You may not believe this, but philosophers sometimes work in ignorance of research programs, bodies of literature, methodologies, and findings outside of philosophy that could be relevant to their work.
In a post at his blog, Ethan Landes (Eindhoven) shares how he recently discovered that the relatively young philosophical subfield of conceptual engineering, to which he contributes, appears to have reinvented a wheel produced 50 years ago by scholars in the field of sociolinguistics.
Neat find. But ouch.
He writes:
There is an entire literature that discusses things at a level that I (we?) all thought was unique to conceptual engineering. An entire literature the conceptual engineering literature could have drawn on for ideas and knowledge. But no one looked carefully, so we have a decade of literature of us forging our own paths.
It reminds me of the time I spent an hour fighting my way up an English hill through thick, knee-high heather, only to discover at the top that [there] had been an unmarked path 20 meters to my right the whole time.
Some degree of ignorance of other fields is a cost of disciplinary specialization for creatures who sometimes have to do things that cut into their research—like sleep, or die. Since specialization has its benefits, some ignorance is expected.
And its worth noting that philosophy is increasingly interdisciplinary, and on some measures, the most interdisciplinary field in the humanities.
Still, philosophy’s remit is about as broad as can be, so perhaps it has a greater risk of interdisciplinary ignorance leading to research which duplicates work done elsewhere, or research which would have been significantly advanced in light of awareness of very similar research already conducted outside of philosophy.
Dr. Landes gave us one example, but I’m sure there are others, both contemporary and historical. Let’s hear about them.
I wonder if it is really true that this area of philosophy has simply re-invented something that already existed. I’ll wager that there are all sorts of interesting and subtle differences.
The epistemology of inquiry is in a similar position with respect to philosophy of science, especially the historicist tradition (i.e., Kuhn and the subsequent literature).
The philosopher of science Mario Bunge taught us undergraduates in the 1990s that a literature search in philosophy should always include any connected fields. The philosopher of mind must always read psychology and neuroscience; the philosopher of technology must read some engineering or medicine; the ethicist some of the literature on motivation and moral psychology (for example in the clinical literature), the metaphysician the general aspects of all fields (and also, he said, some exact general theories like automata theory), the epistemologist methodological works (especially in the sciences), etc. My own work in metaphysics and the general philosophy of science later on used automata theory, some chemistry, special relativity (because GR is hard!).
I do the same, now, in cyber security – including looking at the philosophers. Examples: Bunge, Armstrong, Dennett, Wimsatt, Humphreys, Piccinini, Churchland(s), …
I don’t wanna bash anyone, but this is the kind of thing you expect anyone would do as they consider writing about something. It is comprehensible that a paper or another may go unnoticed when you have no acquaintance with a whole area of knowledge, but an entire well-established topic? Given how many of us see philosophy as dealing with foundational stuff, it is expected that one would at the very least look at the closer areas that might be discussing something akin to the idea under development.
I attended a lecture recently where a philosopher of science shared how innovation does not necessarily follow from fully connected systems. I can’t remember the source but it showed three wheels: one mesh, one hub and spoke and one spokeless wheel (where nodes were connected around the edges).
The observation was that while information sharing does lead to innovation, there is also merit in not connecting too soon, before the group has had time to consider a hypothesis on their own.
There might some value in reinventing the wheel, at least in isolation, and then looking out and learning from what others have done. Though not noticing another field’s work for 50 years seems like a lost opportunity.
You don’t even need to go that far afield to find a prehistory of conceptual engineering! At the time conceptual engineering came into vogue, I was studying R. G. Collingwood’s philosophical methodology. Speaking in caricature here, but: ‘conceptual engineering’ was how all philosophy to that point had been done; the emergence of what he called ‘atomism,’ a tradition which refused the coherence of a concept changing or developing and which he associated with the then-up-and-coming Bertrand Russell, necessitated his writing a book (‘An Essay on Philosophical Methodology’) to defend that earlier tradition. Articulated so clearly there, the parallels between it and ‘conceptual engineering’ are, if not uncanny, certainly strong enough that I wanted to bring the two together. (Alas I never got the chance.)