Philosophers and seeking answers
This thread has produced some interesting commentary around whether philosophers actually want to answer their own questions, or whether they enjoy sounding profound by debating big questions but don’t want to lose that opportunity for profundity by finding single correct answers to them.
I don’t quite disagree with the latter theory: the main reason I quit academic philosophy was exasperation that people were still debating questions where the right answer seemed obvious to me (like theism vs. atheism, or whether there was a universally compelling morality/aesthetics of pure reason), and worry that my philosophical career would involve continuing to debate these issues ad nauseum rather than helping to solve them and move on to the next problem.
But when I explained this to a particularly sarcastic friend, he summarized it as “So you think philosophy is useless because not everyone agrees with you?”
The problem isn’t that philosophers never come up with solutions. The problem is that they come up with too many different solutions.
Science has solved many scientific problems, and anyone wondering what the solution is can look it up in a book or on Wikipedia. Philosophers have also solved many philosophical problems, but it is full of so many distractions and false solutions that anyone wondering which proposed solution is correct will have to become nearly as good a philosopher as the person who solved it in the first place. It’s much easier for science to settle its disputes via experiment than for philosophy to settle its disputes via debate.
I am wary of criticizing the discipline of philosophy simply on the grounds that not everyone in it agrees with me. But I also don’t want to let it off and say it’s okay that they’ve managed to go so long without coming to any answers, when it seems to me that settling at least some of the easier problems is not that difficult.
How do we tell the difference between a discipline that doesn’t really seek answers and a discipline which honestly seeks answers but just can’t agree within itself? And how can philosophy do something about its level of internal disagreement without having to apply the “kick out everyone who disagrees with Less Wrong” solution?
Citizens of Mathematics-Land carry the Rapier of Proof at all times, and citizens of Physics-Land carry the Six-Shooter of Experiment, and anyone committing an offense or faux-pas meets swift and merciless punishment from his peers. Philosophy-Land is a weapon-free country, whose citizens can be rude to each other without risk.
In Medicine-Land and Engineering-Land, great material rewards befall those whose ideas are new and true, whereas those who cheat or deceive themselves may cause catastrophes. But in Philosophy-Land, there is no reward for honesty or hard work.
I wouldn’t expect progress in the field as a whole, I’d expect small subfields, departments, individual philosophers to try to solve those problems locally. And I don’t know enough about academic philosophy to tell whether that’s already the case; Experimental Philosophy may be a step in that direction. Maybe analytical philosophy was. Maybe the institutional incentives are such that any effort in the “right direction” tends to fail.
The worst thing is that the rapier does work in Philosophy-Land a lot of the time. It’s just that all the people who are especially vulnerable to said rapiers tend to emigrate. Those remaining don’t tend to have the courtesy to event grant touché when the rapier is sticking out of their chest, nor to adjust their technique.
You give me the lolz.
Wow, that’s just a masterpiece metaphor! Saved this. I must also mention here, in addition to the Rapier and the Gun, one very famous razor, Occam’s Razor (and even a seemingly more advanced version of it, Solomon’s Lightsaber), from which it obviously follows that many philosophers also still cannot stand shaving (they themselves say that it’s just a straight razor, it’s too easy to cut yourself) and walk around with huge beards.
Wrong meta-level. It’s not disagreement with you, it’s a long list of specific reasons that move you to a long list of specific conclusions that are different from those of many other philosophers.
That depends what the conclusion is supposed to be. If it is just that philosophers X, Y and Z are wrong, then you are right—he can simply bring forward arguments a, b and c to show this.
However, his claim is stronger than that. He is claiming that these philosophers (or at least many of them) are not in the truth business. His philosophical arguments may show that the other philosophers are wrong, but it won’t follow that they are not sincere in trying to find answers and solve problems. For that he needs something like: they can’t really be trying to find the truth, otherwise they would agree with me (at least on these “simple” matters).
Perhaps individual philosophers honestly seek answers, but academic philosophy as an institution has evolved to not really seek answers. That is, mechanisms that promote the spread of true ideas have atrophied or were never built, while mechanisms to promote diversity of positions have proliferated, without anyone consciously wanting these things to happen.
(This is just a guess as I’m not really familiar with the inner workings of academia.)
A priori it seems like a good guess. In any academic discipline, at the thesis level and above, originality is necessary for your work to be perceived as having any value, But most complicated questions with one true answer have a thousand false answers. Once people have beaten you to the true answer, it’s going to be easier to be original if you go for one of the false ones, so long as you’re in a discipline where verifying truth or falsehood is harder than obscuring it.
I suspect a good bellwether for identifying such disciplines is the way they treat repetition of existing truths. A lemma in a math paper might be “obvious”, a paper with too many obvious lemmas might be “too verbose”, but there’s never any suggestion that the lemmas are “trite” or that the reviewers would prefer to read their converses instead.
Then what I’m wondering is what these mechanisms are, how they caught on, and how we can identify them in philosophy in other disciplines so we can be on guard.
I think the main mechanisms are probably journals that publish only original ideas, and hiring based on number of publications. These mechanisms have to be counteracted by equally strong mechanisms to spread truth and suppress untruth, but unfortunately in philosophy there is no simple and uncontroversial way to distinguish between these, so the former mechanisms tend to overpower the latter ones.
One idea to fix this is maybe universities could start hiring philosophy professors based not on apparent research progress (i.e., number of publications) but on tests of intelligence and rationality.
A link to this Paul Graham essay seems warranted.
It seems to me that one thing that could be done is for people who’ve “gotten it right” not to leave the discipline. And (then) for folks who do leave to remember that there are plenty of people like them left behind.
Although, at the risk of dissenting somewhat from what seems to be the consensus, I don’t actually think that analytic philosophy is in particularly bad shape, certainly not by the standards of academic disciplines in general. We’re talking about a field whose giants have included people like Russell, Quine, and (currently) Dennett. (And I mention these folks with particular reference to their views on the relationship of philosophy to science.) Yes, there are also some people who are Wrong, but that’s pretty much life in academia (or, if you really want the truth, anywhere else in human society). I think one has to be happy with a field if those in it with good ideas are rewarded (which is not always the case in all subjects, but is something on which philosophy does a decent job, as far as I can tell); expecting those with bad ideas to be punished may be asking too much (even if we assume it is wholly desirable).
Well that warrants a link to Karl Popper’s essay on the nature of philosophical problems.
You missed out Popper! I’d probably rank these four in the order Popper > Quine > Dennett > Russell.
Russell was historically important, and is always a pleasure to read, but his inventions were either utterly trivial (e.g. Russell’s paradox and his theory of descriptions) or else a monstrously ugly obfuscation of mathematical logic, parasitic on the original ideas of Frege, Pierce, Peano and Cantor, which was unbearable to use and became obsolete almost immediately (I’m talking about Principia Mathematica of course.)
I’m not sure what you’re worried about. Just as you can’t force people to move on from a problem that you think has been solved, so too they can’t force you to wait while they work it out.
In the early modern period various thinkers were asking questions that would ultimately lead to the foundations of modern science (I’m thinking of Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, John Locke and others). Philosophers have continued worrying about a lot of these issues (problem of induction, demarcation) while the scientists have moved on and made many fruitful discoveries. You may think that this shows that the philosophers have wasted their time, but so what? It hasn’t slowed science down. It has also proved to be important. When new discoveries (particularly in physics) question the underlying assumptions, or where the method seems inadequate for solving the problem, then it turns out to be rather useful that there are some philosophers still thinking about these things.
So, you are free to carry on with your assumptions, and ignore others who think the matter is not solved, but further down the line you might be grateful that others were a bit more hesitant.
Thomas Kuhn agrees with you:
from “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”
I notice that Kuhn does not say that the scientists turn to philosophers. So are they really “turning to philosophical analysis”? Or are they just, because they must examine more basic assumptions that they usually need to, perforce turning to thinking at the level where the disagreements can be resolved? In the process, what they are doing may look like what philosophers do, but they eventually settle on an answer and move on. Philosophy never seems to do that.
Indeed, much of what we think of as “modern science” used to be called “natural philosophy”. Even “logic” used to be considered the realm of philosophers rather than mathematicians. Philosophy may be maligned in part due to a linguistic selection bias where, as soon as we start to really understand a subject, we stop calling it “philosophy”.
It occurred to me recently, while I was reading some article in the SEP, that academic philosophers (of the analytic variety) may be conceiving their project as one of charting the logical space of ‘tenable’ philosophical positions, rather than trying to eliminate as much of that space as possible. Of course the SEP may tend especially to give that impression, since it is meant to consist of review articles that summarise all the positions and arguments on a given topic which are taken seriously. But philosophers do often say that they are concerned with ‘conceptual analysis’, and to some extent this is taken to mean that philosophy is supposed to be the practice of analysing the subject matter (and methodology) of other fields, as opposed to having any subject matter of its own. Hence ‘philosophy of physics’, ‘philosophy of ethics’, ‘philosophy of biology’, … In other words, philosophy is taken to be a mode of investigation rather than a subject.
I think it’s worth distinguishing between cases where being correct has pragmatic advantages, and cases where it doesn’t.
For example, there are plenty of people who reject the philosophical underpinnings of modern medicine. There always have been. Those people don’t go to medical school, don’t go to conferences, etc.; eventually a whole discussion emerges to which they are not invited. Believers in medicine don’t convince the believers in homeopathy, they ignore them and concentrate on doing medicine.
And because doctors achieve more valuable things more reliably than homeopaths, over time they displace the homeopaths… they create their own community within which a belief in medicine is pervasive. That the homeopaths are not convinced isn’t actually important; it just means they aren’t part of that community.
Of course, if believing in homeopathy doesn’t correlate with skill at carpentry, then the medicine/homeopathy disagreement may continue to exist among carpenters. But so what? Who cares what carpenters think about medicine? Why is resolving that disagreement worth devoting energy to? Better for medicinists to devote their efforts to advancing medicine.
Similarly, there are plenty of people who reject atheism. There always will be. The thing for the atheists to do is work in areas where atheism gives them a pragmatic advantage. Over time they will displace the theists in that area, and the atheism/theism disagreement will disappear in that area. If atheism confers no demonstrable advantage to carpenters, then the disagreement will continue to exist among carpenters. But, again, so what?
By the same token, if a philosophical problem turns out to not have any pragmatic implications—that is, if there is no area where people with the correct answer can do something valuable that people with the incorrect answer can’t do, or can’t do as well—then the disagreement will continue to exist everywhere. But, again, so what?
Within the more practical sorts of philosophy, like logic, epistemology, and morality, there are potentially huge gains to society for getting it right. But these can only be “tested” (in the sense of creating a society that revolves around certain philosophical ideas) on a multi-decade time scale with a huge investment of resources and possible human suffering if you’re wrong, and all experiments are necessarily imperfect (communists still argue their principles would have worked if the situation had been different).
That means there are practical gains from having good philosophy, but not in a way that means it can be decided by experiment.
Sure, maybe we’d see huge pragmatic gains after everyone was (for example) an atheist for a century but there just aren’t smaller gains to be realized from atheism at smaller scales.
My inclination is to distrust anyone who claims that the theory they advocate can only be tested by an apparatus too impractical to build, and is necessarily untestable on any scale small enough to actually test… but I concede that it’s possible.
And agreed that my examples aren’t good analogies for that sort of situation.
Your Rationality is My Business argues against this idea.
Insofar as that post is asserting that the author gets warm fuzzies by caring about my being wrong, and signaling that caring through argument… well, I don’t object to that. It’s actually kind of sweet.
Insofar as it is asserting that it’s useful for him to argue with me whenever I say something wrong, relative to spending the same energy on other projects… well, I observe that the author doesn’t actually do that, given the choice. Which leads me to believe that he doesn’t actually believe that. (Nor do I.)
Let’s not confuse warm fuzzies and utilons.
But but … warm fuzzies are (an important species of) utilons.
And, perhaps more important, rationality isn’t wholly goal-directed, so I expect plenty of experts to continue to try to convince carpenters. Rationalists reason—that’s how we roll. Of course, one can always redefine “the goal” to include the exercise of reason, as such (which would still misrepresent what is more nearly a habit than a goal). Hmm—this topic is quite the can of worms. I might open it properly later.
I think this exchange has become completely unmoored at this point.
I have no objection to reasoning about stuff for the fun of it, or out of habit, or to signal one’s in-group status or one’s superiority, or various other things. And I agree with you that many people, most especially soi-disant rationalists, do this all the time.
But I very much doubt that this is what Plasmon was getting at, or what EY was talking about, or what Yvain was talking about.
Nice posting. As a complete outsider/dilettante, I suppose I am allowed to make suggestions …
First, I would ask whether the discipline has an agreed set of criteria which it uses to distinguish correct proposed answers from incorrect ones. Then, if the answer to that question is “no”, I would ask whether the discipline is devoting the bulk of its effort toward coming up with such a set of criteria. If the answer to the second question is “no” as well, then I fear my view on the question of whether philosophy really seeks answers should be obvious.
Well, one approach suggested by my answer to the first question would be to embark on a crash program to find that set of criteria for correctness (and then kick out everyone who disagrees with the choices).
A better approach might be to abandon the pose that philosophers seek correct answers to precisely formulated questions. Instead take an approach which is both more holistic and more pluralistic (an approach which, incidentally, is actually not too far from what philosophy really does.) Instead of trying to systematically generate true facts about the world, philosophers should instead generate competing coherent systems of assumptions—systems which provide fruitful viewpoints toward the world. “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”. That is, it is not the philosopher’s role to find truth, it is instead his role to suggest methodology.
As I see it, there can be no universally good set of criteria for correctness of philosophical answers. The reason being that both questions and answers are inevitably theory-laden. So, abandon the conceit that good answers exist to good questions simpliciter. Accept the fact that both questions and answers grow out of theories, and that there is no such thing as a correct theory—only more and less fruitful theories.
It seems systemic of the means of settling arguments.
When is a debate finished? When you have run out of arguments to evaluate (there is no shortage)?
Thomas Kuhn