Much Ado about Hokum

“… and then we can talk all you want about this…hokum.”  

I was taken aback for a moment, unsure how to respond. I often struggle to find a way to describe my opinions and thoughts to those that I disagree with, be they theists or conspiracy theorists, in a way that communicates why I don’t believe in what they do that gets them up to speed with my thinking while not also coming across as condescending. But “Hokum?!” I’ve spent practically my entire adult life immersed in philosophy; thinking about thinking is something that I do naturally. I know this interlocutor well enough to know that he didn’t mean it to be hurtful. But I think he ironically actually touched upon an important question of the justification of philosophy as a practice.

As philosophers, it’s easy to get so immersed in the jargon that we forget that we’ve left the laity back at the bus stop. We package lofty, complex, and very abstract concepts into 25 cent words and throw them around so casually that it’s only natural that the uninitiated think we’re playing word games. I’ve had other such conversations with atheists about concepts such as beauty and goodness that end in similar frustration: my thoughts are “heckin’ valid” but don’t mean anything beyond my own sense of self. 

This is more than just a question of securing more funding for our philosophy department from the board, but rather a question of helping the world to think better. To that end, I think there are two main things that philosophy has to offer the world, both in the way that it offers value to the laity who dabble in its practice and in what we as its practitioners have to offer. We philosophers need to find a way to explain why what we think, say, or write matters. Why does it matter to think about what we say as reflecting necessary truths instead of contingent ones? Who cares if I say that I am sympathetic with the dialectical materialists and that influences how I look at social media? These are all word games about things that don’t exist. I should get my head out of the clouds and think about real things.

Let’s look at the most basic logical fallacy: equivocation. I don’t mean the same thing when I say I love my wife versus when I say that I love my whiskey. One might muddy the waters a bit by pointing out that I love my whiskey in a way that is analogous to the way that I love my wife, but the distinction remains. I don’t, for instance, buy flowers for my whiskey from time to time. Similarly, in debates about the existence of God, some theists will clap back that evolution is “just a theory.” But theory is being used equivocally here. It’s not the same thing to say that one is positing that there is some instance of a phenomena that could be observed, and that one is positing an overarching explanation of what causes a commonly observed phenomena to take place. In other words, it’s one thing to say that we have a theory about how the mass of objects attract each other, and another thing to say that I can jump off this building and fly because it’s only a theory that I’ll slam into the ground.

In another conversation with that same interlocutor, we ended discussing the merits of a hypothetical. What value is there in discussing something that not only never happened, but in all likelihood, never would? We can respond to this by first pointing out that reality is often messy and complicated, and that it’s more straightforward to discuss a situation that forgos that baggage and contains only the relevant factors. Further, is such a situation just fiction without the flowers? We can discuss a hypothetical brain in a vat, or we can use The Matrix. In either instance we are taking an imaginary reality and trying to use it to make inferences about the real world. 

My point here is at a basic level, the main fruit of philosophy is just as beneficial to the layman as it is to the tenured professor: thinking about thinking can help us form a better understanding of why we think what we do and on what grounds. Beliefs are funny little things: you can find yourself only believing something to be true even when you don’t have a valid reason to think so. Beliefs tend to be things we think are true in the absence of sufficient evidence particularly when that belief lends itself to allowing us to perceive the world in a way that makes us feel better. A theist relative of mine, for example, insists that Halloween is a demonic festival. Even when I explained to them that that evidence is tenuous at best, they insisted that I hadn’t done proper research and they could “…feel it [the evil] in their heart.” Not that a philosophy class would spare us of all these instances; it would get us at least as far as understanding that if we have a reason to think something is true, and if that reason were called into question, that that should undermine our credence in the belief even if it doesn’t deprive us of it entirely. 

In other words, if I can form at the very least an educated opinion about something then I can at least say that there’s a truth value to my opinion. To use that value of hypotheticals: if three people are told to paint a room with the primary colors and one of them insists the blue and green are one color called “bleen” simply because that’s their subject viewpoint, where can that project go? The “bleen” proposition means nothing to anyone else. As another example, I could argue that the school board should cancel recess for the children since being more literate will help them all earn more income in the future. You could (rightly) point out that this would in fact be counter productive, as forcing children to sit still will make them even less interested in reading. We were able to have a conversation because we understood the objective of the other and could both examine and explain our reasons for the belief. 

But then what about philosophy as a practice? I can talk till I’m blue in the face or type till my fingers break about how dialectical materialism has created a concern within me that the commodification of experience coupled with the ease of self-satisfaction has hurt our ability to participate in our self rule as voters because nuance simply isn’t entertaining enough. (Have I lost you already?) If I’m lucky, I’ll get more than a confused stare, which is usually a smile and a request to focus on things “…that are real.” But then how far would that go? I can refer to the sociological term of “Disneyization” and what kind of experiential marketing it refers to, is that something real? 

In conversations that get to this point, again, one is usually met with eyerolls and an assertion that this is being pedantic. Obviously we don’t mean that abstract concepts aren’t real, and we can intuit the difference between things just fine. But our intuitions are often wrong, and that is an empirical fact. In the case that inspired this post, when I talk about modality and essential versus contingent, I’m not pointing out a disparity between what was dreamed up by my mystic versus what was dreamed up by his. I’m pointing out that 1*1=1 seems to be true in a different way than that my shirt is black, that is, it seems like the former is true necessarily whereas the latter is true as a matter of contingency. He would have been welcome to dispute that, but not without ignoring what seems to be true empirically. I would be rather curious to see how I could only have worn a black shirt that night, or how 1*1 may very well equal something other than 1. 

I think with the exception of professors and academics of the hard sciences, few people think that we should abandon philosophy wholesale. For the most part, the reason the laity tend to tune out conversations by and from philosophers is that it just doesn’t seem relevant to their daily lives. What do you mean numbers aren’t real? I get so many dollars per paycheck and need to add up my expenses and make sure that they’re less that; seems real to me. Why is it even a question if the table is really there? It holds up my drink and dinner plate just fine; it must be there to be able to do that in the first place. 

But that complacency has its own ironic twist. The Catholic Church may breathe with both lungs, and the New Atheism breathes with its own two lungs: Natural Science and Philosophy. Whether the majority of us like it or not, the contra-religious and metaethical arguments that fuel the entire apparatus come from the philosophy lung. The theist is at least aware of the role of philosophy in this dialogue, as he will quote christian philosophers in response to certain arguments or at the very least have a laundry list of philosophers to blame for the post christian world. The scientist may well fall asleep in philosophy class when everyone is talking about whether or not the table is really there, but when his research shows that sometimes we perceive things incorrectly? His first impulse seems to be to publish a New York Times best seller about the implications for how we know what we know about reality as if he was the first one ever to ask such a question. He seems to simultaneously want the question of whether or not the table is there to just be silly word games until it can snag him a Nobel Prize. We really need to get a group of people together to think about how we think about things…