Philosophy Departments are Dishonest, or at Least Have Bad Business Ethics

By On September 17, 2012 · 29 Comments · In Current Events

Many philosophy departments have a “Why Study Philosophy?” section on their home pages. Many of them argue that philosophy must do an unusually good job developing students’ intellectual skills. As evidence, they post graphs showing how philosophy majors consistently get the highest scores on the verbal and analytic part of GRE, and get the highest score among all humanities majors (and higher than most social science and many natural science majors) on the quantitative part of the GRE.

For example, see here: http://www.ius.edu/philosophy/

If you’ve taken even a semester’s worth of an empirical social science, or if you’re just a generally thoughtful person, your first reaction to such graphs should be: treatment effect or selection effect? That is, from the fact that “Students declaring an intention to go to graduate school in philosophy have the highest mean scores on the Verbal section of the GRE (mean: 589) of any major ” we cannot conclude that “Philosophy prepares students for the Graduate Record Exam.” Instead, we would need to know whether philosophy A) makes people smarter, or whether instead B) the people who study philosophy are on average smarter.

Departments make no effort to try to show that it’s A, not B. And, in light of the vast empirical on how little students develop in college–literature which most philosophers have come across–they should know better than to just assume it’s A, not B. In fact, by default, given this vast empirical literature on learning, we should presume that it’s B, not A, until shown otherwise.

So, I think philosophy departments have immoral advertising practices. They are not dishonest, but they are at the very least negligent in how they advertise. They claim philosophy delivers certain goods, but they do not have sufficient evidence that it in fact delivers these goods, and they should know that they lack sufficient evidence. Most of my philosopher colleagues would rightly condemn a pharmaceutical company if it tried to sell medicine on such flimsy evidence.

UPDATE 1: If you know of a department that recognizes this problem, and thus actually tries to show that studying philosophy causes high scores, please let me know.

UPDATE  2: Joel Grus points out that Rice University admits that they have no evidence philosophy causes high GRE scores. Good for Rice!

UPDATE 3:

Aeon Skoble (Bridgewater State) objects

They claim philosophy delivers certain goods, but they do not have sufficient evidence that it in fact delivers these goods, and they should know that they lack sufficient evidence.” We claim that majors in philosophy are obliged to develop certain intellectual skills which will be valuable in a wide range of careers, which is true. I don’t see where this is morally-flawed advertisin

I respond:

 Nope, I’m going to bite the bullet here and say that it’s bad ethics. Take the following two similar, but slightly different, claims:

  • A. As a result of majoring in philosophy, most philosophy majors develop general skills that are useful in a wide range of careers.
    B. As a result of majoring in philosophy, most philosophy majors develop general skills, along with the ability to apply these skills to a wide range of careers.

    A and B here are empirical claims. If you want to know whether they are true, you check. You do proper social science. Philosophers should know that their personal experiences might make A and B seem true to them even they are false. They should know that before claiming A and B are true, they should check.

    And, as a matter of fact, there is empirical literature on student learning. You may recall a book called Academically Adrift, widely discussed last year, which presents a significant range of this literature. In general, the evidence supports three basic claims:

    1. Students in particular majors do tend to learn significant amounts about the particular content of that major. (Yeah!) However, they forget most of that rather quickly. (Ouch.)
    2. Most students, including most students at elite colleges, do not develop much greater verbal, reasoning, or mathematical skills in college.
    3. Most students do not apply general skills from their learning to other areas. Learning is highly specific. As Bryan Caplan puts it, when he summarizes others’ work on this: Most of us do not learn to learn.

    So, yeah, I think departments make pronouncements they are not entitled to make, and which they should realize they are not entitled to make. I doubt anyone is being dishonest. They are sincere, but negligent in their beliefs about the advantages philosophical study confers.

 
  • Brandon Towl

    Nice
    point. I wonder, though, if one could test A or B by restricting the
    population one looks at. For example, it could be that only very bright
    people choose a philosophy major. Then again, there must be some very
    bright people that choose, say, psychology, economics, physics, etc. So
    do the results stand if we look at, say, only students with close to a
    4.0? If so, then philosophy has some pay-off. If not, its much more
    likely to be a selection effect.

  • mikegiberson

    I checked my institution’s philosophy department website (Texas Tech U), they state:

    “Philosophy majors do exceptionally well on graduate and professional
    school admissions exams. Their average scores regularly place philosophy
    among the top five majors on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT),
    Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), and the Graduate Records
    Examination (GRE). No other undergraduate discipline matches this record
    of achievement.”

    I’d say up until that last sentence they could claim they were merely repeating empirical facts. But the last sentence calls the previous facts a “record of achievement,” which makes it a claim about the value of majoring in philosophy (as opposed to just being the kind of person who, when given a range of options, chooses to major in philosophy). As you say, that claim is unsupported by facts in a manner that should give any philosopher teaching “Logic” or “Ethics” grounds for concern.

  • mikegiberson

    George Mason, where I attended graduate school in economics, says this about Philosophy majors:

    “Philosophy majors perform very well on exams for graduate and
    professional school. Philosophers outscore all other majors on the Graduate
    Record Exam (GRE’s) and receive scores that are among the highest on the LSAT’s,
    GMAT’s, and MCAT’s.”

    These two statements amount to observation of mere facts without specifically claiming that majoring in philosophy is the cause. Of course, the observations are made under a heading “Why study philosophy?” that implies the observations are part of the answer.

  • Aeon Skoble

    “They claim philosophy delivers certain goods, but they do not have sufficient evidence that it in fact delivers these goods, and they should know that they lack sufficient evidence.” We claim that majors in philosophy are obliged to develop certain intellectual skills which will be valuable in a wide range of careers, which is true. I don’t see where this is morally-flawed advertising.

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1702318862 Jason Brennan

      Nope, I’m going to bite the bullet here and say that it’s bad ethics. Take the following two similar, but slightly different, claims:

      A. As a result of majoring in philosophy, most philosophy majors develop general skills that are useful in a wide range of careers.
      B. As a result of majoring in philosophy, most philosophy majors develop general skills, along with the ability to apply this skills to a wide range of careers.

      A and B here are empirical claims. If you want to know whether they are true, you check. You do proper social science. Philosophers should know that their personal experiences might make A and B seem true to them even they are false. They should know that before claiming A and B are true, they should check.

      And, as a matter of fact, there is empirical literature on student learning. You may recall a book called Academically Adrift, widely discussed last year, which presents a significant range of this literature. In general, the evidence supports three basic claims:

      1. Students in particular majors do tend to learn significant amounts about the particular content of that major. (Yeah!) However, they forget most of that rather quickly. (Ouch.)
      2. Most students, including most students at elite colleges, do not develop much greater verbal, reasoning, or mathematical skills in college.
      3. Most students do not apply general skills from their learning to other areas. Learning is highly specific. As Bryan Caplan puts it, when he summarizes others’ work on this: Most of us do not learn to learn.

      So, yeah, I think departments make pronouncements they are not entitled to make, and which they should realize they are not entitled to make. I doubt anyone is being dishonest. They are sincere, but negligent in their beliefs about the advantages philosophical study confers.

      • Javier

        Jason, you might be right. But, if I remember correctly, the evidence from Academically Adrift found that humanities and social science majors made substantial gains in critical reasoning abilities, whereas business majors do not. Philosophy majors probably make these gains as well too, although I don’t think that they break down the data by major. Again, this may be a selection effect and there may be fade out. But I don’t think that this evidence at least can tell us whether these gains are a selection effect.

        I’m familiar with Bryan Caplan’s views and I’m broadly sympathetic. But I sometimes wonder whether Caplan ignores more subtle effects of education. For example, Caplan’s own work on economics knowledge finds that a major predictor of whether you know anything about economics is your level of education, even when we control for general intelligence. Apparently, education is having some effect here and for the better.

        • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1702318862 Jason Brennan

          My point isn’t that we know for sure education (or philosophy education in particular) fails to deliver the goods. Rather, it’s that we 1) don’t know that it does deliver the goods, and 2) the evidence we have, while not conclusive, suggests that it does not.

          • Javier

            Fair enough, but I have less confidence in (2). I’m less confident that the balance of evidence supports the view that education does not deliver the goods. Caplan’s view is still a minority position.

          • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1702318862 Jason Brennan

            Caplan’s view is a minority position in the sense that most people haven’t studied the issue, but still have an opinion, and the opinion is contra Caplan’s. If you ignore the question of signaling and just look at the empirical lit trying to study the marginal learning effects of college, you get dismal results. The average professor doesn’t know about these results and just assumes they are false.

          • Javier

            My impression is that Caplan’s view is a minority view among economists who study education.

          • Clayton Littlejohn

            Hi Jason,
            A quick follow up on this – is there lit you know of on whether the students that studied philosophy specifically didn’t show improvement. In my own case, I scored in a much higher percentile on the GRE than I did on the SAT. If we found a trend, would that be the sort of evidence you were looking for? I also wonder about your (2). is your view that the typical professor doesn’t take herself to have evidence based on observations in her own classroom that would support (2)? Is it that she takes herself to have it but doesn’t have it (or enough of it)? I wonder if there’s a move from the failure to consult the literature to the failure to base belief on evidence that might be a touch too quick here. Just curious.

        • Sean II

          The extent to which humanities and social science majors learn critical thinking can be reckoned thus…

          The kids at Occupy Wall Street last year had a very long list of complaints. They blamed employers for not hiring them, or for paying too little. They blamed banks for loaning them too money much as students and consumers, and not enough as would-be small business people. They blamed rich people for having too much. They blamed the government for taking too little from those who have too much, and giving not enough to those who have nothing.

          One group they did not blame: the professors who took their money for an average of 5.5 years and left them with nothing more than an 1870s view of history and a 1930s grasp of economics, served up to compliment a main course of 1990s identity politics.

          It’s not just that they are incapable of criticizing those ideas and the people who imprinted them. Oh, no…they believe the mere fact of holding those views is a complete substitute for real-life, grown-up virtue and thoughtfulness.

          Whatever those kids might score on a Watson-Glaser, they don’t have critical reasoning in any way that counts.

      • Aeon Skoble

        Jason, as I think you know, you cannot succeed as a philosophy major without learning how to read carefully, parse arguments, think creatively while retaining analytical rigor. Our “sales pitch” is that these are valuable skills for a variety of professions, and that study in our discipline is an excellent way to cultivate them. Both of those claims are true, although it’s also true that the student must work hard. I don’t see why you think I’m not entitiled tro make these claims. Indeed, I think our claims are much more realistic and ethically defensible than the claims of pre-professional majors that “you’ll get a good job if you major in our field.” We don’t promise anything, but what we offer is legit: you _will_ learn these skills if you apply yourself. BTW, our “sales pitch” is not entirely based on this; we also stress the intrinisic values of philosophy e.g. an opportunity to grapple with big meaningful questions etc. I will look over our website again, since we’re discussing this, but I am pretty sure I won’t spot a dishonest claim.

  • http://twitter.com/joelgrus Joel Grus

    My alma mater pleasantly surprises me by at least mentioning the issue:

    “Of course, majors’ training in philosophy may not be wholly responsible for these results — it might also be that brighter students are entering the field to begin with. But in either case, the report suggests that you’re not stupid if you join them.”

    http://philosophy.rice.edu/content.aspx?id=80

  • http://www.facebook.com/roman.altshuler.90 Roman Altshuler

    Whether learning or selection effect is responsible, it remains true that, statistically, majoring in philosophy raises one’s likelihood of scoring well on the GRE. Perhaps this is a Calvinist picture (where one is not saved for performing good deeds, but rather performing good deeds is a sign that one is saved), but if we accept the selection effect explanation, what follows is only that students who are less likely to score well on the GRE are also less likely to become philosophy majors (perhaps because they will not be able to maintain a reasonable GPA when their grades are based on analytical thinking skills). If so, then the departments’ advertising is not deceptive, but merely ineffectual: students likely to get low GRE scores will be less likely to fall for it. Still, nothing unethical about it.

    • Stan Tsirulnikov

      You seem to making a causal claim when you say “it remains true that, statistically, majoring in philosophy raises one’s likelihood of scoring well on the GRE.” And that goes to the issue of whether this is a selection effect or treatment effect.

      I would guess that people who buy a Mercedes have a higher income, on average, than those who buy a Honda. I would also guess that a dealership that made the claim that, statistically, buying a Merc raises the likelihood of you earning a higher income would be laughed at by most philosophers and maybe sued for false advertisement.

  • Benjamin Hale

    On the other hand, there probably are some benefits to being
    associated with a group of people who self-select as philosophers and also rank
    highly on the GREs, just as there are benefits to being associated with a group
    of people who self-select as MBAs or engineers and also have extremely high
    starting salaries.

  • http://www.facebook.com/deathtoself David Holden

    This is true with all of the University-Industrial Complex and not just their philosophy departments.

    • Sean II

      You said it. Who cares HOW philosophy departments attract students when the big crime is encouraging so many people to pretend, at such huge expense, that they have either the talent or any remotely plausible chance to earn a living as intellectuals?

      At least the kid who’s chasing the dream of a higher GRE score has a specific and attainable goal in mind. Worst case scenario for him is he gets the same score he would have gotten anyway, after discovering that Wittgenstein is not a brand name for concert pianos. He may yet break even.

      I’m worried about the kids who think they’re going to go be professional geniuses for McKinsey & Co., or maybe author a definite case-cracker for the problem of induction. Those kids are just getting completely screwed.

      I want to grab them and say: “Take a look at that cool, thoughtful professor who inspires you so much. He seems young, reasonably healthy. With a bit of luck and some further advances in medical technology, he could hold down that faculty position for another 40 or 50 years. What are you gonna do while you wait for him to die? Worst case, you’re straight unemployed. Next step up, you’re foaming coffee. Get some really good luck on your side, and you might become Robin Williams’ character from Good Will Hunting. Feel that, playa!”

      (Of course the same complaint goes just as well for all the humanities and social sciences, and come to think of it, any field of study where the number of
      subsidized students massively outstrips the demand for work.)

      • Aeon Skoble

        Sean II, pursuing an undergrad major in philosophy has nothing to do with tricking them into thinking it’s cool to be a professor — it is, of course, but you’re right to note that jobs are scarce. This isn’t the pitch, though. The idea isn’t “you should major in philosophy so you can become a college professor” – it’s “you will find this major prepares you well for all sorts of careers, plus it’s good for you to spend some time thinking justice, knowledge, virtue, etc.”

        • Sean II

          I get that – in fact, that’s why I tried to draw a line between the mercenaries and the dreamers in my comment above. I think I simply disagree with you on two points:

          First, I think you may be underestimating the number of people who are innocently confused about their prospects. Even if they know a full professorship isn’t in the cards, they may still have some very implausible ideas about what awaits them as the next Ayn Rand, or Eric Hoffer, or Malcolm Gladwell (sorry to mention that name here…hopefully I won’t catch a ban for it). A lot of those fantasies will be private and hidden, so it would be hard to see them from up front in the classroom.

          The second point is more important. Genuine critical thinking skills are both a blessing and a curse, in life, and especially in the work place. The smart guy is useful enough in a crisis, but in between times he is hated by bosses who prefer the company of cronies and sycophants. When you give a young person the gift of logic and reason, you are equally saddling him with a burden of being difficult and (in the eyes of the powerful) unpopular. Indeed, the most perfect careerist is an anti-philosopher, a morally ambiguous practitioner of double-think who stands ready to abandon his beliefs at the first sign of trouble.

          So…what do we mean when say philosophy “prepares” people for all sorts of careers? It does of course, but in some really important ways, it leaves them unprepared and vulnerable.

          • TracyW

            Isn’t the evidence that the study of philosophy doesn’t burden most young people with the gift of logic and reason?

            You also seem to be confused between genuine critical thinking skills, and letting on that one has genuine critical thinking skills. To quote Terry Pratchett

            The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins. They are so much brighter that they soon realized that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendants not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships or being patronized rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don’t find out about it. So they long ago plumped for a lifestyle that, in return for a certain amount of porterage and being prodded with sticks, allowed them adequate food and grooming and the chance to spit in a human’s eye and get away with it.

  • Clayton Littlejohn

    Bad business ethics? I thought that the basis for good business ethics was “Let the buyer beware!”

    One way to defend philosophy departments would be to show (as Joel has) cases where departments have explicitly said that philosophical training might not be responsible for superior test results. Another would be to offer evidence that supports hypothesis A over B. In my own experience as a student, I’ve observed the benefits of philosophical training. I’ve also observed the way that majors improve over time in my courses. I’ve also observed no discernible difference in intelligence and ability in large introductory courses between majors and non-majors. Does that count as evidence? I suppose it’s some, but it’s scant. I’d be surprised if my colleagues don’t take themselves to have some evidence that make it reasonable for them to believe that A is true to some degree. Maybe that’s exculpatory, but I suppose your worry still applies. Some evidence isn’t sufficient evidence and maybe we’re not being as rigorous as we should. I don’t know where to find good data on test scores for incoming students, but after some poking around I found a bit: http://dkl3fnj1o5loa.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/intended-college-major-sat-scores-2010.png

    It looks as if students that intend to pursue Philosophy and Religious Studies do better than average but don’t rank quite as highly as students that intend to study, say, English or Social Sciences. We need some way to carve out the Religious Studies people, track for changes in major, and cull out those who don’t take the GRE, but would comparisons of SAT score by major give you the evidence you want to test whether it’s down to B or down in part to A?

  • Brian Robinson

    I was just writing about these same problems myself. http://publiusnemo.blogspot.com/2012/09/challenging-a-supposed-benefit-of.html

  • TracyW

    I’ve noticed in internet debates that self-proclaimed philosophy students who assert the advantages of critical thinking resulting from the study of philosophy seldom appear to have applied those skills to philosophy itself.

  • Pingback: Philosophy majors are teh smartest, but philosophy departments, maybe not so much. | The Thinker

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Roderick-Tracy-Long/1037941173 Roderick Tracy Long

    One of the main functions of such ads, of course, is to give ammunition to students who want to study philosophy but have to convince their parents that doing so is not career suicide.

  • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

    How about this?

    “Either majoring in philosophy makes you smarter; or smarter people tend to major in philosophy. Maybe they know something you don’t?”

    • MARK_D_FRIEDMAN

      Nice. “Heads,” I win, and “tails” I also win. I think I’ll major in philosophy.