The fallacy of smart philosophers
I ran across this fallacy in re-reading an article by Jay Garfield. He is talking about a Tibetan Buddhist tradition which tries to bring together the work of Dharmakirti and Nagarjuna into a coherent whole. This fallacy runs like:
Philosopher X is really smart. So is Philosophy Y. Therefore, they must both be right and putting them together will yield a great philosophical system.
This is a fallacy that I think I (and many burgeoning philosophers) are prey to. After all, we get our education in two ways, I think. First, we are given lists of Really Smart Philosophers to read by subject: epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, etc. Then, as we read these RSPs, we start to do the bibliographic dance. What I mean by this is we weave in and out of footnotes, looking up articles which lead to refutations which lead to counter-refutations then books and then book reviews citing someone else. In some ways, it’s all very disjointed. There is no entirely systematic way to teach philosophy (or any other subject matter, but let’s set that aside).
I think that I–and I will assume many others, but perhaps not all–are driven to look up these footnote RSPs because of conclusions that they lead us to, or their apparent coherence with other favorite RSPs. So, while we are allowing the arguments to do their work, we’re also considering what we are really not supposed to be–the other pieces which we’re attached to.
An example. How do I understand the relationship between the brain and the mind? There are several major explanations, all of which have arguments pro and con, and can adduce evidence to support them. Now, we’re not supposed to be attracted to the argument that the mind is not the brain (for example) because of its ethical conclusions. That’s out of bounds. We’re supposed to look at the argument itself. Yet at the same time, philosophers appeal to intuition in the construction of their thought experiments. But what shapes this intuition?
I’ve been criticized here (and by others, offline) for desiring to be ultra-coherent. In an article I recently read about Martha Nussbaum’s philosophy, the reviewer claimed that too much coherency yields Naziism and other "-isms" dangerous to society (the context was cultural coherence, but I think the point can stand for human coherence–no one examines all their beliefs). As I dig more into Buddhist philosophy, I find both the ultra-coherence that I am drawn to, as well as some of the paradoxical conclusions (reality is ultimately empty; the idea of "ultimate" is empty as well) which jive with some of what I know about science.
The point of this? I’m not questioning the fruitfulness of philosophy, rational reflection, etc. Rather, I’m wondering about the limits of human knowing. At the limits of knowing, we continue to run up against seeming paradox–Wittgenstein, Nagarjuna, Hegel…Hawking, etc. And yet we continue to pursue the "rules" of logic–whichever system we choose–and rationality.
I think of the course I just took, and this fallacy. On one hand, you have people like Sharon Welch, John Cobb, Jr. (who I learned a great deal about in doing my master’s thesis) who are trying, in different ways, to bring together apparently contradictory points of view. Welch takes African American humanism, Native American Spirituality, Engaged Buddhism, postmodern and feminist philosophers…and tries to build a coherent ethic. John Cobb, Jr. and his cohorts at Claremont take the major religious traditions of the world and try to construct a SuperStructure of Process Philosophy that maintains each tradition as its own "ultimate" without contradicting the other. Welch wouldn’t join Cobb in his terminology of "ultimate", but the question is whether that matters?
So, in conclusion, what I am wondering is this–without yielding to fideism or authoritarianism, how can we compare tremendously complex systems of thought without committing fallacies of RSP, or (the other problem) segregating ourselves to a tiny philosophical ghetto, in which we eke out progress on one question, but nothing else?
Image: Kindred Spirits, acrylic on wood; wood engraving, 118" x 80" x 4", 2004