Settling Questions
A Princeton Professor of Philosophy writes this week about a trend toward philosophical experimentation and away from a field of pure thought. He gives an example of the kind of experiment being performed. The philosopher devises two questions and puts them to a group of people, then tallies the results:
Question #1:
A company chairman has to decide whether to adopt a new program that would increase profits and help the environment too. “I don’t care at all about helping the environment,” the chairman says. “I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” Did the chairman intend to help the environment?
Question #2:
The chairman must decide on a new program, but the program would harm the environment. The chairman, who still couldn’t care less about the environment, authorizes the program in order to get those profits. As expected, the bottom line goes up, the environment goes down. Did the chairman harm the environment intentionally?
(In one survey, 23 percent of people said that the chairman in the first situation had intentionally helped the environment, 82 percent thought that the chairman in the second situation had intentionally harmed the environment.)
Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, the author of the piece, supports the perspective that such studies can shed light on philosophical study, but points to the complex and subjective matter of interpreting the results, and the ultimate need for traditional armchair thinking to surface any new philosophical insight.
But, to me at least, this seems to be a matter of one of those divisions in a field where philosophy should fall back to give way to a new field of scientific study. This is not experimental philosophy, it is experimental psychology mixed up with the study of language.
This kind of study doesn’t ask people to analyze the situations objectively, which would give us some meager insight into common objective analysis, it merely asks them to give a subjective response. When Socrates posed questions to his fellow Greeks, he didn’t use their answers to tally up some new philosophical insights, he used them to show how most people didn’t have a clue how to objectively interpret the world around them. Philosophy is neither a matter of statistics nor subjective perspective.
And finally a long overdue and eminently cogent report on the illusory impact of race on intelligence. Richard Nisbett in the NY Times draws together a broad and well-informed knowledge of the various studies on racial differences, both those flawed and those not flawed, to show that the likes of James Watson, and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (authors of The Bell Curve) are full of crap. That was the conclusion I would have drawn in the absence of such information, but it’s good to see it in print.
I’m puzzled though by why such a keen rebuttal took so long to appear. When Watson made his remarks earlier this year, the general consensus seemed to be that he was either bigoted or off his rocker or both. But people rebuked him with opinion rather than information, which seemed at the time and has seemed since almost a cover up for a concealed bigotry — as if people were thinking to themselves, it’s terrible that he said that, but what if he’s right?
Which makes me think that freedom of speech is a wonderful thing, because it allows people like Watson to say inflammatory things and for people like Richard Nisbett to set matters straight. It’s the advice we give our children in school — if you have something to say, speak up, because you can bet that there are several other kids thinking the same thing but saying nothing.
Tags: experimental-philosophy, intelligence, james-watson, philosophy, psychology, race, sociology, the-bell-curve