Trial by Fire Philosophy

Many who are into philosophy, myself included, like to make fun of famous scientists for not understanding it. It is the classic phenomena of experts in one field making bad statements about a field they aren’t familiar with.(sidenote: There’s even some philosophy about it: “Experts, Public Policy, and the Question of Trust”.¹ )

When someone like Stephen Hawking says that “Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge” and that “Philosophy is dead”, I can’t help but wonder if his conception of philosophy is stuck in ancient Greece, when what we call philosophy and science were more closely linked together, when philosophers made unhinged statements about the physical nature of the world without any empiric evidence. This despite the fact so much has happened in the field since, and that contemporary philosophy is investigating so many important questions that are very much relevant to us today. Political philosophers build knowledge around how we should govern ourselves; critical disability theory aims to interrogate the social norms that define disability; queer theory investigates the social and cultural phenomena of gender and sexuality; postcolonial studies seeks to understand how colonialism and imperialism continues to affect the world. The list goes on. These are often interdisciplinary fields that often include both the social and natural sciences. Philosophy is even important for science itself, as questions of how science is and should be conducted are key topics in philosophy of science. It is not something that can be solved through gathering empiric evidence.

It is of course fun to make fun of people who don’t know what they’re talking about, but it overshadows a wider problem: that society does not value philosophy and the wider humanities very much compared to fields like STEM. That is a shame because philosophy can be so much more fun than aimlessly reading Plato or Kant. If you just look at any introduction to philosophy you’ll quickly see tha- (sidenote: Chapter 1 of “Introduction to Philosophy”, OpenStax. (emphasis mine)² )

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Identify sages (early philosophers) across historical traditions. Explain the connection between ancient philosophy and the origin of the sciences. Describe philosophy as a discipline that makes coherent sense of a whole. Summarize the broad and diverse origins of philosophy.

Oh, but-(sidenote: Table of Contents of “An Introduction to Philosophy”, Russ W. Payne. (emphasis mine)³ )

1. What Philosophy Is
2. Critical Thinking I, Being Reasonable
3. Critical Thinking II: Logic
4. Ancient Philosophy
5. Rationalism
6. Empiricism
7. Philosophy of Science
8. Philosophy of Mind
9. Love and Happiness
10. Meta Ethics
11. Right Action
12. Social Justice

Surely not every introduct-(sidenote: Table of Contents of “Philosophy: An Introduction”, Antony Flew. (emphasis mine)⁴ )

1. What Socrates should have said to Thrasymachus
   
2. Objective values and Plato’s Ideas
   
3. The man-centredness of Hume
   
4. Subjective or relative, conventional and expressive
   
5. Making room for moral argument
   

At this point my inner philosopher starts to wonder “Are we the baddies?”. Is it the philosophers’ own fault that their field is treated as boring, reality-detached and irrelevant navel-gazing? There has to be more interesting ways to teach philosophy than to regurgitate what some dudes said centuries or even millennia ago. It seems to me that philosophy as a discipline has been very bad at communicating with the public.

How much do you know about what modern philosophy is about? Compared to modern physics or biology, I at least know very little. Science has been pretty good at communicating what they’re about to the public, even if it’s just the flashy bits. There is media coverage when scientific breakthroughs happen, and there are countless pop-science books, documentaries, and Youtube videos that convey what scientists have been working on to a lay audience. But when philosophy is in the media it seems to always be stuck between ancient Greece and somewhere around the 18th century, and it’s always about what some white dude was saying.

This is a problem not only because it causes physicists to be hilariously wrong about philosophy, but also because it hurts the field. Ancient Greek philosophy is boring.(sidenote: Fight me⁵ ) Philosophy nerds (as well as people who want to sound smart) already like reading Aristotle or Descartes or whoever, but what about those that aren’t already into philosophy?

Is there any other academic field that introduces itself by looking at its history? When teaching math would you start with how the ancient Greeks did math? When teaching geography would you start by looking at the Turin Papyrus Map? Of course not, you start by looking at what the world currently looks like. Physics is a field that can trace its roots back to ancient Greece as well, but of course we don’t start there when we teach physics in school. We start with stuff that is relevant to us now. So why do it with philosophy? Some might say that it is because philosophers do their work in answer to philosophers before them, so you need to start from the start in order to understand them. That might be true if you pursue deep knowledge of philosophy, but it is also true for practically every other discipline, but they don’t necessarily teach it that way. History is almost always useful in understanding a topic, but it isn’t always the best source of pedagogy.

It is a horrible way to make people interested in philosophy, because it doesn’t give a reason to care. In Dune, Exposition, Education I wrote about how inexperienced fiction authors often dump their exposition in the introduction, before telling me why I should care about all these kings and countries that I’ve never heard about. That makes at least me profoundly bored, but that is exactly how I see philosophy introduced. A better approach is to give a reason to care before explaining everything. In my education I have really enjoyed an approach that does this well, that I like to call Trial by Fire education.

The basic principle is that you start with a contemporary question you want to answer, or gain more understanding about. The question can’t be something like “What was the Enlightenment about?”, but should be something that students already have a connection to. The “objective” view from nowhere is uninteresting. You can still reach coveted topics such as the Enlightenment through investigations that start somewhere highly contemporary, basically by digging where you stand.

One such alternative route to the Enlightenment can be taken from the philosophy of games. Most people today have experienced games in one form or another, be it as computer games, board games, or some form of sport. But have you ever noticed that a lot of things that aren’t games, look like games? The education system through grades, social media through views and likes, and the stock market through valuations — all have point systems that resemble those from games. We even have the word “gamification” to indicate when we add a point system to some activity. But what happens when we put point systems on communication or knowledge? One contemporary philosopher who has written about this is C. Thi Nguyen. He writes that point systems are incredibly useful for large bureaucratial entities such as states or companies because they allow them to process information from many different sources. The problem with points and other abstracted information systems is that they have to discard context-sensitive information. Bureaucracies can’t see this context-sensitive information, so they try to make everything more standardized — turning knowledge into grades, or rich communication into number of views and likes — in order to make the world more legible to them. For example, a school might choose to teach students to pass the narrow scope of the next exam while avoiding the things that are useful in life — thus turning this rich valuable experience into a soul-less meat-grinder activity.

Nguyen builds much of his work on a previous book called Seeing Like a State by James C Scott. If we’re curious about this topic we might try to read it and find out that it is a critique of “governments’ overconfidence in the ability to design and operate society in accordance with purported scientific laws” and of “high modernism”. In order to understand what those beliefs came from we might look further into what modernism and the Enlightenment was about, and how that in turn is connected to our starting point: gamification of communication.

Instead of starting with the famous names, what we have done is that we have started with an interesting and relevant question, and dug into its history. We still arrived at the famous philosophers, but this time armed with interesting questions and motivation for our inquiry.

What this does is that it gives us a reason to care first, a goal with the learning. I call it Trial by Fire education because it describes the experience as a student well. You are thrust into the contemporary context without the ground of the past to stand on, so you and the teacher have to together fill in the holes as you find them. The advantage is that it starts with the motivating questions, so it’s clearer what the goal is, why you’re doing it. For philosophy, one big advantage of starting with contemporary stuff is that it is tied closely to the time we live in, and the questions that are salient today. The fundamental nature of ethics may always be relevant, but it isn’t as concrete and urgent as questions about, say the existential threat of ecological collapse. Or what it is about art we care about, and how automation might play into that. Or how expertise and fame interact in media.(sidenote: E.g. this paper: “Celebrity, Democracy, and Epistemic Power” ⁶ ) Or what the surprisingly complicated concept of gender even is. Or the similarities and differences between the rules in games and the rules of states.(sidenote: This podcast episode about states and games is super interesting and fun, I highly recommend it: Seeing Like a Game⁷ )

In contrast to mathematics or physics, cutting edge philosophy can be surprisingly approachable, because in contrast to those subjects, current philosophy isn’t just a response to previous philosophy, it is also a response to the society we live in now. There is of course incredibly technical philosophy, but there is also philosophy that is about understanding what a game is, or whether border control is justifiable for a democracy. You don’t need to know what a man who has been dead for millennia has said to think and learn about such questions. I think philosophy can become much more approachable if introduced not as a series of responses by long-dead old men, but as responses to things we ourselves care about, today. Don’t start with the theory, build up to it through a connection to a reality the students are familiar with.