An Argument That Philosophers Should Communicate Better and Study Their Psychological Limitations

This was my senior thesis for my BA in philosophy. I wrote it in about 48 hours after spending a year or so thinking about what I wanted to write about, so while I am very happy with the main ideas in the essay, there are a lot of things about the explanation of my ideas that I'm not happy with and will be changing over time. There are many, many things in this essay that make me cringe when I see them.

Things to change

  • I say I define philosophy as "the love of wisdom", but I then use the word "philosopher" to refer to academic philosophers as opposed to "lovers of wisdom". So I'm kind of mixing two different definitions together.




Author: Nathan Wailes, Undergraduate Philosophy/Psychology Major
Intended Audience: The Philosophy Department of the College of New Jersey

Table of Contents

  • Table of Contents
  • Simplified Argument Map for This Paper
  • Introduction
  • The Overall Claims I Will Be Arguing For
  • A Description of the Structure of This Paper
  • Major Assumptions of This Paper
    • I Define Philosophy as the Love of Wisdom
    • My Use of the Word “Ought” Is Hypothetical, Not Categorical
  • Disclaimer
  • I. Philosophers aren’t as good as they should be at communicating their ideas, and ought to look to science for help.
    • I-1. Philosophers ought to be as good as possible at conveying their ideas to others.
      • I-1-1. Communicating well is an aspect of wisdom.
      • I-1-2. Even if it isn’t an aspect of wisdom, it is essential for the work of philosophers.
    • I-2. Philosophers aren’t as good as possible at conveying their ideas to others.
      • I-2-1. Works of philosophy either lack or contain poor in-text indicators of argument structure.
      • I-2-2. Works of philosophy either lack or contain poor tables of content.
      • I-2-3. Works of philosophy are almost never accompanied by an argument map.
      • I-2-4. Philosophers lack incentives to communicate their ideas as clearly as possible.
    • I-3. Scientific research can help philosophers become better at communicating ideas to others.
  • II. Philosophers are not as informed as they should be about humans’ limitations as rational agents, and ought to look to science for help.
    • II-1. Philosophers ought to be well-informed about humans’ limitations as rational agents.
    • II-2. Philosophers as a whole aren’t well-informed about humans’ limitations as rational agents.
      • II-2-1. Philosophers seem unconcerned about the fact that many philosophers’ views are correlated with those of their mentors.
      • II-2-2. Philosophers seem less concerned than they should be about the use of intuitions as a basis for philosophy.
      • II-2-3. Even Joshua Greene, a philosopher who arguably thinks more about human psychology than other philosophers, seems to err by placing undue emphasis on human rationality.
    • II-3. Scientific research can help philosophers better understand the limits of human wisdom/rationality.
  • Conclusion
  • References



Simplified Argument Map for This Paper

[I need to upload the graphic]

Introduction

The Overall Claims I Will Be Arguing For

In this paper I argue that philosophers are not spending enough time thinking about and applying the findings of psychology, economics, and other scientific research on human nature. I suspect that the two most contentious claims I make in support of this thesis are 1) philosophers are not as good as they should be at communicating their ideas, and 2) philosophers are not as informed as they should be about humans’ limitations as rational agents.

A Description of the Structure of This Paper

Since one of the major claims in my paper is that philosophers could be better at communicating their ideas, I will attempt to show how that might be done by using this paper as an example. I strongly recommend that you frequently refer to the attached argument map to get an overall view of how my different claims connect to each other in support of my thesis. I also strongly recommend using the table of contents to get an overall view of the order in which I discuss the various claims on my argument map, as well as to see sections that aren’t included on the argument map (such as this one).

That being said, I’ll now briefly describe the structure of my paper. As you can tell by referring to the table of contents, the paper will be broken into two major sections (I and II). The first major section will argue that philosophers aren’t as good as they should be at communicating their ideas, and ought to look to science for help. The second major section will argue that philosophers are not as informed as they should be about humans’ limitations as rational agents, and ought to look for science for help. My overall thesis is just the combination of those two claims.

Major Assumptions of this Paper

I Define Philosophy as the Love of Wisdom

I am going to define philosophy as the love of wisdom. This is what I think philosophy originally was and what it should continue to be. I don’t think philosophy should be the love of armchairs, or reflective equilibrium, or complex terminology. Accepting this definition may not be necessary to accept my thesis, but my arguments for why philosophers should be good communicators and know their limits as rational agents will be based on the premise that philosophers want to be wise (see sections I-1 and II-1).

My Use of the Word “Ought” Is Hypothetical, Not Categorical

In this paper I will be using the word “ought” in a hypothetical sense (as opposed to a categorical sense). Here’s an example of the hypothetical sense of “ought”: if Joe wants a pie, and paying a dollar will get Joe a pie, then Joe ought to pay a dollar. Here’s an example of the categorical use of “ought”: “Joe ought to donate his life savings to charity.” The hypothetical “ought” is dependent on an individual’s subjective values, whereas the categorical “ought” is not. See Greene (2002, p.220) for a brief discussion of this distinction.

Disclaimers

First: This paper should be seen as largely speculative; I don’t pretend to have all the answers, and I don’t believe that all philosophical writing should follow the structure of this paper (even though I offer this paper as an example of more explicit structure). My goal is simply to suggest that there may be certain areas in which philosophy can make significant improvements, and suggest some possible ways that these improvements could come about.

Second: This will not be a typical philosophy paper. I won’t be throwing around many fancy terms, or directly responding to any philosophical theories. The paper is more about how philosophy is conducted today. 

Section I. 
Philosophers aren’t as good as they should be at communicating their ideas, and ought to look to science for help.


I-1. Philosophers ought to be as good as possible at communicating ideas to others.

In this section I will argue that philosophers ought to be as good as possible at conveying wisdom to others. There are two reasons I will discuss in support of this claim. The first is that communicating well is an aspect of wisdom. The second is that even if it isn’t a type of wisdom, it is still essential for the work of philosophers. Some may see this argument as unnecessary, as they may think that most philosophers would be willing to grant that they ought to be good at conveying wisdom to others; however, I’m not so sure that philosophers believe it as strongly as they ought to, for reasons I will make clear in section I-2.

I-1-1. Communicating well is an aspect of wisdom

[note: this section is pretty awful; most of it is irrelevant]

I’m going to argue for this claim by appealing to your thoughts about Plato’s Socrates. Most people would agree that Plato’s Socrates is a supreme example of a wise man. Why? Well, in the Apology Socrates says that his wisdom consists in being “conscious of knowing practically nothing”. As Socrates put it, when referring to the craftsmen of Athens:

 

Quote:
…they knew things I did not know, and to that extent they were wiser than I. But, men of Athens, the good craftsmen seemed to me to have the same fault as the poets: each of them, because of his success at his craft, thought himself very wise in other most important pursuits, and this error of theirs overshadowed the wisdom they had, so that I asked myself, on behalf of the oracle, whether I should prefer to be as I am, with neither their wisdom nor their ignorance, or to have both. The answer I gave myself and the oracle was that it was to my advantage to be as I am. (22d-22e)

So Socrates was wise because he knew what he didn’t know. But I think most people would agree that that was not the limit of Socrates’ wisdom. He also possessed the incredible ability to engage someone in conversation, draw out all of that person’s beliefs, and then lead that person to see that one or more of his beliefs could not be true. This ability to communicate with others is probably Socrates’ most famous trait. If you would agree that that was an essential aspect of Socrates’ wisdom, then you should agree that communicating well is an essential aspect of wisdom.

I-1-2. Even if it isn’t a type of wisdom, it is essential for the work of philosophers

But let’s say you don’t agree that communicating well is a type of wisdom; you think it’s just a skill, like knowing a language, and you don’t consider such a skill to be a type of wisdom (unlike Socrates, who seemed to consider many things to be types of wisdom). Nevertheless, this skill is still essential for the work of philosophers. Philosophers deal in ideas. The ability to use a language may or may not be a kind of wisdom, but you can’t really do philosophy if you are unable to use a language. Likewise, even if the ability to communicate well isn’t wisdom, it remains essential for philosophers who are writing for an audience. So either way, philosophers ought to be as good as possible at communicating ideas to others.

I-2. Philosophers aren’t as good as possible at communicating ideas to others.

There are 4 reasons that I think support my claim. They are: 1. Works of philosophy either lack or contain poor in-text indicators of argument structure. 2. Works of philosophy either lack or contain poor tables of content. 3. Works of philosophy are almost never accompanied by an argument map. 4. Philosophers lack incentives to communicate their ideas as clearly as possible.

I-2-1. Works of philosophy either lack or contain poor in-text indicators of argument structure.

Open up an average work of philosophy and you will see one of two things: 1) the paper will be a string of paragraphs from beginning to end without any sub-headings, or 2) the paper will contain sub-headings, but the sub-headings won’t explicitly state the purpose of that section of the paper.

Examples of work without sub-headings: Quite a few (if not most) of the “classic” philosophy texts (Descartes, Nietzsche, Mill, etc.) lack explicit sub-headings within chapters; some contain double-paragraph-breaks or numbered sections, but I don’t consider those to be sub-headings. As for contemporary work: later in this paper I will discuss an article by Jaakko Hintikka (1999) titled “The Emperor’s New Intuitions”. Published in the prestigious Journal of Philosophy, this complicated paper contains not a single sub-heading within its 20 pages. Another example would be Judith Jarvis Thomson’s influential paper “A Defense of Abortion”. While she has 6 numbered sections, she doesn’t include an explicit heading describing the content of each section. The take-home point is that it is not unusual to see philosophy papers without sub-headings.

Examples of work with sub-headings that don’t explicitly state the purpose of their sections: Almost all philosophy papers that don’t fall into the first category fall into this second category. Most sub-headings simply state the concept discussed in that section of the paper rather than a full proposition; for example, most philosophers would probably have called this sub-section “In-text indicators of argument structure”. This is fine if the section discusses a broad variety of statements surrounding that idea, but then the author should consider using more sub-headings so that he can use propositions rather than nouns by themselves (which are less informative). I’ll discuss this more in the next section.

I will assume that my audience will grant that philosophy articles lack any other kind of explicit indicator of the argument’s structure (unless you count paragraph breaks). Such indicators, such as boxes surrounding a particular discussion or lines connecting two key phrases, always need to be written with pen by the reader of the article.

I-2-2. Works of philosophy either lack or contain poor tables of content.

I won’t spend time arguing that journal articles lack tables of content because I expect this will be obvious to my intended audience. I’ve never seen a journal article start with a list of the sub-headings contained within the article itself.

Regarding books – The problem with sub-headings that I identified above carries over to tables of content in books: chapter and sub-section titles almost never form a proposition. Instead the author uses a few words that describe the basic ideas discussed within a section. The problem is that while this may be an acceptable mnemonic aid for the author and those who are familiar with a text, it is not as helpful for someone who is not familiar with a text.

Example of a book with less-than-ideal tables of content: Joshua Greene’s dissertation has sections that could easily be reworded to be much more helpful to his readers. In one section he argues that moral realism requires “Fundamental Moral Principles”. But rather than labeling the section “Moral realism requires Fundamental Moral Principles”, he names it “Moral Realism and Fundamental Moral Principles”. He has another section in which he argues that analytic naturalism cannot be true, but rather than calling the section “Analytic Naturalism Cannot Be True”, he simply calls the section “Analytic Naturalism”. This pattern of naming is standard in works of philosophy.

Objection: Using declarative sentences would make the section titles too long and cumbersome! 

Response: I’ll be the first to admit that declarative sentences don’t make aesthetically pleasing section/chapter names. In fact they are usually long to the point of being somewhat cumbersome. But what you get in return is far more valuable: First, you gain the ability to quickly remind yourself of the main claim being argued for in a section. Second, you gain the ability to see the argument from a bird’s eye perspective by simply reading the table of contents.

Objection: If a person wants a bird’s eye perspective of the argument, they should read the book’s introduction/abstract! Response: An introduction and abstract are very helpful, but I think it would nonetheless be far easier for people to learn the structure of an argument if they were constantly confronted with it. This is an empirical claim that I must admit having no evidence for aside from my own experience, but I think most people would agree with it. In any case, experiments should be done to test the effectiveness of more explicit tables of content (as I argue later). 

I-2-3. Works of philosophy are almost never accompanied by an argument map.

What an argument map is: Argument maps are visual representations of the structure of an argument. Claims are contained within boxes and connected to other claims with arrows showing the relationship between them (e.g. one claim being a reason for accepting another claim, or an objection to that claim). They can exist in various degrees of complexity; the argument map I have developed for this paper is an extremely basic type.

The fact that philosophy journals/books are almost never accompanied by an argument map should be obvious to my audience. What may be less obvious is the benefit that argument maps have in aiding the communication of ideas; see section I-3 for my discussion of this benefit.

I-2-4. Philosophers lack incentives to communicate their ideas as clearly as possible.

One of the major ideas in economic theory is that a person’s behavior (or a company’s behavior) can largely be predicted by the incentives they are faced with. So, for example, if a company is subsidized by the government then they will have less incentive to reduce costs, and thus they will be much more likely to operate in an inefficient way. I think philosophers are subject to incentives just as much as any other industry, and they should be aware of the effect it has on their behavior.

To prove my point I will compare philosophers with textbook authors and book translators. Philosophers in academia have a very large incentive to come up with original ideas, because you need an original idea in order to get your paper published; you can’t just say exactly the same thing as someone else, but in a better way. But compare this with textbook authors and translators: the success of a textbook or translation is not as much dependent on the material contained within the book as it is on the effectiveness of the book at conveying that information to its readers. Thus, textbook authors and translators will have a huge incentive to communicate their material as effectively as possible, while philosophers will have less of an incentive.

Objection: Philosophers do compete on the basis of clarity: two philosophers may write about the same thing, but one philosopher may be so badly written that his work is never published (or if it’s published, it’s never cited by other philosophers). Response: I agree to an extent, but I still think that philosophers lack the level of incentive that textbook authors and translators have. A philosophy paper can be merely adequately clear and become successful based on the significance of the idea that it discusses; a textbook or translation’s success is much more dependent on its form, as the content is roughly the same among competing books.

I think what really proves this sub-section’s point are the differences you see between the way textbooks are presented and the way works of philosophy are presented. Textbooks contain frequent explicit (boxed and bullet-pointed) reminders of the overall points of various sections, frequent visual aids, key vocabulary words defined in the margins, glossaries, and a whole host of other little innovations designed to make it easier for people to learn the material. Works of philosophy are much more drab.

Objection: Works of philosophy move at a much faster pace than textbooks and deal with much more complicated ideas; it simply isn’t possible to reduce such material into simplistic headings and boxed summaries. Response: I disagree. Calculus and chemistry are also complicated subjects, but the textbooks written for their students nonetheless contain mnemonic aids in the form of explicit indicators of structure, boxed summaries, etc. The real difference between philosophers and authors of those textbooks, as I said above, are the incentives they are faced with.

Objection: Works of philosophy are written for other philosophers, while textbooks are written for non-specialists. It would be inefficient for philosophers to spend so much effort making their work more accessible to non-specialists who would never read the article anyway. Response: I disagree. Humans are human, and mnemonic aids that make the structure of the work explicit will benefit whoever reads it, regardless of their level of expertise. Once again, I think the real predictor of the philosophers’ behavior is the incentive they are faced with. Philosophers simply don’t have as much of an incentive to communicate their ideas as clearly as possible.

I-3. Scientific research can help philosophers become better at communicating ideas to others.

In this section I will argue that science can help philosophers become better at communicating ideas to others. I’m using the term “science” pretty broadly here to mean any kind of systematic empirical investigation. So, for example, a survey asking people for their thoughts about X could fall under my discussion.

I-3-1. Argument mapping has already been shown to increase comprehension of arguments

In his 2004 paper “Argument Maps Improve Critical Thinking”, Charles Twardy discusses the findings of his own research on the effectiveness of argument mapping at teaching students critical thinking. He found that argument mapping was far more effective than other methods, “more than tripling the absolute gains” of those other methods. I’ll acknowledge up front that his empirical evidence is not directly supportive of my claim (as he was using argument mapping to teach critical thinking rather than having students comprehend a new work of philosophy). However, given the results of this study, I don’t think it will be a stretch for people to imagine that a future study may find that presenting students with an argument map would result in much faster learning of the argument than if the argument were presented in prose.

I-3-2. Future experiments could be used to develop effective techniques for communicating wisdom between philosophers.

There are a whole host of future experiments that could be conducted by philosophers and psychologists in an attempt to develop an effective way of communicating wisdom/ideas between people. Such work could start off by evaluating the strategies that textbooks use to aid the memory and seeing if philosophers could benefit by using such techniques in their own work.

Certain philosophical institutions could even be tasked with coming up with a set of guidelines that philosophers could use when writing their papers; such a responsibility would be similar to that fulfilled by the American Psychological Association in printing their Publication Manual. I understand that journals have their own standards; the purpose of this institution would be to make recommendations for new standards based on empirical research.

Section II. 
Philosophers are not as informed as they should be about humans’ limitations as rational agents, and ought to look for science for help.


II-1. Philosophers ought to know about humans’ limitations as rational agents.

Much of my discussion in section I-1 regarding the ability to communicate well can simply be carried over to this section. Self-knowledge is perhaps the most universally accepted aspect of wisdom, with the famous aphorism “Know Thyself” being attributed to the very first Greek philosophers. I don’t expect that this claim will be very contentious; I expect that most philosophers would agree that philosophers ought to know about humans’ limitations as rational agents. But as my later criticisms will show, I don’t think philosophers quite grasp the full importance of self-knowledge, and so I’d like to briefly argue that it is perhaps the most important type of wisdom for a philosopher.

To do this I will simply draw an analogy to another vocation in the world. If you want to be an aircraft pilot, you need to have an in-depth understanding of the internal workings of planes before you can get your license to fly; there is a mandatory knowledge test, and if you don’t know how the plane works, you don’t get your license. Students learn about the process of combustion, the reason the wing is shaped the way it is, and even how each of the instruments work. This is important information for a pilot, because if (for example) a particular instrument isn’t functioning correctly, it will be the pilots who know how the instrument works that will most easily identify the problem and correct it. For example, knowing that a particular instrument ceases to work correctly if it becomes cold will allow you to adjust the heat going to that instrument until it begins working correctly again. If someone wants to be a great pilot, he will go even further in his studies of the inner-workings of the plane (rather than, for example, trying to get better by just flying more).

Just as a pilot’s primary piece of equipment is his plane, a philosopher’s primary piece of equipment is his mind, brain, ability to reason, etc. And just as a pilot ought to know exactly how his plane’s instruments work so that he can identify and correct malfunctions of the instrument, a philosopher ought to know exactly how his mind works so that he can identify and correct problems that may arise in his thought-processes. Self-knowledge is of paramount importance for a philosopher.

II-2. Philosophers as a whole aren’t well-informed about humans’ limitations as rational agents.

I expect this to be the most contentious claim in my paper, and so I’ll spend quite a bit of time discussing my reasons for believing it.

II-2-1 Philosophers seem less concerned than they should be about the fact that many philosophers’ views are correlated with those of their mentors.

I’m going to start this section by acknowledging that I don’t have any hard empirical evidence for this claim. It’s based purely on my discussions with philosophers.
If philosophers were truly concerned with the limits of human wisdom and the causes of their own beliefs, you would expect them to be more concerned about the possibility that many philosophers tend to hold beliefs similar to those of their mentors in graduate school. 

The reason they ought to be concerned is that such a pattern would call into question whether or not those philosophers’ views are based on reason or merely circumstance. If I would believe utilitarianism is true if had I gone to graduate school X, and deontology was true had I gone to school Y, what does that say about my ability to use reason to come to an objective conclusion?
This kind of bias is often seen outside of the philosophical realm: people very often end up holding similar views about various topics (e.g. religion, politics, etc.) as those who surround them while they are developing their beliefs. Within the philosophical realm, it can be seen as far back as Melissus’ holding bizarre metaphysical views that were practically the same as those of his mentor, Parmenides (Plato 1997).

In my undergraduate career as a philosophy major, I can’t recall anyone bringing up this fact as a source of major concern. And I couldn’t find the subject discussed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I can only conclude that this is not a major topic of discussion by philosophers; and thus if it is true that this correlation exists, and if it is true that most philosophers know about it, I can only conclude that that philosophers are less concerned than they should be about it.

II-2-2 Philosophers seem less concerned than they should be about the use of intuitions as a basis for philosophy. 

In his 1999 paper “The Emperor’s New Intuitions”, Jaakko Hintikka offers a thorough critique of the use of intuitions in philosophy. Tracing the history of their use and recent popularity, he argues that the “vast majority” of contemporary philosophers seem to have used intuitions without a proper justification. If Hintikka is correct, what seems to have happened is that philosophers simply became caught up in a fad, with everyone assuming that the method was justified based on the fact that everyone else was using them as well. This sort of behavior is quite common in humans; in fact, it’s part of the reason that we’re in a global financial crisis right now. People simply assumed that certain financial practices were safe based on the fact that everyone around them was doing it; but in fact it turned out that these practices were not safe, and few people realized it before it was too late.

What’s disturbing is that the philosophical community doesn’t seem to be very disturbed by all of this. Hintikka himself doesn’t seem to realize the larger psychological implications of his argument, instead limiting his recommendations to a moratorium on papers that use intuitions without an explicit basis:

 

Quote:
Unfortunately, the vast majority of appeals to intuition by contemporary philosophers cannot be conceived as controlled thought experiments nor be justified by recasting them as such. In view of such goings-on, I am tempted to suggest, half-jokingly—but only half-jokingly—that the editors of philosophy journals agree to a moratorium on all papers in which intuitions are appealed to, unless the basis of those appeals is made explicit. (1999)

If it’s true that philosophers are subject to less-than-rational fads, the philosophical community ought to be a bit more concerned about the implications of these tendencies on their ability to engage in rational reflection.

II-2-3 Even Joshua Greene, a philosopher who arguably thinks more about human psychology than other philosophers, seems to err by placing undue emphasis on human rationality.

I’ll start by providing some background information. Joshua Greene is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard University with a PhD in Philosophy from Princeton; he conducts fMRI studies in which he scans participants’ brains while they make moral decisions. What he’s found is that moral decisions activate two different parts of the brain, and each of the two areas corresponds to a different type of moral decision. Activation in the prefrontal cortex is associated with “characteristically utilitarian” decisions, and activation in more ancient, emotionally-driven parts of the brain is associated with “characteristically deontological” decisions. Greene has argued that these findings should lead us to the conclusion that moral realism is merely a rationalization of evolutionarily-determined motivations to behave in one way or another (e.g. “save this baby” or “punish that man”).

Greene begins “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul” (2007) with the observation that people often believe things for reasons unknown to them:

 

Quote:
There is a substantial and growing body of evidence suggesting that much of what we do, we do unconsciously, and for reasons that are inaccessible to us (Wilson, 2002). In one experiment, for example, people were asked to choose one of several pairs of pantyhose displayed in a row. When asked to explain their preferences, people gave sensible enough answers, referring to the relevant features of the items chosen—superior knit, sheerness, elasticity, etc. However, their choices had nothing to do with such features because the items on display were in fact identical. People simply had a preference for items on the right-hand side of the display (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). What this experiment illustrates—and there are many, many such illustrations—is that people make choices for reasons unknown to them and they make up reasonable-sounding justifications for their choices, all the while remaining unaware of their actual motives and subsequent rationalizations. (Greene 2007)

But Greene doesn’t seem to consider the full implications of these findings. In his dissertation, he spends the first half of the paper arguing that moral realism is false and that humans believe in moral realism for reasons unknown to them. But then he spends the last part of the paper arguing that many of the problems of the world are a result of these rationalizations, and that these conflicts could be solved if only we could make people realize that moral realism is false. And that to do that, he thinks we should give them books to read:

 

Quote:
“Here. You might find this book on evolutionary psychology interesting. It offers biologically based explanations of many important aspects of the human experience, from love to violence to morality.” Now you’ve got a chance. The topics are inherently interesting, and the arguments are compelling once you get into them. (Greene 2002)

This is Greene’s big mistake. If we’re going to agree that people usually act for reasons they’re unaware of, and that these theories of moral realism and religion are just a superficial dressing of deeper causes for behavior, then why should we try to solve the problem by engaging people at a superficial level? Wouldn’t it be smarter to suggest that we engage people at whatever level they are most likely to respond at? 

Example: Let’s say your goal is to get a particular population to become moral anti-realist. You do research and see that belief in moral realism is correlated with certain social variables, and that after a certain age one’s belief tends to become harder to change. In order to change that population’s moral beliefs, wouldn’t it be smarter to simply try to change the social variables that tend to determine those beliefs?

I’m not saying that the superficial level is completely unimportant, but it certainly seems as though the bigger factors are below the surface. If someone asked me for the best way to reduce the tension in Ireland between Protestants and Catholics, engaging them at the rational level would probably be further down on my list. More important would be helping the population out of poverty, ensuring that they have access to a good education system (to stay out of poverty), and exposing them to individuals of different cultures (preferably from a young age).

The more significant point to be seen here is that even Joshua Greene, who is a bit of a rebel in the philosophical community for his use of psychological research to disregard whole swaths of philosophy, seems to be over-emphasizing the use of rational interaction and under-emphasizing the use of non-rational methods in changing a person’s mind about an issue. This makes me wonder what the rest of the philosophical community is thinking.

Objection: “You’re criticizing our ability to influence each other through prose on the one hand, and saying that our prose isn’t good enough on the other! And you’re making both of these arguments through prose!” Response: I don’t think that prose is useless; however I also don’t think it is the main reason people end up believing what they believe. That said, I don’t think I contradict myself in saying that philosophers ought to spend more time thinking about how to make their writing easier for people to parse; better writing is more persuasive writing, even if it still isn’t as persuasive as other methods.

II-3. Scientific research can help philosophers better understand the limits of human wisdom/rationality.

I don’t expect that this claim will be very contentious at this point; Joshua Greene’s research and the work of other psychologists seem to provide ample evidence that science (and specifically, psychology) will be able to help philosophers gain a better understanding of how their minds work, how they come to believe things, and perhaps even what wisdom truly consists of.

I would like to point out that this has already started to happen to an extent. I’ve already discussed Joshua Greene’s research, but Shaun Nichols is another example of a philosopher who has leaned heavily on scientific research to better understand the nature of human reasoning. In 2002 Nichols had an article published in the Monist titled “How Psychopaths Threaten Moral Rationalism, or Is It Irrational to Be Amoral?” In that article Nichols discusses psychological research that has found that while psychopaths seem to have all of the faculties we associate with “reason” and “rationality”, they do not have the intuitions that the rest of us have about right and wrong. Nichols sees this split between rationality and a moral sense as very strong evidence against the idea of moral rationalism—the idea that morality is based on reason or rationality. This use of scientific research by a philosopher is a good example of what I think needs to happen on a much broader scale.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have argued that philosophers are not spending enough time thinking about and applying the findings of psychology, economics, and other scientific research on human nature. I sought to show this by establishing two main claims: 1) philosophers are not as good as they should be at communicating their ideas, and 2) philosophers are not as informed as they should be about humans’ limitations as rational agents.

This paper raises some serious questions about the rationality of humans and the use of writing and discussion to change another person’s view of the world. I honestly can’t introspect and conclude that my beliefs are based on evidence I’ve rationally reflected on and not based on more complicated factors outside of my conscious reflection. But rather than become agitated, I think back to Socrates, and consider that perhaps true wisdom is found in honest doubt. 


References

Greene, J. D. (2002). The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What to Do About It. Department of Philosophy, Princeton University.
Greene, J. D. (2007). The secret joke of Kant's soul, in Moral Psychology, Vol. 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Disease, and Development, W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Ed., MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Hintikka, J. (1999). The Emperor’s New Intuitions, in The Jounal of Philosophy, Vol 96, No. 3, March. 127-147.
Nichols, S. 2002. How Psychopaths Threaten Moral Rationalism: Is It Irrational to Be Amoral? The Monist, 85, 285-304. 
Plato (1997). The Apology, in Plato: Complete Works, J. M. Cooper, Ed., Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, IN, 17-36.
Thomson, J. J. (2004). A Defense of Abortion, in Morality in Practice, 7th Ed. James P. Sterba.,127-135.
Twardy, C. R. (2004). Argument Maps Improve Critical Thinking. Teaching Philosophy 27:22, 95-116.