A Plea for Synthetic Philosophy (guest post)

“There need not be strict disciplinary boundaries between philosophy and other disciplines.”

In the following post, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Professor of Philosophy at VU Amsterdam and Professorial Fellow at Arché at the University of St. Andrews explains and makes a case for synthetic philosophy.

This is the first in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.

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A Plea for Synthetic Philosophy 
by Catarina Dutilh Novaes

A few years ago, the philosopher (and prolific blogger) Eric Schliesser used the term ‘synthetic philosophy’ to describe the work of Daniel Dennett and Peter Godfrey-Smith. Schliesser presented synthetic philosophy as “a style of philosophy that brings together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both). Synthetic philosophy may, in turn, generate new research in the special sciences…” Schliesser did not coin the term itself: the once influential but by now largely forgotten polymath 19^th-century thinker Herbert Spencer (of ‘survival of the fittest’-fame) titled his mammoth 10-volume work covering biology, psychology, sociology and ethics System of Synthetic Philosophy.

But Schliesser can be credited for re-introducing the term to denote an approach in philosophy that has become more pervasive and widely accepted over the last two decades, namely one where philosophers engage extensively with work done in relevant (empirical) disciplines to inform their philosophical investigations and theories. Other recent examples of synthetic philosophers include Neil Levy (see his Bad Beliefs) and Kim Sterelny, who describes his book The Evolved Apprentice in the following terms: “The essay is an essay in philosophy in part because it depends primarily on the cognitive toolbox of philosophers: it is work of synthesis and argument, integrating ideas and suggestions from many different research traditions. No one science monopolizes this broad project though many contribute to it. So I exploit and depend on data, but do not provide new data” (Sterelny, 2012, p. xi). If this is a good description of synthetic philosophy, then it is fair to say that I have been (trying to be!) a synthetic philosopher for about 15 years now, so when Schliesser introduced the term, I adopted it wholeheartedly. (It is for sure much catchier than alternatives such as the cumbersome ‘empirically-informed philosophy’.)

The idea that there need not be strict disciplinary boundaries between philosophy and other disciplines enjoyed some popularity in the 20^th century, in particular in the tradition of ‘scientific philosophy’ initiated by Bertrand Russell and continued by the Vienna Circle and later with their ‘heirs’ in the United States such as W.V.O. Quine (who used the ambiguous term ‘naturalism’ to describe the idea of continuity between philosophy and other disciplines) and Hilary Putnam. (Much before that, over the centuries, there was for the most arguably no strict separation between philosophy and other disciplines either; Aristotle was first and foremost a biologist.) But there was also much resistance within analytic philosophy to the idea that philosophical inquiry should in any way be informed by scientific findings (see this piece that I co-wrote on the dissonant origins of analytic philosophy). This resistance is to be traced back to G.E. Moore, who insisted that moral philosophy and ethics in particular were strictly non-scientific, purely conceptual domains. It continued with the so-called ‘ordinary language philosophers’, as exemplified by the damning critique of Carnap’s notion of explication in Strawson’s piece for the Carnap Living Philosophers volume.

To motivate a strict separation between science and philosophy, a point sometimes made is that scientists are involved in the merely descriptive inquiry of telling us how things are, while philosophers are involved in conceptual and (or) normative inquiry as well, which includes looking at how things ought to be understood, and how they ought to be. If true, this point has important methodological implications, as different methods are used for different types of investigation. Methods to investigate how things are include data collection, experiments, field work, etc. Methods to investigate how things should be include conceptual analysis, ‘intuitions’, thought experiments, etc. Some decades ago, however, this presumed neat separation was challenged by the so-called experimental philosophy approach, which prompted what might described as a small methodological crisis in analytic philosophy. Could philosophy be empirical/experimental after all? The X-Phi challenge made it clear that more sustained methodological reflection was needed, and philosophers spent much of the first two decades of the 21^st century discussing the ins and outs of different methods for philosophical inquiry (see Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy and the Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology).

It is fair to say that scientific/synthetic philosophy ‘won’ the battle in that the Moorean rejection of engagement with empirical findings in philosophical inquiry has become much less widespread in the last decade. I speak from (anecdotal) personal experience: when I was working on the project that culminated in my monograph Formal Languages in Logic (2012), I often got remarks to the effect that it was all very interesting, but what I was doing wasn’t really philosophy. (My standard response was: well, I’m glad no one is saying that it’s all very philosophical, but not interesting.) By contrast, in later years the research that culminated in my monograph The Dialogical Roots of Deduction (2020) did not typically prompt the same kind of reaction, even though it was just as empirically oriented as my earlier work. The fact that The Dialogical Roots of Deduction won the Lakatos Award in 2022 (sorry folks, time for some shameless self-promotion!) attests to the widespread acceptance of synthetic philosophy as an approach to philosophical inquiry (though philosophers of science are, of course, from the start more amenable to the general idea of engaging with other disciplines).

In my opinion, philosophy is especially well-placed to facilitate much-needed interdisciplinary collaboration between different disciplines. It is now widely recognized that so-called ‘wicked problems’ require complementary approaches to be addressed, but each methodology has its limitations and dead angles. Experimental methods may lack ‘ecological validity’ (lab situations do not really reproduce the phenomena in the wild); quantitative methods are often not very fine-grained and may give rise to spurious correlations and ‘noise’; qualitative methods may be instances of ‘cherry-picking’ and have limited reach. Thus, what has become clear, in particular during the Covid-19 pandemic, is that triangulation of methods is essential for investigating complex problems.

It seems to me that philosophers have much to contribute to interdisciplinarity and triangulation efforts for two main reasons: philosophers are trained to engage in careful conceptual inquiry, clarifying and sharpening significant (scientific) concepts and sometimes introducing new ones (Carnapian explication, conceptual engineering); philosophers may be better able to see the forest rather than only the trees, as it were, by drawing on various scientific disciplines (as suggested in the Sterelny quote above) and noticing connections that may remain unnoticed within each specific discipline. Philosophy has much more potential for synthesis than is often recognized (even by us philosophers), and this is perfectly compatible with the centrality of analysis in analytic philosophy. (Traditionally, analysis and synthesis were viewed as two complementary rather than incompatible processes: you break things down to them put them back together again, usually in a different, more fruitful configuration.) (Note: commenting on an earlier draft of this post, Eric Schliesser remarked that my conception of synthetic philosophy differs in some important respects from his. He thinks that my conception resembles that of Kitcher’s, which he discussed in this blog post.)

True enough, there are also a number of difficulties, pitfalls and risks involved in attempting to do synthetic philosophy. For starters, the approach requires that the philosopher be conversant with various different scientific disciplines; she has to be a ‘polymath’ in some sense, which in the current scenario of scientific hyper-specialization is a formidable challenge. Secondly, there is a perennial risk of conceptual confusion/equivocation and ‘talking past each other’ for lack of a common vocabulary (a familiar problem in interdisciplinarity studies). Third, scientific studies themselves are not always reliable guides, with many important results not being replicated (see the famous ‘replication crisis’ in psychology and other disciplines).

However, while these issues are real and must be taken seriously, I submit that they should not be viewed as knock-down arguments against synthetic philosophy. (I have responses to each of them but I’m running out of space!) Sustained methodological reflection on the ins and outs of synthetic philosophy is still needed, but I hope to have established here at least that synthetic philosophy is an interesting and viable approach for philosophical inquiry.

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The post A Plea for Synthetic Philosophy (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.

Better Philosophy Through Time Travel

Here’s one way of thinking about progress in philosophy.

Having determined that progress in philosophy has been too slow, the leaders of the Galactic Philosophy Federation (GPF) take on the mission of improving it. Realizing that the earlier an intervention can be made, other things equal, the more progress is likely to result, they begin by considering changes that can be implemented immediately. Unfortunately, there are not many inspiring options. They then learn about a new invention, the “Passed to the Past” (P2P) device, which allows people in the present to send messages back in time. The past is earlier than the present, so, they figure, we could in principle have even more progress in philosophy if we changed something in the past.

Still in beta, P2P has certain limits. First, it can only send short messages—no more than around 600 characters (roughly the size of the previous paragraph). Second, the recent past is unavailable as a destination—messages have to be sent to a time prior to 1900. And third, it is very expensive. Still, they find it promising and decide to try to make it the case that there has been (and perhaps will continue to be) more progress in philosophy by sending messages back in time to earlier philosophers.

When it comes time to budget for this project, the GPF’s leaders find, alas, that they have enough money to fund only one message. Hopeful that one message could make a difference, they turn to the matter of settling on its content, recipient, and timing. For this, they ask you, the philosophers of the world, for suggestions:

“Given the aim of improving philosophy’s progress, what brief message would you send to which past philosopher?”
Keep in mind that the message must be around 600 characters or less, and that the message must be sent back to a year prior to 1900; if it matters, be specific about when in the philosopher’s life they should receive the message.

(The question is intentionally open-ended in a few ways, and “progress” is intentionally left unspecified.)

What’s your answer?

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Optimism about Philosophy

“I know a lot of people on twitter and social media complain about the current state of philosophy but I tend to be an optimist.”

That’s Gregg Caruso, professor of philosophy at SUNY Corning, in a new interview at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?. 

He continues:

I think the future of philosophy is strong. There is more interesting and diverse work being done today in philosophy than perhaps ever before. In fact, I can barely keep up with all the excellent work being done in areas of philosophy that never previously existed.

The days of philosophy being dominated by one or two figures (or methodologies) at a time is over, and I think that’s a good thing. Let a thousand flowers bloom, as they say.

This isn’t to say there aren’t things to be concerned about:

If I have any fears, they are not about philosophy itself but with direction of higher education, which has been moving away from providing students with a well-rounded liberal arts education and toward vocational training. This trend is bad, not only for the discipline of philosophy but for society as a whole.  

The interview, interesting throughout, ranges over Professor Caruso’s life, education, and work. You can read the whole thing here.

The Development of Experimental Philosophy

A recent survey of publications in experimental philosophy provides a picture of the field’s growth and range.

In “Twenty Years of Experimental Philosophy Research,” published recently in Metaphilosophy, Jincai Li (Normal University) and Xiaozhen Zhu (Guangdong University) take a bibliometric look at X-phi.

They write:

X-phi has undergone roughly four developmental stages over the past two decades, namely, the initiation period (2000–2005), the development period (2006–2010), the expansion period (2011–2015), and the plateau period (2016–2020). Although works in the first period had paved the way for later development of this experimental approach to philosophical inquiries, the key umbrella term “experimental philosophy” did not come into widespread use until 2006. Since then, it has remained at the center of heated discussion. Over the next fifteen years or so, x-phi evolved from negative research programs with the slogan of “burning the armchair” to the more positive and interdisciplinary projects that embrace more armchairs, becoming a fascinating part of the broad enterprise of cognitive science. This characteristic change of x-phi is showcased in part by the wide array of research topics covered in this area and in part by the diverse academic journals that host the scholarly output on these topics. 

Let’s turn to the data. Here’s a look at x-[hi’s growth, in terms of numbers of publications, since 2000:

The most popular of x-phi’s subfields is ethics, Li and Zhu find, followed by epistemology and philosophy of mind:

 

In which journals is x-phi typically published? Philosophical Psychology, Review of Philosophy and Pyschology, and Mind and Language lead the list, report Li and Zhu:

RANK	JOURNAL NAME	NUMBER OF PUBLICATIONS
1	Philosophical Psychology	84
2	Review of Philosophy and Psychology	66
3	Mind and Language	50
4	Cognition	43
5	Synthese	42
6	Philosophical Studies	36
7	Cognitive Science	26
8	Journal of Business Ethics	24
9	Journal of Cognition and Culture	20
10	Philosophy Compass	19
11	Philosophy and Phenomenological Research	18
12	Consciousness and Cognition	17
13	Analysis	16
14	Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy	15
15	Behavioral and Brain Sciences	14
16	Episteme	13
17	Metaphilosophy	13
18	Journal of Consciousness Studies	11
19	Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology	11
20	Australasian Journal of Philosophy	10
20	Erkenntnis	10
20	Journal of Experimental Social Psychology	10
20	Noûs	10

The authors also provide a list of the thirty most “influential” publications in experimental philosophy, using citation rates adjusted to take into account the “time effect of publishing”. Their metric, “relative citation rate” (RCR) is arrived at by dividing the number of citations of a work by the average citations of any paper in the same year it is published. Here are the top ten from that list:

	TITLE	AUTHORS	TYPE	YEAR	SOURCE	GOOGLE CITATIONS	RCR
1	The Essential Moral Self	Nina Strohminger and Shaun Nichols	Journal article	2014	Cognition	491	23.38
2	The Affective Dog and Its Rational Tale: Intuition and Attunement	Peter Railton	Journal article	2014	Ethics	243	11.57
3	Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds	Edouard Machery	Book	2017	Oxford University Press	254	11.55
4	The True Self: A Psychological Concept Distinct from the Self	Nina Strohminger, Joshua Knobe, and George Newman	Journal article	2017	Perspectives on Psychological Science	240	10.91
5	Folk Moral Relativism	Hagop Sarkissian, John J. Park, David Tien, Jennifer Wright, and Joshua Knobe	Journal article	2011	Mind and Language	222	10.57
6	Atheists and Agnostics Are More Reflective Than Religious Believers: Four Empirical Studies and a Meta-Analysis	Gordon Pennycook, Robert M. Ross, Derek J. Koehler, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang	Journal article	2016	PLoS ONE	214	9.30
7	Estimating the Reproducibility of Experimental Philosophy	Florian Cova, Brent Strickland, Angela Abatista, Aurélien Allard, et al.	Journal article	2021	Review of Philosophy and Psychology	120	9.23
8	Expertise in Moral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Non-Philosophers	Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman	Journal article	2012	Mind and Language	428	9.11
9	Nothing at Stake in Knowledge	David Rose, Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich, Mario Alai, Adriano Angelucci, et al.	Journal article	2019	Noûs	76	8.44
10	The Role of Conscious Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgment	Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, and Marc Hauser	Journal article	2006	Psychological Science	1370	7.83

In discussing their findings, Li and Zhu say that “To move out of the plateau stage and make further progress in a sustainable manner, experimental philosophers need to expand their research territory and upgrade their tool kits.” You can read the whole article here. Discussion welcome.