Saturday, July 4, 2015

The Nature of Philosophical Expertise

On June 22nd this nice piece by Tania Lombrozo called "Why We Need Philosophers Engaged In Public Life" was published on NPR's 13.7 blog.  In general I'm sympathetic to the piece and agree with its main point--that it would be a good thing if philosophers were more visible in the public eye and played more of a role in important debates.  But the article ends with the following passage, which--while striking--seems to me a bit misleading, and I want to explain why:
When a political issue concerns the economy, we often turn to economists — they're quoted in news stories and interviewed on air. When a policy issue concerns the environment, we sometimes hear from ecologists or biologists of an appropriate ilk. But when it comes to the kinds of issues we've confronted in a single week of news — issues about race, identity, moral responsibility and more — we rarely hear from philosophers. I think it's time we did.

I worry that this passage presents an inaccurate picture of the nature of philosophical expertise, in effect assimilating it to other kinds of disciplinary expertise.  Here's the problem with that assimilation.  With respect to experts in the other fields Lombrozo mentions--ecology, biology, economics--two things seem true:

  1. The fact that they are experts in their fields is, all by itself, reason to think they might be worth consulting if we have questions about some subject in their field.
  2. The fact that someone is not an expert in some field suggests--defeasibly, of course--that he is not as good a resource in such situations as someone who is.

Trouble is, neither (1) nor (2) is true of philosophers, at least not with respect to the kinds of issues in the public discussion of which Lombrozo would like to see philosophers involved.  As for (1), the fact that I have whatever degree of philosophical acumen I have managed to garner in my time in the field does not by itself make me any more worth consulting about the obligations of the global rich to the global poor or the extent to which being trans-racial is like being trans-gender, sinceas it happens, I am not especially well-informed about these issues and have not seriously thought about them more than or even as much as many non-philosophers.  And as for (2), the fact that someone is not a philosopher does not entail that they are not just as or more worth consulting about these things than me or, for that matter, any other philosophers.  I am positive, for instance, that many people in the black and LGBTQ communities have much better thought-out views about the latter issue than I--a straight, white, cisgender man--do, since they have probably thought about the relevant issues more than I have and have certainly had relevant experiences I haven't had.  Philosophical expertise would thus seem to differ from economic and other forms of disciplinary expertise in both these respects .

So in what does philosophical expertise consist?  If we can't make some sense of this, it will be a mystery why there is anything at all to Lombrozo's suggestion that it would be a good thing for more philosophers to weigh in publicly on political and other significant issues.

Here's an idea.  Ideally, a philosophical education consists in exposure to wide range of debates and a relatively low degree of specialization on any one of them (relative, that is, to the degree of specialization necessary in, say, physics).  This is why (1) and (2) above are false with respect to philosophers.   But that is not to say that philosophers don't, in the course of their education, acquire a sort of toolbox that helps them to engage in whichever debates they set themselves to thinking about more productively.  In order to do philosophy competently, I need--for example--to know what a "counterfactual" is and what people mean when they refer to the "contrapositive" of some claim.  I need to be able to determine the structure of arguments I encounter, and I need to be able to understand what people are talking about when they say an argument is valid or sound and determine for myself whether or not they are right.   And I need a broad acquaintance with the history of ideas, on which contemporary philosophy inevitably builds, even if not always consciously. In all of this, philosophers typically differ from those without any philosophical background and so are better-positioned to come up with clear and interesting ideas when they set out to do so.

A natural answer to our question, then, is that philosophical expertise consists precisely in possession of this toolbox--that is, the knowledge and skills that are instilled by a good philosophical education and that enable philosophers to be productive in their work.  It is primarily because they have this toolbox, and not because they have mastered any particular debates, that philosophers have a useful role to play in public life.  For if this is the nature of philosophical expertise, it would seem to follow that, if a philosopher were to set herself to thinking about some issue in light of all of the relevant information and with all of the relevant experiences, she would be more likely (though by no means guaranteed!) to come up with something interesting, helpful, or enlightening to say than someone without philosophical expertise but whose situation was otherwise identical.