What's the point (of academic philosophy)?

On expertise and epistemology

In light of academia’s political troubles that some have argued (I think incorrectly) have their roots in the humanities and the consequent political attacks on the humanities, I’ve seen more academics fretting about the point of the humanities. This is not a new concern, of course. “What’s the point of the humanities?” has been a topic for self-reflection and angst among humanities scholars for approximately as long as the humanities have existed. I can’t speak to the humanities as a whole. But I’m intimately familiar with the crisis of self-confidence in philosophy, which is (no surprise) as old as philosophy itself. One of the oldest philosophical works, Plato’s Apology, is a defense of philosophy and the life of the philosopher. But since the question arises again and again, and today with increasing urgency, I’ll offer my answer.

There are two good things about the study of academic philosophy. (Well, of course there are more, but these are the two major goods on which I hang my case.) The first is that philosophers are experts on perennial questions, like the question of whether God exists, whether there is free will, whether morality is real, and so on and on. That is not to say that we know the answers to these questions, whereas others don’t. Questions that philosophers figure out how to answer get relabeled as “science.” These outstanding questions remain a maze of blind alleys. But we philosophers have been pacing those blind alleys for millennia, and your average philosophy professor has spent the better part of their life mapping them out. We may not have found our way through to the other side, but we know the first few turnings incredibly well.

To take one example, think of the problem of free will. Do we have free will? This is a perennial question, that people have asked since ancient times. And it is a question that people still think about today: not just academic philosophers, but normal people in the shower or up late at night, alone with their thoughts. Philosophers don’t know the answer to that question. But we know the kinds of considerations that are relevant to answering the question. For instance, we have a pretty good idea that determinism is relevant to the question of free will: is the existence of free will compatible with a deterministic universe? If not, that would be a strong mark against the existence of free will. If so, that would be a strong mark in favor of the existence of free will, if only because it would eliminate one of the main reasons to doubt the existence of free will.

So, is free will compatible with determinism? We now find that the question we started with, one about the existence of free will, has resolved itself into another question, regarding “compatibilism” and “incompatibilism.” And we know the main sorts of arguments that could be given for or against these views. Ordinary language arguments for compatibilism. The manipulation argument for incompatibilism. The consequence argument for incompatibilism. Are these various arguments sound? Well, that’s controversial. The answers to these questions turn on the answers to further questions. And down the alleys we go.

The point is that if you, as a normal person, want to know whether or not we have free will, academic philosophers can help you think better about this question. We can explain the major arguments to you. We can help fit your inchoate thoughts into a worked-out conceptual framework. All of that is valuable. Of course, if you just like thinking about the question of free will and other philosophical questions merely for your own sake, to have fun with the exercise, then that’s fine. And if you don’t care about the question of free will (or any other question that philosophers talk about), then that would be weird, but that’s also fine. But for those who care about these questions because they’re legitimately interested in an answer? Well, we can’t provide an answer. But we can get you started on thinking about the question in a more coherent way. We can show you what an answer might look like.

The other good thing about the study of philosophy is that it trains you in a certain way of slow, deliberate thinking. In reasoning, we flit quickly from one thought to the next. One thought causes us to have a second thought, and we then frequently think that the second thought is proved by the first. And sometimes it is, but often it’s not.

Philosophers have developed a set of tools of formal logic that help us say when a set of premises conclusively proves some conclusion. (Arguments like this are called “valid arguments.”) These tools are very strict. Unless you’re incredibly careful with how you set up your premises, your argument will almost never be valid. This is an interesting and important insight in its own right. “Here are my reasons. Now, is my conclusion true?” is an incredibly common question. And the answer is almost always “Well, maybe. But maybe not.”

This isn’t to say that philosophy always leads to skepticism. (The argument of the previous paragraph doesn’t entail skepticism!) But once we realize that our argument is invalid, we can slow down and ask what it would take to make our argument valid. We need to add some premises, defend some additional claims that will fill in the gaps between our starting premises and the conclusion we want to support. And then this leads to a new line of inquiry. “My argument is only valid if I add the following premises. But are those premises true?” This is an incredibly useful intellectual habit. By asking what premises we would need to add in order to make the argument valid, we are asking what claims the original, invalid argument had been tacitly assuming. So logical analysis of argument structure is a way of uncovering hidden assumptions. And the further inquiry that this prompts — are those assumptions true? — is an invaluable tool for helping figure out whether your argument had any value to begin with. The hidden assumptions in our arguments are almost always the weakest and most indefensible parts of the argument. If we had to say them out loud, we’d sound stupid, so we skip over them instead. Logical analysis, of the kind practiced by philosophers, exposes the indefensible assumptions. For this reason, training yourself in philosophy can make you a better thinker.

I know some people will bristle at this suggestion. “Philosophy doesn’t have any special claim to teaching people how to think well. And how often do people use formal logic in their every day life? Hell, how often do philosophers use formal logic in their every day life? Never!” But philosophy really is uniquely good at this kind of analysis. Sure, philosophers don’t spend their days making decisions by drawing up truth tables. But over the course of a study in philosophy, you’ll be drilled in a certain pattern of thought: Does the conclusion really follow from those premises? What are the unstated assumptions? Can those unstated assumptions be defended? What general principles are being presupposed here? Are there any counter-examples to those principles? The logical principles that underlie this pattern of thought are not the philosopher’s tools of every day thought, but that pattern of thought itself absolutely is. This pattern of thought is a fantastic tool for sniffing out bullshit. And philosophy is really the only discipline that teaches it in a systematic way.

That first benefit to philosophy, the benefit of providing a map to the blind alleys of philosophical inquiry, is one that is only possible because of this kind of analysis. We have a stock of compelling arguments that we can teach students about in a class about free will. We got that stock of compelling arguments by considering millions of arguments over the years, exposing them all to relentless scrutiny, and throwing out the ones that don’t stand up. The content of philosophy is the various perennial debates that you’ll learn about in a Phil-101 class. But the method is the heart of philosophy. Other humanities disciplines might teach students how to criticize. But the stock in trade of philosophers is criticism from the perspective of logic alone, (ideally) independent of any political considerations.

That’s not to say that any of this is easy or uncontroversial, even among philosophers. What constitutes good reasoning is itself a philosophical question, and a hotly debated one. The point is not that philosophy has the canons of reasoning down pat. The point is that, of all the subjects you can study in a contemporary university, philosophy is uniquely obsessed with figuring out what good reasoning consists in and applying those conclusions to advance further inquiry. That’s pretty valuable.