AnalPhilosopher

One of my longtime readers, Alex Chernavsky, picked up on something I said the other day. I had written that philosophy is not a search for truth. "How, then, does it differ from sophistry?" he asked.

There are two kinds of truth, or rather two ways for a proposition to be true. The first is necessary truth. It's necessarily true that puppies are dogs, that 2 + 2 = 4, and that no widows are male. Philosophers, given their training in conceptual analysis, are equipped to ascertain necessary truths. But notice that these truths say nothing about the world. They relate concepts. It's necessarily true that unicorns are one-horned animals, but this says nothing about whether there are unicorns.

The second kind of truth is contingent truth. It's contingently true that there are no unicorns (there could be), that there are dogs (there might not be), and that George W. Bush is president (he might have lost the election; indeed, some people think he did!). Philosophers have no expertise with regard to contingent truths. Where would they get it? In their graduate seminars? From reading philosophical treatises? By talking to other philosophers? I'm not saying that philosophers cannot make truth claims. Of course they can, and they do. I'm saying that their being philosophers doesn't make their truth claims any more authoritative than they would otherwise be. They're in the same boat as everyone else. Contingent truth is the province of everyone. Each of us is equipped to make careful observations about the world and to form beliefs on the basis of what we discover, using reason as our guide. Science is just common sense disciplined. The discipline allows scientists to find patterns and order in what appears to be chaos.

If philosophy is not about ascertaining contingent truths, then what's it about, besides ascertaining necessary truths? In my view, the role of the philosopher, as such, is to explore and map conceptual space. Just as we share a language, we share a conceptual scheme. How we speak is indicative of the concepts we have and use. Learning to speak is learning the conceptual scheme. This is why philosophers are so attentive to language. It is the means by which concepts are grasped and understood. To a linguist, language is an end. It is studied for its own sake. To a philosopher, language is a means. It is studied for the sake of something else, namely, the concepts (things signified) that words (signifiers) express, denote, or refer to.

Philosophy, in short, is conceptual analysis. I must immediately qualify this. The term "conceptual analysis" is sometimes used to refer (pejoratively) to those philosophers who seek necessary and sufficient conditions for concepts. But not all concepts are amenable to this approach. Some are; some are not. The philosopher's job is to study and correctly describe the behavior of concepts, even if they are not sharply demarcated from surrounding concepts. It is not to reform or revise our concepts (much less our entire conceptual scheme). Some concepts, such as time, space, rights, and justice, are complicated. Only a careful philosopher can describe them accurately. Also, there are specialized concepts in various occupations, professions, and academic disciplines. Philosophers of law, for example, focus their attention on the concepts that are distinctive to law, such as precedent, cause of action, and tort. Philosophers of science focus their attention on the concepts that are distinctive to science (or rather, to particular sciences, such as physics, biology, and chemistry).

I like to think of it this way. The role of the philosopher is to discover what is possible, necessary, and impossible, given this or that. (Nothing is possible, necessary, or impossible simpliciter.) It is not to discover what is actual. That task falls to others. It's an important task. It's just not philosophical in nature. Nothing in our training as philosophers equips us to perform it.

To return to Alex Chernavsky's question, I take it that by "sophistry" he means arguing irresponsibly, with no concern for the truth. But this doesn't describe philosophy. It's not that philosophers aren't concerned about truth or deny that there is such a thing. It's that it's not their job to ascertain it. John Locke described philosophers as "Under-Labourers." Their job, he wrote, is to clear the underbrush and other debris from a site so that others ("Master-Builders") can build impressive edifices. Master-Builders are the likes of Isaac Newton. Under-Labourers are the likes of Locke, at least when writing in his philosophical capacity.

By the way, my views on the nature of philosophy have been much influenced by Alan R. White, who taught for many years at the University of Hull in England. See his essay "Conceptual Analysis," chap. 5 in The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy, ed. Charles J. Bontempo and S. Jack Odell (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975), 103-17.