Armstrong argued that philosophers should “give an account of the general nature of things and of man”… and also “analyse concepts”.
David Malet Armstrong (1926–2014) was an Australian philosopher who studied philosophy at the Universities of Sydney and Oxford. He did much work in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.
Like his fellow Australian, J.J.C. Smart (1920–2012), Armstrong influenced an entire generation of Australian philosophers. The Australian philosopher Keith Campbell, for example, said that Armstrong’s contributions to philosophy “helped to shape philosophy’s agenda and terms of debate”.
Armstrong’s philosophy is taken to be naturalistic. His overall position (i.e., naturalistic metaphysics) accepted (as stated in his Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics) “the assumption that all that exists is the space time world, the physical world as we say”. In addition, Armstrong believed that philosophers should make sure that their theories and ideas square with — or, at the very least, take on board — what the sciences tell them about the world.
Armstrong was influenced by David Lewis (an American philosopher who had strong ties to Australia), J. J. C. Smart (a fellow Australian), Ullin Place, Herbert Feigl, Gilbert Ryle and G. E. Moore.
In terms of prose style. Armstrong's writings are clear and direct — in the “Australian style”.
On Philosophy Itself
In his paper, ‘The Causal Theory of Mind’ (1968), D.M. Armstrong argued that
“philosophers in the ‘analytic tradition’ swung back from Wittgensteinian and even Rylian pessimism to a more traditional conception of the proper role and tasks of philosophy”.
And Armstrong believed that the “proper role and task of philosophy” was
“to give an account [] of the general nature of things and of man”.
All this was largely Armstrong’s reaction to the stress on what was called conceptual analysis (or, more broadly, philosophical analysis) found in analytic philosophy at the time (Armstrong wrote these words in 1968.). That said, Armstrong still saw conceptual analysis as being important in philosophy.
Following on from all that, while many (analytic) philosophers accept that such things as conceptual analysis, explanation, definition, etc. (see later) are fruitful tools of philosophy, they still don’t believe that these things are all that there is to philosophy.
So what did Armstrong have to say on what philosophers should do?
…. But firstly note the word “should” here.
This isn’t a claim that all philosophers actually do all the things which Armstrong will mention. Thus it can be assumed here that Armstrong simply believed that they should do these things. In other words, Armstrong was being both metaphilosophical and normative in his statements.
What Philosophers Should Do
I’ll quote an entire passage from D.M. Armstrong in which he states both his (aforementioned) metaphilosophical and normative position on philosophy.
Armstrong wrote the following words:
“The philosopher has certain special skills. These include the stating and assessing of the worth of arguments, including the bringing to light and making explicit suppressed premises of arguments, the detection of ambiguities and inconsistencies, and, perhaps especially, the analysis of concepts.”
What won’t be discussed in the following are the following questions:
(1) Do philosophers actually have “special skills”?
(2) How would a layperson know that any given philosopher had special skills?
(3) Which philosophers (or kinds of philosopher) was Armstrong actually referring to?
So let’s break down Armstrong’s own words.
On Philosophical Argument
Firstly, Armstrong begins in the following way:
“The philosopher has certain special skills. These include the stating and assessing of the worth of arguments [].”
It can easily be argued that argumentation is vital in philosophy. Indeed if a philosopher — or a layperson — doesn’t offer an argument for his position or viewpoint, then why on earth should anyone else accept it in the first place?
Of course there are indeed various — perhaps even many — reasons as to why people may accept a position or viewpoint without it being argumentatively advanced or defended.
These include the following:
(1) The reader or listener already agrees with much — or even all — of what’s being stated (i.e., not argued) by the speaker or writer.
(2) The listener or reader finds the writer’s or speaker’s prose style (say, its rhetoric and poetry) emotionally appealing. (That said, it would probably only be emotionally appealing if, at least in part, the listener/reader already agreed with much — or even all — of what’s being stated.)
(3) The reader or listener doesn’t really understand what’s being said; but he or she takes the speaker or writer to be some kind of expert or authority on the given subject.
(4) The reader or listener feels emotionally, socially or politically obliged to agree with what’s stated by the speaker or writer.
(5) The reader or listener simply doesn’t know of any arguments against — or even alternatives to — what’s being stated by the speaker or writer.
Suppressed Premises
More particularly, Armstrong believed that one of the “special skills” of philosophers “include[s] the stating and assessing of the worth of arguments”.
The obvious question to ask here is exactly how other people’s arguments are stated and assessed by philosophers with special skills.
Armstrong immediately goes on to answer that question when he says that the worth of arguments is stated and assessed (at least partly) by
“the bringing to light and making explicit [the] suppressed premises of arguments”.
The (possible) suppressing of premises (either deliberately or unknowingly) is of vital importance in nearly all debates or discussions — especially political ones. (See hidden/suppressed premises.)
To put this at its most basic.
In an argument, the suppressed premise (or suppressed premises) is simply assumed to be true from the very beginning. Indeed the argument wouldn’t even work at all if the suppressed premise wasn’t assumed (to be true) from the start. In other words, the entire position (or argument) depends on the reader or listener — as well as the speaker or writer himself — accepting the suppressed premise (either knowingly or unwittingly) as being true — or at least as simply existing (i.e., as being an assumed “fact”).
That said, often suppressed premises aren’t (strictly speaking) part of an argument at all. That is, such premises may simply be part of a stream of poetic or rhetorical statements expressed by, say, an activist, politician, scientist or even a philosopher.
The Detection of Ambiguities and Inconsistencies
Armstrong then mentions “the detection of ambiguities and inconsistencies”.
One would like to believe that literally everyone would have a problem with arguments (or simply positions) which contain “ambiguities and inconsistencies”. That said, the notion of ambiguity seems to be more… well, ambiguous than the notion of inconsistency. That said, not all inconsistencies are easy to spot either.
Thus, in a certain sense, an argument may be strong, valid and/or sound and still be expressed in an ambiguous manner. Or, less strongly, such an argument may simply contain ambiguous phrases or ambiguous individual words. In that case, then, the entire argument won’t necessarily fail simply because some phrases or words within it are ambiguous — or simply taken to be ambiguous.
All that doesn’t seem to also apply as clearly to an argument containing inconsistencies. That said, such inconsistencies may be a result of certain ambiguities and certain ambiguities may be the result of certain inconsistencies. This means that the notions of ambiguity and inconsistency need a lot of work in themselves.
The Analysis of Concepts: the Analysis of Things
D.M. Armstrong finishes off his account of the special skills of philosophers by mentioning what he called “the analysis of concepts”.
Despite the analysis of concepts being a worthwhile philosophical skill, Armstrong did offer some words of warning.
For example, Armstrong argued that
“[Gilbert] Ryle was wrong in taking the analysis of concepts to be the end of philosophy”.
Armstrong himself, on the other hand, believed that
“the analysis of concepts is a means by which the philosopher makes his contribution to great general questions, not about concepts, but about things”.
Oddly enough, Armstrong’s position seems to have been replicated by the British philosopher Colin McGinn (1950-) — at least according to Barry Dainton and Howard Robinson. The latter two philosophers write:
“Colin McGinn has recently defended the view that philosophy is (and should be) a matter of conceptual analysis — although McGinn does not think this is incompatible with analysis-revealing truths pertaining to reality itself.”
Yet Timothy Williamson (1955-), on the other hand (again, according to Dainton and Robinson),
“argues that it is a mistake to think that philosophy is (or should be) a matter of linguistic or conceptual analysis: it is an investigation into reality itself”.
So it’s not that conceptual analysis (sometimes simply called philosophical analysis), specifically, ever completely went away — as the position of Colin McGinn shows. That said and as Armstrong put it, conceptual analysis did come under severe criticism during and after the demise of “linguistic philosophy”.
So at that historical point there was much talk of “pedantry”, “irrelevance” and a “petty focus on minutia” (i.e., at the expense of focussing on meaty, deep and heavy stuff). Sure, not all these criticisms were only aimed at conceptual analysis — yet even this fundamental and basic part of analytic philosophy was deemed suspect by some (or even many) philosophers and laypersons at one point in philosophical history — and still is today. (This is especially the case when it comes to some of those academics who specialise in scare-quoted “continental philosophy”; as well as a number of scare-quoted “continental philosophers” themselves.)
In any case, let’s take it as true that Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) did believe that (as Armstrong put it)
“the analysis of concepts [is] the end of philosophy”.
Yet, if Ryle did believe such a thing, then that position hardly makes sense — at least at a prima facie level. After all, surely concepts, words or terms aren’t about (or they don’t refer to) other concepts, words or terms. How could Ryle have believed that? (Unless, that is, Ryle was some kind of “linguistic idealist”.)
So Armstrong clearly rejected the (as it were) “binary opposition” between the analysis of concepts and the analysis of things. Yet surely we can only get to Armstrong’s things (as it were) through our concepts. Of course that still doesn’t mean that the analysis of concepts is “the end of philosophy”.
The situation is that when we discus things, events, facts, theories, conditions, values, positions… or anything, we obviously use words, terms and/or concepts to do so. So it seems that it’s almost inevitable that philosophers should scrutinise the words, terms and concepts we use in such discussions and debates.
It can also be argued that much — perhaps very much — will flow from philosophers’ and laypersons’ own personal definitions (even if tacit or very vague) of the words (or terms) they use. In other words, it’s not as if there are determinate and fixed definitions of most of the words (or terms) used by philosophers and laypeople when discussing contentious issues and problems.
Of course a person may well claim that he defines a word in a particular way simply because he believes that his very own personal definition unequivocally follows from what the given x he’s defining actually is.
To repeat. Is all this about words (or technical terms) and how we define them?
No, not at all.
As D/M. Armstrong argued above: it’s also about things. So if definitions, conceptual analyses, etc. are very important, then once someone defines his word or term (say, “consciousness”, “existence”, “free will”, “fact”, “prove”, etc.), then we can move on from there. And that’s the case even if we’re using these words to talk about Armstrong’s things.
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