A bit more than 20 years ago, back in the early heyday of academic blogging, I started a blog. It ran for almost five years, though I eventually stopped posting, as my growing professional responsibilities took more time, and the rise of social media took up more of my para-professional content creation. In the past few years, I’ve noticed that a good number of my professional peers have started up Substacks, so I’ve decided to try this out again. As before, I expect I’ll mainly be posting philosophical thoughts that come up while reading, but that haven’t yet made their way into a publication.
My previous blog was called “Antimeta”, and had a tagline “A general distrust of strong metaphysical claims in mathematics and philosophy.” This is a bit strange, because some of my best friends in philosophy work on metaphysics, and especially during the years I ran the blog, I often went to metaphysics-focused conferences. But my inclinations always leaned towards nominalism or fictionalism about abstract objects (that is, the idea that talk of things like “numbers”, “sets”, “propositions”, “concepts”, and “ideas” is just a way of using language that is useful even though it doesn’t correspond to anything real). Many of the posts I made were about three different questions of realism in mathematics - do mathematical objects exist? are there truths beyond what can be proved from ZFC? does mathematical truth obey classical logic? These were the questions I focused on for my qualifying exam in my PhD program.
As I finished my PhD, my work turned away from these sorts of topics in the metaphysics of mathematics (at least in part because I thought there was less of interest to say about these questions), toward Bayesian epistemology - the idea that it’s useful to think of belief in terms of probability functions, that govern action via decision theory. My dissertation, and most of my other publications, have been in this area. But over the years since then, I have realized that a big part of what I was arguing about in these debates concerned the question of how abstract objects like real numbers could be relevant to the rationality of beliefs or decisions. I am no longer focused on whether numbers actually exist, but it turns out that the same construction and reconstruction of theories that is supposed to show that numbers are or aren’t “indispensable” for theorizing about the world can actually be reinterpreted as a way to show what the numbers actually mean for the topic under discussion (whether it’s about counting the population of cities, measuring distances, or describing someone’s degree of confidence in an uncertain claim).
For most of my early career, I thought of contemporary philosophy as primarily split between the analytic and continental traditions, with myself falling clearly within the analytic tradition. However, my time in the Texas A&M philosophy department made me more cognizant of the fact that this is not a clear binary, and that there are many other philosophical traditions. The analytic tradition itself is an outgrowth of the work of Frege, Russell, and Moore, under the influence of the logical positivists (who largely fled continental Europe during the rise of the Nazis), and later influence from the American pragmatists as the tradition settled in American departments in the middle of the 20th century.
In recent years, I’ve come to the view that my philosophical thinking is now in many ways closer to the thinking of the positivists and the pragmatists than it is to the core analytic ideas we find in Frege and Russell. I won’t go into the details of this here - I’m sure I’ll discuss it more in later posts. But I chose these terms as the title of this Substack, partly for their philosophical resonance, and partly also because I endorse pragmatism and positivity in their non-philosophical senses as well. (I find it interesting that with some suffixes, these roots are ambiguous between philosophical and broader senses, while with other suffixes only one of these meanings is possible.)
I’ll leave off there for now - later posts will have more philosophical content.
Looking forward! I tend to think a major fault line among contemporary philosophers concerns how much sympathy one has for the positivist tradition.
To be clear, I don't think you'll find too many, if any, people who wholeheartedly endorse the verificationism-based critique of metaphysics. But some of us still think the positivists had basically good instincts; their judgments about which sorts of questions are fruitful to pursue and which ones are not tended to be on the right track, even if their theoretical accounts of that distinction aren't ultimately salvageable. (For reasons they themselves largely developed and acknowledged!) While others see the questions the positivists dismissed as perfectly fine philosophical questions, and are happy to pick them back up and debate them with gusto.
E.g., us positivst sympathizers are much more likely to see "verbal disputes" in philosophy, even if we're not sure exactly what makes something a "verbal dispute", or even if that's the right way to characterize the sorts of questions we're suspicious of.
I was a huge fan of Antimeta back in the day and am looking forward to any future writing you do here.