Comments on: Philosophizing in senior year?

By: Michael Bishop

Michael Bishop — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:25:02 +0000

I guess one problem is that I trust chemists to be the wisest about chemistry, and (to a somewhat lesser extent) economists to be the wisest about economics, but I don’t trust that philosophers are the wisest about values.

Though I acknowledge that it is difficult to make a clean distinction, I strongly favor positive research with normative implications. For example, I’d love to find out whether young people who are taught _____ are more reflective, happier, wealthier, less criminal, more political, etc.
Or, for another example, I hope people are researching how funding decisions are made.

By: eli

eli — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 05:58:21 +0000

I’m not sure that “subjective” and “normative” really go together in your provisional distinctions — aren’t norms inherently collective? Anyway, leaving that aside, of course there are questions about what kinds of academic work are worth public money. However, my guess is that the vast majority of (American) humanities funding comes from individual universities who employ humanists, in part, to do research – there aren’t a lot of research costs in philosophy. So if you wanted to push your point further, you’d have to say if you are in favor of universities firing their philosophers, if you support indirect (not direct) state subsidies to philosophy departments, how you’d distinguish between “heavy” subsidies and “light” subsidies (these are not well-funded fields in the first place), and so on.

It comes to mind too that there’s a sort of paradox in your view — in essence, your *norm* is that non-normative research is more publicly worthwhile. Isn’t it a bit strange to primarily value research which makes no claims about value? It seems like a way to avoid having the prior values of the funding agents ever be put in question by what they fund — which, I suppose, is probably completely normal…

By: Michael Bishop

Michael Bishop — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 23:36:16 +0000

I sincerely hope that intelligent academic and non-academic people are engaging in a critique of values. But, personally, I object to being forced to heavily subsidize normative work.

(In truth, I think the distinction between positive and normative, objective and subjective, is problematic. But those words suffice for giving a sense of what scholarship I feel the state can justify subsidizing.)