Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy

425 Pages·2003·5.04 MB·English

by  Kwame Anthony Appiah

T I T
hinking t hrough

AN INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY
PHILOSOPHY
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Oxford New York
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Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
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Copyright © 2003 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 0–19–516028–2
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
CO NTE NTS

Preface ix
Introduction: A Few Preliminaries xi
CHAPTER 1: MIND 1
1.1 Introduction. 1. 1.2 Descartes: The beginnings of modern philosophy of
mind. 5. 1.3 The private-language argument. 12. 1.4 Computers as models of
the mind. 19. 1.5 Why should there be a functionalist theory? 22.
1.6 Functionalism: A first problem. 23. 1.7 A simple-minded functionalist
theory of pain. 25. 1.8 Ramsey’s solution to the first problem. 26.
1.9 Functionalism: A second problem. 28. 1.10 M again. 29. 1.11 Consciousness.
31. 1.12 The puzzle of the physical. 36. 1.13 Conclusion. 37.
CHAPTER 2: KNOWLEDGE 39
2.1 Introduction. 39. 2.2 Plato: Knowledge as justified true belief. 41.
2.3 Descartes’ way: Justification requires certainty. 44. 2.4 Locke’s way:
Justification can be less than certain. 53. 2.5 The foundations of knowledge. 57.
2.6 Ways around skepticism I: Verificationism. 61. 2.7 Ways around skepti-
cism II: Causal theories of knowledge. 66. 2.8 Causal theories contrasted with
traditional accounts of justification. 70. 2.9 Epistemology naturalized. 74.
2.10 Conclusion. 77.
CHAPTER 3: LANGUAGE 79
3.1 Introduction. 79. 3.2 The linguistic turn. 80. 3.3 The beetle in the
box. 84. 3.4 Frege’s “sense” and “reference.” 87. 3.5 Predicates and open
v
vi Contents
sentences. 92. 3.6 Problems of intensionality. 96. 3.7 Truth conditions and
possible worlds. 99. 3.8 Analytic-synthetic and necessary-contingent. 102.
3.9 Natural language and logical form. 106. 3.10 Using logic: Truth
preservation, probability, and the lottery paradox. 113. 3.11 Logical truth
and logical properties. 115. 3.12 Conventions of language. 117.
3.13 The paradox of analysis. 120. 3.14 Conclusion. 124.
CHAPTER 4: SCIENCE 127
4.1 Introduction. 127. 4.2 Description and prescription. 129. 4.3 An example:
Gregor Mendel’s genetic theory. 130. 4.4 Theory and observation. 136.
4.5 The received view of theories. 141. 4.6 The deductive-nomological model
of explanation. 145. 4.7 Theory reduction and instrumentalism. 148.
4.8 Theory-ladenness. 152. 4.9 Justifying theories I: The problem of induction.
157. 4.10 Goodman’s new riddle of induction. 161. 4.11 Justifying theories II:
Popper and falsification. 163. 4.12 Justifying theories III: Inference to the best
explanation. 167. 4.13 Laws and causation. 171. 4.14 Conclusion. 174.
CHAPTER 5: MORALITY 177
5.1 Introduction. 177. 5.2 Facts and values. 180. 5.3 Realism and emotivism.
183. 5.4 Intuitionism. 187. 5.5 Emotivism again. 191. 5.6 Kant’s universaliz-
ability principle. 197. 5.7 Dealing with relativism. 201. 5.8 Prescriptivism and
supervenience. 204. 5.9 Problems of utilitarianism I: Defining “utility.” 205.
5.10 Problems of utilitarianism II: Consequentialism versus absolutism. 208.
5.11 Rights. 213. 5.12 Self and others. 215. 5.13 Conclusion. 217.
CHAPTER 6: POLITICS 221
6.1 Introduction. 221. 6.2 Hobbes: Escaping the state of nature. 224.
6.3 Problems for Hobbes. 229. 6.4 Game theory I: Two-person zero-sum
games. 232. 6.5 Game theory II: The prisoners’ dilemma. 242. 6.6 The limits
of prudence. 245. 6.7 Rawls’s theory of justice. 248. 6.8 The difference princi-
ple and inequality surpluses. 250. 6.9 Criticizing Rawls I: The structure of
his argument. 252. 6.10 Criticizing Rawls II: Why maximin? 254.
6.11 Criticizing Rawls III: The status of the two principles. 256.
6.12 Reflective equilibrium. 258. 6.13 Are the two principles right? 260.
Contents vii
6.14 Nozick: Beginning with rights. 261. 6.15 The entitlement theory. 265.
6.16 Ethics and politics. 267. 6.17 Conclusion. 269.
CHAPTER 7: LAW 271
7.1 Introduction. 271. 7.2 Defining “law” I: Positivism and natural law. 275.

7.3 Defining “law” II: Legal systems and the variety of laws. 278.

7.4 Hart: The elements of a legal system. 280. 7.5 Punishment: The problem. 285.

7.6 Justifying punishment: Deterrence. 286. 7.7 Retributivism: Kant’s

objections. 288. 7.8 Combining deterrence and retribution. 289.

7.9 Deterrence theory again. 291. 7.10 Why do definitions matter? 293.

7.11 Conclusion. 296.

CHAPTER 8: METAPHYSICS 299
8.1 Introduction. 299. 8.2 An example: The existence of numbers. 300.
8.3 “God” as a proper name. 305. 8.4 The necessary being. 310. 8.5 Hume: No
a priori proofs of matters of fact. 316. 8.6 Kant: “Existence” is not a predicate.
317. 8.7 A posteriori arguments. 322. 8.8 The argument from design 324.
8.9 The harmony of nature. 325. 8.10 The necessity of a creative intelligence. 329.
8.11 Hume’s argument from design: The argument from experience. 331.
8.12 The problem of evil and inference to the best explanation. 334.
8.13 Conclusion. 337.
CHAPTER 9: PHILOSOPHY 339
9.1 Introduction. 339. 9.2 Traditional thought. 341. 9.3 Arguing with the
Azande. 344. 9.4 The significance of literacy. 349. 9.5 Cognitive relativism. 353.
9.6 The argument against strong relativism. 355. 9.7 The argument for weak
relativism. 357. 9.8 Philosophy and religion. 360. 9.9 Philosophy and
science. 364. 9.10 An example: Free will and determinism. 365.
9.11 Compatibilism and moral responsibility. 373. 9.12 The special
character of philosophy. 377. 9.13 Conclusion. 379.
Notes 381
Index 393
PREFACE

You learn a lot about your subject when you set out to introduce the
range of it to people who are approaching it for the first time. That
is a good part of the reason I set out to write an introduction to con-
temporary philosophy. After a while, as you do the detailed work of
professional research, you risk losing sight of the forest for the trees.
Stepping back for a bit, to think again about the shape of the subject
and where your own work fits into it, allows you not just to redis-
cover connections but also to make new ones. That is why under-
graduate teaching is so invigorating.
What I have tried to write is a reliable and systematic introduc-
tion to the central questions of current philosophical interest in the
English-speaking world. (I have also pursued some less mainstream
questions because I think they should be more mainstream!) A phi-
losophy textbook can’t be a record of current answers to the central
questions, because philosophy is as much about deepening our
understanding of a question as it is about finding an answer. So my
task has been to prepare the reader to enter into contemporary
debates by delineating the conceptual territory within which the
many answers currently in play are located. I hope I have succeeded
in making it possible for a newcomer to navigate that territory and
that I have also made the navigation seem engaging, for that will
mean that some of my readers will want to read more deeply in the
subject. An introduction can be the beginning of a lifelong romance.
I find I have now taught philosophy on three continents, and it is
astonishing how the same questions arise in such culturally dis-
parate circumstances. I am grateful to all of my students, in Ghana,
in England, and in the United States: Almost every one of them has
taught me a new argument or—what is much the same—shown me
an old one in a new light. This book is dedicated to them.
ix
INTRODUCTION

A Few Preliminaries
People come to philosophy by many different routes. The physicist
Schrödinger, who developed some of the key concepts of modern
quantum theory, was drawn into philosophy by the profoundly puz-
zling nature of the world he and others discovered when they
started to examine things on the scale of the atom. One of my
friends came to philosophy when, as a teenager, he was first devel-
oping adult relationships of friendship and love. He was perplexed
about how easy it was to think you understood somebody and then
discover that you had not understood her at all. This led him to won-
der whether we ever really know what is going on in other people’s
minds. And many people come to philosophy when they are trying,
as we say, to “find themselves”: to make sense of their lives and to
decide who they are.
If, for these or any other reasons, you come to have an interest in
philosophy, it is natural to turn to the works of great philosophers. But
for most people the content of these works is rather a shock. Instead
of offering direct answers to these questions—What is physical real-
ity really like? Can we ever be sure we know what other people are
thinking? Who am I?—a philosopher is likely to start with questions
that seem to him or her more basic than these . . . but which may
seem to others far less interesting. Instead of beginning by asking
what we can know about other people’s thoughts, a philosopher is
likely to start by asking what it is to know anything at all—thus begin-
ning with epistemology, which is the philosophical examination of the
nature of knowledge. Despite the natural disappointment it produces,
I think that starting with these fundamental questions makes sense.
Let me suggest an image that might help you to see why.
Imagine you are lost in a large old city in Africa or Asia or
Europe. Every way you turn there is interest and excitement. But
xi
xii Introduction
you’d like to know where you are. The trouble is that just when you
think you have found your way out of one maze of alleys, you are
plunged into another. If, in your wanderings, you climb to the top of
a tall tower, you can look down over the streets you have been lost
in, and suddenly everything begins to make sense. You see where
you should have turned one way but went another; you realize that
the little shop you walked past, with the cat in the window, was only
yards away from the garden in the next street, which you found
hours later. And when you get back down into the maze you find
your way easily. Now you know your way about.
In this book we shall find ourselves discussing the nature of
morality, when we set out to decide whether it is always wrong to kill
an innocent person; we shall end up talking about what it is for a
theory to be scientific when we started out wondering about the
claims of astrologers. And when this happens, I think it will help to
bear in mind this image of being lost in an old city. When we move
to these abstract questions, apparently remote from the practical
concerns we started with, what we are doing is like climbing up that
tower. From up there we can see our way around the problems. So
that when we get back down into the city, back to the concrete prob-
lems that started us out, we should find it easier to get around.
People are normally introduced to philosophy by one of two routes.
The first is through reading the more accessible of the great histor-
ical texts of philosophy—Plato’s dialogues, for example, or
Descartes’ Meditations. The second is by examining some central
philosophical question: “What is knowledge?” say, or “Is morality
objective?” In this book I shall be following this second route, but I
shall discuss the views of some of the great philosophers on the cen-
tral questions on the way. Still, it is important to keep in mind that
I will always be trying to move toward a philosophical understand-
ing of the problem I am looking at, rather than trying to give a his-
torically accurate account of a past philosopher.
It is fashionable, at the moment, to stress the way that the central
problems of philosophy change over time. People say that no one
nowadays can really be concerned with all of the problems that wor-
ried Plato. There is some truth in this. There are things in Plato that
it is hard to understand or get excited by: much of the theory in the
Introduction xiii
Symposium about the nature of love, for example, is likely to seem
to a modern reader hopelessly wrong. Fortunately, however, a good
deal more in Plato is extremely interesting and relevant: his
Theaetetus, which is a dramatic dialogue about the nature of knowl-
edge, remains one of the great classics of philosophy, and I shall dis-
cuss it in Chapter 2.
So the reason we philosophers continue to read Plato and many
other philosophers between his time and ours is not simple curios-
ity about the history of our subject. Rather, we find in the great
works of the past clues to a deeper understanding of the philosoph-
ical questions that trouble us now. That’s why mentioning Plato and
Descartes isn’t some kind of concession to the proponents of the his-
torical route into philosophy. It isn’t even just a concession to old
habits in the teaching of philosophy. It is simply a reflection of the
facts that make the historical route work.
My aim in this book is twofold, then: First, I would like anyone
who reads it carefully to be able to go on to read contemporary
philosophical discussions. Second, I would like such a reader to be
able when he or she comes to read Plato, say, or Descartes, to see
why their work remains an enduring contribution to our under-
standing of the central problems of philosophy. I shall always have
in mind a beginning philosophy student who knows none of the
technical language of philosophy but is, nevertheless, willing to
think through difficult questions. There are bibliographical notes
and some advice on further reading at the end of the book; and
there is also an index, which gives in bold type the page number of
the page where a term is introduced or defined. Finally, because I
often need to refer you back or forward to a discussion of a related
issue, I have numbered the sections of each chapter. So sometimes
I’ll refer to section 5 of chapter 3, for example, as 3.5. Together,
these various tools—the notes, the index, the further reading, and
the numbered sections—are meant to help you find your way
around.
You will learn a lot of new words in the course of reading this book.
Philosophy, like all scholarly disciplines, has its own technical terms.
We use them because technical language allows you to keep track of
important distinctions and to speak and write in ways that are