Methods? We Don’t Need No Steenking Methods.

What’s meant by claims that our methods need revised? Here are some preliminary suggestions, some results from our paying attention to methods.
             1. Abstractions cut loose from examples tend to operate or to guide our thinking according to their own rules, and to mislead us in ways we can detect if we check them by reminding ourselves how the examples go. For example, right? (See #2 below.)
             2. Abstract dichotomies are especially noxious. They tend to lead us into either-or thinking; they make us want to sharpen the edges to eliminate problematic or borderline or ill-fitting examples, sharpen edges by means of precising definitions; they often come with their own trailing clouds of prejudices (privileging and marginalizing) shaped by agendas of power rather than truth; and viewing them as continua looks like critical thinking and so substitutes for honest toil even while it puts questions about applicability to sleep. For example, consider the opposition between power and truth. And dichotomies are especially obnoxious because as long as you operate at an abstract level, you cannot get rid of them. Need a nondichotomous consciousness? Weeeeelll, what’s that mean? (It must mean a consciousness which is not dichotomous. Oooopsie.) There's a problem.
             3. Philosophical questions are not equal. It is possible to ask bad questions of several different kinds. “How can I know whether the way things seem to me now is based on reality?” imports appearances, perceptions, seemings, looks, into every moment of consciousness, imports them from Cartesia, an intellectual third-world country where they are manufactured by kids jerked out of middle school to slave away for 16-hour days for $1.34 per month. “How is it possible for one word to refer to an indefinitely large number of things?” suffers from trench foot contracted in the war in South Plato. “Are the connections between words and their meanings arbitrary/conventional, or are they natural/necessary?” has to be kept aloft at 35,000 feet in order not to breathe, and melts when brought closer to examples. “What is (Identity or Truth or Knowledge or Meaning or Language or Goodness or Justice or Art or Being or Morality or Consciousness or . . .), Really?” have many ways of going bad right as they get out the gate, ways which remain unnoticed during the crippled frenzy surrounding the home stretch, the refutations and screaming and binoculars and tearings of tickets. Noticing first steps is very difficult. Derek Parfit’s remarks about empty questions are just right, but even he takes a few steps before he gets his binoculars up to look and see.
             4. Ordinary language methods are not proofs, and do not involve criteria by which philosophical questions, terms, lines of thought must stand or fall. But they do help raise issues about whether the justifications for those questions, etc. are complete or adequate. Ordinary language methods, when applied, are deeply corrosive of many standard problems. Those problems are revealed as having roots in only empty air or speculation, in begged questions, in wildly oversimplifying pictures, in overreaching analogies, in assumptions that substantives name substances. This result can be dizzying (especially when we find our darlings melting before our very eyes). The questions often are revealed as not being about the examples we thought, and what they are about are revealed as mythological beasts.
             5. Transcendental arguments: These are arguments of the form, it has gotta be this way, because otherwise we don’t know how to think about it. Examples are legion. Human beings have to be as Cartesian dualism describes, otherwise what could they be? Recognition has to involve matching perceptions against internal templates, or we don’t know how it works. The thing to remember is that these arguments offer just as good support for the claim that we do not know as they are for the claim which they allegedly support.
             6. Thought experiments: Thought experiments have to be understandable, and they have to be understandable without sacrificing sanity. J.L. Austin comments that with some thought experiments (what shall we say about our old goldfinch who explodes or starts quoting Ms. Woolf?) all we can do, and it does not further the argument, is to fall silent. We can perhaps guess how to extend these insights–thought experiments do their work only if they stand on their own as stories without our importing philosophical terms or lines of argument. They need to be purified of our philosophical temptations to agree or disagree with positions at issue. If what we keep seeing in our philosophical spelunking are the contours of what turn out to be the silhouettes on the lens of our batlight, then we need to back up, start over.