Sometimes, they are even divided on psychological questions that psychologists have already answered: Philosophers are split evenly on the question of whether it’s possible to make a moral judgment without being motivated to abide by that judgment, even though we already know that this is possible for some people with damage to their brain’s reward system, for example many Parkinson’s patients, and patients with damage to the ventromedial frontal cortex (Schroeder et al. 2012).1
This isn’t an area about which I know very much about but my understanding is that very few philosophers actually hold to a version of internalism which is disproven by these sorts of cases (even fewer than you might expect because those people that do hold to such a view tend to get commented on more often because “look how empirical evidence disproves this philosophical view” is a popular paper writing strategy and so people hunt for a target and then attack it, even if that target is not a good representation of the general perspective). As I said, not my area of expertise so I’m happy to be proben wrong on this.
I know you mention this sort of issue in the footnote but I think that still runs the risk of being misleading and making it seem that philosophers on mass hold a view that they (AFAIK) don’t. This is particularly likely to happen because you cite a survey of philosophers in the same breath.
In general, I find that academic philosophy is far less bad than people on LW seem to think it is, in a large part because of a tendency on LW to focus on fringe views instead of mainstream views amongst philosophers and to misinterpret the meaning of words used by philosophers in a technical manner.
This isn’t an area about which I know very much about but my understanding is that very few philosophers actually hold to a version of internalism which is disproven by these sorts of cases (even fewer than you might expect because those people that do hold to such a view tend to get commented on more often because “look how empirical evidence disproves this philosophical view” is a popular paper writing strategy and so people hunt for a target and then attack it, even if that target is not a good representation of the general perspective). As I said, not my area of expertise so I’m happy to be proben wrong on this.
I know you mention this sort of issue in the footnote but I think that still runs the risk of being misleading and making it seem that philosophers on mass hold a view that they (AFAIK) don’t. This is particularly likely to happen because you cite a survey of philosophers in the same breath.
In general, I find that academic philosophy is far less bad than people on LW seem to think it is, in a large part because of a tendency on LW to focus on fringe views instead of mainstream views amongst philosophers and to misinterpret the meaning of words used by philosophers in a technical manner.