 Our next panel is skepticism and philosophy. Let me get our little haiku. Hi, I'm a skeptic. Hi, I'm a philosopher. Really? Well, depends. Your moderator is DJ Grothy. He'll introduce the rest of the panel. I share George's sentiment that was very moving for us backstage. This is inspiring stuff. They say that it might be hard to do philosophy on a full stomach. Today, we'll be in exercise to determine whether or not it's hard to do philosophy on no sleep. For those of you who weren't there, you should know that last night's pens party last night, the donut, the rock and roll donut, and bacon party just went on forever. In fact, I think it's still going on if you want to enjoy. If you look at the history of this thing, we call scientific skepticism. Going back to the 70s when all of this started with Randy and Ray Hyman and Martin Gardner and then Psycop, you'll find a lot of scientists, science journalists, even many magicians involved in the effort. But you'll also notice, if you look at the history, that there were, on occasion, some prominent academic philosophers who've played a big role over past decades. This discussion today with our panelists aims to explore that relationship, the intersection maybe of philosophy and the sort of skepticism that we're talking about, what philosophy has to contribute to this work, if anything, and how philosophy can inform or maybe undergird our efforts. And maybe we'll have time to even get into some of the recent critics of philosophy coming from folks in science and skepticism, some prominent names. So I'd like to introduce our panel. First off is Massimo Piliuci. He's chair of the philosophy department at City University of New York and a long time figure in the skeptics movement, in the work of skepticism. He's editor in chief of the journal Philosophy and Theory in Biology and hosts the popular blog and podcast, Rationally Speaking. And the online video series called Five Minute Philosopher. He's the author of a number of books, 12 books, including the recent titles Nonsense on Stilts, How to Tell Science from Bunk and Answers from Aristotle, How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to a More Meaningful Life. Next up is Russell Blackford, an attorney and philosopher from Australia and co-editor of the book 50 Voices of Disbelief. He's author of a number of other titles, including Freedom of Religion and the Secular State and Humanity Enhanced. He's editor in chief of the Journal of Evolution and Technology and blogs regularly at the Hellfire Club. It's one of the great blogs at the blog network Skeptic Inc. Susan Hock is a distinguished professor in the humanities at Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at the University of Miami. She's the author of a number of really acclaimed books, including Putting Philosophy to Work, Inquiry and It's Place in Culture, and also Defending Science Within Reason between Scientism and Synicism. She's one of only a handful of living philosophers who were included in the listing 100 philosophers, the life and work of the world's greatest thinkers. And she was listed in the Sunday Independence list of the 10 most important women philosophers of all time. Peter Bogosian, at the end there, is a philosophy professor at Portland State University and has been making waves with his philosophical teaching. It's really helping students think critically about a number of centrally held beliefs. His students aren't just in the classroom and maybe we'll have time to get into this as well, since he's also taught philosophy and he's taught us stuff in prisons, hospitals, small and big businesses, he teaches online, he teaches a popular atheism course, also a course in scientific skepticism at Portland State. So please join me in welcoming our very distinguished panel. Okay, just to begin the discussion, events like this, there's a lot of talk of science and critical thinking, skepticism. So to lead off, where do we get what we know about critical thinking and how to think straight about things? Doesn't that come from philosophy or no? I ask a leading question, because I know the answer that they may give. So, Massimo, let's start with you. Well critical thinking of course is a general term that can be applied to pretty much anything and of course it's a fundamental approach to both science and philosophy. But as a discipline being taught actually in college classes and occasionally in high school classes, that's actually a branch of philosophy when it comes out. It's about informal logical thinking, formal fallacies and things like that. You typically don't get, I thought both introductory science classes, introductory philosophy classes, you typically don't get that introductory science classes. You do get to critical thinking indirectly in science education but usually much later. So you could go through a VA in some field in science and not learn critical thinking extensively. I'd be surprised if you actually took a single class in critical thinking in any course in science, yeah? Which is not good. I would agree. Susan, Russell, any thoughts about this philosophy informing this critical thinking? Okay, I think I'm a little bit skeptical about critical thinking. There is of course something that we think of as thinking critically, very important skill. I believe it's a skill that some people have to some degree naturally and other people don't. And a skill that one acquires primarily by trying to figure out something difficult and discovering that it really is hard to figure things out and that there are complications that you might not have anticipated. What's taught in many philosophy departments under the heading critical thinking enables students to identify some informal fallacies, a few formal fallacies. But to be perfectly candid, it seems to me that this has become the course we put on to bring in bodies when you have a bunch of students who are not capable of taking a rigorous logic course. And the thing that troubles me about it is it is all too easy to convey the impression to a student, okay, you've taken this course, you've passed the exam, you're set for life in critical thinking. And it isn't like that at all. It's something that you learn the complexities of as you live, as you try to figure stuff out. Peter, you teach a number of courses along these lines, is she right? No. I will say that I think she's spot on just because someone takes a class in critical thinking, it doesn't make them a good critical thinker. Just if somebody takes a class in something that doesn't give them a skill-based proficiency in something, I think it's more complicated than that. We use the general term critical thinking. I read a study a few years ago when they asked college professors to define critical thinking and I think it was 100% of college professors that it was important, but when asked to give a definition of it, people were pretty much clueless. The term critical thinking, it's a broad term, it's a rubric term under which different areas and subsets of thoughts follow. Each person brings something different to the discourse. I agree with what she said about trying to figure things out, but essential in that is that you have to have some kind of feedback mechanism, some way to correct your cognitions and we don't have that. I think we don't have that the way that we've institutionalized philosophy as it is. That could be just a function of university architecture, how we've institutionalized critical thinking, but there has to be some kind of mechanism to correct students' thoughts and the way that's institutionalized in education, it's very difficult because we're so focused on assessments. For example, Masmo came and spoke to my class and he had, you can ask him, he's at the end of the panel. He teaches, how many students a term do you teach? Of about 20. Yeah, I teach almost 280. So it's very difficult in those sorts of designated large classes to really hit critical thinking core objectives to help people use those tools once they leave the classroom, but I think it's definitely possible. Critical thinking is a very wide area. It includes informal logic, as Masmo said, and I think courses in formal logic and informal logic are very important, they're a very important foundational part of the philosophy curriculum. But critical thinking goes way beyond that to include analyzing our concepts, trying to get our concepts straight. That's not something you can teach in one unit at first year level, or it might be a college or university, philosophy is very largely about just trying to think through your concepts and get the concepts straight. A lot of our concepts are a mess, and that's really been known since ancient times. Socrates got into a lot of trouble because he showed that the way people think about things like beauty and goodness and justice, it's a conceptual mess and we're still trying to sort out a lot of those conceptual problems. That's very largely what philosophy is about and that kind of conceptual analysis has to go hand in hand with the kind of empirical investigation that's really science. If I may, since this is a panel about why philosophy is relevant to skepticism, as we are understanding in this kind of setting, let me give you one brief example. Many people here probably are familiar with several so-called informal logical fallacies, appeal to authority and things like that. But I notice, for instance, that in the skeptical literature, more and more often these things are thrown as generic weapons against anybody who says anything that we don't like. Oh, that's just an appeal to authority. What would I mean? If the authority's actually reliable, like if I'm telling you that I accept climate change, for instance, because there is a large consensus among the relevant group of experts in the field, yes, in a sense I am in fact appealing to authority, but this is a reasonable appeal to authority. It becomes fallacious when I'm saying, I think that just because somebody says so, then this thing is true. So even skeptics themselves, although they heard about these kind of things, often they misuse them, and that's something that we definitely don't wanna do, and we wanna be careful about using these kinds of tools. Just to drill down a bit more on this one topic before we move on. If you look at some of the, let's call them the cultural competitors of the purveyors of undue credulity, right? You know, the paranormalists, the fundamentalist religionists, et cetera. There's, I'm thinking of Tim Lehey and David Noble, they have this book out for evangelical Christians about how to protect your kids when they go off to college, right? For me. Right, and in fact one of the rounds of advice is whatever you do, don't let them take a philosophy course, right? Because if they take a philosophy course, they'll end up coming home on a break and not believe the truth anymore. So that's what I was getting at. You think of Paul Kurtz or other philosophers involved in the skeptics movement and teaching four decades, maybe it's sort of a faith claim, but isn't the idea that a freshman, a philosophy student comes in and starts asking questions he or she might not have ordinarily asked about supernatural or paranormal beliefs at a very basic level? I think that's absolutely correct and one of the things that I've noticed in my classes, we had mentioned in the breakout session that I've used Skype as a tool when we Skype people in to talk about various issues and many of the students have said to me, it's really important that please, please don't post this online, don't record this because my parents don't know I'm here. They don't want me to be here. And so yeah, and so that was very revealing and that was very interesting and people come from homes of entrenched dogma and their parents don't want them to take these classes or they're afraid that they'll take a class and not even the atheism class, the science and pseudo science and it will be on their transcript and employers will be worried about that. So things that you don't want your parents to know, sex, drugs, rock and roll in philosophy classes. Yes. But you know, I think all of the academic disciplines tend to erode belief in the supernatural. One of the galling things actually that comes out of some empirical research that was actually done is that one of the things that most erodes traditional religious belief is exposure to post-modernism, you know, exposure to epistemic relativism, those kinds of things, things that actually are anathema to me, right? I'm not supporting those things at all. But when students are exposed to those kinds of ideas, you know, truth is all relative, et cetera, et cetera, it does actually start to erode their commitment to any particular belief that they started out in. So even things that maybe are anathema to me in the academic curriculum can actually erode traditional belief. That's a funny thing. These things often turn out more complicated than you think. Yeah, it's an interesting question. Should we expose them to nonsense to disabuse them of a greater nonsense? I think it's also a question how much they learn in the classroom and how much they learn simply from being in college, from being among other young people. It's had closer to the mic, but yes. So it's not just the instruction, but it's the... I don't see that it's necessarily just the instruction or even necessarily primarily the instruction. And after all, you're away from home for several years and in a bunch of other people whom you might never have met. And that may very well be at least as important as anything that we teach in a critical thinking class. If the philosopher, if the philosoph, Diderot said there's nothing like a Jesuit education to make you an atheist, maybe just going away to college will lead to some doubt because you're not under the roof anymore. So I think that's the point. Switching gears, question, Susan. Folks here at this conference, we call ourselves scientific skeptics, many of us. Scientific skeptics, as if science is sort of a compliment given to the sort of skepticism we practice. Question for the panel, but I'd like to start with Susan. Is, without drilling down yet into all these distinctions between the kinds of skepticism there are, there's academic skepticism, which is just a radical doubt of all knowledge, science is just one mythic narrative among many others, et cetera. Is this scientific skepticism, or is this just another kind of skepticism? Oh goodness, okay. I think the first thing I have to say is if I could abolish the honorific use of the word science as a kind of epistemic compliment, I would. Of course, I don't have that power. So what I do have within my power is to say plainly, whilst the sciences, at least the natural sciences, are in my opinion, one of the most remarkable cognitive achievements of the human race. When I read what Watson and Crick did, I feel kind of proud to be human. Oh, nevertheless, there is bad science as well as good. And has anyone who specializes, as I do in my legal teaching, in scientific testimony in court, you need to be very well aware, but there is very poor science as well as good science presented in court. And so using the word scientific as if it was a shorthand for epistemically good is actually a dangerous thing to do. I recommend against it. Marsha? To follow up on that, I also don't have that kind of power that Susan wishes, but maybe I could suggest an alternative that instead of referring to what we're doing here as scientific skepticism, we should take a broader view and call it something like empirical skepticism. I mean, after all, what this kind of crowd is about is the critical evaluation of empirical claims of any sort, whether they arise to the level, lofty level of science or not, and whatever that level may be. We really are concerned with people that say the world is in a certain way, and we are asking them to provide evidence. You're looking at evidence. It's evidence-based. So it's just empirical. Maybe in the spirit of science, but not science per se. So you heard it here, folks. Today at TAM 2013, we're launching a new movement called Empirical Skepticism, and having fun along those lines. I say that in jest, by the way. It's already trending on Twitter. No one run with that, yeah. Yeah, it's a funny thing. You might think if you did not come from this sort of environment that scientific skepticism would be skepticism about things that are scientific, right? It would be skepticism about science itself, thinking that science is not what it's cracked up to be. After all, when we're talking about moral skepticism, we mean skepticism about morality, thinking, yeah, maybe morality's an illusion, something like that. Scientific skepticism, I take it, though, is actually skepticism about claims that are extraordinary or anomalous within our scientifically informed view of the world that we now have. But of course, there are claims by analogy where what matters is not the information from science but information from humanistic scholarship. So, for example, the other day we were talking about skepticism about the identity of Shakespeare. Now, we have a lot of evidence that the plays of Shakespeare really were written by, wait for it, not the Earl of Oxford, but by Shakespeare. We don't have that from science as I would understand science. We have it from humanistic scholarship, a whole mountain of evidence that scholars can go to. And by analogy, I'd say a claim like that is quite similar to the kinds of claims such as homeopathy and so on that fail against the scientific information we have. So, yeah, you can generalize. You can have a skeptic move that goes to all of this. If not homeopathy particularly, but let's think Bigfoot or something. A lot of the analysis of Bigfoot, some of it relies on scientific analysis, but some of it's folklore and some of it's sort of cultural anthropology, other things that you don't think of as sometimes the hard sciences. It's the form of empirical knowledge. Right, right, so it's evidence-based, okay. We were sort of getting into drawing some distinctions. In the Academy, someone says skepticism, they don't think Bigfoot ghosts, they don't think, or ghosts of Bigfoot, that sounded like. They don't think of the paranormal, they don't think of pseudoscience. They think of a sort of radical, sometimes even denial that knowledge is possible, that science is just one mythic narrative among many others. And Massimo, is that where this opposition from some scientific skepticism, some scientific skeptics is coming from? Empirical skeptics. Empirical skeptics, exactly, yeah. When they sort of set themselves opposed to philosophy. I'm thinking Lawrence Krauss, say, in his last book. Just to pick one at random, yes. Exactly, not only did he not need, it's not that he just doesn't have any need for philosophy, he thinks philosophy is sort of a bad thing. So this is the thing that actually does worry me, or has begun to worry me in the last couple of two or three years when I started paying attention to these issues. There is a number of skeptics, prominent skeptics, particularly people like Lawrence Krauss, but also Sam Harris, there's a number of them out there who have these interesting, not just, well, philosophy doesn't tell me particularly anything relevant, but it's a rejection of philosophy as a discipline, it's useless and so on and so forth. That worries me because, so I think it comes from, in part, from what you're talking about. In fact, at least people like Harris and Krauss explicitly say so. They are reacting against post-modernism, what we were talking about earlier, the radical rejection that there can be any kind of knowledge, including scientific knowledge is just a cultural issue and your understanding of science is just as good as my understanding of pseudoscience and so on and so forth. Now, they are rightly worried about that, but they seem to conflate that with philosophy in general, which is a big mistake for one thing, it's just factually incorrect, and also they don't seem to appreciate that actually the best arguments against post-modernism do come from philosophers. It's not that you can't refuse post-modernism on scientific grounds and empirical grounds that you have unique philosophical arguments and those arguments are out there. The other thing I think that is happening there is that people like Krauss, who by the way, I'm gonna be debating on this very topic in Ghent in Belgium in a couple months and with Daniel Dennett, so that should be interesting and David is gonna be put out there, so watch out for that. But for Krauss, for instance, it's pretty clear to me that he has probably never read a single paper in philosophy or in philosophy science because otherwise he just couldn't be saying the kinds of things he's saying and that translates to me into a very disappointing form of anti-intellectualism. I mean, this is an intellectual community and I thought that we would in fact appreciate all sorts of intellectual endeavors as long as they're rigorous and well done within that particular field. So science, if it is well done, philosophy, if it is well done, whatever else, mathematics, logic, if they're well done. And the idea that somebody who is a prominent member of this community, of an intellectual community, can reject out of hand, clearly without knowledge, an entire other field of inquiry, it bothers them, frankly. I could be wrong about this because I haven't followed that debate closely but I didn't think that was the claim that he was making. I thought that the claim that he was making is that philosophy talks about areas of what there is, metaphysics. So grossly oversimplified epistemology is how you know what there is and metaphysics is what there is and what there is is in the domain of science and philosophy ought not to encroach upon that. So I thought that was one of the points that had repeatedly come up in the debate. And with apologies, before we debate Krause in absentia, we'll look forward to that debate. But yeah, I think it's a nuanced argument. Obviously, four or five sentences from Massimo won't completely flesh out everything, Krause. I do wanna say one more thing. I think part of the broader criticism of philosophy is that it's become unhinged from reality. And so often the way that we institutionalize the discipline of philosophy, for example, I don't know any, like literally no philosophers at even at graduate levels in any program in the country that are trained to do studies, mixed method studies, quantitative, qualitative research. So the discipline then, in a sense, we look at it as unhinged from reality and not based in, are not using its roots in empirical data and studies and that we train our thinkers to do that. So I don't really agree on that. Yeah, Susie, go ahead. Sorry, yeah, Susie, you wanna jump in there? Okay, first of all, it's very important to distinguish philosophy as institutionalized and practiced in universities, in the English-speaking world, at the moment from philosophy, the discipline, right? I would actually prefer, rather than empirical skepticism, which is certainly an improvement. Evidence-sensitive skepticism, I think would be the right phrase. I see encounter groups starting all over the country for evidence-sensitive skeptics. Now, if you ask yourself, what's the discipline to which it falls to explain what evidence is, what's its structure, what makes it better, what makes it worse? The answer is, I hardly dare say this word, epistemology. Jonathan Rouch once wrote, if you want to empty the room at a cocktail party, just say epistemology. So if anyone wants to leave, okay. The problem is that if you look in the philosophy journals at the work in epistemology, really relatively little of it will help you at all with those questions. But that's an institutional problem. It's not a problem with the discipline as such. Well, if I may, also in response, I'm not checking my email, I'm just making notes. These days you need to be careful. In part to what Peter was saying, I disagree, I mean I know actually a good number of philosophers, not a lot of philosophers, but a good number of philosophers who are very much involved, interested in sort of interfacing with other disciplines and empirical evidence. There's an entire new discipline of experimental philosophy, for instance, that is essentially a mix between philosophy and social sciences, psychology, cognitive science. Philosophers of mind are very much interested in what neurobiologists have to say. Philosophers of science do different things, but some of the things that they do very much interact with, you know, biologists, physicists, and so on and so forth. But again, as Susan was saying, there is a distinction between academic philosophy and the broader discipline. When we say things like, oh, philosophers is decoupled, not much academic philosophy is decoupled from reality, however I want to define reality, well that's true for almost any academic field. I guarantee you that almost any talk that you're gonna hear at a professional science meeting is very much detached from reality. It's about very, very tiny little things, very specialized things, because that's the nature of academic jobs at this point. I mean, you have to concentrate on very tiny little portions of a particular problem, otherwise you're not gonna be saying anything novel about it. You don't get to publish your papers, you don't get your grants, and therefore you don't get tenure and you're dead. But that's, it would be a mistake to say that science as a discipline is irrelevant, let's say, to society at large, just because the 99% of actually published scientific papers are in fact irrelevant to much of what we do. That's a strong claim in fighting words for which we don't have time, but Russell. Well, I like it. That's the most stolen something I've done to hear, but one point I was going to make was, the problem we all face at the moment in our society, and it will probably get worse, is the extreme fragmentation of knowledge and inquiry. Yeah, inquiry in all the academic disciplines is getting more and more specialized. There are reasons for that, of course, but it's happening. Somebody who's a biologist, not only is not gonna be not expert in philosophy, they're not gonna be expert in physics, they're not even gonna be expert in other areas of biology, right? Working scientists, working humanistic scholars, working people in any of the disciplines are going to be highly specialized. The area where you do, however, try to reflect in a general way, being informed from all of the other disciplines where the empirical inquiry is going on, is philosophy. We can't not do philosophy really. I mean, when Lawrence Kraus puts an argument as to why there's a problem with philosophy, he will put a philosophical argument as to why there's a problem with philosophy. It's kind of inevitable that we need to have this discipline. It's a kind of counterforce to the fragmentation of knowledge that we're stuck with. So as we're decrying this fragmentation of knowledge, one thing I like about the history of organized skepticism, scientific and parical skepticism, evidence-sensitive skepticism, is that it's been multidisciplinary from the start. And even disciplines that people really might ordinarily not have considered worthwhile disciplines in that academic sense, like favorite things of mine, like magic, or, you know, but not just sciences, but philosophy and journalism and communication and social psychology, et cetera. Bertrand Russell, a great philosopher, said that sort of controversial line, people should believe only things for which there is adequate evidence, right? It's controversial because if you consistently apply it, it will, he thinks, necessarily overturn some of your basic beliefs about the paranormal, about the supernatural. And if that's coming from philosophy, is that a conversation about sort of informing this project? I guess that's my last long question, which is if, before we go to questions from the audience, can each of you share with the TAM audience what you think, if anything, philosophy has to contribute to skepticism? Well, so you mentioned Bertrand Russell. Let me remind you that one of the mantras that we all learn from skepticism 101 is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right? That is attributed to Carl Sagan, but that is, in fact, a reformulation of David Hume's famous dictum about the proportionality between evidence and claims. And so it has the entire idea of skeptically analyzing, critically analyzing claims that are supposed to be based on evidence, is, in fact, essentially epistemology, goes down to logic, formula, inform logic, and so on and so forth. So I think the philosophy does two things for skepticism. In one sense, it underlies all of what we do, because, as Russell was saying, you simply cannot gain in any interest in discussions about truth, knowledge, and all of that without actually already doing philosophy. Or to figure out what science is versus pseudoscience. That's a philosophical question. And if you're already doing philosophy, you might as well recognize that that's what you're doing and learning the tools of it. And the other thing that it does, again, as we were saying a minute ago, it actually is, ironically, it is accused often of being the detached from reality kind of field, but in fact, ironically, it is actually the glue, the connection between a bunch of different fields. It is inherently interdisciplinary, unlike most of the special sciences. And so it's not that we all need to turn into philosophers, just like most of us don't turn into scientists just because they're interested in skepticism. Or magicians. Or magicians. But it is a question of recognizing that there are deep roots and deep connections among these fields. Russell? Philosophy started out as a rational and rigorous inquiry into an understanding of the world we live in, the understanding of human situation, and some kind of understanding about how we should live our lives. If you go way back to antiquity, that's really what you see Socrates and others doing. A rational inquiry into those things. And because philosophy is that kind of inquiry, it historically has been skeptical about claims before they become extraordinary, right? Philosophy historically has been the discipline that has been skeptical about claims about religion, about the supernatural, about the gods or whatever it might be. Before those claims were really extraordinary, skeptical inquiring into them in a rational way at a time when they were so widely accepted that you could understand why people just believed them without any question. And historically you can see that going through. And historically you can see science arising out of philosophy. Now, philosophy and science still need to be kept in tandem. Science itself makes claims that are extraordinary. I'm going to talk about that tomorrow, but science in some cases gathers the evidence. But philosophy is a discipline that's there to keep science honest even and to engage in dialogue with science about the concepts. Try to get those concepts straight. Yeah, get that conceptual analysis working. And eventually come back and inform how we live our lives and how we think society might be structured. No one science is going to discover that. You need some forum where all that is debated in an informed way, way that's informed by all the disciplines. And we need philosophy to play that role. Susan? And please get a bit closer to the microphone. Okay. I wish it did. I mean, several people, I'm losing track of who said what, I'm afraid. It's very hard to hold a conversation when you're sideways to people. But anyway, several people have suggested that philosophy has gotten very fragmented. That's true. I think it's catastrophic. And in a way, the, okay, it's become very specialized. Massimo is absolutely right about that. But the irony is that there's no intellectual reason for this as there is in the sciences. The discipline is in its nature, not like that. And one of the problems with the institutionalization and the fragmentation is that it's nobody's job to look at the most important questions. Because you don't get tenure for looking at that. And if you look at questions like, okay, and how exactly do we distinguish science from rubbish, good science, from rubbish, from bad science? That question is now regarded as terribly old hat and you won't get tenure for writing about it. And if you do write about it, scientists will buy your book, I know this from personal experience, but philosophers of science will not. So I think we have a serious institutional problem, not a serious problem with the discipline, which I agree with everybody else who's spoken. Potentially it's awfully useful, especially for example, in articulating exactly what it means to be sensitive to evidence, to proportion your belief to the strength of the evidence. But institutionally we're not succeeding, which explains some of the hostility, I'm sure. The question is, what is the relationship between philosophy and skepticism? I guess the last question is, does philosophy give skepticism anything? Yeah, I just wanted to, that was awesome. When the, no, I mean that absolutely epitomized exactly what the problem is. Let me tell you the problem, to repeat a little bit. So I really have almost no other life. I think about philosophy, I read philosophy, I work constantly. When I go to a philosophy talk or philosophy conference, I have absolutely no idea what anybody's talking about. Yeah, and I think part of that is the way that we've institutionalized the discipline. And so it's that people focus on unbelievably small areas. I mean just minutiae that is inconceivable that anybody would care about. And I don't think, yeah, but the problem is I don't think they care about it. That's the problem. The problem is that I think you can have a rebuttal absolutely, let me finish the idea. The problem is that you need to get, you need the way that promotion and tenure committees work is that you need to do that. And what's amazing to me is that when I go to these things, I see everybody sitting there nodding. And I think to myself, come on. Like you really understand some unbelievable esoterica that somebody's talking about a sentence in a fragment that we have from the pre-Socratics and everybody's like, you know. So it's possible that I'm completely clueless and then I'm the only one, you know, or it's possible that a whole bunch of people are pretending to know something they don't know. Okay, so I'm sorry, I need to say something about this. Can I just, just very quick, so I'll bottom up. I think that what philosophy gives is the possibility to live a life free of delusion. I think philosophy at its best when it's taught will give you tools to differentiate reality from make-believe land and use that in a very practical way to improve your life and the life of your community. What I want to say is that I don't actually disagree at all with both what Susan and Peter are saying. That is exactly the feeling you get at an academic conference in philosophy. Although again, let's remember the distinction between academic philosophy and the discipline itself. Where I'm disagreeing, and this is maybe because I've been, I'm at late camera to philosophy. You know, I was a practicing scientist for 25 years and then, you know, my midlife crisis led me to philosophy. But, all things. But, you know, that is what they just described is exactly the same feeling I had whenever I went to a science conference. Most of academic science is done exactly the same way. Most of the time you hear this guy talking about something, you have no idea what it is because it's not in your narrow area of expertise. You don't know what the significance of it is. It's probably just a tiny little bit of thing that it's gonna get in a publication that it's good for tenure. This is the problem with the academy in general. It's not just philosophy. You know, when you are in one discipline, when you practice philosophy, you're worried by these things. My God, what am I colleagues doing here? But, if you move into another discipline, that's exactly what you'll see. And I'm bad, I haven't been at conferences on, I don't know, psychology or literary criticism. But I bet that that's exactly the feeling that academics end up in those areas. In the humanities as well. Well, it is a problem across all the disciplines. You know, the fragmentation of knowledge, the fragmentation of inquiry. I suppose the issue that's come up now is how far is that justified in philosophy? I'm not so sure, as Susan is, that it's totally unjustified. I think there is some justification in having some people doing scholarship on. The point that Peter made, the specific, yeah, that's right. There's value in having someone there working on that line from Plata or whatever it was, trying to make sense of it. Whether we put too much weight on that, though, is the question. Maybe that's not the way you should get tenure. Philosophy does have this role that we've all been, I think, agreeing on, of being informed by all of the areas of inquiry and being the space to have these kinds of discussions. Now, maybe more weight should be put on doing that and doing that well, and maybe that's how you should get tenure. But I don't think the fragmentation is entirely unjustified. I think that's going too far. The TAM audience, during this panel, got a twofer. They got this discussion of philosophy and skepticism, and also how to solve problems in academic philosophy. That's fantastic. We have two or three minutes for a couple of questions. And does anyone have any questions? I think George will come out for a second. A really good, really meaty, good question. And do the Donahue. Susan is jumping up and down there. Here we go. A really good one, right? Yeah, Susan Blackmore in front. If she's going to sing the question, I'll take it. Well, you all have tenure, clearly. No. So what happens after you get tenure? Can you go back to the basic issues that you couldn't address before? Sure. I just put together a book on the Marketian problem, which I think Susan is right. It wouldn't have gotten me tenure. But now I got tenure, so I said, you know, whatever. That is, I mean, tenure has, we could have a whole long discussion about the good and the bad about tenure, but one of the good things about tenure is exactly that, that to some degree, it does release you into doing whatever you'd like. That is, by the way, ironically, less so for the sciences than in philosophy. Again, I've been a tenure professor in the sciences. And even after tenure, the pressure is very high on you to keep getting grants. And getting grants does still require doing very narrow and very, you know, unexplorative kind of research. National Science Foundation funds only stuff that they think it's gonna work. They don't go for the aesthetic stuff. If you're outside of sciences on the other hand, you don't have that kind of, a lot of cash like that, then you have more intellectual freedom, I think. We have time for one last question. Susan. I'm glad we don't have a tenure system like that in England. Susan, you mentioned how proud you were of the science of Watson and Crick and what they did. The feeling was not mutual. I interviewed Francis Crick just before he died. And he said, oh, philosophers, it's a load of rubbish. What use are they ever, what philosopher has ever discovered anything worth having? And under some pressure, he said, well, maybe they do help us to ask better questions. Would any of you agree that you do that or indeed that that's the only use you have for scientists, great scientists like him? Gosh. Well, of course, you know the line. Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as all mythology is to birds. It's Richard Feynman, I think. Yeah, it was Richard Feynman, but before you go ahead, that's a great line. Now remember, ornithologists are too stupid to understand, birds are too stupid to understand ornithology, number one. And birds do need ornithologists, otherwise they're gonna go extinct. But anyway. Okay, no. I actually think that's false, but it depends on the philosophy of science. I think some of the best philosophy of science has actually been done by philosophically thoughtful scientists. I'm actually an admirer of Thomas Huxley, for example. I think he has a lot of good sense about how the sciences work. One thing I hope that, one thing I have tried to do with respect to philosophy of science that might be of some use to a scientist is to articulate what the institutional circumstances are which are hospitable to good honest thorough inquiry and what kinds of pressure threaten it. And I think scientists ought to be able to learn something from that about how they organize themselves, about what possible forms of corruption there are in the peer review system, for example. Now somebody may say to me, well that's not really philosophy, that's sociology. And to that all I can say is, I really don't care. I have tenure too. I got it in England and I got it for not raping the vice chancellor's dog. So with that, please, please join me in thanking our distinguished panel, Masimo Piroyuchi, Russell Blackburn, Susan Hock and Peter Bogosian. Thank you very much. Thank you.