Philosophy is often psychology with a sample size of one

A philosopher intuiting how others think by thinking about how they think.

I have seen the topic of doxastic voluntarism come up several times in philosophy. Roughly, it is the view that we exhibit at least some degree of control over at least some of our beliefs, such that we are capable of (in some way) choosing our beliefs. A proponent of this view could think we have complete control over all of our beliefs, but we need not from it as all-or-nothing.

So, for instance, perhaps we can't choose to believe 2+2=34, but we may be able to choose to believe in certain philosophical positions, or choose to believe things will go well tomorrow, and so on.

What I find strange about these disputes is that there is almost zero discussion of psychological research on belief formation, self-control, self-deception, and other empirical findings that seem obviously relevant. Rather, people discussing the topic seem to take little or no interest in empirical considerations about human psychology, and dispute whether or not, and to what extent, doxastic voluntarism is true in almost total isolation from e.g., cognitive psychology.

I find this completely baffling. How much control we have over our beliefs is an empirical question. We’re not going to be able to make much headway through introspection and a priori reasoning.

A great deal of the way both academic philosophy and popular discussions about philosophy operate seem to deal with questions where empirical findings are extremely relevant. This may have made sense centuries ago, but today there is a wealth of empirical information that is highly relevant to many philosophical questions, and philosophical discourse is at a serious disadvantage if it ignores this work.

Unfortunately, rather than acknowledging the need to engage with it, I see philosophers trying to offer philosophical justifications for why the matters in question aren't empirical at all, or why we don't need psychological research to address the relevant questions. Certain questions are taken to be obvious, or self-evident, or something one can ascertain merely via introspection. Introspection was a major methodological approach in the early days of psychology, but it was abandoned. Why? Because there was too little consistency.

More generally, the past few decades have provided overwhelming evidence of the shortcomings of introspection: we can and frequently are simply wrong about what information is introspectively available to us, why we performed the actions we did, the efficacy of our memory, the accuracy of our perceptions, and so on. Philosophers whose interests concern what ought to be uncontroversially recognized as empirical questions are simply depriving themselves of the relevant methods to adequately address the questions they’re interested in.

Philosophers are fond of criticizing scientists who dismiss philosophy, and claim not to require philosophy to do science well. This point was made by Lakoff:

Philosophy is most powerful when it is invisible. Over the course of centuries philosophical theories may become so engrained in our culture and our intellectual life that we don’t even recognize them as theories; they take on the cast of self-evident truth, part of the intellectual landscape that serves as a background for theorizing. Such virtually invisible philosophical theories are often harmless. But when they are false and become widely accepted within important academic disciplines, invisible philosophical theories can stand in the way of scientific investigation. Because they are invisible, they are neither questioned nor taken into account. (p. 122)

As philosophers rightly point out, there is no way to escape addressing scientific questions without taking a stance on certain philosophical presuppositions, even if they remain implicit and underdeveloped. One’s only option is to either do philosophy explicitly, and try to do it well, or to do it implicitly and without critical reflection or conscious awareness of what you’re doing, which will likely result in doing it poorly. Ironically, Lakoff made this point to criticize cognitive science for making implicit philosophical presuppositions.

Yet philosophers have a much longer tradition of doing the exact opposite. Just as one can do science poorly by failing to reflect on the relevant philosophical considerations, one can do philosophy poorly by failing to consider the relevant scientific implications. And, in the case of doxastic voluntarism, cognitive science is integral to an understanding of the nature of belief and choice. If one’s goal is to adequately address the degree to which belief is a matter of voluntary control, engaging with cognitive science isn’t optional. You can either read about or even conduct empirical studies of your own, or you can make empirical assumptions in the absence of any actual data or evidence beyond your own powers of introspection and the dubious and unsystematic array of similar reports you encounter in the philosophical literature or in the course of a conversation, accounts that have not been gathered in any systematic way, and are no substitute for rigorous and systematic data collection.

In short, just as scientists can either do philosophy explicitly and well, or do philosophy implicitly and badly, philosophers whose interests overlap with psychology can either do psychology explicitly and well by engaging the relevant empirical literature, or they can do it poorly, by relying on inadequate and unscientific methods. Such methods often amount to little more than consulting their own experiences. As I’m increasingly fond of saying: a great deal of philosophy is little better than very bad psychology: it is psychology with a sample size of one.

References

Lakoff, G. (1988). Cognitive semantics. In U. Eco, M. Santambrogio, & P. Violi (Eds.), Meaning and mental representations: Advances in Semiotics (pp. 119-154). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.