Philosophical Pattern-Matching

The struggle to replace philosophical stereotypes with substance

One of the hardest things in philosophy is to get readers to update their preconceptions about a view (especially if they are unsympathetic to begin with). Any academic will have horror stories about journal referees whose comments address a straw man while completely ignoring the section of your paper where you explicitly pre-empt their objection (or even assert the opposite of the claim that they are attributing to you). And referees are among the tiny minority of colleagues who (at least attempt to) read your work at all! Most will just assimilate your view, based on broad labels, to the nearest stereotype already present in their mind. This is understandable, of course: we have limited time and cognitive resources, so economizing via philosophical stereotypes and pattern-matching may lead to better approximating more people’s views than would suspending judgment on all but the few philosophers for whom we’re willing to do a “deep dive” into their work. But it can be frustrating, nonetheless.

Not a match

This leads me to think that more philosophical communication should lead with counter-stereotyping details: “Here is how my view is different from what you might expect.” I’ve tried to do this in posts like ‘The Utilitarian Tradition is Conceptually Stunted’, ‘How Intention Matters’, and—especially—‘Bleeding-Heart Consequentialism’:

The standard caricature portrays utilitarians as “cold and calculating” moral robots, motivated solely by extremely abstract considerations like simplicity, who insist that we should maximize happiness (perhaps by throwing people into experience machines against their will) since at least that’s an end that we can quantify and measure.

Sounds pretty awful! It’s also nothing remotely like how I think about ethics, despite the fact that I self-identify as a utilitarian(-ish) philosopher. I think there’s a striking disconnect between how people commonly think of utilitarianism and what (the best version of) the view actually looks like.

To help remedy these common misconceptions, here’s a rough summary of my preferred brand of (utilitarian-flavoured) consequentialism…

Bleeding-Heart Consequentialism

At least consequentialism is a sufficiently mainstream view that people are willing to discuss it. Helen faces an even steeper uphill climb, defending epiphenomenalism and seriously considering idealism—two of the most maligned (almost taboo) views in the discipline! As I wrote about the latter:

My sense is that older philosophers, at least, may have a bit of a stereotyped conception of what a book on idealism must look like. They seem to imagine something like:

• Implausible ambitions to try to show that rival materialist views are inconceivable (perhaps paired with hopelessly fallacious arguments involving unconceived trees).

• Scholastic metaphysical orientation: formal, theistic, impenetrably abstract, etc.

• An insular approach, offering little engagement with contemporary science or other areas of philosophy.

• Stodgy prose, and no theme song.

The View from Everywhere is, thankfully, the opposite of this in every respect…

I hope folks read the book. While I’m not much inclined towards idealism myself, I think it’s very plausibly the most underrated view in all of contemporary analytic philosophy, considering the ratio of (average) actual : warranted credence. The View from Everywhere makes a clear and compelling case for taking the view seriously (assigning it non-trivial credence). Since almost nobody currently does take idealism seriously, the book could plausibly inspire more radical epistemic updates than almost any other philosophical work. (It’s rare to have an opportunity to update your credences by three orders of magnitude, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some readers went from <0.01% prior credence in idealism to ~10% after reading the book.)

Sticky Objections

A related phenomenon is that once an objection to (or expression of) a view becomes widely regarded as “canonical”, it becomes very difficult to update the discipline’s conventional wisdom. A couple of years ago, I offered an opinionated survey of the persisting disciplinary myths that bother me the most:

I especially wish that (i) people convinced that the “paradox of phenomenal judgments” is a devastating problem for epiphenomenalists would address Helen’s paper on the topic, and (ii) anyone tempted to claim that utilitarianism treats individuals as fungible (neglecting the “separateness of persons”) would seriously engage with my arguments to the contrary in ‘Value Receptacles’.

I suspect that many philosophers, skeptical of philosophical progress, implicitly assume that a canonical objection could not be decisively addressed or refuted. Once canonical, it must (they assume) continue to carry force. Or, even after reading a refutation, it may not fully sink in—the original claim may still feel true to them. And while it may be fine on an individual level to sometimes be a bit dogmatic or otherwise limit the role of reason, we cannot make collective philosophical progress unless defenders of the conventional wisdom feel some pressure to actually engage with novel challenges (at least those that pass the obvious hurdles for quality control, say by securing publication in top journals). It would be a shame to miss out on this, because I think there’s lots of philosophical progress to be made: some views really do have a lot more going for them than others, and some arguments and objections are demonstrably confused and subject to decisive refutation. But it isn’t worth much, in practice, if people aren’t willing to actually consider the arguments.

So I think it’s a bit of a problem for academic philosophy that canonical objections are treated as “sticky” in just one direction: they cling to their original targets, while undercutting counterarguments are allowed to “bounce off” and be widely ignored. (I guess this involves some mix of vibe bias and social prestige influencing who in the discipline is seen as most “central” and worth engaging with.)

I wish we had better institutional mechanisms for tracking the current state of the dialectic, and incentivizing further engagement at the cutting edge. I’d welcome others’ thoughts on how to make this happen. (‘Philosophy’s Digital Future’ set out an optimistic vision of how we might do better in future, with AI-powered literature maps.) In the meantime, I can offer… erm… imploring blog posts¹ with a standing invitation for more cross-camp engagement, for whatever that’s worth.

Over to the commentariat: What do you see as the most significant persisting misconceptions about your views (or views to which you are sympathetic)? What “sticky” objections lumber on, like the ghosts in Sixth Sense, unaware that they’ve been dead for years? (Don’t forget to share a link to the murder weapon…)

1. Plus kudos to Daniel Muñoz for engaging (in the comments) with my polemic against Kamm’s “inviolability” view. Occasionally I’ll see a philosopher on Facebook share one of my posts with a disclaimer like, “I disagree with almost everything else Richard writes, but quite liked this post.” I appreciate the approving share, naturally. But I also wonder why they never try pursuing any of their disagreements! I’m always up for a civil argument—objections are very welcome.