What's The Use of Philosophy

W H AT ’ S T H E U S E O F P H I L O S O P H Y ?
WHAT’S THE USE

OF PHILOSOPHY?
Philip Kitcher
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kitcher, Philip, 1947– author.
Title: What’s the use of philosophy? / Philip Kitcher.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America :
Oxford University Press, [2023] |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022040696 (print) | LCCN 2022040697 (ebook) |
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9 780197657249.001.0001
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To the wonderful graduate students
whom I have had the privilege of teaching
—
and for all the others
who once fell in love with philosophy
and who would like the relationship
to stay that way
CONTENTS
Preface ix
1. Philosophy Inside Out 1
2. “So . . . Who Is Your Audience?” 26
3. Pathology Report 57
4. The Whole Function of Philosophy 108
5. Letter to Some Young Philosophers 155
Notes 183
References 185
vii
PREFACE
Occasionally, the question posed in my title is asked as if the ques-

tioner eagerly expected an answer. For the most part, however, the
speaker’s tone—heavily emphatic on the “use” and the “philoso-
phy”—suggests something quite different. That the question is
unanswerable. Because, as everybody knows, philosophy is utterly
useless.
For the past twenty years or so, I have been brooding about
the question. The usual dismissive tone is, I believe, readily under-
standable. It stems from the remoteness of philosophy from the
rest of contemporary culture. Philosophers appear to outsiders as
peculiar beings, perhaps highly intelligent but with bizarre tastes
in the ways they spend their “work” time. They labor over ques-
tions without answering them, spend hours in heated debates
about very little (if anything), criticize one another with peculiar,
and often distasteful, ferocity. Their employers, mostly colleges
and universities, pay them for engaging in their pointless jousts.
But even their colleagues, who teach and do research in other aca-
demic disciplines, seem to agree with the general judgment that
their activities are incomprehensible.
During the early years of this century, I became more and more
convinced that this worrying attitude was common enough to
ix
x Preface
deserve attention. The Humanities rarely receive much respect in

the English-speaking world. Philosophy is usually assigned to this
low-status division, but it is almost always cut off from its fellow
orphans. Once, of course, philosophers were avidly read by excited
members of the public. Their works were treasured as sources of
life-changing transitions in allegiances and attitudes. Not any-
more. Even in the days when there were local bookshops, the phi-
losophy section was typically stocked with works few Anglophone
philosophers would recognize as contributions to their discipline.
What has happened to philosophy?
I began to focus my unease about this situation when Armen
Marsoobian, the editor of Metaphilosophy, invited me to a con-
ference in London to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the
journal. Four speakers, of whom I was one, presented their per-
spectives on the state of the subject. My contribution was the first
draft of Chapter 1 in this volume, later revised and published with
the other papers in an issue of Metaphilosophy. That issue did not
include any parts of the lively panel discussion.
I had expected criticism, even hostility, and I received some
of the former; I don’t recall any of the latter (perhaps repression
has done its impressive work). But I was also surprised by a fair
amount of sympathy for my heterodox position. Besides that,
what remains in my memory is a vigorous debate with Timothy
Williamson (surely one of the most distinguished philosophers of
his generation.) It was conducted in that wonderful spirit of old-
fashioned disagreement that used to be a characteristically British
style of intellectual exchange. No quarter given, but everyone goes
off happily to the pub afterward. In this instance, we retired to an
excellent dinner.
Preface xi
Reactions to the published article convinced me that I was far

from alone in worrying about the current state of Anglophone
philosophy. Before long, Rob Tempio, philosophy editor for
Princeton University Press, had written to me with the suggestion
that I expand the article as a short book. I mentioned that pos-
sibility to Peter Ohlin, my long-time editor at Oxford University
Press, and someone I count as a friend. Peter, too, thought this
was a good suggestion, although, like me, he was concerned about
poaching another editor’s bright idea. In any event, the issue was
moot. I did not feel ready to write a book in this area.
A few years later, Stefan Hartmann and Michela Massimi
invited me to give a keynote address at the meeting of the
European Society for the Philosophy of Science (later published
in the European Journal for the Philosophy of Science). I accepted
with alacrity. Wishing to develop my approach further, I wrote a
preliminary version of Chapter 2. When I delivered it at the con-
ference, I was again pleasantly surprised by a sense that what I had
said had resonated with at least some parts of the large audience.
The discussion opened with a question that has occupied me ever
since. It was posed by a young woman whose name I do not know.
She began by saying that she was sympathetic to the approach
I had taken—but she wondered how people like herself, starting
out on their philosophical careers, could pursue something of that
sort in a profession whose priorities ran counter to the kinds of
philosophy I commended.
Similar reactions greeted the John Dewey Lecture I delivered
(via Zoom) to the 2021 meeting of the Eastern Division of the
American Philosophical Association (subsequently published in
the Proceedings of the Association). Both during the discussion
xii Preface
immediately following my presentation, and in emails I received

during the next few days, younger philosophers again pressed
me on how they might actually pursue the kinds of philosophy
that appealed to them—without ruining their careers. I tried to
respond, always with a definite feeling that what I was saying was
inadequate.
It seemed, then, that the time had come to attempt to develop
my thoughts further, to combine and integrate the sometimes
scattered pieces of the three lectures, to supplement them with
further material to make some of my negative and positive points
clearer, and to address more systematically the worry that, at least
for younger philosophers, following anything like the course
I described would be suicidal.
I wanted to write a book that would not only expose the
insights in the common, rhetorical version of my title question—
but also respond to those who eagerly want an answer. What fol-
lows is my attempt to do that.
Chapters 1 and 2 are revised versions of the published articles
with the same titles. They have been rewritten to reflect small
adjustments in my views, to make them more broadly acces-
sible, and to integrate them with one another and the chapters
that follow them. The third chapter is new. Its presence reflects
my sense that, besides the impressionistic surveys of its predeces-
sors, a systematic diagnosis of the shortcomings of much contem-
porary Anglophone philosophy would help to expose what has
gone wrong. The fourth is a considerably expanded presentation
of my positive conception of philosophy as outlined in my Dewey
lecture—my response to the imagined eager questioner, who is
genuinely open to an answer. The task assigned to a Dewey lecturer
Preface xiii
is to offer some mix of intellectual autobiography and reflections

on the state of the profession. I have eliminated the former, and
developed considerably further the core themes of the latter, since
I believe I can now be somewhat more precise about what I have
in mind. The final chapter is written to that first questioner who
responded to the first version of Chapter 2, and to all her succes-
sors who have voiced similar concerns. I hope it is more helpful
than what I have previously said to them.
In making my negative case, the principal focus is on genres,
and I have tried to avoid pointing fingers at individual philoso-
phers. Only in a very few instances is identification unavoidable.
Fortunately, in these cases, the people most prominent either in
pioneering or developing the style of philosophy I criticize nev-
ertheless deserve respect and even admiration. Their practices,
although flawed, have an art, a sensitivity, and an intelligence that
is often lacking in those who imitate them.
Where I identify healthy growth in current philosophical
endeavors, I try to single out examples, in hopes that they will be
useful to the reader. So I drop a fair number of names. My lists of
positive figures should not be taken to indicate that those whom
I single out are the only shining lights in the areas of philosophy
with which I associate them. Or even that they are the prime
examples for making my point. Others might choose differently.
Quite reasonably, too.
My emphasis throughout is on the use (or uselessness) of phi-
losophy, a discipline practiced in a variety of ways for well over
two millennia. Only in the final chapter do I take up (briefly)
a different question, the potential usefulness of philosophers.
Many outsiders who find the subject arid and irrelevant might
xiv Preface
well agree that the subject’s practitioners do some valuable work.

Although philosophers show an odd devotion to wrestling with
unanswerable questions lacking any practical import, the effort
breeds in them skills for lucid and rigorous thinking. To be sure,
when they do their “creative research,” their talents are misap-
plied. Sometimes, however, earning their pay requires them to
stand up in front of a previously uninitiated audience and hold
forth. When they do that, they often help those who listen to
them to think more clearly. Since most of their hearers leave their
presence without becoming addicted to the sterile game play-
ing that occupies the consummate professional philosopher’s
“research” life, the listeners tend to put their newly acquired
capacities to work in productive ways. As, perhaps, do the philos-
ophers at the times when they are off-duty and pondering some
important decision.
This side of a philosopher’s life will occupy me only in the final
chapter, where I shall offer some thoughts on the importance of
teaching, and on the contexts in which introducing people to the
subject might prove valuable. “What’s the use of philosophers?” has
a relatively straightforward answer (just summarized). Having
spent fifty-odd years devoting myself to the subject, I don’t believe
the answer can simply be extended to resolve my title question.
“Philosophy’s use is to provide material for training people, who
can then use the material to help others to think better than they
would otherwise have done” won’t do. My imagined eager ques-
tioner wants more than that: a valuable role for some of the books
and articles philosophers write. So do I.
I am extremely grateful to Armen Marsoobian, Stefan
Hartmann, Michela Massimi, and the Committee on Lectures
Preface xv
and Publications of the American Philosophical Association

for the invitations that spurred me to write the raw material for
three of these chapters. I am also indebted to Natalia Rogach
Alexander, Nancy Cartwright, Lorraine Daston, Justin Clarke-
Doane, John Dupré, Gerd Gigerenzer, Clark Glymour, Robbie
Kubala, Susan Neiman, Alexander Rosenberg, James Woodward,
and two anonymous readers of an earlier draft, all of whom have
given me thoughtful advice about how to improve it. Rob Tempio
deserves thanks for his magnanimity and forbearance in not
insisting that planting a seed secured the right to the unpredict-
able fruits that have emerged from a decade in which many people,
most especially those who have responded to those original lec-
tures, have done a fair bit of weeding, watering, pruning, and fer-
tilizing. Besides those I have already thanked, Peter Ohlin should
be counted among the gardeners. I am indebted to him for much
advice, help, and support.
I am grateful for permission to reprint revised versions of three
published articles: to Armen Marsoobian and Metaphilosophy
for allowing me to reuse large parts of “Philosophy Inside Out”
(Metaphilosophy 42, no. 3 [2011]: 248–260); to the editors of
the European Journal for Philosophy of Science and to Springer
Publications for permission to include much of “So . . . Who Is Your
Audience?” (European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9, no. 1
[2018]: 1–15); and to the Officers of the American Philosophical
Association for allowing me to draw on “The Whole Function
of Philosophy” (Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association 95 [November 2021]: 84–102).
Finally, I want to thank all the students I have taught during a
longish career, especially those whose doctoral dissertations I have
xvi Preface
supervised. They have inspired me to reflect on my profession and

its value, and they have constantly challenged my assumptions.
This book is for them and for the many others who will, I hope,
keep the value of philosophy alive.
Autumn 2021
Berlin
February 2022
New York
1 P H I LO SO P H Y I N S I D E O U T
O nce upon a time, in a country not too far away, the most
prominent musicians decided to become serious about their
profession. They encouraged their promising students to devote
hours to special exercises designed to strengthen fingers, shape
lips, and extend breath control. Within a few years, conservato-
ries began to hold exciting competitions, at which the most rig-
orous études would be performed in public. For a while, these
contests went on side by side with concerts devoted to the tra-
ditional repertoire. Gradually, however, interest in the composi-
tions of the past—and virtually all those of the present—began
to wane. Serious pianists found the studies composed by Chopin,
Liszt, Debussy, and Ligeti insufficiently taxing and dismissed
the suites, concertos, and sonatas of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven,
Brahms, Bartok, and Prokofiev as worthy of performance only by
second-raters.
Popular interest in the festivals organized by the major con-
servatories quickly declined, although the contests continued to
be attended by a tiny group of self-described cognoscenti. A few
maverick musicians, including some who had once been counted
What’s the Use of Philosophy? Philip Kitcher, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press
2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197657249.003.0001
2 What’s the Use of Philosophy?
among the serious professionals, offered performances of works

their elite ex-colleagues despised. When reports of the broad
enthusiastic response to a recital centered on the late Beethoven
sonatas came to the ears of the professionals, the glowing reviews
produced only a smile and a sniff. For serious pianists, the fact
that one of their former fellows had now decided to slum it was
no cause for concern. Compared to the recent competition in
which one pianist had delivered Multi-Scale 937 in under 7’10”
and another had ornamented Quadruple Tremolo 41 with an extra
trill, an applauded performance of the Hammerklavier was truly
small potatoes.
As time went on, the outside audience for “serious perfor-
mance” dwindled to nothing, and the public applause for the
“second-raters” who offered Bach, Chopin, and Messiaen became
more intense. The smiles of the cognoscenti grew a little more
strained, and the sniffs were ever more disdainful.
***
Is this sorry tale relevant to the current state of philosophy in the

English-speaking world? I shall not try to offer conclusive reasons
for thinking that it captures the predicament of Anglophone phi-
losophy in the early twenty-first century—but I shall argue that
philosophers, as well as members of the wider intellectual com-
munity and even reflective citizens, should worry about the ques-
tion. “Reconstruction in philosophy” may be urgently needed.1
I shall present a vision of the discipline questioning the dominant
assumption that topics currently viewed as central deserve the
P hilosophy I nside O ut 3
emphasis placed on them, and celebrating issues often regarded as

peripheral.
Reconstruction in Philosophy is the title of a book by John
Dewey (Dewey 1920/1982), whom I take to be the most impor-
tant philosopher of the twentieth century. The approach I shall
elaborate renews Dewey’s concerns with respect to our own times.
To add to the madness of my estimate of Dewey’s significance, let
me start with his provocative characterization of philosophy:
If we are willing to conceive education as the process of

forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emo-
tional, toward nature and fellow men, philosophy may even
be defined as the general theory of education. (Dewey 1916/
1980, 338)
Dewey’s proposal reminds us of his pioneering work in setting

up the lab school at the University of Chicago, and of his con-
tinual willingness to cross West 120th Street to join Columbia
University to Teachers College (as well as pointing to his many-
sided work in the world—can we imagine any philosopher selected
to preside over the trial of an exiled political giant, the contempo-
rary counterpart of Leon Trotsky?). For those who have been well
brought up in recent Anglo-A merican philosophy, his suggested
definition of philosophy is, at best, quaint. Applied philosophy is
all very well, but we know where the center of the discipline lies: in
metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philoso-
phy of mind—the “core areas” as aficionados today typically call
them—in a coinage that has grown in prominence during the past
decades and is increasingly used as a semantic weapon for down-

grading certain kinds of work.
Yet why exactly should we accept that standard picture?
What is philosophy supposed to do—for individual people or for
a broader culture? Pragmatists will think of areas of inquiry as
making contributions to human lives, and they will suppose that
those areas are healthy only if they are directed toward deliver-
ing the things expected of them. When some discipline seems to
be cut off from other fields, when the “literature” it produces is
regarded as arcane and irrelevant, they will think it worth asking
if that discipline is doing its proper job. Immediately after charac-
terizing philosophy as the “general theory of education,” Dewey
buttresses his definition by raising this issue:
Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic—or verbal—or

a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary
dogma, its auditing of past experience and its program of
values must take effect in conduct. (Dewey 1916/1980, 338)
The danger that a field of inquiry will become a “sentimental

indulgence for a few”—or perhaps a site of intellectual jousting
for a few—is especially urgent in the case of philosophy.
The fact that philosophical problems arise because of wide-

spread and widely felt difficulties in social practice is dis-
guised because philosophers become a specialized class which
uses a technical language, unlike the vocabulary in which the
direct difficulties are stated. (Dewey 1916/1980, 338)
Two important points are made here: first, philosophical prob-

lems emerge from situations in which people—many people, not
just an elite class—find themselves; second, the development of
technical language is particularly problematic in philosophy. Both
these points need to be treated carefully.
Take the second first. Philosophy is hardly unique in using a
specialized language. Mathematicians, physicists, and biologists
all talk and write in ways outsiders find incomprehensible. Can
the pragmatist suspicion that all is not well with the technicalia
of philosophy be distinguished from the philistine dismissal of
the esoterica of mathematics, physics, and molecular genetics? Or,
for that matter, from the critical remarks analytic philosophers
direct against the use of the language used in areas of the humani-
ties for which they tend to have little esteem—literary theory, for
example?
There are indeed important differences between philosophy
and the practice of the natural sciences. Faced with skepticism
about the worth of seeking the Higgs boson or investigating the
concentrations of particular molecules in particular cells of appar-
ently uninteresting organisms, particle physicists and molecular
biologists can describe, at least in outline, a sequence of steps
that will lead from answers to the technical questions they pose
to issues of far broader, and more readily comprehensible signifi-
cance. Investigations of these molecules can be combined with
those achieved in different studies to yield a picture of a small step
in the development of organisms, and that picture, in its turn, can
be integrated with perspectives similarly achieved on other aspects
of development, until, at last, our successors may understand how
a multicellular organism emerges from a zygote. Not only is there

a vision of how a large question, one whose significance outsiders
can appreciate, can be decomposed into smaller issues, significant
because of their potential contribution to giving the large answer,
but there is every reason to believe that well-grounded answers
can be found. Discovering those answers may require time, per-
sistence, and ingenuity, but researchers are encouraged by the
recognition that others have done similar things before. They see
themselves as having “methods” for arriving at reliable results.
Philosophy isn’t like that. To the extent that the technical
issues that fill Anglophone journals result in any comprehen-
sible way from questions of large significance, they do not seem
to have reached the stage at which firm answers might be found.
Any defense of the idea that philosophy, like particle physics
and molecular biology, proceeds by the accumulation of reliable
answers to technical questions would have to provide examples of
consensus on which larger agreements are built. Yet, as the philo-
sophical questions diminish in size, disagreement and controversy
persist, new distinctions are drawn, and yet tinier issues are gen-
erated. Decomposition continues downward, until the interested
community becomes too exhausted, too small, or too uninspired
to play the game any further.
The phenomenon is especially dispiriting when industries of
busywork descend from an original and powerful philosophical
idea. Giants have sometimes walked the earth, even in the past
few decades, bequeathing to their students and successors a new
approach to some important cluster of topics. The immediately fol-
lowing generation often takes up the inspiration in fruitful ways,
elaborating the pioneering perspective. Soon, however, “normal
philosophy” takes over, fussing over minute details. Within phi-

losophy, the illumination of the early discussions is dimmed by
debates of increasingly decreasing significance. The larger world
ignores those debates, and, in its deliberations, the power of the
conception may live on—as with John Rawls’s thought of the
basic structure of society as decided in the original position (Rawls
1999)—even while the philosophers argue interminably about the
exact thickness of the veil of ignorance.
Mathematics, rather than the natural sciences, might provide
a more promising comparison, since there are affinities between
the purest parts of mathematics and game playing, and some
famous players have even gloried in the “uselessness” of the sub-
ject (Hardy 1967). Here, too, however, similar points hold. Even
at their most playful, mathematical investigations have rules for
bringing the game to an end; one may fail to see the point of a
theorem (why anyone would care about it), but disputes about
its status as a theorem can typically be settled. Furthermore, the
alleged uselessness of pure mathematics should be placed in his-
torical context. Until the Renaissance, mathematics was viewed
as a low-status activity, precisely because its practitioners were per-
ceived as playing games of no great significance. Developments of
mathematics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries showed
how mathematical languages, devised for esoteric purposes or for
no purpose at all, might be valuable in framing physical inquiry.
Talk of imaginary numbers, for instance, characterized apologeti-
cally by Bombelli (who introduced them) as “subtle and useless,”
became an integral part of an algebraic language for a nascent the-
ory of functions that could be deployed in understanding motion.
The role of mathematics within inquiry—and the social status of
mathematicians—changed. In effect, from the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries on, mathematicians have been given license
to focus on the questions they (collectively) regard as significant,
to introduce new languages, and to find promising new games as
they please. Workers in other fields can borrow from these lan-
guages in reformulating their own questions, and, even though
not every extension of mathematics lends itself to appropriation
by physicists or biologists or economists, there have been enough
successful examples to justify the original faith in unanticipated
fruits of free mathematical play. Hardy, distressed by the outbreak
of World War II, gloried in the uselessness of number theory—
and did not foresee how cryptography would later apply his field.
Philosophy might aspire to something similar, the framing of
conceptions that can assist existing disciplines, or even initiate
new modes of inquiry. At important moments in its history it has
done just that, but its success has resulted from careful attention
to features of the state of knowledge or of the broader human con-
dition. There is no internal dynamic of building on and extending
the problem solutions of a field that can be pursued in abstraction
from other inquiries. In part that is because of the lack of proce-
dures for yielding firm solutions, but also because philosophical
issues evolve. As Dewey remarks of philosophical questions, “We
do not solve them: we get over them” (Dewey 1909/1998, 14).
***
This feature of philosophy is central to the other point I men-

tioned above as worthy of careful treatment. It is easy to suppose
that there are timeless questions, formulated by the Greeks, or
by Descartes, or by Kant, or by Frege, or by Wittgenstein, that,

once introduced, must constitute the core of the subject thence-
forward. I want to suggest a different history, one more conso-
nant with the pictures historians paint of the evolution of the
natural and social sciences. Philosophy grows out of an impulse
toward understanding nature and the human place in it, an
impulse that was present long before the invention of writing.
At early stages of written culture, that impulse was expressed in
undifferentiated concerns about the cosmos, matter, life, soci-
ety, and value. As Dewey remarks in the opening pages of The
Quest for Certainty, the impetus to philosophy was present in all
human contexts, from the natural and social environments of
our Paleolithic ancestors, through the variant forms of society
we know from history and anthropology, to the circumstances of
the present. At each stage, the philosopher’s first task is to recog-
nize the appropriate questions that arise for his contemporaries.
Dewey focuses this thought by offering a diagnosis of the needs
of the 1920s:
The problem of restoring integration and cooperation

between man’s beliefs about the world in which he lives and
the values and purposes that should direct his conduct is
the deepest problem of modern life. It is the problem of any
philosophy that is not isolated from that life. (Dewey 1929/
1988, 204)
Whether or not this is a good diagnosis for his time or for ours
is something I’ll consider later. For the moment, however, I want
to see it as pointing to two axes along which philosophy has
historically operated, and as recognizing an important shift along

one of these.
For most of the history of the sciences, those most deeply
involved saw themselves as doing “natural philosophy.” Similarly,
figures we continue to teach in philosophy classes recognized no
limitations that prevented them from pronouncing on issues we
take as scientific. From the fragments of their writings that have
come down to us, the pre-Socratics were plainly concerned with
questions of physics; Aristotle evidently took all nature as his
province; Descartes wrote his discourse on method as a preface
to treatises on geometry, optics, and meteorology; Kant discussed
the formation of planetary systems as well as the categories of
pure understanding. Ambitious attempts to advance and defend
claims about the natural world, without venturing very far into it,
waned in popularity only as the need for intricate and demand-
ing experimentation became more evident. Nevertheless, the
connections between philosophy and the search for knowledge
of nature show the value of informed reflective thought: philoso-
phers with a thirst to acquaint themselves with the best infor-
mation available to their contemporaries have often found ways
of framing a nascent field of inquiry. Philosophical midwifery, as
I shall call it, is a valuable result of the original urge for systematic
knowledge of nature. The service of the midwives is sometimes
recognized and appreciated. One of the most effective responses
to the complaint that philosophy never makes progress stems
from acknowledging philosophy’s offspring: “Of course philoso-
phy doesn’t make progress! That’s because, when philosophers
launch a study that plainly makes progress, people don’t call it
‘philosophy’ anymore.”
The search for natural knowledge defines one axis along which
philosophy has been directed. As that search is undertaken, the
form of the question changes. Ancient thinkers wanted to know
the fundamental elements out of which the cosmos is built. Two
millennia later, it began to become clear that answers to questions
like that would require complicated interactions with the natural
world to address all sorts of preliminary issues, and that dawning
recognition gave rise to a division of labor. From the nineteenth
century on, philosophy’s role in the search for natural knowledge
has been that of an assistant—sometimes, as in recent work iden-
tifying causes (Spirtes et al. 2000), of an assistant who is promoted
to a full partner. There are places where difficulties arise through
conceptual confusion, or where options are limited because some
presupposition defines the apparent possibilities—and in these
places natural philosophy can still flourish. I’ll postpone for the
moment any further consideration of this role for philosophy, and
of how it can contribute to the enterprise of factual knowledge
(the following chapter will offer some examples).
The second axis marked out by Dewey’s diagnosis is directed
toward identifying value. For Paleolithic people, living together
in small bands, as for well-born members of a Greek polis and for
citizens of contemporary societies, there were and are issues about
what ways of life are worthwhile, what ends are worth pursuing,
what rules should govern their interactions, and what institutions
they should fashion or maintain. Questions like these arise from
the conditions in which people find themselves, and, as those con-
ditions change, we should not expect that the formulations that
are most salient or most apt should remain invariant. They are
questions that are urgent for all people—or at least for all people
who have any chance of directing the course of their lives. They
deserve answers that are not only pertinent to the situations in
which people find themselves but also are as well-informed as pos-
sible about the character of the world in which we live (including
what is known about ourselves). Hence Dewey emphasizes the
importance of integrating the contributions of various forms of
inquiry and of connecting them with our search for what is valu-
able. As he goes on to remark:
Man has never had such a varied body of knowledge in his

possession before, and probably never before has he been so
uncertain and so perplexed as to what his knowledge means,
what it points to in action and in consequences. (Dewey
1929/1988, 249)
The evolution of philosophy along the value-oriented axis should

respond to the changing circumstances of individual and social
life, and also incorporate the best general picture that can be
derived from the contributions of the various specialized sciences.
Framing that general picture is itself a philosophical problem that
emerges along the knowledge axis.
We can now begin to understand how philosophy can continue
to be more than a “sentimental indulgence for a few,” how it can
be a vital part of evolving human culture. Setting aside any fur-
ther ventures in philosophical midwifery, societies and individu-
als continue to need an integrated picture of nature that combines
the contributions of different areas of inquiry, and different fields
of investigation can be assisted by thinkers whose more synthetic
perspective can alert them to missed opportunities and provide
them with needed clarification. Along the value axis, philosophy

can offer an account of morality and of ethical life as evolving
practices, a series of such practices that has probably occupied our
species for tens of thousands of years (a significant portion of its
history), and that has been variously distorted by claims to exper-
tise that are based on alleged religious revelations or on supposed a
priori reasoning. Philosophers can seek, as Dewey recommended,
methods for advancing these practices, ways to make moral and
ethical progress less chancy and bloody, more systematic and
complete. The heart of moral philosophy and of ethics consists in
identifying ways to improve people’s decisions and to reform the
institutions framing human conduct. Methodological advice can
be garnered from history, fueling attempts to avoid the blind spots
of our predecessors, and to diagnose the places in current ethical,
social, and political practice where we are similarly unable to see
clearly.
Philosophy, so understood, is a synthetic discipline, one that
reflects on and responds to the state of inquiry, to the conditions
of a variety of human social practices, and to the felt needs of
individual people to make sense of the world and their place in it.
Philosophers are people whose broad engagement with the con-
dition of their age enables them to facilitate individual reflection
and social conversation.
***
I’ll attempt to remedy the vagueness of this vision by offering

some illustrations with respect to each of the axes along which
philosophical discussions should advance. Consider, first, the
knowledge-seeking axis. There are, of course, the grand questions

that dominate our standard curricula: What is knowledge? Can
various forms of skepticism be rebutted? Professional meetings are
typically abuzz with spin-offs from these grand questions: Should
we opt for internalism or externalism? Is knowledge distinct
from belief or a form of belief? We lack firm answers to these
questions. That does not seem to matter very much. Inquiry goes
on, often delivering valuable results. It is far from evident that it
would go even better if especially clever philosophers settled these
issues once and for all. Perhaps philosophy’s well-known failure
to reach answers to its questions stems from its irrelevance: if the
issues were truly urgent, wouldn’t those who felt their significance
demand standards for resolving them?
At times, human inquiry is retarded or even halted because
investigators are ignorant or confused about the entities involved
in the phenomena they seek to understand. Genetic research was
greatly advanced when it was recognized that genes are segments
of chromosomes, when it was discovered that paired chromo-
somes can exchange material, and—dramatically—when scien-
tists recognized DNA as the genetic material (for most organisms;
awareness of retroviruses came later). When philosophers grandly
ask, “What is knowledge?” or “What makes moral statements
true?,” it might be well to pose a counter question: “Why do
we need to know?” Is it, as in the genetics case, to remove road-
blocks to inquiry? Would we be able to gain greater knowledge
if we had an answer to the epistemological question? Would
settling the issue of the grounds of moral truth assist in moral
decision-making? Do the kinds of answers philosophers offer to
these questions—and about which they continue their ever more
technical debates—enable our knowledge seeking and our moral

practices to make progress? For centuries, knowledge of the natu-
ral world has grown impressively, even in the absence of “philo-
sophical clarity” about what knowledge is. Perhaps with respect
to moral and ethical deliberations, “philosophical clarification”
would be welcome—but only if understanding the status of
morality led to methods we could follow to make moral progress.
I suggest a slogan for a much-needed revolution: No philosophi-
cal clarification without methodological edification! Revolution is
required because so much of contemporary analytic philosophy
fails to satisfy that demand.
Some of the questions philosophers continue to pose were once
important. In the early seventeenth century, as Aristotelianism
crumbled after two millennia of dominance, it was extremely
natural to ask how knowledge could be placed on an immoveable
foundation. For those who saw the past as an exercise of building
on sand, it was important that this should never happen again.
Out of their (ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to find firm foun-
dations came many of the questions that dominate philosophy
courses today. Yet our predicament is different. We have grown
used to the idea that almost everything—or for some of us,
everything—is revisable. What issues should arise in our times?
The knowledge axis of philosophy began by seeking to iden-
tify the structure of the cosmos. Today it is doubtful that there is
any grand structure to be found. As Nancy Cartwright has force-
fully argued, we live in a dappled world (Cartwright 1999). The
predicament of inquiry is to select questions that are particularly
salient for people, given their cognitive capacities and their evolv-
ing interests, and then to work to address those questions—not to
seek some grand “theory of everything.” Perhaps some insightful

philosophers can help through further midwifery: helping neuro-
science in its struggles to tackle hard problems about conscious-
ness, say—a lthough I harbor doubts about whether these topics
are tractable in our current situation. Or perhaps philosophers
can bring broader perspectives to bear on areas of inquiry where
there are protracted controversies and difficulties: in debates
about how to square quantum mechanics with the theory of rela-
tivity, or in disputes about biological determinants of behavior,
for example.
As the division of labor between philosophy and natural sci-
ence was more firmly instituted in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, there was an obvious way to redirect the knowledge
seeking of philosophers. The natural scientists would investigate
the world, while the philosophers would study the methods of
investigation. Provision of canons of evidence, and explication of
metascientific concepts—like theory, law, cause, and explanation—
would contribute to philosophical midwifery by demonstrating
how nascent sciences might begin to grow. From the efforts of
nineteenth-century methodologists, Mill and Peirce, for example,
to the attempts of logical positivists, logical empiricists, and con-
temporary Bayesians, some valuable things have been learned, and
we have acquired better tools for the resolution of some scientific
controversies. Yet, just as there is no grand theory of nature, so,
too, there is no overarching scientific method of any substance.
There are the various fields of inquiry with their collection of tech-
niques for assessing hypotheses, techniques passed on to aspiring
practitioners in “methodology” courses. If the philosophy of sci-
ence is to make genuine contributions to the methods used in
any of these fields, it must be by delving into the details—as, for

example, Clark Glymour and his colleagues do with respect to the
discovery and evaluation of causal models from statistical data
(Spirtes et al. 2000).
The epistemological questions I’ve so far considered focus on
individual knowledge. Yet it should be evident that the principal
issues in an age in which so much potential information abounds
are social. In what directions should inquiry go, if it is to respond
to human needs? How is collective knowledge to be certified and
its status made clear? How can the body of knowledge we have
be organized so it is available for distribution to the people who
need it? How are the claims of expertise to be balanced against
the claims of democracy? Among others, Alvin Goldman, Nancy
Cartwright, and I have begun to consider questions of these
types (Goldman 1999; Cartwright 2007; Kitcher 2001, 2011b).
I submit that our preliminary efforts are not peripheral investiga-
tions that derive from “core epistemology.” They are central to a
renewal of philosophy at a time when one significant project along
the knowledge axis is, in Cartwright’s apt phrase, to explore how
knowledge can best be adapted “for human use.”
***
My earlier discussion of the value axis takes for granted a view of

the ethical project that I cannot fully defend here. Like Dewey,
I take morality and ethics to be human inventions,2 although
not arbitrary ones. They grow out of our needs and our social
condition—they are, if you like, social technologies that respond
to the problems of that condition. We have been engaged in moral
life for at least fifty thousand years, and for most of that time our
moral practices have been worked out in very small groups.
Here is a brief and blunt overview (a more extended account
is given in Kitcher 2011a). Our hominid ancestors, like our evo-
lutionary cousins, the chimpanzees, lived in groups mixed by age
and sex. They were able to achieve that social state because they had
acquired psychological dispositions to respond to their fellows.
Like contemporary chimp societies, those hominid groups were
constantly in danger of social dissolution because of the limits of
the responsiveness: evolution under natural selection has equipped
us with psychological dispositions to take the needs of others into
account—sometimes. Unfortunately, our adaptive equipment
allows for many occasions in which we ignore what those around
us are attempting to achieve, and our neglect typically provokes
social trouble. Unlike our evolutionary relatives, who continue
to solve their social problems through time-consuming forms of
reconciliation, human beings gained an ability to control some
socially disruptive inclinations through self-command. The moral
project began when our ancestors deliberated with one another,
on terms of (rough) equality among the adult members, all of
whom were needed for the survival of the band, and arrived at an
agreement on rules that would govern their lives together. They
initiated a series of experiments of living—to use Mill’s phrase—
and we, who come late in that series, have inherited the experi-
mental ideas that were most culturally successful.
We cannot tell whether either natural or cultural selection has
any tendency to generate elements of ethical practice that might
merit the title of “truth” or “rightness.” Yet it is still possible to find
a kind of objectivity in our moral codes. The patterns of conduct
we praise and the rules we endorse are objective to the extent that
they help in overcoming not merely the surface symptoms but the
deep cause—the restricted character of our evolved responsive-
ness to others. Objectivity in that sense enables us to talk of moral
progress, not as increasing proximity to independently fixed moral
truths, but in terms of problem-solving. The keys we sometimes
devise fit some of the locks we need to open. As with other forms
of technology, we can understand progress in morality as accumu-
lating solutions to problems. Moral progress has been partial, and
vulnerable to reversal, and it occurs significantly less frequently
than would be desirable—but it exists. Dewey’s hope—which
I share—is that an understanding of the character of the moral
project (and its offspring, the ethical project) can help us make
progressive transitions more frequently, more completely, more
reliably, and with more enduring results (Kitcher 2021a).
If anything like this picture is correct, then it bears on the way
philosophy should proceed along the value axis. Contemporary
meta-ethics, as practiced in the English-speaking world, is full of
questions about “reasons” and “knowledge” that an account of eth-
ics as social technology bypasses. Those who use these idioms rarely
deploy them to offer methodological advice for ethical inquiry.
Their discussions of reasons candidly concede that little can be said
about what reasons are. Indeed, we might wonder whether enti-
ties appropriately dubbed “reasons” exist. To be sure, people make
up their minds by thinking things through, engaging in forms of
reasoning good or bad. Does that entail the existence of reasons?
Although deliberators often describe themselves as doing things
for reasons, that hardly clinches the matter. After all, people do
things for the sake of those they care about. I suspect very few of
them believe in the existence of sakes. It is surely worth asking if

contemporary meta-ethics is a Ptolemaic enterprise, resolutely add-
ing epicycles that tend to obfuscate rather than to clarify.
Instead of continuing that venture, we might use the picture
I have painted to diagnose the conditions of contemporary ethical
practices. They are radically different from those obtaining at early
stages of the ethical project. Today, causal involvement with other
members of our species takes place on a far vaster scale, and what
ethical discussions we have are not undertaken on terms of equal-
ity nor with any close connection with many people who might be
affected by what we decide. Most importantly, our entire thinking
is dominated by the myth that there are experts with final author-
ity to answer ethical questions. Usually these are identified as reli-
gious teachers who have access to the will of a being who sets the
rules. An alternative and far less influential version of the myth
takes them to be clever philosophers who have discovered the fun-
damental principles on which the governance of conduct should
rest. Both versions of the myth sometimes fasten on stable elements
of ethical traditions, principles or ideals that were introduced in a
progressive shift and would remain in place under further progres-
sive modifications—we might introduce a notion of ethical truth
to mark this feature of them—but instead of presenting these ide-
als and principles in the vague forms that underlie their stability,
religious teachings and philosophical pronouncements, driven by
the desire for complete systematization, transform them into uni-
versal claims that brook no exception. Better to think in terms of
methods for advancing morality, grounded in the idea of engaging
with others, and of the contributions of sages, saints, and savants
as tools to facilitate that engagement (Kitcher 2021a).
One task for moral practice is to pay attention to the places at

which vague moral generalities, the tools we draw from the tool-
box, fail to serve us well, either because they are inapplicable to the
troubles at hand, or because different tools would generate alterna-
tive reforms among which we cannot decide. When this occurs,
our best response, I claim, is to facilitate some analogue of inclu-
sive, engaged conversation in a world in which billions of voices are
typically lost. Once the myth of final expertise is abandoned, phi-
losophers can only propose. We might seek to emulate the features
of the ethical project that dominated its early stages, requiring con-
versation to engage with the aspirations and needs of others—all
others, on an equal basis—and that discussion must accord with
the best integrated knowledge we have (according to the synthetic
philosophical picture generated along the knowledge axis).
One particular task for philosophical inquiry is to attend to
the functioning of those roles and institutions that the evolution
of the ethical project has generated. Many of the questions peo-
ple pose about what they should do or about what they should
aspire to be are already framed in terms of existing roles and
institutions—caregiver and worker, property and marriage. Given
the picture I have sketched, we should anticipate that roles and
institutions were introduced in response to problems that were
salient for our ancestors. Through a genealogical investigation,
one that traces their original functions, we can prepare the way
for exploration of alternatives that are better suited to the prob-
lem background of our own times (as, on my interpretation of his
work, Michel Foucault attempted to do).
Another task is to address the opportunities for people, indi-
vidually and collectively, to engage in reflection and conversation
about the sense of their lives. Aristotle’s brilliant anatomy of the

good life proceeds from the circumstances in which elite members
of the polis found themselves. We need not only an anatomy that
is responsive to the full range of modern human beings but also a
physiology that will give, beyond the bare list of possibilities, a sense
of how a particular kind of life might be experienced. Dewey recog-
nized the need for a physiology of this sort, and he saw it as proceed-
ing through the interaction between philosophy and the arts:
As empirical fact, however, the arts, those of converse and the

literary arts which are the enhanced continuations of social
converse, have been the means by which goods are brought
home to human perception. The writings of moralists have
been efficacious in this direction upon the whole not in their
professed intent as theoretical doctrine, but in as far as they
have genially participated in the arts of poetry, fiction, par-
able and drama. (Dewey 1925/1981, 322)
Work that points to the philosophical significance of literature is

not peripheral, but central to a philosophical question that arises
in different specific forms in different epochs.
***
Much of what I have said so far needs refinement—and some of

that will be provided in later chapters. Yet I don’t think my over-
simplifications undermine my plea for philosophical redirection.
Whether I have the details right, it seems abundantly clear that
there are important questions along both axes that philosophy
should be addressing, and that much of what is taken to lie at the

center of the subject has no obvious bearing on any such question.
Appearances might be deceptive. Nevertheless, it is incumbent
on philosophers to consider just what, if anything, makes their
intended contributions worth having.
Work that genuinely makes a difference is being done at many
places in contemporary Anglophone philosophy. Philosophers of
the special sciences, not only physics and biology but also psychol-
ogy, economics, and linguistics, are attending to controversies that
bear on the future evolution of the focal field, and sometimes on
matters that affect the broader public. Some political philosophers
are probing the conditions of modern democracy, considering
in particular the issues that arise within multicultural societies.
Ventures in normative ethics sometimes take up the particular
challenges posed by new technologies or the problems of global
poverty. Social epistemology has taken some first, tentative, steps.
A growing number of thinkers are engaging with questions of
race, gender, and class. Within aesthetics, attention has been paid
to connections between art and politics, and some philosophers
have followed Stanley Cavell’s pioneering work in exploring the
philosophical significance of major works of music, drama, and
literature (Cavell 1969). In many of these developments, there is
a welcome rapprochement between ways of thinking that were
too often blocked off from one another by prominent “Stop”
signs, marked with one of the two unhelpful labels “Analytic” and
“Continental”—as if to travel across the English Channel were to
breach a significant philosophical barrier.
The many praiseworthy ventures to which I have just alluded
rarely view themselves as part of a common philosophical
approach: what, after all, does a critique of rational choice models

in economics have to do with an excavation of the moral perspective
in the novels of Henry James (Sen 1977; Pippin 2000)? Whatever
the degree of shared consciousness, these parts of contemporary
Anglophone philosophy realize Dewey’s vision, in their attempts
to renew philosophy in relation to contemporary life and culture.
Dewey’s own major works traverse similar terrain, as they range
from science to politics, from religion to aesthetics. His descen-
dants may even be seen as exemplifying his account of philosophy
as general theory of education, in their serious consideration of the
world as the current state of inquiry presents it, in their attempt
to provide an integrated vision of that world that can guide the
developing individual, in their attention to the meaningful pos-
sibilities for that individual, in the shaping of a self that will live
in community with others.
What binds these endeavors together is a concern for philo-
sophical questions that matter, rather than a shared method. In
setting high standards for precision and clarity, the Anglophone
philosophy of the past half century can be valuable for Deweyan
practitioners— just as finger- tangling études can be excellent
preparation for aspiring pianists. Yet unless one can show that the
more abstract questions do contribute to the solution of problems
of more general concern, that they are not simply exercises in vir-
tuosity, they should be seen as preludes to philosophy rather than
the substance of it. As I said at the beginning, I leave it to those for
whom metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of language and
mind, as currently practiced, count as the center of philosophy to
respond to the challenge. If that challenge cannot be met, then
our current image of philosophy should be turned inside out.
Why does that image matter? What is the point of the metaphi-
losophical question? I gave one part of the answer already: the
common Anglophone conception of philosophy shapes the ways
in which practitioners relate to other areas of inquiry and to the
problems of everyday human life. A faulty image will mislead
the profession of philosophy, and the consequence will be a fail-
ure to fulfill the functions with which philosophers are properly
charged. My reintroduction of the theme of education suggests
the second part of the answer. Graduate programs in philosophy
currently train highly intelligent and imaginative young people,
whose lives will be dominated for decades by the problems their
mentors and colleagues take to be central to the field. We train
them well by giving them studies that improve their facility for
thinking precisely and rigorously. If, however, the prevailing
image of philosophy fails to distinguish the preliminary studies
from the genuine work, if it treats what is most important as mere
periphery, as a place in which the second-raters slum it, then their
education will have failed them. Whether they eventually recog-
nize it or not, they may spend their entire lives knocking a second
off the performance of Multi-Scale 937 or adding an extra trill to
Quadruple Tremolo 41.
2 “ SO . . . W H O IS YO U R
AU D I E N C E? ”
I have a friend, a Shakespearean scholar, whose books are not

only acclaimed by his fellow academics but avidly read by many
other people. Sometimes, when we meet for a cup of tea or a
drink, we talk about our current research topics. I will explain
what I am thinking and writing about, and he will listen sym-
pathetically. His own work inclines him to consider how profes-
sors might reach a wider public. And, often, he will lean back and
ask . . . the question I have quoted in my title: “So . . . who is your
audience?”
I hate the question. As I’ve told him, I conceive my writing dif-
ferently. There are ideas and arguments I want to explore, debates
I hope to resolve. My first job is to do justice to the ideas and the
reasoning. Once I have that straight, I try to make everything as
clear and as accessible as I can. I would like as many people as pos-
sible to gain a better understanding of the issues with which I’m
concerned. But the articulation of the ideas, the generation of the
understanding comes first. The audience will be determined by
my ability, first to figure things out, and second to be as clear as
possible about what I’ve done.
2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197657249.003.0002
“ S O . . . W H O I S YO U R A U D I E N C E ? ” 27
My friend isn’t convinced. He finds this a curious way to think

and write. Much as I dislike his question, I’ve come to think that
he has a point. In this chapter, I want to explore it.
***
The trouble is that my title question has a skeptical relative. “Is

there any audience for the issues that interest you, any group of
people for whom the ideas and arguments you struggle to clarify
are valuable or important?” It’s easy to dismiss that form of skep-
ticism, to see yourself as pursuing inquiries that are intrinsically
significant, even “fundamental” and “timeless.” But I think the
skeptical voice deserves a hearing. A century ago, John Dewey
worried that many of his fellow philosophers were “socially
absent-minded men” pursuing “intellectual busywork.” Like him,
I don’t want philosophy to become “a sentimental indulgence for
the few” (Dewey 1916/1980, 338).
Chapter 1 was inspired by a sense of this danger, indeed by a
growing conviction that contemporary Anglophone philosophy
has lost its audience. I focused concern by comparing today’s pro-
fessional philosophy with its discussions and printed exchanges to
a musical culture that had set up competitions to see who could
perform études of maximal difficulty in minimal time, and that
disparaged those who continued to play the standard (much-
loved) repertoire of sonatas and concertos. Here, I proceed differ-
ently. I want to look at a particular subdiscipline, one that seems
less remote and cloistered than most. Philosophy of science strikes
me as a relatively healthy part of philosophy. So I am not in the
business of delivering a jeremiad or a lamentation. Instead, I hope
to offer a positive answer to the skeptic. But one that, as school

reports sometimes suggest, sees “need for improvement.”
***
There are three obvious responses to the question “Who is the

audience for work in the philosophy of science?” The first pro-
poses that philosophers of science can deliver something of value
to philosophy; the second suggests that the practices of the sci-
ences can benefit from philosophical reflection on them; the third
views philosophy of science as reaching out beyond the academy
and helping the general public to think through issues that are
important for individual lives and for the health of human soci-
eties. I shall want to consider all three of these possibilities, but,
before I do so, it’s worth reflecting on the history of the subject
and considering how the question would have been answered at
various stages.
The prehistory of contemporary philosophy of science begins
with the first recorded attempts to reflect on the search for knowl-
edge of the natural world. Ancient thinkers, in many different
civilizations, offered their views about the fundamental charac-
teristics of the cosmos. As their different proposals collided, they
began to make explicit the ideas about how investigations should
be conducted they had tacitly presupposed. Consequently, much
of the early exploration of nature mingles substantive hypotheses
with claims about how knowledge of the pertinent kinds can be
obtained. One aspect of the period in which modern science was
born, often characterized as “the scientific revolution,” was the
increasing separation of substance from method. As experimental
practices were developed, and as they were viewed as essential to

disciplined inquiry, a division of labor was instituted. Unless phi-
losophers were prepared to go into the laboratory (or, for some sci-
ences, into wild nature) to make rigorous observations, they were
no longer expected to pronounce on substantive matters. Their
license was restricted to articulating canons of proper inquiry.
Work of that type flowered in the writings of those we hail as phi-
losophers, as well as some “philosophical” natural scientists, from
the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. It became focused in
the early twentieth century in the writings of a group of thinkers
who have left an enduring imprint on the way in which philoso-
phy of science is done.
Many of the questions philosophers of science continue to dis-
cuss were posed by philosophers displaced in the 1920s and 1930s
from Vienna and Berlin—Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach,
Otto Neurath, Herbert Feigl, Carl Gustav Hempel, and oth-
ers. The Vienna and Berlin circles, influenced by passages in the
writings of David Hume and Ernst Mach, looked at the history
of philosophy with a suspicious eye—and pledged themselves to
doing better. The problem with philosophy, they thought, was not
so much that its claims were largely false, but that they failed to
possess any clear meaning—or “cognitive significance.” Logical
positivism, the movement they initiated, sought a criterion of cog-
nitive significance, applicable to all philosophical discussions. It
would, they thought, slice away the useless fat, leaving only the
healthy substance behind. (Interestingly, although judgments
about value were officially carved away, deposited among the
fatty leavings, the positivists were not reluctant to adopt a moral
stance; they were passionate advocates for political causes, going
to great lengths to extricate vulnerable people from the clutches

of Nazism, for example.) The body left intact after their surgery,
they claimed, consisted of logic (now formalized by Frege, Russell,
Hilbert, Wittgenstein, and others whom they admired) and the
regimentation of the natural sciences by formal logic. Philosophy’s
scope was radically reduced. It was to be “the logic of the sciences.”
The goal of philosophical work, pursued in the various volumes
of an ambitious series of monographs, the Encyclopedia of Unified
Science, was to clarify concepts and expose structures of justifica-
tion across a wide range of fields of inquiry.
The grand project presupposed a principle, the criterion of
cognitive significance. Supposedly there are two kinds of genu-
inely meaningful statements: some (e.g., the truths of logic and
mathematics) are true or false in virtue of the semantic relations
among their constituent terms; others go beyond matters of
mere meaning to make claims about the world, and these must
be verifiable, at least in principle. Regarding the previous sen-
tence (and its kin) as philosophically unsatisfactory, the posi-
tivists demanded that the criterion be formulated in approved
logical form, so it could be applied to decide difficult cases.
Unfortunately, attempts to find a proper formulation proved
unsuccessful. Logically kosher versions either debarred impor-
tant parts of natural science or allowed in the murky sentences
against which the positivists railed, and which they dismissed
as cognitively insignificant “metaphysics.” As it became clear
that the difficulties were systematic, the search was abandoned.
Logical positivism metamorphosed into logical empiricism.
Logical empiricism, born around 1950, then set the agenda for
subsequent philosophy of science.
Before we consider that transition, let’s ask how the positiv-

ists would have identified their audience. They’d have empha-
sized two out of the three possibilities I mentioned. Not the first,
of course. Traditional philosophy is contentless, the pursuit of
pseudo-questions (Carnap 1928). That leaves no independent
discipline to be enlightened by the philosophy of science. The
second possibility, however—addressing scientists—was viewed
as especially important. The logical reconstructions of parts of
science were offered at a historical stage when the principal foci
of philosophical reconstruction were relatively new. For the logi-
cal positivists were enthusiastic about physics, and inspired by its
early twentieth-century developments. The theory of relativity
and quantum mechanics were recent developments, each of them
posing difficult scientific questions. Philosophical reconstructions
were intended to help clear up some of the scientific puzzles. And
they did. Axiomatization enabled practitioners to see the conven-
tionality of choice for the one-way velocity of light and to recog-
nize the equivalence of different formulations of quantum theory.
But this was by no means the only way in which philosophy
of science aided the sciences. The Encyclopedia was a missionary
effort. Through showing the structures of the well-developed sci-
ences (physics!), and reviewing the state of the less-developed ones,
the hope was to foster fields of inquiry that were only beginning to
find their way. A general picture of how successful science worked
would help the psychologists and the anthropologists and the lin-
guists. Moreover, beyond the scope of the second possible answer,
there would be illumination for a broader public. Nonscientists
would understand the special credentials of the sciences. Their
admiration might even translate into efforts at emulation. And,
perhaps, the logical reconstructions would prove useful in show-

ing how best to educate the young. Obstacles involved in making
some parts of science comprehensible would be overcome.
The transition from logical positivism to logical empiricism
preserved many of the previous aims but modified the priorities.
Hempel’s classic articles on the problems encountered in trying to
formulate a precise criterion of cognitive significance conclude by
setting a new agenda for the philosophy of science (Hempel 1950,
1951). The old conception of a sharp distinction between the cog-
nitively meaningful and the meaningless gives way to a graded
account of the differences among various putatively cognitive
ventures. Areas of inquiry differ with respect to their capacities
to develop genuine theories, their ability to provide explanations,
and the extent to which the claims made by their practitioners
are supported by evidence. Hence arise three of the four main
enterprises Hempel projects for logical empiricist philosophy of
science: to find general accounts of theory, explanation, and con-
firmation. (The fourth, the explication of simplicity, mostly fell by
the wayside.) From 1950 to the present, logical empiricist philoso-
phy of science—the overwhelming majority of general philosophy
of science—has pursued these tasks, and others that have spun
off from them (e.g., an account of the laws of nature, and, most
recently, an account of models and their functions).
The priorities shifted in that the focus on theory, explana-
tion, and confirmation became seen as central to the missionary
role of aiding the relatively undeveloped areas of inquiry. During
the 1950s and 1960s, less emphasis was placed on reconstructing
prominent achievements in the special sciences. Philosophy of
science seemed to speak mainly to scientists by offering a richer
account of the distinctive qualities that had made some groups of

natural scientists so spectacularly successful. By doing so, it also
offered an image of the sciences to a broader public, one that was
occasionally influential in debates and discussions.
Why “occasionally”? Because, for all its orthodoxy among
philosophers of science, the logical empiricist picture of axiom-
atic theories, tied to observational claims through correspondence
rules, offering explanations through subsumption under general
laws, and confirmed in ways that would be articulated in some
still-to-be-completely-developed inductive logic or confirmation
theory, was never the most popular account with the general
public, with journalists, or even with practicing scientists. That
honor fell to the rival approach proposed by Karl Popper (Popper
1934). Popper (another emigré from Vienna) claimed that verifi-
ability was not the key to cognitive significance. What was crucial
to meaningfulness was the susceptibility to being shown false.
His concept of falsifiability captured the imagination of a broad
audience—as witnessed by the frequency with which it has been
wheeled out as the hallmark of genuine science, even in famous
court decisions.
Moreover, the potential influence of the logical empiricist pic-
ture, and also of its Popperian rival, was diminished by the devel-
opments of the 1960s and 1970s. Attempts to answer the general
questions about the sciences posed by the logical empiricists led a
group of philosophers—N. R. Hanson and Stephen Toulmin, as
well as Paul Feyerabend and T. S. Kuhn—to consider the histori-
cal details of the classic achievements. They replaced the comfort-
ing legends of standard presentations with accounts that were far
more informed and nuanced. And far more disturbing. Kuhn’s
monograph (Kuhn 1962) was the final volume in the Encyclopedia

of Unified Science, and it was well received by many scientists,
who saw in the concept of normal science (in which investiga-
tors attempt to solve supposedly well-designed puzzles, and in
which the world tests them, not the framework under which they
operate) a far more accurate presentation of their activities than
anything previous orthodoxies had been able to offer. Much to
Kuhn’s regret, “paradigm” slid smoothly into public discussions.
To this day, the most prominent general image of science, among
outside commentators and scientific researchers, marries pieces of
Popper with bits of Kuhn (although neither would be happy to be
joined to his bedfellow).
Kuhn’s proposals about the difficulties of scientific revolu-
tions, in which one paradigm gives way to another, caused little
offense to the scientists who read his monograph. The only people
bothered by his references to “faith” and “conversion experiences”
were, apparently, philosophers. From the late 1960s on, a princi-
pal task of philosophy of science was to show how the historical
details might be accommodated without abandoning the concep-
tion of the natural sciences as special—as “rational” and as “pro-
gressive” (Scheffler 1967; Lakatos 1970; Laudan 1977). The task
seemed urgent. Perhaps general attitudes toward science would
be corrupted by the awful bogey Kuhn-Feyerabend—a chimera
constructed by people (including me) who failed to recognize the
important differences between these two thinkers. And it got
worse. Feyerabend was very clear that his ideas were different from
Kuhn’s, and his presentations became ever more flamboyant—
and more entertaining (Feyerabend 1978, 1987). Meanwhile, the
historicists had inspired other radical developments, including a
sociological parade begun in Edinburgh and extending through

Bath and Paris (Barnes 1977; Collins 1985; Latour 1987). All
the figures enjoying the carnival Kuhn-Feyerabend seemed to
have initiated were taken, by the majority of philosophers of sci-
ence, to be undermining the authority of science, announcing an
awful relativism that would leave the wider world bereft of proper
guidance. Apparently, our public discussions needed an image of
scientific research that would preserve the proper respect for the
special accomplishments of the natural sciences. Yet, even when
a few professional scientists paid attention, when Paul Gross and
Norman Levitt and Alan Sokal declared the science wars, the
trenches were dug and the shells fell within the walls of the acad-
emy (Gross and Levitt 1994; Sokal 1996). A dash of Popper and
a soupçon of Kuhn satisfied the journalists who wrote about sci-
ence, as well as their readers.
Of course, there were rumblings about the credentials of par-
ticular sciences. Particularly evolution. But those who debated
largely adopted an image of science as a special enterprise.
Scientists trotted out their Popper-Kuhn, philosophers tried their
favorite emendations—more complex, definitely arcane, but more
likely consistent. The more general doubts about science (i.e.,
about having “too much of experts”) are a later phenomenon, for
which the supposed heretics—Feyerabend or Bruno Latour, say—
should not be held primarily responsible.
Yet, from the 1960s on, there have been other important devel-
opments in the field. First is a return to studies of special sciences,
now on a far wider scale. David Hull and Michael Ruse founded
a new philosophy of biology; Merrilee Salmon and Alison Wylie
ventured into archeology; Dan Hausman, Alex Rosenberg, Mary
Morgan, and Nancy Cartwright turned philosophical attention

on economics; a host of scholars reinvigorated earlier attempts to
study psychology; Patricia Churchland campaigned for neurophi-
losophy; and, even within physics, the science from the classical log-
ical empiricist perspective, attention turned to a far wider range of
areas, sometimes centering on the previously understudied uses of
experiment, sometimes on areas of physics that had been neglected
(thermodynamics and solid-state physics, for instance).1 Thirty
years ago, in an important Presidential address to the Philosophy
of Science Association, Arthur Fine suggested that general philoso-
phy of science was dead (Fine 1988). It had given rise to something
more profitable, namely philosophical study of the special sciences.
Fine refined the logical empiricist answer to the audience ques-
tion. Forget about providing a general image of the sciences, either
for practicing scientists (who almost certainly don’t need it) or for
the general public. Philosophy of science earns its keep by foster-
ing the development of the particular sciences. That can occur
through helping to clarify particular disputes or to reconstruct
parts of a scientific theory so as to aid research. It can also happen
through the elaboration of new methods for testing or justifying
specific types of hypotheses.
The refinement tacitly absorbs another important evolution in
the philosophy of science. A wide-ranging cluster of philosophers
in Northern California, the “Stanford school,” debunked the old
picture of a unified science, in which natural sciences are arranged
in pyramidal form, with the most fundamental (physics) as the
solid base, and the more specialized sciences (chemistry, biology,
neuroscience, and so forth) occupying successively higher layers.
As the Stanfordians made clear, the sciences are many (Dupré
1993; Cartwright 1999). Each of them is a complex practice,

sharing features in common with other complex practices, and
typically elaborating the most general (and banal) methodological
theses in ways suited to its particular questions and its particular
subject matter. Philosophers can sometimes help in making meth-
odological progress within some scientific domain. They do so not
by offering some general advice about methods, but by attending
to the specific problems that arise.
Up to this point, philosophy of science could be character-
ized as epistemology (maybe with a bit of metaphysics thrown in)
about a particular kind of subject matter (perhaps knowledge at its
most striking). No intersection with other fields of philosophy—
ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and the like. Why not?
As Elliott Sober once reminded me, the absence of values should
cause no surprise. For the founding fathers, before they were logi-
cal empiricists, were logical positivists—and the positivists denied
that value judgments have cognitive content. (However, as I have
noted, that didn’t inhibit their moral passion in the face of tyr-
anny and oppression.)
The move to a more inclusive philosophy of science began in
the 1980s, in the work of some feminist thinkers—particularly
Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen Longino (Keller 1985; Longino
1990). Despite the fact that they began with similar questions to
those occupying previous philosophers of science—asking what
science is and how it is properly done—values started to creep in
to the answers they gave. For some of us, they have hung around.
But for many philosophers of science—perhaps for most?—
the old questions are the right ones. Philosophy of science is
epistemology—and maybe metaphysics—of science.
A more inclusive philosophy of science finds room for science

(in the singular) as well as the sciences (plural). For science (singu-
lar) is a social institution, one that plays a role in social and politi-
cal life. There are, I suggest, serious value questions, questions
about what its role ought to be.
This, however, is to anticipate. My immediate task is to take
stock of the story I have told.
***
Contemporary philosophy of science is heir to the history

I have—very crudely—rehearsed. And, of course, there are other
developments I haven’t mentioned, a few of which will occupy me
later. Where does that leave us with respect to the audience ques-
tion? Who belongs in the audience for this kind of philosophy of
science?
If you are a refined person, a follower of Fine, you will think
that the second possibility is the right one. Philosophy of science
should speak to scientists, offering its luminous reconstructions
and its methodological advances in specific domains. Perhaps
incidentally it should address the general public, explaining
(say) why some apparently contentious piece of science is well
grounded (think of evolution or climate modeling). Or argu-
ing that some supposed scientifically grounded claim that bears
on human lives and human aspirations is actually unwarranted
(think of debates about IQ, about the biology of race, about
sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and genetic modification
of organisms).
What’s the alternative? Some suppose that general philoso-

phy of science isn’t dead. Hempel and his successors posed the
right questions, and, despite the failure to find fully general
answers, philosophy of science should keep plugging away. I am
skeptical about cleaving to tradition in this way. The diversity
of the sciences—and of human inquiry in general—goes very
deep. There are lots of different kinds of theories, many types of
explanation-seeking questions, even many species of evidence.
To be sure, some, rather thin, general theses can be advanced and
defended—and they have already been stated and defended quite
enough. When philosophers try for greater precision, along with
science-wide scope, accuracy has to give. Generality and accuracy
we can manage—so long as we remain vague.
This is by no means to declare that the attempts to wrestle with
Hempel’s questions are worthless. The partial proposals generated
over the past half century and more are not devoid of value. Almost
all the juice has been squeezed from the fruit Hempel and other
logical empiricists offered. Yet some of the distillations remain
valuable for the contexts in which Fine exhorts philosophers to
go to work. Consider some of the major proposals for understand-
ing scientific explanation. None of them covers all cases, and none
of them provides the final answer to Hempel’s question. Yet, in
particular contexts, thinking of explanation as subsumption
under law (Hempel 1965) or as the ascription of increased prob-
ability (Salmon 1971) or as revealing possibilities of intervention
(Woodward 2003)—even as unification (Friedman 1974; Kitcher
1981)—can be helpful for clarifying a scientific dispute. Much of
the fruitful work in the philosophy of the special sciences depends
on applying the curative liquids supplied by the failed efforts to

provide a general account.
Moreover, immersion in the special sciences need not be
restricted just to one. Those brave enough to explore several
branches of science may find them to share methodological prob-
lems or conceptual unclarities, so that general philosophy of sci-
ence may spring from addressing a common need. Appeals to
causes span several domains of physical science, fields in the bio-
logical sciences, as well as psychology, economics, and sociology.
Mathematics, often regarded as the hallmark of truly serious sci-
ence, is deployed to highlight physical (and linguistic) structures
and to explain. So arise quests for methods of causal identification
and for understanding of mathematical explanations, enterprises
in a renewed, post-Hempelian, general philosophy of science
(Woodward 2003, 2021; Lange 2017).
Alternatively, you might think my third possible answer has
something going for it. Public discussion would go better if there
were a well-developed, widely accepted image of the sciences.
Perhaps. But most of the time people seem to manage quite well
with a vague idea, even with their own blend of Popper and Kuhn.
When public distrust wrongly arises (evolution, climate science)
or when unsound ideas are greeted with enthusiasm (IQ, evolu-
tionary psychology), proceeding piecemeal and focusing on the
special science does just fine.
We have an answer to my title question. It comes with advice.
Go and find your special science(s). Write about it (them). Write
for (and maybe with) the pertinent scientists. They are your
audience.
For all of its attractions, I am not happy with this answer. Let
me explain.
***
I began with three possibilities. Only two of them have figured in

my cartoon history and the morals drawn from it. When the other
one drops out, only Fine’s favorite remains.
My first possibility, that philosophy of science might contrib-
ute to philosophy, was excluded at the start of my potted history,
because, for the logical positivists, there was no independent
contentful philosophy for philosophy of science to influence.
Of course, along the way to today, that has changed. Indeed, if
members of the Vienna and Berlin circles were resurrected among
us, they would be appalled by the profusion of incomprehensible
speculations.
Long ago, I heard Hempel tell an amusing anecdote about
meetings of the Vienna Circle. An early convention was insti-
tuted for the discussions. If any of the participants believed what
had just been said to lack any cognitive content, he was to shout
out “Metaphysics!” Apparently, the shouts were so frequent as to
inspire Neurath to propose an amended convention. When some
declaration actually possessed cognitive content, he suggested,
those who recognized this were to call out “Not Metaphysics!”
The tale suggests how those great forefathers would behave at
today’s philosophical meetings. Those cleaving to the original
convention desperately go from room to room, from session to ses-
sion, exclaiming “Metaphysics!” in ever more agitated tones. Their
Neurathian counterparts are similarly nomadic, but, through-

out their days of listening they maintain an increasingly gloomy
silence.
In fact, a place for independent philosophy already became
apparent after the transition to logical empiricism. The great
gray volumes of Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science,
rich in classics of the field, contained from the beginning modest
ventures in the philosophy of mind. Nothing, of course, to the
multiplication of modalities, the embrace of essentialism, and the
proliferation of supposedly a priori principles that have come to
flood philosophical journals.
Despite its epistemological focus, the philosophy of science of
the past decades has very little to say to what is often dubbed “main-
stream epistemology.” And a good thing, too. For philosophy of
science has concentrated on the old-fashioned task of assembling
tools for sorting out the evidential merits of different claims. It
has been, healthily and steadfastly, more interested in promoting
inquiry than in tackling strained questions about whether, under
particular artificial conditions, a subject can properly be said to
know. Where it has wrestled with skepticism, the forms of skepti-
cism addressed have been live options, typically generated from
historical or sociological studies of scientific practice, attempts to
slay the alleged monsters spawned by Kuhn-Feyerabend.
The metaphysicians of today might, however, learn much from
the achievements of philosophers who have studied the special
sciences. For anyone trained in the philosophy of biology, many
of the pronouncements self-styled metaphysicians make about
natural kinds are embarrassing. Given the sophistication of half a
century’s explorations of causation, from Wesley Salmon, Patrick
Suppes, and Brian Skyrms to Nancy Cartwright, Jim Woodward,

and Clark Glymour, listening to many presentations on “the
metaphysics of causation” is akin to hearing fingers scraped over a
chalkboard. And those steeped in the history of attempts to give
a formal account of explanation will see the latest fashions in “the
logic of ground” as making their painful way into the blind alleys
of the past.
Yet, even if philosophy of science has value for general phi-
losophy, you ought to wonder whether the skeptic has been
addressed. Finding a scientific or a public audience would appear
to settle doubts, although even here we should ask why satisfying
the needs of these audiences suffices. Serving as a handmaiden
to philosophy—to metaphysics, say—only seems to pass the aca-
demic buck. An audience of philosophers would be small conso-
lation, if the philosophers served have themselves no significant
audience.
Later in this chapter, I shall suggest an answer to this
worry: philosophy of science should contribute to a much-needed
successor discipline to traditional metaphysics. For the moment,
let’s consider another part of philosophy, one about which it’s
much harder to sustain charges of irrelevance. Whether or not
you’re a fan of contemporary meta-ethics or of the higher reaches
of ethical theory, it would be hard to deny that, in the past half-
century, philosophical discussions of particular ethical and
political questions have made a positive impact on the condi-
tions of human lives (and on the lives of sentient animals). From
its inception in 1971, Philosophy and Public Affairs has published
seminal articles that have shaped public discussions of important
ethical and social questions (e.g., Thomson 1971; Singer 1972). As
my historical sketch has emphasized, philosophy of science has

mostly avoided any questions about values. That is now changing
(Douglas 2009).
Specifically, within the past quarter century a number of phi-
losophers have taken up Darwin’s suggestion (in the Descent of
Man) that our ethical life could be understood as a product of our
history. The philosophical work has taken two main directions.
One, pursued in the pioneering studies of Brian Skyrms, has elab-
orated formal models for the emergence of norms (Skyrms 1996,
2004). The other, now a dialogue between philosophers and scien-
tists, has attempted to understand the genealogy of morality. The
primatologist Frans De Waal, the anthropologist Christopher
Boehm, and the psychologist Michael Tomasello have found
philosophical fellow travelers, including Patricia Churchland,
Kim Sterelny, and me. Perhaps I express the fondness of a partisan
when I hope for a sophisticated account of the evolution of ethi-
cal life, one that will improve ethical discussions across a range of
significant questions.
The first option, then, isn’t as unpromising as it might initially
have appeared. Philosophy of science might illuminate ethics, and
thereby contribute something that would ultimately improve the
world in which we live. As Chapter 1 already indicated, attention
to evolution might combine with the traditional focus on meth-
odology to reorient ethical discussions away from the currently
fashionable meta-ethical concerns with reasons and abstract ver-
sions of moral realism, and toward an understanding of moral
progress—one that might enable us to have more of it (Kitcher
2021a). Similarly, philosophers engaged with psychology and
neuroscience might improve our understanding of moral decision-

making (Churchland 2019).
Let’s turn now to the second possibility, taking up Fine’s the-
sis that the philosophy of science is the philosophy of the special
sciences. Part of this seems importantly correct. Already in the
1980s, the impact of philosophical work on particular areas of
science was apparent. Biology was an outstanding example. (As
I sometimes used to tell students, philosophers have less effect on
physics, since physicists typically don’t think they have much to
learn from anyone else—except maybe mathematicians; social
scientists, by contrast, are sometimes so desperate for any advice
that a well-intentioned philosopher might start a trend that spent
decades going nowhere; biology is the Goldilocks science, peopled
by scientists who have some sense of what they are doing but who
are still open to the suggestions of outsiders. I should probably
also have recognized psychology as Goldilocks’s twin.) Here are
some obvious examples of early effects on biology. Fine’s colleague
David Hull made large differences to systematics, Elliott Sober
and William Wimsatt clarified controversies about units of selec-
tion, John Beatty addressed long-standing concerns about the
concept of fitness. Those early contributions have been extended
in a long list, and, as the work of people like Samir Okasha, Peter
Godfrey-Smith, and Laura Franklin-Hall shows, the influence on
biological practice shows no sign of abating. Moreover, thanks to
some recent contributions—those of John Dupré, Ken Waters,
and Marco Nathan, for example—the initial emphasis on evo-
lutionary biology has given way to a more inclusive treatment of
biological fields.
In fact, my advice to students was wrong. As philosophers of

physics began to liberate themselves from the framework of logi-
cal empiricism, making use of its tools where studies of scientific
practice seemed to show their promise, exchanges of ideas with
physicists became more consequential (as in the work of David
Albert, Tim Maudlin, and many younger philosophers). Similarly,
as philosophers with an interest in the social sciences abandoned
the thought of some grand pan-scientific perspective offered by
philosophy of science, they have begun to work profitably with
scientific colleagues on concrete problems.
A resounding cheer, then, for part of Fine’s thesis. However,
I think Fine underrated the possibilities of continuing the meth-
odological tradition, begun by the philosopher-scientists (natural
philosophers?) of the seventeenth century who revolutionized the
physical sciences, continued in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies (think of Whewell and Herschel, Mill, Darwin, and Peirce),
and pursued by the principals who figured in my potted history.
As I have already asserted, this tradition strikes me as the healthy
enterprise in epistemology (in sharp contrast to the sickly cousin
whose spasms are recorded in “mainstream” philosophy journals).
Fine perceptively recognized that the disunity of the sciences
spelled trouble for the logical empiricist approach to continuing
that tradition. What he overlooked, I suggest, was the possibil-
ity of different methodological questions, pertinent to particular
aspects of scientific practice that were shared by a number of fields.
Two examples stand out. Consider first the revival of causa-
tion. Russell famously pronounced the death of the notion of
causation. His obituary has turned out to be premature. Many
special sciences hunt for causes, and many applied sciences use
them. Almost forty years ago, Clark Glymour and Judaea Pearl
independently began to explore the possibilities of using directed
graphs to frame causal hypotheses from statistical data (Spirtes,
Glymour, and Scheines 2000; Pearl 2000). Today, the method-
ological proposals advanced by Pearl, and, perhaps, even more
those articulated by Glymour and the brilliant team he has assem-
bled at Carnegie-Mellon University, are being used across a swath
of special sciences. Valuable exercises in methodology have them-
selves been revived with the resurrection of causality (Woodward
2021). Nevertheless, Fine is partly vindicated. Significant further
work in methodology required a different focus (on the problem
of finding causal hypotheses), one that was compatible with the
disunities found in scientific practice. And, perhaps most impor-
tantly, it required a vast amount of dedicated effort on the part of
highly talented people.
My second example addresses an even larger lacuna in the logi-
cal empiricist approach, one shared with the great tradition out
of which it grew. With the conspicuous exception of Peirce, pre-
twentieth-century methodologists sought canons of individual
methodology. They considered how a single investigator should
properly adjust belief in light of interactions with nature. Peirce
not only recognized that inquiry is a communal affair. He also
started to consider the ways in which the efforts of individual
researchers might best be distributed if the community is to
make epistemic progress—he talked of the “economy of research.”
Twentieth- century methodology ignored the hint, remaining
relentlessly individualistic, until— interestingly—Kuhn’s cele-
brated monograph highlighted the scientific community and rec-
ognized the possibility of reasonable cognitive variation within it.
Inspired by this idea, as well as by David Hull’s attention to social

processes in scientific inquiry (and only belatedly discovering that
Peirce had been there before me), I made some clunky attempts
at formal models of community inquiry. Those efforts have been
advanced by Michael Strevens, and more recently by younger
scholars who have deployed far more sophisticated mathematical
tools (Kevin Zollman and Cailin O’Connor are two prominent
examples). To cite just one example, unfamiliar to most philoso-
phers, the senior scholar Rainer Hegselmann, formerly of the
University of Bayreuth, has developed extraordinarily sophisti-
cated models of the flow of information in scientific networks; a
quick visit to Google Scholar will reveal just how unusually influ-
ential Hegselmann’s principal article (Hegselmann and Krause
2002) has been.
As in the case of methods for identifying causes, a change of
focus opens the way for methodological investigations that cut
across scientific disciplines. I am surely partial, but, despite my
great admiration for the achievements of Pearl, Glymour, and
their associates, I view social methodology, formal and informal,
as the great area for epistemology today. Detailed studies of sci-
entific practice, carried out by philosophers, historians, and soci-
ologists, have revealed many aspects of communal inquiry. That
invites philosophical reflection. Are the conventions and norms
governing interactions within scientific communities conducive
to the progress of inquiry? Do the conventions on publication and
rewards for discovery interfere with the sharing of scientific infor-
mation? How much disagreement should scientific communities
tolerate? Questions of this sort are obviously difficult, but answers
would be profoundly relevant to the practice of the sciences. We
should amend a famous line by Marx: The philosophers have

ignored the social structure of science. The point, however, is to
change it.
Thus, I agree with Fine that scientists are an important audi-
ence for the philosopher of science. But I want to expand the range
of topics beyond those emphasized in his prophetic address.
***
And I also want to make a case for the third possible audience.
Indeed, at this particular moment in human history, the need to
present scientific issues clearly to people who are not scientists
seems to me the most crucial task of all. The rest of this chapter
will be devoted to explaining and defending that view, idiosyn-
cratic as it may initially appear.
We live at a time when many decisions profoundly affecting
human lives turn on the details of the sciences, sometimes with
respect to matters on which a community of scientists agree,
sometimes on topics about which there is lively debate. When
citizens of affluent democracies have misguided views about what
policies (and which candidates) will advance their goals, their
choices at the ballot box can run directly contrary to their inter-
ests. Ironically, the act through which democracy is often taken to
express its commitment to individual freedom then undermines
that freedom. Where misinformation is rife, democracy starts to
collapse.
Hence, advancing the knowledge of citizens is an important
task. If philosophers writing for the general public were able to
make their readers more likely to understand and accept the
consensus views of an expert community— think of climate

change—that would be a valuable achievement. By the same token,
if they were able to unmask inadequately supported claims about
genetic determinism—think of controversies about the inevitable
limitations of women and racial minorities—they would have
contributed to the general good. To write about socially conse-
quential parts of science for a nonacademic audience is to perform
a public service. Succeeding with that audience delivers the most
obvious answer to the skeptical question.
But why would this be a project for philosophers of science?
Wouldn’t scientific practitioners be much better at doing it? The
short answer is that recent history shows how a combination of
efforts from writers with different backgrounds and abilities has
often proved profitable. In the original controversies about the fix-
ity of IQ, the geneticist Richard Lewontin played an important
role—but so did Ned Block and Gerald Dworkin. In debates about
the credentials of evolution, Niles Eldredge, Stephen Jay Gould,
Ken Miller, and Douglas Futuyma had an important impact—
as did Michael Ruse, Barbara Forrest, and Robert Pennock.
Lewontin, Leon Kamin, and Stephen Rose offered a powerful case
for the speculative nature of human sociobiology—but I like to
believe that John Dupré and I have added something. (Not appar-
ently enough, however, to prevent the old fallacies from pervad-
ing many prominent efforts at evolutionary psychology. Perhaps
my own critiques would have had more lasting impact if they had
been delivered less pugnaciously?) With respect to climate change,
despite the best efforts of James Hansen, Michael Mann, Naomi
Oreskes, and others, even the most basic thesis—the claim that
anthropogenic climate change is real—remains disputed. Here,
input from philosophers has been largely focused on methodolog-

ical issues about modeling, recapitulating the view of philosophy
of science as focused on epistemology. More is needed, however.
Demands for climate action are currently entangled in a cluster
of debates in which science, economics, political theory, and hard
questions about values all figure. Philosophy of science ought to
offer a more comprehensive analysis in which all the difficult top-
ics are addressed (Evelyn Keller and I have made a first attempt at
this; Kitcher and Keller 2017).
I don’t think there is any great mystery about why philoso-
phers have been able to make contributions in the areas I’ve cited.
To be sure, recent decades have witnessed the emergence of an
important scientific genre. Eminent scientists have written superb
books and articles for a wide audience. Happily, they have been
applauded for doing so. It is no longer true, as it was forty years
ago, that scientific colleagues would utter “popularizer” with a
sneer. Yet, despite the excellence of many presentations of major
scientific ideas by experts in the pertinent fields, philosophers of
science have brought a special set of skills to their own—typically
complementary—expositions. Trained to think hard about evi-
dential relations, they have sometimes found ways of showing
more clearly than their expert scientific colleagues how justifica-
tion works or where exactly it is lacking. The best account I know
of the interpretive difficulties posed by quantum mechanics was
written by a philosopher, albeit one with a PhD in physics (Albert
1992). Logical empiricists, of course, believed that their philo-
sophical reconstructions of parts of science would be especially
illuminating. But their belief in the “logic of the sciences” was
held by the idea of a very particular form in which parts of science
should be reconstructed. Eighty years on, philosophers of science

take a far more diverse set of approaches to laying bare the concep-
tual structures and evidential relations, although they continue to
deploy tools forged by predecessors who sought general answers to
Hempel’s three big questions.
Since I have spent significant periods of my life on projects of
the kind just described, it is hardly surprising that I should see this
kind of writing as a major part of the answer to my Shakespearean
friend’s question (Kitcher 1982, 1985, 1996, 2007). But I want to
close this case study by suggesting that, important though it may
be, it is by no means the sole way in which philosophy of science
should address the general public. In recent years I’ve come to view
a different, more general, philosophical task as more important still.
***
As I remarked earlier, feminist scholars who attended to the prac-

tices of science—and I see Evelyn Keller and Helen Longino as
pioneers—taught us to see science, the institution, in relation to
human lives and to our sociopolitical condition. I was slow to take
the lesson. But my involvement with the Human Genome Project
brought home to me what Keller and Longino had so clearly
seen—the importance of raising ethical and political questions
not only about the practices of the different sciences but about sci-
ence as an institution.
In retrospect, the sheer weirdness of the fact that, for decades,
philosophy of science has been “all epistemology and metaphysics,
all the time” seems blindingly obvious. Even when scholars, influ-
enced by Kuhn, started to think about scientific communities as
heterogeneous, and not as large individuals with a single mind,
social studies of science were dominated by issues about truth and

knowledge. Much of the disagreement between philosophers of
science and sociologists of science can probably be explained by
seeing the socially oriented scholars as forced to pursue questions
about values by other means. Were their flirtations with relativ-
ism simply a hangover from the positivist assumption that reason
breaks down when value judgments enter the discussion?
Thanks to Heather Douglas, Torsten Wilholt, and others, the
limitations of the value-free ideal are now recognized (Douglas
2009; Wilholt 2009). Yet, in many corners of philosophy of sci-
ence, the old questions—and often the old, inadequate answers—
remain popular. To be sure, new directions are being pursued in
centers that explore the connections among scientific research,
public policy, and the quality of human lives. Important work is
being done at Western University in Canada, and at many places in
Europe: Bielefeld and Hannover, Munich, Rotterdam, Durham,
and—definitely not least—at Exeter. Under John Dupré’s leader-
ship, Exeter’s Center for studying the social implications of the
genome project, Egenis, has flowered into a model for socially rel-
evant thinking about science.
To my mind, we need much more ethically and politically
informed philosophy of science. Many general questions about the
proper role of science in democratic societies and with respect to
human lives have yet to be addressed adequately. There are specific
ethical issues about many kinds of research, especially in the bio-
logical and the human sciences. As Nancy Cartwright and her col-
laborators have demonstrated, methodological and value-theoretic
questions intertwine in considering the evidential bases of policies
with large human impact (Munro et al. 2017). Perhaps most urgent
of all is the tangle of problems—epistemological, ethical, economic,
technological, social, and political—that are generated by anthro-

pogenic climate change. I applaud the fact that some philosophers
of science have begun to study the simulations used by climate mod-
elers (Lloyd and Winsberg 2018; Parker 2020; Winsberg 2018).
But, to repeat, a far wider philosophical focus is needed.
Skeptics about the possibility of important contributions to
such difficult issues might take heart from another philosophi-
cal example. As I noted in the previous chapter, a series of articles
about the concept of race, some by scientifically informed phi-
losophers, has transformed understanding of that concept. It has
helped to influence public debates. Since the earliest such articles,
written in the 1990s, the progress has been extraordinary.
***
Finally, I also want to outline a philosophical task beyond these

particular endeavors, an enterprise I take to be almost unappreci-
ated. Start with a question akin to the one with which I began.
Why do we continue to read the great philosophers of the past?
Not, I think, simply because contemporary thinkers enjoy work-
ing through the intricacies of the reasonings of their predecessors.
Sometimes, it must be admitted, there are deeply disappointing
moments—the Cartesian circle, Mill’s attempt to prove the princi-
ple of utilitarianism, Kant’s second analogy (maybe P. F. Strawson
was right—it was “a non-sequitur of numbing grossness”?). The
real achievements of the Western philosophical tradition lie in the
magnificent syntheses provided by thinkers who reflected widely
on the achievements of the past and the conditions of life as they
encountered it. Philosophy at its greatest is synthetic. It doesn’t
work beside the various areas of inquiry and culture and practice.
Instead, it works between and among them. As Dewey puts the
point, it tries to offer the meanings of what human beings have
come to know. In that consists the successor discipline we need to
replace the metaphysics of the past.
In a highly complex world, the project of offering an illuminat-
ing synthesis of every significant aspect may be too ambitious for
any individual thinker. Philosophers are often disinclined to col-
laborate, but perhaps it is worth considering a more cooperative
future. An obvious alternative would be to focus on a particular
facet of the world as we find it. Philosophy of science would con-
tribute a general picture of the sciences and of science as an impor-
tant institution in human societies.
For all their faults, logical positivism and logical empiricism
undertook part of that task. So, too, did Popper and Kuhn. Their
greater influence may stem from their willingness to connect,
from time to time, with social and political issues. Today, perhaps
because we recognize the heterogeneity of scientific practices, the
philosophy of science has not yet offered any convincing substitute.
Ironically, though, the best versions we have emerge in the writ-
ings of prominent “disunity theorists”—Longino, Cartwright,
Dupré, Ian Hacking, Hasok Chang, and Michela Massimi.
So I offer a threefold answer to my original question. The audi-
ence for philosophy of science should include philosophers, scien-
tists, and thoughtful members of the public (the supposed, possibly
mythical, “educated general reader”). If, as a matter of fact, any of
these groups—especially the last—is playing truant, it’s part of our
responsibility to try to bring them back. Occasionally, a philoso-
pher can speak to all three audiences at once—as Daniel Dennett
has shown for almost three decades, and as Peter Godfrey-Smith

has done in his recent books (books with an unusually wide read-
ership) exploring the character of experience across many species
(Godfrey-Smith 2016, 2020).
It’s time for the end-of-term report card. Progress has been made
in recent years. Philosophers of science are more attentive to the
practices of the sciences than they were several decades ago. They
sometimes help to clarify issues with which their scientific colleagues
are wrestling. Many have abandoned the search for general answers
to questions about “the nature of explanation” or “the structure of
scientific theories” or “the character of confirming evidence.” The
entanglement of scientific work with values has begun to be taken
seriously.
Yet there is plenty of room for improvement. Efforts to tackle
the questions on Hempel’s agenda continue to yield vastly dimin-
ished returns (to the extent that they yield anything at all). With
depressing frequency, the immersion in a particular piece of sci-
entific work generates reportage, as the author’s fascination with
the details of the study loses sight of any philosophical point, or,
indeed, any discernible message for anyone who doesn’t share the
writer’s obsession. Consideration of “science and values” is unin-
formed by broader discussions of values. No large synthetic vision
is on offer to replace the conceptions presented to the public in
the past. Far too many talks, too many articles, too many books
still provoke my Shakespearean friend’s uncomfortable question.
Some philosophers of science have reflected on that question
and know what their own answer to it would be. Too many, I fear,
have not.
3 PATH O LOGY R E P O RT
A wareness of trouble begins, for most of us, with a sense of

discomfort. Something has gone wrong, but, until we have
consulted people more expert than ourselves, we are in the dark
about what it is. We need a diagnosis—a pathology report.
In the two previous chapters, I have tried, impressionistically,
to arouse discomfort, by contrasting the state of much contempo-
rary Anglophone philosophy with foils that appear much health-
ier. The present discussion attempts to pinpoint causes of trouble.
I shall identify six problematic features found in the writings of
today’s professional philosophers—six diseases of today’s philo-
sophical practice. Some people are infected as undergraduates;
others succumb during their graduate training; a few are even-
tually cured; but, for the majority, at least one type of malady is,
I fear, a permanent condition.
As with some bodily diseases, the pathologies arise out of
hyperfunctionality. Just as the body can become sick when a pro-
cess normally required for good health goes into overdrive—think
of the production of thyroid—so, too, a healthy philosophical
2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197657249.003.0003
impulse, pursued with a monomaniacal fetishism, can generate a

diseased, even moribund, philosophical practice.
Diagnosticians are in the business of deciding “normal ranges.”
That is typically difficult, requiring attention to a variety of subjects
and a variety of ambient conditions. First attempts are unlikely to
be correct. They aim simply to initiate a process through which
the differentiation of pathology from normal functioning can be
successively refined.
So my pathology report is preliminary. It tries to isolate a few
intellectual virtues that, when acclaimed to the point of obsession,
become vices. When that occurs, I contend, philosophy turns
inward, becoming the “sentimental indulgence for the few” that
Dewey feared and losing its audience. Where exactly that occurs,
and the extent to which it is prevalent in contemporary profes-
sional philosophy, are matters for discussion. Some people will
surely contest particular examples I use. Reasonably enough, the
bounds of functionality should be debated. I hope, however, for
agreement on the reality of the diseases. For that would be enough
to start the self-questioning on which philosophy, throughout its
history, has rightly prided itself.
***
In a famous article, Charles Sanders Peirce reflected on how our

ideas can be made clear (Peirce 1878/1974). He began from a sim-
ple, but important, point. Many people know the meanings of the
words they use, in the sense of being able to provide the diction-
ary definition, without much facility in applying those words to
the world they experience. Peirce thought this was the case with
Pathology R eport 59
the idea of truth, and he offered a famous (and controversial)

exposition of the concept. I’ll offer a different and easier example.
“Democracy” is a word in frequent employment these days, as
political commentators and those who listen to them wonder if
democracy is dying, whether it still exists in particular parts of the
world, and what is responsible for its decline. All of us, if asked,
would produce a definition—probably by identifying democ-
racy with government by the people. Yet the commentators, and
their followers, disagree quite radically in their judgments about
the current state of political life. Not all of them can be correct.
Indeed, it seems reasonable to wonder if anyone is correct.
Peirce’s own response to predicaments of this kind was to
supplement the definition with something explicitly designed to
help people use the pertinent concept in dealing with their expe-
riences. The exposition is intended to make them able to use the
concept smoothly in the contexts where they need, or want, to
employ it. In principle, different expositions might be valuable
for different classes of contexts. The point is to get the jobs done,
to enable people to overcome the obstacles they face in deploying
ideas. His essay presupposes a pragmatic standard, one pervading
several of his early articles. You scratch only where it itches. “Let
us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in
our hearts” (Peirce 1868/1974, 157). Our ideas are tools. We need
to be able to use them for the tasks arising for us.
Logical positivism, equally concerned with clarification, pro-
ceeded differently. The inability of the definition to enable those
who know it to apply the concept testifies to the inadequacy of
what is taken as a definition. Hence arises an alternative to Peirce’s
strategy. Instead of a supplement to the definition, what is needed
is a replacement for it. The user’s predicament demonstrates the

deficiency, typically in some lack of clarity in the defining formula.
What’s needed, then, is to clarify the vague language occurring in
the commonly accepted definition. For the positivists, this meant
using a privileged language, one whose terms could be understood
without definition. Basic logical terms and terms whose meanings
can be grasped through observation uniquely enjoy the privilege.
Hence satisfactory definition (or “explication”) must eventually
be presented using only observational vocabulary and the lan-
guage of logic.
Contemporary “analytic” philosophy, dominant in the English-
speaking world, retains part of the positivist program. Philosophy’s
central task is seen as one of providing analyses of concepts, analy-
ses exact enough to make the concept completely clear. The posi-
tivist insistence on reduction to terms of a privileged language is,
however, relaxed. It is replaced by a test: the analysis must decide
whether or not the concept applies in any possible case.
That test is more stringent than Peirce’s pragmatic attitude.
Instead of crafting a tool suited to the particular jobs awaiting
attention, analytic philosophy yearns for an all-purpose instru-
ment. If that proves unattainable, the appropriate fallback posi-
tion is to distinguish a number of concepts capable collectively of
applying in all cases (including not only all that actually arise, but
all that could occur). At just this point, the commendable demand
for clarity goes into overdrive. The result is the fetish of com-
plete clarity—an analysis that would leave no potential instance
undecidable.
Hence the familiar style of many articles in the most prestigious
philosophy journals, a style that sometimes amuses, and sometimes
appalls, any nonprofessional reader who may take a look. An

analysis of a concept—perhaps it’s knowledge, perhaps it’s moral
responsibility, perhaps it’s if x were to be the case, then y would be
the case (the counterfactual conditional)—is proposed. The author
demonstrates the ability of the favored analysis to yield satisfactory
results in a significant range of circumstances. A few journal issues
later comes a reply: the proposed analysis doesn’t deliver the cor-
rect answer for certain other cases (I’ll postpone until later how
judgments about the “correct” answer are made). The critique
invites attempts at repair, as well as new styles of analysis. Through
a whole sequence of journal issues—over the years, perhaps even
over decades—versions compete, counterexamples multiply, and
the cases to which the concept is to be applied become ever more
outré. Along the way, perhaps, some reflective author discerns two
types of approaches in the “literature,” rival perspectives on the
analytic problem. The recognition inspires a further debate about
the relative merits of these perspectives. And so it goes.
Typically, though not always, the enterprise begins with a
live problem. Clarifying the concept of democracy, or of moral
responsibility, would serve important practical purposes. That’s
because, considering the state of a nation or the conduct of a per-
son, questions about the application of those concepts cannot be
settled with the definitional tools at hand. When that occurs,
analytic work is genuinely valuable. The fetish of complete clar-
ity, however, drives philosophers to keep trading other-worldly
scenarios and analyses putatively adequate to them long after the
difficulties provoking the original analytic quest have been over-
come. No further itch remains. But the fetishists keep scratching.
Moreover, even when the original analytic project is (temporarily)
suspended, it may enjoy a ghostly continuation in debates about

the distinctions that have been drawn as a result of prior exercises
of the fetish. The zeal for analyzing “S knows that p” abates, but
controversies about the merits of externalism and internalism and
contextualism thrash on. And on.
Peirce’s emphasis on crafting instruments to advance our actual
purposes is salutary. It is echoed in one feature of the positivist
program, the turn from definitions of concepts as people—“ordi-
narily”—use them, to explications that reshape the old concept to
fashion a better tool, one more adapted to the actual employments
envisaged for it. When philosophers no longer ask after the point of
a concept, they not only devote themselves to exploring bizarre fan-
tasies of no practical significance; they also lose sight of possibilities
of conceptual reform. We need to adjust our concepts, to re-engineer
them, when they do not help in the work for which they are needed—
in our world for people with our purposes. We lack world enough
and time to fix them to apply to any circumstances creative minds
can imagine and with respect to any conceivable ends. Engaging in
so ambitious a venture is a foolish luxury. Its result is a sequence of
performances, game-playing at whose virtuosity the well-socialized
reader may marvel, while outsiders are impressed (depressed?) by the
pointlessness of the enterprise. To the extent that onlookers remain
sympathetic, they can only feel sad that people of such evident intel-
ligence waste their lives on such trivial disputes.
***
The second pathology is related to the first. It may be an exten-

sion of the fetish of complete clarity, or it may be divorced from
the demand to settle all possible cases. The fetish of formalization

modifies the positivist requirement to use a privileged language in
definition or explication. The idea of formal logic as a clarifying
instrument is retained. Proposals about a privileged set of non-
logical terms are abandoned.
Sometimes formalization, the use of an artificial quasi-
mathematical language, is strikingly helpful in advancing
inquiry. Hidden presuppositions are exposed. That occurred in
the late nineteenth century, in Hilbert’s classic axiomatization
of Euclidean geometry. It goes on today in any number of scien-
tific contexts—for example, in the modeling ventures of physi-
cists, biologists, and economists. Moreover, a formal treatment
can deliver surprising results—as when Gödel demonstrated the
impossibility of Hilbert’s attempt to prove (using finitary means)
the consistency of arithmetic. Or it can shed light on apparently
puzzling phenomena, as in Thomas Schelling’s elegant demon-
stration of how racial segregation can arise in the absence of any
strong prejudice, or in George Akerlof ’s explanation of the break-
down of an unregulated market in used cars (Schelling 1978;
Akerlof 1984).
These benefits can accrue within philosophy, too. Thanks to
the formal work of David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker (Lewis
1973; Stalnaker 1968), subtle difficulties in counterfactual rea-
soning have been uncovered. The embryonic field of formal social
epistemology has already disclosed some surprising results about
the factors that promote or retard the collective search for knowl-
edge. And, of course, Gödel’s famous result about the incomplete-
ness of formal systems of arithmetic sits on the borderline between
mathematics and philosophy.
Formal methods can be powerful tools in the quest to think

clearly about significant questions. Those who do the hard work
of developing new and fruitful styles of formalization deserve
sustained applause—it often requires years of dedicated efforts.
Hence my admiration for the work of Pearl and for that of
Glymour and his coauthors. They have transformed the ways in
which the scientists who work with statistical data (researchers in
a wide range of fields) hunt for causes.
Yet it is possible to make a fetish of formalism, to demand for-
malization when it would not yield any further fruits, to insist on
introducing a quasi-mathematical apparatus when an informal
or semiformal account is already clear enough, or is, at least, an
advance on the prior situation. Almost all (perhaps even all?) phi-
losophers have had the experience of struggling through a paper
bristling with symbols only to find, at the end, a disappointingly
banal conclusion, supported by reasoning that could have been
characterized in far simpler terms. Sometimes it almost seems as
though the author is deterring potential critics, that the purpose
of the notation is to warn off those who might attack—as if the
philosopher were mimicking those butterflies whose defense con-
sists in mimicking unpalatable relatives.
C. G. Hempel was no opponent of formal methods. Yet he
acknowledged the limits of the quest for formalization and was
careful to warn graduate students against overdoing it. As he
pithily remarked, we gain no greater clarity by rewriting “A man
crossed a road” as
(∃x )(∃y)(Mx & Ry & Cxy)

and even less by rewriting “The man crossed the road” as
(∃x )(∃y)(( z )(Mz ≡ z = x ) & (w)(Rw ≡ w = y) & Cxy)
Perhaps Hempel’s cautions descended from his own seminal work

on scientific explanation. After his efforts to construct a formal
account of explanation had encountered repeated difficulties, he
turned to an extensive and thorough attempt to articulate his
guiding idea, using a mixture of semiformal devices, carefully cho-
sen examples, and lucid definitions offered in ordinary language
(Hempel 1965).
Philosophers of science working on explanation have largely
followed Hempel’s example, introducing some pieces of formal
machinery at points where they seem helpful, and resorting to infor-
mal characterizations where adequate symbolization runs out. What
advances in understanding have been achieved by thinking of expla-
nation as subsumption under laws, or identifying causes, or as answer-
ing why-questions, or as achieved through unification have largely
come from the authors’ initial presentations. Later discussions, bent
on “remedying the unclarities” of those presentations by introduc-
ing more formalism have typically yielded diminishing returns. The
fetishism of formal tools provokes more scratching where there is
no itch. (I have surely succumbed to the fetish at times in my own
writings, both in some of my attempts to characterize explanation
and in at least parts of the last chapter of The Advancement of Science
[Kitcher 1993], to mention just two evident instances.)
The study of confirmation has also benefited from formal
methods. The idea that people have degrees of belief—perhaps
related to their willingness to bet—is a powerful one. When cou-

pled to thinking of degrees of belief as rightly governed by proba-
bility theory, it yields useful advice about some situations in which
ordinary people, as well as researchers, must react to new evidence.
A classic example: You learn that you have tested positive for some
rare but devastating disease; knowing that the false-positive rate is
low (only 2%), you are in despair. Your spirits are lifted by a friend,
a philosopher who espouses a Bayesian approach to confirmation.
She points out to you that you are neglecting the base rate: only
one person in a million has the disease. After she lays out the
arithmetic for you, you discover that your rational degree of belief
that you have the disease is (roughly) simply one in five thousand.
Ambitious confirmation theorists take this dynamic to be at
work when inquiry is properly conducted. That suggestion proves
helpful when statistics are available (as in the disease example). In
many decision situations, however, there are no helpful figures to
guide those attempting to find their way forward. To apply the
Bayesian machinery, you need two kinds of probabilities that are
often elusive: the prior probability of any hypothesis under consid-
eration, and the probability of the evidence if the hypothesis were
false. All too frequently, any choice of numbers for these probabil-
ities would be guesswork. Sometimes, to be sure, decision-making
can be advanced by relaxing the demand for precise assignments;
Isaac Levi’s work on inexact probabilities has inspired some use-
ful refinements, both within the orthodox Bayesian tradition and
outside it (Levi 1974). So, too, the understanding of how to adjust
our degrees of belief to the evidence is advanced by results show-
ing how and when people who begin with different assignments
of probabilities will converge—in the long run; despite Keynes’s
reminder that “in the long run we are all dead,” convergence theo-
rems might guide an inquiry to finding evidence that would accel-
erate consensus.
Nevertheless, all too many important scientific decisions, past
and present, could not and cannot be made in the way formal
theorists envisage. Consider the prediction that, by 2070, over a
billion people will be forced to leave their homes because increases
in local temperatures will make those places uninhabitable.
Despite a vast amount of evidence about the changing climate,
nobody has a formal calculus for assigning a probability to that
hypothesis. The best those who deliberate about the issue—like
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—can
do is to rely on the informal judgments of a very wide population
of experts (who make their own best guesses). Fetishistic formal-
ization aims to drive out judgment. Often, however, the judgment
of the experienced is the best we have. Reasonableness outruns the
kind of rationality that demands algorithms and is never satisfied
without calculations.
Once this point is appreciated, it is possible to see how a valu-
able philosophical program can degenerate into insignificance,
pressing for formalization when playing with the existing tools
will only yield tiny returns, if any at all. Although the philosophy
of science is a relatively healthy subdiscipline, its zest for formal-
ization über alles sometimes needs to be restrained.
Formalistic fetishism is more evident in other parts of philoso-
phy. Sometimes, to be sure, using some existing formal language
enables an author to avoid ambiguity in the presentation of some
putative principle. All too often, however, the introduction of the
notation seems to be designed to add extra importance to some
relatively straightforward idea (prestige inflation) or to provide

armor against the missiles expected from critics (objection deter-
rence). Both motivations can inspire an author to devise an entirely
novel notation when standard formal languages seem insufficient.
Here, the formalism fetish opposes the fetishism for complete
clarity. Indeed, the thesis that formalization always brings clarifi-
cation should always be treated with suspicion. Dedicated readers
must usually work hard to penetrate an initially opaque symbol-
ism. As they trudge through the pages, they may wonder whether
the effort is worth it. Perhaps they are kept going by their recogni-
tion that journal editors will hold their own submissions to the
standards set by previous “contributions to the literature”—and
thus require them to be familiar with the contents of this article
(and many others, no doubt).
Some new formalisms, of course, do earn their keep. Since
the pioneering efforts of Frege, Russell, Hilbert, and Gödel, phi-
losophers have had to become acquainted at least with first-order
logic. Subsequent decades have witnessed developments in modal
logics, applications of Boolean algebra and probability theory, the
Lewis-Stalnaker formalisms for counterfactuals, and many other
less widely used formalisms, each of which has done honest work.
Recognizing and appreciating these developments should not
inspire a thoughtless license to couch banal thoughts in an impres-
sive and idiosyncratic idiom or controversial ones in an opaque
and idiosyncratic notation.
Nor should those who love formalism neglect two lessons
from history. First, whatever his own motivations for invent-
ing the Begriffsschrift, Frege’s pioneering work in formal logic
gained recognition only when it was recognized as addressing the
mathematical problems of the age—as helping to resolve the ambi-

guities of some allegedly complete proofs, focusing existing dis-
putes about the construction of the real numbers, facilitating the
kinds of studies envisaged in Felix Klein’s Erlanger Programm—
and calling forth the paradoxes of naïve set theory. Frege’s work
was initially ignored because his contemporaries, mathematicians
as well as philosophers, saw it as much ado about remarkably little.
They were wrong—as I may be wrong about some of the ventures
that I regard as pointless exercises. Yet the aspiring formalist
should always pose the question: For just what kind of clarifica-
tory work is this notation needed?
The second lesson comes from the career of theories of scien-
tific explanation. Sometimes a little formalism is all that is needed.
Today, especially in analytic metaphysics, the urge to clarify drives
new programs of formalization. It is entirely reasonable to scruti-
nize claims that some aspects of the world are “grounded” in oth-
ers. Equally reasonable to appreciate a kinship with the concept of
explanation: it seems, at least initially, that x is grounded in y just
in case we would explain x by appealing to y. If that equivalence
is even in the ballpark of the truth, it might be advisable to reflect
on the reasons for which, in a number of alternative traditions, the
idea of a complete formal theory of explanation was abandoned.
That has implications for those who seek “the logic of ground.”
So, too, for analytic metaphysics generally, for parts of analytic
epistemology, and even for some segments of analytic meta-ethics.
Practitioners should always ask: Am I in the business of formal-
izing “The man crossed the road”?
***
Up to this point, I have left unaddressed the question of how

philosophers should decide whether a proposed analysis, formal
or informal, passes muster. That is something every well-brought-
up twenty-first-century graduate student knows. You use “cases,”
hypothetical scenarios, to test (or prompt) “intuitions” about
them. You give them names—“Fat man on bridge,” “Visiting sick
friend,” or whatever. Let’s call this one: “Philosopher deciding.”
Philosopher Deciding
Derek is a philosopher, trying to decide whether a particu-
lar ethical principle is correct. He considers a wide variety of
cases to which the principle might be applied. Finding that,
in some of them, his intuition is that it holds, while, in a few
of them, his intuition tells him that it does not, he modi-
fies the principle. The new version is—intuitively—satisfied
in all the cases. But, pressing further, he invents new cases
in which his revised principle breaks down (as he discovers
through consulting his intuition). Accordingly, he revises the
principle again and repeats the procedure. After a number of
iterations, he is content. The principle at which he has now
arrived is—intuitively—completely successful. He judges it
to be correct. Is Derek’s final judgment justified?
What are your intuitions about this case?

As most philosophers will appreciate, I have named the pro-
tagonist for the most brilliant and astute artist of the genre, a
philosopher who made seminal contributions in a number of
philosophical fields, most notably (in my, perhaps nonmain-
stream, view) in thinking about potential obligations to restrain
the growth of the human population (Parfit 1984, Part IV).

Derek Parfit deployed this method with enormous skill and
sophistication—and sometimes very convincingly (in parts of
Parfit 2011). Nevertheless, I want to ask: when, if ever, is this a
good approach to deciding philosophical questions?
A rough version of my preferred answer: when, using the capac-
ities we have acquired during our education and socialization, we
can think ourselves into the situation envisaged. On occasion,
thanks to our past development, it’s easy to imagine being in the
situation described—or to imagine observing someone else in that
situation—and to ask what we would be moved to do (or, in the
third-person case, how we would judge the protagonist’s action).
Long ago, in a famous, and rightly influential article, Peter Singer
introduced a compelling example (Singer 1972).
Drowning Child
You are well-dressed for a social event. On your way to it, you
pass a pond, and observe a child in the water. The child is
obviously struggling, and although the pond is not very deep,
will drown unless someone intervenes. You are the only per-
son in the vicinity. To wade into the water would make your
clothes wet and muddy, so that you would be inappropriately
clad for the occasion to which you are headed. What should
you do?
Like Singer, like every other philosopher I know, like all the
undergraduates to whom I have ever told some version of this
story, I take the answer to be obvious. You should plunge in and
rescue the child. Simply walking on and arriving unsullied at the
party would be monstrously immoral. (To recognize the case

as successful in generating consensus about it is not, though, to
endorse Singer’s provocative conclusions about the obligations of
the relatively well-off. As a lengthy debate has made clear, there are
serious questions concerning the analogy between the child in the
pool and the significant fraction of the human population who
suffer from extreme poverty.)
So far, so good. Let’s now proceed to a case, equally famous,
introduced in Foot (1967), on which many philosophers would
agree, but, as I have discovered, which often fails to elicit the same
confident reaction.
Runaway Trolley: Trackside View

As you approach some trolley tracks, you observe, to your
horror, that five people have been strapped to the rails.
Worse, a trolley is hurtling toward them at high speed. In a
few moments it will collide with these unlucky folk, and they
will all be crushed to death. As you can see, there is no driver
who might stop the trolley in time. Fortunately, there is a
switch at hand, and if you throw the switch, you will divert
the trolley onto a side track. Unfortunately, strapped to the
rails on that track is another person. Throwing the switch
would lead to that person’s death. What would you do?
Lots of people think it’s obvious. You should throw the switch and
save the five. It’s impossible to rescue all these luckless people, and
it’s better that five should survive, rather than only one.
Anyone who believes that the numbers always count will
arrive at that verdict. So, provided you are already committed to a
principle—it is always better to save the maximum possible num-

ber of lives—the answer is obvious. Yet the apparent point of the
case, the rationale for the flourishing industry of Trolleyology, is
to test that principle against intuitions. People who respond to the
case simply by applying the principle to the situation aren’t doing
that. They are rather like my younger self, hopeless in laboratory
experimentation, using the light from the window to estimate
the focal length of the lens, and then (I confess) generating my
“results” from the formula I was supposed to be testing.
What is supposed to happen is that belief in any principle is
suspended. “Intuition” must operate uncontaminated by prior
commitments. Unfortunately, though, our grasp of how “intu-
ition” works is so rudimentary that you should feel quite uncertain
about whether your “intuition” about the case is uncontaminated
by your firm belief in the maximizing principle. In my embryonic
career as a dry-labber, I had no difficulty in telling what I was
doing: I knew I was fudging the numbers. Philosophers with firm
allegiances to particular moral stances cannot be so clear about
what is going on in generating their “intuitions.” Reasonable skep-
ticism should engender tentativeness about what the “intuitive”
judgment is.
Indeed, “tentative” overstates the reactions of the uncor-
rupted. Perhaps my own experience in teaching undergraduates is
unusual, but, in my efforts to present them with Trackside View
and kindred cases, the main difficulty is eliciting any response at
all. Almost everybody in the class shifts uneasily. When I look at
particular people, eyes are lowered. If I press for an answer, I start
to feel like the principal investigator in some notorious (and noto-
riously unethical) psychological experiment. There’s no avoiding
the conclusion. Unless they have prior commitments, “intuition”

doesn’t yield a firm answer. They would probably be even more
reluctant to speak up if they knew how variable some, suppos-
edly intuitive, moral judgments are across cultures and histori-
cal periods (as, for example, in differences between Chinese and
American responses to the Trolley Problem).
Moreover, as I find out when I ask them to imagine being in
the situation, there are good reasons for their hesitation. Life isn’t
like that—the predicament is “too weird.” Anyone observing the
people in danger would want to save them—all of them. So, once
my students have expressed that thought, we can start to explore
what they would do. They arrive to find the victims bound to the
track. Can they set them free? No, I say, the bonds are too tight,
there’s no way to cut them, there’s too little time. Can they signal
someone to stop the trolley? No, they can see the empty cab. But
how are they so sure that nobody is directing its course? They just
are sure: it’s certain that the trolley is running without any human
control. Might there be people on the trolley, whose lives would
be endangered if its course were diverted, and it went off track?
No, you know that throwing the switch will work, and the trolley
will continue on the other track. What about placing an obstacle
between the five and the oncoming trolley? That can’t be done,
since there’s nothing around you could use.
I keep imposing conditions, things the person at trackside can
observe—or (more often) know by some other (unspecified and
mysterious) means. Despite all my explanations, most of my class
continues to balk. One student, more articulate than the oth-
ers, typically closes the discussion in a way that prompts nods of
assent: “OK. It’s impossible to save everybody. You’ve built that
into the case. But still, if you ask me how I would act, if I were
beside the track, I’d search for some way of stopping the trolley.
I wouldn’t know that it’s impossible, and I’d keep trying. At the last
moment, in desperation, I might throw the switch, but I wouldn’t
see that as the right thing, only as the lesser of two bad options. I’d
regard myself as having failed. I hadn’t been sufficiently resource-
ful in finding a way out.”
That response— and I’ve heard something like it several
times—identifies a crucial difficulty with this kind of case. To
make the case work, all kinds of constraints have to be imposed.
Moreover, it’s not enough for these conditions to apply in the
envisaged situation—they also have to be matters about which
the agent is completely sure. So a world is constructed, a “small
world,” one totally alien to the students’ experience. Imaginative
identification is blocked because they can’t think themselves into
a world with those properties, can’t imagine being certain about
all the things that force the alleged options for them. This world is
just too small—it constricts them. They rightly resist the attempt
to compel judgment when their capacities for judging find no pur-
chase. So they lack the “intuitions” philosophers think they are
supposed to have.
But it gets worse. Trackside View is only the beginning of wis-
dom in Trolleyology. My students are even more perplexed by a
well-known follow-up case.
Runaway Trolley: Fat Man on Bridge

As in Trackside View, you see five people strapped to the rails
and thus in danger from a runaway trolley. This time there is
no side track, and no switch to throw. Instead, you observe the
situation from a bridge above the tracks. A fat man is sitting on

the parapet of the bridge. If you were to push him off, he would
fall into the path of the trolley, thus halting it before it would
hit the five potential victims. Should you push the fat man?
Philosophers divide on this case. Some take it to fall under the

scope of the “go by the numbers” principle and opt for push-
ing the fat man. Others take it to expose the limitations of the
principle and refuse to sacrifice a presumably innocent observer.
Undergraduates, at least those whom I have encountered, are even
more adamant that they don’t want to answer.
Completely understandably. For Fat Man on Bridge is even
weirder than Trackside View. As in the latter case, various things
have to be known for certain: the trolley is not controlled, there’s
no inanimate object to serve as an obstacle, no missile that might
derail the trolley, no potentially vulnerable passengers. But more
besides. You have to be sure:
That you are too light to serve as an obstacle (otherwise you

could sacrifice yourself)
That the fat man would fall if you pushed him (otherwise
your gesture would be useless)
That he would land in a place that would block the trolley
(useless, again)
That he would not agree to leap, either alone or with you.
How you are supposed to become aware of these things is left

unspecified. In fact, the difficulties of accounting for this alleged
knowledge are spinoffs from a more fundamental bizarreness in

the case. Why are you supposed to think of pushing the fat man
as an option?
Perhaps the philosophers who claim to have clear intuitions
about Fat Man on Bridge are different. But, like my students, when
I walk around the world, spotting people, corpulent or not, on the
parapets of bridges, I am not inclined to think of their potential as
obstacles to impede runaway trolleys. Sometimes their seat strikes
me as precarious, and I worry about their safety. Perhaps I should
talk to them and advise them to come back down. Even if there
were a runaway trolley bearing down on five people strapped to
the track (and I rarely come across that kind of situation), the
thought “You could always push the fat man” would not occur to
me. I don’t think this is an idiosyncrasy of mine.
So when I’m asked to consider what I’d do in Fat Man on
Bridge, one of the supposed options isn’t even on the cards. It’s
no good for the Trolleyologist to try to compel me to make up my
mind by asking me to imagine that I see pushing the fat man as a
possibility. I don’t know what it would be like to see that. Even less
do I know what it would be like to know (for certain) that there
were only two possibilities—pushing the fat man, or allowing the
five to die, the former certain to succeed. Like my students, like
just about everyone, I can think myself into some scenarios and
feel an inclination to identify with a particular course of action.
But here the cognitive/affective gears don’t mesh with the stipula-
tions of the case. So, I believe, those without axes to grind are left
nonplussed.
The standard philosophical name for the supposedly correct
responses is “intuition.” As I understand it, advocates of appealing
to judgments about hypothetical cases think of a process, initi-

ated by imagining the favored scenario, something akin to every-
day perception, and as issuing in justified assessments. There’s no
well-established theory of how the process of intuition works or
of the circumstances under which it is reliable, but, for much of
human history, the same would have been true of vision, hearing,
taste, smell, and touch. The analogy between perception and intu-
ition is imperfect, in that, even before people knew much about
the operation of the senses, they were reasonably clear about the
kinds of things being perceived and had some ability to tell when
a particular sense was being misled. If we are to take the analogy
seriously, and not simply dismiss the judgments elicited as idio-
syncratic eruptions in human psychological lives, two features of
everyday perception are transferable to our thinking about intu-
ition. First, children need to be taught to observe and to detect
particular kinds of objects, states of affairs, and events. The social-
ization they receive continues for some people, for artists and
fashion designers who need greater sensitivity to hues and tints,
for musicians whose ears are trained to identify pitches, pitch rela-
tionships, inner voices, and musical structures, for scientists who
must learn to see strata or cellular components or forms of animal
behavior. Second, sensed difficulty in sensing justifies withhold-
ing judgment or, at most, tentative judgment.
These two points combine in the diagnosis I have offered of my
students’ uneasiness when confronted with philosophical cases.
As those cases become too outré, the capacities, skills, and habits
stemming from their particular versions of our common adap-
tive psychology through processes of socialization and education,
break down, leaving them speechless. That isn’t a mark of their
deficiency. It is, rather, a signal that, with respect to this particular

scenario, intuition, whatever it’s like, cannot function properly.
The world envisaged is too remote from the world to which their
capacities are adapted.
Aficionados might reply that philosophical training sharpens
the intuitive ability. Perhaps. What is completely clear, however,
is that philosophical training instills definite attitudes toward
putative principles. An alternative to thinking that philosophers
are the intuitional equivalents of the keen-eyed watchers of the
skies who can detect heavenly motions lesser observers cannot dis-
tinguish is to suppose that “intuition” is molded by antecedent
philosophical commitment, that what occurs in the philosophers’
response isn’t some higher power but the corruption of what is,
among the folk, an unbiased faculty.
The method I have been reviewing has some obvious merit—
when it is deployed judiciously. It is akin to techniques used in
jurisprudence, where hypothetical cases are introduced to bridge
the gap between some established precedent and a matter of cur-
rent concern. Pinned down at both ends, the usage of a scenario
is rightly debated by examining the strength of the similarities.
Although philosophers cannot be as explicit about why they are
making the judgment they do—they can’t say, as a legal scholar
might, that the newly introduced case is akin to one previously
decided, only that their response to it is “intuitive”—they may
try to justify their evaluations. In Drowning Child, for example,
the familiarity of the situation allows people to imagine what it
would be like to come across a child in danger, and to explain
their responses as the smooth operation of the underlying capaci-
ties. (As I have noted, the moral debate centers on whether the
scenario is connected closely enough—“pinned down”—to the

program for giving Singer advocates.)
All goes reasonably well, then, when the scenarios remain
close to our experiences. Sometimes, the agreement among very
different people, together with the confidence resulting from the
imaginative immersion, suggests that the judgment may be justi-
fied. That is also the case, I think, for another kind of storytell-
ing, typically more complex than the tales philosophers construct,
but manageable nonetheless. Great writers can construct fictional
worlds, in which readers can submerge themselves, vividly imag-
ining what it would be like to be a particular character in a par-
ticular predicament. Fiction, drama, and film can offer intricate
presentations of decisions and conduct. As recent work in philo-
sophical discussions of novels, plays, and movies has shown, these
are sites at which difficult ethical issues can be explored.
Pathology starts where our inability to enter the scenario
begins. Even before that, however, I would recommend a cau-
tious rephrasing of the standard confident assertion. Instead of
saying—as if one were reporting on an ordinary observation—
“My intuition about Puzzling Case is . . .” philosophers would
do better to avoid mentioning a process about which so little is
understood. Why not say instead: “When I reflect on Puzzling
Case, as a result of our common psychological adaptations and
my particular history of social interactions, I find myself inclined
to say . . . ”? Longer and clumsier, to be sure, but humbler and
more honest.
***
Let’s briefly take stock. I’ve reviewed three pathologies: the fetish
for complete clarity, the fetish for formalization, and the intro-
duction of hypothetical cases, so far removed from reality as to
defy imaginative identification. Before proceeding to my second
trio, it’s worth noting how these three are easily found in combi-
nation with one another.
Someone who seeks an analysis of a concept that will cover all
possible cases, or the formulation of a principle that would hold
in any possible situation, will be driven to test proposed analyses
or available versions against any scenario an inventive mind can
dream up. The enterprise of revising current proposals may start
close enough to home to elicit confident responses about whether,
under the circumstances considered, the test has been passed. Yet,
given the goal of universality, the enterprise must leave the sphere
within which imaginative identification can be achieved. The test
cases introduced will come to include some ingenious fantasies
with respect to which unbiased “intuition” yields no answer. At
this point, aspiring authors committed to a particular analysis
or principle often declare the test to have been passed, while oth-
ers, with different affiliations, will see failure. Both sides are then
inspired to generate more scenarios, ever more intricate and fan-
ciful, in their endeavors to demonstrate the correctness of their
response to the cases that provoke division. For any philosopher
who has followed the career of a significant number of debates
during the past several decades, the dynamic is surely familiar.
Cases are multiplied. The analyses and principles become laden
with qualifying clauses in attempts to accommodate the cornuco-
pia of “intuitive evidence.” Until, ultimately, the enterprise runs
out of steam, and the case-mongers move on to fresh woods and

pastures new.
Along the way, in a search for clarity as the logical structure
of the proposal loses the transparency of the original suggestions,
formalism may be wheeled in to refine what might otherwise
become a vague or ambiguous formulation. Perhaps it will apply
an already existing formal language. Or maybe something new
will be required. Either way, the development is likely to be seen as
positive. As progress.
A pathologist finds no great difficulty in summing up what
has happened in this well-known story. Assuming that the first
attempts to clarify the concept or to find an adequate principle
addressed some genuine need (not, as we shall see, always a trivial
assumption), the initial stages may have been helpful. They may
have supplied all that was required to meet the original demands,
fulfilling the purposes Peirce intended for his expositions. Yet the
fetish of complete clarity drives the venture further. “Intuition”
loses whatever purchase it once had. The result, then, is a recital in
which performers play études of finger-tangling difficulty, whose
musical value is, at best, nil.
These virtuoso performances should not drown out the real
music.
***
What are the sources of philosophical knowledge? How can a

philosopher justify a claim about what it is correct to do or what
conditions are required for a state to be democratic? The approach
just reviewed answers these questions. Philosophical method
works through constructing hypothetical cases and reviewing

them in intuition. Philosophers can pronounce from the arm-
chair, in ways others cannot, because they are especially good at
conjuring up a wide array of scenarios and subjecting them to the
test of intuition. If, however, intuition is—at best—reliable only
when the stories stay relatively close to the world of everyday expe-
rience, it is not so obvious why the community of philosophers
is especially privileged with respect to the projects its members
undertake.
Earlier generations of analytic philosophers might have
answered the questions slightly differently. Instead of trying to
prescribe a method, they could have specified the goal. Philosophy
strives to uncover the structure of concepts, exposing seman-
tic connections until everything is made completely clear. They
might have continued by pointing to a number of exemplary
efforts—by thinkers like Wittgenstein, Carnap, and J. L. Austin,
whose efforts in this regard are rightly admired. Offering answers
along these lines helps to distinguish philosophers’ special tal-
ents from those of the folk, only to arouse a different query: why
are philosophers better than lexicographers or linguists, when it
comes to performing this task? Perhaps the (healthy) trend among
some philosophers of language to engage more closely with work
in linguistics represents an acknowledgment of the force of the
challenge.
Let’s pose the issue a bit more aggressively. Western philosophy
has existed for over two millennia. For a very large part of that
period, knowledge of many aspects of the world was the product
of the efforts of people working in very different ways. Some of
them we think of as philosophers. Others seem better classified
as scientists or doctors or theologians or social theorists or law-

yers or . . . . During the last few centuries, however, inquiry has
made remarkable advances in any number of fields. Investigators
come in many varieties. There are all kinds of specialists and sub-
specialists, equipped with all sorts of methods for addressing the
questions with respect to which they are given responsibility in
our division of investigative labor. If philosophy has no distinc-
tive method of proceeding, why does it still survive? Why didn’t
it quietly fade away, when the domains it had once shared with
others were handed over to different specialists? Perhaps, it should
have withered in the eighteenth century, as soon as it became clear
that knowledge of the world requires focused observation and
experimentation. Philosophers are no more likely than other folk
to engage in the kinds of contact with nature that can yield seri-
ous knowledge. Or maybe it could hang on a bit, simply because
some fields—biology, psychology, economics, linguistics, political
science—were latecomers to the Serious Inquiry Business? Now
that they are here, however, why do universities continue to pay
philosophers to do research? What do they contribute? How can
they contribute anything of any worth?
What’s the use of philosophy? In part, the question gains
force from the suspicion that there aren’t any special sources of
philosophical knowledge. That suspicion is fueled by the appar-
ent ineptness of philosophers to explain how they acquire any
basis for their judgments. We seem to many people “just to be
making it up.”
In fact, the history I irreverently summarized reveals how,
from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century on, many
of the greatest figures in the history of Western philosophy would
have responded to the skeptical question. They would have insisted

on the power of thought to generate certain kinds of knowledge
(or, for some of them, to generate kinds of certain knowledge!).
Descartes could sit down by the stove and arrive at enduring prin-
ciples, beyond possible doubt, by meditating; Kant claims to have
attained fundamental knowledge of important matters, knowl-
edge that is “independent of all experience.” Kant gave this species
of knowledge the name under which it has since made its way in
the philosophical world. It is a priori knowledge.
And has it ever made its way! Almost all philosophers think
our knowledge of logic and of mathematics is a priori. (I am one
of the exceptions to this view.) Many contemporary philosophers
also believe that whatever they contribute to the store of knowl-
edge is a priori. Unlike many of their predecessors who gave us
coordinate geometry, or the calculus, or the economic advantages
of free trade, or the nebular hypothesis, or solutions to problems
in economics, or mathematical logic, or . . . , only a small percent-
age of philosophers today make contributions to other fields. They
read, and sit, and think, and talk, and think again, and read again,
and talk again, and think again . . . and write. Out of this process
come their articles and books. Where, if at all, do the kinds of
contacts with reality that undergird the knowledge of ordinary
folk and of specialists in some area of science (broadly construed)
help them come to new knowledge?
Possibly indirectly. Standard forms of experiential knowledge
stand behind the claims of some of the authors they read, and,
maybe, behind things they learn from some of their interlocu-
tors. So the knowledge they contribute can’t be entirely indepen-
dent of experience, since they are indebted to the experiences of
others (and—a banal point—to the processes through which their

sources transmit information to them). Plenty of philosophers
believe, nonetheless, that some of what they offer the world is a
priori knowledge. For, in what they write, they sometimes hail a
particular principle as “a priori.” Typically, it is a thesis for which
they supply no justification, but take as a premise in a line of argu-
ment. A necessary premise. Without it, they would not be able to
reach their proffered conclusion.
What exactly do they mean when they characterize their the-
ses as a priori? At least in the early parts of his Critique of Pure
Reason, Kant is clear about what he has in mind. A priori knowl-
edge is knowledge generated by processes of thought that could
occur in the knower, whatever experiences she had had (provided
only that they could suffice to teach her the concepts involved in
the knowledge claim), that would sustain justification whatever
her experiences, and that would invariably yield true belief (Kant
1787/1996; my interpretation is given in Kitcher 1980, another
place in which I may have shown the influence of the fetish of
formalism, and even of the fetish for complete clarity). Those are
extremely strong conditions. Are they what the author of the jour-
nal article has in mind?
Almost certainly not. The author may well believe that the
process through which he has arrived at his thesis is one he might
have repeated, given any course of life experience (provided it was
sufficiently rich). He may think the thesis is not merely true but
could not have been false. He is, however, unlikely to suppose
that any experience whatsoever would have enabled that process
to yield justified belief. Our opinions are too easily undermined,
our justifications unsettled by illusions, deceptions, apparently
authoritative testimony, and the like. Let’s say, then, that a claim is
weakly a priori just in case it satisfies only Kant’s first condition—
the thought process generating it is always available, and if, given
the experience the believer has, it is actually justified and actually
true. I suspect that most of the authors who decorate the premises
they introduce (without further support) as “a priori” have some-
thing like this in mind. If they do not, they owe the world some
account of why they are using the term, since they appear to be
rejecting all the conditions that their illustrious philosophical pre-
decessors have placed upon it.
If, however, they declare their favored necessary premise to
be weakly a priori, they have lapsed into a fourth pathology—I’ll
call it sprinkling fairy dust. For the effect of labeling Necessary
Premise in this way (probably the intended effect) is to trans-
form an unfamiliar and often ugly statement—a philosophical
frog—into a gleaming philosophical prince. Wearing “a priori”
Necessary Premise stands before the readers in full glory. No fur-
ther questions need to be asked about its (his) credentials. Just
look inward and reflect. The thought process should run its course
in you, bringing the indisputable charm of Necessary Premise to
your consciousness. If it does not . . . ? The defect is in you.
Claiming apriority is currently less popular than appeal-
ing to intuition about cases—but the two strategies are in the
same line of work, and sometimes even fused together.1 In both
instances, they preempt objections to a thesis the author needs,
if he is to elaborate his argument. I have already suggested a more
accurate and more modest reformulation of “My intuition about
this case is . . . .” The appeal to the a priori should also be recast.
Instead of saying “Necessary Premise is a priori,” it would be more
straightforward to declare: “Necessary Premise is a judgment at

which I have arrived after long reflection, and one that has sur-
vived my efforts to think of ways in which it might turn out false.”
As authors surely understand, there are costs to saying that. My
reformulation issues an invitation to ask questions, questions that
could not be briefly answered. What reflections? What efforts?
Without attaching an appendix—as mathematicians do when the
proof is complicated, or as scientists do when they are asked to
supply their data—the author couldn’t explain how he’s arrived
at his firm conviction about Necessary Premise. Sprinkling fairy
dust shortcuts all that. Hence the popularity of the practice.
Yet, sometimes, authors can do better. They can reveal what
has actually convinced them of a particular principle or inclined
them to characterize something in a specific way. A conversation
I once had with a friend, one of the most creative and influential
philosophers of science of our times, brought me to appreciate
this point.
Until his death, Nancy Cartwright spent many years happily
married to another eminent philosopher, Stuart Hampshire. One
day, though, as Nancy and I were having lunch together, she said,
with some irritation: “Stuart tells me I never give any arguments.
Do I give arguments, Philip?” I thought for a little while, before
replying. “Yes, Nancy, you do,” I told her, “but they all have the
same form—Here are some phenomena. Try looking at them this
way.” Again and again, throughout her writings, she offers her
readers some facts about areas of scientific work or about social
programs, sometimes unfamiliar, sometimes juxtaposing the
familiar with the previously unrecognized, points to tensions
among them or with standard judgments about them, and offers
a perspective on them to resolve the tensions and to make sense of

the whole. As I have since reflected on that conversation, I have
begun to think she is not alone in coming to her innovative (and
sometimes startling) views through this kind of argument—I’ll
dub it modus Cartwright, in her honor. It’s all over the history of
Western philosophy, at the moments when a thinker is introduc-
ing new principles and new concepts; also in many of the illumi-
nating discussions authored by her (skeptical) husband. (And,
as you might have observed, I’ve just made a very modest use of
modus Cartwright in my own ruminations.)
So, perhaps, instead of the pathological sprinkling of fairy dust,
the author would do better by claiming to be performing modus
Cartwright. Even better, of course, if he were to give (as Nancy
does) the goods. Reflecting on his route to Necessary Premise, he
might recognize a cluster of phenomena that he found initially
puzzling to which Necessary Premise brings order and coherence.
So he might do better than make conversation-stopping appeals
to the “a priori,” or even to bald confessions of modus Cartwright.
He could point to the considerations from which his affection for
Necessary Premise emerged. Perhaps even with relative brevity.
“Here are some phenomena,” he might say, “Try looking at them
this way.”
***
When philosophers realize the extent to which their philosophical

work depends on experience and on experiential knowledge, they
are sometimes encouraged to make systematic use of ideas from
some other area of inquiry. They see the potential for knowledge
gained elsewhere to influence philosophical discussions. Another

healthy impulse. But, again, one that can lead to pathology.
In this instance, the disease stems from underestimating the
intricacies of the domain from which the philosopher proposes
to borrow—or perhaps from overestimating the relative subtlety
of philosophy. The venture into new intellectual territory is not
so much a deliberate exploration, helped by wise local guides, as a
snatch-and-grab raid. A prominent idea catches the philosophical
eye. It is detached from all the connections that elaborate and qual-
ify it. A cartoon emerges and becomes the basis of a long sequence
of misguided philosophical writings. Furthermore, in the course
of the ensuing discussions, the number of simplifications tends to
grow, with the caricature becoming ever more distorted.
Darwin is especially vulnerable to this treatment. The central
thought behind evolution by natural selection is simple—Huxley
was right to exclaim “How stupid not to have thought of that!”—
and so those who (knowingly, or not) agree with Dewey in rec-
ognizing Darwin’s importance for philosophy (Dewey 1909/
1998) sometimes clutch at the most elementary formulation. “A
trait can only evolve,” they declare, “if it yields some advantage to
its bearer.” Inspired by this declaration, they can try to put it to
work. Some philosophical views, they claim, attribute properties
to human beings that could not have brought any advantage to
our ancestors. Those properties, therefore, could not have evolved.
Any philosophical position committed to seeing them as part of
our human nature is refuted.
During the past sixteen years, evolutionary debunking argu-
ments have given rise to a thriving cottage industry. Journals
are full of articles advancing or refuting attempts to discredit
various philosophical theses. Ambitious undergraduates, keen on

impressing graduate admissions committees, proliferate further
versions of the genre—as I know, from having been asked to read
so many of them for my own department. Very few, if any, of the
numerous examples I have read show serious engagement with the
details of Darwin’s own views, let alone with the century-and-a-
half ’s worth of refinement and elaboration that has occurred since
the Origin of Species.
As so often in philosophy, the article initiating the trend was
far subtler and more sophisticated in its treatment of evolution
than those that have swum in its wake. Fifteen years ago, a gifted
young philosopher published “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist
Theories of Value,” an article in which she went considerably
beyond cartoon Darwinism—“if it doesn’t yield an advantage,
it can’t evolve!”—and took into account some of the respects in
which the caricature might need modification (Street 2006). Her
involvement with Darwinism did not, in my view, go far enough,
and the argument was consequently flawed. But most of her suc-
cessors have thrown all caution to the winds. With worse results.
Sharon Street’s declared aim was to debunk moral realism,
the view that correct moral judgments tell the truth about some
independent moral realm. Her fire focused on any alleged capac-
ity for detecting the features of this realm and adjusting action
accordingly. Champions of moral realism tend to be coy. They
are reluctant to say very much about the capacity (capacities?) in
question, although so long as they attribute some moral knowl-
edge and suppose conduct to be shaped by it, they must, it seems,
believe it to exist. Some of their detractors are skeptical on non-
evolutionary grounds, offering arguments to doom any possibility
of acquaintance with the posited moral realm. Presumably Street

and the debunkers who have followed her lead must take these
arguments to be inadequate, since they turn to a Darwinian chal-
lenge to supplement or to replace them. Evolution is wheeled into
the battle as heavy artillery: no account of the evolution of the
hypothetical ability, the moral sense, could be provided; hence, it
is not a capacity human beings could have come to have.
So long as you adopt a highly simplified view of Darwinian
evolution, suspicions about a path from the amoral state to the
hypothesized capacity are not hard to fathom. Wouldn’t apprecia-
tion of moral truths lead people to make sacrifices, handicapping
them in the reproductive competition on which the evolutionary
trajectory depends? To amend the Anglican General Confession,
morally praiseworthy tendencies will “incline them to leave
undone what they ought to have done (to spread their genes),
and make them do what they ought not to have done (to achieve
reproductive success)—and there will be no evolutionary future
for them.”
Too simple. Giving the details of evolutionary explanations is
notoriously difficult, especially when the trait whose presence is to
be understood is complex. When, typically after years of sophis-
ticated genetic and ecological studies, an investigator (or team of
investigators) proposes an account, the investigator claims to have
identified a number of things: the current form of the trait, the
ancestral form in which the trait was absent, the ancestral envi-
ronment, the changes (if any) in the environments experienced by
the intermediate forms, a sequence of intermediates, and, in the
most compelling cases, some features of underlying genotypes,
with attention to the ways in which the pathway from genotype
to phenotype might affect other features of the organism, besides

the focal trait. Someone who thinks a trait could not have evolved
under natural selection must claim that, given the ancestral form
and the environment(s) in which the organisms have lived, there
is no sequence of intermediate forms on whom possession of the
trait (in its intermediate forms) would have conferred an advan-
tage. Usually, the skeptic thinks the trait would have been disad-
vantageous in its intermediate versions.
That, it seems, is how evolutionary debunking ought to work.
That’s the way it’s done by those who are best at it. The real mas-
ters of the craft aren’t philosophers. Indeed, they’re people many
of the philosophical debunkers despise. (Not all though—some
respected philosophers, moved by a narrow, literalist, dogmatic
Christianity, love to aim debunking arguments against traits
human beings clearly have, thus “refuting godless evolution.”) The
virtuosi in evolutionary debunking are known to the world as
“Creationists” or as proponents of “Intelligent Design.”
The style of argument I have reviewed is evident in the well-
known Creationist gibe “What use is half an eye?” The Creationist
knows the current phenotype: he can draw on textbooks to
explain the anatomy and physiology of eyes. The Creationist
claims to identify an ancestral form, a remote predecessor with
no sensitivity to light at all. How, the Creationist asks, do you get,
in gradual stages, from that to this? Surely, along the way, there
must have been large numbers of useless contraptions, interfering
with all sorts of previously well-functioning organs and systems. It
is, at least at first sight, a formidable challenge—indeed, one suf-
ficiently powerful to have bothered Darwin. Yet, since the nine-
teenth century, the mystery has been solved, as researchers have
found organisms with various capacities for responding to light

and have constructed chains of modified forms to link distant eye-
less ancestors with the seeing animals of today. Once-triumphant
Creationists have had to retreat and to rely on other, less catchy,
cases. The bacterial flagellum is one of their favorites.
Some bacteria have tails (flagella) that they move to propel
themselves through ambient media. Others don’t. The aspiring
Creationist debunkers can use the unflagellated as models for the
ancestors of the flagellated. They can explore the environments in
which related members of both types live. Hence they can specify
a fair number of details about the story they challenge Darwin’s
defenders to tell—here’s the starting point, here’s the endpoint,
here’s the environment along the way, with its various pressures
on putatively evolving organisms; now tell us how the bacteria got
from there to here! When they can specify this much, they deserve
some sort of appreciation. Let’s call cases in which these con-
straints can be fully characterized high-end Creationist debunking.
What’s wrong with the Creationist argument? It overlooks a
number of features of evolutionary theory, not only as it is prac-
ticed today (informed by information about dynamic genomes,
for example) but that have been commonplaces for half a century.
The evolution of a population is traceable in terms of gene fre-
quencies. Individuals with new genotypes are produced. Whether
a genotype increases in the population will depend (forgetting
about a few possibilities that would complicate the Creationist’s
reliance on the idea that disadvantages are inevitably driven out)
on whether the overall phenotype resulting from the genotype in
that environment yields an advantage in reproduction (a greater
number of descendants). A new genotype may only modify a
single trait of the organism—but that would be highly unusual.

Typically, genetic modifications affect a bundle of characteris-
tics, and the new genotype will succeed if that bundle confers an
advantage. Of course, the bundle may contain traits that would
be disadvantageous if they were the sole phenotypic property to
change. A plus B plus C organisms leave more descendants than
the unmodified form, but if an organism just had A it would be
less reproductively successful. Given the phenomenon of linkage,
however, you don’t just get A. Because of genetic-developmental
pathways, the choice is between the whole package (A, B, and C)
and the prior type. A plus B plus C wins, and A comes along for
the ride.
So the Creationist idea of bacteria evolving by adding tiny bits
of a tail (useless until you have the whole thing) is an arbitrary
choice from a space of unknown possibilities. The impossibility
of the evolution of the flagellum could only be demonstrated if
further work were done, specifically exploration of the genetics
underlying flagellal development. Until that is fully worked out,
the debunking argument—even though it’s high-end—is worth-
less speculation.
Let’s turn back to philosophy and compare philosophers’
debunking arguments with high-end Creationism. What con-
straints on the alleged problem for evolution can the philosopher
specify?
None. Philosophers’ debunking arguments are bargain-basement
Creationism.
That’s a strong charge. But justified. Can the philosopher
tell us the current form of the moral realist’s alleged capacity (or
should it be “capacities”?) for detecting moral reality and acting
according to what those who have it come to recognize—the psy-

chological phenotype evolution under natural selection allegedly
can’t deliver? No. Moral realists are very cagey (vague) about this—
their reticence (to repeat) could be grounds for concern about
their position. But complaints about vagueness (or impossibility)
can be made without dragging in Darwin. Is it possible to describe
the ancestral population in which the first changes that might
have initiated the evolution of the capacity occurred? In principle,
perhaps. Were the philosophers to study the contributions of pri-
matologists and archeologists—debunkers usually don’t—they
could learn many things about the characteristics, physical and,
to a lesser extent, social and behavioral, of our predecessors. But
to make use of that information, they would have to specify some
rough time period during which the evolution of the moral sense
is supposed to have occurred. Of course, nobody is prepared to do
that, and hence the ancestral type of Homo, just before the initial
emergence of the capacity, is left completely unspecified. Can our
Creationist debunkers tell us anything about the selective envi-
ronment in which they take the evolution of the capacity to occur?
They could garner some information about Paleolithic human
environments from the writings of outstanding scholars (again—
they don’t), but to make use of the findings they would have to fix
on a time period. For there have been significant changes in the
physical environments human beings have inhabited during the
last two hundred thousand years—and, more crucially, changes
in the social environments (this is, after all, a period during which
human language is often supposed to have evolved) that would
sometimes have transformed human behavioral repertoires.
What’s being denied then? The possibility of some utterly

vague psychological capacity evolving in a population of organ-
isms whose properties are left almost totally unspecified, in envi-
ronments about which we are told virtually nothing. In effect, the
evolutionary debunking argument is a variation on the cheapest
Creationist gibe: What’s the use of half a moral sense—or even a
whole one? Bargain-basement Creationism, indeed.
Yet there are reasons to place the philosophical Creationists
even lower, in some deeper subbasement. Their fellows who focus
on the bacterial flagellum are not subject to a reasonable demand,
one I haven’t yet mentioned, that applies to the evolution of
human beings and some other animals. People only talk about
bacterial culture in a rather specialized sense. They don’t think of
capacities being “culturally transmitted” across the generations—
baby bacteria receiving instruction from wise elders. With our
own species, matters are rather different. Cultural transmission
clearly goes on among primates, and it has been carefully studied
in our closest evolutionary relatives. Thus there’s every reason to
think of the evolution of traits in Homo throughout the entire his-
tory of our species as governed not only by natural selection but by
cultural selection as well. Since the mid-1980s, students of human
evolution have known two important things about the operation
of two forms of selection in tandem. First, a population evolving
under both natural selection and cultural selection may follow
a different trajectory—and fix different traits—from one evolv-
ing under natural selection alone. Second, if a population reaches
an outcome different from the one it would have attained under
natural selection, that outcome may remain stable; it is not fated
to revert to the state that natural selection, acting alone, would

have generated.
So “What’s the use of half a moral sense?” is an even cheaper
gibe than its Creationist counterpart.2 When someone denies the
value of half an eye or half a flagellum, he is at least absolved of
the need to attend to cultural transmission and cultural selection.
Philosophers focused on the moral sense not only fall into the gap-
ing traps that beset Creationist debunking—most obviously, the
failure to recognize the linkage among phenotypic traits. They also
completely ignore a special, but hardly unobvious, feature of evo-
lution in many organisms, most notably and most spectacularly in
human beings. People who engage in free-subbasement Creationist
debunking—a whole industry of recent philosophers—have no
Culture.
To do worse than the cheapest Creationists is quite an achieve-
ment. Not one, I think, of which many philosophers would be
proud. The pathology comes about, of course, because the pur-
veyors of these dubious goods, debunkers and the anti-debunkers
who reply to them alike, have only a nodding acquaintance with
the field on whose ideas they intend to rely. The moral of the story
should be plain: When you want to borrow ideas from some other
intellectual domain, do your homework. Read up. Talk to the
natives. Don’t shrug off advice to probe more deeply. Be aware of
the possibility that your philosophical applications might produce
a cartoon version of the ideas you claim to value. And take steps
toward avoiding that.
Not only in the case of Darwin, of course. The point applies
when you borrow from psychology or anthropology or art history
or physics or . . . . The Darwinian case is prominent, because so
many people think they can understand Darwinian evolution—

and even sum it up in a single sentence.
They might ponder the advice Francis Crick enunciated as
“Orgel’s second law”: remember that evolution is much cleverer
than we are.
***
I come to the sixth and last of my pathologies, another disease

born of a healthy impulse. The starting point this time is a proper
respect for what previous philosophers have achieved. It is right
to suppose human inquiry to be a roughly cumulative process.
Even in the moments when former firmly entrenched beliefs are
abandoned, we hope to build on the efforts of our predecessors,
to make up, eventually if not immediately, the losses incurred by
jettisoning some principle or theory that guided their successful
research.
Appropriate respect for tradition inclines contemporary phi-
losophers to continue the ventures of the past, to return to ques-
tions that have been singled out for philosophical discussion, to
take up the debates in which previous generations have engaged.
Deference to the elders should not, however, be unthinking. From
time to time—at least once in a philosopher’s career—she should
pause to take stock. Is this question, or this debate, one that
remains worth pursuing?
Sometimes people devoted to “freedom in philosophy” resist
the question. Nobody can predict, they say, which intellectual
pursuits will lead to future benefits. Better, then, to let individ-
ual scholars, disciplinary communities, even whole fields, go in
whatever directions they choose. No need to justify working on

questions others dismiss as pointless. Sources of good things are
often found in surprising places.
If investigative talent were widely cultivated across our species,
allowing for all the perplexities and difficulties afflicting human
beings to receive thorough attention, this plea for liberty might
be persuasive. As matters stand, however, it is a rationalization for
academic irresponsibility, for airy refusal of that “social division
of labor” on which Dewey insisted. Surely, it “proves” too much.
Should societies grant blanket permission to people who, in at
least some instances, are privileged in the level of support they
enjoy, to pursue any venture that arouses their intellectual curi-
osity, without any responsibility to account for the benefits they
take it to deliver? In everyday life, an “anything goes” approach
to planning is typically a luxury. Dickens saw the point clearly in
his portraits of two feckless characters: Harold Skimpole (of Bleak
House) and the better-known (and larger-hearted) Mr. Micawber
(David Copperfield). Both of them glory in going where fancy
takes them and they rely on others to support them when their
confidently pursued (but optimistically designed) projects come
crashing down—or simply fizzle. Unlike Skimpole, Micawber has
real charm. So, too, may some philosophical rhapsodies about the
unworried pursuit of projects whose probability of adding to the
broader human good is infinitesimal. Yet those rhapsodies, and
the “no questions asked” attitude they encourage, also exhibit the
dark side of Micawberism.
Because it is Micawberish (or Skimpolean?), the libertarian
defense fails to rebut the challenge to contemporary Anglophone
philosophy to reflect far more often, and in greater depth, on the
value of the questions about which “core philosophers” obsess.

Socialized into a profession, too many young philosophers rarely
scrutinize the worth of the enterprises to which they will devote
years of their lives. Perhaps this is the most obvious pathology
of all, apparent to those outsiders who learn about what their
friends in the philosophy department are doing and wonder why
anybody would want to find out about that. Besides the appeal to
freedom, there’s another standard reply. Philosophy has its own
questions. Some of them are timeless. If the “core issues” do not
move nonphilosophers, that is a sign of their ignorance and philis-
tinism. The cognoscenti sniff, and continue with their exploration
of the higher matters, unappreciated by the base vulgar.
Ever since Plato (or maybe Socrates), philosophy has posed
plenty of “What is . . . ?” questions. The point of seeking answers
to such questions is frequently to advance an investigation. For
the first half of the twentieth century, geneticists offered several
accounts of what genes are, and they were able to develop genet-
ics further as a result. Yet mysteries remained. How could these
mysterious entities lose one of their functions (generating abnor-
mal phenotypes) while retaining another (copying themselves so
they could be transmitted to progeny)? After Oswald Avery and
his colleagues had identified DNA as the genetic material, James
Watson and Francis Crick were inspired to investigate the struc-
ture of DNA, and molecular biology has since transformed our
understanding of living organisms. Toward the end of their epoch-
making article, Watson and Crick inserted a laconic sentence
pointing toward a resolution of the mystery I have noted: “It has
not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated
suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”
Answers to “What is . . . ?” questions are seldom as fruitful as

the one Avery and his coworkers provided. But, I suggest, we can
assess the significance of questions by the size of the obstacles we
expect them to remove. In this light, let’s examine the relative sig-
nificance of two questions that go back a long way in the history
of Western philosophy.
“What is justice?” retains its importance. We know there
is much we don’t know about justice. That’s clear from a host of
disagreements about what counts as just treatment in a variety of
contexts—when individuals interact with other individuals, when
individuals interact with social institutions, when the state sets up
(or amends) a framework for governing its citizens. Careful and
wide-ranging accounts of justice are always welcome. By contrast,
it’s hard to see what any new answer to “What is knowledge?”
would do for us. Would it aid people to make more accurate assess-
ments of what they know and what they don’t know? Not unless it
were conceived as explaining what counts as evidence for beliefs in
various domains—and giving those kinds of explanations would
appear to be the province of the practitioners in those domains,
and of those who study the methods deployed there (reflective
practitioners and philosophers concerned with that specific sort of
inquiry). Would it help investigators gain new knowledge or enable
them to proceed at a faster rate? Probably not. Innovative method-
ological advice is always welcome, but, again, that’s the province of
people who understand specific kinds of inquiries. Answers about
knowledge in general have nothing to say to them. Unlike the par-
allel question about justice, “What is knowledge?” is idle.
Analytic epistemologists may see this as yet more vulgar phi-
listinism. Crude nonphilosophical folk don’t appreciate the value
of understanding “for its own sake.” Dewey anticipated that line

of defense and issued a diagnosis. He claimed that intellectual
work should conform to a social division of labor, in which the
inquiries conducted should serve others outside the tiny coterie
of those who undertake them. When the connections to broader
interests are severed, what remains is “a kind of intellectual busy-
work carried on by socially absentminded men.” There are all sorts
of things people might want to know “for their own sake,” and
the choices of which ones to pursue ought to respond to interests
that are widely shared. Otherwise, what results is a narcissistic
elitism—or, as Hilary Putnam once put it to me (more bluntly), a
form of mental masturbation.
The same pathology infects not only efforts to “clarify impor-
tant concepts” but philosophical controversies about doctrines
as well. For at least two decades, a significant percentage of dis-
cussions in ethics have centered on the issue of moral realism.
Debates about the merits of evolutionary debunking arguments
are only one part of a far larger cluster of exchanges. Moral real-
ists contend that moral statements are true or false in virtue of
some aspect of reality. On their account, moralists are attempting
to fathom this facet of reality and to characterize it accurately, just
as various other groups of investigators attempt to expose features
of the natural or the social world.
Moral philosophy has its roots in a desire to improve human
decision-making, human conduct, and the institutions that shape
our lives. Contemporary normative ethics renews the reformist
impulse, and it is one of the philosophical ventures whose contri-
butions to society-wide discussions are broadly appreciated. Meta-
ethics, the enterprise of investigating what ethical statements
mean and what, if anything, makes them true or false, arises as a

spin-off from this readily comprehensible project of reformation.
To become clearer about the meanings of moral judgments might,
by analogy with Avery’s biological breakthrough, streamline nor-
mative discussions. Insight into the status of morality looks to be
a promising source of better methods for generating and justifying
theses about what people and institutions ought to do and be. As
a side benefit, it would provide a rejoinder to those irritating skep-
tics (serious or not) who denounce moral principles as express-
ing arbitrary human demands, typically made in the interests of
retaining power.
After more than a century of meta-ethical explorations,
prominent among them debates about moral realism, what
exactly has been learned? Suppose that, tomorrow, the philo-
sophical community arrived at an unusual consensus: Moral
realism is correct. What would be the payoff? Extraordinarily
little. For the versions of moral realism proposed are either tai-
lored to fit existing normative theories (utilitarianism, for exam-
ple) that are, to put it mildly, controversial, or else so nebulous
as to provide zero guidance in normative discussions. We are
hardly advanced by learning that moral reality is something the
author knows not what, accessed he knows not how, or even by
the slightly more definite thought of morality as characterizing
“what we have, overall, most reason to do.” Linking morality to
a realm of reasons is useless without some more definite account
of what reasons are, one that might enable us to arrive at firmer
judgments about where “the balance of reasons” lies, and thus
devise methods for settling moral disputes more reliably and
more systematically than we currently can. Nor is the response
to the skeptics worth much. We can easily envisage their reply.

“Do you really expect anyone to be confident about the existence
of a supposed moral reality, concerning which your accounts are
so thin? Odd, isn’t it, that you insist it exists, while confessing
your profound ignorance about its character or about how we
find out about it?”
As my late colleague and friend, Isaac Levi, used to maintain—
and he finally convinced me—arguments about realisms are
worthless unless they have some methodological implications. In
this instance, the meta-ethical turn began in hopes of illuminat-
ing normative disputes through ventures in semantics and ontol-
ogy. It has come out not quite empty. But as near as makes no
difference.
Yet my diagnosis, in this instance, has a positive message, too.
For, once the tale I have briefly rehearsed is clearly appreciated,
there’s an obvious way to reform meta-ethics: give up the intricate
exchanges about meaning and truth; focus instead on improving
whatever methods we have for making moral progress.
“But how can you do that if you don’t know what you’re talking
about?” Easy. Mathematicians and natural scientists do it all the
time (recall Russell’s famous remark about mathematics as “the
subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor
whether what we are saying is true”). They develop new concepts,
as well as new methods, by reflecting on the achievements of the
past, and on the procedures that did and didn’t work. Philosophers
interested in moral methodology can do the same. Consider his-
torical paradigms of what you take to be moral progress, look
for features that advanced the progressive changes, as well as for
those that retarded them. Formulate tentative methodological
guidelines. Test them against further instances. Refine the meth-

odological advice. Repeat.
I have tried, elsewhere, to present a first attempt at how this
might work. Perhaps the turn to methodology might point meta-
ethics toward a new question, one capable of delivering something
to satisfy the reformist impulse that prompted meta-ethics in the
first place (Kitcher 2021a).
***
Although pathology reports sometimes bring relief, they fre-

quently prove upsetting. I fear that my review of philosophical
pathologies will fall into the latter category, provoking distress
and even outrage. The mirror I have held up to professional
Anglophone philosophy has been constructed to make vivid the
deformities I recognize in that academic practice, misshapen fea-
tures that amuse or annoy or appall scholars in other fields. It is,
of course, possible that the distortions are produced by the mir-
ror itself—effects of the kinds produced by the reflective surfaces
found in fairgrounds. Whether or not that is so, I hope my fellow
philosophers will reflect on how their work may look from dif-
ferent angles and begin a serious interrogation of whether those
perspectives expose a genuine defect.
Receiving bad news sometimes moves people to engage in
denial. The report is seen as exaggerating the defects, failing to
recognize positive features of the status quo, suffering from a dys-
peptic lack of sympathy that generates blind spots and incompre-
hension. So complaints are waved away, and business goes on as
usual. Philosophers all-too-easily take themselves to have grounds
for dismissal. After all, their training in analysis and argument

has equipped them with powerful weapons for use in disputes (or
conversations) with colleagues from other disciplines, instilling a
sense of intellectual superiority. “Smart” is a principal adjective
when they rate one another, when they evaluate fellow academ-
ics, and even when they reflect on their personal acquaintances.
Hence arises a professional culture with a tendency to assume that
philosophers are usually (almost always?) “the smartest people
in the room.” Most of us have been guilty of succumbing to the
lure of that attitude. Humility and the recognition of a diversity
of cognitive and affective virtues would be wiser. So, too, would
be an openness to self-examination and to questioning whether
charges of pathology are altogether unfounded. My report is
offered not as the last word on the state of contemporary analytic
philosophy, but as an invitation to take its current health far more
seriously than most philosophers are inclined to do. To induce a
group of dedicated and highly talented people to reflect on what
they are doing with their lives.
Moreover, as the discussion of moral realism is intended to
bring out, identifying pathologies is not always negative. Beyond
the obvious advice about the road to health—remove the offend-
ing feature—it is sometimes possible to point in a positive direc-
tion. So my remarks on idle “enduring questions” end with a
suggestion about more profitable forms of inquiry.
In any event, we have lingered too long among the sick. It is
time to respond directly to my title question and to paint a picture
of philosophical health. What is the use of philosophy?
4 TH E W H O L E F U N C TI O N
O F P H I LO SO P H Y
The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out

what definite difference it will make to you and me, at defi-
nite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-
formula be the true one.
—William James (James 1907/1975, 30)
T he sentence that supplies the title for this chapter is the third and
last of a short paragraph in William James’s seminal Pragmatism.
It is far less often quoted than its predecessor, which presents a theme
many scholars have seen as central to the pragmatist movement: the
idea of there being no difference that doesn’t make a difference to
“somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen.” The three sen-
tences of that paragraph were important to James. They all occur in
a much longer passage in the lecture in which he initially announced
“the pragmatic method,” a lecture delivered almost a decade earlier
(at what was then known as “the University of California”) and first
published six years after it was given (James 1904/1978).
Even more explicitly in that earlier lecture, James’s goal was
to point out how philosophical disputes can easily collapse into
2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197657249.003.0004
T he W hole F unction of P hilosophy 109
insignificance, how philosophers can go on talking indefinitely

about topics that have not the slightest bearing on what matters
to other people. Many of their professional discussions today
are not only irrelevant to the lives of the kinds of people among
whom I grew up but also to the lives of my nonphilosophical
friends and of my colleagues in other departments at the universi-
ties in which I have taught. Contrary to some interpreters of the
pragmatists, James’s dominant concern wasn’t to present some
improved theory of meaning—he didn’t have advance access to
Michael Dummett’s thesis that the theory of meaning lies at the
heart of contemporary philosophy. His target was much more
straightforward. In his view, a lot of the philosophy he knew
was insignificant—unimportant, not worth the time of talented
and industrious people. Pragmatism, as he conceived it, would
reform that.
The three sentences follow a natural sequence. First, diagno-
sis: a large amount of philosophical writing and talking “collapses
into insignificance.” Second, justification: it makes no difference
to human lives (except, of course, to the lives of the tiny cote-
rie who do the talking and the writing). Third, positive sugges-
tion: James points to what, in his view, philosophy ought to do.
Contemporary philosophers, at least those who spend any time
on James, often try to domesticate him, turning the second sen-
tence into the sketch of a theory of meaning (a theory most of the
would-be domesticators view as a disastrously bad one). They shy
away from the explicit indictment of the first sentence and avert
their eyes (to spare James’s blushes?) from the language of the
third. “World-formulas” indeed!
James was far from the first to feel a need to scrutinize the
worth of philosophical projects. At the end of the Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume proposes a pro-
gram of philosophy book burning. Writings dealing with “rela-
tions of ideas”—treatises in logic and mathematics—should be
preserved. So, too, for works offering factual information about
the natural or social world. All the rest should be committed “to
the flames” because they “can contain nothing but sophistry and
illusion.” Hume’s peroration would be echoed, a decade or so after
James’s death, in the logical positivists’ campaign for the elimi-
nation of metaphysics. The difference between James’s diagnosis
and that shared by Hume and the positivists turns on alternative
readings of an ambiguous word: “significant.” For Hume and
company (including, allegedly, the properly domesticated James)
much of philosophy is insignificant in the sense of being literally
meaningless. For the real James, and even more explicitly for John
Dewey, philosophy, as often practiced, lacks significance because
it is unimportant, and the unimportance shows up in the lack of
any impact on people’s lives.
As previous chapters have noted, Dewey’s writings contain
many elaborations of James’s diagnosis. Democracy and Education
charges that philosophy may not only suffer from being “merely
verbal” but also become “a sentimental indulgence for a few”
(Dewey 1916/ 1975, 338). Five years later Reconstruction in
Philosophy amplifies the charge. Dewey reflects on academic life,
noting how it represents a “social division of labor.” The division,
he thinks, only proves healthy when those who pursue “theory and
knowledge” are “in unobstructed cooperation with other social
occupations, sensitive to others’ problems and transmitting results
to them for wider application in action.” Without such connec-

tion, inquiry “easily degenerates into sterile specialization, a kind
of intellectual busy work carried on by socially absent-minded
men.” When these people are challenged on the point, their “occu-
pation is ‘rationalized’ under the lofty name of devotion to truth
for its own sake” (Dewey 1920/1982, 164).
I hope the preceding chapters serve as an elaboration of James’s
and Dewey’s negative work, the work of diagnosis, in the context
of contemporary philosophy in the English-speaking world. The
aim of this one is to develop further the positive account of phi-
losophy they offer as a replacement.
***
Before constructing my preferred version of the James-Dewey

picture, it is worth taking a look at the most perceptive response
offered by those who reject pragmatist diagnoses of philosophy’s
ills. For any rival to orthodox conceptions will be improved by
capturing whatever insights are presented by opponents of sweep-
ing reforms.
A decade or so ago, a precursor of Chapter 1 (Kitcher
2011) plainly struck a chord with some readers. Equally, it
appeared to many others as profoundly misguided, failing to
appreciate the subtler values of Anglophone philosophy as it is
practiced, as if I were some philistine outsider who had wandered
in to an exquisite art collection and, after gawking uncompre-
hendingly, bluntly denounced what I had seen. I compared profes-
sionally high-status enterprises unfavorably with others, pursuits
often regarded as “peripheral”—perhaps “worthy enough,” but
not “core philosophy.” The pathologies identified in that original

article, and at greater length in the preceding chapters, contrasted
with my enthusiastic embrace of discussions about race and gen-
der, of attempts to develop a methodology for causal analyses of
statistical data, of studies of rationality and its limits, and of the
genre of philosophical work about literature and music inspired
by Stanley Cavell.
No more needs to be said about the negative case. The previ-
ous chapters may be too much already! Yet, since thoughtful
people have found my “inside-out” vision wrongheaded, and even
offensive (I apologize for my past—and present—lack of tact), it’s
worth offering a brief update to explain my enthusiasm for alleg-
edly “peripheral” enterprises and my delight in seeing more of
them flourish.
Today, at a time when political discussions are clouded by talk
of “alternative facts,” one might have thought that philosophi-
cal clarification of such claims could help. Most of the work in
“core analytic epistemology” is unhelpful for these purposes.
Nevertheless, a number of philosophers have provided illumina-
tion in work that is either socially informed (investigations of pro-
paganda, for example; Stanley 2015) or develops formal models in
social epistemology (studies of the ways in which information and
misinformation flow through different kinds of social networks;
O’Connor and Weatherall 2019).
Moreover, the value of philosophical studies of race is even
clearer today than it was a decade ago. The sophistication of
the contributions that have been made in this area, by phi-
losophers developing critical race theory, by eliminativists and
social constructivists, and by those exploring the biological and
demographic phenomena underlying attempts to draw divisions

within the human population, has increased enormously. Thanks
to a whole alphabet of philosophers, from Anthony Appiah at the
beginning to Naomi Zack at the end—with people like Robert
Gooding-Williams, Sally Haslanger, Charles Mills, and Tommie
Shelby in between—not only has the understanding of race and
racism been decisively advanced, but there’s good reason to think
the progress has had an impact on public discussions.
In this chapter, I come to praise philosophy, not to bury it.
During the years since I wrote “Philosophy Inside Out,” a higher
proportion of American philosophers have written articles and
books illuminating issues for a broader public. Besides the exam-
ples I have already mentioned, other obvious ones include many
contributions, offered by philosophers of all ages and with many
different perspectives, to the New York Times’ “Stone” column,
Laurie Paul’s studies of transformative experience (Paul 2014),
Susan Neiman’s reflections on coming to terms with a nation’s
horrific past (Neiman 2019), and the important work on epistemic
injustice that has pursued issues pioneered earlier by Miranda
Fricker (Fricker 2007). The health of the social division of labor is
better than it was a decade ago.
So I am less pessimistic than I used to be. In the interests of
revealing myself to be a reforming character—a philosophical
philistine on the road to finer appreciation—I want to take up a
line of thought suggested by people who believe I debase philoso-
phy in the search for extra-philosophical relevance. These people
would, I believe, endorse my admiration for the kind of work
toward which I have gestured. Perhaps they now have a higher
appreciation of the value of “applied philosophy” than they once
did. But, they insist, that kind of work is not everything. It leaves
out important kinds of studies philosophers pursue. A world in
which philosophy is reduced to the ventures that make immediate
social impact would have lost something important.
I agree wholeheartedly. On this point, my critics are entirely
correct. My earlier account was incomplete. But I don’t think the
“enduringly significant core” of philosophy is what they think it
is. James saw more, and saw more clearly, than those who protest
my philistinism.
***
The real importance of that much-read paragraph lies in the final

sentence—specifically in the question it attempts to answer. What
is “the whole function of philosophy”?
James’s own answer probably strikes you as somewhat odd—at
least, I hope it does. References to “world-formulas” conjure up
disconcerting images, inviting us to think of earnest seekers climb-
ing mountains to receive from the solitary guru seated at the top
the one-sentence answer to the “ultimate question.” James’s posi-
tion can be clarified by following a thread leading from his early
writings to the opening lecture of Pragmatism. “The Sentiment of
Rationality” already foreshadows his later view of the whole func-
tion of philosophy:
What is the task which philosophers set themselves to per-

form; and why do they philosophize at all? Almost everyone
will immediately reply: They desire to attain a conception of
the frame of things which shall on the whole be more rational
than that somewhat chaotic view which everyone by nature

carries about with him under his hat. (James 1879/1979, 57)
In the first lecture of Pragmatism, the thought is further developed

by taking these individual conceptions “of the frame of things” to
have links to two major types of philosophical temperaments—
the tough-and tender-minded. So, in the passage on which I am
focusing, “world-formula” appears to refer to articulations and
elaborations of these temperaments, philosophical systems whose
deliverances may help people improve and refine the muddled—
“somewhat chaotic”—approaches to life they “carry about under
their hats.”
The Dedication to Pragmatism hails John Stuart Mill as “our
leader were he alive today,” and I detect Mill’s influence on James’s
proposals. On Liberty celebrates individual projects or plans of
life, as later philosophers like Bernard Williams and John Rawls
would call them (Williams 1981; Rawls 1999). Our free choice
and pursuit of our projects constitutes, Mill claims, “the only free-
dom worthy of the name” (Mill 1859/2008, 17). His insistence on
multiplying “experiments of living” points to a suggestion about
how autonomous and intelligent choices are made: through recog-
nition of the diverse ways in which people think of the world they
inhabit and of their places in it, and subsequent attempts to derive
an identity suited to the nascent individual. James adds to this pic-
ture the sensible thought that the resultant conceptions are likely
to be something of a mess. Philosophy tries to proceed more sys-
tematically. It attempts to develop overarching accounts of “how
things, in the broadest sense of the term, hang together, in the
broadest sense of the term” (to use Wilfrid Sellars’s influential and
much-cited characterization of “the aim of philosophy” [Sellars

1963, 1]). James steps back from that creative project to recog-
nize more modest goals. In the spirit of pragmatism, he supposes
that the grand ventures are worthwhile only if they are connected
with human lives, if they make a difference to “somebody, some-
how, somewhere and somewhen.” If “chaotic” conceptions are to
be improved, people need to see how the large synthetic schemes
(assumed to be articulations of two major species of tempera-
ments) bear on their decisions and actions.
I shall want to clarify and refine this picture, but, even in the
outline I’ve given, it will help me to respond to the thoughtful line
of criticism to which I’ve referred. Readers of my early version of
Chapter 1 have noted how that article conceives of philosophical
relevance in a very direct, and thus restricted, way. Other areas
of human inquiry have a problem. They send for the philosopher,
in much the way homeowners might send for a plumber, to fix
things. (Or, quite often, the philosophical plumber turns up, unin-
vited.) My critics rightly point to the many occasions on which
successful research in coping with difficulties comes about in a
more roundabout fashion. My own favorite instance derives from
the history of genetics. After the rediscovery of Mendel’s ideas in
1900, some geneticists were eager to apply the new approach to
fathom hereditary human diseases. Over a century later, many
important advances have been made in this area. They did not
emerge, however, from any direct assault on the problem, but from
a long and circuitous route through basic science—through devel-
oping genetic tools applicable first to fruit flies, to yeast, bacte-
ria, and bacteriophage, through the identification of DNA as the
hereditary material in most organisms, through understanding
the molecular structure of DNA, cracking the genetic code, dis-

covering precise techniques of gene mapping and sequencing, and,
most recently, inventing molecular scissors-and-paste for modi-
fying genomes. Surely we should want to applaud T. H. Morgan
and his students for the groundbreaking work they did in the “fly
room” at Columbia—and, by the same token, it is suggested, we
should not dismiss the efforts of philosophers who tackle “core
questions,” often in ways quite remote from the urgent demands
of the age.
There is, I think, genuine insight in this objection. Some philo-
sophical projects without any direct bearing on extra-philosophical
questions can be justified. Obvious examples occur in aesthetics
and in the philosophy of science, where more abstract questions
about artworks and aesthetic experience, or about confirmation
and causation, can be expected to feed back into work that will
illuminate particular types of works of art or prove valuable in
clarifying urgent scientific controversies. As I’ll suggest below, the
most insightful contributions to the history of philosophy can be
given a parallel defense. Nevertheless, to concede these points is
not to issue a blank check. Those inclined to dispense the funds
might ask how long it is proper to wait for the expected returns.
When you turn to the kinds of philosophical cottage industries
I have targeted—large swaths of analytic epistemology, analytic
metaphysics, and analytic meta-ethics—any such evident connec-
tion vanishes. The extra-philosophical world has been waiting a
long time for the goods to be delivered. Is it reasonable to maintain
that discussions of ever more far-fetched hypothetical scenarios
will eventually contribute enhanced abilities to advance human
knowledge, or the type of understanding metaphysics is supposed
(wrongly, I think) to provide, or to guide individuals or societies

to better decisions and improved conduct? That strikes some peo-
ple, including me, as very hard to sustain. I vividly remember an
occasion, at an interdisciplinary conference on knowledge across
a variety of areas of inquiry, when, after the sole session devoted
to analytic epistemology, the nonphilosophical researchers, drawn
from many fields, erupted in outrage at the discussion they had
just heard. One eminent psychologist brutally advised one of the
participants to find “an honest line of work.” That was cruel, but it
was not hard for people who grew up, as I did, at a far remove from
academia, to understand the impulse from which it flowed. We
should not spend our time playing irrelevant games for “socially
absent-minded” people. Sometimes our cottage industries may
need an industrial revolution. Do professional philosophers fail
to hear the stirrings of discontent because so many of them are
academically and socially isolated? Or is it from a conviction that
philosophers are obviously “the smartest people in the room”?
***
My diagnoses are, of course, fallible. Perhaps there is more kin-

ship between “core philosophy” and the practices of the pioneer-
ing geneticists than I have allowed. Possibly some champion of the
ventures I criticize will show how they help discharge the “whole
function of philosophy.” Perhaps the champion will demonstrate
their bearing on some particular field of inquiry. Or, more likely,
what will be shown is their pertinence to the function James
identifies. From these explorations will come something—some
thesis, some concept, some method—useful to people as they try

to make sense of themselves and their world, a resource enabling
them to remedy some part of the chaos bubbling away under their
hats. I am doubtful. Yet, let me retreat further, reformulating my
concern.
What prompted me to write “Philosophy Inside Out” was a
sense that, all too often, questions about the worth of a profession-
ally approved enterprise do not even arise. As I have just conceded,
maybe a sterling defense could be given. What is problematic—
philosophically problematic—is that it isn’t given, and it isn’t given
because the question never even surfaces. Philosophers are socialized
into the ways of a profession, taking it for granted that such-and-
such is a “major philosophical question,” even “one for the ages,”
and people spend years seeking answers without serious reflec-
tion on the sources of its significance. That strikes me, as it once
struck Dewey, as a profoundly unphilosophical attitude. My aim
is not to denounce, as if I were qualified to issue a final verdict on
the value of particular practices. It is to raise skeptical questions,
and thereby prod confident people to take an outside look at the
research they do, to consider how it might (or might not) contrib-
ute something of value to the wider world, and thereby assess its
worth for themselves. To ask themselves if they are in “an honest
line of work.” Self-examination of this kind is all too rare.
Professional philosophy can do better. Articulating James’s
view of “the whole function of philosophy” will help us con-
sider how.
***
Some themes from Dewey suggest a more comprehensive answer

to James’s question. Dewey didn’t suppose philosophers to have
some special source of knowledge, or even some special method.
Other academic disciplines, from anthropology and art history
at the beginning of the alphabet to zoology at the end, engage
in first-order inquiry. They aim at finding true answers to signifi-
cant questions—or, as Catherine Elgin has eloquently argued, to
answers that are “true enough” (Elgin 2017). Part of their task,
though, is to identify which questions are significant, and in dis-
charging this task (as I’ve tried to show during the past twenty
years) they need to acknowledge the predicaments and aspirations
of all members of our species (and of other sentient beings).
You can’t hope to arrive at the whole truth about nature. There
are at least continuum many true statements about the area in
which you are sitting during the time through which you read
this page—and only a tiny number of those, if any, are worth
knowing. (How much would you really want to find out about
the values of physical, chemical, and biological magnitudes at
each of the space-time points in this interval of your life, about
the relations among them, the relations among average values in
all the many regions one could demarcate, and so on?) One of phi-
losophy’s tasks, I believe, is to assist the various areas of inquiry
in their work of identifying significance, and to do so through
helping people discover what most matters to them—sorting
out the chaos under all those hats. As Dewey memorably puts it,
“[Philosophy] is a liaison officer between the conclusions of sci-
ence and the modes of social and personal action through which
attainable possibilities are projected and striven for” (Dewey
1929/1984, 298).
Although I think that formulation needs adjustment, the fig-

ure is apt. For it draws our attention to the way in which philoso-
phy finds its place among disciplines and among all the mess of the
varied lives people live. Dewey sometimes puts the point, vaguely
but suggestively, by saying that investigators, within institutional-
ized forms of inquiry and in the everyday activities of human life,
find out lots of diverse facts—philosophers, reflecting on these, are
to provide some account of the “meanings” of those facts (Dewey
1925/1981, 307). I read Dewey’s loaded word—“meanings”—
through the lenses offered by James and by Sellars. Philosophy
strives for some kind of synthetic vision. Perhaps that is done, as
James proposes, by taking some existing framework, offered by
a philosophical system, and showing how it bears on lives in the
here and now. Or perhaps it is pursued through Sellars’s appar-
ently more ambitious enterprise, finding a new synthesis of what
is known and experienced, one that fits the times. Dewey would,
I think, applaud both of the recommended ventures—if he felt
either to be feasible. More thoroughgoing in his pragmatism than
either James or Sellars, he sees their characterizations as ideals—
and he views ideals not as terminal states toward which we ought
resolutely to march, but as diagnostic tools, for appraising our
current situation, uncovering problems, and initiating efforts to
overcome our difficulties.
So Dewey, as I read him, diverges from James at the very end of
the crucial sentence. He isn’t allergic to talk of a “world-formula,”
but he worries about the idea of our ever finding one and is skep-
tical of regarding any such formula as “true.” Humanity needs
the synthetic thinking which both James and Sellars commend
as philosophy’s task. But it is vastly overambitious to conceive
this as directed at all-encompassing theories, capable of being true.

Think instead, he advises, about particular domains of human
life, about the sciences, the arts, political institutions, economic
frameworks, religious practices, education, and so forth. Reflect
on what is known in the areas on which you focus, and how it
relates to other parts of human life. So, for example, you might
want to assess the goals of education in light of the existing politi-
cal or economic constraints, asking whether reforms are needed,
not to implement the currently identified political or economic
desiderata, but rather to change the entire framework (Dewey
1916/1975; Kitcher 2021b). What the philosopher supplies is a
more general view: posing questions, offering concepts, suggest-
ing useful analogies, putting forward ideals. If you read Dewey in
this way, there will be no mystery as to why he writes the kinds of
books he does, unphilosophical as they seem to many. His books
are notably short on references to “the latest journal literature”—
not, of course, a body of work that has figured particularly often
in the genesis of the greatest works of philosophy that have ever
been written. Moreover, he typically introduces figures from the
history of philosophy only for the purposes of revealing how some
idea—usually one with advantages and defects—has been intro-
duced and has shaped the ways in which people run their lives.
Like Nietzsche and Foucault, Dewey sometimes indulges in gene-
alogy, doing so for the purposes of recognizing how we might lib-
erate ourselves from constraints our predecessors have imposed on
us, in their own prior attempts to do the synthetic work he views
as philosophy’s principal contribution.
So the worrying Jamesian idea of a “world-formula” is scaled
back a little. In many of his works, Dewey develops his version
of the “whole function of philosophy” by linking it specifically to

the advance of inquiry. Philosophy is in the business not simply
of responding directly to the problems and controversies of the
age—the kind of work emphasized when philosophy is turned
inside out—but also in helping with the general project of inquiry
by working among various disciplines, developing conceptual
tools to remove potential obstacles. For all their apparent fail-
ures, Hempel and his logical empiricist successors have sometimes
helped the natural sciences in this way. So, too, writers about art
and music have offered new ways of thinking about genres of art
and their histories (Danto 1964, 1981, 1997; Goehr 2007). Even
more influential have been the reshapings offered by John Rawls
and Thomas Kuhn.
Yet, in this Deweyan articulation of the link between philoso-
phy and human lives, something James perceived starts to disap-
pear. Philosophers as liaison officers, or as handmaidens to other
forms of knowledge seeking, are not entirely detached from the
lives of ordinary folk. For the impacts they have on the various
species of inquiry may resonate further, reaching a wider human
population who are affected directly by the advances of the various
investigations philosophy nurtures. When he specifies his concep-
tion as one of refining methods of inquiry, Dewey preserves an
indirect connection to everyday life. James wanted more than that.
I do, too.
***
In scaling back the bothersome idea of a world-formula, turning

instead to the facilitation of inquiry, Dewey expresses unease with
his own language of philosophy’s unveiling of the “meanings” of

the mass of facts accumulated by the full gamut of human investi-
gations. Directing philosophy toward counseling various types of
inquiry provides a familiar, and credible, task. It is, nonetheless a
retreat from James’s own ambitious hope—to help people to bet-
ter versions of whatever chaotic and inchoate vision of the world
and their place in it guides their aspirations and activities.
The difficulty of taking that task seriously lies in recognizing
temptation: the seductive power of grandiosity. What the con-
fused hat-wearer appears to need is a full perspective on every-
thing, a “world-formula,” or an understanding of the “meanings”
of all the information available from the current state of inquiries
in all domains, or Sellars’s broad perspective on “things” and their
“hanging together.” What many commentators describe—in a
usage that typically irritates philosophers—as “someone’s philoso-
phy.” The philosophical wince stems from a commendable mod-
esty. If finding a world-formula, a grand overarching perspective,
is to be the philosophical enterprise, it is almost certainly gran-
diose, overweening, “vaulting ambition.” Surely anything offered
along these lines will be superficial—and probably banal?
So, as I read him, Dewey backs off. He urges philosophers to
survey all the various domains in which inquiry is pursued, more
or less successfully. The task is to reflect on them, to refine the
methods of those that are plainly making progress, and to develop
new tools for the ones that currently struggle. Dewey’s recom-
mendation is a far broader version of Hempel’s proposal for logical
empiricist philosophy of science. Hempel wanted to address ques-
tions arising for the various sciences, hoping to refine the methods
of the flourishing ones and nurture those in their infancy. Dewey
recognizes, insightfully, that inquiry goes on in all manner of con-

texts and all kinds of domains, and refuses to limit the search for
method to the ventures we label as “scientific.” In particular, he
sees the principal challenge as developing methods for moral, ethi-
cal, social, and political forms of inquiry (Dewey 1909/1998).
Dewey’s generalization specifies part of what— borrowing
a term from my accusers—I’ll call core philosophy. Unlike the
search for a universal perspective on the world in which we live
and on the possibilities for human lives, it doesn’t appear entirely
hopeless, doomed to failure or to shallow pseudo-success. After
all, people have succeeded at this kind of work. They reflect on
the kinds of procedures that have led to progress in some cho-
sen domain, take note of the ways in which advances have been
blocked, and try to provide a systematic account of how future
investigations might better be conducted. They may be aided by
comparisons with other domains, perhaps especially those whose
successes seem most striking. In effect, people who attempt to do
philosophy in this way are practicing modus Cartwright in differ-
ent places, and sometimes on a broader scale.
Yet to take these Deweyan projects as the whole of core phi-
losophy would shrink the enterprise James envisages. For there
are many aspects of everyday experience besides human inquiry.
Although I think Homo quaerens is a better name for our species
than the one assigned by biological taxonomy—sapiens is far too
self-congratulatory, and even cognoscens would be overdoing it—
all kinds of situations and conditions figure in the experience of
ordinary folk, generating chaos and confusion under a vast num-
ber of hats. People need tools for making sense of their individual
experiences, to determine for themselves their own identities and
central aspirations, to formulate and refine and revise their “plans

of life,” and to decide where and about what to inquire. Can phi-
losophy respond to their needs, without taking on the impossible
burden of supplying “world-formulas”?
I believe that it can. For a very simple reason. Sometimes it has.
***
The world we inhabit often seems far more complicated than the
ones in which the great philosophers of the past made their wide-
ranging proposals. Should that excuse contemporary philosophers
from pursuing synthetic philosophy? Aristotle could do it. Kant,
perhaps, could do it. Sadly, though, we can’t do it.
To be sure, nobody today can hope to write as intelligently on
so many topics as Aristotle did. Yet it’s worth asking: did Aristotle
write about everything that mattered to his contemporaries?
Certainly not. He ignored a fair number of areas of potential con-
cern to various groups of people—most evidently, the slaves and
the women of his age. Even if we restrict attention to the well-born
male members of the polis, did he provide them with a complete
account of how everything hangs together? His works are a seri-
ous candidate for “most impressive synthesis of current knowledge
ever given.” But they are silent, or scanty in what they say, on any
number of issues: questions about religion, economic life, educa-
tion, and the treatment of animals, for example. Is the synthesis
only incomplete because the pertinent texts—like the examina-
tion of comedy—have gone missing?
Kant is the only subsequent philosopher whose synthetic
scope might rival Aristotle’s. Scholars routinely praise the depth
and intricacy of his analyses and arguments, but, to my mind, the

breadth of his knowledge is equally breathtaking. Even Kant, how-
ever, didn’t cover everything. Like some twentieth-century phi-
losophers, his understanding of the sciences was shaped by a few
parts of physics. Less at home with chemistry, as it was developing
during the 1780s, he appears to have had little interest in theo-
ries about the history of the Earth, in the mathematical analysis
developed by Euler and Lagrange, or in eighteenth-century politi-
cal economy. Like Frege, I have “no wish to incur the reproach of
picking petty quarrels with a genius to whom we must all look up
with grateful awe” (Frege 1884/1968, 101e). The point is simple
(and, I hope, uncontroversial). Some dead philosophers have sys-
tematized large and important parts of what was known when
they wrote. Nobody has ever achieved a grand, universal synthesis.
That should encourage those who write philosophy today. The
complexity of the modern world may further limit the scope of
contemporary efforts to provide a synthetic picture from which a
significant portion of the human population might draw—as, for
example, German youth once drew from Kant, and a later genera-
tion drew from Schopenhauer. Maybe ours have to be on a smaller
scale. Nevertheless, partial syntheses, attempts to make sense of
some cluster of phenomena, can serve the purpose toward which
James’s remark about world-formulas points. Especially when
they respond to a kind of confusion or some localized chaos that
affects a sizeable group of people.
The encouragement is fortified by reflecting on other contribu-
tors to the Western philosophical canon, thinkers whose syntheses
were plainly narrower than those of Aristotle and Kant. Descartes
is often taken to have revolutionized philosophy by instituting a
search for absolute certainty—and thus provoking generations of

epistemologists to take up a “core issue,” the assessment (typically
the attempted rebuttal) of skepticism about the external world.
I view his achievements from a different angle. Inspired by the
impending collapse of the Aristotelian synthesis in the early sev-
enteenth century, Descartes drew from his own investigations of
questions in mathematics and natural science—geometry, optics,
and meteorology—a method whose use, he believed, would help
his contemporaries build a substitute for the previous ortho-
doxy. Concern aroused by the two-thousand-year dominance of
a faulty framework led him to impose a stringent demand on his
method: it must be guaranteed not to lead us astray. Thus arose his
quest for certainty. It was a spin-off from a commitment to replac-
ing a (decrepit) synthesis. Regarded in this way, the supposed “core
issue” is a secondary question, one caused by Descartes’s (under-
standable) sense of appalling error—he saw people as having been
beguiled for two millennia. Ironically, his aspiration not to make
the mistake of his predecessor led him to commit a version of the
same misstep. He started with an unscrutinized philosophical
assumption: rebuilding has to be on immoveable foundations. His
emphasis on the need for ironclad guarantees distorted epistemol-
ogy for another two hundred (plus) years.
Or consider Schopenhauer. His magnum opus seems to be
inspired by reflections on a familiar aspect of human experi-
ence: the satisfaction of desire is only temporary (Schopenhauer
would have intensified the claim—it’s evanescent). Combining
this thought with his own reading of Kant, he suggested that
the noumenal realm would be better characterized as the prov-
ince of an insatiable will. The famous pessimism, so influential on
fin-de-siècle German youth, developed from that conjunction of

ideas. To those, like Thomas Mann, who felt the disappointment
of evanescent relief from desire, Schopenhauer brought some
order to the chaos of late adolescent, or early adult, ruminations.
Marx can also be viewed as a synthesizer, melding together
ideas from Hegel and his successors, with a commitment to social
reform and socialist ideals, all tempered by his own appraisal of
the insights and oversights of classical political economy. The
end result is an account of social and political life that attempts
to make sense of its history, and to point the way to a genuinely
scientific socialism.
Others, too. Kierkegaard struggled to make sense of the deep
significance of religion and its debasement in his own times. Mill
and Nietzsche, concerned in very different ways with the suppres-
sion of individualism, were determined to help to create a world
in which individuals can develop and flourish. William James,
driven by a desire to honor science and oppose scientism, found a
place for religion and for the deepening of values in a world that
threatened to eliminate what he regarded as most important in
human life. John Dewey, playing fox to James’s hedgehog, sur-
veyed many difficulties in the society he knew best: recognizing
the shortcomings of existing educational practices in their dis-
tortion of young people’s growth, diagnosing the limitations of
democratic institutions, trying to find ways of bringing art back
into the everyday lives of his fellow citizens, seeking a conception
of religion that could preserve what is valuable while abandoning
superstition.
I have been engaging in a quick exercise of modus Cartwright.
“Here are some philosophers: try thinking of them this way.” I’ve
proposed viewing my exemplars (and I could add many more) as

forming partial syntheses to account for widespread features of
human experience. They had an influence on others, sometimes
immediately, sometimes much later, because they supposed sig-
nificant groups of people would share their puzzlement about the
facets of human life to which they tried to bring order. And they
were right about that.
Yet, in one obvious respect, I must acknowledge the histori-
cal distortion I have committed. For most of them would have
regarded their synthesis as a cognitive achievement. Not simply a
proposal for straightening things out, but as declaring to the world
how matters, in their chosen domain, should be straightened out.
That, I suggest, mischaracterizes what they actually achieved.
They should have maintained the modesty of modus Cartwright.
Here are some phenomena: try thinking about them in this way.
***
Contemporary philosophy could emulate these synthesizing

efforts. Indeed, it sometimes does. Our own times are not entirely
bereft of ventures in the same vein. Recent English-language
philosophy has offered some attempts to make coherent sense of
aspects of the world in which we live.
Twentieth-century paradigms of synthetic work are visible in
Kuhn’s studies of scientific change and in Rawls’s explorations
of justice and of political liberalism (Kuhn 1962; Rawls 1999,
1993). Both authors offer the broader world large pictures of areas
of human existence that concern significant numbers of people.
Kuhn’s is narrower and more specialized, intended to reshape
prior understanding of the sciences and their development,

their past contributions and their potential achievements. Rawls
presses closer to the everyday concerns of the citizen, aiming to
bring some order to the chaos and confusion boiling away under
people’s hats when they try to wrestle with questions about the
justice of laws and institutions, or to determine the proper limits
on political freedoms.
As I read them, both are practicing modus Cartwright. Each
has read widely. Their work is grounded in facts uncovered by
first-order investigators (from several disciplines), and sometimes
involves reflection on their own experiences. Kuhn assembles
information from the history of the sciences (and from other
parts of history), from psychology and from sociology, and from
his own struggles in coming to terms with the discarded perspec-
tives of the past. Rawls ranges even more broadly, drawing on eth-
ics and political theory, on economics, on the history of political
life, and on an understanding of the sources of human motiva-
tions drawn both from a wide reading and from unusual powers of
sympathy. Out of these sources they gather a body of phenomena
to be brought into order. Their great achievements lie in articulat-
ing a way of viewing these phenomena. “Try looking at this part of
life from this angle,” they suggest.
What brings them an audience is their initial success in cir-
cumscribing a domain in which nonphilosophers (even people
of no great education) seek guidance. And then in offering
something to readers who previously “didn’t know their way
about” in an area of interest or concern to them. Their writings
satisfy a genuine need rather than “filling a welcome gap in the
literature.”
I have selected my examples deliberately, to avoid arousing

too much of the common suspicion of larger synthetic ventures
in philosophy. I hope not to provoke the kinds of grumbles
often heard in response to James’s talk of “world-formulas” and
kindred declarations. Even philosophers who disagree sharply
with Rawls’s conclusions find it hard to denigrate his work, or
to resist conceding its stature in the history of political thought.
Kuhn, by contrast, has sometimes been the target of harsh
criticism, accused of being philosophically insensitive and not
fully understanding the details of the issues about which he
attempted (allegedly inadequately) to deal. In the early decades
after the publication of his study of scientific revolutions, he
was routinely lumped with Feyerabend as one of the “leaders of
the new fuzzies” and lambasted for his supposed “relativism.”
Although the tone of the complaints is milder today, some of
the substance endures.
Is high-quality synthetic philosophy a thing of the past (if
only of the relatively recent past)? I think not. It endures today
in the writings of some creative and insightful philosophers. To
illustrate, I shall point to six exemplars (paradigms?), recogniz-
ing that others might opt for different lists: Elizabeth Anderson
(Anderson 2010, 2017), Anthony Appiah (Appiah 1992, 2006,
2018), Nancy Cartwright (1983, 1999, 2007, 2019), Alexander
Nehamas (1998, 2007, 2016), Susan Neiman (2002, 2008, 2014,
2019), and Martha Nussbaum (2011, 2012, 2015, 2016). Although
I would not advertise my list as complete, I think these exemplars
are much rarer than they should be. As I shall suggest in the fol-
lowing chapter, each might inspire young philosophers who have
felt the concerns previous chapters have aired.
Each of these authors focuses on some aspects of the contem-

porary world that raise questions or perplexities for a sizeable
group of people. James might view them as responding to different
sources of subhat chaos. Anderson, for example, writes insight-
fully about how people from different races (with a tortured his-
tory of oppression, suffering, and mistrust) might come to live
together in mutually satisfying ways, and about the unobserved
channels through which our lives are shaped. Appiah develops
sophisticated accounts of identities, with particular attention to
individuals who are often seen in the light of one, or several, ste-
reotypes, and he explores the possibilities of genuine community.
Nehamas is concerned with the place of beauty in the modern
world, with the lifelong search for beauty, and the ancient ques-
tion of the good life. Neiman’s synthetic endeavor stems from
a conviction that concern with evil lies at the heart of modern
thought, and she examines the forms in which evil arises and the
strategies deployed to combat it. Nussbaum’s many wide-ranging
studies include presentations of an original and influential way of
thinking about the quality of human lives, explorations of the role
of the emotions in politics, proposals for facilitating the develop-
ment of marginalized groups, and defenses of the importance of
liberal education. (In each case, I have considered only a selection
of the topics and themes these philosophers explore.)
Like Rawls and Kuhn, these philosophers, too, practice modus
Cartwright. They gather diverse phenomena, identified by first-
order investigators. They try to bring order to the phenomena,
resolving tensions and increasing coherence. They offer a perspec-
tive to help those who are conscious of specific areas of subcra-
nial chaos.
Despite their ability to reach readers beyond philosophy, like

Kuhn, each of those I have listed is sometimes the target of profes-
sional suspicion, and even dismissal, with the frequency and the
intensity of condemnation varying from case to case. Sometimes,
it seems, success in having an impact on a wider world automati-
cally elicits the disdainful sniffs of “real philosophers.” Even peo-
ple whom I greatly admire have complained that an attempt to
bring order to some domain of everyday confusions, even one
I view as exemplary, is “philosophically shallow” or that some part
of it “isn’t up with the recent literature on the topic.” The first
dismissal arises from the correct perception that the analyses on
offer are not pursued as far as professional philosophers, writing
for one another, would take them. Notions or principles are intro-
duced without attempting to make them cover all possible cases.
Here the disdainful critic is in the grip of the fetish of complete
clarity. The appropriate question to ask is a different one. Has the
principle or concept been sufficiently clarified to satisfy the needs
of the groups whose perplexities are to be addressed? Is it readily
applicable in the instances where interested readers would like to
apply it? Those are the questions that matter. Sometimes, to be
sure, ventures in synthetic philosophy are flawed. Overreach pro-
duces superficiality. The brush used in painting the picture is too
broad. That judgment is, I believe, unwarranted in the examples
I have offered. Moreover, to concede the possibility that attempts
at synthesis will be flawed is not to justify a hair-trigger reaction,
to see the ability to speak to a wider audience as guaranteeing the
author’s desertion of “real philosophy.” What the fetishist pro-
poses is a “professional rewriting” that would not only be unnec-
essary but would also interfere with the comprehension of the
intended readership. Sufficient unto the public is the clarity of the

synthesis!
The second charge can be dismissed more briefly. Professional
philosophers may be irritated that a discussion neglects “the recent
literature.” Before they give in to that irritation, they should ask
themselves two questions. First, would the synthesis do a better job
for the intended audience if the author had absorbed the analytic
studies the critic has in mind? Second, the synthesizers I admire
are neither lazy nor illiterate. They read widely about their phe-
nomena, exploring many different perspectives. Would their time
have been better spent combing the specialized books and journals
so that they would be thoroughly up on the most recent wrinkles?
I suspect that these authors do glance at the “journal literature”
from time to time. Perhaps their response when they do so is akin
to mine: Not much here to help with what I am trying to do.
Do the knee-jerk reactions of contemporary professionals stem
from an impulse pervading the history of Western philosophy?
Ever since Plato, major thinkers have distrusted good writing. Yet,
even if the language of the poets is unsuited to philosophical clar-
ity and precision, Plato himself surely demonstrated to his succes-
sors that philosophy does not have to be esoteric or turgid, that it
may be accessible, and that “loose” is not an inevitable adjective to
accompany “popular” in application to philosophy. True enough,
authors whose sense of style inclines to variation in phraseology
may introduce ambiguities by presenting the same idea in differ-
ent guises—William James is sometimes led into this temptation
(and pays the price for his sin). Throughout much of the history
of philosophy, to be sure, the stylistic expectations of readers were
sufficiently low to allow many influential thinkers to nourish
a large class of consumers with oatmeal prose. (Although Plato,

Augustine, Descartes, Hume, Schopenhauer, Mill, Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, James, and Russell constitute a sizeable cohort of
eminently readable exceptions.) Today’s readers, however, have
become adjusted to a spicier diet. So the insistence on “plain lan-
guage” would seem to be a recipe for an esoteric future.
Complaints about the “superficiality” or “unphilosophical
character” of attempts at synthetic philosophy, whether justified or
not, arise with different frequencies for different authors. I incline
to a testable hypothesis: The number of dismissive objections var-
ies directly with the perceived size of the synthetic philosopher’s
audience. Perhaps that points to a seventh pathology: the urge to
deter fellow philosophers from discharging the whole function of
philosophy.
***
My sympathy for work in the history of philosophy should now

start to appear more comprehensible. When I was a graduate
student, historians of philosophy were often regarded as second-
class citizens. In the intervening decades, things have changed
for the better. The careful scholarship that has been done, on the
Ancients, on Hume and Kant, on Hegel and Nietzsche, and on
many others has proven valuable for the fledgling synthetic efforts
of our day. We return to the ambitious synthesizers of the past—
in part because so little in present philosophy answers to the task
they undertook, in part because some of their concepts and ques-
tions continue to seem relevant today. For history to play this
valuable role, the historian must chart a careful course, avoiding
any tendency to wrench the text to current philosophical fashions

(reading the great figures of the past as groping precursors of our
most enlightened contemporaries). I confess to committing the
latter type of error in some of my own historical work—but that
doesn’t interfere with my admiration for studies that consider past
philosophers in their contexts, taking them on their own terms
and still revealing ideas that speak to us.
Let me sum up. Philosophers can do valuable work in clari-
fying and advancing the debates that arise in various individual
domains of human life, and in supplying synthetic perspectives to
help people with the perplexities generated when they think about
the world in which they live and about their own place in it. The
past decade has witnessed an encouraging trend: more work of
this kind is being done. Yet the vision of professional philosophers
is often constricted in comparison with the giants of the past.
Today, there are vast numbers of well-trained people, even gradu-
ate students, whose analytic skills, powers of dissecting arguments,
exceed those of the great figures in the history of philosophy. That
is, of course, a good thing. Clarity is a philosophical virtue. (Even
if it is not the only philosophical virtue.) Attempts at synthesis
made by people who lack the training, who do not think or write
precisely, however popular they may be, are worthless—that is the
correct insight behind the dismissive complaints. Nonetheless,
some of those who try to renew the synthetic enterprise of phi-
losophy’s past, including those I have selected as exemplars, have
been properly schooled. They retain the techniques instilled by
the études of their graduate school years. Now, they want to make
music—new sonatas and suites and concertos. And many outsid-
ers listen and appreciate.
Because the world in which we live grows ever more compli-

cated, the syntheses individual philosophers accomplish are likely
to be smaller than those attempted by the historical figures who
excite our admiration and who reward our rereading (for all their
relative lack of analytic training!). Future philosophy may, how-
ever, take advantage of an opportunity to imitate other areas of
investigation, in which progress is promoted through a division of
labor. Perhaps, in the future, teams of philosophers will collabo-
rate on synthetic work in adjacent areas, striving collectively for an
overall perspective sufficiently broad to match some of the efforts
of our philosophical predecessors. Even if that occurs, I hope
there will always be room for individual voices—for, as we shall
see, philosophical progress depends on the richness of the varied
proposals the philosophical community offers.
Synthetic philosophy hopes to revive the past embedding of
ideas in human lives. Before philosophy was thoroughly profes-
sionalized, the writings of figures like Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer,
Mill, Marx, and Nietzsche were devoured by large numbers of
people who didn’t think of themselves as philosophers. Those peo-
ple were hungry. They had a genuine need for systematic thinking.
If people trained in philosophy don’t do it, it may be done partially
and implicitly—often helpfully—by artists and scholars in other
fields. Cavell and those he has inspired have done valuable work
in serving as “liaison officers” between literary works (and movies
and pieces of music) and philosophy’s often underfed audiences.
Unfortunately, the appetites of those audiences are sometimes
sated by writers who have neither the skills of the artist in evoking
a philosophical perspective, nor the analytic training to present it
explicitly, by writing with precision and clarity. The professionals
are correct to view some grand synthetic efforts as amateurish and

grandiose. Where they err is in supposing that any attempt to
respond to public hunger should be automatically dismissed.
You don’t need to believe in a comprehensive world-formula,
some philosophical analog of Newton’s dream for a fully unified
science, to take up the synthetic venture. You need simply to rec-
ognize the wisdom expressed by Margaret Wilcox, the protago-
nist of E. M. Forster’s Howards End: Only connect.
***
My discussion so far has definitely not supplied an account of

synthetic philosophy sufficient to enable readers to classify any
possible instance of philosophical writing. I hope, however, it has
been clear enough to enable people attracted to this kind of work
to envisage how they might undertake it. Perhaps, though, they
might be aided by a brief account of how one of my own attempts
at this genre originated and was developed.
Provoked by Dewey’s heterodox suggestion that philosophy
was centrally concerned with education, I began, some years ago,
to read in this (often-despised) area of philosophy. I quickly dis-
covered the contempt often directed toward the field to be entirely
undeserved. During the past decades, a number of philosophers
have done work on education that is both of high intellectual
quality and socially relevant. Nonetheless, I found myself rais-
ing questions about the correctness of the assumptions normally
framing discussions of education. A newcomer to the field, as
I was, encounters any number of proposals about what education
ought to do and how the proper purposes should be achieved.
Those proposals are typically made specific by supposing certain

kinds of institutions—schools, universities, a fixed period during
which education begins and ends—to be parts of the framework,
within which the details are to be worked out. Turning to the
history of education, I was struck by the accidents that develop
those institutions in particular ways: the emphasis on good citi-
zenship spurred by events that bring home the need for solidar-
ity and community, the increased focus on science when it seems
that a rival nation achieves a technological breakthrough (as in
the launching of Sputnik). Moreover, the institutions themselves
were once founded to serve very different functions from the ones
people currently endorse: schools were originally inspired by the
need to have scribes; higher education as a set of general studies
entered universities that had previously been devoted to one of the
professions—medicine, law, and theology—only as a necessary
preliminary for candidates who were poorly prepared.
The classic philosophical writings on education, those of Plato
and Rousseau and Mill, for example, provoked a question: How
on earth can anyone expect to instill all the knowledge, skills, and
character traits the philosophers want young adults to acquire?
Conceiving the issue from the viewpoint of the individual, gen-
erations of philosophers have found all kinds of plausible ideals for
the well-educated person, and they have proposed curricula to suit
the goals they take to be most crucial. In some philosophical writ-
ings, appreciation for the attractions of many ideals is expressed
in the problem of overload. So many desiderata, so much to learn!
Hence, on occasion, the curriculum becomes so vast as to appear
ludicrous—nobody, it seems, could manage to absorb it all without
a decades-long commitment. In practice, of course, representatives
of the state decide on a selection. There is, then, a shift from think-
ing of what would be good for the individual pupil to considering
what the state most needs. In the modern world this is keyed to
the interest in economic and technological success. Reflections on
how to shape good citizens, or to prepare people to live fulfilling
lives, take second place—if they come in at all. As talented histori-
ans have shown (Graham 2005), American education (and educa-
tion in other affluent democracies) has tended to lurch from one
set of central purposes to another, driven by the perceived needs of
a society at various times. The emphasis on the imperative to out-
produce and outcompete rival nations is simply the latest chapter
in this disjointed story.
Parents all over the world hope the schools their children
attend will help them develop, to be the best they can be. How
those parents think about what is best is inevitably shaped by a
large variety of factors, some drawn from the dominant culture
(“Our daughter needs to learn how to support herself ”), some
from their own relation to other institutions (“It’s important
that she keeps her faith and forms a firm moral compass”), some
from their sense of what has been important (or lost) in their own
lives (“I would hate her to lose her freedom and spontaneity”),
some from their social and political commitments (“She needs to
understand the importance of community and serving the com-
munity”). They, too, are overloaded, wanting many things for
their kids, and not seeing clearly how to come to a manageable
selection.
These, then, were some of my phenomena. Chaotic and con-
fused. My task was to bring them to order. Not just for myself.
I was convinced that perplexities about what counts as good
education were widely shared. And in that, if in nothing else,

I quickly found out that I was correct.
An invitation to give a series of three lectures inspired me to
draft some preliminary thoughts on these topics. I offered an
overview of what I took to be the central predicament (the prob-
lem of overload), presented ideas about education for democratic
citizenship, and considered the role of the sciences and the arts in
education. My audience surely had a small minority of philoso-
phers (the lectures were “in the Humanities”), possibly a major-
ity of students and faculty, but it also contained a significant
number of people from outside the academy. The discussion con-
vinced me of two things: first that I had touched a nerve—many
people were interested in these questions (however skeptical they
were about my answers); secondly that I had a considerable way
to go. Three and a bit years later, my attempts to respond to the
many points my audience raised has appeared as a longish book
(Kitcher 2021b).
My aim in these paragraphs isn’t to advertise, but to use my
own experience to make more vivid how an enterprise in synthetic
philosophy might take root and grow. In this case, the starting
point is an accident. A surprising sentence of Dewey’s inspired
me to look at a facet of human life of which I had direct experi-
ence (my own schooling), vicarious experience (the education of
my children), and on which I had sometimes engaged in confused
reflections. I supposed, from the beginning, that education is
important in the lives of many people, and that my own uncer-
tainties and perplexities would be widely shared—judgments that
were later confirmed. So I attempted a synthetic project, rounding
up phenomena from various sources, and trying to make sense of
the whole. Bringing some order to the chaos under my own hat
and offering the result to others.
One feature of this example may suggest good places in which
to look for the starting points from which synthetic philosophy
can grow. Our lives are wholes, but we live them in and across
many domains: we work and we play, we teach and are educated,
we earn money and we spend it, we play sports and we pursue
other hobbies, we participate in political life and we worship (or
turn our backs on religion), we form friendships and (sometimes)
provoke enmity, we fall in love. The domains are inhabited by
conventions, norms, rules, roles, and institutions. Each individual
domain may make what is, by its own lights, progress: the church
may be renewed, the economic system may become more efficient,
love may be deepened and enriched, or the recognition of loving
relations may be broadened.
Yet it is possible, it seems, that progress in some domains may
inhibit the progressive development of others. There can be insti-
tutional friction. That occurs when a change occurring in one set
of institutions counts, according to the standards reigning in that
domain as an advance, but also imposes checks on the progress
of another domain. The apparently progressive domain constrains
its neighbor, preventing advances or, worse, even causing regress.
That occurs in the example I have given. Economic life constrains
practices of education. The priority given to the goal of self-
maintenance (“getting a good job”) crowds out other educational
values—finding a satisfying identity, preparation for a fulfilling
life, becoming a good citizen—because the apparent streamlining
of economic arrangements demands more time for the develop-
ment of work-related skills, at cost to less “practical” studies.
It would be foolish to suppose the only source of widespread

perplexity to be those points at which institutional friction occurs.
For the aspiring synthetic philosopher, however, I suggest these as
good places to look.
***
My attempt to characterize synthetic philosophy intentionally

falls short of complete clarity. Those who demand a criterion
enabling them to occupy the judgment seat and divide all works
of philosophy into two classes, the significant sheep and the game-
playing goats, will be doomed to disappointment. The more seri-
ous charge is that I have not said enough to settle live doubts about
particular projects concerned philosophers have undertaken or
are considering for themselves. Are the concepts I have introduced
too vague and indefinite to enable the self-examination I have
urged on the profession of philosophy?
It would be contrary to the spirit of this book for me to
legislate—nobody should claim the throne, canonizing some and
dismissing others to perdition. The notions of synthetic philoso-
phy, of contributions to inquiry (broadly construed), of philoso-
phy that bears on the issues of the day, together with the resulting
distinction between “those disputes that collapse into insignifi-
cance” and those that are genuinely worthwhile, have been char-
acterized discursively and illustrated by example. I have rounded
up some phenomena, labeling them either as instances of a con-
cept or as cases to which it does not apply. Those provide tools
for self-questioning. Reflective philosophers may want to discard
some of them and apply others. The decision about what is, and
what is not, worth pursuing should not be forced upon them from
an external standpoint. Each of us ought to look at our lives from
a number of angles, comparing what we conceive of doing with
the “experiments of living” pursued by others, and considering
whether the pattern of similarities and differences corresponds to
our own sense of spending our existence wisely. In a world where
it is all too easy for highly talented people to adopt the conven-
tions of a profession with obvious attractions, what is crucial is to
undermine complacency, to suggest angles from which everyday
practices look less obviously important, and to initiate a process
of self-interrogation. I hope I have said enough to start that—
philosophical—trial and to provide some resources for conducting
it appropriately. The eventual verdict, however, must be your own.
***
Like the philosophers whose synthetic work I commended earlier,

I have been trying to employ modus Cartwright. As you may have
observed, in my overly brief accounts of their enterprises one of
my paradigms was absent—the philosopher whose name I have
attached to that style of argument. In fact, Nancy Cartwright
is doubly exemplary for my purposes in this book. For her work
divides into two main genres. Writing generally about science,
she offers a new perspective on how we should think about the
scientific enterprise. Parts of that perspective have become widely
accepted, not only through her writings but because of contribu-
tions by other members of the “Stanford school” (notably John
Dupré). Here she is doing synthetic philosophy with respect to a
specific domain, the area we think of as scientific practice. At other
times, her studies are directed toward the ways in which particular
pieces of science are used in developing policies with social impact.
That part of her work falls under the so-called peripheral ventures
I praised in the first chapter. Some of the time, then, she is doing
synthetic philosophy, and at other times she is using (“applying”?)
philosophy to make a direct contribution to specific (and urgent)
social problems.
Which of these genres is more important? I find the question
impossible to answer. What criterion would we appeal to in rat-
ing one kind as more important—more “central to philosophy”
than the other? Nor do I believe in a sharp distinction between
them. For, if the synthesis is relatively small-scale and the social
problem relatively broad, either label may be appropriate. The
boundary between “two genres” becomes indecipherable. An
exploration of the potential ethical losses faced by people who
aspire to a very different kind of life than the ones common in the
communities into which they are born (the “strivers” as Jennifer
Morton calls them in an insightful recent book) can be viewed
either as addressed to a single social problem or as presenting
a synthetic perspective on a class of issues highly significant to
anyone whose chosen plan of life involves a disruption of com-
munity. The label attached to studies like this is unimportant. If
they are pursued with the care and sensitivity of Morton (2020),
their value is evident.
So, although I have used a ladder to climb, I now want to kick
it away. My articulation of James’s conception of “the whole func-
tion of philosophy” was an attempt to embrace an insight of critics
of my earlier efforts to offer a pragmatist account of philosophy.
They saw me, rightly, as missing something. They called it core

philosophy, and I went along with that language. It was a conve-
nience for starting a debate about what the core might contain.
Champions of today’s professionalized philosophy will think of it
as containing some selection from analytic metaphysics, analytic
epistemology, analytic philosophy of mind, and analytic philoso-
phy of language. I have proposed to empty the core of those ven-
tures and fill it with different things: the search for methods of
inquiry in various first-order fields of investigation, and synthetic
philosophy, probably on smaller scales than in earlier historical
periods. That proposal is now conjoined with my earlier endorse-
ment of philosophical attempts to respond to urgent problems.
Does that make a piebald core and a monochrome periphery? Do
I still want to turn philosophy inside out?
These are silly questions, artifacts of a linguistic decision, one
useful for focusing my response to an important critical insight.
Having reached a tripartite explanation of philosophical value,
we no longer need a core-periphery distinction. Instead, there are
three kinds of valuable philosophy: the Deweyan methodological
project, synthetic philosophy, and philosophical attempts to help
with urgent problems. Maybe some more—I cannot reasonably
claim completeness. But any additions should make some differ-
ence to the lives of some significant number of people, somehow,
somewhere, and somewhen. The professionals’ core is unlikely,
I think, to meet that test.
So a provisional answer to the question posed in the title of this
book. Philosophy has its uses. Important uses. Three of them. To
help resolve the problems and debates of the age; to offer tools for
various branches of inquiry; and to provide perspectives, synthetic

responses to the chaos under people’s hair (if not their hats).
***
But what exactly does it give to the intellectual and social worlds?
I want to close by trying for a little further clarity and precision.
We can make some progress on this issue by reflecting on a recent
debate, centered on the question of philosophy’s progress.
This is, I believe, typically couched in the wrong terms.
Philosophy is taken to strive for theories, and the theories are
intended to be true. But philosophers always disagree, and the dis-
agreements persist—indeed, they are so long-lasting, and so much
ingenuity is displayed in conducting them, that it would be folly
to hail any philosophical theory as true. Hence pessimism: there
is no progress in philosophy.
For some people, including powerful outsiders (perhaps a
Provost or Dean, keen on translational research and impatient
with the interminable debates endemic to supposedly important
disciplines), there’s a corollary. In hard budgetary times, you can
cut, or even abolish, the philosophy department. Why invest in
researchers who never offer any new knowledge? My answer is
straightforward: because, working in the interstices of the fields
of first-order inquiry, philosophy helps all those fields and helps
humanity to take full advantage of their epistemic achievements.
It does so by offering cognitive resources—not theories of every-
thing (or, indeed, anything) but concepts, questions, suggestive
arguments, and analogies. Those are useful in individual delibera-
tions as people try to come to terms with the particular muddles
that lie under their hats, in collective deliberations as we engage

with one another in trying to work through the ethical, social,
and political issues of our times, in the pursuit of all those impor-
tant styles of investigation (including the ones my tough-minded
administrator favors most). To adapt a phrase from James, the
trail of the philosophical serpent is over it all.
Of course, ventures in synthetic philosophy are often full of
propositions—or, better, proposals. Does the value of the syn-
thesis turn on whether they are correct? Surely not. Philosophy
changes the way people think, the way they see the world, by
accomplishing a change of perspective. Experience is con-
ceptualized differently. New possibilities come into view.
Connections are made between aspects of life that were once
“loose and separate.” The audience is invited to pursue a certain
line of reasoning. Questions emerge that had not been posed
before. The proposals are best seen as signposts, pointing to
changes of Gestalt.
Why do we continue to read the great philosophers of the
past? Not, I suggest, because we take them to have offered a true
theory, but because of the other things they provide. The argu-
ment of the Euthyphro (and Kant’s deepening of it) is relevant to
contemporary discussions of moral questions that confront us; the
Aristotelian ideal of friendship helps us to pose questions about
relationships on the internet; the concepts of “the state of nature”
and “the social contract” are alive in our political discussions;
so, too, are Mill’s conception of liberalism and Rawls’s notion of
the original position; the retrospective test for the value of a life,
posed by Schopenhauer and elaborated by Nietzsche, is one con-
sideration thoughtful people employ in trying to figure out what
kind of person they should be; talk of paradigms is everywhere

(even though Kuhn wanted to take back the word).
One of the great insights behind Kuhn’s seminal monograph,
one appreciated by the many practicing scientists who have read
it with pleasure, is its recognition of the multidimensionality of
scientific practice. The science of a time is not adequately charac-
terized as a collection of propositions. As Kuhn saw, and as many
philosophers of science have argued since, it is distinguished by its
concepts, its questions, its standards, its methodological rules, its
preferred modes of reasoning, its tools and techniques—as well as
the answers it gives to the questions it has picked out as significant.
We ought to think of other areas of life as Kuhn invited us to
think about the sciences. Individuals and communities engage in
multidimensional practices in their work and their play, in their
friendships and enmities, in their politics and their religions, in
their educations and their lawmaking. They adopt a certain lan-
guage, commend various forms of action, endorse certain kinds
of reasoning, and are motivated by some analogies and not others.
All of that is subject to change. Philosophy can prompt and lead
the change, not by delivering new accepted truths, but at a more
fundamental level.
We should think of philosophy as guiding human practices
through its achievements in introducing concepts, proposing
lines of reasoning, suggesting standards and rules, posing ques-
tions, offering striking comparisons, opening up possibilities, and
so on. From that perspective, the enduring fascination of texts
written centuries, or millennia, ago becomes readily comprehen-
sible. When, as it happens, a philosopher puts forward a proposi-
tion widely accepted as true, it is likely to become someone else’s
property, taken over by scientists or mathematicians or political

theorists or medical ethicists. Those people develop it further,
and, after a while, the philosophical origins are forgotten.
The progress of philosophy doesn’t stand or fall according to
whether the would-be synthesizer arrives at a true overarching
theory. The crucial question is different: Do the efforts at synthesis
generate resources that prove useful, whether for some systematic
field of inquiry, or for collective efforts to resolve difficult ques-
tions, or for people’s attempts to make sense of their lives? I see
the long history of Western philosophy as providing a resound-
ingly positive answer to this question. A century’s worth of work
in which Anglophone philosophers have largely turned away from
synthetic ambitions makes that answer far less convincing today.
Indeed, the unconvinced are everywhere—as with my Thatcherite
administrator whose hatchet reforms the university.
Skepticism about the value of philosophy is not only damaging
when research universities trim their philosophy faculty. It is just
as bad, maybe worse, when philosophy declines or vanishes from
any educational setting—when community college students don’t
have access to philosophy courses, when there is no longer a major
at the liberal arts college, when high schools think of the philoso-
phy club as dispensable, when programs to bring philosophy into
the prisons or into the lives of ex-prisoners are no longer encour-
aged. For, as those things disappear, large groups of people lose
the opportunity, not only to think more clearly but also to reflect
upon and challenge their inherited ways of viewing the world. The
philosophical milieu in which I grew up passed on a narrow view
of philosophical success. I want to celebrate all those who have
done very much what James commended, the teachers at all levels
who have trained people to use philosophical tools in tidying up

the chaos of what they carry about under their hats. In doing so,
they have helped fulfill “the whole function of philosophy.” I’m
not sure I can say as much.
***
I’ve pointed to a pragmatic argument for contemporary philoso-

phers to show how they can contribute something more than clever
solutions to puzzles of interest only to a privileged coterie. In hard
times, administrators will ponder the value of paying people to
continue what they see as an ingrown conversation. The line of
thought I’ve developed from James and Dewey offers a more phil-
osophical, albeit pragmatist, alternative: We should see our lives
as making a positive difference to a project larger than ourselves,
and so renew the grand—synthetic—tradition of Western phi-
losophy. Thus it is appropriate for us to reflect periodically on the
worth of the work we are doing, on whether it makes a difference,
and, if so, how. In Chapter 1, I tried to assess the current state of
Anglophone philosophy, by focusing on direct connections with
particular domains of inquiry or on urgent social issues. That is
one way for philosophers to make differences, but it is not the only
one. As I have suggested in this chapter, James’s apparently strange
talk of “world-formulas” can be elaborated, with a little help from
Dewey, to identify a different species of linkage, one to whose
value the history of our discipline proudly testifies.
It should go without saying that my conclusions should be
debated, possibly revised, or even discarded entirely. More than
half a century ago, I left mathematics because I didn’t want to
devote my life to solving intricate problems. I entered philoso-

phy sideways, and that may have distorted my vision. Even so,
as the history of philosophy reveals so clearly, sometimes a pro-
vocative falsehood stimulates fruitful discussions and leads to
increased self-awareness. It can be a stepping-stone to greater
self-understanding and to the fashioning of helpful cognitive
resources.
In our best moments, when we reflect upon our lives, most of
us want to make a positive difference to the world into which we
have come and which we shall ultimately leave. We hope that what
we have done with our lives will have left it better than we have
found it, albeit almost certainly in tiny ways. Mill concluded his
Inaugural Address as rector of St Andrews University, by exhort-
ing each of the (male) undergraduates who had elected him “to
leave his fellow creatures some little better for the use he has
known how to make of his intellect.” Dewey rarely rises to the sty-
listic elegance of Mill’s prose, but, toward the end of A Common
Faith, he offers an eloquent elaboration of Mill’s exhortation.
We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends into

the remote past, a humanity that has interacted with nature.
The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves.
They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the con-
tinuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is
the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and
expanding the heritage of values we have received that those
who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more
widely accessible and more generously shared than we have
received it. (Dewey 1934/1986, 57–58)
Each of us is part of a multigenerational project, from which we

borrow and to which we contribute. Even the most professional
of professional Anglophone philosophers intends to advance the
project. I have tried to make some proposals about how a philo-
sophical career might do that.
Try thinking about a life devoted to philosophy this way.
5 L E T TE R TO SO M E
YO U N G P H I LO SO P H E R S
I am extremely grateful to you for your questions and comments

on two of the lectures from which my discussions here have
been drawn. One of you asked the first question after I presented
a version of Chapter 2 in 2017 at the meeting of the European
Society for Philosophy of Science. Others have raised further
questions after hearing (via Zoom) the John Dewey Lecture
I delivered at the meeting of the Eastern Division of the American
Philosophical Association in January 2021, either in the discus-
sion following the lecture or in emails to me. A common theme
runs through your queries and your comments: How can people
at early stages of their careers take the risk of flouting the accepted
standards of the profession they hope to join? As I said to that ini-
tial questioner, it’s an important issue, and it deserves a full discus-
sion. Although, in the past, I have tried to give answers, I’m sadly
conscious of their inadequacy. Here, I shall try to do a bit better.
Apparently, some of the things I have said have resonated with
you. You are sympathetic to a project for renewing philosophy.
You, too, have felt dissatisfied with the game playing that often
appears to be the be-all and end-all of professional philosophical
2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197657249.003.0005
lives. You do not wish to spend your own careers in this way. You
would like to contribute to a broader philosophical project, one
akin to what the past philosophers you admire most have pursued.
You would like your work to have an impact on people’s lives,
beyond the philosophy profession and beyond the academy. Like
me, you regret the dominant mood of judging such aspirations to
be somehow second-rate, inferior to the supposedly important
work that wins acceptance from “the top journals.”
But you are young. Your careers are just beginning. You have
no job security. Even if you are in a tenure-track position, you
know that your chances of obtaining permanent employment will
depend on assessments of your published work, perhaps of your
work-in-progress, and that, at some stage of the process, your con-
tributions will be assessed by people who adopt the dominant pro-
fessional attitude. Although your colleagues may be sympathetic
to the kind of philosophy you would like to write, it is highly
likely that some of the external letters they solicit will be more
dismissive. And, of course, your current post may be temporary, a
postdoctoral fellowship, or a one-year “replacement” position. You
may be scurrying from institution to institution as an underpaid
adjunct. You may be struggling with a heavy teaching load, one
those whose work enjoys high prestige would find intolerable. You
may not even have a job at all.
So, you ask, what are you to do? You judge that, if you do not
play by the rules, your prospects of continuing in philosophy are
far from bright. Hence, however appealing you may find my call
for reform, you see it as an invitation to gamble at unfavorable
odds, where the loss would involve forfeiting the opportunities
for which you have spent years of hard work preparing. It would
L etter to S ome Young P hilosophers 157
be difficult to dispute your judgment. Also not to appreciate your

tact. You have been too polite to point out that the invitation is
issued by somebody who has retired, after decades of full job secu-
rity, somebody who has nothing to lose.
Surely, then, I owe you a reply.
Before I take up your questions, a prefatory note seems in
order. A few words of confession and apology. Although begin-
ning a career in philosophy has never been easy (at least during the
past half-century), I know the difficulties you experience today are
more severe than at any time in the recent past. Jobs are scarce and
the number of disappointed candidates seems to grow from year
to year. I am also sure that there may be challenges of the current
situation whose intensity I do not appreciate. Please forgive me if
there are places in what follows where what I say seems tone-deaf.
I hope those passages won’t occur too frequently. For my own
career began in an unpromising fashion, with its own difficul-
ties, and I am conscious of how its subsequent trajectory has been
largely shaped by luck. Just over fifty years ago, I arrived at gradu-
ate school in Princeton, with virtually no philosophical training.
Fortunately, although I was dismally unprepared for philosophy
as Princeton then conceived it, a few people recognized some
sparks of something and devoted themselves to knocking me into
shape. My mentors were astute enough to view their crash course
as incomplete and to steer me in the direction of an unfashion-
able dissertation topic, one they rightly perceived as suited to my
background: I was to write on the historical search for a founda-
tion for mathematics. Their advice has proven valuable, in ways
nobody could have predicted at the time, in steering me to my
own approach to philosophical questions. An approach totally
unforeseen when I emerged from graduate school with an odd,

but passable, dissertation.
The largest piece of luck entered my life with the arrival, in
my second year of graduate education, of a young woman, then
known as Patricia Williams. We have now been married a long
time, both of us pursuing careers in philosophy. From the start,
we were determined to avoid the “commuting marriages” we saw
as undermining the unions of many academics. When I told my
advisor of our resolution, he estimated the chances of our success,
not by multiplying the independent probabilities of each of us
finding a job, but as diminishing according to some nasty expo-
nential decay function. That assessment was entirely rational. In
those days, some colleges and universities had policies against hir-
ing married couples in the same department. As, in a job interview,
Pat was told by a member of a department that, some years later,
appointed us both. In a moment when the prospects of working
together appeared particularly bleak, black humor prompted us
to canvass alternatives. Should we open a restaurant: Kitcher and
Kitcher Kurry with a ‘K’? (In those days, South Asian restaurants
were relatively rare in the United States—and I was enjoying
learning to cook what I then took to be Indian food.)
Most aspects of professional life in philosophy have become
considerably worse in the decades since then. The opportunity for
joint appointments isn’t one of them. Prospects for married phi-
losophers who hope to live in the same place are better than they
were. Better, but far from perfect. I have been told that graduate
students who live together and aim to find jobs in the same depart-
ment have been warned “not to look at the Kitchers”—that’s just
“dumb luck.”
We are saddened by the continued problems many philosophi-

cal couples still face. We had hoped that, by now, universities
would have become more sympathetic to their predicaments and
more imaginative in responding to them. Good fortune is still
needed, and work remains to be done. Our own lives have cer-
tainly benefited from large doses of dumb luck.
So, if my replies to your questions sometimes appear to miss
the deeper point, I hope you will excuse me. With some under-
standing of “where I am coming from.”
I am not qualified to offer you advice, but, having observed
people following various courses that might serve as options for
you, I feel more confident presenting four models and reviewing
their potential and their disadvantages. A small catalog of what
Mill might have called “experiments of philosophizing.” Although
each possibility has been pursued by some people I know, people
who have been satisfied with that specific choice, many of you,
maybe most of you, are likely to find all of them inadequate, or,
in the case of the last, unavailable to you. At the very least, then,
more steps need to be taken to address your entirely justifiable
aspirations. Senior members of the profession who sympathize
with those hopes have a responsibility to consider the possibility
of collective efforts in going forward, and I shall conclude with
some tentative proposals.
My account in the preceding chapters concentrates on one part
of a life in philosophy. I’ve been concerned with philosophical
research, with the development of philosophy through the pub-
lication of books and articles, and the presentation of lectures to
colleagues. But virtually no philosopher spends the entire work-
ing day in reading, writing, and talking to peers (at least, not
before retirement). Almost every one of us teaches philosophy,

bringing philosophical ideas and debates to people who, for the
most part, never aspire to make their living in philosophy. That
part of our job should not be viewed as a chore, something we’re
required to do in order to think through the issues that fascinate
us. It is important, ought to be a vital part of a philosophical life,
and should be informed by, and feed into, whatever creative philo-
sophical work we do. Two of the options I shall consider empha-
size this aspect of a philosophical career. Let’s pause for a bit, then,
and examine how the role of a philosophical teacher is developing
and how it might help satisfy some of what you aspire to do.
If you follow James in thinking of philosophy as helping to sort
out the chaos in people’s conceptions of themselves and their lives,
then the philosophy classroom is an obvious site at which this work
can be accomplished. Drawing on all sorts of traditions, including
the analytic philosophy of the last hundred years or so, teachers
can provide their listeners with many tools for thinking more
clearly, for conceptualizing the issues most important to them, for
reshaping their tentative identities. The healthy impulses behind
the pathologies can be cultivated, without prompting those who
acquire them to indulge in the hypertrophied forms found among
the professionals. Those you teach will go on to apply the skills in
critical thinking you have instilled in them, in their careers and in
their personal decisions. Their lives will go better for your instruc-
tion, and, perhaps, from time to time, they will recognize that and
think of you with gratitude. Most of your audience leaves before
addiction to any fetish starts.
Philosophers of my generation tend to think of this valuable
instruction too narrowly. Your contemporaries are sometimes
more imaginative. Several years ago, a few Columbia graduate

students in philosophy combined with some of their peers at
Teachers College, to begin a program of bringing philosophy into
high schools. That enterprise has been enormously successful in
helping young people, especially in places where the previous edu-
cational opportunities were slim. A later generation of graduate
students has extended the venture to help people on parole (in the
award-winning program Rethink). Some of my former colleagues
have initiated further efforts, bringing philosophy to people in
prison. Similar programs have been developed at other universi-
ties and have been equally fruitful. One of my great regrets is that
this kind of work didn’t emerge earlier, and that I haven’t contrib-
uted to it.
Hence, I’ve talked about the philosophy teacher’s “listeners” or
“audience”—not necessarily to be centered on the paradigm of the
undergraduate at an elite university or liberal arts college. Indeed,
the primary places at which chaos begins to be reorganized may
well be the community college, or the extension program, or the
night classes, or the seminar for parolees, or the high school phi-
losophy club, or the weekly prison discussion.
Teaching at these venues is typically under-respected and
almost always underpaid (sometimes, even, unpaid). People
engage in it because it enables them to identify, very clearly, the
contributions they are making to the lives of others. Anyone who
views lives as fulfilled when they make positive differences, small
but by no means insignificant, to the multigenerational human
project should celebrate these roles.
Option one for you is to put on that mantle and wear it
proudly. Two former graduate students with whom I worked, one
who completed a PhD, one who did not, decided on this as the
best choice for them. Both were dedicated to philosophy—and
equally dedicated to teaching precollege students. Finding them-
selves in a professional environment hostile to their own visions of
what philosophy should do, they resolved not to force themselves
into the molds expected of them but to teach under a regime in
which their future writing would not be a factor in advancing,
retarding, or ending their careers. They have retained the part of
philosophical practice they love; they teach and enlighten young
people, some of whom will go on to colleges and universities. In
their spare time, these two devoted teachers can write the kinds of
philosophy they value.
Would that satisfy you? Perhaps not. For you may reasonably
fear that, without continued interactions with colleagues and
with more advanced students, your own teaching would become
more mechanical and less effective. Contrary to a popular stereo-
type, teaching and research are by no means incompatible. To be
sure, there are only so many hours in a working day, and, when the
preparation for teaching is more demanding and the time in the
classroom increases, the period set aside for research is squeezed.
Moreover, many of you are at a stage in your lives when you expe-
rience not only the career challenges—writing articles that will
establish you as a researcher, learning how best to communicate
with your students—but also the demands and responsibilities
(and joys!) of raising children. Although creative thinking about
philosophical issues usually refreshes and enlivens teaching, just as
teaching often opens up new questions for philosophical research,
your days may be too loaded with other activities to allow very
much of either form of synergy.
That is a serious loss. For, if you are lucky enough to have time
for exploration, your teaching can even open up a new field, one
to which you may devote years. I had that good fortune. Almost
at the beginning of my teaching career, a student at the University
of Vermont changed the direction of my writing. Somewhat dif-
fidently, he came to see me in office hours, to tell me that the
students in my philosophy of science class were, like him, mostly
premeds, and that they would appreciate some examples from
biology. I was too ashamed to confess that I was utterly ignorant
about this area of science, but his plea did prod me to visit the
library, where I discovered David Hull’s recently published intro-
ductory volume (Hull 1974—probably the most important text
in inspiring the development of philosophy of biology). I started
reading and was hooked. It led me to a program of wide reading
in biology, to many long sessions with biologist colleagues, to a
sabbatical at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and to
writing a number of books and articles in this area of philosophy.
A very few people spend a lifetime as wonderful teachers
of philosophy, without writing very much at all. Another small
minority are prolific authors, although they never teach. For most,
however, there is a useful interaction between the two parts of a
philosophical career. You may well conclude that, without tak-
ing on both roles, you would not succeed in the one to which you
devoted all your time.
Option two attempts to respond to that concern. Instead of
abandoning research, you live a divided professional life. You rec-
ognize that, to teach philosophy at the level that satisfies you, in
the way that you take to be most helpful to your students (and,
possibly, to other audiences), you need an academic license. To
buy and renew that license, you have to pay in the currency the
profession demands. So, periodically, you will have to publish an
article or two, to show you are still a card-carrying member of the
professional philosophers’ club. You don’t like the genre, but you
know how to play the game. You resolve to do that throughout
your academic life.
You wonder, of course, if you can keep it up. Will the times
at which you find paying your dues frustrating, unpleasant, even
sickening, come to be frequent enough to provoke you to chuck
it all in? Even if you are confident about your strength of will,
you are still likely to feel unsatisfied. You probably want to con-
tribute not only to the lives of those whom you teach but also to
the advance of philosophy. Realistically, none of us can expect to
do very much in this way—the changes most philosophical writ-
ing can inspire are small—but you want to try to leave your own
mark. You care about philosophy. You would like to show how to
think philosophically about a live social issue or to craft some par-
tial synthesis. The hoops you must jump through to maintain your
credentials detract from your ability to do the kind of research you
passionately want to pursue. They take considerable time. And
they sap your energy. Perhaps you also regard your professional
writings as a kind of pretense, and your hours spent on them as
exercises in mauvaise foi.
The research pressures of the world you inhabit are consider-
ably more intense than those I experienced when I was starting
out. During the course of your graduate training, you may have
been advised by well-meaning mentors to send off a paper to a jour-
nal. If you heeded the advice, you have probably already felt the
keen sting of disappointment that comes from rejection, whether
it arrived in the wake of a curt form letter, or was provoked by

lengthy reports, parts of which you found uncomprehending and
other sections that appeared gratuitously snide. Sometimes, of
course, even negative referees can be generous and constructive.
Even so, almost every philosopher, no matter how high the reputa-
tion, goes through this kind of “blooding.” And it proves painful.
You may well wonder whether your skin is thick enough to
enable you to compete in a contest in which some of your rivals,
especially those who succeed early and often, appear completely
attuned to the conventions of the profession, already adepts at
“core philosophy” with impressive publications in “top journals.”
In the race for jobs, run each year with, it seems, a diminishing
stock of prizes, they are a lap or two ahead.
Option two does work for some people. Some contemporary
philosophers (including some I have referred to in the previous
chapters) can wear different hats at different times, enabling them
to combine satisfying teaching with two kinds of research, the
dues-paying variety and the species they really want to do. But,
I suspect, you find this option, too, unsatisfactory.
It has an obvious relative, toward which I have gestured in
some of my previous attempts to address the issues you raise. Hold
your nose and play by the rules. Do what the profession expects of
you until you have a secure position. Then you can begin to write
the kinds of philosophy you view as genuinely important. Your
career will divide into two periods: an apprenticeship in which
you must meet standards set by others, and an independent life
when you become your own boss.
This version is, I think, superior to its predecessors. A few years
of bowing to standards whose worth you question isn’t too much
of a burden. It is, after all, one borne by many laboratory scientists,

who have to spend lengthy postdocs working on someone else’s
projects. (Although, it must be recognized, as the time demanded
before job security is granted increases, the biological clock ticks
ever more loudly for women who hope to begin a family.) For those
who can reconcile them with their other aspirations, apprentice-
ships are typically valuable. They develop technique—as with
musicians who undergo rigorous training, playing études before
they perform the masterpieces of the repertoire. You could regard
the professionally approved articles you publish before earning
job security as an opportunity to sharpen the tools you will then
deploy in your “proper work.”
Nevertheless, you might reasonably wonder how the colleagues
who have vigorously supported your early career, offering com-
ments on drafts of your journal papers, perhaps even testifying to
those with the authority to make your position permanent, will
react when the early spate of publications in “core philosophy”
dries up, and you start to dabble in more “peripheral” matters.
Will you become an exile, labeled as dead wood? Will their dis-
satisfactions be expressed in attempts to impose a heavy teaching
load—“After all, your ‘research’ isn’t doing anything to help our
department”? Will some higher administrator listen to pleas to
transfer you to some other unit (not of your own choosing)? Even
if none of these measures succeeds, will the lack of local apprecia-
tion come to weigh on you?
I suspect you want not simply a job and a salary, but some kind
of recognition, some confirmation that you, too, are contributing
to intellectual life and to the mission of the university. It is pos-
sible that you may find colleagues in other departments. You may
find your niche in a Humanities program. Perhaps you may come

to be seen by other Humanities faculty as “the philosopher we can
talk to.”
You can increase your chances of a comfortable academic life
by mixing some features of the second option into the approach
of the third. Why must the switch from Orthodox Professional
Philosopher to Doing Real Philosophy (your version), or to
Dilettantish Popularizer (one of the labels your colleagues might
use), be so dramatic? Perhaps, while your employment is still not
secure, you might accompany your respectable articles with a
piece of writing in the vein you intend to mine later? And, even
after you are launched on your excavations, you might come back
to the surface from time to time, to show that you can still chop
logic with the best of them? One way to live happily ever after is
a hybrid option (I’ll consider it as a subcategory of option three).
You engage in a significant amount of interdisciplinary writing
and teaching, working with colleagues in other departments, in
the Humanities in particular. You continue to publish in “main-
stream” journals, albeit at a slower rate (not letting your profes-
sional philosophical friends know that you see this as a “leisure
activity,” something you take up when a currently fashionable
game strikes your fancy). More and more, your time is taken up
with your main work, and you write to make the kind of impact
William James, John Dewey, and I want philosophy once again to
have. Even if your colleagues lament the decreased productivity
from your earlier years, you still wear the mask of respectability—
and, they may concede, all your cross-departmental connections
mark you out as an excellent university citizen, one whose broader
reputation is even helpful to the philosophy department.
Yet any attempt to conform to the norms currently govern-

ing our profession, while also trying to make space for synthetic
philosophy, faces a difficulty I have not so far mentioned. You are
probably well aware of it. The problem consists in finding time
(and energy) to engage in two distinct kinds of reading. Many of
those who succeed in placing their submissions in the pages of
“the top journals” seem to read very little except “the latest litera-
ture on the topic” of their article. What they write is impressively
scholarly, studded with references to the previous contributions of
the coterie to which they aspire to belong (or in which they hope
to retain their position). Every wrinkle of “the most recent dis-
cussions” is acknowledged. They have dug deep, pored again and
again over the suggestions and arguments of their peers and their
rivals. Hours have been spent on a narrow program of highly spe-
cialized study.
Many years ago, an eminent philosopher remarked to me that
the great privilege of being a philosopher was the license to read
anything. He was right. The giants of the past have delighted in
using that license. As I’ve explored parts of the history of philoso-
phy, I’ve been constantly astonished by the range of the reading of
some of our predecessors—not only the obvious suspects (Kant
and Mill) but also Rousseau (conversant with the latest zoology as
well as music theory) and Schopenhauer (an avid student of Indian
thought and a reader of the Lancet). Synthetic philosophy—
indeed, any venture employing modus Cartwright—demands
breadth of reading. Attentive to human life, with its diversity
of problems and potentialities, you may find yourself drawn to
genres far beyond what your professional competitors consider as
the proper bounds of philosophy—to works of anthropology and
history, even to poetry, drama, and novels. If you are dedicated to

pursuing philosophy in this way, will you be able to combine the
two styles, to do well enough not to be outcompeted by those for
whom a handful of journals offer the only “indispensable” read-
ing? Can you avoid falling between two stools?
Perhaps you can. Something akin to a hybrid strategy can work.
It seems to be the life I have lived. At least, as others often see it.
Like a few other philosophers I know, I appear to have walked a
fine line, doing just enough “respectable” work to count as ortho-
dox. With some weird stuff on the side.
In fact, I can’t claim to have devised some clever strategy for
pursuing the approach to philosophy I recommended in the fore-
going chapters. I am a slow learner. It has taken me decades to
develop the views I have presented here. Forty years ago, I was no
rebel against the analytic philosophy I had only partially learned,
and at which I have never been truly adept. Indeed, as I look back
to the 1970s and early 1980s, it seems to me that the divergence
of “core philosophy” from issues of broader concern was less pro-
nounced. Professional Anglophone philosophy then was closer to
other academic disciplines. It was easier to love.
My route to my present views was a series of accidents. The
first, already described, turned me toward the philosophy of biol-
ogy. A second occurred when a bout of flu led me to flip through
TV Guide, where my eyes lit upon an advertisement, featuring a
free book, a Creationist tract entitled The Remarkable Birth of
Planet Earth. I wrote off, it arrived, and I read it. Finding it both
an intellectual mess and so slick as to be plausible, I decided that
its confusions—and those of a whole genre of anti-evolutionary
manifestoes—ought to be thoroughly exposed. I began giving a
few talks about the deep flaws in Creationism. The third accident
occurred when, over lunch with Harry and Betty Stanton (the
founders of Bradford Books), I casually mentioned what I had
been doing. They immediately insisted that I must write a short
book on the subject. Abusing Science (Kitcher 1982) was the out-
come of that conversation, written in the following months, and
published very quickly thereafter.
Few philosophers feel contempt for those who take up the
cudgels on this kind of issue. Or for those who write about the
overreach of human sociobiology, or about the ethical and social
implications of the Human Genome Project, or about “intelligent
design,” or about the dangers of scientism, or about debates over
what to do about climate change. I have had it very easy. As do
many philosophers of science. There are plenty of places at which
pieces of scientific research have an impact on public policies and
thus on human lives. Philosophers who write on these topics will
not be dismissed as having abandoned the discipline. They are
seen as using their philosophical training in valuable ways, even
though it isn’t “core philosophy.” And, of course, if they some-
times publish articles in “mainstream journals,” that adds to the
aura of respectability.
No cunning plan, laid out in advance. Lots of luck, with, at
the end, an emerging perspective on what philosophy is and what
it should be. The hybrid option will work—if your interests lie in
particular directions, and if you enjoy sufficiently large doses of
good fortune.
My fourth option attempts to generalize from the hybrid
approach. It looks for philosophical fields in which questions
arise that have an impact on people’s lives and also are likely to be
regarded as contributing to philosophy’s mission. Philosophy of

science, as I have said, is one obvious place where this can happen.
But it is not the only possibility.
Some other locations: Philosophy of/in Art, Normative Ethics,
Social Philosophy, Philosophy of Technology, Philosophy of
Education, Political Philosophy. Although these are not the most
central parts of philosophy (according to the orthodox), they are
established enough. Most philosophy departments acknowledge
a need to have someone who can “cover” these fields—although
one or two of them might be more dispensable than the rest. If
you choose one or more as your area(s) of specialization, you can
discover potential investigations to last you a lifetime, without
incurring dismissal by your colleagues. They may view you as less
central than themselves. But you are not beyond the pale.
If you share my view about the importance of work in synthetic
philosophy, and accept my characterization of it, the history of phi-
losophy supplies rich choices. Turning to the past and focusing on
a wide-ranging synthetic philosopher, you can attempt to develop
that philosopher’s perspective in ways that speak to our times. Your
life can be profitably spent on a version of neo-Aristotelianism or
neo-Kantianism (should it be neo-neo-Kantianism?). Or you may
rescue the thought of an intellectual figure who has fallen out of
the canon: Cicero, say, or Montaigne, or Dilthey. Through renew-
ing a large perspective from the past, you may offer contemporary
people new ways of conceiving their lives.
One form of this strategy consists in identifying an aspect of
life today about which there is widespread puzzlement. Sex, for
example. Birds do it, bees do it, human beings not only do it, but
talk, think, and worry about it. Our times offer a whole complex
of perplexities about how sexual relations should be initiated—

between whom? under what prior conditions?—about the proper
form of sex education, about pornography, and many more.
Working from within one of the fields I have listed, or working
across them, drawing on normative ethics, social philosophy, and
political philosophy, you can attempt to clear up some of the chaos
occurring throughout a sizeable chunk of the body underneath
the hat (or the hair).
Amia Srinivasan has done this to great acclaim (Srinivasan
2021). Her writings are informed by large amounts of empirical
information (a similarity with work in the philosophy of science).
Her analyses and syntheses are astute and often surprising. Her
prose combines the clarity of analytic philosophy at its best (nei-
ther haze nor hypertrophy here) with stylistic elegance. So she
achieves a wide audience, to whom she can bring focused social
and political philosophy to address widely shared perplexities.
Nor is she dismissed as a philosophical lightweight. To the
contrary. In a bold and brilliant move, Oxford University—not
always prominent for being innovative in educational matters—
elected her as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory.
This is a chair in which she will continue an important intellec-
tual tradition—to which she is the worthy heir.
Although you might reasonably wonder about the chances of
emulating her striking success—it seems to require unusual con-
ditions, that, unfortunately, only a very few can currently enjoy,
lavish doses of “dumb luck”—Srinivasan can be the model for the
most satisfactory of my options. Start with live issues that pro-
voke puzzlement in a significant portion of the population (per-
haps in members of some identifiable group, perhaps spread across
all sorts of segments of society). Investigate what is known about

the empirical issues underlying the perplexities. (When philoso-
phy returns to “being about stuff,” it’s crucial to know your stuff.
One of the reasons underlying the appreciation of “applied work”
is the sense that the author, like Srinivasan, knows a lot of facts
about the area under study and has devoted a great deal of effort
to synthesizing them.) Offer a perspective for bringing the mate-
rial to order.
If you can do all that, you may be able to sidestep the difficul-
ties I have noted with my previous options.
Amia Srinivasan offers hope that, even in these demanding
times, if they receive the right opportunities, young philosophers
may undertake important projects and still find a splendid home
within the academy. Should that be the sole niche in which you
might pursue the style of philosophy you find valuable? Earlier
parts of my proposals have brushed against other possibilities.
I have, for example, envisaged doing philosophy with stronger or
looser ties to a philosophy department, situating yourself within
some broader program. At various stages of their careers, my six
exemplary synthetic philosophers have done just that.
Besides Philosophy, the fields with which they have
(or have had) academic affiliations include the follow-
ing: African-A merican Studies (Appiah), Classics (Nehamas,
Nussbaum), Comparative Literature (Appiah, Nehamas),
Divinity (Nussbaum), Gender and Sexuality Studies (Appiah),
Humanities (Nehamas), Humanities Engaging Social Science
(Cartwright), Human Rights (Nussbaum), Law (Anderson,
Appiah, Nussbaum), Philosophy of Natural and Social Science
(Cartwright), Political Science (Nussbaum), South Asian Studies
(Nussbaum), and Women’s Studies (Anderson). Although she

has held Chairs in Philosophy during the past, Nussbaum’s cur-
rent primary appointment is as a Distinguished Professor in a
major American Law School.
Neiman has taken a further step. In 2000, after working in
Philosophy Departments at two famous universities, she left a
Professorship at Tel Aviv University to become Director of the
Einstein Forum in Berlin. This Institute, a major center of intellec-
tual life in Germany, has given her a place from which to continue
her philosophical work and to take it into the broader cultural
world. Her writings have been widely read on both sides of the
Atlantic, and, although she no longer has students, she interacts
not only with a broad range of thinkers in a variety of fields but
with a staff of productive scholars, who, like her, have chosen to
pursue their writing careers outside a university.
A position in philosophy at some institution of higher educa-
tion is not the only option. There are possibilities elsewhere—in
other divisions of colleges and universities, and outside the educa-
tional sphere entirely. As the scramble for academic appointments
becomes ever more intense, perhaps the latter course will attract
more of you.
But, if you follow it, you are likely to hear whispers charging
you with desertion. Disdainful voices, ever ready to produce sen-
tences of the form “X has given up philosophy.” Sneers of that
kind are sometimes directed at people like my exemplars, people
who devote their efforts to philosophical questions that overlap
the interests of other scholars, and who spend time working with
(and in) other departments. They occur more frequently if another
discipline comes to be the philosopher’s primary affiliation, and
become almost de rigueur if a brave thinker chooses to pursue phi-

losophy outside the academy.
Nothing justifies these accusations except a narrow conception
of philosophy as an inward-turning discipline populated by highly
focused specialists who talk (excitedly) only to one another. It
seems never to have occurred to those who level the charges that
the vast majority of philosophers in the Western canon earned
their keep outside a university philosophy department. Some were
engaged as private tutors, others as diplomats, or as theologians
or clerics, mathematicians or scientists. A few were political revo-
lutionaries, one ground lenses, and one was a colonial adminis-
trator. The psychology building on the Harvard campus is named
for William James—philosophers dwell in Emerson hall, so called
after a man who was exiled from his alma mater for a large chunk
of his adult life. The catalog could be extended at length, to under-
score the irony of the accusatory mutterings. Has “core philoso-
phy” lost all sense of humor?
If you decide to work in another academic discipline, or to work
outside a university, perhaps in some setting akin to the Einstein
Forum, you should be prepared for some hyper-professional ana-
lytic philosophers to say—probably behind your back—that you
“have given up real philosophy.” Whether you hear it or not, the
gibe should have no sting. For the idea that the path you have cho-
sen must lead you to desert philosophy is laughable. Dismissive
comments of this kind should be voiced only after a careful,
informed, and sensitive review of the work a scholar produces—
if they are uttered at all. Yet, if they are to be made, they should
rebound on those who standardly issue them. Some of the most
zealous and specialized apostles of core analytic philosophy have a
far stronger claim to the title of deserter. Isn’t the narrowness and
insularity of their productions a clear sign of having abandoned
the great philosophical tradition?
I do not think what I have said so far touches the deepest
source of your concerns. For it leaves in place many features of the
status quo. As I hear you, you do not simply want to carve out a
life in which you can do the work you want, having a satisfactory
career within a philosophical world run according to a particular
conception, and imposing particular standards. Or to leave it, and
work elsewhere, on terms of peaceful coexistence with the profes-
sional orthodoxy. You want to change the conception and replace
the standards. Even if “core philosophers” come to recognize the
value of what you do, you don’t want the prevailing notion of what
“core philosophy” is to remain in place. Perhaps (like the author
who wrote the original version of Chapter 1) you would like to
turn philosophy inside out. Or maybe (as I hope) you share the
present author’s wish that the pathologies will be cured, the dis-
tinction between core and periphery abolished, and the philo-
sophical venture regain its power to have an intellectual impact,
through its direct contributions to resolving particular live issues
and through its partial syntheses. In the end, it’s not just about
your life. It’s about the future of the discipline you love.
As I said in my reply to that first questioner, and have said on
several occasions since, it’s the responsibility of senior members of
the profession who have arrived (sometimes, as I have, in chancy
and muddled ways) at the views I have outlined here, to do what
they can to amend the norms and conventions of the profession,
the constraints that bind, under which you chafe. To “play the
game” or to “go under cover” or even to follow my fourth option
would not count as a full solution. The point is not just to under-
stand the state of the Anglophone philosophy profession. It is to
change it.
How can that be done? Hastening to the barricades to dem-
onstrate against the philosophical establishment is not likely to
succeed. Defenders of the current professionalization will use
the skills they deploy in their professional work to eviscerate the
demonstrators—or to carry out what they, and those who are like-
minded, can claim to be evisceration. We do better, I think, to
build on some of the developments of the past decade to create—
together—an academic environment in which the kind of work
you hope to do can be supported, in which its worth—and its
attractions—will become ever more visible.
In my opening fantasy, the breakaway pianists who desert the
étude Olympics to perform classics (and, perhaps, some newly
written pieces) for an appreciative audience only elicit even more
disdainful sniffs from the cognoscenti. That is not the inevi-
table end of the story, although it may well be a passing phase.
Continued acclaim for “popular concerts” could slowly begin an
exodus. Not only does the noncompeting audience for further
assaults on Multiple Tremolo 41 disappear entirely, but, each year,
the number of competitors diminishes. Eventually, disdain proves
hard to sustain. Only the diehards resist joining their fellows who
receive the adulation of the slums.
As the previous chapter noted, the past ten years have witnessed
a shift. More philosophers have begun to write for a broader public.
Their ranks include some established figures, people whose writ-
ings on “core topics” have been much admired. I gave a very short
list (the first few people who came to my mind) in the previous
chapter, but there are many more, people whose work you know
better than I do, and whose writings may have given you encourage-
ment. Inspired by this trend, those who would like to see philoso-
phy regain its place in the wider culture might band together, start
a movement to plead for institutional changes, at first on a modest
scale. The acknowledgment of “public philosophy” as an important
part of what philosophers do could be expressed in the funding
of centers to support scholars—especially younger scholars—so
they could have time to develop their contributions to this genre.
Fellowships for one year or for two years would be a start.
A campaign to enrich philosophical culture could begin there.
It should aspire, however, to go much further. Centers of this kind
might invest in longer-term support. The seven years of an All
Souls’ Prize Fellowship—under which Amia Srinivasan was given
time to think through her ideas—provide a model for nurturing
more ambitious ventures in synthetic philosophy. The status quo
does not have to be overthrown overnight. Its limitations may
become evident as alternatives to the current professional style
become ever more diverse and ever more visible.
If these limited ventures succeed, more ambitious reforms
may follow. Philosophy is currently an isolated discipline within
a larger cluster of academic fields, the always-besieged low-status
areas universities call “the Humanities.” As philosophers emerge
who can begin to engage with their colleagues from other parts of
this culture, philosophy contributes to a valuable general program
in the Humanities—philosophers participate in a curriculum
in which the synthetic enterprises of philosophy’s past are given
their due. Such programs enlighten those who teach, as well as
those whose official role is that of student. Rereading classic works
of philosophy in conjunction with texts from other areas in the

Humanities prompts a Gestalt switch. Even the most dedicated
“core philosopher” finds it difficult to resist viewing the subject
differently.
It is no accident, I think, that the department in which I have
spent the last twenty (happy) years is full of people whose writ-
ings (sometimes) find readers from other academic disciplines and
beyond the academy as well. Teaching in Columbia’s program of
general education (the “Columbia core”), as most of us have done,
undermines the insular vision of philosophy as a segregated busi-
ness. Certainly, in my own case, the years I have spent teaching
sophomores for whom “Contemporary Civilization” is required,
as well as helping to train the graduate preceptors who have
responsibility for some sections of the course, have broadened my
philosophical sympathies and modified my approach to my pro-
fession. Like M. Jourdain, who learned that he had been speaking
prose all his life, I discovered that I had always been a pragmatist
and a would-be synthetic philosopher.
Hence, a further step. Amend my fantasy of the Dean or
Provost who dismisses philosophy as useless—and then dismisses
the philosophers. Our administrator takes note of the current iso-
lation of the philosophy department. But there are a few promis-
ing signs of rapprochement with other parts of the university. In
particular, one or two philosophy faculty are collaborating with
other colleagues in the Humanities, and they are writing on topics
of public concern, in ways the administrator finds valuable. After
conversations with several faculty members in the Humanities
division comes a decision to institute a new Humanities course.
Or, perhaps, a center for public philosophy. Maybe even to appoint
someone to teach, and to do research in, public philosophy. Or to

do synthetic philosophy.
So philosophy starts to rejoin the division within which it has
lived, for decades now, in inner exile. If this administrator runs
your university or college, you begin to have, at least locally, the
reshaping of philosophy you would like to see.
Your administrator talks to opposite numbers at different aca-
demic institutions. Some of those conversations report academic
successes. Others are inspired to emulate what has been done.
Across the English-speaking world, there are gradual changes.
More appointments in the kinds of philosophy you aspire to do.
A different composition of philosophy departments and of the
philosophy profession. Even if a significant population of die-
hards remains, resolutely breaking records for Multiple Tremolo
41, that is no longer a concern for you or for your philosophical
kin. The holdouts can be left to play the games that interest and
amuse them. For you and those like you form a sufficiently large
company to pursue projects of a very different kind.
To try to renew philosophy.
The gradual evolution of our subject I have outlined suggests
the ways in which established philosophers can seek changes.
Perhaps some of you may be able to envisage ways in which the
process could be accelerated. (If so, I would like to know about
your ideas.) Urging reform along these lines is, so far as I can tell,
the best strategy for facilitating progressive change in the profes-
sion of philosophy in the Anglophone world. So I offer this pro-
gram, tentatively, as a supplement to my models of how you might
aim for a satisfying career within a field whose current norms you
find constraining.
Of course, there is another, very obvious, way of trying to

change the culture of philosophy. You can write books about the
character of philosophy. Like this one. Or, I hope, better ones.
They might lead people to rethink what they have been doing.
Alternatively, such uncomprehending manifestoes could cause
well-socialized readers to dig in their heels and to write broad-
sides against philistinism. Engendering philosophical debates, in
which each side tacitly appeals to its own standards.
Yet however those debates unfold, however frustrating they
appear, staking out a position at some length can help a nascent
community of rebels to form. The banner may be poorly designed
and poorly woven, left tattered by the barrage of shells directed at
it—but its continued fluttering in the winds may have a valuable
effect. It can serve to bring together people drawn to a common
cause. And thus help promote a collective effort at reform.
I have written this book to try to change minds. It may do some
of that (if, as I have so often been, I am lucky). But I would not
have written it without the encouragement I have received from
you and from others like you. Your questions and comments have
given me a little hope that my vision is not entirely idiosyncratic.
And hence that presenting it, as I have done here, is not an utter
waste of time.
So, thank you. I hope these brief remarks are of some help.
More than that, I trust that you will have the philosophical life to
which you aspire, and that, through your efforts, the philosophy
of the future may attain, once again, the glories of its past.
Good luck.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
1. My case is restricted to philosophy in the English- speaking world.
Some non-A nglophone traditions seem healthier. I think, for example,
of Frankfurt School critical theory, especially as developed by Jürgen
Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rahel Jaeggi.
2. I follow other authors, especially Bernard Williams, in distinguishing
between morality and ethics. Morality is concerned with action: its central
question is “What should I do?” Ethics is broader, asking “What kind of
person should I be?” It is more inclusive than morality, since acting rightly
is necessary (but not sufficient) for being ethically good.
CHAPTER 2
1. As noted in the Preface, my references to particular authors, whom
I associate with positive developments, are intended merely to point to
instances of various general types. It would be foolish to claim that my
choices are the only exemplars, or even the best ones. Others would select
differently, and I would expect broad agreement on the value of a far
lengthier list.
CHAPTER 3
1. Perhaps the author would be inclined to imitate Shakespeare’s Cassius:
The fault, dear Reader, is not in my claim,

But in yourself, that intuition’s dim.
183
184 Notes
2. Perhaps evolutionary debunkers will contend that this is not the challenge
they intend to level. “We’re concerned,” they may say, “with the selective
advantage of a whole moral sense. What’s the use of that?” To which
the obvious reply is: “In which environment? If you are talking about a
world—like ours—in which people with defective capacities of this kind
are condemned and socially sanctioned, there are some pretty obvious
advantages of having the capacity moral realists ascribe. The real issue,
then, is how an environment of that type came to be, how a significantly
large majority of the human population came to be able to make and act on
correct moral judgments and to expect their fellows to conform to them.
Hence, your question is a historical one, focused on how an embryonic
power of detection caught on sufficiently widely to make that kind of
environment possible. So you are asking the same question as the higher
end versions of Creationism, while remaining lamentably vague about the
specifics. And offering the same cheap gibe.”
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What is the book about?

What is the book about?

What are some of the main arguments discussed in the book?

What are some of the main arguments discussed in the book?

W H AT ’ S T H E U S E O F P H I L O S O P H Y ?

WHAT’S THE USE

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9 780197657249.001.0001

1. Philosophy Inside Out 1

2. “So . . . Who Is Your Audience?” 26

4. The Whole Function of Philosophy 108

5. Letter to Some Young Philosophers 155

Occasionally, the question posed in my title is asked as if the ques-

deserve attention. The Humanities rarely receive much respect in

Reactions to the published article convinced me that I was far

immediately following my presentation, and in emails I received

is to offer some mix of intellectual autobiography and reflections

well agree that the subject’s practitioners do some valuable work.

and Publications of the American Philosophical Association

supervised. They have inspired me to reflect on my profession and

among the serious professionals, offered performances of works

Is this sorry tale relevant to the current state of philosophy in the

emphasis placed on them, and celebrating issues often regarded as

If we are willing to conceive education as the process of

Dewey’s proposal reminds us of his pioneering work in setting

decades and is increasingly used as a semantic weapon for down-

Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic—​or verbal—​or

The danger that a field of inquiry will become a “sentimental

The fact that philosophical problems arise because of wide-

Two important points are made here: first, philosophical prob-

a multicellular organism emerges from a zygote. Not only is there

philosophy” takes over, fussing over minute details. Within phi-

mathematicians—​changed. In effect, from the seventeenth and

This feature of philosophy is central to the other point I men-

by Descartes, or by Kant, or by Frege, or by Wittgenstein, that,

The problem of restoring integration and cooperation

historically operated, and as recognizing an important shift along

Man has never had such a varied body of knowledge in his

The evolution of philosophy along the value-​oriented axis should

them with needed clarification. Along the value axis, philosophy

I’ll attempt to remedy the vagueness of this vision by offering

knowledge-​seeking axis. There are, of course, the grand questions

technical debates—​enable our knowledge seeking and our moral

seek some grand “theory of everything.” Perhaps some insightful

any of these fields, it must be by delving into the details—​as, for

My earlier discussion of the value axis takes for granted a view of

them believe in the existence of sakes. It is surely worth asking if

One task for moral practice is to pay attention to the places at

about the sense of their lives. Aristotle’s brilliant anatomy of the

As empirical fact, however, the arts, those of converse and the

Work that points to the philosophical significance of literature is

Much of what I have said so far needs refinement—​and some of

should be addressing, and that much of what is taken to lie at the

approach: what, after all, does a critique of rational choice models

I have a friend, a Shakespearean scholar, whose books are not

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9 780197657249.001.0001

Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic—or verbal—or

mathematicians—changed. In effect, from the seventeenth and

The evolution of philosophy along the value-oriented axis should

knowledge-seeking axis. There are, of course, the grand questions

technical debates—enable our knowledge seeking and our moral

any of these fields, it must be by delving into the details—as, for

Much of what I have said so far needs refinement—and some of

neuroscience might improve our understanding of moral decision-

consensus views of an expert community— think of climate

technological, social, and political—that are generated by anthro-

has shown for almost three decades, and as Peter Godfrey-Smith

related to their willingness to bet—is a powerful one. When cou-

mathematical problems of the age—as helping to resolve the ambi-

principle—it is always better to save the maximum possible num-

scenario is connected closely enough—“pinned down”—to the

out of steam, and the case-mongers move on to fresh woods and