Report this comment

Report this comment

I was hoping to come here to find some comments on the details about X-Phi that the author of the original post didn’t exactly get right. But all I find is a silly fight.

Leiter is a nice guy, and he shouldn’t have to put up with all of this crap that comes from having the most famous philosophy blog in the world. He didn’t really ask for it.

Report this comment

Report this comment

html stripped again.
shit

Report this comment

Report this comment

I think this is exactly the right sort of question to ask here. I also suppose most x-phi-ers think it the right question to ask. I like to ask this sort of question. Here is how I like to put it: Is X-Phi primarily an attempt to prove philosophical theses by experimental means or is it primarily an attempt to bring philosophy to bear on our world in an experimental fashion?

Knowing me you know that I would be quite excited if the main point of x-phi were more of the latter. I worry that it is however more about the former (in some cases but not in all of course!). Philosophy is probably going to be better off in the long run if it conceives of itself as a style of thinking rather than as a domain of inquiry. If it turns out to be a domain of inquiry it will eventually seal in upon itself and nobody else will listen. I can’t tell which way x-phi wants to go. I suspect many x-phi-ers don’t yet know either. That is why I’m chiming in late anyway and saying that you are asking the right question.

Knowing me you also know that I’m just preaching Dewey here. This is because I think that x-phi could learn a great deal from pragmatism. Since the whole thing is still emerging my contemporary attitude is to see if I can’t nudge part of all this back over to pragmatism. Note this well, future x-phi collaborators, if much of your motivation comes from wishing to reject the spurious role that intuition too often plays in philosophical argument these days, then go back to Peirce’s 1868 papers where he tries to set a new course for modern philosophy by arguing that we actually have anything like intuitions that might play any important role in our reasoning.

One should always conclude over-lengthy blog comments with shameless advertising. I note that I say all this at much greater length in my review of Appiah’s excellent book over at my Requiem for Certainty:
http://cwkoopman.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/pragmatism-returns-to-princeton-appiahs-new-book/

Report this comment

Report this comment

In that case, however, my understanding of experimental practice, in many different sciences, is that it does not produce claims that are true in the sense of reference, or true in the sense of meaning. What it does produce are stabilities–it reproduces intuitions in a rigorous form from which it is not acceptable to dissent (i.e. without being branded a heretic, an idiot, or some other pariah status, and occasionally, a revolutionary who is ahead of his/her time). We can, and people have and will, argue about whether experiment possesses a necessary logical structure. My reading and my own work suggest that it does not, except in very rare cases, and that it is neither more nor less convincing if it does.

However, experiment can do something extremely important, which is to produce surprising results—results which are explained neither by logic nor existing theory. Such results come from creative and clever experimental design–not rigorous logical deduction or rock-solid, statistically sophisticated question-asking. I like to think that experimental philosophy could go this route—but i think most of the work will be a form of question-asking whose answers are presented in the same form as armchair intuitions, only with the powerful authority of experimental science to back them up. So I guess in the end, I agree with your suspicion of me, that I don’t think experimental science is any more or less likely to lead to truth (than intuition or creative reasoning or anthropological fieldwork). However, it does commit a bunch of people to arguing in ways that have more precision (which is both a liberating and a constraining thing), and allows them to build up a body of questions and answers from which dissent is much harder to achieve, and hence the direction of knowledge and its accumulation, much easier to master.

I would also add that comet jo’s comment is right on here: anthropology is deeply committed to empiricism, but it does not restrict that definition to surveys, questionnaires, games or cog-sci-style experiments. Every generation of anthropology so far has been obsessed with this issue. Franz Boas was a physicist before turning to anthropology, and his writings are some of the most cogent philosophical engagements with the vicissitudes of empiricism we have in the discipline. Gregory Bateson was obsessed with using ethnography to capture social reality both early on (in Naven) and later in his engagement with cybernetics. Geertz himself was dissenting from an overly-theoretical Parsonian systems theory when he turned to people like Kenneth Burke for guidance in an alternative empiricism. Post-geertzian anthropology has grown up in dialogue with science studies, and has constantly struggled with how to define its scientific status in terms that do not reduce it to surveys an questionnaires— a problem that has been particularly troubling lately in terms of our engagement with IRBs (which you can read about on this blog). So yes: what’s at stake here, as ever, is the relationship between empiricism and truth, and i think anthropologists and experimental philosophers (perhaps eventually, the dissident ones) will encounter each other again in the future.

Report this comment

The rule of reason is not the rule of law. In fact it’s the opposite. The rule of law is the rule of chosen words in the common language and the rule of argument over their meaning. That argument itself is constitutive of democratic society. Language is public. Numbers are impersonal, indeed anti-personal, but are also private.
Hows that for philosophy?

out.

Report this comment

Leiter’s academia is a ghetto culture, and he spends as much time discussing gossip and academic bed-hopping as philosophy. But he does not discuss the philosophy of bed-hopping. If he were I’d have more interest.
It’s not status-seeking that annoys me it’s the status-seeking of moralizing priests. McGinn like Leiter claims to be an atheist and a freethinker, but neither come close. McGinn is obviously a product of his experience and of his time, in ways that he will not admit. He’s blind. We’re all products of culture. We’re not all hypocrites.

Reading any text, examining any made thing you ask yourself what to respond to: text or subtext, the intention of the maker or what the thing seems on its own to represent. Ideally you learn from both. Ideally you learn to respect the maker, but you always ask: “Is there more to learn from this author as thinker or as symptom?”

There is no subtext to number; numbers are clean. Some dream there is no subtext to their own words, that subtext is for others. But that’s not how language and history work. I won’t argue against the Platonism of numbers. It’s not worth the effort. But numbers are not words. To pretend otherwise silly as it is, is bad philosophy and even worse politics.

http://www.colinmcginnblog.com/comments.php?y=08&m=03&entry=entry080311-133549

Report this comment

http://www.interdisciplines.org/interdisciplinarity/papers/3/2

Btw, I wouldn’t say that disciplines do anything to increase the inherent status orientation of intellectual work, which has always been an anxiously subaltern position within larger class and status hierarchies. They’ve just fragmented it. Think guys who had to scramble and scrape for noble or church patronage weren’t attentive to status? Who’s more of a status hound than Galileo, Michelangelo, or Cellini?

So, agreed about context. Now, what’s the c-o-n-t-e-x-t that makes you so angry about McGinn’s point, which may well be a rationalization but no worse than the various used to underwrite democratic religiosity? ;-)

Report this comment

It was a long night, longer for you I guess.
You worked hard I can tell.
“I think philosophers are like the number theorists. They are logical, they embrace formal methods of reasoning, and demand the highest level of rigour and scholarship. All, though, unscientific, not pseudo…”

You described the problem well in those two sentences. But you answered nothing, so I’ll add more.

“I myself see a close link between democracy as a dogma and the idea that everyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s: that is, between equality in respect of voting power and forms of relativism about truth. For if people’s opinions do not have equal value, how can we justify giving their votes equal power?”

Colin McGinn. A quote from the link I posted [it should appear one of these days, with a second to an equally offensive and idiotic Simon Blackburn]

So tell me, why is the “atheist” Colin McGinn still at heart an angry altar boy?
His argument isn’t reason it’s rationalization. And you can’t understand the “truth” behind it without an understanding of the c-o-n-t-e-x-t.
Please, please, someone do a study of the transformation of the humanities into fields of “technical” knowledge and the resultant culture of status-seeking. Leiter is a parody.
“Whether or not Mr. Leiter is “intellectual” or not is beside the point.”

No actually it’s the issue.

Report this comment

I rest with this: I think your criticism fails. Philosopher generally don’t find academic anthropological concerns, or academic sociological concerns, philosophically relevant. It may be that the concerns of those disciplins are important, just not philosophically. Sometimes, those fundamental concerns may overlap, especially in the domain of ethics and political philosophy. But, even here, ethicists wan’t to know what the term ‘good’ means, or if moral-sentences express propositions, et cetera. This is not within the scope of the natural-scientist’s discipline as a scientist. It may be that they can answer it, but then, it seems, the scientist would simply no longer be doing science, because the answer to these aforementioned questions is an a priori affair…

However, because someone is not doing science, it does not follow that what they are doing is pseudo-science, or less-rigorous. This can hardly be said to be true. Mathematics is not science, if by ‘science’ we mean ‘the systematic study of the natural world by observation and experiment’. On such a definition, it would follow that number theorists -mathematicians- are not scientists after all. So, then, as a critism they are pseudo-scientists. Flaky folk who toss their pseudo-scientific theses around as though they were sound science. I think philosophers are like the number theorists. They are logical, they embrace formal methods of reasoning, and demand the highest level of rigour and scholarship. All, though, unscientific, not pseudo…

Report this comment

Report this comment