Learning From Four Analytic Philosophy Wins

I have been somewhat pessimistic about analytic philosophy (including my own specifically) on this blog. While I have hosted other voices, at least in my own meta-philosophical musings the tone has been somewhat doomerish. Well, I wouldn't want to let it be said that I am in any way consistent, and in any case it's been a bit too long since I posted on here so thought I would throw out a low effort crowd pleaser. So herein I will outline some things that I think analytic philosophy has unambiguously done well at, and try to draw general lessons from them.

(Apologies about the length between posts, I really do mean for these to be about one a month and I have failed at that lately. I am actually working on a longer post it's just taking more time than I anticipated and events keep interfering. As the poet said, life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.)

Democritus having an absolute blast.

To be clear on some terminology, I am not going to be too fussy about what counts as an analytic philosopher. Partly because I buy into a broad family resemblance notion of the concept (from Glock) that makes such fussiness seem a bit silly. Partly for reasons expressed in this recent blog post from Weatherson; you miss out on interesting and important contributions if you draw the boundary tightly. And partly because this post isn't going to make any claims to being exhaustive; the examples I give below very obviously reflect idiosyncrasies of my educational background, for instance. And the cases I shall be dealing with are not, I think, that controversial. So the issue just won't be worth disputing. 

Second, the ultimate criterion of success is rather simple indeed: I, Liam Kofi Bright, the Decider, think it is cool and good and influential. (One of my favourite moments in meta-philosophy comes in Timothy Williamson's The Philosophy of Philosophy where he briefly considers the question "Is "how does vagueness work?" really a philosophical question?" and immediately resolves it by simply answering "I'm a philosopher and I find it interesting.") Well, ok, it'll be a bit more complicated than that; though to be clear any edge cases will be decisively resolved by that master criterion. What I shall highlight though are cases where in my judgement it is not just that professional philosophers have come to agree an intellectual achievement is cool and good, but that people in other fields of the academy or broader life have given it uptake and come to treat it as a contribution which advanced their inquiry or projects.

I think this is useful for avoiding Kuhnian solipsism, which is the bad case for any coherentist or paradigmatic approach to understanding a field's internal progress. When one is a Kuhnian solipsist the criteria that have come to be inculcated and shared within one's little research community come to encompass one's entire understanding of intellectual merit, and continue to do so even if any reasonably broader or ecumenical perspective would immediately bring to light the weaknesses with one's approach. This is to be avoided. So even in cases where I personally very much like some work or an approach, and those with a similar educational background (etc) seem to agree with me - I shall avoid counting it as a success unless I think a sufficiently broad or diverse range of inquirers or pertinent practitioners have also come to accept the contributions of analytic philosophers as important and worth their time and uptake. Note that I am not requiring the ideas be true or correct in some substantive way, that will be relevant later.

With all that said, let's get the obvious one out of the way:

Modern Logic: whenever I am pessimistic about analytic philosophy's intellectual achievements someone always brings up the case of contemporary logic. And well they should! Many of the founding figures of analytic philosophy are also (and non-coincidentally) founding figures in modern logic. Key devices and theorems of modern logic were initially found (or at least independently and most influentially found) in important texts by analytic philosophers. And its not just quirky one off ideas -- authoritative systematic textbooks in various non-classical logics were penned by analytic philosophers, etc etc. I won't belabour the point, simply because it is just utterly uncontroversial that analytic philosophers were very influential on the development of modern logic.

And to be clear -- this wasn't just limited to some past heroic age. Philosophers are involved in the Homotopy Type Theory project and continue to write influential textbooks on these new developments. One need only check the citations to any of these things on google scholar to see they are getting uptake outside philosophy (including in practical applications), a fact which philosophers themselves have themselves theorised. In short, the example of modern logic looks about as strong as one can get for a success case of analytic philosophy, and I think people are quite right to remind me of it when I get too pessimistic.

Now precisely because this one is so often appealed to I do think we should curb our enthusiasm a little bit. Even on a fairly broad conception of (analytic) philosophy some very important contributors to the development of modern logic arguably fall outside or predate the field. As far as I can tell economists just independently invented dynamic epistemic logic in the 70s, and more generally in modal logic arguably analytics were simply rediscovering what various medievals had well studied (see e.g. the fascinating Hodges & Johnston paper in here). So our claims to originality, or more pertinently any claims regarding the necessity of our involvement or the special insight of our field, can be overstated. Still though, no such caveats diminish the central point: the invention, propagation, and development of contemporary logic remains a very significant intellectual achievement for which the analytic tradition ought be proud to have played such a significant part.

Statistical Method: not unrelatedly, analytic philosophy can also claim a fair few wins when it comes to developing theories of inductive reasoning. Given where I got my PhD the case that is most salient to me is the heavy involvement of philosophers in contemporary theory of causal discovery/inference; both the mathematics and conceptual foundations thereof, as well as developing tools for the practical application thereof. These have received widespread uptake and recognition (e.g.). A lot of this stuff is fairly recent too! So there you go, some Tartan pride.

But it's not just there -- core concepts in probabilistic inference were developed by analytic philosophers or those connected thereto, and ideas in decision theory that are at least closely related to stuff here were developed either by philosophers or in close conversation with philosophers. Di Finetti was engaged with Quine and Reichenbach, it's no coincidence Carnap appears in the acknowledgements of Savage's Foundations of Statistics, nor that Good published on the principle of total evidence in BJPS, etc etc. 

In some sense this is basically unsurprising; if analytic philosophy was good at deductive logic you'd sort of expect the same skill set to be useful in inductive inference. But I think there might be more to learn from this than just that, so we shall return to the overlap between these fields before closing.

Paradigms and Falsification: in some sense the ideas from analytic philosophy that have gained most widespread uptake outside academia are surely these two from philosophy of science. The Kuhnian idea of a paradigm and the Popperian ideal of falsifiability are just ubiquitous, so much so that I don't really feel the need to explain them here, nor argue that they have received uptake and been influential outside philosophy. You've already heard of them and know they have influenced how people think and act.

What I will note is interesting about these cases though is that they tend to make philosophers (maybe especially philosophers of science) a bit grumpy, when brought up. My sense is that people in the field generally think these ideas have been more influential than they really merit. Not, mind you, that anyone thinks there is nothing to them or that they are bad ideas per se. But insiders tend to think that falsificationism in its full power is wildly implausible, and that talk of paradigm shifts is so vague and overplayed as to be a bit meaningless at this point.

So whereas when I am glum about analytic philosophy everyone throws logic in my face, and a few more refined souls bring up the various probabilistic accomplishments, insiders rarely throw these two at me. Despite the fact that they are probably just as influential, if not more so, than anything we have done in the more mathematical fields!

Linguistic Pragmatics: one interesting thing to point out is that there is a cluster of ideas coming out of the analytic study of language and meaning that does seem to have made its influence felt beyond the narrow confines of the field. There is speech act theory, much of which heavily influenced by J.L. Austin, which is the study of how "[w]e are attuned in everyday conversation not primarily to the sentences we utter to one another, but to the speech acts that those utterances are used to perform: requests, warnings, invitations, promises, apologies, predictions, and the like." There is signalling theory, the study of how information can be (reliably and credibly) conveyed through observable signs, and which has gotten a lot of uptake from linguists, economists and biologists, and wherein analytic philosophers made fundamental contributions. And then there is the study of implicature, for which Paul Grice was foundational.

I am going to stop here, even though I was very tempted indeed to talk more about a kind of welfarism that is distinctly a minority position in analytic political philosophy and ethics and yet has a very clear case for having been very influential (think of Singer's consequentialism and its influence on the animal rights movement, or effective altruism) - I think that is so big as to be its own topic. What lessons then do I draw from these case?

Precisely because this is not exhaustive and not pretending to be I do not think that what the cases have in common is that noteworthy. Ultimately what they have in common is: Kofi knows a bit about them, and that is best explained by the contingencies of my biography.  But I think they are interesting for what they do not have in common, as that tells us what might be thought to be necessary conditions are not so.

1. So one thing they do not have in common is: consensus within the field on the merits of the ideas. It often seems to me that people equate the idea of the field successfully achieving consensus by its internal lights with it being able to present worthy ideas for uptake beyond its remit. I think this is tempting because the sciences often work that way - something achieves "textbook status" by being consensus in the field, then is taught to people and generally gets uptake from students who do an undergrad or masters level education but go on to do something else with their lives, and in that way the good ideas spread beyond the field. If I am right about the above being success cases for analytic philosophy then, outside of the example of deductive logic wherein classical logic as a good theory of inference probably does have about as close to that status as we are ever going to get, it seems analytic philosophy does not need to work that way to get its wins.

2. Another thing they do not have in common is being asocial or removed from daily life. The language examples are all worth attending to, I think, because they dispel a certain common but (so far as I can tell) by this point entirely baseless assumption that non-analytics make about analytic philosophy. Namely, given the huge and obvious influence of analytic philosophy on something like deductive logic, it is hard to plausibly argue that analytic philosophy simply has no external influence or noteworthy achievements at all. But one can suggest, or outright assert, that somehow it is only appropriate for sterile subjects far removed from everyday life and the messy world of social interaction. 

Yet that does not seem to me to be true at all (and wouldn't be true even if these examples were not given; it's just a kind of two-cultures snobbery that makes people doubt that statistical inference is relevant to their every day life, but that's for another time.) The case of these widespread adoption and influence of ideas from analytic philosophy in the study of the practical business of communication is, I think, undeniable, and also about as socially embedded as one could hope to get. The limitations and weaknesses of analytic philosophy I have highlighted in my previous work have very pointedly not been something like "impossible to apply" or "unable to conceptualise a hierarchical and socially embed lifeworld", despite the frequency of these charges, and that is because compared to its more shallow critics I (somewhat self-satisfiedly believe of myself that I) pay more attention to the actual use and uptake the field gets.

3. Ok fine to break the rule I started with just a little bit... I am at least a little bit intrigued by the recurrence of "inference" as a theme here, in either highly formalised forms of logic and stats, middlingly formalised forms of informal scientific reasoning, or every day forms of linguistic interaction. I don't think it's necessary that analytic philosophy focus on that to get some wins in, but maybe it helps?