This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 20, Issue 4, from 2010.
I do a fair amount of talking in public these days and inevitably I get the occasional bit of audience participation that doesn’t go my way. In Derbyshire this summer, for example, I was told by a perfectly civil and friendly questioner that he had been following my work for some time, thought he knew what my strengths were, and didn’t think my latest book played to them.
At Edinburgh a few months later, an indignant interlocutor informed the entire panel I was sitting on that we were not qualified to say anything on the subject of nature and nurture because we weren’t able to instantly identify Hans Eysenck from his cryptic description. “Is this a crossword puzzle?” the philosopher Simon Blackburn asked him, before getting the right answer.
The crowd at a London Skeptics in the Pub meeting was not nearly so rude or eccentric, but the last question I faced there left me musing for some while. Apparently, in some kind of pre-talk web chat, someone had said that I would be “a good speaker but hard to pin down”. What did I feel about that?
Obviously, I had no quarrel with the first part. But am I hard to pin down? And if so, is that a bad thing?
There are clearly bad ways of being hard to pin down. Being slippery as a means to disguise a deficit of precision or clarity in your own mind is an old trick. Even here, however, it can sometimes be excused. Politicians are masters of this particular game, and sometimes that is for the very good reason that it is too soon to commit either way and leaving options open is the best bet.
A different kind of unpindownability concerns commitment, whether it’s to meet at a certain place or time, pledge yourself to your beloved or say exactly what it is you’ll do if you get elected. People who are persistently elusive in this way are at the very best trying and at worst impossible.
However, sometimes it is good to avoid nailing your flag to a mast. The late Bernard Williams was perhaps the best example of a great thinker who hardly ever took a stance on anything. “There are two subjects on which I’ve had more or less positions, I guess,” he told me when I interviewed him shortly before his death. The reason for this is that he thinks “philosophy starts from realising we don’t understand our own activities and thoughts. I guess what I think most about is opening up ways of showing people that we don’t understand our own thoughts, and then suggesting ways in which we might get a better hold of it.”
That’s the kind of unpindownability I like. It’s not because of any evasion, it’s because what one is trying to do is get people to think better and more clearly about difficult issues, without pretending to resolve them and have a clear position yourself. I think that’s an important philosophical task.
A properly sceptical outlook requires one to be fully aware of what we do not know and to be willing to live with that uncertainty, rather than reach for answers that are not substantiated.
Philosophy itself, however, has not always exhibited wisdom in this regard. In the twentieth century, for example, much British and American philosophy was concerned with replacing the messy vagueness of ordinary language with a purer, more exact language of logic.
The problem is that logic is only precise if it remains entirely a formal matter of syntax and symbols. But to give it content, you have to translate propositions into it from the language of real speech. So, for example, “All true sceptics are careful judgers” can be formalised as (“x)(Fx ® Gx), where F is the property of being a true sceptic and G is the property of being a careful judger. Apparently.
However, nice though it is to have neat symbols you can now get to work on, the fact remains that the properties of being a true sceptic and a good judger are just as imprecise as they were when we started.
No problem, you might think. Let’s just get more precise about them. This philosophers try to do, by specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions of something being whatever it is. Hence we can say that “x is a good judger if and only if …” and then go on to specify what the conditions are.
Alas, this task is also doomed to failure. Sure, you can come up with some good criteria which help pin the concept of good judgement down a little, but it unrealistic to suppose you could ever define such a concept as precisely as, say, water can be defined as H2O. In any case, since you’re always using other words to clarify what you mean, imprecision can never be fully avoided.
So although the project of getting more precise and pinning down as much as possible is a worthwhile one, the fact that some things remain hard to pin down should not be a cause of surprise and alarm.
Incidentally, I was told by a rather drunk skeptic at the end of my talk that some people were muttering that the t-shirt I was wearing was not only an unflattering colour, it also drew attention to my ‘man boobs’. It seems some of my failings are all too easy to pin down.
