The PhilPapers Fallacy (Part 2 of 9)
The PhilPapers Fallacy (Part 2 of 9)
Table of contents
Part 2: Relevant expertise matters
Part 4: Selection effects matter
Part 5: How PhilPapers respondents interpreted the survey questions matters
Part 7: Philosophical fashions matter
Part 8: Demographic, social, and cultural forces matter
2.1 Relevant expertise matters
An appeal to a legitimate authority isn’t necessarily a fallacy. And philosophers are often legitimate authorities on particular philosophical questions. A Kant scholar may have trustworthy knowledge about what Kant wrote and what interpretations of Kant’s work are more or less credible. Someone who specializes in normative ethics can probably do a good job characterizing deontology and utilitarianism. Philosophers may have expertise in forming and assessing arguments, evaluating the validity of a formal argument, and possess other forms of knowledge or expertise about matters of history and scholarship in the field.
However, are philosophers experts at reaching correct philosophical conclusions? Or having correct philosophical intuitions? It’s not at all clear that they do, and granting that philosophers have certain kinds of expertise does not require us to grant that they have this kind of expertise, or that consensus among philosophers is especially good evidence that whatever they form a consensus about is likely to be correct. One’s expertise in other fields can be checked against extraneous markers of expertise:
expert doctors save lives
expert engineers build bridges that don’t collapse
expert chess players can beat you in chess
…and so on. We Have no similar external indicators of a philosopher’s success. There’s no independent means of corroborating their claims outside of philosophy, or at least the individual appraisals of different people.
Whether philosophers are experts at getting the correct answers is conditional on whether the methods they use to arrive at those conclusions are actually good. In the absence of independent means of corroborating their conclusions, how are we supposed to know whether they’re experts about the answer to philosophical questions?
I doubt there’s any clear or uncontroversial answer that philosophers themselves could provide, and that we’d be obliged to accept. The degree to which philosophical conclusions are the result of a legitimate form of authority turns on the quality of the methods employed in the field and the diligence with which its adherents employ those methods. It’s not even clear what contemporary analytic philosophy’s methods are (which isn’t to say there isn’t work on this, it’s just that metaphilosophy is decidedly unresolved and incomplete), but one route towards rejecting the philosophical consensus or majority on a given philosophical issue is to question the methods of analytic philosophy itself. If the methods themselves don’t equip practitioners with the ability to reliably arrive at the truth, then what philosophers think about any particular philosophical issue won’t be especially good evidence that they’re correct. Making a comprehensive case against that method is … well, comprehensive, and outside the scope of this post. Here, I mean only to flag a general point: that analytic philosophers are “experts” with respect to arriving at the correct conclusions to philosophical questions is a legitimate matter of dispute.
I won’t make a case for this claim here, but there is little good reason to think that analytic philosophy endows its practitioners with a capacity for arriving at the “truth.” There is ongoing work on the matter, and several critics have challenged the claim that philosophers rely on intuitions (Cappelen, 2012; Deutsch, 2009; 2010; 2015; Earlenbaugh & Molyneux, 2009; Nado, 2016; cf. Climenhaga, 2018) in any distinctive way and that they aren’t used as evidence in ethics (Herok, 2023), questioned the reliability of philosophical intuitions (Machery, 2012; Schwitzgebel & Cushman, 2015; Vaesen et al., 2013; cf. Mizrahi, 2015), and raised doubts about the degree to which we can consider philosophers expert intuiters (Buckwalter, 2016; Nado, 2014; Weinberg et al., 2010), including with respect to morality (Horvath & Wiegmann, 2022; Tobia, Buckwalter, & Stich, 2013).
I don’t consider these findings to decisively refute the “expertise defense” of the intuitions of professional philosophers, but I also don’t think philosophers have made a very good showing that they are experts in the relevant sense. At the very least, if the matter is unsettled, I don’t grant that philosophers are entitled to presume they are experts unless and until they have some means of demonstrating their expertise. I’m not even sure the onus should be on critics to show that they don’t: I see no reason to grant academic philosophers the benefit of the doubt. The history of the field has given me little confidence to believe they’ve earned it.
However, while I’m a fan of criticizing analytic philosophy and its now ubiquitous appeal to intuitions, my concern with these approaches is that, for the most part, is that focusing on whether philosophers are subject to various cognitive biases, or are responsive to factors that don’t seem truth-tracking would, at best, only show that philosophical appeals to intuition may be biased or distorted in ways that undermine their capacity for tracking the truth. While such criticisms are relevant to philosophical expertise, I don’t think they go nearly far enough: even if philosophers weren’t subject to such biases, why should we suppose that their intuitive judgments were tracking the truth in the first place?
The institutions we put in place function as a forum for the overlapping Venn diagrams of our respective efforts to grapple with one another until there’s enough overlap that a consensus is squeezed out of the melee. That’s all a bit metaphorical, but the general point is that we serve to mutually check one another’s errors and biases in order to, hopefully, converge on the truth. Studies showing that philosophers are subject to biases in experimental conditions hardly shows that the discipline as a whole is incapable of converging on the truth, only that philosophers are humans like everyone else, and are subject to the same cognitive biases.
Note, however, that many cognitive biases may be an artifact of experimental conditions in which they occur (Gigerenzer, 1991), and the way in studies are constructed and analyzed, and in any case the presumption behind such research is that it has sufficient external validity that we should be worried, if philosophers are subject to biases in some experimental context, that those same biases render them unable to converge on the truth in real-world contexts. As much as I’d like to think the data shows this is the case, I don’t. Studies that show philosophers are subject to this or that mundane bias everyone else is also subject to do not show that philosophical intuitions aren’t sufficiently truth-tracking to serve an evidential role in conventional philosophical theorizing.
A better line of critique is, to my mind, a theoretical one: it’s not clear what would constitute philosophical expertise to begin with, nor is it clear how we’d confirm that someone was correct. The problem is that, even if philosophers are experts at analyzing arguments, doing logic, constructing syllogisms, understanding the history of philosophy, understanding the structure along with the strengths and weaknesses of different philosophical arguments, determining whether two or more philosophical positions are consistent with one another, and so on, positions often bottom out in seemingly incorrigible differences in priors, phenomenology, and other privately accessible considerations.
What I’ll maintain, instead, is that if analytic philosophy does confer some capacity for arriving at the truth by its proponents, the onus is on them to make a good case for this. I don’t think that they have.¹
Notes
1. I also think the kinds of concerns raised by critics of analytic philosophy can make a strong case, by drawing on the insights of e.g., Wittgenstein, Schiller, and others, that much of the discipline is fundamentally misguided, in that its practitioners have twisted themselves into knots over their misunderstandings about language.
I don’t think analytic philosophers are generally well-equipped to handle these criticisms, which is why I predict you’ll find that when they’re raised that analytic philosophers won’t have good answers, but will instead rely heavily on insults, tradition, gatekeeping, critiques of the competence or education of the critic, and the exploitation of rhetoric and snarl words to discredit, dismiss, and defame metaphilosophical objections that come from outside the field (or at least mainstream views in the field). It’s hard to gather concrete data on how often and to what extent this occurs, but my own experience with criticizing the field has been met with, at best, awkward indifference, a change of subject, and a convenient amnesia about the concerns, and at worst, with the challenge, “then why are you even here studying this topic?” as though questioning the methodological foundations of philosophy wasn’t a legitimate philosophical endeavor. The field has also done its best to render itself as insular and as impenetrable to outside forces as possible. Findings suggest Anglophone philosophers rarely interact with or cite philosophers whose work appears in other languages (Schwitzgebel et al., 2018), that philosophy lacks public relevance because it is isolated from the public (Conix, Lemeire, & Chi, 2022).
References
Buckwalter, W. (2016). Intuition fail: Philosophical activity and the limits of expertise. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 92(2), 378-410.
Cappelen, H. (2012). Philosophy without intuitions. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Climenhaga, N. (2018). Intuitions are used as evidence in philosophy. Mind, 127(505), 69-104.
Conix, S., Lemeire, O., & Chi, P. S. (2022). The public relevance of philosophy. Synthese, 200(1), 15.
Deutsch, M. (2009). Experimental philosophy and the theory of reference. Mind and Lanuage, 24(4), 445–466.
Deutsch, M. (2010). Intuitions, counterexamples, and experimental philosophy. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1(3), 447–460.
Deutsch, M. (2015). The Myth of the intuitive: Experimental philosophy and philosophical method. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Earlenbaugh, J., & Molyneux, B. (2009). If intuitions must be evidential then philosophy is in big trouble. Studia Philosophica Estonica, 2, 35–53.
Gigerenzer, G. (1991). How to make cognitive illusions disappear: Beyond “heuristics and biases”. European review of social psychology, 2(1), 83-115.
Herok, T. (2023). Intuitions are never used as evidence in ethics. Synthese, 201(2), 42.
Horvath, J., & Wiegmann, A. (2022). Intuitive expertise in moral judgments. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 100(2), 342-359.
Machery, E. (2012). Expertise and intuitions about reference. THEORIA. Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia, 27(1), 37-54.
Mizrahi, M. (2015). Three arguments against the expertise defense. Metaphilosophy, 46(1), 52-64.
Nado, J. (2014). Philosophical expertise. Philosophy Compass, 9(9), 631-641.
Nado, J. (2016). The intuition deniers. Philosophical Studies, 173, 781-800.
Schwitzgebel, E., & Cushman, F. (2015). Philosophers’ biased judgments persist despite training, expertise and reflection. Cognition, 141, 127-137.
Schwitzgebel, E., Huang, L. T. L., Higgins, A., & Gonzalez-Cabrera, I. (2018). The insularity of Anglophone philosophy: Quantitative analyses. Philosophical Papers, 47(1), 21-48.
Tobia, K., Buckwalter, W., & Stich, S. (2013). Moral intuitions: Are philosophers experts?. Philosophical Psychology, 26(5), 629-638.
Vaesen, K., Peterson, M., & Van Bezooijen, B. (2013). The reliability of armchair intuitions. Metaphilosophy, 44(5), 559-578.
Weinberg, J. M., Gonnerman, C., Buckner, C., & Alexander, J. (2010). Are philosophers expert intuiters?. Philosophical Psychology, 23(3), 331-355.