In 2009 a very useful and enlightening research study was done polling the opinions on key subjects of thousands of philosophers, called the PhilPapers Survey (something I wish someone would fund for Biblical Studies). Well, that study was repeated, with substantial revisions and updates, in 2020. See The 2020 Philpapers Survey. I already wrote up where I stood on the questions asked in the original survey, and discussed the nature and design of the survey a bit as well, in How I’d Answer the PhilPapers Survey. Here I will discuss some interesting new things in the 2020 Survey—just a few things that caught my attention; this is by no means a comprehensive discussion of their results. In a separate article to follow I will cover what my own responses would be to the new questions asked in 2020, or if I’d change any of my earlier responses in light of the 2020 study.

It’s important to read the accompanying survey paper, as it explains why one cannot simply directly compare the 2009 and 2020 surveys, owing to important differences in the way responses were measured, and it provides a compensating longitudinal analysis that does that comparison for you, using the requisite statistical techniques for compensating for those differences. I will also be discussing only the results reproduced in that paper here. It may be possible to dig into their settings and get answers to questions about the counts and frequencies that I here state are not given. So what I mean by that is only, “not given” in the survey summary paper, not necessarily by whatever survey tools are available at the site (though again, remember, direct comparisons aren’t possible).

The primary difference between 2020 and 2009 is that they expanded the thirty main questions to forty, and then added sixty more questions that hit on specific subjects (like abortion or race) rather than broad philosophical positions like the mains. And they did some interesting things this time. One that really caught my eye was with their new question, “Gender: Biological, Psychological, Social, Unreal, Other.” As I noted for the 2009 survey, their questions are often not well formed, and here we see another example of that: these are overlapping categories, and how one answers depends on semantic assumptions all respondents might not share, or might not have known how to navigate for this survey. For example, what really is the difference between “Unreal” and “Social”? I can certainly come up with a way to define both terms that makes them refer to different things, but I’m not here being asked to do that. So what did the respondents do? This makes the answers harder to evaluate. Some who answered “Unreal” might have meant “Socio-Psychological,” while others may have meant gender isn’t even a psychological phenomenon or a social construct (which would be a bizarre position, but logically allowed by the phrasing of the question). Likewise, there is no such thing as a social construct that isn’t also psychological in some sense. Nor can anything psychological not also be biological (since it’s all in the brain regardless). So how can one answer any of these things exclusively? And so on.

I’ll use this then as my first example, especially as I’ve endeavored to know a lot about it.

Transgender and Race Issues

One way the survey tried to work around this problem is to allow more ways to answer and more ways to count up the answers. As in this case: the percentage of philosophers who answered “Biological” to that gender question superficially clocked in at 29%, compared to about 22% who put it as psychological and 63% as social, or both. By contrast, only 4% answered “Unreal” (and about 15% “Other”), and that number dropped to under 2% when you discount those who answered that and something else at the same time (probably all those people I expected would answer both “Unreal” and “Social” and the like, which amounts really to just saying gender is a social construct, or whatever they additionally answered).

But wait, you might say, those numbers add to over 100%. This is because they counted inclusively multiple responses this time. For example, if you answered both biological and social/psychological you were counted in both percentages. When counting exclusively resulted in a different count by three or more percentiles, they show that as well, and that happened here. When we ask how many philosophers answered that gender is only biological, the count drops to only 15% (compared to 4% who answered “only psychological” and 43% who answered “only social,” for nearly 50% when you include those who answered only as “Unreal,” and these sums don’t include those who answered more than one way). 

It would be entirely congruent with scientific fact to answer both biological and either or both psychological or social, or to have answered yes to both psychological and social but not biological (which count is not shown in their comparison). This is because it is impossible to have a social fact that isn’t also a psychological fact (no minds, no society; much less any effect of one), although respondents might forget that, given the way the question is worded, and think what is being sought is the primary and not incidental engine of an effect. Likewise, it is impossible to have a psychological fact that isn’t also a biological fact (no brain, no mind), but again one might forget that, given the way the question is worded, and think what is being sought is the primary and not incidental engine of an effect, or worse, if someone thought adding “Biological” was affirming chromosomal essentialism or something, which is a much more specific assertion than just “Biological.”

This is a problem with over-simplified questions like this, because “Biological” is ambiguous as to whether what is meant actually is “Inherited” (or even what is being inherited—chromosomal destiny is a different inheritance position than thinking about cross-inheriting different body-maps or other “gendered” brain components). Likewise whether “Biological” is meant to include environmental and deliberative biological outcomes. Everything one learns, passively or actively, is represented in a biological structure in the brain; hormone replacement therapy has gendered effects that are obviously thereby being caused biologically; and cross-gender brain structures we know can be biologically inherited, so even the inheritance aspect of gender does not entail denying transgender identities, but can even be used to support them, the same way “born gay” thinking has done. 

So if one wants to get at the unscientific transphobic nutters who don’t know the difference between sex and gender and thus who still think gender must match someone’s genitals or chromosome type or something, this survey might not help as much as you’d like, owing to all those confusions. But by giving also the exclusive counts when they differed enough to pay attention to, they did give us at least an upper bound. Since we know 15% answered “only” biological, it is reasonable to infer most of those respondents were discounting any role for psychological choice or social category-making (they must imagine no one can take HRT or experience a different biochemical environment or be raised in a different cultural context or have different experiences and develop a different gender identity than they “inherited”). Maybe a few of these respondents are “cis-trans” essentialists who believe even transgender identity is inherited by birth (like the body-mapping theory and other “inherited brain structure” models; the survey provided no tool to discern that). But odds are, I think, most of those respondents are transphobic gender essentialists. More importantly, it’s certain no more than that are. It’s thus encouraging to see that that number is low enough to be in line with the usual percentages of reactionary idiots in educated society generally. This survey shows most philosophers (by a nearly 6 to 1 margin) correctly comprehend at least some of the science on sex and gender. That’s reassuring. And these numbers were comparable for race, indicating philosophers have a better read on the sociology and biology of these things, and that the bigots are less than 15% of us.

What I also found interesting is that they added a question as well on what to do about the concept of gender: “Preserve, Revise, Eliminate, Other.” Fascinating. Half are for revising. In other words, we need to change the social construct of “gender categories” in some way. By contrast, only one in six want to eliminate gender as a category altogether, and only one in five want to preserve gender categories just the way they are—which are comparable numbers, of each side hanging out at the extremes. Although again, poor question design leaves it unclear what “Preserve” as an answer was thought to mean. Preserve as in preserve even transgender identities, and thus stick with the way we demarcate feminine and masculine but just let people choose between them? Or preserve as in, disallow transgender identities, and stick with “men are men and women are women”? Can’t tell. Bad study design.

There were similar results for racial categories, although again one can’t tell if respondents thought they were answering for “now” or an ideal future. There can be reasons to maintain racial categories while racism continues to target them precisely because you have to to fight back against that, and that requires acknowledging who is being discriminated against and why; which is a different consideration than what you might say would be the ideal end state of society to work toward. “Eventually we want to get rid of racial categories; but we can’t do that until racism declines enough to be insignificant” is not the same position as “Race doesn’t exist; therefore neither does racism.” In any event, 40% were for “Eliminate,” only 8% for “Preserve,” and a third or so for “Revise.” Racial categories are therefore much less popular among philosophers than gendering people. (And yes, though they added no question about the race of respondents, I suspect a disproportionate number are white, so we probably aren’t getting an accurate picture of what actual targets of racism think about all this.)

Philosophical Methods?

By contrast, their new question about philosophical methods was just garbage, a total mess of utter useless construction. They asked the question, ”Philosophical methods (which methods are the most useful/important)?” and had a slate of possible answers to the unintelligible tune of, “Conceptual analysis, Conceptual engineering, Empirical philosophy, Experimental philosophy, Formal philosophy, Intuition-based philosophy, Linguistic philosophy, Other.” I don’t even know what some of these things mean. How does “Formal philosophy” differ from any of the others listed? What does that phrase even mean as a methodology? Or “Conceptual engineering.” What is that? And how is it a method? And insofar as I can contrive some meaning it could possibly have as a method, how does that differ from literally anything else on the list? Almost every single thing listed is barely comprehensible as a distinct option. Only “Conceptual analysis” and “Empirical philosophy” come close to having any anchor to a recognizable distinction being made, and even that is fuzzy, particularly since the question wasn’t about which methods were useful or legitimate or important, but only “most” so, which is a hopelessly subjective and vague query to pose. By what metric? Time spent? Words written? A numerical count of the problems a method is applied to? By the significance or importance of the problems it can be applied to? By feels?

I literally have no idea what this question is even asking, and even less how to answer it, and I doubt anyone else was in a better position. They certainly weren’t likely in any commonly shared position, as I’m sure each came up with their own framework for answering the WTFs of this question in order to answer it at all. All of which renders the answer stats here pretty much useless. The most I can take from their results that is at all informative (?) is that only a third or so of philosophers are “against” experimental philosophy, and less than 15% against any empirical philosophy at all, which puts an end the claptrap about philosophy being “only” about the analysis of concepts and having no empirical component—of it being only about ideas and not facts. To the contrary, 60% of all philosophers declared empirical philosophy “most useful” or “most important” and a third even put experimental philosophy on that level. We can’t tell from this readout how many of those respondents overlapped, but one might expect no one would answer “experimental philosophy” and not also “empirical philosophy,” so presumably these are independently usable numbers—which would mean half of all empirical philosophers (hence a third of all philosophers) endorse experimental philosophy as also “most useful/important,” and if roughly a third of “all” philosophers are against it, that leaves roughly a third who are cool with it but don’t prioritize it, which would mean two thirds accept experimental philosophy as a thing, even if they disagree on how important it is (by whatever metric for “important” each was using, which we have no idea of).

If you asked me my answer here, I’d have to say “all of the above,” with perhaps leaving out “Intuition-based philosophy.” Maybe. I can conceptualize a role for that to explore or discover ideas, but it has no use as a method for determining which ideas are true or useful. Ultimately knowledge has to come from something empirical or analytical (or both). But notice, their question did not even make clear that distinction. So we can’t even tell what someone who answered “Intuition” even meant; that reliable knowledge can be gained that way (wrong), or that only adduced information can (right)? Beyond that, I see no way to argue any of the listed methods is “more important” or “more useful” than the others. They all have a range of importance and uses across a whole range of problems and objectives. So I’d be counted in nearly every statistic shown. Except, I guess, I’d be in the “against” categories for intuition as a methodology—alongside apparently 29% of philosophers. Which concerns me. What do the other 71% of philosophers think they were accepting as a methodology here? How? I can come up with maybe what possibly they think; but the issue for me is this survey gives me no tools to find out. Indeed, roughly 50% even classify “Intuition” as “important/useful.” Maybe they are thinking of the same position I hold (that intuition is useful as an information source but not as a method of resolving what’s true), or something else. So the statistic is more or less useless. Since I don’t know what the respondents thought it meant, I don’t know what these percentages tell me about them, or about philosophy.

Miscellaneous Observations

On the one hand, it’s useful to see that only 13% of philosophers deem elective first trimester abortion to be “impermissible.” That’s probably the same percentage or so who are Evangelical Christians (or otherwise in the conservative idiot bigot brigade). Good to see it’s so small. But why no question about third trimester abortion; or distinguishing “elective” from “medically necessary”? Their question again becomes terribly uninformative. On the other hand, the new question about which argument for theism “is the strongest” (which, as I explored recently, doesn’t entail agreeing it’s effective) ended up with disappointing results. Evidently there is no agreement as to the answer. The “Other” category shows the highest probability (at 25%), but that’s also counting respondents who ticked that and other boxes as well. But since we know the exclusive percentage (those who only selected “Other”) varies from that by less than three percentiles (since it isn’t listed; so, it must be above 22% and under 28%), it is still more than every other answer.

The next highest was “cosmological argument” at 21% or so, beating out even even the “design argument” at 18% or so. Although I wondered at first if the question as framed has confused the cosmological and the fine-tuning arguments, since technically the latter is a design argument yet a lot of people conflate it as a cosmological argument and assume “design argument” means biological creationism. So, one might worry not all respondents were answering the same question here. But the survey included a separate question about “Cosmological fine-tuning (what explains it?)” and the percentage who credited that to design was essentially identical (about 17%), so these concerns were addressed. It apparently is true: the fine-tuning argument isn’t at the top in philosophers’ minds. Though it’s close. Amusingly, though, even counting inclusively, the losers are equally the Ontological and Moral augments, neither winning respect from even 10% of respondents. So in a sense you can say more philosophers think abortion is evil than think the moral argument for god is particularly convincing. Which is to say, almost no philosophers at all.

Looking back at the question about cosmological fine-tuning, it was interesting to see, as a side point, only 15% of philosophers believing in a multiverse; this suggests a much poorer attention to the state of current cosmological science than the gender and race questions showed regarding the sociobiological sciences. I am astonished that nearly a third of philosophers actually think fine-tuning is a “brute fact” (no indicated difference for exclusive counts means this is roughly indeed the case among philosophers), while 22% or so don’t believe there is any fine-tuning at all (though an understandable position, given my point earlier this month that it’s actually not yet possible to really know if there is). And I have no idea what the 18% of philosophers who answered “Other” are thinking. That’s a lot (nearly a fifth). What other options are there?  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Similarly, I was surprised to see that about 30% of philosophers deny there is a hard problem of consciousness. It is unclear if respondents thought they were answering whether there is a problem but it has been solved (like Dennett might say) or whether there isn’t even a problem to solve (like I have encountered some maintaining of late: see The Bogus Idea of the Bogus Mysteries of Consciousness). I was likewise fascinated to see nearly an even split between philosophers over whether they would even want to live forever (45% Yes to 41% No)—an interesting problem for Christians trying to sell them that. Although, IMO the “Nos” are not thinking logically here; because any problem of dissatisfaction, like boredom, that can be solved in a short span of time, can be solved in a long one, which is just a bunch of short spans of time. So any problem there could be with living forever, must necessarily be solvable. More pertinent is, rather, the diminishing, rather than negative, value of eternal life. And there is a crucial difference between saying “I don’t want to live forever” and “I don’t need to live forever.” And we can’t discern that here. Bad study design again.

But part of the issue in this case may be skepticism about even the possibility of immortality. Because a different question about mind-uploading, whether it counts as living forever or really means your death (and some non-you doppelgänger gets to live forever in your place instead…or something), an astonishing half of all philosophers classified this as “Death.” There is no actual ontological basis for such a judgment (since you do not consist of anything more than patterns of information; it matters not one whit what instrument is storing and running it, nor would you ever even notice if we secretly swapped that out), so I always took that to be more of a layperson’s mistake. But evidently half of all philosophers aren’t well grounded in the ontology of personal existence. And this does look the same as the half who don’t want to live forever, though the survey paper didn’t show the correlation factor. They did show the correlation, though, between “immortality: yes” and theism and Evangelical positions like “against abortion,” and those were weirdly low—only around 0.36 and the like—which means most theists, even Evangelicals, don’t want to live forever, which is a strange result. I can’t explain it.

Still, almost 28% are on board with mind-uploaded immortality, and another 18% answered “Other,” thus (combined) accounting for the other half of philosophers. I expect the “Others” would merely assert a more nuanced view as to what degree or kind of survival that would indicate. For example, one can consistently admit mind-uploading equals the death of the body and rebirth to a new life, and thus see the question as warranting qualification. As no exclusive counts are given, we know they were close to the inclusive counts, so it would be safe to say that half of all philosophers don’t see mind-uploading as dying and being replaced. For comparison, the 2020 answers to the old Teletransporter problem (does it really transport you, or just kill you and make a copy that isn’t you?) are also roughly evenly split (35% “Survival,” 40% “Death,” 25% “Other”), which comes out nearly the same (more than half don’t see it as “death” but as at least qualified survival, while still quite a lot see it as “Death”).

My Top Observations

I was most impressed to see almost a third of philosophers embrace naturalist realism about moral facts. This means the general position (and I mean the general position, not any specific position) shared by Sam Harris and myself has won over 1 in 3 philosophers. That puts us in good company then. Also interesting in this direction is that only 1 in 4 philosophers are exclusively Capitalists, outnumbered by nearly half of all philosophers (twice as many) who are exclusively Socialists! It is true the 2020 study included all major English-speaking nations, including Australia and the U.K., and English-speaking philosophers all across Europe and beyond (whereas the 2009 study was mostly North America). But the respondents from the US still swamp them all. So I don’t think this can account for the result here. It’s clear from the numbers that some philosophers (two or three percent maybe) ticked both boxes—as I would have: I believe the ideal system is an equilibrium state of both systems as checks and balances against each other’s excesses, akin to a well-functioning ecosystem. It’s possible many who checked “Other” (19%) share a similar outlook. So, I’m with maybe a quarter of philosophers in all. But wow, there sure is a lot of anti-capitalism among academic philosophers even in the U.S.!

Another result that caught my eye was that nearly half of all philosophers think the Principle of Sufficient Reason is bullshit. Sorry, theists. And probably related, nearly 1 in 5 philosophers believes in the Many-Worlds hypothesis of Quantum Mechanics! (Which means, if you compare stats, that too many of these philosophers don’t know that entails a multiverse with respect to Fine-Tuning.) Also, only 28% think spacetime is real. Instead most, at 45%, think it is only a relational concept, which is a leading view in physics today, so understandable; but, IMO, wrong (such a stance cannot explain why there are only three spatial and one temporal dimension instead of infinitely many—spacetime has to be real, in order to be constrained to only that domain). By contrast, 41% of philosophers agree time travel is “metaphysically impossible.” IMO, they’re right…if we mean by that what most people want time travel to mean; as opposed to what it really is, which would never make for an interesting movie, despite implausibly trying: e.g. in Tenet, their thoughts would also go backwards, and thus “undo” their memories rather than build them, producing no net change in anything. In fact, you couldn’t tell the difference between your going forward or backwards in time (see Sense and Goodness without God, “Time and the Multiverse,” III.3.6, esp. pp. 92-93).

There were some other odd questions, like whether the “Units of selection” in evolution are “genes” or “organisms.” Philosophers are evenly split (one third say genes, one third say organisms, and only one third say neither or both). This is again indicative of poor science education in the field. The answer is of course both. Genes are always attached to an organism. You can’t individually isolate a gene and select it without killing or saving the organism as a whole. If organisms could survive while their genes continued a selection process (something more akin to what Lamarck imagined, or the X-Men comics), then you could answer only “genes.” Honestly, philosophers should know this (see the corresponding article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Finally, it was super weird to see countable numbers of philosophers think plants and even subatomic particles are conscious (7% and 2%, respectively; and only 80% and 89% respectively even so much as “leaning against” that conclusion!). It’s hard to fathom what those philosophers are imagining or thought they were answering. Perhaps these are panpsychists, or imagining a completely different definition of “conscious” than the other respondents were—or (as I suspect for most panpsychists) both.

What’s Changed?

Overall, the new questions tend to be even more poorly formulated than the original thirty, with answers and distinctions among them often hopelessly unclear; and questions as well. So it will be harder to do my next article covering what my responses would be. But another question one might ask about the 2020 survey is, what’s changed? Very little, IMO; but some things of note. 1 in 5 of the philosophers in this survey are women, same as last time. And Aristotle, Hume, Kant, or Wittgenstein are still whom most philosophers identify with. But when it comes to positions, their survey paper singles out the biggest changes, and can even show changes for the same individuals (though the survey is anonymous, the computer analytics can track the same respondent in the blind). It’s been only ten years of course, which isn’t much time to expect much to have changed. But still. What happened?

I have a lot of problems with the lack of clarity and consistency in the way philosophers use or ascribe to any of the positions polled. But if I settled on an “on balance, all things considered” assessment, most but not all of the change has been in the right direction, IMO. The largest swing (13 points) was toward “non-classical” interpretations of logic, a distinction I think is more vacuous than useful, but on balance I would say this is moving in the right direction. Nearly as large (11 points) is a swing against “Invariantism” about knowledge claims, mostly heading back toward “Contextualism” (nearly 8 points), which I agree is also the right direction.

Swings get smaller after that. “Externalism” about moral motivation has gotten more popular (almost 9 points), which I think is the wrong direction. Likewise another such swing toward Humeanism about laws of nature (wrong). But a comparable swing toward the existence of a priori knowledge I can say is correct only because I think philosophers today are misusing the term. Then smaller swings (almost 7 points) have gone toward “Subjectivism” in aesthetics (correct); but against “pull the switch” on Trolley Problems (wrong). And yet at the same time we see swings (over 5 points) toward moral realism (correct) and compatibilism (also correct).

So, in all, the entire field has mostly moved in my direction. I think the only wrong directions being taken so far are in the popularity of moral externalism, Humean physics, and how to answer the trolley problem. The question then is, how do my philosophical conclusions stack up against the field in all the new topics this survey explored? My next entry on this subject will answer that question.

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