It seems like, if I’m trying to make up my mind about philosophical questions (like whether moral realism is true, or whether free will is an illusion) I should try to find out what professional philosophers think the answers to these questions are.
If I found out that 80% of professional philosophers who think about metaethical questions think that moral realism is true, and I happen to be an anti-realist, then I should be far less certain of my belief that anti-realism is true.
But surveys like this aren’t done in philosophy (I don’t think). Do you think that the results of surveys like this (if there were any) should be important to the person trying to make a decision about whether or not to believe in free will, or be an moral realist, or whatever?
My answer to this depends on what you mean by “professional philosophers who think about”. You have to be aware that subfields have selection biases. For example, the percent of philosophers of religion who think God exists is much, much larger than the percent of professional philosophers generally who think God exists. This is because if God does not exist philosophy of religion ceases to be a productive area of research. Conversely, if you have an irrational attachment to the idea that God exists this than you are likely to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to prove one exists. This issue is particularly bad with regard to religion but it is in some sense generalizable to all or most other subfields. Philosophy is also a competitive enterprise and there are various incentives to publishing novel arguments. This means in any given subfield views that are unpopular among philosophers generally will be overrepresented.
So the circle you draw around “professional philosophers who think about [subfield x] questions” needs to be small enough to target experts but large enough that you don’t limit your survey to those philosophers who are very likely to hold a view you are surveying in virtue of the area they work in. I think the right circle is something like ‘professional philosophers who are equipped to teach an advanced undergraduate course in the subject’.
Edit: The free will question will depend on what you want out of a conception of free will. But the understanding of free will that most lay people have is totally impossible.
Seconded. There are a lot of libertarians-about-free-will who study free will, but nobody I’ve talked to has ever heard of anyone changing their mind on the subject of free will (except inasmuch as learning new words to describe one’s beliefs counts) - so this has to be almost entirely due to more libertarians finding free will an interesting thing to study.
Free will libertarianism is also infected with religious philosophy. There are certainly some libertarians with secular reasons for their positions but a lot of the support for this for position comes from those whose religious world view requires radical free will and if they didn’t believe in God they wouldn’t be libertarians. Same goes for a lot of substance dualists, frankly.
I’ve definitely changed my mind on free will. I used to be an incompatibilist with libertarian leanings. After reading Daniel Dennett’s books, I changed my mind and became a compatiblist soft determinist.
Are you a professional philosopher/ were you a professional philosopher when you were an incompatibilist with libertarian leanings? I’d say the vast majority of those untrained in philosophy hold the view you held and the most rational/intelligent of them would change their minds once confronted with a decent compatiblist argument.
Edit: I’m being a little unfair. There are plenty of smart people who disagree with us.
No, I wasn’t, and I agree with you. Defending philosophical positions as a career creates a bias where you’re less likely to change your mind (see Cialdini’s work on congruence: e.g. POWs in communist brainwashing camps who wrote essays on why communism was good were more likely to support communism afer release). But even so, professional philosophers do change their mind once in a while.
But even so, professional philosophers do change their mind once in a while.
Absolutely! I tentatively hold the thesis that professional philosophers even make progress on understanding some issues. But there seem to be a couple positions that professional philosophers rarely sway from once they hold those positions and I think Alicorn is right that metaphysical libertarianism is one of these views.
I think I agree with everything you say in response to my original post.
It seems like you basically agree with me that facts about the opinions of philosophers who work in some area (where this group is suitibly defined to avoid the difficulties you point out) should be important to us if we are trying to figure out what to believe in that area.
Why aren’t studies being carried out to find out what these facts are? Do you think most philosophers would not agree that they are important?
Yeah, I’ve felt for a while now that philosophers should do a better job explaining and popularizing the conclusions they come to. I’ve never been able to find literature reviews or meta-analysis, either. Part of the problem is definitely that a lot of philosophers are skeptical that they have anything true or interesting to say to non-philosophers. Also, despite some basic agreements about what is definitely wrong philosophers, at least with a lot of issues have so many different views that it wouldn’t be very educational to poll them. Also, a lot of philosophy involves conceptual analysis and since it is really hard to poll a philosophical issue without resorting to concepts you might have a lot of respondents refusing to accept the premises of the question.
But none of these arguments are very good. If I ever make it in the field I’ll put one together.
I don’t think most laymen are confused about free will at all. I think they have an entirely correct notion of free will: when your actions are caused by you rather than by an outside agency. I think it is philosophers and intellectuals generally who came up with the strange, confused notion that free will means your actions are uncaused.
If laypeople didn’t have a confused notion of free will, they wouldn’t become so consistently confused when they learn elementary facts from physics or neuroscience.
Interesting paper, thanks! From a quick skim it seems to me that when asked moral questions—“is Fred morally responsible for his actions?”—most of the subjects expressed compatibilist intuitions. They only start expressing incompatibilist intuitions when asked to comment on abstract philosophical statements of a kind one would not normally encounter. So it seems to me that the data upholds my claim, with the addendum that when a layman is asked to dabble in philosophy he does indeed fall into the classic error into which professional philosophers have fallen.
They only start expressing incompatibilist intuitions when asked to comment on abstract philosophical statements of a kind one would not normally encounter.
This is the Nichols and Knobe hypothesis which argued that people in general are incompatibilists but that language which generates strong affective responses will nonetheless lead people to import moral responsibility. The hypothesis is formed by taking some vignette about free will and making the action significantly more condemnable. So people will think that someone who gives to others in a deterministic world is not responsible but someone who murders others in that world is. Every other feature of the story remains the same. The stories that generate incompatibilist intuitions aren’t different from those that generate compatibilist intuitions except in the emotional/morally condemnable content. The former aren’t more abstract or philosophical. The better interpretation of this hypothesis is that people’s actual intuitions about determinism get overrun by a desire to signal that they do not support the evil action committed in the vignette. Feel free to google Knobe’s work in intentionality for evidence that this phenomena is more general.
In any case, the Nichols and Knobe hypothesis isn’t the position of the article. The authors set out to test the hypothesis and found it false. Instead, they found that people responded to vignettes mostly consistently. About 60-67% gave incompatibilist responses, 22-9% gave compatibilist responses and mixed/inconsistent responses were returned at a high single digit rate.
It seems like, if I’m trying to make up my mind about philosophical questions (like whether moral realism is true, or whether free will is an illusion) I should try to find out what professional philosophers think the answers to these questions are.
If I found out that 80% of professional philosophers who think about metaethical questions think that moral realism is true, and I happen to be an anti-realist, then I should be far less certain of my belief that anti-realism is true.
But surveys like this aren’t done in philosophy (I don’t think). Do you think that the results of surveys like this (if there were any) should be important to the person trying to make a decision about whether or not to believe in free will, or be an moral realist, or whatever?
My answer to this depends on what you mean by “professional philosophers who think about”. You have to be aware that subfields have selection biases. For example, the percent of philosophers of religion who think God exists is much, much larger than the percent of professional philosophers generally who think God exists. This is because if God does not exist philosophy of religion ceases to be a productive area of research. Conversely, if you have an irrational attachment to the idea that God exists this than you are likely to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to prove one exists. This issue is particularly bad with regard to religion but it is in some sense generalizable to all or most other subfields. Philosophy is also a competitive enterprise and there are various incentives to publishing novel arguments. This means in any given subfield views that are unpopular among philosophers generally will be overrepresented.
So the circle you draw around “professional philosophers who think about [subfield x] questions” needs to be small enough to target experts but large enough that you don’t limit your survey to those philosophers who are very likely to hold a view you are surveying in virtue of the area they work in. I think the right circle is something like ‘professional philosophers who are equipped to teach an advanced undergraduate course in the subject’.
Edit: The free will question will depend on what you want out of a conception of free will. But the understanding of free will that most lay people have is totally impossible.
Seconded. There are a lot of libertarians-about-free-will who study free will, but nobody I’ve talked to has ever heard of anyone changing their mind on the subject of free will (except inasmuch as learning new words to describe one’s beliefs counts) - so this has to be almost entirely due to more libertarians finding free will an interesting thing to study.
Free will libertarianism is also infected with religious philosophy. There are certainly some libertarians with secular reasons for their positions but a lot of the support for this for position comes from those whose religious world view requires radical free will and if they didn’t believe in God they wouldn’t be libertarians. Same goes for a lot of substance dualists, frankly.
I’ve definitely changed my mind on free will. I used to be an incompatibilist with libertarian leanings. After reading Daniel Dennett’s books, I changed my mind and became a compatiblist soft determinist.
Are you a professional philosopher/ were you a professional philosopher when you were an incompatibilist with libertarian leanings? I’d say the vast majority of those untrained in philosophy hold the view you held and the most rational/intelligent of them would change their minds once confronted with a decent compatiblist argument.
Edit: I’m being a little unfair. There are plenty of smart people who disagree with us.
No, I wasn’t, and I agree with you. Defending philosophical positions as a career creates a bias where you’re less likely to change your mind (see Cialdini’s work on congruence: e.g. POWs in communist brainwashing camps who wrote essays on why communism was good were more likely to support communism afer release). But even so, professional philosophers do change their mind once in a while.
Absolutely! I tentatively hold the thesis that professional philosophers even make progress on understanding some issues. But there seem to be a couple positions that professional philosophers rarely sway from once they hold those positions and I think Alicorn is right that metaphysical libertarianism is one of these views.
Jack:
I think I agree with everything you say in response to my original post.
It seems like you basically agree with me that facts about the opinions of philosophers who work in some area (where this group is suitibly defined to avoid the difficulties you point out) should be important to us if we are trying to figure out what to believe in that area.
Why aren’t studies being carried out to find out what these facts are? Do you think most philosophers would not agree that they are important?
Yeah, I’ve felt for a while now that philosophers should do a better job explaining and popularizing the conclusions they come to. I’ve never been able to find literature reviews or meta-analysis, either. Part of the problem is definitely that a lot of philosophers are skeptical that they have anything true or interesting to say to non-philosophers. Also, despite some basic agreements about what is definitely wrong philosophers, at least with a lot of issues have so many different views that it wouldn’t be very educational to poll them. Also, a lot of philosophy involves conceptual analysis and since it is really hard to poll a philosophical issue without resorting to concepts you might have a lot of respondents refusing to accept the premises of the question.
But none of these arguments are very good. If I ever make it in the field I’ll put one together.
I don’t think most laymen are confused about free will at all. I think they have an entirely correct notion of free will: when your actions are caused by you rather than by an outside agency. I think it is philosophers and intellectuals generally who came up with the strange, confused notion that free will means your actions are uncaused.
If laypeople didn’t have a confused notion of free will, they wouldn’t become so consistently confused when they learn elementary facts from physics or neuroscience.
If only thinking made it so! Alas, even we confused philosophers run experiments. The percentage of laymen who express incompatibilist intuitions is around 60-67%.
...with the caveat that other studies have shown different results.
Interesting paper, thanks! From a quick skim it seems to me that when asked moral questions—“is Fred morally responsible for his actions?”—most of the subjects expressed compatibilist intuitions. They only start expressing incompatibilist intuitions when asked to comment on abstract philosophical statements of a kind one would not normally encounter. So it seems to me that the data upholds my claim, with the addendum that when a layman is asked to dabble in philosophy he does indeed fall into the classic error into which professional philosophers have fallen.
This is the Nichols and Knobe hypothesis which argued that people in general are incompatibilists but that language which generates strong affective responses will nonetheless lead people to import moral responsibility. The hypothesis is formed by taking some vignette about free will and making the action significantly more condemnable. So people will think that someone who gives to others in a deterministic world is not responsible but someone who murders others in that world is. Every other feature of the story remains the same. The stories that generate incompatibilist intuitions aren’t different from those that generate compatibilist intuitions except in the emotional/morally condemnable content. The former aren’t more abstract or philosophical. The better interpretation of this hypothesis is that people’s actual intuitions about determinism get overrun by a desire to signal that they do not support the evil action committed in the vignette. Feel free to google Knobe’s work in intentionality for evidence that this phenomena is more general.
In any case, the Nichols and Knobe hypothesis isn’t the position of the article. The authors set out to test the hypothesis and found it false. Instead, they found that people responded to vignettes mostly consistently. About 60-67% gave incompatibilist responses, 22-9% gave compatibilist responses and mixed/inconsistent responses were returned at a high single digit rate.