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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 What Genealogy Can Do For Us 32 The Benefits of Conceptual Reverse-Engineering 32 Explanation Without Reduction 36 Weakening and Strengthening Confidence 42 Situating Pragmatic Genealogy in the Methodological Landscape 45 3 When Genealogy Is Called For 48 Fictionalising and Historicising 51 Self-Effacing Functionality 67 Nietzsche’s Challenge: Historical Inflection and Local Needs 74 4 Ideas as Remedies to Inconveniences: David Hume 94 Motivating Genealogy: Artificiality and the Circle Argument 98 A Remedy to Conflict Over External Goods 101 De-Instrumentalising Justice 109 Promising: Enabling Reciprocal Cooperation Over Time 118 The Functions of the State of Nature 121 5 A Genetic History of Thought: Friedrich Nietzsche 138 Philosophers’ Dehistoricising and Denaturalising Tendencies 141 Concepts Conditioned by History and Functionality 147 Nietzsche’s Vindicatory English Genealogies 154 Hypertrophy: Taking A Good Thing Too Far 174 Thinking Historically 178 6 Loosening the Need-Concept Tie: Edward Craig 186 Fictional Starting Points 190 What Informants Need to Be 197 A Genealogy Showing There to Be No Room for Genealogy 200 The De-Instrumentalisation of Concepts 207 Assessing and Synthesising Competing Accounts of Concepts 212 7 The Uses of Intrinsic Value: Bernard Williams 220 Truth: What Needs Defending? 222 The Point of Valuing the Truth Intrinsically 227 Reading Williams as a Cambridge Pragmatist 251 McGinn’s Three Challenges and Self-Effacing Functionality 255 A Pessimism of Strength: Williams’s Debt to Nietzsche 270 8 A Political and Ameliorative State of Nature: Miranda Fricker 277 Good Recipients of Information 279 De-Idealising as Far as Necessary and as Little as Possible 283 Pairing Genealogical Explanation with a Theory of Error 286 Making Ameliorative Use of Pragmatic Genealogy 289 9 The Normative Significance of Pragmatic Genealogy 304 Genetic Fallacies and the Ways Around Them 305 Understanding Pointfulness and Avoiding Continuity Failures 314 The State of Nature as a Model of Local Problems 325 Contested Needs and the Conception of the Agent 332 10 Ideas Worth Having 341 Grounding Socratic in Pragmatic Inquiry 341 Pursuing Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline 343 Bibliography 348.
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