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Why is this philosophy?

April 11, 2015

By Roberta Millstein

Most philosophers of science have been on the receiving end of this question at one time or another. A friend of mine recently called it a type of hate speech. I think my friend was joking. But maybe not. Philosophers of science struggle to get into grad programs, to obtain jobs, to earn promotion and tenure, to be perceived as "central" and important figures in the field, all because their work is not seen as philosophical. So, while it may not be hate speech, it is speech that does genuine harm.

This isn't a new issue and it's one that others have touched before. But a number of recent events have brought the issue to mind for me and emphasized the importance of continuing to discuss it. One in particular was a conversation with a colleague whose opinion I value and whose good faith I have utter confidence in. And yet this colleague had doubts about an essay being philosophical even as I could see that it fell squarely within the domain of philosophy of science. The colleague was willing to take my word for it, but the fact that such a well meaning person had doubts really brought home to me the fact that this is (at least in some case) simply a lack of awareness about philosophy of science. Thus this post. I can't hope to fully convince anyone in a blog post length entry, but I can at least point to some of the other events that have got me thinking about this topic again.

The second event was the excellent essay "Philosophical Enough" by Subrena Smith, a recent Featured Philosop-her. Smith rightly points out:

I think that it's difficult to find philosophers who believe that their work does not have some empirical features. Philosophers are interested in the world, and as such I think that the sorts of questions and claims that they make are, for the most part, about the world—including unobservable, but postulated, features of the world. Claims about consciousness are empirical. Claims about the metaphysics of gender are empirical, and so are claims about the nature of moral judgment. Philosophers like myself go to biology and psychology because we believe that the methods used in those domains often enough provide us with explanatory resources which help us to adjudicate the philosophical issues. We do not worship at the altar of science; we embrace those methods that stand the best chance of being knowledge-producing.

If I do no more than point my readers to her essay and persuade them to read it, I will consider my own blog post a success.

The third event was an illustration of Smith's point – a series of "regular" philosophy talks that invoked, variously, human nature and adaptationist assumptions, game theory, and claims about the use of vague concepts in science. These references were only recent, not unusual; I have heard "regular" philosophy talks appeal to specific claims about science or general claims about the nature of science on many occasions. The thing was, however, that the talks were taking these claims for granted and not arguing for them. That's OK, of course; we all take certain assumptions for granted in order to move forward with the issues that we are really seeking to discuss. But those very assumptions are ones that philosophers of science debate. So, non-philosophers of science ought to be quite interested in these debates in philosophy of science, even when they involve getting their hands dirty in the nitty-gritty of science, and recognize that they are one of a piece with the subjects that they are interested in. (And, as a side note, they should recognize that such references call into question the notion that any area of philosophy is more central than another).

The final event was my attendance at the APA Pacific in Vancouver, where I saw two engaging "author meets critics" sessions whose books show very clearly the relevance of philosophy of science to the rest of philosophy: Justin Garson, The Biological Mind: A Philosophical Introduction and James Tabery, Beyond Versus: The Struggle to Understand the Interaction of Nature and Nurture. The former explicitly seeks to use the philosophy of biology to shed light on topics in the philosophy of mind, while the latter delves into an issue that is commonly appealed to by philosophers, showing just how complex debates over human nature can be. I have read one and not the other, but based on what I heard, both are worth a look from interested parties.

Surely our view cannot be that philosophers can only invoke views about the world from their armchair. That doesn't seem to me to be, well, very philosophical.

Posted in Improving the philosophy profession, Philosophy of Science, Roberta Millstein, Science

27 responses to “Why is this philosophy?”

Alan White

April 11, 2015

Roberta, in a related context on Daily Nous I commented on how complaints about philosophers by some physicists seem really out of place, and I think I echoes your own sentiments here:
http://dailynous.com/2015/04/10/defending-philosophy-against-the-physicists/#comment-59203
Thanks for this.

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Roberta L. Millstein

April 12, 2015

Thanks, Alan. I think you’re arguing a similar point but from the other direction — I’m suggesting that philosophers can, should, and do get their hands dirty in science, whereas I think you’re suggesting that scientists can, should, and do mix it up philosophically. Agreed! And yes, they try to meet in the middle, so much so that in the middle that the lines between the two become a bit blurry, which is all to the good in my opinion. I think we should encourage productive exchanges between scientists and philosophers.

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Anonymous Philosopher

April 12, 2015

Thanks for these interesting remarks and for linking to Smith’s fascinating post!
I am a fan of philosophy of science and I agree with much of what you say, but I also find a grain of truth in the criticism you describe. I wonder if you would agree with that grain.
In my experience, a lot of philosophy papers and talks are (to be frank) pretty bad. Philosophy is really hard, and so it’s really hard to do it well! Lord knows none of my work is as good as I wish it were.
When a philosophy of science paper or talk is bad, however, it is often bad in a particular way. The talk or paper consists of a detailed and thoughtful summary of some complicated scientific findings (along with the relevant experimental methodology) followed by a very brief argument for the claim that these findings support a certain philosophical thesis. (In the all-too-common limit case, that the findings support the philosophical thesis is simply asserted and not actually argued for…) The non-philosophers-of-science in the audience, who irresponsibly zoned out during the 90% of the talk that was spent summarizing scientific findings, are then unimpressed with the brief philosophical argument and say: “That wasn’t philosophy! All the speaker did was talk about science!”
The philosophers in the audience should pay better attention. But this kind of talk or paper nonetheless is deeply flawed in a familiar way. It shows exactly the same flaw that many other bad philosophical talks and papers show: the author spent so much time and energy just trying to understand and then explain the (very complicated!) background dialectic that the author had very energy left to put into his or her novel argument. This happens all the time in philosophy! When it happens in, e.g., epistemology, the result is just considered a bad epistemology paper. But when it happens in the philosophy of science, the result is considered “not really philosophy.” After all, 90% of it just summarized scientific findings!
Is this a phenomenon you find familiar, too? Or do you think this criticism is also (unfairly!) levied against really good work in the philosophy of science? It’s also possible that I am being uncharitable in my description of this kind of talk–perhaps summarizing complicated scientific findings in a way accessible to philosophers is a worthwhile use of colloquium time and philosophy journal pages, even if the summary isn’t accompanied by an argument for a philosophical thesis. That doesn’t seem immediately plausible to me, but I am willing to be convinced that I’m wrong about it!

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Alan White

April 12, 2015

Thanks so much Roberta. I couldn’t agree more that while philosophy that is essentially non-empirical thought experimentation–Zombies pop into mind here–can certainly make significant contributions, most philosophy would be much improved by relevant data. My own minor work in time and free will requires that I get as much of the basic relevant science right as I can, and the rise of X-Phi is so rapid I can hardly keep up! Anyway again a really good post. And pardon my egregious typo!

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Roberta L. Millstein

April 12, 2015

It is a phenomenon that I have seen, yes, and find problematic. But I suspect that I would attribute it to far fewer papers and talks than you would. I think there are many cases where the author is discussing a conceptual or methodological issue that is relevant to a particular science or a particular finding in science, rather than discussing one of the more canonical issues in philosophy. I think sometimes that those outside of the philosophy of science see only that the author is knee deep in the details of the science without appreciating the philosophical points that are being made because they don’t recognize the topic that is under debate. To give two examples from my own work: in some of my research I have discussed the evolutionary process known as random genetic drift — how it ought to be characterized, how it can be distinguished from other evolutionary processes, whether it can be empirically demonstrated, etc. In other research I have explored different types of experiment: lab experiments vs. field experiments vs. natural experiments, using particular cases in science to explore the merits of each. The former is an example of exploring concepts in science, whereas the latter is an example of exploring methodology in science. They are just as philosophical as explorations in, say, the philosophy of mind, but I think they are less recognized as philosophical by people who aren’t familiar with the particular issues under discussion, and all they see is that details of science are being discussed — sometimes complicated by the fact that they are grasping to understand the science itself, making it harder to see the philosophical points.

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Roberta L. Millstein

April 12, 2015

Thanks, Alan. What typo?? whistles

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Anonymous Philosopher

April 12, 2015

Very interesting. Thanks, Roberta! I agree it is a problematic mistake not to consider the types of projects you mention to be philosophy. Distinguishing such projects from the phenomenon I described was helpful to me.

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Roberta L. Millstein

April 12, 2015

Glad it was helpful! 🙂

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twbb

April 12, 2015

“Philosophers of science struggle to get into grad programs, to obtain jobs, to earn promotion and tenure, to be perceived as “central” and important figures in the field, all because their work is not seen as philosophical.”
That’s interesting; I recently read an argument that philosophy of science had become the most (or one of the most) prestigious subfields in the discipline. Wish I could remember where I read it.

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George Gale

April 12, 2015

You raise some excellent points Roberta. Let me just mention one autobiographical experience. Articles that I published in Scientific American, Nature, and the American Journal of Physics were challenged by members of my department as “not being real philosophy” when I came up for promotion. Nicely enough, my article on methodological disputes in cosmology during the ’30s and ’40 can’t be challenged: it’s published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 🙂

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Anon

April 12, 2015

Do you think that philosophers of science have a distinctive struggle getting jobs? I ask because philosophers of science aren’t the only ones that get asked this deeply frustrating question and because almost everyone, regardless of specialization, has to struggle to get a job now. Over the last few years, it seems like there have been a good number of AOS:philosophy of science (/biology/physics/etc) jobs, so philosophers of science have at least that going for them. This last point may be wrong, because of how the philosophy of science jobs are divided up into specialties.

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Roberta L. Millstein

April 12, 2015

I think philosophers of science have a “distinctive” struggle in that it manifests in a particular way, where the challenge is that their work is sometimes seen either as “doing science” or as “reporting science.” However, it’s not distinctive in the sense that, as you say, other philosophers are on the receiving end of the same question, just for different reasons. I speak to philosophy of science here because that is what I know. I agree that there is a much broader problem of “line drawing” for what counts as philosophy and what does not.
Yes, there have been some jobs in phil sci, etc., but whether a particular individual gets them might depend on how “philosophical” their work is seen, and they might have to modify their work or bend over backwards to have it seen as “philosophical enough.” I agree that the job market is a struggle for everyone. This just highlights a particular struggle within that struggle.

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grad

April 12, 2015

I find philosophers of science to be the philosophers I most consistently respect and am impressed by. (I am not a philosopher of science.)

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Anon

April 12, 2015

The challenge you indicate, “that [the work of philosophers of science] is sometimes seen either as “doing science” or as “reporting science”, seems to be a fairly general, and shamefully common, sort of thing. Philosophers of language will get accused of “just doing linguistics”, a certain stripe of philosophers of math of “reporting math”, formal epistemologists of “doing probability theory/game theory/etc”, x-phi-ers of “doing psychology”, and philosophical logicians of “just doing math”. There have recently been nice discussions (on this site? on FP?) of how some feminist philosophy and philosophy of race is dismissed as “doing/reporting sociology”. This is all to say that too many of us deal with (or have had to deal with) the line drawing/disciplinary boundary policing nonsense.
The point that “whether a particular individual gets [a particular job] might depend on how “philosophical” their work is seen, and they might have to modify their work or bend over backwards to have it seen as “philosophical enough”” also seems not to be specific to phil. sci. If a candidate knows that she’s presenting in a dept she suspects to be unenthused by/ignorant of., say, formal epistemology or phil. language, she might have to bend over backwards to make things accessible. This would apply even to philosophers working in other areas. If one has an AOS in, say, Wittgenstein or Kant, giving a job talk in certain depts might require modifying one’s talk heavily in order to convince the dept that one does philosophy in which they would be interested (or whatever it is that job talks are supposed to show). These seem to be variations on the issue of “fit”, which is a terrible concept when left too vague.
I agree with you that some, perhaps many, philosophers “invoke views about the world from their armchair”. In addition, there seems to be a more general disdain for requiring technical knowledge outside the usual philosophical canon.

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David Wallace

April 13, 2015

I have to say that I recognise “anonymous philosopher”‘s point as occurring quite often in philosophy of physics: that is, someone will give a very careful detailed summary of some area of physics and then make quick or cursory philosophical points. (And I’m reasonably sure the problem isn’t just that I don’t understand the physics well enough to have missed the philosophy.) These are cases where the physics being summarised is standard, textbook, physics – I think the problem, though, is that the “textbook” is some pretty advanced graduate-level text where just understanding the material can be a very large amount of work for someone not already trained in theoretical physics, so I see the temptation to cash in that time by reporting the physics to another community.
I think the temptation usually needs to be resisted, not because “it’s not philosophy” but because it’s not original research. Having said that, I think sometimes there’s a need to simply report some bit of physics in the philosophy literature, in terms philosophers can follow, just because there’s so much confusion and so many misconceptions about that bit of physics; indeed, I’ve basically done this myself a couple of times.

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Roberta L. Millstein

April 13, 2015

A number of the examples you cite I would include under the umbrella of philosophy of science, construed broadly, including math and game theory. Perhaps the general category I am aiming at is “empirical philosophy,” although I’m avoiding the term here because I am not sure what I think about it and I think it is distinct from x-phi, although I understand that some cast x-phi as a subset of empirical philosophy. As for the others, yes, as I acknowledged already, other areas have line-drawing issues that specialists in those areas would be better positioned to speak to than I can. I am particularly focused on the anti-empirical sentiment here.
Also, it’s one thing to have to make your work accessible and to show that it’s interesting. It’s another to have to defend it as philosophy at all.

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Roberta L. Millstein

April 13, 2015

That’s interesting, David. I rarely see such papers in philosophy of biology (which is not to say that I have never seen them), so perhaps that is a difference between the sub-disciplines. It’s also interesting to me that you’d self-describe some of your own work as largely clarifying some difficult finding in physics. I wonder if some of the other authors you have in mind would self-describe similarly, in which case, they would not be instances of the problem I’m describing here.

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p

April 13, 2015

the same occurs in history of philosophy – much of the work is seen as being not philosophical enough, or as just being “history of ideas” or historiography of philosophy and so on. Sometimes, I find it actually true, sometimes not. I do not think that it is necessarily an illegitimate question to ask whether or not something is a philosophical piece of work. The fact that one calls oneself a philosopher or calls one’s own research philosophy does not make it so. Not that I know what does make something philosophy (there probably isn’t a single, coherent set of features) but it seems to me at least not entirely implausible to think that there might be something that distinguishes philosophical writing and research from non-philosophical ones. Or, perhaps, good philosophy from bad philosophy. Btw. I always thought the exact opposite about philosophy of science than the post suggests. I might be wrong, of course but at least landing an open specialization position as a historian of philosophy seems to me to be far less likely than landing it as a philosopher of science.

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Sock

April 14, 2015

This often happens to people working in aesthetics/philosophy of art. I wasn’t aware it happened frequently in the philosophy of science, too. It makes sense, though, since the two subfields share a lot of structural things in common. Both subfields, for example, require mastery of a vast literature in fields other than philosophy.

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Roberta L. Millstein

April 14, 2015

I agree, it is not necessarily an illegitimate question to ask whether something is philosophy or not. See the second paragraph of my post above. However, it become illegitimate when it is just a knee jerk rejection of anything that seems “too empirical” — and yes, I have witnessed exactly this on multiple occasion.
As for your point about jobs in phil sci: first of all, note that I said nothing about the ease of getting a job in philosophy of science as compared to other areas. It seems to me that phil sci jobs are advertised with decent frequency as compared to other areas, more or less. The question is about who gets an advertised job and whose work gets dismissed because it is not “philosophical enough,” and the things that philosophers of science have to do to seem “philosophical enough” to get hired.

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Roberta L. Millstein

April 14, 2015

Interesting — I wasn’t aware of that in aesthetics/philosophy of art.

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Clement Loo

April 14, 2015

Sock,
I’ve found that it happens to pretty much anyone outside of LEMM. While I wholeheartedly agree with Roberta’s post, it seems to me that many philosophers outside of LEMM could write similar posts but about their subfields.

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mars

April 15, 2015

Glib summary:
When research requires attention to areas of research outside of (what’s traditionally been considered) philosophy, it’s not philosophical. Thus philosophical research should be ignorant of anything outside of philosophy–or at least of anything that can’t be learned from the newspaper.
Correlary: If some research requires attention to areas of research outside of philosophy, philosophers won’t understand it–unless the non-philosophical research is summarized. However, the summary is not philosophy; philosophy only occurs in the time or space that remains. Therefore, research that requires attention to other areas should almost never be presented at conferences, where time is short, and care must be taken with papers and longer presentations. A better solution is to engage only in philosophy that can proceed in ignorance of other areas of research.
A little less glib:
(a) Some of the antipathy toward specialized philosophy might be only that. i.e. complaints about time/space spent on what’s “not philosophy” might be stand-ins for complaints about another area of philosophy independent of its dependence on outside research.
(b) The situation seems related to the usual problem for interdisciplinary research. Despite Deans’ rallying cries, our academic institutions aren’t designed for evaluation of interdisciplinary research. (Who has the expertise? Whose department should house it?)

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Roberta L. Millstein

April 15, 2015

“Therefore, research that requires attention to other areas should almost never be presented at conferences, where time is short, and care must be taken with papers and longer presentations. A better solution is to engage only in philosophy that can proceed in ignorance of other areas of research.”
Sarcasm, yes? I hope? I really can’t tell.

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mars

April 15, 2015

Yes, sarcasm. Sorry–it wasn’t as obvious as I thought.
In fairness, I think that discomfort with the amount of science that gets included in philosophy of science presentations and papers, for example, is understandable, and in a sense reasonable. While I don’t think that philosophy should be restricted to topics that do not involve specialized extra-philosophical research, I don’t blame others for not (yet?) seeing things that way. (For anyone reading this who does not see things as I do, if my sarcasm seemed insulting, I sincerely apologize.)

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Roberta L. Millstein

April 15, 2015

Well, people usually don’t state it that baldly. But I have come across people who essentially have that view, so I wanted to check.
How about this proposal? When speaking to generalist audiences, we all (even those in so-called “core” areas) make an attempt to make our papers as accessible as possible, not assuming, e,g,, that we’ve all read certain papers or know about certain debates. I think I may find many such talks just as baffling as some people find phil sci.

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mars

April 19, 2015

I agree. For me, there are difficult tradeoffs when time is short at conference with a broad range of attendees. I try to guess who will be in the audience, and use that to judge how to balance what will interest specialists, with what’s needed to make the content intelligible to non-specialists.

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