Since leaving NYU, I’ve increasingly shifted my focus from ethics and political philosophy, the topics that most occupied me there, to certain issues in the philosophies of logic and language. There’s a kind of continuity there, since I’ve always taken a core underlying problem, whose clarification would help us make headway in any of those fields, to be the question of what, exactly, “reasons” are and how they work. (That is, what sort of game are we playing when we say that someone has a reason to do, or to believe, such-and-such?) Still, it’s clearly a departure.
I’d represented this shift in interest to myself partly as just a desire to think about something new, and partly as a pragmatic matter. If I’m actually going to write about these matters for a living one day (I thought), it might be better to establish some level of competence doing more technical stuff, and wait to write about poltics — where my views aren’t terribly popular with the professoriat — once I’m tenured somewhere. I could be “outed” pretty quickly by Google, of course, but it wouldn’t matter that much if I were looking for a position teaching formal logic. But as I was reading the introduction to Putnam’s Representation and Reality today, I realized there’s another reason I hadn’t quite allowed myself to acknowledge. He writes:
The fact that I change my mind in philosophy has been viewed as a character defect. When I am lighthearted, I retort that it might be that I change my mind so often because I make mistakes, and that other philosophers don’t change their minds because they simply never make mistakes. But I should like now, for once, to say something serious about this. […]
Carnap is still the outstanding example of a human being who puts the search for truth higher than personal vanity. A philosopher’s job is not to produce a view X and then, if possible, to become universally known as “Mr. View X” or “Ms. View X.” If philosophical investigations (a phrase made famous by another philosopher who “changed his mind”) contribute to the thousands-of-years-old dialogue which is philosophy, if they deepen our understanding of the riddles we refer to as “philosophical problems,” then the philosopher who conducts those investigations is doing the job right.
Well, I’m no longer sufficiently confident in my own ability to change my mind in politics. I don’t think I’ve become a rigid dogmatist just yet, but I now have a personal stake in my current views. My politics have become entangled with my social circle and my “public persona.” Not that I’d wish it otherwise: I genuinely think my views are more or less correct, and it would be weird if I didn’t care enough about my own conception of justice to become actively involved in promoting it, both solo and with others. Still, I’ve “got a dog in the race” now. If some argument threatened to force a major revision of my views, I’d have a powerful personal incentive to sweep it under the rug, or to allow myself to be satisfied with a response to it that wasn’t fully adequate. What is a necessary virtue in an activist would be a monstrous deficiency in a philosopher. I think that’s a big part of the reason Nozick never really replied to critics of Anarchy, State and Utopia. He didn’t want to become (as they used to call Murray Rothbard) “Mr. Libertarianism.” I hope, if push came to shove, I’d have the integrity to jettison the views I now hold. But I’m unsettled to realize that I no longer fully trust myself to do so. Good thing I find logic & language interesting, or I’d have to start looking for a new career plan.
