Theory and Philosophy

As a break from thinking about issues of life and death, I want to weigh in on a fairly abstruse discussion that has been going on in the more rarified neighborhoods of the Blogosphere (here, here, and here, for example); the discussion concerns ‘political philosophy’ vs. ‘political theory’.

The discussion is pretty abstract and academic, but I think it is an important one. It is important both because I think that these kinds of questions are important - that philosophy matters, as shown by the role that an obscure Muslim philosopher played in 9/11 and the current geopolitical situation - and because this distinction helps mark a break point between where I stand and where I believe Joe stands, in encouraging what we call ‘4th Generation’ politics and where some other commentators seem to be.

Part of where this difference lies is in the notion that instead of looking at ‘one unifying truth’, it is often best to let that truth develop through the elicitation and communication of ‘many small truths’. I'll expand on this at some point.

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Jacob Levy has a pretty extensive discussion on the subject, with a pretty good institutional analysis of the differences, which leads him to an explanation of the difference:

All of this means that theorists and philosophers, even when thinking or writing about the same questions, have different intellectual backup resources. To put it crudely: a political philosopher is much more likely to appeal to a higher level of abstraction (to general ethical theory, then to metaethics, then to epistemology...) while a political theorist is much more likely to appeal to a lower level of abstraction (empirical findings, history).

Relatedly...though this is probably the weakest tendency I'll mention...theorists tend to be more interested in institutions, in normative analyses of political systems as a whole, and more willing to think that politics is importantly distinct from other realms of ethics. Sometimes 'political philosophers' are simply ethicists and moral philosophers who apply their familiar tools to new situations. What a policymaker should do is treated as a special case of what the person standing at the trolley switch should do. This is not true of Rawls, and indeed isn't true of many of the most prominent political philosophers. (Interestingly, it is sort of true of Nozick.) Moreover, some theorists tend this way themselves. But (as Matt Yglesias notes), for this sort of reason theorists have a loose tendency to find the turn to 'political liberalism' in late Rawls both more comprehensible and more justifiable than do philosophers.

This doubtless marks me as someone who fits neatly into the ‘theorist’ camp. My senior paper, which in essence argued that ‘political philosophy’ was an oxymoron ... probably sealed my membership in that camp.

It wasn't until graduate school, where I studied with Host Rittel, that I began to be able to articulate a little more about the distinction.

Rittel, along with Mel Webber, wrote a brilliant paper on this exact issue. It was called "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning", and in it, they suggested that problems could be divided into two categories: "tame" and "wicked".

"Tame" problems are those that can be modeled (represented in language, notation, or a simplified physical representation), repeated (they will consistently give the same response to the same inputs), and bound (defined entirely within a constrained space, such as a laboratory).

"Wicked" problems, on the other hand, meet none of those criteria. Rittel and Webber developed ten criteria to define wicked problems:

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad.
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
9. The existence of a discrepancy in representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution.
10. The planner (designer) has no right to be wrong.

Problems in politics are almost certainly "wicked" problems, as defined here, and one of the reasons why we have so much trouble talking about politics ... and why so much of the discussion on politics is inherently unsatisfying is that we persist in trying to make believe that they are tame problems.

Let me try this again in a more accessible way.

In Los Angeles, where I live, the movie industry is one of the core industries, so much as people who live in Redmond are fairly conversant in the ins-and-outs of the software industry, or people who live in Manhattan are often conversant in advertising and finance, we tend to be comfortable with movie jargon.

Most high-budget pictures today are what are called "high concept" pictures. The essence of the picture ... the point, if you will ... is readily reducible to a sentence or two, in which you describe the hero or heroine and situation. The rest of the film hangs from this armature of concept; in some cases, it works well - pick a John Ford western or a Kurosawa samurai movie - and in some, badly - pick any current Eddie Murphy movie.

"High concept" pictures are "tame"; they are representable (you can readily describe the film in two or three sentences), repeatable (Lethal Weapon II, III, IV, V, etc.), and bound - you leave the film feeling like the whole of the characters, plot, and environment are contained within the film itself.

Other movies are not "high concept"; they depend on the unpredictable-seeming interactions of the characters to define the plot, and you certainly walk away from them feeling like what you have seen is a small window into a vaster, more complex world that extends far beyond the screen and the duration of the film. These "wicked" films are typically more complex, more interesting, and when they work, can leave you with a deeper experience.

Similarly, what political philosophy attempts to do is to create what would in essence be a "high concept" politics; one in which the richness and unpredictability of real political relationships can be reduced to a to compact armature of formula. This manages to be both wrong and dangerous, because it turns theory into a Procrustean bed onto which we intend to force messy, complex, real people to fit.

I'll pick this up later and use it to discuss Rawls specifically and how the nature of thinking that underlies this kind of "philosophical politics" can be perceived at the opposite end of the pole from the kind of dynamic 4th generation politics that I'm interested in.