Analysis and Synthesis / Part and Whole /
Specialist and Generalist / Labor and Management / Deliberation and Decision

 

I’m going to continue to harp on Scott Soames’ exceptionally ill-advised and stupid retort to Richard Rorty. I do this because, to the extent that what Soames says actually represents the sense of the discipline, this means that analytic philosophy is actually (as I have frequently asserted) bankrupt.

The trouble is that Soames makes the analytic movement absolute, and forbids the synthetic movement. His argument is that, since no individual can master every area of philosophy, no synthesis is possible and none should be attempted. This argument would forbid any synthesis in any field whatever, since it would be much more difficult for someone to master all of physics than it would be to master all of philosophy. Yet physicists still write textbooks, and not only that, they also often claim that their discoveries apply to all of physics, and not just to their subfield.

The problem here is the defeatist perfectionism of analytic philosophy. The argument is something like “Until we have successfully solved the component problems, what hope is there of finding a solution to the general problem? Let’s do this step by step.”

It doesn’t work that way. Take Isaac Newton. When he published his work, embedded within it were a number of unsolved problems. For example, his calculus was theorized on the basis of the impossible and paradoxical “real infinitesimal”, and as a result, for a couple of centuries mathematicians considered calculus to be simply a physicists’ kludge rather than a real contribution to mathematical knowledge. Likewise, whether he knew it or not, Newton's equations were only valid for two bodies (i.e., the sun and one planet). The first problem was ultimately solved, but  the three-body problem actually represented a truth about reality, and meant that his system would never be as perfect many of his later followers would claim.

Copernicus, whose theory wrongly assumed circular orbits and later required correction by Kepler is a similiar case. Both Newton and Copernicus quite rightly chose to violate Soames’ principle, and to present their higher-level theory even though some of its component theories were not quite right. Soames would call this “doing badly what cannot be done” and would have preferred that they had “constructed a series of limited, but accurate and overlapping, syntheses that together illuminated reality as we know it”.

The choice whether to work the higher (synthetic) or the lower (analytic) level is made all the time in science.  These are relatives; what is a grand synthesis at one level of analysis will be a component element of a higher level, and there is no rule saying that the lower levels must be perfect before any work can be done at the higher levels. (Newton was also working without an atomic theory, much less relativity. And Darwin misunderstood genetics – though that was not his fault, since no one understood genetics at that time.)

A misunderstanding of what “practical applications” are goes along with analytic philosophy’s misunderstanding of whole and part. When Newton used an imperfectly-developed, theoretically-illicit calculus in his physics, that was a practical application (and a sleazy one) from a  mathematician’s point of view – even though Newton’s physics, as physics, was more theoretical than anything anyone had ever done before. Whenever knowledge from one field is used in a different field, that is a practical application.

When philosophers are asked what the practical application of their work is, they respond snarkily, as if you had asked them to satisfy some centerfold-interview dream of world peace, a cure for cancer, and a new Mercedes. But the application of research in one field to some other field is what practice is all about, and if philosophy doesn’t have practical applications anywhere, people rightly  wonder whether it’s doing anything at all. (One reason why physics PhDs get more respect from the general public than philosophy PhDs is that it’s easy to say what the applications of physics are).

Now comes my main point. If you put specialization, analysis, and the parts all together on one side of the page, and then put generalism, synthesis, and the whole together on the other side, the specialist is labor and the generalist is management. Every specialist job that can be done by an expert is done by someone hired for that job, but the big decisions are made by generalists who are in charge of everything, including the unknowns. Analysis is deliberation, and synthesis is decision.

Philosophy’s principled decision to limit itself to specialized subjects, and to refuse to try to understand the whole, confines philosophy to the subordinate role and minimizes the possibility that philosophy might actually make a difference. If generalism is unphilosophical, then the boss will be unphilosophical. And in the world we live in, that boss will be someone like Pat Robertson or George W. Bush. If you leave a vacuum, someone will fill it.

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