When I was an arrogant highschooler thinking I was smarter than everyone else, I used to subscribe to this false quote of Aristotle’s: it is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it. I have been thinking a lot about the entertainment of thoughts lately, drafting and deleting numerous blog posts. I still don’t know if I’ve found the perspective I’ve been looking for, but here’s another attempt.
Philosophers often overestimate their ability to rationally entertain a number of ideas they do not hold, sometimes even the entire possibility space of ideas. It is not simply the fact that they are wrong about this that is problematic. It is even not simply the fact that one needs to possess incredible privilege in order to entertain certain ideas they don’t hold that is problematic. Rather, it is the interaction of the two and the recognition of neither that is the problem. I’ll (try to) explain.
A view from nowhere
In a recent conference I helped organize, Talia Bettcher presented (among other things) a very interesting framework concerning the question of “what is philosophy”. She started by observing, by looking at works of Bertrand Russell and Graham Priest, a commonly held view that philosophy is the questioning of the ordinary. The idea is that the pre-philosophical person is at ease with the world; as they start to adopt a critical point of view and question the common sense, they realize that the world is actually very confusing. I am aware of this perspective, of course, and agree with Bettcher that it is quite prevalent. Bettcher then points out that this perspective — that philosophy is primarily critical — relies on a key assumption, namely, “the pre-philosophical person is at ease with the world”, which simply is not true for many of us. She thereby distinguishes two kinds of philosophies, pristine philosophy vs. ground-bound philosophy, to describe the view “from the outside” vs. the view from the struggle of the everyday.
A very nice illustration of this dynamic is presented by a recent exchange featured in Daily Nous’s mini heap. Basically, there has been a graduate student worker strike at Chicago University as a part of an ongoing attempt to unionize. A philosophy professor, Agnes Callard, has crossed the picket line and written a reflective piece on civility, freedom of thought, and persuasion. Objectively speaking, it is actually a very nicely written piece (I think, though many may disagree) on the conflicts between respecting other perspectives and dealing with real problems on which consensus must be achieved. Overall, it is an elegant, sophisticated, and abstract journey through philosophical ideas.
One of the striking students, David Kretz, has written a response. In stark contrast to Callard’s piece where one may very easily lose track of what it’s supposed to be talking about, Kretz’s response is much more flesh-and-blood. He talks about receiving food and water from undergraduate students, coordinating graduate students from different disciplines, walking the picket line 10 hours a day, negotiating with administrators, etc. He talks about things he and others have done, people they’ve met, causes they’ve decided to fight for, challenges they’ve encountered. There is very little higher-level reflections or abstract principles.
There is a sense in which abstract, detached, “objective” reflections are important. Indeed, many believe that philosophy should be all about it. And I don’t actually disagree. But there is also a very important sense in which this perspective is a luxury for many people. A tenured professor can think through the ethics of strikes carefully and abstractly, and very little hinges on which answer she decides on or whether she is right about it. A graduate student without health insurance who barely makes enough money to cover rent but has recently discovered a costly health problem, however, does not have this luxury, since one of the two sides may very well mean a literal endanger of their life.
Of course, the fact that some interested party (let’s call it the ground-bound party) cannot entertain both sides does not necessarily mean that the other party (let’s call it the pristine party) is not arguing fairly. Instead, the problem comes when the reason that the pristine party can argue fairly is that they lack certain important epistemic resources. While I don’t want to claim that one can never argue fairly about X unless one has X-related experiences, I do think it’s largely true that 1) people who have trouble arguing about X abstractly tend to be those with X-related experiences and stakes, and 2) X-related experiences and stakes often put one in a better epistemic position to argue about X. Consequently, people who have no trouble arguing abstractly about X tend to be those who are epistemically less well positioned regarding X.
Seeing all sides
Worse still, when one party cannot argue objectively and the other cannot argue fairly, the first party’s limitations are usually more visible. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps this is a side effect of the academic taboo over conflicts of interest — that we think only a party with no stake in the debate can approach it in the right way. Perhaps this is a carry-over of the false reason-emotion dichotomy, where an emotional person cannot possibly be equally or more rational as an emotionless person, no matter what the discussion is about.
It is perhaps also because ground-bound parties tend to be ones that have been marginalized in various ways — which is precisely why they cannot argue objectively about certain topics. On the other hand, pristine parties who have no obstacles entertaining all sides tend to be politically secure. Sure, they may collectively make more mistakes because they don’t have first-hand experiences with the subjects but, as said earlier, it doesn’t matter if they make mistakes. It doesn’t affect them.
I recently encountered an episode that makes this dynamic painfully clear to me. Someone made a remark about a group of people of which I am a member but this person isn’t. The remark does not appear at all informed and also strikes me as false. I shared it with my friends from the same affected group and they all agree that it is not well informed and not true. However, none of us dares to raise this as a challenge because none of us is politically secure enough to criticize this person in public. I don’t even dare to speak of it here in any more specific terms.
Is this person right? I don’t know, as I’m also not an expert on the subject. But there is a sense in which the extremely low-effort stab at a topic which may deeply affect the lives of people who’re much less powerful is a background power imbalance worth recognizing, whether or not the point is in fact correct. One cannot possibly, in good conscience, pretend that this imbalance does not at all affect the epistemic lanscape of these debates.
Aside from this background power imbalance, there is the standard of persuasion. What is the kind of justification appropriate for persuasion or non-persuasion? What are good reasons or bad ones? This is another point at which ground-bound parties run into trouble. Aside from a few philosophers with experience in X who also specialize in X philosophy, many people with experience in X do not specialize in X. They therefore may have trouble articulating sophisticated reasons for or against a position, other than “this has/hasn’t been my experience”, which is as hollow as philosophical argumentation goes. Their opponent, however, also often without sophisticated reasoning, is not held to the same standard, because the opponent is the question-raiser, not an answer-defender. A judge at a swimming contest does not need to have won the gold medal. A person who asks “why is this not such-and-such?” does not need to provide an argument for thinking that it should be such-and-such. At least not a good one. The burden of persuasion is on the defence team.
Coincidentally, I have also had experience on this front. Again, the person in question has much greater political power than myself and my friends, and does not belong to the group that is affected by debates on the topic. In our many attempts at getting our point across, the angle “this is you doing harm to me and let me disclose to you all of my sufferings as one human to another” did not work. Practical suggestions with well thought-out proposals did. So did an abstract argument from another unaffected ally.
The entertainment of ideas
Let us return to the thought that one can — indeed, ought to — entertain all ideas in the abstract and objective. In a (for lack of a better word) cathartic article (that I also came across through Daily Nous’s mini heap), Joshua Moufawad Paul writes,
This is a world in which unsubstantiated opinion is treated as logical simply because those peddling this opinion know how to speak in the language of analytic philosophy––and thus don’t have to do any research beyond self-reflection.
He specifically attacks the phenomenon I briefly described earlier — that many philosophers believe that they can, through the power of careful thought alone, entertain all sorts of ideas they have no expertise in.
I have suggested that one needs to possess incredible privilege in order to entertain certain ideas objectively. The privilege comes in two folds: first is the emotional distance that allows one to adopt the stance of a “disinterested third party”; second is “to speak in the language of analytic philosophy”, as Paul puts it, or the ability and willingness to use abstract argumentation that makes little reference to worldly contexts.
However, it is not that the possession of the privilege is itself intrinsically bad. It is only bad when one does not acknowledge the existence of the privilege or the epistemic disadvantage associated with it.
“Debate me,” says the pristine philosopher, “express your view in full rationality and sophistication, and I may very well be persuaded.”
“I can’t,” says the ground-bound philosopher, “I cannot emotionally bear the journey, physically bear the consequences of losing such a debate, or politically bear the risk of offending you.”
Except the ground-bound philosopher is rarely allowed to voice such a thing. Instead, they smile and remain silent. “My view is thus correct,” triumphs the pristine philosopher, “careful thought is, after all, the ultimate arbiter of truth.”
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