The Philosophers' Cocoon

By Sam Duncan

In this post I want to dig more deeply into some points about the deeply worrying effects of our belief in talent on our students made by Allison Gopnik and Eric Schwitzgebel. As Gopnik notes there’s good reason to think that there is some causal relationship between the fact that philosophy puts so much stock in talent and our lack of gender and racial diversity. And Schwitzgebel paints a very plausible picture of one way that this likely plays out in practice; as he notes it’s a lot easier for a young white guy to get away with various ploys that allow him to seem smart than it might be for a woman or a member of a minority group (It’s also a lot less risky). However, I think there are deeper ways that a belief in talent sets up bias in our field.

Let me begin with a question: When you look at student papers or consider how to respond to student comments, questions, and challenges in class do you think about whose paper it is or who made the comment? I’m betting that you do. If you make much of an effort to know who your students are it’s hard not to do this, and to a great extent this is part of getting to know our students. But this also opens up a danger of bias and believing that talent determines success in philosophy makes this danger much worse.

When we think about who wrote what we’re reading or who’s speaking it is all too easy to treat students unfairly without meaning to, and a belief in talent makes this much easier to do. If we sort our students into “talented” and “untalented” boxes (or even something more fine grained) then it is very hard indeed to hold them to the same standards. When a student we deem  to be “talented” student writes or says something that seems wrong or just surprising, one gives them much more of a benefit of the doubt and tries much harder to make sense of what they’re saying than one does when an untalented student does so. When students say or write something truly surprising that we are initially unsure what to make of, there is all too much temptation to interpret it in a charitable light when it comes from talented students. 

On top of all this one must also take account of the fact that students themselves will no doubt react to the subtle, and often not so subtle ways, that they are treated differently based on judgments about talent. Students deemed talented and treated charitably become more willing to speak in class, more enthusiastic about the material and willing to contribute positively, and more willing to put in effort, while those deemed untalented shut down in discussion, stop putting in work, or even try to trip up the professor or disrupt class in other ways. 

All this is bad enough but let us take a step back and think about how we philosophers often decide who is talented and who isn’t. We judge the students who give the “right” answers on papers and tests or make “good” or “insightful” points in discussion to be talented and those who don’t do these things to be less talented or untalented. 

Even if one thinks there is such a thing as philosophical talent that plays the role that many people think, there is every reason to believe that these judgments are quite fallible and often wrong. For one thing, they are often made very early on in the semester on the basis of very limited evidence. More importantly though, it just isn’t nearly as clear as we would like to believe what a right answer or “good” or “insightful” comment is. I have changed my own mind about just how powerful a philosophical argument is or how good various objections to it are a number of times. For me at least, this happens especially often with objections against and supposed counter-examples to philosophical arguments. On several occasions I have come around to the view that student objections I had dismissed as misguided, “missing the point”, or even just plain dumb were much more powerful than I had given them credit for.

For example, take Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” For a long time, I pretty haughtily dismissed a number of common objections about just how bizarre and unrealistic the violinist and people seed cases were to be thoroughly mistaken. The “talented” students were the ones who focused on the questions and objections I’d had when I first read the piece, which were mainly about Thomson’s claims about the duty to rescue. The untalented ones were the ones who got hung up on the fact that say both the violinist and “people seed” cases were at odds with basic biological facts. However, I’m much less convinced that these are necessarily bad objections. They might not be fatal but I no longer think that we can simply overlook them. (The main reason for my change of heart is that I realized that it seemed to be inconsistent to treat the fact that Nozick’s arguments ignored important facts about history and economics as damning objections to his arguments while dismissing similar objections to Thomson).

Now I deliberately chose this example for its politically and culturally loaded nature. I worry very much that philosophers’ judgments about what are and aren’t good arguments as well as good objections to those arguments are determined by our political views and our background experiences and beliefs. This is a hard problem with no easy solution, but focusing on talent makes it much much worse. Students with backgrounds and values very different from our own are likely to approach standard cases in philosophy classes differently than we do. I see this constantly in teaching students in the community college system who are more diverse in pretty much every way than most student bodies. When they do there will always be a temptation to dismiss them rather than giving them the hearing that the principle of charity demands. Judging a student to be untalented (or let’s be blunt, dumb) makes this so much easier to do; there’s no point in being charitable. Of course not thinking in terms of talent will not magically make us treat other viewpoints fairly much less charitably. Those are hard things indeed and can take a lifetime of practice. What it will prevent though is a sort of snowball effect where being unfair or uncharitable to a student’s views in one case makes it all the easier to do so in another.

Just to be clear I am not advocating a suspension of judgment when it comes to every single argument students might make. When students make claims we know to be factually wrong we can and should correct them. And some arguments are bad ones and some objections are misguided. However, even in these cases we should avoid any judgments about talent as far as we can. After all, who among us hasn’t made a bad argument or gotten a point of fact wrong? We would not want our colleagues, students, and other conversation partners to dismiss anything we might say in the future because of that. Even when students do say stuff that’s clearly wrong or mistaken we should do everything we can to treat them with the charity we want others to extend to us. Not sorting them into a mental box them makes them easy to dismiss or ignore in the future is one small step in that direction.