a genealogical myth of philosophy

I read something by my supervisor that struck me as problematic, but I can't quite put my finger on what I find wrong with it, so it might not be a bad idea to air some of the grievances.

He begins the paper with a Heidegger-inspired "genealogical myth of philosophy." Heidegger-inspired in the sense that it draws on Heidegger's distinction between ontic sciences, regional ontologies, and fundamental ontology. The idea is that there are various ontic sciences that go about interrogating particular kinds of beings: living beings in the case of biology, rocks in the case of geology, and so on. We're driven to interrogate entities because we want to understand their nature better: we want to know what kinds of entities there are. These ontic sciences all operate within a particular framework, a set of assumptions about what questions there are, how we should go about asking them, what basis of knowledge we all agree on, and so on. In Kuhnian terms, normal science operates within a paradigm. Call this paradigm a regional ontology. Occasionally, problems will arise that will make people start questioning the regional ontology. That's largely what philosophers do: philosophers of science aren't doing science but are doing regional ontology, where they question the framework within which the ontic science takes place. The Heideggerian step is then to ask what we're presupposing in doing our regional ontologies. This question then leads us back to fundamental ontology and Heidegger's beloved Question of Being.

Now, there are a few things that trouble me about this. Perhaps the central concern is that he calls this a "genealogical myth" because obviously it's not meant to be a rigorous description of how knowledge or science or philosophy or inquiry actually work, but rather a framework for thinking about it. A regional ontology for philosophy, if you will. But I can't help but think it's a bit sloppy and lazy to introduce something while granting it's far from rigorous, but then move on to other things without returning to question its assumptions. And my suspicion isn't just that it's drawing neat lines where things are far messier, but that it actually is a bad myth, it distorts matters in a number of important ways. Though I'm not sure I'm quite succeeding in putting my finger on how.

One simple objection is just that lines are far fuzzier than this myth suggests, though I suspect the use of "myth" was meant to grant that point. It can only have bite if I can show that these fuzzy lines are too fuzzy to make the distinctions worth drawing. But, for instance, it's not like scientists never question their paradigms. "What is life?" is as much a biological question as a philosophical one. And indeed, many of the people working in the "regional ontologies" of philosophy of biology or philosophy of physics are scientists first and foremost rather than philosophers. My uncle, a chemistry professor, once remarked to me that philosophers tend to come up with very simplistic notions of what it means to do science because they've never really done it themselves, and it takes many years of working in the sciences to really have a clear notion of what goes on in the sciences.

Not just do I think the hierarchical distinctions are problematic, I also think that a three-tiered hierarchy groups together things that don't really belong together. Mulhall talks about different regional ontologies, giving the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science as two examples. But are they really the same sorts of things, and more important, are science and religion really two commensurable "ontic sciences"? The myth I gave above--recapitulating his own--gives a scientific example, where it's easier to operate within the simple assumption that scientists are in the business of accumulating knowledge and that this accumulation can then be interrupted by questioning the overall framework. I'm not sure the same accumulation of knowledge occurs in any non-scientific field. What's the "ontic science" of religion in the business of doing? Science isn't one way of answering our curiosity about the world; it's the way of doing so. My interest in art or religion isn't provoked by a question of "what sorts of entities are there in the world?" but by entirely different kinds of question altogether.

This problem become more acute when we consider various ontic sciences deal with different kinds of entities, so that regional ontologies are asking the question of what it means for something to be an entity of that nature. He writes that philosophy of science asks what it is for something to be material, philosophy of mind asks what it is for something to be mental, philosophy of religion for something to be divine, and so on. That strikes me as bizarre on a number of levels. Firstly, I haven't done much philosophy of science, but I've done enough to know that "what is it for something to be material?" isn't a question they ask. That's a question for the metaphysicians. And also, it further reinforces this suggestion that the material, the mental, and the divine are just three different kinds of entities, which sounds all right if you're Descartes, but sounds very odd to a more contemporary ear. It takes some unnecessary reification and grouping together of apples and oranges to insist that there are divine or aesthetic entities just like there are material entities.

I also think this genealogical myth would be inimical to Wittgenstein, who's one of Mulhall's other great heroes. Wittgenstein explicitly rejects the notion of a "second-order philosophy," which is what fundamental ontology sounds like on this picture. And he was also very clear that he wasn't doing anything connected to science. Nor did he take himself to be interrogating entities. This might be Heidegger's genealogical myth of philosophy, but I don't know how much we can extend it beyond Heidegger.

Anyway, I don't know if any of this sounds like sound criticism to you. I don't feel I've quite put my finger on what troubles me about this genealogical myth, but I do find it problematic.