On Wittgenstein's Quietism and the possibility of philosophical certainty
Of course, we can know for certain, certain logical truths. But outside of this, is the philosophical enterprise able to reach a certainty?
The more I learn philosophy, especially academic philosophy, the more it seems all caught up in a web of confusion and seems more like a game than anything else. I am doubting the infallibility of a priori introspection, that is, armchair philosophy. In my opinion, it seems ridiculous that we could actually assert something positive in philosophy - almost all philosophical positions in the past have been criticized or even flat out rejected later on, which leads me to believe that nothing I am learning in academic philosophy is legitimate knowledge.
To put it short and sweet, I've given up on the entire traditional philosophical enterprise.
All of metaphysics is unverifiable and limited to our own, rather small, perspective. So as much as I enjoy thinking about metaphysical questions, the anti-Realist position is the only position that makes sense, which means that traditional metaphysics is nonsense.
Outside of metaphysics, we have fields such as epistemology, philosophy of mind (which has metaphysical connections), political philosophy, etc. Now these fields don't appear to be dead ends as metaphysics does, but they still are fields that will likely never reach a full philosophical consensus and an objective certainty. Instead, it's just a game. It's nihilistic.
Enter Wittgenstein, who basically said all I've said above, criticizing the past philosophers of talking nonsense and making questions where there weren't any. His quietism is more or less what I've come to see as the only method of philosophy that is respectable.
Now, I would like to hear your opinions on this. Is traditional philosophy bullshit? Or is it a respectable enterprise?
The more I learn philosophy, especially academic philosophy, the more it seems all caught up in a web of confusion and seems more like a game than anything else. I am doubting the infallibility of a priori introspection, that is, armchair philosophy. In my opinion, it seems ridiculous that we could actually assert something positive in philosophy - almost all philosophical positions in the past have been criticized or even flat out rejected later on, which leads me to believe that nothing I am learning in academic philosophy is legitimate knowledge.
To put it short and sweet, I've given up on the entire traditional philosophical enterprise.
All of metaphysics is unverifiable and limited to our own, rather small, perspective. So as much as I enjoy thinking about metaphysical questions, the anti-Realist position is the only position that makes sense, which means that traditional metaphysics is nonsense.
Outside of metaphysics, we have fields such as epistemology, philosophy of mind (which has metaphysical connections), political philosophy, etc. Now these fields don't appear to be dead ends as metaphysics does, but they still are fields that will likely never reach a full philosophical consensus and an objective certainty. Instead, it's just a game. It's nihilistic.
Enter Wittgenstein, who basically said all I've said above, criticizing the past philosophers of talking nonsense and making questions where there weren't any. His quietism is more or less what I've come to see as the only method of philosophy that is respectable.
Now, I would like to hear your opinions on this. Is traditional philosophy bullshit? Or is it a respectable enterprise?
Comments (37)
Something can't be an inquiry into the conceptual foundations, or basic presuppositions, of some area of thinking and yield propositions that are expressive of factual knowledge. This is not to say that some results of philosophy can't be enduring, and constitute intellectual progress of some sort. But the progress at issue is a progress in understanding, rather than an incremental addition to knowledge. And understanding, unlike empirical knowledge, always is liable to be challenged. When there is definitive progress, it mostly consists in highlighting habitual conceptual confusions that we are liable to fall into whenever we generalize or theorize about anything. But such confusions have a habit of re-emerging under new guises, and their standard modes of elucidation have a habit of settling down into rigid and systematic ways of thinking (philosophical "theories") that in turn spawn new confusions. The impetus to philosophize thus is more akin to a standing responsibility to unravel the confusions inevitably spawned by a constantly evolving understanding (of some domain of inquiry) rather than the expression of a desire, or need, to add to the enduring stock of human knowledge. Sciences, techniques and (conservative) arts can take care of the latter.
I don't think they need to reach a consensus to be productive.
The people who founded the government of the USA were deeply influenced by John Locke, for example, and his political philosophy seems to have had at least partial responsibility for the political and economic superpower that resulted. Even if political philosophy never reaches a consensus, it still changes things in the real world.
If it's most likely false, there's no reason to treat it as anything but most likely false.
I tend to think much of the problem with traditional metaphysics results from a refusal to accept the fact that we and our "minds" are as much a part of the world as anything else is; that we're not spectators of a world apart from or external from us. We're participants in the world, which makes it rather odd to maintain that we can't know what it "really" is or even whether it is, because we're "in here" and it's "out there." I can't recall if Wittgenstein writes about this, but others have.
Yes, if by traditional philosophy you understand the philosophy which gives reason an undue priority in the world, and makes an arbiter out of it.
There can be no sensible arbiter other than reason; the issue is about how that reason is informed as much as it is about how well it is employed.
Whether or not you believe the future will be like or will not be like the past is irrelevant, per se , to whether you accept custom as a guide. If anything accepting custom as a guide is more consonant with thinking the future will be like the past.
You brought up custom as a purported sensible alternative to reason, and I pointed out that following custom can either be done for reasons or blindly. If the first it would be an example of exercise of reason, and hence not an alternative to reason at all, and if the latter then it would not be a sensible alternative to reason.
Because it consists in postulating reasons (theories) for observed regularities; reasons which are justified not deductively (although deduction comes into it) but by their predictive success.
As for having a deductively valid reason - the reason is that deduction is the only process which guarantees an answer.
I think you are confusing yourself into claiming such beliefs are not reasonable merely because they are not deductively certain. This produces a very impoverished understanding of reason.
Go back and look at the question again; you didn't even come close to answering it!
One should not, while defending inductive reasoning, offer some mutually accepted premises (of whatever nature) on the basis of which our interlocutor ought to be able to infer, deductively, that conclusions of inductive arguments (based on true premises) are true. That would be to misrepresent an inductive argument as a deductive argument!
The defense of inductive reason ought rather be something like an account of the sort of embodied practice engaged in by subjects who thus reason; something that is bound to seem circular from the point of view of a skeptic who only has faith in deductive arguments and may doubt even the existence of the sensible body. Rather than portray the inductive argument as some sort of a risky generalization based on a finite set of experienced 'data', one could explain how the practice of inductive reasoning is, well, reasonable. And for the practice to be reasonable just is for it to be able to secure knowledge. Once the fallibility of our epistemic powers is acknowledged, then we can brush off the challenge offered to us by the skeptic who questions the epistemic status of our beliefs. The skeptic isn't merely challenging a particular belief on some specific rational ground, but our entitlement to any empirical belief whatsoever since such beliefs only are inductively justified (i.e. conceived as the upshot of ordinary, fallible albeit reliable, perceptual powers). The reason why we are entitled to brush her skeptical challenge off, is precisely because we aren't committed to prove everything deductively!
Having no good reason to doubt just is having good reason to believe.
Requiring deductive proof to support empirical beliefs is not itself a reasonable demand since it betrays a category error in the understanding of reason, and so just as you say we are entitled to refuse to take the sceptics very artificial, even, it might be said, inconsistent, doubts seriously.
No. I was charging you with trying to advance a deductive argument in support of the validity of inductive reasoning. I don't think just pointing out that we have no doubts that thing will go on in the future as they went in the past is a pragmatist argument in support of inductive reasoning. It seems more like a proclamation of faith (I am not saying this disrespectfully).
How do we know that what held up in the past will hold up in the future? Let's suppose I try to justify some principle of uniformity of nature; how will I go about it?
1. Newton's law of motion held from 1600AD-2016AD.
2. The past will be like the future.
3. Therefore Newton's law of motion will hold in the future too.
This works. But notice that premise two is the very principle of uniformity. So how shall I justify it?
1. The past has always been like the future.
2. The past will continue to have the same relationship with the future.
3. Therefore the past will continue to be like the future.
Notice I smuggled it in again when I tried to justify it. I cannot justify that the future will be like the past without falling into circular reasoning. And furthermore, how could I know empirically that the future will be like the past? All that I can know is that the present is like the past.
I grant you that I do believe that the future will also be like the past. But this is not based on some reasoning; it is merely the way my mind works. My mind presumes that the past is a reasonable guide to the future; but there is no reason for this presumption. It's just the way my mind works. When it sees the constant conjunction of things, it is inclined to associate the presence of one with the presence of the other. All we can say is that it SEEMS (to whom - to ME!) like the future will be like the past. This is believed out of habit, not out of reason. I have no reason to affirm a matter of fact: that it will really be like this. It is sufficient and truthful if I say that I believe it, and stop there.
Of course they could suddenly fail tomorrow, but we have every reason to think that is vanishingly unlikely.
I wonder if you're going too far the other way, in particular with the judgement of "undue". It's not entirely obvious to me whether the priority of reason in the philosophical tradition is warranted or not. In part, the philosophical tradition is an attempt to settle the issue of where reason stands in relation to knowledge acquisition. Indeed, a good portion of the tradition can be regarded as an inquiry into setting the limits of reason. Your declaration strikes me as too presumptuous.
If I understand John's claim as well, your shift from deduction to custom is not a shift from reason to something otherwise, but just a shift in the form of reasoning. Induction is still a reasoning faculty albeit distinct from deduction, but using custom as an arbiter is still deferring to reason.
What form could such a deductive argument take? Any deductive argument is only as certain as it's premises, which when it comes to non- tautological arguments, they never are.
So the argument could look like this:
So, if I am presenting a deductive argument this would be it's form. The argument for the premise can only be an inductive argument if it is not something simply taken for granted.
If I had to make an inductive argument for what I really believe is a self-evident premise this is how it would look:
Oddly you are here making a claim about the invariance of human nature and habit.
Nature's invariance could be explained by positing that it operates under strict 'Laws' or alternatively that it has developed entrenched habits. Assuming for the sake of argument the latter explanation, if the propensity of humans to develop entrenched habits of expectation based on past experiences reflects nature's propensity to developed entrenched 'habits' of behaviour, then it would be both natural and reasonable to expect the future to be in general form like the past.
The claim that it is nonsense is a non-sequitur. Simply because its claims cannot be empirically verified doesn't mean they are false or meaningless, unless you assume that all empirically unverifiable claims are either false or meaningless.
I would say metaphysical claims are confirmed by the individual's experience of the world. I experience the world a certain way, this is indisputable, and the metaphysician simply tries to construct in language this very same pre/non-linguistic experience of the world.
I look around my room, and down at my own body, and at my kitten who runs about here and there playing, and think of my life and the people in it, and that I am alive, and live in England, on a planet called Earth, and that I go to work, and eat and drink, and so on and so forth, and it just seems so foolish and absurd to doubt or deny all of this, and posit that it would be sensible to instead remain silent about such things. That when my kitten jumps up at me, as she just did... that I am not justified in claiming that that really happens, and was a real occurrence... absurd, I say. I am certain of it.
It's human nature to doubt and criticise and reject; there will always be those who do so for as long as we continue to exist. That something cannot be defended well does not mean that it isn't nonetheless true. But I happen to think that there are at least some basic, fundamental metaphysical truths which can be defended well, e.g. in the form of a reductio ad absurdum, and that it is more plausible and constructive to do so.
Philosophers are engaged in a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence - not so much by means of language, but by philosophy itself, and the many ways in which it can warp our view of the world in which we live.
I agree with that, although I'm not sure I'd limit confirmation to the individual's experience of the world.