Why philosophers and psychologists should collaborate

We have witnessed a growing interest in experimental philosophy in recent years. The field that has commonly been referred to as "experimental philosophy" has so far been taken to include empirical tests of intuitions concerning philosophical concepts, such as knowledge and intentional action. There are lots of other areas of philosophy that rely on empirical data and even studies and experiments. Several years ago, it became slightly uncool to do philosophy of language in complete isolation from the empirical findings in linguistics. Many philosophers of language decided to conduct their own tests of certain word groups or word constructions. There are also several folks working in philosophy of mind who take empirical data in neuroscience and psychology seriously. Some of us also conduct our own studies in these areas.

 

Despite this new movement, philosophy cannot yet be considered an empirical science or an area that reliably relies on empirical data. I don't think that things will change in this respect any time soon. Part of the reason for this has to do with how colleges view departments and the traditions of those departments. In psychology it is common to have yearly start-up money, graduate research assistants, advanced statistics software and a subject pool. If you are in a philosophy department (only), chances are that you don't receive any of this. Personally, I have been fortunate because I have joined positions in psychology and neurodynamics. These positions come with some access to subject pools, advanced statistic software, research money and research assistants.

But my impression is that there is very little internal or external funding available to philosophers who want to conduct empirical studies. In some sense philosophy is doomed by its heritage. This is unfortunate.

Despite the rumors on the street, philosophers are often significantly better experiment designers than psychologists. I have several times witnessed a philosopher with no prior training in psychology being told about some experimental design and immediately pointing out some gaps in the design. I think philosophers often are great experiment designers because they are so used to think about counterexamples. If you can provide counterexamples to philosophical hypotheses, you can also provide alternative interpretations of the expected data given the design. It's kinda the same thing. Most philosophers don't have sufficient training in statistics, and that limits their actual contributions to psychology and other sciences. Back in the day when I studied neuroscience I was required to take several statistics courses. I hated it. But it was nonetheless useful in various respects. I think it is a mistake that philosophers are required to take logic but not statistics. Given that philosophers tend to be better than average in logic, they probably wouldn't have any major difficulties excelling in statistics. This, perhaps, is the one skill that most philosophers do not currently have and that clearly sets them apart from psychologists in terms of their ability to conduct their own studies.

Given the strengths and deficiencies of philosophers -- their ability to contribute in very positive ways to experiment design and theorizing about data and their lack of training in statistics -- it would clearly be mutually beneficial for philosophers and psychologists to collaborate. My sense is that psychologists more often are open to this idea that philosophers, who typically are not used to any form of collaboration and who may even insist on working on their own.

There is a further issue that needs to be dealt with before collaboration can be mutually beneficial to philosophers and psychologists. In my opinion, empirical studies belong in science/psychology journals rather than philosophy journals, perhaps with some exceptions. But if philosophers spend time collaborating with psychologists, they might reasonably worry that their papers will not count toward tenure, promotion and salary raises. To facilitate real progress in philosophical areas other than philosophy of language and the original types of x-phi, I believe it's important that departments and university administrators begin to give equal weight to single-authored papers in philosophy journals and first-authored papers in empirical science/psychology journals, at least in those cases in which the journals are comparable in terms of quality of contributions.