= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant
Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy
Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject.
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:
| more Bayesian rationality, heuristics and biases, & debiasing, | less | informal "critical thinking skills"; |
| more mathematical logic & theory of computation, | less | term logic; |
| more probability theory & Bayesian scientific method, | less | pre-1980 philosophy of science; |
| more psychology of concepts & machine learning, | less | conceptual analysis; |
| more formal epistemology & computational epistemology, | less | pre-1980 epistemology; |
| more physics & cosmology, | less | pre-1980 metaphysics; |
| more psychology of choice, | less | philosophy of free will; |
| more moral psychology, decision theory, and game theory, | less | intuitionist moral philosophy; |
| more cognitive psychology & cognitive neuroscience, | less | pre-1980 philosophy of mind; |
| more linguistics & psycholinguistics, | less | pre-1980 philosophy of language; |
| more neuroaesthetics, | less | aesthetics; |
| more causal models & psychology of causal perception, | less | pre-1980 theories of causation. |
(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:
- Stanovich, Rationality and the Reflective Mind (2010)
- Hinman, Fundamentals of Mathematical Logic (2005)
- Russell & Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd edition, 2009) — contains chapters which briefly introduce probability theory, probabilistic graphical models, computational decision theory and game theory, knowledge representation, machine learning, computational epistemology, and other useful subjects
- Sipser, Introduction to the Theory of Computation (3rd edition, 2012) — relevant to lots of philosophical problems, as discussed in Aaronson (2011)
- Howson & Urbach, Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach (3rd edition, 2005)
- Holyoak & Morrison (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (2012) — contains chapters which briefly introduce the psychology of knowledge representation, concepts, categories, causal learning, explanation, argument, decision making, judgment heuristics, moral judgment, behavioral game theory, problem solving, creativity, and other useful subjects
- Dolan & Sharot (eds.), Neuroscience of Preference and Choice (2011)
- Krane, Modern Physics (3rd edition, 2012) — includes a brief introduction to cosmology
(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
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (510)
I was going to say something about the ease of which I can come up with obviously confused or unimportant "science" abstracts, but then I realized I was missing the point. Philosophy can be improved (and probably more easily than science) and your proposed introductory sequence is actually pretty good.
Thanks! My post on how to improve science (in a few ways, at least) is How to Fix Science.
Forgive me if someone else has made this rather obvious remark (too many comments to wade through), but isn't it a weird irony to rely on the big generalization that "[h]itherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong?"
You give the impression of someone who has not begun to understand basic, perennial philosophical problems. To illustrate, consider the following questions that are dealt with explicitly (and incredibly well) by philosophers throughout the tradition, but not derivable at all from any scientific discovery:
What is the nature of the ontological difference between being qua being and particular beings? Perhaps you think this is a pseudo-problem, yet we all think we can meaningfully say that different things are in (maybe) the same way and the same respect. In what sense is it legitimate to do this?
What is the best metaphor we can use to describe what is going on when we say something is "true"?
What is the Good?
The presuppositions that underlie this blog post are questionable for many reasons, but they are especially so because you go out of your way to ridicule the only mode of inquiry that is capable of calling them into question: namely, philosophical inquiry.
Yes, you caught the irony. Of course, not all ironic statements are false. There are in fact true generalizations about overgeneralization.
There are indeed questions to which philosophers have given insightful answers. But I feel embarrassed on behalf of philosophers to see such pseudo-questions paraded as their proudest accomplishments. Being is univocal because quantification is univocal; we don't mean different things by 'are' or 'two' or 'all' in different contexts. The best metaphor for truth will depend on our goals. 'The Good' and 'Being' are ambiguous terms, so the question as to their intended sense will need to be clarified before it can be fruitfully pursued. See Peter van Inwagen's Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment.
(Since I'm citing a philosopher, you know I agree with you to some extent. I just don't like treating Philosophy as a tribe to be defended. Especially not Bad Philosophy. If philosophy is anything worth preserving, it's just a toolbox.)
I like this post. Can you think of any pre-20th century philosophers whose works you still hold to be valid/useful today? [or from that list, any pre-21st century...]
Hume turns out to have been right about an awful lot, but still... why read Hume when you can read contemporary works of science and philosophy there are clearer, more precise, and more correct? (If you're reading Hume for his lovely prose, I suppose that's a different matter.)
Speaking of Hume, the Nov. 30th episode of Philosophy Bites was kind of amusing. A bunch of philosophers, including famous ones, gave their answers to "Who's your favorite philosopher?" IIRC, when giving their reasons for liking their favorite philosopher, almost nobody said "because this philosopher turned out to be correct about so much" — except for all the people who picked Hume.
Bostrom simply said: "I'm not sure I have one favorite philosopher. Contemporary philosophy, at least the way I'm doing it, is more like science in that there are many people who have made significant contributions and you're not so much following in the footsteps of one great individual. [Instead] you're drawing on the heritage accumulated by many people working for a long time."
As I was reading your post, I kept thinking to myself: "Yeah, well this applies to almost everybody except for Hume (some of the time)" so I find myself nodding along to everything you said in this comment.
Because Hume drew correct conclusions from very little information (relative to what it took for Science to catch up), and I want to learn how to do that.
It's not clear that Hume having drawn correct conclusions from very little information comes from any essential Humeness that you should be trying to emulate. If the set of reasonable-sounding answers to the kinds of questions philosophers like Hume were thinking about is small enough, you'd expect that out of a sufficiently large pool of philosophers some of them would get it mostly right by sheer luck (e.g. Democritus and atoms). You'd need evidence that Hume was doing very well even after adjusting for this before he becomes worth studying.
(I say this knowing almost nothing about Hume - I last took a philosophy course over 8 years ago - and so if it's obvious that Hume was doing very well even after adjusting for the above then sure, study Hume.)
Good answer.
Qiaochu_Yuan has a point, but Hume was conspicuously right about so many things that almost everyone around him was wrong about, I think there might indeed be some "Humeness" having an effect going on there. Maybe: unusual good rationality. Or maybe he was a plant from our simulators.
I'm not Luke, and I'm not even sure this is what he would count as philosophy, but the Stoics were right about an awful lot of practical things to help you live a better life, and research now seems to be indicating that their techniques do in fact work.
Great post.
I wonder is this study-list also good enough for applied psychology? I would like to learn Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and as you point out above most studies are flawed.
If this post post is not enough could you write another one answering my question?
Would you consider turning this knowledge into an actual curriculum that includes practice problems and exams?
I'm thinking of something in the lines of MIT's free curriculum and Khan Academy's Math section. I have no problem with still linking to these text books as long as the freely available curriculum made by you or your team fills the gaps and there are plenty of ways to test understanding. I name khan's math section specifically because it uses that infinite practice problems and 10 in a row signals proficiency and has built in SRS.
Unlike khan however i would want to see mastery of whatever is the current status of the field instead of the low target of a certain school's exam requirements.
Your examples of bad philosophy ... your reasons why they are bad ... aargh! Apparently it's bad to (1) reason about psychology (2) use the ideas of ancient philosophers (3) argue about definitions (4) mention religion at all. (I'm just guessing that this is the problem with the last item in the list.)
So far as I can see, the only problem you should have with papers 1 and 3 is that they're not sexy enough to hold your interest. They're not bursting at the seams with citations of experimental psychology or computational epistemology. Really, you shouldn't dismiss paper 2 as you do either, but I concede that seeing value in the psychological reflections of antiquity would require unusual broadmindedness. (Paper 4 is just oddball and I won't try to defend it as a representative of an important and unjustly maligned class of philosophical research.)
Concerning your curriculum for philosophy students, well, such zeal as yours is the basis for the renewal of a subject, but in the end I still think something like Plato and Kant would be a better foundation than Pearl and Kahneman. Causal diagrams and behavioral economics do not touch the why of causation or the how of conscious knowledge. If they were not complemented by something that promoted an awareness of the issues that these formalisms inherently do not answer, then philosophically they would define just another dogma parading itself as truth.
I myself am willing to go out on a limb and say paper 4 is possibly worth thinking about and not blatant trolling. I presume lukeprog wouldn't have a problem with a paper proposing an fMRI comparison study of atheist/theist Bach listeners. But one would first have to justify such an expense, no? Or at least formulate an hypothesis:
I hope lukeprog would not give a paper credence just because it did sciencey stuff and maths. There is, after all, the famous dead fish study which, as it happens, used fMRI. We have already learned that there is a lot of junk science in medicine and in nutrition. So also in neuroscience.
Luke, how does the Dolan & Sharot book measure up by the standards of science as it should be done?
I was not suggesting anything of the sort. Azari's work on religious experience is not junk science, as far as I'm aware.
Seconded.
They're a necessary foundation, because you can't understand Kripke without understanding Kant (etc). That has nothing to do with reverence.
Presumably, then, you would study Kant in the early stages of whatever course you are devoting to Kripke's work. Other than his work in Political Philosophy (I'm well aware he's a prerequisite for that,) what other foundational purpose does studying Kant serve?
I didn't say Kant was only relevant to Kripke. He was hugely influential.
Re-reading my post, it wasn't clear that I was asking you for other examples, so I apologize for that. Would you mind giving other examples of relevant ideas for which a prior knowledge of Kant is absolutely necessary?
Eg. the whole of German Idealism. Believe it or not, philosophy educators have a reasonably good idea of what they are doing.
Having dropped a double major in philosophy, I'm inclined to take the side of "not."
Having read a lot of bad attempted philosophy by scientists, I'm inclined to think phil. doens't need replacement by, or oversight from, science
But most of the really brilliant philosophers have come from a scientific background! For example, I don't think 20th-century philosophy would have accomplished nearly as much without Wittgenstein. And Aristotle wouldn't have gotten anywhere if he hadn't spent all those years cataloging plants and animals.
Is a fairly self contained subject. You could go through a degree or two without ever touching upon it unless you had to study Hegel for unrelated reasons. So, I don't see any reason he wouldn't be taught during the course or in a course of his own which is a prerequisite for the GI course, rather than in Phil 101.
Some do, some don't, generalizing is fun.
I think you'd have an easier time justifying the thesis 'Kant was wrong about everything' than 'Kant was not super-super-crazy-influential.' Consider:
Kant ⇒ Schopenhauer ⇒ Nietzsche ⇒ all the postmodernists and relativists
Kant ⇒ Schopenhauer ⇒ Wittgenstein ⇒ most of the positivists
Kant ⇒ Schopenhauer ⇒ Nietzsche ⇒ Freud
Kant ⇒ Fichte ⇒ Hegel ⇒ Marx
Kant ⇒ von Mises ⇒ the less fun libertarians
My conclusion, by Six-Degrees-of-Hitler/Stalin/RonPaul ratiocination, is that Kant is directly and personally responsible for every atrocity of the 20th century.
I was just mulling over that Peter may have been right in this conversation, and then this beauty of a comment drops. You should put this on a poster or a t-shirt, or something! :)
Please help me compare: what useful things does Plato say about the why of causation, and why should I believe him? How can I use Plato's knowledge about causality to achieve things in the real world (except for impressing people by quoting him)?
Aristotle is a more straightforward example. If you made an effort to understand Aristotle's four types of causes and ten categories of being - if you critically tried out that worldview for a while, tried to understand your own knowledge and experience in those terms, identified where it works and where it doesn't, the logic of the part that works and the problem with the part that doesn't - it would undoubtedly be instructive. Aristotle is such a systematic thinker, you might even fall in love with his system and become a neo-Aristotelian, bringing it up to date and evangelizing its relevance for today's world.
This seems to be more indicative that if one thinks hard enough about any world view it will seem to be useful and make sense. This is essentially as much of an argument to take Aristotle seriously as C. S. Lewis's claim that "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." is an argument to take Christianity seriously.
This doesn't answer the question or even the type of question as phrased by Viliam. The claim isn't that you can use a systematic approach to make your own thoughts ordered in some fashion, but how to make the claims pay rent.
When you say things like "More machine learning, more physics, more game theory, more math", what I hear is, "more of anything that's not philosophy".
For example, Machine Learning alone is a topic whose understanding requires a semi-decent grounding in math, computer science, and practical programming. That's at least a year of study for someone with an IQ over 150, and probably something like three or four years for the rest of us. And that's just one topic; you list others as well. It sounds like you want us to just stop doing philosophy altogether, and stick to the more useful stuff.
The world is complicated.
Imagine people who are trying to write books, without knowing the alphabet. They keep trying for ages, but produce nothing that other person could unambiguously read.
So someone comes and says: "You should learn alphabet first."
And they respond: "We are interested in writing books, not learning alphabet. The more time we spend learning alphabet, the less time we will have for actually writing books. We desire to become writers, not linguists." (Famous writers are high status, linguistics is considered boring by most.)
Similarly it seems to me that many philosophers are too busy discussing deep topics about the world, so they don't have time to actually study the world. To be fair, they do study a lot -- but mostly the opinions of people who used the same strategy, decades and centuries ago. Knowing Plato's opinions on X is higher status than knowing X.
This would be acceptable in situations where science does not know anything about X, so the expert's opinion is the best we can have. But in many topics this simply isn't true. Learning what we already know about X is the cost of ability to say something new and correct about X. The costs are higher than 2000 years ago, because the simple stuff is already known.
Mathematicians also cannot become famous today for discovering that a^2+b^2=c^2 in a right-angled triangle. They also have to study the simple stuff for years, before they are able to contribute something new. Computer programmers also cannot make billions by writing a new MS DOS, even if it were better than original. Neither do they get paid for quoting Dijkstra correctly. Philosophers need to work harder than centuries ago, too.
Are truth, meaning, beauty and goodness about the world? They are just not susceptible to straightforward empirical enquiry. People study Plato on the Good, because there aren't good-ometers.
(If Plato is not at least a little bit a good-ometer, there is no point in studying Plato for that purpose either.)
Beauty is about the world. More precisely, about humans. What makes humans perceive X as beautiful?
Required knowledge about the world: What happens in our brains? (Neuroscience, psychology, biology.) Do our beauty judgements change across cultures or centuries? (Sociology, anthropology, art history.) Do monkeys feel something similar? (Biology, ethology.)
It might prove helpful to look at humans etc. to understand the things that trigger the topic of beauty, in the sense that you might learn interesting related ideas in greater detail by studying these things. But the detailed conditions of triggering the topic are not necessarily among them, so "What makes humans perceive X as beautiful?" may be a less useful question than "What are some representative examples of things that are perceived by humans as beautiful?". The world gives you detailed data for investigation, but you don't necessarily care about the data, the ideas it suggests might make the original data irrelevant at some point.
Not in any sense that leadds to straightforward empiricism.
That knowledge about the world is necessary is not in doubt. The issue is whether it is sufficient.
We agree about the first sentence. And the knowledge about the world also helps to form a qualified opinion about the second one.
I have no problem with students of philosophy learning Plato's opinions and the related science, if they want to write a book about Beauty. (I just imagine them more likely to do the former part and ignore the latter.)
A lot of this seems to be imagination-driven.
Propositional and predicate calculus is routinely taught in undergraduate philosophy programs. Does taking the time to acquire such skills make people 'less philosophical'? Bugmaster, it sounds like you're buying into the meme that true philosophy must avoid being too rigorous; if a paper consists mostly of equations or formalized proofs, it's somehow less philosophical even if contentwise it's nothing but an exegesis of Kant. This deep error is responsible not only for a lot of the philosophical laziness lukeprog takes issue with, but also for our conception of philosophical fields like metaphysics as being clearly distinguishable from theoretical physics, or of philosophy of mind as being clearly distinguishable from theoretical neuroscience. Define your academic fields however you otherwise want, but don't define them in terms of how careful they're allowed to become!
My comment wasn't about philosophy, but about all those other topics: math, physics, machine learning, etc. They are very rigorous, and will take a lot of time to understand properly, even at an undergraduate level. There are only so many hours in the day; and while you are sitting there debugging your linked list code or whatever, you're not doing philosophy.
My point is that if students do as lukeprog suggests, and study all those other topics first, they won't have any time left for philosophy at all -- assuming, of course, that they actually try to understand the material, not just memorize a few key points.
Yeah, it sucks that you can't do good philosophy without knowing a ton of other stuff, but that's life. We don't listen to electrical engineers when they complain about needing to know nitty-gritty calculus, and that's a year of study for someone with an IQ over 150. Sometimes fields have prerequisites.
Agreed!
What? Surely lots of electrical engineers have IQ less than 150 (the average being approximately 126 ETA: actually that's the average for EE PhD student, but still). How did they pass their calculus courses?
I assume they meant that an EE with IQ > 150 would require a year; many places distribute their calculus courses over two years, and some students require longer.
Correction: you don't. Those of us who teach EEs (really, any class of engineers), do.
You could do good programming without knowing too much physics. You could probably do good physics without knowing too much machine learning, assuming you have someone in your department who does know machine learning. You could do good biology with chemistry alone, though that requires minimal physics, as well.
But lukeprog's curriculum / reading list suggests that you can't do good philosophy without knowing math, machine learning, physics, psychology, and a bunch of other subjects. If that is true, then virtually no one can do good philosophy at all, because absorbing all the prerequisites will take a large portion of most people's lifetimes.
Yes, some subjects are just hard. But there are limits to this. How much one needs is a function of how much one wants to focus on a particular subject. So for example most physicists probably need three semesters of calc, linear algebra, and stats, at minimum. But only some of the physicists will need group theory, while others will need additional stats, and others will need differential geometry. But almost no physicist will need all of these things. Similarly, some degree of specialization may make sense if one wants to do philosophy.
That's in fact already the case: the moral philosopher has a read a lot more about the history of moral philosophy, and same for the person studying epistemology, or other basic aspects of things. So to some extent the issue isn't the amount of learning that is required, but a disagreement with what is required, and how cross-disciplinary it should be.
It doesn't really take that long to learn things. But good philosophy already looks like this - my favorite political philosophy professor threw out references to computing, physics, history, etc. assuming students would get the references or look them up. Much like pride is the crown of the virtues, philosophy should be the crown of the sciences.
And we independently observe that almost no one can do good philosophy at all, so the theory checks out.
Nothing better than a hypothesis that makes correct empirical predictions!
I am curious about the qualifier "pre-1980." Do you think later work in these disciplines is noticeably better?
"pre-1980" = "pre-lukeprog", and thus, the ancient days
(kidding)
If I correctly identified him from his karma score in the survey results (and everything else I saw was consistent with what I already knew about him), he's younger than that.
Is this problem limited to philosophy?
Good work in virtually every discipline requires a semi-decent grounding in math (with the possible exception of menial work)
Indeed, the universities teaching such subjects would do well to realize this and make math an integral part of the curriculum in most subjects, as opposed to the tackled-on (or non-existent) math courses they have now.
I agree that there is good work to be done with math in all of those fields. But there's plenty of good work in most of them that can be done without math too.
Yes. Two caveats:
1) The person doing the good work without math should remember to consult someone with the math skills before publishing their results, if they are trying to say something math-like.
For example, to invent a hypothesis, design an experiment and collect data, the math may be unnecessary. But it becomes necessary at the last step when the experimenter says: "So I did these experiments 10 times: 8 times the results seemed to support my hypothesis, 2 times they did not; therefore... what exactly?"
2) There should be enough people in the given field knowing the math, so when the person from the first example wants to find a colleague with domain knowledge and math skills, they actually find one.
It's not going to happen because it would disqualify too many candidates and make courses unpopular. Maths is a huge turn off for a lot of people.
Also, one could argue that history is releant to just about everything. Etc.
Indeed. This is a bug, not a feature, and alas, it holds these fields back.
It is certainly true that history-of-(field) is useful for people doing work in (field). History in general, while useful in general, is less directly useful for a specific field. And indeed, most fields do spend reasonable (or more than reasonable!) amounts of time discussing their own history. Art does this, philosophy does this, even mathematics and physics do this to some extent.
It is true that the argument "one could argue that (some field) is relevant to just about everything and that therefore more of (this field) should be taught" can be made convincingly for many fields, but the fact that it can be made for many fields is not an argument against it, it just means that some field must be prioritized, hopefully on utilitarian grounds.
I disagree that this is a bug, not a feature. I think it's useful for fields to contain people with different styles of thinking. The people who are competent at math are probably N types on the MBTI, people who are good at abstract reasoning, but who might be less competent at focusing on empirical data and specific concrete situations. The sciences, especially the social sciences, need people who are good at observing/collecting data, and I would hate to disqualify these people with a math requirement, or relegate them to lower-status because their minds operate in a different (but also useful) way.
(This comment informed by having read this essay earlier this morning.)
That is an exceedingly optimistic hypothesis.
Might be, indeed. This hasn't stopped physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, astronomy, etc. all of which have empirical data and concrete situations, and are chock-a-block with maths.
Indeed they need such people. If you have evidence that the present selection procedures prevalent in the social sciences select for such people, I would be delighted to hear it.
Observing and collecting data is stereotypically something that maths types are good at. Consider google, data science and data mining.
Let me refer to Why is machine learning not used in medical diagnosis?
The expert systems in question supposedly outperform human doctors!
I hypothesise as follows : the non-mathy fields maintain a group dynamic that causes a certain hostility towards mathematical ideas, even when such ideas are objectively superior. To an extent, this also prevents objective judgement of people's abilities within the field, and steers these fields away from a desirable meritocratic state. We end up with fields that select against mathematical ability (those with mathematical ability flee as soon as they realise that the entire history curriculum does not contain a single course on radiometric dating - I wish I were kidding), and that may not select for other desirable qualities instead.
I suspect that the negative attitude towards math has less to do with personality type and more to do with the execrable state of mathematics education.
From the essay:
It might be possible to get some information about this from the survey.
I have a feeling I will have a lot to say about this posting, but I will start with one small issue: what is the watershed that occurred in metaphycs circa 1980? I'm pretty sure the Wikipedia article isn't going to tell me, because I wrote the "history and schools" section.
It seems a strange date to choose in some cases. If anything, philosophy of mind was a lot more LessWrongy (i.e., zombieless) before 1980.
I chose 1980 because after 1980 there are at least a few philosophers studying these subjects who are attuned to contemporary science, compsci, and maths to get things basically right. E.g. after 1980 some philosophers of mind decided to just start agreeing with what cognitive scientists were discovering at the time.
It's a graduate level text; to benefit from it adequately, one should have at least a pure math undergraduate major worth of training, including the first courses in naive set theory and formal logic. A text that's too advanced for one's level risks confusing the reader, introducing intuitive misconceptions and giving the illusion of understanding, so it's better to read up on something much more basic. This book might be a long term goal that contributes to shaping the curriculum, but then it should be understood that there are at least 20 books before it on the reading list.
Right; many of my selections presume prior training. I do 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.
The things on your curriculum don't seem like philosophy at all in the contemporary sense of the word. They are certainly very valuable at figuring out the answers to concrete questions within their particular domains. But they are less useful for understanding broader questions about the domains themselves or the appropriateness of the questions. Learning formal logic, for example, isn't that much help in understanding what logic is. Likewise, knowing how people make moral decisions is not at all the same as knowing what the moral thing to do would be. I gather your point is that it's only certain concrete questions that have any real meaning.
This naive logical positivism is dismaying in a blog about rationality. I certainly agree that there is plenty of garbage philosophy, and that most of Aristotle's scientific claims were wrong. But the problem with logical positivism is that its claim about what's meaningful and what isn't fails to be a meaningful claim under its own criteria.
Your dismissal of certain types of philosophy inevitably rests on particular implicit answers to the kinds of philosophical questions you dismiss as worthless (like what makes a philosophical idea wrong?). Dismissing those questions—failing to think through the assumptions on which your viewpoint rests—only guarantees that your answers to those questions will be pretty bad. And that's something that you could learn from a careful reading of Plato.
Reforming phil. and leaving it alone are not the only options. There is also the option of setting up a new cross-disciplinary subject parallel to Cognitive Science
Quite. It is a perfectly coherent possibility that the moral instincts given to us by evolution are broken in some way, so that studying morlaity form the evolutionary perspective does't resolve the "what is the right thing to do" question at all. The interesting thing here is that a lot of material on LW is dedicated to an exactly parallel with argument about ratioanlity: our rationality is broken and needs to be fixed. How can EY be so open to the one possibility and so oblivious to the other?
He has attempted to address this issue in the Meta-Ethics sequence, although I find his points on this specific matter very confusing and I was very disappointing with it compared to the other sequences.
What do you mean by "broken", here?
About the same as when I said rationality is borken, according to EY.
Our rationality has an obvious standard to compare it to: the real world. If we consistently make the wrong predictions, it's easy to see something is wrong. What can you compare morality to but itself?
I suspect I'm missing something here.
Pre-supposing Moral Realism gives one a clear standard by which to judge whether one's actions are moral or immoral. A tendency to consistently make wrong predictions about whether an action is moral or immoral would mean that our moral compass is "broken."
Of course... Pre-supposing Moral Realism is silly, so there's that.
No, it doesn't. If your ethics conflicted with Morality, how on earth would you tell?
That would depend on exactly what kind of Moral Realism you espouse. If you're Kantian, you think reason will tell you whether your actions are "really" wrong or right. If you're a Divine Command Theist, you think God can tell you whether your actions are "really" wrong or right. If you're a Contractarian, you think the Social Contract can tell you whether your actions are "really" wrong or right...
And so on, and so forth.
As I've said, I think Moral Realism of this kind is silly, but if it happens to be true then what you think you "ought" to do and what you actually "ought" to do could be two different things.
Oh. Right. Yes. I'm an idiot.
Hmm.
Well, if they think they can prove it, any moral realists are welcome to post their reasoning here, and if they turn out to be right I can't see any objection to posting on the implications. That said, I suspect that many (all?) forms of moral realism come not from mistakes of fact but confusion, and have a good chance of being dissolved by the sequences.
Isn't EY a moral realist?
Some folks have used the idea of "moral observations" to address this. Basically, if you see your neighbor's child light a dog on fire, and you say "I saw your child doing something wrong", you're making a coherent statement about your observation of reality. Our moral observations can be distorted / hallucinated just like other observations, but then that is only as much of a barrier to understanding moral reality as it is to understanding physical reality.
And more importantly: why the ** (excuse the language) would you care.
If what I truly desire upon reflection is objectively "evil", I want to believe that what I truly desire upon reflection is objectively "evil". And tautologically, I will still truly desire it.
In the sense that pre-supposing anything is silly?
Okay.
Our de facto reasoing is wrong. Either it is not leading to wrong predictions, or it is not easy to see something is wrong.
In any case, the world is not the only standard rationality can be compared to. We can spot the incoherence of bad rationality by theoretical investigation.
This is a very good point. If we agree cognitive biases make our understanding of the world flawed, why should we assume that our moral intuitions aren't equally flawed? That assumption makes sense only if you actually equate morality with our moral intuitions. This isn't what I mean by the word "moral" at all—and as a matter of historical fact many behaviors I consider completely reprehensible were at one time or another widely considered to be perfectly acceptable.
It certainly doesn't hurt! Learning formal logic gives you data with which to test meta-logical theories. Moreover, learning formal logic helps in understanding everything; and logic is one of the things, so, there ya go. Instantiate at will.
Sure. But for practical purposes (and yes, there are practical philosophical purposes), you can't be successful in either goal without some measure of success in both.
Where does lukeprog say that? And by 'meaning' do you mean importance, or do you mean semantic content?
Lukeprog and Eliezer are not logical positivists in the relevant sense. And although logical positivism is silly, it's not silly for obvious reasons like 'it's self-refuting;' it isn't self-refuting. The methodology of logical positivism is asserted by positivists as an imperative, not as a truth-apt description of anything.
In some cases, yes. But why do you think lukeprog is dismissing those questions? He wrote, "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!" Lukeprog's objection is to how people answer philosophical questions, more so than to the choice of questions themselves. (Though I'm sure there will be some disagreement on the latter point as well. Not all grammatical questions are well-formed.)
I think that logical positivism generally is self-refuting. It typically makes claims about what is meaningful that would be meaningless under its own standards. It generally also depends on an ideas about what counts as observable or analytically true that also are not defensible—again, under its own standards. It doesn't change things to say formulate it as a methodological imperative. If the methodology of logical positivism is imperative, then on what grounds? Because other stuff seems silly?
I am obviously reading something into lukeprog's post that may not be there. But the materials on his curriculum don't seem very useful in answering a broad class of questions in what is normally considered philosophy. And when he's mocking philosophy abstracts, he dismisses the value of thinking about what counts as knowledge. But if that's not worthwhile, then, um, how does he know?
Let's try to unpack what 'self-refuting' could mean here. Do you mean that logical positivism is inconsistent? If so, how? A meaningless statement is not truth-apt, so it can't yield a contradiction. And you haven't suggested that positivists assert 'Non-empirical statements are meaningless' is both meaningful and meaningless. What, precisely, is wrong with positivists asserting 'Non-empirical statements are meaningless,' and asserting that the previous sentence is meaningless as well? You're framing it as an internal problem, but the more obvious and compelling problems are all external. (I.e.: Their theory of meaning is coherent and intelligible, at the very least from an outsider's perspective; it just isn't remotely plausible.)
Here I agree, except 'under its own standards' isn't doing any important work. Logical positivism's views are not inconsistent; they're just silly and unmotivated. There is no reason for us to adopt its standards in the first place.
Speaking for myself, I think it's very important for us to unpack what we mean by epistemic justification (as opposed to moral and other forms of justification). For instance, it's very difficult to understand 'rationality' without an understanding of the normative dimension of 'knowledge.' But the words 'knowledge' and 'justification' themselves aren't magical. If we need to taboo them away for purposes of rigorous philosophy, then re-introduce them only for pragmatic/rhetorical purposes in persuading laypeople, that's fine. The traditional philosophical way of framing the question, as 'What is knowledge?', is unhelpful and confusing because it conflates the semantic question 'What do we mean by the word "knowledge"?' with the much deeper and more important questions beneath the surface.
Similarly, I think a lot of recent work in the metaphysics of causality unhelpfully conflates conceptual analysis with metaphysical hypothesizing; both are important topics (and important work may be done on either topic under lukeprog's rubric), but if we confuse the two we lose most of the topics' significance in a haze of equivocation.
Minor nitpick:
Those aren't the world's top 5 philosophy departments, those are the top 5 for the United States. In the rankings for the English-speaking world, Oxford is #2 after NYU (after that the rankings are the same until you get down to ANU and Toronto, which are tied with a bunch of other schools for #15).
Furthermore, the Philosophical Gourmet Report doesn't try to compare English-speaking and non-English-speaking universities.
Fixed.
I agree that modern science provides valuable insights into philosophical problems. I also agree that Bayesian probability theory and machine learning are powerful models for approaching problems in epistemology. This is why I'm in grad school in machine learning, and not for philosophy. Furthermore, I'm not a big fan of ancient philosophers (especially ones who think categories are absolute), and I'd like to see the computational theory of mind excised from popular thought, in favor of something closer to embodied cognition. I actually really like the idea of incorporating modern theories and empirical discoveries into a philosophical curriculum.
Despite this, I have a strong negative reaction to your post, because it suggests there is One True Way to do philosophy and that everyone who does not follow the Ways of Bayes is doing it wrong. The last thing I want us teaching students is any kind of absolutism. It can only damage students to tell them that our current models are the true models, and all past thinkers were necessarily wrong. It would also damage students to restrict them to one philosophical viewpoint; as much as I like Bayesian reasoning and empiricism, I think it would hurt students to teach them that these methods are the One True Way, because it would prevent them from exploring alternative viewpoints.
I think that students of philosophy should be taught as many theories as possible, both ancient and modern. By coming to understand the diverse range of models that we've applied over the course of human history, students can learn some humility. Just as all of these past models were superceded, our current theories will inevitably be replaced. Just as we can spot the glaring errors in past philosophical models, the people of the future will spot the "obvious" follies in our own ideas.
Also, the more models that students learn, the more "degrees of freedom" they will realize exist. They will come to understand along which dimensions worldviews can vary; they can then explore other options for these dimensions, or discover new dimensions that no one has tried varying yet. I strongly believe that learning more worldviews is a powerful method of keeping one's mind flexible enough to come up with genuinely new ideas.
Lastly, as much as I love mathematical models and rigorous empiricism, I oppose the trend of applying them haphazardly to the social sciences. If we're studying e.g. anthropology, I think it's a mistake to favor statistical data over first-hand accounts or subjective analyses. Not because there's anything inherently wrong with empirical and statistical methods, but because the models we use are too simple. There are so many features, and it's hard to account for all of them, both because we don't know which features to choose, and because inference is computationally intractable in such an enormous model. Fortunately, the typical human brain comes prepackaged with empathy and a theory of mind, a powerful module for modeling the behaviors/preferences/internal experiences of other humans. Certainly, this module is subject to biases and might make systematic errors when reasoning. But when choosing between two imperfect models, I tend to think our built-in circuitry is better suited for the social sciences than tools of machine learning. I assume that our built-in intuitive machinery is useful for some branches of philosophy as well.
You are not supposed to teach them it's the One True Way, just that it's The Best Way Anyone Have Found So Far By A Fair Margin.
When I saw the title "Religious Music for Godless Ears," I was sure it would be in some second rate journal, maybe Religious Studies at best. But nope! It's in freakin' Mind.
So I've made this sort of argument before in a somewhat more limited form. The analogy I like to give is that we don't spend multiple semesters in chemistry discussing the classical elements and phlogiston (even though phlogiston did actually give testable predictions(contrary to some commonly made claims on LW). We mention them for a few days and go on. But in this context, while I'd favor less emphasis on the old philosophers, they are still worth reading to a limited extent, because they did phrase many of the basic questions (even if imprecisely) that are still relevant, and are necessary to understand the verbiage of contemporary discourse. Some of them even fit in with ideas that are connected to things that people at LW care about. For example, Kant's categorical imperative is very close to a decision-theory or game theory approach if one thinks about it as asking "what would happen if everyone made the choice that I do?" Even Pearl is writing in a context that assumes a fair bit of knowlege about classical notions. What is therefore I think needed is not a complete rejection of older philosophers, but a reduction in emphasis.
In my Intro to Moral Philosophy course, Kant's work was preceded by an introduction to basic game-theory and such, which most people understood much better than his actual work, so I don't really think his is a necessary foundation or a proper introduction in those fields
We certainly don't start science students off with the latest and greatest science, because there's a boatload of other science they have to study before it'll do them any good. In practice,almost everything we teach undergrads in hard science fields is pre-1980, because of the amount of time it takes to get a student up to speed with where the frontier of the field had progressed to by 1980.
Point, but:
1) The science that lukeprog is concerned with comes from subfields that are substantially younger than most major fields in the hard sciences, e.g. the heuristics and biases program is much younger than Newtonian mechanics.
2) Old hard science at least has the benefit of working within a certain domain, e.g. Newtonian mechanics is valuable because it is still applicable to macroscopic objects moving slowly, and any future theory of physics is constrained by having to reduce to Newtonian mechanics in certain limits. The older results in the science that lukeprog is concerned with are misleading at best and dangerously wrong at worst.
In other words, I think what lukeprog is advocating is less analogous to teaching undergraduates about string theory before Newtonian mechanics now and more analogous to teaching undergraduates about thermodynamics before phlogiston theory in the 1800s (edit: and I see JoshuaZ made this point already).
Correct.
I don't understand why this isn't simple. Science and philosophy are both abstractions of reality in the sense that they both have less detail than reality. But philosophy has way less detail than science. So shouldn't philosophy knuckle under and reformat itself to become science's gentle introductory text?
EDIT: This comment reminded me why it isnt simple.
Philosophy largely isn't about uninterpreted reality, it is largely about how humans think about and relate to reality. And each other. And thought itself.
I guess? But it still needs oversight. Those questions are important enough to require precision that philosophy doesn't have.
From whom? Do you know of some people who understand philosophy and can do it better than philosophers, but aren't philosphers?
I find that imprecise. Did you mean conceptual or numerical precision?
I'm not sure how to answer you, because I don't get how philosophy isn't a sketchbook/scrapbook for other fields (who don't even necessarily need outside sketchbooking/scrapbooking help).
Both?
Besides coming up with questions for science to answer, describing the history of ideas, and teaching people basic question-asking skills, what do we need philosophy for?
It isn't becuase it isn't just a vaguer way of addressing the same questions.
coming up with questions for philosphy to answer, teaching advanced question-ansering skills, etc.
Philosophy has answered questions?
Yes. Eg: "Is Logical Positivism a good idea?". Answer: no.
Philosophy has yet to answer what "good" or "idea" even mean with authority, so I'm gonna say no to this, although I don't disagree with your overall assertion.
I don't think the fine details of "good" and "idea" are relevant. What' relevant is that no-one does LP any more, and even its former adherents turned against it.
Speaking as someone who has read a lot of philosophy...
If I had a boatload of money, I would currently be throwing it at you to make this thing happen.
Actually, is this happening anywhere? Does CMU teach this sort of stuff in their philosophy department? Luke gave as examples the five top American programs, but are there other programs ranked lower which teach philosophy Pearl and Kahneman style?
I seriously doubt it. This is pretty much a "reboot" of Philosophy - a reconception of what it's about. Anyone who wants to put together a program like this might hesitate to call it Philosophy instead of something else.
I'm not sure. Looking at CMU's website makes me think that they are leaning in this new direction, which is maybe not reflected in the Intro courses yet, but is certainly present in the lecures they have scheduled, as well as the fact that it offers a Major in Logic & Computation and puts it in the Philosophy department.
The tech schools have had excellent philosophy departments. It's no accident that Judith Jarvis Thomson taught at MIT.
If I was looking into majoring in philosophy and I was possibly interested in this new-fangled portion of it, you're saying tech schools are the way to go?
I do not know that specifically.
However, the advice I would give to anyone thinking of majoring in philosophy is: don't major in philosophy.
That said, I don't think it matters too much what you major in. The main benefit of a liberal arts degree is the liberal arts part - being exposed to people from many different disciplines with different ways of thinking, being forced to take them seriously for a while, and getting a chance to see the connections between them.
Really, if you want to major in something, you should take the opportunity to learn a skill, or else to take advantage of machinery that you'll only find in a university. There are things that you can learn in college, like how to mix chemicals in a lab or how to make pottery, that are difficult to learn without the proper facilities. And if you do prefer learning academic subjects in a class, remember that math and computing are good bases for everything.
You can read philosophy on your own time, and if you're reasonably intelligent then reading it in a class probably won't help. A philosophy club might be a good idea - those are often as good as seminar classes.
Actually, I agree with all this. Phil is a great hobby. No special equipment is required and you can do it anywhere.
In my opinion, your comment is a very valuable kind of philosophy. You make clear statements in plain language about expected results from doing things in the real world. If a "newfangled" philosophy has a technical end, I would like the non-technical end to look like training in writing this way.
Yes, though it would be better-written if I'd instead trained in writing and it would be more useful if I'd been able to link to empirical research demonstrating the effects I just baldly asserted. My training in philosophy did seem to make me better at sounding like I know what I'm talking about when I tell other people what to do.
The empirical research is nice for footnotes, but I honestly don't know how you could've written it better.
If you can describe the methods of sounding authoritative, I think it would be very valuable, whether as a contribution to understanding the dark arts or as a tool for increasing motivation. (Or does is it a skill of sounding right which doesn't actually motivate people?)
I've been wondering about the techniques ever since I noticed that Heinlein had a talent for sounding right.
Here is CMU's spring 2013 philosophy department course catalog. Unfortunately, the CMU website doesn't show syllabi for its philosophy classes. Just looking at the classes, they appear to be much more logic- and compsci-heavy than most philosophy departments, but also cover some standard stuff: political philosophy, Kant, etc.
So if I had to design an intro to philosophy/first-year philosophy course (and I will), at the moment I would do this:
There are four ideas in philosophy which stand above the others as ideas which have shaped our thinking and our civilization to the point where you've probably heard of these before you came to class: Plato's theory of forms, Aristotle's theory of causes, Descartes' 'Cogito ergo sum', and Kant's categorical imperative. The aim of this course is to understand what philosophy is, and why one should engage in it.
The course will discuss the writings of these four philosophers:
Plato- Selections from Plato's Republic and Phaedo
Aristotle- Physics book I and II, and III.1, and De Anima II.1, 5.
Descartes- The Meditations
Kant- Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
That's my thought. I'm a frequent reader, and sometimes poster on Less Wrong. I'm also going to be teaching undergraduates philosophy in about two years, and right now my idea of how to go about doing this is very different from yours. I very much do not want to do a bad job, or hurt my students, so if I'm wrong, I should be convinced otherwise.
Maybe it wasn't your purpose, but there's no argument in this post. Please, please, please present an argument. You (or whoever wants to try) would be doing me a very great benefit by correcting me on this, if indeed I am wrong.
I think you need to focus in on what your goals are. Lukeprog's idea of an intro to philosophy class sounds like a boot camp for aspiring professional philosopher-kings and intellectual revolutionaries. Yours sounds like a historical overview of the effects of a scattered set of ideological trends upon human culture. There isn't any clear unifying content of your imagined course, as there would be if you focused, say, just on game-changing epistemological texts (like the much more engaging and well-written Berkeley in lieu of Aristotle) or just on game-changing meta-ethical ones.
On the other hand, if your goal is to make students think critically and rigorously about very deep issues, not just to expand their historical horizons, then you may want to choose more accessible secondary literature. John Perry's A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality is a superb candidate; a short, accessible dialogue packed with arguments much clearer and more human than those you'd find in a Platonic dialogue.
Good, excellent suggestion: much of this disagreement seems to come down to a disagreement over what a) the goals of philosophy are, and b) the goals of philosophical training are. So, if I had to state the goal of my course, I would say: the aim of this course is to understand what kinds of questions philosophy asks, and how we should approach those questions. That could use a lot more filling out, of course. And I don't think those four ideas are scattered, ideological, or trends, but that's not something you could have gotten from my description.
Anyway, what do you think is the right view on these two goals? What does philosophy aim to do, and what should training aim to achieve?
I think the most important thing an introductory philosophy class can do is to taboo philosophy. Ask instead: What can I get away with teaching a bunch of undergraduates under the umbrella term 'philosophy' that will be most useful to human beings (or specifically to the sorts of human beings who are likely to study 'philosophy'), and that they are least likely to acquire by other means? Your goal shouldn't be to make them understand what people tend to classify as 'philosophy' vs. 'non-philosophy;' it should be to maximize their ability to save the world and live fulfilling lives. I don't think reading Berkeley need be unhelpful for saving the world; but it all really comes down to how you read Berkeley.
He could certainly teach you how to take theories to their logical conclusions no matter how bizarre they seem...
Okay, could I ask you for just a couple more details? It seems like a big moving part in your description is saving the world, and another is leading a fulfilling life. What do you mean by these things?
That's a very large question, and my answer will depend on where you're coming from and where you want to take this discussion. You probably have your own intuitive conception of where, in some general terms, you'd like the world to go. 'Philosophy' is a largely artificial, arbitrary, and unhelpful schema, and you owe it no fealty. So my main goal was not to persuade you to adopt my own vision of a happier and more rational world. It was to motivate you to reframe what teaching a 'philosophy' class is in a way that makes you more likely to exploit this opportunity to move the world infinitesimally closer to your own vision for the world.
If I were teaching an Intro to Philosophy class, I might break it down as follows:
Part 1: Destroy students' complacence. Spend a few weeks methodically annihilating students' barriers, prejudices, thought-terminating clichés, and safety nets. Don't frame the discussion as 'philosophy.' Frame it as follows:
"OK, we're trying to understand the world, and get what we want out of life. And we can't just rely on authorities, common sense, or usual practice; those predictably fail. So we'll need to reason our way to understanding the world. But our reasoning itself seems infirm. When we debate, we hit walls. Our ignorance corrodes our predictions. We let language and concepts confuse us. We don't entertain enough possibilities, and we don't weight them fairly. Paradox, ambiguity, and arbitrariness seems to threaten our human projects at every turn. Is it really possible for us to patch our buggy brains to any significant extent?"
The answer is Yes. But the best way to reach that conclusion is to test how much our own capacities can improve in practice. And the best test will be for us to take a few of the most fundamental riddles humans have devised, and see whether we can resolve or dissolve them by introducing more rigor and creativity to our thinking.
Part 2: Incrementally build students' confidence back up. Spend about 3/5 of the course focusing very closely on one or two simple, readable, accessible, counter-intuitive analytic philosophy texts in epistemology/metaphysics (like Perry's or Berkeley's dialogues), teaching students that making progress in understanding and critically assessing good arguments requires rigor and patience, and, just as importantly, that they are capable of exercising the rigor and patience needed to make important progress on deep issues.
In other words, this part of the course is about trying very hard to impress students regarding the utility and value of carefully reasoning about very general questions — these issues are hard — without intimidating them into thinking they as individuals are 'non-philosophers' or 'non-intellectuals,' and without motivating them to despairingly or triumphantly regress to an 'oh it's all so mysterious' relativism. It's a precarious lesson to teach — making them skeptical enough, but not too skeptical! — but an indispensable one. And the best way to teach it is by concretely empowering them to think better, and letting them see the results for themselves. Acquaint students with a variety of tricks and techniques for analyzing and evaluating arguments, including deductive logic, Bayesian empiricism, semantics, and pragmatics.
Part 3: Make students put it all into practice. Coming up for air from these deep metaphysical and epistemological waters, spend the last 3-4 weeks talking about how to use these philosophical doctrines and techniques in daily life. I'm imagining something in between a CFAR course and a whirlwind tour of existentialism. This will engage and inspire students who are a bit more continental than analytic in temperament, while reiterating that the same very careful techniques of reasoning can be applied (a) to everyday life-decisions, and (b) to even more abstract and difficult riddles than might initially have seemed possible. Ideally, the pragmatism and humanism of this part of the course should also help finish disenchanting any remaining relativists, positivists, and hyper-skeptics in the class. (Or is it re-enchanting?)
How's that sound to you?
2 questions:
How do I sign up?
Who do I give my money to?
I see you're point. Many philosophers still like reading and writing about dead people rather than looking to science for entertainment and answers. However, it is a hasty generalization to infer from this fact that "philosophy is a diseased discipline which spends 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." And it is a bit myopic to think that your suggestion has not already been addressed by numerous institutions.
Plenty of philosophers study contemporary science and statistics about as much as philosophy. I myself am very interested in understanding philosophical cognition, and I am by no means alone in that interest.
The reason most departments do not teach what you want them to teach is because almost no one in a philosophy department specializes in what you are after, otherwise they would not be (solely) in the philosophy department. So to do what you want, universities would have to offer philosophy degrees that are interdisciplinary...and they already do. CU Boulder, UCSD, and GSU all offer PhDs in philosophy and neuroscience, for example.
This post has me wondering if we should make basic philosophy (and by basic I do not mean "ancient") compulsory for computer science, engineering, and science majors. Perhaps that would obviate the need for unwarranted commentary like this post.
This post has a number of useful insights, but I'm not so sure about this:
As someone who is currently studying philosophy at the undergraduate level--and thus has first-hand knowledge of what it is like to start with Plato and Kant--I don't quite see where you're getting the claim that starting with ancient philosophers either (1) in fact teaches students to revere them/their methods, or (2) is at least meant to teach students to revere them/their methods. My own experience, what I've heard from fellow students, and the academic papers that we are actually assigned to read all run counter to your claim.
First, one of the primary, if not the main, purposes in starting with ancient philosophers is precisely to discuss how and where they went wrong. The professor does not just tell us whether a certain philosopher is right/wrong, but has the students critically evaluate that philosopher's claims both in papers and in discussions. Second, there are numerous academic articles written on their claims (just by virtue of the fact that they are ancient philosophers), which in turn means that those articles--and their arguments--combined with the students' own analyses provide a substantial foundation for 'critical thinking.' Third, regardless of the ancient philosophers' specific claims, the manner in which they argue for their conclusions and critically think themselves is tremendously helpful--both as a model to emulate and to not emulate--for students just starting to learn what constitutes a good argument. A charitable reading, which in particular recognizes the historical context, will show that many of the ancient philosophers do make good arguments, and value precision and rigor in so arguing; of course, many specific empirical claims are wrong, but insofar as those depend on context and not on poor argumentation they are irrelevant.
I do think that there is much wrong with philosophy, but that specific claim you made is a little shaky (and underspecified).
Isn't it history of philosophy, rather than philosophy? Learning why Aristotle's ideas on physics are wrong (e.g. "all bodies move toward their natural place") belong mostly in a History of Science course, not in a Physics course. Shouldn't it work the same for philosophy?
Hmm, this is a good question. After spending some time thinking about this, I think the problem I have in trying to separate "history of philosophy" from "philosophy" is that such an enterprise almost appears antithetical to the goal(s) of philosophy.* Philosophy seems meant not to be useful or practical, but intended to ask the right sorts of questions, think about things one abstraction deeper/more meta, and question things others don't question. As such, studying the history of philosophy is philosophy--and vice versa--insofar as the goal of philosophy is not to positively answer the right questions but to think philosophically and ask those questions in the first place. So, learning why Aristotle's ideas on physics are wrong is simply not the sort of thing with which philosophy would concern itself--for better or for worse.
*Thinking about it some more, I just realized that I may be conceiving of the goal(s) of philosophy as something different than what most of the posters here do. I get the sense that lukeprog (and others here) wants philosophy to provide answers to the deep questions, or at least attempt to do so. The problem is philosophy is not about that; maybe it should be, but then I'd argue that such a field is precisely what science is, with philosophy as almost a check/balance (making sure that the right questions are still being asked, assumptions questioned, etc.).
I'm pretty sure many philosophers would disagree.
I fully concede that; that was more what I think it should be about. And if that's true and philosophers really do want to answer those deep questions, philosophy needs to be reformed to incorporate more modern science--something like what lukeprog proposed.
How is asking "the right sorts of questions" not "useful or practical"? To "question things others don't question" is what scientists do. Examples: Why do things fall down when let go? (physics) Why do children tend to look like their parents? (genetics) Why does a candle burn? (chemistry)
What are the questions "others take for granted" that philosophy asks? Wikipedia:
Most of these are logic, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science and linguistics, and most recently AI research (esp. knowledge acquisition and reasoning). What's left is "reality" and "existence". Have I missed anything?
Upvoted. I do largely agree with you, and the things that I don't quite agree with you about are things about which I don't think I can form a persuasive argument.
If I recall correctly, introductory college physics (as I took it almost 20 years ago!) didn't teach how to discover physical truths, so much as which ones have been discovered. One might do a few experiments to verify that thrown objects approximate a parabolic path, but one will spend much more time and effort doing word problems applying known formulae from Newton, Boyle, Kirchhoff, etc.
Downvoted for sloganeering and applause-lighting.
That's quite an applause-lighting slogan you have there.
<Insert infinite descent>
ω+1
Could you be more specific?
Playing Devil's Advocate...
As Eliezer has argued, it would be greatly beneficial if science were kept secret. It would be wonderful if students had the opportunity to make scientific discoveries on their own, and being trained to think that way would greatly advance the rate of scientific progress. Making a scientific breakthrough would be something a practicing scientist would be used to, rather than something that happens once a generation, and so it would happen more reliably. Rather than having science textbooks, students could start with old (wrong) science textbooks or just looking at the world, and they'd have to make all their own mistakes along the way to see what making a breakthrough really involves.
This is how Philosophy is already taught! While many philosophers have opinions on what Philosophical questions have already been settled, they do not put forth their opinions straightforwardly to undergrads. Rather, students are expected to read the original works and figure out for themselves what's wrong with them.
For example, students might learn about the debate between Realism and Nominalism, and then be expected to write a paper about which one they think is correct (or neither). Sure, we could just tell them the entire debate was confused, but then we won't be training future philosophers in the same way we would like to train future scientists. The students should be able to work out for themselves what the problems were, so that they will be able to make philosophical breakthroughs in the future.
While a nice idea, it's hardly workable. There are roughly two types of science consumers: researchers and users. The users do not care what's under the hood, they just need working tools. Engineering is an example. Making them discover the Newton's laws instead of teaching how to apply them to design stable bridges is a waste of time. Researchers build new tools and so have to understand how and why the existing tools work. This is a time-consuming process as it is (20+ years if you count all education levels including grad studies). Making people stumble through all the standard dead ends, while instructive, will likely make it so much longer. The current compromise is teaching some history of science while teaching science proper.
Indeed. And look where it led. The whole discipline appears largely useless to the outsiders, who hardly care what misinformed opinion some genius held 1000 years ago.
The current compromise isn't working. A smidgen of history is taught, but usually in the mode of fact-memorization, not in the mode of exploration and discovery. The game method, whatever its value in philosophy, is certainly useful for scientists -- it not only creates better (more dynamic, audacious, rigorous) thinkers in general, but also gives people a better sense of what science is and of why it is not ugly or dehumanizing. Teaching people arithmetic is of much greater value when successfully accompanied by a taught appreciation for and joy in arithmetic.
My recommendation: Ditch the 'philosophy/science/history' breakdown of courses, at least at the lower levels. If you're trying to teach skills and good practices, you want to be able to draw on philosophical, scientific, and historical lessons and exercises as needed, rather than respecting the rather arbitrary academic divisions. Given low levels of long-term high school science class fact retention, there's simply no excuse to not be incorporating 'philosophical' tricks (like those taught in the Sequences) and game-immersion at least as a mainstay of high school, whether or not we want to maintain that method at the higher levels.
And I don't think this is only necessary for researchers. In some cases it's even more important for users to be good scientists than for researchers to be, since our economic and political landscapes are shaped by the micro-decisions of the 'users'.
Let me try to separate two different issues here, teaching science and teaching rational thought. The latter should indeed be taught better and to most people. The standard "critical thinking" curriculum is probably inadequate and largely out of date with the current leading edge, which is hardly surprising. Game immersion can be one of the tools used to teach this stuff. A successful student should then be able to apply their new rationality skills to their chosen vocation (and indeed to making a good choice of vocation), be it research or engineering, commerce or politics.
This is largely a typical mind fallacy. Plenty of people can find no joy in arithmetics, just like plenty of people find no joy in poetry, no matter how hard you make them.
Right, this is the new critical thinking curriculum part, unrelated to any particular science.
And here's why I try not to separate those two issues: (1) Teaching science and teaching rational thought are largely interdependent. You can't do one wholly without the other. (2) 'Rational thought' and 'critical thinking' don't generally get their own curricula in schools. So we need to sneak them into science classrooms, math classrooms, philosophy classrooms, history classrooms -- wherever we can. Reminding ourselves of the real-world intersectionality, fuzziness, and interdependence of these fields helps us feel better about this pragmatic decision by intellectually justifying it; but what matters most is the pragmatics. Our field divisions are tools.
The worry of typical-mind errors looms large on any generalized account, including a pessimistic one. To help combat that, I'll make my background explicit. I largely had no interest in mathematical reasoning in primary and secondary schools; hence when I acquired that interest as a result of more engaging, imaginative, and 'adventurey' approaches to teaching and thinking, I concluded that there were probably lots of other students for whom mathematics could have been taught in a much more useful, personally involving way.
Perhaps those 'lots of others' are still a minority; no data exists specifically on how many people would acquire a love of arithmetic from a Perfectly Optimized Arithmetic course. But I'm inclined to think that underestimating people's potential to become better lay-scientists, lay-mathematicians, and lay-philosophers at this stage has greater potential costs than overestimating it.
Yes, absolutely. As shminux points out below, it isn't practical to expect students to (re-)make real scientific discoveries during their training, but that doesn't mean that we can't game-ify scientific training using a simpler universe wherein novel discoveries are a lot closer at hand.
This would require a larger proportion of philosophy professors to admit that the debate is confused.
There don't seem to be anything that shouldn't be changed, and thus it seems meaningless to keep the label "philosophy". Hence why I object to saying LW is about philosophy as well. The ONLY similarity is that it tries to resolve questions (previously) though to be the domain of philosophy to solve, but that used to be the case with many other things that are now their own sciences. I say just plain scrap all of philosophy, and move all the supposed tasks of it that are worth keeping over to new fields if they aren't resolved by existing ones already.
There are a series of statements like this in Luke's post and in the comments. I don't understand them. What would it mean to 'scrap philosophy'? Would someone from like the government have to come along and make it illegal or something? It doesn't seem like there's any way to change philosophy, or eradicate it, except by arguing with philosophers and convincing them to do something else. Is that what 'scrap philosophy' means?
I think it would be something more along the lines of spreading a meme that says "Let's just ignore philosophy, it's pretty much a waste of time."
This is happening already to some degree. It would have to be a heck of a lot more infectious of a meme to actually destroy philosophy as a field, though.
That's been a meme since 400 BC, and it remains by far the dominant view today among laypeople, scientists, economists, etc. Basically, the only people who think philosophy is worth pursuing are philosophers. If that's all you mean by 'scrapping philosophy' then the job is long since done.
Yeah, this is true. Maybe scrapping philosophy means just not funding it anymore?
Presumably s/he means de-funding everything that pretends to be philosophy, but is, in fact, history of thought, and so belongs in the history department.
But the funding from philosophy programs comes from universities. I doubt the government itself spends more than a pitance on philosophy. So do you mean 'scrap philosophy' as in, try to convince universities to fire the philosophers under their employ?
I am not suggesting this, just trying to interpret what Armok_GoB may have meant. My view is that the defunding of the old school should happen organically, as it usually does. Newer, more successful approaches and sub-disciplines slowly replace the old as the old guard retires.
Ah, thanks. Is it weird that this has never happened to philosophy as a named discipline? Certainly schools of thought come and go, but why is philosophy as an academic banner by far the longest lived?
As some quick replies have pointed out, yea, cutting funding and spreading memes about ignoring it and actually ignoring it.
Getting people to ignore philosophy is, as I said do DSimon, largely accomplished already. Ignoring it is as easy as pie. As far as defunding it goes, I'm not sure I see the point. It's not as if it uses up much of any given university's budget. I'd be willing to bet that philosophy departments are generally cash positive for a university.
I'm fairly certain a professor at the University of Chicago told our class that the philosophy department was cash negative.
Really? Which professor?
I believe it was Ted Cohen, who's the head of the philosophy department. I'm not certain though.
As a curiosity, what would they make money on?
If it wasn't easy it probably wouldn't be worth the trouble to suggest.
Thank you for clearly expressing what is wrong with the current state of philosophy as practiced by professional philosophers. It sums up my own vague reservations pretty well. (Yes, I know, confirming evidence bias.) Catchy title, too. The next time I hear someone quoting Plato or Kant, I'll be tempted to reply "Bzzt! wrong P&K!".
Luke, do you have any ideas how to reform philosophy education and professional practice without antagonizing a lot of current professional philosophers and their students and having the debate degenerate into a blue-vs-green tribal fight? Or more generally see much chance of success for such an attempt? If not, maybe you should reframe your posts (or at least future ones) as being aimed at amateur philosophers, autodidacts, CS and math majors interested in doing FAI research, and the like?
.
This seems like an unavoidable problem with professional psychoanalysts. But philosophers are, up to certain age at least, willing to change their minds. It could be targeted at the first few years of undergrad. I've seen people change from "the dead old guys" to good stuff. Just give them a chance! And a figure of high status (Bostrom and Russell come to mind) to be inspired by.
Yes, this is my intention. I don't think I can reform how philosophy is taught at universities quickly enough to make a difference. My purpose, then, is to help "amateur philosophers, autodidacts, CS and math majors interested in doing FAI research" so that they can become better philosophical thinkers outside the university system, and avoid being mind-poisoned by a standard philosophical education.
The most polite way would be to call it a new subset of philosophy, let's say "Scientific Philosophy" (or something else if this name is already taken), and then open Scientific Philosophy courses. Nobody would get offended by this.
On the other hand, it would give people easy opportunity to ignore it. They could just teach Philosophy as they did before... and perhaps include one useless short lecture on Scientific Philosophy just to show that: yeah, they heard about it.
It is already taken (see Reichenbach's The Rise of Scientific Philosophy), but it arguably means something very similar to what Luke seems to be advocating anyway (that is to say, it seems to be in the same direction that Carnap, Reichenbach, and some of the other logical empiricists were moving in after the mid-20th century), so I don't think it would be much of a problem.
Without any comment on if the post is correct or not, I want to note that if the sequences have done their job LWers will not be pursuaded by this post. It looks at a large number of abstracts, picks a non representive (and small) sample and then quotes them to make them salient in the reader's mind.
It could have been made more convincing by using a less biased sampling such as generating 3 random numbers for each journal, than multiplying by the number of total articles in the journal and then posting the abstract for those articles.
Hang on. Did you mean to say that the conclusion of this post is wrong? If the sequences did their job, then LWers should steelman the arguments, and be persuaded if-f the conclusion is correct, regardless of the arguments presented.
I was about to write a post saying how even though we are aware this is a biased sample, the fact that 4 papers with questionable thinking appeared in top journals recently is still a lot of evidence. Then, I looked at how recent "recently" is. Two papers are from 2012, one is from 2011, and one is from 2010.
The fact that Luke went back as far as 2 years suggests that the field either isn't that bad, or Luke did look chronologically. If it's the first, then I would update away from it being a diseased field, because even in top journals I would expect a few bad papers a year. If it's the latter, then Luke should let us know.
I had guessed that Luke picked out what he thought were good representative samples, since he is probably familiar enough with the field to do so.
Do we know if this is representative, or just the worst ones?
I'm not sure if this really applies to philosophers in general or just a few that have been commenting here, but I think I've found one source of friction. It seems that SI/Luke care about problems/questions that are different enough from what philosophers think their field is about for even good(by its own standards) philosophy to be largely worthless for SI's purposes, while still being similar enough on the surface for a lot of destructive interference to happen. By destructive interference I mean things like LWers thinking that phil should have relevant answers because it addresses similar sounding questions, third parties thinking that SI type work belongs in phil journals/departments/grant slots even when its not really appropriate to that venue, having irrelevant phil papers pop up due to overloaded keywords ect.
Working in philosophy, I see some move toward this, but it is slow and scattered. The problem is probably partially historical: philosophy PhDs trained in older methods train their students, who become philosophy PhDs trained in their professor's methods+anything that they could weasel into the system which they thought important. (which may not always be good modifications, of course)
It probably doesn't help that your average philosophy grad student starts off by TAing a bunch of courses with a professor who sets up the lecture and the material and the grading standards. Or that a young professor needs to clear classes in an academic structure. It definitely doesn't help that philosophy has a huge bias toward historical works, as you point out.
None of these are excuses, of course. Just factors that slow down innovation in teaching philosophy. (which, of course, slows down the production of better philosophical works)
This made me chuckle. Truth is often funny.
As a philosophy student with a great interest in math and computing, I can definitely attest to the lack of scientific understanding in my department. Worse, it often seems like some professors actively encourage an anti-scientific ideology. I'm wondering if anybody has any practical ideas on how to converse with students and professors [who are not supportive or knowledgeable of the rationalist and Bayesian world-view] in a positive and engaging way.