Why study philosophy?

In a recent essay, Peter Hacker gives many good answers; but as is often the case with advertisements, he over-sells his product. I will be focusing on this formulation:

The study of philosophy cultivates a healthy scepticism about the moral opinions, political arguments and economic reasonings with which we are daily bombarded by ideologues, churchmen, politicians and economists. It teaches one to detect ‘higher forms of nonsense’, to identify humbug, to weed out hypocrisy, and to spot invalid reasoning. It curbs our taste for nonsense, and gives us a nose for it instead. It teaches us not to rush to affirm or deny assertions, but to raise questions about them.

Similar claims about the general usefulness of philosophy are endlessly repeated in introductory texts. (For instance by Bertrand Russell in the raving last chapter of his Problems of Philosophy: "The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation of consent of his deliberate reason.") I must admit scepticism.

When Hacker writes that 'philosophy cultivates a healthy scepticism' and 'teaches one to detect higher forms of nonsense', he makes it sound as if taking philosophy classes were a method for developing fail-safe nonsense-alerts. Because philosophy means love of wisdom, and wisdom is never foolish or gullible, there is in that sense an intimate connection between "philosophy" and "critical thinking". Empirically speaking though the connection is less reliable. Great philosophers have been guilty of great stupidity. Heidegger famously was a Nazi. I doubt that Wittgenstein shared Hacker's optimism; but when hearing one of his students unreflectingly repeating nationalistic slogans, Wittgenstein was infuriated, and his anger seems somehow to have been aggrevated by the fact that the person talking nonsens was a philosopher:

[W]hat is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any... journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends.

Studying philosophy would be a waste of time if all it did was to enable one to talk about abstruse questions of logic. But there is no reason to think this is so. If anything, evidence seems to point in the direction of Hacker. Philosophers seem better equiped than most when it comes to general reasoning skills. Philosophy majors tend to do very well on certain tests. Some claim this is due to their education: "[P]hilosophy majors develop problem solving skills at a level of abstraction" that cannot be achieved through most studies. But if we assume (which seems plausible to me) that philosophy mainly attracts students who already possess certain skills and interests, this cannot be the final word. It doesn't follow from this that exercising one's philosophical muscles might turn out to have no effect on a person's ability to think (that would be as astonishing as if one's stamina could never be improved by physical excercise); but it does follow that even if philosophers demonstrate first rate reasoning skills, it is an open question to what extent these test results actually reflect the learning outcome of their studies.

Continuing on a semi-empirical line. Most courses in philosophy, certainly most courses an undergraduate is likely to attend, are designed not to make the student better at reasoning in general, but to make him better at philosophical reasoning. A course in moral philosophy, say, is deemed successful not to the extent its students have become more sensitive and morally reflective persons (though this of course would not be negative), but, borrowing Wittgenstein's prase, to the extent the students have learned to talk with plausibility about abstruse questions in ethics. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with this. Philosophising is after all working with philosophical questions. As any academic field, philosophers have manufactured tools and techniques suited to these questions. Picking up on the jargon is the first step toward making contributions to the classroom discussions. And sometimes this will prove useful in other contexts too...

 
But 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."

It is puzzling that Hacker, throughout this essay, keeps using "philosophy" as if it denoted one uniform activity ("At a very general level, it [philosophy] is a unique technique for tackling conceptual questions that occur to most thinking people" and "At a more specialised level, philosophy is a technique for examining the results of specific sciences for their conceptual coherence," and so on), when he clearly would agree with much of what I have written. The reason, I suspect, is that Hacker, as Wittgenstein often did, uses "philosophy" to refer not to everything going by that name, but mainly to his own practice. In that case his claims seem on safer footing. Hacker's texts are predominantly critical, and his ability to sniff out philosophical nonsense is (usually) impressive. Studying his philosophy -- or wittgensteinian philosophy generally -- and acquiring some of his tools and techniques will be good for any critical thinker.

But in the end, though, which philosophical texts one studies (or if they are philosophical texts at all) is less important for one's ability to think straight than how one studies them. Reading even the most conceptually self-conscious and critical writer won't make critical thinkers out of us unless we read him critically.

Dreaded analogy...not so fast.

Here is Coetzee with another take on the dreaded analogy between animal cruelty and the Holocaust, this time in his own voice:

The transformation of animals into production units dates back to the late nineteenth century, and since that time we have already had one warning on the grandest scale that there is something deeply, cosmically wrong with regarding and treating fellow beings as mere units of any kind. This warning came to us so loud and clear that it you would have thought it was impossible to ignore it. It came when in the middle of the twentieth century a group of powerful men in Germany had the bright idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter – or what they preferred to call the processing – of human beings.

Of course we cried out in horror when we found out about this. We cried: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like cattle! If we had only known beforehand! But our cry should more accurately have been: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like units in an industrial process! And that cry should have had a postscript: What a terrible crime, come to think of it, to treat any living being like a unit in an industrial process!

Whether you accept this argument or not depends, at least, on whether you accept the premise that human beings and animals are similar in morally significant ways. (You may admit all the empirical similarities Coetzee draws on even if you don’t, but in that case you are likely to dismiss the moral analogy he draws on the back of these similarities as a non sequitur.) If you accept something along the line of Peter Singer’s idea of the expanding circle of moral concern, then you might concur that treating any living creature as a production unit is similar to treating human beings like that. The moral power of the analogy would presumably weaken as you move further and further away from origo, but as long as you don't overstep the outer boundaries of the circle, it won't loose all power. Inside the circle of moral concern, you can always describe such treatment as a violation against our common creatureliness, or something to that effect. I am prepared to say things like that myself. Though, I am not sure exactly what saying this amounts to. (Nor am I, for that matter, certain where to draw the periphery line.) But it surely entails that no living creature can be treated any way we please. However, the Nazis were not simply refusing certain living beings admission to our community of fellow creatures, they were denying certain human beings admission to our idea of a common humanity too; and that makes a (moral) difference, doesn’t it? On the other hand, one could, as Matthew Pianalto points out, suggest that this question is nothing but further evidence of our inherit speciesism.

Other important differences between factory farming and the Holocaust are also too often overlooked by people who are horror-struck by undeniable similarities. The Nazi crimes were not “merely” to treat living beings as units in an industrial process (nor was it merely to treat human beings this way); the aim of the Nazi’s was to exterminate certain human beings, to eliminate the Jews and to wipe the Earth clean of them. In this respect the (admittedly factory-like) Holocaust didn't much resemble factory farming. Extermination camps were launched as the final solution to the Jew problem. With the problem finally solved, the murders would have stopped too simply because there would have been no one left alive. The industrial stockyard aims at something altogether different: it aims for eternity. Factory farming is a perpetual enterprise, where animals are ceaselessly being brought into the world for the purpose of being killed, to paraphrase Elizabeth Costello. I agree with her that this is a significant difference (though I am not sure I follow her when she claims that factory farming therefore dwarfs any evil the Third Reich was capable of). The extermination camps and the industrial stockyard are strikingly similar in some respects -- in that they employ many of the same methods, for instance --, but the extermination camps were, unlike the modern stockyard, fueled by hatred for their victims and aiming for their annihilation. In this respect the Holocaust was more analogous to a merciless war on vermin than to the merciless meat industry.

Many people disagree with this “dreaded analogy” because (as I have pointed out in the preceding paragraphs) this is far from a perfect analogy; but then again, there is no such thing as a perfect analogy. A perfect analogy simply wouldn’t be an analogy at all. Finding differences doesn’t necessarily undermine the possibility of connecting the dots (that depends on the number and the character of the differences one is talking about). On the contrary, a non-perfect fit is a prerequisite for talking about an analogy between two subjects at all.

"The reasons why the Allies fought against Germany were complex, but many people believe rightly that the Holocaust itself would have proved sufficient reason," Raimond Gaita has written, but “no one can seriously wish to respond, to the slaughter of animals as though it justified taking up arms against farmers, butchers and people who work in abattoirs.” To this I would like to say: in one sense yes, maybe, but in another sense no. "Fighting" is of course a complex term with many applications. Hence there are numerous ways of fighting an evil. It may be true that no one is prepared to shoot and kill farmers and butchers (though, as I pointed out here, whatever truth there is in this, it is hardly of the empirical kind), but many people do walk the streets daily in protest against what butchers and farmers are doing; they write about it, talk about it; they refuse to be accomplices in the wrongdoings by boycotting their products, and try to convince others to follow their lead. Many people would be very relieved (though, perhaps not as relieved as they were when the Holocaust ended (but, then again, how to compare?)) if the horrific treatment of animals that Coetzee describes were to come to an abrupt end. Boycotting and walking the streets in protest is, of course, not the same as taking up arms, but may still be an analogous reaction.

What troubles me with expressions like “animal holocaust” or “eternal Treblinka” is not that one rhetorically bridges a gap between two kinds of horror, but, rather, that one steps too quickly from one to the other as if there were no gap there at all. Stuart Rachels does so with this one-liner. Seemingly blind to all the important differences, such rhetorical moves strike me as both insensitive and unthinking. That being said, I do not think it is impossible to connect the two phenomena in reasonable and non-offensive ways. Consider this quote by Wittgenstien:

Supposing you meet someone in the street and he tells you he has lost his greatest friend, in a voice extremely expressive of his emotion. You might say: "It was extraordinarily beautiful, the way he expressed himself." Supposing you then asked: "What similarity has my admiring this person with my eating vanilla ice and liking it?" To compare them seems almost disgusting. (But you can connect them by intermediate cases.) (Lectures on Aesthetics, II, §4)

Is this analogous (!) to our own question? I suggest that it might be. People may of course be divided over how many intermediate steps one needs (and what steps they must be) in order to make the connection, but if one can, through sensitive employment of intermediate cases, connect one's delight in someone's expression of sorrow with one's delight in eating vanilla ice cream, then, I believe, one can also, as Coetzee (to my mind not quite successfully) attempts to do, namely to draw the connecting line from people's horror in face of the Holocaust (the murdering of human beings on an industrial scale in order to get rid of them) to his own horror in face of modern food industry, where billions upon billions of living beings are being turned into production units in order to be slaughtered and used for food, without behaving disgustingly.

Statistikk og intuisjon.

Forestill deg at du er med i et gameshow på tv. Du står overfor tre stengte luker. Bak en av lukene ligger en gevinst. De to andre er tomme. Velger du rett, er gevinsten din, velger du feil, får du ingenting. Du gjør ditt valg, hvorpå programlederen åpner en av de gjenstående lukene og viser at den er tom. Hva ville du ha gjort -- stått ved ditt opprinnelige valg eller benyttet muligheten til å bytte luke?

Du burde i alle fall bytte. Magnus Jiborn, som presenterte nøtten i Filosofiske rummet, forklarer løsningen på denne måten:

Sannolikheten för att deltagaren valde rätt från början är 1/3, och sannolikheten för att vinsten finns bakom en av de återstående dörrarna således 2/3. Efter att tävlingsledaren öppnat en av de återstående dörrarna är sannolikheten för att det första dörrvalet var rätt fortfarande 1/3, och således är sannolikheten för att vinsten finns bakom den av de två återstående dörrarna som deltagaren inte valde 2/3. Alltså vinner man på att byta.

Mange lyttere protesterte. Stilles ikke deltakeren overfor to valg her? I det første tilfellet må han velge en av tre luker. Da har han naturligvis 1/3 sjanse å treffe rett. Men denne sannsynligheten på 33% kan da umulig påvirke sannsynligheten i neste valgrunde -- "eftersom det är ett helt nytt val med nya förutsättningar". I andre runde er jo antallet luker redusert til to. Sannsynligheten for å velge rett må derfor være fifty/fifty. Altså vinner man ingenting på å bytte.

Feilen er at det slett ikke er et nytt valg med helt nye forutsetninger. Hadde programlederen åpnet en av de tomme lukene før vi bestemte oss, hadde valget vært hipp som happ. Og det samme hvis en ny deltaker (som ikke ante noe om første valgrunde) skulle stå for valget i runde to: Vedkommende hadde hatt 50% sjanse for å velge luken med gevinst. Men vi vet at "vår" luke ikke kunne åpnes fordi vi hadde valgt den. Sant nok: hvis det faktisk er der gevinsten befinner seg, hadde programlederen aldri åpnet luken uansett -- men vi vet altså at det ikke er mer enn 33% sjanse for at så er tilfellet.

Dette kan være vanskelig å begripe eller -- hvis man begriper det -- akseptere. "Även jag svarade att det inte finns något skäl att byta när jag första gången hörde talas om problemet, och reagerade med misstro när jag fick höra svaret: 'Det måste vara fel'," var Jiborn reaksjon:

Själva poängen med att jag tog upp exemplet är att nästan alla svarar på detta sätt och att våra intuitioner när det gäller sannolikheter således inte verkar vara att lita på [....] Det tycks finnas systematiska fel i hur vi tänker när det gäller sannolikheter, vilket är en av de saker som Daniel Kahneman kartlägger i den utmärkta och mycket läsvärda boken "Thinking, Fast and Slow" som jag berättade om i programmet.

Jeg skal ikke avvise at det eksisterer systematiske misforståelser i folks tenkning omkring statistikk (jeg har ikke lest Kahnemans bok; han har sikkert statistikk som tyder på det), men lurer på om ikke intuisjonen fører oss vill i akkurat dette tilfellet fordi gameshowet er konstruert nettopp for å villede på denne måten. Jeg både forstår og aksepterer det matematiske beviset her -- likevel må jeg, hver eneste gang jeg forsøker å sette meg selv inn i situasjonen, så å si overtale meg selv til å bytte luke. Det er som med visse optiske illusjoner. Jeg vet at de lange linjene i dette bildet er parallelle -- likevel greier ikke å se det på dem. Jeg har målt også, og ført bevis for meg selv, uten at det hjelper.

Illusjonen sier naturligvis interessante ting om synet vårt. Ikke at synet generelt er upålitelig; ei heller at våre øyne systematisk har problemer med å oppfatte parallelle linjer som parallelle. Men illusjonen demonstrerer at våre øyne av og til kan bedra oss på denne måten.

Kanskje er det også dét gameshow-eksemplet viser -- ikke at intuisjonen systematisk fører folk vill i sannsynlighetsspørsmål, men at den av og til gjør det? I akkurat dette tilfellet skyldes kanskje problemene at det statistiske materialet er for smått. Var antallet luker noe større, mistenker jeg at mange, foruten å forstå matematikken, også intuitivt ville se poenget. Sett at du ikke skulle velge en av tre, men en av hundre luker. Prinsippene er for øvrig de samme, det er kun sannsynlighetsverdiene som er nye. Sannsynligheten for å ta rett første gang er ikke lenger 1/3, men 1/100 eller én prosent. At programlederen åpner én tom luke, er nærmest ubetydelig, skjønt statistisk sett øker du også nå vinnersjansene ved å bytte. Men hvis programlederen, som i det opprinnelige eksemplet, åpnet alle lukene og lot bare to stå igjen, den du valgte (og dermed satte ut av spill) og én til -- ville du da ha valgt å bytte?