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The Practical Origins of Ideas The Practical Origins of Ideas Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering MATTHIEU QUELOZ Under contract with Oxford University Press Abstract Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the practical point of coming to think in these terms? This book uncovers, develops, and defends a philosophical method that aims to answer such questions. This is the method of pragmatic genealogy: the telling of developmental narratives that seek to make sense of ideas in terms of their practical origins. Two principal theses structure the book. The first is that there is a pragmatic genealogical tradition which cuts across the analytic-continental divide, a tradition running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to more recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalising and historicising in ways that even those sympathetic to genealogy have found puzzling. Hence the book’s second, systematic thesis: we understand why both the fictionalising and the historicising are called for if we interpret these genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation to generic and socio-historically local needs. Pragmatic genealogy then emerges as having two attractive features. Far from issuing in the kind of reductively instrumental view of things often associated with naturalism, pragmatism, and genealogy, the method offers us explanation without reduction, helping us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. And far from being normatively inert in the way that genealogical explanations are commonly taken to be, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having. Keywords: Philosophical Methodology,Conceptual Reverse-Engineering, Con- ceptual Ethics, Genealogy, Cambridge Pragmatism, Naturalism, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, E. J. Craig, Bernard Williams, Miranda Fricker. Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations. J. L. A Concepts are neither true nor false, but they can be evaluated: do we have reason to track the distinction drawn by the concept? Should we have this or that concept in our repertoire at all? S. H Table of Contents Preface vi 1 Why We Came to Think as We Do 1 Bringing the Pragmatic Genealogical Tradition into View 3 A Systematic Account of the Method 6 Doing Systematic Philosophy by Doing History of Philosophy 25 2 The Benefits of Reverse-Engineering 32 From a Practical Point of View 32 Seven Virtues of Conceptual Reverse-Engineering 33 Explanation Without Reduction 37 Weakening and Strengthening Confidence 44 Responsible Conceptual Engineering 45 Situating Pragmatic Genealogy in the Methodological Landscape 46 3 When Genealogy Is Called For 50 Fictionalising and Historicising 53 Self-Effacing Functionality 69 Nietzsche’s Challenge: Historical Inflection and Local Needs 76 4 Ideas as Remedies to Inconveniences: David Hume 96 Motivating Genealogy: Artificiality and the Circle Argument 100 A Remedy to Conflict Over External Goods 103 De-Instrumentalising Justice 111 Promising: Enabling Reciprocal Cooperation Over Time 120 The Functions of the State of Nature 123 5 A Genetic History of Thought: Friedrich Nietzsche 140 Philosophers’ Dehistoricising and Denaturalising Tendencies 143 Concepts Conditioned by History and Functionality 149 Nietzsche’s Vindicatory English Genealogies 156 Hypertrophy: Taking A Good Thing Too Far 176 Thinking Historically 180 6 Loosening the Need-Concept Tie: Edward Craig 188 Fictional Starting Points 192 What Informants Need to Be 199 A Genealogy Showing There to Be No Room for Genealogy 202 The De-Instrumentalisation of Concepts 209 Assessing and Synthesising Competing Accounts of Concepts 214 7 The Uses of Intrinsic Value: Bernard Williams 222 Truth: What Needs Defending? 224 The Point of Valuing the Truth Intrinsically 229 Reading Williams as a Cambridge Pragmatist 253 McGinn’s Three Challenges and Self-Effacing Functionality 257 A Pessimism of Strength: Williams’s Debt to Nietzsche 272 8 A Political and Ameliorative State of Nature: Miranda Fricker 279 Good Recipients of Information 281 De-Idealising as Far as Necessary and as Little as Possible 285 Pairing Genealogical Explanation with a Theory of Error 288 Making Ameliorative Use of Pragmatic Genealogy 291 9 The Normative Significance of Pragmatic Genealogy 306 Genetic Fallacies and the Ways Around Them 307 Understanding Pointfulness and Avoiding Continuity Failures 316 The State of Nature as a Model of Local Problems 327 Contested Needs and the Conception of the Agent 334 10 Ideas Worth Having 343 Grounding Socratic in Pragmatic Inquiry 343 Pursuing Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline 345 Bibliography 350.
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