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Philosophical “fads”?

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–MANY INTERESTING COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME

Friday's poll generated a lot of interest–nearly 850 votes!  Here, in the opinion of readers, were the "top five" current "fads" in philosophy to which readers were plainly not sympathetic:

1. Epistemic injustice  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
2. Experimental Philosophy  loses to Epistemic injustice by 379–302
3. Critical Race Theory  loses to Epistemic injustice by 326–308, loses to Experimental Philosophy by 340–328
4. Effective altruism  loses to Epistemic injustice by 401–280, loses to Critical Race Theory by 349–261
5. Grounding  loses to Epistemic injustice by 395–268, loses to Effective altruism by 326–299

 I confess that apart from "effective altruism" and "grounding," this doesn't look much like my top 5, which also included "formal epistemology" (I've yet to see a paper in this genre that did not involve preposterous idealizations and assumptions with the result that it was useless for epistemology), and non-naturalist normative realism (naturalistic normative realism failed, but true to their conservative nature, analytic philosophers then went for a position some of us had thought was, deservedly, dead and buried).   I forget my 5th!  It is probably true that people are overplaying the "epistemic injustice" meme (as injustices go under capitalist relations of production, it's far down the list), but the core idea is an interesting one, or so I thought.  Hostility towards experimental philosophy is not surprising, but I'm optimistic it will stick around, given its close ties to the cognitive sciences.

Reader comments on "fads" welcome, including possible fads not in the poll.  Feel free to explain your own choices (or to defend some of the possible "fads" against the charge).

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50 responses to “Philosophical “fads”?”

  1. Jonathan

    Even with the direction given ('what you think ought to fade away') there's a difficulty in agreeing on what counts as a fad. I think there are interesting and perennial philosophical questions about grounding, but I think the disproportionate attention given to it at the moment makes it a fad. And while I can see how those unsympathetic to non-naturalistic normative realism would think it ought to fade away, its presence throughout the history of moral philosophy (insofar as we can anachronistically attribute this kind of label) makes it unfair, to my mind, to label it a fad, however wrongheaded as a philosophical position. (I also don't think it currently attracts the disproportionate amount of attention that, day, grounding does in metaphysics.)

    Reply
  2. Eugene

    I'm very curious to hear which arguments you think killed naturalistic normative realism, if you wouldn't mind sharing. A lot of young philosophers you seem to respect (off the top of my head: Finlay, Manne, Schroeder, and Sinhababu) don't look like they're carrying out necromancy.

    BL COMMENT: If I have time later, I'll say more. One could start with Peter Strawson's paper on intuitionism, though.

    Reply
  3. pete

    As far as listing Critical Race Theory as my number 1, there are several things involved:

    1) The commitment to "narrative" over empirically ascertained information/rationally constructed arguments is somewhat horrifying. Should individual narratives count as something to be taken into consideration and respectfully listened to? Of course! Should they be taken at face value as the truth each and every time? Nah, that borders on insanity. One of the reasons I know there's a severe problem in the criminal justice system as it relates to treatment of individuals of different races is precisely because of empirical information on arrest rates, incarceration rates, drug arrests (especially in light of comparable use rates between blacks and whites), video footage, etc. None of that is based on "narratives" taken as dogmatic truth.

    2) Related to #1, the idea that logic/reasoning/empiricism are Eurocentric ideas that are "violent" towards marginalized groups. This is incredibly shocking for two reasons. The first is that it is plainly self-defeating: Why am I sitting there listening to a Critical Race Theorist that is trying to argue his or her position in a rational and coherent way? Committing to those concepts would seem to fly in the face of the fields resistance to "Eurocentric norms." The second is that the implication seems to be racist/bigoted in and of itself. Did the Ancient Greeks and later Europeans make seminal contributions to areas of logic and rational inquiry? Yes they did. Did logic/rational inquiry not exist anywhere else in the world? No, and the notion that one might think so, especially a philosophy professor, is disturbing to a degree I'd rather not think about.

    3) People deploy the ideas of CRT to stifle any attempt at discussion or to counter objections to the theory that actually end of making the theory virtually worthless in terms of explanatory power. To give an example from a recent post I submitted over at Massimo's "Footnotes to Plato" blog:

    "On my view, I’m actually a bit horrified at the seeming uptick in usage of this concept among many academics since it really does remind me of epicycles. Not only do some of the ideas that spring from it (i.e. the idea that someone who is non-white cannot be racist because “racism = prejudice + power”, something that I should stress is said all the time on sites like HuffPost, Salon, etc. as if it were an objective truth of mathematics or an empirically ascertained fact of nature) sound almost philosophically untenable, but I’ve actually encountered debates where the concept is deployed in a way that won’t lend itself to being countered.

    To give one brutal example, I was speaking with my brother recently with respect to philosophy of race and social justice and the like, and I pointed him to an article by a black individual that delineates some of the problems with various positions that critical race theorists will take: the idea that logic/reasoning is Eurocentric and “violent” (a notion that I find ludicrous and ironically racist in itself), or the idea that someone’s “narrative” or subjective experience needs to be taken at face value as truthful. He retorted that this individual could be an “uncle Tom” and that the critique wasn’t actually valid since he was likely a cog in the oppressive racist-capitalist-imperialist Western machine. This same line of argument can also apply to many other criticisms that any person arguing in good faith could see as warranted/reasonable."

    4) Garbage in, Garbage out. If you argue for a conclusion that follows from certain premises, you better hope those premises are at least somewhat plausible. Let me turn now to Professor Charles Mills, who is very eloquent in his writings and lectures on philosophy of race. One thing he constantly harps on is that the Enlightenment ideals of liberalism are solely geared towards white Europeans, that this was indeed the case since the inception of those relevant political ideas. If you read "The Racial Contract" by Professor Mills, this is a central notion you'll be introduced to. Not once in that work, or in any other papers/articles/books by Professor Mills to my knowledge (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), does he mention what would be a historical (and in my opinion very powerful) counterargument to his entire analysis: The Cornerstone Speech.

    Here in 1861, a full 90 years before the birth of Charles Mills, the Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens gives a speech about forefathers of the United States and their mistake:

    "The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away… Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."

    Apparently Stephens (and the founding fathers) didn't get the memo about classical liberal notions only pertaining to white Europeans in principle, which is a central claim Mills makes. It's in-your-face examples of this sort that make my blood boil when it comes to bullshit areas of philosophy like CRT. Is racism and bigotry a huge problem in the West (and globally)? You bet your ass. Can we talk about notions of privilege and inclusion and diversity? That's an absolute must. Do we need to effect radical change politically and culturally? No question.

    But don't lie to people and build castles in the sky. Don't resort to calling entire groups of people "inherently racist" as if there's a gene for it. Don't construct an edifice that targets its own foundations in terms of calling into question rational inquiry while using it at the very same time.

    Would love feedback from Professor Leiter or others with respect to this. It's incredibly bothersome that much of this passes academic muster…

    Reply
  4. Robert Gressis

    I didn't understand the option entitled "Reasons". Was it supposed to capture this thought: "there are reasons for and against belief and for and against action. What such reasons *are*, though, is unanalyzable"?

    BL REPLY: Yes, something like that.

    Reply
  5. B. Bolzano

    Regarding grounding, I would have thought it to be something close to an analytic truth about the word "fad" that a topic studied in philosophy since its inception (in both the East and the West, quite independently) is not a philosophical fad.

    Reply
  6. Grad

    Formal epistemology has been around for nearly 100 years, going back to (at least) Frank Ramsey’s “Truth and Probability”. Formal epistemology is done by people working in many academic areas, including philosophy, economics, statistics, computer science, and decision theory. It seems to me obvious that formal epistemology is not a “fad”. Furthermore, a cursory look at the history of science makes it evident that idealizations are often crucial in making real progress. This is borne out by the enormous amount of progress that has been made in the field just in the past couple of decades.

    Reply
  7. Alnica Visser

    I'm surprised (and dismayed) that Epistemic Injustice came out as the biggest fad in our discipline. As far I can tell, work in this area provides a fruitful analysis of a salient feature of social interaction. And it provides an interesting enrichment of critiques of capitalism, especially in terms of the asymmetric control over the production and dissemination of knowledge. It is an obvious feature of capitalist society that only some can produce knowledge, only some can contribute to conversations, and only some dissent is taken seriously. This is partly due to the commodification of knowledge, and partly due to the different statutes different people are afforded. None of this work strikes me as a fleeting trend. And given the common concern for academic freedom readers of this blog regularly express, I find it curious that so many readers are dismissive of this branch of epistemology.

    Reply
  8. Brian Leiter

    In the 1980s, there was no literature on "grounding" (then the topic was supervenience and reduction, which, thanks to Kim, was a far more precise debate). Now there is a literature on grounding. Of course, almost any fad can claim some historical antecedents, suitably reinterpreted.

    Reply
  9. Brian Leiter

    Can you name some examples of progress in formal epistemology that have helped with other areas of epistemology? I would be glad to be educated about this.

    Reply
  10. Grad

    Formal learning theory (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/learning-formal/) is relevant to the age old problem of inductive inference. Work in epistemic logic (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-epistemic/) is directly relevant to “belief” and “knowledge”, which are central in traditional epistemology (e.g. work on Common Knowledge, which axioms in epistemic logic should we adopt (e.g. KK)). There has been a lot of work in the belief-credence connection as well (e.g. the Lockean thesis and the Preface and Lottery Paradoxes, for example). And in general, it seems like all of the different norms of Rationality proposed in Bayesian epistemology (Reflection, Deference, Principal Principle, Indifference, Conditioanlization, Probabilism, etc.) are all important for any truth-seeker. The problem of peer disagreement is an old one that has benefited from formal work as well.

    Reply
  11. Eric Winsberg

    Idealization has been the preferred way to understand complex phenomena since at least Galileo. Criticizing formal epistemology for engaging in idealization is a bit like criticizing Galileo for talking about frictionless planes. Maybe formal epistemology has no benefits for ordinary epistemology. If so, so much the worse for ordinary epistemology.

    In my book *Philosophy and Climate Science* which will appear soon, I engage with formal epistemology and use it as a tool in six different chapters. And this was hardly an idiosyncratic choice on my part. Much of what climate scientists and the IPCC *do* has close affinities to formal epistemology and naturally leads itself to being analyzed with those tools. I would be shocked if formal epistemology didn't continue to inform philosophy of science for the rest of my lifetime.

    Inter alia, the only other area of epistemology that was helpful in writing the book was social epistemology. Ordinary, "S knows that P" epistemology is a perfectly interesting area of philosophy, but if the question is what areas of epistemology are *most helpful* in their application to other subjects, it will fare poorly compared to both formal and social epistemology.

    The only other area of epistemology that makes an appearance is social epistemology.

    Reply
  12. Brian Leiter

    As you know, idealization in the sciences is justified by its predictive power; that was Milton Friedman's justification for it in economics. So the only question is whether formal epistemology has results that justify its idealizations, as Galileo's were rather obviously justified.

    Reply
  13. Eric Winsberg

    I don't think predictive power is the only purpose of idealization. (I don't read much Friedman if I can help it.) Idealization also helps to isolate the different contributions to a phenomenon. I don't recall if Galileo was able to use his idealization to make detailed predictions (he used his own pulse as a stopwatch, so I doubt it). What he mostly used it to do was to isolate the effects of kinematics from the effects of mechanics, which Aristotle had completely muddled together. And it he did that so as to make plausible the claim that the earth went around the sun and not vice versa. Galileo's model of the solar system was a predictive disaster compared to Ptolemy.

    Reply
  14. grad student

    I ranked high precisely those areas where I personally have the thought "I'll sit this one out." Missing from the list, to me, is "semantics of fiction" and the whole paraconsistent/impossible worlds shebang that comes with it.

    Experimental Philosophy was one of my top choices. It seems to be a "fad", since the internet (Amazon Mechanical Turk etc.) has made it very easy to conduct empirical "studies" (so-called), which has resulted in an uptick in simple survey-style studies in all kinds of fields, not just philosophy. I don't think it will last, since ultimately (a) folk intuitions (really, anyone's intuitions) have little bearing on philosophical analysis; (b) by definition, empirical data only bears on descriptive claims, never normative claims; and (c) most philosophers have insufficient training in how to set up a proper experiment, and sooner or later the field will wise up to that fact (and discount the alleged "evidence" that ExPhi has collected so-far).

    ExPhi is closely related to the cognitive sciences — but so much worse for the cognitive sciences, which are a fad in and of themselves (pace Prof Leiter).

    Critical Race Theory / Epistemic Injustice could be here to stay, but one would hope that the researchers in these fields manage to get the chips of their shoulders. As it stands, arguments against the assumptions in these fields are swatted aside on the basis of these very assumptions. One would hope that philosophy at larges wises up to this circularity.

    Reply
  15. Larry

    Brian's response to Balzano seems to miss the latter's point: what today we call "grounding" is a label for a set of phenomena we have been discussing for quite a while, and which, properly understood, has played an indispensable role in areas from metaethics to metaphysics. What we've done recently is precisify the explanandum.

    Sure, some of this literature misses the forest for the trees — but that's true in pretty much every area of Western philosophy. (Sometimes, younger philosophers manage to publish only because they put into fancy technical terminology what older generations might call "low-hanging fruit.")

    But to say that what (e.g.) Gideon Rosen or Kit Fine have been doing recently is so new such that in the 1980s "there was no literature on grounding" is to confuse what grounding *is* with what it has been previously *called*.

    Reply
  16. Brian Leiter

    I agree there is a similarity between today's grounding literature and the 1980s supervenience literature; it's not clear the former represents any improvement in precision and clarity over the latter. But perhaps you have something else in mind.

    Reply
  17. Julia

    There is a special issue of Res Philosophica on connections between formal and traditional epistemology. Especially the article by Lin and Hajek speaks to the issue you're interested in.
    https://www.pdcnet.org/collection-anonymous/browse?fp=resphilosophica&fq=resphilosophica%2FVolume%2F8906%7C94%2F8998%7CIssue%3A+2%2F

    Reply
  18. Tim

    The grounding literature has always struck me as taking a whole grab bag of interesting things, all of which are superficially similar, and trying to make hay out of their superficial similarity.

    Reply
  19. Eddy Nahmias

    grad student writes: "I don't think it [experimental philosophy] will last, since ultimately (a) folk intuitions (really, anyone's intuitions) have little bearing on philosophical analysis; (b) by definition, empirical data only bears on descriptive claims, never normative claims; and (c) most philosophers have insufficient training in how to set up a proper experiment, and sooner or later the field will wise up to that fact (and discount the alleged "evidence" that ExPhi has collected so-far)."

    Regarding (a), maybe, but the question of what roles, if any, intuitions have in various philosophical debates (and what intuitions are) is itself a big debate, which explains why xphi has led to some important new debates and work in meta-philosophy. But even if those meta-debates conclude that intuitions (or folk intuitions or both) don't matter, that would have no bearing on the x-phi work that aims to discover how our minds work (and I'm not sure why one would think cog sci is a fad–what, ALL of it!?)

    Regarding (b), I assume you didn't mean to say that no empirical data has any bearing whatsoever on any normative claims, since that would be crazy. No x-phi article I've seen has suggested that empirical data on people's intuitions or about how the mind works will *alone* answer philosophical, including normative, questions. But lots of this work argues (successfully) that such data is relevant to answering those questions (and asking new ones).

    Regarding (c), yep, which is why it's good news that so many philosophers are working with scientists and philosophy students are getting trained in relevant methods.

    Anyway, all of this is to say what most x-phi practitioners have said from the start: there is no single 'fad' to die since there are lots of methods and goals under the umbrella of what gets called x-phi, and much of what is going on under that umbrella is continuous with a long history in philosophy (and more recently, psychology and cog sci) of trying to understand how humans think and why they think and act the way they do (and if those questions are a fad, then I give up).

    Reply
  20. Joshua Reagan

    grad student wrote: "by definition, empirical data only bears on descriptive claims, never normative claims"

    This is clearly false. Descriptive claims have quite obvious connections with normative ones. If scientists do a study showing that people hallucinate in conditions X, Y, and Z, then I ought to discount strange testimony from people in those conditions.

    Reply
  21. B. Bolzano

    Brian, First: it's a little ironic that you mention Jaegwon Kim in this regard: see, for example, his seminal article "Concepts of Supervenience", pages 165-167 (published in 1984, I might add). Second: by your lights, you should also maintain that any of the (many) perennial philosophical topics that re-emerged after the heyday of logical positivism ought to count as philosophical fads.

    Tim,

    Which items make up this 'grab bag of interesting things', and what is the 'superficiality similarity' that people 'make hey out of'? Genuine question.

    Reply
  22. Someone who works in philosophy of race

    I hope this goes without saying, but just in case it doesn’t, someone should respond to Pete. Pete, I encourage you to rethink your characterization of CRT. The views you attribute to CRT in (1) and (2) are nowhere near typical of the field nor even occasionally asserted, in my experience, except perhaps very, very rarely. (Also you equate CRT with philosophy of race. Some others do this, too, but it’s worth noting that some people who use the term “critical race theory” and identify with that label think that the two fields of study are not identical.) If (3) is right, then to the extent that’s a problem, it’s not with CRT, but with people using the tools of CRT in a problematic way. Finally, (4) seems like a crude caricature of Mills’ work to me (and I'm not sure I follow the substance of your point), but of course even if it were completely on point, one person does not represent the field, any more than any one person represents any other field.

    Reply
  23. Brian Leiter

    I said, "Of course, almost any fad can claim some historical antecedents, suitably reinterpreted." I still haven't seen your response to that. Perhaps there isn't one.
    I'm also unclear on the relevance of the Kim reference. He mentions the word "ground," and as I said, the supervenience debate was about a similar issue, but formulated less metaphorically and more precisely than the grounding debate (or so it seems to me). But "ground" or "grounding" doesn't even merit a mention in the index of his Supervenience and Mind. If someone cares to explain how the current grounding debate is an improvement over or advance upon the older supervenience debate, that would be great!

    Reply
  24. YAAGS

    Well, I do think there are tons of applications of formal epistemology (or at least Bayesian probabilistic frameworks) in the sciences and programming. Presumably these applications count more than whether it has applications to abstract philosophical disputes. But even setting that aside, here are some reasons to think that formal epistemology is a better program than traditional epistemology.

    First, formal epistemology (or at least probabilistic approaches) seems better situated to make long-term progress. There is intractable disagreement in traditional epistemology over what the basic forms of justification are (rationalism vs. empiricism), and over whether there even are basic forms of justification (foundationalism vs. coherentism). It seems as though these disputes are intractable because some people start off with different sets of assumptions about what the data for epistemological theories should be and how they should be weighed (e.g. everyday knowledge claims vs. the general claim that all beliefs must be non-circularly justified). The mathematical methods used in formal epistemology narrow the assumptions to the choice of axioms (e.g. whether we should minimize total inaccuracy or average inaccuracy), which are also tightly constrained in other ways.

    Second, traditional epistemology also involves a huge amount of psychological idealization. When have you ever heard someone explicitly use modus ponens in everyday conversation? Can you see that objects have a back side or is this inferred from a 2D visual representation of them? If there are no psychological joints corresponding to the distinctions between inference, intuition, and perception then much of traditional epistemology fails, and it is far from clear that there are such joints.

    Third, perhaps the primary way in which formal epistemology and traditional epistemology differ insofar as the latter tends to be far more focused on metaphysics of mind and how human beings relate to the world. Insofar as one is suspicious of metaphysics, one should be suspicious about many epistemological disputes. For instance, a central dispute in traditional epistemology is over the nature of the a priori, which is explicitly driven by metaphysical concerns about how our minds link up to objects in a realm beyond space and time. If the whole dispute about the nature of the a priori is confused then one should probably worry about the rest of traditional epistemology.

    Reply
  25. JDF

    Just as an argument from authority: Kim says in the introduction to Supervenience and the Mind that the essays in part 1 "all have something to do with the relationship of 'determination' and 'dependence'–both the causal and noncausal kinds–holding for properties, events, and states of the world. … According to 'explanatory realism', when something is correctly invoked as an explanation of another thing, the explanatory relation must be grounded in some objective relation of dependence or determination holding for the explanans and the explanandum". Aside from the word 'ground' in that description of the unity of those essays, the idea of this ontological kind of determination or dependence just is what people means by 'ground' these days (although why this term was chosen is not clear to me). I think that most people, including I think even Kim in the essays towards the end of that section of the collection (though it has been a while), think that supervenience will not work as an account of this kind of dependence–mere modal covariation is not enough for dependence, or so the argument usually starts, because things covary even if there is no such dependence relationship between them (insert the normal examples, which people find more or less convincing). All of that requires argument and development, of course, but I doubt anyone thinks that it cannot be defended.

    None of that is to say that the popularity of it is not faddish at this point. It is just to say that the topic addresses a legitimate explanatory need that modal metaphysics plausibly cannot meet.

    Reply
  26. B. Bolzano

    First: I didn't say that grounding laid claim merely to *some* historical antecedents, but that they are extensive, longstanding, and developed independently in both the East and the West. So I didn't see why your point constituted an objection in the first place, and for that reason I didn't respond to it.

    Second: my point behind the Kim reference was not merely that he mentioned the word "ground" on page 165. Rather, it's his observation on page 166 that notions of supervenience are by themselves inadequate to express the notions of "dependence", of "determination", and of a supervenient property's being "in virtue of" its base properties that many thought they could (a point elaborated in, for example, Kim's "Supervenience as a Philosophical Concept", 1990, page 167). The recent literature on grounding is in large part an attempt to study what these other notions are, what varieties they come in, how they interact (with themselves and with notions like supervenience), and what work they can be put to. So in that sense, it's an improvement.

    Reply
  27. Nichole Smith

    I put particular positions higher on the list than more general questions. So effective altruism and knowledge first were my top two since I imagine both will fall out of favor. I put reasons and grounding last because, at least broadly understood, both are very long-standing problems. (When I first learned about grounding, it was presented as an Aristotle thing.)

    Picking out how far something can be stretched before it's a different thing seems to be pretty critical, and in retrospect I've noticed my understanding of these things while voting was colored by my views on them. For example, I think a lot of epistemic injustice literature throws around words like "violence" too liberally. I think (or at least hope) the traits like that will fall out of favor. Zooming out, though, it seems like it could be part of the same thing as liberation epistemology.

    I think overall positions tend to be the most faddish, then methods, then questions. Though some questions or methods hinge on certain positions, so when the position falls out of favor, the questions and methods go down with it.

    Reply
  28. Metaphysics Grad

    There are many reasons why the grounding framework is an advance over the supervenience framework for metaphysical reduction, which have been pointed out in the literature. Supervenience just has all the wrong formal features to be a relation of metaphysical reduction (it's symmetric and reflexive, grounding isn't). It's not fine-grained enough to capture the dependence of the singleton set of Socrates on the person Socrates without claiming that the dependence goes the other way as well.

    And the grounding movement has often been thought of as a return to the Aristotelian style of metaphysics.

    Reply
  29. Sid

    I hope encouraging people to save lives and trying our best to figure out better ways to do that winds up being less of a fad than talking about grounding.

    Reply
  30. Brian Leiter

    In reply to Bolzano:

    I said "almost any fad can claim some historical antecedents, suitably reinterpreted." You want to say it can claim lots of them. My objection remains. As to Kim, the new literature is an improvement only if it has succeeded in clearly elucidating the remaining notions in question. That is what some doubt. In any case, our exchange seems to have exhausted itself.

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  31. Brian Leiter

    I agree the grounding literature often seems to involve a kind of return to an Aristotelian style of metaphysics. Some might think that a significant objection to it, of course, and thus a reason to hope it will prove a mere fad. In any case, since "grounding" was chosen as a fad by many readers, I hope others will weigh in.

    Reply
  32. Grad Student in Moral Philosophy

    I'm a grad student in moral philosophy, and "reasons" and "effective altruism" were in my top five. My two cents: most (all?) of the historical tradition does not treat "reasons" as the primary place to start in theorizing about ethics. Starting with reasons has, in my opinion, had the following deleterious effects: (1) stacks the deck in favor of primitivism — a very bad view IMHO; (2) obscures important issues; (3) generates pseudo-problems; (4) reinvents the wheel by simply re-describing things everyone from Aristotle to Sidgwick already knew about in terms of "reasons."

    On "effective altruism": I hope it dies out before "grounding." At worst, grounding is a waste of time. Effective altruism obscures the most vital of ethical issues, diverting attention towards work in moral philosophy that starts with a bad conceptual apparatus and ends with–in the grand scheme of things–conservative policy proposals. We should be spending time discussing revolution and the history of revolutionary thought in politics. (A dig at "footnotes to Rawls" too.)

    Reply
  33. Peo

    I thought that supervenience was non-symmetric (i.e., neither symmetric nor asymmetric). Was I wrong?

    Reply
  34. Sid

    Huh. Thought supervenience was asymmetric at least. Multiple realization played an important role in moving phil mind debates away from identity. And isn’t supervenience supposed to allow for the multiple realizability of the mental? Fix all the physical facts, fix the mental facts; but not vice versa due to multiple realizability— hence we’ll say the mental just supervenes on the physical.
    Is this all wrong?

    Reply
  35. pete

    Thanks for the response! Appreciate the chance to discuss and learn more.

    So one thing I want to clear up before touching on some of your other points is that there is nowhere in the previous comment where I equated CRT with philosophy of race. I mentioned speaking with my brother about "philosophy of race" and social justice and also mentioned that Professor Mills works within that field as well. I am well aware that CRT is but one facet of the conceptual space within that specialty, and I just wanted to make that clear before proceeding.

    I will defer to you since you work in philosophy of race, so what you say about 1) and 2) not being anywhere near widespread beliefs within the tradition is an awesome thing to hear. And it may be that I would have come to the same exact conclusion if I was within that sphere of study. What I will say, however, is that if that is the case then the majority of CRT scholars have allowed the "very, very rare" view to achieve gospel status among many online journalists and authors that write articles on sites (Huffpost, Salon, Slate, etc.) that reach millions of people each and every day. It is not the job of philosophers of race to constantly police these websites and comment whenever a misunderstanding occurs, but it seems strange that views like that could proliferate if the vast majority of people working within the theoretical landscape of CRT actually didn't subscribe to (or defend) them. Could I only be seeing a smaller collection of click-baity articles that provoke lots of commentary and stay pinned to the front page for more ad-revenue? Absolutely. But again, it just seems more prevalent in light of countless think-pieces, nevermind student groups that advocate positions that are equivalent to 1) and 2) on a regular basis (did they all only read the CRT academics that you might describe as "on the fringe" or unorthodox?).

    I do agree with your comment on 3) and would hope that that is indeed the case with my brother and any others that would engage in that sort of reaction to dissent.

    To make 4) more clear, what I am getting at with that passage is that Professor Mills can't seriously claim that Enlightenment style liberalism was from the start only geared towards white Europeans and hence "racialized" if the very individuals (who were white) that lived during that era easily recognized that things like freedom and equality would apply to black people. That was very much the case with the founding fathers (the consternation and criticism of slavery even at the conception of the United States is well documented historically), and Stephens seems to recognize it as such. The main point is this: How can Professor Mills tell me something to the effect of "white elites/philosophers/thinkers during that time would not view these liberal ideals as applying to blacks" when its incredibly obvious that many of them actually did? If this is to misconstrue his idea, I would very much like to hear (from you or anyone else) what he is actually trying to say…

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  36. YAAGS

    One can hold that grounding is a more useful notion than supervenience while also holding that the grounding literature is a fad. The grounding literature is concerned with characterizing the notion of grounding at a conceptual level rather than just using it in first-order metaphysical theorizing, and there seems to be very little that can be said in this regard that is both of general interest and neutral in regard to first order metaphysical theorizing. To even say that grounding is asymmetric and transitive would require one to reject the very notion of metaphysical interdependence as conceptually incoherent. Like most concepts, we probably have a better grasp on how it behaves in specific examples than in general. Better to just help yourself to the notion and then clarify how it behaves within your own proposed theory.

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  37. Mike

    I'm a longtime reader, first time commenter on this blog. I was in a PhD program in philosophy and this thread on fads encapsulates why I got a terminal MA and got out of philosophy. First, the hostility towards X-Phi doesn't surprise me. Philosophers of the traditional stripe like to feel that there are certain questions that are their sole province, a priori, and they don't like it when people employ empirical methods to actually answer these questions. It just so happens that John Doris, Joshua Greene, and Joshua Knobe (to name just a few) are doing some of the most exciting work in philosophy today, but the traditionalists dismiss their work as a "fad" because they can feel real empirical science encroaching on what was exclusively their turf. They sense that if this trend continues, pretty soon science will supersede them in all their questions until they have nothing left to do, so their hostility is actually borne of an impulse of self-preservation.
    The real fads here are non-naturalist normative realism and all this Reasons talk that has infected the field in recent years. Regarding non-naturalism, I believe Prof. Leiter is right in his appraisal that naturalistic normative realism failed, but instead of admitting defeat, some moral realists just dug up G.E. Moore, put a twist on him, and thought they won the day. Non-naturalism is still beleaguered by the same problem as it was when Moore argued for it. How do we detect this non-natural moral property? With a special intuition whose nature it is to detect that property, of course! How does opium induce sleep? Because it contains a dormitive virtue whose nature it is to induce sleep. (Moliere) It's not an answer, it's just a reformulation of the question whose proper place is comedy. As Mackie succinctly put it "Intuitionism merely makes unpalatably plain what other forms of objectivism wrap up."
    Now, as for all this Reasons talk, let's call it for what it is. No one is talking about reasons as efficient cause (e.g. The reason the window shattered is a baseball hit it.) All this reasons talk is back-door normative talk. "Having a reason" is just a new place holder for the old "should/ought to", so before, when people would say "x ought to phi" now they just say "x has a reason to phi". Whether employed by moralists or epistemologists (e.g. x has a reason to believe…) the real goal of all this reasons talk is to impute normativity surreptitiously. I read Moral Realism: A Defense by Russ Shafer-Landau and Taking Morality Seriously by David Enoch and at their best they were rife with wishful thinking and at their worst they were downright mendacious. There is no God, but theologians will continue with their God-talk anyways. Metaphysical knowledge is beyond our epistemic limits, but metaphysicians persist in their idle speculation anyways. There are no moral facts, but moralists will insist on their existence ad nauseam.

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  38. Sid

    But, at best, EA winds up saving and improving a bunch of lives. And, at best, talking about grounding provides an account of grounding. It would be good if more people were allocated to one task than the other—and this is compatible with the fact that grounding is an important topic in metaphysics.
    Taking individual moral action is one way to improve lives; taking political action is another. Both have a place.
    Even if you’re not a consequentialist or utilitarian, and even if you don’t think we have moral obligations to help others, surely helping others still counts as a good thing to do.
    There might be even better things to do, like starting a revolution. And if there is good evidence that revolutions save more lives than aid, then I guess effective altruists will have to become revolutionaries.

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  39. Matt Lutz

    I'm with Brian, against formal epistemology. To respond to YAAGS's points here:

    1. This doesn't make much sense to me. Bayesians aren't immune to Problem of the Criterion-type concerns about what the starting points of justification are. For Subjective Bayesians, our priors are completely unconstrained; Bayesians don't answer questions about the starting point of justification, they punt on those questions. You allude to a "choice of axioms" but the two examples you give are NORMS. Granted, if you select a relevant end for your credal states, you can work out the best way to attain that end. But similarly, traditional epistemologists can adopt a truth-norm on belief (or, as I prefer, a knowledge norm on belief), and work out the best way to attain that end. That's a hard task, and involves plenty of philosophical work on the nature of knowledge and justification… but that's epistemology.

    2. Bayesian epistemology makes modeling assumptions that do not correspond to psychological evidence about the way that the brain functions. We DO NOT MAKE PROBABILITY JUDGMENTS. The idea that "credences" should be equated with "subjective probabilities" is a dogma from Ramsey. Kahneman and Tversky showed that our credences do not function like probability judgments. The orthodox interpretation of K&T's results has been to say that K&T showed that we are systematically irrational. I say that the real upshot of K&T's work is not that we are irrational, but that it was a mistake to model confidence as a kind of probability judgment and rationality as conformity to Kolmogorov axiomatization. If we take confidence to be a measure of explanatory coherence with our background beliefs, it's rational to be more confident that Linda is a feminist bank teller than that she is a bank teller. (See Gerd Gigerenzer's work.) This is one way in which a traditional approach to epistemology (focused on explanatory coherence) seems to model psychological reality better than Bayesianism. It seems to me that formal epistemologists haven't fully absorbed the implications of the falsity of the homo economicus model of human cognition.

    3. This is only a concern if we adopt the Platonic conception of a priori knowledge as thinking that puts us in contact with abstract entities. On a Humean conception of the a priori, our knowledge of the a priori is knowledge of the relations between ideas, where ideas/concepts are just modes of thought. There's no problem of how our minds link up to themselves. This is also, by the way, why I don't think X-Phi is a fad at all. A priori knowledge proceeds by conceptual analysis, and our concepts can be studied both from the inside (traditional philosophy) or from the outside (X-Phi, cog sci).

    I'm working on some papers in this area now. If I'm mistaken, I'd love to know why!

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  40. Hugh Broughton

    "Intellectual Humility" is a fad! Check out the boom of literature (and associated grant projects) on this topic in just the past five years alone. (Given the current epistemic crisis in American political media, though, this may well be a well-timed fad)l

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  41. Eddy Nahmias

    FWIW, Mike's comment here illustrates one reason I think x-phi research specifically on folk intuitions about philosophical concepts can be useful (continuing my response to graduate student above). It's pretty clear that realism about morality (or free will or the self or …) is likely to be false IF one sets the bar high enough, as high as some philosophers have set it (i.e., typically where its set by some non-naturalists about morality, most libertarians about free will, some dualists about the self, etc.). One naturalist strategy is to set the bar lower without going eliminativist about the concepts at issue.

    To me, the bar-setting debate can be informed by (AMONG OTHER PHILOSOPHICAL WORK AND NOT ALL BY ITSELF) better knowledge about the contours of ordinary usage of, intuitions about, and understanding of the relevant concepts at issue. For instance, if the folk really are wedded to the demands that our (Western) religious traditions have set for morality (or free will, etc.), then assuming those demands cannot be met (e.g., because naturalism is true), eliminativism looks more plausible than naturalist preservationism. But if the relgious traditions were mereley providing an implausible theoretical scaffold for much more theory-neutral or non-demanding concepts, then a naturalist account of those concepts is much more plausible. I think the latter is the case, but what do I know just from the armchair? (And then, there's the important cross-cultural work that needs to be done to see how universal the bar-setting is.)

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  42. Grad Student in Moral Philosophy

    I guess I don't see how that's responsive to my point. Yes: It's good to help people. Sometimes the relevant thing to think about when helping people is individual action. Sometimes it's political. Those are truisms, not a theory. You can pick up any major thinker who has written about ethics and politics and find some interesting reflections on those truisms. (Or, from the contrarians, interesting rejections of them.) What is distinctive of EA is the way of conceptualizing "helping people," which bakes a basically unreflective acceptance of the status quo into the foundations.

    Your way of assessing revolution just makes my point. You ask the question "What saves more lives?" I'm suspicious that members of EA have genuinely carried out a cost-benefit analysis here, but put that to one side along with my cranky, idiosyncratic anti-consequentialist scruples. Why isn't the question, e.g., "How would we have to live to together so that people aren't systematically deluded and treated like garbage?" Reflection on revolutionary thought, I hope, would show EA people why "What saves more lives?" is not the only question one can ask, and is actually an essentially conservative one.

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  43. Anon

    I suspect that it's only if one is in the grip of the fad of grounding that one will accept claims like 'Socrates grounds singleton Socrates'. Why on earth should we believe that to be true? It seems highly doubtful that abstracta are in general grounded in concreta. (And if singleton Socrates isn't an abstractum it is still a mystery why Socrates should ground it.) Indeed, the fact that each supervenes on the other in this case is precisely what should tip us off to the highly dubious nature of this claim. I suspect that once such alleged data are regarded through an appropriately critical lens, the whole fad of grounding will come crashing down around them!

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  44. Jessica Wilson

    'Grounding' qua fad adverts to the new-fangled notion or relation that is often taken to be primitive and is supposed to be operative in any and all contexts where complete metaphysical dependence is at issue.

    A bunch of people got excited about Grounding because its proponents pitched it, inaccurately, as a revolutionary corrective to a supposed contemporary tendency of metaphysicians to either ignore metaphysical dependence (under a post-Quinean hangover) or else to mischaracterize it in the deflationary not-properly-metaphysical terms of supervenience or other modal, conceptual, or epistemic notions.

    This pitch was inaccurate, since OF COURSE metaphysicians have, since time immemorial, been carefully and articulately attending to the varieties of metaphysical dependence, and in particular, have recently (pre-Grounding) spent a great deal of time exploring specific, properly metaphysical relations of metaphysical dependence (what I call 'small-'g' relations, to distinguish them from the primitive or generic 'big-'G'' notion), including, e.g., type and token identity, functional realization, the determinable/determinate relation, set membership, mereological parthood, the proper subset (e.g., of powers) relation, and so on (note that supervenience is not on this list). The physicalism debates provide one case-in-point: literally hundreds of articles and books have been written since the 1970s exploring specific dependence relations and assessing their application to this or that phenomenon. More generally, it's completely standard for contemporary metaphysicians to appeal to diverse small-'g' relations in the course of investigating into the dependence of some phenomena—events, properties, possible worlds, persons, objects, laws, causes, artifacts, institutions, and seemingly indeterminate states of affairs—on some others presumed (as a working, speculative, or antagonistic hypothesis) to be more fundamental.

    Failure of early prominent proponents of Grounding to properly register these available options not only swept a bunch of literature on metaphysical dependence (and fundamentality) off the table, but has also resulted in the literature on Grounding mainly consisting in the identification of problems with the notion or ‘applications’ of the notion which are really just the starting point of more substantive investigations into dependence. For example, proponents pronounced that Grounding has certain formal features (originally: asymmetry, irreflexivity, and transitivity). Now, suitable familiarity with the diverse small-'g' relations would have immediately shown this claim to be a non-starter, so there unsurprisingly followed a large literature consisting in the canvassing of counterexamples to these purported features of Grounding, effectively rehearsing what we already knew. And then there's the ever-burgeoning 'What Grounds Grounding?' literature, which in my view concerns a spandrel question arising purely from the overly abstract nature of this generic primitive. You can say that X Grounds Y, but that's not going to close any explanatory gaps, is it? Here the contrast with the specific grounding relations, which do close such gaps, is instructive.

    In any case, if there is something non-faddish about Grounding, it mainly pertains to the genuinely new (though hardly revolutionary) question of whether there is a generic notion of metaphysical dependence, in addition to the small-'g' relations to which we are already committed and which are needed to do any substantive work in metaphysics. Schaffer and others are advancing debate on this topic, though as yet I'm unconvinced. And Fine's work on the logic of diverse dependence relations seems to me a perfectly good and interesting project, and not at all faddish.

    Interested parties can check out some of my further thoughts on these issues on my website ('No Work for a Theory of Grounding', 'The Unity and Priority Arguments for Grounding', 'Grounding-based Formulations of Physicalism', and 'Three Barriers to Progress in Philosophy').

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  45. Larry

    In response to Anon at 1/30/18 at 8:41 am, it is very interesting to me how some philosophers can differ so widely on what other other philosophers take to be so compelling. Maybe I am "in the grip of the fad of grounding," but I find it hard to see why on earth one would deny that Socrates grounds singleton Socrates. For how else might we explain the latter's obtaining? It's not like we who see the value of grounding were born into the fad — we are working in metaphysics, and we see the value behind the apparatus for the purposes of a well-defined set of tasks.

    Again, you need not accept the metaphors — you don't have to explain singleton Socrates using the term "grounds." But it seems — by far — the best explanation of the singleton set is that it exists in virtue of the existence of the thing it is a set of. The seeming implausibility of "abstracta grounded in concreta" disappears when you realize that "grounded in" is just a term that picks out certain forms of explanation!

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  46. Brian Leiter

    Thanks, Jessica, for this informative contribution to the discussion. One small comment: I would have thought supervenience rather central to thinking about type- and token-identity, which is on your list. No?

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  47. Jessica Wilson

    Most think supervening with metaphysical necessity is necessary but insufficient for the holding of a metaphysical dependence relation. Supervenience was initially offered (by Davidson) as a metaphysical dependence relation (suitable for formulating a physicalist account of mental goings-on, for example) but was pretty much immediately problematized as too weak, since even the strongest modal correlations are compatible with anti-physicalist views (e.g., Strong emergence). I discuss the history here in some detail in 'Supervenience-based Formulations of Physicalism'.

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  48. Anon PhD

    Two areas that, in my view, should be near the top of the list:

    1. Work on implicit bias. (Though, given the devastating criticisms of the "empirical" underpinnings of this work, perhaps the bubble has already burst)

    2. Much of what falls under the heading of "social and political philosophy of language" (e.g. slurring, "silencing," the recent work on propaganda). Even when such work addresses issues of substantive moral concern, I find that most of it consists of marshaling obscure arguments to derive outlandish conclusions.

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  49. Brian Leiter

    Thanks for the clarification. I would dispute the "pretty much immediately," having lived through a good bit of that debate!

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  50. Eric Winsberg

    Jonah Schupbach has a nice paper that deals with your worry #2.

    http://jonahschupbach.com/documents/Troubles.pdf

    the gist is that its a mistake to think the probabilities of formal epistemology are degrees of belief, or psychological properties of real humans at all. (If I haven't butchered his main point.)

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