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September 2007  
  
In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college. I had
several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the less honorable
was to shock people. College was regarded as job training where I grew up, so
studying philosophy seemed an impressively impractical thing to do. Sort of
like slashing holes in your clothes or putting a safety pin through your ear,
which were other forms of impressive impracticality then just coming into
fashion.  
  
But I had some more honest motives as well. I thought studying philosophy
would be a shortcut straight to wisdom. All the people majoring in other
things would just end up with a bunch of domain knowledge. I would be learning
what was really what.  
  
I'd tried to read a few philosophy books. Not recent ones; you wouldn't find
those in our high school library. But I tried to read Plato and Aristotle. I
doubt I believed I understood them, but they sounded like they were talking
about something important. I assumed I'd learn what in college.  
  
The summer before senior year I took some college classes. I learned a lot in
the calculus class, but I didn't learn much in Philosophy 101\. And yet my
plan to study philosophy remained intact. It was my fault I hadn't learned
anything. I hadn't read the books we were assigned carefully enough. I'd give
Berkeley's _Principles of Human Knowledge_ another shot in college. Anything
so admired and so difficult to read must have something in it, if one could
only figure out what.  
  
Twenty-six years later, I still don't understand Berkeley. I have a nice
edition of his collected works. Will I ever read it? Seems unlikely.  
  
The difference between then and now is that now I understand why Berkeley is
probably not worth trying to understand. I think I see now what went wrong
with philosophy, and how we might fix it.  
  
**Words**  
  
I did end up being a philosophy major for most of college. It didn't work out
as I'd hoped. I didn't learn any magical truths compared to which everything
else was mere domain knowledge. But I do at least know now why I didn't.
Philosophy doesn't really have a subject matter in the way math or history or
most other university subjects do. There is no core of knowledge one must
master. The closest you come to that is a knowledge of what various individual
philosophers have said about different topics over the years. Few were
sufficiently correct that people have forgotten who discovered what they
discovered.  
  
Formal logic has some subject matter. I took several classes in logic. I don't
know if I learned anything from them.  It does seem to me very important to
be able to flip ideas around in one's head: to see when two ideas don't fully
cover the space of possibilities, or when one idea is the same as another but
with a couple things changed. But did studying logic teach me the importance
of thinking this way, or make me any better at it? I don't know.  
  
There are things I know I learned from studying philosophy. The most dramatic
I learned immediately, in the first semester of freshman year, in a class
taught by Sydney Shoemaker. I learned that I don't exist. I am (and you are) a
collection of cells that lurches around driven by various forces, and calls
itself _I_. But there's no central, indivisible thing that your identity goes
with. You could conceivably lose half your brain and live. Which means your
brain could conceivably be split into two halves and each transplanted into
different bodies. Imagine waking up after such an operation. You have to
imagine being two people.  
  
The real lesson here is that the concepts we use in everyday life are fuzzy,
and break down if pushed too hard. Even a concept as dear to us as _I_. It
took me a while to grasp this, but when I did it was fairly sudden, like
someone in the nineteenth century grasping evolution and realizing the story
of creation they'd been told as a child was all wrong.  Outside of math
there's a limit to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad
definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings.
Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in everyday
life that you don't notice. Words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics
seems to. But you can always make them break if you push them far enough.  
  
I would say that this has been, unfortunately for philosophy, the central fact
of philosophy. Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but
driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean
by "free." Do abstract ideas exist? Depends what you mean by "exist."  
  
Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical
controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure how much
credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted
simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.  
  
How did things get this way? Can something people have spent thousands of
years studying really be a waste of time? Those are interesting questions. In
fact, some of the most interesting questions you can ask about philosophy. The
most valuable way to approach the current philosophical tradition may be
neither to get lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them
down like Wittgenstein, but to study it as an example of reason gone wrong.  
  
**History**  
  
Western philosophy really begins with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. What we
know of their predecessors comes from fragments and references in later works;
their doctrines could be described as speculative cosmology that occasionally
strays into analysis. Presumably they were driven by whatever makes people in
every other society invent cosmologies.   
  
With Socrates, Plato, and particularly Aristotle, this tradition turned a
corner. There started to be a lot more analysis. I suspect Plato and Aristotle
were encouraged in this by progress in math. Mathematicians had by then shown
that you could figure things out in a much more conclusive way than by making
up fine sounding stories about them.   
  
People talk so much about abstractions now that we don't realize what a leap
it must have been when they first started to. It was presumably many thousands
of years between when people first started describing things as hot or cold
and when someone asked "what is heat?" No doubt it was a very gradual process.
We don't know if Plato or Aristotle were the first to ask any of the questions
they did. But their works are the oldest we have that do this on a large
scale, and there is a freshness (not to say naivete) about them that suggests
some of the questions they asked were new to them, at least.  
  
Aristotle in particular reminds me of the phenomenon that happens when people
discover something new, and are so excited by it that they race through a huge
percentage of the newly discovered territory in one lifetime. If so, that's
evidence of how new this kind of thinking was.   
  
This is all to explain how Plato and Aristotle can be very impressive and yet
naive and mistaken. It was impressive even to ask the questions they did. That
doesn't mean they always came up with good answers. It's not considered
insulting to say that ancient Greek mathematicians were naive in some
respects, or at least lacked some concepts that would have made their lives
easier. So I hope people will not be too offended if I propose that ancient
philosophers were similarly naive. In particular, they don't seem to have
fully grasped what I earlier called the central fact of philosophy: that words
break if you push them too far.  
  
"Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers," Rod
Brooks wrote, "programs written for them usually did not work."  Something
similar happened when people first started trying to talk about abstractions.
Much to their surprise, they didn't arrive at answers they agreed upon. In
fact, they rarely seemed to arrive at answers at all.  
  
They were in effect arguing about artifacts induced by sampling at too low a
resolution.  
  
The proof of how useless some of their answers turned out to be is how little
effect they have. No one after reading Aristotle's _Metaphysics_ does anything
differently as a result.   
  
Surely I'm not claiming that ideas have to have practical applications to be
interesting? No, they may not have to. Hardy's boast that number theory had no
use whatsoever wouldn't disqualify it. But he turned out to be mistaken. In
fact, it's suspiciously hard to find a field of math that truly has no
practical use. And Aristotle's explanation of the ultimate goal of philosophy
in Book A of the _Metaphysics_ implies that philosophy should be useful too.  
  
**Theoretical Knowledge**  
  
Aristotle's goal was to find the most general of general principles. The
examples he gives are convincing: an ordinary worker builds things a certain
way out of habit; a master craftsman can do more because he grasps the
underlying principles. The trend is clear: the more general the knowledge, the
more admirable it is. But then he makes a mistake—possibly the most important
mistake in the history of philosophy. He has noticed that theoretical
knowledge is often acquired for its own sake, out of curiosity, rather than
for any practical need. So he proposes there are two kinds of theoretical
knowledge: some that's useful in practical matters and some that isn't. Since
people interested in the latter are interested in it for its own sake, it must
be more noble. So he sets as his goal in the _Metaphysics_ the exploration of
knowledge that has no practical use. Which means no alarms go off when he
takes on grand but vaguely understood questions and ends up getting lost in a
sea of words.  
  
His mistake was to confuse motive and result. Certainly, people who want a
deep understanding of something are often driven by curiosity rather than any
practical need. But that doesn't mean what they end up learning is useless.
It's very valuable in practice to have a deep understanding of what you're
doing; even if you're never called on to solve advanced problems, you can see
shortcuts in the solution of simple ones, and your knowledge won't break down
in edge cases, as it would if you were relying on formulas you didn't
understand. Knowledge is power. That's what makes theoretical knowledge
prestigious. It's also what causes smart people to be curious about certain
things and not others; our DNA is not so disinterested as we might think.  
  
So while ideas don't have to have immediate practical applications to be
interesting, the kinds of things we find interesting will surprisingly often
turn out to have practical applications.  
  
The reason Aristotle didn't get anywhere in the _Metaphysics_ was partly that
he set off with contradictory aims: to explore the most abstract ideas, guided
by the assumption that they were useless. He was like an explorer looking for
a territory to the north of him, starting with the assumption that it was
located to the south.  
  
And since his work became the map used by generations of future explorers, he
sent them off in the wrong direction as well.  Perhaps worst of all, he
protected them from both the criticism of outsiders and the promptings of
their own inner compass by establishing the principle that the most noble sort
of theoretical knowledge had to be useless.  
  
The _Metaphysics_ is mostly a failed experiment. A few ideas from it turned
out to be worth keeping; the bulk of it has had no effect at all. The
_Metaphysics_ is among the least read of all famous books. It's not hard to
understand the way Newton's _Principia_ is, but the way a garbled message is.  
  
Arguably it's an interesting failed experiment. But unfortunately that was not
the conclusion Aristotle's successors derived from works like the
_Metaphysics_.  Soon after, the western world fell on intellectual hard
times. Instead of version 1s to be superseded, the works of Plato and
Aristotle became revered texts to be mastered and discussed. And so things
remained for a shockingly long time. It was not till around 1600 (in Europe,
where the center of gravity had shifted by then) that one found people
confident enough to treat Aristotle's work as a catalog of mistakes. And even
then they rarely said so outright.  
  
If it seems surprising that the gap was so long, consider how little progress
there was in math between Hellenistic times and the Renaissance.  
  
In the intervening years an unfortunate idea took hold: that it was not only
acceptable to produce works like the _Metaphysics_ , but that it was a
particularly prestigious line of work, done by a class of people called
philosophers. No one thought to go back and debug Aristotle's motivating
argument. And so instead of correcting the problem Aristotle discovered by
falling into it—that you can easily get lost if you talk too loosely about
very abstract ideas—they continued to fall into it.  
  
**The Singularity**  
  
Curiously, however, the works they produced continued to attract new readers.
Traditional philosophy occupies a kind of singularity in this respect. If you
write in an unclear way about big ideas, you produce something that seems
tantalizingly attractive to inexperienced but intellectually ambitious
students. Till one knows better, it's hard to distinguish something that's
hard to understand because the writer was unclear in his own mind from
something like a mathematical proof that's hard to understand because the
ideas it represents are hard to understand. To someone who hasn't learned the
difference, traditional philosophy seems extremely attractive: as hard (and
therefore impressive) as math, yet broader in scope. That was what lured me in
as a high school student.  
  
This singularity is even more singular in having its own defense built in.
When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they're nonsense
generally keep quiet. There's no way to prove a text is meaningless. The
closest you can get is to show that the official judges of some class of texts
can't distinguish them from placebos.   
  
And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected it was a
waste of time just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning
evidence, considering philosophy's claims. It's supposed to be about the
ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it
delivered on that promise.  
  
Because philosophy's flaws turned away the sort of people who might have
corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating. Bertrand Russell wrote in
a letter in 1912:

> Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved
> the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact
> minds have taken up the subject. 

His response was to launch Wittgenstein at it, with dramatic results.  
  
I think Wittgenstein deserves to be famous not for the discovery that most
previous philosophy was a waste of time, which judging from the circumstantial
evidence must have been made by every smart person who studied a little
philosophy and declined to pursue it further, but for how he acted in
response.  Instead of quietly switching to another field, he made a fuss,
from inside. He was Gorbachev.  
  
The field of philosophy is still shaken from the fright Wittgenstein gave it.
 Later in life he spent a lot of time talking about how words worked.
Since that seems to be allowed, that's what a lot of philosophers do now.
Meanwhile, sensing a vacuum in the metaphysical speculation department, the
people who used to do literary criticism have been edging Kantward, under new
names like "literary theory," "critical theory," and when they're feeling
ambitious, plain "theory." The writing is the familiar word salad:

> Gender is not like some of the other grammatical modes which express
> precisely a mode of conception without any reality that corresponds to the
> conceptual mode, and consequently do not express precisely something in
> reality by which the intellect could be moved to conceive a thing the way it
> does, even where that motive is not something in the thing as such. 

The singularity I've described is not going away. There's a market for writing
that sounds impressive and can't be disproven. There will always be both
supply and demand. So if one group abandons this territory, there will always
be others ready to occupy it.  
  
**A Proposal**  
  
We may be able to do better. Here's an intriguing possibility. Perhaps we
should do what Aristotle meant to do, instead of what he did. The goal he
announces in the _Metaphysics_ seems one worth pursuing: to discover the most
general truths. That sounds good. But instead of trying to discover them
because they're useless, let's try to discover them because they're useful.  
  
I propose we try again, but that we use that heretofore despised criterion,
applicability, as a guide to keep us from wondering off into a swamp of
abstractions. Instead of trying to answer the question:

> What are the most general truths?

let's try to answer the question

> Of all the useful things we can say, which are the most general?

The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read what we've
written to do anything differently afterward. Knowing we have to give definite
(if implicit) advice will keep us from straying beyond the resolution of the
words we're using.  
  
The goal is the same as Aristotle's; we just approach it from a different
direction.  
  
As an example of a useful, general idea, consider that of the controlled
experiment. There's an idea that has turned out to be widely applicable. Some
might say it's part of science, but it's not part of any specific science;
it's literally meta-physics (in our sense of "meta"). The idea of evolution is
another. It turns out to have quite broad applications—for example, in genetic
algorithms and even product design. Frankfurt's distinction between lying and
bullshitting seems a promising recent example.   
  
These seem to me what philosophy should look like: quite general observations
that would cause someone who understood them to do something differently.  
  
Such observations will necessarily be about things that are imprecisely
defined. Once you start using words with precise meanings, you're doing math.
So starting from utility won't entirely solve the problem I described above—it
won't flush out the metaphysical singularity. But it should help. It gives
people with good intentions a new roadmap into abstraction. And they may
thereby produce things that make the writing of the people with bad intentions
look bad by comparison.  
  
One drawback of this approach is that it won't produce the sort of writing
that gets you tenure. And not just because it's not currently the fashion. In
order to get tenure in any field you must not arrive at conclusions that
members of tenure committees can disagree with. In practice there are two
kinds of solutions to this problem. In math and the sciences, you can prove
what you're saying, or at any rate adjust your conclusions so you're not
claiming anything false ("6 of 8 subjects had lower blood pressure after the
treatment"). In the humanities you can either avoid drawing any definite
conclusions (e.g. conclude that an issue is a complex one), or draw
conclusions so narrow that no one cares enough to disagree with you.  
  
The kind of philosophy I'm advocating won't be able to take either of these
routes. At best you'll be able to achieve the essayist's standard of proof,
not the mathematician's or the experimentalist's. And yet you won't be able to
meet the usefulness test without implying definite and fairly broadly
applicable conclusions. Worse still, the usefulness test will tend to produce
results that annoy people: there's no use in telling people things they
already believe, and people are often upset to be told things they don't.  
  
Here's the exciting thing, though. Anyone can do this. Getting to general plus
useful by starting with useful and cranking up the generality may be
unsuitable for junior professors trying to get tenure, but it's better for
everyone else, including professors who already have it. This side of the
mountain is a nice gradual slope. You can start by writing things that are
useful but very specific, and then gradually make them more general. Joe's has
good burritos. What makes a good burrito? What makes good food? What makes
anything good? You can take as long as you want. You don't have to get all the
way to the top of the mountain. You don't have to tell anyone you're doing
philosophy.  
  
If it seems like a daunting task to do philosophy, here's an encouraging
thought. The field is a lot younger than it seems. Though the first
philosophers in the western tradition lived about 2500 years ago, it would be
misleading to say the field is 2500 years old, because for most of that time
the leading practitioners weren't doing much more than writing commentaries on
Plato or Aristotle while watching over their shoulders for the next invading
army. In the times when they weren't, philosophy was hopelessly intermingled
with religion. It didn't shake itself free till a couple hundred years ago,
and even then was afflicted by the structural problems I've described above.
If I say this, some will say it's a ridiculously overbroad and uncharitable
generalization, and others will say it's old news, but here goes: judging from
their works, most philosophers up to the present have been wasting their time.
So in a sense the field is still at the first step.   
  
That sounds a preposterous claim to make. It won't seem so preposterous in
10,000 years. Civilization always seems old, because it's always the oldest
it's ever been. The only way to say whether something is really old or not is
by looking at structural evidence, and structurally philosophy is young; it's
still reeling from the unexpected breakdown of words.  
  
Philosophy is as young now as math was in 1500. There is a lot more to
discover.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**