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What philosophical ideas should non-philosophers know about?

Brian Leiter

Philosopher Iskra Fileva posed this nice question on FB, and I thought it would be interesting to pose it here for a wider audience.  Professor Fileva asked her friends to pick just "three top" ideas, but I'm happy if readers want to propose more than three.  From many years of teaching philosophy to law students (and very good law students I might add), as well as talking to very smart law faculty, here are a few familiar philosophical ideas that I think are valuable for non-philosophers to understand:  the difference between justification and truth, and, relatedly, the difference between an epistemic and a metaphysical claim; the idea of a "natural kind," whether understood in the Kripke-Putnam way, or the earlier Whewell-Mill-Quine way (I prefer the latter); the difference between realism and anti-realism about some domain, and its relationship to ideas of mind- or attitude-independence.   I'm sure there are many others, so welcome reader perspectives on this.  I'd be particularly interested to hear from non-philosophy readers about what philosophical ideas they have found especially useful.  It's also fine to answer this question with an eye to philosophical ideas "ordinary" people might find important in their lives, and not simply those that are helpful in other areas of scholarship or study. 

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34 responses to “What philosophical ideas should non-philosophers know about?”

  1. s. wallerstein

    I'm not a philosopher.

    Two philosophical ideas which have been important in my life, which have been both revealing and liberating.

    First, Nietzsche's idea, as expressed in the Genealogy of Morality and in other texts, that moral ideas are rationalizations, often unconscious rationalizations, of psychological needs, hang-ups and drives.

    Second, Marx's idea that people's political and ethical views are rationalizations of their class interests.

    Nietzsche's and Marx's ideas don't contradict each other because people's conscious ethical and political ideas can well be both a rationalization of their psychological needs and of their class interests.

    Those ideas have helped me to see through so much bullshit that one finds in the media and in normal political discourse.
    As I said above, both are very liberating and what more can one ask from philosophy or from any other discipline than liberation from what Nietzsche calls "herd mentality" and/or what Gramsci describes as "hegemonic common sense"?

    Reply
  2. anon

    The differences between justification/truth and epistemic/metaphysical claims are great. I'd also add the difference between justified belief/mere opinion, and perhaps inference to the best explanation.

    On the flip side are philosophical concepts prone to misunderstanding and bastardization – things like relativism, free will/determinism, and even the basic first-order moral theories (mainly utilitarianism and Kantianism).

    Reply
  3. David Shoemaker

    The use/mention distinction, by god.

    Reply
  4. Patrick

    I'd say a Popper-like distaste of ad hoc arguments/explanations, and the according demand of people to state their falsification conditions. Despite the criticisms Popper's ideas have faced from within philosophy, I've found it exceptionally useful in everyday life to demand from myself and other people that we state what evidence we would accept as counterevidence to our stance.

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  5. anon

    People often ask "does [Noun] satisfy [Predicate]?" for some noun and predicate. Then someone says "well it just depends how you define [Predicate]". Sometimes that response is appropriate; sometimes it's not; sometimes a mix. Philosophy has had some interesting ideas about this over the years.

    Reply
  6. Charles Pigden

    Patrick pipped me to the post. Though Popper overstated his case, it's a mark of a good scientific theory – indeed of a good empirical theory of any kind – that it is in principle falsifiable and a mark of a bad one that it isn’t. Lakatos elaborates this basic idea in a helpful way.

    And now two from my own work

    1) You cannot by logic alone derive substantively moral or evaluative conclusions from premises that are not themselves substantively moral or evaluative. However this thesis (NOFI, short for No-Ought-From-Is) does NOT imply any fundamental split between facts and values. (Maybe there is such a split, but it is not implied by NOFI) Why is this idea useful in everyday debates? Because when people *seem* to be deriving an Ought form an Is, an appeal to this principle can be used to flush out the underlying ethical assumptions and subject them to critical scrutiny.

    2) The idea that conspiracy theories *as such* are somehow suspect or unbelievable is simply idiotic. For the fact is that people frequently conspire, which means that many conspiracy theories are straight-forwardly true. Since many conspiracy theories are not only true but well-proven, and many more are perfectly sensible, the fact that a theory features a conspiracy should carry no presumption either one way or the other about whether it is true or false sensible or silly. Although many conspiracy theories are suspect or unbelievable, they are suspect or unbelievable because they are suspect or unbelievable not because they feature a conspiracy, which is or ought to be a *neutral* feature. The epistemic status of a conspiracy theory depends upon the details (for instance the specific character of the conspiracy in question) and ton the evidence for and against. Since there is nothing wrong with conspiracy theories *as such* (though there is often quite a lot wrong with individual conspiracy theories), there is nothing wrong with conspiracy THEORISTS *as such* (though again there is often quite a lot wrong with individual conspiracy theorists). Indeed, since many conspiracy theories are part of the historical record, every politically and historically literate person – that is every person with a nodding acquaintance with history, including recent history – will be a big-time conspiracy theorist. (which means that anybody who does NOT subscribe to a wide range of conspiracy theories is not historically literate).

    Why is this important? Because idea that conspiracy theories are inherently suspect has been used by real-life conspirators to deflect critical scrutiny, sometimes with catastrophic results. Bush and Blair often employed anti-conspiracist rhetoric to defend themselves during the run-up to the Iraq War, whilst conspiring to foist two FALSE conspiracy theories on a credulous public: a) that Saddam was somehow in cahoots with Al-Qaeda and b) that he had successfully conspired to acquire WMDs, (including perhaps nuclear weapons) and that therefore he represented a fundamental threat to US an UK interests. Because the term ‘conspiracy theory’ is often deployed in a chauvinist way (so that theories positing conspiracies on the part of Other People don’t count as ‘conspiracy theories’ ) they mostly managed to get away with this with the result that hundreds of thousands of people died needless deaths.

    I also think that the idea of invisible hand mechanisms is of enormous importance in understanding the social world, There are repeatable situations in which large numbers of people pursuing their own individual objectives in a structured environment tend to produce a relatively stable outcome which was no part of their intentions. Invisible hand effects are the outcomes of human action but not (sometimes despite appearances) of human design. However it should be emphasised that the invisible hand can smack you down ( as with Hobbes and maybe Marx) as well as lifting you up (as allegedly with Mandeville, Hume and Smith).

    And just to forestall a question (and a possible objection), in my view Hidden Hand operations (conspiracies) and Invisible Hand mechanisms are BOTH important factors in history.

    Reply
  7. Ludovic Marsillach

    As a non philosopher the question brings to mind this quote by the philosopher Olaf Stapledon, which in turn seems to resemble something Charles Sanders Peirce said in passing about the potential quotidian insignificance of a hypothesized reality of telepathy:

    "Some claim that telepathy and clairvoyance and pre-vision of the future are high-level powers characteristic of the upper reaches. I am not in a position to judge whether such powers exist or not, though on the whole I incline with much hesitation to believe that in some form or other they do. But I cannot see anything particularly lofty about them. They may be consequences of high development, but in themselves they are merely strange modes of perceiving events of commonplace order."

    In light of recent strange discussions in the Guardian and other media regarding the alleged creation of literal mind and potentially dream reading/translating AI-powered machines coupled with more expansive Muskian promises of AI-powered (or otherwise artificial) telepathy tout court, what, if anything, can academic philosophy do to help guide the common man or woman on the street in processing such as the aforecited claims in a manner that might allow them to better guard against the temptations of an overly speculative or indeed "magical" way of thinking about said subjects?

    Reply
  8. Walther Ellis

    My training is in chemistry and biomedical engineering. I did take a junior-level course in medieval philosophy, which left me with a sense of respect for philosophy as an academic discipline.

    Given what all of us have been subjected to in recent years, it seems that TRUTH needs to be at the top of the list. I am sick and tired of 'alternative facts' (aka shameless mendacity).

    Reply
  9. Bryan Frances

    I have found non-philosophers to react well to hearing some well-chosen stories that prove the distinctness of true belief, reasonable belief, knowledge, and confident belief.

    I also think non-philosophers can learn a lot by becoming aware of how prevalent various kinds of subtle ambiguity are in their conversations, and how they cause trouble in communication. For instance, people who are dating always say they want to find a "kind" partner, but what they miss is that there are importantly different notions attached to uses of that term–and it's easy to end up talking past one another when using "kind".

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  10. Dean C. Rowan

    A non-philosopher here.

    1. Causality and causation — What is determinism? What part does probability play in the relationship expressed by the statement that A causes B?
    2. Gettier problems — I have a sense that these at best remain only charming to philosophers, armchair or tenured, but I often lose sleep pondering them. Why is this so? I don't really care that I "know" such-and-such, only that I "am pretty damn sure" that such-and-such, give or take. I think I include this because Gettier problems are fun.
    3. Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations — ?

    Let me add one idea that I would argue nobody should care about, at least not based on the little bit I've read about (Searle, Austin) speech acts. I understand why Austin cared about the varieties of "force" language can exercise, furthermore why he acknowledged the difficulty of distinguishing those varieties, but to my mind the whole putative question is absurd. Unfortunately, Searle doesn't help at all. His Speech Acts is by my account among the worst books ever written.

    Reply
  11. Jason Aleksander

    Free will debates, but mainly insofar as they intersect with practical questions in jurisprudence and penal science (rather than metaphysical debates). And, fortunately, there is already a very good Ted Talk from Gregg Caruso related to this:

    Reply
  12. Ted Parent

    Thank you for this post–it is very timely for me. I am trying to re-design my "critical thinking" course with the aim of introducing more (broadly useful) philosophical content.

    With this aim, two pieces that have stood out are Plato's "Euthphryo" and Hume's "On Miracles." The former encourages people to think about morality instead of largely deferring to authority. The latter offers some valuable, more general lessons on the epistemology of testimony, the importance of error theories, etc.

    I also would highlight the very idea of philosophical method. Non-philosophy students often have "philosophies" that are based significantly on free association and on what "feels true to me." As a remedy, it is very important to teach formulating one's thesis carefully, formulating the arguments for the thesis, formulating the objections to the arguments, the objections to the objections, and so on, until the obvious problems (at least) are dealt with. The process also cultivates interpretive charity, sensitivity to multiple perspectives, etc., all of which are crucial. The very idea of philosophical method (even though such method is far from perfect) is one of the most important ideas in philosophy.

    Reply
  13. Murray Gregorson

    The difference between a prima facie (or pro tanto) reason and a reason sans phrase (or all-things-considered). The COVID debates would've benefited from greater attention to this.

    Reply
  14. Daniel Kodsi

    The distinction between contextualism and relativism.

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  15. doris

    I tell my students that the "Euthyphro Problem," understood as demonstrating the insufficiency of divine command ethics, is one of the relatively few unequivocal results in the history of philosophy.

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  16. Publishing Veteran

    1. The idea that it is impossible not to have some explicit or tacit metaphysical assumptions that can't be proven

    2. Locke's conception of private property rights and the primacy of their protection as a (or perhaps the) main purpose of government — in hindsight, hard not to see this as one of the most damaging ideas of all time

    3. Nietzche's elaboration of the ancient Greek idea that the world can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon

    Reply
  17. Daniel A. Kaufman

    I think most people would benefit from some understanding of the following:

    1. Use/Mention distinction.
    2. The essence of the argument in On Certainty.
    3. Hume on miracles.
    4. Basic rules of inference
    5. The falsifiability principle.
    6. The Euthyphro dilemma.
    7. Connotation vs. denotation.
    8. Gricean implicature.
    9. Mill, “On Liberty”
    10. Aristotle on the rigor it is reasonable to expect in different subject areas.

    Reply
  18. Derek Bowman

    I hope it's not too far off-topic to offer suggestions specifically for your course re-design. When I did something similar many years ago I also included the first part of the Meditations, to help bring out some of the epistemic/doxastic distinction Bryan Frances mentions above. And I included selections from Pascal/Clifford/James on the ethics of belief.

    I also included Frederick Douglass's 4th of July oration, which includes a powerful passage that simultaneously includes an example of a straightforward modus ponens anti-slavery argument and a reflection on the limits of rational argumentation in that debate. (Look for the paragraph beginning: "But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, 'It is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, an denounce less; would you persuade more, and rebuke less; your cause would be much more likely to succeed.'") https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2927t.html

    Reply
  19. VBBaltzly

    Constitutive explanation, or maybe even just the idea of "constitution" in general. People tend to default to causal thinking, but you can get them to understand constitution in simple cases like the liquidity of water. ("It's not that a bunch of H2O molecules get together and *cause* liquidity … it's just that, under the right circumstances, when you have a critical mass of H2O molecules all in the same place, that IS liquidity.") And then you can get them to see that this same model applies quite widely. ("The physicalist isn't saying that a certain pattern of neuronal firings in your brain *causes* your mental state; rather, it's that this neuronal pattern just IS your mental state," etc.)

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  20. Steven Hales

    (1) That tu quoque is a fallacy. (2) What a collective action problem is.

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  21. Phil

    Was Guy Debord a philosopher? Few things loom as large in my intellectual development as the moment in my early twenties when I read his casual reference to

    "The workers of Italy, who can be held up as an example to their comrades in all countries for their absenteeism, their wildcat strikes that no particular concession can manage to appease, their lucid refusal of work, and their contempt for the law and for all Statist parties"

    I think it'd be very useful for a lot of people to take on board the idea of workers being celebrated "for their absenteeism" – and, more broadly, the thought that un'altro mondo è possibile!

    Another huge influence was Alfred Schutz. There's a lovely line from (IIRC) a letter to Garfinkel, in which Schutz admits that he has no definite idea about the ontological reality or otherwise of anything he writes about, and adds (WTTE of) "my only consolation is that I share this predicament with every other philosopher since Plato". IDK what a philosopher would call this – the insight that, while we do know what we know, we can *only* know what we know – but it hit me like a train.

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  22. Nick Drew

    1. As a businessman specialising in the negotiation of large, bespoke commercial contracts, I have endlessly found the principle of Reductio ad Absurdum of huge value in tackling stubborn and irrational opposition to a fair point. It's at the core of some great commercial tactics for reaching win-win deals. (The beauty of lengthy negotiations is that you generally have the opportunity to create the time & space to make an opponent confront logic. In much of life, stubborn and irrational opponents just punch you.)

    OK, Logic rather than Philosophy, perhaps – but it's still very useful!

    2. More philosophically: in a world of shifting certainties and "alternative facts" I'd cite what I understand to be Nietzsche's "plural realism" (Julian Young's coinage, I believe). For making constructive sense of the extreme range of oft-conflicting world-views one meets around the globe – a critical requirement if one is to do business in any sphere – and retrieving just as much as what rightfully deserves to be retrieved from frequently lazy or dishonest promotion of "epistemic diversity" etc.

    (I've done business in Russia, China and Africa. Some differences in worldview are tangible: but science is science.)

    3. Finally, I'd hark back to #1, s.wallerstein – and add back Freud, to complete the "hermeneutics of suspicion" triumvirate (under the exegesis of Brian's 2005 essay on the same).

    Reply
  23. Phil

    And of course I find the quote two minutes later.

    "I am afraid I do not exactly know what reality is, and my only comfort in this unpleasant situation is that I share my ignorance with the greatest philosophers of all time."

    Not a letter to Garfinkel, it turns out, but the 1943 paper The Problem of Rationality in the Social World .

    Reply
  24. Keith Douglas

    (I have some graduate training in philosophy but do not work in the field as such now.) Lots of good examples above: here are a few more –
    1) Normative vs. descriptive
    2) The technical meaning of "valid" in logic (eliding that there are several)
    3) (Effectively) everyone has some viewpoints about the general structure of reality and the human place in it – the discipline that studies this is called metaphysics (and this is true even if you think such study is a waste of time, impossible, better suited to be done some other way, etc.!)
    4) "There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not said it."
    5) Ethical disagreement can be rooted in epistemological or metaphysical disagreement and (hence?) requires unearthing to resolve some debates
    6) Standards of rationality, broadly speaking, are portable across fields of inquiry
    7) "possible" has many different meanings, and their relations are difficult to think through

    Reply
  25. Jeremy Goodman

    Of the ideas that I regularly teach and that are central to my research: the asymmetry of epistemic accessibility. It is possible to have false beliefs without being in a position to tell that you're mistaken, but it doesn't follow that when you have true beliefs you don't know that you're correct. I find this to be a very helpful idea in thinking about fallibility in politics, science, and ordinary life, and it's a good warm up for other kinds of externalist thinking more generally.

    Reply
  26. anon

    Re 10 (Aristotle on "rigor" in e.g. ethics):
    Ethical functions and algorithms are complex: 1) high-dimensional and 2) nonlinear. That's why it's hard to find good precise ethical theories in English. But the study of complex functions in any domain is just beginning its infancy and was non-existent in Aristotle's time. So, going forward I don't think we should pay much attention to what Aristotle thought.

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  27. MP

    Lawyer with undergraduate philosophy training here. For me the most *useful* philosophical ideas have been:

    1. Contingency versus necessity. People waste an enormous amount of time making a priori (usually normative) arguments about contingent claims. People also, interestingly, waste a huge amount of time trying to muster facts against purportedly necessary claims. You short circuit a lot of needless disputes, and quickly home in on what’s really at issue, if you keep this distinction in mind.

    2. Socially constructed facts vs. natural kind facts. Again, I find you save a lot of time and gain a great deal of clarity when you distinguish between whether you’re evaluating (or arguing about) what a convention calls for or what is the case regardless of convention.

    3. Exegesis versus critique. Deliberately separating exegesis (where you schematize an argument, identify its premises, spell out how it’s supposed to go) from critique (where you evaluate whether the argument’s any good or not) is super helpful to clear communication and rational decisionmaking.

    As for the most *important* philosophical ideas, I second (or third) s. wallerstein.

    Reply
  28. LFC

    The OP asks "what philosophical ideas should non-philosophers know about?"

    People who "do" or are interested in the social sciences — broadly construed to include both qualitative and number-crunching varieties as well as so-called multi-method work — should probably have at least some nodding acquaintance with the (quasi-)philosophical debates/discussions around: holism vs. reductionism; nomethetic vs. idiographic approaches; interpretation and causal explanation; what counts as an explanation; the uses (and abuses) of history; the uses (and limits) of historical analogies; descriptive inference vs. causal inference; positivism vs. "post-positivism" (vs. anti-positivism); the notions of "cumulation" and "progress"; etc.

    Among works in the philosophical (or near adjacent) canon that have had an impact on me: Marx, Capital vol. 1; Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality; Machiavelli, The Prince; Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars. Kant's political writings don't do a whole lot for me (though I understand why they're important).

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  29. School teacher

    School teacher – of Religious Education – here. Question: "Is morality objective?"

    (a) Student proposal: if God exists, morality would be objective. But God doesn't exist. So, morality isn't objective. *Denying the antecedent*.

    (b) Another vote for Euthypro: premise 1 of the skeleton argument above is not true: no moral question can be settled by an appeal to authority, even God's *Euthyphro*

    (c) Objectivity and subjectivity is not such a clear distinction as teenagers are inclined to think. *Values as secondary qualities, McDowell*

    Reply
  30. David Wallace

    I’ll second the various recommendations of the moves in the free will debate, and of some basic epistemology of science. I think in general some understanding of scientific methodology and how science makes and corrects mistakes and when it reaches consensus would be hugely helpful in all manner of current political debates, from climate change to COVID to some aspects of the sex/gender debate. (Some philosophers could stand to know more about it, frankly.)

    As another, and perhaps more traditionally ‘philosophical’ example: the Euthyphro dilemma, not necessarily in its historical context but as applied to the idea that atheists must be amoral.

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  31. Perry Hendricks

    Skeptical theism! And externalism about justification.

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  32. Siddharth M.

    The basic ideas of probabilistic epistemology (broadly construed without the hardcore commitments): that credences come in degrees; that these credences should obey the probability calculus; how priors work; how one updates by conditionalization; and how Pr(E|H) is not Pr(H|E), and how the two are related via Bayes' theorem. How to operationalize these credences in terms of betting odds, and what it means to be calibrated in probabilistic judgments. Related ideas such as base rate fallacies, Dutch books.

    Also, in a related vein, the way causation is confused with correlation. How causal relations are discovered in science, and why it's hard to do so purely statistically.

    Reply
  33. Ludovic Marsillach

    As a non philosopher I would also venture to inquire about the possible distinctions between "type," "category," and the like in philosophy. Specifically how are these terms/concepts, if it all, employed in current analytical philosophy with a view towards a better and more precise understanding of the function, ability, and potentialities inherent in human perception?

    Do such potential philosophical distinctions contribute anything in themselves as opposed to at best duplicating a sort of telos or intelligence already inherent at this point in techno-scientific research on the nature, limits, and potential methods of augmentation of human perception, such as might be achieved through the facilitation of ever more advanced AI technologies?

    Reply
  34. Dan Dennis

    1) The distinction between treating a person as a mere means and treating him as an end in himself.
    2) The distinction between shared goods and competitive goods.
    3) The possibility, and importance, of being someone who tries to question and learn at the deepest possible level regarding all aspects of belief, decision-making etc.

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