Between Philosophy and
Social Science
Useless Kibitzing?
Stephen Turner
University of South Florida
Two Perspectives
• Big Difference between personal
strategies in face of disciplinary
differences and institutional “solutions” or
reflections on successful institutional
practice.
Some Personal Strategy Issues
• Two extremes:
• Asserting special authority of philosophy
over some domain-- the normative, for
example.
• Going native– write in a way that is
indistinguishable from the “professionals”
in these fields, rather than assert some
sort of external disciplinary authority.
Advantages of Going Native
• Sense of having to earn your way into a
disciplinary discussion by paying dues.
• Learn a lot, some of which you can use
later in other contexts.
• Have the comparative advantage of
having a different viewpoint than the
conventional academic in these fields.
• Get an identity as the “philosopher of x” in
different little fields.
Disadvantages
• No one really understands you.
• Become famous in little villages rather than
developing a coherent rep in which the “project”
is visible and the elements reinforce one
another, even if it is coherent.
• Need to get people to read your stuff– but unlike
disciplines, where readers rely on disciplinary
knowledge that someone is important, one must
earn the audience again and again.
“Conceptual” Problems on
Personal Level
• Can’t rely on basic logical considerations outside
philosophy, e.g. deduction, theory.
• Social scientists don’t generalize and tend to think that
minor differences in positions free them from problems.
• Residual Kantian “resources of reason itself” model in
philosophy keeps people from treating the big conflicts in
other disciplines as philosophically interesting.
• Kantian-induced tendency to ghettoize/immunize
philosophy from issues with empirical content: hence
collective intentionality is protected by saying it is a
normative concept, and the discussion becomes
“philosophical social theory” (Gilbert) rather than a
contribution to a discussion in social theory.
But there are positive Models,
individual and institutional
• In philosophy: Suppes, Davidson, Pettit,
maybe MacIntyre.
• In social science/jurisprudence: Zolo,
Lukes, Agemben.
• Interdisciplinary fields: success story of
Italian philosophy/sociology of law and
jurisprudence. Decision theory in the fifties
before it was ghettoized/mandarinized as
“philosophical”
Why Disciplinarity is Hard to
Give up
• Career realities: mandarins and narrow
disciplinarians always win disciplinary contests–
as recorded and co-produced by Leiter, but
evident also in economics, and sociology.
• Matthew effect doesn’t work outside of
disciplines.
• Disciplines as coercive apparatuses provide
powerful means of producing responses,
assigning status, rewards, and so forth.
Disabilities of Interdisciplinarity
• International differences in academic
systems usually mean that narrow
disciplinary stuff transfers fairly well,
interdisciplinary stuff doesn’t, and same for
reputation, ability to get responses.
• Book Review problems as example.
• Social theory as example of institutional
location problems solved differently in
different national systems.
Interdisciplinary Philosophy and
Philosophy of Interdisciplinarity
• Philosophy that pays attention to nonphilosophers seems to be working
definition of “interdisciplinary philosophy”–
at least among my students.
• Can one say something “philosophical”
about interdisciplinarity? Maybe about
interdisciplinary philosophy, and
philosophy in general, by seeing what kind
of kibitzing is actually “useful.”
Some Basic Conflicts
• going native and giving up authority vs.
authority of discipline/in discipline.
• Is there philosophical “expertise” that can
be provided in a setting of interdisciplinary
collaboration as in science? Or is the
relation inherently dialogical/Socratic?
• Paradox of incommunicability: if they
understand it already, they don’t need us
to tell them; if they can’t understand it, it
doesn’t matter if we tell them. So there is a
narrow and self-vanishing space for useful
Some Happier News
• Collaboration is easy, if you aren’t publishing in
J.Phil and are interested in the fields in question.
• Lots of good examples– Martin Hollis with S.
Smith) Explaining and Understanding
International Relations, 1990. Avocational
interest for Hollis (nephew of head of MI5)
worked from 1963 to 1966 at the Foreign Office.
• Did get read in IR. 634 citations!
• But techno-ethics guys never heard of it, and
neither did philosophers of social science.
One Disheartening example:
Causality
• Literature stemming from David Lewis’s papers.
Applies to nothing because it ignores
confounding. Nevertheless this flourishes as a
field in analytic philosophy.
• Clark Glymour, Judea Pearl, Paul Humphreys,
James Woodward and Causal modeling. Applies
to what people actually do. Is all about
confounding.
• Lot’s of philosophical careers for analytic
philosophers about the David Lewis stuff, not
much for the other stuff, which is more
demanding, requires more non-philosophical
knowledge..
Lessons
• The predictable result of disciplinarity and purely
internal competition is that a powerful coercive
disciplinary hierarchy is generated that reflects
the competition, rather than the supposed larger
purposes of the discipline.
• There is no free lunch for stepping out of this
competition, and there are real costs.
• Institutional (and personal) solutions need to
mitigate these costs in order to be attractive.