while "knowledge" might mean different things to different philosophers, I'm not sure there's a philosophy which aims at understanding as opposed to knowledge. — Moliere

To make this more than a slogan, you'd need some sort of theory (hermeneutics would be an example), and I think what that theory would try to account for is, first of all, the "as opposed to science" part.

Williamson begins by claiming (uncontroversially) a shared lineage for science and philosophy, and he mentions the relation of science to philosophy at several points. (The other disciplines that can discipline philosophy; whether a theory can be used in empirical linguistics; etc.)

And this is as it should be, because Williamson wants to talk about rigor, and throughout the 20th century, at least, that discussion took this form: (1) Can philosophy be a science? (2) Should philosophy be a science?

(Williamson doesn't quite approach the issue this way, so his answer seems to be that philosophy can and should be science-ish.)

So we need to talk about science, and what the comparison to science might reveal about philosophy.

Here's where I thought to start, with the self-image of a toy version of science: in order to study and theorize the laws of nature, science breaks itself into one part that is by design subject to those laws, and another that is not. (There's a problem with this we'll get to, but it's not where you start.)

What I mean by that is simply that the data a scientist wants is generated by the operation of the laws of nature in action. You can observe events where those laws are operative; you can also conduct experiments to try to isolate specific effects, which you then observe. But the whole point of an experiment is to submit some apparatus or material to the forces of nature so that you can see what happens. This part of the work of science deliberately submits itself to nature at work.

But the two further steps, observing and theorizing, are intended to be separate, and not subject to the forces and constraints and whatnot under investigation. The weights fall from the tower and I observe the action of gravity upon them, but my watching them does not require that I too fall from the tower. I need not submit my process of observation to gravity to observe the effect of gravity on bodies.

Then I collect my observations and I work out a mathematical description. My mathematics describes the action of gravity, but is not subject to it, and need not be to describe it. My mathematics is not a theory of gravity, but provides constraints on the theories I produce. (By showing what it does to what, and how much it does it, and what it doesn't do because it's not part of that equation, and so on.) My theories of gravity are also not subjected to the work of gravity as the bodies I observed were.

Before getting to philosophy, I'll note that this self-division of science worked right up until it didn't, but also that when it stopped working, it didn't entirely stop working. It seems when you observe nature at very small scales the process of observation itself has effects on the observed big enough that they must be taken into account. We might wonder whether something similar happens in philosophy, but for now I'll just observe that we know more or less exactly why this happens at quantum scale, and could have predicted it would. (But we don't end up with the equations I write on a whiteboard changing the outcome of an experiment, for instance.)

The practice of science doesn't make a universal claim about not being subject to the laws it studies. The paper upon which my equations describing gravity are written is itself subject to the force of gravity, but not in a theoretically important way. The self-division of science is not absolute. (It is even plausible to claim that the division itself is not a posit of theory, but is itself found in nature -- right up until you hit the exception at quantum scale.)

Now what about philosophy?

Can it achieve this sort of self-division? Must it do so to achieve the same rigor as science? (Or can it be just as rigorous without doing so?)

--- I spent a few pages trying to answer these questions, but it was a mess, so here's just a couple obvious points:

1. If you think philosophy (or logic) studies the laws of thought or of reason, you're unlikely to think any of your work needs to separate itself from those laws

2. If you think philosophy studies norms of thought and behavior, neither making your work subject to the specific norms you're studying nor making it subject to different norms seems obviously satisfactory. Both present problems.

I think Williamson wishes to describe something like an experimental approach to philosophy, and that's what his whole competition between theories business is meant to be. Is it really similar to how science does this? If it's not, does it still make sense?

The advantage of the question What is bread made of?" is that there is a pathway to answering the question, that we might well answer the question. You have the answer when you can make bread.

Seems pretty direct. — Banno

So the moral of the story is: don't ask questions you don't already know how to answer, or don't just already have the answer to.

Exciting stuff.

My point right here will be that, once again, clarity is a means, not the goal. — Srap Tasmaner

For you, sure. But why shouldn't clarity also be a goal, if not for you, then perhaps for others? And so an aesthetic. — Banno

I mean, sure, it's an aesthetic value, of course.

And of course it can be a goal, alongside others, or sometimes the goal, in specific cases ― we're not making progress, so let's rethink this.

But see there again, I'm going to tend to think you need to clarify a problem to stand a better chance of solving it. And I think this is certainly Williamson's view.

This is where my view is at odds with that of Williamson. I am on the side of the doubters at the philosophy conference in Presocratic Greece, rejecting the discourse of Thales and Anaximander in favour of dissecting the bread. — Banno

Yeah, this is a funny thing, because the question "What is bread made of?" isn't obviously clearer than the question "What is everything made of?" They're both pretty simple questions, in form anyway, and pretty easy to understand.

What's quite different is how you'd go about answering them. For one thing, bread is artificial, so we already know what it's made of because we make it.

What isn't clear is (a) how you'd go about figuring out what everything is made of, and (b) that everything is made of the same "ingredients". The question might not have the same kind of answer that the bread question does, and it's very hard to see how you could figure out it has that type of answer.

What Williamson says, is that it's not clear what the various proposed answers even mean. Another way to put that might be to say that it's not clear in what sense they are answers to the question.

So there's all sorts of clarity we might want. First, we'll want to be able to tell when we have an answer, and it should be clear. Second, we want to know how to proceed toward finding an answer. For some sorts of problems, this is clear ― maybe you just need to do a calculation. But for a whole lot of questions, and I think the ones Williamson is valorizing here, we absolutely are not clear how to proceed, what procedure will, if carried out, produce an answer.

And here, not only must we begin without clarity, but we cannot really expect to have clarity about the effectiveness of our procedure until we see some positive or negative results. Even then, the results may not be enough to tell us whether we're on the right or the wrong track. Clarity will come only at the end, when you reach your destination or a dead end.

So what's the advantage with bread? That we already know? What about the ingredients of your bread? What's water made of? Or wheat? Is it clear how you'd answer those questions? Were the Greeks capable of answering them?


Bonus anecdote on one sort of clarity.

My father drew building plans for a living, for much of his career. I loved his drawings. They showed his experience, the way he would work in notes on exactly the tricky things the men at the job site might struggle with. (And I loved watching him work. He'd step back from the drafting table, still looking at the drawing in progress, pull a cigarette from his breast pocket without looking, light it, take just a few puffs while he was thinking, then rest it in an ashtray and back to it. I looked in his office once and there were three cigarettes still burning in three different ashtrays, and he was hard at work on the drawing.)

The thing that made his drawings beautiful to me was that he knew what would make them most useful, and you could see that he knew, and he made sure it was there, right where it needed to be.

There's also the Sellars line from PSIM:

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term

where the verb is "understand" not "know".

There is a more definite take on all this available, but I can't name anyone who holds this position. (@J, @Moliere, @Count Timothy von Icarus, @Leontiskos, anyone come to mind?)

The claim would be that philosophy does not aim at knowledge, as science does, but at understanding. I don't know whether you would say this, @Banno, but some might describe Wittgenstein's famous "quietism" this way, and I suppose that's plausible.

I think it's clear this is not Williamson's view at all.

None of this business about absolute or relative clarity was at issue. — Srap Tasmaner

Odd. Seems to me the very point of contention. — Banno

I have no idea why you think that. @Moliere and I were talking about the norms of analytic philosophy, and I don't think either one of us ever mentioned it.

Given two proofs, the clearer is preferred. On that we agree? — Banno

I don't know where you're headed with any of this.

I don't think there's a standard measure of how clear a proof is.

If there were ― contrary to fact ― what would come next? That a clearer proof is more mathematical? Maybe "better mathematics" where "better" means more aesthetically pleasing, but that's not a measure of truth in mathematics, or a criterion of knowledge. It wouldn't make one proof truer than another.

A good proof aids in concept formation, as I've said more than once. An interesting proof might show connections between theorems, or even between branches of mathematics, that you didn't expect. Might be more worth knowing such a proof because it's an aid to your work, to understand that.

All of this is lovely.

But none of it amounts to the goal of mathematics being clarity of anything. I don't even understand what that would mean.

***

The trouble is, "What are all things made of?" is not as clear as "What is bread made of?". I'd suggest that progress came from iterating clear questions: "What is φ made of?" - "what is bread made of?"; "What is water made of?"; "what is Hydrogen made of?"; What are protons made of?" And that this has proved more agreeable than just-so-stories about water and fire. — Banno

I think Williamson is drawn to the ambition of the bigger question. It provides motivation for the smaller questions. (Much as he suggests a theory should be able to handle toy examples.) We can talk more about that.

My point right here will be that, once again, clarity is a means, not the goal. "What is everything made of?" unanswerable because it's not clear how to proceed? Fine, we'll do it by cases, and keep breaking bigger questions into smaller ones until we have one we can finally answer. (This used to be called "analysis".)

But the point is answering the questions. Gaining knowledge. Putting all the knowledge you acquire together into a theory.

As you say, clear enough to get on with it is clear enough. And what we want to get on with is acquiring knowledge, not making things clear. Means, not end.

A mathematical proof is never completely clear - there is always more to be said, more for the mathematician to clarify. — Banno

None of this business about absolute or relative clarity was at issue.

Here we are again, where the question is: Is making things clear, to whatever degree, the goal of mathematics? Your description here of what's always left for mathematicians to work on ― it sounds like that's what you want to say.

Now, I'm always talking about good proofs and bad proofs, but that's all about communication and especially pedagogy. The real work of mathematics is producing the proof in the first place, because that's how you produce mathematical knowledge.

There is still work being done on ZFC. But there is enough clarity for mathematicians to get on with other questions in the mean time. — Banno

Great. They have enough clarity to get on with what exactly? Making other parts of mathematics clear? And in the meantime of what? Of making set theory even clearer?

Seems to me that we can posit clarity as an aesthetic value. As something that we might preference not becasue of what it leads to, but for it's own sake.

Seems Moliere agrees, but perhaps you do not. — Banno

I think by and large I don't see clarity itself as a goal, as I believe you do.

I don't know whether Williamson is closer to my view or yours.

If you think about mathematics, there can be a sense in which a mathematical theorem or a construction or whatever can be clear, because nothing is hidden, the rules are known, everything can be made explicit on demand, and yet be complex enough or counter-intuitive enough that it remains difficult to understand, despite having industry-standard clarity.

The other natural point to make here is that what is clear to one mathematician may not be clear to another, so it's a little uncomfortable making the "psychological" clarity of the producer or consumer of the work a measure of anything.

Thinking about how various "analytic philosophy" is, I should also say that my last few posts might be very wrong-headed. Maybe it is a loose set of norms that binds it altogether. Maybe it's a "family resemblance" situation.

Sometimes I've been inclined to think that, and put a lot of emphasis on those norms (as @Banno does with "clarity"). But not at the moment.

Somehow that collective norm doesn't cease to be a value just because we call it "function" to my mind — Moliere

I get that, and maybe there's no harm in noting that there are these norms, and maybe they're in a special subcategory but maybe not, and you get the advantage of applying what you know about norms to them. Sure.

On the other hand -- and I'd have to take a few minutes to work out an example -- I worry slightly that you could choose to define analytic philosophy in terms of this set of norms it enforces, instead of the thing that required them. That could have odd results like classifying something as analytic philosophy because it follows all those norms, even though it's something quite different.

It's not that these boundaries are all that important, but if what we're doing at the moment is trying to understand what Williamson is up to, we want to know what analytic philosophy is, rather than what it looks like.

For the record

"Your analysis is correct (or incorrect) because you share (or don't share) my values." That's a hellscape analytic philosophers want no part of — Srap Tasmaner

Though I also don't think it's as much of a hellscape as perhaps the analytic philosophers imagine. — Moliere

I'm enough of an analytic that I do.

That's perfectly acceptable when it's not the values which are the reason people are miscommunicating, though. — Moliere

Yes and no. An analytic philosopher can talk *about* values, the roles they play in discourse, all that sort of thing, but by and large is determined not to offer a "wisdom literature." So it might be able to "clarify" (hey @Banno) that it's the values at stake in a dispute, rather than something else, but it's not, as a rule, espousing a set of values.

But then it seems we have to agree, ahead of time, to this analytic norm in order for it to function — Moliere

Yes. And that might be down to your values. You might hope (as Tarski did, on the eve of World War II) that promoting logic and clarity would help people talk out their differences rather than kill each other. But the norm itself is just fit to purpose, like showing your work, making your arguments. It's what the community needs to do what they've set out to do, even if that thing turns out to be a huge mistake.

this utility is what I'd say are the sorts of we'll call them interests that the engineer and builder have to keep in mind. It can be judged to succeed or fail insofar that we have some standards of utility to judge it as successful or a failure. — Moliere

I think there's room to distinguish function from utility (or interest or value or aesthetic or ...).

A bridge (I'm just going to make this up) is a structure that enables conveyance of people or goods or vehicles across an obstacle under their own power, whether that's something you value or not. A structure can fail to enable such conveyance, whether you want it to or not, and so is not (or is no longer) a bridge.

I think it's a distinction worth calling attention to because this is exactly what people hate about analytic philosophy, and why they'd rather read Nietzsche or the Stoics or Camus.

Analytic philosophy keeps values in quarantine. When we talk about "epistemic values," or some such, that's understood to be heuristic, just shorthand for "fit to purpose," more or less. We're still not taking about "why we value knowledge" or anything like that.

And this is seen as a good thing to do by the analytic community because you ward off this sort of thing: "Your analysis is correct (or incorrect) because you share (or don't share) my values." That's a hellscape analytic philosophers want no part of, but it is embraced elsewhere, with suitable obfuscations.

That's why there is a sort of "shut up and calculate" attitude in analytic philosophy, and why Williamson is demanding that people work harder. It's why his model for a successful theoretical discipline is mathematics, which he imagines sitting in the armchair next to philosophy's.

(I can put it even more colorfully. The analytic attitude is this: Philosophy doesn't need a hero; it needs a professional.)

I'll try too:

We decide to build a bridge because we believe it would make our lives better, and the sense of "better" there is colorably an aesthetic judgement. Life with the bridge would be preferable, simply in terms of what we want our lives to be like.

That's persuasive, but we still have the problem that the bridge's capacity to improve our lives is instrumental; it has to succeed as a bridge, and can be judged to succeed or fail as a bridge, without any consideration of our motive for building it, and without considering whether we were right that the bridge would improve our lives in the way we wanted.

(Oh! Spectacular movie reference for this: Stanley Tucci's speech about his bridge in Margin Call, 2011.)

You can always take a step up like this, and examine anything by placing it in a wider context, but while you will gain new terms for evaluating the thing, you'll lose the ones you had before.

Since it's not true, and it's not good -- well, maybe it's not beautiful in the old sense of the aesthetic, but there is this broader sense of "beautiful" which is that which is judged worthy, but not on moral grounds.

Basically the judgment of values which are not-moral falls into the aesthetic. Sometimes we like to say these are "epistemic values", or some such, but even there there are are choices between which epistemic values one makes appeals to. — Moliere

Here for instance you didn't have to take the word "good" to have an exclusively moral sense, and I feel quite certain than @Count Timothy von Icarus would not. I think your use of "aesthetic" (or maybe "beautiful" in the mooted non-traditional sense) has noticeable overlap with his use of "good".

I think Williamson is only demanding that philosophical theories succeed as theories, to some recognizable degree. Whether they make our lives better or worse or give us a warm fuzzy, he's presumably going to consider a separate question.

the desire for results, success, knew knowledge -- how is that not aesthetic? — Moliere

Because it isn't?

I'm genuinely puzzled why you'd stretch the word "aesthetics" to cover, well, everything. Now if you wanted to talk about value or utility or something, you'd have an argument. But an engineer who designs a beautiful bridge has to make sure, first and separately, that what he designs will function as a bridge and it'll probably have to meet a host of other requirements before considerations of beauty come into it.

I do think philosophy can to some extent provide a service to other disciplines, fixing the leaks and bad smells. — Banno

I don't think any other discipline has asked for philosophy's help or wants it.

That's not to say that some kind of interdisciplinary business isn't possible and sometimes interesting, but no astronomer (or even social psychologist) has ever said, "Whoa, have you seen the new data? We're gonna need a philosopher."

Doing philosophy involves going back and looking again at what we have said — Banno

This is the same issue that bedeviled the other thread, that you need something to dissect. There are a lot of candidates for that; is one of them the kind of theory that Williamson thinks it is the business of philosophy to produce?

"Why not?" you'll say. "Have scalpel; will travel."

But there's a genuine question of intention here: Williamson would absolutely agree to carefully examining theories, with the goal of improving them or producing better ones, not with the expectation they'll all be left dead on the dissecting table.

Ok, lets' settle on clear knowledge... — Banno

Why do I feel like I just walked into the Meno?

Do you think that "learning" in philosophy amounts to becoming clear about what you already know? Or can philosophy provide us with knowledge we did not have before?

Do you have any impression what's happened since 2004? — Ludwig V

I really don't. That's right in SEP's wheelhouse though. I think of it primarily as a "review of recent literature" for grad students.

Wonder if anyone's ever thought of that before! — J

The emoji indicates that you know the answer is "everyone", right?

In the context of the paper, where the principal example is semantics, we could note that Williamson is going to insist that people actually try doing this analysis formally, and he has very little patience for claiming, before the work begins, that it's unnecessary or impossible.

You and I seem to agree with large portions of Williamson. — Leontiskos

I would at least say, perhaps incorrectly, that I think I get where he's coming from, and I do have considerable sympathy with the view expressed, but I also have reservations.

There honestly isn't much point in "taking his side" here or not because the paper itself, as he acknowledges, is pretty handwavy. As philosophy, it's pretty weak tea, but it might be strong medicine for philosophers.

neither side — Ludwig V

Yeah that's fair. My memory of the paper is probably colored a bit by knowing which side Williamson is on.

Here's a quick example (from Wittgenstein) of everything, I hope.

Is the standard meter rod (or whatever it's called) itself 1 meter long?

The question assumes a bivalence that turns out to be troublesome. "Obviously" and "obviously not" both spring to mind and are both defensible.

Some will be inclined to shrug off the question and say it is "by convention". But Quine argued (repeatedly and at length) that "true by convention" is actually incoherent.

So then David Lewis comes along and writes a book (cleverly titled "Convention") that gives a rigorous definition of convention in terms of game theory (complete with lemmas and theorems), and applying it to semantics, and Quine writes a preface saying Lewis has done more than any other philosopher to mount a defense of "truth by convention".

I think Williamson here says, this is how it's done. You put in the work, develop the theory as far as you can, and you'll at least have some evidence for or against, insofar as some obstacles are overcome or roadblocks to progress appear.

lowest common denominator — Leontiskos

Sometimes a grandmaster discussing a game will say something like this: "I looked at sacrificing the pawn, but I didn't see anything concrete." "Concrete" here is a magic word; it means actual variations leading to a specific advantage, not just "I'll have more piece activity," or something vague like that.

A lot of discussion of chess in the pre-engine era turns out to have been mere handwaving if not outright bullshit. Once you have a machine that cares a lot more about the concrete than vague evaluations, chess starts to look different.

I think Williamson's minimum requirement is theories that produce something concrete. Rather than "I think white stands better" versus "I think black", show me some actual variations.

That sounds fine to me, though I don't see "undemonstrated" or "unjustified" as a truth value. — Leontiskos

Intuitionistic logic is a whole thing, which we probably don't want to get into here, and to which I would not count as a reliable guide. It's part of the gossipy backstory of this paper, is all.

this comes too close for my liking to "flaw-based" resolution of a difficult issue — J

One way to read the paper is that Williamson proposes an alternative to "my theory versus your theory", namely results, success, new knowledge. Proof is in the pudding.

(For instance, skeptics of intuitionistic logic have to admit it has proved very useful for proof theory, and thus for creating automated proof checkers. That's a success.)

Then he has to come up with a plausible story about a kind of result all parties of good faith could recognize.

And you do all this so that the choice between theories or approaches is not "merely aesthetic". (@Moliere)

playing a different game — Leontiskos

My memory is that that's how this whole things started: Dummett pointed out that some philosophers seemed to be playing a game that they did not realize was rigged against them, so they tended to flounder.

The solution he proposed was to recognize when you were inclined to deny that a specific type of statement within a given domain was bivalent.

(Dummett also had no truck with more than two truth values, so for him (and I believe Williamson agrees with him about this) intuitionistic logic becomes especially attractive: the sentential operator "not" is understood as "it has not been demonstrated that ..." Hence the double negative is merely "it has not been demonstrated that it has not been demonstrated that ..." )

So, side R made the rules for the first version of the game (universal bivalence); the other side AR made a new set of rules that gave them a fair chance, but those rules were never accepted by side R (because you lose LEM).

Given Williamson's critique of (the lack of) anti-realist semantics, another title for the paper might have been "Put Up or Shut Up."

I think Williamson finds anti-realism deeply suspect, but is frustrated because its opponents are denied the opportunity to land a solid punch, if not quite a knock-out blow.

To switch to another sports metaphor, anti-realists won't step up to the plate, but hang around off to the side claiming they could easily get a hit if they wanted to.

If there were ideas definite enough to be discredited (or not) put forward, Williamson wouldn't have written this paper. Since they refuse to get in the game, as he sees it, they have discredited not their ideas but themselves.

One might think so, but this is not what happened in the realism/antirealism argument. No solution was found, no one side was shown to be discredited. So was the argument pointless? I don't think so. — Banno

Not entirely "pointless" perhaps, but Williamson is holding up the realism/anti-realism debate as an example of a philosophical debate that wasn't good enough.

And he claims that there was no resolution, or even much progress, because the anti-realist side, in particular, did not develop their theories to a sufficient extent. That is, they were never clear enough for specific arguments to take hold and produce even local, partial answers.

(He suggests that debates about truth went somewhat better and that some progress has been made.)

But nowhere here are we talking about arguments showing that people actually agree, or argument as a means of clarifying, or any of the things you said and that I was asking about. Are we just moving on?

I'll try another question: do you think that clarity tends to dissolve disagreements because it shows most disagreements to have been merely verbal? ("Just semantics" as lay people say.)

It slowly sank in that there was not one, but many questions here - that what is real in mathematics is not the same as what is real in science or as what is real in ethics. — Banno

I don't know the history here, but my memory of Dummett's paper was that he was identifying a pattern in debates across several domains in philosophy, so this would be a little odd.

So clarity may still be the end goal. — Banno

I think Williamson considers the end goal knowledge. You might not be able to know everything you want right away, but you can claim progress if you know more than you used to. And that's exactly what he says ― for instance, "we know more about truth now".

Williamson's paper argues that if we don't do better (which would include your "clarity") we'll never learn anything.

And sometimes the quarrel concerns a difference that may be sorted by a line of reasoning - an argument that dissolves an argument, as it were. — Banno

But when an argument settles a disagreement, one side agrees that the other was right. The disagreement isn't dissolved, but remedied.

Williamson is advocating explicit and clear lines of reasoning. He's doing this in order to move past the discussion being a mere quarrel. — Banno

I think there's something to that, yes. Williamson is bemoaning the lack of effort put into the realism/anti-realism debate, so it would be fair to characterize it as a kind of quarrel, and the worst kind ― the kind where people haven't developed their own positions enough for it to be clear to both sides exactly what the disagreement is and what might resolve it.

But clarity is not the end goal. One side should eventually have an argument that the other side accepts ― if not as entirely dispositive, then convincing enough that they consider their own position discredited and abandon the fight.

Clarity is a necessary condition for arguments to matter, but clarity can only resolve a disagreement if that disagreement was actually a misunderstanding.

I'm just puzzled about where the word "argument" comes into it for you, and in what sense is an argument is

working out how best to say something that we agree is the case. — Banno

Suppose we do

say the same thing in different ways — Banno

Is the point of an argument to show that?

What if the disagreement is not just about how to say what we agree on? When I say "one human perspective", I mean something very fundamental; there's still a great deal of headroom for disagreement up toward the surface of our mental lives.

Sorry, I'm just puzzled now about whether you have some general view of disagreement (which, amusingly, I don't think I share), and about, given that, why you would reach for the word "argument" at all instead of, say, "explanation" or some other word. When someone is under the mistaken impression that you disagree, the usual thing to say would be something like, "I think we're saying the same thing ― let me explain ..." I don't know how the word "argument" got in here at all, if you're talking about agreement.

the difference between an argument as convincing someone that something is the case, and an argument as working out how best to say something that we agree is the case. — Banno

Why would I need to convince you of something you agree with me about? Why would you or I bother with arguments at all?

@Moliere

Here's another element of taste ― doesn't apply to everyone.

Some people have a decided preference for the new. Sometimes this is argued for, as Dewey does: the old ideas are dead, no longer suited to our time, and we need new ideas that suit our needs. Sometimes this is argued for as "the philosophy of the future", leading the way, changing the world rather than meeting the present need.

As some people want to be in the vanguard or the avant garde, some people want to stand athwart history saying, stop. Or, if they're not interested in a fight, they want to ignore whatever foolishness people nowadays are getting up to, and stick by the tried-and-true ideas of their forefathers. Some people are naturally suspicious of the new.

As I say, not a motivator for everyone, but I think for some people very important.

Next you'll tell us there are 10 kinds of people ...

The other issue is that people very quickly learn to game metrics. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Goodhart's Law.

I am not sure about the claim that we "know much more about truth then we did decades ago," unless it is caveated for instance. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'll have to reread if this thread continues, but my memory is that within a page it's clear what he means is the theories are more fully developed, and so brought closer to direct head-to-head comparison. There are other points in there.

Anyway, I can tell you when I read that sentence it struck me as a preposterous thing to say! Stopped me dead in my tracks. But because of his thinking about the role of theory, he means it quite literally. I don't know if it was courage, putting it this way, so removable from context, or obliviousness.

Note, however, that some of the responses to this sort of thing seem deficient. For example, simply pointing to seemingly incoherent analytic or scholastic philosophy. This doesn't say much; presumably there can be bad scholastic philosophy, bad theoretical physics, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is all very level-headed, Tim. Thanks.

I'll note that the point of Williamson's paper was very much less throwing stones at another tribe, way over there in another village, and more about throwing stones at a particular clan within his own tribe, and ― having done that ― chucking some more stones at his own tribe in general.

I'm hesitant to say this (but conscience demands it): I think it would be fair to say Williamson does this because his standards for philosophy are understood by him to be universal. (He has, elsewhere, chucked stones at the other tribe.) They needn't be. He could say, "If we are to call ourselves analytic philosophers, then we bloody well ought to act like it, and that means adhering to certain standards of rigor and discipline, which I can't believe I have to explain to you." I don't think he says that.

Now maybe that is what he's saying ― I didn't go looking for evidence in the paper either way. In the specific context, it just wouldn't matter because he was addressing his own tribe. He intended what he said to apply to them; it makes no difference if he also intended it to apply to other philosophers as well.

But it will make a difference when it comes time to debate the standards he is proposing, and the justifications he (or anyone else) is prepared to offer for those standards. I was going to say there are conditional and unconditional options, but really it's just a difference in the antecedent class: "if you want to do analytic philosophy then ..." versus "if you want to do philosophy then ..."

There is, for example, no actual philosophical work by anyone anywhere in this thread. At least on this view. Strictly speaking. — Srap Tasmaner

Did I misunderstand you here? I had understood that this was becasue of the topic, not the degree of formality...

I think I'm having trouble with the apparent juxtaposition of formal and natural languages. I understand formal language as a subclass of natural language, not as its antithesis. "A = apples" is as much a part of English as "May I introduce you to George?" The difference is in the rules around "=" that permit substitution extensionally...

Formal language is just natural language with more explicit restrictions and explanations. — Banno

I'll try this (and see what I think tomorrow).

In fields that have a perspicuous notation available (mathematics, chemistry, music, etc), the moments when a professional reaches for that notation are often the moments when he is doing (or demonstrating) the work of that field rather than talking about it. That's why they have the notation. English was already available for talking about the field. (This is not meant as an absolute, obviously.)

Philosophy doesn't really have its own notation like this, and probably cannot, but that doesn't mean there isn't still a distinction between doing the work of philosophy and just talking about it. It's just that we can't rely on differing modes of expression to identify which is which. We can do this a little ― there's logical and mathematical notation philosophers find use for, and you can draw attention to definitions or theses for which the precise wording is important (something like the house style at the SEP).

So I have not been trying to claim that real work can only be done in a more formal mode of expression, only that in other disciplines the choice of that formal mode is an indicator that we're working (or demonstrating, etc), rather than just talking about it.

He has the back-up — Leontiskos

He does, you're right, but I think this sentence

if different groups in philosophy give different relative weights to various sources of discipline, we can compare the long-run results of the rival ways of working. — Williamson, 10-11

is pie in the sky. Who's the "we" tallying the results and scoring the competition?

It’s not idealizations that are the problem. I agree that we cannot get along without them. The problem is when philosophy takes them as its starting point and adopts them as its method rather than delving beneath the facade to explicate the underlying processes. — Joshs

We're not just in agreement, then, we are brothers!

Look, I know Williamson takes a lot for granted, has a sort of philosophical ideology. My long post from yesterday, the "silliness" post, was intended at least in part as a demonstration of how he was tripping over his own tools.

In my own case, I long for the serenity I suppose he feels, the certainty about how to do things. When I had firmer ― well, any ― commitments to this or that school, this or that thinker, it was a lot easier, and I absolutely miss that.

that, in so far as it goes, is not a poor position to adopt? — Banno

I think it's clearly a pretty good idea for positions that are pretty close.

For ways of seeing and ways of setting up problems that begin very far apart, I'm not sure it's much use at all.

The obvious examples are pretty bad, and I don't want to give them the oxygen.

Do you think Russell and Wittgenstein, after 1930 -32, could have managed something like this? I'm really not sure.

what is the nature of our subjective comportment toward the world such that it makes possible the invention of abstractions which leave out the relevant and purposeful way in which we encounter the meaningful world? — Joshs

I'll just say that I am very interested in the role of ideals in our thinking, in our communication, in our lives. I tend to see them as things we construct rather than discover, and I'm curious why we do that, what role they serve (language as idealization is a crucial example, certainly), and also how we do that.

There's a bit of a sense in your post ― at least in what I quoted ― that ideals are a problem, and that their leaving stuff out is a problem, especially because they leave out what's most important. I may come to agree with you someday, but that's not really my sense of things. I guess I'm approaching them more neutrally ― idealization is a fact of human life and thought and behavior. Some clear upsides, some just as clear downsides, and something there's no reason to think we can get along without.