I am currently supervising a student writing a paper on Wittgenstein’s notion of therapy as a metaphilosophical concept. The paper relies centrally on a very useful distinction discussed in N. Rescher’s 1985 book The Strife of Systems (though I do not know whether it was introduced there for the first time), namely the distinction between prescriptive vs. descriptive metaphilosophy (the topic of chap. 14 of the book).
The descriptive issue of how philosophy has been done is one of factual inquiry largely to be handled in terms of the history of the field. But the normative issue of how philosophy should be done – or significant questions, adequate solutions, and good arguments – is something very different. (Rescher 1985, 261)
Rescher goes on to argue that descriptive metaphilosophy is not part of philosophy at all; it is a branch of factual inquiry, namely the history of philosophy and perhaps its sociology. Prescriptive metaphilosophy, by contrast, is real philosophy: methodological claims on how philosophy should be done are themselves philosophical claims. (Full disclosure: I haven’t read the whole chapter, only what google books allows me to see…) Rescher’s position as described here seems to be quite widespread, encapsulating the ‘disdain’ with which not only descriptive metaphilosophy, but also the history of philosophy in general, is often viewed by ‘real philosophers’. And yet, this position seems to me to be fundamentally wrong (and this is also the claim that my student is defending in his paper).
(Notice that to discuss the status of descriptive metaphilosophy as philosophy, we need to go meta-metaphilosophical! It’s turtles all the way up, or down, depending on how you look at it.)
In a number of posts, I’ve argued for the purely philosophical value of historical analyses, as opposed to their ‘merely’ historical value. I argued that the history of philosophy can provide an antidote to excessive reliance on philosophical ‘intuitions’, by revealing the substantive assumptions made along the way which led to the establishment of these intuitions, now often viewed as ‘truisms’. Inspired by Nietzsche and Foucault, I call the enterprise of tracing the history of a given philosophical concept conceptual genealogy. It now seems to me that what I’ve been arguing for all along, in Rescher’s terms, is for the importance of descriptive metaphilosophy for the enterprise of prescriptive metaphilosophy, and thus for the claim that historically-informed descriptive metaphilosophy is indeed part of philosophy tout court, just as prescriptive metaphilosophy. More to the point, I’ve been claiming that prescriptive metaphilosophy desperately needs descriptive metaphilosophy.
Let me make this point more concrete with a specific example. Some years ago, in the context of my research project on formal languages and formalization (it eventually culminated in my book Formal Languages in Logic, which has overt metaphilosophical prescriptive ambitions!), I figured that the first step would be to obtain a better grasp of what the qualification ‘formal’ means in the phrase ‘formal languages’. And thus, I began to investigate the very notion of the formal as it had unfolded throughout the history of logic and philosophy, so as to ascertain what is distinctive about formal languages, formalization and formal methods more generally. It seemed obvious to me that the metaphilosophical discussion on formal methods had much to benefit from a better understanding of the concept of the formal, and this in turn was to be achieved through an examination of the different meanings of ‘formal’ entertained by different people at different times. How else?
Alas, what was obvious to me was far from obvious to others… Although my findings were for the most part received with interest by historically minded philosophers, many people seemed to see them as utterly unimportant from the point of view of purely philosophical debates. In my paper ‘The different ways in which logic is (said to be) formal’ I presented these findings in terms of Wittgenstein’s notion of the ‘grammar’ of a term – in this case, the term ‘formal’ (not coincidentally, the Wittgensteinian notion of ‘grammar’ also figures prominently in my student’s paper). The paper was harshly criticized by a number of referees for different journals (until it finally found a home in History and Philosophy of Logic); in particular, it was described as having ‘no real philosophical value’. And yet, it seemed to me that a careful analysis of the concept of the formal in its many senses was much needed, in particular in view of debates in philosophy of logic where the notion of the formal plays an important role (e.g. debates on the concept of logical consequence), but where it is not clear whether people are not talking past each other in virtue of (tacitly and unwittingly) adopting different meanings for the term.
But all is well that ends well, and now that the paper is published, I am often told by colleagues that they found the paper quite helpful, in particular the taxonomy of notions of the formal on the basis of two clusters (formal as pertaining to forms – opposite: material – and formal as pertaining to rules – opposite: informal). After all, aren’t we philosophers in the business of conceptual analysis, striving for clarity and precision in our uses of terminology? For certain philosophically laden terms, how are we to achieve conceptual clarity if not by examining the different ways in which these terms have been and are currently used – that is, the ‘grammar’ of the term?
So I conclude by saying that, while Rescher’s distinction between descriptive vs. prescriptive metaphilosophy remains very useful, I don’t quite see how prescriptive metaphilosophy can be competently done without at least some dose of descriptive metaphilosophy, and especially attention to the history of philosophy.
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