The following is excerpted from a November 2004 entry on my first weblog. I like Stove's political conservatism but I don't much cotton to his positivism. The original entry of 2004 is prefaced with a polemical screed in which I denounce Stove as an anti-philosopher, and with some justice. But nowadays I direct my polemic only against my political enemies, holding, as I have for quite a few years now, that polemic has no place in philosophy proper.
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My focus will be on The Plato Cult (Basil Blackwell, 1991), and for now mainly the preface thereto. Stove tells us that "the few pages of this preface will be sufficient to make clear what my view is, and even, I believe, to justify it." (p. vii) His view is "best called positivistic." (ibid.) The "basic proposition of Positivism" is that "there is something fearfully wrong with typical philosophical theories." (p. xi, italics in original) Stove claims to "prove" this thesis. (ibid.) From Stove’s perspective, "what a spectacle of nightmare-irrationality is the history of philosophy!" (p. xi)
We are all familiar with A. N. Whitehead’s remark that "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." (Process and Reality, p. 39). Whitehead meant this in praise of Plato. For Stove, however, Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Berkeley, and a host of other philosophers deemed great, are "dangerous lunatics." (p. 184) They espouse views that cannot be taken seriously by any sane person. Let us consider what Stove has to say about Berkeley:
Berkeley held that there are no physical objects: that there was no right hand behind his ideas of his left hand, no wig behind his ideas of his wig, and so on. Indeed, he said, there is nothing at all behind any of our ideas of physical objects, except the will of God that we should have those ideas when we do. Yet Berkeley was a physical object himself, after all – born of a certain woman, author of certain printed books, and so forth – and he knew it. (p. ix)
Stove’s misunderstanding is so deep that it takes the breath away. Berkeley did not hold that there are no physical objects; what he gave us was a theory of their ontological constitution. That there are physical objects is self-evident, a datum, a starting point; what they are, and how they exist, however, are questions open to dispute. To deny the existence of physical objects would of course be lunacy. But to give an analysis of them in terms of ideas, an analysis that identifies them with clusters of coherent ideas, is not a lunatic project. It is no more a lunatic endeavor than that of analyzing thoughts (and mental states generally) in terms of brain states.
Suppose we explore this comparison a bit. It is prima facie reasonable to hold that our thoughts are identical with complex states of our brains. (I don’t think that this is true, and I think that there are formidable arguments to the contrary, but the reasonable and the true are two, not one.) Accordingly, my thinking about Stove is a state of my brain. Suppose a philosopher propounds the following theory: Every (token) mental state is numerically identical to some (token) brain state. Someone who holds such a token-token identity theory is obviously not denying the existence of mental states; what he is doing is presupposing their existence and giving us a theory of what they are in ultimate reality. What he is saying is that these mental states of which we are introspectively aware are really just brain states; they are not states of an immaterial thinking substance. (One could of course argue that this identity theory is unstable and, given a few pokes, topples over into eliminativism about the mental; to discuss this instability, however, is beyond the scope of this entry.)
Now if the project of reducing the mental to the physical avoids lunacy, then the same goes for the reduction in the opposite direction. If it is not ‘loony’ to say that the perceiving of a coffee cup is a state of my brain, why is it ‘loony’ to say that the coffee cup perceived is a bundle or cluster of ideas (to be precise: accusatives of mental acts)? Either both of these views belong in the lunatic asylum or neither do.
Note also that if one cannot analyze the physical in terms of the mental, or the mental in terms of the physical, on pain of going insane, then one also cannot analyze the universal in terms of the particular, or the particular in terms of the universal. And yet philosophers do this all the time without seeming to lose their grip on reality.
Take the obvious fact that things have properties. These two tomatoes are both (the same shade of) red. That things have properties is a datum; what properties are, however, and how they exist, is not a datum but a problem. It appears that our two tomatoes have something in common, namely, their being red. This suggests that redness is a universal, an entity repeated in each of the tomatoes. Some philosophers resist this suggestion by maintaining that, although both tomatoes are red, each has its own redness. They then analyze the seeming commonality of redness in some other way, say, as deriving from a mental act of abstraction, r in terms of trope resemblance-classes.
Metaphysical reductions (of the mental to the physical, the physical to the mental, the universal to the particular, the particular to the universal, the modal to the non-modal, the normative to the non-normative, etc.) seem to be as meaningful as scientific reductions. The identification of lightning with an atmospheric electrical discharge; of a puddle of water with a collection of H20 molecules; of a light beam with a stream of photons – none of these identifications are intended by their proponents as lunatic denials of the phenomena to be reduced. There are of course interesting questions about when identifications collapse into eliminations; but the point here is that no denial of existence is intended.
Philosophers, like scientists, are not in the business of denying obvious facts; they are out to understand them. The project of understanding aims at the reality behind the appearance. Stove cannot seem to wrap his mind around this simple notion.
I may have more to say about Stove later. He is dangerous enough to be worth taking apart piece by piece. One good thing about him, though: he is politically conservative. (I left the political tone of this last paragraph in place to give you a flavor of the original.)
