This is a drafty sort of Fisking
of Stanley Fish's essay,
"Truth But No Consequences:
Why Philosophy Doesn't Matter"

Comments and criticisms are welcome; probably need them.


Fish's essay opens thusly:

When in the wake of September 11 a number of commentators began to draw lines of cause and effect between what had happened and the “rise” of postmodernism, a new chapter was opened in a very old story. It is the story of the supposed relationship between philosophy at its highest reaches and the events of history. The governing thesis that makes the story go is that philosophy matters and matters both at the societal level—the actions of a society will in some sense follow from the philosophical views encoded in its institutions—and at the level of the individual who will think or do something as a consequence of the philosophical views to which he or she is committed. My counterthesis is that philosophy doesn’t matter and that when faced with a crisis or choice or decision you and I will typically have recourse to many things—archives, consultations with experts, consultations with friends, consultations with psychiatrists, consultations with horoscopes—but one of the things we will not typically consult (and if we did it wouldn’t do us any good) is some philosophical position we happen to espouse.

We have our first straw man in the first line. September 11 was caused by ‘postmodernism’. No doubt someone has said it, but – since it is not plausible - it hardly seems a suitable test case for the thesis that philosophy ‘matters’, i.e. has real-world consequences. And phrases like ‘the governing thesis that makes the story go’ – in which awkwardness and absent-mindedness compete – foreshadow trouble to come. Stories have beginnings, middles and ends; arguments have premises and conclusions. If we cannot decide which we are talking about, we are not likely to talk about much of anything. Finally, Fish’s preliminary formulation of his ‘counterthesis’ seems most inauspicious. For consider the following, representative statement of the ‘thesis’, from the beginning of Mill’s essay on “Bentham”.

They [Bentham and Coleridge] were destined to renew a lesson given to mankind by every age, and always disregarded – to show that speculative philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and in the long run over-bears every other influence save those which it must obey itself. The writers of whom we speak have never been read by the multitude; except for the more slight of their works, their readers have been few; but they have been the teachers of the teachers.

A stronger statement of this thesis is hardly conceivable. (A weaker one almost certainly advisable.) Nevertheless, Fish’s counterthesis is obviously perfectly consistent with the truth of this strongest of all likely formulations of the thesis he wishes to argue down. We consult archives, experts, friends. Perhaps what they tell us is tinctured with … philosophy. Trickle-down is the model most appropriate to speculative free market of ideas, after all. And even command economies of Mind, like Plato’s, do not envision every man his own philosopher King. Who is left for Fish to target, if he has missed liberal Mill and authoritarian Plato, and everyone in between, cleanly?

The mansion of philosophy has many rooms. To miss the broadside of the barn from such close range is an accomplishment.

From here, things get bad.

Let me make clear what I do and do not mean by philosophical position. I don’t mean a substantive idea, like the idea that gender differences justify discriminatory practices or the (opposing) idea that they don’t. Ideas like those most certainly matter and have real world consequences as the history of the twentieth century amply shows.

In other words, Fish’s argument to the conclusion that philosophy doesn’t matter, i.e. philosophical positions have no consequences, will rest squarely and explicitly on the premise that the set of ‘philosophical’ ideas and the set of ‘substantive’ ideas share no common members.

There are obvious problems with this (and a veritable host of less obvious ones, which we will let pass.) First, this is a premise no one on the other side will grant – certainly not without argument, and Fish does not propose to argue for it; he takes it to be self-evident that philosophy is not ‘substantive’, which is his privilege. But, in the context of the game he proposes to play, it rather amounts to taking the ball and going home.

For that matter, why not argue straight from the premise that philosophy is not ‘substantive’ to the conclusion that it is ‘inconsequential’. I, for one, would be willing to grant the conditional: if philosophy is about nothing really, then it really can’t matter much. (Why a 30 page essay? If this a result, then it ought to be a one-page paper in Analysis.)

It is just barely possible that Fish thinks he is crafting a term of art, for purposes of his discussion: if an idea turns out to have consequences, it is stipulatively disqualified from counting as ‘philosophical’. But, if so, this is an even more flagrant case of taking the ball and going home. If nothing consequential is allowed be called ‘philosophy’, will ‘philosophy has no consequences’ turn out to be true? Yes, I expect so.

If Fish isn’t uselessly stipulating usage, then the distinction he is drawing is perfectly indistinct. For consider: it is common enough for writers on many subjects to declare with authority, ‘there are black things and white things’, thereby ignoring a host of gray things. But usually these writers have the decency to figleaf their fallacy by holding up a few black things and white things as proof. Fish says, ‘there are black things and white things’, then triumphantly produces a gray as proof: ‘gender differences justify (or they don’t) discrimination’. A bit vague (more about that below), but this strikes me (how about you?) as an idea whose middling degree of abstraction probably puts it on the fence between philosophy and … something else; push or pull it where you will: practical ethics, received wisdom, custom, culture, public policy, law. In which case it is the worst possible sort of example to pick on for purposes of sharply distinguishing ‘philosophy’ from ‘substantive ideas’. It is the best possible example for someone like Mill to pick on, to provide prima facie support for his view that philosophical speculation impinges on every sphere of practical reason.

This point should be underlined emphatically. Fish’s whole argument rests on a distinction between ‘philosophical ideas’ and ‘substantive ideas’ which is not spelled out. It is left to the reader to derive it herself from one single example which, so far as I can tell, is probably a counter-example. So it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the core of Fish’s position so far consists of a strong counter-example to whatever the core of his position will be, should it subsequently make its appearance.

Nor do matters improve.

Moreover if you are committed to one of those [substantive] ideas, you will be inclined to act in certain ways in certain situations. You say to yourself (for example), “since I believe that gender differences do not justify differences in compensation, I will take care that men and women receive equal pay for equal work.”

There is an incidentally irritating feature of this passage. Namely, I do not think that anyone – not in the United States, anyway; not in recent decades – has argued that ‘women should be paid less for equal work’ is some sort of basement moral truth. It is thought (less often said) by some that women are in some way inferior, and therefore do less work – or lower quality work – and are therefore entitled to less pay under the ‘equal pay for equal work’ principle. It is probably felt by many (males) that, ideally, society ought to be male-dominated; a feeling that no doubt tends to overflow into preferences concerning pay-scales. It is believed by many that employers have (or should have) a right to set pay for employees as they see fit, i.e. a right not to have to justify themselves in certain ways.

I could go on. The point is: Fish picks one example of an allegedly substantive but non-philosophical intellectual dispute, on which he erects an alleged distinction between ‘substantive ideas’ and ‘philosophy’. The example does not seem to work, as noted. To make matters even worse, Fish fleshes out the example in completely unrealistic fashion. At best, his characterization of what the dispute is about, in practical and psychological and policy terms, is unrecognizably incomplete. Indeed, it might be closest to the truth to say that the thing he labels a paradigm ‘substantive idea’ – i.e. ‘gender differences don’t justify discrimination’ - is closer to what is ordinarily called a ‘rhetorical slogan’: a blunt device whose chief employment is to exclude the unwelcome intrusion of what are ordinarily called ‘substantive ideas’.

It might be objected to this that the distinction between substance and rhetoric is a false one. Fine. Yet, if someone asks for an example of a ‘substantive foreign policy idea’ and someone holds up a flag and says ‘these colors don’t run’, the example may pardonably be deemed an imperfect paradigm.

It might be objected, instead, that the retrograde Republican attitudes I have enumerated above are so far beneath contempt that they deserve exclusion and don’t deserve the honorific ‘substantive’. Be that as it may, the example is Fish’s not mine. If these ideas don’t deserve to be called ‘substantive’, it simply follows that his example is a bad one; which is my point.

I think it would be hard to exaggerate how perfectly evacuated of sense is Fish’s proposed distinction between ‘philosophical ideas’ and ‘substantive ideas’. I do not think this distinction even works, as many do, in a rough-and-ready, many-cases-will-be-clear sort of way. And even if it did work like that, it would not be sufficient for Fish’s purposes. If philosophy is always shading off into intellectual substance, then intellectual substance will be infected with philosophy to some unspecified degree; and if so, how can philosophy fail to be infected by consequence to some unspecified degree? The line must be bright and sharp for the argument to go through. As it is, the line is not even foggy. It is simply absent. There is no there there.

Now that we have located ourselves so precisely, shall we proceed? What follows is an alleged example of a philosophical idea – or, rather, of a philosophical dispute.

But if you say to yourself, “I believe that what is true is what corresponds to the independently specified facts,” or, alternatively, “I believe that truths are internal to historically emergent and revisable frames of reference or interpretive communities,” nothing follows with respect to any issue except the issue of which theory of truth is the correct one. That is to say, whatever theory of truth you might espouse will be irrelevant to your position on the truth of a particular matter because your position on the truth of a particular matter will follow from your sense of where the evidence lies, which will in turn follow from the authorities you respect, the archives you trust, and so on. It is theories of truth on that general level that I refer to when I say that philosophy doesn’t matter.

There are at least three problems here, at least two of which are fatal.

First, there are theories, and philosophical theories, and then there are philosophical theories of truth, i.e. of the nature of truth. It is possible to fudge the distinction by saying things like ‘my theory of the truth about the nature of mathematics,’ so that all theories of x turn out, trivially, to be theories of the truth about x. But it is more natural not to speak this way. Yet I detect a temptation in Fish to slide from the position that theorizing about truth may be practically inconsequential – something I myself suspect to be true: I think truth is a primitive notion - to the position that theorizing about anything (or anything abstract) must partake of the inconsequentiality of theories of truth; this most definitely does not follow.

The last sentence of the above passage seems simply and forthrightly and fallaciously to equate the subject matter of philosophy with the subject matter of the theory of the nature of truth. If so, Fish is sunk once again. And if this isn't what he is saying, why would pointing out an example of an allegedly inconsequential philosophical idea, or dispute, lend significant credence to the thesis that all philosophy is inconsequential? After all, no one denies – surely – that sometimes philosophy devolves into nonsense and inconsequence: angels on the heads of pins; pick your favorite example. The only question is whether it is always that way.

It might be retorted that Fish hasn’t made his argument yet. This is page one. He is just settling his usage. But – as per above – his usage would appear to be distinctly eccentric. The philosophy/substance distinction persists in not coming clear; or else he is simply stipulating his conclusion at the start. He is defining ‘philosophical position’, for purposes of what follows, as ‘one that lacks real world consequences’.

Second problem: as with the gender and discrimination example, it is distracting and disruptive that Fish picks non-positions as his examples of positions. “I believe that what is true is what corresponds to the independently specified facts.” I suppose Fish supposes this is how foundationalists talk, or correspondence theorists; someone. It is worth mentioning that such folk – rather an antique breed - do not typically think that facts need to be ‘independently specified’ in order for things to be true of them. (This would require an independent, omniscient specifier, whose nature and relation to ourselves is problematic, and whose existence is subject to doubt.)

Nor is there any obvious, necessary tension between the proposition that ‘what is true is what corresponds to the facts’ and ‘truth is internal to a frame of reference or interpretive community.’ A correspondence theorist or foundationalist will admit, for example, that linguistic usage evolves, as a result of which a true sentence may become false or nonsensical. Whether a sentence is true is thus an ‘internal’ question about the meanings of the words composing it, which is obviously a function of what a certain community means by them. But it is possible – if one thinks it advisable – to be a correspondence theorist or foundationalist at the same time that one acknowledges these obvious facts.

What is going on here? In order to illustrate his thesis that philosophy has no consequences, Fish proposes a dispute between two propositions that are, in fact, apart from certain awkwardnesses of formulation, probably consistent. Since asserting contradiction where there is none is nonsense, and nonsense is inconsequential, it would not be surprising if this pseudo-dispute proved inconsequential. The question, of course, is whether all philosophy is nonsense. Serious thinkers have suspected it. The view is not to be lightly dismissed. But simply offering a few examples of nonsensical philosophy does not prove it.

To put it another way, it is possible Fish is mistaking his private case for the general. This is not just an insult, though it is certainly an unflattering thing to say. It is possible that Fish has fixated on a pseudo-dispute and that some part of him recognizes its inconsequential character; and he thinks all philosophy is like the philosophy he has fixated on for years: wheels turning without engaging the machinery, as Wittgenstein says.

It will be objected that the dispute between realism, or foundationalism, and anti-realism, or anti-foundationalism, can be given teeth, even if Fish’s versions do not exhibit any. I agree. I think it is likely, for example, that certain dogmatic or fundamentalist religious doctrines are inconsistent with certain forms of anti-realism or anti-foundationalism. But this just brings me to my third point: religious doctrines, if believed and acted upon, can have consequences. Putting the point as weakly as possible, so that it will be as strong as possible: if any version of any theory of truth or epistemology, however wrong or mistaken, can potentially clash with any religious view – and I believe this modest bill can be filled – then it is possible for philosophy to have consequences. In which case Fish’s thesis is decisively falsified.

We have now read about a page of Fish’s 30 page article. It is very true, as J. L. Austin says, that in philosophy it is usually all over by the bottom of page 1. Is there, then, any point in going on? I think there may be. If I have the will, I will take the matter up tomorrow.