. Critics said that the clock was distracting, and the report of a
conscious decision was too subjective. Neuroscience experiments usually have controllable
inputs — show someone a picture at a precise moment, and then look for reactions in the
brain. When the input is the participant's conscious intention to move, however, they
subjectively decide on its timing. Moreover, critics weren't convinced that the activity seen by
Libet before a conscious decision was sufficient to cause the decision — it could just have
been the brain gearing up to decide and then move.

Haynes's 2008 study1 modernized the earlier experiment: where Libet's EEG technique could
look at only a limited area of brain activity, Haynes's fMRI set-up could survey the whole
brain; and where Libet's participants decided simply on when to move, Haynes's test forced
them to decide between two alternatives. But critics still picked holes, pointing out that
Haynes and his team could predict a left or right button press with only 60% accuracy at best.
Although better than chance, this isn't enough to claim that you can see the brain making its
mind up before conscious awareness, argues Adina Roskies, a neuroscientist and philosopher
who works on free will at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Besides, "all it
suggests is that there are some physical factors that influence decision-making", which
shouldn't be surprising. Philosophers who know about the science, she adds, don't think this
sort of study is good evidence for the absence of free will, because the experiments are
caricatures of decision-making. Even the seemingly simple decision of whether to have tea or
coffee is more complex than deciding whether to push a button with one hand or the other.

Haynes stands by his interpretation, and has replicated and refined his results in two studies.
One uses more accurate scanning techniques3 to confirm the roles of the brain regions
implicated in his previous work. In the other, which is yet to be published, Haynes and his
team asked subjects to add or subtract two numbers from a series being presented on a screen.
Deciding whether to add or subtract reflects a more complex intention than that of whether to
push a button, and Haynes argues that it is a more realistic model for everyday decisions. Even
in this more abstract task, the researchers detected activity up to four seconds before the
subjects were conscious of deciding, Haynes says.

Some researchers have literally gone deeper into the brain. One of those is Itzhak Fried, a
neuroscientist and surgeon at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Tel Aviv
Medical Center in Israel. He studied individuals with electrodes implanted in their brains as
part of a surgical procedure to treat epilepsy4. Recording from single neurons in this way gives
scientists a much more precise picture of brain activity than fMRI or EEG. Fried's experiments
showed that there was activity in individual neurons of particular brain areas about a second
and a half before the subject made a conscious decision to press a button. With about 700
milliseconds to go, the researchers could predict the timing of that decision with more than
80% accuracy. "At some point, things that are predetermined are admitted into consciousness,"
says Fried. The conscious will might be added on to a decision at a later stage, he suggests.

Material gains

Philosophers question the assumptions underlying such interpretations. "Part of what's driving
some of these conclusions is the thought that free will has to be spiritual or involve souls or
something," says Al Mele, a philosopher at Florida State University in Tallahassee. If
neuroscientists find unconscious neural activity that drives decision-making, the troublesome
concept of mind as separate from body disappears, as does free will. This 'dualist' conception
of free will is an easy target for neuroscientists to knock down, says Glannon. "Neatly dividing
mind and brain makes it easier for neuroscientists to drive a wedge between them," he adds.

The trouble is, most current philosophers don't think about free will like that, says Mele. Many
are materialists — believing that everything has a physical basis, and decisions and actions

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come from brain activity. So scientists are weighing in on a notion that philosophers consider
irrelevant.

Nowadays, says Mele, the majority of philosophers are comfortable with the idea that people
can make rational decisions in a deterministic universe. They debate the interplay between
freedom and determinism — the theory that everything is predestined, either by fate or by
physical laws — but Roskies says that results from neuroscience can't yet settle that debate.
They may speak to the predictability of actions, but not to the issue of determinism.

Neuroscientists also sometimes have misconceptions about their own field, says Michael
Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In particular,
scientists tend to see preparatory brain activity as proceeding stepwise, one bit at a time, to a
final decision. He suggests that researchers should instead think of processes working in
parallel, in a complex network with interactions happening continually. The time at which one
becomes aware of a decision is thus not as important as some have thought.

Battle of wills

There are conceptual issues — and then there is semantics. "What would really help is if
scientists and philosophers could come to an agreement on what free will means," says
Glannon. Even within philosophy, definitions of free will don't always match up. Some
philosophers define it as the ability to make rational decisions in the absence of coercion.
Some definitions place it in cosmic context: at the moment of decision, given everything that's
happened in the past, it is possible to reach a different decision. Others stick to the idea that a
non-physical 'soul' is directing decisions.

Neuroscience could contribute directly to tidying up definitions, or adding an empirical

dimension to them. It might lead to a deeper, better understanding of what freely willing
something involves, or refine views of what conscious intention is, says Roskies.

Mele is directing the Templeton Foundation project that is beginning to bring philosophers and
neuroscientists together. "I think if we do a new generation of studies with better design, we'll
get better evidence about what goes on in the brain when people make decisions," he says.
Some informal meetings have already begun. Roskies, who is funded through the programme,
plans to spend time this year in the lab of Michael Shadlen, a neurophysiologist at the
University of Washington in Seattle who works on decision-making in the primate brain.
"We're going to hammer on each other until we really understand the other person's point of
view, and convince one or other of us that we're wrong," she says.

Haggard has Templeton funding for a project in which he aims to provide a way to objectively
determine the timing of conscious decisions and actions, rather than rely on subjective reports.
His team plans to devise an experimental set-up in which people play a competitive game
against a computer while their brain activity is decoded.

Another project, run by Christof Koch, a bioengineer at the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena, will use techniques similar to Fried's to examine the responses of individual
neurons when people use reason to make decisions. His team hopes to measure how much
weight people give to different bits of information when they decide.

Philosophers are willing to admit that neuroscience could one day trouble the concept of free
will. Imagine a situation (philosophers like to do this) in which researchers could always
predict what someone would decide from their brain activity, before the subject became aware

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of their decision. "If that turned out to be true, that would be a threat to free will," says Mele.
Still, even those who have perhaps prematurely proclaimed the death of free will agree that
such results would have to be replicated on many different levels of decision-making. Pressing
a button or playing a game is far removed from making a cup of tea, running for president or
committing a crime.

The practical effects of demolishing free will are hard to predict. Biological determinism
doesn't hold up as a defence in law. Legal scholars aren't ready to ditch the principle of
personal responsibility. "The law has to be based on the idea that people are responsible for
their actions, except in exceptional circumstances," says Nicholas Mackintosh, director of a
project on neuroscience and the law run by the Royal Society in London.

Owen Jones, a law professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who directs a
similar project funded by the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, Illinois, suggests that the
research could help to identify an individual's level of responsibility. "What we are interested
in is how neuroscience can give us a more granulated view of how people vary in their ability
to control their behaviour," says Jones. That could affect the severity of a sentence, for
example.

The answers could also end up influencing people's behaviour. In 2008, Kathleen Vohs, a
social psychologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and her colleague Jonathan
Schooler, a psychologist now at the University of California, Santa Barbara, published a study5
on how people behave when they are prompted to think that determinism is true. They asked
their subjects to read one of two passages: one suggesting that behaviour boils down to
environmental or genetic factors not under personal control; the other neutral about what
influences behaviour. The participants then did a few maths problems on a computer. But just
before the test started, they were informed that because of a glitch in the computer it
occasionally displayed the answer by accident; if this happened, they were to click it away
without looking. Those who had read the deterministic message were more likely to cheat on
the test. "Perhaps, denying free will simply provides the ultimate excuse to behave as one
likes," Vohs and Schooler suggested.

Haynes's research and its possible implications have certainly had an effect on how he thinks.
He remembers being on a plane on his way to a conference and having an epiphany.
"Suddenly I had this big vision about the whole deterministic universe, myself, my place in it
and all these different points where we believe we're making decisions just reflecting some
causal flow." But he couldn't maintain this image of a world without free will for long. "As
soon as you start interpreting people's behaviours in your day-to-day life, it's virtually
impossible to keep hold of," he say

Fried, too, finds it impossible to keep determinism at the top of his mind. "I don't think about it
every day. I certainly don't think about it when I operate on the human brain."

Mele is hopeful that other philosophers will become better acquainted with the science of
conscious intention. And where philosophy is concerned, he says, scientists would do well to
soften their stance. "It's not as though the task of neuroscientists who work on free will has to
be to show there isn't any."

Kerri Smith is editor of the Nature Podcast, and is based in London.

 References
1. Soon, C. S., Brass, M., Heinze, H.-J. & Haynes, J.-D. Nature Neurosci. 11,
543-545 (2008). | Article |

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2. Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W. & Pearl, D. K. Brain 106, 623-642
(1983). | Article | PubMed | ISI |
3. Bode, S. et al. PLoS ONE 6, e21612 (2011). | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |
4. Fried, I., Mukamel, R. & Kreiman, G. Neuron 69, 548-562
(2011). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |
5. Vohs, K. D. & Schooler, J. W. Psychol. Sci. 19, 49-54
(2008). | Article | PubMed |

Experimental Philosophy - Philosophy Commons - Typepad

philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/

by T Nadelhoffer - 2016

Experimental Philosophy. ... What underlies the conviction that personal autonomy should be
protected even at substantial costs to one's health? Perhaps, we ...

Help! - Experimental Philosophy - Philosophy Commons - Typepad

philosophycommons.typepad.com/.../so-how-do-we-move-forward-as-a-once-thrivin...

2 days ago - Second, I wanted to thank all of the readers who come to this blog ... My hope is
that the current and next generation of experimental philosophers will want ... most successful
philosophy blogs on the web: (a) The Brains Blog, ...

Experimental Philosophy: Conferences - Philosophy Commons

philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/conferences/

Jul 5, 2016 - CFP: Buffalo Annual Experimental Philosophy Conference 2016 ... Submissions
should be sent via email to rkelly2@buffalo.edu no later than June 1, ... The online conference
this month at the Brains blog is up and running.

Benjamin Libet's Experiments on Free Will | Philosophy 1100H Blog

https://u.osu.edu/group5/2014/12/06/benjamin-libets-experiments-on-free-will/

Dec 6, 2014 - Philosophy 1100H Blog ... Benjamin Libet's Experiments on Free Will ...
Following data collection, Libet compared the timing of brain activity ...

Affiliate Blogs

 Discrimination & Disadvantage

 Experimental Philosophy
 Flickers of Freedom
 Philosophy Commons

Knobe's X-Phi Page

 Experimental Philosophy

X-Phi Grad Programs

 MA and PhD Wiki

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X-Phi Groups & Labs

 Behavioral Ethics Lab

 Bristol University X-Phi
 Experimental Ethics Lab
 MERG
 MU X-Phi Lab
 Philosophical Science Lab
 Porto X-Phi Lab
 UI PoP Lab
 UA X-Phi Lab
 X-Epistemology Lab
 X-Phi and Psychology
 X-Phi Group UK
 X-Phi Society (XPS)

http://experimental-philosophy.yale.edu/ExperimentalPhilosophy.html

About Experimental Philosophy

Welcome to the experimental philosophy page. Experimental philosophy, called x-phi for
short, is a new philosophical movement that supplements the traditional tools of analytic
philosophy with the scientific methods of cognitive science. So experimental philosophers
actually go out and run systematic experiments aimed at understanding how people ordinarily
think about the issues at the foundations of philosophical discussions.

If you are you looking for a brief overview of experimental philosophy, you could try reading
the New York Times article.

 X-Phi of Action
 X-Phi of Language
 X-Phi of Mind
 X-Phi of Ethics
 X-Phi of Epistemology
 X-Phi of Metaphysics
 Foundations of X-Phi
 Misc. X-Phi
 X-Phi Replications

http://philwiki.net/x-phi/index.php/Main_Page

 1 How to Contribute
 2 Standards, Practices, and Guidelines
 3 Ph.D. Programs (Australasia)
o 3.1 Australian National University
o 3.2 Monash University
o 3.3 Victoria University of Wellington
o 3.4 University of Waikato
 4 Ph.D. Programs (Canada)

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o 4.1 University of Toronto

o 4.2 University of Waterloo
 5 Ph.D. Programs (Europe)
o 5.1 Institut Jean Nicod
o 5.2 Umeå University
o 5.3 University of Groningen
o 5.4 VU University Amsterdam
 6 Ph.D. Programs (United Kingdom)
o 6.1 Cardiff University
o 6.2 King's College London
o 6.3 University College London
o 6.4 University of Cambridge
o 6.5 University of Edinburgh
o 6.6 University of Leeds
o 6.7 University of Oxford
o 6.8 University of Reading
 7 Ph.D. Programs (United States)
o 7.1 Arizona State University
o 7.2 Binghamton University, State University of New York
o 7.3 Carnegie Mellon University
o 7.4 City University of New York
o 7.5 Cornell University
o 7.6 Duke University
o 7.7 Florida State University
o 7.8 Georgetown University
o 7.9 Harvard University
o 7.10 Johns Hopkins University
o 7.11 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
o 7.12 Michigan Tech
o 7.13 New York University
o 7.14 Princeton University
o 7.15 Rutgers University, New Brunswick
o 7.16 State University of New York, Buffalo
o 7.17 University of Arizona
o 7.18 University of California, Berkeley
o 7.19 University of California, Riverside
o 7.20 University of Connecticut
o 7.21 University of Illinois (U-C)
o 7.22 University of Miami
o 7.23 University of Michigan
o 7.24 University of Minnesota
o 7.25 University of Missouri
o 7.26 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
o 7.27 University of Oregon
o 7.28 University of Pennsylvania
o 7.29 University of Pittsburgh, History and Philosophy of Science
o 7.30 University of Utah
o 7.31 Yale University
o 7.32 Washington University, St. Louis
 8 M.A. Programs
o 8.1 Georgia State University
o 8.2 Western Michigan University
 9 Institutions without Graduate Programs
o 9.1 California State University, Fullerton
o 9.2 College of Charleston
o 9.3 Lawrence University

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o 9.4 St. John's University

o 9.5 University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown
o 9.6 University of Puget Sound
o 9.7 Utah Valley University
o 9.8 Vassar College
 10 Notes
 11 Wiki Editing Resources

The above are information about X-Phi but I decided include information about other
aspects of philosophy as well while I include these listings.

http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/thomasnadelhoffer/

Affiliate Blogs

 Discrimination & Disadvantage

 Experimental Philosophy
 Flickers of Freedom
 Philosophy Commons

Why Study Philosophy?

 Be Employable, Study Philosophy (Salon)

 Bloomberg: More Philosophy, Please
 Bloomberg: Philosophy is Back in Business
 GRE/LSAT Scores by Major
 NYT: Beat the Market, Hire a Philosopher
 NYT: Making College Relevant
 NYT: Opting for the Examined Life
 NYT: Philosophy Pays Off
 The Guardian: I Think, Therefore I Earn
 US News & World Report: Learn Philosophy
 What Philosophy Can Do For You!
 Why Major in Philosophy? (UNC Chapel Hill)
 WSJ Salary Chart by Major
 WSJ: Best and Worst Jobs

Philosophy Links

 APA Committee on the Status of Women

 APA LGBT Newsletter
 AskPhilosophers.org
 Implicit Bias & Philosophy Project
 Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
 New Philosopher Magazine
 PhilEvents
 PhilJobs
 Philosophical Journals on the Web (MacFarlane)
 Philosophical Lexicon
 Philosophy News
 Philosophy of Action

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 Philosophy Walk
 PhilPapers
 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
 The Philosophers' Magazine
 The Philosophical Gourmet Report
 What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?
 Women of Philosophy

Philosophical Societies

 Academics Stand Against Poverty

 American Philosophical Practitioners Association
 Experimental Philosophy Society (XPS)
 International Neuroethics Society
 Minorities and Philosophy
 Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
 Society for Philosophy and Disability
 Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP)
 Society for Philosophy of Agency
 Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy
 Society of Young Black Philosophers
 Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology
 The American Philosophical Association
 The Society for Women in Philosophy
 The UK Society for Women in Philosophy

Centers & Institutes

 Centre for Computing in Philosophy

 Harvard Radcliffe Institute
 Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics
 National Humanities Center
 Princeton Center for Human Values
 PUCRS Brain Institute
 The Oxford Centre for Neuroethics
 U Penn Center for Neuroscience and Society

07/04/2013

Welcome to Philosophy Commons!

Greetings! I have designed Philosophy Commons to serve as a central hub for the following
online projects:

1. Flickers of Freedom--a blog dedicated to the philosophy of agency and responsibility

(relocated in 2013). For the past two years, the blog has had a on-going Featured Author
series (see here)--which highlights cutting edge work being done by junior and senior
philosophers, psychologists, and legal theorists.
2. Experimental Philosophy--a blog dedicated to interdisciplinary work in philosophy,
psychology, biology, economics, and other fields (relocated in 2013). Started back in

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2004, the X-Phi blog is one of the oldest philosophy blogs. It currently has 60+
contributors with interests in philosophy, psychology, and related fields.
3. Discrimination and Disadvantage--a blog dedicated to philosophical reflection on
various kinds of disadvantage (e.g., discrimination based on racism, classism, sexism,
hetero-sexism, ableism, and the intersectionality of these and related phenomena) as
well as discussion of such disadvantage within the philosophical community. I am
coordinating the blog along with Kevin Timpe (who was the inspiration).
4. Philosophical Exchanges (coming soon!)--a new online, open-access, philosophy
journal (with a blog format). I am putting together an editorial board now. The goal is
to start working in earnest on setting up the platform for the blog during 2015 with the
goal of an official launch in early 2016!
5. The Online Philosophy Conferences: OPC1 (2005) and OPC 2 (2006). These two online
conferences were early test runs for the kind of online journal I am hoping to create in
Philosophical Exchanges (see above).
6. Justica: Desafios Teoricos e Institucionais (coming soon)--a blog dedicated to justice
that will be developed and run by Daniela Goya-Tochetto. The goal is for the blog to
be a dual language blog (with both Portuguese and English).
7. I also run a personal blog about one of my obsessions--namely, the grappling arts. The
blog is called The Grumpy Grappler. People who have a interest in martial arts more
generally might find the posts to be of interest from time time!
8. Plus, some additional projects I am kicking around with collaborators! So, stay tuned!

The overarching goal of Philosophy Commons is to help connect people around the world who
have common philosophical interests. Hopefully, we can collectively make philosophy more
democratic, more widely accessible, and even more relevant to our daily lives! Given the
precarious state of the world, we would all certainly benefit from a little more philosophical
reflection and dialogue! I humbly hope this site can do some small part in nudging readers in
the right direction.

Open Access

 OA at Max Planck Society

 Tomkow on OA Philosophy
 Andrew Cullison on OA
 OA Philosophy Journals
 Budapest OA Initiative
 Creative Commons

Blogs

 Bioethics Forum
 BrainEthics
 Brains
 Certain Doubts
 Daily Nous
 Error Statistics Philosophy
 Ethics Etc
 Feminist History of Philosophy
 Feminist Philosophers
 Filosofia Experimental
 Fragments of Consciousness
 Gender, Race & Philosophy

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 Gender, Race and Philosophy

 Law & Neuroscience Blog
 Leiter Reports
 Legal Philosophy Blog
 Nietzsche Blog
 Lemmings
 Machines Like Us
 Moral Responsibility Blog
 Neuroanthropology
 Neuroethics & Law Blog
 Neuroethics at the Core
 Neurophilosophy
 On the Human
 Overcoming Bias
 PEA Soup
 Philosophical Weblogs
 Philosophy and Bioethics
 Philosophy of Memory
 Philosophy, Etc.
 Philosop-her
 Sprachlogik
 The Brooks Blog
 The Neurocritic
 The Splintered Mind
 Thoughts Arguments & Rants
 Vihvelin.com

http://tomkow.typepad.com/tomkowcom/2008/06/open-resource-p.html

http://tomkow.typepad.com/tomkowcom/2008/06/open-resource-p.html#mo

Open Access Philosophy

Why are there still hard copy philosophical journals and books? Why is so much on-line philosophy hidden behind
subscription walls? Why are universities, students and researchers being forced to pay for access to information
authors would happily give away for free?

Who disagrees with this:

The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and
cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive
representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access.

Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is not made widely and readily
available to society. New possibilities of knowledge dissemination not only through the classical form but also and

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increasingly through the open access paradigm via the Internet have to be supported. We define open access as a
comprehensive source of human knowledge and cultural heritage that has been approved by the scientific
community.

In order to realize the vision of a global and accessible representation of knowledge, the future Web has to be
sustainable, interactive, and transparent. Content and software tools must be openly accessible and compatible.

Berlin Declaration on open access Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

Shouldn't philosophers be especially sensitive to the moral and intellectual imperatives of the open access
movement? Why is it that scientists have been so much more ready to embrace it than philosophers?

When I put this question to professional philosophers I hear two different kinds of arguments. One foolish and one
cynical.

The foolish argument goes like this: "

"I know that the stuff published in the journals is selected by the editors because it’s good. How will I know what's
good without the journals? And if I can't tell who's writing good stuff how will I know who should be promoted,
hired or tenured?"

The obvious answer is that the journals are only as good as they may be because of the judgment of their
philosophical editors and reviewers and those people will not go away just because the hard-copy journals
do. Those editors can publish on-line journals, or best-of lists or run contests or simply offer personal
recommendations. There are many many different ways to do open access peer review and almost all of them are
better than what we have now.

But I think this foolish objection really conceals a more cynical worry.

"Artificial and cumbersome though it may be, the economics of hard-copy publication is ultimately the only external
discipline on the profession's standards. Without the objective constraints imposed by the textbook and library
marketplace, the profession would never manage to achieve any sort of consensus about what was better than what;
standards would collapse. "

The cynical worry may not be wrong. But if it’s right it is an issue the profession should and must
address. Academic publishing is doomed. If the end of hard-copy journals means the end of professional standards
then the discipline is doomed too.

It seems to me that the transition to open source could come swiftly and relatively smoothly.

What's needed is a sort of academic version of the eSign Act. eSign said that courts cannot treat a contract or
signature as invalid just because it is in electronic form. At a stroke, congress made an eContract as good as a paper
one.

What we need is for professional philosophers to declare that they are going to stop ranking philosophical quality by
counting trees killed.

If significant numbers of philosophers, starting with luminaries and full professors, publicly committed to something
like the following, the transition to open access could happen virtually over night.

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The Open Philosophy Pledge

1. I will make my academic writings available for viewing without charge on my personal
website. I will do so before, or at least at the same time as, I (would) submit them to hard-
copy journals.
2. I will not submit my academic writings to journals whose policies prevent me from
continuing to make them available, free of charge, on my own web site .
3. I will endeavor to make copies of all my previously published academic writings freely
available for on-line viewing. I will encourage journals in which my work has appeared
to make their archives of past issues open for general viewing without charge.
4. When I am asked to judge the quality of scholarly work for any purpose, including hiring, Opinion Polls
promotion and tenure, I will not assume that fee-charging publication is always superior & Market
to open access publication. Research
5. I will encourage and participate in the evolution of new practices and mechanisms for
objective peer review and evaluation in an open access environment.
6. The format of academic books and journal articles is, in part, a function of the
requirements of hard copy publication. On-line publication will make possible new forms
and structures of expression. Realizing this, I will not assume that excellent work must
take traditional forms.
7. I will encourage my colleagues and my department as a whole to take this pledge. I will
endeavor to have the standards proposed by this pledge explicitly incorporated into my
department’s and my institution’s policies on hiring, promotion, tenure, and merit.

http://mind.ucsd.edu/commercialfree/why-im-CF.html

Why I have decided to go completely commercial free

Briefly, the business model on which commercial publishing is based is not only grotesquely outdated, but it is
contributing directly to some serious social evils. And so it now strikes me that continuing to support commercial
publishing, is, frankly, unethical.There was a time when the dissemination of scholarly work required the help of
publishers, and so it made sense for academics to transfer various rights to these businesses, and to pay for their
services. Now, though, the ability to disseminate research is ubiquitous and free. Ironically, most publishers now
work hard to RESTRICT access to the work of philosophers, to those who can pay for it. This may not seem like a
problem to professional philosophers at wealthy universities. But it is a problem for students, and for anyone not
fortunate enough to be in the financially elite class.

But students and teachers at thousands of colleges and universities around the world either cannot afford the prices
that commercial publishers charge for our work, or they can afford them, but the cost for them is significant --
working extra hours for college students, paying out of pocket for a little access. For example, Ryan Heavy Head,
who teaches at a small American Indian reservation college in Canada:

I am the acting director of an academic program called "Kainai Studies" - a series of courses with various degrees of
hybridity between Western and Blackfoot knowledge systems. Anyway, being situated in a small tribal college in
Southern Alberta, I am intimately familiar with the kinds of problems you've described. Here in Canada, a great
deal of federal research funding is currently being funnelled toward research controlled and authored by First
Nations thinkers (be they degreed or not). Given our national multicultural policy, the government is hoping to
locate bridges to discourse between Western and Indigenous theoretical paradigms. Unfortunately, for those of us at
ground-zero in these movements, the resources that would make such conversations potentially possible - i.e. access
to a wide variety of Western scholarship - are not there. Our library is tiny, and although my students have access to
some electronic journal databases (via subscriptions that I pay from my pocket), we don't have nearly the resources

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as someone situated at a decent university. The technology is there to change these kinds of circumstances. I just
wanted to thank you for reminding our colleagues of this issue.

In literally thousands of colleges and universities, in third world or developing countries, and less than wealthy ones
in North America, students simply do not have access to top research in the field, or they must pay for it themselves,
out of their own underpaid pockets. To put the point in deep relief with a specific example, each article included in a
college course reader for which royalty fees must be assessed translates directly into the budget of students,
including working students, single parent students, and anyone else. Some of these individual articles, in Sythese or
other venues, may EACH translate directly into an extra three or four hours of work at a minimum wage job. Ten or
fifteen such articles in a reader for a class taken by a struggling college student can easily make the difference
between finishing college and having to drop out, or between being able to spend time with their child and having to
work overtime instead. (As an aside, I should make clear that my remarks here are intended primarily to apply to
published original research. The situation with textbooks and instructional materials is analogous in many ways, but
disanalogous in others. I am not sure at this point what to think, though clearly the current situation stands in need of
improvement.)

It is easy for those of us who are at a privileged institution and no longer students ourselves to be blind to the
problems. We are given access for free -- free to us, though the institution itself must pay, money supplied in turn by
taxpayers or student fees. But so long as the wealthy academics who produce the product continue to supply this
product to the commercial interests, the academic class society will persists.

Ever wonder why so many of the top philosophy jobs go to philosophy PhD students from wealthy US Universities?
There are many reasons, to be sure, but one is that even the best aspiring philosophers from non-wealthy countries
are simply denied access to the content that the would need to have ubiquitous access to in order to get their own
philosophical skills up to the standards that are expected. As a PhD student in Eastern Europe pointed out to me:

Although I am doing my PHD at one of the best institutions in Europe, I still find it rather difficult to get access to
articles and books I really need for writing my thesis. I could get some necessary literature with the help of Doctoral
Support Research Grant, but the problem is still present. I just dont see the point of paying 30 USD for an article.
The situation with books is even more depressive, their prices make them rather luxury goods.

For these and many other reasons, I can no longer in good conscience support this system or business model, and so
as of January 1, 2008, I have decided to stop. (Actually, the decision to stop was made about 18-24 months prior, but
it took a while for my prior commitments to work their way through the pipeline.) I no longer give any work or
research I have produced to any commercial interest, nor do I support them by refereeing, serving on editorial
boards, or anything else of the sort.

Our system is one that rightfully places importance on the production of good research, and unfortunately publishing
in certain journals or with certain presses is taken to be the main indicator of research productivity. Hence the
system survives. Someone without a job or without tenure simply can't afford to avoid playing the game. However,
many of us are quite secure professionally, and don't take any professional risk by publishing in The Philosophers
Imprint (free to anyone in the world) as opposed to Phil Review or Synthese (free to those are privileged
universities, everyone else must pay).

The only exception I make is the venue of publication on pieces I co-author with collaborators whose professional
position is insecure, students or untenured faculty. Since their professional position is decided by mechanisms that
fetishize 'top' journals, all of which are commercial, I have to make this exception in order to not put those people at
risk. Though my hope is that one day the system will change.

There are now some resources that are non-commercial -- venues that do a better job of disseminating research, and
don't place anyone at a disadvantage in the process. The Philosophers Imprint, the Notre Dame Philosophical
Reviews, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are a few prominent examples (more can be found on the
Resources page). If more of those of us who are leaders in our fields, and whose professional positions are not at
risk, support these venues -- by reading them, publishing our best work in them, and so forth -- then we have a

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chance to raise their perceived standing in the field, increase the number of such venues, and perhaps one day
completely remove ourselves from the exploitative commercial enterprises with which we have become entwined.

Advantages of publishing in open access venues, other than social responsibility

There are many benefits to publishing in open access venues, aside from the social benefits of helping those
excluded by the current system. First, authors retain copyright to their work. No more asking someone else for
permission to use one of your own diagrams in a future publication, for example. Second, the work is more widely
available. The internet reaches almost everyone, and in an open access venue, the usual mechanisms of preventing
anyone but the wealthy from reading your work are removed. In addition, because the full content is available, it is
retrieved by interested parties doing an appropriate internet search. If you've written on topic X, and someone in
Romania is interested on X and does a google search, your work can come up and they can begin reading it
immediately. Even for those of us at rich universities, this is better than the current system. Even if we have access,
the content is usually not searchable, and even if we can get content, it is often only after navigating some set of
portals and special websites.

Other potential benefits derive from the fact that venues not tied to print publication have freedoms that other venues
do not. Of course, 'open access' need not mean that the content is not available in print form, and commercial access
need not mean that the content is not available electronically. But it remains true that commercial publications'
online content is a reflection of, and hence largely must conform to the constraints of, the printed medium. Open
access venues need not (though those that choose to have printed distribution might) have these limitations. What
are they? Color images and graphics. Easy to produce in electronic documents, difficult and expensive in
print. Multimedia. Impossible in print, easy in electronic.

But more importantly, the tether to print distribution creates artificial constraints on the form of academic
expression. A journal article must be of a certain size in order to allow for a certain number of them to appear in a
physical print object that is roughly journal sized. Hence the ubiquitous word-count constraints (minima as well as
maxima) that are imposed on academic work independent of what the nature of the topic and project itself
recommends in the judgment of the one who produces it. In an electronic distribution format these artificial
limitations are removed, and academic expression and research can take the form, including length, that the author
feels appropriate for the project at hand.

If I have managed to convince you that open-access publishing is worth supporting, please take a look at the What
you can do page.

What can you do?

A few of the web discussions have contained something like good-faith pledges for anyone who is interested in
supporting the open access movement. See, for example, the Open Philosophy Pledge. I am on board with the bulk
of this, but it seems to me to confuse a few issues (for example, what is important is not something being online, but
it's being open access. Open access materials can also be published in hard copy format, and closed-access can be
published online).

In any case in order to help spread awareness of the issue, I have decided to create a couple of little logos,
representing one's level of commitment to the ideal of supporting the open access movement in philosophy. If you
feel as I do, then I encourage you to adopt one of these and, for instance, display it on your own web page, include it
on the sig. file of your emails, and maybe even have it displayed on the bottom of the title page of any powerpoint
presentations you give. Whatever you deem appropriate. The two logos are "I support commercial free philosophy",
and "I am a commercial free philosopher". To support commercial free philosophy is more or less along the lines of
the Open Philosophy Pledge referenced above. In displaying this logo, you are communicating your commitment to:

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i) support open access publication by submitting some of your best work to open access venues -- only by getting a
good selection of top research will open access venues become increasingly accepted as viable alternatives to
commercial venues.

ii) support open access publication by diligently checking the current contents of open access journals -- if it is
known that most philosophers will actually see the TOC of open access journals, this will encourage more people to
submit their best work to those venues. I plan, in the near future, to create a mailing list to which anyone can
subscribe, that will distribute the new articles and contributions published in the relevant open-access venues once a
month, so that all you will need to be done is to skim through one fairly brief email once a month to see if anything
relevant to your own work has been published.

iii) support open access publication by citing and using articles published in open access venues where possible, as
opposed to, or in addition to, those published in commercial venues. For example, if an entry in the Stanford
Encyclopedia is as suitable for some classroom or seminar purpose as a similar entry in a commercial encyclopedia,
then put the open access entry on the syllabus rather than the commercial entry.

iv) support open access publication by taking material published in open access venues seriously when making
tenure and hiring decisions, and so forth. That is, don't simply assume a standard correlation between quality of
work and the current prestige of the venue, but, for work published in open access venues, read that piece carefully
and make an independent assessment (this is better in any case), or if the material is not in your field, ask a
colleague who does know that field to read it carefully and give you an honest independent assessment.

If you are a bit more hard core and radical, then you might consider following me in being commercial free. For me,
this means that, as of January 1, 2008, I no longer publish any of my own single authored work in any non-open-
access venue, nor do I support such venues by volunteering my time and resources to them (e.g. refereeing). Doing
so now strikes me as supporting a deeply unethical economic-based class structure in philosophy, and I for one can
no longer participate in that in good faith (it strikes me as analogous in many ways to continuing to play gold at a
whites-only country club). It's not easy, though, since right now there are only a few top-shelf open access
publishing venues for articles, and none for books, in philosophy (though I am putting some thought into doing
something about the latter problem). So it's not going to be easy for me. I am feeling the pinch in several ways. But
as I am one of the fortunate ones who has tenure and has achieved some degree of professional success, while I am
undertaking a lot of cost and inconvenience by vowing to be commercial free, I am not undertaking any significant
career risk. My hope is that at least a few, and hopefully eventually many, philosophers who are in a similar position
will move from supporting commercial free philosophy to being commercial free philosophers. (And n.b., it will
take anyone at least a year, perhaps longer, to do this -- if you are like me, you have a long list of prior commitments
that have to get through the pipeline before you can shed commercial interests). If you are willing to go as hog-wild
as me, then please take and display the "I am a commercial-free philosopher" logo, and in using it you will be
communicating your commtment to do (i)-(iv) above, and in addition:

v) not publish any of your original research in any non-open access venue. (Of course, co-authored work with
people who are not professionally secure is a well-motivated exception to this commitment.)

vi) stop contributing to the commercial publication model (and its associated social evils) by giving it the resources
of your time and expertise -- via refereeing, editing volumes, serving on editorial boards, and so forth.

Also, as part of the more complete version of this website I hope to soon put up, I will include a list of those people
who have decided to either support commercial free philosophy, and who will join me in being commercial free
philosophers. Please send me an email (rick@mind.ucsd.edu) and let me know if I can add your name to the "I
support commercial free philosophy" list, or the "I am a commercial free philosopher" list. Your name and
institutional affiliation is all that will appear.

Rick Grush (rick@mind.ucsd.edu)

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PS. Here are some emblems/logos you can use if you'd like to show your support for Commercial-Free Philosophy,
three sizes, in black on white and white on black -- just right-click (windows), or control-click (mac) to download
and save, and add to your email sig, web site, or whatever. Hopefully they will get people to take a look at this
website, and soon this site should be more than just my own rants, but actually a good resource for various open-
access discussion, venues, and so forth. General awareness raising stuff:

http://www.andrewcullison.com/2009/09/open-access-philosophy-and-self-publishing-books/

http://www.youngphilosophers.org/

http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philosophy-without-intuitions-9780199644865?cc=us&lang=en&

Philosophy without Intuitions

Herman Cappelen

 An incisive and controversial exploration of the role of intuition in philosophy

 Offers a fresh view of how philosophy works
 Will galvanize debate about philosophical method
 Throws down a challenge to the growing "experimental philosophy" movement

Preface and Acknowledgements

1. Intuitions in Philosophy: overview and taxonomy
Part I: The Argument from 'Intuition'-Talk
Introduction to part I
2. 'Intuitive', 'intuitively', 'intuition', and 'seem' in English
3. Philosophers' use of 'intuitive' (I): A defective practice?
4. Philosophers' use of 'intuitive' (II): Some strategies for charitable interpretation
5. Philosophers' use of 'intuitive' (III): Against the explaining away of intuitions
Part II: The Argument from Philosophical Practice
Introduction to part II
6. Centrality and Philosophical Practice
7. Diagnostics for intuitiveness
8. Case studies: Ten philosophical thought experiments
9. Lessons Learned, replies to objections, and comparison to Williamson
10. Conceptual analysis and intuition
11. A big mistake: Experimental philosophy

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Bibliography
Index

http://www.re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf

Contents
1
Towards a Speculative Philosophy
What will happen to the tradition formerly known as continental philosophy? This exciting new anthology sketches
an answer by bringing together the most prominent established and emerging authors in the field, all of them taking
a more speculative turn than was found in the textually oriented continental philosophies of the past. The diverse
positions outlined in this book include such old and new approaches as transcendental materialism, speculative
realism, actor-network theory, object-oriented philosophy, non-philosophy, cosmopolitics, eliminative materialism,
and even new-wave deconstruction. The book also has a highly international flavour, with its 19 authors hailing
from 12 different countries on 5 continents.
It has long been commonplace within continental philosophy to focus on discourse,
text, culture, consciousness, power, or ideas as what constitutes reality..
Humanity remains at the centre of these
works, and reality appears in philosophy only as the correlate of human thought. In
this respect phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and
postmodernism have all been perfect exemplars of the anti-realist trend in continental
philosophy. Without deriding the significant contributions of these philosophies, some-
thing is clearly amiss in these trends. In the face of the looming ecological catastrophe,
and the increasing infiltration of technology into the everyday world (including our
own bodies), it is not clear that the anti-realist position is equipped to face up to these
developments. The danger is that the dominant anti-realist strain of continental philos-
ophy has not only reached a point of decreasing returns, but that it now actively limits
the capacities of philosophy in our time.
Yet in the works of what we describe as ‘The Speculative Turn’, one can detect the
hints of something new… the new breed of thinker is turning once more toward reality itself

1
Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman
2
Interview
19
Alain Badiou and Ben Woodard
3
On the Undermining of Objects: Grant, Bruno, and Radical Philosophy
21
Graham Harman
4
Mining Conditions: A Response to Harman
41
Iain Hamilton Grant
5
Concepts and Objects
47
Ray Brassier
6
Does Nature Stay What-it-is?: Dynamics and the Antecendence Criterion
66
Iain Hamilton Grant
7

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Against Speculation, or, A Critique of the Critique of Critique:

A Remark on Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude (After Colletti)
84
Alberto Toscano
8
Hume’s Revenge: À Dieu, Meillassoux?
92
Adrian Johnston
9
Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux
114
Martin Hägglund
10
Anything is Possible: A Reading of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude
130
Peter Hallward
11
The Speculative and the Specific: On Hallward and Meillassoux
142
Nathan Brown
12
Capitalism and the Non-Philosophical Subject
164
Nick Srnicek
13
Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic Necrocracy
182
Reza Negarestani
14
Is it Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today?
202
Slavoj Žižek
15
Potentiality and Virtuality
224
Quentin Meillassoux, translated by Robin Mackay
16
The Generic as Predicate and Constant: Non-Philosophy and Materialism
237
François Laruelle, translated by Taylor Adkins
17
The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology
261
Levi R. Bryant
18
The Actual Volcano: Whitehead, Harman, and the Problem of Relations
279
Steven Shaviro
19
Response to Shaviro
291
Graham Harman
20
Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les différents modes d’existence
304
Bruno Latour, translated by Stephen Muecke

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21
Outland Empire: Prolegomena to Speculative Absolutism
334
Gabriel Catren, translated by Taylor Adkins
22
Wondering about Materialism
368
Isabelle Stengers
23
Emergence, Causality and Realism
381
Manuel DeLanda
24
Ontology, Biology, and History of Affect
393
John Protevi
25
Interview
406
Slavoj Žižek and Ben Woodard
Bibliography
416

16

In this section I intend to mention two articles concerning subjects, topics or issues that can be included of excluded
from the discourse of philosophy and the socio-cultural practice of doing philosophy or philosophizing. I have
already dealt in detail with the idea of traditional philosophical subject-matter or philosophical objects, areas or
fields of investigation. See here for details https://independent.academia.edu/UlrichdeBalbian

Here are two comments on the article I will discuss

 I think philosophy was about self-help, but once it becomes academic ad studied then it seems
to separate itself from self-help. Consider ethics by Aristotle, the higher man by Nietzsche -
classic text books for self-help.

http://thinking-time.blogspot.com/

Reply


Philosopher's Beard17 February 2011 at 12:38

Philosophy has always been about the Big Questions, and one of the most important is of course,
'how should I live?'

But that is only a tiny part of the spectrum of ethics, let alone philosophy, which has been
"academic" right from the beginning when Plato founded his academy.

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This is the article – by thetomwells at gmail.com.

Tuesday, 23 February 2010

What is Philosophy?
Philosophy is concerned with the pursuit of wisdom: (Usually it is said that philosophy is love of
wisdom, not the pursuit of it; this love is sometimes interpreted as having meant respect.) not only with
what we think we know, but how? why? and what is it really worth? (I like these twists what we THINK
we KNOW and HOW we know it. Whatever these complex notions mean. Why we know it or want to
know it? Another interesting side track that could be investigated, and what is it really worth? This is a
completely new value-question and of course of great importance.)

In line with this spirit of questioning (meaningful assertion) philosophy can be defined as the discipline
of critical scrutiny (interesting claim), though its specific methods (I would like to know more about
what the author means by methods) are informed by a variety of philosophical styles, claims, histories,
(notice the factors that determine philosophical methods: styles?, claims!, historical and I suppose
socio-cultural factors!) and concerns ( are these personal concerns? Those of a certain group,
community, social class, academic profession as is the case today with the professionalization of the
discipline, certain sub- or interdisciplinary fields eg experimental, practical and cognitive science
philosophical concerns?, particular academic institutions in specific countries?) from Plato to Kant to
Foucault (this I suppose refer to the many notions, factions and philosophical groups from Plato To
Foucault?), which constitute often quite divergent schools (here philosophical concerns are related to
divergent schools – we only need to think of the different concerns of the Analytic and Continental
‘schools’). Philosophers from different traditions see philosophy differently (check out the anthology of
answers by contemporary philosophers to the what is philosophy question over at the excellent
Philosophy Bites). http://philosophybites.com/2010/11/what-is-philosophy.html

November 14, 2010

What is Philosophy?

We asked a range of Philosophy Bites interviewees the simple question 'What is

Philosophy?'...Here are some of their answers:

Listen to What is Philosophy?

The Philosophy Bites podcast is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

http://philosophy.sas.ac.uk/ The Institute's aim is to promote and facilitate high quality research
in philosophy, making it available to the widest possible audience both inside and outside the
UK's academic community.

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About the Institute

The Institute of Philosophy is an Institute of the University of London's School of Advanced
Study. Founded in 2005, the IP was made possible by a generous private donation and matching
funding from the University of London.

What is the Institute for?

The Institute's aim is to promote and facilitate high quality research in philosophy, making it
available to the widest possible audience both inside and outside the UK's academic community.

Where is the Institute?

The IP's offices are located in the University of London in the Stewart House part of the
University comples (access via Senate House main entrance). Most of the Institute's events are
held in Senate House.

Who runs the Institute?

Here is a list of the Institute's staff and a description of how it is managed.

What does the Institute do?

The Institute's activities may be grouped into three categories:

 Events - including lectures, seminars and conferences (Phil-list calendar of both IP and other
philosphy events in London)
 Fellowships - visiting fellowships and postdoctoral research fellowships
 Research support - including electronic resources and information for graduate students

Who can come to the Institutes events?

The Institute's events are open to everyone. You do not have to be a member of the Institute, or a
member of any university, to attend Institute events.

Membership is also open to all. Details about membership are here.

The award of fellowships at the Institute is, of course, on the basis of a competition. Details are
here.

Philosophy Bites is now produced in association with the Institute.

http://philosophy.sas.ac.uk/events/podcasts

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Here are a few comments on the above –

Comments

I thought the best answer to that question was laughter, the laughter of wisdom that
acknowledges ignorance.

Posted by: Paul So | November 18, 2010 at 12:10 AM

Alban Low produced a charming piece of art from my Tweeted definition of Philosophy
http://t.co/XgOJ8dco

Posted by: Jonathan | October 21, 2011 at 02:47 AM

I was surprised at how cumbersome the answers were from those attempting to teach it to
children. My answer that even children would understand (and that all other meanings of
philosophy naturally spring from) is:

Q: What is [western] Philosophy?

A: Being able to answer the question, Why do you think what you think? Why do you believe
what you believe?

And while you want to be able to answer to someone else's satisfaction, you foremost want to be
able to answer to your own satisfaction because you want to know the truth. (BTW, the western
bit is "we believe humans are capable of doing this ourselves")

Posted by: Www | February 03, 2013 at 04:28 AM

Meaning of life is very impractical to give because it changes every moment in different ways
for different people, So its answer should be different for different people.

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Many external forces try to bring unanimity to the meaning of life but how the fuck this could
happen when we are so efficient even at the DNA level to be different from each other.

Posted by: Ankush Arora | February 03, 2013 at 06:04 PM

You will find a list of books on philosophy and other subjects by Edmonds and Warburton on that site – I
suppose the site belongs to them. Some relevant to the present discussion are these –

Philosophy: The Essential Study Guide Paperback – 1 Jul 2004

by Nigel Warburton (Author)

Philosophy: The Essential Study Guide is a compact and straightforward guide to the skills
needed to study philosophy, aimed at anyone coming to the subject for the first time or just
looking to improve their performance. Nigel Warburton clarifies what is expected of students
and offers strategies and guidance to help them make effective use of their study time and
improve their marks.

The four main skills covered by the book are:

 reading philosophy - both skimming and in-depth analysis of historical and contemporary
work, understanding the examples and terminology used
 listening to philosophy - formal lectures and informal classroom teaching, preparation,
picking up on arguments used, note taking
 discussing philosophy - arguing and exploring, asking questions, communicating in
concise and understandable ways
 writing philosophy - planning and researching essays and other written tasks, thinking up
original examples, avoiding plagiarism.

(Well to me the above appears to involve many more than four skills, each of which
needs to be discussed in detail. And, most of them are not typical philosophical?)

http://philosophybites.com/political_philosophy/ on power

A Little History of Philosophy (Little Histories) Hardcover – 19 Aug 2011

by Nigel Warburton (Author)

Philosophy begins with questions about the nature of reality and how we should live. These
were the concerns of Socrates, who spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking
awkward questions, disconcerting the people he met by showing them how little they genuinely
understood. This engaging book introduces the great thinkers in Western philosophy and
explores their most compelling ideas about the world and how best to live in it. In forty brief
chapters, Nigel Warburton guides us on a chronological tour of the major ideas in the history of
philosophy. He provides interesting and often quirky stories of the lives and deaths of thought-
provoking philosophers from Socrates, who chose to die by hemlock poisoning rather than live
on without the freedom to think for himself, to Peter Singer, who asks the disquieting

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philosophical and ethical questions that haunt our own times. Warburton not only makes
philosophy accessible, he offers inspiration to think, argue, reason and ask in the tradition of
Socrates. 'A Little History of Philosophy' presents the grand sweep of humanity's search for
philosophical understanding and invites all to join in the discussion.

Philosophy: The Basics Paperback – 31 Oct 2012

by Nigel Warburton (Author)

‘Philosophy: The Basics deservedly remains the most recommended introduction to

philosophy on the market. Warburton is patient, accurate and, above all, clear. There is no
better short introduction to philosophy.’ - Stephen Law, author of The Philosophy Gym

Philosophy: The Basics gently eases the reader into the world of philosophy. Each chapter
considers a key area of philosophy, explaining and exploring the basic ideas and themes
including:

 Can you prove God exists?

 How do we know right from wrong?
 What are the limits of free speech?
 Do you know how science works?
 Is your mind different from your body?
 Can you define art?
 How should we treat non-human animals?

For the fifth edition of this best-selling book, Nigel Warburton has added an entirely new chapter
on animals, revised others and brought the further reading sections up to date. If you’ve ever
asked ‘what is philosophy?’, or wondered whether the world is really the way you think it is, this
is the book for you.

Philosophy: Basic Readings Paperback – Import, 25 Mar 1999

by Nigel Warburton (Author)

Nigel Warburton brings philosophy to life with an imaginative selection of philosophical writings on key
topics. Philosophy: Basic Readings is the ideal introduction to some of the most accessible and thought-
provoking pieces in philosophy, both contemporary and classic.

The second edition of Philosophy: Basic Readings has been expanded to include new pieces in each
major area of philosophy:
· What is philosophy?
· God
· Right and wrong
· The external world
· Science
· Mind
· Art

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The readings in Philosophy: Basic Readings complement the chapters in Philosophy: The Basics (4th
edition 2004)

Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy Paperback – 15 Mar

2001
by Simon Blackburn (Author)

This is a book about the big questions in life: knowledge, consciousness, fate, God, truth, goodness,
justice. It is for anyone who believes there are big questions out there, but does not know how to
approach them. Think sets out to explain what they are and why they are important.

Simon Blackburn begins by putting forward a convincing case for the study of philosophy and goes on
to give the reader a sense of how the great historical figures such as Descartes, Hume, Kant, and
Wittgenstein have approached its central themes. Each chapter explains a major issue, and gives the
reader a self-contained guide through the problems that philosophers have studied. The large scope of
topics covered range from scepticism, the self, mind and body, and freedom to ethics and the
arguments surrounding the existence of God.

Lively and approachable, this book is ideal for all those who want to learn how the basic techniques of
thinking shape our existence.

Philosophy Bites Again Hardcover – 30 Oct 2014

by David Edmonds (Author), Nigel Warburton (Author)

Philosophy Bites Again is a brand new selection of interviews from the popular podcast of the same
name. It offers engaging and thought-provoking conversations with leading philosophers on a selection
of major philosophical issues that affect our lives. Their subjects include pleasure, pain, and humour;
consciousness and the self; free will, responsibility, and punishment; the meaning of life and the
afterlife. Everyone will find ideas in this book to fascinate, provoke, and inspire them.

Philosophy Bites Paperback – 4 May 2012

by David Edmonds (Author), Nigel Warburton (Contributor)

In recent years, some of the world's leading philosophers have held forth on their favorite topics on the
immensely popular website philosophybites.com. This remarkably popular site has had to date some
12.5 million downloads, and is listened to all over the globe. Philosophy Bites brings together the
twenty-five best interviews from this hugely successful website. Leading philosophers-including Simon
Blackburn, Alain de Botton, Will Kymlicka, Alexander Nehamas, and more than twenty others-discuss a
wide range of philosophical issues in a surprisingly lively, informal, and personal way.

Here Peter Singer argues forcefully for vegetarianism, Anthony Appiah discusses cosmopolitanism, and
Stephen Law shows why it is unreasonable to believe in an all-powerful, all-good deity. Time, infinity,
evil, friendship, animals, wine, sport, tragedy-all of human life is here. And as these bite-sized interviews
reveal, often the most brilliant philosophers are eager and able to convey their thoughts, simply and

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clearly, on the great ideas of philosophy. Publishers Weekly called the volume "thoughtful and highly
readable," concluding that "these bite-size dialogues add up to a surprisingly substantial whole."

Philosophy Bites Back Hardcover – 22 Nov 2012

by David Edmonds (Author), Nigel Warburton (Author)

Philosophy Bites Back is the second book to come out of the hugely successful podcast Philosophy Bites.
It presents a selection of lively interviews with leading philosophers of our time, who discuss the ideas
and works of some of the most important thinkers in history. From the ancient classics of Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle, to the ground breaking modern thought of Wittgenstein, Rawls, and Derrida, this
volume spans over two and a half millennia of western philosophy and illuminates its most fascinating
ideas.

Philosophy Bites was set up in 2007 by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton. It has had over 12 million
downloads, and is listened to all over the world.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But here's my take on it.

The strength of philosophy is in its open-mindedness and commitment to deep critical thinking. (I would
like to see each of these notions described in more detail as they are of crucial importance to what is
being claimed.)

(The following are very meaningful and true points!)

Its greatest weakness of course is the mirror image of its strengths: a poor sense of proportion
(pursuing an argument to the point of absurdity) (arguments are mere tools but are often treated as if
they are the aim, the purpose, the goal of some narrative ), and irrelevance to the real world (?please
describe) and real people's concerns (just what strange rational world did Kant live in? ha-ha I love this!!
And Hegel? Etc…). In this respect David Hill has neatly described (analytic) philosophy as "the ungainly
attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to
lawyers." (YES!)

Because of this structural feature, successful philosophy requires negotiating a reasonable (relevant? To
stay on the method/way/main road and not get distracted into irrelevant by-paths) course through a
treacherous strait. On one side lies the mundane (?) world(S) of sciences, arts, and common life, a world
of muggles content to wallow in their own ignorance, a life-world that seems incredibly conceptually
impoverished, dull and slow compared with the sparkling philosopher's life. On the other side lies the
esoteric world of pure reason, a high pure realm where there is little oxygen to breathe and
hallucinations are frequent. (Love it!)

The history of philosophy is full of occasions when philosophers did 'descend' to the mundane. The
disciplines of physics, economics, psychology, computer science, and so forth all started with
philosophers' questions, but as soon as people started developing small-m methodologies, with just a
few fixed and unquestioned concepts, for systematically answering them, the philosophers left in

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pursuit of more open, concept-rich topics. All such disciplines are quite respectable in their own way, of
course, but too limited to count as proper philosophy anymore. (Summary of the socio-cultural
differentiation of other discourses as they are excluded from the discourse of philosophy.)

Philosophy is far more concerned with raising questions like "How does the sun work", using clever
conceptual analysis and theory construction to set them up,( summary of philosophical methodology,
methods, techniques that concentrates on a few features, steps, aspects, stages of the processes of
theorizing) than in the answers, which however marvellous at first glance, quickly acquire the tedium of
the mundane: "Gosh, a great ball of hydrogen under such pressure that nuclear fusion takes place?
Yawn". The best questions (what standards are employed to sort good, better, best questions from bad
or less good questions?) (the ones at the core of western philosophy since Plato) are those that teeter
on the edge of intelligibility - such as "How can something stay the same thing when it changes?" or
"What is truth?". These are good philosophical questions because even posing them requires elegant
multi-tiered conceptual constructions, and there isn't much chance of ever getting a definitive (i.e.
boring) answer. The intellectual dance can continue indefinitely: incessant, addictive, inescapable, like
Facebook for grown-ups. (As Wittgenstein noted, "The real discovery is the one which enables me to
stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy (Philosopher) peace, so that it is no
longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.")

So philosophy is obviously biased towards the esoteric world of ideas. The first problem with this
attitude is that to the extent that pure philosophy concerns itself with itself it will produce little of
relevance (standards and norms to measure this degree of relevance? And why should it be relevant? Is
that the standards to measure all things by? Eg music, visual art etc, is being meaningful not also
important? Are there no other values than being relevant?) to the world (no relevant to small
communities, interest groups and other field of socio-cultural practices, eg the arts, music, dance,
astrophysics, etc) of muggles. It thus takes on the character of a private hobby whose value only its
acolytes perceive. Like chess.

Secondly, that study may itself be impoverished to the extent that muggle disciplines, such as
psychology, politics, and physics, are deliberately excluded as lesser forms of knowledge rather than as
different and possibly complementary projects (although 'experimental philosophy' is making a
comeback). It is a mistake to think that philosophy is in the meta-knowledge business: understood as
independently advancing humanity's true knowledge brick by brick. Philosophy is in the understanding
business, and that should include understanding and learning from the practises we attempt to criticise.
(This if fine, but this should form part of the stage of theorizing when data to be study is collected. How
do other disciplines proceed and execute this stage? How can these now excluded phenomena be
included in that stage of the process of theorizing or doing philosophy?)

Thirdly, philosophy misses a tremendous opportunity to apply its sophisticated skills (please provide
details for these sophisticated skills) directly to the world of muggles.

The specialists in operative concepts (one skill) should speak up when some conceptual artist claims
(note this refers to VISUAL and other FINE ARTS, not a philosopher doing tricks with concepts) her work
is about "resisting the system". 'Really? How? What do you mean by that, exactly? Why?' . (This already

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occur in Fine Art practices, students are taught such critical skills, critics, reviewers, curators can do this –
if they do their work properly and intelligently and not merely utter art speak.)

When some economist claims that governments should concern themselves with maximising happiness
it is the trained philosopher who should be there to ask what she means by happiness. To show that she
is employing three different concepts of utility interchangeably (it does not require philosophers to ask
such questions - any well-educated individuals will do this.) in her welfare economics models (none of
which seems to justify the crude income metric actually employed). To challenge sloppy reasoning:
"Happiness is just obviously the most important thing?". To analyse its implications and how they may
conflict with our other foundational moral commitments and values (such as respecting the distinctness
of individuals). That is not to say that conceptual analysis is always helpful or appropriate - don't try
analysing love with your partner - but the engaged philosopher is more likely to develop the required
sense of judgement than the esoteric one.

(It seems as if the author is looking for ways, practices, fields, problems to extend the practice and
discourse of philosophy. These suggestions can and should be fulfilled by any well trained intelligent
practitioner on his own field. I do this in Fine Art and question the rubbish art speak we are presented
with by artists, galleries, art critics and reviewers.)

In pure philosophy philosophers seek to impress each other by posing and critiquing elegantly formed
questions, in perfect isolation from the rest of the world. (Absolutely correct! The incestuous world of
academic philosophy and ‘professionalization’ of doing philosophy! These ills being identified and
pointed out by the author are merely a few of the many problems caused by the institutionalization of
academic philosophy, its market, faculties, journals, books publishers, conferences, celebrities, status,
and other socio-cultural factors, structures, processes, etc.)

Outside philosophy people try to answer questions using the tool set they already have. But the answer I
suggest to 'What is philosophy?' takes the question as a practical one, and points to the applied
philosophy where the critical skills of philosophers are genuinely engaged with the concerns of other
disciplines (and even ordinary life), (I disagree with this – these things being suggested, what
philosophers should do in other disciplines, should be done by those involved in those disciplines. They
should be trained to do that by training them in the features and aspects of the processes of theorizing,
for example conceptual analysis. Some aspects or features of these processes are what are known as
philosophical methods or skills.) making scientists more critical, (or perhaps more sensitive to
conceptual and other philosophical-type issues and questions) and philosophers more humble and
grounded. The resources of philosophy are best engaged in considering the world, (meaning?) and
especially the human projects and studies that struggle to understand it. That is where the strengths of
philosophy shine brightest, and its weaknesses least.

Public Philosophy
First, I write for the general public rather than for a specialised sub-group of philosophers. You shouldn't
need to have gone to grad school to understand what I'm talking about, or to care about the topics I
discuss.

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Second, I write about issues, from prison to love and robots, that I am not an expert on but that I want
to try to think through by writing. This blog is not some kind of public service, such as translating the
discoveries of academic philosophy into something ordinary people can understand. I write for me as
well for my readers. What I am trying to do here are essays in Montaigne's sense: personal efforts at
making sense of the world.

I do not claim - as I implicitly must do in my academic work - that what I write here qualifies as a
definitive contribution to the sum of human knowledge. In fact I am continuously revising my past
essays as I reflect further, read further, and am persuaded by the comments of readers of my errors of
judgement, fact, or reason.

Published Essays

Several of my blog essays have been republished elsewhere, such as in Think, Quartz, Philosophy Now,
the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Religion and Ethics site, and Open Democracy.

I also write a regular column for 3 Quarks Daily and I have recently started writing for Aeon
magazine and The Critique.

17

http://consc.net/weblogs.html

Philosophical Weblogs
This is a list of weblogs that are devoted to topics in and around analytic philosophy, or that are
by analytic philosophers. Suggestions for addition are welcome.

Group Weblogs (Topical)

 Aesthetics (Aesthetics for Birds)

 Bioethics (Philosophy and Bioethics)
 Bioethics (Bioethics Forum)
 Early Modern Experimental Philosophy
 Epistemic Value
 Epistemology (Certain Doubts)
 Ethics (Ethics Etc)
 Ethics (Pea Soup)
 Ethics of Resource Allocation
 Experimental Philosophy
 Feminist Philosophers
 Formal Epistemology (Choice and Inference)
 Free Will/Responsibility (Flickers of Freedom)
 Gender, Race, and Philosophy
 Green Future Ethics

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 Meta-philosophy
 Meta-philosophy
 Metaphysics (Matters of Substance)
 New APPS: Art, Philosophy, Politics, Science
 Neuroethics (Neuroethics at the Core)
 Philosophy and Psychiatry
 Philosophy of Architecture
 Philosophy of Art
 Philosophy of Mind (Brain Pains)
 Philosophy of Mind (Brains)
 Philosophy of Religion (Prosblogion)
 Philosophy of Science (It's Only A Theory)
 Philosophy of Sport
 Philosophy of Time
 https://sites.google.com/site/philosophyphilosophizing/home (art, philosophizing, methods,
subject-matter, death of philosophy, ontology, meta-philosophy)
 Philosophy Talk
 Practical Ethics
 Political Philosophy (Public Reason)
 Secular Philosophy
 Teaching Philosophy (In Socrates' Wake)
 Theorizing (the process, features, levels, aspects resemble philosophizing)
 Virtue Theory (Janusblog)
 What Sorts of People Should There Be?

Group Weblogs (Local)

 Barcelona (The bLOGOS)

 Berlin (Phlox)
 Bowling Green (Unideal Observers)
 Buffalo
 Connecticut (What Is It Like to be a Blog)
 Leeds (Metaphysical Values)
 London (Bloggin the Question)
 Macquarie
 Michigan (Go Grue)
 Missouri (Show Me the Argument)
 New Zealand (Prior Knowledge)
 North Florida (Florida Student Philosophy Blog)
 Northwestern College (Gadflies)
 Notre Dame (Plato's Beard)
 Rochester (This is Not the Name of This Blog)
 San Diego Mesa (Philosophy on the Mesa)
 San Francisco State
 Southern California (Hesperus)
 St. Andrews (The Arche Weblog)
 St. Andrews (The Arche Methodology Project Weblog)
 Syracuse (OrangePhilosophy)

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 Tufts (The Web of Belief)

 Turkey (Hesperus is Bosphorus)
 UC San Diego (Daily Phil)
 UC Santa Barbara
 Western Michigan (Undetached Rabbit Parts)
 Wisconsin (Milwaukee)

Philosophers (= roughly: Philosophy Ph.D.)

 Ken Aizawa (The Bounds of Cognition)

 Anton Alterman (Brain Scam)
 Albert Atkin (The Wages of Ignorance)
 Mike Austin
 Ralf Bader (Transcendental Idealism)
 Andrew Bailey (Ratiocination)
 Gary Banham (Inter Kant)
 JC Beall (B-log)
 Joseph Biehl (Biehlosophy)
 Henk bij de Weg (Philosophy by the Way)
 Stephan Blatti (De Dicto)
 Evelyn Brister (Knowledge and Experience)
 Berit Brogaard (Lemmings)
 Richard Brown (Philosophy Sucks)
 Thom Brooks (The Brooks Blog)
 Anderson Brown
 Ben Burgis (Blog & ~Blog)
 John Capps (American Philosophy)
 Colin Caret (Inconsistent Thoughts)
 David Chalmers (Fragments of Consciousness)
 Michelle Ciurria (Moral Responsibility)
 Jon Cogburn
 Wesley Cooper
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 Jean Kazez
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 Adam Swenson (Pain for Philosophers)

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Students

 Derrick Abdul-Hakim (Muslim Philosopher)

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 James Dow (Selbsttatigkeit)

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 Small Gray Matters

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Compendia

 Online Papers in Philosophy

 Papers on Agency
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See also

 people with online papers in philosophy

 online papers on consciousness
 web resources on philosophy, consciousness, etc
 David Chalmers' home page

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9973.00156/abstract

Identity and Difference: A Hundred Years of Analytic Philosophy

Jeanne Peijnenburg

At its origins, analytic philosophy is an interest in language, science, logic, analysis, and a systematic
rather than a historical approach to philosophical problems. Early analytic philosophers were famous for
making clear conceptual distinctions and for couching them in comprehensible and lucid sentences. It is
argued that this situation is changing, that analytic philosophy is turning into its mirror image and is
thereby becoming more like the kind of philosophy that it used to oppose.

Analytic philosophy is sometimes said to have particularly close connections to logic and to science, and
no particularly interesting or close relation to its own history. It is argued here that although the
connections to logic and science have been important in the development of analytic philosophy, these
connections do not come close to characterizing the nature of analytic philosophy, either as a body of
doctrines or as a philosophical method. We will do better to understand analytic philosophy—and its
relationship to continental philosophy—if we see it as a historically constructed collection of texts,
which define its key problems and concerns. It is true, however, that analytic philosophy has paid little
attention to the history of the subject. This is both its strength—since it allows for a distinctive kind of
creativity—and its weakness—since ignoring history can encourage a philosophical variety of “normal
science.”

Not long ago it was easy to say how analytic philosophy

could be distinguished from nonanalytic, so-called continental philosophy. The charac-
teristic landscape of analytic philosophy may be described by eight
features, and although each of them can be found in one textbook or
another, they seem never to have been surveyed together. Below I give all

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eight of them and evaluate the recent sea changes with a critical, not to say
a jaundiced, eye. We shall find that none of the defining characteristics of
early analytic philosophy are nowadays entirely applicable. Indeed, an
important raison d’être of early analytic philosophy, namely, an opposition
to such thinkers as Hegel and Heidegger, seems to be quite absent today.
Characteristics of Analytic Philosophy
The first criterion that distinguishes analytic from nonanalytic philosophy
is that the former evinces special interest in questions of language and
meaning. This criterion has been extensively re-evaluated by Michael
Dummett (1993, Chap. 2), and in a recent Ph.D. thesis the emphasis on the
philosophy of language is still called “the fundamental tenet of analytic
philosophy” (Lievers 1997, 2). As for the second criterion, it has currently
been underlined by Peter Hacker (1996, 4; cf. 1997, 55). According to
Hacker, analytic philosophers may be distinguished from their continental
colleagues by a partiality for “analysis” in the most literal sense of that
© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000
1
The name was coined by Herbert Feigl, if we are to believe Feyerabend (1996, 116).

Was Wittgenstein an Analytic Philosopher?

Authors

Hans-Johann Glock

Published Date

9 July 2004

Prolegomena to any Future History of Analytic Philosophy

Authors

Aaron Preston

Published Date

9 July 2004

On the Structure of Twentieth-Century Philosophy

Authors

Tom Rockmore

Published Date

9 July 2004

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McDowell on Kant: Redrawing the Bounds of Sense

Authors

Christopher Norris

Published Date

July 2000

Philosophy, Logic, Science, History

Authors

Tim Crane

Published Date

5 January 2012

http://www.ockhamsbeard.com.au/?cat=11

July 4, 2009 philosophy, psychology | 3 Comments

Reconciling Continental and Analytical Philosophy

There are two types of people in this world: cat people and dog people; Beatles or Elvis; tissues
or hankie. And there are analytic and continental philosophers.

Why is this? And why do continental and analytic philosophers have such difficulty
understanding, let alone appreciating, each others’ work? And why the latent (and sometimes not
so latent) animosity between adherents of both traditions?

I’d suggest it’s because the two approaches represent fundamentally opposite approaches to
philosophy. However, when taken together, they actually turn out to be complementary, much
like Niels Bohr’s motto: “Contraria non contradictoria sed complementa sunt,” (“opposites are
not contradictory but complementary”).

See, the world of experience is a strange and chaotic one, and it’s the job of philosophy to make
sense of it. The question is: how?

For the continental philosopher, the starting point is the world of experience itself.
Continental philosophy takes as its task the mapping of the phenomenal world. It involves itself
with perception, language, culture, emotion, history etc. It seeks to make sense of the
phenomenal by determining its very contours.

Analytic philosophy, on the other hand, takes as its starting point the desire to describe the
smallest number of moving parts – the very cogs that underlie the phenomenal world – that,
when working together, produce the seemingly chaotic phenomena of everyday life. The analytic

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philosopher is less interested in the dozens of ways a word might be used than in what all usages
of the word have in common. They wish to abstract away the individual phenomena to get at
the underlying eddies and currents that reinforce and annihilate each other to produce the
contours of experience.

Yet the continental philosopher is wary of this approach, for it is suspicious of reductionism and
the notion of objectivity, and is sceptical about our ability to know when we have actually
discovered the underlying moving parts. The analytic philosopher, on the other hand, is irritated
by the slippery nature of continental discourse; to them it’s like trying to herd cats.

One thing I’ve noticed is that most philosophers don’t strictly choose which side of the fence
they’ll pitch their tent; they discover one day their tent already pitched and simply make home,
realising later the fence some way distant.

Personally, I find myself firmly in the analytic camp. I’m interested in systems, although this not
not so much from choice as a consequence of my psychology; I’m a high systemiser – to the
point of being close to the ASD range. (In fact, I think a fascinating experiment would be to test
a sample of analytic and continental philosophers to see where they fall on this scale – I predict
they’ll all be higher than average on the systemising scale, but analytic philosophers will top out
the systemising scale, while the continental philosophers will be higher on the empathising
scale.)

The take home message from this whim and speculation? Continental and analytic philosophy
are just two sides of the same coin. And the very fact that they diverged at all is perhaps a sign
that both sides have taken their approach to extreme. Regular readers will remember that I’m
critical of both sides. As philosophy has been shrunk and become overshadowed by its offspring,
it has retreated to the extremes and become less relevant to the real world. As a matter of priority
philosophy – of all persuasions – needs to make itself relevant again. And philosophers going
head to head at cross purposes doesn’t do anybody any favours.

https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/pir/article/viewFile/12660/3846

Lee Braver
Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger
Lee Braver, Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, MIT Press,
2012, 354pp., $38.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780262016896.

Reviewed by Gary E. Aylesworth, Eastern Illinois University

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are the two most influential philosophers of the
twentieth century. Though they were aware of one another, each made only one recorded
mention of the other, and these were made in passing. These remarks open a narrow pathway
into a large field of investigation. However, perhaps because they came to represent opposing

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camps of professional philosophers, few have attempted to read them so as to bring them into
productive dialogue. Lee Braver's publication is the latest of these relatively rare efforts. His
general thesis is that, despite their differences, Wittgenstein and Heidegger both insist upon our
radical finitude as human beings, and that there is an unsurpassable limit to the reasons we give
as to why things are the way they are. In other words, reason as a ground-giving activity cannot
ground itself, but arises out of our situation in a world that is always already "there" before the
question of grounds or reasons can arise in the first place. In developing this thesis, Braver hopes
to begin a dialogue between so-called analytic and continental philosophers and to inaugurate a
re-appropriation of the philosophical tradition on the basis of mutual understanding. That is to
say, he believes his study can lead "analysts" and "continentalists" to agree on what philosophy
is, on what it has been, and on what it ought to become. Given the institutional divisions within
professional philosophy, in place for two or more generations, this is no small ambition, and it is
unlikely to meet with a friendly reception from all quarters (see Richard Rorty).

As a matter of strategy, Braver begins each chapter with an account of the early Wittgenstein,
who then functions as a critical target for the later Wittgenstein and as a stand-in for the
metaphysical tradition that Heidegger, early and late, seeks to overcome. Chapter 1 presents both
thinkers as calling for an "end" to philosophy as it has been practiced in the past, which for
Braver means the assumption of a disengaged theoretical stance over and above our
everyday ways of speaking and dealing with things in the world. The paradigm case of
philosophical theorizing is Wittgenstein's famous positing,in the Tractatus of a logically perfect
language beneath the irregular and disorderly uses of ordinary speech. Braver gives a detailed
account of the later Wittgenstein's rejection of this position, including criticisms of the assertions
that all meaningful propositions must have a single form, that elementary propositions constitute
a set of linguistic atoms whose combinations are calculable, and that the complete set of their
possible combinations delimits language (and the world) as a limited whole. Once the later
Wittgenstein realizes that language cannot be reduced to one function, the project of the
Tractatus collapses under the untenability of its basic assumptions. While noting their
fundamental differences, Braver argues that Heidegger's analysis in Being and Time of objects
"present at hand" closely parallels Wittgenstein's criticisms of the misleading confusions created
by philosophers when they focus upon one example, such as propositional statements, as a model
for all cases. Just as Wittgenstein insists there is no actual problem with language as long as we
attend to the particularity of each "move" in a language game, Heidegger grounds the traditional
view of things as present objects within the network of our involvements with things "ready at
hand," a network that constitutes a world we already understand.

In the second chapter, Braver extends his account of the Tractatus, in which Wittgenstein
theorizes that elementary propositions mirror the organization of objects into the states of affairs
that make up the world. Metaphysically, objects are nothing but the set of all of their
combinatory possibilities, including the combinations they are actually in. In this way,
Wittgenstein seeks to anchor the sense of language in a logical space where primitive
propositions name the "meaning-bodies" of the world and isomorphically "picture" them in their
combinations in states of affairs. However, as noted in chapter 1, the later Wittgenstein rejects
this schema as the answer to an unnecessary worry about grounding linguistic sense in an
objectively determinable world. This worry dissolves once we realize that our involvements with
the world are already in order, and that philosophy gets caught up in nonsense of its own making

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by taking things out of their natural contexts, e.g., by looking for the "meaning" of meaning.
Braver suggests that Heidegger carries out a similar critique of traditional theorizing in Being
and Time when he describes the derivative nature of things as present-at-hand objects (the mode
of traditional metaphysics and epistemology) in contrast to our close involvement with things in
their usefulness, prior to any objectification.

In chapter 3, Braver provides more detail on the holism of human actions as described by both
thinkers. Here, he comments on Wittgenstein's rejection of the notion of a private language in the
Philosophical Investigations, which he suggests is not so much an argument as a series of
examples illustrating the uselessness of such an idea. First of all, we learn language by
interacting with others, and thus we can refer our private feelings to ourselves only after we have
learned how to refer and how to distinguish between "private" and "public" in the first place.
Thus the sense of what is private is derivative upon non-private communication, and there is,
then, a holistic connection between any so-called private language and language's ordinary uses.
Braver links this with Heidegger's holism in his description of tools in Being and Time, where
the use of a tool, such as a hammer, presupposes a non-thematic understanding of an entire world
of references within which the hammer functions, and this includes involvements with other
human beings (other Dasein). In this regard, our existential being-in-the-world is our primary
experience of everything, and it must simply be described rather than theoretically reconstructed,
for such reconstruction would be a falsification. (seem to me like sociologism and an emphasis
on socio-cultural practices by both thinkers?)

Braver carries these considerations over into chapter 4, which focuses upon the nature of
thinking. He presents in considerable detail Wittgenstein's critique of the modernist model of
thinking as viewing images in a mental picture-gallery. As Wittgenstein points out, much of what
we call knowing or understanding does not involve any particular mental activity, and can be
accounted for perfectly well by attending to what we do (Ryle’s behaviourism?) in various
situations. This parallels Heidegger's description of everyday understanding in Being and Time,
and Braver suggests that both Heidegger and Wittgenstein embrace what he calls the Perceptual
Model of Thought. As he says: "Rather than weighing the pros and cons of an array of options
confronting us, we simply see what is to be done in a given situation" (p. 141). As Braver notes,
there is a certain passivity to perceptual thinking, in contrast to the intellectualist models of
thought favored by modern thinkers, including Husserlian phenomenologists and analytic
philosophers. As he points out, the later Heidegger, in particular, emphasizes the passivity of
thinking in his notion of Gelassenheit, or releasement toward things. In addition, he argues that
there is an affinity between the Perceptual Model of Thought and Aristotle's characterization of
ethical judgment as phronesis.( Phronesis Ancient Greek: φρόνησις, phronēsis) is a Greek word
for a type of wisdom or intelligence. It is more specifically a type of wisdom relevant to practical
things, requiring an ability to discern how or why to act virtuously and encourage practical
virtue, excellence of character, in others)

In chapter 5, Braver argues that the later Wittgenstein and Heidegger are anti-foundationalists in
accounting for a certain deceptiveness in the search for ultimate "grounds" or "reasons." For
Wittgenstein, this takes the form of an illusion of greater depth beneath the ground that lies on
the surface, while Heidegger states it in terms of an event of being that is a groundless "giving"
of grounds.(Very Kantian things-in-themselves rejected?) This constitutes what Braver calls the

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Framework Argument: "we cannot judge the rules of a game or the framework of a discussion by
criteria applicable within it" (p. 180). For Wittgenstein, this means any attempt to ground
language games in an independently existing reality is, if it makes sense, a move in a certain
language game. Furthermore, it means that the search for such an ultimate ground is a
philosophical disease that can be cured when we understand that the obviousness of knowing
how to play a language game is itself the only ground to be had. This extends to the rules of
reason, such as the law of excluded middle, which is a rule for certain language games, but not
one that all language games must necessarily follow. Braver argues that the early Heidegger's
anti-foundationalism is compromised by his call for authenticity in Dasein's existence, which
Braver reads as suggesting that there is an authentic self that one can enact. However, he finds in
Heidegger's epochal history of being the sense that our understanding of being, and thus of the
ground of beings, takes different shapes at different times. These epochs are "sendings" or
"givings" of grounds, and are thus themselves groundless. Braver notes that Wittgenstein's
thinking is not essentially historical, but suggests Heidegger's epoch's of being can be lined up
with Wittgenstein's "strange tribes" who play alternate language games (p. 197). As an example,
Braver argues that Heidegger's remark on the principle of reason, i.e., there is no reason why
everything must have a reason, can be taken as generally equivalent to Wittgenstein's
observation that language games do not ultimately justify themselves, but are simply played or
not played.

In concluding chapter 5, Braver introduces a discussion of David Hume's insistence that the
practices of ordinary life must ultimately trump any attempt to provide them with metaphysical
foundations; the best we can do is to clarify that reason is an instinct that cannot ground or
explain itself, and that this insight changes nothing in common life and experience. Braver thus
invokes Hume to reinforce the deflationary spirit of his readings of Heidegger and Wittgenstein
(and probably to show analytic philosophers that Heidegger can be read as a "philosopher" in
their sense): "All three want to return us to what we already know in or usual comings and
goings, by exposing reason's limitations -- its finitude, its dependence on factors that escape
rational analysis or legitimation" (p. 219). (approximations, like concepts, notions, ideas, theories
and models also are?) This statement may be taken as the main point of the entire book.

Braver concludes by reiterating that human finitude is, for Wittgenstein and Heidegger,
philosophy's point of departure and final destination. The difference between them, he
argues, is that Heidegger begins with human finitude in Being and Time, whereas
Wittgenstein arrives at it via his own critique of the Tractatus. Nevertheless, Braver regards
Heidegger's early attempt to work out a fundamental ontology of Dasein as a piece of
essentialism in its own right, insofar as it suggests that we can view our finitude sub specie
aeterni in terms of Dasein's unchanging existentialia. On this reading, Heidegger only moves
past this remnant of metaphysics when he turns to Gelassenheit (openness toward beings) in his
later writings. For Braver, it is no coincidence that language moves to the forefront in the later
Heidegger Braver seeks to make it a weight-bearing bridge between Heidegger's meditations
on being and Wittgenstsein's reflections on grammar. In emphasizing this connection,
however, he downplays the sense of mystery in Heidegger compared with Wittgenstein's critique
of the need for mystery as a symptom of the desire to transcend finitude (a need expressed in the
Tractatus as the mystical). While acknowledging this difference, Braver does not account for it

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in detail, nor does he address the further difference beneath it: the sense of finitude as historical,
that is, as temporal facticity, as opposed to finitude as the limit of a non-epochal space.

Missing in Braver's account is Heidegger's deeply historical sense of language itself and of
metaphysical thinking, such that "saying" and "thinking" are gathered together in an inception
that has remained unthought and unsaid since the Greeks, but whose recovery he finds hinted at
in the poetry of Hölderlin. For Heidegger, this calls for deep engagement with the historical
tradition and with language as the bearer of an "unsaid" from the past. For Wittgenstein, by
contrast, the temporality of language is not essential -- a mark, no doubt, of Schopenhauer's
influence on his thinking. Instead, he depicts the historicality of language in terms of an old
European city, with its ancient center of narrow and irregular paths, and its modern outer districts
with linear streets and uniform houses (Philosophical Investigations, 16). There is no epochal
temporality here, but only spatial accumulation and extension. Perhaps a deeper dialogue
between the two philosophers, a dialogue drawn out of this radical difference, would take a step
beyond comparing their similarities, however compelling these might be.

As to the difference between analytic and continental philosophy, we might begin by recognizing
it as a construction of professional philosophers rather than something essential to philosophy
itself. More to the point, both Wittgenstein and Heidegger had plenty to say about the
professionalization of philosophy and its deleterious effects. Perhaps Braver could have
applied some of their criticisms to the tired and tiresome divisions he is seeking to mend.(NOTE
THIS last insight!! Mr Braver!)

https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/pir/article/viewFile/12660/384

Philosophy in Review

XXXIII (2013), no. 5363

Lee Braver Groundless Grounds: A Study of
Wittgenstein and Heidegger
.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 2012.
xvi + 354 pages $38.00 (cloth ISBN 978–0–262–01689–6)
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are

Key figures in the analytic and continental philosophical

traditions. Wittgenstein was designated

by Bertrand Russell to be his philosophical

heir, and his work shaped the course of the analytic tradition of philosophy by influencing first

the logical positivists and then ordinary language philosophy.

Edmund Husserl, meanwhile, predicted that

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that the future of phenomenology was in Heidegger’s hands, And he continues to

be an inspiration to continental philosophers. While the gulf

between the analytic and continental

traditions seems as wide as ever—as Braver

observes, the only thing many philosophers

educated in one of the traditions knows

about the other tradition is that

it’s a waste of time

learning anything else about it—one

of the objectives of this book is to build a “load

-bearing bridge”

between the continental and analytic traditions in philosophy.

The material for the bridge is provided by focusing on

Wittgenstein and Heidegger’s rejection of traditional

Metaphysical philosophy.

On Braver’s reading, they have a similar diagnosis of

what’s wrong with

philosophy, and they offer a similar cure.

The overall plan of the book is to focus

first on the sources of

Wittgenstein and Heidegger’s discontent with

philosophy, then to consider

their more positive recommendations

. Each of the five chapters and the conclusion begins

with a theme or doctrine from the early Wittgenstein

which serves as representative of the metaphysical tradition opposed by the later Wittgenstein

and the early Heidegger (the later Heidegger makes only brief appearances in this book).

According to Wittgenstein and Heidegger, the source of

traditional philosophical problems and theories is

disengaged philosophical reflection:

a kind of staring at

the objects and activities of everyday life

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in an attempt to discover the

essence hidden beneath their external form

This in turn requires transcending the

contingent and limited perspective

imposed by culture and human

finitude in order to see the world as it is in itself.

In order to account for our capacity to think and

talk about the world,

the early Wittgenstein is lead to

postulate a logically perfect language

underneath the messiness of natural languages.

For Heidegger, the

philosophical impulse to

discover the essence of the world

leads to the “present-

At -hand” stance

towards things, a theoretical perspective

in which ordinary things

are viewed in isolation and treated as substances

with essences that are

independent of the role and purpose

those things have in our lives.

But rather than

revealing the essence of the world, this sort of

investigation alienates us from

the things we

first wanted to understand and

generates skeptical problems and paradoxes

. Philosophers then respond

with arguments and theories designed to solve these problems; and

the corpses of those theories now

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litter the history of philosophy.

According to Braver,

Wittgenstein and Heidegger have

similar responses to philosophical

problems and theories: each suggests that

the problems are not real and

that moreover,the theories

designed to solve them merely

produce more confusion.The

reasons for this harsh assessment

can be elucidated by using three

themes of their thought that

Braver highlights: holism,

original finitude, and groundless ground

According to Wittgenstein and Heidegger,

disengaged philosophical contemplation

wrenches the item under investigation

—a mathematical rule or an ordinary object like a hammer—out of the

context in which it is used

and considers it in isolation. But from their

holistic perspective, this sort of approach is

guaranteed to produce confusion

: concepts and things can’t be understood in isolation because what they are (their

being) is defined by the network of relations they have to other concepts, things, and activities.

The essence of a hammer cannot be disclosed by the present-to-

hand perspective because its

nature is determined by its

relation to other things and activities: nails,

boards, carpenters, and building projects

What it is to follow a rule can only be understood against a background of

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intentional agents using,

teaching, and following rules.

One of the more seductive ideas of

traditional philosophy is that

philosophical progress can be made only by

transcending our intellectual and cultural limitations,

so that we achieve a more

objective view. Failure to do so results in

distortions and contaminates our theories with

contingent, subjective impurities

Braver uses the idea of original finitude

to emphasize not only

that finitude is a

fundamental feature of being human (229), but

also that our finitude

should not be contrasted with infinity

(9)

The attitude

that Wittgenstein and Heidegger are urging is one of

“metaphysical humility”,a view that

refrains even from claiming that “from a God’s

-Eye View there is no God’s-

Eye View” (231).

A prominent theme

of traditional philosophy is foundationalism, (first philosophy!!)

The attempt to provide some

sort of ultimate explanation and justification for our beliefs and practices.

But trying to justify

everything threatens to generate an

infinite regress, and the only way

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of halting the looming regress is

an appeal to something self-justifying—

Platonic forms, God, self-evident principles, or

the immediately given in experience

. But this only gives rise to a new regress, for what

justifies the belief that the

thing that halts the regress is

indeed self-justifying?

Wittgenstein and Heidegger

acknowledge that there is a ground for our beliefs and practices, but this ground is

groundless: it is not a foundation that we can speak of as

justified (or true or rational),

because then it would no longer be ground

—the “ground” would now need a justification.

The same anti-foundationalist point can be made using Braver’s Framework Argument (180): we cannot

justify a belief system (or a form of life) by using criteria internal to that system because this would beg

the question.

But trying to justify it from an external perspective is quixotic,since this would amount to trying to justify

it ex nihilo

. Wittgenstein and Heidegger are confident that

once the foundationalist project of providing an ultimate justification for our world views

is exposed as incoherent, it will

also be seen as unnecessary. The groundless grounds of our beliefs and practices are

provided by human nature and cultural norms, and this Is enough (sociologism? Socio-cultural
reductionism? Or on the way to some universal or at least different cultural cognitive order/s?)

(174).

Braver’s account of both the early and late Wittgenstein is clear and illuminating.

He also does a good job of making Heidegger more

accessible to those on the analytic side of the divide, which is no mean feat

given the difficulty of his thought and

the opacity of his prose. One key

difference between Wittgenstein and Heidegger

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that emerges from Braver’s study is that while

the former wants to

dissolve philosophical problems

completely,

the latter seems content to

continue the metaphysical tradition, in the early phase by providing a fundamental

ontological analysis of Dasein and in the later phase

through an epochal history of being.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/on-heidegger-wittgenstein-derrida/

On Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida

Lee Braver interviewed by Richard Marshall.

Lee Braver is the funky philosopher with deep broodings on Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard,
Foucault, Heidegger, Derrida, existentialism, embodiment and disintegrating bugbears going on
all the time. If that doesn’t hook you then check your pulse, you may have died. He’s written
Heidegger’s Later Writings: A Reader’s Guide, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental
Anti-Realism, and Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. He’s
participated in the McDowell-Dreyfus debate and about the Gadamer Davidson link. He gets
riled when Derrida gets bad-mouthed and distorted. Which makes him a medley of the coolest
daddio Derridean-doo-be-doo!

3:AM: What was it that made you become a philosopher? What are the rewards of becoming one
for you?

Lee Braver: I always had a Romantic image of philosophers—wizened old men studying aged
parchment, peering into the depths of their soul and the universe. Gandalf if he were tenured, I
suppose. I was eager to try it but, like most Americans, my first chance to study it came in
college, so I took Intro to Phil my first semester. Among other things we read Kierkegaard’s
Fear and Trembling, and it blew my mind; I had a genuinely visceral reaction to it. It wasn’t just
having a new thought—it was thinking a new kind of thought, one that stretched my mind into a
new shape just to accommodate it. It was like the lights suddenly going on in a whole wing of
my mind that I hadn’t even known was there. Needless to say, such an experience was addictive,
and I had to get more and, well, following that pretty much lead me to where I am today. It still
happens, though less often; sometimes I get a contact high off my students.

3:AM: Perhaps before we delve into some of your ideas in a little detail we should give readers a
rough guide to the geography of your thoughts. Can you say something about the areas of
philosophy that you have been mostly engaged in, and perhaps suggest why you find these areas
to be of intense interest.

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LB: I’m attracted to those thinkers who give me the new ways of thinking described above,
foremost being Heidegger and Wittgenstein, though there are plenty of others: Kant, Hegel,
Foucault, Derrida. I study them primarily as thinkers rather than as bundles of ideas that serve as
resources for contemporary debates—a more common approach in continental than analytic
philosophy.

This is because I think you have to grasp a thinker’s general outlook on things, the ethos of their
minds, before you can appreciate the various views they held. Their positions on issues are very
subtle and often very different from standard views, and you have to do quite a bit of work to
appreciate their unique slant. Another way of putting it is that these thinkers’ work is holistic, so
that particular ideas and claims make sense in the context of their broader views.

Just to take an example that I treated in my book on Heidegger and Wittgenstein, lots of people
discuss Wittgenstein’s so-called Private Language Argument by pulling it out of the
Investigations, diagramming it, separating out the premises and conclusions, and so on. But I
found it so much more intelligible when seen in the broader context of his other concerns, such
as ostensive definitions, which then brings in notions of training and our form of life, and so on.
So in order to understand an apparently isolated idea, one must have a solid understanding of the
surrounding ideas and, ultimately, a thinker’s basic outlook, their deep philosophical character
that is the source of their views on particular topics, the prism out of which the rainbow flows, so
to speak. Getting to that level of understanding takes years (I am acting as if I have achieved it
and, although it feels like I have, in a few years I’m sure I will look back and see how far I fell
short, and again a few years later, and so on. Scholarship, like life, is an endless cycle of being
humbled anew).

So, I think the criticism that continentals are uninterested in doing philosophy but only want to
slavishly repeat the great old masters, and that the value of past philosophers resides in what we
can apply to today’s issues, gets it wrong. For continentals (broadly speaking, of course), even
this kind of intellectual strip mining can only work after one has dug deep into the rock and spent
a lot of time learning the contours of a thinker’s mind.

As far as topics go, I have been most engaged with realism. What more paradigmatically
philosophical question could there be than what is real? I think this issue ties into the question of
what kind of creatures we are, of what it means to say that we are finite. Many of the
philosophers I study connect realism, at least in some forms, with what Putnam famously calls
the God’s-eye view on the world (a phrase coined by Kierkegaard). Without an absolutely
objective perspective, the “real world” becomes a fable, and reality just is what shows up for us,
which is basically how I understand anti-realism.

3:AM: Your book A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism was
immediately praised when it appeared for its scholarship as well as its agility and the skillfulness
with which you handled material from continentals and non-continentals. But before we say
more, can you say something about this divide. You use continental and analytic to label distinct

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positions, and you do so in your new book too, but at the same time you’re working to show that
the supposed divide isn’t really a principled one. Is that right?

LB: Yes, that’s right. I don’t think that the two are so heterogeneous that they simply cannot
speak to each other, nor do I think that the differences are merely superficial or just the
sociological factors of hiring and classification (although these do exert a powerful force in
maintaining the division). It is a real difference. Analytic and continental philosophers have
different intellectual landmarks, vocabularies, favored approaches, senses of what kinds of
moves are allowable or convincing, and much else. Primarily, since I agree with Gadamer that
philosophy is a kind of conversation that follows its own winding path, the two are like
conversations that started from a common root but split and then, “knowing how way leads on to
way,” the initial divergence widens. This is why just eavesdropping on the other branch often
produces mere confusion and frustration—if you haven’t been following the thread, then
individual comments seem to come out of nowhere.

This raises the holism of philosophy a power of magnitude, from an individual’s oeuvre to their
historical context as well. As Douglas Adams the wise demonstrated, you can’t understand an
answer without the question and philosophy, like most human endeavors, is a matter of
responding to the problems and ideas one is educated into. Aristotle’s phronesis and akrasia
make more sense when seen as disagreements with Plato’s view of knowledge, Kant’s
epistemology is to some extent an attempt to solve Hume’s problem of induction, and, to
continue the example above, Wittgenstein’s discussion of a private language is a critique of the
Tractatus and the ideas of people like Frege and Russell. This means that when philosophers
from one tradition pick up a book or article from the other, they’re usually missing two crucial
contexts: the rest of that philosopher’s views, and the ongoing conversation that gave rise to the
text. Many then simply dismiss it as obscurantist or dry and trivial, but it takes much more to
actually give it a chance. Filling in this background, primarily of continental philosophy for
analytic philosophers, was one of the main goals of the book. If successful, it can bring readers
up to speed on what is going on, and how these views are reasonable and interesting ways of
adapting and developing their intellectual inheritance.

3:AM: What’s really cool about A Thing is we find you discussing realism and anti-realism
positions of Putnam and Heidegger and Hegel and Davidson and Dummett and the rest cheek-to-
cheek and in the same breath. This is part of your general idea that once we get to know the
different vocabularies of the two camps we can have ‘informed dialogue and debate.’ So can you
say something about the two vocabularies? What would you say to those who are suspicious of
several writers – Hegel and Heidegger being the parade cases I guess – who are accused of being
willfully obscure?

LB: Yes, that accusation has been bandied about a lot. There are quite a few things to say about
it. The easiest is a tu quoque response that there are plenty of difficult analytic writers too. One
of the ones you mentioned — Davidson — is no slouch when it comes to difficulty, although his
writing is peculiar in that, sentence for sentence, I feel like it’s perfectly clear but when I look up
and try to summarize what he just said, it slips through my fingers (Quine can be like this too).
And Wittgenstein, arguably the single most important analytic philosopher, was extremely

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cryptic and actively averse to argumentation, yet he largely got a pass (I catalogue his and
others’ comments about this in my book).

Tu quoque is a fallacy, I realize — just because the accuser does it, that doesn’t make it right —
but in this case it can remove the sense that one side is dedicated to clarity, truth, justice, and the
American way while the other is a bunch of mush-heads wallowing in jargon and obscurity. A
large degree of clarity has to do with familiarity. Once you’ve spent time with these texts, you
master the vocabulary and it changes from an obstacle to a help. Sam Wheeler said that Derrida
found Being and Time perfectly clear whereas Naming and Necessity was completely obscure to
him. Part of the reason must surely be that he had a firm grip on Heidegger’s context whereas
Russell’s understanding of proper nouns — the object of Kripke’s critique, was not well-known
to him.

Another thing has to do with what I mentioned above, the real newness of these ideas. Heidegger
is quite explicit about this — he does not want to use the usual words like “consciousness”
because, no matter what he says about them, the very word smuggles in the older meanings he
wants to dispense with. If grammar and vocabulary can contain philosophical assumptions
(Russell actually says the exact same thing about our subject-verb grammar as Nietzsche), then
we need to be innovative with our words if we are to be innovative with our thoughts.

3:AM: Anti-realism as you construe it begins with Kant and his idea that categories of
knowledge and experience are organised by the human mind. This has been a very sexy idea in
modernity and post-modern thinking and you argue that understanding the historical
development of anti-realism allows realists to appreciate the power of anti-realist thinkers. So we
get Dummett, Davidson, Putnam, Hegel, Heidegger, Foucault all developing along a similar
trajectory. Could you perhaps say what you think binds them in this process and what would be
lost if none of the non-anglo-americans had been part of the process and vice versa? I guess the
thought is: why should we heed obscure vocabularies when when enough are speaking clearly?

LB: One small comment—although Davidson is certainly part of the conversation, I wouldn’t
quite classify him as an anti-realist (and Putnam only was for a period). I quite agree with your
point — if they are all just saying the same thing, then all this work would hardly be worth it.
But although they’re talking about overlapping topics, and some of the same ideas do pop up in
both traditions, I don’t think analytic and continental philosophy developed the same trajectory
nor are they just saying the same things. Again invoking Gadamer, it is these differences that
make a conversation worthwhile, allowing each to bring new perspectives and insights to the
table.

If I were to briefly summarize the most distinctive contributions of continental figures, I would
say that they think more about the implications of the topic for the self. This is one of the big
changes from Kant to Hegel — Kant believes that all subjects have the same transcendental
faculties and so structure the (phenomenal) world in the same ways, a unity which grounds the
universality of math and science. Hegel takes the crucial step of introducing history into the self,
so that the subjectivity that gives shape to the world itself develops, thereby giving rise to
multiple worlds. From this point on, the self dissolves more and more — into history, into
temporary coagulations of will to power, into epochs, power-systems, self-differentiating

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systems of elements, etc. Continental figures are also more interested in the ethical ramifications
of anti-realism; for example, Foucault is deeply concerned about the way the human sciences
justify their classifications of people as abnormal by appealing to a realist notion of human
nature. The claim to knowledge conceals its power effects.

3:AM: A realist – and Searle is the philosopher we might have as the stand-in for this argument
– might resist the charms of abandoning assumptions of correspondence that the anti-realists –
and Heidegger after ‘The Great Turning Around’ in particular – see as the only way to go. Can
you say something about this crucial disagreement. It has been the source of genuine bitterness
that seems to go beyond just intellectual disagreement. What do you make of the dispute and the
unpleasantness attached to it? (I’m thinking as an example of the exchange between Derrida and
Searle back in the day!)

LB: Yes, Searle is quite successful in resisting its charms. There’s one essay where he says that
the loss of faith in the correspondence theory of truth signals the abandonment of rationality and
the collapse of Western civilization, which seems slightly alarmist to me. It also makes me
wonder what he thought of Kant. While nominally subscribing to the theory, Kant is the one who
makes it untenable by taking off the table the object that our thoughts or propositions would
naturally correspond to, namely, the world as it really is.

I think one reason why this change appears so disturbing is that dropping correspondence truth
seems to amount to the abandonment of truth full stop. If our beliefs cannot be compared with
the world, then they just float free, reality is whatever we believe it to be, and a thousand
caricatures are born (if I had a nickel for every time someone uses the phrase “anything goes” in
this context….). In fact, I think that one of the main topics throughout continental philosophy has
been to come up with alternative conceptions of truth, not giving it up, whatever that would
mean. As I try to show in my book, most of the great continental philosophers come up with new
theories of truth; each of these has its problems, no doubt, but each also has its reasons and is
intelligible against the background of the inherited ideas and problems.

3:AM: Some of my best friends side with Derrida over Searle so I wonder whether you could
say why you think Derrida is a genuine contributor to this anti-realist tradition? I suppose there’s
a little bit of skepticism in my voice that he should be considered as substantial a philosopher as,
say, Michael Dummett, but that may well be just me being boorishly snarky and I don’t want to
be that.

LB: I think Derrida is a great philosopher, absolutely brilliant. In that particular “dialogue,” I
think Derrida wiped the floor with him, at least in the first round (it’s pretty obvious in Searle’s
first response to Derrida’s take on Austin, that Searle had barely read Derrida, assuming that a
skim would give him all the ammunition he needed to expose him as a fool. Derrida easily shows
how superficially Searle was arguing, raising objections against him that Derrida himself
expounded elsewhere in the text. It always makes me think of that scene when, after Rocky
knocks him down in the first round, Apollo Creed’s manager tells him, in a tone of incredulous

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outrage, that Rocky thinks it’s actually supposed to be a fight! Anyway, Searle’s later responses
are much more informed).

Derrida does what philosophers have always done: he starts with reasonable, plausible premises
and then follows them out to conclusions that seem bizarre, especially if you leap right to the
conclusions. But, to bring in the tu quoque* again, is his view on the undecidability of texts any
stranger than Quine’s indeterminateness of sense, or even all that different (different, yes, but
fundamentally so?)?

Of course, Derrida’s difficulty is exacerbated by a kind of performative dimension to his

writings. He believes that language is inherently unstable and that a text’s meaning is always
open to more than one legitimate interpretation (not infinitely open—readings must be based on
what is actually written), and he shows this occurring in his own writing, playing with language
and emphasizing ambiguities. This is all very carefully done and, with some work, you can see
what he’s doing, but it is very different from our normal ways of reading and, if you don’t have
some patience, it comes across as impenetrable gobbledygook. Note, however, that this way of
writing follows from his views on the nature of language. Surely this is a sensible an approach as
Quine’s describing the fact that there is no fact about meaning in as clear and unequivocal a way
as possible.

He is accused of not doing philosophy, of attacking and rejecting reason, and of not reading his
subject matter carefully. But just what philosophy is and how it works and what is allowed to be
reasonable is precisely what is at issue in a lot of philosophy, and is often challenged by the great
philosophers. Frege would have dismissed Austin’s meticulous taxonomies of the everyday use
of words as entirely irrelevant to philosophy. Later Wittgenstein would have thought the
discussion of alternate worlds an excellent example of philosophical nonsense, as would the
logical positivists for entirely different reasons. Surely many analytic figures are “not doing
philosophy” in the sense understood by others, but because these schools are familiar, and the
way they developed out of their predecessors makes them intelligible, these are seen as
discussions among reasonable adults. Derrida, however, gets consigned to the children’s table
because it looks like he’s just throwing food and making rude noises. The very notion of what
philosophy and reason are changes, a process that seems to speed up in continental philosophy,
so that accusations of someone “not doing philosophy” really mean, “not doing philosophy the
way I understand it and the way those I read and talk with do it.” One may disagree with the
changes someone tries to introduce, of course — that’s part of the discussion — but the tacit
appeal to a permanent set of values and procedures seems to me to be distinctly unphilosophical.

*Tu quoque (/tjuːˈkwoʊkwiː/;[1] Latin for, "you also") or the appeal to hypocrisy is an informal
logical fallacy that intends to discredit the validity of the opponent's logical argument by
asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion(s).

Tu quoque "argument" follows the pattern:

1. Person A makes claim X.

2. Person B asserts that A's actions or past claims are inconsistent with the truth of claim X.
3. Therefore X is false.[2]

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An example would be

Peter: "Based on the arguments I have presented, it is evident that it is morally wrong to use
animals for food or clothing."

Bill: "But you are wearing a leather jacket and you have a roast beef sandwich in your hand!
How can you say that using animals for food and clothing is wrong?"[2]

It is a fallacy because the moral character or past actions of the opponent are generally irrelevant
to the logic of the argument.[3] It is often used as a red herring tactic and is a special case of the
ad hominem fallacy, which is a category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on
the basis of facts about the person presenting or supporting the claim or argument.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Derrida is an extremely rigorous thinker and an extremely thorough reader. He reads texts
incredibly closely, more so than anyone else I’ve ever encountered, paying attention to
everything on the page. He shows us how we usually read with blinders of expectations on,
sifting out what we take to be important from what we know to be marginal. Derrida on the other
hand reads it all, and rigorously draws out the consequences, often to surprising ends. He
grounds all of his admittedly strange interpretations in the text, a necessity he insists on
repeatedly (I cover all this with quotes in the Derrida chapter of A Thing). What’s really bizarre
is that those who accuse him of not reading and not meeting the standards of scholarship
themselves have rarely read anything of his, or very little and with little effort. This is
understandable — without a lot of background knowledge and a lot of patience, he is very
hard—but then, by those very standards, you shouldn’t publicly denounce him. The famous letter
protesting Cambridge’s awarding him an honorary degree actually attributes a quote to him that
he never said or wrote!

It’s hard to give a substantive account of his contributions in the course of an interview, but I
would point to his innovative views on and practice of reading and language in general, which go
far beyond formulaic descriptions of deconstruction. I would also point to his ideas about the
contradictions, instabilities, and paradoxes inherent in many of the ideas we take to be stable and
unproblematic.

3:AM: What do you say to people who just think you can’t have these philosophers really
talking to each other because its not just different vocabularies we’re dealing with but different
problems? I guess you don’t like that idea.

LB: Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I try to get them to talk to each other and the
question — as far as my work is concerned — is whether I succeed or not. The historical
argument is that both traditions can be traced back to Kant, who initiated anti-realism. Most
continental philosophers followed him in this, extending and developing the basic idea that we
organize experience into all sorts of interesting configurations. Analytic philosophy, on the other
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hand, was born (on one telling) of Frege’s realism and Moore and Russell’s realist rebellion
against Idealism, itself a development of Kantian anti-realism. But arguing against something
still keeps it a topic of conversation. Later, as often happens, the pendulum swung back and a
number of analytic thinkers came to embrace at least some elements of anti-realism (Putnam
explicitly says that he got his “internal realism” from Kant).

But the argument rests primarily on drawing the main ideas of realism and anti-realism (I come
up with 6 theses in my book) from prominent analytic thinkers such as Russell, Dummett,
Wittgenstein, Putnam, Goodman, Davidson and others, and using this as a lens to examine
continental work. Success would mean that this lens brings these very difficult thinkers’ work
into focus and clarifies the course of continental philosophy as the development of these ideas.

3:AM: So in your new book we get a similar sort of dialogic bridge being built but this time
instead of an overview we get it focused down on two major representatives of what you are
suggesting is a phony divide between continental and analytic philosophy. This is what you call a
‘deep bore’ exercise. So on the one hand we have Heidegger and on the other Wittgenstein. It’s
clear that you find both awesome presences, philosophers of the first rank. So could you briefly
say what it is about these two that holds you spellbound?

LB: It’s not that the divide is phony, but that it is surmountable, and fruitfully so. I hope it’s only
“deep bore” in one sense! I find these thinkers absolutely captivating, more so than anyone else I
have ever encountered. I’m hardly alone here — both have virtual cults devoted to them (can you
think of any other philosophers who have entire books devoted to their houses?). They have
taught me the most about myself and about life. If aliens landed and wanted to know what it was
like to be a human (rather than a bat), I would give them Nicomachean Ethics and Being and
Time because these capture the texture of human life better than anything else I’ve read, except
perhaps One Hundred Years of Solitude. On Certainty would be on the short list, too, but it’s
more narrowly focused. Of course, the aliens would almost certainly disintegrate me for making
them read such difficult stuff, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.

3:AM: ‘Wittgenstein and Heidegger constantly put language under fire’ is something you cite
from Stanley Cavell with approval. But you don’t agree do you that what we should be doing is
making the rift in the philosophical mind between so called continentals and so called analytics
palpable, as Cavell advises we do, because it already is palpably palpable! I think you suggest
rather that we should be aiming at mutual translation so the rift is healed and dialogue can
continue as it used to be in the time of Kant et al. You say at one point that ‘one way to know a
philosopher is by the company she keeps’. You point out that Wittgenstein has been connected
with philosophers such as Derrida, Lyotard, Saussure, Kierkegaard and so on, but his
relationship with so called analytics you also say ‘has always been problematic’. Doesn’t this
weaken your claim that this is a mutual translation exercise of prototypes of the two traditions if
Wittgenstein is so problematic? Heidegger sure is absent from one half, but Wittgenstein himself
isn’t fully there either. Wouldn’t it have been more illuminating to get someone like Fodor and
Heidegger into the same place? Or would you be saying that although problematic Wittgenstein
keeps company with Russell, Frege, Peano and so on, so he’s still useful?

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LB: Yes, I don’t want arguing to stop so that we can see that really we’re all saying the same
thing deep down — how boring would that be! I want arguing to begin — that’s how we learn
from each other.

Interesting point about Wittgenstein — he is a very peculiar figure. Here’s a thought experiment:
imagine that he had played no public role in 20th century philosophy but just scribbled things
down in obscurity, and his writings were suddenly discovered and published this year. What
would we make of them? How would we classify them? His early work takes up Frege and
Russell’s issues, certainly, but also Kant, their arch-nemesis, and Schopenhauer. And the primary
interlocutor of his later work seems to be his earlier self! He is almost certainly the analytic
figure that continentals are most interested in and feel most at home with, partially due perhaps
to the fact that he knew and admired Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard — he even defended
Heidegger to the Vienna Circle. Now that’s chutzpah!

However, Wittgenstein’s de facto intertwinement with the history of analytic philosophy makes
this classification unavoidable, if qualified. It’s just really hard to tell the history of analytic
philosophy without him. And, although I have heard that his stock has dropped in analytic
circles, he’s still taught a lot, making a connection with him helpful in laying the foundations for
a broader dialogue. But I didn’t strategize about how best to build a bridge and then hit upon this
pairing; the topic just attracted me, as most things I write about do. Like philosophy itself, it
chose me more than I chose it. The main reason I joined these two figures is because I found
them so fascinating and I saw so many interesting connections that had not been explored very
thoroughly.

3:AM: You take both Heidegger and Wittgenstein to be philosophers who developed not one but
two distinct philosophies. So this means you dismiss revisionist readings of Wittgenstein which
argue that there is only a single philosophy? Is it partly their ability to continue to change and
challenge themselves that appeals to you as a thinker? As you have developed your themes
around continental and analytic, have you changed your mind over things?

LB: Yes, I have a fairly standard reading of the Tractatus as making metaphysical claims and of
Wittgenstein’s “turning” as rejecting much of that project. There are important continuities, of
course — he always took philosophy to be a matter of clarifying confusions rather than
discovering facts, for example — but I read much of his later work as an extended critique of the
kind of mindset that gave rise to the Tractatus, not a continuation of it.

It is impressive that both thinkers developed and grew like this, although their attitudes towards
this are very different: Wittgenstein berates himself mercilessly for his earlier mistakes whereas
Heidegger insists that his later ideas are what he was really thinking all along by subjecting his
early writings to Procrustean readings.

One way that my own thinking has changed is that I’m more interested in realism than I used to
be. Although A Thing does not exactly endorse or promote anti-realism, I found it extremely
convincing and gave it a very sympathetic treatment. I still find much of it persuasive, but I’m

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now interested in the possibility of a realism that has learned the lessons of anti-realism, a — if
you’ll forgive the monstrous neologism—post-anti-realist realism. I talk about this in my paper,
‘A Brief History of Continental Realism’), and am presently writing a book on it.

3:AM: Both thinkers were concerned with the whole philosophical project. So can you first of
all set out what these two thought philosophy was and what it wasn’t, or shouldn’t be?

LB: They thought of it as primarily an activity rather than a method whose importance lies solely
in its results, as a journey rather than an arrival. Heidegger was more interested in discoveries
than the later Wittgenstein, but both thought of it as something that changes your life rather than
a dispassionate inquiry (this emphasis on conversion over conclusions is more apparent in
Wittgenstein’s early work, but I’m writing a paper about its presence in his later writings). They
also drew a stark contrast between philosophy and science, something more common in
continental than analytic philosophy, and were concerned about science’s increasing authority in
Western society.

3:AM: Both thinkers seem to be very concerned with diagnosing errors that occur when thought
becomes disconnected from everyday things or when everyday thoughts are transplanted into
unfamiliar contexts. So ideas like Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’ and Heidegger’s ‘readiness to
hand’ are thoughts that do seem to be connected in some way. ‘Holism’ is what you think binds
the thoughts together. Is this right? Could you say something about this?

LB: Yes, both of your points are right, and they’re connected. Both philosophers believed in
holism which means that individual elements can only be fully understood within their context,
while isolating elements changes and distorts them. So, for Heidegger, equipment operates
fluidly within a context of other tools and our general projects. Stopping and staring at a tool
congeals it into an inert present-at-hand object, which philosophers retroactively read back into
the tool and end up defining everything as substance. Wittgenstein’s later work insists on seeing
words in sentences, sentences in language-games, and language-games within our whole form of
life (it would take a long time to unpack all of this; see Chapter 3 of Groundless Grounds).

The problem is that philosophy, as a contemplative activity, stops this ongoing process to stare
intently at an object, or word or sentence, often displacing it into unusual situations which sheer
off our usual understanding of how to use these things or words, which generates the fantasies of
philosophy. Both of them insist on putting things and words back in their average everyday
home, where we can see them functioning as they normally do (Wittgenstein compares words to
tools and our use of them to the unthinking use of tools a number of times).

http://newbooksnetwork.com/lee-braver-groundless-grounds-a-study-of-wittgenstein-and-
heidegger-mit-press-2012/

Lee Braver Groundless Grounds A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger MIT Press 2012

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are both considered among the most influential
philosophers of the twentieth century. Both were born in 1889 in German-speaking countries;
both studied under leading philosophers of their day – Bertrand Russell and Edmund Husserl,

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respectively – and were considered their philosophical heirs; and both ended up critiquing their
mentors and thereby influencing the direction of thought in both the Analytic and Continental
traditions. In Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (MIT Press, 2012),
Lee Braver, associate professor of philosophy at Hiram College attempts to build what he calls a
“load-bearing bridge” between these often polarized traditions. He argues that both thinkers have
similar arguments for similar conclusions on similar fundamental issues. Both blame the
disengaged contemplation of traditional philosophy for confusion about the nature of language,
thought and ontology, and that attention to normal, ongoing human activity in context presents
alternative fundamental insights into their nature. The groundless grounds of the title is the idea
that finite human nature gives us everything we need to understand meaning, mind and being,
and that to insist that this ground requires justification itself betrays confusion.

http://files.newbooksnetwork.com/philosophy/027philosophybraver.mp3

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/groundless-grounds

Groundless Grounds
A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger

By Lee Braver

Overview
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are two of the most important—and two of the most
difficult--philosophers of the twentieth century, indelibly influencing the course of continental
and analytic philosophy, respectively. In Groundless Grounds, Lee Braver argues that the views
of both thinkers emerge from a fundamental attempt to create a philosophy that has dispensed
with everything transcendent so that we may be satisfied with the human. Examining the central
topics of their thought in detail, Braver finds that Wittgenstein and Heidegger construct a
philosophy based on original finitude—finitude without the contrast of the infinite.

In Braver’s elegant analysis, these two difficult bodies of work offer mutual illumination rather
than compounded obscurity. Moreover, bringing the most influential thinkers in continental and
analytic philosophy into dialogue with each other may enable broader conversations between
these two divergent branches of philosophy.

Braver’s meticulously researched and strongly argued account shows that both Wittgenstein and
Heidegger strive to construct a new conception of reason, free of the illusions of the past and
appropriate to the kind of beings that we are. Readers interested in either philosopher, or
concerned more generally with the history of twentieth-century philosophy as well as questions
of the nature of reason, will find Groundless Grounds of interest.

About the Author

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Lee Braver is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida and the author of
Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (MIT Press) and A Thing of This
World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism.

Reviews
“A well-researched study for those interested in the intersections between analytic and continental
philosophy, and it continues Braver's quest for a new way of doing philosophy as a kind of hybrid
enterprise composed of those two strands.”—Review of Metaphysics

“Few have attempted to read [Heidegger and Wittgenstein] so as to bring them into productive
dialogue. Lee Braver's publication is the latest of these relatively rare efforts.”—Notre Dame
Philosophical Reviews

“With his recent work on Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Lee Braver has accomplished something
remarkable: he has given us an account of two of the past century's most challenging thinkers that is as
insightful and provocative as it is eminently readable...a joy to read...This is an exciting a fertile work, an
invaluable reference for anyone interested in the emerging dialogue between the continental and
analytic traditions.”—Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

“The book is a pleasure to read, due both to its clarity and its humor. Braver has mastered a vast primary
and secondary literature; the book is truly a scholarly tour de force. It is also rare to find a philosopher
who is fluent in both philosophical traditions. This is a terrific book, and it is recommended for anyone
interested in Wittgenstein or Heidegger, the analytic-continental schism, and twentieth-century
attempts to overcome the traditional philosophical project.”—Philosophy in Review

“Lee Braver's Groundless Grounds is an ambitious and groundbreaking volume for making comparisons
of two intellectual giants seldom juxtaposed...Braver's project, which in my estimation succeeds well, is
to bridge what each thinking was doing, finding parallels in Wittgenstein and Heidegger where former
scholars saw distinct, possibly incommensurable, ideas and approaches.”—Journal of Applied
Hermeneutics

Endorsements
“In this admirable book, Lee Braver sets out to bring out the parallels on various levels and on a wide
range of subjects in the work of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, two elusive, and
idiosyncratic thinkers. Thanks to his amazing grasp of what may well be the total works of Martin
Heidegger and of Ludwig Wittgenstein, (as well as the views of a vast selection of relevant
commentators) he is able to bring out deep parallels in the thought of these two thinkers. Indeed,
Braver’s unlikely project turns out to be a great success. Each of these difficult thinkers becomes more
intelligible and convincing when read in the light of the other.”
—Hubert L. Dreyfus, Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley

“Continuing the project of his, A Thing of this World, Lee Braver once again shows how the traditions of
analytic and continental philosophy overlap. Groundless Ground, however, demonstrates this
philosophical intersection by investigating, in depth and in the clearest terms, the thought of Martin

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Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Braver makes a strong argument not for moving beyond the
analytic and continental traditions. Rather, Braver moves contemporary philosophy forward, beyond
idealism and realism, by means of the thought of 'original finitude.' There can be no question that
Groundless Ground is an important book.”
—Leonard Lawlor, Sparks Professor of Philosophy, Penn State University

3:AM: A bridge that you think helps link the two thinkers is Aristotle and his idea of
‘phronesis’. If right, this really does help secure the mutual translation you’re aiming for. Can
you say why you think Aristotle helps us understand these two as working on the same
problems?

LB: Phronesis is a really interesting idea that is very different from the much more common
view of knowledge as the explicit awareness of statable facts. Hubert Dreyfus is a big influence
on me on this topic. Heidegger and Wittgenstein both appeal to this kind of understanding that
obeys very different rules than express knowledge. The problem is that once you stop acting or
talking, you look for the universal formulae that must have been guiding you and read these back
into the original situation, which distorts what actually took place. This is one of the things that
good philosophy “reminds” us of. By the way, I’m not claiming that Wittgenstein got this idea
from Aristotle; he once bragged that he had never read any of Aristotle’s writings (one can only
imagine what Heidegger would have thought of this). I’m just pointing to a precedent for this
uncommon and important view of understanding.

3:AM: Of course what they are thinking about is the idea of foundationalism. In their approach
you find that Hume can be linked with both the Wittgensteinian and Heideggarian story don’t
you? Can you say why this idea of ‘groundless grounds’ is such an important feature of their
work and why this has huge consequences for any philosophical enquiry?

LB: Hume is a really radical thinker, and is the second of the three historical antecedents I
discuss. He’s reacting to, among other things, the Cartesian dream of foundationalism, the quest
to found all that we believe and do on something that is, epistemologically speaking, absolutely
rock-solid. And it’s an all-or-nothing proposition — either we find an ultimate foundation for our
beliefs that itself can withstand all possible challenges, or our beliefs are built on mud and sand
and we don’t really know anything.

Hume found such an ambition ridiculous. There are certain ways we think and look at the world
that are just hard-wired into us; we’re continuous with animals, not angels. We can’t think
otherwise, but neither can we justify these ways of thinking the way people like Plato or
Descartes wanted to. I see Kant as continuing this line of thought in his first Critique (though not
in the second; see the conclusion to A Thing for details). We have to organize our experience in
certain ways that have nothing to do with the way the world really is, and that’s ok. We have no
alternative, and intersubjective agreement can be a kind of knowledge, albeit one quite different

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from what philosophy has always dreamt of. Thought stops being a way to escape the human
conditions, all that is contingent about us, and becomes a part of them.

3:AM: You say of these two philosophers that ‘like Kierkegaard, a thinker both admired, they
strive to construct a new conception of reason itself – one that is free of the illusions of the past,
one that is appropriate to the kind of beings we are.’ Can you say something about this and how
far you think they succeeded and how far their own projects have perhaps become just historical,
superseded by new approaches?

LB: Think about how Plato conceives of reason. Yes, it’s true that we happen to have been born
into bodies that pull our attention hither and thither, that we have been born in this time and
culture rather than that one, brought up to believe in these values and gods and not those, but
none of that touches our deep inner core, our true spiritual self that is merely housed within these
factors without being affected by them. We must use reason to separate ourselves from these
factors that are accidental in both senses of the word. Reason is what frees us from the shackles
of the merely human, a project we see repeated in Descartes’ math, Kant’s ethics, and Frege’s
logic, to name just a few.

Kierkegaard’s conception of reason is like Hume’s in that it is continuous with all kinds of
contingent facts about us like our bodies, culture, our ability to be trained in certain ways and not
in others (this one is Wittgenstein’s), rather than a way to overcome it. This is what I mean by
original finitude — it’s a sense of finitude that isn’t just a limitation or dark reflection of an
infinite mind.

3:AM: If only one of the two had existed, who would you have preferred and why?

LB: Don’t Sophie’s Choice me! What a cruel interview… I guess if I had to choose, I’d take
Heidegger. As much as I love Wittgenstein, his project is to get me to stop doing philosophy, to
perform a philosophical intervention on someone in denial, and damn it — I like doing
philosophy! Heidegger still believes in the ability to use philosophy to learn, and he is still
teaching me new things, even after reading him for nearly 20 years. I think that answers the
question about their obsolescence as well.Foretelling future histories of philosophy is not a
profitable endeavor, but I certainly can’t imagine them fading from view, or even becoming
minor characters. If the view of philosophy as a conversation is right, then there are vast swaths
of 20th Century philosophy that simply cannot be understood without them: phenomenology,
existentialism, post-modernism, logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy, to name a
few.

3:AM: Given that they both took philosophical puzzles to be caused by illusions of grammar and
language, is there not some legitimacy in the thought that there are philosophical puzzles that
survive grammatical and linguistic scrutiny? If this is right aren’t the concerns of both thinkers in
some way less central than they might have seemed at first. After all, aren’t there genuine
metaphysical problems that don’t reduce to our contingent susceptibilities of socialization and
language? Aren’t there ideas of agency and being that are better supported by empirical evidence
than the models suggested by either of these two? And can’t both be read as quite conservative,
even reactionary, in their opposition to skepticism?

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LB: That’s a lot of questions! First, I don’t think that characterization quite fits Heidegger. He
was a firm believer in philosophical topics that are not merely linguistic confusions. Although
language can deceive us, it teaches us much more than it misleads us.

The question of whether there are “metaphysical problems that don’t reduce to our contingent
susceptibilities of socialization and language” — and human nature, I would add—rests on the
question of whether anything does, which is something I have become increasingly doubtful of,
as discussed above.This doesn’t mean, however, that they stop being legitimate philosophical
issues or “genuine metaphysical problems.” We just need to redefine what we mean by
metaphysics. We have to, in a sense, take the “meta” out of metaphysics.

As for agency, my book tried to show that they have an interesting and persuasive conception of
it, which is becoming increasingly well-supported by empirical evidence. I quote some of the
neuro-scientific literature in the footnotes to Chapter 4. I’m not sure I understand what you mean
by conservative or reactionary; I find their responses to skepticism innovative and convincing.

3:AM: Has your work changed the philosophical company you now keep? And do you find the
ecumenical spirit of your work carried on elsewhere by other philosophers? I’m thinking perhaps
Brian Leiter is a parade case of someone who is very much a philosopher as happy reading
Nietzsche and Adorno and Marx as reading Rosenberg, Stanley and Fodor. Is this becoming
more typical in your experience or do you find there is still some pretty hardcore resistance?

LB: In general, I think we will do better philosophy the more, and the more diverse, the thinkers
we’re familiar with. Reading figures who come at topics from extremely different points of view
rather than just with different views helps broaden our perspectives, allowing us to think about
the subject in new ways.

As to the general trend in professional philosophy, I really don’t know. I don’t have my finger on
any pulses. I hope so, but I do see a lot of the sociological features of the profession reinforcing
the division.

3:AM: Jerry Fodor once ruefully noted how the shelves of the philosophy section of ordinary
bookstores were full of Foucault and Derrida and Sartre and hardly ever carried any of his books,
or Rawls or Searle. How do you account for this? It strikes me that it can’t be that people are
looking for simplicity and an easy read, so why haven’t the ordinary public taken to the Anglo-
Americans like they have these others in your opinion? Perhaps there’s a certain kind of reader
out there who relishes obscurity. You’ve done a mighty fine job translating the thoughts so
there’s dialogue, but perhaps dialogue is not what these readers are wanting, but a different
space? In a way, the idea then is that these readers are making their reading a kind of political
act. What would you say to that sort of idea?

LB: I see a simpler answer. As I discussed earlier, philosophy should be read within its context
— who is the author responding to? What questions and problems is she taking up? In one way,
this is truer of continental thinkers because they are very self-conscious of their historical
situation and more likely to name-drop or refer to other thinkers. But in another way, it’s more
applicable to analytic philosophy because of the nature of their main topics.

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Going back to the Kripke example, in order to appreciate Naming and Necessity, you need to be
familiar with previous theories of naming and care about them. You must find the problem
interesting and significant if a new solution is to be interesting and significant, and I think this is
a lot less obvious when it comes to analytic topics. This lack of immediate or obvious relevance
is of course largely invisible to analytic philosophers because they are precisely the people who
are invested in these topics, but the question of how a name hooks onto an object or how we can
rescue propositions such as “The present king of France is bald” just don’t seem all that pressing
to most people. It takes quite a while just to show why that proposition is in any way problematic
in the first place, much less why it matters.

But to be interested in the topics that continental thinkers deal with, you just have to be human.
We all want to know how to face death, whether life is meaningful or not, what we should do
about God’s either non-existence or moral perversity, about the sinister features of seemingly
harmless institutions like schools and psychology. These are of much more immediate concern
and interest, and don’t require so much work just to show that they’re important. I find many
analytic questions important and interesting too; it just takes longer to see why. Which would
seem more obviously worthwhile to a lay-person: the linguistic analysis of ethical propositions;
or a discussion of our responsibility in the choices we make, and our need to create an authentic
self in the face of mass media?

3:AM: And finally, if you were to recommend five books to illuminate the deep set here at
3ammagazine, (other than your own of course, which everyone will now rush out and devour!)
which books would they be?

LB: I loved Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self. One Hundred Years of Solitude, as mentioned
above, is just wonderful. Dreyfus’ What Computers Still Can’t Do illuminates a lot of what I was
saying about phronesis. Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript is way too long and
repetitive, but so brilliant and illuminating; I reread it about every other year. And, what the hell,
some Derrida, just for you! Interviews are a good place to start, as you well know: Positions is
short and I found it very helpful in orienting me when I first started studying him.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

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Having Cake and Eating it With Hume and Spinoza

Hume makes both a metaphysical claim and a psychological claim. The metaphysical claim is that the mind is in...

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Friday, August 24th, 2012.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00048402.2013.862557

Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, by Lee

Braver

Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press,

2012, pp. xvi + 354, £27.95 (hardback).
Jonathan Lewis

Pages 206-207 | Published online: 25 Nov 2013

 Download citation
 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2013.862557
 http://figureground.org/interview-with-lee-braver/

Interview with Lee Braver

© Lee Braver and Figure/Ground

Dr. Braver was interviewed by Laureano Ralón. May 4th, 2011.

Lee Braver is Department Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hiram College. He
specializes in Nineteenth and twentieth century continental philosophy, history of philosophy, the
connections between analytic and continental philosophy, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Foucault.
He is the author of A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Northwestern
University Press, 2007), Heidegger’s Later Writings: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum Books,
2009), Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (MIT Press, 2012).

How did you decide to become a university professor? Was it a conscious choice?

I like the second part of your question, because I’m rather sympathetic with what’s sometimes
called anti-humanism, which argues that we misconstrue the nature of conscious choice. My fate
was at least as much the result of not making decisions as it was of making them. From my first
taste of the subject—Philosophy 101 was my very first college class—I couldn’t get enough;
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling in particular blew me away. Certainly, the pump was
primed. I declared myself sentient at the age of 9 when I realized that just grasping the idea of

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sentience conferred that status upon me. I also clearly remember being fascinated with a cup that
had a cereal mascot holding a cup with a picture of himself hold a cup and so forth. Such are the
stirrings of a young philosophical mind. I knew I wanted more, and the place to get it was graduate
school; inertia then played an embarrassingly large role. Which is not to say that I’m unhappy
with my vocation—there is a great deal to love about the academic life. I’m just not in a position
to evaluate it since, as Nietzsche said of the universe, I have no fleshed out alternative life to
compare it with.

As strange as it sounds to my students, one of the reasons I’m so taken with the subject is that I
bore easily. The complexity of philosophy means that I can think about a topic or philosopher for
a long, long time without getting close to the bottom.

In your experience, how did the role of university professor evolve since you were an
undergraduate student?

I can’t give an informative answer about this since my career has been split between two very
different kinds of schools. I attended medium-sized, moderately prestigious universities, but have
taught at a very small, low-profile liberal arts college, so that any account I could give of the
evolution of the professoriate would suffer from a severe punctuated equilibrium. During the 11
years I’ve taught at my liberal arts college, I have seen the encroaching mentality of the market
that many others have noted. Students think of themselves as consumers who know what they
want and complain when they haven’t gotten it, while schools and programs feel compelled to
justify their existence in market terms, and of course the size of the administration only seems to
increase, regardless of the circumstances.

What makes a good teacher today? How do you manage to command attention in an “age of
interruption” characterized by attention deficit and information overload?

Statistically, I’ve read that the trait that best tracks student learning and positive evaluations is
teacher enthusiasm. When the teacher gets excited about the ideas, it’s often contagious. I don’t
have to simulate this since I find it thrilling to rebuild the structure of an argument and give students
a guided tour through it.

I think that we do need to push back against the distractions and disrespect that’s somewhat
endemic to this generation. I refuse to let students sleep or pass notes in my classes, though it’s
hard to disallow laptops since many students prefer taking notes on them. We need to push back
on grades as well, though this is much easier to do once one has tenure.

What advice would you give to young graduate students and aspiring university professors?

As I said in another interview, graduate students might want to seriously consider other options,
as I did not. It’s a very tough time in academia, and many argue that the trend points to its getting
worse, possibly much worse.

I see a problematic strategy that is unfortunately built into the early stages of an academic
career. On the one hand, grad students and untenured professors are under tremendous pressure

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to publish, and for their own sake they really need to get out as much as possible. However, this
is bad for the profession, collectively. Journals have outrageous backlogs (I recently submitted a
paper to a fairly good journal, and was told that it would be nine months before they could let me
know anything), and so much gets published that really isn’t worth it—extremely narrowly focused
skirmishing, multiple articles and presentations with very slight variations on the same ideas
(smallest publishable slices), etc.

Ideally, one should publish only what deserves to be read, but this is very, very hard and takes a
long time. I wasn’t able to write material of any genuine quality until I was seasoned with a good
five years of teaching and thinking after finishing my dissertation. Since search and tenure
committees rarely read candidates’ work—and who can blame them from doing what they can to
tame the avalanches of paper—the criterion of quantity wins out over quality. But I still tell myself
that quality wins out in the long run.

One piece of advice is to email people when you read something you like. Most publications
create very little feedback, making most authors quite grateful to know that anyone’s reading
something they worked so hard on. And the contacts made this way can have very long-lasting
benefits.

In another interview, R. Kevin Hill spoke of the “overqualified-professor-at-a-less-

prestigious-institution” phenomenon, and you just mentioned that you had attended
moderately prestigious universities but have taught primarily at a very small, low-profile
liberal arts college. What are the pros and cons of being a big fish in a small pond?

Well, I think that in order to experience being a big fish in a little pond, one’s pond would have to
at least have some intimation of one’s size. In my case, whatever my “size” may be, I doubt that
more than ten people at my school know that I’ve published anything. I’m more like a
camouflaged fish, maybe a cuttlefish. To some degree, the ethos of my college is such that it is
not particularly interested in research. It’s a bit like drinking—a glass of wine now and then is
fine, but getting carried away is just gauche.

Of course, I initially had a rather low opinion of publishing myself, partially due to the fact that I
saw it primarily in terms of the narrow skirmishing mentioned above. One of the things that
changed my mind was when I realized that research is not entirely about its readers. At least as
important is the impact on the author. When I write something, I am first and foremost explaining
an idea to myself, one that I can’t fully understand until I’ve spelled it out thoroughly.

One of your areas of specialization is the points of contact between analytic and continental
philosophies and by extension, I suppose, the specific connection between Martin Heidegger
and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In a nutshell, what are the most prominent links between these
two thinkers? Was the later Wittgenstein analytic philosopher?

While writing my first book, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, I
became fascinated with the connections between Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and I’m presently
wrapping up a book on the two titled, Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and
Heidegger, that will be coming out with MIT in January. I think their similarities are both wide

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and deep, but to explain fully would require, well, a book. I wrote 5 chapters, each taking on a
central topic of their work: their views of philosophy, their main candidate for bad philosophy,
holism, the nature of thinking, and anti-foundationalism.

Wittgenstein presents an interesting test for classification. Imagine that he wrote his works in
private, and there were just published today without their implication in the history of analytic
philosophy. What impression would they make on eyes unaware of their
history? The Tractatus obviously has a great deal to say about logic and the philosophy of
language with the clear influence of Frege and Russell, but equally prominent are elements of Kant
and Schopenhauer. Indeed, like Kant’s treatment of science, Wittgenstein is clear that despite its
length, the logic is there to limit language, to set off what lies beyond, the mystic, which is far
more important. And the later work can be just as easily read as a deconstruction of metaphysical
conceptions of knowledge and the self as, say, a work of ordinary language philosophy.

Beyond Heidegger and Wittgenstein, what other points of contact between continental and
analytic philosophies are worth exploring in your view?

If I knew that, I’d be writing on them! I think of the division in a Gadamerian way: each branch
has developed its own prejudices which, shared by each member’s interlocutors, go
unnoticed. Dialogue with those who don’t share them provides extremely fruitful challenges. The
very point of such exchanges is that we don’t know what will come of them—if we did, they would
be almost superfluous. One general point, I suppose, would be one that has been noted by many—
analytic philosophers should pay more attention to the role that history and rhetoric play in
philosophy. The last couple of decades has produced a great deal of high quality work in the
history of analytic philosophy, which is great. There’s a longer answer concerning the flexibility
of reason, which my next book is going to discuss.

Actually, in a recent interview, Professor Dermot Moran declared that the distinction between
continental and analytic philosophy “has had its day.” He pointed out that it especially does
not make sense when you attempt to impose this distinction upon the entire history of
philosophy: “you have this bizarre idea that there are some texts of Plato where he is an
analytic philosopher, and other texts where he is a continental philosopher,” he said. Do you
agree with Moran here?

Well, since they are historical movements, it certainly would be problematic to go back and
classify much earlier philosophers under these more recent rubrics; I don’t particularly see why
anyone would want to do that. But there are clearly divergent approaches to Plato: continentally
influenced philosophers will pay attention to rhetorical aspects of the dialogues such as the setting,
the characters, Socrates’ tangents (which are, virtually without exception, more interesting than
the main topic), whereas analytically-trained philosophers will focus in on the arguments, sifting
them out of all the external factors in an attempt to bring them into direct conversation with
contemporary debates. Obviously, these approaches can and should be complementary; I doubt
you could find a completely pure example of either, but as far as I can tell, there is a difference of
emphasis. The distinction can be real, while of the “family resemblance” type.

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I also want to say that the distinction between continental and analytic isn’t intrinsically wrong or
insidious. Everyone has to specialize. Indeed, from the Gadamerian perspective, it’s precisely the
differences that make dialogue so worthwhile (I just wrote a paper about this on Davidson and
Gadamer). The problem is that people trained in one tradition close themselves off from the other,
in principle. It’s very hard to read philosophy, and it’s almost impossible if you are completely
unfamiliar with the intellectual landmarks someone takes for granted, or with the conversation she
is participating in. But moving from difficult to understand to wilfully obscure and without merit
is a non sequitur, and an insulting one at that. What I’ve tried to do in my work is not erase the
distinction, but lower the ante to join the conversation.

You’ve just wrote an essay entitled Is the Mental a Myth? I believe Hubert Dreyfus often toys
with this turn of phrase during the course of his lectures on Heidegger at UC Berkeley,
possibly as part of his “quarrels” with John Searle. His position seems to be that we don’t
need “minds” (representations, intentional content, etc.) to come in and inform our actions
when we are fully absorbed in the ongoing flow of our daily practices. Following Heidegger,
he believes that there is a much more primordial, non-thematic form of understanding that
is embedded in our skills. What is your position on this issue? Is the mental really a myth?

That’s the title of the anthology; my contribution is “Never Mind: Thinking of Subjectivity in the
Dreyfus-McDowell Debate,” and I actually go further than Dreyfus! Where he sees a great deal
of our daily behaviour as coasting along on autopilot, with conscious intentional thought rarely
arising, I want to collapse the distinction between mindless coping and explicitly conscious
attention. I see all action as reaction to solicitations which permeate the mental and linguistic
realms just as much as the bodily and perceptual ones, as described so well by people like Merleau-
Ponty, Rodney Brooks, and J.J. Gibson. This extension is one of the signal accomplishments of
the later work of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and Chapter Four of my upcoming book explains
the idea at length.

In a nutshell, the claim is that all the phenomena that characterize our being-in-the-world as
absorbed reactions to solicitations apply to the arenas where we are more tempted to believe
ourselves freely, consciously, voluntarily making decisions as well. Just as hot apple pies cooling
on window sills send out tendrils of aroma to pull us towards it by the nose, as the great
phenomenologist Tex Avery has it, so “2+2=__” pulls forth “4.” The same goes for “Socrates is
a man; all men are mortal;….” Even when I relieve my auto-pilot and take charge of my decision-
making, I rely on the way the various options appeal to or repel me. I have to. Without these
claims on us, we would stand paralyzed between the options as Buridan’s ass, with free choice
only being an Lucretian swerve. It will be objected that yes, we receive solicitations, but we are
free to follow or reject them; as Merleau-Ponty quotes Malebranche, they impinge upon us
respectively. But how do we decide whether to resist or give in? Certainly, different solicitations
affect us differently so that one has greater impact than another, but we are already in the terrain
of compatibilism. As far as I can tell, the train of argument only ends in reacting, indecision, or
unmotivated coin-flipping.

What other projects are you currently working on?

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I’m writing a book on continental realism, actually. It takes up a thread that was in my first book,
but seen in a new light. I’m also using it to analyze some works of art and literature, which I’ve
never done before. After that, I’d like to follow up some more on anti-humanism; it’s out of
fashion, but I still think there are some nuggets left.

© Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Lee
Braver
and Figure/Ground with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Suggested citation:

Ralon, L. (2011). “Interview with Lee Braver,” Figure/Ground. May 4th.

< http://figureground.org/interview-with-lee-braver/ >

Questions? Contact Laureano Ralón at ralonlaureano@gmail.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-realism

In analytic philosophy, anti-realism encompasses any position involving either the denial of an
objective reality or the denial that verification-transcendent statements are either true or false.
This latter construal is sometimes expressed by saying "there is no fact of the matter as to
whether or not P". Thus, one may speak of anti-realism with respect to other minds, the past, the
future, universals, mathematical entities (such as natural numbers), moral categories, the material
world, or even thought. The two construals are clearly distinct but often confused. For example,
an "anti-realist" who denies that other minds exist (i.e., a solipsist) is quite different from an
"anti-realist" who claims that there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not there are
unobservable other minds (i.e., a logical behaviorist).

Contents
 1 Anti-realism in philosophy
o 1.1 Michael Dummett
o 1.2 Hilary Putnam's "internal realism"
o 1.3 Precursors
 2 Metaphysical realism vis-à-vis internal realism
o 2.1 Anti-realist arguments
 3 Anti-realism in science
 4 Anti-realism in mathematics
 5 See also
 6 References
 7 Bibliography
 8 External links

Anti-realism in philosophy
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Michael Dummett

The term "anti-realism" was coined by Michael Dummett, who introduced it in his paper Realism
to re-examine a number of classical philosophical disputes involving such doctrines as
nominalism, conceptual realism, idealism and phenomenalism. The novelty of Dummett's
approach consisted in seeing these disputes as analogous to the dispute between intuitionism and
Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics.

According to intuitionists (anti-realists with respect to mathematical objects), the truth of a

mathematical statement consists in our ability to prove it. According to platonists (realists), the
truth of a statement consists in its correspondence to objective reality. Thus, intuitionists are
ready to accept a statement of the form "P or Q" as true only if we can prove P or if we can prove
Q: this is called the disjunction property. In particular, we cannot in general claim that "P or not
P" is true (the law of Excluded Middle), since in some cases we may not be able to prove the
statement "P" nor prove the statement "not P". Similarly, intuitionists object to the existence

property for classical logic, where one can prove , without being able to produce any term

of which holds.

Dummett argues that the intuitionistic notion of truth lies at the bottom of various classical forms
of anti-realism. He uses this notion to re-interpret phenomenalism, claiming that it need not take
the form of a reductionism (often considered untenable).

Dummett's writings on anti-realism also draw heavily on the later writings of Wittgenstein
concerning meaning and rule following. In fact, Dummett's writings on anti-realism can be seen
as an attempt to integrate central ideas from the Philosophical Investigations into the
constructive tradition of analytic philosophy deriving from Frege.

Anti-realism in the sense that Dummett uses the term is also often called semantic anti-realism.

Hilary Putnam's "internal realism"

http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2015/04/why-the-canon-
fight-is-different-in-analytical-philosophy.html

04/21/2015
Why the Canon Fight is Different in Analytical Philosophy; on Heroworship

For a brief spell in the 80’s and 90’s, higher education was consumed by the canon wars. For those
too young to remember, the canon wars were some earnest and intense battles among people who

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couldn’t agree on which authors needed to be taught for students to be considered properly
educated.--Inside Higher Education (2013).

A year ago Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman successfully managed to ignite discussion within
professional philosophy about the status of the canon (recall my response).* Other humanists
might think -- paraphrasing a quip falsely attributed to Heinrich Heine (which doesn't stop the
Wall Street Journal from recycling it) -- that philosophy is the Netherlands of higher education,
everything happens there three decades later. (Genuine humanists know that debates over the
canon are as old as the canon itself.) While there are solid sociological-demographic reasons
that help explain why philosophy remained aloof from the canon wars (the short version:
professional anglophone philosophy is overwhelmingly white, male, change-averse and
unreceptive toward unmasking narratives), there is also a key intellectual reason: within
analytical philosophy the (Western) canon is largely irrelevant to disciplinary
conversations.+ No command over the details of the text is ever presupposed. This is no surprise
because analytical philosophy was founded -- self-consciously mimicking Descartes's
dismissiveness toward book-knowledge -- as a revolt against historical approaches to
philosophy.

While the days may be gone in which one could count on all literature professors to recite
Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, Virgil, Goethe, Dante, and the other mighty dead, especially
Middlemarch, from memory, to this day working knowledge of some such books provides a
shared, contested frame of reference in literary and cultural studies even if nobody thinks
that command of such books is a mark of civilization or even a signal of one's cultural capital.
And while close reading persists in college courses, the idea that literature can replace Scripture
has long been deconstructed, and De Man unmasked; I would not be surprised if it has had its
brief, ironic revival prompted by a Simpsons episode.

By contrast even when I present on David Hume's Treatise to professional historians of

philosophy, let alone generalist philosophical audiences, I make sure to prepare detailed excerpts
of key passages. Hume is the fourth most admired philosopher in history (according to a recent
poll); he is the highest ranked English language philosopher--his Treatise the acknowledged
masterpiece.** Even the anti-historical logical empiricists would say nice things about Hume.
My excerpts are not merely aids to memory; I know that the passages I am calling attention to
are simply unknown. Professional philosophy is not a discipline in which texts from the past are
internalized. (Yes, there are a few Hume scholars that have working knowledge of some texts,
but even among that lovely crowd -- dominated by professional philosophers -- there are very
few people that know Hume's major works really by heart.)

Even when working positions come to be known as Humean or Carnapian (etc.), odds are we are
dealing with Hume* or Carnap*. It doesn't matter, really, if Hume is not a Humean. (The
relationship between, say, Carnap and contemporary Carnapians is very interesting and
illuminating.) While there are a few magisterial clubs within professional philosophy --
Kantians often really try to get Kant right (even at the price of introducing anachronism),
Wittgensteinians even have a second-order debate whether it makes sense to get
Wittgenstein right, etc. --, philosophical puzzles and controversies do not get settled by

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authoritative interpretation of major texts. Of course, interest in such puzzles can be started by
way of some such interpretation.

The above is not to deny that there is an image of philosophy prevalent within professional
philosophy in which a limited number of historical, canonical figures are very prominent:
starting with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle through Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant (etc).
These folk are often, indeed, implicated in subtle and not-so-subtle forms of ideological
domination (or worse). It is worth serious reflection why Gorgias's Helen is unread; why even
specialist scholars are unaware of the male feminism of Toland, Mandeville, and John Millar--all
eighteenth century figures that were once extremely famous. (Even world class Nietzsche
scholars tend to be ignorant on the genealogy of genealogy.) It is shocking that (the first)
professional interest in early modern female philosophers only commenced less than a generation
ago.

If we abolish the canon in professional (analytic) philosophy, we just give folk another excuse
not to read books. This trend may be unstoppable anyway: the textbook is beloved by university
technocrats who hire cheap labor to teach pre-set curriculum with well-defined (achievable)
goals.

For, in addition to the image of philosophy, there are classic works, often drawn from those
canonical figures that figure in the image of philosophy, which are routinely but not exclusively
used to introduce students to philosophy (e.g., an intro to ethics course with Aristotle, Hume,
Kant, and Mill--hopefully Sophie de Grouchy before long, too) [recall, recall, and more if you
use Google]. Arguably, Nietzsche has become canonical within professional philosophy because
teachers could not resist the allure of assigning him in their courses. There could be quite a bit
more experimentation and innovation in the pool of such classics. In preparing a course on
Islamic philosophy, I encountered Ibn Tufayl (recall) and was certainly not the first to be struck
by how easily he could fit in any text-based introductory course in epistemology, philosophy of
religion, and political philosophy.

What does exist in professional philosophy is a kind of hero-worship of living authority

figures and the recently deceased.* Manifestly odd views can endure because they are
associated with some such hero and, more importantly, because they put (often informal, but no
less tight) conceptual and methodological constraints on what is acceptable within professional
discussion. Williamson describes the mechanisms involved in a recent essay: he patiently
explains the fear factor that surrounded Quine for a while [recall my post]. This is why in the
overthrow of such heroes we find more than argument--there is also rhetoric; Williamson
describes Lewis's metaphysics as "extreme" (9) and memorably, but unflatteringly, notes that
Lewis is "also known as ‘the machine in the ghost’ for his eerie computational power,
mechanical diction, faint air of detachment from ordinary life, and beard from another era." (8)

This hero-worship is associated with a lot of the worst features of the discipline; the common
cruelty, the lack of respect for viewpoints associated with outsiders, the willful ignorance, and
the awful systematic demographic patterns of exclusion. So, if we abolish the canon in
professional philosophy without ending the hero-worship not much will change about the
professional practice.

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*This post was prompted by Facebook discussions on hero-worship and the canon, with Jason
Stanley and William Friday Dark. I think the latter, especially, for his focus on the evils of hero-
worship.

+In huge swaths of Continental philosophy, by contrast, there is a canon with an accompanying
narrative that unfolds in fairly predictable ways, and one's contributions are often made as much
in conversation with that canon as one's more humble professional peers.

**Peter Millican has been an advocate of the first Enquiry. Hume himself preferred the second
Enquiry.

Professional Philosophy
12/07/2016
On the Multiplicity of Intelligence and Philosophical Method

To be honest, I think most philosophers are pretty limited in their intelligences. They may be
amazing along a certain dimension of intelligence, but in many cases the other dimensions are
atrophied. And moreover, they don't even recognize the multiplicity of intelligences and think the
kind they have is either the only one or the most important. That, to my mind, is a serious limitation
that negatively affects our discipline.--Sally Haslanger

Haslanger's remarks about merit have received quite a bit of attention (see here at Dailynous,
[recall also my post]), but I have seen no attention focused on the remarks I have quoted.
Haslanger is not making the familiar point -- well it's one that I stress and that Ruth Chang has
made with forceful clarity-- that philosophical training creates intellectual dispositions or
reflexes that undercut the proper functioning of, say, our reactive attitudes or sympathy and,
thereby, the possibility of a virtuous life or acting ethically (recall and here). Rather, she is
making the more subtle point that we do not recognize different ways of (for lack of better
words) being smart. Let's stipulate Haslanger is right about this.*

I want to reflect a bit on what follows from this fact for philosophy. (So, let's allow and ignore
that it may also generate all kinds of interpersonal and moral challenges for philosophers and
their fellow human beings.) Now, it's possible that this oversight is only harmful when we
theorize about the capacities of other agents (in philosophy of mind, epistemology, political
philosophy, normative theory, philosophy of action, applied ethics, etc.). That is, we theorize
smarty-ness in other human beings along too few or impoverished dimensions. Our conception
of agency would then be unidimensional in the way that the economist's homo economicus is.
This need not be a problem as long as we would recognize this unidimensionality as a
disciplinary tick, that allows us to have a lot of efficient conversations and to theorize cleanly
(but partially) about the world. It is, however, foreseeable that, in practice, we would come to
mistake the model for reality. Thinking like a philosopher would be to assume unidimensional-
smartyness-man (or woman).

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As an aside, I do think unidimensional-smartyness-man is packaged into a lot of standard

forms of analysis and the ways intuitions work in epistemology and philosophy of language.
But that's for another time.

But there is another kind of harm, a methodological one for philosophy. A lot of
methodologies that are advocated basically say, do something difficult and rigorous and good
things will follow for the discipline. As it happens, I am very good at this difficult and rigorous
method. Example: Timothy Williamson ("Must do Better.") [I only mention it because I have
harped on the example before--lately I am a big fan of Williamson.] If intelligence is uni-
dimensional then the only question is,' is that the right method for the discipline (or the optimal
one given our present knowledge and resources, etc.)?' and, if it is, how do we make sure that a
lot of us get on with the program.

But if intelligence is not uni-dimensional, then even if one grants that the difficult and rigorous
method proposed by the important person works well to make progress (yeah, okay, let's ignore
my qualms) in philosophy, it is by no means obvious that all would-be philosophers can
contribute by way of that method. It is, after all, equally possible that there is a second-best (let's
stipulate not so rigorous not so terrific method) method that allows some fruitful steps on the
path to true philosophy by folk who are smarty in ways distinct from the important person who
advocates the difficult and rigorous method. Perhaps, the alternative smarties can contribute
quite a lot by following methods more suitable to their intelligence(s). (I think Amia Srinivasian
first pointed this out to me as an implication of some of my own views.) That is to say, I am
unfamiliar of writings in philosophical methodology that soundly establish that theirs is the
unique, only possible method to make progress.

The claim in the previous paragraph is familiar enough from the epistemic advantages of
diversity as discussed in epistemology and philosophy of science. But it's also a moral point
(again Srinivasian taught me this) that is a way to interpret the second norm of the
methodological analytical egalitarianism that I adopt and advocate: experts/philosophers should
not promote policies where the down-side risks of implementation are (primarily) shifted onto
less fortunate others. That is, many of us often advocate methods that are good for us -- we can
flourish by using them -- and the way we conceive the discipline, but that are not evidently
good for others (even if, and often this is a big if, they also conceive the discipline in the same
way). So, if unidimensional-smartyness is false (as I stipulated), then it follows 'we' make others
miserable (qua philosophers) by insisting that they adopt the method privileged by 'us' (and
suitable for 'us').

To be sure, the previous paragraph is not an argument for anything goes. Some methods and
strategies may well be self-defeating or not conducive to any path to wisdom, or philosophical
progress, given our atrophied natures. But one may then explore what could be done to develop
human potentiality.

Continue reading "On the Multiplicity of Intelligence and Philosophical Method"

11/28/2016

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On Secular Priests & Technocrats; the Reluctance of Issueing Normative Pronouncements

When I read people from the early 20th century...discussing their reluctance to issue normative
pronouncements I frequently get something like the following impression....Our forbearers were
very keen to avoid any suggestion that others should defer to their pronouncements on moral
matters, they really did not think they should be deferred to as if they were some kind of
intelligentsia secular-priesthood. They wanted to avoid it being possible to illegitimately translate
the epistemic authority and bully-pulpit one gains as a professor into an ability to command or
sway others with especial [sic] authority, since they thought that we have not earned that or for
other reasons should not be granted it. Of course one gets involved in moral and political life as a
private citizen; but one does so there as an equal, one voice among many. Where one is in some
sense speaking or acting with professional authority one must avoid treating one's lectern as a bully
pulpit, since one has no right to that bully pulpit.

Standing behind this... is some kind of egalitarian ideal of non-imposition, and a vision of the
proper role of intellectuals in public life.(As on the Continent?) I find that people launching the
Berlin-esque critique frequently just brush this aside, and treat these people like they are shallow
technocrats with no interest in public life....But it seems to me that it's at least plausible that the
early analytics were on to something important here, that is worthy of serious reflection in
metaphilosophy, and it wasn't just a refusal to engage but a bit of principled egalitarian politics
that guided their decisions. As it stands I don't think this non-imposition ideal is quite viable in our
present social circumstances -- this because I think that if we none of us say explicitly say ``I think
you should adopt these ends'' but it just so happens that all of the professoriate only treat certain
goals as worth taking seriously, we have collectively violated the spirit of this egalitarian ideal of
non-imposition, even if no-one of us did individually. But those social circumstances are
potentially subject to change, and in any case perhaps the ideal could be refined to account for that.

Plenty of my colleagues in philosophy are responding to recent events by saying that we should,
as a profession, be more involved in public life. I quite agree, and as noted I think Berlin was on
to something in his critique of the more limited or technocratic mode of political engagement. But
I also do sometimes get the impression that some ... of those who launch critiques of technocratic
political philosophy really do have designs on operating as a kind secular-priesthood, and have
authoritarian ideas of how `layfolk' should relate to the moral-expert professoriate. The early
analytic reluctance, when under the guise of a moral professor, to issue normative pronouncements
about the proper ends of social life can start to seem very sympathetic to me when I am struck by
this. So I hope that not only do we start to engage more with the world of practical affairs, but that
as we do so we are self-conscious and reflective about the way in which we relate to our fellow
citizens.--Liam Kofi Bright "Defending Technocrats" @The Sooty Empiric.

Liam's very interesting remarks are a response to one of my older post that I recently recirculated
again. For the record: I edited his remarks a bit, and so removed some of his careful
hedging/clarifications. For the purpose of clarification, let me offer some working definitions of
different kinds of philosophers:

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 the philosopher as secular-priest: somebody that deploys publicly the epistemic authority and
normative bully-pulpit one gains from being a professor in order to pronounce in normative
fashion on current affairs from a superior-in-some-sense perspective
 the philosopher as technocrat: somebody that takes (shared) normative ends as given and works
out the implications of these akin to an engineer.

The first thing to recognize is that the philosopher qua secular-priest and qua technocrat need not
be in tension with each other. One can be a secular-priest philosopher in one's public utterances
and be a technocrat in one's (more esoteric) professional publications. The philosopher qua
secular-priest and qua technocrat only may seem to oppose each other if the technocrat wishes to
pursue her craft in public. These comments do not exhaust the possibilities, of course. But here I
shall remain focused on public philosophy (which recall I distinguish conceptually from punditry
and advocacy). I distinguish among three kinds of public philosophy (recall). I associate the
'public' in public philosophy with a shared life or common good. That is, public philosophy so
understood is committed to a form of minimal political unity--a unity that is constituted by
(educational) practices, narratives, and public understandings that facilitate some dispositions
conducive to minimal, political union. (In a community of angels or philosophers there would be
no need of public philosophy.)

First I list two species of direct public philosophy, which can draw on the results/insights or
distinctions of professional philosophy, but need not do so. Then I mention a third indirect
species:

1. Normative interventions or participation in public debates by professional philosophers and

those trained in professional philosophy.
2. A genre of writing and speaking by intellectuals, who are not professional philosophers -- and do
not engage in the debates/discussions among professionals --, yet engage public(s) on
philosophical topics. (Sometimes these are topics that are not much discussed by recent
professional philosophy.)
3. Facilitating or enhancing social norms, public practices, and political institutions conducive to a
common good is an indirect form of public philosophy. For such practices can instantiate
rational arrangements that make possible, perhaps, constitute a common good which I will
provisionally define (recall) as mutual accommodation and modest forms of mutual receptivity
such that public conversation -- not war or domination -- can be continued.

Now, let's return to Liam Kofi Bright's analysis of the philosopher qua secular-priest and qua
technocrat; it should be immediately clear that these two modes of being do not exhaust the way
one can be a public philosopher. His account of the practice(s) of early analytical philosophers
on these matters is evocative of a species of Weberianism, whose influence of analytical
philosophy is not sufficiently appreciated (recall Weber's (1917) Science as Vocation, "the true
teacher will beware of imposing from the platform any political position upon the student,
whether it is expressed or suggested." By contrast: "When speaking in a political meeting about
democracy, one does not hide one's personal standpoint; indeed, to come out clearly and take a
stand is one's damned duty. The words one uses in such a meeting are not means of scientific
analysis but means of canvassing votes and winning over others." (10)) As an aside, Weber is
clear that public philosophy is the realm of opinion not truth.

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Bright's early analytical philosopher primarily practices indirect public philosophy. Even her
most public interventions tend to be aimed at facilitating more rational public practices and
discussions rather than articulating a normative position as such. Often these interventions have
firm ground in normative commitments (in early analytical philosophy these are often treated as
optative choices beyond rational scrutinity/grounding--a point Bright ignores), but these are, as it
were, withheld with great self-command in order to facilitate a better operation of public reason
(recall this post on Stebbing; and this one). Surprisingly enough, here early analytical
philosophers anticipate the practices of contemporary students of Foucault (and Deleuze)--
who often unmask away this or that public practice and offer us maps of local
terrains/practices while intimating their own normative stances, but without defending them.

So, there are at least three kinds of philosophers:

 the philosopher as secular-priest: somebody that deploys publicly the epistemic authority and
normative bully-pulpit one gains from being a professor in order to pronounce in normative
fashion on current affairs from a superior-in-some-sense perspective
 the philosopher as technocrat: somebody that takes (shared) normative ends as given and works
out the implications of these akin to an engineer.
 the philosopher as social facilitator: somebody that engages in public philosophy in order to help
stabilize or promote social norms, public practices, and political institutions conducive to a
common good

Of course, there are more species of philosophy, some of them highly relevant to our practices of
public philosophy. (I have written on the philosopher-prophet (recall); the philosopher-quietist,
the Socratic political philosopher, the puzzle-solver, etc.) My modest point here today is that one
can reject being a philosopher qua secular-priest as much as being a philosopher qua technocrat.
While there were secular priests among the early analytical philosophers (Russell comes to
mind), they tended to understand these priestly practices as distinct from philosophy as such. In
fact, I would suggest that the truly striking fact about the recent public turn in analytical
philosophy, is that many of its best practitioners combine elements of the secular-priest and the
technocrat, that is, they become priestly technocrats. Our friends combine an unquestionable
commitment to a robust species of moral realism, and they assume they have access to the
normative implications that follow from it. (I take this to be saying pretty much the same as
Bright's they "do have designs on operating as a kind secular-priesthood, and have authoritarian
ideas of how `layfolk' should relate to the moral-expert professoriate.")

Bright expressed his reservations about priestly technocrats by appealing to a kind of

sympathetic norm of respect toward our "fellow citizens." Unfortunately, Bright here assumes a
shared egalitarian ideal. But it is by no means obvious that the (let's stipulate meritocratic)
priestly type embraces this ideal in their hearts. More often than not the priestly type pontificates
on the cognitive biases of the lay-folk, which undermine their capacities. Even if they do
recognize the ideal as binding on themselves, it is by no means obvious that the incentives under
which our priestly-technocrats flourish promote such an ideal of egalitarianism. Rather, our
institutional incentives tend to promote imprudent, expert over-confidence and lack of attention
to the cognitive biases on the experts' themselves. I am not suggesting here that these facts
explain the reticence of some of our forefathers and foremothers (which may have multiple,
overlapping sources), although I would not be surprised if they did.

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11/18/2016
On Putting a Child on this world; Does Philosophy's Show Must Go On?

Imagine a heap of sand. You carefully remove one grain. Is there still a heap? The obvious answer
is: yes. Removing one grain doesn’t turn a heap into no heap.--Timothy Williamson "On
vagueness, or, when is a heap of sand not a heap of sand?" @Aeon 15 November, 2016 [HT
Dailynous]
When I went to bed, in Amsterdam, around 2:30am the night of the US Election, I concluded after
seeing the Indiana returns (where the Democrat was not being as competitive as expected in the
Senate election), and carefully watching Florida and North Carolina returns, that it was not going
to be a Clinton landslide, but a close election. (At that time I had no idea about how Pennsylvania
and the rest of the Midwest were unfolding.) When I awoke three or so hours later, I could not
resist to check the election results and by then it was clear that Trump was going to be the next
President. Much to my own surprise, my first thought was How could I have put a child on this
Earth?*

While the day before election, I had written that "I have no idea what happens if Trump wins,"
my reaction betrayed my sense of unease. Throughout the year, as I have shared in these
musings, I have been concerned about Trumps's embrace of an illiberal, Jacksonian/authoritarian
(misogynist, etc.) political stance. While I did not overlook the fact that the Clinton campaign
deliberately and mistakenly had turned the election into a referendum on Trump's character, I
had watched enough of the debates and his speeches to have come to independent, preliminary
unsettling conclusions.

But I recognized a deeper source of unease; my whole childhood I had been told, by my refugee-
traumatized parents, to treasure my US Citizenship and passport as a kind of backstop or security
blanket to whatever craziness or worse would occur in Europe. While most antisemitism I
encountered locally was nonthreatening during childhood, there was always a quiet daemonic
voice reminding me that the parents or grandparents of nearly all the people I encounter were
complicit, or worse, in Nazi-crimes, or too servile to do anything. (And genuine xenophobia has
become socially permitted again.) I always found it reassuring that the Dutch, and our neighbors,
were protectorates within an American empire. Of course, I recognized that American
exceptionalism was a myth, but we all need to embrace some fictions to live by.

My second thought was, there is no place to run.* America's reach is global. I felt a panic swell
up, and I reflected on familiar names of exiled and refugee philosophers; I paused to reflect on
their friends, forgotten names, who never got out on time. As regular readers know, these daily
musings are a form of therapy. When I logged in to start a post, while the election results and
commentary were being announced on the background, I found myself staring blankly at a
screen--a fatigued paralysis. I am not much prone to writer's block, but I had no desire to remain
frozen in my feelings. Philosophy can be a form of escapism, a means not to feel (recall). I call
this false philosophy. By contrast, in true philosophy the thoughts are felt and, thereby, owned. I
was too fragile, so opted for false philosophy (this piece on Bayesianism), despite the risk that
such intellectual running would just hasten the onset of depression.**

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Not everybody responds to fear in the same way. Some are thrown into panic; I have that with
heights, airplanes, snakes, and some forms of social embarrassment. But to my own surprise after
I completed the post, I could sense a decision: I really don't know what will happen; I am a
witness to the unfolding events and devote my efforts to understanding them. I joked, to no body
in particular, that I should rename these daily digressions, notes toward a post-apocalyptic
liberalism.

A few days ago, when Dailynous linked to Williamson's piece, my first thought was, he's still
minutely working his way through yet another sorites paradox. Just as I was about to start a
satirical mental rant, I noticed how he was making the argument for relevance: "More important
legal and moral issues also involve vagueness." Yeah, vagueness really does matter, and not for
the last time I agreed with him that vagueness is not a problem about logic. (I tend to think
sometimes it's an ontic problem, but I am happy to concede it is often merely epistemic.)

Much to my surprise I was vehemently annoyed at Williamson for making the case for the social
significance of his work on vagueness. I wanted him to double down on contingently non-
concrete objects, and forego selling philosophy to an indifferent public; it's degrading. In
reflecting on my irritation, I recognized that precisely because political events demand our
attention, we should not sacrifice all the noble ends that justify life. If the only proper end
becomes the political fight, then the bad dudes have won and even conquered our inner sanctum.
I made a mental note to check if one of my bourgeois heroes, a Havel or an Arendt, had made the
point somewhere about the significance of defending (philosophical) art for art's sake.

And, then suddenly, I am not even sure I was still even reading the words, I had made it to the
final paragraph of Williamson's piece, and stumbled across these lines:

Although language is a human construct, that does not make it transparent to us. Like the children
we make, the meanings we make can have secrets from us.

If analytical philosophy could reach maturity, perhaps I could live without my security blanket.

http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/origin-of-analytical-
philosophy/

09/25/2015
When will the progress of analytical philosophy be defended without propaganda?

Frege’s article had a galvanizing effect on such philosophers as Bertrand Russell. When the young
Russell arrived as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890, philosophy was dominated by
the ponderous metaphysics of German idealism, which pounded out propositions purporting to
delve into the murky and nebulous features of “the Absolute.” An older Russell once reminisced
that he had thought of language as transparent, the medium of thought that could simply be taken
for granted. Frege demonstrated otherwise. Instead of trusting language to transport one into
intimacy with the Absolute, it might be good to first discover how language manages to do more
basic things, in the manner of Frege. Modern philosophy of language and analytic philosophy

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were both born in this same technical turn taken by philosophy. "What Philosophers Really
Know" by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (October 8, 2015, New York Times), reviewing
Philosophy of Language: The Classics Explained by Colin McGinn. {HT Liam Kofi Bright &
Jason Stanley}

After the string of (self-inflicted) bad press received by Colin McGinn's teaching style and recent
academic publications, it's nice to be reminded of some of his academic virtues in Goldsteins
review ("McGinn has succeeded brilliantly in demonstrating the substantive progress made in
philosophy of language.") The review itself is a pleasure to read and makes useful distinctions
among, "philosophy of language," "the linguistic turn," and "ordinary language philosophy," that
should help the public better understand analytical philosophy's practices and history. Yet the
review is framed as a robust defense of the "cumulative progress of" analytical philosophy.
And here the review manages, despite astute observations (as regular readers know, I like her
resistance to the idea that consensus is constitutive of expertise), to turn into clownish
propaganda.

There are four sure ways of recognizing one is in the realm of analytical propaganda: (i) the
origin myths of the rebellion against British Idealism contain obvious blunders: (ii) analytical
philosophy's progress contains neither Kuhn loss nor other problems; (iii) obligatory mention of
Heidegger as bad guy; (iv) the role of ethics in analytical philosophy's birth is systematically
effaced.

On (i): above, I quoted the treatment of British Idealism and Russell. Russell did not attribute to
the British Idealists the idea that language could be transparent; it was the view that the youthful
Russell entertained himself while writing one of the masterpieces of early analytical philosophy,
The Principles of Mathematics. ( Peter Hylton has made the point in print.) His later self,
perhaps influenced by the encounter with Wittgenstein's writing, saw the error of his earlier
analytical ways! I am no specialist of British Idealism, but I would be amazed if they held
something like the transparency of language thesis. They held, rather, (in Bradley's hands) that
language was something to be left behind in (the ascent toward) the Absolute (a view shared with
folk like Plato and Spinoza and several other early modernists).

Goldstein's treatment of the origin of analytical philosophy, which was undoubtedly common
when she was a PhD student, is especially cringe-worthy because it provides a dated view of
what's going on in (ahh) the best analytical departments. Here I don't just mean the work by
historians of analytical philosophy, but rather the work by metaphysicians like Jonathan Schaffer
(in a famous paper) and Michael Della Rocca (in one of my favorite papers), who have returned
with a confident and self-critical eye toward the origin myths of analytical philosophy. They
show that today we can reflect on the history of analytical philosophy without anxiety.

On (iv): at one point Goldstein writes, "Analytic philosophy originated with philosophers who
also did seminal work in mathematical logic, most notably Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell,
and the alliances with both formal logic and science are among its defining features." She then
goes on to offer the gratuitous and obligatory dismissal of Heidegger ((indeed he is coupled, en
passant, with "Slavoj Žižek") thus covering (ii)). Goldstein's position makes sense of the self-
conception of analytical philosophy as advanced during the early Cold War by influential

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disciples of the first generation of logical positivism and culminated in Dummett's efforts to turn
Frege into the true founder of analytical philosophy. This story effaces the role of one of the
founders, G.E. Moore, whose reputation rested and rests, in part, on his work in ethics not logic.

There are two further problems in this narrative: first, by joining analytical philosophy into an
"alliance" with science, Goldstein quietly glides over Wittgenstein's philosophical hostility to
natural science. It also misses, say, the role of analytical philosophy's practice as friendly critic to
science's public roles as manifested in the wonderful work by the second generation analytical
philosopher, Stebbing, who is generating more interest both among those who care about
analytical philosophy as public philosophy and the nature of responsible speech/propaganda as
well as those who wish to recover the roots of metaphysical analysis.

But, more subtly, second, Goldstein's picture completely leaves Sidgwick's role in the origins of
analytical philosophy out of the story.* By this I do not merely mean that Rawls, Parfit, Singer
(et al) are in (ongoing) conversation with Sidgwick; rather, I also mean that the Cambridge side
of analytical philosophy originates in the circle around Sidgwick and students who were
preoccupied with a whole range of problems (besides ethics, logic, and linguistic philosophy),
including, political economy, philosophy of science, probability, etc. In my view this story has
not been fully told yet, but would include, in addition to the names already mentioned, also
Ramsey, W.E. Johnson, Broad, and Keynes father and son.

Finally, all change, even the progressive, "technical" ones, can entail losses ("progress" and
"technical" are repeated like a mantra in the review). Goldstein wisely (and correctly) places
analytical philosophy's progress "more in the discovery of questions, which often includes the
discovery of the largeness lurking within seemingly small questions." But she does not reflect on
the fact that during this progress some questions may have become harder to ask+ and other
worthy questions were regularly overlooked (if not mocked); in closing her review, Goldstein
recognizes that there remain questions of enduring interest "not limited to philosophers," but fails
to reflect on our tradition's repeated willingness to pretend that the most profound are not really
philosophy.

Continue reading "When will the progress of analytical philosophy be defended without
propaganda?" »

http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/philosophical-traditions/

12/16/2016
On Graeber's Genealogies of Philosophy

In Athens, the result was extreme moral confusion. The language of money, debt, and finance
provided powerful — and ultimately irresistible — ways to think about moral problems. Much as
in Vedic India, people started talking about life as a debt to the gods, of obligations as debts, about

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literal debts of honor, of debt as sin and of vengeance as debt collection. Yet if debt was morality
— and certainly at the very least it was in the interest of creditors, who often had little legal
recourse to compel debtors to pay up, to insist that it was — what was one to make of the fact that
money, that very thing that seemed capable of turning morality into an exact and quantifiable
science, also seemed to encourage the very worst sorts of behavior?

It is from such dilemmas that modern ethics and moral philosophy begin. I think this is true quite
literally. Consider Plato's Republic, another product of fourth-century Athens. The book begins
when Socrates visits an old friend, a wealthy arms manufacturer, at the port of Piraeus. They get
into a discussion of justice, which begins when the old man proposes that money cannot be a bad
thing, since it allows those who have it to be just, and that justice consists in two things: telling the
truth, and always paying one's debts. The proposal is easily demolished. What, Socrates asks, if
someone lent you his sword, went violently insane, and then asked for it back (presumably, so he
could kill someone)? Clearly it can never be right to arm a lunatic...

As we all know, Socrates eventually gets around to offering some political proposals of his own,
involving philosopher kings; the abolition of marriage, the family, and private property; selective
human breeding boards. (Clearly, the book was meant to annoy its readers, and for more than two
thousand years, it has succeeded brilliantly.) What I want to emphasize, though, is the degree to
which what we consider our core tradition of moral and political theory today springs from this
question: What does it mean to pay our debts? Plato presents us first with the simple, literal
businessman's view. When this proves inadequate, he allows it to be reframed in heroic terms.
Perhaps all debts are really debts of honor after all. But heroic honor no longer works in a world
where…commerce, class, and profit have so confused everything that peoples' true motives are
never clear. How do we even know who our enemies are? Finally, Plato presents us with cynical
realpolitik. Maybe nobody really owes anything to anybody. Maybe those who pursue profit for
its own sake have it right after all. But even that does not hold up. We are left with a certainty that
existing standards are incoherent and self-contradictory, and that some sort of radical break would
be required in order to create a world that makes any logical sense. But most of those who seriously
consider a radical break along the lines that Plato suggested have come to the conclusion that there
might be far worse things than moral incoherence. And there we have stood, ever since, in the
midst of an insoluble dilemma.--David Graeber Debt: The First 5000 years, pp. 195-7.

It is much noticed that Graeber's book is a polemic both against what he takes to be the
purportedly scientific "discipline of economics" (which he treats as founded by Adam Smith (p.
24)) as well as a polemic within political economy (with Graeber taking sides with various
heterodox positions). I have not seen it remarked yet that the polemic extends toward philosophy.
Graeber executes the polemic with great panache in the space of a few pages. Before I get to that,
I should note that he relies on the striking methodological claim that "anthropologists have the
unique advantage of being able to observe human beings who have not previously been part of"
philosophical conversation "react to" philosophical "concepts." Thereby, anthropologists are thus
given moments of "exceptional clarity" that "reveal the essence of our thought." (p. 243)*

The long passage quoted above (I deleted the remainder of the summary of Book I of the
Republic) occurs in the middle of Debt. Graeber treats Plato's Republic as (an instance of) the
origin of "modern ethics and moral philosophy." I return to the question of what may count as

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pre-modern or ancient ethics and moral philosophy before long. (Henceforth, I'll use 'moral
philosophy' or 'modern moral philosophy' to refer to what he calls "modern ethics and moral
philosophy.") He treats modern moral philosophy as (the) response to conflicts created by the
clash between aristocratic norms or honor systems with commercial and utilitarian values. On
Graeber's account the response fails to provide a coherent theory that can accommodate let's say
the best of the conflicting pulls. Theory suggests that the only coherent alternative is a "radical
break"--one such version is sketched by Socrates in the Republic.

Now, throughout Debt, radical is a word with a very positive valence. It does not follow Graeber
endorses all radical solutions (he dislikes Platonic hierarchy, for example). But rather, he
understands himself as belonging to the minority (as opposed to 'most') among those who
seriously reflect on such matters who recognize that Plato got it right in some sense. That is to
say, systematic modern moral philosophy (which is, thus, always political philosophy!) is always
at odds with the world and can only be made to cohere with the world by nothing short of a
thorough revolution. The insight is not disputed by the majority of serious thinkers -- presumably
aware that many revolutions have a tendency to worsen the world they are supposed to improve -
- decide to muddle on. (There is a sense that Socrates of the Republic belongs to the majority
[see also this post on Le Guin.])

That is to say, Graeber essentially understands the whole history of modern moral philosophy as
a tension between those with a responsible risk aversion on behalf of themselves and humanity
and those few daring souls who are willing to risk all to improve man's estate. Graeber is notable
for insisting that this tension plays out in all major philosophical traditions including ones
(China, India) not initially influenced by Plato. Graeber's interpretation of the risk averse side is
compatible both with a kind of conservative status quo bias and with the thought that the
responsible types opt for small, incremental steps toward the more radical ideal knowing full
well that the ideal itself is out of reach (because it will bump up against internal contradictions
eventually). This is not, in fact, a silly reading of the history of philosophy, although many will
dispute the claim that there can't be a reconciliation between the world and our best moral or
political theory short of radical rupture. The radical response is, of course, itself to be found
within modern moral philosophy.

I infer from Graeber's treatment that pre-modern moral philosophy is not theoretical or
systematic. For, as we have seen, he does not deny that reality of moral evaluation. Recall that he
is committed to three claims that,

 When humans transfer objects back and forth between/among each other or argue about what
other people owe them the same fundamental moral principles will be invoked everywhere and
always;
 Humans have a sense of justice that grounds sociality;
 Most humans are, when given the opportunity, oriented toward a pleasing conviviality.

What Graeber, thus, claims is that it is impossible to systematize these three commitments in a
way that does not end promoting revolution. (As an aside, one may understand Plato's true city
more derisively known as the city of Pigs as a way at approximating these three commitments.)
But that's compatible with finding instantiations of these commitments throughout human
history. So, the alternative to modern moral philosophy is by Graeber's lights a kind of anti-
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theoretical situationism eternally immanent in local mores and practices (he sometimes dubs this
'baseline communism') if they are not corrupted by significant violence. I call this rustic wisdom
(recall). It does not always remain immanent, and it is partially expressed in many religions.

Now, Graeber tells another genealogy of (Greek) philosophy. For, he recognizes that modern
moral philosophy was preceded by "speculations on nature." In his broader story, Thales of
Miletus is the founder of philosophy. As I noted a few days ago in a post on James Ladyman,
this is a recurring trope in the history of philosophy (see Hume), and the way to understand
Thales' philosophy was even a matter of dispute between Hume and Smith (recall). He suggests
that it is no coincidence that the founding of Greek philosophy coincides in time with the
introduction of coinage (p. 245, and the rise of Greek mercenaries). In different contexts I have
suggested that the debate over the meaning of Thales also recurs throughout the history of
economics and political economy (see also this paper; and this one). As an aside, one thing
missing from Graeber's interpretation (as distinct from the tradition) is Thales's (mythical)
significance as an astronomer.

The key to this broader genealogy is that the "peculiar way" in which "pre-Socratic philosophers
began to frame their questions" is (indirectly) a meditation on the nature and paradoxes of
coinage (p. 247); this results in (i) making forms of materialism the "starting point" of
speculative philosophy and (ii) the creation of (historically more popular) systems in opposition
to materialism, but all these oppositional systems introduce (iii) conceptual dualities around
some enduring form vs content or mind vs body distinction (or both; there are shades of
Nietzsche here--Graeber never confronts more monist systems). (Again, this is also said to be
true of non-Greek traditions.)

The underlying thought of -- and the bite of -- Graeber's genealogy is that our inherited traditions
of philosophy fail to recognize that the manner of theorizing is itself conditioned by particular
and peculiar circumstances. In particular, these circumstances presuppose the violent eradication
of forms of life that may be amenable to baseline communism and rustic wisdom (see also this
post on Justin Smith). This is, I think, what Graeber means elsewhere in Debt, "the logic of
identity is, always and everywhere, entangled in the logic of hierarchy." That is to say, the
Graeber critique of philosophy amounts to our unwillingness to recognize the reliance of our way
of (philosophical) life on this violence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences

The theory of multiple intelligences differentiates intelligence into specific (primarily sensory)
'modalities', rather than seeing intelligence as dominated by a single general ability. Howard
Gardner proposed this model in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple
Intelligences. According to Gardner, an intelligence must fulfill eight criteria:[1] potential for
brain isolation by brain damage, place in evolutionary history, presence of core operations,
susceptibility to encoding (symbolic expression), a distinct developmental progression, the
existence of savants, prodigies and other exceptional people, and support from experimental
psychology and psychometric findings.

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Gardner chose eight abilities that he held to meet these criteria:[2] musical-rhythmic, visual-
spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal,
and naturalistic. He later suggested that existential and moral intelligence may also be worthy of
inclusion.[3] Although the distinction between intelligences has been set out in great detail,
Gardner opposes the idea of labeling learners to a specific intelligence. Gardner maintains that
his theory of multiple intelligences should "empower learners", not restrict them to one modality
of learning.[4] According to Gardner, an intelligence is "a biopsychological potential to process
information that can be activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that
are of value in a culture."[5]

Many of Gardner's "intelligences" correlate with the g factor, supporting the idea of a single,
dominant type of intelligence. According to a 2006 study, each of the domains proposed by
Gardner involved a blend of g, cognitive abilities other than g, and, in some cases, non-cognitive
abilities or personality characteristics.[6]

Contents
 1 Intelligence modalities
o 1.1 Musical-rhythmic and harmonic
o 1.2 Visual-spatial
o 1.3 Verbal-linguistic
o 1.4 Logical-mathematical
o 1.5 Bodily-kinesthetic
o 1.6 Interpersonal
o 1.7 Intrapersonal
o 1.8 Naturalistic
o 1.9 Existential
o 1.10 Additional intelligences
 2 Critical reception
o 2.1 Definition of intelligence
o 2.2 Neo-Piagetian criticism
o 2.3 IQ tests
o 2.4 Lack of empirical evidence
 3 Use in education
 4 See also
 5 References
 6 Further reading
 7 External links

Intelligence modalities
Musical-rhythmic and harmonic
Main article: Musicality

This area has to do with sensitivity to sounds, rhythms, tones, and music. People with a high
musical intelligence normally have good pitch and may even have absolute pitch, and are able to

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sing, play musical instruments, and compose music. They have sensitivity to rhythm, pitch,
meter, tone, melody or timbre.[7][8]

Visual-spatial
Main article: Spatial intelligence (psychology)

This area deals with spatial judgment and the ability to visualize with the mind's eye. Spatial
ability is one of the three factors beneath g in the hierarchical model of intelligence.[8]

Verbal-linguistic
Main article: Linguistic intelligence

People with high verbal-linguistic intelligence display a facility with words and languages. They
are typically good at reading, writing, telling stories and memorizing words along with dates.[8]
Verbal ability is one of the most g-loaded abilities.[9] This type of intelligence is measured with
the Verbal IQ in WAIS-IV.

Logical-mathematical
Further information: Reason

This area has to do with logic, abstractions, reasoning, numbers and critical thinking.[8] This also
has to do with having the capacity to understand the underlying principles of some kind of causal
system.[7] Logical reasoning is closely linked to fluid intelligence and to general intelligence (g
factor).[10]

Bodily-kinesthetic
Further information: Gross motor skill and Fine motor skill

The core elements of the bodily-kinesthetic intelligence are control of one's bodily motions and
the capacity to handle objects skillfully.[8] Gardner elaborates to say that this also includes a
sense of timing, a clear sense of the goal of a physical action, along with the ability to train
responses.

People who have high bodily-kinesthetic intelligence should be generally good at physical
activities such as sports, dance, acting, and making things.

Gardner believes that careers that suit those with high bodily-kinesthetic intelligence include:
athletes, dancers, musicians, actors, builders, police officers, and soldiers. Although these careers
can be duplicated through virtual simulation, they will not produce the actual physical learning
that is needed in this intelligence.[11]

Interpersonal
Main article: Social skills

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In theory, individuals who have high interpersonal intelligence are characterized by their
sensitivity to others' moods, feelings, temperaments, motivations, and their ability to cooperate in
order to work as part of a group. According to Gardner in How Are Kids Smart: Multiple
Intelligences in the Classroom, "Inter- and Intra- personal intelligence is often misunderstood
with being extroverted or liking other people..."[12] Those with high interpersonal intelligence
communicate effectively and empathize easily with others, and may be either leaders or
followers. They often enjoy discussion and debate. Gardner has equated this with emotional
intelligence of Goleman."[13]

Gardner believes that careers that suit those with high interpersonal intelligence include sales
persons, politicians, managers, teachers, lecturers, counselors and social workers.[14]

Intrapersonal
Further information: Introspection

This area has to do with introspective and self-reflective capacities. This refers to having a deep
understanding of the self; what one's strengths or weaknesses are, what makes one unique, being
able to predict one's own reactions or emotions.

Naturalistic

Not part of Gardner's original seven, naturalistic intelligence was proposed by him in 1995. "If I
were to rewrite Frames of Mind today, I would probably add an eighth intelligence - the
intelligence of the naturalist. It seems to me that the individual who is readily able to recognize
flora and fauna, to make other consequential distinctions in the natural world, and to use this
ability productively (in hunting, in farming, in biological science) is exercising an important
intelligence and one that is not adequately encompassed in the current list."[15] This area has to
do with nurturing and relating information to one's natural surroundings.[8] Examples include
classifying natural forms such as animal and plant species and rocks and mountain types. This
ability was clearly of value in our evolutionary past as hunters, gatherers, and farmers; it
continues to be central in such roles as botanist or chef.[7]

This sort of ecological receptiveness is deeply rooted in a "sensitive, ethical, and holistic
understanding" of the world and its complexities – including the role of humanity within the
greater ecosphere.[16]

Existential
Main article: Spiritual intelligence

Gardner did not want to commit to a spiritual intelligence, but suggested that an "existential"
intelligence may be a useful construct, also proposed after the original 7 in his 1999 book.[17] The
hypothesis of an existential intelligence has been further explored by educational researchers.[18]

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Additional intelligences

On January 13, 2016, Gardner mentioned in an interview with BigThink that he is considering
adding the teaching-pedagogical intelligence "which allows us to be able to teach successfully to
other people".[19] In the same interview, he explicitly refused some other suggested intelligences
like humour, cooking and sexual intelligence.[19]

Critical reception
Gardner argues that there is a wide range of cognitive abilities, but that there are only very weak
correlations among them. For example, the theory postulates that a child who learns to multiply
easily is not necessarily more intelligent than a child who has more difficulty on this task. The
child who takes more time to master multiplication may best learn to multiply through a different
approach, may excel in a field outside mathematics, or may be looking at and understanding the
multiplication process at a fundamentally deeper level.

Intelligence tests and psychometrics have generally found high correlations between different
aspects of intelligence, rather than the low correlations which Gardner's theory predicts,
supporting the prevailing theory of general intelligence rather than multiple intelligences (MI).[20]
The theory has been widely criticized by mainstream psychology for its lack of empirical
evidence, and its dependence on subjective judgement.[21]

Definition of intelligence

One major criticism of the theory is that it is ad hoc: that Gardner is not expanding the definition
of the word "intelligence", but rather denies the existence of intelligence as traditionally
understood, and instead uses the word "intelligence" where other people have traditionally used
words like "ability" and "aptitude". This practice has been criticized by Robert J. Sternberg,[22][23]
Eysenck,[24] and Scarr.[25] White (2006) points out that Gardner's selection and application of
criteria for his "intelligences" is subjective and arbitrary, and that a different researcher would
likely have come up with different criteria.[26]

Defenders of MI theory argue that the traditional definition of intelligence is too narrow, and
thus a broader definition more accurately reflects the differing ways in which humans think and
learn.[27]

Some criticisms arise from the fact that Gardner has not provided a test of his multiple
intelligences. He originally defined it as the ability to solve problems that have value in at least
one culture, or as something that a student is interested in. He then added a disclaimer that he has
no fixed definition, and his classification is more of an artistic judgment than fact:

Ultimately, it would certainly be desirable to have an algorithm for the selection of an

intelligence, such that any trained researcher could determine whether a candidate's intelligence
met the appropriate criteria. At present, however, it must be admitted that the selection (or
rejection) of a candidate's intelligence is reminiscent more of an artistic judgment than of a
scientific assessment.[28]
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Generally, linguistic and logical-mathematical abilities are called intelligences, but artistic,
musical, athletic, etc. abilities are not. Gardner argues this causes the former to be needlessly
aggrandized. Certain critics are wary of this widening of the definition, saying that it ignores "the
connotation of intelligence ... [which] has always connoted the kind of thinking skills that makes
one successful in school."[29]

Gardner writes "I balk at the unwarranted assumption that certain human abilities can be
arbitrarily singled out as intelligence while others cannot."[30] Critics hold that given this
statement, any interest or ability can be redefined as "intelligence". Thus, studying intelligence
becomes difficult, because it diffuses into the broader concept of ability or talent. Gardner's
addition of the naturalistic intelligence and conceptions of the existential and moral intelligences
are seen as the fruits of this diffusion. Defenders of the MI theory would argue that this is simply
a recognition of the broad scope of inherent mental abilities, and that such an exhaustive scope
by nature defies a one-dimensional classification such as an IQ value.

The theory and definitions have been critiqued by Perry D. Klein as being so unclear as to be
tautologous and thus unfalsifiable. Having a high musical ability means being good at music
while at the same time being good at music is explained by having a high musical ability.[31]

Neo-Piagetian criticism

Andreas Demetriou suggests that theories which overemphasize the autonomy of the domains are
as simplistic as the theories that overemphasize the role of general intelligence and ignore the
domains. He agrees with Gardner that there are indeed domains of intelligence that are relevantly
autonomous of each other.[32] Some of the domains, such as verbal, spatial, mathematical, and
social intelligence are identified by most lines of research in psychology. In Demetriou's theory,
one of the neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development, Gardner is criticized for
underestimating the effects exerted on the various domains of intelligences by the various
subprocesses that define overall processing efficiency, such as speed of processing, executive
functions, working memory, and meta-cognitive processes underlying self-awareness and self-
regulation. All of these processes are integral components of general intelligence that regulate
the functioning and development of different domains of intelligence.[33]

The domains are to a large extent expressions of the condition of the general processes, and may
vary because of their constitutional differences but also differences in individual preferences and
inclinations. Their functioning both channels and influences the operation of the general
processes.[34][35] Thus, one cannot satisfactorily specify the intelligence of an individual or design
effective intervention programs unless both the general processes and the domains of interest are
evaluated.[36][37]

IQ tests

Gardner argues that IQ tests only measure linguistic and logical-mathematical abilities. He
argues the importance of assessing in an "intelligence-fair" manner. While traditional paper-and-
pen examinations favour linguistic and logical skills, there is a need for intelligence-fair

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measures that value the distinct modalities of thinking and learning that uniquely define each
intelligence.[8]

Psychologist Alan S. Kaufman points out that IQ tests have measured spatial abilities for 70
years.[38] Modern IQ tests are greatly influenced by the Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory which
incorporates a general intelligence but also many more narrow abilities. While IQ tests do give
an overall IQ score, they now also give scores for many more narrow abilities.[38]

Lack of empirical evidence

According to a 2006 study many of Gardner's "intelligences" correlate with the g factor,
supporting the idea of a single dominant type of intelligence. According to the study, each of the
domains proposed by Gardner involved a blend of g, of cognitive abilities other than g, and, in
some cases, of non-cognitive abilities or of personality characteristics.[6]

Linda Gottfredson (2006) has argued that thousands of studies support the importance of
intelligence quotient (IQ) in predicting school and job performance, and numerous other life
outcomes. In contrast, empirical support for non-g intelligences is either lacking or very poor.
She argued that despite this the ideas of multiple non-g intelligences are very attractive to many
due to the suggestion that everyone can be smart in some way.[39]

A critical review of MI theory argues that there is little empirical evidence to support it:

To date, there have been no published studies that offer evidence of the validity of the multiple
intelligences. In 1994 Sternberg reported finding no empirical studies. In 2000 Allix reported
finding no empirical validating studies, and at that time Gardner and Connell conceded that there
was "little hard evidence for MI theory" (2000, p. 292). In 2004 Sternberg and Grigerenko stated
that there were no validating studies for multiple intelligences, and in 2004 Gardner asserted that
he would be "delighted were such evidence to accrue",[40] and admitted that "MI theory has few
enthusiasts among psychometricians or others of a traditional psychological background"
because they require "psychometric or experimental evidence that allows one to prove the
existence of the several intelligences."[40][41]

The same review presents evidence to demonstrate that cognitive neuroscience research does not
support the theory of multiple intelligences:

... the human brain is unlikely to function via Gardner's multiple intelligences. Taken together
the evidence for the intercorrelations of subskills of IQ measures, the evidence for a shared set of
genes associated with mathematics, reading, and g, and the evidence for shared and overlapping
"what is it?" and "where is it?" neural processing pathways, and shared neural pathways for
language, music, motor skills, and emotions suggest that it is unlikely that each of Gardner's
intelligences could operate "via a different set of neural mechanisms" (1999, p. 99). Equally
important, the evidence for the "what is it?" and "where is it?" processing pathways, for
Kahneman's two decision-making systems, and for adapted cognition modules suggests that
these cognitive brain specializations have evolved to address very specific problems in our
environment. Because Gardner claimed that the intelligences are innate potentialities related to a

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general content area, MI theory lacks a rationale for the phylogenetic emergence of the
intelligences.[41]

The theory of multiple intelligences is sometimes cited as an example of pseudoscience because

it lacks empirical evidence or falsifiability,[42] though Gardner has argued otherwise.[43]

Use in education
Gardner defines an intelligence as "biopsychological potential to process information that can be
activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that are of value in a
culture."[44] According to Gardner, there are more ways to do this than just through logical and
linguistic intelligence. Gardner believes that the purpose of schooling "should be to develop
intelligences and to help people reach vocational and avocational goals that are appropriate to
their particular spectrum of intelligences. People who are helped to do so, [he] believe[s], feel
more engaged and competent and therefore more inclined to serve society in a constructive
way."[a]

Gardner contends that IQ tests focus mostly on logical and linguistic intelligence. Upon doing
well on these tests, the chances of attending a prestigious college or university increase, which in
turn creates contributing members of society.[45] While many students function well in this
environment, there are those who do not. Gardner's theory argues that students will be better
served by a broader vision of education, wherein teachers use different methodologies, exercises
and activities to reach all students, not just those who excel at linguistic and logical intelligence.
It challenges educators to find "ways that will work for this student learning this topic".[46]

James Traub's article in The New Republic notes that Gardner's system has not been accepted by
most academics in intelligence or teaching.[47] Gardner states that "while Multiple Intelligences
theory is consistent with much empirical evidence, it has not been subjected to strong
experimental tests ... Within the area of education, the applications of the theory are currently
being examined in many projects. Our hunches will have to be revised many times in light of
actual classroom experience."[48]

Jerome Bruner agreed with Gardner that the intelligences were "useful fictions," and went on to
state that "his approach is so far beyond the data-crunching of mental testers that it deserves to be
cheered."[49]

George Miller, a prominent cognitive psychologist, wrote in The New York Times Book Review
that Gardner's argument consisted of "hunch and opinion" and Charles Murray and Richard J.
Herrnstein in The Bell Curve (1994) called Gardner's theory "uniquely devoid of psychometric or
other quantitative evidence."[50]

In spite of its lack of general acceptance in the psychological community, Gardner's theory has
been adopted by many schools, where it is often conflated with learning styles,[51] and hundreds
of books have been written about its applications in education.[52] Some of the applications of
Gardner's theory have been described as "simplistic" and Gardner himself has said he is "uneasy"
with the way his theory has been used in schools.[53] Gardner has denied that multiple

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intelligences are learning styles and agrees that the idea of learning styles is incoherent and
lacking in empirical evidence.[54] Gardner summarizes his approach with three recommendations
for educators: individualize the teaching style (to suit the most effective method for each
student), pluralize the teaching (teach important materials in multiple ways), and avoid the term
"styles" as being confusing.[55]

Educational pedagogies, including Purpose Driven Education, have begun to tap into multiple
intelligence as a way to better understand the uniqueness and specific abilities of each individual.
These draw from the idea that each student is capable, and has a purpose.

http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2014/04/on-the-culture-of-
sexual-harassment-wisdom-and-progress-in-philosophy.html

04/07/2014
On the Culture of Sexual Harassment, Wisdom and Progress in Philosophy

Our agency may have a role in determining what reasons we have in the first place.--Ruth Chang

[Stoic] Wisdom consists in the special disposition of character. As this disposition is the (only)
condition for wisdom, the virtuous (or expert) disposition of the sage need not be accompanied by
the awareness of the fact that it is a virtuous disposition...This sequence, where the disposition
comes first, only to be followed by the awareness of being in that condition, the Stoics compared
with the initial unawareness of someone who becomes an expert in an ordinary craft.--Brouwer
The Stoic Sage, 84

The two most prevalent ‘unsympathetic’ reactions to all the press about sexual harassment or
sexually inappropriate behavior I’ve had – all from senior male philosophers, some of some fame
– are both of apiece with what we do as philosophers and therefore not altogether surprising. But
I find them pretty dispiriting.

The first is that we all have to remain neutral, that we can’t express even conditional moral
disapprobation or sympathy for a party until we ourselves have the proof in hand and we can make
our own judgment about the matter. Allied with this reaction is the intellectual reflex to think of
all the counterarguments to any allegation or counter-interpretations to data with which we are
presented. We are trained to be this way – to see the world in terms of arguments for and against
a proposition, and to withhold judgment until all the arguments and data are in.--Ruth Chang.

This wonderful interview with Ruth Chang has been shared widely on philosophy blogs and
Facebook. The whole interview is worth reading not just for those of us interested in philosophy
of economics and decision theory, but also because Chang's approach is a nice exemplar of, what
I recently called, the turn to analytical existentialism (while noting that her work is not
reducible to that!) Of course, the interest in her remarks is driven by what she says about the
culture of the profession.

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Chang's account remind us of what's wrong with the systematic dispositions (our intellectual
reflexes) that are a consequence of contemporary professional philosophical training in what we
professionals take to be the very best exemplars ("senior male philosophers, some of some
fame.") She need not name names because (to paraphrase Hobbes), we can read the truth of
what she says in ourselves: when we obtain PhDs in professional philosophy, we have become
experts with dispositions that can generate systematic reactions that are out of tune with what is
required from us by ordinary decency, let alone justice.

To be clear: I am not claiming that our professional dispositions are necessarily incompatible with more
appropriate reactive attitudes.* Rather, I am claiming that the way we commonly understand our
expertise, and the way we train ourselves in it and evaluate each other, falls short of wisdom such that
we become not just inhospitable to victims of injustice(s), but are also likely to make us complicit in
systematic patterns of exclusion.

I coupled Chang's interview with Brouwer's description of the early Stoic understanding of the
sage because the Stoics may have something to teach us here. For them wisdom, which is a
normative ideal that we never reach, consists of a 'mastered disposition' (Brouwer: 85). What
makes the Stoic ideal worth reflecting on for us professional philosophers, is that their self-
mastery includes logic and knowledge. The tenor of life they promote is neither anti-intellectual
nor focused on outer-worldly mystery. What they get right is that the tenor of our intellectual
reflexes are central. This entails that we often discover unpleasant facts about ourselves after the
fact (i.e., tacit biases).

As regular readers know, I am very wary of triumphant narratives of philosophical progress. But
it also does not follow that we should start imitating the Stoics (recall my reservations). Rather,
all I am claiming is that it's not obvious how to keep what's most noble about our intellectual
reflexes and integrate these in properly cultivated moral sentiments such that we respond more
appropriately to injustices within our midst and -- given that plenty of us see philosophy as
central to our moral projects -- in the larger world. I'd like to follow Chang in thinking that "our
agency may have a role in determining what reasons we have in the first place."** So, perhaps,
by aiming to get our individual and systematic responses right toward the injustices in our midst,
we will, in fact, discover that we have developed an improved conception of philosophy.

*After all, Chang is able to distance herself from these systematic dispositions.

**An interesting consequence of this is, that if we wish to use the language of truth in discussing
such reasons, we may need what I have been calling a 'metaphysical identity theory of truth'
rather than the more familiar Tarski-inspired approaches.

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http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2014/04/on-philosophys-
hostility-toward-the-other.html

04/06/2014
On Philosophy's hostility toward the Other--On Giving the Sophists a Second Chance

If someone who is unconvinced by these [mythological accounts], and tries to reduce each to what
is likely, with some rustic wisdom, he will need a great deal of leisure. But I have no leisure for
these [mythological accounts] at all; and the reason for it, my friend, is this: I am not yet capable
of, in accordance with the Delphic inscription, knowing myself; it therefore seems ridiculous to
me, while I am still ignorant of this subject, that I inquire into things that are alien. So then saying
goodbye to these things, and believing what is commonly thought about them, I inquire, as I was
saying just now, not into these things, but into myself.--Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus, 229E-30A

The passage is quoted from the translation and discussion in section 4.4 of René Brouwer's
(2014) The Stoic Sage, a little book that is worth the attention of any seeker of wisdom. Brouwer
argues that the early Stoics "fashioned themselves" (176), and modeled their image of the sage,
on Socrates (as presented in Plato, Xenophon, and perhaps other Socrates literature).

I ignore, temporarily, Brouwer's purposes. In context of the Phaedrus passage, three attitudes
toward myths (muthologema) are articulated: (i) one can believe what is commonly said about
them (230A); (ii) one can "play the sophist" (sophizomenos) (229C) and naturalize the hidden,
kernel in myths, that is, reduce them to what is likely; (iii) one can follow Socrates and ignore
most of the myths because they detract from more important tasks (say, knowledge of self). It
turns out that for Socrates (i) and (iii) are not mutually exclusive; one can accept what is
commonly said about most myths and then go on to ignore them. Socrates's criticism of the
Sophistical approach is not that it is a waste of time because there is almost never any kernel of
truth in myths. That is, Socrates tacitly rejects (iv) denialist approaches, which insist, say, that
what is commonly said about myths should be systematically criticized because most myths
cannot partake in the true.*

Rather, Socrates' reported criticism of the Sophistical approach is that it involves intolerable
opportunity costs that prevent focus on more important topics. That is, Socrates comes very close
to saying explicitly that knowledge of self is far more important than knowledge of what is said
about the divine (at least what is reported in myth). Oddly enough, in this way, Plato's
presentation effectively distances of Socrates from some of the charges against him (i.e., -- pace
Aristophanes -- Socrates is really different from the Sophists). More subtly, Plato also implies
that Socrates could not be guilty of religious innovation because he prefers to leave well enough
alone.**

Here I am primarily interested in Socrates's argument that the Sophistical approach toward many myths
involves intolerable opportunity costs. The scarce good is time, or "leisure." Socrates also explains why
the Sophistical approach is so time consuming. For, there are lots of myths and these involve
"multitudes of strange, inconceivable, portentous natures" (229D; i.e, Centaurs, Chimaera, Gorgons,

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etc.) So, one danger of the Sophistical approach is that it opens the door to a never ending process of
rationalizing all what is said about the gods, including engagement with the inconceivable.

Now, Brouwer points out that what is crucial in the Phaedrus passage is not so much the
rejection of the naturalizing enterprise, but rather that Socrates rejects the reduction to rustic
wisdom here. That is, the Sophistical enterprise tames myth not merely by articulating the hidden
kernel, but by assimilating myth to rustic wisdom, that is, knowledge of "local geography"
(Brouwer: 150) and other non-urbane concerns. And such alien (ἀλλότρια) concerns are a
hindrance to knowledge of self. As Socrates puts it a few lines below "country places and the
trees won't teach me anything, and the people in the city do." (230D)

Now, one need not be a friend of intellectuals that try to reconcile what is said about the divine
and what is likely according to country-folk, to see that Socrates is activating some potentially
pernicious oppositions in which philosophy and self-knowledge are associated with city-life. To
see where this leads, it is worth quoting some evidence that Brouwer uses in his argument that
the passage from Phaedrus played a crucial role in the Stoic understanding of sagehood:

They also say that every inferior person is rustic. For rusticity is inexperience of the practices and
laws in a city; of which every inferior person is guilty. He is also wild, being hostile to that lifestyle
which is in accord with the law, bestial and a harmful human being. And he is uncultivated and
tyrannical, inclined to do despotic acts, and even to cruel, violent, and lawless acts when he is
given the opportunities.--quoted in Stobaeus 2.103.24.4.5

Here we see that rusticity stands outside the law; it stands for bestial lack of cultivation. To be
outside the city (and its laws) is to stand outside of civilization, that is, to be barbarous. By
contrast to be philosophical is to be oriented toward and governed by the law, which, in turn, is
perfected by philosophical inquiry, that is, knowledge of city-dwellers; that is, philosophy and
(political) civilization are co-constituted projects (recall this post on where this can lead if
civilization and philosophy are racialized).

Now, according to the Stoics all of us are inferior persons. So, in keeping with their egalitarian
tendencies, they resist the imperial temptation to favor a privileged group. Even so, following
Socrates' example, the Stoics orient philosophy toward political civilization; to be rational, that is
to be perfectly virtuous, is to be law-governed properly (in the way that is in accord with
immanent divinity, Brouwer: 90).

necessary prerequisite for (and co-development with) philosophy, - See more at:
http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2014/03/heidegger-frege-
antisemitism-and-worse.html#sthash.jqTl2gK9.dpuf

Socrates and the Stoics legislate an understanding of philosophy by way of an act of exclusion:
some forms of life and some forms of knowing are not philosophical. I am not suggesting that
the Sophists were more broadminded. Even so, by not excluding the rustic as alien, and by

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actively engaging with it, the Sophists show the way toward a more inclusive philosophy one,
perhaps, more receptive and more capable of wisdom than the traditions we have inherited.

*Socrates could reject (iv) on grounds of prudence (it is dangerous to unmask what is commonly
believed) or elitism (folk are not capable of Enlightenment).

**The situation is more complicated, of course. For as Brouwer notes (151) the quoted passage
goes on with Socrates willingly exploring and using a myth about Typhon. It seems Socrates
distinguishes between myths that present the gods actively interfering in human affairs (to be left
alone) and the allegorical use of myth that provide insight into human nature (worth mining for
insight).

Acknowledgments are due to Saar Frieling, with whom I am leisurely reading and discussing
Plato's Phaedrus in Amsterdam's most lovely spots for over a decade now, as well as Michael
Fixler, who got me first interested in this dialogue.

http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2014/04/one-of-my-friends-
said-that-he-regards-the-history-of-philosophy-as-rather-like-a-text-book-of-chess-openings-just-
as-it-i.html

04/08/2014
Philosophy's Usable Past (On Graham Priest, Kuhn & Stigler)

Not only can the study of the history of economics teach one how to read, it can also teach us
how to react to what we read.--G.J. Stigler (1969) "Does economics have a useful past?" [HT
Chuck McCann]

There is a lot of truth in this analogy, but it sells the history of philosophy short as well. Chess is
pursued within a fixed and determinate set of rules. These cannot be changed. But part of good
philosophy (like good art) involves breaking the rules. Past philosophers may have played by
various sets of rule; but sometimes we can see their projects and ideas can fruitfully (perhaps more
fruitfully) be articulated in different frameworks—perhaps frameworks of which they could have
had no idea—and so which can plumb their ideas to depths of which they were not aware.

[T]he history of philosophy provides a mine of ideas. The ideas are by no means dead. They have
potentials which only more recent developments...can actualize. Those who know only the present
of philosophy, and not the past, will never, of course, see this. That is why philosophers study the
history of philosophy. --Graham Priest. [HT Cogburn at NewAPPS.]

It's always gratifying to see a fantastic philosopher extoll the virtues of the history of philosophy.
As his discussion reveals, Priest's comments are not (the more common) mere polite, lip-service.

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Moreover, while Priest's heart is clearly (a) in the engagement with the 'potentials' of the past and
(b) in show-casing how his tools can aid in articulating "fruitfully (perhaps more fruitfully)" the
past, he first asserts that (c) that "the history of philosophy is interesting in its own right." As
regular readers of my blogs know, I am very partial to (a) the idea that historians of philosophy
can 'actualize' the past.

As Priest notes in his piece, unlike a lot of disciplines (he mentions mathematics, physics, and
economics), philosophy has kept its own history in its curriculum and in many places
specialization in the history of philosophy is a respectable career option within the profession.*
Given the enduring impact of Kuhn's image of science, it's easy assume that the way these other
disciplines organize their relationship to their disciplinary and intellectual past is normal or fully
justified by experience. Given that the mores of professional philosophy have much in common
with professional mathematics, physics, and, in my experience, economics, we may well come to
see our engagement with our past as an aberration if we take their mores to be 'normal.' This is a
non-trivial risk given the enduring temptation to turn our profession into 'scientific philosophy.'

But discarding a disciplinary past is a relatively recent phenomena in at least two of these
disciplines: so, for example, leading nineteenth century physicists (Maxwell, Duhem,
Boltzmann, Helmholtz, Mach, etc.) were very competent in the history of physics (and
philosophy).* Through the 1960s professional economists were trained in their own history (and
philosophy). This is recent enough, that many of the best, most senior economists still have a
very sophisticated command of their own history and philosophy in often shocking and striking
contrast to younger generations. While disciplinary decisions that lead to displacement of history
within a field often take place one department at a time, they are influenced by the attitudes of
trend-setting departments and figures (and external agents), which are guided, in turn, by
influential, normative images of science, which are influenced by philosophy as developed
within professional philosophy or within a discipline.

For example, as I have recounted elsewhere, Kuhnian ideas about the nature of science were both
developed within economics and 'imported into' economics from philosophy; this Kuhnian image of
science prepared the way for the removal of history of economics (and for a while, economic history)
from economics. What makes the case of economics interesting is that key thought-leaders within
twentieth century economics -- Samuelson and Stigler (recall)-- were also world class historians of
economics, and friendly to the Kuhnian image of science: Samuelson never tired of describing the
impact of his formal approach in terms of a "revolution." One might wonder why he would engage in
history of economics at all. In fact, in Samuelson we can find hints of a contrast familiar from Kuhn
between the disciplinary immortals (like himself) and problem-solving, “mere mortals.” The historical
mastery of economics is indulged, even praised, in the immortals (see this obituary of Viner). Here --
with echoes of Veblen's account of conspicuous consumption or Darwin's peacock's tail -- engagement
with one's own history is both status-enhancing among elite observers and a sign of high disciplinary
status due to its utter lack of practical utility.

It's possible, of course, that Samuelson and Stigler thought that by writing the past of their own
discipline and eliminating controversy over this past, they could set the agenda for its future.

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History then has a role in the creation of shared paradigm formation and suppression of variance
in belief. (There are plenty of statements of this in Stigler's writings.) Stigler knew his Kuhn
well.***

Even in Priest there are hints of Kuhn's influence in (i) the way Priest sets up the problem
(privileged sciences don't have a past in their classroom) and (ii) when Priest writes that "part of
good philosophy (like good art) involves breaking the rules;" (iii) the language of incompatible
'frameworks' is reminiscent of the way Carnap and Kuhn are brought together by Michael
Friedman. In (ii) Priest might as well be describing the virtues of the scientific legislator who
establishes a new paradigm.

A recent re-reading of Stigler's (1969) reminded me that Stigler stresses the pedagogical and
cultural values of the history of economics to economics. He recognizes that in areas where
progress has been slow, it may well pay to return to a thinker. But he does not appreciate the
possibility of re-actualization of the past. So, when it comes to judging opportunity costs of
studying the history of economics to a future professional economists, his verdict is decisively
negative. And it is that verdict that has endured: "it remains the unfulfilled task of the historians
of economics to show that their subject is worth its cost." (230)

It's hard to argue with success. Judged by some parameters (e.g., influence on policy, influence
on public opinion, number of employed PhDs, resources available to leading practitioners,
theoretical richness) professional economics has been an unqualified success since it purged its
own history. But its half-century bet on technical solutions to extremely complex evidential
problems have paid off less securely. Moreover, after a period of 'economic imperialism,' its
main conceptual workhorses have been in visible retreat vis a vis psychological and experimental
approaches and, especially, data-mining technologies. As I have argued before
(recall here and here [both with lots more links], data-mining technologies have a hidden status-
quo bias and so do not really advance knowledge in economic theory (understood, say, in the
way that Stigler did, as comparative institutional analysis.) In fact, if data-mining becomes the
main game in town, it's not obvious that there will be much of an 'economics' discipline left;
economists have no comparative advantage in computer science. Of course, professional
philosophy survived the cratering of demand for its graduates within religious institutions, and
we now happily train ethicists and lawyers (among others), so, perhaps, economics will survive
its data-mining turn as a distinct intellectual enterprise.

And, here I have found myself sliding into arm-chair sociology of science. Ironically, in that
1969 article, after quoting and commenting on Kuhn, Stigler does argue that knowledge of the
history of a scientific disciplines could play a vital role in two 'sociological' projects: (1) the
study of the "development of the intellectual content of the science;" (2) study of the "effects of
the organization and environment of the science upon its evolution."**** It is easy to study the
development in (1) and the incentives that govern (2) in isolation from each other. But one
common factor/variable (or cause) in both is the dominant image of science at a given time
(among practitioners and commentators). It's by studying the history of economics as both a
professional philosopher as well as a kind of arm-chair sociologist, that I have become aware of
the significance of the role of philosophical images of science. So, I close with a warning: if one

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is not cautious about the way(s) one activates and re-animates such images of science in passing
them on, one may well contribute to the demise of one's most cherished disciplinary values.

*There are very wide geographical and cultural differences: west-european analytical
philosophers are rarely trained in history of philosophy at all. (There are separate history of
philosophy of chairs.) The status and orientation toward history of philosophy is different in
Anglophone analytic and Anglophone continental, etc.

**Duhem's work in history and philosophy has eclipsed his contributions to physics.

***The 1969 paper which provides me with the epigraph to this post, is filled with extended
quotations from Kuhn and the sociologist Merton. (Merton was a colleague of Stigler at
Columbia, and Merton's son joined Stigler as a member of the Chicago school of economics.)

****"sociology puts its imperialistic title on this area of study only on the ground that sciences
are practiced by human beings and therefore involve social behavior. In the same sense it would
be possible and equally meritorious to describe as the economics of science the economic
organization and evolution of a science." (223)

http://dailynous.com/2016/12/01/philosophy-not-meritocracy-haslanger/

Philosophy: “Not A Meritocracy”

By

Justin W.
.

The latest edition of What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher? is out, with Clifford Sosis (Coastal
Carolina) interviewing Sally Haslanger (MIT).

As usual, there is a lot of interesting material in the interview.

Here’s one bit that stuck out. Haslanger says:

There have been many highs and lows in my career. And a lot of the time has been very mixed. I
have considered leaving the field over and over. But somehow I was offered a path that made it
worth staying. I know there are many people who deserve more than they get in philosophy, and
I’ve been lucky in so many ways. I believe that recognizing the luck in it all is extremely
important, and doing what I can to open paths for others is the least I can do. Philosophy is not a

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meritocracy. Life is not a meritocracy. Yet some are treated much worse than others by life, by
chance, by individuals, by structures. I hate that unfairness; I just hate it.

Anyone who has been in the profession for a while recognizes that philosophy is not a
meritocracy, but I sometimes find that younger graduate students don’t quite recognize
this or take it seriously, believing instead that the quality of their work alone will bring
them professional success.

Of course the quality of their work matters, and yes there are certain meritocratic aspects of the
profession. But other things make a difference, too. Luck, yes, but not just that. Being able to get
a job and do well as a professional philosopher involves professional and social skills. Graduate
programs need to be sure their students know this from early on and, to some reasonable extent,
take steps to help them cultivate these skills. That won’t make philosophy more of a meritocracy
(leaving aside the ethics and epistemology of that), but it may help students better understand
what they’re getting into, and how to better get through it.

http://www.whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com/#/sally-haslanger/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy

Analytic philosophy (sometimes analytical philosophy) is a style of philosophy that became

dominant in English-speaking countries at the beginning of the 20th century. In the United
Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, the majority of
university philosophy departments today identify themselves as "analytic" departments.[1]

The term "analytic philosophy" can refer to one of several things:

 As a philosophical practice,[2][3] it is characterized by an emphasis on argumentative clarity and

precision, often making use of formal logic, conceptual analysis, and to a lesser degree,
mathematics and the natural sciences.[4][5][6]
 As a historical development, analytical philosophy refers to certain developments in early 20th-
century philosophy that were the historical antecedents of the current practice. Central figures
in this historical development are Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, Gottlob
Frege, and the logical positivists. In this more specific sense, analytic philosophy is identified
with specific philosophical traits (many of which are rejected by many contemporary analytic
philosophers), such as:
o The logical-positivist principle that there are not any specifically philosophical facts and
that the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. This may be
contrasted with the traditional foundationalism, which considers philosophy to be a
special science (i.e. the discipline of knowledge) that investigates the fundamental
reasons and principles of everything.[7] Consequently, many analytic philosophers have
considered their inquiries as continuous with, or subordinate to, those of the natural
sciences. This is an attitude that begins with John Locke, who described his work as that
of an "underlabourer" to the achievements of natural scientists such as Newton. During
the twentieth century, the most influential advocate of the continuity of philosophy
with science was Willard Van Orman Quine.[8]

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o The principle that the logical clarification of thoughts can be achieved only by analysis
of the logical form of philosophical propositions.[9] The logical form of a proposition is a
way of representing it (often using the formal grammar and symbolism of a logical
system), to reduce it to simpler components if necessary, and to display its similarity
with all other propositions of the same type. However, analytic philosophers disagree
widely about the correct logical form of ordinary language.[10]
o The neglect of generalized philosophical systems in favour of more restricted inquiries
stated rigorously,[11] or ordinary language.[12]

According to a characteristic paragraph by Russell:

Modern analytical empiricism [...] differs from that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume by its
incorporation of mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able,
in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science
rather than of philosophy. It has the advantage, in comparison with the philosophies of the
system-builders, of being able to tackle its problems one at a time, instead of having to invent at
one stroke a block theory of the whole universe. Its methods, in this respect, resemble those of
science.[13]

Analytic philosophy is often understood in contrast to other philosophical traditions, most

notably continental philosophies such as existentialism and phenomenology, and also Thomism,
Indian philosophy, and Marxism.[14]

Contents
 1 History
o 1.1 Ideal language analysis
o 1.2 Logical positivism
o 1.3 Ordinary-language analysis
 2 Contemporary analytic philosophy
o 2.1 Philosophy of mind and cognitive science
o 2.2 Ethics in analytic philosophy
 2.2.1 Normative ethics
 2.2.2 Meta-ethics
 2.2.3 Applied ethics
o 2.3 Analytic philosophy of religion
o 2.4 Political philosophy
 2.4.1 Liberalism
 2.4.2 Analytical Marxism
 2.4.3 Communitarianism
o 2.5 Analytic metaphysics
o 2.6 Philosophy of language
o 2.7 Philosophy of science
o 2.8 Epistemology
o 2.9 Aesthetics
 3 See also
 4 Notes

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 5 References
 6 Further reading
 7 External links

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2010/09/analytic-versus-continental-philosophy.html

Monday, 20 September 2010

Analytic Vs. Continental Philosophy
Analytic philosophy is rationalistic: rigorous, systematic, literal-minded, formal (logical), dry, and
detached. It is modelled on physics and maths and is particularly popular in the Anglo-Saxon world.
Continental philosophy is humanistic: reflexive, literary, essayistic, charismatic. It is modelled on
literature and art and is particularly popular in France, Germany, and Latin America. These two
traditions dominate contemporary philosophy, and they are largely mutually incomprehensible. This is
unfortunate since their strengths and weaknesses are somewhat complementary.

The strengths of analytic philosophy are its universal scope, clarity and public accountability. It is
concerned with universal principles and their interactions and implications. It tries to explain as much
as possible with as little as possible in the way of assumptions. This is basically the scientific model, and
incidentally also explains why analytic philosophy has much in common with neoclassical economics in
its formal modelling approach - both are modelled on physics. It tries to systematise knowledge: setting
each contribution within a framework that acts as scaffolding and allows others to easily comprehend it
and build on it (or identify the design flaws and tear it down). It aspires to a model of public reasoning
(as I do in this blog) in making clear claims of universal validity based on an explicit and systematic
rational justification that are in principle comprehensible and acceptable to all, and to which anyone
may raise an objection in the same way and be assured a fair hearing.

But its weaknesses are in its lack of self-reflection. There is an assumption of progress and of an
efficient 'market for ideas' (the current conversation incorporates everything of any importance, so why
bother reading anything from more than 5 years ago). There is an assumption that philosophical
analysis consists only in the efficient transmission of arguments, in language that should be as
transparent as a 'window pane' (as Orwell put it). There is an assumption that ideas can be analysed
independently of their context, of who made them and what they intended - the impulse to abstract,
which can easily become an impulse to superficiality. There is an assumption that logical validity is
sufficient for actual significance, that producing yet another finely turned distinction is a real
contribution to human knowledge.

The strengths of continental philosophy are its direct concern with the human condition, its ambition,
its reflexivity, its concern with the media as well as the message. Unlike analytical philosophy it does not
assume that people are rational and then move on from there. It directs itself inward, to trying to
understand how people work and why, and it does so with reference to traditions in the social sciences
(particularly sociology, and anthropology) and the humanities (psychoanalysis, literature, art). It asks big
and impossible but thrilling questions, like why is there something rather than nothing (hence its
alternative name 'metaphysical philosophy'), but the answers usually relate insightfully to us, not

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physics. It is alert to the place of the author and her interests in the questions she asks and the way she
answers. The text is never detached from the author as a contribution to knowledge in the abstract. It
pays attention to the construction of the texts themselves, to how rhetorical elements are employed in
the business of persuading particular people rather than providing neutral arguments that anyone, even
Martians, would see the same way.

Its weaknesses are its insularity, arrogance, and lack of perspective. Because it lacks a common
framework continental philosophy is fragmented between different traditions requiring long
apprenticeships to master (similarly to the social sciences and humanities). Texts in continental
philosophy have the same problem as in the disciplines they model themselves on: by deliberately
incorporating the difficulties of their subject into the manner of their presentation they require
particular effort from the reader to understand. They can be dazzling tours de force in which every
element seamlessly links with every other and the whole conveys multiple levels of meaning. Or, much
more frequently, every sentence is a turgid jargon filled ordeal written at German length and apparently
in German grammar, that seems to deliberately insult the reader with its elaborate opacity that one
always suspects may be hiding nothing but bullshit.

There is a prima donnaish quality to many continental philosophers (in contrast to the pettifogging
bureaucrat tendency of the analytic), as if they understand themselves as 'artists' who should behave, as
the Romantics taught us by example, as natural geniuses unconstrained by normal conventions of
etiquette and morality. At all costs one must avoid the 'iron cage of rationality'. Despite claiming that
interpretation is everything, continental philosophers are notoriously bad at appreciating criticism - at
submitting to interpretation by others - because they see the exercise of power everywhere. They are
often overcommitted to the truth of their own approach and exhibit impatience with other perspectives
and traditions and decline to take them seriously. They often seem to talk past each other, and not
merely the analytic philosopher.

The focus on the particular comes at the expense of the universal, but this also leads to a lack of
perspective: they can miss the forest for the trees. They can overattend to the construction of a text for
example, and miss the argument (Why does the author say 'man' and not 'person'?). Insight is not a
substitute for balanced argument, but this is often forgotten when for example education is considered
only through the lens of power (conclusion: education is oppressive).The microscope of interpretation
can reveal much detail but seems arbitrarily employed and no-one seems interested in putting the
resulting jigsaw together.

Philosophy needs insight as well as clear argument, the universal as well as the particular. No-one
should wish for philosophy to be 'healed' into one unified approach, but we would certainly benefit
from trying a bit harder to understand each other, at least sometimes.

Update: Check out the excellent discussion of the analytical-continental split on BBC radio's In Our Time.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016x2jp

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016x2jp

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0 comments:

1.

Anonymous28 September 2010 at 00:59

Interesting article. The best analytic philosophers and the best continental philosophers
can learn much from each other. I enjoy Russell and Searle as much as Kierkegaard and
Foucault.

Reply

2.

howard Berman11 March 2013 at 00:02

You've explained why people in the continental tradition are less likely to respond to an
interested amateurs contributions than those in the analytic tradition. In the humanities
and the continental tradition the attitude of the authority is "who are you? I've spent a
lifetime getting to the bottom of this. I'm the genius.". While in science and the analytic
tradition though there are authorities the attitude is that philosophy is a collective effort
and anybody who can contribute should.
Would you agree?

Reply

Replies

1.

Philosopher's Beard11 March 2013 at 12:53

Not exactly. I think the difference is more about the demands of the form. It is
easier to succeed as a mediocre analytical philosopher (or scientist) than as a
mediocre continental philosopher (or novellist). This is because the literary style
demands more in the way of judgement: not only, which questions should I ask,
but how should I ask them. That is also why understanding the 'answers' reached
by continental philosophers requires more effort and application (as reading a
literary novel requires more from the reader than reading a genre science fiction
or romance novel).

2.

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Philosopher's Beard11 March 2013 at 12:54

PS I should update this post. It's a bit biased against the continentals at the
moment!

3.

howard Berman12 March 2013 at 17:41

It may be the social sciences which best try to combine the analytic and
continental traditions. Freud's was an attempt at bringing logic to bear on human
problems. He may have failed; but he tried.
Also, theoretical sociologists, like say Jeffrey Alexander might have their work
characterized as such an attempt of synthesizing the two traditions

Reply

3.

Kamsen Lau12 November 2013 at 02:36

can you recommend any philosophers/works that best bridge this gap? consciously or
unconsciously, who would fall under an in-between category?

Reply

Replies

1.

Anonymous3 January 2014 at 23:30

I'd also like some recommendations in this category!

2.

Thomas Rodham Wells9 January 2014 at 11:51

Sorry I missed the original question. Wittgenstein perhaps?

Reply

4.

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ornithosaurus_rex15 October 2014 at 17:55

Hello, I'm a continental-type thinker.

Great post, yours is one of the best posts online describing this subtle but critical matter.

You do well to strive for a balance and remove the anti-continental bias of your post,
don't worry it's just slight plus articulating a true neutral stance is the most difficult, I for
example suffer a major apparently anti-analytic bias in my writings and thoughts, and I
can't even get close to the level of balance you've attained, a bit bad at editing and good
only at thinking, that is the handicap of most continentals.

So of course it's explicable why the Analytic and Continental schools of philosophy
fight... but it's also the saddest thing, the greatest internal tragedy of mankind, sole
blocker of the golden age. I've always wished, why can't an analytic philosopher come
forward and bravely invest the time to read my thesis? As you describe yourself as an
analytic, maybe you will read my works?

The root reason for the difference between analytic and continental styles of thinking
(paper 2 below):

http://www.djedefsauron.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=55&It
emid=141

Reply

https://upstart.atavist.com/philosophy-and-the-crisis-of-relevance

Professor David Chalmers is a renowned philosopher and cognitive scientist, but his anticipation
for the future of philosophy lacks some originality.

Sure, the future is difficult to predict, but one worthy exercise is to create stories about what the
future might look like. This task is not supposed to evaluate if our imagination was on point in
the distant future. But rather to participate in a creative approach that reframes how we think
about the future. Instead of considering the future as something ‘out there’ in which we generally
play the protagonist - I.e. am I married with children, will I have a better job or can I teleport to
Mars - we shall create narratives as something that someone could somehow anticipate.

Can we use our future narratives to shape our present in the same way that a weather forecast
influences our choice of clothes? Perhaps creating the narrative is the first step to activating our
anticipatory systems.

“I fear that great philosophers would not be published these days, if they were edited by their
contemporaries, because great philosophers break boundaries and develop very different ways of
looking at things.”

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Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Brian Ellis from La Trobe University is concerned the future
of philosophy is becoming “more and more scholastic”, and consequently “less and less
exciting.” A conversation with Professor Ellis began to deepen as he sketched a future in which
the Kantian theory of morality  - that has dominated social and political philosophy since the
enlightenment  -  will give way to social humanism in the next 25 years.

Perhaps Professor Ellis’ narrative is quite a theoretical one, so much so, he wrote a book about it.
However, the essence of exploring something without boundaries, something a little less
scholastic and a little more exciting is the essence of philosophy fiction, or speculative “phi-fi”.

In one sense, the future doesn’t exist: It is only a word that we use in the present to describe a
later-than-now point in time. But for the purpose of this exercise, it is the prospective of
philosophy’s students, teachers, professionals and the discipline itself that will receive attention.

Philosophy is facing a crisis of relevance. To curve the stereotype and prevent futures we do not
want, we will need to carve more desirable futures today.

Philosophy today
Philosophy today is often characterised as an ambiguous qualification whereby students inherit a
deep-rooted insecurity about employment prospects. The future looks bleak as departments
around the globe continue to justify their place in the academy as a worthy investment.

Fortunately, philosophers can argue, but they are not the greatest public communicators. And
unfortunately, the bad news continues as anecdotal evidence suggests that philosophy
undergraduates are dwindling in Australia.

“It’s been a steady decline in numbers.”

Click to hear Dr Joanne Faulkner discuss the challenges of philosophy

Dr Joanne Faulkner from the University of New South Whales says that the number of
philosophy students are declining. Perhaps part of this is based on an observable classroom
presence, or lack of. But philosophy is committed to the epistemic traditions of considering both
the subjective experience and objective data. An investigation into the decline of students is not
easy to measure considering its place in academia. Philosophy students often “major” in the
discipline as part of a broader field of interdisciplinary study, such as a Bachelor of Arts. A
dedicated Bachelor of Philosophy is often rare, but one institute that offers graduates the “job-
ready” qualification is the University of Notre Dame in Sydney, Fremantle and Broome.
Regardless of any evidence of a decline, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Angus Brook
believes the numbers are “growing slowly but steadily year after year”. The program at Notre
Dame is relatively small in comparison with other higher education providers. Yet, an

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approximation of 15 Bachelor of Philosophy students, and more philosophy majors within the
Bachelor of Arts each year qualifies enrolments in “no way of decline” he says.

Associate Professor Brook believes that there is an increase in philosophy majors and minors at
the Fremantle campus due to the introduction of philosophy to secondary education in Western
Australia. Although, this picture does not resonate throughout Australia’s largest state.

A member of Australia’s Group of Eight, The University of Western Australia revealed a

decrease in recent years via email. The office of Strategy, Planning and Performance confirmed
an average of nine philosophy undergraduate students completed a Bachelor every year from
2008 to 2014. Most recently, eight philosophers graduated in 2014.

The Strategic Intelligence and Planning Unit at Deakin University was unable to release detailed
data, but it did confirm in an email that the “representation has not changed”. It also advised that
an average of 50 students completed a philosophy major each year between 2011 to 2015.

Mr Tony Hartley from the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of
Queensland said that “enrolments dropped a couple of years ago when there was talk from
Government of $100,000 Arts degrees.” Mr Hartley was unable to provide Bachelor
completions, but did confirm via email that over 100 students are enrolled in a philosophy major.

Student enrolments can obscure a picture of bachelor completions. And the Head of Department
of Politics and Philosophy at La Trobe University, Gwenda Tavan says that “philosophy majors
also obscure other entry points for students”. This includes minors and those enrolled in Politics,
Philosophy and Economics (PPE). Dr Tavan says that current philosophy enrolments are slightly
less than 2011, although “they have actually been quite steady overall.” She says that we cannot
rely on this data as “many students don’t actually enrol in a major until second year and this
distorts the overall figure”.

Capturing a holistic snapshot throughout Australia is difficult. Although, the Department

of Education and Training have confirmed by email an average of 322 Bachelor
completions identifying with a philosophy major from 2010 to 2014 across the country.

The number of undergraduates was derived from an exhaustive list of over 100 courses from
different higher education providers.

This data does not provide a definitive result. There is no evidence to suggest that philosophy
students are on a long downward spiral. And it is evident that we have not captured all
undergraduate philosophers completing similar qualifications, or those choosing to minor in the
discipline. But perhaps it does provide one more insight that contributes to an indicative result of
fewer students in 2014.

Several higher education providers were unable to provide information, or denied supplying any
data. Western Sydney University confirmed via email that it introduced their philosophy major in
2013 and graduations are just beginning. It currently has more than 100 undergraduate

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philosophers in training, so perhaps we are likely to see the overall number increase in the
near future.

But what about jobs?

Mr Bhanuraj Kashyap, University of Melbourne

The Department of Education and Training revealed that 58 per cent of undergraduate
philosophers are employed in full-time jobs within three to four months after completing their
course. In comparison, 70 per cent of all other undergraduates from all educational fields are
employed in the same period of time. The minor difference can be understood and analysed in all
sorts of ways. This is not an accurate representation of fewer employment opportunities, but it
can illustrate a nebulous definition to understanding career ambitions.

Ms Tylaa Ryan, La Trobe University

Interpreting this data is pointless. To measure employment opportunities is a contentious issue in

many industries. But to speculate, it is the philosopher that is equipped with the most diverse set
of skills to work in several different industries.

Dr Gwenda Tavan from La Trobe University says that training in logic and critical thinking can
benefit all aspects of our lives and are sought after skills in graduates by employers. She says that
“many of the fundamental questions and political challenges of our time - including global
warming, economic inequality, massive technological change and questions of human rights and
justice - require the sort of knowledge, ethical training and cognitive skill set that philosophy
provides.”

The Department of Education and Training confirmed that the 58 per cent of philosophers in
full-time employment equated to 167 graduates. From this sample, 23 per cent were employed in
Professional, Scientific and Technical Services. A further 15 per cent were employed in
Education and Training, and an additional 15 per cent in Public Administration and Safety. The
remaining philosophers were employed in a variety of industries.

From lawyers, academics and psychotherapists to consultants, software engineers and television
writers; the opportunities may be limitless for philosophers of the future.

Fewer student enrolments may contribute to a reputation with little jobs, but it cannot validate
less opportunity. And most likely, it is the lack of interest that is responsible for fewer students.

Why communication matters

The communication - and accessibility - of philosophy has received some attention in recent
times with The Conversation’s Cogito, The New York Times’ The Stone, Daily Nous, New
Philosopher magazine and plenty of podcasts.

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Dr Tim Dean, The Conversation

Dr Tim Dean is the Science and Technology editor at The Conversation. He too has declared a
strong interest in the communication of philosophy. The discipline appears to have shrunk over
centuries and Dr Dean says that the “natural sciences” have taken parts of philosophy and left the
“hard questions” relating to metaphysics, meta-ethics, consciousness and qualia among others
that are difficult to answer. And this has prompted the question of philosophy as a worthy
investment. In other words, the subject matter within the discipline itself has been called into
question.

“We see those questions being asked at the moment and we see philosophy departments have their budgets cut and
we see them closing down around the world. This is a relevance problem for philosophy and it will become an
increasing issue for philosophy in the next 25 years.”

Now, the philosopher has to respond. Dr Dean says that the role of the philosopher is to be
“expanded educators”. But not only limited within the academy, but also in schools and the
community. So how does the philosopher communicate complexity to attract a wider audience?

Dr Matthew Beard, The Ethics Centre

Dr Matthew Beard from The Ethics Centre in Sydney believes that philosophy communicators
are able to bridge the gap between complex philosophical research and the general public. He
says that contemporary issues like online dating can be unpacked by utilising valuable concepts
that were introduced by philosophers a long time ago. Although, the very idea of promoting the
value of philosophy may not be as simple as it seems.

Coming together to push the value of philosophy is a bit like herding cats because philosophers are
often independent and do not see what they are doing is related to what the person in the next
office is doing. Scientists work in labs together, they have a community.

-Dr Joanne Faulkner, University of New South Whales

Perhaps climate change has been the catalyst for scientists to communicate with the general
public, but what reason do philosophers have to reach out? Dr Faulkner’s point is not to say that
philosophers must come together to promote the discipline, but rather the concept of the
philosopher as a public intellectual needs some work. Philosophers do not have to reach out to
communicate their research, but conveying its relevance might create an interest. Dr Faulkner
says that it is not natural for philosophers to enter the public sphere, “the most natural thing to do
is to sit alone, read a book, think and have some solitude.”

Click to hear Mr Daniel Teitelbaum from The School of Life discuss philosophy communicators

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The School of Life is a global initiative devoted to the obscure lessons in life that are not taught
in regular school. Their ambitious mandate addresses matters of meaningful work, mastering
relationships, managing stress and anxiety all through an understanding of great thinkers from
different philosophical traditions.

Mr Daniel Teitelbaum is the Head of Curriculum at The School of Life in Melbourne. He

believes that the role of philosophy communicators is to relate difficult concepts to everyday
living. For Mr Teitelbaum, the value of philosophy can be a snapshot as opposed to entire
concepts.

The School of Life dedicates the conceptual understanding of philosophical ideas, equally as
much to making them useful in the 21st century. Although, there have been several responses to
lay interpretations of philosophical concepts or packaging and selling philosophy as a self-
help guide.

Mr Christian Gelder from the Sydney School of Continental Philosophy says that defining a texts
difficulty contributes to the postmodern notion of knowledge as a commodity.

Click to hear Mr Christian Gelder’s response to lay interpretations of philosophy

In other words, a text is read in order to immediately receive something, as opposed to putting
you to work. Ultimately, Mr Gelder’s question becomes philosophical; “should philosophy
submit to the demands of clarity or are those very demands part of a larger structure that
philosophy is already resistant to?”

Whether or not this controversy contributes to philosophy’s challenge of relevance, they are both
committed to - albeit different interpretations of - contemporary philosophy.

The communication of philosophy has suffered for many years. Sadly, the inability to convey the
benefits of a multifaceted discipline has resulted in its poor significance. This is not to say that it
should submit to demands of clarity, or over-promise responses to the meaning of life. But it sure
could do a better job at spruiking its significance in the 21st century.

The figure of the philosopher

The role of the philosopher has taken many shapes over the centuries, from the annoying gadfly
to contemporary academic thought leaders. The trial of Socrates was testament to the punishment
of a thinker and history has seen it time and time again. The Romans criticised Jesus Christ, and
the astronomer, Galileo Galilei had a close call with the stake. The Danish theologian, Søren
Kierkegaard attacked the Danish State Church, and the Marxist, Slavoj Žižek is still antagonising
much of Europe. Today, in Australia, perhaps Peter Singer is the Utilitarian gadfly taunting the
general public with his controversial views of abortion and euthanasia.

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-Gilles Deleuze. Read by Mr Christian Gelder

Mr Christian Gelder, Sydney School of Continental Philosophy

Deleuze is right. Philosophy saddens. But a little bit of melancholy goes a long way. The
agitator critiques but not because he is a pessimist, but because he is concerned with truth. And
truth concerns everyone. We cannot define philosophy’s use in such narrow terms, but the point
here is to emphasise its “egalitarian universalism”. While philosophy is concerned with all
people, the stereotype philosopher retains a reputation.

Senior Lecturer at Deakin University, Patrick Stokes says that “philosophy tends to put more
weight on ‘innate talent’ and that when combined with stereotypes of the philosopher as white
and male this perpetuates our dreadful lack of diversity.” But Dr Stokes says that the philosopher
as a “social category” is going to change considerably in the future.

Ms Chloe Mackenzie, Women & Minorities in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne

Ms Chloe Mackenzie from Women & Minorities in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne
also shares Dr Stokes’ view. Ms Mackenzie says that “we still see the under-representation of
women, people of colour, disabled people, trans[gender] people and gender non-conforming
people” in philosophy. She would like to see the barriers continue to break down to give way to
other voices. As Ms Mackenzie sketches an ideal future of philosophy, she hopes that there will
be less idolisation of the figure of the philosopher as a “white old man”.

Philosophy beyond today

There is another long-standing tradition of idolising the continental and analytic traditions of
philosophy. Dr Patrick Stokes further illustrates his preferred account of the future by imagining
that “academic philosophy of 2040 would have lost much of the analytic/continental tribalism
that still dogs the discipline today.”

Associate Professor, Ross Brady from La Trobe University believes analytical philosophy may
be considered “conceptual sciences” to be studied in conjunction with neighbouring disciplines.
This includes “the social sciences, empirical sciences, computer science, mathematics and
psychology.” He also sees the continental tradition more akin to “literature” in 2040. Dr Joanne
Faulkner considers Associate Professor Brady’s latter idea to be occurring throughout the
academy today as “philosophy jobs are really scarce”. Philosophers tend to find work where they
can and this is occurring in “literature departments and cultural studies”. Dr Faulkner says that
she has “colleagues over in the School of Arts and Media who are philosophers”. But sometimes,
these humble philosophers shy away from the title saying they don’t teach or publish as
philosophers. Yet, their ideas about the future may provide great alternatives. Trained in
economics, Professor of Public Ethics, Clive Hamilton provides a correlation with behavioural
economics. He imagines the emergence of “behavioural philosophy” in the future. Professor

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Hamilton says that young philosophers will go out and “test established principles in the real
world” in 2040.

“The results will come as a shock.”

Indeed, some ideas about the future may come as a shock. Associate Professor Ross Brady
believes that philosophy of 2040 will emphasise areas that have a monetary focus such as
“medical ethics, logical applications in computer science and parts that intersect upon some
aspects of business.” Mr Christian Gelder says that “there is nothing more depressing than
medical ethics”. And Ms Chloe Mackenzie reluctantly agrees with Associate Professor Brady.
“I don’t like the idea” but it is inevitable for philosophy to emphasise these areas she says. Of
course these contributions are important but if you “have to start making yourself relevant in
ways you can sell philosophy, other areas will suffer” she says.

Click to hear Mr Daniel Teitelbaum reflect on his philosophical utopia

Mr Daniel Teitelbaum says that the response to a crisis of relevance is to “provide more
opportunity for people to interact with philosophy in a comfortable, light, playful, fun, engaging
and meaningful way.” He further explores his philosophical utopia akin to physical health. He
would like philosophy embedded as part of everyday life, like we consider physical exercise. Mr
Teitelbaum draws on mindfulness, meditation and exercise. He says that people had to be
convinced that these activities were valuable and it is time that we weave philosophical reflection
into everyday life. Mr Teitelbaum says that “you don’t have to be a bodybuilder to go for a
run, you don’t have to be a philosopher to read a passage of Plato.” So the role of the
philosopher can take the shape of everyday characters like “personal trainers, psychologists,
mindfulness coaches or yoga instructors.” As he shifts away from his ideal state, he finally lands
at artificial intelligence. Mr Teitelbaum says that this “technological era is important in a very
practical sense” for the future of philosophy. He begins to highlight several ethical dilemmas that
Dr Matthew Beard elaborates on.

Dr Beard says that if we want philosophy to be more useful, we may have to work in an
interdisciplinary space. This includes things like artificial intelligence and genetic editing in
bioethics.

Dr Matthew Beard, The Ethics Centre

He says that these are the areas philosophers will increasingly be forced to address because that
is where the demand will take place. He also constructs an image of philosophy for the
“everyman” in 2040. Dr Beard says that if we can successfully manage the automation of work,
“people will have time to ask the questions that they don’t have time to answer.”

"We need the space to just sit under a tree and think if we’re going to do philosophy. So if
we can automate responsibly and take away menial tasks and create leisure time for people
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... then there is the potential that philosophy isn’t just going to hide in the academy
anymore, but it is going to be something that comes out into whatever 2040’s version of the
agora is."

Perhaps Dr Beard’s vision of the future of philosophy has an uncanny resemblance to a post-
capitalist society where a universal basic income provides the capability to just sit under a tree.
We’ll have to wait and see if that comes to fruition.

Can these narratives influence the present?

The future is the result of our anticipatory actions in the present. So, can our narratives about the
future influence the trajectory of philosophy? Well, that depends on what philosophers decide to
do now.

For some, selling philosophical skills and the idea of visiting your local stoic councillor is
alarming. Yet, for others, it may be a valid response to making philosophy great again.

Other suggestions require large economic forces to shift to provide the space for philosophy to
flourish. But further ideas can be addressed with a new syllabus that challenges the very
traditions of philosophy.

We must also squash the ‘white male’ stereotype to embrace a diverse discipline. You may not
have noticed, but of the 16 individuals in discussion here, only four are women. As the
stereotype implies, this is no surprise. And this is not good enough. Attempts were made to
rectify this throughout the story’s research but a number of female philosophers declined to
participate. There appears to be a dreadful irony in demanding diversity but showcasing
something else. This was a personal and valuable lesson.

If we anticipate a diverse philosophy community in the future, we really need to act now.

≈≈≈

About the author

Matt Marasco is studying a Bachelor of Arts with majors in philosophy and journalism at La Trobe
University. He is currently volunteering at UNESCO in the Social & Human Sciences department and
completing undergraduate research on the career ambitions and challenges of women in academia.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/bridging-the-analytic-continental-
divide/?_r=0

The Stone

Bridging the Analytic-Continental Divide

By

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Gary Gutting

February 19, 2012 5:00 pm

Many philosophers at leading American departments are specialists in metaphysics: the study of
the most general aspects of reality such as being and time. The major work of one of the most
prominent philosophers of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, is “Being and Time,” a profound
study of these two topics. Nonetheless, hardly any of these American metaphysicians have paid
serious attention to Heidegger’s book.

The standard explanation for this oddity is that the metaphysicians are analytic philosophers,
whereas Heidegger is a continental philosopher. Although the two sorts of philosophers seldom
read one another’s work, when they do, the results can be ugly. A famous debate between
Jacques Derrida (continental) and John Searle (analytic) ended with Searle denouncing Derrida’s
“obscurantism” and Derrida mocking Searle’s “superficiality.”

The distinction between analytic and continental philosophers seems odd, first of all, because it
contrasts a geographical characterization (philosophy done on the European continent,
particularly Germany and France) with a (philosophy done by methodological one analyzing
concepts). It’s like, as Bernard Williams pointed out, dividing cars into four-wheel-drive and
made-in-Japan. It becomes even odder when we realize that some of the founders of analytic
philosophy (like Frege and Carnap) were Europeans, that many of the leading centers of
“continental” philosophy are at American universities, and that many “analytic” philosophers
have no interest in analyzing concepts.

Some attention to history helps make sense of the distinction. In the early 20th century,
philosophers in England (Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein) and in Germany and Austria
(Carnap, Reichenbach, Hempel — all of whom, with the rise of the Nazis, emigrated to the
United States) developed what they saw as a radically new approach to philosophy, based on the
new techniques of symbolic logic developed by Frege and Russell.

The basic idea was that philosophical problems could be solved (or dissolved) by logically
analyzing key terms, concepts or propositions. (Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions of
what does not exist — e.g., “The present King of France” — remains a model of such an
approach.) Over the years, there were various forms of logical, linguistic and conceptual
analysis, all directed toward resolving confusions in previous philosophical thought and
presented as examples of analytic philosophy. Eventually, some philosophers, especially Quine,
questioned the very idea of “analysis” as a distinctive philosophical method. But the goals of
clarity, precision, and logical rigor remained, and continue to define the standards for a type
of philosophy that calls itself analytic and is dominant in English-speaking countries.

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At roughly the same time that analytic philosophy was emerging, Edmund Husserl was
developing his “phenomenological” approach to philosophy. He too emphasized high standards
of clarity and precision, and had some fruitful engagements with analytic philosophers such as
Frege. Husserl, however, sought clarity and precision more in the rigorous description of our
immediate experience (the phenomena) than in the logical analysis of concepts or language. He
saw his phenomenology as operating at the fundamental level of knowledge on which any truths
of conceptual or linguistic analysis would have to be based. In “Being and Time” Husserl’s
student, Heidegger, turned phenomenology toward “existential” questions about freedom,
anguish and death. Later, French thinkers influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, especially
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, developed their own versions of phenomenologically based
existentialism.

The term “continental philosophy” was, as Simon Critchley and Simon Glendinning have
emphasized, to an important extent the invention of analytic philosophers of the mid-20th
century who wanted to distinguish themselves from the phenomenologists and existentialists of
continental Europe. These analytic philosophers (Gilbert Ryle was a leading figure)
regarded the continental appeal to immediate experience as a source of subjectivity and
obscurity that was counter to their own ideals of logical objectivity and clarity. The analytic-
continental division was institutionalized in 1962, when American proponents of continental
philosophy set up their own professional organization, The Society for Phenomenology and
Existential Philosophy (SPEP), as an alternative to the predominantly (but by no means
exclusively) analytic American Philosophical Association (APA).

The claim that working in the analytic mode restricts the range of our philosophical
inquiry no longer has any basis.

Over the last 50 years, the term “continental philosophy” has been extended to many other
European movements, such as Hegelian idealism, Marxism, hermeneutics and, especially,
poststructuralism and deconstruction. These are often in opposition to phenomenology and
existentialism, but analytic philosophers still see them as falling far short of standards or clarity
and rigor. As a result, as Brian Leiter has emphasized, “continental philosophy” today
designates “a series of partly overlapping traditions in philosophy, some of whose figures have
almost nothing in common with [each] other.”

The scope of “analytic philosophy” has likewise broadened over the years. In the 1950s, it
typically took the form of either logical positivism or ordinary-language philosophy, each of
which involved commitment to a specific mode of analysis (roughly, following either Carnap or
Wittgenstein) as well as substantive philosophical views. These views involved a rejection of
much traditional philosophy (especially metaphysics and ethics) as essentially
meaningless. There was, in particular, no room for religious belief or objective ethical
norms. Today, analytic philosophers use a much wider range of methods (including quasi-
scientific inference to the best explanation and their own versions of phenomenological
description). Also, there are analytic cases being made for the full range of traditional
philosophical positions, including the existence of God, mind-body dualism, and objective
ethical norms.

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Various forms of empiricism and naturalism are still majority views, but any philosophical
position can be profitably developed using the tools of analytic philosophy. There are Thomists
and Hegelians who are analytic philosophers, and there is even a significant literature devoted to
expositions of major continental philosophers in analytic terms. The claim that working in the
analytic mode restricts the range of our philosophical inquiry no longer has any basis.

This development refutes the claim that analytic philosophers, as Santiago Zabala recently put it,
do not discuss “the fundamental questions that have troubled philosophers for millennia.” This
was true in the days of positivism, but no more. Zabala’s claim that analytic philosophers have
not produced “deep historical research” is similarly outdated. It was true back when the
popularity of Russell’s “A History of Western Philosophy” signaled the analytic disdain for
serious history. Now, however, even though many analytic philosophers still have little interest
in history, many of the best current historians of philosophy employ the conceptual and
argumentative methods of analytic philosophy.

Because of such developments, Leiter has argued that there are no longer substantive
philosophical differences between analytic and continental philosophy, although there are
sometimes important differences of “style.” He has also suggested that the only gap in
principle between the two camps is sociological, that (these are my examples) philosophers in
one camp discount the work of those in the other simply because of their personal distaste for
symbolic logic or for elaborate literary and historical discussions.

Some continental approaches claim to access a privileged domain of experience.

I agree with much of what Leiter says, but think there are still important general
philosophical differences between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, in all
their current varieties. These differences concern their conceptions of experience and of reason
as standards of evaluation. Typically, analytic philosophy appeals to experience understood
as common-sense intuitions (as well as their developments and transformations by science)
and to reason understood as the standard rules of logical inference. A number of continental
approaches claim to access a privileged domain of experience that penetrates beneath the veneer
of common sense and science experience. For example, phenomenologists, such as Husserl, the
early Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty try to describe the concretely lived experience from
which common-sense/scientific experience is a pale and distorted abstraction, like the
mathematical frequencies that optics substitutes for the colors we perceive in the
world. Similarly, various versions of neo-Kantianism and idealism point to a “transcendental” or
“absolute” consciousness that provides the fuller significance of our ordinary experiences.

Other versions of continental thought regard the essential activity of reason not as the logical
regimentation of thought but as the creative exercise of intellectual imagination. This view is
characteristic of most important French philosophers since the 1960s, beginning with Foucault,
Derrida and Deleuze. They maintain that the standard logic analytic philosophers use can merely
explicate what is implicit in the concepts with which we happen to begin; such logic is useless
for the essential philosophical task, which they maintain is learning to think beyond these
concepts.

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Continental philosophies of experience try to probe beneath the concepts of everyday

experience to discover the meanings that underlie them, to think the conditions for the
possibility of our concepts. By contrast, continental philosophies of imagination try to think
beyond those concepts, to, in some sense, think what is impossible.

Philosophies of experience and philosophies of imagination are in tension, since the intuitive
certainties of experience work as limits to creative intellectual imagination, which in turn
challenges those alleged limits. Michel Foucault nicely expressed the tension when he spoke of
the competing philosophical projects of critique in the sense of “knowing what limits
knowledge has to renounce transgressing” and of “a practical critique that takes the form
of a possible transgression.” However, a number of recent French philosophers (e.g., Levinas,
Ricoeur, Badiou and Marion) can be understood as developing philosophies that try to reconcile
phenomenological experience and deconstructive creativity.

In view of their substantive philosophical differences, it’s obvious that analytic and continental
philosophers would profit by greater familiarity with one another’s work, and discussions across
the divide would make for a better philosophical world. Here, however, there is a serious lack of
symmetry between analytic and continental thought. This is due to the relative clarity of most
analytic writing in contrast to the obscurity of much continental work.

Because of its commitment to clarity, analytic philosophy functions as an effective lingua franca
for any philosophical ideas. (Even the most difficult writers, such as Sellars and Davidson, find
disciples who write clarifying commentaries.) There is, moreover, a continuing demand for
analytic expositions of major continental figures. It’s obvious why there is no corresponding
market for, say, expositions of Quine, Rawls or Kripke in the idioms of Heidegger, Derrida or
Deleuze. With all due appreciation for the limits of what cannot be said with full clarity, training
in analytic philosophy would greatly improve the writing of most continental philosophers.

Of course, analytic philosophers could often profit from exposure to continental

ideas. Epistemologists, for example, could learn a great deal from the phenomenological
analyses of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and metaphysicians could profit from the historical
reflections of Heidegger and Derrida. But in view of the unnecessary difficulty of much
continental writing, most analytic philosophers will do better to rely on a second-hand
acquaintance through reliable and much more accessible secondary sources.

It may be that the most strikingly obscure continental writing (e.g., of the later Heidegger and of
most major French philosophers since the 1960s) is a form of literary expression, producing a
kind of abstract poetry from its creative transformations of philosophical concepts. This
would explain the move of academic interest in such work toward English and other language
departments. But it is hard to see that there is much of serious philosophical value lost in the
clarity of analytic commentaries on Heidegger, Derrida, et al.

There are some encouraging recent signs of philosophers following philosophical problems
wherever they are interestingly discussed, regardless of the author’s methodology,
orientation or style. But the primary texts of leading continental philosophers are still
unnecessary challenges to anyone trying to come to terms with them. The continental-analytic

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gap will begin to be bridged only when seminal thinkers of the Continent begin to write more
clearly.

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the
Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960,” and writes regularly for The Stone.

18

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences

The theory of multiple intelligences differentiates intelligence into specific (primarily sensory)
'modalities', rather than seeing intelligence as dominated by a single general ability. Howard
Gardner proposed this model in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple
Intelligences. According to Gardner, an intelligence must fulfill eight criteria:[1] potential for
brain isolation by brain damage, place in evolutionary history, presence of core operations,
susceptibility to encoding (symbolic expression), a distinct developmental progression, the
existence of savants, prodigies and other exceptional people, and support from experimental
psychology and psychometric findings.

Gardner chose eight abilities that he held to meet these criteria:[2] musical-rhythmic, visual-
spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal,
and naturalistic. He later suggested that existential and moral intelligence may also be worthy of
inclusion.[3] Although the distinction between intelligences has been set out in great detail,
Gardner opposes the idea of labeling learners to a specific intelligence. Gardner maintains that
his theory of multiple intelligences should "empower learners", not restrict them to one modality
of learning.[4] According to Gardner, an intelligence is "a biopsychological potential to process
information that can be activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that
are of value in a culture."[5]

Many of Gardner's "intelligences" correlate with the g factor, supporting the idea of a single,
dominant type of intelligence. According to a 2006 study, each of the domains proposed by
Gardner involved a blend of g, cognitive abilities other than g, and, in some cases, non-cognitive
abilities or personality characteristics.[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

 1 Intelligence modalities
o 1.1 Musical-rhythmic and harmonic
o 1.2 Visual-spatial
o 1.3 Verbal-linguistic
o 1.4 Logical-mathematical
o 1.5 Bodily-kinesthetic
o 1.6 Interpersonal
o 1.7 Intrapersonal

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o 1.8 Naturalistic
o 1.9 Existential
o 1.10 Additional intelligences
 2 Critical reception
o 2.1 Definition of intelligence
o 2.2 Neo-Piagetian criticism
o 2.3 IQ tests
o 2.4 Lack of empirical evidence
 3 Use in education
 4 See also
 5 References
 6 Further reading
 7 External links
 The g factor (also known as general intelligence, general mental ability or general
intelligence factor) is a construct developed in psychometric investigations of cognitive
abilities and human intelligence. It is a variable that summarizes positive correlations
among different cognitive tasks, reflecting the fact that an individual's performance on
one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other
kinds of cognitive tasks. The g factor typically accounts for 40 to 50 percent of the
between-individual performance differences on a given cognitive test, and composite
scores ("IQ scores") based on many tests are frequently regarded as estimates of
individuals' standing on the g factor.[1] The terms IQ, general intelligence, general
cognitive ability, general mental ability, or simply intelligence are often used
interchangeably to refer to this common core shared by cognitive tests.[2]
 The existence of the g factor was originally proposed by the English psychologist Charles
Spearman in the early years of the 20th century. He observed that children's performance
ratings, across seemingly unrelated school subjects, were positively correlated, and
reasoned that these correlations reflected the influence of an underlying general mental
ability that entered into performance on all kinds of mental tests. Spearman suggested
that all mental performance could be conceptualized in terms of a single general ability
factor, which he labeled g, and a large number of narrow task-specific ability factors.
Today's factor models of intelligence typically represent cognitive abilities as a three-
level hierarchy, where there are a large number of narrow factors at the bottom of the
hierarchy, a handful of broad, more general factors at the intermediate level, and at the
apex a single factor, referred to as the g factor, which represents the variance common to
all cognitive tasks.
 Traditionally, research on g has concentrated on psychometric investigations of test data,
with a special emphasis on factor analytic approaches. However, empirical research on
the nature of g has also drawn upon experimental cognitive psychology and mental
chronometry, brain anatomy and physiology, quantitative and molecular genetics, and
primate evolution.[3] While the existence of g as a statistical regularity is well-established
and uncontroversial, there is no consensus as to what causes the positive correlations
between tests.
 Research in the field of behavioral genetics has established that the construct of g is
highly heritable. It has a number of other biological correlates, including brain size. It is
also a significant predictor of individual differences in many social outcomes, particularly
in education and employment. The most widely accepted contemporary theories of

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intelligence incorporate the g factor.[4] However, critics of g have contended that an

emphasis on g is misplaced and entails a devaluation of other important abilities, as well
as supporting an unrealistic reified view of human intelligence.

Contents
 1 Cognitive ability testing
 2 Theories
o 2.1 Mental energy or efficiency
o 2.2 Sampling theory
o 2.3 Mutualism
 3 Factor structure of cognitive abilities
 4 "Indifference of the indicator"
 5 Population distribution
 6 Spearman's law of diminishing returns
 7 Practical validity
o 7.1 Academic achievement
o 7.2 Job attainment
o 7.3 Job performance
o 7.4 Income
o 7.5 Other correlates
 8 Genetic and environmental determinants
 9 Neuroscientific findings
 10 g in non-humans
 11 g (or c) in human groups
 12 Other biological associations
 13 Group similarities and differences
 14 Relation to other psychological constructs
o 14.1 Elementary cognitive tasks
o 14.2 Working memory
o 14.3 Piagetian tasks
o 14.4 Personality
o 14.5 Creativity
 15 Challenges
o 15.1 Gf-Gc theory
o 15.2 Theories of uncorrelated abilities
o 15.3 Flynn's model
o 15.4 Other criticisms
 16 See also
 17 References
 18 Bibliography
 19 External links

19

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy

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Continental philosophy is a set of 19th- and 20th-century philosophical traditions from

mainland Europe.[1][2] This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in
the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and traditions
outside the analytic movement. Continental philosophy includes the following movements:
German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism (and its antecedents, such as the thought of
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, French feminism,
psychoanalytic theory, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and related branches of
Western Marxism.[3]

It is difficult to identify non-trivial claims that would be common to all the preceding
philosophical movements. The term "continental philosophy", like "analytic philosophy", lacks
clear definition and may mark merely a family resemblance across disparate philosophical views.
Simon Glendinning has suggested that the term was originally more pejorative than descriptive,
functioning as a label for types of western philosophy rejected or disliked by analytic
philosophers.[4] Nonetheless, Michael E. Rosen has ventured to identify common themes that
typically characterize continental philosophy.[5]

 First, continental philosophers generally reject the view that the natural sciences are the only or
most accurate way of understanding natural phenomena. This contrasts with many analytic
philosophers who consider their inquiries as continuous with, or subordinate to, those of the
natural sciences. Continental philosophers often argue that science depends upon a "pre-
theoretical substrate of experience" (a version of Kantian conditions of possible experience or
the phenomenological "lifeworld") and that scientific methods are inadequate to fully
understand such conditions of intelligibility.[6]
 Second, continental philosophy usually considers these conditions of possible experience as
variable: determined at least partly by factors such as context, space and time, language,
culture, or history. Thus continental philosophy tends toward historicism (or historicity). Where
analytic philosophy tends to treat philosophy in terms of discrete problems, capable of being
analyzed apart from their historical origins (much as scientists consider the history of science
inessential to scientific inquiry), continental philosophy typically suggests that "philosophical
argument cannot be divorced from the textual and contextual conditions of its historical
emergence".[7]
 Third, continental philosophy typically holds that human agency can change these conditions of
possible experience: "if human experience is a contingent creation, then it can be recreated in
other ways".[8] Thus continental philosophers tend to take a strong interest in the unity of
theory and practice, and often see their philosophical inquiries as closely related to personal,
moral, or political transformation. This tendency is very clear in the Marxist tradition
("philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to
change it"), but is also central in existentialism and post-structuralism.
 A final characteristic trait of continental philosophy is an emphasis on metaphilosophy. In the
wake of the development and success of the natural sciences, continental philosophers have
often sought to redefine the method and nature of philosophy.[9] In some cases (such as
German idealism or phenomenology), this manifests as a renovation of the traditional view
that philosophy is the first, foundational, a priori science. In other cases (such as
hermeneutics, critical theory, or structuralism), it is held that philosophy investigates a
domain that is irreducibly cultural or practical. And some continental philosophers (such as

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Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the later Heidegger, or Derrida) doubt whether any conception of
philosophy can coherently achieve its stated goals.

Ultimately, the foregoing themes derive from a broadly Kantian thesis that knowledge,
experience, and reality are bound and shaped by conditions best understood through
philosophical reflection rather than exclusively empirical inquiry.[10]

Contents
 1 The term
 2 History
 3 Recent Anglo-American developments
 From the early 20th century until the 1960s, continental philosophers were only
intermittently discussed in British and American universities, despite an influx of
continental philosophers, particularly German Jewish students of Nietzsche and
Heidegger, to the United States on account of the persecution of the Jews and later World
War II; Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Kaufmann are
probably the most notable of this wave, arriving in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
However, philosophy departments began offering courses in continental philosophy in
the late 1960s and 1970s. With the rise of postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s,
some British and American philosophers became more vocally opposed to the
methods and conclusions of continental philosophers. For example, John Searle[22]
criticized Derrida's deconstruction for "obvious and manifest intellectual weaknesses."
Later, Barry Smith and assorted signatories protested against the award of an honorary
degree to Derrida by Cambridge University.[23]
 American university departments in literature, the fine arts, film, sociology, and political
theory have increasingly incorporated ideas and arguments from continental philosophers
into their curricula and research. Continental Philosophy features prominently in a
number of British and Irish Philosophy departments, for instance at the University of
Essex, Warwick, Sussex and Dundee, Manchester Metropolitan, Kingston University,
Staffordshire University and University College Dublin, and in North American
Philosophy departments, including the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, Boston College,
Stony Brook University (SUNY), Vanderbilt University, DePaul University, Villanova
University, the University of Guelph, The New School, Pennsylvania State University,
University of Oregon, Emory University, Duquesne University, the University of
Memphis, University of King's College, and Loyola University Chicago. The most
prominent organization for continental philosophy in the United States is the Society for
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (known as SPEP).[24]
 The rise of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy can be interpreted both as a
prophylactic and a therapeutic movement: on the one hand, Whitehead's life and thought
show that analytic rigor and speculative imagination can work together; on the other
hand, Whiteheadian scholarship has sometimes provided bridges between these fields.[25]

 4 Significant works

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 5 See also
 6 Notes
 7 References
 8 External links
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_continental_philosophy_articles
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-philosophy

Contents
 1 Non-philosophy according to Laruelle
 Laruelle argues that all forms of philosophy (from ancient philosophy to analytic philosophy to
deconstruction and so on) are structured around a prior decision, and remain constitutively blind to this
decision. The 'decision' that Laruelle is concerned with here is the dialectical splitting of the world in order
to grasp the world philosophically. Examples from the history of philosophy include Immanuel Kant's
distinction between the synthesis of manifold impressions and the faculties of the understanding; Martin
Heidegger's split between the ontic and the ontological; and Jacques Derrida's notion of
différance/presence. The reason Laruelle finds this decision interesting and problematic is because the
decision itself cannot be grasped (philosophically grasped, that is) without introducing some further
scission.
 Laruelle further argues that the decisional structure of philosophy can only be grasped non-philosophically.
In this sense, non-philosophy is a science of philosophy. Non-philosophy is not metaphilosophy because, as
Laruelle scholar Ray Brassier notes, "philosophy is already metaphilosophical through its constitutive
reflexivity".[1] Brassier also defines non-philosophy as the "theoretical practice of philosophy proceeding
by way of transcendental axioms and producing theorems which are philosophically uninterpretable". [1] The
reason why the axioms and theorems of non-philosophy are philosophically uninterpretable is because, as
explained, philosophy cannot grasp its decisional structure in the way that non-philosophy can.
 Laruelle's non-philosophy, he claims, should be considered to philosophy what non-Euclidean geometry is
to the work of Euclid. It stands in particular opposition to philosophical heirs of Jacques Lacan such as
Alain Badiou.

 2 Role of the subject
 The radically performative character of the subject of non-philosophy would be meaningless without the
concept of radical immanence. The philosophical doctrine of immanence is generally defined as any
philosophical belief or argument which resists transcendent separation between the world and some other
principle or force (such as a creator deity). According to Laruelle, the decisional character of philosophy
makes immanence impossible for it, as some ungraspable splitting is always taking place within. By
contrast, non-philosophy axiomatically deploys immanence as being endlessly conceptualizable by the
subject of non-philosophy. This is what Laruelle means by "radical immanence". The actual work of the
subject of non-philosophy is to apply its methods to the decisional resistance to radical immanence which is
found in philosophy.
 3 Radical immanence
 4 Sans-philosophie
 In "A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy" (2004), François Laruelle states:
 "I see non-philosophers in several different ways. I see them, inevitably, as subjects of the university, as is
required by worldly life, but above all as related to three fundamental human types. They are related to the
analyst and the political militant, obviously, since non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism
— it transforms the subject by transforming instances of philosophy. But they are also related to what I
would call the ‘spiritual′ type — which it is imperative not to confuse with ‘spiritualist′. The spiritual are
not spiritualists. They are the great destroyers of the forces of philosophy and the state, which band together
in the name of order and conformity. The spiritual haunt the margins of philosophy, Gnosticism, mysticism,
and even of institutional religion and politics. The spiritual are not just abstract, quietist mystics; they are
for the world. This is why a quiet discipline is not sufficient, because man is implicated in the world as the
presupposed that determines it. Thus, non-philosophy is also related to Gnosticism and science-fiction; it

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answers their fundamental question — which is not at all philosophy's primary concern — ‘Should
humanity be saved? And how?’ And it is also close to spiritual revolutionaries such as Müntzer and certain
mystics who skirted heresy. When all is said and done, is non-philosophy anything other than the chance
for an effective utopia?" [2]
 Numbered amongst the members or sympathizers of sans-philosophie ("without philosophy") are those
included in a collection published in 2005 by L’Harmattan:[3] François Laruelle, Jason Barker, Ray
Brassier, Laurent Carraz, Hugues Choplin, Jacques Colette, Nathalie Depraz, Oliver Feltham, Gilles Grelet,
Jean-Pierre Faye, Gilbert Hottois, Jean-Luc Rannou,[4] Pierre A. Riffard, Sandrine Roux and Jordanco
Sekulovski.

 5 Precursors
 Adam Karl August von Eschenmayer also developed an approach to philosophy called non-philosophy.
 He defined it as a kind of mystical illumination by which was obtained a belief in God that could not be
reached by mere intellectual effort.[5] He carried this tendency to mysticism into his physical researches,
and was led by it to take a deep interest in the phenomena of animal magnetism. He ultimately became a
devout believer in demoniacal and spiritual possession; and his later writings are all strongly impregnated
with supernaturalism.
 Laruelle sees Eschenmayer's doctrine as a "break with philosophy and its systematic aspect in the name of
passion, faith, and feeling".[6]

 6 See also
 7 References
 8 Further reading
 9 External links
 Controversy over the Possibility of a Science of Philosophy (pdf) a debate between Laruelle and Derrida
(from La Décision Philosophique, No. 5, April 1988, pp. 62–76) translated by Robin Mackay
 Frequently Asked Questions at Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale (ONPhI)
 Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale
 A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy by François Laruelle at Organisation Non-Philosophique
Internationale (ONPhI)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_realism

Speculative realism is a movement in contemporary philosophy that defines itself loosely in its stance of
metaphysical realism against the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy (or what it terms correlationism[1]).
Speculative realism takes its name from a conference held at Goldsmiths College, University of London in April
2007.[2] The conference was moderated by Alberto Toscano of Goldsmiths College, and featured presentations by
Ray Brassier of American University of Beirut (then at Middlesex University), Iain Hamilton Grant of the
University of the West of England, Graham Harman of the American University in Cairo, and Quentin Meillassoux
of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Credit for the name "speculative realism" is generally ascribed to
Brassier,[3] though Meillassoux had already used the term "speculative materialism" to describe his own position. [4]

A second conference, entitled "Speculative Realism/Speculative Materialism", took place at the UWE Bristol on
Friday 24 April 2009, two years after the original event at Goldsmiths.[5] The line-up consisted of Ray Brassier, Iain
Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and (in place of Meillassoux who was unable to attend) Alberto Toscano.[6]

In the framework of hermeneutics, as a reaction against its constructivist or nihilistic outcomes, Maurizio Ferraris
has proposed the so-called "New Realism" (Manifesto del nuovo realismo, 2012), a philosophical orientation shared
by both analytic philosophers (such as Mario De Caro, see Bentornata Realtà, ed. by De Caro and Ferraris, 2012),
and Continental philosophers, such as Mauricio Beuchot (Manifesto del realismo analogico, 2013), and Markus
Gabriel (Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology, 2014). New realism intersects with other realistic movements that
arose independently but responding to similar needs, such as the "speculative realism" defended by the French
philosopher Quentin Meillassoux and the American philosopher Graham Harman.

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For new realism, the assumption that science is not systematically the ultimate measure of truth and reality does not
mean that we should abandon the notions of reality, truth or objectivity, as was posited by much twentieth century
philosophy. Rather, it means that philosophy, as well as jurisprudence, linguistics or history, has something
important and true to say about the world. In this context, new realism presents itself primarily as a negative realism:
the resistance that the outside world opposes to our conceptual schemes should not be seen as a failure, but as a
resource – a proof of the existence of an independent world. If this is the case, however, this negative realism turns
into a positive realism: in resisting us reality does not merely set a limit we cannot trespass, but it also offers
opportunities and resources. This explains how, in the natural world, different life-forms can interact in the same
environment without sharing any conceptual scheme and how, in the social world, human intentions and behaviors
are made possible by a reality that is first given, and that only at a later time may be interpreted and, if necessary,
transformed.

 1 Critique of correlationism
 2 Variations
o 2.1 Speculative materialism
o 2.2 Object-oriented philosophy
o 2.3 Transcendental materialism / neo-vitalism
o 2.4 Transcendental nihilism / methodological naturalism
 3 Controversy regarding the existence of a speculative realist "movement"
 4 Publications
 5 Internet presence
 6 See also
 7 References
 8 External links

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://read.hipporeads.com/why-i-left-academia-philosophys-homogeneity-needs-rethinking/

Eugene Sun Park

Philosophy

Philosophy is predominantly white and predominantly male. This homogeneity exists in almost all aspects and at all
levels of the discipline. The philosophical canon, especially in so-called “analytic” departments, consists almost
exclusively of dead, white men. The majority of living philosophers—i.e., professors, graduate students, and
undergraduate majors—are also white men. And the topics deemed important by the discipline almost always ignore
race, ethnicity, and gender. Philosophy, it is often claimed, deals with universal truths and timeless questions. It
follows, allegedly, that these matters by their very nature do not include the unique and idiosyncratic perspectives of
women, minorities, or “people of culture.”

Astoundingly, many professional philosophers are perplexed as to why there aren’t more women and minorities in
philosophy. While there may be no single reason why philosophy is so lacking in diversity, the fact that it is lacking
is blatantly clear when we compare philosophy to other humanistic disciplines (and even to many STEM fields). One
important step towards solving philosophy’s diversity problem is to figure out why so few women and minorities stick
with philosophy for the long haul. My own experiences as a graduate student, while not necessarily representative,

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may shed some light on the matter. (Further discussion on this topic by professional philosophers can be found here
and here.)

I used to be a philosophy PhD student at a well-respected department in the Midwest. After six and a half years of
graduate study, I withdrew from my program and left academia altogether. Why? The dismal academic job market
certainly had something to do with my decision. But, more importantly, as a person of color, I found myself
increasingly uncomfortable in my department and within the discipline at large. Granted, a PhD program in any
discipline will involve a certain amount of indoctrination, but the particular demands of philosophy were, in my view,
beyond unreasonable.

As I discovered over the course of my graduate career, in order to be taken seriously in the discipline, and to have any
hope of landing a tenure-track job, one must write a dissertation in one of the “core areas” of philosophy. What are
these core areas? Philosophers quibble about how exactly to slice up the philosophical pie, but generally the divisions
look something like this:

 Metaphysics & Epistemology

 Logic & Philosophy of Language
 Philosophy of Mind
 Value Theory
 History

Such is the menu of choices available to the philosopher-in-training today. (See, for example, the PhD
requirements at these prominent philosophy departments: Penn, Berkeley, and Duke.) On the surface, this might look
like a wide range of options. But appearances are deceiving. For instance, the subfield of philosophy of mind does not
typically engage at all with Indian, East Asian, African, or Native American ideas about the nature of mind. It’s as if
non-Western thinkers had nothing to say about the matter. Similarly, those who work in the history of philosophy
work almost exclusively on the history of Western philosophy—e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant,
Hegel, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc.

Why don’t Anglo-American philosophers engage with non-Western philosophical traditions? In my experience,
professional philosophers today often perceive non-Western thinkers as inferior. Of course, few would say this
explicitly. Rather, philosophers often point to non-Western philosophy’s unusual and unfamiliar methodology as the
primary reason for the disconnect. Or, as a prominent member of my department once explained to me, philosophers
literally can’t understand non-Western philosophy because they can’t read it: “Philosophers trained in English-
speaking countries can’t read ancient Chinese or Hindi or some obscure African language, and given the existing
demands on our time, it’s unreasonable for us to have to learn those languages.” (Somehow, though, it is perfectly
reasonable for philosophers to spend years studying ancient Greek, or German, or French.)

The excuses for excluding non-Western thinkers from the philosophical canon are sometimes more obviously
derogatory. For instance, philosophers often claim that non-Western thought lacks “rigor” and “precision,” essential
characteristics of serious philosophy. As a result, many philosophers simply dismiss non-Western intellectual culture
as (mere) religion, speculative thought, or literature.

As an Asian American, and as someone who grew up under the partial influence of Buddhist and Confucian
culture/thought, I find this dismissive attitude towards “the East” to be personally and deeply offensive. At best,
Anglo-American philosophers seem to regard most non-Western philosophy as a cute side hobby, but certainly not
something deserving of serious attention. As one of my dissertation advisors told me, “Asian philosophy can be one
of your several Areas of Competence (AOC), but not your Area of Specialization (AOS).” To be fair, this advice was
given in response to the existing realities of the discipline and the prospects for an academic job. Considered in that
light, this was not bad advice, but is problematic nonetheless because it simply accepts and even perpetuates the status
quo. And what is the status quo? A quick glance at the course offerings of any top philosophy department (examples
here, here, and here) reveals unambiguously where their priorities lie—most departments provide nothing by way of
non-Western philosophy, and the ones that do will usually offer one or two introductory classes taught by visiting
lecturers or affiliated faculty in other departments. The record of recent tenure-track hires by philosophy departments

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also confirms this overwhelming bias towards philosophers who specialize in the “core areas” of the Western
philosophical tradition.

So, fairly early in my career as a PhD student I learned that certain ways of doing philosophy are acceptable, while
others are not. Likewise, certain topics count as legitimate philosophy, and others do not. These disciplinary
boundaries, by and large, are not up for debate. Any graduate student who ignores these basic facts about the
discipline runs the risk of professional ostracism and, ultimately, failure. (Kristie Dotson’s paper on philosophy’s
“culture of justification,” published in Comparative Philosophy, provides an excellent analysis of how the profession
privileges certain approaches to philosophy over others. A similar analysis is offered by Yoko Arisaka, an assistant
professor at the University of San Francisco, who writes about the lack of Asians and Asian women in academic
philosophy.)

The current state of affairs in academic philosophy is, from an historical perspective, extremely curious. Most
humanistic disciplines have gone through (a sometimes painful) process of self-evaluation and reconstruction. History
and literature departments, for instance, were once primarily focused on the work, thought, and writings of white,
Western European men. But throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, women, minorities, and other
traditionally marginalized people have been increasingly incorporated into these fields, both as subjects and as
practitioners, as explored in David Hollinger’s book The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War
II.

Somehow philosophy got left behind. Walk around most philosophy departments today, and you’ll likely see just a
sprinkling of women and minorities, with the vast majority of students and faculty being white men. This imbalance
is also painfully evident in philosophical publications, citations, and overall disciplinary influence. Among the
266 most cited contemporary philosophers in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 10% are women and 3% are
minorities. In order for things to change, philosophers need to see that there is a need for change. I worry that this is
not happening.

In my own department, I tried to stimulate discussion about what could be done to increase diversity. The faculty and
my fellow graduate students were, to their credit, perfectly happy to have more women and minorities in the
department. In fact, many spoke openly about their desire to see a more diverse department. This desire, however,
seemed to be a desire mostly for a cosmetic change in the look of the department. When it came to making changes
that might bring about a much deeper sense of diversity—i.e., changes in the culture and intellectual environment—
there was less accommodation. In attempts to open up a discussion about diversity, I found myself repeatedly
confounded by ignorance and, at times, thinly veiled racism. To various faculty, I suggested the possibility of hiring
someone who, say, specializes in Chinese philosophy or feminist philosophy or the philosophy of race. I complained
about the Eurocentric nature of undergraduate and graduate curricula. Without exception, my comments and
suggestions were met with the same rationalizations for why philosophy is the way it is and why it should remain that
way. To paraphrase one member of my department, “This is the intellectual tradition we work in. Take it or leave it.”

The pressure to accept and conform to a narrow conception of philosophy was pervasive. When I tried to introduce
non-Western and other non-canonical philosophy into my dissertation, a professor in my department suggested that I
transfer to the Religious Studies Department or some other department where “ethnic studies” would be more
welcome. When I considered exploring issues of race in my dissertation, my advisor remarked that she had always
thought of Asian Americans as “basically white,” so she was genuinely surprised that I would have any desire to
pursue such topics.

Underlying these remarks are highly problematic assumptions about who “we” are and what historical figures and
texts comprise “our” intellectual heritage. This is certainly a complicated and contested set of issues. For the purposes
of this discussion, I’ve vastly oversimplified matters with my naïve talk of West vs. East, and my use of broad
categories like Asian philosophy and analytic philosophy. But one thing is absolutely clear and indisputable: “We”
are no longer mostly white men of European descent. (In fact, it’s doubtful “we” were ever this.) At colleges and
universities across the country, women and minorities are now frequently in the majority. While much of the rest of
the academy has evolved to reflect these demographic changes, philosophy remains mired in a narrow conception of
the discipline that threatens to marginalize philosophy even further.

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So why did I choose to leave philosophy, instead of staying and advocating for change from within? It was certainly
not an easy decision, but, by the end, my departure felt like an inevitability. I loved studying philosophy, and truly
have no regrets about devoting nearly a decade of my life to it. But I also grew tired and frustrated with the profession’s
unwillingness to interrogate itself. Eventually, I gave up hope that the discipline would ever change, or that it would
change substantially within a timeframe that was useful to me professionally and personally. (Since I left graduate
school, at least two philosophy departments—Rutgers and Georgia State—have implemented policies to improve the
academic climate for women and minorities. Whether these policies will be effective, and whether similar policies
will be adopted more broadly, remains to be seen.)

The lack of women and minorities in philosophy may be an anomaly in the academy, especially among the humanities,
but it is not an accident. Philosophers have made, and continue to make, decisions that impact the demographics of
the discipline. Until they acknowledge their own complicity in the problem, philosophers will continue to scratch their
heads about the lack of diversity in their field. It’s not that women and minorities are (inexplicably) less interested in
the “problems of philosophy”—it’s that women and minorities have not had their fair say in defining what the
problems of philosophy are, or what counts as philosophy in the first place.( These are serious questions and many
complex socio-cultural and perhaps discourse-related factors are involved? I do not only refer to race and gender but
why does philosophy or any other discipline concentrate on certain objects of investigation and not other subject-
matter? Or certain analytic methods rather than so-called Continental methodologies? Or ideas or approaches?))

Further Reading:

 “How is This Paper Philosophy?” in Comparative Philosophy by Kristie Dotson

 David Hollinger’s The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II
 “What Could Leave Philosophy?” in Thoughts Arguments and Rants
 “Different Voices or Perfect Storm: Why Are There So Few Women in Philosophy?” by Louise Antony in
the Journal of Social Philosophy
 “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone)” by Sally Haslanger in Hypatia
(Spring 2008)
 “Asian Women: Invisibility, Locations, and Claims to Philosophy,” in Women of Color in Philosophy, by
Yoko Arisaka
 “Quantifying the Gender Gap: An Empirical Study of the Underrepresentation of Women in Philosophy,”
by Molly Paxton, Carrie Figdor, and Valerie Tiberius (as part of the Society for Philosophy and
Psychology’s Diversity initiatives)
 Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
 Eric Schwitzgebel, Professor of Philosophy at University of California at Riverside, “Citation of Women
and Ethnic Minorities in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,” in his blog, The Splintered Mind.
 “Missing Men: Addressing the College Gender Gap” in HigherEd Live
 “California Latinos Surpass Whites in Freshman UC Admission Offers,” in Los Angeles Times
 The NY Times’ Opinionator: Women in Philosophy section

20

http://tar.weatherson.org/2012/07/

Posted on 18 July, 2012 by Brian Weatherson

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What Could Leave Philosophy?

I’ve been writing up some stuff on Herman Cappelen’s great new book Philosophy Without Intuitions. And it got
me thinking about just what is distinctive about philosophy. You might have thought it was something to do with the
use of intuitions, but Cappelen shows that isn’t right. Whatever intuitions are, there isn’t much ground for saying
they are more prevalent in philosophy than in other disciplines.

So what is it? It’s not a trivial question, because there isn’t much obviously in common between what different
philosophers work on. Just looking at my own colleagues, it’s hard to say what the common thread linking the work
of Sarah Moss, Elizabeth Anderson, Chandra Sripada, Allan Gibbard, Victor Caston and Laura Ruetsche could be.

I sort of suspect there isn’t really a principled answer to the question of what is philosophy. Rather, the answer as to
why some things are done in philosophy departments and others are not will largely be historical, turning on
some fairly contingent choices that were made in the formation of the contemporary academy.

To get a sense of how plausible this hypothesis is, I wanted to run a couple of little thought experiments. The
experiments concern which departments house which questions. Here’s what I mean by ‘house’. For some
questions, there is an obvious department (or small group of departments) to be in if you want to work on that
question. If you want to work on what needs to be added to justified true belief to get knowledge, you should be in a
philosophy department. If you want to work on the power relationships between the French monarch and aristocracy
in the 18th Century, you should be in a history department (or perhaps a very historically oriented political science
department).

Which departments house which questions changes over time. In the distant past, physics was part of philosophy
departments. In a good sense, economics only split from philosophy in the early 20th Century. At Cambridge, which
was at the time the most important place in the world for both disciplines, the economics tripos split from the
philosophy tripos in 1903. To the extent that cognitive science was a recognisable field in the 1950s and 1960s, it
was just as much part of philosophy as anything else.

Similarly, which departments house which questions can change over modal space. In some very nearby worlds,
there are very few departments we would recognise as philosophy departments, even though there is much work on
philosophical questions. That’s because in those worlds there are separate departments for moral philosophy and for
logic & metaphysics, as there was at St Andrews traditionally.

But let’s focus on worlds in which there are recognisable philosophy departments. Here’s the question.

 For each sub-discipline in philosophy, how far into modal space do you need to go to find a world where it
isn’t housed in a philosophy department?

I’ll put my views on this over the fold, so if you like you can think about this before seeing what I have to say.

For a few areas, it is easy to imagine them being in other departments, because they already overlap so substantially
with work done in other departments. These areas (and the overlapping departments) include:

 Logic (Mathematics and Computer Science)

 Language (Linguistics)
 Decision Theory and Game Theory (Economics)
 Legal Philosophy (Law)
 Political Philosophy (Political Science)
 Feminist Philosophy (Women’s Studies)
 Philosophy of Physics/Biology (Physics/Biology)

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(My comment: What about the many different ‘types’, issues, problems of Experimental Philosophy? And
the departments or disciplines they overlap with? And Philosophical studies related to Cognitive Sciences?
And In the arts, literature, social sciences, eg sociology? Just think of the 4 generations of Critical Theory
and in different universities, and other schools or movements of philosophy in France.)

Those are roughly ordered in terms of how substantial the overlap is between what goes on inside philosophy
departments and what does on in other departments. It is perhaps a bit of a stretch to include Philosophy of Physics
and Biology here, because physics and biology departments have on the whole moved away a bit from the kind of
theoretical work philosophers do. But I think it’s easy to imagine them including more work we currently call
philosophical.

It’s true that some work that’s currently done in philosophy of language doesn’t really overlap with much of
linguistics. But a lot does. I think the paradigm of recent work in philosophy of language is the joint work on
epistemic modals between Thony Gillies and Kai von Fintel, the existence of which is a pretty strong proof of the
overlap between the departments. (Why overlap of departments? Why not of ideas, assumptions, methods,
techniques, tools, problems, questions, etc? My Comment

What is Visual Communication Design?

Visual Communication Design is a broad term encompassing graphic design, information design,
instructional design, visual storytelling and various products of cultural and visual information.
In today's competitive and information-rich world, visual communication design is
indispensable. From the moment we wake up, most of our experiences, actions, perceptions and
decisions are informed and controlled by design. On a daily basis, the faces of clocks, our street
signs, magazines, books, posters, advertisements, package labels, logos and branding, ATM
interfaces, film, television and websites help us to access vital information about the world
around us. Featuring a broad range of media and formats, each of these visual messages is
designed with a specific function, purpose and audience in mind. This is the creative domain of
designers of visual communication.

Rationale

The Master's degree in Art Education is motivated by a need to harness the critical social power
of art in an era of globalisation and social reparation, by engaging both potential and established
art educators. The course is premised on the belief that the creative and critical practice of teaching
and generating art is instrumental in the creation of an imaginative and socially conscious citizenry.

Aims

 To create socially conscious graduates who would be able to practice as qualified art educators,
and to further engage established educators in the transformative potential of art.
 To promote a responsiveness to a South African and African context, both within academia and
school curricula, and to develop partnerships between the University and its surrounding
environment (schools and educational initiatives), both through the curriculum itself and the
professionals qualified through the degree.
 To develop and maintain a high research output in the fields of art and education, and within
these fields lead research in social transformation, institutional accountability, collaborative
knowledge production, aesthetics and popular culture, and encourage cross-disciplinary
academic collaborations and a scholarship of engagement.

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Courses

 10101 Teaching and learning theories 811 (15 credits)

 10102 Art education and citizenship 812 (15 credits), 841 (15 credits)
 10104 Art education and globalisation 842 (15 credits)
 10105 Service Learning (Art Education) 876 (30 credits)
 10106 Thesis 871 (90 credits)

Why Visual Studies?

In a world increasingly mediated by the visual, to understand the production, circulation and
reading thereof is essential. As a relatively new discipline, Visual Studies brings critical theories
from a wide array of fields including Sociology, Cultural Studies, Philosophy etc. to bear on a
host of visual objects. The interdisciplinary nature of the programme allows one to analyse
objects originating from a variety of contexts such as fine arts, mass media, corporate
communication, visual communication design, film and architecture. Courses tend to adopt an
overarching critical focus such as post-colonialist or gender theory under which umbrella popular
cultural or so-called high art images may be explored.

The highly popular undergraduate offering poses questions that resonate with student's
experience of their complex life-world:

 How does rapidly changing technology impact on human identity?

 How is our embodiment as raced, sexed, gendered and aged persons negotiated by the visual?
 How do inherited cultural and linguistic structures encode meaning in visual images?
 How can images be read against the grain of dominant western epistemologies?

Visual Studies offers a comprehensive post-graduate programme all the way through to doctoral
level.

Our intensive year-long Honours course attracts students who are interested in pursuing careers
in the arts sector as curators, art critics and media specialists. As part of the 2015 programme we
offer special curricula themed around: photography and self-representation, art criticism and
curatorship. )

I could perhaps also have included (see my additions above. That is only from one visual art department.).

 Aesthetics (Literature, Art History and Music)

but that would require knowing more about what goes on in literature, art history and music departments than I
actually do. (Many art schools teach critical thinking, analysis, art appreciation, and some offer degrees in art
journalism, curatorship, criticism, etc. So much so that there students do course in philosophy departments)>

And it isn’t much more of a stretch to include

 History of Ancient Philosophy (Classics)

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There is obviously a fairly substantial overlap between classics and ancient philosophy, as evidenced by the number
of very important academics that have joint appointments in philosophy and classics programs. It would require a bit
of a culture change to classics to have all the work that’s currently done in ancient philosophy moved into classics,
but it doesn’t feel like we’d be moving too far from actuality to imagine that culture change happening.

The next two are a bit trickier, but still could move without too radical a change to the academy.

 History of Modern Philosophy

 Philosophy of Mind

There are a few ways that history of modern could leave philosophy.

One is that existing history of science programs could incorporate more history of philosophy. It isn’t too hard to
imagine there being much more work on Descartes and Leibniz in existing history of science programs, and if
history of science included more history of economics, then Hume and Smith and possibly Locke would be included
too. Once that happens, it is easy to see how a full blown history of modern program could be inside history of
science.

A second involves the same thing happening inside history departments, but that is a bit more unlikely. Not
completely unlikely, there is actually already excellent work in history of modern philosophy inside history
departments, but perhaps unlikely.

A third involves there being more history of ideas departments, like there used to be at ANU. Again, perhaps that’s a
little way from actuality.

Philosophy of mind (Cognitive sciences!! And X-PHI!! As examples) is a little trickier, because it is such a diverse
field. My sense of the most active work in the last decade could easily be duplicated by theorists who fit into
psychology or cognitive science departments. Again, I’m not completely sure about the culture of psychology and
cognitive science departments to say how much change would be needed to fit more philosophy into those
departments, but my guess it would be a relatively small culture change.

That brings us to three fields that it would be hard to see moving en masse: Ethics, Epistemology and
Metaphysics.

There are not massively distant worlds where there are departments of value theory covering basically current
ethics and economics. In some of them I suspect to some extent that’s what Alfred Marshall had in mind when he
moved economics out of philosophy at Cambridge. If you thought that Bentham and Mill had solved the very big
questions in ethics, and that what was left to do was to work on applied questions, then you might think economics
was a general department of value theory. But it’s trickier to imagine a combined economics and ethics department
where Kantian views are given much more attention. And it’s even harder to imagine much meta-ethics work going
on in my imagined value theory department.

Some epistemology work, especially in formal epistemology, does obviously overlap with other disciplines. But
it is hard to see work on, say, the proper formulation of the safety condition on knowledge fitting into anything like
current departments outside philosophy. (Logic and mathematics, Bayesian Epistemology, Abduction Theory and its
role in theorizing, Bayesian Confirmation Theory, argumentation, work on theorizing and all the philosophy
involved in that in Management research and studies

Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination

lib.cufe.edu.cn/upload_files/other/4_20140512034955_3.pdf

by KE WEICK - 1989 - Cited by 1710 - Related articles

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Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination. Author(s): Karl E. Weick. Reviewed work(s):

... 4 (Oct., 1989), pp. 516-531 ... Academy of Management Review, 1989, Vol. 14, No. ......
Weick, K. E. (1974) Middle range theories of social systems.

Research in Organizations: Foundations and Methods in Inquiry

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1605093335

Richard A. Swanson, Elwood F. Holton - 2005 - Business & Economics

Building process theory with narrative: From description to explanation. Academy of Management
Review, 24(4),711–724. Poole, M. S. ... A primer in theory construction. ... Weick,K.E.(1989).Theory
construction as disciplined imagination.

Just look at the philosophizing involved in this and the entire process of theorizing resembles philosophizing or vice
versa.).

Metaphysics might seem easy at first, though there are some overlaps with other fields. In those decades where
metaphysicians care about things like causation and laws, there is overlap with other fields. (Remember that one of
the most important books on causation in recent times was written by Judea Pearl.) But in those decades, like the last
one, where the focus is on meta-metaphysics, it is hard to see it fitting into non-philosophy departments.

(http://bespalovseminar.narod.ru/literature/MetaX2.pdf

Metaphysics is concerned with the foundations of reality. It asks questions

about the nature of the world, such as: Aside from concrete objects, are there
also abstract objects like numbers and properties? Does every event have a
cause? What is the nature of possibility and necessity? When do several things
make up a single bigger thing? Do the past and future exist? And so on.
Metametaphysics is concerned with the foundations of metaphysics.
¹
It asks:
Do the questions of metaphysics really have answers? If so, are these answers
substantive or just a matter of how we use words? And what is the best
procedure for arriving at them — common sense? Conceptual analysis? Or
assessing competing hypotheses with quasi-scientific criteria?
This volume gathers together sixteen new essays that are concerned with
the semantics, epistemology, and methodology of metaphysics. My aim is to
introduce these essays within a more general (and mildly opinionated) survey
of contemporary challenges to metaphysics.
²
And the preferred methodology for answering these questions is
quasi-scientific, of the type recommended by W. V. O. Quine, developed by
David Lewis, and summarized by Theodore Sider in this volume:
Competing positions are treated as tentative hypotheses about the world, and are
assessed by a loose battery of criteria for theory choice. Match with ordinary usage
and belief sometimes plays a role in this assessment, but typically not a dominant

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one. Theoretical insight, considerations of simplicity, integration with other domains

(for instance science, logic, and philosophy of language), and so on, play important
roles. (p.385)
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24198-metametaphysics-new-essays-on-the-foundations-of-
ontology/

2009.10.13

David Chalmers, David Manley, Ryan Wasserman (eds.)

Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology
David Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New
Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, Oxford UP, 2009, 529pp., $45.95 (pbk), ISBN
9780199546008.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Barnes, University of Leeds

 

The main goal of a favorable book review should be to make people who read the review want to
read the book. With that in mind, this review of Metametaphysics won't be addressed to those
deeply immersed in contemporary metaphysics (you know who you are). Rather, I'll try to show
that even if you're not a metaphysician -- indeed, even if you're deeply suspicious of metaphysics
-- Metametaphysics is interesting.

Selling Metametaphysics to people who don't really like first-order metaphysics isn't easy. A
non-metaphysician colleague of mine recently remarked, in a discussion about the volume, that
'it really tells you something about the status of metaphysics, doesn't it?' Given that metaphysics
only returned to the philosophical mainstream in the latter decades of the 20th century (after long
years on the post-positivist sidelines), metaphysics seems to have 'gone meta' far more quickly
than other disciplines. Moreover, it seems to have 'gone meta' largely in order to defend itself as
a worthwhile discipline. That it has had to launch such carefully mounted defenses of itself and
resort to meta-commentary analyzing its own nature as a discipline were to this colleague yet
further evidence that there's something suspicious about metaphysics. He maintained that
practicing metaphysicians who want the discipline to be taken seriously should find a volume
like Metametaphysics cause for concern rather than for celebration. Non-metaphysicians can
simply dismiss it as another reason to look askance at metaphysics.

Suspicion about metaphysics isn't uncommon, and it isn't new. Metaphysicians obsess about
abstract and technical debates, carried out in esoteric terms only used by (and perhaps only
comprehensible to) other metaphysicians. If you ask non-metaphysicians about metaphysics,
they will more than likely be inclined to shrug and say 'what's the point?' (and that's if they are
being polite). If metaphysics is a robust enterprise, trying to describe the nature of objective
reality, then surely its questions are better answered by physicists. If it's a more modest
enterprise, trying to describe our concepts, then surely its questions are better answered by
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philosophers of language and philosophers of mind. If it's a domain where multiple answers are
on equally good footing and the disputes are merely verbal, then surely its questions are better
left unasked.

That the questions asked by metaphysicians should simply be left to physicists is not a criticism
that those not generally skeptical of philosophical inquiry should take seriously. As philosophers,
we tend to value the methodology of our own discipline and (whether justified or not) think that
this methodology can make uniquely valuable contributions. Philosophy of language should not
be abandoned for linguistics, aesthetics should not be abandoned for art criticism and art history,
philosophy of mind should not be abandoned for psychology and cognitive science, and so on.
There are often more empirical disciplines concerned with the same subject matter, but that
doesn't mean the philosophy is in bad standing. Or so say the philosophers, anyway.

But that metaphysics is at best a conceptual project (even if it thinks of itself as an inquiry into
objective, 'fundamental' reality) and at worst a badly-formed language game is a criticism that
philosophers can bring against metaphysics without undermining their own sub-disciplines.
Further, it's a criticism which should, and often does, worry those working in metaphysics.

The project of 'metametaphysics' is often thought to be aimed at these very criticisms.

'Metametaphysics' is metaphysicians trying to defend the legitimacy of their own discipline. This
is where my colleague's worry arises. What other subfield of philosophy has to try so hard to
defend itself? The very existence of 'metametaphysics', and a volume like Metametaphysics,
shows just how precarious a position metaphysics stands in.

So is the publication of a book like Metametaphysics yet further evidence that there's something
philosophically queasy about metaphysics? Not obviously. To fully understand why, however,
you really need to read Metametaphysics.

Compare metametaphysics to that other famous 'meta' discipline -- metaethics. Arguably, ethics
as a whole couldn't be the same after Mackie. Once someone clearly articulated the idea that our
moralizing (while useful) rests on a mistake, and that our moral claims were all false, a question
loomed over most any first-order normative debate: is this all just nonsense? But metaethics
didn't then simply divide itself into moral skeptics on one side (yes, it's nonsense!) and moral
realists on the other (no, real objective moral truth is out there!). There are multiple gradations of
metaethical positions between Mackie and Moore (emotivists, projectivists, relativists,
contextualists, etc). Moreover, metaethics extends far beyond such debates. It includes
discussion of what normativity is like, how normative inquiry should be undertaken, and so on.

Metametaphysics is, in many respects, a similar field. Metaphysics can't be the same after Ayer
and Carnap. Once the suspicion is raised that your discipline is really nonsense, you can think
that suspicion is wrong, and you can argue against it, but you can't ignore it. But as the pages of
Metametaphysics show, the ensuing debate is not simply a matter of 'skeptics vs. true believers'.
Being skeptical about metaphysics is much more complicated than simply saying 'oh, that sounds
like nonsense'. Moreover, there's much more to metametaphysics than a dialogue between those
who like metaphysics and those who don't. There are questions of how metaphysics should be
done, what kinds of questions it should include, and so on.

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On a brief guided tour of Metametaphysics, though, skepticism about metaphysics is a good

place to start.[1] Though skepticism about metaphysics is common, when pressed it's often
unclear what this skepticism amounts to. Verificationist-based skepticism about metaphysics was
easy to espouse when positivism dominated. Now that positivism is mostly a footnote in
philosophical history, the skeptics have to try a little harder. As sections of Metametaphysics
point out, however, appropriately articulating what skepticism about metaphysics involves
proves difficult. John Hawthorne outlines the problems in developing a skepticism about
metaphysics that is both stable and plausible. In a similar vein, Theodore Sider carefully
specifies what the metaphysical skeptic must commit to, and then argues that the metaphysician
can and should resist these commitments. It's not as easy to be skeptical about metaphysics
(while not being skeptical about all philosophy) as many philosophers assume.

Even if you're convinced that no defense of metaphysics could ever be adequate, you'll likely
still find something of interest in Metametaphysics, since it contains perhaps the most compelling
articulation, to date, of the idea that abstract metaphysical debates are insubstantial or 'merely
verbal': Eli Hirsch's Neo-Carnapian theory of quantifier variance. Consider the debate between
the compositional universalist (who says that every collection of objects composes a further
complex object) and the compositional nihilist (who says that there are no complex objects).
Then consider an entire linguistic community which speaks like the nihilist, and one which
speaks like the universalist. Each community's ontological claims are, according to Hirsch, true
in their own language. This shows that the debate between the nihilist and the universalist is
merely verbal -- and a merely verbal debate gets us nowhere and so might as well be given up.
(Though it's important to note that Hirsch thinks this form of skepticism applies only to cases
where the statements on one side of a debate have equivalent counterparts on the other side of
the debate.)

But skepticism about metaphysics is not limited to neo-Carnapianism. Metametaphysics usefully

distinguishes numerous gradations of skepticism and deflationism about metaphysics. David
Chalmers and Stephen Yablo, for example, each think that some metaphysics is in good standing
and unproblematic. They both take issue, however, with some of the more abstract debates in
first-order ontology, arguing that the existence-questions these debates pose may have no
determinate answer. Yablo locates the problem in the semantics of the debates' referring terms,
whereas Chalmers points the finger at its quantifiers, but both agree there is something defective
about the discourse that makes many of its core postulates indeterminate, and thus its central
questions unanswerable.

Whether talk of determinacy -- and lack thereof -- is the best way to characterize skepticism
about such ontological disputes is questionable. Some philosophers (this reviewer included)
think that metaphysical indeterminacy is at least coherent, and thus could make sense of the
thought that some existence questions don't have determinate answers without thinking this
shows anything problematic about those questions themselves. That point aside, however,
Chalmers and Yablo both present an interesting 'middle ground' form of skepticism: not
dismissive of metaphysics as a whole, but dubious of some of its more rarefied ontological
debates. Whether this form of skepticism is stable -- that is, whether one can continue to do some
metaphysics non-skeptically while being highly skeptical about the question of what
'fundamentally exists' -- is an important question for metaphysics.

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Yet another form of skepticism in Metametaphysics is that presented by Karen Bennett. Bennett
agrees that we should be skeptical about some debates in metaphysics, but argues for a different
form of skepticism than the familiar 'metaphysicians are talking past each other' or 'these
questions don't really have answers'. Bennett construes abstract ontological debates as well-
formed, in good philosophical standing, and as having answers (answers which are determined
by how the world is, not by what our conceptual scheme is like). But, in certain paradigm cases,
she doesn't think we'll ever be able to figure out what those answers are. The problem with these
ontological disputes, according to Bennett, is that we're simply unable to decide between what
seem -- to us, anyway -- to be equally good rival theories, and no amount of further theorizing
will help us decide. The questions we're asking in metaphysics -- or at least parts of metaphysics
-- aren't the sort of questions to which the methodology of metaphysics will ever provide
answers. This is skepticism not about the good philosophical standing of metaphysics, but rather
about our ability to make progress in it.

One way of avoiding skepticism -- in whatever form it comes -- about metaphysics is to be

revisionist about metaphysics. This is the approach taken by Amie Thomasson. Thomasson
argues that the skeptical problem arises when metaphysicians attempt to use ontological terms
like 'thing' in a theory-neutral way, stripped of all 'application conditions'. They do this in an
attempt to avoid talking past each other, but they end up asking meaningless ontological
questions. Yet there are many ontological questions which are not like this: whether that is a
table, whether this is a tree, etc. To answer these questions, we simply need to engage in a two-
step process -- first, conceptual analysis to determine the application condition of our sortal
terms ('table', 'tree', etc), and second, empirical inquiry as to whether those conditions are met.
This type of conceptual investigation -- rather than rarefied technical discussions about ontology
-- should be the task of metaphysics. Metaphysics is perhaps still, on this construal, open to other
forms of criticism that might be classed as skepticism about metaphysics -- that metaphysical
questions are at best better left to the philosopher of language, and at worst simply uninteresting,
can still trouble this more conceptual picture of metaphysics. Nevertheless Thomasson articulates
an interesting alternative picture of the methodology and aims of metaphysics.

Those in favor of more traditional metaphysics can look to Sider, who defends abstract
ontological debates from the kind of skepticism espoused by Hirsch. By appealing to a notion of
ontological structure, Sider argues that metaphysicians can show how their debates are in good
standing. Realism about structure -- 'joints in nature', to quote the familiar metaphor -- enables
metaphysicians to appropriately ground their theories, ensuring that they do not merely talk past
their opponents in debates about metaphysics.

As should be clear, Metametaphysics hosts a debate that is much more nuanced than a simple
'skeptics vs. enthusiasts' dichotomy. Skepticism about metaphysics can take different forms and
come in different degrees. It is also, unsurprisingly, resistable in a variety of ways.
Metametaphysics develops many of the central issues in this dialectic, making it essential
reading, not just for the metaphysician, but for the skeptic about metaphysics as well.

It's also important to note that Metametaphysics covers far more than skepticism about
metaphysics and responses to such skepticism. Many of its papers are devoted to, inter alia, how

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we should understand the basic project of metaphysics, how metaphysical questions can be
answered, and what kinds of questions should be included in legitimate metaphysical debates.

Jonathan Schaffer, Kit Fine, and Sider each give explanations of how basic ontological inquiry
should be understood. Schaffer appeals to a notion of ontological priority, Fine to a distinction
between what exists and what exists 'in reality', and Sider to ontological structure. Each of these
represent alternative ways of characterizing the basic -- but often opaque -- ontological question
of what is 'fundamental'.

Bob Hale and Crispin Wright undertake the metametaphysics of their NeoFregean philosophy of
mathematics. They argue that, suitably construed, questions such as 'are there any numbers?'
have easy and straightforward answers. On their construal, once you understand that certain
basic principles (such as 'Hume's Principle': the number of Fs = the number of Gs iff there is a
one to one correspondence between the Fs and the Gs), gain some empirical information (there is
a one to one correspondence between the Fs and the Gs), and reflect a little on how reference
works, the existence of numbers falls out straightforwardly -- no need for ontological hand-
wringing or deep background metaphysics.

Kris McDaniel focuses on rehabilitating a kind of metaphysical question that has been in general
disrepute since the early 20th century. Metaphysics should include, according to McDaniel, not
just the question of whether a thing exists, but also the question of what way a thing exists. He
argues for the coherence of 'ways of being' -- a resurrection of the historically popular idea that
'being' is not univocal. For example, if there are both abstracta and concreta, it could be a
different thing entirely for something to exist abstractly than it is for something to exist
concretely.

This is a very brief -- and very incomplete -- sampling of Metametaphysics. The central point is
simply that there's much more to the volume than metaphysicians saying 'trust us, it really is
okay to do metaphysics'. There's much value in it, not just for the metaphysician, but also for the
person skeptical about metaphysics (but trying to solidify that skepticism, or figure out what
exactly those metaphysicians are up to). And it shouldn't make you worry about metaphysics --
at least not more than you already do.

[1]
NB: I am using the term 'skepticism' more loosely than it's used in parts of Metametaphysics.
In the volume, a distinction is drawn between skeptics (who think metaphysics asks questions we
can't answer) and deflationists (who think the questions are somehow defective). My use of
'skepticism' is meant to include those who are generally skeptical about metaphysics, and
deflationists fall into this category. If you don't like my use of 'skepticism' you can replace it with
'suspicion'.

http://flov.gu.se/digitalAssets/1445/1445637_metametaphysics.pdf
To appear in
Oxfordbibliographies
[http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/browse?module_0=obo

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-
9780195396577].
Meta
metaphysics
Anna
-
Sofia Maurin
University of Gothenburg
TOC
Introduction
General Overviews
Anthologies
Textbooks
Metaontology
Carnap and the Impossibility of Metaphysics
Quine and the Possibility of Metaphysics
Neo
-
Carnapian Deflationism
Semantic Worries I: Indeterminism and Unrestricted Quantification
Semantic Worries II: Quantifier Variance
Semantic Worries III: Triviality
Neo
-
Quinean Responses
Quantifier Invariantism
Ontological Pluralism
Metametaphysics
The Ontological Turn
The Goal of Metaphysical Inquiry
Metaphysical Explanation
Truthmaking
Grounding
Metaphysics and Science

https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/pir/article/viewFile/911/470

Metametaphysics
is an excellent collection of papers about the nature and methodology of
metaphysics written by the subject’s movers and shakers. It will be of great interest to
anyone enamored, repulsed, or mystified by metaphysics.
Metaphysics, especially ontology, enjoyed something of a renaissance a few
decades ago, at least when compared to the preceding anti
-
metaphysical currents of the
early 20thcentury. According to lore, this renaissance had two main causes. The first was
Quine’s alleged purification of ontology: Quine revived ontology by showing us how to
do it without indulging in the obscurities which so bothered his positivist predecessors,
such as Ayer and Carnap. But there remain questions about the accuracy of this lore and
what its legacy ought to be. Peter Van Inwagen’s essay articulates and defends Quine’s
alleged purification. Scott Soames critically examines the nature of the infamous debate
between Carnap and Quine, arguing that they were more closely allied than the lore
allows. Huw Price argues that Quine’s alleged revival of ontology has been vastly
overstated.

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The second cause of metaphysics’ renaissance was the bold metaphysics of Saul
Kripke, David Lewis, David Armstrong, Kit Fine, and others in the last part of the 20th
century. These philosophers shamelessly invoked supposedly mysterious metaphysical
notions (such as possibility, necessity, essence, natural properties, truthmakers, and
grounding) and used them toward fruitful and ambitious philosophical ends. Along this
trajectory, Bob Hale and Crispin Wright’s essay focuses on how the neo
-Fregean project
uses abstraction principles (such as: the number of
F s = the number of Gs iff the Fs and the Gs correspond one-to
-one) to develop a Platonist view about numbers which avoids
its traditional epistemic pitfalls.
However, reading the essays in
Metametaphysics
gives one the impression that the
renaissance’s days are numbered. This is because most of the essays are each, in one way
or the other, concerned with addressing skepticism about metaphysics.
The essays by David Chalmers and Eli Hirsch each defend a broadly neo
-
Carnapian view according to which answers to many (if not all) metaphysical questions
reflect little more than our choices about how to describe reality. The essays by Matti Eklund,
John Hawthorne, and Theodore Sider are direct responses to this view. Both
Eklund and Hawthorne, although in different ways and toward different ends, object that
Philosophy in Review
XXX(2010), no. 3174
neoCarnapians must reject plausible semantic principles. Sider objects that reality has an
objective structure and that metaphysics strives to discover it.
The skeptical threats are manifested in other ways too. Karen Bennett, while
unsympathetic to neoCarnapianism, nevertheless argues that creatures like us are poorly
suited to making metaphysical progress. Amie Thomasson rejects much of traditional
metaphysics as concerned with unanswerable questions, while favoring a revisionist
metaphysics combining conceptual analysis with empirical investigation. Stephen Yablo
argues that discourse which
apparently carries ontological commitment is, in a peculiar
way, ontologically neutral and so ontological questions about the objects of that discourse
are factually defective.
The preoccupation with skeptical threats is partly just the playing out of the
old epic struggle between metaphysics and epistemology. But there also seems to be a more
specific culprit: the nearly universal endorsement of Quine’s conception of ontological
questions as quantificational questions (which, ironically, was supposed to have purified
ontology). For once ‘Are Fs real?’ is purified as ‘Is there at least one
F?’, then it can seem
that only two sensible methodologies emerge for answering such questions: (i) consult our
Moorean beliefs (‘There’s obviously a table there!’); or (ii) consult our best science
(‘Physics only needs the particles, and not any table over and above them!’). If (i), then it
seems that the answers to ontological questions are trivial and uninteresting; but if (ii),
then it seems that science, not metaphysics, provides the answers. So either metaphysics
trades in trivialities or is made obsolete by science. Thomas Hofweber’s essay explicitly
concerns finding a place for metaphysics between this rock and hard place, and many of
the other essays are at least implicitly wary of this dilemma.
The long shadow skeptical doubts cast upon the essays in
Metametaphysicsmight
easily give one the impression that metametaphysics is primarily concerned with
responding to skeptical challenges to metaphysics. But (f
ortunately) metametaphysics
isn’t merely the epistemology of metaphysics. A few maverick contributors are more
focused on the metaphysics

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of metaphysics. This is especially evident in the way these

mavericks depart from various aspects of the Quinean orthodoxy mentioned earlier.
Many of the authors recognize the need to distinguish an ordinary ‘metaphysically
-unloaded’ sense of the quantifiers from their serious ‘metaphysically
-loaded’ sense. But
Sider pushes this idea further by building upon Lewis’ notion
of natural properties and
taking reality itself to have natural joints: objective structure which only the
metaphysically
-
loaded sense of the quantifier captures. Ontological questions are
quantificational questions; but only a special kind of quantificational question is an
ontological question. Kris McDaniel defends a revival of the outmoded distinction
between ways of being by arguing that Sider’s general notion of structure is really an
abstraction upon many particular notions of structure, each corresponding to a distinct
way of being.Philosophy in Review XXX(2010), no. 3175
One last maverick theme opposes contemporary metaphysics’ focus on ontology.
There are at least two reasons why it is thus focused: (i) Quine’s alleged purification of
ontology, and (ii) David Lewis’
tour de forceof how an incredible ontology of possible
worlds provides broad philosophical payoffs. No wonder, then, that the only anthology
on metametaphysics is subtitled
New Essays on the Foundations ofOntology
!
Refreshingly, Jonathan Schaffer and Kit Fine buck this trend. While Schaffer
agrees with Quine that ontological questions are quantificational questions, he argues that
ontological questions just aren’t what metaphysics is really about. It is rather about what
is fundamentalor prior
(in the sense of being ontologically independent), as opposed to
what is derivative
(in the sense of being ontologically dependent). More radically, Fine
rejects what all the other essays (implicitly or explicitly) endorse: the Quinean
assimilation of ontological questions to quantificational questions. Instead, Fine defends a
primitive metaphysical conception of reality which does not support construing
ontological questions quantificationally. Metaphysics is about what facts hold in reality
and how they groundthose facts which do not. Ontology is just a (small) branch of this
larger project; it is the branch concerned with which objects the real facts are about.
The contributions of these mavericks seem to be the most refreshing and
interesting parts of Metametaphysics
.
It is unfortunate that they did not receive
more attention from the other contributors. For one example, Hofweber chastises Schaffer,
Fine, and others for making metaphysics an esoteric game playable only by members of
an elite club who claim to possess metaphysical
concepts, such as fundamentality,
ground, and reality. Suspicions about these metaphysical concepts are thus taken to be a
reason to conceive of metaphysics without them. But perhaps that is to change the
subject. Perhaps the way to rein in metaphysics’ excesses of
esotericism is not by
ignoring its distinctive but elusive concepts, but by confronting them head on.
In any case, it’s understandable that metaphysicians want to defend their
discipline, especially after feeling so much pressure from skeptics f
or so long. But it
seems as if the skeptics have been allowed to set the terms of the debate. Perhaps some
more mavericks are needed.
Nevertheless, this is a first

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rate anthology of firstrate essays. These papers,

together with David Manley’
s useful introduction, offer an accurate snapshot of the
current state of metametaphysics. Not only that, they also
give us an ideawhere
metametaphysics is headed.
Michael J. Raven
University of Victoria

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295478896_An_Introduction_to_Metametaphysics

How do we come to know metaphysical truths? How does metaphysical inquiry work? Are
metaphysical debates substantial? These are the questions which characterize metametaphysics.
This book, the fi rst systematic student introduction dedicated to metametaphysics, discusses the
nature of metaphysics – its methodology, epistemology, ontology, and our access to
metaphysical knowledge. It provides students with a fi rm grounding in the basics of
metametaphysics, covering a broad range of topics in metaontology such as existence, quantifi
cation, ontological commitment, and ontological realism. Contemporary views are discussed
along with those of Quine, Carnap, and Meinong. Going beyond the metaontological debate,
thorough treatment is given to novel topics in metametaphysics, including grounding, ontological
dependence, fundamentality, modal epistemology, intuitions, thought experiments, and the
relationship between metaphysics and science. The book will be an essential resource for those
studying advanced metaphysics, philosophical methodology, metametaphysics, epistemology,
and the philosophy of science.

http://www.philostv.com/category/meta-metaphysics/

Tuomas Tahko and Thomas Hofweber

Tuomas Tahko (left) and Thomas Hofweber (right) on the foundations of metaphysics.

If metaphysics is a form of genuine inquiry, then presumably metaphysicians investigate

questions of fact. But it seems that for any given type of fact, there is already a discipline that
investigates facts of that type. For instance, physicists investigate physical facts; […]

May 12th, 2012 | Category: meta-metaphysics, Metaphysics |

Craig Callender and Jonathan Schaffer

Craig Callender (left) and Jonathan Schaffer (right) on meta-metaphysics.

Do mereological sums constitute objects? Questions like this are hotly debated in contemporary
metaphysics — yet such questions seem utterly disconnected from science. Has metaphysics
gone in the wrong direction? Callender and Schaffer explore the issue.

[…]

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September 8th, 2010 | Category: meta-metaphysics, Metaphysics, Methodology | 4 comments

So that’s my ranking. It doesn’t match very readily with any popular sense of what’s ‘core’ to philosophy.
Epistemology and metaphysics are hardest to dislodges, but logic and language are easiest. But it does perhaps help
us think about why philosophy has ended up with the fields that it has.

Posted on 19 July, 2012 by Brian Weatherson http://tar.weatherson.org/2012/07/18/what-could-leave-

philosophy/

What Could Have Entered Philosophy? (MY Comment” more searching for philosophical subject-matter!!)

In the previous thread, Robbie Williams asked about the converse of the question set there. That is, he was
wondering

 What fields that are currently not (primarily) studied inside philosophy departments could (in nearby
worlds) be inside philosophy?

This is a much harder question I think. But there are a few candidates that come to mind.

Note that in every case I’ll describe, there is some work on this topic done inside philosophy. It’s just that the
primary location for them in the contemporary academy is (I think) outside philosophy.

The simplest perhaps is professional ethics. There is tons of ethics teaching in medical and business schools, much
more I think than there is in philosophy departments. It isn’t as clear that the primary location for research into
professional ethics is outside philosophy, but I suspect that it is. And it is easy enough to imagine a world where that
isn’t true.

Not too far behind is work on feminism and race theory. There is a pretty nearby world where researchers like
Tommie Shelby have their primary home in philosophy departments. Though that’s probably a world where people
actually in philosophy departments rate work on Philosophy of Race as higher than 27th out of 27 fields.

The other idea I have is perhaps a little harder to imagine given the current arrangement of the academy, but I think
with a small tweak at the right point in time it could have happened. There’s currently a lot of work, primarily in
psychology and economics departments, on happiness research. I think a lot of this concerns questions of long
lasting philosophical interest; in particular it connects to important debates about welfare. Now we’d have to
rearrange a lot of things to make philosophy departments suitable homes for people like Daniel Gilbert or Justin
Wolfers. But I imagine that had various things happened a little differently at the start of the 20th century, the idea
that contemporary philosophers did this kind of experimental and statistical work would seem no more surprising
than than Descartes and Locke worked on optics and economics.

Still, I feel this is too small, and too idiosyncratic, a list. What else could philosophy have easily incorporated?

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What’s Wrong with Contemporary Philosophy?

Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons and Barry Smith

Preprint version of paper to appear in Topoi, 25 (1-2), 2006, 63-67.

Abstract

Philosophy in the West divides into three parts:

Analytic Philosophy (AP), Continental Philosophy (CP), and

History of Philosophy (HP). But all three parts are in a bad

way. AP is sceptical about the claim that philosophy can be a

science, and hence is uninterested in the real world. CP is

never pursued in a properly theoretical way, and its practice

is tailor-made for particular political and ethical conclusions.

HP is mostly developed on a regionalist basis: what is studied

is determined by the nation or culture to which a philosopher

belongs, rather than by the objective value of that

philosopher’s work. Progress in philosophy (Can there be, should there be progress in philosophy?

And what would that mean? What standards will be employed to measure it?) can only be

attained by avoiding these pitfalls.

Philosophy in the West now divides into three parts – Analytic Philosophy,

Continental Philosophy and History of Philosophy.

Analytic Philosophy (AP), although it comes in many varieties, has four

striking properties. First, it is cultivated with every appearance of theoretical

rigour. Second, its practitioners do not, by and large, believe that philosophy

is or can be a science, i.e., they do not believe that it can add to the stock of

positive human knowledge. Third, the philosophers who until very recently

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were the most influential models in the pursuit of philosophy as a theoretical

enterprise – Chisholm, Davidson, Armstrong, Putnam, Kripke, Searle… –

have no obvious successors. Finally, AP has succeeded in the institutional

task of turning out increasing numbers of highly trained, articulate and

intelligent young philosophers. Each of these properties reflects a relatively

uncontroversial empirical claim.

Continental Philosophy (CP) comes in almost as many varieties as does AP

but is always decidedly anti-theoretical. This is particularly true of those

varieties which sport the name “Theory”, but it holds in general of all those

CP philosophical traditions in which political goals are more or less pre-

eminent. The heroes of CP – Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida – also

belong to the past and they, too, have no obvious successors.

The History of Philosophy (HP) is pursued by both analytic philosophers and

their Continental consoeurs. In Continental Europe – with the exception of

Scandinavia and Poland – philosophy is, in large measure, just the history of

philosophy. In the Anglosaxophone world most philosophers are not

historians of philosophy. The almost total identification of philosophy with its

history in Continental Europe reflects massive scepticism about any

theoretical ambitions on the part of philosophy. These claims are also

uncontroversial, as an examination of the publications of philosophers in

Continental Europe easily shows.

How is it possible for so many analytic philosophers to pursue philosophy in

a more or less rigorous and always theoretical way and yet believe neither

that philosophy can be a science nor that it can add to the stock of positive

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human knowledge? Sometimes this combination is due to a conviction that

philosophy can never be other than aporetic (tending to

doubt. The aporetic voice is that which
expresses wonder and perplexity. Word Origin. from a Greek word meaning 'to be at a loss'
Dictionary.com's 21st Century Lexicon.. Sometimes it is due to the belief

that philosophy can aspire at most to negative results. Sometimes it is due to

the belief that philosophy’s final goal is not theoretical – however much

theory may enter in along the way – but practical, for example, therapeutic.

Sometimes it is due to caution; sometimes to self-deception; and sometimes

to the insidious influence of Kant.

II

Perhaps the most striking illustration of these claims is provided by the fields

of metaphysics and ontology (which, with logic, constitute the heart of

theoretical philosophy.) Although metaphysics and ontology have always been

part of philosophy, and are perhaps more popular within AP today than ever

before, they are still, there, the object of a scepticism which does not apply to

epistemology or even to practical philosophy. The source of this scepticism is

not difficult to locate. If you think that philosophy is or can be a science, then

metaphysics and ontology clearly deserve their traditional central place within

philosophy. If you are sceptical about philosophy’s scientific ambitions, your

scepticism will be at its strongest in connection with metaphysics and

ontology.

Suppose we say that ontology is the study of what there might be and

metaphysics of what there is. Then metaphysics is clearly inseparable from

empirical science. But it is thereby also inseparable from an interest in the

real world. Such an interest, it might naturally be assumed, will extend for

example to an interest in the metaphysics of boundaries, such as the

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boundaries between death and life or between health and sickness, or to the

metaphysics of quantities and qualities, of powers and of functions, or indeed

to the metaphysics of any one of a number of domains which are today of

theoretical interest in the world outside philosophy.

But this interest in the real world is not, as it happens, a characteristic of

analytic ontology and metaphysics. Consider, for example, the metaphysics of

social objects and of social facts (of money and contracts, wills and

corporations). The questions proper to this part of metaphysics might

reasonably be thought to be of great interest for any philosophy, practical or

theoretical, of political, social and cultural phenomena. But analytic

metaphysics of the social world only begins with the publication by John

Searle in 1995 of The Construction of Social Reality and it has still gone little

further than Searle.

Another example of the lack of interest in the real world in analytic ontology

and metaphysics is provided by the sad story of current work in such fields as

bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, and the so-called ‘Semantic Web’.

(But there is a craze a fad a fashion about involvement by philosophers in

X-PH, AI and Cognitive Sciences?)

Ontology and metaphysics ought surely to be acknowledged as of great

importance in fields such as these.1 In fact, however, philosophical confusion

is the order of the day, because AP-philosophers with some knowledge of

ontology, manifesting their horror mundi, have shown little interest in

grappling with the problems thrown up by these fields, leaving it instead to

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philosophically naïve exponents of other disciplines to wreak ontological

havoc. Philosophers, for their part, occupy themselves with in-house puzzles,

ignorant of the damage their neglect is wreaking in the wider world.

And what is true of ontology and metaphysics is true of other parts of AP,

too. In the recent history of analytic philosophy a series of puzzles have been

mooted, flared up as trends, attracted a significant portion of graduate

students, then died down again with no obvious solution having established

itself and the world not much the wiser. These problems include: paradigms,

rules, family resemblance, criteria, ‘gavagai’, Gettier, rigid designation,

natural kinds, functionalism, eliminativism, truth-minimalism, narrow vs

wide content, possible worlds, externalism vs internalism, vagueness, four-

dimensionalism, and, just now, presentism.

Although all the issues mentioned are genuinely philosophical ones, they are

pursued, still on the basis of the attitude of horror mundi, among practitioners

of philosophy whose horizon extends little further than the latest issue of

Mind or The Journal of Philosophy. The AP system of professional

1 ‘Gene Ontology’ already receives two million google hits. [Now six million

(as of September 1, 2000 )

philosophy encourages introspection and relative isolation because

philosophy is not seen as directly relevant to the scientific concerns which

prevail in the wider world. As a result, once the main options have been

explored, which takes between two and ten years, it becomes hard to base a

new career on contributing to the debate, and so interest shifts elsewhere, on

to the next trend. The result is a trail of unresolved problems. The problems

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are not unsolvable, nor are they unimportant, but the attempts to solve them

are insufficiently constrained by matters outside philosophy conceived in a

narrow and incestuous way. They are insufficiently constrained, too, by any

attempt to build a synoptic system through sustained, collaborative efforts, in

which philosophical theses about substance, matter, qualities, science,

meaning, value, etc. would hang together in a coherent way.

In positive science results are expected. In analytic philosophy everyone waits

for the next new puzzle. Like the braintwisters holidaymakers take onto the

beach, philosophical puzzles divert from life’s hardships. They doubtless

have their place in a flourishing theoretical culture. But AP is at its core a

culture driven by puzzles, rather than by large-scale, systematic theoretical

goals. Russell recommended stocking up on puzzles from as early as 1905;2

Analysis was founded as a puzzle-solving journal. The quickest way to a

career in the competitive world of modern AP is to pick a puzzle in a trendy

area – be it vagueness, modal counterparts, rigid designation, “the hard

problem” or the elimination of truth – and come up with a hitherto

unsuspected twist in the dialectic, earning a few more citations in one or

another of the on-going games of fashionable philosophical ping-pong.

F(a)ntological philosophy triumphs, because elegantly structured possible

worlds are so much more pleasant places to explore than the flesh and blood

reality which surrounds us here on Earth.

There is little doubt that individual philosophers who have no interest in the

real world can occasionally make important contributions to philosophy. But

a philosophical tradition which suffers from the vice of horror mundi in an

endemic way is condemned to futility. It may be, too, that in empirical

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science entire research communities can briefly flourish without an interest in

the real world. But that is because, whatever the interests and claims of

scientists, the real world will soon put them to rights if they diverge too far

from reality. Philosophers, on the other hand, cannot confront their ideas with

reality in this same direct way. That is why philosophical traditions can thrive

which are indifferent to the way the real world is.

2 Though he never intended that puzzle-solving should become the whole of

philosophy.

III

And so in CP, too, metaphysics thrives. Claims about the nature of reality and

being, about possibility and necessity, and about particularity and universality

are flourished ad nauseam by its practitioners. Moreover,

CP metaphysics is inseparable from a genuine interest in the real world.

But this interest is not theoretical. First, CP

metaphysics are invariably tailor-made for particular political and

ethical conclusions. Heidegger’s 1927 ontology is made for his lugubrious,

supernatural Protestant naturalism. The multiplicities of Deleuze and

Guattari, (and Habermas) in which difference is neither numerical nor qualitative, are made

for their corresponding peculiar brand of soixanthuitard infantile leftism.

Habermas’ accounts of truth and of value are made for a vision of politics in

which all citizens would be obliged to sit in on the equivalent of a never-

ending Oberseminar on Kant, talking their way to emancipation.

Second, as with all other parts of CP, its metaphysics is never pursued in any

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properly theoretical way. Just as, in a good poem, content and form are

inextricably entwined, so too in CP the metaphysics is inseparable from its

idiosyncratic expression (“différance”, Seyn). Finally, CP’s interest in the real

world is an interest in the social and political world, never in the physical or

biological world. Only occasionally, when a scientific theory or, more often, a

piece of scientific jargon, resonates with the CP metaphysician’s view of (fashionable things and the lastets
crazes)

things does he turn his attention to science (to catastrophe theory, complexity

theory, quantum gravity, Gödel’s limitation theorems, Risk, environment) in order to play with a

handful of ill-understood expressions.

IV

Consider two very different ways in which the history of philosophy might be

carried out, and in which canons may become established and studied. At one

extreme there is history of philosophy as the history of philosophy in

particular regions, cultures, etc., where the philosophy whose history is being

studied is determined by the nation, language-group, or culture to which the

philosopher in question belongs. At the other extreme there is history of

philosophy as the history of the best of what has been thought, said and

argued, where the philosophy whose history is being studied, and the way in

which it is studied, is determined by the conviction that philosophy can

progress because it has progressed.

How does the way history of philosophy is now done relate to these two

possibilities? Unsurprisingly, the nationalist (regionalist, ...) option is the rule:

the British above all study Locke and Hume, US philosophers study Peirce

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and Dewey, the French have their Malebranche and Bergson, the Germans

Fichte and Schelling (Kant and Marx). Of course, all analytic philosophers study Frege, Russell

and Moore – and it sometimes seems as though Wittgenstein has everywhere

in the West been elevated into the pantheon of great philosophers. A small

canon of modern philosophers, too, enjoys attention almost everywhere –

Hobbes, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant. More importantly, interest in ancient and

medieval philosophy knows no geographical limitations.

Consider the second option. It is now a curiosity, not a live option. Perhaps

the last card-carrying believers in this option were Brentano and some of his

pupils. It is now often felt that to take seriously the second option is to be

unfaithful to the proper task of the historian. Some historians of philosophy in

the analytic tradition have been suspected of following this option, but they

now earn strong disapproval from those historians who insist on raw textual

exegesis and disinterested tracking of influences.

We can summarize this opposition between two kinds of history of

philosophy as an opposition between the study of the philosophy of the past

independently of whether it is good, bad or embarrassing, and the study of

past philosophical discoveries. The latter, especially, requires an awareness of

the distinction between philosophical achievements and blind-alleys. And this

in turn requires a view of philosophy as a theoretical enterprise that can lead

to positive knowledge.

Why does the former (in its various regional guises) prevail ? This is a large

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and difficult question. But one prime reason why it prevails in Continental

Europe is that philosophy is not there taken seriously as a theoretical

enterprise. Indeed the near total identification of philosophy with its history

leaves no breathing space for theoretical philosophy and thus no fulcrum on

which to base a non-purely regionalist conception of the history of the

discipline. Instead we have a situation in which widespread familiarity with

Fichte’s egology, or with the details of Reinhold’s Auseinandersetzungen

with Kant, or with ontological difference à la Heidegger, co-exist with almost

complete ignorance of, say, Bolzano’s account of the difference between

logical consequence and explanation.

In the AP world, in contrast, the history of philosophy is an uneasy mélange

of the two main options. AP’s history of philosophy is, to be sure, focused

always on topics of the familiar and reassuring logic, mind and language sort.

But it is at the same time strikingly indifferent to the history of just those

ideas which have there proved most fertile. Thus the enormous commentary

literature on Wittgenstein pays almost no attention to the Austro-German

context of his main ideas. Anton Marty’s anticipations of Grice’s account of

meaning are unknown. So too are the anticipations by Adolf Reinach of the

theories of speech acts developed by Austin and Searle.

CP’s lack of interest in philosophy as a theoretical enterprise emerges most

clearly in its relations to the phenomenological movement. Heidegger, Sartre,

Derrida, … and many other prominent CP thinkers grew out of

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phenomenology. At the same time, CP rejects the vision of philosophy as a

theoretical enterprise that was embraced by Husserl and the other great

founders of phenomenology – yet without making any attempt to justify this

rejection. Phenomenology has, in fact, served CP well as a hydra-headed

pretext – Marxist phenomenology, feminist phenomenology, hermeneutics,

Derrida’s foaming defilements of what he calls ‘phallologocentrism’ – but in

all these cases the aspirations of the founders of phenomenology to uncover

truth have been made subservient to a non-theoretical agenda, whether

political or socio-cultural, and in Derrida’s case to an agenda that is

shamelessly anti-theoretical.

Moreover, in spite of the dominance of phenomenology in CP philosophizing,

CP’s own history of philosophy is strikingly ignorant of the history of

phenomenology itself. The loving attention lavished on manuscripts by

Heidegger or Fink coexists with complete ignorance of the writings of truly

important phenomenologists such as Reinach, Ingarden or Scheler.

In Europe, CP has triumphed institutionally and culturally even though, and

indeed in part because, it has never won any theoretical battles, flourishing

best in the feuilleton. In certain philosophy departments in North America,

too, CP is slowly moving towards hegemony, aping the successes of CP-

related anti-theoretical movements in US departments of sociology, literature,

cultural studies, geography, anthropology, archaeology, and so forth. In the

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leading philosophy departments in the Anglosaxon world however, AP still

holds its place, though it has something of the flavour of a self-perpetuating

academic business, frequently proud of its lack of relevance to real-world

concerns. HP on the other hand has almost everywhere collapsed into

nationalist or regionalist hagiography.

The major parts of twentieth century philosophy thus end in defeat. The tried

and tested traditional reaction to defeat is to rally round the flag. What

Russell said almost a hundred years ago is, as ever, timely:

There have been far too many heroic solutions in philosophy; detailed

work has too often been neglected; there has been too little patience. As

was once the case in physics, a hypothesis is invented, and on top of

this hypothesis a bizarre world is constructed, there is no effort to

compare this world with the real world. The true method, in philosophy

as in science, will be inductive, meticulous, and will not believe that it

is the duty of every philosopher to solve every problem by himself.

This is the method that inspires analytic realism and it is the only

method, if I am not mistaken, by which philosophy will succeed in

obtaining results which are as solid as those of science (Russell 1911

61, our emphases)

The honest pioneering spirit of the early and constructive phase of AP had its

close parallels also in the early phenomenologists, so much so that a century

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ago there existed no gulf between them. And it is precisely this spirit that

must be rekindled. Philosophers should learn and practise their analytical

skills. They should prize the theoretical virtues of consistency, analytic

clarity, explanatory adequacy, and constrained simplicity, be aware of the

historical depth and pitfalls of the ideas they are manipulating; and be wary of

the assumption that everything new is better. They should trust to common

sense, avoid bullshit, and beware celebrity. But above all they should lift their

heads above philosophy: study and respect good science and good practice,

and try to understand its implications. Like scientists, they should cooperate

with one another other and with other disciplines, and seek funding for

cooperative research, aiming at theoretical comprehensiveness, using topic-

neutral skills and knowledge to bridge compartments in knowledge. They

should learn how to present ideas clearly to all kinds of audiences, and not

just to fellow afficionados of the fake barn. Above all, philosophers should be

humble, in the face of the manifest complexity of the world, the acumen of

their philosophical predecessors and non-philosophical contemporaries, and

their own fallibility. But with this humility they should be unwaveringly

resolved to discover, however complex, frustrating and unlovely it may be,

the truth. Reference

Russell, B. 1911. “Le réalisme analytique”, Bulletin de la société française de

philosophie, 11, 53-61.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------

21

Theorizing and abductive/guessing reasoning

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Please read this article on Peirce as an introduction to philosophizing , nay theorizing. I wish to
emphasize again the importance of the entire process of theorizing – its many steps and stages, features
and characteristics. I have dealt with these things in previous articles here –

https://independent.academia.edu/UlrichdeBalbian

Abductive reasoning plays a crucial part at meant stages of the process/es of theorizing. So, in case you
are not informed about it, please read the following on Peirce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce#Scientific_method

Theory of inquiry
See also: Inquiry

Critical common-sensism

Critical common-sensism,[147] treated by Peirce as a consequence of his pragmatism, is his

combination of Thomas Reid's common-sense philosophy with a fallibilism that recognizes that
propositions of our more or less vague common sense now indubitable may later come into
question, for example because of transformations of our world through science. It includes
efforts to work up in tests genuine doubts for a core group of common indubitables that vary
slowly if at all.

Rival methods of inquiry

In The Fixation of Belief (1877), Peirce described inquiry in general not as the pursuit of truth
per se but as the struggle to move from irritating, inhibitory doubt born of surprise,
disagreement, and the like, and to reach a secure belief, belief being that on which one is
prepared to act. That let Peirce frame scientific inquiry as part of a broader spectrum and as
spurred, like inquiry generally, by actual doubt, not mere verbal, quarrelsome, or hyperbolic
doubt, which he held to be fruitless. Peirce sketched four methods of settling opinion, ordered
from least to most successful:

1. The method of tenacity (policy of sticking to initial belief) — which brings comforts and
decisiveness but leads to trying to ignore contrary information and others' views as if truth were
intrinsically private, not public. The method goes against the social impulse and easily falters
since one may well notice when another's opinion seems as good as one's own initial opinion. Its
successes can be brilliant but tend to be transitory.
2. The method of authority — which overcomes disagreements but sometimes brutally. Its
successes can be majestic and long-lasting, but it cannot regulate people thoroughly enough to
withstand doubts indefinitely, especially when people learn about other societies present and
past.
3. The method of the a priori — which promotes conformity less brutally but fosters opinions as
something like tastes, arising in conversation and comparisons of perspectives in terms of "what
is agreeable to reason." Thereby it depends on fashion in paradigms and goes in circles over
time. It is more intellectual and respectable but, like the first two methods, sustains accidental
and capricious beliefs, destining some minds to doubt it.

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4. The method of science — wherein inquiry supposes that the real is discoverable but
independent of particular opinion, such that, unlike in the other methods, inquiry can, by its
own account, go wrong (fallibilism), not only right, and thus purposely tests itself and criticizes,
corrects, and improves itself.

Peirce held that, in practical affairs, slow and stumbling ratiocination is often dangerously
inferior to instinct and traditional sentiment, and that the scientific method is best suited to
theoretical research,[148] which in turn should not be trammeled by the other methods and
practical ends; reason's "first rule"[114] is that, in order to learn, one must desire to learn and, as a
corollary, must not block the way of inquiry. Scientific method excels over the others finally by
being deliberately designed to arrive — eventually — at the most secure beliefs, upon which the
most successful practices can be based. Starting from the idea that people seek not truth per se
but instead to subdue irritating, inhibitory doubt, Peirce showed how, through the struggle, some
can come to submit to truth for the sake of belief's integrity, seek as truth the guidance of
potential conduct correctly to its given goal, and wed themselves to the scientific method.

Scientific method

Insofar as clarification by pragmatic reflection suits explanatory hypotheses and fosters

predictions and testing, pragmatism points beyond the usual duo of foundational alternatives:
deduction from self-evident truths, or rationalism; and induction from experiential phenomena,
or empiricism.

Based on his critique of three modes of argument and different from either foundationalism or
coherentism, Peirce's approach seeks to justify claims by a three-phase dynamic of inquiry:

1. Active, abductive genesis of theory, with no prior assurance of truth;

2. Deductive application of the contingent theory so as to clarify its practical implications;
3. Inductive testing and evaluation of the utility of the provisional theory in anticipation of future
experience, in both senses: prediction and control.

Thereby, Peirce devised an approach to inquiry far more solid than the flatter image of inductive
generalization simpliciter, which is a mere re-labeling of phenomenological patterns. Peirce's
pragmatism was the first time the scientific method was proposed as an epistemology for
philosophical questions.

A theory that succeeds better than its rivals in predicting and controlling our world is said to be
nearer the truth. This is an operational notion of truth used by scientists.

Peirce extracted the pragmatic model or theory of inquiry from its raw materials in classical logic
and refined it in parallel with the early development of symbolic logic to address problems about
the nature of scientific reasoning.

Abduction, deduction, and induction make incomplete sense in isolation from one another but
comprise a cycle understandable as a whole insofar as they collaborate toward the common end
of inquiry. In the pragmatic way of thinking about conceivable practical implications, everything

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has a purpose, and, as possible, its purpose should first be denoted. Abduction hypothesizes an
explanation for deduction to clarify into implications to be tested so that induction can evaluate
the hypothesis, in the struggle to move from troublesome uncertainty to more secure belief. No
matter how traditional and needful it is to study the modes of inference in abstraction from one
another, the integrity of inquiry strongly limits the effective modularity of its principal
components.

Peirce's outline of the scientific method in §III–IV of "A Neglected Argument"[149] is

summarized below (except as otherwise noted). There he also reviewed plausibility and
inductive precision (issues of critique of arguments).

1. Abductive (or retroductive) phase. Guessing, inference to explanatory hypotheses for

selection of those best worth trying. From abduction, Peirce distinguishes induction as inferring,
on the basis of tests, the proportion of truth in the hypothesis. Every inquiry, whether into ideas,
brute facts, or norms and laws, arises from surprising observations in one or more of those
realms (and for example at any stage of an inquiry already underway). All explanatory content of
theories comes from abduction, which guesses a new or outside idea so as to account in a simple,
economical way for a surprising or complicated phenomenon. The modicum of success in our
guesses far exceeds that of random luck, and seems born of attunement to nature by developed or
inherent instincts, especially insofar as best guesses are optimally plausible and simple in the
sense of the "facile and natural", as by Galileo's natural light of reason and as distinct from
"logical simplicity".[150] Abduction is the most fertile but least secure mode of inference. Its
general rationale is inductive: it succeeds often enough and it has no substitute in expediting us
toward new truths.[151] In 1903, Peirce called pragmatism "the logic of abduction".[152]
Coordinative method leads from abducting a plausible hypothesis to judging it for its
testability[153] and for how its trial would economize inquiry itself.[154] The hypothesis, being
insecure, needs to have practical implications leading at least to mental tests and, in science,
lending themselves to scientific tests. A simple but unlikely guess, if not costly to test for falsity,
may belong first in line for testing. A guess is intrinsically worth testing if it has plausibility or
reasonably objective probability, while subjective likelihood, though reasoned, can be
misleadingly seductive. Guesses can be selected for trial strategically, for their caution (for
which Peirce gave as example the game of Twenty Questions), breadth, or incomplexity.[155] One
can discover only that which would be revealed through their sufficient experience anyway, and
so the point is to expedite it; economy of research demands the leap, so to speak, of abduction
and governs its art.[154]

2. Deductive phase. Two stages:

i. Explication. Not clearly premised, but a deductive analysis of the hypothesis so as to render its
parts as clear as possible.

ii. Demonstration: Deductive Argumentation, Euclidean in procedure. Explicit deduction of

consequences of the hypothesis as predictions about evidence to be found. Corollarial or, if
needed, Theorematic.

3. Inductive phase. Evaluation of the hypothesis, inferring from observational or experimental

tests of its deduced consequences. The long-run validity of the rule of induction is deducible
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from the principle (presuppositional to reasoning in general) that the real "is only the object of
the final opinion to which sufficient investigation would lead";[143] in other words, anything
excluding such a process would never be real. Induction involving the ongoing accumulation of
evidence follows "a method which, sufficiently persisted in," will "diminish the error below any
predesignate degree." Three stages:

i. Classification. Not clearly premised, but an inductive classing of objects of experience under
general ideas.

ii. Probation: direct Inductive Argumentation. Crude or Gradual in procedure. Crude Induction,
founded on experience in one mass (CP 2.759), presumes that future experience on a question
will not differ utterly from all past experience (CP 2.756). Gradual Induction makes a new
estimate of the proportion of truth in the hypothesis after each test, and is Qualitative or
Quantitative. Qualitative Gradual Induction depends on estimating the relative evident weights
of the various qualities of the subject class under investigation (CP 2.759; see also CP 7.114–20).
Quantitative Gradual Induction depends on how often, in a fair sample of instances of S, S is
found actually accompanied by P that was predicted for S (CP 2.758). It depends on
measurements, or statistics, or counting.

iii. Sentential Induction. "...which, by Inductive reasonings, appraises the different Probations
singly, then their combinations, then makes self-appraisal of these very appraisals themselves,
and passes final judgment on the whole result".

Against Cartesianism

Peirce drew on the methodological implications of the four incapacities — no genuine

introspection, no intuition in the sense of non-inferential cognition, no thought but in signs, and
no conception of the absolutely incognizable — to attack philosophical Cartesianism, of which
he said that:[121]

1. "It teaches that philosophy must begin in universal doubt" — when, instead, we start with
preconceptions, "prejudices [...] which it does not occur to us can be questioned", though we
may find reason to question them later. "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do
not doubt in our hearts."

2. "It teaches that the ultimate test of certainty is...in the individual consciousness" — when,
instead, in science a theory stays on probation till agreement is reached, then it has no actual
doubters left. No lone individual can reasonably hope to fulfill philosophy's multi-generational
dream. When "candid and disciplined minds" continue to disagree on a theoretical issue, even the
theory's author should feel doubts about it.

3. It trusts to "a single thread of inference depending often upon inconspicuous premisses" —
when, instead, philosophy should, "like the successful sciences", proceed only from tangible,
scrutinizable premisses and trust not to any one argument but instead to "the multitude
and variety of its arguments" as forming, not a chain at least as weak as its weakest link, but "a
cable whose fibers", soever "slender, are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected".

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4. It renders many facts "absolutely inexplicable, unless to say that 'God makes them so' is to be
regarded as an explanation"[156] — when, instead, philosophy should avoid being
"unidealistic",[157] misbelieving that something real can defy or evade all possible ideas, and
supposing, inevitably, "some absolutely inexplicable, unanalyzable ultimate", which explanatory
surmise explains nothing and so is inadmissible.

Peirce divided metaphysics into (1) ontology or general metaphysics, (2) psychical or religious
metaphysics, and (3) physical metaphysics.

Peirce outlined two fields, "Cenoscopy" and "Science of Review", both of which he called
philosophy. Both included philosophy about science. In 1903 he arranged them, from more to
less theoretically basic, thus:[102]

1. Science of Discovery.
1. Mathematics.
2. Cenoscopy (philosophy as discussed earlier in this article—categorial, normative,
metaphysical), as First Philosophy, concerns positive phenomena in general, does not
rely on findings from special sciences, and includes the general study of inquiry and
scientific method.
3. Idioscopy, or the Special Sciences (of nature and mind).
2. Science of Review, as Ultimate Philosophy, arranges "...the results of discovery, beginning with
digests, and going on to endeavor to form a philosophy of science". His examples included
Humboldt's Cosmos, Comte's Philosophie positive, and Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy.
3. Practical Science, or the Arts.

Peirce placed, within Science of Review, the work and theory of classifying the sciences
(including mathematics and philosophy). His classifications, on which he worked for many
years, draw on argument and wide knowledge, and are of interest both as a map for navigating
his philosophy and as an accomplished polymath's survey of research in his time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwood_Russell_Hanson

Hanson's best-known work is Patterns of Discovery (1958), in which he argues that what we see
and perceive is not what our senses receive, but is instead filtered sensory information, where
the filter is our existing preconceptions – a concept later called a 'thematic framework.' He
cited optical illusions such as the famous old Parisienne woman (Patterns of Discovery, p. 11),
which can be seen in different ways. Hanson drew a distinction between 'seeing as' and 'seeing
that' which became a key idea in evolving theories of perception and meaning. He wanted to
formulate a logic explaining how scientific discoveries take place. He used Charles Sanders
Peirce's notion of abduction for this.[1]

The philosophical issues involved were important elements in Hanson's views of perception and
epistemology. He was intrigued by paradoxes, and with the related concepts of uncertainty,

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undecidability/unprovability, and incompleteness; he sought models of cognition that could

embrace these elements, rather than simply explain them away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning

Abductive reasoning (also called abduction,[1] abductive inference[2] or retroduction[3]) is a

form of logical inference which goes from an observation to a theory which accounts for the
observation, ideally seeking to find the simplest and most likely explanation. In abductive
reasoning, unlike in deductive reasoning, the premises do not guarantee the conclusion. One can
understand abductive reasoning as "inference to the best explanation".[4]

In the 1990s, as computing power grew, the fields of law,[5] computer science, and artificial
intelligence research[6] spurred renewed interest in the subject of abduction.[7] Diagnostic expert
systems frequently employ abduction.

 1 History
 2 Deduction, induction, and abduction
o 2.1 Deductive reasoning (deduction)
o 2.2 Inductive reasoning (induction)
o 2.3 Abductive reasoning (abduction)
 3 Formalizations of abduction
o 3.1 Logic-based abduction
o 3.2 Set-cover abduction
o 3.3 Abductive validation
o 3.4 Probabilistic abduction
o 3.5 Subjective logic abduction
 4 History

Peirce consistently characterized it as the kind of inference that originates a hypothesis by

concluding in an explanation, though an unassured one, for some very curious or surprising
(anomalous) observation stated in a premise. As early as 1865 he wrote that all conceptions of
cause and force are reached through hypothetical inference; in the 1900s he wrote that all
explanatory content of theories is reached through abduction. In other respects Peirce revised his
view of abduction over the years.[18]

In later years his view came to be:

 Abduction is guessing.[8] It is "very little hampered" by rules of logic.[9] Even a well-prepared

mind's individual guesses are more frequently wrong than right.[19] But the success of our
guesses far exceeds that of random luck and seems born of attunement to nature by instinct[20]
(some speak of intuition in such contexts[21]).
 Abduction guesses a new or outside idea so as to account in a plausible, instinctive, economical
way for a surprising or very complicated phenomenon. That is its proximate aim.[20]
 Its longer aim is to economize inquiry itself. Its rationale is inductive: it works often enough, is
the only source of new ideas, and has no substitute in expediting the discovery of new truths.[22]

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Its rationale especially involves its role in coordination with other modes of inference in inquiry.
It is inference to explanatory hypotheses for selection of those best worth trying.
 Pragmatism is the logic of abduction. Upon the generation of an explanation (which he came to
regard as instinctively guided), the pragmatic maxim gives the necessary and sufficient logical
rule to abduction in general. The hypothesis, being insecure, needs to have conceivable[23]
implications for informed practice, so as to be testable[24][25] and, through its trials, to expedite
and economize inquiry. The economy of research is what calls for abduction and governs its
art.[11]

Writing in 1910, Peirce admits that "in almost everything I printed before the beginning of this
century I more or less mixed up hypothesis and induction" and he traces the confusion of these
two types of reasoning to logicians' too "narrow and formalistic a conception of inference, as
necessarily having formulated judgments from its premises."[2


o 4.1 1867
o 4.2 1878
o 4.3 1883
o 4.4 1902 and after
o 4.5 Pragmatism
o 4.6 Three levels of logic about abduction

Peirce came over the years to divide (philosophical) logic into three departments:

1. Stechiology, or speculative grammar, on the conditions for meaningfulness. Classification of

signs (semblances, symptoms, symbols, etc.) and their combinations (as well as their objects and
interpretants).
2. Logical critic, or logic proper, on validity or justifiability of inference, the conditions for true
representation. Critique of arguments in their various modes (deduction, induction, abduction).
3. Methodeutic, or speculative rhetoric, on the conditions for determination of interpretations.
Methodology of inquiry in its interplay of modes.

Peirce had, from the start, seen the modes of inference as being coordinated together in scientific
inquiry and, by the 1900s, held that hypothetical inference in particular is inadequately treated at
the level of critique of arguments.[24][25] To increase the assurance of a hypothetical conclusion,
one needs to deduce implications about evidence to be found, predictions which induction can
test through observation so as to evaluate the hypothesis. That is Peirce's outline of the scientific
method of inquiry, as covered in his inquiry methodology, which includes pragmatism or, as he
later called it, pragmaticism, the clarification of ideas in terms of their conceivable implications
regarding informed practice.

o
 4.6.1 Classification of signs
 4.6.2 Critique of arguments
 4.6.3 Methodology of inquiry

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At the methodeutical level Peirce held that a hypothesis is judged and selected[24] for testing
because it offers, via its trial, to expedite and economize the inquiry process itself toward new
truths, first of all by being testable and also by further economies,[11] in terms of cost, value, and
relationships among guesses (hypotheses). Here, considerations such as probability, absent from
the treatment of abduction at the critical level, come into play. For examples:

 Cost: A simple but low-odds guess, if low in cost to test for falsity, may belong first in line for
testing, to get it out of the way. If surprisingly it stands up to tests, that is worth knowing early in
the inquiry, which otherwise might have stayed long on a wrong though seemingly likelier track.
 Value: A guess is intrinsically worth testing if it has instinctual plausibility or reasoned objective
probability, while subjective likelihood, though reasoned, can be treacherous.
 Interrelationships: Guesses can be chosen for trial strategically for their
o caution, for which Peirce gave as example the game of Twenty Questions,
o breadth of applicability to explain various phenomena, and
o incomplexity, that of a hypothesis that seems too simple but whose trial "may give a
good 'leave,' as the billiard-players say", and be instructive for the pursuit of various and
conflicting hypotheses that are less simple.[42]

o 4.7 Other writers
 5 Applications
o 5.1 Artificial intelligence
o 5.2 Medicine
o 5.3 Automated planning
o 5.4 Intelligence analysis
o 5.5 Belief revision
o 5.6 Philosophy of science
o 5.7 Historical linguistics
o 5.8 Anthropology
 6 See also
 7 References
 8 Notes
 9 External links
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_reasoning

Informally, two kinds of logical reasoning can be distinguished in addition to formal deduction:
induction and abduction. Given a precondition or premise, a conclusion or logical consequence
and a rule or material conditional that implies the conclusion given the precondition, one can
explain that:

 Deductive reasoning determines whether the truth of a conclusion can be determined for that
rule, based solely on the truth of the premises. Example: "When it rains, things outside get wet.
The grass is outside, therefore: when it rains, the grass gets wet." Mathematical logic and
philosophical logic are commonly associated with this type of reasoning.
 Inductive reasoning attempts to support a determination of the rule. It hypothesizes a rule after
numerous examples are taken to be a conclusion that follows from a precondition in terms of

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such a rule. Example: "The grass got wet numerous times when it rained, therefore: the grass
always gets wet when it rains." While they may be persuasive, these arguments are not
deductively valid, see the problem of induction. Science is associated with this type of
reasoning.
 Inductive-creative reasoning this term has been coined by D. Iosif to combine the specificity of
the observation set from the inductive arena and the creativity (and intuition) element from the
abductive arena therefore providing a cogent view of the future. This methodology will result in
grounded creative thinking and can be used in strategy planning to generate future as-yet
unobserved phenomena. One example would be: "we observed a large number of white swans
on all continents and hypothesize that we need to protect by law all swans that are white but
also black (in existence but unobserved) and red (possibly to be re-engineered in a distant
future)". While inductive reasoning cannot yield an absolutely certain conclusion, it can actually
increase human knowledge (it is ampliative).
 Abductive reasoning, aka inference to the best explanation, selects a cogent set of preconditions.
Given a true conclusion and a rule, it attempts to select some possible premises that, if true also,
can support the conclusion, though not uniquely. Example: "When it rains, the grass gets wet.
The grass is wet. Therefore, it might have rained." This kind of reasoning can be used to develop
a hypothesis, which in turn can be tested by additional reasoning or data. Diagnosticians,
detectives, and scientists often use this type of reasoning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Challenges_final.pdf

http://www.iep.utm.edu/conf-ind/

Abduction
First published Wed Mar 9, 2011

Abduction or, as it is also often called, Inference to the Best Explanation is a type of inference
that assigns special status to explanatory considerations. Most philosophers agree that this type
of inference is frequently employed, in some form or other, both in everyday and in scientific
reasoning. However, the exact form as well as the normative status of abduction are still matters
of controversy. This entry contrasts abduction with other types of inference; points at prominent
uses of it, both in and outside philosophy; considers various more or less precise statements of it;
discusses its normative status; and highlights possible connections between abduction and
Bayesian confirmation theory.

 1. Abduction: The General Idea

o 1.1 Deduction, induction, abduction
o 1.2 The ubiquity of abduction
 2. Explicating Abduction
 3. The Status of Abduction
o 3.1 Criticisms
o 3.2 Defenses
 4. Abduction versus Bayesian Confirmation Theory
 Bibliography

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 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/

1. Abduction: The General Idea

You happen to know that Tim and Harry have recently had a terrible row that ended their
friendship. Now someone tells you that she just saw Tim and Harry jogging together. The best
explanation for this that you can think of is that they made up. You conclude that they are friends
again.

One morning you enter the kitchen to find a plate and cup on the table, with breadcrumbs and a
pat of butter on it, and surrounded by a jar of jam, a pack of sugar, and an empty carton of milk.
You conclude that one of your house-mates got up at night to make him- or herself a midnight
snack and was too tired to clear the table. This, you think, best explains the scene you are facing.
To be sure, it might be that someone burgled the house and took the time to have a bite while on
the job, or a house-mate might have arranged the things on the table without having a midnight
snack but just to make you believe that someone had a midnight snack. But these hypotheses
strike you as providing much more contrived explanations of the data than the one you infer to.

Walking along the beach, you see what looks like a picture of Winston Churchill in the sand. It
could be that, as in the opening pages of Hilary Putnam's (1981), what you see is actually the
trace of an ant crawling on the beach. The much simpler, and therefore (you think) much better,
explanation is that someone intentionally drew a picture of Churchill in the sand. That, in any
case, is what you come away believing.

In these examples, the conclusions do not follow logically from the premises. For instance, it
does not follow logically that Tim and Harry are friends again from the premises that they had a
terrible row which ended their friendship and that they have just been seen jogging together; it
does not even follow, we may suppose, from all the information you have about Tim and Harry.
Nor do you have any useful statistical data about friendships, terrible rows, and joggers that
might warrant an inference from the information that you have about Tim and Harry to the
conclusion that they are friends again, or even to the conclusion that, probably (or with a certain
probability), they are friends again. What leads you to the conclusion, and what according to a
considerable number of philosophers may also warrant this conclusion, is precisely the fact that
Tim and Harry's being friends again would, if true, best explain the fact that they have just been
seen jogging together. (The proviso that a hypothesis be true if it is to explain anything is taken
as read from here on.) Similar remarks apply to the other two examples. The type of inference

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exhibited here is called abduction or, somewhat more commonly nowadays, Inference to the Best
Explanation.

22

As conclusion, please read my articles on the process of theorizing. And pay special attention to
the few steps and characteristics mentioned by Weick – Pay special attention to the first article.

It deals with brain storming or brain dumping as one collects the data to be investigated. The
development of problem statements by means of that data. Dealing with these problem
statements in different ways. For example the analysis of the concepts or terms being employed.
The identification of implicit assumptions and tacit pre-suppositions being made. The
development and testing of conjectures concerning the problem statements. Working one’s way
through all the stapes and stages of the processes of theorizing. One will frequently return to
earlier stages, being informed about and aware of all sorts of issues and problems.

When one finally begins to draw conclusions with the assistance of tools such as abductive
reasoning as suggested by Pierce one would personally have acquired experience about many of
the different steps, stages, levels, dimensions and features of the processes of theorizing. In this
manner one will be able to refine one’s theorizing skills.

I add as an appendix a paper from a Conference on the Possibility of Philosophy as a science. By

adding that paper or any other articles it does not mean that I support or reject any of the ideas
stated in them. My main aim is merely to inform about these thoughts in an attempt to encourage
interest in and an awareness of the need to take notice of the processes of theorizing, by all
students, and especially students of philosophy –as the doing of philosophy or philosophizing,
appears to resemble many characteristics and stages of the processes of theorizing. In so far that
the latter might well replace the doing of philosophy?

Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination

lib.cufe.edu.cn/upload_files/other/4_20140512034955_3.pdf

by KE WEICK - 1989 - Cited by 1710 - Related articles

Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination. Author(s): Karl E. Weick. Reviewed work(s):. Source: The
Academy of Management Review, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Oct.

Missing: asymptotic

Weick: Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination

faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/weick_theory.html

Theorizing consists of disciplined imagination that unfolds in a manner analogous to artificial selection. It
comes from the consistent application of selection ...

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Missing: asymptotic

[PDF]MAKING SENSE OF THEORY CONSTRUCTION: DISCIPLINED ... - Core

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/55419.pdf

by JP Cornelissen - Cited by 119 - Related articles

imagination partake in theory construction, and how insightful metaphors and the ... construction as
disciplined imagination' (Weick 1989), wherein theory ...

Missing: asymptotic

[PDF]The Cycles of Theory Building in Management Research

www.hbs.edu/faculty/publication%20files/05-057.pdf

Oct 27, 2004 - Debates about deductive versus inductive theory-building ...... anomaly-seeking
research can improve theory asymptotically towards that goal. ..... Weick, K. (1989), “Theory
Construction as Disciplined Imagination,” Academy ...

Enactment Theory
https://www.utwente.nl/cw/theorieenoverzicht/Theory%20Clusters/.../enactment_theor...

Organizational Communication > Enactment Theory ... Weick (1988) describes the term enactment as
representing the notion that when people act they bring ...

Weick's Model of Organizing

faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/encyclop/weick.html

Weick's Model of Organizing Weick added his own twist the the systems design approach and applied it
at the social psychological level. He first notes that it's all ...

Sensemaking in Organizations: Reflections on Karl Weick and Social ...

https://www.epicpeople.org/sensemaking-in-organizations/

Mar 24, 2015 - It's worth reading just for the preface, which is delightfully welcoming for a volume of
organizational theory. Weick advises novice sensemaking ...

Organizational Information Theory

highered.mheducation.com/sites/0767430344/student_view0/chapter17/

Weick's Organizational Information Theory has been identified as a powerful theoretical

framework for explaining how organizations make sense of the ...

Organisational Information Theory | Communication Theory

communicationtheory.org/organisational-information-theory/

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Introduction Organisational information theory is a complex theoretical ... Karl Edward Weick, an
American organisational theorist developed this concept.

cmm - Oregon State University

oregonstate.edu/instruct/theory/organize.html

Karl Weick writes of the process oriented organizing, rather than the structural oriented organization.
Communication is key to the ... Back to theory contexts page.

Communication 168 Karl Weick's Theory of Organization - YouTube

▶ 5:52

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmycRsUcCVA

Feb 20, 2015 - Uploaded by Iveth F Hernandez

Communication 168 Karl Weick's Theory of Organization ... Karl Weick Loosely Coupled Systems: Loose
and ...

Karl weick's sense making model final - SlideShare

www.slideshare.net/kichimura25/karl-weicks-sense-making-model-final

Apr 25, 2010 - Karl weick's Sense-making ModelKayo Ichimura TracyCOMM303 Introduction
to Organizational ... Dialogic Communication Theory. jdtanne.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/

4. The Methodology of Metaphysics

Is there a unified methodology for metaphysics more broadly understood? Some think the task of
the metaphysician is to identify and argue for explanatory relations of various kinds. According
to Fine (2001), metaphysicians are in the business of providing theories of which facts or
propositions ground other facts or propositions, and which facts or propositions hold “in reality”.
For example, a philosopher might hold that tables and other composite objects exist, but think
that facts about tables are completely grounded in facts about the arrangements of point particles
or facts about the state of a wave function. This metaphysician would hold that there are no facts
about tables “in reality”; rather, there are facts about arrangements of particles. Schaffer 2010
proposes a similar view, but holds that metaphysical grounding relations hold not between facts
but between entities. According to Schaffer, the fundamental entity/entities should be understood
as the entity/entities that grounds/ground all others. On Schaffer's conception we can
meaningfully ask whether a table is grounded in its parts or vice versa. We can even theorize (as
Schaffer does) that the world as a whole is the ultimate ground for everything.

Another noteworthy approach (Sider 2012) holds that the task of the metaphysician is to “explain
the world” in terms of its fundamental structure. For Sider, what unites (good) metaphysics as a
discipline is that its theories are all framed in terms that pick out the fundamental structure of the

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world. For example, according to Sider we may understand ‘causal nihilism’ as the view that
causal relations do not feature in the fundamental structure of the world, and so the best language
for describing the world will eschew causal predicates.

5. Is Metaphysics Possible?
It may also be that there is no internal unity to metaphysics. More strongly, perhaps there is no
such thing as metaphysics—or at least nothing that deserves to be called a science or a study or a
discipline. Perhaps, as some philosophers have proposed, no metaphysical statement or theory is
either true or false. Or perhaps, as others have proposed, metaphysical theories have truth-values,
but it is impossible to find out what they are. At least since the time of Hume, there have been
philosophers who have proposed that metaphysics is “impossible”—either because its questions
are meaningless or because they are impossible to answer. The remainder of this entry will be a
discussion of some recent arguments for the impossibility of metaphysics.

Let us suppose that we are confident that we are able to identify every statement as either “a
metaphysical statement” or “not a metaphysical statement”. (We need not suppose that this
ability is grounded in some non-trivial definition or account of metaphysics.) Let us call the
thesis that all metaphysical statements are meaningless “the strong form” of the thesis that
metaphysics is impossible. (At one time, an enemy of metaphysics might have been content to
say that all metaphysical statements were false. But this is obviously not a possible thesis if the
denial of a metaphysical statement must itself be a metaphysical statement) And let us call the
following statement the “weak form” of the thesis that metaphysics is impossible: metaphysical
statements are meaningful, but human beings can never discover whether any metaphysical
statement is true or false (or probable or improbable or warranted or unwarranted).

Let us briefly examine an example of the strong form of the thesis that metaphysics is
impossible. The logical positivists maintained that the meaning of a (non-analytic) statement
consisted entirely in the predictions it made about possible experience. They maintained, further,
that metaphysical statements (which were obviously not put forward as analytic truths) made no
predictions about experience. Therefore, they concluded, metaphysical statements are
meaningless—or, better, the “statements” we classify as metaphysical are not really statements at
all: they are things that look like statements but aren't, rather as mannequins are things that look
like human beings but aren't.

But (many philosophers asked) how does the logical positivist's central thesis

The meaning of a statement consists entirely in the predictions it makes about possible
experience fare by its own standards? Does this thesis make any predictions about possible
experiences? Could some observation show that it was true? Could some experiment show that it
was false? It would seem not. It would seem that everything in the world would look the same—
like this—whether this thesis was true or false. (Will the positivist reply that the offset sentence
is analytic? This reply is problematic in that it implies that the multitude of native speakers of
English who reject the logical positivists' account of meaning somehow cannot see that that
sentence is true in virtue of the meaning of the word “meaning”—which is no technical term but
a word of ordinary English.) And, therefore, if the statement is true it is meaningless; or, what is

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the same thing, if it is meaningful, it is false. Logical positivism would therefore seem to say of
itself that it is false or meaningless; it would be seem to be, to use a currently fashionable phrase,
“self-referentially incoherent”.

Current advocates of ‘metaphysical anti-realism’ also advocate a strong form of the thesis that
metaphysics is impossible. Insofar as it is possible to find a coherent line of argument in the
writings of any anti-realist, it is hard to see why they, like the logical positivists, are not open to a
charge of self-referential incoherency. Indeed, there is much to be said for the conclusion that all
forms of the strong thesis fall prey to self-referential incoherency. Put very abstractly, the case
against proponents of the strong thesis may be put like this. Dr. McZed, a “strong anti-
metaphysician”, contends that any piece of text that does not pass some test she specifies is
meaningless (if she is typical of strong anti-metaphysicians, she will say that any text that fails
the test represents an attempt to use language in a way in which language cannot be used). And
she contends further that any piece of text that can plausibly be identified as “metaphysical”
must fail this test. But it invariably turns out that various sentences that are essential components
of McZed's case against metaphysics themselves fail to pass her test. A test-case for this very
schematic and abstract refutation of all refutations of metaphysics is the very sophisticated and
subtle critique of metaphysics (it purports to apply only to the kind of metaphysics exemplified
by the seventeenth-century rationalists and current analytical metaphysics) presented in van
Fraassen 2002. It is a defensible position that van Fraassen's case against metaphysics depends
essentially on certain theses that, although they are not themselves metaphysical theses, are
nevertheless open to many of the criticisms he brings against metaphysical theses.

The weak form of the thesis that metaphysics is impossible is this: there is something about the
human mind (perhaps even the minds of all rational agents or all finite rational agents) that unfits
it for reaching metaphysical conclusions in any reliable way. This idea is at least as old as Kant,
but a version of it that is much more modest than Kant's (and much easier to understand) has
been carefully presented in McGinn 1993. McGinn's argument for the conclusion that the human
mind is (as a matter of evolutionary contingency, and not simply because it is “a mind”)
incapable of a satisfactory treatment of a large range of philosophical questions (a range that
includes all metaphysical questions), however, depends on speculative factual theses about
human cognitive capacities that are in principle subject to empirical refutation and which are at
present without significant empirical support. For a different defense of the weak thesis, see
Thomasson 2009.

Bibliography
 Armstrong, David, 1989, Universals: An Opinionated Introduction, Boulder, CO:
Westview.
 –––, 1997, A World of States of Affairs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 Baker, Lynne Rudder, 2000, Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
 Barcan [Barcan Marcus], Ruth, 1946, “A Functional Calculus of First Order Based on
Strict Implication”, Journal of Symbolic Logic, 11: 1–16.
 Broad, C. D., 1925, The Mind and its Place in Nature, London: Lund Humphries.
 Davidson, Donald, 1967, “Causal Relations”, Journal of Philosophy, 64: 691–703.

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 Fine, Kit, 2001, “The Question of Realism”, Philosopher's Imprint, 1: 1–30.

 Ginet, Carl, 1990, On Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 Kripke, Saul, 1972, Naming and Necessity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
 Laurence, Stephen and Cynthia Macdonald (eds.), 1998, Contemporary Readings in the
Foundations of Metaphysics, Oxford: Blackwell.
 Lewis, David, 1973, “Causation”, Journal of Philosophy, 70: 556–67.
 –––, 1986, On the Plurality of Worlds, Oxford: Blackwell.
 Lowe, E. J., 2006, The Four-Category Ontology: A Metaphysical Foundation for Natural
Science, Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
 McGinn, Colin, 1993, Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry, Oxford: Blackwell.
 McTaggart, J.M. E., 1908, “The Unreality of Time” Mind, 17: 457–474.
 Paul, L.A. and Ned Hall, 2013, Causation: A User's Guide, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
 Plantinga, Alvin, 1974, The Nature of Necessity, Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
 Politis, Vasilis, 2004, Aristotle and the Metaphysics, London and New York: Routledge.
 Prior, A.N., 1998, “The Notion of the Present”, in Metaphysics: The Big Questions, Peter
van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell Press.
 Quine, W. V. O., 1948, “On What There Is”, in Quine 1961: 1–19.
 –––, 1953, “Reference and Modality”, in Quine 1961: 139–159.
 –––, 1960, Word and Object, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 –––, 1961, From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 Rea, Michael (ed.), 1997, Material Constitution: A Reader, Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield.
 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1949, Situations III, Paris: Gallimard.
 Schaffer, Jonathan, 2010, “Monism: The Priority of the Whole”, Philosophical Review,
119. 31–76.
 Sider, Theodore, 2012, Writing the Book of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Stalnaker, Robert, 1968, “A Theory of Conditionals”, in Studies in Logical Theory,
Nicholas Rescher (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell.
 Sullivan, Meghan, 2012, “The Minimal A-Theory”, Philosophical Studies, 158: 149–174.
 Thomasson, Amie, 2009, “Answerable and Unanswerable Questions”, in
Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, David J. Chalmers,
David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Thomson, Judith Jarvis, 1998, “The Statue and Clay”, Noûs, 32: 149–173
 Van Fraassen, Bas C., 2002, The Empirical Stance, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
 Van Inwagen, Peter, 1998, “The Mystery of Metaphysical Freedom”, in Peter van
Inwagen and Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Metaphysics: The Big Questions, Malden,
MA: Blackwell: 365–374.
 Williamson, Timothy, 2013, Modal Logic as Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
 Zimmerman, Dean W. (ed.), 2006, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (Volume 2), Oxford:
The Clarendon Press.

http://thomasson0.wixsite.com/amie-thomasson/publications

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 Ontology made Easy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

 Ordinary Objects. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 (Reissued in

paperback 2010).

 Fiction and Metaphysics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. (Reissued
in paperback 2008. Published in French translation 2011 as Fiction et Metaphysique).

"What can we do, when we do Metaphysics?", forthcoming in Giuseppina d'Oro and Soren
Overgaard, eds. Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

What can we do, when we do metaphysics?

Amie L. Thomasson

What are we doing, when we do metaphysics? A tempting answer—popular among

contemporary metaphysicians—is to think of metaphysics as engaged in discovering especially deep or
fundamental facts about the world. But there are familiar and formidable problems for this
‘heavyweight’ conception of metaphysics. First, it leaves the epistemology of metaphysics unclear: by
what methods are we supposed to be able to discover these deep or fundamental features of reality?
Second, it leaves metaphysics in danger of falling prey to a rivalry with science—for isn’t it the purview
of physics to discover the deep and fundamental facts about reality, and doesn’t it do so better than
metaphysics? Third, the radical and persistent disagreements that have characterized metaphysics for
millennia lead to skepticism about whether metaphysicians are really succeeding in discovering such
facts—which might encourage some to abandon metaphysics altogether.

In the face of these difficulties, deflationary positions about metaphysics have become
increasingly prominent. The deflationist is suspicious of the thought that metaphysicians are like
scientists in discovering ‘deep facts’ about the world and its nature. The deflationist also takes a more
cautious view of the methods available to metaphysics, typically limiting what we can sensibly do in
metaphysics to some combination of conceptual and empirical work—with the metaphysician’s share of
the work being largely a matter of conceptual analysis. But the idea that the core work of metaphysics is
conceptual analysis makes it difficult to account for the felt depth, importance, and world-orientation of
debates in metaphysics. Indeed many have thought that this leaves metaphysics nothing of interest to
do.

I think this is too hasty, however. Here I aim to sketch a broader conceptualist model, on which
metaphysics may undertake not merely descriptive but also normative conceptual work. This broader
model, I will argue, enables us to preserve—and in some cases improve on—the advantages of the
descriptive conceptualist approach in avoiding epistemic mysteries and rivalry with science. But it also
enables us to give a more satisfying view than descriptive conceptual analysis can of what we can do

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when we do metaphysics: a view that does far better at explaining the radical disagreement that persists
in metaphysics, and gives a much more satisfying account of the apparent world-orientation, depth, and
potential importance of work in metaphysics. Yet it does so without sacrificing the demystifying
advantages of deflationism.

 “Experimental Philosophy and the Methods of Ontology”, Monist. 95/2. (April 2012): 175-
199.

 "Research Problems and Methods in Metaphysics", in Robert Barnard and Neil Manson,
eds. The Continuum Companion to Metaphysics. Continuum International Publishing: London:
14-45 (2012).

 "Artifacts in Metaphysics", in Handbook of the Philosophy of the Technological Sciences, ed.

Anthonie Meijers. Elsevier Science, 2009.

 "Answerable and Unanswerable Questions", in MetaMetaphysics, eds. David Chalmers, Ryan

Wasserman, and David Manley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009: 444-471.

"Conceptual Analysis in Phenomenology and Ordinary Language Philosophy", in Michael

Beaney, ed. The Analytic Turn: Analysis in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology.
London: Routledge, 2007.

"Phenomenology and the Development of Analytic Philosophy", Southern Journal of Philosophy

vol. XL, supplement (Proceedings of the 2001 Spindel Conference "Origins: The Common
Sources of the Analytic and Phenomenological Traditions"): 115-142.

Download the PDF version here (These are very good illustrations of what AP is doing, their
methods and subject-matter- for example in meta/metaphysics, ontology etc).

http://bespalovseminar.narod.ru/literature/MetaX2.pdf

[PDF]Metametaphysics – new essays on the foundation of ontology

bespalovseminar.narod.ru/literature/MetaX2.pdf

Metametaphysics. New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology edited by. David Chalmers, David
Manley, and Ryan. Wasserman. CLARENDON PRESS · ...

Davidson's “Method of Truth” in Metaphysics - The University of North ...

www.unc.edu/~ujanel/Davidson%20Method-3.pdf

by WG Lycan - Cited by 1 - Related articles

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Davidson's “Method of Truth” in Metaphysics. William G. Lycan. University of North Carolina.

Davidson made a strikingly distinctive and valuable contribution to ..

Davidson’s “Method of Truth” in Metaphysics

William G. Lycan

University of North Carolina

Davidson made a strikingly distinctive and valuable contribution to the practice of

ontology. It was a species of argument for the existence of things of one kind or another. It

was inspired by Quine’s doctrine that “To be is to be the value of a bound variable,” but it

combined that with Davidson’s own apparently antiQuinean views on semantics and logical

form in natural language. Roughly: Suppose truth-conditional analysis of certain English

sentences assigns them logical forms containing characteristic quantifiers, and the quantifiers’

domains include entities of a certain sort. Then, assuming that some of the relevant sentences

are true, it follows that there exist entities of that sort.

1. Davidson’s own classic instance of this method was his argument for the existence of

events, in “The Logical Form of Action Sentences” (1967b). But, preliminaries:

According to his theory of meaning (1967c, 1970), the core meaning of a natural-

language sentence—its propositional or locutionary content as opposed to its illocutionary

force or what on an occasion its utterer might have meant by it—is that sentence’s truth

condition. The truth condition is determined by the meanings of the sentence’s smallest

meaningful parts together with their syntactic mode of composition, and it is best represented

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by a formula of some explicitly truth-defined logical system acting as what Quine called a

canonical idiom.1 Such a formula wears its own truth condition on its sleeve, in that its truth

condition is computable on the basis of the usual Tarskian set of extensions for the atomic

elements of that system plus a set of recursive rules that project the semantic values of a

formula’s elements through truth-functional and other syntactic compounding into a truth-

condition for the formula as a whole.

In that way, our original English sentence has its logical and semantical features

predicted

by its associated formula (call that explicitly truth-defined formula the sentence’s semantic

representation, though that is not Davidson’s own term). Via the semantic representation too,

logical anomalies are resolved, and other semantically puzzling features of the target sentences

explained, just as Russell intended at the time he fashioned the Theory of Descriptions. The

natural-language sentences simply inherit their perceived semantical features, such as

entailments, from the formal properties of their semantic representations.

To do semantics in Davidsonian fashion is (using his method of deriving Tarskian “T-

sentences”) to assign semantic representations and thereby explicit truth-conditions to natural-

language sentences, in such a way as to illuminate semantic structure consonantly with what is

known of the sentence’s syntactic structure. A semantic analysis of a target sentence will have,
or should have, testable consequences: it will predict ambiguities, synonymies, anomalies,
logical implications, and the like. Capturing implications is a main goal, perhaps the main goal,

of the enterprise.2…..

This university (I looked at and quotes from Prof Michael Tooley’s site) has excellent under-
graduate lectures online about topic that illustrate very clearly the subject-matter (for example in

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Metaphysics and Epistemology, as well as in Logic, Reasoning, the types and uses of arguments
and ‘analysis’. The different types of analysis and how to investigate them, as well as ways to
identify and evaluate different types of arguments).

Philosophy 4340/5340
spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/434.htm

[DOC]Philosophy 5340 - Epistemology

spot.colorado.edu/~tooley/AnalysisKnowledge.doc

Philosophy 3340 - Epistemology. Topic 2 - The Problem of Analyzing the Concept of Knowledge.
Handout: Analyses of the Concept of Knowledge: An Overview

http://spot.colorado.edu/%7Etooley/Philosophy5340.html

Epistemology - An Overview
Philosophy 5340

BASIC CONCEPTS, METHODS, ISSUES, QUESTIONS, AND ARGUMENTS

Topic I. Introductory Discussion: The Nature of Epistemology

Basic Types of Questions: (1) Questions of analysis; (2) Questions of justification.

Analysis: (1) Analysis of fundamental epistemological concepts; (2) Analysis of different

types of statements - such as statements about physical objects, about unobservable entities,
about minds and mental states, about the past, and about the future.

Basic Concepts Related to Analysis: Translation, analytic truths, necessary conditions and
sufficient conditions, logical supervenience, realist analyses versus reductionist analyses.

Justification: (1) The general issue of skepticism versus foundationalism versus

coherentism; (2) The possibility, and the scope of, noninferential knowledge, or of
noninferentially justified beliefs; (3) Inferential knowledge, or inferentially justified beliefs.

Basic Concepts and Distinctions Related to Epistemic Justification: Knowledge, truth,

correspondence, objective certainty versus subjective certainty, belief, degrees of belief, justified
belief, evidence, probability, inference, deductive inference versus inductive inference, instantial
generalization versus hypothetico-deductive method (or inference to the best explanation),
inferential knowledge versus noninferential knowledge, inferred versus non-inferred belief,
inferentially justified belief versus noninferentially justified belief.

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The Relation between Analysis and Justification: Reductionist versus realist analyses of
various types of statements, and their relation to different responses to skeptical challenges.

Topic II. The Analysis of the Concept of Knowledge

The Traditional Tripartite Analysis: Knowledge is justified true belief.

Gettier's Counterexamples: (1) Existential generalization, and the case of Smith, Jones, and
the person who will get the job; (2) Disjunction, and the case of Brown, Barcelona, and owning
a Ford.

Responses to Gettier's Counterexamples: (1) Supplementation strategies; (2) A

strengthening strategy.

Supplementation Strategies: (1) No false intermediate conclusions; (2) No undermining

evidence; (3) Causal connections; (4) Inference to the best explanation; (5) Discrimination
and counterfactuals; (6) Knowledge as tracking, and the closure condition for knowledge.

A Strengthening Strategy: Rozeboom, knowledge, and complete certainty. A skeptical

outcome? Ordinary 'knowledge' as an approximation to the ideal?

Crucial Test Cases for Analyses of the Concept of Knowledge: (1) Gettier-style
cases; (2) Broken causal chain cases - e.g., the hologram example; (3) Cases with deviant
causal connections - e.g., the modified hologram example; (4) Cases of undermining via
potential evidence that one does not actually possess - e.g., Tom Grabit; (5) Non-
discriminability cases - e.g., barns versus barn facades.

Some Possible Theses: (1) Knowledge = justified belief, plus the truth of all of the beliefs used
in the inferences; (2) In determining whether a justified true belief is a case of knowledge, the
truth of propositions that one does not believe may also be relevant; (3) The right sorts of causal
connections are also crucial to whether a given justified true belief is a case of
knowledge; (4) The truth-values of relevant counterfactual statements are also crucial to
whether a given justified true belief is a case of knowledge.

Topic III. Skepticism

The Scope of Skepticism: (1) Knowledge versus justified belief; (2) Certain knowledge
versus knowledge in general; (3) Contingent propositions versus necessary
propositions; (4) Inferentially justified beliefs versus noninferentially justified
beliefs; (5) Global versus local.

A Basic Skeptical Pattern of Argument: (1) The beliefs in question cannot be noninferentially
justified; (2) No deductive bridging of the gap from the evidence to the conclusion is
possible; (3) No bridging via instantial generalization; (4) Instantial generalization is the only
legitimate type of inductive inference; (5) Deduction and induction are the only legitimate types
of inference; (6) Conclusion: the beliefs in question cannot be justified.

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Targets of this Pattern of Skeptical Argument: Beliefs about (1) macroscopic objects, (2)
other minds, (3) the past, (4) laws of nature, and the future, and (5) submicroscopic objects.

Possible Responses to this Basic Skeptical Pattern of Argument: (1) Direct

realism; (2) Reductionism; (3) Instantial induction without reductionism; (4) The explanatory
theories approach: hypothetico-deductive method.

Comments on these Responses to the Skeptical Argument: (1) Questions of justification and
questions of analysis are interrelated; (2) Different responses may be appropriate to skeptical
challenges in different areas.

Topic IV. Theories of Justification: Foundationalism Versus Coherentism

The Epistemic Regress Argument: (1) There are only four possibilities with regard to
inferentially justified beliefs: (i) The regress of justification is a finite one, terminating in
noninferentially justified beliefs; (ii) The regress of justification is finite, but it terminates,
instead, in one or more beliefs that are not justified - either inferentially or
noninferentially; (iii) Inferential justification proceeds in a circle, or in a more complex closed
loops; (iv) The regress of justification is infinite, with no belief occurring more than
once. (2) If possibilities (ii), (iii), or (iv) obtained, the belief in question would not be
justified. (3) Hence the only way to avoid skepticism is possibility (i): justification must
terminate in beliefs that are noninferentially justified.

Foundationalism: (1) There can be noninferential knowledge, or at least noninferentially

justified beliefs; (2) All other knowledge is justified on the basis of noninferential knowledge,
and all other justified beliefs are justified on the basis of noninferentially justified
beliefs. Classical foundationalism involves: (a) Indubitable and infallible starting
points; (b) Deductive inference. Moderate foundationalism differs in these
respects: (a) Noninferential knowledge need not be indubitable, and noninferentially justified
beliefs need not be infallible; (b) The relevant inferences need not be deductive.

Arguments for Foundationalism: (1) The epistemic regress argument; (2) The argument
concerning the possibility of evidentially isolated, justified beliefs.

Possible Characteristics of Noninferential Knowledge, or of Noninferentially Justified

Beliefs: (1) Infallibility; (2) Objective certainty; (3) Subjective certainty; (4) Indubitability
- logical or psychological; (5) Indefeasibility.

Coherentism: Coherence theories of truth versus coherence theories of justification. Coherence

theories of truth versus correspondence theories of truth. Different concepts of
coherence: (1) Probability and relations of mutual support; (2) Explanatory interrelations.

A Standard Objection to a Coherence Theory of Truth: The possibility of equally coherent,

but mutually incompatible, sets of propositions. The isomorphic, or mapping version, of this
objection: the generation of another set of propositions by a systematic interchange of individual
concepts and predicate concepts.

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Two Arguments Against Foundationalism, and in Support of a Coherence Theories of

Justification: (1) The doxastic ascent argument; (2) The question of whether the idea of the
immediately given is ultimately coherent.

Possible Objections to Coherentism: (1) Isn't it possible for there to be alternative, equally
coherent, but mutually incompatible, sets of beliefs? (2) Is there a good reason for thinking that
coherent beliefs are likely to be true? (3) Shouldn't observational beliefs be assigned a special,
epistemic place? 4) Direct acquaintance and understanding the meaning of semantically basic
terms; (5) Fumerton's objection that coherence Is too easily achieved: (6) Fumerton's objection
that coherentism, combined with internalism, leads to an infinite regress; (7) Fumerton's
objection that rational beliefs need not even be mutually consistent - the "Lottery Paradox"
case; (8) Disagreements and the impossibility of "pooling evidence"; (9) The possibility of
evidentially isolated, justified beliefs.

Topic V. Perceptual Knowledge and the External World

Three Main Alternatives: (1) Direct realism; (2) Phenomenalism; (3) Indirect realism, or the
representative theory of perception.

Four Varieties of Direct Realism: (1) 'Pre-scientific' direct realism; (2) Armstrong's
"perception as the mere acquisition of beliefs" form of direct realism; (3) Sellars's version of
direct realism; (4) Searle's "experiences as also intentional states" version of direct realism.

Two Forms of Phenomenalism: (1) Classical phenomenalism, and the reductionist analysis of
statements about physical objects; (2) Instrumentalist phenomenalism, and the non-existence of
physical objects. (Stace)

Important Concepts and Distinctions: Conscious versus unconscious inference; realist versus
reductionist analyses of statements about physical objects; semantically or analytically basic
terms and concepts; realist, reductionist, and instrumentalist interpretations of scientific theories;
inference to the best explanation; counterfactuals, or subjunctive conditional statements, and
"hypothetical experiences".

Some Central Issues Connected with Perceptual Knowledge:

(1) Do experiences involve emergent properties?

(2) Is talk about physical objects analyzable, or are at least some sentences about physical
objects semantically basic and unanalyzable?
(3) If all sentences about physical objects are analyzable, what is the correct analysis?
(4) Does perception always involve the acquisition of beliefs about sense experiences?
(5) If perception always involves the acquisition of beliefs about sense experiences, do the
beliefs thus acquired, together with memory knowledge, suffice to justify the beliefs about
physical objects that one comes to have as a result of perception?

Issue 1: Do Experiences Involve Emergent Properties?

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(1) Thomas Nagel's "What It's Like to Be a Bat" Argument

(2) Frank Jackson's "What Mary Doesn't Know" Argument
(3) The Inverted Spectrum Argument
(4) Armstrong's Indeterminacy Objection
(5) Armstrong's Intransitivity Objection
(6) The Epistemic Objection.

Issue 2: Are Sentences About Physical Objects Analyzable?

(1) The Ostensive Definability Requirement

(2) The "Blind Man" Argument.

Issue 3: If Sentences About Physical Objects Are Analyzable, What Is the Correct
Analysis?

Armstrong's Objections to Phenomenalism:

(1) Unperceived objects as having only a "hypothetical existence";
(2) A world with material objects, but no minds?
(3) Determinate physical objects and indeterminate sense experiences;
(4) Can phenomenalism explain the public nature of space and time?
(5) The problem of qualitatively indistinguishable minds existing at the same time;
(6) Can phenomenalism account for the unity of the mind?

Crucial Objections to Phenomenalism?

(1) "Mindless World" Objections;
(2) The "Truth-Makers for Counterfactuals" Objection;
(3) The "Exceptionless Laws" Argument.

Issue 4: Does Perception that Results in Perceptual Belief Always Involve the Acquisition
of Beliefs About Sense Experiences?

(1) The Peculiarity Intuition;

(2) The Case of Abnormal Conditions of Observation.

Issue 5: Are Beliefs about Physical Objects Inferentially Justified?

(1) The "Retreat to More Modest Beliefs" Argument;

(2) The "Justification and Internal States" Argument;
(3) The Appeal to Hypothetico-Deductive Inference;
(4) The "Naturalness of the Theory of Physical Objects" Argument.

Topic VI. The Justification of Beliefs about Other Minds

Some Important Issues:

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(1) How can one justify beliefs about other minds and their mental states?
(2) Can we have noninferentially justified beliefs about others minds?
(3) If all or some of our beliefs about other minds are inferentially justified, what type of
evidence is relevant? Is it evidence concerning behavior, or evidence concerning internal
constitution, or both?
(4) How does one get from the evidence to the desired conclusion?
(5) What is the scope of the mental - that is, what sorts of things enjoy mental states? Non-
human animals? Possible extraterrestrials with a very different physiological makeup? Super-
computers?
(6) What account is to be given of the very concept of a mind? And what type of analysis is to
be given of statements about different types of mental states?
(7) Are there any significant divisions between types of mental states, in the sense that a very
different type of account might have to be given for some types of mental states than others?
(8) What is the "mark" of the mental? That is to say, what is it that distinguishes states of affairs
that are mental states from those that are not? (Consciousness and intentionality as two
important answers.)

Four Different Accounts of the Analysis of Mental Concepts: (1) One anti-reductionist
approach: a "raw feel", or "qualia", or phenomenalistic account; (2) A second anti-reductionist
approach: intentionality as a defining property of mental states; (3) Analytical, or logical,
behaviorism; (4) Functionalism, and the identification of mental states on the basis of their
causal roles, rather than on the basis of their intrinsic natures. The computer program analogy.

Intensional Language and Intentional States: Intensional contexts versus extensional

contexts; the interchange of co-referential terms within extensional contexts as preserving truth-
values; existential quantification, or "quantifying in", as permissible within extensional contexts;
the relation of these two features to patterns of inference.

Consciousness and the Mental: Is consciousness a mark of the mental? Is it a sufficient

condition of the mental? Is it a necessary condition of the mental?

Intentionality and the Mental: Is intentionality a mark of the mental? Is it a sufficient

condition of the mental? Is it a necessary condition of the mental? "That" clauses and two types
of mental states.

Language, and the Question of the Source of Intentionality: Is the intentionality of language
more basic than the intentionality of the mental, or vice versa? Is intentionality related to causal
and/or dispositional properties? The argument from purely physical systems - e.g., the case of
the heat-seeking missile.

The Relation between the Problem of Other Minds, and the Analysis of Talk about Mental
States: Two theories that greatly simplify the problem: (1) Analytical
behaviorism; (2) Functionalism.

Objections to Analytical Behaviorism: (l) The inverted spectrum argument; (2) The
unconsciousness argument; (3) The understanding sensation terms argument.

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Alternative Accounts of the Justification of our Beliefs about Other Minds: (1) The
argument from analogy; (2) Psychological theory and the inference to the best
explanation; (3) A combined approach; (4) A non-analogical argument based upon use of
mentalistic language.

Some Crucial Issues: (1) Is evidence concerning one's own case crucial or not? (2) Is
evidence about an individual's behavior, or output states, sufficient? (3) Is evidence about
stimulation of an individual, about its input states, sufficient? (4) Is evidence about an
individual's constitution, or internal makeup, crucial or not?

The Argument from Analogy: Two types of laws that one might establish in one's own
case: (1) Laws concerning physical causes of mental states; (2) Laws concerning mental causes
of behavior. Generalizing from one's own case to that of other, relevantly similar bodies.

Objections to the Argument from Analogy: (l) The verifiability objection; (2) Strawson's
objection; (3) The checkability objection; (4) The objection that the reasoning is inductively
unsound; (5) The objection that the reasoning lends only very weak support to the
conclusion; (6) The objection that, though the argument from analogy is in principle sound, it
implies that justified beliefs about other minds presupposes detailed neurophysiological
knowledge.

Psychological Theory and the Inference to the Best Explanation: The irrelevance of
evidence concerning one's own case; the use of hypothetico-deductive method, or inference to
the best explanation, to confirm hypotheses concerning the existence of other minds.

Possible Objections to the Inference to the Best Explanation Approach: (1) Machines and
paralyzed persons; (2): Epiphenomenalism and knowledge of other minds; (3) An unjustifiably
strong hypothesis. (The third objection is the crucial one, and the thrust of it is that a
functionalist interpretation of our everyday psychological theory results in an ontologically more
modest theory, but one with equal explanatory power.)

A Combined Approach: Physiology and Behavior: The key ideas here are: (1) One makes
use of causal laws that run from the physical to the mental, and from the mental to the
physical; (2) The sorts of input-output relations that one finds in one's own case are also found
in the case of individuals with similar bodies; (3) Those input-output relations are explained, in
one's own case, on the basis of causal laws that involve experiences, or states of
consciousness; (4) It is extremely unlikely that precisely the same input-output relations would
exist in the case of other bodies if they did not have the same basis.

An Argument Based upon the Use of Mentalistic Language: This final type of argument
turns upon facts of the following sorts: (l) Other organisms appear to use and understand
mentalistic language; (2) Other organisms appear to assert that they have states of
consciousness. (Compare Michael Scriven's article, "The Compleat Robot: A Prolegomena to
Androidology".) If this sort of argument works, it can be applied to entities that are physically
very different from life forms found on earth - both extraterrestrials, and super-computers.

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Topic VII. The Justification of Beliefs about the Past

Some Distinctions: Knowledge of the past versus memory knowledge; memory beliefs versus
memory experiences; memories of experienced events versus memories of facts.

Some Preliminary Issues: (1) Is all knowledge of the past either itself memory knowledge, or
else based upon memory knowledge? (2) Do memory experiences involve images? (3) If
memory experiences do involve images, is this epistemologically important? (4) Are memory
experiences epistemologically necessary, or are memory beliefs sufficient? (5) Are apparent
memories of experienced events epistemologically more significant than apparent memories of
facts? (6) Can the concept of the past be analyzed, and if so, how?

Alternative Accounts of the Justification of our Memory Beliefs: (1) Direct realism; (2) An
a priori argument for the theses that memory must be generally reliable; (3) An appeal to the
specious present; (4) The use of hypothetico-deductive reasoning on its own.

Direct Realism: Two versions of direct realism with respect to the justification of memory
beliefs: (1) A memory image approach, paralleling Sellars's approach to perceptual
knowledge; (2) A non-phenomenological approach, paralleling Armstrong's approach to
perceptual knowledge.

Comments on Direct Realism: A reason for preferring the non-phenomenological version to

the memory image version: the former does not provide a sufficient answer to skepticism. Can
any reason be offered for thinking that beliefs about the past can be noninferentially
justified? The failure of beliefs about the past to possess characteristics typically associated with
noninferentially justified beliefs.

An A Priori Argument for the Reliability of Memory? Is it logically possible that all of one's
memories might be incorrect? Shoemaker's formulation of the a priori argument, based upon a
proposed criterion for when it is reasonable to regard a translation as correct. Three criticisms of
Shoemaker: (1) It is important to distinguish between observation statements and theoretical
statements, and this is relevant to the translation issue; (2) Nonlinguistic behavior is often
crucial in determining what beliefs to assign to a person; (3) Later linguistic behavior can also
be relevant with regard to the ascription of memory beliefs.

An Appeal to the Specious Present: Two formulations: (1) A version using inductive
generalization; (2) A version, advanced by R. F. Harrod, involving an appeal to hypothetico-
deductive method.

Possible Objections to Harrod's Argument: (1) The circularity objection: the concept of the
specious present is analyzable, and it turns out to involve the concept of memory knowledge; (2)
Even if one experiences were instantaneous, and there were no specious present, beliefs about
the past could still be justified; (3) If memory knowledge presupposes a specious present, then
it presupposes memory experiences, and this means that one does not have a fully satisfactory
answer to skepticism; (4) Harrod has not shown that the hypothesis that there is a past is the
best explanation of the specious present.

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A Hypothetico-Deductive Account of the Justification of Beliefs about the Past: Beliefs

about the past are justified via an inference to the best explanation of one's present beliefs, and
other present states of affairs. The superiority of the hypothesis that present beliefs were caused
by past events over the hypothesis that the world just now popped into existence; One objection
that must be overcome: the hypothesis that the world has been around forever - or, at least, for a
long time - cannot be shown to be superior to "Russell's hypothesis" that the world has existed
for only five minutes.

http://spot.colorado.edu/~tooley/Methods%20in%20Metaphysics.pdf

PHILOSOPHY 4360/5360 – METAPHYSICS

Methods that Metaphysicians Use

Method 1: The appeal to what one can imagine – where imagining some state of

affairs involves forming a vivid image of that state of affairs.

Such appeals to what one can imagine are used to support claims that

something is logically possible.

Example 1: Humans and Immaterial Minds

Can one imagine surviving the destruction of one’s body? The idea is that

one can form a vivid picture of what it would be like to continue to have

experiences, thoughts, memories, and other mental states, and ones that were

causally linked to one’s earlier mental states, at a time after which one’s body had

been destroyed. Some philosophers, such as Richard Swinburne, have held that

since one can do that, it is logically possible that one could survive the destruction

of one’s body. But if it is logically possible to survive the destruction of one’s body,

then one cannot be identical with one’s body.

What is one to say about this argument? Since there is excellent evidence that

one’s psychological capacities and abilities depend on one’s brain, and will not

survive the destruction of one’s brain, there is surely something wrong with this

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argument. But what exactly is wrong with this argument? Does the error lie in the

view that one’s ability to imagine something, to picture something vividly, is

grounds for concluding that the thing in question is logically possible? Or does the

error lie elsewhere?

Consider precisely what it is that one can vividly imagine. One can imagine

experiences and memories that belong to a single, unified consciousness, that exist

after the destruction of one’s body, and where the memories include memories of

experiences that one had before the destruction of one’s body. But those experiences

and memories have to belong to a mind, with various capacities, if one is to have

survived the destruction of one’s body, and that mind will be an immaterial

substance, since we are not considering the possibility of surviving in a new body.

Now, however, if one is to have survived, the mind that exists after the destruction

of one’s body must be identical with the mind that existed before the destruction of

one’s body. Suppose now that materialism about human beings is true. Then the

mind that existed before the destruction of one’s body was identical with one’s

brain, so if one is to be imagining surviving the destruction of one’s body, one has to

be imagining – vividly or otherwise – that the material mind that existed earlier is

identical with the immaterial mind that exists later. Is this possible?

If the answer is that it is not, then what one is imagining is not one’s

surviving the destruction of one’s body: what one is imagining is the coming into

existence of an immaterial mind that, although not identical with one’s earlier mind,

contains memories of one’s earlier experiences, and perhaps the same beliefs,

desires, attitudes, and personality traits.

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On the other hand, if it is possible, given appropriate laws of nature, for a

brain to “morph” into an immaterial substance, so that the later immaterial mind is

identical with the earlier brain, then there is no impossibility in surviving the

destruction of one’s body even if one is identical with one’s body.

Either way, then, Richard Swinburne’s argument is unsound.

Example 2: Time Travel and Backwards Causation

A second example involves imagining that one is traveling in a time machine,

back into the past. Again, it might seem that one can form a series of vivid pictures

of what it would be like to travel back to the year 1900, and to have experiences

there. Does this then provide good support for the idea that time travel into the past

is logically possible?

If it does, it also provides good grounds for concluding that backward

causation – causation in which later events cause earlier ones – is logically possible.

But if backward causation is logically possible, then mustn’t causal loops be logically

possible. But causal loops may involve self-supporting causal loops, or, more

dramatically, self-undercutting causal loops. If such things are problematic, then the

question arises whether what one imagines when one thinks of oneself as imagining

what it would be like to travel back into the past really provides good grounds for

concluding that time travel is logically possible.

The crucial question to ask in such a case is this: “What exactly can one

vividly imagine in such a case?” Try imagining travelling back a day into the past.

As regards what one can vividly imagine – as contrasted with what one can

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conceive – is it not the case that it does not differ from what one can vividly imagine

if one imagined oneself being transported instead to an alternative spatiotemporal

realm that is just like the way this world was yesterday? If this is right, then one’s

description of what one is imagining as imagining that one has travelled back into

the past goes beyond the content of the vivid image that one has formed. The vivid

image provides no support, then, for the claim that time travel back into the past is

logically possible.

Method 2: The appeal to what one cannot imagine.

Such appeals to what one cannot imagine, in cases where, if the state of

affairs in question did exist, it would be perceivable, are sometimes used to support

claims that that state of affairs is logically impossible.

Example: The Incompatibility of Different Color Properties

Can one imagine something that is both completely red and at least partly

green? It seems that one cannot, and many philosophers have taken that as grounds

for concluding that it is logically impossible for something to be both completely red

and at least partly green.

In thinking about this, it is worth asking a related question: Can one imagine

something that is reddish-green in color? Here, too, it seems that one cannot. But is

it logically impossible that something should be reddish-green? Given that

something can be reddish-blue, reddish-yellow, greenish-blue, and greenish yellow,

is it reasonable to think that it is logically impossible for something to be reddish-

green?

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Method 3: The appeal to what one can coherently conceive.

Sometimes claims about what is logically possible are supported by claims

about what one can coherently conceive, rather than by claims about what one can

imagine. But what does it mean to say that one can coherently conceive of some

proposition’s being true? Does it mean that when one contemplates the proposition

in question, one is unable to see how it gives rise to any contradiction? If so, then

that may provide some support for the conclusion that the proposition expresses a

logical possibility, but it is not clear that the support is very strong, since a

proposition may be such that the proposition is necessarily false, and yet it may be

very hard indeed to show that this is so.

Example 1: Fermat’s Last Theorem

When one contemplates the following proposition

(*) There are whole numbers x, y, z, and n, such that n > 2 and such that xn + yn = zn

no contradiction appears to follow from that proposition. But, as Andrew Wiles

showed in 1993, that proposition is necessarily false.

Example 2: The Goldbach Conjecture

Can one coherently conceive of an even number greater than 2 that is not

equal to the sum of two prime numbers? If one contemplates the proposition that

there is such a number, no evident contradiction is apparent. But if the Goldbach

Conjecture is true, there is no such number, and so the proposition that there is such

a number will express a logical impossibility.

Method 4: The appeal to what one cannot coherently conceive

One can also appeal to what one cannot coherently conceive to support

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claims about what is logically impossible. If to be able to coherently conceive of

something is to be able to contemplate the relevant proposition without seeing any

contradiction arising from it, not to be able to coherently conceive of something is

for one to see, when one contemplates a proposition, that some contradiction does

follow from it. But then it is certainly true that the proposition does not express a

logical possibility. This method, then, seems unproblematic.

Method 5: The Appeal to Intuitions, or Intellectual Seemings

Sometimes philosophers, to support claims about what is logically possible,

or logically impossible, appeal not to what one can or cannot imagine, nor to what

one can or cannot coherently conceive, but, instead, to intuitions about what is

logically possible, or logically impossible.

What are intuitions? One answer is that to have an intuition that something

is the case is for it to seem to one that it is the case, where the seeming, rather than

depending, either directly or indirectly, upon perception or sensory experience,

arises directly out of contemplation of the proposition in question. In short,

Person S has an intuition that proposition p is true

= def.

Person S’s contemplating proposition p is itself sufficient to bring it about that it

seems to S that p is true.

If merely contemplating a proposition suffices to make it the case that it

seems to one that the proposition is true, then it would seem that the truth of the

proposition cannot depend upon anything outside of the proposition, and so it

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would seem that the proposition, if true, must be necessarily true. If an intuition

can provide grounds for thinking that a proposition p is true, it would seem that it

also provides grounds for thinking that proposition p is necessarily true. In doing

so, it also provides grounds for thinking that not p is necessarily false. The method

of intuition, then, if sound, would seem to provide grounds for conclusions about

the modal status of propositions – that is, for conclusion about what is logically

necessary, logically impossible, and logically possible.

But is the method sound? I am inclined to think that when it seems to one

that something is logically possible, that seeming is likely to rest simply upon one’s

inability to see how the proposition in question can give rise to any contradiction. If

this is right, then the appeal to intuitions has only as much force as the appeal to

what one can coherently conceive.

Similarly when one appeals to the fact that it seems to one that something is

logically impossible, I do not see why weight should be placed on that unless it rests

upon one’s seeing that the proposition in question gives rise to a contradiction. If

that is right, then the appeal to intuitions concerning what is logically impossible has

no force beyond what is present in an appeal to what one cannot coherently

conceive.

Method 6: Conceptual analysis.

Here the basic ideas are, first, that some concepts can be analyzed in terms of,

can be explained in terms of, other concepts; secondly, that the relation of analysis is

an asymmetric relation, so that if there is an analysis of concept A that involves

concept B, there cannot be an analysis of concept B that involves concept A; and,

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thirdly, that the process of analysis, rather than being one that goes on forever, must

terminate in concepts that cannot be analyzed, that are analytically basic.

Nelson Goodman’s Challenge to this View: Analysis as Merely Relative to a

Conceptual System

X is grue at time t = def. Either X is green at time t and t is earlier than t0, or X is blue

at time t and t is either t0 or later than t0.

X is bleen at time t = def. Either X is blue at time t and t is earlier than t0, or X is

green at time t and t is either t0 or later than t0.

These definitions suggest that the concepts of being grue and bleen are less

basic than the concepts of being blue and green. But Goodman argues that he can

equally well claim:

X is green at time t = def. Either X is grue at time t and t is earlier than t0, or X is

bleen at time t and t is either t0 or later than t0.

X is blue at time t = def. Either X is bleen at time t and t is earlier than t0, or X is grue

at time t and t is either t0 or later than t0.

Syntactically, in short, it is true at least that there are analytical equivalences

that are completely parallel.

Method 7: The proof of propositions using logic alone.

Example 1: The non-existence of the Russell set, R, defined as the set of all sets

that are not members of themselves.

Bertrand Russell’s Proof of the Non-Existence of the Russell Set

‘∈’ is the symbol typically used for the relation of set membership. So ‘!∈!‘ says

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that X is a member of the set Y.

Then ‘! ∈!‘, in saying that S belongs to set S, is saying that S is a set that belongs to

itself, while ‘~(! ∈!)’ says that S is a set that does not belong to itself.

Notice that the sets that one typically thinks of do not have themselves as

members: the set of all horses does not, for example, contain itself as a member, for

all of its members are horses, and no set is a horse.

Can one think of any sets that do belong to themselves? Well, must not the

universal set, U, defined as the set that contains every set, be a set that contains itself

as a member?

Next, define the ‘Russell set’ – call it R – as the set of all and only sets that are

not members of themselves:

!∈! = def. ‘~(!∈!).

Question: Is it the case that !∈!? Does the Russell set belong to itself?

Well, either !∈!, or ~(!∈!)

(1) Suppose then that !∈!. It then follows immediately from the definition of the

Russell set R that ~(!∈!). So we have a contradiction.

(1) Suppose, on the other hand, that ~ !∈! , It then follows immediately from the

definition of the Russell set R that !∈!. So once again we have a contradiction.

In either case, then, we have a contradiction. So if the Russell set R exists, if there is

a set that contains all and only those sets that are not members of themselves, a

contradiction is true.

Like most philosophers, Russell held that there are no true contradictions,

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and so he concluded that there could not be a set of all and only sets that are not

members of themselves. (Graham Priest, an Australian philosopher, and advocate

of dialethic logic, maintains that the correct conclusion to draw is that there are some

true contradictions.)

Example 2: The non-existence of the universal set, U, defined as the set of all sets.

The following principle seems extremely plausible:

For any set S, and any property P, one can define the set T that consists of all and

only members of set S that have property P.

But if that principle is right, if the universal set, U, defined as the set containing

absolutely every set that exists, exists, then one can define the Russell set, R, since

that is just the subset of U that consist of the members of that set that have the

property of not belonging to themselves.

Accordingly, if universal set, U – the set of all sets – existed, so would the

Russell set, R – the set of all sets that are not members of themselves, and so we

would again have a contradiction.

Method 8: The proof of propositions using logic plus conceptual analysis.

Analytic truths can be defined as truths that are derivable from logical truths

in the narrow sense that is, from purely formal logical truths – by the substitution

of synonymous expressions.

Historical Note

Immanuel Kant defined analytical truths as subject-predicate propositions

whose predicate concept is contained in its subject – as, for example, in the

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proposition that all bachelors are unmarried. This definition is, however, too

narrow, since it means that analytically true propositions are restricted to

propositions of a subject-predicate form, whereas analytically true propositions can

have other logical forms.

What are some examples of analytically true propositions that are not of

subject-predicate form? Here are some candidates:

(1) The proposition that 5 < 7

(2) The proposition that if x < y, and y < z, then x < z.

(3) The proposition that if x is a subset of y, and y is a subset of z, then x is a subset of

z.

(4) The proposition that if x is heavier than y, and y is heavier than z, then x is

heavier than z.

But how does one show that these are analytic when analytic truths are

defined, not as Kant did, but as truths that are derivable from logical truths in the

narrow sense – that is, from purely formal logical truths – by the substitution of

synonymous expressions? Here is an illustration in the case of the fourth of the

above propositions.

1. Introduce the term “outbalances”, where x outbalances y is defined as follows:

When x and y are placed on opposite sides of a balance scale, the side with x on goes

down, and the side with y on it goes up.

2. So defined, there can be possible worlds where x outbalances y, and y outbalances

z, but z outbalances x.

3. Now define the concept of being heavier than as follows:

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“A is heavier than B” = def. “A outbalances B, and it is true that (x)(y)(z)(If x

outbalances y, and y outbalances z, then x outbalances z)”.

4. Then one can use the following proposition, which is a purely formal logical

truth:

If (1) A outbalances B and (x)(y)(z)(If x outbalances y, and y outbalances z, then x

outbalances z), and (2) If B outbalances C and (x)(y)(z)(If x outbalances y, and y

outbalances z, then x outbalances z), then (3) A outbalances C and (x)(y)(z)(If x

outbalances y, and y outbalances z, then x outbalances z).

5. Substitution of the definition of “A is heavier than B” will then yield the

proposition that if A is heavier than B and B is heavier than C, then A is heavier than

C.

Possible Examples:

(a) A cause cannot succeed its effect.

(b) Time cannot be cyclic.

(c) All properties are completely determinate.

Comment

Often, in metaphysics, philosophers have tried to establish negative

existential claims - that is, claims to the effect that certain things do not exist - by

arguing that it is logically impossible for them to exist, and have tried to establish

the latter by showing that the proposition that things of the type in question do exist

leads to a contradiction.

The use of logic alone, or logic plus conceptual analysis, to establish positive

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existential claims is much less common - with the ontological argument being one of

the very rare cases where such a line of argument has been attempted.

Method 9: The use of inference to the best causal explanation.

Examples

(a) Arguments for the existence of God, or a first cause, or an unmoved mover.

(b) Arguments for the existence of other minds.

(c) Arguments for the existence of a mind-independent physical world.

Method 10: The use of inference to the best non-causal explanation.

Example 1: Laws of Nature

Here the basic idea is that cosmic regularities, if they do not obtain in virtue

of some atomic state of affairs, would be immensely improbable.

Example 2: Causal Relations

Here one basic idea is that there are striking temporal asymmetries in the

world that would be immensely improbable if there were no causation in the world.

(Popper’s case of outgoing concentric waves, and the case of outgoing spherical

wave fronts.)

Comment

One needs to ask, however, whether inference to the best explanation can be a

fundamental method. Consider, in particular, inference to the best causal

explanation. The concept of causation is itself a concept whose analysis is very

difficult, and is it not surprising to see such a concept playing a role in a

fundamental inductive principle? Wouldn’t one think that inductive logic, at its

most basic level, should be free of such concepts, just as deductive logic is? That is

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certainly the view of some philosophers – most notably Bas van Fraassen, who has

argued at length that the principle of inference to the best explanation should be

rejected.

I think that van Fraassen is right in maintaining that the principle of inference

to the best explanation cannot be a basic principle of inductive logic. But that does

not mean that it cannot be a sound principle, for it may be possible to derive the

principle of inference to the best explanation from fundamental principles of

inductive logic, together with an analysis of the notion of explanation, and quite

possibly also an analysis of the concept of causation.

But how would the more basic inductive principles be formulated? The

answer is given by the next method that metaphysicians have used:

Method 11: The use of a system of logical probability to show that certain things

are likely to be the case, or that certain things are unlikely to be the case.

Illustrations:

(1) The mathematician Thomas Bayes (1702-1761), in his posthumously published

"An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances” (1763), starting

from the assumption that all propensities are equally likely, showed how statistical

information about the behavior of an object could justify probabilistic conclusions

concerning that object’s underlying propensities.

(2) If metaphysically robust, governing laws of nature are logically impossible, then

it is very unlikely that the world contains any cosmic regularities.

(3) If metaphysically robust, governing laws of nature are, on the other hand,

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logically possible, then it can be very likely that the world does contain cosmic

regularities.

Method 12: The use of inference to the best account of the truth conditions of

statements of a certain type.

Example 1: David Lewis's account of the truth conditions of statements about

logical possibilities.

Lewis’s idea of possible worlds is as follows. Possible worlds are concrete

entities. They are concrete spatiotemporal worlds of concrete objects, where

different possible worlds are completely unrelated to one another, worlds that stand

in no temporal, spatial, causal, or other external relation to one another.

Given this notion of possible worlds, David Lewis argues that one was

justified in postulating the existence of such things since they are needed to provide

truthmakers for statements about logical possibilities. Consider, for example, the

proposition that the existence of a talking donkey is logically possible. Lewis’s view

is that what makes that proposition true is that there is a concrete, spatiotemporal

world that is not our world, and that is not connected spatially, temporally, or

causally, or in any other way to our world, and which contains a talking donkey.

What is a truthmaker? The idea of a truthmaker for a given proposition is the

idea of a state of affairs that serves to make that proposition true, where as state of

affairs consists either of some entity’s having a property, or two or more entities’

standing in some relation, or some more complex combination of these things.

Lewis’s argument appears to appeal to something like the following

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principle:

The Strong Truthmaker Principle: For every true proposition, there is some state of

affairs that is a truthmaker for that proposition.

But as Lewis was aware, at least later on, the Strong Truthmaker Principle is

problematic. First of all, consider, for example, a statement that says that something

lacks a certain property, such as

“A is not red.”

Many metaphysicians hold that if P is a genuine property, then there is no genuine

property that consists in something’s lacking property P. There are, as it is said, no

negative properties.

The reason for holding that there are no negative properties is as follows.

Genuine properties are viewed as entities that are present in all of the things that

have the property in question, and because of the presence of a single entity – what

is referred to as a “universal” – in different particulars, all of those particulars must

exactly resemble each other in a certain respect. But things that are, for example,

not circular in shape can have a variety of shapes, and so there need not be any

respect in which all things that are not circular exactly resemble each other, and in

virtue of which they are not circular. So there is no property of not being circular.

But then if states of affairs consist of things having properties, and of two or

more things standing in relations, what can the truthmaker be for a statement such

as “A is not circular”?

But secondly, even if one either accepts the idea of negative properties, or,

alternatively, and I think preferably, one holds that states of affairs can include

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something’s lacking a genuine property, this will not enable one to provide

truthmakers for all propositions. In particular, consider negative existential

propositions, such as the proposition that there are no unicorns. What state of

affairs could be the truthmaker for that proposition? One answer that one might try

is that it is a huge conjunctive state of affairs, each conjunct of which consists in a

state of affairs that involves some particular individual lacking the property of being

a unicorn, or having the negative property of not being a unicorn. But nothing

about that conjunctive state of affairs ensures that there aren’t any individuals

beyond those involved in the various states of affairs that enter into the conjunctive

state of affairs. So such a conjunctive state of affairs cannot provide a truthmaker for

the proposition that there are no unicorns.

Some philosophers, such as David Armstrong, have attempted to provide an

answer. But David Lewis, following the lead of John Bigelow, was inclined to

abandon the Strong Truthmaker Principle in favor of a different principle:

The Difference-Maker Principle: For any proposition p, and any two worlds W

and V, if p is true in W but false in V, then either W must contain a truthmaker for p

or else V must contain a truthmaker for ~p.

The problem for Lewis’s argument for possible worlds is then that when one

shifts from the Strong Truthmaker Principle to the Difference-Maker Principle, the

latter principle does not apply in the case of necessarily true propositions, since if p

10

is a necessarily true proposition, there aren’t possible worlds W and V such that p is

true in W but false in V.

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Example 2: The postulation of second-order relations between universals to serve

as truthmakers for statements of laws of nature.

Method 13: The appeal to direct acquaintance.

Examples

(1) The existence of emergent, sensuous properties.

In philosophy of mind, one of the major issues concerns the existence of what

are referred to as ‘qualia’ (Singular: ‘quale’ – pronounced either ‘kwalay’ or

‘kwalee’.) Qualia are qualitative properties involved in experiences, such as colors in

visual perception. Their existence is controversial, since if they exist, it is hard to see

how they can be reduced to the particles, forces, properties, and relations that entre

into theories in physics.

(2) The existence of a flow of time.

Some people hold that in experience one is aware of the ‘flow’ or ‘passage’ of

time, where such flow or passage is something more than its merely being the case

that events stand in relations of temporal priority.

(3) Phenomenological approaches to philosophy, and phenomenological states.

Philosophers who adopt a phenomenological approach typically claim that

one can be directly aware of properties of psychological states other than qualia of

the sensory variety. Thus it is often claimed, for example, that one can be aware of

cognitive qualia, such as what it is like to be a belief, or a thought, or a desire, or that

one can be aware of the intentionality of some mental states, of what it is for a

mental state to be about some other state of affairs.

Method 14: The appeal to non-intellectual “seemings”

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Mike Huemer, in his book Skepticism and the Veil of Perception, advances the

following principle:

(PC) If it seems to S as if P, then S has at least prima facie justification for believing

that P. (99)

If Huemer’s (PC) principle is correct, then one can appeal to non-intellectual

seemings in support of a variety of important metaphysical propositions, including:

(a) There is a mind-independent physical world.

(b) God exists.

(c) Humans have libertarian free will.

Comment: Everything turns upon whether (PC) is sound. I believe that it is not, for

a variety of reasons. For one thing, I do not think that there is any concept of

seeming that has all of the properties that Huemer’s (PC) principle requires.

http://spot.colorado.edu/%7Etooley/Some%20Metaphysical%20Questions.pdf

PHILOSOPHY 4360

/5360

This course will focus upon the fundamental skills, methods, concepts and distinctions that are essential for the
study of philosophy.

The basic skills covered will include the writing of philosophy papers, the reading of articles, the extraction of
arguments, and the evaluation of arguments.

The philosophical methods discussed will include the technique of counterexamples, the formulation of analyses
by searching for necessary conditions, reductive analyses of concepts, functionalist analyses of concepts, methods of
analyzing theoretical terms, the technique of reductio ad absurdum arguments, and the use of infinite regress
arguments.

The basic concepts to be covered will include the concepts of analysis, supervenience, reduction, quasi-logical
vocabulary, theoretical terms, subjunctive conditionals, the verifiability principle, logical form, truthmakers, modal
logic, and possible worlds, while the distinctions examined will include necessary versus sufficient conditions, a
priori versus a posteriori knowledge, necessary versus contingent truths, analytic versus synthetic statements, sense

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versus reference, intensional versus extensional contexts, de re versus de dicto statements, deduction versus
induction, and inductive generalization versus inference to the best explanation.

Philosophy 3480: Critical Thinking

Lecture: Background Material for Exercise 1
Inference-Indicators and the Logical Structure of an Argument

1. The Idea of an Inference-Indicator

To offer an argument is to claim that certain things are the case, and that they provide a
reason for believing that something else is the case. The propositions that one puts forward as
reasons for believing something else are the premises of the argument. The proposition that they
are intended to support is the conclusion of the argument. The logical steps by which one moves
from the premises to the conclusion are the inferences.

To understand the logical structure of an argument is simply a matter of knowing what these
three components are. To determine what the logical structure is one needs, therefore, to answer
the following questions:

(1) What is the basic conclusion that this argument is attempting to establish?

(2) What are the premises, or assumptions, that the person is putting forward in support of the
conclusion?

(3) What are the inferences that the person is making, and which are supposed to take one from
the premises to the final conclusion?

How does one go about answering these questions? The answer is that a passage that
contains an argument will generally contain a number of words or phrases that function as
inference-indicators. Consider, for example, the following sentence:

"I have just polished off two six packs; I am feeling very nauseous; I am unable to get up off the floor,
and the rest of the world is spinning around me at something approaching the speed of light. Therefore
I am probably slightly drunk."

Here the word "therefore" is an inference-indicator, and it functions to indicate that the fact that I
have just polished off two six packs, am feeling very nauseous, am unable to get up off the floor, etc., is
a reason for drawing the conclusion that I am probably slightly drunk. So the pattern it points to is the
following:

[Reason, inference indicator, conclusion].

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Other inference indicators work in the opposite way. They indicate that what follows the
inference indicator provides a reason for what precedes it. Here is an example of that sort of
inference-indicator:

"Mary is probably a marginally better tennis player than I am, since she has beaten me 6-0 in each of the
last ten sets we have played."

The word "since" is an inference indicator. In particular, it indicates that what follows it - i.e., the fact
Mary has beaten me 6-0 in the last ten sets that we've played - is a reason for believing what precedes it
- i.e. that Mary is probably a marginally better tennis player than I am. So the pattern this sort of
inference indicator points to is as follows:

[Conclusion, inference indicator, reason].

Notice, however, that with words that are inference indicators of this second type, it is
sometimes possible for the world order to be inverted:

"Since Mary has beaten me 6-0 in each of the last ten sets we have played, she is probably a marginally
better tennis player than I am."

When this is done, the pattern that this sort of inference indicator points to is instead this:

[Inference indicator, reason, conclusion].

But what is always true with this sort of inference indicator is that the inference indicator is
always followed by the reason.

2. Inference-Indicators Versus Argument-Indicators

Consider the following passage:

"The existence of a deity who created our world can be proved in the following way. Everything that
exists either is due to chance, or results from the operation of natural laws that made its existence
necessary, or is due to the action of an intelligent designer and creator. Our world contains things,
however - such as living organisms - that are very complex indeed, and because of this it is unreasonable
to suppose that their existence is simply a matter of chance. But neither is it the case that the existence
of such things is necessitated by natural law. Consequently, there must be an intelligent designer and
creator who is ultimately responsible for the existence of such things."

Are there any inference-indicators present in this passage? The three most plausible candidates are
the three expressions "can be proved in the following way", “because", and “Consequently". Of these,
the second and the third are inference-indicators, but the first is not. Why is this? The answer is that
while the expression "can be proved in the following way" is what might be referred to as an argument-
indicator, it is not an inference-indicator, since while it indicates that an argument, or proof, is about to
be set out, it does not point to any specific inference in that argument - that is, to any transition from a

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premise to a conclusion. The word “because”, by contrast, indicates that the proposition referred to by
the term “this” is a reason for accepting the claim that follows. Similarly, the word "Consequently" also
points to an inference, since it indicates that what follows it is a conclusion, and that what precedes it
contains one or more premises on which the conclusion in question is based.

In short, argument-indicators are valuable in that they do alert you to the fact that the author
is offering an argument in support of his or her view. But, unlike inference-indicators, they
provide one with no help in working out what the logical structure of the argument in question is.

3. Some Common Inference-indicators of the Two Types

1. Inference-indicators of Type 1:

[Reason, Inference-indicator, Conclusion]

therefore hence consequently

so thus accordingly
as a consequence entails implies
from which it follows

2. Inference-indicators of Type 2:

[Conclusion, Inference-indicator, Reason]

[Inference-indicator, Reason, Conclusion]

since for because

is implied by is entailed by is a consequence of
follows from

4. Utilizing Inference-indicators to Work out the Logical Structure of an

Argument

The basic idea, then, is that one can pick out passages that contain arguments, and begin to
work out the logical structure of those arguments, by looking for words and phrases, such as
those listed above, that function as one or other of the two types of inference-indicators.

In doing this, however, there are two points that it is important to note. First, there are other
words and phrases, besides those listed above, that function as inference-indicators. The above
lists contain only some of the more common ones.

Secondly, however, there are some words that it may be tempting to view as inference-
indicators, but that are not functioning in that way. (Especially tricky in this regard are words

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that often function as inference-indicators, but that do not always do so.)

5. Some Words that Are Not Inference-Indicators

Of the words and expressions that can easily be mistaken for inference-indicators, four
categories, in particular, deserve attention.

(1) Argument-Indicators or Proof-Indicators

This category was discussed above. The basic idea is that these proof-indicator or
argument-indicator expressions point to a claim for which someone is going to offer an
argument, but they are not inference-indicators, since they do not point to an inference - that is, a
move from a premise to a conclusion.

Here are some typical examples of this sort of expression:

can be proved that can be demonstrated that can be shown that

(2) Contrastive Terms

As the label suggests, contrastive terms do not point to the presence of an argument, let
alone to a specific inference: they simply contrast one claim with another claim.

Here are some typical examples of contrastive expressions:

but nonetheless nevertheless on the contrary

(3) Enumerative Terms

This third category consists of expressions that sometimes indicate premises involved in an
argument, but these expressions do not point to a place where an inference is being made - where
one is moving from one or more premises to a conclusion.

Here are some typical examples of this sort of expression:

first second next in addition moreover

(4) Conditional Statements and the Word “then”

The word “then”, when it is not a temporal term, occurs within conditional statements ? that
is, statements of the form “if p then q” ? and in such cases, it may be tempting view the word
“then” as an inference-indicator.

The source of this temptation is probably that some “if . . . then - - -“ statements are closely
related to inferences. Consider, for example, the statement “If Socrates is a man, and all men are
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mortal, then Socrates is mortal.” Because this statement expresses a necessary truth, and does so
in virtue of its logical form, there is a corresponding, valid argument, namely
:
(1) Socrates is a man.

(2) All men are mortal.

Therefore:

(3) Socrates is mortal.

Nevertheless, “if . . . then - - -“ statements do not express inferences in arguments. For one
thing, it is only when an “if . . . then - - -“ statement is necessarily true (and in virtue of its
logical form), that there will be a corresponding, valid argument. More important, in an
argument, one is asserting that the premises are true, and that the conclusion is true. To advance
an “if . . . then - - -“ statement, however, is not to assert either that that antecedent is true, or that
the consequent is true.

The term “then” in an “if . . . then - - -“ statement should be viewed, accordingly, as part of
a sentential connective, on a par with words like “and” and “or”.

(5) Causal Explanation Expressions

This final category is an especially tricky one, since it involves words that often function as
inference-indicators, but that do not do so in some contexts. Consider, for example, the word
"because" in the following sentence

(1) Suzanne has been swimming very good times because she has been doing a good deal of
weight training

The word “because” is often an inference-indicator, but it is not so in the case of the present
sentence. The reason is that the fact that Suzanne has been doing a good deal of weight training
is not being offered as a reason for believing that Suzanne has been swimming very good
times. It is being offered, rather, as a causal explanation of the fact that she is swimming good
times. So it is important to distinguish, in the case of sentences containing the word "because",
between sentences that offer reasons for thinking that some claim is true and sentences that offer
a causal explanation (or other type of explanation) for why something is the case.

As another illustration of the need for care in identifying inference-indicators, consider the
following three sentences containing the word "since":

(2) 1001 is not a prime number, since it is divisible by 11.

(3) Paul hasn't written to me since he went to Europe.

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(4) John hasn’t played golf the past two years, since he has been living in Antarctica.

In the first of these sentences, "since" does function as an inference-indicator, but in the
second it indicates, instead, a temporal relation, while in the third it refers to an explanation of a
certain fact, rather than offering a reason for thinking that something is true.

Careful attention to wording can sometimes help one to determine whether or not one has
an inference-indicator. To see this, compare sentence (1) with sentence (5):

(5) Suzanne must be swimming very good times, because she has been doing a good deal of
weight training.

Here the word "must" indicates that the speaker, rather than reporting a fact that he or she is
already aware of - the fact that Suzanne is swimming very good times - is instead drawing a
conclusion from something else that he or she knows, namely, that Suzanne has been doing a
good deal of weight training. (Terms such as “must” and “necessarily” typically function in
either of two quite different ways. Sometimes they indicate that a certain proposition is
necessarily true, rather than merely contingently so, and sometimes ? as in the present case - they
indicate instead that the proposition in question follows from some other proposition.)

Similarly, compare sentence (3) with sentence (6):

(6) Paul can't have written to anyone, since he is in Europe, and all the mail carriers there are on
strike.

Just as with the use of the term "must" in sentence (5), so the use of the word "can't" in
sentence (6) strongly suggests that the speaker, rather than referring to a fact that he or she
already knows - namely, that Paul hasn't written to anyone - is instead drawing that conclusion
from other things that he or she knows - namely, that Paul is in Europe, and that all the mail
carriers there are on strike.

Philosophy 3480: Critical Thinking

Lecture: Background Material for Exercise 2
Reasons, Arguments, and the Concept of Validity
(1) The Concept of Validity
Consider the following three arguments:

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The moon is not made out of a dairy product

Cheese is a dairy product
Therefore: The moon is not made out of cheese

The moon is made out of cheddar cheese

Cheddar cheese is blue cheese
Therefore: The moon is made out of blue cheese

There are trees in the Quad

It sometimes snows in Boulder
Therefore: There are cars in New York city.

As the above arguments illustrate, the evaluation of any argument involves two
issues. First, are the premises of the argument plausible - that is, likely to be true? Secondly, do
the premises provide satisfactory support for the conclusion of the argument?

Arguments are traditionally divided into two sorts: inductive and deductive. In an inductive
argument, where the reasoning is good, the premises make it likely that the conclusion is true. In
a deductive argument, on the other hand, the reasoning is good only if the relationship between
the premises and the conclusion is such that it is logically impossible for all of the premises to be
true, and yet the conclusion false.

Deductive arguments where the reasoning is good are described as valid arguments. A
valid argument, accordingly, is one where the truth of the premises suffices to guarantee the truth
of the conclusion.

In ethics, almost all of the arguments that one encounters are deductive arguments, rather than
inductive ones. The question of whether the reasoning involved in an argument is good in the
case of an ethical arguments almost always comes down, therefore, to the question of whether
the reasoning is valid.

(2) A General Test for Validity

Intuitively, then, what one can do to test whether an argument is valid is to ask oneself if
one can imagine a world - which may be very different from the actual world - in which all of the
premises of the argument are true, but the conclusion is false. If one can, then the argument is
invalid (or fallacious).

In testing whether an argument is valid, it is important, when trying to imagine a world in

which the premises are all true, and yet the conclusion false, not to add on to the premises,
unconsciously, extra assumptions that one naturally associates with the premises in
question. For adding on such extra assumptions may suffice to guarantee the truth of the
conclusion when the original premises themselves would not have not done so.

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(3) Testing for Valid and Invalid Inference by Venn

Diagrams
The study of logic began with Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), and one of the things that Aristotle
particularly focused upon was the study of what are known as syllogistic arguments, where a
syllogistic argument consists of two premises and a conclusion, and where the two premises
share a common term - the middle term - which is not present in the conclusion.

Here are two examples of syllogistic arguments:

Socrates is a man
All men are mortal
Therefore: Socrates is mortal

All politicians are honest and forthright people

No honest and forthright people are demagogues
Therefore: No politicians are demagogues

Here, in the case of the first of these arguments, the middle term - which occurs in both
premises, but not in the conclusion - is "man"/"men", while, in the second argument, the middle
term is the expression "honest and forthright people".

Notice, also, that the statements in a syllogistic argument typically contain terms such as
"all", "some", "no", "any", and "every" - although one can also have statements that refer instead
to some specific individual - such as the statements "Socrates is a man" and 'Socrates is mortal"
in the case of the first argument.

Aristotle set out rules specifying when such syllogistic arguments are valid, and when they
are invalid. Doing so is a somewhat complex matter, as will be clear if one considers variations
on the following syllogistic argument:

All As are Bs
All Bs are Cs
All As are Cs

The term "all" occurs in both of the premises and in the conclusion. In each case, one could
replace the given occurrence of the term "all" by the term "no", or by the term "some",
generating arguments of a different logical form. So, for example, one could replace the second
occurrence by "some", and the third by "no", giving one the following argument:

All As are Bs
Some Bs are Cs
No As are Cs

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The first argument form is valid, and the second is not. One needs, then, rules that specify which
forms are valid, and which not. Moreover, since there are three possibilities for each occurrence
of he term "all", one can generate a total of (3 x 3 x 3) = 27 different argument forms. This does
not mean that one will need 27 separate rules. But it does suggest that giving a satisfactory
account may be a somewhat complicated matter.

Long after the time of Aristotle, however, logicians arrived at much simpler ways of
evaluating arguments that involve statements containing terms such as "all", "some", "no", "any",
and "every", and which say that everything has some property, or that some things have some
property, or that nothing has some property. In particular, the logician Venn (1834-1923)
developed a very simple and useful technique for determining whether an argument is valid -
now called the method of Venn diagrams.

The method provides a vivid way in which one can determine whether or not there could be
possible worlds where all of the premises of a given argument are true, but the consequent
false. The technique that Venn developed is as follows. First, one uses a circle - or any other
closed curve - to represent the set of all the things that have some property, P. The idea is that
things that fall inside the circle have property P, while things that fall outside the circle do not.

Secondly, if one uses two circles, A and B, to represent the things that have property P, and
the things that have property Q, respectively, then there are four ways in which those two circles
can be arranged relative to one another:

(1) Circle A could be inside of circle B;

(2) Circle B could be inside of circle A;
(3) Circles A and B could overlap without either being inside the other;
(4) Circles A and B might be totally outside of one another.

If one circle falls within another, that must indicate that everything with the property represented
by the former circle also has the property represented by the latter circle. So possibilities (1) and
(2) above correspond to:

(1) All things with property P have property Q;

(2) All things with property Q have property P.

If, on the other hand, circles A and B overlap without either being inside the other, that
corresponds to the possibility that

(3) Some things with property P have property Q.

Finally, if circles A and B are totally outside of one another, that corresponds to the possibility
that

(4) Nothing with property P has property Q.

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Thirdly, there may, of course, be sets of things that are completely empty - such as the set of
all unicorns. One needs to have a way of representing, then, the statement that a given set is not
empty. This can be done by placing a letter inside the circle in question.

Fourthly, some arguments refer to a specific individual - such as Socrates. In that case, one
should choose a letter to represent that specific individual - such as the letter 's' for Socrates - and
one can then place it inside of the relevant circle or circles.

Finally, one evaluates a given argument by drawing in circles to represent all the properties
mentioned in the premises or in the conclusion, and uses letters to represent any specific
individuals referred to in the premises or in the conclusion, and then one considers all of the
possible ways in which the circles and letters might be arranged so as to make all of the premises
true. The question then is whether there is any arrangement that makes all of the premises true,
but makes the conclusion false. If there is, the argument is invalid. If there is no such
arrangement, the argument is valid.

As an exercise, try diagramming the following arguments to determine, for each argument,
whether it is valid or not.
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore: Socrates is mortal

Marlboro men do not eat quiche

John does not eat quiche
Therefore: John is a Marlboro man

(4) Valid and Invalid Patterns of Inference - Hypothetical

Reasoning
Consider the following arguments:

Argument 1: If it's not raining today, we'll go on a picnic

It's not raining today
Therefore: We'll go on a picnic.

Argument 2: If it's not raining today, we'll go on a picnic

It's raining today
Therefore: We won't go on a picnic.

Argument 3: If it's not raining today, we'll go on a picnic

We won't go on a picnic
Therefore: It's raining today.

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Argument 4: If it's not raining today, we'll go on a picnic

We'll go on a picnic
Therefore: It's not raining today.

Which of these arguments is valid - that is, which of these arguments is such that it is
logically impossible for all of the premises to be true, while the conclusion is false?

In thinking about this, it may be helpful to notice that one can consistently say: "If it's not
raining today, we'll go on a picnic; if it is raining today, we'll (still) go on a picnic. That is, we'll
go on a picnic regardless of whether it rains." Noticing that this is perfectly consistent may help
one to see that arguments 2 and 4 are not valid. For if some conclusion, C, does not follow when
you add more information to your original premises, then the original premises cannot suffice to
ensure that the conclusion, C, is true.

One way of guarding against the temptation of fallacious inferences involving "if-then"
statements is to be familiar with rules about valid and invalid forms of inference involving "if-
then" statements.

I. The following inferences are valid:

If p, then q If p then q
p Not q
Therefore: q Therefore: Not p

(Affirming the antecedent) (Denying the consequent)

II. The following inferences are not valid:

If p, then q If p then q
q Not p
Therefore: p Therefore: Not q

(Affirming the consequent) (Denying the antecedent)

Philosophy 3480: Critical Thinking

Lecture: Background Material for Exercise 3
Extracting an Argument from a Text
1. An Overview
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How does one extract an argument from a passage, and then formulate that argument in a
complete and explicit fashion? In outline, the answer is as follows:

(1) First, look for inference indicators in the passage.

(2) Secondly, ask yourself, with regard to each inference indicator, which type of inference
indicator it is. Is it of the same type as "therefore" - where the inference indictor is followed by
the conclusion, and preceded by one or more premises:

[Premise - Inference Indicator - Conclusion]

Or is it of the same type as "since" or "because" - where the inference indictor is followed by one
or more premises, and where the conclusion either precedes the inference indicator, or else
follows the premise:

[Conclusion - Inference Indicator - Premise]

[Inference Indicator - Premise - Conclusion]

(3) Having decided upon the type of inference indicator that is involved, you can then make use
of the information to arrive at the relevant conclusion, together with at least one of the premises
involved in the inference, since if the inference indicator is of the same type as "therefore", the
conclusion will follow the inference indicator, while the premise will precede the inference
indicator, and if the inference indicator is instead of the same type as "since", what follows the
inference indicator will be a premise, and the conclusion will either precede the inference
indicator, or else come after the premise.

(4) Inferences usually involve two premises. Consequently, there will usually be one more
premise that one needs to identify. So scan the text in the vicinity of the inference indicator to
see if there is another statement that it appears the author is using, in conjunction with the
premise already identified, to generate the conclusion in question.

(5) If no other premise appears to be part of the text, is there an implicit premise that it is
plausible to ascribe to the author? Here you can often use the mechanical method of arriving at
possible implicit premises, which is set out below.

(6) Once you have arrived at the premises and the conclusion for the sub-arguments associated
with all of the inference indicators, try to link the sub-arguments together in such a way that
every conclusion of a sub-argument - with the exception of the grand conclusion that the
argument as a whole is supposed to establish - is a premise in another sub-argument.

(7) Your final goal should be a fully explicit, and logically organized argument. Such an
argument will have the following features:

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(1) It will be a series of statements, and will include all of the premises, both stated and unstated,
plus the final conclusion, plus any intermediate conclusions that were used in getting from the
premises to final conclusion.

(2) It is probably best to place a number in front of each statement, so that it is easy to refer to
that statement later on, both within the argument itself, and when one is discussing the argument.

(3) If a statement is a premise, it should be indicated that this is so.

(4) If a statement is not a premise, it must be inferred from one or more earlier statements in the
argument, and one should indicate which statements are supposed to entail it. This can be done
either by giving the numbers of the statements from which it is supposed to follow, or, as we
shall be doing later on, by means of a diagram.

(5) The final statement in the argument will be the grand conclusion.

2. The Idea of Implicit Premises

Let us now look at some of these steps in more detail, starting first with the idea of implicit
premises.

The basic point here is that it is often the case that people, in setting out an argument, do not
bother to state explicitly all of the premises or assumptions that play an essential role in the
argument. Assumptions that are thought by the person in question to be widely shared, and
uncontroversial, are likely not to be mentioned. The same in generally true with respect to
premises that seem obvious, given the argument as a whole, or the context in which it is being
advanced.

As an illustration, consider the following argument, which was used in an earlier discussion
of the idea of an inference indicator:

"I have just polished off two six-packs; I am feeling very nauseous; I am unable to get up off
the floor, and the rest of the world is spinning around me at something approaching the speed of
light. Therefore I am probably slightly drunk."
When I say that I have just polished off two six-packs, that I am feeling very nauseous, and
so on, and then conclude that I am probably somewhat drunk, it is natural to conclude that the
six-packs in question contained beer, rather than, say, mineral water. I did not, of course,
explicitly say, at any point, that they contained beer rather than mineral water. None the less, it
is reasonable for you to view the claim that they contained beer as one of my unstated premises,
since given the context of the argument as a whole, it is easy to see why I should think that it was
not something that needed to be explicitly mentioned. If, of course, I am right in front of you, in
a lively state, you need merely ask me whether the proposition that the six-packs contained beer
was one of the unstated premises of my argument. But if I am no longer around, or have passed
out, or you are simply reading the argument when I am not present, there will be no alternative

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but to interpret the argument, charitably, as involving the unstated premise that the six-packs did
contain beer.

3. An Illustration of the Expansion of a Condensed Argument

Let me now illustrate some of the above steps by considering a very simple
argument. Suppose that someone says that it is wrong for people to have blood transfusions, and
when asked why it is wrong, responds as follows:

"It is wrong to have blood transfusions because the Bible says that God has forbidden us to have
blood transfusions."
The first step involves a preliminary identification of the logical structure of the
argument. Given the brevity of the argument, and the presence of the inference-indicator term,
"because", this is relatively straightforward. What precedes the term "because" - namely, the
claim that it is wrong to have blood transfusions - must be the conclusion, while what follows -
namely, that the Bible says that God has forbidden us to have blood transfusions - must be the
premise. So we now have the following argument

The Bible says that God has forbidden us to have blood transfusions.

Therefore: It is wrong to have blood transfusions.

This argument is surely incomplete. So let us move on to the next step, and ask whether
there are any assumptions, which the person had in mind, but neglected to state explicitly in the
above formulation of the argument. It seems very likely indeed that there are, since it seems
likely that if we were to ask a person who had put forward the above argument what connection
there is between his claim that the Bible says that God has forbidden us to have blood
transfusions, and his claim that it is wrong to have blood transfusions - that is to say, why he
thinks that the former provides a reason for accepting the latter - he would respond by saying,
first, that if the Bible says that God has forbidden us to have blood transfusions, then God has
forbidden us to have blood transfusions, since everything the Bible says is true, and secondly,
that if God has forbidden us to have blood transfusions, then it is wrong for us to have blood
transfusions, since whatever God forbids is necessarily wrong. In short, it is likely that a person
who advanced that above argument would be relying up-on the following two, unstated
assumptions:

(i) Everything the Bible says is true;

(ii) Whatever God forbids us to do is wrong.

Given these additional, unstated assumptions, we can now move on to the task of setting out
an explicit formulation of the argument as a whole. One way of doing this would be as follows:

(1) The Bible says that God has forbidden us to have blood transfusions. (An explicit premise).

(2) Everything the Bible says is true. (Implicit premise).

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(3) God has forbidden us to have blood transfusions.

(An intermediate conclusion, inferred from statements (1) and (2).)

(4) Whatever God forbids us to do is wrong. (An unstated assumption).

(5) It is wrong for us to have blood transfusions. (The final conclusion, inferred from statements
(3) and (4).)

4. The Idea of Linking Together Sub-Arguments

Consider the following, very plausible argument:

"All left wingers are aliens! How do I know? Well left wingers must all come from Venus,
given that they're women. But you wonder whether left wingers are all women? Well they must
be, mustn't they? After all, left wingers are soft-hearted and caring people."
In expanding this into a fully explicit argument, the first step is to identify the inference
indicators. Here, we have some rather long phrases serving as inference indicators, indicating by
the underlining:
"All left wingers are aliens! How do I know? Well left wingers must all come from Venus,
given that they're women. But you wonder whether left wingers are all women? Well they must
be, mustn't they? After all, left wingers are soft-hearted and caring people."
Next, one asks about the type of each inference indicator, and here it appears that each is of
the same type as "since" - that is, they are of the following sort:

[Conclusion - Inference Indicator - Premise]

By making use of this information, and selecting material after the inference indictor as the
premise, and appropriate material preceding it as the conclusion, one arrives at the following
partial statements of the three sub-arguments:

Sub-Argument 1

All left wingers come from Venus

Therefore: All left wingers are aliens

Sub-Argument 2

All left wingers are women

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Therefore: All left wingers come from Venus

Sub-Argument 3

All left wingers are soft-hearted and caring people

Therefore: All left wingers are women

In the case of each sub-argument, a premise is missing. The next step, then, is to find, in
each case, a second premise that, together with the first premise, might plausibly be viewed as
generating the relevant conclusion. Here the most plausible candidates, I think, are as indicated
below:

Sub-Argument 1

(1) All left wingers come from Venus [Explicit premise]

(2) All things that come from Venus are aliens [Implicit premise]

Therefore: (3) All left wingers are aliens [Grand conclusion]

Sub-Argument 2

(4) All left wingers are women [Explicit premise]

(5) All women come from Venus [Implicit premise]

Therefore: (6) All left wingers come from Venus [Intermediate conclusion]

Sub-Argument 3

(7) All left wingers are soft-hearted and caring people

[Explicit
premise]

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(8) All soft-hearted and caring people are women [Implicit premise]

Therefore: (9) All left wingers are women [Intermediate conclusion]

In the next section, I shall set out a mechanical method of locating missing premises. First,
however, I want to introduce the idea of linking together sub-arguments so that the argument as a
whole is set out in a logical fashion.

To do this, notice that each of the two intermediate conclusions occurs as a premise in one
of the other two arguments. Thus the intermediate conclusion that is statement (6) is identical
with statement (1), which is a premise in the first sub-argument. Similarly, the intermediate
conclusion that is statement (9) is identical with statement (4), which is a premise in the second
sub-argument.

It is possible, because of this, to arrange the above arguments in a series where every step is
either a premise, or something that follows from earlier steps. When this is done, the argument
as a whole will contain seven statements, since, as we have seen, of the nine statements in the
above three sub-arguments, two occur twice.

Here is the rearranged argument, with the statements renumbered:

(1) All left wingers are soft-hearted and caring people [Explicit premise]

(2) All soft-hearted and caring people are women [Implicit premise]

Therefore: (3) All left wingers are women [From (1) and (2)]

(4) All women come from Venus [Implicit premise]

Therefore: (5) All left wingers come from Venus [From (3) and (4)]

(6) All things that come from Venus are aliens [Implicit premise]

Therefore: (7) All left wingers are aliens [From (5) and (6)]

5. A Mechanical Method for Arriving at Implicit Premises

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Consider the first inference in the above argument:

(1) All left wingers are soft-hearted and caring people

(2) All soft-hearted and caring people are women

Therefore: (3) All left wingers are women

This argument has a certain logical form, or structure. To see what that structure is,
replacing the following expressions - "left wingers", "soft-hearted and caring people", and
"women" by "As", "Bs", and "Cs" respectively. This gives us:

(1) All As are Bs

(2) All Bs are Cs

Therefore: (3) All As are Cs

Thus formulated, one can see that the argument has the following features:

(1) Both of the premises, and the conclusion, begin with the word "all".

(2) No general term occurs in the conclusion unless it occurs in one (but not both) of the
premises. Thus the general term "As" occurs in the conclusion and in premise (1), while the
general term "Cs" occurs in the conclusion and in premise (2).

(3) One general term - namely, "Bs" does not occur in the conclusion, but it does occur in both
premises.

(4) Moreover, that term occurs in a different position in the two premises. In the first premise,
"Bs" is in the consequent of the "all" statement, whereas in the second premise it is in the
antecedent.

At this point, it is very helpful to have a label for a term that functions in the way that "Bs" does
in the above argument schema. The label traditionally used here is "middle term". A middle
term can, then, be defined as follows:

A middle term is a term that has the following properties:

(1) It occurs in both premises;

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(2) It does not occur in the conclusion;

(3) In arguments that involve three "all" statements, the term in question occurs in a different
position in the two premises - namely, in the antecedent of one, and in the consequent of the
other.

The above provides one with a mechanical method of arriving at missing premises in
arguments of the relevant sort - that is, that involve three "all" statements. (Similar methods can
be used for arguments with a different logical form.) For suppose that one is confronted with an
argument with a missing premise, such as:

(1) All As are Bs

(2) ??

Therefore: (3) All As are Cs

Looking at this argument, one can see that it contains a general term - namely "Bs" - that
does not occur in the conclusion. That term, accordingly, must be the middle term, and so it
must occur in both premises. In addition, since one is presumably dealing with an argument that
involves three "all" statements, one knows that the middle term must occur in a different position
in the two premises. So this allows us to partially fill in the missing second premise:

(1) All As are Bs

(2) All Bs are ??

Therefore: (3) All As are Cs

Next, one knows that in arguments of the sort we are considering - and which are referred to
as syllogistic arguments - any general terms that occur in the conclusion just occur in one of the
premises. (This is not true of other types of arguments.) This means that since the term "Cs"
occurs in the conclusion, it must also occur in one of the premises. There is, however, only one
place that is still blank. Putting the term "Cs" in that location then gives us the following
argument, in which the missing second premise has been completely identified:

(1) All As are Bs

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(2) All Bs are Cs

Therefore: (3) All As are Cs

Finally, suppose, instead, that it was the premise at (1) that was missing, so that all that we
had was:

(1) ??

(2) All Bs are Cs

Therefore: (3) All As are Cs

Looking at this argument, one can see that it, too, contains a general term - namely "Bs" -
that does not occur in the conclusion. That term, accordingly, must be the middle term, and so it
must occur in both premises. Moreover, since one is presumably dealing with an argument that
involves three "all" statements, one knows that the middle term must occur in a different position
in the two premises. So this allows us to partially fill in the missing second premise:

(1) All ?? are Bs

(2) All Bs are Cs

Therefore: (3) All As are Cs

Next, one knows that in syllogistic arguments that any general terms that occur in the
conclusion just occur in one of the premises. (This is not true of other types of arguments.) This
means that since the term "As" occurs in the conclusion, it must also occur in one of the
premises. There is, however, only one place that is still blank. Putting the term "As" in that
location then gives us the following argument, in which the missing premise has once again been
completely identified:

(1) All As are Bs

(2) All Bs are Cs

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Therefore: (3) All As are Cs

Philosophy 3480: Critical Thinking

Lecture: Background Material for Exercise 4

The Method of Counterexamples

One of the most important methods for evaluating moral claims - both one's own and those
of others - is the method, or technique, of counterexamples. But this method is also applicable to
factual claims that involve no moral content, and since the situation is simpler there, it may be
best if we begin with its use in that area.

1.1 Non-Moral Generalizations and the Technique of Counterexamples

Generalizations can vary greatly in complexity. But it will suffice, for understanding what
the technique of counterexamples is, if one considers generalizations of the following two simple
types:

(1) Anything that has property P ALWAYS has property Q as well;;

(2) Something that has property P NEVER has property Q.

Confronted with any generalization, the first thing to do is to look for counterexamples. If
the generalization in question is one that asserts that anything that has property P always has
property Q as well, then a counterexample will consist of something that has property P, but that
does not have property Q. On the other hand, if the generalization is one that asserts that nothing
that has property P ever has property Q, then a counterexample will be a case of something that
has both property P and property Q.

Consider, for example, the following generalization:

"All swans are white."

A counterexample to this generalization would be something that had the property of being a
swan, but which was not white: a black swan from Australia.

The technique of counterexamples points, incidentally, to one habit that it is very important
to acquire - the habit of taking generalizations seriously. Thus, if someone asserts that
something is always the case, or that it is never the case, you should immediately ask whether
there are any counterexamples. If it has been claimed that all Ps are Qs, can one find a case of a

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P that is not a Q? Or, if it has been claimed that Ps are never Qs, can one point to a case of a P
that is a Q?

Some people, by contrast, tend to put forward generalizations very casually, and when
confronted with a counterexample, respond by saying, "That's the exception that proves the
rule." The appropriate reply is simply: "No it isn't. It's a case which shows that your
generalization is false, and so has to be abandoned."

1.2 Moral Claims and the Technique of Counterexamples

When the technique of counterexamples is applied to general moral claims, the same basic
idea is involved as in the case of purely descriptive or factual generalizations that do not involve
any moral content. There are, however, some special considerations that arise when the
technique of counterexamples is applied to moral claims, and that need to be kept clearly in
mind. These involve:

(1) The distinction between absolute moral rules, and prima facie rules;

(2) The idea of doomsday-style counterexamples;

(3) The value of counterexamples that are not of the doomsday variety;

(4) The use of purely imaginary cases;

(5) Counterexamples and rights claims;

(6) The scope of the method of counterexamples;

(7) The reason why the method is so often fruitful;

(8) Searching for the most effective counterexamples.

1.2.1 The Distinction between Absolute Moral Rules, and Prima Facie Moral
Rules

The first point, and perhaps the most important, is that many moral statements can be
interpreted in either of two very different ways. Consider, for example, the following
claim: "Adultery is always morally wrong." A person who utters this statement might be saying
either that

(1) Adultery is always wrong, all things considered, regardless of the circumstances, and
regardless of the consequences,
or that

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(2) Adultery is always prima facie wrong; it is always wrong in itself; it is always wrong other
things being equal.

What is the difference between these two claims? Suppose that Mary is in a rather odd
situation, in which the only way in which she can save the life of some innocent person is by
committing adultery. Someone who maintains that adultery is prima facie wrong might say that,
although adultery was always wrong in itself, nonetheless Mary should commit adultery in order
to save the life of the innocent person. In contrast, someone who held that adultery was always
wrong, all things considered, regardless of the circumstances and regardless of the consequences,
would say that Mary should not commit adultery, even though an innocent person will die if she
doesn't.

One needs to distinguish, therefore, between absolute moral rules and prima facie moral
rules. An absolute moral rule is one that asserts either that a certain sort of action is wrong
without qualification, and so should never be performed, or, alternatively, that an action is
obligatory, and so should always be performed in the appropriate circumstances. A prima facie
moral rule, in contrast, is one that specifies what have been called right-making and wrong-
making properties of actions - a right-making property being one that makes it obligatory, other
things being equal, to perform an action, and a wrong-making property being one that makes it
wrong, other things being equal, to perform an action.

The importance of this distinction in connection with the technique of counterexamples lies
in the fact that it is often more difficult to find a plausible counterexample to a moral statement
when it is interpreted as expressing a prima facie moral rule than when it is interpreted as
expressing as absolute moral rule. Someone who holds that adultery is absolutely wrong is
saying that one ought not to commit adultery even if that is the only way to prevent a nuclear
holocaust, and many people would view this case as a convincing counterexample to the claim
that adultery is absolutely wrong. But cases such as this leave untouched the claim that adultery
is prima facie wrong. A person who advances the latter claim can happily concede that one
ought to commit adultery if that is the only way to prevent a nuclear holocaust, while
maintaining that adultery is always wrong in itself. For what he or she can say is, first, that while
the fact that an action is a case of adultery is a wrong-making characteristic of that action, in the
case we are considering the action also has a right-making characteristic - namely, that of being
an action that saves the life of an innocent person - and, secondly, that the latter, right-making
characteristic is more significant than the former, wrong-making characteristic, so that, thirdly,
the action in question is one that is right, all things considered.

How, then, does on go about constructing counterexamples to claims that some action is
prima facie morally wrong? This is an important question, and it will be addressed later, in
section 1.3.

1.2.2 The Idea of Doomsday-Style Counterexamples

Some counterexamples to absolute moral claims involve an instance of the type of action
that the person is claiming is always morally wrong where not performing the action in those

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particular circumstances will have some extremely bad consequences - such as, in the above
example, the death of an innocent person, or, more dramatically, the destruction of all life on
earth. Hence the label: "doomsday-style" counterexample.

1.2.3 The Advantage of Non-Doomsday-Style Counterexamples

Doomsday-style counterexamples can be very effective against many absolute moral

claims. But they have the disadvantage that they cannot be used against prima facie moral
claims, since there the person who is advancing the moral claim can simply reply that while the
action in question is not wrong in the doomsday case, the reason is that the prima facie
wrongness of performing the action is outweighed by the prima facie rightness of performing an
action that will prevent a horrendous outcome.

In addition, if someone advances an absolute moral claim, and you respond by offering a
doomsday-style counterexample, the person may grant that your counterexample has force
against the absolute moral rule, but then shift to the corresponding prima facie rule - at which
point your counterexample will not have any force.

Non-doomsday-style counterexamples have the advantage, then, of greater applicability,

because they apply to prima facie moral rules, as well as absolute ones, and, as a consequence,
someone who initially advances an absolute moral claim cannot escape your counterexample by
shifting to the corresponding prima facie claim.

1.2.4 The Use of Imaginary Cases

Confronted with a factual generalization, such as that all swans are white, it will be of no
use to appeal to an imaginary case of a pink swan. A counterexample to the generalization must
be some actual swan that is not white; hypothetical non-white swans do not count. The situation
is different, in this respect, in the case of at least some moral generalizations. For at least some
moral generalizations are concerned, not only with all the cases of actions of a given sort that
actually arise, but with all possible actions of that sort. So if, for example, someone maintains
that it is prima facie wrong to break a promise, he or she is not saying merely that every case of
breaking a promise throughout all of history has some property which, other things being equal,
will make the action wrong. The claim is rather that the property of being a case of breaking
one's promise is a wrong-making property so that there could not possibly be an action that had
that property which did not have at least one wrong-making property. To claim that it is prima
facie wrong to break one's promises is therefore to make a claim that covers both actual and
possible actions that involve the breaking of a promise.

The upshot is that in applying the technique of counterexamples to moral claims, it will
often be unnecessary to point to a case of some actual action that falls under the moral
generalization, but that fails to have the moral property which, according to the generalization, it
ought to have. A purely imaginary, or hypothetical case, will often suffice. This is illustrated by
the discussion above of the claim that adultery is always wrong, all things considered, and
regardless of either the circumstances or the consequences. For it is unlikely that there has ever
been an actual case where the only way in which someone could prevent a nuclear holocaust was

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by committing adultery. The case is therefore a purely hypothetical one. This in no way makes
it, however, a less effective counterexample.

1.2.5 Counterexamples and Rights Claims

Some moral generalizations involves claims about rights. What does it means for
something to have a right? At the very least, for A to have a right not to be treated in a certain
way - call it M - it must be at least prima facie wrong to treat A in way M. But that is not
sufficient, since the fact that it is wrong for Mary to drink Sue's beer does not mean that the beer
has a right not to be drunk, or a right not to be drunk by Mary. The right here belongs to Sue, not
to the beer. Thus, to say that something has a right is not merely to say that it would be wrong to
treat it in a certain way: it is also to say that if one were to treat it in that way, one would be
wronging the thing in question, rather than wronging something, or someone, else.

In short, if one is considering a claim that something has some right, one must ask not only
(1) whether treating it in a certain way would be wrong, but (2) if so, whether such treatment
would also wrong the thing in question.

1.2.6 The Scope of the Method of Counterexamples

How widely applicable is the technique of counterexamples? The answer is that it is

potentially applicable to every moral claim that anyone advances. But how can this be so, given
that while some moral claims take the form of general claims, others do not? The answer is that
in the case where someone puts forward a moral claim that, rather than being general in form,
concerns only what someone did, or what someone is considering doing, in a particular situation,
a defense of the specific claim will ultimately have to appeal to general moral principles. As a
consequence, every moral claim either is, or depends upon, some general moral claim, and this
means that the technique of searching for counterexamples to generalizations is a technique that
is always relevant in any moral discussion.

1.2.7 The Reason Why the Method is So Often Fruitful

People sometimes wonder how the technique of searching for counterexamples can possibly
be an effective technique to use in moral discussions. For suppose that John claims that all
actions of type M are morally wrong, and Mary tries to convince John that he is mistaken by
describing a certain action which is of type M, but which she believes is not morally
wrong. Given that John believes that all actions of type M are wrong, won’t he simply reject her
proposed counterexample, and hold that the action which she describes is morally wrong? So
that while the case that Mary proposes as a counterexample to the generalization may seem to
Mary to be a plausible counterexample, it will not seem so to John, and so it cannot help their
discussion to move ahead.

The answer is that people, in advancing a general moral claim, do not always consider all of
the different sorts of cases that fall under the general claim. A person’s acceptance of a
generalization may often rest upon quite a limited range of cases. As a consequence, if Mary
focuses upon a case ? either actual or hypothetical ? which is of a sort that John may not have

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considered, then she may very well come up with one where his moral intuitions do not square
with those of the general moral claim which he has advanced. What is a counterexample for
Mary may therefore be a counterexample for John as well, and thus provide him with a reason
for modifying or abandoning his original moral claim.

1.2.8 Searching for the Most Effective Counterexamples.

Finally, it is important to keep in mind that one is searching for counterexamples that are as
uncontroversial as possible, since the goal is to find something that will be effective in providing
a person who accepts the generalization with a reason for entertaining doubts about its
acceptability.

1.3 Finding Counterexamples to Prima Facie Moral Claims

We have seen that it is much easier to find potentially convincing counterexamples to

principles that are advanced as absolute moral rules than to principles that are advanced as prima
facie moral rules, since doomsday-style counterexamples often work in the form case, but not in
the latter. How, then, does on go about locating potentially effective counterexamples when one
is confronted with what is being claimed to be a prima facie moral rule?

Suppose that someone claims that all actions of type A are prima facie wrong. What
properties will a potentially effective counterexample need to have? The answer would seem to
be as follows:

(1) The action in question must be one of type A which most people would not view as morally
wrong, all things considered.

(2) Either there must be no right-making characteristic at all that is present in the action in
question or else, if there is a right-making characteristic that is present, it must not be
sufficiently weighty that it could explain why the action in question is not wrong, all things
considered.

The idea underlying condition (2) is this. First, if there is an action of type A that is not
morally wrong all things considered, and that possesses no right-making characteristic, then that
action cannot possess any wrong-making characteristic either, and so it cannot be the case that
being an action of type A is itself a wrong-making characteristic. Secondly, if the action in
question does possess a right-making characteristic, but one that is not sufficiently important to
outweigh the purported wrong-making characteristic of being an action of type A, then the right-
making characteristic cannot suffice to explain why the action in question is not wrong all things
considered, and so there is no alternative to the conclusion that being an action of type A is not a
wrong-making characteristic.

Let us now try finding effective counterexamples to some prima facie moral
claims. Consider, for example, the following five moral claims:

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1. Adultery is always prima facie wrong.

2. It is always prima facie wrong to kill someone who wants to live.

3. Breaking the law is always (at least) prima facie wrong.

4. Divorce is always prima facie wrong

5. Pleasurable experiences are always prima facie good.

(The first four claims involve moral principles concerning the wrongness of actions. The fifth is
a different type of moral claim, and of a sort that we have not so far considered, as it is
concerned not with the rightness or wrongness of actions, but with the value - the goodness or
badness - of states of affairs of a certain type.)

Let us now consider how one might arrive at promising counterexamples to the above five
claims. (Before reading on, try coming up with a plausible counterexample. This will not
always be easy. If you have difficulty, see if the hints and suggestions that follow help.)

Hints and Suggestions

For claim 1: Try thinking about harm, deception, and breaking promises.

For claim 2: Think about someone who is, or has been, very naughty.

For claim 3: Don't confine yourself just to laws that exist at the present time. Consider laws that
existed at earlier times, both in this country and in other countries.

For claim 1: Try thinking about divorce and the idea of harm.

For claim 1: Can you think of any pleasures that do not make the world a better place?

Discussion

1. Adultery is always prima facie wrong.

What explanation might people offer of the wrongness of adultery? There are many
possibilities, but some are as follows: (1) Adultery involves breaking a promise to be sexual
faithful to one's spouse. (2) Adultery involves deceiving one's spouse, or at least not being
honest with him or her about a very important matter. (3) Adultery involves a significant chance
that one's spouse will find out what one has done, and be harmed by it. (4) Adultery may
destroy one's marriage, and, thereby, inflict suffering upon one's children.

The idea, then, is to think of a case of adultery where the factors just listed are absent. For
example: John and Mary are a swinging couple with no children who give each other permission
to have sexual relations with others at a party they are both attending.

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Now, of course, not everyone would concede that this is a sound counterexample. One
might think, for example, that marriage is a contract that involves not just John and Mary, but
God as well, and that in committing adultery, even with each other's permission and approval,
John and Mary are breaking a promise that they made to God, and not just to one
another. Nevertheless, this is still a very promising counterexample, and one that many people
would view as sound, and the key to arriving at it was to construct a case where various factors
that bear upon the morality of adultery are not present.

2. It is always prima facie wrong to kill someone who wants to live.

Are there cases in which you would think it was justified to kill someone? Suppose that
you were being attacked by someone who was armed, and who it appeared wanted to kill
you. Or suppose you knew that the person in question was America's most wanted serial killer?

In short, one good type of counterexample to claim 2 involves the case where you kill a
guilty aggressor in self-defense, and the crucial thing that you needed to notice about claim 2
was that it did not specify that the person in question was innocent.

Once that is noticed, another potentially effective counterexample may spring to mind as
well - namely, the case of capital punishment involving a person who has been found guilty of
some horrendous series of crimes. (Since many more people reject capital punishment than
reject killing in self-defense, this second counterexample will not be quite as effective as the
first. But it is still very relevant, and quite strong.)

3. Breaking the law is always (at least) prima facie wrong.

Here one should ask what grounds there might be for disobeying a law. One answer is that
the law may itself be immoral, in that it may itself involve a violation of the rights of
people. Consider, for example, the following laws from earlier times:

(1) Laws in America concerning the ownership of slaves, or racial intermarriage.

(2) Laws in America denying women the right to vote.

(3) Laws in Nazi Germany concerning the treatment of Jews and certain other groups.

(4) Laws in the middle ages concerning the appropriate punishment - namely, execution - for
holding heretical religious beliefs.

Can you think of any present-day laws that you would hold are unjust?

4. Divorce is always prima facie wrong

Here, as in the case of adultery, it is helpful to ask what reasons there might be for holding
that divorce is harmful. One reason might be that divorce may harm either the man or the

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woman. Another is that it may harm any children that they have. Once again, then, the strategy
is to construct a case where these sorts of consideration are not present. For example: the people
involved do not yet have any children, they have found that they both prefer living on their own
to living with someone else, and both of them want to abandon their marriage, and go back to
living as single individuals.

Here, too, as in the adultery case, not everyone will agree that this is a convincing
counterexample - since, here too, some will hold that marriage is a contract with God, and not
just with one another. But, once again, one has a potentially very effective counterexample,
since one has constructed a case where factors that might make divorce wrong have been
removed.

5. Pleasurable experiences are always prima facie good.

Some pleasurable experiences may be bad all things considered, because they may lead to
consequences that involve, say, suffering that outweighs the pleasure. But how could a
pleasurable experience not be prima facie, or intrinsically, good? How could a pleasurable
experience not be such as, in itself, makes the world a better place?

The answer emerges if one considers people who enjoy doing things that harm others - the
psychopath who enjoys torturing and murdering people. So the suggestion is that the world is
not a better place if such a person gets great pleasure from such activity than it would be if he or
she got only a little pleasure from it, and thus that sadistic pleasures are a counterexample to the
claim that pleasure is always prima facie good.

Some people might argue that the judgment that sadistic pleasure is not prima facie good is
based upon a confusion, and that one is mistakenly transferring one's disapproval of the sadistic
action over to the pleasure that results from that action. I do not think that there is a confusion
here. But one could avoid this objection by shifting to a slightly different case where there is no
sadistic action - namely, the case of a person who simply takes pleasure in any suffering that he
or she happens to see people undergoing.

METAPHYSICS

Some Metaphysical Questions

The following are among the bewildering variety of questions that raise

metaphysical issues:

(1) Is there anything that must be true of absolutely everything that exists?

(2) Must anything that exists have

intrinsic properties?

(3) What are properties? Are they universals, or tropes, or . . .?

(4) Must anything that exists stand in some relation to something else?

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(5) Must anything that exists be completely determinate, or can there be vague

objects?

(6) Can there be things that exist that are not in time?

(7) Is there anything that is not part of the spatiotemporal world?

(8) What are the truthmakers for mathematical statements?

(9) What are numbers?

(10) Can there be necessarily existent entities?

(11) What is it for something to be an actual entity?

(12) Is everything that exists

an actual entity?

(13) What are the truthmakers for statements of logical possibility?

(14) Do merely possible worlds exist?

(15) What sorts of things are possible worlds?

(16) Is change really possible?

(17) Can there be things that are in principle unobservable?

(18) Can one make sense of a non-

reductionist view of theoretical entities?

(19) Can there be aspects of reality that are in principle unknowable?

(20) Why is there something, rather than nothing?

(21) Could the world contain only dispositional properties?

(22) Can there be pure dispositional properties

–that

is, properties that have no

categorical basis?

(23) What is time?

(24) Is time real, or an illusion?

(25)

Could time be cyclic?

(26) Can there be time without change?

(27) Is space real, or an illusion?

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http://spot.colorado.edu/%7Etooley/OverviewPhilosophy4360.html

METAPHYSICS – AN OVERVIEW
Basic Concepts, Methods, Issues, Questions, and Arguments
Topic I. What Is Metaphysics?
A Definition of Metaphysics: Metaphysics is the philosophical investigation of the ultimate nature of reality.

Some Basic Types of Questions in Metaphysics: (1) Questions concerning reality as a whole; (2) Questions
concerning things that must be true of absolutely everything that exists; (3) Questions concerning possibilities for
existence; (4) Questions concerning fundamental aspects of contingent things; (5) Questions concerning the nature
of human beings.

The Problem of Method in Metaphysics: Science, especially physics, is also concerned with arriving at
knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality. How do the methods used in metaphysics relate to, and differ from, the
methods used in science? Is metaphysics a legitimate discipline, rather than pure speculation, or armchair science?

Methods Used in Metaphysics, and Some Examples: (1) The appeal to what one can imagine – where imagining
some state of affairs involves forming a vivid image of that state of affairs. (2) The appeal to what one cannot
imagine. (3) The appeal to what one can coherently conceive. (4) The appeal to what one cannot coherently
conceive. (5) The appeal to intuitions about what is logically possible, or logically impossible, to support claims
about what really is logically possible, or logically impossible. (Comment: Appeals of these five sorts occur, for
example, in connection with the evaluation of proposed analyses of concepts, and in connection with attempts to
formulate truth conditions.) (6) Conceptual analysis (7) The proof of propositions using logic alone. (Bertrand
Russell and (a) the non-existence of set of all sets that do no belong to themselves, and (b) the non-existence of a set
of all sets) (8) The proof of propositions using logic plus conceptual analysis. (Analytic truths as derivable from
logical truths in the narrow sense by the substitution of synonymous expressions.) (Examples: A cause cannot
succeed its effect. All properties are completely determinate.)
(9) The use of inference to the best causal explanation. (Examples: God; other minds) (10) The use of inference to
the best non-causal explanation. (Examples: Laws of nature; causal relations) (11) The use of a system of logical
probability to show that certain things are likely to be the case, or that certain things are unlikely to be the case. (12)
The use of inference to the best account of the truth conditions of some statement. (The idea of a robust
correspondence theory of truth) (Example: David Lewis's account of the truth conditions of statements about
possibilities.) (13) The appeal to direct acquaintance. (Example: The existence of emergent, sensuous properties)

The Status of Metaphysical Truths, and Questions of Method: Are some metaphysical propositions merely
contingently true? If so what methods can be used to establish such contingent truths? Are some metaphysical
propositions necessarily true? What methods are appropriate in such cases?

Truthmakers and Metaphysical Propositions: Do all true statements require truthmaking states of affairs that are
external to the statements? What about logically true, or analytically true statements? (Compare Lewis's postulation
of possible worlds to supply truthmakers for modal statements.)

Topic II. Identity and Persistence

Two Important Preliminary Distinctions: (1) Qualitative identity versus numerical identity; (2) Numerical
identity versus the unity relation.

The Definition of Numerical Identity: (1) Numerical identity is a purely logical relation; (2) Numerical identity
can be defined via introduction and elimination rules.

A Potentially Misleading Way of Talking: "synchronic identity" versus "diachronic identity". Identity is not a
cross-temporal relation.

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Realist versus Reductionist Accounts of the Synchronic Unity Relation: (1) What makes it the case that two
property instances that exist at the same time belong to one and the same thing? (2) Is the synchronic unity relation
unique and unanalyzable, or is it analyzable? (3) Is it reducible, for example, to nomological connections between
property instances? (4) Or does the synchronic unity relation have to be analyzed in terms of causal relations to
property instances that exist at earlier times?

Realist versus Reductionist Accounts of the Diachronic Unity Relation: (1) What makes it the case that two
property instances that exist at different times belong to one and the same persisting thing? (2) Is the diachronic
unity relation unique and unanalyzable, or is it reducible, for example, to causal connections of an appropriate sort?
(3) Causal connections as a necessary condition of the presence of the unity relation: Armstrong's
annihilation/creation case. (4) Are all questions of identity settled once all causal relations are settled? (5) The
issues raised by fission and fusion cases.

The Diachronic Unity Relation and the Definition of Persisting Entities: (1) The diachronic unity as a relation
not between temporal parts, but between property instances existing at different times; (2) Fission and fusion cases
show that the diachronic unity relation cannot be both symmetric and transitive, whereas identity is; (3) Can one
define a persisting entity ("identity over time") in terms of property instances that are related via a non-branching
unity relation?

Topic III. Personal Identity

Personal Identity - Realist and Reductionist Alternatives: (1) The diachronic unity relation is an irreducible
relation, both in the case of persons, and in the case of inanimate objects; (2) The diachronic unity relation is an
irreducible relation in the case of immaterial egos, and so there would be a fact of the matter in fission cases; (3)
Bodily identity is a necessary and sufficient condition of personal identity; (4) Brain identity is a necessary and
sufficient condition of personal identity; (5) The unity relation is a matter of relations between occurrent
psychological states; (6) The unity relation is a matter of relations between psychological states, both occurrent
states and underlying powers; (7) The unity relation is a matter of relations between psychological states, both
occurrent states and underlying powers, and also a matter of those states' being instantiated in the same underlying
stuff, where the latter might be either the same brain, or the same immaterial substance.

Important Thought Experiments and Test Cases: (1) Interchanging psychological states between different
brains; (2) The transference of psychological states and powers to a different immaterial substance; (3) The
destruction of all psychological states, together with the continued existence of brain and body; (4) Shoemaker’s
brain transplant case; (5) The case where one hemisphere is destroyed; (6) The case where one hemisphere is
destroyed, and the other hemisphere is transplanted; (7) The case where both hemispheres are transplanted into
different bodies; (8) Derek Parfit's fusion cases; (9) The reprogramming case; (10) Teletransportation cases, (a)
with the same matter arranged the same way, (b) with the same matter arranged a different way, and (c) with
completely different matter.

Issues Raised by Derek Parfit: (1) Is it possible to make sense of the notion of "surviving" in a case where the
resulting person is not identical with the original person? (2) Must there always be a true answer to any question
concerning identity in any conceivable case? (3) Is identity an important matter? (4) Is what matters an all-or-
nothing matter, or a matter of degree? (5) Can one set out an account of memory, which is such that it is not an
analytic truth that if A has a memory of experience E, then E is an experience that A had? (6) Can all mental states
be described impersonally - that is, in a way that does not presuppose the existence of any person at all? (7) Does
personal identity just consist in bodily and psychological continuity, or is it a further fact, independent of the facts
about these continuities? (8) If there is a further fact, is it (a) a deep fact, and (b) an all-or-nothing fact?

Topic IV. The Nature of the Mind

Some Important Issues: (1) What account is to be given of the very concept of a mind? (2) What type of analysis
is to be given of statements about different types of mental states? (3) Are there any significant divisions between
types of mental states, in the sense that a very different type of account might have to be given for some types of

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mental states than others? (4) What is the "mark" of the mental? That is to say, what is it that distinguishes states of
affairs that are mental states from those that are not? (Consciousness and intentionality as two important answers.)

Four Different Accounts of the Analysis of Mental Concepts: (1) One anti-reductionist approach: a "raw feel",
or "qualia", or phenomenalistic account;
(2) A second anti-reductionist approach: intentionality as a defining property of mental states; (3) Analytical, or
logical, behaviorism; (4) Functionalism, and the identification of mental states (primarily) on the basis of their
causal roles, rather than on the basis of their intrinsic natures. The computer program analogy.

Three Main Families of Views Concerning the Nature of the Mind:

(1) Physicalistic views of a reductionist sort; (2) Non-physicalistic views;
(3) Emergent physicalism.

Physicalistic Views of a Reductionist Sort: (1) Analytical behaviorism: concepts of mental states are to be
analyzed in terms of behavior – both actual behavior and behavioral dispositions; (2) Mind-brain identity theory:
This involves (a) a functionalist account of the mind, and of mental states; (b) an identification of those functional
states with the physical states that realize them; (3) Mental states are functional states, physically realized. This
involves (a) a functionalist account of the mind, and of mental states; (b) an identification of mental states with, so
to speak, the program that the brain is running, rather than with the specific physical processes that are involved in
the running of the program; (4) Eliminativism: this is the view that no minds, and no mental states, exist.

Non-Physicalistic Views: (1) Property dualism: there are non-physical properties, in the form of emergent qualia;
(2) Intentional state dualism – according to which intentionality is the mark of the mental; (3) Substance dualism:
the mind is an immaterial entity; (4) Idealism - the view that there is no mind-independent physical world.

Emergent Physicalism: There are emergent, sensuous properties - qualia - but they are physical properties, and
everything that exists is purely physical.

Property Dualism versus Emergent Physicalism: Does one have logically privileged access to qualia, or are they
in principle publicly observable?

Arguments for Substance Dualism: (1) The argument from personal identity, advanced by Richard Swinburne;
(2) The argument from human freedom and responsibility; (3) The knowledge argument, advanced by J. P.
Moreland and Scott B. Rae; (4) The argument from intentionality; (5) The argument from the existence of
paranormal powers, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis; (6) The argument from out-of-
body experiences, and near-death experiences.

Arguments against Substance Dualism: (1) General arguments for materialism; (2) The crucial argument: the
appeal to specific facts about humans, including (a) the results of blows to the head, (b) the effects of damage to
different parts of the brain, (c) diseases that affect mental functioning, including Alzheimer’s, (d) aging and the
mind, (e) the gradual development of psychological capacities as humans mature, (f) the inheritance of intellectual
abilities and psychological traits, (g) the great psychological similarity between identical twins than between
fraternal twins, (h) the existence of psychotropic drugs, which can affect one’s mental state and functioning; and (i)
the correlations between differences in psychological capacities across species with differences in the neural
structures found in their brains.

Analytical Behaviorism: (1) Actual behavior versus behavioral dispositions; (2) The irrelevance of the nature of
the causal connections between stimulus and response.

A Functionalist Analysis of Mental Concepts: (1) Mental states are individuated into different types on the basis
of relations to (a) stimulation of the organism, (b) behavioral response, and (c) other mental states; (2) On most
functionalist accounts, the relations in question are causal relations. So a mental state is the type of mental state it in
virtue of its causal role. (David Armstrong also allows the relation of resemblance.) (3) The intrinsic nature of a
state is irrelevant to the question of whether it is a mental state, and, if so, what type of mental state it is.

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Objections to Analytical Behaviorism: (l) The inverted spectrum argument;

(2) The unconsciousness, or absent qualia, argument; (3) The understanding sensation terms argument. (Compare
Thomas Nagel's "What it's like to be a bat" argument, or Frank Jackson's case of Mary.)

A Crucial Question: Do the preceding objections to analytical behaviorism also tell against a functionalist account
of metal concepts?

Topic V. Consciousness, and the Existence of Emergent, Sensuous Qualities

Important Types of Arguments in Support of the Existence of Emergent Qualities: (l) Thomas Nagel's "What
It's Like to Be a Bat" Argument; (2) The Continuity Objection, and the Line-Drawing Problem; (3) Frank Jackson's
"What Mary Doesn't Know" Argument; (4) The Logical/Metaphysical/Nomological Possibility of an Inverted
Spectrum; (5) David Chalmers’ Argument: The Logical/Metaphysical Possibility of Zombies; (6) The “Unconscious
Perceivers” Argument; (7) The “Understanding Sensation Terms” Argument.

Armstrong's Early Arguments against the Existence of Emergent Qualities:

(1) Armstrong's indeterminacy objection; (5) Armstrong’s intransitivity objection.

Thomas Nagel's Arguments: (1) The relocation used in the case of "phenomenal" physical properties is no longer
available in the case of qualia; (2) Qualia are known by introspection, while properties of brain states are not known
by introspection; (3) The "what it's like to be a bat" argument.

Paul Churchland's Responses to Nagel's Three Arguments: (1) Argument 1: The relocation move is incorrect in
the case of the "phenomenal" properties of physical objects; (2) Argument 2 is unsound, since it mistakenly
assumes that a certain context is extensional; (3) Argument 3 can be answered in the same way as Frank Jackson's
argument, which is essentially the same.

Responses to Thomas Nagel's Third Argument, and to Frank Jackson's Argument: (1) What Mary acquires
when he leaves the room is not propositional knowledge; (2) David Lewis and Laurence Nemirow: Mary acquires
the ability to make certain sensory discriminations in a direct fashion, using only her body; (3) Paul Churchland:
Mary acquires a representation of sensory variables in some prelinguistic or sublinguistic medium of representation.

Comments on the Lewis/Nemirow and Churchland Responses: (1) The difference between the Lewis/Nemirow
response and the Churchland is that the former focuses upon an ability, and the latter on the state underlying that
ability; (2) Both responses are open to the same objection: Very different states can be a prelinguistic
representation of a given property of physical objects, and those representing states might involve either (a) different
qualia, or (b) no qualia at all. (3) This shows, however, that the Nagel/Thomas argument really presupposes either
the inverted spectrum argument, or the absent qualia argument.

Armstrong's Later Anti-Qualia Arguments: (1) Minds as making up only a very small part of the universe; (2)
The peculiar nature of the laws that must be postulated; (3) The need for a large number of extra laws; (4) The
problem of the relation between mind and body: Should one opt for epiphenomenalism, or for interactionism, or for
a pre-established harmony? All are deeply problematic: (a) The pre-established harmony view would only work if
the mental were a self-contained realm, which it is not; (b) Epiphenomenalism is 'paradoxical'; (c) Interactionism
entails, first, that physics is an incomplete account even of the inanimate world.

Topic VI. Intentionality and the Mind

Intensional Language and Intentional States: Intensional contexts versus extensional contexts; the interchange of
co-referential terms within extensional contexts as preserving truth-values; existential quantification, or "quantifying
in", as permissible within extensional contexts; the relation of these two features to patterns of inference.

Consciousness and the Mental: Is consciousness a mark of the mental? Is it a sufficient condition of the mental?
Is it a necessary condition of the mental?

Intentionality and the Mental: Is intentionality a mark of the mental? Is it a sufficient condition of the mental? Is
it a necessary condition of the mental? "That" clauses and two types of mental states.

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Language, and the Question of the Source of Intentionality: Is the intentionality of language more basic than the
intentionality of the mental, or vice versa? Is intentionality related to causal and/or dispositional properties? The
argument from purely physical systems - e.g., the case of the heat-seeking missile.

Topic VII. Is Change Possible?

Important Arguments Against the Possibility of Change: (1) Parmenides argument concerning being and non-
being; (2) Zeno’s four arguments:
(a) Achilles and the Tortoise; (b) The Dichotomy; (c) The Arrow; (d) The Stadium; (3) Benardete's "Serrated
Continuum" versions of Zeno's paradox: (a) An infinite number of wall-building deities in T-shirts; (b) The infinite
sequence of deafening sounds; (c) The infinite pile of thinner and thinner slabs; (d) The book with thinner and
thinner pages; (4) McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time.

Some Relevant Ideas: (1) With regard to Parmenides' argument: Does change require negative properties? (2)
With regard to Zeno's arguments:
(a) Infinite series that have finite sums; (b) An action that has an infinite number of parts need not involve an
infinite number of sub-actions, since one can intentionally will some outcome without separately willing each part of
that outcome; (c) If space or time is infinitely divisible, there will be no next location, or next moment; (d) Infinite
collections of things versus infinitely divisible things (Aristotle and actual infinities versus potential infinities);
(e) Russell's analysis of motion as simply being in different locations at different times; (f) Fallacies involving
switching the order of quantifiers.
(3) With regard to Benardete's paradoxes: (a) Causally sufficient conditions versus conditions that are actually
efficacious; (b) Causally sufficient conditions that are never actual.

Topic VIII. Time: Realist Versus Reductionist Views

Distinctions and Concepts: (1) The concept of space; (2) The idea of empty space, or space-time; (3) Realist
views of space: (a) Empty space is possible; (b) Facts about space are not logically supervenient upon spatial
relations between things or events; (4) Reductionist views of space: (a) Space cannot exist unless there are spatially
related things or events; (b) Facts about space are not logically supervenient upon spatial relations between things
or events. (Similarly: realist versus reductionist views of (a) time and (b) space-time.

Philosophical Arguments against Realist Views of Space: (1) General arguments against anything unobservable;
(2) Something is real only if it is causally connected to other things; (3) Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of
Indiscernibles.

A Philosophical Argument for Realist Views of Space: Space provides truth-makers for statements about
empirical possibilities concerning unoccupied locations in space.

Scientific Arguments for Realist Views of Space and Time: (1) Newton's arguments for absolute space: (a)
Force as producing a change in absolute motion, but not necessarily in relative motion; (b) Rotational motion
relative to absolute space shows itself by its effects (The bucket argument, and the two globes argument. (2)
Newton’s argument for absolute time: Time enters into the laws of nature, and cannot be merely "sensible" time.
(3) Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity allows for the possibility of empty space-time. (4) The idea of worlds
with only laws of pure succession, and the fact that our world is not such a world: temporal magnitudes as the best
explanation of correlations between different causal processes, both of the same type, and different types.

The Issue of the Relation between Time and Change: (1) Aristotle's view that change is the measure of time, and
thus that if there is no time, there is no change; (2) The bearing of Newton's views upon Aristotle thesis: (a) The
problem of getting a sensible measure of time that involves a constant interval; (b) The need to provide an
explanation of correlations between causal processes: Newton's postulation of a temporal measure intrinsic to space
itself; (3) Worlds where there is time, but no measure of time, because there are no quantitative temporal relations;
(4) Sydney Shoemaker's argument for the possibility of time without any change: (a) Local freezes versus total
freezes; (b) Objections to local freezes versus objections to total freezes; (c) A verificationist objection? (d)
Alternative hypotheses? (e) The causation objection: temporally extended causes, or action at a temporal distance?

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Topic IX. Time: Static Versus Dynamic Views

Some Fundamental Questions concerning the Nature of Time: (1) Does time have a direction? (2) If so, is it a
feature of time itself, or is it definable in terms of the patterns that are found in time - such as increasing entropy, or
expansion of the universe? (3) Are there fundamental differences between the past, the present, and the future? (a)
Do past, present, and future differ with regard to being real? (b) Are there special, tensed properties of pastness,
presentness, and futurity? (c) Or do terms like 'past', 'present', and 'future' simply serve to locate events temporally
relative to the speaker in question, just as terms such as 'here' and 'there' simply locate things spatially relative to the
speaker?

Dynamic versus Static Views of the Nature of Time: (1) The static conception of change: change is simply the
possession of different properties by a thing at different times; (2) The dynamic conception of change: what facts
there are, and thus what propositions are true or false, changes from one time to another; (3) The ontological
concepts of being actual, and of being actual as of a particular time; (4) The corresponding semantical concepts of
being true simpliciter, and of being true at a time.

Tensed Temporal Concepts versus Tenseless Temporal Concepts: (1) Tensed concepts are ones that locate
events relative to the present. Examples: past, present, future, five minutes in the past. (2) Tenseless temporal
concepts are ones that pick out a temporal relation between events that does not involve any reference to the present.
Examples: earlier than, simultaneous with, three hours later than, two minutes apart.

The Issue of Analyzability: (1) Can tenseless temporal concepts be analyzed in terms of tensed ones? (2) Can
tensed concepts be analyzed in terms of tenseless temporal concepts?

Objections to Attempts to Analyze Tenseless Temporal Concepts in Tensed Terms: (1) The concept of the
future is needed, and yet it cannot be taken as analytically basic; (2) One also needs relational tensed concepts, such
as that of being past at a time, and these appear to involve the earlier than relation.

Can Tensed Concepts be Analyzed in terms of Tenseless Temporal Concepts?

(1) Analyses that provide a translation versus analyses that provide truth conditions; (2) Translational analyses are
unsound; (3) Analyses that involve indexicals: Analyses that involve only static world concepts - such as those of
being earlier than and of being simultaneous with, versus those that involve dynamic world concepts - such as that
of truth at a time.

Which are More Basic: Tenseless Quantifiers or Tensed Quantifiers? (1) The future tensed existential
quantifier, 'there will be', cannot be taken as basic; (2) One needs quantifiers that range over possible non-temporal
entities, such as numbers and propositions.

Arguments in support of a Dynamic View of Time: (1) The appeal to the phenomenological of our experience of
time: Can one be directly aware of the fact that the world is a dynamic one? (2) The linguistic argument: tensed
sentences cannot be analyzed in terms of tenseless sentences; (3) Steven Cahn's argument that if the world were
static, logical fatalism would be true; (4) The controllability argument: how the future is depends upon what one
does now, whereas how the past is does not; (5) The direction of time argument: If the world is static, one cannot
give an adequate account of the direction of time; (6) The argument from causation: reductionist approaches to
causation are unsound, and the correct realist account is such that causation can only exist in a dynamic world.
(Comment: I think there are satisfactory answers to the first five arguments.)

Arguments in support of a Static View of Time: (1) The argument from simplicity: a static world is simpler than
a dynamic world; (2) No satisfactory explanation can be given of the idea of a dynamic world; (3) McTaggart's
argument: the existence of tensed facts would give rise to a contradiction;
(4) Instantaneous events cannot possess different tensed properties at different times; (5) Mellor's argument: the
truth-values of tensed sentences are completely fixed by tenseless facts; (6) The "how fast does time flow?"
objection; (7) A dynamic view of time can be ruled out on scientific grounds, since a dynamic world involves
absolute simultaneity, and the latter is rendered implausible by Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.

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Arguments Based upon the Special Theory of Relativity (STR): (1) The modest argument: STR does not
postulate any relations of absolute simultaneity; (2) Putnam's claim: STR entails that all events - past, present, and
future - are equally real; (3) Stein's response to Putnam's argument;
(4) Causal relations between parts of spacetime, realistically conceived, and a defense of absolute simultaneity: the
simplest hypothesis is that the causal relations between parts of space-time are non-branching ones.

McTaggart's Argument for the Unreality of Time: (1) The A-series versus the B-series. (2) McTaggart's support
for the claim that the B-series cannot involve real change: spatial parts versus temporal parts; (3) The A-series gives
rise to a contradiction; (4) If tenseless sentences are not analyzable in tensed terms, there is a simple answer to
McTaggart's argument, since one can specify, in tenseless terms, using dates, when events have the various tensed
properties. No contradiction then even threatens to arise.

Topic X. A Causal Theory of the Direction of Time

Some Alternatives with regard to a Causal Theory: (1) A causal theory of time, or of spacetime? (2) An account
in terms of actual causal connections, or in terms of causal connectibility? (3) A causal theory of the direction of
time, or of all temporal relations?

A Prerequisite of any Causal Theory: An account of the direction of causation that does not involve any temporal
notions.

Elements of a Possible Causal Theory: (1) A definition of simultaneity in terms of spatial relations; (2) Causal
priority as a sufficient condition of temporal priority; (3) A definition of temporal priority in terms of causal priority
plus simultaneity; (4) Causal relations as holding between spacetime points.

Objections to Causal Theories of Time: (1) Causal priority presupposes temporal priority; (2) Accounts
involving causal connectibility are implicitly circular; (3) Backward causation is logically possible; (4) Empty
spatiotemporal regions are logically possible; (5) Events that are not causally connected to other events are logically
possible; (6) Spacetime itself could be totally empty.

Topic XI. Laws of Nature: Realist Versus Reductionist Views

Realist versus Reductionist Views of Laws of Nature: (1) Reductionism: what laws of nature there are is totally
fixed by the complete history of the world; (2) Realism: laws of nature are not logically supervenient upon the
history of the world. There could be two worlds with precisely the same history, but with different laws. (3)
Reductionism and regularities: Non-probabilistic laws are either just cosmic regularities, or cosmic regularities that
satisfy certain further constraints.

Arguments for a Reductionist View of Laws of Nature: (1) The appeal to ontological simplicity; (2) Arguments
against theoretical entities: (a) the problem of meaning; (b) the problem of confirmation; (3) The inference
problem: How do laws, realistically conceived, entail the corresponding regularities? (Bas van Fraassen and David
Lewis)

Arguments for a Realist View of Laws of Nature: (1) The problem of distinguishing between laws and cosmic,
accidental regularities; (2) The logical possibilities of basic, uninstantiated laws; (3) The improbability of mere
cosmic regularities; (4) The problem of giving a reductionist account of probabilistic laws.

Topic XII. Causation: Realist Versus Reductionist Views

Realist Versus Reductionist Views of Causation: (1) Strong reductionism: Causal relations between events are
logically supervenient upon the non-causal properties of events, and the non-causal relations between them;
(2) Weak reductionism: Causal relations between events are logically supervenient upon causal laws plus the non-
causal properties of events, and the non-causal relations between them.

Arguments for a Realist View of Causation: (1) The problem of giving an account of the direction of causation:
(a) Simple worlds that are time symmetric as regards the events they contain; (b) 'Temporally inverted' worlds. (2)

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Underdetermination objections: (a) The problem posed by indeterministic laws; (b) The possibility of uncaused
events; (c) Uncaused events plus probabilistic laws; (d) The possibility of exact replicas.

Topic XIII. Freedom of the Will: Logical Fatalism

Logical Fatalism: it follows from logical principles alone that whatever happens could not have not happened.

Important Distinctions: (1) The law of bivalence (For any proposition p, either p is true or p is false.) versus the
law of excluded middle (For any proposition p, either p or ~p); (2) Truth versus truth at a time.

Two Distinct Arguments in Aristotle's On Interpretation: (1) An argument that involves the law of bivalence;
(2) An argument that involves, instead, only the law of excluded middle.

Implications of Aristotle's Solution with Respect to Logic: (1) There is a third truth-value- indeterminateness;
(2) Propositions can change their truth-values; (3) Propositions can also change modally from not being inevitable to
being inevitable.

Implications of Aristotle's Solution with Respect to Time: (1) Time is real; (2) A static view of time cannot be
correct: one must adopt a dynamic view.

Criticisms of Cahn's Discussion: (1) The analytic law of excluded middle entails what Cahn refers to as the
synthetic law of excluded middle i.e., the law of bivalence; (2) The second argument for logical fatalism set out
above does not involve even the analytic law of excluded; (3) Cahn is mistaken in thinking that acceptance of a
static view of the world makes the argument for logical fatalism unanswerable; (4) Cahn's discussion is faulty
because he fails to distinguish between the classical notion of truth simpliciter and the temporally-indexed notion of
truth at a time.

A Sound Version of Aristotle's Own Response to the Argument: (1) One must distinguish between truth
simpliciter and truth at a time; (2) The principle of bivalence must be accepted in the case of truth, but rejected in
the case of truth at a time; (3) If a proposition about the future is true at an earlier time, that does generate a fatalistic
conclusion; (4) But a proposition's being true simpliciter does not generate any fatalistic conclusion,

An Important Objection to Aristotle's Response to the Argument for Logical Fatalism: (1) If one admits a
third truth-value in the case of truth at a time, it turns out that disjunction is not a truth functional connective; (2) It
is, however, possible to answer this objection; (3) The key ideas needed are, first, a distinction between a
proposition's being true because there is a state of affairs in the world that makes it true, and a proposition's being
true because of its logical form, and secondly, that the idea that what are normally referred to as the truth functional
connectives can be defined in terms of tables whose entries record factual truth status, where a proposition is
factually true if and only if there is some state of affairs external to it that makes it true.

Topic XIV. Freedom of the Will: Theological Fatalism

A Crucial Distinction: God conceived of as an entity outside of time versus God conceived of as an entity in time.

Objections to the Idea that God is Outside of Time? (1) Can something outside of time be causally related to
things in time? (2) Can there be causal relations without temporal relations?

The Idea of God in Time and the Accidental Necessity Versions of the Foreknowledge Dilemma: The basic
ideas: (1) The Aristotelian idea of the (accidental) necessity of the past; (2) God's temporally earlier belief states as
necessary; (3) Whatever is entailed by what is accidentally necessary is itself accidentally necessary.

A Version of the Argument Based upon the Assumption that God Is Infallible: (1) God's belief at t1 that I will
do S at t3 is accidentally necessary at t2; (2) If A is accidentally necessary at t and A strictly implies B, then B is
accidentally necessary* at t; (3) God's belief at t1 strictly implies my act at t3; (4) So my act at t3 is accidentally
necessary* at t2; (5) If my act at t3 is accidentally necessary* at t2, I cannot do otherwise than bring about that act

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at t3; (6) If when I bring about an act I cannot do otherwise, I do not bring it about freely; (7) Therefore, I do not
bring about my act at t3 freely.

Linda Zagzebski's Three Proposed Solutions: (1) The individuation of beliefs in the case of God; (2) Harry
Frankfurt's argument for the view that one may freely perform an action that one could not have refrained from
performing; (3) The rejection of principle of the transference of accidental necessity.

The Problem with the Second Solution: The argument can be restated so that, rather than starting out from the
premise that God's belief at t1 that I will do S at t3 is accidentally necessary at t2, it starts out from the premise that
God's belief at t1 that I will freely do S at t3 is accidentally necessary at t2. The Frankfurt idea is then irrelevant.

An Alternative Solution: (1) Statements about free future actions are not now either true or false: they are
indeterminate; (2) One can have knowledge of events only if either (a) one has knowledge of a sufficient cause, or
(b) the event itself causally gives rise to one's belief; (3) The first possibility is ruled out in the case of free actions;
(4) Backward causation is logically impossible; (5) So the second possibility is ruled out in the case of belies about
later events; (6) Therefore knowledge of free, future actions is logically impossible; (7) To be omniscient does not
involve the ability to now what it is logically impossible to know; (8) Consequently, God's omniscience is
compatible with his not having any knowledge of the actions which people will freely perform in the future; (9)
Moreover, the lack of such knowledge would not prevent God from exercising providential control over human
history, since all that is needed for that is knowledge of what a person is in the process of freely doing at a given
time.

http://spot.colorado.edu/~tooley/PA-ArgumentsValidityTruth3480.html

Philosophical Analysis
Samuel Gorovitz, Merrill Hintikka,
Donald Provence, and Ron G. Williams

Elementary Logic

2. Arguments, Validity, and Truth

Let us consider some examples to illustrate the general discussion above.

(1) All men are bipeds.

A (2) Edgar is a man.

(3) (Therefore) Edgar is a biped.

is an argument in which line A(3) is the conclusion that is indicated to follow from lines A(1) and A(2). If we know
A(1) and A(2), we can deduce that A(3) is true. Lines A(1) and A(2) are called premises; line A(3) is called the
conclusion. Here the fact that a conclusion is sometimes, but not always, marked by a word such as ëthereforeí or
ësoí is shown by enclosing the indicator in parentheses.

Consider the following three sentences:

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(1) All women are bipeds.

B (2) Helen is a woman.

(3) (Therefore) Rover is a biped.

Here, too, we have an argument, which bears some rese blance to A in form. But this time we notice
something strange. The purported conclusion, line B(3), does not follow from the premises at alL Even if B(1) and
B(2) are true, B(3) is not thereby guaranteed to be true. So B, like A, is an argument; but B, unlike A, is not a good
argument Its conclusion does not follow from its premises, and we call such arguments invalid.

I may know that no one in San Francisco is seven feet tall and that Jean Jones is a five-foot New Yorker. Still,
I can assert that if it were true that all San Franciscans are seven feet tall and that Jean Jones lives in San
Francisco, then it would be true that Jean Jones is seven feet talL My argument would look like this:

(1) All San Franciscans are seven feet talL

C (2) Jean Jones is a San Franciscan.

(3) (Therefore) Jean Jones is seven feet talL

Argument C, like argument A, is valid; that is, both arguments are such that it must be that if the premises are true,
the conclusion is true. The conclusion of a valid argument is a logical consequence of its premises, and the
premises are said to imply or to entail the conclusion. But C, unlike A, has false premises. Thus C is a
valid argument, but it is not sound. Argument C illustrates the fact that a sentence can be the conclusion of a
valid argument and still be false. For, to say that a sentence is the conclusion of a valid argument is to say only that
its truth is guaranteed ~fthe premises of the argument are true. But consider D:

(1) All men are mortaL

D (2) Socrates is a man.

(3) (Therefore) Jean Jones is seven feet tall.

Here the conclusion clearly does not follow. Argument D is invalid. Yet D(3) is the same sentence as
C(3). That sentence is both the conclusion of a valid argument and the conclusion of an invalid argument. It is
helpful in beginning the study of philosophy to speak only of arguments, not of sentences, as being valid or invalid
and to speak only of sentences as being true or false.

To illustrate further the difference between truth and validity, let us consider the following arguments:

(1) All professional tennis players are athletes. T

E (2) Billie Jean King is a professional tennis player. T V

(3) Billie Jean King is an athlete. T

(1) All Oakland Raiders are football players. T

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F (2) Ken Stabler is a football player. T I

(3) Ken Stabler is an Oakland Raider. T

(1) All athletes are professional golfers. F

G (2) Arthur Ashe is an athlete. T V

(3) Arthur Asbe is a professional golfer. F

(1) All philosophers are Greeks. F

H (2) Inge Broverman is a psychologist. T I

(3) Inge Broverman is a Greek. F

(1) All humans are whales. F

I (2) All whales are mammals. T V

(3) All humans are mammals. T

(1) All whales are humans. F

J (2) All whales are mammals. T I

(3) All humans are mammals. T

(1) All humans are dogs. F

K (2) Lassie is a human. F V

(3) Lassie is a dog. T

(1) All humans are fish. F

L (2) Lassie is a human. F I

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(3) Lassie is a dog. T

(1) All senators are Democrats. F

M (2) Gerald Ford is a senator. F V

(3) Gerald Ford is a Democrat. F

(1) All Federal judges are Republicans. F

N (2) Barbara Jordan is a Republican. F I

(3) Barbara Jordan is a Federal judge F

(1) All Republican senators are U.S. citizens. T

O (2) All Democratic senators are U.S. citizens. T I

(3) All Republican senators are Democratic senators. F

grounds and the third as a conclusion which is purported to follow from the premises. It is convenient to speak
of the truth value of a sentence in referring to its truth, if the sentence is true, or to its falsity, if the sentence is
false. For many of these arguments, their validity or invalidity is intuitively obvious. Since a proof of the validity
or invalidity of these arguments is beyond the scope of this book, we will capitalize on the readerís intuitions in
using these arguments to illustrate some important points about relations between an argumentís validity or
invalidity and the truth values of its premises and conclusion.

We note, for example, that E is a valid argument with true premises and a true conclusion, while F is
an invalid argument although, as in the case of E, each of its premises and its conclusion are true. We
can schematize this situation, as we have done to the right of the above arguments, indicating the truth value
of premises and conclusion (using ëTí for trueí and ëFí for ëfalseí) and the validity or invalidity of each argument
(using ëVí for ëvalidí and ëIí for ëinvalidí).

Argument G is a valid argument with one false premise, one true premise, and a false conclusion. However H,
while it is like G in having one false premise, one true premise, and a false conclusion, is unlike G in a most
important respect: H 2. Arguments, Validity, and Truth (11 is an invalid argument. The pair of arguments G and
H (as well as each of the pairs E and F, I, and J, K and L, M and N) illustrates that two arguments may be exactly
alike in respect to the truth value of their premises and their respective conclusions while differing in an all-
important respect: their validity or invalidity. This fact is not surprising if we recall that an argument is valid just in
case it is not possible for its premises to be true while its conclusion is false.

How does F fare in light of this informal account of validity? Although its conclusion is in fact true, it
is possible for the premises of F to be true and its conclusion false. Stabler could be traded to another football
team, or he might play out his option and sign with a rival club. In fact, even though the conclusion of F is true
when this page is being written, that sentence may have a different truth value when you are reading this book.

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Similarly, many other sentences in our example arguments may have different truth values as you read this book
than they had when we indicated their truth values. The truth of the premises of F does not exclude these
possibilities; the truth of the premises of F does not guarantee the truth of its conclusion. It is beyond the scope of
this book to provide the reader with skills needed to demonstrate that the truth of the premises of E does guarantee
the truth of its conclusion. Nonetheless, the possibility that Billie Jean King is not an athlete is excluded by the
truth of the premises of E.

Arguments E, G, I, K, and M are all valid. Yet only E, I, and K have true conclusions. So we see that the
conclusion of a valid argument may be a false sentence. A valid argument guarantees the preservation of truth in
that its conclusion is true if all its premises are true. This requirement on a valid argument says nothing about the
truth value of the conclusion of a valid argument with one or more false premises. The conclusion of such an
argument may be true (consider I and K); the conclusion of such an argument may be false (consider G and M).
While we cannot know that the conclusion of a valid argument is true on the basis of knowing that the argument is
valid, we do know that the conclusion of a valid argument would be true if all its premises were true. Consider G;
if it were true that all athletes are professional golfers and that Arthur Ashe is an athlete, then it would be true that
Arthur Ashe is a professional golfer.

If the premises of G were true, it would be a sound argument, a valid argument all of whose premises are true.
The truth value of the sentences that constitute the premises and conclusion of an argument may differ from one
time to another. Thus the soundness of an argument may differ at different times. But the validity of an argument,
the relation between its premises and its conclusion which we have expressed informally as guaranteeing the
preservation of truth, cannot change. Of course, our ability to recognize or to demonstrate its validity may change.
At the time this book is written, E is a sound argument. But if, for instance, Billie Jean King were no longer a
professional tennis player, E would no longer be a sound argument, although its conclusion might remain true. But
it would remain a valid argument, no less so if its conclusion were false.

An invalid argument does not guarantee the preservation of truth. The above discussion of F indicates that
an argument can fail to guarantee that if its premises are true so also is its conclusion, even if its premises
and conclusion are in fact true. But neither does an invalid argument guarantee that falsity in the premises will
be preserved in the conclusion. In other words, an invalid argument may have one or more false premises and a
true conclusion (consider J and L). Since a valid argument does not guarantee the preservation of falsity (consider 1
and K), we can say that no argument guarantees that if one or more of its premises is false then so is its conclusion.

Of course an invalid argument with one or more false premises may have a false conclusion, as do
arguments H and N. And an invalid argument, all of whose premises are true, may have a true conclusion
(consider F) or a false conclusion (consider O)~ In short we may say that no invalid argument guarantees either
that its conclusion is true or that it is false. From the pair of arguments I and J, as well as K and 4 we see that a
sentence that is the conclusion of an invalid argument may be the conclusion of a valid argument also. If a sentence
is the conclusion of an invalid argument, that argument does not guarantee its truth; it remains an open question
whether there is a valid or a sound argument of which it is the conclusion.

Argument 0 has true premises and a false conclusion; so 0 is an obviously invalid argument. Among
the invalid arguments above, 0 is the only one whose invalidity is obvious merely from the assertion of section 1
that an argument is valid just in case it is not possible for all its premises to be true while its conclusion is
false. Argument 0 alone presents us with an actual instance of that possibility which is excluded for a valid
argument. It is for this reason that no argument is paired with 0 ëas each other invalid argument is grouped with
a valid argument. For there can be no valid argument whose premises are true and whose conclusion is false.

Of course not all invalid arguments display their invalidity in the truth values of their premises
and conclusion; not all invalid arguments have premises that are in fact true and a conclusion that is in fact
false. Argument F, for instance, has a true conclusion. To argue that it is invalid, we attempted to describe
situations in which its premises would be true but its conclusion would be false. We did not have to argue that any
such situation actually is the case. For an argument is invalid if it is possible that its premises are true while its
conclusion is false. Argument H, for example, has a false premise; so its invalidity is not obvious from the truth
values of its premises and conclusion alone. Again we attempt to describe a situation in which its premises would

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be true and argue that H is invalid by showing that in such a situation its conclusion might be false. Suppose it were
true that all philosophers are Greeks and that Inge Broverman is a psychologist; it would still be possible that she is
not Greek. Roughly speaking, even if the premises of H were true, they would offer no support, and certainly
no guarantee, of the truth of the conclusion of H.

In arguing that F and H are invalid, we have relied on the informal account that an argument is valid if
but only if it is not possible for its premises all to be true and its conclusion to be false. This technique of
arguing that an argument is invalid is not singly adequate. Consider the following argument:

(1) All squares are polygons. T

P (2) All rectangles are polygons TI

(3) All squares are rectangles T

An attempt to describe a situation in which the conclusion of P would be false while its premises are true will
faiL But it will fail not because the truth of the premises of P guarantees the truth of its conclusion. The truth of
the conclusion of P is guaranteed by information which is no part of the argument. While this information
from geometry supports the truth of the conclusion of P, it in no way strengthens the support which argument
P provides for its conclusion. Indeed the conclusion of P could be the conclusion of a sound argument, but P is not
that argument; for P is not a valid argument and so cannot be a sound argument. To argue that P is invalid, we
might produce another argument which has the same logical form as P and has true premises and a false
conclusion.

The concept of logical form is a complex one which has been the subject of considerable work
among philosophers, implicitly at least since Leibniz and explicitly since Frege. Only a brief discussion of
logical form can be undertaken in this book (see Chapter III, section 1), but the study of logic will provide the
student with tools enabling increasingly detailed analysis of form. Argument 0 has the same logical form as
P. This fact, for which the reader will find evidence in Chapter III, section 1, conjoined with the fact that 0 has true
premises and a false conclusion, provides an excellent argument that P is invalid. For an argument is valid just in
case no argument with the same form has all true premises and a false conclusion.

We have said that the goal of logic is to preserve truth and that, pursuant to this goal, the most basic mark
of quality in an argument is validity. The reader may wonder why, then, in this section we have
discussed techniques which may be used to provide evidence that an argument is invalid but not that an argument is
valid. Recalling the informal accounts of validity that have been given will provide a partial answer. An argument
is valid just in case it is not possible that its premises are all true while its conclusion is false. To capitalize on this
account in an effort to establish that an argument is valid, we would have to survey all possibilities to determine
that none of them provides a situation in which all the premises of the argument are true while its conclusion is
false. Such a survey itself is not possible in any finite period of time! But a single situation in which the premises
are all true and the conclusion false obviously is sufficient to show that such a situation is possible and that the
argument cannot be valid. An argument is valid if and only if no argument with the same form has all true premises
and a false conclusion. Analogously, to capitalize on this account in order to establish that an argument is valid, we
would have to survey all arguments (actual and possible?) which have the same form. Such a survey is equally
beyond what is possible for finite humans.

Because of these and other difficulties in establishing the validity of an argument considered in isolation
rather than as exemplil~ing the logical form on which its validity or invalidity depends, the tools of formal
logic are extremely valuable. Within the study of logic, special symbolism or notation is developed which enables
us to study the forms of arguments and to isolate many of the formal components of sentences, on which
components the validity of arguments depends. Precise rules can be stated in terms of the forms of sentences, and
the deductive methods available enable us to evaluate arguments to the extent that their form can be expressed in
the symbolic notation available to us. In addition to the informal accounts of validity already mentioned, we
can say that an argument is valid if and only if its conclusion is a logical consequence of its premises. The methods

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of formal logic put us in a position better to understand the content of this and other informal accounts of
validity. Presentation and discussion of these methods are beyond the scope of this book. However, we shall
attempt, in the remaining section of this chapter and in Chapter II, to introduce the reader to some of the most basic
formal components of arguments.

Many philosophers claim that the existing tools of formal logic are inadequate to express, and therefore to
evaluate, the forms of many interesting arguments. If so, this claim provides an incentive for further developments
in logic, but it is no criticism of the value of the existing tools of logic in evaluating the arguments whose logical
forms these tools enable us to reveal

Not all arguments are of the three-line form we have been considering. And not all arguments which are
of that form appear at first glance to be so. For example:

(1) Caesar is emperor.

Q (2) (Therefore) Someone is emperor.

is a simple argument that is sound but has a different form. And:

(1) Jones is a man.

R (2) (Therefore) Jones is mortal.

is an argument that is valid only on the strength of the suppressed (or unexpressed) premise that all men are mortal.
Such an argument is clearly valid, and of the familiar three-line form, if we add the missing premise. If we do not,
we can consider the argument as incomplete rather than invalid

And of course not all arguments are either as simple in their structure or as obvious in their validity or
invalidity as those we have considered. In fact few arguments are, whether they are found in the writings of a
famous philosopher, in one’s own writings, in editorials, in political debates, or in advertisements. We
have attempted to choose as examples arguments about which the reader will have accurate intuitions concerning
their validity or invalidity. Since intuitions are not infallible guides to validity, especially as arguments increase
in their complexity, we have sought to strengthen these intuitions and to provide the reader with ways to
support his or her evaluation of arguments. In the discussion of validity and its relations to the actual and possible
truth value of premises and conclusions, we hope the reader will find an increased understanding of the concept
of validity which will sharpen intuitions involved in assessing arguments. And we have attempted to suggest ways
of structuring these intuitions so that they may be extended and applied constructively to less explicitly structured
and more complex arguments.

http://spot.colorado.edu/~tooley/WritingEssays.html

The following can be employed as standards to evaluate articles/books as well as for checking
the methods or tools, especially arguments employed in the doing of philosophy.

Introduction Checklist: Key Questions

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1. Is my introduction concise?
2. Does it contain a clear statement of my main thesis?
3. Does it indicate very briefly my main line of argument?
4. Does it explain the overall structure of my essay?

IV. An Overall Structure for Essays Focusing Upon an Argument

Philosophy essays tend to come in two main forms. First, there are essays where one is
setting out and evaluating an argument, and trying to show either that the argument is unsound,
or that the argument can be sustained. Secondly, there are essays where the focus is instead upon
some thesis, which one is either trying to establish, or trying to refute. In the case of essays of
the former sort, if you are criticizing an argument, your discussion should involve at least the
following elements:

(1) A careful exposition of the argument that you are criticizing.

(2) A detailed statement of your objection to the argument, and one which makes it clear exactly
what step in the argument you think is unsound. (Is it one of the premises that is faulty, and if
so, which one? Or is one of the inferences invalid?)

(3) If you are claiming that an inference is invalid, you need to consider whether the argument
could be slightly revised, by adding another premise, so that the faulty inference is
eliminated. If, on the other hand, you are attacking one of the premises, you need to consider
how a defender might respond. Could he or she attack your argument against the premise? Or
might it be possible for him or her to respond by offering some strong, positive support for the
premise that you are criticizing?

If, on the other hand, that you are trying to show that some argument is sound, your
discussion will need to contain the following elements:

(1) A careful setting out of the argument that you are defending.

(2) A formulation of the most important objections to your argument - either objections to
premises, or objections to steps in the reasoning.

(3) Detailed responses to those objections.

Checklist for Overall Structure for Essays Focusing upon an Argument

1. Have I formulated the relevant argument in a careful and explicit fashion?

2. If I am criticizing the argument, have I made it clear exactly what step in the argument my
criticism is directed against?
3. Have I set out the most important objections that might be raised to the view that I am
defending?
4. Have I offered careful and detailed responses to those objections?

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V. An Overall Structure for Essays Focusing Upon a Thesis

Suppose, instead, you are focusing upon some thesis that you wish to defend. In this case,
your essay should contain at least the following elements:

(1) A clear and precise formulation of the thesis that you are advancing.

(2) A careful setting out of your argument (or arguments) in support of that thesis.

(3) A statement of the most important objections that can be directed, either against your thesis
itself, or against your supporting argument.

(4) Detailed responses to those objections.

Similarly, if your goal is to give reasons for rejecting some thesis, your discussion will need
to contain the following elements:

(1) A clear and precise formulation of the thesis that you are attempting to refute.

(2) A careful exposition of your argument (or arguments) against that thesis.

(3) A statement of the most important counterarguments that can be offered, either in support of
the thesis that you are criticizing, or against the objections that you have offered to that thesis.

(4) Detailed responses to those criticisms.

Checklist for Overall Structure for Essays Focusing upon a Thesis

1. Have I stated the thesis clearly?

2. Have I formulated the relevant argument (or arguments) in a careful and explicit fashion?
3. Have I set out the most important objections that might be offered?
4. Have I responded in a careful and detailed way to those objections?

VI. Exposition of Arguments

Both in essays where you are focusing upon some specific philosophical argument, and in
those where you are either defending, or criticizing, some philosophical thesis, the setting out of
arguments, and the evaluation of them, are absolutely central. How well you do these things,
then, will have a very important bearing upon the strength of your discussion.

How can one formulate arguments in an effective fashion? One thing that I would strongly
recommend is that you set out any argument in a careful step-by-step fashion, so that it is clear,
both to yourself and to the reader, both what assumptions the argument involves, and what the
reasoning is. For when this is done, it is usually much clearer exactly which premises, or which
steps in the reasoning, are most in need of support, if the argument is one that you are defending,

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or which premises or inferences might most profitably be questioned and examined, if your goal
is instead to show that the argument is unsound.

When you are advancing a number of arguments, either for or against some thesis, it is very
important to avoid setting out more than one argument in a single paragraph. For this often
results in too brief an exposition of either or both of the arguments.

Finally, it is not a good idea to combine the exposition of an argument with a consideration
of possible objections to it. Set out the argument first, and when that has been done, go on to
evaluate the argument, and to consider possible objections that might be directed against it.

Checklist for your Exposition of Arguments

1. Are your arguments carefully and explicitly set out so that both all of the assumptions, and all
of the reasoning, are clear?
2. Have you, at any point, set out more than one argument in a single paragraph?
3. Are objections and responses set out in separate paragraphs?

VII. Examining Responses to your Arguments

One crucial point to note is that responses to your arguments come in two different
forms. First, there are responses that are directed against your argument itself, and which claim,
therefore, either that some of your assumptions are implausible, or that some of your reasoning is
invalid. Secondly, there are responses that are directed against the conclusion of your argument,
and which attempt to provide reasons for thinking that that conclusion is false.

Objections of both sorts are important. For if you confine your discussion to a
consideration of objections to your thesis, and you fail to consider objections to your argument,
then you haven't shown that you have made out a satisfactory positive case in support of your
thesis.

How do you arrive at interesting objections to your own arguments? The crucial thing is to
look carefully at the assumptions that you have made, and to ask yourself which of those are
philosophically controversial. Then you can turn to the relevant literature to see what sorts of
argument are offered against the assumption in question by philosophers who reject it.

Checklist for Responses to your Argument

1. Have I explicitly indicated to the reader which of the assumptions in my argument are
philosophically controversial, and why?
2. Have I then offered reasons for thinking that those assumptions are nevertheless plausible?
3. Have I considered, and responded to, counterarguments directed against the conclusion of my
argument?

VIII. Logical and Perspicuous Structure

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A crucial factor that makes for a good essay is the presence of a logical and perspicuous
structure. So it is important to ask how one can both organize one's discussion in a logical
fashion, and make that organization perspicuous to the reader.

Some suggestions concerning logical organization of essays of different types were set out
above - in sections IV and V. But how can you also make the structure of your essay
perspicuous? The main ways are, first, by beginning with an introductory paragraph of the sort
described above; secondly, by dividing your essay up into relevant sections (and possibly also
subsections); and thirdly, by using informative headings to mark off those sections (and
subsections). The reader will then be able to see at a glance how you have structured your
discussion.

The main reason why a perspicuous structure is desirable is not, however, to make life
easier for readers. It is rather that when the structure of your essay is clear at a glance, it is much
easier for you to notice, when you are writing and revising your essay, that there are gaps in your
discussion, where additional material is needed, or that your essay as a whole is not organized in
the most logical and effective fashion.

Checklist for Logical and Perspicuous Structure

1. Is my essay organized into sections in a logical fashion?

2. Are the sections divided into appropriate subsections?
3. Have I made the overall structure of my essay clear by using informative headings for
sections and subsections?

IX. Overall Clarity and Conciseness

Unit 8: Knowledge

Chris Heathwood

Office: Hellems 192

heathwood@colorado.edu

What We’ll Cover in Unit 8

I. The Nature of Knowledge

A. What is a theory of knowledge?

B. Plato on Knowledge

1. Theaetetus’ Theory of Knowledge

2. Socrates’ Refutation of Theaetetus

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3. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge

C. Gettier’s Refutation of Plato

II. Hume’s Problem of Induction

The Three Fundamental

Questions of Philosophy

1. What is there?

2. What should I do?

3. How can I know?

(Metaphysics)

(Ethics)

(Epistemology)

Some Questions in

Epistemology

1. What is knowledge?

2. What is epistemic justification?

3. What are the fundamental sources of

knowledge?

4. What are the limits of human

knowledge?

5. What is the status of skepticism?

The Nature of Knowledge

Our First Question:

What Is Knowledge?

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• Putting the question this way makes the

question sound really hard. Here are two

other ways to put it:

– “What is it to know something?”

– “Under what conditions is it true that a person

qualifies as knowing that something is the

case?”

• An answer to this question will be a

theory of knowledge.

What is a theory of

knowledge?

A theory of knowledge is a statement of

the conditions under which a person

knows that something is the case.

It is a statement of this form:

S knows that p if and only if

____S____p____ .

Theories are knowledge

are supposed to reveal the

nature of knowledge.

Further Clarification of the

Question ‘What is Knowledge?’

Three Ways the Word ‘Knows’ Is Used:

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• “Bob knows how to ride a bicycle.”

• “Bob knows the president of the U.S.”

The theories of knowledge we’re looking at are

about the third kind of knowledge – called

knowledge that, or propositional knowledge.

How Do We Go About

Constructing (and Evaluating)

a Theory of Knowledge?

Analogy: Bachelorhood.

What is bachelorhood?

What is it to be a bachelor?

What are the conditions under which a person

qualifies as a bachelor?

What a “theory of bachelorhood” looks like:

x is a bachelor if and only if _____x_____.

The Socratic Method, or the

Method of Counterexamples

• A generalization is proposed

• We try to come up with a “counterexample”

to it – i.e., a concrete example that

“counters”, or shows false, the generalization

just proposed

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• If we do, we have refuted the generalization

(but we might use the counterexample to

help us improve on the generalization just

refuted)

• If we can’t, perhaps the generalization is

true.

What We’ll Cover in Unit 3

I. The Nature of Knowledge

A. What is a theory of knowledge?

B. Plato on Knowledge

1. Theaetetus’ Theory of Knowledge

2. Socrates’ Refutation of Theaetetus

3. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge

C. Gettier’s Refutation of Plato

II. Hume’s Problem of Induction

Plato on Knowledge

Plato (428-347 BC)

• The best known ancient Greek

philosopher

• Student of Socrates; teacher of Aristotle

• Wrote about 23 philosophical dialogues

• Famous doctrine: the Theory of the

294
295

Forms

• Western philosophy “consists of a

series of footnotes to Plato.”

- A. N. Whitehead (1929)

excerpt from the

Theaetetus

by

Plato

transla ted by F.M. Cornford

Socrate s: Well , that is prec isely wh at I am puz zled abou t. I cann ot

ma ke out to my own satisfact ion what know ledge is. Can

we answer t hat question . What do you thin k?

Socrates: But the question you were asked, Theaetetus, was not, what

are the objects of knowledge, nor yet now many sorts of

knowledge there are. We did not want to count them, but to

find out what the thing itself – knowledge – is. Is there

nothing to that?

Theaetetus: No, you are quite right. …

Socrates: Then tell me, what definition can we give with the least risk

of contradicting ourselves?

295
296

Theaetetus: The one we tried before, Socrates. I have nothing else to

suggest.

Socrates: What was that?

Theaetetus: That true belief is knowledge. Surely there can at least be

no mistake in believing what is true and the consequences

are always satisfactory.

Theaetetus’ Theory of

Knowledge

The True Belief Theory:

S knows that p if and only if

(i) S believes that p; and

(ii) p is true.

Socrates’ Argument Against

the True Belief Theory

Soc: You will find a whole profession to prove that true belief is not knowledge.

The profession of those paragons of intellect known as orators and

lawyers. There you have men who use their skill to produce conviction,

not by instruction, but by making people believe whatever they want

them to believe. You can hardly imagine teachers so clever as to be

able, in the short time allowed by the clock, to instruct their hearers

thoroughly in the true facts of a case of robbery or other violence which

those hearers had not witnessed. …

296
297

… when a jury is rightly convinced of facts which can be known only by

an eyewitness, then, judging by hearsay and accepting a true belief,

they are judging without knowledge, although, if they find the right

verdict, their conviction is correct? …

But if true belief and knowledge were the same thing, the best of

jurymen could never have a correct belief without knowledge. It now

appears that they must be different things.

Socrates’ Argument Against

The True Belief Theory

The Argument

1. If the True Belief Theory is true, then the

jury knows that I committed the crime.

2. But they don’t know I committed the

crime.

3. Therefore, the True Belief Theory is not

true.

Further Counterexamples to the True

Belief Theory of Knowledge:

a. My belief that our football team will

win their next game.

b. Groundhog’s Day example.

Each case shows that true belief is not

sufficient for knowledge.

297
298

The Lesson:

a belief that is true

just because of luck does not

qualify as knowledge.

Plato’s Theory of Knowledge

Socrates: So when a man gets a hold of the true notion

of something without an account, his mind

does think truly of it, but he does not know

it, for if one cannot give and receive an

account of a thing, one has no knowledge of

that thing. But when he also has got hold of

an account, all this becomes possible to him

and he is fully equipped with knowledge. …

a true notion with the addition of an account

is knowledge?

Plato’s Theory of Knowledge

The JTB Theory

S knows that p if and only if

(i) S believes that p;

(ii) p is true; and

(iii) S is justified in believing that p.

Comments About the JTB

Theory

298
299

a. How it avoids the counterexamples to the

True Belief Theory

b. Theory of Justification still needed.

c. Some possible ways to be justified in

believing something:

i. perception iv. testimony

ii. introspection v. induction

iii. memory vi. deduction

d. Theory accepted for thousands of years.

e. Theory no longer accepted today.

What We’ll Cover in Unit 3

I. The Nature of Knowledge

A. What is a theory of knowledge?

B. Plato on Knowledge

1. Theaetetus’ Theory of Knowledge

2. Socrates’ Refutation of Theaetetus

3. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge

C. Gettier’s Refutation of Plato

II. The Problem of Induction

Gettier’s Refutation of Plato

Edmund Gettier (1927- )

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300

• Not the best known contemporary American

philosopher, but pretty well know.

• Student of his teachers at Cornell; teacher of

me at UMass.

• Wrote just one 3-page paper.

• Famous doctrine: Justified true belief ain’t

knowledge.

• A. N. Whitehead (1929) probably didn’t say

anything about Gettier.

• Really good at badminton.

A Gettier-style Counterexample

• STEP 1. Suppose I see your driver’s

license, an Alaska driver’s license.

This seems to justify me in believing

(1) You are from Alaska.

Note: this assumes that justification does

not entail truth.

(That is, that what justifies me in believing

something need not absolutely guarantee

that that thing is true.)

A Gettier-style Counterexample

• STEP 2. Now suppose that on the basis of

my belief that

300
301

(1) You are from Alaska

I come to believe that

(2) Someone in my class is from Alaska.

It seems that I am justified in believing (2).

This is due to the following principle:

If S is justified in believing p, and p entails q,

and S believes q on the basis of S’s belief

that p, then S is justified in believing q.

A Gettier-style Counterexample

• STEP 3. Now suppose that the driver’s

license I saw was in fact a fake ID, and that

(1) You are from Alaska

is in fact false.

(Note: I have a false justified belief in (1).)

(Note also: the JTB Theory thus far implies,

correctly, that I do not know (1).)

A Gettier-style Counterexample

• STEP 4. Finally, suppose that, just by

chance, someone else in the class really is

from Alaska.

In other words, my belief that

(2) Someone in my class is from Alaska

actually turns out to be true.

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302

It is true just by luck.

A Gettier-style Counterexample

• STEP 5. Let’s ask some questions about

this proposition:

(2) Someone in my class is from Alaska.

• FIRST QUESTION: Would you say that I

know (2)?

ANSWER: No.

• SECOND SET OF QUESTIONS:

Is (2) true? YES

Do I believe (2)? YES

Am I justified in believing (2)? YES

A Gettier-style Counterexample

• STEP 6: Thus, bringing it all together:

I have a justified true belief in (2), but I

don’t know (2).

In the form of a little argument …

A Gettier-style Argument Against JTB:

1. If the JTB Theory is true, then I know that

someone in our class is from Alaska.

2. But it’s not true that I know that someone

in our class is from Alaska.

3. Therefore, the JTB Theory is not true.

302
303

Other Gettier-style Examples

• The Hallucination

• Russell’s Clock

• The Sheep in the Field

A Way to Save the JTB Theory

• Note that what all the examples have in

common: the subject has highly reliable,

but not infallible, evidence for the

proposition believed.

• To say that e is infallible evidence for p

is to say that e entails p.

• Recall that Gettier’s argument assumed

that a person can be justified in

believing something without having

infallible evidence for it.

A Way to Save the JTB Theory

• But consider this thesis about

justification:

Infallibilism: S is justified in believing p

only if S’s evidence for p entails p.

• If Infallibilism is true, then Gettier’s

argument against JTB fails.

• But is Infallibilism true? …

303
304

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Appendix –

Dictionary of Non-Philosophy - Monoskop

https://monoskop.org/images/.../Laruelle_Francois_Dictionary_of_Non-Philosophy.p...

by F Laruelle - Cited by 11 - Related articles

Originally published as François Laruelle, Dictionnaire de la Non-Philosophie. (Paris: Editions Kime,

1998.) All translations by Taylor Adkins unless otherwise ...

[PDF]A Summary of Non-Philosophy - The Warwick Journal of Philosophy

https://plijournal.com/files/laruelle_pli_8.pdf

304
305

Pli

8 (1999), 138-148.

A Summary of Non-Philosophy

FRANÇOIS LARUELLE

The Two Problems of Non-Philosophy

1.1.1.

Non-philosophy is a discipline born from reflection upon two

problems whose solutions finally coincided: on the one hand, that of the

One’s ontological status within philosophy, which associates it, whether

explicitly or not, to Being and to the Other whilst forbidding it any

measure of radical autonomy; on the other, that of philosophy’s

theoretical status, insofar as philosophy is practise, affect, existence, but

lacking in a rigorous knowledge of itself, a field of objective phenomena

not yet subject to theoretical overview.

1.2.1.

Concerning the first point, there follows an observation and a

proposal. First the observation: the One is an object at the margins of

philosophy, an object of that transcendence which is stated in terms of the

epekeina

rather than in terms of the

meta

. Accordingly, it is as much

Other as One, as divisible as it is indivisible; an object of desire rather

than of ‘science’. It occurs to the thinking that is associated or convertible

with Being, without being thought in its essence and origin (‘How does

the One necessarily occur to man-the-philosopher?’). Philosophy

establishes itself within Being and within a certain ‘forgetting of the One’

which it ceaselessly uses in favour of Being and which it supposes as

given without further ado.

1.2.2.

Now the proposal: to finally think the One ‘itself’, as independent

of Being and the Other, as un-convertible with them, as non-determinable

305
306

by thought and language (‘foreclosed’ to thought); to think

according

to

the One rather than trying to think the One. But to think this non-relation

to thought using the traditional means of thought; this displacement

vis à

vis

philosophy with the help of philosophy; to think by means of

philosophy that which is no longer commensurate with the compass of

philosophy, that which escapes its authority and its sufficiency. These are

the terms of the new problem.

1.3.1.

Concerning the second point, there follows an observation and a

proposal. First the observation: philosophy is regulated in accordance

François Laruelle

139

with a principle higher than that of Reason: the

Principle of sufficient

philosophy

. The latter expresses philosophy’s absolute autonomy, its

essence as

self

-positing/donating/naming/deciding/grounding, etc. It

guarantees philosophy’s command of the regional disciplines and

sciences. Ultimately, it articulates the idealist pretension of philosophy as

that which is able to at least co-determine that Real which is most radical.

The counterpoise for this pretension, the price of this sufficiency, is the

impossibility for philosophy to constitute a rigorous, non-circular

thinking of itself, one which would not beg the question, that is to say, a

theory. Philosophy is self-reflection, self-consciousness; it thinks, or in

the best of cases, feels that it thinks when it thinks; this is its

cogito

306
307

Philosophy never goes beyond a widened

cogito

, an immanence limited

to self-reflection or to self-affection. It is a practice of thought, or a

feeling and an affect. Philosophy thereby manifests through this nothing

more than its own

existence

and does not demonstrate that it is the Real to

which it lays claim, nor that it knows itself as this

pretension

. Implicit in

its existence is a transcendental hallucination of the Real, and in

philosophical ‘self-knowledge’, a transcendental illusion.

1.3.2.

Now the proposal: how to go about elaborating, with the help of

philosophy and science but independently of the authority of the Principle

of sufficient philosophy, a rigorous theoretical knowledge, but one that

would prove adequate or attuned to philosophical existence, to the

philosophical manner of thinking? These are the terms of the new

problem.

The Identity of the Problem of Non-Philosophy or the Solution

2.1.1.

The principle of the solution: this is the same thing as positing the

One as the Real that is radically autonomous

vis à vis

philosophy, but a

Real thought according to a new use of the latter’s now reformed means;

the same thing as making of it the real condition or cause for a theoretical

knowledge of philosophy. The solution constitutes a new problem: how,

using the ordinary means of thought, to conceive of the One as no longer

philosophizable or convertible with Being and, at the same time, as

307
308

capable of determining an adequate theory of philosophy?

2.1.2.

Non-philosophy typically operates in the following way:

everything is processed through a duality (of problems) which does not

constitute a Two or a pair, and through an identity (of problems, and

hence of solution) which does not constitute a Unity or synthesis. This

Pli

8 (1999)

140

way is known as that of the ‘Unilateral duality’ which is just as much an

‘Identity’.

2.1.3.

The resolution of the problem requires two transformations which

form an identity of transformation. First, that of the philosophical One-

Other into a radically autonomous One-in-One, a transformation of the

One as object of philosophy into vision-in-One or into a phenomenality

capable of determining knowledge.

2.1.4.

Second, a transformation of that self-referential usage of

philosophical language which regulates the statements of philosophy, into

a new usage (one that is real and transcendental, of identity and of

unilateral duality) furnishing those statements with a double and identical

aspect: axiomatic and theorematic. The statements of the One and of its

causality as vision-in-One rather than as object or instance of philosophy,

are formed on the basis of the gradual introduction of terms and problems

of philosophical extraction, but terms and problems which now receive a

usage other than philosophical, a usage possessing a double aspect:

axiomatic on one hand, theorematic and thus transcendental on the other,

or relating to the Real and to its effects on philosophical existence.

2.1.5.

The One is not an object/entity ‘in itself’ opposed to a language ‘in-

itself’ and thereby forming a philosophical or dialectical pairing of

308
309

opposites. The vision-in-One as matrix of thought is a ‘speaking/thinking

according to

- the One’. Nor is it a relation of synthesis between the

One (the Real) and language. It is a non-relation, a ‘unilateral duality’.

2.1.6.

All the statements of non-philosophy appear as axiomatic insofar as

they constitute the Identity (in-the-last-instance) of the unilateral duality;

and as transcendental theorems insofar as each constitutes the unilateral

duality that accompanies identity. The theorems may serve as axioms on

condition of determining-in-the-last-instance other theorems; the axioms

may serve as theorems on condition of being determined-in-the-last-

instance by other axioms. Axioms and theorems do not constitute, as in

science, two distinct classes of expressions, nor, as in philosophy, a

reciprocal duality, that of propositions whose donation and demonstration

are, certain operations aside, ultimately convertible.

From the One to the Vision-in-One

3.1.1.

Immanence

. The One is immanence and is not thinkable on the

by F LARUELLE - Cited by 30 - Related articles

Pli 8 (1999), 138-148. A Summary of Non-Philosophy. FRANÇOIS LARUELLE. The Two Problems of Non-
Philosophy. 1.1.1. Non-philosophy is a discipline born ...

[PDF]The Non-Philosophy Project: Essays by François Laruelle - Centre of ...

theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/.../Laruelle_NonPhilosophy2.pd...

by F Laruelle - Cited by 7 - Related articles

Telos Press Publishing

Order online at www.telospress.com
Are the things of this world
given
to thought? Are things really
meant

309
310

to be known, to be
taken as the objective manifestations of a transcendental conditioning power? The Western
philosophical tradition, according to François Laruelle, presupposes just this transcendental
constitution of the real—a presupposition that exalts philosophy itself as the designated
recipient of the transcendental gift. Philosophy knows what things really are because things—
all
things—are given to philosophy to be known. Laruelle’s trenchant essays show how this
presupposition controls even the ostensibly radical critiques of the philosophical tradition that
have proliferated in the postmodern aftermath of Nietzsche and Heidegger. For these critiques
persist in assuming that the disruptive other is in some way given to their own discourse—
which shows itself thereby to be still philosophical. An effective critique of philosophy must be
non
-philosophical. It must, according to Laruelle, suspend the presupposition that otherness
is given to be known, that thought has a fundamentally differential structure. Non-philosophy
begins not with difference, not with subject and object, but with the positing of
the One
. From
this axiomatic starting point, non-philosophy takes as its material philosophy, rethought
according to the One. The non-philosophy project does not, like so much postmodern
philosophy, herald the end of philosophy. It takes philosophy as an occasion to raise the
question of another kind of thought—one that, instead of differentially
relating
to the world
that it presupposes, asserts that it is ultimately, in the flesh,
at One
with what it can never know.
“Of the post-1960s generation of modern French thinkers, François Laruelle is the most
difficult and arguably the most probing. He raises the question of whether there could not
be a philosophy or philosophies entirely other to ‘philosophy’ as we know it, based upon
different axiomatizations. The debate that must now ensue is whether or not some pre-modern,
theological, and non-western philosophies were not indeed already ‘non-philosophies’ and
whether a ‘non-philosophy’ must necessarily assume a materialist guise. Laruelle has moved
the theoretical conversation well beyond post-structuralism and postmodernism. He is a great
thinker, and we are all deeply in his debt.”
John Milbank, Professor of Religion, Politics, and Ethics
University of Nottingham
“François Laruelle, uniquely, has probed the question of materialism to its very depths—to a
point where monism challenges rationalism and the absoluteness of matter becomes a religious
absolute, accessible only by gnosis. After his work, the world will forever look topsy-turvy. But
maybe just this insight will help us to set it right in an altogether new and unexpected fashion.”
Catherine Pickstock, Reader in Philosophy and Theology,
Fellow and Tutor of Emmanuel College, Cambridge
“François Laruelle is not the ‘next big thing’ in philosophy. His thought does not aim to correct,
reduce, or supersede that of Derrida, or Deleuze, or Badiou. That game of European ‘master
thinkers’—with each new figure superseding the previous model—is over. What Laruelle offers
us instead is a new vision of philosophy that is neither a right nor a wrong representation of

310
311

reality, but is a material part of the real, a ‘

mixte
,’ ‘amphiboly,’ or ‘dyad’ that refracts the real. In
The Non-Philosophy Project
, we see Laruelle construct this vision in one of the most demanding
and provocative intellectual practices within contemporary theory: an absolutely immanent,
democratic, and materialist mode of thinking.”
John Mullarkey, Professor of Film and Television Studies
Kingston University, Londo

philosophical tradition, according to François Laruelle, presupposes just this ... It must, according to
Laruelle, suspend the presupposition that otherness is given ...

Resources | Speculative Heresy

https://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/resources/

[PDF]; Francois Laruelle, 'The Truth according to Hermes: Theorems on the Secret and Communication'
[PDF]; Quentin Meillassoux, “Contingence et ...

Resources
A constantly updated page of the latest online resources for speculative realism.

OTHER RESOURCES

 AAAARG.org – Speculative Realism entry

 Speculative Realism Blog Aggregator
 Speculative Realism Path Finder
 Wikipedia – Speculative Realism entry

JOURNAL ISSUES

 Collapse, Vol. I: Numerical Materialism

 Collapse, Vol. III: Unknown Deleuze
 Collapse, Vol. IV: Concept Horror
 Speculations, Vol. I

ARTICLES

 Elie Ayache, White Papers

 Alain Badiou, “Metaphysics and the Critique of Metaphysics”
 Ray Brassier, “Stellar Void or Cosmic Animal: Badiou and Deleuze”
 Ray Brassier, “Behold the Non-Rabbit: Kant, Quine, Laruelle”
 Ray Brassier, “Badiou’s Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics” [PDF]

311
312

 Ray Brassier, “Genre is Obsolete” [PDF]

 Ray Brassier, “Axiomatic Heresy: The Non-Philosophy of Francois Laruelle” [PDF]
 Gabriel Catren, (2008) “Can Classical Description of Physical Reality be Complete?”
 Gabriel Catren, (2008) “Geometric Foundations of Classical Yang-Mills Theory”
 Gabriel Catren, (2008) “On Classical and Quantum Objectivity”
 Gabriel Catren, (2011) “Quantum Ontology in the Light of Gauge Theories”
 Manuel DeLanda, “The Geology of Morals: A Neo-Materialist Interpretation”
 Jacques Derrida & Francois Laruelle, “Controversy over the Possibility of a Science of
Philosophy”
 Iain Hamilton Grant, “Burning AutoPoiOedipus”
 Iain Hamilton Grant, “Schellingianism & Postmodernism: Towards a Materialist
Naturphilosophie”
 Iain Hamilton Grant, “The ‘Eternal and Necessary Bond Between Philosophy and Physics'” [PDF]
 Iain Hamilton Grant, “The Chemistry of Darkness” [PDF]
 Iain Hamilton Grant, (2008) “Being and Slime: The Mathematics of Protoplasm in Lorenz Oken’s
‘Physio-Philosophy
 Iain Hamilton Grant, (2011) “Movements of the World”
 Graham Harman, (2007) “The Metaphysics of Objects: Latour and His Aftermath” (Draft) [PDF]
 Graham Harman, (2007) “On Vicarious Causation” [PDF]
 Graham Harman, (2008) “Intentional Objects for Non-Humans” [PDF]
 Graham Harman, (2008) “On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl”
 Graham Harman, (2009) “A New Theory of Substance”
 Graham Harman, (2010) “I am also of the Opinion that Materialism must be Destroyed”
 Graham Harman, (2010) “Time, Space, Essence, and Eidos: A New Theory of Causation”
 Katerina Kolozova, “Investigating the Non-Dichotomous Possibility of Thinking Unity for a Non-
Unitary Subject”
 Katerina Kolozova, “Territorial Apories: The Imaginary and the Real Aspects of (the) Location”
 Katerina Kolozova, “The Project of Non-Marxism: Arguing for ‘Monstrously’ Radical Concepts”
[PDF]
 Nick Land, “Meltdown”
 Francois Laruelle, “A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy”
 Francois Laruelle, “A Summary of Non-Philosophy” [PDF]
 Francois Laruelle, “Identity and Event” [PDF]
 Francois Laruelle, “The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter”
 Francois Laruelle, “What can Non-Philosophy do?” [PDF]
 Francois Laruelle, ‘The Truth according to Hermes: Theorems on the Secret and Communication‘
[PDF]
 Quentin Meillassoux, “Contingence et Absolutisation de l’Un” [PDF] [Translation]
 Quentin Meillassoux, “History and Event in the Writings of Alain Badiou”
 Quentin Meillassoux, (2008) “Spectral Dilemma”
 Quentin Meillassoux, (2008) “Time without Becoming” [PDF, courtesy of AAAARG]
 Thomas Metzinger, (2000) “The Subjectivity of Subjective Experience”
 Thomas Metzinger, “Response to ‘A Self Worth Having'”
 Thomas Metzinger, “Soul Travel for Self-less Beings”
 Reza Negarestani, (2008) “The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo“
 Reza Negarestani, (2009) “Instrumental Spectrality and Meillassoux’s Catoptric Controversies”
[PDF]
 Benjamin Noys, “Anarchy-without-Anarchism”

312
313

 Benjamin Noys, (2008) “Horror Temporis“

 Anne-Francoise Schmid, “The Hypothesis of a Non-Epistemology”
 Eugene Thacker, (2008) “Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror”
 Alberto Toscano, (2009) “Against Speculation, or, a Critique of the Critique of Critique”
 James Trafford, (2008) “The Shadow of a Puppet Dance: Metzinger, Ligotti and the Illusion of
Selfhood”
 Rainer Zimmermann, Various Papers
 Rainer Zimmermann, “Beyond the Physics of Logic” [PDF]

REVIEWS

 Scot Barnett, (2010) “Toward an Object-Oriented Rhetoric”

 Nathan Brown, (2008) “On After Finitude: A Response to Peter Hallward” [PDF]
 Simon Critchley, “Back to the Great Outdoors (Review of After Finitude)”
 Mark Fisher, (2008) “Clearing the Air”
 Mark Fisher, (2009) “Speculative Realism”
 Peter Hallward, (2008) “Order and Event: Badiou’s Logics of Worlds“ [PDF]
 Jones Irwin, (2008) “A Contemporary Platonic-Christianity? On Radical Orthodoxy” [Review of
‘The Grandeur of Reason’ conference]
 Joseph Lawrence, “On an Artificial Earth: Philosophies of Nature after Schelling“
 Robert Lehman, “Toward a Speculative Realism (Review of After Finitude)”
 Benjamin Lozano, (2009) “A Contested Revolution (Review of Collapse Vol., V)”
 Daniel Miller, “Nihil Unbound“
 Gabriel Riera, “After Finitude“
 Brian Smith, (2009) “Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics”
 Eugene Thacker, “Nihil Unbound“
 Alistair Welchman, “Post-Continental Philosophy“
 Ben Woodard, “Philosophies of Nature after Schelling”

BOOKS/DISSERTATIONS

 Ray Brassier, Alien Theory: The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter (Unpublished
doctoral thesis, University of Warwick, 2001). [PDF]
 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound (Chapter 1) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). [PDF]
 Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.) The Speculative Turn: Continental
Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: Re.press, 2011).
 Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: Re.press,
2009)
 Katerina Kolozova, The Real and “I” (On the Limit and the Self) (Skopje: Euro-Balkan Press, 2006).
[PDF]
 Francois Laruelle, Dictionary of Non-Philosophy tr. Taylor Adkins (Paris: Editions Kime, 1998).
[PDF]
 Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part I tr. Ninian Mellamphy
(London: University of Western Ontario, 1980). [PDF]

INTERVIEWS

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314

 Jane Bennett
 Ian Bogost (2)
 Ray Brassier
 Levi Bryant (2)
 Paul Ennis
 Graham Harman (2)
 Quentin Meillassoux
 Nick Srnicek
 Ben Woodard

JOURNALS

 Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities

 Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development
 Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy
 Speculations
 Thinking Nature

ONLINE SYMPOSIA

 Psyche – “Thomas Metzinger: Being No One”

AUDIO

 Iain Grant, “An Introduction to Hegel”

 Graham Harman, “Assemblages according to Manuel DeLanda”
 Set of Graham Harman recordings

VIDEOS

 Ray Brassier, “The Pure and Empty Form of Death: Heidegger and Deleuze”
 Manuel DeLanda, “Materialism, Experience and Philosophy”
 Iain Grant, “Philosophy and the Natural History of the Mind”
 Thomas Metzinger, “Being No One: Consciousness, The Phenomenal Self, and First-Person
Perspective”
 John Mullarkey, “Diagrammatic Actualism”
 Slavoj Zizek, “Materialism and Theology”
 ONPhI

Organisation Non-philosophique Internationale

http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html

A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy

Let me begin in traditional terms: what is the essence, what are the possibilities of non-

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philosophy? From the outset, it originated from four concerns that were coupled two by
two; and hence from dualities. It continued to develop in terms of dualities, constantly
calling them into question but never dispensing with them entirely. Its current
possibilities or themes are merely a continuation or development of this (non-) essence…

…Thus, my point of view here will be historical and systematic. This reconstruction after
the fact cannot avoid appearing to be a piece of retrospective self-interpretation, but since
fidelity here is not to a historically predetermined meaning or truth, but to a last instance,
and hence to the spirit of dualities, I stop short of anything that could draw us into a
hermeneutics.

The genealogy of non-philosophy is problematic. Born, like everything else, of the

intersection between two original and loosely coupled problems –whose coupling was not
quite as arbitrary as the encounter between Poros [Expediency] and Penia [Poverty]1 –
non-philosophy has always refused to be their synthesis, and hence their offspring.
Philosophy was born of the one-sided encounter between a sleeping being (Poros) and the
desire for a child (Penia), but as a philosopher Plato ultimately remains beholden to
biology –he does not get right to the bottom of Poros sleep, because he still attributes it to
drunkenness and closed eyes, to a merely slumbering intelligence. Similarly, he does not
get right to the bottom of Penias poverty, because he still attributes her desire for a child
to her sighting of Poros. Plato does not go beyond the pharmakon as coupling, as
condition for the couple or procreation.

This filiation is not that of non-philosophy. Like every child, she consents to be born
according to biological conditions, but she refuses the continuity of birth; she is an
orphan and it is she who decides to be born “according to X”. She sees in the
drunkenness of her father merely the symptom of mans blindness, of an un-learned
knowing; and sees in her mothers desire for a child the symptom of the impossible desire
for being-blind. Not refusing the past, but refusing to be determined by it, presenting
herself as the daughter of man, her problem is that of being and remaining ahead of the
image of the newborn. It is in this simply human manner that she escapes from the
biological and familial cycle and provides –without founding a new family or some sort
of new city– the basis-in-person for a new type of organization: an organization of
heretics, of sons or daughters of man who are continuously newborn, grateful orphans of
philosophy and the world. As for the act of birth, whereas philosophy is destined to
parricide and is only capable of acknowledging its filiation through this founding crime,
non-philosophy tries to avoid the synthesis of expediency and poverty that is parricide.
Born according to X, which is to say, according to man as the unknown, non-philosophy
joins its parents to the city of brothers and sisters, elevating its own filiation to utopian
status.

In actuality, the structure (but not the origin) of non-philosophy consists of a principal
duality and a secondary duality. The principal duality is the following:
1. The enigmatic character of the One, of its essence, its origin; the fact that it is forgotten
and subordinated to Being. The Heideggerean preoccupation with Being and the
Lacanian and Derridean preoccupation with the Other rendered this forgetting of the One

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more crucial, as though the circle of philosophy had not been fully covered in its entirety.
Philosophy continuously talked about the One, presupposed it, invoked it, but without
properly thematizing it.
2. There was another kind of forgetting in the guise of philosophys abusive attitude, its
abuse of power in general; the way in which it laid claim to reality and truth, but also to
domination; the arbitrary nature of its questioning. How was such a form of thinking
possible? One that claimed to be undeniable without furnishing any credentials other than
its own practice and tradition, rather like an unfounded and interminable rumour?
So, on the one hand an entity that reigns without governing: the One; and on the other a
discipline that claims to provide a theoretical domination of the world and of other forms
of thought to such an extent that it presumes to have a proprietary claim on “thinking”. I
found myself faced with a new and apparently artificial duality, since in normal
circumstances the One was, after all, merely an object of philosophy. But this duality was
accompanied by another, which seemed to graft itself upon it necessarily, as though it
provided the means for realizing it. This was the duality of science and philosophy, which
I have up until now tended to privilege as a guiding thread when recapitulating the
history of non-philosophy, and which continues to hold sway in the idea of non-
philosophy as a discipline. There is a sense in which I have never exited from this space,
from its type of duality and internal unity; even if, as I hope to show, it has undergone
contractions and expansions –and above all redistributions. My problem was never that of
the one and the multiple, even if I often evoked it. But in non-philosophy one must be
wary of confusing the object with which one struggles, and the essence of the struggle,
the former frequently occluding the latter. My problem has been that of the One and the
two, in the sense in which the two is something specific and not synonymous with the
multiple. My problem has to do with a tradition that differs from, or is parallel to, that of
philosophy. It has to do with the struggle with philosophy. It is a transcendental
mathematics, but one that will have to abandon the Platonic or philosophical form of
transcendental numbers, and stop being a divine mathematics (Leibniz). Thus, it is a
struggle on two times two fronts: that of the One and that of the two, that of the definition
of philosophy and that of science. That makes at least four fronts. This quadripartite
structure of the struggle is the dimension within which I have confronted another
quadripartite, the one constituted by the philosophers who ‘influenced me, as they say.
When reconstructing the history of non-philosophy, I have often confused this second
quadripartite with the first, committing a category mistake by according it an excessive
influence, when in fact it was already no more than the material for the first, or a terrain
for the struggle. These problems were resolved as I came to understand that instead of
trying to unify these four sides philosophically by binding or suturing them together in a
relational exteriority, I could do so through another kind of unity, one effected through a
radically immanent cloning. As a result, the notions of ‘struggle and ‘front undergo a
transformation. What was required was a unilateral leap, which is to say, abandoning all
pretension on the side of the One, no longer positing it as one of the sides or terms of the
quadripartite, acknowledging its collapse or non-consistency. This meant giving up at the
same time the idea of a ‘head to head struggle and elaborating the notion of a unilateral
front. That every struggle engages two fronts but only puts one combatant into play was a
riddle that was resolved when it turned into its own solution. This involves a shift from
the divine Logos to a practice placed under the name-of-man.

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The problematic of the quadripartite, of its binding or cloning, has the advantage of
allowing a synoptic overview of all the stages –even the most rudimentary– in the
research that led to non-philosophy, and of not dismembering it in terms of historical
distinctions. Before being non-philosophical, the magma from which non-philosophy
emerged has all the characteristics of a pre-philosophical chôra, from its deepest to its
most superficial layer, like a landmass or conglomerate rising up when the tectonic plates
underlying the philosophical continent start breaking up. The division of non-philosophy
intro three stages privileges a historical overview and should be inscribed within the
structure of the quadripartite.

I will confine myself here to sketching an outline and drawing a continuous guiding
thread for the development of non-philosophy, while passing over two kinds of
circumstance that played a part and affected this development. On the one hand, the
innumerable hesitations, misgivings, amendments and variations in the binding of these
two terms. For in the beginning it was question –as it is for every philosopher– of
identifying the point of suture between the two sides of this duality, which philosophy
had summarily realized or admitted in the form of systems and their traditions. On the
other hand, there were the personal conditions under which non-philosophy existed,
adverse institutional circumstances, all sorts of phantasms, various interests that exceeded
the bounds of philosophy alone –these do not need to be recalled here since we are trying
to identify a structure and the history contained in it.

For the moment, it is still a question of binding rather than of cloning. These dualities
were already present in the initial series of works grouped together under the heading
Philosophy I, but were still being resolved to the benefit of the side of philosophy and
binding, and to the detriment of the One and science. The shift to Philosophy II occurs by
way of an overturning: it is now the One which becomes the principal theme and assumes
the mantle of the real, and philosophy that is evaluated in terms of the Ones capacity for
being conceived ‘for itself and as such, or as immanent. This is the gist of Le principe de
minorité [The Minority Principle (1981)]. But…

… Non-philosophy does not effectively or successfully begin until Une biographie de

lhomme ordinaire [A Biography of the Ordinary Man (1985)], because it is there that the
problem of how to bind the four sides together is thematized and basically formulated –
albeit not without difficulties– through the notion of unilaterality. The conditions for this
solution are that the One acquire a radical autonomy with regard to philosophy, that it
stop being a philosophical object, and that the latter is revealed to be a transcendental
appearance. It is as though an over-neoplatonization of the One was accompanied by a
corresponding over-kantianization of philosophy as appearance…

…Formulated in this way, without satisfying the pretensions of philosophy vis-à-vis the
One, the problem increased in difficulty. We had deprived ourselves of every
philosophical solution. Nevertheless…

…the germ of the solution resided in this excessive separation between the One and

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philosophy, which amounted to a sort of Platonic chorismos. In effect, the cause of their
exteriority or reciprocal autonomy, and hence of their unity, could no longer be
philosophical or one that operated through transcendence. Moreover, the One in question
was no longer epekeina-physical, or beyond being, so that, on the contrary, what caused
this separation had to be its radical immanence. But how could radical immanence be
reconciled with exteriority?

At this stage, as my path momentarily crossed that of Michel Henry, the other half of the
problem remained unresolved –specifically: how could one still use philosophy –which
was not designed for this end– to speak of this One or radical immanence? The initial
project of a theoretical domination of philosophy and of a critique of its transcendental
appearance reappeared in a new form: that of the transformation of philosophical
statements or phrases. This was the Idea of a theoretical discipline with philosophy as its
object. All of Philosophy I and a large part of Philosophy II is devoted to a twofold task.
On the one hand, to a more and more precise binding of the duality which is outside
every system or synthesis by combining three requirements: that of the Ones radical
immanence; that of the unilaterality this duality; and finally that of the reduction of the
logos to the status of a structured appearance or material. On the other hand, to the search
for a discourse that would no longer be the logos and whose resources (despite this
discourse being appropriated by the causality of the One) would be provided by
philosophy alone. Thus, to the constitution of a discipline of philosophy in view of
thinking the One.

But to present non-philosophy in this way, in terms of a problem of binding, is to tip the
scale in favour of philosophy once again –albeit philosophy as the object of a discipline.
It may be that this is a step forward. And I admit that it is possible to freeze the
development of non-philosophy at one or other of its stages, so long as its essential
conditions of existence are acknowledged. I believe much of the work that will be
presented to you today develops this aspect and this concept of non-philosophy as a
rigorous discipline of philosophy –an aspect which, let me repeat once more, is very real.
Nevertheless, there is obviously the risk of an excessive formalization of the rules
governing this practice, in the manner of a universally recognizable corpus guaranteeing
a certain epistemological coherence…

…Non-philosophy is neither a universal method taking over from deconstruction, nor an

immanent process in which method and material, rational and real, are fused together, as
in Hegel. Everything depends on how unilaterality binds –if I may be allowed to continue
using this term– the opposing terms. Although non-philosophy has a disciplinary aspect,
it is not just another discipline.

For it is in fact the other side, that of the One, which must, by definition, have primacy
over philosophy from the outset, and it is according to it that one should unilaterally
balance or unbalance the quadripartite as a whole. The One is not just the condition of
possibility for non-philosophy –this formulation is too Kantian and empirico-idealist. It is
however its presupposed, and as such is not once again at the service of philosophy.
Unlike a condition or presupposition, which disappears into the conditioned, the

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presupposed has an autonomy that is irreducible to the conditioned. Whence the necessity
of developing this side of the One so as to turn it into, if not the centre, then at least the
principal aspect of non-philosophy. In fact, the essential gains, those that condition the
theory, were made on the side of the One –not the One alone, but precisely this logic of
unilaterality which goes together with the One and its immanence. And it so happens that
the successful adjustment of the second duality –that of philosophy and science– depends
on the kind of solution one has found for the first.

How is one to reestablish the structures unilateral equilibrium? Uni-laterality should no

longer be understood in a Hegelian sense as abstraction of one side at the expense of the
other. It has to be understood as a formulation close to two others used by contemporary
philosophers. It is similar to 1) ‘no-relation in Lacans ‘there is no sexual relation. The
real in Lacan as well as in non-philosophy is without relation in the sense that it excludes
symbolic and linguistic relation. It is generally foreclosed to relation, as is required by
radical immanence or the fact that, as Lacan says, the real always comes back to ‘the
same place. It is also similar to 2) ‘relation-without-relation in Derrida, who puts the
absence of relation or the Other who is without relation at the heart of relation, i.e. the
Logos. In other words, Lacan and Derrida are moved by antithetical motives with regard
to the real: the former wants to exclude all relation, while the latter is content to
differentiate relation through its other and hopes to find the real in an affect of absolute
Judaic alterity. Their difference can be situated between two conceptions of the other, but
it does not basically touch on the real. Both conceive of the ‘without-relation in the same
way: the former (Lacan) as opposed to relation, or as non(-relation); the latter (Derrida),
more subtly, as at the very least indissociable from relation. In either case, psychoanalysis
or deconstruction, relation is presupposed as that in terms of which the real must be
posited. And relation is transcendence or a certain kind of exteriority. Both cases remain
within the realm of philosophy and seek immanence, the without-relation, through
opposition or in terms of an ultimate reference to transcendence. Under these conditions,
the real cannot be radically relationless, even in Lacan where the real and the symbolic
are linked through topology. Can one follow Lacan but go beyond Lacan by positing a
real that is de-symbolized, un-chained from the signifier, unconditioned by it; yet one
which, as in Derrida, nevertheless continues to have a proven effect on the logos or
symbolic realm in general?

What I have called uni-laterality is the solution without synthesis to this problem. It is the
only kind of relation tolerated by the real as immanence and primacy over philosophy.
On the one hand, it is essentially a radical non-relation, as in Lacan –but one which is
genuinely radical this time because its non-relationality follows from its immanence.
More than ever, the real returns to the same place, to such an extent that it no longer
defines one and is u-topic through and through. But on the other hand, it does not remain
alone because it is separated (from) the logos or the world –it is also an Other, but
without relation to transcendence, which would otherwise continue to define it and
constitute it. It is Other-than…relation, rather than Other to…relation, whether as
opposed to it (Lacan), or partially internalized by it (Derrida). There is an alterity that
goes with the One but it is itself One or radical immanence. There is no longer an Other
of the Other as there necessarily is in psychoanalysis and philosophy. This is why I use

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the term ‘unilation instead of the word ‘relation. This the place of the non-philosophical
concept of uni-laterality: between Hegel who reduces it to an abstraction of the
understanding; Lacan who ultimately does not understand it and tolerates it only in order
to cancel it in the signifying chain through which he thinks he acknowledges it; and
Derrida and others, who try to give it a status but still within the realm of philosophical
exteriority. The radical has primacy over the uni-lateral, but primacy is not itself a
relation.

More concretely, consider a philosophical system, i.e. a dyad of terms that are opposed or
correlated through a third term which is itself divided between an immanent or
transcendental One and a One that transcends the dyad. We move to a unilateral duality
in the following way. The One is no longer divisible into real and transcendental, it is real
and takes the place of one and only one term in the dyad: it now constitutes one of the
two terms as indivisible and is simply immanent to the new duality. But the status of the
second term in the dyad is also immediately transformed. It is no longer face to face with
the One, which is immanent even from the perspective of this second term, and yet it
exists and makes up a duality with the One without being face to face with it; hence
without entering into relation with it. We will say that this second term is also in-One or
immanent even though it is expelled from the One, which it does not constitute. More
precisely, we will say that it is expelled only insofar as the One is radically separate from
what it gives or manifests. This is why I continue to repeat that philosophy, which is the
second term, is given in a radically immanent fashion or in the mode of the One, even as
it is expelled from the One…

…The unilateral duality excludes the two major types of traditional solution: the theory
of relations and the theory of judgments. It is not a relation, whether internal or external,
and it is not a judgment, whether analytic or synthetic. It is precisely because it has none
of the characteristics of a system that non-philosophy, which excludes synthesis as well
as analysis, possesses the quasi or non-analytic power of systems and their subsets, as
well as the quasi or non-synthetic power of the systems which it brushes up against in
each of their points. We use the term ‘dualysis to designate this activity carried out
through unilateral dualities, which analyze without an operation of analysis and
synthesize without an operation of synthesis. Non-philosophical statements are neither
contained analytically within those of philosophy nor added synthetically to them. It is
not a matter of complex judgments and interpretation, but of transformation through the
force of unilaterality.

Unilaterality proceeds through two stages. The first is that of the real, whose immanence
is no longer that of a punctual, still transcendent interiority, but a being-separate from
what it expels, or rather that which it is separated from. The second is transcendental and
takes this other term into account. It relates to philosophy, which, expelled-in-One so to
speak, now calls for help from the real. In the first phase, there is already duality, but on
the basis of the One and its primacy: the second term is mentioned without yet being
referred to. In the second phase, duality is explicitly present but on the basis of
philosophy –although it does not go so far as to constitute a two.

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The immanence of the One and the transcendence proper to philosophy are now so tightly
and intimately bound together that there is no longer any relation but only an alterity of
the One, which is an immanence without relation to philosophy –even though it gives or
manifests philosophy while separating itself from it…

…The work undertaken since the book on non-marxism [Introduction to Non-Marxism

(2000)] has sought to carry out this intimate binding of the two sides and to justify the
discipline devoted to philosophy through the primacy and uni-laterality of the One.

Thus, as I have already said, I accept that it may be necessary to isolate aspects or
moments of non-philosophy in order to examine them, or even –why not– develop them
into independent disciplines. Nevertheless, one should bear in mind non-philosophys
indivisible duality, the fact that it is structured in phases, so as not to separate in an
abstract fashion the One from philosophy, and vice versa. But we have seen why this
indivisibility or intimacy of non-philosophy is not that of a system. The truth is that we
find ourselves here at the heart of the non-philosophical solution. By striving to bind and
suture together opposed terms, we are forced to realize not only that that they were not
really opposed, but that they are not bound together and that the genuinely guiding
problematic for us may not be philosophical –we have been trying to prize it free from
philosophy piece by piece. Non-philosophy, which began as a problem of binding,
unbinding and rebinding, is radically fulfilled as something that we could never have
imagined, since we were deceived by the exteriority of philosophy. It is fulfilled as a
cloning. If all philosophy comes down to a question of binding, non-philosophy comes
down to a question of cloning, which is also the answer to the question of binding. The
One gives its identity to philosophy precisely insofar as the latter refuses it –an identity
which philosophy both refuses and requires. We could say –parodying Lacans famous
formula about love by inverting it in favour of the giver rather than the receiver– that the
One withholds itself, thereby giving itself to philosophy, which requires it by refusing it.
If non-philosophy attains a point of unilateral equilibrium, of fulfillment proper to it, it is
through this inversion of binding into its point of immanence, which is not a dead-end but
rather the point at which there is a radical interiorization of the real and an inversion of
philosophy. A bind forms a point of immanence, but its principle is not radical
immanence –it is rather a combination of the two, through topology for example. I spent
a long time looking for such a point: the point of the cogito, the point of Nietzschean
transmutation, the point of critique. Non-philosophy may well be philosophys critical
point, but it is not critique that makes the point; it is the ‘point that critiques. I consider
this long hunt for immanence to have reached its goal when immanence gives itself as
and through a unilateral leap –that of the (non-)One, which is the key to the hunt. Cloning
assembles and retroactively legitimates all those hesitant investigations, all those
contradictory hypotheses about the problem of the theorys internal coherence.

Consequently, with regard to philosophy there was, strictly speaking, no overturning but
rather a displacement. But a displacement without an operation can only be a utopia. And
what is displaced is philosophy as such, because displacement here resolves itself into a
‘en-placement. There is no non-philosophical gesture, just the leap or unilateral operation

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whereby human utopia affects every possible site and frees or furnishes a ‘space for the
subject.

It will be objected that binding is more intelligible than cloning. But these solutions are
neither opposed nor complimentary. The real difficulty with this objection is that binding
is not straightforwardly and uniquely mathematical but also transcendental, and that such
a combination, which is difficult because it is an internalized topology, is precisely what
calls for the solution of unilateral duality in which cloning takes binding as its object.
This is what explains the possibility of taking philosophy as object for a real that does not
objectify it, but transforms it.

Non-philosophy is obviously not a theory of knowledge or a system in general. It is a

real-transcendental science of the world. The only way of discovering it is by relativizing
the exclusive primacy of the logic that hides it and prevents one noticing it in philosophy,
even of the non-analytical kind. We could say, in our customary style, that it is a
transcendental logic that is real-and-nothing-but rather than logical; one that is without-
logic or non formal, so to speak. Contrary to the logicist reduction of philosophy, which
leaves the hidden prerogatives of philosophical sufficiency intact, specifically in the form
of positivity and hence of a kind of dogmatism, this non-philosophical reduction of
philosophy is at once real-transcendental and capable of a wide variety of realizations,
not only in terms of logic but in terms of the sciences in general. There is an instance that
is more radical than logic, and this is the real. Not that it is possible to replace logic by
just any science while maintaining the same privileges for the latter. It is the universal
posture of science that must take the place which in philosophy is held by the restricted
universality of logic. Non-philosophy shatters the strictures of logic and analytical
reduction, just as it dissolves the residues of a compulsory, exclusive and primary logic in
the transcendental logic of philosophers, granting the transcendental the sole support of
the radical real, and hence the possibility of entering into combination with each of the
sciences. Non-philosophy is unified theory: a radical extension of philosophy beyond
transcendental logic, but one that deprives it of its traditional pretensions. As a result, it is
philosophy and its logical organon that lose their prerogatives by being turned into a
simply real-transcendental organon.

Thus, it is necessary to take the expression ‘non-philosophy quite literally, so to speak. It

is not just a metaphorical reference to ‘non-Euclidean. It is possible for the One and the
(non-)One to be identical because we are no longer operating in the realm of
transcendence. Nothingness is transcendent but the non- is the One in all its immanent
uni-laterality. Non-philosophy is the inversion of philosophy; it is the ‘non- addressed to
philosophy by man, who is the presupposed that philosophy cannot get rid of. It is not
that there is philosophy first, which then has to be denied –philosophy is given from the
outset as suspended in the future by the future, and this is the determining condition for
its becoming the object of a new discipline.

As for the trilogy of real, philosophical material, and unilateral syntax (or determination-
in-the-last-instance), to which non-philosophy is often reduced, there is a sense in which
it bears a marked resemblance –despite the difference in content– to the Lacanian trio

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RSI, and like the latter, it is merely a structural base for non-philosophy. I too could say,
like Lacan, that the latter is not an all-purpose grid, but rather a sort of vade-mecum,
dangerous to the extent that it traces the structure of the philosophical system by simply
distorting it. It has to be said that this trilogy was placed at the head of INPhO in the form
of three axioms so as to allow the latters constitution and functioning, but at the cost of a
certain approximation and the risk of encouraging a new kind of scholastic common
sense or formalism. A large part of my research has been devoted to putting this trilogy
into practice and extending it to new materials. But the principal task has been trying to
achieve a parallel adjustment of these instances so as to bring them all into play; tuning
and adjusting the instrument; coordinating and recalibrating the apparatus. INPhO was
constructed like an un-tuned instrument, in which everyone wants to play their part with
the instrument they have cobbled together themselves, preferring a free interpretation of
the axioms to their free effectuation. There is a fundamental problem concerning the
articulation of these three instances. Two tasks need to be carried out. The new
articulation of the three terms will have to 1) undo their topological and hence structural
organization, overcome the appearance that they are three by showing how they are each
time two, and that each of these two is ultimately ‘one while remaining ‘two from the
viewpoint of one of them; 2) define boundaries or degrees of freedom in the ‘preparation
of this apparatus, but in a way that does not end up destroying it.

In any case, non-philosophy did not invent ‘the real, or the One, or man (every
philosopher can take some credit for the latter), or even the idea of a ‘radical immanence
(there is Michel Henry and perhaps others as well –Maine de Biran? Marx?). On the other
hand, non-philosophy exists because it invented the true characteristics of the latter,
because it took the requirements of radicality seriously and distinguished between the
radical and the absolute. It has had to carry out a complete overhaul of the entire
philosophical apparatus even when it seemed closest to it. These characteristics are:
1. the full sense of immanence as real ‘before it assumes a transcendental function;
2. the necessity of treating immanence through immanence, rather than through a
transcendent overview. It is at once a structure and an immanent knowing of this
structure, or what I call ‘the vision-in-One;
3. philosophys being-already-given in-One, its unilation rather than external relation to
the real;
4. the structure of real immanence as uni-laterality, uni-lateral (duality), as other than…
or alterity through immanence, rather than as a metaphysical point;
5. the coupling of real determination and determination-in-the-last-instance or
transcendental determination (cloning), and the thesis that Marxs concept provides a
symptom of the latter;
6. the unilateral duality of man and of the subject as a function with the world as free
variable;
7. the discovery of radical immanence or uni-laterality as human Messianism or
immanent future, its vocation to utopia and fiction;
8. the two aspects of the future language spoken by non-philosophical subjects: axiomatic
or mathematical, and philosophical or oracular.

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Non-philosophy is a human mathematics –a formulation I would oppose to Leibnizs

conception of philosophy as a ‘divine mathematics. Radicality should be understood in
terms of these principles or modes of operation, which prevent one from mistaking it for
the radicality invoked by Descartes or Husserl. Everything can be summed up in terms of
the distinction between the radical and the absolute.

Lastly, a few words about these new possibilities.

Non-humanist. With topological binding, philosophy remained in the hands of a deus ex

machina: the philosopher or infant-king, who surveys and arranges the former like a
handyman assembling and destroying scale models of worlds, or a demon whispering
answers to Socrates. With cloning, it is finally man and man alone who is implicated in
philosophy. But man is not implicated in the way being is implicated as bound up with
the question of being. Man is the real or the answer, the minimal but insufficient
condition necessary for local resolutions. Non-philosophy is the primacy of man as non-
immanent over being and nothingness. It is to man and man alone, not to matter or
religion that it falls to reduce humanism, for example, along with the problems of which
humanism is symptomatic. Non-philosophy is the discovery that man is determining, and
that he is determining-in-the-last-instance as subject.

Non-theological. Insofar as man gives the world while remaining separate from it –but
not separate as an exception to it– non-philosophy invalidates all metaphysical problems
such as that of the creation, procession, emanation, or conversion of the world –the entire
philosophical dramaturgy. Man is a grace for the world. This is an inversion of the
philosophies of transcendence and of the divine call addressed to man, because it is now
the world that calls on man. Where philosophy knows exception, non-philosophy knows
–dare I say it– the miracle, but one that has been mathematized, shorn of its theological
transcendence.

Non-historical. The immanent real-one is also given as other than…or separated; as the
future that precedes the past and the present. Man is not consciousness, he is the force of
utopia or of immanent Messianism that accompanies his confrontation with the world and
inverts every possible course of history. Nietzsches overhuman ‘yes has to be included in
the ‘no- that accompanies man from the depth of his immanence.

Non-literary. Non-philosophy is an activity of fiction both in thought and language; it

crowns the discipline of philosophical theory. New terms should surge forth from the
non-philosophical understanding in the way essences surge forth from the divine
understanding according to Leibniz. They should combine the enigmatic authority of the
oracle with the clarity of the theorem.

Ultimately, I see non-philosophers in several different ways. I see them, inevitably, as

subjects of the university, as is required by worldly life, but above all as related to three
fundamental human types. They are related to the analyst and the political militant,
obviously, since non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism –it transforms
the subject by transforming instances of philosophy. But they are also related to what I

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would call the ‘spiritual type –which it is imperative not to confuse with ‘spiritualist. The
spiritual are not spiritualists. They are the great destroyers of the forces of philosophy and
the state, which band together in the name of order and conformity. The spiritual haunt
the margins of philosophy, gnosticism, mysticism, and even of institutional religion and
politics. The spiritual are not just abstract, quietist mystics; they are for the world. This is
why a quiet discipline is not sufficient, because man is implicated in the world as the
presupposed that determines it. Thus, non-philosophy is also related to gnosticism and
science-fiction; it answers their fundamental question –which is not at all philosophys
primary concern–: “Should humanity be saved? And how?” And it is also close to
spiritual revolutionaries such as Müntzer and certain mystics who skirted heresy. When
all is said and done, is non-philosophy anything other than the chance for an effective
utopia?
Let me begin in traditional terms: what is the essence, what are the possibilities of non-
philosophy? From the outset, it originated from four concerns that were coupled two by
two; and hence from dualities. It continued to develop in terms of dualities, constantly
calling them into question but never dispensing with them entirely. Its current
possibilities or themes are merely a continuation or development of this (non-) essence…

…Thus, my point of view here will be historical and systematic. This reconstruction after
the fact cannot avoid appearing to be a piece of retrospective self-interpretation, but since
fidelity here is not to a historically predetermined meaning or truth, but to a last instance,
and hence to the spirit of dualities, I stop short of anything that could draw us into a
hermeneutics.

The genealogy of non-philosophy is problematic. Born, like everything else, of the

intersection between two original and loosely coupled problems –whose coupling was not
quite as arbitrary as the encounter between Poros [Expediency] and Penia [Poverty]1 –
non-philosophy has always refused to be their synthesis, and hence their offspring.
Philosophy was born of the one-sided encounter between a sleeping being (Poros) and the
desire for a child (Penia), but as a philosopher Plato ultimately remains beholden to
biology –he does not get right to the bottom of Poros sleep, because he still attributes it to
drunkenness and closed eyes, to a merely slumbering intelligence. Similarly, he does not
get right to the bottom of Penias poverty, because he still attributes her desire for a child
to her sighting of Poros. Plato does not go beyond the pharmakon as coupling, as
condition for the couple or procreation.

This filiation is not that of non-philosophy. Like every child, she consents to be born
according to biological conditions, but she refuses the continuity of birth; she is an
orphan and it is she who decides to be born “according to X”. She sees in the
drunkenness of her father merely the symptom of mans blindness, of an un-learned
knowing; and sees in her mothers desire for a child the symptom of the impossible desire
for being-blind. Not refusing the past, but refusing to be determined by it, presenting
herself as the daughter of man, her problem is that of being and remaining ahead of the
image of the newborn. It is in this simply human manner that she escapes from the
biological and familial cycle and provides –without founding a new family or some sort
of new city– the basis-in-person for a new type of organization: an organization of

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heretics, of sons or daughters of man who are continuously newborn, grateful orphans of
philosophy and the world. As for the act of birth, whereas philosophy is destined to
parricide and is only capable of acknowledging its filiation through this founding crime,
non-philosophy tries to avoid the synthesis of expediency and poverty that is parricide.
Born according to X, which is to say, according to man as the unknown, non-philosophy
joins its parents to the city of brothers and sisters, elevating its own filiation to utopian
status.

In actuality, the structure (but not the origin) of non-philosophy consists of a principal
duality and a secondary duality. The principal duality is the following:
1. The enigmatic character of the One, of its essence, its origin; the fact that it is forgotten
and subordinated to Being. The Heideggerean preoccupation with Being and the
Lacanian and Derridean preoccupation with the Other rendered this forgetting of the One
more crucial, as though the circle of philosophy had not been fully covered in its entirety.
Philosophy continuously talked about the One, presupposed it, invoked it, but without
properly thematizing it.
2. There was another kind of forgetting in the guise of philosophys abusive attitude, its
abuse of power in general; the way in which it laid claim to reality and truth, but also to
domination; the arbitrary nature of its questioning. How was such a form of thinking
possible? One that claimed to be undeniable without furnishing any credentials other than
its own practice and tradition, rather like an unfounded and interminable rumour?
So, on the one hand an entity that reigns without governing: the One; and on the other a
discipline that claims to provide a theoretical domination of the world and of other forms
of thought to such an extent that it presumes to have a proprietary claim on “thinking”. I
found myself faced with a new and apparently artificial duality, since in normal
circumstances the One was, after all, merely an object of philosophy. But this duality was
accompanied by another, which seemed to graft itself upon it necessarily, as though it
provided the means for realizing it. This was the duality of science and philosophy, which
I have up until now tended to privilege as a guiding thread when recapitulating the
history of non-philosophy, and which continues to hold sway in the idea of non-
philosophy as a discipline. There is a sense in which I have never exited from this space,
from its type of duality and internal unity; even if, as I hope to show, it has undergone
contractions and expansions –and above all redistributions. My problem was never that of
the one and the multiple, even if I often evoked it. But in non-philosophy one must be
wary of confusing the object with which one struggles, and the essence of the struggle,
the former frequently occluding the latter. My problem has been that of the One and the
two, in the sense in which the two is something specific and not synonymous with the
multiple. My problem has to do with a tradition that differs from, or is parallel to, that of
philosophy. It has to do with the struggle with philosophy. It is a transcendental
mathematics, but one that will have to abandon the Platonic or philosophical form of
transcendental numbers, and stop being a divine mathematics (Leibniz). Thus, it is a
struggle on two times two fronts: that of the One and that of the two, that of the definition
of philosophy and that of science. That makes at least four fronts. This quadripartite
structure of the struggle is the dimension within which I have confronted another
quadripartite, the one constituted by the philosophers who ‘influenced me, as they say.
When reconstructing the history of non-philosophy, I have often confused this second

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quadripartite with the first, committing a category mistake by according it an excessive

influence, when in fact it was already no more than the material for the first, or a terrain
for the struggle. These problems were resolved as I came to understand that instead of
trying to unify these four sides philosophically by binding or suturing them together in a
relational exteriority, I could do so through another kind of unity, one effected through a
radically immanent cloning. As a result, the notions of ‘struggle and ‘front undergo a
transformation. What was required was a unilateral leap, which is to say, abandoning all
pretension on the side of the One, no longer positing it as one of the sides or terms of the
quadripartite, acknowledging its collapse or non-consistency. This meant giving up at the
same time the idea of a ‘head to head struggle and elaborating the notion of a unilateral
front. That every struggle engages two fronts but only puts one combatant into play was a
riddle that was resolved when it turned into its own solution. This involves a shift from
the divine Logos to a practice placed under the name-of-man.

The problematic of the quadripartite, of its binding or cloning, has the advantage of
allowing a synoptic overview of all the stages –even the most rudimentary– in the
research that led to non-philosophy, and of not dismembering it in terms of historical
distinctions. Before being non-philosophical, the magma from which non-philosophy
emerged has all the characteristics of a pre-philosophical chôra, from its deepest to its
most superficial layer, like a landmass or conglomerate rising up when the tectonic plates
underlying the philosophical continent start breaking up. The division of non-philosophy
intro three stages privileges a historical overview and should be inscribed within the
structure of the quadripartite.

I will confine myself here to sketching an outline and drawing a continuous guiding
thread for the development of non-philosophy, while passing over two kinds of
circumstance that played a part and affected this development. On the one hand, the
innumerable hesitations, misgivings, amendments and variations in the binding of these
two terms. For in the beginning it was question –as it is for every philosopher– of
identifying the point of suture between the two sides of this duality, which philosophy
had summarily realized or admitted in the form of systems and their traditions. On the
other hand, there were the personal conditions under which non-philosophy existed,
adverse institutional circumstances, all sorts of phantasms, various interests that exceeded
the bounds of philosophy alone –these do not need to be recalled here since we are trying
to identify a structure and the history contained in it.

For the moment, it is still a question of binding rather than of cloning. These dualities
were already present in the initial series of works grouped together under the heading
Philosophy I, but were still being resolved to the benefit of the side of philosophy and
binding, and to the detriment of the One and science. The shift to Philosophy II occurs by
way of an overturning: it is now the One which becomes the principal theme and assumes
the mantle of the real, and philosophy that is evaluated in terms of the Ones capacity for
being conceived ‘for itself and as such, or as immanent. This is the gist of Le principe de
minorité [The Minority Principle (1981)]. But…

… Non-philosophy does not effectively or successfully begin until Une biographie de

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lhomme ordinaire [A Biography of the Ordinary Man (1985)], because it is there that the
problem of how to bind the four sides together is thematized and basically formulated –
albeit not without difficulties– through the notion of unilaterality. The conditions for this
solution are that the One acquire a radical autonomy with regard to philosophy, that it
stop being a philosophical object, and that the latter is revealed to be a transcendental
appearance. It is as though an over-neoplatonization of the One was accompanied by a
corresponding over-kantianization of philosophy as appearance…

…Formulated in this way, without satisfying the pretensions of philosophy vis-à-vis the
One, the problem increased in difficulty. We had deprived ourselves of every
philosophical solution. Nevertheless…

…the germ of the solution resided in this excessive separation between the One and
philosophy, which amounted to a sort of Platonic chorismos. In effect, the cause of their
exteriority or reciprocal autonomy, and hence of their unity, could no longer be
philosophical or one that operated through transcendence. Moreover, the One in question
was no longer epekeina-physical, or beyond being, so that, on the contrary, what caused
this separation had to be its radical immanence. But how could radical immanence be
reconciled with exteriority?

At this stage, as my path momentarily crossed that of Michel Henry, the other half of the
problem remained unresolved –specifically: how could one still use philosophy –which
was not designed for this end– to speak of this One or radical immanence? The initial
project of a theoretical domination of philosophy and of a critique of its transcendental
appearance reappeared in a new form: that of the transformation of philosophical
statements or phrases. This was the Idea of a theoretical discipline with philosophy as its
object. All of Philosophy I and a large part of Philosophy II is devoted to a twofold task.
On the one hand, to a more and more precise binding of the duality which is outside
every system or synthesis by combining three requirements: that of the Ones radical
immanence; that of the unilaterality this duality; and finally that of the reduction of the
logos to the status of a structured appearance or material. On the other hand, to the search
for a discourse that would no longer be the logos and whose resources (despite this
discourse being appropriated by the causality of the One) would be provided by
philosophy alone. Thus, to the constitution of a discipline of philosophy in view of
thinking the One.

But to present non-philosophy in this way, in terms of a problem of binding, is to tip the
scale in favour of philosophy once again –albeit philosophy as the object of a discipline.
It may be that this is a step forward. And I admit that it is possible to freeze the
development of non-philosophy at one or other of its stages, so long as its essential
conditions of existence are acknowledged. I believe much of the work that will be
presented to you today develops this aspect and this concept of non-philosophy as a
rigorous discipline of philosophy –an aspect which, let me repeat once more, is very real.
Nevertheless, there is obviously the risk of an excessive formalization of the rules
governing this practice, in the manner of a universally recognizable corpus guaranteeing
a certain epistemological coherence…

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…Non-philosophy is neither a universal method taking over from deconstruction, nor an

immanent process in which method and material, rational and real, are fused together, as
in Hegel. Everything depends on how unilaterality binds –if I may be allowed to continue
using this term– the opposing terms. Although non-philosophy has a disciplinary aspect,
it is not just another discipline.

For it is in fact the other side, that of the One, which must, by definition, have primacy
over philosophy from the outset, and it is according to it that one should unilaterally
balance or unbalance the quadripartite as a whole. The One is not just the condition of
possibility for non-philosophy –this formulation is too Kantian and empirico-idealist. It is
however its presupposed, and as such is not once again at the service of philosophy.
Unlike a condition or presupposition, which disappears into the conditioned, the
presupposed has an autonomy that is irreducible to the conditioned. Whence the necessity
of developing this side of the One so as to turn it into, if not the centre, then at least the
principal aspect of non-philosophy. In fact, the essential gains, those that condition the
theory, were made on the side of the One –not the One alone, but precisely this logic of
unilaterality which goes together with the One and its immanence. And it so happens that
the successful adjustment of the second duality –that of philosophy and science– depends
on the kind of solution one has found for the first.

How is one to reestablish the structures unilateral equilibrium? Uni-laterality should no

longer be understood in a Hegelian sense as abstraction of one side at the expense of the
other. It has to be understood as a formulation close to two others used by contemporary
philosophers. It is similar to 1) ‘no-relation in Lacans ‘there is no sexual relation. The
real in Lacan as well as in non-philosophy is without relation in the sense that it excludes
symbolic and linguistic relation. It is generally foreclosed to relation, as is required by
radical immanence or the fact that, as Lacan says, the real always comes back to ‘the
same place. It is also similar to 2) ‘relation-without-relation in Derrida, who puts the
absence of relation or the Other who is without relation at the heart of relation, i.e. the
Logos. In other words, Lacan and Derrida are moved by antithetical motives with regard
to the real: the former wants to exclude all relation, while the latter is content to
differentiate relation through its other and hopes to find the real in an affect of absolute
Judaic alterity. Their difference can be situated between two conceptions of the other, but
it does not basically touch on the real. Both conceive of the ‘without-relation in the same
way: the former (Lacan) as opposed to relation, or as non(-relation); the latter (Derrida),
more subtly, as at the very least indissociable from relation. In either case, psychoanalysis
or deconstruction, relation is presupposed as that in terms of which the real must be
posited. And relation is transcendence or a certain kind of exteriority. Both cases remain
within the realm of philosophy and seek immanence, the without-relation, through
opposition or in terms of an ultimate reference to transcendence. Under these conditions,
the real cannot be radically relationless, even in Lacan where the real and the symbolic
are linked through topology. Can one follow Lacan but go beyond Lacan by positing a
real that is de-symbolized, un-chained from the signifier, unconditioned by it; yet one
which, as in Derrida, nevertheless continues to have a proven effect on the logos or
symbolic realm in general?

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What I have called uni-laterality is the solution without synthesis to this problem. It is the
only kind of relation tolerated by the real as immanence and primacy over philosophy.
On the one hand, it is essentially a radical non-relation, as in Lacan –but one which is
genuinely radical this time because its non-relationality follows from its immanence.
More than ever, the real returns to the same place, to such an extent that it no longer
defines one and is u-topic through and through. But on the other hand, it does not remain
alone because it is separated (from) the logos or the world –it is also an Other, but
without relation to transcendence, which would otherwise continue to define it and
constitute it. It is Other-than…relation, rather than Other to…relation, whether as
opposed to it (Lacan), or partially internalized by it (Derrida). There is an alterity that
goes with the One but it is itself One or radical immanence. There is no longer an Other
of the Other as there necessarily is in psychoanalysis and philosophy. This is why I use
the term ‘unilation instead of the word ‘relation. This the place of the non-philosophical
concept of uni-laterality: between Hegel who reduces it to an abstraction of the
understanding; Lacan who ultimately does not understand it and tolerates it only in order
to cancel it in the signifying chain through which he thinks he acknowledges it; and
Derrida and others, who try to give it a status but still within the realm of philosophical
exteriority. The radical has primacy over the uni-lateral, but primacy is not itself a
relation.

More concretely, consider a philosophical system, i.e. a dyad of terms that are opposed or
correlated through a third term which is itself divided between an immanent or
transcendental One and a One that transcends the dyad. We move to a unilateral duality
in the following way. The One is no longer divisible into real and transcendental, it is real
and takes the place of one and only one term in the dyad: it now constitutes one of the
two terms as indivisible and is simply immanent to the new duality. But the status of the
second term in the dyad is also immediately transformed. It is no longer face to face with
the One, which is immanent even from the perspective of this second term, and yet it
exists and makes up a duality with the One without being face to face with it; hence
without entering into relation with it. We will say that this second term is also in-One or
immanent even though it is expelled from the One, which it does not constitute. More
precisely, we will say that it is expelled only insofar as the One is radically separate from
what it gives or manifests. This is why I continue to repeat that philosophy, which is the
second term, is given in a radically immanent fashion or in the mode of the One, even as
it is expelled from the One…

…The unilateral duality excludes the two major types of traditional solution: the theory
of relations and the theory of judgments. It is not a relation, whether internal or external,
and it is not a judgment, whether analytic or synthetic. It is precisely because it has none
of the characteristics of a system that non-philosophy, which excludes synthesis as well
as analysis, possesses the quasi or non-analytic power of systems and their subsets, as
well as the quasi or non-synthetic power of the systems which it brushes up against in
each of their points. We use the term ‘dualysis to designate this activity carried out
through unilateral dualities, which analyze without an operation of analysis and
synthesize without an operation of synthesis. Non-philosophical statements are neither

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contained analytically within those of philosophy nor added synthetically to them. It is

not a matter of complex judgments and interpretation, but of transformation through the
force of unilaterality.

Unilaterality proceeds through two stages. The first is that of the real, whose immanence
is no longer that of a punctual, still transcendent interiority, but a being-separate from
what it expels, or rather that which it is separated from. The second is transcendental and
takes this other term into account. It relates to philosophy, which, expelled-in-One so to
speak, now calls for help from the real. In the first phase, there is already duality, but on
the basis of the One and its primacy: the second term is mentioned without yet being
referred to. In the second phase, duality is explicitly present but on the basis of
philosophy –although it does not go so far as to constitute a two.

The immanence of the One and the transcendence proper to philosophy are now so tightly
and intimately bound together that there is no longer any relation but only an alterity of
the One, which is an immanence without relation to philosophy –even though it gives or
manifests philosophy while separating itself from it…

…The work undertaken since the book on non-marxism [Introduction to Non-Marxism

(2000)] has sought to carry out this intimate binding of the two sides and to justify the
discipline devoted to philosophy through the primacy and uni-laterality of the One.

Thus, as I have already said, I accept that it may be necessary to isolate aspects or
moments of non-philosophy in order to examine them, or even –why not– develop them
into independent disciplines. Nevertheless, one should bear in mind non-philosophys
indivisible duality, the fact that it is structured in phases, so as not to separate in an
abstract fashion the One from philosophy, and vice versa. But we have seen why this
indivisibility or intimacy of non-philosophy is not that of a system. The truth is that we
find ourselves here at the heart of the non-philosophical solution. By striving to bind and
suture together opposed terms, we are forced to realize not only that that they were not
really opposed, but that they are not bound together and that the genuinely guiding
problematic for us may not be philosophical –we have been trying to prize it free from
philosophy piece by piece. Non-philosophy, which began as a problem of binding,
unbinding and rebinding, is radically fulfilled as something that we could never have
imagined, since we were deceived by the exteriority of philosophy. It is fulfilled as a
cloning. If all philosophy comes down to a question of binding, non-philosophy comes
down to a question of cloning, which is also the answer to the question of binding. The
One gives its identity to philosophy precisely insofar as the latter refuses it –an identity
which philosophy both refuses and requires. We could say –parodying Lacans famous
formula about love by inverting it in favour of the giver rather than the receiver– that the
One withholds itself, thereby giving itself to philosophy, which requires it by refusing it.
If non-philosophy attains a point of unilateral equilibrium, of fulfillment proper to it, it is
through this inversion of binding into its point of immanence, which is not a dead-end but
rather the point at which there is a radical interiorization of the real and an inversion of
philosophy. A bind forms a point of immanence, but its principle is not radical

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immanence –it is rather a combination of the two, through topology for example. I spent
a long time looking for such a point: the point of the cogito, the point of Nietzschean
transmutation, the point of critique. Non-philosophy may well be philosophys critical
point, but it is not critique that makes the point; it is the ‘point that critiques. I consider
this long hunt for immanence to have reached its goal when immanence gives itself as
and through a unilateral leap –that of the (non-)One, which is the key to the hunt. Cloning
assembles and retroactively legitimates all those hesitant investigations, all those
contradictory hypotheses about the problem of the theorys internal coherence.

Consequently, with regard to philosophy there was, strictly speaking, no overturning but
rather a displacement. But a displacement without an operation can only be a utopia. And
what is displaced is philosophy as such, because displacement here resolves itself into a
‘en-placement. There is no non-philosophical gesture, just the leap or unilateral operation
whereby human utopia affects every possible site and frees or furnishes a ‘space for the
subject.

It will be objected that binding is more intelligible than cloning. But these solutions are
neither opposed nor complimentary. The real difficulty with this objection is that binding
is not straightforwardly and uniquely mathematical but also transcendental, and that such
a combination, which is difficult because it is an internalized topology, is precisely what
calls for the solution of unilateral duality in which cloning takes binding as its object.
This is what explains the possibility of taking philosophy as object for a real that does not
objectify it, but transforms it.

Non-philosophy is obviously not a theory of knowledge or a system in general. It is a

real-transcendental science of the world. The only way of discovering it is by relativizing
the exclusive primacy of the logic that hides it and prevents one noticing it in philosophy,
even of the non-analytical kind. We could say, in our customary style, that it is a
transcendental logic that is real-and-nothing-but rather than logical; one that is without-
logic or non formal, so to speak. Contrary to the logicist reduction of philosophy, which
leaves the hidden prerogatives of philosophical sufficiency intact, specifically in the form
of positivity and hence of a kind of dogmatism, this non-philosophical reduction of
philosophy is at once real-transcendental and capable of a wide variety of realizations,
not only in terms of logic but in terms of the sciences in general. There is an instance that
is more radical than logic, and this is the real. Not that it is possible to replace logic by
just any science while maintaining the same privileges for the latter. It is the universal
posture of science that must take the place which in philosophy is held by the restricted
universality of logic. Non-philosophy shatters the strictures of logic and analytical
reduction, just as it dissolves the residues of a compulsory, exclusive and primary logic in
the transcendental logic of philosophers, granting the transcendental the sole support of
the radical real, and hence the possibility of entering into combination with each of the
sciences. Non-philosophy is unified theory: a radical extension of philosophy beyond
transcendental logic, but one that deprives it of its traditional pretensions. As a result, it is
philosophy and its logical organon that lose their prerogatives by being turned into a
simply real-transcendental organon.

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Thus, it is necessary to take the expression ‘non-philosophy quite literally, so to speak. It

is not just a metaphorical reference to ‘non-Euclidean. It is possible for the One and the
(non-)One to be identical because we are no longer operating in the realm of
transcendence. Nothingness is transcendent but the non- is the One in all its immanent
uni-laterality. Non-philosophy is the inversion of philosophy; it is the ‘non- addressed to
philosophy by man, who is the presupposed that philosophy cannot get rid of. It is not
that there is philosophy first, which then has to be denied –philosophy is given from the
outset as suspended in the future by the future, and this is the determining condition for
its becoming the object of a new discipline.

As for the trilogy of real, philosophical material, and unilateral syntax (or determination-
in-the-last-instance), to which non-philosophy is often reduced, there is a sense in which
it bears a marked resemblance –despite the difference in content– to the Lacanian trio
RSI, and like the latter, it is merely a structural base for non-philosophy. I too could say,
like Lacan, that the latter is not an all-purpose grid, but rather a sort of vade-mecum,
dangerous to the extent that it traces the structure of the philosophical system by simply
distorting it. It has to be said that this trilogy was placed at the head of INPhO in the form
of three axioms so as to allow the latters constitution and functioning, but at the cost of a
certain approximation and the risk of encouraging a new kind of scholastic common
sense or formalism. A large part of my research has been devoted to putting this trilogy
into practice and extending it to new materials. But the principal task has been trying to
achieve a parallel adjustment of these instances so as to bring them all into play; tuning
and adjusting the instrument; coordinating and recalibrating the apparatus. INPhO was
constructed like an un-tuned instrument, in which everyone wants to play their part with
the instrument they have cobbled together themselves, preferring a free interpretation of
the axioms to their free effectuation. There is a fundamental problem concerning the
articulation of these three instances. Two tasks need to be carried out. The new
articulation of the three terms will have to 1) undo their topological and hence structural
organization, overcome the appearance that they are three by showing how they are each
time two, and that each of these two is ultimately ‘one while remaining ‘two from the
viewpoint of one of them; 2) define boundaries or degrees of freedom in the ‘preparation
of this apparatus, but in a way that does not end up destroying it.

In any case, non-philosophy did not invent ‘the real, or the One, or man (every
philosopher can take some credit for the latter), or even the idea of a ‘radical immanence
(there is Michel Henry and perhaps others as well –Maine de Biran? Marx?). On the other
hand, non-philosophy exists because it invented the true characteristics of the latter,
because it took the requirements of radicality seriously and distinguished between the
radical and the absolute. It has had to carry out a complete overhaul of the entire
philosophical apparatus even when it seemed closest to it. These characteristics are:
1. the full sense of immanence as real ‘before it assumes a transcendental function;
2. the necessity of treating immanence through immanence, rather than through a
transcendent overview. It is at once a structure and an immanent knowing of this
structure, or what I call ‘the vision-in-One;
3. philosophys being-already-given in-One, its unilation rather than external relation to
the real;

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4. the structure of real immanence as uni-laterality, uni-lateral (duality), as other than…

or alterity through immanence, rather than as a metaphysical point;
5. the coupling of real determination and determination-in-the-last-instance or
transcendental determination (cloning), and the thesis that Marxs concept provides a
symptom of the latter;
6. the unilateral duality of man and of the subject as a function with the world as free
variable;
7. the discovery of radical immanence or uni-laterality as human Messianism or
immanent future, its vocation to utopia and fiction;
8. the two aspects of the future language spoken by non-philosophical subjects: axiomatic
or mathematical, and philosophical or oracular.

Non-philosophy is a human mathematics –a formulation I would oppose to Leibnizs

conception of philosophy as a ‘divine mathematics. Radicality should be understood in
terms of these principles or modes of operation, which prevent one from mistaking it for
the radicality invoked by Descartes or Husserl. Everything can be summed up in terms of
the distinction between the radical and the absolute.

Lastly, a few words about these new possibilities.

Non-humanist. With topological binding, philosophy remained in the hands of a deus ex

machina: the philosopher or infant-king, who surveys and arranges the former like a
handyman assembling and destroying scale models of worlds, or a demon whispering
answers to Socrates. With cloning, it is finally man and man alone who is implicated in
philosophy. But man is not implicated in the way being is implicated as bound up with
the question of being. Man is the real or the answer, the minimal but insufficient
condition necessary for local resolutions. Non-philosophy is the primacy of man as non-
immanent over being and nothingness. It is to man and man alone, not to matter or
religion that it falls to reduce humanism, for example, along with the problems of which
humanism is symptomatic. Non-philosophy is the discovery that man is determining, and
that he is determining-in-the-last-instance as subject.

Non-theological. Insofar as man gives the world while remaining separate from it –but
not separate as an exception to it– non-philosophy invalidates all metaphysical problems
such as that of the creation, procession, emanation, or conversion of the world –the entire
philosophical dramaturgy. Man is a grace for the world. This is an inversion of the
philosophies of transcendence and of the divine call addressed to man, because it is now
the world that calls on man. Where philosophy knows exception, non-philosophy knows
–dare I say it– the miracle, but one that has been mathematized, shorn of its theological
transcendence.

Non-historical. The immanent real-one is also given as other than…or separated; as the
future that precedes the past and the present. Man is not consciousness, he is the force of
utopia or of immanent Messianism that accompanies his confrontation with the world and
inverts every possible course of history. Nietzsches overhuman ‘yes has to be included in

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the ‘no- that accompanies man from the depth of his immanence.

Non-literary. Non-philosophy is an activity of fiction both in thought and language; it

crowns the discipline of philosophical theory. New terms should surge forth from the
non-philosophical understanding in the way essences surge forth from the divine
understanding according to Leibniz. They should combine the enigmatic authority of the
oracle with the clarity of the theorem.

Ultimately, I see non-philosophers in several different ways. I see them, inevitably, as

subjects of the university, as is required by worldly life, but above all as related to three
fundamental human types. They are related to the analyst and the political militant,
obviously, since non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism –it transforms
the subject by transforming instances of philosophy. But they are also related to what I
would call the ‘spiritual type –which it is imperative not to confuse with ‘spiritualist. The
spiritual are not spiritualists. They are the great destroyers of the forces of philosophy and
the state, which band together in the name of order and conformity. The spiritual haunt
the margins of philosophy, gnosticism, mysticism, and even of institutional religion and
politics. The spiritual are not just abstract, quietist mystics; they are for the world. This is
why a quiet discipline is not sufficient, because man is implicated in the world as the
presupposed that determines it. Thus, non-philosophy is also related to gnosticism and
science-fiction; it answers their fundamental question –which is not at all philosophys
primary concern–: “Should humanity be saved? And how?” And it is also close to
spiritual revolutionaries such as Müntzer and certain mystics who skirted heresy. When
all is said and done, is non-philosophy anything other than the chance for an effective
utopia?

1[ Cf. Plato, Symposium, 203, b-c]

François Laruelle

[PDF]Axiomatic heresy - Middlesex University Research Repository

https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/211/1/r595025.pdf

by R Brassier - Cited by 35 - Related articles

will be equally quick to point out that Heidegger or Derrida wed formidable abstract inventiveness to.
Axiomatic heresy. The non-philosophy of François Laruelle.

[PDF]françois laruelle, a dictionary of non-philosophy - Parrhesia

www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia20/parrhesia20_james.pdf

by I James

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In his preface to the original French edition of the Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, François Laruelle writes
that its intention is to 'summarize the theoretical ... In his preface to the original French edition of the

Dictionary of Non-Philosophy
, François Laruelle writes that
its intention is to ‘summarize the theoretical acquisitions’ and to ‘present the essentials of the
technique’ of
non-philosophy. Given Laruelle’s reputation as a thinker whose writing can be enormously difficult
to access,
the presentation of his non-philosophical approach in a dictionary format should be a welcome
contribution to
the wider reception of this highly original body of thought. It is undoubtedly fair to say that, barring
notable
exceptions, Laruellian non-philosophy has not been as widely disseminated and engaged with to date
as it
might have been, with perhaps his most important works,
Philosophy and Non-philosophy
and
Principles of
Non-philosophy
being translated into English only last year, at the same time as this dictionary (by Univocal
and Bloomsbury respectively). It might be expected, therefore, that the dictionary format would
clarify the the
-
oretical and technical essentials of non-philosophy, as Laruelle claims, and aid the uninitiated in
relation to its
more difficult or opaque aspects and in relation to what Laruelle himself terms ‘non-philosophy’s
unique style
PARRHESIA
NUMBER 20 • 2014 • 129-31
In his preface to the original French edition of the
Dictionary of Non-Philosophy
, François Laruelle writes that
its intention is to ‘summarize the theoretical acquisitions’ and to ‘present the essentials of the
technique’ of
non-philosophy. Given Laruelle’s reputation as a thinker whose writing can be enormously difficult
to access,
the presentation of his non-philosophical approach in a dictionary format should be a welcome
contribution to
the wider reception of this highly original body of thought. It is undoubtedly fair to say that, barring
notable
exceptions, Laruellian non-philosophy has not been as widely disseminated and engaged with to date
as it
might have been, with perhaps his most important works,
Philosophy and Non-philosophy
and
Principles of
Non-philosophy
being translated into English only last year, at the same time as this dictionary (by Univocal
336
337

and Bloomsbury respectively). It might be expected, therefore, that the dictionary format would
clarify the the
-
oretical and technical essentials of non-philosophy, as Laruelle claims, and aid the uninitiated in
relation to its
more difficult or opaque aspects and in relation to what Laruelle himself terms ‘non-philosophy’s
unique style’.
Yet, necessarily perhaps, things cannot be quite so straightforward in relation to Laruellian thought.
This is
because the dictionary of non-philosophy must itself be rigorously non-philosophical in its operation
as a dic
-
tionary, and therefore it must, in a certain sense, function as a ‘non-dictionary’. In this context the
non-philo
-
sophical dictionary, just as much as Laruelle’s other writing, is performative and functions from the
perspective
of a certain suspension of the operations of determinate conceptuality, of the sense, meaning or
identity of terms
that would be presented in a traditional philosophical dictionary. Any reader expecting a
straightforward and
more or less pedagogical presentation and clarification of the key terms of Laruellian thought in this
volume
should therefore beware.
This means that, in practice, some prior knowledge of the theoretical acquisitions and technique of
non-philos
-
ophy is of great help when it comes to reading the very dictionary which would seek to summarize
those acqui
-
sitions and techniques. Laruelle’s opening essay ‘Theory of the Non-Philosophical Dictionary’
orientates the
reader to a certain extent, but draws heavily on terms and arguments that are given in far more detail
elsewhere,
FRANÇOIS LARUELLE,
A DICTIONARY OF NON-PHILOSOPHY
(UNIVOCAL 2013), TRANSLATED BY TAYLOR ADKINS
Ian James
ANTHONY PAUL SMITH,
A NON-PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF NATURE
most notably the two works cited above,
Philosophy and Non-philosophy
and
Prinicples of Non-philosophy
.

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It might therefore be worthwhile recapping some of the central tenets or axioms of Laruelle’s
thinking. It
could be noted, for instance, that non-philosophy, for Laruelle, is never to be understood as the
negation or
destruction of philosophy, but rather as a
science
or theory of philosophy. Non-philosophy can be understood
as a science in the structuralist sense insofar as it seeks to offer a rigorously formal definition of the
structure
of philosophy itself, and with this, a formal means of engaging with the materials of philosophy by
way of
a different structural gesture. Non-philosophy would be to philosophy, Laruelle tells us, what non-
Euclidean
geometries (Lobachevskian or Riemannian) would be to Euclidean geometries. The difficulty and
complexity
of Laruelle’s thinking lie in the means by which he seeks to accomplish this different structural
gesture and
thereby to achieve the ‘non-’ of non-philosophy. Necessarily, therefore, this different structural
gesture would
inform or underpin the practice of a non-philosophical dictionary.
The mutation of non-philosophical thinking, and the practice to which this mutation gives rise, is
derived from
the founding axiom of Laruellian thought: namely that the Real be understood in terms of radical or
absolute
immanence and as an indivisible and autonomous One. According to what Laruelle comes to call the
‘Vision-
in-One’, the absolute autonomy and indivisibility of the immanent Real dictate that it is always
irreducible to,
and in excess of, any and all operations of conceptual determination, of phenomenalisation, or of the
transcen
-
dence of consciousness and world. Yet this axiomatic vision also dictates that, at the very same time,
the real
is necessarily
immanent to
all these instances as their cause or determination in the last instance. As a science
or theory, non-philosophy understands philosophy itself as being always, in one way or another,
engaged in
operations of conceptual transcendence which supervene upon the immanence of the Real. This
would be true
structurally for all philosophy of whatever kind, whether it be ontology, epistemology, logic, or the
modes of
idealism, empiricism, of phenomenology, realism, or any other position, including recent French
philosophies
of difference. The constant or invariant structure that Laruelle identifies is one in which immanence
and tran
-
scendence are first posed by philosophy and then immanence is subjected to a form of ‘capture’ by
the transcen
338
339

-
dence of conceptual determination. In this way immanence and transcendence are ‘mixed’, and this
mixture is
‘synthesized’ into a whole. This whole would be philosophy’s determination of being taken together
with its
concomitant determination of the means by which being can be grounded or known, that is, its
determination
of truth, reason, logic and so on. Put differently philosophy poses ‘being’ or existence on the one
hand and its
representation in concepts or categories on the other, and it then constructs, or legislates for, the
equivalence,
identity, or unity of these in the universality of philosophical truths and foundations. Philosophy thus
positions
itself as the unifying transcendent principle which governs the original division or opposition. In this
way
it also founds its own authority (in a very circular manner, Laruelle argues) at the very same moment
that it
founds the ‘truth’ of being and existence.
From the Laruellian perspective, however, all philosophies necessarily exist on a plane of
equivalence in rela
-
tion to the One of the Real, that is to say, they all and equally have no purchase upon it whatsoever,
and the
foundations philosophy purports to offer are always entirely illusory. Divergent philosophical
approaches or
traditions may have stark differences in relation to the way they configure the instances of being,
world, con
-
sciousness, truth etc. and their interrelation, but the vision-in-One necessarily poses them as
equivalent in rela
-
tion to absolute immanence. In this context, then, non-philosophical thought and practice emerges as
a specific
use of the materials of philosophy from the perspective of the Vision-in-One, and according to the
axiom of the
absolute immanence, autonomy and indivisibility of the Real. The affirmative goal here is a freeing
of thought
from the authority and, Laruelle would argue, authoritarianism of philosophical determination and
from the
hierarchies of truth, value, and reason that the authority of different philosophies would seek to
impose. Non-
philosophy sets itself up as a democratisation of thought and of its freeing in the name of a certain
creativity
and production of as yet undetermined future thought forms and practices.
The non-philosophical dictionary needs therefore to be understood as a
non
-dictionary insofar as it treats its
entries according to non-philosophical axioms and insofar as it, in Laruelle’s own words, ‘reduces
the secret
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340

claim of every dictionary [...] to project the totality of sense and exhaust the real’ (31). This has the
direct
PAUL J. ENNIS
consequence, of course, that any reader who approaches the dictionary as means of gaining a clear
idea of the
identity, sense or determinate meaning of Laruelle’s non-philosophical terminology will find that it is
precisely
the identity or non-identity of its terms in relation to the real and the effect of this upon sense that is
at stake
or in question in the pages of this work. On the positive side, the dictionary enacts a further
affirmation of
Laruelle’s democratisation of thought. All the terms treated are treated with respect to a ‘democratic
equality of
terms’ and their equality or equivalence in relation to the Real. This, it should be noted, is not exactly
a relativ
-
ism in which every term or concept is equally true or levelled in its specificity, since in a sense all
terms retain
their specificities, their distinctive traits and the legacy of their respective philosophical contexts. All
the terms
in this dictionary are treated as equal or equivalent in relation to the Real only, that is, in relation to
that which
determines them ‘in-the-last-instance’. So the terms presented in the dictionary are given their full
philosophi
-
cal specificity but also articulated in their new function as non-philosophical materials which are
placed or
‘emplaced’ in relation to an immanent Real upon which they can have no purchase at all.
On a less positive note there is always the possibility that, in its ambition to summarize the
theoretical acquisi
-
tions and techniques of non-philosophy, the (non-)dictionary necessarily pre-supposes those
acquisitions and
techniques and, in a somewhat circular and obscure manner, performs itself as yet another difficult
and hard
to access modification or mutation of philosophical practice in which the integrity of the non-
philosophical
gesture is preserved at the expense of the very ambition which gives the dictionary its purpose. That
said, the
structure of each entry mitigates this problem somewhat insofar as the term in hand is given a
summary defini
-
tion and commentary, is then followed by a short paragraph detailing significant points in the
philosophical
history of the term, and is then followed by an explication of the term in the light of its non-
philosophical usage
or its status as non-philosophical material. A wide variety of philosophical and distinctively non-
philosophical

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terms are covered and some of the most important entries, for instance those on the ‘Vision-in-One’
and ‘De
-
termination-in-the-last-instance’ are genuinely helpful and illuminating.
At the heart of Laruellian thinking, and despite its difficulty of access and ‘unique style’, there is a
highly
original account of the way in which all concepts, philosophies, thought-forms, and all modes of
lived ex
-
istence, consciousness and experience are determined or caused by the immanent Real. In a way this
is an
ultra-realism rather than an extreme relativism since it is a matter, for Laruelle, of thought dispensing
with the
illusory foundations of philosophical determination in order to align itself axiomatically with, and in
favour
of, the only real base of thought, that of the immanent Real itself. There is arguably a reversal of
Kantianism
here which is comparable to the similar but different reversals of Kantianism sought by thinkers such
as Alain
Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux and, more broadly, by those bodies of contemporary thought which
have gathered themselves under the banner of speculative realism. The effectivity of the Laruellian
non-philosophical
gesture will no doubt have to be judged by the future forms of thought that his thinking engenders or
allows
in its freeing or democratizing of philosophical materials and practice. And this, as Laruelle himself
affirms, is
arguably the main purpose and interest of the
Dictionary of Non-philosophy,
which functions less as a vehicle
for the clarification or pedagogical presentation of the identity of its terms, and far more as a means
of inciting
or engendering the ‘non-philosophy to come’ (19).
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

[PDF]François Laruelle, Théorie générale des victimes - Parrhesia

www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia16/parrhesia16_galloway.pdf

by A Galloway

François Laruelle, the highly idiosyncratic French thinker and promulgator of ... Laruelle's newest book to
appear in French, Théorie générale des victimes [A ...

[PDF]Francois Laruelle S Principles Of Non Philosophy PDF Online

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with compatible format of pdf,ebook, epub, mobi and kindle. You can read online or download Francois
Laruelle S Principles Of Non Philosophy, this book is.

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[PDF] Francois Laruelle s Principles of Non-Philosophy: A Critical ...

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Sep 25, 2016

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Laurelle. A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy - François Laruelle.pdf

https://www.scribd.com/.../Laurelle-A-New-Presentation-of-Non-Philosophy-Francois...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Laruelle

Laruelle claims that all forms of philosophy (from ancient philosophy to analytic philosophy to
deconstruction and so on) are structured around a prior decision, but that all forms of philosophy
remain constitutively blind to this decision. The 'decision' that Laruelle is concerned with here is the
dialectical splitting of the world in order to grasp the world philosophically. Laruelle claims that the
decisional structure of philosophy can only be grasped non-philosophically. In this sense, non-
philosophy is a science of philosophy.

Contents
 1 Non-philosophy according to Laruelle
 2 Role of the subject
 3 Radical immanence
 4 Sans-philosophie
 5 Precursors
 6 See also
 7 References
 8 Further reading
 9 External links
 Henology (from Greek ἕν hen, "one") refers to the philosophical account or discourse on
"The One" that appears most notably in the philosophy of Plotinus.[1] Reiner Schürmann
describes it as a "metaphysics of radical transcendence" that extends beyond being and
intellection.[2] It can be contrasted with ontology, as ontology is "an account of being"
whereas henology is an "account of unity."
 Areas of inquiry
 Henology stands in contradistinction to several other philosophical disciplines. The term
"henology" refers to the discipline that centers around The One, as in the
philosophies of Plato and Plotinus. It is sometimes used in contradistinction to
disciplines that treats Being as its starting point (as in Aristotle and Avicenna) and also to
those that seek to understand Knowledge and Truth (as in Kant and Descartes).[3]


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Laurelle presenting his 'Non-Philsophy' in a short article by gynther11 in Types > Presentation

Controversy over the Possibility of a Science of Philosophy.

La Decision Philosophique No. 5, April 1988, pp62-76

Translated by Robin Mackay (http://blog.urbanomic.com/dread/). Work in progress. 22

February 2005.

This debate followed a conference on "The Community of Researchers", held under the

auspices of the Forum of the College International de Philosophie. Jacques Derrida had

agreed to open the discussion. For which we thank him. The citations are taken from

that conference. (F.L.)

Jacques Derrida:

Mine is not an easy task. After what you’ve just heard, you can see what a risk I took in

speaking of the François Laruelle’s "polemos".

You have spoken to us in the name of a certain peace. It is true that, in regard to polemos

and of terror, there were moments I must say I have sometimes been tempted to recognize

in the description that you give of philosophical terror, as transcendental constituent of

philosophy, etc., a rigorous analysis of what you have done here. At moments – because

I haven't succumbed to the temptation. I shall nevertheless try to say something else. I

am obliged to play the role of devil's advocate here.

Amongst all the questions that I would have liked to have asked you, slowly, patiently,

text in hand, as in a philosophical society or in a scientific community, from among all

these questions, it seems natural for me to select a few and formulate them in a schematic

fashion, since we haven't much time, and to refrain, at least for the time being, from

referring to your latest book1.

I am going to state in a word or two, bluntly, the questions that occured to me whilst you

343
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were speaking, and my perplexities.

Would you say that the scientific community, the community of science, of the new

science which you have described, is a community without a socius, in the sense in which

you have defined the socius?

The question is not about whether you have shown adequate caution, but rather about the

manner in which your precautions run riot and counteract one other. When you speak of

the essence of science, being careful to say that what is at stake is this essence apart from

its political and social appropriations, that is to say prior to what one calls its effectivity,

its effectivity rather than its reality, where are we to find this essence of science, which

science in its effectivity always falls short of? What is it apart from of its effectivity, its

political and social appropriations? This is a very general question, which I will naturally

try to expand upon with the other questions which I have prepared.

1 Les philosophies de la différence, Paris: P.U.F., 1986.

My first question – and it is a massive one – concerns the reality of the real which you

constantly evoked in your talk, or, and it comes down to the same thing, the scientificity

of this science, the new science, since they are related one to the other. You oppose

reality to a number of things; you oppose it to the totality: it is not the whole, beings as a

whole; you have distinguished it, most insistently, from effectivity and from possibility.

The distinction between reality and possibility doesn’t seem all that surprising. What is

more surprising is when you oppose reality, on the other hand, to philosophy. If we ask

you in a classical manner or in what you call the ontologico-heideggerian manner, “what

is the reality of this real”, and whether it is a specification of being, you would I suppose

dismiss this type of question, which belongs still to the regime of philosophico-

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345

ontological discourse, and even to its deconstruction, since one can so easily assimilate

the latter to the former. Such a question would still be governed by this law of

philosophical society to which you oppose the real, the new science, the community.

What makes it difficult to go along with the movement I would like to accompany you in,

is that it sometimes appears to consist in operating a sort of violent shuffling of cards in a

game whose rules are known to you alone... I mean to say that ultimately the hand is

totally reshuffled. The only thing I seem to detect – and this is probably a philosophical

illusion on my part, one I ask you to disabuse me of – is a philosophical and real

programme which is already tried-and-tested. For example, when you say the following:

"By way of contrast, one can pose another question, that of [science’s] conditions

of reality. I am careful not to say its ‘conditions of possibility’, these being the

metaphysical and the State combined together with the metaphysical and

philosophical interpretation of science, but rather its transcendental conditions of

reality..."

On what condition is research a real activity rather than a social illusion? This is all the

more crucial given that you go on to state:

"The problem is therefore that of a critique of reason [let us say heuristical]; of a

real and not merely philosophical critique."

Is this distinction pertinent for a transcendental philosophy? Can a transcendental

philosophy distinguish between the possible and real in the way that you do?

I have to say that I often find myself in agreement with you. For example, your initial

description of the researcher, of research such that in effect it would seem to follow a

certain Heideggerian logic, in the description you gave of the principle of reason, and

what you have said about programming and about non-goal-oriented research, which in

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fact reinstitutes a goal..., all this, I was ready to subscribe to. And then you went on to

oppose this new science distinguished from its social, political, etc., appropriations, and

there, obviously, I got the impression that you were reintroducing in this description, in

this concept of the new science, of the One, of the real, etc., certain philosophemes, that

of the transcendental being only one of them. There, all of a sudden, I said to myself: he

is once again trying to pull the trick of the transcendental, of auto-foundation, of auto-

legitimation, at the same time he claims to have radically broken with it. So if, for

example, the distinction "possible/real" is pertinent outside philosophies of the

transcendental type, then another hypothesis arises, which I immediately have to dismiss

along with you: isn't this distinction already characteristic of marxist or neomarxist type

of programme? Real and no longer philosophical: at least insofar as the philosophical is

restricted to a theoretical rather than transformational interpretation and hence would

remain confined within what we call the social illusion. But you rule out this hypothesis

by telling us that when you say real, you are not referring to material structures. So I

understood that this type of marxist-style interpretation is among the things that you want

to rule out.

You claim that:

"This amphiboly of the philosophy of the real, which is the secret of the

philosophical decision, can only be discovered in accordance with another,

generally non-philosophical experience of the real."

There I would have liked you to have said very pedagogically what you meant by a

‘generally non-philosophical experience of the real’.

You also claim that:

"Philosophy and unconstrained research are the abundant forgetting of their real

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essence, not of their conditions of possibility but of their conditions of reality.

There is no forgetting of philosophy, on the other hand there is a forgetting by

philosophy, as principle of sufficient philosophy, of its own real essence."

And a little further on we encounter this notion of ‘force’ concerning which I will have

many questions to ask you:

"It is this latter thesis that must be radically contested in order to found a critique

that would be more forceful than all the deconstructions of philosophical

sufficiency."

This motif of force reoccurs even more forcefully, but associated this time with a project

of auto-foundation, of transcendental legitimation – these are the words you use, with

inverted commas, and my question relates to the inverted commas, in the end. I could

have been very brief and simply asked you: what is the status of inverted commas in your

texts?

For example, when you say:

"This instance must be real rather that material; it must be of a cognitive order in

order to measure up to philosophy and to research, finally it must find its

foundation and legitimation in itself, without requiring the mediation of

philosophy, which is to say that it must be transcendental in its own way";

My question, my perplexity and the point I ask you to elucidate is: what a transcendental

project of auto-foundation, of non-philosophical auto-legitimation, when it is non-

philosophical? And when you go on to attribute this non-philosophical project of auto-

foundation, auto-legitimation, to a science, to what you call science as distinct from all its

appropriations, which you also call the force of thought (you yourself underline the

"the"), my question, then, is: What is it in this force, this science, that is not

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philosophical, etc?

This force will be a force capable, I don’t want to go too far by saying capable of

imposing peace, but ultimately it is a force in the name of which the peace proper to the

community of this new science will be possible. What is this force belonging to a subject

whose undivided identity, without identification, anterior to division, will ultimately

found a community? When one knows, after having read you, that the One to which you

refer in your discourse and on the basis of which you critique – you prefer "critique" to

"deconstruct" – or rather, send philosophy packing; when this force, this subject, this

science, this undivided subject, is a One which you specify in your book is not the

identical, must not be understood in the classically philosophical sense of the One, what

then is the difference between this One and the entire chain that accompanies it, i.e.

science, the real, the entire community, the enforced peace, free peace?

What, then, is the difference between this One and what others call ‘difference’, since it

is not identity?

Ultimately, all the questions that I want to ask come down to this schema: why do you

reduce – and isn't there a violence here of the type you denounce in philosophical

society? – so many gestures which could accompany you along the path you wish to

pursue? To take just one example among many, the gesture of proposing scientific

approaches which no longer conform to the conception of current practices, to the

philosophical concept of science; of interrogating certain discourses which claim to be

scientific, of helping science making critical progress through movements which would

no longer conform to what is understood in those appropriations you have spoken of?

Why ignore the existence of this gesture in the various deconstructions which you evoked

in passing?

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Why, when this or that approach advances propositions very similar to yours – for

example, with regard to constitution, since you have said that some things are un-

constituted – why class these gestures with everything else you dismiss? It is obvious

that amongst the movements of the deconstructive type, which you have thought about

and whose analysis you have developed at greater length in your book, there is among

other things a movement to deconstruct the model of constitutition, to avoid that

constitutive or constitutional schema that you have identified with everything you want to

reject.

Why proceed thus if not on account of a gesture tantamount to sociophilosophic war?

Here, rather bluntly put, are all the questions that I would have liked to have been able to

formulate better, in a situation other than one of improvisation and haste.

To what do you tie your concept of democracy, what does ‘democracy’ mean, if you

empty this concept of all its philosophemes?

François Laruelle:

I notice that all your questions are interrelated, obviously; they form a coherent whole,

just as one might expect. These questions are indicative of the resistance of the Principle

of sufficient philosophy.

Jacques Derrida:

No surprise there, needless to say…

François Laruelle:

Which is to say that your questions had a very particular style, which I found very

interesting, that of retortion: "You are just like those you criticize", "You’re doing just

what you claim to abhor". You taught me in your work that one must be wary of

retortion. So I would like to suggest that to the extent that you are making a certain use

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of retortion, and this is a theme that recurred throughout, right up to the end via the

accusation of socio-philosophical war, then necessarily the case that some of your

objections say, in a certain sense, precisely the opposite of what I said.

I take the first of your questions. You tell me that I am practicing terror.

[protestations from Jacques Derrida]

Am I practicing terror? There are two readings of my text, obviously. There is a

philosophical reading, one in which I do practice terror. And there is a non-philosophical

reading, which is obviously my reading. And from the latter point of view, I am reluctant

to concede that I am practicing terror. I would like to suggest to you why not.

I was very careful to say that terror is bound up with overturning. I only used the word

"terror" in contexts that related it to overturning.

So, are the relations I have described between science and philosophy relations of

overturning?

Absolutely not. The whole problem for me, having studied your work along with that of

other contemporary philosophers, lies in defining a point of view that would not be

acquired philosophically; which is to say, a point of view that would not be acquired via

philosophical operations, be they those of doubt, controversy, or overturning as principal

philosophical operation, and even displacement insofar as it is of a piece with

overturning. From science to philosophy, because I return to this point – and it is this

direction that governs everything I write – there is no overturning. There is merely a

delimitation but one that does not take the form of an overturning. However, maybe it

should be made more explicit, there is a limitation of philosophy by science, that is all.

But above all I do not overturn philosophy; were I claiming to overthrow it, then that

would be pointless gesture, a zero-sum game. The entire enterprise would then be

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contradictory.

Jacques Derrida:

When you say that you are calling into question the sufficiency of philosophy, in what

way is this gesture different from a host of others, mine among them? Why erase the

latter gesture and consign it to the realm of sufficiency?

François Laruelle:

You often say that I conjoing ontology and deconstruction. Obviously I only conjoin

them under certain conditions, I do not put conflate them in general terms, and I have

sufficiently emphasized in other works how seriously I take the difference between

certain forms of metaphysics and your work on and in metaphysics. But if I allow myself

to conjoin them, it is in the name of the struggle against the Principle of sufficient

philosophy, and in that regard alone. What is more, I do call any philosophy into

question, since I posit the equivalence of all philosophical decisions.

What is probably wounding for philosophers is the fact that, from the point of view I

have adopted, I am obliged to posit that there is no principle of choice between a classical

type of ontology and the deconstruction of that ontology. There is no reason to choose

one rather than the other. This is a problem that I have discussed at great length in my

work (Les philosophies de la différence), whether there can be a principle of choice

between philosophies. Ultimately, it is the problem of the philosophical decision. And I

sought a point of view – one can query the manner in which I arrived at it, or constituted

it – which implies the equivalence of all philosophical decisions, or in other words, what

I call democracy and peace.

Obviously, I only defined democracy and peace insofar as these might be pertinent to a

community of philosophers, and within that context. So I am not at all conflating your

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work with a classical ontology, not at all. But in the name of the principle of sufficient

philosophy, and since I adopt a point of view which allows one to discover that principle,

I am obliged to stipulate that equivalence. Because the principle of sufficient philosophy

cannot be discovered from within philosophy. It can only be discovered from elsewhere.

But I would like all the same to return to the problem of terror because it it is really close

to my heart.

There is no overturning of philosophy. There is not even a reduction in the Husserlian

sense or a bracketing of philosophical decision. There is, if one wants to take up the term

reduction – but you will challenge me on the use of philosophical terms so I will come

back to this presently – there is what I call an already-accomplished reduction, an already

present reduction of the philosophical decision by science. science is precisely

not constituted in the same way in which a philosophy is Because

constituted, through a set of

operations certain of which might be transcendental reductions; science is already a

transcendental reduction in act. And this is why the order that I follow, the real order, is

the order that proceeds from science to philosophy. If you follow the opposite trajectory

– and as a philosopher who is in a certain sense governed by the principle of sufficient

philosophy, you cannot but follow the opposite trajectory – then you will necessarily

experience my gesture as a particularly aggressive one. But I am bound to tell you – and

this is the consistency proper to my position – that your impression of terrorism and

aggression is an impression that is internal to philosophical resistance, a mechanism of

philosophical self-defence.

So, on to the second problem: the new science. It seems to me that, unless I made a

mistake, I did not speak of a "new science"?

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Jacques Derrida:

I am absolutely sure of it.

François Laruelle:

If I did, then it is, in a certain sense, a philosophical lapse, precisely. Philosophy is

always stronger than one imagines. In no way do I want to speak of a "new" science:

precisely because what I mean by science, is just what everyone else means by science.

What I don’t want to do is to reiterate the philosophical distinction between the so-called

empirical sciences, and transcendental science. This is precisely the distinction I don’t

want to make because to do so would be to reconstitute a hierarchy whereby philosophy

can characterize itself as thinking whilst relegating science to the status of a mere blind

technical production of various kinds of knowledge.

Since my concept of the transcendental differs from the use to which philosophy puts it,

my concept of the empirical will also be different from the its use in philosophy. For me

all sciences, even those which philosophy degrades by calling them ‘empirical’, all these

sciences partake of transcendental structures. They are already consistent in themselves,

they already have access to the real. On the other hand, what is possible is a science,

perhaps “new” – one might call it new insofar as it has yet to be constructed – a science

that I will call transcendental science and which whose goal will consist simply of

describing the transcendental constitution of the sciences which philosophy calls

"empirical". But this transcendental science is not superior to the empirical sciences,

since it no longer relates to them in the ways in which philosophy related to them. It is a

science that is absolutely side-by-side with the others. In a certain sense, there is a

community, a kind of equivalence among all sciences, whether ordinary or

transcendental. I wanted to break the relation of domination which philosophy enjoys

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over the other sciences.

Jacques Derrida:

This is what you wrote:

"Thus a community of researchers in philosophy will be democratic and

peaceable only if it refrains from founding itself upon the principle of sufficient

philosophy, in order to consider itself as the subject of science. And if it then

contents itself with treating philosophy simply as the object of a new science and

with new practices elaborated on that basis..."

François Laruelle:

What I describe with the term ‘essence of science’, are the structures of any science

whatsoever. Once these transcendental structures have been elaborated, or rather once

these already existing structures have been described (it is not my description that creates

them) it then becomes possible to envisage a specific science for philosophy and, to some

extent, so to speak, scientificity such as I understand it to the study of philosophy itself.

In this sense, yes, there is a new science to create, but the science I describe, this is the

most banal, the most ordinary kind of science.

You have also asked me: Is there not a socius within science? Yes, obviously: I have

alluded to it in when I said, with regard to the politics of science, that the latter are an

overdetermination of transcendental structures, which I have not analysed here. I left

them on one side precisely because it is an overdetermination. But obviously, the

sociological, political, economic intrications of science need to be analysed, and its

transcendental structures include or may be affected by the effective conditions of

production of forms of knowledge. I do not deny this.

You also asked the question: where do we find the essence of science?

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It's obviously the principal question in a sense, because it means: from where do you

derive what you are telling us? There are two ways of answering this question: a

philosophical answer, which I don't want to give, and a rigorously transcendental answer.

The philosophical response would be to say: having reflected upon the philosophical

decision and the ultimate prerequisites for transcendence, for the mixture of

transcendence and immanence, I concluded that philosophy assumed something like the

One and that the One had always been presupposed by philosophy but the essence of the

latter had never been elucidated by philosophy.

But I have to say that this response didn’t satisfy me at all

, which is that of philosophy because it entailed my taking a position in your territory, and
having to give a "false" (the term is perhaps not quite right) description of what is at stake. The
true answer that I

must make to you – maybe it seem appear a little cavalier to you – but ultimately it is as

simple as the question itself:

"Where do I get this from?"

I get it from the thing itself. There is as rigorous an answer as I am able to give. Because

the criteria for my discourse was a rigorously immanent or transcendental criterion, there

is no other answer I can give without placing myself on the terrain of effectivity, and I

neither can nor want to think science on the basis of transcendental effectivity.

Jacques Derrida:

I don't understand what is meant by "transcendental" outside of philosophy. But when

you tell us: my response, it is the thing itself, then, I want to put two questions to you:

isn't this a philosophical move here: the appeal to the thing itself? What, which, what is

the thing itself?

François Laruelle:

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The One is the thing itself.

Jacques Derrida:

You think that the relation to the One as the thing itself is an experience that is non-

philosophical?

François Laruelle:

Yes, precisely because it is not a relation. This is the crux of the misunderstanding,

which is to say that you persist in wanting to make a philosophical reading through the

prism or the optic of the philosophical decision, albeit a decision which has been worked

upon, you persist in wanting to read what I do through the medium of philosophy.

No doubt you will object: "but you constantly use philosophy. In whose name do you use

the term ‘transcendental’ or the term ‘One’ if not in the name of philosophy?"

I have to tell you that this is an absolutely normal, common, standard objection; it is

always the one people put to me first: “you use philosophy to talk about something you

pretend is not philosophical”. Listen...the objection is so fundamental that it is

tantamount to indicting me of a primitive, rudimentary self-contradiction, in my terms. It

is entirely obvious that I allow myself the right, the legitimate right, to use philosophical

vocabulary non-philosophically.

It is the defining characteristic of philosophy, of the principle of sufficient philosophy,

and its unitary will, to believe that all use of language is ultimately philosophical, sooner

or later. Philosophy, which I characterize as a "unitary" mode of thought, cannot imagine

for a single instant that there are language can be used in two ways: there is the use of

language in science, which is not at all philosophical, contrary to what philosophy itself

postulates in order to establish itself as a fundamental ontology or epistemology of

science; and the use of language in philosophy. Philosophy postulates that every use of

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language is a use with a view to the logos or that which I call a use-of-the-logos,

language being taken as constitutive of the being of things. From this point of view, if

there were the only possible us of language, then obviously, there is no question of

escaping from philosophy. But I postulate – in reality I do not postulate, since I begin by

taking them as indissociably given from the outset, the bloc of real as One and a certain

use of language which corresponds to this particular conception of the real. Since I take

as indissociably given from the outset a certain use of language, which is not that of the

logos, and the One that founds it, I do not contradict myself, I do not relapse into

philosophical contradiction. Philosophy has a very deeply ingrained fetishism, which is

obviously that of metaphysics but which may not be entirely destroyed by the

philosophical critiques of metaphysics; and this is the ultimate belief that ultimately every

use of language is carried out with a view to being, in order to grant being, or to open

being, etc., that every usage of language is "positional".

Now science – I don't have time to develop this here – makes a non-positional, non-thetic

use of language. There is an entire theory of scientific representation waiting to be

elaborated, because it doesn't have at all the same "ontological" structure as philosophical

representation. I think that most of the objections put to me are a consequence of this

belief that there is only one use of language, and that not only does being speak through

language, but as soon as you speak, it is ultimately being that speaks and you are no more

than an intermediary. It is this belief that science extirpates. That is why I allow myself

to use the word ‘transcendental’ under conditions which are no longer ontological, my

only problem then being to display a requisite degree of internal rigour or consistency,

that is to say to transform the word ‘transcendental’ so as to render it better suited to

describe this non-thetic experience that the One is. So, if I continually oppose the One of

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science, which from my point of view explains scientific thought’s profoundly realist

character, its blind aspect, its deafness to the logos, its unbearable character for

philosophy; if I distinguish this particular One from philosophical unity, this is for

reasons that are relatively precise, ones which provided the starting point for these

investigations. It seems to me that philosophy cannot help but deploy itself in a hybrid

structure that combines transcendence and immanence. Whatever their modes, however

varied these two coordinates, philosophical space is a space with two coordinates,

transcendence and immanence. It may be that metaphysical transcendence has a kind of

tain or lining of alterity; that may well be possible, in which case there would no longer

be just two dimensions, but three or four, one could try to discover them. But it seems to

be a defining characteristic of philosophy to combine something like a position with

something like a decision, and hence to deploy unity, but to always deploy unity along

with its opposite. This opposite may not always be given immediately, one may have the

impression that it has been expelled from immanent unity, but, in reality, transcendence

returns in the form of a pedagogy: you are told that the soul must identify itself with the

One...Philosophy thereby shifts to a pedagogical stance which reintroduces

transcendence, and as a result the One of philosophy...(there is no doubt that the subject

is obliged to identify with the One) simultaneously transcends the subject.

But I claim that science’s paradoxical nature for philosophy, its fundamentally obscure

and unreflective character from the viewpoint of philosophy – which explains why

philosophy has denigrated it throughout the centuries, since Plato at least, and right up

through to Heidegger ("science does not think") follows from the fact that with science

immanence is given from the from the outset in itself and solely by itself. "Absolutely

immanent data," Husserl used to say, are without “the slightest fragment of world”. I am

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in fact very close to Husserl, of course, but with a difference that is truly the crucial non-

philosophical difference, which is that in Husserl, in spite of everything, a transcendental

reduction is required in order to actualise the transcendental ego. But I claim that in

science, no preliminary transcendental reduction is required: we already start from the

One. Which obviously seems rather odd, this is not where we expected to find science!

We start from the One, rather than arriving at it. We start from the One, which is to say

that if we go anywhere, it will be toward the World, toward Being. And I frequently use

a formulation which is obviously shocking to philosophers and particularly those of a

Platonist or Plotinian bent: it’s not the One that is beyond Being, it is Being that is

beyond the One. It is Being that is the other of the One.

Hence this great upheaval, this seismic shift in philosophical concepts, which philosophy

is in a certain sense obliged to suppress. But as I have often repeated, it is neither a

permutation or an overturning.

As to the distinction between the possible and the real, obviously, it is initially a

philosophical distinction. But in philosophy one distinguish the empirical real and the

possible (the a priori), and then the real of possibility; one envisages a synthesis or a

mixture of possibility and the real. All I am saying, is that science is a type of thinking

that is realist in the last instance and that is exclusively realist. At least initially, or in the

last instance, because obviously I haven't developed the analysis of science, particularly

the problem of objectivity which would have complicate matters a little. But science in

its principle or absolute foundation does not acknowledge the possible, it knows only the

real. Obviously, it will make use of the possible and effectivity, but it will make use of

them only on this basis, which is to say that contrary to philosophy, which very often

starts from the empirical in order to pose the possible or a priori in opposition to the

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empirical – you know all the problems this generated for Kantianism, and how the

NeoKantians tried to overcome this problem of the a priori posed in opposition to the

empirical; it is a problem that the disciples of Kant and by Fichte were already aware of

–, science starts directly from the One, that is to say from the most radical experience

there could be. It is necessary to start from the real, otherwise you will never get to it.

Who wants the real? Philosophy. And wanting the real, it never gets it, which is to say

that it has realization instead: in other words, war...

The force in the name of which peace is imposed?

If I grant myself this force as One, through a use of language which corresponds to this

anteriority of the real over representation, then I am quite straightforwardly obliged to

deduce peace from it, a non-divisive peace, as I said; I must deduce it from science, I

cannot do otherwise, it is simply a matter of rigour. So either you’re saying that this

whole project is an act of force, in which case, obviously, all of its details are also acts of

force; or we have to start from this One and this real.

As for the interpretation in terms of an‘act of force’ I am perfectly willing to

acknowledge its plausibility one I position myself on the terrain of philosophy. But I

think that once one has, not made the leap, because it's precisely not a matter of a leap,

but rather realized the ‘stance’ proper to science, there is no act of force. I did not claim

to be exiting philosophy, that's not my project at all...My project is quasi-scientific and

science has not governed by any practical ence, at least not to my knowledge. In this

regard, I am very Spinozistic: we must absolutely eliminate all teleology. Science

contents itself with description and my attitude is purely descriptive. In reality, science

contents itself with describing the order of the real, and the order of the real is that which

goes from science toward philosophy. It is philosophy which transcends science; science

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is not some sort of black block or black transcendence for philosophy, contrary to what

some claim.

I understand why one may have a impression of terror or of a totally uncompromising set

of demands. I think that in theory there can be no compromise, unless compromise is

constitutive of the real. But since I don’t think that compromise is constitutive of the

real, I make none, I remain content with being consistent, which is to say that I try to

elaborate a rigorous science.

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07/10/13 12.32ONPhI : A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy - François Laruelle
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5. the coupling of real determination and determination-in-the-last-instance or transcendental
determination (cloning), and the thesis that Marxs concept provides a symptom of the latter;
6. the unilateral duality of man and of the subject as a function with the world as free variable;
7. the discovery of radical immanence or uni-laterality as human Messianism or immanent future,
its vocation to utopia and fiction;
8. the two aspects of the future language spoken by non-philosophical subjects: axiomatic or
mathematical, and philosophical or oracular.
Non-philosophy is a human mathematics –a formulation I would oppose to Leibnizs conception of
philosophy as a ‘divine mathematics. Radicality should be understood in terms of these principles
or modes of operation, which prevent one from mistaking it for the radicality invoked by Descartes
or Husserl. Everything can be summed up in terms of the distinction between the radical and the
absolute.
Lastly, a few words about these new possibilities.
Non-humanist. With topological binding, philosophy remained in the hands of a deus ex machina:
the philosopher or infant-king, who surveys and arranges the former like a handyman assembling
and destroying scale models of worlds, or a demon whispering answers to Socrates. With cloning, it
is finally man and man alone who is implicated in philosophy. But man is not implicated in the way
being is implicated as bound up with the question of being. Man is the real or the answer, the
minimal but insufficient condition necessary for local resolutions. Non-philosophy is the primacy of
man as non-immanent over being and nothingness. It is to man and man alone, not to matter or

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religion that it falls to reduce humanism, for example, along with the problems of which humanism
is symptomatic. Non-philosophy is the discovery that man is determining, and that he is
determining-in-the-last-instance as subject.
Non-theological. Insofar as man gives the world while remaining separate from it –but not separate
as an exception to it– non-philosophy invalidates all metaphysical problems such as that of the
creation, procession, emanation, or conversion of the world –the entire philosophical dramaturgy.
Man is a grace for the world. This is an inversion of the philosophies of transcendence and of the
divine call addressed to man, because it is now the world that calls on man. Where philosophy
knows exception, non-philosophy knows –dare I say it– the miracle, but one that has been
mathematized, shorn of its theological transcendence.
Non-historical. The immanent real-one is also given as other than…or separated; as the future that
precedes the past and the present. Man is not consciousness, he is the force of utopia or of
immanent Messianism that accompanies his confrontation with the world and inverts every possible
course of history. Nietzsches overhuman ‘yes has to be included in the ‘no- that accompanies man
from the depth of his immanence.
Non-literary. Non-philosophy is an activity of fiction both in thought and language; it crowns the
discipline of philosophical theory. New terms should surge forth from the non-philosophical
understanding in the way essences surge forth from the divine understanding according to Leibniz.
They should combine the enigmatic authority of the oracle with the clarity of the theorem.
Ultimately, I see non-philosophers in several different ways. I see them, inevitably, as subjects of
the university, as is required by worldly life, but above all as related to three fundamental human
types. They are related to the analyst and the political militant, obviously, since non-philosophy is
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close to psychoanalysis and Marxism –it transforms the subject by transforming instances of
philosophy. But they are also related to what I would call the ‘spiritual type –which it is imperative
not to confuse with ‘spiritualist. The spiritual are not spiritualists. They are the great destroyers of
the forces of philosophy and the state, which band together in the name of order and conformity.
The spiritual haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosticism, mysticism, and even of institutional
religion and politics. The spiritual are not just abstract, quietist mystics; they are for the world. This
is why a quiet discipline is not sufficient, because man is implicated in the world as the presupposed
that determines it. Thus, non-philosophy is also related to gnosticism and science-fiction; it answers
their fundamental question –which is not at all philosophys primary concern–: “Should humanity be
saved? And how?” And it is also close to spiritual revolutionaries such as Müntzer and certain
mystics who skirted heresy. When all is said and done, is non-philosophy anything other than the
chance for an effective utopia?
1[ Cf. Plato, Symposium, 203, b-c]
François Laruelle
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Laurelle presenting his 'Non-Philsoophy' in a short article
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www.materiologiques.com Appel à contribution pour le n°5 de philo-fictions C’est sous le signe de
l’engagement que la revue Philo-Fictions souhaite organiser sa prochaine livraison (n°5). Tout en se
maintenant dans l’orbe des dispositifs de la non-philosophie, et désormais de la philosophie non-standard, les
textes proposés chercheront à s’insérer dans l’un des types suivant, leurs variations, extensions ou

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croisements n’étant bien entendu pas exclus : - Dualyses dimensionnelle, dont les thèmes possibles, très
variés, sont titrés ici de façon rhapsodique, chaque auteur conservant la liberté d’en agencer les fils
comme il ou elle l’entend : o Télos et pistis – l’en-vue-de-quoi l’on s’engage, les formes
d’une intentionnalité d’engagement, la foi et l’objet de l’engagement, … o Hypokheimenos,
ontos, logos et bios – quel sujet s’engage ? pour quelle écriture ? quelle parole ? quel témoignage ?
quelle manifestation ? o Praxis, krisis, ethos– structures de l’acte engagé, le choix, la fidélité et la
consistance des engagements, le jeu. .. o Polis, kratos – l’engagement plus spécifiquement politique,
conflits et coopérations, appropriation d’autrui et de soi-même, les jeux du pouvoir et de la résistance. .. o
Ergon, enèrgeia, entropia – où il serait question de lutte, de risque, de contrôle et de maîtrise, de limitations
de l’action, de résistance derechef… Organisation Non-philosophique Internationale Des nouvelles de
l'épistémologieLettres non- philosophiquesPhilo-fictions, la revueStatuts et membresTextes et Recherches -
GlossaireAgenda - InterventionsCollections - Bibliothèque - VideosFAQ - Forum - Liens - Plan
07/10/13 12.32ONPhI : A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy - François Laruelle Page 2 of
19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html o Philosophia et sophia – plus
spécifiquement, nature de l’engagement philosophique, non-philosophique, de l’engagement dans la
pensée, dans le refus de la pensée, jusqu’au désengagement, à la Gelassenheit ou au lâcher-prise… o
Etc. - Dualyses pratiques : au-delà des thématiques évoquées, les formes les plus diverses sont encore
recevables, pour peu qu’elles témoignent d’un engagement travaillé dans et par l’unilatéralité,
depuis l’immanence radicale : o Libelles, manifestes et actes de foi o Règles de conduite, manuels o
Biographies, « autophilofictions », journaux o Poèmes, scénarios o Peintures et dessins, enregistrements de
performance, musique, dialogues o Etc. Veuillez envoyer vos contributions en français et en anglais (.doc) Ã
philofictions@onphi.org au plus tard le 30 octobre 2013. A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy Let me begin in
traditional terms: what is the essence, what are the possibilities of non-philosophy? From the outset, it originated
from four concerns that were coupled two by two; and hence from dualities. It continued to develop in terms of
dualities, constantly calling them into question but never dispensing with them entirely. Its current possibilities or
themes are merely a continuation or development of this (non-) essence… …Thus, my point of view here will be
historical and systematic. This reconstruction after the fact cannot avoid appearing to be a piece of retrospective
self-interpretation, but since fidelity here is not to a historically predetermined meaning or truth, but to a last
instance, and hence to the spirit of dualities, I stop short of anything that could draw us into a hermeneutics. The
genealogy of non-philosophy is problematic. Born, like everything else, of the intersection between two original and
loosely coupled problems –whose coupling was not quite as arbitrary as the encounter between Poros
[Expediency] and Penia [Poverty]1 – non-philosophy has always refused to be their synthesis, and hence their
offspring. Philosophy was born of the one-sided encounter between a sleeping being (Poros) and the desire for a
child (Penia), but as a philosopher Plato ultimately remains beholden to biology –he does not get right to the
bottom of Poros sleep, because he still attributes it to drunkenness and closed eyes, to a merely slumbering
intelligence. Similarly, he does not get right to the bottom of Penias poverty, because he still attributes her desire for
a child to her sighting of Poros. Plato does not go beyond the pharmakon as coupling, as condition for the couple or
procreation. This filiation is not that of non-philosophy. Like every child, she consents to be born according to
biological conditions, but she refuses the continuity of birth; she is an orphan and it is she who decides to be born
“according to X―. She sees in the drunkenness of her father merely the symptom of mans blindness, of an un-
learned knowing; and sees in her mothers desire for a child the symptom of the impossible desire for being-blind.
Not refusing the past, but refusing to be determined by it, presenting herself as the daughter of man, her problem is
that of being and remaining ahead of the image of the newborn. It is in this simply human manner that she escapes
from the biological and familial cycle and provides –without founding a new family or some sort of new city–
the basis-in-person for a new type of organization: an organization of heretics, of sons or daughters of man who are
continuously newborn, grateful orphans of philosophy and the world. As for the act of birth, whereas philosophy is
destined to parricide and is only capable of acknowledging its filiation through this founding crime, non-philosophy
tries to avoid the synthesis of expediency and poverty that is parricide. Born according to X, which is to say,
according to man as the unknown, non-philosophy joins its parents to the city of brothers and sisters, elevating its
own filiation to utopian status.
07/10/13 12.32ONPhI : A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy - François Laruelle Page 3 of
19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html In actuality, the structure (but not the
origin) of non-philosophy consists of a principal duality and a secondary duality. The principal duality is the
following: 1. The enigmatic character of the One, of its essence, its origin; the fact that it is forgotten and
subordinated to Being. The Heideggerean preoccupation with Being and the Lacanian and Derridean preoccupation
with the Other rendered this forgetting of the One more crucial, as though the circle of philosophy had not been fully

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covered in its entirety. Philosophy continuously talked about the One, presupposed it, invoked it, but without
properly thematizing it. 2. There was another kind of forgetting in the guise of philosophys abusive attitude, its
abuse of power in general; the way in which it laid claim to reality and truth, but also to domination; the arbitrary
nature of its questioning. How was such a form of thinking possible? One that claimed to be undeniable without
furnishing any credentials other than its own practice and tradition, rather like an unfounded and interminable
rumour? So, on the one hand an entity that reigns without governing: the One; and on the other a discipline that
claims to provide a theoretical domination of the world and of other forms of thought to such an extent that it
presumes to have a proprietary claim on “thinking―. I found myself faced with a new and apparently artificial
duality, since in normal circumstances the One was, after all, merely an object of philosophy. But this duality was
accompanied by another, which seemed to graft itself upon it necessarily, as though it provided the means for
realizing it. This was the duality of science and philosophy, which I have up until now tended to privilege as a
guiding thread when recapitulating the history of non-philosophy, and which continues to hold sway in the idea of
non- philosophy as a discipline. There is a sense in which I have never exited from this space, from its type of
duality and internal unity; even if, as I hope to show, it has undergone contractions and expansions –and above all
redistributions. My problem was never that of the one and the multiple, even if I often evoked it. But in non-
philosophy one must be wary of confusing the object with which one struggles, and the essence of the struggle, the
former frequently occluding the latter. My problem has been that of the One and the two, in the sense in which the
two is something specific and not synonymous with the multiple. My problem has to do with a tradition that differs
from, or is parallel to, that of philosophy. It has to do with the struggle with philosophy. It is a transcendental
mathematics, but one that will have to abandon the Platonic or philosophical form of transcendental numbers, and
stop being a divine mathematics (Leibniz). Thus, it is a struggle on two times two fronts: that of the One and that of
the two, that of the definition of philosophy and that of science. That makes at least four fronts. This quadripartite
structure of the struggle is the dimension within which I have confronted another quadripartite, the one constituted
by the philosophers who ‘influenced me, as they say. When reconstructing the history of non-philosophy, I have
often confused this second quadripartite with the first, committing a category mistake by according it an excessive
influence, when in fact it was already no more than the material for the first, or a terrain for the struggle. These
problems were resolved as I came to understand that instead of trying to unify these four sides philosophically by
binding or suturing them together in a relational exteriority, I could do so through another kind of unity, one effected
through a radically immanent cloning. As a result, the notions of ‘struggle and ‘front undergo a transformation.
What was required was a unilateral leap, which is to say, abandoning all pretension on the side of the One, no longer
positing it as one of the sides or terms of the quadripartite, acknowledging its collapse or non-consistency. This
meant giving up at the same time the idea of a ‘head to head struggle and elaborating the notion of a unilateral
front. That every struggle engages two fronts but only puts one combatant into play was a riddle that was resolved
when it turned into its own solution. This involves a shift from the divine Logos to a practice placed under the name-
of-man. The problematic of the quadripartite, of its binding or cloning, has the advantage of allowing a synoptic
overview of all the stages –even the most rudimentary– in the research that led to non- philosophy, and of not
dismembering it in terms of historical distinctions. Before being non-
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19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html philosophical, the magma from which
non-philosophy emerged has all the characteristics of a pre- philosophical chôra, from its deepest to its most
superficial layer, like a landmass or conglomerate rising up when the tectonic plates underlying the philosophical
continent start breaking up. The division of non-philosophy intro three stages privileges a historical overview and
should be inscribed within the structure of the quadripartite. I will confine myself here to sketching an outline and
drawing a continuous guiding thread for the development of non-philosophy, while passing over two kinds of
circumstance that played a part and affected this development. On the one hand, the innumerable hesitations,
misgivings, amendments and variations in the binding of these two terms. For in the beginning it was question –
as it is for every philosopher– of identifying the point of suture between the two sides of this duality, which
philosophy had summarily realized or admitted in the form of systems and their traditions. On the other hand, there
were the personal conditions under which non-philosophy existed, adverse institutional circumstances, all sorts of
phantasms, various interests that exceeded the bounds of philosophy alone –these do not need to be recalled here
since we are trying to identify a structure and the history contained in it. For the moment, it is still a question of
binding rather than of cloning. These dualities were already present in the initial series of works grouped together
under the heading Philosophy I, but were still being resolved to the benefit of the side of philosophy and binding,
and to the detriment of the One and science. The shift to Philosophy II occurs by way of an overturning: it is now
the One which becomes the principal theme and assumes the mantle of the real, and philosophy that is evaluated in
terms of the Ones capacity for being conceived ‘for itself and as such, or as immanent. This is the gist of Le

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principe de minorité [The Minority Principle (1981)]. But… … Non-philosophy does not effectively or
successfully begin until Une biographie de lhomme ordinaire [A Biography of the Ordinary Man (1985)], because it
is there that the problem of how to bind the four sides together is thematized and basically formulated –albeit not
without difficulties– through the notion of unilaterality. The conditions for this solution are that the One acquire a
radical autonomy with regard to philosophy, that it stop being a philosophical object, and that the latter is revealed to
be a transcendental appearance. It is as though an over-neoplatonization of the One was accompanied by a
corresponding over-kantianization of philosophy as appearance… …Formulated in this way, without satisfying the
pretensions of philosophy vis-Ã -vis the One, the problem increased in difficulty. We had deprived ourselves of
every philosophical solution. Nevertheless… …the germ of the solution resided in this excessive separation
between the One and philosophy, which amounted to a sort of Platonic chorismos. In effect, the cause of their
exteriority or reciprocal autonomy, and hence of their unity, could no longer be philosophical or one that operated
through transcendence. Moreover, the One in question was no longer epekeina-physical, or beyond being, so that, on
the contrary, what caused this separation had to be its radical immanence. But how could radical immanence be
reconciled with exteriority? At this stage, as my path momentarily crossed that of Michel Henry, the other half of the
problem remained unresolved –specifically: how could one still use philosophy –which was not designed for
this end– to speak of this One or radical immanence? The initial project of a theoretical domination of philosophy
and of a critique of its transcendental appearance reappeared in a new form: that of the transformation of
philosophical statements or phrases. This was the Idea of a theoretical discipline with philosophy as its object. All of
Philosophy I and a large part of Philosophy II is
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19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html devoted to a twofold task. On the one
hand, to a more and more precise binding of the duality which is outside every system or synthesis by combining
three requirements: that of the Ones radical immanence; that of the unilaterality this duality; and finally that of the
reduction of the logos to the status of a structured appearance or material. On the other hand, to the search for a
discourse that would no longer be the logos and whose resources (despite this discourse being appropriated by the
causality of the One) would be provided by philosophy alone. Thus, to the constitution of a discipline of philosophy
in view of thinking the One. But to present non-philosophy in this way, in terms of a problem of binding, is to tip the
scale in favour of philosophy once again –albeit philosophy as the object of a discipline. It may be that this is a
step forward. And I admit that it is possible to freeze the development of non-philosophy at one or other of its
stages, so long as its essential conditions of existence are acknowledged. I believe much of the work that will be
presented to you today develops this aspect and this concept of non- philosophy as a rigorous discipline of
philosophy –an aspect which, let me repeat once more, is very real. Nevertheless, there is obviously the risk of an
excessive formalization of the rules governing this practice, in the manner of a universally recognizable corpus
guaranteeing a certain epistemological coherence… …Non-philosophy is neither a universal method taking over
from deconstruction, nor an immanent process in which method and material, rational and real, are fused together, as
in Hegel. Everything depends on how unilaterality binds –if I may be allowed to continue using this term– the
opposing terms. Although non-philosophy has a disciplinary aspect, it is not just another discipline. For it is in fact
the other side, that of the One, which must, by definition, have primacy over philosophy from the outset, and it is
according to it that one should unilaterally balance or unbalance the quadripartite as a whole. The One is not just the
condition of possibility for non- philosophy –this formulation is too Kantian and empirico-idealist. It is however
its presupposed, and as such is not once again at the service of philosophy. Unlike a condition or presupposition,
which disappears into the conditioned, the presupposed has an autonomy that is irreducible to the conditioned.
Whence the necessity of developing this side of the One so as to turn it into, if not the centre, then at least the
principal aspect of non-philosophy. In fact, the essential gains, those that condition the theory, were made on the
side of the One –not the One alone, but precisely this logic of unilaterality which goes together with the One and
its immanence. And it so happens that the successful adjustment of the second duality –that of philosophy and
science– depends on the kind of solution one has found for the first. How is one to reestablish the structures
unilateral equilibrium? Uni-laterality should no longer be understood in a Hegelian sense as abstraction of one side
at the expense of the other. It has to be understood as a formulation close to two others used by contemporary
philosophers. It is similar to 1) ‘no-relation in Lacans ‘there is no sexual relation. The real in Lacan as well as in
non-philosophy is without relation in the sense that it excludes symbolic and linguistic relation. It is generally
foreclosed to relation, as is required by radical immanence or the fact that, as Lacan says, the real always comes
back to ‘the same place. It is also similar to 2) ‘relation-without-relation in Derrida, who puts the absence of
relation or the Other who is without relation at the heart of relation, i.e. the Logos. In other words, Lacan and
Derrida are moved by antithetical motives with regard to the real: the former wants to exclude all relation, while the
latter is content to differentiate relation through its other and hopes to find the real in an affect of absolute Judaic

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alterity. Their difference can be situated between two conceptions of the other, but it does not basically touch on the
real. Both conceive of the ‘without-relation in the same way: the former (Lacan) as opposed to relation, or as
non(-relation); the latter (Derrida), more subtly, as at the very least indissociable from relation. In
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19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html either case, psychoanalysis or
deconstruction, relation is presupposed as that in terms of which the real must be posited. And relation is
transcendence or a certain kind of exteriority. Both cases remain within the realm of philosophy and seek
immanence, the without-relation, through opposition or in terms of an ultimate reference to transcendence. Under
these conditions, the real cannot be radically relationless, even in Lacan where the real and the symbolic are linked
through topology. Can one follow Lacan but go beyond Lacan by positing a real that is de-symbolized, un- chained
from the signifier, unconditioned by it; yet one which, as in Derrida, nevertheless continues to have a proven effect
on the logos or symbolic realm in general? What I have called uni-laterality is the solution without synthesis to this
problem. It is the only kind of relation tolerated by the real as immanence and primacy over philosophy. On the one
hand, it is essentially a radical non-relation, as in Lacan –but one which is genuinely radical this time because its
non-relationality follows from its immanence. More than ever, the real returns to the same place, to such an extent
that it no longer defines one and is u-topic through and through. But on the other hand, it does not remain alone
because it is separated (from) the logos or the world –it is also an Other, but without relation to transcendence,
which would otherwise continue to define it and constitute it. It is Other-than…relation, rather than Other
to…relation, whether as opposed to it (Lacan), or partially internalized by it (Derrida). There is an alterity that goes
with the One but it is itself One or radical immanence. There is no longer an Other of the Other as there necessarily
is in psychoanalysis and philosophy. This is why I use the term ‘unilation instead of the word ‘relation. This the
place of the non-philosophical concept of uni-laterality: between Hegel who reduces it to an abstraction of the
understanding; Lacan who ultimately does not understand it and tolerates it only in order to cancel it in the
signifying chain through which he thinks he acknowledges it; and Derrida and others, who try to give it a status but
still within the realm of philosophical exteriority. The radical has primacy over the uni-lateral, but primacy is not
itself a relation. More concretely, consider a philosophical system, i.e. a dyad of terms that are opposed or correlated
through a third term which is itself divided between an immanent or transcendental One and a One that transcends
the dyad. We move to a unilateral duality in the following way. The One is no longer divisible into real and
transcendental, it is real and takes the place of one and only one term in the dyad: it now constitutes one of the two
terms as indivisible and is simply immanent to the new duality. But the status of the second term in the dyad is also
immediately transformed. It is no longer face to face with the One, which is immanent even from the perspective of
this second term, and yet it exists and makes up a duality with the One without being face to face with it; hence
without entering into relation with it. We will say that this second term is also in-One or immanent even though it is
expelled from the One, which it does not constitute. More precisely, we will say that it is expelled only insofar as the
One is radically separate from what it gives or manifests. This is why I continue to repeat that philosophy, which is
the second term, is given in a radically immanent fashion or in the mode of the One, even as it is expelled from the
One… …The unilateral duality excludes the two major types of traditional solution: the theory of relations and the
theory of judgments. It is not a relation, whether internal or external, and it is not a judgment, whether analytic or
synthetic. It is precisely because it has none of the characteristics of a system that non-philosophy, which excludes
synthesis as well as analysis, possesses the quasi or non-analytic power of systems and their subsets, as well as the
quasi or non-synthetic power of the systems which it brushes up against in each of their points. We use the term
‘dualysis to designate this activity carried out through unilateral dualities, which analyze without an operation of
analysis and synthesize without an operation of synthesis. Non-philosophical statements are neither contained
analytically within those of philosophy nor added synthetically to them. It is not a matter of complex judgments and
interpretation, but of transformation through the force of unilaterality.
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19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html Unilaterality proceeds through two
stages. The first is that of the real, whose immanence is no longer that of a punctual, still transcendent interiority, but
a being-separate from what it expels, or rather that which it is separated from. The second is transcendental and
takes this other term into account. It relates to philosophy, which, expelled-in-One so to speak, now calls for help
from the real. In the first phase, there is already duality, but on the basis of the One and its primacy: the second term
is mentioned without yet being referred to. In the second phase, duality is explicitly present but on the basis of
philosophy –although it does not go so far as to constitute a two. The immanence of the One and the
transcendence proper to philosophy are now so tightly and intimately bound together that there is no longer any
relation but only an alterity of the One, which is an immanence without relation to philosophy –even though it
gives or manifests philosophy while separating itself from it… …The work undertaken since the book on non-

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marxism [Introduction to Non-Marxism (2000)] has sought to carry out this intimate binding of the two sides and to
justify the discipline devoted to philosophy through the primacy and uni-laterality of the One. Thus, as I have
already said, I accept that it may be necessary to isolate aspects or moments of non- philosophy in order to examine
them, or even –why not– develop them into independent disciplines. Nevertheless, one should bear in mind non-
philosophys indivisible duality, the fact that it is structured in phases, so as not to separate in an abstract fashion the
One from philosophy, and vice versa. But we have seen why this indivisibility or intimacy of non-philosophy is not
that of a system. The truth is that we find ourselves here at the heart of the non-philosophical solution. By striving to
bind and suture together opposed terms, we are forced to realize not only that that they were not really opposed, but
that they are not bound together and that the genuinely guiding problematic for us may not be philosophical –we
have been trying to prize it free from philosophy piece by piece. Non-philosophy, which began as a problem of
binding, unbinding and rebinding, is radically fulfilled as something that we could never have imagined, since we
were deceived by the exteriority of philosophy. It is fulfilled as a cloning. If all philosophy comes down to a
question of binding, non-philosophy comes down to a question of cloning, which is also the answer to the question
of binding. The One gives its identity to philosophy precisely insofar as the latter refuses it –an identity which
philosophy both refuses and requires. We could say –parodying Lacans famous formula about love by inverting it
in favour of the giver rather than the receiver– that the One withholds itself, thereby giving itself to philosophy,
which requires it by refusing it. If non- philosophy attains a point of unilateral equilibrium, of fulfillment proper to
it, it is through this inversion of binding into its point of immanence, which is not a dead-end but rather the point at
which there is a radical interiorization of the real and an inversion of philosophy. A bind forms a point of
immanence, but its principle is not radical immanence –it is rather a combination of the two, through topology for
example. I spent a long time looking for such a point: the point of the cogito, the point of Nietzschean transmutation,
the point of critique. Non-philosophy may well be philosophys critical point, but it is not critique that makes the
point; it is the ‘point that critiques. I consider this long hunt for immanence to have reached its goal when
immanence gives itself as and through a unilateral leap –that of the (non-)One, which is the key to the hunt.
Cloning assembles and retroactively legitimates all those hesitant investigations, all those contradictory hypotheses
about the problem of the theorys internal coherence. Consequently, with regard to philosophy there was, strictly
speaking, no overturning but rather a displacement. But a displacement without an operation can only be a utopia.
And what is displaced
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displacement here resolves itself into a ‘en-placement. There is no non-philosophical gesture, just the leap or
unilateral operation whereby human utopia affects every possible site and frees or furnishes a ‘space for the
subject. It will be objected that binding is more intelligible than cloning. But these solutions are neither opposed nor
complimentary. The real difficulty with this objection is that binding is not straightforwardly and uniquely
mathematical but also transcendental, and that such a combination, which is difficult because it is an internalized
topology, is precisely what calls for the solution of unilateral duality in which cloning takes binding as its object.
This is what explains the possibility of taking philosophy as object for a real that does not objectify it, but transforms
it. Non-philosophy is obviously not a theory of knowledge or a system in general. It is a real- transcendental science
of the world. The only way of discovering it is by relativizing the exclusive primacy of the logic that hides it and
prevents one noticing it in philosophy, even of the non- analytical kind. We could say, in our customary style, that it
is a transcendental logic that is real- and-nothing-but rather than logical; one that is without-logic or non formal, so
to speak. Contrary to the logicist reduction of philosophy, which leaves the hidden prerogatives of philosophical
sufficiency intact, specifically in the form of positivity and hence of a kind of dogmatism, this non- philosophical
reduction of philosophy is at once real-transcendental and capable of a wide variety of realizations, not only in terms
of logic but in terms of the sciences in general. There is an instance that is more radical than logic, and this is the
real. Not that it is possible to replace logic by just any science while maintaining the same privileges for the latter. It
is the universal posture of science that must take the place which in philosophy is held by the restricted universality
of logic. Non-philosophy shatters the strictures of logic and analytical reduction, just as it dissolves the residues of a
compulsory, exclusive and primary logic in the transcendental logic of philosophers, granting the transcendental the
sole support of the radical real, and hence the possibility of entering into combination with each of the sciences.
Non-philosophy is unified theory: a radical extension of philosophy beyond transcendental logic, but one that
deprives it of its traditional pretensions. As a result, it is philosophy and its logical organon that lose their
prerogatives by being turned into a simply real-transcendental organon. Thus, it is necessary to take the expression
‘non-philosophy quite literally, so to speak. It is not just a metaphorical reference to ‘non-Euclidean. It is
possible for the One and the (non-)One to be identical because we are no longer operating in the realm of
transcendence. Nothingness is transcendent but the non- is the One in all its immanent uni-laterality. Non-

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philosophy is the inversion of philosophy; it is the ‘non- addressed to philosophy by man, who is the presupposed
that philosophy cannot get rid of. It is not that there is philosophy first, which then has to be denied –philosophy is
given from the outset as suspended in the future by the future, and this is the determining condition for its becoming
the object of a new discipline. As for the trilogy of real, philosophical material, and unilateral syntax (or
determination-in-the-last- instance), to which non-philosophy is often reduced, there is a sense in which it bears a
marked resemblance –despite the difference in content– to the Lacanian trio RSI, and like the latter, it is merely
a structural base for non-philosophy. I too could say, like Lacan, that the latter is not an all- purpose grid, but rather
a sort of vade-mecum, dangerous to the extent that it traces the structure of the philosophical system by simply
distorting it. It has to be said that this trilogy was placed at the head of INPhO in the form of three axioms so as to
allow the latters constitution and functioning, but at the cost of a certain approximation and the risk of encouraging a
new kind of scholastic common sense or formalism. A large part of my research has been devoted to putting this
trilogy into practice and extending it to new materials. But the principal task has been trying to achieve a
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19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html parallel adjustment of these instances
so as to bring them all into play; tuning and adjusting the instrument; coordinating and recalibrating the apparatus.
INPhO was constructed like an un-tuned instrument, in which everyone wants to play their part with the instrument
they have cobbled together themselves, preferring a free interpretation of the axioms to their free effectuation. There
is a fundamental problem concerning the articulation of these three instances. Two tasks need to be carried out. The
new articulation of the three terms will have to 1) undo their topological and hence structural organization,
overcome the appearance that they are three by showing how they are each time two, and that each of these two is
ultimately ‘one while remaining ‘two from the viewpoint of one of them; 2) define boundaries or degrees of
freedom in the ‘preparation of this apparatus, but in a way that does not end up destroying it. In any case, non-
philosophy did not invent ‘the real, or the One, or man (every philosopher can take some credit for the latter), or
even the idea of a ‘radical immanence (there is Michel Henry and perhaps others as well –Maine de Biran?
Marx?). On the other hand, non-philosophy exists because it invented the true characteristics of the latter, because it
took the requirements of radicality seriously and distinguished between the radical and the absolute. It has had to
carry out a complete overhaul of the entire philosophical apparatus even when it seemed closest to it. These
characteristics are: 1. the full sense of immanence as real ‘before it assumes a transcendental function; 2. the
necessity of treating immanence through immanence, rather than through a transcendent overview. It is at once a
structure and an immanent knowing of this structure, or what I call ‘the vision-in-One; 3. philosophys being-
already-given in-One, its unilation rather than external relation to the real; 4. the structure of real immanence as uni-
laterality, uni-lateral (duality), as other than… or alterity through immanence, rather than as a metaphysical point; 5.
the coupling of real determination and determination-in-the-last-instance or transcendental determination (cloning),
and the thesis that Marxs concept provides a symptom of the latter; 6. the unilateral duality of man and of the subject
as a function with the world as free variable; 7. the discovery of radical immanence or uni-laterality as human
Messianism or immanent future, its vocation to utopia and fiction; 8. the two aspects of the future language spoken
by non-philosophical subjects: axiomatic or mathematical, and philosophical or oracular. Non-philosophy is a
human mathematics –a formulation I would oppose to Leibnizs conception of philosophy as a ‘divine
mathematics. Radicality should be understood in terms of these principles or modes of operation, which prevent one
from mistaking it for the radicality invoked by Descartes or Husserl. Everything can be summed up in terms of the
distinction between the radical and the absolute. Lastly, a few words about these new possibilities. Non-humanist.
With topological binding, philosophy remained in the hands of a deus ex machina: the philosopher or infant-king,
who surveys and arranges the former like a handyman assembling and destroying scale models of worlds, or a
demon whispering answers to Socrates. With cloning, it is finally man and man alone who is implicated in
philosophy. But man is not implicated in the way being is implicated as bound up with the question of being. Man is
the real or the answer, the minimal but insufficient condition necessary for local resolutions. Non-philosophy is the
primacy of man as non-immanent over being and nothingness. It is to man and man alone, not to matter or religion
that it falls to reduce humanism, for example, along with the problems of which humanism
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discovery that man is determining, and that he is determining-in-the-last-instance as subject. Non-theological.
Insofar as man gives the world while remaining separate from it –but not separate as an exception to it– non-
philosophy invalidates all metaphysical problems such as that of the creation, procession, emanation, or conversion
of the world –the entire philosophical dramaturgy. Man is a grace for the world. This is an inversion of the
philosophies of transcendence and of the divine call addressed to man, because it is now the world that calls on man.
Where philosophy knows exception, non-philosophy knows –dare I say it– the miracle, but one that has been

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mathematized, shorn of its theological transcendence. Non-historical. The immanent real-one is also given as other
than…or separated; as the future that precedes the past and the present. Man is not consciousness, he is the force of
utopia or of immanent Messianism that accompanies his confrontation with the world and inverts every possible
course of history. Nietzsches overhuman ‘yes has to be included in the ‘no- that accompanies man from the
depth of his immanence. Non-literary. Non-philosophy is an activity of fiction both in thought and language; it
crowns the discipline of philosophical theory. New terms should surge forth from the non-philosophical
understanding in the way essences surge forth from the divine understanding according to Leibniz. They should
combine the enigmatic authority of the oracle with the clarity of the theorem. Ultimately, I see non-philosophers in
several different ways. I see them, inevitably, as subjects of the university, as is required by worldly life, but above
all as related to three fundamental human types. They are related to the analyst and the political militant, obviously,
since non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism –it transforms the subject by transforming instances
of philosophy. But they are also related to what I would call the ‘spiritual type –which it is imperative not to
confuse with ‘spiritualist. The spiritual are not spiritualists. They are the great destroyers of the forces of
philosophy and the state, which band together in the name of order and conformity. The spiritual haunt the margins
of philosophy, gnosticism, mysticism, and even of institutional religion and politics. The spiritual are not just
abstract, quietist mystics; they are for the world. This is why a quiet discipline is not sufficient, because man is
implicated in the world as the presupposed that determines it. Thus, non-philosophy is also related to gnosticism and
science-fiction; it answers their fundamental question –which is not at all philosophys primary concern–:
“Should humanity be saved? And how?― And it is also close to spiritual revolutionaries such as Müntzer
and certain mystics who skirted heresy. When all is said and done, is non-philosophy anything other than the chance
for an effective utopia? Let me begin in traditional terms: what is the essence, what are the possibilities of non-
philosophy? From the outset, it originated from four concerns that were coupled two by two; and hence from
dualities. It continued to develop in terms of dualities, constantly calling them into question but never dispensing
with them entirely. Its current possibilities or themes are merely a continuation or development of this (non-)
essence… …Thus, my point of view here will be historical and systematic. This reconstruction after the fact cannot
avoid appearing to be a piece of retrospective self-interpretation, but since fidelity here is not to a historically
predetermined meaning or truth, but to a last instance, and hence to the spirit of dualities, I stop short of anything
that could draw us into a hermeneutics. The genealogy of non-philosophy is problematic. Born, like everything else,
of the intersection between two original and loosely coupled problems –whose coupling was not quite as arbitrary
as
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19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html the encounter between Poros
[Expediency] and Penia [Poverty]1 – non-philosophy has always refused to be their synthesis, and hence their
offspring. Philosophy was born of the one-sided encounter between a sleeping being (Poros) and the desire for a
child (Penia), but as a philosopher Plato ultimately remains beholden to biology –he does not get right to the
bottom of Poros sleep, because he still attributes it to drunkenness and closed eyes, to a merely slumbering
intelligence. Similarly, he does not get right to the bottom of Penias poverty, because he still attributes her desire for
a child to her sighting of Poros. Plato does not go beyond the pharmakon as coupling, as condition for the couple or
procreation. This filiation is not that of non-philosophy. Like every child, she consents to be born according to
biological conditions, but she refuses the continuity of birth; she is an orphan and it is she who decides to be born
“according to X―. She sees in the drunkenness of her father merely the symptom of mans blindness, of an un-
learned knowing; and sees in her mothers desire for a child the symptom of the impossible desire for being-blind.
Not refusing the past, but refusing to be determined by it, presenting herself as the daughter of man, her problem is
that of being and remaining ahead of the image of the newborn. It is in this simply human manner that she escapes
from the biological and familial cycle and provides –without founding a new family or some sort of new city–
the basis-in-person for a new type of organization: an organization of heretics, of sons or daughters of man who are
continuously newborn, grateful orphans of philosophy and the world. As for the act of birth, whereas philosophy is
destined to parricide and is only capable of acknowledging its filiation through this founding crime, non-philosophy
tries to avoid the synthesis of expediency and poverty that is parricide. Born according to X, which is to say,
according to man as the unknown, non-philosophy joins its parents to the city of brothers and sisters, elevating its
own filiation to utopian status. In actuality, the structure (but not the origin) of non-philosophy consists of a
principal duality and a secondary duality. The principal duality is the following: 1. The enigmatic character of the
One, of its essence, its origin; the fact that it is forgotten and subordinated to Being. The Heideggerean
preoccupation with Being and the Lacanian and Derridean preoccupation with the Other rendered this forgetting of
the One more crucial, as though the circle of philosophy had not been fully covered in its entirety. Philosophy
continuously talked about the One, presupposed it, invoked it, but without properly thematizing it. 2. There was

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another kind of forgetting in the guise of philosophys abusive attitude, its abuse of power in general; the way in
which it laid claim to reality and truth, but also to domination; the arbitrary nature of its questioning. How was such
a form of thinking possible? One that claimed to be undeniable without furnishing any credentials other than its own
practice and tradition, rather like an unfounded and interminable rumour? So, on the one hand an entity that reigns
without governing: the One; and on the other a discipline that claims to provide a theoretical domination of the
world and of other forms of thought to such an extent that it presumes to have a proprietary claim on
“thinking―. I found myself faced with a new and apparently artificial duality, since in normal circumstances
the One was, after all, merely an object of philosophy. But this duality was accompanied by another, which seemed
to graft itself upon it necessarily, as though it provided the means for realizing it. This was the duality of science and
philosophy, which I have up until now tended to privilege as a guiding thread when recapitulating the history of
non-philosophy, and which continues to hold sway in the idea of non- philosophy as a discipline. There is a sense in
which I have never exited from this space, from its type of duality and internal unity; even if, as I hope to show, it
has undergone contractions and expansions –and above all redistributions. My problem was never that of the one
and the multiple, even if I often evoked it. But in non-philosophy one must be wary of confusing the object with
which one struggles, and the essence of the struggle, the former frequently occluding the latter. My
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19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html problem has been that of the One and
the two, in the sense in which the two is something specific and not synonymous with the multiple. My problem has
to do with a tradition that differs from, or is parallel to, that of philosophy. It has to do with the struggle with
philosophy. It is a transcendental mathematics, but one that will have to abandon the Platonic or philosophical form
of transcendental numbers, and stop being a divine mathematics (Leibniz). Thus, it is a struggle on two times two
fronts: that of the One and that of the two, that of the definition of philosophy and that of science. That makes at
least four fronts. This quadripartite structure of the struggle is the dimension within which I have confronted another
quadripartite, the one constituted by the philosophers who ‘influenced me, as they say. When reconstructing the
history of non-philosophy, I have often confused this second quadripartite with the first, committing a category
mistake by according it an excessive influence, when in fact it was already no more than the material for the first, or
a terrain for the struggle. These problems were resolved as I came to understand that instead of trying to unify these
four sides philosophically by binding or suturing them together in a relational exteriority, I could do so through
another kind of unity, one effected through a radically immanent cloning. As a result, the notions of ‘struggle and
‘front undergo a transformation. What was required was a unilateral leap, which is to say, abandoning all
pretension on the side of the One, no longer positing it as one of the sides or terms of the quadripartite,
acknowledging its collapse or non-consistency. This meant giving up at the same time the idea of a ‘head to head
struggle and elaborating the notion of a unilateral front. That every struggle engages two fronts but only puts one
combatant into play was a riddle that was resolved when it turned into its own solution. This involves a shift from
the divine Logos to a practice placed under the name-of-man. The problematic of the quadripartite, of its binding or
cloning, has the advantage of allowing a synoptic overview of all the stages –even the most rudimentary– in the
research that led to non- philosophy, and of not dismembering it in terms of historical distinctions. Before being
non- philosophical, the magma from which non-philosophy emerged has all the characteristics of a pre-
philosophical chôra, from its deepest to its most superficial layer, like a landmass or conglomerate rising up when
the tectonic plates underlying the philosophical continent start breaking up. The division of non-philosophy intro
three stages privileges a historical overview and should be inscribed within the structure of the quadripartite. I will
confine myself here to sketching an outline and drawing a continuous guiding thread for the development of non-
philosophy, while passing over two kinds of circumstance that played a part and affected this development. On the
one hand, the innumerable hesitations, misgivings, amendments and variations in the binding of these two terms. For
in the beginning it was question – as it is for every philosopher– of identifying the point of suture between the
two sides of this duality, which philosophy had summarily realized or admitted in the form of systems and their
traditions. On the other hand, there were the personal conditions under which non-philosophy existed, adverse
institutional circumstances, all sorts of phantasms, various interests that exceeded the bounds of philosophy alone
–these do not need to be recalled here since we are trying to identify a structure and the history contained in it. For
the moment, it is still a question of binding rather than of cloning. These dualities were already present in the initial
series of works grouped together under the heading Philosophy I, but were still being resolved to the benefit of the
side of philosophy and binding, and to the detriment of the One and science. The shift to Philosophy II occurs by
way of an overturning: it is now the One which becomes the principal theme and assumes the mantle of the real, and
philosophy that is evaluated in terms of the Ones capacity for being conceived ‘for itself and as such, or as
immanent. This is the gist of Le principe de minorité [The Minority Principle (1981)]. But…

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19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html … Non-philosophy does not
effectively or successfully begin until Une biographie de lhomme ordinaire [A Biography of the Ordinary Man
(1985)], because it is there that the problem of how to bind the four sides together is thematized and basically
formulated –albeit not without difficulties– through the notion of unilaterality. The conditions for this solution
are that the One acquire a radical autonomy with regard to philosophy, that it stop being a philosophical object, and
that the latter is revealed to be a transcendental appearance. It is as though an over-neoplatonization of the One was
accompanied by a corresponding over-kantianization of philosophy as appearance… …Formulated in this way,
without satisfying the pretensions of philosophy vis-Ã -vis the One, the problem increased in difficulty. We had
deprived ourselves of every philosophical solution. Nevertheless… …the germ of the solution resided in this
excessive separation between the One and philosophy, which amounted to a sort of Platonic chorismos. In effect, the
cause of their exteriority or reciprocal autonomy, and hence of their unity, could no longer be philosophical or one
that operated through transcendence. Moreover, the One in question was no longer epekeina-physical, or beyond
being, so that, on the contrary, what caused this separation had to be its radical immanence. But how could radical
immanence be reconciled with exteriority? At this stage, as my path momentarily crossed that of Michel Henry, the
other half of the problem remained unresolved –specifically: how could one still use philosophy –which was not
designed for this end– to speak of this One or radical immanence? The initial project of a theoretical domination
of philosophy and of a critique of its transcendental appearance reappeared in a new form: that of the transformation
of philosophical statements or phrases. This was the Idea of a theoretical discipline with philosophy as its object. All
of Philosophy I and a large part of Philosophy II is devoted to a twofold task. On the one hand, to a more and more
precise binding of the duality which is outside every system or synthesis by combining three requirements: that of
the Ones radical immanence; that of the unilaterality this duality; and finally that of the reduction of the logos to the
status of a structured appearance or material. On the other hand, to the search for a discourse that would no longer be
the logos and whose resources (despite this discourse being appropriated by the causality of the One) would be
provided by philosophy alone. Thus, to the constitution of a discipline of philosophy in view of thinking the One.
But to present non-philosophy in this way, in terms of a problem of binding, is to tip the scale in favour of
philosophy once again –albeit philosophy as the object of a discipline. It may be that this is a step forward. And I
admit that it is possible to freeze the development of non-philosophy at one or other of its stages, so long as its
essential conditions of existence are acknowledged. I believe much of the work that will be presented to you today
develops this aspect and this concept of non- philosophy as a rigorous discipline of philosophy –an aspect which,
let me repeat once more, is very real. Nevertheless, there is obviously the risk of an excessive formalization of the
rules governing this practice, in the manner of a universally recognizable corpus guaranteeing a certain
epistemological coherence… …Non-philosophy is neither a universal method taking over from deconstruction, nor
an immanent process in which method and material, rational and real, are fused together, as in Hegel. Everything
depends on how unilaterality binds –if I may be allowed to continue using this term– the opposing terms.
Although non-philosophy has a disciplinary aspect, it is not just another discipline. For it is in fact the other side,
that of the One, which must, by definition, have primacy over philosophy from the outset, and it is according to it
that one should unilaterally balance or
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19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html unbalance the quadripartite as a
whole. The One is not just the condition of possibility for non- philosophy –this formulation is too Kantian and
empirico-idealist. It is however its presupposed, and as such is not once again at the service of philosophy. Unlike a
condition or presupposition, which disappears into the conditioned, the presupposed has an autonomy that is
irreducible to the conditioned. Whence the necessity of developing this side of the One so as to turn it into, if not the
centre, then at least the principal aspect of non-philosophy. In fact, the essential gains, those that condition the
theory, were made on the side of the One –not the One alone, but precisely this logic of unilaterality which goes
together with the One and its immanence. And it so happens that the successful adjustment of the second duality
–that of philosophy and science– depends on the kind of solution one has found for the first. How is one to
reestablish the structures unilateral equilibrium? Uni-laterality should no longer be understood in a Hegelian sense
as abstraction of one side at the expense of the other. It has to be understood as a formulation close to two others
used by contemporary philosophers. It is similar to 1) ‘no-relation in Lacans ‘there is no sexual relation. The
real in Lacan as well as in non-philosophy is without relation in the sense that it excludes symbolic and linguistic
relation. It is generally foreclosed to relation, as is required by radical immanence or the fact that, as Lacan says, the
real always comes back to ‘the same place. It is also similar to 2) ‘relation-without-relation in Derrida, who puts
the absence of relation or the Other who is without relation at the heart of relation, i.e. the Logos. In other words,
Lacan and Derrida are moved by antithetical motives with regard to the real: the former wants to exclude all

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relation, while the latter is content to differentiate relation through its other and hopes to find the real in an affect of
absolute Judaic alterity. Their difference can be situated between two conceptions of the other, but it does not
basically touch on the real. Both conceive of the ‘without-relation in the same way: the former (Lacan) as opposed
to relation, or as non(-relation); the latter (Derrida), more subtly, as at the very least indissociable from relation. In
either case, psychoanalysis or deconstruction, relation is presupposed as that in terms of which the real must be
posited. And relation is transcendence or a certain kind of exteriority. Both cases remain within the realm of
philosophy and seek immanence, the without-relation, through opposition or in terms of an ultimate reference to
transcendence. Under these conditions, the real cannot be radically relationless, even in Lacan where the real and the
symbolic are linked through topology. Can one follow Lacan but go beyond Lacan by positing a real that is de-
symbolized, un- chained from the signifier, unconditioned by it; yet one which, as in Derrida, nevertheless continues
to have a proven effect on the logos or symbolic realm in general? What I have called uni-laterality is the solution
without synthesis to this problem. It is the only kind of relation tolerated by the real as immanence and primacy over
philosophy. On the one hand, it is essentially a radical non-relation, as in Lacan –but one which is genuinely
radical this time because its non-relationality follows from its immanence. More than ever, the real returns to the
same place, to such an extent that it no longer defines one and is u-topic through and through. But on the other hand,
it does not remain alone because it is separated (from) the logos or the world –it is also an Other, but without
relation to transcendence, which would otherwise continue to define it and constitute it. It is Other-than…relation,
rather than Other to…relation, whether as opposed to it (Lacan), or partially internalized by it (Derrida). There is an
alterity that goes with the One but it is itself One or radical immanence. There is no longer an Other of the Other as
there necessarily is in psychoanalysis and philosophy. This is why I use the term ‘unilation instead of the word
‘relation. This the place of the non-philosophical concept of uni-laterality: between Hegel who reduces it to an
abstraction of the understanding; Lacan who ultimately does not understand it and tolerates it only in order to cancel
it in the signifying chain through which he thinks he acknowledges it; and Derrida and others, who try to give it a
status but still within the realm of philosophical exteriority. The radical has primacy over the uni-lateral, but primacy
is not itself a relation.
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19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html More concretely, consider a
philosophical system, i.e. a dyad of terms that are opposed or correlated through a third term which is itself divided
between an immanent or transcendental One and a One that transcends the dyad. We move to a unilateral duality in
the following way. The One is no longer divisible into real and transcendental, it is real and takes the place of one
and only one term in the dyad: it now constitutes one of the two terms as indivisible and is simply immanent to the
new duality. But the status of the second term in the dyad is also immediately transformed. It is no longer face to
face with the One, which is immanent even from the perspective of this second term, and yet it exists and makes up
a duality with the One without being face to face with it; hence without entering into relation with it. We will say
that this second term is also in-One or immanent even though it is expelled from the One, which it does not
constitute. More precisely, we will say that it is expelled only insofar as the One is radically separate from what it
gives or manifests. This is why I continue to repeat that philosophy, which is the second term, is given in a radically
immanent fashion or in the mode of the One, even as it is expelled from the One… …The unilateral duality
excludes the two major types of traditional solution: the theory of relations and the theory of judgments. It is not a
relation, whether internal or external, and it is not a judgment, whether analytic or synthetic. It is precisely because it
has none of the characteristics of a system that non-philosophy, which excludes synthesis as well as analysis,
possesses the quasi or non-analytic power of systems and their subsets, as well as the quasi or non-synthetic power
of the systems which it brushes up against in each of their points. We use the term ‘dualysis to designate this
activity carried out through unilateral dualities, which analyze without an operation of analysis and synthesize
without an operation of synthesis. Non-philosophical statements are neither contained analytically within those of
philosophy nor added synthetically to them. It is not a matter of complex judgments and interpretation, but of
transformation through the force of unilaterality. Unilaterality proceeds through two stages. The first is that of the
real, whose immanence is no longer that of a punctual, still transcendent interiority, but a being-separate from what
it expels, or rather that which it is separated from. The second is transcendental and takes this other term into
account. It relates to philosophy, which, expelled-in-One so to speak, now calls for help from the real. In the first
phase, there is already duality, but on the basis of the One and its primacy: the second term is mentioned without yet
being referred to. In the second phase, duality is explicitly present but on the basis of philosophy –although it does
not go so far as to constitute a two. The immanence of the One and the transcendence proper to philosophy are now
so tightly and intimately bound together that there is no longer any relation but only an alterity of the One, which is
an immanence without relation to philosophy –even though it gives or manifests philosophy while separating itself
from it… …The work undertaken since the book on non-marxism [Introduction to Non-Marxism (2000)] has

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sought to carry out this intimate binding of the two sides and to justify the discipline devoted to philosophy through
the primacy and uni-laterality of the One. Thus, as I have already said, I accept that it may be necessary to isolate
aspects or moments of non- philosophy in order to examine them, or even –why not– develop them into
independent disciplines. Nevertheless, one should bear in mind non-philosophys indivisible duality, the fact that it is
structured in phases, so as not to separate in an abstract fashion the One from philosophy, and vice versa. But we
have seen why this indivisibility or intimacy of non-philosophy is not that of a system. The truth is that we find
ourselves here at the heart of the non-philosophical solution. By
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opposed terms, we are forced to realize not only that that they were not really opposed, but that they are not bound
together and that the genuinely guiding problematic for us may not be philosophical –we have been trying to prize
it free from philosophy piece by piece. Non-philosophy, which began as a problem of binding, unbinding and
rebinding, is radically fulfilled as something that we could never have imagined, since we were deceived by the
exteriority of philosophy. It is fulfilled as a cloning. If all philosophy comes down to a question of binding, non-
philosophy comes down to a question of cloning, which is also the answer to the question of binding. The One gives
its identity to philosophy precisely insofar as the latter refuses it –an identity which philosophy both refuses and
requires. We could say –parodying Lacans famous formula about love by inverting it in favour of the giver rather
than the receiver– that the One withholds itself, thereby giving itself to philosophy, which requires it by refusing
it. If non- philosophy attains a point of unilateral equilibrium, of fulfillment proper to it, it is through this inversion
of binding into its point of immanence, which is not a dead-end but rather the point at which there is a radical
interiorization of the real and an inversion of philosophy. A bind forms a point of immanence, but its principle is not
radical immanence –it is rather a combination of the two, through topology for example. I spent a long time
looking for such a point: the point of the cogito, the point of Nietzschean transmutation, the point of critique. Non-
philosophy may well be philosophys critical point, but it is not critique that makes the point; it is the ‘point that
critiques. I consider this long hunt for immanence to have reached its goal when immanence gives itself as and
through a unilateral leap –that of the (non-)One, which is the key to the hunt. Cloning assembles and retroactively
legitimates all those hesitant investigations, all those contradictory hypotheses about the problem of the theorys
internal coherence. Consequently, with regard to philosophy there was, strictly speaking, no overturning but rather a
displacement. But a displacement without an operation can only be a utopia. And what is displaced is philosophy as
such, because displacement here resolves itself into a ‘en-placement. There is no non-philosophical gesture, just
the leap or unilateral operation whereby human utopia affects every possible site and frees or furnishes a ‘space
for the subject. It will be objected that binding is more intelligible than cloning. But these solutions are neither
opposed nor complimentary. The real difficulty with this objection is that binding is not straightforwardly and
uniquely mathematical but also transcendental, and that such a combination, which is difficult because it is an
internalized topology, is precisely what calls for the solution of unilateral duality in which cloning takes binding as
its object. This is what explains the possibility of taking philosophy as object for a real that does not objectify it, but
transforms it. Non-philosophy is obviously not a theory of knowledge or a system in general. It is a real-
transcendental science of the world. The only way of discovering it is by relativizing the exclusive primacy of the
logic that hides it and prevents one noticing it in philosophy, even of the non- analytical kind. We could say, in our
customary style, that it is a transcendental logic that is real- and-nothing-but rather than logical; one that is without-
logic or non formal, so to speak. Contrary to the logicist reduction of philosophy, which leaves the hidden
prerogatives of philosophical sufficiency intact, specifically in the form of positivity and hence of a kind of
dogmatism, this non- philosophical reduction of philosophy is at once real-transcendental and capable of a wide
variety of realizations, not only in terms of logic but in terms of the sciences in general. There is an instance that is
more radical than logic, and this is the real. Not that it is possible to replace logic by just any science while
maintaining the same privileges for the latter. It is the universal posture of science that must take the place which in
philosophy is held by the restricted universality of logic. Non-philosophy shatters the strictures of logic and
analytical reduction, just as it dissolves the residues of a compulsory, exclusive and primary logic in the
transcendental logic of philosophers,
07/10/13 12.32ONPhI : A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy - François Laruelle Page 17 of
19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html granting the transcendental the sole
support of the radical real, and hence the possibility of entering into combination with each of the sciences. Non-
philosophy is unified theory: a radical extension of philosophy beyond transcendental logic, but one that deprives it
of its traditional pretensions. As a result, it is philosophy and its logical organon that lose their prerogatives by being
turned into a simply real-transcendental organon. Thus, it is necessary to take the expression ‘non-philosophy
quite literally, so to speak. It is not just a metaphorical reference to ‘non-Euclidean. It is possible for the One and

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the (non-)One to be identical because we are no longer operating in the realm of transcendence. Nothingness is
transcendent but the non- is the One in all its immanent uni-laterality. Non-philosophy is the inversion of
philosophy; it is the ‘non- addressed to philosophy by man, who is the presupposed that philosophy cannot get rid
of. It is not that there is philosophy first, which then has to be denied –philosophy is given from the outset as
suspended in the future by the future, and this is the determining condition for its becoming the object of a new
discipline. As for the trilogy of real, philosophical material, and unilateral syntax (or determination-in-the-last-
instance), to which non-philosophy is often reduced, there is a sense in which it bears a marked resemblance
–despite the difference in content– to the Lacanian trio RSI, and like the latter, it is merely a structural base for
non-philosophy. I too could say, like Lacan, that the latter is not an all- purpose grid, but rather a sort of vade-
mecum, dangerous to the extent that it traces the structure of the philosophical system by simply distorting it. It has
to be said that this trilogy was placed at the head of INPhO in the form of three axioms so as to allow the latters
constitution and functioning, but at the cost of a certain approximation and the risk of encouraging a new kind of
scholastic common sense or formalism. A large part of my research has been devoted to putting this trilogy into
practice and extending it to new materials. But the principal task has been trying to achieve a parallel adjustment of
these instances so as to bring them all into play; tuning and adjusting the instrument; coordinating and recalibrating
the apparatus. INPhO was constructed like an un-tuned instrument, in which everyone wants to play their part with
the instrument they have cobbled together themselves, preferring a free interpretation of the axioms to their free
effectuation. There is a fundamental problem concerning the articulation of these three instances. Two tasks need to
be carried out. The new articulation of the three terms will have to 1) undo their topological and hence structural
organization, overcome the appearance that they are three by showing how they are each time two, and that each of
these two is ultimately ‘one while remaining ‘two from the viewpoint of one of them; 2) define boundaries or
degrees of freedom in the ‘preparation of this apparatus, but in a way that does not end up destroying it. In any
case, non-philosophy did not invent ‘the real, or the One, or man (every philosopher can take some credit for the
latter), or even the idea of a ‘radical immanence (there is Michel Henry and perhaps others as well –Maine de
Biran? Marx?). On the other hand, non-philosophy exists because it invented the true characteristics of the latter,
because it took the requirements of radicality seriously and distinguished between the radical and the absolute. It has
had to carry out a complete overhaul of the entire philosophical apparatus even when it seemed closest to it. These
characteristics are: 1. the full sense of immanence as real ‘before it assumes a transcendental function; 2. the
necessity of treating immanence through immanence, rather than through a transcendent overview. It is at once a
structure and an immanent knowing of this structure, or what I call ‘the vision-in-One; 3. philosophys being-
already-given in-One, its unilation rather than external relation to the real; 4. the structure of real immanence as uni-
laterality, uni-lateral (duality), as other than… or alterity through immanence, rather than as a metaphysical point;
07/10/13 12.32ONPhI : A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy - François Laruelle Page 18 of
19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html 5. the coupling of real determination
and determination-in-the-last-instance or transcendental determination (cloning), and the thesis that Marxs concept
provides a symptom of the latter; 6. the unilateral duality of man and of the subject as a function with the world as
free variable; 7. the discovery of radical immanence or uni-laterality as human Messianism or immanent future, its
vocation to utopia and fiction; 8. the two aspects of the future language spoken by non-philosophical subjects:
axiomatic or mathematical, and philosophical or oracular. Non-philosophy is a human mathematics –a formulation
I would oppose to Leibnizs conception of philosophy as a ‘divine mathematics. Radicality should be understood
in terms of these principles or modes of operation, which prevent one from mistaking it for the radicality invoked by
Descartes or Husserl. Everything can be summed up in terms of the distinction between the radical and the absolute.
Lastly, a few words about these new possibilities. Non-humanist. With topological binding, philosophy remained in
the hands of a deus ex machina: the philosopher or infant-king, who surveys and arranges the former like a
handyman assembling and destroying scale models of worlds, or a demon whispering answers to Socrates. With
cloning, it is finally man and man alone who is implicated in philosophy. But man is not implicated in the way being
is implicated as bound up with the question of being. Man is the real or the answer, the minimal but insufficient
condition necessary for local resolutions. Non-philosophy is the primacy of man as non-immanent over being and
nothingness. It is to man and man alone, not to matter or religion that it falls to reduce humanism, for example,
along with the problems of which humanism is symptomatic. Non-philosophy is the discovery that man is
determining, and that he is determining-in-the-last-instance as subject. Non-theological. Insofar as man gives the
world while remaining separate from it –but not separate as an exception to it– non-philosophy invalidates all
metaphysical problems such as that of the creation, procession, emanation, or conversion of the world –the entire
philosophical dramaturgy. Man is a grace for the world. This is an inversion of the philosophies of transcendence
and of the divine call addressed to man, because it is now the world that calls on man. Where philosophy knows
exception, non-philosophy knows –dare I say it– the miracle, but one that has been mathematized, shorn of its

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theological transcendence. Non-historical. The immanent real-one is also given as other than…or separated; as the
future that precedes the past and the present. Man is not consciousness, he is the force of utopia or of immanent
Messianism that accompanies his confrontation with the world and inverts every possible course of history.
Nietzsches overhuman ‘yes has to be included in the ‘no- that accompanies man from the depth of his
immanence. Non-literary. Non-philosophy is an activity of fiction both in thought and language; it crowns the
discipline of philosophical theory. New terms should surge forth from the non-philosophical understanding in the
way essences surge forth from the divine understanding according to Leibniz. They should combine the enigmatic
authority of the oracle with the clarity of the theorem. Ultimately, I see non-philosophers in several different ways. I
see them, inevitably, as subjects of the university, as is required by worldly life, but above all as related to three
fundamental human types. They are related to the analyst and the political militant, obviously, since non-philosophy
is
07/10/13 12.32ONPhI : A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy - François Laruelle Page 19 of
19http://www.onphi.net/texte-a-new-presentation-of-non-philosophy-32.html close to psychoanalysis and Marxism
–it transforms the subject by transforming instances of philosophy. But they are also related to what I would call
the ‘spiritual type –which it is imperative not to confuse with ‘spiritualist. The spiritual are not spiritualists.
They are the great destroyers of the forces of philosophy and the state, which band together in the name of order and
conformity. The spiritual haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosticism, mysticism, and even of institutional religion
and politics. The spiritual are not just abstract, quietist mystics; they are for the world. This is why a quiet discipline
is not sufficient, because man is implicated in the world as the presupposed that determines it. Thus, non-philosophy
is also related to gnosticism and science-fiction; it answers their fundamental question –which is not at all
philosophys primary concern–: “Should humanity be saved? And how?― And it is also close to spiritual
revolutionaries such as Müntzer and certain mystics who skirted heresy. When all is said and done, is non-
philosophy anything other than the chance for an effective utopia? 1[ Cf. Plato, Symposium, 203, b-c] François
Laruelle

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by François Laruelle (Author), Taylor Adkins (Translator)

In The Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, the French thinker François Laruelle does something
unprecedented for philosophers: he provides an enormous dictionary with a theoretical introduction,
carefully crafting his thoughts to explain the numerous terms and neologisms that he deems necessary
for the project of non-philosophy. With a collective of thinkers also interested in the project, Laruelle
has taken up the difficult task of creating an essential guide for entering into his non-standard, non-
philosophical terrain. And for Laruelle, even the idea of a dictionary and what a dictionary is become
material for his non-philosophical inquiries. As his opening note begins, “Thus on the surface and within
the philosophical folds of the dictionary, identity and its effect upon meaning are what is at stake.”
i
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Dictionary of Non-Philosophy
Originally published as François Laruelle,
Dictionnaire de la Non-Philosophie
.
(Paris: Editions Kime, 1998.)
All translations by Taylor Adkins unless otherwise noted.
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Translation of F. Laruelle’s “Toward an Active Linguistics”
Posted on September 3, 2013 by Taylor Adkins

I apologize in advance for the many bracketing of the French, but this was only to render the distinctions between
langue and langage clear (as well as pouvoir and puissance). Furthermore, all the footnotes are mine, and I have
included them to provide as much context and added scholarly value, so to speak, as possible. -TA

Laruelle, F. “Pour une linguistique active (la notion de phonèse)”, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger
Vol. 168 Issue 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1978): 419-431.

Toward an Active Linguistics (The Notion of Phonesis)

By François Laruelle

“When one has demonstrated that a thing is of the highest utility, one has however thereby taken not one step
towards explaining its origin: that is to say, one can never employ utility to make it comprehensible that a thing must
necessarily exist”.[1]

This axiom is not Spinoza’s, but Nietzsche’s (Daybreak, #37). If we introduce a Spinozist point of view (i.e. anti-
Cartesian) into linguistics, what will be our estimation of man? Will we impose on science’s serenity the
requirements of an Ethics and the point of view of the active passions? How does one speak of God’s enjoying?
How does one make of linguistics a science of beatitude in the subject?

The idea of an active linguistics

An era is fading away under our steps, that era in which antihumanism served as the sigil if not for linguistics, then
at least for the philosophical usages of linguistics. We are now free to pose our problem otherwise, to add
complements and nuances to it, to differentiate this antihumanism. For quite a while it’s been a misunderstanding,
both in linguistics and outside. A principle was made of antihumanism, whereas it’s perhaps nothing but an effect; it
was made into a project, whereas it was just the index of other deeper critiques and surely the symptom (but it
became automatic) of a change of terrain in the manner of apprehending the phenomena of language. Taken in its
sense and its ambitions, this structural mutation should be a “break”, but too often it functions less as a veritable
displacement than as a simple “revolution”, i.e. a reversal that returns on the spot and passes through the same
positions. It leads to refusals that we esteem as fully and completely inefficacious. Furthermore, on this terrain
certain rectifications have been set in motion, more or less explicitly (by Althusser, Lacan, Foucault). It suffices to
extend this line of new deeds to define the limits that antihumanism may not surpass in order to remain what it is.
For on the one hand it’s a method, or, if you will, merely a procedure and a strategy devoted to the determination of
certain critical effects against classical anthropological presuppositions; on the other hand, it’s a tendency that can
receive new theoretical forms and new instruments, pass through non-structural mutations and become in these
forms a guiding thread for a new examination of language’s phenomena, i.e. the project of an “active linguistics”
that we shall outline below. What are these limits?

a) We should distinguish a “linguistic antihumanism”, i.e. an antihumanism in the theory of language, from an
antihumanism that would claim to be real and practical. A linguistic antihumanism makes no sense except in theory
(supposing, provisionally, that we can isolate it from linguistic practice), but it does make sense in the express goal
of making much more intelligible the struggles that real men lead in order to be able to speak [pouvoir parler][2].
When these extremely old philosophical figures (of the “mind” [esprit], the psuché, the mental or “speech” as
effectuation of language [langue][3]) are eliminated; when reductions, suspensions or indeed deconstructions of
various types are deployed onto the almost infinite procession of presupposeds which will function all too often—

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even in Saussure—as an axiom of the linguistic field’s closure, thereby prohibiting it from opening up to other
givens under the pretext that these givens were apparently not linguistic; when, taking up structuralism’s relay but
against structuralism itself à la Derrida, one of structuralism’s “logocentric” chains, which feeds this formation
from Saussure to Lacan through Hjelmslev and many others, is sublated, each time all of the above are (this is at
least the guiding thread that we’re taking for our accounting of all these gestures) procedures for better
comprehending how humans are constrained to speak, and how they are to speak in determined forms and with
determined means. But precisely which linguistics has ever been able to explain the necessity of having to speak?

b) Perhaps it’s necessary to distinguish partially between man and the subject. Although these two values
communicate through a whole philosophical network, the antihumanism of “structure” already concerned man much
more as an empirico-transcendental entity than the subject as a subjected correlate of the signifying chain (Lacan)
or—this can be imagined—of structure as primacy of the relations of production (Althusser). The problem,
nevertheless, is to free the subject even further (if this is possible) from its anthropological connotations in view of
founding linguistics as what Saussure has failed to do: as a linguistics of the subject. Despite everything, this isn’t
Lacanian psychoanalysis…

Having determined the project in this way, the way to attain it is to trace a new line of demarcation between man and
the subject and to transform the subject into the correlate of a speaking chain that is no longer signifying or
structural. We’ll get to this later on by introducing (as the complement or rather supplement to the phoneme) the
radically subjective and antistructural concept of “phonesis”, which will correspond to the position of the “agency”
[instance][4] of speaking-power in linguistic reason and will determine it as “active”. In other words, this concept
will finally introduce the possibility of considering a generativity at the level of “structure”, a special type of
generativity that is both immanent and transcendent to structure. Let’s say right out that this concept of phonesis has
nothing to do with the phonetic, which isn’t being reintroduced here. It’s a trans-linguistic concept, it’s coincident
with the enigmatic distinction, here advanced as a slogan or rather as an advertisement signal, between the subject
and the all-too-human (rather than the “human”). For the human properly speaking is an entity perhaps without
existence, if not statistical existence. The sense of this effort is manifest: differentiate the speaking subject, nuance
antihumanism vis-à-vis an interrogation, and above all introduce to a problematic no longer language acts but
productions of language. In view of other effects, this is the positive project that concentrates and re-divides the
balance-sheet of linguistic antihumanism otherwise and refuses to turn it into a program in any way. The notion of
phonesis envelops a linguistic and “anti?” linguistic program proper, but the latter doesn’t enter into rivalry with
existing linguistics whatsoever.

This is to say that we’re not positing here a resolutely nonlinguistic question to language and linguistics so as to
extend the contemporary inquiries; it’s also to say that it’s not a matter of yet another idealist and eventually
“political” intervention, an intervention that would claim to be constituting in the autonomous field of linguistics.
Would there be candidates for taking on Marr’s (let’s say Nietzschean) role[5], i.e. for breaking the history of
linguistics in two? For all sorts of reasons, some more philosophical than others—we shall therefore not examine
them here, having advanced them elsewhere[6]—this type of intervention is not just in linguistics, like the way in
which Marxism handled it, but involves a relation of contiguity: to linguistics (to = in / outside = relation of
supplementarity), which thereby leaves linguistics (in a manner to be determined) to its objects, its criteria, its
autonomy, its field of description. But the weak difference of the in from the to is strictly philosophical here and
cannot be elucidated by linguistics whatsoever.[7]

Let’s take up the guiding thread of one of Heidegger’s formulas, and let’s determine that formula through the cross-
wiring [le recoupement] of two chains of his text. For example, the chain of Being’s essence defined as power
[pouvoir][8] and desire (mögen and vermögen) and the chain of the phenomenological description of the utility of
tools: one has to extend these chains to the point of linguistic tools and cross-wire the chains in the famous formula:
die Sprache spricht.[9]

This equation is the formula of a post-Saussurian tendency in linguistics, and this tendency must be taken further.
Let’s translate this tendency so that we can transform this apparent tautology into the antistructural slogan of this
essay: speaking or languistic language [langue parlante ou langagière][10]. This is a joyous paradox, an almost
absolute contradiction within the Saussurian framework—the chiasmus of speech and language [langue] toward the
subversion of linguistics. And this is despite the fact that Saussure’s evergreen genius had in its own way
apprehended what every linguistics strives to fill in and what Heidegger calls “the abyss of language”. To relaunch

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this line of flight and risk disorganizing “structure” and “grammar”, one can even translate: speaking speaking
[parler parlant][11], i.e. the power (— of) speaking.[12] Just as there is a power to punish, a power of working
(labor-power) [force de travail], etc., there is a prephonetic and prephonological speaking-power, but it’s always
invested in phonetic and phonological productions.

Such a formula is capable of generating, if not a “new” linguistics, at least a new functionality of objects
traditionally described by linguistics, both the structural and the generative type: for it is a question of a generativity
that’s considerably less Cartesian but, hopefully, a little more “powerful” [puissant].[13] What this generativity first
contains is the critique—not the destruction, but the displacement—of the instrumental and functional conception of
language [langage]: language does not speak to communicate, it speaks (to) speak and (to) communicate eventually,
as if speaking were first an immanent process, a production, a speaking speaking before being this spoken speaking
that linguists call a “Corpus”, thereby turning it so easily into a simple instrument of communication. Speaking
language [langue] is the formula of a pregnancy: as if the means were pregnant with its ends, gained the dignity,
continuity and limitlessness of its ends and sovereignly attributed to itself their nobility for “itself”. This is precisely
what an “active” linguistics must think from the start: speaking [le parler] as simply speaking [parlant] our
generativity to us, an unlimited speaking that enjoys its limitlessness.

“Structuralism” is merely a manner of disdainfully regarding language [langage] from its small tip, i.e. listeners and
receivers[14] that attempt to analyze a datum of sound and sense. Let’s ultimately analyze structuralism into
producers or into “users”. Perhaps structuralism does not exist, other than stastically, and there are only structuralists
or anatomists of dead speaking (have I been understood?)[15] who exploit, i.e. overexploit the being-productive of
language [langage] for a profit that is “political” in its own way. This is what implies, among other things, that
what’s played out within this interval from the dead to the productive (which is not at all the promise of a classical
“hermeneutics”), from the corpus of spoken speaking to the body [corps] of speaking speaking, is the destiny of this
piece, this piece that we no longer know where to put[16] or mainly for which function to require it: man. It’s with
this principle of a production of the speaking subject that this piece strives to elaborate its full span, which has
nothing to do with the structural concept of production or speech nor with the phonetic concept of vocal motricity,
and which does not at all represent (by the name of speaking-power or speaking speaking) a simple reversal of the
structuralist primacy of language [langue] over speech.

In effect, unlike the current attempts in this direction, an active linguistics in principle avoids being given the
superior levels of the phrase and the word for its sole primary matter. Active linguistics is on the surest and most
established level of formal linguistic analysis: on the phonematic level, wherein it will attempt to intervene and
displace the structural portions. This is precisely where it will succeed or fail, without however entering into direct
rivalry with structural linguistics but by seeking to be placed with it in a singular relation, which we have defined as
contiguity, i.e. supplementarity simultaneously immanent and transcendent to the objects and methods of
phonematic description. Active linguistics nuances, differentiates the phoneme in its own way, yet without
destroying it but remaining content with deriving it. Active linguistics adds supplements to the phoneme that take
this notion to its most productive regime and make it draw out all its consequences in the procedure of phonematic
analysis. Furthermore, in conformity to its rule of activity or of languistic production as its point of view (a rule that
it uses immanently and conforms to on its own behalf), active linguistics does not delimit the procedure of the
phoneme without first putting the positive and active notion of “phonesis” in the phoneme’s place or on its frontiers.
It uses this name as a new translinguistic relevance and a new criterion of what falls under “description”, i.e. the
complex associations of phoneses and phonemes insofar as they are languistic production itself: its means and also
its shackles. But without defining a new, properly linguistic relevance in rivalry with others (perhaps nothing is
properly linguistic, which is what active linguistics wants to make known), without further constituting a
philosophical meta-linguistics of language [langage], active linguistics posits (as its criterion of the apportionment
and analysis of its field of empiricity) that which plays a role in production—in its limitlessness and its limitation—
and, rigorously secondarily, that which therefore plays a role in the reproduction of language, i.e. in the
communication of messages. Thus what will be relevant will no longer be the distinctive function (it’s relevant for
the externalized reproduction and consumption of language), but its productive function, insofar as the latter,
secondarily, can also explain the distinctive function or signalization of a phonematic choice of sense.

In fact, an “active” linguistics doesn’t simply respond (otherwise than other linguistics[17]) to the foundational
questions already posed by structuralism and generative grammar. It projects a set of three fundamental questions
that disrupt these linguistics and that were meticulously obliterated by structural and generative mechanisms. These

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questions form a matrix or a “machine” that generates an infinite field of general descriptions and statements,
introducing into the heart of existing linguistics a front of political struggle in its own way (it isn’t “Marxist” or
“bourgeois”), a line that has the property of passing (among other things) through all the phenomena that linguistics
do not explain and all of which partake in the power-of-speaking or in a production of language irreducible to its
social reproduction (although it’s not our object to show this here, Humboldtian energeia and Chomskyan
generativity still implicitly and despite themselves—due to their theoretical instruments—posit a primacy of
reproduction over “production”, or a vicious reflection of the former in the latter). The questions that open up the
field of active linguistics are the following:

1. What’s the relation of “language acts” with language productions, considered without particular or privileged
reference to real phonic production and without these productions ensuing from, but also no longer denying, these
acts? What instruments assemble [agence] speaking-power, and how is a phoneme associated with another?
Question of a generatitivty which would not be primarily that of phrases but which would be just as valid (due to its
universality) for the phonematic “level”? The solution to this question is the introduction of the notion of “phonesis”
meant to explain the notion of phoneme.

2. What are the conditions of the internal reproduction of language productions? How do these productions
condition language’s social reproduction under conditions of the corpus and of “tongues” [langues] as specific
modes of language [langage][18]? How do languistic agents transform speaking into a Body determined each time?
The solution to this question is the introduction of the notion of “language potentials” [langue] meant to delimit the
notions of “system”, “deep structures” and energeia.

3. Who speaks[19]? or who is it that returns the productions of speaking-power to the subject? The solution to this
question is the introduction of the notion of “collective agents of phonetization and of phonematization”, or even the
notion of “speaking masses” [masse(s) parlante(s)][20].

Here we shall only attempt to elaborate the first question.

The notion of phonesis

Structuralism describes the conditions of possible languistic experience rather than its conditions of real experience.
It brackets the internal cause or production, it will have systematically ignored what’s in anterior linguistics and
phonetics from the point of view of production. It isolates the total effect in the form of a “corpus” where the
production of language is nullified, where the flux is cut off, where causality becomes indifferentiated: in the
perception and identification of sense, in the recognition and identification of invariant signifying entities. Its ideal is
consumption, it begins by suspending the veritable faktum of every linguistics, namely that individuals are languistic
agents, agents by and for language (a faktum that’s in the foundations of their activity and for whom speaking is not
a possible activity, but a necessary constraint and a necessary existence): these agents are constrained to enter into
the cycle of a debt of speech. Structuralism displaces the debt from the historical, concrete and necessary level of
speech, where speaking returns to be freed from debt, toward the abstract level of language [langue]: it “sublimates”
the debt, renders the debt ideal, cumulative and inexhaustible. Structuralism’s postulate is the hypothetical
imperative or end: the effect to be produced (the communication of the message) is at the speaking subject’s
disposal, but the means is imposed on him (the message’s distinction) in order to attain this end: hypothetical or
conditional necessity, which is in fact the way in which the receiver imagines that one speaks, but which is incapable
of explaining why and how one really speaks. Nevertheless, saying that speech itself is necessary is not to say that it
answers a categorical necessity—the end as necessary by itself or even the means as “absolutely” necessary:
speaking doesn’t stem from a categorical imperative. What we mean is that the modality of speaking is the
problematic necessity, speaking is a problem of language internal to language [du langage au langage].

But since there’s an internal problem to be resolved—that of who speaks, and not, like the structuralist, that of who
hears—we are evacuating means/end from vicious and circular causality. This supposes the generalization of the
means (the “end” of speaking is to produce—apart from any end—language). The true sense of the theory of
“Hobson’s choice” is that the choice is itself forced in its relation to another choice, no doubt, but apart from any
effect to be produced, i.e. external message effect. It’s on condition of generalizing the technological aspects of
language that (paradoxically) one will destroy its instrumental conception which prevents speaking from becoming

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index sui, i.e. speaking speaking. The external instrumentalization of language [langue] is not a deviation, but
structuralism’s congenital malaise.

Language [langage] as action or power has a formula, which is: speaking (for) speaking and (for) communicating;
such phoneme (for) such other phoneme and for discriminating. The discrimination of the signified, which
guarantees its reception, is a local “secondary” effect that is associated or connected to the “primary” effect of
production, i.e. of the phoneme as phonesis (phonesis: phoneme qua productive flux or speaking-power). The
question isn’t: how does one make to speak, with what instruments, why choose a certain phoneme rather than
another? But: how does one speak in an actual[21]way and can one continue to speak? What can language do? How
does one explain generativity, not merely that of phrases, but first off that of phonemes themselves? How does one
perceive a generativity at the level of the phoneme itself? How can a phoneme be associated to another phoneme and
form a continuum, a flux or a conveyance of language—how can a phoneme arise from its opposite, all while
remaining opposed in a partial way that remains to be determined (no doubt as the receiver’s specific point of view)?
How is the continuity of speech instituted (not as excluded by language [langue], but speech as the speaking of
language [langue]: die Sprache spricht…) once the reductive Form of substance is suspended, i.e. Form as the
transcendent morphological continuity characteristic of speaking’s reproduction and not of its production? How is
the discretion of phonemes, or the break of the languistic flux, also (speaking for speaking and for…) what allows
the flux to restart and to be re-launched? What’s the condition of this trans-phonematic generativity that we should
postulate, once the two classical solutions to the very production of language [langage] (Saussurian Form and
Cartesian Innateness, both of which break the immanence of speaking or its reality) are refused?

The only answer that’s phenomenologically exact, i.e. that respects the principle of the immanence of speaking
language [langue], is that the phoneme functions not just as opposition or break, but also and first off as retention
beyond opposition in the in praesentia and the in absentia. The phoneme can (this is speaking power itself) be
exerted as a passive retention, a passive synthesis. Synthesis = production = action…an action in the mode of
passivity or a primary continuity of the flux of language [langue] in the form of a “living present”. This is a retention
that’s both the debt of speaking language [langue] (not of “language” [langue] alone in the abstract Saussurian
sense) and its production: language [langue] as passive, preoriginary or prephonematic memory, and consequently
capable of explaining the phonematic flux in its qualities of flux without the need to resort to habitual puppet-
fetishes.

This solution is also the critique of structural “opposition”, either of that of phonemes, or instead (Saussure,
Jakobson) of that of their distinctive features. Opposition is defined, for example by Jakobson, as the reciprocal
implication of two terms, and by a “clear, reciprocal and necessary” evocation of one distinctive feature by another.
This overly vague and abstract definition obliterates two problems that structuralism avoids posing.

a) The possibility or rather the reality and means of passage from one contrary to the other: this requires an
associative capacity [puissance], a retention of one phoneme that is unlimited as a flux when the other phoneme
(either in the paradigm, or in the syntagm) comes to determine or limit it. This limitlessness of the phoneme is
nothing but phonesis, and this is precisely and solely what guarantees the coupling with the following phoneme; in
this way, due to the immanent concept of association, the explanation is freed from the recourse to the mental fetish
of “evocation”.

b) The non-reciprocity of the coupling of phonemes. The reciprocity of passage or symmetry is valid only for
production (instance from which structuralism selects its abstract conception of language [langue]). In production,
there is an asymmetrical coupling in the following form: an unlimited phonesis is cut off or limited by a phoneme
which, in turn, re-launches as unlimited phonesis, etc., so much so that phonesis always identifies with the break that
“is” distinguished from it: unilateral or fractional identification and distinction. These are the two immediate sides of
the phonetico-phonematic entity or of the fractional organ of language [langue], which is an object of a complexity
superior to that of the phoneme alone and is produced by associative contiguity of “contraries”. All structuralists, but
also Jakobson, remain content with an abstract and imprecise phenomenology of the break under the aegis of
distinctive “opposition”. It’s advisable instead to subordinate “opposition” to retention as a passive objective
synthesis that takes place in the subject and not for and by the subject. What will be accounted for in this way are
trans-phonematic tensions, dynamisms and fluctuations that suppose a dehiscence in the phoneme, but these cannot
then be called intra-phonematic; or remarkable points will be accounted for that exclude an absolute equivalence or
an exchange (the commutation of phonemes), to be supposed the real act of speaking.

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The real act of speaking doesn’t juxtapose exemplary entities selected from classes of linguistic objects, but it
associates a fragment of phoneme or even of a distinctive feature, acting as phonesis, with another fragment of the
following phoneme. This fractional character of the organ of language [langue] does not designate a subset of the
phoneme. The phoneme is an entity whose differential character still remains external and indifferent from the
moment that this difference is maintained not only as relative but as op-positive and negative. Precisely, the
association of two fractional phonemes must be formed outside any opposition and negation as Form and external
continuity that break the immanence of the power-of-speaking. Phonematic difference must be fully “internalized”
to the phoneme and serve as its vehicle. This is only possible if the phoneme, qua continuous and fractional object,
becomes a complex entity (through internal syntax, not through its distinctive features) and builds on two series: a
“phonetic” series and a phonematic series properly speaking, internal/external borders of the phoneme that form an
open system and transform a minimal invariant term in an asymmetrical process wherein the inferior series of
phonematics breaks is articulated in the superior series and intertwined in it by the successive gaps of the terms of
one series to the other.

In this graph of phonetico-phonematic coupling, Ps here stands for phonesis, and Pm stands for the phoneme.[22]

The essence of languistic production requires a “transcendental” principle that is “superior” to that of the phoneme.
The notion of phoneme is purely empirical and descriptive of the adjustment of speaking to social conditions: it does
not explain the reality of language [langage]. The phoneme is a micro-unity capable of being reproduced under an
identical concept. It would be absurd to deny that such phonematic properties exist. But we’re not proceeding with
such entities to produce the diachrony of speaking speaking. We have instead found with phonesis and its
prephonematic generative syntax a tool that doesn’t exclude the phoneme and its properties, but can instead explain
them insofar as they are selections from the power-of-speaking. We cannot show this here: the phoneme is a term,
genuinely a relation, but phonesis instead implies a whole play of immanent syntaxes that explain the generativity of
language [langage]. Undoubtedly the phonesis-phoneme correlation tends to nullify its dehiscence in the phoneme
alone, which then becomes divisible into two phonemes on the same level, where the flux of speaking speaking can
be totalized into a corpus, indifferentiated and decomposed into equivalent unities that are instrumentalized and
prepped for treatment by cybernetics and computer engineering: language’s linguistic gregarization.[23] But
phonesis is the active and productive procedure in language, and the phoneme must be subordinated to it. This
means that the phoneme is still a phonesis despite everything, even when it’s devoted to language’s [langage]
functions of reproduction and social adaptation, to the functions of “language” [langue] in the Saussurian sense of
the term.

Structuralism obliterates action, it’s incapable of giving action a theoretical status (there’s no question of doing this
by re-alienating production in language acts or even in grammars…); structuralism selects the phoneme from all the
effects that speaking-power draws out each instant. But the positivity of an entity or a level, for example one that’s
supra-phonological but equally phonological and a-signifying (distinctive), cannot be avoided, it’s an inevitable
problem structuralism encounters and to which it must give mentalistic, phenomenological or even hermeneutic
solutions, solutions that contradict it. The principle of opposition cannot be maintained for long and calls on a level
where it’s no longer valid, where entities receive a substitute of positive function. The “form”, for example, receives
the capacity of “designating” a content (the exception being a logical and positivist conception of opposition which
would refuse to account for the necessary retention of trans-phonematic production: but that’s an abstract theory
which is purely hypothetical and unthinkable, save by resorting to “behaviorist” substitutes…). Nevertheless, this
way of crafting weapons and avowing the abstraction of this principle, i.e. this way that the phoneme has of still
postulating phonesis as simple capacity [puissance] or actual power [pouvoir] of speaking, is a little shameful and
can do nothing but leave the principle to a hermeneutics whose presupposed is recognized: listening, reception,
identification.

From the outset, there’s a lot placed onto the terrain that avoids this complicity, not counting the complicity with the
phenomenology of consciousness: and what’s placed there is activity-production qua “phonetico-phonematic”
synthesis such that it breaks the signifier/signified parallelism. With its differential mechanisms of retention, such a
syntax destroys the possibility of applying the cybernetic and computer-science distinction of the “digital” and the
“continuous” to language [langage]. This syntax transforms language into an immanent process and a question for
itself, which language resolves by identifying its production and its functionality in a continuous way, but with many
more traversals. Distinctive opposites merely suppose two dimensions or a plane and induce a Euclidean linguistics,

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but the latter is itself incessantly constrained to denounce its insufficiency and to recognize that it says nothing about
the nature of “opposites”, i.e. to act inversely to its fundamental principle which consists in sectioning off and
abstracting tiny unities, not from big unities (morphemes) but from real flows alone and from the conveyance of
speaking speaking. In this way it wants to reunite what it has begun by separating: the dissymmetries, thresholds,
intensities, strategies that problematize language and turn it into a production that traverses distinctive oppositions as
well as levels of articulation.

It’s this first phonetico-phonematic “synthesis” that immanently contains in it the two other moments of language’s
process [language]. On the one hand, language [langue] potentials: against the Saussurian break, which has let loose
in linguistics the powers [puissances] of conservation and languistic normalization, put forth the “super”-
linguistic[24] power [puissance] of phonesis. On the other hand, collective agents of phonetization: lived
experiences [vécus], experimentation of intensity, are the subject’s only real content, the speaking masses who make
language [langue].

Translated by Taylor Adkins 9/3/13

[1] Here I have followed Laruelle’s format of quoting, though it leaves out the title of the aphorism and the
remainder of it, as well. [TN]

[2] This phrase foreshadows its formalization below as linked by hyphenation, where it will be translated as
“speaking-power”. [TN]

[3] Here Laruelle switches registers from speaking about ‘langage’, which I have translated above as “language” (for
example, “theory of language”), to a Sassurian register about “speech” (‘parole’) and “language” (‘langue’). It
should be noted, though, that Saussure also speaks about ‘langage’ as a universal system, not an instantiated
“tongue” (‘langue’), so to speak. I will be sure to mark ‘langue’ whenever Laruelle uses it, but from now on the
word “language” will always translate ‘langage’ unless noted. [TN]

[4] In other contexts in Laruelle’s work (for example, Determination-in-the-last-instance), this word would always
be translated literally. Here I have translated it as ‘agency’ in order to make it correspond with the manner in which
Lacan has been translated, i.e. “Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud”. Notice that
Laruelle explicitly mirrors this title by referring to ‘linguistic reason’. [TN]

[5] Cf. Nicolas Marr, who, among other things, was famous for postulating a unique, originary common language.
[TN]

[6] Laruelle is presumably referring to Machines textuelles (1976) or perhaps Le déclin de l’écriture (1977), the
latter of which contains conversations with Derrida, Nancy, Kofman, and Lacoue-Labarthe. [TN]

[7] Here it should be noted that the prepositions “to”, “in” and “outside” translate ‘à’, ‘dans’ and ‘hors’ respectively.
[TN]

[8] Here as well as above, power has always rendered ‘pouvoir’, which roughly can also mean ‘to be able (to)’ as an
infinitive, which is how it’s used in the reference in footnote 1 above. It should be noted here that juxtaposed against
Heidegger’s mögen, perhaps a better translation would be ‘capacity’; nevertheless, a ‘speaking-capacity’, as it’s
used earlier, might give the wrong appearance that it’s about a measurable ability (speaking well, etc.). [TN]

[9] ‘Speech/Language speaks’, cf. Heidegger’s 1950 lecture Language (“Die Sprache”). [TN]

[10] This is my neologism to indicate an untranslatable emphasis and play on ‘language’ (bad pan)… In any case, it
should be noted that this is the first instance of ‘langagière’, which is only quasi-synonymous with ‘linguistique’ as
an adjective; this is because ‘un langagier’ is a “linguist”, i.e. more like a “philologist” than a savant of linguistics.
So, this makes the phrase “langue…langagière” much closer to Heidegger’s formula, but it also forecloses the sense
in which the disciplinary meaning of ‘linguistique’ is evacuated from the notion. Finally, to be clear, Laruelle is not
coining a neologism here, but I am resorting to one as a compromise, so reader beware! [TN]

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[11] ‘Parler’ is an infinitive meaning ‘to speak’ or ‘speaking’ as gerundive, and ‘parlant’ is the participle form of the
same verb. [TN]

[12] It should be noted that with the parenthetical “bracketing” of the preposition in Laruelle’s work, the phrase
should be read in reverse (along with the hyphen), thus as speaking-power, which is how Laruelle formulates it
earlier. [TN]

[13] This marks a change from discussing ‘pouvoir’ to ‘puissance’, and the most likely reference is to the notion of
‘Vouloir de puissance’, i.e. will-to-power, and this notion of power/powerful is taken up explicitly in Laruelle’s
Machines textuelles; cf. the intro to that work. [TN]

[14] Cf. Saussure’s famous diagram of listeners-speakers in his Course in General Linguistics. [TN]

[15] This phrase mirrors Nietzsche’s from Genealogy of Morals. I thank Brian Dooley for pointing this out in the
following passage from Nietzsche: “That the ascetic ideal has meant so many things to man … is an expression of
the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui: it needs a goal— and it will rather will nothingness than not will.
—Am I understood…Have I been understood? … “Not at all, my dear sir!”— Then let us start again, from the
beginning” (GM 3.1). It should also be noted that “understood” in Laruelle’s text (‘entendu’) also means “heard”,
and so there’s a sort of punning on Saussure and the notion of “dead speaking” here, coincidental or not. Lastly,
there is a resonance with Nietzsche’s critique of philosophers as producing dissections, rather than vivisections, as
he proposes to do. [TN]

[16] The sense of this phrase is not quite about “where” to put the piece “man”, but more about: which side of the
binaries does this piece go (i.e. the dead/productive, the corpus/corps)? [TN]

[17] It should be noted that here and in what follows, Laruelle is referring to linguistics in the plural sense,
something that the English makes obscure at times. [TN]

[18] Here and below I will begin translating ‘langue’ as ‘tongue’ for more clarity when appropriate, but Saussure
should still be kept in mind. [TN]

[19] Cf. the introduction to Machines textuelles for a similar question of “who deconstructs?”. [TN]

[20] In French this turn of phrase can function in the singular and the plural, although in English this sense is more
or less untranslatable, since ‘masse’ in the singular in French already means a ‘group of people’. Beyond this play, it
should also be noticed that the bracketed “s” for both of these words would be silent in spoken French, which is
fairly ironic in light of the discussion of the phoneme. [TN]

[21] It should be noted that the French word (‘actuelle’) also means and can mean “current” or “contemporary”,
which may resonate with the italicized “continue” in the sentence here. [TN]

[22] I have not included the graph here, but suffice it to say, it’s a simple staggered model where the Ps—Pm chain
branches down into a Ps—Pm chain ad infinitum; alongside to the left of this staggered model, there is a single,
diagonal ray pointing down and to the right on the border of the staggered chains labeled “continuous phonetic
flux”. [TN]

[23] Cf. the notion in biology where ‘gregarization’ (etymologically linked to the notion of ‘gregariousness’)
indicates the formation from individual (insects) to that of swarms. [TN]

[24] “‘Sur’-linguistique”, which should also resonate with Nietzsche’s ‘overman’ (surhomme). [TN]
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Laruelle in London

Prefatory Thoughts for Reading Laruelle's Anti-BadiouWith 3 comments

Laruelle in London
This entry was posted in Translations and tagged Heidegger, Laruelle, linguistics, Nietzsche, phoneme, power,
Saussure by Taylor Adkins. Bookmark the permalink.
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6 thoughts on “Translation of F. Laruelle’s “Toward an Active Linguistics””

Pingback: Laruelle Bibliography (English & French) | Linguistic Capital

Eilif Verney-Elliott on December 8, 2013 at 7:22 pm said:

Reblogged this on Eilif Verney-Elliott and commented:

Laurelle
Reply ↓
Eilif Verney-Elliott on December 8, 2013 at 7:23 pm said:

Taylor, thank you for this. Did you do the translating? Great stuff.
Reply ↓
Taylor Adkins on December 9, 2013 at 1:09 am said:

Thank you Eilif, and yes, I translated it, more or less on a whim. It’s one of Laruelle’s earliest published pieces,
and it’s something I’ve had my eye on for years.
Reply ↓
Eilif Verney-Elliott on December 9, 2013 at 12:10 pm said:

I really enjoyed a piece – I am not sure if it was here – on non-standard aesthetics. Anyways, thank you for
the work, translation can be an emphatically arduous task.
Reply ↓
Eilif Verney-Elliott on December 9, 2013 at 12:22 pm said:

“Just as there is a power to punish, a power of working (labor-power) [force de travail], etc., there is a prephonetic
and prephonological speaking-power, but it’s always invested in phonetic and phonological productions.” – L

I am here interested in what he is saying about a return (he notes this in the next paragraph) to the Corpus, or the
body. Indeed, the immanent ‘enjoyment’ of the body, or what I call the ‘sensation of the corpse’ – does this for L
precede even the pre-phonetic, or is it pre-phoneme itself?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
François Laruelle
Dictionary of Non-Philosophy
Translated by Taylor Adkins
i
-----------------------------------
Dictionary of Non-Philosophy
Originally published as François Laruelle, Dictionnaire de la Non-Philosophie.
(Paris: Editions Kime, 1998.)
All translations by Taylor Adkins unless otherwise noted.
Compiled by Nick Srnicek and Ben Woodard.
http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/
Cover Art by Tammy Lu.
http://tammylu.wordpress.com

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Free for noncommercial use and distribution with proper attribution.

-----------------------------------
ii
Table of Contents
Preface 1
Auto-Position 3
Being-in-One (Being-according-to-the-One) 3
(Epistemic, Non-Philosophical) Break 5
(Non-philosophical) Chora 6
(Non-philosophical) Definition 7
Democracy (Democracy-of-Strangers) 8
Desire (non-desiring (of) self) 9
Determination-in-the-last-instance (DLI) 10
(Non-phenomenological or non-autopositional) Distance 12
(Non-autopositional) Drive 13
Dual 13
Essence (of) science (the Science) 15
Europanalysis 16
Experimentation 17
First Name 18
Force (of) thought (existing-subject-Stranger) 19
Formal Ontology (uni-versalized transcendental Logic) 20
Generalization (generalization and uni-versalization) 21
Generalized Fractality 23
Given-without-givenness 24
God-without-Being 25
Hypothesis (philosophizing-by-hypothesis) 26
Language-Universe 27
Lived Experience (lived-without-life) 29
Man (Humans) 29
Material Ontology (Chôra, Uni-versalized Transcendental Aesthetic) 30
Metascience 32
Mixture 33
Multiple 34
Noema-Universe 35
Non-Aesthetics 36
Non-Dictionary 37
iii
Non-Epistemology 38
Non-Erotics 39
Non-Ethics 40
Non-Intuitive (non-spatial and non-temporal) 41
(Non-)One 42
Non-Philosophy 44
Non-Psychoanalysis 45
Non-Rhetoric 47
Non-Sufficiency (of the Real or of the One) 48
Non-Technology 49
Occasion (occasional cause) 51
Ordinary Mysticism 52
Other (non-autopositional Other, non-thetic Transcendence) 53
Performativity (performed, performation, performational) 55
Philosophical Decision 56
Philosophy 57
Presentation (non-autopositional presentation) 58
Primacy (primacy-without-priority) 59

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Priority (priority-without-primacy) 60
Radical Immanence 61
Real (One-in-One, Vision-in-One) 61
Real Essence 63
Reflection (reflection according to the One or non-autoreflexive) 63
Relative Autonomy 65
Reversibility (reciprocity, convertibility, exchange) 66
Rule (of the force (of) thought) 67
Science-of-men 68
Sense (sense (of) identity) 69
Solitude (Solitary) 70
Stranger (existing-subject-Stranger) 71
Thought (continent of thought) 72
Thought-science (unified theory of thought) 72
Thought-world 74
Time-without-temporality (radical past, transcendental future, present-world) 74
Transcendental (pure transcendental identity) 76
Transcendental Axiomatic 77
iv
Transcendental Science 78
Unconscious (non-psychoanalytic Unconscious) 79
Universal Noesis 80
Universal Pragmatics 81
Universality (Uni-versality and Generality) 83
Universion 84
Vision-in-One (One, One-in-One, Real) 85
World 87
1
Preface
Non-philosophy is constituted under a double aspect: doctrinal, with the objective appearance of
a philosophical type of thought; methodical and disciplinary, with a more theoretical than
systematic will of extending its modes of argumentation and its vocabulary to all fundamental
knowledges. For these two reasons, it appealed to a dictionary destined to form the pinnacle of
theoretical acquisitions, to present the essentials of the technique, and to distinguish parallel,
neighboring, or variant thoughts in the midst of which it has developed. In terms of dictionaries,
this one has the benefits, insufficiencies, and illusions which are attached to this genre of
works—nothing here is added from this order. On the other hand, it is important to emphasize
that in virtue of the style proper to non-philosophy, this dictionary presents several
particularities:
1. It does not retrace the internal, somewhat hesitant, non-philosophical history of the
concepts: it is instead prospective and leads to the elaboration of articles in a
theoretical point that often surpasses the Principles of Non-Philosophy themselves
and is not content with merely specifying them. It is, so to speak, a dictionary for the
non-philosophy to come.
2. After the definition of the term and before the explicative commentary, each article
reserves a short paragraph destined not to compose the philosophical history of this
term but to mark some of the most significant points of this history for us. They are
simple indications without erudite pretention, but which each time attempt an
interpretation of philosophy as “philosophical Decision.”
3. The vocabulary of non-philosophy is that of philosophy principally, but each term is
constantly reworked in its sense, its cut, and sometimes in its signifier. This language
is taken from whichever point in the tradition—a toolbox, no doubt, but where the
box is itself a tool, where every tool is inseparable from the box. Non-philosophy
does not attach itself to a particular tradition, for it is a theory and a pragmatics of all
actual or possible philosophy, past or to come. Hence the effects of over-
determination, a wide variety of languages required, and a fluidity of “language

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games,” which is itself a term capable of entering into seemingly non-philosophical,

i.e. philosophically contradictory, combinations. This is why the title that names each
article is often completed by a parenthesis that specifies the literal form such as it is
effectively utilized. Only the most theoretical and most universal vocabulary is called
upon here.
Each of the three types of consideration—the non-philosophical definition, the philosophical
meanings, the non-philosophical explication—is distinguished from the others simply by
typography.
The articles have been proposed by the members of the “Non-philosophy” collectif, collectively
discussed, and harmonized by F. Laruelle who has adjusted them on the actual theoretical level
of non-philosophy, not without exceeding the latter, as we said. The collaborators are those who
make up the “Non-philosophy collectif”: T. Brachet, G. Kieffer, F. Laruelle, L. Leroy, D.
Nicolet, A.-F. Schmid, S. Valdinoci.
2
Lastly, the dictionary is preceded by one of F. Laruelle’s essays: “Theory of the Non-
Philosophical Dictionary,” which the journal Furor (1994) in the person of D. Wilhem has had
the amicability to let us reprint—amend and lengthen—from the special numero which the
former consecrated to Voltaire’s philosophical Dictionary for the tricentennial of his birth.
3
Auto-Position
The highest formal act of the philosophical Decision through which philosophical faith in the
real enables the latter to be posited as the Real in an illusory way. It is consequently the real
cause of the appearance of philosophy. Auto-position as real of the transcendental Unity proper
to philosophy is that which prioritizes the vision-in-One.
The formal trait of auto-position is structural and completely exceeds the presence
of this concept in Fichte (Self=Self). Not only the transcendental One—the peak
of philosophical knowledge—but whichever concept (cf. Deleuze) is itself posited
or is in a state of pairing, doubling, self-survey…Philosophizing is concentrated in
the inasmuch and the as [l’en tant que et le comme], in the repetition of a more or
less differentiated Same. This trait forms a system with philosophy’s no less
structural debt to perception as its point of departure and to transcending it as its
essential organon. Object and objectivity, phenomenological self and disinterested
and philosophical self, consciousness of object and self-consciousness,
transcendent One and transcendental One, all philosophy repeats itself because it
copies itself. This is the activity of philosophical faith and this faith itself.
The vision-in-One supports the specific faith-in-the-real of philosophy, i.e. the philosophical
hallucination of the Real. But this support is still nothing but a partial condition which is
completed through a different suspension, the unilateralization of the transcendental One, of the
divided One of philosophy. This suspension is performed by the transcendental Identity which
the vision-in-One clones on the basis of the former. Auto-position (its sufficiency, its desire for
mastery, its violence) is annulled while non-philosophical thought renounces every idealism so
as to be allowed-to-be determined-in-the-last-instance by the Real. Hence the characterization of
non-philosophical a prioris as non-auto(decisional, positional, donative, etc.). Concretely, the
vision-in-One dismantles the importance of any dyad. The object is seen-in-One or dualyzed on a
noetic and transcendental side and on a noematic content on the other side which is the reduction
of this object to the state of occasion.
Being-in-One (Being-According-to-the-One)
In the order of phenomenal instances, Being takes “third” place after the One-in-One and
transcendental Identity, or second in the order of the (non-)One, between the One and the
equivalent of Being (the experience or given of philosophy): it is the transcendence or non-
autopositional Distance of the force (of) thought. If understood in a broad, for example
Heideggerian, sense, we shall say that it is decomposed into transcendental Identity and a priori
Identity which then correspond to their respective symptoms which are transcendental being or
being proper (philosophically convertible with the One) and division or duality which are, for
example, the Intelligible (Plato) or Intentionality (Husserl), etc.
Being or more precisely the existent is primarily one of the transcendentals

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(alongside the one, the multiple, the true, the good, etc.) and the support of the
other transcendentals which are its predicates that, as such, are in it by essence.
4
They add nothing real to it and form ontological knowledge, knowledge without
reality if not specularity. When the existent is understood on the basis of the meta-
which makes it the transcendens par excellence and the meta- thematizes as such
in turn, together they form “Being” insofar as it is distinguished or differentiated
from the existent now assigned to functions of the empirical pole of ontological
Difference. Difference (being of the existent, existent of being [etre de l'etant,
etant de l'etre]) is then speculative and ontology is primarily ignorant of the
existent fulfilled as speculation. The becoming-speculation of ontology takes on
its divided-doubled structure by the meta- which adds nothing to the existent but
relates it to itself as existent. This doublet or this auto-position of the existent, and
thus also of Being, is the heart of the speculative or non-naive experience of
philosophy.
Heidegger tried to reunite in “Being” as ontological Difference (with the existent)
the multiple significations and modalities of Being which philosophy had
elaborated and dispersed. There is then no concept not only more general and
more transcendent, but also more enveloping than that of Being and then its own
unity and provenance (sense, truth, locality, etc.). Heidegger confirms the telos of
every philosophy, even if Being is his principal object (Being qua Being) and its
element, even if it is an originary-transcending, an ekstatico-horizontal and
temporal opening, a “rift” and “clearing,” (Heidegger), or even a void and a pure
multiple (Badiou). A law of essence wills that the concepts of “being” be
inseparable from the duality of a division and from a more or less divided, indeed
disseminated, horizon; from a multiple and a void without which it is unthinkable.
Hence Heidegger’s effort to simultaneously protect nothingness, the void, the
nihilist “vapor” and to deliver them from Being by “barring” it in a non-
metaphysical way. But nothing of this touches upon philosophy, upon its effort to
think itself and discharge itself from the metaphysics which cannot avoid positing
Being as a presupposed which has primacy not only over the Existent but also
over the One which it affects from its own division, and partially over the Other.
In non-philosophy, the nomination “Being” is still possible but under the reserve of its uni-
versalization of-the-last-instance. It only intervenes in the nomination and formulation of non-
philosophical instance via a mode of separation or abstraction of the axiomatic type: the One-
without-Being, outside-Being, etc. But it is possible to elaborate a “non-ontology” taking general
metaphysics and ontology–autoposition, either speculative or not, of Being–for material: a theory
of Being such as it is cloned on the basis of Being as such. The instances of which it is the
philosophical symptomatic indication decompose the totality of functions which it has fulfilled
through becoming: on the one hand pure transcendental Identity, whose symptom is the One as
convertible with Being or intricated with it, or ordered in it: on the other hand, a priori Identity,
i.e. transcending here reduced to its phenomenal nucleus of Exteriority or non-autopositional
Distance. Together they are the “force (of) thought” which henceforth takes the place of Being or
is Being-in-One.
The most extensive suspension of metaphysical authority is this: Being is determined or given in-
the-last-instance-in-One. “In-the-last-instance” because it must be–as force (of) thought–cloned
5
from philosophical and metaphysical Being. The “question of Being” is attached to philosophy
and transformed into a problem capable of resolution according-to-the-One. As non-ontology,
non-philosophy secedes from the “first science of Being” or, better yet, radically effectuates it by
making of Being-according-to-the-One, and not “as One,” the object of a science in effect first
but having lost the priority of metaphysics because this science is “divorced” from the One,
which indeed is not the object of a first science but determines it. Finally, the statements of non-
ontology, cloned from ontology under the effect of the One-in-One, are knowledges said of
Being-in-One-in-the-last-instance or related to the force (of) thought.
(Epistemic, Non-Philosophical) Break

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First Science’s mode of constitution as “unified theory” or identity-in-the-last-instance of

science and philosophy, distinct from the unitary theory that mixes it in-Unity. The non-
philosophical break must be called “epistemic” rather than “epistemological,” for all relations
of the logos or epistemological relations arise from a unitary synthesis and break.
Every philosophical Decision programs its break with the previous state of
philosophy, science, culture, etc. This break is inscribed in the structure of the
philosophical Dyad, then in synthetic or systematic unity itself. It can take on local
specified forms according to the doctrines, for example the “rupture” (Bachelard),
the “epistemological break” (Althusser), but also the difference-break (Deleuze),
the différance-break (Derrida), the literal break (Lacan, etc.). This specification
depends upon what overdetermines the properly philosophical break (“scientific
practice,” the “pathos of distance,” or the affect of Judaic alterity, etc.).
After having elaborated an “epistemic break” separating first Science (of the One) from
philosophy, non-philosophy has complicated and displaced this distinction. 1) Every
phenomenon of breakage is second in relation to the Real, to the vision-in-One, and not first as in
the philosophical Decision. Or, if it is “first,” it is in the radical and not absolute sense of non-
philosophy: first operation of thought but not an operation of the Real. The “epistemological
break” instead remains under the ultimate authority of philosophy despite the “mobile” force of
science’s rupture in relation to ideology, a force that still too simply proceeds from a reversal of
hierarchy. 2) Every non-philosophical break discovers its element in the oldest duality of
philosophy and the Real, a duality each time articulated by a certain type of foreclosure. 3) To
the extent that a break exists in non-philosophy, it is in the same proportion less “first” than
equivalent to the a priori, and not transcendental, instance that “terminates” the constitution of
the force (of) thought. The latter is non-self-positional and non-self-decisional Distance or
Exteriority and thus distinguishes itself from the self-decisional decision of philosophy. 4) The
non-philosophical decision is determined-in-the-last-instance by the Undecided (of the) Real,
whereas philosophy is intricated in the Undecidable (to various degrees of irreducibility). It is
what distinguishes a decision, break, or axiomatic-transcendental abstraction from its
philosophical forms. 5) The a priori break of the non-philosophical type is not that through
which non-philosophy globally distinguishes itself from philosophy—this distinction is first of
all real, then transcendental and inseparable from the uni-versality of the vision-in-One—but is
the organon of this dual distinction.
6
(Non-Philosophical) Chora
Sense (of) identity of supposedly Real philosophical faith when the vision-in-One transforms it
into its correlate (unilate) or gives it its sense (of) identity. The chora is the site through
unilateralization that philosophy has become (as identity) by wanting to be equal to the Real
(still not as transcendental unity). It is the phenomenon or given-without-givenness (of) this real
hallucination.
Chora designates the spatial emplacement, or better yet the receptacle, indeed the
prima materia through which it ends up being confused with Chaos, thus
generating the dialectic of the One and the Multiple developed from that of the
One and Being. Chora is the site of a pure multiplication: after its idealist
reduction, when chaos becomes sensible diversity, the chora becomes its
transcendental condition as spatiality, indeed, for certain philosophers, a name for
a particular mixture of the transcendental and empirical, the…feminine.
The vision-in-One is the Given, it gives-without-givenness. Its first correlate (it should be said:
its first uni-late) is that which it extracts or manifests from the first object to which it is opposed
and which is philosophy: not as doctrine or system, but as faith-in-the-real that finally supposes
itself to be the Real. Philosophy is not the only site of its doctrines and all existents, a universal
site, it is the total site, that which envelops itself and which can thus only believe itself to be the
Real or the absolute Site, including its self-knowledge. The vision-in-One can only exclude this
belief or more precisely back up its supposed validity. But it gives it also without givenness
under the form it extracts, that of an identity or a sense (of) identity which is that (of) this Site.
The theoretical illusion, the supposed validity is supported but not the materiality of this belief
consubstantial with philosophy. We shall call chora not this Site spontaneously aware of itself,

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but that which the vision-in-One sees of this pretention, including the reduced identity (of the)
philosophical Site. This chora is not an emplacement of the spatial order in the manner of the
philosophical imagination. It is the instance which, in the order of the sense (of) identity (of the
“noema”), determines-in-the-last-instance the other philosophical contents (more specific and
constituting the structure of the philosophical Decision) as at least given-in-One and reduced to
their sense (of) identity. The One thus determines through its acting a more originary or more
transcendental site equally foreign to every topo-logy, where the World and its contents, the
Authorities, and the philosophical Decisions themselves come to be emplaced.
As an expression of being-separated/given from the One, the chora is “unilateralized,” it is a
non-self-positional position (of) the World, impossible to be dialectized or topologized, to be
scanned by a transversal gaze. The One is in effect indifferent to what it determines due to the
fact that it determines it in-the-last-instance and through its being-foreclosed. The chora is the
absence of every reciprocal determination, every unitary correlation of contraries, every
sufficient philosophy. It is more than an a priori: if the Real is nowhere, utopic, it finally gives a
real Site (in-the-last-instance…) to philosophy which no longer magically springs from the head
of the latter but where it finds its emplacement. Instead of constituting an (anti-)thetic a priori
susceptible to being-coupled, which would only be at the price of some “infinite task” or
“différance” with its philosophical contrary within some unitary dyad of the One and the Other,
the chora is the extreme counterpart of the Vision-in-One, that which, without forming a relation
or correlation but a unilation, “faces” it after philosophical faith. It defines the object of the
world par excellence; it is even its first determination.
7
(Non-Philosophical) Definition
Identity-in-the-last-instance of a proper name and a first term.
The definition posits the equivalence of a “word” and a combination of other
words such that they explain the signification of the first. The theory of the
definition is historically rich and complex, passing through Pascal, Leibniz,
Gergonne. The important works of the end of the 19th century and the beginning of
the 20th century pertaining to numbers and sets of numbers have enabled
specifying the characteristics of definitions through abstraction and inductive
definitions above all: works pertaining to the concept of distance in geometry have
explicated the so-called definition through postulates. Definitions can be classified
either according to a “structural” point of view, according to how they bear upon
an individual (“nominal” definitions), or how they bear upon a structure or a
property (definition “through postulates”); either according to a more
metaphysical criterion, according to how they give the rule of production of what
they define (“real” definitions), or how they are admitted as purely conventional
(“nominal” definitions”). This double acceptance of the nominal definition has
enabled the most complex passages in the tradition between the individual, the
real, and the conventional.
The definition does not enjoy in non-philosophy the same role as in philosophy, where its
functioning as conventional equivalence supposes the unitary closure of the system. Non-
philosophy posits the identity-in-the-last-instance of the individual and the philosophical system,
or better yet of the conventional and the effective, its problem not being of knowing if a
definition is pertinent or not for the Real. It dualyzes the classical definitions by affirming the
identity-in-the-last-instance of two heterogeneous functions, the name of the One and the first
term. It thus assures the non-formalist character of the transcendental axiomatic, the first term
being obtained by rules of transformation on the basis of relatively autonomous materials that are
philosophical, ethical, aesthetic, technical, mystical, etc.
The non-philosophical definition functions on the transcendental level which does not affect the
One but is said according to it for the occasion of an “Existent” which is related to it in-the-last-
instance. It thus participates in the contingency of this Existent, but it is conventional to the
extent that it is a name according to identity. It is as a name according to the One and its clones
that it is implicit, only being explicit via the way in which the first term and its conceptual
symbol are obtained. The non-philosophical definition thus receives something of the opacity
and mystery of the One. It does not deny the philosophical definition but emplaces it in

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effectivity by giving it a new function: no longer simply giving a signification to the functioning
of a quasi-closed system, but enabling a dictionary from one philosophy to another cut out from
translations between various systems. This magnification of the philosophical definition by the
implicit definition of non-philosophy is one of the elements that contributes to non-philosophical
poetics and “artificial philosophy.” A dictionary of non-philosophy makes use of this
generalization of classical definitions because it sets off from philosophical material; but it also
entrusts them with an implicit function which no effectivity can account for.
8
Democracy (Democracy-of-Strangers)
Internal form of non-philosophical thought as unified theory of philosophy and a particular
region. Here democracy is not an object of thought or reflection but the essence of knowledges
produced by the force (of) thought or in-the-last-instance by the vision-in-One which assures
against the transcendental equality of unified terms against every form of hierarchy. Non-
philosophy is a transcendental theory of human multitudes in a manner through which humans
of-the-last-instance are em-bodied [en-corps], but it takes for material philosophical inequality
in general and in particular the ego-xenological Difference typical of philosophy.
The philosophical Decision, when it studies politics and more particularly
democracy, poses the question of the relation established between individuals, but
on the grounds of the World or the City, and as belonging to the World. This
relation signals the reciprocity among parties and the appearance of equality
bound to reciprocity. Thus, historically speaking, modern democracy is imposed
by the idea of a social contract (Rousseau). In general, the problem of democracy
is tied to that of the management of contractual and intersubjective situations.
Certainly, the structure of the problem will be different according to whether one
proceeds from Greco-European being-in-the-world (Heidegger) or from the
“Most-High” (Levinas) of the Other. The democratic question of the contract, and
which is more of a social bond, can be complexified into that of a
communicational action (Habermas), that of grand anti-nihilistic politics
(Nietzsche), or that of a political overdetermination of the last instance
(Althusser). But in every philosophical scenario, equality through reciprocity or
difference implies philosophical hierarchy as the most “abstract” equality
subtending the spirit of inequality proper to philosophy. Philosophy, or the
“thought-world,” is an objective democratic appearance and a real anti-democracy.
The philosophers’ political thought mimics human struggles and thus can only explain them. The
problem of a philosophy of democracy no longer makes rigorous human sense. A mode of non-
hierarchized and non-anarchic democracy presupposes a unilateral duality: I…am (and not “is”),
thus I am an Other, a democratic multitude, a Stranger. The Stranger is not the Other
encountered in the space of the World or as Infinite, but myself in-the-last-instance. This is the
transcendental organon of the World and the absolute condition of democracy.
The Stranger “makes” the void; it transcendentally anesthetizes every type of conditioning
(psychological, sociological). The void is also fully positive, as identity of universal law, which
is itself in the flesh. The content of this void is precisely a transcendental multitude, a non-
autopositional democracy. Completely understood, democracy, which neither acts on the
logological center nor on the margins or inequalities, destabilizes and utilizes authoritarian
autopositions henceforth made secondary. The theoretico-pragmatic human-in-the-last-instance
is substituted for the violence of the democratic State and its philosophical expression.
9
Desire (non-desiring (of) self)
Designates, for non-psychoanalysis, the side of reality of jouissance, itself determined by the
Real or Enjoyed-without-enjoyment [Joui-sans-jouissance]. Deprived of its philosophical
essence of self-desire or desire of the Other's desire, it loses its determining role which
philosophy through Plato and psychoanalysis through Lacan granted it.
Desire, at least when it’s not understood, as in the classical, notably Thomist
tradition, as a mask of the will or, in Kant, as having its destination in the latter
which would constitute its superior form, is often defined as the essence of man:
either under its simple form (Spinoza), or under the reflected or duplicated form of

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a desire-of-desire (Kojève), or finally under the triadic form mediated by

representation (Plato, Girard). In the desire of Hegelian recognition, “the two fall
together as three,” because recognition is created in relation to the Idea of man
intervening in the third position among animals that are mistrusted, being
understood that Hegelian desire is the consequence of life.
In psychoanalysis, desire is itself triadic since it is advisable to discern here, either
in Freud, the representation of the affect (desire itself differing from the one as
well as the other, representation not being libidinal as such and anxiety, for
example, consisting in a non-desired and even undesirable affect); or in Lacan, the
object of the cause. The cause of desire is the castration of the “subject;” the
object is contingent. Desire “not giving up on its desire” (Lacan) founds the ethics
of psychoanalysis.
Verdiglione and Deleuze, in different directions, dissociate desire and castration:
the former, because he situates desire and jouissance (whose condition is
castration) on opposed sides of the unconscious; the latter, because he rejects law
and castration in general, affirms the plenitude of desire indentified with creativity
and subtracts it from the lack to which, on the contrary, he submits all
psychoanalysis.
“Non-analytic” desire is “simplified” since it finds its non-Platonic essence in the
nonautopositional transcendence of jouissance or affect of the Other in the sense that non-
philosophy intends; like it, desire has its condition in the Enjoyed or Real-of-the-last-instance. Its
transcendence constitutes it into the desire (of) the Other. The way in which Lacan grasps it is a
redundant structure; indeed the desire (of) desire testifies not only to his affiliation with Kojève
but also to the structure of the philosophico-analytic mixture in general where the philosophy of
desire obviously has a privileged place. Desire can only escape from philosophical and
psychoanalytic authority if its cause is no longer the Real as lack or castration, but the Enjoyed-
without-enjoyment insofar as it determines it in-the-last-instance.
In fact, desire finds its identity in jouissance with the syntax which is the property of the
Unconscious. This identity defetishizes it and dismantles its relation with repetition, diffèrance,
the letter, and the symbolic as it has been advanced by the restrained deconstruction which sets
its post-Lacanism in the Idea of a constitutive Alterity and a One insufficient to itself via the
10
mode of an “I desire, thus You Enjoy.” Its setting in relation with its essence of the non-
autopositional Other dismantles the circle of desire and liberates thought from phantasmatic
desire: enjoyed loss—thus Freud designates it—of the hallucinatory object of satisfaction. A loss
which neither grounds an identifying “hysteria” nor a traditional lack of desire (in aphanisis), nor
the unconscious insistence on incest as in schizoanalysis. Desire is not desiring (of) self or (of)
the desire-of-the-Other by its essence; it is instead a clone enjoyed-in-the-Real, even if it is
cloned from philosophico-analytic desire.
Determination-in-the-last-instance (DLI)
Central concept, along with the One-in-One, of non-philosophy that distinguishes it from all
philosophies. It is said of the causality proper to the One as such or vision-in-One, of the Real in
virtue of its primacy over thought and its object (like Being). This causality exerts itself upon
what is given as non(-One) and serves as experience or data for thought-according-to-the-One:
philosophy itself as form-experience of the World; and upon the universal noematic structures or
theoretical knowledge that is extracted by it from this material. It is therefore also the specific
causality of non-philosophy in general. This concept has a Marxist origin and is here extracted
from historical Materialism, transferred and radicalized into first Science or according to the
One which gives it its radical sense and enables its full employment (it should rigorously be
called: givenness-in-the-last-instance).
The DLI only has stifled attempts in philosophy whose most complete concept of
causality is the category of reciprocal Determination, decisive for philosophical
systems with its immediate modes (reciprocity, convertibility, reversibility,
systematicity) and its more remote mediate modes, the four forms of causality
distinguished by Aristotle, which themselves instead arise from the causality of
Being (efficient, final, formal, material) than from the One. The Real which is not

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Being thus has its original mode of efficacy, whereas thought-according-to-the-

One or non-philosophy distinguishes itself from the DLI of every ontology and
simultaneously excludes, at least in its essence, finality, formalism, materialism,
and technologism.
The DLI is not simply an immanent causality but radical immanence itself—which distinguishes
it from every “Spinozistic” immanence or every immanence derived from Spinozism. Reciprocal
determination and the DLI are distinguished in many ways. 1) In the first case, causality is
divided between two terms (cause and effect) which belong to a set or an ontological or ontico-
ontological couple; in the second case it is attributed to one of these alone: the effect then
supposes an objective or passive, merely occasional “receptacle” of this causality. 2) This
occasion is already reduced to the moment when it manifests itself, in return deprived of
determinant or real action. The DLI thus supposes a unilateral, non-reciprocal duality of causes.
3) In the first case, causality goes in two opposed yet circular or infinitely convergent directions
(action/reaction; real opposition; dialectical contradiction; differential relations of two terms,
etc.); and, in the second case, causality goes in a single direction (from the Real towards the
effectivity of the thought-world; from immanence towards transcendence). 4) In the first case, it
supposes an alienating continuity and an identification of the cause in a supposedly given other
11
term; in the second, cause is not alienated in its effect but supposes, being nothing but a universal
negative condition, a functional transcendental instance which is that through which the Real can
be said to act.
This rigorously irreversible character excludes that it is a question of a “linear” causality,
“mechanistic” causality always being de jure irreversible and dialectizable by philosophy, as if
by showing it the constant philosophical reinterpretations of historical Materialism which are so
many re-normalizations. The necessity of the DLI is understood through the essence of the One:
how can a radical immanence, which does not escape from itself or alienate itself, act upon an
exteriority or a non(-One)? There is no causality of the One to answer for a cause or an
occasional exteriority. If therefore and for example a thought adequate to the One or according-
to-the-Real must exist, then it will necessarily be rejected outside of the One itself or outside of
its essence without the latter alienating itself in this representation. This rejection is the primitive
form of deduction: if a non(-One) exists, then it comes, either it or its clones, radically after the
One itself of which it can only constitute a premise. The support for this argument is the radical
immanence of the One which is here not simply its essence, which one could survey and treat as
an object, but the performed point of view where the argumentation and what argues (the One
itself in-the-last-instance) are enclosed together. When the One is taken as a point of view for a
thought which can only emanate or proceed from it, then this thought is posited after the One at
the same time as its material and that which has already supported the efficacy of the One. “Last-
instance” signifies that the One is the real unique cause despite the distance of the effect or the
mediations that separate it from the One: a cause that reasoning or description never abandons
and does not objectify surreptitiously by setting it in a face-to-face (= dyad) with another given.
The latter is always-already proved through the One or “in-One”—it is the radical performativity
of immanence—or has always-already sustained its efficacy. Vision-in-One and DLI describe the
same phenomenon. We shall thus say of the One and every given = X: the One and X are not the
Same but only identical in-the-last-instance. Non-philosophy’s destruction of the universal
pretentions of philosophy’s Parmenidian matrix guarantees the radical autonomy of the One and
the relative autonomy of the thought-world. The DLI is the causality of philosophically
unforeseeable (non-definable and non-demonstrable) theoretical and pragmatic emergence.
What should be understood now by this rejection or foreclosure outside the One and by the One
of every given = X and thought in particular? The efficacy of the DLI is double: 1) it invalidates
or suspends theoretical authority (claims to knowledge of the Real) of form-philosophy as
circularity (variously open and distended according to the philosophy): it is unilateralization in
the narrow sense of the word; 2) it inscribes the mark of the One or Identity upon the content or
diversity of form-philosophy itself (its material): this is unidentification. This vision of form-
philosophy “in” and “after” the One, which remains in itself without identifying with its object,
is the “cloning” of non-philosophy on the basis of the latter. Cloning expresses itself through
various operations or operatory rules that make it equivalent to radical Identity in the core of the

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philosophical Decision (its dyadic duality of terms and its unity, the tissue of relations, thetic and
autopositional disjunctions and syntheses, etc. which internally structure it). This quasi-operatory
side of the One can be called noetic, even though it does not exert itself through any
intentionality of consciousness. It consists in relating every given to the One-of-the-last-instance
and to describe its being-lived or its (transcendental, aprioritic) identities thus cloned from it. On
the other hand, we shall call noematic the phenomenal state of affairs that is grasped when it is
12
reduced to its sense (of) identity (philosophy [“la” philosophie]), i.e. sense of occasion and
foreclosure of the Real. This sense of form-philosophy as grasped in-identity takes on different
forms according to the levels or moments considered in form-philosophy. The DLI is not, for
example, exclusive of the noetico-noematic duality, but only of its origin in consciousness or
Being and its aspect of infinitely reversible bi-lateral correlation
(Non-phenomenological or non-autopositional) Distance
Non-autopositional a priori extracted from the autopositional transcendence of philosophy
constituting the last noetic determination of the force (of) thought or the subject-Stranger.
The concept of distance functions as a general rule in an implicit way along the
interior of “philosophical distinctions;” for example, the distinction of the given
that imposes itself upon the establishment of a philosophy (the “present,” the
“contemporary,” the “inauthentic,” etc.) and the empirical that agrees with “its”
transcendental. It is a critical concept (via the distinction of specific spaces, the
philosophical theories of geometrical space always being the result of the
superposition of various sensible, geometric, physical, Euclidean, non-Euclidean
spaces) and synthetic (which re-articulates the divisions of the empirical and
therefore the site of every schematism). From the point of view of aesthetic
reason, distance is presupposed by metaphor and the cancelation of metaphor in
catachresis. It is the protection a philosophy grants itself through the rhetoric
against an overly individuated style. From the point of view of practical reason,
there exists a distance, never completely identifiable or known, that separates us
not only from inauthentic values but also from their cause, radical evil. Post-
Husserlian phenomenology has made explicit use of the minimal
“phenomenological distance” given by phenomena or representations (Max
Scheler, Michel Henry) in the “return to the things themselves.”
Deconstructionists have exacerbated the necessity of distance over the non-
topological mode of deference or différance, particularly under the form of
metaphor of metaphor, thus revealing that no distance is evaluable along the
interior of philosophy (topology) or in its margins, but that it is “unavoidable” in
order to understand the “gestures” of the latter (its mixtures, its distinctions, its
operations).
The Real as Given-without-givenness excludes any “phenomenological distance” and its modes
(nothingness, distinction, division, transcendence, alterity, etc.). It radically limits the
philosophical importance of distance. Even the determination-in-the-last-instance of philosophy
proceeds without recourse to it. It only appears as noesis (in the structure of the force (of)
thought) and noema (in the correlate—“unilate”—of this structure) which correspond to
transcendence as the essence of philosophizing and more particularly the essence of apriority,
obviously via the non-autopositional mode. It is then determined-in-the-last-instance by the Real
and takes on the noetic form of a “non-phenomenological distance” deprived of its autopositional
doublet. It is designated in general as non-autopositional Exteriority or Distance (NAP-D) and
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creates the a priori element that contributes to the force (of) thought or that gives it its character
as organon.
(Non-autopositional) Drive
Other name for the force (of) thought as organon of the One and for its action of a pragmatic
nature on the World or philosophy-material.
The notion of “drive” is consecrated by psychoanalysis rather than its
philosophico-psychological equivalents (as tendency, and notably an altruistic
tendency with Maurice Pradines). In psychoanalysis, it is a question of a

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“borderline” concept which Freud situates at the limit of the psychic and the
somatic, if it is not elsewhere in metapsychological mythology. In every case, the
most exact equivalent of drive (sexual/death) would be the physical image-concept
of force, itself valorized by Freud. It would no longer be interesting, from this
perspective, to ask what would a drive become, in the psychoanalytic sense, if it
were no longer understood as a force in the sense of pre-relativistic imagery, but
as a field: perhaps, as certain analysts have suggested, a function (of repression or
resistance).
The force (of) thought (or drive in the first forms of non-philosophy) takes its character of
force/drive from its cloned nature (not clone of the One but of the World as seen-in-One). The
clone is not distinct from the One, it is the universality of the One effectuated by a givenness.
Therefore, it is itself through one of its aspects One-in-One, radical immanence. Consequently,
the clones in question here—transcendental and a priori instances—are radical immanence on
one of their “faces;” on the other, they are primarily relation-without-relation (transcendental) to
the World, and, secondly, relation of transcendence or (aprioritic) exteriority to this same World.
The force (of) thought is intrinsically an action, a pragmatics of the thought-world. This drive is
deprived of negativity or representativity and ignores the play of forces as well as the functions
which engage in transcendence or in the logico-real order. It constitutes thought or reason in an
action without principle, but not without cause, and “attains” the World in its identity. This is not
an immediate given but rather a given-without-givenness of action as the ultimate transcendental
residue of activity as mediation. The One is effectuated as pulsional. Drive [pulsion] is the Other
or the Unconscious, whereas in its psychoanalytic sense, drive is the mark of the Other.
Dual
Fundamental matrix of non-philosophy that defines a general order founded upon the being-
foreclosed of the One and the generator of irreversibility and unilaterality between the
experience of the immanence of the One and the object to which it is foreclosed, the World.
Whereas the dual is still not unilateral duality (which sets cloning in play), it is opposed par
excellence to the mixture as form of philosophy founded upon reversibility and reciprocity.
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The dual exists via several attempts in logic and in algebra. It is also attempted
and missed by philosophy via the form of a dyad between man and world, being
and non-being, being and nothingness, etc. But these contraries are unified in a
synthesis or a unity. Phenomenology tried to elucidate it through the idea of a
parallelism between noesis and noema. Nevertheless, this Husserlian form only
divides the duality of the subject and the object by internalizing it and replicating
it. The set forms two pairs of terms that cannot avoid redundancy: on the one
hand, the subject-object pair of the natural attitude; on the other hand, the noesis-
noema pair of the reduced transcendental attitude. Trying to surpass a so-called
natural duality, Husserl doubles the dual function through the heroic synthesis of
these two elements in a noetico-noematic correlation that simulates radical
immanence. Thus, there are in philosophy certain attempts to explain the concept
of dual; but these initiatives fall short because the duality of the two terms is
always thought according to a reciprocity, to the reversible limit, and not
according to a more originary foreclosure. The One and the World are neither
distinguished really as two terms radically “separated” by a foreclosure, nor
unilateralized by the specific causal relationship that follows from them, that of
the determination-in-the-last-instance. The structural mode of the philosophical
Decision, despite certain attempts at unilaterality (Difference), is on the contrary
that of the unitary or reversible (reciprocal, convertible) unity of contraries.
The dual is a key concept for non-philosophy that allows it to distinguish itself from philosophy.
First, it signifies the existence not of a double givenness but of the duality of the given-without-
givenness and givenness: of the One and the mixture of the World. This “duality” of experiences
prior to any synthesis and unitary analysis is formulated in terms of foreclosure: the given-
without-givenness is foreclosed to the givenness-of-the-given, and the latter in turn forecloses it
in another, less originary way.
The dual therefore implies an “epistemic” break between non-philosophy and philosophy. Not

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only in its way of thinking (according to the real-One or man), but also in its will to liberate the
essence of thought. Through its real and transcendental essence, non-philosophy is not decidable
by philosophy; it possess a “radical,” somewhat relative autonomy of thought that it inherits
from the non-sufficiency of its cause.
Finally, the dual engenders an order characterized by its irreversibility. It orders the duality of
man or its instances in a relation of unilaterality. This relation of causality is formulated in terms
of determination-in-the-last-instance or “unilateral duality.” It enables the reduction of
philosophy to the state of contingent given occasion, thus a non-philosophical science of
philosophy. By situating the real site of the different protagonists (science, philosophy…), the
dual introduces an opening of uni-versal thought ordered in the Real alone.
It is important to distinguish between the dual, duality, and dualism. The dual, having a real
essence, excludes dualism as a philosophico-religious decision in transcendence. (Unilateral)
duality is established between the World-occasion and the clones of the Real, but not with the
One itself. Lastly, dualism supposes a duality or a first syntax, thus a philosophical position.
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Essence (of) science (the Science)
One of the objects of first Science or unified Theory of thought; that by which it is a theory of
science and not simply a theory of philosophy; that by which it distinguishes itself also from the
philosophical reduction of science to its knowledges.
Philosophy only recognizes science or sciences under the classical, i.e.
metaphysical form of essence (Plato; Husserl: the Idea of science); then under the
nihilistic or degraded forms of an essence that denies itself: sciences as formations
of power-knowledge (Foucault); as microsocieties in a laboratory, objects of a
sociology; as techno-sciences, reduced to the technical and losing their theoretical
specificity; as formula: “science does not exist, only sciences exist,” etc. Via all
these modes, even the most vulgar, philosophy still claims to dictate the essence
of science in-itself.
First Science or unified Theory of science and philosophy proposes, among other tasks, to
determine the science-essence [essence (of) science] of the sciences. Such an object is thus not
philosophical. It forms the hypothesis, also of the “unified” type, scientific as well as
philosophical, that this science-essence is distinct from any essence of the simply philosophical
type, for it finds in the real-One the cause that determines it in-the-last-instance. To this end, it
requires the philosophy of the sciences or epistemologies, but simply as occasion or material.
Philosophy only posits an essence produced and masterable by itself, denying science any
scientifically recognizable essence, requiring the remainder of the regional knowledges or
empirical theories to isolate their processes of production and to serve as supports for the essence
of substitution that it projects onto the sciences. Non-philosophy is the refusal of this operation;
it radically distinguishes between the essence (of) science (as a science itself it is able to
determine it in its specific nature) and the knowledges it produces in its observation. The essence
(of) science is thus no longer this mixture of local knowledges that philosophy and the
ontological decision reifies or fetishizes, because from Plato to Heidegger it has projected itself
onto the sciences, denying any autonomy to the latter and devoting them to their nihilist destiny
foreign to thought in its identity.
First Science has a guiding formula in common with the philosophy-of-science: “the science of
science in general” (Fichte), indeed “absolute science” containing the foundations of the other
sciences (Husserl). But while philosophy and epistemology circularly interpret the relation of the
science-subject and the object-subject by reducing the latter to facts of knowledge, first Science
discovers the object that hides or suppresses this formula and that philosophy does not see
because it cannot: “the science of identity or essence (of) science.” It reestablishes the real object
of a theory of science and reduces the philosophical or epistemological mixtures to the state of
material which helps it determine, this time via operations of a “unified” type, the identity that
science comprises. The latter is thus no longer one of these abstract generalities with which
epistemology surveys [survole] the sciences and claims to safeguard their essence while simply
annihilating it.
The essence (of) science appears under two associated forms. From the side of the Real, it
appears as force (of) thought insofar as it is the identity-in-the-last-instance of theory (science)

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and pragmatics (philosophy), whereas the force (of) thought is not subject-(of/for)-science
without being subject-(of/for)-philosophy. From the side of the object, it appears as identity or
sense (of) identity of the philosophy of the sciences or even epistemo-logical Difference, etc.
Europanalysis
Phenomenological method of auto-analysis in the Internal (One). Neighboring doctrine of non-
philosophy, also referred to the One but through other axioms which understand it as Internal.
These axioms do not form a non-phenomenology or a non-philosophy of phenomenology but
posit the possibility of a thought and a language of the One (and not simply according to the
One).
Every philosophical investigation concerning the concept of Europe–not to
mention its corresponding mythologies–, including that of Husserl, constitutes
“Europe-philosophy,” i.e. a synthetic–not analytic–mode of approach of this same
concept, and must be overcome.
The point of–non-methodological–departure for europanalysis (S. Valdinoci) is the immanence
of impression. Together these notions separate it from phenomenology–which is justifiably
nothing but a methodology–and from empiricism. These notions both in fact rest upon the
concept of interior completely foreign, for example, to Hume. Furthermore, indifferent to the
break of inside and outside, the internal–immanent and impressive–determines a new regime of
thought, for example concave or opposed to the convexity of philosophy.
If philosophy is a thought-space marked by perceptual duality, it is a question of passing from
perception–and from the conception with which it pairs–to endoception, a fundamental
europanalytic notion. Endoception as internal intuition is tact without contact or without spatial
distantiation, a disidealized intuition without chora, which sees itself replaced by internal chaos.
Here Identity becomes a complex Identity receiving an internal Universe–certainly distinct from
the cosmological Universe as well as Schellingian psychocosmism. Open, fractured, or
fractalized Identity, it offers itself to method, zigzagging as representation of the unrepresentable
by means of an impressive language transmissable within all mankind.
The hypothesis of an impressive language or an internal speech leads to affirming the identity of
the analysis bearing upon the real and the autoanalysis of the real, or precisely “immense man.”
Europanalysis skirts alongside psychoanalysis, for which everything is also internal since the
latter abstracts from the sexual drive.
Europanalysis declares itself distinct from and complementary to non-philosophy to the extent
that, far from claiming to be a first science where the syntax of language is detached by the
foreclosure of the real, it endeavors a prescience or a genealogy of science by means of an
impressive language. Moreover, by affirming, as analytical induction, the identity of the last
instance of givenness and reduction, it overcomes one of the a prioris of formal ontology; on the
other hand, radicalizing the concept of One-Multiple obtained by the fractalization of generalized
deconstruction, it incorporates the Other in the One, which has become the Open by
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integralization. Indifferently, at the limit: Opening of Universe or ef-fect, Opening of Man or af-
fect. An ultimate difference then certainly separates europanalysis from an idealist philosophy:
this is because, recusing the concept of synthesis, it does not endeavor the autogivenness of an
absolute Opening which had also rejected it under the name of the signifier, so much the less that
it admits language as external relation into psychoanalytic alterity.
Experimentation
Effectuation of the system of hypotheses of non-philosophy by the object “philosophy” as
reduced to the state of occasion (symptomatic indication, nomination, cloning). The
experimentation of non-philosophy neither verifies nor falsifies it, but effectuates it as “simple”
hypothesis determined-in-the-last-instance by the Real.
An experimental thought only exists by excess or passages to the limit: Hegel
experiments with but idealizes experience according to Kant and extracts a
dialectic of the Logos from transcendental appearance. Heidegger, reading Kant,
experimented with the ontological status of temporality on the basis of the
experience of inner sense. Philosophy, correlating the hypothesis and
experimentation in a mixture, renders them convertible at the limit, finally

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knowing neither the one nor the other or ignoring them in their identity. Despite
the epistemological discussions on the necessity or non-necessity and status of
experimentation, the sciences offer a more solid conception of experimentation. In
effect, after the concept of “crucial experience” (Bacon)–still philosophical–has
been relativized, the sciences proceed by permanent experimentation either in a
goal of verification or falsification.
While non-philosophy conserves the identity of the hypothesis form and prevents it from
philosophically converting with the Real, either by verification (logical empiricism), or by
falsification (critical epistemology), or by absolute identification (Hegel, Nietzsche, for
example), it conserves the necessity and relative autonomy of experimentation. But it suspends
the philosophical sense of these latter: the experience (here philosophy) is necessary but limited
to its function of occasion, material, symptom, etc. There is no transcendental philosophy outside
the field of philosophy as its object, but the transcendental is no longer determined in its essence
even by this object (the “occasional” cause).
Experimentation indeed has effects of verification and falsification for non-philosophy, more
exactly for its previous hypotheses as investments in another philosophical material. But contrary
to what happens with philosophical hypotheses, it does not realize those of non-philosophy but
effectuates them in their conditions of existence without alienating them. It respects and thus
confirms the status of non-philosophy to be a valid hypothesis because it is determined–and
protected–in-the-last-instance by the vision-in-One. When transcendental thought is ordered in
the Real, it demands more than ever an experimentation relative to its conditions of existence
(against Platonism and its “digression,” Kant), but more than ever resists it and does not
progressively fall into it. It affirms the unilateral duality of the transcendental and the empirical,
of the force (of) thought and of experimentation, and thus avoids the epistemological (positivist,
critical, etc.) and philosophical (realist, idealist, “absolute,” etc.) solutions which are all founded
on their de jure convertibility (with a verification, a falsification, a rectification close…to a
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“labor” of adequation). By making experimentation pass from its epistemological status to its
“occasional” status, it liberates it from philosophical idealism simultaneously as it liberates the
transcendental from the empirico-transcendental circle.
First Name
Symbolic element of the transcendental axiomatic, formed on the basis of a philosophical
concept and entering into the constitution of the axioms that describe the One.
A first term is that which resists every regression according to Aristotle’s demand.
One can relate it to other terms either by definition or by a system of principles. In
philosophy, first terms can give the hope of breaking the circularity of the
commencement and at least to introduce an appearance of deductive rigor in it
against its “hermeneutic” penchant: which can include the cogito as axiom
belonging to a quasi-mathematical order of reasons; or the first notions posited by
Spinozist definitions. But these attempts arise from an ontological axiomatic to the
extent that every philosophy remains structured like a metaphysics. These terms
thus in fact remain intuitive (intellectual intuition) and can at any moment be re-
introduced into the philosophical circle of the given and the demonstrated, of
premises and consequences.
When a term no longer results from a conceptual and metaphysical abstraction but a really-
axiomatic abstraction (somewhat non-formal), i.e. when it is related to the One-in-One in-the-
last-instance, employed on the basis of the philosophical concept by the force (of) thought,
referred to this intuitive usage of the concept but deprived of its philosophical sense, it is
“formalized” and “symbolized” in a transcendental and first manner par excellence. The first
terms of non-philosophy, which principally describe the One and the subject-force (of) thought,
are first both due to their uniquely axiomatic abstraction and due to their transcendental status.
These are first names, but only in-the-last-instance, even when they are said of the One, the Real,
etc. There are no–save in onto-theo-logy–absolutely proper names, but radically proper or proper
in-the-last-instance alone. Even though by their occasion or philosophical extraction they have
an aspect of representational content, regional-and-fundamental, but by their real essence–their
identity (of) concept, non-conceptual identity–they are indifferent to philosophical hierarchies

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and to the deconstruction or dissemination of the latter. With an equal intraphilosophical

interpretation, which restores it to the transcendental and finally to the “One,” which it can
always serve to describe, any philosophical concept whatsoever can be treated as a first name
and inserted into the axioms. In this sense, first names result from the cloning of words from
philosophy by the One-of-the-last-instance. These are no longer mixtures of language and Being
said of the metaphysical One in the signboard of the reversibility of words and things. They no
longer designate the inherence of the referent within the word either from the point of view of
performativity (analytic philosophies) or from the point of view of the “mystical” (Wittgenstein).
They result from a usage that could be called “mystical-in-the-last-instance,” according to the
One and not simply when they are said of the One. These proper or first names arise from a
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transcendental and uni-versal pragmatics which produces them as non-conceptual symbols on the
basis of conceptual material.
Force (of) thought (existing-subject-Stranger)
Organon or means through which the One can enact or possess a causality without being
alienated in the material of its action. Instance which is not real like the One but produced
through cloning. Transcendental and aprioritic, it has its real essence in the One without adding
or subtracting anything to the Real itself which determines it in-the-last-instance to a local
occasion.
Marxism recognizes an equivalent concept which it places at the foundation of
historical Materialism: labor power [la force de travail]. This is an energetic
concept of human energy which only exists in the personality of the worker and
which is irreducible to his functions or operations, to work output or expended.
This concept is necessary so as to transform the object of work into exchange
value and is thus creative of value. According to the plan of the Marxist
systematic, it articulates the Marxian ontology of the individual and the theory of
capitalism. Nietzsche and Deleuze propose an idea of thought as a symptom of
forces, establishing its cause in a differential play of multiple forces rather than in
a Real-of-the-last-instance.
Whether idealist or materialist, philosophy recognizes “thought” [la-pensée] as a continuously
differentiated generality beginning from an empirical tracing of the faculties (intuition,
understanding, reason, and finally philosophy itself as objective auto-reflection). In its concepts
of thought, philosophy is content to idealize, sublimate, or critique an image of thought. Under
its most ethereal forms, it conforms to its origins and internalizes a final intuitive content,
topological in the best case, which reifies or thingifies it into an ontic element or into a
transcendental imagination, at best. Philosophy is nothing but the mobilization of this inertia or
this substantialization which continues to burden its experience of thought and which at best
proceeds to the “act” (Fichte, Nietzsche, Husserl), or to the Unthought (Heidegger), but never to
the Real which determines thought in-the-last-instance as force (of) thought.
In opposition to the gregarious generality of “thought,” non-philosophy discovers the content of
the latter to be foreclosed by philosophical authority. The force (of) thought is the first possible
experience of thought—after the vision-in-One which is not itself a thought—and a defetishizing
experience. Whereas “thought” is a fetishized and auto-factualized generality, susceptible of
circulating among all philosophies and all their objects and dimensions—in the manner of an
abstract exchange or a common sense—, the force (of) thought is the reality of thought insofar as
the former is not alienated in the latter or in its historico-philosophical forms. Under the
dependence of the vision-in-One in-the-last-instance, but only from its practice, it transforms the
material of philosophical statements and particularly the datum of the images of thought so as to
give them the scientifico-transcendental (“unified”) sense of non-philosophical knowledges.
The force (of) thought is a complex concept. The One cannot act of itself, for only Being or
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Transcendence can act upon philosophical material, i.e. a universal exteriority which is
employed by the organon for the One. Since the force (of) thought serves to determine Being
itself on the basis of experience, there is a circle, but this circle must be understood as that which
is characteristic of the a priori and which is broken with the transcendental. In effect, Being is
the a priori which structures every theory produced by thought and which, as such, is itself

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presupposed in its existence, but the transcendental Identity which precedes it and which makes
of the force (of) thought a transcendental subject in its radical manner puts an end to this
circularity because it is a clone entirely produced “under” One or “according to” the One. The
force (of) thought contains two constituents: transcendental Identity and aprioritic Identity, the
latter being directly open to experience. Why “force?” Nothing here is either mechanical or
energetic: it is called “force” because the transcendental Identity, cloned according to the One,
concretely effectuates—thanks to the occasion of philosophy and its transcendental identity—the
immanent universality of the vision-in-One. The latter, because it is turned-towards…the World
or given to…that which it gives, is for that a force, but still “negative” or in-effectuated.
Transcendental Identity is necessary in order to effectuate this real or immanent uni-versality and
to make it the transcendental force which is thought.
Formal Ontology (uni-versalized transcendental Logic)
Equivalent of transcendental Logic (under its “analytic” aspect) generalized under the universal
conditions of the vision-in-One. It contains the a priori non-autopositional moments which are
equal to Position as dimension of the philosophical Decision. Counterpart of material ontology
as generalized transcendental Aesthetic, the former would also be under the same universal
conditions and would correspond to Givenness.
A formal ontology does not exist as such in philosophy, but it does find its
restrained forms here, for example in Kant’s “transcendental Analytic” (ontology
or “transcendental” philosophy” “considers the understanding and reason even in
the system of all the concepts and principles which are related to objects in general
without admitting the objects which would be given,” Critique of Pure Reason,
version B, part II, chapter III); and in Husserl’s “formal ontology” (the aprioritic
doctrine of the object but taken on the modes of something in general).
Non-philosophy contains a “material ontology” or a “generalized transcendental Aesthetic,”
universalized in-the-last-instance, which is a theory of “something in general” insofar as it is
given. It results from the work of the force (of) thought on the aspects of Givenness which are
those of the philosophical Decision and in particular of this givenness par excellence that is that
of the regional. It also contains its counterpart from the perspective of the Position which belongs
to Decision. To the a priori of position correspond the non-autopositional a prioris of
Transcendence, Position, and Unity. Why are these formal?
These a prioris are all generalized and simplified in a non-autopositional mode in the sense that
each of them, as cloned identity, in-the-last-instance escapes from or leaps beyond the contrasted
couple which it forms with another or with itself in its being-doubled: they are all expressed in
an equal way of philosophy in accordance with the One-real.
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In particular, transcendental logic is generalized because it leaps beyond the disjunction of forms
as intellectual or sensible: it also contains the clones of the sensible or intuitive forms
(“Transcendence” and “Position” insofar as they are simultaneously intellectual and intuitive,
ideal and sensible—topological), provided that they form, posit, or objectify something in
general. The givenness/position couple (the guiding thread in the research of the a priori) must
be distinguished from the intellectual/sensible couple (which completely remains internal to
philosophy, its frontiers being indeterminate and porous). The terms “formal” and “material”
intend to surpass the formal/material philosophical couple and its internal folding, the Kantian
projection of the intellectual form and the sensible intuitive form. These couples are restrained,
even when they are no longer understood “metaphysically” but “transcendentally” (neo-
Kantianism) and when form conditions matter a priori. This transcendental direction, still
understood as circle or empirico-transcendental doublet, does not succeed in generalizing form
(the formal) or matter (the material), i.e. in breaking the circle of their correlation or reciprocal
determination and in positing relatively autonomous orders (in regard to the force (of) thought)
of a generalized transcendental logic and aesthetic. This generalization is only acquired when the
“transcendental subject” and its circle yields to the force (of) thought which alone is uni-versal
and which alone can determine the a prioris of form and matter, of position and givenness, in
their universal and equal validity for philosophical material.
Two complementary points follow:
1. Being given the uni-versal generality of non-philosophy, it is less a question in this

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universal transcendental logic of “categories” than transcendentals (the Other, Being,

Unity, the Multiple, etc. and the One equally as objects of a theory); consequently, it is a
question of transcendentals in their non-autopositional usage.
2. When non-philosophy breaks away from theories of something in general (object in
general + given or matter in general), in the theory of some object X (the Event, the
Subject, the Multiple, the Affect or something still more concrete), it must establish that
which we will call the transcendental equation of this object X, i.e. to preliminarily define
the type, order, nature and syntax of the non-autopositional transcendentals which in
some sense establish the proper formula or “algorithm” for this object. The syntax of this
system of transcendentals is always a mode of the determination-in-the-last-instance or
envelops the latter.
Generalization (generalization and uni-versalization)
Said of the reigning redirection of a structure of philosophical or scientific representation and
responsible for adjusting it in-the-last-instance to the immanent Real. Generalization is the
fundamental operation of non-philosophical knowledge, that which gives it its explanatory and
deconstructive force, but on condition of being ordered in the uni-versality of the vision-in-One.
Philosophy generalizes: autoposition, autoreflection, and primarily every type of
metaphysical abstraction, etc. Logos, Kosmos, and Polis are structural invariants,
Greco-occidental foundations which are called earth, horizon…according to the
eras. The philosophical work has an essence of reflexively forming a logos of
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these stabilized invariants: this reflection is either pure logology (Aristotle’s
Organon), or cosmic logos, or political logos. Philosophical generalization is an
amplification of reflexive interactions, an operation with a traditionally unitary
and systematic goal; hence the multiplication of tautological effects and reflexive
symmetries. After the intervention of Hume and Kant, critiquing the possibility of
metaphysical reflection, two simulacra of generalization are set in place: 1) Hegel
has conserved the effect of symmetry (bilaterality). Philosophy is then the
extrapolation of topology. The invariant foundations are assimilated by totalizing
variation as Concept. Hegel simultaneously idealizes and naturalizes thought by
revealing real immanence. 2) In the 20th century, the inverse operation was
attempted: interpolate or disintegrate. The Other loses the support of Being and
provokes effects of asymmetry, differe(a)nce, singularity. These effects after
Nietzsche and Husserl are still generated in a foundation of the logos which they
affect by unilaterality (the differentialists and M. Henry via a completely different
mode). In a general way through its metaphysical nucleus, philosophy is generality
and totality, and thus its universality is divided and does not manage to constitute
itself in really universal thought. Despite or because of its claims, philosophy
remains a particular thought (for example, “Greek,” to which “Jewish” thought
can be opposed).
Non-philosophical generalization stems–this is the meaning of the “non-Euclidean” metaphor–
from a non-, an effect of the vision-in-One or the Real. This is not an immediate negation but a
unilateralizing of the claims of philosophy about the Real. It does not destroy the reality of
philosophical mixtures by dissociating the sides of one another (M. Henry), but conserves this
reality as support for sense, the sense (of) identity equivalent to philosophy. The vision-in-One
does not deny the World but simply unilateralizes its claims. It gives or clones via its own mode
in-the-last-instance on the basis of the experience of the World or philosophy, on the one hand
the identities which constitute the subject as force (of) thought, and on the other the correlative
identities which are equivalent to these objects, their sense (of) identity such that it is lived by the
force (of) thought. But this play of “unilateralization” and “unidentification,” which extracts
from philosophy identities-in-the-last-instance, is a radical universalization. More precisely, a
uni-versalization: everything (received-)given-in-One is on the mode of the immanent uni-
versality of the One or is given-in-the-last-instance, as an identity turned-towards…X (insofar as
X exists). We thus oppose to the universality by and in the transcendence of philosophy, always
divided into generality and totality, the identity of immanent uni-versality which enables
constituting on the basis of philosophy’s terms a transcendental axiomatic of uni-versal first

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terms in-the-last-instance.
A true generalization accepts losing the always illusory foundations, as well as logological
manipulation, on behalf of continual work of redirection. The destabilization of Greco-occidental
invariants loses the intuitive references which are found in a thought annexed to space and time.
The thought that arises, but only in-the-last-instance, from immanence is atopic. Philosophical
reflection with its reflexive, bilateral returns [renvois] then appear as the symptom of a unilateral
sending [envoi]. The positive destabilization of thought deploys itself without the flattening
philosophical symmetries. We could call, for example, “generalized fractality” the uni-versal
alterity (in-One) that affects thought and suspends representational closures. Fractal-real
objectivity rectifies and generalizes knowledges by continuously adjusting their closures over the
uni-versal Other and its non-representational identity. The universalizing redirection must be
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distinguished from an artificializing philosophy that naturalizes thought. It is a question of
simulating–without returning to a philosophy of simulacra–philosophical statements through
non-philosophical means of a generalizing fractality and of producing “statements of synthesis”
irreducible to reflexive syntheses and thus capable of explaining them.
Generalized Fractality
One of the other possible names of the unilateral structure of non-philosophical representations.
It attests to the practice of theoretical and experimental generalization—a radical
universalization—of a particular physico-geometrical theory: the fractals of Mandelbrot, from
which it releases a fractal identity being able to call itself from philosophy and then constitute an
“artificial philosophy.”
The philosophico-spontaneous treatment of the Mandelbrotian concept of
fractals—which is the quantification of the degree of irregularity and
fragmentation of a physico-geometrical object—is revealed from a decisional
gesture of philosophy in regard to the sciences. The mechanism of philosophical
universalization, illegitimate or “delirious” (cf. Kant) but inevitable, of a local
scientific theory, is the following: knowledges are isolated from their practico-
experimental and auto-positional processes as transcendent “facts,” only insofar as
they ideologically sustain the representation of Being. The result of this
universalization, indispensable to the survival of philosophy, is a mixed, empirico-
transcendental concept of fractality. That is to say scientific modeling (dimension
D) is confused with reality or being: it is the real itself that “fractalizes itself”
(Serres). Suppose that this is re-appropriated “schizoanalytically” to become a
unitarily split representation of being: the “fractal” model describes “the smooth
space” of non-metric, nomadic multiplicities (Deleuze). It is then supposed that
the thought of being or the being of thought acts under the pretext of the
“reconciliation of science and philosophy,” of the claim of the “transcendental”
right of philosophy over the sciences.
Generalized or uni-versalized fractality is a specific experimentation which gives up its destiny
as the desire of philosophy to be science. Instead of being a simple analogical transference of the
scientific knowledge for the representation of Being, it is the experimental non-philosophical
work of scientific concepts: I) let this be such a particular scientific theory in its own legitimacy
without intervening there as philosophy wants to 2) do not “apply” or imprudently generalize this
particular theory for the benefit of philosophical authority. The universalization of fractality is
rather a modeling, similar to the theoretico-experimental work of Mandelbrot, but under other
conditions of experimentation—the universal of the vision-in-One—and with a broad object
consequently “larger” than geometrico-physics, the philosophical object itself.
These conditions are those of first Science rather than philosophy: 1) the One or the condition of
identity-of-the-last-instance replaces the internal principle of homothety or constancy in
Mandelbrot; 2) the Unilateral as the very structure of thought according to-the-One replacing the
condition of irregularity or fragmentation; 3) the object of fractalization, maintaining natural
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language in its various philosophical, poetic, literary uses….replaces the geometrico-physical
object. These conditions given, the fractalization of philosophy is possible as a potential example
of non-philosophical work effectuated under the condition of the last-instance of the One and the

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force (of) thought. This work produces an open set, a universe of really universal fractal
knowledges that “reflect” the One adequately. Such a practice is distinguished from the task of
the wise-philosopher who, believed to hold the authority of transcendental approval, repeats the
mixed epistemo-philosophical gesture of’ expropriation and reappropriation, instead of using the
sciences themselves only under the conditions of a transcendental axiomatic.
Given-without-givenness
Other first name for the One or the Real, considered from the philosophical and
phenomenological angle of Givenness. The Given in this radical sense is immanence (to) self and
has no need of forming the object of knowledge. “Given-without-givenness” itself signifies
foreclosure to any operation of givenness (manifestation, etc.) or thought and not simply any
giving instance. Therefore, we shall call Givenness the first operation of thought-according-to-
the-Given. It is givenness-of-the-Given, but is itself determined-in-the-last-instance by the latter.
The given-givenness couple or fold has a phenomenological origin and
undergoes several variations that mark the post-Husserlian history of
phenomenology. According to Husserl, it is the “originally giving intuition” of
things “in the flesh” or as object, which is the evidence or “principle of
principles.” For Heidegger, it is the deconstruction of this givenness, which is
still metaphysical, through the givenness of Being itself; through it, there is (es
gibt das Sein). For Derrida, it is “Giving Time,” a formula that translates and
deconstructs “Being and Time.” The history of this notion continues (J.L.
Marion), but in every case and whichever deviation emplaced to differ the
coupling or to privilege one of the terms, it is characteristic of philosophy to no
longer separate the given and givenness in a unilaterality. These notions serve
together to think the manifestation of the Real in the state of phenomenon
(Being or Existent, indeed the Gift itself) and its constitution as that to which
thought must yield as the most originally possible.
Non-philosophy makes a problem of thought according to the One or to the Real, but not of the
Real itself. It dissolves the amphibology or the “fold” of the given and givenness and treats it as
a simple material to be dualyzed after serving as occasion (nomination and indication) for
speaking the Real. It is the non-phenomenology of givenness.
We shall call Given the real-One and it alone. It can only be given without the excess or the
other-world of an act of givenness, and certainly not with a giving instance on which it would
depend; it is the phenomenon itself. The Given implies in its essence that it is radically immanent
(to) self and to nothing else (the Existent, the World, Being, Substance, Givenness, Appeal, etc.).
Non-constituted and “separated,” the Real is firstly and only given (to) itself; it is the vision-in-
One without the supplementary aid of an operation of thought. As for it, Givenness is first, but
would be impossible if the Real weren’t already given; it would cease being the stability,
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exteriority, and objectivity proper to thought if the Given did not “precede” it, radically or
without return, due to its primacy without priority or its status as “last-instance.”
We shall globally call Givenness the sphere of non-real or real-in-the-last-instance “reality” that
comes after the Given, thus the transcendental essence of thought that finds its cause in the One-
Given. It is in turn a phenomenal given and is also called “given,” but only in-the-last-instance.
Insofar as it distinguishes itself from the One, unlike the latter, it supposes an operation of
givenness that sets philosophy in play, the givenness of philosophy.
Non-philosophy thus manifests the essence of thought, but not the One which, being manifested
by itself, has no need of being a second time; but which also can exist under the conditions of
objectivity to which it must then satisfy in its own way.
God-without-Being
[Original translation by Anthony Paul Smith]
First name for the identity (of) “God,” human identity in-the last-instance of a simple onto-
theological material. Necessary symbol for a non-theology or a unified theory of philosophy and
religious faith.
The expression “God without Being” comes from Jean-Luc Marion and testifies to
at least a Heideggerian deconstruction, and more so, of onto-theo-logy. It is the
idea of God represented in a particular mode of philosophy, onto-theo-logical,

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from the matrix of combining the great opposites (Being/being [Être/Étant],

One/Multiple) characteristic of the metaphysical Decision and added on to the
causality of the One. Instead of one of the opposites simply being split—at the
assistance of language—in order to achieve the status of a principle (for example
and in particular the Platonic One), each of the opposites are here subjected to that
splitting: the One of the aforementioned example would appear as One-for-the-
dyad, the two of the dyad itself appears as “One divided into two,” and God as the
conceptual gathering of that double division—the All of things which Kant said
was composed by the unity of the One and the Multiple. In other words, God is the
principle of the enclosure of onto-theo-logical language, indeed philosophical.
In the ontological demonstration, God is the name of the combination of essence and existence,
or even of Being [Être] and being [l'Étant], since God is the being-which-is [l'Étant-qui-est]. In
the cosmological demonstration, God appears in the inverse as the difference between Being
[Être] and being [l'Étant], in the play of the two demonstrations, God is then the difference of the
identity and difference of Being [Être] and being[l'Étant], pure amphibology.
The contemporary attempts (Lévinas, Marion) to think God without being, essence, or existence,
leads to the identification of God with the Other, an Other non-thetic in and by the definitions of
an ethical God for the former and of a God without theology—liberated from the amphibology—
in the latter. But the amphibology reappears as crossing from the philosophical Decision insofar
as it is structured as a metaphysics that these attempts cannot radically invalidate.
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The One-in-One, not being Self [Moi], could not be God (as in Schelling who confused the One
and Being). The Stranger-subject [subject-Étranger] not being non-Self [non-Moi], could not be
(in particular) God. God is a specific and irreducible mode of the Stranger - it is at the least that
which imposes the onto-theo-logical material. The vision-in-One determines in-the-last-instance
the experience of the identity (of) God, identity (of) a transcendence or of an absolute height
(and not only of an exteriority). This is the only manner of returning to God his transcendence, as
it is lived-in-One [vécue-en-Un], or his sense (of) identity, while it is compromised by all the
modes of arguing for its subject by presence, or, in the inverse, by withdrawal, or lastly by the
withdrawal in presence which would qualify God as “gift.” It brings from dualysis the confusion
One-God, identifying in the identity (of) God, always presupposed by theology, an effect of
vision in-One. If the “given” precedes givenness and, as such, necessarily the gift, the only error
of the dialectic is of having attributed this being-given [être-donné] (“givenhood” [donnéité]) to
Being [Être], in forming the expression of “Being-given” [Être-donné] (Kojève), and in also
consequently refusing to God appearance in the non-real order of donation. Being [Étant] given
the One, as well as in-the-last-instance the givenhood of the Other-as-givenness, the new gift of
non-philosophy may consist in admitting, in its manner, the being-given-without-givenness of
the givenness of a non-theological-God, of an atheistic or human God in-the-last-instance, all the
more transcendent, where the paradox dissolves the amphibology without resurrecting the
dialectic of God and man (Hegel, Feuerbach). It is only from the radical phenomenal point of
view of the-last-instance (and not phenomenological) that one knows that it is non-sufficient, that
man is the measure of God himself.
Hypothesis (philosophizing-by-hypothesis)
“Applied” or variant usage of non-philosophy (proposed by A.F. Schmid) that adds to its axioms
a supplementary axiom bearing upon the philosophical Decision: that of the de jure multiplicity
of philosophical decisions. This axiom is simultaneously added to those of the vision-in-One and
those formalizing the philosophical Decision.
This problem has no meaning in philosophy and must not be confused with the
philosophical problem of the One and the Multiple. At most, a historian-
philosopher of philosophy (M. Gueroult) has elaborated a theory of the
philosophical decision in a Fichtean spirit under the hypothesis of an empirical
or de facto spatio-temporal multiplicity of philosophies.
Sufficiency demands the certitude and absoluteness ending in the principles of philosophy. Non-
philosophy can on the contrary support and promote a practice of philosophy–and not a “pure”
non-philosophy–by hypothesis rather than speculation, without sufficiency or exhaustiveness.
The hypothesis is in every way a fundamental concept of non-philosophy, but it is even more so

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for this “application” to which it gives rise. It allows admitting the coexistence of multiple
positions, contrary from the point of view of their sufficiency, yet no longer understanding them
as contraries or even as “positions” but as transcendental orders or transcendental Identities.
Veritable differences of order are no longer determined by the war of philosophical interests but
arise from multiple transcendental identities which are so many hypotheses. The engagements of
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philosophies, concepts, and names of philosophers are no longer the occasion of a
hierarchization, the hypothesis being in-the-last-instance the form of equivalence of
engagements. Likewise, we could suppose that the simulation has modified relations between
theory and experience in the contemporary sciences, we could suppose that, understood in this
sense, the hypothesis will transform the relations in philosophy which rule over the
transcendental and the empirical while displacing one of the major problems of philosophical
objectivity: the respect of the sciences and facts must accommodate themselves for the
philosophers in their personal philosophical histories, that which leads them to perpetuate a
vicious dialectic between the model and the elevated, the master and the disciple, against the
other supposedly inauthentic positions. “Philosophizing by hypothesis” is a way of giving a
meaning to a love-without-master-and-without-disciple in philosophy, and making of the latter a
veritable oecumine for the Stranger. Philosophical individuation is then considered “ordinary”
and no longer as the effect of a narcissistic difference.
Of non-philosophy rigorously takes philosophy as reduced occasion and as “object,” nothing
prevents us from supposing that this object possesses the degree and nature of autonomy which
accords it this new axiom. In this case, non-philosophy modifies the practice of philosophy
itself. It is a postulate there in the sense that no rule can allow us to preview the concrete nature
of such effects. It is not simply a question of relating the content of the material to the One
according to rules which deliver philosophy from its sufficiency, but of practicing philosophy,
psychoanalysis, ethics, etc. in such a way that they satisfy the requisites of non-philosophy under
this axiom. This schematism of non-philosophy in this material contributes to transforming the
practice of philosophy in several ways. From the point of view of “pure reason,” philosophy
would proceed by hypotheses and first terms, there would be as many philosophies as examples
of the mixtures between the empirical and the transcendental. From the aesthetic point of view,
every philosophical project would have its own style which could individuate it: this is one of the
meanings that could be given to “artificial philosophy.” From the ethical point of view, radical
evil, which concerns the World, would be judged as the lure that the distance of philosophy from
the Real produces on the basis of radical misfortune, the essence of human solitudes. Every
concept elaborated by non-philosophy could be reintroduced into its original discourse and
enrich it without for all that reproducing a logic of sufficiency. This schematism would be a
positive and liberating transformation of the material in itself.
Such a schematism confirms that non-philosophy is in no way the end of philosophy but its
salvation in multiple and non-exclusive practices. Philosophy continues as one of the forms of
non-philosophy. This axiom in question is thus the condition of the reality of philosophy in non-
philosophy. It saves philosophy from the edge of non-philosophy which it softens but without
returning to the forms of its most spontaneous sufficiency.
Language-Universe
Cloned-according-to-the-One from the Logos, from the philosophical mixture of thought and
language. Language and its function of ontological opening, of language-world, is received in its
sense (of) identity by the force (of) thought as language-universe, or uni-versal in-the-last-
instance for philosophy, the World, and the Logos itself. Language-universe is the identity (of
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the) language-world or Logos.
Before the various philosophical conceptions of language, a philosophical
invariant consists in bestowing upon language a transcendental function (in a
broad sense) of world, opening, and being. Hence its status simultaneously as
(real) referent and as explicit or implicit organon of philosophy. To speak is
always and in every way to open, to tear, to surpass, to transcend. This
transcendental opening is a dimension that discovers its empirical condition of
existence in the variable linguistic digressions between the signifier, the signified,

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signification, sense, sign, etc. The “linguistic turn” is nothing but a possibility
programmed by the essence of the philosophical Decision and actualized by
supplementary historical causes.
Non-philosophical pragmatics recognizes itself as an activity of language, but it treats language
as an inert material concerning its properties of the Logos, the One determining it in-the-last-
instance without the mediation of philosophy’s operations. We shall thus distinguish:
language as claiming to be constitutive or co-constitutive of the Real itself (philosophy), a
linguistico-philosophical appearance or language-world which non-philosophy transforms into a
simple material;
the transcendental-axiomatic usage of language as clone in-the-last-instance of language-in-
philosophy;
language in its signifying wrapper and signified as support of the reality of the force (of) thought
and its non-philosophical a prioris, i.e. the duality of the (non-)One, the support being a function
which is more than the clone-according-to-the-One and less than the constitution of the Real
(philosophy) through language or Logos.
Language is necessary for the axiomatic formulation of the One and the force (of) thought, if at
least we propose to think according-to-the-One. On the other hand, it is not necessary to the
essence of the One or to its internal structure. The axiomatic position of the Real, i.e. thought
according to the One as non-philosophy, is contingent in relation to it: it indeed has its
determination in it but only in-the-last-instance. By using language as a simple material
inseparable from the philosophical concept, non-philosophy restores its essence: it transforms the
latter into a mode of the (non-)One. The axiomatic descriptions of the One, of the force (of)
thought, and of the philosophical material’s sense (of) identity no longer designate the fine-
infinite form of a World but arise through their being-manifested-in-the-last-instance from the
immanent Uni-verse which shelters the vision-in-One. The usage of language’s logos supposes a
spontaneous autofactualization and fetishization of language. Its setting-in-universe defetishizes
it as much as possible by relating it to its aprioritic, transcendental, and finally real conditions.
We call “language-universe” this clone produced on the basis of the logos or the language-world.
In the vision-in-One, language is given-without-givenness, ungenerated and ungenerating,
sterile, delivered from the goals and slavery of poetry. This usage of language without closure–
where language is no longer its own closure as in Wittgenstein–supposes that it stops defining
and delimiting the pragmatic aspect of thought and that it become instead the object of a
pragmatics which furthermore defines it.
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Lived Experience (lived-without-life)
Every act of thought or experience, of theory or life, insofar as it is related in-the-last-instance to
the One as lived (of) lived experience or immanent “in-lived-experience” and insofar as it thus
defines the cause of a non-phenomenology.
After Descartes, transcendental phenomenology achieves the telos of “lived
experience” (Erlebnis) which traversed certain idealist philosophies of life
(Plotinus, Fichte, Hegel). “Lived experience” then designates every intentional act
as related to consciousness on its subjective side (hyle and noesis). Lived
experience is thus conscious by definition and “ready for perception” (Husserl);
immanent or absolutely and adequately given without attempts, unlike the object;
individualized and capable of plurality; finally, pure as transcendental and not
psychological. Not even in transcendental phenomenology does it attain the purity
of radical immanence or the ultimate and reversible character which is the mark of
the Real. It is always slightly of the transcendental order of an object or an
attribute that forms a frontier, if not violence, -to the (rational) subject. A
radicalization of phenomenological lived experience, but which remains at the
limits of philosophy, is given by immanent “Life,” auto-generative and auto-
affective in the sense of Michel Henry.
Non-philosophy universalizes what philosophy gives it occasion of thinking as “lived
experience.” The unilateralizing suspension and unidentification of the transcendence of
phenomenological lived experience makes the sense of the latter seem like an existent yet a
foreclosure of non-phenomenological or radically immanent experience. This sense is in some

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way the non-phenomenological noema of the “lived” phenomenological object. Under this form,
it can then serve to name, as first term, the One itself or the Real of-the-last-instance, the “thing”
of real lived experience. Released from its autoposition and its perceptibility of consciousness
reduced to its identity-in-One, it finally possesses a transcendental purity and a universality
which allow it to be said of whichever thought or experience as related to this lived-experience-
of-the-last-instance. In effect, always in non-philosophy but here more particularly, we
distinguish (lived experience as) Real or One-in-One from the “lived” as original conceptual
symbol but having undergone a non-conceptual treatment of first term, a symbol through which
the Real forms the object of a position of thought obviously without being posited in its essence
itself. The term “lived experience” is thus also a vocable among others without a
phenomenological type of privilege and without giving rise to a philosophy of Life. Within the
framework of non-phenomenology, it can be “re-worked” as “lived-without-life,” a first term
that effectively marks its neutralization as philosophical concept.
Man (Humans)
In their complete notion, men or humans are existing-subject-Strangers, determined-in-the-last-
instance by the Real or the One as Ego-in-Ego. Ego-man, contrary to the philosophical Ego, is
foreclosed to the subject, but the latter, insofar as it presupposes it, effectuates its uni-versality
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for the World.
As a philosophical concept, man is a humanoid simultaneously traced from the
anthropoid which has hardly gone beyond Greek anthropological thought and the
Judeo-Christian “creature.” Philosophy has oriented the human around the
Cosmos, Physis, Being, Spirit, Will to Power, etc. as so many abstract and puppet
[fantoches] entities which imply the dismemberment of man into attributes
(power, language, sex, society, politics, etc.) with which it has attempted to
artificially recompose him. The pro-thetic, anti-thetic, syn-thetic—artificial—man
of philosophy (and not only of anthropology or the human sciences to which the
thought-world assigns its dirty work) is this “sublime abortion” which must give
birth to the “overman.” Philosophy desires the inhuman, the pre-human, the all
too-human, the over-human without recognizing the “ordinary” nothing-but-
human. The philosophical heaven is populated with anthropoid and artificial
creatures, Dasein included, which escape from a cloven thought and lead to a host
of masks and travesties, after which demons and angels become fully rationalized.
Humanism is an inferior angelism and a lie concerning man. Because of this
dishonor, philosophy is saved with great difficulty through the thesis of a
theoretical anti-humanism (Althusser) which will not have been sufficiently
radicalized.
Non-philosophy is like a negative universal thought which can be effectuated, for example, in the
language of a science-of-men rather than sciences-of-man. Determined-in-the-last-instance
according to the Ego-in-Ego, radically non-anthropoid, it manifests the essence of the existing-
subject-Stranger essentially from the force (of) thought. But the latter is a general and even
universal matrix and must be modulated by the a prioris of a unified theory of philosophy and
sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, ethnology, etc. It is a question of making equivalent in
the disciplines of the human sciences a thought whose content-in-human and content-in-science
are assured without demanding the exclusion of philosophy pure and simple. The civil war
between philosophy and the human sciences can only find its peace treaty outside itself and in a
different conception of man. Non-philosophy is a rigorous heresy: it makes of man a being-
Inseparate (from) self, and thus Separated-without-separation from the World. In other words,
for one of the first times it has become possible to define man in a “formal” way without
formalism; to constitute him as an axiomatic rather than philosophical object. Man is precisely
the Real foreclosed to philosophy. The latter can only imagine what is alone the “existent” and
“non-existent” which can be set into axioms and which only tolerates—so great is its
autonomy—axioms. Where there is man, the thesis and principle are excluded. Where there is
the human, thought must be axiomatized and renounce its sufficiency.
Material Ontology (chôra, uni-versalized transcendental Aesthetic)
That which philosophy becomes or the function which it fulfills in relation with experience when

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its sufficiency is suspended by the force (of) thought and when it is reduced to its sense (of)
identity. It then becomes the material a priori through which all phenomena are necessarily
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given; equal to the term of chôra in its non-philosophical usage.
Philosophy claims to give regional or singular phenomena through its form and
submits them to its legislation. Consequently, it posits them according to the very
diverse modes in its interior and from its relation to the experience of universal
and necessary structures of the “a priori” type, which are all generally copied
from the sciences. It therefore supposes: 1) a certain contingency or autonomy,
indeed alterity, of experience in relation to these a priori; 2) a certain superiority,
which is proper to it, over experience through the means of the a priori itself—to
which it is however not reduced—through which it is the superior form still called
“transcendental”: the principle of reason, for example, must be “grounded” in turn
or “ungrounded” accordingly. Philosophy presents itself as both the ultimate
legislator of experience as well as its a priori organon. As a whole, philosophy
wills or desires its unity with experience, but this unity remains contingent,
menaced, aleatory: reassuring it is the motor of the creation of new philosophies
supposedly more in control of the real than preceding philosophies.
The suspension of the Principle of sufficient philosophy (PSP) in its different stages (real,
transcendental, a priori) liberates the identity (of) philosophy and transforms the latter in a
general way into a noematic a priori of the World or all possible experience, but into an a priori
itself of the non-philosophical type. Thesis: “everything, from experience, is philosophizable”
never ceases being a new philosophical and antinomical decision, while philosophy is
necessarily and universally equal to all phenomena without exception, if the diverse dimensions
of the mixture of philosophy insofar as it is givenness—and from the latter with experience—are
lived in their sense (of) identity through the force (of) thought. Philosophy ceases being the
legislator of the event in order to become the a priori giverr: mixture itself is given as identity.
The contingent relations of experience and philosophy are then intrinsically indissoluble or
thought beyond all hierarchies. Hence an equivalence (without exchange or reciprocity) of
identities (non-mixtures) which introduces democracy into the heart of the given or new
experience. Every ontic or ontological and philosophical term of object or action, every
statement, etc. is henceforth treatable as such an identity in which experience is immediately
inscribed philosophically and philosophy immediately incarnated ontically in the same
movement. This radical diversity of “material” identities forms a chôra to which philosophy and
its necessary relation to experience are reduced. Philosophy is reduced to the state of simple
“material” a priori, or “material” rather and thus itself becomes, under this form, the basic
material of non-philosophy. This is the “uniformal” form of the material givenness of
phenomena. It fulfills a function, but only from a simple a priori organon of experience. It
corresponds to a “transcendental aesthetic” of the World or to whichever experience possible on
the basis of transcendence. “Aesthetic,” but which substitutes philosophy itself (its identity) and
thus its relation to whichever experience for regional and limited models of givenness which are
scientific, perceptual, artistic, etc. which would be grasped so as to be assured of givenness and
its mastery over phenomena. “Transcendental,” but only because of the origin of this reduction in
the force (of) thought. Its principle being the identity—but exercised in its real origin, not posited
dogmatically—of Being and the Existent, it thus generalizes the fundamental axiom of a recent
materialist ontology: mathematics=ontology (Badiou) by intending it for all experience possible
beyond mathematics and by transcendentally determining this equation instead of passing over to
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a dogmatic thesis lacking any legitimacy other than being one decision among others. Philosophy
as simple material ontology is a way of cutting materialism short as a hidden philosophical
decision. Furthermore, by limiting philosophy to a simple aprioritic ontology of experience, non-
philosophy legitimates it or validates it—in certain limits which precisely returns to the
extrication of the violent and arbitrary act of auto-legitimation (including its Kantian auto-
limitation or its deconstructive hetero-limitation) but which better assures it a necessary and
positive function.
Metascience

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Ensemble of discourses of a philosophical type that finds its origin in the object of science, the
elucidation and foundation of its essence, but which in turn are treated as the object or the
phenomena of first Science.
This concept does not have a special use in philosophy since it spontaneously
recognizes the right to legislate over science, and that it is thus by definition
“meta-science” sometimes the absolute science or science of sciences, sometimes
the discourse of elucidation or commentary, interpretation, critique, and
foundation of the sciences.
Non-philosophy defines a precise content and status of metascience. Content: the whole of the
nonscientific discourses that aim at the essence of science; that is to say directly: epistemologies,
philosophies-of-sciences, and philosophies-to-science (which are based explicitly on a given
empirical theory); that is to say indirectly, philosophy in general as it is implicitly determined by
scientific breaks. Status: “metascience” conjoins with “science,” and this generalized couple is
that of “mathematics” and “metamathematics” posited by Hilbert in his theory of the
demonstration of the absolute consistency of formal systems. This concept thus has sense only
within and according to science and its priority over metascience.
This generalization answers a precise objective:
1. To show the similarity between the programs of formal (Hilbert) and logical (Frege,
Russell) foundation of arithmetic, and the programs of foundation of science in general
which are implicitly all philosophies and explicitly the “theories of science” (Aristotle;
Fichte; philosophy as “science of science in general”; Husserl: philosophy as rigorous
science or “science with absolute foundation,” etc).
2. To make metascientific discourses a type of operation similar to what Godel did to
metamathematics: instead of supposing, without evidence other than philosophical faith,
that philosophies are really able to found and anticipate sciences and that this objective
has some sense that it does, reversing the situation and giving itself the means of a
science of metascience or philosophy. It is “first science,” still known as “non-
philosophy” (or “science of philosophy,” but this is only one aspect of its activity).
Philosophy corresponds indeed to the area of the phenomena of which this new or
“unified” science uses in order to determine not the traditional “essence of science,” but
the knowledge of the essence (of) science.
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3. To show through this new discipline in the character of “unified theory” that if
metascience aims at the essence of science, it aims at it in illusion or repression, seeing its
foreclosure, and that it is for these two reasons that philosophy functioned through
materiality.
The concept “metascience” makes it possible to renew the parallel problem of `metalanguage’
and to draw a possible treatment of this question. First Science poses the following statements
which are also applicable to metalanguage: 1) there is, in any event, metascience, that is to say a
discourse which is posed or is presented in the form as such (resp. metalanguage); 2. The
statements: “there is no metascience (…),” or; “there is a metascience, and it is valid,” are
excluded as an expression of the sufficiency of philosophy; in the same way, though to a lesser
degree: “there are effects of metascience (…),” effects of a play of “textual forces” or a
“language game” in the immanence through which metascience plunges. First Science is a
transcendental science of metascience, it reintroduces it into the immanence-of-the-last-instance
of the One-real; it is not a philosophy that would reintroduce it into the immanence of a
(philosophical) decision.
Mixture
[Original translation by Anthony Paul Smith]
Other first name for the philosophical Decision insofar as it is founded on reversibility as
structure or limit-tendency of the mélange, fold, relation, correlation, synthesis, convertibility,
etc.—characteristic of specifically philosophical unitary syntaxes.
The mixture such that philosophy itself thematizes it (Deleuze, Derrida) is not
only the form of its material or its object (Anaxagoras), but its own autoposition,
its point of view (Plato, the Philebus), thus the system-essence and sufficiency of
philosophy. From this point of view, the mixture can grow and transform along its

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external edges through which it is affected (Derrida) or through its internal edges
and its mid-place [mi-lieu] (Deleuze). But in all these scenarios, the mixture itself
thinks itself and deconstructs itself and exceeds the simple mélange, the synthesis,
etc. The “transcendental-empirical doublet” (Foucault) is only one particular
mode of the mixture-form of which the more universal forms are autoposition,
autogivenness, autoreflection, etc. Mixture in this “total” or “absolute” sense is
not always realized, philosophy burdening itself in its various objects, in its
objectives and its foreign materials, its regional representations. But it is its limit-
form or tendential. And philosophy only thematizes the mixture by itself.
Non-philosophy finds this theme of mixture by generalizing it—in an approximate
interpretation—in all philosophy, then by demonstrating its identity (of) mixture
for the subject. In effect, all philosophical decisions necessarily obey one
structural and transcendental rule which is the unity of contraries. Primarily,
contraries are posited as more or less antagonistic or even reciprocal in a Dyad;
then one of them has the privilege of supporting the third that it identifies,
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unifying the other two in a synthesis. For example, philosophy thinks the One and
the Multiple as opposites but capable of being united in the synthesis of
“multiplicities” (Deleuze) and in general in One/Multiple hierarchies. The end
thus produced is a mixture.
From the ancient and contemporary indications on the mixture as object and as form of
philosophy, non-philosophy is made up of the symptoms from which it extracts the identity (of)
mixture. This signifies that mixture, in the sense which we have defined it, is not only the form
of philosophy but the philosophical form a priori to all experience, the interior form of the
thought-world, and not a simple regional or even “fundamental” form, i.e. irreducibly contingent.
As self-will, the philosophical mixture believes to be able to think itself because it wills to think
itself thus. Hence the philosophical faith in the Real that it is (without being more), that it desires
(without obtaining), etc. It is then the place par excellence of the transcendental illusion and
indeed a “real appearance” even more profound than transcendental dialectic appearance (Kant),
because it is the appearance of philosophy itself and not simply that of metaphysics.
Amphibological by essence, philosophy is structurally incapable of dualyzing contraries, which
is only possible for the immanence in-the-last-instance of the One. It is the ideological place par
excellence (the concept of ideology from Marx-Althusser is here generalized), the place of real,
then transcendental illusion (in a non Kantian sense, or in a generalized Kantism). On the other
hand, mixture is in itself indestructible, and non-philosophy, differently from a philosophy of
transcendental immanence (Michel Henry), does not believe itself able to dissolve it as without
reality or consistency, but only to suspend its importance in the constitution of a subject as
existing-Stranger or the force (of) thought.
Multiple
Nature of the aprioritic instance, the last in the constitution of the force (of) thought as
transcendence or non-autopositional Distance. Exteriority, restored to its identity-of-the-last-
instance-in-the-One, is the element of a radical multiple or multiple without multiplicity (without
Unity to recover it or “set-theorize” it), multiple which is neither qualitative nor quantitative nor
quantitative-qualitative, but purely primary and phenomenal.
Philosophy knows of purely qualitative concepts (Bergson), or even purely
quantitative and numerical (Badiou); explicitly the majority of the time, but
implicitly for all the others, the mixed concepts, qualitative and quantitative
(Nietzsche, Deleuze: difference of quantity as quality). But the two former
conceptions are justifiably not pure despite their claim, since we relate them to the
structure of the philosophical Decision which their concept of the Multiple
employs. Every philosophical theory of the Multiple or even of the One is
structured as a metaphysical mixture of the One and the Multiple. The Multiple is
amphibological with the One and, for the same reasons, the dyad One/Multiple,
the vertical axis crossing in metaphysics the horizontal axis of Being/Existent.
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When the One is itself recognized as “separated,” without any abstraction but axiomatic, from

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the structure in crossed doublets of metaphysics, as “separated-without-separation,” it is neither

qualitative (Plotinus), nor quantitative (Pythagoras), nor qualitative and quantitative (Plato).
Everything that sustains its mark as clone is perfectly protected from these adventures. This is
the case of the Multiple that appears on the last level of the force (of) thought after the real One
and transcendental Identity under the form of a non-autopositional Exteriority, simple and single,
not duplicated or folded. The a priori has always contained not an empirical multiple but no
longer exactly a “pure” multiple, for it is still conditioned by its relation to experience. The non-
philosophical concept of the a priori also shelters the first appearance of a multiple-without-
unity, precisely of the identity (of the) Multiple. The identity (of the) Multiple is this concept that
enables avoiding the quantitative/qualitative mixtures as the amphibology or convertibility–with
a hierarchy and its reversals–of the One and the Multiple. The Multiple is not itself multiple,
does not predicate itself of itself. But the fact that there is no multiple of the multiple does not
mean that it forms a metaphysical entity: the One determines-in-the-last-instance the Multiple as
such or in its identity.
Noema-Universe
Immanent object of the force (of) thought or the subject-Stranger that univerts towards and
through it, relating itself in a non-intentional way as its correlate (its unilate) of sense. The
universal noematic form is an identity (in-the-last-instance) of sense. The thought-world is given
to the Stranger through the sense of being occasion-in-the-last-instance, i.e. foreclosure of the
Real or even Other-than-the-One. A more restrained concept of the noema would designate the
occasional sense acquired by the phenomenological noema as correlate of non-autopositional
Distance (“equivalent” of intentionality).
In phenomenology where this notion has found its full usage, the noema is the
correlate of the sense of noesis, a sense of the object, and is constituted by the
multiplicity of the modes or ways in which the latter is given. The noema is thus
the intentional sense of an object in the World, still not uni-versal sense (by
universion) of the World itself or its identity for the subject-Stranger. Like noesis,
the noema is constrained in this context to a circularity more or less differing with
noesis, a parallelism founded upon an identity or a self-sameness rather than
broken by a determination-in-the-last-instance, upon a correlation rather than a
“unilation.”
If the subject-Stranger constitutes itself by a play of (philosophical) occasions which are
universions (effects of the universality of the One), it thus does not manifest itself without the
series of philosophy’s “occasional” interventions being manifested in relation to it. The first
reduction, called “real,” of philosophical sufficiency precisely transforms the thought-world into
a simple occasion of cloning by the One. The state of “occasional cause” is thus the noematic
sense in person which is said of the thought-world. For philosophy, this sense is of being
foreclosed to the One. In other words, the noematic identity (of) philosophy gives it as “Other-
than-One,” first appearance of an alterity as object of the Stranger. Finally, the non-philosophical
noema contains a variety of determinations corresponding to the principle modes of philosophy’s
autopresentation. These determinations are all occasional or determined in-the-last-instance by
their first state of occasion. The latter has allowed them to enter into the noematic sphere of non-
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philosophical sense and of the being of the modes of the Other-than-One. But they all participate
in the universal essence of the non-philosophical noema–noema (of the) World and unilate of the
Stranger–which we shall call “noema-universe” to distinguish it from the “noema-world” which
is that, restrained to intentionality, of phenomenology.
Non-Aesthetics
Said of the application, under several forms, of the non-philosophical process to aesthetic
material itself. Either—first distinction—from theoretical non-philosophy (first science) alone, or
in the complete rigor of non-philosophy intrinsically modified, in an aesthetic sense, to “logico-
aesthetic” material. Or—second distinction—from its application to aesthetic discourse or
directly to the artistic matter itself, to “art” (under the condition of the addition of axioms
relative to the autonomy of art and irreducible to those of the vision-in-One).
It would be necessary to say: non-aesthetics. The plural designates the
fragmentation of the grand traditional text of the thought of art, and the eventual

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extraction of possible aesthetics issuing from particular generalizations (non-

Bachelardian, non-Kierkegaardian, non-Baudelairian, etc.) which are still
philosophical symptoms of a universal non-aesthetic in the radical sense of this
word. The term is not directly present in philosophy. It nevertheless retains an air
of familiarity with the philosophical concept of non-philosophy from which it
seems to present a sort of analogical prolonging under the form of a particular
application to the artistic domain. This is a new way of thinking philosophy in
recourse to peripheral categories traditionally belonging to the artistic domain. For
example, to this procedure corresponds the reflection on hypnotism in Bergsonian
Givens. The aesthetic illusions surrounding storybook hypnotism intends the
restoration of a simulation of duration through the fragmented tools of expression.
The “non-”philosophical is then a peripheral manner of recommencing
philosophy. This activity of philosophy since its pictorial, literary, etc. margins is
not merely contemporary (Derridian or Deleuzian). It corresponds to a very
ancient use incessantly reactualized. Let us designate it with the term “non
aesthetics,” without the feature of a union, so as to differentiate it from its rigorous
or non-philosophical usage. This is essentially a more or less differentiated
mimesis, thus a cloning still imaginary or intra-philosophical.
The usage of non-aesthetics instead should be found in the specificity of the activity of the
“non,” indeed in a specifically artistic concept if not of the Real at least of the “force (of)
creation.” The latter is radically distinguished from the Bachelardian type of generalization of a
philosophy of the “non,” even understood in its domains other than the epistemological. It is
universal according-to-the-One-in-the-last-instance. Nonetheless, the extension of the
“philosophy of the non” to domains other than the epistemological on the grounds of a non-
Bachelardian philosophy itself is already a sort of basic approximation of non-philosophy, in
which it would nevertheless lack this primacy of identity inherent to non-philosophy. We shall
indicate three principle directions:
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At the limit, any artistic act can be combined with any act of thought, without any limit; such is
the first axiomatic constant. It is necessary, from this point of view, to rethink the concept
presently used by the “avant-garde” in a non-historical context, since all linearity as well as
circularity of history is excluded.
A second constant of axiomatic creativity rests on the fact that combinations can be made,
combinations of particular non-aesthetics, according to a principle of generalized relativity, and
which form together like fractal-islands of thought on art, which can touch upon the works
themselves, at best by constituting an equivalent poetics. Different particular non-aesthetics can
then spring up, stretch out, and combine so as to describe the most diverse works, ancient,
traditional, recent, or futuristic. This is an activity to which no limits can be fixed. The
reorganization of fractal-islands of non-aesthetic making could then design continents under
internal homothety with the constitutive unities. On this terrain, one could see increasingly dense
non-aesthetics appear as continental regroupings of scattered islands.
But, third constant, everything must be able to be erased and return to the non-system of-the-last-
instance.
This constant protects non-aesthetics from congealing into a system of sufficiency, again
returning to a philosophical illusion.
Non-philosophical pragmatics is at the base of this unlimited aesthetic production. Some of these
theoretical non-aesthetic islands have appeared, like, for example, the non-philosophical a priori
of “non-Euclidean perspectives.”
Non-Dictionary
Collection of non-autopositional universes obtained by the reiteration of a universal pragmatics
in a material of philosophical and regional terms; open list of non-conceptual symbols obtained
on the basis of a list of philosophical concepts.
This expression does not exist in philosophy but could here designate a negative or
suspended moment in the economy of a dictionary, a dialectic or differential
economy, etc.
A non-dictionary is produced from a pragmatics on the basis of the vision-in-One and its

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ordination of conceptual, philosophical—indeed philosophizable—material (regional terms). It

opposes the sufficiency-to-the-Multiple of the real One to unitary philosophical autosufficiency
rather than the multiplicity of philosophical and semantic decisions. Whereas philosophical
dictionaries constitute an inventory, in the name of unity, of the multiple opinions in the subject
of a presupposed-Being or (psychoanalytic variant) of a supposed-Other, a non-dictionary—
without another supposition—translates the real multiplicity inherent to the force (of) thought
beginning from an empirical plurality of concepts. The force (of) thought manifests the repertory
terms as so many non-unitary universes.
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Non-Epistemology
Unified theory of science and philosophy that takes for its object and material the discourse
which lays claim to a particular mixture of science and philosophy: epistemology.
Philosophy recognizes epistemology in two ways which are not always exclusive.
It can treat it as a continuation of traditional philosophy of science, crystallized
around the Kantian question of the possibility of science, often relating precise and
delimited scientific problems to philosophical systems, whether classical or
modern (Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Russell, Quine, etc…) along with
traditional philosophical positions (realism, empiricism, idealism, etc.). It can also
consider it as a relatively autonomous discipline—simultaneously more regional
and more technical—whose sources or occasions are extensions beyond the
mechanical or Euclidean geometry of the physical, or even “exact” model of the
concept of science; or still it can consider the technological interpretations of this
concept. With this more specific preference, the epistemological tradition, going
strong for over a century, has become extremely multiform and varied in regard to
the nature and order of grandeur of its objects and methods. Nevertheless, its
object or its final interest always more or less explicitly remains the criteria of
scientificity for science or the sciences. This question, in its constantly displaced
and renewed repetition, is always understood as aporetic and even at times gives
rise to an admission of failure, which is the motivation for “external” perspectives
(technological, sociological, economic, political, and ethical) on science. The
advent of epistemology under these hypotheses seems like a becoming-network of
its concept of science in a complex, non-linear, and unstable system.
This “future” of epistemology is explained, according to non-philosophy, by the fact that it treats
(and only treats) local problems in a spontaneous way beginning with the reduction of science to
isolated knowledges and theories, consequently to the detriment of the nature of its extreme
poles of constitution which are supposed in advance and without examining the fundamental
supports which are decided upon. Therefore, it supposes the general rule of an implicit continuity
between scientific and philosophical concepts, the possibility of an amphibological recovery of
the ones through the others. It simultaneously acts as though one could produce statements about
science—which is already in itself problematic—and as though philosophy were on the contrary
a simple passage to the limit of an object defined or definable by a universal correspondent, a
passage which makes it impossible to speak specifically about this envelopment which is
philosophy. Instead, non-philosophy admits that we cannot take science for an object in the
manner in which epistemology has done by imposing a philosophical objectification and
reduction on it, but that we can describe an “invariant” of philosophy, which, far from being
reified in a model, enriches and multiplies the effects and in particular makes their
experimentation possible. For its own account, it will use the material of epistemology; it will
relate its amphibologies, justifiably that which functions as “continuity” and “recovery,” to an
identity that determines them in-the-last-instance, but by conserving the terms and the words of
epistemology which, in a certain way, it will axiomatize according to a transcendental, but not
logical, mode. This labor will make it possible not to give this discipline up to its mechanically
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foreseeable future and to liberate the sciences and philosophy from an overly narrow and
historical image. It will then have to shed light on new problems which are embarrassing and
poorly thought: the impoverishment of the notion of “domain,” the formation of disciplines
whose interest is not simply theoretical, taking into account the conjunctions around analogies in

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the formation of a scientific problem, the status of applied sciences, the signification of ethical
discourses accompanying scientific and technological developments, etc…The latter only appear
for an instant and in this epistemological framework in a symptomatic form, because the
inexplicitness of its concepts and an overly narrow, not quite universal comprehension of
philosophy insist that it always proceeds under the same hypotheses, occasionally reversed and
intensified, not recognized as such, but always given up to philosophical sufficiency. Hence
some of the very narrow and consequently moral descriptions (it’s necessary to “get your hands
dirty” in order to comprehend science, etc.).
The dualyzation of epistemology in accordance with its two sources permits the liberation of the
latter as transcendental orders, their unification without hierarchy or non-unitary unification. But,
as a result, the object of epistemological discourses seems as though it never had anything to do
with science since these discourses essentially suppose a continuity between their object and the
knowledge of this object. Epistemology effectively yet confusedly makes use of philosophy on
behalf of the sciences. By transforming it into material, non-philosophy will be able to utilize
these discourses as a source of new scientific and philosophical problems and knowledges in the
occasion from which philosophy and science work on an equal footing. For example, the
geometrical concept of fractality can find a scientific usage without being geometrical for all
that; it can also be formulated in natural language without becoming a philosophical or
epistemological mixture through a non-philosophical process of universalization. Hence the new
non-epistemological conceptions of induction, deduction, axiomatization, hypotheses,
definitions, and other notions of traditional epistemology.
Non-Erotics
Ensemble of the modes of approach and non-philosophical formulations of duality that
constitutes the subject-Stranger as a uni-sex subject.
We shall call erotics the converging ensemble of doctrines which, from Plato to
Badiou passing through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, attempt to assure consistency
to the thematic of an originary Two—an attempt more recently explored by
psychoanalysis. Philosophical erotics tends to sexualize duality, by imposing on it
the dyadic form of the union of contraries, relayed by the unity that imprints it on
the philosophical One: the sex of philosophy is, in fact, nothing but a contrary for-
the-One.
In psychoanalysis, we could speak of contrary-for-the-Other, being only the
misrecognition, instead of the Other, of sexuation. This results in the assumption
of a sex without sexuality and the erotics of a relation-without-relation where,
however, “the three falls together from the two” (Lacan), i.e. that in the nonsexual
relation is superposed an external relation in the Other: the contrary thus becoming
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the contradictory, on condition that the real of the One is understood as the
impossible. We shall thus distinguish from philosophical erotics or the erotics of
contraries a psychoanalytic erotics of contradiction that can at least testify to a
jubilating consummation of the Logos.
Like the Enjoyed through and through, thus without the other-world of jouissance, the One is
(non-)erotic since it has nothing to do with contraries and never participates in any logico-real
mixture.
This Enjoyed, without the subject-object of aesthetics or the desiring ethical subject, separates
the One from every telos of given difference, in-One or outside it, a telos still called love,
because in non-philosophy every difference is instead dualytic.
The vision-in-One certainly does not ignore the horizon of the Two and the Multiple. But far
from being extracted from the Multiple in a subtractive way, in a manner in which it would
fundamentally appear sexuated under the effect of this deduction and which, according to
Badiou’s powerful proposition, love would always be heterosexual, non-produced from a
rupture, non-femininity is to itself only sex-without-sexuation, or sexual-without-sexuality. This
is why it appears as Enjoyed and determines-in-the-last-instance “sexual difference,” cloning
from the latter a non-eroticism which is not the negation of Eros but the constitution of every
human into a uni-sex subject. In this sense, every non-erotic subject is sex-Stranger or sexually-
existing-Stranger. Uni-sex is not the marketable indifference of the sexes but sex insofar as it

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makes every subject a Stranger.

Non-Ethics
Effectuation of non-philosophy in the ethical- or philosophical-world, this term does not
designate the negation of ethics but its universalization according-to-the-One as well as its
exclusive subordination to man; this is the theory and use of ethics adequate to the essence of
man as radical immanence or radical evil.
Despite certain empirical interpretations which confuse it with the description of
mores or ethos in opposition to morality that would be prescriptive, ethics
designates either a more universal form of commandment than morality (it is
addressed to all moral beings and to the personality as society and not to the
individual—cf. Schelling) or the universality of a science. From this perspective, it
is either theoretical science of moral judgment or practical science teaching what
should be desired.
Non-ethics recovers this latter and double determination of ethics and transforms it. It is
identically presented as a theory or a science and as a pragmatic bearing upon philosophical and
regional (sociological, biological, etc.) doctrines of morality or practice—on the ethical-world. It
demonstrates that the relations of philosophy and ethics are ethico-philosophical mixtures, i.e.
aporetic. On the one hand, these mixtures subordinate ethics to philosophy as “superior ethics”
which is partially excluded from communal moral legislation and implies an exception through
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hierarchy; or it is subordinated to a religious affect of radical transcendence which implies
exception by election. The ethico-philosophical is equivocal, the ethico-religious antidemocratic.
On the other hand, these mixtures prevent ethics from positing a truly unconditioned imperative
since that of philosophy and that of the transcendent-religious are still more unconditioned than
that of ethics. Finally, they partially subordinate man to ethics, philosophy, and the Law. The
implication of philosophical ethics in particular is that the Law is made circularly by and for
man, thus reciprocally that man is made by and for the Law. This idealism and this voluntarism
culminate in the “moral vision of the world” (Kant and Fichte) where the being of man is
reabsorbed in the obedience to the commandment or better in the project of freedom.
On the contrary, non-philosophy posits that man is the immanent cause of ethics or that it
determines it in-the-last-instance by excluding the relations of metaphysical causality between it
and ethics. The essence of man as radical solitude—also called “radical evil” of being
foreclosed—is not directly this cause. It acts as this cause when it takes not the form of the will,
but of the existing-subject-Stranger, of the force (of) thought whose ethical modality is here not
the Law but the force (of) law. The force (of) law does not derive from the existing Law, but
designates the element of height or alterity so that it is at least susceptible of being received in-
One and brought to the subject-Stranger. In other words, this non-ethical subject—for the
ethical-world—is deprived of auto-positionality which would make its essence, for example, into
the Law as form of the ought (Kant) or into the Project (Fichte), and which still exists under a
residual form only inhibited by the radical transcendence of the Face or the Other (Levinas).
Radical evil, the subject-Stranger, and the force (of) law are the major concepts of non-ethics, for
they determine the theoretical and practical usage of ethics. Non-ethics or ethics-according-to-
the-Stranger does not claim to create new morals (cf. Kant) or to be satisfied with giving the
rigorous formula of existing morals, but invents/discovers the formula of a new use of existing
morals and ethics. This formula being determined by the real essence of man alone, non-ethics is
the limitation of the inhuman Law and ethics on behalf of man, who is no longer defined as
being reasonable, i.e. ultimately as philosopher, but as “ordinary man” or Stranger. More
positively, it universalizes ethics from the point of view of experience precisely because it
deprives them of their philosophical pretention to define the essence of man. By definition it
refuses entering into the philosophical circularity of the ethical-world, it more reasonably refuses
entering into the contemporary marketplace of ethics. One thing alone is good—i.e. human and
only human, in the World or above all outside the World, i.e. for the World—which is the force
(of) law exercised by the Stranger. But it is only good because one thing alone is determinant of
the usage of the World, and that is radical evil, the solitude of being-foreclosed or separated.
Non-Intuitive (non-spatial and non-temporal)
Mode of being of thought produced by the force (of) thought on the basis of materials of

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scientific and philosophical representations, intuitive or spontaneously spatialized and

temporalized; it only renders visible according to the Invisible-of-the-last-instance, thus without
leading thought back to its philosophical virtualization and temporalization.
To grasp the problem of space in the constitution of thought, the philosophical
work supposes the interaction, for example, of three spatial structures. The first
spatial structuration concerns writing which, according to Plato, represses Speech
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(myth of Teuth). Classical authors are not disturbed by this problematic of
inscription. In the second place, space is partes extra partes, the unlimited milieu
(apeiron) or Chaos. Finally, these still spatial determinations virtualize Chaos into
a positive Logos. In Plato, these three structurations are intricated and constitute
the philosophical Order. In Kant, space, the pure form of intuition, is more
particularly related to the Logos of the categories disciplining the rhapsody of the
sensible. Husserl is disturbed, on the contrary, by the idealizing function of
mathematized space, just like Bergson. The differentialists return to shifting
writing, sometimes topology, sometimes difference disseminating space.
However, by doing so they duplicate space which simultaneously becomes
concept and unlimited milieu. Their radicalization does not escape from the
doubling interaction of Chaos and Logos. The entirety of philosophy, explicitly or
not (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger), reinforces the spatial intuitivity of
thought through its temporal intuitivity, never completely eradicated despite
Heidegger’s efforts, to the extent that philosophy essentially remains a work of the
language-world.
Non-philosophy abandons the differe(a)ntialist spirit which does not really escape from the
doublet of the empirical and the transcendental or the doublet of space and time. Language takes
on a functional and no longer originary role on behalf of the force (of) thought. This order of the
functional is structured in-the-last-instance by the vision-in-One which supports the supposedly
necessary intuitivity of thought. With the end of the importance attached to its intuitivity
(common and/or philosophical or ontological), language is brought to the so-called “non-
conceptual” state of “words-without-language.” It no longer serves to name Being and to make
its ultimate sense appear (that it be topological or temporal), but it is transformed into the reserve
of terms or “first names” which enter into the axioms formed on the objects of non-philosophy.
If a residue of sensible and ontological intuitivity accompanies thought and its “words-without-
language,” it only serves as some manner of support for the noemata that philosophy extracts
from the operations and concepts of philosophy. This residual intuitivity is transcendent and no
longer determines the essence of thought as ontology but belongs to the pure transcendental
axiomatic which it has become as a trace of its occasional philosophical origin and as a
testimony to the relative autonomy of the latter. Non-philosophy is the “choice” of the Real
against the philosophical choice of space and time, i.e. finally, of Being. More generally and
independently of language, intuition as mode of representation of the object is here dualyzed in:
1) intuition in the philosophical sense, now recognized as auto-intuition and not simply intuition
of an object; 2) intuition as starting-from-the-intuited, not as exclusion of every intuition, but as
“simple” or “non-self-intuitional” intuition (non-self-positional Distance).
(Non-)One
Other name for unilaterality, form of suspension or invalidation which, no longer arising from
Being but from the One, is a mode of the One’s being-foreclosed, either real and not effectuated
(”uni-laterality”), or transcendental and effectuated by the occasion of philosophical
“nothingness” (”unilaterality”). It testifies to the primacy of (real) foreclosure over
(philosophical) negation.
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From Plato to Fichte, negation arises from the logico-real order of an anti-thesis.
Several philosophers have supposed the contingency of negation thus understood,
from the fact of the reapplicability of the logical order to itself or double negation
(Hegel). For philosophy, with several close exceptions (Bergson), the category of
negation has its reason in non-Being or Nothingness (Heidegger, Sartre), whether
matched with the negative dialectic or not. Contemporary philosophy replaces

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negation through more positive experiences of alterity which mitigate it

(difference, multiplicity, dissemination, singularities, finitude, etc.) without for all
that the unitary illusion being broken, these substitutions taking place in the
linguistic element alone and remaining conditioned by the horizon, if not of Being,
at least of the structure of the philosophical Decision.
In the sciences, the non- is bound in particular to non-classical, multivalued, or
intuitionist logics. But the usage of the non- from which non-philosophy’s
departure is inspired is that of “non-Eulcidean geometry” in the sense that the non-
(which has finally replaced the expressions “metageometry” or “pangeometry”)
simultaneously determines the limits of the Euclidean in geometry and generalizes
the latter. This generalization has been thought differently, according to how one
understands Euclidean geometry as a model of non-Euclidean geometry
(Poincare), a position which allows admitting as such an infinite number of non-
Euclidean geometries, or according to how one postulates the radical
heterogeneity of these geometries (Russell) and thus their restriction to spaces in
constant curvature. These two attitudes–between which could be ranked those of
Riemann, Klein, Helmholtz, Cayley, or Hilbert for example–differ in the
interpretation of the axioms’ role, and in particular of the so-called “parallel lines”
postulate–“disguised definition of distance” (Poincare) (hence the idea of a
“dictionary” allowing the passage from one geometry to another), whereas it
harbors an empirical value for the others. The treatment of the “non-” thus
involves diverse conceptions of models and axiomatics, concepts of which
philosophy also makes use.
The (non-)One, suspensive causality of the One over philosophy and one of the roots of non-
philosophy, is not a negation but an invalidating suspension of philosophy’s claims. Non-
philosophy is not a negation, no more than in its order non-Euclidean geometry is a non-
geometry, it is the identity (of) philosophy liberated from its principle of sufficiency. Its essence
is the being-foreclosed or real indifference of the One and its immanent uni-versality (“negative”
condition of the givenness of philosophy). The (non-) One thus itself has a real “negative” form,
which directly expresses this foreclosure or this “uni-laterality” of the One and an “applied” form
or “unilaterality” of-the-last-instance which exerts itself upon the transcendental Unity, among
others, of the philosophical Decision. Negation is thus no longer–despite the expression “non-
philosophy”–the resource of this thought. Only being-foreclosed as real essence can enable a
non-technological usage of negation, to explain it or manifest its phenomenal identity outside its
metaphysical sense. Non-philosophy abandons negation and Nothingness, their mitigated forms
as well as their metaphysical forms, for the same reason that it released itself from Being–i.e.
from the resources of philosophy. The “non-Euclidean metaphor” is thus subordinated to being-
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foreclosed as the “non-Euclidean” generalization of philosophy is in the immanent uni-versality
of the vision-in-One…
Non-Philosophy
Autonomous and specific discipline of an identically scientific and philosophical type, which
describes in-the-last-instance according to the One-real and by means of philosophy and science
considered as material, on the one hand the force (of) thought or the existing-subject-Stranger,
on the other hand the object of non-philosophy, the identity (of) the thought-world.
Non-philosophy is regarded by philosophy either as the state of immediacy of
naive and sensible opinions (the judgments of common sense), or as its other
which it remains to think (sciences, technologies, politics, the arts…) that is to say
as the presuppositions of philosophy itself (the innumerable “non-thoughts”
[impensés]) which are in turn philosophizable). Merleau-Ponty’s report in
connection with post-Hegelian thinkers (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx…) is very
revealing when he wonders whether our century “does not enter the age of non-
philosophy.” But the expression initially has a negative content, even depreciated,
which can become positive as it has among contemporary thinkers of difference,
such as Derrida (cf. Positions), and especially Deleuze (cf. What Is Philosophy?)
who still synthesizes to the extreme this very “negative” vagueness which is at

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bottom the thought of the Other, by writing: “the philosopher must become non-
philosopher, so that non-philosophy becomes the ground and the people of
philosophy.”
Distinct from this becoming that intertwines Being and Difference, the vision-in-One (as
immanent and manifest Real) is the transcendental “thread” of a non-philosophical thought
consisting and positively distinct from this non-philosophical current flowing in the recesses of
philosophy.
Non-philosophy is an autonomous and specific discipline which has its own concepts (One-real,
vision-in-One, first science, cloning…) ; its theoretical operations which are transcendental by
their real or in-One cause (induction and deduction); its non-autopositional pragmatic rules; its
philosophically undecidable objects such as; the One, Being, the Other, the Existent, and which,
non-philosophically transformed, gives: the One-real; the a priori structure of Representation;
the philosophical as the Principle of resistance of the thought-world; the chaotic universe (of)
multiple representations obtained by acting it of the One-cause on the philosophical material as
forms of the World. Autonomy means the epistemic cut (foreclosed being, determination-in-the-
last-instance, unilaterality, the dual…) between the non-philosophical posture and the
philosophical Decision. The specificity of non-philosophy wants to speak of a practice
(pragmatic and theoretical) strictly immanent for philosophy but also sciences, art…with
determined rules, as for example the rule of the chora, the suspension of philosophical Authority,
and the staging of philosophy’s material.
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Non-philosophy is initially a theory by or according to the One, therefore a unified theory of
science and philosophy. It is over time a theoretical, practical and critical discourse, distinct from
philosophy without being a meta-philosophy. It is specified according to the regional material
inserted into the structure of the philosophical Decision (non-aesthetics, non-ethics, etc).
Non-Psychoanalysis
Real and transcendental uni-versalization of psychoanalysis which suspends its theoretical
authority rather than its objects (Unconscious, Identification, Symptom, etc.) by relating it to the
Real as vision-in-One rather than to a final philosophical definition of the Real. Non-
psychoanalysis is the unified theory (not unitary or auto-legitimating) of psychoanalysis and
philosophy.
All philosophy is by definition anti-psychoanalytic instead of non-psychoanalytic
insofar as it refers to Being or the transcendent Other. Even through its essence it
denies (Sartre) or ignores (Leibniz’s “tiny perceptions”) the autonomy or
immanent alterity of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis affirms on the contrary,
through its essence, the irreducibility of the unconscious to any philosophical
operation. This incompatibility does not exclude certain philosophers (Ricouer,
Deleuze, Henry, Derrida); even certain analysts (to begin with, Lacan) tried
several allergic combinations which would join these two domains, particularly
around the notion of a supposed subject (of the unconscious). Lacan notably
believed to be able to affirm, after Michel Henry whose research would confirm
this genealogy if it was authentically analytic, that the subject of the unconscious
is the Cartesian subject.
On its behalf, in a final homage to philosophical authority, psychoanalysis lays
claim to its own autonomy, its sufficiency, and the critique of philosophy. The
double yet always unequal bind of philosophy and psychoanalysis is the Ariadne’s
thread leading through the labyrinth of 20th century “continental” thought, and the
ground upon which psychoanalysis’ pretentions of autonomy are dismantled.
These types of unitary relations inaugurated by the “Judaic turn” of thought at the
beginning of the century only allows imagining—the concept (still) does not exist
in this framework–a very restrained form of “non-psychoanalysis,” for example
through a simple transference of the non-Euclidean style. The topological
generalization, de-biologization, and de-psychologization of psychoanalysis, along
with the primacy of theory over the system performed by Lacan, are undoubtedly
the most fruitful tendencies in the transformation of psychoanalysis (not by its
own means but under its own authority and under that of the thought-world) and

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the preparation of non-psychoanalysis.

Non-philosophy is concretized and exposed in diverse “unified theories” or according-to-the-One
in-the-last-instance. In particular, it substitutes a unified theory of psychoanalysis and philosophy
in their confused, unstable, and violent relations. From this perspective, simultaneously of its
own necessity and through that which the Lacanian occasion offers, it reorganizes every analytic
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problematic including the Real/Symbolic/Imaginary structure around the primacy of the Real and
the One but understood as vision-in-One, foreclosed to the order of knowledge and thought, not
simply to the symbolic. Any knot between any circle merely ties these essential instances in a
structure or simultaneity, but a series of clonings articulates the Real and the thought-world. For
example, if Lacan-thought is given as simple material, it is necessary, on the one hand, to treat its
philosophico-analytic complex as the Imaginary object of n0on-psychoanalysis and the symbolic
and in general all the structures of the Unconscious and the Other as occasion and symptom of
the transcendental and aprioritic instances of a non-analytic “subject” through which the force
(of) thought gives its universal matrix. From this point of view, these are all analytic instances
which are transformed and displaced: the Unconscious itself, the Other, Object, Symptom,
Identification, Desire, Jouissance, etc. On the other hand, the structural and “Borromean”
organization of these instances, forcibly unitary, circular, and knotted, finally yields to a cloning
process. The Real clones non-analytic instances on the basis of the philosophic-analytic given.
Unified theory thus radically differs from the syntheses described, which it considers as mixtures
that, in their entirety, together constitute the Imaginary or philosophico-analytic symptom. Hence
the dyads of the subject and the object, of the conscious and the unconscious, the signifier and
the signified, metaphor and metonymy in their pre-pragmatic use in a large number of Lacanian
analysts or several “Derridanalysts.”
The Real is given prior to the Imaginary or the transcendental appearance of the philosophic-
analytic, what unified theory will call, in this particular case, the Enjoyed, or Enjoyed-without-
enjoyment. The Enjoyed [Joui] is distinguished from enjoyment [jouissance] which is
furthermore so poorly defined that a number of contemporary analysts gladly identify it with the
unconscious. The Real—contrary to Lacan’s lack-oriented ontology—adequate, with the
exclusion of any other, to the Freudian discovery—never lacks even though it is of itself
radically foreclosed. Radical jouissance is distinguished completely from “Jouissance,” which
the philosophic-analytic mixture characterizes as the return of the repressed, the subversion of
the subject, jouissance of the Other, phallic jouissance, indeed jouissance of being or the open,
proliferations of disseminated signifiers where the One-experience of the Enjoyed is completely
lost in “La-Jouissance.” Non-psychoanalysis admits jouissance as an analogue of the Stranger,
organon of the Enjoyed as the cause-of-the-last-instance of the Unconscious. This latter is thus a
jouissance neither connected to a mixture nor a symptom (which marks a decisive rupture with
psychiatry). With this title, we shall speak of the non-self-signifying Unconscious, never
signifying or coming to overdetermine jouissance.
The fundamental tendencies of this lack-oriented ontology in Lacan—rather than those of
subtractive ontology—constitute the privileged, but not only, material submitted to non-
psychoanalysis.
Because it is not a question of destroying psychoanalysis but of transforming it into an object-
material and occasion of a different, more rigorous, and more universal knowledge. Non-
psychoanalysis intends to put an end to the confused conflict between philosophy and
psychoanalysis; by universalizing the latter under conditions which are no longer philosophical
and scientific (mathematical), but in-One-in-the-last-instance; by making theoretical and
pragmatic activity prevail over the system; finally, by establishing the theory of a non-analytic
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subject. Rather than the discourse of the Other, non-psychoanalysis is the discourse of the
Stranger-of-the-last-instance, of man as existing-Stranger.
Non-Rhetoric
Usage of rhetoric and its philosophical employment according to the vision-in-One. More than a
philosophically “generalized rhetoric,” it is a uni-versal rhetoric for the thought-world.
Primarily, rhetoric is less a specific domain than an organon. Nevertheless,
classical philosophy treated it in a specified way as fulfilling two functions:

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ornamentation–excluding, if you will, being taken for the “whole dry truth”
(Leibniz)–and persuasion, which was confined at best to writings classified as
“synthetic” (for example, The Principles of Philosophy or the Monadology), more
apt to be read by those who let themselves be led by their imagination. Philosophy
excludes rhetoric to protect itself from the inessential and the ignorant as well as
from the multiplicity of other contemporary philosophies (this is why it requires
all the same a force of conviction) and the existence of autonomous exteriorities. It
internalizes the latter by postulating a non rhetorical usage (in a negative and
restrained sense) of language to protect itself from the modifications and
falsifications unmastered by it. The relations between classical philosophy and
rhetoric will then be all the more complex since the latter equally supposed a
simple and natural manner of speaking after being able to evaluate turns and
figures, and that this simplicity has been founded on a non-figural figure,
“catachresis” or dead metaphor (cf. in particular Fontanier). The Moderns have
taken account of the ambiguous complexity of these relations, either in a weak
fashion by postulating that philosophy seeks to convince the public of its readers
(Perelmann-Obrecht-Tytecka), or in a stronger way by postulating a philosophcial
anaphore as veritable gesture of establishment (Souriau). In effect, after one
admits that all interpretations of philosophy, even the most contradictory, belong
to it (Leibniz, German Idealism), rhetoric can invest all philosophy. But it is above
all with and after Nietzsche, around him, that rhetoric becomes an explicit theme
investing a field equivalent to Being and organizing its own modes of
manifestation. Rhetoric is then required more or less strategically, like the
signifier, to semi-objectively describe the operations or gestures of philosophy
(Derrida, Galay). The margins, disseminations, ashes, monstrosity, forgetfulness,
the Other, etc. become philosophical terms on the same rank as classical themes;
they even belong as the at least partial conditions of their apprehension. There is
thus no truth without rhetoric. No metaphor is a catechresis but a metaphor of
metaphor, the classical example appearing as a rhetorical turn. It is not a question
of reducing philosophy to rhetoric but of setting ontology between parentheses in
philosophy. This is the meaning of a “generalized rhetoric,” an active affirmation
of the Other or drive in philosophy.
The goal of generalized rhetoric is not to specify these deviations but to administer
their ensemble into distinct singularities: it is a transcendental rule of relations
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between forms and contents, between syntaxes and themes, between multiplicities
and exteriorities. Rhetoric is thus simultaneously means and metastable variance
of deviations, of differences of philosophical potentials. Philosophy only
conserves the rhetoric that allows the distinction and mastery of alterity and
exteriority according to its own structure of doublet and redoubling (of simulacra).
It even becomes (cf. Nietzsche) the possibility of an almost rigorous reversibility
between philosophy and its alterities, its exteriorities, in such a way that the
former does not lose itself; it is conserved in its consistency and its coherence by
giving itself the means of mastering these sets of relations. Hence Deleuze’s
extreme thesis: there is no metaphor, which is the opposite of generalized rhetoric.
Liberated from philosophical sufficiency, non-philosophy does not have to reduce the “turns” for
the example or denial of rhetoric, nor to exclude the multiplicity of philosophies founded on the
recourse to the latter. On the contrary, it liberates rhetoric after enriching and modifying the
philosophical material. Non-spatializing, it enables recognition in Being and the discourse of all
possible spaces, and even those which found the distance that each philosophy gives itself in the
empirical which is given to it, in that which it constructs according to its transcendentals, or even
in that which it calls “real.” The rules of transformation of the material are indifferent to rhetoric
and hence liberate the latter from its philosophical restrictions.
“Non-rhetoric” is the manifestation of language according to the One which is not language, but
such that it is no longer measured by an efficacy (persuasion) or an inefficacy (the obscuring of
relations of transparency with the real). This latter division between force of conviction and force

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of transparency has no place here, for it merely reinforces philosophical divisions and
hierarchies. Let us simply speak of a force (of) language which transforms the relations of
transparency and conviction. Non-rhetoric treats these relations as so many identities and no
longer seeks in the use of a metaphor that which is “properly” philosophical and that which is
not–the distinction of disciplines is no longer subordinated to philosophy. We shall call “style”
the “strangerhoods” which are no longer related to the non-figural or to the normal but each
comprised as identity (of the) philosophical and (of the) non-philosophical. Every attempt will be
able to be recognized as individuated, each turn or figure treated as a mode of the identity of the
subject-Stranger. Nothing can then limit the play of figures: they are so many proper names of
the identities of the Ego and the Stranger. Style justifiably posits the identity of heterogeneous
elements without seeking to reduce them according to a supposedly normative or fundamental
wrapper of language. Thus, rhetoric is no longer evaluated according to representational contents
nor limited in view of the control and mastery of alterity after protecting a certain traditional
image of thought. Considered as identities rather than as relations or differences of potential,
figures can be posited in-the-last-instance either as radically different or individuated without
there being a relation of active indifference between these two solutions, for it is no longer a
question here of dividing and hierarchizing Being.
Non-Sufficiency (of the Real or the One)
The “principle” of in-sufficient Real is that which alone invalidates without remainder, if not a
material, the Principle of sufficient Reason and its universalization, at least the Principle of
sufficient philosophy. It signifies that the Real as vision-in-One is a uni-versal but simply
49
negative condition, necessary but non-sufficient, and which must be effectuated by the givenness
of the thought-world. In itself it is not insufficient, but “radical” rather than “absolute,” yet
becomes so in relation to thought: it is thus as cause or principle that it exists.
The real, such as it is posited by philosophical decisions with which they
reciprocally determine themselves through various equivalent operations, is of a
completely relative insufficiency. It requires decisions of thought even in its
essence because thought has already contributed to defining it and affects its
essence–it is the system of insufficient sufficiency. It forms with thought a system
of sufficiency or the absolute which takes on the name of “philosophy” and
expresses itself in different layers of the philosophical Decision (faith-in-the-real,
transcendental-and-real unity, autopositional transcendence, primacy-and-priority
of philosophy over regional knowledges, etc.). Philosophy can describe itself in
this way, but only in partial or particular descriptions (according to some decision,
etc.) which misrecognizes the sense (of) identity of these descriptions.
Precisely because it is radical (and not absolute), the sufficiency of the Real, that of its
immanence without desire or need of thought, implies also its completely “radical” insufficiency
for thought which could develop itself on the basis of it and according to it. From this point of
view, non-philosophy articulates itself on a “principle” of the Real’s non-sufficiency which
invalidates, by dualyzing them, the mixtures which are the Principles of Reason and sufficient
philosophies. The Real is not a problem, it is the presupposed grace in which thought becomes a
problem rather than a question. But it supplies nothing but the immanent uni-versality specific to
the vision-in-One. It is also necessary to supply it with the World in the form of thought, thus of
philosophy, but now in the sense of simple “occasional” material or field of properties with
which transcendental and empirical effectuation becomes possible. If it is itself foreclosed to the
World, thought is not, and the vision-in-One “extracts” it from the mixture it forms with the
World. The non-sufficiency of the Real is completely positive, it concerns nothing but its
function of cause in relation to thought. It justifies the recourse to an experience–undoubtedly
special because it is the experience that philosophy has become–and legitimates non-
philosophy’s claim of possessing an experimental aspect without being an experimental
discipline in the positivist sense.
Non-Technology
Unified theory of technics and philosophy. It takes for material or object their unitary relations
of techno-scientific mixture and above all the engineer sciences–engineering–which it treats as
its proximate symptom. It extracts from it a thought through orders (of) identity qualitatively

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different and transcendentally distinct. It relates the technico-philosophical complex, with its
ideologies (all-technology, technologism, techno-science, end of philosophy, etc.) to the Real
which enables the critique of these illusions and determines these heterogeneous orders in-the-
last-instance.
The term “technology” has a minor but momentous history whose invariant is the
articulation of technics and logos. It has primarily designated the limited domain
of description of know-hows, of their tools and ingredients, to now designate the
mixtures of technics and sciences in their interpretations and political, economic,
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and social usages. This latter preference finally tends to identify technology with
knowledge of networks, systems, and complexity, its essence being to articulate
heterogeneous elements on all levels and all orders. This concept thus almost
naturally discovers its place in monist philosophies and sociologies, in the case
where the real is identified with the complexity of networks. Scientific technics,
through their imitation, can function as breaks, but the continuities are privileged
the moment when technology is thought of as the silent and omnipresent
transcendental of so-called “postmodern” society whose philosophical finesse is
exerted in a sort of sceptical relativism, where the grand categories of Man,
Science, and Work appear as products of networks and lose their autonomy.
The philosophical critique of this concept consists in creating its genealogy and
showing that it is the result of the reversal and intensification of a narrow and
reductive conception of science, characterized by the opposition of theory and
experience, thus in several proximate displacements of the logos and technics. In
contrast, philosophy does not destroy the amphibology essential to this concept
which would allow it to extract its most positive value. Technology seems to be
the schematizing articulation of two heterogeneous orders. The first is formed by
extremely diverse multiplicities of finite events or problems, simultaneously
technical and scientific–it is somewhat a question of the sciences of engineering in
their broadest conception. The second is its imaginary continuation and
totalization which functions in the manner of a schematism that relates these
events to Being. Technology thus has two types of existence, almost always
confused, which makes it oscillate between the engineering sciences and
philosophy. This inequality confers upon it in the same stroke the traits of
competency and humanism, often considered as the foundations of the good in
democracy. One then finds that the definitions of technology are too narrow and
that philosophy itself is technology: the former explaining the latter.
Non-philosophy does not content itself in treating technologism as a transcendental illusion. It
takes the technological discourses and metadiscourses seriously but as a disguised description of
that which would make us forget the illusion: that which is “at the heart” of the epistemological
opposition between “theory” and “experience,” between “logos” and “technics.” In effect, the
engineering sciences, which almost have no place in classical epistemology and which are in
some way the “truth” of technology, are its symptom. The transformation of technological
statements outside “sufficiency” allows these sciences to emerge, to designate a broader and
more specific conception of them, to destroy the epistemological limits of the classical concept
of science, and to renovate the comprehension of its technical usages.
The engineering sciences are not completely independent of the classical image of science but
imply a new relation to scientific knowledges. They do not define domains and are more
difficult to identify than the classical sciences. They are instead generic disciplines capable of
treating widely different problems in project or objective. They thus articulate knowledges of
different origin and multiple levels of “concretude”: models then become more important than
theories in the resolution of problems. Theory appears as a “theoretical given,” simultaneously
condition of knowledge and compatibility of the models employed in this project. It is one of the
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reasons why engineering is often identified with design (C.A.O. or C.M.A.O.) and divided by
philosophy between analysis and conception, or even between the formal character of
knowledges and the articulation of models on the one hand, and the empirical and sensible

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content of the technologies they modify on the other.

Non-philosophy refuses this division and posits an identity-of-the-last-instance which allows
specifying the engineering sciences in light of its technoscientific and epistemological
interpretations. The usage of theory by the engineering sciences is then characterizable not by
economical, political, or ideological protractions and projections, but by the fact that its
knowledges are indecomposable in-the-last-instance, that they are investments in the models.
This identity allows radically distinguishing between the conception of engineering and the
philosophical project: the constraints of a problem of engineering are defined, internal to its
project, although the engineer discovers simultaneously as he or she invents. At the same time,
the multiplicities of the engineering sciences are neither unifying nor sensible like those of
philosophy: their identity does not depend upon the terms it unifies, it is what ensures, on the
contrary, the identity of the most heterogeneous terms.
Thus, non-philosophy dualyzes the concept of technology elaborated on the occasion of the
systematic engagement of the classical sciences and technics. It therefore distinguishes the
engineering sciences from the ethical discourses with which they are accompanied in a continual
way as a substitute for a lackluster ideology. If ethics simply concerns the prosthetic bodies and
philosophical anthropoids but not at all Man as subject-Stranger while non-philosophy posits it,
the ethical problem transforms into a non-ethical problem, radically distinct from that of
technology: only a transcendental illusion confuses them. Technology will then lose its function
of Grand Transcendental, like what previously happened to the categories of History and
Language, while its imaginary dimensions will be effectively assumed from their aspect by
fiction and science-fiction.
Occasion (occasional cause)
[Original translation by Anthony Paul Smith]
Said of the specific causality of philosophy or the thought-world in general—with regard to the
causality of the One or the Real, the Determination-in-the-last-instance. This concept thus
belongs to non-philosophy rather than to philosophy itself: it is the non-philosophical sense or
the noema which receives the causality of philosophy that is foreclosure-in-the-last-instance of
the One.
The occasion stems from a double register. In practical and everyday ethics, it is a
notion similar to that of kairos but of a distinct temporality. In metaphysics, it has
given rise to the “occasionalist” theory of Malebranche who attributes the reality
of causality to God alone and thus reduces physical causality to functions of
simple impulsion and relay.
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To the vision-in-One, ultimate and necessary but non-sufficient (“negative”) point of view, an
object may be given that effectuates it. This givenness of an Other-than-the-Real, enjoying a
relative autonomy, is certainly indispensable but it cannot make itself so under the condition of
the Real, consequently of its determination-in-the-last-instance by the latter. Such a real
suspension of the causality of philosophy is that of its real then transcendental illusion. It does
not destroy the mechanism proper to philosophy but transforms the sense or the importance that
it spontaneously attributes to itself as thought-world possessing all possible causality and a
unitary causality which it believes to be the Real. Occasionality is therefore the noematic sense
to which the determination-in-the-last-instance reduces the alleged causality of philosophy.
Because of this sense, we do not speak of philosophical causality as reduced “occasionally” but
“occasional” [occasionnale]. The simply occasional status of philosophy specifies itself in turn
in three functions which it then fulfills in the constitution of non-philosophy or the force (of)
thought: a function of nomination or symbolic support for the first terms of non-philosophy; a
function of symptomal indication by which philosophy indicates itself or signals itself in the
vision-in-One, for example as transcendental structure, or as a priori and transcendence; finally,
a so-called function of material for cloning by which it allows the One to clone a function of
radical transcendental Identity alongside itself; then cloning a function of a priori Identity
alongside itself as philosophical a priori. The Real does not universalize itself—it is already
universal—, but there is an agent of its effectuation, and it is the philosophical occasion,
precisely its sense of occasional causality.
Ordinary Mysticism

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Usage of mysticism in accordance with the instance of radical immanence, of the One-in-One,
itself called “the” mystical. The mystical, although foreclosed to thought, is the negative
universal condition of man as Stranger.
“Mysticism” designates the experience of a supposedly immediate and rationally
impenetrable access to a transcendent order of reality. On the one hand, it is a
question of an immediate supra-rational or supra-discursive coincidence, indeed
supra-intuitive, proceeding without the aid of a form or a concept. On the other
hand, this so-called “mystical” access—when it turns itself into the “inspiration”
or “recesses” of the soul, or better to a super- or non-human calling—to a
phenomenon which reveals itself but which exceeds the possibilities of language,
follows the path of an identification immanent to a transcendent order of reality
always supposedly being the authentic real, or a real beyond the limits of
discourse and language. Since it is a question of the transcendence of a
superessential God in the immanence of the (Christian mystical) soul or of a
reality which reveals itself without being able to be spoken, in the manner of an
alterity (Wittgenstein), this excess, so as to be able to be called “mystical,” should
not be a simple delimitation, lack, or absence, as in deconstruction, but an ekstasis,
be it blocked or prohibited, a phenomenal given or an experience of transcendence
given “in person” on the mode of immanence.
If all philosophical concepts of mysticism or the mystical are polarized by transcendence which
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is supposedly the object of immanent experience, non-philosophy reduces the mystical to
designate immanence alone, but having become to itself its own phenomenal given or even the
Real. “Mysticism” is a possible nomination for the essence of the Real or the vision-in-One. The
reduction of transcendence, of its ekstatic essence and its religious modalities, rightly understood
only suspends the mystical or mysticism, save for the phenomenon which is mystical experience,
its reality, and the act deploying its uni-versality into the heart of thought. Real or mystical
identity thus “precedes” mystical identification, as it determines-in-the-last-instance the usage of
discourse and language, without for all that giving place to the aporias of an undecidability or an
ineffability of “negative theology.” On the contrary, because it is now radically immanent and
without ek-stasis, but not without uni-versality, mystical experience is the content in the real of a
new non-theological usage of language. In the latter, the logos ceases being itself denied in the
name of the immanence of a transcendence, thus of an antinomic reciprocation that implies the
autonomy of the logos with itself. It is suspended by a force (of) thought which no doubt
possesses a grasp on language but which, on its side and through its real essence, is not grasped
by the latter. Because the mystical thus understood is only an immanent cause through its
essence, and consequently in radical heteronomy to the logos, the non-philosophical usage of
language does not end in a negative henology, the negation or suspension of the logos no longer
belonging to the essence of the real cause or the mystical since it still belongs to the religious
relation to a superessential.
Whereas philosophy calls “mysticism” the real, which it touches upon or approaches in a
transcendence, or even beyond, but without being able to penetrate it, being satisfied by an
intuition or representation which it denies, non-philosophy takes its departure in the same Real as
mystical given-without-givenness and endeavors, on this universal yet insufficient basis, to
transform our relation to philosophy, science, art—to mysticism itself from which it liberates
non-philosophical and non-religious a prioris. From this perspective, it is not a question of a
secularization—still rational and transcendent—of an extraordinary experience, but of the
possibility of rendering the usage of an exceptional or superhuman experience in every “ordinary
man” which was supposed to be refused to him. Philosophy is this organon, this a priori form
which, giving us the World, forecloses the mystical experience which intrinsically constitutes
humans and which is a question of rediscovering, not in its reality which has never abandoned
us, but on the mode of thought and by the non-philosophical force of the latter. The mystical is
the real essence of the Stranger and that which turns it, that which uni-verts it towards the World.
Other (non-autopositional Other, non-thetic Transcendence)
Aprioritic structure which is a mode of the force (of) thought and the non-autopositional
Distance which belongs to it. It corresponds to the symptom-material of transcendence yet

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insofar as the latter is not reduced to simple exteriority or distance but adds a “vertical”
dimension or height to it.
The philosophical history of the Other is punctuated by three epochs. 1) The Other
as belonging to the Same or expulsed by it, as deprived of being and more or less
identical to the pure multiple or simulacra (Plato). 2) The Other as real opposition,
existence irreducible to logic (Kant). This Other founds the modern concept of the
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subject as denying its particularity and transcendence towards self. But it is finally
re-absorbable into rational autoposition. 3) The Other, in the Judaic and
psychoanalytic extraction, characterized by a real transcendence affecting the ideal
transcendence of the Logos (Derrida). This Other, proper to the “Judaic turn” and
posterior to Nietzsche, marks the “attack” or real excess of alterity over
philosophy but always under the ultimate authority of the latter, supposedly valid.
Furthermore, the Other being grasped dialectically as alterity from the theoretical
angle (Plato) as well as the practical (Fichte), all philosophy of the Other as such
is thus carried off in a speculation up to the fiction of an Other of the Other, which
psychoanalysis (Lacan) intends to prohibit. On the other hand, when ethics intends
to become primary, indeed an-archic (Levinas), the Other is grasped as identity of
an absolute Other or infinite distance (of) the “Most-High.” But when this Judaic
Other affects philosophy itself, the rigor of this identity is again attenuated and the
Other menaced by duplication—this is différance (double, proxy, supplement,
vicariousness, etc. cf. Derrida).
It’s advisable to distinguish, against the philosophical amphibology of the Other, between a
transcendence of pure exteriority or ek-stasis–non-horizontal in every way, non-autopositional
and non-autodecisional position, organon of thought—and the secondary dimension of a real
alterity of transcendence whose symptoms are ethics and theology and whose manifestation
constitutes the specific organon of a non-ethics and a non-religion.
The experience of alterity implies a non-autopositional transcendence prohibiting both the
absolute Levinasian reversal of the hierarchy of Being to the Other as well as the Derridean
semi-dialectization of this reversal under the name of différance. This dialectization implies that
the Other is only present as a symptom; instead it is performatively given, but in the vision-in-
One in-the-last-instance. There is an identity of-the-last-instance of the Other, and this objective
structure is not obtained by the reversal of a philosophical hierarchy, but given once and for all
without which it can be divided: this is the Other such as it is and not as such [tel quel et non
comme tel], with its own action in the force (of) thought.
The vision-in-One is not the vision-in-Other (cf. Lacan: “discourse of the Other”) which would
make the Other primary. It no longer presents the One and the Other as a mixture subtending a
thought of relation such as is fashionable in psychoanalysis: the Other is not the immanent
content of the One, no more than its final transcendent(al) condition. The existing-subject-
Stranger is defined by the force of thought, while alterity is here no longer one of its
specifications. Non-philosophy distinguishes, in contrast to philosophy, three concepts entangled
in the generality of the “Other”: 1) the immanent Uni-versality of the vision-in-One, which gives
the World without-givenness or which is disposable for it, uni-verts towards it; 2) non-
autopositional Distance or Exteriority; 3) finally, its modality of real alterity or “vertical”
transcendence. Alterity is an ethical specification of the existing-Stranger, but is not itself
essentially defined by this alterity as philosophy would have it in its dyad of ego and alter-ego.
The “Other” or “Alterity” with its various ancient and recent modes is nothing but a symptom of
the existing-Stranger. In its beginnings, non-philosophy itself, under the term of “non-thetic
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Transcendence (NTT),” does not distinguish between these three layers.
Performativity (performed, performation, performational)
Term borrowed from the philosophy of ordinary language (Austin and Searle), transposed and
generalized here outside the linguistic sphere to characterize the radical type of immanence and
of the One’s acting, compared to the efficacy of language and Being in a philosophical regime or
Logos.
In the sphere of language, a performative is said of certain enunciations in which

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the signifying value and the value of action, the sense and the operation, the
signified and the practical are supposed to identify with one another: they “do
what they say,” or more precisely: they do something (and do not content
themselves to saying it) by saying this same thing or doing it by saying it (Austin).
This concept has been critiqued by Ducrot (1980 and 1984) as illusory, arising
from a “confusion committed by linguists between the words they study and the
words of which they make use, a confusion furthermore prefigured in language
itself insofar as it is the site of an illocutionary derivation conceptualizing the
words that it sets in the disposition of the speaking subject.”
If we now suppose, as non-philosophical practice authorizes, a radical identity of saying and
doing (doing (by-) saying, saying (by-) doing), but which is no longer itself of the order of doing
or saying, the only instance that defines itself by this identity without fail and sufficiency is the
One, i.e. the Real itself such as it is defined by a pure immanence or a self-inherence of the
phenomenon. The Real is performative because it is given-without-givenness by knowing (itself
) given, thus without this knowledge still opposing itself to a transcendent object. The non-
philosophical usage therefore manifests the phenomenal or real nucleus which is always at the
foundation of this concept despite everything somewhat divisible and effectively illusory in the
usage that philosophy makes of language. In particular, it restores its verbal and active dimension
and inscribes performativity into the radical passivity of the Real: we could speak of “passive
performativity,” of which Husserl’s “passive synthesis” would give a first but still transcendent
indication.
Thus understood as cause in-the-last-instance of thought, radical performativity completes
dismantling its antinomic pairing with the “constative” function of language; it introduces piece-
by-piece its identity-in-the-last-instance into the linguistic pairings that it “unilateralizes” outside
the Real. It prohibits on its account the reflexive and philosophical usage of language and shows
that, in non-philosophy, language is required without it speaking of the ground itself because it
speaks facing the Real or according to it.
If performativity designates the immanence of the force (of) thought which does not arise from
itself, i.e. in-the-last-instance from the Real alone, it radicalizes the Marxist criterion of practice,
which precisely designated a certain real immanence against the transcendence of ideology,
indeed of philosophy. Against practice as scission (Hegel), we shall oppose practice as
performativity, eventually by also calling it “passive” (“passive practice”; cf. “praxis” according
to M. Henry). The force (of) thought is identically passive in-the-last-instance (Descartes) and
active (Spinoza)–this is another possible reading of performativity.
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Lastly, for more rigor and axiomatic clarity, we shall distinguish between the Performed-
without-performation or the already-Performed (the real-One itself, not the result of the action
but the self-immanent phenomenal state-of-affairs), and the Performation as activity or labor of
the force (of) thought on its material. It is performational–immanent via its specific mode–
without being the Performed itself.
Philosophical Decision
Principal and formalized invariant or structure of philosophy according to philosophy which
does not indicate it without also simultaneously auto-affecting and affecting its own identity;
instead, non-philosophy gives it a radical identity (of) structure or determines it in-the-last-
instance. Its synonyms: dyad and unity, ambiguity, unity-of-opposites, mixture, mélange—are
likely even to have a double use, intra-philosophical and non-philosophical, which changes their
sense. The philosophical Decision is a mixture of indecision and decision, never pure decision.
1) The decision in the traditional rational sense is the act determined by reasons of
a structural nature, of the economic situation or individual (choice), through which
the individual puts an end to a deliberation. The economist and specialist in
artificial science, H.A. Simon, defines it: “the process at the end of which each
moment one chooses one of these alternatives. The series of decisions that
determine behavior during a given amount of time can be called a strategy.” 2)
The philosophical Decision, variable according to the philosophers, corresponds to
a certain invariant, explicit, or repressed distribution of transcendental and
empirical functions. Compared to an ensemble of facts known as “empirical,” or a

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“technico-experimental” work, etc., the philosopher reactivates the decision of the

question of the essence of phenomena, which he considers fundamental. He makes
a double distinction, that of the empirical and the a priori, whatever it be; then that
of the a priori and the transcendental, which is an ascent such that he calls it
beginning, origin, substance, Being, etc, but which is always presumably authentic
reality, equipped with transcendental functions (in a broad sense). 3) These
concepts were obviously generalized and criticized in Deconstruction and the
philosophies of Difference by the interrelated concepts of play, effects, and
strategies. But the empirical, a priori, transcendental levels and reality are
structural invariants and do not apply only to Kant and Husserl, with the provision
of understanding them as invariants and not as entities or essences.
The philosophical Decision is an operation of transcendence which believes (in a naïve and
hallucinatory way) in the possibility of a unitary discourse on Reality. This authoritative claim is
expressed through autoposition, an operation made possible by its being mixed or ambiguous.
The philosophical Decision thus has as a structure the coupling of the Unity of opposites and as a
function to hallucinate the One-real and thus to foreclose. To philosophize is to decide Reality
and the thoughts that result from this, i.e. to believe to be able to order them in the universal
order of the Principle of Reason (Logos), but also more generally in accordance with the “total”
or unitary order of the Principle of sufficient philosophy. Hence the ambiguities that relate to
Reality (as Being…) and to thought (as philosophy), and which are at the same time the element
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and the result of the auto-decisional process. This comprises the various operations which are the
fundamental moments of any philosophical Decision, and to which corresponds, under a non-
auto-decisional form, the transcendental and a priori identity of the subject of non-philosophy,
the force (of) thought. Broadly, the philosophical Decision, as the philosophical formalization of
philosophy itself, is used as a symptomatic indication and occasion for the development of the
force (of) thought which, in addition, has for its “correlate” the identity, the sense (of) identity of
the philosophical Decision, which is equivalent to foreclosure of the Real or the One.
Philosophy
Object (occasion, material, symptom) of non-philosophy.
When it tries to be thought rather than to be practiced spontaneously and naively,
philosophy is for itself the object mid-speech, of a semi-definition, a set of
speeches and silences. It is embarrassing to say “the” philosophy is the true
philosophy. Philosophical systems are a fallen or menaced effort to say what they
are, to dissimulate the impossibility of saying it, to avoid having to keep
themselves silent.
Philosophy is an a priori discourse on the one hand with a systematic goal on the other. It posits
the world of which being is preformed in the logos with a predicative structure. This predicative
structure of philosophical discourse is organized in a speculative reflection, as the last absolute
philosophy shows (Hegel). The essence of speculative reflection is specularity or the dyad. Since
Parmenides, the suture of being and thinking forms the unsurpassable mirror
stage of philosophy. Since Heidegger, certainly, the deconstructive philosophers have tried to
break the mirror by substituting it for the specularity of Being and its residue dispersed or
disseminated by the Other. However, this Other of the logos has efficacy only in an ultimate
reference obligated to the logos that is presumably relevant for Reality. The philosophical
Decision has become a forcing. Since Plato at least, it homogenizes, idealizes, quantifies, and
qualifies Reality and the foreclosed. To philosophize means to decide on a strategy of positing
the world. It is not to know, but to form a priori decisional speech acts in an action of culture.
Always (re)stated in a diversity of styles of writing and following the example of myth and its
primordial metaphors, form-philosophy expresses the repetition of itself and the inertia of its
auto-reproduction. Nietzsche shows extremely well that philosophy is brought to think itself by
thematizing the absolute and primordial metaphor of the Eternal Return of the Same. Form-
philosophy is then a metaphorical discourse (supported by the logos, being, etc. and basically
anointed by primordial Greece). In general and non-Nietzschean terms, philosophy is finally a
priest conveying to the Occident the sacred Greeks overdetermined by the holy Judeo-Christian.
Through its principal process—to transcend it as it overrides the transcendent–, it is a faith, with

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the sufficiency of faith, intended by necessity to remain empty but which necessarily evades this
void by its repopulation with objects and foreign goals provided by experience, culture, history,
language, etc Through its style of communication and `knowing’ it is a rumor—the occidental
rumor—that is transmitted by hearsay, imitation, specularity, and repetition. Through its internal
structure, or “philosophical Decision,” it is the articulation of a Dyad of contrasted terms and a
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divided Unity, immanent and transcendent to the Dyad; or the articulation of a universal market
where concepts are exchanged according to rules specific to each system and from an authority
with two sides: one of the philosophical division of labor, the other of the appropriation of part of
what the market of the concepts produces. The philosopher is thus capital or quasi-capital in the
order of the thought, or the shape of the World understood in its more inclusive sense.
The preceding descriptions of philosophy find their occasion in philosophical descriptions, but
they actually already suppose non-philosophical ground. If it is embarrassing to say that
philosophy is the criterion of the philosopher, the transformation of this aporia into a problem
and its solution is the criterion of the non-philosopher who substitutes, in connection with
philosophy, i.e. its identity, knowledge of the sufficiency of its faith. He or she does it using
radically unknown means of philosophy (vision-in-One as “presupposed reality”), or foreign to it
(cloning and the determination-in-the-last-instance of the force (of) thought; the reduction of
philosophy to the state of symptom and occasion). Non-philosophy breaks with auto-
heterocritical philosophy, typical of modernity and post-modernity. In its manner it develops
philosophy by releasing it from its authority over itself and by releasing its identity or its sense
for the force (of) thought, which is the authentic subject of (for) philosophy. It gives philosophy
even a broader relevance through which it seems like the span or the dimension of the World, i.e.
like the identity (of) its Greek, cosmopolitan determination; like the thought-world that only the
vision-in-One can take for an object.
Presentation (non-autopositional presentation)
Immanent structure of reference of non-philosophical statements. It is a clone or reflection-
without-reflecting, a theoretical givenness effectuated by and as the force (of) thought.
The metaphysics of Representation, or of autopositional representation as primary
presence of the World, established itself in the 17th century. It is rediscovered
beyond the doctrinal differences in every classical author, and it continues to
predominate in the scientific psychology of perception. For classical authors,
consciousness is a doubling of presence which, despite the subjective closure and
cloistering, secretly reproduces an exterior of things for interior representation, a
represented that prevails over its representation. Husserl and phenomenology have
wanted to constitute this primary and presupposed relation to the World. But the
difficult and extreme passage in the world-of-life (Lebenswelt) only signals the
difficulty inherent to autopositional representation. The constitutive
Representation only re-posits this relation to the world by positing the Real in
thought. Thus it only posits what was presupposed by the classical authors. The
theoreticians of deconstruction no doubt limit and displace the representation by
différe(a)nce. However, this critique is still caught in the critiqued from which it
originates: and the displacement of Representation is nothing less than its adequate
emplacement by the Real. In short, Representation is the element of specularity (of
the double reflection or divided reflection), of speculation, and finally of
speculative thought.
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The circle or triad of Representation (represented, representative, and mixture of representation)
in turn only serves as material in the elaboration of the concept of non-autopositional
presentation. From this point of view, an exercise of dualysis would show this. The Real would
be the representative, the force (of) thought the (transcendent) representation, and the World the
represented, but everything changes around “presentation.” The repetition or reduplication
included in Re-presentation can do nothing but disappear on behalf of a simple presentation,
non-autorepresentational presentation. The Real is instead the Presented, but Presented-without-
presentation. It is named with the occasion or aid of presentation as the radical past of
presentation, as the Presented which has never formed the object of a presentation. As for the

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World, the simple but “heavy” presenter completely supports the philosophical triad; it is also
presented, but through and by the force (of) presentation, thus presented-by-presentation non-
representational (of) itself–there it is the noema or the sense in which the world simply gives
itself. Representation is the concept of the World, an autopositional concept, but here given to
the vision-in-One, i.e. to the presented-without-presentation as noema or identity of the presented
(through presentation). It would remain to combine and reformulate this thematics on behalf of
that of the mirror, the reflection, and specularity equally under the reserve of its dualysis.
Non-philosophy, as force (of) thought, dismantles fetishism of thought-representation, of its
critical or modern, differentialist, or postmodern avatars. In reality, the full usage of
Representation is philosophy itself insofar as it is autoposition or autogivenness or
autorepresentation in person. All philosophical critiques of Representation are not extensive
enough, giving themselves a restrained concept of the latter and remaining captive to the real
illusion of the philosophical Decision as sufficient.
Primacy (primacy-without-priority)
Characteristic of the One-in-One of inalienable being, or of the Real being foreclosed to thought,
yet able to determine the latter. Primacy understood as determination-in-the-last-instance
dismantles the philosophical mixture proper to the principles of primacy and priority, their
power-in-domination or ontological primacy. Primacy-without-priority precisely determines
thought (as force (of) thought) to be primary in relation to philosophical material.
Ontology and metaphysics attribute a mixture of primacy and priority, of power
and originarity in “first causes” and in “first principles” (Heidegger included: the
ontico-ontological primacy of Dasein). Primacy is not without being primary,
priority without participating in the primacy of principles, it is the manifestation of
the philosophical circle and hierarchy within the heart of metaphysics itself. This
trait subsists in every philosophy whatsoever insofar as it is structured as a
metaphysics and insofar as it receives a secret politics in this structure. Mao and
then Althusser’s de-Hegelianized dialectic has exploited this logic of primacy and
domination in the theory of contradiction as “dominant structure” and primacy of
practice over theory, of the dialectic over materialism (or the other way around).
The radicalization of the One-in-One posited as non-ontological ground of thought subtracts it
from the transcendental characteristics of Being, in particular from the spirit of hierarchical
domination and the priority of principles–from their commandment and their commencement.
The Real cannot be primary–lest it be submitted to an order more powerful than it. It subtracts
itself from this order for reasons of radical being-separated and being-foreclosed rather than for
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reasons of super-ontology or super-essential domination surpassing Being itself. Thus
simultaneously de-politicized and de-ontologized, the Real can still be said to harbor a primacy-
without-domination insofar as it determines–but precisely in-the-last-instance alone–not an
object but another cause called “occasional.” The “presupposed real” is thus deprived of every
ontological power and sets an end to philosophy’s specific desire-of-hierarchy. On the other
hand, this being-foreclosed, foreign to every philosophical politics, is capable of determining
thought: no longer by a mastery using a form or an information, but by a cloning or transmission
of radical identity to a material prepared to receive it and in turn divested of its original will of
domination. The specific primacy of the “last-instance” thus extracts as “unilateral duality” the
real nucleus of contradiction as structure from primacy. It liberates a radical democracy or a non-
politics that transforms the politics-world which philosophy is by submitting it to a “minimally”
and strictly human pragmatics, in some fashion without principles or “an-archic,” but without
contenting itself in deconstructing the supposedly relevant power of philosophy.
Priority (priority-without-primacy)
Characteristic of the force (of) thought as primary, actually and performatively “radical
commencement.” Transcendentally primary in relation to philosophical material, precisely as
ordered in the primacy of the real-One and itself deprived of any primacy of the philosophical
type (mastery or domination).
Priority, joined together with primacy, is characteristic of “first” principles and
cause of metaphysics. “First philosophy” is first somewhat by its objects
themselves (Aristotle), somewhat by the order it establishes in knowledge

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(Descartes), somewhat by the mode of obvious givenness of its objects (Husserl),

but this priority is marked also by ontological dignity. “Ontico-ontological
primacy” could also under certain conditions be called “ontico-ontological
priority.” This ideal emerges with Descartes and above all with Husserl on the
urgency of a “radical commencement.” But the divided or mixed structure of
priority-primacy ensures philosophical priority neither priority nor
commencement. Hence a delay installed in the transcendental commencement, a
powerlessness in the radicality of the origin, consequently the philosophies that
attempt to register this failure as positive and that “commence” through difference,
milieu, becoming-as-origin (Nietzsche, Deleuze) or through differance, deference,
and supplement (Derrida).
If thought–as fetishized philosophical object–can not be first without also being second and
delayed, at least postponed, if the “radical commencement” is a myth or a constituting
philosophical fantasy, the “force (of) thought” cloned by the vision-on-One on the basis of
philosophical material is necessarily undivided in its essence and consequently radically primary
(but without-primacy). The commencement is nothing but commencement and radical if it is that
of a performational thought which does not divide itself even when it makes use of division or
distance. The force (of) thought does not know of deference, delay, differ(a)nce, or supplement
to the origin, because nothing separates or divides it from its “real presupposed,” the One, in the
primacy through which it is ordered but which itself is not primary or “anterior” to thought or
proto-originary in some way. The force (of) thought–or the Stranger–comport themselves “with”
philosophy and are turned towards it. The radical commencement is the same thing as the
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powerlessness of the force (of) thought to turn itself around towards its “origin” or towards the
Real, being turned by definition towards the thought-world. It is every post-modern philosophy
and its style of deviation, of difference, just like every modern philosophy and its fantasy of the
identity-of-the-origin, that is invalidated when radical identity ceases being original and becomes
cause-of-the-last-instance.
Radical Immanence
Under its really radical form, i.e. self-immanent or thoroughly under some hypothesis of thought
that validates it, it is equivalent to the One-in-One and consequently implies the uni-versal
vision-in-One, but foreclosed to thought and/or the World, the Real as given-without-givenness
and separated-without-separation.
The immanence/transcendence couple is one of the fundamental operators of
philosophy. This dyad reciprocally relativizes its terms, whereas the philosophies
that lay claim to immanence (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze on the one hand, M.
Henry on the other and via a completely different mode) are nothing but halved (in
a close inequality) and are equally thoughts that “divide” transcendence. In a
philosophical dyad, the opposed terms are convertible with their close opposition:
immanence participates there in the transcendence that it presupposes either as
element where it is surreptitiously inscribed, or as effect that revolves around it
and from which, as its condition, it constitutes or develops meaning. Every
procedure of reduction of transcendence to immanence remains a philosophical
operation of division and is reversible at the limit, such that immanence is not a
“real presupposed,” i.e. given-before-every-presupposition or supposed-without-
position, i.e. without-transcendence.
Non-philosophy re-assumes the notion of radical immanence investigated by M. Henry, but on
condition of submitting it pragmatically and theoretically to the vision-in-One. It is not a thought
of immanence—it is still a philosophical decision that would objectify it, that would posit
supposedly radical immanence generally through means of transcendence. A thought is itself
effectively immanent and not an auto-negation of philosophy when it operates according-to-
immanence or proceeds by cloning philosophy and the World. Radical immanence itself stops
being an excessive slogan in the philosophical tradition (the slogan as the other face of destiny,
consignment, or calling) when it is no longer posited by philosophical or constitutive operations
but simply axiomatic operations; when it forms the object of an axiomatic (transcendental)
decision rather than theses. It has been fundamental for the specificity of non-philosophy and its

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distinction from the philosophies of immanence to concurrently elaborate the axioms of radical
immanence and the axiomatic style (here transcendental and determined-in-the-last-instance) of
thought.
Real (One-in-One, Vision-in-One)
Instance defined by its radical immanence under all possible conditions of thought: thus by its
being-given (of) itself, yet called Vision-in-One or One-in-One, and by its being-foreclosed to
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thought. The Real is neither capable of being known or even “thought,” but can be described in
axioms. On the other hand, it determines-in-the-last-instance thought as non-philosophical.
There is no notion vaguer and more “ideological,” also more “modern,” than that
of the “real,” if not that of “thought.” Every philosopher wants by definition to
“think the real,” even the most diehard idealist. Its indetermination and its
overdetermination nevertheless find certain (generative and critical) limits in
Parmenides’ initial equation: “Being and Thinking are the Same,” thus in its
“etymological” origins (res) determining the field of its possible variations. The
latter are as various as philosophical decisions, but each one requires the primacy
and the priority of the real (substance and its treatments, being, spirit, will to
power, faith, sense, moral law, etc.) in relation to which the other instances of the
philosophical decision are distributed and hierarchized. That the real lays claim to
a primacy-and-priority implies that it is inscribed in the element of transcendence
and exteriority (immanence being one of its secondary properties, even in the so-
called “philosophies of immanence”): (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze), and that it is
reciprocally determined–in an operation, a negation, a difference, etc.–with
thought. The philosophical real is at best repressed because it is a desired real,
cloven by transcendence. The philosophy of the 20th century in the opening of the
“Judaic turn” has innovated by ceasing to identify with the Same and/or with
Being so as to identify with the Other. It has contributed to dislocating the
philosophical Decision without suspending its authority.
In virtue of its usage of philosophy as its “occasional cause,” non-philosophy recourses to the
“Real” as non-conceptual first term. It conserves its primacy without priority, thus a non-
metaphysical primacy over thought, the primacy of an only-in-the-last-instance determination
that respects the relative autonomy of thought, which can on the other hand be called “primary”
or transcendental. Non-philosophy is only a primary thought because it lacks effect over the Real
henceforth called radical immanence or identity through and through. No ontic or ontological
content, not even feeling, affectivity, or life, can serve to define the essence of the One, lest it
introduce a hidden transcendence into it. Even “immanence” only serves to name the Real which
tolerates nothing but axiomatic descriptions or formulations. Its function does not exceed that of
first term having a primacy over others. It cannot be a question of a simple formal symbol,
precisely because axiomatics is, if not in the Real, at least in-Real or according-to-the-Real and
thus operates only via a transcendental mode.
Non-philosophy interrupts for itself the philosophical path of the real, identified with various
instances during the course of its history (existent, ousia, being, one, substance, concept,
multiplicity, etc., and finally Other through various modes). This is a particular interruption that
does not consist in radicalizing its transcendence in an exacerbated neo-Platonic lineage or in a
Lacanian lineage (as the impossible of the symbolic, hole of the signifier, etc.), lest it claim to
exceed philosophy by an ultimate philosophical means, but consists in radicalizing the bit of
immanence the tradition has accorded to philosophical thought, to the point of no longer
claiming even to “attach” it once and for all, to the point of axiomatizing it as being-foreclosed.
One-in-One as well as outside-being, outside-representation, outside-possibility, it enables
transforming the philosophical (Marx) and psychoanalytic (Lacan) discourse on the real into a
particularly “indicative” and fruitful symptom of an emergent experience of thought emerging
beyond philosophical possibilities.
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Real Essence
Instance of radical phenomena in opposition to the proper order of philosophy or occasion. We
are therefore speaking of “real” essence, for essence in general must be ordered in the Real and

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determined by it, insofar as it is a characterization operated by thought, lest it reintroduce a

metaphysical interpretation.
In the history of philosophical ideas, essence serves as an ideal and stable
reflection against the mobility of becoming. According to Heidegger, this
reflection feeds upon the metaphysical difference, codified by the scholastics,
between essentia (quidditas) and existentia (quodditas). For Heidegger, authentic
difference ignores ideal reflection as essentia. It indicates another essence
(Wesen) of thought, less positive and less affected by in-essence.
“Essence” is an ambiguous conceptual operator in non-philosophy and has not always been
rigorously utilized. “Real essence” alone enjoys a precise usage: here it is not transcendental
possibility but the Real as determination-in-the-last-instance. Non-philosophy globally
substitutes a thought (of the) Real of the last instance for a metaphysical thought of essence and
coupling of essences. The invalidation of the mixture of the Real and language orders thought in
the Real rather than in the essences and subordinates the latter as operators instead of techniques.
An axiomatization and dualyzation of essence and existence are possible. For example, on the
basis of essence as metaphysical entity, essence as a priori, essence as real or transcendental,
essence as form, as sense, etc. Hence the variable games of interpreting according to the context:
essence (of the) Real or the One, essence (of) real of the transcendental, the Real as that which
“precedes” essence…and existence, etc. The plasticity and style of non-philosophy demand a
continuous labor of internal interpretation and taste or affect simultaneously, i.e. the sensibility
of solitary terms.
Reflection (reflection according to the One or non-autoreflexive)
Thought’s status as clone according to the One, determined according to the philosophical
schema of specularity and speculation. Another way of understanding the cloning of thought by
the vision-in-One on the basis of philosophy.
To the extent that philosophy, taken in its most invariant and most general
structure of dyad and decision, is an operation of division and doubling, it
integrates a mirror moment, specular and speculative, that forms the double or
image of every term, to the closest difference, of another or itself. It thus knows of
reflection, but the latter is necessarily in turn divided into two reflections that
divide representation, the latter being on the one hand a reflection of the real and
on the other a reflection of itself. Reflection is thus divided by the duality of the
thing and the representation-as-mirror of the thing; the mirror is then the common
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and mediating form of the thing and representation, and relates the latter to the
form because it also (for example, the ego) participates in both, or is thing and
representation. Materialism (with Lenin and the concept of knowledge as
“reflection without mirror”) has simplified this problematic and begun to
denounce the idealist functioning of the metaphysical doubles of the Real. On the
one hand, it autonomizes the process of knowledge which no doubt is referred to
the Real or is its “reflection,” but without being it in the sense of an image in the
mirror, without knowledge and duplicating such a fantasy, cloud, or mirage. On
the other hand, it affirms the nature relative to the Real of this process of
knowledge by narrowly subordinating the latter to form and by thus prohibiting
every idealism, i.e. the speculative autoposition of knowledge as being the Real
itself. Another critique, that of transcendental idealism against transcendental
realism, denounces in the latter the presence of a mirror (Fichte and Husserl
against Spinoza and Descartes).
The materialist solution poses the problem of knowledge in a simpler and more
exact way than idealism, but without perceiving that the latter defines every
philosophy, materialism included, and not simply theories of knowledge
(Althusser). This is because it still poses it in the element of transcendence–that of
matter or “being” in relation to “knowledge”–whereas it is still obliged to
conceive the latter via the model of the reflection of a thing (the objectivity of
matter). Such a reflection implies, being given the transcendence of matter, the
dissimulated existence of a mirror, like in idealist philosophy, but materialism can

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only simplify this structure in the sense of the identity or the immanence of the
“in-itself” of matter which determines consciousness without being determined in
return by it (primacy of materialist theory over the gnoseological thesis). It thus
arbitrates the problem by recognizing the existence of reflection but by denying
that of the mirror.
Non-philosophy takes its departure in the identity of immanence, unbound from all objectivity or
transcendence, from the One-Real rather than that of “matter.” The simplification of the
philosophical structure is more radical than it but precisely less resolved. On the one hand, the
in-objective immanence of the Real excludes that it can give itself as a thing to a mirror, that it
can alienate itself in an image which would be its representation, i.e. its auto-representation. The
One is thus not bilaterally reflected, not because it does not “exist,” but because it is itself
foreclosed to the possibility of being: if there is a reflection and mirror through the World, this
will be a reflection without the positive cooperation of the reflected. Furthermore, transcendence
and its modes (indicated and presented in particular by philosophy), if they give themselves to
the One, are from the latter’s point of view given and lived in-One. But, from their point of view,
that of their relative autonomy, they function as a mirror. They undoubtedly do not dispose of a
thing which would be given to be reflected but, unlike the intra-philosophical mirror, they enjoy
a relative autonomy and are seen to extract a reflection according to the One which they convey
or support: their clone. The One does not reflect itself, does not produce the reflection, is not its
own mirror; but there is a mirror that lays claim to the One from its solitary authority. The Real
is the necessary and “negative” condition of the reflection or clone, which it extracts in some
way. This reflection, which supposes the relative autonomy of transcendence (of “being), is the
transcendental, then the a priori as specific orders without their own autonomy, caught between
the Real cause of this forced reflection and the World which effectuates it. These orders thus
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articulate the Given-without givenness and the Given-by-givenness. Together they constitute the
transcendental and a priori syntax of the subject or force (of) thought.
Thus transferred onto the terrain of radical immanence which dualyzes it, the specular and
speculative structure that obviously has the form of a triad (things to be reflected, mirror, image
or reflection) is not dismembered: it always comprises three terms, but otherwise disposed. We
could speak, except through anti-metaphysical abstraction, of a reflection without mirror in the
sense of an absolute absence of mirrors. But it is transformed in depth by being-separated or
foreclosed to the Real–through its immanence–and gives rise to a new syntax which
characterizes it, from the fact itself that the Real is not divided and does not give itself to be
reflected or to reflect itself due to its non-autopositional simplification. The clone is the identity
of the speculative structure which is reflection according to the Real. In effect, the speculative
structure in and of philosophy is itself divided in each of these three instances along with the
conditions of the vision-in-One, without removing the reflection (for the World not for the One),
the mirror, and the reflection, by extracting simplicity or identity in some way. These conditions
suffice to attach the speculative triad to its own autoreflection and in general to the philosophical
circle. It is now formed by three terms which are identities, the first being real identity, never
divided (the One); the second, certainly a divided identity but which can no longer spread its
division (the World); the third, the transcendental order of the reflection which is reflection
according to the Real, but undivided, non-autopositional reflection and never double reflection.
These three instances no longer form a system like the philosophical Decision. Admittedly, we
shall not say that non-philosophy is “antispeculative”–it is never the negation or reversal of
philosophy–but that it is non-speculative, which signifies that it is the identity (of) philosophical
speculation and in general the identity (of) philosophy.
Relative Autonomy
Irreducibility of the transcendent orders of reality to the Real, or of transcendence in general to
the immanence of the One-in-One as radical autonomy. It justifies their function of occasional
cause or material for every theory determined in-the-last-instance by the Real and justifies even
the existence of a theory.
It is in Marxism rather than in a philosophy of substance and accidents that the concepts
of relative and absolute autonomy take on a precise and theoretically grounded sense,
consequently in the framework of an ontological dualism of the infrastructure, which

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defines the real par excellence, and the superstructure, which conjugates a type of reality
and specific or autonomous organization with a causal dependence in regard to the
infrastructure. These concepts connect a distinction of regions of reality with a distinction
of types of causality in the original but poorly elucidated concept of “determination in the
last instance.”
If the real-One is defined by a radical immanence which does not support anything empirical,
ontic, or even ontological, neither object nor objectification, if it does not itself fall under any
objectifying or even surreptitiously intuitive act, then necessarily nothing can be concluded from
it concerning existence or non-existence, the reality or inconsistency of the sphere of
transcendence. A thought according to the One, if it wishes to be thematized, thus supposes
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transcendence to be given—and it along with the latter. This thought thus renounces every
“why?” (why transcendence instead of nothing?), every hypothesis about this type of reality and
does not concern itself with it insofar as it can be given in turn, even though it is transcendence,
under the conditions of radical immanence or the phenomenon. But it must also, if it analyzes all
its conditions, integrate this relative autonomy—which in part explains its own—in the total
operation of thought which cannot be deduced, if not by idealism, from the real-One alone. It is
prevented from claiming to completely dissolve, with regard to the One alone, the antinomies
and amphibologies of which transcendence is composed under the form of philosophy in
particular. This relative autonomy explains that there is a causality of the Real upon
transcendence—a causality supposed in every way by the exercise of thought—because it takes
on the form of Determination-in-the-last-instance and because the latter concretizes itself into a
third but not synthetic instance, the force (of) thought as identity of the Real (and) thought, of the
One (and) Being.
To use another formulation, the real-One itself is defined by an indifference or an autonomy of
being-foreclosed (immanent uni-laterality) without necessary relation to the empirical, even of
immediate negation. But it has an effect of unilaterality which is unilaterality-of, which is a
transcendental property and is said of a necessary “empirical” given as occasional cause or
material. It is necessary to admit that the force (of) thought, as a priori organon in-the-last-
instance, real through its essence, conserves from its occasional origins a nucleus of
identification with philosophy or mixture-form or semi-reciprocity, insofar as, without being
essentially determined by it, it has need of a support or sup-poses the mixture-form without being
with it in a relation of mixture. This interminably reduced or suspended nucleus, but transformed
and indestructible, manifests itself as function-support. It is obvious that its “transcendental”
situation, which does not make it the Real but a “relation” identical to the Real in the Real alone
and thus without synthesis, forces the force (of) thought to symmetrically maintain a unilateral
relation to the empirical, in some ways a relation without reciprocity with reciprocity. That it has
“need” of a support which is the mixture itself reduced to this function signifies that it is
identical to the support not in the latter by in itself and through it alone, that it is thus a question
of a unilateral transcendental identity. This nucleus of identification not reciprocal with the
mixture-form or occasional cause could be called the “fantasy” of the force (of) thought. It
represents the effective, if not real, condition of non-philosophy.
Reversibility (reciprocity, convertibility, exchange)
Syntax and operation of the dyad that form the basis of the philosophical Decision and are
reflected on the superior or transcendental level of the system. Tendency-limit of all philosophy
to which the apparently least fluid syntaxes can be reduced (reciprocity, convertibility,
exchange, contract, etc.). To reversibility is opposed the unilateral duality of cloning (whose
principle is the vision-in-One) which should instead be characterized as “unitax.” Or still, to
reciprocal determination is opposed the determination-in-the-last-instance.
As duality and synthesis of a “syntax” and a “semantics” (experience of the real),
philosophy defines a specific “form of order” which it interprets and mixes with
scientific forms of order—this is “philosophical rationality.” The essence of
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philosophical syntax is precisely to be a syn-taxis (a synthetic order par
excellence, unifying analysis in this same sense). This is reversibility, fully
realized only in certain cases of absolute idealism (Hegel—above all Nietzsche),

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but which is a tendential limit of all philosophy as such, again relieved of its
procedures taken from the sciences with which it is combined (convertibility,
dialectics, difference, reciprocal determination, relation-without-relation or semi-
reversibility, etc.). Reversibility is the mixture of a formal relation of equivalence
and of the intuitive given of spatiality which is the element of philosophical
topology. It is in the principle of philosophy itself insofar as the latter commences
with a dyad, a coupling of terms or a line of demarcation; particularly in the
principle of the order of phenomena in Plato, of the essence of matter in Aristotle,
of the cosmological dialectical illusion in Kant, and forces every philosopher to
reject the irreversible as semblance or to reabsorb it into circularity. In
psychoanalysis, reversibility is a fundamental dimension of the topological
approach of the Other and assures its footing on the One; instead of the
determination by the One in-the-last-instance, there is a reciprocal determination
of the One by the Other, and consequently the impossibility of thinking
Unilaterality and Time. This reversible coupling of the One and the Other is the
analogue of that of the One and Being in philosophy and demonstrates that, in the
best of cases, psychoanalysis is structured like a philosophy.
Non-philosophy treats this syntax as a simple material. It prohibits it from entering into play, at
least for its own account, not in philosophy itself, but its relating to self or being autoposited. It
transforms it into a simple symptom of the transcendental identity constitutive of the force (of)
thought at the same time that it manifests the sense (of) identity as foreclosure of unilateral
duality. Stated otherwise, it determines it in-the-last-instance. The preceding descriptions, carried
out beginning from philosophical indications, already suppose the perspective of the vision-in-
One.
Rule (of the force (of) thought)
Syntax or immanent form of the usage of language-material (philosophy). The rules of non-
philosophy constitute an a priori pragmatics of the unilateral action of the force (of) thought.
The concept of rule has been subtracted from its purely (methodo-)logical usage
(Descartes, Durkheim) by Kant who defines the understanding as the faculty of
rules. Consequently, the rule is constitutive of the theoretical usage of reason yet
is, however, not reduced to it. Reason, the faculty of principles, is moreover less
constrained in its practical or teleological usage. Kant thus refuses the reduction of
thought to regularity, a refusal which for example also characterizes the reflection
of Wittgenstein, who emphasizes the necessary hiatus between the rule and its
application and inscribes complete regularity into the fabric of a form of life.
The vision-in-One or given-without-givenness is deprived of rules, unlike the regulated use in
immanence—thus “non-regulated” but not uncontrolled—of non-philosophical pragmatics.
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Immanent expression of the force (of) thought whose essence is the determination-in-the-last-
instance, the rule naturally accompanies the procedure of reception and transformation of
philosophical material. It takes as many determined configurations—which are not transcendent
or autopositional—as this procedure needs for its operations. The non-philosophical rule is
neither the rule of the rule nor exception to the rule, but a non-autopositional rule (not
autoregulated).
Thus the first rule of non-philosophy prescribes, under the (misleading) term of “reciprocal
redescription,” the determination of material by the One and the reformulation of the One with
the symptomatic aid of material. The second rule hurls the ensemble of material into the “general
equivalent” of the chôra or a generalized Aesthetic. The third and fourth rules characterize the
cloning and “redescription” in language-material of the (transcendental and a priori) structures
that are equivalent to the philosophical Decision. The fifth rule announces the function support
fulfilled by the material itself in the course of the preceding operations. Finally, the sixth
rule explains the results of the procedure itself (rules 2 and 4) under the form of a non-thetic
universe, i.e. a clone or reflection.
One can then no longer speak of a transcendent opposition, within use, of a material and a rule—
which confirms the immanentization of the latter—but of a unilateral duality between the
transcendental essence of the rule and the given to be transformed. As for the rule, it is

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contingent-and-necessary through its own occasional material (the philosophical concept of the
rule and a priori rules of philosophy) and determined-in-the-last-instance by the Real or the
vision-in-One. Thus is broken the supposedly immanent “systematic necessity” of a “body of
rules,” the last fetish from which pragmatics must be liberated if it wants to focus on
philosophical language itself.
Science-of-men
Science according to the One-as-man exposing the unifying effects of the vision-in-One to the
variety of philosophical, anthropological, sociological, psychoanalytic, etc. matrices of the
description of man. The science of men or human multitudes must explain, in a unified theory of
the Stranger, the “sciences of man.”
Form-philosophy regulates the relations between man and the city, man and the
logos, man and the cosmos. This preoccupation of the Ancients has been
appropriated by the Moderns and above all by the Postmoderns who are hooked on
man as being-in-the-world or being-in-the-city, etc. Thus the indifference or
being-foreclosed of man is the central phenomenon that is always repressed. If
treatises of human nature have existed, no Treatise of man as real Identity has ever
seen the light of day. The human sciences have divided a territory which is not the
domain of the One-man, but a territory dispersed in hallucinated or supposedly
human attributes (power, language, desire, politics, etc.).
The vision-in-One is cause or real essence in-the-last-instance of the existing-subject-Stranger.
Conversely, one can symbolize or name the One by man or at least by the real essence of man or
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real-Ego (Ego-in-Ego). It is not man in general who is submitted to the Real (philosophy,
psychoanalysis), it is the subject which is appointed but in-the-last-instance to man-as-One. The
secret of the non-philosophical, non-Platonic One is the same secret as man as Ego—it is being-
foreclosed to the World. Man is the non-sufficient radical, neither the absolute nor a deficiency
of the absolute. This is because man himself can determine, in a radical but not sufficient
manner, a transcendental science for him but only as subject-Stranger, not as immanent Ego or
given-without-givenness. The only real and rigorous science is not a theory of the Ego-One but
justifiably a theory of the subject as Stranger. This thesis invalidates, if not philosophy and the
human sciences, at least their pretentions over so-called “man,” their belief in “man,” their
anthropo-logical faith. Since the subject-Stranger exists radically by right and is not numerically
multiple, non-philosophy gives rise, in accordance with the material of the human sciences and
anthropology, to a “science of men” rather than to “sciences of man”: it exhibits the anthropo-
logical identity (of) difference that sustains them and gives it as an “object” to the subject-
Stranger.
Sense (sense (of) identity)
Ensemble of knowledges related to philosophical material insofar as they are manifested by the
force (of) thought as its “correlate.” Non-philosophical sense is always sense (of) identity. The
content of this identity of philosophy or its structures is of being foreclosure-in-the-last-instance
of the Real. Philosophy takes on a sense of foreclosure and simple occasion: it is its identity as
“constituted” by the force (of) thought and the vision-in-One in-the-last-instance.
Sense is the element of philosophy as transcendence in immanence (Husserl),
enveloping every given in a “halo of generality” (Merleau-Ponty). It can be
defined as irreducible tension, digression, distance, or as ensemble of the way in
which the ideal identity of an object is given. Analytically, sense is said of a sign
or proposition and is reduced either to another sign which interprets the first
(Peirce), or reduced to this proposition itself, i.e. to the ensemble of the rules that
govern its usage (Wittgenstein). After having insisted it in the line of
phenomenology, Heidegger rejects this concept as relevant or seemingly arising
too directly from a certain human performativity, in order to come to Truth as
Aletheia.
If philosophical sense and in particular phenomenological sense is of the order of generality,
non-philosophical sense is uni-versal in-the-last-instance: it is an identity which is said or is
related to the philosophy-object but which is only related by the uni-versality in-the-last-instance
of the vision-in-One. Immediate consequences:

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1. The philosophical doublet of sense (a halo–itself “general”–of generality…) is eliminated

and the non-autopositional identity (of) sense consists in being the sense (of) identity.
2. Sense is determined in philosophy by referential, situational, actional, interpersonal
contexts. It arises now in its essence from the determination-in-the-last-instance alone: it
is thus identically theory or explanatory and pragmatic or the usage of philosophy.
3. It can be said that non-philosophical sense is determined by the structure of the force (of)
thought as “subject,” yet that this structure does not form a set of rules but a game of
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rules itself determined-in-the-last-instance by the Real, which suffices to distinguish non-
philosophy from Wittgenstein’s solution.
4. Thus understood, sense is a first term of non-philosophy whose formulation and
representation are in turn elaborated by the force (of) thought on the basis of the concepts
of sense as simple material, in particular of sense in its various relations to the noema, the
signifier, the signified, signification, usage, etc. In other words, the non-philosophical
representation of sense can make use of extremely diverse conceptual materials.
According to the preceding points, this representation of the “sense” object can do
nothing but form a circle with the latter but is determined-in-the-last-instance by the
sense of this “sense” object. As for these latter, the “sense” object and its sense–the sense
of sense–are identical to the equal diversity of philosophical material.
Solitude (Solitary)
Pure affect without affection of the human in man, of his essence “separated” from radical
essence, of his self-identity independent of the World or foreclosed to the thought-world. Solitude
is also with Veracity that through which the One-in-One determines (in-the-last-instance) its
objects and their non-philosophical descriptions.
In general, solitude takes on an anthropological value: a means of moral
asceticism, instrument of introspection (Montaigne, Rousseau, Amiel, Passoa) for
an intimate self-knowledge. It becomes a specifically philosophical problem with
the Cartesian position of the Cogito menaced by metaphysical solitude or
solipsism. Henceforth, even when Husserl defines a transcendental solitude of the
Ego, it is a question of reducing solipsism through intersubjectivity and to show
that it is only an appearance or a necessary stage. The philosophers’ fear facing
human Solitude is still marked in Heidegger: boredomk, anxiety, care, being-
towards-death, by elevating Dasein to authenticity, promoting a non-human, if not
superhuman solitude, giving it a status of effect or attribute and refusing it that of
strictly real and simply human essence.
Solitude can primarily be understood in a simple manner as identity of self-immanence. It then
radicalizes in a positive way the idea of a finitude intrinsic to the human in man as being-
foreclosed, more precisely of the human-of-the-last-instance in the existing-subject-Stranger. It
implies that man never coincides with the World, not even “with” itself in distance–contrary to
the thesis of philosophy which thus makes of solitude a naturally unthinkable numerical concept.
Prohibiting the autoposition of the Ego and the subject-Stranger which it determines, it
definitively signifies that man is deprived of all substance (res) and all ideal essence as mode of
such a substance. Solitude is the real nucleus of the Ego, its being-separated-without-separation
which “precedes” the existence that is the subject-Stranger and more reasonably the
philosophical type of essence. It implies the abandonment of every metaphysical anthropology as
well as every humanism. Man, in the duality of the Ego, positively alone by himself, and of the
subject turned as Stranger towards the World, is not even a transcendental Robinson and does not
arise from number and quantity from which Solitude precisely protects him.
A more differentiated axiomatic distinguishes between the Ego as Solitary (the One without
attribute, even of solitude), and Solitude properly speaking as non-worldly or non-philosophical
position of the Solitary as subject-Stranger, in the same way that Given-without-givenness is
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distinguished from Givenness. Another possible distinction is still that of the Solitary and
Solitude now as the effect of unilateralization through which the Solitary (i.e. the vision-in-One)
affects every thought. Solitude then receives an ethical type of function parallel to that of
Veracity which expresses the unidentity in the non-ethical order through which the Solitary

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affects its objects and their descriptions. In both cases, it is a problem of axiomatic usage, of
rigorous pragmatics rather than a problem of conceptual systematicity.
Stranger (existing-subject-Stranger)
Other first name for man (as) subject 1) existing beyond its [his/her] nucleus of real immanence;
2) in occasional relation with the World; 3) not as opposed to another [un autre] or facing an
Other [un Autrui], but as radical form or clone of the Other itself [him/herself].
If it is not Plato who makes of the Stranger, in relation to Being and Non-Being,
to the One and the Multiple, the introducer and spokesperson of the highest
doctrines, the Stranger is one of the greatest unknowns of philosophy which has
sometimes substituted it for the linguistico-cultural problem of “strangers”
received from the social and political sciences, sometimes and more frequently
the problem of the “Other” which it has believed to be able to rule in the best of
cases (Fichte, Husserl) through that of Intersubjectivity as simple reconstruction
of the old specular topos of the alter ego. Only Levinas at the Judaic limits of
philosophy has developed a reflection on the conditions of man as Stranger, but
always within the context of the equation: man = the Other man as absolute
inversion of the modern philosophical equation: man = Self, and Other = other
Self. In every scenario and in their socio-political degradations, the Stranger is
always Other than the Self to various degrees, face to face with the Self,
consequently lacking identity and harboring danger and aggressiveness.
Philosophy has never yielded to the idea that the Self, the man that I am, could be
the Stranger itself [him/herself]. The stubborn search for exception and unicity (in
the name of the subject) has made it mistake the identity of the Stranger.
Non-philosophy, through the reconstructed and successive concepts of the individual, minorities,
unary multiplicities, has finally found in the Stranger its strategically most adequate concept of
man, more exactly of the subject as existing beyond the real immanence that it nevertheless is in
its ultimate cause. Determined-in-the-last-instance by the real or radically immanent Ego, the
subject exists in certain transcendental and aprioritic functions produced by the real Ego cloning
them on the basis of the occasion that is the World. But if these functions create it as Other-of-
the-World by definition, its real essence makes it Other-than-the-World or Stranger.
Thus, the Self (the real Ego) and the Stranger cease being opposed, that is, cease being face-to-
face and at war. They are identical-in-the-last-instance. The Stranger does not lack identity, for
she possesses it in-the-last-instance; and the Self is no longer encroached upon and divided by
the Other (self), but she can be, she and she alone, the Stranger. There are only Egos without
Strangers of which they have no need, or Strangers unopposed to Egos, nothing but a democratic
society of Strangers who are a Self-in-the-last-instance, each and everyone. Democracy is thus
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primarily given under the real conditions of thought, not in the World where, by definition, it can
be nothing but an objective appearance; and then, during their interval, under the form of these
existing-subject-Strangers who form a transcendental City that is not of this World without
consequently being abstract, for it is cloned from this World or the philosophical City. It is the
excess of the explanation over what it must explain: the default universal war of uni-versality,
i.e. identity.
Thought (continent of thought)
Uni-versalized concept, identically equivalent for philosophical thought and scientific
knowledge. Thought is in this sense that which is determined-in-the-last-instance or cloned from
these two disciplines.
The relations of thought and the real are given by the Parmenidian matrix: “Being
and Thinking are the Same.” Thought and Being are in a relation of reciprocal
dominance. Their identity can thus take on several forms: from the supposedly
adequate correspondence of perception and object up to the identity of self-
consciousness and consciousness of the object; subjective “reflection” and
objective reflection, dialectical identity of the real and the rational, but always in
the respect of this co-respondance. Broken under the form of a (co-)respondance
of a response-listening to Being (Heidegger), or a difference, a thought-in-the-
trace (Derrida), this adequation subsists as one of the major presuppositions–one

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of the halves–of deconstructions and one of the most inherent criteria of the
philosophical style.
First science introduces another “experience of thought”–this is its object–under the form of a
triple innovation. 1) From the point of view of its origin: it abandons the Parmenidian matrix and
breaks every a priori and non-a posteriori correspondence of thought to the Real. Instead of
thought being supposed to co-determine the Real as Being, it is the Real–but as One–that
determines it more than unilaterally or without reversibility (without reflection under some
unspecified form of the one in the other): by foreclosure. This is the formula of their relations:
“the One and thought, or the One and Being, are identical but only in-the-last-instance.” Thought
can thus only hope to change itself according to the Real-One rather than changing the Real. 2)
From the point of view of its nature: first science distinguishes its cause and its specific
operations; on the one hand, the vision-in-One, the immanent lived experience proper to the One
alone which responds to a third type of experience, of “knowing” or manifestation which is
neither Consciousness nor Reflection, nor the Unconscious or some unspecified logico-natural
procedure, but that which can only call itself Given-without-givenness or Manifested-without-
manifestation, etc.; on the other hand, its specific mechanisms which are no longer philosophical
operations (reflection, dialectic, difference, etc.) or psychoanalytic (condensation, displacement,
etc.) but the henceforth transcendental operations of induction and deduction. 3) From the point
of view of its “subject” and its extension: a thought-science in the fullest sense of the term is
finally recognized against the impoverishment of thought through which philosophy would affect
the latter. Real thought in-the-last-instance by its cause: thinking by its practical immanence,
somewhat deprived of all reflexivity or consciousness; rigorous by its non-circular operations,
somewhat effective upon the natural language of philosophy.
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Thought-science (unified theory of thought)
A unified theory of thought is the first objective of non-philosophy consequently understood as
first science. Its field of properties is philosophy-as-metascience (epistemology, philosophy of the
sciences, etc.); its specific object is thought as identity-in-the-last-instance of science and
philosophy. Only a theory rather than a new philosophy thus introduces democracy into thought
itself.
Philosophy spontaneously presents itself as a thought rather than a theory, a
thought distinct from knowledge or on the contrary coordinated with it–as a
thought of thought. Its telos is thus the autoposition of thought as being or
determining the Real. It is the only claimant to this privilege which it exerts in an
ultimate way through empirical materials via autoreflection or autoposition. If the
Same is Thinking and Being, thought can simultaneously be a term opposed to
Being and the superior synthetic form of their opposition. Philosophical thought is
the complement or the supplement, but also the enveloping recollection of all
experiences, science included, thus the absolute thought (Ge-danke). In its
structure, philosophy is thought-without-knowledge that needs science’s
knowledge-without-thought–it is a double structure of division or lack. We call
unitary, indeed “unitary theory of thought,” this self-division and setting-in-
hierarchy of science and philosophy. The unitary motivations of certain sciences
or even the empiricist Idea of a “unified Encyclopedia of the sciences” through a
common logical language (Vienna Circle) are projections or avatars of the unitary
style. Conversely, what philosophy fetishizes under the term “thought” are always
unstable mixtures of philosophy and science (Idea, Concept, Act, Reason, etc.).
By determining the mixtures of philosophy and science as material and occasion, first Science,
the initial realization of non-philosophy, proposes not to separate a pure thought from science or
to elevate science to the state of a new thought, but to produce the emergence of a new entity,
thought-science, which will have for its object–this is another way of saying it–the thought-world
or this mixture. It must guide under the form not of their synthesis but of their identity-of-the-
last-instance, a theory through which thought-science relates itself to its mixture form like a
science to its object and identically like a philosophy relates itself to its object. It therefore
constitutes this mixture of the thought-world, of “thought” and “knowledge” in a new “scientific
continent,” scientific yet transcendental, unified for every saying according-to-the-Real. It sets

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and end to philosophy’s pretention to hierarchical domination over science and to the perpetual
scientific revolution in “thought.”
Such a thought-science does not yet exist and only knows of the attempts of Marx and Freud, and
Lacan, for example. But the thought-world is the (non-philosophical) symptom and occasion of
thought-science. At each time and on each side, science and philosophy are inseparable via the
more or less compact modes. When this inseparability is simply that of a philosophical
connection, science is dispersed and reified in knowledges isolated and requisitioned for their
external ends, philosophy in antagonistic decisions. When it is more compacted, more-than-
connected or bound, science and philosophy, from the point of view of their objects and that of
their specific procedures, fuse together in a common matrix, or more precisely in a matrix
unified-in-the-last-instance by the Real: the force (of) thought. The emergence of this utopia is
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the objective of non-philosophy beyond measures with a new alliance of science and philosophy
somewhat on behalf of the former, somewhat on behalf of the latter.
Thought-world
Other name for philosophy in the broadest non-philosophical comprehension of its concept.
Thought-world is any thought founded upon the principal resource of transcendence and the
secondary resource (by right or in fact) of immanence–over their hierarchized mixture.
Philosophy has always involved the narrowest relations with the World, primarily
as thought positing cosmic order or cosmopolitical order: hence its more properly
physical, indeed physicalist interest for the “World” (Descartes for example) or
metaphysical for the origin of the World and its antinomies (Kant); or
phenomenological for the “World-of-life,” Heidegger has believed this Greco-
philosophical theme and the Christian theme of the “World” and its wisdom-
madness in the elucidation of being-in-world to be the basic structure of Dasein.
If the World belongs to the ultimate concept of philosophy, non-philosophy radicalizes this
belonging by deciding to call philosophy the thought-world in its identity, i.e. every thought that
uses transcending as its principal operation or that simply has recourse to it so as to constitute the
Real, including the so-called “philosophies of immanence”–Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze–who
still have recourse to transcendence through which they ground an overly limited concept and
which they believe to have wrongly eliminated. It more narrowly binds the World and
philosophy by making the latter in some way the general form of the former which, in this
manner, is no longer defined by its content of existents. And it is this thought-world with its
congenital empiricism and its powerless desire of the One that it gives as unique object to the
vision-in-One. The thought-world then auto-presents itself under several distinct but
continuously linked forms (philosophical faith: transcendence as a priori essence of the latter).
All in all, non-philosophy posits not co-belonging but the identity-of-the-last-instance of
philosophy and the World (of experience) under a form that definitively limits the former to the
latter and more narrowly ties the fundamental and the regional together without contingency.
Time-without-temporality (radical past, transcendental future, present-world)
Said of the radical past, self-immanence of time, its identity through and through which does not
exist nor has existed, which is, but negatively or without being. It determines-in-the-last-instance
a transcendental and subjective temporality that it clones from the philosophical mixture of the
time and temporality proper to Being or the Other–of the present as time-world. This pure
transcendental temporality constitutive of the subject-Stranger is the “mobile” clone of the
present-world under the condition of the “immobile” Past: non-Platonism.
It is useless to systematically categorize the philosophies of time. Their aporias
(thinking time or the unstable, temporally or not) stem from the unitary opposition
between metric, chronological, or ontic time and ontological time (or not: Judaic
diachronics). Hence the doublet of a “temporal time” or “(self)-temporalizing,” of
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a temporalized time and a temporalizing time, which testifies to a failure of the
identity (of) time conceived as mixture.
Temporality is more often an interpretation by philosophy of the scientific theories
of time (for example, physico-cosmological time conceived as linearity and
irreversibility, cf. the second principle of thermodynamics). Contemporary

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philosophy wishes to avoid this overly passive course and reattaches temporality
to Being or the Other. Already in Kant, time, as a priori form of sensibility,
enjoyed a privilege in relation to space, understood in a more originary way (cf.
Heidegger). Heidegger radicalizes exiting the Husserlian circle of objective or
metric time by opposing it, in an almost Bergsonian way, to subjective duration:
the originary lived time said of intimate consciousness. Husserl, through the
opposition he establishes between constituting time and constituted time, reveals
the originary autoconstitution of time in its different modalities (retention,
protention, presentation, representation). It is through these latter that the
autoconstitution of the so-called “immanent” temporality of consciousness
effectuates itself. Heidegger displaces this problematic by radicalizing it with the
three ekstases of time as Dasein’s modes of temporality. If temporality–as
question–exists, it signifies the sense of Being as veiling and unveiling of Dasein’s
ek-sistence; but as manifestation of Being in its triple and unique dimension.
Unlike the philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries, of Nietzsche and Heidegger after Hegel,
non-philosophy renounces to make of time (of history or even becoming) the essence of the Real,
to desubstantialize the latter by the former. These operations are so diverse that they repeat the
philosophical gesture of the search for an originary and hierarchizing essence which is the “time
of time,” an originary temporality, indeed a transcendental or existential temporalization, etc.
Recent philosophical decisions multiply the forms of the doublet of time and temporality,
deviating it, bringing time back to the alterity of a diachrony, but still not finding the cause of
time, nor the subject (of) temporality, nor the identity of this time-world which is philosophical
time, precisely because they temporally transcend towards the essence of time on the basis of the
presupposition of the (empirical) time-of-the-World and only posit this essence of time as
sufficient or mixed essence. The time-world on the contrary can only be a material or occasion
for naming, indicating, and effectuating the vision-in-One (of) time. This time-seen-in-One can
only be on its side the radical past of pure immanence and identity, a past which not only has
never been present but also will never be in the future (and for the future) as trace, but which will
remain immanent past even in the future when it clones from the present of the time-world.
It can also not be a question of understanding time-according-to-the-One via the onto-
chronological model of Being or that of its semi-specular image (Judeo-philosophical: the
infinite Other whose structure takes on the simply inhibited unitary autoposition: temporality as
memory or even diachronic past). It is no longer a question of connecting with a particular
scientific theory (Einsteinian space-time, for example). It is instead a question of employing a
theory and pragmatics (of) the essence of identically philosophical and scientific time (in the
cosmological sense, for example), but as determined in-the-last-instance by the One-past.
Hence the clones or instances, rather than dimensions or ekstases, that form the theory of
temporality. We shall remark that it implies new conceptions of the “past,” the “present,” and the
“future,” i.e. three symptoms of time-in-One or according-to-the-One.
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1. Time as Given or Past-without-temporalization, as seen-in-One or “in-time,” etc.–these
first names of time symbolize not a past time but a past which simultaneously possesses a
primacy over synchrony and diachrony and determines these transcendent dimensions
themselves at least as comprising the object of philosophical interpretations. The radical
past is uni-versal immanent time, of which one could say that it is-without-existing or
even that it is a non-temporal time. It is less a question of a memory capable of
forgetting and anamnesis than of a past which cannot be forgotten and which, precisely
for this reason, is foreclosed to memory which itself, in its sufficiency, believes to be able
to forget and repeat by anamnesis. This One-time, even effectuated as future, remains in
its necessary sterility and in no way participates in the present-world such as non-
philosophy conceives it and no longer–this is what distinguishes it from the Levinasian
Other, and from the “trace”–in the ontological present or the “Same.”
2. The mixture of time and the World–the sense or identity of this mixture–elevates time to
the form of the World under the authority of philosophy: it is the time-world, which is not
simply a regional time nor even the time of the world, but the philosophical experience of
time insofar as it structures a “world” whose sense is foreclosed in turn to the One-time

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of the past. In its non-philosophical sense, the “present” is no longer a dimension nor
even ekstasis of time, but the entirety of the decisions-of-time already operated or still to
come according to the World. It is the time-material, the time-occasion in which non-
philosophy extracts its language from time.
3. Finally, from the past-in-One to the Present-world is deployed the instance of the
transcendental future or the temporalizing force. The future is the identity cloned or
produced on the basis of the time-world as One. The way of the future is to be an
effectuation of the uni-versal past under the conditions of the time-world. This
effectuation signifies that, by definition and in distinction with the past which does not
exist, the future exists in the sense that it is transcendental identity turned towards the
present of the time-world. Instead of disposing the three instances in the ekstatic or
universal-through-transcendence element that generalizes the so-called linearity of time,
non-philosophy produces the experience of a time of exteriority or the stranger, existing-
Stranger for the present, addressed to rather than thrown into the time-world. The subject-
Stranger with which the transcendental future is confused “aims” at the World in its
identity, aims at it in a non-phenomenological or non-intentional sense without
fulfillment, simply sufficing for it to aim at it to completely assure its possible relation to
it. If the future is subject (of) time or temporalizing force (indicated, named, effectuated
on the basis of the present of the time-world), it is turned towards the latter which it
transforms or from which it extracts itself through the power of the past. The future is the
clone obtained by the radically “immobile” past on the basis of the mobile time of the
World. The existing-subject-Stranger liberates time from its Platonic as well as
Bergsonian and Heideggerian images. It brings about the manifestation of the
phenomenon of time, prohibited from applying the structure of a philosophical Decision
to it but instead proceeding to a theory and a pragmatics of philosophical time on the
basis of the past as radical immanence (of) time to itself. It is heretical time or the
heretical conception of time, without history or becoming.
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Transcendental (pure transcendental Identity)
First instance after the Real or the One constitutive of the subject as force (of) thought. It is the
clone of the transcendental Unity proper to the philosophical Decision and produced by the
vision-in-One on the basis of this symptomatic indication. Transcendental Identity is no longer
the transcendental One of philosophy associated with a division; it is an undivided identity which
finds nothing in it but its occasion.
The transcendental obviously has a long philosophical history marked by
Aristotle, certain scholastics, Kant (who is nothing but an important turn for it),
Husserl, etc, but under these labels, there is the transcendental as invariant of the
structure of the philosophical Decision as transcendental Unity, immanent and
transcendent to the basic Dyad, consequently divided and claiming to be real, the
Real, through its autoposition. In this very general sense, the transcendental is the
superior dimension of all philosophy. This is how non-philosophy understands it,
as that which forms a circle or doublet with the empirical on the one hand through
the a priori, and with the Real on the other hand through autoposition.
In its philosophically overdetermined beginnings, non-philosophy is radically equivalent to the
transcendental, and then has understood that its project–which risked passing for a radicalization
of Husserl–demanded more than a supplementary overcoming of the transcendental, which is in
every way first or commencement in the order of thought: that it required ordering it in the
primacy of the Real as though in a cause by immanence, not present and positive but non-
sufficient or negative. Non-philosophy thus displaces itself on four and not three orders: the Real
or the One (foreclosed to the transcendental), the “empirical” given (or the thought-world), the
transcendental (which the Real clones on the basis of the Unity of experience), the a priori (also
cloned but on the basis of the Transcendental which is the organon of philosophy). The
transcendental forms the first instance of the force (of) thought. Now it is an undivided identity
although cloned–thus also “separated”–on the basis of divided transcendental Unity; or given-
without-givenness in-the-last-instance on the basis of the givenness of this most cloven
philosophical Unity. It is related from the point of view of its genesis and its function not in the a

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priori but even in the transcendental which serves as occasion for it. Thus, non-philosophy
effectively separates the amphibologies of the philosophical transcendental (with the empirical
and with the Real) and the “subjective” identities which are its symptom, and all this without
claiming to dissolve these amphibologies. Such an immediate dissolution of the latter would
suppose that the One-in-One, the Real, be identical to one of their sides: this unilateral
identification without fail leads to a new transcendental philosophy (M. Henry) and again to the
disappearance of the Real.
Transcendental Axiomatic
The nature and procedure of the formation of the primary terms of non-philosophy, of its
nonconceptual symbols, starting from philosophical concepts concerned with philosophical
intuitiveness and naïveté.
Axiomatics is initially a scientific object. It is the organization of a theory or a
fragment of a theory in order to empty the terms of their empirical or regional
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contents and to explicitly reveal the logical apparatus that connects them and
becomes through this their only contents. There is a philosophical reflection on the
axiomatic (Aristotle), but there are few examples of axiomatization in philosophy
itself, if not perhaps in Descartes’ Responses, Spinoza’s Ethics, and Fichte’s
Science of Knowledge. In all these cases it is a matter of an ontological
axiomatization, still largely intuitive. In the sciences, more or less complete
attempts at axiomatization were made in particular by Hilbert in geometry, by
Jean-Louis Destouches in quantum physics—i.e. above all in fields where
unexpected innovations (non-Euclidean geometries, Heisenberg’s “uncertainty”
principle) required theoretical reorganization to legitimate their rigor. The
epistemology of Mario Bunge draws conclusions from the postulate that it is in
theory possible to axiomatize any scientific discipline. But axiomatization is an
effort of reorganization that comes with the aftermath—even after a crisis—in
view of examining the validity of a theory and the formalization of its relations to
other theories which, in any event, has known limits (Godel). It is more a
theoretical instrument than a theoretical project of the foundation of science.
In opposition to a formal axiomatic applied to a body of scientific knowledge, and an ontological
and intellectualist axiomatic that is still intuitive (for example, Descartes’ I think, therefore I am
or Husserl’s I am—the World is), the pure transcendental axiomatic forms the first terms or first
names, the non-conceptual symbols, on the basis of the intuitive and naïve concepts of
philosophy. It explicitly inscribes in the writing of these names the first suspension of their
philosophical sense (e.g. One-without-being, lived-without-life, given-without-givenness, One-
beyond-being, etc.), of its worldly and/or ontological intuitiveness. It gives them a radical,
indivisible theoretical universality in “generality” and “totality” and a transcendental or univocal
universality applying to any philosophy. This decision of nomination, non-philosophical decision
itself given-in-the-last-instance by the vision-in-One, is the primary transcendental act of the
force (of) thought. This is to say that far from being subservient to a philosophical project of
foundation, even of the auto-foundation of science, it is only a transcendental instrument given-
in-the-last-instance by the Real, thought (thought according to the One) thus using science as
much as philosophy.
It is no longer a question of a logico-formal, scientific axiomatization of philosophy—an absurd
project that misunderstands its irreducibly transcendental style. Non-philosophy does not claim
to reorganize the system of philosophy after its crisis. To axiomatize is its primary ordinary
practice of philosophy, according to the “abstraction” or the being-separate-without-separation of
the Real-of-the-last-instance. Thought is condemned to resort to philosophy and its language
while rendering it adequate to the non-philosophical essence of this thought, which wants to be
the measurement of the Real.
Transcendental Science
Other name of non-philosophy in its form of unified theory of science and philosophy or first
Science.
Transcendental philosophy aspires to constitute itself into a transcendental science
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Kant, Husserl). Science here fulfills a philosophical goal that conserves its
primacy. The former supports theoretical knowledges or forms, the latter fulfills
the immanent or transcendental dimension of the relation of truth to experience or
the World. Philosophy pursues its scientific dream through transcendental science:
to become a rigorous science in the critique of metaphysics (Kant) or in the
foundation of the positive sciences (Husserl).
Transcendental science in its non-philosophical realization as first science can be characterized
1) by its material: the scientific forms of theory or even particular scientific theories and the
philosophical forms of thought or the philosophical Decision; 2) by its unifying-without-
synthesis cause, the vision-in-One rather than the structure of the philosophical Decision; 3) by
its “method,” which is the unification of-the-last-instance, of scientific or theoretical explanation
irreducible to the explained properties of its objects and the philosophical or transcendental
relation to these objects; 4) by its internal object: on the one hand, on the side of the vision-in-
One or the Real, the subject of this transcendental science, cloned transcendental subject,
motivated but not co-determined by the objects of experience; on the other hand, on the side of
the latter or the material, this material’s sense (of) identity (and its modalities) such that it is
lived by the subject, i.e. the Essence (of) science, which is not the existence of “science” but the
essence of the philosophy-science mixture.
Transcendental science in its philosophical version is of metaphysical origin (its cause is Being,
the transcendental here has the primacy of the Real): of unitary (it is the mixture of science and
philosophy) and inegalitarian (it is hierarchy, domination of the latter over the former) spirit. In
its non-philosophical version, it is real before being transcendental (its cause is the vision-in-
One); of “unified” (it is the identity-in-the-last-instance of science and philosophy, or thought-
science) and egalitarian (science and philosophy intervene here equally and in-identity) spirit. It
is the “combination” of the Real’s primacy under the form of the “determination-in-the-last-
instance”; of the priority of thought-science under the form of transcendental commencement or
first transcendental; finally, of specific scientific urgency under the form of theoretical
explanation as non-image, non-representation of the object to be explained.
Unconscious (non-psychoanalytic Unconscious)
Syntactic dimension of jouissance through which desire is a dimension of reality.
The unconscious designates one of the modes of representation, initially in
Descartes a negative mode under which representation comes to be deficient,
since, in Leibniz, there is an intimate representation itself as unperceived
representation. It can also be interpreted as position of an unconscious absence, in
Kant, of a radical or real foundation of representations. Following this path, the
unconscious becomes the quasi-synonym of the will (Schopenhauer), at least
being simply nature or the idealized object (Schelling), even life (Nietzsche,
Bergson, Deleuze. A transcendental reduction, à la Michel Henry, illuminates the
genealogy of the unconscious in its transmission from philosophy to
psychoanalysis. In fact, psychoanalysis treats under the name of the unconscious
not only one of the local proprieties of the psychic apparatus—the product of
repression constituted from representations of things (Freud, Klein)–but also the
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dimension of the imaginary (Jung) or symbolic (Lacan) Other, nevertheless
generally endowed with a “subject” that Lacan estimates as being “nothing but the
Cartesian subject.” It is thus legitimate, on behalf of this transcendental solidarity
which makes the unconscious appear as the support of an epistemological circle,
to consider this notion as the major axis of the philosophico-analytic Complex (or
Mixture) or moreover to identify the unconscious as an invention (but not an
illusion) of psychoanalysis.
Non-psychoanalysis extricates a radical transcendental unconscious from the result of the Real
(the One). The unconscious is the syntactic side of jouissance, which is itself, in non-
psychoanalysis, a concept on the same level as the Stranger. But, in opposition to the restrained
unconscious or the unconscious determined by the signifier, logic, or the combinatory, the non-
psychoanalytic unconscious has nothing to do with the transcendence of “the autonomy of the

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symbolic”: it is the identity of jouissance and a unilateral duality. Together they form with the
Enjoyed or the Real such a duality, which does not exclude that other syntactic aspects would be
able to overdetermine jouissance, yet only overdetermine it—which excludes every concept of
phallic jouissance, or jouissance itself determined by the “signifier of the unconscious.” Finally,
the expression “jouissance of the Other” appears redundant since the unconscious is already
united with jouissance and the Other. On the other hand, there is no jouissance of the One, the
One is Enjoyed-without-enjoyment.
To the degree that the signifier, conforming here to the “generalized” tendencies of linguistics, is
dual or unilateral, it never represents the subject (of the) unconscious, but jouissance itself.
Jouissance is the identity of desire and syntax. That it is non-self-signifying specifies the
unconscious as non-phallic, as transcendental autonomy without repetition, without Other of the
Other (one last form of the Other’s autoposition). The unconscious does not even have the Other
for its subject, because what psychoanalysis calls subject is simultaneously transcendent and
immanent to the signifier, and because the signifier signifies nothing but the Other—which is a
way of calling it pulsional. It is void without forming an ontological void, Other rather than
Being, but an Other whose essence resides, in-the-last-instance, in the One. In fact, the
unconscious is so estranged from the Cartesian concept of the subject that such a subject of the
unconscious would be equivalent to the foreclosure of jouissance. This foreclosure is perhaps
materialized, in psychoanalysis, by the concept of sex as signifier of a hole in knowledge and
(non-)truth of the signifier.
Universal Noesis
Non-real dimension of the subject-Stranger constituted by two functional (transcendental and
aprioritic) identities cloned from phenomenology and supposing their universion by the One.
Noesis is not, in its essence, of the nature of objectifying or intentional transcendence, but of the
uni-versal nature of a being-turned-without-return-towards…(the World), even if its last moment
is non-autopositional or non-phenomenological Distance. It could be called determined-in-the-
last-instance by the Real in reference to its occasion.
Husserl has re-introduced the ancient thematic of noesis and noema behind
intentionality into modern philosophy. Noesis designates the act of aiming at the
intentional object (of the noema), an act susceptible to various qualities. It is a
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lived experience but a non-hyletic or non-real lived experience which only has
sense in its correlation with the noema. It is thus of the general nature of
transcendence to which its nature of immanence remains subordinate. Hence the
typically philosophical, unscientific idea of a correlation, parallelism, or semi-
circularity of noesis and noema. It is the fundamental dyad of the
phenomenological decision insofar as it is structured like a philosophical Decision.
It is possible to re-employ under another reason–the vision-in-One–the noetico-noematic
correlation, after expunging it of every philosophical circularity. Noesis will designate the
instances cloned by the Real on the basis of the phenomenological material of the transcendental
Ego and intentional noesis. These instances, uni-versal by definition, are consequently
determined in-the-last-instance by the One, as if henceforth the intention were no longer mixed
or co-exclusive with the “hyle” but determined unilaterally by the latter (itself uprooted from its
state of sensual and thus worldly exteriority). These two functions motivated by the occasion of
philosophy, which indicates them in a symptomatic way, are identities and not modes of
transcendence: transcendental and aprioritic identities. The latter, however, for content have a
distance or “open” exteriority not self-enclosed in an auto-position, but they are also already
oriented by essence and in an immanent way “towards” the World as such in its identity rather
than towards an object-pole or a world-pole like that towards which phenomenological
intentionality transcends. Universion is obviously that which gives its non-philosophical uni-
versality to the force (of) thought, to the subject-Stranger, its power of accessing the thought-
world itself. The functional and universal nature attributed to the intentionality of consciousness
by Husserl is as radicalized as intentionality is thus originarily oriented towards the World itself
in its noematic identity rather than towards the object in a world-horizon and determined by the
last-instance of the One which alone gives it this amplitude of uni-versality. We thus substitute a
noesis-universe for the intention-world of phenomenology at the same time as a noema-universe

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for the noema-world.

Universal Pragmatics
One of the two styles–alongside the theoretical–of non-philosophy. Far from being its own
essence as in philosophy, pragmatics is this non-objectifying proximity, here radical, of the One
to the World, the usage of the latter by the former or by the force (of) thought. Its essence is thus
the cloning universion by the Real that dedicates the subject-Stranger to the usage of the World.
In virtue of this essence, it is transcendental and universal (uni-versal).
Rather than enumerating the explicitly pragmatist (James, Dewey) or pragmaticist
(Peirce) philosophies with their avatars (Rorty), or rather than tracing the grand
lines of pragmatics as theories of discourse, it is more interesting to isolate the
elementary syntactic nucleus of every pragmatics as usage or pragmateia of things
(including discourse) in opposition to the theoretical attitude. One labels
pragmatics the semi-relation of usage or proximity, of the identification of a term
Y with a term X (which is independent or distinguishes itself from Y from its side
alone). This identification is a way of turning towards, a turning point, a turn of Y
towards X, thus a non-objectification of an objective term X, in some sense a
semi-objectivity distinct from theoretical objectification which is bilateral and
reciprocal more or less to a lengthy term. Hence–this is an example but which
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gives the essence of pragmatics–the spontaneous pragmatics of phenomenology
that describes independent objects in a quasi-mimetic or identificatory way, yet
the latter refusing to identify themselves with their description and affirming their
autonomy “in-itself,” such that the givenness of ideal objectivity or the identity of
the thing in person throughout the multiplicity of goals or attempts (Husserl); or
the usage of Being by being and being by Being (Heidegger). These examples
demonstrate the extent of the pragmatic posture within the heart of all
contemporary philosophy. It is essential to note that, despite the independence of
the term X distinguishing itself from Y which does not distinguish itself from it,
this schema of unilaterality veers toward a semi-circularity or a broken circularity,
no doubt, but which conserves as essence the autopositional circularity of the
identification (of Y with X) itself. This syntactic aspect in general combines with
an experience of the real as acting or action and is better known as the criterion of
pragmatic thought. Action is then the ultimate criterion that enables dissolving the
conceptual confusions of metaphysics, it is to distinguish really clear ideas from
those which are only seemingly so, because this action is itself conceived
rationally (Peirce) or conceived in a more practical and sensible manner (James).
Non-philosophy conserves the irreducible syntactic nucleus of a proximity or a certain
identification of the subject with the World in general in the usage it creates. But by transferring
this nucleus onto the terrain of the Real or the vision-in-One, it changes its essence, its real
status, and consequently its importance for thought. The unilateral semi-relation loses the
essence of circularity which it possesses in a secret or ultimate in philosophical pragmatics and
which determines that the immediate identification of Y with X be finally auto-positional,
reversible, and alienating of Y. If Y is the inalienable Real, it cannot itself be identified with the
World, but only under the “mediating” form of a cloned transcendental function, which it is not
but to which it contributes through cloning, the latter being provoked by the occasion that the
World is. Thus the non-objectifying syntax of proximity to an “objectivity” subsists, but only by
receiving for essence the cloning operation of the Real which is itself substituted for the
autoposition or circularity of philosophical identification. The Real only identifies with the
World through cloning and through this occasion that ensures safeguarding it against the return
to it of the turning-towards…the World, simultaneously as it safeguards the relative autonomy of
the World and its unilaterality. As for the force (of) thought, it is dedicated to the thought-world,
the Stranger is turned-towards the World. But instead of being two-times-each-time and thus
being shut off in the magic orbit of philosophy, they are only one-time-each-time, delivered from
the oldest slavery so much the less tempted by the vain hope of a metaphysical flight whose
Heideggerian “Turn” towards Being through Being does not sufficiently protect them. When
man ceases to be at Being’s use and when Being comes to the use of man-as-One, the “turning”

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towards Being will only be “occasionally” motivated by the latter and determined by man-One as
cloning.
Thus understood or “dualyzed,” pragmatics defines one of the two aspects of non-philosophy,
the other being the theoretical aspect. It gives rise certainly to a primary pragmatics, but without
primacy, no longer being autopositional and claiming to be real like pragmatic philosophies, i.e.
“pragmatisms.” But more than ever pragmatics is transcendental (not claiming to be real but
determined in the last instance by the Real) and uni-versal (produced by uni-version): a
pragmatics for philosophy and the World themselves. As for the active aspect or action of this
uni-versal pragmatics, it arises from the Real as being-Performed in-the-last-instance and from
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the force (of) thought as performational. Thought is precisely force (of thought) for reasons of
pragmatic syntax, reasons of usage of the World by the subject that unilaterally identifies with it.
Universality (Uni-versality and Generality)
Characteristic of the vision-in-One of giving or manifesting every X via the mode of the One
itself or the mode of given-without-givenness and separated-without-separation. Far from being
self-enclosed, it is de jure open-without-ekstasis to the World in an immanent way. Uni-versality
determines-in-the-last-instance the “non-Euclidean” generality of non-philosophy and gives it
its sense.
Universality is an overdetermined concept issuing from the combination of the
proper structure of the philosophical Decision and the scientific knowledges the
latter requires. The Decision presents two levels of universality: that of the Dyad
as level of the universal and necessary a priori (universality in the a priori mode);
that of the Unity of synthesis or system (universality in a transcendental mode) in
the sense of totality or the One-all. Another proximal description of the preceding
discerns in metaphysics the onto-theo-logical triangulation of an ontological base,
the Dyad of Being and the Existent, and of a summit constituted by the Existent
cause par excellence, God, who determines the base or horizontal plane. But
perhaps in this case it is still a restrained, historical, and doctrinal version of a
more universal structure which would be the crossing of two axes: the horizontal
axis of Being and the Existent, and the vertical axis, instead ontic, of the One and
the Multiple, a structure on the verge of closing through a double process of
recovery: of the Existent and the Multiple, of Being and the One. The so-called
formalization of the “philosophical Decision” extracts the minimal structure
common to these models and makes the two connected planes of universality
appear. The essential philosophical type of universality is in the connection of
these two planes, thus in a unitary conception of the universal as divided in
generality and totality, itself founded on division or the dyadic type. Completely
understood, this structure varies throughout diverse positions and doctrinal
decision, throughout the tangle of the “theories” of generality and universality.
We emphatically distinguish generality and universality (sometimes written uni-versality in order
to indicate its veritable bearing and to distinguish between its philosophical concept), but on a
non-unitary mode, without division or philosophical decision, in some way losing their
connection or form-mixture.
Uni-versality is the essence of the vision-in-One which, far from being self-enclosed like an
“inside” or mixed with transcendence, is an immanence without transcendence but not without
uni-versality. The distinction of a uni-versality specific to the most radical immanence without
transcendence, yet which forms a system with the being-foreclosed of the latter, is the
fundamental theoretical acquisition of non-philosophy that distinguishes it from the mixed
solutions of the “philosophies of immanence” (M. Henry included). This uni-versality is taken in
a “literal” sense: as the being-turned of immanence or the One towards…, as non-ekstatic-
openness, availability-without-transcending, in the sense that the vision-in-One can always give
the World but give- it -without-givenness. It is also to be taken as a completely negative
condition just like the vision-in-One, sine qua non, absolutely necessary but also totally
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insufficient, refusing to confuse the necessity and sufficiency in the Principle of reason with
philosophy. The vision-in-One is a “principle” of radical non-sufficiency that precisely gives the

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bearing and sense of its uni-versality to philosophy. We can say of the latter that without being a
completely negative doctrine or negative philosophy, it is a uni-versal but non-sufficient theory
that must be effectuated in different philosophical vocabularies, which in a sense means that it
takes on an axiomatic.
On the other hand, the generality of non-philosophy is a feature of its organon, of the force (of)
thought or the subject-Stranger. If uni-versality is real, neither transcendental nor logical,
generality is transcendental and not real, it is a property of first terms, of axioms, and of what is
deduced in the theory of the subject and in that of the identity (of) the thought-world. It can also
be said of this generality that due to its origins, which are neither philosophical nor scientific, it
is determined-in-the-last-instance by uni-versality. Their philosophical relations are redistributed
in a non-unitary sense. The generality of the force (of) thought is indeed also an identity. It is
said of mixtures or pairings, it is no longer divided by decision or philosophical faith, for it is the
transcendental effectuation (through cloning) of real “negative” uni-versality. It is thus also a
universality, but positive and more concrete than the vision-in-One. Cloning excludes unitary
mixtures, the connection of universality and generality. Non-philosophy stops “generalizing”
philosophy itself, but it can only do this in recourse to the last-instance of a real uni-versality
ignored by philosophy. The “non-Euclidiean” model has helped non-philosophy constitute itself,
and it effectively functions on a certain level of elaboration; it is a possible scientific material.
But it is itself ordered in the experience of the vision-in-One as universal.
Universion
Effectuation of the “negative” uni-versality of the One in the occasion and its causality; but not
of the One itself, foreclosed and inalienable under whichever effect. It is one of the three effects
of the Real, alongside unidentification and unilateralization.
The philosophies of the One in the Platonic tradition obviously experienced
conversion as return to the One “according to” procession; for mystics, it was the
reversion of the soul to its identity with God; for metaphysical ontology, the
convertibility of the One and Being, the thought of truth and Being, the “turn”
(Kehre) as semi-version; schizoanalysis, the reversion of desire to its
autoproductive essence. Every philosophy in fact knows of “circumversion,” the
circular version with various degrees of breakage and opening, of
transcendentality and empiricity, of topography and topology, of inversion and
reversal of extremes, etc. In every scenario, the circle is the primary element of the
“version,” which is nothing but an abstract arc and always carries the dotted-line
tracing of this circularity specific to philosophy.
Defined as One-in-One, the Real is inalienable in effects or objects, for example in the unidentity
and unilaterality through which it affects the grasping of any given. It also exists in the
functional instances to which it gives rise on the basis of its “negative” uni-versality or in which
it is, so to speak, effectuated (rather than simply following or converting with it) under the
“occasional” effect of philosophy or the thought-world. The occasional cause is thus univerted
towards the One or immanent-in-the-last-instance. It is under this aspect that it will constitute the
material for the cloning of the force (of) thought.
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The possibility of universion itself must be sought not in an external and brute causality of the
thought-world over the supposedly isolated vision-in-One, but in the latter’s essence insofar as it
is the site of the uni-versal and obligated, somewhat negative, being-given of the thought-world.
Its radical immanence and its “empty” indifference does not signify a closure but the negative
condition of a uni-versal opening to every form of transcendence, consequently an opening itself
immanent or without transcendence and which univerts this transcendence. Uni-version is thus
the de jure operation of the uni-versality of the One which indeed depends on no occasion but on
the essence of the One’s radical inherence alone. From this point of view, non-philosophy is the
discovery and exploitation of the uni-versality specific to radical Identity which philosophy has
ignored.
Thus replaced on the real terrain of uni-version, the “version” loses its philosophical nature of
“turning,” bi-lateral or di-rectional turning. It acquires an identity, identity (of) turning, which it
has never had, even in the Heideggerian Kehre. It is the ultimate condition of cloning in general
in its noetic forms, since the former is transcendental and aprioritic. But it is its essence, the uni-

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versality of the One, which in general makes of the subject a Stranger devoted to the World,
subject-for-the-World, facing the One rather than facing the World, turned one time each time
towards it; consequently, from which it is impossible to “turn away.” From a perfect mystical
essence, by definition given but which gives- the World -without-givenness, man can only be
turned irreversibly towards the World and can only pretend to “return” to an essence which it
never lost.
Universion in particular transforms the a priori of phenomenological intentionality. The latter,
without being annihilated as a movement from one goal to another, ceases on one hand being
held by transcendence (the latter is only its occasional cause); on the other hand, it stops being an
essence of itself or autopositional; lastly, it stops being commanded by a pole-object with which
it would have to identify and alienate itself in. Restored to its essence of uni-versality,
intentionality is liberated from form-consciousness as well as the form-object: it is only “of” to
the extent that it is primarily “for” or “towards.” Universion gives to the force (of) thought its
universality which allows it to be equal to the World itself and no longer to such and such an
object.
Vision-in-One (One, One-in-One, Real)
[Original translation by Sid Littlefield]
Primary concept of non-philosophy, equivalent to the “One-in-One” or the “Real.”That whicht
determines the theory of in-the-last-instance and the pragmatics of the Thought-World
(“philosophy”). The vision-in-one is radically immanent and universal; it is the given-without-
givenness of the givenness of the Thought-World.
Philosophy is the desire and oppression of the One, divisible or associated with
division. The problematization of Being (Heidegger included) supposes this barred
One without really thematizing it. Philosophies of the One (Plato, neo-Platonism,
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Lacan) suppose a final convertibility with Being based on the fact that Being is
given a final objectivity which is ordered by the criteria of Being or abstracted
from them. All ‘thoughts of the One’ are still structured like that of metaphysics:
They hold an ultimate bound between the metaphysics of the science of Being and
the science of the One. Hence the necessary disqualification of the One of the
Greek from its empirical component, the one of the count or counting (Badiou), a
point of extreme conflict between Being and the One and the ‘death’ of the
former. The philosophy that wishes to be post-metaphysical oscillates, in the best
cases, between the end of Being and the end of the One, while never ceasing to
honor metaphysics.
Non-philosophy enunciates a series of axioms on the One understood as vision-in-One and no
longer as the desire of the One:
The One is radical immanence, identity-without-transcendence, not associated with
transcendence or division.
The One is in-One or vision-in-One and not in-Being or in-Difference.
The One is the Real insofar as it forecloses all symbolization (thought, knowledge, etc).
The One is the given-without-givenness and separation-without-separation—of the given.
The One is that which determines in-the-last-instance the Thought-World as given (the
object of givenness).
Non-philosophy renounces the thought-of-the-One or the desire-of-the-One, but this renunciation
has a higher purpose than the renunciation of desire: the One-in-One is the unknown of
philosophy, that which is certainly foreclosed but, by confusing the transcendental One with the
transcendent One, that which philosophy believes to be within its power to think, sometimes
close to repression. Philosophy represses its own “One” but forecloses the being-foreclosed of
the One-in-One in its own way. This confusion is the faith and sufficiency of philosophy that
starts by supporting the vision-in-One. Non-philosophy is installed on a different ground than
philosophy or, better still, on “the absurd” that is the Real. Philosophy occurs upon a ground
which it delusionally takes as the Real but which is “real” only for experience, while non-
philosophy takes its departure from the utopia of the Real. This is not a “utopia” in the vulgar
philosophical sense, but a thought-according-to-utopia. Utopia determines-in-the-last-instance
thought which takes the Thought-World for its object. Rather than the interminable end of

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metaphysics, it is a question of its identity, such that this identity (of) metaphysics invalidates or
unilateralizes its sufficiency and its authority. With this substitution of thought-according-to-the-
One for the thought of the science of the One, the triumph or victory over the Greek One, over
the desired One, whether it is conveyed or spoiled by the Multiple (Deleuze/Badiou), is of little
importance: the philosophical adventures of the One are property of the objects of non-
philosophy as vision-in-One, and nothing more.
In any case, the vision-in-One “gives” the One and it alone; it is “the” given entirely, the given as
the identity of the given, as the given-without-givenness, unfolding or doublet of the given and
givenness. It is thus radical phenomenon, without the background phenomenological world in its
vastest sense: without Being behind the phenomenon or related to it. But if it does not give the
One and if it neither exceeds it nor is alien to it, it also gives the Thought-World, but it still gives
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it in-One or in the form of given-without-givenness. The givenness-of-the-given (Thought-
World) is the object of a non-philosophical givenness by force (of) thought, the latter itself
given-without-givenness or given-in-the-last-instance. The vision-in-One is thus universal-in-
immanence instead of universal by transcendence, extension, generality, etc. It is necessary to
write uni-versal: with the sense of the One, while remaining in an immanence foreclosed as the
Thought-World, receiving it without being effected by it, or offered and opened to it as an
openness-without-horizon, from a completely immanent in-stasis [instase].
In a sense the One is “for the World,” understanding that “for” does not signify any end,
internally or externally, but is available through indifference (and not an indifference through
abstraction as this abstraction is generally understood).
World
[Original translation by Anthony Paul Smith]
Alongside “philosophy,” other first name for the mixture of philosophy and the world.
Philosophy is the pure and general form of the World and the World is the immanent object of
philosophy. In short: the “thought-world.” It is the identity of this mixture and not simply this
mixture thought after itself in an intra-philosophical or intra-mundane manner.
The world is the object of cosmological meditation, either in terms of pre-Kantian
metaphysics or in terms of a transcendental constitution by principles. In Husserl, the
natural, even regulatory, thesis of the World is suspended, while in Heidegger that which
is the horizon of the World, correlate of an infinite potential intentionality, becomes,
over-determined by the Chrisitan experience of the world, the first phenomena of the
existential analytic of Dasein as being-in-the-world [être-dans-le-monde] (or in-the-world
[au-monde]). Philosophy has always had a special affinity with the World as its originary
dimension (the Greeks and Kant) to the point of reciprocating itself with it (Marx, the
becoming-world of philosophy, the becoming-philosophy of the World).
The distinction of the World and the One (or of man) is at the heart of non-philosophy—its dual
dimension. The World is the Authority of Authorities, whereas the One defines the order of
Minorities or Strangers. In this sense, the World is radically transcendent to the One-essence of
man, and we are not in-the-world [au-monde]. But it is unilaterialized by the One which
simultaneously determines it in-the-last-instance in the contingency of its “occasional” givenness
and in its usage. The World ceases to be an object of philosophy, of special or fundamental
metaphysics, to become its immanent object when this one is thought in its greatest generality as
thought-world. In other words, now it forms with the World, seen-in-One-in-the-last-instance, no
longer a unitary mixture, a simple reciprocation, but the noematic sense or the identity (of) this
mixture.
In this enveloping mixture, man-in-One is the real condition of the only science possible. As
transcendental science and determined by man in-the-last-instance, it possesses a mystical aspect
linked to a real difference of the One and the World, or unilateral dual(ity). This expression
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signifies that it does not exist due to the reversibility of the givenness of the World and the given
of the One, contrary to the postulate of unitary and philosophical thought.
The unitary illusion, real then transcendental appearance, is specific to the World which
necessarily resists the One with all its philosophical forces. The reason for such resistance is that
the World is a mixture of the (hallucinated) Real and of the philosophical logico-real, this

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mixture thus not being the Real itself but effectivity. Yet the sense of this resistance only appears
with the vision-in-One that manifests the thought-world as a sort of foreclosure of the Real that
could not forget the latter but only hallucinate it and, as a result, hallucinate its relation of
foreclosure as simple “forgetting.” The One thus manifests this resistance and suspends it by
revealing it as a foreclosure. The relation of man and the World is dialyzed in this one, the latter
emplaced or unilateralized, treated as correlate (unilate rather) of the One. What does this mean?
The World is no longer an object or an envelopment from which the One should incessantly try
to distinguish itself, an object flooded by intentionality or vice versa. It remains, as reduced, the
phenomenon (in a non-phenomenological sense) of the occasion and the triple function
(nomination, indication, cloning) that it fulfills with regard not merely to the One itself, but to
the subject or the force (of) thought. Thus, non-philosophy escapes from the hatred fascinated
with the World (philosophy) which it takes “such that it is” [“tel quel”], man abandoning the
World and its thought, philosophy, to their destiny and not pursuing any project with respect to
that which they are in themselves. On the other hand, as simple opportunity, it gives rise to a
theoretical and pragmatic acting that expresses the generosity of-the-last-instance of the One
recognizing a right to the World [un droit au Monde]. The World is thus the material from
whence the non-philosophical pragmatic extracts the sense of the World, not objective sense but
occasional (without auto-position). This occasional sense (the equivalent of a noema), rather than
“the World itself” or a “being-in-the-world” [être-dans-le-monde], is the identity (of) the
thought-world. Thus, the Stranger, who is constituted except in its [his/her] real essence, with the
support of occasional causality, frees itself of every essential relation to the World (but not every
“relation”) and as a result releases the World itself from the primacy of Being [Être]. Non-
philosophy gives up every transcendental deduction of the World, which is supposedly given, but
proceeds to a transcendental “deduction” of the Stranger with the support of the World.

Philosophy and Theorizing

1 Scanning, surveying, collecting, selecting, listing, mentioning of potentially relevant information and data and
probably, significant facts.

Do (some aspects of) philosophy resembles theorizing? Is a question that requires to be dealt with in a certain
context and against a particular, explicit background so as not to be misleading. Is there an object such as

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philosophy? Is there and object such as theorizing? Is the object philosophy or theorizing a notion (somewhere in
my head so that I might refer to it, correctly or misleadingly, as an idea in my ‘mind’?) Or, are they also, in some
cases, things outside in the external world? Can we be conscious of these cases? And if we can experience them
how can we explain this, for example as qualia, a phenomenal experience? How do we arrive at the semantics of
these questions from the experience and perception of the things (by integrated, complex processes such as
discrimination, integration of information, focus attention on them and reporting them)? What are the mechanics
of performing those processes or creation of those states? How and why do those processes give rise to
experience? Will it assist us if we view it from, at least, two perspectives, from different points of view, for
example as subjective (mental?) and objective (physical)? The former might refer to processes such as reasoning,
knowledge, attention, memory, judgement, evaluation, decision making, comprehension, understanding, etc.
Other words that we can include here are acquire knowledge, thinking, experience, cognitive, intellect, deduction,
induction, abduction, and other modes of reasoning such as intuition, verbal discourse vs intuitive, (the capacity
for) making sense of something, apply logic, verify facts, justify practices, belief. Are these things embodied
cognition rather than extended cognition? Can all of them be included under the umbrella terms of consciousness
(as a state of cognition) and a quality of awareness of being aware (by the ‘mind’)? Are human beings then mere
skin encapsulated egos? Embodied egos that can employ, or act by, extended cognition when our minds are
extended in an instrumental manner by tools – as individuals (persons) or as teams ‘minds’ collectively (as
people)? Even the encapsulated egos might, even sufficiently or normally socialized, exist as an employ shared
mental models. The latter might consist of shared knowledge, information or data and also acquired sets of skills
for performing tasks so that encapsulated egos (individuals in the communicative reality of the cognitive society)
can interact and communicate with others in a fluid or problematic manner as individual performs and/or
members of groups.

These individuals contribute information (information dumping or brain contribution or dumping of intersubjective
relevant data). This will probably occur in a dynamic manner that could affect the situation they are involved in the
constitution of (for example as police officer or arrested criminal, two lovers, teacher and student, parent and
child, etc). We can imagine endless varieties by this contribution to the situation or context. These contributions, if
we were to develop a theory will be called the data that need to be ordered. Are there any constraints, conditions,
limits, limitations to such situations? What are they? Can they be identified and classified or categorized? And can
our tools for classification themselves be ordered and simplified? Can we generalize about the data we decide to
include so that we can order it. We can for example express an hypothesis about the data as some kind of guiding
principle – which aspects of the data to identify, which relations between the data, and other questions to be
expressed in the form of a hypothesis concerning the data (and its ‘behaviour’ in certain situations, circumstances
or contexts). We can do this in words, express it as logical propositions, mathematical formula, statistics, graphs,
diagrams, and other forms of representations, etc. The (alternative) ways in which we classify, depict and order the
data might themselves vary and thereby identify different patterns in or aspects of the data.

A useful notion here is that of Boundary critique (BC). It is the concept in critical systems thinking, according to
Ulrich (2002) that states that "both the meaning and the validity of professional propositions always depend on
boundary judgments as to what 'facts' (observation) and 'norms' (valuation standards) are to be considered relevant"
or not.[1]

Boundary critique is a general systems thinking principle similar to concepts as multiple perspectives, and
interconnectedness. Boundary critique according to Cabrera (2006) is "in a way identical to distinction making as
both processes cause one to demarcate between what is in and what is out of a particular construct. Boundary
critique may also allude to how one must be explicit (e.g., critical) of these boundary decisions. Distinction making,
on the other hand, is autonomic—one constantly makes distinctions all of the time." [2]

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Boundary critique is based on Churchman's (1970) [3] argument, "that what is to be included or excluded for any
analysis of a situation is a vital consideration".[4] According to Kagan et al. (2004) "Something that appears to be
relevant to overall project improvement given a narrowly defined boundary, may not be seen as relevant at all if the
boundaries are pushed out. Thus, he argues, as much information as possible should be 'swept in' to the definition of
the intervention".[4]

This argumentation was extended by Werner Ulrich in the 1980s. According to Kagan et al. (2004) he "offered a
detailed challenge to the idea that the boundaries of any system are given and linked to "social reality". They are
social or personal constructs that define the limits of knowledge relevant to any particular analysis. From this
position, pushing out the boundaries of an analysis, in the context of human systems, also involves pushing the
boundaries of who may be considered a decision maker". [4]

In the practice of boundary critique, according to Ulrich (2000) [5] different kind of boundaries can be set based on
different questions:

 Self-reflective boundary relating to the question "What are my boundary judgements?".

 Dialogical boundary relating to the question "Can we agree on our boundary judgements?".
 Controversial boundary relating to the question "Don't you claim too much?".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_critique

 Werner Ulrich (2002). "Boundary Critique". in: The Informed Student Guide to Management Science, ed. by H.G.
Daellenbach and Robert L. Flood, London: Thomson Learning, 2002, p. 41f.
  Derek Cabrera (2006). "Boundary Critique: A Minimal Concept Theory of Systems Thinking". ISSS research
paper.
  C. West Churchman (1970). Operations research as a profession. Management Science, 17, B37-53.
  Carolyn Kagan, Sue Caton, Amisha Amin and Amna Choudry (2005). "Boundary critique' community
psychology and citizen participation" Paper delivered to European Community Psychology Conference, Berlin,
September 2004.
 Werner Ulrich(2000). "Reflective Practice in the Civil Society: The contribution of critically systemic thinking".
in: Reflective Practice;;, 1, (2) 247-268

Three other properties to remember when we depict and classify the data we decide to include are –

 Theories should stipulate the order in which one variable or event might affect another variable or event
 Theories should include a narrative or description that depicts why one variable or event might affect another
variable or event
 These narratives should refer to processes or mechanisms that might not be observable or conspicuous.

Kaplan, A. (1964). The conduct of inquiry. New York: Harper && Row.

Merton, R. K. (1967). On theoretical sociology. New York: Free Press.

Sutton, R. I., && Staw, B. M. (1995). What theory is not. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40, 371-384.

The author, and see the comments, have a lot to say about aspects of boundaries and their role in thinking here
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/01/19/boundary-condition-thinking/ The author Venkatesh Rao suggests that
one can easily separate the three building blocks or dynamics, constraints and boundary conditions by mathematic
or non-mathematical models by asking these three types of questions.

Historians are a great example. The best historians tend to have an intuitive grasp of this approach to building
models using these three building blocks. Here is how you can sort these three kinds of pieces out in your own
thinking. It involves asking a set of questions when you begin to think about a complicated problem.

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1. What are the patterns of change here? What happens when I do various things? What’s the simplest
explanation here? (dynamics)
2. What can I not change, where are the limits? What can break if things get extreme? (constraints)
3. What are the raw numbers and facts that I need to actually do some detective work to get at, and cannot
simply infer from what I already know? (boundary conditions).

The commentaries made comments especially on the third one. I wish to distinguish between internal and
external boundaries or limits at all stages of thinking and theorizing. The external conditions will often be
explicit and what we will recognize more easily or be aware of, while some of the internal ones will be
more implicit and not so obvious. The latter will include things such as attitudes towards the problem area,
norms we follow, the limits to our knowledge and information concerning the problem (we will attempt to
extend this by gathering data and information, but we might still perceive these things in a limited manner),
underlying assumptions and other things or processes.

One thinks in some kind of general way through abstractions from the so far collected data, as if one goes
through the whole ‘theory’ or perspective being developed (the frame of reference being constituted) in a
very general way. In this way one arrives at some preliminary generalization or hypothesis. This
generalization will be altered because of a number of factors, for example the ‘nature’ (characteristics of
the type of philosopher dealing with them or the kind of philosophical handling they will be submitted to)
and the stage of the theorizing (and the theorist’s conception of theorizing). Then one returns to the
beginning of one’s collecting of data and information and selects, orders and classifies or categorizes them
in terms of this preliminary generalization.

Returning to the end of section 1. There are both internal and external limits or boundaries to one’s work.
These limits will vary for a number of reasons, for example the step or stage of theorizing the writer is
involved in. The dealing with the problem itself, for example thinking (more and more in detail), the
depiction of it and the writing down about and of it and other cognitive practices, skills, doings and
extensions will be submitted to more and different types of boundaries, One factor that will cause this is the
step in the exploration and the stage of the investigation one is occupied with. Some boundaries will be
explicit and one will be aware of them while others will be more or totally implicit and one will be less
conscious of them and most likely only notice some of the effects of some transcendental, implicit ones.

Some of these limits will be for example knowledge (of the are and problem being dealt with, of the nature
of limits and their functioning), available skills (of know how), available facts (information of know that of
the problem etc), awareness of relevant terms and concepts (and those one is unaware of), available and
understood ideas (and those one is unaware of and do not, yet, grasp and involved), norms one follow and
is aware of (and unaware of), values, attitudes, arguments being employed (skills ion argumentation and
limits to these), reasoning, different types of limits that are functioning (and that one is un/aware of).

The different stages of investigation include the scanning and collection of data and information, depicting,
organizing, classification and dealing with these data, the making of conjectures about the data, their
interrelations, awareness (and lack of awareness) of and reference to relevant work, books, articles, studies,
etc concerning the data and the problem being dealt with, making generalizations concerning trends in the
data and developing hypotheses.

Let us look at some of the ideas concerning good or better theories in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory tells us that : A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation
of some aspect of the natural world that is acquired through the scientific method and repeatedly tested and
confirmed, preferably using a written, pre-defined, protocol of observations and experiments.[1][2] Scientific theories
are the most reliable, rigorous, and comprehensive form of scientific knowledge.[3]

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It is important to note that the definition of a "scientific theory" (often ambiguously contracted to "theory" for the
sake of brevity, including in this page) as used in the disciplines of science is significantly different from, and in
contrast to, the common vernacular usage of the word "theory". As used in everyday non-scientific speech, "theory"
implies that something is an unsubstantiated and speculative guess, conjecture, idea, or, hypothesis;[4] such a usage
is the opposite of the word 'theory' in science. These different usages are comparable to the differing, and often
opposing, usages of the term "prediction" in science (less ambiguously called a "scientific prediction") versus
"prediction" in vernacular speech, denoting a mere hope.

The strength of a scientific theory is related to the diversity of phenomena it can explain, and to its elegance and
simplicity (see Occam's razor). As additional scientific evidence is gathered, a scientific theory may be rejected or
modified if it does not fit the new empirical findings; in such circumstances, a more accurate theory is then desired.
In certain cases, the less-accurate unmodified scientific theory can still be treated as a theory if it is useful (due to its
sheer simplicity) as an approximation under specific conditions (e.g., Newton's laws of motion as an approximation
to special relativity at velocities that are small relative to the speed of light).

Scientific theories are testable and make falsifiable predictions.[5] They describe the causal elements responsible for
a particular natural phenomenon, and are used to explain and predict aspects of the physical universe or specific
areas of inquiry (e.g., electricity, chemistry, astronomy). Scientists use theories as a foundation to gain further
scientific knowledge, as well as to accomplish goals such as inventing technology or curing disease.

As with most, if not all, forms of scientific knowledge, scientific theories are both deductive and inductive[6][7] in
nature and aim for predictive power and explanatory capability.

Paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and science historian Stephen Jay Gould said, “...facts and theories are
different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world′s data. Theories are structures of
ideas that explain and interpret facts.”[8]

 National Academy of Sciences, 1999

  "The Structure of Scientific Theories" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

  Schafersman, Steven D. "An Introduction to Science".

  National Academy of Sciences, 2008.

  Popper, Karl (1963), Conjectures and Refutations, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, UK. Reprinted in
Theodore Schick (ed., 2000), Readings in the Philosophy of Science, Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View,
Calif.

  https://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic265890.files/Critical_Thinking_File/07_The_Scientific_Method.pdf

  Andersen, Hanne and Hepburn, Brian, "Scientific Method", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter
2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/scientific-
method/>

 The Devil in Dover, p. 98

Contents

 1 Characteristics of theories

 1.1 Essential criteria

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 The defining characteristic of all scientific knowledge, including theories, is the ability to make falsifiable
or testable predictions. The relevance and specificity of those predictions determine how potentially
useful the theory is. A would-be theory that makes no observable predictions is not a scientific theory at
all. Predictions not sufficiently specific to be tested are similarly not useful. In both cases, the term
"theory" is not applicable.
 1.2 Definitions from scientific organizations

 2 Formation of theories
The scientific method involves the proposal and testing of hypotheses, by deriving predictions from the hypotheses
about the results of future experiments, then performing those experiments to see whether the predictions are
valid. This provides evidence either for or against the hypothesis. When enough experimental results have been
gathered in a particular area of inquiry, scientists may propose an explanatory framework that accounts for as
many of these as possible. This explanation is also tested, and if it fulfils the necessary criteria (see above), then
the explanation becomes a theory. This can take many years, as it can be difficult or complicated to gather
sufficient evidence.
 3 Modification and improvement of theories

 3.1 Unification of theories

 3.2 Example: Relativity

 4 Theories and laws

Both scientific laws and scientific theories are produced from the scientific method through the formation and
testing of hypotheses, and can predict the behavior of the natural world. Both are typically well-supported by
observations and/or experimental evidence.[27] However, scientific laws are descriptive accounts of how nature will
behave under certain conditions.[28] Scientific theories are broader in scope, and give overarching explanations of
how nature works and why it exhibits certain characteristics. Theories are supported by evidence from many
different sources, and may contain one or several laws.[29]
 5 About theories

 5.1 Theories as axioms

The logical positivists thought of scientific theories as statements in a formal language. First-order logic is an
example of a formal language. The logical positivists envisaged a similar scientific language. In addition to
scientific theories, the language also included observation sentences ("the sun rises in the east"), definitions, and
mathematical statements. The phenomena explained by the theories, if they could not be directly observed by the
senses (for example, atoms and radio waves), were treated as theoretical concepts. In this view, theories function as
axioms: predicted observations are derived from the theories much like theorems are derived in Euclidean geometry.
However, the predictions are then tested against reality to verify the theories, and the "axioms" can be revised as a
direct result.

The phrase "the received view of theories" is used to describe this approach. Terms commonly associated with it are
"linguistic" (because theories are components of a language) and "syntactic" (because a language has rules about
how symbols can be strung together). Problems in defining this kind of language precisely, e.g., are objects seen in
microscopes observed or are they theoretical objects, led to the effective demise of logical positivism in the 1970s


 5.2 Theories as models
 The semantic view of theories, which identifies scientific theories with models rather than propositions, has
replaced the received view as the dominant position in theory formulation in the philosophy of
science.[36][37][38] A model is a logical framework intended to represent reality (a "model of reality"), similar
to the way that a map is a graphical model that represents the territory of a city or country. [39][40]

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
 Precession of the perihelion of Mercury (exaggerated). The deviation in Mercury's position from the
Newtonian prediction is about 43 arc-seconds (about two-thirds of 1/60 of a degree) per century.[41][42]

 In this approach, theories are a specific category of models that fulfil the necessary criteria (see above).
One can use language to describe a model; however, the theory is the model (or a collection of similar
models), and not the description of the model. A model of the solar system, for example, might consist of
abstract objects that represent the sun and the planets. These objects have associated properties, e.g.,
positions, velocities, and masses. The model parameters, e.g., Newton's Law of Gravitation, determine how
the positions and velocities change with time. This model can then be tested to see whether it accurately
predicts future observations; astronomers can verify that the positions of the model's objects over time
match the actual positions of the planets. For most planets, the Newtonian model's predictions are accurate;
for Mercury, it is slightly inaccurate and the model of general relativity must be used instead.
 The word "semantic" refers to the way that a model represents the real world. The representation (literally,
"re-presentation") describes particular aspects of a phenomenon or the manner of interaction among
a set of phenomena. For instance, a scale model of a house or of a solar system is clearly not an actual
house or an actual solar system; the aspects of an actual house or an actual solar system represented in a
scale model are, only in certain limited ways, representative of the actual entity. A scale model of a house
is not a house; but to someone who wants to learn about houses, analogous to a scientist who wants to
understand reality, a sufficiently detailed scale model may suffice.

o 5.2.1 Differences between theory and model
 Several commentators[43] have stated that the distinguishing characteristic of theories is that they are
explanatory as well as descriptive, while models are only descriptive (although still predictive in a more
limited sense). Philosopher Stephen Pepper also distinguished between theories and models, and said in
1948 that general models and theories are predicated on a "root" metaphor that constrains how scientists
theorize and model a phenomenon and thus arrive at testable hypotheses.
 Engineering practice makes a distinction between "mathematical models" and "physical models"; the cost
of fabricating a physical model can be minimized by first creating a mathematical model using a computer
software package, such as a computer aided design tool. The component parts are each themselves
modelled, and the fabrication tolerances are specified. An exploded view drawing is used to lay out the
fabrication sequence. Simulation packages for displaying each of the subassemblies allow the parts to be
rotated, magnified, in realistic detail. Software packages for creating the bill of materials for construction
allows subcontractors to specialize in assembly processes, which spreads the cost of manufacturing
machinery among multiple customers. See: Computer-aided engineering, Computer-aided manufacturing,
and 3D printing
o
 5.3 Assumptions in formulating theories
 An assumption (or axiom) is a statement that is accepted without evidence. For example, assumptions can
be used as premises in a logical argument. Isaac Asimov described assumptions as follows:
 ...it is incorrect to speak of an assumption as either true or false, since there is no way of proving it to be
either (If there were, it would no longer be an assumption). It is better to consider assumptions as either
useful or useless, depending on whether deductions made from them corresponded to reality...Since we
must start somewhere, we must have assumptions, but at least let us have as few assumptions as
possible.[44]

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 The term "assumption" is actually broader than its standard use, etymologically speaking. The Oxford
English Dictionary (OED) and online Wiktionary indicate its Latin source as assumere ("accept, to take to
oneself, adopt, usurp"), which is a conjunction of ad- ("to, towards, at") and sumere (to take). The root
survives, with shifted meanings, in the Italian sumere and Spanish sumir. The first sense of "assume" in
the OED is "to take unto (oneself), receive, accept, adopt". The term was originally employed in religious
contexts as in "to receive up into heaven", especially "the reception of the Virgin Mary into heaven, with
body preserved from corruption", (1297 CE) but it was also simply used to refer to "receive into
association" or "adopt into partnership". Moreover, other senses of assumere included (i) "investing
oneself with (an attribute)", (ii) "to undertake" (especially in Law), (iii) "to take to oneself in appearance
only, to pretend to possess", and (iv) "to suppose a thing to be" (all senses from OED entry on "assume";
the OED entry for "assumption" is almost perfectly symmetrical in senses). Thus, "assumption" connotes
other associations than the contemporary standard sense of "that which is assumed or taken for granted;
a supposition, postulate" (only the 11th of 12 senses of "assumption", and the 10th of 11 senses of
"assume").
 Note: I need to mention implicit assumptions underlying thinking, often the person ios not aware of their
existence and their functioning.

 6 Descriptions of theories

 6.1 Philosophers of science

Karl Popper described the characteristics of a scientific theory as follows:[5]

1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory—if we look for confirmations.
2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened
by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory—
an event which would have refuted the theory.
3. Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory
forbids, the better it is.

Note: Make explicit, describe and set limits, boundaries, conditions

4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a
theory (as people often think) but a vice.
5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there
are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they
take, as it were, greater risks.
6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this
means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in
such cases of "corroborating evidence".)
7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, might still be upheld by their admirers—for
example by introducing post hoc (after the fact) some auxiliary hypothesis or assumption, or by
reinterpreting the theory post hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always
possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its
scientific status, by tampering with evidence. The temptation to tamper can be minimized by first taking
the time to write down the testing protocol before embarking on the scientific work.

Popper summarized these statements by saying that the central criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its
"falsifiability, or refutability, or testability".[5] Echoing this, Stephen Hawking states, "A theory is a good theory if it
satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that
contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future
observations." He also discusses the "unprovable but falsifiable" nature of theories, which is a necessary

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consequence of inductive logic, and that "you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that
disagrees with the predictions of the theory".[45]

Several philosophers and historians of science have, however, argued that Popper's definition of theory as a set of
falsifiable statements is wrong[46] because, as Philip Kitcher has pointed out, if one took a strictly Popperian view of
"theory", observations of Uranus when first discovered in 1781 would have "falsified" Newton's celestial mechanics.
Rather, people suggested that another planet influenced Uranus' orbit—and this prediction was indeed eventually
confirmed.

Kitcher agrees with Popper that "There is surely something right in the idea that a science can succeed only if it can
fail."[47] He also says that scientific theories include statements that cannot be falsified, and that good theories must
also be creative. He insists we view scientific theories as an "elaborate collection of statements", some of which are
not falsifiable, while others—those he calls "auxiliary hypotheses", are.

According to Kitcher, good scientific theories must have three features: [47]

1. Unity: "A science should be unified…. Good theories consist of just one problem-solving strategy, or a
small family of problem-solving strategies, that can be applied to a wide range of problems."
2. Fecundity: "A great scientific theory, like Newton's, opens up new areas of research…. Because a theory
presents a new way of looking at the world, it can lead us to ask new questions, and so to embark on
new and fruitful lines of inquiry…. Typically, a flourishing science is incomplete. At any time, it raises
more questions than it can currently answer. But incompleteness is not vice. On the contrary,
incompleteness is the mother of fecundity…. A good theory should be productive; it should raise new
questions and presume those questions can be answered without giving up its problem-solving
strategies."
3. Auxiliary hypotheses that are independently testable: "An auxiliary hypothesis ought to be testable
independently of the particular problem it is introduced to solve, independently of the theory it is
designed to save." (For example, the evidence for the existence of Neptune is independent of the
anomalies in Uranus's orbit.)

Like other definitions of theories, including Popper's, Kitcher makes it clear that a theory must include statements
that have observational consequences. But, like the observation of irregularities in the orbit of Uranus, falsification
is only one possible consequence of observation. The production of new hypotheses is another possible and equally
important result.

Note: creative development and employment of theories, as Weick says –p519 When theorists build theory, they
design, conduct, and interpret imaginary experiments. In doing so, their activities resemble the three processes of
evolution: variation, selection, and retention. Because the theorist rather than nature intentionally guides the
evolutionary process, theorizing is more like artificial selection than natural selection, and theorizing becomes more
like natural selection the more the process. Academy of Management Review, 1989, Vol. 14, No. 4, 516-531
Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination KARL E. WEICK The University of Michigan

Note: the 3 important processes or aspects of theory that resembles evolutionary processes are variation, selection,
retention. More on this later.


 6.2 Analogies and metaphors of theory
 The concept of a scientific theory has also been described using analogies and metaphors. For instance,
the logical empiricist Carl Gustav Hempel likened the structure of a scientific theory to a "complex spatial
network:"

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Weick builds his ideas concerning theory on this idea, as stated explicitly and explored by Cornelissen, J.P.
(2006) Making sense of theory construction: Metaphor and
disciplined imagination. Organization Studies, 27 (11). pp. 1579-1597. Through his many writings on
theory construction and theorizing (e.g., Weick 1989,
1995a, 1999), Karl Weick has sketched an account of organizational theorizing as an ongoing and
evolutionary process where researchers themselves actively construct representations -
representations that form approximations of the target subject under consideration and that
subsequently provide the groundwork for extended theorizing (i.e. construct specification, development of
hypotheses) and research. The most detailed account of this process is provided in his awarded 1989
article on ‘theory construction as disciplined imagination’ (Weick 1989), wherein theory construction is
likened to artificial selection as “theorists are both the source of variation and the source of selection”
when they construct and select theoretical representations of a
certain target subject (Weick 1989: 520). Furthermore, in constructing theory, Weick suggested, theorists
and researchers design, conduct and interpret imaginary experiments where they rely upon metaphors to
provide them with vocabularies and images to represent and express organizational phenomena that are
often complex and abstract. The various metaphorical images simulated through such imaginary
experiments, then, are further selected through the application of specific selection
criteria and possibly retained for further theorizing and research. As such, theory construction resembles
the three processes of evolution: variation, selection and retention (Weick 1989).

Logical empiricist Carl Gustav Hempel likened the structure of a scientific theory to a "complex spatial network:"
Its terms are represented by the knots, while the threads connecting the latter correspond, in part, to the
definitions and, in part, to the fundamental and derivative hypotheses included in the theory. The whole system
floats, as it were, above the plane of observation and is anchored to it by the rules of interpretation. These might
be viewed as strings which are not part of the network but link certain points of the latter with specific places in
the plane of observation. By virtue of these interpretive connections, the network can function as a scientific
theory: From certain observational data, we may ascend, via an interpretive string, to some point in the
theoretical network, thence proceed, via definitions and hypotheses, to other points, from which another
interpretive string permits a descent to the plane of observation.[48]

 Michael Polanyi made an analogy between a theory and a map:

 A theory is something other than myself. It may be set out on paper as a system of rules, and it is the more
truly a theory the more completely it can be put down in such terms. Mathematical theory reaches the
highest perfection in this respect. But even a geographical map fully embodies in itself a set of strict rules
for finding one's way through a region of otherwise uncharted experience. Indeed, all theory may be
regarded as a kind of map extended over space and time. [49]
 A scientific theory can also be thought of as a book that captures the fundamental information about the
world, a book that must be researched, written, and shared. In 1623, Galileo Galilei wrote:
 Philosophy [i.e. physics] is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually
open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and
interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters
are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a
single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth. [50]
 The book metaphor could also be applied in the following passage, by the contemporary philosopher of
science Ian Hacking:
 I myself prefer an Argentine fantasy. God did not write a Book of Nature of the sort that the old Europeans
imagined. He wrote a Borgesian library, each book of which is as brief as possible, yet each book of which
is inconsistent with every other. No book is redundant. For every book there is some humanly
accessible bit of Nature such that that book, and no other, makes possible the comprehension, prediction
and influencing of what is going on…Leibniz said that God chose a world which maximized the variety of
phenomena while choosing the simplest laws. Exactly so: but the best way to maximize phenomena and
have simplest laws is to have the laws inconsistent with each other, each applying to this or that but none
applying to all.[51]


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 7 Theories in physics
 8 Examples of scientific theories

Note that many fields of inquiry do not have specific named theories, e.g. developmental biology. Scientific
knowledge outside a named theory can still have a high level of certainty, depending on the amount of evidence
supporting it. Also note that since theories draw evidence from many different fields, the categorization is not
absolute.

 Biology: cell theory, modern evolutionary synthesis, germ theory, particulate inheritance theory,
dual inheritance theory
 Chemistry: collision theory, kinetic theory of gases, Lewis theory, molecular theory, molecular
orbital theory, transition state theory, valence bond theory
 Physics: atomic theory, Big Bang theory, Dynamo theory, M-theory, perturbation theory, theory
of relativity (successor to classical mechanics), quantum field theory
 Other: Climate change theory (from climatology),[54] plate tectonics theory (from geology),
theories of the origin of the Moon, theories for the Moon illusion,

 9 See also

 10 Further reading

 11 References

http://www.sicotests.com/psyarticle.asp?id=165

Properties of excellent theories here Moss presents us with a very general description of good theories. As
already quoted above - Theories should include the following properties (see Kaplan, 1964 & Merton, 1967 &
Sutton & Staw, 1995):

 Theories should stipulate the order in which one variable or event might affect another variable or event
 Theories should include a narrative or description that depicts why one variable or event might affect
another variable or event
 These narratives should refer to processes or mechanisms that might not be observable or conspicuous
 These processes or mechanisms should relate to many constructs that were not assessed in the study
and thus extend appreciably beyond a specific research project
 Hence, theories should present implications that are not observable or inevitable.

He continues - According to Van Lange (2012), four ideals can be utilized to evaluate and to improve theories.
Specifically: excellent theories demonstrate:

 Truth: That is, the theory should generate predictions or hypotheses that are usually accurate and
substantiated.
 Abstract: That is, the theory should allude to broad, unobservable concepts, assumptions, or principles
rather than only superficial, tangible features. The theory should generalize across specific people, contexts,
and processes.
 Progress: The theory should include assumptions that challenge obsolete principles or introduce new
principles and perspectives. The theory might imply relationships between concepts that would have been
overlooked otherwise and, therefore, should stimulate considerable research.

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 Applicability: The theory should be relevant to many events and issues. The theory should be practical
and helpful to everyday life

Moss then mentions shortcomings authors should avoid as stated by Sutton and Staw (1995) Sutton, R. I., && Staw,
B. M. (1995). What theory is not. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40, 371-384. And reviewed by Weick - What
Theory is Not, Theorizing Is and also by Paul J DiMaggio

Kayla Booth sums up Weick - Theorizing by Weick Regarding "What Theory is Not, Theorizing IS" by Kayla Booth lile
this –

Kayla Booth "What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is"

Karl E. Weick Argument Based on Process:

Theory as an end product vs. theory as a process.

Theory in the making! Conclusion The Gist Argument Theorizing Response to Sutton and Staw "Benefit of the Doubt
Piece":

This is not theory because

1) The author is lazy
2) The author is not there... yet Argument
Is Theory itself a Continuum or is the Process of Creating Theory a Continuum?

"What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is" or

"What Theory is Not, Theorizing Can Be"

1) Sutton and Staw's 5 Parts are part of the process of making theory, reliant on context
2) Authors should articulate where they are in the process of theory creation, instead of calling it complete
3) Theory is a continuum
4) Nuances of language and original concepts may help further develop these components

Moss, above, sums up Sutton and Staw as follows –

Rather than characterize the procedures that researchers should follow to construct a theory, Sutton and Staw
(1995) delineated a set of shortfalls that writers should circumvent. First, according to Sutton and Staw (1995),
many writers merely include a list of references, such as "Extraversion is related to level of management (Smith,
1995)" rather than explicate the mechanisms or processes that relate one variable or event to another variable or
event.

As Sutton and Staw (1995) contend, an allusion to a reference should not replace a brief but lucid description of
why these variables or events are related to one another. Writers do not need to characterize every facet of the
theory, but should certainly summarize the key arguments.

Second, according to Sutton and Staw (1995), research findings should not be regarded as a substitute to
theory. For example, suppose a researcher wants to contend that extraversion is related to level of management,
which in turn is associated with breadth of knowledge. To propose this argument, authors must clarify why
extraversion might be related to level of management&& the finding that "Extraversion is related to level of
management, as shown by Smith (1995)" is informative, but not sufficient.

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Third, as Weick (1989) contends, classifications or constructs should not be regarded as substitutes to
theories. For example, according to Sutton and Staw (1995), dividing variables into dispositional and situational is
not a theory. Characterizing three distinct forms of justice is not a theory, even if valuable to readers. These
contributions do not demonstrate how variables are related to one another. They do not demonstrate how various
events unfold.

Fourth, a diagram that entails a series of variables, connected by arrows, does not alone represent a theory.
Again, researchers need to characterize the mechanisms or processes that underpin each arrow--a narrative to
explain why one variable is associated with another variable (Sutton & Staw, 1995).

Finally, researchers need to recognize that hypotheses are not theories. That is, hypotheses do not specify the
mechanisms or processes that demonstrate how the variables might be related to each other. According to
Sutton and Staw (1995), a lengthly set of hypotheses often indicates that such propositions were included in lieu of
suitable theoretical development.

Arguments to justify these shortfalls

In some instances, researchers recognize their theories are not optimal, but rely on references, data, constructs,
diagrams, or hypotheses to mask shortfalls in their arguments. Nevertheless, some scholars have proposed
arguments that can be used to justify the legitimacy of papers, despite these shortfalls.

First according to Weick (1995), the hallmarks of an exemplary theory are seldom realized. Instead, most
attempts merely represent approximations to these ideals. For example, according to Merton (1967), some
attempted theories are merely frameworks, stipulating the categories of variables that are relevant to this domain.
Other attempted theories are merely characterizations of various constructs, without any attempt to show how
these concepts are related. Finally, some attempted theories are broader conceptualizations of specific
observations&& for example, the finding that anger amplifies the optimism bias could be written as negative
emotional states might magnify cognitive errors.

Although these attempts do not represent exemplary theories, they do, according to Weick (1995), facilitate the
construction of insightful and definitive theoretical arguments. In other words, these attempts are still
invaluable, even if imperfect. That is, these attempts to expedite the processes that underpin theory development:
abstracting, generalizing, relating, selecting, explaining, and synthesizing.

Second, according to DiMaggio (1995), these shortfalls, such as a reliance on diagrams or hypotheses, do not
compromise all categories of theories. That is, not all theories are intended to explain relationships between
associations. Some theories, for example, are intended to challenge readers, highlighting paradoxes and
undermining common assumptions, but not designed to explain broad generalizations, which are usually
broadly recognized and thus somewhat unenlightening. As a consequence, no specific set of criteria should be
applied to all theories.

Indeed, many of the criteria that define optimal theories conflict with each other, according to DiMaggio
(1995). For example, theories need to penetrate a single issue, deeply and profoundly, but also encompass a broad
range of factors, such as culture. Likewise, theories need to be lucid and clear, but also seem challenging and
paradoxical.

https://www.reference.com/world-view/characteristics-good-theory-f1ec4f7e40024887#

What are the characteristics of a good theory?

They should encourage further testing and expansions of the hypothesis. Good theories mean that others should be
able to test them and, if possible, disprove them. This doesn't mean that theories should be disprovable, but that they

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should be designed so that they are neither impossible to be proved or disproved. In this way, theories should be
made to facilitate further research and insights, not discourage them.

Theories should be able to predict what will happen from a given experiment. This is what gives them a better
standing because their basis is not on pure speculation but informed hypothesizing. Good theories focus on the
effects, not the causes of a phenomena. They are also never regarded as statements of fact, but instead of likelihood.
Theories aren't regarded as facts because they are frequently revised and rethought. To say a theory is a fact, is to
take away the notion that they could ever be further tested and reformed, a practice highly important and regarded
by the scientific community.

Learn more about Logic & Reasoning

https://typeunsafe.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/four-qualities-of-a-good-theory/

Four Qualities of a Good Theory

Posted: 2011/09/02 | Author: sl0wpoke | Filed under: conceptual explanations, interesting questions | Tags:
epistemology, rationalism, theory of computation |Leave a comment

Generally speaking, there are two steps to using any model:

 Determine whether conditions validate the assumptions of the model. (“Is the model applicable here?”)

 If conditions do validate the model, determine what predictions can be made. (“What work can the model
do?”)

The first step involves knowledge of the particular situation; the second step involves knowledge of the model.
A useful analogy is made with raw materials and the tools used to craft them into something: the situation itself is
the raw material, the model or theory is the tool, and the end-product is some information. As is to be expected, the
quality of the product will depend significantly on the quality of the material, the power of the tools, and the skill of
the craftsman who wields them.

The important difference between physical and intellectual work, however, is that intellectual work may produce
“tools” that are not at all useful. It might be argued that this difference is not an essential one; there is, after all, no
barrier to the manufacture of implements that function in purely imaginary modes. (One real example of this
phenomenon is the production of “fantasy weapons”, e.g. extremely ornate blades that look very impressive but
carry very little utility as real aids to attack or defence, and were probably never intended to provide such.) That
said, intellectual work is able to produce its tools quite quickly, and some of these tools defy any practical attempts
to definitively prove their usefulness. Rather than bring down the ire of any one discipline by making all the usual
accusations that their basic theories are airy-yet-crude blunders, I’d like to constructively examine the question of
what makes for a good useful theory. Here are four simple criteria to consider:

A good theory makes its inapplicability promptly and unambiguously known. This might be the most important
feature a theory can have. There is always a very strong temptation to become so enamored with a theory that it
becomes difficult to distinguish an elegant demonstration from a completely insubstantial fantasy. Physical
chemistry, with its need for a huge plethora of quick-and-dirty theories seems to be quite apt at producing models
that speak their applicability up-front and neatly hand off control to their alternatives when their presuppositions fail.
Different models predict significantly different behaviors given different spatial scales and different temperature
and pressure conditions, sometimes radically. While such a diversity of different views might seem cluttered and
confusing from the perspective of assimilating the knowledge of the discipline, it is nonetheless quite easy to
determine which model applies to a given situation. Assumptions (e.g. “this system behaves as an Ideal Gas”) are
very clear from the start, and even though they incorporate known and deliberate approximations, these are accepted
in a way that understands the imprecisions and their consequences.

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A good theory approximates objects, not their relationships. An outstanding example of this feature comes from,
of all places, political philosophy. John Rawl’s theory of justice (as constructed in his famous book of the same
name) proceeds from an extremely idealized view of individual humans and the origins of social organization,
as do virtually all other political-philosophical arguments. “A Theory of Justice”, however, stands out as perhaps
the most compelling political argument of the 20th century; Rawls became famous following this work, and
virtually every other theory that followed was compelled to address Rawls’ Theory in some form. Nonetheless, other
theorists very extensively criticized Rawls for some unrealistic features of his model, specifically the extremely
strong risk-aversion individual agents are assumed to display. These criticisms, though well-founded and justified,
made Rawls’ Theory no less compelling. The reason is that Rawls’ Theory, though it overstates individual
aversion to risk, very precisely captures the way in which individuals evaluate their position relative to others
in real societies. This emphasis on relations between individuals stands in sharp contrast to traditional
Utilitarianism, which presumes that individuals will assent to any social contract that maximizes net social welfare
with no consideration as to how they will fare personally, a presumption very clearly at odds with reality.

A good theory tells you what it can’t tell you. A theory that incorporates its own limits can very rapidly and
efficiently prune away lines of inquiry that are essentially fruitless. The example par excellence comes from the
classical theory of computation, with its results on formally undecidable propositions. A beautiful example of this
dynamic at work comes from the use of Turing’s famous result to demonstrate in just a few lines the undecidability
of a static information flow safety analysis. While practitioners don’t very frequently encounter results from Godel,
Turing, Church, Post, or Skolem, it is arguably because the theoretical foundation of computation very quickly
and firmly establishes the limits of what can and can’t be done, so that engineers need never be visited by the
insidious temptation to construct the unconstructible.

A good theory rapidly makes new predictions from old predictions. This criterion applies to how much
uncertainty is introduced by applying a theory, or alternately, to what degree a theory lends itself to
computational procedure. It is precisely this feature that accounts for the unparalleled success of Newton’s
mathematization of physics. Translating observed phenomena into readily transformable symbolic representations
allows inferences to be easily composed with one another, which means that a theory can readily build on its own
successes. While there is some danger that concrete realities will not fit well with their symbolic outlines, i.e. that
failures will also build on failures, a theory that can rapidly turn over its findings into new findings will have the
opportunity to propagate errors forward in a way that will eventually become conspicuous, and hopefully
diagnosable. By contrast, a theory that cannot readily incorporate its own predictions as antecedents to new
inferences is more likely to function as a kind of myth or parable than as a real producer of knowledge. While it’s
essential to have a conceptual foundation for considering any phenomenon, and while such a foundation is a
necessary condition for a theory, it’s easy to see that a theory, as considered here, is more than just a framing device.

While a definitive breakdown of what makes for a good theory is certainly an appealing goal, this short exposition
is intended more as an exploration of the issues than as any sort of final word. Much, no doubt, has already been
said on the subject. While this may seem too general a subject to consider for a computer science blog, it’s worth
reflecting upon for the simple fact that computer science is presently faced with the temptations of a lot of new
theories. Unfortunately, few of these new theories have gained any kind of wide use or acceptance outside of
academic circles for the simple reason that they have thus far failed to demonstrate their usefulness in any
compelling way. I would emphasize, once again, that this is especially the case for security. A good theory of
security, hopefully, can make is applicability clearly known, precisely describe relationships between its agents,
make clear the fundamental limitations of security (i.e. articulate the existence of fundamental insecurity), and draw
useful conclusions.

http://faculty.atu.edu/swomack/3023ch2/sld002.htm

http://www.tectonicsdrivenbyclimvariation.com/-the-characteristics-of-a-good-theory-
hypothesis.html

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The Characteristics of a Good Theory (Hypothesis)

In the philosophy of Science literature there is an extensive discussion on what makes a good theory or hypothesis.
My first introduction to the idea came from Aaron Ihde when I was a graduate teaching assistant for his course called
"The Physical Universe" at the University of Wisconsin in 1961, but I have added a few ideas. Although not all agree
with what I have found I think that theories should:

1.Explain any observations of phenomena or results of an experiment;

2.Be understandable to the interested lay person;
3. Be reasonable so that they are testable (some, like Karl Popper, say falsifiable and some like Francis
Bacon that there should be the possibility that they can be disproved by experiment or observation);
4.Be economical or parsimonious (I call this Occam's razor) and
5. Be predictive or fruitful leading to new observations or hypotheses.

http://www.soc.iastate.edu/class/202/powerpoint/soc202.pdf

Characteristics of a theory

1. Explanatory function-account for or explain a phenomenon.2. usually stated in

propositions and concepts,3. good hypothesis provides a rigorous test of theory
Dependent variable Assumed to depend on or be caused by independent variable .Variable the
researcher wishes to explain. Expected outcome of the independent variable.Termed the criterion
variable

http://www.analytictech.com/mb870/handouts/theorizing.htm Copyright ©1996 Stephen P. Borgatti

1. What is a theory?
2. Correctness of theories
3. Good theories
4. The process of theorizing
5. A tutorial on theorizing

What is a Theory?

A theory is an explanation of something. It is typically an explanation of a class of phenomena, rather than a

single specific event. Instead of explaining why there is a brown stain on my tie, a theory would explain why men's
ties often have brown stains.

Theories are often expressed as chains of causality: this happens because this and that happened just when
something else happened and this in turn happened because ... you get the idea!

Theories are sometimes confused with hypotheses, because both seem to consist of statements relating one
variable to another. Well, it's true that some theories are little more than hypotheses. But good theories are a bit
different. Here are some of the differences:

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 theories are more general

 theories explain why things are related, whereas hypotheses just say they are related
 theories generate hypotheses; hypotheses are implicit in theories

As discussed in the next section, one way that theories explain is by providing a sense of process or mechanism for
how one thing is related to another. This is very important.

Having a sense of process is an attribute or characteristic of a good theory. There are many characteristics that make
a theory good. It is not just whether the theory is correct or not. In fact, the correctness of a theory is a very
complicated issue, and is not quite as important as you might think.

Correctness of Theories

Unfortunately, we can never prove a theory right. We can prove it wrong, but can never prove it right. There are
two reasons for this. First, it doesn't matter how many times you test a theory, there is not enough time in the
universe to do all possible tests. So even if a theory has survived 100 tests, it could still fail the 101st test. In a way,
the situation is the opposite of locating a missing object in a house. If you search for the object in the house and find
it, well, it's definite that the object was in the house -- case closed. But if you search and don't find it, that doesn't
absolutely mean that the object is not in the house. It could still be there, you just missed it. The same (well, the
opposite) is true of theories. If you test a theory and it fails, that's it: it's been disproved. But if you test it and it
passes, that's just one test. There may be other data out there, or other situations, that will disprove. You just haven't
gotten to them yet.

The second reason you can't prove a theory true is that there is never just one theory that fits the facts. A
theory is really just a narrative. A tale that explains. But stories can be told very differently. In a sense, there
are always an infinite number of theories that fit the facts. Think for example of Newtonian theories for the motion
of bodies -- equations like f = ma. Those theories served us very well for a very long time. But now, we have
replaced Newtonian physics with a whole new theory brought to light by Einstein. Was Newton wrong? Not exactly.
His theories were correct as far as they went. They predicted the motion of bodies quite well: well, enough, for
example to build airplanes that actually fly. Engineers still use Newton's theories to build certain things. But for
other things, today we use entirely different equations built on a completely different understanding of the physical
universe to do exactly the same thing. The new theory explains additional phenomena that the old theory didn't -- for
example, according to Newtonian theory, objects should not change mass as they approach the speed of light (which
they do), nor should time slow down.

Good Theories

Good theories have a number of important characteristics, including:

 mechanism or process
 generality
 truth
 falsifiability
 simplicity
 fertility
 surprise

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Mechanism (or Process). A good theory has a sense of movement, a dynamic element. The feeling of
understanding that a good theory gives is due mostly to having a sense of process by which one state of affairs leads
to another. For example, suppose athletes tend to ask dumb questions in class. A bad theory explains this very
simply: athletes are dumb. This is a bad theory on many counts, but one problem is that there is no sense of process
by which the quality of the mind is linked to the stupidity of the question. What is the mechanism by which the
questions are formed, and how is mind quality related? Contrast this with a much better theory: that athletes have to
spend a lot of their time practicing and going to games, and so have less time to study. This has a sense of process:
there is only so much time in a day, the more time is spent on sports, the less there is available for study, the less
studying the less they will understand what's going on in class, and therefore the less cogent their questions will be.
This theory is a chain of causal links, each one small enough that we can readily believe it.

Here's another example. Why do some people steal, hurt people, and spend their lives going in and out of jail? A
common type of answer is something bad happened to them as children, or they had bad or missing parents (the old
"came from a broken home" idea). We tend to think that whatever bad happens, it is due to something bad. But
what exactly is the mechanism by which something bad happening as a child causes them to do bad things
themselves? What is it about the way the brain works that one bad thing leads to another bad thing? That's the part
we need to specify in order to have a good theory.

Bad theories often just give a name to the cause of something, without actually explaining anything. We are
often fooled into accepting these theories because it's been given a name, which makes it seem real or credible. For
example, suppose we observe that some workers work harder than others. What's the reason for that? Some people
will say "motivation". They are motivated. Motivation is an inner drive to do something. But does it really explain
anything or does it really just restate the observation? Knowing that working harder is caused by motivation doesn't
seem to help us understand anything. It really just brings up the question 'why are some workers more motivated
than others?'.

Generality. Good theories are general enough to be applicable to a wide range of individual events, people or
situations. Consider the theory that athletes ask dumb questions because they spend so much time on athletic stuff
that they don't have time for school. This is general because it should work for all athletes, not just BC athletes, and
not just for one sport. Furthermore, it can really be applied to any person who has a serious time commitment
outside of class, such as musicians. The basic idea of the theory -- the mechanism -- is that people with significant
time commitments in other areas will perform less well on the area in question.

Truth. Unfortunately, theories can never been proved to be true. There are two reasons for this. 1) No matter how
thoroughly we test the theory against data, there is always the possibility that tomorrow there will be some data that
contradicts the theory. Just because the sun has risen everyday since we started checking, doesn't prove a theory that
suggests that it will always rise. 2) Theories are just descriptions. There are always other ways to describe the
facts that are equally valid. In this sense, truth is not a reasonable concept. All that is available to us is descriptions
that are not contradicted by the currently available facts.

Falsifiability. A good theory is falsifiable. If there is no conceivable way to construct an experiment or collect
some data that could potentially contradict the theory, the theory is worthless. Suppose you are trying to
explain the pattern of heads and tails that come up when you flip a coin 10 times. Your theory is that it comes up
heads when an invisible magician wants it to, and tails otherwise. How do you test the theory? If you flip the coin
and it comes out heads, that does not contradict the theory because it just means that the magician wanted it to be
heads. If you flip the coin and it comes out tails, that does not contradict the theory either, because it just means the
magician wanted it to be tails. No matter how the experiment turns out, the data cannot possibly contradict the
theory.

Theories like this do not really explain anything. You can't use them to predict outcomes, nor to do things (e.g., to
build airplanes that actually fly). A lot of psychological theory comes very close to being non-falsifiable. For
example, the general concept that employees in an organization work hard because of something called
"motivation", is kind of like saying the coin comes up heads because a magician wants it that way. We can't see
motivation. We can only infer its existence by its effects (human behavior). So if a person works hard, we say they
were motivated. If they don't work, we say they weren't motivated. Yet we say the reason they work hard or not is

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because of motivation. This is circular: if they are motivated, then they work hard. If they work hard, they are
motivated.

In general, any theory that explains human behavior in terms of human desires is treading on thin ice. In other
words, if you study voluntary turnover in organizations and find that people leave organizations because they want
to, you haven't really explained anything, and you could never be proven wrong.

To summarize, there are two ways that theories can fail to be falsifiable: (a) because the data are impossible by their
very nature to collect, or (b) because they are circular.

Parsimony refers to the simplicity of a theory -- the avoidance of positing complex relationships when a
simpler alternative exists. One reason for preferring parsimony is that nature seems to. Complicated things have
more ways of breaking down, and less likelihood, therefore, to endure to the present. The other reason is that
theories are useless unless they are simple enough for people to understand. Theories are sometimes called
models, and the whole idea of a model is that it is a smaller, simpler version of the real thing. Models are meant to
pull out the important parts, and leave the unimportant behind. The power of a model can be defined as the
proportion reduction in complexity that it affords over nature. Too much detail can obscure the key things. Really
complicated models don't actually explain much. The best model possible of the Earth's weather patterns would be
obtained by constructing a duplicate Earth and surrounding solar system, exactly the same in every detail. It would
predict perfectly. The problem is, the model is as complicated as the thing we were trying to understand in the
first place.

An example of parsimony is chance models. Suppose we want to understand why almost all human societies have
significant inequality -- that is some people are much richer than others. We could posit a number of special reasons,
including supernatural causes like "God wants it that way", but it is important to realize that inequality is what we
would expect even if there were no special reasons why it should happen. If we take 100 coconuts and divide them
randomly among 10 people, there are only a handful of ways it could come out that would be approximately equal:
but there are about 1030 ways to divide them so that there is significant inequality. It's just like keeping your
room neat: there is basically one way of distributing all your stuff in the 3-dimensional space you call your room
such that you would say 'everything is in it's place'. But there are millions of ways that stuff can be arranged such
that you would say 'the place is a mess'.

The principle of using parsimony as a criterion for model selection is known as Occam's Razor.

Fertility. A fertile theory is one that generates lots of implications in different areas. Implications are important
because (a) they are essentially insights that were not obvious prior to stating the theory, so they represent
potentially new knowledge, and (b) they represent possibilities for testing the theory.

To be fertile, a theory pretty much has to be general.

Surprise. A quality of good theories is that they are interesting. This means that they generate non-obvious
implications. They lead you to understand things in new ways. Surprise refers to the theory's ability to make non-
obvious, unexpected predictions. A famous example is a theory that explains why certain countries have so many
more girls than boys. The theory says that this happens, ironically, when people prefer boys, such as in India. You
see, the probability of having a boy is different in different families -- it's a genetic thing. Now, suppose what people
do is keep having babies until they've got more boys than girls, or they have run out of room. So if the first baby is a
boy, they stop there. If the first baby is a girl, they have two more kids. If both are boys, they stop there. But if one's
a girl, they keep going. The result is that families that have a predisposition to have boys, tend to have small families
-- if the first kid's a boy, the stop there. But families that have a predisposition to have girls have enormous families,
as they keep trying to get boys. If there were no preference between boys and girls, then there would be no
relationship between number of kids and the sex of the kids: large families would be just as likely to contain boys as
small families.

This paradoxical result is fun -- it's beautiful.

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Process of Theorizing

Start with an observation, such as "white people and black people sit at different tables in Lyons Hall". Then create
an initial explanation. For example, you might try out the idea that people prefer to eat lunch with their own kind.

Now think about your explanation in terms of the qualities of good theory, and try to make it better. For example, to
make the theory more general, change "eat lunch with" to the more general "socialize with". Then check the other
criteria. One problem with this particular theory is that it lacks a sense of process -- how does it happen that
people prefer their own kind? Because it has no sense of process, this theory is little more than a restatement of
the initial observation. It's also hard to test. It basically says: people sit at different tables because they want to. So if
some people don't sit with their own kind, it must be because they didn't want to. Another problem with this theory
is that it is not fertile. It does not generate interesting implications. The best you could do is predict that at parties (or
any other social event), blacks and whites will self-segregate.

A model with a little more sense of process and explanation is: "People tend to do what they've done before. So
if whites grew up socializing with whites, then they will continue to socialize with whites, and the same for blacks.
People's earliest experience is with their families, who are typically the same color as they are." This theory
generates implications much more readily. For example, it suggests that kids adopted at a young age by families of a
different color will prefer to socialize with people of that color, rather than their own. It also implies that kids
growing up in racially mixed school systems should not show as much preference for their own kind.

Theorizing is an iterative process of creation, criticism, and re-creation. It is also an art. Good theories are
beautiful, and the process of creating this beauty is what art is all about.

For more detail on the process of theorizing, click here.

http://www.analytictech.com/mb870/handouts/howto.htm

This material drawn liberally from Lave & March

An Introduction to Models in the Social Science
(some changes have been made)

Start with an observation. For example, think about being in college. You're in class, and the guy next to you -- who
is obviously a football player -- says an unbelievably dumb thing in class. So you ask yourself: Why? And the
answer comes thundering back:

 Football players are dumb.

This is a theory. It is not a very good one, but it is a start. What would make it better?

One thing would be to make it a little more general. Theories that are too narrow and specific are not very
interesting, even if they are correct. So, we could say:

 Athletes are dumb

This is better, but the theory still has no sense of process, of explanation. It says, athletes have this property of
being dumb, and that's why they ask dumb questions. Dumb begets dumb. Does that actually explain anything? Or
does it just push the thing to be explained one step back? Why are athletes dumb? It's like when kids ask you 'Why
is the sky blue?' and you say 'Because it is, that's why'.

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There is also a circularity here. What do we mean when we say that a person is dumb? Practically speaking, it means
that they consistently behave dumbly. We cannot perceive dumbness directly. The only way we can know whether
people are dumb is by what they say and do. Yet what we are trying to explain is a dumb thing that they said. So in
effect we are saying that they say dumb things because they say dumb things.

The really big problem with circularity is that it prevents theories from being falsifiable. For example, take the
theory that if you perform the Rain Dance Ceremony and all the participants are pure of heart, it will rain the next
day. This theory is not falsifiable because if you perform the ceremony and it rains, the theory is confirmed. If you
perform the ceremony and it doesn't rain, that tells you right away that one of the participants was not pure of heart,
and again the theory is confirmed.

A good theory has a sense of process. It describes a mechanism by which A makes B happen, like the way the
gears in a car transfer the rotation in the engine to a rotation of the tires. For example, look at this explanation:

 To be a good athlete requires lots of practice time; being smart in class also requires study time. Amount
of time is limited, so practicing a sport means less studying which means being less smart in class.

This has much more of a sense of explanation. When reading this account, we have a much greater sense of
satisfaction that something is being accomplished by theorizing. Of greatest importance is that the focus of the story
is a mechanism, not an enduring property of a class of people (athletes). This means that we can apply the same
reasoning to other people and other situations. Let's rewrite it this way:

 [Limited Time Theory] There is limited time in a day, so when a person engages in a very time-consuming
activity, such as athletics, it takes away from other very time-consuming activies, such as studying.

An implication of this theory is that we should also observe that good musicians (who practice many hours a day)
should also be dumb in class. If we don't find this, the theory is wrong. This is in part what makes it such a good
theory. It is general enough to generate implications for other groups of people and other contexts, all of which serve
as potential tests of the theory. That is, the theory is fertile.

The essence of theorizing is that you start with an observation, and then imagine the
observation as the outcome of a (hidden) process.

Here is another process that would lead to the outcome of a football player asking a dumb question in class:

 [Excellence Theory] Everyone has a need to excel in one area. Achieving excellence in any one area is
enough to satisfy this need. Football players satisfy their need for accomplishment through football, so
they are not motivated to be smart in class.

This theory also has implications for other groups of people, such as musicians or beauty queens.

Here's one last theory:

 [Jealousy Theory] We are jealous of others’ success. When we are jealous, we subconsciously lower our
evaluation of that person’s performance in other areas. So we think football players ask dumb questions.

This theory has some interesting implications. For example, because we are jealous of rich people, we love soap
operas which reveal how unhappy the rich really are. Similarly, perhaps really beautiful women get a lot of
recognition and status, so others will feel that beautiful women are dumb. This would explain the widespread
stereotype of the "dumb blonde" or "bimbo".

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Choosing Among Competing Theories

We can use the fertility and non-circularity of all these theories to help test and choose among them. If the theory is
specified clearly enough, we can essentially present a situation to a theory and ask what it would expect as an
outcome. The idea, then, is to collect a set of situations which the different theories would have different predictions
or expectations about.

Consider, for example, how football players should behave (or appear to behave) in class out of season. Will they
still be asking dumb questions? According to the first theory (Limited Time), football players should not ask dumb
questions out of season, because there is plenty of time to study. [Whether or not there is ever a time when football
players are not consumed by the sport is another question.] But according to the second theory (Recognition),
members of the football team should continue to ask dumb questions because they are still football players and still
getting recognition, so they still don't need to excel academically. The third theory (Jealousy) also yields the
expectation of continued dumb questions, because we are still jealous.

So studying football player behavior out of season should help to distinguish between the first theory and the other
two, no matter how the data turn out. If the football players appear smart, then the Recognition and Jealousy theories
are wrong. If the football players appear dumb, then the Limited Time theory is wrong. [Of course, we can make the
theory more complicated: having limited time during the season makes them dumb in class for those times, which
erodes their confidence and interest, so they that even when they have the time, they still don't study effectively, so
they don't do any better in the off-season. We'll deal with that some other time.]

Now, consider athletes who do not look like athletes -- they are not unusually big (like football) or tall (like
basketball) or fat (like sumo wrestling). Will they appear to ask dumb questions? The Limited Time theory will
again clearly say "yes" because practice time is unaffected by physique. The Excellence theory will also say "yes"
because even if people can't recognize them on the street, they are still fulfilling their need to do one thing really
well so they will not feel the need to excel in class. The Jealousy theory would say "no" for most people because
they just don't know that they are in the presence of an athlete.

Expectations Generated by Each Theory For Two Situations

Question Limited Time Excellence Jealousy

Football players ask dumb questions out of season? No Yes Yes

Will athletes who do not look like athletes ask dumb questions? Yes Yes No

Once again, no matter how the data turn out, we will know which theories are wrong. Note that if the answer to both
questions is No, that means that all the theories are wrong, since none predict a NO answer to both questions.

In practice, we would want to ask many other questions as well, even ones that more or less duplicate the expected
answers for other questions. For example, consider how football players appear in schools where football is not
important. Will they still be asking dumb questions? The Limited Time theory clearly says "yes" because they still
have to practice even if nobody on campus cares about football. The Excellence theory also says "yes", because
football is still satisfying their need for accomplishment. And the Jealousy theory would say "no" because we are not
jealous unless football is a source of status. So this question has the same pattern of expected answers as question
#2:

Question Limited Time Excellence Jealousy

FB players ask dumb questions in schools where FB is not important? Yes Yes No

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Every implication of one theory is potentially useful in choosing among all the theories. For example, we noted
earlier that an implication of the limited time theory was that students studying music should also ask dumb
questions, because of the time they spend practicing their instrument. So what would the other theories say about
musicians?

Question Limited Time Excellence Jealousy

Musicians ask dumb questions too? Yes Yes No

(I'm assuming here that people don't realize, just by looking at their classmates, who is a musician, and that it not
terribly high status anyway.)

http://com330.pbworks.com/w/page/28856798/What%20Are%20the%20Characteristics%20of%
20a%20Good%20Theory

What Are the Characteristics of a Good Theory?

Read: Gleiser, "The How and the Why: Can Science Explain Purpose?";
Miner, "Body Ritual among the Nacirema"

What does Gleiser mean when he says that science is about the "how" and not about the "why?"

What is a hypothesis, and how does one use it in developing a theory?

When Gleiser argues that Isaac Newton's approach "set the stage" for modern science to have a "very clear
operational procedure," to what is he referring?

Gleiser says that science is hard enough just focusing on the "how." What does he mean?

Should we study media influence like Gleiser says we should study science?

What does the Nacirema article not tell us about the culture it discusses?

"The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in which different people behave in similar
situations that he is not apt to be surprised by even the most exotic customs" (Miner 1). What overall point is Miner
trying to make with regard to studying culture?

How can Miner help us better understand how to study media influence?

A good theory...

is testable

is predictable

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is verifiable

predicts results which can be reproduced

can explain an effect but not a cause

can be disproven

is not a statement of fact, but a statement of likelihood

invites disagreement, alternative, and better explanations

constantly undergoes revision and refinement

http://ocw.jhsph.edu/courses/socialbehavioralfoundations/PDFs/Lecture4.pdf

http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/357/theory.white.pdf

Different types of theories described, building blocks of theories variables and concepts, propositions; development and change of theories,
paradigm shifts.

The above sources gave us their notions about theories, models and other aspects of theories and the process of
theorizing, as well as characteristics of better and good theories and essential features of the process of theorizing.
We will return to theorizing after the next section.

Philosophy, its branches, or nature, aims and purpose, methods, procedures and techniques and the main
contemporary philosophical schools (or approaches) will be referred to in this section. During the exploration of the
nature of philosophy the doing or process of philosophizing will be explored. Illustrations will be given to show if
and where the doing of philosophy by these schools or approaches reveal aspects of theorizing, good, indifferent or
bad theorizing.
A possible hypothesis : philosophy/izing is (as if) like theorizing with some aspects of the process missing/ignored
and other stages/features over-emphasized (as if they are absolute, necessities, essential to the process or
methodology of philosophy) so as to dissolve the present problem.
Exploring this proposition in more detail to reveal the implications, if any, of this for an understanding of this
‘hypothesis’. The ideal (of) theorizing, although all real theorizing are only approximate to this ideal (situation,
process), can function as a guiding principle to investigate philosophizing. The pure theorizing ideal is merely the
leading ideal or guiding principle (functioning as a principle or guide) during philosophizing in the process of doing
philosophy, during philosophical investigations in an attempt to follow this principle but never to achieve it
completely or realize it fully.

4 a) Let us look at examples of doing philosophy and what is said about it by philosophers.

I hope to write ABOUT philosophizing, doing philosophy and possible different approaches to and of doing it,
decisions that are made during this process and underlying (explicit and implicit) assumptions that are made along
the way and the (often mistakenly) selected (side tracks of the) path (method) chosen at different stages.

4 b)

By expressing the above I have already made many implicit decisions and assumptions, some of which I am sort of
aware but others I have not yet realized. The consequences of ‘having’ those assumptions and of having made
those decisions will determine many things that I will do, taking me to places where I am compelled to make

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decisions - that I am fairly and some totally, unaware of at this stage of writing down these (the fairly vague at this
point) ideas.

I mention a number of different approaches to and ways of doing philosophy, this is to illustrate different
philosophical methods and methodologies. I discuss certain aspects of them in between quoting them at length. I
also give the entire contents of a certain approach, book or article so that the reader can see if s/he is interested in
that approach to the socio-cultural practice of philosophy or not as different people are only interested in certain
schools or types of doing philosophy.

See for instance Formal Methods in Philosophy Lecture Notes — 2013 Dr. Anders J. Schoubye.

At the end I again work through an approach that treats different methods and methodology of philosophy as if it
is a process with different steps in it. The previously mentioned approaches, lectures, articles and Contents pages
of books/articles etc can be seen to fit in somewhere in this final overview. This illustrates the restrictions of all
these approaches.

Broad concentrates on or reduces philosophizing to three things or activities namely : analysis, synopsis and
synthesis. I give some background details concerning Broad so to assist in the understanding of these notions of
his, for example that he really was trained in science, mathematics and logic. He considered himself not to be
outstanding in those ‘difficult’ disciplines so he moved to philosophy (becoming a professor at several universities
in the UK). But his former training is shown in his ‘reductionist’ view and treatment of philosophy and
philosophizing. He shows that certain philosophers reduce all philosophy, philosophizing and reality by means of
these approaches (skills or tricks) to execute their speculative system of philosophy, like Hegel, or analytic, like
Hume. His science background is obvious from his examples and dealing in depth with issues from science.

Broad, on his own admission, did not have “a philosophy”—if by that phrase is meant highly original philosophical
theories, and a highly original way of approaching philosophical problems. He writes: “I have nothing worth calling
a system of philosophy of my own, and there is no philosopher of whom I should be willing to reckon myself a
faithful follower.

Another, very different view on and interpretation of philosophy is that by Buddy Seed, et al in their lengthy (15
pages) presentation of what the life of the philosopher and the need for doing and living philosophy by everyone
are. That article seems to be inspired by religion, more specifically Christianity (and Roman Catholicism?). It does
mention a number of important notions concerning the true philosopher, real philosophy and authentic
philosophizing. But eventually it appears, to me at least, as if it goes off into a flight or flights of fantasy or
phantasy.

It will be noted that I try to write in United Kingdom English, but that other spelling than UK English appears in for
instance US sources – I am aware of that but decided to leave it like that.

4 c)

3**

I can mention a few things that should serve as a warning to what I think, what I exclude from considering at this
stage and what I imagine to be meaningful and relevant enough to write down now.

Three of these things are, being aware of the fact that it is said that -

a)

Philosophy, especially at this stage, involves doubt and the sense of wonder - (This astonishment and wonder
could mislead one, being over-enthusiastic, into following misleading notions and practices.

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Plato said that "philosophy begins in wonder",[Plato, Theaetetus 155 d (tr. Benjamin Jowett)] a view which is
echoed by Aristotle: "It was their wonder, astonishment, that first led men to philosophize and still leads them."
[Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b12] Philosophizing may begin with some simple doubts about accepted beliefs. The
initial impulse to philosophize may arise from suspicion, for example that we do not fully understand, and have not
fully justified, even our most basic beliefs about the world.

Note that in what I expressed above these things are revealed, namely that I wonder about and am filled with
wonder as well as being astonished about certain things. But, at the same time I am, wise enough by now after
years of becoming involved in such ‘philosophically’ relevant things and being trapped by them, suspicious of what
I started to do here, again. I feel suspicious of what I do because I now know that I do not really know, that I do not
fully understand what I am involved with by writing this. Why am I writing this, what are my reasons, what are my
motives, what motivates me and what are the rationale for executing this.

First of all philosophizing to me always was a very personal and passionate affair - really one of the basic reasons to
be alive, giving meaning to me life.

This is why I emphasize the wonder of this activity, the euphoria of having insights - and that arrives non-stop as I
am a highly creative- and original thinking individual, apart from having an exceptional IQ, EQ etc.

Both the acts or experience of having or undergoing insights as well as the objects the insights are about fill me
with endless wonder, delight and astonishment. Much of this concerns not yet conceptualized or pre-conceptual
notions. As this occurs to me endlessly my life and experiences are very subtle, profound and vast. Because my life
consisted out of such insights, sets of them lead to me insights and so on.

b)

I reflect on these things, the process of insights, the things they are about etc, thus I grasped what is
According to Aristotle three levels of abstraction:

- First Degree of Abstraction: we consider things as dogs, cats, car, wood, etc.

(Natural Sciences)

- Second Degree of Abstraction: we consider things in terms of number

(Mathematics)

- Third Degree of Abstraction: we consider things as Being (Metaphysics).

Having different types of insights and from or in different discourses by means of different socio-cultural practices required me to
reflect on them and distinguish them - meta-reflection, if not always meta- philosophically relevant reflections.

So what did I do with those insights? Apart from the fact that they created in my mind, or as if my mind and ways of thinking, having
experience, perception and being conscious in general occurs in a very insightful, greatly differentiated and subtle frame/s of
reference.

So what did I do with such insights?

After having an insight, we can do something about it, i.e. we can articulate, clarify and deepen our understanding of our insight.

- Fr. Ferriols mentions 3 techniques in doing something with the insight: metaphor, analysis, and other techniques.

He says about this -

Metaphor (compare what Weick does with metaphors in theory construction and Cornelissen’s eight optimality principles)

- use of something familiar, ordinary to articulate, clarify, and deepen what is not

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familiar and ordinary.

Metaphor is very important because:

1. it fixes the insight in the mind

2. it sharpens the insight in the sense that:

- it clarifies the insight

- it makes us understand the insight more deeply

3. it enables us to understand the ordinary and familiar more deeply.

Analysis (something like Weick’s meaning construction, creation of new insights by conceptual and selection during through trials)

- We use analysis also to articulate, clarify and deepen our understanding of the

insight

- analysis:

- breaking down into parts

- breaking down the insight into the different elements or dimensions which

constitute it.

Other Techniques (compare Weick’s disciplined imagination)

- according to Paul Ricoeur:

- Symbol

- Myth

- Speculation (does this have anything in common with simulation? As employed for virtual experiments by Weick?)

We are given certain cautions for dealing with insights - Analysis could desiccate an insight

- analysis could dry up, fossilize the insight

- in other words, insight could cease to be alive, to be meaningful and relevant as

one subjects it to analysis.

ii. It is important to return to the concrete fullness of the original insight and insight should

permeate the whole process of doing with an insight. Why?

- to vitalize the insight

- to keep it alive, meaningful and relevant

- to prevent it from being fossilized, from being dried up.

- To check whether the analysis, metaphor or other technique of doing with

insight really leads to a clarification, articulation and deeper understanding of the insight

iii. Insight is inexhaustible

- one can explore and do something with the insight in variety of ways in order to

clarify, articulate and understand it

- but the insight itself is rich, superabundant such that it could never be exhausted

by any techniques; none of the them could fully and completely clarify, articulate, and

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understand the insight.

- In every doing with an insight, there is a tension between: sense of

knowledge/light and sense of ignorance/darkness

iv. The richness of insight is the richness of reality itself

- insight brings us to the very heart of reality, to the deeper aspect of reality

- reality itself is superabundantly rich, inexhaustible

- thus, the richness of insight points to, indicated the richness of reality itself

- reality as mystery

- there is a tension between light and darkness in our knowledge, understanding,

appropriation of reality.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/56238200/Lecture-1-The-Act-of-Philosophizing page 4
In the Throe of Wonder: Intimations of the Sacred in a Post-Modern World by Jerome A. Miller

“Insight” by Bernard Lonergan

This is the appropriate context to introduce false and misleading notions about philosophy, doing philosophy and philosophers.

"The Philosophical Enterprise" by John Kavanaugh

a. Introduction: False Notions of a Philosopher and Doing Philosophy

i. False Images/Caricature of a Philosopher

1. Isolated Thinker

- one who is confined, isolated within the walls of his rooms or sitting on a ivory

tower

- one who tries to make sense of the world which he is isolated from and which

he alone understands.

2. Great System Builder

- one who has built a great system of thought but now is relegated to obscure

footnotes and erudite commentaries

- one has to cite him in one's footnote in order to be considered learned, scholarly

but in fact he is difficult to understand.

3. Academician

- one who teaches courses in philosophy which seem to be not in touch with

present pressing realities and to be irrelevant to the demands of the day to day life.

ii. False notions in how a person conducts the discipline of philosophy

1. memorizing answers to questions which he himself never has asked or has ceased to ask

or which should have never been asked or never cares to ask

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- trying to remember what the philosopher said rather than trying to understand

what drove the philosopher to say those things in the first place

- consequently, philosophy courses will turn out being a big mistake on all levels:

experientially, pedagogically, and humanistically

2. isolated from other disciplines and sometimes reduced to the same level as other

disciplines

- study of philosophy in general, and of philosophy of man in particular is

conducted in isolation from social/behavioral and natural sciences, and other

disciplines

- thus, there is little connection between philosophy and history, myth, literature

or arts

- Why? some want philosophy to be "science", a respectable discipline with

subject and credential of its own. But as a consequence, it reduces philosophy on the

same level as other disciplines.

3. Being concerned with the problems of "the one and many", the development of logical

atomism, and linguistic or metaphysical analyses than with the fundamental questions of

meaning and the horizon of his possibilities as a man.

- to correct these false notions of a philosopher and of how philosophizing is to be

conducted, let us try to see philosophy as a Discipline of Questioning, Discipline of

Liberation, and Discipline of Personhood.

ibid. pages 4-5

More details, analysis and points of the wonder and astonishment mentioned by Plato and Aristotle, especially in so far as the
formulation of questions goes. How and why someone will ask questions and the wonder associated with this activity and
developing the ability of this attitude towards all experiences, people, the world, situations, one self and others.

Philosophizing as the Discipline of Questioning (note: at a later stage we will deal with an author who uses ‘inquiry’ instead of
questioning as the philosophical method)

- to understand the act of philosophizing, we must find out and understand first

what drives, moves, leads one to philosophize as sheer human exigency, i.e. very

necessary to human existence.

- What drives a person to philosophize is the inescapable dynamism and capacity

of the human person himself to question and to seek answers to questions he himself

raises.

- In short, at the root of all philosophizing is the pre-eminent personal affair of

question-asking.

i. Queston-Asking (Weick’s problem statements, requiring accuracy and going into details)

1. Question-asking is very common, at the heart of our day to day experience

- we could not escape, pass the day without asking question, without being

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confronted by a question

- we could not start nor finish the day without some questions

- Why? Because of our desire, our dynamism to:

- To be confronted by things outside of us (Experience)

- Know, understand the things we experience (Understanding): What is it?

- Find out the truth of what we come to understand (Judgment): Is it?

- Make decisions for what we do/act (Decision/Action): What should I do?

2. Different Levels 2.1 Horizontal/Superficial Questions

- questions of survival

- Where will I find money to pay my rent?

- What will I do to save myself from trouble?

- practical questions

- What will I do tomorrow?

- How do I use the computer?

- What shirt, shoes, pant will I wear?

- What are the advantages and disadvantages of VFA?

- scientific questions: Questions of facts and making sense of certain,

particular empirical reality

- How does the sun produce its heat and light?

- How does a computer work?

- Are there intelligent life-forms outside of our planet?

- Why is there a rainbow?

2.2 Vertical/Depth Questions

- questions of ultimate purpose and meaning

- questions of significance and meaning that enables us to perceive order

and harmony in the world as a whole, our place in the universe.

- E.g.:

- Where does the world as a whole come from?

- Why is there existence rather than non-existence?

- Why am I here? What is my place in the universe?

- Where am I going?

- question of truth/reality

- Is what I perceive, understand true? What makes it true?

- question of value

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- Is it good? What makes it good? What makes us truly happy?

- These are ultimate, fundamental questions in life:

- deeper questions, questions we ask even if our superficial questions are

answered; questions to which the superficial questions bring us ultimately if

we pursue the inner dynamics of questioning

- questions whose answers have bearing on our superficial questions,

questions which are the bases/foundations of our horizontal questions.

ii. Personal Affair of Asking Depth-Question

1. I myself have come to these depth-questions

- I myself see them as questions, as problems

- They are really questions/issues for me.

2. The depth-questions are really of personal value to me

- the answer to these questions are of great value to me: significant, important,

would make a difference in my life

- such that these questions:

- consume my entire person: my intellect, my will, my effort, my time,

my body

- no let up till I find the answers

3. Starting point of all the depth-questions is my own person.

- behind, at the center and the beginning of all depth questions: questions about

MYSELF, AS A HUMAN PERSON

- Question of Meaning and Purpose: Why am I here? What can I hope for?

- Question of Truth: Who am I really? What are my potentialities? My

uniqueness?

- Question of Value: What is my good, my happiness? What should I do? What is

the criterion in deciding what is good or not, my happiness or not?

iii. Conclusion: Greatness of philosophy lies in perpetual questioning

- philosophy does not begin with an answer/insight but a question

- it continues because we still continue to ask questions, particularly depth questions

- and the answers to our questions do not stop the question-asking but spur one to

further search for a better answer, to ask for further, deeper or different questions.

- Thus, philosophy is music of the fugue: incessant counterpoint of questioning and answering them.

4 d)

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The notions in this last paragraph (I refer to point 3 from the beginning here **) should be conceptualized
more clearly and then analysed in much greater detail and depth. (As Weick suggests that accuracy and
great detail are required when making problem statements) So on to certain warnings contained in

c)

Jonathan Ichikawa, Arché Philosophical Research Centre, University of St Andrews reviewed Chris Daly’s

An Introduction to Philosophical Methods, Broadview Press, 2010, 257pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781551119342 here

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24675-an-introduction-to-philosophical-methods.

By the way see sentences 2 and 3 in the first paragraph that stun me with their beauty: “Even setting aside their notorious
epistemological challenges, attempts to understand philosophical investigation” and " And more inclusive
discussions of the methodology of philosophy run the risk of generating lists of tautologies - ...etc. - rather than
informative treatments of how philosophy ought to proceed.” This OUGHT surely is another problem and a very
large one?

Daly does not attempt a unifying statement of the nature or methodology of philosophy. “..... instead electing for
what he calls (p. 11) a 'twin track' approach, considering particular methods and kinds of data that philosophers
sometimes appear to use, and pairing descriptions of such methods with various case studies intended to illustrate
them”.

I quote these reviewing statements as they express what I wrote above concerning my present writing’s ‘cause’,
my astonishment and wonder, and that Daly wisely steered clear from that. What he does attempt, according to
Ichikawa is employ a “restricted strategy does seem advisable; the nature of philosophy is best understood
through methodologically reflective first-order philosophical practice.” (What is the nature of this practice? Does
it resemble any aspects or stages of theorizing?)

Here follows Ichikawa’s warning and criticism of the shortcomings of Daly’s approach/book: “However, its
proponent does run the risk of having little of interest, and little distinctive of philosophy, to say, thus succumbing
to the latter horn of the dilemma set out above. Daly's book does, to some extent, so succumb.” Ichikawa refers to
his 3 rd sentence in the first paragraph: “And more inclusive discussions of the methodology of philosophy run
the risk of generating lists of tautologies -- believe according to the evidence, make good inferences, do not beg
questions against dialectical opponents, etc.” (Surely there are other aspects of the methods of doing or
philosophizing that are not mere tautologies, but that are doing different things and that have other purposes?
Such aspects could fit in at different stages of the process of theorizing. That is, they are not mere tautologies but
have very functions for the process of philosophical ‘theorizing’? If there is such a thing or if we can apply the word
theorizing to what philosophers do or attempt to do?)

Ichikawa then criticizes Daly for NOT having done the following: "Daly does little in the book to characterize how
he thinks philosophy might differ from other kinds of engagement. (How does it differ and from what other
‘engagements’? And what kind of standards or ideas will be employed to make such judgements?) The extended
discussion of science in Chapter Six considers how science may bear on philosophy but does not engage with how
it is and is not similar. He does point out (p. 1) that philosophers are unlike scientists in that they do not use
laboratory tools to run experiments, but this does little to distinguish philosophy in particular.” He then states
what Daly said he IS going to do: " Since the central puzzle motivating the book, as given in the introductory pages,
involves the juxtaposition of, first, the propensity of philosophers to, to use Daly's term, 'make various claims'
with, second, their neglect of laboratory experiments.” He suggests that: "a more forceful introduction to the
present book might include a discussion of to what extent, if any, the questions raised are particularly pressing for
philosophy.” Well Daly did NOT do that. (Are these claims made by philosophers hypotheses, or having the

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function and nature of hypotheses? Are they generalizations? Often they are merely the results of conceptual
analysis and linguistic usage and not ‘theoretical’ statements or conclusions)

On page 11 Daly mentioned his approach: " he calls (p. 11) a 'twin track' approach, considering particular methods
and kinds of data that philosophers sometimes appear to use, and pairing descriptions of such methods with
various case studies intended to illustrate them. This restricted strategy does seem advisable; the nature of
philosophy is best understood through methodologically reflective first-order philosophical practice.” (The kind
of data philosophers use will be part of the very first step of theorizing namely data collection, or as some authors
refer to it ‘brain dump’. But let us see what Daly means by the ‘methods’ philosophers use and if they constitute
the process of theorizing or if they are merely one aspects of this process. The same questions concerning
theorizing can be asked of the philosophical reflective practice. Is it the entire process of theorizing or merely some
features of this process? Already we can begin to see that philosophers must study the nature of theorizing and
the process of theorizing. Such investigations will assist them to reflect on what they do when they philosophize as
they will be more clear on what they are doing and what they are doing at different stages of philosophizing or
steps when doing philosophy – if they could compare such activities with the different stages of theorizing and the
function and purpose of each stage in this process. Philosophers, especially if one sees how Daly interprets what
they are doing, are unclear about the different stages of doing philosophy as well as the purpose of each of these
stages, and when they are executing a particular stage.)

“The book comprises six chapters, plus a brief introduction and conclusion. Each chapter involves an initial set of
methodological questions and consideration of one or more case studies designed to illustrate how the
questions bear on philosophical methodology. (All this, a sort of listing of what philosophical methods and
methodology are, appears to me very haphazard. This is why I wish to explore these things in terms of the aspects
of the process of theorizing. Philosophers will then be able to compare what they are doing in general with this
process and what they do at a particular stage they can compare to a particular step or stage in the process of
theorizing. Such comparisons, a sort of meta-activity, executed all along their first order philosophical activities,
will assist them to be clear about what they are doing in general and at a certain stage or in a particular context. )
For example, the first chapter, 'Common Sense', opens with questions about the nature and significance of
common sense claims, then focuses primarily on G. E. Moore's application of common sense arguments to
philosophical questions, with particular emphasis on his infamously straightforward attempted proof of the
external world.”( Did Moore execute something like virtual experiments, one aspect of theorizing? Does what
Moore did here resemble aspects of thought trials and simulations with different ideas and aims in mind?)

"it was not clear to me why Daly chose the topics he did” one question

“and what unifies the work as a whole.” another separate question.

“The longest chapter of the book, the 62-page Chapter Two, 'Analysis', considers several attempts to analyze the
notion of philosophical analysis and finds them inadequate in various respects before finally concluding very
briefly (on p. 100) that the notion of analysis is not after all an interesting (This is truly and odd thing to say as
‘analysis’ has been for almost a century THE method employed by much of western philosophy. Perhaps Daly does
not get very far in understanding the nature and aspects of the process and activity of analysis because to be able
to understand it one should see it in the larger context of what philosophy is and what philosophizing is trying to
do – its aims and purposes? If he were to view it in the larger context or framework of philosophy as almost some
kind of theorizing, he might be ale to reflect in a meta-manner more meaningfully on the first-order philosophical
activity of ‘analysis’. I write ‘analysis’ as to me it appears to be many things, this word refers to many different
conflated stages and features of the process of theorizing. Aspects and stages that need to be distinguished,
identified and explicitly conceptualized and not merely being lumped together as ‘analysis’.)

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one for the purpose of understanding the methodology of philosophy. (But it does fit in somewhere in the
process of theorizing, even if only as one feature of it) Although I agree with Daly's conclusion here, students
engaging with the book will wonder, as I did, why we spent so much time on a question that was ultimately to be
dismissed? “ another (type) question

"The third chapter is devoted to 'Thought Experiment'. (these are something like metaphysical variations,
simulations and other aspects of Weick’s thought trials. Such trials have many functions.) It begins with general
questions about the nature and value of thought experiments before giving brief introductions to seventeen well-
known examples of thought experiments, plus a more extended case study of thought experiments involving
personal identity. (Daly rejects the notion and tool of thought trials or simulated experiments as relevant to
philosophizing. The mistake he makes is merely listing the seventeen different types, he should instead look at
their function. Not merely in isolation, as one aspect, one feature of doing philosophy. If he were to see the doing
of philosophy as resembling the process/es of theorizing he would be able to execute such observations in a much
clearer and more accurate manner. Then thought trials or simulated experiments will be seen as relevant to
philosophizing, as a certain feature or aspect of this activity, at a particular stage of doing philosophy.)

“Daly concludes: "chapter (pp. 127-8) with what he calls the 'tentative and speculative sceptical proposal' (what
is the theoretical status, function and nature of Daly’s ‘proposal/s? Are they hypotheses? Conjectures or what are
they?) that use of intuition and consideration of hypothetical cases (again, I wish to suggest that Daly makes this
mistake, have this misunderstanding, because he sees these things, these techniques in isolation, while he should
instead view them in context as one aspect and one stage in the larger process of philosophizing.) are irrelevant to
philosophical questions”.(But according to Weick they form an important aspect of theorizing, especially as
thought trials and virtual experiments. I would like to know more about these so-called ‘philosophical questions’.
They are not mere isolated phenomena, but crucial tools and techniques. Furthermore they take different forms or
have different functions ate different stages of the process of philosophizing That is why I state that they are not
mere isolated phenomena, one type of identical object, instead, they take on many differ forms, or rather they are
of many different – functional - types.) At least we can now exclude them as relevant and necessary to
philosophizing and philosophical methodology!

" Daly suggests that we dispense with thought experiments and intuitions and observe only that knowledge and
reliably produced true belief are in fact coextensive. (To me it seems as if Daly here merely repeats uncritically
some notion from philosophical history as if it is a universal and absolute truth, without detailing it or arguing for
it. And to reject the crucial tools of thought experiments and ‘intuitions’ - whatever this word means, it need to be
analysed to discover what it means and how it functions in this context as Weick also asserts it positive value - on
the basis of that notion – knowledge is true belief or vice versa – is not very enlightening and unsound.) Then we
may infer to the best explanation that they are identical. This very radical suggestion raises many serious
questions which go unaddressed.....” (Here Daly states generalizations and unfounded hypotheses.)

Ichikawa questions Daly on the following: "can one correlate actual cases of knowledge to reliably produced true
belief without making use of the sorts of intuitions Daly wants to set aside?” Ichikawa gives a suggestion by means
of a question that, he thinks, refutes what Daly states. This is not very important to me. The following is his
judgement on Daly’s hypothesis of/for setting intuitions aside. “The two paragraphs Daly devotes to his 'sceptical
proposal' --.... -- are not adequate to the extreme view articulated,” (Note that in chapter Four Daly does deal with
hypotheses and their selection. He does not deal with this in detail but instead comes to a conclusion that
simplicity for selecting hypotheses are too restricted a standard, so I suppose we have to employ complexity as
standard to evaluate hypotheses? Weick deals with this when he describes judgment of conjectures, employing
the application of selection criteria).

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"Next is Chapter Four, 'Simplicity', which examines how considerations of simplicity and complexity bear on
appropriate selection of hypotheses; the main focus is on various interpretations of Occam's Razor. Daly's
conclusion here (p. 152) is that given the various notions of simplicity available, and given the availability of
reasons to tolerate complex hypotheses, considerations of simplicity are 'quite restricted' in their applicability to
philosophical methodology.” I personally cannot see the point and relevance of this?

"In Chapter Five ('Explanation'), Daly considers the extent to which philosophical theories do and should explain.
(Here Daly use the word theory for philosophical ‘systems’.) In particular, he considers the suggestion that, when
choosing between hypotheses, we should select that which offers the best explanation of the relevant
phenomena. (Here he talks about choosing between hypotheses and selection of the best one because it gives the
best explanation. But there is much more than this choosing on the basis of the best explanation – Weick talks
about conjectures and their refutation and judgement. This is a complex issue and requires detailed investigation
so as to develop an idea and understanding of how hypotheses function, what they are and what their elation with
the ‘things to be explained are’. Merely stating that one or some hypotheses can give a better ‘explanation’ is not
good enough. Some of the questions that need to be asked are: how does hypotheses explain, explain what?
Selected data, domains, collections or contexts of data, and what is the nature of the explanatory relationship
between hypotheses and ‘the data’ it explains? In other words, how are hypotheses related to the data or things it
explains?) Of course, there are difficult and interesting questions about just what explanation consists in, how to
distinguish cases of explanation from non-explanation, and how to determine which of various competing
explanations is in the relevant sense 'better'. (Here my own questions about explanation are stated by Ichikawa as
well.) Daly says little about these questions, noting (p. 180) that 'the strategy of inference to the best explanation
needs to be supplemented not only by detailed accounts of each of the theoretical virtues, but also by a detailed
account of how to make a rational theory choice in [various cases].' (This is a very important point – a rational
choice. How will this work, what will be the standard to make such a choice? Daly glosses over all the complex
questions concerning explanation to the theoretical virtues of – whatever that means? Explanation as one tool at a
certain stage of the process of theorizing? – and the tool of ‘rational theory choice’. A number of complex issues
are covered by this notion, for example: rational, theory, rational theory, choice, rational theory choice. These
complex notions need to be analysed in detail and it is necessary to take note of investigations in the areas of
rational choice theory. An ‘how’ to make a rational theory choice? At what stage of their ‘analysis’ or doing
philosophy will philosophers employ this rational theory choice tool? Will or do they analyse what the nature of
this tool is on every occasion and in each context they employ it? What are the standards employed by rational
theory choice tools? And what arguments can be made, in each context, for its valid use? )

This is surely right; but absent any such detailed account -- or even a vague, impressionistic account -- the
suggestion threatens to be all but empty.” Again I fail to see any significant point in this for philosophical
methodology. (Here my own questions and queries concerning rational choice theory tools are summed up.)

"Chapter Six, 'Science', is not about science per se, but instead considers the bearing of science on philosophy.
The bulk of the chapter consists in putting forward and criticizing arguments for naturalism, which Daly officially
characterizes as 'The view that scientific methods and results are valuable, or even indispensable, to philosophy.'
I would like to know more about the reasons for this claim and in which ways such things are indispensable,
functional, useful to philosophy? Do they keep philosophers informed in general and/or about the approaches of
sciences, or about particular results, facts from, science? (I also would like to know what Daly here means by
scientific methods? And in which ways are they, and their results, valuable, meaningful, functional and useful to
the philosophical discourse, the practice of philosophizing and philosophical ‘knowledge’ and understanding? Are
scientific results valuable and indispensable to philosophy and philosophizing? How are they? How are they
connected to these philosophical practices and understanding?)

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“However, he also cautions the reader that 'no single view can be identified with naturalism.' (p. 188)
Unfortunately, in much of the ensuing discussion, Daly does not keep various naturalist theses distinct, in several
dimensions. For instance, Daly argues against naturalizing epistemology in part by claiming (p. 199) that the
psychological claims that might be of relevance to epistemology -- our susceptibility to various errors in
perception, reasoning, etc. -- consist largely in 'something we already knew, at least in broad outline'. While this
may provide some insulation against the methodological suggestion that one must formally study psychology in
order to do epistemology responsibly, it does not show, as Daly suggests it does, that scientific information is
not relevant to epistemology. This point is particularly clear if one considers how, by parity of reasoning, one
could argue from the fact cited above -- common sense already told us that we perform less well epistemically in
certain kinds of environments -- that the data provided by science is not relevant to cognitive psychology. In both
cases, philosophy and cognitive psychology, that common sense already delivered the broad outlines of the
relevant information is a non sequitur with respect to the general bearing of scientific evidence.

Daly also seems at times to conflate the suggestion that scientific work bears on philosophical questions ('it is
perfectly appropriate to draw on the resources (e.g.) of science', p. 200, quoting Hilary Kornblith) with the
suggestion that scientific evidence and methodology are sufficient for resolving the relevant philosophical
questions (a 'discipline or theory can generate a problem but it does not follow that its resources are sufficient to
solve that problem', p. 202).” This seems a bit confusing to me. To me the more serious question is - which aspects
of science, science’s methods, methodologies are relevant to philosophy/izing and why is it the case, how does it
work?

"After these six chapters, Daly gives a three-and-a-half page conclusion that puts forward two more general ideas
about philosophy.

The first is that although there is philosophical debate about what data and methods are appropriate to the
practice of philosophy (of course there is and there will always be as it depends on particular cases and it is
impossible to generalize outside a specific contact which data and which method are applicable to the doing of
philosophy in a particular context at a specific stage of the doing of philosophy), it is permissible when engaging in
first-order philosophy to proceed from contentious or debatable assumptions” I cannot accept the latter as one
would have to look at particular cases of such debatable assumptions. (One would first of all have to explore the
nature of assumptions and how they function. Then one would have to investigate the nature of a particular
assumption, its functions and the implications of accepting and employing it in a specific philosophical context.)

."This claim does sit in some obvious prima facie tension with various accusations throughout the book -- for
instance, on pp. 27, 33, 115, and 177 -- that certain arguments beg questions in pernicious ways, and with the
statement on p. 115 that 'begging the question is a defect in any piece of reasoning'. This tension is not
explored.[1]

The second idea of the conclusion is that often a method of cost-benefit analysis is appropriate to choosing
between philosophical theories. (It is essential to investigate what this means, to identify meaningful, if any,
aspects of this statements and then develop and re-state them in a clear manner.) This idea, while plausible and
useful, is not obviously connected to or developed from the discussion of the main text.” Ichikawa questions Daly’s
suggestion or statement on other grounds, namely that Daly itself contradicted it earlier in his book. I cannot see
the point of Daly’s second idea, while Ichikawa is concerned about the fact that it is/was not developed in the main
text. The latter to me is irrelevant as the whole second idea, as it stands, is irrelevant to philosophizing. If Daly took
note of the process of theorizing and its different aspects and stages and tools being employed at those stages he
would not need to make this bizarre statement. ‘Choosing between’ philosophical, or any type, of theories is
complex. This statements appears to be meta-theoretical, as when working in terms of or internally to the process
of theorizing one does not have such theories to choose between. It requires a theoretical enquiry of its own,

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during which standards for choosing between theories will be suggested, as data to be investigated and then the
entire process of theorizing will be executed so as to investigate and theorize about the nature of ‘choosing
between…’ theories. However one would have to know which particular theories in what context one will have to
choose between and what the standards for making such choices are. Furthermore, I did not know that philosophy
has theories? What are these philosophical theories? Do they consist of proven hypotheses? Are they
generalizations? How did they come about?

In general, Daly's writing style is reasonably clear, although he does tend to transition rather suddenly from
general conversational tones to more technical ones that might confuse or intimidate students. This happens most
often when he draws on work from other academics that speaks to the issues he has introduced.” This point I
have often seen in philosophical writing - employing the work of other academics, so as not to have to argue for a
certain ‘idea’. But is IT a (useful? meaningful?) “philosophical” (writing) tool (I suppose?).

“this often includes the incorporation of direct quotation, which is not always clearly extracted or explained”

This is one, of several, ways of academic writing that Sutton and Staw questioned in ‘Theory or not” and is dealt
with somewhere else in this article.

Ichikawa then writes more on this criticism and continues with it below:

“Although Daly notes that this cannot constitute a criterion for common sense, since some Moorean certainties
are not directly observational (the earth has existed for centuries, etc.), he suggests -- citing, but not explaining
(another issue dealt with by Sutton and Staw), Campbell -- that the empirical questions might nevertheless help.
Few students at an introductory level could, I suspect, engage this passage with anything like full clarity without
quite a lot of guidance. This is a representative pattern that occurs many times in the book. (E.g., a detour from
common sense into a discussion of Michael Dummett and a distinction between belief and acceptance on p. 19; a
presentation of Steven Rieber's application of a technical notion of semantic structure to bear on questions of
analysis on p. 66; the consideration of a dialectic between Kathleen Wilkes and James Robert Brown on personal
identity on p. 118.)

More advanced students or researchers will have an easier time following these parts of the book, but they, I
think, will be frustrated by the superficial treatments of the interesting issues raised in the case studies. And in
some instances, these latter seem also to involve philosophical errors and confusions (for example, in the
discussions of the Euthyphro’s famous argument about piety and god-lovedness and of David Lewis’s modal
realism).

The book would also have benefitted from more careful editing; there are a surprising number of typos -- including
one on the first page of the introduction -- and grammatical/structural errors. These are not serious philosophical
matters, of course, and would easily be fixed; I mention them because an introductory text read by philosophy
students will provide a model for their own writing, and it is best to expose them to writing of the highest technical
quality.

An Introduction to Philosophical Methods does touch upon many issues worthy of engagement, and Daly does
seem to have done well in selecting the relevant literature to consider with respect to each of his chosen topics. As

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a result, the references and bibliography in this book will be useful for philosophers looking for guidance in their
early research efforts. But with respect to its central aim as an introduction to philosophical methodology, the
book falls short.

My own problem with Daly is that he does not take note of the nature of the process of theorizing and work on
this topic. If he read about the nature and the process of theorizing he would have perceived and executed his
book in a different manner. He does not have to agree with or accept my idea that philosophizing reveals many
aspects of the process of theorizing, but some of his main ideas fits in somewhere on the continuum and in the
process of theorizing and he does mention the word theory and even philosophical theory in a few places in his
book. If he knew even a little about the stages of theorizing he would have been aware when he dealt with an
issue that really expresses a certain feature or stage of theorizing and that their do exist, are institutionalized,
terms for the issue he deals with. In short he and others should inform themselves about theorizing, the general
stages of the process of theorizing and some of the terms that are employed for features of this phenomena.

[1] Daly suggests (p. 158) that 'tension' in contexts like this is 'a weasel word' that should be avoided because it is
unclear what exactly it is meant to convey. I do not agree that this sort of language is in general inappropriately
vague. At any rate, in this instance, when I say that these elements of Daly's view are 'in tension,' I mean that there
is sufficient prima facie conflict such that someone averring both views ought to recognize that they constitute a
surprising conjunction and remark on how, contrary to appearance, they may be consistent and mutually well-
motivated. I suspect this is approximately what most philosophers mean when they say that various claims are
'in tension' with one another.” So clarify what they DO mean.

I quote, with my highlights, what I consider to be distracting in philosophizing. This person refers to these things
that I object to as philosophical methods. I object to them when you see the contexts he employs them in and the
topics he applies them to. Philosophical methods? Strategies? Technique for/of Reasoning and explanation? He
uses these different philosophical ‘methods’ (he calls them) in isolation. I would refer to them as techniques or
tools. Furthermore, they should not be seen in isolation – as useful tools in particular contexts or for dealing with
some specific issue or topic or ‘problem’ – but in the context of the process of philosophizing. That is as
instruments, procedures, tools or techniques being employed (for specific reason as they have explicit functions) at
particular steps or in specific stages of philosophizing as a more general process of almost ‘theorizing, if not full
blown theorizing.

http://simsphilosophy.blogspot.co.za/2007/05/reflection-essay-on-philosophical.html

Reflection on Philosophical Methodologies

I think I have applied most of these philosophical methodologies in philosophy classes. First off, the logical
analysis is a method we employed in various exercises for my reasoning class. The conceptual analysis is
something I am doing quite a bit of right now in my European Contemporary Thought class through examining
such terms as “democracy”, “freedom” and “sovereignty”. I also experience this methodology through some of the
Save Our Constitution panel discussions. I took a whole course basically just about the method of deconstruction
in the Sociology of Knowledge class I took last semester. Phenomenology and one that is not on here but seems
quite similar to phenomenology, “introspection”, is something I have been doing on my own since I was
seventeen. It is, in many respects, my self-therapy as I struggle to reflect on my life experiences and the meanings
or lack thereof that they so entail. Also, in a class I am taking now, Feminist Philosophies, we were just reading an

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essay by Iris Marion Young titled Menstrual Meditations, where young talks a lot about where young talks a lot
about Heidegger’s methodology of exploring oneself by going into and through and reflecting upon one’s
moods. The Philosopher as Public Intellectual is a method that I would like to utilize more often, especially once I
am out of school. The example I have given through my article about democracy matters I actually got published a
few weeks ago in the hill news. In all, I think I have applied most, if not all, of these methods whether in courses or
just in my everyday life.

A couple methods that I would like to explore in more depth in my own philosophical activities are the philosophy
as conversation method and the two respective comparative methods. I believe these two methods could be
synthesized in a way as to facilitate a true dialectic between a diversity of philosophical positions. All too often
philosophy is only talking to itself. While the comparative methods might still be subject to this problematic I
believe the philosophy as conversation method could really serve as useful tool to bridge the gap between the
formally philosophical and everyday experiences. The comparative method is one that I in fact employed in my
first philosophy class called Humanities which I had in my senior year in high school. I believe this method is most
necessary in terms of its political implications. I say this because the current methods of “Identity Politics” have
fragmentized and specialized the Left in comparison to the what I would consider the over-specialization of
academia. While particular groups on the left such as women’s liberation, civil rights, socialists, gay rights and
environmental organizations fight for their own particular ends, they all too often fail to form coalitions as they
instead fight (both internally within organization and externally between different movements) for the same
resources and media attention. I firmly believe that the Left needs to bridge this gap if it ever hopes to achieve any
of its particular goals in a sustainable way. Thus, if I choose to return to academia my work will most surely focus
on making these connections and explicit comparisons between different social movements and between different
philosophies.

I think if there is one method here that most reflects my own philosophical work it would be either
phenomenology or deconstruction. As I already mentioned I think I’ve been doing phenomenology for some time
now, and I believe in the necessity of looking critically and reflectively first and foremost at one’s own experiences.
I believe that the deconstruction and phenomenological method are implicit within one another. If there was
anything I learned in Sociology of knowledge it is the reciprocity by which our epistemology is created and
legitimized by particular subjectivities with particular intentions (usually power). Only by understanding how
one’s own sincere intentions figure into this power struggle can one begin to determine how to change the system.
One cannot do this by simple abstraction for there is no view from nowhere. The key is to be honest with oneself
and one’s intentionality, for it is my contention that only from within the system may the system ever be altered.”

The writer makes statements and do not present any grounds or arguments for them

http://www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/WDGroupsubpages/stories/four_approaches_to_philosophy.htm

This article presents us with what the author claims are Four Approaches to Philosophy.

His summary:

Summary:

Few people care to study or understand logic due to everyone believing that they are skilled enough in the art of
reasoning. Logicality is one of our most useful qualities. There are four main approaches to philosophy.

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1. If you can not prove something is real, then it does not lead to a contrary conclusion, but it is still seen as being
harmonious in the aspects of method and conception.

2. There is one thing in which a proposition should and will in most cases confirm. This means that no one can
doubt realities because it would not be a source of dissatisfaction. The hypothesis is then something that
everyone must agree on and admit.

3. Everyone uses the scientific method for many things and only not use it when one does not know how to apply
it to the situation.

4. Using or gaining experience of the method does not make us want to use it but helps us settle our opinions.
Because of its many splendid triumphs, it has become a permanent part of our lives.

The fourth method is the only one that displays the distinction of right and wrong. By adopting the method of
tenacity, you are taking away any doubt in which you might come upon. We adopt whatever belief that we are
most accustomed to until we are awakened by the harsh realities which cause us to down spiral into the so called
'real world'. Authority is the method in which mankind will always be ruled. The other methods do have their
importance and truths, but this method is the one that will never change.

He then continues to provide us with an ‘analysis” -

Tenacity

The first method Pierce names is tenacity, which is characterized by clinging to a particular belief with complete
disregard to all evidence or reason that may imply that it is incorrect. While this is an effective method in that it
allows for action and decision without hesitation, it is limited by the fact that other people will inevitably
tenaciously cling to different beliefs, casting doubt and disunity. After all, it is hard to believe absolutely in one
thing and deny all other reason when you are surrounded by people who hold different beliefs to be just as true.

To resolve this problem, the second method of authority is formed. It ensures that everyone tenaciously holds to
the same belief..

people will inevitably see that other authorities practice different doctrines, and will therefore question their own
authority.

A third method, a priori, accounts for this. It is the method of choosing whatever opinion or truth is most pleasing
at the time. This allows for quick and easy satisfaction to the problem of "who is right?"

All of these methods are flawed, however, for several reasons. They do not distinguish between a right and
wrong method. The a priori method, which derives from the first two, will eventually leave doubt in regard to the
validity of the opinion ("sure, it feels good, but is it truly correct?"). For these reasons it becomes necessary to
develop a method that removes the "human" factor from the equation and leaves only the raw facts. This is the
scientific method, which operates off of the belief that regular laws affect the world and are completely

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independent of our opinions about them. By observing these laws and their interactions with the world, it is
possible to come to a valid conclusion.

These methods are interlinked. We always allow our opinions to be determined by something; be it a particular
belief, an authority, what strikes us at the moment, or science. Peirce argues that humans need a scientific
authority because we are self centered and view the world in a biased way.

...Science itself is influenced by our flawed nature....Thus, Peirce's argument deserves a qualification: with the
scientific method, we move constantly towards a greater knowledge and more "valid" opinions based on our
ever more accurate (and yet never perfect) perspective of the world.

http://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-Methods/FormalMethodsNotes2013.pdf

Formal Methods in Philosophy

Lecture Notes — 2013

Dr. Anders J. Schoubye

School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

University of Edinburgh

anders.schoubye@ed.ac.uk

See the Contents of this lecture and judge for yourself the assumption underlying this piece. This piece is obviously
for those who have one, very selective notion of philosophy and philosophizing. That is fine as only those who
share this narrow idea will take notice of and be able to understand the details of this ‘philosophical’ ‘method’. I
wish this article could take of theorizing and situate its ideas somewhere in the process of theorizing instead of
standing on its own and in isolation.

Contents

Preface

1 Summary: First Order Logic

1.1

First Order Logic (FOL) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.1.1

Primitive Vocabulary of

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.1.2

Syntax of

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.1.3

Variable Binding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.1.4

Semantics and Models for

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.1.5

Variables in

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.1.6

Valuations and Truth-in-a-Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1.1.7

Validity and Logical Consequence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2 Set Theory

2.1

Na

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ıve Set Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2.1.1

Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2.1.2

Basic Axioms of Na

ıve Set Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2.1.3

Empty Set, Singleton Sets, and Pairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2.1.4

Subsets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2.1.5

Intersection and Union . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2.1.6

Ordered Pairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

10

2.1.7

Cartesian Products . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

10

2.1.8

Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

11

2.2

Russell’s Paradox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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15

3 Zermelo–Fraenkel Set Theory

17

3.1

Cumulative Set Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17

3.1.1

The Intuitive Picture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17

3.1.2

The Axioms of ZFC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

18

3.1.3

Sizes of Infinite Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

23

3.1.4

Cardinality and One-to-One Correspondence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

23

4 Modal Logic

25

4.1

Modal Logic: Necessity and Possibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25

4.1.1

Modals in Natural Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

26

4.2

Grammar of Modal Propositional Logic (MPL) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

26

4.2.1

Primitive Vocabulary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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27

4.2.2

Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27

4.2.3

Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27

4.2.4

The Problem with a Truth Functional Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

28

4.3

Modal Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

30

4.3.1

Validity and Consequence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

31

4.4

Establishing Validities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

32

4.5

Invalidity and Counter models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

34

4.5.1

Graphical Procedure for Demonstrating Invalidity . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

35

4.6

Axiomatic Proof Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

39

4.6.1

System K . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

39

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4.6.2

System D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

44

4.6.3

System T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

44

4.6.4

System B . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45

4.6.5

System S4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45

4.6.6

System S5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

46

4.7

Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

46

5 Counterfactuals

49

5.1

Counterfactuals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

49

5.2

The Behavior of Natural Language Counterfactuals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

49

5.3

The Lewis-Stalnaker Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

52

5.4

Stalnaker’s System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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53

5.4.1

Primitive Vocabulary of SC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53

5.4.2

Syntax of SC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53

5.4.3

Semantics and Models for SC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53

5.4.4

Semantic Validity Proofs in

SC

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

56

5.4.5

Semantic Invalidity in

SC

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57

5.4.6

Logical Features of

SC

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57

5.5

Lewis Criticism of Stalnaker’s System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

60

5.5.1

Lewis’ System (LC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

62

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5.6

Disjunctive Antecedents: Problems for Stalnaker and Lewis . . . . . . . . . . . . .

63

6 Decision Theory

65

6.1

Decision and Game Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

65

6.1.1

Some (famous) Decision Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

66

6.2

Dominance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

68

6.3

States, Choices, and Independence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

68

6.4

Maximax and Maximin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69

6.5

Ordinal vs. Cardinal Utilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

70

6.6

Do What Is Likely To Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

72

7 Probability Theory

75

7.1

Probability and Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

75

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7.2

Propositions and Probabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

78

7.3

Axioms of Probability Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

79

7.4

Conditional Probability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

80

7.5

Conditionalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

83

7.6

Probabilities: Independence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

84

7.7

Correlation vs. Causation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

85

8 Utility and Probability

91

8.1

Utilities and Expected Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

91

8.2

Maximise Expected Utility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

92

8.3

Properties of the Maximise Expected Utility Rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

93

8.4

A More General Version of Dominance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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94

8.5

The Sure Thing Principle and the Allais Paradox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

95

8.6

Interpretations of Probability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

97

8.6.1

Probabilities as Frequencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

97

8.6.2

Degrees of Beliefs — Bayesianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

98

8.6.3

Evidential Probability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

8.6.4

Objective Chance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

9 More on Utility

103

9.1

Declining Marginal Utility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

9.1.1

Insurance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

9.2

Utility and Welfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

9.2.1

Experience Based Theories of Welfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

9.2.2

Objective List Theories of Welfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

9.2.3

Preference Theories of Welfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

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10 Newcomb’s Problem

109

10.1 Solutions to Newcomb’s Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

10.2 Two (potentially) Conflicting Decision Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

10.2.1 Arguments for 2-Boxing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

10.3 Causal vs. Evidential Decision Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

10.3.1 Arguments for Evidential Decision Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

11 Framing Effects

119

11.1 Risk Aversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

11.1.1 Gains vs. Losses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

11.2 Outcome Framing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

11.2.1 The Psychophysics of Chances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

11.2.2 Normative vs. Descriptive Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

https://onemorebrown.com/2008/08/15/the-philosophical-method/

It seems to me that philosophy is distinguished from other endeavours by the method that it adopts. This is not
unusual, as science is usually identified by the scientific method. But what is the philosophical method? This
question is obviously controversial but I think a good case can be made that the philosophical method involves a
commitment to reason and argument as a source of knowledge.

Well there you have it!

More on this in a later section

The Method of Philosophy Is the Method of Inquiry

Posted on 7 November, 2013

In my earlier post on the method of philosophy I made several negative claims: the method of philosophy is not
based on intuitions or reflective equilibrium, it’s not random speculating, and it’s also not just about arguments.
Today I’m going to motivate a little maxim that I’ve been mumbling to myself for a few years: that the method of
philosophy is the method of inquiry.

What do I mean by ‘inquiry’? By ‘inquiry,’ I mean something like the deliberate project of understanding the world
(including ourselves) better. Sometimes this is done in order to accomplish a specific goal, like curing polio or

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building bridges, and sometimes it’s not. I take it that building the Large Hadron Collider and looking for the Higgs
boson is an example of the latter kind, although there have been highly practical discoveries along the way and this
was always a part of the plan. At its best moments, the academy (I don’t mean the Academy, but academia, the
worldwide system of universities and other institutions of higher learning) is an institution dedicated to furthering
inquiry and disseminating the resulting understanding to students and others. I am tempted to think of inquiry as a
distinctively human project (as far as we know).

Nothing needs to be said about this?

--------------------------------

The Method of Philosophy: Making Distinctions. - School of Philosophy

philosophy.cua.edu/.../The Method of Philosophy Making Distinction...

lies in its method The method of philosophical thinking is not obvious; we think we have ... I wish to help clarify
what philosophy is by discussing its method.

As critique of the following article I highlighted certain phrases, while ignoring other parts as merely misleading
and/or distracting. This individual should read about theorizing and then apply some of the stages of it to his own
confused views on the practice or doing of philosophy and its ‘method’.

http://www.csudh.edu/phenom_studies/methods_phil/lect_2.htm

2. Methods in Philosophy

As long as we understand philosophy is "questioning search," and thus (???) "pursuit of knowledge," this search is
not the end product of such a search as a bulk of knowledge or information. On the contrary, any pursuit of
knowledge, as long as we are finite, mortal human-beings and it searches for knowledge, this pursuit is a rather
"endless" process. It is the process starting from "here," from this starting point of the self awareness of one's own
ignorance.

§ 2-1-1. Method in General

In general, therefore, the decision to choose a certain way or road or approach is extremely crucial, also needless
to say, to the pursuit of knowledge. It may be so due to the lack of knowledge of the so-called "controlled
procedure," or it may be the lack of knowledge about the preparations (e.g. including the strong enough approach)
or the confusion of the knowledge of the end of such a search. It may very well be that we have a totally wrong
"direction" and "anticipation" of such an investigation.

§ 2-1-2. Method and Tool

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On the other hand, method may find its way in other activities than in the pursuit of knowledge (of course, of
which we are most interested in). Take for example, to work on making something by dealing with what Aristotle
called productive knowledge. I would like to cut this pine tree in the garden. In order to do this, I have to have an
axe, a hand saw or an electric chain saw. Not only the knowledge of the tools in relation to the object to which the
tool is going to be applied here is necessary, but also the knowledge of which direction the tree should fall down in
as well as the knowledge of how to axe or saw the tree in order to have it happen. The order of the steps
necessary for cutting the tree should be considered ahead before we start cutting it. The similar will be applied to
any kind of "productive" activity (including making a clay pot, curving a stone into something, etc.). Thus controlled
procedure means those different kinds of knowledge in order to act or achieve some particular goal as well as the
order of the knowledge and steps. A biological or a pharmacological experiment perhaps requires more elaborate
conditions in which an experiment is going to be conducted. Needless to say, so are doubtlessly with the
engineering.

Within the complexity which can be specified those order of steps and knowledge of the tool by means of the
linear, mechanical causality, how complicated the procedure might be can be solved by the causal connections
step by step.

However, when the procedure to be controlled becomes so complex that the linear, mechanical causation (logical
inference on the basis of that causality) can no longer handle it. Take for example, to send a moon we are no
longer able to linearly follow the procedure step by step, but rather mutual influences and simultaneous
processes are to be "controlled" in order to achieve such a goal with the complex means. In this case, we are now
developing a controlling procedure called "simulation." This is certainly one of the first steps to overcome the
limits of the linear, mechanical causality. Such a thinking is sometimes called a "system" or a "complex system." (to
continue)

2-1-3. The Etymological Search for "Method"

On the one hand, however, the word "me¡odos" or "methodus" in Latin, "method" in English translation, existed in
the Classical Greek, which was made as a composite word from two words, the one is "meta" (meta)‹‹"in pursuit of
(something) along side with"‹‹, the other, "¢odos" (hodos)‹‹"the way." What do these words, "meta" and "hodos,"
mean in the Ancient Greek?

Thus, "methodos" as a composite word from "meta" and "hodos" signified and understood as "in pursuit of (a
certain end) along side with the (specified and controlled) way." This concept of "method" in the philosophical
significance may be traced back to Hesiod and some Pre-Socratic philosophers via Plato. According to this
understanding of the method in philosophy as the Way, the method meant "the Way" ('odos, keleuqos, patos,
each one of which means the way, the road, the path, etc.) in the doubled significance 1) as the Way of one's
devotion of life to the true and the right and 2) as the Way of the questioning search with such a devotion.

Hesiod distinguished the narrow, sterile way of the virtue (in the sense of "success") from the wider path of
wickedness.

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Heraclitus was supposed to warn the person who should be mindful when one forgets where the way would lead.

In case of Parmenides, the Way to Truth and Just is shown as the way of the person with the rational
understanding that Being is, and is distinguished from the way, which the people of habitual mundaneity and in
mortal conceptions follow and are never in touch with Truth. Thus, in the pursuit of Truth lead by Reason shows
the Way of Truth with confidence.

In Plato, it appears, this Way ended with the explicit notion of "Method." First of all, in Plato's philosophy, the
method signified the inquiry or search, that is, to "scientifically" ask a question or the questioning as such. As we
shall see it later in more details, his famous doctrine of method as the dialectic to search the ultimate reality. Then,
of course, in distinction from the art of persuasion or sophistic art and skill (h sofistikh teÿnh‹hé sophistiké
techné‹) of persuading the other regardless of its truth, the correct way and manner of investigation or of the
questioning search for reality.

Among the earlier and later sophists, naturally the method signified the way of winning the discussion or the art of
persuasion itself ('h sofistikh teÿnh‹hé sophistiké techné‹) or rhetoric.

According to Hippocrates, the method may find its master example of the art and manner of inquiry in the correct
medical diagnosis.

As we shall also discuss later more in detail, Aristotle stipulated the method as the procedure directed to the good
with deliberation ('h proairesis‹hé proairesis‹) which is controlled on the basis of insight and can be obtained by
study. It is also considered belonging in general to techné ('h tchnh).

The above mentioned characteristics of "method" are to be more precisely articulated and defined in terms of a
specific end. Thus, we may generally state the nature of method as follows:

The activity to pursue a certain plan or goal in accordance with the controlled procedure.

This etymological explication of the meaning of "method" may apply to philosophy as questioning search as well
as any search for knowledge as a scientific pursuit including mathematics.

Before we shall get into the explication of the historical development of the philosophical method or the
methods in philosophy, we would like to discuss Aristotle and his method as logic first. For logic was considered
for a long time as the philosophical method even until Immanuel Kant. It is necessary to pay a special attention to
logic as the philosophical methods.

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§ 2-1-4. Methods in Philosophy and the Objective of Philosophical Inquiry

‹an Overview of the Problem Domains Anticipating our Inquiry‹

According to the preceding etymological investigation of the nature of method, the method is "the activity to
pursue a certain plan or goal in accordance with the controlled procedure.

We also understand that philosophy is questioning search, the pursuit of knowledge, for its own sake

Philosophical inquiry is not useful, nor practical, even not meaningful to our living at all. In this sense, the
philosopher in the genuine sense is non professional, because of the following two senses: 1) it is because the
philosopher and the philosophical knowledge are absolutely no use for our practical, pragmatic life: 2) the
philosopher and the philosophical knowledge cannot have any professional training (in order to earn one's living
by doing so).

However, this does not mean that the philosophical inquiry has no end or goal, nor even a plan. To be sure that the
research and its consequence are neither useful anything else or practical at all.

Neither the knowledge which is to be pursued should be "objective!" It is beyond such a distinction between the
objective and the subjective, as Kierkegaard correctly pointed out about the question of our own existence as the
reality.

And yet, as long as the method in philosophy is a "activities" to attain a certain knowledge as its objective via
certain "procedure," we must be rather explicitly aware not only of the "controlled procedure," but also of the
"plan," "objective," or "end." This "objective" or "goal" is, as pointed out before, should be known to us even if it
is obscure in terms of our cognition of the thing experience.

As we saw earlier, thus, often lead by the value which such an end or a plan possesses, we are only aware of the
general direction.

Due to this beginning of philosophical inquiry, the phenomenological epoché (the bracketing the preconceived
ideas, bias, assumptions, presuppositions) neutralizes our dogmatic beliefs, as Husserl said. This may be
characterized as a return to Pythagoras' "audience" as the philosophical attitude during the Olympic Games. In this
sense, the philosopher is not in the stream, not in the flow of consciousness, but an observer standing outside of
such a stream. This unconcerned, uninterested observer's attitude seems to work as long as our endeavouring to
see, experience and know reality as it discloses itself as it actually is static in two senses: In the sense a) reality
itself is unchanging, static. In the other sense, not reality, but our attitude itself is static in tune with the way in
which reality reveals itself as it actually is.

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Besides, reality in which we live is no longer static, but in dynamic change and metamorphosis. We are no longer
stand outside of reality and remain as the unconcerned, uninterested observer.

In approaching to reality as it reveals itself as it actually is, the philosopher today is no longer an uninterested
audience to the static reality, but h/she is expected and does commit himself/herself to the search for reality itself
as it reveals itself. Kierkegaard was right, when he said, the objective truth loses its total significance, but the
problem is our urgent, subjective truth of our own existence.

§ 2-2. The Methods in the Classic Philosophy in the Far East

I find the following articles confusing and confused

https://explicitblog.wordpress.com/page/2/

Philosophy as Logical Anthropology

This is the last part of my wee methodological mini-manifesto. In the first part, I claimed that
philosophy isn’t all about argument.
https://explicitblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/philosophy-isnt-all-about-arguments/

In the second part, I argued that the method of philosophy, insofar as there is such a thing, is
the method of inquiry. This time I am going to talk about one thing that some philosophers
do, and what I do.

One of the most obvious questions one can ask about philosophical methodology is “Well, what
is the method of philosophy?” If you’ve got an answer to that question in your pocket, it will
help you to judge whether something is a bit of philosophy or not, and whether a bit of
philosophy is a good one or a bad one. By comparison, one might suggest at a first pass that the
method of science is essentially empirical: you have a question about what the world is like, and
then you go check the world with a controlled experiment and find out.

So what can we say about the philosophical method? As in so many things, you can’t go too
wrong starting with Plato. Plato has Socrates say somewhere that “Philosophy begins in
wonder.” A lot of people seem to like that expression, and it might be true. But—my weird and
enduring love for Plato notwithstanding—it doesn’t do much for me. A more articulate
suggestion in Plato is that philosophy (sometimes ‘dialectic’) is the ‘examination’ part of the
examined life. It is the investigation of your reasons for thinking what you think and for
doing what you do, and the policy of offering those reasons up for criticism by others

Part of my dissertation is on what people sometimes call the “metaphysics” of cognition. In that
part, I’m trying to figure out what sort of a thing cognition is. Is it stuff, like brains? Or activities,
like hearing and deciding? Or is cognition like a program on a computer? And whatever it is,
what precisely makes it cognition and not something similar, but that isn’t cognition (like a dead

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brain, or what a microphone does, or like your web browser)? But I think of my work as a kind
of “critical metaphysics” in the Kantian tradition. One of the better-known doctrines in Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason is what he calls the “Copernican revolution in philosophy.” He claims
that metaphysical knowledge, such as it is, is not really about the ultimate structure of
reality, but the structure of our own concepts. So metaphysical claims about space and time
are not really facts about the world, truly and independently of us, but facts about the basic ways
we organize our own experience. I don’t think Kant is totally right about all of that (I’m not an
idealist in quite the way he is), but that’s mostly how I think of what I do. My work won’t tell
us what cognition really is, but if I’m right I’ll have learned something about how cognitive
scientists think about the world, and what we learn from their research (after Sellars: how it is
that their bailiwick fits into the countryside of science and understanding).

A nearby suggestion, though, is that philosophy is about evaluating reasons as such.

Professor James Shaw that he sometimes tells his undergraduate classes. I like this story. Shaw
says that the method of philosophy is described by something called the “science of
argumentation,” which is presumably a generic variation on formal logic. (“Argument” here, as
in most philosophical contexts, means a reasoned defense of a claim, not a verbal fight.) On
Shaw’s suggestion as I understand it, philosophical training involves acquiring special
knowledge of the forms of argumentation, with a focus on which ones are conducive to
preserving truth, and expertise in clarifying and evaluating arguments as such. That’s the
method.

Concerning the method of philosophy, I’m pretty sure that it’s something like the standard line in
analytic philosophy (the tradition in which I’m trained) that the method consists in attention to
argument.

Even in analytic philosophy, good work does a lot of things apart from describing argument. For
example, good work sometimes describes the range of possible ways of thinking about a topic.
As we sometimes say, it maps out the “logical space.”

All other activities belong to philosophy insofar as they help with the activity of articulating
good arguments.

Distinctions and other tools for navigating “logical space” without getting lost or overwhelmed
are often more widely applicable than a grasp of particular arguments and counterarguments. For
example, one set of distinctions familiar to most who have taken introductory philosophy is the
standard tree for categorizing views about free will (below).

Another activity of philosophers, and one that is harnessed by the folk picture, is the articulation
of possibilities that have not been thought of or put clearly before.

This exploratory side of philosophical activity is easy to miss in the analytic tradition because
most papers are organized around arguments, even when they include other kinds of
intellectual work.

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Some of Wittgenstein’s critics, who see him as a crackpot guru and not a philosopher (“Where
are the arguments?”). I would venture that a lot of the power of Wittgenstein’s work comes from
his ability to get you to think about things a certain way. Perhaps the same can be said of
many of the famous thinkers in the continental tradition. I might say that Plato has a similar
effect, even though his dialogues are full of arguments.

So what is the method of philosophy? My opinion is that the method of philosophy just is the
method of inquiry.

(Again I have highlighted the main points. Obviously restricting philosophizing to ‘the method’
(???) of inquiry, whatever that is meant to refer to, and arguments are far too simplistic. And,
again, I can only suggest that the author informs himself about the process of theorizing; then he
will be able to fit in his highly selective notions of philosophy, its aims and methods, as
particular features and stages of theorizing, instead presenting them as if they are the entire
process.)

Continuing with his statement that https://explicitblog.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/the-method-

of-philosophy-is-the-method-of-inquiry/

The Method of Philosophy Is the Method of Inquiry

Posted on 7 November, 2013

In my earlier post on the method of philosophy I made several negative claims: the method of
philosophy is not based on intuitions or reflective equilibrium, it’s not random speculating, and
it’s also not just about arguments. Today I’m going to motivate a little maxim that I’ve been
mumbling to myself for a few years: that the method of philosophy is the method of inquiry

What do I mean by ‘inquiry’? By ‘inquiry,’ I mean something like the deliberate project of
understanding the world (including ourselves) better. Sometimes this is done in order to
accomplish a specific goal, like curing polio or building bridges, and sometimes it’s not. I take it
that building the Large Hadron Collider and looking for the Higgs boson is an example of the
latter kind, although there have been highly practical discoveries along the way and this was
always a part of the plan. At its best moments, the academy (I don’t mean the Academy, but
academia, the worldwide system of universities and other institutions of higher learning) is an
institution dedicated to furthering inquiry and disseminating the resulting understanding to
students and others. I am tempted to think of inquiry as a distinctively human project (as far as
we know). I don’t think that when a cat figures out how to use door handles it’s performing
inquiry, but maybe we can say it’s a special kind of cat-inquiry as long as we recognize the
differences between cat-inquiry and human inquiry. For example, the understanding gained from
cat-inquiry does not tend to be disseminated among other cats, whereas human inquiry is a
deeply social project.

Inquiry is about understanding of some sort, and not just truth or knowledge, narrowly
construed.

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I believe that the method of philosophy is just the method of inquiry—that the acceptable
methods in philosophical work are any and all of the acceptable methods in inquiry in
general. To illustrate what I mean, I’ll talk a little bit about philosophy as a scientific discipline,
and then about philosophy as a humanistic or perennial discipline.

Philosophy and scientific inquiry. Despite what you may have heard, philosophy and science
are pretty tight. This is true in at least two ways. For one, a lot of contemporary analytic
philosophy draws on empirical premises to make arguments. Hilary Kornblith is a good avatar
for this practice in epistemology. Kornblith uses results in psychology and cognitive science to
defend a particular picture of how we come to know things, and what our limitations are. This is
also very true in my own specialty, philosophy of cognitive science.

(Cognitive sciences is an exception because it is an inter-disciplinary area of study, with the

discipline of philosophy being included…)

Now, I am not claiming here that philosophy is better than scientific disciplines. I am just saying
that, at bottom, we are all doing the same kind of thing. Craig Skinner (an interesting fellow)
argued online last year that one function of philosophy as a discipline is to be a source for the
‘budding off’ of other disciplines, like the sciences. This is an interesting notion, but the
‘budding off’ activity makes more sense if there is at bottom a continuity between philosophical
inquiry and other kinds of inquiry.

The perennial aspect of philosophy.. there is another dimension to some philosophy, which I am
tempted to call the “perennial” side to philosophy…. Philosophy in its perennial mode engages
with topics that are not suited to being settled once and for all, but that require repeated
engagement. I think some ethics is like this…

I also think that this is the sort of picture of philosophy that the later Wittgenstein had in mind
when he defended his “therapeutic” conception of philosophy (the most famous remarks are
probably §§115–128). Wittgenstein claimed that philosophy clears up the linguistic confusions
that we encounter in life. I wouldn’t go so far as Wittgenstein here, but I think it is a part of
philosophical inquiry to devise methods for getting around logical space without getting
lost, and techniques for finding our way if we have.. (this is all very interesting and I agree
with Wittgenstein in this. Much of what was classified under philosophy, for example
ontological and metaphysical problems can be dissolved by exploration, or ‘analysis’. But these
things, for example clarification of concepts and meaning, form a small part of the process of
theorizing and situating them in that larger context will assist philosophers in many ways –
getting the bigger picture of what philosophy is like, what it is about and how it is done.)

The perennial vision of philosophy is also championed by Richard Rorty. In a notorious

discussion of Derrida’s work (“Philosophy as a Kind of Writing”), he criticizes the analytic
philosopher’s “Kantian” conception of inquiry as narrowly knowledge-producing, and suggests
instead that philosophers think of themselves as commentators in a great and interminable
conversation about how to live. (I quote his words on Rorty, Derrida and Kant as they point out a
meaningful aspect of philosophizing and the need to situate it in a lerger process.)

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So what is philosophy? All this is to say that philosophy’s methods include those of other
areas of inquiry. Sometimes philosophy uses the scientific method. Sometimes science uses
philosophical methods. Sometimes philosophy functions to apply old views to new situations.
Sometimes in philosophy we reimagine the old and familiar from a new perspective. So (note
the, unfounded conclusion the author comes to after all the examples he gives!) if there is any
method to philosophy, I think it’s just the method of inquiry in general. Philosophers adopt a
broad range of methods for understanding the world, and those methods seem to include, well,
all of them.

But I think in the end this is an ecumenical conclusion (I like my conclusions ecumenical). If the
project of philosophy is, at its broadest, just the project of inquiry, then that sits well with a
lot of other things people have said about philosophy. It sits well with Plato’s old line that
“Philosophy begins in wonder,” since the ultimate end of philosophy is to promote
understanding. It also plays nice with the other claims of Plato’s Socrates, that philosophy is the
means to the examined life, since a better understanding about how to live well is a special case
of inquiry, and perhaps the most important one. My conclusion explains the central importance
of argument to Plato’s Socrates, but also the importance of critical examination of assumptions
and the development of tools for navigating logical space. My conclusion also sits well with
Skinner’s suggestion that philosophy is a source for other disciplines to “bud off” from, since
other disciplines represent more specialized approaches to inquiry. (Inquiry has now become
some kind of measuring tool, and standard..)

Finally, I think my conclusions is a happy companion to Sellars’ famous dictum that “The aim of
philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things, in the broadest possible
sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Sellars continues
that philosophy is distinguished from the special disciplines in that philosophers aim to keep
track of the big picture (“It is therefore the ‘eye on the whole’ which distinguishes the
philosophical enterprise”). I would say that that’s a nice regulative ideal, and it is something I
try to do, but I doubt it’s a necessary condition. A lot of philosophers specialize quite narrowly,
who are still philosophers. And people of many professions sometimes address philosophical
concerns without necessarily reflecting on how their “bailiwick fits into the countryside as a
whole.”

If this is right, though, there is a question left outstanding. What does that mean for the subject
matter of philosophy? Surely if “leftovers” is too narrow a characterization, then “everything”
is too broad! Not everything is philosophy, but I am not sure how to limit the subject matter
because anything could be philosophy. Consider that Plato’s prescriptions about policy and
social architecture belong to philosophy. Aristotle’s early biology is philosophy (even if it’s not
great). Newton was a natural philosopher. Really, it’s one of the most frustrating things about
philosophy that potentially anything can be relevant to anything. As a philosopher of cognitive
science, I feel like I should know so much more than a human being ever could. I’ve got to
manage my time and effort, of course, and it’s hubris to think that one person can be an expert in
everything, or even (these days) in very many things at all. But I don’t think I can write off any
sphere of human knowledge as clearly irrelevant to philosophy or even to my project. I never
really get to say “That’s work for another department,” unless I mean that I just don’t have the
skills ( it is not skills that the author requires but just taking notice of the notion of theorizing and

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explore what the process of theorizing consist of, so that he can situate his selective notion of the
activity of philosophizing as inquiry, only, as one stage and one feature of the entire process of
theorizing.) or the time or the funding to look into it. But I never meant to claim that it’s my job
to know everything (what a wonderful and terrible job that would be!). But any technique that
anybody uses to understand the world better is a technique I could potentially find a use for in
my line of work.

Other articles by this author –

https://explicitblog.wordpress.com/2015/05/19/agreeing-and-disagreeing-with-help-from-
objectivity

https://explicitblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/why-study-philosophy/

Continuing his article on https://explicitblog.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/philosophy-as-logical-

anthropology/

This is the last part of my wee methodological mini-manifesto. In the first part, I claimed that
philosophy isn’t all about argument. In the second part, I argued that the method of philosophy,
insofar as there is such a thing, is the method of inquiry. This time I am going to talk about one
thing that some philosophers do, and what I do.

The “metaphysics” of cognition. In that part, I’m trying to figure out what sort of a thing
cognition is in

doctrines in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is what he calls the “Copernican revolution in
philosophy.” He claims that metaphysical knowledge, such as it is, is not really about the
ultimate structure of reality, but the structure of our own concepts. So metaphysical claims about
space and time are not really facts about the world, truly and independently of us, but facts about
the basic ways we organize our own experience. I don’t think Kant is totally right about all of
that (I’m not an idealist in quite the way he is), but that’s mostly how I think of what I do. My
work won’t tell us what cognition really is, but if I’m right I’ll have learned something about
how cognitive scientists think about the world, and what we learn from their research (after
Sellars: how it is that their bailiwick fits into the countryside of science and understanding).

Sociologists and anthropologists are interested in describing various human practices and social
structures, perhaps especially with an eye toward making comparisons across different
communities, or attending to power dynamics and forms of organization and so on. What
philosophers (some of them) do is examine human practices with an eye toward their rationality.
For example, epistemologists are interested in characterizing and evaluating our evidential
practices in general, philosophers of science are interested in scientific practices like explanation
and theory-construction, philosophers of action and ethicists are interested in various features of
our deliberative practices and practices of evaluating actions and holding people responsible. So
like anthropologists, these philosophers are interested in human practices. But unlike most
anthropologists, the philosophers are not interested primarily in things like power dynamics or
the diversity of cultural practices (though they’re interesting)—philosophers are especially

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interested in practices that involve reasoning, and whether and why these practices make
sense.

(My view here turns out, predictably, to have been anticipated somewhat. For example, the idea
of logical anthropology has some affinity with George Graham and Terry Horgan’s notion of
“ideological inquiry,” and Katrin Flikschuh’s notion of “philosophical field work.” But my view
differs from these others on some details, and was worked out independently with different aims
and different cases in mind. Nevertheless, I suspect all three views spring from the same post-
Kantian place

“Why bother figuring out what scientists think cognition is? Why not just figure out what it
really is?” More generally, one might suppose that it is a better use of time to figure out how
things really are, rather than what experts who aren’t trained in philosophy seem to think but
don’t tend to say out loud. After all, reconstructing what is implicit in scientific (or other)
practices and making it explicit seems to be a roundabout way of figuring out how things really
are, and the scientists might not be right, anyway (Would it not be more meaningful to look at
the theorizing process/es employed by scientist as well as philosophers? And then situate what
you are doing, and then try to understand what scientists are doing – from your perspective?)

The stronger reply is that the scientific enterprise is our best effort to figure out how the world is,
and that our everyday practices of learning and inferring and acting reflect the priorities and
limitations we actually live with. Doing logical anthropology is a good way to learn about the
world while taking advantage of our existing knowledge, and avoiding the philosopher’s
temptation to simplify and generalize too much. Logical anthropology isn’t a roundabout route to
understanding; it’s a route that takes seriously the fact that we can learn by examining practices
that have already emerged to learn about the things we philosophers might want to learn about.

Edouard Machery argues in his book Doing without Concepts (I linked to the précis above) that
cognitive scientists investigate at least three different kinds of cognitive structure that are all
called “concepts,” that the result is confusion and false disagreement, and that we’d be better off
using three different words instead

I think, for philosophers to investigate and describe the practices of those scientists, either in
order to explain their practices to others or in order to learn something about the rational
organization of scientific institutions, or perhaps for some other reason

While not all philosophers are engaged in kinds of logical anthropology, I think that a lot of us
do something like this (although I think few of us think of our work this way). I think it’s a
valuable kind of research for philosophers to do—our training makes us suited to it, and not a lot
of other researchers do work like this, and it reveals an interesting dimension of human activity
that, sometimes, allows us to better understand what we do, and why it does or doesn’t make
sense given the world that we live in. At any rate, this I how I think of my own work and its
value. And, I suppose, trying to describe logical anthropology as a philosophical project is itself a
kind of logical anthropology of philosophy. The main goal I have with Explicit Content is to
say clearly what I think philosophers do, in order to explain it to non-philosophers and to
induce discussion about whether our practices are good ones. (I still think the author requires a

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general framework to situate what he is doing philosophically, as if it is philosophy and that

frame of reference is that of the process of theorizing.)

In this article the author is doing meta-philosophy..

https://explicitblog.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/metadiscursive-technology-distinctions-continua-
phase-spaces/

In an earlier post https://explicitblog.wordpress.com/2013/11/15/metadicursive-technology-

claims-views-arguments/

I discussed the notion of metadiscursive technology: we use concepts to make sense of the
world and do things in it, and bits of metadiscursive technology are the concepts that help us
understand how we do this. In this post I’d like to talk about three ways of carving up
possibilities (three categories of ways to draw categories): distinctions, spectra or continua,
and phase spaces.

First, this post is a little meta (getting meta is another important philosophical activity). I’m
going to be talking about ways of categorizing possibilities. People usually adopt ways of
categorizing things without thinking about which way to use; they just use a way. But I’m going
to talking about these ways as objects.

can call the different ways models, or schemes, or theories.

lots of different models that are useful for different contexts.

First, the distinction is one of the most important tools a philosopher has. A distinction is a
contrast between two or more categories in a space of relevant possibilities, or a contrast between
two ways of categorizing.

A dichotomy is a special kind of distinction that divides the entire space of relevant possibilities into
two non-overlapping categories.

, a continuum only varies along one dimension. That is, a continuum is only the appropriate
discursive technology if the relevant possibilities can be placed in order, along a single line.
If placing things in a single line doesn’t help you with what you’re doing, you may need to
consider more than one dimension of variation. To capture multiple dimensions of variation, you
need what I call a phase space by loose analogy with a notion from math and physics

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A simple Vijay-fancier model. This is a phase space composed of a continuum and a distinction.
The bluer areas indicate regions more likely to contain Vijay’s secret admirer.

For an example of a more complex phase space, we can consider the fact that gender
identification does not always agree with biological sex. We could represent that situation by
constructing two distinctions in different dimensions, like so:

For an example of a more complex phase space, we can consider the fact that gender
identification does not always agree with biological sex. We could represent that situation by
constructing two distinctions in different dimensions, like so:

Sex and gender as a phase space composed of two orthogonal distinctions.

Now recall our simple phase-space model of Vijay’s potential admirers, the Vijay-fancier model.
That model relied on the assumption that we could treat gender as a dichotomy. That might be a
safe assumption under some circumstances—perhaps all of the people who might have written
the notes to Vijay are transgendered or cisgendered. Nevertheless, we could strive to be more
inclusive of other trans* people and replace the man/woman dichotomy in the model with a more

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complex categorization of gender. However, the continuum conception of sexual preference also
presupposes a gender dichotomy, so we might also want to revise that dimension of the Vijay-
fancier model. A model like that would be a very serious piece of conceptual technology. And as
I hope is evident, the activity of categorization need not be restrictive or oppressive. By engaging
earnestly with variation and maintaining an open mind about the choice of models for
categorization, the activity can be legitimating to those who might normally feel left out. Perhaps
particularly with gender, sex, and sexuality, a refusal to think openly about categories often
cedes too much ground to traditional (in these cases, also oppressive) models of categorization.

I don’t mean to suggest that phase spaces are always best and distinctions or dichotomies always
worse. Different technologies are suited to different tasks.

I trust these examples show that doing things with concepts—even just distinguishing between
related categories—can get really complicated really quickly. It often pays to use the simplest
model that suits your present purpose

(The reason why I included this philosopher’s discussion on meta-discursive technology,

continuums, phase-space etc as they can be useful to create diagrams about the meanings one
distinguish during theorizing.)

https://explicitblog.wordpress.com/2013/11/15/metadicursive-technology-claims-views-
arguments/

This is the first post in what will be an ongoing series about what I like to call “philosophical
technology” or, sometimes, “metadiscursive” or “metaconceptual technology” (since it’s not
relevant only to philosophers). I said last time that the method of philosophy is just the method of
inquiry, but in practice a lot of philosophy these days involves a lot of attention to the way we
use words or concepts (more on that next time). Since that’s a thing that philosophers do, we
need to have some conceptual resources for talking about ways of talking, or for thinking
about ways of thinking. I like to refer to these resources as bits of technology to emphasize the
fact that developing these resources requires some ingenuity and effort, that using them
effectively involves a bit of training, and that they can be developed or improved over time. I
like to emphasize that last part because, like a lot of philosophical work, progress in
metadiscursive technology tends to become invisible once it’s been made.

Some bits of philosophical technology - distinctions, objections, counterexamples—

arguments, soundness and validity for arguments, and necessary and sufficient conditions.

modality ( necessity, possibility, and related notions) which comes in various forms—alethic,
epistemic, practical, and others

the difference between a claim, a view, and an argument.

First, a claim is the sort of thing that is expressed by a declarative sentence. A lot of what
philosophers do is examine claims, and eventually commit themselves to affirming some of

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them, and denying others. (If you both affirm and deny the same claim then you’ve got a
contradiction on your hands,

consideration of claims is a necessary part of philosophy,

Views are collections of claims that are supposed to be coherent. Views, like claims, can be true
or false

Views are often associated with the particular philosophers who explain them, like Ruth Garrett
Millikan’s teleosemantics (roughly a view that meanings of words or thoughts, like biological
functions, are determined by their causal history according to a process of natural selection

teleofunctionalism is a word for a family of related views, like Millikan’s and Karen Neander’s.

The main business of philosophy involves giving and evaluating arguments.

(Argument – connected series of statements; intended to establish a proposition. Evaluate

arguments, are the reasons given true and significant to the conclusion? Is the inference valid
and is the conclusion plausible?)

An argument is a reasoned defense of a claim. On this view (see what I did there?), arguments
consist of two parts: a claim, called the conclusion, that the argument is supposed to support, and
a reason that supports the conclusion. Philosophers use arguments to support claims (where
the claim is the conclusion) and views (where the various claims that make up the view are
conclusions, usually of different arguments). And just like there can be claims about claims,
there can be arguments about arguments. For example, criticisms or objections about arguments
are arguments about arguments (they are arguments that some other argument is bad)

If arguments are reasoned defenses of claims, then you see that they are not bare statements of
claims, and not disputes or questions or problems. Philosophical controversies, like the “mind-
body problem” or the “problem of personal identity,” are not arguments in this sense because
they do not have conclusions and they do not provide reasons. People make arguments for
various views that resolve these controversies in different ways, but philosophers do not usually
call the controversies themselves “arguments”

The most common way to model arguments in the analytic tradition is based on the form of a
deductive inference in classical logic, or a syllogism in Aristotelian logic. Either way, the
reason is made up of claims called premises that, if they are arranged right, support the
conclusion through some rule or combination of rules.

logic models arguments

most philosophical arguments are given in the form of reasons

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arguments cannot be true or false. Conclusions or premises, since they are also claims, can be
true or false, but arguments have more complicated ways of being good or bad. Arguments can
be valid or invalid, or cogent or not cogent, or sound or unsound, and so on.

an argument is bad if it doesn’t give you a good enough reason to believe its conclusion, and the
ways that reasons are bad are different and more complicated than being false.

At least three main ways to criticize arguments in philosophy. First, one can claim that the
premises or presuppositions of the argument are untrue. That doesn’t make the argument
“untrue,” and it doesn’t mean that the conclusion is false, it’s just one way that an argument
might not give you reason to believe its conclusion. A second way to criticize an argument is
to say that the reason doesn’t support the conclusion, regardless of whether its presuppositions
are true. A simple example:

Edinburgh is in Scotland.
Humans often wear clothes.
Therefore, George Clooney is famous.
The premises and the conclusion are all true, but the premises don’t support the conclusion. They don’t
give you reason to believe it. A third way to criticize an argument is to claim that we have an
independent reason to believe that the conclusion is false, and that this reason is better than the
reason given in the argument.
Even if not all philosophy is about arguments, critical examination of arguments is a central activity of
philosophers, especially analytic philosophers. And while most disciplines do the same thing a lot of the
time, philosophers are often the ones that are most concerned with developing the
metadiscursive technology for doing so with self-conscious clarity and precision.
sustained attention to arguments, and for the complicated ways of supporting and evaluating claims,
arguments, and views.
(The above provides a basic description of some elementary, but essential aspects of writing philosophy.
Combined with the internal dialogue of the philosophical narrator, where he plays two or more roles,
some might be employed as techniques to question or disagree with what he is trying to express, these
things are the cement that connects the building blocks of the story being narrated in the entire
theorizing process.)
L

http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/phil/phil_03.html

The methods employed in philosophical reasonings and enquiries include the basic presuppositions of scientific
approach in general; but over and above these methods, philosophical processes endeavour to discover ways of
considering and knowing the facts implied in the phenomena of experience.

The true philosophic method should not be lopsided, should not be biased to any particular or special dogma, but
comprehend within itself the processes of reflection and speculation and at the same time be able to reconcile
the deductive and the inductive methods of reasoning. The philosophy of the Absolute rises above particulars to
greater and greater universals, basing itself on facts of observation and experience by the method of induction
and gradual generalisation of truths, without missing even a single link in the chain of logic and argumentation,
reflection and contemplation, until it reaches the highest generalisation of the Absolute Truth; and then by the
deductive method comes down to interpret and explain the facts of experience in the light of the nature of this
Truth. This is a great example of the most satisfactory method of philosophical enquiry.

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Philosophy being the way of the knowledge of Truth, its method must be in agreement with the nature of Truth.
In philosophy and religion the end always determines the nature of the means.

(All these are very beautiful, high ideals, but merely abstract speculation. It covers over all the details that are
required in philosophical methodology and theorizing.)

-------------------------

The following is interesting and perhaps suitable for limited scholarly work and academic investigations and their
aims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_method

The scholarly method or scholarship is the body of principles and practices used by scholars to make their claims
about the world as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly public. It is the
methods that systemically advance the teaching, research, and practice of a given scholarly or academic field of
study through rigorous inquiry. Scholarship is noted by its significance to its particular profession, and is creative,
can be documented, can be replicated or elaborated, and can be and is peer-reviewed through various methods

Originally started to reconcile the philosophy of the ancient classical philosophers with medieval Christian
theology, scholasticism is not a philosophy or theology in itself but a tool and method for learning which places
emphasis on dialectical reasoning. The primary purpose of scholasticism is to find the answer to a question or to
resolve a contradiction. It was once well known for its application in medieval theology, but was eventually applied
to classical philosophy and many other fields of study.

The historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other
evidence to research and then to write history. The question of the nature, and indeed the possibility, of sound
historical method is raised in the philosophy of history, as a question of epistemology. History guidelines
commonly used by historians in their work require external criticism, internal criticism, and synthesis.

The empirical method is generally taken to mean the collection of data on which to base a hypothesis or derive a
conclusion in science. It is part of the scientific method, but is often mistakenly assumed to be synonymous with
other methods. The empirical method is not sharply defined and is often contrasted with the precision of
experiments, where data is derived from the systematic manipulation of variables. The experimental method
investigates causal relationships among variables. An experiment is a cornerstone of the empirical approach to
acquiring data about the world and is used in both natural sciences and social sciences. An experiment can be used
to help solve practical problems and to support or negate theoretical assumptions.

The scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or
correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on
gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific

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method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and
testing of hypotheses

------------------------

I deal with Broad’s positive suggestions for philosophical methods somewhere else, they are, as should be
expected, restive and rather ‘analytical’.

SOME METHODS OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY

By Professor C. D. Broad.

Published in Aristotelian Society Supplement 21 (1947): 1-32.

Examples of Synopsis

Problem of sense-perception

Mind-body problem

Free-will problem

Paranormal phenomena

Synopsis and Analysis

Synopsis and Synthesis

Some further Remarks on Synopsis and Synthesis

How are Principles of Synthesis Discovered?

How are Proposed Principles of Synthesis Recommended?

O
https://www.scribd.com/user/76974855/Buddy-Seed

https://www.scribd.com/doc/56238200/Lecture-1-The-Act-of-Philosophizing

(This work appears to be very existentialist as it takes the subject, as a person, as the point of reference.
Philosophy/izing then becomes a very personal affair. This dimension is probably present in all philosophizing, but
philosophers decide not to concentrate on or deal with it and/or they consider it not to be part of ‘objective’
philosophy/izing?)

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On page 6 we are informed about

Philosophizing as the Discipline of Liberation -

especially by ,means of questioning ourselves, our species, our history/ies, our society, community, culture,

socio-cultural practices such as philosophy/izing, etc.

Below we are shown how this questioning operates and how it assists in liberation one from historical, sociological, psychological
encapsulation, determination or conditioning.

- philosophizing as a discipline of questioning is a discipline of liberation, i.e. in

asking questions, philosophy leads to liberation:

- liberation from encapsulation, conditioning, determination

- liberation to the horizon of possibilities

- liberation to affirm one's possibilities and one's determination

i. Questioning liberates one from historical, sociological, psychological encapsulation,

determination or conditioning

1. Historical, Sociological and Psychological encapsulation, determination, conditioning

Historical

- what am I know, what can I do, what I am doing, how I value things,

4. Philosophizing as the Discipline of Personhood

- philosophizing becomes an authentic discipline of questioning and of liberation

when it is discipline of personhood, i.e.:

- personal task

- at the root of one's being a person

- important in my growth as a person

i. Philosophizing as a Personal Task

1. Personal Affair of Asking-Question

- I must myself personally ask the depth-question

- The personal questions and their answers are of great value to me

- The questions have to do with my person, my identity

2. Personal Search for the answer, for the truth to these depth-questions

- I myself will look/find for the answers to these depth-questions

- I could not delegate this to other, nor just be a spectator to the searching-activity

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- In my personal search, I must not be content:

- with sheer conjecture,

- with sentimentalism: feeling good and nice

- with philosophical warm blanket

- just with pursuing relevance

- utmost aim: pursuing truth:

- be it palatable or not

- be it a comfort or threat/discomfort

- my personal search for the answer involves:

a. exacting, careful, disciplined reflection of my own experience and thoughts

b. philosophical dialogue:

- I will be open to other philosophers' experiences and insights

- Study works of others

c. study also of other disciplines

- open to other things which might be vehicle for finding answers to my

depth-questions about myself: myth, history, literature, natural sciences,

behavioral sciences.

3. Seeing the answers to these questions or the truth myself

- in finding some answers to my depth-questions, I myself see, realize

- the truth of these answers

- that they are really true to me

- they really answer my personal depth-questions

ii. Philosophizing is at the root of one's being a person

- the human person is driven by his personhood to philosophize:

- to ask depth-questions

- to seek/find answers for them

- to see himself the truth of the answers he has found

- Why? because of the nature of his person as homo viator (man on the way)

- His present situation - the situation he finds himself at the moment:

- not yet complete, not yet finished-product

- not yet sufficient with himself

- contingent

- finite truth, happiness, justice (Pascal)

- yet not content, satisfied with what he is: restless, insatiable

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- he is not happy, at rest, content with he is and has at the moment

- he desires, longs from something more than what he is and has at the

moment

- Quixotic man: dreaming the impossible

- Alexandrian man: crying because there is no more to conquer

- Augustinian man: ever restless until my heart rests in Thee.

- Pascalian man: great abyss within that cannot be filled by anything

finite.

- Dostoyevski's moral hero

- Thus, he asks more questions, he searches, demands for more answers about

himself, about his world.

iii. In philosophizing, one's personhood, one's growth as a person is at stake

- when I stop philosophizing (to ask depth-questions, to seek/find answers for

them and to see himself the truth of the answers he has found),

- I become determined, conditioned, encapsulized by my history, society, and

psychological make-up

- I refuse to be open to my own possibilities, and take responsibility of them and

myself as creative self-project

- Remain satisfied with the present and stagnate, arresting my growth as a person.

Conclusion/Summary:

- questioning, then, is the starting point and the continuing force of all philosophy

- questioning leads one to find answers, and finding the answers he himself must see the

truth of those answers

- but in finding answers to the depth-questions primarily about himself: his identity and

action, he will not reach a point of no return; rather leads him back to new questions, leading

to a new search, new answers, so on and so forth.

- In so doing, he is liberated from those which enslave, he becomes open

how I see things could be determined or conditioned in large extent by the past

events, by what happened in the past

- past events: personal, family, society.

- Sociological encapsulation, determination, conditioning

- the kind of society that I live in, the culture, the social structures I find

myself in affect in significant degree to the point even of conditioning,

determining and encapsulizing my seeing, doing and valuing.

- Psychological encapsulation, determination, conditioning

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- refers to how my genes, experiences of pain and pleasure, neurons,

among others affect my seeing, doing and valuing.

2. By questioning, I am liberated from these conditioning, encapsulation and determination

- Why? By questioning, I am able to place myself at a distance from these types

of conditioning, determination or encapsulation, such that they no longer determine

at least in the same degree as before I have begun to question -

By questioning, I could say, "wait a minute", to the present situation: the present

conditioning, determination

- In this way, I could resist the conditioning, the currents, the pull; in effect, I

revolt against the historical, sociological and psychological conditioning.

ii. Questioning opens me to the horizon of possibilities

1. What was seen before as a pure necessity (that which could not be otherwise, in which I

have no choice) is now seen upon questioning as a possibility which I could choose to

reject or accept.

2. Other possibilities, possible patterns, options which I never have thought before open

before me.

iii. Questioning leads one to Affirmation

1. Affirmation of the Future as Creative Self-Project

- the possibilities that are opened before him/her in questioning, he must affirm,

he must choose, must take responsibility of as his/her project, through which he

shapes, determines himself/herself.

- Only in this way, he takes responsibility to determine/shape himself/herself,

what kind of self/person he will be in the future (future self-project), rather than

being determined by one's history, society and psychological make-up.

2. Affirmation of the Past, of my determinations

- Questioning leads one to confront the past and embrace/accept/own/possess the

past as his/her past

- Why is this very important?

- The past is part of one's identity though I do not have to be determined

by it

- The possibilities of the present that are opened to me and among which

I must choose to determine my self-project are the results of the past.

- Thus, to embrace the past is also to embrace my present identity and

my future self-project.

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This exploration of questioning is then from page 7 onwards related to philosophy, or placed in the context of the discourse of
philosophy. First as philosophy for all people (as individuals) or in everyday context and then gradually as a disciplined practice.

4. Philosophizing as the Discipline of Personhood

- philosophizing becomes an authentic discipline of questioning and of liberation

when it is discipline of personhood, i.e.:

- personal task

- at the root of one's being a person

- important in my growth as a person

i. Philosophizing as a Personal Task

1. Personal Affair of Asking-Question

- I must myself personally ask the depth-question

- The personal questions and their answers are of great value to me

- The questions have to do with my person, my identity

2. Personal Search for the answer, for the truth to these depth-questions

- I myself will look/find for the answers to these depth-questions

- I could not delegate this to other, nor just be a spectator to the searching-activity

- In my personal search, I must not be content:

- with sheer conjecture,

- with sentimentalism: feeling good and nice

- with philosophical warm blanket

- just with pursuing relevance

- utmost aim: pursuing truth:

- be it palatable or not

- be it a comfort or threat/discomfort

- my personal search for the answer involves:

a. exacting, careful, disciplined reflection of my own experience and thoughts

b. philosophical dialogue:

- I will be open to other philosophers' experiences and insights

- Study works of others

c. study also of other disciplines

- open to other things which might be vehicle for finding answers to my

depth-questions about myself: myth, history, literature, natural sciences,

behavioral sciences.

3. Seeing the answers to these questions or the truth myself

- in finding some answers to my depth-questions, I myself see, realize

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- the truth of these answers

- that they are really true to me

- they really answer my personal depth-questions

ii. Philosophizing is at the root of one's being a person

- the human person is driven by his personhood to philosophize:

7

- to ask depth-questions

- to seek/find answers for them

- to see himself the truth of the answers he has found

- Why? because of the nature of his person as homo viator (man on the way)

- His present situation - the situation he finds himself at the moment:

- not yet complete, not yet finished-product

- not yet sufficient with himself

- contingent

- finite truth, happiness, justice (Pascal)

- yet not content, satisfied with what he is: restless, insatiable

- he is not happy, at rest, content with he is and has at the moment

- he desires, longs from something more than what he is and has at the

moment

- Quixotic man: dreaming the impossible

- Alexandrian man: crying because there is no more to conquer

- Augustinian man: ever restless until my heart rests in Thee.

- Pascalian man: great abyss within that cannot be filled by anything

finite.

- Dostoyevski's moral hero

- Thus, he asks more questions, he searches, demands for more answers about

himself, about his world.

iii. In philosophizing, one's personhood, one's growth as a person is at stake

- when I stop philosophizing (to ask depth-questions, to seek/find answers for

them and to see himself the truth of the answers he has found),

- I become determined, conditioned, encapsulized by my history, society, and

psychological make-up

- I refuse to be open to my own possibilities, and take responsibility of them and

myself as creative self-project

- Remain satisfied with the present and stagnate, arresting my growth as a person.

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527

Conclusion/Summary:

- questioning, then, is the starting point and the continuing force of all philosophy

- questioning leads one to find answers, and finding the answers he himself must see the

truth of those answers

- but in finding answers to the depth-questions primarily about himself: his identity and

action, he will not reach a point of no return; rather leads him back to new questions, leading

to a new search, new answers, so on and so forth.

- In so doing, he is liberated from those which enslave, he becomes open he becomes open to his own

possibilities, and takes responsibility of himself as a creative self-project.

--------------------------------------

We are then presented with William Luijpen’s Authenticity of philosophy.

As we can see this section deals with the following:

The authenticity of philosophy and the contradiction of or rather in(side) philosophy. Misleading or mistaken reactions lead to , what
Luijpen’s consider to be, inauthentic philosophy. Symptoms of inauthentic philosophy are:

scient-ism, (as absolute, final, all-encompassing, revealing and dealing with the one and only true reality, perfect methods, etc)

scepticism (rejection of all knowledge, truths, philosophies, etc) is also a philosophy (philosophical approach or attitude);

and dogmatism (of the one, absolute philosophy or the final philosophical system and method, eg Marxism, Critical Theory,
Phenomenology, Kantiasm, Analytic philosophy, Deconstructionism, etc).

Luijpen then sets out the characteristics of authentic philosophy from page 9 onwards.

It is-

a personal affair

of asking questions

looking for answers

seeing the truth (and meaningfulness?) of some of the answers

and philosophy/izing is authentic when -

Philosophizing is authentic when it is one's own life that raises the philosophical questions

- man has to live his own life, determine his own action

- he is responsible for his own life and his actions

- he is only human, a person only when he himself lives his own life and

determines his own actions

- others could not live my life for me nor I could simply live the life of others

- I could not let others determine my life and actions, nor determine others' lives

and actions

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528

- To live my own life, to determine my own action is to live according to my own

basic convictions about:

- Life/Realtiy

- Myself

- Values

- To come to my own basic convictions, I myself have to discover them:

- I myself ask the questions about them

- I myself seek the answers

- I myself have to see the truth of the answers

- Thus, I myself can discover my own basic convictions from within.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

He then deals with existing philosophies and the relation of my own personal philosophy or authentic philosophical living to them.
Page 10

What is the role of constituted philosophies in the philosophizing as a personal

task/affair? This we will answer:

- First, by clarifying the nature of these constituted philosophies. This we will do

in this section.

- Then, by clarifying the proper relationship between my philosophizing as a

personal affair with these constituted philosophies. This we will do in the next

section.

i. Philosophy as Personal

Philosophy as Personal Expression of Particular Experience of Reality

Here he introduces a new notion , almost a standard of authentic philosophy/izing as

a SPEAKING WORD. Not merely a talking word, but a speaking word.

AND not all speaking word is philosophy/ical.

Then describes to us what a philosopher is *

(someone:

- who sees particular aspects of reality, in a particular depth

- who experiences reality in a particular way

- who is present to reality in a particular way

- to whom reality is present in a distinct way

- philosophy (philosophers ideas, theories, etc.) is an articulation, expression of

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this particular way of experiencing the world/reality.)

He describes the correct philosophical training and his conclusion informs us about the purpose and necessity of studying already
constituted (or already existing) philosophy/ies.

Conclusion:

- If constituted philosophy is a speaking word (i.e., an articulation/expression of a

particular experience of reality), then the study of the works of the different philosophers

leads us to:

- Experience the philosophers' particular experiences of reality

(APPROPRIATION)

- Experience new and deeper aspect of reality other than what they have

experienced (EXPANSION)

- And one does not simply accumulate knowledge but listens to reality no matter

where it speaks to him.

------------------------------------------

1. Philosophy as Speaking Word, not Talking Words

- talking:

- ideas are just set of ideas

- which we must relate with one another

- which we understand in themselves as ideas/ statements/words

- speaking:

- ideas are expressions of the philosopher's personal experience of reality

- experience:

- subject presence to reality: personal presence of who I am to reality, my

opening up to reality

- reality presence to the subject: presence of reality to the person;

unfolding, manifestation, unveiling of reality to the person.

- Ideas try to express, articulate what the person sees himself deeply in

reality, what he himself experiences, his particular insight of the wealth of

reality

2. Not All Speaking Word is Philosophy

- there are different ways of experiencing reality, i.e.

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- of being present to reality

- of reality being present to me

- not all of these are philosophy, or philosophical experience. E.g.:

- Rose, a beautiful beach:

- Economist

- Lover

- Theologian

- Scientist

- Philosopher

- School

10

- Student

- Teacher

- Administrator

- Janitor

- *A philosopher is someone:

- who sees particular aspects of reality, in a particular depth

- who experiences reality in a particular way

- who is present to reality in a particular way

- to whom reality is present in a distinct way

- philosophy (philosophers ideas, theories, etc.) is an articulation, expression of

this particular way of experiencing the world/reality.

- E.g.: Plato's Philosophy: Theory of Forms

- As solidified thought it may sound abstract

- But it is really an expression of Plato's particular experience, insight of

3. The Authenticity of Philosophy (William Luijpen)

a. Introduction

i. The Innumerable Contradictions of Philosophy

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531

- for 2,500 years, man has been philosophizing and the result is innumerable and

contradictory claims and systems of philosophy.

- much older than Modern Science, yet unable to formulate even a few theses

(statements) which are unanimously accepted by all philosophers as observed by the

philosophers themselves like the Sceptics, Rene Descartes, Hume, Kant

- not a single thesis is not denied by another philosopher in the past, present,

or/and future.

ii. Reactions Leading to Inauthentic Philosophy

1. Scientism: Rejecting Philosophy and Absolutizing Physical/Empirical Sciences

- Unlike philosophy, Physical/Empirical Sciences:

- Very successful discipline

- Better knowledge of the physical world

- Fruitful knowledge: leads to mastery/control of the physical world

- Greatly contributed in making life better

- Highly Verifiable/Intersubjective Knowledge

- Because of these characteristics of Physical Sciences, some are led to reject

philosophy and to absolutize Science (Scientism). How? By claiming/believing that:

1. Science alone is the only genuine and reliable source of knowledge, not

philosophy or any other means.

- what can be known and is known by Science constitutes alone as the

true knowledge

- knowledge, pure and simple, is the knowledge offered by Science

- here, Science, already claims and decrees, not about the physical world

but claims and decrees on Theory of Knowledge: the possibility, extent and

validity of knowledge

2. Science alone discloses reality such that whatever cannot be disclosed or are not

disclosed by Science is not real.

- here, reality is equated or reduced with the reality accessible to Science

- from its epistemological claim, Science is led to an ontological claim:

A Theory of Reality: The Structure and Constitution of Reality.

- Scientism (absolutizing Science) is not a science, not scientific

- It already claims about things beyond the competence/realm of physical

sciences

- It deals with or addresses some things beyond its tasks, namely: Theory

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of Knowledge, Theory of Reality

- This is already the work of philosophy.

- Thus, in rejecting philosophy, it philosophizes although in a

contradictory way, an inauthentic philosophy

- Scientific yet unscientific

- Verifiable yet unverifiable

- Rejects philosophy but already takes a philosophical position on the

issues of Knowledge and Reality

2. Scepticism

- rejection of all claims of knowledge of reality, all claims as doubtful, not only

philosophical claims, but all claims

- this is itself is a philosophy, a philosophical position/view about knowledge and

reality

- yet a self-contradictory philosophy; thus, an inauthentic philosophy

- claim: all knowledge is doubtful

- yet this claim is also a form of knowledge

- therefore, this claim (that all knowledge is doubtful) is also doubtful

- this shows that the conclusion falsifies the first premise; thus the

argument contradicts itself.

- Any rejection of philosophy (Scientism, Scepticism and others) is itself a

philosophy though a bad one

- To ridicule philosophy, to laugh at philosophy is itself a philosophy

3. Dogmatism

- claims that of the different philosophical systems, one can be the philosophy, is

the philosophy

- thus, one looks for THE philosophy:

- in the past: turns to different philosophies or philosophers in the past

- in the present: turns to every new philosophy or system to whether at

last it present THE philosophy

- in the future: expects that THE philosophy will be formulated in the

future.

- This expectation, of course, meets with disappointments, frustrations, and

disillusions. Why?

- Because there was, is and will be never such thing as THE philosophy

2. Authentic Philosophy as a Personal Task

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i. Philosophizing: not an attempt to learn a philosophical system

- few geniuses in history laid down their thoughts in grandiose masterpieces and

systems like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Whitehead

- to philosophize authentically is not simply to learn one of these philosophical

systems

- not just to talk about, study/learn with or without proof:

- the questions they asked

- the answers the found and proposed

- and these questions and answers are in the first place not my own personal

questions nor could their answers mean anything to me nor make a difference in my

life, nor make me more human, more of a person I am meant to be.

- In short, learning their truth, but not my truth.

ii. Philosophizing is authentic only when it is a personal affair

1. Personal Affair of Question-Asking

- I myself personally raise the depth questions

- I myself see the importance of these questions and their answers to me

- It is myself that I question

2. Personal Affair of Searching the Answer to these questions

- I myself look diligently for the answers, overcoming any obstacles, subjecting

myself to certain disciplines

3. Personal Affair of Seeing the Truth of the answers

- I myself see the truth of the answers I found.

- Only in this way can philosophizing be authentic philosophizing, i.e.:

- Philosophize in an original and personal way

- My own philosophy, not just any other philosophy

iii. Philosophizing is authentic when it one's own life that raises the philosophical questions

- man has to live his own life, determine his own action

- he is responsible for his own life and his actions

- he is only human, a person only when he himself lives his own life and

determines his own actions

- others could not live my life for me nor I could simply live the life of others

- I could not let others determine my life and actions, nor determine others' lives

and actions

- To live my own life, to determine my own action is to live according to my own

533
534

basic convictions about:

- Life/Reality

- Myself

- Values

- To come to my own basic convictions, I myself have to discover them:

- I myself ask the questions about them

- I myself seek the answers

- I myself have to see the truth of the answers

- Thus, I myself can discover my own basic convictions from within.

3. Authentic Philosophy as a Speaking Word

- though authentic philosophy is a deeply personal affair, there are already

concluded philosophies, i.e. thoughts laid down in a system by great genius of the past,

like Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas among others.

- What is the role of constituted philosophies in the philosophizing as a personal

task/affair? This we will answer:

- First, by clarifying the nature of these constituted philosophies. This we will do

in this section.

- Then, by clarifying the proper relationship between my philosophizing as a

personal affair with these constituted philosophies. This we will do in the next

section.

i. Philosophy as Personal Expression of Particular Experience of Reality

1. Philosophy as Speaking Word, not Talking Words

- talking:

- ideas are just set of ideas

- which we must relate with one another

- which we understand in themselves as ideas/ statements/words

- speaking:

- ideas are expressions of the philosopher's personal experience of reality

- experience:

- subject presence to reality: personal presence of who I am to reality, my

opening up to reality

- reality presence to the subject: presence of reality to the person;

unfolding, manifestation, unveiling of reality to the person.

- Ideas try to express, articulate what the person sees himself deeply in

reality, what he himself experiences, his particular insight of the wealth of

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535

reality

2. Not All Speaking Word is Philosophy

- there are different ways of experiencing reality, i.e.

- of being present to reality

- of reality being present to me

- not all of these are philosophy, or philosophical experience. E.g.:

- Rose, a beautiful beach:

- Economist

- Lover

- Theologian

- Scientist

- Philosopher

- School

10

- Student

- Teacher

- Administrator

- Janitor

- A philosopher is someone:

- who sees particular aspects of reality, in a particular depth

- who experiences reality in a particular way

- who is present to reality in a particular way

- to whom reality is present in a distinct way

- philosophy (philosophers ideas, theories, etc.) is an articulation, expression of

this particular way of experiencing the world/reality.

- E.g.: Plato's Philosophy: Theory of Forms

- As solidified thought it may sound abstract

- But it is really an expression of Plato's particular experience, insight of

reality.

ii. End of Philosophical Formation and Training

- not just:

- drilling the aspirant into different philosophical theses or ideas

- memorizing the different philosophical theses and understanding them in

themselves

- but the ideas/theses/solidified thoughts are just means:

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- to make us personally see/experience what the philosopher has seen, has

experienced of reality

- to make us enter into a whole new world we have never seen or even suspected

before

- analogy of index finger as a sign

4. Authentic Philosophy as a Common Task

i. Authentic Philosophy as both a personal task and a common task

- Philosophizing to be authentic should both:

- A personal task/affair

- A personal affair of asking questions, seeking answers, and seeing the

truth of the answers I have found.

- Philosophizing about my person, philosophizing arising from my own

personal situation

- A common task

- Demands the study of the works, thoughts of the philosophers

- Why?

- I am inserted in a history of thought, which is not purely personal,

which I have not made myself.

- I do not start from zero, from scratch in my own philosophizing for

other have thought before me.

- I am carried by their thought; I am in the stream of thought established

by tradition

- at least because of the language I speak

- and because of the ideas in this language which permeate me

- Thus, impossible for me to think without tradition

- Problem:

- How do I philosophize in such a way that we do not compromise either:

- The act of philosophizing as a personal task

- The act of philosophizing as a common task

ii. Constituted Philosophy makes us sensitive and gives us access to the wealth of reality

which they great philosophers have perceived and which otherwise we could not have

perceived.

- philosophers have long been dead and their own particular experiences of reality

have long passed.

- Yet these experiences found expression, are embodied, contained in their

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philosophy which is a speaking word.

- Through their works, we have access to their unique experience of reality and

through them, their own experiences of reality could also be ours.

- Without their experiences, it would be difficult for us to come to those

experiences. E.g.:

- without Plato,

- our experience and conception of reality would be trivial and

materialistic

- the totality of being could not be experienced and understood in its

great variety and levels, at least when we reflect philosophically upon reality

11

- without Augustine, we would not have been sensitive and understood the

meaning of our restlessness of being-in-the-world.

- Without Marx, Darwin, Freud, we could not have been corrected of our

exaggerated spiritualism.

- Therefore, they make it possible for us to have personal experience of reality, to

make us sensitive to the superabundance/wealth contained in the totality of all that is.

iii. What the great philosophers saw/experienced remains fruitful and source of inspiration

- works of great philosophers are considered classical not only because they make

us see/experience what they saw/experience which otherwise we could have been blind

of.

- But at the same time they inspire us to see/experience over and beyond what

they saw

- They further inspire us to ask questions, further beyond, deeper than they have

asked

- To find/seek answers beyond what they found

- To see ourselves the truth of the answers beyond what they themselves saw.

- Yet as every philosopher was struck/awed by a particular aspect of reality, and

every system constructed by a great philosopher is an expression/articulation of some

aspect of reality, there is a danger:

- that a particular aspect of reality might be elevated by him to the rank of reality,

pure and simple, or THE REALITY

- that a particular experience of reality may be proclaimed as the only REALITY

and its articulation and systematization as the SYSTEM, THE PHILOSOPHY.

- When this happens, it becomes antiquated.

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Conclusion:

- If constituted philosophy is a speaking word (i.e., an articulation/expression of a

particular experience of reality), then the study of the works of the different philosophers

leads us to:

- Experience the philosophers' particular experiences of reality

(APPROPRIATION)

- Experience new and deeper aspect of reality other than what they have

experienced (EXPANSION)

- And one does not simply accumulate knowledge but listens to reality no matter

where it speaks to him.

--------------------------------------------------------------

From page 12 onwards we are informed that philosophy is intersubjective. In other it is not merely subjective, invented and practised
by a single, isolated individual but in terms of inter-subjective (socio-cultural) standards, norms or rules of the philosophical
discourse and socio-cultural practice.

According to him philosophical truths (insights? knowledge) are intersubjective because -

Philosophical Truth is intersubjective simply because any truth is intersubjective.

- In principle,

- Truth is not true to me alone but to true to all; otherwise is not true at all.

- Though in fact (de facto)

- A particular philosophical truth is not yet recognized by all

- Yet, it can be recognized by all as true, as valid.

---------------------

Philosophical truths differ from scientific (also intersubjective) truth -

difference is not that scientific truth is intersubjective while philosophical truth

is not

- but that the intersubjectivity of scientific truth is easier to achieve than the

intersubjective examination of philosophical question and discovery.

- In principle, both are intersubjective.

He then concludes that philosophy is not useful in the world/reality of work, but it is useful and meaningful(?) in the context of the
reality/world of philosophy.

-------------------------

5. The Intersubjectivity of Philosophical Truth

i. Denial of Intersubjectivity of Philosophical Truth

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- Subjective View of Philosophical Truth: Philosophical Truth has to be

subjective in order to be authentic. Why?

- Philosophy is a personal task/affair:

- Asking one's own depth-questions

- Seeking find by himself answers for them

- Seeing himself the truth of the answers

- As a personal task, it involves study of other philosophers in order to see the

truth they discovered as true to me, to be inspired to see myself more than what they

have seen.

- Subjectivistic View of Philosophical Truth

- Philosophical truth (that which I see, discover, know in my philosophical

enterprise, that which is unfolded before me in philosophical pursuit) is true/valid to

me alone but not true/valid for all.

- Philosophical Truth is per se not truth for all (not intersubjective)

- Intersubjective View of Scientific Truth

- Scientific truth is the only intersubjective truth, i.e. the only truth which could be

accepted/validated by all as true.

- Intersubjectivity as the exclusive characteristic of Science

ii. Subjectivistic View of Philosophy is Self-Contradictory View

- those who claim that philosophical truth is true to me alone but not true to all

contradict themselves; in other words, their claim contradicts/falsifies their claim

- How?

- For them to claim this subjectivistic view of philosophical truth, they presuppose

that this view as true is valid to all and not just to a particular person.

- To claim otherwise, they would not make sense at all as they would not make

any statement or any claim on this view. Why?

- For to make a claim of anything before anyone, I presuppose that no

one can rightly deny this truth. Thus, this implies that he can also see the truth of

what I claim.

12

- But they claim that no philosophical truth is true to all

- Thus, they contradict themselves.

iii. Difference between Philosophical Truth and Scientific Truth

- difference is not that scientific truth is intersubjective while philosophical truth

is not

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- but that the intersubjectivity of scientific truth is easier to achieve than the

intersubjective examination of philosophical question and discovery.

- In principle, both are intersubjective.

iv. Philosophical Truth is intersubjective simply because any truth is intersubjective.

- In principle,

- Truth is not true to me alone but to true to all; otherwise is not true at all.

- Though in fact (de facto)

- A particular philosophical truth is not yet recognized by all

- Yet, it can be recognized by all as true, as valid.

6. The Usefulness of Philosophy

1. Philosophy is not useful in the "World of Work"

- "World of Work":

- technocratic world, functional world

- control/manipulation of nature to serve/meet one's particular needs

- dealing with practical living

- life on the horizontal dimension

- Science is very useful in this kind world

- E.g. Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Economic, Psychology

- But philosophy is not useful, and even wholly useless in this kind world, the

world of work

- Thus, when a person concerns himself with the practical living and as society

tends to become a technocratic organization of work, philosophy is seen as useless

- Ironically, it is to this person, and to this society that philosophy becomes not

only useful but even necessary.

2. Philosophy is useful in the "World of Philosophy"

- unless one enters into a particular presence to reality (world) achieved by

philosophers, unless one enters into the level, dimension, realm, aspect of reality which

the philosophers have entered, one cannot be convinced of the usefulness of philosophy.

- Thus, the usefulness of philosophy can only be appreciated by those who have

left behind or go beyond or deeper than the world of work, and have experienced,

perceived or entered into this realm, dimension of reality - world of philosophy

- For those who have already entered, they do not need to be convinced of the

usefulness of philosophy for the value of philosophy clearly reveals itself.

- For those who have not yet entered into the world of philosophy, they can at

least accept the usefulness of philosophy in good faith, and start philosophizing.

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I find many of his ideas very attractive because I have since my youth identified written about then when I found their relevance for
philosophy and their meaningfulness, for example intersubjectivity, authentic philosophy/izing and philosophers and those who live
for philosophy (and not merely living off it as academic “philosophers”). Original, creative thinking philosophers versus academic,
derivative philosophers, comparable to academic art and the art by original-, creative-thinking artists.

However, much of what he suggests are not hard philosophy(ical facts), but the idealization of and hope for what philosophy might
be like - almost in the vein of Plato. These are often mere speculations when he makes statements or speculates and do not provide
us with arguments and reasons for these statements he makes.

I include this article by C D Broad from 1947 among methods of philosophy as I find it interesting for several reasons.

He was professor of philosophy at a number of universities, mostly in the UK .

(Broad was openly homosexual at a time when
homosexual acts were illegal. In March 1958, Broad along with fellow philosophers A.J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell,
writer J.B. Priestley, and 27 others, sent a letter to The Times which urged the acceptance of the Wolfenden Report's
recommendation that homosexual acts should 'no longer be a criminal offence'.). He was also President of the
Society for Psychical Research in 1935 and 1958. Broad argued that if research showed that psychic events occur,
this would challenge philosophical theories of "basic limiting principles" in at least five ways:

1. Backward causation, the future affecting the past, is rejected by many philosophers, but would be shown
to occur if, for example, people could predict the future.
2. One common argument against dualism, that is the belief that minds are non-physical, and bodies
physical, is that physical and non-physical things cannot interact. However, this would be shown to be
possible if people can move physical objects by thought (telekinesis).
3. Similarly, philosophers tend to be skeptical about claims that non-physical 'stuff' could interact with
anything. This would also be challenged if minds are shown to be able to communicate with each other,
as would be the case if mind-reading is possible.
4. Philosophers generally accept that we can only learn about the world through reason and perception. This
belief would be challenged if people were able to psychically perceive events in other places.
5. Physicalist philosophers believe that there cannot be persons without bodies. If ghosts were shown to
exist, this view would be challenged.
6. Broad argued for "non-occurrent causation" as "literally determined by the agent or self." The agent could
be considered as a substance or continuant, and not by a total cause which contains as factors events in
and dispositions of the agent. Thus our efforts would be completely determined, but their causes would
not be prior events.
7. New series of events would then originate which he called "continuants." These are essentially causa sui.
8. Peter van Inwagen says that Broad formulated an excellent version of what van Inwagen has called the
"Consequence Argument" in defense of incompatibilism.

Broad's early interests were in science and mathematics. Despite being successful in these he came to believe that
he would never be a first-rate scientist, and turned to philosophy. Broad's interests were exceptionally wide-
ranging. He devoted his philosophical acuity to the mind-body problem, the nature of perception, memory,
introspection, and the unconscious, to the nature of space, time and causation. He also wrote extensively on the
philosophy of probability and induction, ethics, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of religion. The ample
scope and scale of Broad's work is impressive In addition he nourished an interest in parapsychology—a subject he
approached with the disinterested curiosity and scrupulous care that is characteristic of his philosophical work.

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Broad did not have “a philosophy”—if by that phrase is meant highly original philosophical theories, and a highly
original way of approaching philosophical problems. He writes: “I have nothing worth calling a system of
philosophy of my own, and there is no philosopher of whom I should be willing to reckon myself a faithful
follower” (1924, p. 77 “Critical and Speculative Philosophy,” in Contemporary British Philosophy (First Series), ed.
by J.H. Muirhead, London: Allen and Unwin).

It is one thing to delineate the contours of the notion of emergence, another to argue that emergent phenomena
actually exist. A wide variety of phenomena have been held to be emergent. Apart from consciousness, various
chemical and biological phenomena have been held to be emergent. Broad is not willing to rule out a physicalistic
reduction of chemistry and biology to physics: chemical and biological phenomena might, he believes, very well be
reducible to complex microphysical processes. In his opinion, however, consciousness is a different matter. We will
turn to consciousness in a moment. When it comes to biology and chemistry he declares that he does not see any
“a priori impossibility in a mechanistic biology or chemistry” (1925, p. 72). He stresses that it is in practice
enormously difficult to know whether, say, a certain biological feature such as nutrition is emergent or not. It is
evident from what Broad says that he recognises that the Emergentist stance has its dangers in that it tends to
encourage acceptance of laws and properties as ultimate and irreducible. There is a danger in this because, as he
notes, reductive explanations have proved remarkably successful in the past, and there is the possibility that what
we take to be an emergent phenomenon is in fact reducible.

In the last chapter of his book Broad presents a taxonomy of no less than seventeen different theories which are
“possible theoretically on the relation between Mind and Matter” (1925, p. 607). By a process of elimination Broad
arrives at a more wieldy number of theories. Two of the remaining rivalling theories are Physicalism—in Broad's
terminology, “Mechanism”—and Emergentism. Let us now take a closer look at his case for Emergentism.

Broad adduces a version of what has come to be known as The Knowledge Argument in favour of an Emergentist
position with respect to the place of consciousness in nature. He asks us to assume that there is a mathematical
archangel.

Metaphilosophy

Broad distinguishes two chief aspects of philosophical thinking. He labels these critical philosophy and
speculative philosophy. Critical philosophy has two chief tasks, one of which is to analyse “certain very general
concepts such as number, thing, quality, change, cause, etc.” (1924, p. 82). We make use of these and a whole host
of other concepts in science and ordinary life. Although we are typically able to apply them fairly consistently, we
are not able to analyse them. Nor are we able to state their precise relations to each other. One task of critical
philosophy is to provide analyses of such concepts. It becomes evident that this is an important task as soon as it
is realized that when we seek to apply these concepts to odd or exceptional cases we are often uncertain whether
they are applicable. For example, it might be unclear whether a certain individual with a multiple personality
disorder is a person or not .Such difficulties arise because “we are not clear as to what we mean by ‘being a
person’” (1924, p. 83). There is, therefore, a need for an intellectual discipline that seeks to analyse and define this
and many other concepts.

In science and in daily life we do not merely use unanalysed concepts. “We also assume uncritically a number of
very fundamental propositions. In all our arguments we assume the truth of certain principles of reasoning. Again,
we always assume that every change has a cause. And in induction we certainly assume something—it is hard to
say what—about the fundamental ‘make-up’ of the existent world” (1924, p. 84).

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The second task of critical philosophy is to examine these and other fundamental assumptions; it is “to take
these propositions which we uncritically assume in science and daily life and to subject them to criticism” (ibid.).

In order to analyse a proposition we must seek to attain a clearer grasp of the concepts featured in the
proposition. Thus the analysis and criticism of a proposition depends on the analysis of concepts. And vice versa:
by reflecting on the propositions in which a certain concept occurs we clear up the meaning of it.

Now, critical philosophy is one part or aspect of philosophical thinking. But critical philosophy “does not include
all that is understood by philosophy. It is certainly held to be the function of a philosopher to discuss the nature
of Reality as a whole, and to consider the position and prospects of men in it” (1924, p. 96). This aspect of
philosophical thinking is speculative philosophy.

Speculative philosophy seeks to work out a view of reality as a whole by taking into account the whole range of
human experience—scientific, social, ethical, æsthetic, and religious: “Its business is to take over all aspects of
human experience, to reflect upon them, and to try to think out a view of Reality as a whole which shall do justice
to all of them” (1924, p. 96).

Broad's idea is that the various aspects of human experience and (putative) facts linked to these provide a point of
departure for philosophical reflection—an exceedingly important sort of reflection aiming at a reasoned view of
Reality as a whole.

As can be gathered from the above, philosophical thinking features, according to Broad, a distinctive type of birds-
eye view. He calls it synopsis. Let us take a somewhat closer look at this. The plain man as well as the professional
scientist or scholar…

I understand by synopsis the necessary preliminary towards trying to satisfy this desire, viz. the deliberate viewing
together of aspects of human experience which are generally viewed apart, and the endeavour to see how they are
inter-related. (1947a, p. 4)

On reflection it is clear that the synoptic stance is necessary for the discovery of various inadequacies in our picture
of reality, inadequacies resulting from a far too insular perspective on reality. The synoptic stance will, in effect,
lead to the discovery of latent philosophical problems: “It is synopsis, revealing prima facie incoherence, which is
the main motive to philosophical activity” (1958, p. 121; cf. 1947a, p. 16). And it is clearly only after we have
discovered and successfully addressed these problems that we may lay claim to a satisfactory picture of reality as a
whole.

Broad gives several examples of how synopsis is featured in philosophical thinking. One of these is taken from the
free will problem. The main facts germane to the problem are these: (i) When we consider a situation in which we
did a certain action, we are quite convinced that we could have done otherwise: we could have performed an
alternative action. On reflection it seems clear that ‘could’ is used in some sense that is not analysable in terms of
‘would have, if’. (ii) Our moral judgments seem to presuppose that a person who in fact willed to do a certain action
could have willed otherwise. (iii) Given the past, the actual situation and the laws of nature it seems impossible that
anything other should have happened than what in fact did happen. If so, how can our volitions be other than
completely determined? (iv) It is difficult, then, to reconcile the notions of moral responsibility with the view that
our volitions are completely determined.

The problem of free will is discovered when we look at (i) and (ii) in the light of (iii) In other words, the very
problem is discerned only because we have envisaged these facts together, i.e. because we have taken a synoptic
view of the facts.

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Above are a few of the reasons why I find Broad, his work, ideas and suggestions of interest. It is against the above
background as context that the article below should be res.

I find Broad’s notions and depictions of method of (analytic and) speculative philosophy both very general, but also
in another sense very limited. Those are obviously not the only reasons for philosophy or the only methods
employed by philosophers. In spite of this I find his view of methods of philosophy of interest.

SOME METHODS OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY

By Professor C. D. Broad.

Published in Aristotelian Society Supplement 21 (1947): 1-32.

Examples of Synopsis

-it might be said, there is no single non-disjunctive characteristic, and no conjunction of such characteristics, common and peculiar to what
Hume was doing and what Hegel was doing. To philosophize, on this view, is to perform one or another or a mixture of at least two
fundamentally different kinds of activity, one of which is exemplified by Hume's attempt to analyze causal propositions and the other by Hegel's
attempt to establish the formal structure of the universe by dialectical reasoning.

I think it is quite clear that the word "philosophy" has always been used to cover the kind of thing that Hegel did and that McTaggart did in
addition to the kind of thing which Hume did and which Moore does, whether or not these be two radically disparate kinds of activity. Anyone
who proposes that the name "philosophy" shall be confined to the latter kind of activity is proposing that it shall henceforth be used in a new
and much narrower sense, and he should be expected to give reasons for this linguistic innovation. He might, e.g., give as his reason that
philosophizing, in the sense of doing the kind of thing that Hume did, is a practicable and useful activity; whilst philosophizing, in the sense of
doing the kind of thing which Hegel did, is not only impracticable and therefore useless, but is also a deceptive activity, based on certain
fundamental illusions which have now been detected and explained but are still dangerously insidious.

This brings me to my main point. I am inclined to think that there are two features which are together characteristic of all work that would
generally be regarded as philosophical, and a third which is often present in a high degree but may be evanescent. The two which I think are
always present may be called "analysis" and "synopsis"; the one which may be present in a vanishingly small degree can be called "synthesis."
Analysis and synopsis themselves may be present in very different degrees and proportions. Hume's work, e.g., is so predominantly analytic
that it might be denied to be synoptic, and Hegel's is so predominantly synoptic that it might be denied to be analytic. But I believe that both
are always present, and that each involves some degree of the other. Lastly, there is a very high positive correlation between synopsis and
synthesis. Synthesis presupposes synopsis, and extensive synopsis is generally made by persons whose main interest is in synthesis.

. Let it suffice to say crudely that it (analysis) consists in clearing up the meanings of all the fundamental kinds of sentence which we habitually
use, e.g., causal sentences, material-thing sentences, sentences with the word "I" as grammatical subject, sentences with temporal copulas,
ethical sentences, religious sentences, and so on.

Synopsis and synthesis are especially characteristic of what may be called "speculative philosophy," and that is why the latter phrase occurs
in the title of my paper. I will begin with the notion of synopsis.

Examples of Synopsis.

(1) As our first example we will take the problem of sense-perception. Why is there a problem?

(i) In the first place, because, if we attend carefully, we note such facts as these.

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Two observers, who are said to be seeing the same part of the same thing at the same time, are often not being presented with precisely
similar visual appearances of that object.

One and the same observer, who is said to be seeing the same unchanged part of the same thing at different times and from different
positions, is often not presented with precisely similar visual appearances of that object on both occasions.

(ii) Secondly, because there are visual experiences which are abnormal in various ways and degrees, but are similar to and continuous with
those which are normal. They range, e.g., from mirror-images and straight sticks that look bent when half immersed in water,

(iii) Thirdly, because of facts which are still quite unknown except to a minority of grown-up educated persons, and which must have been
completely hidden from everyone at the time when the language in which we express our sense-experiences was first formed and for
thousands of years afterwards. One of these is the physical fact that light takes time to travel; and that the visual appearance which a remote
object presents at any time to an observer depends, not on the shape, size, position, etc., of the object at that moment, but on what they were
at the moment when the light now striking the observer's eye left the object. Another of them is the physiological fact that visual appearances
vary with certain changes in the observers eye, optic nerve, and brain

There is a problem of sense-perception, in the philosophical sense, for those and only those who try to envisage all these fact together and to
interpret sense-perception and its implications in relation to all of them. Since it is plain that they are all relevant to it, it is desirable that
someone should take this synoptic view. Since the language in which we express our visual sense-perceptions was formed unwittingly in
prehistoric times to deal in a practical way with a kind of normalized extract from our visual experiences, and in complete ignorance of a whole
department of relevant physical, physiological, and psychological facts, it would be a miracle if it were theoretically adequate and if it were not
positively misleading in some of its implications.

(i) It is plain to common sense that many of a person's sensations and feelings follow immediately upon and vary concomitantly with certain
events in his eyes, ears, joints, etc. On the other hand, many experiences, e.g., processes of day-dreaming, deliberating, reasoning, etc., do not
seem prima facie to be covariant with events in the body.

(ii) The sciences of physiology and anatomy make it almost certain that the immediate bodily antecedents and correlates of sensations and
feelings are not events in one's eyes, ears, joints, etc., but are slightly later imperceptible chemical or electrical changes in certain parts of one's
brain.

(iii) It is further alleged, on the authority of these sciences, that there are immediate bodily antecedents and correlates of the same general
nature, viz., chemical or electrical events in certain parts of the brain, even to those mental processes, such as deliberating, comparing,
abstracting, reasoning, etc., which do not seem prima facie to be covariant with bodily events.

(iv) The physical sciences have developed a concept of causation in terms of regular sequence and concomitant variation, in which the notions
of agent and instrument, activity and passivity, etc., play little if any explicit part.

Now these various mutually relevant facts are hardly ever viewed synoptically except by philosophers. Common sense is quite ignorant of
many of them and common language had grown up and crystallized ages before they were known or suspected. On the other hand, scientists
who are familiar with all of them tend to concentrate on one at a time and temporarily to ignore the rest. When they confine their attention to
the physical and physiological and anatomical facts they are inclined to take the view that men are "conscious automata," i.e., that all our
mental states, including processes of reasoning, willing, etc., are mere by-products of states of brain which are determined by purely physical
and physiological antecedents. But their daily lives and all their professional activities presuppose a view which is shared by plain men and
which seems prima facie to be incompatible with the conscious automaton theory.

Scientists all assume in practice that when they design and carry out an experiment, they are initiating certain changes in the material world
which would never have taken place unless they had been thought out beforehand, desired, and deliberately led up to. They assume that their
assent to or dissent from the various alternative interpretations which might be put on the results of an experiment is determined by processes
of reasoning, demonstrative or probable, in which belief is given or withheld in accordance with evidence, which may be favourable or
unfavourable, weak or strong or coercive. Now all this involves concepts, and seems prima facie to involve modes of causation, completely
different from those in terms of which the conscious automaton theory is formulated.

To sum this up briefly. The scientist who investigates and theorizes about man and his powers and activities is himself a man exercizing certain
characteristically human powers and activities. But the account which he is apt to give of man, when he treats him as an object of scientific
investigation, seems prima facie difficult to reconcile with the occurrence and the validity of his own most characteristic activities as
investigator, experimenter, theorist, and reasoner. The need for synopsis by someone who is aware of all the main facts and can hold them
steadily together in one view is here particularly obvious.

(3) As a third example of synopsis I will take what may roughly be called the "free-will" problem. The main facts are these.

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Here again the need for synopsis is evident. It seems prima facie that each of us conducts one part of his life on the assumption of complete
determinism and another part on the assumption of incomplete determinism plus something else more positive which it is very hard to
formulate clearly. And these two parts are not sharply separated; they overlap and interpenetrate each other. Most of us generally manage to
ignore one aspect at a time and concentrate on the other; but, however convenient this may be in practice,

Problem of sense-perception

Mind-body problem

Free-will problem

Paranormal phenomena

Synopsis and Analysis

I think that there is a very close connexion between synopsis and the process of analysis which everyone admits to be a characteristically
philosophical activity. It is generally synopsis which gives the stimulus to analysis. As I have shown in my examples, it often happens that each
of several regions of fact, which we generally contemplate or react to separately, gives rise to its own set of concepts and principles; that each
such set seems satisfactory and internally coherent; but that, when we contemplate these various departments together, we find that the
corresponding sets of concepts and principles seem to conflict with each other. The intellectual discomfort thus produced in a person of
philosophical disposition is perhaps the most usual motive for trying to analyze those concepts and to formulate those principles clearly. Such a
process is an indispensable step towards deciding whether the inconsistency is real or only apparent and towards formulating it precisely if it is
real; and this is a precondition of any efficient attempt to resolve it.

Synopsis and Synthesis

Synopsis is not an end in itself. It not only provides the stimulus for analysis, but it also furnishes the basis for something else, which may be
called "Synthesis." The purpose of synthesis is to supply a set of concepts and principles which shall cover satisfactorily all the various regions of
fact which are being viewed synoptically.

The apparent conflict between the concepts and principles characteristic of different regions of fact must be shown to arise from the valid
application of these common concepts and principles in different contexts and under different special limitations.

Some further Remarks on Synopsis and Synthesis

Intellectual activities which are genuinely philosophical, in that they involve deep analysis, wide synopsis, and illuminating synthesis, occur
from time to time within some special science. This is particularly obvious when the science is concerned, as physics is, with very fundamental
and pervasive features of reality. I could certainly count as philosophical the work done by Galileo on the analysis of kinematic and dynamical
phenomena, and the correlated work of synthesis in which the formulation of the three laws of motion and the law of gravitation by Newton is
an outstanding phase and the unification of these laws by Lagrange, Hamilton, and finally Einstein is a further development.

Again, the situations which led respectively to the formulation of the Principle of Relativity and the Uncertainty Principle are typical of what I
have exemplified under the head of synopsis, and the principles themselves are typical of what I have described as synthesis. In the case of
relativity there were many different kinds of possible experiments which, in accordance with well-tried and generally accepted principles, might
have been expected to provide perceptible evidence for the motion of a body relative to the surrounding ether. The results of all these
experiments were completely negative

The Principle of Relativity and the Uncertainty Principle are clear instances of synthesis, based on synopsis, and preceded and made possible by
a more profound analysis of generally accepted concepts and principles.

The results of such synthesis in physics have the advantage that either they themselves can be stated mathematically or that they impose
certain conditions on the form of equations which express possible physical laws. Hence their consequences can be rigidly deduced. This is
seldom, if ever, true of syntheses which cover several widely different fields of fact, e.g., man considered as reasoner, experimenter, and
morally responsible agent, and man considered as an object of physiological and psychological experiment

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In the Second Book of his Ethics Spinoza tries to formulate a theory of bodies consistent with his general principle that there are no finite
continuants, that the only genuine continuant is God, and that God is a substance which is at once material and mental

Synopsis and synthesis both take place at various levels. I have just given examples of them within a single region of fact, viz., that of physics.
At a higher level one would try to get a synoptic view, e.g., of the phenomena of organic and inorganic material things and processes, and try to
synthesize them into a single coherent scheme. At a still higher level one would take into one's view the facts of mental life at the animal level,
and then at the level of rational cognition, deliberate action, specifically moral emotion and motivation, and so on. Finally, if no account had so
far been taken of paranormal phenomena, these would have to be brought into the picture, and an attempt made to synthesize them with the
normal facts. As each new department was considered it would be necessary to review the syntheses which had seemed fairly satisfactory at
the previous level. Some of them might not need to be rejected or even seriously modified, but others might have to be completely abandoned
or considerably altered when a new department of facts was brought into the picture.

How are Principles of Synthesis Discovered?

I am sure that it is impossible to give rules for the discovery of principles of synthesis in philosophy just as it is impossible to give rules for
suggesting fruitful hypotheses and colligating a mass of observations in science

Now the speculative philosopher naturally wants to unify and synthesize such a hierarchy, and he is often tempted to do it in one or other of
two opposite ways. These might be called respectively Reduction and Sublimation. The reductive type of unification tries to show that the
features which are characteristic of the higher levels are analyzable without remainder into those which belong to the lower levels. Just the
same laws hold throughout, but we have different and more special collocations of the same elements at the higher levels; and the occurrence
of those special collocations is itself explicable from the laws and collocations characteristic of the lowest level. The sublimative type of
unification tries to show that the features which seem to be peculiar to the higher levels are really present in a latent or a specially simplified or
a degenerate form at the lower levels. It may even try to show that features which seem to be typical of the lowest levels are partially
misleading appearances of features which are typical of the highest levels. Materialism, in its non-emergent forms, and Leibniz's form of
mentalism, are extreme cases respectively of the reductive and the sublimative types of unification.

How are Proposed Principles of Synthesis Recommended?

How does a philosopher persuade himself and try to persuade others to accept the kind of synthesis which he proposes?

In former times the method was often, ostensibly at any rate, deductive. Certain very general premises were accepted by a philosopher as self-
evident synthetic propositions. He either assumed that other persons would find them self-evident at once, or, if not, he tried to remove
confusions and misunderstandings and to place his readers in a position in which they could contemplate these premises for themselves. He
hoped and expected that they too would find them self-evident.

In recent times speculative philosophers have more and more tended to abandon this method.

Certain very general premises were accepted by a philosopher as self-evident synthetic propositions. He either assumed that other persons
would find them self-evident at once, or, if not, he tried to remove confusions and misunderstandings and to place his readers in a position in
which they could contemplate these premises for themselves. He hoped and expected that they too would find them self-evident.

I offer as a conclusion to the different notions expressed concerning the method/s and the methodology of
philosophy the following suggestions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_methodology

I make comments in this statement of philosophy and its methods/methodologies.

Philosophical method (or philosophical methodology) is the (intersubjective, socio-cultural practice , discipline or
discourse employing and based on agreements or norms accepted by and institutionalized in the particular schools
of or moments in philosophy of the philosophical discourse, if not accepted by the entire discourse, that is all the
schools and movements that constitute it) study of how to do philosophy. A common view among philosophers is

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that philosophy is distinguished by the ways that philosophers follow in addressing philosophical questions. There
is not just one method (I suggest that this article means that there exist different techniques at different stages of
doing philosophy, or at different stages of theorizing, instead of different, available, mutually exclusive methods or
approaches for a particular stage or context) that philosophers use to answer philosophical questions.

Systematic philosophy is a generic term that applies to philosophical methods and approaches that attempt to
provide a framework in reason (This is not one exclusive method of philosophy but one aspect, one stage of
philosophical investigation or theorizing) that can explain all questions and problems related to human life.(is it not
ALL life or rather existence? Ontology and metaphysics) Examples of systematic philosophers include Plato,
Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hegel. (But what are the methods they used to do this? To build such systems?
Systematic philosophy is not one method but a label a classificatory term of their type of work or their intentions) In
many ways, any attempts to formulate a philosophical method that provides the ultimate constituents of reality, a
metaphysics, can be considered systematic philosophy. (Again this is used a a label a classificatory term) In
modern philosophy the reaction to systematic philosophy began with Kierkegaard and continued in various forms
through analytic philosophy, existentialism, hermeneutics, and deconstructionism.

Some common features of the methods (NOT methods, techniques or tools in the larger philosophical process of
theorizing or philosophical methodology) that philosophers follow (and discuss when discussing philosophical
method) include:

 Methodic doubt - a systematic process of being skeptical about (or doubting) the truth of one's beliefs.
(and all underlying assumptions and implicit pre-suppositions or transcendentals as in the case of Kant).
 Argument - provide an argument or several arguments supporting the solution.(by means of coherent,
logical reasoning and sound arguments0
 Dialectic - present the solution and arguments for criticism by other philosophers, and help them judge
their own.

Doubt and the sense of wonder

Plato said that "philosophy begins in wonder", a view which is echoed by Aristotle: "It was their wonder,
astonishment, that first led men to philosophize and still leads them." Philosophizing may begin with some simple
doubts about accepted beliefs. The initial impulse to philosophize may arise from suspicion, for example that we
do not fully understand, and have not fully justified, even our most basic beliefs about the world. (doubt as a way, a
method to question and problematize things)

Formulate questions and problems (problem statements!)

Another element of philosophical method is to formulate questions to be answered or problems to be solved. The
working assumption is that the more clearly the question or problem (the process of problematization) is stated,
the easier it is to identify critical issues. (It is called problem statements, creating alternative problem statements.)

A relatively small number of major philosophers prefer not to be quick, but to spend more time trying to get
extremely clear on what the problem is all about. (Paying a great deal of attention to alternative problem statements
so as to select the most accurate and detailed one.)

Enunciate a solution

Another approach is to(1) enunciate a theory , or (2) to offer a definition or analysis, which constitutes an attempt
to solve a philosophical problem. (This is a method and approach? Where does this THEORY come from?
Philosophers invent them by speculation? Surely a lot of prior work would have to be executed to fabricate such a
THEORY?) Sometimes a philosophical theory by itself can be stated quite briefly.(?? really) All the supporting
philosophical text is offered by way of hedging, (Broad illustrates how this works in detail, attempts to provide

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solutions from particular cases, generalize mistakenly to all cases, false hypotheses and proposals) explanation, and
argument. (see Broad who from his scientific background, has a number of things to say about developing and using
theories in science and reductionism, sublimation and deductionism in philosophy. How are Principles of Synthesis
Discovered? gives details of how philosophers do this. “remarks on the general procedure of speculative
philosophers….What often happens is this. A philosopher is strongly impressed by some feature which is highly
characteristic of a certain important region of fact, and which within that region is felt to be completely intelligible
and a source of satisfactory explanations…..Finally, he tries to show that this principle is, in fact, operative in those
regions in which it seemed at first sight not to be so. In this way, he feels that he has discovered order and unity
pervading the collection of various regions of fact which he is surveying synoptically.” “Now the speculative
philosopher naturally wants to unify and synthesize such a hierarchy, and he is often tempted to do it in one or other
of two opposite ways. These might be called respectively Reduction and Sublimation. The reductive type of
unification tries to show that the features which are characteristic of the higher levels are analyzable without
remainder into those which belong to the lower levels. Just the same laws hold throughout, but we have different and
more special collocations of the same elements at the higher levels; and the occurrence of those special collocations
is itself explicable from the laws and collocations characteristic of the lowest level. The sublimative type of
unification tries to show that the features which seem to be peculiar to the higher levels are really present in a latent
or a specially simplified or a degenerate form at the lower levels. It may even try to show that features which seem
to be typical of the lowest levels are partially misleading appearances of features which are typical of the highest
levels.”)

Not all proposed solutions to philosophical problems consist of definitions or generalizations. (such as?
Examples please) Sometimes what is called for is a certain sort of explanation — not a causal explanation, but an
explanation for example of how two different views, which seem to be contrary to one another, can be held at
the same time, consistently. One can call this a philosophical explanation. (See the above comments and
‘philosophical explanation’ of how this is done by Broad. Broad himself uses this technique in the whole of his
article). (These are truly baffling comments, especially as they are presented as truthful generalizations)

Justify the solution

A argument is a set of statements, one of which (the conclusion), it is said or implied, follows from the others (the
premises). One might think of arguments as bundles of reasons — often not just a list, but logically interconnected
statements — followed by the claim they are reasons for. The reasons are the premises, the claim they support is the
conclusion; together they make an argument. (See Formal methods in Philosophy by Schoubye for details on the
formal aspects of arguments and reasoning, very detailed and complex). (also see Thouless: Straight and Crooked
thinking for correct arguments and different fallacies. Available as free PDF download here:
http://neglectedbooks.com/Straight_and_Crooked_Thinking.pdf Straight and Crooked Thinking, first
published in 1930 and revised in 1953, is a book by Robert H. Thouless which describes,
assesses and critically analyses flaws in reasoning and argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_and_Crooked_Thinking Synopsis of Thirty-eight fallacies discussed in
the book. (Brtoad selects a few of these that according to him are frequently , illegally not
validly, employed by philosophers. He uses his own terms to refer to them). Among them are:

 No. 3. proof by example, biased sample, cherry picking

 No. 6. ignoratio elenchi: "red herring"
 No. 9. false compromise/middle ground
 No. 12. argument in a circle
 No. 13. begging the question
 No. 17. equivocation
 No. 18. false dilemma: black and white thinking
 No. 19. continuum fallacy (fallacy of the beard)
 No. 21. ad nauseam: "argumentum ad nauseam" or "argument from repetition" or
"argumentum ad infinitum"

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 No. 25. style over substance fallacy

 No. 28. appeal to authority
 No. 31. thought-terminating cliché
 No. 36. special pleading
 No. 37. appeal to consequences
 No. 38. appeal to motive

Thinking portal

 List of cognitive biases

 List of common misconceptions
 List of fallacies
 List of memory biases
 List of topics related to public relations and propaganda )

Philosophical arguments and justifications are another important part of philosophical method. It is rare to
find a philosopher, particularly in the Western philosophical tradition, who lacks many arguments. Philosophers
are, or at least are expected to be, very good at giving arguments. They constantly demand and offer arguments for
different claims they make. ( To make and argument is to provide a bundle of reasons that are logically
interconnected or coherent so as to be able to arrive at and make a or draw a certain conclusion. The statements are
followed by a claim for something to be the case or not. The argument/s support the claim, the conclusion that is
arrived at or made). (As we shall see in the quotes below a good argument is clear, well organized and a sound
statement of a number of interconnected or coherent reasons for why one is able and it is legitimate to say something
or to make a certain claim or draw a certain conclusion.)

This therefore indicates that philosophy is a quest for arguments.(Really? Arguments have very specific
functions in philosophical writing, investigation, description and communication. Another unfounded
generalization) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument n philosophy and logic, an argument is a series of
statements typically used to persuade someone of something or to present reasons for accepting a conclusion.[1][2]
The general form of an argument in a natural language is that of premises (typically in the form of propositions,
statements or sentences) in support of a claim: the conclusion.[3][4][5] The structure of some arguments can also be set
out in a formal language, and formally defined "arguments" can be made independently of natural language
arguments, as in math, logic, and computer science.

In a typical deductive argument, the premises guarantee the truth of the conclusion, while in an inductive argument,
they are thought to provide reasons supporting the conclusion's probable truth.[6] The standards for evaluating non-
deductive arguments may rest on different or additional criteria than truth, for example, the persuasiveness of so-
called "indispensability claims" in transcendental arguments,[7] the quality of hypotheses in retroduction, or even the
disclosure of new possibilities for thinking and acting.[8]

The standards and criteria used in evaluating arguments and their forms of reasoning are studied in logic.[9] Ways of
formulating arguments effectively are studied in rhetoric (see also: argumentation theory). An argument in a formal
language shows the logical form of the symbolically represented or natural language arguments obtained by its
interpretations.)

Argument at PhilPapers

Argument at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project

"Argument". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.http://www.iep.utm.edu/argument/ The focus of this article is

on understanding an argument as a collection of truth-bearers (that is, the things that bear truth and falsity, or are
true and false) some of which are offered as reasons for one of them, the conclusion. This article takes propositions

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rather than sentences or statements or utterances to be the primary truth bearers. The reasons offered within the
argument are called “premises”, and the proposition that the premises are offered for is called the “conclusion”.

The Structural Approach to Characterizing Arguments

1. The Pragmatic Approach to Characterizing Arguments

2. Deductive, Inductive, and Conductive Arguments
3. Conclusion
4. References and Further Reading

A good argument — a clear, organized, and sound statement of reasons — may ultimately cure the original
doubts that motivated us to take up philosophy. If one is willing to be satisfied without any good supporting
reasons, then a Western philosophical approach may not be what one actually requires.
https://www3.nd.edu/~jspeaks/courses/2008-9/10100-spring/_LECTURES/2%20-%20arguments.pdf
http://philosophy.hku.hk/think/arg/goodarg.php Argument analysis

 A01. What is an argument?

 A02. The standard format
 A03. Validity
 A04. Soundness
 A05. Valid patterns
 A06. Validity and relevance
 A07. Hidden Assumptions
 A08. Inductive Reasoning
 A09. Good Arguments
 A10. Argument mapping
 A11. Analogical Arguments
 A12. More valid patterns
 A13. Arguing with other people

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/logical-and-critical-thinking/0/steps/9153

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https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/logical-and-critical-thinking/0/steps/9152

So far we have talked about the kind of support that can be given for conclusions: deductive and
non-deductive. But we haven’t said anything yet about whether the premises are true or not. This is what we do
when we evaluate whether arguments are sound or cogent.

Validity and strength of arguments do not on their own tell us whether arguments are good or bad. We’ve actually
seen rubbish arguments that were valid. That’s why we need to introduce two further concepts for arguments: being
sound and being cogent.

Sound Arguments

 Definition: A sound argument is a valid argument that has true premises.

Firstly, a sound argument is a deductive argument. It’s trying to establish conclusive support for its conclusion.
Secondly, the argument is valid: the premises, if true, would guarantee that the conclusion is also true. And on top of
all that, the premises are actually true. Therefore, a sound argument guarantees that its conclusion is true.

We say that a sound argument is a good argument. It is a good argument because it guarantees that the conclusion is
true. It would be irrational for you not to believe the conclusion of a sound argument.

Of course, sound arguments are very rare, because they’re very hard to establish. But, some arguments are sound.

For example:

The province of Québec is part of Canada. Patrick was born in Québec. Therefore, Patrick was born in Canada.

This is a valid argument. Can you see why?

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Furthermore, the premises are true: Québec is indeed part of Canada, and Patrick was indeed born in Québec.
Hence, you can be absolutely certain that Patrick was born in Canada, and you ought to believe that Patrick was
born in Canada. There’s no way around it.

Here are some more examples of sound arguments:

I drank coffee this morning; therefore, I drank something this morning.

Patrick got married on January 4, 2014. Patrick has not been divorced, and Patrick is not a widower. Therefore,
Patrick is not a bachelor.

It is true that Patrick got married on January 4, 2014, that he has not divorced and that he is not a widower. So
Patrick is not a bachelor because a bachelor is an unmarried male, by definition.

Cogent Arguments

Now, what about non-deductive arguments? For non-deductive arguments, we introduce the notion of a cogent
argument.

 Definition: A cogent argument is a strong non-deductive argument that has true premises.

And again, we say that cogent arguments are good. A cogent argument is by definition non-deductive, which means
that the premises are intended to establish probable (but not conclusive) support for the conclusion.

Furthermore, a cogent argument is strong, so the premises, if they were true, would succeed in providing probable
support for the conclusion. And finally, the premises are actually true. So the conclusion indeed receives probable
support.

Here’s an example:

Patrick was born in North America and Patrick wasn’t born in Mexico. It’s thus quite probable that Patrick was born
in the USA.

That is a cogent argument. If all you know about Patrick is what’s contained in the premises, and those premises are
true (they are!), then that’s a fairly strong argument, because the population of the USA is over 300 000 000,
whereas that of Canada is under 40 000 000. This means that the odds that Patrick was born in the USA are roughly
88%, which makes the support for the conclusion quite strong. Furthermore, the premises are true. Therefore, the
argument is cogent, and so it is a good argument.

This means that we can have good arguments that have false conclusions!

Here’s another example:

I had coffee this morning. Therefore, it’s quite likely that I drank something this morning.

This is a strong argument with true premises, so it is cogent and therefore, good. But the conclusion is not
guaranteed. It may be that I had coffee this morning by eating it, or by some other means. But of course, this is very
unlikely, so the argument is strong, though it’s still possible that the conclusion is false. Still, this is cogent and
therefore, a good argument.

© Patrick Girard, University of Auckland

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Philosophical criticism (by and among colleagues and other philosophers that form part of the intersubjective
discourse of philosophy or a particular school of or movement in it, usually from a specialized field).

In philosophy, which concerns the most fundamental aspects of the universe, the experts all disagree.( (First of all
they dis/agree about what philosophy is and is not, what it must be and what it may be; then they disagree with
those from other schools and movements of philosophy and finally with those from the same school or movement as
their own. All this occurs on agreed intersubjective, institutionalized and internalized socio-cultural norms,
practices, rules and standards that constitute the current or contemporary philosophical discourse in general and their
own school or moment in particular. ) It follows that another element of philosophical method, common (socio-
culturally institutionalize in their particular school or movement of philosophy and internalized and adhered to be
individuals constituting that school, movement or approach) in the work of nearly all philosophers, is philosophical
criticism. It is this that makes much philosophizing a(n institutionalized) social (a socio-cultural practice and
intersubjective discourse) endeavour.

Philosophers offer definitions and explanations in (to try and obtain a) solution to problems (or to attempt and
dissolve those problems) ; they argue for those solutions; and then other philosophers provide counter
arguments, expecting to eventually come up with better solutions. This exchange and resulting revision of views is
called dialectic. Dialectic (in one sense of this history-laden word) is simply philosophical conversation amongst
people who do not always agree with each other about everything.

One can do this sort of harsh criticism on one's own, but others can help greatly, if important assumptions are shared
with the person offering the criticisms. Others are able to think of criticisms from another perspective.

Some philosophers and ordinary people dive right in and start trying to solve the problem. They immediately start
giving arguments, pro and con, on different sides of the issue. Doing philosophy is different from this. It is about
questioning assumptions, digging for deeper understanding. Doing philosophy is about the journey, the
process, as much as it is about the destination, the conclusion. Its method differs from other disciplines, in which the
experts can agree about most of the fundamentals.

Motivation

Method in philosophy is in some sense rooted in motivation (it is a passion for a need of certain individuals, the
wonder and astonishment of Plato and Aristotle), only by understanding why people take up philosophy can one
properly understand what philosophy is. (The article of Buddy Seed deals at length with details of the – why do
philosophy, the reasons, the passion for it, the authentic philosopher, the authentic and inauthentic philosophical life
and philosophy and ways of doing philosophy and reasons for doing philosophy).

People often find themselves believing things that they do not understand. For example, about God, themselves, the
natural world, human society, morality and human productions. Often, people fail to understand what it is they
believe (and how this what of their believes are determined by implicit underlying transcendentals such
assumptions and pre-suppositions. These assumptions concern many things, for example the philosopher’s
acceptance of the principles of a certain school or movement, certain methods and norms concerning other aspects
of philosophical practice that frequently remains implicit and that people are unaware of) and fail to understand the
reasons they believe in what they do. Some people have questions about the meaning of their beliefs and questions
about the justification (or rationality) of their beliefs. A lack of these things shows a lack of understanding, and
some dislike not having this understanding.

These questions about are only the tip of the philosophical iceberg. There are many other things about this universe
about which people are also fundamentally ignorant. Philosophers are in the business of investigating all sorts of
those areas of ignorance.

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A bewilderingly huge number of basic concepts are poorly understood. For example:

 What does it mean to say that one thing causes another?

 What is rationality? What are space and time?
 What is beauty, and if it is in the eye of the beholder, then what is it that is being said to be in the eye of
the beholder?

One might also consider some of the many questions about justification. Human lives are deeply informed with
many basic assumptions. Different assumptions, would lead to different ways of living.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Theories to consider if you wish to be involved in metaphysics, ontology and epistemology –

 The notion of inflation. Definition: A sound argument is a valid argument that has true premises.

David Marsh, of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge University, is not giving up on inflation yet.
“The predictions of inflation developed by Stephen Hawking and others more than 30 years ago have been tested by
cosmological observations and faced those tests remarkably well. Many scientists regard inflation as a simple and
elegant explanation of the origin of galaxies in the universe,” he said.

Or,

Scientists could soon find out whether light really did outpace gravity in the early universe. The theory predicts a
clear pattern in the density variations of the early universe, a feature measured by what is called the “spectral index”.
Writing in the journal Physical Review, the scientists predict a very precise spectral index of 0.96478, which is close
to the latest, though somewhat rough, measurement of 0.968.

Science can never prove the theory right. But Afshordi said that if measurements over the next five years shifted the
spectral index away from their prediction, it would rule out their own theory. “If we are right then inflation is wrong.
But the problem with inflation is that you can always fine tune it to fit anything you want,” he said.

And

Magueijo and Afshordi’s theory does away with inflation and replaces it with a variable speed of light. According to
their calculations, the heat of universe in its first moments was so intense that light and other particles moved at
infinite speed. Under these conditions, light reached the most distant pockets of the universe and made it look as
uniform as we see it today. “In our theory, if you go back to the early universe, there’s a temperature when
everything becomes faster. The speed of light goes to infinity and propagates much faster than gravity,” Afshordi
said. “It’s a phase transition in the same way that water turns into steam.”

Magueijo and Afshordi came up with their theory to explain why the cosmos looks much the same over vast
distances. To be so uniform, light rays must have reached every corner of the cosmos, otherwise some regions would
be cooler and more dense than others. But even moving at 1bn km/h (The speed of light in a vacuum is considered to
be one of the fundamental constants of nature. Thanks to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, it was stamped in
the annals of physics more than a century ago at about 1bn km/h. But while general relativity is one of the

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cornerstones of modern physics, scientists know that the rules of today did not hold at the birth of the universe.),
light was not travelling fast enough to spread so far and even out the universe’s temperature differences.

The multiverse (other universes or alternative universes) -

The multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of possible universes, including the universe in which we
live. Together, these universes comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, and the
physical laws and constants that describe them.

The various universes within the multiverse are called "parallel universes", "other universes" or "alternative
universes."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Astronomy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Cosmology

In this section we will look at the process of theorizing or what theorizing is not according to Weick’s comments on
Sutton and Staw
(http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00018392%28199509%2940%3A3%3C371%3AWTIN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F)
What theory is not, theorizing is Weick, Karl E Administrative Science Quarterly; Sep 1995; 40, 3; ABI/INFORM
Global. As well as the article by DiMaggio in Administrative Science Quarterly Vol 40 no 3 Sept 1995 pages 391-
397.Comments on “What theory is Not.” Weick; http://www.jstor.org/stable/258556 Theory Construction as
disciplined imagination.
The importance of this article by DiMaggio is because he suggests other kinds of theory. That of course will change
the whole picture as presented by Weick and “Theory or not,” as suggested by Sutton and Staw.
Cornelissen, J.P. (2006) Making sense of theory construction: Metaphor and disciplined imagination. Organization
Studies, 27 (11). pp. 1579-1597 can be mentioned for the reasons that he improves, according to him, Weick’s work
by adding the use of the optimality principles and that he explicitly states that Weick deals with (imagining apt and
meaningful metaphors in artificial selection or evolutionary epistemology) Metaphor (‘organizational improvisation
as jazz’ and ‘organizational behavior as collective mind’ which Weick himself has imagined, selected and advanced
in his writings) He suggests that these metaphors fulfil and adhere to optimality principles (*the ‘integration
principle’; topology principle, web principle, unpacking principle, good reason principle, metonymic tightening
principle, distance principle, concreteness principle,) and stress the importance of it in Weick’s work when he
discusses creative imagination and theory or theorizing. These metaphors have created new images and theoretical
representations of organizations. Cornelissen suggests that adhering to the principles will extend and improve
Weick’s take on theorizing as disciplined imagination.
Both metaphors are good examples of how metaphors lead to emergent meaning (and cannot therefore be reduced to
the meanings of its component parts), and as such have enriched the conceptualization (and subsequent
understanding) of ‘organizational improvisation’ and ‘organizational behavior’ and have generated novel inferences
and conjectures, these metaphors were also found to be ‘apt’ and fitting to the target subjects that they are meant to
illuminate,
We (Cornelissen) argue that this is primarily the result of these two metaphors adhering to a set of specific principles
known as the ‘optimality principles’; a set of constraints under which metaphorical blends are most effective. As a
whole, the eight ‘optimality principles’ are the following*, with the first six the original ones proposed by
Fauconnier and Turner (1998, 2002; see also Coulson 2001; Coulson and Oakley 2000): the integration, topology,
web, unpacking, good reason, metonymic tightening, distance and concreteness principles. These principles are
derived from standard pressures that obtain in all mapping situations including metaphorical mappings (see

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Hofstadter 1995, for a review). The ‘organizational improvisation as jazz’ metaphor satisfies most of these
principles including the integration, topology, web, unpacking, good reason, metonymic tightening and concreteness
principles. The ‘organizational behavior as collective mind’ equally satisfies a multitude of principles including the
integration, topology, web, unpacking, good reason, metonymic tightening and distance principles. Cornelissen
discusses them in detail on pages 17- 24.

Kayla Booth sums up Weick - Theorizing by Weick Regarding "What Theory is Not, Theorizing IS" by Kayla Booth says
this –

Kayla Booth "What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is"

Karl E. Weick Argument Based on Process:

Theory as an end product vs. theory as a process.

Theory in the making! Conclusion The Gist Argument Theorizing Response to Sutton and Staw "Benefit of the Doubt
Piece":

This is not theory because

1) The author is lazy
2) The author is not there... yet Argument
Is Theory itself a Continuum or is the Process of Creating Theory a Continuum?

"What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is" or

"What Theory is Not, Theorizing Can Be"

1) Sutton and Staw's 5 Parts are part of the process of making theory, reliant on context
2) Authors should articulate where they are in the process of theory creation, instead of calling it complete
3) Theory is a continuum
4) Nuances of language and original concepts may help further develop these components

In “What theory is not, theorizing is” Weick states that he wishes to deal with the process of theorizing rather than
the product. He agrees with Sutton and Staw that : Theory is not something one "adds" to data, or something that
one transforms from weaker to stronger by means of graphics or references, or can be feigned by flashy conceptual
performance.” He suggests that references, lists, diagrams, data and hypotheses might not be theories but can refer to
theoretical development in the early stages. He then decides to look at the theorizing process with the reminder
that most theories are approximate theories and not strong theories and Merton says they take four forms:
* general orientations
* analysis of concepts
* post-fact interpretation from a single observation
* empirical generalization
While they are not full theories, they can serve as means to further development.

Like Sutton and Shaw say, it is hard in this low-paradigm field to spot which efforts are theory and which are not.
Theory can take a variety of forms and is a continuum .
One can also go directly from data to prescription without a theory, as doctors go from symptoms to treatment
without a diagnosis sometimes. Data, lists, diagrams are not theory but can help point to and elaborate theories.
We have the definition of theory as a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially
one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained. It belongs to a family of words that include
hypothesis, thesis, conjecture, supposition, speculation, postulation, postulate, proposition, premise, surmise,
assumption, presupposition; opinion, view, belief, contention . p.389 The process of theorizing consists of

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activities like abstracting, generalizing, relating, selecting, explaining, synthesizing, and idealizing. These
ongoing activities intermittently spin out reference lists, data, lists of variables, diagrams, and lists of
hypotheses. Those emergent products summarize progress, give direction, and serve as place makers. They have
vestiges of theory but are not themselves theories. Then again, few things are full-fledged theories.

. The ongoing activities often create the lists, diagrams, etc. that eventually can become real theory.
"Those emergent products summarize progress, give direction, and serve as place makers. I suspect that
tight coupling between treatments and symptoms, with belated theorizing of the outcomes, is a fairly common tactic
in theory construction. In my own ASQ paper re-analyzing the Mann Gulch disaster (Weick, 1993), the argument
developed partially by taking the Mann Gulch data as symptoms and, through a series of thought trials
corresponding to treatments, seeing which concepts made a difference in those symptoms. This exercise in
disciplined imagination resulted eventually in the theory that sense making collapses when role structures collapse

Weick develops his own ideas further in many articles and books, for example in “Theory construction as
disciplined imagination.”
DiMaggio says that the problem is even more important than as stated by Sutton and Staw as there are three
additional issues. 1 There is more than one kind of theory. Theory as covering laws
Some traditional theories are simply statements of the world as we see it. (This sounds like some traditional
speculative metaphysical systems.) Here researchers often scurry about looking for high r-squares and explanations.

Theory as enlightenment
A device of sudden enlightenment. This kind of theory is complex, de-familiarizing, and rich in paradox. It's a
"surprise machine".

Theory as narrative
An account of a social process with tests of the plausibility of the narrative. Sutton and Shaw have a version of
this in mind when they talk about theory. Yet explanation means accounting for variance.

2. Good Theory Splits the Difference

Many of the best theories are hybrids of the above approaches. One problem is that these approaches are driven by
different values and purposes.

Clarity vs De-familiarization
One must balance the act of helping readers see the world with new words/eyes without confusing them too much.

Focus vs Multidimensionality
One person's multidimensionality is another person’s goulash. One person’s focus is another’s reductionism.

Comprehensiveness vs Memorability
Sometimes our search for novelty causes us to overlook the most important variables (though uninteresting).

Theory Construction is Social Construction, often after the fact.

Resonance
"The reception of a theory is shaped by the extent to which a theory resonates with the cultural presuppositions
of the time and of the scientific audience that consumes it". The environment in which evolutionary arguments are
released changes. Cultural change modifies the metaphors that we think with.

Theories into Slogans

People often simplify the things they read until they fit into pre-existing schemas. If a paper is widely read by others
not expert in the original field it gets further refined and simplified. New ideas get lumped into either "hard" or
"soft" intuitive notions.

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Post hoc theory construction

Theories are socially constructed after they are written. It’s a cooperative venture between writer and readers. We
often reduce theories to slogans.

I really wished to return to Weick and his “Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination.” I already included
details about Cornelissen’s article on this work by Weick in which he suggested the use of the eight optimality
principles. Some descriptions (‘metaphors’) of Weick adhere more to these principles while others fail to adhere to
all of them. However I wish to concentrate on a few points made by Weick himself.

p.516 Theorists often write trivial theories because their process of theory construction is hemmed in by
methodological structures that favor validation rather than usefulness (Lindblom, 1987, p. 512)..

The process of theory construction in organizational studies is portrayed as imagination disciplined by

evolutionary processes analogous to artificial selection. p.516 Theorizing consists of disciplined imagination
that unfolds in a manner analogous to artificial selection. (variation, selection, retention). In other words the
theorist will make variations on many things, eg concepts used, stating the problem, on the variables, conjectures,
hypotheses, generalizations etc for example by virtual or imaginary experiments. They will make selections and
retain only certain things.

p.519 When theorists build theory, they design, conduct, and interpret imaginary experiments. In doing so, their
activities resemble the three processes of evolution: variation, selection, and retention. p.519 These
evolutionary processes are guided by representations of the environment, not by the environment itself. The radar
emissions are a substitute for actually moving through the environment.

p.520-521 The theoretical problem that trial and error thinking tries to solve is equivalent to the adaptation problem
that trial and error locomotion tries to solve... the likelihood of a solution is determined in part by the way the
environment is represented or perceived... solutions... are more likely to be discovered where the representations are
fuller. Whether the problem is to find an explanation or a competitive advantage, fuller descriptions suggest a
greater number of possibilities.

p.522 In general, a theorizing process characterized by a greater number of diverse conjectures produces better
theory than a process characterized by a smaller number of homogeneous conjectures.
The key property is heterogeneity among thought trials. The advantage of blind-variation, after which thought trials
are modeled, is that the process can be "smarter" than the people who run it.

p.522 Blind alleys will be searched longer and more deeply when classification is weak or ignored than when it is
strong and heeded.

p.524 Given the laboratory for rejecting hypotheses, science will develop most rapidly when the widest range of
guesses is being tried [Campbell, 1961, p. 21] Execute imaginary experiments with concepts, problem statements,
metaphors, representations, the optimality principles, generalizations, hypotheses, etc
p.524 In an earlier example... it was argued that a reaction such as "that's interesting" was sufficient to selectively
retain a conjecture, independent of efforts to verify it. Eventual attempts at verification may occur sometime later
but, for reasons discussed... the value of a theory does not ride on the outcome of those tests. The reason it does not
is that validation is not the key task of social science. It might be if we could do it, but we can't - and neither can
economists

p.524 If valid knowledge is difficult, if not impossible to attain in social science, then this puts theorizing and
selection in a different light. Theorizing is no longer just a preliminary to the real work of verification, but
instead it may involve a major portion of whatever verification is possible within the social sciences.

p.524 The generic selection criterion that seems to operate most often in theorizing and that substitutes for
validation [JLJ - Weick is referring here to the social sciences] is the judgment, "that's plausible."

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p.525 Whenever one reacts with the feeling that's interesting, that reaction is a clue that current experience
has been tested against past experience, and the past understanding has been found inadequate.

p.525 A disconfirmed assumption is an opportunity for a theorist to learn something new, to discover something
unexpected, to generate renewed interest in an old question (make assumptions explicit and identify them and their
implications)

p.526 A disconfirmed assumption interrupts a layman's well-organized activities and plans, but it accelerates the
completion of the theorist's well-organized activities and plans. Those differential effects suggest that each should
experience quite different emotional reactions to the experience of disconfirmed assumptions... theorists should
like disconfirmed assumptions because they accelerate the completion of their intention to build interesting
theory.

Theorists are both the source of variation and selection in choosing the form of the problem statement and
select their thought trials to solve the problem.

p.517 By theory we mean "an ordered set of assertions about a generic behavior or structure assumed to hold
throughout a significantly broad range of specific instances" (Sutherland, 1975, p. 9). To understand a model,
the terms theory, validation, and quality of theory are defined. Theory building involves simultaneous parallel
processing, not sequential thinking.

The greater the number of diverse criteria applied to a conjecture, the higher the probability that those
conjectures will result a good theory. Selection criteria (develop and apply them during the entire process of
theorizing) must be applied consistently. To retain the theory, the theory statement should be obvious, connected,
believable, beautiful, and real.
p.517 The lesson to be learned is that any process must be designed to highlight relationships, connections, and
interdependencies in the phenomenon of interest.

p.518 Campbell (1974, p. 415) argued that the process of knowledge building is an evolutionary sequence that
involves trials in the form of conjectures and errors in the form of refutations. Thus, as Popper (1966) said,
imagination becomes a "benign environment that permits our hypotheses to die in our stead." Learning is viewed as
a cumulative achievement, and theorizing is viewed as "selective propagation of those few social constructions that
refer more competently to their presumed ontological referents" (Campbell, 1986, p. 118). Selection of these more
competent social constructions is done either by the external environment or by mental selectors that represent
that external environment and select on its behalf (Campbell, 1974, p.430).

p.519 Most existing descriptions of the theorizing process assume that validation is the ultimate test of a theory and
that theorizing itself is more credible the more closely it simulates external validation at every step... These concerns
can be counterproductive to theory generation.

p.519 researchers should view theory construction as sense making (e.g. Astley, 1985). Durbin (1976) pointed the
way to this usage when he remarked that "a theory tries to make sense out of the observable world by ordering
the relationships among elements that constitute the theorist's focus of attention in the real world" (p. 26).
This article emphasizes that thought trials, representations, and mental selection should be taken into a
consideration in the theory construction. A combination of experience, practice, convention to select among
conjectures, and imagined (simulated) reality should be used in the process of theory building. This compromise
presents some similar discussions as other articles in the theory building domain. Weick (1989) states the
importance of imagination in the process of theory construction. He believes that imagination in theorizing results
from diversity of problem statements and trial and error thinking
. Such idea is close to Daft (1983) in the article “Learning the Craft of Organizational Research” that suggests an
innovative organization research method that differs from traditional research that primarily put an attention on
quantitative or qualitative research methods. Moreover, theory for Weick (1989) is not simply a category of
fact.This thought is similar to Bacharach(1989) in the article “Organizational Theories: Some Criteria for
Evaluation,” which represents that a theory is different from categorization of data, typologies, and metaphors.

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http://johnljerz.com/superduper/tlxdownloadsiteWEBSITEII/id87.html

I mention a few points that I found of importance in Weick’s article. Problem, problem statements in my view can
change as one develops a ‘theory’. Additional problems can be added and problems can be stated in greater detail
with new perspective that arrive during the development of the ‘theory’. As Weick suggest accuracy and great detail
is essential in stating the problems to be dealt with by a theory.I think that apart from the problem/s to be
investigated problems concerning the development or evolvement of the theory might also occur and they should be
distinguished from the problems in the problem statements. To deal with the problems data would have to be
collected, even though such a brain dump or phenomenological vision of problems might not be accurate.
Theorizing is not one-dimensional but multi-dimensional and one must remain open to the fact simultaneously,
parallel processing is required and not simplistic linear thinking. Many cognitive skills will be required to function
at the same time for example sense making, ordering, selection, creative thinking, adding new concepts, being aware
of the implications of the concepts and terms use, etc. One should also remain aware of the main functional and
unnecessary internal and external limits and constraints, such as boundaries, are operating at every step of the
process of theorizing. One can take as example conjectures or suggestions to be dealt with. One will be involved all
the time in imaginary experiments and solutions, designing them, conducting and interpreting them.
Weick highlights this by his three evolutionary (epistemological) notions or processes of variation, selection and
retention.

The quality of theory produced is predicted to vary as a function of the accuracy and details present in the problem
statement that triggers theory building, the number of and independence among the conjectures that attempt to solve
the problem, and the number and diversity of selection criteria used to test the conjectures

An essential ingredient in Weick’s ‘disciplined imagination’ involves his assertion that thought trials and theoretical
representations typically involve a transfer from one epistemic sphere to another through the creative use of
metaphor.

The article follows up on this point and draws out how metaphor works, how processes of metaphorical imagination
partake in theory construction, and how insightful metaphors and the theoretical representations that result from
them can be selected.

The paper also includes a discussion of metaphors-in-use (organizational improvisation as jazz and organizational
behaviour as collective mind) which Weick proposed in his own writings

The whole purpose of this exercise is to theoretically augment and ground the concept of ‘disciplined imagination’,
and in particular to refine the nature of thought trials and selection within it.

In doing so, he also aims to provide pointers for the use of metaphorical imagination in the process of theory
construction.

It is argued that interest is a substitute for validation during theory construction, middle range theories are a
necessity if the process is to be kept manageable, and representations such as metaphors are inevitable, given the
complexity of the subject matter.

p.526 Generalists, people with moderately strong attachments to many ideas, should be hard to interrupt and, once
interrupted, should have weaker, shorter negative reactions since they have alternate paths to realize their plans...
Generalists should be the upbeat, positive people in the profession, while specialists should be their grouchy,
negative counterparts.

p.528 The view that theory construction involves imagination disciplined by the processes of artificial selection has
a variety of implications and raises a number of questions.

p.529 The assessment that's interesting has figured prominently throughout, because it has been viewed as a
substitute for vaildity... The reaction that's interesting essentially signifies that an assumption has been falsified.

p.529 The choice is not whether to do mental testing. Instead, the choice is how well this less than ideal procedure
can be used to improve the quality of theoretical thinking.

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Weick sees the theorist as the creator, executioner and maintainer of epistemological evolution. He must deal with
the problem statements he creates in a certain manner. He should introduce and consider as many relevant aspects
and details of the problems as possible. His statements should be accurate and detailed and making explicit all
assumptions. This will be done against the background or in the context of the three processes of evolution that his
theorizing will resemble. He will design, conduct and interpret his theorizing as if it is executing artificial selection
that consists of imaginary experiments. The three principles underlying this selection are closed related and consists
of the three activities of variation, selection and retention. Something like the survival of the fittest (the most
relevant, functional, meaningful and necessary) in natural evolution.
Variations of problem solving of and conjectures of the problem statements will be made and judgements by means
of what is interesting, plausible, consistent and appropriate must be executed.
Selection criteria by means of conjectures (about what should be retained and what must be rejected) during thought
trials (employing mental experiments or simulations) will alter the conjectures, delete some, modify others and
include new ones. Imagination for example employs a technique of metaphors as cognitive/heuristic devices.
Simulated images are employed for theoretical representation as aids to learning, exploration, discovery and
problems solving. According to Cornelissen, good examples of such metaphors are: trap door of depression, a word
painting or picture, boiling mad, clean slates. These metaphors fulfil the criteria, he sets out, for the best metaphors
to be used in this context.

The problem statements will present the imagined thought trials with problems to be solved, investigated, explained,
dis/confirmed and identifying meaningful domain words and sets of assumptions concerning these things. Smaller or
middle range theories will deal with solutions that have limited and explicit assumptions, accuracy of the problem
specification in detail.
The thought trials will employ metaphorical variation (as analysed by Cornelissen in detail and with his suggestions
to improve this technique) so as to create a number of them with a great diversity. They will present conjectures as
ways to dis/solve the problem. For this diverse, heterogeneous conjectures are required. Thought trials should be
eclectic with periphery cases that are often under-explore. This is where the function of selection criteria comes in.
They enable the manipulation of the selection process to retain that what is plausible. Validation is not the key task
of social sciences so selection criteria of conjectures to be created replace validation. The theorist must control the
choice of the conjectures. The value of social science do not lie in validated knowledge but in the suggestion
(propositions) of relationships and connections that change our perspective on an issue.
Weick’s suggests theory construction as a process that involves imagination (by the use of metaphors and imaginary
experiences) and that is disciplined by selection criteria (leading to the development of conjectures, variation,
selection, aptness, judgements of plausibility, dis/confirmed assumptions). Cornelissen re-states terms used by
Weick by the application of the eight principles, for example that’s concrete is the topology principle (preserve a
relations structure, for example organizational as collective mind) that’s obvious is the integration principle
(concepts or domains that are unrelated are brought together), etc. Other optimality principles that are employed in
mapping situations, for example at the level of thought trials and that can add to variation in such trials by
conceptual blending as in the case of metaphors, as stated before, are the web (maintain mappings to input
concepts), unpacking (mapping schemes, other applications), good reason (significant elements, managerial,
scanning, interpretation of concept as calling concept by another name), metonymic tightening (elements in the
blend and the input), target and source concepts must be from distant domains, concreteness (select concrete not
abstract concepts to blend with target concept) principles.
To summarize Weick’s disciplinary imagination.
Construct theoretical representations, not merely deduct them from the problem statement;
The ‘logic’ (arguments?) used to develop and select representations by means of thought trials, simulation and
imaginary experiments;
Develop representations from heterogeneous variations;
Evolutionary epistemology, in the form of variation, selection and retention.
Variation of multiple and different images and metaphors that are apt, plausible (fulfilling the criteria of the
optimality principles); this will create new insights for a conceptual advance (search for new concepts is an ongoing
process of meaning construction).

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Generalizations and conclusions

In this articles I attempted to include a number of different things according to various perspectives and frames of
reference of what philosophy is. I did not view philosophy from what types of subject-matter, problems or objects it
is concerned with. I instead concentrated on the methodologies, the methods, the techniques, tools and procedures
employed for doing philosophy and during the activities and processes of philosophizing.
These things can be considered the data of our investigation. The will usually be applied during a narrative or a
description executed by the philosopher. Such a narrative will consist of different steps and stages that can clearly be
distinguished and differentiated from each other. It can occur on several levels simultaneously for example that of
first-order philosophy/izing and second-order or meta-philosophy/izing. The philosopher can also employ other tools
for example that of dialogue, by using different, opposing voices, at certain stages of presenting the narrative.
The major point of my investigation was the nature of the process of theorizing. I found the methodologies,
methods, tools etc of philosophy as presented and described by the different authors very restrictive, often
misleading and taken out of the general context of philosophizing or philosophical theorizing.
My suggestion as a remedy for these symptoms is the idea that philosophical activities and what are presented as the
methods of different philosophical approaches and schools are in fact aspects of the process of theorizing.
Practitioners appear to be unaware of the general process of theorizing and the fact that what they perceive and
describe as a philosophical methodology and method are merely a stage in this general process or a single isolated
feature of this process.
I wish to make philosophers aware of these facts. And that they need to investigate the process/es of theorizing, the
different features and stage of this/these processes – so that when they philosophize they will be aware of what stage
of theorizing they are in and what aspect or feature of philosophizing they are concerned with.
This is of course an aspect of meta-philosophy, a meta-philosophical view or critique executed simultaneously with
their first-order philosophical activity/ies, be they of the analytical, deconstructive, critical theory kind or whatever
method or approach they employ.
I was surprised, amazed and even shocked when I read what philosophers think they are doing and what they say
they or other philosophers are doing or have done. They appear to view their activities as if they exist and are
executed in isolation and as if what they do (their particular isolated technique and approach) are the entire process
of doing philosophy, of philosophizing. For example when they explore, investigate and analyse a concept or sets of
concepts, they consider and present this as THE, entire, philosophical method, while in fact it is merely a certain,
very common, frequently occurring feature of the process of theorizing (namely that one must constantly explore
one’s concepts and experiment with alternative ones). The same can be said about other so-called methods
philosophers think they are employing, for example the Continentals and their followers such as the
deconstructionists and the third and fourth generation critical theorists.
Serious philosophers do not have to fear, I do not criticize their adherence to the traditional ‘methods’ of their
particular school. I do not suggest that they should get rid of them or do something alien. I merely wish that they get
into perspective what they, and other philosophers, are doing and what philosophers have done in the past. Namely,
they are theorizing, they are executing the process/es of theorizing, while being unaware of it, with the consequence
that they execute their doing of philosophy by means of their particular school or tradition’s method as if that is all,
the entire process, from the (always new never exhausted) beginning to the (never ending|) end of philosophical
theorizing, while in fact they are merely executing and concentrating on one or a few features of philosophical
theorizing and/or one or a few stages of the process of philosophical theorizing.

Now with these thoughts and suggestions of mine, let us look again at a summary of what Weick says concerning
theorizing and if what I have attempted to do in this article and my summary or conclusions in part 6 fulfil and
realize the points he makes here. If my suggestions do realize a point I while make a simple exclamation mark next
to it -

- Weick,
Karl. E., Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination, Academy of
Management Review, 1989, 14:4 516-531.

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"Theorists often write trivial theories because their process of theory construction is hemmed in
by methodological structures that favor validation rather than usefulness. (Lindblom, 1987). Too
much validation takes away the value of imagination and selection in the process.

! I attempted to fulfil the useful, instrumental, practical function, although it seems to me what I
suggested will stand up against validation as well.

Theorizing consists of disciplined imagination that unfolds in a manner analogous to artificial

selection. It comes from the consistent application of selection criteria to "trial and error"
thinking and the "imagination" in theorizing comes from deliberate diversity introduced into
the problem statements, thought trials, and selection criteria that comprise that thinking."

! What I suggested fulfilled these ‘criteria’, or adhered to these norms or standards.

A theory is "an ordered set of assertions about a generic behavior or structure assumed to
hold throughout a significantly broad range of specific instances."

! From my section or point 1 until my final point 6 I think I fulfilled this criteria, so that it almost
appears as if I created a theory of philosophizing or the doing of philosophy as a process of
theorizing.

Verification and validation mean the demonstration, beyond pure chance, that the ordered
relationship predicted by the hypothesis exists and thereby lends support to the hypothesis. Proof
is verification of a probabalistic statement. It is a statement of high reliability.

! yes or no?

A good theory is also a plausible theory, more interesing than obvious, irrelevant, or absurd,
obvious in novel ways, a source of unexpected connections, high in narrative rationality,
aesthetically pleasing, etc.

! yes?

A good theory process should be designed to highlight relationships, connections and

interdependencies in the phenomenon of interest.

! relationships between the philosophical discourse, the processes of doing philosophy and the
processes of theorizing.

a) Knowledge growth by intention is when an explanation of a whole region is made more

and more clear and adequate. b)Knowledge growth by extension means a full explanation
of a small region is used to explained adjacent regions.

! yes to a) what I suggested can be applied to b)

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Bourgeois states that theorizing process should weave back and forth between intuition and
data-based theorizing and between induction and deduction.

! did I go backwards and forwards between data and the making of inductions and deductions
and between expressing intuitions and data based …? yes

Most theory theorists describe it as a more mechanistic process, with little appreciation for the
intuitive, blind, wasteful.... quality of the process. They assume that validation is the ultimate
test of the theory and a good theorizing process keeps this in mind at every step.

! yes, I identified and pointed out those things conceptually.

In reality, theory construction is not problem solving, because many steps happen
simultaneously. It is more a struggle with "sensemaking".

! yes I executed many steps simultaneously and I concentrated on sense making by

conceptualization of many features

When looking at philosophical writings it is obvious and rather surprising that philosophers are
unaware of the socio-cultural practice and the process of theorizing. This is surprising because
the process of doing philosophy resembles the different features and stage of the execution of
theorizing.
The systematic work of the major philosophers fits in well with the framework of theorizing,
such as surveying of the object or subject-matter to be investigated by data collection and other
practices, stating the problem as problem statements or problematization, exploration and stating
of the problem and the concepts it involves in alternative ways, representation of them in several
heterogeneous ways, submitting these things to a variety of thought trials, imaginary experiments
or simulations (of images and representations) , applying optimality principles, the application of
rational selection criteria employing evolutionary epistemology (variation, selection, retention)
at all stages of the process of theorizing, drawing of conclusions, making generalizations and re-
viewing hypotheses.
The entire process will be presented by means of reasoning or a reasoned, coherent ‘narrative’ of
argumentation, sound arguments and consistent, coherent, significant and plausible reasons.

We find that the major philosophers who developed grand, systematic theories adhere to and
reveal the general framework of the entire process of theorizing, even if they do not deal with all
features and the detailed stages of the process. Minor, derivative and academic thinkers appear to
be unaware of the existence of theorizing and that they as aspiring philosophers are in fact
executing this practice. The way they deal with ‘problems’ always select and represent merely
one or more isolated features and stages of the entire framework of the process of theorizing.
They seem to be ignorant of this fact and that they are really involved in, at least some features
and aspects, of the process of theorizing. They employ and apply isolated ‘methods’,
instruments, tools or techniques such as ‘analysis’, critical thinking and theory, deconstruction

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etc as if they represent the entire process of theorizing and as if their specific tool/s are really the
entire philosophical methodology.

These words are about philosophy, the doing of philosophy and what philosophers and what they
think they do, so it is in fact meta-philosophical descriptions. They are intended as general
statements about these things, generalizations, hypotheses, a model and pointers to a possible
framework for a theory about what the doing of philosophy is like, what the process/es of
philosophizing are like and what the processes of theorizing are like. The philosophical
‘methods’ that are referred to and described are in fact resembling different aspects and features,
and different stages of the process of theorizing, for example identifying and describing the data
that are collected as subject-matter to be investigated, deconstructed, analysed, dealt with
phenomenologically, logically or by means of the tools of critical theory, the creation of problem
statements involving this data, issues or problems,, the development and weighing of alternative
conjectures concerning these things, the use of disciplined imagination, the selection,
interpretation and retention of such conjectures, guiding ideas and concepts, meaning
construction by means of variations of different sets of concepts, invention of concepts, use of
simulations or imaginary experiments, imaginative representations eg by using metaphors in
accordance with the eight optimality principles, applying selection criteria relevant to the
particular stage of philosophizing, and other uses of thought trials, etc.

---------------------------------------------------- Philosophizing is part of the Process/es of

Theorizing

Abstract
An illustration (by means of a number of articles, books, opinions, statements, hypotheses,
theories, arguments, reasoning and comments) of doing philosophy or philosophizing and its
methods, as aspects of the contexts, stages, steps and features of the process/es of theorizing.

A number of implicit assumptions and tacit pre-suppositions of this socio-cultural practice and
discourse, for example as they resemble that of everyday and religious perception (MNC,
“maturationally natural” perception, cognition, and action), are identified and revealed.

1
When philosophers think they are philosophizing, they are actually occupied with
one feature, one aspect, one step in the process of theorizing. When they think that
they are doing philosophy, they are executing activities that should and could be
placed in a more general context in the larger process of doing theorizing.
2

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If you do not believe me, you do not have to take my word for it, merely go and
read philosophical texts, from the large, all-inclusive metaphysical fabrications of
Kant, Husserl, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Hume, Marx, Spinoza Descartes, Leibniz,
Sartre, Derrida, et al, to individual articles, for example in the so-called tradition of
logical analysis or Analytic Philosophy or the speculative, literary fabrications and
constructions of the Continental Philosophers from France or the four Critical
Theory generations, from the earliest writers through the second generation of
Habermas to the contemporary ones.
3
They, philosophers, make numerous implicit assumptions during the entire process
of their thinking or theorizing, or call it theoretical thinking. Most of these pre-
suppositions are tacit and the thinker is unaware of them and the implications of
subscribing to them. The kind of suppositions, their functions and consequences
for subscribing to them vary according to the context and the step or stage of
theorizing they are made in, or at.
4
A few examples that are made from the beginning are the usual metaphysical,
ontological, epistemological, methodological and anthropological ones. That is
apart from the more specific philosophically–related or philosophically specific
ones. The latter are for example related to the fact that to do philosophy has socio-
cultural value, meaning and validity. That the existence of the discourse is
legitimate even in contemporary culture, that it is a valid, meaningful, necessary
and relevant discipline and socio-cultural practice and activity.
5
The discourse of philosophy therefore is employed and the socio-cultural practice
of the doing of is accepted without questioning its legitimacy or its validity.
Implicit, unwritten rational are ascribed to the ‘discipline’, to the discourse, to the
practice, to its existence and employment, without asking in-depth questions about
these things. They are merely uncritically accepted on the basis of implicit customs
and traditions. Rationale for them are uncritically and unquestioningly bestowed on
them. It is assumed as if the discourse, its continued existence and employment
have value, as if it has in-built aims and purposes, values, norms and leading ideals
that are not required to be identified or investigated, researched or argued for, that
no reasons are necessary for its continued existence, execution or employment.

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6
But what is the nature of the discourse of philosophy, what are its values, norms
and purpose? What is the nature, the purpose of and the rationale for the doing of
philosophy? In short, why should the discourse of philosophy exist in the first
place and why should it continue to exist? Why should the socio-cultural practice
of philosophizing exist and why is it acceptable, necessary and valid? Has the
discourse of philosophy any purpose, any socio-cultural value, any function? Does
it fulfil any practical, utilitarian or any other kind of function or need?
7
If we were to scrutinize this discourse more closely in the light of these queries we
can ask questions such as what is the nature of philosophy? What is its rationale?
Its aim and purpose? What is the nature of the subject-matter of this ‘discipline’ or
socio-cultural practice? What are the objects being explored and investigated by it?
What are the methodologies, methods, techniques, tools and instruments being
employed by it?
8
Can we really bestow, or continue to bestow, meaning and validity on this
discourse, this ‘discipline’, this socio-cultural practice merely because ‘it’ existed
or has existed in the past? Is this the same discourse as that of Plato or Spinoza?
Has the development and differentiation of disciplines, discourses and practices
that were once viewed as philosophy, considered to be objects of philosophical
study and investigation, not affected the philosophical discourse at all? Has
philosophy still meaningful and identifiable subject-matter, objects and a
methodology, methods and techniques and results of its own? Does the
involvement of ‘philosophy’ in other disciplines, for example philosophy of art,
music, history, literature, biology, language, religion, logic, mathematics, etc, give
a rational to the existence and the continued existence and practice of philosophy?
All these things could and should be executed by those sciences, arts, humanities
and disciplines as part of them, if they were executed in an appropriate manner.
Does the involvement of ‘philosophy’ in cognitive studies and inter-disciplinary
cognitive science/s bestow meaning on this discourse and produce any results for
it, does it assist this discourse to progress? Is this type of so-called interdisciplinary
involvement even necessary or meaningful? The very fashionable practical
philosophy, X-Phi or experimental philosophical craze are some of the ‘fields’ or
subject-matter that ‘philosophers’, seemingly blindly or uncritically and without
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questioning it, are involved in. All this seems to me as if philosophy is begging for
objects to study, pleasing and searching for subject-matter, or not?
9
Philosophizing, the different aspects of the process of doing philosophy or
philosophizing is nothing other than activities being executed in different contexts,
during certain steps and phases or at certain stages of the process/es of theorizing.

10

Please take note what McCauley writes here, not the fact that other disciplines
were differentiated from philosophy, but that philosophers should not remain
inattentive to those new scientific insights. I am not concerned about the contents
of those insights, but the manner in which scientists arrived at those insights. That
is what I think philosophers should be attentive to. Philosophy, like most subjects
can be broken down into content, skills, attitudes and values and the last three are
those that I would advise philosophers to take note of when they view scientific
disciplines and activities.
The reason why I quote this work, how it fits into my own descriptions, will
eventually become clearer.
http://www.robertmccauley.com/research/philosophy-of-cognitive-and-brain-
sciences

Philosophy of Cognitive and Brain Sciences →

How do scientific findings bear on our inquiries about the perennial

philosophical questions?
“I have defended and pursued a naturalistic approach to epistemology, the
philosophy of science, and the philosophy of the cognitive and brain sciences.
Philosophical naturalism holds that the history of Western philosophy is, in part, a
history of philosophy spawning new empirical sciences—a process that has
inevitably resulted in those sciences returning to advance claims about topics that
philosophers had, until that time, regarded as philosophy’s privileged
territories. Philosophical naturalists need not hold that those new scientific
theories, findings, and methods will solve philosophers’ perennial questions (for

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example, about such matters as human nature, values, and meaning), but they do
hold that philosophers’ inquiries about such matters will be done less responsibly
than they should be if they are inattentive to those new scientific insights.

It is within such a naturalistic framework that I have fathomed some of the ways
that the findings from the social, cognitive, and brain sciences might bear on our
conceptions of knowledge, perception, learning, science, mind, and consciousness.
I have developed, in particular, proposals about what I call “maturationally
natural” perception, cognition, and action and (in collaboration with William
Bechtel) the heuristic identity theory (HIT).”

Note: It seems to me if many philosophers share the maturationally natural

perception of both ordinary people and those involved in, or employed in religion.
One can frequently and clearly see the implications and consequences of
philosophers employing this type of perception and related implicit (ontological,
epistemological and methodological) assumptions and pre-suppositions..

11

Where do philosophical questions and problems come from? What is their origin?
Created by individual philosophers? And/or acquired socio-culturally as they are
institutionalized in or as the tradition, the norms and the customs of the
philosophical discourse? Where do problem statements of this discourse come
from, such as concerns about distinctions such as analytic and synthetic
statements? Are all philosophical questions and problems of this incestuous,
introspective kind of the philosophical discourse, customs and traditions, or
derivatives of them by being conceptualized in slightly different words? Are all
philosophical problems of this self(discourse)-generated kind? And caused by the
methodology and the methods used in philosophy? One only needs to know the
basics of cognitive semantics and linguistics and what they have to say about
things such as the structure of concepts, frame semantics, framing, profile, bases
and domain, prototype theories, classical, generative and radial categories,
conceptualization and the four cognitive abilities (attention/salience,
judgment/comparison, situatedness, and constitution/gestalt) that play a role in the
construction of construals so as to become aware of the many implicit assumptions
that underlie the problems caused by the language philosophers and the ways they
use language.

Other philosophical problems are created by the language and terms, and the ways
these things are misused/abused in philosophical thinking, writing, reasoning and

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arguments. For the execution of the myths of philosophical reasoning about and
reflection on and arguments of certain philosophical problems and questions that
are built-into the philosophical discourse, customs, traditions and norms, and by
the nature of the discourse itself, its methods, aims, and purpose and the leading
ideals of philosophy and philosophizing themselves. The discourse, methodology,
methods, techniques and instruments employed for the doing of philosophy or
philosophizing. These things themselves re/generate philosophical problems,
objects and subject-matter – a priori many types of philosophical problems exist,
while other types of philosophical problems are generated at the different stages
and steps of doing philosophy during the processes of theorizing, for example that
of problem stating or statements, making of conjectures to refute problems, during
the creation and using of metaphors, the creation and use of philosophical
imaginary problems and simulations, and other stages of the process/es of
theorizing such as the making, construction and expression of models and theories,
the creation and application of hypotheses and during the application of paradigms,
models and theories. In short, the wrong, mistaken ways of asking and expressing
misleading questions and problems creates ‘philosophical’ questions and problems.
For example, how do we know? How do we know that we know? What is the
meaning of umbrella words (with many meanings) such as consciousness, death,
life, the meaning of life, existence, etc. Words such as meta-physics, episteme and
logos from the Classics, eg Greek, are used to create misleading statements to
express misleading propositions with built-in confusion/s and in this way construct
self-generated problems. The philosophical discourse and practice, the doing of
philosophy generate philosophical subject-matter to be investigated and methods
and techniques to research them. In these and other ways this discourse and the
doing of philosophy by the way it uses words, created and self-perpetuate, self-
imagined problems. The underlying assumptions and pre-suppositions when doing
philosophy, asking questions in a philosophical manner creates and causes
philosophical problems. There are many different types of philosophical questions
and problems and they are created in all sorts of different ways and caused by
different kinds of reasons.

Some of these are for example created by the philosophical involvement in other
disciplines, for example mathematics, religion, art, social sciences, philosophy of
race, feminist issues, government, equality, cognition, etc, while other types of
problems or philosophical subject-matter are created by this discipline’s
involvement in other or inter-disciplinary studies in neurosciences, experimental
and practical philosophy, in sociology (for example by Habermas seemingly
philosophical problems are created), by the language and the ways it is used by
contemporary French philosophers, often by the way they use language when

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writing. Other problems are created by the use of philosophical terminology or

terms in the contexts of other disciplines (for example in sociology of cognition or
cognitive studies by sociologists), in everyday or speculative writing, the playing
with words, etc.

12

http://www.robertmccauley.com/research/philosophy-of-science

Philosophy of Science →

How do the sciences and their theories hang together?

The rise and continuing success of the sciences have overshadowed all of Western
philosophy for the past 400 years. A central philosophical question about the
sciences concerns how they are connected to one another. Within academic
philosophy and in more popular discussions, talk about philosophical models of
cross-scientific relations traditionally has been cast in the language of scientific
“reduction.” I have contributed to a considerable critical literature on classical
reductionism, and I have advanced and developed a larger conception of cross-
scientific relations in terms of explanatory pluralism in science.

Explanatory pluralism enlists two important insights from the literature of the
philosophy of science. The first is William Wimsatt’s distinction between inter-
theoretic relationships that arise from intra-level (successional) contexts as
opposed to those that arise from inter-level (cross-scientific) contexts. a)
Successional relations concern theoretical change over time within/intra some
particular science. Slow, gradual changes result in scientific evolution, whereas
rapid, abrupt changes result in scientific revolutions. b) Cross-scientific relations,
by contrast, concern comparisons at some particular moment in time of theories
that have a common object of study (e.g., human behavior) but that arise from
different sciences (e.g., social psychology and social neuroscience).

The second insight that explanatory pluralism enlists is Paul Churchland’s

suggestion that the relative commensurability of two theories in science may fall
anywhere on a continuum of possibilities from high to low. Sometimes two
theories are thoroughly discontinuous with one another and their comparison falls
at one end of this continuum. (Churchland has argued that this is the case with
respect to the relationship between intentional psychologies and computational

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neuroscience.) In other cases, two theories are sometimes completely continuous

and their comparison falls at the opposite end of the continuum. Such cases
approximate the circumstances on which the classical reductionists focused.
Statistical mechanics, for example, readily redescribes and captures the
generalizations of classical thermodynamics. Comparisons of different pairs of
scientific theories fall at various points on this continuum of commensurability
between these two extremes.

Combining these insights, explanatory pluralism suggests that the models of the
classical reductionists and of the New Wave reductionists confuse a variety of
decidedly different sorts of intertheoretic relationships in science and,
consequently, in at least some cases, mischaracterize their implications.

Explanatory pluralism envisions 4 different forms of scientific progress that can

arise from exploring the relationships between theories in science. In successional
contexts within a particular science over time, slow, gradual change—(1) scientific
evolution—should be distinguished from rapid, abrupt change—(2) scientific
revolution. The elimination of theories and the things they are committed to can
arise in successional contexts, but that process is, famously, far more sudden and
dramatic in the revolutionary cases. Crucially, these successional contexts should
not be confused with cross-scientific settings, which examine the relationships
between theories in different sciences at the same time. In cross-scientific settings,
high intertheoretic commensurability results in something that approaches (3)
classical reduction, vindicating the relevant theory of the upper-level science. Low
intertheoretic commensurability in cross-scientific contexts, by contrast, reveals
divergent theoretical proposals, which, ironically, can occasion both insular
declarations about the autonomy of disciplines and the process of (4) theoretical
co-evolution, simultaneously.

http://www.robertmccauley.com/articles/philosophy-of-science/

Robert N. McCauley (2015). Religion and Science as Forms of

Life: Anthropological Insights into Reason and

http://www.robertmccauley.com/articles/philosophy-of-cognitive-and-brain-
sciences/enriching-philosophical-models-of-cross-scientific-relations-
incorporating-diachronic-theories-book-chapter-pdf

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Time is of the essence: Explanatory pluralism and accommodating theories

about long-term processes

Robert N. McCauley
Pages 611-635 | Published online: 06 Oct 2009

 Download citation
 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09515080903238906

Abstract

Unified, all-purpose, philosophical models of reduction in science lack resources

for capturing varieties of cross-scientific relations that have proven critical to
understanding some scientific achievements. Not only do those models obscure the
distinction between successional and cross-scientific relations, their preoccupations
with the structures of both theories and things provide no means for
accommodating the contributions to various sciences of theories and research
about long-term diachronic processes involving large-scale, distributed systems.
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the parade case. Explanatory
pluralism accommodates a wider range of connections between theories and
inquiries in science than all-purpose models of reduction do. Consequently, it
provides analytical tools for understanding the roles of the theoretical proposals
about the evolution of the human mind/brain that have proliferated over the last
two decades. Those proposals have testable implications pertaining to both
structure and processing in the modern human mind/brain. An example of such
research illustrates how those proposals and investigative tools and experiments
cut across both explanatory levels and modes of analysis within the cognitive
sciences and how those studies can yield evidence that bears on the assessment of
competing theories and models.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515080903238898?src=recsys

Philosophical Psychology

Volume 22, 2009 - Issue 5: Cognition and Neurophysiology: Mechanism,

Reduction, and Pluralism

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Reductionist Challenges to Explanatory Pluralism: Comment on McCauley

Markus I. Eronen
Pages 637-646 | Published online: 06 Oct 2009

 Download citation
 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09515080903238898
 In this comment, I first point out some problems in McCauley's defense of
the traditional conception of general analytical levels. Then I present certain
reductionist arguments against explanatory pluralism that are not based on
the New Wave model of intertheoretic reduction, against which McCauley is
arguing. Reductionists that are not committed to this model might not have
problems incorporating research on long-term diachronic processes in their
analyses. In the last part of the paper, I briefly compare Robert N.
McCauley's conception of reduction to some other current accounts,
highlighting the differences between them.
 Keywords: Explanatory
Pluralism, Levels, McCauley, Neuroscience, Psychology, Reduction

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/530a3ca8e4b01885d317b273/t/536a60
e1e4b023d3d9c4b488/1399480545791/enriching-philosophical-models-of-
cross-scientific-relations.pdf

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/530a3ca8e4b01885d317b273/t/536a60
58e4b023d3d9c4b3dc/1399480408273/maturationally-natural-cognition-
impedes-professional+science-and-facilitates-popular-religion.pdf

Note: What McCauley writes here about MN and the Theory-Ladenness of

perception can be applied to attitudes in philosophy (religion and other domains).
This is a serious matter for, “If humans do not realize that they operate with
maturationally natural (implicit) assumptions and if they do not realize that those
assumptions involve tacit theoretical commitments, then they have few, if any
occasions to question them,” unless and until they become aware of this fact, and
identify and deal with those assumptions.

forthcoming in Journal for the General Philosophy of Science

Maturationally Natural Cognition, Radically Counter-Intuitive Science,
and the Theory-Ladenness of Perception

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https://static1.squarespace.com/static/530a3ca8e4b01885d317b273/t/536a6058e4b
023d3d9c4b3dc/1399480408273/maturationally-natural-cognition-impedes-
professional+science-and-facilitates-popular-religion.pdf
Humans’ maturationally natural proclivities undergird a theory-ladenness of
perception that is
inescapable. That alone, though, need not jeopardize the rationality of science, as
some philosophers of science recognize. Failing to appreciate how much material
and cultural circumstances influence
maturationally natural aspects of perception, however, does threaten some
proposals, specifically Jerry Fodor’s (1990), for surmounting the challenges of the
theory-ladenness of perception.
Section 2 presents some philosophical and psychological preliminaries. Section 3
delineates
maturationally natural dimensions of perception and cognition as one species of
automatic,
unconscious, mental activity. Commensurate with dual process theories in
cognitive science, this
broadly intuitive mentation contrasts with more reflective, conscious forms of
thinking and perceiving, but also with another form of fast intuitive perception and
cognition, acquired after extensive experience or practice. Section 4 examines the
relationship of these maturationally natural dimensions of perception and cognition
with the perceptual and cognitive demands of theoretical science. Sooner or later,
science involves representations that fail to square with the deliverances of
humans’maturationally natural capacities are, in this regard, radically counter-
intuitive (RCI). Section 5 considers how maturationally natural verdicts about the
world automatically intrude in perception and thought and impede learning and
mastering science. Section 6 briefly reviews Fodor’s proposal for managing the
theory-ladenness of perception rooted in maturationally natural aspects of vision.
Then it outlines findings from cross-cultural experimental research bearing on the
cultural infiltration of maturationally natural dimensions of visual perception that
pose a problem for that proposal. Section 7 argues that the persistence and
invisibility of maturationally natural influences on individual scientists’ perceptual
judgments pose challenging, but not insurmountable, problems for science
education and for accounts of science’s epistemic prominence. Various social and
institutional arrangements in science play a decisive role in correcting for the
possibility of individual scientists’ limitations.
2. Naturalism and the Selectivity of Theories
One thing that even the most lingua-focal philosophers, the most
phenomenologically-oriented

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philosophers, and the most naturalistic philosophers can agree about is that
explicitly formulated,
scientific theories are made up of concepts. What the first and the third disagree
about is what concepts
are. (See, for example, Machery 2009). What the second and the third disagree
about is how broadly
and how deeply theories and their concepts apply (Churchland 1989). These
disagreements are not
peculiar to concepts but are, instead, born of broader differences about methods.
Naturalists are more
liberal, at least in the sense that they include all of the methods of these other
philosophers and more.
Comparatively, naturalists are less impressed with philosophical methods overall.
The history of
Western philosophy, in the Modern era especially, is a history of philosophical
speculations spawning
sciences, which return, not much later, as contributors to understanding topics, on
which philosophy
had presumed it held a proprietary claim. Many philosophers (and humanists,
generally) find these
scientific proposals presumptuous, pushy, and offensive; by contrast, naturalists
welcome them.
Naturalists differ among themselves in how prominent a role they accord scientific
accounts of things,
but they all agree that philosophical tools and pronouncements possess no inherent
superiority over the
hypotheses, methods, and discoveries of modern science concerning empirical
questions.
Naturalists’ methodological liberalism inclines them to adopt comparably liberal
conceptions of
theories. Whatever philosophers take scientific theories to be, from logically
integrated sets of
sentences (Hempel 1965) to patterns of connection strengths in neural networks
(Churchland 1989),
one thing all agree about is that theories are speculative in that they select among
what we experience,
perceive, and know. They choose particular items, features, events, processes, or
relations, from
amongst the limitless possibilities of what might bear on some explanandum.
Theories are conjectures
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about what does and does not matter, any appearances to the contrary
notwithstanding, for obtaining
explanatory understanding about phenomena.1 They often reveal hitherto
unrecognized patterns.
Theories instruct us about which variables to manipulate in order to predict or
control outcomes. In all
of these respects and more, theories highlight what we should attend to.
For any perceptual or cognitive system, then, to select among inputs is, in
effect, to theorize. To
select systematically is, functionally, to entertain a theory, whether or not that
selection is conscious
and whether or not the entertained theory is formulated linguistically. Perceptual
and cognitive
mechanisms that carry out such systematic selection embody theories, irrespective
of those
mechanisms’ novelty or complexity or of those theories’ origins. If, for example,
theories are patterns of
connection strengths in neural networks, as Paul Churchland (1989, pp. 188-89)
proposes, then
. . . no cognitive activity whatever takes place in the absence of some theory or
other.
This perspective bids us see even the simplest of animals and the youngest of
infants as
possessing theories . . . The difference between us and them is not that they lack
theories.
Rather, their theories are just a good deal simpler than ours, in the case of animals.
And their
theories are much less coherent, less organized, and less informed than ours, in the
case of
infants. . . . But insofar as there is cognitive activity at all, it exploits whatever
theory the
creature embodies, however useless or incoherent it might be.
Naturalists contend that from the standpoints of perceptual and cognitive
processing, of underlying
mechanisms, and, therefore, finally of theoretical form, nothing of epistemically-
principled importance
differentiates the influence -- with regard to perception, judgment, and inference --
of humans’
maturationally natural perceptual and cognitive proclivities from that of the
painstakingly acquired
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command of professional sciences’ most esoteric theories. As Churchland stresses,

the major difference
between maturationally natural theoretical commitments and those of professional
science concerns
their comparative sophistication. This paper argues that they also differ with
respect to the ease with
which human minds utilize them and with respect to their vulnerability to
interference and to decay.
Since Norwood Russell Hansen’s Patterns of Discovery (1958), philosophers of
science have
wrestled with the epistemic implications of theory-impregnated perception and
cognition in science. On
the naturalists’ liberal account of the theoretical, the theory-ladenness of perception
and cognition
comes in at least two varieties. These correspond broadly to two types of cognitive
processing that
cognitive scientists have been differentiating for nearly forty years (Schneider and
Shiffrin 1977; Shiffrin
and Schneider 1977; Kahneman 2011).2 Dual process theories distinguish between
slow, reflective,
conscious cognition and fast, intuitive3, unconscious cognition. Since the former
involves deliberate,
conscious, articulable thought, it is described as off-line. By contrast, intuitive
cognition is on-line,
because it occurs automatically and, typically, without verbal representation. The
discovery and
illumination of the latter has especially set the theories and findings of the
cognitive sciences off from both commonsense and most philosophical
conceptions of the mind.
Since Chomsky’s claims in the 1960s about speakers’ tacit knowledge of their
grammars,
cognitive scientists have examined the myriad ways that perception, thought, and
action reflect
humans’ thorough-going familiarity with and use of vast bodies of knowledge
about scores of matters
that they are usually just as thoroughly unaware that they possess (Reber 1993).
While philosophers
squabbled about whether these capacities merited the label “knowledge” (Harman
1974), cognitive

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scientists plunged ahead with explorations in dozens of domains of the

representations and processes of
these fast, automatic perceptual and cognitive systems.4
At least since Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) discussion of experimental participants’
initial failures to
correctly identify the suits of anomalous playing cards (e.g., red spades),
philosophers of science have
recognized that influences of theories on perception and cognition need not be
readily available to
consciousness. With intellectual work, such implicit influences can be brought to
consciousness. The
study that Kuhn discussed suggests that sufficient experience with stimuli can also
incite conscious
reflection from the bottom up. After multiple trials with the anomalous playing
cards participants began
to sense that something was amiss. After further presentations of the cards, many
could eventually
articulate what was wrong.
The influence of implicit theoretical commitments should worry philosophers
of science. Those
commitments are, after all, unrecognized and unconscious, and, thus, far less
likely to undergo
conscious scrutiny, compared to the explicit scientific theories people entertain and
debate. Kuhn’s
example indicates how unlikely people are to detect anomalies in everyday
experience, which does not
normally involve plentiful presentations of the same stimuli that would push their
tacit theoretical
understandings up to the level of consciousness as candidates for critical
examination.
By contrast, Churchland (1979, 2012) has examined the sometimes laborious
intellectual task it
is to learn to perceive the world in terms of the frameworks that explicit scientific
theories provide.
What is particularly noteworthy is that Churchland focuses on a theory to which
everyone assents yet
which seems to influence almost no one’s normal perception. In short, he examines
how difficult it is to
see the sky as a Copernican (addressed in Section 5 below.)

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To make sense of the cognitive processing that informs theory-ladenness in these

and other
cases requires introducing a distinction between two sub-types of fast, intuitive
processing.
Differentiating these two kinds of intuitive processing will clarify but also
complicate the underlying
educational and epistemological issues science occasions.
3. Two Kinds of Intuitive Processing
Proponents of dual process theories distinguish slow reflective perception and
cognition from the fast
intuitive varieties. With this intuitive mode humans seem to perceive and know
things instantly;
consequently, it has been characterized as “cognitively natural” (McCauley 2000).
Exhibiting a couple of
key features will ordinarily suffice to ignite such intuitive processing. Though
humans normally presume
the soundness of these intuitions, in fact, they are woefully underdetermined by the
evidence. Those
automatic verdicts seem so natural that people normally fail to realize that they
even know such things,
let alone how they know them or that what they presume amounts to conjectures.5
Humans routinely
draw conclusions about individuals’ emotional states on the basis of their facial
expressions, tones of
voice, or bodily comportment, and they do so with little, if any, explicit awareness
of what informed
those inferences. Cognitively natural, fast intuition, whether it concerns perception,
cognition, or
action, comes in two forms.
3.1 The Practiced Naturalness of Some Intuitive Processing
A common English idiom describes some capacities as becoming “second nature.”
Perception, thought,
and action become second nature after people have extensive experience in some
domain, often
supplemented by explicit instruction. After a great deal of practice in some area,
perception, cognition,
and action gradually shift from conscious, arduous, and deliberate to unconscious,
easy, and automatic.
Labored, unnatural cognition can become natural cognition – second nature -- with
practice, yielding an
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(oxymoronic) acquired naturalness (McCauley 2013). Depending upon the

complexity of the patterns or
pursuits, this transition might take years, as in the procurement of sophisticated
skills, like those bench
scientists acquire. Recognizing the species of a fossil, assessing the consistency of
two hypotheses,
planning effective moves in chess, or throwing the discus, once challenging, begin
to feel natural by
virtue of frequent and extended reflection, observation, experience, participation,
or practice. Each is a
domain in which humans can develop expertise.
Experts have ready intuitions about what they master; however, expertise need not
be esoteric.
Sometimes, experts are rare (e.g., in high energy physics), but expertise can also be
widespread (e.g.,
negotiating London’s mass transit system). Perception, thought, and action that
have become second
nature enjoy a “practiced naturalness” (McCauley 2011). Human beings attain
practiced naturalness in
different domains, and those domains are largely a function of their culture and
time period. Proficiency
driving cars seems ubiquitous in societies where many people can afford them, but
no one possessed
this skill in the ancient world.
3.2 Maturationally Natural Intuitive Processing
Talk of ‘second nature’ presumes forms of perception and cognition that are first
nature. First nature is
comparably unconscious, easy, and automatic, but it requires neither tutelage nor
any culturally
distinctive inputs. Prominent discussions have underscored such systems’ putative
innateness,
modularity, or both (e.g., Fodor 1983). If cognitive systems are innate or modular
in the senses that
Fodor or the evolutionary psychologists (Buss 2005) have advanced, they would
certainly qualify as
maturationally natural systems. For more than fifty years language has been the
prime candidate,
however promising alternative accounts eschewing strong nativist and modular
claims exist (e.g.,

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Christiansen and Chater 1999). Other putative cognitive modules that would
qualify as maturationally
natural systems address domains such as the basic physics of solid objects (Spelke
et al. 1992),
contamination avoidance (Rozin et al. 1995), face recognition (Duchaine and
Nakayama 2006), and
theory of mind (Baron-Cohen 1995). Since both these systems’ innateness and the
modularity (at least
in Fodor’s sense) are controversial (e.g., Barrett and Kurzban 2006) and since
neither is necessary for
characterizing maturationally natural systems, the focus here shall be on other
facets of these systems,
without commitment concerning their putative innateness and modular status
(whatever each of those
attributions are taken to entail6).
The stress on innateness arises partly from the fact that such systems address
fundamental
problems for human survival. Whether it is perceptual recognition of objects,
cognitive discrimination of
syntactic distinctions, or action responses to environmental contaminants,
maturationally natural
4. Radically Counter-Intuitive Science
Since maturationally natural systems address matters that are often decisive for the
preservation of
human life and limb and, thus, for human reproduction too, the biases that inform
those systems’
selectivity among inputs must, at least, prove good enough for humans to get by.
They may well do
better (Papineau 2000). Still, when the exacting standard of the epistemic
credentials of science is the
topic at hand, good-enough-to-get-by or good-enough-to-assure-reproduction are
unlikely to be good
enough.
The sciences advance, usually sooner rather than later, representations that are
radically unlike
the deliverances of humans’ maturationally natural cognitive systems. The sciences
traffic in RCI
representations that imply that the world is not as our maturationally natural
perception and cognitionsuggest. In short, the world is not as it appears. Science’s
RCI representations not only improve upon our
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maturationally natural conceptions, they also account for when and why those
conceptions work when
they do.
Scientific theories and concepts reorder and re-categorize things by presenting
new, unobvious
regularities based, in psychology and social science no less than in the physical and
biological sciences,
on what are often mechanisms and forces that are not manifest to our unaided
senses (Bechtel 2008).
The sciences offer more penetrating explanations than maturationally natural folk
physics, folk biology,
and folk psychology or our lame attempts at folk sociology by personifying
societies and groups
(Contreras et al. 2013). Scientific theories do not just make sense of the familiar
world; they also have
implications for how things work in exotic environments. This gives scientific
claims theoretical depth.
They must be extended to circumstances either inexplicable before, inaccessible
before, or, often,
unimagined before. Scientists invent technologies for gaining access to such
extraordinary
circumstances. Experimental investigation of scientific theories’ implications in
unexplored settings is a
pivotal means for testing them and extending knowledge.
Such endeavors inevitably result in representations that diverge drastically from
maturationally
natural conceptions of things. From the first ground-breaking proposal of modern
science, viz. that the
earth moves, to finding that the biological distinction between the sexes in humans
is not discrete,8 to
the discovery of what seem to be conceptually impossible pathologies such as
Anton’s syndrome, i.e.,
blindness denial (Churchland 1983), to ascertaining, via the theory of relative
deprivation, that the most
oppressed peoples are not most likely to protest, the physical, biological,
psychological, and social
sciences generate findings about the world that defy maturationally natural
intuition and,
simultaneously, offer the most far-reaching explanatory accounts of the matters at
stake
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5. Maturationally Natural Perception and Cognition Impede Science

Since maturationally natural perceptual and cognitive operations are
simultaneously selective,
unconscious, and automatic, the problems of theory-ladenness that they introduce
are acute, certainly
for science education, if not for scientific practice as well. Specifically,
maturationally natural perception
and cognition tends to be cognitively invisible, intrusive, and tenacious.
5.1 Maturationally Natural Intuition is Invisible
Humans are alert neither to their maturationally natural intuitions (they have them,
but they rarely, if
ever, notice that they have them) nor to those intuitions’ theoretical character.
Humans not only
presume the soundness of the intuitions born of their maturationally natural
proclivities, they do so
unconsciously. Under most conditions, maturationally natural intuition is invisible
in the sense that it is
the set of unnoticed internal lenses that humans perceive the world through; it is
the set of
unrecognized presumptions that humans know the world with. Knowledge that is
this constitutional is,
in effect, perceptually and cognitively invisible. It constitutes the default,
background assumptions that
both frame and enable humans’ transactions with their physical and social
environments. Churchland
(1989, p. 282) comments that we “. . . suppress the important fact that the
antecedent taxonomy
provided by common sense is as richly theoretical, conjectural, and provisional as .
. . “ the taxonomies
of science are. If knowledge is invisible, so is its theoretical status.
If humans do not realize that they operate with maturationally natural assumptions
and if they
do not realize that those assumptions involve tacit theoretical commitments, then
they have few, if any,
occasions to question them. Everyday interactions with medium sized, terrestrial
objects, including
organisms, rarely frustrate humans’ maturationally natural expectations.
Consequently, the systematic
probing of the world that the sciences carry out, the often counter-intuitive findings
their inquiries
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uncover, and the RCI theories and models that they advance to explain both those
findings and
commonplace phenomena jointly form the single most noteworthy challenge to the
perceptual and
cognitive supremacy of maturationally natural intuition.
5.2 Maturationally Natural Intuition is Intrusive
That scientists challenge the dominion of maturationally natural intuition by
pursuing slow, conscious,
deliberate cognition presents a problem. When scientists step forward from their
reflections to meet
the everyday world, maturationally natural dispositions intrude. When less
experienced science
students face ordinary, unremarkable environments, they feel the tug of
maturationally natural
intuitions that are inconsistent with their hard-won scientific knowledge. Since
those maturationally
natural systems operate automatically, neither explicit, reflective knowledge nor
long histories of
practice completely undo their operations. Given their transparency and their
comparative theoretical
simplicity, they mostly constitute obstacles to learning, mastering, and doing
science.
Michael McCloskey and his colleagues (Caramazza et al. 1981; McCloskey 1983;
McCloskey et al.
1983) showed that most naïve participants rely on maturationally natural physical
intuitions when
making judgments about relatively simple motions of objects. Their critical
finding, though, was that
roughly one quarter of participants who had successfully completed a high school
or college course in
Over the past four decades experimental research has revealed that even experts
can be
suspect probabilistic thinkers, especially when contexts or problems are atypical.
Probabilistic inference
is, of course, often pivotal in scientific inquiry. Humans’ intuitions about
probabilities, which lead them
to ignore base rate information, sample sizes, and patterns such as regression to the
mean, violate the
normative principles of probability theory (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982;
Gilovich, Griffin, and
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Kahneman 2002). People employ heuristics, such as representativeness, which

holds that “like goes with
5.3 Maturationally Natural Intuition is Tenacious
As noted, expert knowledge is endowed with an acquired naturalness, achieved on
the basis of towering
amounts of experience in some domain. Thus, expert scientists may develop a
complement of
competing intuitions possessing a practiced naturalness (Papineau 2000). Even if
exotic cases continue
to pose problems for them, experts’ perceptual and cognitive management of
routine problems in
normal environments, at least, becomes second nature.
Still, it appears that not even the pervasive, long-standing embrace of a well-
established
scientific theory with clear consequences for perceptual experience will always
suffice to supersede
maturationally natural dispositions influencing perception. Not even
uncontroversial, long-held, widely
accepted, thoroughly familiar scientific theories appear capable of readily eliciting
corresponding
6. Maturationally Natural Perception: Challenge or Opportunity?
Because he holds that humans’ perceptual input systems are modularized, Fodor
(1990) is unbothered
by the theory-ladenness that their maturational naturalness entails. That is because
his account (1983)
of mental modules subscribes not only to the features by virtue of which they
qualify as maturationally
natural systems but to some decisive additional features as well.
Fodor holds, first, that humans’ general-purpose, central cognitive systems have
extremely
limited access to perceptual input systems’ inner workings. He notes (1983, p. 56),
for example, that
although humans must process utterances’ phonemic, lexical, syntactic, and
pragmatic features, what
they recall, certainly after more than a dozen seconds or so and without
tremendous mnemonic
investments is, if anything, an utterance’s semantic import – the gist of what was
said. Representations
employed at intermediate stages in perceptual input systems’ processing are
basically inaccessible and,
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thus, not candidates for conscious theoretical comparison.

Even more significantly, Fodor also maintains (1983, pp. 64f.) that perceptual
input systems’
operations are “informationally encapsulated”; they are mostly impervious to the
feedback of
information from central cognitive systems. He argues that systematically ignoring
information that
central systems possess enables perceptual input systems to be fast and to manage
the unexpected
perceptually. To be fast, these systems are stupid. They do not search through
everything we know
before offering a verdict. Activating one or two diagnostic cues is enough to
trigger their operations.
Assessing myriad confirmation relations is not part of their repertoire. These
maturationally natural
systems provide stereotypical deliverances to central cognitive systems about how
the world appears.
Mastery of the sciences’ RCI theories does not penetrate the operations of
perceptual input systems.
Knowledge of scientific theories only exerts its influence at the levels of perceptual
judgment and belief
fixation, which are performed by central cognitive systems.
Crucially, Fodor’s point is not that perceptual input systems are not theory-laden.
He stresses,
rather, that the relevant mental modules of every human have the same theoretical
biases. Those
modules’ operations are overwhelmingly indifferent regarding the explicit theories
humans are
committed to reflectively, and, thus, they are “encapsulated enough to permit
theory-neutral,
observational resolution of scientific disputes” (1990, p. 255).
Fodor construes the apparent fixity of maturationally natural perception as offering
not a
challenge but an opportunity. He holds, ironically, that the theory-ladenness of
maturationally natural,
perceptual input systems provides grounds for managing the theory-ladenness of
perception in science
and for playing a prominent role in accounting for the scientific community’s
decisions between

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theories. Fodor’s epistemological proposal for managing the problems, which the
theory-ladenness of
perception presents for accounts of scientific rationality, turns on the uniformity of
humans’
maturationally natural perceptual biases. On Fodor’s view that uniformity in the
theory-ladenness of
perceptual systems purchases a theory-neutrality with regard to the assessment of
any theories that
humans entertain reflectively, including the theories of science, in the light of
observational evidence.
A pivotal premise of Fodor’s argument for this uniformity is that perceptual input
systems are
overwhelmingly indifferent to variability both in individuals’ learning histories and
in their social and
material environments. Stability in perceptual input systems’ deliverances over the
life course (reflecting
their “diachronic encapsulation”) will undergird a “perceptual consensus” that will
“survive the effects
of the kinds of differences of learning histories that observers actually exhibit”
(1990, p. 257). Fodor’s
proposal that such theory-neutral observation promises to aid the resolution of
“almost all” theoretical
disputes in science indicates that he thinks any diachronic penetration of input
systems is modest and
infrequent at most (1990, p. 254).
The single most important type of evidence Fodor cites in support of the
informational
encapsulation of perceptual input systems and, thus, of their uniform development,
and, thus, of his
proposal for managing the challenges theory-laden perception poses, is the
persistence of perceptual
illusions. What better evidence is there for the informational encapsulation of
perceptual input systems,
if perceptual illusions persist even after perceivers understand (a) that the stimuli
elicit an illusion and
(b) what the actual state of affairs is? If perceivers’ knowledge could inform the
operations of their
modular input systems, it would, presumably, mitigate, if not eliminate, the
illusion. But it does not -- at

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least not with the parade case that Fodor has repeatedly headlined, viz., the
Mueller-Lyer illusion
(McCauley and Henrich 2006). See Figure 1. Perceivers’ conscious knowledge that
the two horizontal
Maturationally natural perception is automatic, invisible, intrusive, and tenacious,
but it is also
variable depending upon “the kinds of differences of learning histories that
observers actually exhibit.”
(See too Dunning and Balcetis 2013). Contrary to Fodor’s contention,
maturationally natural perception
remains a challenge, not an opportunity.
7. Scientific Education and Scientific Rationality
Maturationally natural features of perception and cognition pose significant
challenges for science
education. Along with other research on the intellectual foibles of individual
scientists, these findings
about maturationally natural perception and cognition also raise nagging concerns
about individual
scientists’ perceptual judgments and about their cognitive processing, more
generally. Neither the
pervasiveness nor the implacability of maturationally natural features of
perception, though, jeopardize
conceptions of scientific rationality that do not look to some definitive perceptual
grounds for
adjudicating theoretical disagreements.
The intrusions of maturationally natural proclivities of mind in human judgment
readily triumph
when they are not confronted by contrary inclinations associated with deeply
ingrained scientific
expertise. The experimental research on these matters shows that this is a pervasive
problem for
students across many sciences, not just physics (Carey 1986; Gregory 2009). Much
of the relevant
research examines what proves to be the dismal understanding of basic scientific
matters among
American undergraduate science students. Those students have a minimum of
thirteen years of formal
education and anywhere from four to eight years of formal science instruction and
experience at the

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secondary and undergraduate levels. Those facts alone suggest that the amount of
practiced
naturalness, which people must acquire with scientific conceptions to forestall such
intrusions with
much consistency, probably requires educational achievements equivalent to
doctoral level studies at
least. That is a sobering conclusion for champions of democratic ideals that
envision informed citizens
wrestling thoughtfully with pertinent scientific findings about matters of public
interest.
The situations that induce science students to revert to their maturationally natural
perceptual
and conceptual inclinations do not usually trip up scientific experts. Proffitt and
Gilden’s (1989) findings,
however, intimate that even experts’ intuitions routinely go awry with more
complex problems. Those
intimations and the maturationally natural features of mind that drive them, at least
in part, combined,
especially, with studies presenting the penchant of scientific researchers for
confirmation bias (e.g.,
Mahoney and DeMonbreun 1977) but also with research that reveals individual
scientists’ weaknesses
at deductive, probabilistic, and statistical reasoning,11 suggest that any satisfactory
account of scientific
rationality should not turn on presumptions about the soundness of individual
scientists’ perceptual (or
intellectual) judgments.
Clearly, the problems that individuals’ maturationally natural dispositions of mind
present for
science education and for the enterprise of science, more generally, are not
insurmountable. Science,
after all, has progressed. Science has developed ways to manage these problems.
The way around them,
though, is not by looking either to perceptual verdicts of individual scientists or to
uniform perceptual
capacities across the species to establish some theory-neutral perceptual basis for
adjudicating scientific
debates. It is not to look to any account of scientific rationality that depends
essentially on some

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perceptual basis (theory-neutral or not) for deciding scientific controversies.

Scientific rationality does
not rely on any intrinsic or uniform property of humans’ perceptual capacities.
More inclusive
conceptions of its epistemic prestige that focus on science’s social and institutional
arrangements are
preferable, in which individual scientists’ perceptual judgments are but one among
a number of
considerations that play into how scientific communities sort through observational
evidence and in
which observational evidence is but one among a number of considerations, such
as achieving overall
explanatory coherence (Thagard 1992, 2012), that make for scientific progress.

Note: The above is crucial for the investigation of the doing of philosophy and the
assumptions, ‘attitudes’ and pre-suppositions brought to or underlying this socio-
cultural practice. As is the case with science social and institutional arrangements
and others factors are probably meant to guarantee the validity and meaningfulness
of philosophical insights or results? Philosophical methods, reasoning,
argumentation, rationality, coherence, soundness of arguments, etc form part of
these standards. To identify more of these norms it is necessary to explore the
entire process of doing philosophy as if it is a process of theorizing.

13

I employ these discussions of McCauley concerning Maturationally Natural

Cognition (MNC) and Radically Counter-Intuitive Science (RCI) merely to
make a point of my own and not for all of the contents he discusses, although the
latter may provide useful insights, distinctions and concepts for the doing of
philosophy. This discussion I use as data, for the data-collection feature of theory-
making, for the data collection stage of theory-building in the process/es of
theorizing. In other words they will be used so as to create problem statements.
Problem statements that will be developed concerning the process/es of doing
philosophy and that will be investigated in that context. When more data has been
collected I will eventually develop conjectures to be asserted or refuted and that
might eventually produce hypotheses.
McCauley points out the many assumptions that underlie MNC and thereby colour
our daily or everyday cognition. These assumptions and the patterns created by
MNC create problems for students and novices of the scientific enterprises as their
judgements are coloured by such things. MNC comes automatically, is intrusive, is
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fast and creates constraints for the development of slower, reflective, acquired,
artificially RCI.
MNC also plays a huge, implicit and often unrecognized and unidentified role in
cognition of students and practitioners of the philosophical discourse. Philosophers
must be aware of these things and their effects and should identify them and make
them and their consequences explicit, as they are employed during the doing of
philosophy. MNC plays a huge role in the discourse of religion, religious thinking,
attitudes, values and experience. In a similar way they underlie and operate during
philosophizing or the doing of philosophy – while philosophers are unaware of
this. McCauley states that there is a naturalness of religion (religious experience
and thinking) and an unnaturalness of acquiring, learning, developing and
executing scientific thinking. See the following article for his development of the
nature of this religious cognition in comparison with that of scientific cognition. In
the same way that religious cognition can be compared with scientific thinking, we
can compare philosophical cognition with scientific cognition. Philosophical
thinking not only resembles MNC, but it also resembles the naturalness of religious
cognition. Such things should be investigated and modified so that cognition of the
philosopher and the philosophical discourse resemble the different steps and
features of the processes of theorizing and scientific cognition.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/530a3ca8e4b01885d317b273/t/5369228ce4b
091c22d81bed8/1399399052676/the-naturalness-of-religion-and-the-
unnaturalness-of-science.pdf
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/530a3ca8e4b01885d317b273/t/5369228ce4b
091c22d81bed8/1399399052676/the-naturalness-of-religion-and-the-
unnaturalness-of-science.pdf

By contrast, science, throughout its history, would not have existed without
progressively
more sophisticated explanatory theorizing and evidential reasoning and the
resulting activities that
constitute cutting-edge endeavors. The emergence and persistence of science as a
cultural form
depend on the coordination--through avenues of professional communication and
association--of
gifted individuals' invention of new cognitive tools as well as their ongoing
refinement of familiar
ones, shaping the resulting practices and products along very specific trajectories.
These are not activities that come naturally or easily to human beings. Whatever
currency scientific knowledge
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gains within a culture, that knowledge is always the result of determined effort and
prolonged
reflection of the most esoteric sorts by an intellectual elite.
Scientists, themselves, have produced evidence about the difficulties of doing
science.
Experimental psychologists (Tweney, Doherty, and Mynatt, 1981) have revealed
that college level
science students often fail to exhibit the forms of judgment and inference suitable
for rational
assessment of scientific theories. Even experienced researchers are sometimes
prone to erroneous
forms of reasoning (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky, 1982), although they are less
likely to make
some types of errors when they are operating in areas where they possess expertise.
These sorts of findings have at least two implications. First,
overcoming these cognitive biases and errors, to which human beings seem all too
naturally prone,
requires extensive study and experience, yet even these provide no guarantee
against such
shortcomings. Second, it is the comparatively narrow community of research
scientists that is
primarily responsible for maintaining science's critical traditions. Scientific
standards, just like
scientific knowledge, depend mostly on the evolution of the expert scientific
community's collective
judgment in the long run. Individual scientists are far too susceptible to such
problems as errors in
reasoning, flawed heuristics, and confirmation bias.
The difficulties associated with reasoning properly, judging reliably, and
comprehending
esoteric scientific concepts go some way toward explaining why science
progresses so slowly most
of the time. These difficulties are also excellent indications of just how unnatural
doing science is
from a cognitive standpoint.
Although a few scientific ideas (atomism, heliocentrism, continental drift) required
extended
consideration in more than one era before they eventually prospered, at least so far
in the history of

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science, this seems the exception and not the rule. Science is uniquely innovative.
Its pursuit has
regularly generated new theories and conceptual tools (the calculus, gravity,
natural selection, field
theory, inferential statistics, quantum theory, antimatter, chaos theory, implicit
memory, distributed
representation, etc.) that have sometimes required reinterpretations of science's
most fundamental
metaphysical assumptions. In addition, science has not undergone the conservative
revolutions that
some religious groups have where the explicit aim is not only to overthrow the
prevailing states of
affairs but to resuscitate earlier forms of religiosity or religious practice in all of
their details (even
when these goals are transparently implausible).
Science has never arisen in nonliterate cultures. As I argued in the previous
section, its
practice and appreciation demand developed intellectual skills, of which the most
fundamental are
literacy and mathematical fluency. Possessing such forms of intellectual expertise--
together with
systems of external scientific symbols (Bechtel, 1996)--is a key to discerning,
retaining, and
engaging scientific materials. Standard scientific works--like theological and
ecclesiastical works
but quite unlike most other religious works--are usually carefully reasoned, tightly
constrained by
detailed conventions, and couched in relatively dry, antiseptic prose.
First, human beings--children in particular--seem to be inveterate
anthropomorphizers. Our
cognitive mechanisms for detecting the eyes, faces, and forms of macroscopic
organisms that have
them and of human beings in particular as well as the related mechanisms for
attributing agency,
mentality, and personality to things in the world are profoundly liberal in their
operations,
generating false positives at every turn. (Guthrie, 1993) We not only see faces in
the clouds, we
routinely talk about our cars' and computers' recalcitrant moods. Advertisers have

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anthropomorphized everything from cleaning products to vegetables to airplanes.

Indeed,
superimposing human characteristics on products is probably second only to sex in
the advertiser's
bag of tricks for grabbing human attention. Attributing agency and psychological
properties to
various parts of the physical universe--sometimes on the basis of the skimpiest
evidence--seems
nearly a cognitive compulsion in human beings. (See Mithen, 1996, pp. 55 and
164-167.)
Second, humans seem to find explanations in terms of agents and their actions
more
naturally appealing. Social psychologists have discovered telling biases in human
judgment on
these counts. (For discussions see Gilbert and Malone, 1995 and Anderson, Krull,
and Weiner,
1996.) Human beings are overwhelmingly predisposed to give accounts of their
own and others=
behaviors in terms of socially shared theories about agents and their states of mind.
Even when
experimenters openly manipulate the independent variables that account for the
variance in
subjects= responses, those subjects typically remain not only unaware of these
variables= influence
but convinced of the critical role of agents= actions and mental states in
determining the outcomes.
Third, religious ontologies and narratives go hand in hand. I have already
mentioned
mnemonic advantages narratives enjoy, compared to other forms of knowledge
organization. The
prominence religious systems accord CPS agents and their actions is of a piece
with the central role
that narratives play in religious thought and practice. Narratives, after all, go
nowhere without
agents. Agents' actions and states of mind are the underlying engines that drive
narratives.
Proliferating agents inevitably requires proliferating narratives, because every
agent has a story.

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Introducing individual agents raises kinds of questions that only stories can answer.
In explaining Finally, as Boyer (1994) has emphasized, by appropriating such
fundamental notions as
'agent' (and the conception of causality that accompanies it) for the purposes of
characterizing the
invisible forces of the universe, religious systems provide participants with a huge
amount of
information for free.

14

Here is another review, with criticisms of work in philosophy, more specifically

neurophilosophy or should one say philoneuroscience. Ned Block reviews
Brainwise studies in neurophilosophy by Patricia Churchland. Here are some of his
critique against this type of ‘philosophy’.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/brain-wise

Studies in Neurophilosophy
By Patricia S. Churchland

Overview

Progress in the neurosciences is profoundly changing our conception of ourselves.

Contrary to time-honored intuition, the mind turns out to be a complex of brain
functions. And contrary to the wishful thinking of some philosophers, there is no
stemming the revolutionary impact that brain research will have on our
understanding of how the mind works.

Brain-Wise is the sequel to Patricia Smith Churchland’s Neurophilosophy, the

book that launched a subfield. In a clear, conversational manner, this book
examines old questions about the nature of the mind within the new framework of
the brain sciences. What, it asks, is the neurobiological basis of consciousness, the
self, and free choice? How does the brain learn about the external world and about
its own introspective world? What can neurophilosophy tell us about the basis and
significance of religious and moral experiences?

Drawing on results from research at the neuronal, neurochemical, system, and

whole-brain levels, the book gives an up-to-date perspective on the state of

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neurophilosophy—what we know, what we do not know, and where things may go

from here.

About the Author

Patricia S. Churchland is President’s Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the

University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute for
Biological Sciences. She is the author of many books, including Neurophilosophy
and Brain-Wise (both published by the MIT Press).

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/BrainWise.pdf

Ned Block Neurophilosophy or philoneuroscience

“Churchland thinks the contact

points between philosophy and neuroscience
lie in what neuroscience has to say
about the big problems and in theoretical
neuroscience. But the first does not amount
to much, and the second assumes that
philosophical training somehow provides
an advantage in constructing theories in
neuroscience, something I doubt.
In my view, the intersections between philosophy
and the sciences of the mind reside
largely in smaller problems, conceptual issues
arising in the sciences themselves and
invoking ideas or distinctions that have come
up in philosophy or that are well served by
the methods of philosophy. Philosophy is often
defined as the study of issues in which the
questions themselves are up for grabs. Thus it
is no surprise that the smaller problems are
often messy and so are disdained by some—
but definitely not all—scientists. Oddly,
Churchland appears to adopt the “just the
facts” mindset of those scientists who are impatient
with the more conceptual and foundational
issues in their fields.

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Here is an example of the kind of issue I

am talking about. There has been a vigorous
debate among both psychologists and
philosophers about whether mental images
represent in the manner of pictures
(Kosslyn) or in the manner of sentences
(Pylyshyn), and the discussion of this issue
has involved conceptual issues about representation
that link up to long-standing philosophical
literature. Although Churchland devotes
an entire chapter to how the brain represents,
this issue does not come up.
Churchland’s impatience with foundational
issues also extends to conceptual issues more
closely connected to the big problems. For
example, anti-innatists have argued that no
phenotypic characteristic can be genetically
determined, because there is always some environmental
feature (even within the womb) in
which the phenotypic characteristic would not
develop (e.g., as demonstrated in imprinting in
chicks). The innatists say that although every
phenotypic characteristic is produced by a
complex gene-environment interaction, in
some cases when we ask where a certain phenotypic
informational structure comes from,
the best answer is “from the genes.” This is the
classic “poverty of the stimulus” argument.
Churchland has a section on innateness, but instead
of grappling with this conceptual issue,
she confines herself to describing the complexity
of the gene-environment interaction.
Lastly, in her discussion of consciousness,
Churchland takes theories that see experiential
consciousness as a kind of brain activation and
theories that see the essence of consciousness
in terms of higher order cognitive states as
rivals. But many philosophers have suggested
that such theories may be talking about consciousness
in different senses of the term:
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experience is one thing and experience accompanied

by higher order cognition is another.
One would think a philosophical treatment of
the relation between these theories would at
least discuss this possibility, if only to dismiss it.
Brain-Wise makes many excellent
methodological points and has some interesting
and sensible things to say about the
big problems of philosophy. Unfortunately,
Churchland, despite her militantly interdisciplinary
views, approaches many conceptual
issues in the sciences of the mind like
the more antiphilosophical of scientists.
References and Notes
1. P. Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Towards a Unified
Understanding of the Mind-Brain (MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1986).
2. T. Burge, Philos. Rev. 102, 457 (1993).
3. C. Peacocke, A Study of Concepts (MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1992).
4. These include J. Kim, Mind in a Physical World: An
Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental
Causation (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998).
5. S. Kripke, in Semantics of Natural Language, D.
Davidson, G. Harman, Eds. (Reidel, Dordrecht,
Netherlands, 1972), pp. 253–355.
6 D. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (Oxford Univ. Press,
New York, 1996).
7. F. Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of-

http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/landreth.pdf

Human Nature Review 3(2003)

The Human Nature ReviewISSN 1476-1084
URLof this document http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/landreth.html
Book Review
Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophyby Patricia Smith Churchland. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2002.
Reviewed by Anthony Landreth

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In many regards, Brain-Wiseis an update on Patricia Churchland’s 1986 book

Neurophilosophy. Both books present textbook neuroscience in the context of
traditional philosophical problems. Neither of these books are so much an attempt
to argue, point-by-point, for particular positions
on traditional philosophical issues, as they are arguments for a different approach
to philosophical questions.
In Brain-Wise, Churchland adds to the survey of relevant science some of the
innovations of the next generation of neurophilosophers.
Churchland’s strengths lie primarily in her
synoptic view of the behavioral sciences. As an alternative to thought-experiment
as a method for investigating the order of the natural world,
she brings together a host of clearly described and familiar scientific case studies.
The rationale is that thought-experiment may have little bearing on our
understanding of the natural world. Churchland warns us to be wary of a priori
methods in philosophy,… Churchland recommends that we would “do best to
resign our-selves to the probability that there is no special faculty whose exercise
yields the Absolute, Error-Free, Beyond-Science Truths of the Universe” (pg.
41). In Churchland’s mind, this
leads to a renouncement of metaphysics as a methodology, with the
retention of some metaphysical questions for scientific investigation.
When the sciences begin to encroach on the subject matter of metaphysics, the
metaphysical status of its issues “will eventually be cast off as uninformative
and burdensome”
In Churchland’s view metaphysics is a term that one applies to the pre-
scientific stage in a field’s evolution, a term of history. In opposition to a
priori methods, Churchland endorses
abductive argumentation. What can be explained by a framework becomes
the determination of tenable positions. Case studies in neuro-scientific
explanation therefore
take center-stage since they become the data for assessing explanatory power.
Unfortunately, this abductive approach is not one that Churchland sticks to
consistently. For instance, despite her deployment of explanatory strategies from
cognitive science, the bulk of her section on freedom of the will is guided by a
priori considerations in the standard fashion,……
In other sections, Churchland sometimes
gets running but seems to lose track of where she is going. In her epistemology
section, naturalistic she argues for a theoretical approach, then moves on to
theoretical issues concerning neural representation and neural plasticity, without
explaining the bearing of her case studies on basic epistemological issues, for

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instance—how we can be wrong, or how we are to understand what counts as

evidence. While it might be a bit ……

While an account of neural representation is critical to Churchland’s contribution,

in this regard one might call into question the coherence of her presentation.
… While Brain-Wise is not an ideal introduction to philosophy, generally
speaking, nor the most biologically rigorous of neurophilosophy texts (cf. Bickle
2003) it is perhaps the most accessible single-author introduction to neuro-
philosophy available. Churchland is always en gaging, enthusiastic and frank.
While there are a number of neurophilosophical positions that she does not survey
(cf. Bechtel, et al. 2002), the book offers more than enough to chew on with a
kind narrative continuity unavailable in edited volumes. Neurophilosophy is still
young and the job of the neurophilosopher is still not well-understood.
Neurophilosophers—as theoreticians applying neuroscience to philosophical
problems—are in increasing need of skills for evaluating the character of
neuroscientific evidence. The acquisition of these skills would be greatly
facilitated by a philosophy of science committed to problems in neuroscience, but
at present, there is no field of research that investigates the methodological and
epistemic problems encountered by neuroscientists. The exchange between
philosophy and neuroscience has been, primarily, one way. If this state of affairs
is going to change, philosophers will have to undergo a different training regime
to that to which they are accustomed. Philosophers will need a better feel for the
geography of the biologically-based behavioral sciences. Toward that end, Brain-
Wise represents progress in its level of detail and accessibility in canvassing
cognitive neuroscience, in its challenge to conventional wisdom on the nature of
the philosopher’s intellectual contribution, and in its gestures toward a different kit
of tools with which to make that contribution.

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----------------------
Here is another philosopher who argues for the involvement of philosophy in
cognitive science.

Why Cognitive Science Needs Philosophy and Vice Versa Paul Thagard.
http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/whycogsci.2009.pdf

He also argues for the generality and normativity as required by cognitive sciences.

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Contrary to common views that philosophy is extraneous to cognitive science, this

paper argues
that philosophy has a crucial role to play in cognitive science with respect to
generality and normativity.
General questions include the nature of theories and explanations, the role of
computer
simulation in cognitive theorizing, and the relations among the different fields of
cognitive science.
Normative questions include whether human thinking should be Bayesian, whether
decision making
should maximize expected utility, and how norms should be established. These
kinds of general
and normative questions make philosophical reflection an important part of
progress in
cognitive science. Philosophy operates best, however, not with a priori reasoning
or conceptual
analysis, but rather with empirically informed reflection on a wide range of
findings in cognitive
science.

Here McCauley also shows, again the general questions that philosophy when
involved with science deals with.
http://www.robertmccauley.com/articles/philosophy-of-science/enriching-
philosophical-models-of-cross-scientific-relations-book-chapter-pdf
More examples of that below -

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/530a3ca8e4b01885d317b273/t/536a60a4e4b
023d3d9c4b430/1399480484212/inte
In the course of defending both a unified model of intertheoretic relations in
science and scientific realism, Paul Churchland has attempted to reinvigorate
eliminative materialism. Churchland's eliminativism operates on three claims:
(1) that some intertheoretic contexts involve incommensurable theories,
(2) that such contexts invariably require the elimination of one theory or
the other, and
(3) that the relation of psychology and neuroscience is just such a context.
I argue that a more detailed account of intertheoretic relations, which distinguishes
between the relations that hold between successive theories at a particular
level of analysis over time and those that hold between theories at different
levels of analysis at the same time, offers grounds for denying Churchland's
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second and third claims and, therefore, undermines his eliminativism. The paper
concludes by suggesting why it is, nonetheless, not unreasonable, given this
more detailed model of intertheoretic relations, to expect the eventual elimination
of commonsense psychology. (philosophy?)

http://www.robertmccauley.com/research/philosophy-of-science

How do the sciences and their theories hang together?

The rise and continuing success of the sciences has overshadowed all of Western
philosophy for the past 400 years. A central philosophical question about the
sciences concerns how they are connected to one another. Within academic
philosophy and in more popular discussions, talk about philosophical models of
cross-scientific relations traditionally has been cast in the language of scientific
“reduction.” I have contributed to a considerable critical literature on classical
reductionism, and I have advanced and developed a larger conception of cross-
scientific relations in terms of explanatory pluralism in science.

Explanatory pluralism enlists two important insights from the literature of the
philosophy of science. The first is William Wimsatt’s distinction between
intertheoretic relationships that arise from intralevel (successional) contexts as
opposed to those that arise from interlevel (cross-scientific) contexts. Successional
relations concern theoretical change over time within some particular science.
Slow, gradual changes result in scientific evolution, whereas rapid, abrupt changes
result in scientific revolutions. Cross-scientific relations, by contrast, concern
comparisons at some particular moment in time of theories that have a common
object of study (e.g., human behavior) but that arise from different sciences (e.g.,
social psychology and social neuroscience).

The second insight that explanatory pluralism enlists is Paul Churchland’s

suggestion that the relative commensurability of two theories in science may fall
anywhere on a continuum of possibilities from high to low. Sometimes two
theories are thoroughly discontinuous with one another and their comparison falls
at one end of this continuum. (Churchland has argued that this is the case with
respect to the relationship between intentional psychologies and computational
neuroscience.) In other cases, two theories are sometimes completely continuous
and their comparison falls at the opposite end of the continuum. Such cases
approximate the circumstances on which the classical reductionists focused.
Statistical mechanics, for example, readily redescribes and captures the
generalizations of classical thermodynamics. Comparisons of different pairs of

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scientific theories fall at various points on this continuum of commensurability

between these two extremes.

Combining these insights, explanatory pluralism suggests that the models of the
classical reductionists and of the New Wave reductionists confuse a variety of
decidedly different sorts of intertheoretic relationships in science and,
consequently, in at least some cases, mischaracterize their implications.

Explanatory pluralism envisions 4 different forms of scientific progress that can

arise from exploring the relationships between theories in science. In successional
contexts within a particular science over time, slow, gradual change—(1) scientific
evolution—should be distinguished from rapid, abrupt change—(2) scientific
revolution. The elimination of theories and the things they are committed to can
arise in successional contexts, but that process is, famously, far more sudden and
dramatic in the revolutionary cases. Crucially, these successional contexts should
not be confused with cross-scientific settings, which examine the relationships
between theories in different sciences at the same time. In cross-scientific settings,
high intertheoretic commensurability results in something that approaches (3)
classical reduction, vindicating the relevant theory of the upper-level science. Low
intertheoretic commensurability in cross-scientific contexts, by contrast, reveals
divergent theoretical proposals, which, ironically, can occasion both insular
declarations about the autonomy of disciplines and the process of (4) theoretical
co-evolution, simultaneously.

15

Burge argues for the importance of psychology compared to neuroscience and of

course against reductionism of psychology to neuroscience, or eliminativism, as is
the case with the Churchlands. How does one account for two completely opposite
views or opinions? These two views are indications if not completely
representative of many other opposing views and contradictory opinions
concerning such ‘philosophical’ attitudes and ideas.

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/a-real-science-of-mind/?_r=0
The Stone A Real Science of Mind - Tyler Burge 12/19/2010 In recent years
popular science writing has bombarded us with titillating reports of discoveries of
the brain’s psychological prowess. Such reports invade even introductory patter in
biology and psychology. We are told that the brain — or some area of it sees,
decides, reasons, knows, emotes, is altruistic/egotistical, or wants to make

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love. For example, a recent article reports a researcher’s “looking at love, quite
literally, with the aid of an MRI machine.” One wonders whether lovemaking is to
occur between two brains, or between a brain and a human being.

There are three things wrong with this talk.

First, it provides little insight into psychological phenomena. Often the discoveries
amount to finding stronger activation in some area of the brain when a
psychological phenomenon occurs. As if it is news that the brain is not dormant
during psychological activity! The reported neuroscience is often descriptive
rather than explanatory. Experiments have shown that neurobabble produces the
illusion of understanding. But little of it is sufficiently detailed to aid, much less
provide, psychological explanation.

The idea that the neural can replace the psychological is the same idea that led to
thinking that all psychological ills can be cured with drugs.

Second, brains-in-love talk conflates levels of explanation. Neurobabble piques

interest in science, but obscures how science works. Individuals see, know, and
want to make love. Brains don’t. Those things are psychological — not, in any
evident way, neural. Brain activity is necessary for psychological phenomena, but
its relation to them is complex.

Imagine that reports of the mid-20th-century breakthroughs in biology had focused

entirely on quantum mechanical interactions among elementary particles. Imagine
that the reports neglected to discuss the structure or functions of DNA. Inheritance
would not have been understood. The level of explanation would have been
wrong. Quantum mechanics lacks a notion of function, and its relation to biology
is too complex to replace biological understanding. To understand biology, one
must think in biological terms.

Discussing psychology in neural terms makes a similar mistake. Explanations of

neural phenomena are not themselves explanations of psychological
phenomena. Some expect the neural level to replace the psychological level. This
expectation is as naive as expecting a single cure for cancer. Science is almost
never so simple. See John Cleese’s apt spoof of such reductionism.

The third thing wrong with neurobabble is that it has pernicious feedback effects
on science itself. Too much immature science has received massive funding, on
the assumption that it illuminates psychology. The idea that the neural can replace

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the psychological is the same idea that led to thinking that all psychological ills can
be cured with drugs.

Perceptual psychology, not neuroscience, should be grabbing headlines.

Correlations between localized neural activity and specific psychological

phenomena are important facts. But they merely set the stage for
explanation. Being purely descriptive, they explain nothing. Some correlations
do aid psychological explanation. For example, identifying neural events
underlying vision constrains explanations of timing in psychological processes and
has helped predict psychological effects. We will understand both the correlations
and the psychology, however, only through psychological explanation.

Scientific explanation is our best guide to understanding the world. By reflecting

on it, we learn better what we understand about the world.

Neurobabble’s popularity stems partly from the view that psychology’s

explanations are immature compared to neuroscience. Some psychology is indeed
still far from rigorous. But neurobabble misses an important fact.

A powerful, distinctively psychological science matured over the last four

decades. Perceptual psychology, pre-eminently vision science, should be grabbing
headlines. This science is more advanced than many biological sciences, including
much neuroscience. It is the first science to explain psychological processes with
mathematical rigor in distinctively psychological terms. (Generative linguistics —
another relatively mature psychological science — explains psychological
structures better than psychological processes.)

What are distinctively psychological terms? Psychology is distinctive in being a

science of representation. The term “representation” has a generic use and a more
specific use that is distinctively psychological. I start with the generic use, and
will return to the distinctively psychological use. States of an organism generically
represent features of the environment if they function to correlate with them. A
plant or bacterium generically represents the direction of light. States involved in
growth or movement functionally correlate with light’s direction.

Task-focused explanations in biology and psychology often use “represent”

generically, and proceed as follows. They identify a natural task for an
organism. They then measure environmental properties relevant to the task, and
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constraints imposed by the organism’s bio-physical make-up. Next, they

determine mathematically optimal performance of the task, given the
environmental properties and the organism’s constraints. Finally, they develop
hypotheses and test the organism’s fulfillment of the task against optimal
performance.

This approach identifies systematic correlations between organisms’ states and

environmental properties. Such correlations constitute generic
representation. However, task-focused explanations that use “representation”
generically are not distinctively psychological. For they apply to states of plants,
bacteria, and water pumps, as well as to perception and thought.

Explanation in perceptual psychology is a sub-type of task-focused

explanation. What makes it distinctively psychological is that it uses notions like
representational accuracy, a specific type of correlation.

The difference between functional correlation and representational accuracy is

signaled by the fact that scientific explanations of light-sensitivity in plants or
bacteria invoke functional correlation, but not states capable of accuracy. Talk of
accuracy would be a rhetorical afterthought. States capable of accuracy are what
vision science is fundamentally about.

Science of mind is one of the most important intellectual developments in the last
half century. It should not be obscured by neurobabble.

Why are explanations in terms of representational accuracy needed? They explain

perceptual constancies. Perceptual constancies are capacities to perceive a given
environmental property under many types of stimulation. You and a bird can see a
stone as the same size from 6 inches or 60 yards away, even though the size of the
stone’s effect on the retina differs. You and a bee can see a surface as yellow
bathed in white or red light, even though the distribution of wavelengths hitting the
eye differ.

Plants and bacteria (and water-pumps) lack perceptual constancies. Responses to

light by plants and bacteria are explained by reference to states determined by
properties of the light stimulus — frequency, intensity, polarization — and by how
and where light stimulates their surfaces.

Visual perception is getting the environment right — seeing it, representing it

accurately. Standard explanations of neural patterns cannot explain vision because
such explanations do not relate vision, or even neural patterns, to the
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environment. Task-focused explanations in terms of functional correlation do

relate organisms’ states to the environment. But they remain too generic to explain
visual perception.

Perceptual psychology explains how perceptual states that represent environmental

properties are formed. It identifies psychological patterns that are learned, or
coded into the perceptual system through eons of interaction with the
environment. And it explains how stimulations cause individuals’ perceptual states
via those patterns. Perceptions and illusions of depth, movement, size, shape,
color, sound localization, and so on, are explained with mathematical rigor.

Perceptual psychology uses two powerful types of explanation — one, geometrical

and traditional; the other, statistical and cutting-edge.

Here is a geometrical explanation of distance perception. Two angles and the

length of one side determine a triangle. A point in the environment forms a
triangle with the two eyes. The distance between the eyes in many animals is
constant. Suppose that distance to be innately coded in the visual system. Suppose
that the system has information about the angles at which the two eyes are
pointing, relative to the line between the eyes. Then the distance to the point in the
environment is computable. Descartes postulated this explanation in 1637. There
is now rich empirical evidence to indicate that this procedure, called
“convergence,” figures in perception of distance. Convergence is one of over 15
ways human vision is known to represent distance or depth.

Here is a statistical explanation of contour grouping. Contour grouping is

representing which contours (including boundary contours) “go together,” for
example, as belonging to the same object. Contour grouping is a step toward
perception of object shape. Grouping boundary contours that belong to the same
object is complicated by this fact: Objects commonly occlude other objects,
obscuring boundary contours of partially occluded objects. Grouping boundaries
on opposite sides of an occluder is a step towards perceiving object shape.

To determine how boundary contours should ideally be grouped, numerous digital

photographs of natural scenes are collected. Hundreds of thousands of contours
are extracted from the photographic images. Each pair is classified as to whether
or not it corresponds to boundaries of the same object. The distances and relative
orientations between paired image-contours are recorded. Given enough samples,
the probability that two photographic image-contours correspond to contours on
the same object can be calculated. Probabilities vary depending on distance — and

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orientation relations among the image-contours. So whether two image-contours

correspond to boundaries of the same object depends statistically on properties of
image-contours.

Human visual systems are known to record contour information. In experiments,

humans are shown only image-contours in photographs, not full
photographs. Their performance in judging which contours belong to the same
object, given only the image-contours, closely matches the objective probabilities
established from the photographs. Such tests support hypotheses about how
perceptions of object shape are formed from cues regarding contour groupings.

Representation, in the specific sense, and consciousness are the two primary
properties that are distinctive of psychological phenomena. Consciousness is the
what-it-is-like of experience. Representation is the being-about-something in
perception and thought. Consciousness is introspectively more
salient. Representation is scientifically better understood.

Where does mind begin? One beginning is the emergence of representational

accuracy — in arthropods. (We do not know where consciousness
begins.) Rigorous science of mind begins with perception, the first distinctively
psychological representation. Maturation of a science of mind is one of the most
important intellectual developments in the last half century. Its momentousness
should not be obscured by neurobabble that baits with psychology, but switches to
brain science. Brain and psychological sciences are working toward one
another. Understanding their relation depends on understanding psychology. We
have a rigorous perceptual psychology. It may provide a model for further
psychological explanation that will do more than display an MRI and say, “behold,
love.”

Additional Reading:

Charless C. Fowlkes, David R. Martin, and Jitendra Malik, “Local Figure-Ground

Cues are Valid for Natural Images,” Journal of Vision 7 (2007), 1-9.

W.S. Geisler, “Visual Perception and the Statistical Properties of Natural Scenes,”
Annual Review of Psychology 59 (2008), 10.1-10.26.

David Knill, “Discriminating Planar Surface Slant from Texture: Human and
Ideal Observers Compared,” Vision Research, 38 (1998), 1683-1711.

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Stephen E. Palmer, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology (Cambridge,

Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).

D. Vishwanath, A.R. Girshick, and M.S. Banks, “Why Pictures Look Right When
Viewed from the Wrong Place,” Nature Neuroscience (2005), 1401-1410.

D.S. Weisberg, F.C. Keil, J. Goodstein, E. Rawson, and J.R. Gray, “The Seductive
Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20
(2008), 470-477.

16

In case you still interpret the doing of philosophy as conceptual (or language)
analysis and think of that subject-matter of philosophy, namely concepts, as
simple and straightforward, see the following on concepts.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concepts/
1. The ontology of concepts

 1.1 Concepts as mental representations

 1.2 Concepts as abilities
 1.3 Concepts as Fregean senses
 1.4 Is the issue terminological?

2. The structure of concepts

 2.1 The classical theory

 2.2 The prototype theory
 2.3 The theory theory
 2.4 Conceptual atomism
 2.5 Pluralism and eliminativism

3. Empiricism and nativism about concepts

 3.1 Renewed interest in the empiricism/nativism dispute

 3.2 Empiricism about concepts
 3.3 Nativism about concepts

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4. Concepts and natural language

 4.1 Can there be concepts without language?

 4.2 The priority between language and concepts
 4.3 Linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity

5. Concepts and conceptual analysis

 5.1 Attractions of conceptual analysis

 5.2 Objections to conceptual analysis

McCauley continued
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/530a3ca8e4b01885d317b273/t/536a60f4e
4b023d3d9c4b49c/1399480564239/about-face.pdf
Philosophical Naturalism, the Heuristic Identity Theory, and Recent
Findings about Prosopagnosia

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maia_Bailey/publication/26281894_Rece
nt_advances_in_the_study_of_gynodioecy_The_interface_of_theory_and_emp
iricism/links/00b7d529733e23abea000000.pdf
INVITED REVIEW
Recent advances in the study of gynodioecy: the interface of
theory and empiricism

2. Naturalism and the Selectivity of Theories

One thing that even the most lingua-focal philosophers, the most
phenomenologically-oriented
philosophers, and the most naturalistic philosophers can agree about is that
explicitly formulated,
scientific theories are made up of concepts. What the first and the third disagree
about is what concepts

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are. (See, for example, Machery 2009). What the second and the third disagree
about is how broadly
and how deeply theories and their concepts apply (Churchland 1989). These
disagreements are not
peculiar to concepts but are, instead, born of broader differences about methods.
Naturalists are more
liberal, at least in the sense that they include all of the methods of these other
philosophers and more.
Comparatively, naturalists are less impressed with philosophical methods overall.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------
Articles to see on Philosophical methods –
http://www.universityofcalicut.info/syl/CoreCourseMethodologyPhilosophy.pdf
UNIT – II
LOGICO – MATHEMATICAL METHOD
UNIT – III
DIALECTICAL METHOD
UNIT – IV
METHOD OF ANALYSIS
UNIT – V PRAGMATIC METHOD
UNIT – VI
PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHOD

http://johnpollock.us/ftp/PAPERS/Pollock_Technical_Methods_In_Philosophy.pdf
This book is quite similar to the article below by Schoubye.

http://schoubye.org/teaching/Formal-Methods/FormalMethodsNotes2013.pdf
The notes are based almost entirely on the texts listed below and they are
supposed to merely function as a supplement to these texts.
⋅
Barwise and Etchemendy (1999) Sider (2010) Weatherson (2011

http://www.math.chalmers.se/~ulfp/Review/philomethod.pdf

An Essay on Philosophical Method R.G.Collingwood

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As writing philosophy should of course be prose, but not the prose of scientific
writing,
it should eschew, as we have already noted, all technical vocabulary and concern
itself with
natural ordinary language. But philosophy is a kind of poetry as well, or rather to
make
theanalogies more precise, philosophical writing shares with poetry many
significant features.
Unlike prose it is intimate, it invites the reader to share the world of its author. But
this
is not a world of emotion, it is a world of reasoning and intellect. But unlike
straight
prose it is not a fixed world it is a world in a flux. To make it more clear. Historical
writing we consult, while in philosophy we follow. A historian presents to the
reader the
fruits of his labor, he does not disclose the work behind it, thus it is didactic in tone
and
purpose. As readers we need to take the historian on his word, we have no way of
checking
him, unless we become historians ourselves. In philosophy it is different, here we
are not
as much presented with results, but with the work of thought itself, the work that
goes
to present results. Yet again, an analogy with mathematics should not be amiss, is
not a
proof a way of inviting the reader into the work of the author? Not quite. True a
deductive
proof allows the reader to check the reasoning, unlike the case in a historic
exposition, but
it does not give the full story. Far from it in fact. Regrettably what is often missing
in
mathematical exposition is underlying motivation. A formal proof does not reflect
the
labour that went into its discovery, in fact in many ways it is an obfuscation of the
same.
What you really need to understand a proof is not the formal steps but the
motivations
and the ideas that guided the author, the analogies that fired his imagination, along
with

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an indication of dead-ends and blind alleys and temporary confusions. If such

material
would be included, and they almost never are, a mathematical exposition would
indeed
be more philosophical in nature. This points to another difference between
philosophical
literature and mathematical. The former is personal, because it is an invitation to
join
in the intellectual struggles of the author, the latter strives to comply with an
objective
standard, making the personality of the author more and more irrelevant.
How should a philosophical texts be read? It should be followed, as noted above,
not
consulted. There are no facts, no theorems in a philosophical text, there is only a
mental
struggle. The obligation of the reader is to listen and not to obtrude himself, at leas
not
initially. He is obliged to think the thoughts of the author, not just to note them. He
needs
to put himself in the shoes of the philosopher, to make a concerted effort to
understand
him sympathetically. But of course no true understanding is possible without
criticism.
Criticism is not a case of rejection, it is a case of sympathy, of adopting the
viewpoint
of the author and to ask whether he also sees what the author sees, in short whether
the
author speaks the truth.
What is the best way of presenting a philosophical discourse? Artistry is a
necessity,
and Plato, even among his philosophical detractors, is seen as a superb artist, and
the form
he chose, and maybe even invented, was the dialogue, which according to
Collingwood is
a superb vehicle of philosophical presentation, allowing a full range of viewpoints
to be
presented. Strange though that it has been used so sparingly in modern
philosophical
literature.
This points to tradition and its importance in order to understand philosophy, and
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eventually Collingwood would take the stand that it was paramount, that
philosophy was
in fact history, that human history is about the development of thought, in
particular the
development of points of views and thus a climbing up the ladder of the scale of
forms.
A philosophical idea can only be properly understood once you take part in the
ongoing
discussion to which it has been subjected, in other words only if you have tried to
follow
the thoughts that have been lavished on it.

https://www.princeton.edu/~hhalvors/teaching/phi520_s2015/russell-scimet.pdf
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-method/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_methodology
Philosophical method (or philosophical methodology) is the study of how to do
philosophy. A common view among philosophers is that philosophy is
distinguished by the ways that philosophers follow in addressing philosophical
questions. There is not just one method that philosophers use to answer
philosophical questions.
Methodology process

 1.1 Doubt and the sense of wonder

 1.2 Formulate questions and problems
 1.3 Enunciate a solution
 1.4 Justify the solution
 1.5 Philosophical criticism
 1.6 Motivation

2 See also

 Scholarly method
 Scientific method
 Socratic method
 Historical method
 Dialectic

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3 References
4 External links
https://philpapers.org/browse/philosophical-methods
Argument* (469)
Conceptual Analysis (260)
Computational Philosophy (22)
Experimental Philosophy* (1,183 | 4)
Formal Philosophy (12)
Intuition* (575 | 177)
Methodology in Metaphysics* (218)
Linguistic Analysis in Philosophy (60)
Philosophical Methods, Misc (193)
Thought Experiments (372)
Transcendental Arguments (65)
History/traditions: Philosophical Methods

 Aristotle: Philosophical Method (46 | 19

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4276/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Philosophical_methodology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Metaphilosophy
https://onemorebrown.com/2008/08/15/the-philosophical-method/
http://getwiki.net/-Philosophical_Method
http://www.csudh.edu/phenom_studies/methods_phil/lect_2.htm

§ 2-1-4. Methods in Philosophy and the Objective of Philosophical Inquiry

‹an Overview of the Problem Domains Anticipating our Inquiry‹

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https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-
materialism/ch01-s03.htm
A methodology is a system of principles and general ways of organising and
structuring theoretical and practical activity, and also the theory of this system

In Descartes the problem of methodology is central. Methodology is required to

establish on what basis and by what methods new knowledge may be obtained.
Descartes worked out the rules of the rationalistic method, the first rule being the
demand that only propositions that are clearly and distinctly comprehensible
may be accepted as true. The first principles are axiomatic knowledge, that is,
ideas perceived intuitively by reason, without any proof. From these immediately
perceived propositions new knowledge is deduced by means of deductive proof.
This assumes the breaking down of complex problems into more specific and
comprehensible problems and a strictly logical advance from the known to the
unknown.

Another line in methodology was represented at this time by English empiricism,

which sought to devise modes of thought that would help to build a strictly
experimental science guided by proofs of scientific truths arrived at through
induction.

The limitations of both trends were revealed by German classical philosophy,

which produced a searching analysis of the conditions of cognition, its forms and
organising principles. In contrast to mechanistic methodology, which
metaphysically interpreted the ways and means of cognition, classical German
Philosophy developed a dialectical methodology in idealistic forms.

Kant produced a critical analysis of the structure and types of man's cognitive
abilities and defined the constructive and regulative principles of cognition and the
relationship between its form and content. Whereas Descartes' initial
methodological principle was to subject everything to doubt in order to obtain
sound and unquestionably authentic knowledge and Hume had doubted the very
fact of the existence of the world, for Kant a critical attitude to present knowledge
was the methodological basis for overcoming dogmatic and metaphysical views of
the world. His work was aimed against both dogmatism and scepticism and sought
to defend the principle of the authenticity and general significance of knowledge.
Dualism and apriorism however, prevented consistent realisation of this principle.

In Kant's analysis of the process of cognition there were elements of dialectics.

These were developed on a higher plane by Hegel, whose philosophy took the
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form of a universal method of cognition and of intellectual activity in general. The

categories and laws of dialectics evolved by Hegel provided a system of thought
that made it possible to investigate the interconnection and contradictions between
being and thinking, the dialectics of the development of human culture, from a new
standpoint based on the principle of historicism Foremost in Hegel's methodology
is the principle of ascent from the abstract to the concrete, that is, from the general
and limited forms of sensuality and rational judgements to analytical and highly
meaningful concepts, and thence to a system of concepts revealing the object to the
full extent of its essential and, in this sense, concrete characteristics.

The achievements of the methodologies of Preceding periods were generalised and

reviewed on a consistently materialist basis in Marxist Philosophy, enriched by the
latest advances in science and social practice The dialectical method was radically
revised. From being a method and analysis of forms of knowledge in themselves,
regardless of reality and the objective laws of its development, it became a method
of the fullest and most meaningful investigation of this development, an instrument
not only of theoretical cognition but also of revolutionary transformation of reality.
In the methodology of Marxism spontaneously dialectical methods of thought,
which had stimulated progress in the natural and social sciences, acquired their
theoretical substantiation. This methodology clarifies the nature of the
relationship between theoretical and empirical knowledge, and also the role of
practice in organising both forms of cognition.

The relationship between theory and method. Whereas theory is the result of a
process of cognition that reproduces a certain fragment of existence, methodology
is a way of obtaining and building up such knowledge. Theory characterises
knowledge itself, its structure, content and the degree to which it corresponds to
the object; method characterises the activity involved in acquiring knowledge. It
characterises the conditions for obtaining true knowledge

https://openparachute.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/the-scientific-method-what-
about-the-philosophical-method/
http://blogs.stlawu.edu/philosophizingwithnick/2014/03/30/philosophical-methods/
https://school.quipper.com/en-PH/courses/introduction-to-the-philosophy-of-the-
human-person/methods-of-philosophizing-scientific.html
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/philosophizing
http://journal.viterbo.edu/index.php/atpp/article/view/954

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Socratic Philosophizing is an open process of thinking that follows a net of

methods. Martens develops his Five Finger Model in accordance with Socrates and
the history of philosophy. Philosophizing within the community of inquiry is
characterized by attitudes of curiosity, openness, and the willingness to make
oneself understandable as well as to understand the other person in return. There
are five core philosophical methods that assist in making such philosophizing
successful: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Analysis, Dialectics and Speculation.
These five methods are understood as reflective operations which are learned in an
elementary way and practiced step-by-step: (phenomenological) to be able to
describe something exactly, (hermeneutial) to understand oneself and others,
(analytical) to clarify in a conceptual and argumentative way how something is
understood), (dialectical) to ask and to disagree, (speculative), to fantasize how
something could be understood. Martens Five Finger Model builds on these
methods in order to help children build broader and distinct questions through
philosophizing. To illustrate this we will present an interactive game that can be
used to introduce the teaching themes of Who am I?, Partnership, Tolerance, and
Foreign Cultures. The game is called Distance and Closeness. The game was
evaluated afterward using the framework of the five finger method.
https://sites.google.com/site/philosophyphilosophizing/nature-methods-
aims/methods
https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2006/11/the_tasks_of_philosophy.htm

November 10, 2006

The Tasks of Philosophy
Posted by David Corfield
philosophy needs to be conceived as having at least a fourfold subject matter and a
fourfold task. There is first of all that which has to be learned empirically: the rules
and standards, concepts, judgments, and modes of argumentative justification,
actually embodied in or presupposed by the modes of activity which constitute the
life of the social order in which one is participating. Secondly, there are the
dominant ways of understanding or misunderstanding those activities and the
relevant rules and standards, concepts, judgments, and modes of argumentative
justification. Thirdly, there is the relationship between these two in respect of how
far the second is an adequate, and how far an inadequate and distorting
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representation of the first. And finally there is that of which a philosopher must
give an account, if she or he is to vindicate the claim to have been able to transcend
whatever limitations may have been imposed by her or his historical and social
circumstances, at least to a sufficient extent to represent truly the first three and so
to show not just how things appear to be from this or that historical and social
point of view, but how things are.
Philosophy thus understood includes, but also extends a good deal beyond, what is
taken to be philosophy on a conventional academic view of the disciplines. It is
crucial to the whole philosophical enterprise, on any view of it, that its enquiries
should be designed to yield a rationally justifiable set of theses concerning such
familiar and central philosophical topics as perception and identity, essence and
existence, the nature of goods, what is involved in rule-following and the like. But,
from the standpoint towards which Marx and Collingwood had directed me, the
discovery of such theses was valuable not only for its own sake, but also because it
enables us to understand about particular forms of social life what it is that, in
some cases, enables those who participate in them to understand their own
activities, so that the goods which they pursue are genuine goods, and, in others,
generates systematic types of misunderstanding, so that those who participate in
them by and large misconceive their good and are frustrated in its achievement.
(‘Three perspectives on Marxism: 1953, 1968, 1995’, Ethics and Politics, CUP
2006)
http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0631230181.html

Philosophical Reasoning: A Study in the Methodology of Philosophizing

Nicholas Rescher
ISBN: 978-0-631-23018-2
This book is a study in the methodology of philosophical inquiry. It expounds and
defends the thesis that systematization is the proper instrument of philosophical
inquiry and that the effective pursuit of philosophy's mission calls for constructing
a doctrinal system that answers our questions in a coherent and comprehensive
manner.

Table of Contents

Preface.

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1) Philosophy is the venture in rational inquiry whose mission is to

provide tenable answers to our “big questions” regarding man, the world,
and our place within its scheme of things.
(2)
Philosophizing is thus a matter of truth estimation in the light of experience
regarding these large issues that define its domain. As such, it is a necessary
enterprise for intelligent beings.
(3)
Rational reflection is the prime instrument of philosophizing.
(4)
The data of philosophy are the “facts of experience” as best we can discern them.
(5) And the inquiry process involved seeks to arrive at coherent and consistent
beliefs on the issues.
But pursuit of this desideratum constantly requires us to resolve aporetic
belief conflicts so as to adjudicate between rival and competing alternatives.
(6)
The work of philosophy is not so much one of discovering
new facts as one of coordination – of enabling us to achieve the guidance
of a coherent cognitive orientation in a complex world.

Introduction.

Part I: The Task of Philosophy:.

The Erotetic (interrogative) Nature of Philosophy: Philosophy as a Cognitive

Enterprise.

The Need for Philosophy: Humans as Homo Quaerens.

Rationality is the Instrument of Philosophy.

Philosophy as Truth Estimation.

The Data of Philosophy.

Metaphilosophical Issues.

Part II: Philosophizing as an Erotetic Enterprise: The Dialectic of Question

and Answer:.

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Questions and their Presuppositions: Issues Regarding the Legitimacy of

Questions.

Question Dynamics: Kant's Principle of Question Propagation and the Dialectical

Exfoliation of Questions.

Philosophy as a Venture in Erotetic Dialectic.

Philosophical Assessment.

Part III: What's on the Agenda?:.

Unexamined Issues and Agenda Formation.

The Recent Scene.

Metaphilosophy a Part of Philosophy Itself.

The Political Dimension: A Struggle for Ownership.

The Systemic Dimension.

Part IV: Philosophical Discourse:.

The Narrative Dimension of Philosophy.

The Method of Philosophy: Truth-Estimative Conjecture.

Ongoing Explanation.

Historical Unity of Philosophy.

The Data of Philosophy.

Part V: Interpreting Philosophical Texts:.

Setting the Stage: Deconstructionism.

Exegetical Interpretation.

Why Philosophical Texts Need Interpretation.

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The Principle of Contextuality-Context Coherence as an Interpretative Standard.

The First Law.

The Second Law.

The Third Law.

The Fourth Law.

Part VI: Rhetoric And Rational Argumentation:.

Rhetoric Versus Argumentation: The General Situation.

An Uneasy Union.

The Special Case of Philosophy.

Philosophy's Data: The Source of Plausibility.

Part VII: Philosophical Aporetics:.

The Pervasiveness of Apories.

Aporetic Antinomies Structure the Issues.

Part VIII: The Economic Dimension of Philosophical Inquiry:.

Plausibility as a Guide to Issues of Precedence and Priority.

Cost Effectiveness as a Salient Aspect of Rationality.

Unacceptable Price Argumentation in Philosophy.

Part IX: The Impact of Distinctions:.

The Role of Distinctions.

Dialectic Development via Distinctions.

Developmental Dialectics.

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Part X: Inference to the Best Explanation and its Problems:.

Difficulties with Inference to the Best Explanation.

Best Systematization as a Viable Alternative.

Part XI: The Coherentist Criteriology of Truth as a Philosophical Method:.

Coherentism in Philosophy.

How Context Helps via Local Appropriateness.

Philosophical Coherentism is Self Sustaining.

Part XII: Why Philosophizing Must Be Systematic: The Holistic Nature of

Philosophy:.

Externalities and Negative Side Effects.

Systematic Interconnectedness as a Consequence of Aporetic Complexity.

Local Minimalism versus Global Optimalism.

Why Not Simply "Live With Inconsistency?" The Imperative of Cognitive

Rationality.

The Methodological Rationale of Systematicity in Philosophy.

Part XIII: Systematization as an Instrument of Inquiry:.

Hierarchical Systematization: The Euclidean Model of Knowledge.

Systematicity and the Impetus to Coherence: The Network Model.

On the Advantages of a Network Model.

The Pivotal Role of Data for a Coherentist Truth-Criteriology.

Coherentism's Exploitation of the Parameters of Systematicity.

Systematization as Truth Criterion: The Hegelian Inversion.

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Part XIV: Developmental Dialectics and Complexity:.

Spencer's Law: The Dynamics of Cognitive Complexity.

The Methodological Status of Simplicity-Preference: Systematicity, Economy, and

the Principle of Least Effort.

Perennial Philosophy.

Rational Dialectic in Philosophy.

Part XV: Counterfactual Reasoning as a Philosophical Instrument:.

Historical Stagesetting.

Belief-Contravening Supposition: How Apories Arise in Hypothetical Contexts.

The Centrality of Precedence (Right of Way).

Logic as Such Does Not Resolve Matters.

Reductio Ad Absurdum Argumentation.

Evidential Contexts.

The Situation in Philosophy.

An Overview.

Dispensing with "Possible Worlds".

Part XVI: Validating First Principles:.

First Principles.

Historical Postscript.

Part XVII: God's Place in Philosophy (Non in Philosophia Recurrere est ad

Deum):.

Two Opposed Intuitions.

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Theistic vs. Naturalistic Questions.

The Closure of the Secular Realm.

Internal vs. External.

Philosophy and Theology.

Explanatory Economy in Philosophy.

Conclusion.

Part XVIII: Philosophy at the Turn of the Century: A Return to Systems?:.

The Heritage of the 19th Century.

The Revolt Against System (System-Dismissive Antisystems).

The Shipwreck of Inter-Bellum Negativism.

The Burned Bridges.

The Rise of Particularism.

A Vision of Wholeness.

The New Order: A Revival of Systematic Philosophy.

The Contemporary Situation.

http://www.csudh.edu/phenom_studies/methods_phil/lect_1.htm
http://simsphilosophy.blogspot.co.za/2007/05/reflection-essay-on-
philosophical.html
http://groups.able2know.org/philforum/topic/3987-1
http://www.philosopher.org/Socratic_Method.html
http://www.peace.se/?p=191
http://www.friesian.com/method.htm
http://philosophy.lander.edu/

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http://philosophy.lander.edu/gen_phil_links.html
http://socioumane.ro/blog/annalesphilosophici/files/2013/02/Femi-Richard-
Omotoyinbo-Problem-of-methodology-in-philosophy.pdf
Taking an insightful look into the above trends of philosophical methods many
things may be pointed to as the reasons behind the incessant change. A major
premonition is that the methods are all faulty! If not, one of them should have
survived as a common method for all

http://www.ditext.com/ducasse/duc2.html
Belief is knowledge when it has adverted to the evidence and goes no farther
than the latter warrants; it is on the contrary faith when it neglects the
evidence or goes beyond it. To make this distinction sharp is not to
disparage faith or to suggest that it has no legitimate function in the life of
man. It is only to make clear the meaning of the question as to which of the
two -- faith or knowledge -- philosophy seeks to be. It seems to me beyond
question that what most philosophers have considered themselves engaged
in was the pursuit of knowledge properly so called. And Hoernlé himself
seems to agree that this is what philosophy seeks, when he insists that its
conclusions must be dictated "by the logic of the facts" -- by what
experience reveals. Yet he ends by characterizing philosophy as faith, and as
born of the need to understand, to approve, and to love the universe.
But philosophy cannot essentially be both together. Which of the two it is
turns on the answer to the question: What ultimately ought to determine the
nature of the conclusions of philosophy? Ought it to be the human craving to
understand, approve, and love the universe? Or ought it ro be faithfulness to
the testimony of the observable facts, even if this testimony should be that
the universe is chaotic, blameworthy, and hateful? The need to choose
between these two imperatives would never arise if both always dictated the
same conclusions. In any case, it is the choice we are prepared to make
between the two, if we have to choose, that answers the question as to
whether what we expect the conclusions of our thinking to provide is
essentially a comforting religious faith, or philosophical knowledge.

Urban's Cenception of Philosophy Open to Similar Criticisms. -- Comments

of the same general nature as those applying to Hoernlé's conception of the
nature of philosophy seem to me relevant to W. M. Urban's defense of the
"great tradition" in philosophy, which, he says, is characterized by the fact

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that it finds the world "ultimately meaningful and intelligible."{4} For to

evaluate the soundness of any enterprise which purports to be a search for
truth not yet known, on the basis of whether what it discovers is of a kind we
welcome rather than abhor, is to confess that what we are interested in is
essentially comforting belief rather than truth. Even if, as Hoernlé and Urban
hold, truth and comforting belief should happen to coincide -- thus saving us
from the necessity of actually deciding which we value most -- nevertheless,
as remarked above, what is significant of the sort of enterprise we are really
engaged in is which of the two we are ready to choose if the necessity for
choice between them should present itself. I hold that unless truth is what we
are prepared to cling to in any such case, our enterprise is not really
philosophy but religion incognito. If this is admitted to be the test of
genuinely Urban on Philosophical Method. -- The great instrument of
philosophical discovery, according to Urban, is the "principle of self-
refutation." It "has always been the favorite method of distinguishing
between" necessary presuppositions of intelligible philosophical discourse,
and mere avoidable prejudices of this or that philosopher -- "it may almost
be said to be the typical philosophical method."{8}
I do not believe, however, that Urban anywhere describes in general terms
how exactly the principle of self-refutation operates in proving that a given
proposition has the status of necessary presupposition of intelligible
discourse. What he does is to describe in some detail one example of self-
refutation, viz., that of a skeptic who happens to assert that he knows
nothing. But he does not point out which proposition in particular is shown
to be a 'presupposition of intelligible discourse' rather than an "avoidable
prejudice" by the fact that the skeptic's assertion is self-refuting. As concerns
the question of the work which the principle "may legitimately be expected
to perform," Urban indicates his intention of showing it in detail farther on,
and for the time says that "it is one of the determining principles of
intelligible philosophical discourse. It is concerned with those
presuppositions which the thinker cannot deny without making himself
unintelligible."
http://www.ditext.com/ducasse/duc-cont.html
PHILOSOPHY AS LOGICALLY ARTICULATED FAITH

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1. IS THERE A PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD DISTINCT FROM THE

SCIENTIFIC
2. HOERNLÉ'S VIEW OF THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY
3. IS PHILOSOPHIZING ONLY WISHFUL THINKING?
4. THE SEARCH FOR UNITY NO GUARANTEE THAT UNITY
EXISTS
5. METAPHYSICAL SYNTHESES WORTHLESS WHEN ONLY
VERBAL
6. HOERNLÉ ON PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD
7. PHILOSOPHY AS THE ARTICULATION OF A FAITH
8. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
9. URBAN'S CONCEPTION OF PHILOSOPHY OPEN TO SIMILAR
CRITICISMS URBAN ON PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD

PHILOSOPHY AS IDENTICAL WITH LOGIC

1. RUSSELL'S DEFINITION OF PHILOSOPHY

2. PHILOSOPHY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM LOGIC
3. TRADITIONAL METAPHYSICS NOT KNOWLEDGE, BUT ONLY
WISHFUL THINKING
4. PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD ESSENTIALLY ANALYTICAL
5. RUSSELL'S ACCOUNT OF THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY
INCOMPATIBLE WITH HIS EXAMPLES
6. RUSSELL'S ACCOUNT OF THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY
UNSOUND
7. DIFFERENTIATION OF PHILOSOPHY FROM LOGIC NO
REFLECTION ON THE VALUE OF THE ANALYTICAL METHOD

PHILOSOPHY AS SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF MEANING

1. PHILOSOPHY AS COMPRISING ALL THE RATIONAL SCIENCES

2. THE PLACE OF ANALYSIS AND CONSTRUCTION IN
PHILOSOPHY
3. PHILOSOPHY AND THE NATURAL SCIENCES
4. DEFINITION AND SYSTEMATIZATION OF FUNDAMENTAL
CONCEPTS A LATE STAGE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF A
NATURAL SCIENCE
5. INVESTIGATION OF THE MEANING OF CONCEPTS NOT THE
DIFFERETIA OF THE RATIONAL SCIENCES

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6. BROAD'S FAILURE TO GIVE THE DIFFERENTIA OF CONCEPTS

THAT PHILOSOPHY ALONE INVESTIGATES
7. DIFFERENT NATURE OF THE PREMISES FOR THE
ASSERTIONS OF THE RATIONAL SCIENCES VS. THOSE OF
PHILOSOPHY

PHILOSOPHY AS LOGICAL SYNTAX OF THE LANGUAGE OF

SCIENCE

1. WHAT CARNAP SAYS PHILOSOPHY IS NOT

2. PHILOSOPHY AS LOGICAL ANALYSIS, I.E. SYNTAX OF THE
LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE
3. AMBIGUITY OF THE TERM SYNTAX AS USED BY CARNAP
4. SYNTACTICAL SENTENCES AND THE FORMAL MODE OF
SPEECH
5. REAL-OBJECT SENTENCES
6. PSEUDO-OBJECT SENTENCES AND THE MATERIAL MODE OF
SPEECH
7. "TRANSLATION" OF SENTENCES OF THE MATERIAL MODE
OF SPEECH INTO THE FORMAL MODE
8. "TRANSLATABILITY" FROM THE MATERIAL INTO THE
FORMAL MODE NO PROOF THAT PHILOSOPHY IS SYNTAX
9. WHAT CARNAP CALLS TRANSLATION INTO THE FORMAL
MODE OF SPEECH NOT TRULY TRANSLATION
10."PSYCHOLOGISM" VS. "CHEMISTRY OF SYMBOLS"
11.SYNTACTICAL TREATMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS

THE SUBJECT MATTER DISTINCTIVE OF PHILOSOPHY

1. THE PRIMITIVES OF PHILOSOPHY

2. APPRAISAL AND DESCRIPTION
3. APPRAISALS PRIMITIVE FOR PHILOSOPHY SPONTANEOUS,
PARTICULAR, AND FORMULATED
4. PHILOSOPHICAL THEORIZING BORN OF THE DESIRE TO
SETTLE DOUBTS OF OUR APPRAISALS RATIONALLY
5. THE DERIVATIVE PART OF THE SUBJECT MATTER OF
PHILOSOPHY THE MORE PROMINENT AND TECHNICAL
6. IS ALL PHILOSOPHY ULTIMATELY CONCERNED WITH
APPRAISALS?

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7. PHILOSOPHY, THE BRANCES OF PHILOSOPHY, AND THE

PHILOSOPHIES OF PARTICULAR SUBJECTS
8. IS PHILOSOPHY MERE "RATIONALIZATION" OF OUR
APPRAISALS?

THE METHOD OF KNOWLEDGE IN PHILOSOPHY

1. THE FACTS 0F OBSERVATION IN PHILOSOPHY

2. THE EMPIRICAL GENERALIZATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY
3. PRIMITIVE PHILOSOPHICAL FACTS, AND THEREFORE ALSO
EMPIRICAL NORMS, ALWAYS "FUNCTIONS" OF SPECIFIC
PERSONS
4. THE TASK, THE NATURE, AND THE VALIDITY OF
PHILOSOPHICAL THEORIES
5. TWO WAYS OF "KNOWING" THE MEANING OF A
PHILOSOPHICAL PREDICATE
6. TWO KINDS OF "MEANING" OF A TERM
7. PRECEPTS OF THE METHOD OF KNOWLEDGE IN
THEORETICAL PHILOSOPHY
8. ILLUSTRATIONS OF PROCEDURE
9. PHILOSOPHY, NATURE, MIND AND LANGUAGE

http://philosopaedia.blogspot.co.za/2013/09/steps-and-methods-in-art-
of.html

Methods in Philosophizing

Well, there are no stringent method in the art of philosophizing that is why it
is always said that philosophy is meta-methodological. Philosophy being
meta-methodological entails that there is no one particular method that
defines the method for philosophy, that is why it attempts to scrutinize every
method employed. However, there are certain identified methods employed
by philosophers and they are hermeneutics, historiography, analysis,
dialectics, critique and so on.

https://www.academia.edu/30547224/Meta-
Philosophy_Philosophizing_resembling_Theorizing_

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https://www.academia.edu/30473885/Death_of_philosophy_subject-
matter_and_methods_theorizing_sociology_and_cognitive_theory
https://www.academia.edu/30439751/Philosophy_theorizing_sociology.....

https://www.academia.edu/30148411/Philosophy_methods_methodology
https://www.academia.edu/30505428/Philosophy_Meta-
_Experimental_Philosophy_subject-matter_methods_theorizing_
https://www.academia.edu/30703651/philosophizing_no_do_theorizing
https://www.academia.edu/30391232/Philosophy_as_Theorizing
http://www.ianramseycentre.info/
http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/method-and-theory-in-the-
cognitive-sciences-of-religion/
In taking lead from the Cognitive Sciences, its sub-discipline, known as the
cognitive sciences of religion (CSR), has been fashioned as an interdisciplinary
research programme. CSR aims to combine and integrate scientific theories and
methodologies in order to naturalistically explain recurring cultural forms of
“religious” belief and behavior through appeal to cognitive processes. In his
previous podcast with the Religious Studies Project in 2014, Dr. Robert McCauley
gave an overview of some of these processes cognitive scientists appeal to in
accounting for religion (e.g., agent detection, theory of mind), as well as a
technical discussion about why “religion is natural and science is not.” In his
current podcast, recorded at the 2015 North American Association for the Study of
Religion (NAASR) conference (and thanks to their support), McCauley discusses
methodological and theoretical issues within CSR. He begins by tackling the topic
of “naturalism” vs. “supernaturalism” in explaining religion, moving on to how
these explanations function at different levels of analysis and integration. In
closing, McCauley discusses the relationship between the humanities and the
sciences, some successful and not so successful CSR theories, and the interplay
between explanations emphasizing cognition and culture.

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http://philosopaedia.blogspot.co.za/2013/09/steps-and-methods-in-art-of.html
Steps and Methods in the Art of Philosophizing
In the art of philosophizing, there are basic steps one must follow, and they as
follows: wonder, speculation, analysis, synthesis and critique.

1.Wonder: Every art of philosophizing begins by wonder. Man is always

bewildered by his existence, death, inconsistencies experienced in his everyday life
and so on. As one ponders about the nature of realities and various mind-boggling
experiences in his everyday existence, certain questions begins to arise. Some of
such questions are : why are there things rather than nothing? What is Life? What
is reality? Can we know anything for certain? What is the underlying principle of
reality? All these questions lead one into speculation.

2. Speculation: When questions are asked based on our wondering about reality,
human existence and all changes experienced, we tend to form opinions and
presumptions based on the questions raised.

3. Analysis: Analysis entails a detailed examination of the opinion formed. So, in

analysis, the opinions and presumptions made are accessed in parts in view to
understanding what each of the concepts that constitute the opinions entail.

4. Synthesis: After the analysis, we combine our analyzed opinion into a unified
knowledge or idea.

5. Critique: In this step, we take a critical examination of the idea formed,

weighing its strengths and weaknesses before establishing a theory or principle.
The theory formed leads to another kind of bewilderment and subsequent questions
and the process continues ad infinitum.

Note that one basic thing about this art of philosophizing is that through this
process, ideas are created, theories and principles are formulated and are
subsequently critiqued as new ones emerge.

2. Naturalism and the Selectivity of Theories (Continued) McCauley –

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https://static1.squarespace.com/static/530a3ca8e4b01885d317b273/t/536
a60f4e4b023d3d9c4b49c/1399480564239/about-face.pdf

Maturationally Natural Cognition, Radically Counter-Intuitive Science, and the Theory-Ladenness

of Perception
RN McCauley - Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 2015 - Springer

(Defining “religion” as natural: A critical invitation to Robert McCauley

AA Aghapour - Zygon®, 2014 - Wiley Online Library

... cognitive science of religion; epistemology; genealogy of religion; naturalism; naturalistic accounts
of religion ... It is, therefore, the responsibility of the philosophical naturalist to engage with ... the
search
for natural religion had also mutated to naturalistic investigation, utilizing similar ... )

The history of Western philosophy, in the Modern era especially, is a history of

philosophical speculations spawning
sciences, which return, not much later, as contributors to understanding topics, on
which philosophy
had presumed it held a proprietary claim. Many philosophers (and humanists,
generally) find these
scientific proposals presumptuous, pushy, and offensive; by contrast, naturalists
welcome them.
Naturalists differ among themselves in how prominent a role they accord scientific
accounts of things,
but they all agree that philosophical tools and pronouncements possess no
inherent superiority over the
hypotheses, methods, and discoveries of modern science concerning empirical
questions.
Naturalists’ methodological liberalism inclines them to adopt comparably liberal
conceptions of
theories. Whatever philosophers take scientific theories to be, from logically
integrated sets of
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sentences (Hempel 1965) to patterns of connection strengths in neural networks

(Churchland 1989),
one thing all agree about is that theories are speculative in that they select among
what we experience,
perceive, and know. They choose particular items, features, events, processes, or
relations, from
amongst the limitless possibilities of what might bear on some explanandum.
Theories are conjectures
about what does and does not matter, any appearances to the contrary
notwithstanding, for obtaining
explanatory understanding about phenomena.1 They often reveal hitherto
unrecognized patterns.
Theories instruct us about which variables to manipulate in order to predict or
control outcomes. In all
of these respects and more, theories highlight what we should attend to.

com/static/530a3ca8e4b01885d317b273/t/536922bfe4b08dd0fc06e454/139939910
3090/scienti%EF%AC%81c-method-as-cultural-innovation.pdf
Scientific Method as Cultural Innovation (and methods of philosophy? Are they
social, cultural, communal, community, academic, institutional and/or personal
innovations?)
Robert N. McCauley
Consideration of scientific method as a cultural innovation requires examining the
philosophy
and sociology of science, anthropology, developmental, cognitive, and social
psychology as well as the histories of science and technology. Anarchistic
philosophical
proposals about science set the stage for subsequent endorsements of quite liberal
conceptions of science and scientific thinking that root these pursuits in basic
features
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of human—even animal—cognition or in the intimate connection between science

and
technology. That every methodological prescription has its limits or that science is
not
uniform does not entail methodological anarchism. Like any other radial category,
science
includes more and less central instances and practices. (and philosophy?)
Justifications
for such liberality regarding science that are grounded in the acquisition of
empirical knowledge
by infants and other species downplay the sciences’ systematic approach to
criticizing
hypotheses and scientists’ mastery of a vast collection of intellectual tools, facts,
and
theories. Justifications that look to the close ties between science and technology
neglect
reasons for distinguishing them. Intimate ties are not inextricable ties. Research
on scientific cognition suggests that, in some respects, human minds are not well
suited
to do science and that measures progressively sustaining science’s systematic
program
of criticism and its ever more counterintuitive representations both depend on
cultural
achievements and are themselves cultural achievements involving what have
proven to
be comparatively extraordinary social conditions. (and philosophical ideas and
insights,
theories and systems?) This richer, epistemologically unsurpassed
form of science is both rare and fragile, having arisen no more than a few times
in human history.
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Introduction
The increasing scope, precision, and sophistication of modern science and its
explanatory and predictive successes encompass considerably more than science’s
barest cognitive essentials. To focus on those at the expense of characterizing
progressive scientific traditions downplays the crucial role cultural
innovations have played in science’s achievements.
Making this case requires clarifying how much about science comes
naturally to human minds. I thus begin by outlining arguments for skepticism
about the scientific method that have set the stage for recent discussions. It
also demands situating positions that (a) construe science as the outcome of
natural predilections of mind, emphasizing its continuity with commonsense
and (b) fixate on the inevitable entanglement of science with technology. Those
accounts are incomplete. The first takes insufficient notice of the elaborate
measures necessary to insure critical scrutiny in science and the extensive
education required for participating in it, and the second minimizes the vital
position that cognitive ideals occupy. These matters are discussed in the first
section.
Thereafter, cognitive and historical considerations are presented that favor
an accounting of scientific method as cultural innovation. The cognitive
science of science urges caution about the Cartesian picture of rationality
as residing between matched pairs of human ears. Any constructive account
of scientific method and rationality, in the face of myriad shortcomings of
individual reasoners, dwells, instead, in the special cultural, social, economic,
and political arrangements that undergird modern science. Although scientific
sparks and brushfires have erupted sporadically in human history, sustained

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traditions of disciplined inquiry with institutions fostering methodical criticism

are recent, refined, and rare.(Is this also the case with philosophy? Institutionally
based, fostered and determined?)
Although Thomas Kuhn (1970) famously assailed the methodological unity of
science, no one criticized it more provocatively than Paul Feyerabend (1975).
Both were reacting to decades of armchair philosophizing aimed at rationally
reconstructing science in terms of observations and mathematical logic. Both
stressed how prevailing programs of research influence the acceptability of
methods.
Both also defied the methodological proposals of prominent philosophers.
Feyerabend assaulted Karl Popper’s suggestion that aspiring to test persistently
and falsify hypotheses empirically is what distinguishes science. Feyerabend
insisted that this view was unworkable, since from the outset scientists know
about evidence that is incompatible with new hypotheses. The neutrino
hypothesis would have never gotten off the ground, since its first empirical
corroboration came more than two decades after Wolfgang Pauli initially
proposed it (Dunbar 1995). Shoving leading formulations off their pedestals,
Feyerabend suggested the only plausible account of scientific method was
“anything goes,” though, he noted straightaway that not even that slogan was
a methodological recommendation.
That contemporary sciences embrace diverse methods and entertain
abstruse theories, which often resist ready interpretation, only increases
wariness concerning pronouncements about scientif c method. The rise of the
“Strong Program” in the sociology of science (Bloor 1991) and nonmodernist
variants (Latour 1993), which hold that social arrangements fundamentally

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shape scientific interests and procedures, combined with philosophers’ failure

to provide compelling accounts of the influence of the superempirical virtues
(e.g., simplicity, consilience, elegance) on theory choice have only exacerbated
such reservations about an identifiable scientific method.
Scientific Pluralism. Methodological anarchists and the Strong Program
sociologists
of science have overplayed their hands. Given the range of phenomena
that human ingenuity has enabled us to study scientifically as well
as the serendipity and hubbub of human affairs in general, it is not shocking
that, finally, only vague methodological prescriptions (“attend to evidence;”
“pursue overall coherence”) will plausibly characterize all productive forms
of scientific inquiry. “Science” is a radial category that encompasses numerous
endeavors that are spread across a vast conceptual space with more and less salient
cases along a host of relevant dimensions. Exhibiting scientific rationality
in some inquiry may involve conforming to any of a hundred viable principles
that collectively cover the central regions of that space well enough to count as
proceeding reasonably in empirical investigation. Methodological anarchism
hardly exhausts the options for responding to Feyerabend’s arguments that no
particular, exception-less, methodological recommendation will capture the
entire array of activities that we regard as scientific.
Nor do the effects of cultural circumstances on scientific topics, theories,
methods, and assessments, let alone training, organization, funding, and
institutions, constitute an insurmountable barrier to constructing a case
for the reasonableness and epistemic prominence of science. Does anyone
contest the suggestion that culture shapes human thought and conduct? That,
however, hardly establishes that science’s progress, empirical findings, or

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ascendant theories are rationally suspect or that scientists cannot reassess them
through further criticism and research. Scientific objectivity resides neither in
unimpeachable methods nor in investigators’ neutrality.
Criticism as a Scientific Obligation. What distinguishes science from other
explanatory and predictive enterprises is a fixation on criticism. Scientists
constantly push theories for new empirically testable consequences and for
coherence internally and externally with the best theories about related matters
(Tweney 2011).
Infants, young children, and people in cultures in which science never
flowered understand that evidence matters. That, however, is only the
beginning. First, that does not establish that they will discern relevant evidence.
Researchers must know the ascendant theories, their implications, and their
competitors to understand what counts as relevant evidence. Evidence is
always evidence-relative-to-a-theory.
Without knowing the theories, people will fail to recognize evidence right
before their eyes. Correlations between the proximity of islands, their volcanic
activity, size, elevation, and more are not difficult to detect in an island chain,
but it requires some understanding of the theory of plate tectonics to grasp
their evidential status. Without that theory the role those patterns might play as
evidence will be obscure, at best.
Second, scientists must systematically collect and record evidence.
Getting more and diverse evidence demands assembling and documenting
it conscientiously. For some theories and models (e.g., concerning climate),
scientists must examine long-term trends in disparate places with considerable
precision. Aiming to build definitive star maps, John Flamsteed made hourly

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measurements of planets and the positions of various stars for forty years
(Jardine 2000).
Third, scientists are also experts at generating new evidence. Science’s
idealized theories identify relevant variables that affect a system’s behavior
over which scientists seek experimental control, when the systems under
scrutiny are not so large (or so small) or so complex or so remote that they
preclude such interventions. Complicated experimental arrangements and
instruments (whether supercolliders, eye trackers, or electron microscopes)
play a vital role in science. These devices furnish opportunities to examine
phenomena in unfamiliar environments or in what would typically be the
inaccessible provinces of ordinary environments where diverging empirical
implications of competing theories can be tested. Scientists become skilled
experimentalists, producing conditions that differ from typical circumstances
in theoretically significant ways and for which human natural cognitive
inclinations are uninformative and unhelpful.
Fourth, scientists must also analyze and assess the evidence they amass.
Obtaining evidence is one thing; knowing what to make of it is quite another.
Scientists need facility with several forms of mathematical representation to
comprehend theories and to evaluate evidence. The demands of science for
treating data systematically to ascertain their evidential import have led to
a variety of mathematical tools for their analysis. Mathematical clarity and
precision are crucial for exploring, measuring, and dissecting the dynamics of
complex systems.
Science and technology have always been connected, but since the mid-nineteenth
century, they have become practically inextricable. Scientific advances

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routinely depend upon devising machinery for creating special environments

for testing hypotheses. More familiar are the increasingly widespread technologies
that modern science has created, including everyday gadgets. Teasing
theoretical science and its methods apart from technology conceptually runs
the risk of appearing to underplay this intimate connection.
Is Technology Inherently Scientific?
Technological Grounds for Cognitive Liberalism. Barbara Herrnstein Smith
correctly holds that theoretical understanding routinely depends on technologies
implementing theories and that new technologies just as routinely provoke
new explanatory conjectures. Consequently, she asserts that to separate science
and technology so straightforwardly involves a “narrow, historically and culturally
quite specific, understanding of ‘science’ ” that results in a distinction
that “can only be arbitrary and artificial” (Smith 2009:132, 135). Envisioning
technology as inherently scientific also motivates cognitive liberalism about
science. Smith’s cognitive liberalism includes as scientific all production and
use of technology by human groups.
Science as Cultural Achievement
The constructive case for cleaving science and technology segues into a larger
examination of science as cultural innovation. Considerations from across the
disciplines suggest that cognitive liberalism regarding science is incomplete at
best. In light of liberal proposals, it is ironic that more than three decades of
research in the cognitive science of science suggests that not even scientists,
when operating in isolation, are wonderfully impressive scientific thinkers!
Diverse factors point to the paramount position culture has occupied in the
development of science.

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Science is one of many knowledge-seeking activities that humans undertake,

but as a continuing, systematic endeavor to explain the world, it is unsurpassed.
It is “science” in this sense that is pivotal from both an epistemological and
an historical point of view. Consequently, it will prove equally decisive in
reflection about its status as a cultural innovation.
Teasing Science
Science as an Abstract Technology
Broad conceptions of technology that include abstract intellectual tools as well
as implements and structured environments cast science and technology’s
relationship
differently, but justify distinguishing them nonetheless. If written
representations count as a technological genus, then science is one of its species.
It stands apart from material technology, however, in two notable ways:
(a) science, unlike material technology, depends upon literacy and (b) it always
includes abstract theoretical interests in understanding nature for its own sake.
The latter raises two issues.
Seeking Understanding. Science pursues and explores accounts of the world
for their intrinsic interest
Most technologies that modern science engenders are as cognitively inaccessible
as its theories. Laypersons are unaware of the theoretical underpinnings of
the structures and operations of these technologies. This encompasses both the
experimental apparatus of science and familiar machines (e.g., cell phones
A tradition of criticizing theories systematically requires that scientists become
proficient with the requisite intellectual skills. A decade of scientific training is
necessary for novices to gain control of these tools and to begin to appreciate

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the subtleties of their employment. That is because their acquisition and

application call for thought and practices which do not come naturally to human
minds.
Deductive and Probabilistic Inference
Wason. The Wason selection task famously demonstrated how dismally people
perform when carrying out conditional inference (Wason 1966). Around
eighty percent of participants go wrong. This, alone, should substantially
dampen optimism about the naturalness of scientific reasoning
are always reasoning hypothetically: exploring a theory’s implications,
contemplating
some mechanism’s operation, or pondering some nexus of causal
variables. Subsequent research on the Wason selection task seems to corroborate
that in nearly all settings, conditional inference is reasoning that most humans
do not do well (Cosmides and Tooby 2005).
Tversky and Kahneman. Estimating the likelihood of events about which
scientists have incomplete information is pivotal in explanatory theorizing,
argumentation, and decision making. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman
have shown that humans’ intuitive judgments under conditions of uncertainty
routinely transgress normative principles of probability. Scores of studies have
disclosed that people neglect such considerations as regression to the mean
and base rate information, fail to attend to sample sizes when weighing the
significance of evidence, and disregard basic principles of probability theory
(Kahneman 2011).
A collection of cognitive shortcuts, which humans consistently take, explain
these and other failures. Such biased heuristics serve for most purposes, but
their inexact solutions are inappropriate for most scientific jobs

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Other Cognitive and Psychological Obstacles

The cognitive science of science has uncovered an assortment of additional
intellectual pitfalls which can trip up those with scientific training.
Intrusive Intuitions often Swamp Science’s Radically Counterintuitive
Representations. Usually sooner rather than later, the sciences inevitably
generate radically counterintuitive representations that do not square with our
folk conceptions of the world. Learning scientific models and principles that
contradict heuristics’ deliverances, however, does not undo those deliverances.
thus, ordinary phenomena pose perceptual, explanatory, and predictive
problems that usually go completely unrecognized (Liu and MacIsaac 2005).
Practice with hundreds of textbook problems does not assure that students
overcome the conceptual difficulties associated with basic mechanics (Kim
and Pak 2002). Elementary problems do not trick experts, but without
opportunities
to apply their knowledge of relevant formulae, experts’ intuitions for
motions like collisions are often incorrect (Proffitt and Gilden 1989). Formal
education helps, but the knowledge is remarkably fragile.
Confirmation Bias. Psychological and historical research discloses inquirers’
penchant to exhibit confirmation bias, which can take a variety of forms. Besides
attending only to confirming evidence, scientists can be disinclined to search
for contrary evidence and sometimes disregard it when it appears. History is
replete with otherwise distinguished scientists who defended problematic theories,
insisting that failures to replicate their positive findings resulted from
others’ carelessness (Gratzer 2000). Theorists cling to their theories and ignore
alternatives, particularly when considering the import of unfavorable evidence.
When given the choice, instead of seeking information that would bear on the

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comparisons of theories, experimental participants would pursue

“pseudodiagnostic”
information, which would neither support their favored theory as they
thought nor support such comparisons (Mynatt et al. 1981).
Cultural and Historical Reflections
Unfortunately, nature has not groomed human minds for carrying out science’s
obligatory criticism of theories. Learning and doing science demand grasping
intellectual constructs and procuring cognitive skills that humans find difficult
to acquire, onerous to retain, challenging to exercise, and unnatural all around.
(Experimental science involves a host of practical skills that are no less chal-
lenging.) These psychological findings do not support the Cartesian picture
locating
Reason within individuals’ minds. Science’s epistemic prominence does
not arise from guarantees about individuals’ exemplary thought and conduct
but from a host of sociocultural arrangements.
That inevitable publicity assures that the
criticism of scientific work never need turn on the reliability of any individual’s
cognitive processing. Individual scientists may be blind to the weaknesses
of their theories, the gaps in their evidence, the mistakes in their reasoning,
and the errors in their calculations. They may also manifest a decided preference
for evidence that supports their hypotheses. Fortunately, the history of
science provides ample testimony to the fact that scientists suffer far fewer
failings when it comes to assessing positions that compete with their own. It
is that public competition in which the partisans and other scientists uncover a
theory’s failures and problems.
Literacy. That astronomical protoscience (“protoscience” because, among

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other things, it was subservient to state religions) arose in the first literate cultures
is no coincidence. Beyond record keeping, the expectation that scientific
work must become publically available links science to literacy. Written symbols
last. Literacy permits the storage of ideas, relieving demands on memory.
Literate people can return to documents after long delays and retrieve
knowledge. The resuscitation of
about what gets written and published, it is always finally about that.
The opportunity to criticize written, publically available theories occasions
the development of intellectual skills that exceed doing arithmetic or the mere
decoding of text. Publically accessible exchanges tend toward standardized
forms to make positions and reasoning clear. This was as true about the
exchanges of the medieval schoolmen as it is about those of contemporary
scientists. What
Education. Science depends upon the invention of external linguistic and
mathematical symbols and an educational system that engenders facility with
such symbols in numbers sufficient to generate a community of inquirers.
Preserving and transmitting such proficiencies require ample investments in an
educational infrastructure. Like literate humans, not born scientists are made, not
born
Both call for appropriate materials and years of tutelage. Participating in science
at its highest levels routinely requires more than twenty years of formal
education. This type of education is a uniquely modern phenomenon, which
remains confined primarily to the wealthiest half of the world’s nations.
Science has been rare in part because literacy (and numeracy) has been rare
How Has Science Achieved Its Celebrated Epistemic Status?
This is not a substantive question about settled scientific views but a procedural

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one about how science works. Scientific communities have erected safeguards
to catch and correct errors. In addition to the public availability of scientific
controversies, two principles deserve special mention.
Peer Review. Scientific journals make extensive use of peer reviewing.
Expert, independent referees provide editors with written reports laying out
their reservations about scientific papers. Even published authors must nearly
always incorporate additional arguments and analyses to meet their referees’
objections.
Ideally, that is how the system works. Research indicates, however, that
referees treat papers with which they agree more
Replication. Science requires the replicability of results. It does not tolerate
secret formulas, special sensitivities, or “singularities.” Scientists must report
on intersubjectively available phenomena. They must describe their experiments
at a level of detail that permits other scientists to reproduce
How Has Science Progressed?
The public availability of scientific works insures that science remains a social
endeavor, which is the key to its long-standing pattern of theoretical and
practical triumphs. Although science provides no guarantees, its continuing
success depends on its inherently social character. Knowledge, criticism, and
decision making are collective accomplishments, distributed across the
community
(Solomon 2001). Science is inherently social and therefore inherently
institutional.
Universities. The gradual development of independent universities proved
a critical variable buttressing science’s long-term
Scientific Societies and Disciplines. Institutional arrangements that secure

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the openness, publicity, and integrity of scientific research were critical to the
Experimentation and systematic observation carry crucial implications
for social and economic arrangements
Science’s Fragility
Science as an unsurpassed method for acquiring empirical knowledge depends
on a combination of cultural elements, including literacy, long-term education,
freedom from religious and political repression, many peculiar institutions,
and substantial resources for theoretical research. For many reasons, including
both its cognitive unnaturalness and the obvious difficulties with sustaining
such arrangements, this combination is both historically rare and inherently
fragile (And what will be the results, insights, if these statements were to be
applied to philosophy and the socio-cultural practice of philosophy? How and
why are certain philosophers, their ideas and schools granted status in certain
sections of the philosophical community and not in others? What are the
factors involved in causing this?)

17

http://philosopaedia.blogspot.co.za/2013/09/steps-and-methods-in-art-
of.html

Here we are informed about a few general characteristics of philosophy and more
specifically Steps and Methods in the Art of Philosophizing.
In the art of philosophizing, we are told that there are basic steps one must follow,
and they are as follows, and probably assumed to be in that order as well: wonder,
speculation, analysis, synthesis and critique.
“1.Wonder: Every art of philosophizing begins by wonder. Man is always
bewildered by his existence, death, inconsistencies experienced in his everyday life
and so on. As one ponders about the nature of realities and various mind-boggling
experiences in his everyday existence, certain questions begins to arise. Some of
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such questions are: why are there things rather than nothing? What is Life? What is
reality? Can we know anything for certain? What is the underlying principle of
reality? All these questions lead one into speculation.” Well in this case I was
wondering about the nature of the doing of philosophy itself. In this meta-inquiry I
asked questions about what the process/es of philosophizing consist of.
So as to be able to ask questions about these processes I started collecting all sorts
of philosophically relevant data, questions, investigations, articles, books etc – to
be found in the previous section. Most likely not all of them are of equal
importance or even important at all to the questions I wish to explore. I always
prefer to cast my net of wonder much wider rather than too narrow, and that for a
number of methodological, creative- and original-thinking reasons and because of
my personality-type. This brain dump, brain storm or expressed more technically,
the stage of data collection, is not at all that objective and innocent as it already
assumes questions I am interested in and problems I wish to develop. In other
words all sorts of pre-suppositions and implicit assumptions are already present,
logically preceding and underlying the stage of data collection or the world or
aspects of it, that I wish to explore. As the above article states:” 2. Speculation:
When questions are asked based on our wondering about reality, human existence
and all changes experienced, we tend to form opinions and presumptions based on
the questions raised.”
We tend to have implicit assumptions and tacit suppositions even when we wish to
ask a question about something, and therefore of course when we survey the world
or the field to obtain information that may, or may not, or might assist us in
answering our question or exploring it as a problem. The article’s point suggest
that opinions are already present when we ask questions, but I suggest even when
we collect data or brain storm presumptions (an idea that is taken to be true, and
often used as the basis for other ideas, although it is not known for certain, eg
underlying presumptions about human nature) are already operating.
I must admit that one of my assumptions is that the nature of doing philosophy and
the process/es of philosophizing resembles the features, steps and stages of the
process of theorizing – from the initial data collection, to the drawing of
conclusions and the development or construction of more or less coherent,
integrated ‘models’ of systematic ideas, or theory-construction. And that, even
before I stated my questions explicitly. We have been informed by McCauley in
previous citations of his work, that such ‘opinions, attitudes, beliefs, etc” exist and

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that they do operate, often unidentified and uncritically. So, here I have identified
and stated explicitly one of my ‘opinions’ that underlie and probably guide my
present writing.
So now we can commence what the above article numbers as 3 in the process of
the doing of philosophy, namely: “3. Analysis: Analysis entails a detailed
examination of the opinion formed. So, in analysis, the opinions and presumptions
made are accessed in parts in view to understanding what each of the concepts that
constitute the opinions entail.”
When I presented the data in the previous sections I did that selectively and I
already made statements about the articles, links and citations my data collection
consisted of. I for example suggested that what was said about everyday or MN
cognition and perception (“Humans’ maturationally natural proclivities undergird a
theory-ladenness of perception that is Inescapable” Maturationally Natural
Cognition, Radically Counter-Intuitive Science,and the Theory-Ladenness of
Perception
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/530a3ca8e4b01885d317b273/t/536a6058e4b
023d3d9c4b3dc/1399480408273/maturationally-natural-cognition-impedes-
professional+science-and-facilitates-popular-religion.pdf ) and the MNC operating
in religion (as also shown by him) resemble the cognition and perception (or rather
the underlying assumptions, implicit attitudes and theory-ladenness) brought into
the doing of philosophy or philosophical activities.
I have also shown this and argued for this theory-ladenness (by ‘religion’ or more
specifically spirituality and mysticism) in the case of Plotinus’s non-philosophy (or
realization of unity with THE ONE) here –
https://www.academia.edu/30704161/NON-
PHILOSOPHY_OF_THE_ONE_Turning_away_from_Philosophy_of_Being
And many other examples of this spiritual or mystical theory-ladenness in the
quest for the unity experience (with the one, of the realization of the real self,
enlightenment or the Buddha-consciousness, pure consciousness, the Sufi’s
Beloved, etc) here https://www.academia.edu/30813789/Philosophy_of_being_-
_Nonphilosophy_of_the_one
And here
https://www.academia.edu/30241906/philosophos_the_one_the_real_self_pure_co
nsciousness

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As McCauley repeatedly stated in numerous articles and books:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/why-religion-is-natural-and-science-is-
not-9780199827268?cc=us&lang=en&
http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/persons/robert-n-mccauley/
http://www.robertmccauley.com/
http://www.robertmccauley.com/research
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/why-religion-is-natural-and-science-is-not

Can People Overcome Their Implicit Biases?

http://cognitionandculture.net/
http://cmbc.web.emory.edu/
http://www.robertmccauley.com/research/philosophy-of-cognitive-and-brain-
sciences

Philosophy of Cognitive and Brain Sciences →

How do scientific findings bear on our inquiries about the perennial

philosophical questions?
I have defended and pursued a naturalistic approach to epistemology, the
philosophy of science, and the philosophy of the cognitive and brain sciences.
Philosophical naturalism holds that the history of Western philosophy is, in part, a
history of philosophy spawning new empirical sciences—a process that has
inevitably resulted in those sciences returning to advance claims about topics that
philosophers had, until that time, regarded as philosophy’s privileged
territories. Philosophical naturalists need not hold that those new scientific
theories, findings, and methods will solve philosophers’ perennial questions (for
example, about such matters as human nature, values, and meaning), but they do
hold that philosophers’ inquiries about such matters will be done less responsibly
than they should be if they are inattentive to those new scientific insights.

It is within such a naturalistic framework that I have fathomed some of the ways
that the findings from the social, cognitive, and brain sciences might bear on our
conceptions of knowledge, perception, learning, science, mind, and consciousness.
I have developed, in particular, proposals about what I call “maturationally

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natural” perception, cognition, and action and (in collaboration with William
Bechtel) the heuristic identity theory (HIT).

http://www.robertmccauley.com/research/cognitive-foundations-of-religion

Cognitive Foundations of Religion →

Why do religions (and philosophy!) appeal to human minds?

The by-product theory of religious cognition holds that our religious propensities
are, in large part, by-products of the operations of a variety of normal, adaptive,
domain specific cognitive systems. Those systems, which concern such capacities
as language, theory of mind, contamination avoidance, kinship recognition, and
more, arise on the basis of considerations that have nothing to do with religion and
nothing to do with one another. I have pursued the theory’s implications in two
areas.

In my book, Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not, and in a number of

papers, I have investigated the implications of the cognitive by-product view for
thinking about religion and religions and their relationships to science, both
cognitively and socially. That project has involved examining and contrasting the
cognitive foundations of science and the cognitive foundations of religion, and that
contrast has yielded a number of surprising implications (which follow unadorned
and unelaborated):

1. Traditional comparisons of science and religion are cognitively misbegotten.

2. Theological incorrectness is inevitable.
3. Science poses no threat to the persistence of religion.
4. Relevant cognitive disabilities will render religion baffling.
5. Science is an inherently social undertaking.
6. Science depends more fundamentally on institutional support than religion
does.
7. Science’s continued existence is fragile.

Earlier work (most of it pursued collaboratively with E. Thomas Lawson)

concentrated on the cognitive foundations of religious ritual, in particular. We
advanced our theory of religious ritual competence in Rethinking Religion and
investigated—in detail in our second book together, Bringing Ritual to Mind—one
of its principal consequences, viz., the ritual form hypothesis. We argue that:

1. Normal cognitive equipment for the representation of action determines

participants’ representations of the forms of their religious rituals.
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2. Those forms of those rituals are largely responsible for many of those
features of those rituals, including their repeatability (with the same ritual
participants), reversibility, frequency, levels of sensory pageantry, and more.
3. The connections between religious ritual form and performance frequency,
sensory pageantry, and emotional arousal account not only for rituals’
motivational and mnemonic effects, but also for various dynamic patterns
that religious ritual systems manifest the world over.

http://www.robertmccauley.com/articles/cognitive-foundations-of-religion/

Articles: Cognitive Foundations of Religion

 Philosophy of Science
 Philosophy of Cognitive and Brain Sciences
 Modern Conceptions of Liberal Education

Cognitive and Evolutionary Approaches to Religion (book chapter) [PDF]→

R.N. McCauley (2016). Blackwell Companion to Naturalism. K. Clark (ed.).

Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 462-480.

La Cognición Natural, la Ciencia Profesional y la Religión Popular (book chapter)

(PDF)→

Robert N. McCauley (2015). Mesa Redonda 8, 22-46.

Philosophical Naturalism and the Cognitive Science of Religion→

R.N. McCauley (2015). Religion Bulletin (portal of the Bulletin for the Study of
Religion), July 13, 2015.

Maturationally Natural Cognition Impedes Professional Science and Facilitates

Popular Religion (book chapter) (PDF)→

Robert N. McCauley (in press). Reason and Belief in Societies of Knowledge. C.

Salazar and J. Bestard (eds.). Oxford: Berghahn Books.

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Putting Religious Ritual in its Place (book chapter) (PDF)→

On Some Ways Humans’ Cognitive Predilections Influence the Locations and
Shapes of Religious Rituals

Robert N. McCauley (2014). Locating the Sacred: Theoretical Approaches to the

Emplacement of Religion. C. Moser and C. Weiss (eds.). Oxford: Oxbow Books,
pp. 143-163.

Explanatory Pluralism and the Cognitive Science of Religion (book chapter) [PDF]→
Or Why Scholars in Religious Studies Should Stop Worrying about Reductionism

R.N. McCauley (2013). Mental Culture: Classical Social Theory and the
Cognitive Science of Religion. D. Xygalatas and W. W. McCorkle, Jr. (eds.).
London: Acumen, pp. 11-32.

Why Science Is Exceptional and Religion Is Not→

A Response to Commentators on Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not

Robert N. McCauley (2013). Religion, Brain & Behavior. 3 (2), 165-182., 165-
182.

Functions, Mechanisms, and Contexts→

Comments on “Cognitive Resource Depletion in Religious Interactions”

Robert N. McCauley (2013). Religion, Brain & Behavior 3, 68-71.

The Importance of Being “Ernest” (book chapter) (PDF)→

Robert N. McCauley (2012). Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and

the Humanities. E. Slingerland and M. Collard (eds.). New York: Oxford
University Press, pp. 266-281.

A Cognitive Science of Religion Will Be Difficult, Expensive, Complicated, Radically

Counter-Intuitive, and Possible→
A Response to Martin and Wiebe

Robert N. McCauley (2012). Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80,

605-610.

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Why Religion Is Natural, and Science Is Not→

Robert N. McCauley (2012). The Montreal Review, September 18, 2012.

The God Issue→

Science Won't Loosen Religion's Grip

18
Point 4 (concerning synthesis of ideas) of
http://philosopaedia.blogspot.co.za/2013/09/steps-and-methods-in-art-of.html
(3. Analysis: Analysis entails a detailed examination of the opinion formed. So, in
analysis, the opinions and presumptions made are accessed in parts in view to
understanding what each of the concepts that constitute the opinions entail.
4. Synthesis: After the analysis, we combine our analyzed opinion into a unified
knowledge or idea.)
is already to a certain extent included in point 3. This was shown by my remarks
under section 17 pages 49-50.
This writer here http://philosopaedia.blogspot.co.za/ tells us what philosophy is.
“Etymological Approach: In this approach, the concept of philosophy is
assessed from its root-meaning. Philosophy, therefore, is derived from two Greek
words: ‘philo’ meaning ‘love’ and ‘sophia’ meaning ‘wisdom’, combining the two
words, we have ‘philosophia’ which means ‘love of wisdom’.

The concept of philosophy was coined by Pythagoras. Pythagoras was a mystic and
mathematician, who was endowed with knowledge so much so that people began to
see him as a wiseman. But in reaction to this designation, he noted that he was not a
wiseman because wisdom was strictly the property of the gods; rather he saw himself
as the lover of wisdom. From this, therefore, a philosopher is basically seen as a
LOVER OF WISDOM.

Love and wisdom ought to be given somewhat elucidation in view to bring home
what it takes to love wisdom. In loving wisdom, a philosopher is said to crave for or
have a strong passion to acquire wisdom. It is worthy to note that wisdom is quite
different from knowledge. Whereas knowledge means ‘an acquisition of facts’
wisdom implies the possession of a comprehensive knowledge of all there is.

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Whereas wisdom is universal, perfect and all-encompassing, knowledge is limited

to certain information. That is why a philosopher seeks wisdom rather that
knowledge. He mentions three approaches.
Then - Beyond the foregoing, there are several definitions advanced to explain what
philosophy is. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosophy is the activity of
clarification of concepts and language use in view to resolve to philosophical
problems. Wittgenstein has argued that the basic problem which has confronted
philosophers has been the problem of language and it is only when philosophy
concerns itself with the analysis and clarification of thoughts and concepts that the
problem in the philosophical enterprise could be curbed. That is why he views the
business of philosophy as strictly to clarify concepts and thoughts. He explored this
idea in his Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. (Some form of this attitude
and approach we find in many countries, especially Anglophone ones – who forgets
Wittgenstein and his philosophy’s origins and infleunces).
For Socrates, philosophy is a reflective self-examination (How much of this is
present in contemporary, especially ‘analytic’ philosophy?) of the principles of just
and happy life. The business of philosophy is to search for the principles aimed that
making one live a good life. A philosopher would be one whose business is to engage
in self-examination.
For Dewey, philosophy is the criticism of criticisms. Philosophy, from this
definition, is viewed as a second order discipline and activity. Philosophy detaches
itself from other disciplines and begins to question the fundamental concerns and
underpinning of these disciplines. (There exist philosophies of almost every
discipline and domains of the life-worlds of humans. Then of course there is the
discipline of meta-philosophy, itself – investigating philosophical practices.”
(Simon Critchley tells us here more about the difference between knowledge and
wisdom and how it is caused and dealt with, or not, in Continental and analytic
philosophizing.)

http://www.veryshortintroductions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780192853592.001
.0001/actrade-9780192853592-chapter-1
‘The gap between knowledge and wisdom’ asks: Does the scientific conception of
the world eradicate the need for an answer to the question of the meaning of life?
Ancient philosophy was characterized by an identity, or at least an attempted
integration, of knowledge and wisdom: namely, that a knowledge of how things were
the way they were would lead to wisdom in the conduct of one's life. In the modern
world, through the extraordinary progress of the sciences, this unity has split apart.
The question of wisdom, and its related question of the meaning of life, should at
the very least move closer to the centre of philosophical activity.’

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1. The Gap between Knowledge and Wisdom

‘The gap between knowledge and wisdom’ asks: Does the scientific conception of
the world eradicate the need for an answer to the question of the meaning of life?
Ancient philosophy was characterized by an identity, or at least an attempted
integration, of knowledge and wisdom: namely, that a knowledge of how things
were the way they were would lead to wisdom in the conduct of one's life. In the
modern world, through the extraordinary progress of the sciences, this unity has
split apart. The question of wisdom, and its related question of the meaning of life,
should at the very least move closer to the centre of philosophical activity.
(Seeking to realize wisdom is not a search for more factual information, but an
attempt to obtain insights and develop understanding. Then we might be able to
realize greater wisdom).
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/what-are-the-differences-between-
knowledge-wisdom-and-insight.html

What Are the Differences Between Knowledge, Wisdom, and Insight?

Royale Scuderi
Knowledge, Wisdom, and Insight may sound like synonyms, but they are not.
Though they all refer to the mind and an accumulation of thoughts and
experiences, they have some very real differences in the essence of their meanings
and their applications in our life.
Knowledge VS Wisdom VS Insight

Knowledge is the accumulation of facts and data that you have learned about or
experienced. It’s being aware of something, and having information. Knowledge is
really about facts and ideas that we acquire through study, research, investigation,
observation, or experience.

Wisdom is the ability to discern and judge which aspects of that knowledge are
true, right, lasting, and applicable to your life. It’s the ability to apply that
knowledge to the greater scheme of life. It’s also deeper; knowing the meaning or
reason; about knowing why something is, and what it means to your life.

Insight is the deepest level of knowing and the most meaningful to your life.
Insight is a deeper and clearer perception of life, of knowledge, of wisdom. It’s
grasping the underlying nature of knowledge, and the essence of wisdom. Insight is
a truer understanding of your life and the bigger picture of how things intertwine.

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In a nutshell: If knowledge is information, wisdom is the understanding and

application of that knowledge and insight is the awareness of the underlying
essence of a truth.

Sadly we can gain a lifetime of knowledge, yet never see the wisdom in it. We can
be wise, but still miss the deeper meaning.

Christopher Reiss does a great job of summing up the differences on Quora…

Knowledge is measuring that a desert path is 12.4 miles long.

Wisdom is packing enough water for the hike.

Insight is building a lemonade stand at mile 6.

Knowledge is knowing how to manage your money, budgeting, spending, saving.

Wisdom is understanding how money impacts the quality of your life and your
future.

Insight is realizing that money is simply a tool to be used, that it has no inherent
meaning beyond its usefulness.

Knowledge is learning how to paint and using that skill to cultivate a livelihood.

Wisdom is expressing your passion through painting and understanding that art is a
form of communication that touches the lives of others.

Insight is perceiving that all things can be art and that creating your art contributes
to the understanding and the expression of the essence of the world around you.

Knowledge is knowing which things, practices, people, and pleasures make you
happy.

Wisdom is knowing that while those things may bring you pleasure, happiness is
not derived from things or situations or people. It’s understanding that happiness
comes from within, and that it’s a temporary state of mind.

Insight is knowing that happiness is not the purpose of life, that it’s not the marker
of the quality of life—it’s merely one of the many fleeting states of mind in the
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spectrum of full emotions. Those emotions don’t make up our lives; they are
merely experiences.

Knowledge, wisdom and insight all are valuable and all have a place in our lives.
The difficulty lies in the fact that many of us are unclear as to their differences,
often perceiving the terms and their application to be interchangeable. Being clear
and consciously aware of how our minds are engaged may be important to getting
the most out of all three. While acquiring and applying information is valuable in
and of itself, we also need to distill and judge that information, and ultimately find
the deeper meaning and relevance to the whole of our lives. Perhaps the truest form
of knowing is in acquiring all three, and understanding how they each enhance the
quality and experience of life.

2. Origins of Continental Philosophy: How to get from Kant to German

Idealism
‘Origins of Continental Philosophy: How to get from Kant to German Idealism’
considers the historical development of Continental philosophy, beginning by
distinguishing it from analytic philosophy. It explains that the problematic of
Continental philosophy arose out of criticisms of Kant and must be understood in
this context. The other issue that determines the course of Continental philosophy
is the atheist conflict, which began in 1798. There is a path in the Continental
tradition from the critique of Kant in Hamann and Jacobi, through to the religious
and, indeed, irreligious anti-rationalism of Kierkegaard, Stirner, and Dostoevsky
through to the post-war French existentialism of Sartre and Camus.
3. Spectacles and Eyes to See With: Two cultures in philosophy
Spectacles and Eyes to See With: Two cultures in philosophy’ asks how we can
explain the gulf between analytic and Continental philosophy. As a self-
description, Continental philosophy is a necessary — but perhaps transitory — evil
of the professionalization of the discipline. As a cultural feature, Continental
philosophy goes back at least to the time of Mill. The division between
philosophical traditions is the expression of a conflict that is internal to
‘Englishness’ and not a geographical opposition between the English-speaking
world and the Continent. As such, the gulf between analytic and Continental
philosophy is the expression of a deep cultural divide between differing and
opposed habits of thought. ( Here we see underlying assumptions and implicit
attitudes of MNC brought into philosophy at work.)

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4. Can Philosophy Change the World? Critique, praxis, emancipation

Can Philosophy Change the World? Critique, praxis, emancipation’ argues that
much philosophy in the Continental tradition is concerned with giving a
philosophical critique of the social practices of the modern world that aspires
towards a notion of individual or societal emancipation. The texts are characterized
by a strong historical self-consciousness that will not allow them to be read without
reference to their context or our own. Once the human being has been located as a
finite subject embedded in an ultimately contingent network of history, culture, and
society, then one can begin to understand a feature common to many philosophers
in the Continental tradition: the demand that things be otherwise. ( See for example
the thoughts of the different generations of Critical Theory.)
5. What is to be Done? How to respond to nihilism
6. A Case Study in Misunderstanding: Heidegger and Carnap
‘A Case Study in Misunderstanding: Heidegger and Carnap’ explores the conflict
between analytic and continental philosophy in the context of Heidegger and
Carnap. A large part of the disagreement turns on the question of metaphysics,
with Carnap denouncing Heidegger as a metaphysician and Heidegger implying
that Carnap's scientific conception of the world presupposes an unexamined
metaphysics. The interest of the Heidegger–Carnap conflict does not consist in
deciding who is right and who is wrong, but rather in viewing that conflict as a
definitive expression of both a philosophical problematic and a cultural pathology
that are still very much with us. (Here we see the consequences of implicit
assumptions.)
7. Scientism versus Obscurantism: Avoiding the traditional predicament in
philosophy
‘Scientism versus Obscurantism: Avoiding the traditional predicament in
philosophy’ argues that from a Continental perspective, the adoption of scientism
in philosophy fails fundamentally to see the role that science and technology play
in the alienation of human beings from the world. Scientism rests on the fallacious
claim that the theoretical or natural scientific way of viewing things provides the
primary and most significant access to ourselves and our world. However, anti-
scientism does not entail an anti-scientific attitude. Rather, it argues that the
practices of the natural sciences arise out of life-world practices, and that life-

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world practices are not simply reducible to natural scientific explanation.’(We have
seen a lot of discussions about this in the articles of McCaulley)
8. Sapere aude: The exhaustion of theory and the promise of philosophy
‘Sapere aude: The exhaustion of theory and the promise of philosophy’ explains that
current divisions in the study of philosophy are a consequence of professional self-
descriptions which have led to the weakening of philosophy's critical function and
its emancipatory intent, and to its progressive marginalization in the life of culture.
By overcoming any lingering sectarianism, we might begin to move on
philosophically and face up to issues of deep and enduring intellectual interest, such
as those concerned with the gap between knowledge and wisdom, and philosophy
might form an essential part in the life of a culture, and in how a culture converses
with itself and with other cultures.’

We can now return to the steps proposed by Victor C. Wolemonwu here

http://philosopaedia.blogspot.co.za/2013/09/steps-and-methods-in-art-of.html

This is what he suggests for point or step 5 – that we critically exam the major ideas
we have developed from our examination of the data we collected, and probably the
generalizations we made about those ideas. Such generalizations could be
transformed into hypotheses. The latter can be investigated (by experimentation,
different types of arguments and forms of reasoning) so as to modify, transform or
discard them. Thinkers, scientists, theorists, philosophers, etc might often be blind
to their own assumptions, opinions and attitudes that underlie and sneak into their
attempts at developing more rational, coherent, consistent, sound arguments and
reasoning. McCauley showed us that and how this occurs with religious attitudes,
thinking and cognition, as well as with everyday MNC.
These are some of issues and problems we should be aware of when executing step
5, as Victor C. Wolemonwu suggests – “5. Critique: In this step, we take a critical
examination of the idea formed, weighing its strengths and weaknesses before
establishing a theory or principle.” (or make generalizations of a basic, middle-
range or very general kind, make and draw conclusions. This is where peers and
other aspects of academic and other institutions of the philosophical/ scientific
world are involved, as investigated by McCauley in a number of articles and other
work, for example –
com/static/530a3ca8e4b01885d317b273/t/536922bfe4b08dd0fc06e454/139939910
3090/scienti%EF%AC%81c-method-as-cultural-innovation.pdf
Scientific Method as Cultural Innovation Robert N. McCauley

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https://static1.squarespace.com/static/530a3ca8e4b01885d317b273/t/536922bfe4b
08dd0fc06e454/1399399103090/scienti%EF%AC%81c-method-as-cultural-
innovation.pdf
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/robertnmccauley/files/2013/09/SciMethodInnovatio
n.pdf
In the following piece the scientist is treated too much as an isolated individual
rather than being seen in the context of the scientific community. McCauley above,
argues for the importance of that community as well as other (including socio-
cultural and institutional) factors that play a role in questioning and perhaps
correcting scientific hypotheses, insights and theories.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/scientific-experiments/scientific-
method9.htm
“Importance of the Scientific Method”

The scientific method attempts to minimize the influence of bias or prejudice in the
experimenter. Even the best-intentioned scientists can't escape bias. It results from
personal beliefs, as well as cultural beliefs, which means any human filters
information based on his or her own experience. Unfortunately, this filtering
process can cause a scientist to prefer one outcome over another. For someone
trying to solve a problem around the house, succumbing to these kinds of biases is
not such a big deal. But in the scientific community, where results have to be
reviewed and duplicated, bias must be avoided at all costs.

That's the job of the scientific method. It provides an objective, standardized

approach to conducting experiments and, in doing so, improves their results. By
using a standardized approach in their investigations, scientists can feel confident
that they will stick to the facts and limit the influence of personal, preconceived
notions. Even with such a rigorous methodology in place, some scientists still
make mistakes. For example, they can mistake a hypothesis for an explanation of a
phenomenon without performing experiments. Or they can fail to accurately
account for errors, such as measurement errors. Or they can ignore data that does
not support the hypothesis.

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), an Austrian priest who studied the inheritance of

traits in pea plants and helped pioneer the study of genetics, may have fallen victim
to a kind of error known as confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency

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to see data that supports a hypothesis while ignoring data that does not. Some
argue that Mendel obtained a certain result using a small sample size, then
continued collecting and censoring data to make sure his original result was
confirmed. Although subsequent experiments have proven Mendel's hypothesis,
many people still question his methods of experimentation.
Most of the time, however, the scientific method works and works well. When a
hypothesis or a group of related hypotheses have been confirmed through repeated
experimental tests, it may become a theory, which can be thought of as the pot of
gold at the end of the scientific method rainbow. Theories are much broader in
scope than hypotheses and hold enormous predictive power. The theory of
relativity, for example, predicted the existence of black holes long before there was
evidence to support the idea. It should be noted, however, that one of the goals of
science is not to prove theories right, but to prove them wrong. When this happens,
a theory must be modified or discarded altogether.”
19
We can now return to the steps proposed by Victor C. Wolemonwu here
http://philosopaedia.blogspot.co.za/2013/09/steps-and-methods-in-art-of.html
(Note that I separated the last aspect of his point and created point or step 6)

“6 The theory formed leads to another kind of bewilderment and subsequent

questions and the process continues ad infinitum.

Note that one basic thing about this art of philosophizing is that through this
process, ideas are created, (modified, transformed, developed, rejected, replaced)
theories and principles are formulated and are subsequently critiqued (modified,
transformed, rejected, replaced, extended) as new ones emerge.)”
A different approach to these 6 points are –
http://busn8018researchblog-xwchan.blogspot.co.za/2013/03/the-ladder-of-
inference-dont-be-too.html
I have noticed many similarities between the steps expounded in the ladder of
inference and how researchers go about doing research.

The first step of the ladder of inference is the data. There is a vast amount of data
in the world, and each individual has a limited capacity to absorb them. Hence, the

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individual selects the data, and proceeds to add meaning to the data he/she has
selected. Based on the meaning he/she has added, assumptions are made and
conclusions are drawn, and action is taken based on the conclusions made. The
cycle repeats when the results/consequences of the actions become data for
another round of climbing the ladder. Over time, it is believed that the conclusions
formed contribute to the foundation of the individual's beliefs, assumptions, and
even values. They also play an influential role in filtering the data selected and
adding meaning to the data when the process is repeated time and again.

In fact, I think the reason why the ladder of inference is highly applicable to
researchers and their thought processes is because the logic behind the ladder is
built on the assumptions about the human behaviour. In general, humans tend to:

 assume that others see the world as they do. Hence, if there are any
disagreements, they are usually concentrated on the conclusions. The issue
here is, humans assume that everyone selects the same data and adds the
same meaning to the data. Reality is, none of us do.;
 take short-cuts around the ladder (e.g. jump to conclusions), and are
unconscious of the steps they have climbed on the ladder; and
 assume that any conclusions made are the "truth". But what is the truth?

Similarly, in research, the data at the bottom of the ladder represents the pool of
information that may be relevant to the researcher's research interests. Going up the
ladder, the researcher then selects the relevant information from the pool of
information available. The researcher proceeds to learn what the selected
information describes about the phenomenon or issue he/she is studying, and from
thereon, interpret and evaluate whatever he/she has noticed. Any assumptions or
beliefs that the researcher holds greatly influence whatever he/she notices from the
selected information. Following which, the researcher seeks to link the issue he/she
is studying to the information he/she has selected, identifying any inconsistencies
and consistencies between both, and finally, coming up with a theoretical
framework on which the issue will be investigated. Having established a
theoretical framework, the researcher then proceeds to investigate the issue and
provide explanations and conclusions regarding his findings, and at the end of it,
he/she will usually provide some limitations and recommendations for future
research.

I found the following questions derived from the ladder of inference extremely
useful when doing research:

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 What are the facts that I should be using?

o Are the facts relevant?
o Are there other facts I should have considered?
 What data have I chosen to use and why?
o Have I selected data rigorously?
 Why have I chosen this course of action/approach?
o Are there other actions/approaches which I should have considered?
 What belief/assumption led to this particular action?
o Were the beliefs/assumptions well-founded?
 What am I assuming, and why?
o Essentially, are my assumptions valid?
 Why did I draw that conclusion?
o Is the conclusion sound?

Analysing Data: Alan Bryman's Four Stages of Qualitative Analysis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X7VuQxPfpk
http://busn8018researchblog-xwchan.blogspot.co.za/2013/02/ontology-
epistemology-methodology.html
Researchers usually begin their research with an understanding of ontology,
followed by epistemology, and finally, methodology. It seems pretty logical to me
that this should be the case. Ontology should come first because it establishes the
underlying assumptions and beliefs about 'the reality'. Epistemology then goes on
to define how we can know and reason that reality. In many cases, epistemologists
have to assume that findings from ontology are true before they start to make
arguments about knowledge.

In my opinion, anyone undertaking research should be clear about his ontological

and epistemological position before proceeding with a research topic, otherwise,
confusion and contradiction will arise as he progresses further on his research
topic. After which, the methodology for the research topic will naturally come
about. In a nutshell, a researcher's epistemological approach is a result of his
ontological view, which in turn influences his choice of methodology.
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:146617/FULLTEXT01.pdf
http://www.umich.edu/~asq/v02n001.txt

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2. What Theory is...: A Reaction to Sutton and Staw's Essay ``What

Theory is Not'' (Robert I. Sutton and Barry M. Staw, Administrative
Science Quarterly, September 1995, volume 40, no. 3, pp. 371-384 )
From Michael Masuch, Jeroen Bruggeman, Jaap Kamps, Gabor Peli,
and Laszlo Polos (office@ccsom.uva.nl.)

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/work-matters/201005/karl-weicks-
creativity
http://amr.aom.org/content/14/4/516.short

Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination Karl E. Weick1

The process of theory construction in organizational studies is portrayed as

imagination disciplined by evolutionary processes analogous to artificial selection.
The quality of theory produced is predicted to vary as a function of the accuracy
and detail present in the problem statement that triggers theory building, the
number of and independence among the conjectures that attempt to solve the
problem, and the number and diversity of selection criteria used to test the
conjectures. It is argued that interest is a substitute for validation during theory
construction, middle range theories are a necessity if the process is to be kept
manageable, and representations such as metaphors are inevitable, given the
complexity of the subject matter.

http://www.richardswanson.com/textbookresources/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/TBAD-r4a-Weick-Disciplined-Imagination.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/33038739_Making_Sense_of_Theory_
Construction_Metaphor_and_Disciplined_Imagination

Making Sense of Theory Construction: Metaphor and Disciplined Imagination

Article in Organization Studies 27(11) · November 2006
DOI: 10.1177/0170840606068333 · Source: OAI Joep P. Cornelissen
This article draws upon Karl Weick’s insights into the nature of theorizing, and
extends and refines his conception of theory construction as ‘disciplined
imagination’. An essential ingredient in Weick’s ‘disciplined imagination’ involves
his assertion that thought trials and theoretical representations typically involve a

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transfer from one epistemic sphere to another through the creative use of metaphor.
The article follows up on this point and draws out how metaphor works, how
processes of metaphorical imagination partake in theory construction, and how
insightful metaphors and the theoretical representations that result from them can
be selected. The paper also includes a discussion of metaphors-in-use
(organizational improvisation as jazz and organizational behavior as collective
mind) which Weick proposed in his own writings. The whole purpose of this
exercise is to theoretically augment and ground the concept of ‘disciplined
imagination’, and in particular to refine the nature of thought trials and selection
within it. In doing so, we also aim to provide pointers for the use of metaphorical
imagination in the process of theory construction.

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http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/weick_theory.html

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Theorists often write trivial theories because their process of theory construction is
hemmed in by methodological structures that favor validation rather than
usefulness. (Lindblom, 1987). Too much validation takes away the value of
imagination and selection in the process.

Theorizing consists of disciplined imagination that unfolds in a manner analogous

to artificial selection. It comes from the consistent application of selection criteria
to "trial and error" thinking and the "imagination" in theorizing comes from
deliberate diversity introduced into the problem statements, thought trials, and
selection criteria that comprise that thinking."

A theory is "an ordered set of assertions about a generic behavior or structure

assumed to hold throughout a significantly broad range of specific instances."

Verification and validation mean the demonstration, beyond pure chance, that the
ordered relationship predicted by the hypothesis exists and thereby lends support
to the hypothesis. Proof is verification of a probabilistic statement. It is a statement
of high reliability.

A good theory is also a plausible theory, more interesting than obvious, irrelevant,
or absurd, obvious in novel ways, a source of unexpected connections, high in
narrative rationality, aesthetically pleasing, etc.

A good theory process should be designed to highlight relationships, connections

and interdependencies in the phenomenon of interest.

Knowledge growth by intention is when an explanation of a whole region is made

more and more clear and adequate. Knowledge growth by extension means a full
explanation of a small region is used to explained adjacent regions.

Bourgeois states that theorizing process should weave back and forth between
intuition and data-based theorizing and between induction and deduction.

Most theory theorists describe it as a more mechanistic process, with little

appreciation for the intuitive, blind, wasteful.... quality of the process. They assume
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that validation is the ultimate test of the theory and a good theorizing process
keeps this in mind at every step.

In reality, theory construction is not problem solving, because many steps happen
simultaneously. It is more a struggle with "sense making".

"When theorists build theory, they design, conduct, and interpret imaginary
experiments. Their activities are like the three activities of evolution -- variation,
selection, and retention, and actually more like artificial selection than natural
selection.

Theoretical problems are more likely to be solved when the problem is stated
accurately and more detail.

Problem Statements
Unlike nature, theorists are both the source of variation and selection. Often the
problems are wide in scope but limited in detail, inaccurate, and vague. While
natural scientists pick problems they can solve, social scientists pick problems in
need of a solution, whether they have the tools to solve them or not. Natural
scientists pick topics of which governments, political bodies, and religious
authorities are indifferent.

"By their very nature the problems imposed on organizational theorists involve so
many assumptions and such a mixture of accuracy and inaccuracy that virtually all
conjectures and all selection criteria remain plausible and nothing gets rejected or
highlighted."

Theories of the middle range are those that are solutions to problems with a
limited number of assumptions and of manageable scope, with the problem
description of considerable accuracy and detail.

In fact, it would be better if theorists attacked problems that they can solve, not
insolvable problems that people feel too strongly about.

Thought Trials
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A theorizing process that produces lots of conjectures is better than one producing
only a few, especially if there is a lot of variation. A classification system can help
determine when the variation in conjectures is too narrow. Thus conjectures
across various theory paradigms will be more powerful than one constrained in
only one paradigm.

Another way to increase variation is to eliminate memory, preference, or foresight

to avoid narrow habituated thinking. Kuhn's paradigm work shows this is very
difficult to do sometimes -- thought trials tend toward homogeneity. Some devices
to increase variation include heterogeneous research teams, generalists,
randomizing devices, etc.

Selection Criteria
Selection criteria must be applied consistently or theorists will be left an
assortment of conjectures just as fragmented as what they started with.
Remember that validation is not the key task of social science, because we can't.
Thus, the selection criteria must be chosen carefully because the theorist, not the
environment, controls the survival of conjectures. "The contribution of social
science is in suggesting new relationships and connections that change actions and
perspectives."

When theorists apply selection criteria to their conjectures, they ask whether the
conjecture is interesting, obvious, connected, believable, beautiful, or real, in the
context of the problem they are trying to solve.

When an assumption is applied to a specific conjecture, there are four reactions –

that’s interesting, that's absurd, that's irrelevant, that's obvious. They are
equivalent to significance tests, and they serve as substitutes to validity. A
judgement that's interesting is selected for future use.

A disconfirmed assumption is an opportunity for a theorist to learn something

new. However, for a non-theorist is suggests that past experience is misleading for
subsequent action and that coping may be more difficult.

Theorists also assume events are unrelated and are surprised when they find
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unexpected connections between events. Also, the standards by which narratives

are judged differ from those used to judge arguments.

Yet there is a thin line between that's interesting to that's in my best interest, from
that's obvious to that's what managers want, from that's believable to that what
managers want to hear, and that's real to that the power system I want'.

Sifting with a greater number of distinct criteria, which Campbell call opportunistic
multi-purposeness, should produce theories that are more important.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------
Many writers emphasize the fact that theory is merely approximate and never
clear cut and absolute.
http://borders.arizona.edu/classes/mis696a/resources/readings/Weick-1995-ASQ-
WhatTheoryIsNotTheorizingIs.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2393789?seq=1#page_scan_tab_content
http://johnljerz.com/superduper/tlxdownloadsiteWEBSITEII/id188.htm

Karl E. Weick

Administrative Science Quarterly, September 1995

p.385 Products of the theorizing process seldom emerge as full-blown

theories, which means that most of what passes for theory in organizational
studies consists of approximations. Although these approximations vary in
their generality, few of them take the form of strong theory, and most of them
can be read as texts created "in lieu of" strong theories. These substitutes
for theory... may... represent interim struggles in which people intentionally
inch toward stronger theories... references, data, lists, diagrams, and
hypotheses... ruling out those... five may slow inquiry if the problem is
theoretical development still in its early stages.

p.385 Most products that are labelled theories actually approximate theory.

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p.386-387 it can be tough to separate texts that are not theory from texts that
are. A text that looks like "not theory" may simply be a clumsy attempt to
disassemble a gestalt into linear propositions. With more practice and more
nuanced language comes more of the originating insight.

p.388 I suspect that tight coupling between treatments and symptoms, with
belated theorizing of the outcomes, is a fairly common tactic in theory
construction. In my own ASQ paper re-analyzing the Mann Gulch disaster
(Weick, 1993), the argument developed partially by taking the Mann Gulch
data as symptoms and, through a series of thought trials corresponding to
treatments, seeing which concepts made a difference in those symptoms. This
exercise in disciplined imagination resulted eventually in the theory that sense
making collapses when role structures collapse

p.389 The process of theorizing consists of activities like abstracting,

generalizing, relating, selecting, explaining, synthesizing, and idealizing.
These ongoing activities intermittently spin out reference lists, data, lists of
variables, diagrams, and lists of hypotheses. Those emergent products
summarize progress, give direction, and serve as place makers. They have
vestiges of theory but are not themselves theories. Then again, few things are
full-fledged theories.

p.390 ASQ... Notice to Contributors: "If manuscripts contain no theory, their

value is suspect." ..."Ungrounded theory, however, is no more helpful than are
a theoretical data. We are receptive to multiple forms of grounding, but not to
a complete avoidance of grounding."
http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/weick_theorizing.html
Products of the theorizing process seldom emerge as full-blown theories. Some are
weak because of laziness, some weak because the authors are still inching to
something more forceful. Ruling out the "not theory" things like diagrams, lists,
make sense if people are being lazy but not if they are struggling with difficult
issues.

Theory is not something one "adds" to data, or something that one transforms from
weaker to stronger by means of graphics or references, or can be feigned by flashy
conceptual performance.

But the five "not theory" pieces often do embed some theory, and there are

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graduations of each factor.

Most theories are approximate theories. Merton says they take four forms:
* general orientations
* analysis of concepts
* post-fact interpretation from a single observation
* empirical generalization

While they are not full theories, they can serve as means to further development.

Like Sutton and Shaw say, it is hard in this low-paradigm field to spot which
efforts are theory are which are not. Theory can take a variety of forms and is a
continuum .

One can also go directly from data to prescription without a theory, as doctors go
from symptoms to treatment without a diagnosis sometimes. Data, lists, diagrams
are not theory but can help point to and elaborate theories.

Ultimately, the question becomes do you publish "ends" or also "interim

struggles". The ongoing activities often create the lists, diagrams, etc. that
eventually can become real theory. "Those emergent products summarize progress,
give direction, and serve as placemakers.”
http://www.sicotests.com/psyarticle.asp?id=165

Properties of excellent theories

Dr. Simon Moss

Theories should include the following properties (see Kaplan, 1964 & Merton,
1967 & Sutton & Staw, 1995):

 Theories should stipulate the order in which one variable or event might
affect another variable or event (note- as I stated about religion and
philosophy with McCauley’s articles)
 Theories should include a narrative or description that depicts why one
variable or event might affect another variable or event

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 These narratives should refer to processes or mechanisms that might not be

observable or conspicuous (Note – religious and philosophical assumptions,
attitudes and views go undetected as the McCaulley articles showed)
 These processes or mechanisms should relate to many constructs that were
not assessed in the study and thus extend appreciably beyond a specific
research project (note – I applied this to philosophizing and suggested that it
should realize the doing of philosophy is part of the process/es of
theorizing.)
 Hence, theories should present implications that are not observable or
inevitable. (Note – the implications for the doing of philosophy if it wereto
be seen as part of the process/es of theorizing.)

According to Van Lange (2012), four ideals can be utilized to evaluate and to
improve theories. Specifically: excellent theories demonstrate:

 Truth: That is, the theory should generate predictions or hypotheses that are
usually accurate and substantiated. (note – I applied this to philosophizing
and suggested that it should realize the doing of philosophy is part of the
process/es of theorizing.)
 Abstract: That is, the theory should allude to broad, unobservable concepts,
assumptions, or principles rather than only superficial, tangible features. The
theory should generalize across specific people, contexts, and processes.
(note – I applied this to philosophizing and suggested that it should realize
the doing of philosophy is part of the process/es of theorizing.)
 Progress: The theory should include assumptions that challenge obsolete
principles or introduce new principles and perspectives. The theory might
imply relationships between concepts that would have been overlooked
otherwise and, therefore, should stimulate considerable research. (note – I
applied this to philosophizing and suggested that it should realize the doing
of philosophy is part of the process/es of theorizing.)
 Applicability: The theory should be relevant to many events and issues. The
theory should be practical and helpful to everyday life (note – I applied this
to philosophizing and suggested that it should realize the doing of
philosophy is part of the process/es of theorizing.)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------

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Appendix
https://prezi.com/iu62gjqp2jkh/theorizing-by-weick/

Theorizing by Weick
Regarding "What Theory is Not, Theorizing IS" by Kayla Booth
Karl E. Weick Argument Based on Process:

Theory as an end product vs. theory as a process.

Theory in the making! Conclusion The Gist Argument Theorizing Response to

Sutton and Staw "Benefit of the Doubt Piece":

This is not theory because

1) The author is lazy
2) The author is not there... yet Argument
Is Theory itself a Continuum or is the Process of Creating Theory a Continuum?

"What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is" or

"What Theory is Not, Theorizing Can Be"

1) Sutton and Staw's 5 Parts are part of the process of making theory, reliant on
context
2) Authors should articulate where they are in the process of theory creation,
instead of calling it complete
3) Theory is a continuum
4) Nuances of language and original concepts may help further develop these
components

http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/dimaggio_theory.html
DiMaggio, Paul J., Comments on "What Theory is Not", ASQ, 40: (1995) 391-
397.
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DiMaggio find the situation between theory even more complicated than Shaw and
Sutton:

1. There is more than one kind of good theory

Theory as covering laws

Some traditional theories are simply statements of the world as we see it. Here
researchers often scurry about looking for high r-squares and explanations.

Theory as enlightenment
A device of sudden enlightenment. This kind of theory is complex, defamiliarizing,
and rich in paradox. It's a "suprise machine".

Theory as narrative
An account of a social process with tests of the plausibility of the narrative. Sutton
and Shaw have a version of this in mind when they talk about theory. Yet
explanation means accounting for variance.

2. Good Theory Splits the Difference

Many of the best theorys are hybrids of the above approaches. One problem is that
these approaches are driven by different values and purposes.

Clarity vs Defamiliarization
One must balance the act of helping readers see the world with new words/eyes
without confusing them too much.

Focus vs Multidimensionality
One person's multidimensionality is another persons goulash. One persons focus is
anothers reductionism.

Comprehensiveness vs Memorability
Sometimes our search for novelty causes us to overlook the most important
variables (though uninteresting).

Theory Construction is Social Construction, often after the fact

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Resonance
"The reception of a theory is shaped by the extent to which a theory resonates with
the cultural presuppositions of the time and of the scientific audience that
consumes it". The environment in which evolutionary arguments are released
changes. Cultural change modifies the metaphors that we think with.

Theories into Slogans

People often simplify the things they read until they fit into pre-existing schemas.
If a paper is widely read by others not expert in the original field it gets further
refined and simplified. New ideas get lumped into either "hard" or "soft" intuitive
notions.

Post hoc theory construction

Theories are socially constructed after they are written. It’s a cooperative venture
between writer and readers. We often reduce theories to slogans.
http://busn8018researchblog-xwchan.blogspot.co.za/2013/03/summary-review-of-
article-what-theory.html
Summary & Review of Article - "What Theory is Not" by R. I. Sutton & B. M.
Shaw
The content of this blog post is based primarily on the following article:

Sutton, R. I., & Staw, B. M. (1995). What theory is not. Administrative Science
Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 371-384.

In the article "What theory is not" by Sutton and Staw (1995), it is noted that many
researchers mistake references, data, variables/constructs, diagrams, and
hypotheses for theory. The authors also urged journals and editors to be more
receptive to papers that investigate a part of rather than an entire theory, and utilise
illustrative (qualitative) rather than definitive (quantitative) data.

Sutton and Staw (1995) explained that:

 References are not theory, because researchers need to explain which

concepts and arguments are adopted from sources and how they are linked to
the theory.

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 Data are not theory, because data merely describes which empirical patterns
were observed and theory explains why empirical patterns were observed. It
does not constitute a theory. Researchers who use qualitative data must
develop causal arguments (theory) to explain why findings are observed.
 Variables/constructs are not theory. The key issue is why certain variables
are more important and thus chosen, not what variables/construct are in the
theoretical model.
 Diagrams are not theory, because they don't explain why. However, the
authors acknowledged that a good theory is often representational and
verbal.
 Hypothesis (or predictions) are not theory, because hypotheses are
statements about what is expected to occur, not why it is expected to occur.

A strong theory answers why and delves into the underlying processes. According
to the authors, strong theories are missing in many quantitative research papers, as
they seem to be overly concerned with methodology. There is a need to rebalance
the selection process between theory and method. However, the authors also noted
that theory is often over-emphasized in qualitative research. In light of these
findings, the authors argued that the best papers are those that strike a fine balance
between theory and method.
Posted by Carys Xi Wen Chan at 14:56
http://busn8018researchblog-xwchan.blogspot.co.za/2013/05/thesis-antithesis-
synthesis.html
Thesis - Antithesis - Synthesis

Kerry introduced the triad thesis-antithesis-synthesis to assist us in forming good

arguments and developing reasoning based on evidence. He mentioned that
thinking or writing in terms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis can also help us position
ourselves in the flow of scholarly discourse regarding our topic. Additionally, he
mentioned that existing literature is essentially an on-going argument, so if we can
show such a pattern of thought in a literature review, the literature review is likely

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to be comprehensive, thorough, and sophisticated.

The thesis is essentially an idea that we propose (e.g. high social self-efficacy
enables a person to be successful in dating). In research, the thesis is the
proposition. The antithesis is a response to the thesis asserted, a negation of the
thesis (e.g. Z argued that people with high social self-efficacy tend to be flirts
instead, hence people tend to avoid dating them). As illustrated in both examples, a
conflict exists between the thesis and the antithesis. Based on the antithesis, a
person with high social self-efficacy would not be successful in dating since he/she
is usually known as a flirt. Perhaps social self-efficacy is one of the necessary traits
for a person to be good in dating, but we also have to consider the person's
appearance, personality, and experience to determine if he/she will be successful in
dating. I have positioned the new idea as a synthesis of the thesis-antithesis dyad.
In other words, the synthesis solves the conflict between the thesis and antithesis
by reconciling both and forming a new thesis, thereby starting a new cycle of
thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

Applying the thesis-antithesis-synthesis thought process has given me a better idea

of how I can go about formulating good, robust, and persuasive arguments. Despite
Kerry's constant emphasis on making good arguments, I have struggled
considerably in this aspect. This was evident in the first literature review
assignment of this course in which Kerry remarked that I have not addressed the
gap, even though I have found and indicated that there is a gap in existing self-
efficacy literature. Consequently, I decided to practice using the thesis-antithesis-
synthesis approach on my current qualitative research project on self-efficacy
beliefs and perceived career options. The exercise is shown below:

(1) Thesis: Current literature suggests that gender is by far the most important
demographic factor that influences a person's self-efficacy beliefs, and his/her
subsequent perceived career options.
(2) Antithesis: However, in most of the interviews which I have conducted (which
involve full-time ANU CBE students), a person's social capital appears to be the
most influential demographic factor that affects his/her self-efficacy beliefs and
perceived career options.
(3) Synthesis: A possible explanation is that the traditional gender roles have
already evolved such that the influence of gender on a person's self-efficacy beliefs
and perceived career options is diminished. Consequently, a person's social capital

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has become the most important demographic factor in determine the level of self-
efficacy a person possesses, and the formulation of his/her perceived career
choices (possibly as a result of greater social inequality).

I found this exercise to be extremely useful in helping me understand what is

lacking in a salient argument. From now on, I will definitely be using the above
approach when constructing arguments!
The Ladder of Inference - Don't be too quick to jump to conclusions!
I came across this simple yet insightful TED-Ed video entitled "Rethinking
Thinking" by Trevor Maber, and was introduced to th...
Analysing Data: Alan Bryman's Four Stages of Qualitative Analysis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X7VuQxPfpk
http://busn8018researchblog-xwchan.blogspot.co.za/2013/03/the-ladder-of-
inference-dont-be-too.html
The Ladder of Inference - Don't be too quick to jump to conclusions!

I came across this simple yet insightful TED-Ed video entitled "Rethinking
Thinking" by Trevor Maber, and was introduced to the "ladder of inference", an
idea developed by American business theoriest Chris Argyris, and subsequently
thrust into the corporate world by Peter Senge via his book "The Fifth Disciple:
The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation".

The ladder is often used as a tool to help an individual understand how and why
he/she thinks as he/she does about an issue. It can also help the individual
understand why others think differently about an issue and empathise with their
perspectives. The conscious use of the ladder of inference has been shown to be a
valuable resource for understanding the source of differences in opinions. I
identified many similarities between the research process and the steps involved in
the ladder of inference, and one of the most important lessons which I learned
while comparing both is - never be too quick to jump to conclusions! And one of
the ways to avoid jumping to conclusions is to always be clear about the
underlying assumptions and conclusions made.

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The steps involved in the ladder of inference, adapted from:

http://gwynteatro.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/climbing-the-ladder-of-inference/

Consultants advocate the use of the ladder to help leaders or management draw
better conclusions, make better decisions, or challenge other people's conclusions
based on the facts and information available. They also encourage the use of the
ladder in analysing hard data, for example, a set of sales figures, the consumption
habits of the general populace, or to test assertions. At the individual level, the
ladder of inference can also be used to help validate or challenge other people's
assertions or conclusions.

In research, although not many researchers or scholars have mentioned the use of
the ladder in their thought processes, I have noticed many similarities between the
steps expounded in the ladder of inference and how researchers go about doing
research.

The first step of the ladder of inference is the data. There is a vast amount of data
in the world, and each individual has a limited capacity to absorb them. Hence, the
individual selects the data, and proceeds to add meaning to the data he/she has
selected. Based on the meaning he/she has added, assumptions are made and
conclusions are drawn, and action is taken based on the conclusions made. The
cycle repeats when the results/consequences of the actions become data for
another round of climbing the ladder. Over time, it is believed that the conclusions
formed contribute to the foundation of the individual's beliefs, assumptions, and
even values. They also play an influential role in filtering the data selected and
adding meaning to the data when the process is repeated time and again.

In fact, I think the reason why the ladder of inference is highly applicable to
researchers and their thought processes is because the logic behind the ladder is
built on the assumptions about the human behaviour. In general, humans tend to:

 assume that others see the world as they do. Hence, if there are any
disagreements, they are usually concentrated on the conclusions. The issue
here is, humans assume that everyone selects the same data and adds the
same meaning to the data. Reality is, none of us do.;

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 take short-cuts around the ladder (e.g. jump to conclusions), and are
unconscious of the steps they have climbed on the ladder; and
 assume that any conclusions made are the "truth". But what is the truth?

Similarly, in research, the data at the bottom of the ladder represents the pool of
information that may be relevant to the researcher's research interests. Going up the
ladder, the researcher then selects the relevant information from the pool of
information available. The researcher proceeds to learn what the selected
information describes about the phenomenon or issue he/she is studying, and from
thereon, interpret and evaluate whatever he/she has noticed. Any assumptions or
beliefs that the researcher holds greatly influence whatever he/she notices from the
selected information. Following which, the researcher seeks to link the issue he/she
is studying to the information he/she has selected, identifying any inconsistencies
and consistencies between both, and finally, coming up with a theoretical
framework on which the issue will be investigated. Having established a
theoretical framework, the researcher then proceeds to investigate the issue and
provide explanations and conclusions regarding his findings, and at the end of it,
he/she will usually provide some limitations and recommendations for future
research.

I found the following questions derived from the ladder of inference extremely
useful when doing research:

 What are the facts that I should be using?

o Are the facts relevant?
o Are there other facts I should have considered?
 What data have I chosen to use and why?
o Have I selected data rigorously?
 Why have I chosen this course of action/approach?
o Are there other actions/approaches which I should have considered?
 What belief/assumption led to this particular action?
o Were the beliefs/assumptions well-founded?
 What am I assuming, and why?
o Essentially, are my assumptions valid?
 Why did I draw that conclusion?
o Is the conclusion sound?

The temptation to skip various steps of the ladder and jump straight to making
conclusions is something that the ladder of inference would like to remind people
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about (and prevent them from doing so). In order to address and overcome this
temptation, the ladder of inference advocates and emphasises critical thinking in
accepting the existence of perceptions, rather than simply trusting any data that one
has encountered. The next time you do any form of research, it might be a good
idea to go through your thinking process following the steps of the ladder of
inference. Having done that, let me know if the ladder of inference did assist you in
gaining further insights about your thought processes and how you go about doing
research.
Posted by Carys Xi Wen Chan at 12:00

http://www.sicotests.com/psyarticle.asp?id=165
Shortcomings that authors should avoid.

Rather than characterize the procedures that researchers should follow to construct
a theory, Sutton and Staw (1995) delineated a set of shortfalls that writers should
circumvent. First, according to Sutton and Staw (1995), many writers merely
include a list of references, such as "Extraversion is related to level of management
(Smith, 1995)" rather than explicate the mechanisms or processes that relate one
variable or event to another variable or event.

As Sutton and Staw (1995) contend, an allusion to a reference should not replace a
brief but lucid description of why these variables or events are related to one
another. Writers do not need to characterize every facet of the theory, but should
certainly summarize the key arguments.

Second, according to Sutton and Staw (1995), research findings should not be
regarded as a substitute to theory. For example, suppose a researcher wants to
contend that extraversion is related to level of management, which in turn is
associated with breadth of knowledge. To propose this argument, authors must
clarify why extraversion might be related to level of management&& the finding
that "Extraversion is related to level of management, as shown by Smith (1995)" is
informative, but not sufficient.

Third, as Weick (1989) contends, classifications or constructs should not be

regarded as substitutes to theories. For example, according to Sutton and Staw
(1995), dividing variables into dispositional and situational is not a theory.

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Characterizing three distinct forms of justice is not a theory, even if valuable to

readers. These contributions do not demonstrate how variables are related to one
another. They do not demonstrate how various events unfold.

Fourth, a diagram that entails a series of variables, connected by arrows, does not
alone represent a theory. Again, researchers need to characterize the mechanisms
or processes that underpin each arrow--a narrative to explain why one variable is
associated with another variable (Sutton & Staw, 1995).

Finally, researchers need to recognize that hypotheses are not theories. That is,
hypotheses do not specify the mechanisms or processes that demonstrate how the
variables might be related to each other. According to Sutton and Staw (1995), a
lengthly set of hypotheses often indicates that such propositions were included in
lieu of suitable theoretical development.

Arguments to justify these shortfalls

In some instances, researchers recognize their theories are not optimal, but rely on
references, data, constructs, diagrams, or hypotheses to mask shortfalls in their
arguments. Nevertheless, some scholars have proposed arguments that can be used
to justify the legitimacy of papers, despite these shortfalls.

First according to Weick (1995), the hallmarks of an exemplary theory are seldom
realized. Instead, most attempts merely represent approximations to these ideals.
For example, according to Merton (1967), some attempted theories are merely
frameworks, stipulating the categories of variables that are relevant to this domain.
Other attempted theories are merely characterizations of various constructs,
without any attempt to show how these concepts are related. Finally, some
attempted theories are broader conceptualizations of specific observations&& for
example, the finding that anger amplifies the optimism bias could be written as
negative emotional states might magnify cognitive errors.

Although these attempts do not represent exemplary theories, they do, according to
Weick (1995), facilitate the construction of insightful and definitive theoretical
arguments. In other words, these attempts are still invaluable, even if imperfect.
That is, these attempts to expedite the processes that underpin theory development:
abstracting, generalizing, relating, selecting, explaining, and synthesizing.

Second, according to DiMaggio (1995), these shortfalls, such as a reliance on

diagrams or hypotheses, do not compromise all categories of theories. That is, not
all theories are intended to explain relationships between associations. Some
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theories, for example, are intended to challenge readers, highlighting paradoxes

and undermining common assumptions, but not designed to explain broad
generalizations, which are usually broadly recognized and thus somewhat
unenlightening. As a consequence, no specific set of criteria should be applied to
all theories.

Indeed, many of the criteria that define optimal theories conflict with each other,
according to DiMaggio (1995). For example, theories need to penetrate a single
issue, deeply and profoundly, but also encompass a broad range of factors, such as
culture. Likewise, theories need to be lucid and clear, but also seem challenging
and paradoxical.

References

DiMaggio, P. J. (1995). Comments on "What theory is not". Administrative

Science Quarterly, 40, 391-397.

Kaplan, A. (1964). The conduct of inquiry. New York: Harper && Row.

Merton, R. K. (1967). On theoretical sociology. New York: Free Press.

Sutton, R. I., && Staw, B. M. (1995). What theory is not. Administrative Science
Quarterly, 40, 371-384.

Van Lange, P. A. M. (2012). What we should expect from theories in social

psychology: truth, abstraction, progress, and applicability as standards (TAPAS).
Personality and Social Psychology Review, 17, 40-55. doi:
10.1177/1088868312453088

Weick, K. E. (1989). Theory construction as disciplined imagination.Academy of

Management Review, 14, 516-531.

Weick, K. E. (1995). What theory is not, theorizing is. Administrative Science

Quarterly, 40, 385-390

Human Nature Review 3 (2003) 455-458 The Human Nature Review

ISSN 1476-1084
URL of this document
http://human-
nature.com/nibbs/03/landreth.html

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Human Nature Review 3 (2003) 455-458

The Human Nature Review

ISSN 1476-1084

http://human-nature.com/URL of this
document

nibbs/03/landreth.html Book Review Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy by

Patricia Smith Churchland. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Reviewed by
Anthony Landreth

Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy by Patricia Smith Churchland.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
Reviewed by Anthony Landreth

In many regards, Brain-Wise is an update on Patricia Churchland’s 1986 book

Neurophilosophy. Both books present textbook neuroscience in the context of
traditional philosophical problems. Neither of these books are so much an attempt
to argue, point-by-point, for particular positions on traditional philosophical issues,
as they are arguments for a different approach to philosophical questions.
A lot has happened since Neurophilosophy. With the advent of cognitive
neuroscience, and the continuing maturation of cognitive science, the base of
empirical research has grown enormously. With the passage of nearly two decades,
and the popularity of Neurophilosophy, a small but active and international
community of neurophilosophers has emerged. In Brain-Wise, Churchland adds to
the survey of relevant science some of the innovations of the next generation of
neurophilosophers. 1 Brain-Wise is not just an update on relevant science, but an
update on relevant neurophilosophy as well, offering coverage of work produced by
philosophers (e.g. Rick Grush and Steven Quartz) as well as neurophilosophical
work produced by neuroscientists (e.g. work on the emotions and decision making
from the Damasios).
The book is straightforwardly introductory. Each chapter ends with suggested
readings and each chapter begins with a survey of the philosophical area under

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investigation. The book is divided into sections devoted to metaphysics,

epistemology, and religion. Metaphysics breaks down into a chapter on the self and
self-knowledge, one on consciousness, and one on the free will debate.
Epistemology breaks down into a chapter on neuronal models of mental
representation and a chapter on neural plasticity and learning. The religion section
has only one chapter, entitled ‘Religion and the Brain’, principally concerned with
the explanatory value of religious perspectives.
Churchland’s strengths lie primarily in her synoptic view of the behavioral sciences.
As an alternative to thought-experiment as a method for investigating the order of
the natural world, she brings together a host of clearly described and familiar
scientific case studies. The rationale is that thought-experiment may have little
bearing on our understanding of the natural world. Churchland warns us to be wary
of a priori methods in philosophy, since, from a
Darwinian perspective, there is little reason to expect that we have come
prepackaged with the conceptual resources sufficient for an armchair discovery of
natural law. Churchland recommends that we would “do best to resign ourselves to
the probability that there is no special faculty whose exercise yields the Absolute,
Error-Free, Beyond-Science Truths of the Universe” (pg. 41). In Churchland’s
mind, this leads to a renouncement of metaphysics as a methodology, with the
retention of some meta-physical questions for scientific investigation. When the
sciences begin to encroach on the subject matter of metaphysics, the metaphysical
status of its issues “will eventually be cast off as uninformative and burdensome”
(40). In Churchland’s view, metaphysics is a term that one applies to the pre-
scientific stage in a field’s evolution, a term of history. In opposition to a priori
methods, Churchland endorses abductive argumentation. What can be explained by
a framework becomes the determinant of tenable positions. Case studies in neuro-
scientific explanation therefore take center-stage, since they become the data for
assessing explanatory power.
Unfortunately, this abductive approach is not one that Churchland sticks to
consistently. For instance, despite her deployment of explanatory strategies from
cognitive science, the bulk of her section on freedom of the will is guided by a priori
considerations in the standard fashion. Following her rejection of libertarian
approaches to freedom of the will, Churchland offers a compatibilism founded on a
concept of self-control that she confesses is in need of clarification. Then, she asks
us to test our intuitions regarding the amount of self-control we should attribute to

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an individual under a variety of circumstances (pg. 210). The result of this

investigation is supposed to uncover our concept of self-control (assuming that there
is just one such concept to be had) that will be useful for apportioning praise and
blame to those who uphold and violate our social norms. From a perspective of
staunch opposition to conceptual analysis, one should question that understanding
our (common sense?) concept of self-control will result in a better theory of either
freedom or personal responsibility. And yet, that seems to be what Churchland has
committed herself to by adopting the above strategy.
It is curious why Churchland did not take Daniel Dennett’s line (1984), that what we
ought to do is ask ourselves what sort of freedom—or perhaps self-control—we
might want, and then compare our list of desiderata to what nature has made
available, just to see if we can get it. Perhaps this would have been a more consistent
approach, since it would reduce—though unlikely eliminate—the competition of
intuitions that Churchland wants to avoid. Some people might discover that they
want no more freedom than a cognitive neuroscience of action provides. Others
might want more, but by taking Dennett’s route, their desire for that something more
becomes part of the selection criteria for a theory, not the methodology for
constructing the theory.
In other sections, Churchland sometimes gets running but seems to lose track of
where she is going. In her epistemology section, she argues for a naturalistic
approach, then moves on to theoretical issues concerning neural representation and
neural plasticity, without explaining the bearing of her case studies on basic
epistemological issues, for instance—how we can be wrong, or how we are to
understand what counts as evidence. While it might be a bit demanding to expect a
neurophilosophical theory of knowledge in an introductory text, one should at least
expect some coverage of the basic issues. This is absent. In place of these issues,
Churchland surveys some of the basics on neuroplasticity, a topic unfamiliar to
normative epistemology, but nonetheless important for consideration of the
epistemic constraints imposed upon us by our neural architecture.
While an account of neural representation is critical to Churchland’s contribution, in
this regard one might call into question the coherence of her presentation. One could
justifiably
be confused when encountering first Rick Grush’s emulator account of neural
representation in the section on self-knowledge, then Paul Churchland’s state space
account in the epistemology section. Churchland appears to endorse both accounts,
and yet they are quite different in the way that she describes them. In Grush’s

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emulator account (2003), representation is a similarity relation between some

phenomenon and a brain process, such that we can think of that process as
mimicking the input-output pat-tern of that which it represents. In the emulator
account, a neural representation is characterized as being part of a control system.
In Paul Churchland’s (1996) state space account of neural representation, the
content of a neural representation is defined in terms of its location in a multi-
dimensional space, where the parameters of the space could be defined according
to, e.g., stimulus features. The way it is presented, Paul Churchland’s account does
not appear to be an isomorphic account, but Grush’s account is explicitly based on
isomorphism. Control appears to be at the heart of Grush’s account, while vector
coding is the central concept in Paul Churchland’s view. Nowhere does
Churchland explain how these views are supposed to fit together. But while much
of the philosophical hard work of this section is left for another day, one cannot
fault Churchland for her attempts to encourage philosophers to exploit untapped
resources. Many of the ideas surveyed in this section are relevant but ignored by
contemporary epistemology. Many call into question how truly naturalized so-
called naturalized epistemology has become.
The shortest section of the book is the religion section. There is little of a
distinctively neurophilosophical approach at work in it. That is not to say that there
aren’t opportunities for neurophilosophers to do some work here. Graham (2000)
provides some clues as to how neu-rophilosophers might address problems relevant
to philosophical theology—for instance, in addressing the tension between
embodiment (as a way of thinking about cognition) and disembodiment (as a state
experienced in near-death cases), as well as questions concerning the cognitive
architecture of an omniscient being. The recent slew of popular books on the
relationship between religion and neuroscience might also have provided some
interesting grist for the mill. Instead, Churchland provides only a brief investigation
into the relationship between epilepsy and experiences of the divine, and tucks the
rest into the suggested reading list. This section is little more than an addendum to
the rest of the book and would not be missed.
While Brain-Wise is not an ideal introduction to philosophy, generally speaking, nor
the most biologically rigorous of neurophilosophy texts (cf. Bickle 2003) it is
perhaps the most accessible single-author introduction to neuro-philosophy
available. Churchland is always engaging, enthusiastic and frank. While there are a
number of neurophilosophical positions that she does not survey (cf. Bechtel, et al.
2002), the book offers more than enough to chew on with a kind narrative continuity
unavailable in edited volumes. Neurophilosophy is still young and the job of the
neurophilosopher is still not well-understood. Neurophilosophers—as theoreticians

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applying neuroscience to philosophical problems—are in increasing need of skills

for evaluating the character of neuroscientific evidence. The acquisition of these
skills would be greatly facilitated by a philosophy of science committed to problems
in neuroscience, but at present, there is no field of research that investigates the
methodological and epistemic problems encountered by neuroscientists. The
exchange between philosophy and neuroscience has been, primarily, one way. If this
state of affairs is going to change, philosophers will have to undergo a different
training regime to that to which they are accustomed. Philosophers will need a better
feel for the geography of the biologically-based behavioral sciences. Toward that
end, Brain-Wise represents progress in its level of detail and accessibility in
canvassing cognitive neuroscience, in its challenge to conventional wisdom on the
nature of
the philosopher’s intellectual contribution, and in its gestures toward a different kit
of tools with which to make that contribution.
Anthony Landreth, Graduate Program in Philosophy and the Sciences, University
of Cincinnati, USA.
Notes
1. To avoid confusion, whenever referring to the author, I use the last name
“Churchland” alone. When referring to Paul Churchland, I will consistently use both
his first and last name.
References
Bechtel, William et al., eds., (2001) Philosophy and the Neurosciences: A Reader,
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001
Dennett, Daniel (1984) Elbow room : the varieties of free will worth wanting.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Churchland, Paul M. (1995) The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul : A
Philosophical Journey into the Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Churchland, Patricia S. (1986) Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of
the Mind-Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Graham, George (1998) Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction, 2 nd ed. Malden,
Mass.: Blackwell Publishers.
Grush, Rick. “In Defense of Some ‘Cartesian’ Assumptions Concerning the Brain
and Its Operation.” Biology and Philosophy 18: 53–93, 2003. .
https://openparachute.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/the-scientific-method-what-
about-the-philosophical-method/

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The scientific method – what about the philosophical method?

Posted on January 30, 2012 | 14 Comments

I enjoy the In Our Time Podcasts with Melvyn Bragg. The subjects are very wide-ranging and
always informative.

His last one was on The Scientific Method. It basically discusses the evolution of scientific
methods from a philosophical viewpoint. The participants were:

 Simon Schaffer, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge;

 John Worrall, Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the LSE and
 Michela Massimi, Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Science at University College London.

Personally, I would have welcomed inclusion of a practising scientist to bring some practical
insight into the discussion. Still, I did find the historical survey of philosophers ideas on the
scientific method interesting. But it got me thinking – these philosophers seem so concerned
about the scientific method – and yet no one talks about the philosophical method!

What is the philosophical method?

What methods do philosophers use? And how have these evolved over time? And why do we
never come across critiques of philosophical methods? Is this because philosophers are happier
critiquing other areas and avoid their own?

For example. While I thought this discussion did treat the subject fairly the descriptions of
scientific method offered by various philosophers over the years do strike me as “just so” stories.
I get the feeling that the philosophers concerned are presenting their pet model. Evidence quoted
is usually anecdotal, more for example rather than support. The Copernican revolution, or the
evolution of Einsteinian mechanics out of Newtonian mechanics are used to illustrate a thesis,
rather than testing the hypothesis by analysing the data from the history of a large number of
scientific theories.

Now, I could never have got any of my research results accepted for publication with only
anecdotal and illustrative evidence. Good data, statistically analysed to show significance for
claims, was always expected. The standards for philosophical theories seems to be a lot lower.
How many philosophers really take data collection and analysis seriously?

The other thing that strikes me about these “just so” stories are that they always seem to ignore
the human factor. Scientific method is often presented as an algorithm or flow chart – scientists
behave this way and they produce hypotheses which are checked experimentally, etc.

But scientists are humans. They are just as prone to emotions as any other people. And in fact
current scientific understanding of decision-making indicates that emotions are very much
involved in our seemingly rational considerations. Where else do scientists get the passion for
the work they do? Creativity does not come from mechanical application of methods. And

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scientists are also prone to prejudice, fantasy, attachment to preconceived ideas, and
confirmation bias as anyone else. The possible consequences of this need to be recognised and
scientific methodology must compensate for it.

That’s why I like Richard Feynman‘s description of scientific method as “doing whatever it
takes to avoid being fooled by reality.” This is a better description of the human reality of
scientific research than any descriptive, or prescriptive, flow diagram of “scientific method.”

Why does this matter?

Well, for two reasons:

1: How often does one read material from opponents of science using pop versions of scientific
method and philosophy of science to justify their rejection of, or denial of, scientific
knowledge? Creationists and climate change deniers will often talk about Kuhnian “paradigms”
or Popperian “falsification” to justify their rejection of whole fields of science. We even have the
ridiculous example of a climate denier group in Australia naming itself The Galileo Movement!
They are equating acceptance of the current scientific understanding as equivalent to belief in a
geocentric universe! (See “Galileo Movement” Fuels Climate Change Divide in Australia).

2: Post-modernist and ideological motivated concepts of the philosophy of science do get

circulated in academic circles. In the past I have heard some of these descriptions presented by
local science managers and suspect that these ideas can influence management and human
resources teachings via philosophy of science and sociology of science inputs. The danger is that
this influence decisions on science funding and investment.

Maybe some of the cock-ups we have seen in science management and New Zealand over the
years could be traced back to ideology and misunderstanding about the nature of scientific
research picked up by managers during their training. Maybe not all these mistakes were due to
incompetence.

14 responses to “The scientific method – what about the philosophical method?”

1. ropata | January 30, 2012 at 4:26 pm |

Although philosophy includes formal deductive logic, the “philosophical method” that
you seem so suspicious of is not a formal process, it is a rich history of tossing ideas
about and robustly questioning anything and everything. This questioning process may
seem less important in fields where there is plenty of quantitative empirical data, but in
other sciences such as sociology or economics or politics or psychology, philosophical
arguments carry a lot of weight. People and societies are bloody complicated and less
amenable to measurement and modelling than natural processes.

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2. Ken | January 30, 2012 at 4:42 pm |

Ropata – I am not suspicious of philosophical method – just pointing out that while
philosophers will pontificate (often incorrectly) about scientific method no one seems to
pay attention to the philosophical method bring used. Well, Marx did – and I think his
Feurbach theses on this were insightful. But hardly anyone else.

I agree with you on the difficulty of getting objective data in the social sciences. We have
to approach each situation at the level which is possible and shouldn’t be ashamed of that.
Unfortunately I feel sometimes that this is accompanied by permissive subjectivism
rather than honest acknowledgement of limitations.

Regarding philosophy of science I do think there is scope for more objectivity and
wonder about the new field of experimental philosophy. This seems to be paying off in
areas of neuroscience and human cognition. I suspect though it is looked down on by
many philosophers who don’t wish to dirty their hands.

Regarding scientific method I do think there is room for a more data intensive study.
Really, anecdotal illustrations are just not adequate. And they do give free reign to
ideology so that we get some quite shocking philosophers and sociologists of science
(Steve Fuller for example).

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3. cognosium | January 30, 2012 at 8:26 pm |

There is much nonsense talked of scientific method.

Philosophers and teachers are perhaps the main offenders.

Some scientists, usually those few who tend to make science a surrogate religion, invent
obfuscations.

I agree with your opinion, Ken, that Feynman’s typically down-to-earth description is
very apt.

Science is essentially systematic observation.

Scientific method is simply the attempt to, wherever possible, enhance the significance of
observations by the exclusion of confounding variables.

We call this controlled experiment.

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4. Cedric Katesby | January 30, 2012 at 11:10 pm |

Creationists and climate change deniers will often talk about Kuhnian “paradigms” or
Popperian “falsification” to justify their rejection of whole fields of science.

We don’t know absolutely everything therefore we know nothing.

It works for many diverse groups.

Here’s just one famous example:

Do we know absolutely everything about lung cancer? No.

Do we know absolutely everything about tobacco? No.
Therefore, we must do nothing. Absolutely nothing.
How…convenient.

We even have the ridiculous example of a climate denier group in Australia naming itself
The Galileo Movement!

Every crackpot wants to shamelessly drape themselves in the mantle of Galileo. It’s as
sort of reflex action for scumbags of all shapes and sizes.

‘In “reality”, taking up the mantle of Galileo requires not just that you are scorned by the
establishment but also that you are correct. There is no necessary link between being
perceived as wrong and actually being correct; usually if people perceive you to be
wrong, you are wrong. However, the selective reporting of cases where people who were
persecuted or ostracized for beliefs and ideas that later turned out to be valid has instilled
a confidence in woo promoters and pseudoscientists that is difficult to shake. They really
do forget the part where they have to prove themselves right in order to be like Galileo.’

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5. HappyEvilSlosh | January 31, 2012 at 9:04 pm |

“And why do we never come across critiques of philosophical methods?”

Maybe because you haven’t looked: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphilosophy

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6. cognosium | February 1, 2012 at 8:45 am |

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Notwithstanding the reference to “Metaphilosophy”, which of course, is itself part of

philosophy and thus self-referential, the proper reply to:

“And why do we never come across critiques of philosophical methods?”

Is that, in philosophy, which has no overall axiomatic basis, anything goes!

Even the old favorite pronouncement of Descartes has no logical validity.

You can, of course define a system of axioms to use in a subset of philosophy. By far the
most useful system of this kind is that subset called science.

But even in a case such as this the selection of axioms in relation to philosophy per se is
arbitrary.

Twiddling around with philosophy might be, like stamp collecting, an entertaining
pastime but for the generation and manipulation of “real world” (Yeah, I know…)
artifacts, only “Natural Philosophy”, science, is uniquely successful. .

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7. Giovanni | February 1, 2012 at 1:32 pm |

“And why do we never come across critiques of philosophical methods?”

From Socrates onwards, the development and critique of philosophical methods has been
*the* primary concern of philosophy.

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8. Ken | February 1, 2012 at 3:03 pm |

But it doesn’t appear to have concerned anyone else. Nothing seems to get through to the
more accessible literature in the way that discussion of, and polemics on, the scientific
method have. There does not seem to be any equivalent of the Dover case where evidence
had to be presented on scientific method and definitions given.

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9. Giovanni | February 1, 2012 at 3:19 pm |

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Scientists and the wider public routinely discuss post-structuralist and so-called
postmodern philosophy, its social implications, as well as its implications for the practice
of science. To name one. Or Marxism, to name another.

If you’re after legal cases, they would be too numerous to mention, but the ones
involving Holocaust denial seem to have been particularly significant to me, and have
involved a deep questioning of different philosophical methods, both in the broad arena
of public opinion and in works of scholarship such as Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the
Holocaust and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Differend.

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10. Ken | February 1, 2012 at 3:28 pm |

Well, Giovanni – I haven’t seen this regular “scientists and wider public discussion.”
How about providing some links?

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11. ropata | February 1, 2012 at 3:30 pm |

Philosophy of science doesn’t get inordinate criticism that I aware (setting aside Fox
News etc). Politics, ethics & religion are publicly dissected far more.
Having said that, Wired magazine thinks Science is failing us!

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12. Giovanni | February 1, 2012 at 3:46 pm |

“Well, Giovanni – I haven’t seen this regular “scientists and wider public discussion.”
How about providing some links?”

When I was a lad in the old country, the finer point of Hegel, Marx and Gramsci were a
common topic for discussion on the factory floor. Current debates in New Zealand may
not be quite so sophisticated, but what goes under the pejorative term of “relativism” (and
is a strawman version of postmodern philosophy) is brought up often enough, you’ll
pardon me for not collecting the links (god I hate how hyperlinks are now what counts as
evidence in internet discussions). The Sokal querelle certainly got a lot of play in the
media in its day. And so on and so forth. But the most obvious relevant current debate is
the one concerning the funding of humanities vs. science at university and research level,

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and it ultimately hinges on the perceived social and economic value of the philosophical
method, whose stocks are at an all-time low.

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13. Ken | February 1, 2012 at 3:47 pm |

Ropata – this post was referring to a specific episode of In our Times podcast. While I
have no real bitch with the historical description given I do find it interesting that we get
programmes like this and really nothing on “the philosophical method.” Perhaps no-one
is interested?

But I think that is short-sighted because whereas science has a powerful factor keeping it
honest (its interaction with reality) philosophy does not. Therefore we have different
“schools” of philosophy – and often those commenting on real world issues are not up
front about their world view. So clear descriptions of philosophical methods and the
difference between the different schools would be valuable.

As someone who has had a lot of experience with the practice of science I find many of
the descriptions of scientific method given by philosophers are just wrong. And not just
from philosophers of religion like Plantinga and Craig. I also find the
“philosophical/methodological materialism” argument of people like Forrest unrealistic
(even opportunistic). As I say these tend to be “just so” stories that the propounder is
trying to fit reality into.

I still think there is room for an experimental philosopher to make a more data intensive
study of just how scientific research actually occurs. But my impression is that
experimental philosophers’ are looked down on by other philosophers because they get
their hands dirty.

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14. Cedric Katesby | February 1, 2012 at 7:14 pm |

I find many of the descriptions of scientific method given by philosophers are just wrong.
And not just from philosophers of religion like Plantinga and Craig.

That’s not all they get wrong.

They also seem to have this serious mental block with atheism.
It’s a really simple thing to understand. It’s really simple to describe.
There is no required reading necessary nor “deep” concepts that one must grasp.
Yet there is this predictable-as-clockwork compulsion to create strawmen whenever they
try to talk about atheism.

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https://openparachute.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/the-limits-of-philosophy/

The limits of philosophy

Posted on May 2, 2013 | 11 Comments

Or should I say – “The trouble with philosophy?”

Whatever. The title certainly makes a change from those like “The Limits of science.” How
many times have I seen such titles on articles written by religious apologists, philosophers of
religion, or even straight non-religious philosophers. These articles usually annoy me because
they often set up a straw man – a claim that science has no limits – which no scientists is making.

So it’s nice to turn the tables for a change.

Monty Python’s Football – Philosophers often play for different teams

I often get criticised by philosophers, theologians, philosophers of religion and students of

philosophy for making philosophical mistakes – or so they claim. I’ve been told that I should not
write about the science of morality if I haven’t read and studied a long list of ancient, and not so
ancient, philosophers. Commonly I am admonished for trying to determine an “ought from an is”
– a violation of “Humes Law.” And I have been told that scientists should leave questions like
origins of life and the universe, or the question of existence of supernatural beings, to
philosophers. Such questions, they tell me, are outside the limits of science.

Oh yes, about now I also get accused of “scientism!”

Very often my reply to such criticisms is that there is no such thing as an accepted unified
philosophical dogma. That the claims thrown at me come not from philosophy in general, but
from a particular school of philosophy. There is “philosophy” and then there is “philosophy.” My
critics should be up front and advance their claims as representative of their own philosophy, or
the particular school of philosophy they adhere to, not as representative of philosophy in general.

“What do Philosophers Believe?

So I am pleased to see the on-line publication of the paper “What Do Philosophers Believe?“ by
David Bourget and David J. Chalmers. This study confirms that philosophers are indeed divided
on a number of issues – they hold a range of beliefs which can influence their philosophical
thoughts and positions. These beliefs are influenced by a range of demographic and social
factors. And philosophers themselves often have a false opinion of the degree to which different
beliefs are common in their professional community.

Sean Carroll, at What Do Philosophers Believe?, and Jerry Coyne at The consensus of
philosophers, have commented briefly on the paper. Have a look at those articles, or the paper
itself (download here), for a full list of beliefs and their degree of support among philosophers.

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But here are a few which seem relevant to debates I have had here. (Sorry about the briefness of
the terms – that’s related to the nature of the survey):

1. A priori knowledge: yes 71.1%; no 18.4%; other 10.5%.

5. Epistemic justification: externalism 42.7%; internalism 26.4%; other 30.8%.

6. External world: non-skeptical realism 81.6%; skepticism 4.8%; idealism 4.3%; other 9.2%.

8. God: atheism 72.8%; theism 14.6%; other 12.6%.

10. Knowledge: empiricism 35.0%; rationalism 27.8%; other 37.2%.

15. Metaphilosophy: naturalism 49.8%; non-naturalism 25.9%; other 24.3%.

16. Mind: physicalism 56.5%; non-physicalism 27.1%; other 16.4%.

18. Moral motivation: internalism 34.9%; externalism 29.8%; other 35.3%.

20. Normative ethics: deontology 25.9%; consequentialism 23.6%; virtue ethics 18.2%; other
32.3%.

25. Science: scientific realism 75.1%; scientific anti-realism 11.6%; other 13.3%.

So I feel vindicated in answering my critics by pointing out the lack of consensus among
philosophers on many issues. What right has a philosopher of religion to assure me their
arguments against my statements are “philosophical” (and not just representative of a school of
religious philosophy)? Similarly, why should I simply take on trust assurances that “philosophy”
has a particular position on scientific realism, moral motivations or the nature of ethical norms?

There is “philosophy” and there is “philosophy.” If you wish to lecture me about philosophical
positions at least be open about the philosophical school you are representing or adhere to.

No suprise at differences
Frankly, I am unsurprised at the lack of consensus among philosophers. It contrasts sharply with
the situation in science – which on most matters has a high degree of consensus. OK, there are
debates at the edges – and these can be intense. Remember the scene in “The Big Bang Theory”
where a romantic alliance between two physicists broke up because one was a “String Theorist‘
while the other adhered to “Loop Gravity“. Just imagine the problems they would have raising
their children!

Ben Goren commented at Jerry’s website on the poor philosophical consensus compared with
science :

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“Survey a bunch of scientists on comparable topics, and you’ll find overwhelming consensus
that, for example: Evolution is true; Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are basically right on
(and anything that replaces either is going to have to reduce to both at suitable scales); that the
Earth’s surface moves in manners described by Plate Tectonics; and so on.

Yet these jokers are doing good just to get a slim majority that don’t think that we’re all literally
outside of our brains.”

But while we should be aware of the different levels of confidence in philosophical and scientific
knowledge this does not show differences in personal capabilities between the two professions.
The difference is exactly what we should expect from the different nature of the two subjects.

Philosophy could be said to be an “armchair” subject. Philosophers reason and think. They apply
logic to hypothetical situations. Often scenarios which have no possible reality but are at least
“logical possibilities” will get a lot of attention. It’s also not surprising that demographic and
social factors can influence philosophical reasoning. Humans are just not very rational and their
reasoning often suffers from ideolgical and social motivations.

Science is usually a very much “hands on” subject. Ideas are tested against reality. Scientists are
just as irrational (or human) as anyone else – they also easily fall into the trap of motivated
reasoning. But the final arbiter of ideas for science is reality itself. Experiments can be
performed or observations made to check predictions of hypotheses.

Of course philosophy and science does merge at the edges. There is actually a field of
experimental philosophy and good philosophers do pay attention to scientific knowledge. On the
other hand some science cannot always be tested in practice – at least with the current
technological limits. Some scientists seem to work more like philosophers – and some
philosophers work more like scientists.

But let’s get away from the idea that logic or philosophy is the final arbiter of knowledge. That is
taking philosophy beyond its limits.

 Bushbasher | May 2, 2013 at 5:11 pm |

To the outside observer, it would appear that Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and the logical
positivists rubbished most of the speculative nonsense which passed for ‘philosophy’…about
100 years ago. The great Feynmann thought such ‘philosophy’ a joke, and regularly said so.
Levine’s “In Bad Faith” nails it.

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 mikespeir | May 2, 2013 at 7:53 pm |

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To me, the value of philosophy isn’t that it provides the big answers. It rarely does. The value of
philosophy is that it asks the big questions, the ones that rub our noses in the uncomfortable truth
that we really don’t have it all figured out as well as we kid ourselves that we do.

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 Ken | May 2, 2013 at 8:08 pm |

Sure, Mike, but even in the questions being asked there are differences arising from the very
nature of philosophy itself as being based on an attempt, only an attempt mind you, at logic and
rational thought. Some of the questions being posed can reveal a terrific lot about the ideological
motivations of the questioners. Some of the so called “why” questions can in themselves be
meaningless.

I think the best questions are those asked by those who interact with reality.

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 mikespeir | May 2, 2013 at 11:58 pm |

“I think the best questions are those asked by those who interact with reality.”

Absolutely. Now, let’s construct a philosophy that will settle once and for all what reality is.

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 Cedric Katesby | May 3, 2013 at 4:13 am |

…the ones that rub our noses in the uncomfortable truth that we really don’t have it all figured
out as well as we kid ourselves that we do.

Ah. Um. Wha…?

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 Ken | May 3, 2013 at 7:18 am |

Mike – you propose “Now, let’s construct a philosophy that will settle once and for all what
reality is.”

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But isn’t that going outside the limits of philosophy? Surely philosophy is not capable of
answering such questions? Isn’t that the function of science?

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 mikespeir | May 3, 2013 at 8:04 am |

Well, I wouldn’t say so. I see philosophy as dealing with the most fundamental of questions,
even to how science is supposed to work. I mean, the rationale behind scientific work is
philosophical, right? Whenever we discuss the how and why of anything, including science, isn’t
that philosophical?

BTW, my question was a little tongue-in-cheek. I don’t think we’re going to be able to land on a
way of looking at reality that everyone will agree on.

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 Ken | May 3, 2013 at 10:14 am |

Bit, Mike, haven’t we already “landed” on a way of looking at reality which has an immense
amount of consensus – and a way which is very successful and bringing humanity great
understanding and many benefits? It’s called science.

Pure abstract philosophy has not had that success – basically because it doesn’t interact with
reality.

Now, of course philosophy does deal with epistemology etc. But as I have said, and as that
survey makes clear, there is “philosophy” and “philosophy.” True, a philosophy which integrates
with scientific knowledge and process is going to have lot of success. It can even help clarify
how science is done – as long as it does not do so dogmatically.

But be careful about claiming things for “philosophy” in general. There are a number of
philosophical rationales “behind scientific work” and discussion of “the why and how” of things
including science which are pure crap.

For example, some philosophers of religion today are advancing concepts of how science is done
which present it in an extremely false light. For example Plantinga.

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 mikespeir | May 3, 2013 at 8:25 pm |

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I agree with a lot of that. It just looked to me like you were trying to divorce science from
philosophy altogether. Everything–everything at all–has a philosphy underlying it. That’s the
way I tend to use the word. You, apparently, mean something on the order of “that which
professional philosphers do.” Not mutually exclusive, but the spotlight doesn’t necessarily shine
on exactly the same place.

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 Ken | May 3, 2013 at 9:47 pm |

Mike, it really does come back to my point that there is not a consensus in philosophy. Some
philosophy favours science, others oppose it.

I think there was a requirement for a fundamental break with medieval philosophy for the
scientific revolution to occur. In the case of Galileo he expressed it in terms of discovering things
about the natural world by investigating the natural world – not from authority or scripture.

The old philosophy had proved itself incapable of promoting understanding and knowledge and
was intricately intertwined with religion. The new scientific philosophy accepted the need to
investigate and learn from reality, not scripture and authority.

History has shown that a scientific philosophy has been incredibly successful because it
promoted a modern scientific process. But the old medieval philosophy still survives and is
promoted by religions – some more actively, some passively.

So in effect we see a conflicts between different philosophies in today’s world. It is represented

in the conflict between science and religion. In fact the evangelical religious philosophers can be
quite clear about the philosophy they promote in opposition to scientific philosophy. The
intelligent design people at the Discovery Institute made this obvious in their Wedge Strategy
document.

I am not attempting to divorce science from philosophy – just from bad philosophy. In fact
scientist are, without most of them being aware, intuitively doing philosophy when they do
scientific research. But if they accepted Plantinga’s advocacy of simple logical possibility as
reality instead of investigating reality itself then they wouldn’t be doing science – they would be
doing religion.

It is too naive to claim that everything has philosophy behind it without being clear that some
philosophy is bad while some is good.

In my experience people, usually students I think, who tell me what scientific method is from a
philosophical perspective (eg methodological materialism) do not understand scientific process
at all and they are attempting to impose a dogmatic view.

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Like

 mounthell or D Hollenberg | November 11, 2015 at 6:29 pm |

@mikespeir: “Everything–everything at all–has a philosophy underlying it.”

(Whoa; you’ve overshot this runway:) Every human action might have a _theory_ underlying it
— certainly science practice does — but philosophies are at best distantly incidental to a life well
lived. (We hear the P-term a lot because it is routinely overused in conversation: ‘What is your
philosophy about vehicle or _______ maintenance?

https://openparachute.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/the-limits-of-philosophy/

https://philpapers.org/rec/BOUWDP

What do philosophers believe?

https://openparachute.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/debates-in-the-philosophy-of-science/

https://openparachute.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/on-being-philosophical-about-science/

https://openparachute.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/the-philosophy-wars/

https://openparachute.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/using-philosophy/

https://openparachute.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/new-secular-philosophy-blog/

https://openparachute.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/traditions-and-social-arrangements-out-of-step-
with-social-diversity/

https://openparachute.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/the-problem-with-reasoned-discussion/

Why is a straightforward logical discussion so impossible? Why do our discussion partners

refuse to accept our reasoned arguments? And, if we are honest, why do we ourselves find it so
difficult to accept the reasonable logic of our discussion partners?

Well, a recent article at the blog “Why We Reason” provides an answer. It is Psychology’s
Treacherous Trio: Confirmation Bias, Cognitive Dissonance, and Motivated Reasoning and
reinforces what I have often felt – we are not really a rational species – more a rationalising one.

Beliefs dictate what and how we see

The article gets to the root of the matter – the psychological forces that fuel our conversations:

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“While many like to believe that they have a special access to the truth, the reality is that we all
see the world not as it is, but as we want it to be: Republicans watch Fox while Democrats watch
MSNBC; creationists see fossils as evidence of God, evolutionary biologists see fossils as
evidence of evolution; a mother sees abortion as the best thing for her daughter, and the church
sees it as unholy and sinful. You get the point – our beliefs dictate what we see and how we see.”

The article goes on to discuss “a few psychological tendencies that when mixed together form a
potent recipe for ignorance.”

Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias sticks out like a sore thumb when participants in discussion cherry-pick
authorities and citations to support their arguments. Well, it sticks out like a sore thumb to the
discussion partner anyway (who may also be cherry-picking to confirm an opposite bias).

“Confirmation bias is exactly what it sounds like – the propensity for people to look for what
confirms their beliefs and ignore what contradicts their beliefs while not being concerned for the
truth.”

Hard not to fall into that trap when discussing complex issues within the constraints of limited
space and time. But, nevertheless, something we should attempt to avoid.

Cognitive dissonance

“Then there’s cognitive dissonance, which describes a “state of tension that occurs whenever a
person holds two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent.” “

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The article provides an example:

“Leon Festinger introduced it in 1957 after he infiltrated and studied a UFO cult convinced the
world would end at midnight on December 21st, 1954. In his book When Prophecy
Fails, Festinger recounts how after midnight came and went, cult members began to look for
reasons for why the end of the world had not come. Eventually the leader of the cult, Marian
Keech, explained to her members that she received a message from automatic writing, which told
her that the God of Earth decided to spare the planet from destruction. Relieved, the cult
members continued to spread their doomsday ideology to non-believers. Although Festiner’s
example is extreme, all of us do this everyday. Take unhealthy food; we all know that pizza is
bad for us, but we still eat it. And after finishing a few slices we say “it was worth it,” or “I’ll run
it off tomorrow.” Or take smokers; they know that smoking kills but continue to smoke. And
after unsuccessfully quitting, they justify their failures by claiming that, “smoking isn’t that bad”
or that “it is worth the risk.” Whether it’s UFO’s, food, or smoking we all hold inconsistent
beliefs and almost always side with what is most comfortable instead of what is true.”

Motivated reasoning

The article describes this as “our tendency to accept what we want to believe with much more
ease and much less analysis than what we don’t want to believe.”

I think religious apologists often provide the most obvious examples of motivated reasoning –
probably because they are often trained in philosophy and logic. They will argue that their beliefs
are based on reason and not faith, and seem to enjoy constructing logical arguments for their
claims which seem to be built on simple logical steps. Yet, they gloss over, or ignore, the huge
jumps in logic which are inevitably part of their reasoning.

Maybe a faith-based belief reinforced by motivated reasoning is the hardest to defeat because the
proponent actually believes their arguments are completely rational.

The article concludes:

“So what’s the difference between confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and motivated
reasoning? The short answer is that there really aren’t any differences. Generally speaking, they
serve the same purpose, and that is to frame the world so it makes sense to us. But there are a
few nuances worth mentioning. For one, motivated reasoning is like an evil twin to cognitive

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dissonance in that it tries to avoid it. And for another, and I quote NYU psychologist Gary
Marcus who says it perfectly, “whereas confirmation bias is an automatic tendency to notice data
that fit with our beliefs, motivated reasoning is the complementary tendency to scrutiinize ideas
more carefully if we don’t like them than if we do.””

https://openparachute.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/the-scientific-method-what-about-the-
philosophical-method/

https://openparachute.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/why-does-science-have-a-cognitive-privilege/

You don’t often come across the term “cognitive privilege.” But I did the other day – and knew
immediately what it meant – or what was being implied by the term.

The theologian Brian Mattson used it in his blog post Does Scientific Materialism Deserve a
Cognitive Privilege? Its clear what he means, although his specific use of it is very confused. He
accuses someone of, in effect, cognitively privileging “scientific materialism.”

(These theologians love to use words like “materialism” and “naturalism” when they critique
science. The rarely bother defining the terms but they are usually stand-ins for scientific method
or the implied scientific epistemological process.)

As he says:

“A “privilege” is a “right or immunity granted as a particular benefit, advantage, or favor.” The

benefit, advantage, or favor being granted to scientific materialism is that it has the preeminent
right to be the baseline. It is what we are to take for granted. There the edifice stands.”

He is supporting the complaints of Alvin Plantinga and Thomas Nagel about modern science:

“Their point (a philosophically ruthless and perhaps uncomfortable one) is that scientific
materialism is not entitled to privileged status at all. It is not self-evident, self-justifying, an
edifice that must be taken for granted as the baseline. It is precisely this sleight-of-hand they are
challenging, a sleight-of-hand so effective it has largely produced the widespread privileging of
its construct . . . . . It is simply not the case that scientific materialism must be taken as true and
that the burden of proof must be passed on to any and all challengers.”

So these guys are upset by the widespread acceptance that science is generally a reliable way of
getting to know reality? They think this reputation is “privileged? That it hasn’t been earned?
That we have pulled the wool over the eyes of people all these years? We have an unearned
“privilege?”

They obviously haven’t really thought this through, or even looked around at our modern
society. At most they will childishly chant “You can’t logically prove scientific method or
knowledge is reliable.”

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Crickey, do they really think that humanity should have held back. Refused to even contemplate
trying to understand its environment or solve the problems it faced until someone had come up
with a watertight deductive proof that science would work? Something to make it “self-evident”
or “self-justifying?”

And, seriously, do they think that people would have paid any attention to such a deduction? Or
taken seriously the philosophers or logicians who has produced it?

The proof of the pudding

We haven’t allowed such mental gymnastics hold us back. Humanity just went ahead and did the
best it could. Trial and error has taught us what works best. The proof of the pudding was in the
eating.

People respect scientific method and knowledge because of their own experience. They know it
works. So they aren’t particularly interested in these complaints of lack of deductive proof.

And guess what – even scientists, those using these methods are not particularly interested in
those deductive proofs either. They are practical people – if the methods didn’t work they
wouldn’t bother with them. They would look for something else.

So if science has a good reputation it’s well-earned. People know from experience that it works.
That’s why it’s respected. That’s why society and governments turn to scientists when there are
problems and we are looking for solutions.

Science has cognitive respect – not privilege, and certainly not the unearned privilege suggested
by Plantinga, Nagel and Brian Mattson.

An attempt to demand privilege as a right

Mattson’s complaint about the “cognitive privilege” of science is, however, revealing. Both
Plantinga and Nagel have been critiquing the high standing of science because they are arguing
for an alternative. They are in effect demanding that religious or other “way’s of knowing,”
revelation and philosophy of religion, should be more acceptable to humanity. That it should be
given the credibility that science gets, perhaps even more. The more honest theologian may
admit that there is no obvious reason for accepting religious and similar “ways of knowing,” but
because scientific knowledge and method is no more “self-evident” or “self-justifying” than
religious knowledge, the two methods should be treated as “equally valid”

But where science has won cognitive respect through experience, through successful
performance, these theologians and philosophers of religion seem to think they can demand
cognitive respect as a right. Without earning it through deeds.

Actually they, not science, are the ones demanding cognitive privilege.

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(Meta-Philosophy/izing) Philosophizing and Theorizing

Please take note and read my previous articles here – https://independent.academia.edu/UlrichdeBalbian on

philosophizing (the doing of philosophy), philosophical discourse, subject-matter and methods. I do not ask this
because I wish someone to read my articles, but so that you share at least some of my background, that I assume, for
this article.

I have always reflected on things for as long as I can remember, therefore philosophical reflection is merely natural
or automatic to my character. When I read philosophers I do not merely focus on the contents of what they write, but
I instantly see their pre-suppositions, their assumptions and other transcendentals, implicit or tacit issues and ideas.
In other words I automatically deal with philosophical ideas, works, epistemologies, ontologies, metaphysics and
methodologies in a meta-philosophical manner. Thus even these descriptions, narratives, dialogues, thoughts and
thinking of mine are treated, viewed and valued for their meta-philosophical nature and concerns.

One of the recurring things that I have noticed in philosophy or philosophizing is the resemblance between the
nature and characteristics of these practices with that of the steps, stages, intra-contexts, features and other aspects of
the process/es of theorizing. This is the reason for and the aim of this meta-philosophical piece on theory and
theorizing. I wish to make a number of things concerning theory, theorizing or theory-building or –construction
explicit. Such things can then be compared to features, aspects, steps, stages etc in the process/es of doing
philosophy or the process/es of philosophizing. The articles presented here serve as scanning and collecting data for
reflection. This data is not merely viewed and then locked away after deductions or reflections concerning general
patterns in them, but they will be employed in different contexts and at different stages of this article – or the
process of theorizing presented in the narrative o=by which it is constituted. In other words data, like generalizing
reflections for me do not have a fixed place or a single step in the process of theorizing. They will be returned to
over and over again, with different functions, for example to modify certain generalizations. Some of these articles
refer to this backwards and forwards movement as returning to literature, sources, data, etc.

I do not have set hypotheses or preconceived ideas about the outcome of this investigation as I will see what
happens during the entire process of philosophizing or theorizing set out during the narrative of this article. All these
things have been conceptualized by institutionalized terms and we will come across them in the articles mentioned
here.

In this article I will deal with theorizing as it is presented and dealt with in a few publications. These articles are
from what I have seen the best. I attached a lengthy appendix to one of my previous articles for sources about
theorizing, theory and meta-theory.

I present a few articles on theorizing partly as the collection of relevant data to my ‘problem’, or hypothesis (that
philosophizing, the process/es of doing philosophy resembles theorizing, the process/es of theorizing) and/or as the
scanning of relevant literature on the subject of theorizing and theory-building, construction or development.

Before theory comes theorizing or how to make social science more ...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12184/abstract

Before Theory Comes Theorizing or How to Make Social Science ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34DME7lCe1I

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http://forskning.ku.dk/find-en-forsker/?pure=da%2Fpublications%2Fwhat-conception-of-the-
theoretical-does-theorizing-presuppose(235822cf-3746-4184-85d5-c4532bf9ddf5)%2Fexport.html

The basic argument in this article is that sociology and social science more generally are today severely hampered
by the lack of attention being paid to theory. Methods--qualitative as well as quantitative methods--have proven
to be very useful in practical research (as opposed to theory); and as a result they dominate modern social science.
They do not, however, do the job that belongs to theory. One way to redress the current imbalance between methods
and theory, it is suggested, would be to pay more attention to theorizing, that is, to the actual process that precedes
the final formulation of a theory; and in this way improve theory. Students of social science are today primarily
exposed to finished theories and are not aware of the process that goes into the production and design of a theory.
Students need to be taught how to construct a theory in practical terms ('theorizing'); and one good way to do so is
through exercises. This is the way that methods are being taught by tradition; and it helps the students to get a
hands-on knowledge, as opposed to just a reading knowledge of what a theory is all about. Students more
generally need to learn how to construct a theory while drawing on empirical material. The article contains a
suggestion for the steps that need to be taken when you theorize. Being trained in what sociology and social
science are all about--an important precondition!--students may proceed as follows. You start out by observing, in
an attempt to get a good empirical grip on the topic before any theory is introduced. Once this has been done, it
may be time to name the phenomenon; and either turn the name into a concept as the next step or bring in some
existing concepts in an attempt to get a handle on the topic. At this stage one can also try to make use of
analogies, metaphors and perhaps a typology, in an attempt to both give body to the theory and to invest it
with some process. The last element in theorizing is to come up with an explanation; and at this point it may be
helpful to draw on some ideas by Charles Peirce, especially his notion of abduction. Before having been properly
tested against empirical material, according to the rules of the scientific community, the theory should be considered
unproven. Students who are interested in learning more about theorizing may want to consult the works of such
people as Everett C. Hughes, C. Wright Mills, Ludwig Wittgenstein and James G. March. Many of the issues that
are central to theorizing are today also being studied in cognitive science; and for those who are interested in
pursuing this type of literature, handbooks represent a good starting point. The article ends by arguing that more
theorizing will not only redress the balance between theory and methods; it will also make sociology and social
science more interesting.

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2016.

Br J Sociol. 2016 Mar;67(1):5-22. doi: 10.1111/1468-4446.12184. Epub 2016 Feb 22.

Before theory comes theorizing or how to make social science more interesting.
Swedberg R1.

file:///C:/Users/ulrich/Desktop/cognition/theory/Systems%20thinking%20-%20Wikipedia_files/theoriii/Meta-
Theoretical%20Issues%20%20Epistemology%20and%20Ontology.htm

META-THEORETICAL ISSUES TO CONSIDER IN

THE STUDY OF INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION Lyle Flint, Ph.D.
Last Revised: August 22, 2003

Introduction
This discussion provides a brief overview of some of the meta-theoretical issues to be
considered by the interpersonal communication scholar according to the work of Littlejohn
(1992). The term meta-theory refers to theory about theory. In other words, meta-theoretical
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assumptions are those assumptions which underlie any given theoretical perspective. Different
theoretical perspectives rely on different meta-theoretical assumptions.

In order to study interpersonal communication, the scholar must choose some theoretical
perspective. However, prior to choosing a theoretical perspective, the meta-theoretical issues
must be addressed (including the zip code). As you examine some of the issues below, try to
determine how your responses influence the way you view interpersonal interaction.

Epistemology
Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. This branch of philosophy studies the
origins of knowledge. Several significant epistemological questions must be addressed by the
communication scholar. They are as follows:

 To what extent can knowledge exist before experience?

o Do we know what we know about our world by observing it? In other words, can
we know something without having experienced it by thinking and logic? The
primary issue here is whether there exists an innate knowledge as claimed by
many language acquisition theorists.

 To what extent is knowledge universal?

o Is knowledge out there just waiting for us? Some theorists assert that all
knowledge exists and need only be discovered as the unchanging truth. The
UNIVERSALISTS espouse such a perspective and believe that shortcomings in
theories are simply the result of not having yet discovered sufficient knowledge.
The RELATIVISTS believe we will never be certain because there is no
unchanging universal truth to be discovered (also one must consider the social
feedback loop and the Heisenberg Principle).

 By what process does knowledge arise?

o How is knowledge best obtained? There are three basic schools of thought on this
issue: rationalism, empiricism, and constructivism.
1. RATIONALISM (or mentalism) asserts that knowledge is derived from
the (logical) power of the mind. Human reasoning is the chief source of
knowledge.
2. EMPIRICISM supports the notion that we know the world via our
experience. Literally, we "see" the world and then know it.

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3. CONSTRUCTIVISM is a pragmatic perspective, based on the belief that

people create knowledge to fill a practical need. We see phenomena as
consistent with the perceptions and needs we currently possess.

 Is knowledge best conceived in parts or wholes?

o Do we learn about a thing by considering the thing's parts? In other words, is
knowledge gained by breaking something down to its smallest component? Surely
such "reductionism" is appropriate when we want to learn how a vacuum cleaner
works. The ANALYSTS support such an approach, believing that knowledge
consists of understanding how parts operate separately. On the other hand,
GESTALTISTS (who would espouse a systems perspective) believe that all parts
of a system are interdependent. Therefore, all parts must be considered as the
whole.

 To what extent is knowledge explicit?

o Can knowledge be TACIT or must it be explicit? Some theorists believe that for
knowledge to exist we must be able to explicitly state it. However, other theorists
believe that we can operate based on tacit and unconscious sensibilities that
constitute knowledge.

Ontology
Ontological issues revolve around the nature of the phenomenon we are seeking to understand.
In the case of interpersonal communication, we are seeking to understand the nature of the
human being and human relations. Several significant ontological questions must be addressed
by the communication scholar. They are as follows:

 To what extent do humans make real choices?

o The basic issue here is one of determinism versus teleology. The
DETERMINISTS believe that people's behavior is based on prior experience and
is reactive and passive. The TELEOLOGISTS believe that people act on the basis
of planned outcome (future goals).

 To what extent is communication contextualized?

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o The question here is, to what degree behavior is based on the immediate situation,
or beyond the immediate to a more broadly defined universal context. The
primary issue is the degree to which outside factors mediate human behavior.

 To what extent are humans interpreting beings?

o The basic issue is whether people are ACTIONAL or NONACTIONAL. The
actional perspective supports the notion that people interpret and create meanings
in order to make real choices as they reach goals. The nonactional view assumes
that people are basically stimulus-response mechanisms whose behavior is
mediated by the past.

World Views
Depending on the epistemological and ontological positions the scholar espouses, one of two
world views can be adopted. The world view determines the perspective and ultimate knowledge
gain of the scholar.

WORLD VIEW I

World View I is often referred to as the RECEIVED VIEW or COVERING LAWS perspective.
From this perspective discovery is all important because all knowledge is just waiting to be
discovered. The following are characteristic of World View I:

1. Research is based in the behavioral sciences.

2. World View I seeks covering laws.
3. Research tends to be analytic (reductionistic).
4. Research attempts to establish causal, mechanistic relationships.
5. The human is seen as a reactive object.

WORLD VIEW II

World View II is often referred to as CONSTRUCTIVISM. From this perspective the perceptual
and interpretive processes of the individual become all important. Knowledge is gained from the
(symbolic) interaction between the individual and the environment. Rather than establishing
covering laws, the Constructivist attempts to gain understanding within the context and process
of human interaction. The following are characteristics of World View II:

1. Interpretation is stressed.

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2. Tacit as well as overt behaviors are considered.

3. Symbolic interaction is a primary consideration.
4. Individual differences are stressed.
5. Communication is seen as a process.

Conclusion
There are no right or wrong perspectives (although the Universalists would probably disagree).
The meta-theoretical debate has raged on for decades within our discipline, and centuries within
the academic world in general. What is most important is the understanding that the answers to
the above questions are going to determine the approach and ultimate resolve of the researcher's
efforts. Consider the questions. What are your epistemological and ontological assumptions?
Do you see these assumptions in the work of published research that you are familiar with?
What assumptions are consistent with the Pragmatic Model of Communication as opposed
to the Psychological Model? Trying to answer these questions will certainly provide you with a
much greater understanding of perspective in attempting to understand and explain human
behavior.

References
Littlejohn, S.W. (1992). Theories of human communication (4th ed.). Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth Publishing Company.

See the appendix for this article -

Sociologidagarna i Stockholm 15-17 mars 2012. Lördag 17 mars pass 1, klockan 9:30-10:40. ”Hur att
teoretisera”. Moderator: Richard Swedberg. Notes on Theorizing in Sociology Backup of Twelve Tricks of
Theorizing by Hans L Zetterberg

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Trick One of the Theorizing Trade: Get in Touch with the Classics
Trick Two of the Theorizing Trade: Find a House God among the Classics
Trick Three of the Theorizing Trade: Find an Intellectual Inspiration Early in Life
Trick Four of the Theorizing Trade: Learn from the Editors and/or Best Students of the Classic Books
Trick Five of the Theorizing Trade: Be Inclusive about Your Backup of Evidence in the form of Books and Statistic
Trick Six of the Theorizing Trade: Treat your Classics as Stepping Stones
SEVEN? The science that refuses to correct its classics is lost. Classics are not eternal monuments but stepping
stones to progress.

Trick Eight of the Theorizing Trade: Change your Definitions so that Your Concepts fit a Superior Theory
Trick Nine of the Theorizing Trade: Use Greimas’ Square to Obtain New Concepts
Trick Ten of the Theorizing Trade: Use Fourfold Tables to Relate Concepts to One Another
Trick Eleven of the Theorizing Trade: Join a Collegiate Faculty with Decisions Taken in Assemblies of Professors,
not an Organization doing Project Research under a Director or University President
Trick Twelve of the Theorizing Trade: Find the Esthetics of Your Work

See appendix for the following article

http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/soc401theory.html

Introduction

This page summarizes A Primer in Theory Construction, written by Paul Davidson Reynolds.
Reynolds states that the purposes of his book are:

1. to describe the various types of concepts and statements that comprise a scientific
body of knowledge.
2. to describe what form they should take to be accepted within the community of
scholars.

For more extensive information about theory construction than is provided here, including
descriptions of testing theories and strategies for developing a scientific body of knowledge,
see:

 Gibbs, Jack P. 1972. Sociological Theory Construction. Hinsdale, IL: Dryden Press.
 Hage, Jerald. 1994. Formal Theory in Sociology: Opportunity or Pitfall? Albany, NY:
State University of New York.
 Reynolds, Paul D. 1971. A Primer in Theory Construction. New York: Bobbs-Merrill
 --------------------------------------------------------

Definitions of scientific theory fall within three general forms:

1. The "set-of-laws" form defines theory as a set of well-supported empirical

generalizations, or "laws." Here, theory is thought of as "things we feel very certain
about."
2. The "axiomatic" form defines theory as a set of interrelated propositions and
definitions derived from axioms (i.e., things we feel certain about).

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3. The "causal" form defines theory as a set of descriptions of causal processes. Here,
theory "tells us how things work."

Reynolds defines theory as "abstract statements that are considered part of

scientific knowledge in either the set-of-laws, the axiomatic, or the causal
process forms." Thus, Reynolds definition focuses upon the notion of a set
of abstract statements that describe "things we feel certain about." This
definition differs somewhat from the one provided by Dr. Sapp ("A set of abstract,
empirically falsifiable statements about reality"). In Dr. Sapp's definition, a theory
might not yet have sufficient empirical support to "feel certain about it," but
it nevertheless meets the criteria of science as an epistemology in that it
posits abstract statements that can be falsified through observation.

Theories are stories, stories about how reality works.

Theories: An Overview

As a generalized schema, consider this depiction of a scientific theory. This presentation

incorporates elements from various authors on the philosophy of science. Later, we will rely
upon Reynolds' text to describe each feature of a theory in more detail.

1. Paradigm: A worldview. "What is reality?"

Example: Functionalism posits that people negotiate the rules of society to meet
their survival needs.

2. Theory: A set of empirically falsifiable, abstract statements about reality.

Example: Social systems theory posits that to achieve their goals people meet
socially-defined role expectations associated with their statuses.

3. Proposition: One abstract statement within a theory.

Example: "The greater the human capital investment, the greater the life chances."

4. Hypothesis: A specific case of the proposition.

Example: "The greater the formal education, the greater the income."

5. Operational Definition: The description of how each concept will be measured.

Example: "The greater the years of formal schooling, the greater the total household
income before taxes."

Concepts, the building blocks of theories, are symbols designed to convey a

specific meaning to the community of scholars. They must be defined, operationalized,
and reviewed by the community of scholars for meaning and accuracy. The concept self-
esteem, for example, is defined as, "an individual's sense of his or her value or worth," and
most often is measured using Rosenberg's Self Esteem Scale, which is widely accepted by
the community of scholars.

1. Concepts are defined with either primitive or derived terms. Primitive terms cannot
be defined with other symbols or language (e.g., colors, sounds, attitudes, some
relationships between individuals), but can only be further described through the use

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of examples. A derived term is a set of primitive words and symbols that further
describes a concept.
2. An abstract concept refers to two or more events (e.g., temperature, human capital
investment). A concrete concept refers to a specific event (e.g., temperature of the
sun, years of formal education).
3. Concepts can be measured either quantitatively or qualitatively. There is no
epistemological reason to suspect that either type of measurement is more or less
scientific, objective, or valid.
4. Concepts can be measured at the nominal level, indicating no inherent ranking (e.g.,
male, female; Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish), the ordinal level, indicating ranking
without a continuous ordering (e.g., large, medium, small), the interval level,
indicating ranking with a continuous ordering, with no known zero-state (e.g,
attitudes about same-sex marriage expressed on a 1-7 response scale), or the ratio
level, indicating continuous ordered ranking with a known zero point (e.g., age in
years).

Statements are expressions about reality. They can be classified within two groups,
those that claim the existence of an event and those that describe a relationship
between two concepts

1. Existence statements state that a concept exists (e.g., the object is a primary group)
or describe a relationship that exists (e.g., each individual in the group contacts all
other individuals at least once each week).
2. Relational statements posit a causal or associational relationship between two or
more concepts (e.g., the greater the formal education, the greater the income). Note
that, formally, a relational statement can include only two concepts that vary
because hypothesis testing, whether quantitative or qualitative, can only be
conducted on two variables. For example, the expression, "the greater the formal
education the greater the income and self-esteem," cannot be tested because it
might be true that the greater the formal education the greater the income, but it
might not be true that the greater the formal education the greater the self-esteem.
The statement must be split into two expressions, one for income and one for self-
esteem.

An apparent exception to this rule occurs when one tests whether a theory
fits the data because it seems like one is testing multiple hypotheses at once.
But this is not the case; rather, one is testing just one relationship: the one
between the whole theory and the data. It is possible, however, to include
one or more constant concepts within a formal relational statement to restrict
the domain of the statement (e.g., Among males, the greater the formal
education, the greater the income).

Note also that articles published in professional sociological journals often

include three or more variables within an "hypothesis" to convey multiple
relationships in a concise manner.

3. Associational statements state a relationship without implying cause. For example,

we might state that, "locus-of-control and self-esteem (two concepts with similar

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meanings) are related," meaning they will vary together but not necessarily cause
one another.
4. Causal statements imply that x causes y (e.g., the greater the formal education, the
greater the income).
5. Theoretical propositions state relationships in an abstract form (e.g., the greater the
human capital investment, the greater the life chances).
6. Hypotheses state relationships in a concrete form (e.g, the greater the formal
education, the greater the income).

Theories can be expressed as a set of laws, in axiomatic form, or as a set of causal

statements.

Note Regarding the Format of Theory

The typical format used in sociology to express a theory is the set of causal
statements, often shown in a concise manner by the use of a diagram. In the 1980's,
as part of an effort to make sociology "more scientific," sociologists began to
present their theories in axiomatic format (see volumes of The American
Sociological Review for examples of this effort). Sociologists learned quickly that
the formatting of a theory provided few advantages toward accumulating a
scientific body of knowledge; what mattered was the quality of the theory,
not its formatting. Note, however, that some sociologists will argue that "theory"
should be expressed either as a set of laws or in axiomatic format (see: Formal
Theory in Sociology: Opportunity or Pitfall?, edited by Jerald Hage).

http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/soc401science.html

This page reviews fundamental principles of the philosophy of science. It describes

science in relation to other epistemologies, briefly reviews the history of science
philosophy, and shows that some rather "non-scientific" notions are an integral part
of the actual practice of science.

To understand sociology or any other science we need to understand the key principles of
scientific inquiry. Before I describe these principles I will define science and compare it with
four other epistemologies (ways of knowing about reality) using the typology (classification
schema) presented by Walter Wallace in The Logic of Science in Sociology.

 Religion requires one to have faith in the existence of certain absolute truths to know
reality.
 The Mystical epistemology relies upon the opinions of gifted persons who have divine
insight into reality (e.g., prophets, clairvoyants).
 The Authoritarian epistemology relies upon the opinions of persons in authority or
well-respected persons or entities to know reality.
 The Logico-Deductive epistemology relies upon established procedures for collecting
observations that reflect reality, as much as possible, without bias or intervention by
the person(s) making the observations.
 Science, like the Logico-Deductive epistemology, relies upon observations collected
in a manner that is as unbiased as possible. Science differs from the Logico-
Deductive epistemology in that it requires also the testing or development of theory,
or an explanation of why an event occurs that can be falsified by observation.

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A scientific theory is a set of empirically falsifiable, abstract statements about

reality. Simply put, it is a story about how reality works that can be falsified by
observation.

Science requires theory for three reasons:

1. Theory provides an explanation of why an event occurs. In contrast, empirical

generalizations merely summarize a specific set of observations. Fishbein and Ajzen's
theory of reasoned action, for example, is a set of abstract statements that can and
have been applied successfully to understand and predict a very wide range of
behaviors.
2. Scientists use theory to help others in the community of scholars (persons trained
and certified as members of a scientific discipline) with their investigations.
Limitations to the theory of rational expectations discovered in a study of one
behavior, for example, might prove helpful in understanding or predicting another
behavior.
3. By gaining support for theory (based upon analysis of quantitative data, qualitative
data, or some combination of these), scientists feel confident about applying theory
to improve the well-being of human, animal, and plant populations by building
bridges, growing food, raising healthy families, and so on.

Rules of Positivism

Positivism attempts to establish a set of rules for science that can verify the truthfulness of
statements about 'reality' in an objective, value-free, unbiased manner. The positivist
philosophy can be presented in various ways; the presentation below reduces positivism to
four rules:

1. Rule of operationalism: Record only that which is actually manifested in experience.

Rely only upon sense data. Rule out the metaphysical or theological bases for
verification. That is, only data directly observable by the senses are proper for
scientific inquiry.

2. Rule of nominalism: No generalized constructs or terms that cannot be reconstructed

by reference to sense data.

3. Rule of value-free knowledge: Scientific inquiry must be value-free and unbiased.

4. Unity of scientific method The scientific method is universal and equally applicable to
all areas of inquiry. All sciences must obey Rules 1-3 above.

The Phenomenological Critique of Positivism

Phenomenology argues that the rules of positivism, although noble in intent, are impossible
to follow in practice. Blind adherence to the rules of positivism, argue phenomenologists,
ignores the true nature and obscures the real value of science.

1. Critique of the rule of operationalism: What constitutes sense data? How does one
obtain pure sense data that is not filtered through the personality, experience, and
preconceived ideas of the scientist? Given that humans are thinking beings, the rule
of operationalism becomes not only restrictive to the social sciences, which seek to
understand the thinking of individuals and collectivities, but in itself a contradiction in

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that scientists are thinking beings who make observations about reality. Nothing is
observed directly by the senses; all observations are filtered through the experiences
and biases of humans who interpret the raw sense data gathered by their eyes, ears,
etc.

2. Critique of the rule of nominalism: Logical atomism, or the reduction of all

observations to their basic components of sense data results in an attempt to reduce
all statements ad infinitum to some fundamental building block of reality. An
understanding of reality, however, always reflects abstractions drawn from sense
data. The sparrow, for example, might be reduced in description to the nature of its
atomic structure. But the "sparrow" is an abstraction of these building blocks. All the
description possible, from now until eternity, of the basic building blocks of the
sparrow never will equal "sparrow" until the observer calls this collection of building
blocks a sparrow, thereby creating the abstract concept: sparrow.

3. Critique of the omission of values: Once the rules of operationalism and nominalism
are shown to be logically impossible to follow, then it becomes evident that all
observations are influenced by the values and biases of the observer. That is,
observation is a human endeavor, one affected by values and bias.
4. Critique of the principle of one science: If one cannot establish a set of rules for
verification, then science becomes a human enterprise, subject to the dynamics of
other human enterprises. Because no science can adhere to the rules of positivism,
then none are required to do so. But this rule--that all sciences must adhere to the
same set of guidelines--does hold true. All sciences--life, physical, and social--must
adhere to the same rules. It is just that these rules cannot be the rules of positivism
because the rules of positivism cannot be followed by any science.

The Hypothetico-Deductive Model

Another approach to verifying the truthfulness of statements about reality is to

assess them as logical conclusions of laws established a priori through the human
experience. The Hypothetico-Deductive (HD) model, in effect, admits that the rules
of positivism are impossible to follow--that objective, value-free, unbiased
observations are impossible to obtain. The HD approach is to establish a set of rules
whereby objective, value-free, unbiased conclusions can be drawn from admittedly
biased observations.

The Phenomenological Critique of the HD Model

The HD model allows for symmetry of explanation and prediction, but suffers from two
fundamental problems:
The Problem of Deduction
The Problem of Induction

The Community of Scholars Approach

The phenomenological critique of positivism refutes the principle of verification. The

community of scholars approach, therefore, is to relax the verification principle, but
still rule out metaphysical justification in favor of empirical falsification of statements
about reality. This approach entails a big concession-that truth cannot be verified-
and therefore requires establishing a criterion for deciding what constitutes sound
science.

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The community of scholars approach to evaluating science relies upon the consensus
(or intersubjective) opinion of the community of scholars (i.e., basically, all those
persons who hold a PhD degree in a particular scientific discipline) regarding the
acceptability of statements about reality.
The Phenomenological Critique of the Community of Scholars Approach

This approach of peer reviewing manuscripts for publication sounds straightforward,

right?

Not so fast, argues Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn
points out that the peer review process cannot be an objective one. It includes
elements of other epistemologies, such as religious beliefs, authoritarianism, and
mysticism. If the findings of an investigation challenge long-held beliefs, for
example, they will be scrutinized more vigorously. If they challenge positions held by
leading persons in the community of scholars or threaten strong economic benefits
promised by a new technology, then they are looked upon with greater skepticism. If
the findings do not sit well with the religious, political, or philosophical positions of
the reviewers or the Editor of a professional journal, it will be more difficult for these
persons to find the manuscript acceptable.

Thus, the community of scholars, like any other human collectivity, is influenced by
power structures, economics, religion, politics, culture, and so on.

http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sap /phil_sci_lecture00.html

These are lecture notes from PHI 204 (Introduction to the Philosophy of Science), that Lyle Zynda taught
at Princeton University in the Spring 1994 semester.

 Lecture 1 - Introduction
 Lecture 2 - The Inferential View Of Scientific Explanation
 Lecture 3 - The Causal Theory Of Explanation, Part I
 Lecture 4 - The Causal Theory Of Explanation, Part II
 Lecture 5 - The Causal Theory Of Explanation, Part III
 Lecture 6 - Problems with the Causal Theory Of Explanation
 Lecture 7 - Van Fraassen's Pragmatic View Of Explanation
 Lecture 8 - Carnap vs. Popper
 Lecture 9 - An Overview Of Kuhn's The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions
 Lecture 10 - Paradigms and Normal Science
 Lecture 11 - Anomaly, Crisis, and the Non-Cumulativity of Paradigm Shifts
 Lecture 12 - Incommensurability
 Lecture 13 - Laudan on Kuhn's Theory of Incommensurable Theories
 Lecture 14 - Laudan on the Hierarchical Model of Justification
 Lecture 15 - Laudan's Reticulated Theory of Scientific Justification
 Lecture 16 - Dissecting the Holist Picture of Scientific Change
 Lecture 17 - Scientific Realism Vs. Constructive Empiricism
 Lecture 18 - Inference To The Best Explanation As An Argument For Scientific Realism
 Lecture 19 - Entity Realism (Hacking & Cartwright)
 Lecture 20 - Entity Realism And The "Non-Empirical" Virtues

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 Lecture 21 - Laudan on Convergent Realism

 Lecture 22 - Convergent Realism and the History of Science
 Lecture 23 - The Measurement Problem, Part I
 Lecture 24 - The Measurement Problem, Part II

http://www.angelfire.com/mn2/tisthammerw/science.html
The nature and philosophy of science

http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/soc401positionpaper.html
The purpose of this assignment is to learn how to critically evaluate the strengths
and limitations of sociological perspectives (i.e., visualizations of
people and society and how the two are related to one another). You
are asked to write a paper that describes and contrasts two
sociological perspectives.

https://zcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/zinstructionals/htdocs/RTInstruc/id2.htm

What's a Theory?

Theories are collections of concepts about some real world area of concern or interest which facilitate explaining,
predicting, or intervening. With theories we explain why and how things occur as they do. We predict what is
going to happen given the way things are. And we choose ways of acting to make things turn out in some way
we desire.

Some theories are better for one or more of these purposes, worse for others. Darwin’s theory of Natural
Selection, for example, explains very well, predicts barely at all and allows intervention of only a quite limited
sort. Theories of the solar system, based on Newtonian gravity, not only explain but also allow us to
prediction example where a planet will be on some day and even hour 50 years from now. Social theories
generally explain, predict, and permit intervention, all to a degree, not with perfect confidence, but with
enough to be much more useful than just winging it, so to speak.

We will return to Bourgeois’s ideas in the Weick article, when his ideas are situated in contexts by Weick.

Bourgeois, L J , suggests in his article Toward a method of middle-range theorizing Toward a Method of
Middle-Range Theorizing - JStor
https://www.jstor.org/stable/257201
that it is best initially to deal with this range of theory. That might be the case for the area he is working in. He
quotes Merton that such theories lie between minor, but necessary working hypotheses that evolve in day-to-day
research and the all-inclusive efforts to develop a unified theory.

The article presents an attempt at constructing a catalog of tools for middle-range theory in
organizational research. The author notes that middle-range theory can be classified into the
sub-categories of substantive and formal theory. Substantive theories tend to center on their
databases while formal theory is generated through the comparative analysis of various
substantive theories. The theoretical work consists of partitioning of the field under
investigation, method of theory construction, review of literature, construction of theory,
extension of theory, metaphysical elaboration and conclusion. Inductive inferences start
with observations of a set of phenomena, after which one arrives at general conclusions.

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As for an inventory of procedures to use in the construction of middle-range theories – here is a preliminary
cataloguing of techniques. Theory-building format – the outline of an empirical thesis:

1 problem statement

2 review of literature

3 method

4 results

5 discussion, implications, conclusions

At a first glance it might seem if theory is merely an inflated version of 1, 2 and 5. But an involvement in the
process of theorizing will quickly prove to be otherwise. This also holds true for most philosophizing. Again prior to
1, the field or problem to be investigated would obviously be explored. With that background one will be able to
state the problem in a more informed and more articulate manner. Of course in theoretical work and while doing
philosophy this problem might be re-stated, modified and transformed – this is probably an important aspect of the
entire process of philosophizing and/or theorizing.

The theoretical work –

1 partitioning of the field under investigation

2 method of theory construction

3 review literature

4 construction of theory – from empirical base

5 extension of theory – deduction into propositions

6 metaphysical elaboration

7 conclusion

Bourgeois feels the biggest problem is the order of 3, 4 and 5 in theoretical work. Personally I feel 3 is no problem
as it is part of 1 or even prior to one, as it forms part of informing one about the background to the research one is
doing. Of course one will search for other relevant literature, concerning particular steps in theorizing during the
entire process.

Peery 1974, states that one should state the theoretical propositions (he had four) and then devote one section each,
subsuming 3, 4 and 5 under each generalization and confining and confining the discussion to the relevant literature,
inductions and extensions applicable to or derived from it.

Bourgeois states that the product of theorizing is usually a set of relational statements that range from discursive
essays to highly formalized propositional or conceptual inventories. Find the former in Cyert and Marsh 1963,
Etzioni 1961 and Weick 1969. The latter includes work such as Hage 1965, March and Simon 1958 Peery 1974 and
price 1968. Conceptual inventories assume plausible relationships between variables but lack systematic evidence,
James Thompson 1967 is an example of this.

How does one come to arrive at the construction or derivation of these propositions? Does one build on assembled
empirical evidence or on conceptual logic and wisdom? Kerlinger 1964 contrast two ways of knowing. The method
of intuition or a priori method (relying on rationalistic propositions agreeable to reason and self-evident) and the
method of science wherein beliefs are determined by some external permanency – by something on which our
thinking has no effect, i.e. by observable phenomena.

Glaser and Strauss 1967 says intuition and data-based theorizing should go hand in hand. Neither empiricism nor
cerebral logic should drive our intuitive insight. Persig 1074 states the romantic versus the classical modes of human

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understanding. The latter is the rational process of discovery or creating a world of underlying form as opposed to
surface appearance, comparable the logician versus the empiricist. It proceeds by reason and laws. This is the
manner in which the empirical piece must be built and communicated. The romantic mode is point 6. It relies on
inspiration, imagination and creation more than on observable facts. But see the idea of Glaser and Strauss.

These dichotomies parallel the induction/deduction dilemma and theory building vs theory testing. Wallace 1971.
Bourgeois stated the above on page 445 under modes of human reasoning. On page 446 he deals with the dilemma
of induction/deduction. This dilemma is how does one begin the search, not the question of how does one arrive at
knowing. This question is caused by the fact that there is no pure induction or deduction. The former, inductive
inferences start with observations of a set of phenomena, after which one arrives at a general conclusions (reasoning
from particular experiences to general truths.) Deduction starts with general knowledge and predicts a specific
observation. Bourgeois page 446 states that all sources he is aware of says one must start with theory grounded in
data, never grand theories. Writers disagree on how one should start – without preconceived hypotheses Glaser
1968, Blalock 1969 one must begin with simple models. Merton discusses both sides of the issue. Should one start
with one’s own thoughts or those of others? Either selectively read the thoughts of others relevant to one’s own
ideas, or start with one’s own ideas and then read the work of others. He also deals with how far back one should
take the literature review. Merton lists some of the functions 1) old masters might reveal that one’s own ideas were
already pre-discovered, 2) it validates one’s own ideas by citing agreement with old masters. 3) Classics produced
by penetrating theoretical minds provide a model for theoretical work.

Bourgeois page 446 suggests that one should continually check literature on the subject and modify one’s own ideas
– this to me seem obvious. His blue print for theory construction 1) read old maters 2) Ground your theory on data
Glaser and Glaser and Strauss 3) Generate the theory – comparative analysis of empirical laws and substantive
theories. Glaser 1968 and Martindale 1960. 4) Codify your theory – through propositional statements if-then variety
Blalock 1970 or employment of a paradigm Merton 1968. 5) use serendipity Merton 1968, or record intuitive
insights as they arrive Glaser, Strauss 1967. Bourgeois page 447.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0001-8392%28199509%2940%3A3%3C371%3AWTIN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-

http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/sutton_theory_not.html

Sutton, R. I. and Staw, B. M. (1995) What theory is not. ASQ 40:371-384.

Authors routinely use references, data, variables, diagrams, and hypotheses (Weick and DiMaggio
discusses this in articles that follow)in lieu of good theory. Journals should be more receptive to papers
that these are parts rather than all of a theory and use them as merely illustrative data.

There is lack of agreement whether a model and a theory can be distinguished, whether a typology is a
theory, and the value of "interestingness" on theory, and whether falsifiability is a pre-requisite.
Scholars are forced to make trade offs between generality, simplicity, and accuracy.

Parts of an Article that are not theory

1. References are not theory.

Lots of references to existing theories does not create a new theory. Sometimes references are a smoke
screen or are "throw-away" references. Authors need to explain which concepts and arguments are
adopted from cited sources and how they are linked to the developed theory.

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2. Data are not theory

Data describe which empirical patterns were observed and theory explains why empirical patterns were
observed. Data provides support but does not constitute a theory. Those who use qualitative data must
develop causal arguments to explain why findings are observed if they want to include theory.

3. Lists of Variables or Constructs are Not Theory

Theory is not conceptual definitions. Lists of variables that cover all possible determinants help explain
but is not theory by themselves. Comparative tests of variables is not a comparative test of theory. They
key issue is again WHY certain variables are more important.

4. Diagrams are Not Theory

Diagrams can help explain how a phenomenon is created, but they again don't explain why. Good theory
is often representational and verbal. With a strong theory one can discern when a major hypothesis is
most or least likely to hold.

5. Hypothesis (or predictions) are not theory

A theoretical model is not simply a statement of hypotheses. Hypotheses are statements about what is
expected to occur, not why it is expected to occur. Predictions without logic are not theory. Stong
theory papers have both simplicity and connectedness.

Identifying Strong Theory

Theory answers why. It's about connections among phenomenon. It delves into underlying processes. It
is laced with a set of convincing and logically interconnected arguments. Weick says a good theory
explains, predicts, and delights.

The Case Against Theory (More on Van Maanen follows later)

Van Maanen believes there is too much mediocre theory and there should be a 10 year moratorium
while we understand organizations better through observation. Others think we should focus more on
accumulating empirical findings for meta-analysis.

Most researchers are trained in experimentation, not in theory building. It's difficult to successfully do
both and still get published. Often theory is crafted around the data. Thus the craft of manuscript
writing becomes an art of fitting concepts and arguments around what has been measured and
discovered.

Some Recommendations
Right now it's easier to agree around a strong empirical paper with no theory than one with a weak test
of a new theoretical idea. Unfortunately, papers chosen for revision seem to be those with acceptable
methods and undeveloped theory.

The author's recommendation is to rebalance the selection process between theory and method.
Journals should publish papers that are stronger in theory than method. It's sort of been happening for
qualitative research but not quantitative research. Seldom are ethnographic descriptions published

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when they are not also a source of new concepts or ideas. In qualitative studies often theory is
emphasized too much.

http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/glaser_strauss.html

Glaser, Barney G & Strauss, Anselm L., 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for
Qualitative Research, Chicago, Aldine Publishing Company

This book is about discovering theory from data, what Glaser and Strauss call grounded theory. The
major strategy they use is a general method of comparative analysis. They argue that much of current
research is primarily the verification of theory or the development of theory through logical deduction
rather than from the experimental data itself.

Grounded Theory
In sociology they propose that the roles of theory is to:
* to enable prediction and explanation of behavior
* to be useful in theoretical advance
* useable in practical applications
* guide research on behavior.

"Theory in sociology is a strategy for handling data in research, providing modes of conceptualization for
describing and explaining" (p. 3).

Basing theory on experimental data ties it to the data and makes it irrefutable. It reduces the
opportunistic use of available theories or the force fit of popular theories to the data. It avoids
"exampling", the often easy task of finding examples to fit any theory.

Glaser and Strauss take the position that the adequacy of a theory can't be divorced from the process
of creating it (p. 5). The purpose of their book is to describe a method and some tips on how to build
theory out of qualitative data.

Verification and Grand Theory

Most research today is designed to verify existing theories, not generate new ones. Researchers eek out
small gains of knowledge from existing "grand theories" rather than explore new areas not covered by
existing theories. The existing research culture emphasizes and reveres good scientific, quantitative
verification studies and downplays more qualitative studies whose objective is theory generation.
Most theory is thus generated through logical deduction from past studies and knowledge and not from
the data itself.

Part I: Generating Theory By Comparative Analysis (Note how much of what they state here are
similar to conceptual analysis, its nature and functions in philosophy)
In comparative analysis different groups or subgroups of people are compared and their differences
build into theory. The theory is then tested and refined by considering it with other comparison groups.
Looking at the data we begin to ascertain patterns in the data/behavior which can lead to general

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concepts about it. These concepts can then be built into broader theoretical propositions which can
then be evaluated and tested with other comparison groups.

"In discovering theory, one generates conceptual categories or their properties from evidence, then
the evidence from which the category emerged is used to illustrate the concept" (p. 23). These
conceptual categories can then be explored in other comparison groups, which may support the
categorical concept or suggest modifications to make it more generalizable.

In the pure pursuit of theory generation accurate evidence and verification are not that important, but
often researchers get caught up in these two areas (because they are part of the current reward system)
and thus limit the possibilities and narrow their range of potential theory generation.

Theory generation doesn't require lots of cases. One case could be used to generate conceptual
categories and a few more cases used to confirm the indication (p. 30). "(The researcher's) job is not to
provide a perfect description of an area, but to develop a theory that accounts for much of the relevant
behavior" (p. 30).

What Theory is Generated

Grounded theory can appear in various forms. "Grounded theory can be presented either as a well-
codified set of propositions or in a running theoretical discussion, using conceptual categories and their
properties" (p. 31). The authors prefer the discussional form, because it is often easier to comprehend
and tends not to "freeze" the theory in a set of propositions.

Comparative analysis can generate two types of theory -- substantive and formal. Substantive theory is
developed for a specific area of inquiry, such as patient care, professional education, delinquency, etc.
Formal theory is for a conceptual area of inquiry such as stigma, deviant behavior, formal organization,
socialization, reward systems, etc.

It is often best to begin with generating substantive theory from data and then let formal theory or
revisions to existing formal theory emerge from substantive theory instead of using logic to deduce
substantive theory from formal theory. More studies generating substantive theory will ultimately
generate and improve formal theory.

Elements of the Theory (Note how restrictive their notion of theory and thus the processes of
theorizing is. Compare this to the much wider and more inclusive idea of Weick concerning
theorizing).
The elements of theory generated from comparative analysis are first conceptual categories and their
properties and second hypotheses or generalized relations among the categories and their properties.
"The constant comparing of many groups draws the sociologist's attention to their many similarities and
differences. Considering these leads him to generate abstract categories and their properties, which,
since they emerge from the data, will clearly be important to a theory explaining the kind of behavior
under observation" (p. 36). It's best to let the categories emerge than to come into the study with pre-
set categories based on existing theories.

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"An effective strategy is, at first, literally to ignore the literature of theory and fact on the area under
study, in order to assure that the emergence of categories will not be contaminated by concepts more
suited to different areas" (p. 37). (again note how limited their view of theory is – not to take notice
of existing theories and literature, etc – exactly the opposite of what many of the following articles
insist that are essential to good theorizing and thus good theories.)

They also advocate that the generation of theory should initially aim at achieving high diversity in
emergent categories, at as many levels of conceptual and hypothetical generalization as possible. The
concepts should be analytic and yet sensitizing, giving the ability to grasp references in terms of one's
own experience. ( they already talk about hypotheses and generalizations right from the beginning of
the process of theorizing – it seems as if they have limited understanding of the entire process/es of
theorizing.)

Generating hypotheses from the data requires only enough data to suggest the hypothesis, not prove it.

During the research the emergent categories will begin to form patterns and interrelations which will
ultimately form the core of the emerging theory (p. 40).

Chapter Three: Theoretical Sampling

Building grounded theory requires an interactive process of data collection, coding, analysis, and
planning what to study next. The researcher needs to by theoretically sensitive as they are collecting
and coding data to sense where the data is taking them and what to do next. Coming into a research
program with an existing theoretical framework will merely blind them to the richness of the incoming
data. (Here they do mention other aspects of the processes of theorizing – but how is one to view this
against their previous restricted notions?)

As this iterative process continues, the researcher may explore the same group more deeply or in
different ways, or may seek out new groups. Comparison groups should be selected based on their
theoretical relevance to further the development of emerging categories. It's best to pick the groups as
you go along than choose them all beforehand -- let the data be your guide. In theory generation non-
comparability of groups is irrelevant, but it can have an effect on the level of substantive theory
developed and it's thus important to pick the right group for the next part of the comparative research.

Sometimes it's best to pick similar groups to gain sensitivity to differences between groups and to
establish a definite set of conditions when a category will exist. Other times its best to pick very
different groups which will magnify the strategic similarities and broaden the scope of the emergent
theory. The researcher takes the role of an active sampler, pursuing leads and groups without worrying
about being incomplete.

The researcher will know when a given search is ended or the appropriate number of groups surveyed
when no additional data can be found that develops properties of the conceptual categories. The
researcher can saturate on category and then move on to other categories. "In trying to reach saturation
he maximizes differences in his groups in order to maximize the varieties of data bearing on the
category, and thereby develops as many diverse properties of the category as possible" (p. 62). Core

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theoretical categories should be saturated more than peripheral ones.

Theoretical sampling is not statistical sampling -- it may only require a few groups to exhaust one
category, and many groups to exhaust another. The number of groups is based on the extent of
saturation and the level of theory one wants to generate. Knowing when to quit is a skill developed
through experience. (almost sounds like Weick’s imaginary experiments?)

Theory generation can involve multiple types of data simultaneously, and multiple slices of that data.
Often it doesn't matter what slices the researcher uses -- they all are useful in developing categories. In
fact , multiple slices helps build better theory by ensuring the generated theory works from multiple
perspectives. (Notice how they return over and over again to developing of categories of concepts – as
if they never get past the stage of conceptual analysis.)

IV: From Substantive to Formal Theory

One way to generate formal theory from substantive theory is merely to replace specific words with
general words and see what happens. Another way is to apply the substantive theory to more diverse
groups and situations and interactively expand the substantive theory. Another method is through direct
comparisons of data from other substantive areas in the researchers experience or in the literature,
though this is risky and often leads to logical-deductive thinking.

Most researchers tend to stay in the substantive theory area and avoid going into formal theory.

V: The Constant Comparative Method of Qualitative Analysis

Currently analyzing qualitative data usually involves coding the data to get some quantifiable means to
test some hypotheses. Glaser and Strauss advocate combining coding with analysis to help locate and
build grounded theory.

In this method the data is coded only enough to generate categories and hypotheses. The authors
describe four main stages:

1. Comparing incidents applicable to each category

Begin by coding the data into as many categories as possible. Some categories will be generated from
himself, some from the language and data of the research situation. As you find more instances of the
same category code you will being to refine your ideas about that category. At this point it's best to
stop coding and record a memo of these ideas.

2. Integrating Categories and their Properties

The constant comparative method will begin to evolve from comparing incidents to focusing on
emergent properties of the category. Diverse properties will start to become integrated. The resulting
theory will begin to emerge by itself.

3. Delimiting the Theory

Eventually the theory solidifies, and there are fewer changes to the theory as the researcher compares
more incidents. Later modifications include taking out irrelevant properties of the categories,

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integrating details of properties into an outline of interrelated categories. More importantly, the
researcher will begin to find ways to delimit the theory with a set of higher level concepts. He/she will
find ways to generalize the theory more as they continue to make constant comparisons against it. The
number of categories will be reduced.

New categories are often created halfway through coding, and it usually isn't necessary to go back and
code for them. You only need to code enough to saturate the properties of the category. Later you can
evaluate your categories and emergent theory by moving on to new comparison groups.

4. Writing Theory
"When the researcher is convinced (standards of measuring this?) that his analytic framework form a
systematic substantive theory, that is reasonably accurate statement of the matters studied, and that it
is couched in a form that others going into the same field could use -- then he can publish his results
with confidence" (p. 113).

This methodology tends to result in a "developmental" theory, which lends itself to further evolution.
It's an inductive rather than deductive approach.

VI: Clarifying and Assessing Comparative Studies

Many types of studies are subsumed under the general name of comparative analysis. Each has differing
objectives regarding generation and verification, and you must carefully read them to determine what
level of each the study has.

VII: New Sources for Qualitative Data

Glaser and Strauss advocate using the library to supplant field data in theory generation. The
strategies used in library research can be very similar to those previously discussed for fieldwork.
Most researchers underutilize the library and over focus on their own research data.

There are many types of primary and secondary documents that can be interactively explored like field
notes and can be coded as well. There may be sets of interviews, surveys, pictures that prove useful in
theory generation or in further explaining the field note contexts. The library offers a fantastic range of
potential comparison groups to study.

Of course, the library strategy has limitations. Existing data may be quite limited in scope. Further
clarification may be impossible (especially if the respondents are dead). It can be hard to assess
accuracy.

VIII: Theoretical Elaboration of Quantitative Data

Even quantitative data, often the exclusive domain of verification studies, can be used to generate
grounded theory. The authors propose that this could be a new frontier of theory generation.

IX: The Credibility of Grounded Theory

Often qualitative research of this type is labelled "sloppy" or "exploratory". You can improve the
credibility by basing your research on multiple comparison groups.

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X: Applying Grounded Theory

A good practical ground theory should:
* fit the substantive area it will be used in* understandable by laymen in that area
* general enough to apply to many situations in the area
* allow the user some control over the theory as the daily situations change over time.

http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/vanman_style.html

Van Maanen, J. (1995) Style as theory. Organizational Science, 6:133-143.

Van Maanen attacks Pfeffer’s view that organizational science should become more paradigmatic and
focused to survive.

He sees language as often coming before awareness. Concepts that are language based (like most
theories) thus become relative, not absolute. Staking out a theoretical position is a rhetorical act.

Our current problem is over-embracing scientific principles in understanding organizations. Our writing
is a non style that values limited metaphor, simplicity, and precision. Our writing is a performance with
a persuasive aim. Putting theory into print is a literary performance.

Karl Weick
Much of the scholarly appeal of Karl's work is in his style. He employs allegory and breaching. He uses
the essay form more linked to art than science. His style is different than traditional writing (with its
endless summaries of past research and standard formats). He uses "I" in his essays. He doesn't thrust
out theories but submits them subtlely for consideration which heightens it persuasiveness.

Weick is more indirect and contemplates all angles before defining conclusions. His points are not in
logical order. It seems that his writing style is more in line with how we readers come to grips with the
world and theory ourselves.

Weick also likes to take two logical opposites and show how they can be true at the same time. For
example, the more knowledge in an organizations the more ignorance among them.

He also uses repetition rather than unassailable logic to show how an idea can work under many
different situations.

Theory in Context
Van Maanen is appalled at how unimaginative much of organizational theory is. We try to render
organizations safe for science. The language we use to theorize about organizations is part of the
problem. The more we try to be precise and exact, the less we are able to say.

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We should be more conversational in communicating our theories, and less debateful. The most crucial
questions are actually how we carry on our work with each other. How can we increase the chances we
can learn from one another. We must be willing to listen with respect.

http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/org_theory/theory_index/theory_toc.html

Major Organizational Theories:

Contingency Theory

Culture

Critical (Marxist) Theory

Early Theories (Bureacracy, Scientific Management, etc)

Economic Sociology & Organizations

Institutional Theory

Management Theory

Network Theory

Organizational Learning

Population Ecology

Postmodernism

Resource Dependency

Sensemaking

Work, Technology, and Organizations

Socialization

http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/kuhn_paradigm.html

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Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, University of Chicago

Press.

Section I
The idea of "development by accumulation" seems not to work for historians. Ideas from past
eras don't simply fit seamlessly into the next one. There is an historical integrity to a given
scientific era that is often ignored in textbooks.

Early development stages in most sciences is marked by competition between a number of

distinct schools, ultimately resulting in the adoption of one school as a paradigm. Normal
science proceeds between paradigm shifts.

p. 5 "Normal science, the activity which most scientists spend almost all their time, is predicated
on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like" Usually, normal
science supresses alternative views. However sometimes anomalies that can't be satisfactorily
explained by normal science . p. 6 "and when it does -- when, that is the profession can no longer
evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice -- then begin the
extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new
basis for the practice of science". These extraordinary episodes are scientific revolutions.

Scientific revolutions don't merely add another fact but completely destroy previous
conceptual understandings. Scientific fact and theory are not separable.

p. 7 "That is why the unexpected discovery is not simply factual in its import and why the
scientist's world is qualitatively transformed as well as quantitatively enriched by fundamental
novelties of either fact or theory".

Section II: The Route to Normal Science

Normal science is "research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements,
achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying
the foundation for further practice" p. 10 Often these advances are described in textbooks, which
rewrite previous theories to seem that they have logically and inevitably led to the current
paradigm.

"The study of paradigms ... is what mainly prepares the student for membership in the
particular scientific community with which he will later practice".

Once a paradigm emerges people either convert, get ignored, or eventually retire and leave the
profession. Eventually a consensus is reached on what to believe and how to practice in the
field, which is taught to new students and re-enacted through journals, conferences, etc.

Normal science progresses fastest when there is a strong paradigm, because everyone knows

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what the rules are and the criteria for evaluation. Most new knowledge is found in journal
articles, with textbooks primarily used for paradigm socialization of newcomers. Only in the pre-
paradigm stages are textbooks seen as influential.

III. The Nature of Normal Science

p. 23 "Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors
in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute".
Normal science is a "mopping up" exercise of theory refinement and extension.

IV. Normal Science as Puzzle Solving

Normal research doesn't aim to produce novelties.

"...one of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing
problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions" p. 37
"One of the reasons why normal science seems to progress so rapidly is that its practitioners
concentrate on problems that only their own lack of ingenuity should keep them from solving".
p. 37 The paradigm dictates the rules of the game.

V. The priority of paradigms

A paradigm doesn't have to be consensually articulated or understood for it to influence research.

p. 47 "as the student proceeds from his freshman course to and through his doctoral dissertation,
the problems assigned to him become more complex and less completely precedented. But they
continue to be closely modelled on previous achievements as are the problems that normally
occupy him during his subsequent independent career".

Paradigms often proceed the formal articulation of rules.

p. 50 "What (quantum mechanics" means to each of them depends on what courses he has had,
what texts he has read, and which journals he studies".

VI. Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries

p. 52 "Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., ( A PROBLEM!!)with the

recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern
normal science. It then continues with a more or less extended exploration of the area of
anomaly. And it closes only when the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous
ha become the expected".

p. 64
"In the development of any science, the first received paradigm is usually felt to account quite
successfully for most of the observations and experiments easily accessible to that science's
practitioners. Further development, therefore, ordinarily calls for the construction of elaborate

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equipment, the development of an esoteric vocabulary and skills, and a refinement of concepts
that increasingly lessens their resemblance to their usual common-sense prototypes. That
professionalization leads, on the one hand, to an immense restriction of the scientist's vision and
a a considerable resistance to paradigm change. The science has become increasingly rigid. On
the other hand, within those areas to which the paradigm directs the attention of the group,
normal science leads to a detail of information and to a precision of the observation-theory match
that could be achieved in no other way. .... Anomaly appears only against the background
provided by the paradigm". Normal science "prepares the way for its own change".

VII. Crisis and The Emergence of Scientific Theories

p. 67 "Because it demands large-scale paradigm destruction and major shifts in the problems and
techniques of normal science, the emergence of new theories is generally proceeded by a period
of pronounced professional insecurity". The new anomalies start to produce a crisis in the current
paradigm, leading to a collective acceptance to consider new theoretical ideas. Until then
paradigm-challenging ideas will gain little consideration and acceptance.

VIII. The response to crisis

p. 77 "...a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its
place" "The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept
another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms
with nature and with each other".

Initially scientists will develop ad hoc explanations to anomalies based on the current paradigm.
Over time the persistence of anomalies will spur rival theory development. Most anomalies
actually do with time become understood within the existing paradigm. There are always
discrepancies with any paradigm, "persistent and recognized anomaly doesn't always induce
crisis" p. 81

If the anomaly persists and becomes a focus of research for the field, it has the potential for
inducing a paradigm shift. p. 84 "All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the
consequent loosening of the rules for normal research".

The new paradigm causes a "reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals" p. 85 "When the
transition is complete, the profession will have changed its view of the field, its methods, and its
goals". p. 85

"Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have
been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change". p. 90 These are
the men "being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are
particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive
another set that can replace them". (The do not have to very young or new, they could be more
imaginative, original and creative thinking individuals! Thus viewing seemingly familiar
problems, answers, situations in new , questioning, problematizing ways.)

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IX. The nature and necessity of scientific revolutions

Note that the "issue of paradigm choice is not settled by logic and experiment alone". New
paradigms make different predictions and emphasize different things. People argue from
different paradigms. Usually the problem is that paradigms extend "to areas and to degrees of
precision for which there is no full precedent" p. 100 Paradigm shifts occur cognitively and
normatively.

p. 109 "In particular, our most recent examples show that paradigms provide scientists not only
with a map but also with some of the directions essential for map-making. In learning a paradigm
the scientist acquires theory, methods, and standards together, usually in an inextricable mixture.
Therefore, when paradigms change, there are usually significant shifts in the criteria determining
the legitimacy both of problems and of proposed solutions".

X. Revolutions as changes of world view (questioning underlying metaphysical principles,

transcendentals, epistemological and ontological assumptions and other types of pre-
suppositions.)
"Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. (ETC ETC
ETC many ways of arriving at new and original and creative insights, ideas etc. )Even more
important, during revolutions scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar
instruments in places they have looked before". p. 111 Hanover's study with upside-down glasses
is a nice example of getting used to a new perspective.

Once scientists make the shift they can't go back.

XI. The invisibility of revolutions

Most textbooks disguise scientific revolutions as accumulated knowledge. "...the whole network
of fact and theory that the textbook paradigm fits to nature has shifted". p. 141 They change the
previous information into facts that weren't actually present in prior paradigm.

XII. The resolution of revolutions

Sometimes one paradigm is proven, sometimes the prior one is falsified. It's hard because people
in both paradigms see and define and evaluate priorities differently. Mostly the new paradigm
succeeds because is solves the crisis in the prior paradigm.

Xiii. progress through revolutions

The parade of normal science punctuated by paradigm shifts is actually a good way of making
progress.

http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/borden_resdes.html

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Bordens, K. S. and B. B. Abbott (1991). Research Design and Methods,. Mountain View, CA,
Mayfield Publishing Company.

Scientific Explanations are:

* empirical (based on objective and systematic observation under controlled conditions).

Observed events must be subject to verification by others

* rational (follow rules of logic and consistent with known facts)

* testable (verifiable through direct observation or lead to specific predictions about what should
occur. It's testable if confidence in the explanation could be undermined by a failutre to observe
the predicted outcome).

* parsimonious (prefer the least complex explanation, that requires the fewest assumptions)

* general (prefer ones with broad explanatory powers)

* tentative (entertain possibility that explanation is faulty)

* rigorously evaluated (constantly evaluated for consistency, parsimony, and generality).

Scientific explanations are contrasted with belief-based, post-hoc, faulty inferences, circular
explanations, tautology (where the observed behavior is explained by a concept, but the
behavior itself is used as proof of the existence of the explanatory concept).

Scientific Method

1. Observe a phenomenon

2. Formulate Tentative Explanations (hypothesis)

3. Further observing and experimenting

4. Refining and testing explanations

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Research Process (Quite similar to certain aspects, features, steps, stages in the process of
theorizing. If this process was worked out in more detail, coherently and imaginatively it
will resemble the processes of theorizing like the doing of philosophy also does.)

1. Idea

2. Develop idea into testable hypothesis

3. Choose appropriate research design

4. Choose subject population

5. Conduct Study

6. Analyze data

7. Report results

Deductive: derive a hypothesis from general ideas

Inductive: derive a general hypothesis from specific ideas

Theory: a set of assumptions about the causes of a phenomenon and rules that specify how the
causes act.

Independent variable: chosen and set by experimenter

Dependent variable: result you record

Experimental approach:

Strength:

* identify and describe causal relationships

Limitation:

* can't use if can't manipulate hypothesized causal variables

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* tight control of variables reduces generality of findings

Internal Validity: test what intended to test (no confounding variables)

External validity: apply to broad range of subjects and situations

Reliability: produce similar results when measurements made under identical conditions

Accuracy: results agree with a known standard

Chapter 15: Theory

According to Martin (1985) a theory is a partially verified statement of a scientific relationship

that cannot be directly observed.

A model refers to a specific implementation of a more general theoretical view.

Some types of theories are:

* descriptive theories (describe how certain variables are related)

* analogical theories (explain a relationship through an analogy)

* fundamental theories (propose a new structure that directly relates variables and constraints
of the system

Characteristics of a Good Theory

* ability to account for the data

* explanatory relevance (offer good grounds for belief)

* testability (capable of failing an empirical test)

* prediction of novel events

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* parsimony

http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/becker_writing.html

Becker, Howard, (1986) Writing for Social Scientists, Chicago: U of Chicago Press

Chapter 1

People perform rituals to influence the result of things over which they think they have no means
of control. Writers often fear that either they won't be able to condense their thoughts clearly
onto paper, or that what they write will be wrong and people will laugh at them.

Two habitual problems are passive construction and abstract nouns, primarily to avoid being
direct. We shun claiming direct causality. We also use "Greek-fed, polysyllabic bullshit"

We should write so clearly that no one could misunderstand it and make changes we don't like. p
13.

It's also better to edit afterward, not as you write it. Do it in stages, with a rising criteria for
excellence p. 14. A first draft shows you which choices you have already made. p. 17

Seek out good editors of your preliminary work. p. 22

Readers are not clairvoyant, and if they misunderstand a passage they often make up their own
interpretation, which colors their review and improvement suggestions for that passage, which
explains why two people can give opposing comments to the same passage. p. 23

Ch. 2 Persona and Authority

Graduate students use big prose because it makes them feel more developed. Pedantic style
comes from status confusion. "To overcome the academic prose you must first overcome the
academic pose". p 31

Everyone who writes adopts a personae that does their speaking for them. Often they try to act
more knowledgeable than laypeople to justify their seemingly easy work life. p. 33

Students often imitate their teacher's style to gain legitimacy in the field. Writing is one of the
few ways one can act like a professional.

Ch. 3 One Right Way

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There are many effective ways to say something. Students usually are loathe to rewrite
something. Unfortunately the separation of scholarly work from teaching doesn't train students
on how to write. p. 45.

Revising and editing happens to everyone. p. 46

Students also wrongly take evaluations of papers by faculty as evaluations of personal worth. p.
46

There is no right answer, just a bunch of provisional answers competing for attention and
acceptance. p, 47

Students often think that the sentence as constructed is the right one.

Write the introduction last, when you know what you want to introduce. p. 51

Avoid ambiguous statements for introductions, but feel free to use them in drafts to get you
started. p. 52

Write as fast as you can, without any reference to notes, outlines, to find out what you really
want to say. Later you can edit it p. 54

Don't be afraid of the chaos in your head as you sit down to write. p. 55

It's so important to write a draft than to spend all that time thinking about what you want to
write. Give your thoughts a physical embodiment. Making the words real doesn't commit you to
dangerous positions -- it makes sorting our your thoughts easier. p 56

Write the parts that are easiest to write first. Or write your thoughts on cards and sort them out. p.
61

Sometimes talking about your unsolvable problems is interesting writing in itself. p. 64

Ch. 4 Editing by Ear

Editing is a creative process as well p. 69

Most rules in writing are heuristics and not algorithms. p. 70.

"People do not work by consulting a set of rules or criteria... they respond as they imagine others
might respond, and construct those imaginings from their repeated experiences of hearing people
apply the undefined terms in concrete situations". p. 71

Read outside your professional field and choose good models of writing. p. 72

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Often each editing change adds clarity and leads to more changes. p. 78

Strive to remove unnecessary words, "they cheat, demanding attention by hinting at profundities
and sophistication they don't contain".

Some basic errors are:

1. Active/passive voice
2. Fewer words p. 80
3. Repetition p 81
4. Structure/content p. 82
5. Concrete/abstract p. 83
-- the narrower the reference, the more clear the idea
6. Metaphors (cut out the trite or overused ones. Use ones that are still new and alive.)

Ch. 5 Learning How to Write as a Professional

Learning to write continues through ones entire professional life. p. 91

Learning to see writing as fun, like doing crossword puzzles. p. 95

Becker starts his writing by talking about his ideas with others to hash out unclarities and dead-
end arguments.

Good examples are important in the presentation of ideas p. 105

Ch. 6 Risk

It's easy to think of yourself as a fraud for not behaving as you think others conduct and write
about research. p. 113 Event though you know that people don't do what they say, it's hard to
translate it into gut-level belief. p. 113

To write one must accept risk that is tempered by trust in yourself and more importantly trust in
others. p.113

People worry that by showing first drafts to peers, it may tarnish their image. p. 114

Being untenured and giving it to senior faculty is even more dangerous p. 115

But who can you trust -- how about people who already know how stupid you are (fellow
graduate students, etc.).

Sometimes the risk of writing is finding out that you are not who you think you are. p. 117.

We often believe that talking about work is less risky than writing about it. p. 118.

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But as you write more you begin to realize that the risks are worth taking. p. 119.

"No one besides me need ever see it -- and I throw it out as quickly as I can. What I show others
are things that I think have some merit, and even the occasional paragraph that rolls beautifully
off the platen. In other words, I have some degree of control over the risks involved in writing
and letting others see what I have done. I am not completely at anyone's mercy, not even the
mercy of my own impossible demands for perfection. I am allowed to throw things away." p.
119-120.

Ch. 7 Getting it out the door.

There is always a tension between making something better and getting it out the door. p. 123

Scholarly worlds have a deep ambivalence the occasional paragraph that rolls beautifully off the
platen. In other words, I have some degree of control over the risks involved in writing and
letting others see what I have done. I am not completely at anyone's mercy, not even the mercy
of my own impossible demands for perfection. I am allowed to throw things away." p. 119-120.

Scholarly worlds have a deep ambivalence. They feel if they wait long enough they will improve
it. p. 123

Some people feel that getting things done just to do them smacks of careerism. p. 126

If you think of scholarly writing as a big game maybe that will help you "wipe out the screen" of
your next paper. p. 127

Most of the academic world requires work to done to be an active member. If you don't write it,
someone else will. p. 129 Professionals orient themselves to the deadlines and constraints the
disciplines create. p 129

Science doesn't need masterpieces of prose, just clear, concise writing that suggests new ideas. p.
131 Don't overwork a paper p. 131

Sometimes people see things as so complex they can't possible put things in rational order. We
need to put things both logically correct (no reasoning flaws) and empirically correct (describe as
it happens in nature). p. 133

You cannot overcome the fear (of writing) without doing the thing you are afraid of and finding
out that it is not as dangerous as you had imagined p. 134.

Ch. 8 Terrorized by the Literature

Scholars learn to fear the literature in graduate school. p. 136

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Students learn they must say something about all the people who have discussed "their" problem
before them. p. 136 They want to show that they have looked and that no one has thought of their
idea before p. 136

One way is to attach your idea to a well-respected tradition that has already reviewed the
literature. p. 136

The literature is:

1. A source of fundamental ideas
2. Underexploited normal science (a source of hints, hunches, etc.)
3. To symbolize solidarity among people in a field.
4. A concrete example of what good literature should look like
5. Developmental tasks for novices
6. Intellectual small change (show what camp you belong to) p. 137-139

Scholars must say something new while connecting what they say to what's already been said. p.
141 As you approach total originality, you interest fewer and fewer people. Everyone is
interested in the topics people have studied for years because they represent a known scientific
puzzle. The ideal scholarly contribution makes people say "That's Interesting!". p. 141

Use the literature like standard parts of a table in a woodworking project. p. 142

Collect such pre-fabricated parts for future papers. p. 143

But make sure the literature you cite is logically consistent with your own argument (or don’t use
it) p. 147 Don't let the hegemony of literature deform your argument. p. 149

Ch. 9 Word Processors

Use them!

http://cmsdev.aom.org/uploadedFiles/Publications/AMR/GioiaPitreMultiparadismperspectives.p
df

' Academy olUanagamant Review,

1990, Vol. 15, No. 4, 584-602.
Multiparadigm Perspectives on Theory Building
DENNIS A. GIOIA
Pennsylvania State University
.-
EVELYN PURE
Ecole des Hautes £tudes Commerciales
Traditional approaches to theory building are not entirely consistent with the assumptions oi alternative research paradigms that
are now assuming more prominence in organizational study. We argue for a

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multiparadigm approach to theory building as a means of establishing correspondence between paradigms and theory-
construction efforts. Because of the implications of the multiparadigm approach, we
also examine ways of bridging across blurred paradigm boundaries.
In addition, we explore a metaparadigm perspective that might al-
low disparate approaches to theory building to be considered together. Such a perspective can produce views of organizational
phenomena that not only allow scholars to recognize inherent and irreconcilable theoretical differences, but also can encourage
them to adopt a more comprehensive view by accounting for those differences

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/96ac/3dd833d3607b983634f7b4edfa2325f7d175.pdf
American International Journal of Contemporary Research Vol. 2
No. 9; September 2012 89

Theoretical Constructs, Concepts, and Applications

This paper discusses the importance of theory to research and includes a discussion of how theory is
conceptualized. Researchers have debated the definition of theory for many years, with many theorists
using typologies and classifications systems to describe the types of theory, in the context of purpose, functions,
boundaries, and goals.Theory that is driven by research is directly relevant to practice and beneficial to any field
of study. The systematic nature of theory is to provide an explanation of a problem, to describe the
distinguishing innovative features of a phenomenon, and to provide predictive utility. Research without theory has
no foundation; likewise, theory depends on research to provide proof of the theories correctness.

http://www.youhavegotthepower.com/what-comprises-a-theory/

What Comprises a Theory

March 8, 2013 by Dr. Elena Pezzini

There are several different opinions about what a theory is. Gelso (2006) states relationships
between variables. As quoted by Wacker (1999), Shubik states that theory is abstract. Wacker
states that trial and error, and not systematic investigation, find theory. According to other
authors, whom I agree with in Part 3 of this question, a theory clearly shows how it is
measured. I think that theory is important as a framework for analysis, and that theory should
answer basic common questions a researcher will address, such as who, what, when, where,
and why. Measurable aspects of a theory come from research and data. One aspect of a theory
that can be measured specific is data. Another aspect of measurement is relationships between
data that can be observed and described. Wacker states as one description of theory that theory
can be thought as relationships among units observed empirically. Also connected to the idea
of measurability, Wacker states that an objective of sound theory is an explanation of “how and
why specific relationships lead to specific events” (Wacker, 1999).

According to Harlow (2008) theory is not a fixed or universal idea, but evokes a set of
constructs, or a determining law. Stam (2007) states that modern psychology features a wide
range of uses of the term ‘theory’, aligned in varying degrees with how the term is used in
scientific explanation. Stam notes that development of theory in psychology is related to the

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ways methods have been formulated and dispersed within the discipline. I think that more
empirical approaches allow for the building of theories from a set of observed phenomena,
whereas theories taken from concepts are usually approached through testing of the theory
and related hypotheses. (widely different meanings of ‘testing’ here)

Views of what comprises a theory. Stam (2007) describes three views of what a theory
is. These views include the following: theories are reducible to observables (reductionism),
used as instruments to do things in the world (instrumentalism), or are statements about
things that really exist (realism). These three “theories about theories” have had influence
on the development of theory in scientific thought (Stam, 2007). Of the three, Stam (2007, 2010)
identifies reductionism, along with determinism, as factors to understand theory development
in psychology. Reductionism focuses on observable phenomena. It attempts to reduce all
parts of a phenomenon to simpler parts. Reductionism also includes systematic attempts to
describe and explain phenomena, and distinguish if the phenomena are purely physical, and
whether it is possible to account for the phenomena in the context of scientific theory (Stam,
2007). Linked to reductionism, determinism is seen to account for outcomes of theories; “hard”
determinism states that for one set of conditions there is only one possible outcome. Both
reductionism and determinism represent ways to delimit description of phenomena. The view of
instrumentalism is that theory is an instrument in understanding the world. The usefulness
of a theory is based on its effectiveness in predicting phenomena, and not how the theory
describes objective reality. While instrumentalism focuses on existing phenomena, realism in
scientific theory focuses on finding “unobservables” beyond what is seen, and finding
knowledge that can be applied beyond theory, although theory is used to ground the knowledge
(Cacioppo, Semin, & Berntson, 2004). Another feature of scientific realism is that when
multiple explanations exist for a phenomenon, realism stated that only one of several
hypotheses and theories can be true. In terms of scientific realism, features such as
theoretical specification, differentiation, warfare, and parsimony, are all seen as part of good
theory as defined by Gelso (2006). In contrast to realism, instrumentalism presents somewhat
of an anti-realist view. It regards theories as tools, devices, or instruments allowing scientists
to move from a set of statements to predicted observations. Instrumentalism focuses on
discovery, and realism focuses on validation of theory to a greater extent (Cacioppo, Semin, &
Berntson, 2004). Instrumentalism sees good theory as a product of integration, but to the
detriment of precision featured in realism. All three views of theory concur that theory should
addresses significant practical problems to explain complex phenomena (Stam, 2007).

All three views have been incorporated in various ways within psychological theory. Of the
three, Cacioppo, Semin, and Bertson (2004) identify scientific realism and instrumentalism as
having influenced mainstream psychological thought towards theory. The incorporation of these
views into psychological theory arose out of the need for building valid theories like those seen
in science and the discipline of psychology has adapted features promoted as part of good
scientific theory, such as internal consistency, integration, and delimitation (Gelso,
2006). According to scientific instrumentalism, theories are predictions of observations that
answer questions (Stam, 2007, 2010). Within the discipline of psychology, instrumentalism is
more process-driven and focuses on finding useful theoretical structures for localized phenomena
(Cacioppo, Semin, & Berntson, 2004). Of reductionism, psychology recently proposed the ideas
of a non-reductive materialism (Stam, 2007). In other words, materialism allows that some

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features are not able to be reduced to physical properties. Stam (2007) gives examples of such
nonphysical properties as informational, functional, linguistic, cultural, as well as
mental. Theory in psychology has taken the need to account for unobservable phenomena such
as properties listed by Stam, and the need for observation to formulate theory. A use of these
three views, which both takes into account the ways in which they can provide theoretical rigor,
while accommodating for unobservable phenomena and the testing of alternative hypotheses, is a
way in which I would use these theoretical views on theory. I would avoid the literalism of strict
reductionism and determinism, and consider non observable phenomena as part of my theory
development. As identified by Cacioppo, Semin, and Berntman (2004), the challenge facing the
advancement of theory in psychology is the role of realism and instrumentalism, integrating
features of both to guide theory building.

Scientific theory versus other types of theories. A scientific theory has been tested repeatedly
and it is correct for all observed results. According to Gelso (2006), a common theory is a
guess. Overall, extremely broad theories are not scientifically useful. Broad theories do not
generate research that tests their validity. Gelso (2006) states that more useful are mini-
theories. ( middle range theories?)These mini-theories may be parts of the broader systems, or
they may be theoretical statements that are separate from existing systems. Mini-theories stand
by themselves. Even mini-theories appearing to stand alone often are connected at a general
level to broader theories (Gelso, 2006). This concept corresponds to Creswell’s (2009)
description of differing levels of theories: micro-level theories provide explanation of small
areas of inquiry, while macro-level provide explanations for social practices, or extends to
whole societies. A theory is a series of constructions, which hypothesis says share a
relationship. Theories vary in their levels of abstraction, objectivity, realism, perspective,
and formality. A theory states hypothesized relationships among variables. From this
viewpoint, I understand, there is a theory behind virtually all research. In other words, variables
in scientific research must relate to one another. Informal theories are those that are not stated
explicitly. Scientists must make their theories scientific, or explicit, and test them with empirical
research (Gelso, 2006).

How a theory and hypotheses are related. Some researchers state theories are interconnected
hypothesis (Creswell, 2009). Researchers state theories within a research proposal as a series of
hypothesis, or use if-statements to describe a problem. For some researchers, a tested
positive hypothesis will contribute to theory and become theory. Gelso (2006) summarizes the
relation between theory and hypothesis as the following: in general, theories contain
theoretical propositions, and hypotheses are drawn from these. Hypotheses are more
formulated than propositions. Also, hypotheses are what are tested in the research process
(Gelso, 2006). Usually, hypotheses are drawn from propositions, which are drawn from
theory.

In the case of empirical research, one researcher may go through a theory building process which
begins with observations (De Vaus, 2001). Theory building involves observation as the first
step, using inductive reasoning to build a theory from observations. Theory testing involves
deductive reasoning processes, and begins at an abstract level, ending at the empirical level. In
theory testing, one uses theory to guide observations and what steps to take in research. Each
process culminates in the development of propositions, although hypothesis testing as described

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by Gelso (2006), which begins with comparing one proposition from a theory to many others,
takes place in the process of theory testing.

In general, however, I think hypotheses serve as a vital connection between theory and data,
and attempt to reconcile data with theory. The relationship between theory and hypothesis is
a point of debate. As theories come in different types, it is challenging to know when the label
of theory can be applied to a hypothesis (Stam, 2010). In the social sciences, which does not
rely upon mathematical models to the extent of science, there is no one precise point at which
an observation or hypothesis can be labelled a theory. Stam (2010) provides the example of
functionalism, which does not require that one knows what a phenomena is, but that one can
describe the processes surrounding it. He uses the example of memory, as there are many
theories of what memory is, but not exact knowledge of the phenomena surrounding
memory. According to some researchers, the hypothesis-driven nature of psychological research
calls for alternative views of research process.

Gelso (2006) and Stiles (2007) suggest alternatives to hypothesis testing. Gelso (2006) states
that hypothesis driven research has not proven to be as fruitful as expected. He suggests an
approach oriented towards discovery, which is free from hypothesis testing. According to
Stiles (2007), using case studies is an alternative to using hypothesis testing. Case studies
compare many theories to one or two observations whereas hypothesis testing involves
comparing one statement to several observations. Trochim and Donnelly (2008) suggest
grounded theory, which creates links between observations and theory, and allows for
adjustment of theory based upon these links.

The relationship between theory and research and how research (including quantitative and
qualitative) contributes to theory.

Five ways research can contribute to theory. Two ways research can contribute to theory are
suggested in the literature by Harlow (2009) and Stiles (2007). Of the types of theory
development, Stiles (2007) describes that hypothesis testing and case study research
contribute to the development of theory. While hypothesis testing involves testing of one
statement from theory against many observations, case-study compares many statements to
observations. Case-study research highlights the matching of theory and observation, and how
adequately the theory predicts aspects of particular cases. In addition, case study research
depends upon several contacts between each case and each theory, involving elaborated
descriptions and links from theory to observation.

According to Harlow (2009), case studies can contribute to constructing theory. In an

unexplored area, contributions from case studies can offer new data. In areas that are more
established, case studies are more likely to contribute to incremental developments of the work
of previous theorists. New evidence from case studies can provide theoretical insights that
can confirm or deny existing theory. In this way theoretical contributions develop the
knowledge base of disciplines (Harlow, 2009). Grounded theory relates initial questions to
the process of doing research. Trochim and Donnelly (2008) discuss grounded theory, which
is an iterative process in which development of the theory and data collection build upon
each other. Research begins with raising questions which do not confine or remain static, but

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assist in generating the research. Researchers operate from a core of theoretical concepts
which are used as a baseline in asking and adjusting questions. The research contributes
directly to the forming of theory through creating linkages between data.

A third way research can contribute to theory is as follows: a proposition offered to a gap
in research must show how research builds on past theory and must show its important
uses (Ellis & Levy, 2008). This involves knowledge of prior research about the problem or
proposition. Through familiarity with the literature related to the problem, one can identify areas
of further research or inquiry that prior research has not addressed (Ellis & Levy, 2008). Wacker
(1999) identifies one of the purposes of research as theory-building; this is distinguished from
fact gathering, in that the purpose of theory-building is to create integrated knowledge that is
applicable as a cohesive whole. Knowledge of prior research in a field can be built upon, and
theory can be extended to new phenomena.

A fourth way research can contribute to theory is that research design adds up to the
construction of theory. The theory-driven aspect of research in the social sciences implies that
design of research will have an impact on the theory construction. Affected by design of
research are: the relationship of theory construction, observation, and the outcome of empirically
based research (Stam, 2010). Research designs and methods which are employed in psychology
include, but are not limited to: case study, quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. Each
research method is composed of several different tools to apply to research questions (Leedy &
Ormrod, 2005). To summarize, methodology should address how, when, where, and who
(Ellis & Levy, 2008). In examining research design, Gay and Weaver (2011) discuss deductive
and inductive methods of research. They determine which method to use, the research
goal, and the data for the research question. Whenever possible, it is best to use mixed
methods that draw appropriate strategies from both research modes (Gay & Weaver, 2011).

A fifth way research can contribute to theory is highlighted in Stiles (2012). In research,
observations change theories. Observations may confirm the theory. Theories change to
fit the observations. Researchers must practice “quality control”, or observe how theory and
observations match. If theory and observations do not correspond, then the theory should
be adjusted; the goal is for theory to answer. The task of the researcher is to undertake and
verify observations and correlate theory with observations. Successful research, I deduct,
proves or disapproves a theory. Theory can be delimited depending on aspects of the problem,
such as the type of research which has already been conducted in respect to the problem (Ellis &
Levy, 2008).

References

American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American

Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, D.C.

Cacioppo, J, Semin, G., Berntson, G. (May-June, 2004). Realism, instrumentation, and

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scientific symbiosis. American Psychologist 59(4), 214-223.

http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcreprints/csb04.pdf

Creswell, J. W. (2009). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods

Approaches (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

De Vaus, D. (2001). Research design in research. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Ellis, T. & Levy, Y. (2008). Framework of problem-based research: A guide for novice

researchers on the development of a research-worthy problem. Informing science: the

International journal of an emerging transdiscipline, 11, 17-33.

http://inform.nu/Articles/Vol11/ISJv11p017-033Ellis486.pdf

Fawcett, J. (1978, October). The relationship between theory and research: A double helix.

Advances in Nursing Science, 1(1), 49-62. Retrieved from

http://journals.lww.com/advancesinnursingscience/pages/default.aspx

Gay, B. and Weaver, S. (2011, September). Theory Building and Paradigms: A Primer on the

Nuances of Theory Construction. American International Journal of Contemporary Research,

1(2). Retrieved from http://www.aijcrnet.com/

Gelso, C. (2006). Applying theories to research: The interplay of theory and research in science.

In Leong, F.T., & Austin, J.T. (Eds.), The psychology research handbook (pp. 455-465).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc. doi:10.4135/9781412976626.n32

Harlow, E. (2009). Contribution, theoretical. In Mills, A, Durepos, G., & Wiebe, E. (Eds.),

Encyclopedia of Case Study Research (pp.237-239). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications
Inc. doi:10.4135/9781412957397.n89

Levy, Y., & Ellis, T. J. (2006). A systems approach to conduct an effective literature review in

support of information systems research. Informing Science Journal, 9, 181-212.

http://inform.nu/Articles/Vol9/V9p181-212Levy99.pdf

Meltzoff, J. (1998). Critical thinking about research: Psychology and related fields.

Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Ravishankar, M. N. & Pan, S. L. (2008). The influences of organizational identification on

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organizational knowledge management (KM). Omega International Journal of Management

Science, 36(2), 221– 234. Retrieved from
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gement_science.html

Ruttkamp, E. (2011). Interactive realism. South African Journal of Philosophy, 30( 1), 41-52.

Stam, H. (2007). Theoretical psychology. In Pawlik, K. & Rosenzweig, M, (Eds.), The

International Handbook of Psychology (pp.551- 570). London: Sage Publications Stam, H.

Ltd. doi:10.4135/9781848608399.n29

Stam, H. (2010). Theory. In Salkind, N (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Research Design (pp. 1449-

1503). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc. doi:10.4135/9781412961288.n458

Stiles, W. B. (2007). Theory-building case studies of counselling and psychotherapy.

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Strunk, W., & White, E. B. (2000). The elements of style (4th. ed.). New York: Longman.

Tracy, S. J. (2007). Taking the plunge: A contextual approach to problem- based research.

Communication Monographs, 74(1), 106-111. Retrieved from

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcmm20/current

Trochim, W., & Donnelly, J. (2008). The research methods knowledge base, (3rd ed.). Mason,

OH: Cengage.

Wacker, J. (1998). A definition of theory: Research guidelines for different theory-building

research methods in operations management. Journal of Operations Management, 16(4),

361–385. http://dx.doi.org.proxy1.ncu.edu/10.1016/S0272- 6963(98)00019-9

Yin, R. K. (2009). Case study research: Design and methods (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA:

Sage Publications Inc.

I have dealt with this article of Weick in greater detail in my previous articles here
https://independent.academia.edu/UlrichdeBalbian
http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/weick_theorizing.html

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Weick, Karl, E., What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is, ASQ, 1995, 40: 385-390.

Products of the theorizing process seldom emerge as full-blown theories. Some are weak because of
laziness, some weak because the authors are still inching to something more forceful. Ruling out the
"not theory" things like diagrams, lists, make sense if people are being lazy but not if they are struggling
with difficult issues.

Theory is not something one "adds" to data, or something that one transforms from weaker to stronger
by means of graphics or references, or can be feigned by flashy conceptual performance.

But the five "not theory" pieces often do embed some theory, and there are graduations of each
factor.

Most theories are approximate theories. Merton says they take four forms:
* general orientations
* analysis of concepts
* post-fact interpretation from a single observation
* empirical generalization

While they are not full theories, they can serve as means to further development.

Like Sutton and Shaw say, it is hard in this low-paradigm field to spot which efforts are theory and which
are not. Theory can take a variety of forms and is a continuum . (stretching between two opposite poles)

One can also go directly from data to prescription without a theory, as doctors go from symptoms to
treatment without a diagnosis sometimes. Data, lists, diagrams are not theory but can help point to
and elaborate theories.

Ultimately, the question becomes do you publish "ends" or also "interim struggles". The ongoing
activities often create the lists, diagrams, etc. that eventually can become real theory. "Those emergent
products summarize progress, give direction, and serve as place makers.

I have dealt with DiMaggios’ article in my previous articles here

https://independent.academia.edu/UlrichdeBalbian

http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/dimaggio_theory.html

DiMaggio, Paul J., Comments on "What Theory is Not", ASQ, 40: (1995) 391-397.

DiMaggio find the situation between theory even more complicated than Shaw and Sutton:

1. There is more than one kind of good theory

Theory as covering laws

Some traditional theories are simply statements of the world as we see it. Here researchers often scurry

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about looking for high r-squares and explanations.

Theory as enlightenment
A device of sudden enlightenment. This kind of theory is complex, defamiliarizing, and rich in paradox.
It's a "surprise machine". ( a bit like serendipity)

Theory as narrative
An account of a social process with tests of the plausibility of the narrative. Sutton and Shaw have a
version of this in mind when they talk about theory. Yet explanation means accounting for variance.

2. Good Theory Splits the Difference

Many of the best theories are hybrids of the above approaches. One problem is that these approaches
are driven by different values and purposes.

Clarity vs Defamiliarization
One must balance the act of helping readers see the world with new words/eyes without confusing
them too much.

Focus vs Multidimensionality
One person's multidimensionality is another person’s goulash. One persons focus is another’s
reductionism.

Comprehensiveness vs Memorability
Sometimes our search for novelty causes us to overlook the most important variables (though
uninteresting).

Theory Construction is Social Construction, often after the fact

Resonance
"The reception of a theory is shaped by the extent to which a theory resonates with the cultural
presuppositions of the time and of the scientific audience that consumes it". The environment in which
evolutionary arguments are released changes. Cultural change modifies the metaphors that we think
with.

Theories into Slogans

People often simplify the things they read until they fit into pre-existing schemas. If a paper is widely
read by others not expert in the original field it gets further refined and simplified. New ideas get
lumped into either "hard" or "soft" intuitive notions.

Post hoc theory construction

Theories are socially constructed after they are written. It’s a cooperative venture between writer and
readers. We often reduce theories to slogans.

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In this section we will look at the process of theorizing or what theorizing is not according to Weick’s comments on
Sutton and Staw
(http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00018392%28199509%2940%3A3%3C371%3AWTIN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F)
What theory is not, theorizing is Weick, Karl E Administrative Science Quarterly; Sep 1995; 40, 3; ABI/INFORM
Global. As well as the article by DiMaggio in Administrative Science Quarterly Vol 40 no 3 Sept 1995 pages 391-
397.Comments on “What theory is Not.” Weick; http://www.jstor.org/stable/258556 Theory Construction as
disciplined imagination.
The importance of this article by DiMaggio is because he suggests other kinds of theory. That of course will change
the whole picture as presented by Weick and “Theory or not,” as suggested by Sutton and Staw.
Cornelissen, J.P. (2006) Making sense of theory construction: Metaphor and disciplined imagination. Organization
Studies, 27 (11). pp. 1579-1597 can be mentioned for the reasons that he improves, according to him, Weick’s work
by adding the use of the optimality principles and that he explicitly states that Weick deals with (imagining apt and
meaningful metaphors in artificial selection or evolutionary epistemology) Metaphor (‘organizational improvisation
as jazz’ and ‘organizational behavior as collective mind’ which Weick himself has imagined, selected and advanced
in his writings) He suggests that these metaphors fulfil and adhere to optimality principles (*the ‘integration
principle’; topology principle, web principle, unpacking principle, good reason principle, metonymic tightening
principle, distance principle, concreteness principle,) and stress the importance of it in Weick’s work when he
discusses creative imagination and theory or theorizing. These metaphors have created new images and theoretical
representations of organizations. Cornelissen suggests that adhering to the principles will extend and improve
Weick’s take on theorizing as disciplined imagination.
Both metaphors are good examples of how metaphors lead to emergent meaning (and cannot therefore be reduced to
the meanings of its component parts), and as such have enriched the conceptualization (and subsequent
understanding) of ‘organizational improvisation’ and ‘organizational behavior’ and have generated novel inferences
and conjectures, these metaphors were also found to be ‘apt’ and fitting to the target subjects that they are meant to
illuminate,
We (Cornelissen) argue that this is primarily the result of these two metaphors adhering to a set of specific principles
known as the ‘optimality principles’; a set of constraints under which metaphorical blends are most effective. As a
whole, the eight ‘optimality principles’ are the following*, with the first six the original ones proposed by
Fauconnier and Turner (1998, 2002; see also Coulson 2001; Coulson and Oakley 2000): the integration, topology,
web, unpacking, good reason, metonymic tightening, distance and concreteness principles. These principles are
derived from standard pressures that obtain in all mapping situations including metaphorical mappings (see
Hofstadter 1995, for a review). The ‘organizational improvisation as jazz’ metaphor satisfies most of these
principles including the integration, topology, web, unpacking, good reason, metonymic tightening and concreteness
principles. The ‘organizational behavior as collective mind’ equally satisfies a multitude of principles including the
integration, topology, web, unpacking, good reason, metonymic tightening and distance principles. Cornelissen
discusses them in detail on pages 17- 24.

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Kayla Booth sums up Weick - Theorizing by Weick Regarding "What Theory is Not, Theorizing IS" by Kayla Booth says
this –

Kayla Booth "What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is"

Karl E. Weick Argument Based on Process:

Theory as an end product vs. theory as a process.

Theory in the making! Conclusion The Gist Argument Theorizing Response to Sutton and Staw "Benefit of the Doubt
Piece":

This is not theory because

1) The author is lazy
2) The author is not there... yet Argument
Is Theory itself a Continuum or is the Process of Creating Theory a Continuum?

"What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is" or

"What Theory is Not, Theorizing Can Be"

1) Sutton and Staw's 5 Parts are part of the process of making theory, reliant on context
2) Authors should articulate where they are in the process of theory creation, instead of calling it complete
3) Theory is a continuum
4) Nuances of language and original concepts may help further develop these components

In “What theory is not, theorizing is” Weick states that he wishes to deal with the process of theorizing rather than
the product. He agrees with Sutton and Staw that : Theory is not something one "adds" to data, or something that
one transforms from weaker to stronger by means of graphics or references, or can be feigned by flashy conceptual
performance.” He suggests that references, lists, diagrams, data and hypotheses might not be theories but can refer to
theoretical development in the early stages. He then decides to look at the theorizing process with the reminder
that most theories are approximate theories and not strong theories and Merton says they take four forms:
* general orientations
* analysis of concepts
* post-fact interpretation from a single observation
* empirical generalization
While they are not full theories, they can serve as means to further development.

Like Sutton and Shaw say, it is hard in this low-paradigm field to spot which efforts are theory and which are not.
Theory can take a variety of forms and is a continuum .
One can also go directly from data to prescription without a theory, as doctors go from symptoms to treatment
without a diagnosis sometimes. Data, lists, diagrams are not theory but can help point to and elaborate theories.
We have the definition of theory as a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially
one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained. It belongs to a family of words that include
hypothesis, thesis, conjecture, supposition, speculation, postulation, postulate, proposition, premise, surmise,
assumption, presupposition; opinion, view, belief, contention . p.389 The process of theorizing consists of
activities like abstracting, generalizing, relating, selecting, explaining, synthesizing, and idealizing. These
ongoing activities intermittently spin out reference lists, data, lists of variables, diagrams, and lists of
hypotheses. Those emergent products summarize progress, give direction, and serve as place makers. They have
vestiges of theory but are not themselves theories. Then again, few things are full-fledged theories.

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. The ongoing activities often create the lists, diagrams, etc. that eventually can become real theory.
"Those emergent products summarize progress, give direction, and serve as place makers. I suspect that
tight coupling between treatments and symptoms, with belated theorizing of the outcomes, is a fairly common tactic
in theory construction. In my own ASQ paper re-analyzing the Mann Gulch disaster (Weick, 1993), the argument
developed partially by taking the Mann Gulch data as symptoms and, through a series of thought trials
corresponding to treatments, seeing which concepts made a difference in those symptoms. This exercise in
disciplined imagination resulted eventually in the theory that sense making collapses when role structures collapse

Weick develops his own ideas further in many articles and books, for example in “Theory construction as
disciplined imagination.”

I have dealt with this important article of Weick in much greater detail in my previous articles here –

https://independent.academia.edu/UlrichdeBalbian

http://johnljerz.com/superduper/tlxdownloadsiteWEBSITEII/id87.html

I mention a few points that I found of importance in Weick’s article. Problem, problem statements in my view can
change as one develops a ‘theory’. Additional problems can be added and problems can be stated in greater detail
with new perspective that arrive during the development of the ‘theory’. As Weick suggest accuracy and great detail
is essential in stating the problems to be dealt with by a theory.I think that apart from the problem/s to be
investigated problems concerning the development or evolvement of the theory might also occur and they should be
distinguished from the problems in the problem statements. To deal with the problems data would have to be
collected, even though such a brain dump or phenomenological vision of problems might not be accurate.
Theorizing is not one-dimensional but multi-dimensional and one must remain open to the fact simultaneously,
parallel processing is required and not simplistic linear thinking. Many cognitive skills will be required to function
at the same time for example sense making, ordering, selection, creative thinking, adding new concepts, being aware
of the implications of the concepts and terms use, etc. One should also remain aware of the main functional and
unnecessary internal and external limits and constraints, such as boundaries, are operating at every step of the
process of theorizing. One can take as example conjectures or suggestions to be dealt with. One will be involved all
the time in imaginary experiments and solutions, designing them, conducting and interpreting them.
Weick highlights this by his three evolutionary (epistemological) notions or processes of variation, selection and
retention.

The quality of theory produced is predicted to vary as a function of the accuracy and details present in the problem
statement that triggers theory building, the number of and independence among the conjectures that attempt to solve
the problem, and the number and diversity of selection criteria used to test the conjectures

An essential ingredient in Weick’s ‘disciplined imagination’ involves his assertion that thought trials and theoretical
representations typically involve a transfer from one epistemic sphere to another through the creative use of
metaphor.

The article follows up on this point and draws out how metaphor works, how processes of metaphorical imagination
partake in theory construction, and how insightful metaphors and the theoretical representations that result from
them can be selected.

The paper also includes a discussion of metaphors-in-use (organizational improvisation as jazz and organizational
behaviour as collective mind) which Weick proposed in his own writings

The whole purpose of this exercise is to theoretically augment and ground the concept of ‘disciplined imagination’,
and in particular to refine the nature of thought trials and selection within it.

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In doing so, he also aims to provide pointers for the use of metaphorical imagination in the process of theory
construction.

It is argued that interest is a substitute for validation during theory construction, middle range theories are a
necessity if the process is to be kept manageable, and representations such as metaphors are inevitable, given the
complexity of the subject matter.

p.526 Generalists, people with moderately strong attachments to many ideas, should be hard to interrupt and, once
interrupted, should have weaker, shorter negative reactions since they have alternate paths to realize their plans...
Generalists should be the upbeat, positive people in the profession, while specialists should be their grouchy,
negative counterparts.

p.528 The view that theory construction involves imagination disciplined by the processes of artificial selection has
a variety of implications and raises a number of questions.

p.529 The assessment that's interesting has figured prominently throughout, because it has been viewed as a
substitute for vaildity... The reaction that's interesting essentially signifies that an assumption has been falsified.

p.529 The choice is not whether to do mental testing. Instead, the choice is how well this less than ideal procedure
can be used to improve the quality of theoretical thinking.

Weick sees the theorist as the creator, executioner and maintainer of epistemological evolution. He must deal with
the problem statements he creates in a certain manner. He should introduce and consider as many relevant aspects
and details of the problems as possible. His statements should be accurate and detailed and making explicit all
assumptions. This will be done against the background or in the context of the three processes of evolution that his
theorizing will resemble. He will design, conduct and interpret his theorizing as if it is executing artificial selection
that consists of imaginary experiments. The three principles underlying this selection are closed related and consists
of the three activities of variation, selection and retention. Something like the survival of the fittest (the most
relevant, functional, meaningful and necessary) in natural evolution.
Variations of problem solving of and conjectures of the problem statements will be made and judgements by means
of what is interesting, plausible, consistent and appropriate must be executed.
Selection criteria by means of conjectures (about what should be retained and what must be rejected) during thought
trials (employing mental experiments or simulations) will alter the conjectures, delete some, modify others and
include new ones. Imagination for example employs a technique of metaphors as cognitive/heuristic devices.
Simulated images are employed for theoretical representation as aids to learning, exploration, discovery and
problems solving. According to Cornelissen, good examples of such metaphors are: trap door of depression, a word
painting or picture, boiling mad, clean slates. These metaphors fulfil the criteria, he sets out, for the best metaphors
to be used in this context.

The problem statements will present the imagined thought trials with problems to be solved, investigated, explained,
dis/confirmed and identifying meaningful domain words and sets of assumptions concerning these things. Smaller or
middle range theories will deal with solutions that have limited and explicit assumptions, accuracy of the problem
specification in detail.
The thought trials will employ metaphorical variation (as analysed by Cornelissen in detail and with his suggestions
to improve this technique) so as to create a number of them with a great diversity. They will present conjectures as
ways to dis/solve the problem. For this diverse, heterogeneous conjectures are required. Thought trials should be
eclectic with periphery cases that are often under-explore. This is where the function of selection criteria comes in.
They enable the manipulation of the selection process to retain that what is plausible. Validation is not the key task
of social sciences so selection criteria of conjectures to be created replace validation. The theorist must control the
choice of the conjectures. The value of social science do not lie in validated knowledge but in the suggestion
(propositions) of relationships and connections that change our perspective on an issue.
Weick’s suggests theory construction as a process that involves imagination (by the use of metaphors and imaginary
experiences) and that is disciplined by selection criteria (leading to the development of conjectures, variation,
selection, aptness, judgements of plausibility, dis/confirmed assumptions). Cornelissen re-states terms used by
Weick by the application of the eight principles, for example that’s concrete is the topology principle (preserve a
relations structure, for example organizational as collective mind) that’s obvious is the integration principle

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(concepts or domains that are unrelated are brought together), etc. Other optimality principles that are employed in
mapping situations, for example at the level of thought trials and that can add to variation in such trials by
conceptual blending as in the case of metaphors, as stated before, are the web (maintain mappings to input
concepts), unpacking (mapping schemes, other applications), good reason (significant elements, managerial,
scanning, interpretation of concept as calling concept by another name), metonymic tightening (elements in the
blend and the input), target and source concepts must be from distant domains, concreteness (select concrete not
abstract concepts to blend with target concept) principles.
To summarize Weick’s disciplinary imagination.
Construct theoretical representations, not merely deduct them from the problem statement;
The ‘logic’ (arguments?) used to develop and select representations by means of thought trials, simulation and
imaginary experiments;
Develop representations from heterogeneous variations;
Evolutionary epistemology, in the form of variation, selection and retention.
Variation of multiple and different images and metaphors that are apt, plausible (fulfilling the criteria of the
optimality principles); this will create new insights for a conceptual advance (search for new concepts is an ongoing
process of meaning construction).

exclamation mark next to it -

- Weick,
Karl. E., Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination, Academy of
Management Review, 1989, 14:4 516-531.

"Theorists often write trivial theories because their process of theory construction is hemmed in
by methodological structures that favor validation rather than usefulness. (Lindblom, 1987). Too
much validation takes away the value of imagination and selection in the process.

! I attempted to fulfil the useful, instrumental, practical function, although it seems to me what I
suggested will stand up against validation as well.

Theorizing consists of disciplined imagination that unfolds in a manner analogous to artificial

selection. It comes from the consistent application of selection criteria to "trial and error"
thinking and the "imagination" in theorizing comes from deliberate diversity introduced into
the problem statements, thought trials, and selection criteria that comprise that thinking."

! What I suggested fulfilled these ‘criteria’, or adhered to these norms or standards.

A theory is "an ordered set of assertions about a generic behavior or structure assumed to
hold throughout a significantly broad range of specific instances."

! From my section or point 1 until my final point 6 I think I fulfilled this criteria, so that it almost
appears as if I created a theory of philosophizing or the doing of philosophy as a process of
theorizing.

Verification and validation mean the demonstration, beyond pure chance, that the ordered
relationship predicted by the hypothesis exists and thereby lends support to the hypothesis. Proof
is verification of a probabilistic statement. It is a statement of high reliability.

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! yes or no?

A good theory is also a plausible theory, more interesting than obvious, irrelevant, or absurd,
obvious in novel ways, a source of unexpected connections, high in narrative rationality,
aesthetically pleasing, etc.

! yes?

A good theory process should be designed to highlight relationships, connections and

interdependencies in the phenomenon of interest.

! relationships between the philosophical discourse, the processes of doing philosophy and the
processes of theorizing.

a) Knowledge growth by intention is when an explanation of a whole region is made more

and more clear and adequate. b)Knowledge growth by extension means a full explanation
of a small region is used to explained adjacent regions.

! yes to a) what I suggested can be applied to b)

Bourgeois states that theorizing process should weave back and forth between intuition and
data-based theorizing and between induction and deduction.

! did I go backwards and forwards between data and the making of inductions and deductions
and between expressing intuitions and data based …? yes

Most theory theorists describe it as a more mechanistic process, with little appreciation for the
intuitive, blind, wasteful.... quality of the process. They assume that validation is the ultimate
test of the theory and a good theorizing process keeps this in mind at every step.

! yes, I identified and pointed out those things conceptually.

In reality, theory construction is not problem solving, because many steps happen
simultaneously. It is more a struggle with "sensemaking".

! yes I executed many steps simultaneously and I concentrated on sense making by

conceptualization of many features

When looking at philosophical writings it is obvious and rather surprising that philosophers are
unaware of the socio-cultural practice and the process of theorizing. This is surprising because
the process of doing philosophy resembles the different features and stage of the execution of
theorizing.
The systematic work of the major philosophers fits in well with the framework of theorizing,
such as surveying of the object or subject-matter to be investigated by data collection and other

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practices, stating the problem as problem statements or problematization, exploration and stating
of the problem and the concepts it involves in alternative ways, representation of them in several
heterogeneous ways, submitting these things to a variety of thought trials, imaginary experiments
or simulations (of images and representations) , applying optimality principles, the application of
rational selection criteria employing evolutionary epistemology (variation, selection, retention)
at all stages of the process of theorizing, drawing of conclusions, making generalizations and re-
viewing hypotheses.
The entire process will be presented by means of reasoning or a reasoned, coherent ‘narrative’ of
argumentation, sound arguments and consistent, coherent, significant and plausible reasons.

We find that the major philosophers who developed grand, systematic theories adhere to and
reveal the general framework of the entire process of theorizing, even if they do not deal with all
features and the detailed stages of the process. Minor, derivative and academic thinkers appear to
be unaware of the existence of theorizing and that they as aspiring philosophers are in fact
executing this practice. The way they deal with ‘problems’ always select and represent merely
one or more isolated features and stages of the entire framework of the process of theorizing.
They seem to be ignorant of this fact and that they are really involved in, at least some features
and aspects, of the process of theorizing. They employ and apply isolated ‘methods’,
instruments, tools or techniques such as ‘analysis’, critical thinking and theory, deconstruction
etc as if they represent the entire process of theorizing and as if their specific tool/s are really the
entire philosophical methodology.

These words are about philosophy, the doing of philosophy and what philosophers and what they
think they do, so it is in fact meta-philosophical descriptions. They are intended as general
statements about these things, generalizations, hypotheses, a model and pointers to a possible
framework for a theory about what the doing of philosophy is like, what the process/es of
philosophizing are like and what the processes of theorizing are like. The philosophical
‘methods’ that are referred to and described are in fact resembling different aspects and features,
and different stages of the process of theorizing, for example identifying and describing the data
that are collected as subject-matter to be investigated, deconstructed, analysed, dealt with
phenomenologically, logically or by means of the tools of critical theory, the creation of problem
statements involving this data, issues or problems,, the development and weighing of alternative
conjectures concerning these things, the use of disciplined imagination, the selection,
interpretation and retention of such conjectures, guiding ideas and concepts, meaning
construction by means of variations of different sets of concepts, invention of concepts, use of
simulations or imaginary experiments, imaginative representations eg by using metaphors in
accordance with the eight optimality principles, applying selection criteria relevant to the
particular stage of philosophizing, and other uses of thought trials, etc.

http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/weick_theory.html

Weick, Karl. E., Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination, Academy of Management Review,
1989, 14:4 516-531

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"Theorists often write trivial theories because their process of theory construction is hemmed in by
methodological structures that favor validation rather than usefulness. (Lindblom, 1987). Too much
validation takes away the value of imagination and selection in the process.

Theorizing consists of disciplined imagination that unfolds in a manner analogous to artificial selection. It
comes from the consistent application of selection criteria to "trial and error" thinking and the
"imagination" in theorizing comes from deliberate diversity introduced into the problem statements,
thought trials, and selection criteria that comprise that thinking."

A theory is "an ordered set of assertions about a generic behavior or structure assumed to hold
throughout a significantly broad range of specific instances."

Verification and validation mean the demonstration, beyond pure chance, that the ordered relationship
predicted by the hypothesis exists and thereby lends support to the hypothesis. Proof is verification of a
probable (listic) statement. It is a statement of high reliability.

A good theory is also a plausible theory, more interesting than obvious, irrelevant, or absurd, obvious in
novel ways, a source of unexpected connections, high in narrative rationality, aesthetically pleasing, etc.

A good theory process should be designed to highlight relationships, connections and

interdependencies in the phenomenon of interest.

Knowledge growth by intention is when an explanation of a whole region is made more and more clear
and adequate. Knowledge growth by extension means a full explanation of a small region is used to
explained adjacent regions.

Bourgeois states that theorizing process should weave back and forth between intuition and data-based
theorizing and between induction and deduction.

Most theory theorists describe it as a more mechanistic process, with little appreciation for the intuitive,
blind, wasteful.... quality of the process. They assume that validation is the ultimate test of the theory
and a good theorizing process keeps this in mind at every step.

In reality, theory construction is not problem solving, because many steps happen simultaneously. It is
more a struggle with "sensemaking".

"When theorists build theory, they design, conduct, and interpret imaginary experiments. Their activities
are like the three activities of evolution -- variation, selection, and retention, and actually more like
artificial selection than natural selection.

Theoretical problems are more likely to be solved when the problem is stated accurately and more
detailed.

Problem Statements

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Unlike nature, theorists are both the source of variation and selection. Often the problems are wide in
scope but limited in detail, inaccurate, and vague. While natural scientists pick problems they can solve,
social scientists pick problems in need of a solution, whether they have the tools to solve them or not.
Natural scientists pick topics of which governments, political bodies, and religious authorities are
indifferent.

"By their very nature the problems imposed on organizational theorists involve so many assumptions
and such a mixture of accuracy and inaccuracy that virtually all conjectures and all selection criteria
remain plausible and nothing gets rejected or highlighted."

Theories of the middle range are those that are solutions to problems with a limited number of
assumptions and of manageable scope, with the problem description of considerable accuracy and
detail. (See Bourgeois, mentioned earlier on.)
In fact, it would be better if theorists attacked problems that they can solve, not insolvable problems
that people feel too strongly about.

Thought Trials (imaginary experiments)

A theorizing process that produces lots of conjectures is better than one producing only a few, especially
if there is a lot of variation. A classification system can help determine when the variation in conjectures
is too narrow. Thus conjectures across various theory paradigms will be more powerful than one
constrained in only one paradigm.

Another way to increase variation is to eliminate memory, preference, or foresight to avoid narrow
habituated thinking. Kuhn's paradigm work shows this is very difficult to do sometimes -- thought trials
tend toward homogeneity. Some devices to increase variation include heterogeneous research teams,
generalists, randomizing devices, etc.

Selection Criteria
Selection criteria must be applied consistently or theorists will be left an assortment of conjectures just
as fragmented as what they started with. Remember that validation is not the key task of social science,
because we can't. Thus, the selection criteria must be chosen carefully because the theorist, not the
environment, controls the survival of conjectures. "The contribution of social science is in suggesting
new relationships and connections that change actions and perspectives."

When theorists apply selection criteria to their conjectures, they ask whether the conjecture is
interesting, obvious, connected, believable, beautiful, or real, in the context of the problem they are
trying to solve.

When an assumption is applied to a specific conjecture, there are four reactions – that’s interesting,
that's absurd, that's irrelevant, that's obvious. They are equivalent to significance tests, and they serve
as substitutes to validity. A judgement that's interesting is selected for future use. (See Cornelissen
mentioned next for details about these four reactions and their development by ‘his’ 8 principles of
optimality.)

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A disconfirmed assumption is an opportunity for a theorist to learn something new. However, for a non-
theorist is suggests that past experience is misleading for subsequent action and that coping may be
more difficult.

Theorists also assume events are unrelated and are surprised when they find unexpected connections
between events. Also, the standards by which narratives are judged differ from those used to judge
arguments.

Yet there is a thin line between that's interesting to that's in my best interest, from that's obvious to
that's what managers want, from that's believable to that what managers want to hear, and that's real
to that the power system I want'.

Sifting with a greater number of distinct criteria, which Campbell call opportunistic multi-purposeness,
should produce theories that are more important.

I have dealt with this articles of Cornelissen in great detail in my previous articles here
https://independent.academia.edu/UlrichdeBalbian

http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/1921/

Cornelissen, J.P. (2006) Making sense of theory construction: Metaphor and disciplined imagination.
Organization Studies, 27 (11). pp. 1579-1597. ISSN 1741-3044

This article draws upon Karl Weick’s insights into the nature of theorizing, and extends and refines his conception
of theory construction as ‘disciplined imagination’. An essential ingredient in Weick’s ‘disciplined imagination’
involves his assertion that thought trials and theoretical representations typically involve a transfer from one
epistemic sphere to another through the creative use of metaphor. The article follows up on this point and draws
out how metaphor works, how processes of metaphorical imagination partake in theory construction, and
how insightful metaphors and the theoretical representations that result from them can be selected. The paper
also includes a discussion of metaphors-in-use (organizational improvisation as jazz and organizational behavior as
collective mind) which Weick proposed in his own writings. The whole purpose of this exercise is to theoretically
augment and ground the concept of ‘disciplined imagination’, and in particular to refine the nature of thought trials
and selection within it. In doing so, we also aim to provide pointers for the use of metaphorical imagination in the
process of theory construction. (The author suggest Weick use the 8 optimality principles for example.)

Sections 1 and 2 in the following article are excellent and relevant to philosophy, theorizing and the intersections
between these two domains as they sum up the problems concerning the concepts and ideas of theory and theorizing.
And section 2 explicitly states the philosophical pre-suppositions and assumptions underlying theory-building and/or
the processes of theorizing.

These explicitly stated ideas and insights are an excellent frame of reference in which to view the steps, stages and
features of the processes of theorizing, the doing of philosophy or philosophizing and the resemblances between
these two socio-cultural practices, discourses or domains.

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This is also an excellent article as it shows theorizing about the entire process of theorizing. It first scans for data –
the concepts (theory, claims, models, concepts, hypotheses, models, diagrams, and paradigms etc) to be employed
and presents us with analysis of these concepts. Sutton and Staw had something to say about these notions not being
theorizing, while Weick does not take such a strong position concerning these notions.

It begins to touch on hypotheses concerning what theory and theory-building is, it identifies and explicitly states the
transcendentals – epistemology, ontological, metaphysical, etc – that underlies notions of theory, theory-building or
theorizing.

This study examines the definitions of theory and the implications axiomatic presuppositions have on theory-
building research. Theory-building is important because it provides a framework for analysis, facilitates the efficient
development of the field, and is needed for the applicability to practical real-world problems. To be good theory, a
theory must follow the virtues (criteria) for 'good' theory, including uniqueness, parsimony, conservation,
generalizability, fecundity, internal consistency, empirical riskiness, and abstraction, which apply to all research
methods. This article also focuses on the dynamic relationship that exists between the hypothetico-deduction model
(alternately referred to by theorists as nomothetic, positivism, postpositivism, empirical-analytical, or
hierarchialism) and the inductive-synthesis model (alternately referred to as idiographic, grounded theory,
constructivism, or interpretive theory). Finally, this study argues for the inclusion of both theory-building models in
a mixed methods research framework.

This article is the most ‘philosophical’, and the most wisely, generally or metaphysically of all articles I have seen
on theorizing. It deals in detail with the need for and techniques for identifying underlying transcendentals such as
implicit pre-suppositions and tacit assumptions that logically precede, underlie, determine, guide and direct
theorizing (and of course philosophizing). These things are crucial as theorists and philosophers are not even aware
of their existence, their nature and the manner in which they function and determine theorizing and philosophizing
on all levels, in all dimensions, in general and in micro-details.

These things are the subject-matter and focus of meta-philosophy, but in my opinion all philosophers should be
aware of them, identify them and their implications during all features, aspects, steps and stages of the processes of
philosophizing - at the same time as they do first-order philosophy. In other words it is essential there exists a
continual backwards and forwards movement or dialectic of sorts, a dialogue, between philosophy and meta-
philosophy – at all stages of the process of philosophizing. This article identifies and makes these things explicit – it
is up to the serious, creative and original thinking philosopher to investigate them and then to reflect on and
integrate them at all stages of his philosophizing. Very much as the good theorist is aware of all aspects of theorizing
and reflect on them and deal with them and integrate them and his reflections during all stages of his theorizing.

http://aijcrnet.com/journals/Vol_1_No_2_September_2011/4.pdf American International Journal of Contemporary

Research Vol. 1 No. 2; September 2011 24

Theory Building and Paradigms: A Primer on theNuancesof Theory Construction Bruce Gay Sue Weaver

This study examines the definitions of theory and the implications axiomatic presuppositions
have on theory building research. Theory building is important because it provides a framework for analysis, facilitates the
efficient development of the field, and is needed for the applicability to practical real world problems. To be good theory, a
theory must follow the virtues (criteria) for ‘good’ theory, including uniqueness, parsimony, conservation, generalizability,
fecundity, internal consistency, empirical riskiness, and abstraction, which apply to all research methods.
This article also focuses on the dynamic relationship that exists between the hypothetico-deduction model
(alternately referred to by theorista as nomothetic, positivism, postpositivism, empirical-analytical, or hierarchialism) and
the inductive-synthesis model (alternately referred to as idiographic, grounded theory, constructivism, or interpretive
theory)

Here we are presented with the types of theories or traditions of thinking about (philosophically!!) about theories and theorizing
–
1.5 Theory traditions. Despite the fact that there are numerous theory taxonomies, several theory/research
traditions consistently emerge in classification systems. This section will compare and contrast three pervasive
traditions: (1) hypothetico-deduction (alternately referred to by theorists as nomothetic, positivism,

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postpositivism, empirical-analytical, or hierarchialism; (2) inductive-synthesis (alternately referred to as

idiographic, grounded theory, constructivism, or interpretive theory); and (3) critical theory (alternately referred to
as radical, neo-Marxist, or social justice theory). The major tenants of these three theoretical perspectives is
presented in Table 1 below. As Table 1 illustrates, the assumptions and goals of the research tend to dictate
which approach to theory is utilized. (Similarly as the assumptions of these or other positions in philosophy dictate which
approach,
methodology, methods, tools and techniques, frames of reference, ideas, concepts, notions, beliefs, values, norms, standards,
ways of proceeding, narration, discourse, dialogue, etc will be employed. Philosphers must be aware of these things and the effect
they have on their mindset, their approaches, selection criteria for approaches, as well as on their notion of what philosophy is,
how philosophy should be done and what the results, functions, products, outcomes of philosophizing is and should be like.)

.Finally, this study argues for the inclusion of both theory-building models in a mixed methods research framework.

1. What is a Theory?

As with many substantive topics, the academic literature on ―what is a theory?‖ offers a plethora of definitions,
opinions, and criteria. Notwithstanding the many answers to this question, points of view are conflicting and there
is little agreement and a lack of consensus on its definition (Heinen, 1985; Henderikus, 2007; Metcalfe, 2004;
Sutton & Staw, 1995), its quintessential nature (Corley & Gioia, 2011; Lynham, 2002) the criteria for establishing
a ―good‖ theory (Gelso, 2006; Lam, 2007; Wacker, 1998, 2008), the definitive purpose of theory (Harlow, 2009;
Rynes & Gephart, 2004; Southern & Devlin, 2010) and the best methodology for theory-building (Hay & Lee,
2009; Morgan & Stewart, 2002; Smith, Bekker, & Cheater, 2011; Torraco, 2002). In fact, according to Sutton and
Staw (1995), the ―lack of consensus on exactly what theory is may explain why it is so difficult to develop strong
theory in the behavioral sciences‖ (p. 372). One of the primary reasons for this state of affairs is that theorists and
researchers approach scholarly activity from different worldviews and paradigms (Torraco, 2002, p. 356).

1.1 Theory presuppositions. Hall (2000) posited that ―any normative theory, presupposes and is colored by a
metaphysical viewpoint‖ (p. 52). Consequently, issues such as definition, criteria, and purpose reflect an a priori
commitment to certain presuppositional assumptions about what constitutes knowledge (epistemology), reality
(metaphysics), the nature of being or existence (ontology), values (axiology), and other basic philosophical issues.
Henderikus (2007) identifies this thesis as ―theory-laden‖ observation (p. 1); Frame (1995) and Plantinga (1990)
refer to this view of epistemology as ―perspectival presuppositionalism.‖ Tarraco (2002) stated that ―these
[presuppositional] beliefs are fundamental to the theorist‘s choice of research purpose, subject, and methodology‖
(p. 356). Philosophers such as Plantinga and Frame would add that one‘s worldview even ―colors‖ and determines
the types of questions we seek to answer (Polanyi, 1997). Henderikus (2010) affirmed this point when he noted
that ―one does not naïvely observe the world as it is but always approaches the world with some preconceptions in
place … colored by the theories or concepts that were used to frame the observations‖ (p. 2). Ergo, in reality, it is
not (as the old adage goes) ―seeing is believing‖ but more correctly - ―believing is seeing!‖ This truism was
echoed by Bolman and Deal (2003) who stated ―what you expect to see is what you see . . . theories are self-
sealing . . . they block us from seeing our errors and cause us to spin reality so as to protect existing beliefs‖
(p.34). Consequently, Creswell (2009) was correct to admonish researchers to be cognizant of the ―worldview
assumptions that they bring to the study [and] the strategy of inquiry that is related to this worldview‖ (p.5)

Indeed, despite our best effort to be ―neutral‖ in our evaluation of evidence, our worldview often hinders the
pursuit of unbiased knowledge (Helm, 1992; Naugle, 2002; Sire, 2004). From the viewpoint of perspectival
presuppositionalism, it is impossible to unbiased and completely objective (Suppe, 1974). Stated differently, our
commitment to certain a priori philosophical axioms affect us even to the point of causing us to discount evidence
that does not ―fit‖ our worldview. Professor Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, accented this problem in his
review of Carl Sagan‘s book The Demon-Haunted World:

we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that
produce material explanations,…
From the perspective of empiricists, evidentialists, positivists and other advocates of the ―received view‖
(Henderikus, 2007) presuppositionalism ―amounts to saying that theories are underdetermined by data‖ (p. 2);
and, if there is no data, where is the verification or falsification opportunity? Evidentialists argue that since
―falsifiability is a prerequisite for the very existence of theory‖ (Sutton & Shaw, 1995, p. 371),
presuppositionalism is nothing more than personal belief; something akin to religion, superstition, intuition, or
astrology— all which lack the certitude of empirical verification (Gelso, 2006).
1.2 Theory definition. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that there are differing opinions as to what
constitutes a theory (Gelso, 2006; Harlow, 2009; Henderikus, 2007; Henderikus, 2010)

1.3 Theory typologies. Because of the diversity and complexity of definitions and criteria associated with theory,

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many researchers and theorists use typologies and classifications systems to more easily describe the types of
theory—including their purpose, functions, boundaries, and goals (Bachman & Schutt, 2007; Buchanan, 2004;
Lincoln & Guba, 2000; Locke, 2007; Lynham 2002; Rynes & Gephart, 2004; Southern & Devlin, 2010; and
Torraco, 2002). Tarraco‘s (2002) taxonomy identified five types of theory: (1) Dubin‘s hypothetico-deductive
method, (2) inductive grounded theory, (3) meta-analytic theory, (4) social constructionist theory, and (5) case
study theory. According to Gelso (2006), Rychlak suggested that theories have four functions: ―descriptive,
delimiting, generative, and integrative‖ (p. 2)

More parsimonious taxonomies include: Lynham (2002) who cited Habermas‘s three-perspective classification:
empirical-analytical, interpretive, and critical theory (p. 225). DiMaggio (1995) posited that ―there are at least
three views of what theory should be‖: (1) theory as covering laws, (2) theory as enlightenment, and (3) theory as
narrative (p. 391). Finally, reducing theories to their most basic types, Heinen (1985, pp. 417-418) stated that
there only two kinds of theories: a concatenated theory (i.e., inductive-synthesis) and hierarchical theory (i.e.,
hypothetico-deductive).

1.4 Theory distinctions. Before comparing and contrasting three of the above views of what constitutes a theory,
we need to distinguish theory from related concepts, such as hypothesis, paradigm, model, and concept.
According to Dubin (1978), concepts are the terms designating the things about which a science tries to make
sense. Stated differently, a concept is ―a mental image that summarizes a set of similar observations‖ (Bachman &
Schutt, 2007, p. 72). According to Stinchcombe (1968), concepts must have various values, and should be defined
in such a way that one can tell by means of observations which value it has in a particular occurrence (i.e.,
variables).

Propositions are statements that expresses the relationship of two or more concepts (Cozby, 2009).
According to Gelso (2006), propositions form the basis of hypotheses, or more precisely, a hypothesis is a
proposition stated in a manner that is empirically testable.

Hypotheses contain independent and dependent variables and predict1 a measurable observed difference between
them.
As Sutton and Staw (1995) noted, hypotheses ―serve as crucial bridges between theory and data‖ (p. 376),
explaining how variables and relationships are operationalized. Stated differently, many scholars (Dubin, 1976;
Gelso, 2006; Homans, 1964; Kaplan, 1964; Lynham, 2002; and Weick, 1989) have made it clear that hypotheses
are succinct statements about what is predicted to occur, whereas theory presents the causal logic of why it is
expected to occur
Kerlinger‘s (1986) statement clarifies the relationship of these terms succinctly when he
states: ―A theory is a set of interrelated constructs (concepts), definitions and propositions that present a
systematic view of phenomena by specifying relations among variables, with the purpose of explaining and
predicting the phenomena‖ (p. 45).

As for models, diagrams, and paradigms, Sutton and Staw (1995..

the use of models or diagrams are often used in research for the purpose of illustrating relationships within a theory but, by
themselves, do not constitute theory.

On paradigms, their meaning, uses and functions –

1 Hypotheses must contain ―specific predictions concerning the outcome of the experiment‖ (Cozby, 2009, p. 17). (They
function therefore as leading idelas that guide the theory, or values!)
2 The term ―paradigm‖ was first used by Thomas Kuhn in his book The structure of scientific revolutions
(1962/1970).
Kuhn describes paradigms as essentially a collection of shared beliefs and a set of agreements about how problems are to be
understood.

(In other words more implicit assumptions and pre-suppositions that need to be made explicit and investigated)

According to Kuhn, paradigms are essential to scientific inquiry, for "no natural history can be interpreted in the
absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection,
evaluation, and criticism" (pp. 16-17). Indeed, a paradigm guides the research efforts of scientific communities, and it is this
criterion that most clearly identifies a field as a science. A fundamental theme of Kuhn's argument is that the typical
developmental pattern of a mature science is the successive transition from one paradigm to another through a process of a
conceptual revolution. When a paradigm shift takes place, ―scientific revolutions are . . . non-cumulative
developmental
episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one‖ (p. 92).

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The goal of the research is to discover ―truths‖ or laws that are generalizable across populations, then the
hypotheses testing perspective will be used.
If, however, the goal of the research is to better understand what is occurring in a specific setting and how various
stakeholders make sense of the phenomenal elements under observation, then inductive grounded theory is used

. Stated differently, inductive reasoning, by its very nature, is idiographic (i.e., relating to a particular situation), more open-
ended and exploratory, especially at the beginning.

Facts come first, then theory. The most important preliminary task is to gather all available information (data)
about the situation.

Deductive reasoning is more narrow in nature and is concerned with testing or confirming hypotheses. It is
nomothetic in nature (i.e., seeks to explain a broad class of situations, individuals, or behaviors). Because it is
nomothetic in nature, it has greater explanatory power. Hypothetico-deduction can be characterized as Einstein‘s
approach to theory. This approach represent a markedly different approach to the connection between theory,
data, and analysis. From this perspective, the theory specifies explicitly what type of data to collect. Here the
primary purpose is to discover if hypotheses have observed empirical support (prediction) and if the theory can be
falsified using explicit coefficients and other criteria (Rynes & Gephart, 2004). The focus of critical theory is to
uncover facts about power relations that are obscure or purposely obfuscated to members of society with the goal
of transforming political, social, and economic inequalities (Morrow, 1994; Quinney, 1970; Rynes & Gephart,
2004). From this theoretical perspective, issues of exploitation, dominance, and subjugation are often explored in
order to make social actors aware of these inequalities and facilitate emancipation from them. Emancipation from
structures of domination is referred to in the literature as ―critical reflexivity‖ (Rynes & Gephart, 2004, p. 457).

2. Considering Mixed Methods Research

A review of several texts and articles on mixed methods research (Cozby, 2009; Creswell, 2009; Creswell & Plano
Clark, 2010; Curran, 2008; Fielding, 2009; Hesse-Biber, 2010; Huberman & Miles, 2002; Johnson & Onwuegbuzie,
2004; Miller & Fredericks, 2006; Morse, 2005; Patton, 2002; Suri & Clarke, 2009; Tashakkori &
Teddli, 2003; Woolley, 2008) revealed varying definitions of what constitutes mixed methods research.
Notwithstanding these differences, all these definitions have, at their core, two common components (Creswell,
2009): they address the issue of methodology (i.e., the philosophical framework and fundamental assumptions)
and the issue of method (i.e., the specific techniques of data collection and analysis) (Creswell & Plano Clark,
2010). Our definition of mixed methods research is essentially a synthesis of the work of others. We define mixed
methods as:

(NOTE – more pjhilosophical issues and concerns while theorizing, in the case about a particular feature of theorizing –
the methodology and methods. It is necessary to be aware of these philosophical concerns during the entire process of
theorizing or philosophizing. In other words one must do meta-philosophy all the time while doing philosophy, so that
is explicitly aware of one’s tacit assumptions and implicit pre-suppositions concerning that specific stage, step or
context one is at present doing theorizing in or doing philosophy in. On must be aware of this fact all the time. There
must be a constant dialectical movement or dialogue between doing philosophy and doing met-philosophy of or on the
philosophy one is at present doing.)

An approach to inquiry that combines the unique methodology and methods of both
quantitative [nomothetic inquiry] and qualitative [idiographic inquiry] epistemologies. When
used in tandem, a cogent synthesis and mixing of both kinds of data results in findings that
have greater insight and more validity than when either QUAN or QUAL3 are used alone.

In determining the appropriateness of which methodology and method(s) to use (QUAN, QUAL, or MM), the
obvious starting criteria would be (1) the purpose of the research, and (2) the type of data being sought to answer
the research question(s). That is, certain QUAN research questions often lend themselves to only quantitative
methods. Conversely, certain QUAL questions can only be answered by qualitative methodologies and methods.

whenever feasible, researchers should consider using a mixed methods approach. The reason for doing
so is that a mixed methods typology has the advantage of capitalizing on the strengths of both QUAN and QUAL
approaches while offsetting the weaknesses of both (Creswell, 2009; Creswell & Plano Clark, 2010). Therefore,
the use of mixed methods has the advantage of being able to better inform and highlight the nuances and
complexities of the phenomenon being researched (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2010). This is the central premise of
MM research, according to Creswell and Plano Clark (2010). Creswell and Plano Clark (2010) made the case for
MM research by noting the following benefits of a MM approach:

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Mixed methods research provides more comprehensive evidence for studying a research
problem than either quantitative or qualitative research alone … mixed methods research helps
answer questions that cannot be answered by qualitative or quantitative approaches alone …
mixed methods research encourages the use of multiple worldviews or paradigms rather than
the typical association of certain paradigms for quantitative researchers and others for
qualitative researchers … mixed methods research is ―practical‖ in the sense that the
researcher is free to use all methods possible to address a research problem. (p. 10)

The rationale provided above by Creswell and Plano Clark (2010) for the use of mixed methods research forms
the basis for the reasons why we believe this methodology is appropriate for most research problems.
Figure 1 below illustrates the dynamic relationship between the hypothetico-deduction (QUAN) model and the
inductive-synthesis (QUAL) model that make up the ―research circle‖ . In the research circle, inquiry can move
from theory to data and back again (QUAN), or from data to theory and back again (QUAL). All though QUAN
methods are deductive in nature and QUAL methods are inductive in nature, both inductive and deductive
reasoning involve overlapping steps in the epistemological process. As Bachman and Schutt (2007

(This is often stated as the moving backwards an forwards between data, theorizing, returning to literature, imagination,
intuition etc – but here these things are explicitly stated!)

A bit on the determination caused by ‘historical’ factors, or factors that are part of a contemporary socio-cultural situation
(Habernas for example talks about this, enlightenment, modernism, post-modernism and the characteristics of these stages in
history
Also see in the Appendix Swedberg about these stages in/of history ).

Obviously, all research is constrained by the historical times in which the research is conducted. As few as 20
years ago, mixed methods research was not even a viable alternative available to researchers. The emergence of
mixed methods as a research paradigm4 has been documented in several texts (see Creswell & Plano Clark, 2010;
Tashakkori & Teddli, 1998). According to Denzin & Lincoln (2000), the dominant and relatively unquestioned
methodological orientation to research during the first half of the 20th century was quantitative methods and the
positivist paradigm. Beginning circa 1970s and 1980s, a variety of qualitative methods gained widespread
acceptance in the academy as an alternative to a purely positivist approach and orientation to research. The most
common name given to the qualitative paradigm during this period was constructivism (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000).
Over the last two decades (circa 1990 to 2010), a third methodological approach to research has emerged
involving the use of mixed methods (Creswell, 2009; Tashakkori & Teddli, 2003).

Creswell and Plano Clark‘s (2010) review of the history of mixed methods is slightly different using four, often
overlapping, time periods: (1) the formative period, circa 1950s to 1980s; (2) the paradigm debate period, circa
1970s to 1980s; (3) the procedural development period, circa 1980s to 2000; and (4) the advocacy period, circa
2000 to present (pp. 13-17). Each of these time periods (and the researchers who pioneered the ideas of MM)
contributed to the development of mixed methods today so that many disciplines, researchers, and academicians
consider mixed methods research to be, not only appropriate, but valid and necessary.

4 Tashakkori and Teddli (1998) describe, in detail, the ―paradigm wars‖ and the perceived incompatibility between positivism
(quantitative paradigm) and constructivism (qualitative paradigm) on such basic issues as: ontology, epistemology,
axiology, the possibility of generalizations, inferences and axiomatic assumptions underlying these systems. Tashakkori
and Teddli (2003) also discuss at great length (i.e., 700 pages) the emergence and major issues surrounding the mixed
methods paradigm approach to research.

3. Relationship between Theory and Research

The scholarly literature on the relationship between theory and research, and the ways research can contribute to
theory, is as diverse

In sum, the extant literature suggests that research (both quantitative and qualitative) contributes to theory bi-
dimensionally: (1) originality [incremental or revelatory] and (2) utility [scientific or practical] (Corley & Gioia,
2011). This tension between theoretical design (theory-building) and pragmatic design (utilitarian practice) is
ubiquitous (Smith, Bekker, & Cheater, 2011)

Whether resulting in originality or utility, quantitative‘s contribution to theory tends to be more generalizable due to
rigorous hypotheses testing—thereby yielding greate rexplanatory power and predictability.
This contribution truly is ―theory testing‖ and nomothetic (as discussed

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above). Qualitative‘s contribution to theory, though more narrow in scope, is equally as important—particularly
when exploring topics that are difficult to quantify, when trying to make sense of complex social situations
(especially those populations closed to ―outsider‖ observation), when answering the broader question ―what is
going on here‖ or when attempting to explain how stakeholders make sense of their situation

There are many ways research can contribute to theory.

Yet ―truth‖ (i.e., theory) merely for the sake of truth, absent practical usefulness (scientific or pragmatic), is rarely
sufficient. Stated differently, theory must have the potential to ―improve the current research practice of informed
scholars‖ (Whetten, 1990, p. 581) or improve the practice and understanding of practitioners. This third type of
research contribution is, for many, a more significant function for theory—that is, the establishing of ―best-
practice.‖

5 See Tashakkori and Teddli (2003) for a more comprehensive discussion of this topic.
6 For example, Ptolemy‘s geocentric theory of planetary movement versus Copernicus‘ heliocentric theory of planetary
movement.

Basic Orientation Hypothetico-Deduction Inductive-Synthesis Critical

Metaphysics Realism— observational Relativism

reality composed

from objective and subjective

meaning as determined by
stakeholders in the setting

data are considered the

foundation of knowledge;
objective reality can be
understood & measured
Source: Adapted from Bachman & Schutt, 2007, p.44

Table 1: Theory Traditions

Theory Perspective Basic Orientation
Basis orientation Metaphysics
1 Metaphysics Realism
Observational data are considered the foundation of knowledge;objective reality can be understood & measured
Relativism Hypothetico-Deduction
2 reality composed from objective and subjectivemeaning as determined by stakeholders in the setting
3 Reactionism Inductive-Synthesis Critical
Reality shaped by values of those who control power &resources

Methods Focus
1 Hypotheses testing,falsification
2 Gather all facts (data) first,infer theory that matches precisely those facts; allow new theoretical understanding to emerge
from the data
3 Understand historical forces, evolution of meanings, material practices, & inequalities

Goal
1 To explain & predict;discover generalizable laws & universal ―truth‖

2 Accurately understand what is occurring in this particular situation; describe actors view-point & significance

3 Emancipation, uncover hidden interests &contradictions; critique,transformation

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Tasks

1 Postulates Deductions Data(repeat as needed)(i.e., theory to data)

2 Data Deductions Postulates Data (continuous interplay)(i.e., data to theory)

3 Identify and reveal political, social, and economic inequities

Unit of Analysis

1 Operationalized concepts& variables

2 Verbal and/or nonverbal action
3 Relationship contradictions
----------------------------------------------------------------

Research Method

1 Quantitative (QUAN)
2 Qualitative (QUAL)
3 Both QUAN & QUAL

Metaphor

1 Albert Einstein
2 Sherlock Holmes
4 Karl Marx
Source: This table is compiled from Bachman & Schutt (2007), Heinen (1985), Lincoln & Guba (2000), Locke,2007;
Lynham (2002), Rynes & Gephart (2004), Southern & Devlin (2010), and Torraco (2002

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As a summary and conclusion I state these four points (1) Essential reading

a) Essential reading as introduction to the activity of theorizing are these –

https://www.academia.edu/30505428/Philosophy_Meta-_Experimental_Philosophy_subject-
matter_methods_theorizing_

b) Something like this article =-

http://www.analytictech.com/mb870/handouts/theorizing.htm Copyright ©1996 Stephen P. Borgatti

5. What is a theory?
6. Correctness of theories
7. Good theories
8. The process of theorizing
9. A tutorial on theorizing

What is a Theory?

A theory is an explanation of something. It is typically an explanation of a class of phenomena, rather than a

single specific event. Instead of explaining why there is a brown stain on my tie, a theory would explain why men's
ties often have brown stains.

Theories are often expressed as chains of causality: this happens because this and that happened just when
something else happened and this in turn happened because ... you get the idea!

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Theories are sometimes confused with hypotheses, because both seem to consist of statements relating one
variable to another. Well, it's true that some theories are little more than hypotheses. But good theories are a bit
different. Here are some of the differences:

 theories are more general

 theories explain why things are related, whereas hypotheses just say they are related
 theories generate hypotheses; hypotheses are implicit in theories

As discussed in the next section, one way that theories explain is by providing a sense of process or mechanism for
how one thing is related to another. This is very important.

Having a sense of process is an attribute or characteristic of a good theory. There are many characteristics that make
a theory good. It is not just whether the theory is correct or not. In fact, the correctness of a theory is a very
complicated issue, and is not quite as important as you might think.

Correctness of Theories

Unfortunately, we can never prove a theory right. We can prove it wrong, but can never prove it right. There are
two reasons for this. First, it doesn't matter how many times you test a theory, there is not enough time in the
universe to do all possible tests. So even if a theory has survived 100 tests, it could still fail the 101st test. In a way,
the situation is the opposite of locating a missing object in a house. If you search for the object in the house and find
it, well, it's definite that the object was in the house -- case closed. But if you search and don't find it, that doesn't
absolutely mean that the object is not in the house. It could still be there, you just missed it. The same (well, the
opposite) is true of theories. If you test a theory and it fails, that's it: it's been disproved. But if you test it and it
passes, that's just one test. There may be other data out there, or other situations, that will disprove. You just haven't
gotten to them yet.

The second reason you can't prove a theory true is that there is never just one theory that fits the facts. A
theory is really just a narrative. A tale that explains. But stories can be told very differently. In a sense, there
are always an infinite number of theories that fit the facts. Think for example of Newtonian theories for the motion
of bodies -- equations like f = ma. Those theories served us very well for a very long time. But now, we have
replaced Newtonian physics with a whole new theory brought to light by Einstein. Was Newton wrong? Not exactly.
His theories were correct as far as they went. They predicted the motion of bodies quite well: well, enough, for
example to build airplanes that actually fly. Engineers still use Newton's theories to build certain things. But for
other things, today we use entirely different equations built on a completely different understanding of the physical
universe to do exactly the same thing. The new theory explains additional phenomena that the old theory didn't -- for
example, according to Newtonian theory, objects should not change mass as they approach the speed of light (which
they do), nor should time slow down.

Good Theories

Good theories have a number of important characteristics, including:

 mechanism or process
 generality
 truth
 falsifiability
 simplicity

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 fertility
 surprise

Mechanism (or Process). A good theory has a sense of movement, a dynamic element. The feeling of
understanding that a good theory gives is due mostly to having a sense of process by which one state of affairs leads
to another. For example, suppose athletes tend to ask dumb questions in class. A bad theory explains this very
simply: athletes are dumb. This is a bad theory on many counts, but one problem is that there is no sense of process
by which the quality of the mind is linked to the stupidity of the question. What is the mechanism by which the
questions are formed, and how is mind quality related? Contrast this with a much better theory: that athletes have to
spend a lot of their time practicing and going to games, and so have less time to study. This has a sense of process:
there is only so much time in a day, the more time is spent on sports, the less there is available for study, the less
studying the less they will understand what's going on in class, and therefore the less cogent their questions will be.
This theory is a chain of causal links, each one small enough that we can readily believe it.

Here's another example. Why do some people steal, hurt people, and spend their lives going in and out of jail? A
common type of answer is something bad happened to them as children, or they had bad or missing parents (the old
"came from a broken home" idea). We tend to think that whatever bad happens, it is due to something bad. But
what exactly is the mechanism by which something bad happening as a child causes them to do bad things
themselves? What is it about the way the brain works that one bad thing leads to another bad thing? That's the part
we need to specify in order to have a good theory.

Bad theories often just give a name to the cause of something, without actually explaining anything. We are
often fooled into accepting these theories because it's been given a name, which makes it seem real or credible. For
example, suppose we observe that some workers work harder than others. What's the reason for that? Some people
will say "motivation". They are motivated. Motivation is an inner drive to do something. But does it really explain
anything or does it really just restate the observation? Knowing that working harder is caused by motivation doesn't
seem to help us understand anything. It really just brings up the question 'why are some workers more motivated
than others?'.

Generality. Good theories are general enough to be applicable to a wide range of individual events, people or
situations. Consider the theory that athletes ask dumb questions because they spend so much time on athletic stuff
that they don't have time for school. This is general because it should work for all athletes, not just BC athletes, and
not just for one sport. Furthermore, it can really be applied to any person who has a serious time commitment
outside of class, such as musicians. The basic idea of the theory -- the mechanism -- is that people with significant
time commitments in other areas will perform less well on the area in question.

Truth. Unfortunately, theories can never been proved to be true. There are two reasons for this. 1) No matter how
thoroughly we test the theory against data, there is always the possibility that tomorrow there will be some data that
contradicts the theory. Just because the sun has risen everyday since we started checking, doesn't prove a theory that
suggests that it will always rise. 2) Theories are just descriptions. There are always other ways to describe the
facts that are equally valid. In this sense, truth is not a reasonable concept. All that is available to us is descriptions
that are not contradicted by the currently available facts.

Falsifiability. A good theory is falsifiable. If there is no conceivable way to construct an experiment or collect
some data that could potentially contradict the theory, the theory is worthless. Suppose you are trying to
explain the pattern of heads and tails that come up when you flip a coin 10 times. Your theory is that it comes up
heads when an invisible magician wants it to, and tails otherwise. How do you test the theory? If you flip the coin
and it comes out heads, that does not contradict the theory because it just means that the magician wanted it to be
heads. If you flip the coin and it comes out tails, that does not contradict the theory either, because it just means the
magician wanted it to be tails. No matter how the experiment turns out, the data cannot possibly contradict the
theory.

Theories like this do not really explain anything. You can't use them to predict outcomes, nor to do things (e.g., to
build airplanes that actually fly). A lot of psychological theory comes very close to being non-falsifiable. For

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example, the general concept that employees in an organization work hard because of something called
"motivation", is kind of like saying the coin comes up heads because a magician wants it that way. We can't see
motivation. We can only infer its existence by its effects (human behavior). So if a person works hard, we say they
were motivated. If they don't work, we say they weren't motivated. Yet we say the reason they work hard or not is
because of motivation. This is circular: if they are motivated, then they work hard. If they work hard, they are
motivated.

In general, any theory that explains human behavior in terms of human desires is treading on thin ice. In other
words, if you study voluntary turnover in organizations and find that people leave organizations because they want
to, you haven't really explained anything, and you could never be proven wrong.

To summarize, there are two ways that theories can fail to be falsifiable: (a) because the data are impossible by their
very nature to collect, or (b) because they are circular.

Parsimony refers to the simplicity of a theory -- the avoidance of positing complex relationships when a
simpler alternative exists. One reason for preferring parsimony is that nature seems to. Complicated things have
more ways of breaking down, and less likelihood, therefore, to endure to the present. The other reason is that
theories are useless unless they are simple enough for people to understand. Theories are sometimes called
models, and the whole idea of a model is that it is a smaller, simpler version of the real thing. Models are meant to
pull out the important parts, and leave the unimportant behind. The power of a model can be defined as the
proportion reduction in complexity that it affords over nature. Too much detail can obscure the key things. Really
complicated models don't actually explain much. The best model possible of the Earth's weather patterns would be
obtained by constructing a duplicate Earth and surrounding solar system, exactly the same in every detail. It would
predict perfectly. The problem is, the model is as complicated as the thing we were trying to understand in the
first place.

An example of parsimony is chance models. Suppose we want to understand why almost all human societies have
significant inequality -- that is some people are much richer than others. We could posit a number of special reasons,
including supernatural causes like "God wants it that way", but it is important to realize that inequality is what we
would expect even if there were no special reasons why it should happen. If we take 100 coconuts and divide them
randomly among 10 people, there are only a handful of ways it could come out that would be approximately equal:
but there are about 1030 ways to divide them so that there is significant inequality. It's just like keeping your
room neat: there is basically one way of distributing all your stuff in the 3-dimensional space you call your room
such that you would say 'everything is in it's place'. But there are millions of ways that stuff can be arranged such
that you would say 'the place is a mess'.

The principle of using parsimony as a criterion for model selection is known as Occam's Razor.

Fertility. A fertile theory is one that generates lots of implications in different areas. Implications are important
because (a) they are essentially insights that were not obvious prior to stating the theory, so they represent
potentially new knowledge, and (b) they represent possibilities for testing the theory.

To be fertile, a theory pretty much has to be general.

Surprise. A quality of good theories is that they are interesting. This means that they generate non-obvious
implications. They lead you to understand things in new ways. Surprise refers to the theory's ability to make non-
obvious, unexpected predictions. A famous example is a theory that explains why certain countries have so many
more girls than boys. The theory says that this happens, ironically, when people prefer boys, such as in India. You
see, the probability of having a boy is different in different families -- it's a genetic thing. Now, suppose what people
do is keep having babies until they've got more boys than girls, or they have run out of room. So if the first baby is a
boy, they stop there. If the first baby is a girl, they have two more kids. If both are boys, they stop there. But if one's
a girl, they keep going. The result is that families that have a predisposition to have boys, tend to have small families
-- if the first kid's a boy, the stop there. But families that have a predisposition to have girls have enormous families,
as they keep trying to get boys. If there were no preference between boys and girls, then there would be no

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relationship between number of kids and the sex of the kids: large families would be just as likely to contain boys as
small families.

This paradoxical result is fun -- it's beautiful.

Process of Theorizing

Start with an observation, such as "white people and black people sit at different tables in Lyons Hall". Then create
an initial explanation. For example, you might try out the idea that people prefer to eat lunch with their own kind.

Now think about your explanation in terms of the qualities of good theory, and try to make it better. For example, to
make the theory more general, change "eat lunch with" to the more general "socialize with". Then check the other
criteria. One problem with this particular theory is that it lacks a sense of process -- how does it happen that
people prefer their own kind? Because it has no sense of process, this theory is little more than a restatement of
the initial observation. It's also hard to test. It basically says: people sit at different tables because they want to. So if
some people don't sit with their own kind, it must be because they didn't want to. Another problem with this theory
is that it is not fertile. It does not generate interesting implications. The best you could do is predict that at parties (or
any other social event), blacks and whites will self-segregate.

A model with a little more sense of process and explanation is: "People tend to do what they've done before. So
if whites grew up socializing with whites, then they will continue to socialize with whites, and the same for blacks.
People's earliest experience is with their families, who are typically the same color as they are." This theory
generates implications much more readily. For example, it suggests that kids adopted at a young age by families of a
different color will prefer to socialize with people of that color, rather than their own. It also implies that kids
growing up in racially mixed school systems should not show as much preference for their own kind.

Theorizing is an iterative process of creation, criticism, and re-creation. It is also an art. Good theories are
beautiful, and the process of creating this beauty is what art is all about.

For more detail on the process of theorizing, click here.

c)

Sutton and Staw (1995) Sutton, R. I., && Staw, B. M. (1995). What theory is not. Administrative
Science Quarterly, 40, 371-384. And reviewed by Weick - What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is and
also by Paul J DiMaggio.
Weick’s Discipline imagionation.
the process of theorizing or what theorizing is not according to Weick’s comments on Sutton and Staw
(http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00018392%28199509%2940%3A3%3C371%3AWTIN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F)
What theory is not, theorizing is Weick, Karl E Administrative Science Quarterly; Sep 1995; 40, 3; ABI/INFORM
Global. As well as the article by DiMaggio in Administrative Science Quarterly Vol 40 no 3 Sept 1995 pages 391-
397.Comments on “What theory is Not.” Weick; http://www.jstor.org/stable/258556 Theory Construction as
disciplined imagination.
The importance of this article by DiMaggio is because he suggests other kinds of theory. That of course will change
the whole picture as presented by Weick and “Theory or not,” as suggested by Sutton and Staw.
Cornelissen, J.P. (2006) Making sense of theory construction: Metaphor and disciplined imagination. Organization
Studies, 27 (11). pp. 1579-1597 can be mentioned for the reasons that he improves, according to him, Weick’s work
by adding the use of the optimality principles and that he explicitly states that Weick deals with (imagining apt and
meaningful metaphors in artificial selection or evolutionary epistemology) Metaphor (‘organizational improvisation
as jazz’ and ‘organizational behavior as collective mind’ which Weick himself has imagined, selected and advanced
in his writings) He suggests that these metaphors fulfil and adhere to optimality principles (*the ‘integration

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principle’; topology principle, web principle, unpacking principle, good reason principle, metonymic tightening
principle, distance principle, concreteness principle,) and stress the importance of it in Weick’s work when he
discusses creative imagination and theory or theorizing. These metaphors have created new images and theoretical
representations of organizations. Cornelissen suggests that adhering to the principles will extend and improve
Weick’s take on theorizing as disciplined imagination.
Both metaphors are good examples of how metaphors lead to emergent meaning (and cannot therefore be reduced to
the meanings of its component parts), and as such have enriched the conceptualization (and subsequent
understanding) of ‘organizational improvisation’ and ‘organizational behavior’ and have generated novel inferences
and conjectures, these metaphors were also found to be ‘apt’ and fitting to the target subjects that they are meant to
illuminate,
We (Cornelissen) argue that this is primarily the result of these two metaphors adhering to a set of specific principles
known as the ‘optimality principles’; a set of constraints under which metaphorical blends are most effective. As a
whole, the eight ‘optimality principles’ are the following*, with the first six the original ones proposed by
Fauconnier and Turner (1998, 2002; see also Coulson 2001; Coulson and Oakley 2000): the integration, topology,
web, unpacking, good reason, metonymic tightening, distance and concreteness principles. These principles are
derived from standard pressures that obtain in all mapping situations including metaphorical mappings (see
Hofstadter 1995, for a review). The ‘organizational improvisation as jazz’ metaphor satisfies most of these
principles including the integration, topology, web, unpacking, good reason, metonymic tightening and concreteness
principles. The ‘organizational behavior as collective mind’ equally satisfies a multitude of principles including the
integration, topology, web, unpacking, good reason, metonymic tightening and distance principles. Cornelissen
discusses them in detail on pages 17- 24.

Kayla Booth sums up Weick - Theorizing by Weick Regarding "What Theory is Not, Theorizing IS" by Kayla Booth says
this –

Kayla Booth "What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is"

Karl E. Weick Argument Based on Process:

Theory as an end product vs. theory as a process.

Theory in the making! Conclusion The Gist Argument Theorizing Response to Sutton and Staw "Benefit of the Doubt
Piece":

This is not theory because

1) The author is lazy
2) The author is not there... yet Argument
Is Theory itself a Continuum or is the Process of Creating Theory a Continuum?
"What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is" or
"What Theory is Not, Theorizing Can Be"

1) Sutton and Staw's 5 Parts are part of the process of making theory, reliant on context
2) Authors should articulate where they are in the process of theory creation, instead of calling it complete
3) Theory is a continuum
4) Nuances of language and original concepts may help further develop these components

In “What theory is not, theorizing is” Weick states that he wishes to deal with the process of theorizing rather than
the product. He agrees with Sutton and Staw that : Theory is not something one "adds" to data, or something that
one transforms from weaker to stronger by means of graphics or references, or can be feigned by flashy conceptual
performance.” He suggests that references, lists, diagrams, data and hypotheses might not be theories but can refer to
theoretical development in the early stages. He then decides to look at the theorizing process with the reminder
that most theories are approximate theories and not strong theories and Merton says they take four forms:

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* general orientations
* analysis of concepts
* post-fact interpretation from a single observation
* empirical generalization
While they are not full theories, they can serve as means to further development.

Like Sutton and Shaw say, it is hard in this low-paradigm field to spot which efforts are theory and which are not.
Theory can take a variety of forms and is a continuum .
One can also go directly from data to prescription without a theory, as doctors go from symptoms to treatment
without a diagnosis sometimes. Data, lists, diagrams are not theory but can help point to and elaborate theories.
We have the definition of theory as a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially
one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained. It belongs to a family of words that include
hypothesis, thesis, conjecture, supposition, speculation, postulation, postulate, proposition, premise, surmise,
assumption, presupposition; opinion, view, belief, contention . p.389 The process of theorizing consists of
activities like abstracting, generalizing, relating, selecting, explaining, synthesizing, and idealizing. These
ongoing activities intermittently spin out reference lists, data, lists of variables, diagrams, and lists of
hypotheses. Those emergent products summarize progress, give direction, and serve as place makers. They have
vestiges of theory but are not themselves theories. Then again, few things are full-fledged theories.

. The ongoing activities often create the lists, diagrams, etc. that eventually can become real theory.
"Those emergent products summarize progress, give direction, and serve as place makers. I suspect that
tight coupling between treatments and symptoms, with belated theorizing of the outcomes, is a fairly common tactic
in theory construction. In my own ASQ paper re-analyzing the Mann Gulch disaster (Weick, 1993), the argument
developed partially by taking the Mann Gulch data as symptoms and, through a series of thought trials
corresponding to treatments, seeing which concepts made a difference in those symptoms. This exercise in
disciplined imagination resulted eventually in the theory that sense making collapses when role structures collapse

Weick develops his own ideas further in many articles and books, for example in “Theory construction as
disciplined imagination.”
http://johnljerz.com/superduper/tlxdownloadsiteWEBSITEII/id87.html

I mention a few points that I found of importance in Weick’s article. Problem, problem statements in my view can
change as one develops a ‘theory’. Additional problems can be added and problems can be stated in greater detail
with new perspective that arrive during the development of the ‘theory’. As Weick suggests accuracy and great
detail is essential in stating the problems to be dealt with by a theory. I think that apart from the problem/s to be
investigated problems concerning the development or evolvement of the theory might also occur and they should be
distinguished from the problems in the problem statements. To deal with the problems data would have to be
collected, even though such a brain dump or phenomenological vision of problems might not be accurate.
Theorizing is not one-dimensional but multi-dimensional and one must remain open to the fact simultaneously,
parallel processing is required and not simplistic linear thinking. Many cognitive skills will be required to function
at the same time for example sense making, ordering, selection, creative thinking, adding new concepts, being aware
of the implications of the concepts and terms use, etc. One should also remain aware of the main functional and
unnecessary internal and external limits and constraints, such as boundaries, are operating at every step of the
process of theorizing. One can take as example conjectures or suggestions to be dealt with. One will be involved all
the time in imaginary experiments and solutions, designing them, conducting and interpreting them.
Weick highlights this by his three evolutionary (epistemological) notions or processes of variation, selection and
retention.

The quality of theory produced is predicted to vary as a function of the accuracy and details present in the problem
statement that triggers theory building, the number of and independence among the conjectures that attempt to solve
the problem, and the number and diversity of selection criteria used to test the conjectures

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An essential ingredient in Weick’s ‘disciplined imagination’ involves his assertion that thought trials and theoretical
representations typically involve a transfer from one epistemic sphere to another through the creative use of
metaphor.

The article follows up on this point and draws out how metaphor works, how processes of metaphorical imagination
partake in theory construction, and how insightful metaphors and the theoretical representations that result from
them can be selected.

The paper also includes a discussion of metaphors-in-use (organizational improvisation as jazz and organizational
behaviour as collective mind) which Weick proposed in his own writings

The whole purpose of this exercise is to theoretically augment and ground the concept of ‘disciplined imagination’,
and in particular to refine the nature of thought trials and selection within it.

In doing so, he also aims to provide pointers for the use of metaphorical imagination in the process of theory
construction.

It is argued that interest is a substitute for validation during theory construction, middle range theories are a
necessity if the process is to be kept manageable, and representations such as metaphors are inevitable, given the
complexity of the subject matter.

p.526 Generalists, people with moderately strong attachments to many ideas, should be hard to interrupt and, once
interrupted, should have weaker, shorter negative reactions since they have alternate paths to realize their plans...
Generalists should be the upbeat, positive people in the profession, while specialists should be their grouchy,
negative counterparts.

p.528 The view that theory construction involves imagination disciplined by the processes of artificial selection has
a variety of implications and raises a number of questions.

p.529 The assessment that's interesting has figured prominently throughout, because it has been viewed as a
substitute for vaildity... The reaction that's interesting essentially signifies that an assumption has been falsified.

p.529 The choice is not whether to do mental testing. Instead, the choice is how well this less than ideal procedure
can be used to improve the quality of theoretical thinking.

Weick sees the theorist as the creator, executioner and maintainer of epistemological evolution. He must deal with
the problem statements he creates in a certain manner. He should introduce and consider as many relevant aspects
and details of the problems as possible. His statements should be accurate and detailed and making explicit all
assumptions. This will be done against the background or in the context of the three processes of evolution that his
theorizing will resemble. He will design, conduct and interpret his theorizing as if it is executing artificial selection
that consists of imaginary experiments. The three principles underlying this selection are closed related and consists
of the three activities of variation, selection and retention. Something like the survival of the fittest (the most
relevant, functional, meaningful and necessary) in natural evolution.
Variations of problem solving of and conjectures of the problem statements will be made and judgements by means
of what is interesting, plausible, consistent and appropriate must be executed.
Selection criteria by means of conjectures (about what should be retained and what must be rejected) during thought
trials (employing mental experiments or simulations) will alter the conjectures, delete some, modify others and
include new ones. Imagination for example employs a technique of metaphors as cognitive/heuristic devices.
Simulated images are employed for theoretical representation as aids to learning, exploration, discovery and
problems solving. According to Cornelissen, good examples of such metaphors are: trap door of depression, a word
painting or picture, boiling mad, clean slates. These metaphors fulfil the criteria, he sets out, for the best metaphors
to be used in this context.

The problem statements will present the imagined thought trials with problems to be solved, investigated, explained,
dis/confirmed and identifying meaningful domain words and sets of assumptions concerning these things. Smaller or

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middle range theories will deal with solutions that have limited and explicit assumptions, accuracy of the problem
specification in detail.
The thought trials will employ metaphorical variation (as analysed by Cornelissen in detail and with his suggestions
to improve this technique) so as to create a number of them with a great diversity. They will present conjectures as
ways to dis/solve the problem. For this diverse, heterogeneous conjectures are required. Thought trials should be
eclectic with periphery cases that are often under-explore. This is where the function of selection criteria comes in.
They enable the manipulation of the selection process to retain that what is plausible. Validation is not the key task
of social sciences so selection criteria of conjectures to be created replace validation. The theorist must control the
choice of the conjectures. The value of social science do not lie in validated knowledge but in the suggestion
(propositions) of relationships and connections that change our perspective on an issue.
Weick’s suggests theory construction as a process that involves imagination (by the use of metaphors and imaginary
experiences) and that is disciplined by selection criteria (leading to the development of conjectures, variation,
selection, aptness, judgements of plausibility, dis/confirmed assumptions). Cornelissen re-states terms used by
Weick by the application of the eight principles, for example that’s concrete is the topology principle (preserve a
relations structure, for example organizational as collective mind) that’s obvious is the integration principle
(concepts or domains that are unrelated are brought together), etc. Other optimality principles that are employed in
mapping situations, for example at the level of thought trials and that can add to variation in such trials by
conceptual blending as in the case of metaphors, as stated before, are the web (maintain mappings to input
concepts), unpacking (mapping schemes, other applications), good reason (significant elements, managerial,
scanning, interpretation of concept as calling concept by another name), metonymic tightening (elements in the
blend and the input), target and source concepts must be from distant domains, concreteness (select concrete not
abstract concepts to blend with target concept) principles.
To summarize Weick’s disciplinary imagination.
Construct theoretical representations, not merely deduct them from the problem statement;
The ‘logic’ (arguments?) used to develop and select representations by means of thought trials, simulation and
imaginary experiments;
Develop representations from heterogeneous variations;
Evolutionary epistemology, in the form of variation, selection and retention.
Variation of multiple and different images and metaphors that are apt, plausible (fulfilling the criteria of the
optimality principles); this will create new insights for a conceptual advance (search for new concepts is an ongoing
process of meaning construction).

Point (2) Why Weick must be read –

Weick shows that theorizing is an activity. He deals with the features and steps of this activity explicitly. These
stages and aspects will be recognized by anyone who ever has written an essay, a thesis, an article, etc.
These stages will be familiar to those who read philosophical works for the theorizing dimensions rather than the
contents only – in other we are already familiar with the processes of theorizing through our own experience. Take
note of the different features of theorizing as a process as identified and stated explicitly by Weick, for example
collection of data (this includes finding and studying relevant literature concerning the problem) or brain dump,
brain storm, or the preliminary scanning of the terrain with the aim to collect relevant data.
Formulation of a number of problem statements (the must be detailed, accurate, state explicit assumptions and
identify and state explicitly all pre-suppositions) concerning the data. The theorist is deliberate, intentional and the
creator of the process of theorizing. This process requires the theorist to be involved in artificial selection by these
activities: variation, selection, retention. This will occur not merely once at repeatedly during different steps and
stages of the process of theorizing.
The theorist will execute thought trials (a diversity and many are required) to solve problems, by imaginary
experiments or simulations. It is best to deal, initially at least, with middle-range theories, for example their
underlying assumptions, implicit pre-suppositions and other features of their tacit transcendentals, and the
implications of subscribing to these perspectives or points of view can more easily be identify. Create different
conjectures (to be rejected or retained so that one alters the navigational route) for such simulations. Selection
criteria should be applied all the time, they must be interesting, plausible, consistent and appropriate.
There are a number of other characteristics and features of the processes of theorizing as already stated during this
article and in Weick’s own article. Cornelissen deals with one aspect of them – the nature and use of metaphors and
that and how they can be improved by employing the eight optimality principles.

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Many other articles deal in detail with different stages and aspects of the processes of theorizing but Weick presents
us with a preliminary framework of the bare characteristics that we must take note of during our intentional and
deliberate activities of theorizing.

Point (3) Why theorizing should be included as a subject in all curriculums and/or as part of all subjects. If we take
note of how theories come about by identifying their features, characteristics, steps and stages we will understand
the theories themselves much better.
Studying theorizing will assist us to think (through all stages of theorizing) in a more logical, coherent, consistent
and transparent manner. Such clarity will assist us in our research as well as our description, presentation and
reporting of our research for example by writing: articles, essays, theses, etc.
To understand theorizing is especially necessary for students and teachers of philosophy, as the steps, the stages and
the activities of the processes of doing philosophy resembles those of the processes of theorizing.

Point (4)

After the details and characteristics of theory and the processes of theorizing have been investigated, studied and
understood, the following article, that I have discussed at the end of the second section, section 2, is essential
reading - http://aijcrnet.com/journals/Vol_1_No_2_September_2011/4.pdf American International Journal of
Contemporary Research Vol. 1 No. 2; September 2011 24

Theory Building and Paradigms: A Primer on the Nuances of Theory Construction Bruce Gay Sue Weaver.

This excellent article deals thoroughly with many issues concerning theory, theory-building, theory-construction, the
nature and function of theories, different types of theories, types of theories, classifications and taxonomies of
theories, etc as well as the crucial philosophical problem of the underlying transcendentals, implicit assumptions
and tacit –pre-suppositions of theories.
The authors not only identify the numerous details of each of these aspects, but also provide references to articles
and individuals who dealt with each of them.
See for example on page 57 their section 1.1 this excellent section 1.1 Theory presuppositions.
Hall (2000) posited that ―any normative theory, presupposes and is colored by a metaphysical viewpoint‖ (p. 52).
Consequently, issues such as definition, criteria, and purpose reflect an a priori commitment to certain presuppositional
assumptions about what constitutes knowledge (epistemology), reality (metaphysics), the nature of being or existence
(ontology), values (axiology), and other basic philosophical issues…

This section show one reason why all researchers and students, especially those of philosophy must take note of and study the
processes of theorizing.

This Appendix contains work by Swedberg, who are respected for his, work and thinking about theory, in a
different tone, as well as a few other things on theory and theorizing -

Swedberg, R.: The Art of Social Theory (eBook, Paperback and ...
press.princeton.edu/titles/10264.html

In this one-of-a-kind user's manual for social theorists, Richard Swedberg explains how theorizing occurs
in what he calls the context of discovery, a process in ...
http://www.rmm-journal.de/downloads/Review_Tutic2.pdf
RMM Vol. 6, 2015, 1–5
http://www.rmm-journal.de/
Book Review
Richard Swedberg: The Art of Social Theory.
Princeton 2014: Princeton University Press.

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ISBN: 9780691155227
by Andreas Tutic
What is sociology? And if so, how many? (cf. Precht 2011) While basically all so-
cial scientists agree on the answer to the second question, there is no consensus
with respect to the first. Richard Swedberg, well-known for his work in eco-
nomic sociology (Granovetter and Swedberg 2011) and one of the doyens of the
rising movement in analytical sociology (Hedström and Swedberg 1998), would
probably answer: “Boring!”
In his recent monograph “The Art of Social Theory” Swedberg deplores the
state of the art in sociological theorizing. In comparison to methods of empirical
research, sociological theory has seen little advancement in the last six decades.
On the one hand there is empiricist research in which references to tiny bits of
theory figure as attempts in mere window-dressing. On the other hand, we have
abstract theory, which is utterly disentangled from empirical reality, typically
in form of vague orientation hypotheses concerning metatheory (“The notion of
. . . should be in the centre of sociological theory, because . . . ”), grand theory,
or writings about the writings of other theorists. First and foremost, Swedberg
misses original, creative thoughts in dealing with social phenomena. With this
monograph and its companion volume (Swedberg 2014b) he primarily aims at
providing practical guidelines on how to theorize well.
“The Art of Social Theory” is organized in two parts (“How to Theorize” and
“Preparing for Theorizing”). Each part contains five chapters of approx. 20
pages. A short introduction and a small essay on Charles Sanders Peirce’s life
and methodological views complement the book. There is no need to go through
the book chapter by chapter. Instead, we can quickly summarize its main points
as follows.
A theory is a statement about the explanation of a phenomenon and it is the
outcome of theorizing (Swedberg 2014, 17). Theorizing is indispensable in the
research process and should be conducted before a concrete research design is
set up. Swedberg suggests the term “prestudy” for this early stage of theoriz-
ing. On this stage, the researcher tries to identify an interesting phenomenon
to study, gives a name to the phenomenon, defines relevant concepts as well as
typologies, and finally formulates an explanation. It is important to understand
that the prestudy adheres to the logic of discovery and not to the logic of justi-
fication or verification.

Hence, anything goes. It is all about coming up with an

original idea—play around with language, compare things that are prima facie
completely unrelated, make heavy use of heuristics, analogies, and metaphors,
etc. You have to think outside the box. Naturally, reading much related work
by other social scientists would just harm your imagination at this stage of the
research process. Instead, you should try to get a solid grip on the phenomenon,
i.e., observe the parts of social reality related to the phenomenon as close as
possible using all kinds of data (anecdotal, qualitative, quantitative) at hand.
This is important, since the researcher has to get rid of “prénotions” (Durkheim
1964), i.e., commonly held beliefs about the workings of the social.
By and large, as a methodological guideline this notion of prestudy should be
hardly controversial among social scientists. A bit harder to swallow is Swed-
berg’s idea on how good explanations come about: Abduction. Swedberg borrows
this and other ideas from Peirce, which is why the pragmatist philosopher ap-
pears frequently in the text. “Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory
hypothesis.” (Peirce 1934, 171–72) While this quote seems innocent, Swedberg
runs into serious difficulties in explicating the meaning of abduction (cf. Swed-
berg 2014, 101ff.). This is not necessarily his fault, since Peirce is not known
for his accessibly way of writing. In brief, as far as I can tell, abduction means
guessing. According to Peirce, humans have an inborn capacity to guess right,
which he calls lume naturale. All we have to do is train this capacity and trust
in it. Swedberg embraces this thought and links it to Kahneman’s ideas regard-
ing the intuition of experts. Recall, according to Kahneman (2011) there are two
systems of thinking. System 1 relies on intuition and is fast. The rational and
methodical system 2 is rather slow. By gaining experience in a certain area,
you can boost the chances of your system 1 to do the job correctly. This idea

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of trained intuition also resonates with Gladwell’s 10.000-Hour rule (Gladwell

2008), according to which you have to spend at least 10.000 hours on a certain
activity to excel in it. And in fact, this is Swedberg’s main advice in becoming
a good theorist. You have to study the works of classic sociologists such as We-
ber, Durkheim, and Simmel and get a deep understanding of social action, social
facts, and social forms. This studying exercise does not aim at the scholastic
goal of encyclopaedic knowledge of any detail in say Weber’s explanation of the
rise of capitalism. Instead, we should strive for an intuitive grasp of sociolog-
ical core concepts and train ourselves in handling these notions. This way we
adopt “the sociological eye” (Hughes 1984), master “the sociological imagination”
(Mills 1959), and prepare ourselves for successful abduction.
So much for Swedberg’s core argument. Of course, his monograph also con-
tains some other material, for example on how to teach theorizing or what so-
ciology can learn from the arts. However, these passages are only of secondary
interest to the main course of argument.
While I sympathize with Swedberg’s notion of prestudy and his advocacy of
strengthening the role of theorizing in the research process, his exposition suf-
fers from two quite severe drawbacks. The first relates to Swedberg’s aim of pro-
viding practical guidelines for theorizing. Put blatantly, the monograph actually

Book Review: The Art of Social Theory

does not contain much useful material on how to theorize well. The problem is
that Swedberg writes about phenomena which are notoriously hard to deal with
intelligibly: Creativity, the emergence of original ideas, moments of epiphany.
Traditionally, the methodological literature evaded this difficulty by remaining
silent on the logic of discovery. For example, Popper regarded scientific creativ-
ity as a simple matter of empirical psychology, which little can be said about
(cf. Swedberg 2012, 4). While Swedberg repeatedly claims that modern cogni-
tive psychology sheds light onto the logic of discovery, his monograph does not
deliver much on the specific details of these insights. As a consequence, his ex-
position tends to get rather vague when touching upon his main theme. For
example, we learn that good theorizing requires “a good eye for what is social”
and “you have to open yourself up for what is happening, with all your senses
as well as with your subconscious” (Swedberg 2014, 30). In a nutshell, reading
“The Art of Social Theory” has not fully convinced me that there is much to say
about the origin of creative scientific ideas.
My second major point of criticism refers to Swedberg’s assessment of the
main problem in current sociological theorizing. Definitely, Swedberg’s diag-
nosis of the dismal state of sociological theory is convincing. It is true that
many empirical studies basically work without any real theoretical underpin-
ning. At the same, much work that runs under the heading ‘theory’ is useless
for an empirical science, since it contributes only little to the understanding
and explanation of social phenomena. Of course, there are exceptions to this
rule—consider, for example, the research program on conditions for cooperation
and trust as initiated and run by Werner Raub and his collaborators such as
Vincent Buskens and Jeroen Weesie (cf. Raub et al. 2015). Over decades these
researchers theorized on the social conditions of the emergence and sustain-
ment of cooperative relationships via elaborate and fine-grained formal models,
mostly of game-theoretical provenience. In addition, their theoretical results
are put to strict empirical tests using the full range of techniques of empirical
research, i.e., from small-scale experiments to representative samples. From
my point of view, this is sociological research at its best, which avoids both the
trap of abstract, empirically irrelevant theory and the trap of empiricism. How-
ever, this kind of theoretically grounded, yet empirical research is rather rare.
The bulk of sociology suffers from a mismatch between theory and empirical re-
search and Swedberg hits the nail on the head when he identifies theorizing as
the underdeveloped part.
So, how to improve on the state of the art in theoretical sociology? Swedberg
argues that theorizing should figure more prominently in the research process
and pleas for creativity. While I agree fully with the former, Swedberg’s idea
that current theorizing suffers mainly from a lack of scientific originality seems
beside the point. From my point of view, the main problem of current theorizing

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in sociology is that sociologists do not embrace techniques of theory construction

such as formal modelling, agent-based simulations, and computational social
science. Just like there are methods for empirical research, there are methods for
building social theory as well. The mismatch of sociological theory and
empirical research stems from the fact that sociology adopted the former but ne-
glected the latter. Of course, this is not a very original idea of mine. The program
of mathematical sociology and the theory construction movement (cf. Lave and
March 1973; Stinchcombe 1968) argued along these lines decades ago. When
discussing the theory construction movement, Swedberg notes some similarities
to his point of view. However, he also criticizes the approach as “mechanical”
and states that “[. . . ] the capacity to innovate could not be properly cultivated”
(Swedberg 2014, 32). Also he argues that theory construction tends to some kind
of arm-chair research in which the importance of observation while theorizing is
neglected (Swedberg 2014, 33ff.). Both arguments seem rather weak to me. Con-
cerning the relationship between innovative ideas and modelling two thoughts
come to mind. First, techniques of theory construction allow to spell out the
details and to derive consequences from ideas. Second, as any practitioner can
assure, thinking in terms of abstract models generates many new ideas. In fact,
it is more or less generally accepted among modellers that a good model has both
expected implications as well as counterintuitive and hence unexpected conse-
quences. So the generation of new ideas is an integral part of formal theory
construction. Moreover, the fact that economics and political science, both of
which are less reluctant than sociology in adopting modelling techniques, gener-
ated impressive families of theories with plenty of counterintuitive implications,
shows that Swedberg’s claim is empirically unsound.
Swedberg makes a better point when he criticizes that modellers tend to un-
derestimate the importance of observation while theorizing. It is true that often
modellers get seduced by their powerful tools, quickly turn their back on social
reality, and explore the consequences of their initial idea, which might have been
empirically questionable in the first place. Related to this is the tendency to de-
vote more effort in improving the methods of theory construction than in using
these methods for the explanation of social phenomena. As an example, consider
the myriads of solution concepts in cooperative game theory, a majority of which
will probably never find a single application. However, these are just empirical
tendencies in the usage of models. As the exemplary research by Raub, Buskens,
Coleman, Braun, Montgomery, Willer, Macy, Flache and many other social sci-
entists working with formal models shows, there is no inherent tension between
formal theory construction and a “sociological eye” for social reality.
Make no mistake, as a prime proponent of analytical sociology Swedberg is
far from opposing modelling techniques in theorizing. However, in his mono-
graph he highlights the importance of the mysterious Peircian notion of abduc-
tion and somewhat downplays the more practical approach of formal theory con-
struction. Considering that it might be fair to say that at the moment physicists,
mathematicians, economists, and computer scientists outperform sociologists in
terms of sociological theorizing, I feel that leading figures like Swedberg need
to make a strong case for a revival of mathematical sociology and push the dis-
cipline in the right direction. From this perspective “The Art of Social Theory”,
while an inspiring read with noteworthy thoughts on the role of theorizing in
the research process, does not find exactly the right tone.
Book Review: The Art of Social Theory
5
References
Durkheim, E. (1964),
The Rules of Sociological Method
, New York: Free Press.
Gladwell, M. (2008),
Outliers: The Story of Success
, New York: Little, Brown and Com-
pany.
Granovetter, M. and R. Swedberg (2011) (eds.),
The Sociology of Economic Life

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, 3rd edi-
tion, Boulder: Westview Press.
Hedström, P. and R. Swedberg (1998) (eds.),
Social Mechanisms. An Analytical Approach
to Social Theory
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hughes, E. C. (1984),
The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers
, New Brunswick: Transac-
tion Press.
Kahneman, D. (2011),
Thinking, Fast and Slow
, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Lave, C. and J. March (1973),
An Introduction to Models in the Social Sciences
, New
York: University Press of America.
Mills, C. W. (1959),
The Sociological Imagination
, New York: Oxford University Press.
Precht, R. D. (2011),
Who Am I? And If So, How Many?
, New York: Spiegel & Grau.
Peirce, C. S. (1934),
Vol. 5 of Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce
, edited by C.
Hartshorne and P. Weiss, Cambridge: Belknap Press.
Stinchcombe, A. (1968),
Constructing Social Theories
, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Swedberg, R. (2012), “Theorizing in Sociology and Social Science: Turning to the Context
of Discovery”,
Theory and Society
41, 1–40.
— (2014b) (ed.),
Theorizing in Social Science: The Context of Discovery
, Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press.
Raub, W., V. Buskens and R. Corten (2015), “Social Dilemmas and Cooperation”, in:
Braun, N. and N. Saam (eds.),
Handbuch Modellbildung und Simulation in den
Sozialwissenschaften
, Wiesbaden: Springer VS

Before Theory Comes Theorizing or How to Make Social Science ...

www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/.../player.aspx?id=3244

Oct 15, 2015 - Richard Swedberg is Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. His two main specialties are
economic sociology and social theory.

rom Theory to Theorizing by Professor Richard Swedberg, Cornell ...

www.cbs.dk/.../from-theory-to-theorizing-by-professor-richard-swedberg-cornell-uni...

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From Theory to Theorizing by Professor Richard Swedberg, Cornell University.IOA Public Lecture Series,
'Organizing Uncertainty' in Conjunction with the CBS.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-
archive/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=3244

From Theory to Theorizing by Professor Richard Swedberg, Cornell ...

www.cbs.dk/.../from-theory-to-theorizing-by-professor-richard-swedberg-cornell-uni...

From Theory to Theorizing by Professor Richard Swedberg, Cornell University.IOA Public Lecture Series,
'Organizing Uncertainty' in Conjunction with the CBS.

http://www.cbs.dk/en/cbs-fokus/business-in-society-bis-platforms/public-private/events/from-theory-to-theorizing-
by-professor-richard-swedberg-cornell-university

https://economicsociology.org/2014/11/01/how-to-actually-theorize-our-research-richard-swedbergs-the-art-of-
social-theory-is-a-unique-book-about-the-craft-of-theorizing/

How to theorize a research? Richard Swedberg’s “The Art of Social Theory” is a unique book about the craft
of theorizing

Posted on November 1, 2014 by Oleg Komlik

In the social sciences today, students are taught theory by reading and analyzing the works of Karl Marx, Karl
Polanyi, Max Weber and other classics. What they rarely learn, however, is how to actually theorize. The Art of
Social Theory is a practical guide to doing just that. (Open access to the Introduction chapter)
In this unique user’s manual for social theorists, drawing on philosophy, epistemology, and cognitive science,
a leading economic sociologists and expert on social theory Richard Swedberg (Cornell University) proficiently
explains how theorizing occurs in what he calls the context of discovery, a process in which the researcher gathers
preliminary data and thinks creatively about it using tools such as metaphor, analogy, and typology. He guides
readers through each step of the theorist’s art, from observation and naming to concept formation and
explanation. To theorize well, you also need a sound knowledge of existing social theory. Swedberg introduces
readers to the most important theories and concepts, and discusses how to go about mastering them.
For example, Swedberg recommends adding a new phase at the beginning of a project before the research design
is drawn – what he calls the pre-study, a time when early theorizing occurs by observing a topic intensely and
discovering something interesting or surprising to develop and explain. Instead of rushing to use “scientific
methods to try to prove their points,” social scientists ought to spend more time exploring empirical data and
developing creative research ideas, Swedberg said. Swedberg writes: “It is important, in other words, not to pick
your final topic until you have been surprised. If you follow this rule, you will study something that might lead to
new knowledge.”
Richard Swedberg smoothly demystifies the process of theorizing, making it accessible and exciting. Concurrently,
The Art of Social Theory is also erudite and rich with historical allusion.
Mark Granovetter, Thomas C. Schelling, Frank Dobbin and Isaac Ariail Reed enthusiastically endorse this project, as
much as we do.

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i10264.pdf

This story reminds me of those one hears about Sherlock Holmes and his

Amazing deductive powers or reason. He for example met someone,

shook his hand and deducted everything about the man’s background,

work, family etc from that first encounter.

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790

The Sherlock Holmes Conundrum, or The Difference Between ...

https://medium.com/.../the-sherlock-holmes-conundrum-or-the-difference-between-de...

Feb 17, 2015 - The Sherlock Holmes Conundrum, or The Difference Between Deductive and Inductive
Reasoning. Edited from www.scienceofdeduction.co.uk.

INDUCTIVE AND DEDUCTIVE REASONING - YouTube

▶ 1:17

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b3KM2p1nHs

Nov 3, 2011 - Uploaded by NextDirectorr

Extra credit for Geometry. No copyright infringement intended. "Sherlock Holmes" 2009.

How to Develop the 'Sherlock Holmes' Intuition: 12 Steps

www.wikihow.com › ... › Personal Development › Goal Realization & Problem Solving

The quick wit and sharp observational skills of Sherlock Holmes used to ... Conan Doyle to study more of
his style, manner of thinking, and deductive processing.

How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes - SuperThinking

www.superthinking.co/how-to-think-like-sherlock-holmes/

Jan 15, 2009 - In 2004, Sherlock Holmes (or his skills and attitude) were revived in the ..... attractive
quality in anyone and if you master deductive reasoning, ...

Inductive vs Deductive Reasoning - General Information

www.algebraguy.com/inde.htm

Deductive reasoning is the process of reaching a conclusion that is ... with the kind of reasoning used by
Sherlock Holmes in the works by A. Conan Doyle.

Deductive/Indeductive Reasoning/Sherlock Holmes by Brandon Grant ...

https://prezi.com/ncanz1fkvpge/deductiveindeductive-reasoningsherlock-holmes/

Sep 13, 2013 - What is the difference between deductive and Inductive reasoning? And how are they
used

[PDF]Inductive-Deductive Reasoning.pdf
rbrhs.schoolwires.net/site/.../filedownload.ashx?...Deductive%20Reasoning.pdf

Familiarize you with the deductive reasoning ... deductive reasoning uses facts, rules, definitions or ...
Sherlock Holmes would use deductive reasoning to.

[PDF]Sherlock Holmes on Reasoning Soshichi Uchii - Philsci-Archive

philsci-archive.pitt.edu/5306/1/Holmes.pdf

by S Uchii - 2010 - Related articles

Of course I knew who Sherlock Holmes was, since I had read ... contributed to clarifying the nature of
deductive reasoning and scientific reasoning based on ...

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791

[PDF]Sherlock Holmes
www.svsd.net/cms/lib5/PA01001234/Centricity/Domain/.../2.1%20Worksheet.pdf

Deductive reasoning (or logical reasoning) is the process of ... Holmes tale, The Adventure of the Dancing
Men, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Deductive ...

Deductive/Indeductive Reasoning/Sherlock Holmes by Brandon Grant ...

https://prezi.com/ncanz1fkvpge/deductiveindeductive-reasoningsherlock-holmes/

Sep 13, 2013 - What is the difference bewteen deductive and Inductive reasoning? And how are they
used? ... Sherlock Holmes and how he is reliant to Deductive Reasoning. In the stories of ...
DeductiveReasoning.pdf. Google.com/Images

Sherlock Holmes's Methods of Deductive Reasoning Applied to ... - NCBI

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1306061/pdf/westjmed00175-0121.pdf

by L Miller - 1985 - Cited by 12 - Related articles

reasoning and their basis in 19th and 20th century medical diagnostics. (Miller L: Sherlock Holmes's
methods of deductive reasoning applied to medical ...

[PDF]How to Think Like Sherlock - PDF Archive

https://www.pdf-archive.com/2014/07/18/...sherlock/how-to-think-like-sherlock.pdf

Jul 18, 2014 - For years, the worship of Sherlock Holmes has been ...... examples of deductive reasoning
that litter the stories and aim to mirror as many of the ...

[PDF]House and Holmes: A Guide to Deductive and Inductive Reasoning

www.flippedoutteaching.com/lessons/eng2/unit5/houseandholmes.pdf

Like Sherlock Holmes before him, House is a master of induction. In this lesson, ... Distinguish between
deductive and inductive arguments. •. Construct and ...

[PDF]The Uses Of Inductive And Deductive Reasoning In

www.becca-online.org/images/Inductive_Reasoning_-_Benny.pdf

by DJ Benny - Cited by 1 - Related articles

The theory of inductive and deductive reasoning has been a valuable tool in the ... reasoning is in the
works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes ...

How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes - SuperThinking

www.superthinking.co/how-to-think-like-sherlock-holmes/

Jan 15, 2009 - In 2004, Sherlock Holmes (or his skills and attitude) were revived in the ..... attractive
quality in anyone and if you master deductive reasoning, ...

[PDF]Sherlock Holmes: Reading like a Detective - Achieve

www.achieve.org/files/8thG-Sherlock-Holmes_unitFINAL_TextEdits_0.pdf

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sound valid reasoning, and well-chosen details; use appropriate eye contact, adequate ... 6) “Sherlock
Holmes Can Teach You to Multitask,” by Maria Konnikova.
Why is it important to know how to theorize in social science?

And is it a skill you can learn—

and perhaps also teach? Some

interesting light was cast on these questions in the very strange

way in which a crime was solved in the summer of

1879. The victim of the crime, and also the person who solved it, was

philosopher and scientist Charles S. Peirce.

The crime took place on a steamship called

Bristol, which was

traveling between Boston and New York. At the time Peirce was

thirty-nine years old and had just accepted a position as Lecturer in Logic at Johns

Hopkins University. He was also working for

the US government on the Coast and Geodetic Survey.

On Friday, June 20, 1879, Peirce boarded the boat in Boston.

He would arrive the following day in New York, where he was

going to attend a conference. When he woke up in his cabin the

next morning he did not feel well. His mind was fogg y, so he

quickly dressed and took a cab from the harbor to the Brevoort

House, a wellknown hotel on Fifth Avenue where the conference was held.

After he arrived at the hotel, he discovered that he had for

-gotten his overcoat on the boat as well as an expensive Tiffany

watch, to which a gold chain was attached. Peirce was especially

unhappy at the prospect of

losing the watch, since he used it as

an instrument; it also belonged to the government.

Peirce rushed back to the boat, went to his cabin, and looked

around. But the watch and chain and the coat were nowhere to

be found. Peirce thought that one of

the stewards must have stolen his belongings, since they were the only persons who had had

access to his cabin. With the help of the captain he soon had the

stewards lined up for questioning.

What then happened is strange. Instead of questioning the

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suspects in traditional fashion, Peirce proceeded as follows:

I went from one end of the row to the other, and talked a

little to each one, in as

dégagéa manner as I could, about

whatever he could talk about with interest, but would least

expect me to bring forward, hoping that I might seem such

a fool that I should be able to detect some symptom of his

being the thief. (Peirce 1929: 271)

But this did not help, and Peirce had still no idea who the thief

was. He decided to try something else:

When I had gone through the row I turned and walked

from them, though not away, and said to myself. “Not the

least scintilla of light have I got to go upon.” But there-

upon my other self (for our communings are always in dialogues), said to me, “But you simply

must put your finger

on the man. No matter if you have no reason, you must say

whom you will think to be the thief.” I made a little loop

in my walk, which had not taken a minute, and as I turned

toward them, all shadow of doubt had vanished. There was

no self-criticism. All that was out of place. I went to the

© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be

distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical

means without prior written permission of the publisher.

For general queries, contact webmaster@press.princeton.edu

Why Theorize?

The fellow whom I had fixed upon as the thief, and told him to

step into the stateroom with me. (Peirce 1929: 271)

When Peirce was alone with the man, he did not try to make

him confess. Instead he made an attempt to persuade the man to

give back the stolen items. Peirce had a fifty-

dollar bill in his pocket, which he offered to the man in

return for his watch with

the chain and coat.

“Now,” I said, “that bill is yours, if you will earn it. I do not

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794

want to find out who stole my watch. . . . You go and bring me

the watch, chain and overcoat, and I shall only be too glad to

pay you this fifty dollars and get away.” (Peirce 1929: 271)

The man said that he did not know anything about the stolen

goods, and Peirce let him go. He now decided he had to try

something else and contacted Pinkertons, the famous detective

agency. He explained what had happened to the head of the New

York branch, a Mr. George Bangs.

Peirce told Bangs that he knew the name of the thief and

wanted someone from Pinkertons to follow the thief when he

got off the ship. “The man will go to a pawnbroker,” Peirce said,

“where he will get fifty dollars for the watch. When he pawns it,

arrest him.”

Bangs listened to Peirce and asked how he knew that this par

ticular individual was the thief. Peirce answered, “Why, I have

no reason whatever for thinking so; but I am entirely confident

that it is so” (Peirce 1929: 273). Peirce added that if he was

wrong, the man would not go to a pawnshop; and no harm

would have been done by following him.

Bangs was not convinced. He told Peirce that his agency knew

much more about thieves and criminals than Peirce did:

I am sure you have no acquaintance with thieves and are

entirely ignorant of the species. Now we do know them. It

is our business to be acquainted with them. We know the

ways of every kind and every gang, and we know the men

themselves—

the most of them. Let me suggest this: I will

send down our very best man. He shall bear in mind and

give full weight to your impression. Only let him not be

hampered with positive orders. Let him act upon his own

inferences, when he shall have sifted all the indications.

(Peirce 1929: 273)

Peirce agreed, and a Pinkertons detective was sent to the boat the

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very same day, where he questioned all the stewards. The detective

soon found out that one of the stewards had a criminal record, and he had the man followed.

The individual Peirce had singled out as the thief turned out

to have been the personal valet of the captain for many years.

When the theft took place he had also worked on a different

deck than where Peirce’s cabin was located.

The detective followed the man with the criminal record, but

this did not lead anywhere. Peirce asked Bangs what could be

done next in this situation. Offer a reward of $150 to any pawn

broker who can give information about the watch was the answer.

Peirce followed the advice, and already the next day a pawn

broker reported that he had the watch. From the description that

the pawnbroker gave of the man who had pawned the watch,

Peirce immediately recognized the steward he had singled out as

the thief.

Peirce now had his watch, but he still missed the coat and the

gold chain that had been attached to the watch. To get back his

remaining belongings he decided to go to the apartment of the

thief, accompanied by a detective from Pinkertons.

When Peirce and the detective arrived at the place where the

thief lived, Peirce asked the detective to enter the apartment and

retrieve his gold chain and coat. The detective refused. “

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I could not think of it. I have no warrant, and they would

certainly call in the police!’

” (Peirce 1929: 275).

Peirce became annoyed and decided to do it himself. He

climbed the stairs and knocked on the door of the apartment

where the thief lived. A woman opened the door, and behind her

was another woman. Peirce told the first woman that her husband

had been arrested for the theft of

the watch and that he had

come to get his coat and his gold chain back. The women started

to scream and said that he could not enter the apartment. If he

did, they said, they would call the police. Peirce ignored them

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and stepped into the apartment.

At this point, the story takes another curious turn. Peirce describes

what happened once he was inside the apartment in the

following way:

I saw no place in that room where the chain was likely to

be, and walked through into another room. Little furniture

was there beyond a double bed and a wooden trunk

on the further side of the bed. I said, “Now my chain is at

the bottom of

that trunk under the clothes; and I am going

to take it. It has a gold binnacle with a compass attached;

and you can see that I take that, which I know is there, and

nothing else.” I knelt down and fortunately found the trunk

unlocked. Having thrown out all the clothes—

very good clothes—

I came upon quite a stratum of

trinkets of evident provenance, among which was my chain. (Peirce 1926: 276)

There was still the coat. When Peirce looked around for it, the

woman said that he should feel free to look wherever he wanted.

But the way in which she said this made Peirce suspect that the

coat was not in the apartment. He also noticed that the second

woman had disappeared.

Peirce left the apartment and thought that the other woman

might have been a neighbor. He knocked on the door opposite of

the apartment where he had just been. Two young girls opened

the door:

I looked over their shoulders and saw a quite respectable

looking parlor with a nice piano. But upon the piano was a

neat bundle of just the right size and shape to contain my

overcoat. I said, “I have called because there is a bundle here

belonging to me; oh, yes, I see it, and I will just take it.” So

I gently pushed beyond them, took the bundle, opened it,

and found my overcoat, which I put on. (Peirce 1929: 277)

What has so far been told about the theft of Peirce’s belongings,

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797

and how he recovered them, might seem like an odd tale, showing

how eccentric and willful Peirce was, but also that he had a

certain talent as an amateur detective.

Peirce himself, however, interpreted what had happened very

differently. He assigned great importance to the story and wrote

it up during the spring of 1907 in the form of an article, titled

“Guessing.”

The episode, he said, was very instructive for scientists and

could be seen as “a chapter in the art of inquiry” (Peirce 1929:

282). In a letter to his friend William James, he described what

had happened as an instance of the “theory why it is so that people so

often guess right” (Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1981: 16).

Guessing, in Peirce’s view, plays a crucial role in scientific re

search. It is precisely through guessing that the most important

part of the scientific analysis is produced—

namely, the explanation. What explains a phenomenon constitutes the centerpiece

of scientific research, according to Peirce. It is correct that with

-out facts to test the hypothesis or the idea, the guess is of little

value. But without the hypothesis or idea, there will be nothing

to test and no science at all.

The term that Peirce most often used in his work for the guess

of a hypothesis is abduction.

Human beings, as he saw it, are endowed by nature with a

capacity to come up with explanations.

They have a “faculty of guessing,” without which science would

not be possible in the first place (Peirce 1929: 282).

Science could never have developed as fast as it had in the

West, according to Peirce, if people had just come up with ideas

at random and tested these. Somehow scientists have succeeded

in guessing right many times.

In the article titled “Guessing,” Peirce also gives an account of

a series of experiments that he and a student had carried out at

Johns Hopkins on the topic of guessing. According to the article

that resulted, which today is seen as a minor classic in experimental

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psychology, people have a capacity to guess right much more

often than if only chance was involved (Peirce and Jastrow 1885).

The reason for this, the authors show, is that people pick up cues

subconsciously, and then process these in ways in which science

does not yet understand. They also established that people are better

at guessing correctly under certain circumstances than others.

Is this also a skill that can be learned and taught? Peirce defi-

nitely thought so. It is also clear from his behavior in the episode

with the theft that he had trained himself to observe and trust

his own capacity to guess and come up with correct explanations.

In fact, throughout his life, Peirce was deeply concerned with the

issue of how to improve the capacity for abduction. He was espe

-cially interested in the practical ways in which people can train

themselves to become better at coming up with solutions to

problems and new ideas. With this in mind he also constructed a

number of practical exercises.

This brings us back to this book, which is primarily aimed at

those who want to learn the art of theorizing in social science. In

fact, the one author who has inspired the main ideas of this book

more than anyone else is Peirce, who was very concerned with

this issue. It is, for example, his notion of science that underlies

what follows—

namely, that science is about observing a phenomenon,

coming up with an idea or a theory why something

happens, and then testing the theory against facts.

Most importantly, and again inspired by Peirce, I see abduc-

tion, or coming up with an idea, as the most precious part of the

whole research process and the one that it is the most important

to somehow get a grip on. It truly constitutes the heart of the

theorizing process. Following Peirce, I also argue that an idea or

a hypothesis is of little value until it has been carefully tested

against data according to the rules of science.

What I have aimed for in writing this book is first to produce

a practical guide. The book essentially contains tips on how to

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proceed for those who want to learn how to theorize in a creative

way in social science. It also attempts to show how you can teach

theorizing, or at least how you should approach this topic.

This is a tall order, and the book is by design as well as by necessity

an experimental book. As a result, it contains more suggestions

than prescriptions. Still, the hope is that the book will

help to put theorizing—how to do it and how to teach it—

on the agenda of today’s social science.

The book has two parts, each of which consists of five chap

-ters. The first part deals with the issue of what you do when you

theorize in practical terms; the second with how to prepare and

train yourself for theorizing.

In chapter 1, the project of creative theorizing in social science

is presented. Here as elsewhere I will use the term

creative theorizing, or an abductive-oriented

type of theorizing, to distinguish

the type of theorizing I advocate from that of others. I also dis-

cuss the need for a decisive break with some of

the ways in which

theory is currently understood in social science. This is followed

by four chapters that describe how to theorize in a practical way.

Chapter 2 argues that creative theorizing in social science has

to begin with observation. Chapters 3 through 5 describe how

you proceed from the stage of observation to the formulation of

a tentative theory. This part of the process I call building out the

theory, and it can be described as giving body and structure to the

the or y.

First is the problem of naming the phenomenon you want to

study and of developing concepts that can help you to nail it

down and analyze it (chapter 3). In the attempt to produce a

theory, you may also need to use analogies and metaphors, construct

a typolog y, and more (chapter 4). No theory is complete

without an explanation, and there are many different ways of

coming up with one (chapter 5).

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The second part of this book is devoted to the ways in which

you prepare yourself for theorizing, and also how you teach stu

-dents how to theorize. Heuristics are helpful in this and so are

various practical exercises (chapters 6 and 7). It is imperative to

know some theory to be good at theorizing, and how to accom

-plish this in a practical way is discussed in chapter 8.

There is also the question of the role of imagination and the

arts in helping social scientists to theorize well (chapter 9). The

general approach to theorizing in this book is summarized in

the last chapter, which also contains a discussion of what I see as

the inherently democratic nature of theorizing (chapter 10).

The book ends as it starts, with Peirce. I have included an appendix titled “How to Theorize according to Charles S. Peirce.”

The reason for this is that the work of

Peirce is not as well known

in social science as it perhaps deserves to be. This is especially true

for the practical side of his work on abduction, which deals with

learning the art of theorizing

In modern scientific articles and monographs one presents only results. In earlier scholarly writings that took the
form of more paradigmatic essays it was customary to include also the trials and tribulations that preceded the
emergence of the results. I will here try to pick up the old-fashioned path and describe an intellectual process that
began in 1950 with the writing of my MA-thesis, A Semantic Role Theory, at the University of Minnesota
(Zetterberg 1951) and ended with seven planned volumes about social theory and about a many-splendored society
that is within mankind’s reach (Zetterberg 2009, 2nd ed. 2011, Vol 1 et seq.).

The adjective "many-splendored" describes a society with personal freedom and a sparkling differentiation of six
self-governing realms: economy, politics, science, art, religion, and morality. When these societal realms are
integrated, so that no one realm rules over any of the others, we have, in my view, a good society.

The Many-Splendored Society is not a typical collection of essays of theoretical relevance, more or less revised and
integrated, as are works of Max Weber (1920, 1921), Robert K Merton (1957), Herbert Blumer (1969), Clifford
Geertz (1973), Edward Shils (1982), all of which have greatly inspired me. The Many-Splendored Society certainly
has material from my older essays but it is reworked into a whole cloth and everything is presented in English.
Actually, my native tongue, Swedish, is not well suited to the topic at hand since the people and intellectuals who
speak Swedish use the same word, "samhället," for both state and society, an anathema of being many-splendored.

Trick One of the Theorizing Trade: Get in Touch with the Classics

"A classic must stand at last alone: without apology, exegesis, or alibi. It must speak for itself to strangers;
it must be intelligible, and seem true, after all its special friends are dead. It must have the minimum of
weakness, vagueness, vanity, wind. It must be well made at the seams, to stand the long voyage it hopes to

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make, and to endure the waves either of contempt or of competition. It must have been made, in other
words, by one who knew how to make such things, and nothing else about him will matter: who he was,
how he looked, or what he thought about other things than the things he treated" (van Doren 1961, 27).

In the social sciences, particularly sociology, the classic texts are still alive. We cannot learn sociology simply by
reading the most recent textbook. Above all, to theorize in sociology you must attend to its classics. As you have
seen from the program, most papers in the workgroup on theory are explorations of classical texts. Actually we have
good reasons to return all the way to Aristotle when we study social science, particularly if the topic is politics,
aesthetics, or ethics.

No modern physicist or biologist have such reasons to return to any writer from antiquity. But we social scientists
do. I do not think this means that social science is backwards compared to natural science. Social science is the
easier one of the two. The grammar of social reality is easier than the mathematics of physical reality, and the
grammar is known almost automatically by any language brain. Already in ancient Athens one could acquire
abundant and accurate knowledge of human affairs; the wisdom of its dramatists and philosophers has produced
centuries of aha-experiences. It was harder for the Athenians to learn about phenomena of physical and biological
reality. Such knowledge required more conscious initiatives and technologically advanced instruments.

Let me assure you that it is wonderful to live a life in communication with the classics, the brightest of the ages. In
my darker moments in USA, England, Sweden, and Spain, it has been a consolation to be able to turn to the classics.

Let me say a word about the Great Books movement.

After World War II, educational systems in many countries favored early specialization. That which had formerly
been called studium generale,, “general studies,” and which preceded occupationally geared studies, was
accordingly cut back.

A heroic attempt to re-establish general studies with a new (or rediscovered) pedagogy was made after the War at
the University of Chicago, a private university. Its studium generalewas a set of courses in certain subjects, all
having a tradition of basic research. In small, compulsory seminars, all freshmen read, discussed, and analyzed the
most important original works in philosophy, physics, history, and social studies. The aim was not that the students
should learn about the entire series of “Great Books” chosen by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler.
Most of the 54 books were works in Western humanism from Homer to William James in their original (but if
necessary translated) versions. Some original scientific texts were also included by Aristotle, Newton,
HuygensLavoisier ourierFaraday, Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Rather, the goal of the seminars was to develop critical
thinking, not only through exchanges with fellow students and teachers, but also with the pre-eminent thinkers of the
Western world.

Different and sometimes watered-down versions of the Chicago model of “Great books coursessoon came to
Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and Brown, and to other colleges and universitiesin the United States with ambitious
undergraduate programs. Most of these programs have been met with declining interest, and have waned in
importance. They have suffered from some students’ desires to choose easier courses, and their contents became
subject to criticism by feminists and multiculturalists as an ultimate bias and celebration of Western white males.

When I was teaching at the Graduate School of Columbia University for twelve years in the 50s and 60s, the
undergraduates in Columbia College had a mandatory Great Books Course. In the graduate Department of
Sociology we agreed that I would give a seminar of great sociological classics. We would read a different book (or
sometimes a longer book section) each week for twelve weeks. No free-riding allowed. If someone had been unable
to do the home work, they were allowed to stay in the seminar, but with some restrictions on participating in the
discussion. One seminar member had the responsibility to introduce the book of the week, and later in the report also
include chosen points of the group discussion. Some names recurred most every year -- de Tocqueville, Marx,

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Weber, Simmel, Durkheim, Mead -- while I varied others from year to year. Needless to say I got myself the good
education that my colleagues thought I already had when they assigned the seminar to me.

Unfortunately, Richard Swedberg was a teenager when this took place. His idea to replace the teaching of theory
with the teaching of theorizing did not occur to me. I remember that some of Lazarsfeld’s doctoral students in my
classics seminar raised issues of the methodology of theorizing. Merton’s students, like my own, were mostly
interested in the substantive theory of the classics. The Department itself was convinced that if we could teach
superior methodology and superior theory, any of our students could then take up specialties such as race, crime,
family, etc. on her or his own; there was no need for our curriculum to cover everything called sociology.

Trick Two of the Theorizing Trade: Find a House God among the Classics

Classics often inspire a life in scholarship. To get to know a classic of your choice may help your career as a scholar.

Let me cite from the first words I read by Max Weber. They came from a lecture at Munich University on
“Wissenschaft als Beruf” given in 1917 at the request of the students, many of whom planned a career in science.
Here is Weber’s original German text and a translation from the 1940s into English by Professor Hans Gerth of
University of Wisconsin and C. Wright Mills, his graduate student:

All work that overlaps neighboring fields, such as we Alle Arbeiten, welche auf Nachbargebiete übergreifen,
occasionally undertake and which the sociologists wie wir sie gelegentlich machen, wie gerade z.B. die
must necessarily undertake again and again, is Soziologen sie notwendig immer wieder machen müssen,
burdened with the resigned realization that at best sind mit dem resignierten Bewußtsein belastet: daß man
one provides the specialist with useful questions allenfalls dem Fachman nützliche Fragestellungen
upon which he would not so easily hit from his own liefert, auf die dieser von seinen Fachgesichtspunkten aus
specialized point of view. One's own work must nicht so leicht verfällt, daß aber die eigene Arbeit
inevitably remain highly imperfect. Only by strict unvermeidlich höchst unvollkommen bleiben muß. Nur
specialization can the scientific worker become fully durch strenge Spezialisierung kann der wissenschaftliche
conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his Arbeiter tatsächlich das Vollgefühl, einmal und vielleicht
lifetime, that he has achieved something that will nie wieder im Leben, sich zu eigen machen: hier habe ich
endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment etwas geleistet, was dauern wird. Eine wirklich
is today always a specialized accomplishment. And endgültige und tüchtige Leistung ist heute stets: eine
whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to spezialistische Leistung. Und wer also nicht die Fähigkeit
speak, and to come up to the idea that the fate of his besitzt, sich einmal sozusagen Scheuklappen anzuziehen
soul depends upon whether or not he makes the und sich hineinzusteigern in die Vorstellung, daß das
correct conjecture at this passage of this manuscript Schicksal seiner Seele davon abhängt: ob er diese, gerade
may as well stay away from science. He will never diese Konjektur an dieser Stelle dieser Handschrift
have what one may call the “personal experience” of richtig macht, der bleibe der Wissenschaft nur ja fern.
science. Without this strange intoxication, ridiculed Niemals wird er in sich das durchmachen, was man das
by every outsider; without this passion this »Erlebnis« der Wissenschaft nennen kann. Ohne diesen
'thousands of years must pass before you enter into seltsamen, von jedem Draußenstehenden belächelten
life and thousands more wait in silence' ‐‐ according Rausch, diese Leidenschaft, dieses: »Jahrtausende
to whether or not you succeed in making this mußten vergehen, ehe du ins Leben tratest, und andere
conjecture; without this, you have no calling for Jahrtausende warten schweigend«: – darauf, ob dir diese
science and you should do something else. For Konjektur gelingt, hat einer den Beruf zur Wissenschaft
nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can nicht und tue etwas anderes. Denn nichts ist für den
pursue it with passionate devotion. (Weber 1946, Menschen als Menschen etwas wert, was er nicht mit
135). Leidenschaft tun kann. (Weber 1922, 588-589).

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One or two sentences in this quote are typically Weber, i.e. like gothic castles with many towers. My mother tongue
is Swedish; the first foreign language I learned in school was German, later came French and English, and I had had
only one year at an English-speaking university when I began reading Max Weber in America. I shall not hide the
fact that, even in C. Wright Mills smoothening English editing, I had to struggle with the above passage when I first
encountered it in 1950 as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. However, in due course, and when I
discovered also the original German, these pages of text reinforced what was to me a very moving and also a
molding passage.

There are many bottoms in Weber’s statement about a career in science, particularly social science. The quote has a
message about the necessity, but academically unrewarding efforts, of a sociologist (acting in the role of general
social scientist) to cross into the specialties of others, i.e. what Richard Swedberg and Patrik Aspers and some others
who are here today do in their major works. Have solace in Weber’s remark!

The next message in Weber’s sermon is that the work of a scientist must, nevertheless, be highly specialized to
achieve enduring results. Scientists are normally judged (and promoted) on the basis of discoveries in a narrow field.
To reach fame in the very short life-time that is given us, a scientist must persist in a specialty until a discovery is
established.

Weber preaches, furthermore, that scientific endeavors depend on passion, not just rationality. The genuine pursuit
of science includes a passion for discovery. However, errors in using the scientific methods can never be excused by
the fact that the author was passionate.

Moreover, there is a serious warning that your entire worth, “the fate of your soul,” depends on doing scientific
discoveries correctly. Thus, your conformity to, or deviation from, the norms of the scientific methods shapes the
evaluation you will receive from your encounters in the community of science. Clearly, for a scientist there is no
substitute for correct comparisons and experiments, for accuracy of measurements, for carefulness in use of sources
and statistics, for truthfulness in tales and modeling. Here, the very meaning of your short life on this earth is at
stake, when “thousands of years must pass before you enter into life and thousands more wait in silence.”

Finally, your own development to a mature, autonomous self, to a personality of your own, depends on making your
chosen science into, not just a daily routine, but into your calling (Beruf).

My generation of Swedish students of sociology had not had Max Weber on their reading lists, except perhaps
docent Bertil Pfannenstill’s students in Lund. Max Weber eventually became my sociological house god.

Like Marx, Weber came to most Swedish sociologists from America, and, interestingly enough, he came in full
attention only after Marx had become the main macro-sociologist of academic choice among Swedish sociologists.
We were a few who became Weberians. In the 1970s, Kerstin Lindskoug(1979) found Weber on her own in the
Department of Sociology at Gothenburg University. (After her sociology dissertation on Weber’s concept of
charisma she turned to a career in medicine.) In Karlstad, Weber became Sven Eliasson’s house god; Eliasson is
internationally recognized as a Weber scholar.

The greatest help for anyone interested in following us on the Weberian route is Richard Swedberg’s The Max
Weber Dictionary. Key Words and Central Concepts(Swedberg 2005). It is our postil.

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Trick Three of the Theorizing Trade: Find an Intellectual Inspiration Early in Life

There was a time when I attended high school in the 1940s in Sweden when I wanted to become a chemist; I
attended what the Germans call Realgymnasium, i.e. one that specialized in the natural sciences. When friends and
relatives wondered: "What do you want to do with chemistry?" I could answer by telling them about “the periodic
system.” This was a classification of all the elements in a table where columns and lines pointed to common
characteristics of the elements. In 1869 Dimitri I Mendelévy had created a first version of chemistry's periodic
system by classifying the elements, seven to a column, according to their atomic weight.

My excellent chemistry teacher made it clear that although there are about 100 elements, they can form over a
million combinations. If you know where in the periodic table an element is located you have already got a great
deal of information about its characteristics and its ability to unite with other elements. Blanks in the table meant
that the elements had not yet been discovered. This was a lot for a budding chemist to work on, and perhaps a
chance to discover something new!

When I became a social scientist I often missed the elegance of chemistry's periodic system, especially when
confronted with the question "What constitutes a modern society?" I was forced to ponder this question on many
occasions. For half a century I have had opportunities to study modern society as a sociology teacher and scholar, as
a publisher of social science books, as a pollster with involvement in market, media, and value research, as a
consultant to businesses, voluntary associations, and museums, as an ideologue for a political party, and as a
newspaper editor and columnist. Nowhere did I find a classification for this study as elegant as that to be found in
the periodic system of chemistry of my school days.

In volume 2 of my current work in 7 volumes called The Many-Splendored Society I have proposed a Periodic Table
of Social Reality.

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Soci 1 3 4 5 6
2
etal Sci Po Art Reli Mora
A Econ
real enc lit gion lity
omy
ms e y
Exe Emot
cuti Exec Exec Emot Emo ive
Crit
ve utive utive ive tive pre-
ical
B des eval pres descr eval presc
sym
crip uatio cript iptio uatio riptio
bols
tion ns ions ns ns ns
s
Lea
Mon Civi Com
Life rnin Beli
ey- c- Aest passi
C styl g ever
cente min hetes onate
es buff s
red ded
s
Car
Kn
dina Beau Sacr Virtu
owl Weal Orde
D l ty edne e
edg th r
valu ss
e
es
Stra Co
tific mp Clas Pow Recti
E Taste Piety tude
atio eten s er
n ce
Re Prio
Mon Posit Testi
war rity Artis Reve
etary ions, moni
F d of tic renc
devi Trib als
syst find fame e
ces utes
em ings
Sci
Mar
Rati enti Dem Aest Ethic
ket Theo
G onal fic ocra hetic s
econ logy
ity met cy s
omy
hod
Reli Freed
Civi Artis
Aca Free giou om of
Free c tic
H de s consc
dom liber licen
mic trade freed ience
ties se
om
Spo Unpl
Self Non-
ntan Mar Publ Art anne
- ritua
eou ket ic impr d
I corr l
s price opin ovisa civilit
ecti pray
orde s ion tions ies
on ers
r
Publ Thea Welfa
Org Aca Firm Tem
J ic tres, re
an- de s ples
admi muse organ

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izati mie ni- ums, izatio

ons s strati etc ns
ons
Lea
rne Good
Net Elec
d Mark Bohe Sect neigh
K wor torat
soci ets mia s bors
ks es
etie
s
Stag Holy
Sci Adve es, texts
Mas
enc rtisin novel , Heral
s Trib
L e g s, cults ds
med unes
jour medi exhib
ia
nals a its,
etc
Co
Scho Cont
mp
ols endin
etin Politi Rival
B2B (=ap g
Net g cal cong
M mark proac moral
orgs lab parti regat
ets hes group
orat es ions
to s
orie
art)
s
Sourc
Entr Creat es of
Sch Legi
Mak epre ive Prop high
N olar slato
ers neur artist hets norm
s rs
s s s

(Cen Lear
Libr Ethici
Kee tral) Judg Critic ned
O aria sts
pers bank es s Cleri
ns
ers cs
Perfo
rmer Moral
Tea Sale Bure Prea ists
Bro s,
P che sme aucr cher Carer
kers enter
rs n ats s s
tainer
s
Con Dece
Fans
Stu Cons greg nt
Tak Citiz of
Q den umer ation peopl
ers ens cultur
ts s adhe e
e
rents

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Cha Ethic
Con Outsi Leg plain s
Pro Patro
sult de al s to coun
R vide ns
ant inves advi other selor
rs of art
s tors sors real s
ms
Salv
Supp
Res Dep ation Moral
licant
ear osit seek supp
Pro s
ch takin Tax ers ort
S cure from
app g men from seek
rs other
lica bank other ers
realm
nts ers real
s
ms

Please note that The Periodic Table deals with social reality, i.e. what is given and constructed by man’s unique
environment of symbols. Other aspects of human living belong in another table.

A closer look at symbolic environments of societies allows us to specify communicative actions (Row B) as
evaluations, or prescriptions, or descriptions. Such communications are either executive – map out the world around
us, evaluate it, and manage it – or they are emotive – add and shape emotions to events in our outer or inner world.
The six kinds of communicative acts are thus: executive descriptions (Column 1), executive evaluations (Column 2),
executive prescriptions (Column 3); emotive descriptions (Column 4), emotive evaluations (Column 5), emotive
prescriptions (Column 6). These are purely communications by symbols.

Science (Row B, Column 1) is connected with an overrepresentation of executive descriptions, for example, facts
and generalizations. Economy and business (Row B, Column 2) are connected with executive evaluations, for
example, prices and costs. Politics and administration (Row B, Column 3) are connected with executive
prescriptions, for example, laws and regulations. Art (Row B, Column 4) in all its forms deals with descriptive
visions that are emotive, expressive. Religions (Row B, Column 5) relate to expressive evaluations, for example,
ideas about the fundamental value of mankind and the meaning of life. Morality (Row B, Column 6) contains
expressive prescriptions, ethical rules of conduct. Thus, the six communicative acts provide a potential for six
fundamental realms of life in human society: economy, polity, science, religion, morality, and art.

In these realms of society, important products are created which we refer to as their cardinal values (Row D). They
are wealth in the economy, order in the body politic, knowledge in science, sacredness in religion, virtue in the
realm of morality, and beauty in the sphere of art.

When the societal realms hold each other in balance so that no one rules over the other, and when each one can
freely export and import their respective cardinal values, then, and only then, do we have a many-splendored
society.

Each realm has its own pattern of ranking, its stratification (Row E): competence in science, class (purchasing clout)
in the economy, power in the body politic, taste in art, rectitude in morality, and piety in the realm of religion.

Reward systems (Row F) also differ between the realms. Each realm has its own way of expressing awe, admiration,
and deference. In science the greatest testimonials are awarded to those who are the first to make and publish a
discovery. In economy, deference is paid to money and the display of spectacular investments and consumption. In
the body politic, deference to the powerful is expressed in the form of titles and public tributes. In art and

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entertainment, one achieves artistic fame. In religion, deference is shown in reverence, and in the realm of morality,
it is expressed in the real brick of personal respect.

Societal realms are, more or less, rationally organized. However, each may develop its own type of rationality (Row
G). In the contemporary institutions of knowledge, the most common rationality is the scientific method; in the
economy the presently dominant type of rationality at the time of this writing is the market economy; in the body
politic the modern rationality is that of democracy on the domestic scene, and diplomacy on the international scene.

Each realm also has its special type of freedom (Row H): academic freedom, free trade, civil rights, artistic license,
freedom of faith, and freedom of conscience. Freedom is implemented in a society, not as an abstract philosophical
proclamation; it must be anchored in the routines of the respective realms.

Each realm contains four recurrent structures. First, there are organizations (Row J), such as state agencies, firms,
research institutes, churches, theatres, et cetera. Second, outside such formal organizations, we find networks (Row
K), such as electorates, markets, grids of volunteers, colleagues, supporters, et cetera. Third, we note that each realm
also has its media (Row L). In the printed media there are specialized publications, or specialized pages featuring
politics, economy, science, art, religion, and the ethics of interpersonal relations. Fourth, we take special note of a
combination of a full-fledged network as the environment of full-fledged organizations. These, “netorgs” (Row M)
seem to have greater effects on societies than any other structures.

Wealth is created by entrepreneurial producers, recorded by accountants, and preserved by insurers and bankers in
financial institutions, conveyed by trading distributors, and possibly distributed to consumers. The political order is
formulated by leaders and legislators, preserved by the judiciary, the police, and the military, and is implemented by
technocrats and bureaucrats, and received by the subjects or citizens. Knowledge is created by scientists and learned
men and women, is preserved by libraries, is communicated by teachers, and is received by students. Sacredness in
religions is created by prophets, preserved by those versed in the Holy Scriptures and rites, conveyed by the clergy,
and are received by congregations. Beauty in art is created by artists, is preserved on stages and in collections open
to the public, is conveyed by interpreting artists, guides and critics, and is received by the public. Thus, each realm
has four recurrent internal functions. They stand for the creation (Row N) or preservation (Row O) or distribution
(Row P) or reception (Row Q) of the cardinal values that are produced in the different life spheres.

The relative autonomy of the categories in The Table of Societal Realms is more than an impetus to provide the
categories with separate names, and is also more than an impetus for individuals to specialize in one sphere rather
than being a jack of all trades. The relative autonomy signals a confederative nature of a society's parts. Every realm
always embeds some “alien” elements from other life spheres, and needs these elements. The cells in our Table of
Societal Realms are islands, but they are not alone and are never entirely to themselves. In Row R and S we have
provided space for the individuals who are responsible for essential exchanges between realms, the Providers and
the Procurers. A society does not have to create high walls between its realms.

The sum total of these differentiations is what we have called “the many-splendored society.” Its lifestyles (Row C)
hint at the varied options an individual in such a society may enjoy in everyday life.

Trick Four of the Theorizing Trade: Learn from the Editors and/or Best Students of the Classic Books

I was fortunate to have as my first teacher of sociology Torgny T. Segerstedt, a Swede who had been a professor of
philosophy. His intellectual roots were in the Scottish Enlightenment; his main interest was the study of the role of
language in society. His first book was called Verklighet och värde (Segerstedt 1938) addressed the issue of how
values shape social reality, and his second major book with the title Ordens makt (Segerstedt 1944) was a study in
the psychology of "the power of words", also available in German. These books led me to two names that seemed to
have celebrated ideas: the great European linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure and the great American philosopher of
language, George Herbert Mead. However, it was not until 1949 when I had entered graduate school at the

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University of Minnesota that I read Cours de linguistique générale (1916) and Mind, Self and Society (1934). The
impression was lasting and to honor them I have in Chapter 2 of the Many-Splendored Society labeled two types of
symbols with their names – “meadian symbols” and “saussurian symbols’ -- although my definitions of these
concepts are not particularly orthodox. Saussurian symbols are ever changing symbols referring only to other
symbols which may also be changing. Meadian symbols are ostensive (you can point at what they refer to), and this
is not something merely synonymous. I came to prefer to develop sociological terminology on this basis. Before the
First World War, Weber (1913) put together his first taxonomy (Kategorienlehre) for the entire social sciences – or
what he, at that time, called “general sociology," but I was unaware of this at the time. Perhaps this was an blessing
in disguised for me.

There is an enormous secondary literature about Mead and de Saussure. Both these pioneering books were edited by
their students from lecture notes, and they were not particularly easy reading. I decided to check also some writings
by their editors. How had the editors handled and elaborated the heritage of their great masters? This turned out to
be a stroke of luck.

Meads editor, and author of the long introduction, was Charles W Morris, a semiotician and a philosopher in the
American pragmatic tradition. In his 1946 book, Signs, Language and Behavior, he divided the actual use of
language into a universal classification. "These usages may be called in order the informative, the valuative, the
incitive, and the systemic uses of signs. These are the most general sign usages; other usages are subdivisions and
specializations of these four." (Morris 1946, 95, italics in original). I became overwhelmed by the scope and
usefulness of these distinctions.1[1]

de Saussure's editor and collaborator was Charles Bally and in his book La langage et la vie from 1913 I found a
wonderful comment on the meanings of the phrase "It is raining" (Bally 1913, 23). In my MA-thesis 1951 I recited
his discovery:

“If we make some slight changes in his illustrations we can put the phrase into all Morris’ categories. It
may, for instance, stand for:

It has now started to rain (informative)

The weather is bad (valuative)

Shut the window! (incitive)”

Bally made it clear that the language of social reality had a grammar, but it was not the school grammar. The
meaning of its symbols was modified by the social situation in which language was used. The social grammar is not
the same as the school grammar! There is a special “understanding principle” in the social language.

Here then emerged the Tri-section of language that became so fundamental in theory of The Many-Splendored
Society. But I changed the terminology into descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions.

1[1]
I did developed two small objections to Morris. His fourth category, the systemic use of language, is not separate
from the three others. Nothing can be systemic that is not originally informative, and/or valuative, and/or incitive.
The systemic is an attribute of the other three basic usages of communication. It is the attribute of rationalism. The
second objection is the above Bally observation; Morris immediately obfuscated his big discovery by trying to
cross-classify his universal uses of language with the structure of the school grammar of language (Morris 1946,
125f). This produced a confusing 16-fold classification that few except some students of rhetoric have appreciated.

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I have no recollection of the background of my systematic use of a Bi-section of communication, its instrumental
and expressive forms. It seems that I started using it as a self-evident: a duality between head and heart, or between
skill and emotion.

Charles Stevenson, an American philosopher of the same period as Charles W. Morris and in the same tradition of
pragmatism, (1944), clarified this attribute of language by penetrating its emotive component. When we say with
Shakespeare that "All the world's a stage" this emotive description is distinct, Stevenson argues, from an executive
description such as "There is a routine in real life, each man going through a prearranged course"; or, "There is a
good deal of trivial make-believe in each man's conduct." When the very words rather then what they stand for
convey emotions -- such as "Long live the King" -- Stevenson talks about their “independent emotive meaning.”
(1944)

Charles Stevenson’s best student in sociology was Ulf Himmelstrand (Social Pressures, Attitudes and Democratic
Processes 1960), once my fellow student of sociology in Uppsala. He put an element of passion into the study of
attitudes and norms. In any analysis of rhetoric and art, ideology and religion, the emotive components are crucial.

Eventually I began to express a dichotomy, a Bi-section, in terms of “executive actions,” e.g., issuing instructions,
giving a scientific lecture, driving a car, getting dressed for a football game, as opposed to “emotive actions” e.g.,
applauding a team's victory in a football game, reading romantic poetry, hand-wringing.

In Paris, the sophisticated axiomatic theory of signs and symbols of Greimas (Sémantique structurale. Recherche de
méthode 1966) eventually also added emotive intensity as a key concept (Greimas & Fontanille 1991), which I took
as a welcome confirmation of the need for the Bi-section of symbols in addition to the Tri-section. What we learned
from Trick Four is summarized into Proposition 5:2 (Zetterberg, The Many-Splendored Society: Surrounded by
Symbols 2009, 2nd ed. 2011, 149) .

Proposition 5:2 recalled. Tri- and Bisections of Language Usages and The Understanding Principle: a) Any
symbolic environment tends to become differentiated by the language brain into a trisection of descriptive,
evaluative, and prescriptive usages, each of which contains a bisection of executive and emotive components, i.e.
totally six types of usages. (b) The language brain of persons in this symbolic environment has the capacity to
differentiate these six usages regardless of their syntax.

Together the Tri- and Bi-section of language turned out to be fundamental in the discourses that create economy,
politics, science, art, religion, and morality. Torgny Segerstedt (Social Control as a Sociological Concept 1948) had
worked out the executive prescriptive language into his definition of social norms and social groups. I decided to
continue this, but above all to take on a corresponding exploration into sociology of descriptive and evaluative
language. I also wanted to fulfill Himmelstand’s initiative, and take full account of the emotive version of
descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions.

These starting points of social inquiry are found in line B of the Periodic Table of Social Reality above.

Trick Five of the Theorizing Trade: Be Inclusive about Your Backup of Evidence in the form of Books and Statistic

My early backups to my budding periodic system were books and statistics designed to be comprehensive
descriptions, not theory.

Which subjects ought to be found in a library that best describe modern society? This was our chief concern when I
and other social scientists together with a senior librarian, Carl White, were to list and classify the most important
books in the social sciences that were to form part of the base of a new college library

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Many new colleges were founded in the 1960s and they needed libraries with top selection.

I classified the categories of sociology books basic to a new college library in this way (Zetterberg, Sociology 1965):

Precursors of Systematic Sociology

Works that Made History

The Present State of Sociology

Theoretical Sociology

Social Psychology

Groups and Encounters

Organizations

Markets

Social Stratification

Institutional Realms

Topics of Sociology

Human and Non-human Resources

Family Sociology

Economic sociology

Political Sociology

Sociology of Science and Education

Sociology of Art

Sociology of Religion

Urban and Rural Life, Communities and Societies

Social Problems

Methods of Sociology

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Under these headings I proposed a total of 210 book titles in sociology as a minimum for a new library for any
college or for ambitious junior colleges. To this a list was added a selection of journals by the project director.

The statistical backup of my budding periodic system was also in the form of a book project.

What is important to learn from statistics describing a contemporary society? Which ones are the basic 100 tables?
This was the main problem of the editors of A Sociological Almanac for The United States(Gendell and Zetterberg
1961). The book contains a section that recounts how we solved the problem.

One should not pretend that there is agreement among social scientists as to the most relevant information that enters
into a routine description of a society. However, as a rule, social scientists and historians, in dealing with total
societies, begin by discussing:

1. Human resources

2. Material resources

Then they may process along many paths, but in the end they have usually described six interrelated but different
realms of society. The latter are:

3. Polity 6. Religion

4. Economy 7. Art

5. Science 8. Ethics

The Preface told that the tables of this almanac are numbered according to the above scheme. Thus, any table with a
prefix ‘6’ will deal with religion, any table with the prefix ‘4’ will deal with the economy, etc. The same holds for
the subheadings of the text (pp. 31-32). The Almanac had 54 pages of tables. The Almanac also included a guide
“How to read a table” by Murray Gendell (p 33-35) which enhanced its use as a supplementary text in undergraduate
course about the U.S. society.

At this time, I can say that behind the categories of books and statistics list hides bits and pieces of a widely used
Exposition of Categories for social sciences, a Kategorielehre, provided by the young Max Weber (1922/1968,
chapter 1). It is a list of terms and their definitions in which also the most complex ones can be reduced to
observable and understandable behavior. Weber did not allow for any abstractions in the social sciences that could
not be derived from actions that we can see or understand. This so-called “methodological individualism” has been
widely accepted.

My book Social Theory and Social Practice, published the same year, 1962, as the learned society whose 50 th
jubilee we celebrate at today’s meeting, linked the above classifications of books and statistics to the categories of
the periodic system of social reality. When I first published them in support of theory I was still so uncertain about
them that I buried them in footnotes (Zetterberg 1962, 68-69, 71)).

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Trick Six of the Theorizing Trade: Treat your Classics as Stepping Stones

No author, dead or alive, is a supreme lord over his or her own formulations. New generations create own
formulations. As George Herbert Mead said: "A different Caesar crosses the Rubicon not only with each author but
with each generation." In the writing of The Many-Splendored Society I have made several reformulations of the
classics of social science and humanities to fit into my schema, and to be more relevant to the contemporary state of
knowledge. The classics are here treated, not as monuments, but as stepping stones.

The main division of social reality is not class, as Karl Marxthought, but societal realms. They are six in number:
science, art, economy, religion, polity, and morality. They are the homes of knowledge, beauty, wealth, sacredness,
order, and virtue, all being cardinal values of mankind.

Class is important enough as a division within the economy that separates rich and poor, and all that this implies.
However, not only class, but other distinctions with roots outside the economy are important independent
stratifications. Consider, for example, scientific competence, levels of artistic taste, high or low offices of political
power, or measures of religious sanctities, and, not to forget, distinctions in moral rectitude. These stratifications are
as real as that of economic class. Did Marx consider them? Not explicitly in his writings, as far as I can tell. Robert
K Merton notes that Friedrich Engelsclaims in a letter to Josef Block that Marxwas fully aware of such distinctions –
who isn’t? – and that he included them in his notion of class. If so, I would argue that they need to be separated
according to the societal realm to which they belong.

We reach a ‘many-splendored society’ if and when all stratifications – competence, taste, class, sacredness, power,
and rectitude – are given about equal attention, sway, and honor, In such a setting, we would hear the voices of
money and political power, not as a soloists, but in a chorus of other voices.

The counterpart to the class struggle in the latter type of society is stated in our Proposition 10:4 on Monopolization
of Cardinal Values (Zetterberg 2010, 2nd enlarged ed. 2011, 179), recalled here.

Proposition 10:4 recalled. Monopolization of Cardinal Values: In any society, people who possess or control a large
amount of a cardinal value (knowledge, wealth, power, beauty, sacredness, virtue) tend to act to preserve this
situation.

This Proposition pinpoints a universal struggle to monopolize any and all cardinal values of mankind, not just
wealth.

The different societal realmshave become both units of analysis in social science and co-authors of history. Max
Weber noted already in 1919 in a lecture on politics as a vocation: “We are placed into various life-spheres, each of
which are governed by different laws” (Weber 1946, 123).

Max Weber specified six societal spheres for advanced societies. He called them "life orders" (Lebensordnungen).
They are the economic, political, religious, intellectual, erotic, and the family order. A value sphere (Wertssphär) of
particular priorities matches each of these orders. The orders and spheres tend to become relatively autonomous and
develop their own structures with considerable independence from one another. This Weber called
Eigengesetzlichkeit der Wertsphären, "the bounded autonomy of spheres of value" in Swedberg’s translation. In a
couple of brilliant lectures on politics and science as professions, Weber elucidated the competition of the life orders
as a perpetual "struggle of demons."

Scholars have argued about the number of life orders and their value spheres, as does, for example, (Scaff 1989, 94-
96). He stays in the Weberian tradition, but suggests that Weber considered his list of six spheres as open. The
British-American sociologist and historian Michael Mann (1986) in his bold IEMP-model is satisfied with four
spheres: Ideology, Economy, Military, and Politics. The American social philosopher Michael Walzer (1983) has

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presented a pioneering work with a dozen ‘spheres of justice.‛ They are memberships, security and welfare, money
and commodities, office, work, free time, education, kinship and love, divine grace, recognition, political power,
tyrannies and just societies. The French social scientists Boltanski and Thévenot (1991) have made a division into
the ‘worlds of justifications,‛ specifying market, industrial, inspired (sacred), celebrity, domestic, civic justifications.
I am very grateful to Patrik Aspers who led me to this work and impressed by the way Caroline Dahlberg (2010) has
used it in her doctoral thesis.

The many insights of Mann, Waltzer, Boltanski and Thévenot in the spheres they define are remarkable. However,
with the possible exception of Mann, their spheres appear ad hoc and, in the main, they are related to a
contemporary phase of Western history. They do not relate to, nor constitute, any systematic theory of society. The
same can also be said about Max Weber’s original delineations. Weber’s inclusion of the erotic value sphere in his
schema is unconnected to his somewhat related term ‘charisma’ in the same publication – both include elements of
infatuation with another person. It is also unconnected to his previous taxonomy, the Kategorienlehre. His
biographer has linked it up to a particular period of his love life (Radkau 2009).

The Weberian familial life order and erotic life order are part of the socially small world and are more based on
wants than aspirations. For the moment, we may leave out the two micro-sociological spheres, the familial and
erotic value spheres, from our list. The other life orders – the economic, political, religious, intellectual spheres are
macro-concepts, and the values they comprise are aspirations unique to language-using humankind.

More important, we need to add a moral realm to Weber's list. A moral realm’s emotively grounded prescriptions
cannot be reduced to political or religious expressions. This sphere of morality may be underdeveloped in the post-
Athenian and post-Roman Western world, but is, nevertheless, an independent area of life with Eigengesetzlichkeit. I
do not think Weber would have objections to the inclusion of a moral sphere. In several places in his writings, he
appears critical of a modern tendency to push moral statements into the esthetic realm by saying that some-thing‚ is
in ‘bad taste‛ rather than admitting that it ‘is morally deplorable.‛

The science that refuses to correct its classics is lost. Classics are not eternal monuments but stepping stones to
progress.

Trick Eight of the Theorizing Trade: Change your Definitions so that Your Concepts fit a Superior Theory

My second influential teacher of sociology after Torgny Segerstedt was Arnold M Rose at the University of
Minnesota. (Rose had been one of the two junior authors of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma.) I was his
research assistant in the academic year 1950-51. He had his intellectual roots in “symbolic interactions” as
developed in the Chicago School of Sociology. He introduced me to teachings of Ezra Park and Herbert Blumer. It
was easy for me to merge ideas I had learned from Segerstedt and from the philosophy of language and linguistics
with symbolic interactionism.

Park had studied in Germany, and his doctoral dissertation in 1904 at Bonn University had the title Masse und
Publikum. A "mass," he said, is an agglomeration of people without contacts with one another, but, which is exposed
to a common source of information, e.g. the same newspaper. A "public" is a gathering in which people talk to one
another and become aware of one another's viewpoints. The group, the public, the crowd was the beginning of a
schema of different forms of social interaction that came to characterize the most widely used pre-war American text
book in sociology (Park and Burgess 1924).

To streamline this thinking for our use, we first note that terms referring to humans, such as "group," should be
separate from terms that refer to the structures, such as "organization." Chicago sociologists usually ignored the
latter requirement. The proper expression, thus, is “an organization with a group of members.” The members are

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employees, volunteers, senior citizens, or occupants of any other positions. Second, we note that the old designations
do not always fit current everyday usage.

Updated definitions of lasting forms of symbolic interaction can be distinguished, in part, by the reciprocity of
contacts and, in part, by the existence of a shared source or sender of communication. The shared sender is a shared
leadership whenever the message includes explicit prescription about what to do, or implicit prescriptions such as
“Read this,” “Listen, ”Remember”. Such a sender is what Segerstedt called “the source of a norm.”

With these two dimensions, reciprocity and leadership, we can define communication structures. The combinations
provide four types. All are clusters of interconnected positions and roles.

Is there
a
commo
n
sender Yes No Yes No
of
commu
nica-
tions?
Are
there
mutual
channel Yes Yes No No
s of
contact
?
Organizati Mass
Network Media
on
Structur
e of
commu
nica-
tions

Particip Group Atomized

Publics Audiences crowds
ants members
Organizati Gregarious Media
Lifestyle on networker freaks
loyalists s

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Our definitions provide different labels to the participants and to the structures in which they are participating.
Organizations thus have members. Networks, not gatherings, house “publics.” Media have “audiences.” This
streamlining of the terminology implies that Park's original definitions and labels are changed. The definitions of
publics and audiences have been switched. The mass has a new definition.

How can one justify such a switch? In part, it follows more recent speech habits. But I justify it from a notion that
“public opinion” is a spontaneous view in publics as defined here. The corresponding spontaneous order in an
economy is the market prices, in science it is the current standpoint of science.

The pollsters’ use of statistical samples of discrete individuals and demographic units of analysis, rather than real
communities, publics, networks, and groups, was the most serious criticism levelled at the young polling
enterprise in the middle of the Twentieth Century. Public opinion, said the critics, evolves in networks, sometimes
with media input, but never in demographic categories of unconnected individuals. This critique, most effectively
advanced by Chicago sociologist Herbert Blumer (1948) is still valid. It gives opinion research in national samples
limited relevance for a serious study of actual social and political opinion processes. A few demographic
“background variables,” such as age, sex, education and residence, do not point to necessary links to relevant publics
in society engaged in discussions. To talk of demographic variables as causes that can explain public opinions from
informal discussions in networks are clearly misleading.

Old-fashioned network opinions recur as central in most modern theories of state, legitimacy, and democracy. They
appear under various tags, for example, “participatory democracy” in several versions from de Tocqueville
(1856)1866/1998-2001), “participatory principles” (Rawls 1971, 36-37), “deliberate democracy” (Benhabib 1996),
and above all in so called “discourse theory.” The latter is a model of democracy presented by Habermas (1965). It
assumes that communication flows through both the parliamentary bodies and the informal networks of the public
sphere, arenas in which rational opinion formation and democratic decision-making can take place.

For all of these conceptions of democracy, the pollsters’ “public opinion by demography” is largely ignorable, while
“public opinion by networks” is highly relevant. For the latter very sophisticated theories of democracy, the success
since the 1930s of George Gallup's and Elmo Roper’s public opinion by demography appears as a problematic
departure, with no or few arrivals at the current frontiers of knowledge.

I have changed Park’s terminology about “public” in my longstanding effort to make Blumer’s public opinion as the
relevant one to contemporary democratic theory, not the public opinion from polls as we now know them.

Trick Nine of the Theorizing Trade: Use Greimas’ Square to Obtain New Concepts

Organizations are relatively stable interactions of social relations guided from a leadership position. They are a kind
of formalized resting-stages in the ever-going processes of changing and preserving human encounters. Their
opposite is interacting with unorganized positions and social relations. This is what we call a network.

A more advanced means of working with classifications is the so-called "semiotic square," a diagram introduced
below. Those who find such a diagram incomprehensible can simply read on in the text to find the intended
categories. A semiotic square is actually more of a device for the author of a schema of classification than for the
reader of that classification.

Let us use the device of a semiotic square (Greimas 1966) to spell out the ramifications of the difference between
organization and network. In the square we have put the two opposites, organization and network, into such a
square. Such a procedure reveals, better than intuition, what is implicit in thWe get two pay-offs. On the right side of
the square is a well-known combination that we recognize as mass media. On the left side, we obtain a seemingly
unfamiliar combination of a full-fledged organization and a full-fledged network. We have no generally accepted

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word for this. However, we know some illustrations, for example, the perfect firm (an organization) operating on the
perfect market (a network). We shall use as a generic term ‘netorg’ for this phenomenon. All societal realms, not
only in the economy, have netorgs.

The netorgs were not part of Ezra Park’s scheme and the structuration of society taught by the pioneering Chicago
sociologists. It took us a semiotic square to bring them out in the open in the study of social reality.

Trick Ten of the Theorizing Trade: Use Fourfold Tables to Relate Concepts to One Another

Given two dimensions, leadership and boundary, we can devise a fourfold table, a construction that is beloved by
sociologists both in their theorizing and in their statistical presentation of data. (To analyze data to separate effects
of different categories you may need eight- or sixteen-fold table.)

Common leadership Three of the categories are familiar from the Chicago
Yes No School. A new category emerging from this exercise
Outside Yes Organizations Assemblies is the ‘assembly,’ a structure called collegium in the
No Media Networks Roman Republic where it was recognized in the law
as requiring three or more members. They acted as a
boundary
committee, no single person ruled them. Assemblies
are town meetings, legislatures, church concilia, university faculties, alumni meetings, board meetings, family
reunions, and many other get-togethers of defined groups. They have rosters of members none of whom rules over
any others. They have no common leadership, only temporary chairpersons.

Trick Eleven of the Theorizing Trade: Join a Collegiate Faculty with Decisions Taken in Assemblies of Professors,
not an Organization doing Project Research under a Director or University President

Even the best informed scholars about the modern mode of research in the context of applications admit that it has
made “surprisingly small contribution” to basic science (Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons 2001, 11).

In 2011, the Swedish government gave the option to state universities to abandon the rule by collegiate assembly
and adopt the bureaucratic form under a university president. We do not yet know the outcome of this legislation.

Those universities which opt out from collegiate self-government will, in their search for new knowledge, be like
any research institute in the private sector or in the central government. The executive traditions in these sectors may
certainly require that the employees become good at producing research reports that meet the budgets of time and
money. But on the day of the deadline, they run the risk of discovering that the content of a research report is dead
dull. Several interesting insights or hunches, made in passing by the research team, may lay by the wayside. They
are wasted hypotheses that did not happen to fit in the council-approved plan for the project, or did not fit in the
mindset of the boss of the research institute.

A theorist is more at home in a collegiate structure than in a bureaucratic one.

Trick Twelve of the Theorizing Trade: Find the Esthetics of Your Work

The adjective "many-splendored" used in the title of my series of books dates from the 1950s. It was invented and
spelled "many-splendoured" by Han Sugin, a Chinese-born author and physician writing in English and French. One
of her novels was turned into the 1955 film "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," set in Hong Kong, starring Jennifer
Jones and William Holden. Their many-splendored love in the film struggles to overcome the ingrown distrust of a
racially and ethnically different couple and their families. The most memorable scenes in the film are set on the high
and windy hills of Hong Kong where the lovers first meet.

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Love is a many-splendored thing,

It's the April rose that only grows in the early spring,

Love is nature's way of giving a reason to be living,

The golden crown that makes a man a king.

The song won an Oscar but is since forgotten. I felt that the adjective in its title, "many-splendored," deserved a
longer life. So I made it stand for a society with personal freedom and a differentiation of six self-governing realms:
economy, politics, science, art, religion, and morality. To say it again, when these realms are joined in a voluntary
cooperation and no one rules totally over any other we have a many-splendored society, in my view, a good one.

A last word. Do not compromise the integrity of these realms by trying to totally merge them:

Proposition 10:14 recalled. Merged Societal Realms: (a) Initially, the proponents of mergers between societal realms
tend to become approvingly evaluated in a society, particularly by its Takers. However, (b) any mergers of full
societal realms (including their cardinal values, stratifications, organizations, networks, media, etc.) tend to create
instable structures that deteriorate over time. (c) The depth and the speed of this deterioration are inversely related to
the position of the merger on the Scale of Valence of Societal Realms (Zetterberg 2010, 2nd enlarged ed. 2011,
242).

In the long run, a full merger of societal realms results in increasingly wobbly structures. For example, to merge the
body politic and the economy into a socialist society creates an unstable mixture. Likewise, we sense instability
coming when the polity merges with the realm of morality into a Nordic-type welfare state.

Works Cited

Bally, Charles. La langage et la vie. Geneva: Edition Atar, 1913.

Benhabib, Seyla, ed. Democracy and Difference. Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1996.

Blumer, Herbert. "Public Opinion and Public Opinion Polling." The American Sociological Review, 1948.

Dahlberg, Caroline. Picturing the Public. Advertising Self-Regulation in Sweden and the UK. Stockholm: Acta
Universitates Stockholmiensis, 2010.

de Tocqueville, Alexis. L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution. (Several English versions, latest is The Old Regime and
the Revolution, 1998-2001, edited and with an introduction and critical apparatus by François Furet and
Françoise Mélonio and translated by Alan S. Kahan, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Il). 1856.

Gendell, Murray, and Hans L Zetterberg, . A Sociological Almanac for the United States. Totowa, NJ: Bedminster
Press, 1961.

Greimas, Agidas Julien. Sémantique structurale. Recherche de méthode. Paris: Larousse, 1966.

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Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen
Gesellschaft. (Second edition). Berlin and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1965.

Himmelstrand, Ulf. Social Pressures, Attitudes and Democratic Processes. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960.

Lindskoug, Kerstin. Hänförelse och förnuft. Om karisma och rationalitet i Max Webers sociologi. Lund: Dialog,
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Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power: A History of Power from the Beginning to 1760 A.D. Vol. I.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Mead, George Herbert. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
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Merton, Robert K. "Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge." 78 (1972): 9-47.

Morris, Charles William. Signs, Language and Behavior. New York, NY: Prentice Hall, 1946.

Nowotny, Helga, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons. Re-Thinking Science. Knowledge and the Public in an Age of
Uncertainty. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001.

Park, Robert E, and Ernst W. Burgess. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1924.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale. (Translated as Course in General Linguistics, 1959,
Philosophical Library, New York). Edited by Charles Bally. Paris, 1916/1959.

Scaff, Lawrence A. Fleeing the Iron Cage. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989.

Segerstedt, Torgny. Ordens makt. Stockholm: Natur & Kultur, 1944.

—. Social Control as a Sociological Concept. Uppsala: Lundequistska, 1948.

—. Verklighet och värde. Lund: Gleerup, 1938.

Stevenson, Charles L. Ethics and Language. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944.

Swedberg, Richard. The Max Weber Dictionary. Key Words and Central Concepts. With the assistance of Ola
Agevall. Stanford, CA: Stanford University press, 2005.

van Doren, Mark. The Happy Critic and Other Essays . New York: Hill & Wang, 1961.

Weber, Max. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Introduction by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Edited by
H.H. Gerth, & C. Wright Mills. Translated by H.H. Gerth, & C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1946.

—. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Introduction by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Édité par H.H.
Gerth, & C. Wright Mills. Traduit par H.H. Gerth, & C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press,
1946.

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—. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1922.

—. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. (Translated 1968 by Guenter Roth and Claus Wittich as Economy and Society. New
York: Bedminster Press). Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1922/1968.

Zetterberg, Hans L. A Semantic Role Theory. MA-thesis, Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 1951.

—. Social Theory and Social Practice. New York: Bedminster Press, 1962.

--. "Sociology." In Sources of Information in the Social Sciences, edited by Carl H White, 183-209. Totowa, NJ:
Bedminster Press, 1965.

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—. The Many-Splendored Society: Fuelled by Symbols. Vol. 3. Scotts Valley CA and Charleston SC: POD,
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CreateSpace, 2009, 2nd ed. 2011.

http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/soc401theory.html

This page summarizes A Primer in Theory Construction, written by Paul Davidson ... The "set-of-laws" form
defines theory as a set of well-supported empirical

Introduction

This page summarizes A Primer in Theory Construction, written by Paul Davidson Reynolds. Reynolds states that
the purposes of his book are:

1. to describe the various types of concepts and statements that comprise a scientific body of knowledge.
2. to describe what form they should take to be accepted within the community of scholars.

For more extensive information about theory construction than is provided here, including descriptions of testing
theories and strategies for developing a scientific body of knowledge, see:

 Gibbs, Jack P. 1972. Sociological Theory Construction. Hinsdale, IL: Dryden Press.
 Hage, Jerald. 1994. Formal Theory in Sociology: Opportunity or Pitfall? Albany, NY: State University of
New York.
 Reynolds, Paul D. 1971. A Primer in Theory Construction. New York: Bobbs-Merrill.

Definitions of Theory

Definitions of scientific theory fall within three general forms:

1. The "set-of-laws" form defines theory as a set of well-supported empirical generalizations, or "laws." Here,
theory is thought of as "things we feel very certain about."
2. The "axiomatic" form defines theory as a set of interrelated propositions and definitions derived from
axioms (i.e., things we feel certain about).
3. The "causal" form defines theory as a set of descriptions of causal processes. Here, theory "tells us how
things work."

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Reynolds defines theory as "abstract statements that are considered part of scientific knowledge in either the set-of-
laws, the axiomatic, or the causal process forms." Thus, Reynolds definition focuses upon the notion of a set of
abstract statements that describe "things we feel certain about." This definition differs somewhat from the one
provided by Dr. Sapp ("A set of abstract, empirically falsifiable statements about reality"). In Dr. Sapp's definition, a
theory might not yet have sufficient empirical support to "feel certain about it," but it nevertheless meets the criteria
of science as an epistemology in that it posits abstract statements that can be falsified through observation.

Abstractness

Abstract concepts are independent of a specific time and place. Because scientific statements must predict future
events, they cannot be specific to past events. Scientists prefer theories that are as general as possible to time and
place.

Abstract concepts are independent of specific circumstances or conditions. This independence permits efficiency in
understanding and predicting future events. Thus, the statement, "the greater the human capital investment, the
greater the life chances," contains two abstract concepts: human capital investment and life chances. This statement
can be used to derive and test a large number of related hypotheses, such as:

 The greater the formal education, the greater the income.

 The greater the job experience, the greater the likelihood of promotion.
 The greater the communication skills, the greater the job performance.
 ... and so on.

The process of science is one of moving continuously from one level of abstraction to another. Scientists "borrow"
abstract statements from theories to derive hypotheses suitable to their specific study. They test these hypotheses
through observation. They "return" the results of their studies to the theory by reporting to the community of
scholars the efficacy of the theory in explaining their observations. Supported hypotheses provide further support for
and confidence in the theory. Rejected hypotheses prompt consideration of revising the theory or noting that it is less
broadly applicable than originally believed. A scientific body of knowledge is accumulated by this ongoing process
of borrowing, testing, revising, and building new theories.

Empirical Relevance

Empirical relevance refers to meeting two conditions of observation:

1. Scientific theories must be falsifiable. The distinguishing feature of science, in contrast with other
epistemologies, is that its statements can, in principle, be rejected through observation.
2. Scientific theories must be supported by observations. When theories receive strong empirical support, then
we gain confidence in them, which allows us to build safe bridges, send satellites into orbit, design
effective crime prevention programs, etc.

Intersubjectivity

It is impossible to be completely objective, value-free, and unbiased in any human endeavor, including scientific
inquiry. Thus, as described on the Primer in Science web page, the community of scholars relies upon the "safety of
numbers" in reducing the likelihood that science reflects human frailties. Intersubjectivity refers to shared
understandings among the community of scholars within a particular discipline. This intersubjectivity must be
achieved with respect to the definitions of concepts and the interpretation of the results of empirical observations.

The Idea

Theories are stories, stories about how reality works. They differ from other stories in the ways described above:

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they are abstract, causal, and falsifiable. Nevertheless, they are stories about reality. And they come from
somewhere. Much has been written in the philosophy of science about induction and intuition, the twin processes by
which new theories are crafted, where induction refers to designing theories by combining and raising to an abstract
level empirical generalizations and intuition refers to the "great thought" about how something works. Whether
meticulously crafted or designed by inspiration, or some combination of both, it is the idea that describes how
reality works and helps us improve the human condition by this knowledge. Davidson notes that the ultimate test of
any idea is its utility in meeting the goals of science. "There is no substitute for a good idea."

For the purposes of Sociology 401, we will direct our attention to sociological thought rather than to philosophical
inquiries into how ideas are formed. Also, we will cover very few sociological theories except where we discuss
them as examples of sociological thought. Thus, we will focus our attention on the "big stories," or "worldviews"
that guide the development of sociological theories. These grand schemes are called paradigms. They influence
theoretical development throughout a scientific discipline. Evolution, for example, is the predominant paradigm of
the life sciences; all theories in the life sciences rely in part upon the principles of evolution to depict biological
events.

As you would expect, paradigms are more stable than theories. A theory might be revised or even rejected without
necessarily revising or rejecting the paradigm that influenced its development. However, with sufficient anomalous
findings, revisions to theories, and rejected hypotheses, scientists might begin to question the paradigm itself. This
questioning of the paradigm can create "crisis events," wherein much of the body of knowledge within a scientific
discipline is questioned. For example, after many years of collecting sufficient evidence to the contrary, astronomers
eventually rejected the Ptolemian paradigm of the solar system (i.e., the geocentric or Earth-centered perspective) in
favor of the Copernican paradigm (i.e., the heliocentric or Sun-centered perspective). The dynamics of paradigm
development, crises, and revolutions in scientific thought are described in detail by the philosopher Thomas Kuhn in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Theories: An Overview

As a generalized schema, consider this depiction of a scientific theory. This presentation incorporates elements from
various authors on the philosophy of science. Later, we will rely upon Reynolds' text to describe each feature of a
theory in more detail.

1. Paradigm: A worldview. "What is reality?"

Example: Functionalism posits that people negotiate the rules of society to meet their survival needs.

2. Theory: A set of empirically falsifiable, abstract statements about reality.

Example: Social systems theory posits that to achieve their goals people meet socially-defined role
expectations associated with their statuses.

3. Proposition: One abstract statement within a theory.

Example: "The greater the human capital investment, the greater the life chances."

4. Hypothesis: A specific case of the proposition.

Example: "The greater the formal education, the greater the income."

5. Operational Definition: The description of how each concept will be measured.

Example: "The greater the years of formal schooling, the greater the total household income before taxes."

The results of the statistical test of the research hypothesis (presuming it is measured quantitatively) might lead the
researcher to reject the null form of the hypothesis (i.e., "There is no relationship between formal education and
income."). If so, then the results of observation lend support for the hypothesis, the proposition, the theory, and the
paradigm. If the null hypothesis is not rejected, then the community of scholars will explore reasons why it was not

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supported, including the notion that the theory (and perhaps the paradigm) might not be a correct depiction of
reality.

Concepts

Concepts, the building blocks of theories, are symbols designed to convey a specific meaning to the community of
scholars. They must be defined, operationalized, and reviewed by the community of scholars for meaning and
accuracy. The concept self-esteem, for example, is defined as, "an individual's sense of his or her value or worth,"
and most often is measured using Rosenberg's Self Esteem Scale, which is widely accepted by the community of
scholars.

1. Concepts are defined with either primitive or derived terms. Primitive terms cannot be defined with other
symbols or language (e.g., colors, sounds, attitudes, some relationships between individuals), but can only
be further described through the use of examples. A derived term is a set of primitive words and symbols
that further describes a concept.
2. An abstract concept refers to two or more events (e.g., temperature, human capital investment). A concrete
concept refers to a specific event (e.g., temperature of the sun, years of formal education).
3. Concepts can be measured either quantitatively or qualitatively. There is no epistemological reason to
suspect that either type of measurement is more or less scientific, objective, or valid.
4. Concepts can be measured at the nominal level, indicating no inherent ranking (e.g., male, female;
Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish), the ordinal level, indicating ranking without a continuous ordering (e.g.,
large, medium, small), the interval level, indicating ranking with a continuous ordering, with no known
zero-state (e.g, attitudes about same-sex marriage expressed on a 1-7 response scale), or the ratio level,
indicating continuous ordered ranking with a known zero point (e.g., age in years).

Statements

Statements are expressions about reality. They can be classified within two groups, those that claim the existence of
an event and those that describe a relationship between two concepts.

1. Existence statements state that a concept exists (e.g., the object is a primary group) or describe a
relationship that exists (e.g., each individual in the group contacts all other individuals at least once each
week).
2. Relational statements posit a causal or associational relationship between two or more concepts (e.g., the
greater the formal education, the greater the income). Note that, formally, a relational statement can include
only two concepts that vary because hypothesis testing, whether quantitative or qualitative, can only be
conducted on two variables. For example, the expression, "the greater the formal education the greater the
income and self-esteem," cannot be tested because it might be true that the greater the formal education the
greater the income, but it might not be true that the greater the formal education the greater the self-esteem.
The statement must be split into two expressions, one for income and one for self-esteem.

An apparent exception to this rule occurs when one tests whether a theory fits the data because it
seems like one is testing multiple hypotheses at once. But this is not the case; rather, one is testing
just one relationship: the one between the whole theory and the data. It is possible, however, to
include one or more constant concepts within a formal relational statement to restrict the domain
of the statement (e.g., Among males, the greater the formal education, the greater the income).

Note also that articles published in professional sociological journals often include three or more
variables within an "hypothesis" to convey multiple relationships in a concise manner.

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3. Associational statements state a relationship without implying cause. For example, we might state that,
"locus-of-control and self-esteem (two concepts with similar meanings) are related," meaning they will
vary together but not necessarily cause one another.
4. Causal statements imply that x causes y (e.g., the greater the formal education, the greater the income).
5. Theoretical propositions state relationships in an abstract form (e.g., the greater the human capital
investment, the greater the life chances).
6. Hypotheses state relationships in a concrete form (e.g, the greater the formal education, the greater the
income).

Forms of Theory

Theories can be expressed as a set of laws, in axiomatic form, or as a set of causal statements.

1. The set-of-laws format expresses relationships as a set of highly supported laws (i.e., typically in causal
form). Consider, for example, the Theory of Reasoned Action, proposed by Martin Fishbein and Izak
Ajzen. Within this theory we might state as one law, "the greater the attitude about the behavior, the greater
the intention to engage in the behavior." All the other paths implied by the diagram would be listed as laws
within the set of laws that define the theory of reasoned action.
2. The axiomatic format expresses relationships as a set of axioms. For example, within the theory of
reasoned action, we might state as one axiom, "If attitude toward the behavior, then intention toward the
behavior." All the other paths implied by the diagram would be listed as axioms within this format.
3. The diagram shown for the theory of reasoned action represents the causal statement form. Each
diagrammed path represents a theoretical proposition. For example, we might infer from the diagram of the
Theory of Reasoned Action that, "the greater the attitude about the behavior, the greater the intention to
engage in the behavior."

Note Regarding the Format of Theory

The typical format used in sociology to express a theory is the set of causal statements, often shown in a
concise manner by the use of a diagram. In the 1980's, as part of an effort to make sociology "more
scientific," sociologists began to present their theories in axiomatic format (see volumes of The American
Sociological Review for examples of this effort). Sociologists learned quickly that the formatting of a
theory provided few advantages toward accumulating a scientific body of knowledge; what mattered was
the quality of the theory, not its formatting. Note, however, that some sociologists will argue that "theory"
should be expressed either as a set of laws or in axiomatic format (see: Formal Theory in Sociology:
Opportunity or Pitfall?, edited by Jerald Hage).

"Theorists often write trivial theories because their process of theory construction is hemmed in by
methodological structures that favor validation rather than usefulness. (Lindblom, 1987). Too much
validation takes away the value of imagination and selection in the process.

Theorizing consists of disciplined imagination that unfolds in a manner analogous to artificial selection. It
comes from the consistent application of selection criteria to "trial and error" thinking and the
"imagination" in theorizing comes from deliberate diversity introduced into the problem statements,
thought trials, and selection criteria that comprise that thinking."

A theory is "an ordered set of assertions about a generic behavior or structure assumed to hold
throughout a significantly broad range of specific instances."

Verification and validation mean the demonstration, beyond pure chance, that the ordered relationship
predicted by the hypothesis exists and thereby lends support to the hypothesis. Proof is verification of a

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probable (listic) statement. It is a statement of high reliability.

A good theory is also a plausible theory, more interesting than obvious, irrelevant, or absurd, obvious in
novel ways, a source of unexpected connections, high in narrative rationality, aesthetically pleasing, etc.

A good theory process should be designed to highlight relationships, connections and

interdependencies in the phenomenon of interest.

Knowledge growth by intention is when an explanation of a whole region is made more and more clear
and adequate. Knowledge growth by extension means a full explanation of a small region is used to
explained adjacent regions.

Bourgeois states that theorizing process should weave back and forth between intuition and data-based
theorizing and between induction and deduction.

Most theory theorists describe it as a more mechanistic process, with little appreciation for the intuitive,
blind, wasteful.... quality of the process. They assume that validation is the ultimate test of the theory
and a good theorizing process keeps this in mind at every step.

In reality, theory construction is not problem solving, because many steps happen simultaneously. It is
more a struggle with "sensemaking".

"When theorists build theory, they design, conduct, and interpret imaginary experiments. Their activities
are like the three activities of evolution -- variation, selection, and retention, and actually more like
artificial selection than natural selection.

Theoretical problems are more likely to be solved when the problem is stated accurately and more
detailed.

Problem Statements
Unlike nature, theorists are both the source of variation and selection. Often the problems are wide in
scope but limited in detail, inaccurate, and vague. While natural scientists pick problems they can solve,
social scientists pick problems in need of a solution, whether they have the tools to solve them or not.
Natural scientists pick topics of which governments, political bodies, and religious authorities are
indifferent.

"By their very nature the problems imposed on organizational theorists involve so many assumptions
and such a mixture of accuracy and inaccuracy that virtually all conjectures and all selection criteria
remain plausible and nothing gets rejected or highlighted."

Theories of the middle range are those that are solutions to problems with a limited number of
assumptions and of manageable scope, with the problem description of considerable accuracy and
detail. (See Bourgeois, mentioned earlier on.)
In fact, it would be better if theorists attacked problems that they can solve, not insolvable problems

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that people feel too strongly about.

Thought Trials (imaginary experiments)

A theorizing process that produces lots of conjectures is better than one producing only a few, especially
if there is a lot of variation. A classification system can help determine when the variation in conjectures
is too narrow. Thus conjectures across various theory paradigms will be more powerful than one
constrained in only one paradigm.

Another way to increase variation is to eliminate memory, preference, or foresight to avoid narrow
habituated thinking. Kuhn's paradigm work shows this is very difficult to do sometimes -- thought trials
tend toward homogeneity. Some devices to increase variation include heterogeneous research teams,
generalists, randomizing devices, etc.

Selection Criteria
Selection criteria must be applied consistently or theorists will be left an assortment of conjectures just
as fragmented as what they started with. Remember that validation is not the key task of social science,
because we can't. Thus, the selection criteria must be chosen carefully because the theorist, not the
environment, controls the survival of conjectures. "The contribution of social science is in suggesting
new relationships and connections that change actions and perspectives."

When theorists apply selection criteria to their conjectures, they ask whether the conjecture is
interesting, obvious, connected, believable, beautiful, or real, in the context of the problem they are
trying to solve.

When an assumption is applied to a specific conjecture, there are four reactions – that’s interesting,
that's absurd, that's irrelevant, that's obvious. They are equivalent to significance tests, and they serve
as substitutes to validity. A judgement that's interesting is selected for future use. (See Cornelissen
mentioned next for details about these four reactions and their development by ‘his’ 8 principles of
optimality.)

A disconfirmed assumption is an opportunity for a theorist to learn something new. However, for a non-
theorist is suggests that past experience is misleading for subsequent action and that coping may be
more difficult.

Theorists also assume events are unrelated and are surprised when they find unexpected connections
between events. Also, the standards by which narratives are judged differ from those used to judge
arguments.

Yet there is a thin line between that's interesting to that's in my best interest, from that's obvious to
that's what managers want, from that's believable to that what managers want to hear, and that's real
to that the power system I want'.

Sifting with a greater number of distinct criteria, which Campbell call opportunistic multi-purposeness,
should produce theories that are more important.

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I have dealt with this articles of Cornelissen in great detail in my previous articles here
https://independent.academia.edu/UlrichdeBalbian

http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/1921/

Cornelissen, J.P. (2006) Making sense of theory construction: Metaphor and disciplined imagination.
Organization Studies, 27 (11). pp. 1579-1597. ISSN 1741-3044

This article draws upon Karl Weick’s insights into the nature of theorizing, and extends and refines his conception
of theory construction as ‘disciplined imagination’. An essential ingredient in Weick’s ‘disciplined imagination’
involves his assertion that thought trials and theoretical representations typically involve a transfer from one
epistemic sphere to another through the creative use of metaphor. The article follows up on this point and draws
out how metaphor works, how processes of metaphorical imagination partake in theory construction, and
how insightful metaphors and the theoretical representations that result from them can be selected. The paper
also includes a discussion of metaphors-in-use (organizational improvisation as jazz and organizational behavior as
collective mind) which Weick proposed in his own writings. The whole purpose of this exercise is to theoretically
augment and ground the concept of ‘disciplined imagination’, and in particular to refine the nature of thought trials
and selection within it. In doing so, we also aim to provide pointers for the use of metaphorical imagination in the
process of theory construction. (The author suggest Weick use the 8 optimality principles for example.)

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