The Fog Blog

This is an extremely interesting post by Eric Schwitzgebel on the Psychology of Philosophy, urging us, as philosophers, to do more empirical work to try, for example, to figure out why we hold the views we do.

I especially liked the following passage:

Typically, philosophers present themselves as believing things for good reasons, because the arguments compel it. This is of course almost entirely bogus, and here’s how I know that: On day one of your first class in normative ethics, you were either sympathetic or unsympathetic to consequentialism. Those sympathies almost certainly didn’t change by the end of the class. Since at the beginning of the class, you had no appreciation of the subtle arguments pro and con, those subtle arguments can’t really be what’s driving your view. Almost always, I find, we are immediately attracted to or repulsed by philosophical views – long before we really appreciate the arguments, long before we have a sense of what philosophers of different leanings consider to be fatal objections to our views – and those attractions and repulsions don’t change much over time. So why do you love (or hate) Kantian ethics? Why do you accept (or reject) compatibilism about free will? Why do you think metaphysical idealism has to be false? If it’s not a deep understanding of the arguments, what is it? I doubt you have much idea.

Schwitzgebel admits that even a suspiciously motivated view may end up being the correct one on a given question, but he thinks that the understanding we would gain as a result of trying empirically to discover the psychological roots of our various philosophical views and commitments would be valuable. To this end, he calls for an expansion in the activities of experimental philosophy.

Schwitzgebel thinks that this sort of enterprise -- the psychology of philosophy (rather than vice versa) -- is a subfield of philosophy that "has not been pursued seriously since the time of Nietzsche, James, and Dewey"; the time is ripe, he thinks, for it once more to be the focus of our attention.