Philosophy As Bricolage

Paper presented at the Philosophy As Conference, London, November 28-30, 2002

E.P. Brandon

Academic concern for bricolage and bricoleurs is due to Lévi-Strauss (1966), who used them to characterise the process of myth-making in pre-industrial societies. His translator comments that the terms do not have a precise English equivalent - a bricoleur "is a man who undertakes odd jobs and is a Jack of all trades" (p. 17 ftn.) but the term carries connotations for Lévi-Strauss of naïve art that the English lacks. This may have been appropriate in the context of the bizarre elaborations in the myths he was studying, but for my purposes odd-job-man is perfectly sufficient - bricoleur is there merely for the cachet of once-trendy Parisian thought.¹ The basic point for now is the idea of the handyman, making do with what is to hand rather than waiting upon the final answers or custom-built tools and materials. Such making do may well go with a tendency to ignore conventional wisdom and find solutions that reject it. Another important element that I shall invoke is the ability to invent one's own tools rather than rely only on the standard issue.

The context for these reflections is the utility of philosophy. Personally I have spent a good deal of time teaching philosophy to trainee teachers. Since most of my working life has been spent in "third world" countries, another all but unavoidable issue has been the appropriate role for philosophy in universities that are properly expected to contribute tangibly to economic and social development.

More generally, I want to connect with the appeal to greater clarity and the avoidance of confusion that several writers of popular introductions to philosophy invoke by way of justifying the pursuit of philosophy, or at least its public support, or perhaps just the purchase of their books. There is also Bernard Williams' question that Tom Nagel refers us to (1995), of what unoriginal minds should make of the pursuit of philosophy. For those of us not in Williams' or Nagel's league, perpetual students or disciples, perhaps, rather than original contributors to the dialogue, how should we view the issues we engage with?

My focus is, then, not on the whole of philosophy, even in the analytic tradition to which I belong. What perhaps I am getting at is the virtually invisible 90% of philosophising that goes on outside the prestigious journals and graduate seminars.

My suggestion is that we should take more seriously than we appear to some important aspects of the analogy with the natural sciences that is the official position of many analytic philosophers. A handyman stands to advanced physics as one who uses elementary ideas and procedures, conceives things in antiquated modes, but who may yet get things done. Without insisting upon the untrained aspect of the comparison, one can contrast the concerns of physics laureates with how the discipline is generally practised. Physics is not only a matter of superstrings and supercolliders; most of it goes on and is employed on more mundane matters. (One might say that Kuhnian "normal" science is itself to be separated into "cutting edge" puzzle solving and routine application by non-researchers, technicians, etc. My interest is on what handymen and such applied workers have in common.)

What I want to do is to explore whether there is any value in reconceiving philosophy more in line with the actualities of our engagement with physical science and technology.

While it is now commonplace in epistemology to acknowledge the fallibility of our knowledge, and to see philosophy as not strictly isolated from other disciplines by the purity of its methods or peculiar status of its subject-matter, I think the way philosophy is usually done - in the prestigious journals and graduate seminars - suggests that we have not really taken these views to heart. There is a finicky concern for minor inaccuracies; the demolition of a detail in a view is regarded as decisive. Timothy Williamson (2000, 30) is not alone, I believe - he was joined at this conference by Robert Lockie, for instance - in noticing the increasingly irrelevant construction of epicycles upon epicycles in the post-Gettier, post-Nozick analyses of knowledge. An analysis that runs to half a page of sub-clauses might even be accurate, but what insight would it provide?

To go a little further back, Quine revoked the philosophical legitimacy of the analytic/synthetic distinction. Like an illegal alien awaiting deportation, it became unable to function, effectively proscribed in decent company. Quine did not like Kant's metaphor of a predicate being "contained in" a subject. One is inclined to say that if a person cannot understand the idea of unmarried being contained in bachelor, there is little hope of getting him to understand anything else. It may not be mathematics, it may not give clear answers in more contentious cases, but it is hardly incoherent or useless as a way of indicating a substantial difference between bachelors are unmarried and bachelors have lower life-expectancy.

What happens when we teach an episode or issue in philosophy is that we try as best we can to get the issue right by our current lights (so, for instance, Grayling, 1998, and Wolfram, 1989, each carefully examine Quinean and other considerations in the hope of deciding to what extent a synthetic/analytic distinction can be salvaged from his attack). We hope to teach the truth, it might be said. And I do not have anything against the truth. But let us notice what goes on in the teaching of physics, say. Most of the time it is not the theory that is truest by our current lights that is taught but something that does the job required, whether it be for civil engineering, background for physiology or chemistry, or even for approaching quantum mechanics. In general, our teaching is a graveyard of superseded theories which, however, provide some insight and a framework for dealing with the issues - I think some teachers are still told about behaviourism in psychology, though appealing to what goes on in the training of teachers is perhaps somewhat unfair. The moral would then be that, if we think that there are things the analytic/synthetic distinction can usefully do, we might only need to teach it as doing those things, without all the convoluted toing-and-froing of my sample text-books.²

To put this back in touch with fallibilism as a doctrine, what we should learn from looking at the social reality of the sciences is not merely that theories are shown to be false but that some such falsified theories continue in use. Except for stock examples like phlogiston, they are not regarded merely as showing the quaint ideas of our forebears. They are used straightforwardly.

It will properly be objected that I am overlooking an important difference between refuted philosophical theses and the scientific cases. In the latter, we do know a better story and this allows us to see that no great harm will be done by sticking to the refuted view. However difficult to explicate, we have a working notion of degrees of approximation to the truth (or to our latest version of the truth) in the scientific cases. But in philosophy do we have anything comparable?

While there certainly are some bizarre notions to be found in the history of philosophy (even in the expurgated version analytic philosophy carves out for itself), many of the issues, distinctions, theses that now serve to mark out its major episodes do point to prima facie permanent issues, in the sense that, whatever we finally think, we will need to give some account or other of those issues. That supposedly final account may sometimes show that what seemed significant is only a superficial matter, but my conjecture is that most times what seemed significant will turn out to be important, though, of course, not necessarily in the terms in which it was originally couched. Where in science we may be able to show why Newtonian calculations work in this particular context, in philosophy we may only have a vague feeling that someone is on to something significant, even if we have found difficulties in their way of expressing it.

If we grant with the popularisers I mentioned earlier that philosophy can provide insight into issues, not only its own proprietary issues but some of those belonging to other fields, that it can help to clear up confusion and provide tools for "logical self-defence," as one guide to critical thinking has it (Johnson and Blair, 1983), then we should note that the intellectual discomforts that philosophy might alleviate can often be attacked with various remedies. They do not require the full and final story, merely something that will let one see what is or might be going wrong. To take a simple, though not uncontentious example: it is plausible to think that Plato took large as in some way more fundamental than larger than. To avoid the contortions he was then faced with it is not unreasonable to suggest that we should reverse the dependence and see large as some sort of function of larger than. We may not yet know exactly how this should be done (Platts has a lengthy discussion that suggests that this was the position in 1979 at least, 1979 ch. VII) but this ignorance does not undermine the clarification of Plato's problem that we can achieve.

In thus using incomplete or even refuted notions to clarify problems we may recall that the falsified theories that litter the history of science were not entirely useless or unilluminating in their day.

I have contrasted the question of dealing with other people's problems and dealing with our own philosophical questions. It may readily be conceded that there is a possible role for philosophical notions, whether or not still seen as fruitful within philosophy, in contributing to discussion elsewhere. Anyone is free to make use of anyone else's notions, and may find that they work. But that is perhaps not quite right. A difficulty for my project is the Protean nature of the philosophical target: a distinction, a thesis, a concept, a perspective,….? I must agree that greater clarity would require more detailed case by case investigation, but for now let me venture the opinion that philosophical clarification of some one else's problem is still going to be philosophical - it is not a matter of finding that a snake eating its tail clicks with what is known about benzene. So, to take one of Pateman's cases, if advertisers operate with a Gricean mechanism this means that something like Grice's story actually holds in that case. It may not be a case Grice or other philosophers would want to pursue, but it is vulnerable to objections to their programme within philosophy. It is not likely that the advertising case could survive unscathed if the notion were decisively undermined in its homeland.

Another issue here is that the distinction I have used is not clear-cut. Philosophy shades into other concerns. So if bricolage is defensible anywhere it may well be defensible in the heartlands of philosophy as well as in its peripheries. What would this amount to? Returning to the example I used earlier, one might say that philosophy is taught as if the only work to be done is at the cutting edge. Grayling and Wolfram take their readers through issues of a kind that in physics might occupy graduate students. The growing professionalisation of philosophy has reduced the role it might play in informing other people's general perspective on things. We do not teach for the kind of clarification the popularizers speak of, since we teach only for the reproduction of the profession.³ "There are no introductions to philosophy", we say (I have seen a remark very much like this attributed to Strawson and it is one of my own excuses when students cannot see head nor tail of whatever I have recommended them to read). Whereas the sciences do have bodies of people who use but do not advance their subjects, philosophy sees itself as pure cutting-edge, even though as a sociological fact there is a large (in comparative terms) underbelly of "hidden" activity.

One thing I am urging is that we should reconsider the situation. We may need to reconsider the élitism so forcefully expressed by Popper in his disdain for Kuhnian "normal" scientists, and which reflects, I think, the self-image of philosophy itself.⁴ Rereading Pateman, I find him concerned about the intellectual consequences of a philosophical education on the majority of students who move on to lives outside the philosophy establishment.

Making do with what we have good reason to think is false is perhaps the most contentious aspect of bricolage and so I have been led into some devious pathways in trying to make a case for it. To conclude I want to mention two other features that are not so difficult to appreciate, but perhaps deserve more attention than we give them.

The first is an irreverence for accepted wisdom that allows people to find solutions that reject conventional pieties. Why not put a Datsun carburettor in my Brazilian Volkswagen? Ironically, perhaps, bricoleurs can avoid the seductions of the love of binary oppositions that anthropologists have noted. They can find a via media between egoism and altruism in Broad's notion of self-referential altruism that Mackie made central to his account of the workings of morality (1977).⁵ As several have noted, it is not necessary to choose simply between Quine's extreme holism and the atomism he rejected under the name of "reductionism". More modular and more realistic pictures of the structure of our knowledge are available (Sobers, 2000, 260-273; Williams, 2001, ch. 11 and 166-168).

More interesting, though perhaps not so important when it is a matter of getting things straight is concerned, is a third feature of bricolage: the possibility of inventing one's own tools, not always relying on the approved suppliers. In analytic philosophy the approved sources are usually logic and a set of high-status sciences. Philosophy itself may sponsor some tools (I have been advocating the retention of some of the more dubious ones). But in addition to notions that come with a seal of approval one can find various other notions actually in use. One clear case I can point to is that of "ellipsis", whose somewhat submerged history in twentieth-century analytic philosophy I have reviewed elsewhere (1986). That is an example of a notion in common currency, primarily in grammatical and rhetorical reflection, but given a distinctive twist by the philosophers who adopted it.

Many individual writers have constructed their own tools that often do not circulate far beyond their own work, but which may yet be worth garnering for the treatment of common confusions. (Flew was an assiduous collector of off-the-shelf philosophical remedies. I suspect we now lack something of his missionary zeal. One might also see in the notions he picked on - often examples of exploded fallacies - something analogous to the accumulating body of experimental laws that some see as the key continuity across theoretical change in science (Chalmers, 1999, ch. 13). If so, our results are predominantly negative - as I have suggested is more generally true of the disciplines called "educational foundations", 1995b.)

One could mention here Mackie's notion of an inus condition (an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition). Mackie (1965) introduced this structure in an investigation of causation, but it is one that can find useful application elsewhere. Getting the right answer to a particular question in a multiple-choice test is often an inus condition of passing the test. I have suggested that seeing this structural feature (of literacy, say, in relation to leading a worthwhile life in modern societies) and how it connects with ideas of justification can illuminate discussions of the place of compulsory education (1995a). This notion also allows us to see a case where philosophical improvements may not be of wider utility. One might agree that Bennett (1988) is right in thinking that his own NS account of causation (a necessary part of a sufficient condition) is more general and elegant than Mackie's but refuse the improvement on the grounds that Mackie's even-handedly draws our attention to the gaps on either side: the possible insufficiency of the part and the possible lack of necessity of the whole of which it is a part. These gaps are worth seeing when one reflects on our thought about needs, for instance.

Most physicists are not at the cutting edge of theoretical work or its experimental testing. I have referred to Popper's disdain for this sort of unoriginal work that I think is the implicit judgment of the philosophical community on itself. It is a commonplace in philosophy of science that engineers (physicists indeed) routinely use Newtonian theories we know are false, and that this is more sensible than trying to do everything from Einstein or Bohr up. I suggest we grant a similar indulgence to philosophical theses or distinctions that can serve to shed light on intellectual problems, even when we know they may not be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I suggest that we ask ourselves what attitudes are appropriate once we acknowledge the fallibility of our own philosophical results,⁶ and that we reconsider the place of philosophical insight in a defensible liberal education, if our paymasters permit such an anachronism to survive.

Endnotes

¹ I am grateful to Keith Graham for reminding me of what was almost certainly the source of my association of philosophising with bricolage: Trevor Pateman's work on a "radical theory for communication" where he so characterises his own use of bits and pieces of analytical philosophy of language, sociology, linguistics, etc. (1975, 35). Pateman's work was one major resource in my halting attempts to convince trainee teachers that dialogic teaching might not fit the constraints of compulsory schooling.

² Even bricolage develops, so I am not saying that we should teach the analytic/synthetic distinction with the whole array of its traditional accompaniments. There is an argument close to the surface in Williamson (2000), for instance, that there are good Darwinian reasons for thinking a language would not have many terms that could be fully analysed in the way many philosophers aspired to. But unmarried can still be contained in bachelor, and possibly even believes that p could be contained in knows that p, without either concept having a complete analysis of that type.

³ "We" here no doubt ignores those of our colleagues who still offer philosophy as a foundational study for a broad selection of students, and those - often outside the formal academy - who have focussed on philosophy for use, philosophical tool-kits (e.g, Baggini and Fosl, 2002), and so on. My point is made when one reflects that it is hardly possible to use such works within the courses "we" do teach.

⁴ "'Normal' science, in Kuhn's sense, exists. It is the activity of the non-revolutionary, or more precisely, the not-too-critical professional: of the science student who accepts the ruling dogma of the day; who does not wish to challenge it; and who accepts a revolutionary theory only if almost everybody else is ready to accept it - if it becomes fashionable by a kind of bandwagon effect. To resist a new fashion needs perhaps as much courage as was needed to bring it about.… I admit that this kind of attitude exists; and it exists not only among engineers, but among people trained as scientists. I can only say that I see a very great danger in it and in the possibility of its becoming normal (just as I see a great danger in the increase of specialisation, which also is an undeniable historical fact): a danger to science and, indeed, to our civilization" (Popper 1970, pp. 52-53).

⁵ To bring out the socially constituted categories in which much of this moderated altruism finds expression I have suggested using the abbreviation s-r to cover both self-referential and socially recognised (1979).

⁶ One risks, of course, something close to Moorean paradoxes if one applies fallibilism directly to one's present beliefs. I am not suggesting that those at the cutting edge suddenly abandon their convictions (or indeed their pursuit of technical issues) but I do think that perhaps a redistribution of effort and emphasis is called for, though that is not something that academic workers can accomplish entirely by taking thought alone.

References

Baggini, J. & Fosl, P. 2002. The Philosopher's Toolkit. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bennett, J. 1988. Events and Their Names. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Brandon, E.P. 1979. 'The key of the door', Educational Philosophy and Theory 11, 23-34.

Brandon, E.P. 1986. 'Ellipsis: history and prospects', Informal Logic 8, 93-103.

Brandon, E.P. 1995a. 'Inus conditions and justification: a case study of the logic of Gutmann's argument for compulsory schooling.' In Frans H. van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst, J. Anthony Blair, and Charles A. Willard (eds.), Special Fields and Cases, Proceedings of the Third ISSA Conference on Argumentation, Volume IV, pp. 539-545; Amsterdam: International Centre for the Study of Argumentation.

Brandon, E.P. 1995b. '"Relevant experience" for teaching the foundations of education', Caribbean Curriculum 6, 35-53.

Chalmers, A.F. 1999. What is this thing called science? Third edition. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Grayling, A.C. 1998. An Introduction to Philosophical Logic. Third edition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Johnson, R.H. and Blair, J.A. 1983. Logical Self-Defense. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson.

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1966. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.