Recently I was asked to sign
Signing something is a type of writing. Sensible people should not ask Callard to write anything at all.
a petition opposing the deplatforming of philosophers
Philosophers love wisdom. What wisdom appears lovable from a platform?
on the basis of their views on sex and gender.
Pornhub is a platform. There is sex and gender stuff on it which would cause your hair to stand on end. It suggests ' In order to get more profile views and to make better connections with members, we always recommend that you add more friends and subscribers and comment on other members content such as (videos/pictures). This will allow them to view your profile and see who you are. Uploading content to your own profile page will also help you get more views as well, however it is not mandatory for those who do not feel comfortable.'
The problem here is obvious. A despicable platform encourages despicable behavior. But de-platforming is itself a type of platforming because it suggests there exists a class of performances more despicable yet. All these guys commenting on each others depraved and (I imagine) insanitary acts are egging each other on whether they commend or condemn each other's performance.
Deplatforming is the academic branch of cancel culture
No. It was parallel to a 'Civil Society' - i.e. Trade Union and Local Government- initiative. The notion was that there are some opinions which are too vile to be accommodated on a civic or occupational platform however ecumenic. In general, changes in the law, have reduced the need for Civil Society to exercise vigilance in this respect.
— offense-based professional exclusion from forums like conferences, speaking engagements, journals and books. The petition argues that professional and social sanctions directed at the content of a philosopher’s speech — even when the subject is sensitive enough that speech stands to cause harm — compromise core values of intellectual inquiry.*
So, the petition presented an argument- presumably a philosophical argument. Callard refused to sign because she did not agree with that argument. However, if she agreed with the conclusion, she could have written something everybody else may have wanted to sign as more ably expressing their point of view.
Equally she could have written a 'dissenting judgment' while accepting for some limited and practical purpose that it was necessary, for the moment, to proceed in the manner the petition stipulated for.
What Callard has done instead is foolish. She has asserted that those who write or sign petitions 'compromise core values of intellectual inquiry' regardless of circumstances. There is simply no evidence for this view in any intellectual field whatsoever. Moreover, in her own field, there is an a priori reason why it can't possibly be true.
Philosophy, uniquely, is not even a potentially 'buck-stopped' discipline- i.e. there exists no protocol within it such that any argument, qua argument, is terminable. It is only concerned with questions which are open in the sense that no crucial experiment has yet been made in respect to a relevant hypothesis. Moreover, it is a discoordination, not a coordination game, which actively seeks 'distinctions without (an as yet) difference.
I refused to sign, because I believe that petitions, regardless of their content, compromise core values of intellectual inquiry.
Callard doesn't get that some types of intellectual inquiry- but not Philosophy- are coordination games. They may be explicitly 'buck stopped'- i.e. a solution is imposed- or there may be spontaneous overlapping consensus- e.g. re. choice of notation, metrics, protocols etc. Petitions regarding protocols, procedures, eligibility criteria, 'common knowledge' signaling and screening mechanisms, etc. may make intellectual inquiry much much more productive. True, there may be a chilling effect. But that is context dependent. Callard is saying 'regardless of content' and regardless of the type of intellectual core values, some damage or compromise occurs to 'intellectual inquiry' even if some Socioproctologists write a petition demanding that everybody stop writing books titled 'Agnes Callard v Magnus Mallard'.
This is an utterly absurd claim.
Here’s why.
Callard will now display her ignorance and inability to reason.
Whether you call it a “petition,” an “open letter” or a “public statement,” this type of document is distinguished by the fact that after stating and arguing for a position, it lists the names of people who endorse the position.
This is not true. Some people may sign it without endorsing the position. Others, who endorse it, may refuse to sign or forget to do so or may have never have been asked to sign it in the first place. It simply isn't true that the circulation of a petition has the magic property of carrying out the type of 'partition' on a pre-specified set which Callard posits.
The petition aims to effect persuasion with respect to what appears in the first part not only by way of any argument contained therein but also by way of the number and respectability of the people who figure in the second part.
It may aim at 'persuasion'. It may not. The thing may be a signaling or screening device.
Such a document tries to persuade you to believe (that it is right to do) something because many people, some of whom are authorities, believe it (is the right thing to do).
Not necessarily.
It is not always wrong to believe things because many people believe them, but it is always intellectually uninquisitive to do so.
No. It is never intellectually un-inquisitive to alter a belief based on some new quantitative or qualitative information. To argue otherwise is to say 'being inquisitive' requires never believing anything at all'. But this would preclude the belief that inquiry could be useful. Indeed, it would have no 'base case' from which to inductively proceed.
The problem here is not that what many believe can be false,
Yet, if what many believe is always true, then there would be no problem. There are types of intellectual inquiry in which it is sufficient to know that there is a large enough class of people with a particular trait for it to be worthwhile to proceed with the inquiry.
though that is a problem. The problem is that even if it’s true, the fact that many believe it doesn’t shed any light on it why it’s true
It does shed some light. If the thing is true and only people with a particular trait believe it is true then there is a Structural Causal Model which can explain how that trait links belief and truth. This can shed a great deal of light on a whole class of problems.
— and that is what the intellectually inquisitive person wants to know.
Intellectually inquisitive people are not solely concerned with why a thing is true. They may want to know what is true and how some people, but not others, can form justified true belief in such cases.
Is this problem mitigated by the fact that the list is not about sheer numbers because authorities appear on it?
If autocritas is proportionate to a specific trait of the type mentioned above, then sure. If Terence Tao says some random Indian dude's proof of the Reimann hypothesis is wrong, that outweighs a whole bunch of Indian dudes from shite Colleges asserting otherwise.
I think intellectually inquisitive people do gravitate toward those with expertise, because they are in an especially good position to answer our questions. But this goes only for experts taken severally.
No it doesn't. One expert who provides a counter-example is enough. An amateur too may have provided it, but nobody paid him any attention.
Callard immediately contradicts herself-
One expert is a learning opportunity; being confronted with an arsenal of experts is about as conducive to conversation as a firing squad.
I'd get plenty chatty if faced with a firing squad and chatting might get them to see I couldn't possibly be the spy they want to execute.
One expert may be wrong. A bunch of experts who independently arrive at the same conclusion show there is 'replicability'. The thing might not be an error or an artefact.
There is something aggressive about the way in which voices gain strength and volume by being joined together.
There is something pathetic about pedants signing petitions coz they getta no respec'.
Numbers generate a pressure to believe that isn’t grounded in explanatory force,
The Condorcet Jury theorem is based on the Law of Large numbers which has explanatory force in spades.
because having more and more adherents to a view doesn’t give rise to better and better accounts of why the view is correct.
It may do. It may not. But this type of information is useful for some types of intellectual inquiry.
Philosophers ought to be especially sensitive to introducing this element of belief imposition into our culture.
But Callard herself is engaged in such 'belief imposition'. Nothing is preventing any one else from endorsing her article and ensuring that such endorsements are aggregated.
It is quite true that if Callard wrote in a scrupulous manner then nobody would want to endorse her article in an unqualified manner- unless they shared Callard's philosophy and beliefs about the world. But what they would be endorsing would have no imperative force. It would not be a petition.
Callard may say 'I'm not writing a petition because I'm not circulating it'. Yet the thing could be a petition just as my writing a 'petition to change cats into woofy dogs' can't be an actual petition coz everybody thinks it's silly and I'm a big poopy-head and nobody really likes me and I smell bad.
As a philosopher, I want my influence to be philosophical, which is to say, I want to bring people to believe only what they, by their own lights, can see to be justified;
Callard is advancing the following claims
1) Philosophers want to have philosophical influence.
This is not true. One can be a philosopher and desire to have no influence whatsoever of any epistemic sort.
Thus a person may study philosophy so as to be better at portfolio choice. They may not want any information about their philosophical results or investigations to leak out so as to preserve an information asymmetry which they can use to generate a rent.
2) Callard wants to have philosophical influence. This seems unlikely. She is not writing with enough precision and intelligence to influence philosophers- or, indeed, anybody with half a brain.
3) Callard says she wants to 'bring people to believe' x. But Callard says she is a philosopher. She says she wants to accomplish this 'bringing people to believe' shit, because she is a philosopher. But, relying only on their own lights, nobody, speaking generally, has any reason to justify Callard's belief. No doubt, there may be a set of people employed as 'philosophers', just as there may be a set of people who are employed as 'Alchemists', and, it may be, for their own narrow economic or sociological reasons, they credentialize and push forward people like Callard. But this would happen even if they are wholly disassociated with 'intellectual inquiry'. They could be running a scam or, more sadly, merely providing a safe place where victims of epistemic self-abuse can wail together over their vanished virtue.
Callard has just given any 'fellow philosopher' who reads her a good reason to circulate or sign petitions of all sorts. Why? She has asserted that what her profession is about involves 'bringing people to believe' things. As a matter of fact, any belief a person has is, in some sense, justified by their own lights. Callard has not stipulated that those 'lights' exclude argumentum ab auctoritate- e.g being influenced by Callard because she has been presented, by the NYT, as an authority on moral philosophy.
Callard says-
I don’t want them to believe something because (I am one of the) many people who think it.
Yet, the evidence is, she sought credentials in a field and now gets paid to get others to gain similar credentials. But, her getting paid is a function of 'many people' thinking there is some relationship between what she claims to do and what she actually does. In so far as she supplies a service to a market, it must be the case that she needs and thus in some sense wants to believe that a thing is true- viz. she will get paid- because many people (that too those with 'effective demand') think it.
The idea that “the many” cannot be philosophical goes back to Plato’s dialogues:
No it doesn't. The notion that philosophy is esoteric is pre-historic and has much deeper roots.
Socrates’ interlocutors frequently resist his counterintuitive conclusions as violations of “common sense,” and Socrates regularly replies, “why should we care so much for what the majority (“hoi polloi”) think?” (Crito 44c.)
Because the hoi polloi can have you executed if they think you side with the hoi oligoi and are seeking to subvert the polity.
Socrates wants to know why the view is true, not who or how many hold it.
Socrates comes to the conclusion that somethings can be known by intuition (synoida) like the fact that Socrates knows he knows nothing, and others are to be preferred as eudoxa- beliefs salutary if held in common. It may be that God wants this to be the case, but that is not Socrates' concern.
I think there is a Socratic variant of the Hippocratic oath.
In which case it is right to put a philosopher to death if he, imprudently or impiously, does harm to the Polity, just as it would be right to punish a Doctor who breaks his own oath to do no harm.
Consider the fact that most of us tend to be ready with medical opinions in the context of casual conversation — we all think we know more than we actually do and overgeneralize from the one time our aunt had that problem. Doctors have to hold themselves to higher standards, lest they do real harm when people follow their recklessly given advice.
Callard has not held herself to a higher standard in writing this dreck.
An expert understands where her expertise runs out; unlike the layman, the expert knows what she doesn’t know.
This is like Socratic synoida.
Much of the job of the philosophical expert consists of exposing the degree to which all of us — philosophers and laymen alike — are inclined to wrongly arrogate philosophical knowledge to ourselves, often under the heading of “common sense.”
In which case I am a philosophical expert. But a greater one, with respect to Dr. Callard, is Magnus Mallard who looks at her and says 'quack!'.
Just as doctors must commit to not doing any bodily harm,
they should also not do any psychological harm by making fun of the size or shape of your dick
philosophers must commit to not doing a certain kind of epistemic harm.
Doctors should not behave in a manner which causes patients to think they are babbling imbeciles. Nor should philosophers. However, we can give 'informed consent' to Doctors if there is a possibility that harm, not benefit, will be received. Similarly, we may give a philosopher the time of day if there is a possibility they might say something useful. If not we disintermediate them.
Epistemic harm is a notion associated with 'testimonial injustice' such that a speaker is 'wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower'. There is currently no requirement that a philosopher abstain from epistemic harm. Trump is a knower who testifies the election was stolen. A philosopher who denounces Trump is not currently considered to have done anything similar to a Surgeon who decided to amputate the wrong limb for shits & giggles.
It is unacceptable for a doctor to use — or even advise someone to use — a medically unsound procedure.
This is not the case. A medically unsound procedure may do no medical harm but have some other benefit for the patient. Thus, telling a joke to make a patient laugh may not improve his medical condition. But a Doctor may do so for some other reason. However, it is unacceptable to use a medically unnecessary procedure. What Callard is doing here, however, is using philosophically unsound as well as unnecessary procedures. But because her Doctorate is in shit, we don't greatly care.
Persuasion by majority or authority is an unsound way to inquire;
Persuasion is not inquiry. There is nothing wrong with inquiring into what the majority opinion is.
the employment of such a procedure constitutes a kind of philosophical malpractice.
Callard mentioned Socrates. She considers him an authority. She is seeking to persuade us of the above. What she is doing is neither 'inquiry' nor a sound philosophical practice according to her own lights.
Consider a counterargument: Doctors cause bodily harm all the time, for instance to themselves if they engage in risky sports activities. Or consider the doctor who punches someone in the face, breaking his nose, in a bar fight. Whatever he is guilty of, it won’t be medical malpractice.
In the latter case, it may be. A Doctor who gets into bar fights may be struck off. Why? In some jurisdictions, the action may be illegal and incur social odium. To maintain trust in the profession, the Medical Association may feel obliged to make an example of this lady. Suppose, that same Doctor treated a patient the next morning and that treatment was not successful. It is likely that a suit for medical malpractice is entertainable.
Doctors are not always acting in their capacity as doctors; they needn’t always be out to maximize health. Likewise for philosophers. So what if petitions don’t employ philosophical methodology?
There is no link whatsoever between 'philosophical methodology' and the signing of petitions. Callard thinks there is, but what Callard thinks is shit.
This is a reasonable point. Plausibly, the philosophers who write and sign petitions needn’t conceive of that activity itself as a philosophical one — they wouldn’t use petitions as teaching tools in their philosophy classes. I grant that philosophers should sometimes take off their philosophical hats. Nor is it plausible to insist that we employ the same methods inside and outside the classroom.
But ask yourself, in this case, why philosophers would be removing their hats.
Because they are not addressing philosophers as philosophers (who have a professional interest in finding 'distinctions without a difference'- i.e. reasons to disagree) but as people who earn their living in a particular way and thus who may have an 'overlapping consensus' regarding any type of sanction which affects their earning power. In particular, 'offense-based professional exclusion' could be seen as against the 'class interest' of people in that line of work. Just as members of a Trade Union may resist the notion that any member should be sacked for any reason whatsoever so as to secure superior 'property rights in jobs', so too might philosophers want a Hohfeldian immunity w.r.t an aspect of their employment or remuneration. There is a purely economic rationale here. All philosophers benefit if no philosopher can be subject to professional exclusion on the basis of a reported offense. What would be even nicer would be immunity to charges of sexual harassment.
It’s not a matter of the audience’s being unwilling or unable to entertain a philosophical mode of argumentation — they are speaking to philosophers.
Who, professionally, are meant to disagree. However, they can agree on matters which affect them economically or in terms of career development.
Nor is it a matter of philosophers engaging in extraprofessional activity — on their off hours, on summer vacation, maybe philosophers don’t feel like arguing; we are talking about an intramural, professional discussion of the ethics of the profession.
Trade Unions may well consider it 'ethical' that members act cohesively to advance their economic interests. There can be a trade union of philosophers just a much as there can be a trade union of plumbers.
We’d never approach questions such as “Are possible worlds real?” or “Is knowledge justified true belief?” by petition, so why are we tempted to do so in the case of questions around sex, gender and hurtful speech?
Because 'offense-based professional exclusion' has an economic component. The petition reflects 'class interest'.
The answer is that the latter question involves real feelings and real people, and it is about something that is happening now — for all these reasons, it strikes us as being of grave importance.
Callard is too stupid to understand that real people with real feelings take great offense to arguments re. possible worlds for religious reasons or because philosophers are too lazy and stupid to update their arguments in the light of recent scientific advances.
Petitions may be the first step for a particular group of knowledge workers to gain countervailing power (by acting cohesively) against 'offense based professional exclusion'.
The petition writers are thinking to themselves, this time it really matters. I think it is a mistake for a philosopher to take the importance of a question as a reason to adopt an unphilosophical attitude toward it.
It is important that Callard goes to the restroom from time to time rather than poop in her pants. It would be a grave mistake for her to adopt a philosophical attitude to this. It may well be that this petition is about 'the thin end of a wedge' which would end by subordinating the teacher to the student on the basis that the customer is always right. It is also possible that it is part of a concerted attempt to gain countervailing power over employers. Perhaps, it is something to do with the 'Culture Wars'. These are not issues wholly unconnected with different branches of philosophical inquiry. Callard may genuinely be too stupid that this is the case.
One thing that is distinctive about philosophy is that unlike other disciplines, it is philosophical all the way down.
This is not the case. It bottoms out as something else- hermeneutics, model theory, theology, history of ideas, evolutionary biology- take your pick.
“What are mathematical objects?” and other such foundational questions fall under the purview not of the discipline in question but of philosophy.
This is nonsense. Only mathematicians, not philosophers, have shown that mathematical objects can have different properties- e.g. ability to change over time- while still generating the same results. Who was the last philosopher who said anything interesting about math? David Lewis ended up babbling nonsense about megethology. Kripke recently argued that 'a Brouwerian theory of free choice sequences could be added to classical mathematics without any constructive doubts as to its validity'. Meanwhile, vast new horizons have opened up which no philosopher has as yet commented on.
Science doesn’t ask, “What is science?”;
Yes it does. What's more it can answer the question with a crucial experiment somewhere down the line. Is String Theory science? We'll know for sure soon enough.
philosophy asks this, as well as asking, “What is philosophy?”
And Economists ask what is Econ and Socioproctologists ask what is Socioproctology and so forth.
I am not saying that philosophers should refrain from engaging in political activity; my target is instead the politicization of philosophy itself.
But that is itself a political view.
I think that the conduct of the profession should be as bottomless as its subject matter:
But Callard has 'bottomed out' philosophy, according to her own lights, to take a stand on a particular petition. Sadly, she has written in a sloppy and stupid style. This is because she is shit at philosophy.
If we are going to have professional, intramural discussions about the ethics of the profession, we should do so philosophically and not by petitioning one another.
Why not? What is wrong with getting the ball rolling with a petition?
We should allow ourselves the license to be philosophical all the way down.
But the first step needn't be purely philosophical.
“But I need to get people to see that excluding certain voices is not the way to create an inclusive intellectual environment.” Then argue for it! If you strip the list of signatures off your petition, you’ll find that you have an argument on your hands.
But that is still the case if you don't. The fact is, if a lot of people say 'let's debate this', then more debaters will be attracted to that debate. Callard doesn't get that quantitative and qualitative information is important for determining 'kairos'- timeliness- and 'scheduling'. The thing can break a concurrency deadlock or livelock.
The argument was there all along, but only when shorn of the appeal to authority does it invite counterargument — as opposed to counterpetitioning.
So, Callard isn't, according to her own lights, responding as a philosopher. She is merely 'counter-petitioning'. Perhaps she is doing so for a careerist reason. Thus the globalized market for shite promotes her.
Philosophers value having opponents worth listening to; we shouldn’t be trying to sort people into teams of the like-minded.
But team sports encourage athletic excellence. They also draw in resources because spectators get enthused and are willing to pay more so that the competition becomes more exciting and greater virtuosity is displayed.
The fact is academic philosophy is constantly trying to sort thinkers into 'teams of the like-minded'. Is Callard really ignorant of this fact?
Philosophical argument may not always bring about the largest number of mind-changes in your audience — the award on that front would go to mass propaganda of some kind —
Callard takes a dim view of her peers. The way to influence them is 'mass propaganda of some kind'.
but it represents the kind of belief acquisition that we as philosophers are committed to: intellectually honest, conducive to knowledge, nonaggressive, inquisitive, respectful.
Callard is either intellectually dishonest or else a moron. Philosophers are not committed to 'belief acquisition' of any sort. They may be interested in discarding beliefs so Faith may shine forth. They may be concerned with procedures and protocols with respect to establishing what is a Justified True Belief. But their motivation is not the acquisition of a belief per se. No doubt, some ideologies and religions consider philosophy the first step to acquiring a particular belief. But once that belief is acquired, the acquirer is considered to have gone beyond the status of a mere philosopher. There are some pedagogical systems where philosophy is taught at high school and the undergraduate level. Students are expected to specialize in some other discipline after that.
There is no greater threat to intellectual culture than
that people stop devoting time and money to its cultivation
the thought that when it really counts, when it actually matters to us, we philosophers give up on doing philosophy.
This is false. We expect philosophers or poets or priests or physicists to respond to an existential threat by doing whatever everybody else is doing to combat it but with some added skill or insight or technical mastery. This does not involve 'giving up' on their vocation. Rather, as Collingwood said of the remarkable progress he made during the First World War, when he was employed in the Admiralty, we can scarcely expect a philosopher to be as productive under the storms and stresses and random explosions of a cloistered academic life as under the conditions of calm and tranquility imposed by war time conditions. Descartes, it will be remembered, was a soldier on active duty when he shut himself in that room with a stove.
If we don’t believe in what we’re doing, no one else will either.
If Callard stopped writing this sort of shite in the NYT or The Point, we might believe she was smart and that she was doing something worthwhile.
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