The human cannot be removed

What modern analytic philosophy, and much of modern thought, misses.

We are all human and that means the way that we see, interact with, conceptualise and exist in the world is fundamentally shaped by our humanness. To adapt an idea made famous (amongst philosophers) by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, if we were some other type of creature, say a bat, how we interact with and conceptualise the world would necessarily be different. In Nagel’s terms, we humans cannot know what it’s like to be a bat. This might seem fairly self-explanatory, but it is implicitly rejected by dominant Western philosophical and scientific traditions.

Most of this essay focuses on the Western tradition known as analytic philosophy as my training and sympathies have been in that tradition. I will extend the analysis (briefly) to other areas towards the end, so those of you who aren’t analytic philosophers (i.e. just about everyone) are welcome to skip over sections.

Conceptual analysis as the foundation of philosophy

Analytic philosophy is one of two dominant Western philosophical traditions, at least from the latter half of the twentieth century onwards. What ties a diverse range of philosophers together into this tradition is a careful, almost obsessive, focus on definitions and the analysis of concepts. The motivating idea is that, to better understand things like knowledge, ethics or free will, our focus should be on analysing the concepts and ensuring we precisely and carefully define them.

On this way of thinking, conceptual analysis is necessary to gaining a more objective and certain understanding of reality. Ideally, if we formulate the right definitions, our confusions or philosophical puzzles will disappear. Even if we don’t get that far, by paying close attention to definitions we will have a much firmer grasp on things.

In any intellectual endeavour, there is a lot to be said for prioritising careful thought and thinking through what key concepts actually mean. We often use terms or concepts in ambiguous and sloppy ways that cause confusion, make answers harder to find and give the false impression of insight. However, the tradition of analytic philosophy has made little progress over the past century or so when measured against its own aims. I have become convinced that the approach taken by this tradition of thought is deeply flawed because it doesn't sufficiently take into account our humanness.

Does a bat ‘see’ the world differently to us?

The long history of philosophy shows that we cannot ever be sure we have achieved genuine knowledge. We cannot ever be certain that what we know is an accurate description of reality as there is always a gap between us and the world. To put it differently, we humans use a range of concepts to understand the world, but we ultimately cannot know whether these genuinely map onto reality or not.

Nagel’s question above provides a neat illustration. A bat draws much of its experience of the world from echolocation, rather than sight. It is therefore entirely possible that our human concept or imagination of space is different to a bat’s. However, as we are bound in our human perspectives, we cannot definitively know whether a bat’s conception of space is different to ours, or not. Neither can we ultimately know whether either conception is a genuine, objective description of the world as it really is.

This means that no matter how good analytic philosophers are at coming up with precise definitions of important concepts, they can only ever define what that concept is for us as humans. They cannot transcend our humanness and so we cannot know if they truly address bigger questions about the world or reality.

Our important concepts were invented at some point

The task of analysing concepts to resolve or better understand philosophical problems runs into a further problem when we consider how human knowledge is generated. Important modern concepts like zero, gravity, probability and even definitions all have a definite history and weren’t always known. Someone, or some group of people, came up with these, and almost all of our important concepts at some point in the past. This process of developing or identifying new concepts is central to human knowledge generation. In the paper about bats referenced earlier (which is actually on the nature of consciousness), Nagel even hoped that new conceptual understandings might resolve some of the issues he identified.

This creates a further challenge for analytic philosophy. As humans, we routinely identify or come up with new concepts to try to explain or make sense of reality. However, analytic philosophy is focused on precisely defining concepts and analysing what we already have. If our current concepts, or what we mean by them, are not up to the mark as ways of describing reality, then we might need to replace or update them. Once again, there is a gap between how we conceptualise or understand the world and what it really is like.

Gaps between human understanding and reality

These gaps expose a critical flaw in the approach of analytic philosophy. It focuses on analysing important concepts yet, as history has often shown, humans have come up with new conceptual schema that provide important answers or new ways of understanding the world. Moreover, we can only ever work with our human concepts or understanding of the world. We cannot know if the world exactly matches our ways of seeing it - other entities may experience and conceptualise it very differently.

Thus, while analytic philosophy can give us powerful ways of better understanding and thinking through our concepts and ideas, it cannot transcend our humanness. Yet analytic philosophers see their work as the way to achieve objectivity and certainty. Not only are they chasing something that may be impossible, but their methods for getting there cannot escape our human conceptual limitations.

To put it differently, all of our concepts belong to the abstracted representations - theories, languages, pictures and stories - we use to understand and make sense of the world. We cannot definitively know how well our concepts match onto reality. Conceptual analysis only operates on the abstractions and isn’t designed to consider the relationship between concept and reality.

Putting the human back in

So, in my view, analytic philosophers seek, and think they achieve, objectivity by analysing things that are distinctly and necessarily human but ignoring the humanness of them. However, this flaw is far more widespread than just amongst analytic philosophers. Most branches of science, especially as applied to policy and strategy decisions, advocate adopting a neutral and objective stance for their work. This is sometimes possible, but often isn’t.

For example, there are many observer effects in science, where the act of making observations or conducting experiments changes outcomes. While they occur in quantum mechanics, they are a permanent feature of social science, medicine or any other investigations that involve humans. By making an intervention, even taking a sugar pill, you can change medical outcomes. Or by measuring social or policy changes, you often change social outcomes.¹ You cannot remove the human aspects and dynamics, yet we put a lot of effort into sophisticated statistics and modelling that seek to do just that.

Instead of chasing objectivity via careful conceptual analysis or sophisticated statistics, we need to acknowledge that our humanness shapes everything we do. We cannot remove the human elements, however much we might want to be able to. For philosophy, but also other fields, that means we have to acknowledge our limitations and remain more humble about what we can know. This isn’t a defeatist attitude though as accepting our real, human limitations will enable us to know more over time.

1. For example, asking someone to answer questions about how they feel, or their personal financial situation, can mean they will make different decisions or feel differently later.