Starmans & Friedman on how philosophers think differently than nonphilosophers

Consider this remark from an article by Christina Starmans and Ori Friedman:

Advanced training in philosophy, on the other hand, may have a large impact on how philosophers think about knowledge. While it is possible that people with a certain concept of knowledge are more likely to enter the field of philosophy, or are quickly driven out of the field (Buckwalter & Stich, 2014), it seems likely that most eventual philosophers entered into their first philosophy class with the intuitions that people in Gettier situations possess knowledge (since at that point they were similar to the laypeople in our sample), but their subsequent training led them to discard these intuitions. Likewise, a freshman philosophy student is likely to feel the effect of skeptical pressure—indeed, a full embracing of skepticism is endemic to Philosophy 101—yet by the time this student has finished her PhD, her intuitions will have changed such that reminders of the possibility of error no longer affect her knowledge ascriptions. (Starmans & Friedman, 2020, p. 26)

You can find the whole article here.

This suggestion emerges in the wake of the rest of the article's content, which presents empirical evidence that philosophers think about "knowledge" differently than others.

This data is consistent with, though certainly not decisive evidence, of my general contention that philosophy inducts its adherents into thinking differently from how everyone else thinks. These philosophers then extrapolate from the way they think to the way other people think. Some philosophers even claim that they are entitled to make generalizations about how nonphilosophers speak and think in virtue of the competence they acquire by studying philosophy.

But what if something else is going on? Rather than philosophy equipping philosophers with the ability to discover the characteristics of the concepts they analyze, what if philosophy itself represents a culturally and institutionally constructed system for inventing the very analyses they end up endorsing, analyses that were invented by philosophers themselves, who then mistakenly project these accounts onto the way everyone else thinks?

If so, philosophers may be engaged in a kind of unintentional conceptual engineering, inventing a whole literature of increasingly divergent and idiosyncratic ways of thinking that have increasingly little to do with how ordinary people think.

So many philosophers take their views to be “commonsensical” or an effort to “capture” how ordinary people speak or think, yet the methods they employ are so removed from actually interacting with ordinary people, and empirically evaluating how they actually speak and think, that perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise if, once we turn our attention to evaluating whether philosophers think differently, we find that they do.

I expect, and predict now, that future efforts explicitly dedicated to evaluating divergences between academic philosophers and nonphilosophers will reliably reveal a consistent and noteworthy pattern of differences in how they think, and that it will become increasingly evident in the coming decades that philosophers are psychologically idiosyncratic, and that they become these way at least partially due to training in philosophy.