Sunday, February 8, 2009

Philosophy Doesn't Teach You How to Think

If you ever happen to take a class on philosophy, especially an introductory class, then the professor will usually make a statement about the importance of philosophy. It is common for philosophers to emphasize the importance of philosophy by telling everyone that all fields of study began as philosophy. They say that philosophy was the first science, the first in investigation and rigor, and from it we get all things, such as physics, chemistry, psychology and biology. In other words it is the root of all other disciplines and the source of all modern understanding, at least that is what they will tell you, and they will use examples from history to demonstrate that the study of philosophy lead to the creation of all the other fields of study.

With this in mind the professor of philosophy will then stress the importance of studying philosophy, because "By studying philosophy one learns how to think and to order one's thoughts so that one can make a coherent argument and participate in all fields of study." On the contrary, I have observed that a study of philosophy will not teach someone how to think.

All a study of philosophy will do is allow someone to articulate better their own way of thinking, it will not change the way they think. Only useful fields of study will actually change the way someone things (and the converse is also true). I have found from personal experience that after a study of philosophy a person will leave with exactly the same manner of thinking, but they will be able to articulate it better. This means that if someone begins to study philosophy and they already have a correct way of thinking then they will come out of it able to express correct, rational and coherent thoughts. But is someone begins to study philosophy and they enter it with incorrect thoughts then they will leave with incorrect thoughts, and even worse they will be able to express those incorrect thoughts in a more sophisticated manner, thus perpetuating their vile thoughts and passing them on to others.

Because I had the opportunity to study both physics and philosophy (and for the most part not concurrently) I could see the difference between the two in how they affect both myself and others. As for myself, despite all the classes I took and the papers I wrote, and the books I read on philosophy I cannot honestly say that it changed the way I think one bit. But in my time studying physics I can see a definite growth in the way I think. Also when I talked to other people, those that went through four or more years of physics had a very definite change in the way they thought. If you put some freshmen physics majors in the same room as some seniors I could tell that the seniors had a fundamental difference in their world views and thought processes from the freshmen. The same was not true of philosophy. I could find no discernible difference in the thought processes and world views of first years from fourth years. The only difference is that the fourth years could articulate their mental mistakes with a greater vocabulary and elegance. In all their study they never bothered or were never challenged to change the way they think. They still persisted with the same philosophical errors of thought that plague so much of humanity. In short, they never learned a thing.


Jared said...

I mostly agree. However, I think that studying the philosophy of science will teach you how to think critically. Very few people actually understand the philosophy behind science and are even threatened by any discussion of it because it forces them to consider new approaches to science.

Quantumleap42 said...

Actually I would have to disagree with you on that one. All the philosophers I have known that have emphasized in studying the philosophy of science would have made terrible scientists. Mostly they held to a post-modernist view of the world which is fundamentally incompatible with science and critical thought. Essentially the problem was that they never could agree to or hold an answer which is fundamentally different to the actual philosophy of science.

So even though they studied the philosophy of science, in the end it made no impact on they way they viewed or interacted with the world, or even taught them to think critically. There have only been two philosophers that I have known (personally) that studied philosophy after they studied something else (one studied math, the other was a plumber). Both of them were viewed as slightly (or very) heretical by other philosophers because of their radical views (they thought critically about philosophy).

And this brings me back to my post. A study of philosophy will not teach someone how to think, how to think correctly or critically. Correct thought comes by studying something else and only then is a study of philosophy beneficial. And in some cases the study of philosophy can be very beneficial, such as studying the philosophy of science, but only after studying something else.