My Philosophy
A postmodernist is a person who claims that texts have an almost indeterminate number of interpretations and who then leaves a note on his/her refrigerator requesting a pepperoni pizza for supper.
-Walker Percy
I want to say something about my philosophical views. Sometime during December '07, I suddenly had an insight that made philosophy seem much clearer to me, and that made certain philosophical questions, which had previously frightened me, seem misguided or silly. Maybe I'm the only one to whom this "insight" has not always been obvious, but I feel like I should have it laid out in writing somewhere, so if it does prove controversial I can direct people to the whole thing rather than blathering at them for half an hour. This is really freaking long, so be warned.
"The only thing that philosophy can do is formalize our intuitions." That's the sentence that passed through my head sometime during last winter break. It soon seemed to me that it was an accurate and important proposition. Let me try to explain what I mean by it.
What is the first thing?
What is philosophy? Many people think that philosophy, properly done, is defined to be rigorous, scrupulous reasoning about what we should believe and what we should do. Of course, we have a way of thinking about things in everyday life, which is not "philosophical." We may say, "you shouldn't do that, it's wrong," or "I believe this, it just makes sense." But "philosophers" have come up with dire paradoxes that should kill all our comfortable faith in our common-sense methods. If we were really serious about life, and not the sort of flawed philistines that we inevitably are, we would use some entirely unrelated, esoteric method--one derived in a skeptical fashion from mysterious, exciting entities called "first principles."
In case this seems like too much of a smug caricature to reflect anyone's actual beliefs, keep in mind that it was the way I thought until recently. I don't know for sure, but I get the impression that many philosophers, and people with affinity for philosophy, do think this way.
But--keeping with the skeptical ethos of this thing called "philosophy"--how can we separate the sorts of thinking that are sloppy from those that are scrupulous? Certainly, a method of thought isn't scrupulous just because it has been called philosophy. It has to be the other way around, that we should call methods "philosophy" when we have recognized that they are particularly scrupulous. But how do we make this choice? And are the things which we have called "philosophy" really philosophy, in the sense just described?
Well, let me put it to you this way. At some point, for surely noble reasons, we have decided that we want to think scrupulously and rigorously. It is important to note that however we have come to this conclusion, we haven't come to it from nothing. When we get together and say "we want to think scrupulously," we have already been thinking quite a lot, scrupulously or not. Otherwise we would probably be dead. In particular, before philosophy enters the picture, we have each been wandering around the world, talking to each other, and generally having conscious experiences. The philosophers among you may already be squinting askance at me: "How do you really know that you have been doing such things? What is 'the world'? What is a 'conscious experience'?" These are not bad questions. But they are strange questions, and there must have been a time in your life when you did not ask them. You may have began asking these sorts of questions as a curious child, or you may have only started to ask them after being introduced to philosophy. But certainly, it is possible to call these questions into question, to wonder whether they are good, or even coherent, things to ask. The same is not true for the fact that you eat and sleep and have something that tends (for better or worse) to go by the name "conscious experience." You cannot choose to run off to a land of abstraction at will. No matter how far your philosophical questioning leads, you are still confronted on a regular basis by mundane phenomena like sunlight and hunger. (If you have found some way to get around this, well, please tell me about it!)
When we get together and say "we want to think scrupulously," what are we really saying? We have already been doing some thinking before we made this assertion, the kind of thinking that lets us negotiate with the world in such a way that we remain alive. It is that thinking that we want to make scrupulous. We are not asking for a God somewhere to hand us stone tablets inscribed with entirely new methods, and for Him to say, "this is real thinking." Even if we were to ask such a thing, the tablets have so far not been forthcoming, so we have to make do on our own. The only thing we could reasonably mean by "we want to think scrupulously" is that we want to take the kind of common-sense thinking we have already been doing, and make it scrupulous (whatever we happen to mean by that). I will refer to the-kind-of-thinking-we-have-already-been-doing by the name of "intuitions." And I will use "formalize" as a synonym for "make scrupulous."
Some details of this project will be worked out in following sections. So far, I hope I have made clear what I mean by the sentence "The only thing that philosophy can do is formalize our intuitions." That is just what philosophy is. There isn't much else that it could be.
The view from a very particular place
But who, in reality, is this "we" that I keep talking about? Whose intuitions are "our" intuitions? If we are to judge from the way philosophy has often been done, the answer must be "the usually rich, usually male people who have been able to become well-educated and publish philosophy that is widely read." I have not read very much philosophy, but in the works that I have read, the reasoning sometimes proceeds like this: The philosopher, comfortably ensconced in the ivory tower, attempts to write seemingly interesting statements that cannot be controversial because they are logical tautologies. (More on the focus on tautologies in a moment.) Eventually, he must confront the fact that tautologies will not get him where he wants to go. He sighs, takes a long sip of black coffee, and writes: "It seems intuitive that . . ." It, whatever it is, certainly seems intuitive to him, and when he reflects on his colleagues (who come largely from the same background that he does) he supposes that it will seem intuitive to them, too. His supposition is correct, and his article is published.
Among philosophers, it is generally agreed that the rules of logical deduction are always safe territory for scrupulous thinkers. Having written "P implies Q," one can write "Not-Q implies Not-P" without prefacing with "it is intuitive that . . ." Of course, the rules of deduction are also a formalized intuition, if a very basic one. In popular culture "logic" may be the esoteric province of Mr. Spock and MIT students, but if someone really did not grasp and believe in the laws of deduction, they would surely soon die (probably of dehydration). Obviously we need more than the rules of deduction to produce scrupulous thought, though. Deduction doesn't tell us how to stay alive, for example, simply because its rules never mention "staying alive." You can play with Ps and Qs all you want, but you'll never reach an arrangement and then exclaim, "ah, this is the scrupulous way of thinking about sunlight and hunger!" We have to let other intuitions enter the discussion, ones that show their true colors more openly. But to some philosophical types, there is something dirty about this. It smacks, they think, of the common-sense reasoning that we only use because we use because we are not serious enough. Intuitions are included, but with a sense of embarrassment, and little fanfare is made of them. Ideally, the reader should not believe that such shameful practices could constitute any large part of the argument being made. For this very reason, it is not often asked to whom this-or-that is intuitive. The whole subject is indecorous. When philosophers do not reflect on who it is that has the intuitions, their whole project inevitably becomes a project of formalizing their intuitions, and maybe those of a small and similar audience. Those who aspire to "the view from nowhere" end up advancing the view from a very particular and predictable place.
So, who is it really that has the intuitions? The only sensible answer I can come up with is that it is all of humanity. It's my understanding that all humans who undergo normal cognitive development are capable of considering questions of philosophy, and of what it means to "think scrupulously." Surely some people don't want to think scrupulously, but that could just be a passing phase. And in any case, those people are also thinking people, or they'd be dead. If we really want to formalize human thinking, then we should include all the human thinking that goes on around us, even that of our buddies who aren't so committed to the formalization project. We live in one world, and we can recognize that each member of that world follows some set of thought-rules. I think we should try to understand the thought-rules that our fellow humans are following, no matter who they are. We (meaning the reader and I) don't have any more claim to the notion of "thought" than anyone else does.
This is a very strange idea. It says that "mere" psychology answers philosophical questions, and that the model for philosophy should be cross-cultural studies of human nature, not ivory-tower scribbling. It says that cognitive psychology is epistemology, insofar as it describes how people reach the stuff that intuitive reasoning calls "knowledge." It says that moral psychology is moral philosophy, insofar as it describes how people make the judgments that intuitive reasoning calls "moral."
What does it mean to "formalize" the intuitions of humanity? As I said, logical deduction is one very simple formalized intuition. It is one that, excluding certain details that I don't really want to discuss here, just about everybody can agree on. So we should ask that our rules for thinking-and-doing be compatible with the rules of deduction. For example, we shouldn't have one rule telling us to do one thing, and another telling us to do the opposite. Then the system does not tell us what to think-and-do, and in that case we have undoubtedly failed.
When two intuitions contradict, which do we throw out? I don't know. It's a hard question.
For another thing, the rules must be ones that everyone can agree upon. This is based on the fact that, as far as I can tell, almost all people act as though there is some single truth, and that ideally everyone would be in agreement about it. The same statements can't be both true-when-Bob-says-them and false-when-Linda-says-them. Of course some people disagree, but those are always people who have some education in philosophy. What they say doesn't reflect their intuitions, it reflects something else that they have learned in a book somewhere.
I think most people can agree that these are good basic standards for making our thinking "scrupulous." Note that even on these basic standards, it is probable that many intuitions will have to be given up. I am not offering a free pass to trust anything that comes into your head. For example, nationalism looks like it has to go. At first glance, this is not obvious. Couldn't we have a rule that says "every person should support the country they belong to (whatever 'belong to' means)"? But look carefully--that isn't what nationalists say. They don't say "it is good for each to support their country," they say "it is good for each to support my country." And that is not something everyone can agree on--the data about "human intuitions" on this matter consists of a bunch of distinct regions like "everyone should support Britain," "everyone should support China," and so on. There's no way to purify this to one good rule, except maybe by arbitrarily picking a country.
What Problem of Induction?
As I said earlier, I am scared that this will seem obvious to everyone but me. So it will probably be valuable to show how this approach defuses certain philosophical "problems," ones mulled over by real adults with academic positions and everything.
You may not have heard the news, but prediction is in trouble. As we said, deductive reasoning is kosher, but the sophisticated know that there is something wrong with inductive reasoning--the kind of reasoning that goes from "the sun has risen every day until now" to "the sun will rise tomorrow." Although this forms the basis of natural science, it is a dirty, bad kind of thinking. One person knowledgeable in philosophy told me that "we can't know that induction doesn't work, but we can't know that it works either." Another told me about a philosopher who said that, although we might enjoy following our natural inclination towards induction, we had no way of knowing if it was really the sensible thing to do or not.
What could they possibly be thinking? The argument usually goes like this. Why do you think induction works? Well, it's always worked for me in the past. I'm not dead, and I have all these techno-gadgets that are based on science, which is based on induction. But ha! You're using induction right there! Without induction, you don't know that induction won't suddenly stop working, just the way the sun might suddenly stop rising. QED.
But why would we believe anything in the first place? Because it formalizes some intuition. Induction is undoubtedly an intuition. Everyone uses it, even the people who don't think they should. The argument above only attacks a faulty, question-begging justification, and doesn't get into the it's-an-intuition justification, even though that's the only justification we have for anything. If philosophers don't notice that omission, something must have gone wrong with the way they think.
Oh, but that's only the old problem of induction. There's a New Problem of Induction these days, and it has fun words! It goes like this: define "X is grue" as "X is green if seen before time t, or blue if seen after time t" (for an arbitrary time t). And define "bleen" as "blue before t, or green after t." Before t, all emeralds we had seen were green, but they were also grue. Why did we make the inductive inference "emeralds will keep on being green," and not "emeralds will keep on being grue"? The answer is very simple: because everyone does. The argument is more subtle than this, though. It says that we can make no meaningful distinction between "green" and "grue" with which to allow "green-like" terms but eschew "grue-like" ones. After all, "green" can be defined as "grue before t, or bleen after t"--the situation seems symmetrical. But certainly people use some rule to distinguish the two. No one, as far as I know, has ever said "hmm, that nearby tree is December-12th-grue, so I expect it'll be turning blue in a few days!" We cannot be faced with a real contradiction of intuitions here, because no one actually has "grue-like" intuitions, however we may end up boxing in the concept "grue-like." We can't pretend to respect intuitions, and then suddenly ambush them partway through, and ask them to justify themselves on some external terms. We have to swallow them whole.
I have my own ideas about what "grue-like" means, but this is already getting too long. I'll just end by saying two things. First, I think science is essentially a formalization of our induction intuition. Second, to my knowledge, the best description of how our induction intuition works (and therefore, what science should do) goes by the name "Bayesian probability." Read all about it here (warning, lots of Javascript).
The starry heavens above and the moral law within
Now we reach a more titillating example of misguided philosophy. The delightfully named Argument From Queerness says that objective ethical facts (truths that read like "thou shalt not kill") are not likely to exist, since they would be so different from all the other facts we have discovered. What are these other facts? They are facts about "the natural physical world that science investigates," of course.
J. L. Mackie, the argument's inventor, is a philosopher generous enough to have swallowed the idea of induction. Science has discovered the underlying predicates (the really green-like ones, so to speak) that we can predict will continue to hold true, and in doing so, it taught us all kinds of fantastic things. But when it comes to ethics, Mackie says, "wait, this doesn't look anything like all my precious scientific facts! It looks all foreign and weird!" But why didn't he respond the same way to induction? Before we had said "induction is an intuition, so we will accept it," the sorts of truths that science discovered must have looked queer, too. Of course, not having accepted induction, we wouldn't be able to follow the Argument From Queerness, since it itself is inductive. But the point is that we have to treat all intuitions about truth-finding methods in the same way. We can't accept one, then come to another--with no less claim to validity--and say, "but this isn't like the one we already have."
I think the Argument From Queerness does reflect an intuition that many educated people have. They feel that they know a lot of "is-type" facts, from science or something like it. They interact with these every day, and see their consequences. But "ought-type" facts are in a separate universe. We can't touch them, and it seems hard to say when we have and haven't accurately found them. But without induction, we would not be sure of is-facts, either--we'd see their consequences, but we wouldn't be able to extrapolate them beyond the present. We have to make that "induction is OK" leap for them to seem like obvious facts, and likewise we have to make a "morals are OK" leap before morals can seem anything but queer.
I said that the above was an intuition of educated people. Shouldn't I respect that like other intuitions? Well, yes, but I'd guess the number of people who buy into the Argument From Queerness is very small, and even smaller among people who have not read philosophy. All in all, the basic programming for human "thinking" probably involves some specific moral claims, and we must respect that.
If you're interested in the kinds of moral intuitions that could be universal, you should check out Marc Hauser's work in moral psychology.
Repopulating the world
In the end, are our common-sense notions frighteningly endangered by philosophy? Maybe, but I don't think we know yet, not until philosophy has based itself on psychological inquiry into human nature and not on the intuitions of a few unusual people. We've seen that a few arguments, which were supposed to endanger common sense, don't do so upon closer inspection. The "philosophical" worldview once looked imposing and bizarre, a twisted psychedelic view of truth, but now it looks much friendlier.
Of course, our common-sense notions might still be in danger. But we must remember that we are trying to preserve our common-sense notions. Every time we have to toss out an intuition, we have lost a little bit of our original hope--that we can think scrupulously, and still be doing something recognizable as "thinking." If philosophical thought looks nothing like common-sense thought, that might be reason to call into question the project of formalizing intuitions, rather than calling common-sense thought into question. We have to remember that we got into this business by free choice, and can withdraw from it if we choose.
What sorts of intuitions might we be able to successfully formalize? Donald Brown's list of human universals seems like a good start, although I don't know how controversial the list is within anthropology. Some of the terms on the list might be disturbing, depending on who you are. We find, for example, "belief in supernatural/religion." Like many items on the list, this is ambiguous (what is the "supernatural" exactly?), but it is interesting, seeing that many people believe either science or philosophy has made religious belief unjustifiable. Of course, science does seem to have found certain facts that contradict certain religious claims (age of the Earth, etc.) But those notions come only from the formalization of a particular intuition, namely induction. When these go against notions that come from another intuition, how do we decide which wins? I don't know. I suspect we will find more reason to keep science than to keep religion in most cases, but I stress that this is not obvious.
More generally, the colorful sorts of beliefs that appear on Brown's list suggest that we may end up repopulating the world with all sorts of different facts. Scientific facts lie in one corner, religious and superstitious facts lie in another, and ethical facts lie in a third, with weird hybrids strewn in between. Conflicts between these sectors may have to be negotiated by a complicated sort of legal system. It's messy, but it's also how people actually think, and that's what we care about. Intellectuals have thought for too long that a philosophical worldview would be an ascetic, stripped-down sort of thing, retaining little of the rich world that the average person walks through every day. It could be that way, but it's wrong to say we know.
I'll end with two questions.
If everyone agreed with you, wouldn't the people in charge of studying human nature get on a huge power trip? They get to determine Truth, once and for all, or at least until anyone wants to try the arduous process of replicating their data. Who says they won't fudge things here and there?
That's a perfectly good point. I'm not saying one way or another whether we should actually undertake such a study of human nature, in this imperfect world. But even if everyone agreed that that would be the way to do things, if we actually could do it right . . . that would be a big change.
But if we may never actually study this stuff, what should we believe in the meantime?
I really don't know. A version of common sense tempered by logic wherever it can be, I guess. That doesn't sound very radical, but the "common sense" part is radical in some circles.
Edit: Not too long after writing this post, I discovered the Experimental Philosophy paradigm. It turns out I'm not the only person who has been thinking along these lines! I recommend looking over the papers on that page -- some of them are really interesting.
-Walker Percy
I want to say something about my philosophical views. Sometime during December '07, I suddenly had an insight that made philosophy seem much clearer to me, and that made certain philosophical questions, which had previously frightened me, seem misguided or silly. Maybe I'm the only one to whom this "insight" has not always been obvious, but I feel like I should have it laid out in writing somewhere, so if it does prove controversial I can direct people to the whole thing rather than blathering at them for half an hour. This is really freaking long, so be warned.
"The only thing that philosophy can do is formalize our intuitions." That's the sentence that passed through my head sometime during last winter break. It soon seemed to me that it was an accurate and important proposition. Let me try to explain what I mean by it.
What is the first thing?
What is philosophy? Many people think that philosophy, properly done, is defined to be rigorous, scrupulous reasoning about what we should believe and what we should do. Of course, we have a way of thinking about things in everyday life, which is not "philosophical." We may say, "you shouldn't do that, it's wrong," or "I believe this, it just makes sense." But "philosophers" have come up with dire paradoxes that should kill all our comfortable faith in our common-sense methods. If we were really serious about life, and not the sort of flawed philistines that we inevitably are, we would use some entirely unrelated, esoteric method--one derived in a skeptical fashion from mysterious, exciting entities called "first principles."
In case this seems like too much of a smug caricature to reflect anyone's actual beliefs, keep in mind that it was the way I thought until recently. I don't know for sure, but I get the impression that many philosophers, and people with affinity for philosophy, do think this way.
But--keeping with the skeptical ethos of this thing called "philosophy"--how can we separate the sorts of thinking that are sloppy from those that are scrupulous? Certainly, a method of thought isn't scrupulous just because it has been called philosophy. It has to be the other way around, that we should call methods "philosophy" when we have recognized that they are particularly scrupulous. But how do we make this choice? And are the things which we have called "philosophy" really philosophy, in the sense just described?
Well, let me put it to you this way. At some point, for surely noble reasons, we have decided that we want to think scrupulously and rigorously. It is important to note that however we have come to this conclusion, we haven't come to it from nothing. When we get together and say "we want to think scrupulously," we have already been thinking quite a lot, scrupulously or not. Otherwise we would probably be dead. In particular, before philosophy enters the picture, we have each been wandering around the world, talking to each other, and generally having conscious experiences. The philosophers among you may already be squinting askance at me: "How do you really know that you have been doing such things? What is 'the world'? What is a 'conscious experience'?" These are not bad questions. But they are strange questions, and there must have been a time in your life when you did not ask them. You may have began asking these sorts of questions as a curious child, or you may have only started to ask them after being introduced to philosophy. But certainly, it is possible to call these questions into question, to wonder whether they are good, or even coherent, things to ask. The same is not true for the fact that you eat and sleep and have something that tends (for better or worse) to go by the name "conscious experience." You cannot choose to run off to a land of abstraction at will. No matter how far your philosophical questioning leads, you are still confronted on a regular basis by mundane phenomena like sunlight and hunger. (If you have found some way to get around this, well, please tell me about it!)
When we get together and say "we want to think scrupulously," what are we really saying? We have already been doing some thinking before we made this assertion, the kind of thinking that lets us negotiate with the world in such a way that we remain alive. It is that thinking that we want to make scrupulous. We are not asking for a God somewhere to hand us stone tablets inscribed with entirely new methods, and for Him to say, "this is real thinking." Even if we were to ask such a thing, the tablets have so far not been forthcoming, so we have to make do on our own. The only thing we could reasonably mean by "we want to think scrupulously" is that we want to take the kind of common-sense thinking we have already been doing, and make it scrupulous (whatever we happen to mean by that). I will refer to the-kind-of-thinking-we-have-already-been-doing by the name of "intuitions." And I will use "formalize" as a synonym for "make scrupulous."
Some details of this project will be worked out in following sections. So far, I hope I have made clear what I mean by the sentence "The only thing that philosophy can do is formalize our intuitions." That is just what philosophy is. There isn't much else that it could be.
The view from a very particular place
But who, in reality, is this "we" that I keep talking about? Whose intuitions are "our" intuitions? If we are to judge from the way philosophy has often been done, the answer must be "the usually rich, usually male people who have been able to become well-educated and publish philosophy that is widely read." I have not read very much philosophy, but in the works that I have read, the reasoning sometimes proceeds like this: The philosopher, comfortably ensconced in the ivory tower, attempts to write seemingly interesting statements that cannot be controversial because they are logical tautologies. (More on the focus on tautologies in a moment.) Eventually, he must confront the fact that tautologies will not get him where he wants to go. He sighs, takes a long sip of black coffee, and writes: "It seems intuitive that . . ." It, whatever it is, certainly seems intuitive to him, and when he reflects on his colleagues (who come largely from the same background that he does) he supposes that it will seem intuitive to them, too. His supposition is correct, and his article is published.
Among philosophers, it is generally agreed that the rules of logical deduction are always safe territory for scrupulous thinkers. Having written "P implies Q," one can write "Not-Q implies Not-P" without prefacing with "it is intuitive that . . ." Of course, the rules of deduction are also a formalized intuition, if a very basic one. In popular culture "logic" may be the esoteric province of Mr. Spock and MIT students, but if someone really did not grasp and believe in the laws of deduction, they would surely soon die (probably of dehydration). Obviously we need more than the rules of deduction to produce scrupulous thought, though. Deduction doesn't tell us how to stay alive, for example, simply because its rules never mention "staying alive." You can play with Ps and Qs all you want, but you'll never reach an arrangement and then exclaim, "ah, this is the scrupulous way of thinking about sunlight and hunger!" We have to let other intuitions enter the discussion, ones that show their true colors more openly. But to some philosophical types, there is something dirty about this. It smacks, they think, of the common-sense reasoning that we only use because we use because we are not serious enough. Intuitions are included, but with a sense of embarrassment, and little fanfare is made of them. Ideally, the reader should not believe that such shameful practices could constitute any large part of the argument being made. For this very reason, it is not often asked to whom this-or-that is intuitive. The whole subject is indecorous. When philosophers do not reflect on who it is that has the intuitions, their whole project inevitably becomes a project of formalizing their intuitions, and maybe those of a small and similar audience. Those who aspire to "the view from nowhere" end up advancing the view from a very particular and predictable place.
So, who is it really that has the intuitions? The only sensible answer I can come up with is that it is all of humanity. It's my understanding that all humans who undergo normal cognitive development are capable of considering questions of philosophy, and of what it means to "think scrupulously." Surely some people don't want to think scrupulously, but that could just be a passing phase. And in any case, those people are also thinking people, or they'd be dead. If we really want to formalize human thinking, then we should include all the human thinking that goes on around us, even that of our buddies who aren't so committed to the formalization project. We live in one world, and we can recognize that each member of that world follows some set of thought-rules. I think we should try to understand the thought-rules that our fellow humans are following, no matter who they are. We (meaning the reader and I) don't have any more claim to the notion of "thought" than anyone else does.
This is a very strange idea. It says that "mere" psychology answers philosophical questions, and that the model for philosophy should be cross-cultural studies of human nature, not ivory-tower scribbling. It says that cognitive psychology is epistemology, insofar as it describes how people reach the stuff that intuitive reasoning calls "knowledge." It says that moral psychology is moral philosophy, insofar as it describes how people make the judgments that intuitive reasoning calls "moral."
What does it mean to "formalize" the intuitions of humanity? As I said, logical deduction is one very simple formalized intuition. It is one that, excluding certain details that I don't really want to discuss here, just about everybody can agree on. So we should ask that our rules for thinking-and-doing be compatible with the rules of deduction. For example, we shouldn't have one rule telling us to do one thing, and another telling us to do the opposite. Then the system does not tell us what to think-and-do, and in that case we have undoubtedly failed.
When two intuitions contradict, which do we throw out? I don't know. It's a hard question.
For another thing, the rules must be ones that everyone can agree upon. This is based on the fact that, as far as I can tell, almost all people act as though there is some single truth, and that ideally everyone would be in agreement about it. The same statements can't be both true-when-Bob-says-them and false-when-Linda-says-them. Of course some people disagree, but those are always people who have some education in philosophy. What they say doesn't reflect their intuitions, it reflects something else that they have learned in a book somewhere.
I think most people can agree that these are good basic standards for making our thinking "scrupulous." Note that even on these basic standards, it is probable that many intuitions will have to be given up. I am not offering a free pass to trust anything that comes into your head. For example, nationalism looks like it has to go. At first glance, this is not obvious. Couldn't we have a rule that says "every person should support the country they belong to (whatever 'belong to' means)"? But look carefully--that isn't what nationalists say. They don't say "it is good for each to support their country," they say "it is good for each to support my country." And that is not something everyone can agree on--the data about "human intuitions" on this matter consists of a bunch of distinct regions like "everyone should support Britain," "everyone should support China," and so on. There's no way to purify this to one good rule, except maybe by arbitrarily picking a country.
What Problem of Induction?
As I said earlier, I am scared that this will seem obvious to everyone but me. So it will probably be valuable to show how this approach defuses certain philosophical "problems," ones mulled over by real adults with academic positions and everything.
You may not have heard the news, but prediction is in trouble. As we said, deductive reasoning is kosher, but the sophisticated know that there is something wrong with inductive reasoning--the kind of reasoning that goes from "the sun has risen every day until now" to "the sun will rise tomorrow." Although this forms the basis of natural science, it is a dirty, bad kind of thinking. One person knowledgeable in philosophy told me that "we can't know that induction doesn't work, but we can't know that it works either." Another told me about a philosopher who said that, although we might enjoy following our natural inclination towards induction, we had no way of knowing if it was really the sensible thing to do or not.
What could they possibly be thinking? The argument usually goes like this. Why do you think induction works? Well, it's always worked for me in the past. I'm not dead, and I have all these techno-gadgets that are based on science, which is based on induction. But ha! You're using induction right there! Without induction, you don't know that induction won't suddenly stop working, just the way the sun might suddenly stop rising. QED.
But why would we believe anything in the first place? Because it formalizes some intuition. Induction is undoubtedly an intuition. Everyone uses it, even the people who don't think they should. The argument above only attacks a faulty, question-begging justification, and doesn't get into the it's-an-intuition justification, even though that's the only justification we have for anything. If philosophers don't notice that omission, something must have gone wrong with the way they think.
Oh, but that's only the old problem of induction. There's a New Problem of Induction these days, and it has fun words! It goes like this: define "X is grue" as "X is green if seen before time t, or blue if seen after time t" (for an arbitrary time t). And define "bleen" as "blue before t, or green after t." Before t, all emeralds we had seen were green, but they were also grue. Why did we make the inductive inference "emeralds will keep on being green," and not "emeralds will keep on being grue"? The answer is very simple: because everyone does. The argument is more subtle than this, though. It says that we can make no meaningful distinction between "green" and "grue" with which to allow "green-like" terms but eschew "grue-like" ones. After all, "green" can be defined as "grue before t, or bleen after t"--the situation seems symmetrical. But certainly people use some rule to distinguish the two. No one, as far as I know, has ever said "hmm, that nearby tree is December-12th-grue, so I expect it'll be turning blue in a few days!" We cannot be faced with a real contradiction of intuitions here, because no one actually has "grue-like" intuitions, however we may end up boxing in the concept "grue-like." We can't pretend to respect intuitions, and then suddenly ambush them partway through, and ask them to justify themselves on some external terms. We have to swallow them whole.
I have my own ideas about what "grue-like" means, but this is already getting too long. I'll just end by saying two things. First, I think science is essentially a formalization of our induction intuition. Second, to my knowledge, the best description of how our induction intuition works (and therefore, what science should do) goes by the name "Bayesian probability." Read all about it here (warning, lots of Javascript).
The starry heavens above and the moral law within
Now we reach a more titillating example of misguided philosophy. The delightfully named Argument From Queerness says that objective ethical facts (truths that read like "thou shalt not kill") are not likely to exist, since they would be so different from all the other facts we have discovered. What are these other facts? They are facts about "the natural physical world that science investigates," of course.
J. L. Mackie, the argument's inventor, is a philosopher generous enough to have swallowed the idea of induction. Science has discovered the underlying predicates (the really green-like ones, so to speak) that we can predict will continue to hold true, and in doing so, it taught us all kinds of fantastic things. But when it comes to ethics, Mackie says, "wait, this doesn't look anything like all my precious scientific facts! It looks all foreign and weird!" But why didn't he respond the same way to induction? Before we had said "induction is an intuition, so we will accept it," the sorts of truths that science discovered must have looked queer, too. Of course, not having accepted induction, we wouldn't be able to follow the Argument From Queerness, since it itself is inductive. But the point is that we have to treat all intuitions about truth-finding methods in the same way. We can't accept one, then come to another--with no less claim to validity--and say, "but this isn't like the one we already have."
I think the Argument From Queerness does reflect an intuition that many educated people have. They feel that they know a lot of "is-type" facts, from science or something like it. They interact with these every day, and see their consequences. But "ought-type" facts are in a separate universe. We can't touch them, and it seems hard to say when we have and haven't accurately found them. But without induction, we would not be sure of is-facts, either--we'd see their consequences, but we wouldn't be able to extrapolate them beyond the present. We have to make that "induction is OK" leap for them to seem like obvious facts, and likewise we have to make a "morals are OK" leap before morals can seem anything but queer.
I said that the above was an intuition of educated people. Shouldn't I respect that like other intuitions? Well, yes, but I'd guess the number of people who buy into the Argument From Queerness is very small, and even smaller among people who have not read philosophy. All in all, the basic programming for human "thinking" probably involves some specific moral claims, and we must respect that.
If you're interested in the kinds of moral intuitions that could be universal, you should check out Marc Hauser's work in moral psychology.
Repopulating the world
In the end, are our common-sense notions frighteningly endangered by philosophy? Maybe, but I don't think we know yet, not until philosophy has based itself on psychological inquiry into human nature and not on the intuitions of a few unusual people. We've seen that a few arguments, which were supposed to endanger common sense, don't do so upon closer inspection. The "philosophical" worldview once looked imposing and bizarre, a twisted psychedelic view of truth, but now it looks much friendlier.
Of course, our common-sense notions might still be in danger. But we must remember that we are trying to preserve our common-sense notions. Every time we have to toss out an intuition, we have lost a little bit of our original hope--that we can think scrupulously, and still be doing something recognizable as "thinking." If philosophical thought looks nothing like common-sense thought, that might be reason to call into question the project of formalizing intuitions, rather than calling common-sense thought into question. We have to remember that we got into this business by free choice, and can withdraw from it if we choose.
What sorts of intuitions might we be able to successfully formalize? Donald Brown's list of human universals seems like a good start, although I don't know how controversial the list is within anthropology. Some of the terms on the list might be disturbing, depending on who you are. We find, for example, "belief in supernatural/religion." Like many items on the list, this is ambiguous (what is the "supernatural" exactly?), but it is interesting, seeing that many people believe either science or philosophy has made religious belief unjustifiable. Of course, science does seem to have found certain facts that contradict certain religious claims (age of the Earth, etc.) But those notions come only from the formalization of a particular intuition, namely induction. When these go against notions that come from another intuition, how do we decide which wins? I don't know. I suspect we will find more reason to keep science than to keep religion in most cases, but I stress that this is not obvious.
More generally, the colorful sorts of beliefs that appear on Brown's list suggest that we may end up repopulating the world with all sorts of different facts. Scientific facts lie in one corner, religious and superstitious facts lie in another, and ethical facts lie in a third, with weird hybrids strewn in between. Conflicts between these sectors may have to be negotiated by a complicated sort of legal system. It's messy, but it's also how people actually think, and that's what we care about. Intellectuals have thought for too long that a philosophical worldview would be an ascetic, stripped-down sort of thing, retaining little of the rich world that the average person walks through every day. It could be that way, but it's wrong to say we know.
I'll end with two questions.
If everyone agreed with you, wouldn't the people in charge of studying human nature get on a huge power trip? They get to determine Truth, once and for all, or at least until anyone wants to try the arduous process of replicating their data. Who says they won't fudge things here and there?
That's a perfectly good point. I'm not saying one way or another whether we should actually undertake such a study of human nature, in this imperfect world. But even if everyone agreed that that would be the way to do things, if we actually could do it right . . . that would be a big change.
But if we may never actually study this stuff, what should we believe in the meantime?
I really don't know. A version of common sense tempered by logic wherever it can be, I guess. That doesn't sound very radical, but the "common sense" part is radical in some circles.
Edit: Not too long after writing this post, I discovered the Experimental Philosophy paradigm. It turns out I'm not the only person who has been thinking along these lines! I recommend looking over the papers on that page -- some of them are really interesting.