"x-phi"

I'm a philosopher by training. I used to go to APA meetings (American Philosophical Association). But, trained as I am in pragmatism, and interested as I am in lots of things outside of philosophy, and frustrated as I am with philosophers' frequent ignorance of lots of these things outside of philosophy, I found going to the APA tedious and downright boring. Kind of like reading the comics in the newspaper - you've always heard the joke, such as it is, somewhere before.

I haven't been to the APA in a couple of years (well, last year, but very briefly and only to meet with a friend). Now, here we have an allegedly new philosophy - "experimental philosophy" or "x-phi" - that's going to look to get entangled in the so-called real world of messy policy issues, emotional buttons, and folk morality? The APA is convening a session on x-phi, and it has its critics who hold onto traditional philosophical subjects of inquiry and frameworks of philosophizing.

Philosophers have ignored the real world because it's messy, full of happenstance details and meaningless coincidences; philosophy, they argue, has achieved its successes by focusing on deducing universal truths from basic principles. X-phi, on the other hand, argues that philosophers need to ask people what and how they think. Traditional philosophy relies on certain intuitions, presented as "common sense," that are presumed to be shared by everyone. But are they?

For example, can people be morally responsible for their actions if they don't have free will? Many philosophers have assumed that all sane people would of course say no. Experimentalists don't assume. They ask.

This sounds similar to the method of contingent valuation in cost-benefit analysis, a method that has tremendous problems of its own. I don't know enough about x-phi to call it BS, and this is only an article in Slate, but I'm inclined to anyway. Not, however, for the reasons Sosa provides in this article. Yes, philosophy has specialized itself out of relevance to daily life. This is only a part of my impatience with APA meetings. But there's an age-old discussion of precisely this problem that dates back to Aristotle's discussion of phronesis, Marx's admonishment of philosophical blindness, and Dewey's experimentalist pragmatism.

In other words, it doesn't look like there's much new here except that part of it which seems truly problematic.

Two things... First, academic philosophy, especially under the dogmatic reign of the analytics since the 1940s, has ignored vast parts of its own heritage. Now it discovers something that seems to require ignorance of that other part of philosophy's heritage and then proclaims it to be new?

Second, asking people what they think isn't good enough in itself. Many people have never questioned the assumptions through which they engage in reflection. Yes, any experimentalist philosophy, like experimental science, requires diverse views of the problem under discussion in order to round out the problem's full contours and also in order to engage in full criticism of proposed solutions. Sometimes this method even comes up with novel ways of dealing with the problem or reframing it.

The article concludes with this claim:

Even if philosophers manage to put forth new theories based on answers that are replicated all over the globe, philosophy will never regain its old degree of certainty. What makes x-phi revolutionary, and horrifying to some, is that once philosophy opens up to the methods, and the irreducible uncertainties, of empirical science, its tenets can no longer be articles of faith. Philosophy is no longer something you believe in. It's something you test, and expect to change tomorrow.

What? Are they plagiarizing John Dewey, the author of the 1929 book, The Quest for Certainty, which slammed philosophy for its certainty fetish and dearth of experimentalism? Or even Richard Rorty, who borrows heavily from Dewey (albeit with some loose reinterpretation)? Dewey (and Peirce) was equal parts a proponent of experimental scientific method in inquiry and the application of intelligence and a critic of scientism. What this entails for philosophical inquiry is that methods, concepts, principles, philosophical claims, etc. are all contingent, and human inquirers are fallible. Together, this means that philosophical ideas and the very bases for inquiry are always potentially mere way stations in the history of thought and intelligent inquiry. History shows this to be the case.

Nonetheless, going around asking people what they think about moral problems, for instance, may yield some interesting and insightful anecdotal information, but it proves little. Proof still matters, even if we acknowledge that we're no longer talking about absolutely certain proof. But if I went around and asked people about al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein prior to the Iraq War, I would have received answers that were flat wrong. Pragmatists understand nevertheless that intelligent inquiry has minimal requirements. People must have basic information, knowledge, freedom of thought, and a basic facility with inquiry. But this depends on the character of the results we're looking for. Are we looking for mass delusion or something that approximates "reality" in such a way that we collectively find better ways of dealing with the world? The latter is what the pragmatist is after. So, it wouldn't make sense asking people in an insane asylum about the nature of reality, and then drawing inductive conclusions from that sample, unless one wanted to know what was up with that sample on its own terms.

It pisses me off when people say they're onto something new when that newness is based in ignorance. It pisses me off when that supposedly new thing runs into its own problems because of ignorance of precedent problem-solving. And it pisses me off when the gatekeepers of philosophy defend traditional ways of doing philosophy against experimentalists even when they no longer seem relevant except to those who think those problems to be real problems regardless of the informed and intelligent views of those who don't. But you have to find a way to do the experiments well or the whole thing collapses into random poll-taking, which will always confirm subjectivist, relativistic, and ill-informed positions.