Constructive vs. destructive philosophy

In my recent post discussing our dialectical obligations in research and publishing, Amanda writes:

The overall point that I can't stand about philosophy these days is this: it is not a philosophy paper unless you are disagreeing with another philosopher and showing them how they are wrong. The idea that a philosophy paper could be about improving the views of someone else is just a laughable concept (unless you are doing that through the conduct of showing that another critic was wrong.)

Mike then responded:

While some people (editors, referees, philosophers sitting in a Q&A) may think that "it is not a philosophy paper unless you are disagreeing with another philosopher and showing them how they are wrong", I think there's enough room within the philosophy publishing ecosystem for creative, constructive papers that are "about improving the views of someone else".

I'm curious what other people think about this. Has academic philosophy become too 'destructive' instead of constructive?

On the one hand, I think we can all agree that philosophical critiques can be important in terms of advancing debates and particular areas of philosophy. One of the best cases I can think of here is the work of my ex-grad-school mate, Michael Bukoski, who has published a series of articles in top-ranked journals (including Phil Review and Ethics) arguing against some really influential arguments in moral philosophy. I myself learned a lot from these articles, and think they are really important challenges to the views they criticize.

At the same time, I am somewhat sympathetic with Amanda's concern. I'll never forget an experience I had fairly early on in graduate school. I wrote a paper that I thought decimated an argument we studied in the course. My professor agreed, but I was a bit taken aback by her feedback, which was (to paraphrase), "Arguing that someone is mistaken is all well and good. But it's a lot easier to destroy than create." That feedback always stuck with me. Finding a flaw in something else someone has made can be important. At the same time, just about all philosophical ideas turn out to have serious problems. The real trick (or so it seems to me) is to come up with something better--which is really hard, since as soon as you begin to create something new, it will inevitably face problems of its own. Nozick has a really great passage here in the opening pages of Anarchy, State, and Utopia where, if I remember correctly, he analogizes theory-creation to trying to keep a new rug lie flat (as soon as you push down one 'bubble' in the rug, a new bubble will pop up somewhere else). Indeed, take Parfit's On What Matters. As I understand it, Parfit shared draft manuscripts (under the working title 'Climbing the Mountain') for many years--getting so much feedback, in fact, that the book ended up being nearly 2,000 pages! Yet, despite all of the time and effort he spent trying to shore everything up, the book's meta-ethical view faces serious problems as does its central claims in normative ethics.

Again, learning that a theory has serious problems like these is important. But how much relative time do philosophers spend trying to improve or develop rather than destroy? As many of my M&E friends would be likely to say (judging the talks I have sat in on), all theories have costs. No theory that says anything interesting will give us everything we want. In order to determine whether one theory is better than its rivals, we need to not only understand those theories' problems: we also need to understand their theoretical virtues. And, in order to do that, we need to develop the best versions of them that we can. This has happened, of course, with some of the Great Figures. Kantian ethicists, for example, have spend over two-hundred years trying to improve and defend Kantianism from critiques. But how much does it happen in general? Do philosophers spend enough time trying improve theories rather than destroying them?

I have to confess that I don't have any clear answer here. I am more curious to hear what readers think!

Comments

[Rex]

I've always liked the idea of generous reading described here:

http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2013/12/this-is-not-my-or-our-time-so-please.html

[Michel]

I don't think this has been my experience of published work, but maybe I'm lucky to work in a particularly 'creative' subfield.

My experience of publishing, however, has been that referees are much happier with the destructive than the creative side of things. (Both in that that they see their job as primarily destructive, but also because they give the creative side of projects a much harder time.)

[Sebastian Lutz]

I can't speak to the ratio of destructive articles, but I want to offer a tangential point about the rhetoric of philosophical papers and the teaching of philosophical writing:

Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross describe in /The Craft of Scientific Communication/ (pp. 3-4) how scientific articles in their introductions typically 1. define a research territory, 2. establish a limited problem in that territory, and 3. suggest or summarize a solution to this problem. It's the simple background-tension-release structure of storytelling (which Randy Ohlson in "Science Communication: Narratively Speaking", Science 342, 2013: 1168, calls the 'and-but-therefore structure').

One way of providing tension is by arguing that some position is wrong, but the release does not have to be that the position must be given up (the destructive conclusion). One can also fix it (the constructive conclusion). Another way of providing tension is by pointing out an as of yet unsolved problem, the release being a (constructive) solution to said problem.

Thus destructive papers almost automatically fulfill a standard rhetorical schema for engaging writing, but there are other ways to fulfill the same schema, and it might be helpful to point out these other ways to students (and ourselves). In that way, we might end up with more constructive but still (according to the standard schema) engaging philosophy.

[Mike]

I think Sebastian's comparison with scientific papers raises two super interesting points.

I read a lot of neuroscience and psychology papers, and it's interesting to note that the "tension" component is usually some unanswered question, set against some broader background theory, with the "release" being a hypothesis they tested in the lab. Curiously, often the tests don't go as planned; but the release isn't to throw out the background theory, but to amend it slightly, complicate it, etc. (You know, just like Kuhn says.) I find it curious that when scientists face challenges to their theories, they amend them, while philosophers have the impulse to throw them out. You might say that this is because scientists usually start with widely shared background theories (a paradigm), while in philosophy there's no settled view (just a bunch of people advocating different positions). But that's not really true. I often see fairly specific competing background theories (e.g., someone affirming, and another denying, that the depictions in the Ebbinghaus illusion engage motion-guiding vision), and yet scientists still seem disposed to search for harmonizing solutions that save the best from their opponents work. Philosophers, in contrast, often want to slash-and-burn.

Second, and relatedly: "Another way of providing tension is by pointing out an as of yet unsolved problem, the release being a (constructive) solution to said problem." This isn't obviously a different approach from the first way of providing tension ("arguing that some position is wrong"). Since *all* unsolved problems are against some background theory, just proposing an unsolved problem requires attacking a theory -- e.g., showing that it can't solve the problem. To turn it around, arguing that some position is wrong is always just equivalent to bringing out an unsolved problem. It's curious that so many philosophers are disposed to always take the negative framing of this situation, and not the equivalent, but positive, one.

[Amanda]

I'd like expand a bit on what I was saying.

May claim wasn't (supposed) to just be something like, "there are more destructive than constructive papers." I do think constructive papers are meet much more harsh criticism, and also I think that we need to be more sympathetic toward the inevitable truth Marcus mentioned: all papers have flaws. My bigger point, however, is that (in my experience) even *constructive* papers must be presented as somewhat destructive, i.e., as in not simply, "I have this new and insightful idea", but rather, "I have this new and insightful idea that shows other ideas are a bunch of hogwash and my idea gets things right in a way that so many ideas get things wrong." I somewhat recently had a conversation with two major philosophical figures , and they seemed to think I was completely crazy to suggest a paper could be written presenting a certain idea, but not attempting to show that the idea was better than other ones. Fundamentally, they suggested, ideas *must* bet competitive, i.e., an idea X can't be much good unless you can compare X to Y and show that X is the winner Y is the loser.

Often I've written papers that do not have much precedent in the literature. I find myself forcing citations and comparisons so that my paper looks like "scholarship," when in actuality, I think it would be much better without them.