Philosophy Versus Logic-Chopping

What is my least favourite genre of philosophy writing?

Many analytic philosophers despise the obscurantist, vague, and unclear writing style of continental philosophers, but at least that writing style can often be entertaining and occasionally deeply insightful. But as a philosopher working in the Anglosphere, continental philosophy isn’t something I encounter much anyhow. Analytic philosophy is the law of the land.

And so, as a naturalist philosopher, I find a particularly common style of writing and reasoning among analytic philosophers far more off-putting, given how frequently I encounter it.

It is also a style of writing that is common in online philosophy, such as on Substack, where it’s all too common to try to debunk a position in a single comment, or dunk on a view with a single short argument, as if philosophical positions could be easily reduced to a short list of premises that can easily be dispelled.

And I say that as someone who frequently expresses a negative attitude towards a variety of philosophical views, whether that is moral realism or panpsychism, or a whole host of other views. But what you won’t hear me say or write is that I think these views are obviously logically incoherent. My polemical blog posts against particular views have made no pretense of being logical proofs against them. Rather, they attacked their meta-philosophical foundations, the theoretical virtues and philosophical methods meant to support them — but that are so rarely made explicit. This is where discussions should really take place. But philosophers, unlike scientists, have no methods sections in their publications to make their methodology explicit, and thus transparent for criticism.

My own view could not be further from one that is often attributed to Gilbert Ryle, who expressed hostility to expressed the following sentiment, but wasn’t really against meta-philosophy:

“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”

I rather think it’s a bad idea to start a marathon with the wrong kind of footwear. And modern runners do, in fact, pay much more attention to their technique. But to add a correction by the philosopher Michael Kremer, to my original use of Ryle’s quote:

I think I am in agreement with the thrust of this essay. But I think I must protest against the use of the quotation from Ryle, which is taken out of context (and widely used to make something like your point). Ryle himself wrote a number of metaphilosophical essays (including "Philosophers' Arguments," his inaugural lecture as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford -- but also for example "Systematically Misleading Expressions," "Categories," and "Proofs in Philosophy"). But in 1953 (when your quotation was written) what concerned him was that people were concentrating on questions of method without doing real philosophy. He did not say "don't do metaphilosophy" but only "don't do *only* metaphilosophy."

The problem I have with much of analytic philosophy is that it reduces philosophy to logic-chopping.

It is the kind of dry and over-precisified writing style aimed at objectivity, but which misses the forest for the trees — effectively ending up straw-manning most of the views it is trying to debunk.

If all you have available in your toolkit is an evaluation of whether a philosophical position is coherent or not, I am not very interested in what you have to say, since that is not very interesting at all. A great many philosophical articulations of theories may have logical inconsistencies, falling far short of offering deductive proof. But why care about debunking an incoherent version of an idea that can be made coherent?

Even as an atheist, I have little doubt that one could offer a logically coherent worldview that includes a God. It’s not that hard to add extra variables to a model. Even as a staunch materialist, I don’t doubt that someone could give a logically coherent account of panpsychism. I just don’t care much for the straw-manning of an entire position, declaring it logically incoherent because one might succeed at showing that one version of a theory is incoherent. Not to mention that many such philosophy articles, or blog posts for that matter, create a straw-man version of a view. Like Dan Dennett, I think we went too far in turning philosophy into mere logic-chopping:

I like to think I’m drifting back to what philosophy used to be, which has been forgotten in many quarters in philosophy during the last thirty or forty years, when philosophy has become a sometimes ridiculously technical and dry, logic-chopping subject for a lot of people — applied logic, applied mathematics. There’s always a place for that, but it’s nowhere near as big a place as a lot of people think. - Daniel C. Dennett

As a naturalist, I prefer to think about philosophical theories as just another species of scientific theory. Logical analysis, of course, does have a place in the sciences. But vagueness is an inherent element of science itself. Many of the attempts to debunk Darwin’s theory of evolution through dry logic-chopping amounted to little more than providing effective proof that logic-chopping isn’t all that conducive to evaluating whether we should endorse a theory or not. Even if a particular specification of a theory has inconsistent assumptions, these can easily be fixed. Pointing out such problems is no proof that an entire theory is misguided.

The same applies to conflicts between views like materialism vs. panpsychism, or atheism vs. theism. The naturalist compares the various theoretical virtues of the best versions of these theories, which are all assumed to be capable of being made logically coherent. The geocentric model of the world was not discarded because it was logically incoherent, but because its theoretical virtues diminished compared to those of the heliocentric one. I reject panpsychism, not because it is incoherent, but because its theoretical virtues pale in comparison to a naturalistic materialism. The case for panpsychism is far too often reliant on flimsy logic-chopping ‘proofs’ for the incoherence of materialism/physicalism, rather than an independent, well-worked out theoretical account of a panpsychist alternative.

Much of analytic philosophy has become entirely dry by restricting itself to uninteresting logic-chopping alone. The same goes for much writing on Substack. While this approach may succeed in showing particular versions of views or particular authors to be mistaken, it adds little value to the grand scheme of evaluating the very best versions of theories we can and ought to articulate to make serious attempts at understanding reality.

Unfortunately, this much more important work does not easily lend itself to Substack comments, tweets, blog posts, or often enough even journal articles. The very architecture of our modern engagement with philosophy encourages logic-chopping and the straw-manning of positions, reducing philosophy to single arguments. As if one argument alone could undermine or prove a particular position… (sometimes it can, but don’t just confidently proclaim that your argument is the final nail in the coffin.)

Once we try to steel-man, rather than straw-man philosophical or scientific theories, logic chopping has little value left to add, since we already work on the assumption that the best theories are logically coherent. But for some analytic philosophers, logic-chopping has unfortunately become their only tool of the trade. All in the hope that all theories but one will eventually show themselves to be incoherent.

But that is a vain hope indeed.

If we have to choose between a vision of philosophy as applied logic versus philosophy as abstract science, we should choose the latter — vastly expanding our toolbox to answer philosophical questions.

That’s why I consider myself a naturalist philosopher. Not an analytic philosopher. (See this blog post:)

If you really want to convince someone to change their mind or if you really want to evaluate alternative philosophical views in an objective manner — you should engage in a discussion about the theoretical merits of alternative views on the table. What are the trade-offs between them? What are the methods we should use to decide between these views? Don’t quibble about the details of how the views are articulated too much. There is a time and place for that, but let’s not miss the forest for the trees. Philosophy has much more to offer.

*Since readers reqeuested an example: I think the Gettier-case industry of papers on the proper definition of ‘knowledge’ is perhaps the clearest illustration for how logic-chopping can go awry. The move towards conceptual engineering/explication, explicitly asking what a concept is meant to do and how we should design it was a very helpful introduction of meta-philosophy into the debate. See the following open-access article:

• Olsson, E.J. Gettier and the method of explication: a 60 year old solution to a 50 year old problem. Philos Stud 172, 57–72 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0383-z

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