I guess there might be a selection effect: ‘mature philosophers’ might have spent a lot of time hashing our their views at earlier stages (e.g. undergrad, graduate school). So it may not be that surprising to find in the subject of their expertise their credences on the issues are highly resilient such that they change their mind rarely, and only after considerable amounts of evidence gathered over a long time.
Good data would be whether outside of this whether these people are good at hashing out cases where they have less resilient credences, but these cases will seldom come up publicly (Putnam and Russell are famed for changing their view often, but it is unclear how much ‘effort’ that took or whether it depended on interlocutors). I can offer my private experience of some of these exceptional philosophers that they are exceptional at this, but I anticipate reasonable hesitance of this type of private evidence.
I guess there might be a selection effect: ‘mature philosophers’ might have spent a lot of time hashing our their views at earlier stages (e.g. undergrad, graduate school). So it may not be that surprising to find in the subject of their expertise their credences on the issues are highly resilient such that they change their mind rarely, and only after considerable amounts of evidence gathered over a long time.
Good data would be whether outside of this whether these people are good at hashing out cases where they have less resilient credences, but these cases will seldom come up publicly (Putnam and Russell are famed for changing their view often, but it is unclear how much ‘effort’ that took or whether it depended on interlocutors). I can offer my private experience of some of these exceptional philosophers that they are exceptional at this, but I anticipate reasonable hesitance of this type of private evidence.