Philosophy of Mind is Very Different Now (guest post)
A field of study may change over time, but since, whatever a field of study is, it’s made up of various kinds of things—researchers, norms, institutions, publications, questions, assumptions—its components may not change at the same rate, or in the same ways.
In the following guest post, Joshua Knobe (Yale) draws our attention to this dynamic in philosophy of mind. But there are parallels in other subfields of philosophy, and I encourage discussion from readers outside of philosophy of mind to reflect on whether and how this plays out in their areas of research.
(A version of this post first appeared at The Experimental Philosophy Blog.)
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Philosophy of Mind is Very Different Now
by Joshua Knobe
A few decades ago, it felt like almost the entire field of philosophy of mind was focused on a pretty narrow range of questions (the mind-body problem, consciousness, the nature of intentionality, etc.). Insofar as anyone wanted to work on anything else, they often justified those interests by trying to explain how what they are doing could be connected back to this “core” of the field.
Clearly, things have changed a lot. These days, people are working on all sorts of different things that don’t connect back in any obvious way to the short list of topics that so dominated the field a few decades ago.
But if you look at various institutions that govern the field, it seems that there is a lag. Many of the norms and institutions we have in place don’t really make sense given the way the field is right now. They are just holdovers from the way the field used to be.
I bet that many readers will agree with the very general point I’ve been making thus far, but there’s room for lots of reasonable disagreement about exactly where our norms are showing a lag and where things need changing. I thought it might be helpful to write this post just to start that conversation. I’m going to suggest a few specific things, but I’d be very open to alternative views.
1. These days, many people in philosophy of mind are engaged in a broadly empirical inquiry into questions about how some specific aspect of the mind actually works: how visual perception works, how racism works, how memory works, how emotions work, and so forth.
When these people apply for jobs in philosophy of mind, it feels like there’s often a vague feeling that what they are doing is somehow “marginal” or “peripheral,” that it doesn’t really fall in the core of the field. But this no longer makes any sense! Contrast a person who is an expert on all the latest experimental studies about implicit bias with a person who is doing purely a priori work in the metaphysics of mind. Given the way the field works right now, there is no sense in which the former is less at the core of things than the latter. To the extent that the latter is seen as having a special status, this is just a residue from the way things were decades ago.
2. People working in philosophy of mind often want to learn about the history of the philosophy of mind. But what exactly is this history? For example, of all the things that Spinoza wrote, what should we call “Spinoza’s philosophy of mind”?
The traditional answer was basically: Of all the things that people in the history of philosophy wrote about the mind, the only ones that count as “history of philosophy of mind” are the ones that relate to the narrow list of questions discussed in late 20th century analytic philosophy. This involved excluding almost everything that figures in the history of philosophy said about the mind.
But again, this doesn’t make sense anymore. If people want to look at Spinoza’s philosophy of mind, I fear they would tend to look only at the discussion of the mind-body problem in Ethics, Book 2, i.e., the part that connects to this stuff discussed in 20th century philosophy of mind. But this is such a narrow way of thinking about discussions of the mind in the history of philosophy. Surely, Spinoza’s contributions to philosophy of mind go way beyond that; it’s just that most of his contributions are about how various specific things in the mind work. So these contributions might not be very closely related to things that philosophers of mind were working on in 1994, but they are extremely closely related to various things that philosophers of mind are working on in 2024.
3. Knowledge of mathematical or formal work is often helpful in philosophy, but we recognize that philosophers cannot possibly master all of the different formal methods that might be relevant to them in their work. So we always face questions of the form: Given that philosophers can’t know everything that would possibly be relevant, which methods do they absolutely need to know?
Now consider a graduate student working in philosophy of mind, and suppose that this student could either (a) take a course in logic but never take any courses in statistics or (b) take a course in statistics but never take any courses in logic.
It feels like there’s a norm in the field that (a) is more acceptable than (b). But does that really make sense anymore? I certainly agree that this is the background that would have been more essential a few decades ago, but if you look at what philosophers of mind are doing right now, it seems that statistics is used much more often than logic.
4. We have certain norms about which things philosophers are allowed to remain ignorant about and which they absolutely have to know. For example, a moral philosopher might say: “I am a consequentialist, and I think that non-consequentialist theories are mistaken.” But we would find it completely unacceptable for a moral philosopher to say: “I am a consequentialist, so I don’t know anything about recent work in non-consequentialist theories. I couldn’t even teach those theories at an undergraduate level.”
A question now arises about which norms would make sense in contemporary philosophy of mind. In many parts of philosophy of mind, the majority of people are using some kind of empirical approach, while a minority are using purely a priori approaches. We can imagine a person saying: “I am pursuing these questions using purely a priori methods, and I think it is a mistake to use empirical methods to address them.” But suppose someone said: “I don’t know anything about recent empirical studies on these questions. In fact, I couldn’t even teach a class about these studies at the undergraduate level.” Should we regard this sort of ignorance as acceptable? And if we do regard it as acceptable right now, might that just be a holdover from norms that really did make sense thirty years ago?
Again, I certainly don’t mean to be dogmatic about any of these four points, and I also don’t mean to suggest that these are the four most important areas in which we are facing a lag. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree about these for specific things, it does seem that the field has changed considerably, and I would love to hear your thoughts about how our norms should be evolving in light of that.
At what point (if any) do you think empirical work stops being philosophy and becomes science? Given that there are many institutional spaces for scientists and far fewer for philosophers, it makes sense that philosophers often resist science’s increasing encroachment on philosophy.
Yes! Disciplinary boundary policing makes sense in some circumstances.
Agreed. I think we ought to be wary of excessive physics-envy in philosophy.
I also agree with this. And even about some methodological tools. I mean, for example, logic–at least parts of logic–are very clearly part of philosophy; while of course formal logics are used for all sorts of things, philosophical logic seems… squarely part of philosophy. I don’t necessarily think every student should have to take logic, but the “why not statistics instead of logic” misses out on the fact that statistics is, at least historically, not a part of philosophy, and might be part of the science-encroachment if it is treated as anything other than “something it is helpful for all intellectuals to know about” (which I think it is!) and more like a tool of the methodology of philosophy…
I think discipline boundary policing DOES make sense here, and that it is always worth asking: what is philosophical about this? Of course lots of philosophy of science is deeply philosophical. But some of the new philosophy of science (including mind-y philosophy of science) reads like basic science reporting with almost no added or no content (sometimes literally none at all!), or some tiny pointing out of some methodological point that is transparently obvious from just looking at the science itself. It’s not just that science isn’t necessarily philosophy; it’s that some of the worst work in philosophy of science seems like neither right now, since no new science is being done either.
Is there an account of the relevant disciplinary boundaries — other than one referencing highly contingent institutional and economic circumstances — sufficient to inform the envisaged boundary policing?
I doubt there’s an uncontentious account of “what philosophy is” more informative than “the sort of thing done in philosophy departments,” or “the sort of thing published in these journals” etc., and I doubt substantive methodological or theoretical questions ought be decided on such grounds.
precisely for this reason it seems to me that the best strategy for those of us (I know not you!) who aren’t into the new work is to argue that it is bad rather than that it is not philosophy. Still, I think it is worth having a discussion about when boundary policing might be reasonable even without a demarcation of philosophy (after all, we boundary police science constantly–and rightly so–despite the demarcation problem being unsolvable!).
I keep trying to post a link to this paper and my comment keeps not getting posted, so I’ll just say (and Justin can attest that I am not the author of this paper) that papers like Peter Epstein’s “In Defense of the Armchair: Against Empirical Arguments in the Philosophy of Perception” are models of the way those of us who don’t love new empirical work should argue (at least, internally to the field). Even though I agree with the above commentators, I still think that philosophers who don’t like some methodological shift in a giant subfield should deal with that by, well, philosophically arguing against it, not just moaning on blog posts (though obviously I am willing to do that too!).
I’m not super familiar with the Philosophy of Perception myself, but as someone who works in the Philosophy of Animal Minds, I find the idea that you can just ignore empirical work very puzzling. I mean philosophers certainly have, and much of my own work has been trying to demonstrate the folly of a priori approaches. For example, from the armchair, philosophers have been making pronouncements about what animals can or, more likely, can’t do since for about as long as philosophy has been around. Lots of these claims look, at least on the surface, like empirically evaluable claims. Now, I don’t think it is enough to just point to empirical work, there is a lot of philosophical work to be done in justifying why that empirical work is relevant and how it is relevant to the issue at hand, but in doing that, such work looks a lot more philosophically grounded than just pulling pronouncements from the sky about what animals can’t do. While that might sound like a caricature, the main thing I think that empirical results often expose is where there is a lack of argumentation, demonstrating that shared assumptions (about, say, the nature of language or human cognition) have been allowed to function as if they are arguments.
Now maybe one could argue that my work isn’t philosophical because it draws on science, but this is a deeply odd claim given that philosophers have been drawing on science for about as long as science has been around. Maybe one doesn’t want to police disciplinary boundaries, so instead of saying that it isn’t philosophy, they say that it is bad philosophy because it draws on science. Are they also willing to say that Kant, Sellars, Putnam, etc. are bad philosophy? Or for that matter, a lot of the really exciting work being done in Philosophy of Science just counts as bad philosophy because it is dependent upon science? If one just wants to say that empirically minded work is being poorly done because some philosophers are just reporting empirical results instead of doing something philosophical with them. Well, I actually don’t disagree there, but notice that isn’t a knock against empirically minded philosophy, it is a knock against how some philosophers are doing it.
Finally, if the armchair crowd wants to say that empirical results are irrelevant to the claims they are making, then they need to do some philosophical work demonstrating why that is the case, especially since many of their claims look, on the face of it, empirical. In my experience, a lot of the empirically minded philosophy spends a lot of time demonstrating why certain matters are empirical and why I particular scientific result weighs on a particular matter, but it is rare that I see careful argumentation in the other direction (anecdotal, but a former supervisor of mine would just constantly point to section in McDowell’s Mind and World on animals as if that automatically showed that animals couldn’t have inner or outer experience no matter what the empirical results said).
I agree that a fully general account might be difficult to produce. However (to echo the comment below), we don’t always need a clear criterion to draw justified distinctions.
Surely a person working primarily on deontological ethics shouldn’t be hired in a physics department and isn’t doing physics.
Just as the existence of contested cases shouldn’t induce us to deny the existence of clear cases, the existence of clear cases should not induce us to deny the existence of contested cases: the “is it philosophy?” questions backgrounding the OP, such as those having to do with the appropriateness of empirical methodologies in the philosophy of mind, are contested cases that are unlikely to be resolved by noting the existence of clear cases such as the one you mention.
I am puzzled by this bit:
We can imagine a person saying: “I am pursuing these questions using purely a priori methods, and I think it is a mistake to use empirical methods to address them.” But suppose someone said: “I don’t know anything about recent empirical studies on these questions. In fact, I couldn’t even teach a class about these studies at the undergraduate level.”
If the first statement is acceptable, why isn’t the second?
Interesting questions!
On #4, there’s an important disanalogy between the cases that may be worth flagging. Consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories offer rival answers to one and the same question. If you’re interested in a philosophical question, it would seem objectionably narrow-minded to remain clueless about the candidate answers offered by other colleagues in the discipline.
By contrast, I take it that empirical and aprioristic philosophers of mind are typically interested in very different questions. That doesn’t by itself settle whether they should know more about each other’s work, of course. But it at least suggests we shouldn’t be too quick to assume the answer must be the same as our answer to the ethical theory example.
(A closer analogy might be an ethical theorist saying they don’t know anything about bioethics. Which wouldn’t seem that surprising, perhaps?)
Hi Richard,
This is a nice objection to what I said in my original post. I’m very open to changing my mind about this, and I would love to continue the conversation.
My sense is that the norm right now is that philosophers are supposed to have a kind of general knowledge of work in their area of specialization. Suppose you are a philosopher of mind who is focused on cutting-edge empirical studies about implicit bias. The norm would be that you are still supposed to have some knowledge of, e.g., key ideas from traditional work in the metaphysics of mind. Perhaps it’s clear that you will never use any of these ideas within your own research, but still, it’s not acceptable for you to be completely ignorant of this stuff. For example, you should be able to teach about it at the undergraduate level.
Then the point I made in my original post was: Some subfields of philosophy of mind are now dominated by empirically-informed work. So if we apply this familiar norm, we get the conclusion that even the philosophers within those fields who are working on questions that are not susceptible to empirical inquiry should still have some basic knowledge of empirical work in those fields. For example, suppose you specialize in philosophy of perception and are working on purely a priori questions for which knowing about empirical work on perception could not be directly relevant. Given the way the field of philosophy of perception works right now, one might think that you still need to have some basic knowledge of empirical work. The reason is just: you should not be completely ignorant about the main things happening in your area of specialization. For example, even if you yourself reject the dominant approach to working in philosophy of perception, you should still be able to teach this approach at the undergraduate level.
But I would be open to the idea that this claim is mistaken. One might instead think that it is perfectly acceptable for someone doing a priori work in philosophy of perception not to know anything about empirical work on perception. However, if one does think that, then surely the conclusion should be applied symmetrically. That is, one should also think that people doing more empirically-informed work for which knowledge of a priori metaphysics is unlikely to be helpful should not be required to study the metaphysics of mind just on the ground that all philosophers are supposed to have general knowledge of work in their areas of specialization.
This last thought sounds reasonable – except of course, I don’t really know the scope of “ought”. Do you mean “ought” in order to teach a philosophy of perception or mind class? To get a job in philosophy of mind or perception? to talk to one’s colleagues in philosophy? to talk to one’s colleagues in psychology? to do research in philosophy of mind or perception?
Suppose they are separate enough research questions that the a priori philosopher can answer questions without knowing much about the empirical and vice versa. It might turn out, for example, that most philosophers (who don’t work in philosophy of perception) have more overlap with a philosopher of perception who works on more a priori claims and so be more likely to hire them (and vice versa for a psychology department…)
I find it very reassuring that this seems an indication that philosophy of mind (and other areas as well?) will finally be breaking out of 20th century analytic narrowness!
I think it’s fair to ask if studies about implicit bias, etc., are philosophy of mind, as opposed to say, something more in line with sociology or psychology. The moral aspect is philosophy, of course, but that’s not phil mind either.
I agree with Richard that it is important to consider that different philosophers (and philosophers of mind, in particular) are often interested in different questions, rather than different answers to the same questions. The post has a bit of the feel of “why aren’t more people aware that the empirical kind of questions that I’m interested in are the better ones”.
re: 1: I would be interested in empirical evidence that the diversity of areas contemporary philosophers of mind are interested in counts against them in “phil mind” jobs.
re: 3: would also be interested in whether most philosophers think knowledge of formal logic – eg., meta logic, computability etc. is more important for a philosopher of mind than knowledge of statistics (assuming one can’t have both).
My sense is that – for better and for worse – traditional “advanced logic” requirements have been replaced in many programs with something like the option of a “statistics” or “probability” course (at least they have at my program).
On the other hand, if the field is changing (and I agree there have been changes), then there will naturally be a “lag” in the norms, hiring, etc.. But some of the “lag” you describe might just be from people that are more interested in the “traditional phil mind topics” compared to the exciting new areas. A case has to be made to the outsiders as to why they should find the new topics of interest, of course. These things take time. And in some cases, it is good for the “traditionalists” to push back against whatever the sexy new trends are.
From my exposure, much of what flies under “philosophy of mind” is now just “philosophy of cognitive science”. Sometimes, the philosophy part is missing, other times the philosophy part means “as applied to a philosophical problem.” Too often it means philosophizing within and about some set of assumptions in cognitive science.
Is this still still continuous with much of 20th and early 21st century philosophy of mind? I don’t think so.
Huh. And here I was thinking that the whole stats / “Bayesian everything everywhere” thing was just a fad that is already on its way out and logic is back in. Mind isn’t my area, but ever since AIs turned from logic to stats to algebra, I’m seeing less and less of Bayesian epistemology or decision theory, and again more of logico-formal analyses (predominantly with a normative bent).
I’m not saying this to be snarky. Perhaps this shows that even our sub-areas have become so diversified that we cannot make out consistent norms anymore, but instead have norms stratified across sub-sub-areas.
If you apply for a “Mind” job at one place, they might not hire you if you do xphi because it is not “core”; and for a job with the same ad over at another place, they might only hire you if you do xphi because it is not “traditionalist”.
The same seems to be true for the rest of the “core” areas: is that Language job for someone working on Reference or political speech? Is what you are doing “not relevant” because it does not tackle the foundational questions about meaning etc, or is it “not relevant” because it has no friction with anything empirical?
Is that Epistemology job for defining knowledge or virtue epistemology? That Metaphysics job for what chairs are or social constructivism?
Who knows anymore.
Curiously (perhaps ironically?) lacking in empirical content. Where’s the data supporting the claim that “these days many people” are taking these approaches, or that this affects academic job prospects?
Lots of great points, but I especially loved the history one. I definitely see this for the topic of attention, which was discussed frequently prior to the 20th century, but then largely absent outside of phenomenology until the last 15 years or so, a strange discontinuity (https://philarchive.org/rec/JENTPL-2). A question: how much do you think these tensions have to do with history versus philosophy of mind’s odd positionality, with connections to topics in both philosophy of science and LEMM? (See page 9 of http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21226/1/Contreras%20Kallens-Networks%20in%20philosophy.pdf for an attempt to get at this empirically)
Hi Carolyn,
This is all super intriguing. I don’t know the answer to your question, but it looks like you have been doing some empirical research on social networks in philosophy that might be relevant here. Could you tell us a little bit about your findings?
When we used areas of specialization and key words reported by current students/past graduates to group departments (using a method common in genetic research), we found that programs focused on philosophy of science stood out as distinct from what one might think of as the analytic and continental split. But, also interesting, “continental” was really itself a bundle of things: historical programs that happen to have continental, applied programs that are pluralistic, etc. Relevant to this conversation is that programs focused on philosophy of mind and cognitive science seemed to be in a group of their own, separate from both analytic and philosophy of science. That could be due to the history you describe (they are moving from one to the other), but could also be due to a topical tension, in which case we might continue to have challenges with students needing to know both traditions.
This is fascinating! Elsewhere on this thread, people are using the phrases “old philosophy of mind” and “new philosophy of mind,” and maybe that distinction helps to make sense of your results. Old philosophy of mind was closely related to traditional epistemology and metaphysics, whereas new philosophy of mind is more distant from those traditional areas and might seem a little bit more like a separate thing. But perhaps the distance will change as our discipline continues to evolve. For example, recent work in formal epistemology seems much more closely related to work in cognitive science than it does too work in more traditional epistemology or metaphysics.
I can see this. But I can also imagine that studying the mind will always require analytic understanding (since the mind is partly governed by rationality/language) and empirical understanding (since the mind is partly governed by biology/chemistry). It will be interesting to see how it turns out!
I’ve noticed a generational difference in how philosophy of mind is taught to undergraduatess. Philosophers from older generations tend to focus solely on the traditional questions (the mind-body problem, consciousness, and intentionality), while philosophers of my generation (~30s) often don’t teach this stuff at all. Instead, they teach things like philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of perception/memory/attention/emotions, implicit bias, introductory AI & machine learning, and competing empirical approaches to mental operations/brain function (to the degree that a philosophy course allows). For what it’s worth, I think this is very positive development. It seems, on the whole, better for students to spend their time thinking about actual scientific developments with a degree of conceptual sophistication rather than speculating about Mary’s room, bats’ feelings, and Martians’ pains.
I thought the big change in the philosophy of mind was that panpsychism has become a respected option and even idealist views are sometimes allowed a hearing!
for a somewhat (very) contrasting view, I like this paper a lot: https://philpapers.org/rec/EPSIDO. Epstein argues that (though this is a kind of broader conclusion built out of other things also going on in the paper! “we should abandon the style of empirically-grounded argumentation that dominates
contemporary philosophy of mind”).
To those who understand what’s going on in phil mind:
Suppose X is some broadly mind-ish phenomenon.
Does asking how X works presuppose X is (or is part of) a mechanism?
If so, does presupposing X is (or is part of) a mechanism exclude certain conceptions of and investigations into X? Like, is any conception of a mechanism necessarily a conception of something knowable only empirically?
If so, is that exclusion “empirically based?” Like, are there empirical reasons to antecedently exclude conceptions of X that are not conceptions of a mechanism?
(I’m asking these questions because I don’t know what the phrases “how racism works,” “how implicit bias works,” and their kin are supposed to mean. So I know neither the sense in which nor the extent to which they’re supposed to be “empirical.” So I’m having a hard time assessing the main claims of the original post.)
Thanks in advance for any answers and explanations.
This may be because I’m too empirically minded – but I don’t know what it would mean for “how racism works” or “how implicit bias works” not to be empirical. (I assume folks who work on these are thinking of psychology, sociology, etc. as answering questions about “what causes racism to exist in the world” “what’s happening in people’s heads when they make apparently biased inferences? how often are they racist and how often do they make implicit biases, etc. etc.
No that helps!
But now I’m realizing that my question has become a question about the inclusion and exclusion of certain conception(s) of function, purpose, causation, and the like. And I’m just not up for that discussion!
Should we manufacture norms to match innovations in a field of study? Of course norms lag innovation. That’s a good thing. When norms are hard to change our fields are resistant to recency bias and faddish upheaval. When innovation is encouraged our fields are resistant to dogmatism and stasis. Either without the other seems a great hinderance to progress. Another way to put it: it is good both that innovation happens purposively and that norm-change does not.
Sincere question:
Why did mind folks interested primarily in empirical stuff and secondarily in theoretical stuff (or mind folks interested equally in both), decide to go into philosophy and urge philosophers to accommodate their empirical interests, rather than go into (e.g) psychology and urge psychologists to accommodate their secondary interest in theoretical stuff?
Because academic philosophy is much more (which is not to say very) accommodating of unorthodox work than academic psychology.
Because what we are doing is philosophy, not psychology. I guess I am fairly Rortian here, but I think that what makes something count as a particular discipline is determined by who you are in conversation with. If you look at empirically minded philosophy, while it draws on science, it is in conversation with other philosophers about philosophical questions. You may disagree that their methodology is relevant to the question at hand but that seems like a metaphilosophical debate worth having, not a reason to think that one type of inquiry doesn’t count as philosophy.
It might be in part that psychologists just weren’t interested in the kind of empirical questions that philosophers were (e.g., suppose a philosopher wanted to know about how the folk would respond to Gettier cases or skeptical scenarios, and so you wanted cross-cultural survey info about this.) Maybe no psychologists (or not enough) care about this. So the surveys/experiments won’t get done unless philosophers get involved (e.g, Stich etc.) If you also think – like Stich etc. presumably do, that these empirical results are relevant to traditional philosophy, then you have a reason why it might get pursued by philosophers or in a philosophy department.
There is a real place for theoretical analysis based in part on empirical findings! Most empirical philosophers of mind don’t do experiments – and all psychologists (practically) are experimentalists. Being empirically connected does not mean doing psychology.
As someone who does empirically informed philosophy of mind/language, I agree with the sentiment here (especially as against the “but is it *philosophy*?” comments in the above thread). And I think the shift in topics in philosophy of mind/psychology described sounds right.
But I think the norm can be justified, even given this shift. In supervising students, you are likely to end up evaluating work in areas you are not an expert in. So, one desideratum in hiring is finding someone who is not just an expert in one field, but whose expertise is most likely to generalize to nearby areas. It seems plausible to me that grounding in (at least some of) these traditional debates is more likely to fit this bill than someone who exclusively works on interpretation and methodology of some specific topic in the cognitive sciences. I’ve certainly found that my knowledge of (eg) Burge, Fodor, Millikan, Putnam, etc has been more relevant for my ability to supervise graduate students than my knowledge of contemporary linguistic theory.
Beyond pedagogy, I’d guess a similar point can be made about research. Much (not al!) of the best contemporary work in these areas involves applying detailed knowledge of empirical debates to some of these traditional questions.
One potential qualification here is that it probably varies from topic to topic how much the above applies. The classic debates which now mostly get called ‘philosophy of psychology’ (intentionality, psychological explanation, modularity, perception) seem more easily relevant than those that get called ‘philosophy of mind’ (mind-body problem, mental causation, etc.). Maybe the shift is that we now do philosophy of psychology more than philosophy of mind, and thus that the norm should be looking for people who know the history of this subdiscipline?
I’m a bit surprised at the amount of pushback to Knobe’s post here since I think I am broadly in agreement (though I have some questions about how exactly we are defining empirically informed philosophy). One of the reasons I thought the field had transitioned to a more empirically oriented approach is that the 20th Century a priori program seemed stuck and the empirically oriented approach seemed to be making progress. I’m certainly biased here since I didn’t become interested in Philosophy of Mind until I realized that I could avoid the increasingly convoluted thought experiments (slightly hyperbolic, but what if swampman was a philosophical zombie who was immediately transported to Twin Earth the second after he was formed) where I couldn’t even tell which way was up, never mind what my intuitions were. However, given the pushback here, I am curious if some of the defenders could point me in the direction of what they regard as recent advancements in the armchair wing of the field?
Very interesting, thank you for a great post! I’d love to see more posts like this for other areas of philosophy.
I’m curious about your point about formal methods in phil mind. I’m always on the alert for at least semi-formal papers in phil mind, and I’m not sure I’ve seen any common formal thread. (This is just my vague impression, I’m not making tallies.)
When I look at the more scientific literature, I find some common areas: statistics, some linear algebra, some probability theory, some information theory. It seems reasonable to train philosophers of mind in the basics of those topics.
But often the scientific literature uses stuff like partial differential equations. From a math point of view, that’s not super-advanced – you take a couple of calculus courses, then you take a course on differential equations. And you don’t have to go far into information theory before you’re needing some pretty solid skills in probability, linear algebra, and so on. You can get these skills as a math undergrad, or as a computer science undergraduate.
That’s how I got my math skills, as a computer science major who took lots of electives in mathematics. But that was like 27 credits of pure math. That might (or might not) be a lot of math for a philosophy undergrad.
I’m not sure what the best way forward is. Just how much math does a philosopher need to know for phil mind? And just how specialized (or broad) should it be?
Of course, I wrote More Precisely: The Math You Need to do Philosophy. But what would the TOC look like for More Mindfully: The Math You Need to do PHILOSOPHY OF MIND?
Hi Eric,
This is a great question! I would love to hear people’s thoughts about which sorts of formal methods one needs to master to do philosophy of mind these days. I’ll start by giving my own opinion, but I’d be very interested to hear what other people think.
In my view, it’s important to distinguish between:
(a) Cases where philosophers are themselves making formal contributions (e.g., proving theorems that are relevant to cognitive science)
(b) Cases where philosophers are not themselves doing formal work but just want to have a certain amount of formal background to understand what is going on in the field
In cases of the former type, there probably isn’t anything general to say about which formal methods are likely to prove most useful, but in cases of the latter type, I do think it is possible to provide an answer.
To follow along in contemporary philosophy of mind, one needs to have at least some rudimentary understanding of statistics. For example, one needs to have some understanding of what it means to say that two variables are correlated (e.g., what it means to say r=.27), what it means to say that a result is statistically significant (e.g., what it means to say p < .01), what an effect size is (e.g., Cohen’s d or eta-squared). I don’t mean to be taking any kind of extremist stance about how much one needs to know regarding these topics, but it does seem that in the field of philosophy of mind as it exists today, philosophers are pretty frequently engaging with papers that use of this sort of formal method.
I’ve been in cognitive psychology for years (PhD 1974, U. of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign) and engaged philosophy of mind extensively (e.g., reviews of books), and do history of psychology. The transformation of philosophy of mind you describe closely resembles the change from psychology as part of philosophy to an autonomous science in late 19th century Germany: Wilhelm Wundt and others took old philosophical issues (e.g., how many ideas can the mind hold?) and applied experimental methods to them. So, I ask a question in puzzlement: Why are not the new empirically oriented, stat-using philosophers cognitive psychologists? Why remain in philosophy, except for personal career inertia?
I’m very interested in the history here. Can you recommend some books/papers describing the emergence of psychology as an autonomous discipline?
Joshua, I can’t help but think that your allusion to implicit bias research cannot be accidental, given the skepticism you have previously expressed concerning (especially) the IAT. Of course, if one knew “the latest experimental studies about implicit bias” one would presumably not have the ill-informed view that many philosophers have formed of implicit bias. And so, I think this was a clever move: the only way to have something meaningful to say about how the mind works is to be up to date on the ways the mind actually works.
It would be a fatal mistake to replace logic with statistics. Given the amount of false information constructed with stats in the behavioral and social fields, there needs to be a firm counter weight that logic provides. Nip the ish in the bud.
Is this performative?
Great points from a noteworthy pioneer of “empirical philosophy of mind!”
A couple of thoughts.
It’s a pity that aprioristic methodology so interfered with fruitful philosophical investigations of the mind. Here’s hoping that our discipline has a more constructive 21st century.