Another academic philosopher, directed here by @Simon Goldstein. Hello Wei!
It’s not common to switch entirely to metaphilosophy, but I think lots of us get more interested in the foundations and methodology of at least our chosen subfields as we gain experience, see where progress is(n’t) being made, start noticing deep disagreements about the quality of different kinds of work, and so on. It seems fair to describe this as awakening to a need for better tools and a greater understanding of methods. I recently wrote a paper about the methodology of one of my research areas, philosophy of mathematical practice, for pretty much these reasons.
Current LLMs are pretty awful at discussing the recent philosophy literature, so I think anyone who’d like AI tools to serve as useful research assistants would be happy to see at least some improvement here! I’m personally also excited about the prospects of using language models with bigger context windows for better corpus analysis work in empirical and practice-oriented parts of philosophy.
I basically agree with Simon on this.
I don’t think this is uncommon. You might not see these reversals in print often, because nobody wants to publish and few people want to read a paper that just says “I retract my previous claims and no longer have a confident positive view to offer”. But my sense is that philosophers often give up on projects because the problems are piling up and they no longer see an appealing way forward. Sometimes this happens more publicly. Hilary Putnam, one of the most influential philosophers of the later 20th century, was famous for changing his mind about scientific realism and other basic metaphysical issues. Wesley Salmon gave up his influential “mark transmission” account of causal explanation due to counterexamples raised by Kitcher (as you can read here). It would be easy enough to find more examples.
Another academic philosopher, directed here by @Simon Goldstein. Hello Wei!
It’s not common to switch entirely to metaphilosophy, but I think lots of us get more interested in the foundations and methodology of at least our chosen subfields as we gain experience, see where progress is(n’t) being made, start noticing deep disagreements about the quality of different kinds of work, and so on. It seems fair to describe this as awakening to a need for better tools and a greater understanding of methods. I recently wrote a paper about the methodology of one of my research areas, philosophy of mathematical practice, for pretty much these reasons.
Current LLMs are pretty awful at discussing the recent philosophy literature, so I think anyone who’d like AI tools to serve as useful research assistants would be happy to see at least some improvement here! I’m personally also excited about the prospects of using language models with bigger context windows for better corpus analysis work in empirical and practice-oriented parts of philosophy.
I basically agree with Simon on this.
I don’t think this is uncommon. You might not see these reversals in print often, because nobody wants to publish and few people want to read a paper that just says “I retract my previous claims and no longer have a confident positive view to offer”. But my sense is that philosophers often give up on projects because the problems are piling up and they no longer see an appealing way forward. Sometimes this happens more publicly. Hilary Putnam, one of the most influential philosophers of the later 20th century, was famous for changing his mind about scientific realism and other basic metaphysical issues. Wesley Salmon gave up his influential “mark transmission” account of causal explanation due to counterexamples raised by Kitcher (as you can read here). It would be easy enough to find more examples.