Many philosophers believe they can gain knowledge about the world from the comfort of their armchairs, simply by reflecting on the nature of things. But how can the mind arrive at substantive knowledge of the world without seeking its input? We asked NYU philosophy professor Michael Strevens, author of Thinking Off Your Feet, to reflect on his defense of the armchair pursuit of philosophical knowledge.
The stereotypical philosopher is Rodin’s Thinker cast in flesh and blood: alone, undisturbed, adrift in inner space. There is much truth to the stereotype. Most if not all contemporary philosophers honor the model of Descartes and Plato, fishing up their most profound ideas about such topics as causality, the passage of time, and morality from the well of pure thought. Critics call them “armchair philosophers,” gently scorning their ambition to arrive at big, substantial truths without braving the light of day.
Those critics seem to have a point. How is it possible to gain substantial knowledge about the world simply by ruminating? Perhaps, many modern philosophers have supposed, the ideas about the nature of things delivered by armchair philosophy are in fact ideas about our concepts of things. When an armchair philosopher ponders the nature of causality, for example, they are examining the structure of the concept of causality. Their ability to do that while seated in a dark room is hardly astonishing; after all, the concept is sitting in the room too, right between their ears.
This notion that the living room thinker is engaged in “conceptual analysis” explains rather nicely how armchair philosophy can furnish truths. The explanation comes at a cost, however: those truths turn out to be, relative to the traditional aspirations of philosophy, rather sad little things, facts not about the structure of the external world but rather about the way that we think about the world. Philosophy is revealed to be a kind of psychology or semantics, gussied up with a lot of big talk and a long, glamorous history.
The good news for armchair philosophers is that this deflating interpretation of their endeavors cannot possibly be correct: it makes assumptions about the way that concepts function in the mind that the last fifty years of cognitive psychology have shown to be deeply mistaken. Above all, it assumes that concepts are built around definitions, that is, around rules for how to use words. Armchair philosophy would if that were true tell us what rules our words obey, but nothing more. Concepts, however, are not in any way founded on prescriptive rules about the way that words work. They are founded on theories, that is, on hypotheses about the way the world works.
Take something as simple as my concept of a swan. On the old-fashioned or “classical” view presupposed by conceptual analysis, at the core of the concept lies a definition of swanhood that tells my mind what things to apply the word “swan” to—interesting to linguists and compilers of dictionaries, but not so much to biologists. That is the view that has turned out to be wrong. In fact, my concept of swan—and yours, and everybody’s, even experts’—is a set of hypotheses about swans. Some of these hypotheses concern swans’ appearances: their shape, color, and so on. Some concern their internal workings: at the very least, even in elementary school children, that they have distinctive insides, subtly different from the insides of, say, seagulls, that give rise to their external features. Some hypotheses concern the relations between swans: that they have swan offspring and swan parents, for example.
The new view of concepts presents both challenges and opportunities to those of us seeking to understand the scope, limitations, and foundations of armchair philosophy. The great opportunity is to get beyond the dispiriting notion that armchair philosophers are merely studying rules for the deployment of words.
As for the challenges, there are two. The first is to show that the theories that make up philosophical concepts have enough of a hold on reality that philosophizing with these concepts—following the clues that are planted in the corresponding theories—is capable of teaching us something true about the outside world. The second is to show that the truths we learn in this way are the substantial, deep things that philosophers have traditionally taken themselves to learn.
Blocking the path to the rehabilitation of armchair philosophy is a novel enterprise called “experimental philosophy.” The experimental philosophers, as their chosen name implies, are not sitting in the armchair themselves, but they are provoked by what goes on in that plush instrument of inquiry, and they use the tools of cognitive psychology and sometimes neuroscience to explore the workings of armchair philosophers’ minds.
Of particular interest to the experimentalists is a method that armchair philosophers use to test philosophical theses, in which the philosophers make judgments about extreme scenarios and ask themselves whether those judgments conform to a given thesis. The utilitarian theory of morality, for example, says that an action is morally permissible if it maximizes human happiness. It follows that it is always okay to sacrifice a single person’s life to save several others (assuming that the lives involved are roughly equally happy). Suppose, then, that two cave explorers are trapped below ground by a large person who has become stuck in the cave entrance. The tide is coming in; if the pair cannot exit the cave they will drown. The “fat man,” however, protrudes high enough to survive. Is it permissible for the pair to cut the fat man in half to save themselves? Many philosophers and ordinary people think not—at least, not unless the fat man agrees to the sacrifice. So, the utilitarian system must be mistaken.
A great deal of armchair philosophy proceeds in this way, devising cruel and unusual vignettes and comparing the verdicts of philosophical theses about causality, knowledge, justice, and so on to what seems “intuitively right.” When a theory clashes with an intuitive judgment, the theory is considered to be refuted by the “thought experiment.”
Experimental philosophers have set out to understand better the features of the judgments that serve as the outcomes of thought experiments. What they find is that judgments about critical cases—often cases of a sort that have played an important role in the history of philosophy—vary from person to person depending on context, background, and sometimes the phrasing of the question. They are by no means stable, settled, uncontroversial. Perhaps you can see this for yourself: reasonable, decent people can disagree on what those desperate cavers should do.
One particular cabal of philosophical experimentalists, many of them students of the famous contrarian philosopher Stephen Stich at Rutgers University, have used these results to argue that philosophers must abandon the armchair. They observe that if the outcomes of scientific experiments were as unstable and variable as the outcomes of thought experiments, we would discount science as a useful method of inquiry. We should apply the same standard, they continue, to armchair philosophy. Its “thought-experimental” method is therefore unsatisfactory. We need to find a different way to philosophize.
In my new book Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy, I fight back on behalf of comfortably seated thinkers. It is a little out of character, as I am myself one of those Stich students. Indeed, when I began this project, applying the new psychological ideas about concepts to philosophical theorizing, I thought that the armchair was at the end of its useful life. But I have become convinced otherwise. It is possible to build, on the new theory of concepts, an optimistic picture of armchair philosophy.
To see this, begin with a disanalogy between the experimental method and the thought-experimental method: in the one, the outcomes of experiments are determined by nature, but in the other, they are determined by our judgments and therefore by the theories that make up our concepts. When we start out in life, these theories are patchy and often inaccurate, and may vary greatly from person to person. That is why our thought-experimental judgments are sometimes so wobbly.
For all these flaws, however, a “starter theory” might be an adequate launching pad for inquiry. We begin with an impoverished picture of many aspects of the world around us, but given enough hard work, our starter theories’ gaps can be filled and their errors corrected. The first humans knew relatively little about the workings of physical and biological systems; their theories were meager. Now we know an enormous amount, and we got there by building on those initially rather skimpy, often incorrect, beliefs.
My aim in Thinking Off Your Feet is to show that the same is true for the theories that make up philosophical concepts. Sometimes it is empirical investigation that enhances these theories; the philosophical process is then of course not purely a matter of armchair inquiry. (I am not against scientific investigation as a source of philosophical knowledge, obviously—my book depends on it!)
But it is also possible to enrich a theory by exploring its consequences using thought alone. Some of the great thought experiments in science, such as those of Galileo and Einstein, work in this way. We can equally well make moral progress—rejecting slavery, embracing women’s rights—not on the basis of empirical data but through intense reflection. Vive l’upholstery!
Further reading: Experimental philosophy’s case against armchair inquiry is formidably presented by Edouard Machery in Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds. My case in favor, only briefly sketched here, is made in Thinking Off Your Feet.
