Ep. 354: Guest Tim Williamson on Philosophic Method (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 354, part 2. We've been talking to Tim Williamson about the first chapters of his book Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy. Been comparing philosophy and science. We've had many philosophy of science episodes and two of them were about Karl Popper on the one hand and Imre Lakatos on the other hand, which you bring up in your book, that Popper had this idea that seemed very revolutionary at the time, you know, that we can't actually prove he was talking about science. But, you know, whenever we read these, we always try to apply them to philosophy.

0:43 Seth: Right.

0:43 Mark: And he was very explicit about something like Karl Marx's. Oh, that you might have thought that was. Marx might be presenting his theory as philosophical, but the fact that it is not falsifiable, that there's no possible counterexample, no historical prediction, that when it doesn't happen, then you say, oh, I guess we were wrong about this whole thing, we'll throw it away if it was true. You know, we don't really have those requirements for philosophy. But even with science, as Lakatos then pointed out, no, it's not that one counterexample disproves the theory and we throw it away.

It's that, well, maybe that was bad data. There's so many different things you could change about it. And it's just when it becomes. When you have what you've called overfitting, when you have given an existing theory, we've had to patch it up in so many places, that the Ptolemaic theory, the original geocentric theory, that everything goes around the Earth, that there were so many things that couldn't make sense of in terms of the actual observed orbits, that people were having to make increasingly elaborate theories to say that maybe we should just throw away that at a certain point you would just want to throw away that theory altogether.

But it's a judgment call, you know, whether you're going to just keep patching it up. So it's an art, not a science, I guess, when you move to a different paradigm. So, yeah. Can you say a little how this applies to philosophy and how heuristics and overfitting fit into this?

1:59 Tim: Yeah. So the kind of crude version of Hobbes view is that you can just kill a scientific theory with a single observation like you have the theory that all swans are white, and then you see a black swan, and that kills the theory. And I think philosophers of science have generally agreed that it's never as simple as that. As you were explaining. I mean, you know, for a start, there might be a question about whether what you saw actually really was a swan and so on. And philosophers do sometimes seem to be using some kind of analog of, you know, a kind of crude Popperian falsificationism where they think one counterexample kills a theory.

So, for example, there's a theory that's kind of in somewhere on the borders between metaphysics and logic that I'm sympathetic about what makes properties different from each other. And so, you know, it's a view on which, if it's necessary that, you know, whatever has property P has property Q and vice versa, then that just means that P and Q are the very same property. And then, you know, a kind of counterexample that some people would think just kills that is that they would say, oh, but what about trilaterality and triangularity? Because, you know, one of those is property of having three angles.

One is the property of having three sides. And, you know, if we define it right, then those are necessarily equivalent. But they still seem, you know, people say, but they're still different properties because one of them is to do with angles and one has to do with sides, you know, and then they would use that as a counter example to kill the theory that necessarily equivalent properties are simply the same property. And, you know, without thinking about, well, where's this judgment that triangularity and trilaterality are different properties?

Where's it really coming from? You know, is it safe? And so on. And I think one thing that goes on in science is that you generally don't abandon a theory until you have a better theory that you can go to. And, you know, in the case of the. The geocentric theory, it wasn't just that people were, you know, it was getting more and more complicated. And then people were thinking, oh, let's just abandon this. It's getting way too complicated. It was that there was the alternative theory where the whole solar system goes around the sun, the heliocentric theory, and that was being developed.

And it was turned out that that actually simplified the whole theory of the solar system a lot. And so it was the point at which the heliocentric theory was just doing manifestly better than the geocentric theory. That was the key point. And so it's, in a way, you don't have to agonize too much about whether to abandon a theory or not. The important thing is that there should be some people who are working on the new theory and developing it as well as they can, and of course other people doing their best best for the old theory. And on the whole, in the long run, it becomes clear which of them is doing better.

You know, so that there are times when it seems too close to call. You can just let these different theories of, you know, paradigms and Thomas Kuhn's phrase, you can let them both be developed and you know, the hope is that the one of them at some point will emerge as just decisively way ahead of the other, so that you can wait until it's pretty easy to choose between them and you know, what you're hoping for is a theory that will be explain the data at least equally well and will be at least as informative as the other theory and simpler, more elegant, those kind of things.

So it's not so much a kind of a judgment about a theory in isolation. Should we keep it or should we dump it? It's more a matter of how we compare different theories and then we can just go on working on the two sides can each go on working on their favorite theory until it's relatively easy to choose.

5:53 Seth: So can we as a group here agree that any theory that requires six year olds to have the same level of linguistic and conceptual competency as a trained lawyer or philosopher falls into the category of not acceptable, not right? That if you give me a competing theory that describes the inner workings of a child's mind, talking about truth conditions and this sort of thing, then I should be able to say, I'll just stick with gettier. I'm happy with that.

6:25 Wes: Well, the inner workings are very complicated though, psychologically and cognitively. So you may say conceptual analysis. I don't want a complicated conceptual analysis of what something means. That doesn't mean that the phenomenon isn't actually complicated. And in the case of Grice, that just describes theory of mind. Right? We're not thinking, oh, I know that, he knows that, I know that you know, but that's what's going on. It's not happening consciously, but it's happening tacitly.

6:51 Seth: Okay, I was trying to make a joke, but unfortunately.

6:53 Wes: I know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but

6:57 Mark: this is all very relevant in terms of what are we actually doing that?

7:01 Seth: Yes.

7:02 Mark: Are we explaining, as you're saying, what's doesn't even implicitly in people's mind? You don't want to overload. Like, you know, that we have evolved as organisms to have really complicated processing. If we can give an equally legitimate response, that makes it much simpler. But.

7:18 Seth: Well, I want to get back to Tim's. I want to bring in the, you know, the example and also get back, back to Tim's point because there's something fundamentally interesting to me going on here, right? So he just talked about the paradigm shift and the Kuhnian thing. We read Lakatos and who was the other guy we read? I can't remember who else. So the idea of, like, you don't just discard a theory when you get at a quote, unquote counterexample, and there's a utility factor. The theory is covering a lot of ground and you don't. You get rid of it when you have a competing theory that covers all that ground and more or something like that.

7:52 Wes: And the dynamic predictive, new predictive power as well.

7:55 Seth: New predictive powers. Pick your criteria. But there has to be some level of equivalency between the old and the new, and the new has to give you something in addition to it. But dynamically, when you think about how it works in philosophy, right, there's no way we can get to that new theory without going through some level of the iterations of methodology that you get in analytic philosophy. Because somebody has to raise a counterexample. Somebody has to come up with a different point of view and then say, oh, well, there's this counterexample that disproves or shows the inadequacy, the explanatory inadequacy of the existing theory.

So I'm going to propose something that captures the original and expands and it counts for this counterexample. And there's two issues here. The first issue is, well, do I even think that's a counterexample? Do I agree with that counterexample? Do I have the same intuition? And, you know, in the Gettier examples, it always seems you always end up in a place. It's like comments on the Internet or ethical problems.

8:55 Wes: It's.

8:55 Seth: You only have to have like seven. You have about seven minutes of conversation and somebody's going to say nazi, right? That's ethics for you. And if you are talking about something like epistemology, you're only going to have about seven counterexamples before you get to aliens or some supernatural phenomenon. You know, like to say, oh, well, every, you know, the evil demon, right? You get to the evil demon eventually. And I'm just like, that's not a real counter. That's just stupid. Like, why would you even bring that up? It's not legitimate data.

It's not a legitimate counterexample. And in the case of talking about the heuristic, if you think of Gettier as a heuristic, or if you think of your white swan, black swan example, say, like, oh, all swans are white. Well, there's a black swan. So all swans as white as false. And I say, no, all swans are white except the black ones. Unless. Except there's. We have a phrase in English, the exception that proves the rule, right?

9:50 Tim: Yes. Although what that phrase actually means is another manipulate.

9:55 Seth: But we have. You're right to point out this is the way our brains work. We're fine with rules that have exceptions. So what would happen if you said, like, somebody says, oh, well, here's the counterexample, and you say, no, it's not a counterexample. My rule's still good. That's just the exception to. But in the case of philosophy, you could come up with an infinite number of exceptions that are more and more outlandish. There seems to be a level at which you would want to say, here's the counterexample that falls into the realm of common sense discourse or common, you know, like it. You have to somehow qualify what the phenomena or the thing you're trying to address to fit it into the set of things that you actually want the rule to cover, because you don't want the rule to cover exceptions.

10:39 Tim: I mean, I think what we're used to at a common sense level is working with generic generalizations where we say things tend to be a certain way that ducks can swim as a generic generalization. But there may be some duck which suffers from some awful disease which make renders it unable to swim. And so in that sense, we're not insisting on completely exceptionless generalizations. But whereas scientific laws are supposed to be exceptionless, it's not enough that they work most of the time. I mean, you know, there's a difference between a rule of thumb, which kind of is, you know, as a generic generalization, holds, but isn't exceptionless, and a rule that.

Where you're just claiming that all the exceptions are actually illusions or something like that. You know, I think that in the swans that were all swans are white, what you'd be talking about is some kind of retreat from offering an exceptionless generalization to just offering what's supposed to be, you know, a generic generalization of what you mean.

11:44 Seth: It feels like the move to a counterexample, like, you know, John is justified in thinking that Fred is in New York City and Fred isn't. You know, it's whatever think of your counterexample is not dissimilar to. Well, I have been mistaken by seeing an object in my visual field while I was awake that wasn't actually there. So I can't trust any of my sense perception and I could just as well be dreaming. It's almost like creating counterexamples that intentionally disprove the rule is almost like coming up. It's that whole. It's falling back on that notion of we have to start with the absolutely certain and then do the Cartesian methodology that you said you didn't want to do later. So it's almost like I want to invalidate or at least call out that whole approach and say it doesn't even make sense to try to approach addressing the problem that way.

12:40 Tim: Yeah, I mean, one thing is certainty and another thing is whether generalizations are meant to be exceptionless or not. So, you know, in logic and mathematics, we're dealing with generalizations which are, you know, being put forward as absolutely exceptionless. You know, there are just. There are no situations in which two plus two isn't four or whatever. Yeah, but that doesn't mean that. I'm not sure whether I'm disagreeing with you here, but that doesn't mean that logic and mathematics are. Are aspiring to absolute certainty. I mean, people can doubt rules of logic if they want to. It's not meaningless to doubt them. And we can imagine that we've made a mistake in logic. But nevertheless, that doesn't mean that the rules themselves, you know, the correct logic is just kind of. Just consists of generic generalizations.

13:32 Seth: Yeah, no, no, no. I think what I'm saying is I'm happy to throw away most of the program of 20th century philosophy and get on the bus with you. I don't know where we're going, but that whole process, like reading those papers about the Gettier problem or reading those things is just painful to me. And I just feel like a lot of great minds spend a lot of energy spinning on that kind of stuff because it's not a fruitful approach for precisely the reasons you call out. And I'm just saying it's a lot like the evil demon argument. Spending your time trying to find counterexamples is like. Like worrying about radical skepticism.

14:09 Wes: I don't think the evil demon is a counter example. I mean, it's a reductio ad absurdum. It's a whole different project.

14:16 Seth: But yeah, what I'm saying is if you can be wrong once, you can't trust anything.

14:21 Tim: That's the whole.

14:22 Mark: If there's some conceivable possible world in which you, you would be wrong about this, obviously that I have hands.

14:30 Seth: Right. Then you can't be certain or you can't understand anything.

14:33 Wes: That's not the argument. He's a foundationalist and so he wants to say suppose nothing were certain certain. Well, I can rebuild everything on top of that. Anyway, anyway, it's a reductio. He's not.

14:43 Seth: So I understand what you're. Listen, I find that to be a fruitless endeavor, like spending time on that. And I find trying to find counter examples to a definition of what constitutes knowledge also to be a fruitful endeavor. I'm having a similar experience in those two places. So I'm on board with what Tim is trying to do. That's what I'm trying to say.

15:05 Mark: It seems though that when Tim has given an example like this, the solution is not that we don't have to evaluate these counterexamples, these alleged counterexamples, but that we actually have to do more work. So it's not actually that these minds have been spinning. It's not this philosophy of philosophy thing. We could see as like the logical positivists. Oh, all these philosophical. Or even Hume, all these philosophical arguments have been fruitless because they are based on some foundational error. And we just need to get very strict and only allow certain kinds of arguments. Right. We need to have a verification principle of meaning or something like that so that we can just throw so much of philosophy to the flames.

15:44 Wes: They're based on grammar or something like that.

15:47 Mark: Right. And so that would be a way of saying, responding to the justified true belief argument by saying, oh, we shouldn't bother with these counterexamples. You know, let's just come up with the stick with the simple theory of justified true belief. But as Tim has told us, he has many more reasons for rejecting justified true belief. So it actually, I feel like the solution here by bringing in heuristics, by bringing in these other issues, is actually makes the process of doing philosophy more complicated than a meta philosopher like Ayer or somebody, you know, one of these logical positivists would bring forth. I mean, does that seem accurate, Tim?

16:25 Tim: I think that's fair. And my point is just. Well, in other sciences, people have come to terms with the fact that dealing with data is quite Tricky. And we can't operate on the assumption that all our data is completely correct, but we've got to find ways of using it productively that are kind of robust to the possibility of errors in the data. And science has got a long way beyond just kind of having a look outside and then writing down and what you think you see. And, you know, I think we probably, we have to do the same in philosophy, but part of what we can be doing, which, you know, rather than just spending all our time worrying about the data, is also by developing powerful explanatory theories in philosophy that don't have to take the form of analyses of concepts or anything like that, but at least kind of tell us something, you know, reasonably informative about the world and then seeing how well they can handle the data that are thrown at them.

And, you know, and one of the moves that they are allowed to make is in some cases to say, well, actually there's something wrong with that judgment. But they can't just say, we can't trust that judgment because maybe it's based on some heuristic or other that's unreliable. I mean, you can't just kind of throw out data at will. You've got to give some kind of reasons for regarding it as suspicious. I mean, kind of diagnose in particular what kind of heuristic it could be that is producing that judgment even if it's false. Yes, but it is going to make philosophy a lot less simple to do in some ways.

But that's what science is like. I mean, you know, as it develops, it becomes more sophisticated and you have to argue in somewhat more complicated ways. But I hope that will also be, you know, a push towards actually keeping the underlying theories that we're comparing relatively simple and elegant, because that is one way of guarding against distortions. Right? Bad data. So, I mean, in some ways it may be more fun if we're dealing with, I mean, elegant theories are fun to deal with and much more fun to deal with than the kind of very sort of rickety ad hoc theories that philosophers have been tending to produce.

18:37 Mark: You contrast theories with models, and I was a little unclear for us, I think the contrast reading later Wittgenstein is always a revelation because theory philosophers have been trying to come up with a philosophical theory. They set of necessary and sufficient conditions for defining the term or what, or defining the phenomenon in the world or whatever it is. And the alternative seems to be no, there is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions. There's just these paradigm and borderline cases and so what do we do with that? Maybe you get something like Ross's intuitionism, which is something we have not actually done an episode on.

But so I'll just describe. Which is, instead of saying only actions are morally permissible if they accord with categorical imperative, accord with the rule of utility, whatever. Instead of saying that, say, well, we have a number of intuitively legitimate duties that we have and we simply don't know a priori which one is going to take precedence in any given situation. It's sort of. It's an art instead of a science, you know, that we're not applying a theory. And so I like this kind of idea that, you know, if I have a duty to go take care of something really important, but then I see someone suffering on the street, do I just go on my way, attend to my.

And hope that other people around will have less pressing business? Or am I always called to take care of somebody like Ross says there is? He's sort of abandoning idea of a theory in favor. So is this idea more like what you're calling a model that. Oh, this is. We have these different modules of values that we carry around with us, and until we have to actually make them interact in some particular circumstance, we don't necessarily know in advance how they will.

20:22 Tim: Yeah, no. So I've been using the term model in a way that's closer to the way that it's used in science. So, I mean, scientific models are. They're kind of. There's something like mathematical idealizations of the way, you know, of the target phenomenon that whatever it is that we're interested in investigating. So, for example, it might be a mathematical model of the population dynamics where, let's say you have a population of predators, maybe foxes, and a population of prey, maybe rabbit, and you can write down some differential equations about how these two popul have the number in each population, you know, as a function of both the number of rabbits and the number of foxes.

I mean, if, you know, if there are too many foxes, the rabbits will all get eaten, but then there'll be nothing for the foxes to eat. And, you know, I mean, so you can write down a simple mathematical idealization of that and that's. And actually, you know, work out the consequences of these equations. Another kind of modeling assumption that you get in maybe a model of the solar system where you treat the planets as point masses, even though you know that of course, a planet is not a point mass. But just for mathematical reasons, it's a convenient simplification to treat it as One, but these, you know, mathematical models in the scientific sense, they have a huge amount of power to, to generate consequences.

I mean, you can calculate exactly how the model will evolve over time, that kind of thing. And you know, that's just a mathematical exercise. Whereas because the kind of that Ross is taking to moral thinking, it's not really a model because it doesn't any mathematical structure. It's more. It's a rejection of both theories and models in a way.

22:08 Mark: Right. It makes it weaker, as you say, there's no predictive power like it's purposely saying. It's almost abandoning ethics at all as a normative theory. The way that I was describing it is, was as psychology, we have these prima facie values and how we to actually get from that idea of as a description of moral psychology to well, what should I do in any situation? It doesn't make predictions and it in fact doesn't tell you what to do. It says it's sort of, it's up to you. The one, if you've been in lots of these situations before, if you develop appropriate virtues to make decisions quickly and to apply your vast experience, then you will be more likely to make the right decision. But that still doesn't actually tell you was this person right in doing this, et cetera.

22:50 Tim: Yeah, I mean, it's a pessimistic view about the possibilities for moral theorize and it might be right. But I don't think that one should give up too easily on moral theory, you know, because I'm not sure that its capacities have been properly explored. And of course, moral theorizing is a very different thing from just trying to produce conceptual analyses of moral terms or something like that. I mean, these can be substantive moral theories. Something like utilitarianism is one sort of substantive moral theory. You know, it has lots of problematic consequences.

I mean, like, it seems that, you know, it's a theory on which it might be morally right to have someone tortured to death on television as long as, you know, enough viewers got enough pleasure from watching it. But it seems that we should, you know, it makes sense also to look for theoretical alternatives to that. And of course, I mean, of course there are some. So although I don't exclude that as well, the kind of pessimism about the possibility of theory that someone like Ross in effect has that that might be right. But I don't think that we're at a point where we can just say for sure that that's the only view left standing.

24:07 Mark: Well, Seth, you brought up the Nazi, so we had read in our previous discussion on episode 348 about one of the Tim's articles was morally loaded cases in philosophy. And this is at least seems related to heuristics because the idea is, are there certain places that philosophical discourse can go that trigger something extraneous to the reasoning that we should be applying to the case? So the question was there is when you bring up extreme cases, are you inviting. So right. Dukakis was asked on stage, right. Dukakis for all for young people, presidential candidate who is against the death penalty.

And I believe he was asked something like, well, what if your wife got killed? Would you be in favor of death penalty for that person? And he, as a very reasonable person, said, no, I would not be in favor of that. And that was. That actually cost him greatly because people thought that, oh, actually we should be. But he was doing what philosophers should do. And in fact, if you try to make it personal. But actually in that article, Tim, you end up saying bringing up these extreme cases actually just shows you that you're not a philosopher, just sitting in an armchair, that you are in the real world, that if you really think that there should be no death penalty in any circumstance, you are including the case in which you are the one personally affected.

And if so, it's actually, it is legitimate to bring in that thing. And, you know, not to say that he gave the right answer or the wrong answer. Yeah. How close is this to heuristics that bringing out in these. The personal weight of these particular issues as you discussed in that other article.

25:43 Tim: So what I was talking about was, you know, whether it's kind of fair to use these very emotive examples. And you know, of course, one thing that I guess that the Dukakis case brought out was simply that his brought out a way in which his view was very different from that of a lot of the voters, I mean, that who were instincts who were all in favor of capital punishment in some cases. And so that was definitely, you know, a vote loser because it exposed that kind of gap between him and the voters, even though I'm kind of think that he was on the right side.

But yes. So I think what I was kind of pressing on was that actually I do think that we have some moral knowledge and you know, and I think knowing that Nazism is wrong, for example, is not such a difficult thing to know. And you know, the one advantage of talking about, you know, morally loaded cases is that it brings home to us that we're not just kind of theorizing in a vacuum that these, that what we're saying has consequences outside the seminar room. I mean, consequences in the sense that implications were what's the case? And so that in a way, certain, I think kinds of rather irresponsible theorizing that are sort of losing touch with reality.

One way of trying to bring them home, bring reality home to them is to say. Well, to emphasize the connection with action, you know, because, you know, if you have a philosopher who's saying all sorts of radical things but isn't prepared to act on them, it looks as though they're not really serious about their own theory.

27:23 Mark: Radical skepticism. Yes. We just read Thomas Reid blasting his, Hume and his other contemporaries for saying these things that, you know, which they would admit. You're not going to suspend belief in causality once you leave the lecture room.

27:37 Tim: Yeah.

27:38 Seth: You're also never going to be put in a situation where you have to choose between one of your two kids to be murdered by the Nazi officer, like, hopefully.

27:48 Mark: I mean, yeah, if you're talking about

27:50 Seth: heuristics, I mean, that's my point, you

27:52 Wes: know, except in Sophie's Choice, I guess.

27:54 Seth: But that's why that's a topic not for the philosopher, but for the artist. Those kinds of questions can't be answered by philosophers or addressed by philosophers. They're not counter examples to a moral theory. It's, it's inapplicable in that circumstance. This is why you need art. Bracket that. Tim, you can ignore that.

28:10 Mark: Well, no, I, I want to see what Tim's response to that, because I feel like. Yeah. That actually it should deal with these very difficult things.

28:18 Tim: Well, I mean, you can't expect philosophy to give you an answer to the question which of your children should you.

28:23 Mark: Should you just make up pros and cons each child?

28:27 Wes: You know, it varies.

28:29 Mark: If you say each individual is equivalent to an infinity. Well, you can do Cantorian comparisons of levels of infinity.

28:36 Tim: Sorry, go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, the question that is, seems like, you know, a legitimate first level question is one about whether is it morally okay in a case like that to choose one of your children or should you just, you know, assuming that if you don't choose one that both will be killed. And I mean, moral philosophers have, I mean, they discuss cases like, like that and it's, you know, I mean, I guess Bernard Williams talks about a case where you're, I think you're set in some village in, in South America and you're somehow in a situation where a whole lot of the native Americans have been rounded up and, you know, and you're given the choice, you know, if you're willing to shoot one of them, then all the others will be saved.

But if you don't shoot one of them, then they'll all be killed. And it seems like, I mean, probably the thing that you should do is to. Is to kill one of them so that all the others are saved. If you were to ask that group, what should you do? They would probably say, we'll just kill one of us and so that the rest of us can be saved, but at the same time, you're going to have blood on your hands. And so it, you know, it's some test of a, you know, of a moral theory. What it does imply about examples like that, you know, I mean, because, you know, I'm not saying that you can't test theories by applying them to hypothetical examples, because, I mean, that's equivalent saying you can't test scientific theories by data.

And I mean, of course you can. I mean, and you can learn a lot about theories by following out their consequences for a lot of examples. It's just that it's not as straightforward, you know, a matter as one counterexample or one apparent counterexample kills the theory. So, you know, I think although it's the type of situation that most of us will never be in, it's still not unreasonable to use it as a way of exploring how a theory works.

30:29 Mark: All right, we did not read anything that you wrote on ethics for this time, so I will stop. Maybe as a final topic you address. I was just looking at the last couple pages of your philosophy of philosophy book and just the role that public philosophy, what it should be doing and what it should not be doing that as you present it, well, it should be sort of like public popular science presenting, you know, reviewing the recent data and presenting it to the public in a way that they can understand. That's. There's nothing controversial about that.

But a lot of public philosophy, other podcasts that we compete with perhaps might say all these questions are perennial. They're never settled for real. All we've learned from all this back and forth is that some kind of skepticism about theorizing and about the utility of bringing in formal logics and bringing in, so that anybody on the street should be able to do, if they're determined about it, should be able to do philosophy as well as anybody else, because we all have the same intuitive data available to us. We all have the same connection, or lack thereof, to the Divine to the world around us.

You know, the very armchair nature of it makes it seem like this is something that unlike. I'm not going to just say I'm going to do nuclear physics myself. I don't have the mathematical skills, I don't have the equipment. There's so many things preventing me from doing that. But philosophy seems like something that anybody could just do. But. But having read the first two chapters of your book, I feel like a lot of the sort of modeling you're referring to and philosophers should be trained to use modeling more often seems very remote. Even having done this podcast for 15 plus years and been in grad school from anything that I've been exposed to, so that there are actually realms of expertise that we should pay attention to and respect and try to learn more about instead of merely looking to the ancients and these perennial questions.

32:26 Tim: Yeah, I mean, it is something that I find very odd because, you know, if in public philosophy a lot of the, the people involved. I'm not, I'm certainly not accusing you of this, but are they seem to have a kind of grudge against academic philosophy and, you know, and they present themselves as if they were doing the real philosophy, that they're somehow the heirs of Aristotle and Plato, not the. Rather than the academic philosophers. And that would. It's a bit as if the people who were doing public science were people who claimed that physics had gone wrong over the last few hundred years and that really we should be getting back to Aristotle's physics or something.

And it's a kind of bizarre situation like that. And of course, I think it's up to the philosophers themselves to do a better job of communicating what they're doing. But, you know, I think one of the difficulties is that the idea that philosophy is something. Well, you know, there's a kind of idea that philosophy should be both very deep and very easy to understand. It's hardly going to be both. And definitely the fact that it's done in an armchair doesn't mean that, that you don't need any training to do it. Because after all, in a sense, you know, mathematics is done in an armchair, but you need enormous amounts of training to do mathematics very well.

And with the case of philosophy, it's not that different, particularly because philosophy often involves logic and logic is very, very close to mathematics.

33:58 Mark: Well, let's go around and give some closing thoughts as to what we've got out of it there. Definitely I was excited about the heuristics and just the possible, a new tool set to visit A lot of the questions that we have been focusing on to this point, and I think it's fundamentally different than, you know, we've been asked, oh, you should do an episode on logical fallacies or informal fallacies or something like that, or in just cognitive biases. How do these, you know, how do people misrepresent probabilities? This is often seen as people who are suspicious of philosophy, who think that a lot of the, maybe the philosophical issues that we're in are just a result of these, you know, thinking wrongly about things.

And so what you presented in this book so far is, has a flavor of that, but seems like, has an extra level of sophistication and is certainly not coming from an anti philosophical point of view. It is. More philosophers should incorporate this in their toolkit. And you seem there's nothing off limits in terms of, you refer to the, the work of experimental philosophy as well. So not just I present to you the Bernard Williams example that you just presented about which would you kill the one person or let 10 people die, but maybe we take surveys and see how other people and we can do psychological research into, you know, what are people's ethical intuitions on this?

Am I just a weirdo? Are people's intuitions different if they're trained philosophers versus if they're regular people? And you, at the very beginning of this book, you dismiss people who argue that actually we can't do philosophy because everybody has different intuitions based on their background, their ethnicity, et cetera, because people have actually tested this kind of stuff. And unless they have some sort of a priori skeptical notion about philosophy in this way, that it's all just identitarian, then actually those potential counterclaims do not hold up experimentally.

So just, yeah, encouraging philosophers to get out of their armchairs or to incorporate more tools, not be afraid of formal logic. I don't know. This all seems to present a challenge that I'm not sure that I'm up to, but I respect in the abstract, of course.

36:04 Tim: One thing to say is you can do experimental philosophy to find out more about what people think is right and wrong, and you can find out to what extent that's humanly universal and to what extent it's culturally specific. But still, I mean, the central philosophical questions are not about what do people think is right and wrong, but what actually is right and wrong. And I don't myself despair of the idea of actually making progress on questions like that, although I don't expect to reach any kind of uncontroversial answers. But after all, lots of science is controversial, but it doesn't mean that it isn't progress. I mean, there are always going to be people who disagree with the theory of evolution, but it doesn't mean that the theory of evolution is false.

36:50 Seth: Well, I'll just close by saying, I think, Tim, you do, you know, you really highlight something that's critical in a lot of contemporary philosophy, or at least of one school of philosophy. And I think we legitimately need to have a deep understanding of these heuristics. We just recently did an episode on the Nyaya Sutra, and we've done some other Buddhist podcasts in the past, and the Buddhists put a lot of work into psychological investigation, like, thousands of years ago. They have a very sophisticated view of how human beings make judgments and act.

And it's, you know, in a lot of ways, a relatively recent invention in the West. But I think there's a legitimate question. You have a throwaway sentence, I think, in chapter one, where you, you say something to the effect of about. I don't want to. It wasn't intersectionality, but like, something along those lines, like, hey, you know, this could have a bearing on understanding whether heuristics are even bound by gender, class, geography, language, et cetera. And this could be a very fruitful way of approaching that and also leveraging, like you said, the work.

I know you have a criticism of the way psychology uses the notion of heuristic, but all in all, I like where it's going and I may actually finish to the end of the book.

38:14 Mark: All right, well, thank you so much.

38:15 Tim: Thanks for all the discussion.

38:16 Wes: Yes, thank you, Tim. Yeah, I enjoyed this a lot. And I thought your papers on knowledge were quite enlightening after reading about the gettier problem and some of the reliabilist attempts to shore that up. And the same here. This problem of heuristics and overfitting isn't something that had occurred to me. So it seems quite original and something to give a lot more thought to.

38:38 Mark: Next time we're going to turn to the political, to Karl Marx and some of his early philosophical essays from 1844, estranged labor, private Property, and Communism, and the Power of Money in Bourgeois Society. For that, we'll be joined by a guest we haven't talked to in a while, Lawrence Dahlman. And we're actually going to be spending a couple episodes in that general era and topic. We welcome your suggestions on what we should read. Please reach out to us pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com you can make comments on the blog post to this Episode@Partially ExaminedLife.com Contact us through Facebook, through X.com through Instagram. We would highly appreciate if you would give this podcast a nice five star review. If you've enjoyed this on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and check out our book@harshlyexaminedlife.com book good night everybody.

39:28 Seth: Good night.

39:29 Wes: Good night.