Tag: philosophy

Getting started: exploiting embarrassment

You probably all know this moment at the beginning of almost every course. “Any questions?” – Silence. No one, it seems, has a question. The same thing might happen after a conference talk. – Silence. The silence after a talk, in a reading group or seminar is quite embarrassing. It is particularly embarrassing because it happens out of embarrassment. You know it: it’s not because there are no questions; it’s because no one wants to make a fool of themselves. – What I would like to suggest today is that there is a simple technique of exploiting this embarrassment in order to get started both with a discussion and with writing.

How then can we exploit this embarrassment? By making it worse of course! We are embarrassed when we want to look smart and are unsure how to achieve that. Seeing other people stuck like that who see you stuck like that doesn’t help either. When we want to speak up or start writing, we probably focus too much on what we know (and then we think that everyone already knows that and that we’d look foolish by saying something trivial). My suggestion is: don’t focus on what you know; focus on what you don’t understand. That might seem worse, but that’s the point. To be sure, you should not just use the donnish phrase “I don’t understand”, while implying that something is just stupid. What I mean is: focus on something you genuinely don’t understand; that way you’ll raise a genuine question. And everyone will be grateful to you for breaking the ice in a genuine way.

How then do you find something that you genuinely don’t understand? – You might be surprised to learn that this will require some practice. That is because it is often difficult to pin down what precisely it is that you don’t understand. Anyway, in philosophy we can be sure of one thing: nothing is ever (sufficiently) justified by itself. Going from this premise, you can develop a question in two steps. Step one: you need to locate a phrase or passage that you find doubtful. (You don’t find one? Well, then ask yourself why everything is so incredibly clear. Are you omniscient?) Step two: ask yourself why you don’t understand that passage. Yes, you will deepen your embarrassment now, but only for a second. Because in asking that question, you will start looking for reasons for your lack of understanding. And reasons are a good thing in philosophy. The other upside of this technique is that you will begin phrasing a question with your own voice. Why? Well, because that question zooms in on the relation between the passage and yourself. But there is no need to fear exposure, for this “you” is not the personal “you”; it is the presuppositions, biases, and convictions of the epistemic culture you are part of.

Where to begin then? Quote the passage and highlight the move or term that you find doubtful. Then begin to spell out the presupposition that makes it seem doubtful to you. “This passage seems to presuppose that p. But I would presuppose that q. So why does it seem apt for the author to presuppose that p?” – Now you have a genuine question. And if you don’t know the answer, you can move on by exploring reasons for your own presupposition: “Why does it seem natural (to me) to presuppose that q?” And then you can ask what reasons there might be for giving up your presupposition.

If this is a helpful strategy, then why don’t we do this more often? I suppose that we assume something like the following: I don’t know why the author presupposes p, but the rest of my peers certainly knows why! – Well, even if they do know the answer, it is still required to make the reasons for accepting the presupposition explicit. Because in philosophy nothing is ever justified just by itself.

On translating as a philosophical skill

Having been raised as a medievalist, doing translations was part of my education. I don’t think highly of my own few translations, but I think translating should figure in philosophical curricula. Yes, I mean philosophical, not merely historical curricula! The reason is that doing translations will familiarise you with what is often praised as “rigour” among philosophers. Although most philosophers think that logics (and sometimes statistics) are crucial, I think that the subtleties of ordinary language can be explored quite thoroughly by trying to translate a small piece of text. It keeps you pacing through all the nuances of formulations. But what is it that keeps you going? Perhaps it is the fact that you have to succeed somehow, while a perfect translation remains impossible.

Have you ever pored over a sentence for hours on end? Once you’ve figured out the grammatical construction and have an idea of the standard word meanings, the real fun might just begin. I remember finishing the translation of a short text by Ockham and not understanding a word of the German that I had just jotted down. It was on the question of whether articles of faith can be demonstrated. The Latin was easy, but the terminology remained a mystery, and it seemed as if a whole theory was lurking behind every expression. I had not read any other text dealing with the same problem. I had no real idea about the tradition of translations, i.e. other translations of such texts, and as far as I could see, there was no secondary literature available. Now I had a text in my native language and didn’t understand a word of it. – To cut a long story short: I turned my work on that text into my MA thesis. This way, I went from complete blankness (in my mind) to an attempt of actually explaining what I found out. Yes, sometimes I even enjoyed it…

Now what is it that makes translating also a philosophical rather than merely a historical or philological skill? It is often assumed that translating requires a good command of the source language (i.e. the language you’re translating from). That might be true, but it’s your target language (i.e. the language you’re translating into, mostly your native language) that is truly challenging. Whatever you lack in your target language, will be lost. The process of translating makes you believe in the possibility of a correct translation, perhaps because failure is always with you. And it is this belief that keeps you pacing through your mental lexicon until it “clicks”. Understanding or perhaps even justifying what that click means, is where you begin to see the limits of your language as the limits of your world.

I think there are two extreme ways of viewing this clicking. (1) You might think that you finally found a translation that matches your source. But then doubts will arise as to what it actually is that guarantees that match. (Think of Quine’s Gavagai example, if you like) Aren’t you bringing in your presuppositions? Should you not try to replace them by more knowledge about the context? This is the view that you need to figure out the meaning of sentences. (2) The other way is to think that that you cannot even hope to rid yourself of your presuppositions. Rather you have to embrace them. If you take the source to be sincere, any translation that will make the sentence come out true in the target language will be fine. And you will pick the context in accordance with what you believe to be true. (Think of Davidson’s critique of relativism, if you like) This is the view that meaning presupposes an understanding of what makes a sentences true. – Yes, sorry, this paragraph is a bit dense. I’ll translate or reformulate it some other time.*

For the moment, I would just like to ask you to consider adding translating to the philosophical curriculum. In philosophy language is crucial. And except for writing and conversing, translating is perhaps the most intimate way of engaging with other people’s texts and one’s own shortcomings. In addition to that, our philosophical culture is lacking respect: translations are still too rarely acknowledged as serious work. Even if we can’t teach all the languages it takes to keep up the conversation in a global world, we need to teach the appropriate sensibilties that provide at least a glimpse of the efforts necessary for moving between the languages.

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*I think that Quine and Davidson can be read as endorsing two opposing  ways of viewing the Gavagai example: a relatvist one, prioritising meaning over truth, and an anti-relativist one, prioritising truth over meaning. I’ll happily go into that another time.

What are you good at?

Many philosophy papers have a similar structure. That is quite helpful, since you know your way around quickly. It’s like walking through a pedestrian zone: even if you are in a completely strange town, you immediately know where you find the kinds of shops you’re looking for. But apart from the macro-structure, this often also is true of the micro-structure: the way the sentences are phrased, the vocabulary is employed, the rhythm of the paragraphs. “I shall argue” in every introduction.

I don’t mean this as a criticism. I attempt to write like that myself, and I also try to teach it. Our writing is formulaic, and that’s fine. But what I would like to suggest is that we try to teach and use more ingredients in that framework. I vividly remember these moments when a fellow student or colleague got up and, instead of stringing yet another eloquent sentence together, drew something on the blackboard or attempted to impose order by presenting some crucial concepts in a table. For some strange reason, these ways of presenting a thought or some material rarely find their ways into our papers. Why not?

I think of these and other means as styles of thinking. Visualising thoughts, for instance, is something that I’m not very good at myself. But that’s precisely why I learn so much from them. And even if I can’t draw, I can attempt to describe the visualisations. Describing a visualisation (or a sound or taste) is quite different from stringing arguments together. You might extend this point to all the other arts: literature, music, what have you!

Trying to think of language as one sense-modality amongst others might help to think differently about certain questions. Visit your phenomenologist! On the one hand, you can use such styles as aids in a toolkit that will not replace but enrich your ways of producing evidence or conveying an idea. On the other hand, they might actually enrich the understanding of an issue itself. In any case, such styles should be encouraged and find their way into our papers and books more prominently.

As I said, I’m not good at visualising, but it helps me enormously if someone else does it. Assuming that we all have somewhat different talents, I often ask students: “What are you good at?” Whatever the answer is, there is always something that will lend itself to promoting a certain style of thinking, ready to be exploited in the next paper to be written.

Originality: What is a reformulation? (Part II)

In my last post, I claimed that originality amounts to nothing but the reformulation of theses or arguments. Although that might sound dismissive, I’m afraid I have to say quite a bit more about the topic of originality. So more posts will follow in due course. It worries me that such a central concept is still much in the grip of an unfounded genius cult. Being as unclear as the notion of clarity itself, it creates anxieties in students and gives undue power to examiners and reviewers. On the other hand, I would like to stress that I think very highly of reformulations and thus of what I call originality. In what follows, I’d like to say a bit more about reformulations.

Let me start with a clarification. I’m talking about originality in philosophy. Once you move outside that narrow field, there are more ways of being original. Already historians of philosophy, for example, can be original by starting to work on a new text, a forgotten author or by invoking new technology such as distant reading. Moreover. recombinations of technologies and traditional approaches in the humanities can bring about a lot of new insights. But there are limits. Once we return to the business of asking questions and giving reasons, we are back to our linguistic basis. – Let’s now move on to reformulations.

Before any reformulation can count as original, it has to count as rational, at least in the sense that it is accepted by our interlocutors. To count as rational, any formulation has to meet three agreement constraints. One’s claim has to agree

(1) with facts (i.e. non-textual phenomena)

(2) with oneself (i.e. with one’s own other beliefs etc.)

(3) with others (fellow academics, canons, authorities)

Constraint (3) is crucial. I might assume to be in agreement with facts or myself as much as I want, being rational is a matter of being in agreement with a community. This is why originality can’t completely transcend the community. Being original is not something you can ascribe to yourself; it’s the community that attributes that status to you.

Within these constraints, we might encounter various kinds of reformulations. Starting from a repetition (in a different context), a reformulation might be a variation, an opposition (in the sense that saying “not-p” requires saying “p”) or a recontextualisation. In this sense you might say that Descartes’ cogito is a variation on Augustine’s cogito, or that Walter Chatton’s anti-razor is an original opposition to William of Ockham’s razor. What makes these items original? I’d say it’s the fact that these theses have been given a decided new twist or turn. Their originality can be seen, as it were, because the initial thesis is still identifiable. They changed the topic or direction of the conversation while remaining in agreement with a community.

Personally, I think the most interesting cases of originality occur when a claim is reformulated such that it is received by different communities. The point is that constraint (3) might work for more than one community. I can think of quite a number of cases where this happened. John Locke combined bits of an Aristotelian theory of language with Pufendorf’s political theory. This way, his theory of language became relevant for different philosophical topics and communities. Another example is Robert Brandom’s reformulation of (a Habermasian) Kant and Hegel that migrated into new communities, even in Germany. The most recent (and for me rather impressive) example is David Livingstone Smith’s reformulation of Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics within the context of a theory of ideology. (By contrast, I find that attempts to shun another community are often rather uninspiring: hello, continental-analytic divide…)

So, yes, I’m not trying to be dismissive when construing originality as a kind of reformulation. Quite the contrary! But I find it helpful to consider the social constraints that govern the notion of rationality and originality, not least to explore the possibilities of transcending or merging communities.

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On a personal note, given the time of the year, I’ll have to reduce the frequency of my posts for the following weeks. But I’ll be back soon with more on these issues.

Originality? – Don’t make a fool of yourself! (Part I)

What is originality? I have been studying and even teaching philosophy for quite some time now, but I still don’t know what fellow philosophers really mean when they say that something is original. Kurt Flasch, my thesis advisor in the nineties, used to say that you become original once you forget where you’ve read your claims. I am myself a bit more positive. I think one can be original in finding a good reformulation of an existing claim or argument. But that’s all there is to it, really. So if you think that originality has to do with novelty, think again.

Why do I believe that originality is not about novelty? Well, I assume that philosophy is an on-going conversation. And in a conversation, conversational rules apply. Reformulating a point is great. It might highlight unexpected aspects or trigger interesting associations. But don’t start talking about things that don’t relate to the current exchange. People will just think you’re weird.

I’m not saying this to discourage anyone from trying to be original. But originality is always listed as a crucial assessment criterion, no matter whether it’s about student essays, PhD dissertations or grant applications. Yet, as far as I can see it doesn’t amount to more than this: reviewer has not thought of the idea in quite those terms. – Again, that’s fine. But let’s be clear about what it amounts to.

When I ask students what they want to achieve in their work, they often reply that they wish to say something original. In order to find out what they mean by that, I have designed a little test. I let them write a small paragraph on a topic of their choice. When I look at what they’ve written, I almost always find something that sounds like it’s coming straight out of a handbook on the issue. – Why, I ask, did you write this? We knew that already. A particularly ambitious and honest student once replied: “Well, I didn’t want to make a fool of myself.” – I guess that is what it comes down to. Wanting to be original might just mean wanting to belong. Belong to that that club in which everyone is original.

Procrastination as conversation, really?

Writing the first post to my blog, I hesitated a lot. Should I really say this? Should I put it like that? – My point was that such hesitations can be seen as conversations with our potential readers and former selves. You might burst out with an idea and then refine it in the light of second thoughts or amend it because you remember someone saying that this idea was no good. If we take our hesitations seriously, they might actually turn into interesting philosophy. Why? Because hesitations are often dialogical and such dialogues display more of the actual thought process, providing refinements that sharpen our understanding of an issue. In the following, I’d like to give some hints at what this might mean and how this can be turned into writing.

Let me give you an example: Initially I wrote above “My point was that procrastination can be seen as a conversation … ” – But then I thought: No, what I mean is hesitation. – But in my last post I also spoke of procrastination, didn’t I? So is procrastination a form of hesitation? – Well, I suppose some is and some isn’t. So, some forms of procrastination might qualify (I guess watching telly doesn’t qualify, but reading blog posts or staring into the distance might). So, sometimes when I procrastinate I engage in a dialogue. — OK, this is a lame example. But now you’ve seen more of my thought process than in the first paragraph. The upshot is: Not only hesitation but also some forms of procrastination might be dialogical. You wouldn’t have got that refinement, had I not added this paragraph. Now, if you want a really thrilling example of the phenomenon, go and read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations again. – Still, you might ask: what’s so great about hesitation?

I said that hesitation is dialogical. But dialogical writing, it seems, isn’t much encouraged in academia. So how can this idea be applied? – One of my greatest worries in writing was and often still is that I can’t say everything at once. I’m not joking! Having to write a paragraph about x and leave you, dear reader, with the idea that this is really all I have to say about x might be embarrassing. To amend this impression before it could even arise, I initially wrote very long paragraphs. Yes, horrible. But then I noticed that other people don’t do this. Good writers have no qualms to say very little or even something blatantly false about x. How do they get away with it? – Well, they write a second paragraph! And then they challenge what they said in the beginning. This simple scheme of thesis-question-refinement-question does not only display a thought process but often provides very intriguing refinements. (If you look at scholastic quaestiones you can see how it’s turned into a labyrinthic art.)

Of course, this is a simple technique of implementing dialogue. But it can be applied easily to regular papers without having to bring in Theaitetos or Socrates. What’s tricky about it is that some readers still stop reading after the first paragraph…

Procrastinating? Hesitating as engaging in conversation

Great timing… While most of you are on holiday, I’m starting a blog on (writing) philosophy. Yes, I know! There are so many blogs, even on philosophy, and we don’t really need another one… Actually, I’m just finalising a book, but since that’s rather scary and torturous, I thought about my new book project called Handling Ideas: it’s supposed to be a (fairly popular, yes!) book about understanding, expressing and applying ideas. And since that is scary, too, why not start by writing about writing instead? Also, it’s 37 degrees in Groningen.

On a more serious note (don’t think you can skip this!), I think that the practice of philosophy and writing are intimately connected. You all know how long the distance between the thought in your head and the page or screen in front of you really is. And you already know that before you actually finish this damn sentence that you started crafting yesterday, you’ll soon rush to the delete button to change a few words again…

Writing, that is amongst other things: deciding on the ultimate way of expressing a thought, is scary for many of us, but I think that it is an integral part of an important process: when we rush to change a word before we settle on a formulation, we actually engage in a conversation with our readers and former selves. You might think something along the lines of “you won’t like this, so…” or “why did I come up with that?” or “no, I should have put this differently.” – But what is actually going on in these moments? – I think that what we often call procrastination or hesitation is part of a conversational exchange or thought process: it’s part of practising philosophy. It’s all the back and forth that you might remember from Plato’s dialogues. Just a little less elaborate perhaps, but certainly just as interesting.

More often than not, these conversations are suppressed, though. They might seem imperfect or whatever. So in many of the following posts I would like to invite you and myself to bring these conversations to the fore. There are excellent guides on writing and philosophy, but most of them aim at good products. I’m more interested in the doubtful stages that all too often fall through the cracks. This concerns both the writing and the actual philosophy.

In keeping with the conversational spirit, I not only hope for comments on posts but for many guest posts. Enjoy the summer and see you around!

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PS. I’d like to thank my former student assistant César Reigosa. It was in conversation with him that I decided to settle on the title “Handling Ideas”.