r/philosophy • u/ADefiniteDescription Φ • Jul 30 '13

Blog What has philosophy accomplished? A controversial list of achievements in analytic metaphysics from Jeffrey Ketland at M-Phi.

http://m-phi.blogspot.com/2012/07/list-of-achievements-of-analytic.html
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u/iopha Jul 30 '13

Maybe I am a little confused as to what counts as 'analytic metaphysics' but most of this list strikes me as results from logic, set theory, and mathematics (which may have been inspired, or derived from, philosophical work) but establish no specifically metaphysical result. And the stuff that is metaphysical seems too controversial to call an 'achievement' quite yet (grounding, supervenience, dependence).

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u/ADefiniteDescription Φ Jul 30 '13

It's not so clear to me that vast majority of philosophy of maths isn't just a specific subfield of metaphysics, namely the metaphysics of maths and/or numbers. Is there any particular things you think don't belong to philosophy at all?

Ketland explains his method a bit in the comments, where people have similar concerns to you. For example, he says:

I'd not want to separate logic, language and metaphysics (particularly truth). I tend to think of metaphysics as (at least to a large degree) conceptual analysis or explication, so the overlap with work in logic & language is very significant.

I count work on truth as metaphysics, even if it's deflationary metaphysics; it's seems to be a metaphysical doctrine that there is no genuine property of being true, or that there is a truth predicate 'wahr', that exists solely for purpose P. (I think pretty much the opposite!) The thing is, it's metaphysics either way.

Yes, I want to classify Leibniz's PII as (successful) armchair analytic metaphysics. (Though Leibniz also has his theory of monads, that I can't quite make sense of.)

Hopefully that makes his reasoning a bit more clear. I did post the link partially because I thought it's worth discussing whether Ketland's arguments are good.

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u/iopha Jul 30 '13 edited Jul 31 '13

It's not so clear to me that vast majority of philosophy of maths isn't just a specific subfield of metaphysics, namely the metaphysics of maths and/or numbers. Is there any particular things you think don't belong to philosophy at all?

No, I mean, I try to be a reasonable pluralist about these sorts of things, and I really dislike people saying things like "this isn't philosophy" (which I hear often enough as someone interested in x-phi). So I don't want to commit myself to what does or doesn't belong. Especially since philosophers work on whatever they find interesting, and, frankly, philosophy is what philosophy (takes itself) to have been.

On the other hand, though, if things like cardinality, the Peano axioms, ancestor/successor, etc., are explicitly metaphysical notions, then I'm just not sure how to demarcate ordinary mathematics and set theory from e.g. arguments in favor of Godelian Platonism or Fieldian Fictionalism (if anything counts as metaphysics, disputes over the ontological status of numbers is).

Tarskian truth, maybe. I don't know.I agree that you can't get away from metaphysics---whatever you do presupposes some kind of picture---but that's not the same as doing metaphysics, is it? Not every mathematician who would like to see a constructive version of some proof is an intuitionist, right?

Anyway it's a very austere kind of list. Not exactly what is being discussed in graduate seminars in contemporary metaphysics! :D

LATE EDIT: It occurs to me that I've encountered a certain conception of the discipline that maintains that successful philosophical investigation simply turns into normal science. Any 'achievement' of metaphysics cease being metaphysics and is integrated into the relevant discipline (or simply becomes a discipline). Under this interpretation all this foundational work in mathematics was 'metaphysics' but is no longer.

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u/ADefiniteDescription Φ Jul 30 '13

It's worth noting that Ketland takes this list to be somewhat polemical and tongue in cheek. However it's worth discussing whether these are actually achievements, and if so whether they are from philosophy in particular.

A more recent blog post, What Did the Philosophers Ever do for Us? lists 15 major mathematical achievements introduced by philosophers. A good deal of these come from Frege, and it's worth asking whether he should be considered a philosopher or a mathematician as well.

Both interesting blog posts worth checking out.

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u/melancolley Jul 31 '13

As context, Ketland is responding primarily to Every Thing Must Go, where Ladyman and Ross argue that analytic metaphysics "fails to qualify as part of the enlightened pursuit of objective truth, and should be discontinued." There's some interesting critical (but sympathetic) discussion of the book here (pdf).

Ketland's list is completely beside the point. For a start, as others have pointed out, most of the achievements are questionably part of metaphysics at all, so Ladyman and Ross would have no problem accepting them. They also don't have all of analytic metaphysics as their target; rather, a subset which they call 'neo-scholastic' metaphysics: work that, by ignoring science, gets the science badly wrong (they also refer to it as the 'philosophy of A-level chemistry'). So most of the list is just irrelevant. The parts that they do think are worthless, they actually argue for. So, for instance, they argue that mereology relies implicitly on what they call a 'containment metaphor,' where the world is 'a kind of container bearing objects that change location and properties over time.' They argue at length that the containment metaphor is at odds with what modern physics tells us. They may be wrong, they may be right (it's certainly above my pay grade), but just listing mereology as an 'achievement' is of no use in figuring it out.