Philosophy 101 #3 – Internal and External Criticism

Philosophy is in the argument business. It constructs arguments that are supposed to give persuasive reasons for accepting one idea or another. Philosophy is also in the business of criticizing arguments, and revealing that in fact we don’t have any good reasons to accept a certain idea. One of the most powerful and useful tools for criticizing arguments is the distinction between external criticism and internal criticism.

1. External Criticism

Imagine two people are locked in a debate. Immanuel believes that women have the right to choose whether or not to continue with their pregnancy, and so holds  to a pro-choice position in political and ethical debates about abortion. Georg thinks that women do not possess this right, but rather that the life of an unborn child ought to be protected at all costs, and so holds to a pro-life position. Now for Immanuel to criticize Georg via external criticism, two things need to happen:

     i. Immanuel’s position must be incompatible with George’s.

     ii. Immanuel must claim that his position is better – that is has some superior claim to authority, acceptability or rationality (or some such thing).

This form of criticism holds that we have reason to reject one idea, because we ought to see that some other idea is better. In our case, Immanuel wants us to reject Georg’s idea by showing that his competing and incompatible view is in fact more worthy of our belief. One great advantage of this line of criticism is that it presents us with a viable alternative, rather then just asking us to abandon a belief. It tries to show us that the ground we stand on is shaky, but fear not because there is firm ground nearby. The disadvantage is that this kind of criticism tends towards dogmatism. It is a temptation for Immanuel to resort to rhetoric or insult, to simply shout at Georg that his view is wrong and no rational person should hold it, without ever proving this.

2. Internal Criticism

Imagine that Immanuel is convinced that Georg’s view is wrong, but he doesn’t have his own alternative worked out. He could then criticize Georg’s view internally. That is, he could work out the logical commitments of Georg’s idea in such a way that it shows that it is not really a coherent view at all. The first step to doing this is to think about the idea and consider whether holding it actually commits you to holding other ideas. For instance:

     i. Georg believes that unborn children have the right to be born. This involves (say) holding that all people have rights and dignities that shouldn’t be ignored by those in a greater place of power.

The next step is to show that these other logical commitments are in fact incompatible with the earlier commitments. So:

     ii. Georg’s initial belief that governments ought to be able to legislate to prevent abortions is incompatible with this other committment as worked out above - the idea that people have rights and dignities that shouldn’t be ignored by those in positions of power, e.g. the woman’s right to control her own body, or make health decisions free of state interference. How can Georg consistently hold that  a woman oughtn’t to interfere with her pregnancy because her unborn child has inalienable rights, but that the  woman’s rights can be ignored by the government?

This line of criticism has the advantage of being more rigorous, since it needs to get inside the logic of an idea and try to analyse it. However, it has the disadvantage of being a purely destructive way of proceeding, since it shows that a view ought to be abandoned, without necessarily offering an alternative, or a diagnosis of how to mend the idea.

This blog post has already been far too long, particularly for what is an attempt to make philosophy interesting and attractive to those who may not have studied it. But to recap: external criticism is the attempt to show that we oughtn’t to believe some idea because we have greater reason to believe some alternate view that is incompatible to the extent that we need to choose to be committed to one but not the other. Internal criticism is the attempt to show that we oughtn’t to believe some view because when you think about things, it actually isn’t internally coherent.

Philosophy 101 #2 – The Difference Between Abstraction and Idealization

Abstraction, taken straightforwardly, is a matter of bracketing, but not denying, predicates that are true of the matter under discussion…Idealization is another matter: it can easily lead to falsehood. An assumption, and derivatively a theory, idealizes when it ascribes predicates – often seen as enhanced, ‘ideal’ predicates – that are false of the case in hand, and so denies predicates that are true of that case. For example, if human beings are assumed to have capacities and capabilities for rational choice or self-sufficiency or independence from others that are evidently not achieved by many or even by any actual human beings, the result is not mere abstraction; it is idealization.

– Onora O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue (1996), pp.40-41.

Philosophy is often accused of falling prey to the vices of abstraction and idealization. Keeping these two notions separate is very important. Abstraction is a kind of thought that aims to say something true on a general level such that it could be true of many cases. Idealization is a kind of thought that proceeds in the abstract register, though involves premises that skew reality. The first should be the friend of the philosopher, and can be a very handy intellectual tool. The second can be deeply misleading.

Take the examples of milkshakes. An abstract sentence might run as follows, ‘A good milkshake is a milk and cream based drink.’ This sentence is abstract since it says nothing about flavour, temperature, total ingredients, size, deliciousness etc. If you had never seen or tasted a milkshake before, this sentence doesn’t give you that much of an idea of what milkshakes are like. But this in itself is, of course, no vice. In O’Neill’s language, this abstract sentence has simply put those issues to one side – those issues which may be more descriptive, but that can change from milkshake to milkshake – for the sake of achieving a helpful description that will apply to many things that we want  to call good milkshakes.

Compare this with this idealized sentence, ‘A good milkshake is a refreshing milk and cream based drink that leaves the drinker feeling youthful, energized, and like they can take on the world.’ This is still an abstract kind of sentence since you are talking at a level of generality that aspires to describe all milkshakes. The difference is that this last sentence builds what O’Neill calls ‘enhanced predicates’ into the abstraction. Is it really true that  all milkshakes will leave the drinker feeling empowered in such a way?

If you were a milkshake enthusiast, and wanted to come up with a theory of milkshakes, this first would be a helpful starting point, albeit abstract, the second would be a bad starting point since your theory is skewed from the outset, and worthy of the criticism of being ‘idealized’. As I see it, this is one basic job of philosophers working in all fields, and once basic contribution philosophy can make to other  discourses.

So next time when you hear a philosopher being criticized for being way too abstract and idealistic, remember that these are different things, and only one of them is a problem.

Handy Hermeneutical Hints

A central part of philosophy is the reading of books, and the attempt to understand these books. This can be tricky business. Often philosophical books are old, vague, odd, complicated, hung-up on by-gone issues, or not directly speaking to the question you are concerned with. In the work of contemporary philosopher Robert Brandom I have recently come across a handy two-fold method for understanding philosophical books and concepts: Brandom calls this the de dicto/ de re method. This method is basically two different sets of questions you can ask a text in an effort to understand it. I think this method could be helpful because it distinguishes two different questions which often get entangled with one another, but need not.

1. De Dicto (Latin: Of the word). We understand what a concept in a particular text means by seeing how it is used by an author, what moves it licenses and what it prescribes, and how it would be understood and deployed in the community at the time. When investigating this dimension of texts/concepts, ask questions like, ‘What did the author think he was illuminating by talking this way?’, ‘What does the author thinks follows from this?’, ‘How was this used in the practices of communities of the time?’ This is essentially a task of trying to understand the book as a whole and within its immediate landscape.
2. De Re (Latin: Of the thing). We try to understand how an original concept could be used in a later context, such as ours, being concerned with what really does follow from the author’s premises (according to our lights), not what the author took to follow from them. This method focuses on what the concept is about, and what the author must be committed to now, given what we now know or what logical resources we now have. When investigating this dimension of texts/concepts, ask questions like, ‘What do we now know about this concept?’ ‘Is this additional body of knowledge something which detracts from or supports the author’s original intentions?’ This is essentially trying to understand how any ideas could be extracted from the way the author thought she was using them and the way the community whom she wrote for deployed them.

Christians, being people of the book, have the dual concern of textual fidelity and textual relevance – of wanting to understand the Bible thoroughly and accurately, and of wanting to allow it to speak to contemporary people and issues. Could this two-fold method from Brandom be handy in reading and applying Scripture?