Michael: Most people think philosophy is just a bunch of old guys in togas asking unanswerable questions. What if the most rigorous philosophy today operates more like a high-stakes science lab, complete with experiments, models, and brutal peer review? That's the provocative claim we're exploring. Kevin: A science lab? I picture dusty books and maybe a nice armchair, not beakers and lab coats. That feels like a total rebranding of the entire field. Where is this idea coming from? Michael: And it all comes from the book Doing Philosophy by Timothy Williamson. Kevin: Williamson... isn't he a big deal at Oxford? Like, a top logician? Michael: Exactly. He's the Wykeham Professor of Logic, one of the most prestigious philosophy chairs in the world. And in this book, which is surprisingly accessible and has stirred up quite a bit of debate, he argues that philosophy isn't dead or irrelevant. It's a living, breathing science that starts with something we all have: common sense. Kevin: Okay, "common sense" and "philosophy" in the same sentence. That already feels like a contradiction. Michael: Well, this idea of starting with common sense is where Williamson kicks everything off, because he argues philosophy has a serious identity crisis.

Michael: For centuries, philosophy has been on the defensive. First, natural science broke away and started answering questions about the physical world with incredible success. This provoked what Williamson calls a "crisis of philosophical method." What was left for philosophy to do? Kevin: Right. If you want to know what stars are made of, you ask an astrophysicist, not a philosopher. So what's the philosopher's job? Michael: Williamson’s answer is that philosophy tackles questions of stupendous generality. But to do that, you can't just invent a perfect, clean starting point. You have to start from where you are, with the beliefs and knowledge you already have. He tells this great little story to illustrate the point. Kevin: Oh, I like a good story. Michael: A traveller is lost in the countryside and asks a local for directions to a faraway village. The local thinks for a moment and says, "Well, if I were going there, I wouldn’t start from here." Kevin: Haha, that's the most unhelpful advice ever. It's funny, but it's also completely useless. You have to start from where you are. Michael: Precisely. And for any inquiry, whether it's science or philosophy, our starting point is our shared "common sense." We have no choice. But this is where the identity crisis deepens, because not everyone respects common sense. The famous philosopher Bertrand Russell once dismissively called it "the metaphysics of savages." Kevin: "The metaphysics of savages"? Wow, that's harsh. He's basically saying it's a primitive, un-evolved way of thinking. Michael: Exactly. It's this idea that common sense is riddled with prejudice, superstition, and falsehoods. And Williamson agrees that it can be. He makes a crucial distinction between common-sense belief and common-sense knowledge. A lot of what a society calls common sense is just widely held belief, and it can be dead wrong. Kevin: And dangerously wrong, I'd imagine. Michael: Extremely. Williamson brings up a chilling modern example: Tony Blair's justification for the Iraq War. The initial claim was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. After the invasion, none were found. In 2004, Blair defended his decision, and his defense boiled down to a single, terrifying sentence. Kevin: What did he say? Michael: He said, "I only know what I believe." Kevin: Whoa. That gives me chills. He shifted the justification from evidence in the world to his own internal conviction. It’s a retreat from facts into pure belief. Michael: And that's the danger of unexamined "common sense" or gut feelings. It's starting from where you are, but never questioning if your starting point is solid ground or quicksand. This is why Williamson argues that while philosophy starts with common sense, it can't end there. It needs a rigorous set of tools to test, refine, and sometimes demolish those starting beliefs. Kevin: Okay, that makes sense. So common sense is both the necessary launchpad and a potentially faulty one. You can't escape it, but you have to be deeply suspicious of it. How do you even begin to navigate that tension? Michael: You navigate it with a specific set of tools. The first, and most controversial, is what Williamson calls disputing—basically, a good old-fashioned argument.

Kevin: A good old-fashioned argument? That sounds less like a science lab and more like a family dinner at Thanksgiving. Michael: Williamson describes it as something far more intense. He points to the Q&A session after a philosophy lecture. He says it's not a polite chat; it's "gladiatorial combat." The audience's job is to rigorously attack the speaker's argument—to find counterexamples, logical fallacies, and ambiguities. It's an adversarial process designed to stress-test an idea to its breaking point. Kevin: Okay, but that sounds incredibly intimidating. Critics of Williamson, and I've seen this in reviews of the book, say this adversarial style can reward aggressive bullies over actual insight. Is it really about finding truth, or is it just about winning the argument? Michael: That's the central criticism, and Williamson acknowledges the danger. He agrees it can devolve into ego and point-scoring. But he argues that the alternative is worse: a culture so polite that bad ideas from prestigious people go unchallenged. He tells a fantastic story about a famous Nietzsche scholar. Kevin: Let's hear it. Michael: This scholar was giving a lecture, arguing that Nietzsche's philosophy should radically transform your life, that it's not just some academic theory. He was passionate, convincing. Then, during the Q&A, an undergraduate student stands up and asks a simple question. Kevin: What was the question? Michael: He basically said, "If this philosophy is so life-changing, why are you living the most conventional life imaginable—as a tenured professor, giving academic lectures for a salary?" Kevin: Ouch. That's a direct hit. How did the scholar respond? Michael: He dismissed it out of hand. He said, "I don’t see the relevance of that question." But the entire audience saw the relevance. The student, through a simple, adversarial question, exposed a massive contradiction at the heart of the scholar's own presentation. That, for Williamson, is why disputation is essential. It keeps everyone honest. Michael: But it's not just about arguing. The second tool is clarification. Philosophers are notorious for this. The old joke is that a philosopher's answer to any question is, "It all depends on what you mean by..." Kevin: Right, like the famous radio philosopher C.E.M. Joad. That was his catchphrase. It can feel like they're just avoiding the question. Michael: It can, but Williamson argues it's fundamental. He gives the example of a mountain guide. A client tells him the temperature is "10 degrees." The guide asks, "Fahrenheit or Celsius?" The client gets annoyed and says, "A degree is a degree!" The conversation is at a standstill because one word has two very different meanings. Clarifying isn't avoiding the issue; it's making sure everyone is even talking about the same issue. Kevin: Okay, that's a fair point. But the most fascinating tool you mentioned was experiments. How can a philosopher, without a lab, run an experiment? Michael: They run them in the most powerful laboratory of all: the human imagination. They're called thought experiments. And they aren't just navel-gazing; they are precision tools designed to dismantle a theory. One of the most famous and powerful is Judith Jarvis Thomson's "Violinist" thought experiment. Kevin: I'm ready. This sounds wild. Michael: Thomson designed it in 1971 to test a common argument against abortion. The argument is simple: a fetus is a person, and every person has a right to life, therefore abortion is morally impermissible. Thomson grants the first two points for the sake of argument. She says, okay, let's assume a fetus is a person with a right to life. Kevin: So she's accepting the core premise of the opposing view. That's a bold move. Michael: It is. Then she asks you to imagine this: You wake up in a hospital bed. You feel groggy. You look over, and you are connected by a series of tubes to another person in the bed next to you. He is unconscious. A doctor comes in and explains that this is a world-famous violinist with a rare kidney ailment. The Society of Music Lovers discovered you are the only person in the world with the right blood type to save him. So, they kidnapped you in your sleep and plugged his circulatory system into yours. Your kidneys are now filtering his blood. Kevin: What? That's insane! And horrifying. Michael: The doctor then tells you the bad news: if you unplug him, he will die. But if you remain plugged in for nine months, his body will recover, and you can both go on your way. The question is: are you morally obligated to stay plugged in? Kevin: Wow. Okay. My gut, my immediate, visceral reaction is: absolutely not. They kidnapped me! I have a right to my own body. I would feel terrible about it, but I would unplug him. Michael: And that's the reaction most people have. But think about what that means for the original argument. The violinist is a person. He has a right to life. Yet, most of us feel you have the right to unplug him, to withdraw the use of your body, even if it causes his death. Kevin: So the thought experiment doesn't say abortion is right or wrong. It just shows that the statement "a person's right to life is absolute and always outweighs another person's bodily autonomy" is not as simple as it seems. It breaks the argument. Michael: It breaks the argument. It reveals a hidden complexity. It forces you to confront the principles in a new, visceral way. That's the power of a philosophical thought experiment. You use an imaginary scenario to test a real-world principle. Kevin: That is a much more powerful tool than I ever imagined. It's not just a silly hypothetical. It's a targeted strike against a logical claim. Michael: Exactly. Thought experiments break down absolute claims. And that leads to Williamson's most radical idea: maybe philosophy shouldn't be looking for absolute, exceptionless laws at all. Maybe it should be building models, just like science.

Kevin: Model-building? What does that even mean in philosophy? I get how an economist builds a model of the market, but how does a philosopher build a model of, say, justice? Michael: It’s a huge shift in thinking. For a long time, philosophy operated on a "conjectures and refutations" model. A philosopher would propose a universal law, like "Knowledge is justified true belief." Then another philosopher would find one tiny, weird counterexample—like a man seeing a cloud of flies he mistakes for smoke, but there happens to be a fire nearby anyway—and the entire theory would be declared dead. Kevin: That sounds incredibly brittle. One crack and the whole thing shatters. Michael: It is. Williamson says this is a disservice to philosophy. He suggests we look at how other sciences handle complexity. They build models. He uses the classic Lotka-Volterra model of predator-prey populations as an analogy. Kevin: The one with the foxes and the rabbits? Michael: That's the one. The model is a set of simple mathematical equations that describe how the fox and rabbit populations interact. When there are lots of rabbits, the fox population grows. When the fox population grows, they eat too many rabbits, and the rabbit population crashes. Then the foxes starve, their population crashes, and the rabbits can recover. It creates a cycle. Kevin: Right, I remember that from biology class. Michael: But here’s the key: is that model true? In a strict sense, no. It's completely false. It ignores weather, disease, other predators, changes in vegetation, human hunters... it ignores almost everything about the real world. Kevin: Ah, I see! So if it were a philosophical theory, someone would say, "Aha! Your model didn't account for a harsh winter! Your theory is refuted!" Michael: Precisely. But scientists don't do that. They know the model is a simplification. Its value isn't in being a perfect, exceptionless law. Its value is that it isolates a core dynamic—the relationship between predator and prey—and reveals a profound truth about how that system behaves. It points us towards genuine understanding, even though it's technically false. Kevin: So a philosophical model, for something like 'knowledge' or 'justice,' doesn't have to be perfect to be useful? It just has to reveal something true about the underlying system of how we think or how society functions? Michael: That's the revolutionary idea. A model can have counterexamples and still be incredibly valuable. It's a more robust, more creative, and more progressive way to do philosophy. You're not trying to write the final, unbreakable law of the universe. You're trying to build a better, more insightful model of our experience. It's about making progress, not achieving perfection. Kevin: That feels so much more... productive. It takes philosophy out of the business of "gotcha" refutations and into the business of constructive building. It's a shift from demolition to architecture. Michael: A perfect way to put it. It's about building these intellectual structures that we can play with, manipulate, and learn from, knowing they are just models, but powerful ones nonetheless.

Kevin: So, after all this, what is philosophy for? Is it just a better way to argue or a new way to build theories? Michael: I think Williamson's answer is that it's a way of thinking that embraces its connection to the messy, real world. It's not an escape into abstraction. It starts with our common sense, our shared human experience, but it refuses to leave it unexamined. Kevin: It sharpens it. Michael: It sharpens it with rigorous tools like logic and debate, and it uses the power of imagination not to escape reality, but to build better models of it. It’s the fundamental science of questioning our own assumptions. And as Williamson says in the book's conclusion, that drive to understand, to question, to go deeper—that drive and that determination will not easily become extinct. Kevin: It’s a fundamental part of being a curious human. Michael: It is. And it leaves us with a powerful question, one for everyone listening to take with them. Kevin: What's that? Michael: What's one 'common sense' belief you hold—about work, relationships, politics, anything—that might not survive a rigorous philosophical stress test? Kevin: That’s a great one to chew on. And a little scary to ask yourself honestly. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Find us on our socials and share what you came up with. Let's get the discussion going. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.