Philosophical Expertise

Abstract

This thesis is about expertise and, in particular, philosophical expertise. It is a response to a question that kept me up at night in the early stages of my PhD program: what kinds of expertise, if any, am I developing here? As the saying goes, all research is me-search.

The thesis is a play in three parts. In Part I, I argue that expertise is brittle, and that the brittleness of expertise should make us suspicious of a common self-conception of philosophers as possessing a set of domain-general thinking skills (e.g., logical, and conceptual analysis) that can be fruitfully applied to any subject.

Part II of my thesis details my efforts to test philosophical expertise directly, via the use of empirical methods. The first study aimed to determine whether philosopher's exhibit any of cognitive hallmarks common to experts in other disciplines (e.g., poor memory for surface level details, difficulties predicting novice behaviour) with respect to their judgements about philosophical cases. We found no evidence of philosophical expertise among professional philosophers. Our second study explored whether philosophical training improved performance with respect to certain modal illusions. We found that philosophical training bore no relationship to expertise with respect to modal judgements, but that mathematical training did.

In Part III, I argue that a growing body of empirical research, including the studies described in the preceding paragraph, suggest that armchair methods alone are inadequate. If we wish to make progress in philosophy, we must augment our armchairs and embrace what I call 'broad-church experimental philosophy'.