The Practical Origins of Ideas Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering MATTHIEU QUELOZ Abstract Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? The Practical Origins of Ideas presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts across the analytic-continental divide, running from the state-ofnature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having. Keywords: Philosophical Methodology, Conceptual Reverse-Engineering, Conceptual Ethics, Genealogy, Cambridge Pragmatism, Naturalism, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, E. J. Craig, Bernard Williams, Miranda Fricker. Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations. J . L. A Concepts are neither true nor false, but they can be evaluated: do we have reason to track the distinction drawn by the concept? Should we have this or that concept in our repertoire at all? S. H Table of Contents Acknowledgements vi 1 Why We Came to Think as We Do 1 Bringing the Pragmatic Genealogical Tradition into View 4 A Systematic Account of the Method 6 Doing Systematic Philosophy by Doing History of Philosophy 20 2 The Benefits of Reverse-Engineering 26 From a Practical Point of View 26 Seven Virtues of Conceptual Reverse-Engineering 27 Explanation Without Reduction 30 Weakening and Strengthening Confidence 35 Responsible Conceptual Engineering 36 Genealogy's Place in the Methodological Landscape 37 3 When Genealogy Is Called For 40 Fictionalizing and Historicizing 42 Self-Effacing Functionality 54 Nietzsche's Challenge: Historical Inflection and Local Needs 60 4 Ideas as Remedies to Inconveniences: David Hume 75 Motivating Genealogy: Artificiality and the Circle Argument 78 A Remedy to Conflict Over External Goods 80 De-Instrumentalizing Justice 86 Promising: Enabling Reciprocal Cooperation Over Time 93 The Functions of the State of Nature 95 5 A Genetic History of Thought: Friedrich Nietzsche 109 Philosophers' Dehistoricizing and Denaturalizing Tendencies 111 Concepts Conditioned by History and Functionality 116 Nietzsche's Vindicatory English Genealogies 121 Hypertrophy: Taking A Good Thing Too Far 136 Thinking Historically 139 6 Loosening the Need-Concept Tie: Edward Craig 145 Fictional Starting Points 148 What Informants Need to Be 153 A Genealogy Showing There to Be No Room for Genealogy 155 The Art of Our Necessities is Strange: De-Instrumentalization 161 Assessing and Synthesizing Competing Accounts of Concepts 164 7 The Uses of Intrinsic Value: Bernard Williams 170 Truth: What Needs Defending? 172 The Point of Valuing the Truth Intrinsically 176 Reading Williams as a Cambridge Pragmatist 193 McGinn's Three Challenges and Self-Effacing Functionality 196 A Pessimism of Strength: Williams's Debt to Nietzsche 207 8 A Political and Ameliorative State of Nature: Miranda Fricker 213 Good Recipients of Information 214 De-Idealizing as Far as Necessary and as Little as Possible 218 Pairing Genealogical Explanation with a Theory of Error 220 Making Ameliorative Use of Pragmatic Genealogy 222 9 The Normative Significance of Pragmatic Genealogy 233 Genetic Fallacies and the Ways Around Them 234 Understanding Pointfulness and Avoiding Continuity Failures 241 The State of Nature as a Model of Local Problems 249 Contested Needs and the Conception of the Agent 254 10 Ideas Worth Having 261 Grounding Socratic in Pragmatic Inquiry 261 Pursuing Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline 262 Bibliography 267 Acknowledgements Portions of this book draw on the following publications: Queloz, Matthieu. 2017. "Nietzsche's Pragmatic Genealogy of Justice." British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (4): 727–749. doi:10.1080/09608788. 2016.1266462 -. 2018. "Williams's Pragmatic Genealogy and Self-Effacing Functionality." Philosophers' Imprint 18 (17): 1–20. doi:2027/spo.3521354.0018.017 -. 2019. "Genealogy and Knowledge-First Epistemology: A Mismatch?" The Philosophical Quarterly 69 (274): 100–120. doi:10.1093/pq/pqy041 -. Forthcoming-a. "From Paradigm-Based Explanation to Pragmatic Genealogy." Mind. doi:10.1093/mind/fzy083 -. Forthcoming-b. "Nietzsche's English Genealogy of Truthfulness." Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. -. Forthcoming-c. "How Genealogies Can Affect the Space of Reasons." Synthese. doi:10.1007/s11229-018-1777-9 CHAPTER ONE Why We Came to Think as We Do We did not make the ideas we live by. They are, for the most part, ideas we inherited, unthinkingly growing into patterns of thought cultivated by others, with little sense of why just these ways of seeing, valuing, and reasoning should have gained hold in the first place. Some ideas, like that of water, may be so plainly useful for creatures like us as to appear inevitable. But many of our most venerable ideas-such as truth, knowledge, or justice–are highly abstract, and their practical value for us is elusive. Why did these 'highest concepts', these 'last wisps of smoke at the evaporating end of reality' (TI, Reason, §4), as Nietzsche called them, ever become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms, and what would we lose if we lacked them? Such Pragmatic Questions about the practical origins of ideas have seldom been raised. They have tended to be side-lined by more traditional Socratic Questions of the form 'What is X?' Aiming straight at the essence of truth, knowledge, or justice, the Socratic approach reckons that if only we achieve clarity about what these things really are, an understanding of why we came to be concerned with them will follow. Socratic Questions can prove obstinately vexing, however, and a consensus on what truth, knowledge, or justice are has yet to emerge. Accordingly, some have concluded with the American pragmatist C. S. Peirce that 'we must not begin by talking of pure ideas-vagabond thoughts that tramp the public highways without any human habitation-but must begin with men and their conversation' (1931, 8.112). Peirce, like the philosophers I discuss in this book,diagnosed a tendency 2 • Why We Came to Think as We Do in philosophy to set ideas too high above human affairs, to contemplate them entirely in vacuo. Ideas are in their element in distinctive contexts of purposive human action, action which takes place against a background of contingent facts about us and the world we live in. Trying to understand the ideas we live by in isolation from the circumstances in which they are felicitously deployed is like studying a shoal of beached fish as if they were in their natural habitat. Instead, we can turn the order of explanation around and let the what grow out of the why: we approach the question of the nature of truth, knowledge, or justice by first asking why we came to think in these terms. Such an inquiry into the origins of ideas can take many guises. Plato asked after the origins of ideas, but he sought them in an abstract realm of Forms. Conceptual historians of various stripes asked after the origins of ideas, but they sought them by tracing the changing meanings of words across different socio-historical contexts. My concern, by contrast, is with the practical origins of ideas: with the ways in which the ideas we live by can be shown to be rooted in practical needs and concerns generated by certain facts about us and our situation. If an idea persists, the reason may be that it fills a need. What motivates this assumption is the realization that we are, as Jane Heal puts it, 'finite in our cognitive resources while the world is immensely rich in kinds of feature and hence in the possibilities it offers for conceptualization' (2013, 342). Why do we find at our disposal just the concepts we do rather than any of the countless imaginable alternatives? As Heal goes on to remark, this question cannot be answered simply by observing that using certain concepts enables us to form true judgements in terms of those concepts. More needs to be said-in particular, about what makes thinking and judging in just these terms worthwhile. This is especially true of the abstract notions at the heart of philosophy, which seem to be the stuff of idle grandiloquence rather than effective action. What needs, if any, were filled by introducing these ideas into our repertoire? What necessity was the mother of these inventions? The method I propose to explore in this book is designed to help us look at ideas from a practical point of view-took look at what ideas do rather than at whether the judgments they figure in are true-in order to see how exactly our ideas are bound up with our needs and concerns. This method, which I propose to call pragmatic genealogy, consists in telling partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these ideas do for us. What point do they serve? What is the useful difference these ideas make to the lives of those who live by them? Much as an archeologist who digs up a mysterious relic Why We Came to Think as We Do • 3 will try to reverse-engineer its point by imaginatively reconstructing the life of those who used it and hypothesizing what useful difference it might have made to that life, we can take an abstract idea whose point eludes us, such as truth, knowledge, or justice, and try to explain why we came to think in these terms by reconstructing the practical problems that these ideas offer practical solutions to. A pragmatic genealogy answers the question of why we came to think as we do by reverse-engineering the points of ideas, tracing them to their practical origins and revealing what they do for us when they function well. [end of preview]