{"id":5200,"date":"2017-04-04T10:33:51","date_gmt":"2017-04-04T15:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5200"},"modified":"2017-04-04T10:33:51","modified_gmt":"2017-04-04T15:33:51","slug":"come-out-come-out-wherever-you-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5200","title":{"rendered":"Come out, come out, wherever you are!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The New Scientist<\/a> has a short article with the title, “Philosophers of Knowledge, Your Time Has Come.”\u00c2\u00a0 Right on!\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, but there’s a catch.<\/p>\n

First, the setup.<\/p>\n

\n

A COMMON refrain heard around New Scientist<\/i>\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcs offices in recent weeks has been \u00e2\u20ac\u0153episte\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 what?!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Even among educated and well-informed people, epistemology \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the study of knowledge \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is neither a familiar word nor a well-known field of enquiry. But it has never been more important.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Again, this seems right.\u00c2\u00a0 And many of the folks working in epistemology, and social epistemology in particular, have been working hard on getting the word out about the study of knowledge, the analysis of evidence, how argument works, and so on.\u00c2\u00a0 And it’s not just since the Trump Presidency — it’s been urgent for longer than that.\u00c2\u00a0 At least since classical Athens.\u00c2\u00a0 OK, so the New Scientist<\/em> wants philosophers to enter the public sphere and discuss accounts of knowledge.<\/p>\n

\n

And herein lies a problem. In the current crisis over truth, epistemology is nowhere to be seen.<\/strong> . . .\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Philosophers may be reluctant to enter the public square, afraid of being derided by the post-truthers as yet more \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fake news\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or tarred with that pejorative term \u00e2\u20ac\u0153expert\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. But epistemology has become one the most relevant and urgent philosophical problems facing humanity. Philosophers really need to come out \u00e2\u20ac\u201c or be coaxed out \u00e2\u20ac\u201c of the shadows.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Give me a break.\u00c2\u00a0 Seriously.\u00c2\u00a0 (In fact, when I read the above paragraph, I said something much<\/em> stronger.)<\/p>\n

The argument seems to be: philosophers are in the shadows, because we don’t see them in the public sphere.\u00c2\u00a0 And it must be because the ‘post-truthers’ have been keeping them there, or because they are just shy beasts<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The first problem is that this first line is an argument from ignorance<\/strong>.\u00c2\u00a0 Just because you haven’t seen X, it doesn’t mean there aren’t X’s.\u00c2\u00a0 In this case, the problem is that you’re often looking in places where you’re not seeing them.\u00c2\u00a0 Perhaps if one were to, say, go look<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 Ask google.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe ask a philosopher, “Hey, are there folks who do this epistemology stuff, but aren’t all academic-y who can sell this to a public audience?”<\/p>\n

And just for the record, here are five, just right off the top of my head, who are public epistemology folks, who’ve been doing it<\/em>, even before the great wave of orange anti-intellectualism<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 Michael Lynch<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Jennifer Lackey<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Lee McIntyre.<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0 Alvin Goldman<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Philip Kitcher<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 And one more that came to me while googling the pages for the others. Elizabeth Anderson<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 And then there are lots of other folks doing that work, too.\u00c2\u00a0 I mean, geez<\/em>, just look around for a second.\u00c2\u00a0 (And for the record, I count the work I do and what I’ve done with Rob Talisse as in this domain.)<\/p>\n

The second bit of reasoning is truly insulting and erroneous as an explanation.\u00c2\u00a0 That philosophers shy from public controversy is not just nonsense, really, it is silly.\u00c2\u00a0 And it’s here that I think I have an explanation for why the folks at the New Scientist don’t know of any philosophers.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s that THEY ignore philosophers of knowledge.\u00c2\u00a0 I can recall almost every time, say, back in the NEW ATHEISM debates, the scientists would scoff at the philosophers when we talked about knowledge.\u00c2\u00a0 Why?\u00c2\u00a0 Because they thought THEY knew about knowledge, and we were bullshitters.\u00c2\u00a0 And that yielded the garbage arguments in Dawkins’ God Delusion<\/em> and all the other ways scientists think they can handle questions external to their domains of inquiry.\u00c2\u00a0 And so when the editors of the New Scientist <\/em>says, “Hey, where are all the philosophers?”\u00c2\u00a0 the answer is: “We’ve been here all along… it’s just that you’ve been ignoring us.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Scientist has a short article with the title, “Philosophers of Knowledge, Your Time Has Come.”\u00c2\u00a0 Right on!\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, but there’s a catch. First, the setup. A COMMON refrain heard around New Scientist\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcs offices in recent weeks has been \u00e2\u20ac\u0153episte\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 what?!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Even among educated and well-informed people, epistemology \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the study of knowledge \u00e2\u20ac\u201c … Continue reading Come out, come out, wherever you are!<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,55],"tags":[1774,2158,126,2160,2159,1936],"class_list":["post-5200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-appeal-to-ignorance","category-bad-explanations","tag-applied-epistemology","tag-argument-from-ignorance","tag-atheism","tag-epistemology","tag-new-scientist","tag-public-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5202,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5200\/revisions\/5202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}