OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/1/2021, SPi The Practical Origins of Ideas OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/1/2021, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/1/2021, SPi The Practical Origins of Ideas Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering MATTHIEU QUELOZ 1 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/1/2021, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Matthieu Queloz 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The pre-press of this publication was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of this licence should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020951579 ISBN 978–0–19–886870–5 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198868705.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/1/2021, SPi For my parents OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/1/2021, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/1/2021, SPi Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Abbreviations xi 1. Why We Came to Think as We Do 1 1.1 Bringing the Pragmatic Genealogical Tradition into View 4 1.2 A Systematic Account of the Method 8 1.3 Doing Systematic Philosophy by Doing History of Philosophy 17 2. The Benefits of Reverse-Engineering 20 2.1 From a Practical Point of View 20 2.2 Seven Virtues of Conceptual Reverse-Engineering 22 2.3 Explanation Without Reduction 31 2.4 Weakening and Strengthening Confidence 38 2.5 Responsible Conceptual Engineering 41 2.6 Genealogy’s Place in the Methodological Landscape 43 3. When Genealogy Is Called For 48 3.1 Fictionalizing and Historicizing 49 3.2 Self-Effacing Functionality 54 3.3 Nietzsche’s Challenge: Historical Inflection and Local Needs 59 4. Ideas as Remedies to Inconveniences: David Hume 71 4.1 Motivating Genealogy: Artificiality and the Circle Argument 73 4.2 A Remedy to Conflict Over External Goods 76 4.3 De-Instrumentalizing Justice 81 4.4 Promising: Enabling Reciprocal Cooperation Over Time 86 4.5 The Functions of the State of Nature 88 5. A Genetic History of Thought: Friedrich Nietzsche 100 5.1 Philosophers’ Dehistoricizing and Denaturalizing Tendencies 102 5.2 Concepts Conditioned by History and Functionality 106 5.3 Nietzsche’s Vindicatory English Genealogies 110 5.4 Hypertrophy: Taking a Good Thing Too Far 123 5.5 Thinking Historically 126 6. Loosening the Need-Concept Tie: Edward Craig 132 6.1 Fictional Starting Points 135 6.2 What Informants Need to Be 139 6.3 A Genealogy Showing There to Be No Room for Genealogy 141 6.4 The Art of Our Necessities Is Strange: De-Instrumentalization 146 6.5 Assessing and Synthesizing Competing Accounts of Concepts 149 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/1/2021, SPi viii 7. The Uses of Intrinsic Value: Bernard Williams 155 7.1 Truth: What Needs Defending? 156 7.2 The Point of Valuing the Truth Intrinsically 159 7.3 Reading Williams as a Cambridge Pragmatist 175 7.4 McGinn’s Three Challenges and Self-Effacing Functionality 178 7.5 A Pessimism of Strength: Williams’s Debt to Nietzsche 187 8. A Political and Ameliorative State of Nature: Miranda Fricker 193 8.1 Good Recipients of Information 194 8.2 De-Idealizing as Far as Necessary and as Little as Possible 197 8.3 Pairing Genealogical Explanation with a Theory of Error 199 8.4 Making Ameliorative Use of Pragmatic Genealogy 201 9. The Normative Significance of Pragmatic Genealogies 212 9.1 Genetic Fallacies and the Ways Around Them 213 9.2 Understanding Pointfulness and Avoiding Continuity Failures 221 9.3 The State of Nature as a Model of Local Problems 231 9.4 Contested Needs and the Conception of the Agent 236 10. Ideas Worth Having 243 10.1 Grounding Socratic in Pragmatic Inquiry 243 10.2 Pursuing Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline 244 Bibliography 249 Index 275 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/1/2021, SPi Acknowledgements This book builds on a series of published articles, and I am grateful to the publishers for permission to draw on them here. Chapter 3 incorporates material that appeared as ‘From Paradigm-Based Explanation to Pragmatic Genealogy’, Mind, 129, no. 515 (2020), 683–714, by permission of Oxford University Press, Copyright © 2019. Chapter 5 draws on ‘Nietzsche’s Pragmatic Genealogy of Justice’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 25, no. 4 (2017), 727–49, by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., Copyright © 2017, and ‘Nietzsche’s English Genealogy of Truthfulness’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 103, no. 2 (2021), by permission of Walter de Gruyter, Copyright © 2021. Parts of Chapter 6 echo ‘Genealogy and Knowledge-First Epistemology: A Mismatch?’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 69, no. 274 (2019), 100–20, by permission of Oxford University Press, Copyright © 2019. Chapter 7 is based on ‘Williams’s Pragmatic Genealogy and Self-Effacing Functionality’, Philosophers’ Imprint, 18, no. 17 (2018), 1–20, by permission of Michigan Publishing, Copyright © 2018, while Chapter 9 builds on ‘How Genealogies Can Affect the Space of Reasons’, Synthese, 197, no. 5 (2020), 2005–27, by permission of Springer Nature, Copyright © 2018. The quotation from Sally Haslanger on page xiii is from ‘Social Meaning and Philosophical Method’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 88 (2014): 16–37. These articles grew out of a dissertation written under the auspices of Markus Wild and Martin Kusch. I am grateful to them for their unfailing support and generosity as well as for encouraging me to write this book, which would not be the same without their incisive comments and suggestions. Many of the ideas presented in the book took shape over years of stimulating discussion with Damian Cueni, who did a great deal to sharpen and enrich them along the way. I have also been fortunate to have such a supportive editor in Peter Momtchiloff and to receive such thoughtful comments from two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press. While working on this book, I have benefited on several occasions from the help and advice of Hanjo Glock, Simon Blackburn, and Amia Srinivasan, whose influence on my thinking has been profound. My debt to Miranda Fricker’s work will be evident in the many places where I discuss it, but not the generosity with which she provided comments on the third chapter and encouraged the project thereafter. The bulk of the book was written in the supportive atmosphere of the Philosophy Seminar of the University of Basel, and I am indebted to Anne OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/1/2021, SPi x Meylan, Basil Müller, Brigitte Hilmer, Christine Sievers, Deborah Mühlebach, Friederike Zenker, Gunnar Hindrichs, Hubert Schnüriger, Jan Müller, Jelscha Schmid, Julia Wentzlaff, Marie van Loon, Mario Schärli, Melanie Sarzano, Michael O’Leary, Muriel Leuenberger, Nico Müller, and Thomas Jacobi for discussions of early versions of the material. I am also grateful for the help I received from Alexander Fischer, Anna Lettieri-Beck, Bettina Huber, Dominik Renner, Emil Angehrn, Marc Sommer, Nadja Heller Higy, Pietro Snider, Samuel Tscharner, Simone Chambers, Susanne Kress, and Susanne Schmetkamp. A particular debt is to Rebekka Hufendiek, who, as a fellow explorer of geneal- ogies, accompanied the book from its inception. I owe the opportunity to explore the ideas that became this book to the Swiss National Science Foundation’s wonderful career-funding schemes. An Excellent Junior Researcher Grant of the Max Geldner Foundation then enabled me to concentrate on revising the manu- script for another year before finalizing it in the vibrant intellectual environment of Wolfson College, Oxford. It does take a village to write a book, and I have received help and suggestions at various junctures from Adrian Moore, Alexander Prescott-Couch, Andreas Cremonini, Andreas Müller, Andreas Urs Sommer, Andrew Huddleston, Anna Goppel, Ariane Schneck, Benedict Vischer, Brian Leiter, Cheryl Misak, Chris Janaway, Claus Beisbart, Constantine Sandis, Daniel James, David Owen, David Wörner, Dominique Kuenzle, Emma Tieffenbach, Francesco Testini, Friedemann Bieber, Georg Brun, Hallvard Lillehammer, Herman Cappelen, Jennifer Marušic, Joachim Schulte, Johannes Steizinger, John Brennan, John Skorupski, Joseph Schear, Katherina Kinzel, Katia Saporiti, Ken Gemes, Livia von Samson- Himmelstjerna, Lorenzo Greco, Manuel Dries, Marcel van Ackeren, Marco Toscano, Mario Brandhorst, Mark Wrathall, Markus Stepanians, Michael Hannon, Michel Meliopoulos, Mindaugas Gilautis, Nicholas Smyth, Nicole Rathgeb, Nikhil Krishnan, Olivier Massin, Patricia Williams, Paul de Font-Reaulx, Paul Roth, Paul Russell, Peter Kail, Philip Pettit, Philippe Queloz, Raphael van Riel, Robin McKenna, Ruth Millikan, and Scott Jenkins.