Philosophy as Naïve Auto-Anthropology

Patrick Hayes, the artificial intelligence researcher, once set out on a project to axiomatize the naïve (or folk) physics of liquids. The idea was to provide a robot with the propositions it would need to use as its core beliefs if it was going to interact with people (who rely on folk physics every day). It proved to be more challenging than he had anticipated, and he wrote an interesting paper about the project, “The Naïve Physics Manifesto” (Hayes, 1978). In the naïve physics of liquids, everything that strikes naïve folks as counterintuitive is, of course, ruled out: siphons are “impossible” and so are pipettes, but you can mop up liquid with a fluffy towel, and pull water out of a well with a suction pump. A robot equipped with such a store of “knowledge” would be as surprised by a siphon as most of us were when first we saw one in action. Hayes’s project was what I would call sophisticated naïve physics, because he was under no illusions; he knew the theory he was trying to axiomatize was false, however useful in daily life. This was an exercise in what might be called axiomatic anthropology: you treat what the folks say—and agree about—as your axioms or theorems, and try to render the data set consistent, resolving any contradictions encountered. And, of course, he didn’t bother rounding up any actual informants; he figured that he knew the naïve physics of liquids as well as any normal person did, so he used himself as his sole informant: axiomatic auto-anthropology.

Now compare Hayes’s project with the philosophical projects in analytic metaphysics, which often strike me as naïve naïve auto-anthropology since the participants in this research seem to be convinced that their program actually gets at something true, not just something believed true by a particular subclass of human beings (Anglophone philosophers of the analytic metaphysics persuasion). Otherwise, the programs seem identical: you gather your shared intuitions, test and provoke them by engaging in mutual intuition-pumping, and then try to massage the resulting data set into a consistent “theory,” based on “received” principles that count, ideally, as axioms. I’ve asked a number of analytic metaphysicians whether they can distinguish their enterprise from naïve naïve auto-anthropology of their clan, and have not yet received any compelling answers.

The alternative is sophisticated naïve anthropology (both auto- and hetero-)—the anthropology that reserves judgment about whether any of the theorems adduced by the exercise deserve to be trusted—and this is a feasible and frequently valuable project. I propose that this is the enterprise to which analytic metaphysicians should turn, since it requires rather minimal adjustments to their methods and only one major revision of their raison d’être: they must roll back their pretensions and acknowledge that their research is best seen as a preparatory reconnaissance of the terrain of the manifest image, suspending both belief and disbelief the way anthropologists do when studying an exotic culture: let’s pretend for the nonce that the natives are right, and see what falls out. Since at least a large part of philosophy’s task, in my vision of the discipline, consists in negotiating the traffic back and forth between the manifest and scientific images, it is a good idea for philosophers to analyze what they are up against in the way of folk assumptions before launching into their theory-building and theory-criticizing.

One of the hallmarks of sophisticated naïve anthropology is its openness to counterintuitive discoveries. As long as you’re doing naïve anthropology, counterintuitiveness (to the natives) counts against your reconstruction; when you shift gears and begin asking which aspects of the naïve “theory” are true, counterintuitiveness loses its force as an objection and even becomes, on occasion, a sign of significant progress. In science in general, counterintuitive results are prized, after all.

One of the weaknesses of auto-anthropology is that one’s own intuitions are apt to be distorted by one’s theoretical predilections. Linguists have known for a long time that they get so wrapped up in their theories they are no longer reliable sources of linguistic intuition. Can you really say in English, “The boy the man the woman kissed punched ran away,” or is my theory of clause embedding tricking my “ear”? Their raw, untutored intuitions have been sullied by too much theory, so they recognize that they must go out and ask nonlinguists for their linguistic intuitions. Philosophers have recently begun to appreciate this point, in the new enthusiasm for so-called experimental philosophy (see Knobe and Nichols, 2008). It is early days still, and some of the pioneer efforts are unimpressive, but at least philosophers are getting used to the idea that they can no longer declare various propositions to be obviously true on the sole grounds that they seem smashingly obvious to them. (In a similar vein, Hayes might have surprised himself about the chief tenets of folk physics if he had gone to the trouble of interviewing a random sample of folk instead of just treating himself as exemplary.)

So here is a project, a particular sort of sophisticated naïve anthropology, that philosophers should seriously consider undertaking as a survey of the terrain of the commonsense or manifest image of the world before launching into their theories of knowledge, justice, beauty, truth, goodness, time, causation, and so on, to make sure they actually aim their analyses and arguments at targets that are relevant to the rest of the world, both lay concerns and scientific concerns. Such a systematic inquiry would yield something like a catalogue of the unreformed conceptual terrain that sets the problems for the theorist, the metaphysics of the manifest image, if you like. This is where we philosophers have to start in our attempts to negotiate back and forth between the latest innovations in the scientific image, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a careful map of this folk terrain instead of just eyeballing it. This is the other half, one might say, of the reform that turned philosophy of science from an armchair fantasy field into a serious partnership with actual science, when philosophers of science decided that they really had to know a lot of current science from the inside. Once we think about our philosophical tasks with this image in mind, we can see that a great deal of the informal trudging around, backing and filling, counterexample-mongering and intuition-busting that fills the pages of philosophy journals is—at best—an attempt to organize a mutually acceptable consensus about this territory.

[1] Hayes’s work inspired others. See the anthology edited by Bobrow (1985). Authors of one of the essays therein remark, “Naïve physics is in itself an ambiguous term. Is it just bad physics? Is it psychology? Artificial intelligence? Physics?” (Bobrow, 1985, p. 13). The answer, I submit, is that naïve physics is the attempt to make the physics part of our manifest image rigorous enough to support automated deductive reasoning.