The PhilPapers Fallacy (Part 9 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
3.0 Conclusion
All of the characteristics of what “matters” have one thing in common: they relate to the reasons why philosophers endorse the positions they do. A panoply of causal factors shape what we think and why we think it. Some of those causal factors will ground our expertise: people who acquire experience and domain-relevant knowledge can reliably modify their judgments over time to make more accurate judgments than others. Someone who has spent years in the kitchen or fishing or hunting develops modes of cognition highly tuned to success. You don’t need books or formal study to develop such abilities. You only need feedback.
Yet other causal factors may be unrelated to a genuine expertise, a genuine responsiveness to the world around us. The “successes” of philosophy are, by and large, of this phantasmal kind.
Philosophers harvest no grain and make no widgets. They provide no products, beyond reports of a ghostly realm whose truths are revealed through Latin incantation, Greek symbols, and strangely enough, conventional English prose sprinkled with a bit of jargon. The recompense is the accolades of their colleagues, and the cultivation of status and prestige within insular academic communities. Esteem may be feedback from the world, and may even result in success of a kind: one will be invited to give talks, win awards, publish books and articles, and grow one’s h-index. While citations may be a marker of success of a kind, they are no indication that one has discovered any truths or contributed anything of substance or value.
The scientific disciplines anchor their successes in the world around us, but philosophers attempt to anchor their successes in the gossamer strands of an ethereal world only accessible through the window of each philosopher’s mind. Were a thousand minds to gaze into this world from a thousand vantage points and observe the same forms, perhaps that would be an indication that philosophers were genuine seers of the a priori. Yet mainstream analytic philosophy has served to funnel its practitioners into as few rooms as possible so that they look together out of the same pane of glass. If their vantage distorts the truth of what they see, that mistake will be shared by all. To step outside the metaphor: if mainstream analytic philosophy relies on a shared set of methods and presuppositions, and those methods and presuppositions are flawed, then the entire field can be wildly off track.
People continue to appeal to the PhilPapers survey results as a cudgel to bludgeon opposition to mainstream views. The notion that we should put so much stock in what philosophers think strikes me as having it exactly backwards. We’re to believe philosophers are successful at arriving at the truth because they’re the experts. Yet a field’s expertise is established via its successes, not the other way around: we regard doctors, scientists, and chess masters as experts because of their success or the success of the institutions they represent. While I may regard a new doctor as likely to be competent and capable despite their lack of personal track record of success, this is because that doctor has been trained in an institution with a track record of success. In short: success precedes expertise. It is the basis for identifying experts in the first place.
We can be confident new doctors, engineers, and chefs will do a good job because the methods they were trained in are the reason why they succeed at their tasks. Those who appeal to the PhilPapers survey do the opposite: they insist the respondents to this survey are the experts, and that therefore we should regard their judgments as likely to be successful. Simply because a group of academics have dedicated their careers to addressing particular questions doesn’t automatically make them very likely to be correct, nor does it mean the methods they’re using are the best methods (or even good methods). I have little doubt we could find experts in astrology, and those experts would be happy to tell us astrology is legitimate. I wouldn’t take this very seriously no matter how sincere and knowledgeable they were, because astrology is bullshit. The mere fact that a group of people regard themselves as experts doesn’t mean they are. Simply because they’re really smart, or publish in peer-reviewed journals, or have the endorsement of universities and reputable journals and publishers likewise doesn’t ensure they’re especially likely to be correct. All of these considerations will weigh in favor of the discipline, but they aren’t decisive, and they aren’t sufficient. What matters is whether philosophers employ good methods: methods capable of reliably and consistently enabling those who employ them to converge on the truth. This is necessary. [FINISH]
This would only be a reasonable demand if the field had a clear and established track record of success, a clear method by which it achieved these successes, and a clear way of training new philosophers in that method. As far as I can tell, philosophy fails in all of these respects. That isn’t to say philosophers are never insightful, or correct, or make good points, or achieve genuine progress. It is only to say that such assessments are, at best, piecemeal and resolve into focus only with considerable hindsight. They aren’t the result of a clear, shared, systematic method of inquiry whose mechanisms are well-understood and consistently and reliably achieve successes that can be corroborated by independent means. Corroboration in philosophy consists almost exclusively of the judgments of philosophers themselves.
References
Atari, M., Mehl, M. R., Graham, J., Doris, J. M., Schwarz, N., Davani, A. M., ... & Dehghani, M. (2023). The paucity of morality in everyday talk. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 5967.
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.
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and brain sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.
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.
Horwich, P. (2012). Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Joshua, K. (2019). Philosophical intuitions are surprisingly robust across demographic differences. Epistemology & Philosophy of Science, 56(2), 29-36.
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.
Stich, S. P., & Machery, E. (2022). Demographic differences in philosophical intuition: A reply to Joshua Knobe. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1-34.
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.
Wittgenstein, L. (1965). I: A lecture on ethics. The philosophical review, 74(1), 3-12.
Yarkoni, T. (2022). The generalizability crisis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, e1.