Negative Public Perceptions of Philosophical Research

Philosophy is not always perceived as well as philosophers would like. There are public discussions of whether philosophy has any value at all (The New York Times or The Chronicle of Higher Education). Members of our own draft manifestos criticizing philosophy's contributions to the academy (see Glymour’s “Manifesto” or Thagard’s “Eleven Dogmas of Analytic Philosophy”). Presidential candidates quip we need less philosophers.

In the latest incident, my personal childhood hero, Bill Nye got skeptical with BigThink about how far philosophical methods can take you in life, compared to say, scientific ones:

  

What contributes to negative opinions about philosophical research?

There are certainly a number of contributing factors. In a recent paper, John Turri and I ran some studies to investigate one potential factor. What we wanted to know was whether negative opinions are partly due to suspicion about the way philosophers conduct their research. To investigate this question, we examined how people evaluate paradigmatic features of philosophical research and compared this to how they evaluate research in the neighboring field of psychology when investigating very similar sorts of questions.

Participants in one large study (N = 1675)  were asked to evaluate different vignettes in which research was being conducted in philosophy and psychology.

Some vignettes described a setup pretty likely to happen in philosophy, involving a solitary male researcher using thought experiments and intuition (Rodin comes to mind)

Other vignettes featured approaches much more likely to get used in experimental psychology, such as teams of researchers using observation and controlled experiments (here's us, go UW!)

We found that people rated research featuring all the prototypical methods of philosophy lower than those in psychology. Specifically, they preferred observation to intuition, team based-inquiry to solitary-inquiry, and gender diversity among research teams. We even found evidence that greater prior exposure to philosophy might lower one’s opinion of inquiry driven by intuitions and thought experiments.

There were also some individual differences in people’s research preferences. We found a small gender effect whereby women favored observation over intuition more than men did, and tended to view a question pursued by a research team as more important than men viewed it. (Findings have since been replicated and extended by another researcher team demonstrating “Students who disliked the method of thought experiments were less likely to report wanting to continue taking philosophy classes,” Thompson, Adleberg, Sims, & Nahmias.)

We conclude from all this that the preference for observation and controlled experimentation over intuition and thought experiments may contribute to negative perceptions of philosophy in our culture and in academics.

This information also might be useful in the classroom and for thinking about training and mentorship in philosophy. For instance, fostering a research environment that allows for team inquiry, or emphasizing the many ways philosophy and evidence from experimental science are continuous or complementary might be a good strategy for attracting new students to philosophy.

Comments

[Josh May]

These are some really interesting and useful results! Thanks for sharing and connecting them to the recent Nye fiasco. I'm glad to see that x-phi may be aiding in making the discipline more inclusive AND better received among outsiders!

[Frank Stone]

Like religion, philosophy's careful avoidance of lingering deeper questions decade after decade is going to get all philosophy departments shut down. Find a single book, article, or dissertation in the entire history of philosophy that covers theories of truth that even mentions the implicit theory of truth that is assumed in order to carry out that evaluation. Feverishly avoiding self-reference issues is the main focus of contemporary philosophy. Let the math departments teach logic and have sociology teach intro, religion, and ethics. Philosophers can't justify themselves these days anyway, nor do they want to. So just close them down---without the need for any Little-Bo-Peep justification.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Wesley, Thanks for sharing this very cool work with the community. It would be interesting to see whether students (and scientists) would be more excited about philosophy if presentations of the history of philosophy highlighted that most philosophers were neither shut off from collaborators or from empirical observation or, in many cases, experimental work. I'd also be curious to see if the gender differences we found in our work in response to Intro course would lessen if an Intro course highlighted these features and/or presented more empirically-informed philosophy or x-phi. (Thanks for the shout out on our paper, which will come out in Phil Imprint soon.)

Frank, huh??