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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I was browsing the latest new journal articles on philpapers.org, an archive of (mostly analytic, mostly Anglophone) philosophy papers, and came across the following: Demanding a halt to metadiscussions:

How do social actors get addressees to stop retreating to metadiscussions that derail ground-level discussions, and why do they expect the strategies to work? The question is of both theoretical and practical interest, especially with regard to ground-level discussions of systemic sexism and racism derailed by qualifying “not all men” and “not all white people” perform the sexist or racist actions that are the topic of discussion. [...] I find that social actors use strategies that may at first glance appear to be out of bounds in an ideal critical discussion—e.g., demanding, shouting, cussing, sarcasm, name-calling—to cultivate a context where using not-all qualifiers becomes increasingly costly.

Something amusing about this abstract is that a statement of the form "not all men are like that" hardly qualifies as "metadiscussion". Challenging your opponent's assertion by pointing out counterexamples isn't metadiscussion - it's just discussion. I would expect "meta" discussion to be something more along the lines of "what epistemology allows you to KNOW that ALL men are sexist?" or "let's examine the sociological history of the concept of sexism and what political or psychological factors may be causing you to deploy it in this context".

Anyway, philpapers is pretty indiscriminate in what they archive, so I checked to see what journal this was actually published in. Argumentation is "an international and interdisciplinary journal that gathers academic contributions from a wide range of scholarly backgrounds and approaches to reasoning, natural inference and persuasion: communication, classical and modern rhetoric, linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, psychology, philosophy, formal and informal logic, critical thinking, history and law" (i.e. the type of publication that would have uncritically accepted the original Sokal paper), so I wouldn't expect the publications in this journal to all conform to the standards and values of analytic philosophy.

Ultimately I don't think that this paper is an isolated incident though, but rather it seems to me to be representative of broader trends in all schools of western philosophy, including analytic philosophy. The Philosophical Quarterly, for example, published a glowing review of a book entitled The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle. My general impression of academic philosophy for the last few years is that departments have shifted focus away from the more "pure" research into questions of metaphysics and epistemology and have put more emphasis on hiring for positions with a focus on social and political philosophy, and the faculty who fill those positions are of course expected to produce research that advances the party line.

If even analytic philosophy, which was founded on norms of disinterested rigor and an explicit suspicion of moral and political philosophy, can become subject to institutional capture for political purposes, then it seems like truly nowhere is safe. The hard sciences are certainly more resilient than the humanities are, although not completely.

Academic philosopher here. Philosophy has been losing its coherence for quite a long time with the “naturalistic turn” from the late 70s on (think Dennett and Fodor) A small but growing number of philosophers of mind were reading David Marr and Zenon Pylyshyn while the philosophers of language were reading Chomsky. Philosophy of biology and took off in a big way in the 90s, and philosophy of computer science in the 00s. Ethicists began to increasingly get into debates in moral psychology (eg John Doris’s work) and epistemologists started to get more and more into formal epistemology, heuristics and biases, and decision theory. Even aesthetics began to blur in some places into aesthetic psychology and neuroaesthetics. Of course you still had (and have) a large core of people doing traditional ethics, metaphysics, epistemology history of philosophy, and political science, so philosophy still had a recognisable centre, with the more empirically minded approaches on the periphery.

But then about 12 years ago, philosophy of race and gender started to expand hugely, frequently blurring into stuff like media studies, STS, and sociology. And this stuff was cool and trendy and attracted big grants. If you were on the job market looking for positions in traditional metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, or history of philosophy you were screwed. So a lot of good grad students and early career people left the field, leading to an evaporative cooling, while the really good empirical people shifted to working in cogsci departments and dedicated cross disciplinary centres with names like “Institute for Human Cognition” or “Centre for Science and Humanity.” So you had an evaporative cooling process that left the new trendy race and gender people in control of the old professional architecture — journals, associations, conferences, etc., though at the cost of losing a huge part of the talent pool and a lot of the connections to other disciplines. The main losers have been the old school philosophers.

Could say more and will do when I’m not writing on a tiny blood screen.

What’s the difference between moral and ethical, from an academic philosophy point of view?

I was once taught that ethics were morals in action.

There isn't really a systematic difference. Both "ethics" and "morality" can refer to norms of human conduct, e.g., "John has no ethics" (=John is immoral). One clearcut difference is that "ethics" can refer to the philosophical study of norms of human conduct, including things like meta-ethics and descriptive ethics, whereas "morality" fills this role rather more awkwardly. For example, it's natural to say that "ethics is the study of morality" (even though this isn't the only use of the term "ethics"), whereas "morality is the study of ethics" doesn't make much sense at all. In this very specific reading of the terms, one might analogise "ethics" and "morality" to "linguistics" and "language", though I'd emphasise again that "ethics" is frequently (if inexactly) used synonymously with "morality" to refer directly to appropriate norms of human behaviour.

I don't know a lot about philosophical academia, but it seems like it's going the same was as Sociology, which is a shame.

Feel like that article was almost a bait-and-switch. I agree with the premise, that meta-discussions are often used as a way to derail object-level discussions but the "Not All X" examples, as you note, are not very good examples.

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