Metaphilosophy: P.M.S. Hacker vs. Timothy Williamson (2)

P.M.S. Hacker and Timothy Williamson

The following is a commentary on P.M.S. Hacker’s sixteen-page review (‘Critical Notice’) of Timothy Williamson’s book The Philosophy of Philosophy. The review is an account of what two analytic philosophers take philosophy and metaphilosophy to be. And Williamson’s own The Philosophy of Philosophy shows us what he takes metaphilosophy and philosophy to be.

In basic terms, P.M.S Hacker’s critique is twofold.

1) P.M.S. Hacker doesn’t really believe that Timothy Williamson’s book The Philosophy of Philosophy is an example of the philosophy of philosophy.

2) Hacker believes that Williamson — in parallel — pays too much attention to various disputes, subjects and problems which are firmly within the domain of analytic philosophy (i.e., not metaphilosophy).

As one might have guessed, Hacker’s other main problem is that Williamson’s criticisms of the “linguistic term” and “conceptual analysis” are both philosophically problematic and often historically and philosophically naïve — sometimes simply false.

Indeed Hacker seems to have a problem with just about every sentence in Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy. Hacker’s relentless (if sometimes mild and subtle) sarcasm does grate after a bit. One is led to ask: Does Timothy Williamson really make so many fundamental schoolboy errors?

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Professor Matti Eklund sums up Timothy Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy in the broadest possible terms. He writes:

“In one way,Williamson is conservative: he wants to defend (analytic) philosophy pretty much as it has tended to be done. In another, he is radical: he wants to correct what he regards as common misconceptions of the enterprise of philosophy.”

P.M.S. Hacker, on the other hand, takes another angle and says that that metaphilosophy is about “the nature of philosophy and its methods”. According to Hacker, such a pursuit has “been little discussed by recent analytic philosophers of the new persuasion”. More precisely, Timothy Williamson involves himself in the “rethinking of philosophical methodology”. This “involves understanding, at an appropriate level of abstraction, how philosophy is actually done”. Yet despite that, Hacker doesn’t think that’s what Williamson does. Instead Williamson covers subjects and problems which have been well trodden in analytic philosophy.

Thus there’s a difference between analysing different subjects (or problems) and philosophical methodology (or “understanding how philosophy is actually done”). For example, analysing (analytic) philosophy’s various accounts of analytic statements and the a priori (as have been staple subjects for various analytic philosophers for the last 70 years or so) is not metaphilosophy or even methodology.

Hacker’s general critique of Williamson (at least within the context of metaphilosophy) is Wittgensteinian. Ludwig Wittgenstein is, of course, sometimes regarded as being a metaphilosopher. Hacker himself says that

“since there is no investigating concepts other than by investigating the uses of words that express them, these questions are about words and their use”.

Furthermore, “[o]ne must look and see how philosophy is actually done”. This, to Wittgenstein, was important. To Hacker it is also, I believe, metaphilosophy. That is, looking at how philosophy is done is — at the least — a part of metaphilosophy.

To put this another way. One gets the feeling that Hacker doesn’t believe that Williamson’s book The Philosophy of Philosophy is an example of the philosophy of philosophy. This is the case in that we only seem to have (analytic) philosophy, rather than the philosophy of philosophy. Hacker offers us this example:

“We are promised insight, rigour and courageous precision, but what we get is tens of pages of reflection on the sentences ‘All vixens are vixens’ and ‘Vixens are female foxes’, coupled with the admonition that ‘impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness’.”

Prima facie, Hacker is perfectly correct. This isn’t even the analytic philosophy of philosophy. It’s just plain analytic philosophy. It’s of course possible to have a metaphilosophical position on — or critique of — the philosophy of “analytic statements” (if that’s what they are). For example, one could question whether or not such statements impinge on extra-philosophical areas or whether they are truly analytic (as with W.V.O. Quine). Is that what Williamson does? Hacker doesn’t think so. All we get, instead, is an expression of “how the current Wykeham Professor of Logic does philosophy”. Does that mean that Williamson doesn’t even tackle philosophical methodology in a metaphilosophical way? Not according to Hacker, who says that

“[o]ne might expect a methodical investigation of how philosophy is actually done by the most eminent philosophers of the ages, or of the past age, or even just of the present age”.

Instead of that (again), “all we are shown is how the current Wykeham Professor of Logic does philosophy”. Of course one has to tackle philosophical subjects and problems in some way in order to see how philosophy is done. But seeing if the a priori is defeasible (or if metaphysical necessity is discovered a posteriori) isn’t such a pursuit. I suppose that, in this case, we’d need to say how these subjects could be tackled in a metaphilosophical kind of way. And that’s difficult. As soon as one attempts to do so, one seems to stop doing philosophy and start doing, for example, the history of philosophy or the sociology of philosophy. And these subjects are neither philosophy nor metaphilosophy. At least not on the reading of Nicholas Joll in the following. He writes:

“We might want to deny the title ‘metaphilosophy’ to, say, various sociological studies of philosophy, and even, perhaps, to philosophical pedagogy (that is, to the subject of how philosophy is taught). On the other hand, we are inclined to count as metaphilosophical claims about, for instance, philosophy corrupting its students or about professionalization corrupting philosophy.”

Yet despite Hacker’s criticisms (as well as what’s just been written), Hacker does adumbrate on what seems to be Williamson’s various metaphilosophical positions. Hacker writes:

“Three themes dominate the book. First, that it is false that the a priori methodology of philosophy is profoundly unlike the a posteriori methods of natural science; indeed that very distinction allegedly obscures underlying similarities. Second, that the difference in subject matter between philosophy and science is less deep than supposed; ‘In particular, few philosophical questions are conceptual questions in any distinctive sense’. Third, that much contemporary philosophy is vitiated by supposing that evidence in philosophy consists of intuitions, which successful theory must explain.”

You’d think that those three subjects were surely enough to fill any book of the philosophy of philosophy (or metaphilosophy). But, again, is this metaphilosophy?

Is a debate about the a priori and its relation to the “a posteriori methods of natural science” metaphilosophy or is it simply philosophy? Presumably the a priori method (if that’s what it is) would need to have been distinguished from the a posteriori method from the very beginning. And that distinction is obviously philosophical. But is it metaphilosophical? If it is, then Plato, Hume, Kant and God knows who else were also metaphilosophers. In order to make a distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori it must surely have been the case that at least some kind of meta-position has been taken. All philosophers will have needed to have taken some kind of meta position. Again, the problem is finding the purely meta in such philosophy.

Philosophy, the A Priori and Science

Hacker’s long non-metaphilosophical investigations of Williamson’s long non-metaphilosophical investigations of analytic philosophy’s problems and pet subjects seem beside the point within the context of metaphilosophy. Nonetheless, Hacker’s statements on the nature of philosophy — in a broader sense — are of interest. Specifically, whether or not philosophy is “an a priori investigation” and therefore radically at odds with “scientific knowledge”.

Williamson sees “fundamental similarities between philosophical and scientific knowledge”. He also makes a move from the “armchair” to what he says is “knowledge of truths about the external environment”. How does he make that move? Hacker says that “no examples of such knowledge are offered, and no explanation is given to render the ‘mays’ precise”.

One of Williamson’s examples of a strong connection between science and philosophy certainly does seem bogus (as well as a little inane). Or, I should say, it does so (only) if we accept Hacker’s account of that example. Hacker tells us that the

“fact that Galileo and Einstein engaged in thought experiments does not make metaphysics any more akin to science than to chess or cricket (in which one may also reflect on what would happen or would have happened if …)”.

Needless to say, there is a connection being made here between the a priori (or at least the importance of the armchair) and the realities of scientific thinking. Yet surely any “thought experiments” that Galileo and Einstein engaged in about concrete empirical specifics — even if they led to general or universal laws — wouldn’t have been purely examples of armchair philosophising or apriorising. (Hume and other empiricists have told us that claims of universality and law always go beyond the empirical and the observational.) In addition, the fact that such scientists sometimes thought about things — and didn’t always require experiments to do so — didn’t make them armchair philosophers or apriorists. If that were the case, every one of us would be an armchair philosopher or an apriorist. And stating these armchair thoughts in the guise of conditionals or hypotheticals doesn’t advance Williamson’s case either. Here again it’s something we all do. (Except, of course, for the fact that we don’t use the word “conditionals” or “hypotheticals”.)

Despite all the above, Hacker does admit that there is some metaphilosophy in Williamson's book The Philosophy of Philosophy. He tells us that Williamson “informs us” that philosophy is “an armchair science”. In addition:

“It consists of thinking, without any special interaction with the world beyond the armchair, such as measurement, observation or experiment would typically involve.”

Now that passage, surely, is metaphilosophy. It’s about philosophy. It’s not about a subject within philosophy. And it’s not an analysis of a problem within philosophy. It is, in fact, a huge thing to say that philosophy is an a priori pursuit. We can of course ask if it is such a thing. We can even ask if it’s possible, in principle, for there to be such a thing. Thus would these questions be metaphilosophical too in the sense that in order to answer them we’d need to philosophise about the nature of the a priori and whether a discipline could ever be entirely a priori — or even a priori at all.

Whatever the answers to these questions are, Hacker also says that Williamson “holds that philosophy can discover truths about reality by reflection alone”. That, for one, isn’t a scientific position. Despite that, Williamson believes that “some philosophical truths are confirmable by experiments”. That means that even though “philosophical truths” are armchair phenomena, there’s nothing to stop them being backed-up or “confirmable” by scientific experiments or other a posteriori factors. (This is a little like Laurence BonJour’s position on a priori statements.) After all, if a philosophical truth is indeed a philosophical truth, then some would say that it can hardly be contradicted by a scientific experiment and it — almost as a consequence of this — must therefore be confirmable by them. However, that would depend on whether an experiment can impact at all on such philosophical truths. (For example, it can be said that a scientific experiment could have no import on a moral truth or on the metaphysical necessities discovered while sitting in Williamson’s armchair.) In addition, in the case of certain philosophical truths it can also be said that scientific experiments can neither confirm nor disconfirm them. In other words, experiments are basically irrelevant to most (or simply many) philosophical truths.

Hacker’s account of Williamson further stresses the latter’s ostensible belief that philosophy isn’t that different from other kinds of thought; or, indeed, from science. Hacker writes:

“[S]ince philosophical ways of thinking are no different in kind from other ways, philosophical questions are not different in kind from other questions. Most importantly, philosophy is no more a linguistic or conceptual inquiry than physics.”

Williamson again bridges the chasm between philosophy and science when he says that “[p]hilosophy, like any other science (including mathematics) […] has evidence for its discoveries”. Williamson then says that “philosophy is no more a linguistic or conceptual inquiry than physics”. Does that mean that philosophy both is and is not like science? Does it depend? 

Alternatively, philosophy can clearly be about “the world” or “the nature of reality” without it thereby being a science. (Williamson gives the following examples: “Contemporary metaphysics studies substances and essences, universals and particulars, space and time, possibility and necessity.”) And that’s certainly true. Here again we can ask whether or not science can either confirm or disconfirm such world-directed philosophical (or metaphysical) statements. Or, alternatively — as with certain logical positivists — we can say that they’re not amenable to scientific scrutiny at all because (as with the most extreme logical positivist position) world-directed philosophical claims are “meaningless”.

More broadly, these strong distinctions and connections between science and philosophy are surely important and indeed metaphilosophical. Though, here again, such a subject has been part of the staple diet of analytic philosophy since Wittgenstein in the 1920s (or even before). So, on the one hand, this is clearly metaphilosophy. On the other hand, if this is metaphilosophy, then metaphilosophy has been part of (analytic) philosophy for a very long time.

Conclusion

Hacker’s review of Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy becomes even more explicit — indeed crushingly so — when he concludes with the following words:

“The Philosophy of Philosophy fails to characterize the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy. It fails to explain why many of the greatest analytic philosophers thought philosophy to be a conceptual investigation… It holds that philosophy can discover truths about reality by reflection alone, but does not explain how. It holds that some philosophical truths are confirmable by experiments, but does not say which. It misrepresents the methodology of the empirical sciences and the differences between the sciences and philosophy. It has nothing whatsoever to say about most branches of philosophy.”

Yes; characterising the “linguistic turn” in broad and contextual terms would indeed be metaphilosophy. However, a philosophical analysis of some of its problems and assumptions wouldn’t be. The same is true about “conceptual investigation”. (For example, arguing that conceptual analysis alone doesn’t do justice to “metaphysical reality” wouldn’t be metaphilosophy… or would it?)

Despite that final declamation against Williamson, Hacker does say that The Philosophy of Philosophy “does provide an adequate ‘self-image’ of the way Professor Williamson does philosophy”. And even that ostensible plaudit is, I believe, subtly sarcastic.

Metaphilosophy: Definitions and Questions (1)

Why Philosophy?

There are many general questions we can ask about philosophy. Many of these questions have been asked by non-philosophers such as laypersons, scientists and academics in the humanities.

A layperson, for example, may ask:

i) Does philosophy have any psychological, moral or social benefits?

ii) Does philosophy improve the people who write and read it?

A physicist, biologist or chemist may ask:

i) Is there such a thing as philosophical knowledge?

ii) Does philosophy (or the philosophy of science) benefit science or scientists?

iii) What is the nature of divergence in philosophy – can it be solved with the aid of such things as evidence, fact or data?

A political scientist, historian, sociologist or political activist may ask:

i) Is all philosophy political - by its very nature?

ii) Does philosophy simply reflect the times in which it is written?

iii) Is philosophy always to be read historically?

Philosophers themselves may ask:

i) What prose-style/s should philosophers adopt – academic, popular, poetic, etc.?

ii) Are we living in a post-philosophy (or post-philosophical) age?

iii) Were Wittgenstein, Heidegger, etc. correct to argue against philosophy itself?

What is Metaphilosophy?

If philosophy itself is hard to define, it will be even harder to define what metaphilosophy is.

One of the main questions about metaphilosophy is whether or not it's actually part of philosophy. Since one has to philosophise about “the nature of philosophy”, it can hardly help but be part of philosophy. Or, as Timothy Williamson puts it, the “philosophy of philosophy [is] automatically part of philosophy".(Williamson's use of the label “philosophy of philosophy” gives the game away.) It's conceivable that there could be sociological, political, scientific., etc. analyses of philosophy which could also be deemed to be metaphilosophical in nature. However, could something that's not philosophy in the first place also be metaphilosophy?

Nicholas Joll believes that these examples (as well as others) of metaphilosophy can be tendentious. He writes:

“We might want to deny the title ‘metaphilosophy’ to, say, various sociological studies of philosophy, and even, perhaps, to philosophical pedagogy (that is, to the subject of how philosophy is taught). On the other hand, we are inclined to count as metaphilosophical claims about, for instance, philosophy corrupting its students or about professionalization corrupting philosophy...”

It's clear that these pursuits have existed for a long time; at least since the early 20 century. Thus they don't really fit the “philosophy of philosophy” (or “metaphilosophy”) label.

Joll also stresses the point that most – or even all – philosophy is metaphilosophical. (He calls it “implicit metaphilosophy”.) Or, at the very least, he argues that all philosophy has metaphilosophical components. He writes:

“... all philosophizing is somewhat metaphilosophical, at least in this sense: any philosophical view or orientation commits its holder to a metaphilosophy that accommodates it. Thus if one advances an ontology one must have a metaphilosophy that countenances ontology. Similarly, to adopt a method or style is to deem that approach at least passable. Moreover, a conception of the nature and point of philosophy, albeit perhaps an inchoate one, motivates and shapes much philosophy. But – and this is what allows there to be implicit metaphilosophy – sometimes none of this is emphasized, or even appreciated at all, by those who philosophize.”

So what would metaphilosophy be if it weren't a part of philosophy? And even if it were distinct from philosophy, would that automatically mean that it isn't philosophy?

Analytic Philosophy and Texts About Texts

Analytic philosophy has traditionally downplayed metaphilosophy. Nowadays that doesn't seem to be the case.

The very definitions of the word 'metaphilosophy' (used by some analytic philosophers) seemed to stress that downplaying. To many previous analytic philosophers, metaphilosophy is simply the the study of previous philosophical works; which the philosopher concerned may analyse or add to. In other words, this isn't seen as contributing anything very new or original to (analytic) philosophy.

In Continental philosophy this has been called 'intertextuality'. Here all we really have, according to Julia Kristeva, is “texts about texts”. Then again, the Continental philosophers who used this term would apply it to every philosopher – even to those analytic philosophers whom contribute what they see as original philosophy to the corpus.

All this also begs the question as to whether or not commentary or research is automatically excluded from the realm of philosophical originality. Can new ideas and theories be found or formulated through research and/or commentary on the works of (dead) philosophers? Yes, because such a thing has occurred many times.

One definition of metaphilosophy doesn't seem to be have taken up by analytic philosophers. That is the seeing of metaphilosophy as post-philosophy. Now this has certainly been taken up by many Continental philosophers over the last 100 years or longer. (For example, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, various postmodernists, etc.) Here again we see that post-philosophy can't help but be philosophy; just as metametaphysics can't help but be metaphysics (at least as practiced by certain metametaphysics).

Metaphilosophy as Second-Order Philosophy

The prime contender for seeing metaphilosophy as being separate from philosophy is to see it as a “second-order” study. This raises the question of whether or not the assessment of philosophy is, in fact, a second-order pursuit or simply philosophy about philosophy (as with Timothy Williamson). The term “philosophy of philosophy” (i.e., unlike “second-order philosophy") doesn't imply that it “look[s] down upon philosophy from above, or beyond”.

Paul K. Moser accepts the second-/first-order distinction. He writes:

"The distinction between philosophy and metaphilosophy has an analogue in the familiar distinction between mathematics and metamathematics."

Thus Moser prefers the term 'metaphilosophy'. However, other philosophers treat the prefix 'meta' as simply meaning about (i.e., not intrinsically second-order).

How can we be more technical and explicit about this second-order study?

For one, it can be said that metaphilosophy is “thinking about thinking”. Haven't virtually all philosophers thought about thought?

Some say that metaphilosophy analyses the concepts [concept], [proposition], [theory], etc., rather than particular concepts, propositions, theories, etc. Though, here again, first-order philosophers (if that's what they are) have always carried out this enterprise. However, some of them did indeed see themselves as second-order philosophers (even if they never used the word “metaphilosophy”) - specifically in the first half of the 20 century. Isn't all this related to (philosophical) mathematical “meta-theory”; which found a philosophical parallel in Tarski and Davidson's meta-language/object-language distinction?

Another question arises here. Is philosophical methodology also metaphilosophy? This is the study of how to do philosophy. I would say no. Primarily because methodology has always been important in philosophy and one can hardly philosophise at all without studying such methodologies. This isn't to contradict the Wittgensteinian point that there may be different methodologies for different philosophical problems or areas. Indeed Wittgenstein himself acquired various philosophical methodologies.

Gilbert Ryle and Martin Heidegger

Gilbert Ryle, for one, was very much against metaphilosophy. Or at least he was without actually using the word 'metaphilosophy'. Instead he focussed on what he called “methods”. He said that the

"preoccupation with questions about methods tends to distract us from prosecuting the methods themselves. We run as a rule, worse, not better, if we think a lot about our feet. So let us... not speak of it all but just do it."

Is this typical English commonsensicalism? This position chimes in with something than a fellow Englishman, Bertrand Russell, once wrote: “The only way to find out what philosophy is, is to do philosophy." It certainly seems like an example of Ryle's well-known distinction between “knowing how” and “knowing that”. And isn't it neat that he should apply this distinction to philosophy itself? Of course if Ryle is correct, then that would mean that metaphilosophy (or at least the methodology of philosophy, as done by Timothy Williamson) is a waste of time.

Martin Heidegger did believe in metaphilosophy (again, without using that term). He wrote:

"When we ask, 'What is philosophy?' then we are speaking about philosophy. By asking in this way we are obviously taking a stand above and, therefore, outside of philosophy.”

Heidegger then went on to offer his own personal slant on the practice of metaphilosophy. However, it's not immediately obvious why such questions should automatically be “taking a stand above and, therefore, outside of philosophy”. Why can't they simply be more examples of philosophy itself? Even if philosophical questions about philosophy are (as it were) meta or second-order, that doesn't automatically mean that these questions are “outside philosophy” or “above” philosophy. They're simply philosophical questions about philosophy; which have been asked since the Greeks.

In any case, Heidegger (in his Was ist das - die Philosophie?) continued by saying:

“But the aim of our question is to enter into philosophy, to tarry in it, to conduct ourselves in its manner, that is, to "philosophize". The path of our discussion must, therefore, not only have a clear direction, but this direction must at the same time give us the guarantee that we are moving within philosophy and not outside of it and around it."

Heidegger, therefore, seems to contradict himself. At first he says that metaphilosophy is “outside philosophy” and/or “above” philosophy. Then he says that his metaphilosophy has a 

“direction [that] must at the same time give us the guarantee that we are moving within philosophy and not outside of it and around it”. 

That's unless I'm a victim of “binary thinking” here. Perhaps Heidegger's metaphilosophy is both above/beyond philosophy and “within philosophy” at one and the same time. This toing and froing beyond and within philosophy may be the only way to reach deep Heideggerian conclusions about philosophy. Jacques Derrida also said (in his 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' - 1970) that one can never transcend Western metaphysics because the borrowing of even a single concept from it brings along with it the entire package. That is, “the entire syntax and system of Western metaphysics” is brought in when we philosophise about Western philosophy.

*) Next: 'Metaphilosophy: P.M.S. Hacker vs. Timothy Williamson (2)'