OK, so as usual I've got an R&R, a book review, and a proposal all due this month, but I can't resist a few comments on the Phil Papers survey. http://philpapers.org/surveys/
There are only three views with extremely widespread acceptance. 1. Non-skepticism about the external world, 2. Scientific realism, 3. Atheism.
Not surprised about 1, especially since not surprised about 2. A bit surprised about 3 (in some of the areas. The widest net catches 18.8% theists, the narrowest relevant one is 14.6%).
So here's the thought. In all the other areas--I checked all the epistemology one's first, but the same goes for all the others--I was more interested in what the top specialists thought. For example, I was...[word weaker than "disgusted" but stronger than "shocked in a bad way"] that contextualism had such a strong plurality among all respondents. But I was heartened that among epistemologists, invariantism held that honor, and even more heartened that it was even more solid among "Target Faculty" in Epistemology. This sort of thinking was repeated repeatedly. The working assumption seems to be:
AOS1 Ceteris paribus, what specialists think is more important (holds more epistemic weight, is better evidence) than what non-specialists think.
There are a lot of factors which would make ceteris non paribus, but AOS1 seems to represent something pretty ingrained in our thinking. It would be good to think about what features of areas make AOS1 more plausible and what features less so.
The thing, though, is that though theism is 4:1 minority in most relevant populations and less so in general, among those who specialize in Philosophy of Religion it's much, much more popular. 68.3% for all respondents and 72.3% among Target Faculty. Now obviously first thing to say is that many theists go into PR because they're theists. And that, of course, is true. However, note the following: we don't know what percentage of theists in academic philosophy work primarily in PR. That would make a difference as to the impact of this this fact. Also, note that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: many atheists go into Phil Mind, say, in order to defend some kind of naturalism about the mind, which would need to proportionately discount the majority results for Physicalism (though, I must say, the results aren't that high for physicalism in Phil Mind in this survey).
And do moral theorists really care that only one third of those working in Philosophy of the Americas accept cognitivism about moral judgment? (Real category and real figure.) Of course some disciplines are much more related than others, so Metaphysics is much more relevant to PR than the Americas thing. (And being a metaphysician increases the probability that one is a theist.)
There are LOTS of complications, and I'd LOVE to have the data to do some regression on, especially to investigate the relationship between various positions one holds and their coherence. For example, I doubt there are many non-physicalist, libertarian atheists who affirm free will.
All just a jumble of thoughts on this Tuesday afternoon, but here's a thesis:
TD1 We should be about as impressed with the fact that most PR specialists are theists as that most Mind specialists are physicalists.
But note this fact:
F1 Theism enjoys a MUCH stronger majority in PR than does physicalism in Mind.
Now I think there's fodder here for non-trivial support for theism from this majority because even after we factor in the fact that theists are--presumably, though we have no data--more likely to go into PR, the majority is still very impressive and--per AOS1--should count for more than the fact that the majority of non-PR people are atheists.
Here's another thesis, since TD1 is compatible with being totally unimpressed by any majoritiy:
TD2 If the theist majority in PR is of no evidential merit, then the physicalist majority in Mind is of no evidential merit.
And since the majority support for physicalism is about the only evidence I have for physicalism, my credence in theism is going to be quite high, since the conditional probability of non-physicalism on common sense is quite high, and my conditional probability of theism on non-physicalism is also quite high.
So, despite the clear overall majority of atheists, I come away from this survey with a modicum of credence-boost for theism.
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*Not proof-read
There's a very confusing typo that made me rush to the data:
The thing, though, is that though THEISM is 4:1 minority in most relevant populations and less so in general, among those who specialize in Philosophy of Religion it's much, much more popular.
"many atheists go into Phil Mind, say, in order to defend some kind of naturalism about the mind, which would need to proportionately discount the majority results for Physicalism (though, I must say, the results aren't that high for physicalism in Phil Mind in this survey)."
There might be a reading of this sentence that is true, but there's a reading of it on which it's pretty questionable. The 'in order to' seems to attribute motive. The hypothesis that there are people who are motivated to go into phil mind because of some deep desire to dedicate their lives to the defense of naturalism from the critics of naturalism seems rather incredible to me. I've never met anyone who does any work in phil. mind who I think it motivated in this way. Maybe you just meant to say that there are people who do phil. mind and defend naturalism, but the 'in order to' suggested something stronger.
On the other hand, you might be thinking that there's little evidence that theists are motivated to do work in phil. religion in order to defend beliefs that are precious to them and were precious to them before they got into phil. religion.
I'll just say this. I can say that I've met lots of agnostics and atheists who don't see much point in doing phil. religion. I cannot say that I've met lots of people who are opposed to naturalism who think there's not much point in doing phil. mind. Final question: were you intending to attribute motive to people who work in phil. mind?
I would think a major factor in the cp clause of AOS1 is the presence of absence of a self-selection effect. If there is a strong selection effect in some AOS for those who hold some position, P, then that the specialists believe P is not evidence for P (absent some discussion of the mechanism for the selection effect).
Care to proffer an estimate of the comparative selection effects in philosophy of mind and philosophy of religion?
Dismayed? Appalled?
Looks like a typo in the seventh paragraph: "The thing, though, is that though
atheism..."You did say ceteris paribus, but it would also be interesting to know how much specialists think their arguments actually support their beliefs — that is, do they expect that seriously studying their field would lead one to agree with them?
I'll just say this. I can say that I've met lots of agnostics and atheists who don't see much point in doing phil. religion.
What could that mean? I mean aside from the local cultural fact that one can say this about PR be perceptibly cooler than one was just before one said it, but you can't say it about PM and be cool at all. I suppose if you have settled the question negatively for yourself, you might not see it as worthwhile trying to get anyone else to see the light. But many (likely most) agnostics and atheists have settled opinions based on, frankly, almost no thought. So that wouldn't explain why they'd think there's not much point. My guess is that if we learned the reason why they thought that, it wouldn't be especially enlightening on the topic. I
But setting that issue aside, someone who didn't know better (as I do) might take you to be suggesting that people go into PR to defend otherwise unstable beliefs that they cherish. But I can't recall anyone at PB not giving a pretty fair hearing to what the opposing positions offer. Maybe there is an exception here or there. So if PB is any indication, and one should expect it to be, the thesis that those doing PR are simply trying to justify otherwise indefensible beliefs is probably not true. On yet another hand, when did the existence of God become (I mean among non-ignoramuses) a less than major metaphysical question, wharever your opinion happens to be on the question?
Hey Mike,
You wrote, "someone who didn't know better (as I do) might take you to be suggesting that people go into PR to defend otherwise unstable beliefs that they cherish."
Just to be clear, I didn't want to suggest anything of the kind. It was the apparent attribution of motive to philosophers of mind in TD's post that puzzled me, but then I thought that maybe he thought that the cases of phil. mind and phil. religion were on par in the sense that self-selection explained the data rather than a desire to pursue some agenda.
"many (likely most) agnostics and atheists have settled opinions based on, frankly, almost no thought."
Perhaps. I take it that many agnostics are agnostics because they cannot see how the debate could progress in any way. Hard to get motivated to join that debate if that's what you think.
As for the atheists, much of the work in mainstream phil. religion seems to have to do with arguments for God's existence, responses to arguments for God's non-existence such as the argument from evil, and attempts to understand the divine attributes. I've met many who think that the arguments for God's existence are sophistry or are just skeptical of the idea of philosophical arguments for the existence of anything. There are people who think that there's not much interesting to say about the arguments from evil that you couldn't talk about by doing ethics instead. As for discussions of the divine attributes, there's good work on freedom and time being done in connection with discussions of the divine attributes but you can work on the parts of those discussions that matter to you if you're an atheist without having to do much phil religion. Just work on the metaphysics of time or free will instead.
Couple all this with the fact that there's the perception (shared by some here) that the philosophical community as a whole doesn't value phil. religion in the way that it values metaphysics, phil. mind, epistemology, ethical theory, and I can see why someone forced to prioritize would not have phil. religion high on their list of priorities.
"On yet another hand, when did the existence of God become ... a less than major metaphysical question?"
Interesting question. I had always thought that the existence of God was one of those things that made sense to discuss in your typical metaphysics course. That being said, phil. religion is a discipline unto itself now. It's not as if someone who claims AOS metaphysics could thereby claim AOS/AOC phil religion. When you think about the vast amount of literature you'd have to mater to credibly claim that you had some grip on what's happening in phil. religion now, I can see lots of people doing metaphysics taking a pass and working on other things entirely.
Clayton, the "in order to" needn't be fully conscious or disingenuous. From what I can tell, most people who go into phil mind have already taken the naturalist "stance" and are attracted to the idea of trying to defend it. I was in fact suggesting self-selection for the most part, but I think things fare better with PR for a couple of reasons. One is that Naturalism/Materialism/Physicalism seems to be a bit of an ideology in a way that theism--for mainstream philosophers--isn't. This comes out clearly in Perry's Bradford book (I think it's _Knowledge, Consciousness, and Possibility_ or something like that). There's a lot more fideism among physicalists from what I can tell than among theists (in mainstream academic philosophy). You've got the van Fraassen piece in the Kvanvig volume on Plantinga, and you've got Ney's "Physicalism as an Attitude" admitting it's on track. And then you add Lycan's recent admissions in "Giving Dualism it's Due" I think it's called. This falling on the heels of Kim's defection and physicalism has fallen on hard times.
So I think the selection effect is more prominent in Mind than in PR, so the expert testimony factor gets discounted less in PR than in Mind. And, let's face it, atheists in PR are treated much nicer than dualists in Mind. Someone who wants to be a maverick defender of dualism in Mind is going to give up a lot sooner than someone who wants to go against the theistic trend in PR.
Add to that that the PR lock on theism is considerably stronger than the physicalist lock in Mind and you get, for me, the result I mentioned: a slight credence boost in theism.
Now, you said the following
I take it that many agnostics are agnostics because they cannot see how the debate could progress in any way....who think that the arguments for God's existence are sophistry or are just skeptical of the idea of philosophical arguments for the existence of anything.
That the debate concerning God's existence could not progress would only support agnosticism for one if one already thought the issue in a deadlock, i.e. if they were already an agnostic. This implies a judgment on the evidential weight of the arguments. But to do that--responsibly--just is to engage in PR. And someone who was skeptical of the idea that philosophical arguments could prove the existence of anything would--if consistent--be equally disposed against much of contemporary metaphysics. But Mind'ers typically aren't so disposed. So I guess I'm pretty confused by these comments (including what a philosophical argument is supposed to be. I know of inductive, deductive, and abductive arguments, all of which can be sensibly used to argue for the existence of something or other, but I no not of philosophical arguments).
Trent,
"I'd LOVE to have the data to do some regression on, especially to investigate the relationship between various positions one holds and their coherence."
I'd love to see you (or someone else competent) doing that. Why not to ask the PhilPapers Survey team for the data (without the portions of personal info about the respondents)? Presumably they wouldn't access them. But there is a real chance (at least under certain conditions).
Anaway and foremost, why not to ask the team itself to make few regressions? It should be easy for them, with the current statistical software. A matter of few clicks.
"That the debate concerning God's existence could not progress would only support agnosticism for one if one already thought the issue in a deadlock, i.e. if they were already an agnostic. This implies a judgment on the evidential weight of the arguments. But to do that--responsibly--just is to engage in PR."
Maybe, but this assumes that the surveys survey people who are fully epistemically responsible and that a fully epistemically responsible person couldn't think that there isn't going to be a lot of interesting work where someone offers an argument for/against God's existence using premises that will be acceptable to those who don't already accept the argument's conclusions.
So, your position is not so much that people are going in to phil mind motivated by something other than the pursuit of truth (although there's a lot of physicalist fideism which is sort of like doing phil mind in bad faith) but that there's an ideology that lumps together naturalism/materialism/physicalism and a stronger selection effect in phil mind than phil religion. I haven't had coffee yet, but I'll be interested to see if I end up believing that at some point today.
"And, let's face it, atheists in PR are treated much nicer than dualists in Mind. Someone who wants to be a maverick defender of dualism in Mind is going to give up a lot sooner than someone who wants to go against the theistic trend in PR."
Really? I have no idea where you're getting this stuff from. I don't know how atheists are treated in phil religion. For the most part, people are nice when you talk to them but I have no idea how atheists are treated when they submit work to phil religion journals, how atheists are treated when conferences are put together, etc... Where's the evidence that someone in phil mind will be treated badly/less well than atheists in phil religion when they are dualists, or don't accept physicalism, or don't buy into the naturalism/materialism/physicalism ideology?
One difference between the PR side and the Phil of Mind side is that there is a greater focus on the PR side in defending theism than there is on the PM side in defending materialism. This fairly naturally means that the atheist who works in PR is less likely to be relatively marginalized, as her work addresses, on its own terms, what is indeed a major portion of PR--namely the question whether theism is true. Think of Rowe or Oppy. On the other hand, the dualist who works in PM is, I think, more likely to be relatively marginalized, because the question whether materialism is true is not such a central part of contemporary PM.
If PR were more like PM, there would be rather more discussion of divine attributes, and rather less work on the problem of evil and especially on theistic arguments.
One thought I have is that philosophy of religion and philosophy of mind are both fields that it is difficult to avoid having significant interactions with; certainly one can't do much history of philosophy and ignore philosophy of religion, for example, and it also has overlap with metaphysics and various other specialities, while philosophy of mind similarly has interactions with metaphysics and with epistemology and also a major historical role. Thus, my tendency is to expect that most philosophers will have fairly well informed opinions in these areas. As a result, while I might become slightly inclined to side with the experts when there's a small difference between the experts and philosophers as a whole, a huge difference makes me suspect that there must be something other than awareness of the evidence at work; awareness of the evidence just shouldn't be that different between the specialists and philosophers as a whole.
I suppose I think most philosophy is pretty interconnected, really, even in these specialized days, but I note that in general in this survey the opinions of experts were rarely very sharply different from the opinions of philosophers in general, so again I think there's evidence that a sharp divergence is suspicious, because it's so unusual.
You mean like Michael Huemer?
Yeah yeah, one swallow does not make a summer...
1. Read the first (non-quoted) paragraph a few times and couldn't parse it. Maybe too many negations for my brain.
2. You doubt that "there's an ideology that lumps together naturalism/materialism/physicalism and a stronger selection effect in phil mind than phil religion." Since the first conjunct is pretty clear, I assume the objection is to the second one. That's not what I was trying to say (I don't think I did say that). The idea was that they were about equal, but that since imbalance in PR is greater you get a *bit* more out of those results.
3. re: treatment of dualists vs. atheists, me thinks thou doth protest to much. My evidence is anectotal (the plural of which is "data"). I've been to a LOT of PR conferences and atheists are, if anything, generally treated as special celebrities. Maybe people will write in with their horror stories but I bet if you ask Evan Fales for example, he'll confirm this. I love that guy. On the dualist side I have less evidence, but nothing to sneeze at (not really sure what that means). If you haven't read the Lycan piece it's instructive in this regard. And it's *commonplace* for dualism to be waived of as "spooky" without argument, for eyes to role, incredulous stares, protests of "do you really believe that," and being called "anti-scientific." I bet other kids out there have plenty of similar stories.
Here's something that could be measured. Here's a testable hypothesis:
AS1 The proportion of dualist publications/conference invites/etc in Mind deviates negatively from the proportion of dualists in Mind reported in the survey more than the proportion of atheist publications/invites/etc in PR does from the proportion of atheists in PR reported in the survey.
I'm a lot more aware of what goes on in PR than in Mind, but it's quite common for theist/atheist exchanges to go on in PR journals. Lycan records some of the nonsense that's gone on in ignoring dualism, but it seems to me that the mind lit is mostly debates between competing kinds of physicalists. There are slightly more non-physicalists in Mind than there are atheists in PR, yet, I surmise, atheists get a much wider hearing in PR than dualists to in Mind (I doubt there's much concern for slippage between non-physicalists and dualists, but I do want to flag it, and my point is strongest for substance dualists, not sure if Mind'ers are counting Kim as a physicalist now or not. I could just revamp my thesis to concern those who are not "close enough" to physicalism).
Just saw Alex's comment, seems like we're on the same track here. And we haven't talked about it in the halls of Baylor!
Trent,
I asked at PhilPapers: "Suppose one wants to investigate the relationship between various positions and their coherence, but he cannot do it by the selection filters available online. E. g., he wonders about the relative number of non-physicalist, libertarian atheists. Can he ask the team for the table? Do you plan to add more selection filters online?"
David Chalmers replied: "Yes, we will be adding more results of this sort. As the results page (and our discussion of results) suggests, within the next month or two we will add data on interquestion correlations and various other effects. I don't know whether we will release data on three-way interactions among the main questions, but we'll see. We will eventually release a near-full data set to a limited number of researchers who want to perform studies using it, but that won't be for a while yet.
In the meantime, if people would like to see certain sorts of data released, feel free to put in a request here."
http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=414
Here's a case that I think shows the relevance of selection for this discussion. I looked at the fine grained results for the atheism/theism question for all faculty/Ph.D.s, philosophers of religion, and asian philosophy, then combined the answers for "another alternative", "other" and "intermediate view". For all faculty/Ph.D.'s, the result is 2.6%; for phil. religion, it's 2.9%; for asian philosophy, it's 23.6%. Of course the sample size is pretty small for the latter group, and we really don't have any idea what the alternative view the respondents had in mind. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that a good number of the 23.6% are adherents of a particular eastern religion and chose "other" to so indicate. Is the fact that specialists of that religion choose other at a greater percentage than other philosophers evidence for the truth of the eastern religion? That depends entirely on the strength of the selection effect, right?
I'm having a hard time figuring out just what sort of evidence we could have for the nature of the different selection effects. Perhaps in a future survey, they could include a questions like, "When did you first come to believe the position you selected?" Absent that, it looks like it's just anecdotal evidence. But I'm not sure that carries much weight, given that there's likely to be selection effects on the evidence available to us. So I suppose I think until we have a better understanding of the nature of the selection effects, the results provide no evidence for or against theism. Why is that not the right view to hold, Trent?
Anecdotal evidence is evidence.
Consider this claim:
AOS2 - Specialists in a field are more likely to support idiosyncratic positions, while non-specialists are more likely to represent philosophical consensus.
I've believed something like this for a while. I first noticed it with philosophers of math being more likely to support anti-realism about math (and philosophers of science being more likely to support anti-realism about science), and it seems like there's a reasonable explanation for this. When you're working in an area, there's an incentive to come up with new and interesting positions, regardless of whether they're correct, and perhaps even whether you initially think they're correct. (Once you've discussed the view a bit more, you're likely to start believing it.) There's also the other tendency that's been mentioned above, that people who initially start out with strange views about a subject area are also more likely to pursue this with further work in that area.
This is compatible with AOS1 - it just means that although (say) epistemologists will more often have strange beliefs about knowledge than non-epistemologists, the epistemologists who have the correct views will have much better reasons for their views than non-epistemologists.
Also, for what it's worth, the breakdown for physicalism among all target faculty is 56/27, while for philosophers of mind it's 61/21, which strikes me as not a very large difference. If the survey was properly randomized, then with a pool of 1000 respondents, this would be just at the edge of the margin of error (3%), but since the survey is non-randomized, this looks like it might not even be a statistically significant difference. (Certainly in any case, it's not an indication of a large difference of any sort.)
I heard Lycan give his paper as a talk, and he was even treating dualism as silly and something no one should hold (and substance dualism as something virtually no one today actually does hold) as he was defending it from arguments usually given against it. When I talked to him afterward to inform him of a bunch of influential people who are substance dualists (including John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman), he was completely shocked. He was assuming there couldn't have been any in the audience, and I counted at least five with a few who might be on the fence.
I have to say that, as a non-specialist in PM, there were only (I believe) two significant spots in Lycan's talk where he was informing me of something I didn't already know about the arguments for and against dualism. But I have a feeling a similarly-detailed presentation of the best contemporary arguments for and against theism would not only take quite a lot more time than Lycan had available but would involve a lot of unfamiliar ground for most atheist non-PR specialists, judging by the simplistic versions of these arguments I regularly see and hear from non-PR specialists. I don't think anything close to the same level of simplification occurs when dualists discuss the arguments for atheism.
It might even be more analogous to discuss a particular aspect of the question, e.g. cosmological arguments or the problem of evil, since each such argument probably already has more literature than the dualism/materialism debate, at least in recent years. A talk of Lycan's level of detail on the cosmological argument by William Rowe about how the objections to the cosmological argument are no longer convincing to him (but why he irrationally resists anyway) would surely involve far more points than non-specialists in PR have never even encountered than Lycan's talk did for non-specialists in PM. I think that's some evidence for the claim that atheists who don't specialize in PR are generally less responsible in their rejection of theism than dualists who don't specialize in PM are for rejecting materialism.
"I don't think anything close to the same level of simplification occurs when dualists discuss the arguments for atheism."
I take it you meant "materialism" rather than "atheism"?