Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (2 page)

The word `philosophy' carries unfortunate connotations: impractical, unworldly, weird. I suspect that all philosophers and philosophy students share that moment of silent embarrassment
when someone innocently asks us what we do. I would prefer to introduce myself as doing conceptual engineering. For just as the
engineer studies the structure of material things, so the philosopher studies the structure of thought. Understanding the structure
involves seeing how parts function and how they interconnect. It
means knowing what would happen for better or worse if changes
were made. This is what we aim at when we investigate the structures that shape our view of the world. Our concepts or ideas form
the mental housing in which we live. We may end up proud of the
structures we have built. Or we may believe that they need dismantling and starting afresh. But first, we have to know what they are.

The book is self-standing and does not presuppose that the
reader has any other resources. But it could be augmented. For example, it could be read alongside some of the primary source materials from which I frequently quote. These are readily available
classics, such as Descartes's Meditations, or Berkeley's Three Dialogues, or Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, or
his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. But it can equally well
be read on its own without the texts to hand. And after finishing it,
the reader should pick up the classics, and other things like logic
texts or writings on ethics, with a mind prepared.

WHAT ARE WE TO THINK ABOUT?

Here are some questions any of us might ask about ourselves: What
am I? What is consciousness? Could I survive my bodily death?
Can I be sure that other people's experiences and sensations are
like mine? If I can't share the experience of others, can I communi cate with them? Do we always act out of self-interest? Might I be a
kind of puppet, programmed to do the things that I believe I do out
of my own free will?

Here are some questions about the world: Why is there something and not nothing? What is the difference between past and
future? Why does causation run always from past to future, or does
it make sense to think that the future might influence the past?
Why does nature keep on in a regular way? Does the world presuppose a Creator? And if so, can we understand why he (or she or
they) created it?

Finally, here are some questions about ourselves and the world:
How can we be sure that the world is really like we take it to be?
What is knowledge, and how much do we have? What makes a field
of inquiry a science? (Is psychoanalysis a science? Is economics?)
How do we know about abstract objects, like numbers? How do we
know about values and duties? How are we to tell whether our
opinions are objective, or just subjective?

The queer thing about these questions is that not only are they
baffling at first sight, but they also defy simple processes of solution. If someone asks me when it is high tide, I know how to set
about getting an answer. There are authoritative tide tables I can
consult. I may know roughly how they are produced. And if all else
fails, I could go and measure the rise and fall of the sea myself. A
question like this is a matter of experience: an empirical question.
It can be settled by means of agreed procedures, involving looking
and seeing, making measurements, or applying rules that have
been tested against experience and found to work. The questions
of the last paragraphs are not like this. They seem to require more reflection. We don't immediately know where to look. Perhaps we
feel we don't quite know what we mean when we ask them, or what
would count as getting a solution. What would show me, for instance, whether I am not after all a puppet, programmed to do the
things I believe I do freely? Should we ask scientists who specialize
in the brain? But how would they know what to look for? How
would they know when they had found it? Imagine the headline:
`Neuroscientists discover human beings not puppets.' How?

So what gives rise to such baffling questions?

In a word, self-reflection. Human beings are relentlessly capable
of reflecting on themselves. We might do something out of habit,
but then we can begin to reflect on the habit. We can habitually
think things, and then reflect on what we are thinking. We can ask
ourselves (or sometimes we get asked by other people) whether we
know what we are talking about. To answer that we need to reflect
on our own positions, our own understanding of what we are saying, our own sources of authority. We might start to wonder
whether we know what we mean. We might wonder whether what
we say is `objectively' true, or merely the outcome of our own perspective, or our own `take' on a situation. Thinking about this we
confront categories like knowledge, objectivity, truth, and we may
want to think about them. At that point we are reflecting on concepts and procedures and beliefs that we normally just use. We are
looking at the scaffolding of our thought, and doing conceptual
engineering.

This point of reflection might arise in the course of quite normal discussion. A historian, for example, is more or less bound at
some point to ask what is meant by `objectivity' or `evidence, or even 'truth', in history. A cosmologist has to pause from solving
equations with the letter tin them, and ask what is meant, for instance, by the flow of time or the direction of time or the beginning
of time. But at that point, whether they recognize it or not, they
become philosophers. And they are beginning to do something
that can be done well or badly. The point is to do it well.

How is philosophy learned? A better question is: how can thinking skills he acquired? The thinking in question involves attending
to basic structures of thought. This can be done well or badly, intelligently or ineptly. But doing it well is not primarily a matter of
acquiring a body of knowledge. It is more like playing the piano
well. It is a'knowing how' as much as a'knowing that. The most famous philosophical character of the classical world, the Socrates of
Plato's dialogues, did not pride himself on how much he knew. On
the contrary, he prided himself on being the only one who knew
how little he knew (reflection, again). What he was good at-supposedly, for estimates of his success differ-was exposing the
weaknesses of other peoples' claims to know. To process thoughts
well is a matter of being able to avoid confusion, detect ambiguities, keep things in mind one at a time, make reliable arguments,
become aware of alternatives, and so on.

To sum up: our ideas and concepts can be compared with the
lenses through which we see the world. In philosophy the lens is itself the topic of study. Success will be a matter not of how much
you know at the end, but of what you can do when the going gets
tough: when the seas of argument rise, and confusion breaks out.
Success will mean taking seriously the implications of ideas.

WHAT IS THE POINT?

It is all very well saying that, but why bother? What's the point? Reflection doesn't get the world's business done. It doesn't bake bread
or fly aeroplanes. Why not just toss the reflective questions aside,
and get on with other things? I shall sketch three kinds of answer:
high ground, middle ground, and low ground.

The high ground questions the question-a typical philosophical strategy, because it involves going up one level of reflection.
What do we mean when we ask what the point is? Reflection bakes
no bread, but then neither does architecture, music, art, history, or
literature. It is just that we want to understand ourselves. We want
this for its own sake, just as a pure scientist or pure mathematician
may want to understand the beginning of the universe, or the
theory of sets, for its own sake, or just as a musician might want to
solve some problem in harmony or counterpoint just for its own
sake. There is no eye on any practical applications. A lot of life is indeed a matter of raising more hogs, to buy more land, so we can
raise more hogs, so that we can buy more land ... The time we take
out, whether it is to do mathematics or music, or to read Plato or
Jane Austen, is time to be cherished. It is the time in which we cosset our mental health. And our mental health is just good in itself,
like our physical health. Furthermore there is after all a payoff in
terms of pleasure. When our physical health is good, we take pleasure in physical exercise, and when our mental health is good, we
take pleasure in mental exercise.

This is a very pure-minded reply. The problem with it is not that it is wrong. It is just that it is only likely to appeal to people who are
half-convinced already-people who didn't ask the original question in a very aggressive tone of voice.

So here is a middle-ground reply. Reflection matters because it
is continuous with practice. How you think about what you are
doing affects how you do it, or whether you do it at all. It may direct
your research, or your attitude to people who do things differently,
or indeed your whole life. To take a simple example, if your reflections lead you to believe in a life after death, you may be prepared
to face persecutions that you would not face if you became convinced-as many philosophers are-that the notion makes no
sense. Fatalism, or the belief that the future is fixed whatever we do,
is a purely philosophical belief, but it is one that can paralyse action. Putting it more politically, it can also express an acquiescence
with the low status accorded to some segments of society, and this
may be a pay-off for people of higher status who encourage it.

Let us consider some examples more prevalent in the West.
Many people reflecting on human nature think that we are at bottom entirely selfish. We only look out for our own advantage, never
really caring about anyone else. Apparent concern disguises hope
of future benefit. The leading paradigm in the social sciences is
hoino econonlicus-economic man. Economic man looks after
himself, in competitive struggle with others. Now, if people come
to think that we are all, always, like this, their relations with each
other become different. They become less trusting, less cooperative, more suspicious. This changes the way they interact, and they
will incur various costs. They will find it harder, and in some circumstances impossible, to get cooperative ventures going: they may get stuck in what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679) memorably called `the war of all against all'. In the
market-place, because they are always looking out to he cheated,
they will incur heavy transaction costs. If my attitude is that 'a verbal contract is not worth the paper it is written on, I will have to pay
lawyers to design contracts with penalties, and if I will not trust the
lawyers to do anything except just enough to pocket their fees, I will
have to get the contracts checked by other lawyers, and so on. But
all this may be based on a philosophical mistake-looking at
human motivation through the wrong set of categories, and hence
misunderstanding its nature. Maybe people can care for each
other, or at least care for doing their bit or keeping their promises.
Maybe if a more optimistic self-image is on the table, people can
come to live up to it. Their lives then become better. So this bit of
thinking, getting clear about the right categories with which to understand human motivation, is an important practical task. It is not
confined to the study, but bursts out of it.

Here is a very different example. The Polish astronomer
Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) reflected on how we know about
motion. He realized that how we perceive motion is perspectival:
that is, whether we see things as moving is the result of how we ourselves are placed and in particular whether we ourselves are moving. (We have mostly been subject to the illusion in trains or
airports, where the next-door train or aeroplane seems to move
off, and then we realize with a jolt that it is we who are moving. But
there were fewer everyday examples in the time of Copernicus.) So
the apparent motions of the stars and planets might arise because
they are not moving as they appear to do, but we observers move. And this is how it turned out to be. Here reflection on the nature of
knowledge-what philosophers call an epistemological inquiry,
from the Greek episteme, meaning knowledge-generated the first
spectacular leap of modern science. Einstein's reflections on how
we know whether two events are simultaneous had the same structure. He realized that the results of our measurements would depend upon the way we are travelling compared to the events we are
clocking. This led to the Special Theory of Relativity (and Einstein
himself acknowledged the importance of preceding philosophers
in sensitizing him to the epistemological complexities of such a
measurement).