CONCEPT
Philosophical Plumbing
Midgley's signature method — the unglamorous work of crawling under the conceptual house to find where the pipes have gone wrong and everything downstream has been contaminated.
Philosophical plumbing is Mary Midgley's name for the philosopher's proper business: examining the hidden conceptual structures through which a culture's thinking flows, and identifying the joints where useful metaphors have been promoted to total worldviews. The pipes are channels through which observations become judgments. When they are properly connected, thinking moves cleanly. When they leak — when 'the brain is a computer' becomes 'the brain is only a computer,' when 'genes influence behaviour' becomes 'genes determine behaviour' — the contamination is invisible. The conclusions look to follow from the premises. But somewhere in the basement, a joint has failed, and everything downstream is polluted. Midgley's method is neither glamorous nor cathedral-building. It is a wrench, a torch, and a stubborn refusal to accept that the water stains on the ceiling mean nothing.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The metaphor was a deliberate counter to the prevailing self-image of twentieth-century philosophy. Philosophers of the linguistic turn imagined themselves as logicians. Continental philosophers imagined themselves as