As part of a project I'm working on, I've been reading the work of neuroscientists and psychologists on free will. Over at the Garden, there has been a series of posts about how bad some of the scientists writing for popular venues are when it comes to discussing free will (for example, see here and here). Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but a lot of the stuff published in good presses is also bad. For example, in a paper in this collection, the author simply doesn't understand the different between the thesis of causal determinism, causalism, and predictibility. And then there is this doozy of a concluding paragraph:
Determinism makes free will possible. It also makes psychology possible. If psychological events were not determined--caused--by antecedent events, psychology could make no sense. We have a lot for which to thank determinism, both as psychologists and as free will-possessing humans.
I also recently read this discussion, based on a book of interviews of academics who serve on funding panels. According to Lamont:
Philosophy is a problem discipline, and it's defined as such by program officers. Philosophers do not believe that nonphilosophers are qualified to evaluate their work. Perhaps that comes out of the dominance of analytic philosophy, with its stress on logic and rigor. Philosophers think their discipline is more demanding than other fields. Even its practitioners define the discipline as contentious. They don't see that as a problem; argument and dispute are the discipline's defining characteristics.
All that conflict makes it difficult to get consensus on the value of a philosophy proposal -- or to convince people from other disciplines of its merits. The panels I studied are multidisciplinary. Nonphilosophers are often frustrated with the philosophers. They often discounted what philosophers had to say as misplaced intellectual superiority.
After reading some of what I've been plowing through, I'm not completely convinced that this impression, even if true, is misplaced. One should at least know what is and is not entailed by a technical term one uses in the title of one's articles.
Leave a comment