Rejecting Philosophical Consensus

[@KaneB]

Articles and videos mentioned: Bryan Frances, "Is it rational to reject expert consensus?" Finnur Dellsen, "The epistemic value of expert autonomy" Robert Nozick, "Why do intellectuals oppose capitalism?" Moore's argument against skepticism: kzbin.info/www/bejne/n2jdpWCqer6jpbc Intuitions in philosophy: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mJypYn98l7dpiaM kzbin.info/www/bejne/e4TWe4eqrspqbc0 Also relevant is work in the epistemology of disagreement: kzbin.info/www/bejne/iIOyiItrorpsp8k kzbin.info/www/bejne/jXucZZRpoc51rrs

[@howtoappearincompletely9739]

A reading- and watchlist-list! Nice. :money_mouth_face:

[@calamari3707]

I got distracted at the beginning by this picture of someone listening to this video and looking down at their hands and being sad because they don’t have hands at all. Anyway that’s my in-depth philosophical commentary on this issue.

[@jolssoni2499]

15:00 I think this point about classification is absolutely key. Another example in philosophy would be how Dennett the compatibilist par excellence agrees about basically everything concerning the properties and capabilities of agents with free will skeptics like Harris, Caruso and Pereboom but denies that non-existence of free will follows for what are basically merely moral reasons (yeah the agent couldn't have done otherwise and is lucky to be the kind of person they are, but we're still punishing them and you just gotta deal with it). This happens outside philosophy as well, eg. in Finnish public discussions about religion a statistic that always gets thrown around is state church membership (currently about 66,6% of the population funnily enough) which tells us basically nothing about the religiosity of the population because of child baptism and not everyone who's an atheist or an agnostic leaves the church. What almost never gets mentioned is data about belief in central teachings, only 33% of the population in 2019 believed that Jesus rose from the dead.

[@lanceindependent]

I don't understand why Dennett and other compatibilists can't just argue that we should pick some term or concept to refer to the practical value of holding people accountable based on some set of criteria, and treat this as a matter of conceptual engineering and the negotiation of the kinds of norms and institutions we want to build - a kind of constructivist project, rather than argue that we as a matter of fact have or don't have free will as such. This bypasses a large part of the debate without seeming to lose anything of substance. 33% believing Jesus rose from the dead strikes me as hi! I would have thought disbelief was even more common.

[@jolssoni2499]

@@lanceindependent I think compared to some 40% of US population being young earth creationists that figure isn't half-bad! :D The Finnish stat is mostly propped by a top heavy population pyramid. Among

[@DesertEagel1995]

I am always interested on how people deal with peer disagreement, so I look forward to hear your take

[@KaneB]

You might be disappointed then, since I don't really give a take on this. I just outline some of the options.

[@KaneB]

Anyway, my own take would probably depend on the minority position in question. My response to the fact that most philosophers reject moral antirealism might be different from my response to the fact that most reject epistemic relativism, etc.

[@derekg5563]

An interesting question that could come up here is namely whether or not those in the expert consensus hold their opinion based on what their pure understanding of the subject matter tells them, or whether they are holding it because they consider it rational to believe the consensus because of the epistemic value of the consensus, and whether this is useful or interesting for assessing the nature of the consensus. For example, perhaps there is one incredibly brilliant expert in the relevant field, and let's say there are 99 other experts, and all 100 of the experts have doctorates in the relevant field. Perhaps the other 99 can't reach or understand the conclusion of the exceptional expert, but the exceptional expert is so famous and well regarded that the other 99 consider it rational to believe what that expert says to be true, as the epistemic value of what that person says to be the case is to them, more compelling than what they personally can see through argumentation purely within the technical realm. There is 100% consensus in what they actually think is the case, all things considered (such as the belief that the brilliant expert must understand something they don't). On one hand, these 99 experts might be perfectly rational in forming this consensus, but one might question how useful this is for those looking from the outside. You could just as easily have 99 enthusiasts but non-experts, who are nevertheless rational and "trust the expert(s)," in the place of the 99 experts, because all of them would ultimately be basing their decision on the epistemic value of a particularly trusted opinion, rather than on any technical details. At that point, it seems more like, one expert who is particularly confident, one single opinion, is being used substantively, whereas the other 99 are just people deciding to trust (though they happen to have expertise, it is not influencing their decision in this case). It looks like in the meaningful sense, you have one expert opinion, and you have 99 experts trusting it, and then of course you could expand it out to perhaps thousands or millions of other people (non-experts) believing this too. However, the point of expert opinions is to narrow things down, look for quality opinions, rather than just the quantity of them. In terms of quality, it doesn't seem that the 99 experts have any more of it than any other person who sees the same epistemic, non-technical basis for trusting that one brilliant expert's opinion. Indeed, insofar as we want to use an argument from consensus, it may only be, for those purposes, relevant to only look at the opinions reached from a technical reasoning or something similar, rather than an "all things considered" approach. Those opinions reached from the latter might be redundant information for a non-expert who is already aware of the supposed epistemic value of a particular expert's opinion - now, this might be enough for the non-expert to trust that opinion, but the point is that no further confidence is added simply by observing many experts using this same reasoning for their opinion - you would just be trusting the opinion of many who say that you should trust the opinion of that one brilliant expert because of its epistemic value, in either case. This does of course make some plausible assumptions, but one might propose that the other experts perhaps have extra insight into the research process, and so when _they_ in particular say to trust the brilliant expert, they have an even better understanding of the epistemic value of their opinion. This is of course possible, but I think we can at least agree that it is redundant compared to these 99 experts independently reaching the same conclusion, or even to go further, if these experts really wanted to disprove the brilliant expert but ended up agreeing after their own research anyway. It doesn’t seem that many people look into not only what the experts believe, but why do they believe it, and as is the focus of this post, how many experts are holding their view based on the idea that their own technical understanding would tell them otherwise, but because of the epistemic value of the other expert opinions they are looking at, they themselves are taking a “trust the experts” approach within their own expert domain. Maybe there could be ripple effects sometimes, in which you start with one genius expert, then five slightly-lesser-genius experts trust that, then 20 lesser experts look at those six smart people and trust them, then the other 50 experts are impressed by that 26 expert consensus, and then you have a full expert consensus, but in a seemingly artificial way, not with the kind of technical basis (aside from that of the one genius expert) that people generally picture it having. Sure, people like seeing the rational conclusions made by others, but this is the kind that wouldn’t necessarily require technical expertise. You could see these same conclusions made from a rationality channel in which its host simply looked up the consensus for the given subject and went with that. In this stipulated case it would be misleading at best to consider the consensus of most of the experts as being an independent reason to believe the conclusion other than that the rationality channel said so, because the latter would just be a later unit in this chain of synonymous trust, namely, expert-(other) experts trust expert-layperson trusts experts who trust expert. It could start to look rather self-referential and redundant, when whether you have 10,000 such experts or 10 such experts, if they are all using this particular reasoning to agree with the original expert, no epistemic value is added by sheer amount. I am just stipulating this to show what is at stake - I don’t know to what extent this happens, depending on the department, but it is worth thinking about, particularly because, frankly, few people seem to investigate this possibility, and so there seems to be many uncharted waters regarding this, and so many opportunities to sharpen our understanding of expert consensus. Perhaps we are less interested in consensus of absolute opinion as we are in consensus as in independent, or at least, in part, distinct, technical processes and reasonings converging - after all, if an expert both trusted a brilliant-expert opinion due to its independent epistemic value _and_ reached similar conclusions in their own technical work anyway, that expert would probably consider it more apt to emphasize the latter, not the former (if it’s even mentioned at all). Of course, this “experts themselves playing ‘trust the experts’” phenomenon would probably be much more prevalent through the process of peer review itself, as opposed to published technical papers whose conclusions agree with those of other experts they happen to trust (although again one wonders how much the final inferences and conclusions from the data could be influenced by trust of the prior research of experts, depending on how open-ended of an interpretation is permitted by the nature of the data collected in the particular research). I guess one way to put it is that one expert _merely_ (a key word, here, it is worth clumsily emphasizing here) agreeing with another expert on something is arguably not adding to the pool of evidence for that position, whereas an independent study by them converging with that opinion is. It wouldn’t logically follow from the fact that this particular epistemic decision from consensus is rational and more likely to result in the truth, that it is necessarily an extra piece of evidence for the truth of the position, as opposed to just something the expert uses for their own epistemic sake. You as a layperson might do the same as them, but only because you already agreed with that epistemic reasoning before you even knew the “follower experts” were applying it (because you also knew of the famous genius expert and their reputation through the internet or something).

[@lanceindependent]

This is now my favorite video you've made. You articulate many of the concerns I've raised against philosophers, and many of your concerns are at the foundation of why I study experimental philosophy, and why I think psychology is so essential to doing good philosophy. I don't even know where to start with expressing how important this concern should be to philosophers. Rather than rewrite relevant thoughts, I'll just share some of my recent remarks on this topic: I'm curious, if philosophers rely so much on their intuitions, if they have care about the psychological mechanisms responsible for producing the particular intuitions they have in any particular case. What proximal causal factors are responsible for any given intuition? What is the ultimate explanation for why they would have those intuitions in that particular case? What role do natural selection, cultural background, personal psychological idiosyncrasies, individual experiences, induction into specific ways of thinking about things, which languages they know, and even their current mood play in the output of any given intuition, "seeming," judgment, inference, and so on? An understanding of these mechanisms might lead to the conclusion that some of these processes are unreliable, and could cause us to doubt some of our philosophical judgments. Intuitions, and related tools employed in philosophy, strike me as unambigious psychological phenomena. Yet philosophers don't seem very interested in understanding the psychological processes behind their intuitions. To put it another way: the data philosophers are working with is almost entirely the output of human brains. Without an understanding of the processes resulting in philosophically relevant data, they are effectively working with a black box. Philosophy, ostensibly the most introspective, self-reflective, navel-gazing discipline on the planet, is inexplicably content to employ a black box methodology. Using a black box method would be fine in any situation in which one can assess the function of the system. If I have a device that can make an excellent pizza, then even if I don't understand how it works, I can still know it can make an excellent pizza. Yet philosophy doesn't have the luxury of having obvious products whose value we can examine. There's no straightforward analog to a good pizza. Instead, philosophers use the outputs of their black box to assess the quality of the outputs of their black box, and often show show contempt or indifference for efforts to criticize this approach or suggest that maybe philosophers should open up the box and look at what's inside. --- Some philosophers are working on this. See the description of the "sources" project in the SEP entry for experimental philosophy.

[@davidfoley8546]

I think there is a certain sense in which you make a very good point--if experimental science has produced such reliable explanations of our experience, we should seriously consider what these same methods say about the formation of our intuitions. But at the same time, I'm not sure it's really plausible to think that using experimental psychology rids us of the problem of "using a black box to assess the quality of the outputs of our black box". Surely the reason I should trust science in the first place is because it explains so much of intuitively interpreted experience. I look at the sky, see lights moving in certain patterns, and science provides a description of the motions of stars and planets as an explanation of that pre-experimental interpretation--what you call "the output of a black box". By that token, a result in a field like psychology, which is experimentally very difficult, itself seems subject to a Moorean shift. If a psychology experiment "confirms" something about my experience that seems profoundly implausible, should I doubt my experience, or should I doubt the experimental setting, the sample of subjects, the operational definitions, etc? Not only is this move available, in some cases it actually might be *much* more plausible than trusting a test of some freshman college students on a contrived operationalization of a concept like "moral worth" and reporting a small p-value!

[@lanceindependent]

@@davidfoley8546 //Surely the reason I should trust science in the first place is because it explains so much of intuitively interpreted experience.// Maybe, but I don't think so. I think it's useful because it enables us to make useful predictions and achieve our goals. Not because it confirms our intuitions. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. It doesn't matter one way or another whether it does. What really matters is whether it (a) makes useful predictions (b) provides useful explanatory models and (c) helps us get things done. //If a psychology experiment "confirms" something about my experience that seems profoundly implausible, should I doubt my experience, or should I doubt the experimental setting, the sample of subjects, the operational definitions, etc?// That's a fair question. We can always employ enough ad hoc modifications to our existing commitments to accommodate any empirical findings. Whether our commitments are consistent with our observations is not, for me, the deciding factor. Rather, the deciding factor is ultimately goal-oriented and practical: which model will allow me to most effectively navigate the world and achieve my goals? I'll go with that model. I'd just be a Bayesian about these issues and think about making testable predictions. I don't have any issue with people starting with whatever priors they have; I just want people to update appropriately. //Not only is this move available, in some cases it actually might be much more plausible than trusting a test of some freshman college students on a contrived operationalization of a concept like "moral worth" and reporting a small p-value!// I agree, but that's because we shouldn't update too much in response to a study conducted by novices using dubious methods. Not because intuitions > data.

[@davidfoley8546]

​@@lanceindependent I guess where we really disagree is that I have no idea how usefulness, or goal-directedness, could be a basic epistemic standard. To me it seems obvious that judging something "to be useful for achieving X" already depends on either a theory or pre-theoretical commitments to certain entities existing, entering into certain relations, etc. I have to have at least a tentative commitment to an ontology to even formulate a goal. I don't know what it would mean for the goal to dictate the ontology, it just seems backwards. Also, I have no idea what a Bayesian update is in the context of philosophical positions, because I can't assign prior probabilities to the space of possible explanations for a phenomenon and do integrals over it. Even in the case of testable predictions, I think we should reserve words like "prior" update" for talking about actual mathematical models and calculations.

[@lanceindependent]

@@davidfoley8546 What I'm denying, in any case, is that the reason science is valuable is because it supports our intuitions. I don't think we need to do literal Bayesian calculations, just crudely approximate a Bayesian approach. //Even in the case of testable predictions, I think we should reserve words like "prior" update" for talking about actual mathematical models and calculations.// Maybe. But I suspect the explicit Bayesian framing is more apt than you do.

[@davidfoley8546]

​@@lanceindependent Well, maybe we're talking at cross purposes. I don't think I claimed that science is valuable because it supports our intuitions, any more than philosophy is valuable for supporting intuitions. What I wanted to say is that we aren't ever totally free from the presence of intuitions as epistemic standards, even when doing science. I do think scientific and philosophical models can (and should) be evaluated based on usefulness, explanatory quality, and achieving goals, but that those things are downstream of (hopefully rationally mediated) intuitions about the state of affairs, and that it's sometimes appropriate for the intuition to weigh noticeably in a judgment.

[@alduin2000]

One thought that came to me: perhaps there being a consensus on whether or not the question is an open or closed question is important. If you ask climate scientists about climate change, I think that it's likely that not only will there be a consensus that man-made climate change is real, but also that this is essentially a closed question. All the evidence points that way, there is no more debate to be had, it has been established as scientific fact. On the other hand, it seems to me that if we were to ask philosophers in a relevant field whether the question "is there free will?" for example is an open question, most would say that actually it is an open question and there are still ongoing arguments on either side. Therefore, perhaps it is ok to go against philosophical consensus because most philosophers would agree that the truth of the matter has not been fully established yet. Perhaps there are some philosophical consensus which we should defer to because they are viewed as essentially closed questions. One example that comes to mind is, perhaps we should defer to expert judgement about the terrain of the debate (not necessarily which position to take, but which positions are live options) if most philosophers would agree that the terrain of debate has been successfully established. This also extends back to scientific consensus; most scientific consensus are ones that we should accept, but this is only because scientific consensus tends to appear alongside consensus that this is now a closed question, or at least that it is established for now. But where there are open questions in science, it seems that we need not listen to what the majority of scientists say because the debate is still ongoing.

[@KaneB]

That's a very useful distinction. It does seem that in practice, we're more likely to defer to the judgments of expert philosophers concerning "closed" questions like the terrain of the debate. That's pretty much what I do when I take, say, a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article as providing a reliable overview of a topic.

[@MaximusTCR]

Your not the first: “The only difference between science and philosophy is that science is what you more or less know and philosophy is what you do not know…Just as there are families in America who from the time of the Pilgrim Fathers onward had always migrated westward, toward the backwoods, because they did not like civilized life, so the philosopher has an adventurous disposition and likes to dwell in the region where there are still uncertainties.” - Bertrand Russell

[@krzysztofciuba271]

AGW as a scientific fact? Do you read sth except the BBC's apes and IPCC AlGore lunatics (with "maybe','PROBABLY" ETC.or Greta Thunberg as an expert in CNN? Another dumb kiddy moron (Luke 7:32)? On p.774 of IPCCC Report (1....0 pages!) there is the self- acknowledgment that it is impossible to predict future temperature because we cannot have a right model (too many parameters and not only one,co2, feed-backs, a chaotic system,..),yet these Lunatics and your Devils(i.e dumb) MaasMedia predict a catastrophe like in 1999 by one of this lunatics,Noel Brown,UNEP in 1989(AP, Jun29,1989 by J.Spielman or of course a Perfect apocalypse is coming in AD 2100! Do you (Moron) know about the court case in Vancouver of Tim BAll who mocked PUBLICaLLY your M.Mann (of "hockey shit") and the Court decision? A whip (John 2:15) or a bullet in your heads (Luke 22:36)will cleanse EArth from enemies of divine molecule co2

[@codinginsights122]

Great vid. Could you please maybe talk about Quine's two dogmas on empiricism? I would love that. Just a suggestion though! :)

[@KaneB]

I don't usually do videos on specific papers. However, I've been intending to read more on both logical empiricism and philosophical views of modality, and Quine's "Two Dogmas" is relevant to both of those topics, so I might cover it in a video on one of those. That is, if I ever get around to either.

[@chickadeeintheblackberries]

Couple possible addendums to the psychological bias section. All of which I think are at least plausible, if not probable. We might argue that because a lot of philosophy is 'armchair philosophy' it is more susceptible to cognitive bias than other disciplines and so philosophical consensus means less. You could additionally make the case that if, across seemingly unrelated philosophical questions, we see a tendency towards the most emotionally/psychologically satisfying answers (i.e. moral realism, compatibilism, scientific realism), then philosophical consensus may be more reflective of that than the strength of arguments or evidence. We could also argue that if popular philosophical views roughly correspond to folk views on that issue, however primitive that version may be, then consensus may reflect post hoc reasoning and philosophers retaining commitments they held prior to their philosophical education.

[@fossforever512]

I feel like dismissal makes the most sense If the majorities opinion is true because it has good arguments, just give me the arguments not just the fact that it’s a majority opinion

[@misticulandrei2234]

Could you do a video about the purpose and nature of arguments? I was wondering what is your position in regards to this, what do you think are the conditions for a successful argument? Do you think it has to rationally compelling for an ideal observer, or does an argument only need to be able to convince someone who is neutral/agnostic in regards to the issue? I find Graham Oppy's account very plausible - that an argument's success depends on the worldview of each individual. An argument can convince you of a proposition iff (1)they show you that, starting from premises that you accept, you are logically commited to a conclusion; or (2) by providing you with new propositions as premises, that you haven't encountered yet, and that you judge to be true. If somenone just provides you with an argument that has a conclusion which contradicts your views, if you didn't already accept the premises of that argument as part of your worldview, you can just reject them. Of course, he might provide you with further arguments as to why you should accept the initial premises, but you can keept rejecting his new premises for the new argumets. The point is, unless he is able to find some common propositions you both accept and then show the logical entailment, you have no reason to change your view, even if the premises of his initial argument might be more intuitive or widely accepted.

[@KaneB]

I haven't thought much about this question before, which I suppose is odd given philosophers spend most of their time producing arguments for things. My initial reaction is that there are lots of different goals people might have when producing arguments, and whether an argument counts as successful will depend on the goal. So there won't be a general account of successful argument. As for the two ideas you suggest: I don't think there's any fact of the matter what would be compelling to an ideal observer, and convincing somebody who is neutral/agnostic seems underspecified. What proportion of neutral people does the argument need to convince? Are we counting all neutral people or just a specific subset, say, neutral people who understand your position and have thought about it before? The other difficulty with this account is that however we draw the lines, real people can be persuaded by dumb arguments.

[@NelsonGuedes]

Well, we don't really know for sure that we have hands, we just assume that the external world exists for the purpose of going on with our day. The reason we do that is not because there is a convincing definitive argument but because it is pragmatic to do so. I think most of our "knowledge" is like that, with logic being an exception as it is self-contained and known a priori. Maybe part of the question here is what can be really known for sure. We can question what appears to be "common sense" and "obvious" but still take those positions for granted, assuming they are true for pragmatic reasons, such as the claim that we have hands.

[@koitsuga]

Probably worth mentioning that here in Japan, I have yet to find someone who agrees to the premise that "if I have no free will, my existence has no more value than a speck of dust floating in the wind (and this bothers me)" which strongly impacts certain arguments about freedom that would be more intuitive in the English speaking world

[@kallianpublico7517]

What's the difference between scientific concensus and the concensus of language? Just as there are different fields of science: chemistry, physics, biology, archaeology, ecology, there are different languages: English, French, etc. How then is concensus completely, translatable? Is every word in French translatable to English? If not concensus is partial. How can it not be, so long as knowledge is incomplete? If concensus is partial then it is possible to be redefined or reoriented. If not, concensus is dogma.

[@derekg5563]

Thanks for making a video on this topic; you give it a fair analytical look. I had tried searching for philosophy on when to trust consensus and I had a lot of trouble finding much, and as it happens it’s one of the few philosophical topics about which I would have felt like reading these days. I don’t think nearly enough is said on this topic and it’s often just assumed that consensus is good without much analysis or elaboration, even though philosophy to my eyes has deeply analyzed much more esoteric things than that. Is there anything you recommend or can point to for further reading on this topic, Kane? I would greatly appreciate it. As I am writing this I just noticed you did give links in a pinned comment, so that’s cool, although if there were any other materials that come to mind I would be interested in hearing about it. One distinction that I consider worth making is between what we think of the consensus before vs. after seeing what their main argument actually is. For example if I am to guess about whether the next woman I look at is going to be at least 6’3 and I don’t have any particular plans of seeing any particular women, I can use the overwhelming statistical reality and strongly believe that she will be shorter than 6’3. However, if I actually come across a 6’3 woman after all, I will not deny that she is 6’3 just because in general most women are shorter than that. I am surprised I encountered her, and wouldn’t have predicted that, but now seeing who the woman is, I can say she is 6’3. So if I haven’t seen the argument for something yet, but most philosophers have x position, I might believe x, but not necessarily so as to be particularly set in my ways about it, but simply because I have no other information about it yet. My opinion might well very strongly change after seeing just a few more pieces of information about it. How large of a percentage of relevance new information I get is compared to my current body of relevant information on it will determine how much it influences me. So if I go from no information to one piece of information, I might have a large change in opinion not because that piece is so defining, but because I had such little information (in this case, zero) that even getting a small piece of information allows me to do a lot more than I did before - so I can greatly improve on my opinion, but it may very well be that my opinion is still fairly baseless, it’s just a difference between, say, extremely baseless and very baseless, with the latter being very baseless, but still a big improvement from the even more baseless previous opinion. As I get more information, the extra small bits of information will be less and less valuable as far as increasing the accuracy of my opinion - diminishing returns. I might catch really quickly some common error the majority of philosophers are making on something, and after seeing that common error, now the fact that there was consensus is suddenly much less interesting to me. So I would say my opinion would be volatile (and thus unreliable) if I am looking at only small amounts of information. It’s interesting how this can apply to life. For example, someone you trust texts you that he won a million dollars. Well, you trust him, but maybe you should make sure there wasn’t a typo or autocorrect issue. And I think there are a lot of implicit assumptions we make like that. When we say there is a consensus, we implicitly mean “in a way that isn’t obviously trivial.” And so really when we trust based on consensus, we’re actually basing it on somewhat more than that. We’re assuming (or perhaps already checked) that there aren’t small details we take for granted that trivialize the piece of information, which could be broken down into a number of mini assumptions for the belief of the absence of each of these details. We assume there aren’t typos or a confusion in definitions being used, many little things like that, and when one of these assumptions don’t hold, we can quickly change what at first seemed like an almost certain opinion.

[@MaximusTCR]

Couldn't you simply argue that anything which attains and maintains an overwhelming consensus would cease being philosophy - a necessary condition in order for something to be considered philosophy is a certain amount of contention, in other words, what makes something philosophical is its contentious nature to begin with?

[@KaneB]

Maybe so -- that doesn't seem any worse than many other definitions of "philosophy"! On the other hand, if it were the case that, say, 99% of philosophers came to endorse moral realism, would that cease to be a philosophical position? I'm inclined to say no. What would it be if not philosophy?

[@Gabriel-sn6yg]

Could we dismisse the need to agree with the consensus by the absurd by using the fact that there seem to be a consensus that we don't need to agree with the consensus?

[@calamari3707]

Ok now I have some things to say: The idea of philosophical consensus comes across as problematic to me. Some of this is covered in the video. I think there are philosophical issues that have been - for the most part - put to bed, in which most people who engage with them now agree with each other. Things like - to use an uncontroversial example - astrology and other forms of magic used to be a hotly debated element of philosophy in the medieval and renaissance times. But, there are plenty of issues in philosophy that remain very unsettled, and I think that someone can hold an unsettled view, and as a result of that view, come to a conclusion against the consensus, totally as a product of the other view they hold, as a natural consequence of it. I don’t think you can go in reverse and say that this minority view necessarily disproves their view on the unsettled issue. Rather, I think the fact that the unsettled issue opens the door to these other views, blows the lid off the whole thing. It creates the possibility for these things. Like, say it is settled that donkeys can’t talk. Well, if you believe in god (unsettled) and you have certain hermeneutical stances (unsettled) then you can come to the potentially justified conclusion that god made a donkey talk in genesis and that that is completely possible. I’m not saying I agree, I’m just saying that “what is possible” is a flexible idea that stretches to fit your worldview based on not unjustified conclusions when you take the given premises. A conclusion on one issue often involves a network of other interconnected issues. In fact, if you asked the genesis person if they believed donkeys can talk they may still say no because of how the question is framed. Along similar lines, I can imagine a difference between a surveyed philosophical consensus of what a philosopher personally holds to be true and what that philosopher believes to be true with absolute proof. So, you can say you believe you have hands, but also you can believe that you don’t have sufficient evidence for that belief. I think there would be a lot of philosophers that would make that distinction, and I think it is a valuable one to make. Many philosophers may understand that there is not sufficient evidence for a belief they hold, but still hold one. This is something almost all people do all the time. It’s almost required to function in the world. Most philosophers will pick something they don’t know, but still believe it based on faith/intuition in their everyday life, and usually this will align with what culture accepts right now. For example, the philosophers that talked about magic. Many of them knew and admitted they didn’t have absolute knowledge on the truth of the topic, but still discussed and believed in it. (I don’t have names of these people but I remember Peter Adamson mentioned some of these in his history of philosophy without any gaps podcast. The details don’t matter as much as the broader point, though.) Philosophers intuitions will generally follow the broader intellectual paradigm, even if their understanding is more nuanced. That paradigm shouldn’t be considered the final evolution, but another step. For a philosopher to admit they believe something isn’t the same as a conclusion. So, why does it matter whether someone disagrees with consensus, if philosophy comes to no conclusions? What weight does consensus have in a case where all the people polled admit they do not know for sure? Context is also important. In the context of different questions philosophers may say different things. So, for example, if I asked a philosopher if they thought they had hands they may say yes, but if I asked a philosopher if they knew they had hands they might say no. If I asked them in the context of what absolute knowledge we had about the outside world, I think many philosophers would say that we don’t really have absolute knowledge, but these same philosophers might still argue in favor of the existence of their hands after stating that.

[@aucontraire593]

Check out Avner Baz's defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy "The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy".

[@GoldenMan-Gaming]

Maybe this is a stupid question, I'm not used to thinking about peer disagreement. However, as you say in the beginning, most philosophers disagree with philosophical consensus sometimes. So, it seems to follow that there is a philosophical consensus that the philosophical consensus is sometimes mistaken. Yet, there doesn't seem to be any real consensus on when the consensus is mistaken or how much it is mistaken. So, when presented with the fact that there is a philosophical consensus for P, even if that consensus counts as evidence for P, wouldn't the consensus that philosophical consensus is sometimes mistaken count as evidence for not-P? Wouldn't that effectively render consensus-based evidence for P weak and negligible? I'm not really sure how you are supposed to figure out the strength of consensus-based evidence (or of counter-consensus-based evidence, especially when the counter-consensus doesn't seem to have a specified scope or degree).

[@KaneB]

I'm no expert on peer disagreement either, but yeah, this strikes me as a problem for deference to consensus. Would this be the case for consensus in other fields also? I assume that most scientists would agree that scientific consensus is sometimes mistaken, but there doesn't seem to be any consensus on when scientific consensus is mistaken or how much it's mistaken. Indeed, for those latter questions, it's not clear to me who the relevant experts would be, e.g. suppose that most biologists agree that consensus among biologists is rarely mistaken, but that sociologists of biology agree that consensus among biologists is often mistaken.

[@GoldenMan-Gaming]

@@KaneB I was actually inclined to think that most other fields wouldn't have the counter-consensus. I don't have much experience in the hard sciences, but from my experience in psychology I got the impression that the consensus wasn't questioned by most psychologists. For instance, it felt rare and weird to see someone who rejected the consensus on the overjustification effect. This is why I was inclined to think that a scientific consensus that P was good evidence for P, even though a philosophical consensus for P wouldn't be. It could just be that I didn't delve deep enough into the field to see the counter-consensus, though, or that psychology is unusual for lacking a counter-consensus. I'm not including wrong consensus from the past, either, while maybe you are. Maybe I should be, but I'm inclined to think that would have implications for the pessimistic induction which I haven't thought through and so I didn't want to risk committing to unknown implications that might turn out to be very problematic. However, we don't usually think of past consensus which have fallen out of favor as giving us consensus-based evidence, either. As for the relevant experts, I'm inclined to think all the experts are relevant, but that the strength of the counter-consensus-based evidence would differ based on the type of expert and the issue. For instance, a bunch of philosophers of physics have told me that the scientific consensus against Bohm's interpretation of quantum physics rests on a philosophical mistake about the experiments they cite when rejecting it, and since I'm inclined to think that philosophers understand such mistakes better than physicists I'm inclined to think the strength of the evidence based on philosophical counter-consensus is stronger than the evidence against Bohm based on scientific consensus (even if I don't understand the experiment or the alleged mistake myself). So, I'm inclined to think the scientific consensus is mistaken here.

[@KaneB]

@@GoldenMan-Gaming I would have expected that if you were to ask psychologists, "is the psychological consensus sometimes mistaken?", the vast majority would say "yes". Maybe I'm wrong about that. I doubt there's anywhere near as much disagreement in psychology as there is in philosophy. Whereas in philosophy, "consensus" means 60-70% of professionals endorse a position, in psychology it might be more like 95-99% endorse it. I can see why that would make a difference to our judgment about the rationality of deference to consensus. But you'd have to be extremely confident about a discipline to think that the consensus is never mistaken. >> I'm not including wrong consensus from the past, either, while maybe you are No, I wasn't including that.

[@GoldenMan-Gaming]

@@KaneB I basically agree with most of what you say here. I think a lot of the parts of psychology where people disagree with the dominant view just wouldn't be considered part of the consensus. Presumably, how many people agree with the dominant view (i.e. how large the consensus is) should increase the strength of consensus-based evidence, unless that evidence is undermined (by, say, explanations which show that the consensus is only large because people are listening to one expert rather than independently verifying that expert's experiments). I'm again not really sure what all is relevant to the strength of consensus-based evidence, though. (What if the one expert is the only expert in a particular sub-field, would we have strong consensus-based evidence for whatever views they hold?)

[@__malte]

I find this whole notion of ‘majority opinion in philosophy’ kinda silly. I guess I would fall into the “dismissal” category, but I think I’d rather call it “deflationist”. The value-able subject matter of (theoretical) philosophy is not ‘positions’, but ‘arguments’. A philosophical belief is worth very little by itself. A few quick points to illustrate this: 1. We do not value philosophers because they were ‘right’ or they ‘created new consensus’, we value them because they developed new interesting arguments. Take David Lewis; almost no-one agrees with him (neither then, nor now) that possible worlds really exist, yet at the same time he is held in high esteem. Why? Because he developed a new style of Lewisian metaphysical arguments, that influenced how (a section of) philosophy was done from that point on. 2. Additionally, most of these beliefs do not influence me or my behaviour, I can switch from being a scientific realist to antirealist without changing how I act at all. I can philosophically position myself anyway I want. That’s the uninteresting, unimportant bit. What makes it interesting is, if I can innovate on my philosophical reasoning behind it. 3. Furthermore, I do not think we are converging on any one belief. In fact, we might be diverging. Why? Surely, if it were somehow in any way important to have the ‘right’ beliefs, we would have honed in on a few of them by now. Instead, we have only gotten more (and sometimes better) arguments for more different positions. Any ‘progress’ in philosophy is just refinement of arguments. Thus, what makes philosophy interesting is the development and evaluation of arguments. If we now say that we should accept philosophical beliefs on the basis of majority opinion, we are forgetting that philosophy is not about holding a set of beliefs, but constantly (re-)evaluating arguments. The majority position itself is simply not an ‘argument’, it is merely a position. And the ‘argument from authority’ that lies behind it is simply not that new, or particularly refined. And therefore the whole a bit philosophically silly. (Do note that I have a more theoretical philosophical background. Perhaps in more practical fields, philosophical positions are inherently more important because they do influence behaviour somewhat. I do not know enough to say this.)

[@HudBug]

This video is probably my second favorite video of yours. My first favorite video of yours is ‘Voluntarist epistemology’. That one is, in my view, the best video you’ve made. I couldn’t hold this to myself, but my third favorite of yours is ‘pessimism and the poor quality of life’, because for whatever reason it made me feel cozy.

[@KaneB]

Interesting! I wonder what other viewers would put as their top three? I really like the Voluntarist Epistemology video too, by the way. I don't think anybody else has produced an introduction to that topic (van Fraassen's voluntarism specifically), in any format, that is accessible to a broad audience.

[@suzettedarrow8739]

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean at 1:28. You say, "This is a problem that is something that pretty much every philosopher is going to have to reflect on." I have trouble understanding the notion of "problem" in that context. How is it a problem that, say, I have a view widely thought of as false by others? Would you expand on that notion of "problem"?

[@KaneB]

>> Would you expand on that notion of "problem"? No.

[@suzettedarrow8739]

@@KaneB Why?

[@KaneB]

@@suzettedarrow8739 I'm just not interested in this line of discussion. All I'm doing in that part of the video is introducing the topic. If it doesn't strike you as a topic worth thinking about, well, don't watch the video.

[@suzettedarrow8739]

@@KaneB It is a topic worth thinking about. I neve said otherwise. I asked about what you meant by something.

[@KaneB]

@@suzettedarrow8739 I'm using the term in the normal way. The definition from Cambridge Dictionary: "a situation, person, or thing that needs attention and needs to be dealt with or solved"

[@dummyaccount.k]

i think philosophers should drop the lone wolf spiel and publish joint papers for once. thatd help the field in more ways than just one

[@guitarizard]

Drives me absolutely mad because of the sophistry. I can make a statement about non-contradiction but somebody will argue with me about it because it's open to interpretation as far as they're concerned. People constantly use the same philosophers to argue views that oppose what the actual views of the philosophers are purported to be.

[@guitarizard]

I went on a philosophy tube channel to argue against objective morality. They were constantly conflating all meanings of objective and subjective. Trying to ask me to prove i could get an ought from an is. Thoroughly confusing. (They were implying since I couldn't get a ought from an is, that objective morality was correct.🤷🏻‍♂️)

[@Hello-vz1md]

You should do a discussion with Thought adventure podcast KZbin channel

[@Ansatz66]

My minority positions: External world skepticism (5%) and scientific antirealism (15%) If I were a brain in a vat, all of my sensory input would be unreliable because it was not coming from the real world. Maybe it's being fed to me from a computer or maybe it's a dream or whatever, but it wouldn't be real. Therefore there is nothing I could possibly do to discover that I am a brain in a vat, even if it were true, and so I can never know that I'm not a brain in a vat. How can this be a 5% position when it seems like such an obvious conclusion? I would suggest it might be an emotional commitment, but why should anyone care about being a brain in vat or any other manner of delusional world? If our world is a delusion then it feels just as real as a real world would, so it's just as good as a real world. Scientific antirealism is entailed by external world skepticism, but even if external world skepticism were false we'd still have reasons to be scientific antirealists. Just because we know things about the external world that we can directly see, that doesn't necessarily give science access to deeper knowledge, and the process of science offers no suggestion that scientists are accessing any real truth. Scientists are merely dedicated to weeding out ideas that do not conform to our ordinary manner of perceiving the world, and they have had great success with this, but this does not imply that the ideas are really true. _Any_ idea that conforms to our perceptions would survive such a weeding process, including both true ideas and ideas that just coincidentally happen to match perception, and there is no way to determine which kind of idea we've found.

[@KaneB]

>> I would suggest it might be an emotional commitment, but why should anyone care about being a brain in vat or any other manner of delusional world? If our world is a delusion then it feels just as real as a real world would, so it's just as good as a real world. It's worth noting that only 13% say they would choose to enter the experience machine. So the majority of philosophers do seem to have some emotional attachment to "the real world" (whatever that's supposed to mean). Perhaps the source of this is our attachments to other people. The worry might be: If I were to take seriously the idea that other people are just hallucinations created by the vat, this would undermine my emotional connections to them and sense of obligation to them. When I fall in love with somebody, I have to believe that there is another mind, genuinely reciprocating my feelings. I want to be in love with a person, not a dream.

[@unknownknownsphilosophy7888]

​@@KaneB I've had plenty of dreams about women who don't exist in my waking life and I've fallen in love with these fictional women inside the dream and had long storylines involving them. But when I woke up I didn't find that relationship less meaningful, it was still very meaningful and there was still a longing for that dream girl a little while after waking. In fact what became less meaningful was that notion of who "I" am. Because although the dream was solipsistic, I don't know which part of the dream counts as "me" or not me. So what seemed meaningful was the relationship, the status of the identities and who counted as a "real person" and what they were constituted from seemed very unimportant. But maybe I'm a complete weirdo (that I'm weird is a consensus for most people)

[@KaneB]

@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 I've never fallen in love with a character in a dream, but I'd be perfectly with a dream relationship. The only problem is that dreams don't last very long.

[@unknownknownsphilosophy7888]

@@KaneB That's interesting, I have dreams where the time dilation makes it seem like a whole month of stuff going on. I was more making a point about how I don't think some character being "dream stuff" or solipsistic mind stuff matters at all. Why should we care what stuff is made of it we find it important haha?

[@mtrisi]

thanks for making this!!!!

[@sandrajackson709]

I think philosophy is only as relevant as its consistency in establishing what is true in a conceptual sense, or the personal value one holds in it. I absolutely hate when someone tries to use philosophy in a quantifiable, evidenced-based situation. I consider it to be evasive.

[@virtuouspyromaniac4467]

I have perhaps the most minority out of other minorities regarding meta-ethical viewpoints, I am a moral skeptic but not an error theorist. I hold the belief that moral knowledge is impossible to obtain. but that does not necessarily follow that all moral judgements that we made so far are false. A moral naturalist who comes to conclude that there are moral facts Even if they use the wrong method or it is just their belief, does not necessarily makes them false .Take the of example parmenides's conclusion for eternalism which is that time does not pass and that past,present and future are all illusions. In physics the concept of eternalism describes the block universe theory which is a sound and acceptable theory by some physicists, it had not been falsified yet, It could turn out to be true. Parmenides had false premises that led to the conclusion of eternalism, his method was based on wrong facts but the conclusion still can be true. if the block universe could be proven in the future to be true then parmenides conclusion is true, regardless of the false premises that it followed.

[@leonmills3104]

I am in the minority too I am vegan I hold moral relativism and knowledge relativism and etc I don't think popularity makes something true there have been a lot of things that are true that were not popular

[@RadicOmega]

The fact that compatabalism is the consensus position is, for me, a reductio to the idea that we should go with the consensus of philosophical experts. That view is just obviously false to me

[@jonathacirilo5745]

which one do you think they should go with then?

[@archon1410]

isn't it kinda misleading to label "veganism" as a minority position? iirc, most philosphers agree that eating factory farmed meat is immoral. Factory Farming is how the vast majority of meat is obtained in USA (where much of your audience seems to be from). so if anything, it's the usual carnism that's a minority position.

[@KaneB]

The results are: Omnivorism: 48% Vegetarianism: 26% Veganism: 18% This doesn't distinguish between different methods of acquiring meat. Perhaps the majority of philosophers who selected "omnivorism" are opposed to the current meat industry, but they were including unusual cases such as consuming roadkill. This is a problem with a survey like this, that just asks which position you endorse without allowing for clarifications and qualifications. But really, it might be misleading to describe *any* of the positions listed as minority positions. This is the point of the second type of dismissal response, that philosophy doesn't produce the relevant kind of consensus. There appears to be a consensus that it's not wrong to use some animal products, but beyond that, there isn't a consensus in favour of any more specific view.

[@absupinhere]

I remind myself that the belief in consciousness was a minority opinion not long ago. Nothing more than this must be said to undermine the merit of consensus 😂

[@KaneB]

I don't think eliminativism about consciousness has ever been a popular position. Maybe the majority of philosophers were committed to positions that entailed eliminativism about consciousness, but most of them would have denied that entailment.

[@KaneB]

But yeah, I take your general point: philosophers believe a lot of crazy shit. What worries me is that I have no idea what would make me any better!

[@lanceindependent]

@@KaneB For what it is worth, I think the common views about consciousness in philosophy are far less plausible than illusionism or eliminativism, neither of which I think sounds as indefensible as more mainstream positions. If the consensus has moved away from these views I'd see that as another bad sign.

[@lanceindependent]

What are you basing the claim that consciousness was a minority view on? And what do you mean by that? Depending on what you mean by "consciousness," I would think we should be denying it.

[@RoryT1000]

You conspicuously leave out ideological reasons for why certain things are the consensus and others are not. This is because you, yourself are blinded by ideology. Case in point, you citing nozick. Apparently academics applaud socialism because of their status and experience within the ivory tower of university. There's one tiny problem. During peak Reaganism, half of Americans believed that the core socialist catechism, 'to each according to his ability to each according to his means', was in the US Constitution! Perhaps it's the inherent truism of the catechism and socialist principles (workers control over the means of production) that attracts people? Hmm I guess we'll never know, but hey Nozick said the thing so believe that too. Also I'm guessing that it's the linked article that keeps getting my post deleted

[@KaneB]

>> This is because you, yourself are blinded by ideology. Case in point, you citing nozick. I disagree with Nozick on pretty much everything.

[@RoryT1000]

@@KaneB ok, well that's odd considering the frequency in which you quote from him throughout your libertarian videos but be that as it may, why not the ideological blinkers that could explain people's choices on these surveys? Seems far more plausible than "psychological" explainations. Which is immeasurable and based on "I reckon" statements, but whatever

[@KaneB]

@@RoryT1000 Yeah, really weird that I would talk frequently about the views of the most influential libertarian in political philosophy in videos introducing people to libertarianism in political philosophy. The reason why I didn't talk about your favourite explanations, or many other possible explanations, is simply that I already had four explanations outlined and that seemed sufficient for an introductory video.