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HYPOPHILOSOPHY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2019

Elijah Millgram
Elijah Millgram*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Utah
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Abstract:

The more obvious forms of corruption are often preceded and explained by the etiolation of a practice: as its participants lose track of the point of their activities, their moral immune system is disabled. The argument is developed via a case study, philosophy itself. After advancing the hypothesis that philosophy is in the first instance the machine tool industry of the intellect—that its task is making the intellectual tools that make the intellectual tools—we consider what becomes of such an enterprise when this objective slips out of focus.

Keywords

consistencycreature constructioncurrencyinferential hygiene regimeRandall Collinssubstancetetheringthick ethical concept
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , Winter 2018 , pp. 138 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2019 

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Footnotes

*

I’m grateful to Chrisoula Andreou, Elizabeth Brake, Phoebe Chan, Benjamin Crowe, Eric Hutton, Kim Johnston, C. Thi Nguyen, Anne Peterson, David Schmidtz, Aubrey Spivey, Cynthia Stark, and an anonymous referee for comments on drafts, to Margaret Bowman, Teresa Burke and Svantje Guinebert for conversation on the topic, and to the other contributors to this volume. Thanks are due to the University of Arizona’s Freedom Center for hosting during work on the essay, and for support by the University of Utah through a Sterling M. McMurrin Esteemed Faculty Award.

References

1 He supported that latter claim by working up a case study (of concepts such as “pornographic,” in the service of proposed legislation), and it may be helpful to the reader to think of his treatment as a model for the ensuing discussion: I mean to be using corruption in philosophy as a case study, of interest on its own, but one that I hope will make convincing points about corruption more generally. See Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 140ffGoogle Scholar, and Williams, Bernard, ed., Obscenity and Film Censorship: An Abridgement of the Williams Report (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);Google Scholar Williams was appropriating the term from Clifford Geertz, who in turn acknowledged Ryle.

In particular, Williams imagined a legislator writing a definition of, say, “obscene” into law, and asked his reader to anticipate the ways in which the financially incentivized adult entertainment industry would mobilize its ingenuity; we would soon see products which evaded the definition, and were nonetheless obscene. We can expect “corrupt” to resist definition for very similar reasons: any definition, once enacted into a basis for enforcement, would be no more than a challenge; we should not underestimate the inventiveness of those thus motivated to devise unanticipated forms of corruption.

2 Collins, Randall, The Sociology of Philosophies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

3 Frankfort, Henri, Wilson, John A., and Jacobsen, Thorkild, Before Philosophy (New York: Penguin, 1960).Google Scholar

4 When we are thinking our way through corruption, not just in philosophy but in any domain, we should expect to have to characterize the point of a practice or institution. As indicated by the metaphor, to apply the concept of corruption is to presuppose a functional base state from which the decay is deviation. (In Aristotle’s rendering of this way of seeing things, rot amounts to an organism’s form losing hold on its matter; more generally, defect requires a species form or the functional characterization of an artifact in the background. Only a living thing, where we understand there to be a way such an organism functions correctly, can become literally rotten.) For very interesting related argumentation, see Thompson, Michael, Life and Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Part I.

The evaluative perspectives involved in practices and institutions are no doubt a good part of what we are led to by thinking of corruption under the heading of a thick ethical concept. For worries about identifying the organizing purpose of an institution—along with a proposal about how to do so that is not compatible with the treatment I will develop here—see M. E. Newhouse, “Institutional Corruption: A Fiduciary Theory,” Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 23, no. 3 (2014).

5 This part of the just-so story condenses the treatment at “Private Persons and Minimal Persons,” Journal of Social Philosophy 45, no. 3 (2014): 323–47, secs. 1–3.

6 For a standard presentation of the constraint, see O’Neill, Onora, “Consistency in Action,” in Millgram, Elijah, ed., Varieties of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001): 301–29.Google Scholar

7 Ryle, Gilbert, Plato’s Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

8 Hacking, Ian, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975);Google Scholar Daston, Lorraine, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

9 Aristotle, , “Metaphysics,” trans. Ross, W. D., in Barnes, Jonathan, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995),Google Scholar at IV 3–6; for background discussion, see Politis, Vasilis, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 2004), chap. 5, andCrossRefGoogle Scholar Gottleib, Paula, “The Principle of Non-Contradiction and Protagoras: The Strategy of Aristotle’s Metaphysics IV 4,” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 8 (1995): 183–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 For discussion of creature construction arguments, with exemplars, see Grice, Paul, “Method in Philosophical Psychology (From the Banal to the Bizarre),” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 48 (1975): 23–53, as well asCrossRefGoogle Scholar Bratman, Michael, Structures of Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), passim and esp. 49f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Rather similarly, Rawls, John, in “Two Concepts of Rules,” Philosophical Review 64, no. 1 (1955): 3–32,CrossRefGoogle Scholar points out that there are only strikes, bases, home runs, and so on within a game of baseball. If you start working on a theory of bases, fouls, etc., only without the baseball, you will be developing a theory of nothing.

12 Is it that cut and dried? After all, sometimes the layperson does change “his philosophy,” and there are a great many philosophers who defend views that they will not consider abandoning under any circumstances. But the status of the layperson’s “philosophy,” as a fund of convictions on which he draws in addressing other issues, remains even if the fund experiences some churn, and defenders of their theoretical fortresses, even if they do not change their minds, are in any case supposed to defend them.

13 Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).Google Scholar But can this be right? Surely getting to the bottom even of a proposal for the revision of a consistency regime will require seeing what it amounts to when it is fully realized; if the proposal is sufficiently ambitious, no one person will be capable of getting to that point; so it will be necessary to develop the proposal cooperatively, which means having philosophers who work within it, thus treating it as Kuhnian normal science.

Something of the sort is no doubt necessary, but when the participants cease to be self-aware about the enterprise—when they forget that the point is assessing and debugging the consistency regime itself—the track record shows, or so it seems to me, that their achievements turn out to be unsuitable for the purpose. And the usual sorts of training for normal science—learning to accept the dictates and methods of your philosophical school as given—are not conducive to self-awareness.

14 That line is the title of Williamson, Timothy, “Must Do Better,” in Greenough, Patrick and Lynch, Michael, eds., Truth and Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 177–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Now, it would have been premature for Socrates to insist that philosophy was not going to succeed in producing theories that counted as established results. But we have an up-of-two-thousand-year track record that he did not, and it now looks to be the conclusion of a well-supported induction that philosophy shares with hypophilosophy not just an apparent subject matter, but this inability. So the point of doing philosophy cannot reasonably be to arrive at those theoretical conclusions.

I have previously attempted to account for the track record on the assumption that philosophy is an attempt to solve discovery problems; see Elijah Millgram, “Relativism, Coherence, and the Problems of Philosophy,” in Fran O’Rourke, ed., What Happened in and to Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century? (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2013). Here I am taking a different tack, and developing the thought that the enterprise is addressed to invention problems. Notice that when we observe a succession of what we understand to be intellectual tools, we should not conclude that the ones that have been discarded did not serve their purpose perfectly adequately in their own day. Analogously, when the carriages were replaced by automobiles, the carriages were not refuted.

This is an occasion to notice also that the observations we used to launch our discussion evidently need to be qualified. As a matter of history, philosophy seems to arise, again and again, out of, as people used to describe Seinfeld, a show about nothing. But now that we have identified the primary role of philosophizing as the development and assessment of consistency regimes—that is, the management of inferential hygiene requirements—we can explain the character of those occasions by invoking a rule of thumb, that science tends to appear late on the scene, after philosophizing itself has become entrenched. The various special sciences generate and rely on their own consistency regimes, which then come to need all of the services that philosophy is in the business of supplying. Thus we find William Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (London: John W. Parker, 1847), an early example of philosophy of science as we know it, in which the conceptual and methodological problems of the sciences are an occasion for philosophizing that—with a little squinting—looks like someone trying to understand and critically reconstruct their evolving consistency regimes.

15 Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edition., ed. Urmson, J. O. and Sbisà, Marina (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 22, 92n, 104, 122;CrossRefGoogle Scholar the gearshift metaphor can be found in Michael Thompson, “What Is It To Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice,” in Wallace, R. Jay, Pettit, Philip, Scheffler, Samuel, and Smith, Michael, eds., Reason and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 333–84.Google Scholar

16 I’m grateful to Frank Buckley for pressing this point.

17 MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 2.Google Scholar

18 Kierkegaard, Søren, Attack Upon ‘Christendom’, 2nd ed., trans. Lowrie, Walter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

19 See Israel, Jonathan, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Enlightenment Contested (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

20 Kuhnian paradigm shifts were famously said to be irrational, and Fisch, Menachem and Benbaji, Yitzhak, The View from Within (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011) is a recent example of philosophers struggling with the problem.Google Scholar

21 For one partial description of the workings of those preloaded responses, see Kelly, Daniel, Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 If philosophy is, as I take it to be, an engineering science, shouldn’t it be possible to certify practitioners, processes, and products? That’s trickier than you might think. While one can study the inferential engineering techniques currently in use, as well as past devices that have been superseded by newer ones, if philosophy really is always properly conducted in the mode of Kuhnian revolutionary science, its practice cannot be routinized. And when a practice cannot be routinized, such certifications have very modest value.

23 And we should have anticipated this. Creature construction arguments resemble state of nature arguments in many respects. Now, when you are convinced by a Hobbesian argument that security functions are legitimately provided by the state, you should not conclude that when you examine actually existing states, they will provide only security.

24 For various roles played by currency, see Townsend, Robert, Financial Structure and Economic Organization (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990).Google Scholar

25 How is the discussion of hypophilosophy itself philosophy? It does seem to be fairly closely tied to the central philosophical enterprise, but it too can engender activities that count as philosophical only by way of being tethered to matters of inferential hygiene.

26 However, there are noteworthy exceptions, and moreover, there are various legitimate functions that conferences can serve. They can be commitment devices: if you are editing an anthology, and you want to ensure that the contributors write something by a given date, you can invite them to present their drafts at a conference scheduled on that date. So-called affinity conferences can provide moral support. And they can be an occasion to field-test the robustness of a position: faced with objections, does it contain the resources to generate responses to them?

27 For discussions of why one widely used productivity assessment tool makes no sense, and of the Leiter Report—a very influential ranking of philosophy departments—see Millgram, Elijah, The Great Endarkenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 44–48, 271f.Google Scholar An internal study of student evaluations at my own institution determined that they assess courses on only one dimension, UX (user experience, roughly, the aspect of an interface that Apple is famously good at); but this has not led to any change in the way that student evaluations are deployed, or the attention they receive from students, faculty, and administration.

28 Metric-chasing can also be fostered by a sense that one’s devotion to philosophy has become quixotic. When one is being managed by administrators who are themselves metric-driven, who don’t understand the why and wherefore of the activities they are supervising, and who out-and-out don’t care about the internal demands of one’s discipline, it can be enormously hard to sustain purity of heart.

29 I rather expect that analogous considerations are in the background when academic administrators make the personally convenient sorts of choices cataloged by Ginsberg, Benjamin in The Fall of the Faculty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).Google Scholar Deans chase metrics for the same reasons that faculty do: in the first place, they have somehow forgotten what the real business of a university is.

If hypophilosophy is our original sin, philosophy corrupted does not require venal practitioners: the academic rushing into print and doggedly showing up at conferences may be genuinely trying to get a hearing for what he thinks is his discovery. But if I am right, etiolation will tend to make professors responsive to other incentives; the hands-on experience of would-be argument, when the domain is the theory of nothing, encourages what Susan Haack calls “preposterism”—roughly, publishing come what may, without regard for or attention to truth. (Susan Haack, “Preposterism and Its Consequences,” Social Philosophy and Policy 13, no. 2 [1996]: 296–315.) To be sure, in any particular case, a philosopher’s motivations can be hard to decipher.

30 Kant, Immanuel, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Ellington, James (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1785/1981), Ak. 399.Google Scholar