Philosophy and the razor of disagreement
Can the razor of disagreement work for philosophy? Before we answer this question, we must first be clear that if it can, then it would still work quite differently in philosophy than it would in normal science. In normal science, the razor would preclude unnecessary speculation occurring when the existing paradigm could still be developed. In philosophy, on the other hand, there are no existing paradigms to be developed. However, the razor would seem in this case to me to imply that unnecessary controversy should be avoided.
Given this formulation, it seems to me that the razor can indeed be applied fruitfully. In fact, it became my strategy during the Masters thesis not to say anything controversial--at least not controversial after I had argued for it. My project could have been enormously controversial, at worst a rejection of morality. But I managed to preserve the essence of my claim while maintaining reasonableness. The essence of the claim was that it is pointless for ethical theorists to keep producing theories that ordinary people simply cannot be expected to take seriously as worth living up to. This involved challenging any sharp distinction between sociological and anthropological studies and abstract theorising about ethics. It resulted in something that the internal reviewer noted as a difficult task handled fairly impressively.
One possible objection to the razor might come from my lecturer in metaethics. He said that philosophy should be able to derive controversial conclusions from uncontroversial premises. However, I think that in some ways this demonstrated a lack of understanding of the requirements of persuasion. The premises of any argument do need to be uncontroversial so that your audience will accept them, and your conclusion may be controversial if you were to state it outright without argument. But if your conclusion is still controversial after you have argued for it, then you still have more argument left to perform. You cannot simply leave a conclusion at the controversial level. If you do, then it will not matter how cleverly you have derived it from uncontroversial premises, because your audience will still reject it.
The only reason I can imagine why someone would make this lecturer's claim is the following: I imagine somebody like Thomas Hobbes, who chanced upon a copy of Euclid's Principles of Geometry. He read one of the later theorems in the book and thought it was preposterous. So he read through the proof for that theorem, and noted that some of the corollaries being introduced in the proof were derived from earlier theorems in the book. He looked back in the book to those earlier theorems, and they too included corollaries derived from earlier theorems. This process went on and on until the very beginning of the book. There, the theorem being discussed was so uncontroversial that he simply had to accept that it must be true. Given the inexorability of this chain of reasoning from one argument to the next, however, he found that he could now accept the previously outlandish advanced theorem! This style of argument greatly impressed Hobbes, to the extent that he chose it as his style in the Leviathan. He considered that if mathematics could achieve such startling discoveries through deductive means, then so could philosophy.
This reasoning, as described by Hobbes, appears perfectly sound. Unfortunately, I think that many philosophers miss the original point of it. The point was not that the conclusion was controversial after Hobbes had read the full argument, but that it had ceased to be so. Most philosophers, unfortunately, do not argue nearly so cogently enough to achieve the same results in their own reasoning. Even Hobbes certainly could not have been considered to have constructed an airtight argument, if only because of the dubiousness of some of his premises. For example, one might argue that he takes an arbitrarily pessimistic view of human nature.
There is an additional difficulty for the derivation of a prephilosophically controversial conclusion. It presupposes that any amount of argument can ever make a prephilosophically controversial conclusion postphilosophically uncontroversial. In some cases, I am sure that it can, but in other cases, I fear that no amount of argument will be sufficient. For example, I think that this is part of what makes Kant's theory of ethics so striking: It appears to seamlessly derive repulsive conclusions from quite compelling premises. Yet it is precisely because the repulsiveness of the conclusions is as tenacious as the premises are compelling that Kant's theory continues to be studied yet has never become a paradigm. In fact, this is probably why utilitarianism has never become a paradigm either. Utilitarian theories can sound very callous because they presuppose a lack of empathy with individuals where such would seem not only human but very legitimate.
This, in fact, does seem to be a legitimate difference between philosophy and science. Science can arrive at compelling conclusions precisely because it provides a picture into a phenomenon that can otherwise be unexplained. The equivalent inexplicable phenomena in philosophy would appear to be dilemmas. Yet scientific phenomena admit of various open-ended explanations, none of which are necessarily problematic if they are also consistent with other phenomena. Most scientific explanations do not seem anti-intuitive if they can fit the facts and explain, predict and control phenomena. Yet anti-intuitiveness is built into philosophical dilemmas from the ground up. Philosophical dilemmas arise precisely because we seem to have intuitions pulling us in two different directions. In that circumstance, it seems that there is no way of arriving at non-coercive agreement about the resolution of the dilemma without a clear hierarchy of intuitions. That hierarchy of intuitions does exist in science, but it is far from obvious that such a hierarchy is possible in philosophy. Different philosophers would surely construct different hierarchies, rendering their views incommensurable with each other.
Given this formulation, it seems to me that the razor can indeed be applied fruitfully. In fact, it became my strategy during the Masters thesis not to say anything controversial--at least not controversial after I had argued for it. My project could have been enormously controversial, at worst a rejection of morality. But I managed to preserve the essence of my claim while maintaining reasonableness. The essence of the claim was that it is pointless for ethical theorists to keep producing theories that ordinary people simply cannot be expected to take seriously as worth living up to. This involved challenging any sharp distinction between sociological and anthropological studies and abstract theorising about ethics. It resulted in something that the internal reviewer noted as a difficult task handled fairly impressively.
One possible objection to the razor might come from my lecturer in metaethics. He said that philosophy should be able to derive controversial conclusions from uncontroversial premises. However, I think that in some ways this demonstrated a lack of understanding of the requirements of persuasion. The premises of any argument do need to be uncontroversial so that your audience will accept them, and your conclusion may be controversial if you were to state it outright without argument. But if your conclusion is still controversial after you have argued for it, then you still have more argument left to perform. You cannot simply leave a conclusion at the controversial level. If you do, then it will not matter how cleverly you have derived it from uncontroversial premises, because your audience will still reject it.
The only reason I can imagine why someone would make this lecturer's claim is the following: I imagine somebody like Thomas Hobbes, who chanced upon a copy of Euclid's Principles of Geometry. He read one of the later theorems in the book and thought it was preposterous. So he read through the proof for that theorem, and noted that some of the corollaries being introduced in the proof were derived from earlier theorems in the book. He looked back in the book to those earlier theorems, and they too included corollaries derived from earlier theorems. This process went on and on until the very beginning of the book. There, the theorem being discussed was so uncontroversial that he simply had to accept that it must be true. Given the inexorability of this chain of reasoning from one argument to the next, however, he found that he could now accept the previously outlandish advanced theorem! This style of argument greatly impressed Hobbes, to the extent that he chose it as his style in the Leviathan. He considered that if mathematics could achieve such startling discoveries through deductive means, then so could philosophy.
This reasoning, as described by Hobbes, appears perfectly sound. Unfortunately, I think that many philosophers miss the original point of it. The point was not that the conclusion was controversial after Hobbes had read the full argument, but that it had ceased to be so. Most philosophers, unfortunately, do not argue nearly so cogently enough to achieve the same results in their own reasoning. Even Hobbes certainly could not have been considered to have constructed an airtight argument, if only because of the dubiousness of some of his premises. For example, one might argue that he takes an arbitrarily pessimistic view of human nature.
There is an additional difficulty for the derivation of a prephilosophically controversial conclusion. It presupposes that any amount of argument can ever make a prephilosophically controversial conclusion postphilosophically uncontroversial. In some cases, I am sure that it can, but in other cases, I fear that no amount of argument will be sufficient. For example, I think that this is part of what makes Kant's theory of ethics so striking: It appears to seamlessly derive repulsive conclusions from quite compelling premises. Yet it is precisely because the repulsiveness of the conclusions is as tenacious as the premises are compelling that Kant's theory continues to be studied yet has never become a paradigm. In fact, this is probably why utilitarianism has never become a paradigm either. Utilitarian theories can sound very callous because they presuppose a lack of empathy with individuals where such would seem not only human but very legitimate.
This, in fact, does seem to be a legitimate difference between philosophy and science. Science can arrive at compelling conclusions precisely because it provides a picture into a phenomenon that can otherwise be unexplained. The equivalent inexplicable phenomena in philosophy would appear to be dilemmas. Yet scientific phenomena admit of various open-ended explanations, none of which are necessarily problematic if they are also consistent with other phenomena. Most scientific explanations do not seem anti-intuitive if they can fit the facts and explain, predict and control phenomena. Yet anti-intuitiveness is built into philosophical dilemmas from the ground up. Philosophical dilemmas arise precisely because we seem to have intuitions pulling us in two different directions. In that circumstance, it seems that there is no way of arriving at non-coercive agreement about the resolution of the dilemma without a clear hierarchy of intuitions. That hierarchy of intuitions does exist in science, but it is far from obvious that such a hierarchy is possible in philosophy. Different philosophers would surely construct different hierarchies, rendering their views incommensurable with each other.
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