How to Think Like a Philosopher

Take arguments seriously

My friend, author of the Philosophy Bear blog has a survey that you should fill out. If you could do that, it would be wonderful.

There are a lot of differences between philosophers and ordinary people. Many of these are mundane: philosophers are demographically non-representative in a whole host of ways, disproportionately highly educated, soon to have a disproportionate share of the hottest people on earth (once I become a philosopher), and so on. Yet more importantly, philosophers don’t think in the way ordinary people do. Philosophers—at least of the analytic variety¹—think in a much clearer and more rigorous way than most people.

Much of this has to do with the selection pressures inherent to philosophical academia. Philosophy selects for argumentophiles, those with an unhealthy obsession with arguments, those who would leave their spouse to run away with an argument, if only there was a sufficiently good argument for doing so. Being surprised that philosophers are better at thinking than others may be like marveling at professional basketball players being taller than average.

But I don’t think this is the whole story. Philosophy doesn’t just select for those who are already good at thinking—it makes people better at thinking. I recently watched a YouTube recording of a debate I had with Michael Huemer many years ago, before I had studied philosophy much. I was a disaster, massively confused, and unable to understand basic arguments. The main thing that’s changed since then is that I’ve thought hard about philosophy. And the same is true of others—those not exposed to philosophy are, especially when thinking about philosophical topics, as a general rule, deeply confused.

For instance, philosophers are much more likely than non-philosophers to avoid weighing in on topics—say, the desirability of some governmental policy—because coming to an educated guess about them would require resolving complex empirical disputes that they don’t know about. It’s far, far more common for philosophers to express agnosticism about, say, the cause of the Great Recession than the general population, because being equipped with general thinking skills makes one realize when they’re not in a position to accurately settle a controversy.

Now, no doubt lots of people think that their field is especially conducive clear thinking. But philosophy has a unique claim to this for two reasons. First, the best philosophers are less likely to believe crazy things without argument than the best of other fields. A philosopher wouldn’t, for instance, assert as Ehrman did, that the resurrection can’t happen because God wouldn’t break the laws of physics.

I cannot prove that the best philosophers are, on average, less confused than the best of other fields. But in my experience, it’s quite clearly true. An old post from

Richard Y Chappell

summarizes:

The Problem with Non-Philosophers

... is that they don't "get" reason. They don't know how to do it; they don't even realize why one should want to.* I generalize, of course, there are some exceptions. But for the most part, even intelligent non-philosophers** seem to lack the mental discipline required to follow a clear and logically rigorous argument. And that's a tragedy. It's something every kid should learn in school.

…

1) They don't understand that rational argument is a form of inquiry. This leads many to close their minds to the perceived "threat" of another's persuasion. They think it's all just a matter of opinion anyway, and so don't bother to seek the truth by challenging their own preconceived beliefs. This leads them to "argue" insincerely. So the perception of empty rhetoric can be sadly accurate when applied to other layfolk and partisans. (And don't get me started on politicians!)

2) They seem incapable of focusing on a particular argument. They don't realize that the only way to make progress is one step at a time. They tend to want to tackle everything about an issue all at once. So half-way through an argument, they will suddenly demand that you address some completely different point. (Especially if the previous argument wasn't going well for them. Perhaps this is related to the intellectual dishonesty mentioned in #1 above.)

3) Perhaps related to the above two points: they only care about conclusions, and not the quality of particular arguments for getting there. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that they'd endorse the argument: "The moon is made of green cheese, therefore [insert any conclusion they agree with]." But rational argument is one arena in which the ends do not justify the means.

4) They constantly fail to understand how a point (e.g. an analogy or thought experiment) fits in to a particular argument, and instead insist on applying it more broadly -- and then objecting when this irrelevant application fails! It's so frustrating.

Second, one would expect philosophy to imbue in its practitioners a general ability to think, just as one would expect journalism to imbue a general ability to writ. All philosophy is is thinking about tricky topics. That’s one commonality among basically all philosophical topics. Those who spend their days thinking and arguing about the topics specifically selected for being non-empirical yet tricky to think about will undoubtedly get pretty good at thinking generally.

It’s hard to break down the differences between the way philosophers and non-philosophers think in a complete way. Skills like thinking critically can rarely be reduced to a few pieces of concrete advice. But there are some important pieces of advice that are, I think, helpful in thinking like a philosopher.

One of the more important pieces of advice is that one should take arguments seriously. I’m putting it in bold to show how important it is. This is tragically rare. I remember watching the Huemer v. Sapolsky debate about free will. Huemer is, of course, a philosopher and Sapolsky is not. This fact showed throughout the debate. Huemer would give some argument with premises and conclusions, and then Sapolsky would, in response, riff on some topic related to what Huemer said but that’s ultimately non-responsive.

Non-philosophers often think simply reiterating their view is the same as addressing an argument. When it comes to free will, non-philosophers who deny it very rarely address the arguments made on behalf of free will. They just sort of reiterate their claim that it’s an illusion. My debate with Walter Block provides another good example of such a thing where he, for example, objects to thought experiments on the grounds of their unrealisticness and bizarrely brings up just law in response to claims of personal ethics.

Most people will not initially agree. The way to convince someone is to show them that things that are plausible conflict with their current views. In other words, to give an argument. Arguments are the only tool one can rationally use to convince another to abandon their views.

Another thing philosophers do more than most that improves their thinking: they think like bayesians. We have all sorts of flawed heuristics for deciding if views are true. Most people just sort of intuitively think about whether it seems plausible that some alternative to a view is true.

Instead, one should start by thinking about the plausibility of a view and then look at the evidence for it. Something is evidence for a view if it’s more strongly predicted on a view than on its negation. The reason to believe in evolution, for example, is that there are lots of facts that are more likely if evolution is true than if it’s false. A view can be the best view even if there are no pieces of very strong evidence—even if each piece of evidence has plausible alternative explanations—if there are enough pieces of evidence.

Lots of people—cough, cough—have extremely weird epistemological views. This seems especially common among atheists on the internet. Because they want to rule out all arguments for God, they construct these bizarre views about how we come to know things that rules out anyone knowing anything. For instance, it’s common to allege that arguments are God of the gap “fallacies.” But every time we reason from some evidence we’ll have a gap in our standing and a theory that plugs the gap.

There’s certainly more to thinking like a philosopher than just doing those things. But that’s all I can think of off the top of my head that’s easily distillable. So, for others, any other good pieces of advice in regards to thinking like a philosopher?

1. Taking seriously my moral obligation to needle the continentals at every opportunity. But in all seriousness, this is one reason continental philosophers annoy me. It seems like instead of learning, from philosophy, how to think well, they learn how to use big words to tautologously assert their ideology (often communist or something in the vicinity).