97. Meet My Philosopher, the Smothers Brother.

J. L. Austin, the Oxford linguistic philosopher, said that we could call oversimplification the occupational disease of philosophers, "were it not their occupation." If that's fair then it's certainly fair for us followers of philosophers to oversimplify each other's positions as taken, say, at a party. The test is personal convenience. "Does the simplification," you ask, "prepare me sufficiently for the next, possibly more serious, encounter? Can I now move on to the next guest?"

I once found it convenient to classify all new academic acquaintances simply as either a Tom or a Dick, following this exchange in the old Smothers Brothers act:

Dick: Your shirttail's out.

Tom: Why do you hate me?

If I identify a Dick I bone up on British philosophy, if a Tom, French philosophy. In one case I'm ready for empiricists, logicians, and hard scientists; in the other I'm ready for phenomenologists, existentialists, and soft scientists, especially psychologists.

Who will I welcome alongside me? That depends on where I am. If I'm in a neighborhood where they break your knuckles if they catch you with your shirttail out I welcome Dick. If I'm at home unconsciously picking on a playmate I welcome Tom. In operating rooms and cockpits it's always Dick; in psychiatrist's offices and confessionals it's always Tom.

There are times when I will positively love Dick. When rumors are flying, when a mob is forming, when a lynching or a pogrom is imminent oh how great it is to have him appear and ask, "Did the provocative event really happen?" When it's a provocation to war — Tonkin Gulf, weapons of mass destruction — it's even greater. Facts. Caring about facts. At last somebody. I could hug him.

But Tom can be helpful too. When I'm listening to a politician, watching commercials, or reading a government-controlled newspaper, I love to hear his voice, "No, what he's really saying is 'Hate this, love that, trust these.'" Tom shows you what a fool you were to concentrate on the shirttail. Those guys were just using it. You've got to love somebody who can take apart propaganda the way Tom does.

The trouble is, Tom and Dick don't get along. Dick thinks he means what he says. He hates to hear "what you really mean." He delights in pointing out the number of places where Tom's philosophers will find themselves with broken knuckles. Tom delights in showing Dick how helpless his philosophers will be before a poem or a subtle philosophy.

I need Dick more than I need Tom simply because I spend more time making my way through the world than I do reading poetry or philosophy. I'd like to trust Tom but I need to trust Dick — as all the scientists, all the physicians I go to, needed to trust him. I can't live without him.

Tom's philosophers weaken my trust in Dick by showing me that he doesn't deserve to be so positive about the "real" world he thinks he's talking about. That world, they say, is just a humanly represented one, and even the representation Dick is surest of is subject to an "uncertainty principle," or an "incompleteness theorem," or its "relativity."

Dick's own philosophers weaken my trust in him by showing me how imperfect his theoretical foundation is. His empiricism proceeds from unexamined dogma and his given, the stuff he gets from his senses, is, they say, largely a myth.

Why should I let criticism from either side weaken my trust in Dick? I don't need a perfect epistemology. I can make my way through the world very well with the epistemology that stood for a long time before Derrida or Rorty or Kuhn revealed its imperfections, or Einstein, or Gödel, or Heisenberg were available to quote.

The old epistemology is not hard to learn, but it is hard to stick to. You don't always notice mistakes, even if you're willing to call them "mistakes." If you have a friend that notices, though, somebody to tell you when your shirttail is out, it's a lot easier. You just have to trust him, even when he doesn't sound like your friend.