Concluded:
Schaffer & Knobe. "Contrastive Knowledge Surveyed." [A] recent series of empirical studies [...] presented ordinary people with precisely the sorts of cases that have been discussed in the contextualism literature and gave them an opportunity to say whether they agreed or disagreed with the relevant knowledge attributions. Strikingly, the results suggest that people simply do not have the intuitions they were purported to have. Looking at this recent evidence, it is easy to come away with the feeling that the whole contextualism debate was founded on a myth. The various sides offered conflicting explanations for a certain pattern of intuitions, but the empirical evidence suggests that this pattern of intuitions does not exist. Our aim is to defend a form of contextualism in the face of this new threat. We acknowledge that some of the specific claims made by earlier contextualists might be undermined by recent experimental results, but we suggest that a different form of contextualism—based on the idea that conversational context provides the relevant contrast—can answer this empirical challenge. We then report a new series of experimental studies that provide empirical support for a contrastive view of knowledge.
Hopkins. "Factive Pictorial Experience: What's Special about Photographs?" What exactly does the specialness of traditional photography consist in? I will defend the following view. Like other pictures, traditional photographs support pictorial experience—we see things in them. But unlike our experience of other pictures, our experience of photographs is factive: it is guaranteed to reflect the facts. What we see in traditional photographs is, of necessity, true to how things were when the photograph was taken. At least, this is the experience traditional photography is designed to produce and which it does indeed produce, when everything works as it should. It is this that explains traditional photography's special epistemic status and the special experience it instils.
Jenkins & Nolan. "Disposition Impossible." Given that dispositions need not be manifested, need it even be possible for them to manifest? Can something be disposed a certain way despite the fact that it not only does not but cannot ever manifest that disposition?
Strevens. "The Explanatory Role of Irreducible Properties. "[F]or any “high-level” phenomenon—chemical, biological, psychological, economic—science claims to be able to provide, in the long term if not quite yet, a lower-level explanation, and ultimately a physical-level explanation. [...] On the other hand, philosophers have recently claimed with increasing confidence that many explanatory properties cited by higher-level sciences—being water, being a gene, being a species, being a belief, being currency—are irreducible. The aim of this paper is to show that both sides may be correct.
Woodward. "Fictionalism and Incompleteness." The modal fictionalist faces a problem due to the fact that her chosen story seems to be incomplete—certain things are neither fictionally true nor fictionally false. The significance of this problem is not localized to modal fictionalism, however, since many fictionalists will face it too. By examining how the fictionalist should analyze the notion of truth according to her story, and, in particular, the role that conditionals play for the fictionalist, I develop a novel and elegant solution to the incompleteness problem.
I think that suffices. So... does this help us determine whether philosophy is useful? Are they Doing It Wrong?
I think that suffices. So... does this help us determine whether philosophy is useful? Are they Doing It Wrong?
I've only gone through some of these and I'll probably be spending the next few hours on all these various tabs now opened, but I would tentatively conclude that the original selection of articles presented was misleading and not fully representative.
Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
I've complained before that philosophy is a diseased discipline which spends far too much of its time debating definitions, ignoring relevant scientific results, and endlessly re-interpreting old dead guys who didn't know the slightest bit of 20th century science. Is that still the case?
You bet. There's some good philosophy out there, but much of it is bad enough to make CMU philosopher Clark Glymour suggest that on tight university budgets, philosophy departments could be defunded unless their work is useful to (cited by) scientists and engineers — just as his own work on causal Bayes nets is now widely used in artificial intelligence and other fields.
How did philosophy get this way? Russell's hypothesis is not too shabby. Check the syllabi of the undergraduate "intro to philosophy" classes at the world's top 5 U.S. philosophy departments — NYU, Rutgers, Princeton, Michigan Ann Arbor, and Harvard — and you'll find that they spend a lot of time with (1) old dead guys who were wrong about almost everything because they knew nothing of modern logic, probability theory, or science, and with (2) 20th century philosophers who were way too enamored with cogsci-ignorant armchair philosophy. (I say more about the reasons for philosophy's degenerate state here.)
As the CEO of a philosophy/math/compsci research institute, I think many philosophical problems are important. But the field of philosophy doesn't seem to be very good at answering them. What can we do?
Why, come up with better philosophical methods, of course!
Scientific methods have improved over time, and so can philosophical methods. Here is the first of my recommendations...
More Pearl and Kahneman, less Plato and Kant
Philosophical training should begin with the latest and greatest formal methods ("Pearl" for the probabilistic graphical models made famous in Pearl 1988), and the latest and greatest science ("Kahneman" for the science of human reasoning reviewed in Kahneman 2011). Beginning with Plato and Kant (and company), as most universities do today, both (1) filters for inexact thinkers, as Russell suggested, and (2) teaches people to have too much respect for failed philosophical methods that are out of touch with 20th century breakthroughs in math and science.
So, I recommend we teach young philosophy students:
(In other words: train philosophy students like they do at CMU, but even "more so.")
So, my own "intro to philosophy" mega-course might be guided by the following core readings:
(There are many prerequisites to these, of course. I think philosophy should be a Highly Advanced subject of study that requires lots of prior training in maths and the sciences, like string theory but hopefully more productive.)
Once students are equipped with some of the latest math and science, then let them tackle The Big Questions. I bet they'd get farther than those raised on Plato and Kant instead.
You might also let them read 20th century analytic philosophy at that point — hopefully their training will have inoculated them from picking up bad thinking habits.
Previous post: Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn't