Friday, May 9, 2014

Corrupting the youth

[There's more on ethics and corrupt thinking here, if you're interested.]

Over at Orienteringsforsøk, vh has a nice post on the value of studying philosophy. It's refreshing to see someone question the value often attributed to it by philosophers. As he says:
reading philosophy and acquiring the analytic and argumentative tools on offer is, as demonstrated by Erasmus Montanus, not the same as becoming a clearheaded thinker. Mastering a philosophical style, may even -- if it is true that certain philosophies offer nothing but fashionable nonsense -- have quite pernicious effects on one's judgement. Not even (mainstream) analytical philosophy is what Hacker has in mind when he hails philosophy as "a unique technique for tackling conceptual questions". Judging by his many heated debates with colleagues, mainly from the anglo-american tradition, it is reasonable to interpret the quote with which I began as deliberately echoing a sigh by his friend, Bede Rundle: "Whatever their limitations, earlier analytical philosophers had at least a nose for nonsense. Sadly, so many philosophers today have only a taste for it."
While Anscombe may be right that Oxford moral philosophy does not corrupt the youth because they already think as badly as Oxford moral philosophers, I do think that studying philosophy can have pernicious effects. This applies not only to the studying of fashionable nonsense and the worst kinds of mainstream analytic philosophy but to studying Hacker's work too. I say this as a former closed-minded Hackerite (without meaning that it's Hacker's fault that anyone ends up like that).

In a word the problem is dogmatism. If you teach your students that utilitarianism is true then you are really not teaching them moral philosophy, even though you might make them better people and give them a useful tool that helps them think better about some issues. (Think of what a course or two by Peter Singer might do in a best case scenario.) The same goes for any other theory or position in philosophy. Including Wittgensteinian ones, of course. And you can teach dogmatism without doing so explicitly or consciously. In fact it's probably almost impossible to teach philosophy without encouraging some kind of dogmatism about something. The best you can do might be to minimize this kind of harm while, of course, maximizing the beneficial encouragement of careful thinking. It's a difficult act to pull off. And it is an act, a kind of behavior or activity, as many people (not just Wittgensteinians) like to point out. So there aren't philosophical findings that we teach our students. Just, or at least primarily, certain habits of mind that we try to develop and maintain in ourselves and others.

In this essay Hacker refers to philosophy as a technique. That doesn't seem right. He also says that philosophy gives us techniques, which is closer to the truth. But this still makes it sound more mechanical than it really is. You don't sniff out nonsense by applying a technique. The practice of philosophy seems to me to be more like the application of ordinary critical intelligence, asking questions like "What do you mean?" and "What are the grounds for that claim?" But it's the application of ordinary intelligence informed by familiarity with certain patterns of thought (both particularly good examples and particularly difficult examples of bad thinking) and lots and lots of practice. In short, philosophers don't really do anything that non-philosophers can't do, and they don't necessarily do it better, but they ought at least to do it better than they themselves did it before they started studying and practicing philosophy, and they ought to do it without some other mission. Every good teacher teaches critical thinking, but non-philosophers usually have some facts, theories, techniques, or dogma that they aim to teach as well. Philosophers do usually want their students to know who Plato was or how to define anti-realism, say, but this kind of thing is, I think, less central to philosophy than it is to any other subject. Philosophy is (even) more about questions than any other subject is.

(Am I falling into fantasy or thoughtless repetition of stale ideas here? I don't think so.)

Which brings me to the question of non-philosophers teaching philosophy. There is no reason why a non-philosopher could not teach philosophy well. Statistically it seems more likely that a philosopher, i.e. someone who has had years of philosophical education and practice, would do a better job, but there are no guarantees either that a philosopher defined this way will be good at philosophy or that a non-philosopher will be bad at it. History professor Robert Zaretsky does little to allay the fears philosophers might have about his teaching a philosophy course, though, when he writes that: Neither the reading list, bursting with texts from Bacon and Locke to Montesquieu and Diderot, nor the publication of my own book on Hume and Rousseau undid the suspicion that a professional historian simply didn’t have the requisite philosophical chops to teach such a course.

A philosophical reading list does not a philosophy course make. And the intelligence it takes to publish a book need not be the kind primarily associated with philosophy. Indeed, a quick look at amazon's page for Zaretsky's book suggests it is more a history book than a work of philosophy. Which is not to say that philosophy is better than history. It's just not the same thing. And recognizing this fact is not the same thing as political protectionism, as Zaretsky implies.

(There's a danger that this could be read as a failed attempt at subtly criticizing some of my colleagues. That's not what I mean. I do reject, though, the idea that the humanities are all more or less the same thing focusing arbitrarily on different texts. That's one thing that I think I disagree with Rorty about.)

13 comments:

  1. "the humanities are all more or less the same thing focusing arbitrarily on different texts" where do you find that in Rorty?
    -dmf

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    1. I'm relying on my memory, which is probably a bad idea. I'll see if I can find a reference, if only to correct my memory.

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    2. Looking at "Texts and Lumps" I find Rorty saying lots of things I like, but also this: "we should not try very hard to separate philosophy from literary criticism, nor the figure of the philosopher from that of the critic. The way in which Derrida, Hartman, Bloom, and de Man weave together "literary" and "philosophical" texts and considerations, disregarding the frontiers between the traditional genres, seems to me just the right way to proceed." (p. 90 of Philosophical Papers Volume 1). I think I might agree with what Rorty is saying here (whether this is a good way to proceed depends a lot on what one is trying to do), but less sophisticated minds than his take this kind of thought to mean that we can and ought to do away with traditional disciplinary distinctions in the liberal arts, as if philosophy and literary criticism just are the same thing. And clearly they are not. Most philosophers would make awful literary critics.

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    3. In other words, Rorty is not necessarily guilty, but he had a bit of a tendency to be less careful when speaking than he was in his written work, and I remember (perhaps wrongly) him saying the kind of thing I accused him of. No doubt everyone has the same tendency, but he had a particular reputation for it which might not have been wholly undeserved.

      Anyway, I am happy to withdraw my complaint about Rorty and make it about generalized anonymous others instead, if I can get away with that. I'm also happy to recommend "Texts and Lumps," which is nice on the non-scientific nature of philosophy.

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    4. no worries, I just think that he is (at his best) calling for a kind of 1,000 flowers bloom approach and not a new meta-whatever mode.
      He certainly oversold the powers of literature to effect ethical changes and wasn't really open to my suggestions that the skills related to reading fiction weren't the same skills needed in flesh and blood interactions, something like that could be said for all bookish learning.
      -dmf

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    5. I just think that he is (at his best) calling for a kind of 1,000 flowers bloom approach and not a new meta-whatever mode.

      Yes, I think that's right.

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  2. Hi Duncan.

    Richard Taylor has written:

    Students of philosophy learn very early -- usually first day of their course -- that philosophy is the love of wisdom. This is often soon forgotten, however, and there are even some men who earn their livelihood at philosophy who have not simply forgotten it, but who seem positively to scorn the idea.

    I was, when writing my post, hoping to make use of this quote but in the end deiced to drop it because I didn’t know what to do with it. I have myself never heard anyone profess such disdain, but have attended lectures where this wouldn’t have surprised me much. This now seems to me connected with the issue of dogmatism. One form of dogmatism which concerns Taylor is the idea that philosophy really is (or should become) like the sciences. When Peter Hacker presents philosophy as a set of techniques, this sounds too mechanical, as you write, but doesn’t it also, and not incidentally, suggest a model of philosophy rather close to that of the sciences? (This is surprising because Hacker too, both previously and again in this essay, has been fighting this very model.)

    If academic philosophers feel a need to defend their subject, this is easily understood given the worldwide trend of cut-backs in the ”unprofitable” humanities departments; but inflated rhetoric is hardly the best way to make people see things your way. As Miranda Fricker once remarked: "I think it is a bit ludicrous when people defend philosophy on the grounds that it teaches you how to think. That is extraordinarily insulting to other subjects!" (True. But suggesting that people must take some university subject to learn how to think is scarcely less insulting.) I also think this misrepresents of what kind of thinking philosophy is.

    To be continued...

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  3. Continuing...

    The practice of philosophy seems to me to be more like the application of ordinary critical intelligence, asking questions like "What do you mean?" and "What are the grounds for that claim?" But it's the application of ordinary intelligence informed by familiarity with certain patterns of thought (both particularly good examples and particularly difficult examples of bad thinking) and lots and lots of practice.

    I agree with all of this. (This touches on issues I was saving for a follow-up over at my blog.) Historians of philosophy often say the subject was invented by the ancient Greeks. When tracing the roots of philosophy understood as a more or less academic discipline, with explanatory ambitions and methodical investigations, this seems about right. But there are other (and deeper) roots too. I am inclined to see philosophizing as a natural feature of human language use. When talking, we must always be prepared to answer probing questions as those you mention. The most casual dinner table conversation can suddenly turn into a discussion. This feature of philosophy would be as ancient and as evenly distributed as talking itself.

    In short, philosophers don't really do anything that non-philosophers can't do, and they don't necessarily do it better, but they ought at least to do it better than they themselves did it before they started studying and practicing philosophy, and they ought to do it without some other mission.

    Agreed. Still, philosophers are often asked to sit on expert committees. In Norway, Knut Erik Tranøy headed several committees on medical questions; Mary Warnock has done the same in England. As far as I am able to judge, both have done great jobs; but, frankly, I believe this is more thanks to who they were and their personal characters than their educational background. This issue has been at the front of my mind lately because I currently am in the middle of the process of applying for a position as a researcher in bioethics at my old university. If I am qualified for this job, which I think I am (at least not unqualified), this is not because I possess any philosophical (or ethical) expertise (whatever, if anything, that is); but rather because I have an interest in that field, have read a fair amount of the literature, both good and bad, and because I care about finding out which is which.

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    1. Thanks, vh. I think we agree pretty much entirely, so I won't say much in response. Just three things:

      1. once subjects like philosophy start defending themselves they can really only talk pointlessly about their own alleged intrinsic value (which critics clearly do not see) or else sell themselves as a kind of tool, which means misrepresenting themselves to at least some degree. Studying philosophy might be useful for non-philosophical purposes but these purposes don't define philosophy.

      2. Miranda Fricker is right, but your quoting her brings out the fact that I didn't say anything about the peculiar nature of philosophical problems. Studying economics might help you think about economic problems, but philosophy has a wider (though still peculiar) kind of application. That is, I don't think economic (or whatever) problems come up in philosophy, but philosophical problems do come up (or are problems but fail to be recognized) in economics (and other disciplines). Philosophy won't help you solve every problem (empirical questions, for instance), but it can be helpful (and harmful if done badly) in the study of just about every other subject.

      3. What do philosophers know about ethics? Again I agree with you on this, but one good thing about philosophers is that there are certain mistakes they are unlikely to make. For instance, the crudest forms of relativism, and being utilitarian without realizing that this is a theory that is open to question rather than simply the obvious (or scientifically established) truth.

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    2. Good luck with your application to the research position, by the way!

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  4. Some thoughts. It is axiomatic that we should avoid dogma in philosophy, insofar as "dogma" is a pejorative term. But it concerns me slightly that this ends up with the refusal to take any substantive position regarding the subject and its various theories. This, it seems to me, implies a certain lack of importance. Who cares what position you adopt? - Or, rather, don't adopt one at all, for that would be falling into dogmatism. But surely, sooner or later, you have to nail your colours to the mast, don't you? (But that, of course, shouldn't involve papering over the cracks in your position.) I think philosophy is important - and largely for negative reasons, I'm afraid. I am strongly drawn to Wittgenstein's work because it's the best approach I know of for exposing the emptiness of mainstream philosophy's claim to be stating (or trying to state) eternal, neutral truths. In other words, I regard it as a form of ideology.

    This brings us to the link between history and philosophy. You've right that they're not the same thing, but the more I consider it the more I think it distorts philosophical ideas to suppose they can be studied as a single discussion taking place in a kind of timeless present. That notion (for me) is itself one of the ideologically-loaded assumptions of philosophy.

    This has come out much more ranty than intended, largely because I'm pushed for time. Anyway, keep up the good work, Comrade!

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    1. It is axiomatic that we should avoid dogma in philosophy, insofar as "dogma" is a pejorative term.

      Touché. What I meant was that in teaching philosophy the goal should not be to get the students to agree with your position or positions. It should be to help them see various positions (including the position that the entire debate in question is a mass of confusion) and reasons for and against adopting them, and to help them make up their own minds rationally. You might hope that they come out Marxists or Catholics or whatever, but if your goal is to make them take a certain position then you are not really teaching philosophy. Or so it seems to me. Now, what if your goal is to get them to see that the whole debate is misconceived? That seems OK (as long as the debate in question really is misconceived), but even then I think you should be open to the possibility that you are wrong, that the debate is not misconceived, or not all misconceived, or not misconceived in the way you take it to be. And your main goal should not be to get students to reject the debate but to help them in some way, by helping them see how intelligent people could get themselves into such a mess, etc.

      But surely, sooner or later, you have to nail your colours to the mast, don't you?

      I don't know. In teaching ethics, for instance, you don't have to pick any of the theories you might teach. You might reject them all. In that case perhaps you might teach anti-theory as well, including arguments for and against it, but you don't have to. One of the best philosophy teachers I ever had could not make up his made where he stood on certain issues. I think this helped make him a better teacher, because he really felt the strengths of competing positions. And what if he had made up his mind and decided that the truth was some incredibly sophisticated position, one that his students were not ready to understand? In that case would he have to try to explain it to them? Or would it be enough to tell them what he thought the truth was, even though he knew they wouldn't understand? Or would that be pointless? I'm not sure whether by "nailing your colours to the mast" you mean deciding on a position or publicizing this position, but either way I can think of reasons why not doing so might be OK. Not caring what the right position or answer is is another matter. But even that might not be so bad. I might be able to help a student understand philosophical issues that arise within a certain religious tradition, say, without belonging to that tradition. Wouldn't that still be a way of teaching philosophy, an acceptable way at that?

      I think it distorts philosophical ideas to suppose they can be studied as a single discussion taking place in a kind of timeless present.

      I think I agree.

      keep up the good work, Comrade!

      Thanks. You too!

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