One issue that one runs into with your question is how one defines a new field being spun off. Some people have argued that biology didn’t really split off from philosophy until the 1850s and 60s, especially with the work of Darwin and Wallace. This is a popular view among Kuhnians who mark a field as becoming science when it gains an overarching accepted paradigm. (However, one could argue that the field left philosophy before it entered science.)
The word “scientist” was first used in 1833, and prior to that “natural philosopher” was used. But certainly by the late 1700s, they were practicing what we could call science. So that argument fails even if one extends the date.
Economics is generally thought of having split off from philosophy when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, and that’s in the late 18th century. But arguably, merchantilist ideas were a form of economics that predated Smith and were separate from philosophy. And you could push the date farther up, pointing out that until fairly late most of the people thinking about economics are people like Bentham who we think of as philosophers.
Possibly the best example of an area that split off recently might be psychology. Wilhelm Wundt is sometimes regarded as the individual who split that off, doing actual controlled scientific experiments in the late 19th century. But there was research being done by scientists/biologists/natural philosophers much earlier in the 19th century, especially in regards to whether the nervous system was the source of cognition. Wikipedia claims that that work started as early as 1802 with Cabanis (this is surprising to me since I didn’t realize he was that early). One could argue given all the subsequent Freudian and Jungian material that psychology didn’t really split off from philosophy until that was removed from mainstream psychology which was in the 1960s and 70s. However, that seems like a weak argument.
Linguistics might be another example, but again, how you define the split matters. It also runs into the not tiny issue that much of linguistics spun off from issues of philology, a field already distinct from philosophy. But other areas of linguistics broke off later, and some people still seem to think of issues like Sapir-Whorf as philosophical questions.
So a lot of this seems to depend on definitions, but regardless of definitions it seems clear that no field has spun off in the last 30 years. Going back farther makes the question murkier, but a decent argument can be made that there has been no such spin off in the last 150 years.
I think psychology is very strongly an example. You have only to read some old psychology textbooks. I read William James’s Principles of Psychology (for a Wittgenstein course) from exactly a century ago, and it was a mix of extremely low-level unexplained experimental results and philosophical argumentation about minds and souls (James spending quite a bit of time attacking non-materialist views, of which there were no shortage of proponents). To point to some of the experiments decades earlier and say that it’d already split off is like pointing at Aristotle’s biology work as the start of the split between natural philosophy and biology.
I would guess that these splits were generally not recognized as splits until much later when we had distinct bodies of work and then we can look back at the initial roots of the topic. This shows that there might be a bunch of roots of new fields present now that simply haven’t grown large enough to be recognized yet.
How similar is Eliezer Yudkowsky’s research program to that which is commonly thought of as “philosophy”?
EY’s work intersects with philosophy in the sense that he asks, “What cognitive architecture would make one have these philosophical discussions / intuitions?” But philosophy is not unique for him in this respect—i.e., he would just as well ask, “What cognitive architecture would make one get this visual sensation that makes these things seem the most salient?”
Certainly, there are definitions, reasonable ones, for philosophy that cover what this site does, but the problem is that Wei_Dai hasn’t defined what he means by “philosophy” here.
Sometime ago I was quite surprised to know that Kevin T. Kelly’s work on Ockham’s Razor, very rigorous and mathematical in nature, falls under “philosophy”. Apparently modern philosophy can get quite awesome when it wants to.
(By the way, someone should really write an introductory LW post about this. I thought Johnicholas Hines would do it, but lately he seems to be missing.)
Typically, philosophers do whatever they want and label it ‘philosophy’, and will claim most positive historical figures as examples of ‘philosophers’.
Symetrically, those who are skeptical of the value of philosophy will note that anyone who does anything useful couldn’t possibly be doing philosophy, sometimes “by definition”.
Typically, philosophers do whatever they want and label it ‘philosophy’, and will claim most positive historical figures as examples of ‘philosophers’. Symetrically, those who are skeptical of the value of philosophy will note that anyone who does anything useful couldn’t possibly be doing philosophy, sometimes “by definition”.
Definitely true, and this suggests that the question of whether philosophy is good/bad/useful is fundamentally confused. One definition that I like is that philosophy is any academic study not otherwise classified. That explains why there are so many examples of fields starting out as philosophy, being given a classification and then not being philosophy any more. It also makes most attempts to say things about philosophy as a whole look rather silly. The only problem with this definition is that a few fields, like ethics, have classifications of their own but are too narrow to count as separate fields, so they’re classified as subfields. Still, I think that this definition does a good enough job of dissolving silly questions that we can ignore a few special cases.
Kelly’s observation: inductive processes by necessity change their minds multiple times before arriving at the truth.
Kelly’s proposal: inductive processes ought to minimize how often they change their minds before truth is reached. (There are some subtle issues here—this proposal does not contradict “statistical efficiency” considerations, although it’s hard to see why at first glance).
I didn’t have a clear-cut definition in mind then—I just thought that the Kelly link was far enough from being an edge case.
If I had to say, I would take a random selection of articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and that gives an idea of what typical philosphy is, as the term is normally used.
One issue that one runs into with your question is how one defines a new field being spun off. Some people have argued that biology didn’t really split off from philosophy until the 1850s and 60s, especially with the work of Darwin and Wallace. This is a popular view among Kuhnians who mark a field as becoming science when it gains an overarching accepted paradigm. (However, one could argue that the field left philosophy before it entered science.)
The word “scientist” was first used in 1833, and prior to that “natural philosopher” was used. But certainly by the late 1700s, they were practicing what we could call science. So that argument fails even if one extends the date.
Economics is generally thought of having split off from philosophy when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, and that’s in the late 18th century. But arguably, merchantilist ideas were a form of economics that predated Smith and were separate from philosophy. And you could push the date farther up, pointing out that until fairly late most of the people thinking about economics are people like Bentham who we think of as philosophers.
Possibly the best example of an area that split off recently might be psychology. Wilhelm Wundt is sometimes regarded as the individual who split that off, doing actual controlled scientific experiments in the late 19th century. But there was research being done by scientists/biologists/natural philosophers much earlier in the 19th century, especially in regards to whether the nervous system was the source of cognition. Wikipedia claims that that work started as early as 1802 with Cabanis (this is surprising to me since I didn’t realize he was that early). One could argue given all the subsequent Freudian and Jungian material that psychology didn’t really split off from philosophy until that was removed from mainstream psychology which was in the 1960s and 70s. However, that seems like a weak argument.
Linguistics might be another example, but again, how you define the split matters. It also runs into the not tiny issue that much of linguistics spun off from issues of philology, a field already distinct from philosophy. But other areas of linguistics broke off later, and some people still seem to think of issues like Sapir-Whorf as philosophical questions.
So a lot of this seems to depend on definitions, but regardless of definitions it seems clear that no field has spun off in the last 30 years. Going back farther makes the question murkier, but a decent argument can be made that there has been no such spin off in the last 150 years.
I think psychology is very strongly an example. You have only to read some old psychology textbooks. I read William James’s Principles of Psychology (for a Wittgenstein course) from exactly a century ago, and it was a mix of extremely low-level unexplained experimental results and philosophical argumentation about minds and souls (James spending quite a bit of time attacking non-materialist views, of which there were no shortage of proponents). To point to some of the experiments decades earlier and say that it’d already split off is like pointing at Aristotle’s biology work as the start of the split between natural philosophy and biology.
I would guess that these splits were generally not recognized as splits until much later when we had distinct bodies of work and then we can look back at the initial roots of the topic. This shows that there might be a bunch of roots of new fields present now that simply haven’t grown large enough to be recognized yet.
Not even cognitive science? This blog seems to be in the process of splitting off philosophy of mind into cog sci and AI research.
How similar is Eliezer Yudkowsky’s research program to that which is commonly thought of as “philosophy”?
EY’s work intersects with philosophy in the sense that he asks, “What cognitive architecture would make one have these philosophical discussions / intuitions?” But philosophy is not unique for him in this respect—i.e., he would just as well ask, “What cognitive architecture would make one get this visual sensation that makes these things seem the most salient?”
Certainly, there are definitions, reasonable ones, for philosophy that cover what this site does, but the problem is that Wei_Dai hasn’t defined what he means by “philosophy” here.
Sometime ago I was quite surprised to know that Kevin T. Kelly’s work on Ockham’s Razor, very rigorous and mathematical in nature, falls under “philosophy”. Apparently modern philosophy can get quite awesome when it wants to.
(By the way, someone should really write an introductory LW post about this. I thought Johnicholas Hines would do it, but lately he seems to be missing.)
Typically, philosophers do whatever they want and label it ‘philosophy’, and will claim most positive historical figures as examples of ‘philosophers’.
Symetrically, those who are skeptical of the value of philosophy will note that anyone who does anything useful couldn’t possibly be doing philosophy, sometimes “by definition”.
Definitely true, and this suggests that the question of whether philosophy is good/bad/useful is fundamentally confused. One definition that I like is that philosophy is any academic study not otherwise classified. That explains why there are so many examples of fields starting out as philosophy, being given a classification and then not being philosophy any more. It also makes most attempts to say things about philosophy as a whole look rather silly. The only problem with this definition is that a few fields, like ethics, have classifications of their own but are too narrow to count as separate fields, so they’re classified as subfields. Still, I think that this definition does a good enough job of dissolving silly questions that we can ignore a few special cases.
Kelly’s observation: inductive processes by necessity change their minds multiple times before arriving at the truth.
Kelly’s proposal: inductive processes ought to minimize how often they change their minds before truth is reached. (There are some subtle issues here—this proposal does not contradict “statistical efficiency” considerations, although it’s hard to see why at first glance).
I don’t think the work shown on that link would be regarded as typical philosophy—it’s more characteristic of computer science or statistics.
What falls under the category of “typical philosophy”, in your opinion?
I didn’t have a clear-cut definition in mind then—I just thought that the Kelly link was far enough from being an edge case.
If I had to say, I would take a random selection of articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and that gives an idea of what typical philosphy is, as the term is normally used.