As someone who is not an expert on anything, I’d be curious to hear some experts weigh in on how opinions within any given field compare (and contrast) with politics, the infamous mind-killer.
Are there similar mechanisms and biases at play? Do people act tribally and use arguments as soldiers in philosphy & linguistics, for instance?
There is a particular way in which they (i.e. linguists) do, but it’s not comparable to politics, because it’s actually productive. Sometimes you have two competing approaches to a phenomenon, and then people try to extend their own approaches as far as possible, shows that all the data the other wants to explain can be explained in their own terms, etc. This, however, seems to work as a heuristic, in that it makes us explore all the strengths and weaknesses of theories, and it’s also sensible insofar as uniting everything under one view would be more parsimoneous. At some point, we might decide that we’re straining the theories to far and that actually both of them are valid for some cases and the phenomena are less unified than we thought at first. (Or it might turn out that the two approaches lead to notational variants of the same theory when worked out fully.)
Philosophy can definitely be a bit tribal, but it’s generally nothing like politics. You might say what typically happens is you see one-half of the usual arguments-as-soldiers behavior: all arguments on the opposing side must be stopped. But since it’s generally recognized that good philosophical arguments are hard to come by, many philosophers would be happy to have one good argument for their view.
As someone who is not an expert on anything, I’d be curious to hear some experts weigh in on how opinions within any given field compare (and contrast) with politics, the infamous mind-killer.
Are there similar mechanisms and biases at play? Do people act tribally and use arguments as soldiers in philosphy & linguistics, for instance?
There is a particular way in which they (i.e. linguists) do, but it’s not comparable to politics, because it’s actually productive. Sometimes you have two competing approaches to a phenomenon, and then people try to extend their own approaches as far as possible, shows that all the data the other wants to explain can be explained in their own terms, etc. This, however, seems to work as a heuristic, in that it makes us explore all the strengths and weaknesses of theories, and it’s also sensible insofar as uniting everything under one view would be more parsimoneous. At some point, we might decide that we’re straining the theories to far and that actually both of them are valid for some cases and the phenomena are less unified than we thought at first. (Or it might turn out that the two approaches lead to notational variants of the same theory when worked out fully.)
In philosophy:
Philosophy can definitely be a bit tribal, but it’s generally nothing like politics. You might say what typically happens is you see one-half of the usual arguments-as-soldiers behavior: all arguments on the opposing side must be stopped. But since it’s generally recognized that good philosophical arguments are hard to come by, many philosophers would be happy to have one good argument for their view.