Baz (and Mizrahi!) on the Method of Cases

A propos to my previous post on whether there has been any progress in philosophy (and the worries about intuition-based philosophy Moti and I have been harping upon recently), I came across this awesome new paper by Avner Baz in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, "Recent Attempts to Defend the Philosophical Method of Cases and the Linguistic (Re)turn."

Basically, Baz takes all of mainstream analytic philosophy -- and Herman Cappellan and Timothy Williamson specifically -- to task, arguing (as I've long maintained to anyone who will listen) that a lot of philosophy does not really tell us much of interest about the phenomena we claim to be interested in (causation, constitution, etc.) so much as it gives us really confused theories about our concepts of causation, constituion, etc. (which is not what we are after). A few choice paragraphs from the introduction:

Herman Cappelen’s new book, Philosophy Without Intuitions (2012; hereafter referred to as ‘PWI’), presents itself as a radical text, and there is little doubt that it will be taken as such by many. One reviewer has already described it as a ‘bombshell’;1 and it is of the nature of things that many will rush either to dispute or to agree with its main thesis that, persistent rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, analytic philosophers have not relied in their theorizing on intuitions, in any significant sense of that word.

In another, deeper sense, however, the book is very conservative, reactionary even. In the face of growing skepticism about much of the work that has been produced within mainstream analytic philosophy in the last half a century or so, Cappelen argues, in effect, that the skepticism has been wholly misplaced: there is nothing fundamentally wrong with how analytic philosophers have tended to proceed; there is only something wrong with how they (or some of them) have tended to describe their own practice: for reasons that Cappelen regards as not very deep, they have come to describe themselves, falsely, as centrally relying on intuitions in their philosophical theorizing; and this talk of intuitions, Cappelen contends, is what has led to the skepticism. Fix the description, and the skepticism will be shown to be out of place. This, according to Cappelen, is bad news for experimental philosophers who have sought to make a career out of checking on the philosophical ‘intuitions’ of those without formal training in philosophy, and bad news too for anyone else who has hoped to question the work produced by analytic philosophers in the last fifty years or so at a foundational level.3 On the other hand, it is intended to be very good news for all those who have found that work fruitful and exciting, and would be happy to see it continuing along more or less the same lines, without a cloud of skepticism cast over it...

[Part 2 of this paper shows that] the method of cases may be examined, by noting that both Cappelen’s denial of ‘centrality’ and whatever actual defense of the method that may be found in PWI and [Williamson] presuppose a particular conception of language. That conception of language is philosophically and empirically challengeable, but is taken for granted by Williamson and Cappelen, and by virtually all of the other participants in the recent debates concerning the method of cases, without much by way of philosophical support, and without any empirical support; and this despite repeated pronouncements on their part to the effect that philosophers should take seriously and engage with empirical studies related to their philosophical theorizing.

Anyway, I think it's an interesting paper, and well-worth the read, especially given recent discussions on this blog. On the flip-side, I'm a bit dismayed by the paper's citation practices. Our own Moti Mizrahi has published several recent papers on intuition mongering and the method of cases, and I think it is unconscionable that Baz's paper doesn't cite any of Moti's papers (Baz almost entirely cites only big names like Soames, Stanley, Sosa, Weatherson, etc, but won't recent articles on the very same topic by lesser names).

As I've noted before, I think this kind of stuff needs to change. Citations are not "professional kudos", and one should not just cite papers by big names in big name journals. Citations exist to refer to the fact that recent work on the topic exists, and one has an obligation to cite recent work directly relevant to the topic you're writing on, even if that work appeared in a less prestigious journal by a less well-known author.

Comments

[Moti Mizrahi]

Hi Marcus,

Thanks very much for posting on this.

[Anthony Carreras]

Part of what I imagine is going on here is that authors are afraid to engage work that has appeared in journals of less prestige because they think that journals of high prestige won't take their papers as seriously if they do. This, of course, is not a good excuse for an author's neglecting to cite someone's work altogether (I mean, c'mon, it's really easy to say in a footnote something like, "For some other recent work on this topic, see Mizrahi 2013).

[Moti Mizrahi]

Hi Marcus,

I thought I’d share here a comment I got on Twitter regarding this post.

@thinkjustdoit the work you both are doing re: citation practices is significant, influencing students like me I hope others. Adam (@adamhayden) April 24, 2014

It got me thinking that it might be a good idea to do something akin to the Gendered Conference Campaign (http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/gendered-conference-campaign/ ) for citations. That is, we could point to papers that cite mostly papers written by big names or published in top journals in order to raise awareness about the negative effects of such citation practices on the profession. What do you think?

[Marcus Arvan]

Moti: thanks for the great suggestion. I will indeed try to start such a campaign.