Don’t these philosophical exercises always, in the end, come to nothing? I am constantly impressed by the thinness and uselessness of them. When we try to argue from first principles, without the input of meaningful and relevant doses of evidence, two things happen. First, we are bound to spin off in silly directions, without the corrective of empirical disconfirmation to put us back on course. Second, we inevitably have to deal not with real characteristics of real entities, which are independent of but may be described by language, and instead deal with putative logical characteristics of abstract or hypothetical entities. We decide that there is something meaningful in terms like “necessary” and “contingent,” but forget that these are concepts we ourselves have constructed to describe abstractions, not real and demonstrable attributes of real things, and we freight new implications in to those terms which may not follow from the reasons we had for applying these terms to these abstract and hypothetical entities in the first place.
I just don’t think language is a mill that can do much work, without some grist on which to do it. And the notion that one can extract real insights into reality from purely verbal exercises, without the input of data, may seem to someone like a lovely, hopeful notion, but there’s very little reason to think it is ever true.
A scientist may come up with a hypothetical notion. He may employ abstractions in thinking about it. And so he, like the philosopher, may use reasoning which is akin to this. But he knows that this is only the mental work of hypothesizing; it is the conceptual stage of inquiry, where the question is formed, but it is not inquiry itself. That comes when rubber meets road and observations of real entities are made to see whether this hypothesis can or cannot be supported or disconfirmed.
We have centuries of history to tell us: which of these methods leads us more effectively out of the muck? Which of them gives us answers on which we can reliably depend? And while it may be true that science cannot do without philosophy, it has become very clear that science can do without MUCH philosophy.
There are fields – ethics, for example – where there is nothing to do but make verbal arguments, and where the tie to the real world is more a matter of human experience than of objectively measurable fact. In such fields philosophy might do important work. But in whether real things exist, or do not? Not so much.
