Eastern APA 2025, Public Philosophy, and Rational Persuasion
I am attending the Eastern APA this year, my favorite large philosophy conference. I like this conference because I can attend the talks in my field and also find time to attend talks in other areas. (Though I’m not a fan of this New York cold.)
Today, I attended a panel on public philosophy. Public philosophy consists of philosophers engaging with the public as opposed to other philosophers. We should get outside of our ivory tower and engage with topics that ordinary people care about; alternatively, we should share our philosophical views in a way that is accessible to the public; or we should do philosophy with the public.
There are different ways to characterize public philosophy, and there also different ways to do it. The most obvious model of public philosophy is the scholar who writes for non-academic publications and gives speeches in non-academic contexts. Though there are less obvious ways of doing public philosophy.
In the panel, Rachel Robinson-Greene (Utah State University) described a series of philosophical discussions she has been putting together in Utah. The idea is to get community members together to discuss some philosophical issue, like the ethics of climate change or abortion. The goal was to get community members to do philosophy, together.
Robinson-Greene shared one discussion that did not go so well. It concerned a philosophical discusison of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). I won’t go into detail. The short story is that some people were not interested in having philosophical discussions that are aimed at the truth; they were interested in changing the other person’s mind, an enterprise that is not necessarily about what is true. It was not a productive conversation.
Philosophers, including me, are often optimistic about the prospects of changing a person’s beliefs via rational persuastion. We believe in the power of rationally persuasive arguments. Though this faith is tempered when we see bad, poorly reasoned arguments be persuasive, and when we see good, well-reasoned arguments fail to be persuasive. Perhaps we are naive to believe in the power of reason.
Or perhaps not.
In thinking about the juiciest philosophical issues discussed by the public, there are often two very different worldviews accompanying opposing philosophical positions. The people who are pro-DEI and anti-DEI tend to have very different sorts of surrounding background beliefs. It is not as if the two groups agree on most things except DEI. I think philosophers — particularly, analytic philosophers — tend to think that philosophizing is about persuading people to adopt specific propositions.
I am inclined to think that philosophizing is more often about trying to persuade people to adopt an entire worldview. There is something irreducibly holistic about the way most people conceive of philosophical issues. We can’t just extract a single precise argument or thesis. We have to make significant alterations to a person’s entire worldview.
Instead of thinking of convincing someone that some proposition is true, you might think of trying to convert someone into a believer of some more general worldview. That may be hard, but it may, ironically, be easier than attempting to change a person’s mind about a single thing.
Is there such a thing as rational conversion? I don’t know, but I hope so.