Philosophy, according to Edward Craig (1942– ) is hard to avoid. In some sense weare all philosophers. Beginning from these thoughts, Craig gives us his picture of whatphilosophy is. His is a broader and more inclusive account of philosophy than youmight expect from someone within the university system (Craig is a professor atCambridge University). It should serve as a useful antidote to those who declare thatphilosophy is simply whatever happens to be taught within reputable universityphilosophy departments.

*

Anyone reading this book is to some extent a philosopher already. Nearly allof us are, because we have some kind of values by which we live our lives (orlike to think we do, or feel uncomfortable when we don’t). And most of usfavour some very general picture of what the world is like. Perhaps we thinkthere’s a god who made it all, including us; or, on the contrary, we think it’sall a matter of chance and natural selection. Perhaps we believe that people haveimmortal, non-material parts called souls or spirits; or, quite the opposite, thatwe are just complicated arrangements of matter that gradually fall to bits afterwe die. So most of us, even those who don’t think about it at all, have some-thing like answers to the two basic philosophical questions, namely: whatshould we do? and, what is there? And there’s a third basic question, to whichagain most of us have some kind of an answer, which kicks in the moment weget self-conscious about either of the first two questions, namely: how do weknow, or if we don’t know how should we set about finding out – use our eyes,think, consult an oracle, ask a scientist? Philosophy, thought of as a subjectthat you can study, be ignorant of, get better at, even be an expert on, simplymeans being rather more reflective about some of these questions and theirinterrelations, learning what has already been said about them and why.

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PHILOSOPHY

Edward Craig

From Edward Craig, Philosophy: A very short introduction, 2002

In fact, philosophy is extremely hard to avoid, even with a conscious effort.Consider someone who rejects it, telling us that ‘Philosophy is useless’. For astart, they are evidently measuring it against some system of values. Secondly,the moment they are prepared to say, however briefly and dogmatically, whyit is useless, they will be talking about the ineffectuality of certain types ofthought, or of human beings’ incapacity to deal with certain types of ques-tion. And then instead of rejecting philosophy they will have become anothervoice within it – a sceptical voice, admittedly, but then philosophy has neverbeen short of sceptical voices, from the earliest times to the present day.

If they take the second of those lines, they may also be implying that mak-ing the discovery that human beings just can’t cope with certain kinds of ques-tion, and making that discovery for yourself – and actually making it, ratherthan just lazily assuming that you know it already – isn’t a valuable experience,or is an experience without effects. Surely that cannot be true? Imagine howdifferent the world would have been if we were all convinced that human beingsjust aren’t up to answering any questions about the nature or even existence ofa god, in other words, if all human beings were religious agnostics. Imagine howdifferent it would have been if we were all convinced that there was no answerto the question of what legitimates the political authority that states habituallyexercise over their members, in other words, if none of us believed that therewas any good answer to the anarchist. It may well be controversial whether thedifferences would have been for the good, or for the bad, or whether in fact theywouldn’t have mattered as much as you might at first think; but that therewould have been differences, and very big ones, is surely beyond question. Thathow people think alters things, and that how lots of people think alters thingsfor nearly everyone, is undeniable. A more sensible objection to philosophythan that it is ineffectual is pretty much the opposite: that it is too dangerous.(Nietzsche called a philosopher ‘a terrible explosive from which nothing is safe’– though he didn’t mean that as an objection.) But what this usually means isthat any philosophy is dangerous except the speaker’s own, and what itamounts to is fear of what might happen if things change.

It might occur to you that perhaps there are people who don’t even think itworthwhile to enter into this discussion at all, however briefly, not even tosupport the sceptical stance that I have just mentioned. And you would be right,but that doesn’t mean to say that they don’t have a philosophy. Far from it. Itmay mean that they are not prepared to ‘philosophize’ – to state their viewsand argue for them or discourse upon them. But it doesn’t mean that they haveno abiding values, nothing which they systematically regard as worthwhile.They might think, for instance, that real expertise at doing something is moredesirable than any amount of theoretical knowledge. Their ideal would not somuch be insight into the nature of reality as the capacity to become one withit in the execution of some particular activity, to have trained oneself to dosomething without conscious effort as if by a perfectly honed natural instinct.I am not just making these people up: a lot of Zen Buddhist thought, or perhapsI should say Zen Buddhist practice, leans strongly in this direction. And this

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ideal, of aiming at a certain kind of thoughtlessness, was the outcome of a greatdeal of previous thinking.

If philosophy is so close to us, why do so many people think that it is some-thing very abstruse and rather weird? It isn’t that they are simply wrong:some philosophy is abstruse and weird, and a lot of the best philosophy islikely to seem abstruse or weird at first. That’s because the best philosophydoesn’t just come up with a few new facts that we can simply add to our stockof information, or a few new maxims to extend our list of dos and don’ts, butembodies a picture of the world and/or a set of values; and unless these happento be yours already (remember that in a vague and unreflective way we allhave them) it is bound to seem very peculiar – if it doesn’t seem peculiar youhaven’t understood it. Good philosophy expands your imagination. Some phil-osophy is close to us, whoever we are. Then of course some is further away,and some is further still, and some is very alien indeed. It would be disap-pointing if that were not so, because it would imply that human beings areintellectually rather monotonous. But there’s no need to start at the deep end;we start at the shallow end, where (as I’ve said) we are all standing in thewater already. Do remember, however (here the analogy with the swimming-pool leaves me in the lurch, the way analogies often do), that this doesn’tnecessarily mean that we are all standing in the same place: what is shallowand familiar, and what is deep and weird, may depend on where you got in,and when.

We may be standing in the water, but why try to swim? In other words,what is philosophy for? There is far too much philosophy, composed underfar too wide a range of conditions, for there to be a general answer to thatquestion. But it can certainly be said that a great deal of philosophy has beenintended as (understanding the words very broadly) a means to salvation,though what we are to understand by salvation, and salvation from what, hasvaried as widely as the philosophies themselves. A Buddhist will tell you thatthe purpose of philosophy is the relief of human suffering and the attainmentof ‘enlightenment’; a Hindu will say something similar, if in slightly differentterminology; both will speak of escape from a supposed cycle of death andrebirth in which one’s moral deserts determine one’s future forms. AnEpicurean (if you can find one nowadays) will pooh-pooh all the stuff aboutrebirth, but offer you a recipe for maximizing pleasure and minimizingsuffering in this your one and only life.

Not all philosophy has sprung out of a need for a comprehensive way ofliving and dying. But most of the philosophy that has lasted has arisen fromsome pressing motivation or deeply felt belief – seeking truth and wisdompurely for their own sakes may be a nice idea, but history suggests that a niceidea is pretty much all it is. Thus classical Indian philosophy represents theinternal struggle between the schools of Hinduism, and between them all andthe Buddhists, for intellectual supremacy; the battle for the preferred balancebetween human reason and scriptural revelation has been fought in manycultures, and in some is still going on; Thomas Hobbes’s famous political

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theory [ . . . ] tries to teach us the lessons he felt had to be learnt in the after-math of the English Civil War; Descartes and many of his contemporarieswanted medieval views, rooted nearly two thousand years back in the workof Aristotle, to move aside and make room for a modern conception of science;Kant sought to advance the autonomy of the individual in the face of illiberaland autocratic regimes, Marx to liberate the working classes from poverty anddrudgery, feminists of all epochs to improve the status of women. None ofthese people were just solving little puzzles (though they did sometimes haveto solve little puzzles on the way); they entered into debate in order to changethe course of civilization.

The reader will notice that I haven’t made any attempt to define philoso-phy, but have just implied that it is an extremely broad term covering a verywide range of intellectual activities. Some think that nothing is to be gainedfrom trying to define it. I can sympathize with that thought, since mostattempts strike me as much too restrictive, and therefore harmful rather thanhelpful in so far as they have any effect at all. But I will at least have a shot atsaying what philosophy is; whether what I have to offer counts as a definitionor not is something about which we needn’t, indeed positively shouldn’t,bother too much.

Once, a very long time ago, our ancestors were animals, and simply didwhatever came naturally without noticing that that was what they were doing,or indeed without noticing that they were doing anything at all. Then,somehow, they acquired the capacities to ask why things happen (as opposedto just registering that they do), and to look at themselves and their actions.That is not as big a jump as may at first sight appear. Starting to ask whythings happen is in the first place only a matter of becoming a little moreconscious of aspects of one’s own behaviour. A hunting animal that follows ascent is acting as if aware that the scent is there because its prey has recentlypassed that way – and it is because that really is why the scent is there thatit often succeeds in its hunt. Knowledge of this sort of connection can be veryuseful: it tells us what to expect. Furthermore, to know that A happens becauseB happened may improve your control over things: in some cases B will besomething that you can bring about, or prevent – which will be very usefulif A is something you want, or want to avoid. Many of these connectionsanimals, humans included, follow naturally and unconsciously. And the prac-tice, once one is aware of it, can valuably be extended by consciously raisingsuch questions in cases where we do not have conveniently built-in answers.

There could be no guarantee, however, that this generally valuable tendencywould always pay off, let alone always pay off quickly. Asking why fruit fallsoff a branch pretty soon leads one to shake the tree. Asking why it rains, orwhy it doesn’t rain, takes us into a different league, especially when the realmotive underlying the question is whether we can influence whether it rainsor not. Often we can influence events, and it may well pay to develop the habitof asking, when things (a hunting expedition, for example) have gone wrong,whether that was because we failed in our part of the performance, as opposed

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to being defeated by matters beyond our control. That same useful habit mighthave generated the thought that a drought is to some extent due to a failureof ours – and now what failure, what have we done wrong? And then an ideamight crop up which served us well in our infancy: there are parents, who dothings for us that we can’t do ourselves, but only if we’ve been good and theyaren’t cross with us. Might there be beings that decide whether the rain falls,and shouldn’t we be trying to get on the right side of them?

That is all it would take for human beings to be launched into the investi-gation of nature and belief in the supernatural. So as their mental capacitiesdeveloped our ancestors found their power increasing; but they also foundthemselves confronted by options and mysteries – life raised a host of ques-tions, where previously it had simply been lived, unquestioningly. It is just aswell that all this happened gradually, but even so it was the biggest shock thespecies has ever encountered. Some people, thinking more in intellectual thanbiological terms, might like to say that it was what made us human at all.

Think of philosophy as the sound of humanity trying to recover from thiscrisis. Thinking of it like that will protect you from certain common misap-prehensions. One is that philosophy is a rather narrow operation that onlyoccurs in universities, or (less absurdly) only in particular epochs or particularcultures; another, related to the first, is that it is something of an intellectualgame, answering to no very deep need. On the positive side, it may lead youto expect that the history of philosophy is likely to contain some fascinatingepisodes, as indeed it does, and it certainly adds to the excitement if we bear inmind that view of what is really going on. Can reeling homo sapiens think hisway back to the vertical? We have no good reason to answer that questioneither way, Yes or No. Are we even sure that we know where the vertical is?That’s the kind of open-ended adventure we are stuck with, like it or not.

But isn’t that just too broad? Surely philosophy doesn’t include every-thing that this account of it implies? Well, in the first place, it will do us less harm to err on the broad side than the narrow. And in the second place, thescope of the word ‘philosophy’ has itself varied considerably through history,not to mention the fact that there has probably never been a time at which itmeant the same thing to everyone. Recently something rather strange hashappened to it. On the one hand it has become so broad as to be close to mean-ingless, as when almost every commercial organization speaks of itself ashaving a philosophy – usually meaning a policy. On the other hand it hasbecome very narrow. A major factor here has been the development of thenatural sciences. It has often been remarked that when an area of inquirybegins to find its feet as a discipline, with clearly agreed methods and a clearlyagreed body of knowledge, fairly soon it separates off from what has up tothen been known as philosophy and goes its own way, as for instance physics,chemistry, astronomy, psychology. So the range of questions considered bypeople who think of themselves as philosophers shrinks; and furthermore,philosophy tends to be left in charge of those questions which we are not surehow best to formulate, those inquiries we are not sure how best to set about.

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This multiplication of thriving disciplines inevitably brings another factorinto play, namely specialization within universities, and creates the opportu-nity to think of philosophy yet more narrowly. University philosophydepartments are mostly quite small. In consequence, so is the range of theirexpertise, which tends to cluster around current (sometimes also local)academic fashion – it must do, since it is normally they who make it. Besides,undergraduate courses are, for obvious reasons, quite short, and therefore haveto be selective on pain of gross superficiality. So the natural assumption thatphilosophy is what university philosophy departments teach, though Icertainly wouldn’t call it false, is restrictive and misleading, and ought to beavoided.

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‘What do philosophers think about?’, ‘How should they think about these things?’ and‘Why does it matter?’ These are the basic questions Simon Blackburn (1944– )addresses in this extract from his book Think. Philosophy should be the enemy of cosycomplacency in thought. Blackburn explains why.

*The word ‘philosophy’ carries unfortunate connotations: impractical, un-worldly, weird. I suspect that all philosophers and philosophy students sharethat moment of silent embarrassment when someone innocently asks us whatwe do. I would prefer to introduce myself as doing conceptual engineering.For just as the engineer studies the structure of material things, so the phil-osopher studies the structure of thought. Understanding the structure involvesseeing how parts function and how they interconnect. It means knowing whatwould happen for better or worse if changes were made. This is what we aimat when we investigate the structures that shape our view of the world. Ourconcepts or ideas form the mental housing in which we live. We may end upproud of the structures we have built. Or we may believe that they needdismantling and starting afresh. But first, we have to know what they are.

[ . . . ]

WHAT ARE WE TO THINK ABOUT?

Here are some questions any of us might ask about ourselves: What am I?What is consciousness? Could I survive my bodily death? Can I be sure thatother people’s experiences and sensations are like mine? If I can’t share theexperience of others, can I communicate with them? Do we always act out ofself-interest? Might I be a kind of puppet, programmed to do the things thatI believe I do out of my own free will?

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3

THINK

Simon Blackburn

From Simon Blackburn, Think, 2001

Here are some questions about the world: Why is there something and notnothing? What is the difference between past and future? Why does causationrun always from past to future, or does it make sense to think that the futuremight influence the past? Why does nature keep on in a regular way? Doesthe world presuppose a Creator? And if so, can we understand why he (or sheor they) created it?

Finally, here are some questions about ourselves and the world: How canwe be sure that the world is really like we take it to be? What is knowledge,and how much do we have? What makes a field of inquiry a science? (Is psycho-analysis a science? Is economics?) How do we know about abstract objects,like numbers? How do we know about values and duties? How are we to tellwhether our opinions are objective, or just subjective?

The queer thing about these questions is that not only are they baffling atfirst sight, but they also defy simple processes of solution. If someone asksme when it is high tide, I know how to set about getting an answer. Thereare authoritative tide tables I can consult. I may know roughly how they areproduced. And if all else fails, I could go and measure the rise and fall of the sea myself. A question like this is a matter of experience: an empiricalquestion. It can be settled by means of agreed procedures, involving lookingand seeing, making measurements, or applying rules that have been testedagainst experience and found to work. The questions of the last paragraphsare not like this. They seem to require more reflection. We don’t immediatelyknow where to look. Perhaps we feel we don’t quite know what we mean whenwe ask them, or what would count as getting a solution. What would showme, for instance, whether I am not after all a puppet, programmed to do thethings I believe I do freely? Should we ask scientists who specialize in thebrain? But how would they know what to look for? How would they knowwhen they had found it? Imagine the headline: ‘Neuroscientists discoverhuman beings not puppets.’ How?

So what gives rise to such baffling questions?In a word, self-reflection. Human beings are relentlessly capable of reflect-

ing on themselves. We might do something out of habit, but then we can beginto reflect on the habit. We can habitually think things, and then reflect on whatwe are thinking. We can ask ourselves (or sometimes we get asked by otherpeople) whether we know what we are talking about. To answer that we needto reflect on our own positions, our own understanding of what we are saying,our own sources of authority. We might start to wonder whether we know whatwe mean. We might wonder whether what we say is ‘objectively’ true, ormerely the outcome of our own perspective, or our own ‘take’ on a situation.Thinking about this we confront categories like knowledge, objectivity, truth,and we may want to think about them. At that point we are reflecting on con-cepts and procedures and beliefs that we normally just use. We are looking atthe scaffolding of our thought, and doing conceptual engineering.

This point of reflection might arise in the course of quite normal discus-sion. A historian, for example, is more or less bound at some point to ask what

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is meant by ‘objectivity’ or ‘evidence’ or even ‘truth’ in history. A cosmolo-gist has to pause from solving equations with the letter in them, and ask whatis meant, for instance, by the flow of time or the direction of time or thebeginning of time. But at that point, whether they recognize it or not, theybecome philosophers. And they are beginning to do something that can bedone well or badly. The point is to do it well.

How is philosophy learned? A better question is: how can thinking skillsbe acquired? The thinking in question involves attending to basic structuresof thought. This can be done well or badly, intelligently or ineptly. But doingit well is not primarily a matter of acquiring a body of knowledge. It is morelike playing the piano well. It is a ‘knowing how’ as much as a ‘knowing that’.The most famous philosophical character of the classical world, the Socratesof Plato’s dialogues, did not pride himself on how much he knew. On thecontrary, he prided himself on being the only one who knew how little he knew (reflection, again). What he was good at—supposedly, for estimatesof his success differ—was exposing the weaknesses of other peoples’ claims toknow. To process thoughts well is a matter of being able to avoid confusion,detect ambiguities, keep things in mind one at a time, make reliable arguments,become aware of alternatives, and so on.

To sum up: our ideas and concepts can be compared with the lenses throughwhich we see the world. In philosophy the lens is itself the topic of study.Success will be a matter not of how much you know at the end, but of whatyou can do when the going gets tough: when the seas of argument rise, andconfusion breaks out. Success will mean taking seriously the implications ofideas.

WHAT IS THE POINT?

It is all very well saying that, but why bother? What’s the point? Reflectiondoesn’t get the world’s business done. It doesn’t bake bread or fly aeroplanes.Why not just toss the reflective questions aside, and get on with other things?I shall sketch three kinds of answer: high ground, middle ground, and lowground.

The high ground questions the question—a typical philosophical strategy,because it involves going up one level of reflection. What do we mean whenwe ask what the point is? Reflection bakes no bread, but then neither doesarchitecture, music, art, history, or literature. It is just that we want to under-stand ourselves. We want this for its own sake, just as a pure scientist or puremathematician may want to understand the beginning of the universe, or thetheory of sets, for its own sake, or just as a musician might want to solvesome problem in harmony or counterpoint just for its own sake. There is noeye on any practical applications. A lot of life is indeed a matter of raisingmore hogs, to buy more land, so we can raise more hogs, so that we can buymore land . . . The time we take out, whether it is to do mathematics or music,or to read Plato or Jane Austen, is time to be cherished. It is the time in which

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we cosset our mental health. And our mental health is just good in itself, likeour physical health. Furthermore there is after all a payoff in terms of pleasure.When our physical health is good, we take pleasure in physical exercise, andwhen our mental health is good, we take pleasure in mental exercise.

This is a very pure-minded reply. The problem with it is not that it iswrong. It is just that it is only likely to appeal to people who are half-convincedalready—people who didn’t ask the original question in a very aggressive toneof voice.

So here is a middle-ground reply. Reflection matters because it is contin-uous with practice. How you think about what you are doing affects how youdo it, or whether you do it at all. It may direct your research, or your atti-tude to people who do things differently, or indeed your whole life. To takea simple example, if your reflections lead you to believe in a life after death,you may be prepared to face persecutions that you would not face if youbecame convinced—as many philosophers are—that the notion makes nosense. Fatalism, or the belief that the future is fixed whatever we do, is a purelyphilosophical belief, but it is one that can paralyse action. Putting it morepolitically, it can also express an acquiescence with the low status accorded tosome segments of society, and this may be a pay-off for people of higher statuswho encourage it.

Let us consider some examples more prevalent in the West. Many peoplereflecting on human nature think that we are at bottom entirely selfish. Weonly look out for our own advantage, never really caring about anyone else.Apparent concern disguises hope of future benefit. The leading paradigm inthe social sciences is homo economicus—economic man. Economic man looksafter himself, in competitive struggle with others. Now, if people come tothink that we are all, always, like this, their relations with each other becomedifferent. They become less trusting, less cooperative, more suspicious. Thischanges the way they interact, and they will incur various costs. They willfind it harder, and in some circumstances impossible, to get cooperativeventures going: they may get stuck in what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes(1588–1679) memorably called ‘the war of all against all’. In the market-place,because they are always looking out to be cheated, they will incur heavy trans-action costs. If my attitude is that ‘a verbal contract is not worth the paper itis written on’, I will have to pay lawyers to design contracts with penalties,and if I will not trust the lawyers to do anything except just enough to pockettheir fees, I will have to get the contracts checked by other lawyers, and soon. But all this may be based on a philosophical mistake—looking at humanmotivation through the wrong set of categories, and hence misunderstandingits nature. Maybe people can care for each other, or at least care for doingtheir bit or keeping their promises. Maybe if a more optimistic self-image ison the table, people can come to live up to it. Their lives then become better.So this bit of thinking, getting clear about the right categories with which tounderstand human motivation, is an important practical task. It is not confinedto the study, but bursts out of it.

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Here is a very different example. The Dutch astronomer NicholasCopernicus (1473–1543) reflected on how we know about motion. He realizedthat how we perceive motion is perspectival: that is, whether we see things asmoving is the result of how we ourselves are placed and in particular whetherwe ourselves are moving. (We have mostly been subject to the illusion intrains or airports, where the next-door train or aeroplane seems to move off,and then we realize with a jolt that it is we who are moving. But there werefewer everyday examples in the time of Copernicus.) So the apparent motionsof the stars and planets might arise because they are not moving as they appearto do, but we observers move. And this is how it turned out to be. Here reflec-tion on the nature of knowledge—what philosophers call an epistemologicalinquiry, from the Greek episteme, meaning knowledge—generated the firstspectacular leap of modern science. Einstein’s reflections on how we knowwhether two events are simultaneous had the same structure. He realized thatthe results of our measurements would depend upon the way we are travel-ling compared to the events we are clocking. This led to the Special Theoryof Relativity (and Einstein himself acknowledged the importance of precedingphilosophers in sensitizing him to the epistemological complexities of such ameasurement).

For a final example, we can consider a philosophical problem many peopleget into when they think about mind and body. Many people envisage a strictseparation between mind, as one thing, and body, as a different thing. Whenthis seems to be just good common sense, it can begin to infect practice inquite insidious ways. For instance, it begins to be difficult to see how thesetwo different things interact. Doctors might then find it almost inevitable thattreatments of physical conditions that address mental or psychological causeswill fail. They might find it next to impossible to see how messing withsomeone’s mind could possibly cause changes in the complex physical systemthat is their body. After all, good science tells us that it takes physical andchemical causes to have physical and chemical effects. So we might get an apriori, armchair certainty that one kind of treatment (say, drugs and electricshocks) has to be ‘right’ and others (such as treating patients humanely, coun-selling, analysis) are ‘wrong’: unscientific, unsound, bound to fail. But thiscertainty is premised not on science but on a false philosophy. A better philo-sophical conception of the relation between mind and body changes it. A betterconception should enable us to see how there is nothing surprising in the factof mind–body interaction. It is the most commonplace fact, for instance, thatthinking of some things (mental) can cause people to blush (physical).Thinking of a future danger can cause all kinds of bodily changes: hearts pound,fists clench, guts constrict. By extrapolation there should be nothing difficultto comprehend about a mental state such as cheerful optimism affecting aphysical state like the disappearance of spots or even the remission of a cancer.It becomes a purely empirical fact whether such things happen. The armchaircertainty that they could not happen is itself revealed as dependent on badunderstanding of the structures of thought, or in other words bad philosophy,

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and is in that sense unscientific. And this realization can change medicalattitudes and practice for the better.

So the middle-ground answer reminds us that reflection is continuous withpractice, and our practice can go worse or better according to the value of ourreflections. A system of thought is something we live in, just as much as ahouse, and if our intellectual house is cramped and confined, we need to knowwhat better structures are possible.

The low-ground answer merely polishes this point up a bit, not in connec-tion with nice clean subjects like economics or physics, but down in the base-ment where human life is a little less polite. One of the series of satires etchedby the Spanish painter Goya is entitled ‘The Sleep of Reason ProducesMonsters’. Goya believed that many of the follies of mankind resulted fromthe ‘sleep of reason’. There are always people telling us what we want, howthey will provide it, and what we should believe. Convictions are infectious,and people can make others convinced of almost anything. We are typicallyready to believe that our ways, our beliefs, our religion, our politics are betterthan theirs, or that our God-given rights trump theirs or that our interestsrequire defensive or pre-emptive strikes against them. In the end, it is ideas forwhich people kill each other. It is because of ideas about what the others arelike, or who we are, or what our interests or rights require, that we go to war,or oppress others with a good conscience, or even sometimes acquiesce in ourown oppression by others. When these beliefs involve the sleep of reason, crit-ical awakening is the antidote. Reflection enables us to step back, to see ourperspective on a situation as perhaps distorted or blind, at the very least to seeif there is argument for preferring our ways, or whether it is just subjective.Doing this properly is doing one more piece of conceptual engineering.

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