The Depth(s) of the Twentieth Century — Galen Strawson

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The Depth(s) of the Twentieth Century

Strawson presents a compact indictment of a mid-to-late twentieth-century philosophical habit: reversing what he takes to be the natural explanatory order. Across desire, belief, meaning, emotion, consciousness, objects, powers, causation, and existence, he was taught that the outward, behavioural, dispositional, or experiential pattern explains the apparently prior inner or metaphysical fact. He thinks these reversals are the wrong way round. > It seemed to me that all these claims were the wrong way round. > I still think they’re all the wrong way round, but I feel a little less insecure.

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Philosophical atmosphere

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Strawson frames the list autobiographically: he took up philosophy in 1972 and encountered a family of claims presented as the sophisticated view of central topics. The joke of the title is that these were supposed to be philosophical depths, but to him they often looked like inversions. > I took up philosophy in 1972, and this... is what I was given to understand.

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General form of inversion

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The repeated structure is: not X explains Y, but Y explains X. Wanting is explained by trying; belief by behaviour; meaning by correct use; anger by expression; consciousness by observable dispositions. Strawson’s target is this broad explanatory style rather than one isolated doctrine.

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Objects reversed

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Objects are treated as posits from experience rather than as causes of experience. Strawson presents the idea as: tableish experiences do not occur because a table is there; the table is there because of the pattern of experiences. > I don’t have tableish experiences because there’s a table in front of me. There’s a table in front of me because I have certain tableish experiences.

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Quine’s physical-object posit

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Strawson’s only footnote points to Quine’s claim that physical objects are epistemological posits. Quine’s line treats ordinary objects as theoretical commitments that help organise experience, rather than as straightforwardly given foundations. > Physical objects... [are] posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer.

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Quine’s context

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In Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Quine rejects a sharp analytic/synthetic boundary and argues that our statements face experience as a whole system. Physical objects, atoms, forces, and mathematical entities are accepted because they make the theory work, not because each is reducible to direct experience. > The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science. > Science is a continuation of common sense... swelling ontology to simplify theory.

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Why Quine matters here

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The Quine reference explains the object case in Strawson’s list. If physical objects are posits comparable to Homeric gods, then the table is not treated as the prior cause of table-experience in the naive realist order; rather, object-talk is justified by its role in organising experience. Strawson sees this as one instance of the twentieth-century reversal he is resisting.

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The wrong way round

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The main judgment is blunt: across all these domains, Strawson thinks the explanatory order should not be reversed. Desire, belief, understanding, consciousness, objects, powers, causes, and existence are not made by their behavioural or experiential shadows. > I still think they’re all the wrong way round.

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Tentative improvement

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The final sentence is dryly hopeful. Perhaps the twenty-first century is recovering somewhat from these reversals, but only slightly. The note ends with philosophical irony rather than a full argument. > Perhaps things are looking up a little—but only a little—in the 21st century.

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Dispositions reversed

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