Conformism

Conformism in analytic philosophy:
ON SHAPING Philosophical boundaries and prejudices[i]
Aaron PReston
Contemporary work in the history of analytic philosophy has revealed that there are not now and never have been any views shared by all and only canonical analytic philosophers. On a traditional understanding of what it means to be a philosophical school, this implies that analyticphilosophy is not and never has been a philosophical school. But if it is not a philosophical school, what is analytic philosophy, and how did it come by its dominant status in academia? This paper argues that (i) analytic philosophy is best regarded a social collectivity unified by interactional memes, and that (ii) its meteoric rise to power and prominence in academic philosophy was due not to thecogency of the philosophical views traditionally associated with it, but to “norm conformism”—a mode of meme-propagation involving humans’ propensity to adopt the most prevalent memes in their local population in order to “fit in” and thus to maximize opportunities for social success.



[S]ince we have suggested that yesterday’s hostility to metaphysics was at least not conclusively pressedhome, we ought to give some consideration to the present position of that subject. Is it, as some have supposed, either likely or desirable that there should be a metaphysical revival? May it be that its recent and contemporary recession has been due to no more than a change of intellectual fashions, unimportant in the longer perspective of philosophical history? (Warnock 1958, 123)[When a theory] in no way prefers an inwardly evident judgement to a blind one ... [i]t thereby destroys the very thing that distinguishes it from an arbitrary, unwarranted assertion. (Husserl 1900-01, 135 f.)



1. Introduction

The first of the two epigraphs selected for this paper comes from G. J. Warnock’s book, English Philosophy Since 1900. As one might expect given the title,Warnock’s subject is what has come to be known as analytic philosophy, and the hostility to metaphysics he mentions is that peculiar hostility which, for a time at least, seemed to be part and parcel of the analytic movement.[ii] What is important about this quotation in the present context is the pregnant suggestion (one of many in English Philosophy) that what was for a long time thought to be oneof analytic philosophy’s defining features might have been a matter of mere fashion rather than the result of sufficiently well-founded arguments and views (which is what Warnock means by saying that the hostility was not conclusively pressed home). My primary aim in this paper will be to develop this suggestion vis-à-vis the phenomenon of conformism and to show that, thus construed, there aregood grounds for thinking it true. Specifically, I shall argue for what I call the conformist hypothesis: the view that it is (and always has been) a mistake to regard analytic philosophy as a philosophical school, movement, or tradition, and that, instead, it is (and always has been) a purely social entity unified by what memeticists call interactional memes, maintained at high frequency byconformist transmission. My secondary aim will be to make a case for the claim that, if Warnock was right, then something was terribly wrong about the way analytic philosophy came both to exist and to dominate the social world of academic philosophy in certain geographical regions (America, Britain, etc.) during the twentieth century.
Now a good bit of conceptual scaffolding will need to be put inplace before these claims will appear plausible, let alone true. Consequently, I will begin (section 2) by explaining the connection between Warnock’s suggestion and conformism. Next (section 3), I will make some general observations about the relation of philosophy to conformism, especially as concerns the formation of groups and group-boundaries among philosophers. Specifically, I shall argue...