why is it in philosophy, philosophers can rationalize their way to getting the truth without having to back up their claims? In my philosophy classes we are told to use what we already know. Science specifically sociology uses data and experiments to back up their claims but yet with philosophy writing a theory is sufficient.. ? I guess I'm asking, how does philosophy gain its legitimacy in the world of academics if many philosophers just rely on theory?
Before answering your ask (and I fully intend to answer your ask), I would like to point out that this question is predicated on a couple of assumptions. The first is a general assumption that academic disciplines, to be legitimate, must be predicated upon the model offered by the STEM fields. To be more precise, the model that this ask is concerned with is the “scientific method,” broadly construed, and the variation on the scientific method that has come to prominence in STEM fields generally. Now, this was not always the case: STEM methodology used to be but one of many ways of approaching a discipline. However, as scientific realism rose to prominence, and science was taken to be the arbiter of truth, it’s methodologies became the bar by which the validity of a field was measured. This is a historical point, not an objective one.
The reliance on the “scientific method” for the validity of a particular field demands that knowledge in that field be produced according to certain “rules,” many of which are culturally determined and reinforced. Put another way, the demand for the conformity of a field to STEM methods is a demand for knowledge to be produced in ways that align with particular ways of cultural and social organization, which serve to reinforce a particular worldview. That being said, I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are not aware of the numerous critiques of the grounding of STEM methodology in various systems of oppression, and the ways in which a demand to conformity to this methodology ultimately forces disciplines to act in service of those ideologies thy seek to resist.
Further, and this is the second assumption, it is not as though philosophy does not use the methodology that you are taking to be the mark of a valid discipline: some branches of philosophy engage in experimentation in exactly the mode that you are calling for. These philosophers actually are a major part of the reason why you can put forwards sociology as an example of a discipline that uses experimental data to justify its claims. To be brief, there was a moment, and it is one that philosophy is still struggling to escape from, where there was a movement to “scientize” philosophy. As the scientific method (ironically expanded upon by philosophers) became more and more the accepted way of doing things, and science itself was showing us more and more of the “truth” of the world, there was a demand that philosophy follow suit and take up the methods that it had a hand in developing and eventually lost control over.
Now, this moment resulted in the birth of a discipline that your might be familiar with: the social sciences. Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, even Economics all used to move in the same circles, trade on the same kind of political capital, but all that gradually changed as the prominence of science (and two World Wars) took center stage in the western cultural imagination. Actually, let’s look back at sociology. August Comte, the man who is credited with coining the term “sociology,” was foremost a philosopher of science; Herbert Spencer, philosopher of science; Karl Marx, trained as a philosopher (specifically a Hegelian, which is pretty clear in most of his work), which he later applied to economics; Emile Durkheim, classmate of Henri Bergson, read Comte, and taught philosophy for most of his career. In fact, Max Weber is the only one of the “founders” of sociology that did not explicitly train in philosophy and then apply it to his chosen subject.
To come back to your second assumption, the result of this “moment” was the splintering of sociology, psychology, and political science away from philosophy, and the carving off of certain areas from philosophy: aesthetics, ethics, morality, and other value fields that could not be measured empirically. In case you’re wondering, what I’m talking about is the rise of analytic philosophy as an attempt to maintain philosophy’s prominence in an increasingly scientific culture. The analytics, and those like them, actually sought to use mathematics, natural (and physical) sciences, and the results of philosophy’s children, to make philosophy “more clear,” which had the social effect of consigning philosophy to irrelevance. Now, you can find them mostly working in areas of language, where they attempt to reduce the world to merely language and/or objective facts.
Your third assumption comes in the form of “philosophy,” which should have been obvious with the history that I’ve laid out above. What do you mean by philosophy? If you mean the stuff you learn in intro, the Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, then I can see how you get the impression of philosophy as “only” theory. In fact, there are several areas of philosophy whose concerns are purely theoretical, and remain so because the subjects of their inquiry are so historically or culturally broad that to do anything but theorize about them is all but impossible. If we’re going to be honest, these are the branches of philosophy that take up the materials produced by sociology, political science, and even the hard sciences and generate work around them.
The reason why I am asking is because the definition of theory and how theory is used changes from branch to branch, philosophy to philosophy. Critical Race Theory, for example, places theory at the center of its work, but is grounded in the lived experiences of African-Americans, particularly where interaction with the law is concerned. Theory, here, is not separated from practice, as CRT would fail (and, to be honest, it has issues) without it. The same can be said for feminist theory or queer theory, as both of these branches of philosophy are fundamentally grounded in the application of their work to the lived experiences of the people they’re concerned with. Further, something like the area of phenomenology relies upon lived experience, the application, in order to demonstrate it’s legitimacy.
This theory-as-practice notion is not new to philosophy: non-Western Philosophy has been doing this kind of work for centuries. Even John Dewey and his pragmatism demanded an application to lived experience as part of his philosophy. In fact, Dewey is a great example: his theories of education are still taught in education courses. Much of what we take to be the core of pedagogical theory is the result of John Dewey’s work on pragmatism and education, and the way in which education cultivates good individuals. Now, it can be said that Dewey’s aims in his education theory have yet to be accomplished, but that does not deny the fact that they are operative in the world that you and I live in.
There is actually a fourth assumption buried in your question, that simply “writing a theory” is enough to justify something in philosophy, when it really isn’t. This is where I’m going to actually start answering your ask, rather than explicating the history that led to you even being able to ask your question.
Theory, in philosophy, is almost always grounded in something observable. Now, various areas of philosophy have different criteria for what counts as “observable,” and you’ll see this if you put an analytic philosopher and a phenomenologist in the same room and ask them to explain why a chair is a chair. Some philosophers even make their living debating whether or not we’re even observing anything, which gets us into the question of whether or not everything in the world is happening in our mind, or if the observable world exists. That aside, philosophy begins with an observation and a question about an observation, around which theories are built, which come together to form a worldview. To support their theory, a given philosopher will engage in thought experiments, empirical testing (though not usually in the mode of other disciplines), and interpretation of the world according to the theoretical basis that they’ve developed.
One thing that you need to bear in mind is that philosophy does not really explain the world, it makes an earnest attempt to describe the world, which is pretty much the same thing that the other sciences do. Our scientific laws, at ground level (and this is kind of aside the point) don’t explain conclusively the operation of the world, they provide more and more complex descriptions of things that we are observing. As we create tools that enhance our senses, our observations become more precise, and this precision is often mistaken for the discovery of an essential truth. Put another way, we don’t know why stimulant medications work for ADHD, or why anti-depressants work in some cases, because we don’t understand the operation of the things that these chemicals are working on. We can, however, observe changes in an organism in response to these chemicals and base our understanding upon this observation. Essentially, we have descriptions of events, but we do not know why these events happen.
Turning back to philosophy: a philosophical theory is not sufficient if it cannot adequately describe that which the theory is about. If you read Marx or Hegel or Kant or Confucius, they’re attempting to describe the possibilities that would result from a particular mode of organization. Philosophical theory, in the most general sense, offers a direction forwards, and the majority of a text is spent demonstrating the potential effects of this direction forwards, observations of a world without this direction, and providing justification for why this description of the world is more effective than another description of the world. If we are to draw a parallel, a similar structure can be found when Sociologists offer a theory based on statistical data (which is really just a description of the rate of occurrence of a given phenomena): the theory is just a better description of what is happening than other theories. Actually, the entire scientific project, if we’re going to be honest, is focused on providing increasingly better descriptions: it is only our tendency to take a description as truth, and our privileging of science that gives science it’s social and political force. And even then, that’s not enough.
Continuing on, because philosophy is rooted in the observation of a given phenomena (at least ideally; many philosophers get sucked into re-explaining another philosopher’s work), the “data” that philosophy uses to “back up” it’s claims is basically “what we know.” By “what we know,” generally philosophers rely upon things that they’ve observed as articulated through the filter of culture. Sometimes that culture is the “data;” other times, the way a particular culture moves is the data; still other times, the data is how entities move through the world in particular repeatable ways. What should be important here is the repeatable, that is, a philosopher sees something happening continuously and attempts to generate a description that articulates what is happening below the level of observation. This is how philosophy generated a lot of the sociological theories that people use to “explain” human behavior. A philosopher will see a pattern and seek to describe that pattern according to the worldview that they have adopted, or they will seek to expand a particular worldview to account for a particular new phenomena. This is not unlike a STEM person observing a new phenomena and then attempting to expand the current theories to account for it.
Put another way, the “experiments” that philosophy uses to provide data for its theories are all around us: the results are merely interpreted based upon the particular theoretical framework that the philosopher is operating in. Sometimes philosophers (like me) have to create entirely new frameworks in order to describe things that do not have any description within the field, or to describe things that are “unseen,” like privilege or patriarchy, two concepts that society owes to philosophy for better or worse. The experiments conduced to generate the theoretical framework that resulted in privilege, for example, was the history of suffering of women and people of color, and the repeated incidences of discrimination, and the endemic problem of the elevation of one group over another without rational justification. The back up for claims of privilege involves point out its operation n the world, in the lived experience of people, which is pretty much how most philosophy “backs up” its claims. Philosophy’s evidence, ideally, is within the world as we are experiencing it.
How does philosophy gain legitimacy if it only relies on theory? To be honest, it doesn’t. Philosophy does not, and has not, relied exclusively on theory for a long time. Still further, Philosophy‘s legitimacy is not derived from its reliance on theory, but form its ability to describe lived experience in a way that aligns with that lived experience. Further, philosophy’s legitimacy is derived from the way that other areas that do and do not identify themselves as philosophy take up the descriptions of the world that philosophy itself produces. Queer theory, for example, draws heavily upon the descriptions of the world articulated by Judith Butler and Michel Foucault among others. Critical Race Theory draws upon the philosophical work done by Franz Fanon, the field of epistemology broadly, and Feminism. Hell, Feminism itself, was philosophy until it got tired of its own marginalization and went elsewhere. In fact, much of the work done in early feminism came out of describing what was happening at the time, and how these phenomena were a response to particular structures.
In the past, philosophy’s legitimacy came from the fact that people coud not do the other work that is so privileged in modernity without philosophy. Now, one of the ways that philosophy maintains its legitimacy is not through its own work, but through the generation of descriptions that are then taken up and explored by other disciplines. It is through collaboration, through observing the world in ways that other disciplines cannot and will not due to their organization, that philosophy maintains its legitimacy. Further, modern philosophy’s legitimacy often comes after the fact, when the other disciplines find that they cannot ignore the observations about the world that philosophy has made and thus need to engage with them, either to refute them or to confirm them.
The fact that you’re even asking me this question means that philosophy is taken seriously enough that you’re driven to question it’s legitimacy.
