A Field With Traditions Is Confessing Something

Read any introduction to philosophy and you will meet the phrase "in the continental tradition," or its sibling, "in the analytic tradition." The words are offered as orientation, the way a guidebook tells you which region you are in.

Now try to construct the equivalent sentence in a science. There is no continental physics. There is no analytic tradition in chemistry. A biologist in Paris and a biologist in Chicago disagree about particular findings, and the disagreements are settled, or at least can be settled, by the next experiment. Nobody describes the disagreement as two traditions.

The presence of traditions in a field is a confession. It says the field rests on basic assumptions that its practitioners do not share and cannot test, so that people who start from different assumptions end up in different schools, and the schools persist because nothing can kill them.

Where Traditions Come From

The mechanism is worth stating, because it is not that philosophers are careless.

A philosopher wants to say something about the high-level problems: morality, consciousness, justice, meaning. These are the problems people will pay to read about, and a philosopher, like everyone else, needs to be read. You cannot make a career measuring the circumference of an atom.

But to reason about a high-level problem you need somewhere to stand. You need working answers to prior questions: what language is, what a mind is, what human beings are like before any society gets to them. Sometimes the philosopher states these answers. Often they are implicit. Occasionally they are hidden from the philosopher too.

These assumptions are, by the standards of science, wild. They are conjectures about matters we did not have the tools to investigate, adopted because the argument could not proceed without them. Science refuses to make conjectures of that size, not from modesty but because it knows what happens next: the conclusion inherits whatever was wrong in the premise, and there is no way to find out which part.

A tradition is what you get when a set of such assumptions attracts followers. Two sets of unwarranted assumptions, two traditions, two bodies of literature that cannot correct each other because they do not share a floor.

The Two Examples I Keep Returning To

Hobbes. The entire edifice of Leviathan stands on a picture of the pre-political human condition as a war of all against all. Everything follows from it: the need for the sovereign, the terms of the contract, the limits of liberty. And it is false. We now have evidence about how humans lived before states, from archaeology and from the study of surviving small-scale societies, and it does not look like Hobbes's picture. It was never based on evidence. It was an assumption that made the argument go.

Rawls. The veil of ignorance is a genuinely attractive idea: design the society you would choose without knowing which position in it you would occupy. I have no quarrel with it as a statement of the target. My quarrel is that it stops there. Having described where we would like to arrive, it says nothing about how to build institutions that actually deliver it, or about what happens to the principle once real people with real positions run those institutions. The assumption doing the work is that a correct principle, once stated, has some path into practice. There is no reason to believe that, and the history of correctly stated principles suggests the opposite.

In both cases the philosopher is remembered for the conclusions. In both cases the conclusions are only as good as an assumption nobody was in a position to check.

What Science Does Instead

The lesson science learned, slowly and at great cost, is that the basic assumptions are the real problem, not the conclusions. A wrong conclusion from a sound premise is a mistake you can find. A sound-looking conclusion from a wrong premise is a mistake that hides indefinitely.

So basic science spends its effort where the risk is. It keeps rewriting the assumptions. Newton's absolute space was an assumption, and it held for two centuries, and then it was replaced, and the replacement did not become a rival tradition alongside the original. It became the field.

That is the difference in one sentence. When a science discovers that a foundational assumption was wrong, the field moves. When philosophy discovers the same thing, it acquires another tradition.

Reading the Word

None of this means that traditions are worthless as history. Knowing which school an author belongs to tells you which assumptions to look for, and that is useful, in the way that knowing a witness's employer is useful.

But it should change how you hear the phrase. "In the continental tradition" is not a compass bearing. It is an admission that what follows depends on premises the author's own colleagues reject, that there is no procedure for deciding between them, and that the author has chosen a side anyway. Truth does not run in traditions. Wherever you find them, something other than truth is holding the field together.