Alicorn comments on Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Ask Your Questions - Less Wrong
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My answer to this depends on what you mean by "professional philosophers who think about". You have to be aware that subfields have selection biases. For example, the percent of philosophers of religion who think God exists is much, much larger than the percent of professional philosophers generally who think God exists. This is because if God does not exist philosophy of religion ceases to be a productive area of research. Conversely, if you have an irrational attachment to the idea that God exists this than you are likely to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to prove one exists. This issue is particularly bad with regard to religion but it is in some sense generalizable to all or most other subfields. Philosophy is also a competitive enterprise and there are various incentives to publishing novel arguments. This means in any given subfield views that are unpopular among philosophers generally will be overrepresented.
So the circle you draw around "professional philosophers who think about [subfield x] questions" needs to be small enough to target experts but large enough that you don't limit your survey to those philosophers who are very likely to hold a view you are surveying in virtue of the area they work in. I think the right circle is something like 'professional philosophers who are equipped to teach an advanced undergraduate course in the subject'.
Edit: The free will question will depend on what you want out of a conception of free will. But the understanding of free will that most lay people have is totally impossible.
Seconded. There are a lot of libertarians-about-free-will who study free will, but nobody I've talked to has ever heard of anyone changing their mind on the subject of free will (except inasmuch as learning new words to describe one's beliefs counts) - so this has to be almost entirely due to more libertarians finding free will an interesting thing to study.
I've definitely changed my mind on free will. I used to be an incompatibilist with libertarian leanings. After reading Daniel Dennett's books, I changed my mind and became a compatiblist soft determinist.
Are you a professional philosopher/ were you a professional philosopher when you were an incompatibilist with libertarian leanings? I'd say the vast majority of those untrained in philosophy hold the view you held and the most rational/intelligent of them would change their minds once confronted with a decent compatiblist argument.
Edit: I'm being a little unfair. There are plenty of smart people who disagree with us.
No, I wasn't, and I agree with you. Defending philosophical positions as a career creates a bias where you're less likely to change your mind (see Cialdini's work on congruence: e.g. POWs in communist brainwashing camps who wrote essays on why communism was good were more likely to support communism afer release). But even so, professional philosophers do change their mind once in a while.
Absolutely! I tentatively hold the thesis that professional philosophers even make progress on understanding some issues. But there seem to be a couple positions that professional philosophers rarely sway from once they hold those positions and I think Alicorn is right that metaphysical libertarianism is one of these views.
Free will libertarianism is also infected with religious philosophy. There are certainly some libertarians with secular reasons for their positions but a lot of the support for this for position comes from those whose religious world view requires radical free will and if they didn't believe in God they wouldn't be libertarians. Same goes for a lot of substance dualists, frankly.