What's Good and Bad About Philosophy
I was once asked to explain to a class (i) what I most like about philosophy, as a field of study, and (ii) what I most dislike about it. My answer was (and would still be) something like this.
Philosophy: The Good
By my count, I've had 23 years of schooling. But it wasn't until year 14 that I learned that there was a subject where you discuss things that matter. Up until that time, only occasionally did I ever run into such discussion, and the teachers would quickly move on from there to the "real" material.
In history, science, and math classes, we often learned things that mattered. For instance, the laws of nature and how the physical world works -- I learned a lot about that, and (unlike most people I guess) I still remember it. (In fact, I wish I'd had 3 more science courses, instead of the useless foreign language courses.) But there was no discussion of these things. The teacher tells the class, "Here's what is known. Learn it." There's no talking about whether what we believe is really true, or why it is the way it is, or what the deeper implications might be. The only room for "discussion" would be if you did not actually understand what the teacher said, in which case you could ask a question and have the teacher explain it again.
There were some classes that had discussion, though. They included the English classes, and sometimes social studies. The students would even write essays defending opinions about the course material. There was, however, a rigid rule that the discussion was never to address anything that matters.
For example, my class read Waiting for Godot in 12th grade. This is a play by Samuel Beckett, which the teacher said was about waiting for God, who never shows up. However, though we had to write essays about this play, we were absolutely prohibited from discussing the existence of God, or anything like that. We could only write about trivial, irrelevant things, like the author's literary technique, or what the author meant by such-and-such.
We read many other works of literature dealing with great philosophical themes -- and every time, we were prohibited from discussing the actual issues that those works were meant to make us think about. Instead, we had to discuss the author's technique, as if we were all aspiring novelists, or how to interpret the author, or how the author depicts women, etc.
I never figured out why this was. But the best generalization I could come up with for how these courses worked was, "You are never to think about anything interesting or important."
Occasionally, someone temporarily broke the rule. When I was in elementary school, in my first social studies class, the teacher opened the year with a discussion of who discovered America. Everyone "knows" that Columbus discovered America. But wait. There were Native Americans already there when Columbus arrived. So surely Columbus didn't discover it. Maybe the Native Americans did. Anyway, even if you just look at Europeans, Leif Erikson is thought to have set foot in North America about 500 years before Columbus. Etc.
On that day, I thought Social Studies (as they called it) was my favorite subject. I later learned that that discussion was extremely atypical. They had temporarily tricked me into thinking I liked social studies by opening the course with a philosophical discussion. Almost all the rest of the history and social science classes that I ever took was about memorizing boring details about people I never heard of and didn't care about.
That was how it went until I took my first philosophy course in college. Suddenly, we were asked to think directly about the central things that mattered. We were not just told to regurgitate someone else's ideas about them; we were invited to explore the issues using our own minds. In one discussion section, for example, the TA (Karen Pilkington) pretended to be part of the first generation of robotic TA's employed by the university. She then invited us to figure out whether she was conscious. (No one could do so.)
Many more philosophy classes were like that. Fascinating questions, central to our understanding of the world and our place in it, which we were invited to have real discussions about.
Philosophy: The Bad
It wasn't until much later that I started to get annoyed with the field of philosophy. We give the good stuff to undergraduates -- free will, the existence of God, the objectivity of morality, etc. The boring, unimportant material is saved for the academic journals, meant to be read by professors -- arguments about whether professor x's objection to y's version of such-and-such argument shows that that version of the argument fails to establish its conclusion, etc. The issue of free will, for example, is super-interesting, but the free will literature is some of the boringest stuff you'll ever encounter. I feel drowsy just thinking about it.
Zzzzz . . .
Okay, I'm awake again. What was I saying? Oh yeah, the bad side of philosophy as a field of intellectual inquiry. Here's our main problem: our method is basically sitting in our armchairs and thinking. Now, there are some interesting things you can arrive at in that way. But it's quite difficult to arrive at interesting conclusions from the armchair without relying on empirical evidence, and there are a lot more things that you would want to know that can't be addressed that way. But we're not going to go out and start collecting detailed empirical evidence (at least, most of us aren't). Most of us aren't going to cross disciplinary boundaries, either, so we won't, e.g., learn economic theory. Most philosophers don't even like advancing bold, synthetic a priori principles (a reluctance perhaps left over from empiricism and (il)logical positivism). So that leaves us really limited in what we can say.
There are a few ways that we deal with this handicap, including:
a. The method of assumption. Just assume that the empirical facts are what seems vaguely plausible to you. Especially popular in applied ethics and political philosophy. E.g., you assume that gun control laws are highly successful in stopping crime, and then reason from there. (Problem: that is actually one of the central points of dispute about gun control.)
b. The conditional thesis. (Closely related to (a).) You have an argument for conclusion C. But you're not sure whether the needed premises, A and B, are true. So you define your thesis to be that if A and B are true, then C. This usually makes your thesis trivial, or at least much less interesting, and stipulates out of consideration the main issues that people would want to talk about.
c. Making conceptual points. We're talking about some interesting and important topic, like justice. You decide to confine yourself to making "conceptual points" -- points about the meaning of a word that's being used in the discussion, or the logical relationship between two of the concepts that are being used, etc.
d. Attacking ridiculous views. You want to refute someone, but you only have armchair conceptual points in your toolbox. So you choose someone who is super-confused and dumb to refute, rather than someone who has interesting, coherent views. Or you choose someone whose statements are somewhat ambiguous and interpret them as taking some absurdly strong view.
E.g., if someone says, "There is no such thing as political authority," you might interpret that as claiming that it is conceptually impossible for anyone to have political authority. Then all you have to do is imagine one hypothetical case in which we could say someone had authority.
Problem: This often results in advancing arguments and positions that are uninteresting and useless. You might give a "counterexample" to some conceptual thesis that someone might hold, but it's an example that is completely unrealistic and no one thinks has any bearing on the actual world. E.g., you give some conditions for a state to have authority, but they're conditions that no actual state satisfies. You don't argue that any state will ever satisfy them; you don't have to, because you were just making a "conceptual point".
. . .
I am reminded of a joke I heard:
Knowledge is knowing that tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put them in a fruit salad. Philosophy is wondering whether this means that ketchup is a smoothie.
Notice that the question whether ketchup is a smoothie is (i) merely semantic and (ii) frivolous. It doesn't matter whether we say ketchup is a smoothie or not. That's like a lot of the conceptual debates that philosophers have.
Obviously, that's not true of the big philosophical questions that draw people into philosophy (and that drew me in) -- e.g., the existence of God, whether we have free will, whether there are objective values. It's just that academic philosophers frequently fall into debating semantic and logical points in the surrounding territory. It's like if we were talking about what drinks we should serve for dinner tonight, and I start up a debate about whether ketchup is a smoothie -- not that I'm saying that we should serve ketchup; I just want us to clarify our concepts before we decide what to serve.