On Philosophical Expertise, Systematicity, and Coherence

...The puzzle presupposes that we ought to defer to experts.  But that only makes sense if we've reason to expect that expertise in a domain sufficiently increases epistemic reliability, i.e. the likelihood of true beliefs.  That's certainly the case for many domains -- it's why we should defer to scientific experts, for example.  But it arguably isn't so for philosophy in general.

Philosophical expertise seems compatible with being completely off the rails when it comes to the substantive content of one's philosophical views.  And this is to be expected once we appreciate that (i) there are many possible internally coherent worldviews, (ii) philosophical argumentation proceeds through a mixture of ironing out incoherence and making us aware of possibilities we had previously neglected, and so (iii) even the greatest expertise in these skills will only help you to reach the truth if you start off in roughly the right place.  Increasing the coherence of someone who is totally wrong (i.e. closer to one of the many internally coherent worldviews that is objectively incorrect) won't necessarily bring them any closer to the truth.

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To put a more subjective spin on it: One's only hope of reaching the truth via rational means is to trust that your starting points are in the right vicinity, such that an ideally coherent version of your worldview would be getting things right.  So we've only got reason to defer to others if their verdicts are indicative of what our idealized selves would conclude.  Often, we can reasonably judge that other philosophers have views so alien to our own that it's unlikely that procedurally ideal reflection (increasing internal coherence) would lead us to share those views.  In such cases, we've no reason to defer to those philosophers, however 'expert' they may be.

(Terminological variant: If you want to build into the definition of a subject-area 'expert' that deference to expert judgement is mandatory, then you should restrict attributions of expertise to those whose starting points are sufficiently similar to your own.)

tl;dr: We should only be epistemically moved by peer disagreement (and related phenomena) when we take the other person's views to be evidence of what we ourselves would conclude upon ideal reflection.  Philosophical intransigence is thus often justified, insofar as we can justifiably believe that an improved version of our view could be developed that is at least as internally coherent as the opposing views. This remains true even if we judge that the defenders of the opposing views are (in purely procedural terms) smarter / better philosophers than we are ourselves.--Richard Yetter Chappell@Philosophy, et cetera, "Philosophical Expertise, Deference, and Intransigence" [HT: Liam Kofi Bright & Dailynous.]

I like that in his post, Yetter Chappell does not simply assume that philosophical expertise is like scientific expertise in all the relevant ways.* In particular, he claims that the are very important differences between science and philosophy when it comes to "epistemic reliability, i.e. the likelihood of true beliefs." Drawing on work of Jason Brennan, he assumes that philosophical methods are not sufficient for generating true beliefs (recall also Katzav's skepticism). Let's spot him the thought, for the sake of argument, that scientific communities have methods that generate true beliefs in some specialist domain. (It is not un-problematic as the history of scientific revolutions and belief change suggests.) So, Yetter Chappell rejects (i) the post-Quine-ian (naturalist) tendency to assume that philosophy and science are continuous, and (ii) the popular move that we can use Kuhnian ideas about mature science as the exemplary ideal in our (arm-chair sociology of philosophy and) meta-philosophy. (So, if Kuhn is relevant at all, it's his views on immature, non-paradigmatic science.)

Before one objects that he does not mention Kuhn at all, it is worth noting that Yetter Chappell conceives philosophy as being involved in the generation of "coherent worldviews." (And the idea of a worldview is very Kuhnian.) That philosophers aim at the generation of coherent worldviews is not silly--it is a ruling ideal in the early modern period and in post-Kantian philosophy in the nineteenth century. This way of understanding philosophy finds its most beautiful (soft-Hegelian) expression in Alexandre Koyré's From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. But while Koyré undoubtedly influenced Kuhn his impact on analytic philosophy is negligible.

For, analytic philosophy is (with a few notable exceptions) fundamentally anti-systematic. (To be sure: by this I do not mean it embraces incoherence!) Rather it embraces an ideal of philosophy (depending on one's sensibility) that is focused on arguments, solving (carefully circumscribed) puzzles, or dissolves apparent paradoxes. This is no surprise: since Russell embraced decomposition or analysis this is part of the disciplinary ethos. (Even philosophers who wish to avoid conceptual confusion tend to do so by way of conceptual distinctions and decomposition.) Of course, there are more ambitious projects (such as L.A. Paul's conception of philosophy as modeling), but few embrace what we may call a kind of synthetic ideal.** There is a lot to be said for the virtues that are consequent of the analytic self-conception and practice. [Even if in another context (recall my series of posts on Nagel's Mind & Cosmos) I have tried to exhibit the costs of such lack of practice in systematicity.]

As an aside, I hinted there are exceptions to the rule. For example, it's true that David Lewis does have a systematic philosophy; but his is unusually modular. (Another exception is Jody Azzouni, who also is systematic, but his approach has little uptake so far and routinely receives hostile reviews.) In his cost-benefit analysis, Lewis does explicitly suggest, in fact, that "making a theory more systematic" is on the benefit side. But if it is not ignored altogether, in metaphysical practice among Lewisians, this condition/virtue/benefit is reduced to considerations of scope.

Okay, let me return to the main argument. It's clear that even Yetter Chappell is not really describing systematicity. This is clear from his diagnosis that philosophical expertise "will only help you to reach the truth if you start off in roughly the right place." That's obviously true if it's okay if one's axioms or foundational concepts are treated as primitive (the favored move these past few decades) or spotted for the sake of argument. But otherwise that's really not true.

What makes systematic philosophy more than mere coherent-ism is that a systematic philosophy has the further burden of having to anchor or ground (etc.) those starting points in bits of reality. This is also why for systematic philosophies more systematicity is (defeasible) evidence that they are getting closer to the truth.

That is to say, I agree with Yetter Chappell that philosophical intransigence is often justified; but I do so in virtue of the fact that so much contemporary philosophy relies either on unquestioned primitives (and/or shared background commitments) or abduction/inference to the best explanation. For in the popular philosophical methodologies today the starting points and conclusions are not themselves really being stress tested (even if one allows that the method of counterexamples does some of that).+

Now one may object that I have said nothing about explaining what the concept of 'conceptual stress testing' means here. Due to constraints on time and space in this post, I will acknowledge that that it is a fair objection and that I have left it very vague. But note that there are bits of science where it is the norm to only accept, say, 'five-sigma results;' this corresponds to a probability of 1 in 3.5 million that it is the result of chance. If one were permitted to transfer this kind of talk to philosophy, one can say that no philosophical abduction has this kind of probability; no argument with (by philosophical standards) modestly contestable premises can aspire to it.

 

*He ignores non-scientific expert communities (legal scholars; priests; rabbis, art-lovers etc.) It is worth  asking to what degree reflection on such communities would change  our self-understanding.

**In recent years, I have come to see that there is a form of synthetic philosophy in, say, the ways that Dan Dennett or Peter Godfrey Smith bring together philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, and evolutionary theory (recall).

+So, I agree that the problem is, in part, one of method.

Comments

[Justin Vlasits]

Thanks for the post! I think you are here pointing to a real weakness in contemporary philosophical methodology. If one takes an even cursory glance through the methodology in Plato/Aristotle/Galen/Avicenna/Zabarella/lots of early modern folks, I think it is pretty clear that *precisely* what they are concerned with is "anchoring those starting points in bits of reality".

My question is: why is contemporary philosophical methodology like this? You suggest Russell, which seems plausible, since other early 20th century philosophical methodologies did seem to be more systematically oriented (neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, maybe even logical empiricism). But what was the reason that this view of Russell's got so much uptake?

[David Duffy]

"five-sigma results": This is difficult for me to think about, in that this is a correction for multiplicity of hypotheses eg in genomic statistical tests, one performs the equivalent of ~10^7 independent t-tests, so the strict threshold gives one a manageable experiment-wise type-1 error rate (speaking in frequentist terms; in a Bayesian framework, one usually ends with quite similar corrections). The point is that these are financial or resource constraints - one just accumulates more data until everyone agrees. In the philosophical settings...

[Eric Schliesser]

yep, there are lot of differences between the resources and practices of science and philosophy. It would be good if folk did not forget that so often.:)

[Eric Schliesser]

Justin, I can warmly recommend Michael Della Rocca's methodological work: "The taming of philosophy." in Philosophy and Its History (2013): 178-208. It says quite a bit about the origins and pervasive commitment to methods that will not be really anchored in reality. (That's compatible with disagreeing with Michael's own proposals.)