Analytic Philosophy Gets Dumber
Well this is just great. I just came across this, so I'm not going to say much about it right now. But any semi-competent grad student in philosophy should be able to explain what's wrong with this IF they're really doing what it sounds like they're doing.
Extra special bad news: UNC seems to have hired one of these guys. Sigh. Don't get me started.
Well this is just great. I just came across this, so I'm not going to say much about it right now. But any semi-competent grad student in philosophy should be able to explain what's wrong with this IF they're really doing what it sounds like they're doing.
Extra special bad news: UNC seems to have hired one of these guys. Sigh. Don't get me started.
posted by Winston Smith at
8:58 PM
10 Comments:
I could be totally missing the point, but how is this philosophy? I mean, it looks interesting from a sociological perspective, but I don't see how one makes the leap from "most people think X" to "X is the case." Especially where "X" is some flavor of metaphysical idea-cluster.
These people seem to be confusing "philosophy" with "economics".
The problem here is the experimentalists' ignorance of the tradition, not their opponents' ignorance of what 'the many' think.
Traditional philosophers have argued that Bill shouldn't be blamed in both cases because it's common sense that moral responsibility requires free will. But, in fact, the first x-phi group did blame Bill in the scenario in which he welcomed Frank's death.
How about that. Ordinary people think that whether an action is voluntary (and therefore liable to praise or blame) depends in part on whether the agent was happy about what happened, independently of whether s/he could be said to have done it freely. And yet traditional philosophers have entirely ignored this aspect of common sense!
For an action to be called involuntary in respect of ignorance [of particular circumstances] it must be painful to the agent and cause repentance.
Marginal philosophical maverick Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III, 1119a19-21
Well that's great. Next time you're considering a problem in ethics, you can just put up a voting box in the sidebar of this blog, and the job's done.
Chris
Yeah, well, I'm way with you (Mike, Chris, ascetic s.) on this. I got nothing by way of defending 'em.
Well, the charitable interpretation of what they're doing--based on my extensive reading of the four or so paragraphs in this story--is this: they're not trying to settle any substantive philosophical problems, rather they're just trying to establish what "common sense" is re: the relevant questions. So it's more like establishing the starting points than it is like discovering the answer.
That's not going to get them entirely off the hook...but it at least makes the project non-crazy.
Listen Doyle, who is this "Aristotle" guy and what does he know about philosophy?
Actually, though I disagree with the Philosopher on this point, his being right is consistent with these experimentalists being wrong (about method). A's trying to tell us what the right answer is, where as the experimentalists had better be trying to tell us what common sense is, not what the right answer is.
The relationship between these two things is, obviously, complicated.
Winston: quite so. I'm not endorsing the experimentalists' methods (far from it). I'm saying that even if there were no problems with their methods, they're representing as a radical correction to the conventional philosophical wisdom something that Aristotle explicitly acknowledged about 2,350 years ago, not only as entailed by how people usually talk about voluntariness, but as true.
Duh. Got it. Excellent point.
As a semi-competent grad student in philosophy, this article makes me want to throttle Jon Lackman, not that I know him or hope to. How this man considered himself qualified to write about philosophy is beyond me, considering the fundamental ignorance of the field he displays. I'm, like most of the commentors here, left wondering how asking a focus group questions is supposed to provide philosophically significant arguments, let alone statistically significant answers to those questions. But this writer for slate is such a... fool that I'm left to hope maybe he did as bad a job describing "x-phi" as he did the rest of philosophy, and that the sub-field isn't as anti-philosophical a practice as it seems. On the other hand, Lackman's references to forcing philosophy to meet empirical standards suggests this is related to the efforts of certain analytics to merge philosophy and science, which to me is like trying to force sculpture to become a form of engineering.
I think of this as a bad joke, even though I think a lot of philosophers do make factual claims without bothering to check the facts.
Actually, I'm all for the merging of philosophy and science -- or better, the recognition of the continuity between what is called philosophy and what is called science. In my old fashioned way, I still think of science as natural philosophy, and I still think the rise of experimental philosophy in the 17th century was a revolution in matters epistemic.
A cop arrests a well-known mass murderer. Unfortunately, the mass murderer used to include other murderers among his victims.
So now, although the total number of murders has stayed the same or even decreased, the cop is blamed for the murders committed by the unmurdered murderers.
X-phi happens all the time. It's the new way of thinking. I've gotten used to it.
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