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(Ebook) The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy For An Age of Hyperspecialization by Elijah Millgram ISBN 9780199326020, 0199326029 Available All Format

The Great Endarkenment by Elijah Millgram explores the philosophical challenges posed by hyperspecialization in modern society, likening it to the biblical Tower of Babel where communication barriers arise from technical specialization. The book argues that while hyperspecialization is necessary for managing contemporary complexities, it creates significant obstacles to mutual understanding among different fields. Millgram emphasizes the urgent need for philosophers to address these issues, as they impact not only academic discourse but also the execution of large-scale projects essential for societal survival.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
14 views84 pages

(Ebook) The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy For An Age of Hyperspecialization by Elijah Millgram ISBN 9780199326020, 0199326029 Available All Format

The Great Endarkenment by Elijah Millgram explores the philosophical challenges posed by hyperspecialization in modern society, likening it to the biblical Tower of Babel where communication barriers arise from technical specialization. The book argues that while hyperspecialization is necessary for managing contemporary complexities, it creates significant obstacles to mutual understanding among different fields. Millgram emphasizes the urgent need for philosophers to address these issues, as they impact not only academic discourse but also the execution of large-scale projects essential for societal survival.

Uploaded by

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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The Great Endarkenment
The Great Endarkenment
PHILOSOPHY FOR AN AGE
OF HYPERSPECIALIZATION

Elijah Millgram

3
3
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.

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Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press


in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by


Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2015


All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the
appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form


and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Millgram, Elijah.
The great endarkenment : philosophy for an age of hyperspecialization / Elijah Millgram.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–0–19–932602–0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, Modern—21st
century—Methodology. 2. Specialism (Philosophy) 3. Analysis (Philosophy) I. Title.
B805.M55 2015
191—dc23
2014032204

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper


For my parents
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

1. Introductory Remarks on the Tower of Babel 1


2. The Great Endarkenment 21
Appendix A 44
Appendix B 49
3. Practical Reasoning for Serial Hyperspecializers 54
4. D’où venons-nous . . . Que sommes nous . . . Où allons-nous? 77
5. Millian Metaethics 101
6. Why Do We Think There Are Things We Ought to Do? 126
7. Lewis’s Epicycles, Possible Worlds, and the Mysteries of Modality 155
8. Progressive Necessity 188
9. Applied Ethics, Moral Skepticism, and Reasons with Expiration Dates 221
10. Segmented Agency 234
Postscript 263
11. Afterword: A Call to Arms 269

Bibliography 283
Index 297
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A number of the chapters in this volume have made previous appearances:


• “The Great Endarkenment” includes material from a review of Steven
Hales, editor, A Companion to Relativism, which appeared in Notre Dame
Philosophical Reviews, April 2012.
• “Practical Reasoning for Serial Hyperspecializers” appeared in
Philosophical Explorations 12(3): 261–278. September 2009. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd,
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals).
• “D’où venons-nous . . . Que sommes nous . . . Où allons-nous?”
originally appeared in D. Callcut, Reading Bernard Williams (London:
Routledge, 2009): 141–165.
• “Millian Metaethics” is a revised and expanded version of “Mètaètica
mìlliana,” Quaderni di Scienza Politica XVII, 2 (2010): 245–265.
• “Applied Ethics, Moral Skepticism, and Reasons with Expiration Dates”
appeared in S. Black and E. Tiffany, Reasons to be Moral Revisited
(Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009): 263–280. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher (http://www.tandfonline.com).
• “Segmented Agency” appeared in M. Vargas and G. Yaffe, Rational and
Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014): 152–189.
I am very grateful for permission to reprint. Acknowledgments are to be
found chapter by chapter, but it is especially appropriate to thank the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation here, for providing fellowship sup-
port during the time the book as a whole was being assembled. Thanks also to
Aliya Khan for proof checking.

ix
1}

Introductory Remarks on the Tower


of Babel

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to
pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of
Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us
make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone,
and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a
city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make
us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children
of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have
all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be
restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go
down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand
one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon
the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the
name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language
of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the
face of all the earth.
—genesis 11:1–9

The Kipling-like just-so story, evidently meant to explain something that has
to be a central part of any acceptable philosophical anthropology, makes a
miracle out of an inevitability, and let’s take a moment to consider why.
Putting up a skyscraper requires a great deal in the way of technical spe-
cialization; you need the architects and the code consultants, the mechanical
engineers and the plumbing engineers, the civil engineers and the landscape
architects, the waterproofing consultants and the hardware consultants, the
lighting designers and the daylighting consultant, the interior designers and
the acoustical consultants; and we haven’t so much as gotten to the specialty
consultants. On the client side, there have to be project managers, owner’s 1
2 { The Great Endarkenment

representatives, the financing team, and so on. Once the project goes into
construction, the general contractor will engage steel fabricators, roofers, elec-
tricians, plumbers, framers, drywallers, painters . . . and we have barely gotten
started on the full list.1
Now, in the course of acquiring their professional specializations, the spe-
cialists will have learned a technical vocabulary, and often enough, not just
a vocabulary, but specialized notation and techniques for manipulating it, as
when the architects learn to read blueprints or the engineering students take
calculus. They learn discipline-specific standards, guidelines, and priorities,
along with the hard-to-formulate sensibilities that allow them to work with the
approximations, idealizations, and other avowedly not-quite-true assertions
which make up such a large part of the information in any field. And when
they have come up to speed, the normal upshot is—and this much should
be familiar from almost anyone’s experience nowadays—that only a similarly
trained member of that specialization can properly understand them.
The obstacles to mutual comprehension go deeper than the fact that
outsiders cannot read specialist professional literature. Because professional
standards end up being framed in a proprietary vocabulary, one that can take
anywhere from five years to a decade to learn, outsiders cannot so much as
understand those standards. Because specialists internalize those standards,
outsiders cannot understand the specialists’ concerns and preferences (in part
because they cannot comprehend what the preferences are for, in part be-
cause outsiders cannot see why anyone would have those preferences). And
because they cannot share the technical sensibilities of the insiders, even
when people seem to understand, say, pronouncements on factual matters
in someone else’s area of expertise, they are not normally competent to use
the information they superficially understand; the information that special-
ists work with is accompanied by special handling instructions. What we saw
quaintly called confounding of language—the inability of one person to un-
derstand another—is entailed by the ability of a society to build a decently tall
tower.
We are, and are becoming ever more, a society of specialists. As recently as
the early nineteenth century, it was possible for a polymath—such as, famously
at the time, William Whewell—to master all of the science of his day.2 It is not
nearly possible any longer; specialization is far more highly articulated than at
any time in previous human history, and because this difference in degree has
come to amount to a difference in kind, I’ll mark the newly extreme form of
division of labor with the label hyperspecialization. Consequently, communi-
cation across the barriers between professions and disciplines is our own very

1 I’m grateful to Michelle Hill for background.


2 For a popular account, see Snyder (2011); Fisch (1991) is a recommended treatment of Whewell’s
philosophy.
Introductory Remarks on the Tower of Babel } 3

pressing problem, and it threatens not just our more ambitious enterprises but
the successful management of our day-to-day lives.
The builders of the Tower of Babel are represented as committing the sin
of hubris (though that is a Greek rather than a Hebrew way of putting it); so
the lesson of the tale might seem to be that we should give up on high-rise
construction and, in general, on overly ambitious technical projects. But
we cannot walk back our commitment to hyperspecialization; whatever the
drawbacks of hubris, there are at this point simply too many people on our
planet to do without this sort of division of labor.3 Hyperspecialization is
necessary if we are to keep anything on the order of our current population
alive, which is to say that the resolution of the biblical tale—geographical
dispersion into distinct societies composed of people who presumably do
speak the same language—is no longer an option for us. When the languages
in question are those of communities of experts, that would be to segregate the
specialists from one another, and specialists can only get the job done when
they work together. We have no choice but to live together and cooperate
with other individuals whom we cannot possibly understand, in executing the
large-scale and very demanding projects on which our survival now depends.

1.1

This book is devoted to the specifically philosophical problems that we face


because we live in our own version of the Tower of Babel. Now, the pro forma
disclosure: I write as an analytic philosopher. Analytic philosophers, espe-
cially, are not used to the idea that division of labor poses problems, much
less urgent ones, for them. And so, as I introduce this collection of essays, I
will need to explain why these very basic facts about contemporary society
should concern philosophers.
But now, if my primary audience does consist of philosophers, that has
consequences for the way a volume like this has to be organized. The phi-
losophers themselves, these days, are not only specialized, but subspecialized;
for instance, it is now routine for a philosopher not merely to think of him-
self as primarily, say, an ethicist or an historian, but to confine himself to an
area of moral philosophy such as virtue ethics or metaethics, or, within his-
tory, an area such as ancient (i.e., Greek and Roman) philosophy. I will take
up the challenges this poses to my project in the Afterword; right now, notice
that such subspecialization had better figure as a constraint on my presen-
tation. The professional incentives that come with subspecialization make it
nearly impossible to convince many analytic philosophers to read anything
that is clearly outside their subspecialization; a monograph that cuts across a

3 This is not a new observation; see, for instance, Hayek (1994, p. 110).
4 { The Great Endarkenment

number of these subfields, even if it does engage one’s own subspecialization,


is likely never to be picked up. So to make the ideas available to subspecialized
philosophers, the chapters in this book, with the exception of this introductory
overview and the Afterword (Chapter 11), can be read as freestanding essays.
This strategy entails a certain amount of repetition, and I apologize for it in ad-
vance: the organizing ideas of the volume will be reintroduced wherever they
are needed. I do hope that once a reader has engaged the problems I am posing
within the confines of his own subspecialization, he will be persuaded that only
by taking a broader view of the issues can even those problems be addressed—
and so will decide to read other chapters, and even the book as a whole.
The remainder of this Introduction will be given over to four tasks. I will
provide a roadmap of the book, one which allows professional readers with
specialized interests to locate the chapters most directly pertinent to them. I
will also preview a number of themes that reappear from chapter to chapter.
I will consider how much progress it is feasible to make at the present stage
of the discussion, and so what both the ambitions and limits of the argument
of the book must be. Last but not least—I take this very seriously indeed—
when philosophical problems are important, they are not problems only for
philosophers. Thus I would like this book to be read by a broader audience
than just those PhD-bearing professionals. And so I am going to explain how
it is that the specifically philosophical problems to which I want to draw our
attention are also of broad, immediate and very practical interest.
Accordingly, although some of the discussion may seem exotic, I have at-
tempted to write throughout so that a reader without an advanced degree in
philosophy can follow it; this has meant explaining from scratch concepts and
moves with which readers who are in-field will be familiar, and I’m going
to ask them for patience while I keep other readers on board. Let me flag
one issue that the alert reader will already be wondering about: I have just
claimed that professional outsiders cannot properly understand the insiders,
and I have also just promised accessibility to the nonphilosophers. In the Af-
terword to the book (Chapter 11), I will return to the question of how I can
expect the nonspecialists to track the arguments I will present here.

1.2

Turning now to one of those threads that is going to keep on reappearing


throughout the upcoming chapters: as I worked on specialization and the
problems it poses, I discovered that in order to make headway I would have to
push back against apriorism in philosophy, pretty much across the board. An
informal introduction to the relevant bit of philosophers’ terminology: what
you can know a priori is what you can know up front, without looking; con-
versely, if you have to look and see to find something out, then your knowledge
Introductory Remarks on the Tower of Babel } 5

is a posteriori.4 With rare exceptions, philosophy has conducted itself as an


apriorist enterprise, meaning that it is assumed that you can know most eve-
rything about the topics taken up by philosophers without going outdoors to
look at anything at all.5 If the reader is philosophically trained, the attempt
to up-end this part of the discipline’s self-conception may strike him as an
agenda best left for its own occasion. So as I continue the Introduction, I’ll
try to show how these agendas belong together: how hyperspecialization turns
out to be a very good reason to reconsider philosophical apriorism, and, con-
versely, that letting go of our disciplinary bias toward the a priori is needed to
make sense of one after another aspect of our lives as hyperspecializers.
An invitation to turn our backs on apriorism is not the only attempt to re-
vise current philosophical practice that the reader will encounter here. As an
analytic philosopher, I grew up trained to approach problems as exercises in
semantic or conceptual analysis and to understand metaphysics as having for
its object descriptive theory with a distinctive look and feel. (I will describe
it briefly below, and the conventionally trained philosopher learns to recog-
nize it immediately.) I found that along with the pushback against apriorism,
I needed to adopt a different way of thinking about metaphysics, in which it
amounts to design analysis of intellectual or cognitive devices, and to treat
metaphysics—construed this way, as intellectual ergonomics—as an alterna-
tive to semantic analysis. I understand very well that one doesn’t want to be
subjected to too many revolutions at once, but once again I will try to con-
vey here how this shift in approach is necessary if we are to make sense of
hyperspecialization.

1.3

What sort of problem does hyperspecialization put on our plate? Our reap-
propriation of the story of the Tower of Babel suggests that some of the most
pressing issues will have to do with social coordination: that is, they will be

4 Take the distinction with more than one grain of salt: mathematics is supposed to provide the par-
adigm of a priori knowledge, but Polya (1990), a thoughtful discussion of mathematical investigation,
suggests that not even the paradigm stays on its side of the boundary. (See, for instance, the emphasis
on observation and induction in his Chapters 1–4.)
5 A recent movement, so-called experimental philosophy, presents itself as a turn away from aprio-
rism, but let me suggest that you take that with a grain of salt, too. While work done under that heading
is somewhat of a hodgepodge, the core of the movement consists in the social-science investigation of
what people’s “intuitions” are. Sometimes this sort of investigation is presented as debunking philoso-
phers’ claims to know things without looking, but not nearly as often as you might think. Sometimes
it is presented simply as a way of determining just what the intuitions are, so that they can be used as
a basis for further philosophical theorizing; see Weinberg (2013, pp. 93ff) for a description of the ap-
proach. Calling that a turn away from the a priori is a little like a creation science institute announcing
that its research is now empirically informed, because instead of just telling you what the Bible says,
from memory, they look up chapter and verse.
6 { The Great Endarkenment

about getting along and managing cooperative enterprises with people whom
we do not understand. If we think of the subject matter of ethics as centrally
concerned with how human beings are to get along with one another, and
if hyperspecialization requires us to rethink even the very basic social traffic
rules, then we can expect it to set a new agenda for moral philosophers—as
I argue, in Section 3.6 and in Chapter 9, that it does. If you unpack that very
quick train of thought, you will see that it turns on a consideration that it’s
time to add explicitly into the mix.
Specialization is not in itself a distinctively human capacity, and since we
were discussing the building of a tower, recall that other animals do on oc-
casion execute relatively complicated cooperative construction projects: bees,
for example, or ants.6 However, the form that specialization takes in human
beings is, as far as we know, unique. For a given species of ant or bee, the types
of specialized task involved in setting up a nest or hive are fixed, and so where
human beings sometimes decide that their next building will include features
seen on no previous skyscraper (for instance, the sort of mass damper installed
in Boston’s John Hancock tower, and then in New York’s former Citibank
building), and that they will have to hire new kinds of specialists, bees do not.
Previously unheard-of specializations cannot belong to a fixed repertoire; they
cannot be, as we used to say, instincts. Thus people learn their specializations,
and not always the same ones. They are able to work their way into any of
an apparently open-ended list of disciplines or professions, and what is more,
they are able to switch from one to another—although because the costs of
doing so are high, these migrations do not happen very many times over the
course of a life.7 Thus someone might (real example) start out as a dancer,
then work for an architecture firm specializing in theater design, then for an
IT department, and subsequently become a vice-president of a bank. To have
a way of marking this, I will say not just that human beings hyperspecialize,
but that they are serial hyperspecializers.
Thus the social traffic rules cannot be fixed ahead of time as they are for the
social insects. But then, if the configuration of differently specialized human
beings changes regularly, if there are no rules for coordinating activities that
are workable no matter what the roles are, and if it follows that the moral
rules have to be rewritten equally regularly, then the distinctive form that

6 For an overview, see Hölldobler and Wilson (2009).


7 Perhaps other animals can switch from role to role also—see Gordon (1989) and Gordon (1986)
on how colonies of social insects shift workers from one task to another—but, very importantly, not
this way.
The observation that we can learn our way around more than one specialization does complicate
my claim that we today make up a society of specialists who cannot understand one another. Some
specialists can, on occasion, fully understand specialists of other types, when they themselves have
mastered the other specialization. But, again, it is only possible for an individual to traverse at most a
small handful of specializations. I will consider what to make of this complication in Chapters 2 and 11.
Introductory Remarks on the Tower of Babel } 7

specialization takes in contemporary human society indeed poses problems


for moral philosophers: most obviously, what the rules should be from time to
time; almost as obviously, how we should go about adjusting them.8
I am going to be trying to convince you that the problems we face as serial
hyperspecializers infiltrate the topics of traditional philosophical discussion at
a great many points, and as I do so, to make the case that we have been do-
ing the philosophy wrong: the chapters to come will be a problem-by-problem
inventory of wrong turns that have come of overlooking specialization. Here
is another of those problems, still closely related to issues in moral philoso-
phy. Because we invent new specializations and discover new subject matters,
we cannot already know what is important and what our priorities should be
in those novel domains. Consequently, for serial hyperspecializers, practical
reasoning (that is, thinking about what to do) involves learning what matters
from experience—a claim I advance in Chapters 3 and 10. Thus, if I am right,
serial hyperspecialization requires us to rethink our theory of rationality.
The conventional wisdom is that learning what to want and what to care
about makes no sense at all. Consider an argument, which I think is often
somewhere in the background but not generally spelled out, for moral theory
or ethics constituting a stable subject matter. Only what’s empirically observ-
able is a posteriori. What to do and what to care about aren’t anything that you
can observe. Ethics and morality are about what to do, and maybe about what
to care about, so they must be a priori. But an a priori subject matter can’t
change with the times; so ethics and moral philosophy are about what anyone
could have understood at any time, even thousands of years ago. It would fol-
low that nothing new in the way of specialization could make a difference to
ethical theory.
Since I’ve just said that I think we learn what matters from experience, you
can expect me to contest at least one of the premises of that argument.9 In
any case, not just our moral philosophy but our theory of practical rationality
has been apriorist. The default view on this topic is still instrumentalism: the
notion that figuring out what to do is means-end reasoning, and that it bot-
toms out in your desires. Again, to call something a priori just means that it’s
something you can know about up front, without looking, and put that way,
it’s obvious that instrumentalism is a practical version of apriorism. You just
have these desires, from which you derive practical conclusions: because the

8 For recent discussion of the idea that we may need to treat our moral guidelines as revisable, see
Millgram (2009d), and Richardson (2013).
9 For instance, Millgram (2005a, Chapter 1) describes one way we observe what is and isn’t a good
idea. Millgram (1997) gives an argument that we have to learn what matters from experience; the pres-
ent discussion is one way of framing that argument, by providing a deeper explanation for some of its
premises. I’ll give a philosophers’ example below, in Section 10.7, especially footnote 47, with follow-up
in Section 10.9.
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