How to reduce all philosophical questions to empirical questions

Contemporary philosophers often make a priori claims about phenomena that are already or could be studied by empirical science. James Ladyman and Don Ross argue in their book Every Thing Must Go (2007) that analytic metaphysicians make assumptions about the nature of physical reality that are simply false according to contemporary physics. Bence Nanay argues that philosophy of action is not informed by the cognitive neuroscience of action even though both fields have partly the same subject matter (Experimental Philosophy and Naturalism, 2015). The training of philosophers makes them prone to this kind of misapplication of armchair methods:

"Philosophers who do not possess empirical knowledge of relevance to their research often make assumptions that are in fact empirical without their noticing. Also, they wrongly conceptualize empirical problems as if they were solvable from the armchair. ... Empirical issues repeatedly crop up in philosophy. Philosophers who subscribe to the erroneous doctrine that they do not, and who do not master the relevant empirical discipline, are bound to fail to notice when they pass into its territory. Instead, they will try to solve the problems in question by means of their standard armchair methods." (Stefan Schubert: Ernest Gellner's Words and Things: A Case Study of Empirical Philosophy, 2015)

Schubert's example is the linguistic philosophy movement, where philosophers made implicitly sociological and anthropological claims as if those claims belonged to a priori philosophy.

Most philosophers - with the exception of the most foolhardy crackpots - accept that whenever philosophy and science conflict, philosophy should give way. That is, philosophy should at least be compatible with science. I of course think that mere compatibility or even "informedness" is not enough and that philosophy should be completely replaced (or displaced) by science.

At first glance, accepting epistemic verificationism would seem to leave many questions of philosophy unanswered (and stop people wasting their time on epistemically worthless projects). But maybe it is possible to re-formulate all problems of, say, analytic metaphysics and epistemology as empirical questions. We could just re-interpret intuition-mongering metaphysicians and epistemologists as doing, without them realizing it, some kind of naive introspective auto-anthropology, as Daniel Dennett, J. D. Trout and Michael Bishop have suggested:

"[the projects of analytic metaphysics often] strike me as naive naive auto-athropology since the participants in this research seem to be convinced that their program actually gets at something true, not just believed-true by a particular subclass of human beings (Anglophone philosophers of the analytic metaphysics persuasion). ... I've asked a number of analytic metaphysicians whether they can distinguish their enterprise from naive auto-anthropology of their clan, and have not yet received any compelling answers." (Dennett: Kinds of Things - Towards a Bestiary of the Manifest Image, 2013)

"[Standard Analytic Epistemology] is actually an odd kind of cultural anthropology: building theories that describe how privileged (mostly) Westerners with Ph.D.s in Philosophy engage in epistemic assessment." (Bishop and Trout: Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, 2005)

After this re-interpretation, we could just fire all metaphysicians and epistemologists and hand their jobs over to psychologists and anthropologists:

"If philosophers want an account that mimics their epistemological judgments, all we would need is a psychologist who is willing to model our judgments ... . Indeed, if philosophers really want to begin their epistemological musings with a descriptive core that accurately accounts for their judgments about knowledge or justification, they would save a lot of time, energy, and expense by employing a few psychology graduate students." (ibid.)

I wouldn't keep metaphysicians and epistemologists even as research subjects. It would be more interesting to get more generalizable results about how humans think, although it could be valuable to take analytic philosophers as case studies in epistemic pathology.

Philosophy of science is just as bad as analytic metaphysics

I recently attended a philosophy of science and an analytic metaphysics conference, with plenty of big-name speakers at both. I couldn't detect any qualitative difference between them, methodologically speaking. Sure, the philosophers of science talked about science, but they merely mentioned it. They didn't go into the nitty-gritty details of scientific results and practices. Nobody presented original empirical results. Nobody had used empirical methods, such as ethnographic field observations and interviews, to reach their conclusions. Nobody made contributions to cutting-edge theoretical science. Basically, it was all just armchair philosophizing. One can hardly call these people naturalists. If a "naturalistic turn" has taken place in recent decades, I didn't notice any signs of it. It is just empty hype.

Philosophers of science shouldn't feel superior to analytic metaphysicians. They are doing the same thing: analyzing concepts, pumping intuitions, not using rigorous empirical or mathematical methods, not making any contributions to our knowledge about anything.

What are analytic metaphysicians doing? Sitting in their armchairs, philosophizing about persistence, composition, identity, properties, states of affairs, truth-makers, time, laws, and emergence.

What are philosophers of science doing? Sitting in their armchairs, philosophizing about evidence, observation, representation, realism, spacetime, biological kinds, probability, theory-change, and explanation.

Just because the concepts of philosophy of science have something to do with science does not mean that philosophy of science itself is somehow more scientific or respectable than analytic metaphysics. Intuition mongering about the nature of scientific explanation is just as unscientific as intuition mongering about the nature of mind.

What are important philosophers of science such as Carl Hempel, Philip Kitcher and Wesley Salmon doing? Intuition mongering:

"[Kitcher] speculates about what scientists would answer when presented with a set of derivations and a corresponding question. He did not actually interview a representative sample of scientists. The result is that the dispute cannot be settled: both Hempel and Kitcher claim that if one would consult scientists, that would result in evidence supporting their hypotheses. They cannot both be right. ... [Kitcher] has not surveyed a large sample of scientists of various disciplines, in order to investigate what their views on understanding are.  

... 

Arguments for the descriptive claim [that scientists seek causal-mechanical explanations] are missing ... [Salmon] should not have set himself descriptive aims that require large scale empirical research for which philosophers do not have the (financial) resources and often not the methodological skills. 

... 

[They] don't argue for their normative claims either." (Erik Weber, Leen De Vreese and Jeroen Van Bouwel: ch. How to Study Scientific Explanation? in Scientific Explanation, 2013)

Should we democratize philosophy?

Traditional philosophy is based on the intuitions of the few (well-off Westerners with PhDs in philosophy). Experimental philosophy is based on the intuitions of the many (ordinary people from different backgrounds). So perhaps we need a democratic revolution carried out by experimental philosophers, the only remnant of the old tyranny being a charred armchair. Justin Sytsma and Jonathan Livengood, who have written a new book on experimental philosophy, do not like this way of putting the issue:

"The image of the burning armchair no doubt served a sociological purpose - it drew a sharp line in the sand, polarized positions, and worked up fervor. ... But such divisive rhetoric can also create problems. ... The danger is that we will come to think of non-experimental philosophy as an inherited, tyrannical tradition based on proclamations (intuitions) delivered by those in power, and experimental philosophy as seeking to undermine those proclamations in favor of a new, more democratically determined set of decrees." (The Theory and Practice of Experimental Philosophy, 2015)

First of all, there cannot be anything tyrannical about traditional philosophy since it's debates are nothing but "implicit legislation of language by a group of people whose orders have no prospect of being followed" (Don Ross: A most rare achievement, 2015, my emphasis). Philosophers simply do not have the requisite power in today's science-centered culture. Traditional philosophy is, at most, a wannabe tyranny. Some philosophers do think that their "expert" intuitions should be privileged over those of ordinary people (read this). They suffer from a severe case of the illusion of expertise.

In any case, to me the only reason to probe the intuitions of a larger group of people is to check if some allegedly common-sensical view actually is part of common sense. Intuitions about X are not and will not become evidence about the nature of X, no matter how many people's intuitions we probe.

In order to learn about the nature of X, we need to study X directly, using empirical methods, instead of studying it indirectly by asking people how they think about X (whether or not there even is an X as a homogeneous "natural kind" is itself an empirical question).

Studying how people think about X or what kinds of cognitive processes generate their intuitions about X, if it is done responsibly, is just ordinary social and cognitive science. No need to call it any kind of philosophy. And social and cognitive scientists already understand that we need a large sample before we can make reliable generalizations.


So no, we should not democratize the study of reality (concepts, if they exist, are part of reality too). In matters epistemic, science has absolute and exclusive authority. What we need is a tyranny of science.

Metaphilosophical arguments are futile

"Some of our authors suspect that a change in [methodological] opinion within philosophy will not be attainable through sophisticated arguments, though, but only by the continual retirement of traditional philosophers." (Christoph Luetge, Hannes Rusch, and Matthias Uhl, eds: Experimental Ethics: Toward an Empirical Moral Philosophy, 2014)

Philosophers are bad at formulating questions and theories

Philosophers often claim that although they may be bad at finding answers, they are good at asking questions. Well, if a (non-mathematical) question cannot be answered empirically, then it is a badly formulated question. The vagueness and untestability of philosophical theories reflects this. There is nothing rigorous, precise, or clear about analytic philosophy.

Edward O. Wilson wrote that his goal is to turn "as much philosophy as possible into science" (Consilience, 1998). For a naturalist, there is no other option. The only way to justify a philosophical thesis is to turn it into a scientific hypothesis and provide empirical evidence for it. However, this requires heavy modification, often rendering the original thesis unrecognizable. Perhaps some philosophical theses are already more compatible with science than others, but they are still too vague and slippery to be decisively confirmed or falsified by empirical evidence. As Timothy Williamson notes here, there is always some wiggle room in philosophy:

"Some metaphysical theories so informal that it is quite unclear what they entail. Whenever an opponent claims to draw false consequences from them, a proponent has the option of denying that they really follow. Sometimes metaphysicians seem to reserve the right to make up their theory's consequence relation as they go along. That has the advantage of rendering their theory hard to refute, but the disadvantage of undermining its 'predictive' power." (Modal Logic as Metaphysics, 2013)

This is why scientists don't like it when philosophical theses and dichotomies find their way to science:

"the dichotomy between associationist versus cognitive models (or 'statistics versus rules'), along with the 'learned' versus 'innate' dichotomy, are pre-scientific intuitive oppositions that are ill-defined, and thus ultimately untestable, and pernicious to empirical inquiry.

...

the history of science provides abundant evidence that science progresses faster when embracing crisp, clear models, even incorrect ones, than by accepting insightful but fuzzy metaphors that include partial truths, but are resistant to disproof.

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debates employing these traditional dichotomies foreground irrelevant and ultimately philosophical issues, while downplaying or ignoring the empirical issues of central relevance." (W. Tecumseh Fitch: Toward a computational framework for cognitive biology: Unifying approaches from cognitive neuroscience and comparative cognition, 2014)

It is wrong everywhere, always, and for anyone to believe in any philosophical thesis

Given that equally smart philosophers disagree about almost everything, can a philosopher justifiably accept any philosophical thesis? Here is Peter van Inwagen's take on this issue:

"Well, I do believe these things. And I believe that I am justified in believing them. And I am confident that I am right. But how can I take these positions? I don't know. ... I suppose my best guess is that I enjoy some sort of philosophical insight ... And this would have to be an insight that is incommunicable

... 

I don't want to be forced into a position in which I can't see my way clear to accepting any philosophical thesis of any consequence. Let us call this unattractive position philosophical skepticism.

 ...

I think that any philosopher who does not wish to be a philosophical skeptic--I know of no philosopher who is a philosophical skeptic--must agree with me that this question has some good answer: whatever the reason, it must be possible for one to be justified in accepting a philosophical thesis" (Is It Wrong Everywhere, Always, and for Anyone to Believe Anything on Insufficient Evidence? 1996)

I have waded through a lot of philosophy and I have not found a single plausible philosophical thesis, unless scientism counts as one. A-theory or B-theory? There is no evidence either way. Internalism or externalism? Impossible to say. Humeanism or non-humeanism? I do not know, and neither does anyone else. Tropes or universals? I could care less.

I guess that makes me a "philosophical skeptic". There is no justification for any philosophical thesis because if there was, the justification would have to be empirical, and that in turn would make the thesis scientific, not philosophical.

This represents my view on justification:

"there is no such thing as a justifiable purely philosophical conclusion about any empirical phenomenon (and there are no such things as 'non-empirical phenomena'). Therefore, anyone who wants to defend a philosophical thesis had better be prepared to defend it as, in large part, a scientific proposition based on scientific evidence." (Don Ross et al: Midbrain Mutiny, 2008)

 

A metaphysician admits to using intuitions as evidence

"Throughout the text I will appeal to my intuitions on some metaphysical thesis or other, and I will invite the reader to reflect on whether she shares these intuitions ... I will freely and without apology appeal to my intuitions about possibility and plausibility, consequences and counterexamples, when choosing among metaphysical theses." (Hud Hudson: The Metaphysics of Hyperspace, 2005)

Finally a metaphysician who doesn't try to give the false impression that intuitions are not playing a central evidential role in analytic metaphysics, as Cian Dorr does in his review of Every Thing Must Go.

 "Really - what else are we supposed to appeal to?" (ibid.)

Try empirical evidence.