110. Stripping the Vocabulary

Let's define the word "philosopher" and see how many words we can eliminate if we do it right. Start with this definition: "a person who is very careful about what he believes." That pretty well describes a scientist, doesn't it? What forces you to be more careful about your beliefs than the scientific method? So I'd say we can do without the separate word.

OK, but you've gotten rid of "scientist" by making "philosopher" pretty narrow. You've left out people who are very careful about values. We often call them "sages" or "wise men." Are we going to deny them your title?

Well, since I believe care is the most important thing I think we'd better give it to them. So let's say, "a philosopher is a person who is very careful about what he believes or values." If that's a sufficient compliment then there's no longer a need for "sage" or "wise man."

You're going to say, "what he believes or values"? Suppose one person values something so highly that to keep it he believes nonsense. Another person is very careful about what he values and is very careful about what he believes. Are you going to use the same compliment-word for both?

Yes, I'll just modify the word. The second person is a better philosopher.

Oh, oh, "better" and "worse." Stretch-words. Pretty soon you'll be calling any minimally careful person a philosopher.

Of course. That's the way to eliminate troublesome words. Like "scientist" and "scientific." Get rid of them and you'll no longer hear, "That's not "scientific"; you'll hear, "That's not very careful." Get rid of that other troublesome word, "religion," and you'll no longer hear that big trouble-maker, "That's not science, that's religion." People will more easily get down to the questions that need dealing with: Have we arrived at this belief carefully? And at this value? What needs to be balanced against what? People who do that are "better philosophers" than people who don't. "Better" is a good enough compliment. "Worse" is a good enough put-down. Care is the key.

Yes, look for care, but be careful. That person you see taking more care than anybody else may not be the greatest philosopher; he may just be the greatest pedant, scrutinizing little things while ignoring the big ones.

Like what?

Human limitations, human mortality. Only if you ignore your own mortality, and think you have all the time in the world, can you aim at perfection. Do that when your fellow mortals need your help and I'll call you a "finicky philosopher" — to specify your inferiority.

And to remove the word "pedant" from the vocabulary. But these mortals that need a philosopher's help, I suppose that that's because they themselves are not philosophers?

No, they are "hasty philosophers." Though they need the same thing, reliable knowledge, they don't have time to take the care scientists take. They have to settle for the good guess. Considering their number, and their influence (especially in democracies), and the terrible actions — lynchings, pogroms, foolish wars, genocides — they take when they act on unreliable knowledge, the best thing philosophers can do in the world is improve their guesswork.

You mean the best thing leisurely philosophers can do. You're calling everybody a philosopher.

OK, philosophers with leisure, the kind given them in universities, the place where they have the best opportunity to help the poor hasties, the guessers, the wanna-be-hafta-be scientists. If they don't help, they're "useless philosophers." If they interfere with the help, they're "dangerous philosophers."

I already know the "useless philosophers." They're the pedants. But who are the "dangerous philosophers"?

The dangerous philosophers are those pedants who undermine confidence in good guesswork by showing that its theoretical support is not perfect, or, worse, that there's no support at all. They are dangerous because if enough hasties lose their confidence there will be more lynchings, pogroms, foolish wars, and genocides than there would otherwise be.

Sounds terrible. How do you deal with such people? I'm ready to lynch them.

No, no, hah, hah. They live in universities, where all us leisurelies live. Threats appear in words and you hold them off with words. Here, speaking in the stripped-down vocabulary I'm trying to promote, you could only call the dangerous people "poor philosophers." You'd have to hope that that was enough of a put-down to discourage them.

33. "Science says"

Anybody who says, "Science says...," tells you right away that he's not a journalist, not one who writes for the New York Times anyway. Journalists are not responsible for any of the clear instances that turn up in a search. Who is responsible? Readers. Of the 28 instances in the last year they, in their comments and letters, produced 16 of them. We have a clear line between popular usage and professional usage.

The professional takes more care. Care here means recognizing that the word "science" doesn't refer to anything that holds beliefs. Science is a way of arriving at beliefs. It can't say anything. Scientists hold beliefs. They can say a lot. You've got to get that straight at the beginning if you're going to go anyplace in your story or discussion.

Most of the time there's no great harm in using "science" in the popular sense. We're at a party or at the beach, and don't really want to go anyplace. But sometimes we want to make a serious point, and break into a serious discussion to do so, as many of those readers who wrote to the Times wanted to do. We either harm our case (when our popular misconception is exposed) or harm the discussion (when it's not).

Do we risk harming a discussion any time we personify an abstraction? Evolution says...Religion believes...Capitalism holds...Society demands...Feminism denies? Paul Davies, a physicist, was about as far from a beach party as you can get when, a while back, he personified science on the Times Op-Ed page (11-24-07), arguing that, like religion, "science has its own faith-based belief system." He was breaking into the most serious discussion you can have, that going on between philosophers, people who take the greatest care with what they believe. Care is their profession. Say they let Davies in. What's that going to do to their long-time discussion of religious beliefs as tested by scientists?

I think we can see right off that it's going to make it less modest. The eyes of the philosopher are going to be lowered here, following the gaze of the scientist, which is always on a particular claim made in a particular religion. Is it a claim of historical fact? Does it pass the test of such claims?

With raised eyes here we can have all sorts of interesting discussions, but we can't have a discussion that will interest philosophers. Philosophers, the ones I have read anyway, are interested in what makes a question hard. What makes the reconciliation of science and religion hard is just this thing we're looking at, a claim and a test. The Bible says 4004 years. The geological test shows a deep negative. That's where the shoe pinches. OK, let's discuss it.

What Davies will do is bring into the discussion a shoe shaped just like the science shoe, except where it pinches. The belief-system he attributes to scientists, a structure based on a belief in "the rational intelligibility of the cosmos," is one I can well imagine scientists holding. But I can't see it interesting scientists. They don't look that high. And it will bore the pants off of philosophers. Answers come too easy up there.

How did Davies subject himself to the snub I see him getting? By starting off on the wrong conceptual foot with that personification of that abstraction, science.

We observers, though, can't walk away thinking that philosophers, with their exemplary care about what they believe, have had the last word. There are other discussions and other kinds of care. Those who are very careful about what they value can be exemplary too, and say things to philosophers. A discussion where they try to work things out, never ignoring the hard part, could be very interesting.

That leaves us, surprise, with a word problem. Can we call those value people talking to philosophers "philosophers"? No, we've already used "philosophers" for people very careful about what they believe. There doesn't seem to be a good word for those very careful about what they value. Maybe "sages"?