I enjoy meta-ethics a lot, as well as a few other areas of meta-philosophy.  Thinking about thinking is right up my alley in terms of what I enjoy doing—What is the proper methodology for carrying out ethical or philosophical discussions? How did we come to use this terminology and framework?

However, one of my friends sometimes likes to poke fun at me for enjoying meta-ethics—What’s next? Am I going to study meta-meta-ethics next?  What about meta-meta-meta-ethics?  I mostly think this ““criticism”” of meta-philosophy is a kind of knee-jerk reaction against anything that sounds vaguely similar to ‘metaphysics’ (my friend generally subscribes to the Carnapian rejections of metaphysics).  It also might be a somewhat thoughtless jab at a prefix which is easy to make sound absurd.  While I agree that meta-meta-meta-meta-ethics seems ridiculous, I still enjoy meta-ethics and meta-philosophy, and that is what this post is about.

Also, I see the irony in how this post is itself is a piece of meta-meta-philosophy.  Don’t @ me.

I think about ‘meta’-ness primarily from two perspectives.  Both of these ways of thinking about ‘meta’-ness are closely linked to their own argument against the accusation that meta-philosophy is absurd on account of its proximity to an infinite regress of ‘meta’s.  The first perspective shows how meta-philosophy is different from meta-meta-philosophy (and so on), and these distinctions between levels of ‘meta’-ness may help people understand why I personally prefer meta-philosophy over the rest.  The second perspective shows how, with a tiny bit of abstraction, ‘meta’-ness can be self-referential, such that meta-meta-...-meta-philosophy practically collapses down to the most basic level of philosophy.

1st Perspective

Philosophy vs. Meta-Philosophy vs. Meta-Meta-Philosophy vs. ...

The first perspective describe a way of making a meaningful distinction between the levels of ‘meta’-ness—from plain philosophy, to meta-philosophy, all the way up the ever-inventable higher orders of persnicketiness.  The differences are in the questions that are being focused on.

Consider ethics.  Ethical questions are those family of questions about what we ought to do, what is good/bad, who has moral responsibility, and so on.  Meta-ethics is generally the family of questions around how we may meaningfully talk about ethics.  It raises questions about presumptions we make when we try to answer questions about ethics, discusses the methods we use to determine if we are actually talking about ethics (as opposed to, perhaps, non-moral opinions and preferences), and how ethical language relates to other areas of language.

Ethics has an area of focus that people generally agree on; meta-ethics has an area of focus generally related to the methodology & conceptual scheme behind the study of ethics; meta-meta-ethics would generally focus on the methodology & conceptual scheme behind meta-ethics; and so on. Questions about a specific field’s methodology / conceptual scheme creates a new meta-field of research. Then, we may ask questions about that new meta-field’s methodology / conceptual scheme.

To say that I like studying meta-ethics is to say that my interests are closely related to that aforementioned set of questions.  The ridicule towards recursively affixed ‘meta’s at the beginning of subjects doesn’t make my interest absurd, but it is ridiculing those people who want to go down that recursive rabbit hole.  People might make fun of a paper with five ‘meta’s in the title because that topic seems to be so barefacedly niche and unintegrated with the rest of philosophy. It’s as if people are inventing new research areas just to keep themselves busy.

Still, it’s pretty clear to me that ‘going meta’ and examining the methodology and conceptual scheme of our research interests is a helpful thing to do, at least briefly.  The conceivability of an infinite regression of meta-analyses in the space of reasons does not mean we are forced into an infinite regression; we stop when we are satisfied with the coherence of our beliefs. (I’m getting ahead of myself—this will be addressed more in the 2nd Perspective.)

Moral philosophers would do well to brief themselves on meta-ethics so they know the general patterns and methods of their field of research.  As for me, I care a great deal about ethical questions, but I find that meta-ethical questions to be the ones I find most interesting; meta-ethics can help add rigor and precision to the methodology of moral philosophers.  Because I’m interested in meta-ethics, I should familiarize myself with the methodology of meta-philosophy by doing a cursory survey of meta-meta-philosophy. This post is evidence that I have forayed at least slightly into that.

2nd Perspective

My second perspective on ‘meta’-ness attempts to reveal how the prefix ‘meta’ can be thought of as a label used to distinguish sub-fields within the initial field or within philosophy.  Meta-ethics can reasonably be thought as a part of ethics, and meta-philosophy in general is just a part of philosophy.  Higher orders of ‘meta’-ness could be collapsed down in a similar fashion.

Some Nominalism about ‘Meta’-ness

The reason we choose to make a distinction in our language between levels of ‘meta’-ness is not because they are ““actually”” separate fields, but because it’s a useful distinction and saves time.  The reason I say I study meta-ethics instead of ethics is extremely similar to why someone might specify that they study deontology instead of ethics, or ethics instead of philosophy.  It’s not that ethics isn’t a part of philosophy, it’s that I’m being precise about my area of interest.

Scientists have ‘Methodology’ portions of their research papers, but we don’t consider them to be doing ‘meta-science’ there.  Although we could say that’s what they’re doing, we just say it’s a normal part of doing science.  Perhaps Meta-science could be another name for Philosophy of Science?  And Meta-veridicality another name for Epistemology?

Understanding our research methodology is useful for our research and should naturally be thought of as a normal part of it!  When we take that perspective, meta-meta-philosophy can reasonably be absorbed into the subject of meta-philosophy, and then meta-philosophy into philosophy.

Some Coherentism about Nominalism about ‘Meta’-ness

It may sound like I am attempting to collapse an infinite regression down to size with an infinite abstraction. But that is not exactly what I am proposing.

Meta-philosophy is, abstractly, doing philosophy about philosophy.  The methods of meta-philosophy are the methods of philosophy.  A meta-area isn’t self-contained in a nice little box that only deals with the area it is named after. For example, in its quest for answers, meta-ethics draws from the rest of philosophy as a resource.  All areas of ‘meta’-research, in practice, draw from other areas of philosophy: philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, logic, nominalism, semantics, arguments about evolution, pragmatism, et cetera. This is similar to what I have done here, using nominalist and coherentist accounts in a meta-meta-philosophical post.

Insofar as ‘meta-ethics’ is simply ‘XYZ areas of philosophy focused towards the questions associated with meta-ethics’, we may think of ‘meta-meta-ethics’ as simply ‘meta-philosophy about XYZ areas of philosophy’.  The infinite regress of ‘meta’-ness in philosophical papers is quickly recast as us philosophers retracing and deducing backwards a web of thought until we either lose interest in doing so and/or discover a web of mutually coherent ideas.

Conclusion

This post has described two ways I tend to look at ‘meta’-ness. Let’s see if we can constructively combine these perspectives.

The first perspective seems to imply that the infinite regression of meta-research is meaningfully created by a recursive questioning process. This view puts an emphasis on the questions asked, but somewhat obscures what those questions are asking about. Sure, they’re questions about the “methodology and conceptual scheme” of the previous level, but that’s about all the specification we get.

The second perspective clears up some of the vagueness around the terms ‘methodology’ and ‘conceptual schemes’. When we look closer at the aspects that meta-research seems to care about, we start to recognize that the ‘methodology and conceptual schemes’ of meta-philosophy are generally those of other areas of philosophy, adapted to address specific meta-questions. In that way, the recursion of ‘meta’-ness might be collapsed down to the basic level of people simply doing philosophy. The ‘meta’ labels are being invented in a manner in which they have little philosophical relevance; these ‘meta’-labels only become relevant when we care about communicating which questions we like to research.

So are the views compatible? Can we hold both views at once? Not really, because one says there is an infinite regression of meaningful ‘meta’-ness, and the other does not. The first view says: “Look at this recursive questioning! If you trace that backwards, you can determine what level of meta-analysis you’re at!” The second view replies: “But look at what you’re actually asking questions about and how you ask your questions—you’re just doing philosophy! Sure, you can label them ‘meta’ to the nth degree, but that’s more because of a quirk of language, not because these levels are particularly meaningful.” Perhaps a third perspective which tries to synthesize the previous two might say: “The label ‘meta’ is useful if you want to specify that you research the methodology and conceptual scheme of a field, but that fact alone does not seem to be a good reason to get caught up in perpetuating an infinite recursive generation of ‘meta’-ness.”

We have to care about meta-philosophy, insofar as that’s simply shorthand for wanting to understand the methodology / conceptual schemes that guide our thinking. You might be like me and have a basic interest in questions regarding effective methodologies, useful definitions, and structures of thought. Alternatively, you might be looking for a principled methodology to help guide your research. (For example, you might engage in some meta-ethics before really digging into ethics.) Questions about our philosophical methodology are important, but recursive ‘meta’-ness for the sake of recursive ‘meta’-ness probably is not.

Notes:

• Later-Wittgensteinian “Meaning is Use” plays a part in my thinking in the first perspective—Meta-Whatever simply refers to the area of questions we talk about when we say “Meta-Whatever”.

• Sellarsian nominalism has been quite influential on my thinking, and you can see evidence of it here in my discussion of nominalism and coherentism. While I gestured at these thoughts before I had familiarized myself with EPM, learning about Sellars helped me put all of this to words.

• A quick Google search shows that Wikipedians have also thought that all of these ‘meta’s are redundant and should be collapsed down to a single article. But their arguments come from pragmatic desire for concision, and from a somewhat unsupported statement in line with what I say in ‘Some Nominalism about ‘Meta’-ness’.

• Cool abstract: Metametametaphysics and Dialetheism by Suki Finn