A Problem With Analysis In Analytic Philosophy

 The ability to distinguish right from wrong is a sign of good moral sense; the ability to distinguish good reasons from bad reasons is a sign of rationality. Our conduct in everyday life depends on the ability to distinguish what is good from what is bad; whether that be morally or rationally. We allow our thinking and our actions to be regulated by a value system where it is necessary to distinguish the good from bad in order to achieve a certain goal which in case of a theoretical inquiry is Truth. The Philosopher tries to understand the normative force behind this rational order – what is a reason, what makes a certain reason good or bad, what is Truth and can we know what is true. This investigation requires that we understand the subject and the way he experiences the world and the place of the subject within this world. Down the ages the best minds of the world have been engaged in resolving this question but with no unanimity in sight. Philosophy differs from other disciplines in as much as it is self-regulatory. In every other discipline we acquire skills in order to be able to follow certain rules. We question these rules only when a practical need arises but we never question why certain rules are right and others wrong; how do we know which rule is the correct one – in short we never question what makes a following a certain rule rational. One thing is certain that in selecting the correct rules we cannot consult other rules otherwise there would be an infinite regress. There is some intuitive way in which we know that a certain rule is a correct one. Philosophy seeks to understand the source of this intuition. But since unlike any other discipline philosophy is both the arbiter in which rules or method one ought to follow and also account for the validity of its methods. Thus different philosophers have come up with different ways to do philosophy. A philosopher however can be held responsible for his philosophy – we can demand that he give his reasons for philosophizing in a certain way. But we need to understand that while in everyday life we follow rules blindly; in philosophy we are conscious of those standards and we seek to find their source.

But in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy we see that this level of self-consciousness is missing. By reducing philosophy to conceptual analysis; philosophy has become a blind execution of method. The question is seldom asked about what an analysis is and what makes a certain analysis a correct one and when it is asked – it is taken as another analytical puzzle to be solved – an attempt to give an analysis of analysis. As a result hard philosophical questions are never asked and it is simply assumed that philosophical questions can be answered via technical analysis. This loosens the relation between theory and practice making the latter unregulated and as a consequence unfruitful. In this paper I would attempt to demonstrate this conclusion. In order to do so I shall use a concrete example of analysis as paradigmatic of current state of affairs. I shall deal with Kripke’s attempt to resurrect essentialism in contrast to certain past approaches to the same problem and its inadequacy shall reveal certain important philosophical insights that should be in store for us.

 

I.                HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

 

Aristotle began his study of science of being qua being by asking the question what is being or what it is to be. This naturally leads to the question what it is to be something i.e. what it is to be that one thing rather than anything else. Aristotle’s answer was form. To be something is to have or instantiate a Form. Thus Socrates instantiates the Form – Human. To be a man is the very essence of Socrates – Socrates cannot not be Human. The Form – Human determines the Being of Socrates – to identify Socrates for example to be the teacher of Plato – depends on a prior ability to identify Socrates himself. It is because of the Form that we can think about something. So Form is the principle of knowledge here – for without that Form we cannot learn anything about an individual like Socrates. Form is what makes Being intelligible to us – it is what allows us to think about Being. It is what renders reality thinkable. The fact that we can make any informed judgements about reality implies that there is a harmony between Thought and Reality.

 

Aristotle’s Categories is a division based on difference between essential predication and predication of contingent properties. Predication cannot explain the unity of a substance because predication presupposes that unity. Without a substance the predicate would not belong to anything. There is no possession if there is no possessor. Predicates can allow us to identify an individual but they do not account for the unity of the individual. Forms or Essences are what account for the Unity of a Substance or can be said to be the ground of the unity of substance. But then we cannot acquire knowledge of Essences via predication. As Aristotle argues in Posterior Analytics how do we have knowledge of First principles? If through demonstrative understanding then demonstrations will be infinite. If however demonstrations are infinite then there shall be no explanation of anything and neither would any understanding be possible since it is impossible to survey infinite items. If not, then these principles would be unknowable and there would be no explanation of anything. The answer that Aristotle favours is that our epistemic access to principles is different from our access to explanations of other facts. This special epistemic access amounts to a rational insight or a pre-predicative understanding of Essences – contemplation of which gives us access to First Principles. This insight Aristotle calls Noesis. And Metaphysics is for him the Science of First Principles. However no demonstrative understanding of First Principles is possible for demonstrative understanding depends on First Principles. It is the First Principles that allow us to understand why some fact is the way it is.

 

Aristotle uses the paradigm of sight and touch to explain what is thinking. It is both a seeing and a grasping and we truly understand something if we can grasp what we see. On Aristotle’s conception of knowledge we know something only when we can state the reason why – why something is the way it is. To know the reason why is to be able to explain it and an explanation is valid if it true or holds of the thing itself rather than our opinions about the thing. As Aristotle puts it in Posterior Analytics: “We think we understand something whenever we think we are aware both that the cause because of which the object exists is its explanation and it is not possible for it to be otherwise”.

 

We see a similar situation in Nyaya Philosophy. It justifies its subject matter the study of pramanas on the ground that successful activity requires correct knowledge of the object and correct knowledge is that which reveals the true character of the object. As Uddyotakara puts it: “That which forms the basis of a certain thing being cognized in its true form constitutes the real nature of that thing; that is to say in the case of everything it is found that there is something in it in virtue of which the thing comes to be known as what it is – and it is this something that forms the real nature of that thing.” Pramanas inform us about the Tattva or the real nature of the object. Tattva means being the object of a demonstrative ‘that’ i.e. it consists of a possession of a certain character that renders it knowable by the pramanas. Other sciences depend on pramanas while Nyaya seeks to study and understand pramanas themselves.

 

Rationalist Philosophers beginning with Descartes collapsed the distinction between substance and essence. Essence is what can be said to possess a bundle of properties or modes as Descartes calls them. The predication relation was transformed into causal necessitation which was further strengthened by Leibniz by making the essence or the monad in his philosophy to be the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of modes in accordance with his Principle of Sufficient Reason. This move led to Idealism for no object outside consciousness need be posited as an occasional cause for accounting for a modification of the conscious substance. The theory raises two questions: a) how do we know the essence of something and b) can essence perform the theoretical role that was supposed to be performed in Aristotle’s ontology by a substance. The reply to the first question as given by Descartes is that essences can be intuited in a clear and distinct intellectual perception – Descartes’s analogue of Aristotle’s Noesis. We have a Clear Idea when we are aware of the essence of something and a distinct Idea when we can exclude every other property from an object except its essence. Ideas are the objects of study of metaphysics. Ideas can be simple and complex and simple Ideas are always of essences and a clear and distinct Idea of an essence is infallible. Ideas have no sensory content whatsoever and hence the sensory experience can neither inform us nor restrict the application of Ideas to things themselves. Sensory Judgements on the other hand are dependent on Ideas. Hence Ideas are purely intellectual and innate since they are not acquired by the senses. The study of metaphysics is conducted via Pure Reason.

The essence of the mind Descartes discerned to be Pure Thought – and all other mental modifications like will, desire, affectations etc. were taken to be modifications of Thought whilst Thought could remain unchanged despite these modifications. However the reduction of all mental states to states of Pure Thought is questionable on the grounds on the possibility of deep sleep state and unconscious mental states like unconscious desires etc. Moreover modes like will, desire, sensations, belief etc. seem to be different faculties rather than modifications of one substance. A merit of Aristotelian substances was that it could receive qualities that were contrary to one another and hence these opposite qualities could co-exist in a single substratum without affecting its unity and also its own distinctive individuality which is compromised in this case since willing, desiring etc. would have to be reduced to consciousness. In the case of extension we can say about any three dimensional figure that it is necessarily extended but we cannot say the same about consciousness and its supposed modifications like will, desire etc. The question also arises – how these modes are related to their substance – if it is identity then a substance is nothing but a bundle of properties and if it is difference then as Gassendi pointed out that perception of modes is not equivalent to perception of substance. We can then be said to have a clear and distinct perception of essence only when we perceive the bare substratum independent of its modes for then we can be said to be able to separate the essence from its modes. In the wax analogy Descartes points out in order to prove the priority of the Idea of Wax over sense-judgements that perception of sensory qualities of wax cannot be equivalent to perception of the substance - wax. The substance is thereby not perceived by the senses but by the intellect for it is something different from a bundle of properties. However Descartes also admits in Principles of Philosophy that a substance can never be perceived independently of its modes for we cannot think of something as bereft of any distinguishing feature. But now Substances cannot be understood via essences for they are essences and essences cannot be grasped via clear and distinct perception for clarity and distinctness demand predication because without a distinguishing feature something cannot be clear and evident to consciousness.

Leibniz’s philosophy corrects these errors to some extent. He criticizes Descartes for his naivety in thinking he we can discern simple Ideas via clear and distinct perception. As he points out:

“For what seems clear and distinct to men when they judge rashly is frequently obscure and confused. This axiom is thus useless unless the criteria of clearness and distinctness which we have proposed are applied and unless the truth of the ideas is established. For the rest, the rules of common logic, of which also the geometricians make use, are not to be despised as criteria of the truth of judgments; so, for example, the rule that nothing is to be admitted for certain unless it has been proved by careful experience or by sound demonstration. A demonstration is sound when it observes the form prescribed in logic, although it need not always follow the form of syllogisms arranged in the Scholastic manner (such as Christian Herlinus and Conrad Dasypodius applied to the first six books of Euclid) ; it is merely necessary that the argument be conclusive by virtue of its form.” (Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas)

 

For Leibniz thinking is calculating and hence is nothing more than rule governed symbol manipulation. It is very difficult to arrive at the correct principles which govern our thoughts and reasoning. The best way to extract these principles is via constructing a deductive proof – making clear all the steps involved in the proof. While Descartes reduces deduction to intuition and Leibniz emphasis deduction over intuition upsetting the balance Aristotle intended to maintain between illumination and discursive thinking.

 

By differentiating between perception and apperception Leibniz is able to accommodate unconscious mental states and possibility of sleep and swoon. Leibniz’s monad is a simple substance – accounting for the unity of consciousness – its various modes are perceptual states and the object of perception is reduced to perception or as Leibniz would put it the ratio of the object can only be found within its perception. Leibniz in this way developed a form of idealism even before Berkeley. The predication relation is reduced completely to causal necessitation. The states of consciousness emanate from a conscious substance who possesses their complete ratio. But can the predication relation be reduced to causal necessitation? According to this view a single effect can only have a single cause but does this not conflict with our everyday experience – where we see that different causes can have the same effect. Leibniz considers this objection in his ‘Meditation on the Principle of the Individual’. His reply is that this scenario is untenable for otherwise – “the effect would not involve its cause” and the “principle of individuation” would be “outside the thing in its cause”. The problem is the effect is individuated by its cause and if the same effect can be individuated by different causes it would lose its identity. It is because Leibniz believes study of metaphysics to be independent of human experience and incapable of being corrected by experience that he does not take these consequences to be a reductio of his own views on causal necessitation. All he has really argued is that assuming cause-effect relation to be otherwise than what he says it is would be fatal to his case. He simply cannot admit to counter-examples to the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles and Principle of Sufficient Reason - for our very ability to think and reason depends on these principles. 

We can gather certain important lessons from a survey of problems here. First, logic can never be metaphysically neutral – every demonstration or even every analysis is rationalized on the basis of its axioms or principles which by themselves cannot be demonstrated. Second, unity of an individual cannot be accounted by predication for predication presupposes this unity. Hence we ought to differentiate between the question of unity and identity. The former has priority over the latter. Third, whether it be axioms or demonstrations we need an account for what kind of epistemic access we have to either. An analysis is a rule-governed activity and for a successful analysis we need to know what our aim in conducting an analysis is and what would count as a successful analysis and where the analysis should stop. These questions however cannot be answered analytically on pain of infinite regress.

 

II.              KRIPKE’S POSSIBLE WORLDS

 

For Aristotle Forms or Essences allow for unity of thinking and being. For Rationalists reality is intelligible to us because of intellectual intuition of Ideas whose source is God. There is continuity between the way we access the world and the way the world actually is. Analytic Philosophy is not preoccupied with essence but with meanings or concepts for the latter determine our epistemic access to the world. Influenced by Frege’s understanding of the relation between subject and object – meanings or senses in Frege’s terminology mediate between the two and allow subject to acquire knowledge of an object. But Frege does not make clear what kind of cognitive grasp we have of senses. Senses cannot be known via intellectual perception nor are they constituted by the Transcendental Ego. However later Fregeans reduced senses to linguistic meanings or descriptions in the minds of the subject via which he fixes a referent. The line of thinking is that meaning has meaning only for someone. An external object can have no meaning for a subject if he cannot think about it and he cannot think about something if he cannot describe that about which he is thinking. But in order to think about something the object has to be available to a subject – only then can he begin to think about it. Consequently Russell distinguished between Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description. Reference to an object is established by intuition unsullied by concepts. But if this pre-conceptual intuition is denied and only authentic knowledge is knowledge by description then it is consistent with this way of thinking that the phenomenological object or our everyday objects are really just conceptual constructs and they do not allow us access to the things themselves if there are such. This is what motivates the phenomenalism of the Later Russell and Carnap and has affinity with views of Locke. In Lockean empiricism the only thing we can know about some object is via the experiences it produces in us and the experiences we are capable of having is determined by our senses. So we can never we sure that there is more to an object than what can be grasped by our senses. The essence of the object is a hidden something that grounds its appearances but is unknowable for our knowledge can never transcend the boundaries of our senses.

It is to this line of thinking that Kripke was opposed for it implied that we would always be in dark about the essence of something. Hence consistent with Aristotle’s way of thinking he made a distinction between fixing the reference and specifying the concepts. Our concepts do not give us access to the referent for they under-determine it. Reference is fixed by something that can provide our subjective access to the object with an objective standard to test against. Only essences are capable of performing this theoretical role. But what are essences? For Aristotle it is what determines the Eidos or the Look of the object – i.e. the species-Form of the object. The look of the cat is determined by the species to which it belongs. But Kripke and Putnam treat this view on a par with description theories of reference and deny it on the basis of the logical possibility that a cat may still be a cat even if it does not belong to the animal kingdom it is taken to belong to. The idea is that if we can imagine something to be otherwise than it is then the very conceivability of the situation gives us access to a logical possibility. But if there is a property that an object may lack then it cannot be its essence. Essences are reduced to logical necessity – it is inconceivable that some object may lack its essence. Kripke states two candidates for essential properties – the origin of some object and individual essences like the property of being-Nixon in case of Richard Nixon. The essence of water is its chemical composition and is discovered by science.

 

Kripke’s imagination produces a fracture in our initial phenomenological situation which is later resolved by scientific discovery of essence. But are our logical intuitions about modal logic i.e. about necessity and possibility - guiding imagination or is our imagination guiding our logical intuitions about modalities? To rephrase is there an objective standard which guides our imagination or is it being wielded without constraint? Is the source of this objective standard common sense, logical intuitions or science? Do they account for how the object is given to us and reference to the object fixed? Or in other words do they account for the unity of thinking and being? What renders the object thinkable and what kind of epistemic access do we have to such an object that allows us to think about it? If this epistemic access is knowledge by description – the view that Kripke seeks to oppose - then just like the phenomenological object is a conceptual construct – science too is a conceptual construction not a discovery. Essences are not objective entities but conceptual constructs of scientists.  

 

Can we however appeal to our logical intuitions to decide whether objects have essences and if yes what are they? The natural question that arises is why identify essence with a necessary property that an object cannot fail to have even within imaginative scenarios. Kripke’s imagination tells him that an object can survive the loss of his Eidos but someone else may not have such a vivid imagination. The metaphysical intuition here is that the world is radically contingent – that something is the way it is – is purely an accidental fact about it. In The Guide to the Perplexed Moses Maimonides ascribed such a view to Asharite school of thought who denied essences as understood by the Peripatetic School. For them something being a certain way is dependent on the will of God and God could have willed a lion to be like a bird and a bird to be like a lion. Kripke perhaps unaware of his metaphysical presuppositions is debunking rather than resurrecting the theory of essences for essences account for a rational order which in turn is opposed to radical contingency. Logical intuitions cannot provide us with theory neutral data for logic cannot be metaphysically neutral; modal logic does not inform metaphysics but needs to be informed by metaphysics as Kripke’s own example shows. Imagination cannot allow us to draw the difference between essential and contingent properties for the possibility of doing so depends on prior intuition of essences. Could science inform us what essences are? Kripke takes the origin of the object to be essential to it. This is strange for we can imagine scenarios where the same object could have originated differently. It may also be asked exactly what theoretical role do essences play? Aristotle distinguished between a necessary property and an essential property in as much as the latter could act as the final and formal cause of the object. Every essential property may be necessary but the converse does not hold. Apart from that essences connect thinking with being. Recognition for instance requires prior acquaintance with the object. But if all we knew about an object was its microphysical structure and nothing about its Eidos - then would we have the ability to recognize the same object? Intuitions like these are at the root of knowledge argument and the problem of qualia; but the philosophical issues behind them are not well understood.

 

The question arises – what exactly is wrong here? What am I objecting to? The answer is that analysis makes sense only within a framework and the framework cannot be prepared by analysis but by reflecting on how we understand – what we understand i.e. on understanding understanding. To elaborate one may ask what objective standards an analysis needs to meet and why. There are no metaphysically neutral logical intuitions. We saw in Kripke’s case his logical intuitions on reducing the notion of essence to logical necessity depend on metaphysical intuitions he is not aware of. Neither can science help us here. For we would need to know in what does scientific understanding consist in? In today’s age scientific understanding is taken to consist in either empirical methods of verification and building mathematical models used for prediction of phenomena. But do they constitute understanding? They cannot; for understanding depends not on collection of information but in understanding why certain facts are the way they are. Mathematical models could be as ill-informed as our prior understanding is. They can further understanding only when backed up by proper reasoning process. Without thinking providing the ground for these methods there is no way they can lead to genuine understanding. We need to distinguish between science as a skill and science as knowledge. As a skill it is a rule governed activity; it involves execution of certain methods blindly - but we need to understand how we understand these rules and are able to distinguish between good and bad rules. We need to understand the rationale for scientific practice. Since Science is as much a rule-governed activity as any other; it cannot further an understanding of understanding – only via reflecting on understanding in a first-person perspective can we understand - understanding. The problem then with analytic philosophy is its attempt to replace genuine thinking with certain methods unquestioningly taken to be objective. But these methods themselves depend on our prior understanding and are of no use in philosophy for philosophy cannot be a method-oriented blind rule following – philosophy demands self-reflection – it demands we know what we are trying to do with our tools and why – and hence the need for an analysis to be informed by a prior understanding of what an analysis seeks to achieve and why and how should it be conducted. Otherwise in Husserl’s words we would have a logic that does not understand itself. Philosophy studies obvious facts but it is from an understanding of the ordinary that something extraordinary is discovered. As I have shown above philosophers of the past were aware of these issues. But contemporary philosophy’s lack of engagement with genuine philosophical issues is their Achilles heel.