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WHAT IS A PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM?P.M.S. Hacker
To what extent are philosophical questions andproblems like
other kinds of questions and problems,such as the those tackled by
the physical sciences?Peter Hacker suggests that the problems of
philosophyare conceptual, not factual, and that their solution or
iresolution is more a contribution to a particular form of
5*understanding than to our knowledge of the world. *"
"D' 5-
The term 'philosophy' dignifies the work of many thinkers.
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IIOne might compare the question 'What is a philosophical
problem?' with 'What is a problem in chemistry (or
physics,biology, or economics)?'
First, it is striking that the latter questions are not
themselvesproblems in their respective disciplines. The question of
what isa chemical problem is not itself a chemical problem, and
does
oo not call for an answer produced by a chemical experiment.^"
But the question of what a philosophical problem is is itself a^
philosophical problem. It has preoccupied philosophers in the West
from Plato and Aristotle to Russell and Wittgenstein. The^ answers
they have given have been varied and conflicting.Q For the very
concept of philosophy is problematic in a way inQ_ which the
concepts of, e.g., physics and chemistry are not,
Q and the temptations to misconstrue the nature of
philosophical.U enquiry are legion.- Second, the correct answers to
problems in other fields ofO intellectual endeavour enlarge human
knowledge. CorrectO^ answers to questions in physics or chemistry,
in biology or!c psychology, in history or economics are permanent
contribu-2" tions to our knowledge of the world we live in, either
by way^ oftheoryand explanation, or by way of fact, or both. If we
turnO to any of these disciplines and ask for their achievements,
we^ can be referred to whole libraries which elaborate them.
But
if we turn to philosophy, the response is different. To be
sure,we may be referred to a host of books written by the
deepestthinkers in our culture over the last twenty-five centuries.
But ifwe ask to be referred to philosophical knowledge,
knowledgethat can be compared to that achieved by the natural
andmoral sciences, we are bound to be disappointed. For thereis
nothing comparable that can be given to us there is noestablished
and indisputable philosophical theory about any-thing, in the sense
in which there are numerous incontestablephysical, chemical and
biological theories. There is no corpusof philosophical facts that
one might look up in a philosophicalhandbook, as one may consult a
handbook in chemistry orhistory to check one's facts.
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This state of affairs might be variously explained. One viewis
that although philosophy is indeed a sector in the questfor
knowledge, it has 'only just recently struggled out of itsearly
stage into maturity'. Accordingly, despite a 2,500 yearadolescence,
we can at last expect a flood of philosophicaltruths and
well-confirmed theories tomorrow. This view isunconvincing.
Philosophers have repeated it from century tocentury, as one great
genius after the other thought that he had iat last found the key
to unlocking the secrets of philosophy, 5*and announced that we
were about to enter the Promised *"Land. But each such
announcement, no matter whether by -QDescartes (and his new Method
of Doubt) or Locke (and his ^ 'new Way of Ideas), by Kant (and his
Copemican Revolution)
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the proper province of philosophy. Similarly, psychology hasnot
produced answers to questions concerning the essentialnature of the
mind, personal identity, the essence of thought,affection and
volition on the contrary, they remain as stub-bornly philosophical
as ever. Moreover, as these subjectsbecame differentiated from
philosophy, far from diminishingit, they spawned new philosophical
subjects, namely philoso-
O phy of physics and philosophy of psychology. The Jamesian^
conception is inadequate to explain the poverty of philosophy
qua cognitive discipline.E0 inQ A more promising view is that
philosophy is not a cognitiveO^ discipline at all. So it cannot be
its business to make discov-
Q eries about how things are in reality. It is not a quest for
newU knowledge or for explanatory and predictive theories such as-
^ we find in the sciences. This radical suggestion excludes theO
idea that, like each science, philosophy has a special sub-_O
ject-matter of its own with respect to which it strives to attainZl
knowledge. Hence it excludes the thought that philosophy is^" the
most general of the sciences concerned with the mostQj general
facts in the universe, or that philosophy is concernedO with
(Platonic) Ideas that underlie all being or with discovering^
(Husserlian) Essences, or unfolding (Kantian) synthetic a
priori
principles. A fortiori it excludes the idea that philosophy
com-petes with the sciences in making empirical discoveries.
Philosophy aims at a distinctive form of understanding.
Ofcourse, it would be absurd to deny that the sciences are aimedat
understanding the empirical phenomena they investigate.They seek
for an understanding of why certain facts are asthey are. They
explain their data by deduction from theoryor by means of
aetiology, or both. This is not the form ofunderstanding which
philosophy strives to attain. It strives toapprehend not
connections between facts (or derivation offacts from explanatory
theory), but connections between con-cepts; and, since the role of
concepts lies in their contributionto thoughts or propositions,
logico-grammatical connectionsbetween propositions. That
apprehension is derived not from
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(empirically confirmed) theory, but from description of
concep-tual articulations. These conceptual articulations are
manifestin the rules for the use of words, which are exhibited in
thepractices of the competent speaker.
The rules with which philosophy is concerned are rulesfor the
use of expressions no less than are those which thedescriptive
grammarian tabulates. But they are by and largenot the kinds of
syntactical rules which interest grammarians. iThey are, to be
sure, typically concerned with the meanings of g*expressions but
not after the manner of the lexicographer. *"The lexicographer is
concerned with tabulating the rules for the -TQuse of a word
(explanations of its meaning) which will assist ^the ignorant in
understanding sentences in which it occurs and
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over whether it is consciousness that characterizes the mindand
whether there is something which it is like to be conscious and
these are not answerable by experiment. Some ques-tions are
patently not scientific, e.g. 'Do universal exist or
onlyparticulars?', 'Can one prove that God exists?', 'Do
numbers(classes, ethical values) exist?' or 'How is knowledge of
theexternal world (of other minds, the past, the future)
possible?',
CN 'Why can nothing be both red and green all over?', 'What is^
the nature of logical necessity?'^ These questions, which are
philosophical, are evidently not amenable to resolution by
scientific experiment or theory.Q But they appear to be about the
objective nature of things.Q Hence it is evident why philosophy is
commonly thought toO^ be a cognitive discipline a form of
super-physics. It seems
-Q that physics investigates the empirical contingencies of theU
world, while philosophy investigates the a priori necessary-
structure of the world.O It is true that philosophical questions
are a priori, i.e. they^ are to be solved or dissolved
independently of experience, by1c a priori reflection and argument.
It is, however, mistaken to2" suppose that philosophy investigates
the necessary (or 'meta-G> physical') structure of reality for
there is no such thing. WhatO appears a super-physically necessary
feature of the world is^ actually an illusion generated by the
norms of representa-
tion that determine our forms of description of reality.
Whenphilosophical questions take on such deceptive appearances,the
task of philosophy is to dispel the illusion. It must showhow this
illusion is generated by misunderstandings of theconceptual
structures we deploy in describing how things are.So, for example,
'space and time form a unity', 'every eventhas a cause',
'substances persist through change' are notdescriptions of reality,
but norms of description.
Other philosophical questions take the form of questionsabout
the nature and essence of things, e.g. of mind or mat-ter, of
perception and perceptual qualities, of goodness andbeauty. These
too appear to be about the language-independ-ent nature of things.
But no empirical investigation can answerthese questions, even
though, as noted, there may be parallel
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scientific ones. Rather they are to be answered by
conceptualclarification, by describing the network of logical
relationshipswhich are constitutive of the concept in question.
Philosophi-cal questions about the nature of knowledge, for
example,are requests for clarification of the conceptual
connections,compatibilities and incompatibilities between knowledge
andtruth, belief, grounds and evidence, memory, imagination,
per-ception and so on connections which ramify throughout our -
iwhole conceptual scheme. =
Not all conceptual questions call for the systematic descrip- *
"tion of conceptual reticulations over a given domain. In some
-Qcases, the questions rest upon misconceived presuppositions.
^They do not need to be answered, but to be dissolved by (Qbringing
their presuppositions to light and showing them to Qbe
misconceived. So, for example, the questions 'How do we ^know of
the existence of the external world?' or 'What do the propositions
of logic (or mathematics) describe?' or 'How can K>we understand
sentences we have never heard before?' areconfused. They do not
need answers, but rather deep analyticprobing that will disclose
their presuppositions.
In other cases, the answers to the questions are platitu-dinous.
For example, we know what other people think andfeel because they
give expression to their thoughts and feel-ings in speech and
action. But this platitudinous answer isinconsistent with apparent
conceptual commitments, e.g. thatwe cannot really know how others
think and feel, becauseany inference from their behaviour is always
shaky, merelyinductive, or analogical, or a hypothetical inference
to thebest explanation of the overt movements. Here
philosophicalachievement consists in disentangling the knots in our
under-standing of our conceptual commitments which stand in theway
of seeing such platitudes as perfectly correct.
In yet others, achievement consists in shaking oneself freeof a
misleading paradigm of explanation, derived perhaps fromscience (as
in postulating entities of a certain kind in order toexplain
phenomena, e.g. monads, simple natures, Tractatussimple objects).
Or it may consist in liberating oneself fromthe mesmerizing
influence of a misguided analogy, derived
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perhaps from a superficially similar linguistic form (e.g. as
inholding 'exists' is a predicate like 'thinks'; or that having a
painis a form of logically non-transferable ownership, as having
apenny is a form of transferable ownership; or that feeling a
painand feeling a pin are both forms of perception; or that
mentalimages are 'just like' physical images, only mental).
Illumination comes from clarification of the conceptual
struc-"vj- tures we employ, from a perspicuous representation of
the0X1
relevant rules for the use of the problematic expression, and^
from a description of the position the relevant concept holds
within the conceptual network.
Q^ Philosophy, then, has a concern with elucidating the uses-p
of words. But its concerns differ from those of the grammar-U ian.
It is guided not by pedagogy or by the requirement for- a
systematized overview of the syntax of a language, but byO the
kinds of problems it confronts. For those problems are_O solved,
resolved or dissolved by conceptual clarification and!c by a priori
argument.2" Nor are the words which capture the attention of
philoso-fl* phers of any special interest to grammarians or
lexicographers.O They do not dwell long on 'sensation' and
'perception', on^ 'know' and 'believe', or on 'act' and 'omit'. Nor
do they have
any special concern with the categorial concepts which
sopreoccupy philosophers, such as material object, materialstuff,
space, time, event, state, process and cause or evenwith such
general concepts as lie at the heart of much phi-losophy, e.g.
person, mind, perceptual quality, good and evil,truth and
falsehood.
Philosophy's interest is typically with categorial, general
orpivotal concepts that play a structural, or at any rate a
centralrole in our thought. Accordingly, their forms shed light on
con-ceptual difficulties that may arise anywhere over wide rangesof
discourse. They include, to be sure, concepts and concept-types
presupposed by the sciences hence the venerableidea that philosophy
is more general and fundamental thanthe sciences. More specific
concepts may also call for care-
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ful description, e.g. of pretending, or of colour exclusion.
Butthese are typically of interest either to resolve a specific
con-ceptual difficulty, e.g. 'Why can't a new born child
pretend?',or because of the light they shed on more general
problems,e.g. of the nature of (one form of) necessity.
Philosophical problems arise out of conceptual unclarity
andconfusion. The unclarity is a corollary of lack of an overview
ofa concept or field of interlocking concepts. It would be wrong to
- iclaim that these problems arise only 'when language is idling'.
g#The conceptual difficulties produced by physics, psychology, or
*"brain-neuroscience do not arise when language is idling, but
-Qwhen it is working, in particular when it is working, e.g.,
across =5"categorially distinct domains (energy and matter, the
mental ^and the behavioural, the neural and the psychological) the
Qlogical relations between which is fiercely difficult to survey.
^
The confusion stems from many sources. One primary source is the
misleading features of a language, e.g. analogies 10in language
between forms of expressions which actually havevery different uses
(geometrical theorems look like descrip-tions of spatial relations,
but are norms of description; ascrip-tions of understanding
resemble ascriptions of mental statesbut are of abilities; 'the
mind' looks as if it fulfils an analogousrole to 'the brain', but
does not). There are many other sources,e.g. analogies from the
sciences or from mathematics, whichlead us to ask misconceived
questions, or to answer concep-tual questions on the wrong model;
the temptation to explainwhen only description of conceptual
connections is legitimate;a natural craving for generality when it
is inappropriate; aninability to detect our most basic
presuppositions on whichsome of our philosophical questions
rest.
VIAn overview of a conceptual field or some part thereof is
es-
sential to the solution or dissolution of any philosophical
prob-lem. Once the illuminating power of an overview is
understood,the investigation may assume an autonomous interest of
itsown. For there is no doubt that appropriately general
enquiryinto the ways our concepts and conceptual categories
hang
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together possesses its own fascination. We crave not only
tounderstand the world we live in, but also to grasp the
overallstructure of the way in which we conceive and understand
it.Philosophy, we may then say, has a Janus-faced character.On the
one hand, it is concerned with disentangling knots wetie in our
understanding, with dissolving conceptual confusionsin ordinary
human life, in philosophy and in the sciences. On
so the other, it is concerned with elucidating the
fundamental,structural components in our conceptual scheme.
Are we not reverting to a conception of philosophy as a
cognitive discipline, viz. one concerned with attaining knowl-i!2
edge of concepts and conceptual connections? That would0 be
misleading. The concepts under scrutiny are conceptsQ_ speakers of
the language already possess. If the description-Q of the features
of the concept or concept-type deviates fromU a competent speaker's
use, then the description is mistaken. For the characterization of
a concept is, implicitly or explicitly, aO specification of the
rules for the use of the term that expresses_O the concept. The
connections which philosophy articulates are!c connections which
any speaker of the language must have2" grasped in order to satisfy
the criteria of understanding for anyQ> instance of the
concept-type in question. So the descriptionO of the conceptual
articulations for which philosophy strives^ cannot be new
information in the sense in which science
produces new information. These descriptions, like thoseof the
descriptive grammarian, are not news to be greetedwith amazement,
but general characterizations to be met byreflective recognition
and realization. The fact of recognitionwarrants denying that
philosophy attains new knowledge. Thefact of realization may give
limited support to the idea that itdoes, in a rather special sense,
add to knowledge. However,it would be more misleading than
illuminating to count phi-losophy among the cognitive
disciplines.
VIIThe picture of philosophy and its problems which I have
sketched out is one conception of the subject. It is, I
believe,appropriate for theoretical philosophy. So it can be
extended to
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the philosophies of the special sciences. Although many of
thequestions they pose are different from those above
discussed,they are concerned with conceptual questions and
relation-ships, with types and structures of explanation and
relationsbetween types of explanation. But with regard to
practicalphilosophy, i.e. to ethics, political and legal
philosophy, it isonly part of the tale. These departments of
philosophy areconcerned with more than conceptual elucidation. Why
that imust be so is itself a deep philosophical problem. g*
7Tiv l-n
IX -QCan there then be progress in philosophy? There cannot ^
"
be progress in the sense in which there is in the sciences, i.e.
conceptual differences are definitively identified,
conceptualconnections are rendered explicit, and confusions
dissolved.The progress often appears less than it is. Often the
distinc-tions drawn become so engrained that we no longer
recollectthat they were not always available, forget that the
articulatedifferentiation of certain concept-types,
proposition-types, orinference patterns has often been a hard-won
insight obtainedfrom philosophical reflection. So the progress that
has beenmade is not recognised for what it is. Similarly,
profoundlytempting philosophical confusions and fallacies are
revealedfor what they are and some of these sink permanently
fromsight and are forgotten.
However, the progress may sometimes appear greater thanit is. A
conceptual field may be partially illuminated for onegeneration,
only to be cast into shadow again. For cultural in-novations occur
(e.g. the invention of the computer, of function-theoretic logic)
and novel scientific theories are introduced,(e.g. quantum
mechanics, the Indeterminacy Principle, rela-tivity theory). These
may cast long shadows over conceptualarticulations previously
clarified, requiring old ground to betraversed afresh from a new
angle (e.g., the need to clarify
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again the concept of mind in response to the temptation
toconceive of the human mind on a computational model).
There may also be regress. Unlike the sciences, which
arehierarchical, and which build upon antecedently
acquiredknowledge and confirmed theory, philosophy is 'flat'.
Hencedistinctions can be lost from sight, methods of clarification
mayfall into disuse and the skills they require may vanish.
Con-
co ceptual confusions are comparable to diseases diseasesof the
intellect. They may be cured for one generation, butthe virus may
undergo mutation and reappear in even more
j virulent form. So, for example, 'internal representations'
are. merely mutant sense-impressions; 'qualia' are WittgensteinianQ
private objects in new guise. So a new cure must be found,O^
appropriately adjusted to the mutation and its host.
Q The work of philosophy can have no end, for the forms ofU
misunderstanding of conceptual connections are endless and
unpredictable. The ground has to be ploughed over again andO again.
Knowledge can be transmitted from one generation_O to another. But
understanding has to be achieved afresh byx : each
generation.Q.k.
* Peter Hacker is a Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford.UD