All in all, this is turning out to be an extremely helpful tool especially for academics, students, etc. If you want to learn more, I suggest watching the intro video they have.

(Note: If you do end up creating an account through that link, it will give me more free space! But of course I’m not just promoting it for the free space from referrals—it’s not really that much. I just think it’s a really cool program.)

UC Officials Call for Cuts – at the Daily Nexus

The situation is similar for all the UC campuses (such as UCLA).  This is all getting a bit tough to swallow when this state has the unruly rule that a super-majority of 2/3rds is required to pass a budget (which is reportedly part of the problem for getting our budget in line on time), yet we can amend the state consitution with a simple majority to outlaw gay marriage!

TLA Award (Front)

This is a bit late, but a student of mine from last quarter gave me this home-made award. Unfortunately, I wasn’t around when he or she left it in my office. Thank you (whoever you are)!

Here’s the backside:

TLA Award (Back)

• Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply – Chronicle of Higher Education
• The Paper Market – On the Media (from NPR)

I previously posted something about whether philosophy is “subjective” (Philosophy is Subjective, Science Objective?). I concluded that it’s not a difference between philosophy and science that philosophy is subjective while science is objective. I concluded this on the basis of the following two claims:

(1) Philosophy, like science, is a truth-seeking discipline.
(2) Both philosophy and science advance us toward the truth (i.e. yield knowledge).

(Note: By “philosophy” I mean the academic discipline practiced by those housed in what are called “philosophy departments” in most of the English-speaking world.)

I noted that some might still say: “Sure, but the point of the claim that philosophy is subjective is that philosophy doesn’t yield much substantial knowledge like science does.” The idea here seems to be that, still, there is so much more disagreement and so on in philosophy. However, if that is the point, then one should not try to express it by saying that philosophy is “subjective.” But this does leave unaddressed what the big difference between philosophy and science is (at least when people try to differentiate them by saying “philosophy is subjective”) and whether the difference is that philosophy fails to yield much substantial knowledge compared to science. I didn’t address this issue before, but I want to address it now.

Preliminaries

So what is the difference between philosophy and science? Let me be clear from the outset. Of course philosophy and science are different. But my concern is that many incorrectly believe in the following claim:

Claim to Be Rebutted (CBR): Philosophy (unlike science) doesn’t yield much substantial knowledge.

I want to provide some reasons against that view. My conjecture here is that the supposed evidence for this claim can be undermined, leaving the position unsubstantiated.

Public Relations

I think the problem lies primarily in the nature of the two disciplines. Science deals with the empirical and largely observable parts of the world. Philosophy, though, deals with the more abstract, non-empirical, conceptual parts of the world. This results in the following situation.

Scientists can much more easily reveal to a lay person that they’re making progress or that they’re scientific claims are known, justified, reasonable to believe, etc. Like philosophers, scientists can’t really easily reveal to a lay person the actual evidence for a scientific claim; that would require learning a great deal of science. But they can at least reveal to the lay person in an easier way that they are justified. They can do this by showing the observable consequences of their views. For example, science yields improved medicines for people. So the lay person can take the medicine and feel better as a consequence in a reliable way. This is evidence to the lay person that the scientists are making progress or gaining knowledge or that the scientists’ claim about the medicine or whatever is well-grounded. And what the lay person learns here is largely acquired without doing a lot of thinking, at least not scientific thinking. The lay person just has to feel the effects in a reliable way (or, in other examples, it would be seeing the effects in a reliable way). In other words, the lay person can learn about the progress of science in a direct way without doing any science (that is, without becoming a scientist).

But, given the subject matter of the discipline of philosophy, philosophers aren’t in this wonderful position. Even though there is progress in philosophy (even though philosophical investigation does yield knowledge), philosophers can’t reveal to the lay person that they have acquired knowledge without the lay person doing a lot of thinking about and understanding of philosophy. Lay people, for example, can’t take a pill that makes them learn about all the great arguments against, say, divine command theory. In other words, lay people can’t understand the progress of philosophy without doing some philosophy; to understand the progress, they have to no longer be lay people.

A Different Approach to PR?

The statements made so far about the dimness of philosophy’s situation are a bit too strong. I think the situation needn’t be so dire. Part of the problem here is caused by philosophers themselves. I think there is one way philosophers can make lay people believe they’ve made progress: testimony. The primary way lay people are going to believe that there is progress in philosophy is by the practitioners of the discipline telling them so. But philosophers predominantly teach their classes in a way that doesn’t highlight progress in the discipline. Our introductory text books are largely purely collections of readings from philosophers who are writing to other philosophers, and these readings are often primarily historical (readings by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Descartes, Kant, Mill, etc.). Students come away thinking that philosophy is largely a historical discipline tracing smart people’s thinking about questions that will never be answered. This only contributes to the problem.

To improve philosophy’s image, and to communicate to the masses the fact that philosophy does make progress, I propose that we at least slightly revise the way we teach our classes. And while this might sound like heresy, I think we should look to science classes for insight here. Now I’m not proposing that philosophers teach their classes exactly like scientists do. I’m simply suggesting that they do things such as the following:

(a) Highlight progress in the material that’s being taught (e.g. say what most philosophers do think about issue X nowadays).
(b) Mention what most philosophers believe nowadays about issue X, but feel free to mention that you think they’re all wrong if you’re the exception.
(c) Respect the historically important philosophers, but focus more on the work of current, living philosophers; leave the exposition of the intricacies of the views of the historical philosophers to the History of Philosophy courses.
(d) Avoid saying things in the syllabus like “In this class, we’re going to think about the big questions that have puzzled philosophers for thousands of years, and you’re going to form your own opinion about these perennial problems….”

I know this challenges the paradigm that most philosophers follow. But, at the same time, most philosophers despise the image of their discipline, especially the image that philosophy is just all about sayin’ what ya feel about problems that will never be solved. Well, the only way to fix that is by presenting the discipline in a better light to the public we interact with most: students, especially the non-philosophy majors that pass through the lower division courses in order to satisfy general education requirements.

Of course, I don’t think all of the image of philosophy is the fault of philosophers themselves. But that’s for another blog rant.

• Daniel Dennett is interviewed by Bill Moyers (in place of Charlie Rose).
• Jesse Prinz can be seen on Bloggingheads.tv.
• Joshua Knobe on Bloggingheads.tv (1).
• Joshua Knobe on Bloggingheads.tv (2).
• Joshua Knobe on Bloggingheads.tv (3).
• Shaun Nichols on Bloggingheads.tv.
• Geoffrey Sayre-McCord talks about meta-ethics on Bloggingheads.tv.
• Martha Nussbaum talks about religious equality with Bill Moyers.
• David Chalmers talks about consciousness on Bloggingheads.tv (this is older).
• Peter Railton and Don Loeb
• David Albert
• Jonathan Haidt (psychologist)

http://www.andrewcullison.com/2009/02/why-major-in-philosophy/#more-682

He posts some nice fliers about how well philosophy majors do on the GRE and so on.

Also on this topic, there have been some nice articles recently on some benefits of becoming a philosophy major:

• The NY Times reports that philosophy majors are on the rise
• The Wall Street Journal reports that being a philosopher is the 12th best job.
• The Guardian reports that philosophy majors are all the rage with employers.

However, upon a more detailed inspection of this article, I’m finding that the results may not show what the reporter (and maybe researchers) implies they’re showing. Students taking these surveys could have just meant that they expect that a normal student should be able to achieve that sort of grade by doing that amount of work (not necessarily if they did that work alone and performed horribly on the assignments). But, I don’t know, maybe they really did mean the stronger thing. Students do tend to have odd views about how they should be graded.

It is often said, or at least assumed, that philosophy is subjective while (empirical) science is objective. At the very least, many who have even been exposed to a few philosophy courses still tend to believe that there is something like this difference between the two disciplines. Of course, there’s no doubt that there are differences between the two. However, I think the differences are exaggerated in much of society.

Allow me to attempt to provide some reasons to think otherwise. My strategy has two main parts: (1) I argue that many people have misconceptions about how philosophy works and that science does not always work the way the average person seems to tend to think it does; (2) this then leads to the idea that philosophy and science are not so different after all.

(Note: Throughout this post I am talking about academic philosophy that is practiced in universities across the world, not “philosophy” in the sense of any old forming of views about things.)

Understanding the Issue

So what does one mean by saying “Philosophy is subjective, but science is objective”? The intuitive idea, as many people are nowadays fond of saying, is that philosophy just involves “opinion” while science gives us “facts.” I think this is poor terminology. What people mean, I think, is that philosophy gives us only mere opinion. For some reason, people now tend to think that calling something an “opinion” is derogatory. But any facts that are believed are opinions as well. Take any fact, such as the fact that the earth is not flat. I believe this, as do many others. It’s my opinion that the earth is not flat. It just so happens that my opinion, my belief, is correct. I believe something that is true.

But, bad terminology aside, the idea is clear: philosophy gives us only mere opinions, but not enough to determine which opinions are correct. A better way to put the complaint, perhaps, is that science gives us knowledge, philosophy doesn’t.

But why should we think this?

Is Philosophy Truth-Seeking?

One way to fail to generate a body of knowledge is for a discipline to fail to be truth-seeking at all. Some disciplines do seem to be in this category. For example, some disciplines are geared toward teaching skills more than facts. Other disciplines are in the grips of post-modernistic thinking, and so hold that there simply aren’t any real “objective” truths or pieces of knowledge to acquire.

But philosophy is clearly a truth-seeking discipline. This is because those who practice the discipline ultimately get to decide this, and most philosophers—I think it is uncontroversial to say—take their discipline to be one that seeks truth. It doesn’t take much to be a truth-seeking discipline. Those in the discipline just need to try to find the truth about things, try to gain knowledge. And philosophers are certainly trying.

Sub-Conclusion: Philosophy, like science, is a truth-seeking discipline.

Does Philosophy Advance Us Toward the Truth?

However, one might claim that, while philosophy seeks truth, it doesn’t ever get us there (or at least that it hardly ever does). That is, another way to fail to generate a body of knowledge is to fail to acquire it, despite one’s efforts.

But in philosophy we do give arguments for or against certain claims and evaluate them using the same standards of reasoning employed in any other truth-seeking discipline. Surely one must admit that philosophy gives us some evidence for certain claims. But, one might retort, “Philosophy doesn’t answer any questions definitively; we are never certain of who is right and who is wrong.” This may be true for the most part, but I don’t think there is any reason to think that science is so different.

Take a look at science. I certainly agree that science generates knowledge. However, some seem to think that science does this by providing a process of determining which claims are true that gives us certainty of their truth. This of course is not really correct. Science gives us good evidence for or against certain claims. It’s not a magical machine with a power button we press to generate knowledge. As with any truth-seeking discipline, acquiring knowledge in science is hard work, and in the end we still fall short of the kind of certainty we can arguably achieve from, say, a mathematical proof (consider a proof of the Pythagorean theorem).

One might still claim that, unlike philosophy, we settle questions in science.

Again, I think this is a misconception. Are issues about, say, space and time closed in science? Is even the issue about whether margarine or butter is better for humans to consume settled? How about the issue of whether Pluto is planet? That should be easy enough, right? It is surely a misconception of science to think that such issues are so easily settled once and for all. What scientists do is gather evidence and render justified conclusions, often yielding knowledge of facts. (I’m not claiming that questions cannot ever be settled once and for all by science or any other discipline or method of inquiry. Rather, I’m trying to dispel a certain implausible set of beliefs about science. In short, I’m not being skeptical, just humble and realistic.)

So, again, why is philosophy supposed to be so different? In philosophy we don’t tend to settle questions once and for all either, but surely we also get good evidence, reasons, or justification for certain claims and can rule out others. I think once we reject scientism, but still take seriously that science is in the business of yielding knowledge by yielding good evidence for or against certain claims, we see that philosophy is not so different. It’s not that science uses reason or reasoning and philosophy doesn’t. Both disciplines use reasoning, just usually different sorts. The method of investigation is often different in philosophy, but both are methods of figuring out what’s true. We need to keep in mind that finding out what’s true is not easy, whether in science, philosophy, or any other discipline. And it’s a mistake to think that we somehow find the truth so much easier in science.

Sub-Conclusion: Both philosophy and science advance us toward the truth (i.e. yield knowledge).

Conclusion

Many are still content with locating the difference between the disciplines in the idea that science does a much better job at providing justified conclusions. In other words, one might still claim that science gets us closer to the truth than philosophy.

I still think this is not quite right. But frankly I don’t see the need to fight this sort of battle, at least not at this point. If I’ve shown what I’ve tried to show so far (namely, the two sub-conclusions I’ve stated), then I think I’ve alr
eady dispelled the myth that philosophy is subjective while science is objective. And that’s all I’ve set out to show.

Conclusion: It is not a difference between philosophy and science that philosophy is subjective while science is objective.

So What’s the Difference?

There are, of course, significant differences between the two disciplines. The differences are just not as great as many think. The differences are primarily in the issues they address. While I think they certainly overlap sometimes, philosophy deals with different aspects of the world than does science. (I think they ultimately both study the same subject matter, namely reality, just different aspects of it.) However, I won’t belabor this point, since most people admit this sort of difference.

Afterthoughts

I think we should be pushing this sort of argument to the public more. I tend to mention something like this to my students at the end of the term, allowing them to chime in about what they think. I would hope that being exposed to some academic philosophy would mitigate the tendency to believe that philosophy is subjective, but many students do still seem unaffected by my spiel. So I’m not sure if it’s entirely effective, but I think it’s on the right track toward curing one of the major problems with philosophy’s poor public image nowadays, at least in the United States (other places, like Australia, are another story).

Ultimately, I think the belief that philosophy is subjective is driven largely by two factors: (1) a lack of acquaintance with what philosophy actual is, and (2) the prevalence of a sort of scientism in current American culture. I do think having some philosophy in high school, like critical thinking, would be highly beneficial for both the students and the image of philosophy. (It seems to be going well in Australia.)