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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Kitcher on “Reconstruction in Philosophy”

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–Philip Kitcher has now responded to some of the comments.  It has been a very good discussion, and I invite others to contribute.

==========================

This new paper by Philip Kitcher (Columbia)–who, of course, has made very substantial contributions in philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of math, and epistemology, among many other areas–is bound to generate discussion (it appears in the April 2011 issue of Metaphilosophy); here is the abstract:

Philosophy is often conceived in the Anglophone world today as a subject that focuses on questions in particular ‘‘core areas,’’ pre-eminently epistemology and metaphysics. This article argues that the contemporary conception is a new version of the scholastic ‘‘self-indulgence for the few’’ of which Dewey complained nearly a century ago. Philosophical questions evolve, and a first task for philosophers is to address issues that arise for their own times. The article suggests that a renewal of philosophy today should turn the contemporary conception inside out, attending to and developing further the valuable work being done on the supposed ‘‘periphery’’ and attending to the ‘‘core areas’’ only insofar as is necessary to address genuinely significant questions.

 What do readers think?  Please read the paper before commenting, and signed comments will be very strongly preferred.

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50 responses to “Kitcher on “Reconstruction in Philosophy””

  1. David Wallace

    I don't have a great deal to say on Kitcher's article (which I'm very sympathetic to), but I thought I'd flag Dan Dennett's classic "Higher order truths about chmess" as making somewhat similar points from a different viewpoint:

    http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/chmess.htm

    Reply
  2. Daniel Greco

    I'm also very sympathetic to Kitcher's article, though I'm a bit more optimistic about the prospects for much "core" philosophy to meet his standards. To take one example, I suspect that part of the reason the debate about disagreement has been such a hot topic in recent epistemology (and not just among specialists in social epistemology, unless that specialty is much more mainstream than Kitcher suggests) is because it's directly relevant to matters that most of us care a great deal about.

    I know that at least in my case, because my first-order beliefs are (I hope) by and large consistent with my views about diasgreement, I find myself far less certain than many of my colleagues concerning politically relevant propositions that are the subject of significant disagreement among experts (especially, e.g., claims in economics). And while I'm an atheist, I take the disagreement of intelligent, thoughtful, and well-informed religious people to raise serious doubts about my position.

    It's certainly possible to take disagreement seriously without having come to that stance via analytic epistemology. But the point stands that one's views on debates in core epistemology can shape one's views on matters of obvious import to philosophers and non-philosophers alike.

    Reply
  3. Docent

    I boldly predict that (a) most philosophers will find considerable merit in the argument, (b) believe their own niche to be exempt from the charge of scholasticism, and (c) nothing will change.

    Reply
  4. Enzo Rossi

    Quite a few of Kitcher's points, and especially his discussion of the 'value-axis', refreshingly resonate with the current realist resurgence in political philosophy (Williams, Geuss, etc.). For what it's worth, I think it's a great piece, though obviously a sketchy one.

    Reply
  5. Jonathan Birch

    I'd just like to add that Kitcher's book "Living with Darwin" is a masterclass in how this kind of philosophy should be done. The book is an assessment of the extent to which evolutionary biology undermines religious faith, and how the religious should react to this. In the final chapter, Kitcher considers what needs to be done if secular humanism is to perform the social and psychological functions religion still performs in most people's lives. It's a little gem of accessible, wise and relevant philosophy.

    Reply
  6. Peter Ludlow

    I'm not sure if I work on the periphery or core, or even whether I work from the outside in or the inside out, but I can say this…

    I'm not here to renew philosophy and I don't care what philosophy (whatever that is) needs from me for its renewal (whatever that means). More generally, I don't see that any of us are here for the benefit of philosophy or its renewal. Maybe, just maybe, could philosophy be here for us? And if some people like to work on core issues, then God bless them. And if some people like to work on peripheral issues, then God bless them too. And if that is self-indulgent, well so is telling people that they need to channel their research interests into some abstract notion of what philosophy needs for its renewal (/tu quoque). No one pays us enough to work for the renewal of Mr. Philosophy. Or at least, no one pays us enough to take marching orders from people that think they know.

    Reply
  7. Roger Albin

    A good example, I think, of what Kitcher favors is Elizabeth Anderson's The Imperative of Integration.

    Reply
  8. Branden Fitelson

    Right on, Peter!

    Reply
  9. Dirk Baltzly

    Recently I've been trying to write about late antique Platonism from a different angle. Some otherwise puzzling features of both the form and content of the works of Proclus, Olympiodorus, et al make a certain kind of sense when we think about the material conditions under which they were produced and the goals of those writing them. We may think it odd from our point of view, but their philosophical writing was linked to a classroom practice aimed at transforming the souls of their students and assisting their ascent to god.

    Naturally I'm not suggesting that this is a notion that contemporary philosophers should pursue! But we'd be very naive if we failed to recognise that the institutional setting in which contemporary philosophy gets written has a lot to do with its form and content too. Consider the demands of tenure, research assessment exercises, the politics of power within a Leiter top-20 culture that tends to embrace 'the meta the betta'' principle.

    If academic philosophical writing does indeed need to be turned inside out, I think this is unlikely to happen without the academic setting in which it takes place undergoing significant changes too. And not the sorts of changes that we're seeing in the UK, Australia or the US.

    Reply
  10. marc moffett

    Well said, Peter.

    Reply
  11. Brian Leiter

    I've now posted 2 "I agree with Peter" comments, but I'd ask that other who agree with Peter post some substantive point that advances the discussion or develops Peter's point. (And, on the other side, anyone who disagrees with Peter should explain why.)

    Reply
  12. Colin Farrelly

    “…on the other side, anyone who disagrees with Peter should explain why”

    I disagree with almost everything in Peter’s comments. I think philosophers ought to care about the renewal of the discipline, and I don’t think telling them that is self-indulgent and I think most are indeed paid enough that they ought to care about the renewal of philosophy.

    But what I find most troubling about the attitude Peter expresses is that it runs contrary to what we might call “well-ordered” philosophy. Well-ordered philosophy requires us to be selective (e.g. making priorities) about the questions and issues we invest our (limited) time and energy tackling. There are a near infinite number of questions we could address. So odds are the questions we now take to be the “most significant” questions are in fact the wrong ones to make the most significant questions (perhaps they are actually insignificant or trivial questions).

    Making a judgement about what constitutes as “significant” and “insignificant” of course presupposes we have some sense of what the goal, purpose or function of the discipline is in the first place (and this is what it sounds like Kitcher is asking us to do) . This internal, critical attitude is vital to the health of the discipline. So Peter’s comment that philosophy is here for *us* (which I take to mean “philosophy is here to satisfy the unreflective intellectual preferences of those academics employed as philosophers) puzzles and troubles me. It troubles me because it is precisely that attitude which makes Philosophy Depts an easy target for cuts when University administrators are looking to save money. And it puzzles me because it expresses an attitude (i.e. “the unexamined (academic) life is worth living”) that runs contrary to philosophy.

    Cheers,
    Colin

    Reply
  13. John Quiggin

    Speaking as a consumer, I'm mostly interested in what philosophers have to say about epistemology. A lot of my concerns are similar to Daniel's, I think, and arise in practical contexts like debates of climate science, not to mention economics. So, if I were picking priorities, which fortunately I'm not, they would probably be the reverse of Kitcher's.

    Reply
  14. An Anonymous Graduate Student in Political Theory, not Political Philosophy.

    I just wonder if what Kitcher calls for hasn't already been taken in house in many fields, at least in the social sciences and humanities. Fields like Political Science, Sociology, History, Literature, Geography, Anthropology, Race and Gender studies, and so on all often have subfields devoted precisely to the theory or philosophy of the discipline. Now I've never been quite clear on what, exactly, the difference is between a Theorist and a Philosopher, other than the conceit among philosophers that theorists often don't really know philosophy, or the conceit among theorists that philosophers are in a world far removed from what's *really* important.

    From my admittedly lay understanding it often seems that the fields where crossovers from philosophy get the most play are those where the question of the 'philosophy' of the discipline has dropped out in a favor of some more or less 'scientific' basis for the work going on (I have in mind here economics and psychology, and then the 'hard sciences,' where one is quite less likely to find a person seriously engaging with something approaching the 'philosophical canon' in relation to the discipline.)

    If we were to look for a difference between a theorist and a philosopher, and one that seems evocative for Kitcher's line of argument, it might do to go back to the greek root. The theoros, of course, was originally a spectator of the sacred ceremonies of others, meant to take in and experience the sacred truths of another people and come back and report on them. That model might provide a rough grounds for distinguishing the stereotype of the philosopher sitting in his department, looking out at other disciplines, from the (insert discipline here)-theorist existing submerged within the institutional context of the field they study, and, hopefully, engaging with its problems in a philosophic way.

    In this sense the 'philosophic' theorist (of politics, art, sociology, etc) is something of a lost child of philosophy, gone and raised up within a field other than philosophy so as to offer the best perspective of the details 'on the ground,' to be party to their 'sacred truths,' but one who never really followed through on the final part of their journey – the returning back home – if, at this point in time, it ever was a place they called home. And if we run with that definition, it seems part of what Kitcher is calling for is a certain going out and immersing oneself in the problems of the field about which one philsophizes – to go and do a little theoria.

    If that distinction is at least somewhat apt, then perhaps part of the reason for philosophy turning inwards and focusing on certain 'core issues,' has to do with philosophy concerning itself with what has not been differentiated out and taken up by others. Political philosophy, social philosophy, philosophy of history, and so on have all often been taken over, to some degree or another, by the field captured by their adjective (political theory, theory of sociology, historiography, etc).

    I don't mean to suggest any particular position as to whether any of this is good or bad, whether theorists of whatever type are especially dreadful or not, or imply that philosophy does not do work where theorists do, or that political philosophy is worse than or better than political theory or anything like that. It just seems that this phenomenon, whatever its status, is one that ties in to Kitcher's concerns.

    Reply
  15. Geoff Pynn

    The key imperatives in Kitcher's paper seem to be that philosophers need to do "work that genuinely makes a difference", engage with "philosophical questions that matter", and "show that the more abstract questions do contribute to the solution of problems of more general concern". He gives a number of very general examples of work that he thinks satisfies these desiderata. And I agree: his desiderata are good, and his research proposals mostly seem interesting and important! (Some of what he praises and urges I don't really get, like developing a "physiology that will give, beyond the bare list of possibilities, a sense of how a particular kind of life might be experienced." But most of it sounds pretty appealing!)

    But I really don't understand the criteria lying behind the implicit judgment in the paper that much (most?) work being done by Anglophone philosophers doesn't make the cut.

    Here are a few examples of recent or current research engaged in by philosophers in my smallish, non-PhD-granting, non-elite department that nonetheless without a doubt conceives of itself as one "for whom metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of language and mind, as currently practiced, count as the center of philosophy" (well, add ethics to the list):

    1. A critique of evolutionary psychology
    2. Work on the concept of scientific reduction
    3. Philosophical issues in quantum mechanics
    4. Articulating the nature of free will
    5. Assessing the argument from evil against God's existence
    6. Understanding the relationship between knowledge and luck or chance

    How do these research projects fail the test of relevance to "problems of more general concern"? And this doesn't include the ethicists! Throw them in the mix and we have work on animal ethics, global justice, paternalism, and intersexuality, to name just four areas. The ethical concerns Kitcher discusses in section 5 seem worth working on. But how are they more urgent or important than projects on (say) global justice or paternalism?

    Anyway, maybe my colleagues and people like them aren't Kitcher's target. But I know enough to know that their research interests are hardly unusual or peripheral in the philosophical community.

    Reply
  16. Keith DeRose

    When I try to venture past the particular examples Kitcher gives, I’m having a hard time telling which for him would be good topics and which bad. "What binds these endeavors together is a concern for philosophical questions that matter" and the like doesn't help that much. When I read *some* of the examples he gives of "places in contemporary Anglophone philosophy where work that genuinely makes a difference is being done," I can start thinking I have some feel for why he was including what he was. But then others thrown in there give me pause and I start wondering things like, Why is social epistemology good & epistemology of the individual bad? (I mean, I see what he writes at pp. 255-6, but it’s *so* easy to imagine someone who, like Kitcher, wants everybody working on the topics they like, but who just thinks it’s individual epistemology that’s really really important, making equally plausible sounds in support for the claim that it’s really the knowledge of the individual that’s so important to our current age. I’m not sure which one to listen to.) Why is "exploring the philosophical significance of major works of music" philosophy that really truly matters (that really makes a difference!), while, say, the questions of meaning studied in phil of language not? For me at least, the suspicion starts creeping in that what really binds these endeavors together is just that they’re all topics Phil Kitcher currently likes.

    In fairness, I should admit that I, too, often wonder why more philosophers don’t work on just the topics *I* like. Now *that* would be renewal I can believe in.

    Reply
  17. Christopher Lewis

    I basically agree with everything Colin said. There is no substantive distinction between doing "philosophy for us" (whether 'us' means people in general, or only professional philosophers) and doing the kind of philosophy that contributes to the renewal of the discipline. One reason (which Professor Kitcher mentions) that philosophy departments are, as Colin says, easy targets for cuts while Math departments aren't is that the self-indulgent games that mathematicians play have been useful enough to other areas of life that the practice (and the funding of it) has been justified to people outside that academic discipline.

    I think Daniel Greco is probably right that "one's views on debates in core epistemology can shape one's views on matters of obvious import to philosophers and non-philosophers alike," but I doubt that fact, if it is true, would mean that 'core epistemology' meets Professor Kitcher's standards. I don't think Philip would like the idea of a discipline where epistemologists come to views about things like disagreement and those views influence what they think about politics or religion – and that is the extent of the discipline's contribution to life outside the study of 'core' M+E issues. M+E aren't like math in the extent to which they are successfully appropriated by workers in other fields. Maybe this is indicative of something wrong with the broader society, but I would guess it has more to do with the discipline not being close enough to other important areas of life. Non-philosophers can't be expected to boil their problems down to the kind of question that M+E scholars discuss in the journals.

    Reply
  18. David Chalmers

    I'm not convinced that mathematics and philosophy are as different as Philip Kitcher suggests. In both disciplines there is a relatively pure part and a relatively applied part. The pure part has a somewhat higher status in many circles within the discipline, especially among traditionalists. At any given time, most of the pure part is abstruse and quite distant from applications. The applied part of is better connected to other areas and to applications. To outsiders much of the pure part looks like pointless game-playing. The pure part has a history of every now and then coming up with nuggets that have been extremely useful and have spawned applied areas and disciplines off their own. This is useful in justifying the pure part to outsiders and to others who think that the only value of these endeavours is extrinsic. Still, most current work in the pure part will probably never be applied. And very few practioners in the pure part think that the value of their work derives from potential connections to the applied part. Rather, they think that the work has intrinsic value in understanding fundamental questions.

    Reply
  19. David Chalmers

    (Of course, as Kitcher notes, there are clearer methods for resolving mathematical questions than there are for philosophical questions. But this difference applies equally to the pure parts and the applied parts.)

    Reply
  20. Paul Raymont

    On p. 257, Kitcher says, 'Contemporary metaethics,as practiced in the English-speaking world, is full of questions about ‘‘reasons’’ and ‘‘knowledge’’ that an account of ethics as social technology bypasses.' The questions are bypassed on the basis of an extensive theory about ethics (which Kitcher says is presented more fully elsewhere [p. 256]), a meta-ethical theory that is open to critique partly on the basis of alternative metaethical views. But won't some such avenues of critique involve discussion of the metaethical issues in 'Anglophone', analytic philosophy that Kitcher sees as irrelevant?

    Kitcher says that philosophical inquiry must make a contribution 'worth having' (p. 258). But how are we to tell if a contribution is 'worth having'? Kitcher says that philosophical ideas should be 'pertinent to the situations in which people find themselves' (p. 253), 'suited to the problem-background of our times' (p. 257), conducted 'in relation to contemporary life and culture' (p. 259), 'a vital part of evolving human culture' (p. 254), and responsive 'to the state of inquiry, to the state of a variety of human social practices, and to the felt needs of individual people to make sense of the world and their place in it' (p. 254). I'd say that academic philosophers already aim to make contributions that fit these broad criteria, and that this aim guides their choice of topics. Kitcher hasn't given any good reason for doubting this. This is especially clear to me when it comes to philosophy of mind (the ME field with which I'm most familiar). Kitcher wants philosophy to make sense of our world and our place in it (p. 254). Why would anyone doubt that philosophers of mind, even in their most abstruse debates about 2-D semantics and zombies, aim to do precisely that?

    Reply
  21. Shane J. Ralston

    I agree with Colin that Peter's attitude is troubling. As philosophers, this might be the ideal time to do some soul-searching about the direction of our discipline, given that departments are being closed and the legion of underemployed academic philosophers is only growing. If Kitcher's intended audience were just philosophical pragmatists (such as myself), then he is merely preaching to the choir. Of course, not all pragmatists agree with Kitcher or his reading of Dewey. But as for his more general point about measuring the worth of our philosophical projects by their practical significance, most pragmatists, I think, would agree with him. So, Kitcher must be speaking to non-pragmatists as well, especially those philosophers who continue to think that philosophy's irrelevance to the concerns of people outside the Ivory Tower has no consequences for them or their livelihood. Rather than giving "marching orders," Kitcher proposes that we reevaluate the core areas in which philosophers work, subjecting them to a standard of practical relevance that many peripheral areas already satisfy. In some ways, Kitcher is late to the party. There are already many experimental philosophers, non-ideal political theorists/philosophers and others (including pragmatists) exploring the philosophical significance of activities in our everyday experience. Still, his paper is a refreshing exercise in meta-philosophy.

    Reply
  22. Alexa Forrester

    Regarding the discussion between Peter and Colin:

    Given that there are limited funds available to support philosophical research, decisions need to be made about which lines of inquiry to support. It would be a shame if either (a) lay people determined what philosophers should do by referencing the needs of the time or (b) those philosophers in a position of power to shape the field used that power simply to forward research projects that happen to interest them.

    I would add to Colin's line of thought that the reason it is important for philosophers to be self-reflective about their work is this: Talented, well-seasoned philosophers are in a better position than others to determine which lines of inquiry should be pursued, and they should be the ones making these decisions. But there is always a risk that they will wittingly or unwittingly abuse their power. So we ask those who have prestigious and powerful positions to think more deeply not only about their own research, but about the departments they build, and the effort they do or don't invest in justifying their choices to the wider audience (the audience that provides the limited funding). In this sense, it is irresponsible not to think about what philosophy is for and why it is worth doing (that is, beyond the fact that we like to do it).

    On the other hand, it is often hard for non-experts to understand the value of inquiries in which they cannot participate due to lack of discipline-specific training (this is true of almost any discipline). And we smother the joy and promise of our work if we shackle it with a demand for service to a singular conception of the greater philosophical good.

    Where is the line between being responsible to the interests of those who support us and being enslaved? Whatever the answer, there is a difference. To take Peter's claim to the extreme and maintain that philosophy is for US ONLY is to shirk responsibility. But to maintain that it is to serve the needs of society only is to make the opposite mistake. That there is lots of room in between seems obvious to me.

    Reply
  23. marc moffett

    Sorry about the simple reply, Brian. Your initial post suggested to me that you were interested in getting a sense of where people were on this issue and so I was simply casting a vote in favor of the "free marketplace of ideas" conception of philosophy.

    As Colin points out above, there may be prudential reasons for thinking that philosophy ought to take a cue from the sciences or other more applied disciplines in determining its focus. I doubt it, though. If philosophers are going to defend the discipline they ought not do it by prostituting themselves out to the scientists but rather by pushing for educational reforms that remove the massive degree of philosophical illiteracy licensed by our current educational focus which allows the scientists to think *wrongly* that the "core" topics of philosophy are not relevant to their disciplines (see Todd's Boston Review article linked above).

    But as far as what philosophers ought or ought not to be focused on qua philosophers, Kitcher's suggestion (understood as a recommendation for the "direction which philosophy ought to take") strikes me as utterly blinkered. For one thing, some reasonable people accept at least a weak form of philosophical autonomy–the thesis that philosophical problems are largely independent of scientific considerations. And many of these (purportedly) autonomous questions are extremely important: normative issues in ethics and epistemology strike most as an obvious candidate here, but I would argue that the autonomy thesis has much wider purchase in the core areas of philosophy. Now assuming that there are important philosophical problems on which scientific opinion has little or no bearing, it would seem to be intellectually disastrous for us to completely abandon such issues or to focus on them only insofar as they were obviously relevant to scientific (or other "practical") concerns.

    Second, and this goes to Peter's point, it seems to me that anyone who thinks that they can say with any confidence what philosophical issues will be important (either philosophically or practically) in 15 years is probably overestimating their own prescience. I really can't think of any single issue in core philosophy that might not become of central importance in understanding various scientific or practical issues. Trying to get clear on these extremely difficult topics only after scientific "advancement" recommends it is a sure way to get the tail to wag the dog and impede intellectual progress across the board.

    Reply
  24. Robert Barnard

    This debate does not begin with Dewey in 1957. Kitcher has indicted “Anglophone” philosophy for its specialization and lack of a method that allow us to answer, rather than get over, philosophical problems. In 1912 Russell offered a defense of the value of philosophy aimed at the common working person, arguing from a discussion of core metaphysical, epistemological, and logical problems to an account of why such philosophy ought to be studied. While I am no enemy of applied and practical philosophy, I do think that Kitcher’s essay occasions a re-visiting of Russell’s position. Anticipating Kitcher’s worry, Russell claimed that:

    "The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty."

    In Kitcher’s reconstructed philosophy where we explain and interpret the “meaning” of literature or art and help define social roles, we do not simply escape the "problem" of uncertainty or lack of method, our uncertainty and methodlessness (if that is what it is) are transposed into the new areas of investigation.

    "As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find …that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given."

    But this is actually a good thing!

    "Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. …it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect"

    The adaptation of knowledge for “human use” that Kitcher lauds seems to limit the sphere of questioning and contemplation that are essential to such wonder. The so-called “core” areas by comparison are the root of such wonder. Russell suggests that:

    "Apart from its utility in showing unsuspected possibilities, philosophy has a value — perhaps its chief value — through the greatness of the objects which it contemplates, and the freedom from narrow and personal aims resulting from this contemplation. …Philosophic contemplation, when it is unalloyed, does not aim at proving that the rest of the universe is akin to man. All acquisition of knowledge is an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is best attained when it is not directly sought. It is obtained when the desire for knowledge is alone operative, by a study which does not wish in advance that its objects should have this or that character, but adapts the Self to the characters which it finds in its objects."

    And it is from this un-rooted, unalloyed, perhaps even inhuman, position of not caring about what “matters” that the philosopher can direct our thinking in ways that do have practical and moral significance:

    "The impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged useful or admirable. Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections…"

    We often applaud the example of Socrates, who shows us how the philosopher can be the conscience of a people. No doubt, this is the sort of thing that Kitcher would, no doubt, also endorse. But Socrates was an analyst of concepts and definitions first, whose method offended his interlocutors by confusing them and failing to answer the questions under discussion. Thus the end of Kitcher’s reconstruction is really the beginning of philosophy. Kitcher’s indictment of “Anglophone” “core” philosophy ought to be welcomed by the humble Lemmings for in its reconstruction of philosophy as education, together with its rejection of a prevailing “faulty image” that “misleads the profession of philosophy”, it reveals that philosophers of the core are doing much of the heavy lifting these days in corrupting the youth.

    Reply
  25. Derek Bowman

    Peter Ludlow is certainly right that we ought not be either taking or giving 'marching orders' for any particular way of directing our philosophical inquiries. Indeed, Colin's healthy skepticism about whether we've identified the most important questions provides strong reasons for not putting our eggs in one basket. Of course this doesn't, and shouldn't, preclude a thoughtful discussion of which are better and worse ways to direct our inquiries.

    But can we please not pretend that the failure of philosophy to demonstrate its broader relevance is to blame for philosophy programs being put on the chopping block? Being useful and relevant hasn't stopped foreign language programs from facing cuts and eliminations, and a focus on specific, contemporary cultural issues hasn't insulated Women's Studies programs from the same. These cuts aren't about what we do, they're about what we produce (e.g. tuition dollars).

    For this same reason, I disagree with Shane's suggestion that this a particularly good time for soul-searching about which questions are important. The short term economic pressures on philosophers to get and keep their academic jobs is likely to distort our judgments about what's worth doing in unfortunate ways. Consider a crude analogy with the film industry. Sure, plenty of independent projects are dull and self-indulgent. But despite the nice production values, Hollywood's focus on mass appeal and marketability tends to produce complete shlock. (Not that I don't enjoy more than my share of Hollywood shlock!)

    Reply
  26. Colin Farrelly

    Suppose intelligent beings from a far away galaxy visited Earth for the first time and, having only a few hours to observe us and try to understand our species and culture, decide to download and scan all the major journal publications and books published in philosophy over the last 2-3 decades. They then return to their home planet with this information and diligently read through it all.

    After they finish reading everything they attempt to explain why philosophers engage with the questions and topics they engage with. They ask themselves: “Why has this foreign (but obviously intelligent) lifeform invested so much time and energy contemplating these specific questions and topics?”

    If philosophy is "renewed", in the way Kitcher calls for, then the Martian explanation of why we have written and debated what we have written and debated will be something like this: “The minds behind these works are engaged with their time and help facilitate individual reflection and social conversation”.

    By reading “renewed” philosophy the Martians will learn a great deal about the human species, the challenges of our times, and many other fields of knowledge. And this general description of “renewed” philosophy could apply to any other time in the history of philosophy when we think the discipline was healthy. It could be describing the work of Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, etc.

    However, if the current state of philosophy is in dire need of renewal, the aliens will not learn much about our species, our culture, our challenges, or other fields of knowledge. So they will posit something like the following explanation to explain why what they have read was written in the first place:
    “The minds behind these works are engaged in what we can only assume is the self-indulgence of the few (for surely no civilization could have sustained themselves for very long with such a narrow mind-set). We assume that some of these authors tackle the issues they do because they are puzzles they find intrinsically rewarding to ponder, but they care little if anyone else finds them interesting or thinks they are important puzzles. But we also think it is highly likely that many of these authors tackle these topics because there is some other incentive at play- like the need to get published, a job, tenure, promotion, etc.”

    Cheers,
    Colin

    Reply
  27. Charlie Huenemann

    I don't think the "specialization in hard but abstruse topics" vs. "make philosophy generously relevant" needs to be a stark either/or. But it certainly wouldn't be a bad idea to encourage some folks to travel in the direction Kitcher promotes. In fact, it wouldn't be a bad idea for some graduate programs to offer a "specialization" in engaging philosophical thought more broadly – sort of training program for public intellectuals. The graduates of such training might well better serve the needs of smaller undergraduate programs in philosophy, where faculty are expected to teach a very range of topics.

    Reply
  28. Andrew Sepielli

    It's ironic that an argument against the bad tendencies supposedly plaguing philosophy should take the form of an under-described thought experiment involving aliens.

    Reply
  29. L.A. Paul

    It is worth noting that the Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (2000) book that Kitcher admiringly cites—and a good deal of the work on structural equations and causal modeling— owes a signficant portion of its plausibility to work done by those in "core" areas developing our understanding of counterfactuals and the metaphysics of causal dependence. In the '60s, even up through the '90s, when much of this "core" work was being done, many people didn't see the point of working on counterfactual theories of causal dependence. Those who did work on it did it, in part, for the love of the subject and its intrinsic interest.

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  30. Jon Lawhead

    Full disclosure: I'm one of Kitcher's graduate students, so I may not be entirely unbiased here. I'd like to think, though, that I ended up working (at least in part) with him because I agree with the spirit of this paper, rather than the other way around (I'm also a fair bit more radical about this than he is). That said, here are my thoughts on this.

    First of all, I don't think this necessarily needs to be read as a normative dictum; I don't think he's claiming that philosophers ought to be pushed into any particular direction any more than anyone else. The scientific project's greatest strength is its pluralism, and the fact that there are a lot of people going in a lot of different directions is a virtue to be celebrated. Just as in mathematics, I think, we never know when someone wandering down what might appear to be a blind alley might eventually yield an incredibly important piece of theoretical machinery. In that sense, I think that we should encourage healthy experimentation (and maybe even a little bit of game-playing).

    Still, I think this point is worth emphasizing: the reason we're concerned with this experimentation–the purpose of the games–ought to be that the machinery we build might eventually be used for something of real scientific/social consequence. We should keep that ultimate goal in mind, I think, or else we risk falling further into insular obscurity. Philosophy is at its worst when it engages primarily with itself, and at its best when it's engaged with the rest of the scientific project–when it's making an active contribution to human knowledge. Arcane discussions in philosophy of language, scientifically-uninformed arguments in metaphysics, and obscure analysis of long-dead aesthetes add little to the overall project, and should not be the primary purpose for which grad students are trained.

    This is not to say, though, that linguistic analysis, foundations of science, or philosophy of art cannot contribute to the enterprise of increasing human knowledge. It's important to understand how language works, how it colors our thinking, and what our words mean. It's important to ask for conceptual rigor in sciences–to do more than just "shut up and calculate" what the equations tell us. It's important to understand art's role in human life, and to ask what our notions of beauty tell us about what it means to be human. These are emphatically worthwhile projects. The proper way to pursue them, though, is to start with linguistics, physics, and cognitive science, and to bring philosophical tools to bear on solving those problems. Philosophy has something real to contribute, but only if it actually sees itself as part of the same project that the rest of the world is engaged in, and only if it sees its tools as just that: tools to a greater end.

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  31. Sam Rickless

    The main problem with Kitcher's article, as I see it, is that it uncritically assumes a certain version of pragmatism (or have I misread it?). Many who work in the "core" areas of philosophy that Kitcher appears to be attacking (M&E, mind, language) will no doubt rightly point out that much of what they do is both informed by contemporary science and also at the least not cut off from, and even sometimes designed to lead to, useful practical consequences. According to this kind of reply, which I think has a great deal going for it, the "core" areas of philosophy meet the pragmatic standard. Good examples of this, I think, are the increasing consilience between semantics and pragmatics (as practised by philosophers) and semantics and pragmatics (as practised by linguists), and excellent philosophical work on perception that is helped by, and can contribute to the development of, the science of perception. (See also L.A. Paul's reply above.)

    But I have great difficulty with an article that assumes pragmatism without so much as pointing to any sort of argument for it. Why should we be philosophical pragmatists about anything? Consider pragmatism about truth. Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but the proposition that the true should be equated with the useful seems either useless (because too vague), and hence false (according to itself), or just false (because there is much that is true but useless and much that is useful but false). In ethics, pragmatism equates to some version of consequentialism. It seems to me just a bit flip to assume the truth of consequentialism, especially in the face of all the well-known counterexamples to it, as well as the fairly well-developed non-consequentialist theories that explain the appeal of consequentialism without having any of its downsides. Perhaps I am overlooking some ur-argument for pragmatism, in which case it would be nice to know what the argument is.

    Regardless of who wins the pragmatism debate, I can't help noticing the following irony: The debate over pragmatism (at least, pragmatism about truth) is part of the classical "core" of philosophy that it is part of the point of Kitcher's article to criticize. Kitcher's piece is therefore in a certain sense pragmatically (!) self-refuting.

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  32. Philip Kitcher

    First, let me express my gratitude to Brian Leiter for organizing this discussion, to the discussants for their comments on my article – and for their politesse. When this material was first presented, at a Metaphilosophy Anniversary symposium in London, one of the other panelists was Timothy Williamson. Tim disagreed very strongly with my perspective, but, throughout the discussion, he presented his objections and reservations forcefully but without anger or bluster. It’s refreshing that Tim’s tone has run through this series of exchanges, since, in my view, we need a calm debate.

    As some discussants see, my ideas are similar to critiques launched earlier by Dan Dennett (a philosopher I greatly admire) – and it should also be noted that they are easily assimilated to those of Dick Rorty (another philosopher I greatly admire). Rorty thought that philosophy was effectively dead. I don’t – and, as I read Dennett, he doesn’t either. My aim was to elaborate a positive vision, and, although I suspect it would overlap with Dennett’s, there are probably significant differences. (Dan – unlike Dick, alas – can tell me where we disagree.)

    First, some remarks about attempts to defend against the negative part of my argument. You might say, as Peter Ludlow comes close to saying, that the impact of philosophy is a non-issue: just let people do what they like. That seems to me quite wrong. Philosophy is important to other areas of inquiry, to culture in general, and to life. In my book Science, Truth, and Democracy, I suggested that science would be well-ordered if its efforts were devoted towards some larger common good. If science isn’t well-ordered, then it’s appropriate (perhaps for philosophers?) to point that out. Similar things go for other areas of inquiry, including philosophy. We have a job to do – and surely of all people, philosophers ought to reflect on how well we are doing it.

    Or you might suggest, as Dave Chalmers does, that there’s some sort of trickle-down from pure philosophy to other areas of inquiry and life. Well, maybe. But shouldn’t we think about how well the trickling is going? Mathematicians, I suggest, have been granted a licence to pursue the ethereal ventures they do because there’s well-grounded confidence that those ventures pay off – in languages for scientific inquiry, as well as in games that a broader group of people enjoy playing. (It’s interesting to think about what status mathematics would have if it just delivered the games.) Can we make a similar argument for many discussions in what currently count as “core philosophical disciplines”? I doubt it, but, if you don’t, I hope you’ll take the question seriously.

    What about the positive part of the program? Is the work I commend just what I happen to like? I hope not. Let me illustrate by responding to Keith DeRose’s point about individualistic epistemology. Individualistic epistemology might do a number of things for human inquiry and culture. For example, it might relieve us from pictures that currently block work in understanding cognition. Barry Stroud has suggested that certain sorts of skeptical questions continue to be important because inquiry into perception or reasoning has to be freed from preconceptions that are hard to shake. That might well be right – but it should be shown, and, in the showing, it might be good to think hard about the current state of psychology and neuroscience.
    Another thing individualistic epistemology might do, a task at the root of the subject in the modern period, is to help with methods for inquiry. I discuss this at some length in the article, and conclude (bluntly, to be sure) that, with some important exceptions (for example, the work of the Carnegie-Mellon group, which, so far as I can tell, owes little to philosophical accounts of counterfactuals) individualistic methodology has not been contributing much of late. It’s not evident to me that much of the Bayesian puttering that takes up a lot of journal space is helping any perplexed investigator out of his/her difficulties in assessing the evidence in the cases of live concern.

    Yet my penchant for social epistemology is more positive than this. Nothing could be more evident about the current state of human knowledge than the fact that we are awash in a sea of information and misinformation, in a state in which many people are at a loss to figure out what sources are reliable or unreliable, and that the diffusion of ignorance has profound consequences (consider climate change debates). I conjecture that, were Descartes alive today, his attention would not be directed towards the various questions “core epistemology” has inherited from him, but to what could be called the “Google/Wikipedia problem”.

    My essay was prompted by a sense that too many brilliant young people are not doing work whose importance is commensurate with their talents. It was also written in clear recognition of the fact that there’s a broader movement – quite unorganized – within philosophy, that attends to all sorts of facets of human inquiry, culture, and life: a scattered group of philosophers respond to art, literature, music, political theory, economics, linguistics, anthropology, religion, education, and all sorts of natural sciences – as well as to pervasive facets of the world in which human beings now live (our global interconnectedness, the inequalities that result from divisions by race, ethnicity, religion, gender, class, and so forth). My inside/outside division is intended to forge an identity here.

    I regret the fact that so much graduate education, and so much philosophical writing sets itself in dialog with a recent “literature”, with a tiny readership. History of philosophy is often healthier than “systematic” philosophy, precisely because it inherits the wider focus that was so typical of the career of culturally significant philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle, through Kant and Mill, to Dewey and Rawls. My article is intended to encourage those who want to think and write with a larger frame of reference.

    BL COMMENT: I'm grateful to Philip for his comments, and just want to note that they were submitted before some of the more recent comments had appeared on the blog. Philip is of course welcome to comment again if he has the opportunity.

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  33. Peter Ludlow

    @ Colin Farrelly

    You say: “what I find most troubling about the attitude Peter expresses is that it runs contrary to what we might call “well-ordered” philosophy. Well-ordered philosophy requires us to be selective (e.g. making priorities) about the questions and issues we invest our (limited) time and energy tackling. There are a near infinite number of questions we could address. So odds are the questions we now take to be the “most significant” questions are in fact the wrong ones to make the most significant questions (perhaps they are actually insignificant or trivial questions).”

    How is it that my position runs counter to being selective or that my position favors burning unnecessary energy on insignificant questions? My point is not that we should burn up valuable time on insignificant questions. My point is that I really don’t trust either you or Kitcher to tell me what is significant. And if you think otherwise I seriously really do not care. And I’m sorry if you don’t count my way of doing philosophy “well-ordered” but again, I could really care less.

    You say: “Peter’s comment that philosophy is here for *us* (which I take to mean “philosophy is here to satisfy the unreflective intellectual preferences of those academics employed as philosophers) puzzles and troubles me.”

    How on Earth is my position an argument for unreflective intellectual preference? How dare you say that my choice of a valuable research path is unreflective? You don’t know how much reflection I put into my research paths and the mere fact that I chose not to do what interests you does not make my choice “unreflective” thank you very much.

    You say: “It troubles me because it is precisely that attitude which makes Philosophy Depts an easy target for cuts when University administrators are looking to save money. And it puzzles me because it expresses an attitude (i.e. “the unexamined (academic) life is worth living”) that runs contrary to philosophy.”

    This comment is beyond the pale. In the first place, the fact that I chose to research topics that do not interest you or Kitcher does not mean I am pursuing the “unexamined life”. Who are you to suggest that my life is in some sense unexamined? The point at issue is whether we should pursue topics that somehow save or rescue philosophy; that is completely orthogonal to the question of whether we are examining our lives. Much of my work is not core and is indeed on the periphery and much of it is influenced by Kitcher’s very excellent work (on, for example, the history of the calculus) but I would never have the hubris to suggest that it is therefore less reflective than work by people working in the core, nor would I have the hubris to suggest that people who do nuts and bolts metaphysics are somehow living lives less examined than mine.

    But worse, when philosophy departments are targets of university administrators and right wing governments it is typically not because they are failing to do their job but rather because the are doing their job all too well. Governments and administrators don’t care about philosophy departments that don’t make waves and don’t challenge the status quo – they care about departments that do challenge how they think. When the philosophy department at UNLV was under threat it was not because it was failing to do its job, but rather because it was doing its job. It is an old story in philosophy; Socrates was not asked to drink hemlock because he was failing to do his job but rather because he was doing his job.

    Honestly, you seem to saying we should steer our philosophical practice so that we don’t become targets of right wing governments and administrators. I would suggest rather that we pursue the philosophical questions that are of interest to us and try to change the political culture so that such research safe from governmental interference.

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  34. Brian Leiter

    I'm sympathetic to a lot of what Peter says in reply to Colin Farrelly. It does seem to me rather difficult to figure out what kind of philosophical work actually matters, unless we adopt the accountant's notion of what 'matters,' which of course no one proposes.

    I'm a bit more skeptical of Peter's reflections on why philosophy departments become targets for cuts. In most cases I know of, it is because their undergraduate enrollments are low relative to English or History. Maybe their enrollments are lower because philosophy is hard–sometimes that's the entire story. But sometimes they are low because the departments are teaching topics that really are of no interest to anyone other than people who already have PhDs in philosophy from a half-dozen departments. That's a real worry that philosophers need to think about–it's a version of the Chmess worry that Dennett articulates in the item referenced by David Wallace in the first comment.

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  35. Peter Ludlow

    when I said "I would never have the hubris to suggest that it is therefore less reflective than work by people working in the core"…

    I meant to to say "I would never have the hubris to suggest that it is therefore *more* reflective than work by people working in the core."

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  36. Colin Farrelly

    Brain says: “It does seem to me rather difficult to figure out what kind of philosophical work actually matters…” I agree, though if we look to the great philosophers of the past and ask why it is significant to study them today I think we’ll have some plausible (non-accountant’s) criteria. And I take the thrust of Kitcher’s argument to be that this issue ought to be our first task- “to recognise the appropriate questions that arise for [our] contemporaries (252)”. So is this difficult? Yes (and no doubt there will be reasonable disagreement about these matters). But we need to tackle this issue first before we turn to the task of trying to answer more specific questions. So I think the most fundamental question is: why ask (and try to answer) any questions? I don’t think that question is fundamental because I fancy thinking about it. I think it is (and ought to be) integral to the discipline of philosophy.

    Regarding Peter’s response to me, I didn’t say that you personally were not living the examined life (that would obviously be an obnoxious comment for me to make, as well as unfounded as I do not know you). What I did pass judgment on was the *attitude* you expressed in your comment. In particular, your comment “I'm not here to renew philosophy and I don't *care* what philosophy (*whatever that is*) needs from me for its renewal (whatever that means)”. It’s the attitude of not *caring* what philosophy needs, or what philosophy even is (!), that I believe is “unreflective” (at least for someone employed as a professional philosopher).
    Cheers,
    Colin

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  37. Keith DeRose

    "Bayesian puttering" will never lead to anything important, but "exploring the philosophical significance of major works of music" has genuine importance written all over it? Guess I'm just not seeing it.

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  38. Keith DeRose

    But that example really marks how very lost I am here. If I were asked, based just on the paper: Is Bayesian epistemology likely to be the kind of thing that Kitcher would find worthwhile, I'd have thought: Well, he seems kinda prickly about epistemology, so you can't be sure, but Bayesian epistemology sure seems like the kind of thing he should like. I mean, so far as philosophy goes, it seems to have pretty good potential for leading to something of practical value (though it could of course never compete with finding philosophical themes in great music 🙂 ).

    But no, my guess seems to be completely wrong. So it's like I said, I really just can't tell. I think I'll need like a more complete list of acceptable vs. bad topics.

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  39. David Velleman

    This discussion is mainly about which problems we philosophers should be trying to solve. But some of us don't think of ourselves as solving problems — not, at least, if problems are the sort of things that once solved, stay solved. Some of us think of ourselves as answering questions of a sort that have to be answered over and over again, in every age and perhaps even by every individual person. (This is of course a familiar point.) I'm not just talking about ethical questions; I would also include, for example, questions about the nature of personhood and agency, about the criteria of cognitive success, or about what is fundamentally real. Sometimes I get the sense that these questions are okay by Philip's lights; sometimes I get the sense that they're not practical enough for his pragmatist sensibility.

    In any case, what questions we philosophers should ask is a perfectly good question for us philosophers to ask. And offering an answer to it is not an insult to philosophers who prefer to ask other questions.

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  40. John Dell

    I'm so glad that Professor Kitcher wrote this article and took the time to outline his position here.

    I hope future PhD's find some hope in the prospect of what philosophy *can* be, and what it can contribute to the world.

    Philosophy does not exist for us. Why should we be so arrogant to think that it does? Philosophy is a *product* of those who practice it, nothing more and nothing less. I don't find it the least bit surprising that those who might find themselves on the negative side of Kitcher's point are threatened. They ought to be. Instead of engagement though (which I think for a variety of reasons will be unpersuasive), it seems to me like the best course of action for those that find themselves tending to the positive side of Kitcher's position is to continue to develop the kind of philosophy that Kitcher advocates and let the crusty other side crumble under its own irrelevance.

    And yes, for the most part practitioners of philosophy ought to be able to practice in a way they see fit. Unless, that is, the manner in which philosophy is being practiced is harming the discipline. Are those who practice irrelevance (especially with pride) harming the discipline? It may well be the case that philosophy as a discipline has developed a kind of pathology. If you were a contributor to this pathology do you really think you would know it? Admitting there is a problem is always the first step!

    For the history buff, here's a wonderful quote from Dewey's "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" (1917), which can be found in full here http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1917b.html.

    "If changing conduct and expanding knowledge ever required a willingness to surrender not merely old solutions but old problems it is now. I do not mean that we can turn abruptly away from all traditional issues. This is impossible ; it would be the undoing of the one who attempted it. Irrespective of the professionalizing of philosophy, the ideas philosophers discuss are still those in which Western civilization has been bred. They are in the backs of the heads of educated people. But what serious-minded men not engaged in the professional business of philosophy most want to know is what modifications and abandonments of intellectual inheritance are required by the newer industrial, political, and scientific movements. They want to know what these newer movements mean when translated into general ideas. Unless professional philosophy can mobilize itself sufficiently to assist in this clarification and redirection of men's thoughts, it is likely to get more and more sidetracked from the main currents of contemporary life."

    It appears to me Dewey was at least a little prescient…

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  41. Douglas Fairbanks

    As an up-and-coming pragmatist philosopher, I was dismayed to read that pragmatism's version of truth is still being equated with what in useful. Now, this seems to me to be the most common misreading of pragmatism, encouraged by William James who often spoke of the "cash value" of ideas.
    James brought attention to Peirce's achievement in logic, but he only was able to use it in a piece-meal fashion to accomodate his own brand of radical empiricism. So, like Peirce, I find myself calling myself a pramaticist, to emphasize that more adept theory of truth discovered by Peirce, in contradistinction the misunderstanding of his doctrine about contemplating the conceivable affects a concept might have. Most recently, a few Peirce scholars have come to fully appreciate how his tychism, synechism, and triadic categories improve upon the Kantian model. Dewey himself dropped out of Peirce's lectures on logic, probably because he could not understand the logic of relatives. Nonetheless, Robert Brandom and Habermas have made good use of Peirce, and this is the kind of pragmatism which I endorse and which offers advantages over both the Continental and Analytic tradtions, precisely because it avoids talking about aliens.

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  42. Branden Fitelson

    I'm with you, Keith! [And, for what it's worth, I wonder if our time might be better spent trying to (e.g.) save philosophy from disappearing of the face of the academic earth. We seem to have plenty enemies in academia these days — outside philosophy. Do we really need people (especially quite powerful, senior people) within philosophy denigrating what other philosophers work on? But, then again, I'm probably just "puttering" here.]

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  43. Branden Fitelson

    I think I can agree with you, David, when you say that offering an answer to it (the question 'what questions we philosophers should ask') is not — in and of itself — an insult to philosophers who prefer to ask other questions. That is to say, answering it doesn't — per se — entail any such insult. But, some of the implicatures in some of these comments do seem kind of insulting. No? For instance, I looked up "puttering", and it seems to mean something like "working at random" (a little ironic, when aimed at a Bayesian!) or doing something "aimlessly". Maybe I'm missing something here, but in my neighborhood that's a little insulting (at least, in some Gricean way). Are you suggesting, perhaps, that I should hear such statements in the following way? "Sure, I'm saying that what you're doing qua philosopher, you're doing at random / aimlessly. But, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to insult you — I mean that in a *good* way." I guess I'm having trouble hearing it that way. If that's how it was intended, then I'm happy to retract my characterization of such remarks as "denigrating".

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  44. Philip Kitcher

    My apologies for “puttering”: my phrase was brief, and therefore cryptic. I’m a big fan of Bayes’ Theorem. What I’m not enthusiastic about are uses of it where the probabilities are either not well-defined or based on imaginative guesswork. It’s not clear to me how much light philosophical investigations in the Bayesian tradition shed on the development of methods for resolving hard cases in fields of inquiry (typically, it seems to me, the problems arise because the evidence is messy and the probabilities elusive). Contributions to methodology were, of course, my focus in the article. The situation is often even worse when Bayesian tools are applied to philosophical problems.

    My admiration for philosophical explorations of literature and music is explained in the article. Thos explorations seem to me to be continuous with traditional investigations of value – specifically the question of the worth of lives – that have been central to philosophy since Socrates. Stanley Cavell and Bernard Williams are important recent exemplars here.

    Of course, much more could be said about what gives questions their significance. I’ve said some of it in other articles and chapters – and plan to treat the subject more systematically in forthcoming work. David Velleman is entirely right to suggest that there should be serious thought about the questions that arise in an epoch, and how they evolve. That is one of Dewey’s great themes (at least as I read him).

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  45. Branden Fitelson

    Thanks for the apology, clarification, and argument, Philip. I do appreciate that (now we're starting to do some philosophy again, which makes me happy!). And, I can of course agree with you that there are better and worse applications/executions/explorations of Bayesian methods. But, isn't that also true of "philosophical explorations of literature and music" — or anything else people might choose to work on? Shouldn't we — therefore — just be trying to do good philosophy (full stop)? That is, why not just say — "hey, there's really great Bayesian stuff out there, and there's also really great … out there, and let's all try to emulate the great stuff — whatever area of philosophy we happen to be working on"? I guess I just prefer positive reinforcement to negative. It seems (in my experience) to be (generally) more effective — especially with students and younger colleagues.

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  46. L.A. Paul

    Philip, although there are many things in your paper that I am broadly sympathetic to, I cannot agree with what I take to be your assessment of the relationship between "core" work in the metaphysics of causation and the more applied work of the causal modelers. Let me try to state why, as clearly as I can in this sort of (non-ideal) forum.

    First, it is important to distinguish between the role that core work can play as an important historical antecedent and the role it should play once something applied has been developed. The causal modeling approach requires one to develop a set of "structural equations" in order to represent the causal structure of a situation. These structural equations are basically descriptions of dependencies, i.e., they are based on assessments of counterfactual dependence. The clarity and usefulness of such assessments are due in large part to the seminal work done in the twentieth century on the semantics of counterfactuals by Lewis, Stalnaker and others. Moreover, the plausibility of using counterfactuals to capture causal dependence, while perhaps vaguely grasped before Lewis's work on the subject, was not nearly rigorous enough until Lewis developed his counterfactual analysis of causation in the 70s. This core work was essential to the development of causal modeling.

    Second, now that causal modeling is off and running, there is still an important role for "core" work, although the role is different. Work on the metaphysics of causation is not defining projects for causal modeling or changing the basics of the methodology, but two-way discussions between causal modelers and metaphysicians of causation continue to produce interesting and importance developments on both sides. Jim Woodward's enormously influential book *Making Things Happen* is one such product. And much of Chris Hitchcock's absolutely top-notch work, which develops a variety of theories about causal modeling, is highly informed by his thoughtful and deep grasp on the current topics exercising metaphysicians of causation. As for work by the Carnegie Mellon group, I think, for example, that David Danks' work on computational cognitive structure is excellent in part because he has a sophisticated grasp of some of the epistemic and metaphysical difficulties involved in determining deep-level causal structure. Finally, as a metaphysician of causation, I have found work by causal modelers to be of enormous value to my own thinking and writing about causation.

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  47. Joachim Horvath

    Here are some things that strike me as straightforward facts about philosophers and their discipline:

    (1) Most philosophers are above average in terms of reflectiveness (there's even experimental evidence for that fact reported in a recent paper by Livengood et al. in Phil. Psychology 23.3, 2010), so they probably already spend or have spent a fair amount of their time and energy on figuring out what strike them as significant and worthwhile philosophical issues to pursue. So, telling philosophers that they should think more about which philosophical issues are significant seems pretty much pointless – it's just preaching to the choir (I read Peter Ludlow as making something like this point).

    (2) Philosophers tend to disagree about almost any significant and substantial philosophical issue, including the question what philosophical issues are significant. So, instilling a philosophical debate about what philosophical issues are significant may lead to all kinds of interesting things, but certainly not to a renewal of philosophy as a whole – unless philosophers magically change their tendency to disagree.

    (3) Pretty much no substantial and significant philosophical issue can be addressed in isolation from many other such issues. So, it seems unlikely that the question of what philosophical issues are significant will be an exception here. In particular, it seems unlikely that this question can be adequately addressed in isolation from one's commitments in the "core areas" of philosophy.

    Taken together, these facts seem to explain – and substantiate – quite bit of the puzzlement about and resistance to Kitcher's manifesto…

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  48. Sam Rickless

    @ Douglas:

    Peirce writes (and Dewey concurs): "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth." This is no better, it seems to me, than the Jamesian claim that the true is the useful. Either "investigate" here is understood in non-ideal terms, in which case the pragmaticist slogan is false (suppose Stalin had won and the future belonged to Lysenko), or it is understood in ideal terms, in which case the slogan is unilluminating (because, in order to avoid obvious counterexamples, the identification of the ideal method of investigation is going to have to be in terms of its truth-conduciveness).

    But I shouldn't be wasting my time discussing the metaphysics of truth, right?

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  49. Amy Lara

    I'm puzzled by Peter Ludlow's response to the original paper and to other commentators. It seems similar to the response normative ethicists sometimes hear. Suppose I make an argument for why we all ought to be vegetarians. Sometimes people respond by saying, "Who are you to tell me what to eat?" But that misses the point. An ethicist examines the available reasons as best she can and then makes a case. If one disagrees with the conclusion, the appropriate thing to do is identify weaknesses in the argument itself. I took Kitcher to simply be making a case for why our discipline ought to shift in some ways. He doesn't need some special standing or authority in order to formulate an opinion about philosophy and make a case for it. The question is whether he makes a good case, not whether he's entitled to do so or whether we trust him to come up with the right answer. Similarly, someone can claim that another's words indicate a problematic attitude. The question is whether that claim is well-justified, not whether the person should "dare" to state such a thing.

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  50. Philip Kitcher

    Much as I'm sympathetic to Branden's attempt to be ecumenical, I fear that the thrust of my article is in danger of being lost. So let me close my contribution to this discussion with some questions and with a confession.

    In one of the most famous passages in *Pragmatism*, James asks what differences answers to philosophical questions will make to "someone, somewhere and somewhen". (Note: James isn't proposing any theory of meaning here; he's concerned with the importance of questions, specifically philosophical questions.) As you pursue a philosophical project, you might ask: What difference can this project be expected to make? To whom? What type of difference? Is it a difference worth making?

    Confession: confronting some of my own projects with these questions has been pointed, even disconcerting. I haven't been satisfied with the bland thought that, because I was tackling "fundamental issues", something good might trickle down some day (perhaps from my efforts in conjunction with those of many others). But the pointed questions have also been healthy, leading me to new inquiries.

    Thanks to all who have participated. I haven't said all there is to say, but I think I've said enough.

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