You’ve just written a book called How To Think Like a Philosopher. The immediate thought I have is that philosophers don’t all think the same way. How can you teach somebody to think like a philosopher?

That’s a very good point. I also think they don’t always think in the right ways. I wanted the subtitle to be ‘and when not to’ but there are marketing reasons why that was considered to be ill-judged. The short answer is that ‘how to think like some of the best philosophers think when they are thinking best’ is just too long. So there’s obviously an element of shorthand in the title.

It’s true that philosophers think differently from each other. That’s one of the things I wanted to get over in the book. You shouldn’t think that there’s a method that you can learn, which is like an algorithm for generating good arguments, and then you can just churn out the philosophy. There is a lot of other stuff going on. To learn to think like a philosopher is learning to think like the most philosophical version of you, if you like.

There’s a strong element of philosophy being a personal endeavour. You’ve interviewed a lot of philosophers, Nigel, and you would probably agree that whereas, on the one hand, philosophers are trying to get at the most accurate and correct understanding, on the other hand, there’s a lot of acknowledgement that they’re really trying to work things out for themselves and hope that other people agree that it resonates. So that element of it being a personal mission, I think, is something which sometimes gets lost when we try and emphasize the objective and Truth (with a capital T)-seeking things about it.

My way of putting it usually is that philosophy is not a spectator sport, that in order to do philosophy you have to do the same kinds of things that the great philosophers of the past and present have done and continue to do: argue, give reasons, put forward hypotheses, take account of counterexamples, explore alternative ways of understanding the same phenomena, sketching a vision of how things could be, those sorts of things that throughout history philosophers have done. If you’re studying philosophy at any level, you have to do some of these. It’s more like studying chemistry and getting a Bunsen burner out and heating chemicals than it is like studying literature or art history from a critical point of view. You can study literature without writing a poem or novel or play, and you can study art history without painting a picture, but you can’t study philosophy in any meaningful sense without engaging in argument and critical thought.

That’s true and the other thing is that you have to take responsibility for your own conclusions. You can’t just defer and say, ‘Well, Kant said this, and Kant is smarter than me so Kant is right.’ One of the weird things that I remember writing about in an editorial for the Philosophers’ Magazine once, is this rather disconcerting fact that although few of us would claim that we’re the smartest people in the world and are right about everything (and everyone else is wrong), as a matter of fact, that’s how we operate. We decide who we’re going to agree with, who we’re going to disagree with, and we come to our own conclusions. We do take our own view to be final. We don’t respect people who just say, ‘Look, I’m not the cleverest person, I’m just going to defer.’ If it’s something technical, you would do that. if it’s a purely empirical scientific matter about what’s the best method for heating lead, I would just ask an expert and say, ‘You’re right.’ But any kind of substantive issue which involves ethics, politics or values, we end up going with our own judgment. If you think about it, that’s quite an arrogant thing to do. So given that that’s more-or-less inescapable, we have a moral responsibility to do that as well as we can, and not just allow ourselves to settle for our preference.

So what are the key elements of thinking philosophically, from your perspective?

I wanted to shift the emphasis away from traditional critical thinking ‘tools’. We’ve both done this actually, you’ve got your Thinking from A to Z, an excellent little book. I co-authored The Philosopher’s Toolkit. There are other books like this too. They tend to emphasize the more formal aspects of good reasoning, validity, soundness, spotting fallacies, all this kind of thing. Over the years, I’ve become more and more convinced that a really important element of good thinking is the attitudes we bring to it. It’s actually becoming a thing— ‘Virtue Epistemology.’ Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. So the idea is that to think well, you’ve got to approach your subject matter with certain kinds of ethical values and virtues. Bernard Williams’s last book was all about this. It was called Truth and Truthfulness. I didn’t include it in my choices here, but I almost did. He says that sincerity and accuracy are two virtues and if you want to think well, the primary thing you’ve got to start out with is the sincere desire to understand things as they really are, which overrides any kind of desire you might have to be right or to not be discombobulated or whatever it might be. The accuracy part is, again, a genuine attempt to try and get things as right as you can, both the facts and your steps in reasoning.

It sounds really simple, but I think not enough people take it to heart, and if you do approach your thinking with sincerity and accuracy, and you have reasonable intelligence, you’re very likely to understand things well and properly more often than not. Whereas you could be the cleverest person in the world, but if you don’t have those drives, if you don’t really focus on those desires for sincerity and accuracy, you will just be generating very, very clever arguments for whatever conclusions you want to reach.

That might be true of lots of subjects, not just philosophy. Do you pull out anything distinctive about philosophy? Because I think there are things which are distinctive about philosophy.

In a way, there’s nothing distinctive about philosophy. I think the thing that really distinguishes philosophy is simply that you are relying entirely on clear and good thinking. There’s no special information base. You do have to get your facts right and so you have to make sure you’ve got the right information. But in every other kind of discipline, they have their own unique methods or knowledge bases—the archaeological record, experiments in the laboratory, observations of populations and so forth. Whereas philosophy is, unusually, thinking without a safety net—that is how I sometimes put it. You really are relying on thinking alone to a degree that is unusual. I don’t like to overstate that, because I don’t like it when philosophers make out they’re the only people who do this kind of critical thinking. It’s very insulting to people from other disciplines. But I think we are unusually dependent upon it, and therefore there’s an extreme focus on it.

I suppose one aspect is that philosophers often challenge things which other people take for granted. Things which it might seem stupid to question in other disciplines, because they are the very foundations of those disciplines. It even pulls the rug from its own feet regularly.

I’ve got two reasons for not wanting to push that. One is that in other disciplines people do a heck of a lot of questioning. So my former colleague on The Philosophers’ Magazine, Jeremy Stangroom, used to get quite angry when philosophers said, ‘Oh, the thing about philosophers is that we question fundamental assumptions in a way that other people don’t.’ Having done a sociology PhD, he knew that sociologists question their own assumptions. He thought they did it all the time and that it was a philosophical illusion that philosophers were the only people to do it.

The other thing is, I’m not sure how well philosophers actually do question their own assumptions. A lot of the time, certainly in professional philosophy, people get settled into a certain way of doing philosophy and they accept certain assumptions. As a result, they can be totally dismissive of anything which doesn’t resemble it. A lot of the reason I knew virtually nothing about non-Western philosophy until recently was because Western philosophers thought that they knew what philosophy looked like. This stuff didn’t look like philosophy and therefore they didn’t have to read it. That doesn’t really seem to me to be indicative of people who really question their assumptions.

We’re going off on a sidetrack here, but I’ve got several things to say in response to that. First of all, Jeremy is thinking like a philosopher when he questions assumptions; whether it’s unique to philosophy is another question. I don’t think you have to accept the academic pigeonholing where sociologists can’t really be philosophers. Durkheim and Marx are important to sociology and they both are very philosophical at times. The other thing is that, as you said earlier, you’re interested in people who do this really well. Just because some philosophers aren’t very good at questioning their own assumptions, it doesn’t mean that that’s not a characteristically philosophical thing to do.

There are certain philosophical things which non-philosophers do very well. And there are certain philosophical things that certain philosophers don’t do so well. So I don’t think philosophy should claim ownership of any of this kind of stuff. But you see more of it, perhaps more commonly, than you do elsewhere.