Six Studies in The Decline and Fall of Professional Academic Philosophy, And A Real and Relevant Alternative
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"The Death of Socrates By Means of The American Philosophical Association," by Q (2013), after "The Death of Socrates," by Jacques-Louis David (1787)
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates…. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. (Thoreau, 1957: p. 9)
ABSTRACT
Contemporary professional academic philosophy is careerist, conformist, coercive-&-authoritarian within its own social-institutional sphere, dogmatic, esoteric, hyper-specialized, and above all, irrelevant to the true needs of the rest of humanity outside the professional academy, even to the point of being fundamentally at odds with those needs. Although, as Kant, Schopenhauer, Thoreau, and Dewey all pointed out, these problems have been perennial since the emergence of professional academic philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries–"there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers" (Thoreau)–they have currently reached their final crisis stage. To demonstrate this, I present six short studies in the decline and fall of 20th and 21st century professional academic philosophy, describing the going-down of post-classical Analytic philosophy–together with its social-institutional Other, so-called "Continental philosophy"–into the ash-heap of history, with social justice theorists and identitarian multiculturalists coercively-&-moralistically presiding over its cognitive collapse and suicide. But all is not lost. I also present an alternative model of philosophy–which I call "life-shaping philosophy"–that’s (i) real, i.e., authentic and serious, pursuing and practicing philosophy as a full-time, lifetime calling, as sharply opposed to its being job-oriented, half-hearted, and Scholastically superficial, (ii) fully relevant-to-humanity by virtue of its being intellectually, morally, and politically autonomous, critical, collaborative, and creative, and that (iii) not only can but should be pursued and practiced outside the professional academy.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
V. Conceptual Engineering Debunked and Replaced
VI. Social Justice Theory and The Paradox of Distributive Social Justice
VII. Eminent Identitarians: Social Justice Theory, Identitarian Multiculturalism, and Moral Fanaticism
VIII. A Real and Relevant Alternative: Life-Shaping Philosophy
IX. Conclusion
You can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text–including the BIBLIOGRAPHY–of this essay HERE.
V. Conceptual Engineering Debunked and Replaced
Lo and behold, there’s a contemporary "movement" (Wikipedia, 2022c) in post-classical Analytic philosophy, operating under a shiny new label that looks and sounds a little like "conceptual analysis," yet is far more STEM-fields-friendly and highly reminiscent of the valorized term "software engineering," that’s called conceptual engineering. What is conceptual engineering? Here’s what David Chalmers, a (or perhaps, the) leading contemporary philosopher in the post-classical Analytic tradition, says:
Conceptual engineering is the design, implementation, and evaluation of concepts. Conceptual engineering includes or should include de novo conceptual engineering (designing a new concept) as well as conceptual re-engineering (fixing an old concept). It should also include heteronymous (different-word) as well as homonymous (same-word) conceptual engineering.
This definition gives us different broad stages or types of conceptual engineering. There’s the design stage, where we design concepts. There are various ways to do that. One classic way would be to give a definition, or maybe an inferential role, or some paradigm cases, or something like that. Next is the implementation stage…. In the implementation stage you actually use a concept, and perhaps try to get others to use it too. This is what Herman Cappelen calls conceptual activism. And then there’s the evaluation stage, which plays a central role in the conceptual ethics work by people like Alexis Burgess and David Plunkett. Here what’s key is the evaluation of how good these concepts are in themselves and for certain purposes, to see how well they play key roles.
[P]hilosophy is [not] the only locus of conceptual engineering. I think it’s absolutely everywhere.
Let me say something about the importance of conceptual engineering. Some people say it’s all of philosophy. Is it important? Yes, some of the most important advances in philosophy have quite clearly involved conceptual engineering. That goes especially for some of the cases I gave of de novo conceptual engineering—rigid designation, implicature, epistemic injustice, and so on. These new concepts capture important phenomena and can do a lot of work. Is conceptual re-engineering important in philosophy? It’s certainly practically important, especially for practical roles in the wider world, such as achieving social justice. Philosophers have an important role to play in that project—both the activist part and the more theoretical part of figuring out which concepts can best play these roles. Aside from these roles in the wider world, conceptual re-engineering can also be theoretically useful within the philosophical community. For example, it can clean up a concept to make it more natural and powerful, modify a concept so it can better play explanatory roles, and distinguish different concepts that play different roles. (Chalmers, 2020: pp. 1-2, 4, 11)
The two-part basic idea behind conceptual engineering, then, is (i) that it is the design, implementation, and evaluation of concepts, and (ii) that contemporary post-classical Analytic philosophers can and should leave behind the boring, old-school, and in any case defunct—due to its failure to formulate a coherent and defensible theory of the analytic-synthetic and a priori-a posteriori distinctions—program of conceptual analysis (Hanna, 1998, 2015a: esp. chs. 4 and 6-8, 2021a: ch. XVII), and become highly STEM-fields-friendly experts in conceptual engineering, by practicing conceptual engineering in either one of two modes: either (iia) the "creative" mode (designing a new concept) or (iib) the "re-engineering" mode (fixing an old concept). More precisely and specifically, they can engineer concepts either (iia*) by creating new concepts by essentially the same classical conventionalist method(s) used by The Vienna Circle Logical Empiricists/Positivists, or (iib*) by substituting some deflationary or ersatz concept C* for some existing theoretically and/or normatively high-powered, rich concept C (say, beauty, human dignity, human freedom, good, right, truth, justification, knowledge, necessity, logic, rationality, etc.) in order either (iia**) to express skepticism about C, or, more radically, (iib**) to debunk C, but in any case also (iic) to provide a new morally-and-politically loaded set of rules for using words, where these words are either (iic1) the old word or words that used to pick out C (for example, "human dignity"), but now, by virtue of these rules, pick out C* (for example, the concept of our basic status as equals in society, whatever other position(s) we may hold [Etinson, 2020: p. 372, italics added]), or (iic2) a new word or words that directly pick out C* (for example, the words "our basic status as equals in society, whatever other position(s) we may hold" [Etinson, 2020: p. 372]).
As I implicitly anticipated in the just-previous paragraph, avant la lettre, Carnap was a 20th century proponent of philosophizing by means of (i)-mode conceptual engineering, which he called "explication" (Carnap, 1950); and again avant la lettre, as it turns out, Nietzsche was a 19th century proponent of philosophizing by means of (ii)-mode conceptual engineering (Nietzsche, 1966), which he called "genealogy" (Nietzsche, 1967; Queloz, 2021). So, at least in principle, the "movement" of conceptual engineering isn’t restricted to contemporary post-classical Analytic philosophers alone: even so-called "Continental" philosophers influenced by Nietzsche can get in on the act too. Nevertheless, even despite all the fanfare surrounding conceptual engineering, I think that there’s a decisive and indeed knockdown objection to it, whether it’s in (i)-mode or in (ii)-mode, and ironically enough the objection is firmly embedded within the classical Analytic tradition (and by the qualifier "classical" I mean: the tradition of Analytic philosophy from the 1880s to 1950, when W.V.O. Quine first publicly presented his spectacularly influential and indeed paradigm-shifting essay, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" [Quine, 1961]) (Hanna, 2021a: chs. II-XVI).
According to the classical hard problem in philosophical logic known as the logocentric predicament, as formulated in 1926 by Harry Sheffer,
[i]n order to give an account of logic, we must presuppose and employ logic. (Sheffer, 1926: p. 228)
It follows directly from the logocentric predicament that any attempt to explain or justify logic in non-logical terms is circular and self-undermining, precisely because it must presuppose and use logic. Otherwise put, logic, in at least the minimalist form of a universal a priori proto-logic (Hanna, 2006b, 2006c), belongs to the essence or nature of all explanation and justification: hence there’s no self-consistent way of standing altogether outside logic, in order to explain or justify logic. Or, as Kant would have put it, what he calls "pure, general logic" is transcendental (Hanna, 2021b).
Now, riffing on the logocentric predicament and its implications—although not acknowledging its Kantian provenance—Quine pointed out to devastating effect in his 1936 essay, "Truth by Convention" (Quine, 1976), that in order to explain or justify logical truth according to conventions, pre-conventional or non-conventional logic, in at least the minimalist form of what fifty years later he called sheer logic (Quine, 1986: p. 81), must be presupposed and used: therefore, there are no such things as purely conventional logical truths, and the conventionalist theory of logical truth is circular and self-undermining. By the same token, then, according to what I’ll neologistically call the conceptocentric predicament, concepts belong to the essence or nature of all explanation and justification: hence there’s no self-consistent way of standing altogether outside concepts, in order to explain or justify concepts. Correspondingly, for any actual or possible process of conceptual engineering, whether in (i)-mode or in (ii)-mode, then pre-engineered or non-engineered concepts, in at least the minimalist form of a set of universal a priori logical and moral proto-concepts, must be presupposed and used: therefore, there are no such things as purely engineered concepts, and conceptual engineering is circular and self-undermining.
To be sure, with its shiny new and highly STEM-fields-friendly label, the conceptual engineering "movement" is perfectly suited to the hyper-professionalism, careerism, Scholastic cleverness, playpen creativity, and full collaboration and complicity with Neoliberal U—by which I mean contemporary neoliberal social institutions of higher education—that’s endemic to post-classical Analytic philosophy in particular, and to professional academic philosophy in general (Haack, 2021; Hanna, 2021: chs. XVII-XVIII).
Nevertheless, none of that can change the rational fact that conceptual engineering is circular and self-undermining: so, in view of the conceptocentric predicament, we must face up to the rational fact that conceptual engineering is nothing but pseudo-philosophy, no matter how cool, popular, and trendy it is in contemporary post-classical Analytic philosophy.
Now, if conceptual engineering is nothing but pseudo-philosophy, and therefore it’s no adequate or authentic successor to the defunct program of conceptual analysis, then what kind of philosophy should the philosophers of the future be doing instead? In my opinion, instead they should be doing the philosophy of thought-shaping, which in turn is a basic sub-part of the overarching philosophy of mind-shaping and life-shaping (Maiese and Hanna, 2019; Hanna and Paans, 2020; Hanna, 2022: esp. ch. 3 and section 00.1; Maiese et al., 2022), which again in turn, is a basic sub-part of what I call The Uniscience, aka the philosophy of the future (Hanna, 2022).
What is the philosophy of thought-shaping? The philosophy of thought-shaping is grounded on the following five theses:
1. All human thinking is really possible only insofar as it’s partially causally determined, formed, and normatively guided by thought-shapers, either (i) in a bad, false, and wrong way, or (ii) in a good, true, and right way (the thought-shaper thesis) (Hanna and Paans, 2021; Hanna, 2022: ch. 3).
2. Social institutions partially causally determine, form, and normatively guide our essentially embodied minds—our thoughts, emotions, and actions—and typically do so without our being self-consciously aware of how, or even that, we’re being significantly affected in these ways (the mind-shaping thesis) (Maiese and Hanna, 2019: ch. 2).
3. There’s a fundamental distinction between (5.1) destructive, deforming social institutions that frustrate and warp true human needs, and (5.2) constructive, enabling social institutions that satisfy and sustain true human needs (the two-kinds-of-social-institutions thesis) (Maiese and Hanna, 2019: esp. chs. 2-3 and 6-8).
4. Because all human thinking is mediated by language, and because language is a fundamental social institution, then the thought-shaper thesis falls directly under the mind-shaping thesis: therefore, ubiquitous mind-shaping in human social institutions and ubiquitous thought-shaping in human thinking are the essential forms of human life-shaping (the life-shaping thesis) (Hanna, 2022: section 00.1; Maiese et al., 2022).
5. Logic is the set of categorically normative, innately specified first principles of human theoretical rationality, when taken together with all the supplementary humanly-constructed ceteris paribus principles of an open-ended plurality of logical systems, just as morality is the set of categorically normative, innately specified first principles of human practical rationality, when taken together with all the supplementary humanly-constructed ceteris paribus principles of an open-ended plurality of moral systems (the morality-of-logic thesis) (Hanna, 2006b, 2006c, 2008b, 2015a: ch. 5).
It’s especially to be noted, as we go forward, that by virtue of thesis 5, the philosophy of thought-shaping fully accommodates and bears witness to the logocentric and conceptocentric predicaments alike. According to thesis 5, there’s a minimalist universal a priori proto-logic and a corresponding minimal set of universal a priori logical proto-concepts, and also a minimalist universal a priori proto-morality and a corresponding minimal set of universal a priori moral proto-concepts, that are innately specified in our "human, all-too-human" capacity for rationality, and used by us for rationally constructing all logical systems, logical concepts, moral systems, and moral concepts, as well as all other kinds of formal or a priori concepts and material or a posteriori concepts. So, as a matter of sheer transcendental fact—echoing Quine’s nice phrase, "sheer logic" (Quine, 1986: p. 81), but not being shy about admitting its Kantian provenance—it’s innately, universally, and a priori built into our rational, "human, all-too-human," cognitive and practical condition, that necessarily, we can never step altogether outside logic or concepts in order to explain or justify logic or concepts. Otherwise put: the logocentric and conceptocentric predicaments are simply part-&-parcel of the rational human predicament. More specifically, however, all concepts whatsoever are either innately specified or rationally constructed by us, and no concepts whatsoever are engineered by us. At the same time, by virtue of theses 1 to 4, all human thinking is neither solely or nor wholly conceptual, and in fact it also necessarily includes a categorically distinct, essentially non-conceptual kind of of representational content: thought-shapers.
Here are some further details about the philosophy of thought-shaping.
The philosophy of thought-shaping falls fully within the broad scope of the first three Es of the contemporary 4E approach to human cognition, by affirming that all human thought is embodied, embedded, and enacted (Newen, De Bruin, and Gallagher, 2018). More explicitly, the 4Es of human cognition are (i) embodied, which says that minds are necessarily realized in organismic animal bodies, (ii) embedded, which says that minds are necessarily external-context-sensitive or indexical, (iii) enacted, which says that minds are necessarily dynamically and practically implemented, and (iv) extended, which says that minds necessarily have external vehicles of consciousness &/or intentionality, aka "the extended mind." Given my commitment to the essential embodiment theory, I reject the extended-mind component, and correspondingly the philosophy of thought-shaping affirms a doctrine I call the body-bounded mind (Hanna and Maiese, 2009; Hanna, 2011c). Moreover, although many 4E theorists are anti-representationalists, by contrast the philosophy of thought-shaping affirms a dual-content version of representationalism, which I’ll briefly spell out immediately below (see also Hanna, 2015a: chs. 1-3).
Nonideal moral or political theory is moral or political theory that’s designed to capture these two manifestly real and widespread facts about our "human, all-too-human" world: (i) that compliance with the normative principles and rules of any theory of human morality or human politics is not always or even normally ideally strict, and (ii) that context-sensitivity or indexicality is a pervasive phenomenon in our moral and political life (Hanna, 2018c, 2021h, and 2022: section 5.2). Correspondingly, nonideal cognitive semantics is cognitive semantic theory that’s specifically designed to capture the corresponding facts (i) that compliance with the normative principles and rules of any theory of human cognitive content or human intentionality is not always or even normally ideally strict, and (ii) that context-sensitivity or indexicality is a pervasive phenomenon in human cognition and intentionality. The cognitive semantics of thought-shapers is a nonideal cognitive semantic theory.
The notion of shaping, which is of course itself an analogy or metaphor, in this context more precisely means partial but not complete determination, formation, and guidance, in a way that’s not only causal but also irreducibly normative. As applied to human thinking, this notion of shaping has two crucial implications. First, thought-shaping is how human thinking is partially—but not completely—causally determined, formed, and guided by mental representations of allegories, analogies, blueprints, catechisms, diagrams, displays, icons, images, lay-outs, metaphors, mnemonics, models, outlines, parables, pictures, scenarios, schemata, sketches, spreadsheets, stereotypes, symbols, tableaux, and templates,[1] for better or worse. I emphasize and re-emphasize that this partially determinative, formative, and guiding human cognitive process is not only causal but also irreducibly normative. Second, thought-shaping creates a new cognitive item, the shaped thought, while at the same time both expressing and also modifying various features of the thinking subject’s external context. So thought-shapers are not only causal and irreducibly normative (as per the first point), but also necessarily external-context-sensitive or indexical (i.e., "embedded") and therefore they cannot be adequately or fully characterized apart from the actual sets of external circumstances in which they arise, although they are not in any way either reducible to or wholly determined by those circumstances.
The dual-content nonideal cognitive semantics affirmed by the philosophy of thought-shaping is closely related to a philosophical controversy that saliently emerged in philosophy of mind in the mid-1990s, but in fact stretches all the way back to Kant: the so-called debate about non-conceptual content (Hanna, 2021d). More specifically, there are two basic questions at issue between the contrary theses of Conceptualism and Non-Conceptualism in the philosophy of cognition and cognitive semantics: (i)whether human cognition is necessarily, solely, and wholly determined by our concepts and our conceptual capacities, yes or no, and (ii)whether human cognizers share a fundamental pre-conceptual/pre-intellectual or "essentially sensible" capacity—or a set of such capacities—with non-rational or non-human animals, that operates in some substantive way independently of our intellectual/logical capacity for conceptualization, believing, judging, etc., while still also being able to combine substantively with those latter capacities for the purposes of socially and linguistically-mediated rational cognition, yes or no. Conceptualists, i.e., intellectualists about human cognition, say yes to (i) and no to (ii); but Strong Non-Conceptualists, i.e., non-intellectualists about human cognition, say no to (i) and yes to (ii). In short, for intellectualists, self-conscious rational, conceptual, and inferential thinking—discursivity—determines the content and specific character of all human cognition, whereas for non-intellectualists, discursivity is just one cognitive capacity that’s categorically distinct from, but also interactive with, a set of inherently non-discursive sensible capacities, including essentially non-conceptual perception, essentially non-conceptual memory, pre-reflective consciousness, essentially non-conceptual imagination, emotion, and intentional agency.
In defense of Strong Non-Conceptualism, I’ve worked out a detailed, systematic version of this dual-content cognitive semantics, which deploys a basic distinction between (i) conceptual capacities and conceptual content, and (ii) essentially non-conceptual capacities and essentially non-conceptual content, along with a basic sub-distinction between: (iii) formal content (i.e., non-empirical or a priori content, i.e., content that’s necessarily underdetermined in its specific character by all actual and possible contingent, sensory facts) whether conceptual or essentially non-conceptual, and (iv) material content (i.e., empirical or a posteriori content, i.e., content that’s necessarily determined in its specific character by all or some actual or possible contingent, sensory facts), whether conceptual or essentially non-conceptual (Hanna, 2005, 2008b, 2011a, 2011b, 2013b, 2015a: ch. 2, 2016a, 2017c: supplement 1, 2018f, 2020a, 2021d; Russell and Hanna, 2012).
I’ll take those distinctions as starting points. Then, according to the dual-content nonideal cognitive semantics asserted by the philosophy of thought-shaping, by conceptual content, I mean the inherently general, descriptive information that’s expressed by (i) one-place predicates in natural language, picking out properties and ranging over domains of individual objects, (ii) n-place relational predicates in natural language, picking out relations and ranging over domains of ordered n-tuples of individual objects, or (iii) syncategorematic terms in natural language, picking out logical constants and other logical forms that unify individual propositions (judgments, predications, statements, etc.) and also capture truth-functional or other relations between complexes of propositions. Correspondingly, according to the dual-content nonideal cognitive semantics asserted by the philosophy of thought-shaping, by thoughts I mean either (i) ideally well-formed, logically-unified complexes of concepts and/or directly referential terms, that express propositions in the strict sense (McGrath and Frank, 2020) and inherently bear truth-values (type-1 thoughts), or (ii) less-than-ideally-well-formed and less-than-ideally-logically-unified complexes of concepts and essentially non-conceptual contents (including directly referential terms) that might or might not express propositions in the strict sense—and if not, they’ll express propositions in a non-strict sense—and therefore might or might not inherently bear truth-values (type-2 thoughts). The category of type-2 thoughts captures the widespread "human, all-too-human" fact of confused thoughts, fuzzy thoughts, half-formed thoughts, hasty thoughts, muddled thoughts, vague thoughts, and so-on. And finally, again according to the dual-content nonideal cognitive semantics asserted by the philosophy of thought-shaping, by beliefs I mean either type-1 thoughts or type-2 thoughts that are asserted to be true by the conscious, self-conscious, and rational human subjects of those thoughts.
In this way, conceptual content is semantic content that’s propositional in either the strict or the non-strict sense, since all propositions are built out of concepts, inferential (Hanna, 2014), since all strict or non-strict propositions correspondingly can enter into strict or non-strict inferences, and logico-linguistic, since all strict or non-strict propositions and strict or non-strict inferences are strictly or non-strictly governed at least to some non-trivial extent by laws of logic and formal rules of natural language (Hanna, 2006b: esp. chs. 4 and 7). Contrariwise, essentially non-conceptual content is sub-propositional (in either the strict or non-strict sense), and therefore non-inferential (in either the strict or non-strict sense), and non-logico-linguistic (in either the strict or non-strict sense) semantic content. Moreover, according to the philosophy of thought-shaping, conceptual content and essentially non-conceptual content alike can be either formal (i.e., non-empirical or a priori) or material (i.e., empirical or a posteriori). But whether they’re formal or material, sharply unlike conceptual contents, which are normally cognized self-consciously, logically, theoretically, and rationally, essentially non-conceptual contents are instead normally cognized in a pre-reflectively conscious, emotive (where "emotion" includes desires, feelings, and passions, and our affective capacities more generally), practical, and proto-rational way that’s poised for intentional action of various kinds.
Assuming those distinctions and working definitions, and according to my formulations in Cognition, Content, and the A Priori (Hanna, 2015a), here’s a brief summary of the theory of essentially non-conceptual content:
The theory of rational human cognition, content, and knowledge that I am proposing … is, in part, a "bottom-up" theory about the nature of minded animals that anchors conceptual content in the primitive fact of essentially non-conceptual content. Essentially non-conceptual content … is a kind of mental content that is categorically different from conceptual content, in the sense that both its underlying semantic structure and also its characteristic psychological function or role are inherently distinct from those of conceptual content. Furthermore, essentially non-conceptual content is a kind of mental content that rational human animals or real human persons share with non-rational minded animals, whether non-human (e.g., cats) or human (e.g., infants), who, it seems, do not possess conceptual capacities. So essentially non-conceptual content epitomizes the specifically non-intellectual or sensible,embodied, perception-based, phenomenally conscious side of human mindedness, whereas conceptual content epitomizes the specifically intellectual or discursive, reflective, judgment-based, self-conscious side of human mindedness…. [B]y way of a preliminary or working characterization to have in front of us, I will say that essentially non-conceptual content is mental content that necessarily includes essentially indexical formal spatiotemporal and dynamic representations that are fully sensitive to complex thermodynamic asymmetries in perceptually manifest natural objects and processes, and also that the primary psychological function or role of essentially non-conceptual content is to account for directly referential cognition, and to guide and mediate the sensorimotor processes constitutive of finegrained intentional body movements in rational minded [human] animals. (Hanna, 2015a: p. 25)
Granting the theoretical backdrop of this dual-content nonideal cognitive semantics for thought-shapers, it follows that the philosophy of thought-shaping focuses on cognitive processes inherently involving the interplay between (i) various kinds of formal or material essentially non-conceptual cognitive activities and representations, with egocentrically-centered, action-poised spatial representations and temporal representations as fundamental, operating as the cognitive shapers, and (ii) various kinds of formal or material conceptual thinking and conceptual thought-content more generally, as what’s cognitively shaped by the various kinds of formal or material essentially non-conceptual cognitive activities and representations, in an inherently external-context-sensitive or indexical way.
In view of (i) and (ii) these cognitive processes produce shaped thoughts as their cognitive products. These shaped thoughts are holistically configured or patterned mental representations, therefore bearing some important similarities to the Gestalten described by the early Gestalt psychologists Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler, and Max Wertheimer, although also, as I mentioned above, only within the broad scope of the first three Es (i.e., embodied, embedded, enacted) of the contemporary 4E approach to human cognition (Newen, De Bruin, and Gallagher, 2018). This cognitive process normally occurs in a pre-reflectively conscious mode, which typically makes it very difficult to catch thought-shapers "at work" self-consciously. Indeed, thought-shapers almost invisibly yet nevertheless continuously bridge and fuse the sensible and discursive domains. In retrospective reflection on our thought-shaping processes, it’s very hard to see precisely when and how thought-shapers have exerted their influence. In this way, thought-shapers provide an all-pervasive, seemingly obvious background for human thinking, for which no special rational justification is required.
One important consequence of how thought-shapers almost invisibly continuously bridge the sensible and discursive domains, is that in the actual-world external contexts of our everyday cognitive life, the distinction between the semantic content of thought-shapers (as essentially sensible) and the semantic content of shaped thoughts (as a fusion of sensible/essentially non-conceptual content and discursive/ conceptual content) will often not be perfectly sharp, but instead a relative matter of degree. For example, looking back now at my working list of paradigmatic thought-shapers—mental representations of allegories, analogies, blueprints, catechisms, diagrams, displays, icons, images, lay-outs, metaphors, mnemonics, models, outlines, parables, pictures, scenarios, schemata, sketches, spreadsheets, stereotypes, symbols, tableaux, and templates—amongst these, allegories, catechisms, and parables differ slightly from the others in containing a relatively greater amount and degree of conceptual content, even though the essentially non-conceptual content of the thought-shaping component is what determines the overall semantic specific character of those mental representations. As an excellent 21st century example of all this, consider the novelist David Foster Wallace’s famous deployment of "the-fish-&-the-water" allegory/parable, in his 2005 graduation address at Kenyon College, "This is Water":
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How’s the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?" (Wallace, 2012)
In the embodied, embedded, and enacted context of Wallace’s Kenyon College speech, the conceptual and essentially non-conceptual elements in his allegory/parable are indissolubly blended; and, just like the water in the allegory/parable itself, thought-shapers operate almost invisibly and yet also omnipresently in human thinking.
In view of the dual-content nonideal cognitive semantics for thought-shapers I’ve spelled out, the philosophy of thought-shaping naturally focuses on the cognitive dynamics of human conceptual thinking and conceptual thought-content, insofar as it’s partially determined, formed, and guided by essentially non-conceptual mental representations of allegories, analogies, blueprints, catechisms, diagrams, displays, icons, images, lay-outs, metaphors, mnemonics, models, outlines, parables, pictures, scenarios, schemata, sketches, spreadsheets, stereotypes, symbols, tableaux, and templates,[ii] featuring egocentrically-centered, action-poised temporal representations and spatial representations as fundamental, in a way that’s not only causal but also irreducibly normative, and inherently external-context-sensitive or indexical, for better or worse. As the metaphorical term "shapers" itself implies, all thought-shapers are characterized by temporal dynamics and spatial dynamics. The temporal dynamics of thought-shapers is captured by formal or material representations of processes of various kinds, for example, either the classical, non-complex, entropic, time-reversible, equilibrium, linear thermodynamics of mechanical motion through space or in place (for example, rotation, vibration, etc.), or the non-classical, complex, dissipative/ negentropic, time-irreversible, non-equilibrium, self-organizing thermodynamics of non-mechanical motion (for example, weather systems and organisms). In turn, the spatial dynamics of thought-shapers is captured by formal or material representations in topology, the mathematical theory of the continuous deformation and transformation of shapes, surfaces, etc., in a multi-dimensional (for example, two-dimensional, three-dimensional, four-dimensional, and so-on) framework, and of their universal interconnectedness, with a special focus on egocentrically-centered (i.e., first-person perspectival), orientable (i.e., inherently directional), three-dimensional spaces in which our own minded living rational human animal bodies, and human or non-human organisms more generally, are embedded, and in which we and they all live, move, and have our being. Hence, all thought-shapers have processual and/or topological properties that are represented by formal or material essentially non-conceptual cognition and essentially non-conceptual content, to which formal or material conceptual thinking and conceptual content naturally adheres or attaches itself, and by which they are inherently causally and irreducibly normatively partially determined, formed, and guided, in an inherently external-context-sensitive or indexical way, for better or worse. Given this inherently causal, normative, action-poised, context-sensitive/indexical, processual, and topological profile, as I’ve mentioned, essentially non-conceptual thought-shapers play a pre-reflectively conscious and almost invisible role in human thinking, yet they also and perhaps above all create a necessary cognitive substrate for conceptual capacities and conceptualization that contributes diachronic and synchronic applicability, articulation, concreteness, depth, friction, thickness, scope, traction, and torque to human thought, for better or worse.
Summarizing now, I’ve made the following six claims about thought-shapers and thought-shaping.
First, human cognition and intentionality are equally top-down (i.e., formally, non-empirically, or a priori, and non-contextually) and bottom-up (i.e., materially, empirically, or a posteriori, and inherently externally-contextually or indexically) constituted and structured; essentially non-conceptual capacities are shared by human and non-human, rational or non-rational animals alike; and conceptual capacities are grounded on this essentially non-conceptual foundation, although conceptual content is categorically different from essentially non-conceptual content.
Second, since conceptual content generally presupposes and is grounded on essentially non-conceptual content, and since thought-shapers are essentially non-conceptual contents, then thought-shapers necessarily constitute, inflect, structure, and guide all human conceptualization and propositional thinking (including belief, judgment, statement-making, and inference) in a causal, partially-determining, and also irreducibly normative, action-poised way, that’s external-context-sensitive or indexical, for better or worse; and normally, the essentially non-conceptual part pre-reflectively, non-self-consciously, and almost invisibly governs conceptualization and thinking.
Third, in the shaped thought (whether type-1, i.e., ideally logico-semantically formed, or type-2, i.e., not ideally logico-semantically formed) that’s the product of the process of thought-shaping, there’s a mutual interpenetration, mutual co-determination, and fusion of conceptual content and essentially non-conceptual content into holistically configured or patterned mental representations (roughly, Gestalten); indeed, it’s precisely this feature makes thought-shapers so cognitively compelling and powerful: they continuously establish links between the essentially non-conceptual and conceptual contents, but do so normally only in pre-reflectively conscious, non-self-conscious mode, whereby it’s almost impossible to catch them "at work," insofar as they almost invisibly bridge the sensible and discursive domains; indeed, this justly famous apothegm from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations neatly captures this insight:
One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing around the frame through which we look at it…. A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. (Wittgenstein, 1953: §§114-115, p. 48e, translation slightly modified)
Fourth, thought-shapers inherently contain action-poised temporal dynamics and spatial dynamics, and therefore enact inherently processual and topological properties in all shaped thoughts.
Fifth, the action-poised purposiveness with which thought-shapers are used is an integral part of their cognitive dynamics.
Sixth, and finally, although thought-shaping is a necessary feature of all human thinking, what makes thought-shapers especially difficult to identify and recognize self-consciously is the twofold fact (i) that as per the second and third points above, the partially constituting, inflecting, and structuring activity of thought-shapers normally takes place in a pre-reflectively conscious and therefore non-self-conscious mode, and (ii) that as per the fourth and fifth points above, in relation to the holistically patterned or configured shaped thought and its external-context-sensitive/indexical action-poised purposiveness, due to its categorically distinct essentially non-conceptual processual and topological content-properties, which as it were pre-install human thinking in a rich cognitive substrate so that it runs along specific grooves, the thought-shaper, on its own, appears to provide a justification for various beliefs. Indeed, it’s precisely this characteristically "pre-installed" and "grooved" cognitive dynamics of shaped thoughts, for better or worse, via essentially non-conceptual thought-shaping, as per (ii), that directly connects the philosophy of thought-shapers with Francis Bacon’s theory of "Idols which beset men’s minds" in The Novum Organum (Bacon, 1620, 2021), with Marx’s theory of ideology in The German Ideology and other works (Wolff and Leopold, 2021: esp. section 6), and with recent work in cognitive psychology and social psychology on the persistence of false belief or misinformation and the "backfire effect" (Nyhan and Reifler, 2010; Lewandowsky et al., 2012).
In short, the philosophy of thought-shaping carries us all the way from the philosophy of mind-and-knowledge and philosophical logic, to moral philosophy and sociopolitical philosophy, and then back again. So, and now by way of concluding this section, I’m strongly recommending that when contemporary post-classical Analytic philosophers have fully faced up to the rational fact that conceptual engineering is circular, self-undermining, and nothing but pseudo-philosophy, then they not only can but also should self-consciously enact a Gestalt-switch—and indeed a paradigm-shift—in their "disciplinary matrix" (Kuhn, 1970: p. 182), and replace conceptual engineering with the philosophy of thought-shaping.
NOTES
[i] This list isn’t intended to be complete, but instead only to be a working list of paradigm cases I want to connect in an essential way to the nature of human thinking, and more generally, to explain. After I’ve provided a more precise characterization of thought-shapers below, the list could in principle be extended according to those criteria. Moreover, allegories, catechisms, and parables differ slightly from the other items on the list, in a way that I’ll also briefly describe below.
[ii] See also the qualifications spelled out in note [i] above.
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