The Folk Philosophy Fallacy (Part 5)
The Folk Philosophy Fallacy (Part 5)
Twitter Tuesday #24
Out with the top down, in with the bottom up! The way forward for experimental philosophy
This post is part of a series. For previous entries in the series see:
4.0 Stopping and asking
At long last, let us return to Dominik’s remarks. Dominik makes an interesting remark that I happen to agree with. Someone responds by stating:
The first six words are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. I suspect if you stopped someone in a supermarket and asked them what they ‘mean by consciousness’ they wouldn’t reply ‘phenomenal properties’. The dialectic to establish what they DO mean might lead anywhere.
Dominik responds:
Obviously they wouldn't explicitly use the specific term to describe it, but they would talk about what's-it-like-ness in some way, e.g. what it feels like to taste coffee. No layperson thinks of consciousness in functional, third-person terms
I agree that most nonphilosophers probably wouldn’t use technical terms like “phenomenal state” to describe their experiences, but would they talk about “what’s-it-like-ness” in some way? This is an empirical hypothesis. It’s interesting that Dominik simply asserts that people would respond this way. If Dominik already had access to empirical data that supported this claim, why not provide it? It’s an interesting hypothesis, so why not go test it?
Again we have assertions about what people would say. Sometimes people tell me, when I criticize philosophers for making empirical claims but not showing any concern for the actual empirical data addressing those questions, that the philosophers in question aren’t really making empirical claims. It is hard to square such objections with what philosophers actually say. Dominik is clearly talking about what people would say as support for the contention that they think consciousness = phenomenal properties, suggesting that this judgment is based on a kind of armchair empirical hypothesis about what people would say when asked. This results in a fairly straightforward operationalization that places Dominik’s claims squarely in the realm of empirical inquiry.
It is exhausting to run into the constant insistence that philosophers aren’t really making empirical claims. Yes, they often are. They routinely make empirical claims but provide or appeal to little or no actual empirical evidence to support those claims. Speculation about what people would say is taken as sufficient to make inferences about what people think. If that sounds ridiculous and implausible to you, it’s because it is.
If it seems so ridiculous and implausible that you are incredulous at the notion that serious academics would make claims like this, then consider reevaluating your standards about the methods (or lack thereof) of contemporary analytic philosophy. Contemporary analytic philosophy seems to instill in many of its practitioners the dubious notion that they have the extraordinary power to know what everyone in the world thinks and means without bothering to check. Note a couple caveats here: many analytic philosophers deal with issues that don’t touch so much on how nonphilosophers think, and others do care a great deal about empirical findings. Experimental philosophy arose out of analytic philosophy, and the field has always hosted empirically oriented philosophers. I do not have a problem with the entirety of analytic philosophy. I have a problem with certain dogmas, presumptions, and approaches that are common or at least influential enough to land on my radar.
5.0 Folk functionalists?
Dominik also says that “No layperson thinks of consciousness in functional, third-person terms.”
I agree that people probably don’t think of consciousness in functional, third-person terms, but I also don’t think that they think of consciousness in terms of phenomenal properties. It’s not as though it has to be one or the other: maybe they have no determinate position at all, or their views are so inchoate and underdeveloped they don’t really comport with any distinctive philosophical accounts.
Dominik’s phrasing almost makes it seem like nonphilosophers must implicitly subscribe to one or another of competing philosophical accounts. It’s almost as though philosophers have identified all the positions one can take, and the only question is which position is the “default” position prior to studying philosophy. Perhaps there is no default. Perhaps people don’t speak, think, or act in a way that implicitly comports with any particular philosophical theory at all. Why should they? Why presume we all come with philosophical default settings?
Dominik’s remarks are not unusual. Many philosophers seem to operate on the assumption that nonphilosophers have implicit views that accord with philosophical accounts. It’s strange. Imagine if physicists went around presuming people had views on how to interpret quantum mechanics, or evolutionary biologists went around supposing that nonphilosophers had implicit beliefs about units of selection. This would be profoundly bizarre: in both instances, I am confident scientists would recognize that ordinary people usually don’t have views about these issues at all.
Of course, “consciousness” is more familiar to us than quantum mechanics and natural selection, but that doesn’t mean that nonphilosophers implicitly appeal to and deploy philosophical theories about the nature of consciousness. I don’t need a theory about what pizzas are to enjoy pizza. Sure, we make judgments about mental states: we judge whether an action was intentional or not. We judge whether a person is morally responsible or not. And sure, these judgments are driven by some underlying causal factors that are clearly nonrandom. But whatever cognitive processes are operating outside of conscious awareness, why suppose that they map onto philosophical theories?
Maybe those theories are a bunch of superfluous bullshit. Maybe those theories are true, but folk thought, language, and action is mistaken, just as it is with respect to the sciences: it’s not as though our implicit ways of talking about biology or physics track what the world is actually like. Or maybe much of what we’re doing when we engage in everyday discourse is driven by identifiable principles, but those principles are practical and functional and have very little to do with metaphysics.
I don’t know, but neither do armchair philosophers. It’s an empirical question. If philosophers actually want to know how people think and speak, they should be using better methods than speculating about how the people they happen to have interacted with use English words.
I suspect the theories philosophers come up with often have little to do with how nonphilosophers think, and, in any case, how nonphilosophers think may very well be so influenced by variation in culture and language that there is no univocal “folk” view: there may be a variety of folk views. And as cultures mutually influence one another, people may become more similar: it could very well be that even if there were widely shared or even universal folk views on one or another philosophical issues, that those folk views are highly contingent. Had history gone differently, and had some different culture or language dominated the globe, people may have thought very differently.
Yet philosophers often seem to treat human thought as though it isn’t sensitive to these sorts of considerations, as though human thought and intuition is universal or nearly universal in a way that transcends time, language, and culture. Maybe they would deny this, too, but if they were truly open to the potentially contingent nature of the way they happen to think, speak, and act, I suspect philosophers would be far more cautious about the efficacy of their intuitions. That they often aren’t at all, and seem to place great confidence in their philosophical intuitions, suggests that a sensitivity to the possibility that their philosophical dispositions may be highly sensitive to historical accident is largely absent from the way many philosophers think.
For instance, many philosophers think moral realism “is obvious” and would insist it’s “intuitive.” Would it be if world history played out differently? I think many philosophers would suppose that it would: that a capacity for intuiting not only that there are stance-independent moral truths, but that we’d intuit the same moral truths, would reliably recur under a variety of counterfactual conditions.
But what if this simply isn’t true? What if the very notion of morality itself is a cultural invention, and that had the cultures in which morality not arose, the very concept of morality itself wouldn’t exist? Philosophers are welcome to scoff at this possibility, but I not only take it seriously, I think it’s probably true. Machery (2018) has argued that morality is a historical invention, and I’m inclined to agree. Stich (2018) has argued that both empirical and philosophical efforts to identify a distinctive moral domain have failed, and I agree. There are a number of studies and essays that explicitly support or could be leveraged in service of these claims (Berniūnas, 2014; 2020; Machery & Mallon, 2010; Parkinson et al., 2011; Sinnott-Armstrong & Wheatley, 2012; 2014; Stich, 2019).
I see the very notion of morality itself as a culturally contingent concept that would no more recur under a variety of sufficiently distant counterfactuals than we’d expect to observe the emergence of chess or baseball. Sure, we’d have normative terms, concepts, language, and institutions similar to morality, but I don’t think we’d get the same thing. People don’t need distinctively moral concepts to experience and express empathy, to create normative systems, to judge one another’s character, to create functional norms and institutions, and so on. I see little reason to suppose that everyone, everywhere, thinks or speaks like a moral realist in part because I’m not even sure “moral” thinking is a sufficiently distinct form of judgment to carve out a distinctive place in our cognitive processes in the first place.
There may very well be cultures whose languages and conception of normativity is sufficiently distinct from WEIRD notions of so-called “morality,” that there may very well exist identifiable populations around the world who think in demonstrably different ways from analytic philosophers about precisely those issues philosophers are often supremely confident involve some shared, universal “commonsense” or “folk” view (Berniūnas, 2020; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010; cf. Doğruyol, Alper, & Yilmaz, 2019). Almost nobody is bothering to check, including philosophers. There is an inexcusable degree of methodological negligence in the consistent failure of philosophers whose positions and methods turn on presumptions about human psychology not bothering to check whether those presumptions are actually born out by the data, and, worse, many will scoff at or dismiss or simply ignore those of us who press the need for empirical data. The whole situation is ridiculous. History will not look kindly on the methodological intransigence of 20th century and early 21st century analytic philosophers.
I don’t need theories about consciousness to talk about experiences. Even if I did, why suppose that whatever patterns or principles governed my thinking and discourse about experiences touched on the kinds of concerns that occupy academic philosophers? When people are using mathematical language in everyday situations, must they all be implicit nominalists or platonists? I don’t think so. I think that everyday talk of numbers and shapes simply doesn’t speak to questions like this. Gill (2009) proposes a similar analogy, when suggesting that nonphilosophers may have no determinate metaethical positions:
There is no fact of the matter as to whether ordinary mathematic usage is better explained by a Platonist or anti-Platonist conception of number. The way people use numbers in everyday math simply does not contain answers to the questions that animate philosophy of mathematics. That is not to say that the question of what numbers are isn't philosophically important. But it's an ontological question on which conceptual analysis of ordinary arithmetic gains very limited purchase. (p. 218)
Maybe philosophers are operating under a far more broad and fundamental assumption about the nature of human psychology: that our language and judgments are driven by or at least accompanied by implicit theories, and those theories comport with or approximate the kinds of philosophical theories that analytic philosophers have come up with. Maybe that assumption is just wrong.
6.0 The folk philosophy fallacy
I want to conclude by introducing yet another fallacy into the fallacy canon. I have mixed feelings about all these “fallacies.” floating around. People misuse and overuse them and it’s annoying and undermines the quality of discussions and debates. Yet it’s also important to provide labels for recurring patterns, themes, and ideas. It reduces cognitive load and makes it easier to recall and identify instances of a given pattern. I can understand why people would hate the proliferation of fallacies, so maybe I should call what I’m talking about something else. If you have a good name for it I’d be open to changing it to whatever that proposed name is. For now, though, I’ll tentatively propose the folk philosophy fallacy.
The folk philosophy fallacy is the mistake of presuming that nonphilosophers (i.e., the “folk”), implicitly or in some cases explicitly think, speak, or act in a way that fits or at least approximates one or another of the mainstream philosophical accounts described by academic philosophers.
Of course there may be cases where nonphilosophers do think, speak, or act in a way that comports with a particular philosophical account. Yet whether they do so is an empirical question and it is not something philosophers are entitled to presume without good arguments and evidence. Nevertheless, they routinely do just this. It’s almost as though philosophical theories are, for philosophers, simply refinements of and elaborations of how people already think, speak, and act. The philosopher’s job is to simply polish what was already there, lurking under the service. This may be the case for any given philosophical issue or even in general, but until and unless philosophers point to compelling evidence to support such claims, they should reconsider the degree to which they presume that the way they think mirrors the way everyone else thinks.
If philosophers really want to get a handle on how nonphilosophers think, they should stop employing top-down, a priori methods where they assume that the categories and distinctions central to mainstream analytic philosophy are reflected in the way nonphilosophers speak, think, and act. For whatever reason, experimental philosophers have been too quick to presume one can simply operationalize philosophical concepts as psychological constructs and identify them among laypeople. This presumption is, I suspect, probably wrong, and in any case I see little theoretical rationale for supposing it was true in the first place, much less any significant empirical justification.
So what should experimental philosophers do? If their goal is to understand how people speak, think, and act, they should do exactly what psychologists should’ve done all along. First, they should stop thinking that their job is to pantomime the hard sciences by focusing primarily on experiments. Psychology, and by extension, experimental philosophy, aren’t mature enough philosophical enterprises for the degree of experimentation we see. For an excellent essay that argues for this (among other points), see Rozin (2001). Instead, they should focus on gathering lots of data about how people think.
Rather than presupposing that the way everyone speaks and thinks can be neatly boxed and labeled using the terms that appear in philosophy textbooks, they should wipe the slate clean, and do their best to gather data in as theoretically neutral and non-presumptuous a way as possible. Rather than conducting studies that bake in the philosopher’s a priori assumptions about what is or isn’t relevant to or characteristic of the way people think, and rather than assuming that the sorts of “intuitions” that interest philosophers are at all relevant to everyday thought and language, experimental philosophers can observe real-world instances of how people speak, think, and act, gather descriptive data (rather than attempting to conduct studies or manipulate how people think), and gather qualitative data, which can provide richer insights into how people think that are less vulnerable to a prioristic assumptions. In short, philosophers should employ bottom up methods rather than top down methods.
Doing this would allow philosophers to adopt a more open-minded mindset about how people really do use language, speak, think, and act, rather than beginning inquiry with the presumption that, e.g., whether free will is compatible with determinism is remotely relevant to everyday judgments of praise, blame, and moral responsibility, or attributions of “free will” more generally.
At the same time, it is imperative that philosophers interested in “commonsense” thinking or who appeal to empirical claims about how ordinary people think show much more interest in population variation due to differences in culture, language, religion, and other factors. I have stressed this point at length, and won’t repeat those same concerns here. See this article for a comprehensive discussion of the problem of what I call “generalizing from the armchair.” At present, most psychological research has been conducted primarily in Western and WEIRD populations, which are psychologically unrepresentative of most of the world’s population (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). However, most research is also conducted by people either from WEIRD cultures or working in universities in WEIRD nations. The abject lack of representation for most of the world’s populations is difficult to stress without looking at the numbers. As Henrich et al. (2010) reported back in 2010:
A recent analysis of the top journals in six sub- disciplines of psychology from 2003 to 2007 revealed that 68% of subjects came from the United States, and a full 96% of subjects were from Western industrialized countries, specifically those in North America and Europe, as well as Australia and Israel (Arnett 2008). The make-up of these samples appears to largely reflect the country of residence of the authors, as 73% of first authors were at American universities, and 99% were at universities in Western countries. This means that 96% of psychological samples come from countries with only 12% of the world’s population. (p. 63)
If researchers themselves have cultural biases, they are bound to influence the way they conduct research: what hypotheses they choose, the languages studies are conducted in, the categories, terms, and distinctions they employ, and so on. The same is no less true of philosophers, who bring their entire Western analytic philosophical repertoire to bear whenever they design studies. Stepping outside their own cultural lens will be challenging, if not futile. Simply put, it should come as no surprise if a bunch of people who are members of the same communities (whether they grew up in them or began working at them later in life), share similar cultural backgrounds, work in the same language, read the same books, and interact to a disproportionate extent with members of a fairly small, insular community, should converge on similar ways of thinking. If, as I think abundant data suggests, culture plays a significant role in shaping how we think, it would be preposterous for philosophers to think that cultural biases couldn’t plausibly play an enormous role in how they design and interpret studies. Until and unless philosophers get a better grasp on cultural variation in human psychology, and how that influences our philosophical views, experimental philosophy will remain a narrow, parochial backwater that may tell us quite a lot about how American college students and online survey participants in the United States think, but it will tell us very little about how people in general think about traditionally philosophical issues.
Advances in experimental philosophy, and philosophy more generally, will require grappling with the origins of our philosophical “intuitions,” dispositions, categories, terms, and concepts. Why are philosophers disposed towards believing people have free will, or thinking moral realism is true, or thinking there’s a hard problem of consciousness? Philosophers may be content to suppose that their intuitions are more or less the same as everyone else’s, and that philosophy is a means of exploring a shared, universal set of philosophical concerns. But what if this simply isn’t true? What if many of the philosophical concerns that occupy philosophers are idiosyncratic, or culturally parochial? What if they are failing to grapple with philosophical problems that didn’t even occur to them? What if the particular topics that occupy philosophers, and their ways of framing and approaching those issues, are highly path-dependent, and that under a wide variety of plausible counterfactual conditions, academic philosophy would be concerned with radically different issues than it is, or employ radically different methods, or lead philosophers to radically different conclusions?
Unless and until philosophers begin to take such concerns far more seriously, the field will make little progress. In short, progress in philosophy will require confronting the considerable challenge posed by developing a comprehensive understanding of human psychology. And this will require abandoning the presumption that everyone, everywhere, thinks like an analytic philosopher.
References
Berniūnas, R. (2014). Delineating the moral domain in moral psychology. Problemos, (Supplement), 90-101.
Berniūnas, R. (2020). Mongolian yos surtakhuun and WEIRD “morality”. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 4(1), 59-71.
Doğruyol, B., Alper, S., & Yilmaz, O. (2019). The five-factor model of the moral foundations theory is stable across WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures. Personality and Individual Differences, 151, 109547. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109547
Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145, 215-234.
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.
Machery, E. (2018). Morality: A historical invention. In K. J. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of moral psychology (pp. 259-265). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
Parkinson, C., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Koralus, P. E., Mendelovici, A., McGeer, V., & Wheatley, T. (2011). Is morality unified? Evidence that distinct neural systems underlie moral judgments of harm, dishonesty, and disgust. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(10), 3162-3180.
Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & Wheatley, T. (2012). The disunity of morality and why it matters to philosophy. The Monist, 95(3), 355-377.
Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & Wheatley, T. (2014). Are moral judgments unified?. Philosophical Psychology, 27(4), 451-474.
Stich, S. (2018). The moral domain. In K. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of moral psychology (pp. 547- 555). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Stich, S. (2019). The quest for the boundaries of morality. In A. Zimmerman, K. Jones, & M. Timmons (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Moral Epistemology (pp. 15-38). New York, NY: Routledge.