A recent article about illusionism in the philosophy of mind got me wondering. How many respected philosophical positions are this easy to debunk? What is it that keeps them going despite strong opposition? And do we all need to be more like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes when evaluating them?

As a strictly rational discipline, philosophy is meant to be above the sophistry and rhetoric that takes place in, for example, the political sphere. And as philosophers, we are supposed to see through fallacies that might gain acceptance in less stringently logical debates – just as, in the fable, an innocent child saw through the Emperor’s new clothes. So in this article I’ll look at how and why it’s possible for patently false, flawed and invalid arguments to sometimes gain philosophical traction, (controversially) suggesting some examples of where this has happened. I’d welcome your ideas, too, in the comments.

Disclaimer: there’s no such thing as consensus in philosophy

When I was an undergraduate, I remember that a friend studying Maths was able to look up the answers in the back of his textbook. I chuckled wryly at the thought of doing the same in my subject. (Wouldn’t it be brilliant though? Especially if the textbook authors showed their working at every step?)

And just recently, when discussing how to cite sources in our MA dissertations, a philosophy professor at Northeastern University London made that same contrast. He pointed out that sometimes, if you’re referring to research completed in other disciplines, you can, actually, boldly state without question that something has been proved or established beyond doubt. When citing philosophy, though, this is not something we can do.

All of this preamble is just to say that I’m fully aware that the claims I’ll make here won’t be without controversy. Stating that illusionism (or any other philosophical position) is patently nonsensical or false is always going to invite counterarguments and comebacks. (And perhaps that answers my question straight off.) Nevertheless, let’s take a look at some of the ideas that I think we can accept are flawed, mistaken or just simply wrong – and the reasons why they persist despite this.

Historical ideas that haven’t moved with the times

Today, the discipline of philosophy stands separate from science, but that wasn’t always the case. In Ancient Greece, for example, philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato used the full toolbox of investigative instruments open to them, employing reason and logic but also observation to learn and theorise about the universe and our place within it. So it makes sense that there are some quasi-philosophical ideas from these times, such as the division by Empedocles of everything into four elements – earth, air, fire and water – that have rightly been superseded by scientific (rather than philosophical) discovery. (The Atomists, who posited tiny, indivisible particles as the building blocks of the universe, were more on the nose.)

Travelling forward to the seventeenth century, philosophers like Descartes were still active in the scientific arena, and so there are ideas from these times that can also be rejected empirically. One pet Cartesian theory that I think I can say has been universally consigned to history is his notion of the pineal gland, an area of the brain where he held that the physical body and immaterial soul are united and can interact.

But it’s interesting that the philosophical aspects of his dualistic ontology – the ideas that can’t be definitively disproved through physical experimentation – are still supported by some today, albeit not by the mainstream. (Actually, I’ve had a go at defending the possibility of mind-body interaction myself – remind me to share that with you one of these days.)

Why subject silos are a barrier to progress

It might come across as if I’m disparaging the involvement of metaphysicians in a realm that should be restricted to empirical experimentation. In fact, I think perhaps the barriers we erect between the disciplines are unhelpful. Going back to that friend who had the maths solutions at hand in his textbook, I recall a discussion I had with him that disillusioned me about the all-encompassing power of philosophical investigation. I was telling him about what I’d learned about free will and determinism, how there’s a tension between the notion of freedom and the idea of a mechanistic, scientifically predictable physical universe. His reaction, as a Physics boff, was to instantly reject that whole dichotomy as a straw man. He knew about quantum physics and uncertainty – concepts that hadn’t yet been introduced to my young, Humanities-undergraduate mind – and so understood that a deterministic description of the world was not that cut and dried.

Now, I’m not suggesting that professional philosophers debating free will are unaware of the implications that quantum mechanics might have on the debate – and at graduate level I have read texts that address this. But I think there is a temptation, on the whole, to keep these things separate. The set way that students learn about classic philosophical issues – often, the way it has been taught for generations – is sometimes kept sheltered from the useful and enlightening input that science or other disciplines might contribute. And if this routinely happens in undergraduate teaching, I’m sure there are ways that it seeps into professional philosophy, too – leading competent thinkers to sometimes endorse outdated positions that are just not credible to specialists in other areas.

Wish fulfilment philosophies

Do we use philosophy to objectively seek the truth, or to justify our own beliefs? On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with doing the latter. We’ve got to start somewhere, after all. The ideas that make sense to us will be the ones that fit in with our existing ‘knowledge’ and intuitions.

It’s why scepticism is so unsatisfactory as a life philosophy, despite being (I think) more watertight in its logic. To me, solipsism (defined as the assertion that we can’t prove the existence of other minds) and idealism (the notion that we can only know about the world through our senses) are impossible to disprove. Yet they haven’t been widely adopted – I’d argue because they are just not nice, satisfactory, intuitive things to believe, and they leave us hanging and wanting more. We want to think there is more to it than that, that the assumptions we make in daily life are accurate, despite not having the evidence available to support this. However much we might like to think we’re rational beings concerned only with logic, philosophy and wish fulfilment are never very far apart.

It’s in this area of wish fulfilment that philosophy often becomes a mainstream concern, not just confined to the seminar room, with universal questions that concern us all:

• What happens when we die?
• Is there a God that loves us?
• Surely it’s morally OK to eat meat or take a long-haul flight? (You can replace these last examples with anything you would like to do or keep doing, without feeling like a bad person)

These deep and meaningful questions are ones that we’re really tempted to address in a way that gives us the answers we want to hear. We want to be soothed and not unsettled by philosophy, reassured that everything’s OK and we’re on the right path. I think it’s why we might use bad reasoning, to present our cherished views in a way that feels credible.

One argument for the existence of God, for example, takes the complexity of the natural world as evidence for an intelligent creator, despite the fact that there’s now a credible and universally accepted scientific theory that provides an alternative explanation. Although evolution is the commonsense way to justify the amazing adaptations and intricately developed biological mechanisms we encounter in the world, there’s something irresistible about the idea of an intelligent designer. And it’s this irresistibility that makes the argument remain compelling and convincing for many.

Of course, when it comes to faith, philosophy doesn’t have the final say – we are pulled in by factors other than logic. Philosophy can’t prove that there is no intelligent designer (neither can science), and sometimes it’s OK to draw on those other factors to arrive at our worldviews. But what is dangerous, I think, is when we deceive ourselves by pretending that logical reasoning is what got us there, rather than faith. I’m sure this type of compelling but flawed justification happens all the time in philosophy, making its way under false pretences into academic spheres where it has no right to be.

Ideas that come with an agenda

It’s understandable that philosophers will make mistakes sometimes, or that they won’t have access to the latest knowledge that might refute their claims. But what of philosophical arguments that knowingly manipulate us into supporting a particular viewpoint? This is where we need all our powers of critical thinking to keep us on the straight and narrow.

I don’t think such arguments are necessarily as heinous as I’ve made them sound. It’s just that their proponents are so invested in a particular way of thinking that they need support to prop it up. And if you are sympathetic to that world view yourself, you’ll go easy on any flawed reasoning that confirms it – to the point where another philosopher might need to point out that the emperor has no clothes.

Still puzzling about illusionism, I’d be inclined to put Daniel Dennett’s philosophy of mind in this category. It’s what inspired this article and it’s a question I’ve been coming back to for a while. I’m sure there is some nuance that I can’t see in the argument, but as I see it, Dennett wants to hold, with a straight face, that qualia – the subjective experiences we have when we see or taste or touch – are an illusion created by the processes going on in our brain. He’s not saying that our senses deceive us, which would be a respectable claim. It seems to me – the child looking at the naked Emperor – that he’s actually trying to hold that when we are having experiences, we are actually experiencing an illusion: we’re not having experiences at all.

Is that a silly a viewpoint as it sounds?

I’m sure a thinker of Dennett’s calibre could explain it so that it becomes philosophically acceptable, and in a way, that’s beside the point. What I’m trying to get at, I think, is that however clever you can be about justifying such a weird claim, it’s not desirable to have to do this. You will only go to the effort of navigating such a logical obstacle course if your underlying thesis really, really depends on it.

But when someone clever is saying something, and it’s published in books, it becomes that much harder to say “I don’t understand this” or “I’m not sure that really makes sense.”

Over to you: hit me with your bad ideas

I’ve found it really quite difficult to come up with examples of philosophy that I can reject as bad or wrong. So I’d love to hear your thoughts. Let me know in the comments which ideas you think are mad, bad or simply incomprehensible – and how you think they may have gained credence, anyway.