Peter Boghossian and James A. Lindsay
Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions. (Stephen Leacock)1
In his paper, “Higher‐order truths about chmess,” Daniel Dennett argues that “[m]any projects in contemporary philosophy are artifactual puzzles of no abiding significance” (Dennett 2006). In other words, much of contemporary academic philosophy is a waste of time.
In this chapter, we’ll first expand on and clarify Dennett’s point. We then argue that in order to rectify this problem, philosophers who seek to create work of “abiding significance” must firmly re‐tether philosophy to science – only science can uniquely pull philosophy in the right direction, and so philosophy, if it wants to retain relevance and value, must follow science.2 We use mathematics, models, and metaphysics, to expand and clarify Dennett’s chmess analogy. We further the argument that some contemporary academic philosophy loses its way and chases chmess‐like endeavors – arguing that philosophy is bloated by extraneous, esoteric, and bizarre philosophical projects that aren’t detached from reality but only related to it tangentially. Chmess‐like games, like some contemporary academic philosophy, nick reality and then shoot off on their own trajectory, often down intellectual rabbit holes.
To illustrate his point, Dennett uses the example of chmess, a made‐up game that’s “just like chess except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one.” We will take chess as a metaphor for reality. The logical universe of chess, then, represents what can be determined about reality. Chmess can be understood as representing logical non‐reality that is tangentially related to reality (the actual state of affairs).3
Chmess, however, is only one example of a rule change on standard chess. There are infinitely many ways the rules of chess could be modified. Here are five possible chmess‐like variants:
All of these chmess games are irrelevant (except perhaps the first which has historical precedent); they are all tangential to chess and interesting only as academic curiosities. Equally irrelevant is the endless list of possible variants: Chmessk2 is a game where the king can move twice. Chmessk3_ is a game where the king can move three spaces. Chmessk390°~\ is a game where the king can move three spaces that optionally include one 90‐degree turn but no diagonals. This can go on and on and on, and every one of these instantiations is yet another example of a pointless game about which no one should care despite being replete with what one might term “locally interesting truths.”
The logical universe of every chmess variant stands in isomorphic relationship to a baroque philosophical project. And just as every chmess game is, frankly, a waste of time, so too are many projects in contemporary philosophy. Being locally interesting to handfuls of philosophers isn’t de facto justification for such projects.
Academic philosophy has institutionalized and legitimized entire domains of chmess‐like thought, which are buttressed by the tendency of philosophers to engage in a dialectical game of peekaboo with ideas that do not merit serious consideration; many philosophers earnestly engage chmess‐like speculations and then construct elaborate lines of supporting arguments. Nowhere is this better seen than in the philosophy of religion (Lindsay 2015).
The fact that chmess‐like variants are both normative and seriously entertained could be one reason why philosophy isn’t accorded much respect outside the academy – it twiddles away and seriously entertains the hyper‐esoteric and inconsequential. One need look no further than to a philosophy conference, where chmess‐like projects are the norm. To attend a philosophy conference is to marvel at the obscurity and irrelevance of what’s become of the discipline. Obfuscation through “grad speak,” nano‐niche topics of absolutely no relevance or significance to those not immersed in the area, a focus on esoterica that are often untethered to reality, unbridled and un‐evidenced speculations about the nature of reality, and so on, and, in a mix of irony and tragedy, the perception of these pursuits as intellectual virtues. It’s almost as if philosophers have forgotten how to speak to people not just outside their discipline, but also outside their niche.4
The difficulty all branches of inquiry face is that while we’re watching chess (reality), we do not know all the rules of the game we’re watching. It’s up to us to attempt to distinguish between chess and chmess, and we have the technically impossible task of deciding whether we are seeing chess or, instead, chmess played in a way such that in every game we ever have observed, the king moves only one space at a time, despite being allowed to move two. Sub‐disciplines like the philosophy of science exist to give robust explanations for why it is reasonable, even preferable, to conclude “chess” even if some restricted‐chmess is the true nature of reality (say, that whatever happens to be analogous to the king moving two spaces happens so rarely as never to be observed, perhaps as with magnetic monopoles).5
Some philosophers, including Massimo Pigliucci, have argued the point of Dennett’s article wasn’t just that the field of philosophy engages in lines of inquiry that no one cares about, but that most academic disciplines do the same thing (Pigliucci 2014 and 2015).6 Of course this “defense” of philosophy can be read as, “Philosophy is useless and obscure, but a lot other disciplines are too.” Maybe that’s what Dennett meant, but if it is, it’s too bad – Dennett, in that case, would have missed his own point. It isn’t that chmess or these other fictitious variants are irrelevant because no one is interested, it’s that when one assumes incorrect rules and then fails to realize it, one can become removed from reality very quickly (it’s even worse when, as in theology, one simply makes up the rules to suit one’s agenda).
While this problem is endemic in some branches of academic philosophy (for example, metaphysics, ontology, the philosophy of religion, and even metaethics), it bears mentioning that virtually the entire discipline of theology is chmess‐like; it’s a chess‐like game that isn’t exactly chess, a pursuit of reality that isn’t exactly pursuing reality. It’s making up rules and then seriously considering them (Boghossian 2013). Within academic philosophy, the problem is often subtler than with theology, but chmess‐like investigations remain tangential to reality, even when it is quite clear where the point of tangency lies.
It is a fundamental mistake to think that one can reason one’s way to understanding reality absent science. Aristotle, for example, made this error in Progression of Animals.7 Here, he tried to reason his way to understanding why snakes don’t have legs and provided abundant reasons for his speculation:
The reason why snakes are limbless is first that nature makes nothing without purpose, but always regards what is the best possible for each individual, preserving the peculiar substance of each and its essence, and secondly the principle we laid down above that no sanguineous creature can move itself at more than four points. Granting this it is evident that sanguineous animals like snakes, whose length is out of proportion to the rest of their dimensions, cannot possibly have limbs; for they cannot have more than four (or they would be bloodless), and if they had two or four they would be practically stationary; so slow and unprofitable would their movement necessarily be.
(Progression of Animals 8, 708a9–20, Revised Oxford Translation)
The problem, in a nutshell, is that Aristotle lived approximately 2000 years before Darwin. He did not have the biological sciences he needed to come to accurate conclusions; he was playing a chmess‐like game.
Engaging in speculation about the nature of reality – metaphysics – tends to be the Achilles’ heel of many philosophers. Absent a scientific background, at best metaphysics is an intellectual sinkhole because it’s almost impossible to do well. At worst, it trains scholars to extend confidence in their speculations beyond the warrant of the scientific evidence, and then to robustly defend those speculations using the tools of argument, with which professional philosophers are particularly adept.
In The Believing Brain, Michael Shermer explains the reason for this: smart people are better at rationalizing bad ideas (Shermer 2012). And in that singular insight many of the problems within philosophy, and metaphysics in particular, are unmasked. Smart people come up with really good reasons for poor ways of conceptualizing problems. And the more clearly the point of tangency between a bad model and reality can be apprehended, the more powerfully we should expect this effect.
The most egregious examples of metaphysical speculations running amok are found in cosmological metaphysics. Philosophers like William Lane Craig and Paul Copan attempt to reason their way to cosmological origins (Copan and Craig 2004; Craig and Smith 1995). But the answers they seek – if there are any answers at all – will be found in science, not in philosophy and certainly not in theology.
No one knows the fundamental nature of reality – no one may ever know it – and there may not even be a “fundamental nature of reality.” This does not mean creating models is a waste of time, nor is developing and refining concepts like model‐dependent realism (Hawking and Mlodinow 2012). Every enterprise that flirts with such ambitious topics as the nature of the universe must draw heavily from the sciences as a base for every speculative model.8 Most metaphysical endeavors should fall under the heading of, “you had better be very scientifically aware if you think you’re going to do this well.”
Elsewhere, we have argued for model‐dependent realism (Stenger, Lindsay, and Boghossian, 2015). All propositions that may be true within certain axiomatic, logical, or philosophical systems should be understood as provisional, and all subject to our presumptions about the nature of reality. Philosophy already tends to do this but it lacks formal, systematized mechanisms to adjudicate wildly speculative claims (for example, Aristotle and Aquinas’ “first cause” argument).
We can determine truths about reality by making models (philosophical objects) and then comparing their consistency with data. This is the only way to judge models about reality, because data is the way we link reality (which we observe and measure) to models (collections of ideas, often expressed linguistically, mathematically, and statistically). Absent matching of models to data, our metaphysics becomes like choosing from an infinite number of chmess‐like games, with nothing but deficient modalities – and these are limited because they’re based on just a few points of tangency – with which to judge the rules. Even if the sciences, as philosophical endeavors in their own right, also suffer from this same problem, their very raison d’être is to bend the tangent curve (the models) to fit the real curve at ever more points.
This does not mean that we shouldn’t make models or that we should refrain from speculations about reality. (This is what string theory does; it speculates about reality and then attempts to match the speculative models to the data.) It does mean that philosophy must keep science at the fore so as to prevent its models from becoming chmess‐like projects.
Mathematics provides a clarifying analogy because the axioms are relatively straightforward, and often clearly attached to reality – but not all of them are. The axiom of infinity, for example, is not clearly attached to reality (Lindsay 2013).9 Unsurprisingly, then, this is where things become complicated. There’s a branch of mathematics that accepts the axiom of infinity (standard mathematics). There are others: Finitist mathematics, which doesn’t allow infinities at all, and ultrafinitist mathematics, which doesn’t even allow for numbers so big that they’re somewhat pointless. There are others in the contrary direction: mathematical constructions that allow for “hyperreal” and “surreal” numbers and other abstract concepts, all populating the landscape of “transfinite” mathematics. Each accepts different axioms and concomitantly produces a different mathematics; each has proponents for various reasons; and each is just an academic exercise once it runs tangential to reality, whether we know its fundamental nature or not.
Within the field of mathematics, it is reasonable to say that mathematics is making a contribution of “abiding significance” when it fills out the set of known truths, falsehoods, and undecidables, within any one of these axiomatic systems, but at the same time, unless we know which of these make any realistic sense, they’re untethered speculations. These efforts have “abiding significance” because there’s an overwhelming consensus that the goal of mathematics is to fill out these compendiums of results, rather for their own sake. Academic philosophy is rightfully afforded less leeway in this regard because it works with broader and less obvious axioms, and because it aims to make statements more directly geared to human functioning within the constraints of reality.
Even though mathematics is just a mental construct, that is, a philosophical endeavor, some domains of mathematics tell us about reality. This is because some mathematical axioms are simple enough to count as self‐evidently “hooking” to reality. For example, if we have eight things and take away three, that there are five left can be checked empirically, but there’s absolutely no reason to bother. The very definitions of eight, three, five, and “take away,” hook the endeavor (math) directly to reality (at the level of discrete objects).
This isn’t a silly example. Because there are infinitely many numbers, most numbers are totally useless because they’re too big to count anything meaningful. An extremely big number by our standards, like a number with a trillion digits take away another extremely big number such that the difference is still an impracticably big number, doesn’t tell us something about reality; it tells us something about a hypothetical reality in which those numbers reference real quantities.10
Still, the math gets it right, even if it cannot be verified empirically, at least not directly, because the numbers are too big to count anything real. Why? Because the axioms that encapsulate basic arithmetic are formulated from obvious descriptions of reality.11 Thus, mathematics gives us knowledge (in that it’s accurate and justifiable) about any hypothetical universe where such numbers make sense. In our own universe, smaller numbers make sense, and mathematics tells us something about our own reality. The empirical nature of counting, and thus of basic arithmetic, ensures many, many points of solid agreement between the arithmetic model and the reality it enumerates. And by extension, apparently unreal concepts such as real numbers, complex numbers, infinity, limits, the calculus, and so on, are unsurprisingly useful because they are natural logical extensions of concepts rooted very deeply in reality.
In that sense, we can trust that philosophy can tell us about reality only when the axioms are so simple as to qualify as being completely legitimate, self‐evident statements about reality. The (or, one) folly of philosophers is tending to forget that the worth of all philosophical conclusions depends entirely on the axioms from which they follow, and thus so does the reliability of their connection to reality.12 (The folly of theologians is pretending that “God” constitutes one such axiom.)
Likewise, philosophy cannot be trusted to tell us about reality when it forgets reality in pursuit of its ideas. This is analogous to running too far down a tangent and then forgetting one’s way back, or to preferring to play some variant of chmess and then confusing its rules with those of chess. Philosophers do so most often either by inventing and exploring counterfactual possible worlds or by failing to recognize the ways in which our ideas oversimplify some matters, for instance by forgetting about the important role and incredible complexity of human psychology and sociology. Models are potentially infinite; most of them are utterly worthless; and the best models are those that have the best connections to reality. These connections are best demonstrated via consistency with empirical data, which outstrips even logic, as the errors of philosophy revealed by scientific investigation have repeatedly shown.
Some philosophers may claim that philosophy is of “abiding significance” if generating names for every possible chmess variant – and whittling out arguments for why one variant is better than another (similar to the five rules of chmess variants) – is the goal of philosophy. We don’t think it is, and acting as if it were is an abandonment of philosophy’s truth‐goals.13 A better goal would be to rest on the fact that the sciences are, bar none, the most effective epistemological tools we have developed for understanding reality and thus the best, if not unique, path to describing it. After all, should we find ourselves not knowing exactly which game we are watching, chess can be most easily discerned from chmess simply by observing the movements of the king. That an epistemic gap remains – the king could be allowed to move two or more spaces and yet, in practice, apparently never does – is little more than a call for humility and openness to belief revision, falling pretty far from making a case that chmess and its set of logical truths are worth pursuing as a possible characterization of the game. And if we always observed the king moving only one space and yet wanted to conclude some chmess‐variant is the right description, how could we possibly determine Chmessk2 instead of Chmessk3_, Chmessk390°~\, or any number of others from that observation? In that case, concluding chess makes at least as much sense as any chmess and yet is far more parsimonious.
If philosophy has any chance of achieving abiding significance and being rescued from the meaningless obscurity that plagues it, philosophers must figure out which games matter and what it means to matter, and must choose to play only the games that get somewhere. In other words, they need to focus on the logical truths of chess, cutting out as much chmess as possible.14
Philosophy has already worked its way to the correct set of rules for making sense of the world, and it named them “science.” This is why science has to be at the root of every part of philosophy that hopes to be of abiding significance. There are infinitely many philosophical pursuits, and most of them are rabbit holes that aren’t worth pursuing. The connection to reality is what matters if relevance outside of pigeonholes in the academy holds any value. Philosophy becomes abidingly significant to the degree it remembers that, and it languishes to the degree that it forgets.