COLIN MCGINN
What is the nature of philosophy? Two views have been influential. One
view is that philosophy is continuous with sciencea kind of proto
science or a commentary on the sciences or a synthesis of them.1 Accord-
ing to this view, philosophy is an empirical discipline, though more
removed from data than typical science: it is not different in kind from
physics, chemistry, and biology. Thus the subject of philosophy comes
under the general heading of science because of its methodological
similarity to the received sciences. Historically, philosophy once con-
tained the sciences, which eventually broke off from it, and it is still a kind
of science-in-waitingpupal science, as it were. The second view is that
philosophy is quite unlike empirical science, both in methodology and
subject matter: it is an a priori discipline, removed from observation and
experiment. According to this view, philosophy is to be contrasted with
empirical science, and is often regarded as properly one of the human-
ities. In its purest form, the second view takes philosophy to consist of
conceptual analysis aimed at establishing a priori necessary truthsthe
1
We associate this type of view with Quine, but Russell too espoused it. Perhaps I should
add that both philosophers were prepared to jettison such parts of traditional philosophy as
could not be so subsumed: what was discontinuous with science in the inherited corpus of
philosophy should be consigned to the flames. In this they shared the predilections of the
pruning positivists.
2
These are not the only conceivable metaphilosophies: one might hold that some phi-
losophy consists of synthetic a priori propositions, in which case conceptual analysis does not
exhaust the field; or one might favor a purely therapeutic view of philosophy in the style of
the later Wittgenstein; or even hold an inspirational view. But the two metaphilosophies I
have mentioned are the most popular.
3
For a defense of this position see my Truth by Analysis: Games, Names, and Philosophy
(McGinn 2011a). The position is nowhere near as narrow as we have been taught to think,
once we have a properly inclusive conception of analysis.
10
Obviously, I am rejecting a pan-cultural view of realitythat it is all social con-
struction or some such. I am supposing that philosophy deals with reality as suchthe real,
objective article. I take this to be compatible with the thesis that methodologically philoso-
phy proceeds by conceptual analysis: in philosophy we analyze reality conceptually (see
McGinn 2011a).
biology? Philosophy, it will be said, does not make the kind of progress
made in the sciences, including the formal sciences; it just isnt as
epistemically solid. The very idea of philosophical knowledge is an oxy-
moron, a sheer fantasy.
Now there is much to be said about this kind of objection to the
scientific standing of philosophy, but I shall try to be brief. First, we must
not underestimate how much knowledge philosophy has actually
acquired, of a quite straightforward sort, mainly in the way of establishing
certain distinctions: that is, philosophers have clarified certain important
distinctions that were previously blurred and unrecognizedand this is
real cognitive progress (use and mention, type and token, particular and
general, name and quantifier, necessary and contingent, fact and value,
knowledge and belief, analytic and synthetic, sense and reference, charac-
ter and content, implication and implicature, and so on).11 Second, phi-
losophy has discovered and articulated the various theoretical options that
are available in any given problematic area, even if it has not actually
settled which options are the true ones: it has mapped out the philosophi-
cal geographyand this too is genuine cognitive progress. Knowing what
these options are, and appreciating their strengths and weaknesses, is a
large part of what makes philosophy appealing to many of uswe hadnt
thought of them before we came to the subject, and they add to our store
of knowledge (they also expand our imagination).12 But still, it may be
retorted, dont the sciences do more than merely articulate the theoretical
optionsdont they decide which are correct and which incorrect?
Well, that depends. The further from direct observation the science
becomes, the harder it is to produce consensus and conclusive verification.
Contemporary quantum physics is an obvious case in point: many options
and no agreed way to settle which is right. So, is theoretical physics not a
science? Biology cannot decide how life originated on earth, though some
options have been sketched out; so, is biology not a science? Psychology
is notoriously beset by disagreements, sometimes fundamental, but it
would be a stern linguistic policeman who denied the label science to
psychology (ditto economics and sociology). No science is immune to
controversy and polarized opinion, once you get beyond the lower reaches
of the discipline. But there is a more telling point to be made, concerning
difficult and easy science. Suppose I establish a new field of study called
11
Even if some people see fit to reject some of these distinctions for one reason or
another, it cannot be denied that they have clarified previously murky ideas and paved the
way for superior ways of thinking.
12
One type of knowledge delivered by philosophy is knowledge of knowledgeand of
ignorance. We learn the scope and limits of knowledgewhat is doubtful or unproven or
merely groundlessly accepted. This is real knowledge, not available to those who refuse to
study the subject; according to Socrates, it is knowledge of a particularly valuable kind. What
philosophy does not provide is knowledge of particular empirical matters of factbut why
is that so marvelous? Philosophy produces its own kind of knowledge.
13
The whole positivist emphasis on verification distorts our view of the essential char-
acter of scienceespecially if we try to reduce theoretical propositions to something called
empirical content. But this is by now an old story.
16
Compare conceptual analysis with chemical analysis. A chemist might conjecture that
water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen and tests this hypothesis by contriving suitable
chemical combinations (she already knows that oxygen or hydrogen by themselves are not
sufficient to produce water). Just so, a philosopher might conjecture that knowledge is true
justified belief (he already knows that belief and truth separately are not sufficient to produce
knowledge). The questions in both cases are fundamentally mereological. The chemist uses
empirical observation, the philosopher uses intuitions about possible casesbut the type of
question is the same: that is, what constitutes what. There are facts about what constitutes
our concepts, and it is possible to ascertain what these facts are, just as there are ascertainable
facts about what constitutes water (see McGinn 2011a).
matches. But dont philosophers have rooms especially set aside for
research purposesspaces in which they philosophically labor? We call
them studies or offices or seminar rooms. I shuffle into my study in
order to do philosophical research work and in that room I often carry out
thought experiments to test analytic hypotheses; so, am I not spending
time in my philosophy lab? The implicatures of saying this in certain
contexts will doubtless include suggestions of white coats and expensive
equipment, but there is nothing literally false in the proposition itself: I am
simply laboring to make philosophical discoveries in the space set aside for
making such discoveries. There are many kinds of laboratory, varying in
their contents according to the subject in question. If I am pressed to
specify what equipment I use in my lab, I might reply that I require a chair
and desk with suitable writing materials and some peace and quietthese
are the tools of research that I employ (physicists, more grandly, have their
massive particle accelerators). I work in a lab performing thought
experimentsand my most precious tool is my brain.
My interlocutor might at this point reluctantly agree that I am guilty of
no outright linguistic solecism in describing conceptual analysis as
experimental but insist that such experiments hardly qualify as empiri-
cal. Here the question becomes trickier, because empirical can mean
several things. Let us again turn to the dictionary for some initial guid-
ance: empirical is defined as based on, concerned with, or verifiable by
observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic, from the
Greek empeiria, experience. Now we can agree that conceptual analysis
does not proceed by observation, but what about experience? During a
thought experiment, dont we have certain experienceswhat might be
called conceptual experiences? Conscious cognition is one variety of
experience in a suitably wide sense; not all experience is sense experience.17
When I judge that I have imagined a case of true belief that is not
knowledge, do I not report a certain conscious experience that I had? The
conscious episodes called intuitions are just a type of cognitive
experiencepart of my total phenomenology at that time. Similarly, we
may have mathematical experiences, as when a proof is appreciated and
accepted. In the case of conceptual analysis, the intuitions play an eviden-
tial role, so we can say that they constitute empirical (experiential)
evidence in this broad sense. We certainly did not proceed from pure
theory or logic without regard for any new cognitive inputwe were open
to new cognitive experiences. Thought experiments are thus rightly
described as empirical in a perfectly good sense of the word. Indeed, we
can even describe them as a posteriori in the sense that they establish their
17
We have emotional and conative experiences as well as sense experiences, and the
exercise of our rational faculty also involves distinctive modes of experience. If we refuse to
apply the word experience here, then what word shall we use instead? Clearly there are
conscious goings-on of some sort.
results only after certain experiences have been obtained; they are not
dogmatically held quite independently of what experience may bring. It is
only after the analytic investigation has been completed that a conceptual
hypothesis is accepted; it is not presupposed at the start.
It now appears that philosophy and physics are alike in being experi-
mental empirical sciences, cleaving strictly to what these words literally
mean. So, what distinguishes them? Here we might appeal to the notion of
perception: physics relies on perception of things, but philosophy (con-
ceived as conceptual analysis) does not. Surely that distinction is rock
solid! Not quite: the dictionary must again give us pause. Under per-
ceive we find become aware or conscious of, from the Latin percipere,
to seize, understand. There is nothing here restricting perception to the
five (or more) senses: intellectual perception is a type of perception too.
Thus I can be said to perceive that true belief is not sufficient for
knowledge by conducting an appropriate thought experiment. Here per-
ceive is synonymous with apprehend, which has both sensory and
intellectual forms. Thus philosophical investigation involves perception in
this capacious sense: I often become aware or conscious of something
while engaged in philosophical thought. I see that something is so.
But we can easily recast the thought behind this suggested differentia by
bringing in the senses explicitly: philosophy does not depend on percep-
tion by means of the senses. Even here we must tread carefully, since one
traditional view is that we have an inner sense capable of sensing what
lies withinin the place where concepts lurk. According to that view, I do
sense the makeup of my concepts, because I use my inner sense to gain
insight into them. The obvious amendment here is to qualify sense by
outer: philosophy, unlike physics, is not based evidentially on the deliv-
erances of outer sense. The dictionary provides a useful gloss on this
philosophical notion: sense is defined as faculty by which the body
perceives an external stimulus; one of the faculties of sight, smell, hearing,
taste, and touch, from the Latin sentire, to feel. And that notion of
sense certainly excludes conceptual analysis, since I dont use my bodily
senses of sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste to excavate the content of
my concepts. If we use observation to capture the use of the senses in
this narrow sense, then we can correctly say (at last!) that physics is based
on observation and philosophy is not. But notice that we can still claim
that philosophy has the qualities (in both the descriptive and the norma-
tive sense) of empirical experimental science: the methodological gap is
therefore not as wide as we might initially have thought.18
18
We can truly say that we acquire information about concepts by interacting with them
in the course of conceptual analysisas we acquire information about material things by
interacting with them in the course of empirical observation. Concepts are real mental
entities that we can gain knowledge about by directing our attention to them in the process
of conceptual analysis, thus deriving necessary and sufficient conditions for their application.
The mode of interaction here is admittedly not by means of the outer senses, but so what?
19
The case is not essentially different from gaining knowledge of our feelings, sensations,
and thoughts by means of introspection; conceptual analysis just digs a little deeper into the
structure of our thoughts and other propositional attitudes.
20
One might wonder whether the vat supervisors make observations as a basis for the
information they feed into the brain in a vat, so that there is an ultimate observational basis
for the knowledge acquired by the latter individual. The case would then be just like a
testimony case. But we can get around this objection by stipulating that the supervisors do
not acquire their knowledge of physics by observation: they might have it innately or have
godlike faculties or be equipped with a kind of super blindsight. All we need to do is eliminate
the role of ordinary veridical sense experience from the epistemic picture, and this seems
easily done. After all, some philosophers believe that perceptual experiences play no eviden-
tial role anyway.
21
I am here relying on a basic principle about beliefs: viz., no belief is necessarily caused
by a perceptual experience. Any belief actually based on a sense experience could have arisen
from some other causeeither by inference from another belief or as a basic innate belief. It
is only contingently true that beliefs are caused by sense experiences, though in the human
case this mode of causation is very common. A conceivable believing subject could have the
same beliefs about the world as us and yet have no sense experiences at all, according to the
principle.
(though I see nothing wrong with such a procedure); we can, instead, opt
for third-person observational conceptual analysis. There are at least two
ways of doing this. One is simply to investigate the concepts of others by
eliciting their judgments about possible cases (Would you describe the
following case as an example of knowledge?). This is the survey method
much employed by the social sciences: questionnaires, statistical analysis,
and so on. It is a method well suited to discovering the content of other
peoples concepts when that is your main interestas with anthropologi-
cal investigation. But it is still conceptual analysisthat is, discovering the
necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a concept. And it
is straightforwardly observational, as much as any other survey of
opinion. But a second, less orthodox, method might involve delving into
the brain mechanisms underlying concepts: by discovering the neural
correlates of a concept it might be possible to find out what other concepts
the given concept embeds. Thus the concept of knowledge might have a
neural correlate that contains as a part the neural correlate of the concept
of belief or justification; this would be evidence, of a sort, that one concept
contains another. It would be difficult research to carry out, and rather
indirect, but it would surely be observationaland it would result in
information about conceptual constituency. So there is nothing inherently
nonobservational about conceptual analysis. Such brain information
could certainly supplement ordinary first-person inquiry into concepts. If
our first-person conceptual judgments were highly unreliable for some
reason, this might be a sounder way to proceed. At any rate, it is not
logically ruled out. Such an inquiry would proceed from sensory observa-
tional knowledge, by contrast with the hypothetical methods of doing
physics and neuroscience sketched above. To those who champion obser-
vation as the defining mark of the scientific, I ask whether they would
agree that conceptual analysis would be methodologically superior to
theoretical physics in the scenarios here imagined. Somehow I doubt
itwhich shows that the presence of observation is not so critical to solid
science as some people seem to suppose. We dont derive intellectual
prestige inversion as a straightforward corollary of observational inver-
sion. I myself think it is highly invidious and implausible to place so much
emphasis on observation as determining what is sound respectable science.
This is a legacy of positivism we can well do without.
This brings us to the amorphous but unavoidable question of science
and epistemic virtue. The positivists made testability the central episte-
mic virtue of any theory, and any field of inquiry. And by testability
they meant testability by means of sensory observation. The more
observationally testable a proposition is, the better it is. If a proposition or
theory is not testable, or very hard to test, that is a demerit of the propo-
sition or theory. Testability is regarded as the epistemic virtue. This pro-
duces a highly distorted picture of epistemic virtue. There are certainly
many other epistemic virtuessuch as generality, depth, interest, impor-
24
This is what Bernard Williams (1978) called the absolute conception. See also
Thomas Nagel (1989). How human beings test a theory, say by directing their eyes at a
measuring instrument, is actually at variance with what the content of the theory aspires to
be: that is, independent of the human viewpoint.
25
This point is really quite obvious, but it is often ignored: it is not that philosophical
claims are somehow too wishy-washy to be falsifiable. I think myself that philosophy can
boast an epistemic superiority compared to physics, because of its extreme generality, depth,
and transparency. I discuss the epistemic limitations of physics by contrast with both phi-
losophy and psychology in Two Types of Science (McGinn 2011b).
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References
McGinn, Colin. 2011a. Truth by Analysis: Games, Names, and Philosophy.
New York: Oxford University Press.
. 2011b. Two Types of Science. In Basic Structures of Reality:
Essays in Meta-Physics, 14264 New York: Oxford University Press.
. 2012. Philosophy by Another Name. In The Stone, published
online by the New York Times under Opinionator (4 March).
Nagel, Thomas. 1989. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Strawson, Galen. 2008. Real Materialism and Other Essays. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Williams, Bernard. 1978. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
29
The professional name scientist was introduced as recently as 1833, by William
Whewell; before that we had natural philosopher or man of science. In a similar spirit we
philosophers could rename ourselves onticists, if we are persuaded that philosopher is
not an apt name for what we do. Apparently there was a good deal of discussion in the Royal
Society regarding the merits of the name scientist; we can envisage just such debates about
the proper labeling of the people now called philosophers. I think myself that onticist
has quite a nice ring once you get used to it.