Philosophers look to find fault with other people’s ideas as well as presenting their own. We’re trained to challenge received opinions and look for weak spots in arguments.
It’s part of the philosopher’s role to expose poor reasoning, express doubts, show inconsistencies, present counter-arguments, demonstrate how the same evidence might support a completely different conclusion. When we meet with one another or write about each other’s theories we are notoriously critical.
We are almost always looking to disagree or to refute. If you’re a philosopher reading this, you’ve probably already started thinking of objections to what I’ve written.
Outsiders can see us as awkward bastards forever squaring up for a scrap. It’s true that some philosophers treat critical thinking as a martial art and want to win the argument at any cost, but the best use critical thinking skills wisely and for the greater good. It’s not about scoring debating points, macho posturing, or personal glory.
That doesn’t mean good philosophers pull their punches though. What might look like an assault is often one thinker paying another – living or dead – the great compliment of engaging with their thoughts, testing them to destruction as you might test a new material to see what it takes to make it break.
Of course this can go too far. In their bestseller Wittgenstein’s Poker, David Edmonds and John Eidinow explored conflicting reports of a notorious interaction at Cambridge University’s Moral Sciences Club in which Ludwig Wittgenstein allegedly threatened Karl Popper with a poker during a particularly fractious argument.
As I’ve mentioned in an earlier column, Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher famous for his discussion of paradigm shifts in the history of science, allegedly threw a glass ashtray at Errol Morris, then a graduate student, during a heated discussion.
Although rarer today than in the past, vicious put-downs, sneers and snubs are still common seminar fare. But at their best philosophical critiques delivered with civility, even when devastating to another’s argument, are an important part of the subject.
It’s one of the ways philosophy improves itself, and a good philosopher will always welcome this kind of engagement. As Wittgenstein once remarked, “A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never enters the ring”.
Philosophy differs from dogma. It’s about why you hold the belief you do as well as what you actually believe. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill wrote of the importance of avoiding “dead dogma” and of the need to have our ideas regularly challenged and criticised. Those with whom we disagree do us a great favour since they stop us becoming complacent:
“However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.”
Part of that process involves making our reasoning clear to others. It’s no use just stating conclusions even if those conclusions turn out to be true: we need to demonstrate how we got there so that others can see and challenge the moves we have made. Philosophers, like mathematicians, have to show their workings.
It’s interesting in light of this to see how Open AI’s epoch-changing products are evolving. Nicknamed “Strawberry”, and officially known as o1, one of the latest, released in preview form last week, puts a new emphasis on how it arrives at its conclusions. The official site explains:
“We trained these models to spend more time thinking through problems before they respond, much like a person would. Through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognise their mistakes.”
Here is AI that can make explicit why it gives the responses it does and modify them as it goes along. We can ask to see the moves it makes in the process of drawing a conclusion, the revisions, the mistaken assumptions, and the dead ends.
This looks startlingly like thinking, philosophical thinking even, but that is because these apps have been well designed to trick us into believing that we are engaging with thinkers. But simulated thought can still be philosophically useful, especially if it acts as a catalyst to genuine thought and keeps us alert and alive in the process.
Perhaps we should train them to become portable critics of our best ideas and turn them into dead-dogma detectors.
