Tamar Gendler on Why Philosophers Use Examples (2014)

 Tamar Gendler on Why Philosophers Use Examples (2014)

Why do philosophers use examples? Tamar Gendler explores this question in conversation with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.

 

Nigel Warburton: This is Philosophy Bites with me, Nigel Warburton.

David Edmonds: And me, David Edmonds.

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David Edmonds: If a murderer is at your door and asks for the whereabouts of a potential victim whom you’re sheltering, are you permitted to lie to him? You might recognize the example from Immanuel Kant. But why does Kant use the example in the first place? Why do any philosophers use examples rather than just deploy pure abstract reasoning? Here’s Tamar Gendler.

Nigel Warburton: Tamar Gendler, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Tamar Gendler: Thank you so much. It’s a delight to be here.

Nigel Warburton: The topic we’re going to focus on is why philosophers use examples. That’s a really interesting question. Why do philosophers use examples?

Tamar Gendler: So, one of the most striking things when you pick up one of the works in the ancient Greek philosophical tradition, take something like Plato’s Republic, is that on the one hand it’s full of all sorts of abstract argument and on the other hand it’s full of all sorts of vivid cases. And I think Plato gives a clue to why it is that the works, the dialogues include these two sorts of things when he talks about the human as having a multi part soul. So, Plato says famously in the Republic and in several of the other dialogues that human beings are composed on the one hand of a part that he calls reason or rationality and on the other of two other parts that he calls spirit and appetite. And this distinction that human beings on the one hand have a capacity that gauges and understands the world in terms of reason and argumentation. And on the other hand have aspects of themselves that understand the world in other ways.

It’s actually a central theme both in the western philosophical and eastern philosophical traditions, and the role of examples is to talk to the other parts of the soul.

Nigel Warburton: So, when Plato uses the example of the cave, the famous example of these prisoners chained facing a wall and just seeing the flickering shadows of reflections cast by people carrying shapes in front of a fire, that elaborate metaphor isn’t there to appeal to the rational part?

Tamar Gendler: Well, it’s doing two things. One of the really interesting things about the allegory is that there’s a way of understanding it analytically. You can see what its structure is, but it also does what all metaphors do, which is it makes you attentive to patterns in the world. So, one of the things that metaphors do is they help direct your attention towards relations that hold between things that you might not otherwise recognize. So, the allegory of the cave is in an incredibly self referential way. It’s appealing to the rational part of the soul by pointing out to you what these various levels and their relations are. But it’s also appealing to the other parts of the soul by giving you vivid imagery that you can hold onto at the moments when you’re trying to understand the nature of the world.

Nigel Warburton: So, if somebody describes architecture as frozen music, then you get a new way of framing the world. Is that the idea?

Tamar Gendler: That’s right. And in fact, there are cases where we’re resistant to certain sorts of metaphorical aberrations because we don’t want those ways of looking at the world to be available to us. So, some of the amazing literature on dehumanization suggests that one of the main things that was done by various of the fascist governments in the middle of the last century was to use metaphors that equated certain groups of humans with nonhumans. And those sorts of patterns of making sense of the world end up affecting our apprehension of things in pretty profound ways.

Nigel Warburton: Now those are metaphors. Are they really examples?

Tamar Gendler: It’s an interesting question. One of the things that is hard ultimately to distinguish when you start pressing almost any dichotomy is where things that seem to lie along a spectrum belong on it. So, I think we’re pretty clear that there’s a notion of abstract logical relation that in its purest form is manifest in things like mathematics and logic. That’s part of why Plato was so obsessed with those as being the aspects that are unadulterated by the other parts of the soul. And then we can continue down from there to things that appear to affect only the non rational parts of the soul.

So, for example, Plato is very interested in the middle of the Republic about the ways in which rhythm in music marching together, dance movements, and so on interact with the parts of the soul that he thinks of as non rational. Examples, metaphors, and so on fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.

Nigel Warburton: I’d have thought the Republic was directed at philosopher kings or potential philosopher kings, and shouldn’t they just be swayed by reason, not by passion?

Tamar Gendler: So, I think all human beings, and this is something that Plato recognizes, it’s something that Aristotle recognizes, it’s something that the early moderns recognize, are evolved creatures. So, one of the things that’s so striking about the Nicomachean Ethics and also the Republic is the emphasis they place on early childhood. The reason they place this emphasis on early childhood they’re interested in the cultivation of the right sorts of instincts and habits in the non rational parts of the soul. Aristotle is constantly worried about what the non well raised one will be able to do. So, although one might think there’s a kind of idealized picture where the reason and the spirit and appetite are in harmony as the result of the proper cultivation, Plato describes these in the middle books.

As a matter of fact, no one reading the book has been raised in the way that Plato describes. Nobody reading Aristotle’s ethics is truly a well raised one. And as a consequence, the argumentation needs to include things that appeal not just to the rational part of the soul.

Nigel Warburton: Well, that explains why Plato was using this because of his particular theory about the soul. But are we all footnotes to Plato to that extent is the subsequent history of philosophy, a history of people just playing out what was implicit in Plato?

Tamar Gendler: So, one of the things that’s interesting is that it’s not just in Plato that you see this. In the non western philosophical tradition, you have a similar metaphor. The Buddhist tradition speaks of a person riding on an elephant. So instead of the metaphor that Plato uses, which is of the charioteer and the horses, the Buddhist tradition speaks of the rider and the elephant. And there are similar metaphors in most world wisdom traditions of a human being.

It’s interesting that we are identified humanly with the rational part and then of some sort of non human animal who’s also co present. So, the extent to which we’re footnotes to Plato when using examples is just the extent to which Plato is metaphorically speaking a footnote to Darwin. That is, as a matter of fact, we’re all evolved creatures. And as a consequence, we have parts of what we call the soul these days, namely the brain, which respond as the result of certain sorts of evolved patterns.

Nigel Warburton: I really like this idea, but I’m sure that many of the times I’ve used examples in philosophy, what I’m doing is illustrating something which I’ve made a generalization about, and I’m clarifying what that generalization really means by giving one or two cases that you can follow out exactly what I meant.

Tamar Gendler: Good. And it’s certainly the case that if something is universally true, it’s true in each instance [παραγωγικός συλλογισμός]. If something is true in a series of instances, then we can make a generalization about it [επαγωγικός συλλογισμός]. But one of the interesting things is that the way that we process information about generalizations and the way that we process information about particulars tends to be quite different. Whereas the processing of information about generalizations, roughly speaking, uses what Plato would call reason. The processing of information about particulars brings with it all sorts of additional features. So, some of the literature that we confront when we try to think about the relation between the statement of abstract moral principles on the one hand and instances where those principles apply. The debate about particularism in ethics is in fact the debate about exactly what you just raised. So those who are particularists who say there’s no way that we can actually come up with a generalization, we just need to look at the particular cases. And those who say any particular instance will in some sense distort what the universal claim was are concerned with tension between these two modes of processing information.

Nigel Warburton: And often the selection of a particular example is rhetorical because you’re pushing a card to somebody. You really want them to believe your generalization, so you choose the best example to persuade them.

Tamar Gendler: That’s right. And in fact, one of the implicit background topics at play here is the debate between the philosopher and the rhetorician. So in the ancient Greek world, but also throughout other wisdom traditions, there’s distinction between coming to understanding through reason and coming to understanding through some alternative mode of bringing about a change of heart. And two of the most famous of those are revelation on the one hand, which involves a change of heart that comes not through reason but through the sudden production of insight. And rhetoric on the other, which in its best versions involves a similar bringing to insight, but in some cases involves the bringing about of a change of attitude that ultimately isn’t grounded in what the person would reflectively endorse.

Nigel Warburton: That’s really interesting, because philosophy is often portrayed as the subject which focuses on reason and tries to play down not just rhetoric, but also appeals to the passions generally.

Tamar Gendler: Yes. I don’t think that if you look at philosophy as a practice, that in fact accords with what it is that philosophers for the most part are doing. Take one of the purest instances, the kind of argument that Kant gives about morality where the claim that Kant’s making, the incredibly deep and profound claim that freedom comes only with being a self law giver and that giving of the law to oneself takes the form that the categorical imperative does. Even in that work Kant feels compelled both to give you multiple formulations of the categorical imperative, so that it can become intuitive appealing in the right sorts of ways, and to give a number of instances there to help make vivid what it is that this very abstract formulation is saying. So, although it is an ideal of some but not all strands in the western philosophical tradition that reason has primacy, it’s also the case that in their practice nearly all philosophers recognize whether implicitly or explicitly that some of their argumentation needs to be involved in bringing on board the nonrational parts of the soul.

Nigel Warburton: And actually, in Philosophy Bites interviews, we often ask people to give an example to clarify exactly what they meant, but presumably also to make the view more plausible to people who hadn’t quite got what the generalization was.

Tamar Gendler: That’s exactly right. And often, we ourselves don’t quite have a sense of what it is that we’re looking for at the most abstract level. But we have several concrete cases on which we’re triangulating. And sometimes presenting those seriatim helps us see what the pattern was that we were trying to pick up on.

Nigel Warburton: So are you suggesting there’s a kind of reflective equilibrium moving between the universal and the particular there?

Tamar Gendler: So, I don’t know that we ever reach the sort of stasis that an equilibrium would suggest. The notion of reflective equilibrium, as you know, is one that’s meant to articulate what it is that happens when you work with a principal and then you work with cases and then you work back to the principal correcting for cases and so on. Equilibrium suggests that there’s a point at which you come to a stable relation between them. One question is if the rational articulation of the general principle is appealing to one part of the soul and the particular cases are appealing to another, it becomes a question whether that sort of equilibrium will in fact ever be reachable or whether in fact there might be inevitable tension between them.

Nigel Warburton: Do you think this pattern of philosophical communication maps discoveries in neuroscience, recent discoveries about the way that the brain works?

Tamar Gendler: So one of the things that’s really clear about the way that the brain works is that a very very small part at the front of it, the prefrontal cortex does the work that Plato thought the charioteer did and that pretty much everything that happens in real time all day long actually happens through various kinds of routines and habits and over learned processes, evolved processes in the back of the brain. So, if you wanted to make a prediction, what would neuroscience tell us? What neuroscience would tell us is that if anything, the metaphor of the parts of the soul understates the degree to which we should expect there to be tensions. It’s only because what we perceive in manifest behavior comes out through limited sensory organs that is we speak, we do things with our arms and legs, we do things with our eyes that there was ever any illusion that we spoke with one voice. And in fact, the literature on the discrepancies between verbal and nonverbal communication, the literature that looks at eye gaze as a predictor of what responses will be suggests over and over again that with regard to almost all of our responses to the world, there are multiple factors coming into play. And one becomes dominant, but the others were present all the way through.

Nigel Warburton: Am I right in suggesting that your view is that it’s a good thing that we, as philosophers, use examples and appeal to the passions, not just hover in that world of abstraction and universals?

Tamar Gendler: Well, you might think that’s how we do philosophy for people with brains, where what I mean by having brains is people who are evolved members of an animal kingdom of which humans are one sort. So, to do philosophy for angels might look like a different endeavor, but to do philosophy for human beings needs to look like this.

Nigel Warburton: Tamar Gendler, thank you very much.

Tamar Gendler: It was absolutely my pleasure. Thank you.

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