Philosophical Delusion and its Therapy

Outline of a Philosophical Revolution

Eugen Fischer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781134322244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Moderne Philosophie

Philosophical Delusion and its Therapy provides new foundations and methods for the revolutionary project of philosophical therapy pioneered by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The book vindicates this currently much-discussed project by reconstructing the genesis of important philosophical problems: With the help of concepts adapted from cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, the book analyses how philosophical reflection is shaped by pictures and metaphors we are not aware of employing and are prone to misapply. Through innovative case-studies on the genesis of classical problems about the mind and perception, and on thinkers including Locke, Berkeley and Ayer, the book demonstrates how such autonomous habits of thought systematically generate unsound intuitions and philosophical delusions, whose clash with reality, or among each other, gives rise to ill-motivated but maddening problems. The book re-examines models of therapeutic philosophy, due to Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and develops an approach that may let us overcome philosophical delusions and the problems they engender. In this way, the book explains where and why therapy in called for in philosophy, and develops techniques to carry it out.

Part I
Philosophical Pictures

1 Philosophical Pictures

The Birth of ‘the Mind’

Pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, determine most of our philosophical convictions. At any rate, they determine many of our most fundamental philosophical convictions. Philosophers alive to the power of pictures have tended to focus on metaphors deliberately employed and pictures actually endorsed by the philosophers guided by them, like the picture of the mind as a repository of images or as always the most sophisticated machinery of the day—a mechanical clock, a telephone exchange, a computer.¹ In this book, by contrast, we shall develop and vindicate the idea that philosophical reflection may be systematically guided, and misled, by metaphors and analogies that philosophers are not aware of relying upon. This idea will prove the key to a new understanding of the nature and genesis of many philosophical problems, which vindicates a radical reorientation of philosophical work.

At least part of the core idea it is built on was first mooted by Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Big Typescript and in contemporaneous sources: ‘We encounter [philosophical problems] only when we are guided not by practical purpose in forming our sentences, but by certain analogies within language’ (BT 427). Many a ‘false analogy’ has been ‘accepted into language’ (BT 409). They guide us without our being aware of this: ‘To use [psychoanalysis’] way of putting things . . . [such] a simile [is] at work in the unconscious’ (VW 69). Such a ‘false picture’, applied to cases where there is nothing analogous to its crucial feature, is frequently at the bottom of philosophical perplexity (BT 428). We can sum this up by coining the notion of ‘being under the spell of a philosophical picture’. In first approximation:

We are under the spell of a philosophical picture when our philosophical reflection is guided by certain analogies within language, without our being aware of being guided by them.

I would like to show that philosophers often are, in this sense, under the spell of philosophical pictures. This is not a philosophical claim which purports to answer a philosophical question. Rather, it is a meta-philosophical claim about how philosophers reason about the topics about which they raise philosophical questions and problems, and construct theories to solve them. This meta-philosophical claim amounts to a hypothesis about how actual people in flesh and blood actually reason when actually engaged in a particular kind of intellectual activity. In brief, it is an empirical hypothesis. We shall develop the concept of ‘philosophical pictures’ in such a way as to turn our claim into a respectable hypothesis, amenable to empirical confirmation and disconfirmation. In this chapter, we will marshal enough evidence to warrant the claim’s adoption as a working hypothesis. In the next chapter we will come to see that, and why, the further pursuit of this hypothesis promises to be philosophically most rewarding.

To turn our basic claim into a respectable hypothesis, we will develop the notion of a philosophical picture with the help of some concepts and results from cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, which are in fact consistent with various Wittgensteinian strictures but were not yet available to Wittgenstein (who had to make do with Freudian psychoanalysis as the most advanced psychology of his day). Those new concepts and results allow us, first, to identify the relevant ‘analogies within language’ and, second, to explain how these analogies guide us without our being aware of it (how they are ‘at work in the unconscious’). This will allow us to see that, and how, an experimentally documented cognitive process interlocks with an empirically documented linguistic process and shapes philosophical reflection: It serially generates philosophical intuitions which are unsound by the lights of the very thinkers who feel bound to honour them. The most salient conflicts between such intuitions and other convictions give rise to illusory but maddening problems.

These philosophical problems can be overcome by coming to understand their nature and genesis: not by finding out new truths about their subject (about the mind, perception, meaning, etc.), let alone by constructing new philosophical theories about that subject (theories of the mind, perception, meaning, etc.), but by gaining new meta-philosophical insight into the way we think about this subject and come to raise those problems, when engaged in philosophical reflection. To build up to the conclusions that motivate this new approach to—one important kind of—philosophical problem, we will reconstruct some of the philosophical intuitions which shaped the early modern conception of the mind and trace how these intuitions gave rise to classical mind-body problems which still worry us today.

1. CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS AND
STRUCTURAL ANALOGIES

Metaphor (from Greek “meta-pherein”, i.e., ‘to transfer’) is the transfer of terms initially applied to things of one sort (the elements of the source domain), to things of a different kind (the elements of the target domain). The transfer is typically motivated by an actual or assumed analogy between the former and the latter. In the simplest case, this is a ‘material analogy’, where the source and the target share one or more particular properties. We think, for instance, that lions are strong and courageous and lambs innocent and docile, and accordingly say that Achilles is a lion and the small child a lamb, in case we think that they share one or more of those properties with these animals. Thus we apply an animal-predicate “F” (“is a lion”, “lamb”, etc.) to a human being in case Fs are exemplary owners of some properties (strength, courage, etc.) and we wish to credit the man at issue with one or more of those properties. Some contexts may leave it quite open which of the potentially pertinent properties get attributed; other contexts suggest some before others; and sometimes convention has rendered the metaphorical application of the animal-term practically synonymous with the attribution of one particular property: We say, “Achilles is a lion”, meaning that he is courageous like a lion—and might as well just have said, “Achilles is courageous”. Focus on these simple and obvious cases led philosophers for centuries to disregard metaphor as a stylistic device relevant mainly in poetry and rhetoric.

Far more common and important, however, are the less simple and salient cases of metaphor which linguists started to study only about thirty years ago:² Frequently, we do not merely transfer one single term, in virtue of a material analogy, but transfer a whole set of related terms, forging a structural analogy. Indeed, such metaphorical extension is one of the major processes driving the development of language:³ We tend to conceptualise unfamiliar or abstract matters in terms initially applied literally to concrete or familiar things or actions, whose use we extend metaphorically to abstract or new contexts. Thus the verb “to grasp” started its career in talk about physical actions (‘He grasped a stone to throw’) and was then put to new use in talk about intellectual achievements (‘He grasped the implications of the claim’).⁴ For English, such metaphorical extension is well documented for a wide range of abstract domains of discourse, including talk about argument, communication, emotions, intellectual activity and economic development.⁵ A debate rages in cognitive linguistics about whether such extension occurs in all natural languages. But it is safe to say that it occurs in very many languages, often with comparatively slight differences between languages which are otherwise very different. For example, English and many Australian Aboriginal languages alike recruit a host of perception-terms for talk about intellectual activities and achievements; but where English employs terms for visual perception, most Aboriginal languages employ terms for auditory perception—where the Englishman ‘sees’ a point or implication, the Aborigine ‘hears’ it.⁶ Metaphorical extension is the single most important process whereby languages become equipped to deal with the abstract. Much of the ‘mental vocabulary’ of the major languages of philosophy (English and German, Latin and Ancient Greek) is recruited in this way from the domains of grasping and seeing, manipulation and perception.⁷

Typically, metaphorical extension is wholesale: The use of a whole set of related terms is extended from the initial (‘source’) domain to a new (‘target’) domain. Consider, for example, the plethora of perception-related terms recruited for talk about the intellectual accomplishment of understanding actions:

It is clear or obscure to me why you did what you did, according to whether or not I manage to see any reasons for acting that way. I may look for reasons where these are hidden or be blind to reasons that are in plain view. An illuminating explanation which throws new light on your action will let me see reasons I had previously overlooked, and thus get a fuller picture of these reasons, or at least let me catch some glimpse of them, where I was previously completely in the dark. For instance, a fresh look at the situation to which you responded may reveal threats in whose light your action no longer looks as out of character as it did at first sight. Those brighter than others will find it easier to make out such reasons, and point them out to those dim-wits who need to have the reasons shown to them. Now that his account has opened my eyes and lets me see your true reasons, I finally see your action in the right light. To see it aright, I had to look at it from another perspective.

More generally, terms initially applied in talk about visual search came to be employed, wholesale, in talk about goal-directed intellectual efforts: efforts to solve problems, answer questions, explain facts, events or actions, etc.

Metaphorical uses of words are commonly thought to involve poetic creativity or license (if only at the point of their inception). However, at any rate the wholesale extension now at issue involves more logical rigour than poetic license and a rather fettered sort of creativity. It is systematic almost to the point of being boring (or beautiful, depending upon your perspective). It derives metaphorical senses for ever more expressions from a basic mapping which maps an element (object, property or relation) of the source domain (here: visual search) onto an element of the target domain (here: intellectual effort). In the present source domain, the principal achievement is that of finding, which takes the shape of seeing what one is looking for. The principal achievements in the target domain are those of knowing and understanding. To understand something is to know its reasons or causes or whatever explains it. Seeing and knowing therefore are the most basic elements of the respective domains. The ‘basic mapping’ links them:

(1) S sees x → S knows x

Further mappings can be obtained by simple logical and modal operations. By replacing “sees” by “knows” in otherwise topic-neutral sentence-frames (‘base extension’), we obtain:

(2) S does not see x → S does not know x

(3) It is possible (for S) to see x, i.e., x is visible (for S)→ It is possible (for S) to know x

(4) It is not possible (for S) to see x, i.e., x is invisible (for S) → It is not possible (for S) to know x

(5) X makes it possible (for S) to see y, i.e., x makes y visible (for S) → X makes it possible (for S) to know y

(6) X makes it impossible (for S) to see y, i.e., x makes y invisible (to S) → X makes it impossible (for S) to know y

(7) S tries to get to see x, i.e., S looks for x → S tries to get to know x

The terms on both sides can also be adverbially qualified, as in:

(3’) It is easily possible (for S) to see x, i.e., x is readily visible (for S) → It is easily possible (for S) to know x

In cognitive linguistics, such mappings of several related ‘models’ (to the left of the arrows) onto several related ‘targets’ (to the right of the arrows) are called ‘conceptual metaphors’. For example, lines (1) to (7) and their progeny (like 3’ above or 8 below), constitute the conceptual metaphor ‘Intellectual Effort as Visual Search’.

Inferences known as metaphorical entailments⁸ seize on familiar facts about the source domain and on such mappings. Their conclusions yield further mappings which extend the conceptual metaphor, or new metaphorical senses which are ‘motivated’ by those mappings and ‘realise’ that metaphor. The source-domain facts can be either empirical or conceptual (consequences of definitions or explanations of meaning). For example: Until the mid-19th century, the adjective “evident” was literally used to mean ‘distinctly visible, conspicuous’. This explanation and mapping (3’)—treated as an implication—jointly entail a conclusion that introduces a still familiar metaphorical sense of this term:

If x is evident, then x is distinctly/easily visible.

If x is easily visible, it is easily knowable.

If x is evident, then x is easily knowable.

Or take the trivial empirical fact that when things are bright and shining they are (by and large) readily visible. Together with the same mapping, this yields the metaphorical sense of the adjective “clear”, applied until the mid-19th century to physical objects which are bright or shining (‘teeth as clear as ivory’):⁹ If a fact or cause, reason or consequence is clear, it is easily knowable (and if statements or explanations are clear, they are easy to understand, i.e. their meaning or content is easy to get to know).

Through such entailments, the same mapping may motivate the extension of several related terms. In early modern English, the term “obvious” was literally used to mean ‘situated in the way, positioned in front of or opposite to, facing’. When things are situated right in our way, they are readily visible. This trivial fact about the source domain and mapping (3’) jointly allow us to say that facts etc. that are easily knowable and ‘perfectly clear and manifest, such as common sense might suggest’ are obvious—a metaphorical use established since the mid-17^th century:

If x is obvious (stands right in our way), then x is well visible.

If x is well visible, then x is easily knowable.

If x is obvious, then x is easily knowable.

In the same way, mapping (5) above facilitates several metaphorical entailments which seize on several different trivial facts about how things can be made visible, and thus motivate talk of people, investigations or explanations ‘exposing’, ‘unearthing’, ‘revealing’, ‘illuminating’ or ‘opening our eyes to’ reasons or causes, facts or events—whatever we try to get to know or understand:

If x sheds light on y, then x makes y visible (in the dark).

If x makes y visible (in any way), then x makes it easy to get to know y.

If x sheds light on y, then x makes it easy to get to know y.

In the same way, again, we can seize on mapping (6) and the truism that things are hard or impossible to see in the dark, to extend the verbs “obscure” and “obfuscate” with their related adjectives from their literal meanings ‘to make dark, to deprive of light or brightness’ and ‘to cast into darkness or shadow’, respectively, to the metaphorical senses we employ when criticising speakers for obscuring facts or implications with obfuscatory rhetoric which makes it hard to grow aware of those facts or implications.

To recruit a source-domain expression for use in...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: SOME PERPLEXING DISCOVERIES
• PART I: PHILOSOPHICAL PICTURES
• PART II: PHILOSOPHICAL DELUSIONS
• PART III. THERAPEUTIC PHILOSOPHY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY