“Higher-Order Truths about Chmess”, 2006-05-29 (; backlinks):
Many projects in contemporary philosophy are artifactual puzzles of no abiding importance, but it is treacherously easy for graduate students to be lured into devoting their careers to them, so advice is proffered on how to avoid this trap.
[Keywords: a priori truth, chess, graduate students, Hebb]
Philosophy is an a priori discipline, like mathematics, or at least it has an a priori methodology at its core, and this fact cuts two ways. On the one hand, it excuses philosophers from spending tedious hours in the lab or the field, and from learning data-gathering techniques, statistical methods, geography, history, foreign languages … empirical science, so they have plenty of time for honing their philosophical skills. On the other hand, as is often noted, you can make philosophy out of just about anything, and this is not always a blessing.
…Now none of this is child’s play. In fact, one might be able to demonstrate considerable brilliance in the group activity of working out the higher-order truths of ‘chmess’ [a variant of chess Dennett just made up]. Here is where Donald Hebb’s dictum comes in handy:
If it isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well.
Each of us can readily think of an ongoing controversy in philosophy whose participants would be out of work if Hebb’s dictum were ruthlessly applied, but we no doubt disagree on just which cottage industries should be shut down. Probably there is no investigation in our capacious discipline that is not believed by some school of thought to be wasted effort, brilliance squandered on taking in each other’s laundry. Voting would not yield results worth heeding, and dictatorship would be even worse, so let a thousand flowers bloom, I say. But just remember: if you let a thousand flowers bloom, count on 995 of them to wilt. The alert I want to offer you is just this: try to avoid committing your precious formative years to a research agenda with a short shelf life. Philosophical fads quickly go extinct and there may be some truth to the rule of thumb: the hotter the topic, the sooner it will burn out.
One good test to make sure you’re not just exploring the higher-order truths of chmess is to see if people aside from philosophers actually play the game. Can anybody outside of academic philosophy be made to care whether you’re right about whether Jones’ counterexample works against Smith’s principle? Another such test is to try to teach the stuff to uninitiated undergraduates. If they don’t “get it”, you really should consider the hypothesis that you’re following a self-supporting community of experts into an artifactual trap.
…So don’t count on the validation of your fellow graduate students or your favorite professors to settle the issue. They all have a vested interest in keeping the enterprise going. It’s what they know how to do; it’s what they are good at. This is a problem in other fields too, of course, and it can be even harder to break out of. Experimentalists who master a technique and equip an expensive lab for pursuing it often get stuck filling in the blanks of data matrices that nobody cares about any longer. What are they supposed to do? Throw away all that expensive apparatus? It can be a nasty problem
…Of course some people are quite content to find a congenial group of smart people with whom to share “the fun of discovery, the pleasures of cooperation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement”, as John Austin once put it (see 1961, pg75), without worrying about whether the joint task is worth doing. And if enough people do it, it eventually becomes a phenomenon in its own right, worth studying. As Burton Dreben used to say to the graduate students at Harvard, “Philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship.”
View PDF: