There's some evidence that philosophy majors score pretty high on the GMAT (for graduate admissions to business school) and on the LSAT (for law school), as well as pretty good on the GRE Verbal and GRE Analytical Writing tests.

Less good at the GRE Quantitative Reasoning than all the science disciplines (and economics) but better than the rest of the arts and humanities subjects (and better than accounting, which is slightly worrying).

See http://dailynous.com/value-of-philosophy/charts-and-graphs/

Also: https://www.salon.com/2013/07/01/be_employable_study_philoso...

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/why-philosophy-majors-...

(I may be biased on this though: I have a BA and MA in Philosophy.)

> There's some evidence that philosophy majors score pretty high on the GMAT (for graduate admissions to business school) and on the LSAT (for law school), as well as pretty good on the GRE Verbal and GRE Analytical Writing test

As a philosophy major you should be the first to point out this doesn't imply causation.

> you should be the first to point out this doesn't imply causation

Nah, I'd rather just go nuclear on causation, with the assistance of Hume...

"...experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connexion, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable... It is allowed on all hands that there is no known connexion between the sensible qualities and the secret powers; and consequently, that the mind is not led to form such a conclusion concerning their constant and regular conjunction, by anything which it knows of their nature."

Why doesn't Hume believe in human mind grasping causal reasoning? Even in non-scientific settings, causal reasoning is fundamental for humans.

Humes point is that we can't perceive causal relationships, even if we think we do. We can only perceive events, and then our mind constructs causal relationships on top of them. But these relationships are not inherent to the world, they are only in our minds.

That is true in the absolute sense, but untrue in the relative sense of day to day life. If there is smoke, there must be fire - people know that. We apply causal reasoning in day to day life. It's probably a cultural thing, though, it does not appear spontaneously in the brain, it's learned.

Judea Pearl wrote a whole book about proving causality (and when it can't be proven).

A rough summary is available as a YouTube video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HUti6vGctQM

They are very very closely related, and philosophers and Pearl cite each other on the topic of causation, but Hume and philosophers are usually concerned with a slightly different problem. Hume is concerned about the nature of the necessity between any cause and effect which seemed to be implied by our experience of events. Whereas Pearl (much less knowledgeable about Pearl) is interested in how we can model events to give us high confidence in the relation applying in a particular case while leaving the topic of necessity and the fundamental nature of causation to the side and assuming a much more vague /ad hoc notion of what causation is.

Hume's point is much more fundamental: you can't know if the world is indeed governed by 'natural laws'. Maybe the sun will just not rise tomorrow, ignoring all of the causal relationships we think we 'discovered'. There is no way to prove it will.

Or in more modern terms: we didn't discover anything inherent in nature, we invented models for prediction. Which are very useful, but don't tell anything about how the world 'really is'.

And, to be very explicit: this includes probability theory. You can prove that a series of observations from the past follows some pattern that matches the definition of probabilistic causality. But you can't prove that the events in the future will continue to fit that same pattern. So again you cannot prove anything about how the world 'really is'.

Hume's idea is that you can only ever directly experience events co-occuring in time, but "causation" is not something you can actually ever see itself.

In practice, it is useful to predict when a given action is likely to achieve a particular result. Or I guess we can't know anything, because what is knowing really...

This is the real problem. Philosophers can’t prove their own existence to themselves, how can they be expected to prove anything else?

"This is the real problem. Philosophers can’t prove their own existence to themselves, how can they be expected to prove anything else?"

Whereas the rest of us are easily able to prove to our full satisfaction that atoms didn't exist, asbestos was safe, white flour no different than brown... etc, etc. It's not just possible for there to be too much certainty in the world, it's common - which is what that Billionaire knew thanks to courses in Philosophy, and exploited to earn his stash 'o cash.

Incidentally Buddhists think that any proof of individuality is false or tainted, too. Best lump them in there too. (Descartes had to please the church, we can't know his private opinion, just his published works with necessary nods to the church.)

Descartes would like to have a word with you :)

The guy who in the end just said "Fuck it, a Wizard (God) did it."? It's really interesting to see the logical hole he digs for himself in the book but then cops out in the end with a "Well, God is good so he wouldn't let something bad happen to us so we must exist."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_argument. You kind of have it backwards, he first concluded that he existed (I think therefore I am). Then because of that (and other arguments), he believed god exists and is good, so he wouldn’t deceive his senses.

He ended with that about non-first-person existants. His argument works for proving oneself exists to oneself.

He basically defined existence as thinking, then turned it into a tautology. And then it blew up in his face when he realized that he couldn't prove anything else was thinking. And in fact even if there wasn't some devil tricking him (ala brain in a box hooked to the Matrix), things like rocks and water could never exist.

His entire philosophy was flawed right from the start. But it usually is. That's why so many philosophy texts take the first chapter (or volume) refuting philosophers who came before them.

They know that they know nothing, so the question of proofs is somewhat moot.

Not really. That was just Socrates being Socrates and being all humble about his knowledge. Apart from him I don't remember any othe philosopher adopting that stance.

> I don't remember any othe philosopher adopting that stance.

Peter Unger's book "Ignorance" (Oxford University Press, 1975) is probably the best modern defence of extreme skepticism.

Also, Unger is pretty fun to read.

To show that studying philosophy causes improvement, at least we need to compare them with a control group whose average SAT scores before going to college are similar to philosophy majors. Otherwise, it could just be a selection bias (i.e., those who choose philosophy tend to score high on those measures like Verbal and Analytical Writing). Any such studies?

Just took the GMAT as an accountant and did substantially better on Verbal than Quant.

The idea that accountants are good at math is nonsense. Accountants aren't taught any more math than marketing majors.

Carlo Rovelli: "Why Physics needs Philosophy"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ0uPkG-pr4

A few notes from the above:

* the beginning of astronomy == plato's school

* the scientific method as falsification == Popper

* quantum theory / relativity / Heisenberg == positivism (If I don't see it (e.g. electron orbitals) it doesn't exist) (* e.g. complementarity)

* Einstein claimed that his reading of Schopenhauer was crucial to thinking about time, space, etc...

in essence, you are doing philosophy when you're re-evaluating your methodology and using a evolving reflective feedback loops to change your thinking.

This is to say that advances in science are often preceded or co-created by a period of philosophy, which it becomes possible express the new scientific ideas, at which point, the philosophy recedes into the background (e.g. no longer is seen an 'philosophy') because it has already been 'accepted'.

If you consider at the the fundamental problems involving physics these days, there is much philosophical activity there as well, but we don't know yet what will come out of it because it hasn't been 'solved' yet, compared to previous big jumps in scientific understanding.

I mentioned this below, but it's even more relevant here: one of the most interesting things I learned in college is that physics departments used to be called natural philosophy. If you're interested in the cyclic nature of philosophy and dogma and the tension between them, check out Kuhn. He invented the term "paradigm shift". And as you allude to, he argues that "true progress" is impossible without a breakdown and reimagining of the prevailing belief system, the social rut, that has captured people's immediate attention.

All the sciences gradually split off from philosophy: physics, biology, chemistry, sociology, psychology, ..., even theology.

Whenever a subfield of philosophy got to the point that it had sufficiently many interesting theories to occupy several people fulltime, it got its own name (for practical reasons) and, after some time, was considered to be its own.

"natural philosopher" = "scientist" before we had a separate term for it.

Philosophers explore and debate the very meaning of the words 'evidence', 'empirical', 'reasoning', 'facts', and various methods of knowing - many of which insist upon empirical evidence (e.g. science, history) and many which do not (e.g. praxeology, law, international relations).

By insisting that all philosophy provide empirical evidence, you've misunderstood what philosophy actually does, and assumed the epistemology of empiricism - which has a number of flaws and contradictions (that any philosophical rationalist would be happy to point out).

You misunderstand. The point is that "philosophy improves critical reasoning" is an empirical statement and hence requires empirical evidence. That doesn't mean philosophical discussions themselves must be empirical in nature. But when they refer to evidence, they do.

You're going to run into problems attempting to operationalize a variable like 'critical reasoning', in order to demonstrate, scientifically, its empirical validity. In fact, you'll need the help of philosophers, who have been studying various ways of interpreting what critical reasoning actually means[1], and how to properly operationalize variables[2].

Reasoning - using logic to form conclusions, inferences, judgements - is a process defined, taught, and professionally applied by philosophers. So, teach students philosophy and some other 'control subject'. They learn logic, rhetoric, and how to follow complex chains of complex thought.

It seems to be a difficult claim to make, that this experiment would some somehow not show an improvement in critical reasoning - however you operationalize it.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-knowledge-externalis... [2]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/#OpeUniAna...

Alchemists are trained in how matter behaves and how to manipulate it... turns out they're not any more competent at it than anyone else. It seems obvious that a student of philosophy who has been trained in logic and critical thinking will be better at it than others, but obviousness is not in itself evidence. Lots of things sound obvious but later turn out not to be true.

The other thing is that you've made a dichotomy out of a quantitative problem: how much better are philosophers at it than anyone else? A little? A lot? Is it a skill that persists after graduation? Better at certain types of problems, maybe worse at others?

In any other context, on any other topic, a philosopher would never dare to make hand-wavey statements about how obvious and straightforward it is that X leads to Y. Only when it comes to their own field of study and its value do philosophers become sloppy and claim the value of their field is self-evident and frankly beyond discussion, or they try to turn it into an irrelevant meta-discussion about the nature of evidence. That's the irony I was pointing out. If you boast about being rigorous, be rigorous even when it doesn't suit your purposes.

The value of the philosophical disciplines of logic and epistemology to empiricism and science is as self evident as the value of algebra and numbers to mathematics in that you can't have one without the other. Empiricism and science depend upon logic, reason, and a particular method of obtaining knowledge.

You're also conflating rigor with empiricism. It is possible to be rigorous and be a rationalist, a phenomenologist, a theologin, or an empiricist.

Exactly right! I was about to say something similar but you phrased it much better than I would have :)

Philosophy improves critical thinking and reasoning skills but it requires active engagement in philosophical literature and inquiry. I can tell by your understanding of philosophy as "feeling" based that you haven't done this -- and you're missing out on a valuable form of rational inquiry. No it's not scientific. But to sit back, arms-crossed ready to rebuke anything philosophical because it fails to satisfy the criterion of a different discipline is so contrary to a healthy, open-minded, rational way of living.

I guess I'll have to throw away my MA in Philosophy then.

If you read closely, you'll see that I didn't criticize philosophy, only the tendency of philosophers to make empirical statements about the practical value of their discipline without the empirical proof to back it up.

Do you concede philosophers never back up their statements with empirical evidence?

This is an example how philosophers work:

if I understood you correctly, you state that one must have empirical evidence to back up their position. If someone claims something without giving empirical evidence, their claim should be refuted (or at least ignored).

However, your claim that empirical evidence is required to make a position valid, is itself not backed up by any empirical evidence.

I can even give counter-evidence, e.g., mathematics works very well without empirical evidence, so it doesn't seem to be required to gain valid knowledge. (just to back up my philosophical argument with empirical evidence)

Haha touché. Though the argument hurts my stomach somewhat.

Philosophy is not an empirical science.

In this case that's not true though - the article is about someone who used critical thinking/reasoning skills to make a huge amount of money, and credits this in large part to his training in philosophy.

It's possible, of course, that Miller is mistaken about the origin of his critical thinking ability (or just got lucky, and there's no ability to credit), however on balance this seems like a strong piece of anecdata in favour of the hypothesis.

I'm interested what would constitute empirical evidence for/against the claim "philosophy helps improve critical thinking". Are there accepted standardised measures of this?

People who study carpentry tend to be better carpenters than people who study accounting. One of the aims of philosophy as a discipline is to instil the discipline of critical thinking, that's the purported business of philosophy after all. Would you ask someone who had studied carpentry for empirical evidence that studying carpentry produces people more skilled in the carpentry than if they had not studied it?

> Would you ask someone who had studied carpentry for empirical evidence that studying carpentry produces people more skilled in the carpentry than if they had not studied it?

Yes I would, if it seemed to me that an awful lot of people who had studied carpentry were mediocre carpenters, while many who hadn't studied carpentry were excellent carpenters. I would start to question the usefulness of carpentry study.

I don't think we should accept that the study of philosophy improves critical thinking just because that is "one of the aims" of philosophy as a discipline. (One of the aims of homeopathic medicine is to cure disease, after all.) I certainly accept that you'd have a very hard time going through a philosophy program without ever thinking critically, but I'd say the same thing about a student in a comparative literature program.

I also think it's very hard to teach philosophy well, and that a poorly taught philosophy course can easily detract from critical thinking rather than bolster it. I took my share of philosophy courses as an undergrad, and a good half of them were glorified history classes with strong implications that certain viewpoints were "wrong" and others were "right." I suppose you could say those courses were not really philosophy courses if they were taught that way, but then I would say it's unfair to say that philosophy education improves critical thinking if you will only admit examples where it does so.

> Yes I would, if it seemed to me that an awful lot of people who had studied carpentry were mediocre carpenters, while many who hadn't studied carpentry were excellent carpenters. I would start to question the usefulness of carpentry study.

Well that's not really the point, is it? The point is that on average the person who studied carpentry is better than someone who hadn't studied it at all.

> I don't think we should accept that the study of philosophy improves critical thinking just because that is "one of the aims" of philosophy as a discipline. (One of the aims of homeopathic medicine is to cure disease, after all.) I certainly accept that you'd have a very hard time going through a philosophy program without ever thinking critically, but I'd say the same thing about a student in a comparative literature program.

That's actually rather insulting, you do realise that don't you? It's insulting in three different ways going by the way you've worded it. First, you've compared philosophy to something that is widely regarded as a pseudoscience (which is ironic considering that philosophy is that _very_ discipline that attempts to rigorously demarcate science from pseudoscience[0]). Second, this isn't something I'm making up–this is _central_ to what philosophy is methodologically about and has been since its inception. Third, It's more than likely you'd _fail_ a philosophy program if you didn't demonstrate critical thinking skills by the end of it. I've tutored philosophy students so I've witnessed first-hand the process whereby one tries to show a young person the difference between mere opinion and reasoned argument. With other disciplines (depending on the level) it's sort of assumed that one already has critical thinking skills or that at least they'll develop along the way. A core remit of philosophy is to think about what it means to think critically and therefore by bringing attention and awareness to this the student ought to develop that faculty.

> I also think it's very hard to teach philosophy well, and that a poorly taught philosophy course can easily detract from critical thinking rather than bolster it. I took my share of philosophy courses as an undergrad, and a good half of them were glorified history classes with strong implications that certain viewpoints were "wrong" and others were "right." I suppose you could say those courses were not really philosophy courses if they were taught that way, but then I would say it's unfair to say that philosophy education improves critical thinking if you will only admit examples where it does so.

I'm sorry your experience was sub-par. Certainly what I am pointing out to you is an ideal. I freely admit that it is always possible to not reach this ideal but then that's just normal human failings.

---

Having said that, there is a reference to an quasi-empirical study and meta-analysis here but I think the results are inconclusive[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem

[1] http://dailynous.com/2015/10/22/does-philosophy-improve-crit...

Maybe I didn't make it clear, but my point on the carpentry thing was that it's not clear to me that the average philosophy student is much better at critical thinking than the average, say, history student. My response to the carpentry analogy was to say that if the benefits of carpentry education were equally anecdotal and unclear, I would absolutely question its usefulness.

My comparisons weren't meant to be insulting—they were meant to clearly show why a field intending to do something doesn't mean we should assume it succeeds. And, even if it does succeed, we can't assume it's uniquely successful. I'm sure you'd agree that homeopathy doesn't succeed at its central goal, and that comparative literature also succeeds at teaching critical thinking skills. The claim is that more people should study philosophy, not that more people should study one of several fields in the liberal arts. I really don't feel it's insulting to question this.

For what it's worth, I'm in the pro-philosophy camp, so maybe that will help put my questioning into perspective.

As for your third point, I myself said you'd have a "very hard time going through a philosophy program without thinking critically," so we're in agreement in that you'd fail if you could not thinking critically at all. That on its own doesn't do anything to imply that the philosophy program teaches critical thinking, though. You'd fail a programming exam if you couldn't program, but the exam does not teach programming. I'm not even trying to split hairs here: philosophy certainly wouldn't be the only subject that, in practice, failed to teach its own requirements.

Which is what brought me to my final point about education. It's basically impossible to argue about what philosophy should do in an ideal world, because we all agree that everything should be great and ideally confers as many benefits as possible. I think that, in practice, philosophy education is a very mixed bag, and that this is very relevant when recommending to people that they pursue philosophy education. You could say the same about many subjects, but I think philosophy is somewhat unique in that the benefits are quite elusive without the right education to confer them.

Philosophy is important. The fact that you're even asking that question indicates a deep ignorance of the history of ideas and thought. It's also slightly absurd because empiricism is itself a philosophy.

Empiricism, as a method, became important because Bacon wanted to replace Aristotle's logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baconian_method. That took about 2000 years to happen, just to give you a sense of scale. And it's what helped spur the scientific revolution so it's also why we've got our little laptops and Facebook today.

The scientific revolution and scientific method are a branch off of a long, long conversation about the world, the nature of it, and how we should understand it.

Now, that's not to say there's not a lot of silly, useless garbage being put out under the guise of "philosophy". That's definitely the case. The challenge is identifying productive or useful parts and using them in a coherent manner.

Not that I got very deep into mathematics but higher level math is all formal logic and proofs. There are mathematical theorems that are proven to be true/closed for many years by mathematicians before they find commercial/practical applications.

For the HN audience, much of the power and usefulness of RDBMSs is derived from the relational model and the relational algebra it sits on [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra

It is sometimes argued that one can find answers about philosophy in the even more abstract field of metaphilosophy–philosophy of/about philosophy. Given that the study of X is usually termed Xology let's call the study of philosophy philosophology. An ugly word, safe from thieves and brigands. Pirsig uses it in his Zen and the Art… reboot Lila–I came up with it independently recently if you're so inclined to believe me.

The world is not divided up into stuff we believe because we have empirical evidence for it and stuff we don't because we don't. For instance, the animal that jumps on my lap and purrs is called a cat. Would you say that I know its a cat because of empirical evidence? Would you say that I know that it is called 'cat' because of empirical evidence?

Philosophy is a discipline. Discipline can be divided into how and what. _How_ are the methods. Hence, a title like 'Discourse on the Method'[0]. So part of the business of philosophy is to train your mind to be able to manipulate certain thinky-stuff in a reliable way†. Like learning to ride a bike. You don't need empirical evidence that philosophy does this. That's one of its raison(s?) d'etre! One can learn these mental habits in other disciplines, sure–but philosophy is especially concerned about them methodologically speaking. Secondly the _What_. This is what people mean when they ask the question, What is philosophy about? or What is it for? That is trickier … :) but I like the Wilfrid Sellar's answer,

“The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”

Of course, the devil is in the details!

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59/59-h/59-h.htm

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/

† examples: learning to spot your own cognitive biases, learning about logical fallacies, reading the works of great thinkers to see how their minds worked, practising mulling concepts over in a measured way oneself in solitude and in dialogue, and so on

How to measure this is itself a philosophical question.

> Does philosophy really improve critical thinking and reasoning skills?

I hope that's a joke. Lest you ignore all those that laid the foundations of western thinking like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

Socrates was the one of the first people to infer the validity of one's thinking by following the thinking to it's natural conclusion by asking questions. This is inline with (and probably inspired) verifying a scientific theory by making predictions and verifying them.

Plato talked the theory of forms. That everything can be classified, abstracted, and reasoned about. The first is inline with classes (in OOPS), and the last part with functional programming.

Aristotle took Plato's classification idea, and was the first known person to classify animals and plants. Oh, only that allowed the rest of science to startup.

Btw, Socrates taught Plato who taught Aristotle.

I am not a philosophy major, so I am sure what I covered is just a bit of what they did (and taught others).

It is very necessary to know and understand how we came to think in a certain way today (because it is not natural), visit the foundations of the knowledge we have today, to understand the world when the tools we know and use are too specialized to use.

There's nothing ironic about that. Your question itself reveals your own assumptions:

* What is evidence?

* What does it mean for evidence to be empirical?

* What does "critical thinking" or "reasoning" mean?

* What is a fact?

Further (more meaty) questions to ask:

* Does your concept of evidence support the existence of a single truth?

* Can 2 people truly perceive the same fact in the same way? What does it mean to perceive a fact?

And the list goes on

You're changing the subject. The fact that it is possible to have a discussion (whether empirical or not) about the nature of evidence or of what constitutes a fact, and even that this might be a very fruitful thing to discuss, does not suddenly make a statement like "philosophy improves critical thinking" true and beyond questioning.

> The irony is that when philosophers make statements like these, they never provide any empirical evidence to back it up.

How many actual philosophers have you communicated with on the matter?

FWIW, philosophy majors are among the highest scoring majors on the LSAT.

Why won't this proponent of philosophical education provide me the education to assess the quality of the claims on its behalf?

My experience with philosophy was a mixture of half-baked history and distracting discussions that aren't useful.

This is the reason introducing mandatory programming in high school will likely cause more harm than good to the reputation of the field. (Don't judge a field of study by how it is taught.)

I don’t doubt that :)