Philosophical self-confidence

Long ago, relatively speaking, I learned not to psychologically tie my success in love to my sense of self-worth. Although recent break-ups have been occasions for sadness, they have not been occasions for lasting self-doubt.

Far riskier for me in this regard than the act of falling in love is the act of letting a professor look at a piece of my philosophical writing. Unfortunately, I have chosen a career that requires a lot of this. (I am being disingenuous--talk of misfortune is misplaced here, as the two preceeding facts are surely causally connected.)

In accordance with duty, I recently gave C. a piece of writing on two-dimensional semantics, which you may recognize as my main philosophical obsession of the past year. It was more or less a summary of my current view of the theory and its motivations, in the service of an eventual critique. (I think the main reason for adopting a two-dimensional semantics, which is not anywhere quite explicit in the writing of its proponents, is a kind of transcendental argument that it must be true if reductive explanation is possible, and we can see that it is since we have succeeded in giving reductive explanations of some things.)

In accordance with his duty, C. wrote some comments on what I had written and suggested further reading (I did not really tip my hand about where I intend to go from here). I received those comments a few days ago, and now the truly difficult work begins. I do not mean developing the argument I have in mind. I mean the emotionally difficult task of finding the confidence to go on at all.

This is a serious problem for me. After spending a good deal of time and energy writing what I did, even a simple comment like:

It would be contentious merely to hold that a priori knowability and necessity of primary intension are coextensive, never mind whether the former can be reduced to the latter. And I’m not sure that 2dists all actually want to endorse the reducibility claim.

can be emotionally devastating. I start to wonder whether I haven't just misunderstood the whole thing, or whether, having understood it, I have deliberately distorted it into a view that is easier to argue against. I feel that David Chalmers must surely be smarter than I am and his views will necessarily be too subtle for my clumsy argumentation to get a grip on.

After listening to some inspiring music (preferably something confrontational and subversive, like Gang of Four or Mission of Burma), I might find it in me to go look again at the writings of the two-dimensionalists, where I might find, for example, the following (from section 1.4 of Chalmers' forthcoming paper, "The Foundations of Two-Dimensional Semantics"):

Core Thesis: For any sentence S, S is a priori iff S has a necessary 1-intension.

Of course, C. is right about the reducibility claim; that will only be endorsed by Chalmers if he thinks that necessity of 1-intensions can be explained without appeal to epistemic notions like a priority, which is doubtful. Still, as noted, the mere co-extensiveness is contentious, and C. doubted in his comments whether the two-dimensionalists would even be committed to it. But here is Chalmers, calling it the "Core Thesis." What I need to do to remove the force of C.'s comments on this part of the paper is, first, to cite this bit of Chalmers and, second, to revise my claim that it is the reducibility of a priori knowability that the two-dimensionalist is after. After all, as C. also points out, I was trying to make an analogy with the motivation for a possible worlds account of the meaning of alethic modal operators, but many who find that to be an attractive theory do not think that alethic modality can be reduced to quantification over possible worlds. The point is, rather, that whatever the source of the attractiveness of this theory may be, the two-dimensionalist hopes to capitalize on it by explaining a priori knowability similarly in terms of truth in all possible worlds (only evaluated on a different "dimension" of the meaning of our expressions).

I wrote the last paragraph not because I think you will care about (or even be able to follow) its content, but as an example of what my response to C.'s criticisms should be. And yet, my first instinct is from despair to throw out everything I have written and start over, perhaps on a different subject entirely, or perhaps even in a different profession (it is at times like this that law school can seem attractive). One would think that, in order to make it this far along the way to a job as a professional philosopher, I would have learned not to take criticism of my work personally, or at least to turn it into constructive activity. I am even tempted to say that this is something I need to work on, except that surely what I should work on is revising and developing my writing on two-dimensionalism.

I shall permit myself just this self-indulgent reflection on the phenomenology of doing what I do; the thing is to do it.

Still, there is the lingering problem that my self-doubt could turn out to be justified. If so, what then? I sometimes wonder whether many philosophers have made their careers out of defending bad ideas that they initially thought were good only to discover too late to change course that they were not. Would not too much confidence in one's own philosophical abilities have the potential to blind one for too long to sound and devastating criticism?

That way is too dangerous. Time to work.