Some politicians and other celebrities substitute the word ‘proposition’ when they really mean a ‘proposal’. These words are not synonyms; that is, their meanings are not interchangeable. Perhaps they think that using the word ‘proposition’ makes them sound more erudite; but for those who understand these words, the opposite is the case.
So, what are the differences in the meanings of these words?
The word ‘proposition’ is a central concept in philosophy and logic. It means a statement that is the bearer of truth or falsity. Every proposition is either true or false but not both; and a true proposition is one that corresponds to reality. It is a statement that asserts a fact which can be subject to verification or testing. For example, ‘The Earth orbits the Sun’ is a proposition because it is a statement that can be scientifically verified as being true.
More colloquially, the Collins Dictionary has a definition for proposition as ‘a statement or an idea that people can consider or discuss whether it is true’. In this way, propositions are assessed in terms of their truth properties rather than their values, preferences or aesthetics.
On the other hand, a proposal is an act of putting forward a recommendation or suggestion for consideration by others. It can be a formal document that outlines a plan, project, or business offer in detail. For example, research proposals, business proposals, and marriage proposals are all types of formal offers to undertake a particular action. In academic or professional settings, a proposal might be a document that outlines a plan requesting approval or funding. They can also be less formal than a written proposal document; for example, ‘I propose we go to the movies tonight.’ Proposals are assessed by their recipients on the basis of values, preferences or aesthetics, rather than truth or falsity.
In recent times, there has been a trend in the popular media towards viewing past events and people through the prism of present-day attitudes. This trend is manifested in attempts to ‘cancel’ the past, including by silencing discussions, banning books, tearing down statues and so on.
In historical and literary analysis, presentism is a pejorative term for the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Some modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they consider it a form of cultural bias, and believe it creates a distorted understanding of their subject matter. The practice of presentism is regarded by some as a common informal fallacy when writing about the past.
Presentism also fails to take into account that, at the time in which historical events occurred, those involved did not enjoy the benefit of hindsight that has informed our present perspective. Yet to fully understand an historical event, we must view it not only with the benefit of hindsight, but also in the more limited context of its own times.
To avoid the fallacy of presentism, orthodox historians restrict themselves to describing what happened and why, attempting to refrain from using language that passes judgment. For example, in analysing the history of slavery, it is more useful to study the attitudes and circumstances of the past that led to slavery, rather than just present-day attitudes that simply condemn slavery without further analysis. One theory is that African-American slavery began for economic reasons and that racism was a consequential attempt to justify the practice, rather than being the prime cause of slavery. Such a theory would be overlooked by presentism.
This fallacy should not be confused with philosophical presentism, which is a technical position in ontology (the study of existence) that only the present exists.
(This essay was published as a Letter to the Editor of The Skeptic magazine, March 2019, Vol 39 No 1)
The philosophy versus science debate has filled the pages of this magazine for some time now, with Gary Bakker1,2 and Ian Bryce3 heaping scorn and derision on the discipline of philosophy. Both claim that philosophy has given humanity nothing of value since it has been unable to answer a single “Big Question”1,3. Tim Harding, James Fodor and Dr Patrick Stokes have already addressed much of Bakker’s arguments in detail, so I will not go over this well-worn ground again. I will address the following: Ian Bryce’s most recent contribution to this discussion and specific claims made by both Bakker and Bryce regarding the role of philosophy and science in morality.
In the most recent edition of this magazine, Ian Bryce writes that he was “puzzled” by Tim Harding’s wish to “exclude science from philosophy”. Ian goes on to describe a face-to-face interaction with Tim Harding in which he asked him directly whether “philosophy should use observations from the real world”3. I asked Tim directly whether Ian’s characterisation accurately represented his position. Tim stated that his argument is that philosophy and science are different but equally valuable disciplines that can work together. Tim’s argument is not that philosophy and science are incompatible, but that they perform different roles, with science using observation, experimentation and the resulting data to discover facts about the world, and philosophy often using these facts, applying reason and drawing conclusions.
In his letter, Ian expands on his account of the discussion with Tim, claiming that those on the philosophy side of the argument were unable to present an example of a “meaningful finding in philosophy which did not use observations of the real world”. Ian goes on to state that he lectures extensively on how “science, not philosophy, has illuminated where the universe came from, how it works, and where it is going”. Ian then states that an unnamed philosopher claimed that 3000 years of debate has not established the origin of human ethics and argues not only that science, but Darwin have answered this question. Ian cites human behaviour systems, genetics and memes as evidence for this claim. This is a curious assertion, as philosophy does not seek to determine the origin of human ethics but to address the ethical questions which humans face as we interact with the world. Here, I note Bakker’s statement1 that “any meaningful question can best, or only, be answered by observation and experimentation, ie (sic) by the scientific method”.
I challenge Bakker and Bryce’s assertion that philosophy has had no real-world impact on human affairs. I refer to Bakker’s statement that the “is/ought” debate in ethics is an empirical not a philosophical question. I will address two of Bakker and Bryce’s claims, firstly that the study of morality is an empirical one rather than a philosophical one; and secondly, Bakker’s statements regarding informed consent.
Bakker essentially argues that experimental evidence on moral reasoning undermines the plausibility of moral rationalism. Bakker is correct that until recently the ideas put forward by moral philosophers regarding moral reasoning were non-empirical. Recent experimental evidence has challenged the rationalist views of Kant, Plato, and Kohlberg that moral judgements are caused by moral reasoning. Our developing understanding of neuroscience, genetics and neurobiology and the application of experimental psychology has allowed us to empirically test claims around moral cognition. Jonathan Haidt presents compelling evidence that cool-headed reason leading to moral judgement formation is an illusion, and posits that reason occurs post-hoc to rapid intuition4. Experimental psychologist Joshua Greene hypothesises a dual-process model of moral intuitions and argues that we should privilege consequentialist intuitions5. Philosophers Richmond Campbell and Victor Kumar draw on the dual-process model with their model of moral consistency reasoning which suggests that reason and emotion closely interact, driving moral change at the societal level6. While they do not have experimental evidence to support their model, they put forward plausible suggestions for hypothesis testing.
Neuroethics
It is true that some moral philosophers have been hostile towards the growing field of neuroethics7. These critics mischaracterise neuroethics by claiming that it seeks to tell us what is right or good. The aim of neuroethics is to understand how our brains come to have values, or, as philosopher Patricia Churchland puts it: “…how can neurons value something?”7. Readers of this magazine would know that understanding our biases is a matter of interest to Skeptics. The work being done in neuroethics could help us to overcome those biases that influence moral cognition, and potentially provide us with the tools to achieve better outcomes for society7,8.
So, as you can see, I do not disagree with Bakker and Bryce that an empirical approach to ethics is both necessary and useful. However, the field is not without its critics and for good reason. As an example, Berker points out that the hypothetical scenarios that Greene tests in his laboratory using fMRI may not represent how we make moral judgements in real-life9. Of course, one of the major limitations of neuroethics is that it would be unethical to test how we would really respond if asked to push the fat man off the bridge to stop the trolley.
A different empirical approach to morality has been taken by Paul Zac, who has been lauded in the media for his work on oxytocin or, as he calls it, “the moral molecule”. I highly recommend that interested readers explore science journalist Ed Yong, and economist John Conlisk’s excellent critiques of Zac’s research. Yong10 expresses concern that Zac’s promotion of the molecule as being the driver of morality is not just stretching the science, but stretching the truth, and wildly oversimplifying a complex issue. Conlisk11 directs his criticism towards Zac’s claims regarding the effect of oxytocin on market behaviour, citing, among other things, concerns regarding methodology, data quality and reliability. There is certainly growing evidence of biological drivers of moral behaviour, however, we must exercise scepticism as the experimental evidence is in its infancy and in some cases unreliable. I find it concerning to see some moral philosophers – Peter Singer as an example – jumping on board the neuroethics train when a particular body of empirical work appears to suggest that our brain may preference their particular moral view.
This leads me to Bakker’s claim that the is/ought question is empirical not philosophical, leading me to conclude that Bakker does not understand the question in the first place, nor the types of questions moral philosophers engage with. What, if anything, does experimental evidence say about the purpose moral judgements serve within a society, and does this mean anything for a normative ethical theory? Understanding how the human brain processes information relating to moral decisions, or that we are prone to treat a particular moral decision in a particular way, tells us nothing about the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of any moral judgement. Neuroscience can tell us what ‘is’ about our moral judgements, but not what is good – the very question that moral philosophy wrestles with. It is fair to ask whether rational theories can provide guiding principles by which to live a good life if they do not incorporate the neurobiology underpinning how humans make moral judgements. I think it is a mistake, especially with the science being in its infancy, to place too much weight on the findings within neuroethics or to disregard the role of moral philosophy in guiding moral decision-making and developing moral frameworks.
Both Bakker and Bryce argue that observational evidence is sufficient to answer these moral questions, however they fail to recognise that scientific and moral observation are different. G. E. Moore argued against ethical naturalism that what we call “goodness” or “the good” is not a natural property12. I refer readers to the entry in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy12 for a more detailed explanation of Moore’s argument. Gilbert Harman draws from Moore’s work, giving the example of a proton going through a cloud chamber resulting in a vapour trail which can be observed. He notes that the scientific observation is itself evidence for the physical theory – the physical theory explains the proton, which explains the trail which explains your observation13. Harman gives an example of a moral observation, in this case seeing a group of children setting a cat on fire and observing that the act of setting a cat on fire is wrong13. Seeing the cat set on fire and making the moral observation “that’s wrong” does not explain the “wrongness” of the observed act. He explains how making the moral observation does not appear to be evidence for the moral principle because the principle does not help explain the moral observation13, demonstrating that science and philosophy are not guided by the same principles.
Bakker states that “Rationalists and humanists decide on what laws and social mores to advance and adopt according to what history and thought experiments tell us will best achieve society’s goals. And those goals … are determined not by theology … or philosophy … but by systematic observation of what human beings are actually found to value…The goals of a person, of society, or of humanity are to be discovered, not imposed. They are an ‘is’ not an ‘ought’.”1. Bakker would have you believe that science can answer the is/ought question by telling us what works. This fundamentally misses the point of the is/ought argument. The type of empirical findings Bakker refers to may tell us that ‘x’ will work, but this does not tell us that ‘x’ is good, nor does it tell us whether a particular societal goal is good.
Informed consent
Moving to Bakker’s comments on Harding’s example of informed consent in clinical trials. Bakker argues that consent is sought “not because of some absolute moral law, either conferred by a deity or deduced by a philosopher; but because of the consequences for science, medicine and society of not having such a consensual system”. Bakker’s point here suggests a lack of both knowledge and understanding of the intense and lengthy debates in the bioethics literature regarding the nature of informed consent. Indeed, the field of bioethics is an example of applied philosophy, thus calling into question both Bakker and Bryce’s claims that philosophy is of no value in the real world.
Informed consent, as it is currently conceived, stems from those historical atrocities carried out in Nazi Germany; at the hands of researchers in Tuskegee, and other notorious examples of how human beings have been sacrificed in the pursuit of empirical facts – the irony should not be lost on the reader. When Bakker states that consent is not sought because of “some absolute moral law” but because of “the consequences for society” he seems oblivious to the fact that once again he is taking a philosophical position. What are the consequences of not obtaining consent from patients? We can see from historical examples that a deficit in trust towards the medical and research community can result, as we see among African Americans who suffered gross injustices at the hands of doctors and scientists. Once again, the irony should not be lost when we consider how the scientific community and society at large have benefited from the use of Henrietta Lacks’ tumour tissue to develop the first immortal cell line14. It is the world of philosophy – specifically the bioethics community – which has truly engaged with the ethical implications of how HeLa cells were obtained. It is the bioethics community which seeks to engage with the implications of dual-use research while many scientists protest that we are an impediment to progress.
But returning to the is/ought question, the focus of the moral philosopher turns to whether, for example, trust itself is good. Assuming that the answer to this and similar questions are implicit is a mistake. In order to promote what is good, we need to demonstrate its goodness and wrestle with what makes it so.
As Bakker suggests, we can operationalise everything, but too often researchers are unaware of how they can impact patients and participants, how they may undermine justice. Bakker overlooks the fact that the discussion of evidence is itself a subset of philosophy, that the factual knowledge that empiricism has given us is diminished without the philosophical study of the nature of knowledge itself. That being said, part of the ethical justification for offering any intervention to a patient is the prior plausibility and empirical evidence substantiating that intervention. Philosophical debate about informed consent has centred on various notions of autonomy; the principles of respect for autonomous choice, beneficence and justice; the role of trust; the fiduciary duty doctors have to patients, and further, how we conceive of and relate to our bodies; the role of power in the investigator participant relationship; the notion of the self in the present state and over time; the role of values and preferences and consideration thereof; our duties to ourselves and to others; the goals of research itself. My recently completed Masters thesis took a hard philosophical approach to informed consent to clinical trials drawing from epistemology and philosophy of language but providing real-world solutions for how we can best protect research participants.
In both Bakker and Bryce’s arguments there is a hubris that I find concerning. Too often science is called into question by those who are disgruntled when the facts challenge their worldview. We in the skeptic community challenge these individuals by highlighting that while the scientific method is imperfect it is the best tool we have for understanding the natural world. Those who would argue, as Bakker and Bryce do, that philosophy is unimportant and irrelevant in this scientific of all ages fail to see that so much of what we do in science is imperfect. It is because of our very humanity that we frequently fail in our scientific endeavours. The replicability problem in psychology stands as a stark example, as does the recent use of CRISPR in China and the ethical problems with this research.
By misconstruing the goals, methods and intent of philosophy, Bakker and Bryce fail to recognise its value in the same way that proponents of pseudoscience who question climate change, vaccination and GMOs dismiss the scientific method. Bakker’s assertion that his undergraduate degree confers on him an expertise in assessing the value of this vast and complex discipline demonstrates a lack of humility; and humility, I would argue, is critical to both good philosophy and good science.
References
Bakker, G., “Science & the Real World”, in The Skeptic, December 2017, Australian Skeptics Inc: Sydney, Australia.
Bakker, G., “More philosophising”, in The Skeptic, June 2018, Australian Skeptics Inc: Sydney, Australia.
Bryce, I., “No contest”, in The Skeptic, December 2018, Australian Skeptics Inc: Sydney, Australia.
Haidt, J., “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment”,Psychological Review, 2001. 108(4): p. 814-834.
Greene, J., The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul, in Moral Psychology, Vol. 3, W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Editor. 2008, MIT Press.
Campbell, R. and V. Kumar, “Moral Reasoning on the Ground”.Ethics, 2012. 122(2): p. 273-312.
Churchland, P.S., Braintrust What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality, 2011, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Christensen, J.F. and A. Gomila, “Moral dilemmas in cognitive neuroscience of moral decision-making: A principled review”, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2012. 36(4): p. 1249-1264.
Berker, S., “The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience”,Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2009. 37(4): p. 293-329.
Yong, E. “The Weak Science Behind the Wrongly Named Moral Molecule”, The Atlantic, 2015.
Conlisk, J., “Professor Zak’s empirical studies on trust and oxytocin”, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2011. 78(1–2): p. 160-166.
Harman, G., The Nature of Morality – An Introduction to Ethics, 1977, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Skloot, R., The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. 2011, New York, USA: Broadway Books.
Joanne Benhamu is a Senior Oncology Research Nurse with a Masters in Bioethics. Her research thesis considers the ethics of informed consent in the light of new scientific developments in medicine. Joanne is also Vice President of Australian Skeptics Inc. Reblogged with permission of the author.
“There is no new thing under the sun” complains ‘the Preacher,’ the great nihilist philosopher of ancient Israel. Certainly, philosophy-bashing is nothing new. The Athenians put Socrates to death, the Alexandrians murdered Hypatia, Jan Patočka died after a long interrogation by the Czech communist secret police. Thankfully in recent years philosophers have gotten off comparatively easily. The hemlock having been quietly shelved, these days we philosophers mostly just have to put up with rockstar astrophysicists (to date: Hawking, Krauss, deGrasse Tyson) and the odd thinkpiece declaring philosophy obsolete, unproductive, or simply ‘dead.’
What’s interesting about these critiques is that they all end up falling obliviously into exactly the same trap. All end up trying to philosophize their way out of doing philosophy, like a drowning person trying to drink his way out of the water. Gary Bakker’s recent article on these pages is a splendidly illustrative example of this genre.
A standard complaint in the anti-philosophy literature is that science progresses and philosophy does not. This complaint takes at least two different forms, both of which are present in Bakker’s piece. The first is that philosophy is simply made redundant by advances in other fields, principally the natural sciences. If physics can tell us why there’s something rather than nothing, so the thinking goes, who cares what Spinoza had to say on the same topic? Why should we care about philosophers’ definitions of ‘nothing,’ ‘cause’ or ‘substance’ when the definitions that scientists use get the job done perfectly well?
To call philosophy an ‘alternative methodology’ to science, as Bakker does, misses the point if it assumes they each apply to the same type of proposition, as if science and philosophy take themselves to be two different ways of testing claims like ‘water boils at 100 degrees celcius at sea level’ and ‘no two numerically distinct entities can share all their properties.’
Bakker’s in fairly esteemed company in buying into this confusion: Stephen Hawking’s claim that physics has superseded philosophy rests on the same mistaken assumption that physics and philosophy were simply alternative, competing methodologies for producing the same type of knowledge about the same thing, both chasing the same goal, and physics won.
You can’t test the boiling point of water philosophically, and you’d be a fool to try. But equally, Leibniz’ principle of the identity of indiscernibles is not an empirical proposition. You won’t determine whether it’s true or not by observation or experiment. Neither are the propositions of logic, or ethics, or aesthetics, or even epistemology. Yet that does not excuse us from having to answer logical, ethical, aesthetic, or epistemic questions.
The second complaint is the even more sweeping one that philosophy doesn’t answer any serious questions we might have. Of course philosophy offers answers to questions all the time; the complaint is, rather, that they don’t stay answered. Bakker argues that my erstwhile Stop the AVN comrade Peter Bowditch, in defending the value of philosophy, fails to provide a single “scrap of empirical evidence – just one example of a problem it had solved.”
But that’s already to invoke a standard of success (empirical evidence) and with it a criterion for measuring philosophy against that standard (the solving of problems) that are not only tendentious in themselves – why would we assume logical, metaphysical, epistemological or ethical problems are solvable in the same way as empirical questions? – they’re a standard and a criterion that could only be defended philosophically.
For a great many of philosophy’s critics, particularly those given to the more naïve forms of scientism, this is a curious and persistent blind spot. They quite rightly defend the scientific method as a knowledge-generating mechanism so unprecedentedly successful that it overrules any and all competing methods – and in a world full of pseudoscience and associated nonsense it’s a very good thing that they do!
But you cannot use the scientific method to investigate the efficacy of the scientific method itself without falling into obvious circularity. Bakker – like a great many philosophers of science before him – appeals here to the fact that science works as a justification for taking the deliverances of the scientific method as being true. I’ve certainly no objection to that. The problem is that ‘what is true is what works’ is not a scientific proposition. It’s a philosophical one, with roots going back to pragmatist philosophers like Charles Peirce and William James.
Like many philosophy denialists, Bakker simply fails to notice that his own position, in this case a position he calls ‘empiricism,’ is itself a philosophical position, and as such can only be evaluated and defended philosophically. In fact, Bakker’s view, as he acknowledges, is really a pragmatist rather than an empiricist one: his “what works, works” is a long way from the sort of scientific realism we usually associate with what he calls ‘Rationalism.’ (It’s also very odd he thinks ‘postmodernists’ – insofar as that’s a descriptively useful term, which it mostly isn’t – dislike pragmatism. Rorty would be spinning in his grave).
That doesn’t mean this ‘Rationalist’ position is wrong. But it’s not, as many philosophically naive commentators seem to assume, simply and obviously right either. Any half-decent epistemologist with an afternoon to kill could drive a truck through any single element of the truth-standard Bakker endorses: “reliable, reproducible, consensual, evidence-based, applicable knowledge.” Can such a standard be defended? Absolutely! How would you do so? There’s only one way, and it rhymes (sort of) with ‘apostrophe.’
Of course, uninterrogated standards, concepts, and assumptions aren’t always a problem. Most of the time scientists simply don’t need to worry about questions of epistemology or metaphysics. They can do science perfectly well without them, and get further that way than if they had to constantly re-litigate questions about the epistemic and ontological basis of what they do. But questions don’t cease to be questions – even important questions – just because we’ve decided to set them aside within a given domain and for a specific purpose. And even the question of which questions are worth pursuing, being a question about value, is ultimately a philosophical one.
Even Bakker’s claim that “all meaningful philosophical problems are actually scientific problems,” quite apart from being false, is itself a philosophical proposition. Perhaps Bakker might have known that had he looked beyond the dictionary definition of positivism to learn why positivism failed in the specific ways it did. If he knew that history, he might have recognized his claim that “we have misused words to ask and answer questions that weren’t there in the first place” comes straight from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.”
Wittgenstein thought the purpose of philosophy is to dissolve such pseudo-problems, to “show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.” Yet as philosophy denialists show time and time again, philosophy is a snare that only gets tighter the more you try to struggle out of it. In claiming science displaces philosophy, Bakker is in fact doing philosophy, not science. In appealing to standards of evidence against which we could judge philosophy, he’s still doing philosophy. In appealing to a (naturalistic?) standard of ‘what works’ in ethics and law he’s absolutely doing philosophy – and falling into a category mistake by trying to smuggle normativity back into a picture he insists is all ‘is’ and no ‘ought.’
That’s the really irritating thing about philosophy: not that the perplexity never ends, but that in the end philosophy itself is simply inescapable. It’s what Bakker’s doing, it’s what I’m doing right now, and it’s what you’re doing right now in assessing these competing arguments. You can do it well, or do it badly; that’s all. And in that sense, we’re indebted to Bakker for unwittingly demonstrating, yet again, the value of philosophy.
Patrick Stokes is senior lecturer in philosophy at Deakin University and a member of Stop the AVN. His most recent book is ‘The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Personal Identity’ (Oxford, 2015). Reblogged with permission of the author.
In the last issue of The Skeptic (December 2017, pages 56-59), Gary Bakker criticises an essay from the previous September issue of The Skeptic by Tim Harding. This essay is headed ‘A Step Too Far’ (pages 32-35), and argues against the relatively recent advent of the ideology known as scientism, which in a nutshell claims that science is the only legitimate domain of objective knowledge. At several points, Tim’s essay cites and quotes an earlier essay by James Fodor in the Australian Rationalist magazine (December 2016, pages 32-35) titled ‘Not So Simple’, which was also criticised by Bakker. That is why we have prepared this joint response to Bakker’s article.
We think that it is incumbent on a critic to understand and come to grips with what one is criticising. A failure to do so is a recipe for misrepresentation of the arguments one is attempting to refute. In this case, Bakker has not only misrepresented many of our positions and arguments, but more fundamentally he has misrepresented the nature of the topics we are arguing about, including science, scientism, rationality and philosophy.
One of Bakker’s major misunderstandings seems to be about philosophy. To characterise philosophy as what happens at amateur ‘Philosophy Cafes’ is disingenuous, highly misleading and frankly absurd. It is like defining psychology as what is discussed in amateur pop psychology or self-help groups. Philosophy is a serious academic discipline which is taught at almost all of the world’s leading universities. The main sub-fields of academic philosophy include logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of science. While logic is of course used by many disciplines including science and mathematics, the study and development of logic itself is actually a branch of philosophy. Until only a few hundred years ago, science was also a branch of philosophy, known as ‘natural philosophy’. Experimental scientific methods were initially developed by the English philosophers Robert Grossteste and Roger Bacon in the 13th century, as explained in an essay by Tim in the June 2016 issue of The Skeptic. Since the branching off of science from philosophy beginning around the 17th century, philosophers have been quite happy to leave empirical observations and experiments to the scientific domain. As such, any competition between philosophy and science exists only in the minds of scientism advocates like Bakker. This imagined competition stems from a lack of understanding of the nature of philosophy. In particular, philosophy of science does not attempt to undermine or replace science, but rather seeks to understand the nature of science and how and why it works as well as it does.
In the present piece, we will critically analyse the arguments made by Bakker in his article. We will begin with an examination of how Bakker has misrepresented our arguments, and failed to understand what we were actually arguing. We will then discuss three key issues raised by Bakker: how moral and ethical questions should be resolved, the justification of science as ‘what works’, and the notion that philosophy has never made any contributions to human knowledge. In each case we argue that not only does Bakker fail to provide convincing reasons for his contention, but also that he faces powerful objections that he fails to address. In discussing each of these specific topics, we also hope to illustrate that the only way Bakker could hope to respond to our objections is by engaging in philosophical argumentation, which would thereby critically undermine his main thesis that such discourse has no value.
Misrepresenting our arguments
Throughout his article, Bakker consistently misstates and misrepresents our arguments. He begins by characterising our writings as exemplary of what he terms ‘small r rationalism’, which according to Bakker entails ‘agreement with Immanuel Kant who argued that knowledge can be innate, can be acquired through pure reasoning, and that philosophical enquiry and argument alone can answer the Big Questions’. This entire concept is a red herring since neither of us is a Kantian, nor are we defending a rationalist as distinct from empiricist approach in our writings. Furthermore, it is logically invalid to infer our wider philosophical positions from two specific essays we have written about narrow topics. In particular, any attempt to characterise us as anti-empiricists is a bit rich given our backgrounds in science and skepticism. This ‘small r rationalism’ is contrasted with ‘capital r Rationalism’, which Bakker says is defined by the Rationalist Society of Australia as holding that ‘knowledge is best acquired by use of the scientific method, which is an inseparable combination of reason plus observation or experiment’. However, Bakker does not provide any reference for his definition of ‘Rationalism’, and we cannot find his quoted definition on the Rationalist Society of Australia website. It remains unclear, therefore, where Bakker’s concepts of rationalism (small or capital ‘r’) have come from.
Later in his piece, Bakker castigates James for his critique of ‘crude positivism’, which Bakker says ‘sounds like a straw man’, and asks ‘why not critique “refined positivism”?’. In his original article, however, James explained that the reason he discusses ‘crude positivism’ is because he wanted to address the ‘patchwork of overlapping ideas and perspectives’ that in his experience seemed quite prominent in rationalist/skeptic/freethought communities. Neither of us criticised ‘positivism’ as such in our essays – another red herring on Bakker’s part. A response to more sophisticated philosophical accounts of positivism would require much more space than available for James’ short article, and furthermore such accounts have already been written elsewhere. All this should have been clear enough after a careful reading of our essays, where we both outline clearly what James means by the term ‘crude positivism’. Consulting ‘Mr Google’ is no substitute for carefully reading the argument one intends to respond to.
James also does not say that scientism claims that ‘the humanities should adopt the scientific method’, and even though this appears in quotes in Bakker’s piece, this phrase is not present in either Tim’s essay or James original essay. So this is an actual misquotation by Bakker – even worse than a misrepresentation. The closest statement to it was one by Prof. Tom Sorrell who was cited on page 33 of Tim’s essay using different words, albeit with a similar meaning. Rather, what James in fact argued is that ‘if the superior status of the natural sciences is based on their superior adherence to a particular set of epistemological principles, then it is those principles themselves that are the true bearer of the superior status… applying these same principles to any disciple should yield knowledge justified to similarly rigorous standards.’ James’ point here was simply that the principles of sound inquiry are broadly applicable across all disciplines. Thomas Huxley expressed this idea well: ‘the man of science simply uses with scrupulous exactness the methods which we all, habitually and at every minute, use carelessly’.
Finally, Tim does not equate ‘science’ with ‘the natural sciences’ in his essay. This comment by Bakker appears to be a misunderstanding of a statement by Prof. Tom Sorrell that Tim cites on page 33.
Bakker on ethics
Bakker attempts to give an account as to how ‘moral and ethical questions’ can be answered without recourse to philosophical argumentation. He argues that we should resolve these questions by the following procedure:
Realise that moral questions are not ‘answerable by reference to some absolute, transcendent set of rules’.
Instead, focus on what principles and laws ‘best achieve society’s goals’.
Engage in systematic observation of ‘what human beings are actually found to value’ (as individuals and as groups).
Determine (empirically) which codes of law, ethics, and mores will work best to achieve these goals, and implement those.
The first point appears to constitute an endorsement of moral anti-realism, the position that there are no objectively existing moral states of affairs. This is a philosophical position that stands in contrast to many forms of moral realism, which affirm the existence of objective moral facts while differing on the form that such moral facts take. Bakker not only fails to notice that he is making a philosophical claim, but also offers no reason at all to accept his assertion. His second point appears to be an endorsement of some form of cultural relativism, the view that what is good or moral is dependent upon the goals and standards of a particular culture. Later though Bakker also mentions ‘the goals… of humanity’, so he may not be a cultural relativist, but providing an account of what it could mean for ‘humanity’ to have goals, let alone what such goals might be, is not even attempted. Either way, these are philosophical positions that require defence, and cannot simply be asserted without argument.
Aside from the lack of substantive arguments for his position, several critical objections can be raised against his views. For example, in cases of genocide or slavery, societies have determined that their goals are best met by engaging in actions we would regard as immoral. On what basis, in Bakker’s account, can we say that they are morally wrong in doing so? Bakker’s account also renders apparently very important questions about what goals we ought to have as unintelligible, since on his view this would trivially amount to asking whether having a certain goal would help us to achieve that goal. Perhaps Bakker’s account can be rescued by developing sufficiently rich concepts about what is meant by a ‘goal’, how competing goals within a group are integrated, what kinds of goals are most pertinent, etc. All of the extra conceptual work and articulation of distinctions and giving of reasons for one’s positions, however, is precisely what one does in doing philosophy. The poverty of Bakker’s ‘solution’ to the problems posed by morality and ethics points clearly and directly for exactly why we need philosophy.
In response to Bakker’s third point, even the notion of determining empirically what people actually value is not the straightforward scientific exercise Bakker implies it to be. It sounds like he is advocating some sort of populist opinion poll or focus group approach to ethical questions. Whilst these might provide opinions about particular ethical issues, they are unlikely to result in more generalised frameworks or principles that can be applied to other ethical issues. Anybody who has seriously studied ethics will be aware that some ethical problems can be very complex, and not conducive to solving by public opinion surveys.
Science and pragmatism
Bakker defines science with prime reference to ‘what works’, arguing that ‘[science] is a method of inquiry, and it is the only one we have found so far that gives us reliable, reproducible, consensual, evidence-backed, applicable knowledge, in any “field of inquiry”. In fact, this is so almost by definition. If a process – a particular method – works, we include it in the scientific method’. In our earlier essays we raised the objection that this is an insufficient basis for defending the superiority of science, since some scientific theories that ‘worked’ and were ‘useful’ nevertheless have been shown to be incorrect. Bakker responds that this is not a reason for doubting pragmatic justifications of the superiority of science, since no disciple outside of science can do any better. As he says: ‘no other method has ever shown a scientifically-derived explanation that works to be wrong’.
The problem with this response is that it ignores most of James’ argument. In his argument he explained that there are two main ways of understanding the goal of science. One view, realism, holds that science attempts to arrive at accurate (albeit usually approximate) descriptions of the way reality actually is. If this is a key goal of science, then obviously there is more to good science than just being ‘useful’, as demonstrated by the fact that many useful scientific theories have nevertheless turned out not to accurately describe reality. Bakker, however, doesn’t seem to be persuaded by this, so perhaps he is an instrumentalist. Instrumentalism holds that science does not attempt to tell us about the way the world really is, but merely to deliver useful models and descriptions that make predictions and/or serve practical ends. Like other advocates of scientism, however, Bakker has also claimed that ‘all meaningful philosophical problems are actually scientific problems’. This seems to pose a problem since a great many philosophical problems relate to claims about the way the world is, while under instrumentalism science has nothing to say about the way the world actually is beyond providing useful models. Thus, if scientific instrumentalism is correct it seems that philosophical problems cannot be scientific questions. The only way to reconcile these views would be to assert that all philosophical questions relating to how the world actually is, are in fact ‘meaningless’. Yet this would entail that even questions like ‘is slavery morally wrong?’ or ‘does God exist?’ or ‘what is knowledge?’ are actually meaningless. Even if one is dubious about whether philosophy has provided useful answers to such questions, it is quite something else to assert that the questions themselves are meaningless. To us this is clearly absurd – such questions may be subtle and multifaceted, but are not ‘meaningless’. As such it seems that Bakker is caught in a bind – either he must embrace scientific realism and thereby abandon his purely pragmatic conception of science as ‘what works’, or else he must instead embrace scientific instrumentalism and thereby (given his other views) hold that all philosophical questions are meaningless.
The other aspect of James’ argument about the status of science that Bakker ignores is the fact that appealing to ‘what works’ is a far too amorphous and generous criterion to grant science the superior status Bakker wants for it. This is because many other fields of inquiry and human endeavour also ‘work’. For example, one goal shared by many people and societies throughout history is to understand their purpose in living and find meaning in life. For the large majority of such people, belief in a supernatural being or spiritual agencies beyond this material world has ‘worked’ to provide them with answers that they find compelling and meaningful. We could even point to a variety of psychological studies indicating that such spiritual beliefs and practises actually do lead to better outcomes along a range of metrics of interest, such as life satisfaction, physical and mental health. Yet we would not wish to thereby grant supernatural belief the status of being a science, no matter how well it has ‘worked’ for many people over human history. Perhaps, however, we are not to understand what ‘works’ in this case as referring to achieving social or personal goals (though Bakker does use the term this way in his discussion of morality), but rather as to being uniquely able to generate ‘reliable, reproducible, consensual, evidence-backed, applicable knowledge’. In this case, however, the criterion still clearly fails, since (as Bakker himself seems to acknowledge), history, social science, detective work, jurisprudence, and other fields can also deliver this sort of knowledge. So it remains unclear what exactly is supposed to place science in the uniquely privileged position that Bakker attempts to carve out for it.
Philosophy and knowledge
One of Bakker’s primary concerns in his article seems to be in arguing that ‘philosophy… as a truth-seeker… has been a dismal failure’. The only reason he gives for believing this, however, is that ‘in 3000 years it has confirmed for us not one answer to any of the Big Questions’. We interpret this to mean that philosophers have not been able to agree upon an answer to any of the Big Questions. This, however, seems to be a completely misplaced criterion. To say that philosophers have not yet agreed upon a final answer to any of the ‘Big Questions’ is simply to say that philosophy is not yet complete. This is hardly unusual in academia – theoretical physicists also admit that their work is incomplete. It does not follow that philosophers have not produced any useful knowledge or insights pertinent to the ‘Big Questions’. Bakker seems to think that philosophical knowledge is all or none – either a question has an established, agreed upon answer, or it does not. Philosophy, however, attempts (among other things) to explore and articulate key concepts that underpin human thought, such as ‘causation’, ‘time’, ‘space’, ‘mind’, ‘rationality’, ‘knowledge’, ‘good’, and ‘meaning’. This process of conceptual exploration and refinement is not all or none, but a gradual accumulation of new arguments, models, comparisons, and analytical frameworks, of that sort that can be found in any introductory philosophical textbook or handbook.
Another aspect that Bakker overlooks is that once a widely agreed upon answer or framework for thinking about one particular question is arrived upon, the field ceases to be regarded as philosophy and becomes an established science. As we mentioned earlier, modern physics was originally called ‘natural philosophy’, and most of the other fields of natural and social science likewise branched off from philosophy at various times. This was not simply because researchers decided to use ‘the scientific method’, but was in part the result of conceptual refinements and theoretical developments (as well as technological advances) that allowed the discipline to reach maturity as a science. We note that much of the subject matter of philosophy of mind is currently in the process of being transformed into the purview of the emerging field of cognitive science. Thus, the only way Bakker can argue that philosophy has been ‘a dismal failure’ as a truth seeker is first, by ignoring all of the important historical contributions that philosophers and philosophical reasoning has made in providing the foundation for modern scientific disciplines, and secondly by imposing an implausibly rigid and simplistic criterion for what philosophical knowledge should look like.
Finally, Bakker ignores the many demonstrable contributions that philosophy has made to increasing human knowledge and wellbeing, of which we will now give a few examples. Our first example is that of Galileo, who drew his conclusions about falling objects using logic and reason rather than experience or observation. On page 58 Bakker draws a distinction between reason and logic, yet he seems unaware that reason is the application of logic, which is a sub-field of philosophy rather than science. How on Earth could Galileo have experienced objects falling in a vacuum? Our second example is that of the democratic principles and safeguards embodied in the United States Constitution, which were significantly influenced by political philosophers such as William Blackstone, John Locke, and Montesquieu. Science had nothing to do with it. Our third example is the work of a number of philosophers, logicians, and mathematicians such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Gödel, and Alan Turing, who developed the foundations of logic and computer science that underpinned the development of modern digital computers. Our final example is the development of the ethical principles of informed patient consent, which were developed by judges and bioethicists. Prior to this, there were some notorious cases in the first half of the twentieth century where informed patient consent had not been obtained for certain clinical trials. We argue that informed patient consent is primarily obtained for legal or ethical reasons, and not for purely scientific purposes. We could supply further examples of the practical usefulness of philosophy, but space in this magazine is understandably limited.
Concluding remarks
Bakker’s article exemplifies the pitfalls of crude positivism and the folly of scientism. There seems to be an inverse correlation in such writings between the disdainful dismissal of non-scientific disciplines like philosophy and the level of understanding of what philosophy actually is. In particular, the fundamental flaw of Bakker’s argument is that, in arguing for the unique superiority of science and the uselessness of philosophy as a field of inquiry, Bakker is himself doing philosophy. Because of his rejection of the value of philosophy and refusal to engage with relevant philosophical literature, however, he also does it very badly. Philosophy addresses many of the most fundamental questions that underpin all aspects of human endeavour, including law, politics, ethics – and even science. It is therefore not something we can simply avoid doing or pretend doesn’t exist. It can often be difficult and even frustrating when agreement and final resolution is often so hard to achieve. Nevertheless, we believe that as intellectually responsible skeptics it is vital to take philosophical issues seriously, and reject the easy but misguided notion of ‘crude positivism’ that science is the only form of human inquiry worth taking seriously.
Peter Bowditch holds a BA (Macquarie 1988), majoring in Cognitive Psychology, with other work in the areas of statistics, experimental design, psychological testing, linguistics, philosophy of science and epistemology. He is a past president of the Australian Skeptics Inc.
Over at Scientific American, Lawrence Krauss has written an apology for dismissing the importance of philosophy, as he seemed to do in his interview in The Atlantic. Apparently set aright by Dan Dennett, and reminded of confrères like Anthony Grayling and Peter Singer, Krauss admits that philosophy has some value after all, though not so much when it comes to guiding the progress of physics. He then clarifies what he meant by the “nothing” in “the universe from nothing”—a better explanation than, as I recall, he proffers in his book.
Krauss’s apology becomes a bit of a notapology in the last paragraph, though:
So, to those philosophers I may have unjustly offended by seemingly blanket statements about the field, I apologize. I value your intelligent conversation and the insights of anyone who thinks carefully about our universe and who is willing to guide their thinking based on the…
Philosophy can seem a daunting subject in which to dabble. But there are many wonderful books on philosophy that tackle big ideas without requiring a PhD to digest.
Here are some top picks for summer reading material from philosophers across Australia.
Shame and Necessity
by Bernard Williams
After a year of Brexit, the return of Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump, many of us are wondering about the state of our public culture. Are we undergoing some kind of seismic cultural and moral shift in the way we live?
However, the ancient Greeks would have been familiar with these phenomena for all kinds of reasons. They understood how anger, resentment and revenge shape politics. And they had some pretty interesting ways of dealing with outbreaks of populist rage and constitutional crises. Our language is still littered with them: think “ostracism”, “dictatorship” and “oligarchy” (let alone “democracy”).
So, this year, amongst all the noise, I found myself driven back to the Greeks, and especially to some of the ideas that pre-date the great philosophical titans of Plato and Aristotle.
Bernard Williams was one of our most brilliant philosophers, and Shame and Necessity is one of his best books. Stunningly – just given how good this book is, and how deep it goes into the classical mind – he didn’t consider himself a classicist, but rather a philosopher who happened to have benefited from a very good classical education. As a result, he is a delightful guide across the often rugged philosophical, historical and interpretive terrain of pre-Socratic thought.
It might seem daunting at first, but the book is an elegant, searching essay on the ways in which we are now, in so many ways, in a situation more like the ancient Greeks then we realise. But it’s not a plea for a return to some golden age. Far from it. Instead, it challenges some of our most fundamental conceptions of self, responsibility, freedom and community, inviting us to think them afresh.
The heroes of his tale are, interestingly enough, not the philosophers, but the tragedians and poets, who remind us of the complexity, contingency and fragility of our ideas of the good. Although almost 10 years old, it’s a book that gets more interesting the more often you return to it. It’s never been more relevant, or more enjoyable, than now.
Duncan Ivison, University of Sydney
The Philosophy Book
by Will Buckingham
Remember when the Guinness Book of World Records was the best gift ever for the little (or grown-up) thinker in your family? Well, if you’ve been there, done that for a few Christmases in a row and are in need of an exciting, innovative gift idea, try DK’s big yellow book of intellectual fun: The Philosophy Book.
With contributions from a bunch of UK academics, this A4 sized tome is decorated with fun illustrations and great quotes from the world’s best philosophical thinkers.
The structure of the book is historical, with between one to four pages allocated to the “big ideas” from ancient times all the way up to contemporary thought. It is accompanied by a neat glossary and directory: a who’s who of thought-makers.
The focus is on the traditional Western approach to philosophy, although some Eastern thinkers are included. Each historical section – Ancient (700-250 BCE); Medieval (250-1500); The Renaissance (1500-1750); Revolution (1750-1900); Modern (1900-1950); and Contemporary (1950-present) – is divided into classical philosophical ideas from that time period.
There are 107(!) in total, including Socrates’ “The life which is unexamined is not worth living”, Rene Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”, Thomas Hobbes’ “Man is a Machine”, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “The limits of my language are the limits of my world”, and even Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of Marx, just to name a few.
The reader can trace the history and development of philosophical thought throughout the ages, in the context of what else was occurring at that time in the world.
This gift would be suitable for ages 12+ as it is written in ordinary, accessible language. But, be warned… after reading this, your Boxing Day is likely to be filled with questions such as, “what is truth?”, “how can we think like a mountain?”, “can knowledge be bought and sold?”, and “how did the universe begin?”
Laura D’Olimpio, The University of Notre Dame Australia
50 Philosophy ideas you really need to know
by Ben Dupré
Obviously there are a lot more than 50 Philosophical Ideas we really need to know, as this book is a part of a great series of small hardback books that cover most of the great thoughts ever thunk.
Dupré has a lot of fun in these 200 pages, with 50 short essays written on a variety of classical philosophical ideas, including the important thought experiments such as brain in a vat, Plato’s cave, the ship of Theseus, the prisoner’s dilemma and many more.
The book’s blurb asks:
Have you ever lain awake at night fretting over how we can be sure of the reality of the external world? Perhaps we are in fact disembodied brains, floating in vats at the whim of some deranged puppet-master?
It is to philosophy that we turn, if not for definite answers to such mysteries, but certainly for multiple responses to these puzzles. The 50 essays in this volume cover things like the problems of knowledge, the philosophy of mind, ethics and animal rights, logic and meaning, science, aesthetics, religion, politics and justice.
There is a nifty timeline running along the footer and inspired quotes by which the reader can link the main ideas, their original thinkers, and the time at which they were writing.
This book would make a great gift for teachers, students and anyone interested in some of the big eternal questions. I would recommend it for ages 12+ given its clear writing style that illuminates and contextualises some of the most important ideas in philosophy.
Laura D’Olimpio, The University of Notre Dame Australia
On Bullshit
by Harry G Frankfurt
When someone asks you “where do I start with philosophy?”, it’s tempting to point them to a book that gives an overview of the history, key figures and problems of the discipline.
But what about someone who doesn’t even want to go that far? Not everyone’s prepared to slog their way through Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy like my optometrist once did; every time I’d go in for new glasses he’d give me an update on where he was up to. And even if they’re prepared to put in the effort, some readers might come away from such a book not really seeing the value in philosophy beyond its historical interest. It’s easy to get lost in a fog of Greek names and -isms until you can’t see the forest for the trees.
So there’s one book I recommend to everyone even if they have no interest in philosophy whatsoever: Harry Frankfurt’s classic 1986 essay “On Bullshit”, published as a book in 2005. It’s only a few pages long so you can knock it over in a couple of train trips, and it’s a great example of philosophy in action.
Frankfurt starts with the arresting claim that:
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.
In the best tradition of the discipline, Frankfurt takes something we don’t even typically notice and brings it into the light so we can see just how pervasive, strange and important it is.
Bullshit, Frankfurt argues, is not simply lying. It’s worse than that. In order to lie, you first have to know the truth (or think you do), and you have to care about the truth enough to cover it up. To that extent at least the liar still maintains a relationship to the truth.
The bullshitter, by contrast, doesn’t care about the truth at all. They just want you to believe what they say. What they tell you could even be true, for all they care, it doesn’t matter, so long as you buy it.
The lying/bullshit distinction is a remarkably useful analytic tool. Be warned, though: once you have it, you’ll be seeing it everywhere.
Patrick Stokes, Deakin University
The Guardians in Action: Plato the Teacher
by William H F Altman
Plato’s dialogues were conceived by their author as a consummate, step-by-step training in philosophy, starting with the most basic beginners. Such is the orienting claim of The Guardians in Action, the second of a projected three volumes in American scholar William Altman’s continuing contemporary exploration of Plato as a teacher.
Altman, for many years a high school teacher trained in the classical languages and philosophy, has devoted his retirement from the classroom to an extraordinary attempt to reread or reteach the Platonic dialogues as a sequential pedagogical program.
The program begins with Socrates walking into the Hades-like den of sophists in the Protagoras. In the middle, the heart and high point of the 36 texts, stands the Republic, the subject of Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic of 2012 (Volume 1).
Here, the education of the philosopher-“guardians” who will rule in the best city, having seen the true Idea of the Good, is timelessly laid out. The true philosopher, as Altman’s Plato conceived him, must “go back down” into the city to educate his fellows, even though he has seen the Transcendent End of his inquiries.
The Republic itself begins emblematically, with Socrates “going back down” to the Piraeus to talk with his friends. As Altman sees things, the entire Platonic oeuvre ends with Socrates going back down into Athens, staying there to die in a cavelike prison for the sake of philosophy in the Phaedo.
Who then did Plato want for his guardians, on Altman’s reading? We his readers –like the first generation of students in the Academy whom Altman pictures being taught by Plato through the syllabus of the dialogues.
This is an extraordinarily learned book, maybe not for the complete beginner. You need to have spent a lifetime with a thinker to write books like this (with the finale, The Guardians on Trial set to come).
But it is everywhere lightened by Altman’s style, and the warm affection for Plato and for the business of teaching that radiates from every page. So it is most certainly a book for anyone who loves or has ever wondered about Plato, still the original and arguably the best introduction to philosophy.
Matt Sharpe, Deakin
Philosophy as a Way of Life
by Pierre Hadot
This book is a collection of essays by the late French philosopher and philologist Pierre Hadot. After 1970, via his studies of classical literature, Hadot became convinced that the ancients conceived of philosophy very differently than we do today.
It was, for them, primarily about educating and forming students, as well as framing arguments and writing books. Its goal was not knowledge alone but wisdom, a knowledge about how to live that translated into transformed ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, mediated by what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises” like the premeditation of evils and death, and the contemplation of natural beauty.
The ideal was the sage, someone whose way of living was characterised by inner freedom, tranquillity, moral conscience and a constant sense of his own small place in the larger, ordered world.
Hadot spent much of the last decades of his life exploring this idea in studies of ancient philosophy, particularly that of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. He wrote long books in this light on Marcus Aurelius (The Inner Citadel) and the German poet Goethe, both of whom feature prominently in the essays in Philosophy as a Way of Life, Hadot’s most popular introductory book. Hadot’s writing is simple and graceful, and has been beautifully preserved in Michael Chase’s translations for English readers.
I’ll let Hadot himself describe his intentions, in a passage which gives a sense of the spirit that breathes through the larger original:
Vauvenargues said, “A truly new and truly original book would be one which made people love old truths.” It is my hope that I have been “truly new and truly original” in this sense, since my goal has indeed been to make people love a few old truths […] there are some truths whose meaning will never be exhausted by the generations of man. It is not that they are difficult; on the contrary, they are often extremely simple. Often, they even appear to be banal. Yet for their meaning to be understood, these truths must be lived, and constantly re-experienced. Each generation must take up, from scratch, the task of learning to read and to re-read these “old truths”.
One of the interesting questions we face as philosophers who are attempting to make philosophical ideas accessible for a general audience, is whether or not everyone can or should ‘do philosophy’.
Some philosophers wish to leave philosophy in the academy or university setting. Whereas others claim the downfall of modern philosophy came in the late 19th century when the subject was institutionalized within the research university setting. By condemning philosophy as only appropriate as a serious subject of study, philosophers have lost much widespread support and public recognition for its value.
Philosophers working in the public arena, such as those contributing to The Conversation and Cogito Philosophy Blog will defend the argument in favour of ‘philosophy for everyone’.
Bertrand Russell’s ‘Philosophy for Laymen’
In 1946 Bertrand Russell wrote an essay entitled Philosophy for Laymen, in which he defends the view that philosophy should be ‘a part of general education’. He proposes that,
even in the time that can easily be spared without injury to the learning of technical skills, philosophy can give certain things that will greatly increase the student’s value as a human being and as a citizen.
Russell revives an ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life in insisting that questions of cosmic meaning and value have an existential, ethical and spiritual urgency. (Of course, what we might mean by such terms is another issue for philosophers to grapple with.)
We see here the idea of philosophy as a praxis; something that we do, and a way of thinking that is beneficial for every rational human being. As Russell puts it,
To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues. For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy.
Russell believes that philosophy can be taught to ‘laymen’ readers which will assist them to think more objectively about emotive issues. Carlisle concedes that this is easier to do when one is not faced with a stressful moral dilemma or the burden of making a quick decision while in an emotional state.
Yet, the idea is that we practice the habit of philosophical thinking, and that we get better at it.
Philosophy with young people
I recently attended the 2016 Federation of Australasian Philosophy in Schools Associations (FAPSA) Conference in Wellington, New Zealand and was struck by the conversation surrounding the idea of what kind(s) of philosophy should be taught to everyone, and particularly to young people.
The presenters and attendees at this conference are all committed to offering philosophy as a subject to school aged children, from ages 3 to 17. I have previously written about Philosophy for Children (P4C) and the benefits of teaching philosophy to young people.
Namely, P4C offers students the chance to learn and practice not just critical thinking skills, but also caring, collaborative and creative thinking skills. It does this using the Community of Inquiry (CoI) pedagogy favoured by P4C practitioners. The CoI involves students engaging in dialogue with one another in an inclusive and democratic manner. Such dialogue is facilitated by their teachers using age appropriate philosophical texts and stimulus materials in the classroom.
But should every student study ‘all’ philosophy?
One of the papers given at the FAPSA Conference, presented by Michael Hand from the University of Birmingham argued that, well, perhaps not. Hand says,
Not only in philosophy, but in all branches of academic study there is a distinction between what has cultural value and what is only of professional interest.
It must be noted that Hand defends the teaching of philosophy to young people and also to offering it as an option for school aged students. He notes that it is ‘easy’ to defend the inclusion of Philosophy as an option on the curriculum because,
like other academic subjects, it is an intrinsically worthwhile activity
like other academic subjects, it is instrumentally valuable in cultivating intellectual virtues and improving the quality of thinking
Yet, when asked whether we can defend the inclusion of philosophy as a compulsory subject within the curriculum, we would need to prove that it offers every student a distinct benefit that they would not otherwise get.
The distinct benefit gained by studying philosophy
Note that Carrie Winstanley does defend such a claim. She, in a book co-edited with Hand, claims that even if other subjects also teach critical thinking skills, philosophy is the best subject to teach students critical thinking skills, precisely because critical thinking is the essence of philosophy.
Philosophy is the best possible subject for helping children to become effective critical thinkers. It is the subject that can teach them better than any other how to assess reasons, defend positions, define terms, evaluate sources of information, and judge the value of arguments and evidence.
Yet if other subjects also teach critical thinking skills to students, why should we make room in a crowded curriculum for philosophy?
Hand considers this point and suggests that what would be uniquely beneficial for students would be to study moral and political philosophy. He tells us that,
Moral and political philosophy do not, of course, tell us the best way to live. But they do enable us to think more deeply and rigorously about the choices we make and the goals we pursue. And they do justify certain moral and political constraints within which we must make our choices and pursue our goals.
Hand concludes that,
moral and political philosophy confers on those who study it the distinctive benefit of being able to think intelligently about how they will live and the moral and political constraints on their conduct… [and] everyone has a strong interest in this benefit because everyone faces the problem of how to live and the responsibility of complying with moral and political constraints.
This results in an argument in favour of teaching moral and political philosophy as a compulsory subject in schools, even if other areas of philosophy (aesthetics, formal logic, epistemology, and ontology) are additional or optional extras.
Philosophy for everyone
When it comes to who should be doing philosophy, I believe that everyone can ‘have a go’ as reasonable citizens who reflect on the meaning they make of their lives. Yes, philosophy is best suited to the university setting in which experts are trained. Yes, philosophy can be done with children in classrooms. And yes, surely philosophy is something everyone can and should do, albeit at differing levels of competence.
But I am also sympathetic to Hand’s focus on moral philosophy, and ethics in particular. When speaking about ethics, philosophers regain their foothold in the public arena in which they can demonstrate how careful thinking skills can be usefully applied to difficult and complex scenarios.
Sure, there is not ‘one perfect answer’ to these moral dilemmas, but, critical, caring, creative and collaborative thinking skills are valuable in ruling out the worst answers. Such philosophical thinking skills also help guide decision makers towards better policies, public understanding, and widespread engagement with issues that affect people’s lives.
To extend philosophical dialogue into schools and public spaces is to engage and encourage careful consideration of fundamentally important ‘big’ questions that have always occupied human thought. And centrally, these days, those questions are moral and political, as these effect our individual autonomy and our collective humanity.
The Logical Place 