Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of responsibility, and this has necessarily entailed (determined even) my encounter with contemporary (mostly American) moral philosophy. It’s not a domain I would ever seek out, being much more comfortable in the idioms of social theory and continental philosophy, but it’s hardly alien. However, a funny thing happened on my way to the agora, which is that I discovered that a small selection of philosophers have recently gone “experimental.”
Apparently, making broad claims about “what a person would naturally think” have finally become so insupportable that even philosophers have started exploring the possibility of actually talking to people. Experiments measuring “folk beliefs” about whether our world is deterministic or not, or whether free will can exist if the world is deterministic, are intended to settle claims that begin “most people believe that…” Settling such claims is necessary in the domain of moral philosophy, because a concept like responsibility is fundamentally tied to what people do in “everyday” circumstances. If it is not possible to start from some kind of claim about whether (to say nothing of why) people make ascriptions of praise and blame in the same way, then, arguments about free will and moral responsibility start to seem like the proverbial and much-maligned mass and extension of angels living on pins.
Enter “X-Phi” — a contingent of young whippersnappers bent on making names for themselves by shaking up some methodological verities in their discipline, “trailing blogs of glory” (as K. A. Appiah deligtfully characterized it) and sporting a burning arm-chair as their logo. You can get a T-shirt, here. You can befriend Experimental Philosopher on myspace here (you’ll be in some rocking company). Or read about them in Slate.
Needless to say, and I speak on behalf of all of us here, This Rocks. I have all kinds of questions and problems with this approach, which I will get to, but I just want to point out that I think the “x-phi” attitude is part of the same zeitgeist that formed Savage Minds– the possibility of a new form of scholarly organization and interaction, of which blogs are an emblematic tool, that subverts and gets around the conservative edifice of the professionally organized disciplines, without being forced to drop out of academia. Rex has called it “scholarly civil society”; I would tend towards a version of a scholarly “public sphere”; regardless, it’s an excellent example of a new kind of scholarship. It might become an important and influential moment in philosophy. Or the fire from the armchair might spread to the lab, as it were. But the fact remains that “X-Phi” is part of the changing game of scholarly communication.
This movement, or whatever it is, isn’t confined to blogs and wikis though–the practitioners are busy filling up the tried and true disciplinary journals with their work (like Nous, Philosophical Topics, or Midwest Studies in Philosophy which despite the folksy name–or perhaps because of it–has been particularly welcoming). Again, regardless of the merit of the work itself, what has been achieved here is a sustained, publicly available, focused community of researchers who are eager to work together to make the problems and topics they address cohere, even if they are busy savaging each other in the pages of what they write (and they are, believe me).
A very good indication of this success is the Wikipedia entry for Experimental Philosophy which is, to date, entirely about this small group of upstarts, and not any of the other historically much more important people and movements that might legitimately lay claim to such a title, like, oh, I Don’t Know, Newton and Boyle? Or Even Hume, whose famous treatise begins with reflections on experiment, thusly:
For to me it seems evident, that the essence of the mind being equally unknown to us with that of external bodies, it must be equally impossible to form any notion of its powers and qualities otherwise than from careful and exact experiments, and the observation of those particular effects, which result from its different circumstances and situations. And though we must endeavour to render all our principles as universal as possible, by tracing up our experiments to the utmost, and explaining all effects from the simplest and fewest causes, it is still certain we cannot go beyond experience; and any hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical.
While Hume is well represented on the Internet (I got the quote from a nicely done, CC-licensed version of the Treatise), it is not Hume, Boyle or Newton who rise to the top when one Googles for Experimental Philosophy… it is Joshua Knobe and Thomas Nadelhoffer and all the other people listed here. Pretty much the only other pretender to the title, as far as Google is concerned is the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University. Huzzah.
So this is a kind of branding success. It might represent a kind of scholarly success, but the jury will be out for a while, obviously. Regardless, it’s a success that interests me precisely because I spend a lot of time teaching students and trying to convince colleagues that anthropology is an empirical philosophy, one that professional philosophers would never attempt precisely because it requires all kind of commitments to the real world that are verboten in most mainstream philosophy departments. By this I and my fellow “empirical philosopher” anthropologists mean that anthropology might begin with the lingering questions of philosophers, but tests them amongst the people and (more precisely) collectivities of people for whom intuition, reason and logic are operative–people in the world. Ethnographic fieldwork is experiment, in this sense, even if it is methodologically distinct from the statistical model of survey and questionnaire represented by the experimental philosophers.
From this perspective, it would seem that the x-phi crew have rather crossed a threshold into not-philosophy, and something more like cognitive science or sociology or even, (gasp) anthropology. Are these dissident experimental philosophers looking to join us anthropologists in the epistemological ecumene we have created? Many philosophers have followed this path before, not least of which, our name-sake and spiritual patron, Claude Levi-Strauss. Once one starts down the primrose path of empirical investigation, even if one is an empiricist, business just gets messier, and the crystalline distinctions of philosophy all the more sterile. I think for most of us, it’s also where the fun starts, and I think this is true of x-phi as well.
But these philosophers are not, so far as I can tell, at all interested in leaving philosophy. Rather, what they are emeshing themselves in is something anthropology also knows all too well– the Game of Authority. X-Phi is an attempt to make philosophy convincing not only to philosophers themselves, but to cognitive scientists, neuro-scientists and evolutionary biologists–in short, to the people and pundits closest to the global mic these days, in so far as anyone listens to science of any kind. If one were to draw a contemporary positivist pyramid of authoritative knowledge, it would have statistically sophisticated laboratory experiments at the top, followed by statistically sophisticated field experiments, followed by other kinds of laboratory experiments not employing statistical reasoning, followed by fieldwork, followed finally by reason and argumentation. I’m not sure critical analysis of historical, literary or philosophical texts would even be admitted to this hierarchy. Hence, the appeal of jumping the pyramid to create new, more authoritative claims about a hoary, well-trodden tradition such as the relationship between free will and determinism.
Such a gambit might work: the papers are in respected philosophy journals, and luminaries in the field like Daniel Dennnet lend support and encouragement to experimental philosophy for the same reasons that the philosophy of mind has turned to, argued for or against, and ultimately incorporated work in artificial intelligence, cognitive science and now neuroscience. Which is to say, it’s not just that philosophy is willfully ignorant of other sciences, only that it is slowly and deliberately working out ways to engage, incorporate and argue with results in those fields, precisely because of their power to convince, and hopefully to open up new questions and new avenues for critique that may or may not require more experiment.
Hence, the implicit argument behind conducting experiment in philosophy–and a particular kind of experiment common in psychology, cognitive science–is that it will render the reasoning of philosophers more authoritative. It is an assumption, because any self-respecting philosopher would be led to question whenever and wherever experiment seems to be standing on its own, generating, sui generis, authoritative arguments. Making experimental knowledge authoritative took hundreds of years of hard, political work, it by no means naturally authoritative, only socially and historically so. Kwame Anthony Appiah seems to get what is troubling about this, and that is the mise-en-abyme character of the problem. Experiments don’t settle questions, they only render some answers unlikely. It’s an issue of authority, and authority is a bugbear anthropologists have been fighting for the last 30 years, at least. It’s also the core domain of science and technology studies, where sociologists, philosophers and historians have been hashing out these issues for at least that long.
All the more troubling then that anthropology–especially recent anthropology and its critiques of ethnographic authority is not even on the horizon of these young guns. What happens when these philosophers start asking “cultural” questions like this one? I suspect that the two fields are headed for a collision, or a rapprochement or at least some kind of mating dance. The language of “folk beliefs” “folk intuitions” and “cultural difference” would seem to suggest that the correct orientation would be towards anthropology and towards fieldwork— not towards cognitive science, evolutionary biology and statistics.
A key, and troubling, figure here is Marc Hauser at Harvard. Hauser’s massive laboratory pumps out experiment after experiment about the moral and communicative behavior of primates. Hauser is himself associated with the anthropology department, but only nominally. Indeed, there is a kinship between Hauser and Levi-Strauss that runs very deep—evidenced in the fact that Hauser apparently cannot imagine anyone more wrong that Levi-Strauss. For Hauser, universal moral “modules” in primates are accessible only through experiment–not through reasoning alone, as the tradition of moral philosophy has had it up until the Dawn of The Age of X-Phi. It is a version of structuralism, in a way, except rather than a structuralism with language and culture as its environment, it is one with genes and behaviors as its environment. They are similarly totalizing and can admit pluralism only as variation on a core moral structure we have yet to discover and locate. Levi-Strauss failed to located it in culture, Hauser will spend the rest of his life searching for it in genes, behaviors and versions of race ethnicity and culture. In any case, Hauser is a figure who, like his mentor and muse, Chomsky, straddles multiple disciplines without much concern for their idols. In general, I think this is a good thing, but it often comes at the expense and denigration of any other styles of reasoning currently deemed less authoritative. Perhaps, then, one could read the emergence of X-Phi merely as a craven attempt by philosophers to get more money for their research… but money means respect, and respect means attracting attention and debate, and so it mightn’t be craven at all, just realpolitik.
So the question remains whether there is a way to square this circle of philosophy, anthropology, empiricism and experiment? Can it matter to X-Phi that anthropology has already developed a sophisticated critique of scientific authority? If X-Phi heads down this path far enough, will they start doing fieldwork in order to start settling the questions they begin with, and if so, at what point will that work begin to intersect with work in anthropology that pretends to be answering philosophical questions?
Another way to ask the question: Is X-phi an ettempt to make philosophy more authoritative through experiment, or an attempt to make experimental work more philosophically rigorous? Who is leading who to drink at which trough? It is a curious situation… perhaps one an armchair sociologist might want to take a stab at explaining. It reminds me in some ways of the split in political science between those who do political philosophy and those who do political “science”– where the latter is fundamentally uninterested in the fact of politics, in favor of something called “political behavior” which is meaningful only so long as it is not troubled by the tradition of writing about politics that does not reduce it to one human behavior among others. It’s a conflict unlikely to be resolved within the discipline.
In any case, anthropology should be a kind of lodestar here. Whatever anthropology’s problems are, they do not arise because the discipline is not yet scientific, but because of having tried so hard to become scientific, that it has come out the other side, with its ambitions unfulfilled, and a serious tradition of doubt that “becoming scientific” can necssarily be the pinnacle of achievement. For that pinnacle, many in the discipline still look towards philosophy, and so it makes it all the more disorienting to see that discipline suddenly wandering up the path behind us.
Perhaps we have really entered that era Heidegger characterized as “after the end of philosophy, yet before the beginning of thought?” I don’t know, but I know I can get a t-shirt and an RSS feed and stay hip to it. But seriously, I think what is most compelling about this movement is not necessarily the questions being asked or the methods employed as it is the sense that it is unfolding in new ways, across the planet, and with a liveliness, openness and flexibility that is uncharacteristic of (at least the image) of academia. It’s exciting to see people organize and create in this way, and to know that it’s both possible and, increasingly, authoritative…
“Is X-phi an ettempt to make philosophy more authoritative through experiment, or an attempt to make experimental work more philosophically rigorous?”
I would say, from what I’ve seen, it’s clearly the former, though I have to say I’ve been somewhat confused so far about what their data is supposed to establish. Regardless of your philosophy of science, it should come as no surprise that large groups of people can have extremely questionable intuitions, so polling a population can’t necessarily lend much credence to the claims of a particular philosopher, only their explicit or implicit claims that a particular perspective is common sense. What it can do is falsify a claim that something is common sense, which works in a satisfyingly scientific way to show that you need either more argumentation or a deeper theory that can account for individual variation. The odd thing is that if you’re going to be motivated to test that sort of thing, chances are there’s already disagreement enough to notice, in which case the uniformity of agreement is already falsified. What good does getting a number ever do in a situation like that?
Inasmuch as the project of philosophy would seem to be constructing a coherent set of concepts for understanding problems like reference or morality, this doesn’t seem to contribute much. These experiments don’t tell us about reference or morality, they tell us about our ideas about those things, and as such I can see how that kind of data would be worth more to fields like anthropology and cognitive science.
The idea of experimental philosophy is interesting to me, but honestly I don’t see what these folks are actually doing for philosophy. Full disclosure: I left philosophy for cognitive science, but I’m still doing philosophy. I think of what I’m doing in cognitive science as a kind of experimental philosophy. Right now I’m designing an experiment to determine if the kinds of recording techniques we’re using to determine the computational structure of cortical columns can actually give us enough data to deduce the computational complexity of said structures. I’m doing that because I believe that as a whole, the cognitive sciences have been using an unfit metaphor drawn from computers to understand computation and have thus drastically underestimated the computational complexity of real neural structures. If I’m right, I’m going to use this to develop a claim that certain insurmountable physical limits make it possible to solve the free will problem(s) in terms of information and prediction. This is an example of how experiment might be useful for philosophy, to me.
Side note/request: So I quite often hear about anthropology’s critiques of scientific knowledge around here, but I don’t actually hear much about this in the philosophy of science circles I travel in. I’ve always been sort of ashamed of my lack of knowledge in this area because my career ambitions stem directly from my philosophy of science background, and I’ve always been interested in whatever anthropological theory I could make time for.
So here’s a project for you savage minds folk to get some interdisciplinary communication going on: Hypothetically, let’s say you’ve got an open minded scientist type who wants to know more about anthropological perspectives on scientific knowledge. Where do you recommend this person starts?
Most people think this is a very long post.
This was all very interesting, as it grapples with some of the core issues I am myself facing working with cognitive anthropology.
For you J.S Nelson; I would recommend Scott Atrans excellent work, especially Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (1990). It is a marvelous blend between philosophy of science and rigorous cognitive anthropology.
look out, brian leiter is asking his readers to confront you on this post! you should know that leiter is one of the greatest philosophers of our time. he has built a very influential blog, along with a scientifically rigorous ranking of philosophy programs and law schools, on the back of his numerous contributions to the most fundamental areas of philosophy.
Experimental philosophy is an embarrassment to the discipline. It’s not at all clear that, done right, experimental philosophy would move *philosophy* forward. It’s utterly clear that most of the philosophers doing it have no idea how to do even the most rudimentary social psychological (or anthropological) study.
As for these claim by alex:
“you should know that leiter is one of the greatest philosophers of our time. he has built a very influential blog, along with a scientifically rigorous ranking of philosophy programs and law schools, on the back of his numerous contributions to the most fundamental areas of philosophy.”
Not in the same ballpark as the greatest *philosophers* of our time. Not a “scientifically rigorous” ranking of philosophy programs. Not a contributor to the “most fundamental areas of philosophy.”
One feature of Wikipedia is that it is a collaborative project, whose authors work almost exclusively in their spare time. An individual page may reflect the work of only a few individuals, none of whom claim to be experts on every aspect of a topic. In my case, I added material concerning contemporary experimental philosophers because that was what I knew about (and I would have spent more time if I’d thought about how many people might be directed to that page!). Historical figures who may have fallen under the heading ‘experimental philosophers’ are neglected because no one who knows about them (at least qua experimental philosophers) has worked on the article. So the focus you see in the article has more to do with change history than any branding considerations. That these sorts of gaps show up is obviously a weakness of the encyclopedia, but it’s usually best not to read too much into it.
Rob,
You state:
“It’s utterly clear that most of the philosophers doing it have no idea how to do even the most rudimentary social psychological (or anthropological) study.”
What is utterly clear is that you–like so many others–are happy to sling mud without having bothered to read much, if any, of what we have actually written and published. Had it occurred to you to actually read our work before concluding that it is an embarrassment to philosophy, you would see that psychologists such as Joshua Greene, Jonathan Haidt, Fiery Cushman, Tania Lombrozo, Liane Young, Bertram Malle, Jonathan Cohen, David Pizarro, Jen Wright, Marc Hauser, and others have co-authored papers that can aptly be described as experimental philosophy (indeed, many of these aforementioned researchers self-identify with the movement).
I, for one, think you ought to be utterly embarrassed to make such uninformed pronouncements (unless, of course, you really think you could defend the claim that the people I just listed “have no idea how to do even the most rudimentary social psychological”).
At the end of the day, burning straw men creates more heat than light–to borrow a phrase from P.M.S. Hacker. Given that it is already the middle of summer, I found the heat you managed to shed on this post irritating if unsurprising. But keep up the good work. Making such wildly empirically unsupported claims from the armchair about experimental philosophy is very fitting for a philosopher with feet of clay…
I should also point out that several of the people I mentioned have training in *both* philosophy and psychology. Moreover, many of their co-authored papers have been written with philosophy undergrads, grad students, and professors. Of course, Rob might respond that I haven’t actually addressed his claim that “most of the philosophers” doing experimental philosophy don’t know anything about experimental design. But what is the evidence for this claim? Many of the studies we have run without the assistance of our psychologist counter-parts are indistinguishable in terms of experimental design, data analysis, etc. Moreover, we have published our work in well-respected peer-reviewed psych. journals.
So, I remain convinced that Rob has succumbed to what I like to call “experimental-philosophy-itis”–the lazy intellectual habit of issuing broad and totally uninformed criticisms of the field of experimental philosophy without having bothered reading what has been written by experimental philosophers. Disagreeing with our goals and methods is one thing (Antti Kauppinen and Ernest Sosa have done that with style, grace, and rigor). But dismissing experimental philosophy tout court as an embarrassment suggests something akin to projection. Or so methinks…
As an aside, it is worth pointing out that top philosophers such as Alfred Mele, Stephen Stich, and Fred Adams have done experimental work. Based on Rob’s comments, should we assume these philosophers are also embarrassments to the field? Come now…
Skipper has revealed himself in his comment to be, quite simply, an ass, though Thomas has expressed this above more politely. He has also revealed himself, not unrelatedly, to be rather badly tone-deaf with regard to irony, as he seems to have utterly missed the (really rather obvious) point of Alex’s comment, a point that I suspect he would have completely agreed with had he been able to recognize it.
Agreed about Skipper, but what in the world was the point of Alex’s ‘irony’ or, quite simply, obnoxious sarcasm? One need not be a great philosopher to recognize that the post above reflects ignorance about X-Phil.
They are similarly totalizing and can admit pluralism only as variation on a core moral structure we have yet to discover and locate…
While you make it sound like they are neophytes who are reinventing the wheel, (and reading the experiment description of the guy at Riverside gives me hope that tenure is still a low-hanging fruit at some places), I would still like more evidence before forming an opinion of this “new” discipline.
For example, presumably there is an experiment or two that they hold up as excellent models which encourage others to join up with their project. Can you unpack and critique the specific methods, analysis, and interpretation of these crown jewels? You make a vague pass at the primatologist at Harvard, without ever properly debunking any of his specific experiments.
Consequently, this long post reads a bit like an anthropologist who has sour grapes because the philosophers are not (yet) excited about ethnography.
I think the most reasonable way to determine whether experimental philosophy is good philosophy or not would be to evaluate actual arguments made in actual works of experimental philosophy. I would imagine that one would find that some of the work is good and some bad and some properly philosophical and some not. I simply doubt that it is wise to either write it off or endorse it wholesale. And as usual, the best way to engage in philosophical argumentation is to evaluate arguments. Once some representative arguments from this rather new sub-discipline have been publically evaluated, I think then it would be appropriate to draw conclusions about its relation to cultural anthropology. In any case, broad generalizations are simply not useful, at least in my opinion.
As for the pro and anti-Leiter feud that always seems to erupt whenever his name is mentioned, I would suggest that until he comments, offering substantial examples of good arguments that experimental philosophy has made or could make, he should be left out of the discussion.
Take all of this with a grain of salt, as I am just a lowly graduate student, trying to navigate the disciplinary wasteland that exists between the two camps (Anglo-American and Continental) of philosophy.
So there’s dispute over method. How is one to determine which methods to follow? Should one ascertain which methods most people accept, or which ones they should accept?
Hey look, a turf war! Chris, I betcha never saw that coming. 😉
Of course each of the fields of the humanities thinks of itself as the ‘master discipline’ that encompasses all the others. However only mine, History, is correct in this. If what I just said seems absurd it might be because although the humanities all examine the same general field of wonders about our humanity and stuff, they do so using different methods, including different histories of question-formation.
To me the most wonderful thing Chris says in this wonderful post is therefore this: “…anthropology is an empirical philosophy, one that professional philosophers would never attempt precisely because it requires all kind of commitments to the real world that are verboten in most mainstream philosophy departments.”
Yes. Exactly. So there are a number of things at stake here, as dramatized in the commentary. If some philosophers are starting to open up to the real world, this may mean that the history of question-formation in philosophy as such has (after some thousands of years) failed to produce a satisfactory history of answers. Which would make philosophy retrospectively and pragmatically start to look like a colossal waste of time; or to be less inflamatory, encourage investigation of alternative questions and methods by those philosophers who for whatever reason (worth exploring) are not fully disciplined.
This, however, is a salto mortale, because as Chris quite rightly said the Authority Game, backed up by the structures of institutional support, is waiting to triage the unwary; and because a philosopher who begins to do the things anthropologists do is instantly vulnerable to the valid critique that she is now merely a bad anthropologist who has self-obsoleted her native expertise and at best is retooling from a misguided career choice.
No need to add to Thomas Nadelhoffer’s apt rebuke of Skipper’s inapt comments. I do want to add three points:
1) The post’s author describes experimental philosophers as “young whippersnappers bent on making names for themselves.” I think I like being considered young, and perhaps a whippersnapper, but it’s a bit unfair to make it sound like our goal has been to make a name for ourselves, since there was little reason for us to think that our projects would be well-received or published at all, much less in the philosophy journals required to get jobs and tenure. I think most of us were motivated by the belief that the numerous claims made from the armchair about which philosophical views are intuitive actually need to be empirically tested and can be so tested. And that’s why we started trying to do just that. I do not think I was the only one who was dubious about whether we would get the interesting results we got and about whether any journals would publish our papers. And I think one reason the papers have been published is that they generally include some very interesting *philosophy* in addition to discussion of the results.
2) No one in experimental philosophy is trying to *replace* traditional philosophical methodology. We are trying to *supplement* it with obviously relevant empirical information. And we’re happy to draw this information from psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, etc., where it is available. Where it is not, we foray into experimentation. And we work very hard to learn the proper methodology and statistics to do this properly. We make mistakes, but we’ve only been at it a few years. We are also extremely open to constructive criticism and help from scientists with more training and from philosophers with useful ideas (e.g., in the experimental philosophy workshop recently held at the SPP meeting).
3) I urge anyone interested in experimental philosophy, especially those inclined to think it is “an embarrassment,” to read some papers. Since the post mentioned work on free will, I’ll suggest my paper, co-authored with Trevor Kvaran and Justin Coates, on that topic (I’m just trying to make a name for myself!).
But many other excellent papers can be easily found on the web or in the new anthology Experimental Philosophy (OUP). My paper is here:
http://www2.gsu.edu/~phlean/papers/Nahmias_Coates_Kvaran.pdf
I’m no expert in the field, but I doubt that experimental philosophers are motivated primarily by the desire to increase their authority–as the original post suggests. Rather, I suspect most of these experimental philosophers understand themselves simply to be calling out other philosophers on the careless claims they often make about people. This process of “calling out” could very well be done by psychologists, sociologists, or anthropologists, except that these groups don’t spend their time wading through philosophical literature and don’t know the important questions to ask, which is what the experimental philosopher is for.
If my account of experimental philosophy is a good one, I do think these philosophers are playing a role of some value. As I read philosophical papers, it’s quite often that I’ll find some careless claim or other (often about supposedly universal intuitions, beliefs, or ways of thinking) that I suspect could be overturned by a good study.
That said, I’m inclined to agree that experimental philosophy is unlikely to really push the discipline forward. The sort of philosophy that makes careless empirical claims is generally not very good or important philosophy to begin with. It’s fine to challenge bad philosophers on their bad claims. But I don’t believe experimental philosophers are ever going to be able to put together a study that compellingly settles between, say, the Positivists and Quine, or Fodor and Dennett, or MacIntyre and Rawls. The really great work in philosophy is that which struggles to put together conceptual frameworks that make sense of everything better than what we were doing before. This philosophical task is just a very one than taking a survey or running two groups through different experimental conditions, even if these studies can be relevant in various ways to the really important work in philosophy.
Lots of interesting food for thought in here, though I must confess that I’m finding some of it a littler hard for me to digest, personally. One thing I felt a bit head-scratchy about was this: “Hence, the implicit argument behind conducting experiment in philosophy—and a particular kind of experiment common in psychology, cognitive science—is that it will render the reasoning of philosophers more authoritative.” That would be nice, sure, but I think most of us are doing it because we think that it will render the reasoning of philosophers more truth-conducive. Is that sort of claim simply out of bounds here?
I also just don’t know what to make of the counter-fetishization of statistics (or, rather, statistics) . Statistics is a tool for keeping you from seeing things that aren’t there, like merely apparent patterns in a set of observations, and for helping you see some things that you’re not going to notice with the naked or even well-trained eye, like subtle correlations in large populations. And a lot of the claims that we’re interesting in exploring are ones for which this sort of tool seems the best one available. And I don’t see why, in order to use statistics in that way, we need to be committed to any sort of post-positivist pyramid of the sort sketched above. Am I missing something?
Let me also add that at least some folks in the x-phi community are already very interested in anthropology:
http://www.philosophy.dept.shef.ac.uk/culture&mind/
“But I don’t believe experimental philosophers are ever going to be able to put together a study that compellingly settles between, say, the Positivists and Quine, or Fodor and Dennett, or MacIntyre and Rawls.” I expect that that’s right, and I don’t think that any x-phi practitioners would say otherwise. But I think we will, and maybe even already have, generated some results that might be pretty relevant to at least some such Debates Over Big Questions. _Solving_ philosophical problems seems like an unfairly high hurdle, since we’ve had precious little of that in the entire history of philosophy; _helping_ to move the ball forward regarding such problems is a more apt threshhold, and one that I think we can cross.
Also, in response to Carl + the original post, I hardly think that “commitments to the real world are verboten in most mainstream philosophy departments.” Surely you two must realize you’re being cheeky. The philosophers currently regarded as greats have generally been interested in precisely the question of what the real world is. In fact, they’ve presumably been much more “committed” to this question than you two, since they are unwilling to take for granted whatever account of the “real world” you’re assuming.
I’d also say it’s somewhat of an optical illusion if it looks like “philosophy has failed to produce a satisfactory history of answers.” Once a branch of philosophy starts generating a stable system of answers, we generally stop calling it philosophy. Two recent examples are the emergence of psychology in the late 19th century and linguistics in the 20th.
R.A.. Dude. The endless recycling of the old tired questions about what the real world is are exactly what get jettisoned when the disciplines that need to deal with a pragmatic reality of some kind get up and running. It’s not that those questions aren’t fundamentally important; it’s that they’re fundamentally unanswerable, as Hume asserted and everyone serious since Kant has conceded.
Okay, Carl. So now your position is that the sciences+history+anthropology don’t answer questions about the real world, and that, in fact, philosophers get into trouble precisely by asking questions about this real world. If you reread your first post, I think you’ll forgive me for originally understanding you to be claiming nearly the opposite.
Anyway, you’re now suggesting that philosophers fail to deal with “pragmatic reality,” while historians and anthropologists do manage to deal with it. I’d be very interested to know what you mean by “pragmatic reality.” But, as something of a pragmatist, I’d have to disagree with you about what philosophers do and don’t do. (By the way, some of the biggest names in contemporary philosophy are associated with Neopragmatism.) In my understanding of pragmatic value, there’s plenty of work that goes on in philosophy departments that’s got it, and plenty of work that goes on all over academia (including philosophy departments) that lacks it. If we weren’t in silly blog-war land, I bet we could come to agreement on the matter pretty quickly. We could also probably agree that shallow and hasty generalizations about the whole of philosophy are not a particularly effective way of dealing with “pragmatic reality.”
No, no, R.A.; no fight. You’re right, I contradict myself and I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m sure that once we got my lazy prose sorted out I would turn out to agree with you.
Along those lines, I very much liked your point about branches of philosophy that produce stable systems of answers ceasing to be philosophy. Now I’ll have to rethink my perception that this happened after the people involved became dissatisfied with philosophical questions and methods as such and moved away from them. Clearly my narrative is too linear.
Anyway, Chris is the one making a serious point here. So I’ll just repeat – bravo, Chris.
X-Phi is not an embarrassment to philosophy. What is an embarrassment is the vitriol unleashed by professional philosophers against a fairly cogent and thought-provoking blog post.
I wasn’t surprised by Leiter’s tasteless, condescending ‘call to arms,’ since I’ve come to expect that kind of tabloid mentality over there. What surprised me was Nadelhoffer’s defensiveness. Laziness? Totally uninformed? Projection?! Come now indeed. Since when do good philosophers need ad hominem rhetoric like that to make a point?
And by the way, the remark about experimental philosophy’s “branding” success is well deserved. Enthusiasm is one thing; logos, t-shirts, and an RSS feed are another. It’s not that these things are necessarily bad. But I suspect that they indicate a certain credulous, “fanboy” mentality among many young devotees. In my opinion, that’s a kind of enthusiasm philosophy can do without.
Carl is above philosophical questions but proceeds to make sweeping generalizations about ‘practical reality’ and ‘stable systems of answers’. As usual, the philosophy-basher is just someone trying to protect his own philosophical assumptions from scrutiny.
you know a troll is successful when leiter commands his hordes to set you straight. I feel the warm loving glow of philosophical tolerance washing over me.
As is not obvious enough from the post, I have little interest in actually adjudicating whether or not X-Phi has any worth. I tried to be even-handed, at least so far as I’m willing to read it (I do), and willing to accept that the methodology employed is a sharp and useful one (it is), and that it is not a replacement for philosophy, but an attempt to push it towards other kinds of practices. I don’t think I meant to suggest that it sought to replace philosophy… but it would be disingenuous for practitioners of this art to suggest that they are just interested in some tiny little corner of human knowledge and no one should feel threatened– i think the x-phi clan expects to be taken quite seriously, and so I can’t urge them enough to ignore the trolls like Skipper (or Leiter for that matter, whose brand of “engagement” seems to me to be the most philosophically rigorous version of griefing I can imagine).
So here’s an interesting thing:
“Once some representative arguments from this rather new sub-discipline have been publicly evaluated, I think then it would be appropriate to draw conclusions about its relation to cultural anthropology.”
I agree, expept, this is what I’m pointing to with respect to the “game of authority”– I think the addition of experiment is part of this process, and i’m not sure whether it is a necessary one. On the one hand, I do think philosophers need ways of evaluating claims about humans and worlds and other beings, and it would be great if they didn’t just blindly accept the reigning answers provided by scientists (that is, bow to the experimental authority of others because of their…experimental authority). On the other hand, I think I agree that this just removes certain broad claims which it is unreasonable (i.e. wrong) to start an argument with. In a field like moral responsibility, this is good idea, because the arguments are so insanely refined to begin with. I think in fact, it’s almost inevitable that philosophers turn to experiment as the questions are refined. However, I do agree with Carl, that the more refined these questions get, the LESS committed they become to the chaos and complexity of the contemporary world (and note, I do not say, “real world”, that’s not what I mean). Anthropologists, I think, are on the whole curious about making sense of this historically evolving, complexifying, stratifying and turbulent contemporary world, and are not at all convinced that the questions about moral responsibility being asked by the contemporary x-phi crew will bear on that world at all… they may, the door is open, that’s why i’m interested.
oh, and i totally agree that statistics “is a tool for keeping you from seeing things that aren’t there, like merely apparent patterns in a set of observations, and for helping you see some things that you’re not going to notice.”
But i don’t think that’s what I meant by “statistically sophisticated”– what I mean is that I think the reliance on surveys and questionairres and things like PD or ultimatium games is taken to be the most reliable (statistical) form of investigation. I shouldn’t imply that these things ARE statistics, they are not. However, the authority of these experimental designs comes from their being most amenable to using statistics as a tool. Fieldwork in anthropology, by contrast, is one of the least amenable “experimental designs” for statistics. Both experiments produce results, but the idiom within which argumentation takes place is vastly different. On the latter, I use Jack Katz’ essays “From How to Why” as a good starting point on evaluating evidence in ethnography.
Weston,
In the past few years I have encountered a litany of comments by philosophers who clearly haven’t bothered reading the things we write but who nevertheless see fit to criticize or dismiss experimental philosophy as a whole. In short, people say belittling things about what turns out to be little more than their own mistaken conception concerning the kind of work we do. Surely you can appreciate that this would become increasingly tiresome.
If you are going to take the time to make flippant public remarks about people’s work, you should have some idea of what it is they’re actually up to. This becomes all the more important when the people in question have gone to great length in a series of papers that try to clarify and motivate the wide variety of projects that we undertake. If, on the other hand, you see fit to dismiss a field of inquiry as an embarrassment without knowing much about the field, you should expect people to respond in kind.
Keep in mind that I didn’t dismiss what Rob said via an ad hominem–instead, I cited particular examples that made it clear that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The claim wasn’t “Rob is lazy (or is projecting), therefore what he said is false.” Rather, it was “a cursory glance at work in experimental philosophy reveals that what Rob says about our knowledge of experimental design is false.” And to the extent that this is the case, a “lazy failure to read” is a viable explanation for why Rob said what he did. Projection is another. Neither of those observations were designed to put pressure on the merits of Rob’s comments–the rest of my response was designed to accomplish that. What my comments about laziness and projection were designed to do was treat Rob as dismissively as he treated me and the rest of the experimental philosophy community.
That being said, it is also worth pointing out that I did not criticize the author of this post–which I actually did find interesting and thought-provoking. Indeed, I was thrilled to find the blog–which I promptly added to the blogroll over at our blog. I was criticizing Rob–who did not write a “cogent and fairly thought-provoking blog post”–he wrote what I demonstrated to be an entirely uninformed comment that was designed to inflame and not inform. I was happy to return the favor…
As for the question of branding, I am curious to hear why you think generating enthusiasm–regardless of how the enthusiasm is created–among young philosophers is something philosophers can do without. By my lights, one of the nicest things about our growing community is how active a roll is being played by both undergrads and grad students. The logo, t-shirts, rock song, myspace page, etc. were all put together in good fun. The RSS feed, on the other hand, is something most academic blogs have–so, I am unsure why you think that is problematic.
I’m a practicing experimental philosopher, I suppose, though my methods and questions are rather different from what is usual in the subfield. Much of what has been done in experimental philosophy seems to me methodologically weak and overinterpreted; but that’s true of much of psychology as well (and I assume it’s true of anthropology too, though I haven’t read widely in that area).
I see no reason to think there’s a flaw at the heart of the “experimental philosophy” project. On the contrary, it seems to me more likely that there’s a flaw at the heart of the more mainstream philosophical project of reflecting from the armchair as a way of discovering substantial metaphysical truths that are immune to scientific refutation.
ckelty,
I would be interested to hear more suggestions concerning accessible pieces from the meta-anthropology literature about some of the issues you’ve mentioned. If there are some lessons that we would do well to learn before we follow anthropology any deeper into the wormhole, I would like to know of them sooner rather than later! For now, thanks again for the post. I have some questions and comments about what you say about experimental philosophy, but I got sidetracked by some of the distractions in the comment thread. I will try to post a comment later that addresses the substance of your post. In the meantime, thanks once again for giving some thought to the broader significance of our growing field.
“What is an embarrassment is the vitriol unleashed by professional philosophers against a fairly cogent and thought-provoking blog post.” Um… huh? Was any of the vitriol aimed at the main post? I think that it was aimed pretty much entirely at Rob Skipper’s comment. I certainly didn’t mean my response to the main post to be anything like vitriolic.
ckelty, I’m not quite seeing how your response to my comment fits in with the main post. The main post makes it sound like (to my ears, anyway) experimental philosophers are looking to experimental methods primarily because of their ordained status as a source of, well ,status. And I don’t see where in there you consider the possibility that we’re doing it primarily because it seems to us like the most likely way available to us for getting the answers to a lot of the questions that we want answered, like, “how many people (and which people) really think that Gettier cases aren’t knowledge, anyway?” It seems to me that tou’re just not going to be able to get reliable answers to questions like that without using methods that involve statistics. So there seemed to me to be a disconnect between your proposed motive for the creation of the subdiscipline, and our own sense of why we’re doing what we’re doing. Which is not to say that we ourselves should get to be too automatically authoritative as to why we do what we do — but our own self-conceptions should at least be on the table as part of the story, I would think! And it seemed that, in your main post, this was not the case.
Prof. Nadelhoffer,
Thanks for your reply. I understand your frustration with those who criticize experimental philosophy before acquainting themselves with the literature. I also agree that Rob’s generalization about “most” experimental philosopher’s abilities is probably false. And perhaps I’m wrong about your rhetorical point in suggesting that his comment is the result of laziness or defense mechanisms–if so I apologize for saying otherwise.
I confess that I’m skeptical about the value, methods, and novelty of experimental philosophy, although less so than I used to be. X-Phi folk have done a better job in recent years of explaining their project and owning up to its limitations. But many people on both sides of the debate still seem to be under the impression that experimental philosophy is supposed to subvert or revolutionize more traditional philosophical methodology. The best experimental philosophers acknowledge that their field should more properly be regarded as a necessary corrective and supplement to those methods, and not as a replacement for them.
But the “brand” of experimental philosophy is at odds with this less-radical interpretation. My worry is that the burning armchair, when worn as an armband of philosophical progress, will confuse and seduce people into an exaggerated sense of the field’s importance, and blind them to its weaknesses. I know the t-shirts, song, web pages, and so on have been made for fun. Far be it from me to rain on anyone’s parade. But as someone who is familiar with some (though certainly not all) of the literature in experimental philosophy and who remains skeptical, I find the PR campaign in its favor–however good-natured–an irritating and potentially misleading distraction.
“But many people on both sides of the debate still seem to be under the impression that experimental philosophy is supposed to subvert or revolutionize more traditional philosophical methodology. The best experimental philosophers acknowledge that their field should more properly be regarded as a necessary corrective and supplement to those methods, and not as a replacement for them.” I’m not sure that these two propositions are really in tension — certainly subverting traditional philosophical methods might be an important requisite step to correcting them! I don’t know who has ever made any claims for the “revolutionary” nature of the endeavor, in the “something totally unprecedented” sense, and indeed I think one standard line here is that the continuity between scientific and philosophical modes of inquiry is more the historical norm than has been the case in recent decades. The spirit is somewhat “revolutionary” in the sense of “insurrectionist”, but I don’t see anything wrong with that, or at least I’d like to hear an argument for what’s wrong with it. We are, after all, trying to tell a rather large set of people that the profession really shouldn’t continue to do things in quite the way that it has been, and that it isn’t just some small, easy tweaks that will do the trick (which is surely entailed by saying, as you do, that x-phi is a _necessary_ corrective).
Perhaps you can clarify a bit what you have in mind with the sort of “before” and “after” claims here, such that I can see how they are meant to be more of a real contrast?
I take a “revolution” to be a more or less complete overthrow and replacement of existing norms and procedures. That’s in tension with “corrective” and “supplementary” changes, because those changes do not aim at a complete overthrow and replacement of existing norms and procedures. Reupholstering an armchair, for example, would be corrective or supplementary. Lighting it on fire would be revolutionary.
I don’t see how saying that the changes X-Phi has shown are necessary entails, or even suggests, that those changes need to be major ones, let alone changes sufficient to justify the erasure and replacement of non-experimental philosophy implied by the logo.
I think the enduring contributions of experimental philosophy will be a renewed caution about relying on one’s own intuitions and a renewed interest in the relevance of empirical data to philosophical theory. I do not think experimental philosophy has–or ever will–give philosophers very good reason to change the way they think about moral responsibility, for example. In the end, I suspect what will happen is that we will develop a set of stock qualifications to disarm objections from the X-Phi direction before they start.
I hope that clarifies my view!
“I think the enduring contributions of experimental philosophy will be a renewed caution about relying on one’s own intuitions and a renewed interest in the relevance of empirical data to philosophical theory.”
While I can’t speak for other experimental philosophers, I think this would be a very satisfying and welcome outcome.
Ckelty, I agree with jonathan weinberg about the response to your post. You’re right that Leiter was commanding his hordes to set you straight. But Leiter doesn’t actually command any hordes. He evidently managed to redirect some philosophers to this post (like me), but it sounded to me like most of the x-phils were grateful for your thoughts. Leiter’s tone was, as usual, ridiculous, in that you were by no means claiming to know everything about x-phil, just offering some thoughts from an outsider’s perspective. And I think most of the philosophers who’ve disagreed with some of your points have done so in a tone far more appropriate than Leiter’s (although some of their responses to each other got flamewarsy).
Know of any good anthropological studies that explain why perfectly intelligent people post such ridiculous things on blogs? My theory is that blog culture is still very primitive. We haven’t figured out what conventions work yet, and, as a result, we get all sorts of adolescent absurdities. But I’m just armchairing it.
R.A., what about Professor Leiter’s tone was ridiculous? As a brilliant thinker who lends his powerful intellect to the common good, Professor Leiter was merely doing his duty. If that bothers you, well then you are the one with the problem, and everyone knows that you are jealous. In any case, you should know that Professor Leiter has a high opinion of X-Phi, but I suppose you think that this is just because Professor Leiter is a hack naturalist who lacks any real philosophical insights. Well, try again. Professor Leiter does work on the philosophy of law, which everyone knows is among the most fundamental and difficult areas of philosophy.
These pro-Leiter posts are sarcastic right? Irony relies on background knowledge and contextual cues to make the words you say mean the opposite. But it doesn’t come off well in the backgroundless, contextless world of anonymous one paragraph blog posts. I don’t know whether Pete and Alex are earnest but deluded/preposterous individuals, a good-natured ironic Leiter basher, a troll playing some weird Leiterific game, or Leiter himself. I’m going to believe option #2, since this is the world I like best.
Aside from the Leiter-induced madness that has inflated this thread (kind of like having your quiet dinner-party crashed by hooligans and discovering that some of your guests were ready to tear up your home in defense of their team), I think the comments here have been thoughtful. I can’t respond to all of them, it took me long enough just to read them all, but…
re: branding… I don’t think of this as a bad thing. Indeed, re-read the post, I’m pointing to x-phi as an example of a new kind of scholarly communication, something that, regardless of its content, is conducted in a new way, and thus able to achieve attention (warranted or not) far beyond what professional philosophers who ignore such techniques (blogging, organizing, collaborating) would be able to achieve. This may in fact account for some of the vitriol… and not anything about x-phi or its truths per se.
re: Statistics and authority (Weinberg’s query). I’m working from a position here that different methods of inquiry do not posess inherent “truthiness” or what you called truth-conduciveness. I think methods of inquiry or complex technical beasts, which are coordinated with complex social systems of approval and disapproval, and together they are what allow a group of people to work out the truths they share and expect others to be unable to dissent from. This may sound like a claim of relativism, but it is not meant to be. My short hand word for this process is “authority”–but conveyed in that is truthiness, which is to say, the impossibility of successful dissent. The reason I can say this about x-phi (and perhaps not about any other domain of philosophy) is because it seems to me that if x-phi is going to rely on its experimental results, to any extent, for the purposes of making claims about the world (as opposed to simply falsifying certain suspect assumptions), then it has entered a domain where truth is not about argument, it is about the socially structured acceptance of irrefutable demonstrations (on this, Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump is the locus classicus). That’s an important distinction to try to get clear about, I think.
What exactly is Experimental Philosophy for? First, how you construct the questionnaire or survey will clearly have an effect on how people answer it. Second to go from something statistically significant in a survey to a claim of the form “most people would think X” seems dubious at best. Third if a philosopher makes a claim like “most people would think X” it should be the case that X is fairly plausible. I think “most people would think X” is a turn of phrase rather than an empirical claim. It could be paraphrased away as something like “I find it unlikely that more than a few loonies could believe ¬X”
As philosophy, I really cannot see any value in this kind of approach.
Seamus, you’ve got a lot packed into those few sentences! It would be enormously helpful if you could say more clearly which particular articles of x-phi you are aiming to critique here.
ckelty, I think that your last comment here somewhat answers your question about why experimental philosophers haven’t drawn much from anthropology. It sounds like you’re taking the ‘strong programme’ as a starting point for thinking about science. But most philosophers today take as their starting point a fairly unreflective endorsement of science as a reliable, perhaps _the_ reliable, source of knowledge about the things that science properly addresses; and where this is a usage of “knowledge” that entails truth. (And not mere ‘truthiness’ — that you want to rhetorically substitute the latter for the former is, I think, another thing that philosophers are just not going to accept. ‘Truthiness’ is something to _contrast_ with truth-conduciveness, for us, and I believe that Colbert (though not his persona) would feel the same way.) A number of philosophers do have more complicated & nuanced views, especially now that social epistemology has become a going concern, but it’s still the case that such philosophers (e.g., Philip Kitcher, Miriam Solomon, or Helen Longino) are going to have the overall veritistic success of science as part of their picture. What I think a lot of the folks in this latter group might say is that you’ve set up a false dichotomy between being truth-conducive and being a “complex social system”. It’s in virtue of the being the right kind of complex social system that science is able to be as truth-conducive as it is.
So, given that that’s where we’re coming from, to the extent that anthropological approaches require coming from somewhere very different, it’s not going to be easy for us to take them on. Now, I don’t know whether a ‘strong programme’ approach is really a necessary part of anthropology — I believe that some of the anthropologists involved in the project I linked to earlier would not endorse it — and to the extent that anthropology can be disentangled from that approach, I see no reason at all why its methods couldn’t be very useful to people trying to ask the questions that experimental philosophers are trying to ask.
I do want to raise a kind of anthropological objection to one of the other claims you made in your last comment here: “if x-phi is going to rely on its experimental results, to any extent, for the purposes of making claims about the world (as opposed to simply falsifying certain suspect assumptions), then it has entered a domain where truth is not about argument, it is about the socially structured acceptance of irrefutable demonstrations”. I think you may have an under-antropologized view of contemporary philosophy — for the practice that folks in experimental philosophy are looking to undermine is precisely one about “the socially structured acceptance of irrefutable demonstrations”, namely, the philosopher’s appeal to their own (and those of their friends) armchair intuitions. I would think that, from your perspective, it would be more appropriate to say that we’re trying to shift from one set of social structures for premise construction to a different set, rather than leaving some pristine world of pure unsocialized argumentation into a world of socially determined epistemic status. Maybe we’re just like the rebels in a small nation signing on with the big global hegemon to help fight our local hegemon, but we’re still antihegemonic in spirit! 😉
Wow, I have no idea what I did, such that it put the last third of my post in strikethrough. My apologies for that.
bq. ckelty, I think that your last comment here somewhat answers your question about why experimental philosophers haven’t drawn much from anthropology. It sounds like you’re taking the ‘strong programme’ as a starting point for thinking about science. But most philosophers today take as their starting point a fairly unreflective endorsement of science as a reliable, perhaps the reliable, source of knowledge about the things that science properly addresses [.]
I think the issue is not only that anthropologists are inclined to believe that science is a social process, but that we have a different understanding of what it means to do “science” — derived, mostly, not from philosophers of science but from Clifford Geertz’s distinction between “explanatory” and “interpretive” science. Anthropology is a _deeply_ empirical field, but one whose practitioners tend to see things like measurements, surveys and experimental controls as _impediments_ to accurate observation in many human contexts because they limit the answers we can assess to those we can imagine before doing the observations
ckelty,
Since I was surely the most disruptive of your guests, I wanted to apologize. I wasn’t trying to tear anything up, I was merely trying to straighten someone out. I certainly didn’t meant to hijack your thread. That being said, it is hard to take certain hostile charges laying down (especially when they are delivered without accompanying argumentation).
Yes, comet jo. And earlier:
If bearing the seal of science is usually enough today to gain a sort of privileged credibility, that is because we have faith in science. But that faith is not essentially different than religious faith. The value we attribute to science depends, in the last analysis, upon the idea we collectively have of its nature and role in life, which is to say it expresses a state of opinion…. To be sure, we can make opinion an object of study and create a science of it; that is what sociology principally consists in. Still the science of opinion does not create opinion, but can only clarify it and make it more conscious of itself.
Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Conclusion), 1912. Trans. Karen E. Fields.
More or less what we’re talking about?
Since we’ve taken it this far, I’d just like to ask how Leiter, with his revolting snobbery and those he defends with their contempt for democracy [more here] have any right to call themselves intellectuals. It’s not science they defend but pseudo-science by way of analogy: a literary form. Words are not numbers, and a Ph.D by their definition is no more than a mechanic of possible engines. Tell me how any of these idiots could come to terms with the fact that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the representative of Modernity in Turkey and the military is the force of reaction. Any anthro. could tell you in an instant [I hope!]
This is the failure of academic- neoscholastic- philosophy, and if you can’t rip these idiots new assholes (without stopping to think) it’s your problem as well.
There’s something to be learned from the observations of 30 year olds with the emotional engagement of 12 year old Asperger’s patients, just as there’s something to be learned from anyone. But they’ve earned no privileges. There is no intellectual life without self-awareness, and I shouldn’t even have to be writing these words.
Don’t argue with these ants: step on them.
http://www.colinmcginnblog.com/comments.php?y=08&m=03&entry=entry080311-133549
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=401547&c=1
I post links they get stripped!
First the links get stripped, then they end up in moderation.
Moderate please so my post makes sense.
Whether or not Mr. Leiter is “intellectual” or not is beside the point. I wan’t to focus on your quarrel with philosophy. First, we have “it’s not science they defend but pseudo-science by way of analogy […]”. This comment, though, if intended to be a criticism of philosophy, is far off-base. As I understand it, we are supposed to understand philosophers as defenders of pseudo-science, or, in other words, pseudo-scientists as defenders of pseudo-science. Luckily for you, the latter is a trivial-truth (for pseudo-scientists that did not defend pseudo-science would not be pseudo-scientists, it seems). However, the former statement -which I presume is intended to be a criticism of philosophy- it is just plain silly. The definition of the term ‘pseudo’ just is adj. ‘not genuine’, informally a ‘sham’. When we put this together with the term ‘science’, which has no clear definition at this point (but we get the general picture), we get “beliefs mistakenly regarded as being based on science”. By this, then, we get ‘philosophers defend beliefs mistakenly regarded as being based on science’.
Now, either the latter statement is true or false -what is it? Well, it seems the statement could be empirically-verified, although that would be terribly boring to research. The question really is just this: do philosophers make mistakes like regarding their beliefs -or theses for that matter- as being based on science? I do not think so. It seems to me that contemporary philosophers try to remain consistent with natural-science, so in this sense “their views” are scientific, but their philosphical-views, at least, are not put forth as scientific-views. Rather, they are put forth as consistent with scientific-views. We do not have philosophers writing out arguments where the premises lead to a conclusion that is purely empirically-verifiable… If this were the case, there would have been no reason whatever to have argued for the conclusion – they just would not have bothered. Of course, lots of philosophy (especially in the area of metaphysics, specifically when the topic is time, and material constitution) we have philosophers that either assume some scientific-concept w/o argument, or we have them argue for certain proposition that are not within the scope of the current science. Usually, though, the questions they ask – or rather, the questions they try to answer – are those questions that a natural-scientist just cannot answer using the scientific-method, because the scientific-method just isn’t especially relevant to the question or the answer (unless, of course, we are in the domain of the philosophy of science, where philosophers argue about the scientific-method, the epistemic status of natural laws, et cetera).
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…
Christopher, I wrote my comments after 4 beers and 3 double shots of Patron.
“I remember… when we used to sit
In the government yard…
in Zagreb,”
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.