Steve Watson

Three Poorly Formed Concepts

A standard justification for the approach of Analytic philosophy is that no real progress can be made on philosophical problems until the concepts with which it deals are made properly clear, and until we have determined that the concepts are in fact well formed. That this is not always the case even now can be seen in the following three examples.

God

I made the point (in these very words) when criticizing the supposed necessity of apophatic treatments of the divine (in Crossing the Via Negativa) that

the impossibility of describing or thinking of God at the same time positively and coherently is a consequence of the fact that the very concept of God is not well-formed. The problem seems to be that it began as a positively defined concept within comprehensible limits but has subsequently been expanded into incoherence by the necessities of philosophical argument – in particular, philosophical arguments for His very existence. One can give a Just-So story: primitive man wanted to explain how the world came into being; he looked at examples of things coming into being that he could understand, like his making a flint tool, and analogised a world-knapper. The world-knapper was just like him but bigger, distant, more powerful, wiser. More than that though, the world-knapper became, as devotion and reverence demanded, not just bigger but as big as possible, and so on, and thus we arrived at the qualities of omniscience, omnipotence, omni-benevolence, as well as ineffability, eternality, ubiquity, etc. These unlimiting concepts are, however, both difficult to directly comprehend and collectively incoherent. The puzzles that arise are well-known. Can God make 2+2=5? Can He make a rock He can’t move? Can He do wrong? Can there be evil in the world He made? And so on. The ultimate point of this is that the seeming necessity of the via negative should be taken not as a sign of the transcendence of God, but as a sign of the ill-discipline of thought about God.

Free Will

Another example of what I take to be an incoherent concept is the notion of Free Will as it is generally understood – or rather as it is generally not understood. The first thing to get straight is what is meant by the Will in these contexts: it’s just the faculty of mental action that initiates an action by which we intend an outcome. (Even that has a lot of baggage that would need unpacking. Is the intention of an outcome different from an act of Will? In what way is ‘intend’ to be understood? Does the Will physically cause the action? If not, then what is its relationship to the action or to the outcome? Much else is also mysterious.) In any case when we say that the Will is free it means that we are free to make any sort of mental exertion whether or not the willed action is possible or prudent. A person in chains can will to be running even if they can’t actually run. They can Will themselves to be a beautiful flower even when there is no action possible to make that so. (Actually, I now wonder whether that sort of Willing is even in the bounds of the provisional definition I gave: does it make sense to say that one can perform a mental act that would have had the effect of initiating an action if that action is logically impossible or physically impossible and known to be so? What could ‘would have’ mean here? More questions. Never mind, the general idea of the general idea is clear enough.

What is meant by saying that the Will is free is simply that it is not constrained by external forces. The notion is used by unconsidered analogy with physical freedom: we are physically free to do something that no-one constrains us from doing. In this case it is acceptable to say that we are free to be a flower even when we know it’s impossible. The implication of lack of external constraint is felt, and the freedom is understood to be nugatory or nonsensical, but it is still a coherent concept. In the philosophical debate, the notion of freedom from constraint is extended – because there is no obvious limiting principle – to freedom from all restraints whatever. And at this point we get into trouble when we realise that the Free Will can therefore not be restrained by the causal structure of the universe. This is clearly nonsensical but has led to all sorts of attempts to make it non-nonsensical.

Moral Law

As a final example, modern moral philosophy (G. E. M. Anscombe (1958) Philosophy, 33 (124):1–19) has come to be based on notions of obligation, rights, and duties modelled on the eponymous legal notions. I have described elsewhere (How we got Rights) the historical process whereby we transitioned from the classical virtue theories that have their central theorist in Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics,) via the Stoic claim that the idea of norms for each thing in the world that constitute a law for their operation can be extended to a Natural Law which describes how the World should/does work, and via the Christian claim – admittedly adapting the Stoic view of Nature and Law as Zeus – that this Natural Law could only come from a Divine lawgiver, to, finally (?,) the view that whether or not there is a Divine lawgiver there must be a Divine Law in which are grounded our rights and duties and which defines our obligations and prohibitions.

The effect of this development has been to create a category of truth-claims phrased in terms of statements of obligation and permission that seems to have no connection to the way that the world is. That is, as ‘normative’ statements, they are not derivable from ‘positive’ statements; as prescriptive statements they are independent of descriptive ones; and as judgements on how the world ‘ought to be’ they cannot be reduced to statements about how the world ‘is.’ This particular problem is only unusual in that it has been well known – if not universally explicitly accepted as a problem – since at least the time that David Hume formulated his ‘Is/Ought’ argument (in his Treatise on Human Nature III, i, i.) However, given that the last few hundred years of Western ethical thought has been devoted to overcoming this difficulty and failing at it, it’s pretty clear by now that (1) it is accepted to be a difficulty, and (2) there is no good solution to it.