In the “thread below”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004533.html on Michael Kremer’s review of Scott Soames’s history of the 20th century, Soames has left an interesting comment which I’d recommend readers look at. One thing I especially wanted to highlight is that he has posted his reply to _Philosophical Studies_ symposiumists on volume 1 on “his website”:http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~soames/, which as “Dave”:http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2005/10/more_online_pap.html notes contains a large crop of papers. The reply is “here”:http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~soames/replies/What_Hist_for.doc (Word). [Just as I wrote this I noticed Ian Proops’s comment that his paper is also online – it is “here”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~iproops/practice/ProopsonSoames3.pdf (PDF).]
Here are a few extended quotes from the introduction to Soames’s paper and the introduction to the response to Proops.
bq. I will begin by replying to the constructive, substantive criticism of Stoljar and Burgess. After that, I will take up the harsher criticism focused on matters of historical scholarship presented by Proops and Sainsbury. In addition to setting the historical record straight, I will locate the roots of the dispute in a conflict between the history-for-historys-sake conception implicitly advocated by Proops and Sainsbury and my own philosophically and pedagogically motivated approach to the history of the subject. In doing so, I will articulate and defend the goals of philosophically oriented history, and use the resulting conception both to illuminate my discussions of individual philosophers, and to clarify how they contribute to what I take to be the leading achievements of the analytic tradition.
bq. …
bq. We now turn to less philosophically, and more historically, focused criticism which, as I shall argue, raises fundamental questions about the proper aims of work done by philosophers, for philosophers, in the history of their subject. Ian Proopss critique of my treatment of the metaphysics and epistemology of Moore and Russell is of this sort. He beings with what he labels a conundrum Did I take myself to be doing history of philosophy, and so to be making claims about what the philosophers said and meant, or was I merely using their writings pedagogically? Of course, I took myself to be doing both. The fact that Proops sees a chasm between these two aspects of the same enterprise is, in my opinion, indicative of a larger failure of perspective that informs his remarks. My task was to extract from the voluminous writings of the philosophers covered, done throughout their entire careers, those lessons that every analytic philosopher today, and every student, should be aware of. Doing this required making their major achievements and failures as clear and comprehensible as possible, but it did not require or allow following every twist and turn in the development of their thoughts. Nor did it mean, in every case, reproducing the exact route to a philosophers most important results, if simpler and more comprehensible routes were available that preserved the philosophers central insights.
bq. This is the strategy routinely used to introduce students to historical achievements in logic, like Gödels incompleteness and Tarskis indefinability theorems. Our confidence in what constitutes progress underwrites our judgments of what was essential and what inessential in the texts of great logicians. The same is true in philosophy. It is because philosophy has progressed, and we know more now, that we can separate the essential from the inessential in presenting the contributions of a philosopher like Russell. That is the spirit in which I approach the task. The opposing spirit denies philosophical progress, or at best adopts a value-neutral stance, and as a result takes the historical enterprise to consist simply in elucidations of all the different strands of past philosophical thought, and identification of lines of influence. There are, of course, other less tendentious routes to this antiquarian conception of the history of philosophy, but they are beside the point. My aim was to present an historically accurate picture of the main lines of progress in the analytic tradition.
I’m mostly posting this here because I think it would be a useful topic to debate. I’m fairly sympathetic to the idea that we can write histories of philosophy that are useful for teaching the students what has been gained through philosophical work, and that this is worth doing even at the cost of eliding some details. As Soames notes in his reply to Sainsbury, in this kind of history, if a philosopher says “I’m pretty confident that p, but there are concerns about how p could be true in areas A, B and C that I’m not 100% sure how to address and can only gesture at D, E and F in response”, often the best way to summarise this in a thematic history book is as “p”. So I’m perfectly happy to grant Soames the appropriateness of his approach.
There is one thing I find rather puzzling though about this line of defence of his books. If the point is to “present an historically accurate picture of the main lines of progress in the analytic tradition”, one might have hoped for a little more _breadth_ of coverage. Soames spends a lot of his time in this response defending himself against the claim that he should have spent more time on the details of, especially, Russell’s views. But I think in many ways, especially given the stated aims, he should have spent quite a bit _less_ time on the authors he actually covered and covered quite a few _more_ philosophers.
Possibly for any century before the 20th, the best way to present its history would be to focus on the works of the greatest philosophers. But surely that’s not the way to present the 20th century. There were so many philosophers making so many contributions, be they positive or negative, that Soames’s almost exclusive focus on the greats ends up distorting the picture.
So, for example, we get a rather detailed study of _The Concept of Mind_, with some fairly trenchant criticisms. There’s a lot there that’s valuable. But wouldn’t the student have got a better guide to analytic progress with a chapter that started with a brief discussion of Ryle and his perceived errors, then went on to say how Smart, Armstrong and Lewis proposed theories that built on Ryle’s virtues while attempting in their own ways to correct the (quasi-)behaviourist excesses? Or instead of going over the back-and-forth between Austin and Ayer about sense data in quite so much detail, simply introduce their positions and their most important innovations and then discuss the most important contemporary work on either side of that debate?
We don’t, or at least I don’t, teach logical results by looking at the work of the original logicians. And much of the history of philosophy could be done the same way. We could, for instance, teach Godel’s completeness theorem by name-checking him and then working through the details of Henkin’s proof. And we can teach at least some aspects of history of philosophy the same way. But Soames sticks to the canonical writers. So we’re left, by necessity of space, with not quite enough _depth_ for a dedicated historical work on the authors covered, but without the breadth of coverage needed for a genuine survey of the important trends in the first full century of analytic philosophy.
Having said all that, this is probably as good a time as any to post my contribution to the other part of the _Philosophical Studies_ symposium. My job was to write on the Wittgenstein to Grice part of the book, and it’s here.
bq. “Doing Philosophy With Words”:http://brian.weatherson.org/dpww.pdf
(The link now works – thanks to Michael Kremer in comments.)
I should say that I now think there is a somewhat serious mistake in the second last sentence of the section on Ryle. I think I managed to totally muddle the story of the battle between the Cartesians and the materialists that Ryle closes _The Concept of Mind_ with, and so my appeal to that story in defending the claim that Ryle wasn’t as much of a behaviourist as Soames suggests is probably a blunder. The story still suggests that Ryle’s position is quite different from the simple behaviourism that Soames attributes to him, but it’s not the evidence for my interpretation that I say there. _C’est la vie_.
Given what I said above, I should stress that my complaint about Soames’s interpretation of Ryle isn’t that he simplified Ryle’s view. That’s a necessary evil of the kind of book he’s writing. It’s that by simplifying in the way he does, in the direction of behaviourism rather than dispositionalism, he’s blocked himself off from telling an interesting story that the well-informed student should know about the importance of Ryle to the development of modern functionalist theories of mind.