What isn’t philosophy: a meta-rational explanation
Philosophy is a nebulous, poorly-defined category. Meta-rationality can help with that!
What I do resembles philosophy in some respects, so mistaking it for that is natural. So why do I say it is not philosophy?
As we saw in “Philosophy isn’t…”, the field has no coherent answer to “what is philosophy?”; and therefore it has no adequate criteria for what is not philosophy. Professionals know it when they see it, but have no philosophical explanation for their recognition.
Stepping outside philosophy’s own confused view of itself, and its failure to answer the question, how can we approach “what is, or is not, philosophy?”
This is the second part of “I don’t do philosophy,” which is Chapter 4 of “Undoing Philosophy.” If you’ve arrived here without context, you might want to read chapters 0, 1, and 2 of “Undoing Philosophy” first. Or, you might want to start with the first part of Chapter 4, which is “Four kinds of philosophy I don’t do.”
From a meta-rational point of view, philosophy is a nebulous category. It has the usual features of nebulous categories, and it can be dealt with in the usual ways. Nebulous categories are typically interactive, purposeful, and accountable.
Nebulous means that something can be “sort of” a fruit, without there being any definitive truth of the matter.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception exemplifies the nebulosity of the category “philosophy”: it could reasonably be categorized as psychology instead. I’ll take that book as my standard example throughout this discussion.
Interactive means that categories are an aspect of activity; you treat something as a fruit (or not) in the course of shopping or cooking.
Depending on your educational background, current interests, projects, and institutional position, you might read and apply Phenomenology of Perception either as philosophy or as psychology.
I recommend that you not read or apply Meaningness or Meta-rationality as either philosophy or psychology, because that would obscure their usefulness. They are meant to be practical tools, not intellectual theories.
Purposeful means that categories are tools for getting work done. You categorize things differently on different occasions, because whether or not something counts as a fruit depends on what you are doing with it. (Botany or cookery?)
What work could you get done by treating Phenomenology of Perception as philosophy, rather than psychology?
Below, I’ll ask: what is philosophy for? What is its purpose? And what is my work for? I’ll point out that their purposes are mainly dissimilar.
Accountable means that if you treat something iffy as a fruit, you may be expected to give a reasonable explanation of why it counts as one.
I’ll explain why Phenomenology of Perception might count as philosophy, or not. I’ll also explain why I think my writing should not count—although there can’t be any absolute truth about whether it is or is not.
Meta-rational ontology observes many approaches to judging whether something should count as a category member or not. In the case of philosophy, we’ll consider:
Institutional legitimacy
Prototype theory, with extensions
Historical continuity and social affinity
Authorial intention
Topics
Purposes
Methods
Institutional criteria
In the case of philosophy, institutional position is a main criterion. Something counts as philosophy iff it’s written by someone educated in, or employed by, a philosophy department; or if it is published in a philosophy journal.
I have never taken a philosophy class; I am not now, nor have I ever been, employed as a philosopher; I have never published in a philosophy journal, nor do I ever expect or intend to. (Merleau-Ponty did all those things.)
Institutional opinion is a distinct, related standard. Something counts as philosophy iff expert professional philosophers, employed by philosophical institutions such as journals and university departments, say it is philosophy.
I am confident that no philosophy journal would accept the sorts of stuff I write for publication, and no philosophy department would hire me to teach philosophy on on the strength of it. They probably wouldn’t even admit me as a graduate student.
Institutional philosophers agree that Phenomenology of Perception is philosophy, although I think it’s had more influence on psychology. In fact, phenomenology as a field pretty much ended with it.
Prototypes
The philosophical theory of categories, going back at least as far as Socrates, is that they must be defined in terms of “necessary and sufficient conditions.” If those conditions hold of a thing, then the thing is definitely a member of the category; otherwise it definitely isn’t.
The philosophical theory of categories does not even work for philosophy itself. There are many marginal examples, of “sort-of philosophy,” for which it is impossible to say whether they definitely are, or are not, philosophy. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception is an example. On the whole, it comes out on the side of “yes, philosophy,” but this is nebulous.
Whether my own work should count as philosophy is also disputable. (It is extensively disputed by reply guys on Twitter.) I will explain why I think it’s pretty clearly not—although, as with almost all other categories, there can be no absolute truth about membership.
Eleanor Rosch, a cognitive psychologist, observed that in the actual world of actual people actually categorizing things, there are usually marginal cases. Eggplants are sort of fruits. Rosch explicitly rejected the philosophical theory, and developed prototype theory as a famous, influential alternative.
I will use prototype theory for much of the rest of this chapter. That’s partly because, unlike the philosophical theory, it admits that there are marginal cases. It’s partly also to make the point that philosophy has no monopoly on its subject matters. Philosophy’s theory of categories is key to its methods, and it is just wrong. A different field, psychology, provides an unambiguously better theory of one of philosophy’s central subject matters. Similarly, psychology has better theories than philosophy’s of key subjects of my work. Purpose and rationality are examples. I think psychology’s theories of these things are also wrong, but they are less wrong than philosophy’s.
So. In prototype theory, something counts as a member of a category if it’s similar to the prototypical member.
Plato is the prototypical philosopher. The stuff I write is extremely dissimilar to the stuff Plato wrote. However, so is much of the rest of philosophy. It would be more accurate to think of philosophy in terms of a branching tree of prototypes, each linked to a previous one in some way.
Which things that definitely count as philosophy are Meaningness or Meta-rationality similar to? To me, they don’t seem much like anything else, philosophical or otherwise. (I’m not claiming this is a good thing, or that it makes them special somehow! Personally, I find it quite weird and puzzling and off-putting. It’s a thing, though.)
The linkages between prototypes may themselves be of dissimilar types. Philosophical prototypes may link by historical or social lineage, by author’s intention, by similarity of topic, similarity of purpose, or similarity of method. We’ll consider those in turn.
Historical and social links
The stuff Aristotle wrote is quite different in content from Plato’s; he cared much more about the diverse specifics of the actual world, for instance. However, Aristotle was Plato’s best-known student, so he counts as a philosopher by personal historical connection. Therefore, later stuff linked to Aristotle’s also counts as philosophy.
A main reason Phenomenology of Perception gets counted as philosophy, not psychology, is that Merleau-Ponty hung out with philosophers. He was close with de Beauvoir and Sartre, for example. His graduate theses were supervised by a philosopher, although he studied with psychologists as well. So, the book counts as philosophy because the author counts as a philosopher, by his history of personal association—regardless of the book’s content, and even though his job title said he was a psychologist. In this case, the criteria of institutional position and lineage conflict, consistent with nebulosity of the book’s classification.
I mostly hang out with engineers; none of my main teachers were philosophers; and I have never taken a philosophy class. So I don’t count as a philosopher by or social connection; and so, by this criterion, the stuff I write doesn’t count as philosophy.
Although, I am in the direct line of PhD advisor-advisee lineage from Martin Luther, so maybe it’s not surprising that I do write theology.
Authorial intention
Merleau-Ponty called his book phenomenology. That counts as a type of philosophy because Husserl, who invented it, was wandering lost in the metaphysical void.1 Merleau-Ponty apparently intended the book to count as philosophy. That doesn’t necessarily make it philosophy. I call my tantric vampire romance novel philosophy, but no reasonable person would agree.
However, the author’s opinion is one factor to consider when weighing possible classifications. I insist that the rest of my writing is not philosophy; and that counts for something.
My work is not meant to be philosophical, scientifical, or intellectual. Nor rigorously argued, well-grounded, or in any other way respectable. Nor intended to contribute to any field; to contain any original ideas; or to be interesting, sophisticated, creative, or impressive.
It is meant to be useful.
I do also try to make it entertaining. That’s partly for my own enjoyment, partly for yours, and partly in hopes of attracting and benefiting readers for what otherwise might be tedious.
Like most of my posts, this one is free. I do paywall some as a reminder that I deeply appreciate paying subscribers—some new each week—for your encouragement and support. It’s changed my writing from a surprisingly expensive hobby into a surprisingly remunerative hobby (but not yet a real income).
Dissimilarity in topics
There are some overlaps in subject matter, but philosophy ignores most topics I care about. I am uninterested in most philosophical topics, and ignore them.
I think I’m right, and philosophy is wrong. You probably should care about roughly the same topics I do. If you aren’t a professional philosopher, you probably do.
Philosophy is mainly about philosophy: “a series of footnotes to Plato,” as Whitehead said. That is philosophy’s topic: philosophy itself. Inasmuch as it is about anything else, it is about how that thing relates to “first philosophy,” i.e. metaphysics.
My writing is not about philosophy.2 It is about antibiotics, marshes, extramarital affairs, and guitar amplifiers. It is about the real world, not imaginary metaphysical abstractions.
I only occasionally mention philosophy in passing. Sometimes that’s because I’ve borrowed a good idea from some philosopher who, atypically, considered something specific and real. More often, it is to dispel a common misunderstanding that originated in philosophy and contaminated ordinary attitudes. Taking up better ways of thinking, feeing, and acting often requires freeing yourself from harmful philosophy that recommends bad ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.
There is some overlap in topics: “problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value,” as the tag line for Meaningness, the book, announces.
Philosophy is sometimes misunderstood as the field that studies topics not studied elsewhere. On that basis, meaningness, the phenomenon, might be thought of as a philosophical topic. However, philosophy doesn’t even have a word for it; I had to invent that one. There’s surprisingly little written about it in philosophy.
I discussed this scanty overlap in “Philosophy has no monopoly on meaningness.” It may be the main reason the stuff I do gets confused with philosophy: I address some of the same issues. However, much of philosophy isn’t about these topics, and several other fields are about them: for example religion and psychology. So discusing these topics doesn’t make something philosophy.
And, the ways religion, psychology, and my own work treat them are dissimilar to the ways philosophy does. The methods are quite different, and I think that counts for more than a partial overlap in topics. Our purposes are also quite different, and that also seems more significant to me. I treat meaningness as a collection of practical problems that can be overcome with practical means, not by difficult thinking.
The meta-rationality book, similarly, is meant as a practical guide to improving your technical work. That is not a philosophical topic. Part One deconstructs rationalism, a philosophical stance, but only in order to get it out of the way. And I do that using non-philosophical means: pointing out how it fails in technical practice.
What is philosophy for?
For some categories, purpose or typical use is the critical membership criterion. Something counts as a chair if its purpose is sitting. Extremely physically dissimilar objects count as chairs. Some objects physically similar to chairs are not chairs because they are not for sitting on. So, is my stuff similar to philosophy, or different, in function?
Philosophy has several different purposes, and you may engage with different parts of it, in different ways, depending on how they align with your own purposes.
If you’ve read academic philosophy, you know that its function is often simply to provide employment to academic philosophers. (That may sound cynical, but it’s true of many academic fields, and philosophy is far from the worst offender.)
One may read philosophy for lite intellectual entertainment. Amateurs also write it for that reason. I recommend against both. If you read or write philosophy for pleasure, be wary. It is insidious. It may influence your thinking for the worse, even without your noticing.
There may be value in hard thinking for its own sake. Pure mathematics is an example; maybe philosophy is another. Sometimes bits of pure math turn out to be accidentally useful, but nearly all will remain permanently useless; and that is probably OK. I like pure math; but after finishing an undergraduate degree in it, I decided not to do a math PhD, because uselessness was not OK for me. On the whole I’m glad other people do it. It’s mostly harmless, though, whereas philosophy is mostly harmful.
For non-professionals, the main reason for learning philosophy is pragmatic. “Problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value” may feel personally pressing. At times, the question “how, specifically, should I live?” becomes urgent. Some people turn to psychotherapy, or religion, or rationalist cognitive “science,” or “spiritual but not religious” systems, or psychedelics, or meditation. Others hope to find answers in philosophy. All those may have something to offer. All can also significantly misguide you.
I think that usefulness for life should be the main justification for producing philosophy. The justification for moral philosophy should be improving moral practice, for example.
I expect that, for many readers, “will learning philosophy make me happier, kinder, more creative or productive?” is the salient question. And I think the answer is “no.” For example, both anecdotal and systematic empirical evidence suggest that learning moral philosophy does not make you more likely to act ethically. It just isn’t useful in practice.
And this is not surprising, because very little philosophy is meant to address practical, personal problems of meaning. However much we may want philosophy to be for that, it’s mostly not what its producers intended. (Existentialism and some Ancient Greek philosophy are exceptions. That explains their popular appeal, as “Philosophy has no monopoly on meaningness” suggested.)
What is philosophy’s affordance? (That is: what does it enable you to do?) Philosophy affords metaphysical argument. If you enjoy that—fine, I guess? If you recognize it as pretentious lite intellectual entertainment, you may find something better to do.
What is my work supposed to be for? And for whom?
Meaningness, the book, is meant to address practical, personal problems of meaning. It may or may not succeed. However, using a chair to sit on, even if it’s a lousy chair, seems more sensible than trying to sit on a potato masher. If you want help with practical problems of ethics, purpose, self, or value, it’s more sensible to turn to religion, psychology, or Meaningness than philosophy.
Meaningness is meant to be useful for most people. I’ve used a tool that estimates how difficult text is to read, and rewritten key parts until the algorithm thinks a high school student will not have trouble with it. Academic philosophy is meant to be read only by academic philosophers. If you aren’t one, maybe it is not for you. If you are one, you won’t mistake my writing for philosophy; it obviously isn’t that, and so it is of no professional interest. (It might be of personal interest to academic philosophers, though.)
Pop philosophy repackages academic stuff for a somewhat wider audience, of amateur philosophy enthusiasts. Amateur philosophy enthusiasts often sneer at Meaningness. They think it’s bad philosophy. That’s right: if you try to use a potato masher as a chair, it will make a bad chair. Meaningness was not meant for them, nor for their purposes.
Reading Meaningness as “interesting ideas” may cause you to argue with them, elaborate on them, and to proliferate concepts, which are what philosophy does. And that may be enjoyable, in a sterile intellectual way, but it may distract you from engaging with your life. It may actively subvert my purpose, which is to support you in changing for the better what you do. My work hopes to improve your concrete activities, with pragmatic benefits for you and others.
Meta-rationality is meant to help you level up if you work in a STEM field. Its substance is methods for improving technical work. Its purpose is not to create or analyze abstract concepts, nor argue in favor of theories. It may include some such creation, analysis, or arguments. If so, those are incidental to the intent and value. Abstractions and arguments are occasional and secondary means, not ends.
The philosophy of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics ideally might help scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians improve their work. That is rare in practice. It is also not what those subdisciplines of philosophy aim for.
Reading Meaningness or Meta-rationality as philosophy, or thinking about them philosophically, is likely to lead to missing much of the value. They are meant to be practical, not to be intellectually interesting.
My work may bear a superficial resemblance to philosophy, but for many categories function is a better criterion for membership than appearance.
Since there is no definite truth of the matter, is it more useful to categorize it as philosophy, or not to do so?
I avoid philosophy’s methods
Here I explain how and why I mostly don’t use philosophical methods. The final chapter of “Undoing philosophy” explains some methods I do use, and encourages you to use them too.
Two main philosophical methods, the ones I’ll reject here, are arguing for theories and defining categories.
Another key method is reasoning with reference to metaphysical entities. I previously discussed and rejected that in “All philosophy is contaminated with metaphysics.” I hope write a longer explanation of this someday, in terms of the relationships among myth, math, and metaphysics.
Arguing doesn’t work
Ancient Greek philosophy congealed out of a mixture of practices derived from earlier professions. Prominent among them were political punditry and lawyering.
Athenian democracy and legal proceedings were inherently adversarial, and inherently binary. Candidates for office would either win or lose; proposed laws would either pass or fail; defendants would be found either guilty or innocent. Politicians and lawyers tried to get what they wanted by arguing for it, and against the opposition.
Philosophy extended this method to important questions like “Is something pious because the gods approve of it? Or do the gods approve of it because it is pious?” Philosophy proceeds adversarially. Metaphorically, it is a battle, in which you defend or attack a theory, and marshal arguments as soldiers, intending to defeat opponents.
Already in Plato’s time, the fatal flaw in this method was well-understood. You can convince most people of false things with clever arguments, and sometimes no argument can convince most people of a true thing. Winning on an battlefield of arguments doesn’t make you right.
Politics and law are about concrete events, so you can point at concrete evidence, as well as arguing about abstractions. On the whole, this means that democracy and common law tend, fractiously and imperfectly, toward agreement and accuracy.
Philosophy is about metaphysical entities (piety, the gods, utility, essences, propositions) for which evidence is absent. In philosophy’s adversarial framework, that leaves arguing as the main method; and it does not tend toward agreement or accuracy. (As we saw in “Philosophy doesn’t work.”)
Rather than abandoning a fatally flawed framework, philosophy—from at least the time of Aristotle—tried to fix argumentation so it would work. He invented logic, which does work. But, only when considering propositions whose truth value is binary: absolutely true or absolutely false. Aristotle declared, by fiat, the Law of the Excluded Middle, that every proposition is either absolutely true or absolutely false. This “Law” is pretty nearly absolutely false. There are nearly no absolute truths or falsehoods in the actual world.
“Pretty much true, in a relevant sense, for particular purposes, in certain sorts of situations” is what we actually can get, and often should aim for. But logic doesn’t work with “pretty much true” statements. (We covered this earlier in “Logic is the branch of philosophy supposedly concerned with thinking well,” and at length in Meta-rationality.) So philosophical argument inherently can’t work in theory; and doesn’t work in practice.
So I don’t do that.
My work aims for practical understanding, not metaphysical truth. I offer common-sense explanations, not arguments. If you’ve inhaled too much philosophy, you may no longer be able to distinguish explanations from arguments. You may have come to assume everything is an argument, and you treat it as such. A step toward freeing yourself from philosophy is to recover your understanding of the difference, and why it matters.
I emphasize participatory observations—“look at this, for example!”—over detached reasoning. I prefer curious, tentative, collaborative inquiry to adversarial struggle over well-defined, well-defended positions.
None of this because I am nice. It is because the methods I use work, and the ones I reject don’t.
“Necessary and sufficient” isn’t necessary or sufficient
Analyzing categories is a main philosophical method. Usually that aims for a definition consisting of necessary and sufficient conditions, which usually doesn’t work.
I began “Philosophy isn’t…” with the observation that introductory philosophy classes often begin by attempting to define philosophy, and then:
After some side-tracking, and delay for rhetorical effect, introductory courses may conclude that the question “what is philosophy?” is unanswerable. No definition is possible.
That creates great, unnecessary confusion among amateur philosophy enthusiasts. Many feel empowered to declare things philosophy or not, based on whatever is convenient for whatever position they are defending, often with absurd results. Professionals don’t make this mistake. They know that no definition is possible, but they can judge accurately what counts and what doesn’t, through extensive experience with exemplary cases.
I introduced prototype theory as a better, explicitly anti-philosophical theory of categories, and have used it to explore what counts as philosophy itself. “Experience with exemplary cases” provides the prototypes required for accurate judgement.
I cheated somewhat, though. I said “Prototype theory, with extensions.” Rosch’s original theory postulated a single, definite prototype for each category. Robins are the prototype for birds. I extended this, as others have, by suggesting that there may be many prototypes. And they may be dissimilar to each other. And members may be similar in different ways, whereas prototype theory postulates a uniform metric.
I don’t think prototype theory is actually correct, nor even that it’s always better than the philosophical theory. It’s sometimes useful to set out necessary and sufficient conditions, even though they will always be somewhat inaccurate when applied in the actual world. This is how rationality works: we engineer sorts of situations in which we can get away with the pretense that we are in the Ideal world of nebulosity-free Platonic Forms.
Understanding philosophy itself is not one of those sorts of situations. Philosophy, as a field, is too diverse to conform to any Ideal Form. Prototype theory is not generally correct, but it was more useful for explaining why my work should not count as philosophy.
Rosch was inspired in part by Wittgenstein’s anti-philosophical discussion of categories. He wrote:
Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games’. I mean board games, card games, ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? Don’t say, “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’”–but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you will not see something common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! Look for example at board games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. […] And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.
Wittgenstein didn’t develop this into a general explanation for how categories work. And, indeed, I don’t think you could get there from here. It’s not quite right, even for his example category “game.” However, it’s closer to correct than prototype theory. It takes no single example as the central prototypical game, and it acknowledges the diversity of ways that games can be similar and dissimilar. My discussion, in this chapter, of the category “philosophy” is similar—in diverse ways.
It’s worth noting Wittgenstein’s method here: “don’t think, but look!” (I added the emphasis in the quoted passage.) Observation provides concrete examples, which are typically more important in forming an understanding than rational analysis. Or, as Merleau-Ponty said, “We know not through our intellect but through our experience.”
A generally better theory will take categories as tools that can be used for particular purposes in particular sorts of situations. That contrasts both with the classical theory and with prototype theory. Both of those analyze categories rationally, i.e. independent of situations and purposes. Observation of examples of people using categories suggests that an understanding of categories as purpose-specific and context-specific is mostly accurate and useful.
For example, a football coach may hector his team before a critical match: “We are not playing a game here!” In context, this makes sense for his purpose: getting the players to take the match seriously, to do their utmost to win. Is football a game? Of course. Is he lying or mistaken when he says it is not? Of course not.
Meta-rationality is supposed to develop this understanding. I haven’t yet written the key chapters, but “Interlude: Ontological remodeling” covers some key points. It uses the official reclassification of Pluto as a non-planet as an example.
So if it’s not philosophy, what is it?
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception has an obvious alternative classification: as psychology. It’s only a question of box A or box B.
When people insist I must write philosophy, it may be because there’s no obvious box B. Then, they mistakenly reason, it must belong in the wastebasket taxon, which they wrongly believe is “philosophy.”
Let go of having to put everything in an imaginary box. That’s a philosophical disease.
Slapping some arbitrary disciplinary designation on Meaningness is not helpful. The book is just what it is. That thing.
Then how can we evaluate it, if not by comparing it to other things in its category according to the standards of that category?
does it make sense?
does it work?
do you like it?
If you feel you have to put it in a box, try “self-help.”
I like this because it is funny. Self-help is a low-status field, whereas philosophy is a high-status field. I have no need to seek status, so I am free to do what I think is most useful. I also like putting silly jokes in my writing, especially when they trade on some paradoxical ambiguity with unexpectedly serious implications.
It’s also sort of true: Meaningness and Meta-rationality are meant to help you help yourself in practical ways. They don’t fit the standard self-help box all that well, though. Most self-help stuff is dumbed-down academic psychology. Some slightly higher-status self-help stuff is dumbed-down philosophy. A few decades ago, self-help was infested with pop existentialism. More recently, there’s been an outbreak of pop stoicism.
I dunno, maybe I’m selling pop phenomenology. Your call. Who cares?
Husserl invented what is now called “phenomenology,” although the word is older.
“Undoing Philosophy” is a partial exception, of course!
This is my favorite piece of yours on philosophy so far! Especially appreciate the clarification on philosophy's methods, and your description of prototype theory
I often think of your work as “psychological philosophy” where the word philosophy is used in the everyday sense (e.g. “my parenting philosophy is…”). It a fun play on words to contrast it with the more formal field of philosophical psychology which I used to find interesting but grew tired of. This blog series helped me realize why: it’s useless except for winning abstract arguments. Thanks.