How to Philosophize

A student asked me how to do philosophy well. Here is what I came up with.

A. Engage the right amount with the literature.

Students fall into two errors (these generally affect different students):

1. Some ignore the literature. They just want to write what they thought, without considering what anyone else has thought about the problem. (Paradigm example of this: Ayn Rand.) The problems with this: (1) Often, other people have already said something close to what you said … only they did it better, because they’d been working on it longer and refining the view in light of other smart people’s comments and objections. (2) Often, there are important objections to your view that you didn’t think of but that anyone familiar with the literature would think of, which refute your view, or at least appear to refute it. In that case, your work is going to come off as amateur and not worth reading (because it will in fact be amateur and not worth reading).

2. Some are too focused on the literature. They spend almost all their time reading other people’s papers and books, and they don’t know what they think about the problem. All their thoughts wind up being thoughts about other people’s thoughts, rather than about the original problem. They then write papers that (while perhaps fitting into the academic literature) are boring. E.g., papers about how Smith’s response to Jones’ second argument for X’ism fails to refute the argument, if we assume a Y’ist account of Z.

So you need just enough attention to the literature. I suggest first thinking through a philosophical problem on your own, to decide roughly what you think of it, then reading more about it in the academic literature (here, the Stanford Encyclopedia is great for learning the main views and finding important references), and then refining your view in the light of what you learned. If you read the literature first, it preempts your thoughts.

B. Engage the right amount with empirical evidence.

Avoid these two errors, characteristic of different fields:

1. People in empirical sciences often either ignore philosophical questions, or say incredibly confused things about them, because they haven’t spent enough time thinking abstractly, and they falsely assume that all interesting questions are empirical. Examples:

   1. If a non-philosopher is talking about religion, they might refuse to consider the actual truth of religious claims and instead just talk about what other people believe, what factors influence belief, etc., because the latter are “scientific” questions.

   2. Or they’ll assume that a philosophical dispute is some shallow empirical dispute, and therefore they can just tell you some empirical fact and that will settle it. E.g., if you disagree with the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, the non-philosopher might assume that you’re denying the experimental results, and they should just reiterate to you that those experimental results really happen. Non-philosophers might have no idea that one could disagree with an interpretation of empirical evidence, and that this isn’t itself an empirical dispute.

   3. Or if you tell someone that you think it’s morally wrong for a lawyer to deliberately try to bring about an unjust outcome in a court case, the other person might assume that you just don’t know the rules of the existing legal system, and they just have to explain to you that no, according to the conventional rules, it’s okay for a lawyer to do that.

   4. The problem is that often, the interesting question isn’t empirical. So what these non-philosophers do is to substitute a boring empirical question for the interesting, philosophical question. Fortunately, philosophers almost never do that. However, philosophers have an opposite problem…

2. Often, the most interesting question is partly empirical. But philosophers don’t know empirical facts, so they substitute a boring, a priori question for the interesting, empirical question. Example:

   1. It is interesting to ask whether the government has genuine authority. But it’s hard to find anyone to address that, because it requires both a priori and empirical knowledge to address. A non-philosopher will likely substitute the much less interesting question, “When do people regard a government as having authority?” (because that’s empirical). A philosopher might instead substitute the question, “Is there a possible hypothetical scenario in which a government has authority?” (because that’s a priori). The interesting question requires some ethical thinking, and it requires attending to what real-world governments are actually like.

Questions in political philosophy, applied ethics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics very often require empirical evidence. (In the case of metaphysics, theories in physics are often relevant.) As a philosopher, you don’t have to gather empirical evidence. But you should look up what evidence other people have gathered, when it is relevant. Do not change the question so you don’t have to confront it. E.g., if someone raises empirical evidence that something doesn’t work the way your argument assumes, don’t just stipulate that you’re talking about a hypothetical case and not the real world, or that you’re only arguing for a conclusion conditional on this (false) empirical assumption. Find out what the actual facts are.

C. How to be interesting

1. Work on whatever topics you most enjoy working on. That will make it easier for you to be productive, and other people will probably also like your work better. (Note: Before you get a job, you might be well advised to work on some applied area, like business ethics, medical ethics, or “AI philosophy”. But once you get a job, you don’t have to keep working on the thing that they hired you for.)

2. Don’t be afraid to take on big questions. Not only are they more fun to think about, but your ideas are also likely to be talked about more.

3. Think about problems, not people. E.g., think about the nature of free will, not so-and-so’s theory about free will.

4. Don’t be afraid to take up bold theses. Sure, you might turn out to be wrong, but almost all philosophical work is wrong anyway. At least you don’t have be boring. If you later realize that you were wrong, you can publish another paper explaining why your old view was wrong — there’s no cost to this! Many academic papers are boring because the author writes defensively: they’re trying to avoid anyone objecting to their argument, so they add endless qualifications and restrictions. This is a fool’s game, because any interesting thesis is going to be objected to by some philosophers.

5. State the obvious (to you) thing that other people aren’t saying. Example: Peter Singer’s argument about famine relief is kind of an obvious argument, yet people weren’t saying it. Now it’s one of the most cited things in ethics. And Peter Unger’s version of the argument is even less creative (since it is inspired by Singer’s earlier work), yet it’s also a well-cited and important work.

D. How to be right

1. Question your own ideas. When faced with an objection, often the best response is to modify your view (change it to something in the same spirit that avoids the objection). Example:

   1. I originally stated the principle of Phenomenal Conservatism as “If it seems to you that P, then you thereby have at least prima facie justification for believing that P.” Michael Tooley raised two objections: (i) “Prima facie”, according to my own definition, implied “foundational”. But some appearances might be produced by reasoning, in which case they should produce (only) inferential justification, not foundational justification. (ii) As stated, the view seems to imply that any appearance (in the absence of defeaters) produces sufficient justification to have a justified belief.

      The best response to these objections is to simply change the formulation of PC. Now I state it as: “If it seems to you that P, then, in the absence of defeaters, you have at least some justification for believing that P.”

      There is, again, no cost for changing your views.

   2. That was a minor modification. But you should also be open to more fundamental, large scale revisions.

   3. In general, when you come up with an idea, before deciding that this is now your view, spend some time trying to think of reasons for doubting it.

2. Do not become a follower of some famous philosopher of the past.

   1. Most (non-trivial, non-mathematical) ideas that were devised centuries ago are wrong.

   2. Famous philosophers are not famous because they discovered so many truths. They are only famous because they said things that other people wanted to talk about. That could be because their ideas gave a systematic picture that gives one a feeling of understanding, even though they are wrong (Aristotle). It could also be because the ideas were so radical or outrageous (which of course means they were probably wrong) (Hume).

3. Don’t build your whole belief system on some assumption that just seems sort of vaguely plausible. (Ex.: “all ideas are copies of impressions”.) Doing so is a good way of winding up completely wrong about almost everything. (Ex.: David Hume.) Instead, reconsider your premises in light of the conclusions they lead to. (Use reflective equilibrium.)

4. Argue from premises that would seem plausible to a wide range of people with different views about other things. Examples:

   1. Starving Marvin: Marvin is hungry and plans to walk to the marketplace to buy food (where there are plenty of people who would happily sell him some food). Sam bars the way and forces Marvin to return home empty-handed, where he starves.

      In this example, almost everyone, regardless of their political orientation, agrees that Sam did something wrong. So that is a suitable premise for philosophical reasoning.

   2. Here’s a premise: “It is intrinsically unjust that some people are better off than others due to luck (e.g., happening to be born into a wealthy family, or even being born with greater capacity for intelligence).”

      This is vaguely plausible to many people, especially left-leaning, egalitarian-type people. But it is not at all obvious to most conservatives or libertarians. So it is not a suitable starting premise.

5. Stay in touch with reality. Try to keep your mind on the phenomena, not the game. An occupational hazard of academics is that we get lost in the ins and outs of the current dialectic — what this person could say at this point in the dialectic, whether this argument “could be resisted”, how many respectable views would disagree with that view, etc. If you get your head too filled up with that stuff, you can wind up losing touch with the phenomena that all this discourse is about. You then start saying stuff that is crazy (like David Lewis) or empty, or boring (like most academic articles), or just generally disconnected from the real world (like Aristotelian metaphysics).