[tMcGrath]

In this case that's not true though - the article is about someone who used critical thinking/reasoning skills to make a huge amount of money, and credits this in large part to his training in philosophy.

It's possible, of course, that Miller is mistaken about the origin of his critical thinking ability (or just got lucky, and there's no ability to credit), however on balance this seems like a strong piece of anecdata in favour of the hypothesis.

I'm interested what would constitute empirical evidence for/against the claim "philosophy helps improve critical thinking". Are there accepted standardised measures of this?

[igravious]

People who study carpentry tend to be better carpenters than people who study accounting. One of the aims of philosophy as a discipline is to instil the discipline of critical thinking, that's the purported business of philosophy after all. Would you ask someone who had studied carpentry for empirical evidence that studying carpentry produces people more skilled in the carpentry than if they had not studied it?

[somestag]

> Would you ask someone who had studied carpentry for empirical evidence that studying carpentry produces people more skilled in the carpentry than if they had not studied it?

Yes I would, if it seemed to me that an awful lot of people who had studied carpentry were mediocre carpenters, while many who hadn't studied carpentry were excellent carpenters. I would start to question the usefulness of carpentry study.

I don't think we should accept that the study of philosophy improves critical thinking just because that is "one of the aims" of philosophy as a discipline. (One of the aims of homeopathic medicine is to cure disease, after all.) I certainly accept that you'd have a very hard time going through a philosophy program without ever thinking critically, but I'd say the same thing about a student in a comparative literature program.

I also think it's very hard to teach philosophy well, and that a poorly taught philosophy course can easily detract from critical thinking rather than bolster it. I took my share of philosophy courses as an undergrad, and a good half of them were glorified history classes with strong implications that certain viewpoints were "wrong" and others were "right." I suppose you could say those courses were not really philosophy courses if they were taught that way, but then I would say it's unfair to say that philosophy education improves critical thinking if you will only admit examples where it does so.

[igravious]

> Yes I would, if it seemed to me that an awful lot of people who had studied carpentry were mediocre carpenters, while many who hadn't studied carpentry were excellent carpenters. I would start to question the usefulness of carpentry study.

Well that's not really the point, is it? The point is that on average the person who studied carpentry is better than someone who hadn't studied it at all.

> I don't think we should accept that the study of philosophy improves critical thinking just because that is "one of the aims" of philosophy as a discipline. (One of the aims of homeopathic medicine is to cure disease, after all.) I certainly accept that you'd have a very hard time going through a philosophy program without ever thinking critically, but I'd say the same thing about a student in a comparative literature program.

That's actually rather insulting, you do realise that don't you? It's insulting in three different ways going by the way you've worded it. First, you've compared philosophy to something that is widely regarded as a pseudoscience (which is ironic considering that philosophy is that _very_ discipline that attempts to rigorously demarcate science from pseudoscience[0]). Second, this isn't something I'm making up–this is _central_ to what philosophy is methodologically about and has been since its inception. Third, It's more than likely you'd _fail_ a philosophy program if you didn't demonstrate critical thinking skills by the end of it. I've tutored philosophy students so I've witnessed first-hand the process whereby one tries to show a young person the difference between mere opinion and reasoned argument. With other disciplines (depending on the level) it's sort of assumed that one already has critical thinking skills or that at least they'll develop along the way. A core remit of philosophy is to think about what it means to think critically and therefore by bringing attention and awareness to this the student ought to develop that faculty.

> I also think it's very hard to teach philosophy well, and that a poorly taught philosophy course can easily detract from critical thinking rather than bolster it. I took my share of philosophy courses as an undergrad, and a good half of them were glorified history classes with strong implications that certain viewpoints were "wrong" and others were "right." I suppose you could say those courses were not really philosophy courses if they were taught that way, but then I would say it's unfair to say that philosophy education improves critical thinking if you will only admit examples where it does so.

I'm sorry your experience was sub-par. Certainly what I am pointing out to you is an ideal. I freely admit that it is always possible to not reach this ideal but then that's just normal human failings.

---

Having said that, there is a reference to an quasi-empirical study and meta-analysis here but I think the results are inconclusive[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem

[1] http://dailynous.com/2015/10/22/does-philosophy-improve-crit...

[somestag]

Maybe I didn't make it clear, but my point on the carpentry thing was that it's not clear to me that the average philosophy student is much better at critical thinking than the average, say, history student. My response to the carpentry analogy was to say that if the benefits of carpentry education were equally anecdotal and unclear, I would absolutely question its usefulness.

My comparisons weren't meant to be insulting—they were meant to clearly show why a field intending to do something doesn't mean we should assume it succeeds. And, even if it does succeed, we can't assume it's uniquely successful. I'm sure you'd agree that homeopathy doesn't succeed at its central goal, and that comparative literature also succeeds at teaching critical thinking skills. The claim is that more people should study philosophy, not that more people should study one of several fields in the liberal arts. I really don't feel it's insulting to question this.

For what it's worth, I'm in the pro-philosophy camp, so maybe that will help put my questioning into perspective.

As for your third point, I myself said you'd have a "very hard time going through a philosophy program without thinking critically," so we're in agreement in that you'd fail if you could not thinking critically at all. That on its own doesn't do anything to imply that the philosophy program teaches critical thinking, though. You'd fail a programming exam if you couldn't program, but the exam does not teach programming. I'm not even trying to split hairs here: philosophy certainly wouldn't be the only subject that, in practice, failed to teach its own requirements.

Which is what brought me to my final point about education. It's basically impossible to argue about what philosophy should do in an ideal world, because we all agree that everything should be great and ideally confers as many benefits as possible. I think that, in practice, philosophy education is a very mixed bag, and that this is very relevant when recommending to people that they pursue philosophy education. You could say the same about many subjects, but I think philosophy is somewhat unique in that the benefits are quite elusive without the right education to confer them.