...

Hasok Chang makes a distinction between the abstract/concrete and the particular/general. This is in service to his way of integrating history and philosophy.

Here’s how I see the distinction between the distinctions. The particular relates to the general by way of induction, whereas the concrete relates to the abstract by way of subtraction. Movement from a particular case to its holding for all cases requires an inductive step. But movement from the concrete to the abstract requires that I remove concrete facts from a situation, resulting in a description (or set of categories or ontology or what have you) which, in principle, could be applied to concrete cases. Therefore, one can think of the general as being the abstract, yet applied. The particular and the concrete are not relevantly different.

A helpful example is to think in terms of “cases” and “episodes.” Case language has an affinity with the particular/general, as a particular case might be tested against a general theory. Episode language lends itself better to the abstract/concrete. An episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Chang’s example) is an instance of abstract TV tropes (such as having certain characters, certain plot structures, etc.); tropes that, in some sense (assuming a certain temperament), depend on or are instantiated in the episodes.

I am less interested in showing how this relates to the history of science and the philosophy of science. Chang tries to show that history-doing can be a way of philosophy-doing, insofar as engaging with history reveals a need for new abstractions which can, possibly, be generalized (for example, his work on temperature articulates an epistemic problem with measurement which is a general epistemic problem for justifying many measurements). I am more interested in how we can understand philosophy itself in terms of these distinctions.

Take the unit of analysis to be a discourse. No, I don’t think that I can spell this out satisfactorily. This is a particular or concrete case, or episode. To characterize the discourse, we abstract and then try to generalize the abstraction. More often than not, our generalizing the abstraction leads to new discourse, which seems either to generate an autonomous discourse (perhaps one that becomes a field of its own) or to create new problems for philosophers. New “problems” are created by new episodes which we must further characterize. And so the cycle continues.

Why start the unit of analysis as a discourse? I take a nice Aristotelian inspiration. He has a transcendental argument (or at least one that has been labeled a “transcendental argument”) for the law of the excluded middle (for every proposition, it is either true or false). I don’t feel like formulating it now, but the idea is that it is a prerequisite for discourse that we accept the law, as it is a precondition for us to disagree with one another. I want to expand on this a bit: when we have a discourse, there must be preconditions for that discourse to be intelligible at all. One of those is the law of the excluded middle, but there are others. Our optimism about articulating the underlying principles of our discourse is philosophical optimism. It may be difficult, yet we must try.

Thanks for listening to my meta-philosophy TED talk.