The New York Times has an article about how philosophers are suddenly going out and doing empirical research.
It’s part of a recent movement known as “experimental philosophy,” which has rudely challenged the way professional philosophers like to think of themselves. Not only are philosophers unaccustomed to gathering data; many have also come to define themselves by their disinclination to do so.
When I was picking a major in college I spoke to my sociology professor and my philosophy professor asking them why I should major in their discipline. I was won over by my sociology professor, who convinced me that the major philosophical questions of our time are really sociological questions, and arguably have been since the birth of the social sciences. While I think there is an important place for arguments from first principles, I still find this argument compelling. And reading the Times, it seems philosophers do as well.
Unfortunately, their methodology seems lacking, restricted mostly to conducting surveys. I hereby invite our fellow philosophers to join us at the next AAA where they can learn a thing or two about philosophical research methods.
I may be exposing my ignorance of what it is that philosophers actually attempt to do, but it seems to me that Appiah hits the nail on the head with his assertion that this kind of empirical work is most useful as a corrective against making “natural” assumptions that really aren’t, rather than as a means of actually answering philosophical questions.
“Empirical philosophy” is just natural philosophy all over again. That term was coined when who we now call scientists broke off from philosophers to study the human body, the stars, etc. This latter incarnation seems to be all about doing science — most of it psychological and sociological, as it turns out — without the cruft of the disciplines that currently own those fields. But it’s still just science and not, in my view, philosophy.
Philosophy, or metaphysics, is what Aristotle said it was — “before physics,” the study of the categories and relations that comprise perception and conception. It asks, how can we even talk about things in the first place? 20th century philosophers tried to reduce this to language, but the jury is still out on whether the reduction (and thus elimination) succeeded. Moreover, philosophy has has always been empirical in the sense of intro-spective, just as phenomenology has. Critics of phenomenology want a public standard of observation, which introspection, by definition, can’t offer. So it goes.
Finally, to say that philosophy has been reduced to sociology is just silly — that itself is a philosophical position. The discussion you had with your advisors? *That* was philosophy. And that sort of talk won’t go away.
“to say that philosophy has been reduced to sociology is just silly”
But he didn’t say that. He said “that the major philosophical questions of our time are really sociological questions,” which is quite a different kettle of fish.
Well, it certainly reduces “the major philosophical questions of our day” to sociology, or else I’m missing something about the word “really.”
Rafael,
It is far from clear that answering a philosophical question through the use of sociology is a form of reductionism. If anything, it seems to make philosophical questions more complex by introducing factors philosophers like to exclude from their analysis.
But also, the assertion is itself a sociological statement. It is not saying that philosophical questions are necessarily sociological – but that the development of western philosophy has moved in a sociological direction.
I think this can be seen most clearly in the study of language: Grice, Austin, etc. have all posed questions which moved the philosophy of language in a sociological direction, leading to Gumperz, Bourdieu, Habermas, etc. I think after reading the latter works, one would be very hard pressed to return to a purely philosophical treatment of these questions.
Rafael says:
bq. Philosophy, or metaphysics, is what Aristotle said it was—“before physics,” the study of the categories and relations that comprise perception and conception. It asks, how can we even talk about things in the first place?
This is exactly the sort of thing I’ve always thought anthropology did better than philosophy, precisely because it took an empirical approach to them and was thus (among other things) less inclined to confuse prescriptive accounts of these things for descriptive ones. (But then I am the product of an anthropology program where one of the questions on the exams we took at the end of our first year quoted Locke to the effect of “Our minds are a blank slate–how then do we get our ideas?”–and then instructed us to “answer this question as an anthropologist”
Allow me to offer the following proposition: Philosophy is to cultural anthropology as mathematics is to physics. Philosophers work out the logic of abstract models based on simple premises that may or may not apply to actual human behavior. Cultural anthropologists explore the ramifications of models in relation to observed human behavior, sometimes producing observations that challenge philosophers’ premises. In the best of all possible worlds, philosophers and anthropologists would engage in constant dialogue that enriches both fields.
Now, donning my flameproof suit….
Actually, I very much agree, John. My own recent (and, admittedly, undergraduate) research has been partly grounded in theoretical works on the nature of belief and authoritativeness.
As someone who did a BA in philosophy before doing graduate work in anthropology, I recall being fascinated at Durkheim’s response to Kant in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. In effect, Durkheim was saying that Kant got it right that human beings require transcendental categories (time, space, self, cause, good, beauty, etc.). That said, Kant got it wrong, ethnographically speaking, by assuming that the categories in question would be those of the Newtownian/Enlightenment world in which Kant himself lived, where, for example, the only space available was the one with Euclidean geometry. But if categories are neither inherent in sense data nor uniform across all human populations, where do they come from? Voila! The social fact as a third aspect of reality.
More recently, philosophers like Charles Taylor have taken on board the Durkheimian critique of Kant, while agreeing with both Durkheim and Kant that some categories are necessary. Taylor’s _Sources of the Self_ is a classic example of what Michael Fischer calls long-durée cultural skein analysis, mapping the transformation of heroic to bourgeoise ethics. It now, in turn, cries out for ethnographic counterpoint to challenge and refine Taylor’s models. Might be a nice topic for a Ph.D. dissertation or someone’s next book.
As someone that majored in both philosophy and sociology, and then sided with sociology for my graduate studies, I couldn’t agree more with Kerim and his instructor. But I am not necessarily sure that philosophy as a whole is behind the curb, only most of Anglo-American philosophy. I tend to read most of the Frankfurt School and French post-structuralism as philosophers opening their categories up to the influence of the social and the other. Of course all of this begins with Hegel’s brilliant response to Empiricism and Kant in the Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind. Kerim has already indirectly mentioned these schools via Bourdieu and Habermas. It’s almost quaint to see the analytic school finally tip-toeing into the fray.
In a previous message I suggest that “In the best of all possible worlds, philosophers and anthropologists would engage in constant dialogue that enriches both fields.” Having embarked on the project of actually reading some of the journals to which I subscribe, I am delighted to find in the February 2007 issue of _American Ethnologist_ a section on “Phenomenology, Place, and Space,” in which the two contributors, Asha Persson, writing about “Intimate immensity: Phenomenology of place and space in an Australian yoga community” and Heiko Henkel,writing about “The location of Islam: Inhabiting Istanbul in a Muslim way,” point to philosophers as sources of inspiration. Persson writes in response to philosopher Edward Casey’s _Getting Back into Place_. Henkel points to Alistair MacIntyre’s _After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory_ for some key methodological points, in a manner reminiscent of Clifford Geertz’s evocation of Gilbert Ryle’s winks while developing the notion of thick description.
Then, I find myself wondering, does anyone else here read journals, at least to the extent of scanning the contents and picking out a few items to read more deeply? Simply because they look interesting? A practice I imagine as contrasting with that of deliberately searching for items that bear directly on one’s own current research or bear the names of authors who have reached the august status of those who must be cited?
This is an excellent thread — and I can’t say I disagree with much of it, except that I maintain that the original post is reductionistic, if only casually so. I too got a Ph.D. in anthropology largely because I thought the field was a great improvement on the philosophy (analytical) I studied as an undergrad. I describe my trajectory as going from theoretical ontology to comparative ontology — and now I do applied ontology as a software developer. But throughout this path, I have never been able to shake philosophy — as someone says above, it is like math for physicists. Because even when–especially when–you *study* categories you *use* them. They are not objects out there to be described by shape, size, mass, and movement. In the end, knowing your Aristotle and Kant (and Peirce) helps you understand your Bororo, Zinacanteco, or even your Rodney Needham. Indeed, the whole field of cultural anthropology is sustained by a framework of discourse that remains philosophical.
“Theoretical ontology…. comparative ontology…. applied ontology….” Very nice, indeed. Rafael, where else can we find you online?
Here is another statement that might help to amplify the proposition that philosophy is to anthropology as mathematics to physics. From _Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock_, the 2003 Mellon Lectures by Kirk Varnedoe,
_Between the vague confusions of individual experience and the authority of big ideas, sign me up for experience first. Given one minute more to either parse critical theory or stammer toward the qualities of the individual work of art, I will use the time for the latter. Now this may sound like dumb anti-intellectualism, but I hope it is something better. Abstraction, of course, has a lot to do with ideas and theory. One of the valuable things it does more fiercely than a lot of other art is to make us think and read what others think….[But] Hard examination and questioning of the specificity of works of abstract art, combined with the experience of the viewer, are our best ways to hold out against and to test “big ideas.” What we want to do is cut through the gas and grab the ideas that flow out of and drive us back toward such confusing, gritty particulars of experience, rather than the ideas that constantly and confidently blend such things into soupy generalities._
Take “abstract art” as a metaphor for any cultural form or symbol, and Varnedoe makes, at least for me, a powerful case for anthropology, with a focus on gritty particulars and personal experience as a counterpoint to big ideas.
John: re my presence online — I’ve started a blog called “The Transducer” at “http://transducer.ontoligent.com”. Thanks for asking!
Rafael,
Thanks for letting us know.