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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31397 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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There's slightly more to the paper than what you included in your summary. They also polled students on things like "how often do you ask questions in class?" and "how often do you explore topics on your own, even if they're not required for a class?". Those seem like reasonable things that could be self-reported, if we think that self-reports can ever have value at all. But you're correct that they also did flatly ask students to rate themselves on "openness to having my own views challenged" and "critical thinking skills". And then they uncritically reported the survey results as "empirical data". Which is wild.

Failings of individual philosophers notwithstanding, I have always believed that education in (analytic) philosophy is the best way to develop critical thinking, and I still maintain that quite firmly. I attribute this broadly to two distinctive features of philosophy:

Norms of argumentation - there's a great Substack post that details the norms that surround debates of contentious positions in professional philosophy:

Affective neutrality in discussion of moral and political issues. One of the major differences between philosophers and the general public is that most people find it extremely difficult to discuss any controversial moral or political issue without getting upset. Philosophers, on the other hand, typically draw a distinction between entertaining a proposition and affirming it, and so assume that one should be able to debate various questions in a hypothetical register, without triggering any of the emotional reactions that might be appropriate if one actually held them. As a result, there is a disciplinary tradition in philosophy of maintaining a stance of affective neutrality when discussing morally charged issues, and even when contemplating abhorrent conclusions. [...]

Reconstructive presentation of arguments. Since the good old days of ancient Athens, philosophers have taken themselves to be more interested in argument than in rhetoric. This is reflected in a variety of disciplinary practices, including the sometimes elaborate efforts undertaken to avoid scoring merely symbolic victory over “straw man” versions of one’s opponent’s position. One of the most basic components of a philosophical education therefore involves learning how to demonstrate, prior to criticizing a position, that one has a correct understanding of it, and that the view is worthy of being taken seriously. [...] Because of this, it is extremely common for philosophers to spend a fair bit of time offering “reconstructions” of positions that they do not actually hold. Indeed, it is not unusual for the first half of a research talk or conference presentation to consist of such reconstruction. [...]

Stipulative definition of terminology. Because of the somewhat obsessive interest in argument that is central to the profession, philosophy also places a great deal of emphasis on the definition of terms. In order to track inferences it is essential to be clear about what one is and is not committed to in making a particular claim, and in order to be clear about that one must be clear about the terms one is using. [...]

These are basically just the norms that we already try to adhere to on TheMotte - basic principles regarding how to treat your interlocutor's position with fairness. And these norms are often sorely lacking in public discourse, so being in an environment where these norms are explicitly encouraged is beneficial, because it teaches people how to actually try understanding positions that are different from their own instead of just instinctively tearing them down.

Of course, debate itself is not unique to philosophy. Debate is found in virtually every academic field. But what's unique about philosophy is that the questions are almost by definition never settled solely by recourse to empirical facts (like say, the experimental data in physics, the primary sources in history or literary studies, etc). Logical argumentation and the careful examination of opposing positions are the only tools you have in philosophy, so you have to get good at them.

Exposure to a wide variety of views - In the course of studying philosophy, you'll encounter a number of extremely bizarre views like dialetheism, object eliminativism, and mathematical fictionalism. You may even be persuaded to begin holding some bizarre views yourself, after evaluating the arguments - or at least, you'll begin to see how reasonable people could come to hold those views. This has the effect of making you more tolerant of other people's views in general. The thinking goes, "if I was wrong about something as fundamental as 1+1=2, then what else could I be wrong about? If someone comes along with something wild that I've never thought of before, maybe I should give him a fair hearing, instead of just dismissing him out of hand."

Obviously individual philosophers are not perfect - they're still fallible individuals, and philosophy can't make you invulnerable to all mistakes in reasoning. A lot of professional philosophers have uncritically jumped on the woke bandwagon just like their colleagues in every other department, and they're unfortunately failing to uphold the norms of inquisitiveness and impartiality that should be central to philosophy. But I nonetheless think that philosophy still gives you the best chance of developing those epistemic virtues, even if it's not guaranteed.

They also polled students on things like "how often do you ask questions in class?" and "how often do you explore topics on your own, even if they're not required for a class?". Those seem like reasonable things that could be self-reported, if we think that self-reports can ever have value at all.

I think self-reports could have value for determining answers to questions like "how often do you believe you ask questions in class?" and "how often do you believe you explore topics on your own, even if they're not required for a class?" but those poll questions you quoted don't seem like reasonable things that could be self-reported at all. I don't think there's any good reason to believe that one's belief about how often one does these things has much correlation with how often one actually does these things, outside of the extremes, like literally never doing it or doing it constantly. I'd guess that they'd be more correlated with how high status the reporter believes these activities to be and how highly of themselves the reporters think. But that's just my pet conjecture, and in any case, I don't see a way to measure these potential correlations just from the self-reporting patterns without actually measuring the underlying activity.

It's the difference between what you're actually measuring vs. what you're trying to measure. Self-reports, with questions such as "how often do you ask questions in class?" only measure "how often do you believe you ask questions in class?". With any luck, belief in X actually correlates with X - but that's something that should be established at some point. My prior is that it correlates somewhat with X, but also correlates well with how highly one thinks of themselves, and for small differences between populations it becomes a meaningless measurement.

I really wish these papers would report it as "Philosophy students believe they are more inclined to consider alternative views" rather than just straight-up reporting their beliefs as truth.

Survey questions like this are implicitly about belief, whether you spell it out or not. Of course the answers aren't always truthful, for a variety of reasons, but I don't think you can make the answers more reliable simply by inserting “do you believe”, and conversely, they aren't less reliable when that was only implied.

Try it yourself. Answer the following questions:

  1. How old are you?
  2. How old do you believe you are?

Or:

  1. What did you have for breakfast?
  2. What do you believe you had for breakfast?

Or:

  1. Are you open-minded?
  2. Do you believe you are open-minded?

Or:

  1. Do you frequently argue with strangers on the internet?
  2. Do you believe you frequently argue with strangers on the internet?

Seriously, answer these. Was there any question pair where the second answer differed from the first? And if not for you, why would you think that inserting “do you believe” changes anyone else's answer?

Well yeah, the fact that basically everyone would answer those questions with the same answer, despite the fact that those questions ask 2 fundamentally different things - the former being a question about objective reality and the latter being about subjective perception - was kind of the entire point I was making.

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