ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND COGNITIVE NORMS
Pascal Engel
University of Paris-Sorbonne
The Monist , April 99, vol. 82, 2, 218-234
1. A “difference without a distinction”?
Is there any point in
defending today “analytic” philosophy against “continental” philosophy? Many
people are doubful about this, just because of the very use of quotation marks
surrounding these names in the previous sentence. For what is “analytic philosophy”?
At the time of Frege, Russell and Moore, or at the time of the positivists, and
even in the late sixties, it may have been possible to find a set of criteria
which could allow us to sort out the doctrines, concepts, methods and style of
analytic philosophers from those of “continental” philosophers. Today it is
much less easy to draw the distinction. This feeling is shared both by those
ecumenists coming from the “continental” camp who find that, for instance,
Habermas and Rawls, Derrida and Quine, Gadamer and Davidson, or Heidegger and
Wittgenstein, share a lot of themes and doctrines in spite of superficial
differences of style, and by a number of writers who would have been
considered, some decades ago, as typical analytic philosophers”, but who do not
have today this sense of their typicality. Bernard Williams, for instance,
writes that
“The contrast between “analytic” philosophy and “continental”
philosophy means neither an opposition in terms of content, of interest, or
even of style. Indeed, there are some differences, some of which are important,
between typical exemples of philosophical writing to which these terms could be
applied, but these differences do not rest upon any significant basic
principles. It could even be said that these terms mark a difference without a
distinction.”[1]
According to this line of thought, it may have been useful, in the
Cambridge of the twenties, in the Vienna of the thirties, or in the Harvard of
the fifties, to emphasize the differences between the rising movement of
analytic philosophy as against the British Hegelians, the German
irrationalists, or the American pragmatists, but it is useless, and the mark of
a peculiar form of dogmatism, to try to draw sharp boundaries where there are
none. Thus Putnam writes:
“From my point of view,
the only legitimate function for “movements” in philosophy, is to gain
attention and recogition for ideas not yet being received or which have been
neglected or marginalized. Analytic philosophy has been around for a long time,
and it is certainly one of the dominant currents of world philosophy. Making it
into a “movement” is not necessary, and it only preserves the features that I
have deplored. Just as we can learn from Kant without calling ourselves
Kantians, and from James and Dewey without calling ourlseves pragmatists, and
from Wittgenstein without calling oursleves Wittgensteinians, so we can learn
from Frege and Russell and Carnap and Quine and Davidson without calling
ourselves “analytic philosophers”. Why can we not just be “philosophers”
without an adjective?[2]
I do not share
Williams’ nor Putnam’s feelings. The fact that the criteria by which we
classify today a philosopher as “analytic” or “continental” are often fuzzy
does not imply that there are no criteria at all, and that they do not mark any
real distinctions. The fact that it seems to be worthless and irrelevant to try
to reinstate, in the context of today’s world philosophy, the voluntaristic
gestures by which the early analytic philosophers attempted to draw attention
to the specificity of their movement, does not mean that we do not need to draw
attention to this specificity in some contexts. If Williams and Putnam had
occupied regular teaching posts in France, Germany or Italy, they probably
would not have felt that their style marked “a difference without a
distinction” in the context of Continental Europe[3]. More
importantly, even if the analytic style in philosophy had become so dominant in
all countries that we could drop the adjectives “analytic” or “continental”, we
would still need to explain what philosophy “without an adjective” is, what we
can expect from it, and why it is worth pursuing. And this would amount to providing some adjectives for
characterizing the kind of philosophical practice that we aim to pursue.
Philosophy is not a bare particular: it is precisely because there is no real
consensus about what a philosophical inquiry is that we are drawn to attach adjectives
to the word “philosophy”. The main problem to define our adjectives.
This does not mean that
the challenge raised by those who doubt that any distinctive definition of
analytic philosophy can be given is not a serious one. We run the risk of
begging all sorts of questions. I believe, however, that some criteria of what
analytic philosophy is, or tends to be, can be provided, and that they can be
justified. My claim will be that any kind of inquiry must conform itself to
certain cognitive norms, that these norms are, in an important sense,
objective, and that a kind of philosophical inquiry which respects these norms
will bear most of the characteristics of what is generally called “analytic
philosophy”, whereas other forms of philosophical practice, currently called
“continental”, do not bear these characteristics.
2. What is “continental philosophy”?
The lack of a
distinctive sense of what analytic philosophy (henceforth AP) is is often
reinforced by the fact that there is no distinctive sense of what “continental”
philosophy (CP) is either. But we can try to describe it. As these labels are
used today, we can distinguish broadly two senses of CP, one broad, and one
narrow, which nevertheless possess many common characteristics.
a) In the broad sense,
CP is the kind of philosophy to which the early analytic philosophers, such as
Frege, Russell and Moore (but a number of Austrian philosophers too) where
opposed: German post-Kantian and neo-Kantian idealism in Germany,
neo-Hegelianism in Great Britain. Later, when neo-Kantianism in Germany was
overcome by Husserlian phenomenology, and in particular by various versions of
existential phenomenology, such as Scheler’s or Heidegger’s, CP was incarnated
in these versions, together with some irrationalistic trends to which the
Viennese positivists were opposed, such as Lebensphilosophie. In France
or in Italy, these doctrines were not assimilated before the thirties, but the
influence of phenomenology and Hegelianism was no less important. What C
philosophers in the broad sense have in common, neverheless, are not some much
specific doctrines than a certain way of dealing with philosophical problems.
Their style is mainly historical: a philosophical thesis is very seldom
examined and discussed in itself or systematically, but through its
“inscription” in texts, or set of texts of Great Philosopers of the Past.[4] A
philosophical reasoning or a philosophical concept is rarely analysed
independently of its incarnation in the writings of philosophers of the past.
Ask a C philosopher what he is working on: he will mention names. This method
is backed by the Hegelian feeling that philosophy is “over”, and that
“everything has been said”; the only alternatives left seem to be the
repetition of past doctrines, or the infinite commentary upon these doctrines.
There are indeed various ways of doing the history of philosophy in this sense,
some of which more objective than the others, but this historical attitude is
at the origin of the basic reaction of C philosophers to A philosopher’s
attempts at dealing with philosophical problems: the latter’s approach is felt
to be “naïve”.
b) In a narrower sense,
CP is a form of radicalization of various phenomenological and hermeneutical
doctrines, which takes its inspiration mainly in Nietzsche and Heidegger. One
of its main characteristics is that it dramatizes its opposition to the whole
Western tradition in philosophy, by denouncing science, reason and metaphysics
as based upon various kinds of illusions, upon a desire for power and
domination. Its discourse, in spite of its philosophical technicity, has an
ideological and quasi-political tone: it takes itself to be a sort liberation
war against various forms of colonization by Western thought of the forces of
poetry, of difference or of creativity which have been under the oppression of
the tyranny of “Presence”, of “Logos” or of “Identity”. Hence its emphasis upon the culture of
“difference”, of minorities against majorities, and in general upon cultural
relativism. One of the features of CP in this narrow sense is that it does not
pertain only to philosophy, but also to literary criticism, psychiatry
(especially psychoanalytic), art and architecture. Some of its names are
typically negative (“Critical theory”, “Deconstructionism”) or suggest the
closing of an Old Age and the advent of a New one (“Post-structuralism”,
“Post-modernism”).
CP is largely the
creation of analytic philosophers, and few philosophers working in Continental
Europe would recognize themselves as such: they believe that they are just
doing philosophy “without an adjective”. Only those philosophers working in
analytic departements in the English-speaking world who do not feel themselves
attracted by analytic philosophy may be willing to grant the epithet.
Nevertheless, it seems quite clear that there is a kind of philosophy, which
deserves the general label of CP, which is practiced in a number of places
(which are not, today, necessarily on the Old Continent) and which shares the
following characteristics, in contrast to the characteristics of another kind
of philosophy, which deserves the label of AP. [5]
AP is the tradition of
philosophical argument, of objections, of descriptions, examples and
counterexamples. It mimics the scientific style of inquiry, which proposes
hypotheses and theories, tests them in the light of datas, and aims at
widespread discussion and control by the peers. It believes in the possibility
of progress through criticism, which is made possible only if its formulations
are clear, and aim at coherence, through the respect of usual logical standards
of argument. It aims to solve particular problems, puzzles and paradoxes, and
to built theories in answer to them. It prefers to work upon details and
particular analyses, rather than to produce general syntheses. For these
reasons, it is scornful of unnecessary abstractions, and close to common sense.
Its style could be characterized as “enlightened” or “critical” common sense.
In contrast, CP is
problem free. It is done, as I said above, through the history of philosophy,
and it seldom discusses a particular problem or philosophical argument in
isolation. Problems, if there are any, are dealt with through their embodiment
within texts, discourses, or systems of texts and discourses. CP takes the form
of the commentary or the exegesis. It is therefore difficult to find in CP any
single thesis, which would be formulated explicitly and modified as the result
of a common discussion between a number of philosophers. The style of argument
in CP, if there is any, if very often analogical, drawing on similarities
between particular words and concepts, moving from quotation to quotation,
rather than by developping the implications of a particular view. It is often
difficult to find where the premisses and the conclusions are. Positions are
systematically underdetermined, because they are never isolated and discussed
for themselves, but systemetically fused into others, in a syncretic way. As a result, it is very often difficult to
criticize any particular thesis in CP, and indeed its practicioners do not
understand the usual practice of criticism among AP. Criticisms are
often taken to reveal some form of bad will or nasty polemics. [6] No
wonder that CP’s style is often obscure, even when it does not indulge in
systematic obscurity. Just as the AP style takes its model from the straight
line, the CP style takes its model on the circle: one does not go from one
position to another though some sort of continuous progress, but one often
comes back to already known positions encountered before. This has to do with
the hermeneutical and historical style of CP’s kind of writing. This feeling of
closure creates two corollary impressions: the impression that there is nothing
new under the sun, that philosophy is a form of eternal return, and the
impression that we could break out of the circle only though some sort of
transgression, of radical move into some new space or new era of thought. Hence
the melodramatic style that radicalized CP often takes, and the form of
political-philosophical messianism that it indulges into.
3. Is analytic philosophy a matter of “style”?
As I have characterized
it above, the contrast between CP and AP is essentially a matter of method and
style, not a matter of doctrines or theses. Although early analytic
philosophers had in common certain set of doctrines, such as various forms of
platonism and realism with Frege, Russell and Moore, or various forms of
empiricism and verificationism, it is no longer the case today, in spite of the
popular images which are still attached to A philosophers as “positivists” in
many circles. The AP house contains many mansions: from the beggining of the
tradition, a number of philosophical theses have been espoused, discussed and
rejected, and there are today metaphysical realists, idealists, Kantians,
Marxists, even Hegelians and phenomenologists among A philosophers. It is often
said, too, that a distinctive thesis of early AP was atomism, as opposed to
holism, and that the widespread acceptance of holism by an number of
contemporary analytic philosophers has, to a large extent, changed the subject.
Or it is said that the loss of the belief that the philosophy of language is
more or less the central part of philosophy has completely reshaped the
understanding that A philosophers have of their practice. But it does not seem,
for instance, that a philosopher like Jerry Fodor, who advocates both atomism
and the priority of the philosophy of mind over the philosophy of language,
could be both an “analytic” through the former commitment, and not an analytic
through the second. What seems to individuate A philosophers are not their
theses, but their practices, their style, and their way of dealing with
philosophical problems.The same indeed seems to be true of CP: although it
obvously bears its Kantian, Hegelian and phenomenological origins and has in
general little sympathy for empiricist doctrines, it would be false to suggest
that writers in this tradition are simply post-German idealists. The CP house
contains even more mansions, which, unsurprisingly, are better individuated by
names: there are Marxists, Freudians, Nietzscheans, Heideggerians,
Habermassians, etc., and all sorts of neo-Xians from the previous set. The
ecumenists mentionned above even suggest that some analytic doctrines, such as
Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, or Davidson’s views on
interpretation, or certain set of views, such as Wittgenstein’s, are shared, in
a different form, by a number of C philosophers such as Derrida, Gadamer, or
Heidegger. The extent to which one can understand the phrase “in a different
form” depends upon whether we can translate or not the relevant AP theses into
CP theses. But either way, this reinforces the claim that AP and CP are a
matter of style: for if the theses can be translated, it purports to show that
both traditions are able of conveying similar contents in spite of differences
of form or style, and if the theses cannot be so translated, it purports to
show that these obstacles to translation are due to differences of style, not
to differences in content.
We reach here an
interesting feature of current debates about the differences between AP and CP:
the feeling that these differences are essentially a matter of style is invoked
both by those “post-analytic” ecumenists
who invite us to minimize the doctrinal differences and to reduce the
conflict between the two kinds of philosophy to “mere” stylistic differences,
which are not so important (it’s was you say that counts, no the way you say
it) and by those “rigorists”
analytic philosophers who want to emphasize the importance of these stylistic
differences in order to single out their practice. In the first camp, we find
people like Putnam, who points out that David Lewis is not harder, nor easier,
to understand than Derrida (what is clear or not is, he suggests, a matter of
convention), or Rorty, who grants the incommensurability of the AP and CP
style, but who nevertheless believes that philosophy is a matter of circulation
of ideas or of “conversation” between traditions. In the second camp, we find
people like the French analytic philosopher François Récanati, who says:
“There is a difference between the
theory and the practice of analytic philosophers; and what characterizes
analytic philosophy is a certain practice, not a certain theory. It may well be
that an analytic philosopher, criticizing its own tradition, declares that he
himself is a partisan of the continental manner in philosophy; thus Hilary
Putnam…has recently held that the views of a philosopher count more than the rigor of his arguments, and
that philosopy is closer to art than to science. Through this kind of position,
Putnam no doubt is closer theoretically to the continental philosophers, but in his practice he remains
fully an analytic philosopher: he has not rejected, in his practice, the ideals
of analytic philosophy…(clarity, precision, arguments, etc.) and it is the only
thing that counts. Going further, on can, it seems to me, imagine without
contradiction an analytic philosopher who would declare himself openly hostile
to the ideals of analytic philosophy: a philosopher who would say that he
prefers slogans to arguments, fuzziness to precision, opacity to transparence,
metaphors to concepts, etc.. I do not believe that such a philosopher would ipso
facto cease to be an analytic philosopher: he would cease to be one if he
did put his theories into practice.”[7]
I myself used to agree
with this sort of distinction between theory and practice and with this
diagnosis of the difference between AP and CP as a matter of style and not a
matter of doctrines[8]. But
there is obviously something fishy in Récanati’s claim that an A philosopher who
would theorize the advantages of vagueness and obscurity over clarity, metaphor
against concepts, slogans over arguments, etc., but who would not put his
theories into practice, would remain an A philosopher. For such a philosopher
would, sooner or later, either be obliged to revise his theory in the light of
his practice, or to withdraw his practice to make it consistent with his
theory. Putnam, for one, has never been in such a predicament, for he never
theorized such things. And he could not have theorized them because the very
practice of AP already involves certain theoretical commitments. In other
words, although the analytic style is indeed compatible with a number of
theoretical views in the logical space of the theses that a philosopher can
reasonably hold, it is not compatible with views which reject some of the
minimal assumptions upon which this style rests upon. To see that, run a small
thought experiment. Suppose that Derrida, for instance, intended to maintain
his well-known views that philosophy is a kind of literary writing, that
metaphor and concept are so necessarily intermingled that we cannot distinguish
between the two, that reason and logos involve a tyranny of sameness against “différance”, and that we
cannot really criticize rationally philosophers, but only “deconstruct” their
views through some sort of textual exegesis which would reveal “symptoms” of
their commitments to fascinating metaphors-philosophemes, etc.; now suppose
also that he had decided to convey these views through rigorous and precise
philosophical arguments, refusing to extrapollate sweaping conclusions from
perverse readings of particular texts, using the most plausible theories of
metaphor and of fictional discourse, and the apparatus of distinctions that
analytic philosophy of language currently use, etc. Could he still maintain his
theories while changing his practice? He could, but at the price of some form
of self deception.[9] At some
point there would be a clash between his explicit theoretical commitments and
the implicit commitments of his newly acquired practice. I want to suggest
that, in this respect, AP is not merely a matter of style, and that the
implicit commitments in question are commitments to distinctive cognitive norms
which govern philosophical discourse.
4. Cognitive norms
I have characterized
above AP as a form of “enlightened” or “critical” common sense. The phrase
comes from C.S. Peirce.[10] It does
not mean that philosophical claims and theories are no better than common sense
beliefs, but that the standards by which we evaluate our philosophical beliefs
should not be different from the standards by which we evaluate our common
sense beliefs. Common sense incorporates implicit norms which go with the very
use of such notions as “belief”, “knowledge” or “judgment”. One of the tasks of
philosophy is to assess these norms in an explicit and reflexive way, and to
evaluate our common sense beliefs in the light of these norms. The evaluation
may lead to revisions of our common sense scheme, and the formulation of more
sophisticated and theoretical beliefs. But even when we reach these new
beliefs, there are no other norms by which we can assess them than those which
were implicit in our ordinary practice of forming and evaluating common sense
beliefs. [11]
What are these norms?
As I said, they are largely contained in the unreflexive use of our cognitive
concepts, such as “belief”. They consist, in Peacocke’s phrase, in the
“normative commitments” of such concepts. The concept of belief, in particular,
contains at least two such commitments.[12] First to
believe something is to believe that it is true . This is why, for
instance, it is odd to assert that p and that one believes that not p (“Moore’s paradox”). Let us call this the truth commitment of belief: a belief is typically something
for which the question of its truth arises (or, as it is often said, which
“aims at truth”). Second to believe something is to be prepared to answer the
question whether what one believes is justified. Some beliefs are unjustified,
some are less justified than others, and some are more justified than others,
in which case they may count as knowledge. But whatever can be our account of
this justification, a belief is something for which the question of its
justification arises. Let us call this the justification commitment of belief. There are indeed, notoriously,
various diverging accounts of the real nature of this commitment, and what
justification really amounts to is a matter of philosophical controversy. But
one requirement of our ordinary concept of justification is that our beliefs
are justified in the light of evidence for them, and that a person who fails to account for all the
evidence in favour of his belief in some sense fails to justify it, or is less
than rational. Let us call these commitments cognitive norms. It is also
a matter of philosophical controversy whether these norms form an autonomous
set, and what their relation is with other sorts of norms, in particular
practical or ethical norms. Thus many people doubt that there is a distinctive
“ethics of belief” in the sense that cognitive norms could in some way overlap
with, or depend upon practical ones. It is not the place here to deal with this
issue, but I shall assume that there is a least some overlap between cognitive
and practical norms: cognitive norms are not simply present in our use of
cognitive concepts, but also worthy of being followed or obeyed. They
are not only norms, but genuine virtues.[13]
How can we apply these
remarks about our common sense cognitive commitments to more sophisticated
kinds of beliefs, such as those instantiated in philosophical theories and
arguments? Can they be simply transferred from the former to the latter?
Obviously not, for philosophy, in its attempt to give a reflexive account of
these norms, usually provides us with conflicting analyses. Philosophers
diverge about what the concept of truth amounts to, or about whether
justification is a matter of coherence or reliability, for instance. And there
is the familiar figure of the skeptic, who doubts that our beliefs could ever
be true or justified. But, as it often remarked, even the skeptic must grant
that there is a minimal understanding
and sharing of the above cognitive norms governing belief without which
he could not even raise his skeptical doubts. Now could there be some other
kind of skeptic, which would not bear on the truth and justification or our
ordinary beliefs, but on the very cognitive norms by which we assess them (and
which we could call a meta-skeptic )? Oviously there are such
meta-skeptics. In fact most of what I have called CP in the narrow sense illustratres
this form of skepticism. For instance a number of French Nietzschean
post-structuralists, such as Foucault or Deleuze, not only deny that there is
an such thing as the truth or the justification of our beliefs, and espouse
some form of relativism or perspectivism, but also explicitly reject the idea
that truth and justification could be norms[14]. This
does not mean that they do not believe in other kinds of norms, such as for
instance “creativity”, “desire” or “life”, but what they have in common is the
rejection of the idea that there are genuine cognitive norms, which could in
some sense regulate our philosophical discourse. Similar claims are put foward,
in a somewhat different form, by Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism”, when he proposes the
replacement of the ideal of “objectivity” by that of “solidarity”.
Such views, admittedly,
are situated at the most extreme end of the spectrum of views which has
received the name of “continental philosophy”. They could also be situated at
the most extreme end of the spectrum of “analytical” views, if one allows, as
we saw above, that a philosopher could hold views which are distinctively
anti-analytical, while remaining faithfull to analytic practice. Rorty, at
least in Philosophy and the Mirror of nature, could be such a
philosopher, or Putnam, or Cavell in some of their (in my opinion worst)
moments[15]. There
are indeed writers who fall more or less in between these extremes, and there
may even be C philosophers who stand closer to the middle of the spectrum, such
as Ricoeur. It is largely a matter of degree. But I want to suggest that the
more a philosopher is prepared to accept consciously the cognitive norms of
truth and justification that he follows in his practice, the closer he is to
the theoretical and practical commitments of analytic philosophy. The
reason why AP is distinct from CP is this explicit and implicit acknowledgement
of the basic cognitive norms of ordinary and philosophical discourse. This
involves a distinctive theoretical commitment, contrary to what is adduced by
those who claim that the difference is only a matter of style. But given that
the cognitive norms in questions are norms governing the general practice of
philosophical inquiry, it is not surprising that they have been confused with
merely practical or stylistic commitments.
This provides us with a
clearer criterion for distinguishing AP from CP, but it still does not justify
it, nor does it show that it is in some sense better to follow these cognitive
norms than to follow other norms, or no norms at all, and to practice AP rather
than CP. In other words, I have not answered the claims of the meta-skeptic.
5.Minimal truth and the minimal analytic ideal
As well known, it is
not easy to answer skeptics, even less meta-skeptics. The only way I know of
rebutting their claims is first to point out that the commitments which they
find questionable are not as strong and unacceptable as they are said to be,
and, second, to point out that they lead to self-refuting views.
On the first score, the
skeptic about the cognitive virtues of AP generally objects that the cognitive
norms adduced above rest upon very heavy theoretical commitments which no
philosopher today would accept: that truth is the end of inquiry, that it is a
form of correspondence with the way things are, that knowledge— and even some
sort of philosophical knowledge— can be achieved, and that there are
context-free standards of justification. In fact these commitments are
precisely those that “post-analytic” philosophers such as Putnam or Rorty have
found unacceptable and obsolete in the analytic tradition. They claim that the
blindness of this tradition to the fragility of these presuppositions is
responsible for the forms of scientism and absolutism about truth that it
typically manifests. The usual antipathy of C philosophers of many persuasions
for the “analytic ideal” in philosophy seems due to the suspicion that A
philsophers still entertain such naive beliefs about a philosophia perennis or about the dissolution of philosophy into
science. It may well be the case that a number of A philosophers are still in
the grip of such ideals. But many others do not— or if they do, they do not
think that these views about truth and knowledge can be so simply entertained
without argument. Indeed there has been a lot of argument in recent and less
recent analytic philosophy about the nature of truth and knowledge. One could
even say that these questions are among
the basic topics in today’s A journals and university courses. In fact
the discussion of the nature of cognitive norms has been present in A
philosophy from its very start. Frege, Russell and Moore rejected the reduction
of cognitive and ethical norms to natural facts, and they proposed various
versions — most often platonistic— of what we may call the thesis of the
autonomy of norms. The Viennese positivists attempted to reduce these norms to
linguistic conventions. Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers
tried also to trace their linguistic origins, but were more tempted into
thinking that they rested upon natural “forms of life”. The contemporary materialists
and naturalists attempt to locate their origin in psychological and biological
facts. And the anti-reductionnists resist this by affirming again the autonomy
of normativity.[16] Analytic
philosophers, therefore, have always been conscious of the conflict between
cognitive norms, and between these and other norms. They have long ago realized
that it was not obvious to talk of truth as “correspondance to the facts” or of
knowledge as justified belief of an independent reality. But they have never
been tempted into thinking that the difficulty of defining these notions were
enough to make us renounce the notions themselves and the norms which they
involved? Why?
Because A philosophers
do not share the typical kind of (melodramatic) modus tollens inference
of C philosophers, when they reason in this way: “If philosophical norms of
inquiry, therefore truth, knowledge, reality, etc. No truth, knowledge, etc..
Hence no philosophical norms of inquiry, no philosophy”. For the fact that we
cannot give satisfactory definitions of truth in terms of correspondence to an
external reality and of knowledge as knowledge of truth does not imply that
there is no satisfactory notion of truth or knowledge to be had, that we should
reject these notions altogether, and side for “deconstruction”, “conversation”,
“le différend” or some form of what Rorty aptly calls “edificatory” discourse.
The topic of truth is, contrary to what many C philosophers (who are scornful
of details) seem to believe, a matter of some delicacy. To simplify
outrageously, according to many contemporary discussions, there are two kinds
of views of truth: a) “substantial” views, according to which the notion of
truth can be defined through some sort of “thick” concept, such as correspondence,
coherence, warranted assertibility, etc., and b) “deflationary” views,
according to which there is no more (and especially metaphysically no more) to
truth than the “thin” equivalence that p is true = p .[17] Rorty,
and a number of neo-pragmatists, side with the deflationary view. They claim
that it is precisely because there is no more to truth than its logical use
that it is useless to base any sort of norm upon it. Truth is a mere assertoric
device, which registers the fact that the members of a community have accepted
certain assertions. But the deflationary view of truth is false. The fact that
we assert certain things as true is not equivalent to the fact that we assert
them, period. We also assert them as true because we think that they are
true, and because we believe that we are justified in doing so. (It is,
indeed, one of the norms of assertion). In that respect, we can keep a minimalist
notion of truth, which preserves
the main fonctional or logical features of the truth predicate, but which
grants that there is more to truth than these logical features: truth as a form
of convergence in our inquiries, as something to which our statements answer,
which can be justified. Such a concept need not imply the more substantial
notion of correspondence. In many ways it can be equated to assertability in
ideal conditions.[18] I
suggest that not only our cognitive norm of truth is based on this minimalist
concept, but that it is the kind of concept that is appropriate for
characterizing the cognitive commitments of a philosophical inquiry. So the A
philosophers takes the preceding inference to be amodus ponens : “If
philosophical inquiry, therefore truth, knowledge,etc. But minimal truth,
knowledge, etc. Hence philosophical norms of inquiry.” From the fact that the
ordinary definitions of truth or knowledge do not succeed, it does not follow
that we have to side with the negation of the cognitive norms of philosophical discourse, and not even
with some form of agnosticism about them. The crisis of cognitive norms, just
as the crisis of ethical norms, does not show that everything is permitted or
than anything goes.[19] The A
philosopher detaches, while the C philosopher contraposes. This is another
illustration of the fact that a philosopher’s modus tollens is another
philosophers modus ponens.
The other half of the
argument against our meta-sceptic would have to show that his refusal to grant
minimal cognitive norms will lead him to self-refuting views. At least it will
lead him, as I have suggested above in the case of an “analytic” Derridian, to
some sort of pragmatic contradiction or of self deceptory practice. Unless the
C philosophers defends here squarely relativistic views about truth, against
which there are familiar arguments in the self-refuting style, it will be less
easy, given the ordinary elusive way of arguing of C philosophers, to pin down
points where they have accepted explicitly theoretical commitments against cognitive
norms, which they would have to deny elsewhere. But we can get a feeling of the
sort of predicament in which they tend to put themselves by looking at their
practice of the history of philosophy. A number of C philosophers do not like
the way A philosophers deal with the history of philosophy: they reject the
idea that one could discuss theses of philosophers from the past in abstraction
from their context, by trying to evaluate them as true or false, or by using
them in other contexts. They typically believe that the “truth” of
philosophical theses is, so to say, purely internal and context-bound. But if this is so how can
one pretend, in explaining these views and placing them into various contexts,
to do the history of philosophy
? If they grant that their work is merely a form of interpretation, which could
not be assessed by other scholars, they
would have no right to claim that their historical analyses are better than the
others. If they do not grant this, they would have to conform to some cognitive
standards. Another familiar claims of C historians of philosophy is that it
wrong to try, as many A philosophers do, to examine the views of philosophers
of the past on such canonical philosophical problems as “the problem of
universals”. For, on their view, there is no such problem, but a motley of
views, all located in various doctrinal contexts, which we cannot abstract from
their historical succession. But the very attempt to show that “there is no
such thing as the problem of universals” (in the sense of a recurrent problem
for philosophers of the past, say in the Middle Ages) implies that one is able
to state what this problem
consists in, and hence to grant that it can be understood at least in part in
abstraction from its various doctrinal contexts. In general some sense of what
kinds of philosophical problems philosophers from the past were trying to solve
must be presupposed, in order to understand the claims of these philosophers.
And to understand them means at least being able to share with them some
minimal understanding of the problems they were dealing with.[20]
My aim in this paper
has not been to suggest that all C philosophers reject the cognitive norms
which I have described as distinctive of A philosophy, and thus run into these
self deceptive strategies. For not all of them reject these norms, either in
theory or in practice. To that extent, they are closer to AP than they
generally believe themselves to be, and on that point the ecumenists are right.
Be it as it may, AP is the kind of philosophy which conforms most closely, both
explicitly and implicitly, to the minimal cognitive norms which govern, and
should govern, philosophical inquiry. Like the stylistic criterion, this one is
compatible with a wide variety of theses and methods, but the core commitments
of analytic philosophy lie here. It allows us to drop the quotation marks which
usually surround the words “analytic” and “continental”, but these norms are
accepted and applied on both sides, it hardly allows us to speak of philosophy
“without an adjective”.
NOTES
[1] Bernard Williams, Preface to the French translation of his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Fontana, Collins, 198 ), L’éthique et les limites de la philosophie, tr. M. Lescourret, Paris, Gallimard, 1990, p. V.
[2] H. Putnam, “A Half Century of Philosophy”, Daedalus, 1997, p.203
[3] To mention only one example with which I am familiar: in France today, the teaching of logic is confined to a one year course at the undergraduate level in the universities (but not in the concourse examinations for the “Grandes Ecoles”); many teachers and students do not see its use and ask for its suppression; very few courses in analytic philosophy exist in curricula; when they exist, they are mainly historical; and concourse examinations such as the “agrégation” emphasize mainly historical competences and rhetorical skills. Even at the graduate level, it is still impossible to teach a course dealing with what are considered as the standard topics in the philosophy of language, of mind, of logic, or ethics in an Anglo-American departement, and the number of doctoral theses bearing on analytic topics is ridiculously small. No professional journal is devoted to analytic philosopy. Moreover, in France, unlike in America or in Great Britain, philosophy is a popular subject, which is often the object of appropriation by “high-brow intellectuals” in the medias. Their feeling about what philosophy is quite different from the concept of it which is currently entertained by professionals. Do all these characteristics, which are instantiated in many European countries, mark “a difference without a distinction”?
[4] I borrow this term from Joelle Proust, “Nouvelles frontières”, introduction to J. Proust, ed. “La philosophie continentale vue par la philosophie analytique”, Philosophie, 35, 1992, Editions de Minuit, Paris, p.11
[5] For similar accounts of these differences, see Proust, op cit, and K. Mulligan “Post-Continental philosophy, some nosological notes”, in P.Engel, ed. “The analytic-continental divide”, Stanford French Review, , 17, 2-3, 1993, pp.150
[6] a celebrated example of this is Derrida’s famous polemics against Searle.
[7] François Récanati, “Pour la philosophie analytique”, Critique , 444, Mai 1984, p.369. See also, Recanati, “La philosophie analytique est-elle dépassée?”, in Proust, ed. op.cit. p.55-64.
[8] See for instance P. Engel, “French and American Philosophical Dispositions”, Stanford French Review, 15, 2, 1991, 165-181, and my introduction to Engel 1993 (ed.) op.cit.
[9] This may not be simply a thought experiment, but also an actual possibility, which Derrida himself may feel, and try to cope with through some form of irony pervading his whole metaphilosophical claims.
[10] Peirce, ref.
[11] In this respect, I am committed to some form of “reflexive equilibrium” view of the assessment of norms.
[12]C. Peacocke, A Study of concepts , Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 1992. Peacocke discerns other commitments of the concept of belief, but they do not concern us here.
[13] This commits me to some sort of “virtue epistemology” in the sense of E. Sosa. See his Knowledge in Perspective, But I cannot argue for this here.
[14] See Engel, “The Decline and Fall of French Nietzscheo-Structuralism”, in B. Smith, ed, European Philosophy and the American Academy , The Hegeler Institute, Monist Library of Philosophy, La Salle,
Ill. p.21-41.
[15] In a sense, S. Stich’s “pragmatism”, in his The fragmentation of Reason, Cambridge Mass, 1990, could count as such an analytical defense of the common C doctrine of relativism, in partiular about cognitive norms.
[16] for an account of the analytic tradition as based upon these changing views about norms, see John Skorupski, english language philosophy, Oxford, Oxford university Press, 1993, and P. Engel, La dispute, une introdution à la philosophie analytique, Paris, Minuit 1997.
[17] This blurrs the usual distinction between redundancy and disquotation, but it is not usueful for my purposes here.
[18] I am here following C. Wright, Truth and Objectivity, Harvard, Havard University Press, 1993. See also P.Engel, La vérité, réflexion sur quelques truismes, Paris, Hatier 1998. Putnam himself defends one version of the equation of truth with ideal assertibility.
[19] I take it that it is in part the same conclusion as E. Sosa, in his paper “Serious Philosophy and the Freedom of Spitit”, Journal of Philosophy, LXXXIV, 12, 707-726.
[20] This is much too sketchy. For a better account, see P.Engel, “La philosophie analytique doit-elle prendre un tournant historique” in J. Vienne, ed. Philosopice analytique et histoire de la philosophie, Paris, Vrin 1997