--Right to reproduce for free personal use is granted provided this notice is included.--
Last Updated: 1996 August 2.
| Faculty Staff Page | Philosophy Home Page |  |
Which philosophical questions are legit, and how do we tell? Explaining this idea is the purpose of this letter.
One of the things which I hope happens just from the occurrence of this suggestion is that we have to change our approach to the problems we work on because the question has been raised. That is, the q., which philosophical q's are legit? implies that sometimes we might be making mistakes in the very first moves of setting up the problems we work on, and so our critical faculties have to be sharp even at the beginning. This whole business might turn out to be wrong, but just raising the question still cannot help but change how we do philosophy. One way philosophical questions could go bad is laid out by Derek Parfit in his Reasons and Persons, in which he suggests some questions might be empty questions. Let me tell that story. There is an interest in philosophy of religion in the intelligibility of the resurrection. That is, is it imaginable that a person (me, or I for short) could die and then after some intervening time be somehow brought to life in such a way that it would make sense to say I am the same person? The question, "Is it the same person?" is taken to be a question for us to investigate. In particular, we could investigate when it might make sense to ask about, or claim or deny that someone is the same person. Parfit has some suggestions about how to think about this, but the only parts we need to note here are two contrasting kinds of examples in which the things that make up something do or do not determine whether the thing is the same thing. (Can we set this to country-western music?) The first example is of a statue, say Donatello's David. If the statue is melted down in a bombing run and then another constructed, even if we use the same bronze we will not say it is the same statue. The second is my library. If my library has all the books in it lost, destroyed in a bombing run (or, more likely, by time, a house fire, an overseas job, failure to pay storage fees) and then is put together again, we will still say it is my library. Given the right example you may even say that it is the same library and be understood correctly. That example might go like this: I come back to teach at HSU after five years and several catastrophes, with not a single book the same, and yet when you ask the dept. chair for a new book on Wittgenstein and she sends you to see me, you come in, I give you the book, and you later tell the chair, Yep, he had it--he's got the same library, all right. If you have trouble with a personal library, think of an institutional library, such as the Arcata Library. (There is also the case in which you come to see me five years later, sit down in my office, and after a bit look puzzled and say, "John, what happened? This isn't the same library." This will be explained perhaps by a major shift in my interests.)
Two lessons emerge in preparation for the main lesson: one, being the same may not be determined by the component parts of something; two, the phrase "the same X" may change depending on context (where context does not mean that it is relative to a speaker or her beliefs but rather relative to a situation or example). It can also shape our thinking in definitional accounts: Lots of philosophical questions are questions about "What is X, (really)?" and the work done centers on giving a definitional account which can be summed up as "X is blank and blank and blank." The relevance to definitional accounts runs like this:
Parfit draws a distinction between the is of identity and the is of composition. "The statue is a piece of bronze" is one kind of example, and it is clear that the statue is not identical with the piece of bronze, since if the statue were melted down we should lose the statue though we still have the piece of bronze. This is in contrast with my library. My library is, and we fill it out--a certain bunch of books on shelves at home, more at my University Office, a storage unit full, plus a few loaned out. But my library should still be my library if I were gradually to get rid of all these books and get others in their place. The compositional whole allows for variation in the parts in a way that identity balks at.
We're ready now to think about empty questions.
There is a pattern of discourse which we philosophers often follow: we look at an
example or a few examples, and bingo, we see a philosophical problem or question.
(Sometimes the question comes first, as in the typical pattern in many of the Platonic
dialogues.) We are going to think here about the relation of some philosophical problems to
the examples we mention in connection with those problems.
Consider a club which dies--it stops meeting, its meeting place burns down in that same bombing run. Five years or ten years or twenty years later you and I (we, for short) start it up again. We, let us say, readopt its bylaws and purposes and rituals and identify ourselves as its members just as our aunts and uncles did. There are some differences, to be sure--we do not dress in the fashions of the Sixties, the old officers are dead or far away, we do not have complete records since the fire.
We are philosophers, and it occurs to us to ask then, "Is it the same club, really?" I demonstrated in class that even when there have been signs that it is a trap, as in a discussion with the subject on the blackboard of "Empty Questions," that most of us are quite happy to begin fighting about what the right answer to the question should be.ΠWe had a good number of people offering highly philosophical reasons for a "no" and others arguing with the same kinds of reasons for "yes." It is one of Parfit's important insights that this question looks as if there is something we do not know which we could find out, as if there were some ingredient we are waiting to find smuggled in or conjured up by some conjunction of other ingredients, or a proper list of necessary and sufficient conditions. As we saw in class, one thing that happens is that for several of us the question looks as if it calls for us to give a definitional account of "club" or of "same." The question looks as if it arises out of the story. But it arises, if we do a bit of self-analysis, because we are philosophers. We have told the story, and that story is, if complete, complete, and the question is revealed as what Parfit calls an empty question. We know the example, and the question gets no grip unless we are inclined to bring philosophy into the context, perhaps with a smuggled answer under our coats.
One proper way to respond to the question might be to repeat the story which led us to ask it. Is it the same club, really? Well, we knew of the club and resurrected it--we got a copy of the old bylaws and the archives, and we found others interested and we pay dues and have the old name. And so on.
Empty questions are those we are tempted by as philosophers, ones we cannot answer, but concerning which there is nothing left to learn. This is because in each of the examples we have the story which provides the answer to the question, in the sense that it reveals all that there is to answer the question, or to show that it is empty, to dissolve it or evaporate it.
One place we might find an application for this is Dennett's "Where Am I?" Consider the possibility, say, of asking where Dennett is after he awakens from his sleep which lasted the better part of a year, and looks in the mirror to see an unfamiliar face. He has been split up several ways by this time, and we are to ask ourselves, where is he, really? Well, with Parfit as our guide we might in answer tell the story which led up to the asking of the question.
jwp
| Faculty Staff Page | Philosophy Home Page | |