S5 E8 - Philip Kitcher on Philosophy for Science and the Common Good

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Professor Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and one of the most influential philosophers of science of the past half-century.

Kitcher traces his intellectual journey from his early years at Cambridge and Princeton, where he studied with Thomas Kuhn, Carl Hempel, and Paul Benacerraf, to his later interventions in public debates over creationism, sociobiology, and the Human Genome Project. These experiences, he explains, shifted his understanding of philosophy’s role—from narrow technical problems to broader ethical and political questions.

He also reflects on his evolving views of scientific explanation, his collaborations with historians and sociologists of science, and the recognition of ethical and political dimensions long neglected in philosophy of science. Kitcher concludes with his vision of a pragmatist philosophy that reconnects ethics with politics and ensures science serves democratic ideals and human flourishing in the face of global crises.

In this episode, Kitcher:

• Recounts his path from mathematics to philosophy of science at Cambridge and Princeton
• Reflects on the influence of Thomas Kuhn, Carl Hempel, Paul Benacerraf, and Richard Rorty
• Explains how public debates on creationism, sociobiology, and genomics redirected his work toward questions of science and society
• Discusses his shift from unificationist to pluralist accounts of scientific explanation
• Highlights the importance of history and sociology of science for philosophy’s self-understanding
• Argues for philosophy’s responsibility to address ethical and political dimensions of science
• Outlines his pragmatist vision for democracy, ethics, and science in the service of human flourishing
  
  

Relevant Links

• Philip Kitcher – Columbia University profile (emeritus)
• Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2001)
• The Rich and the Poor (Columbia University Press, 2021)

Transcript coming soon

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This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.

Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org

Transcript

Philip Kitcher on Philosophy for Science and the Common Good

Welcome to the HPS podcast where we explore all things history, philosophy, and social studies of science.

It is a privilege to introduce today's guest, Professor Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University. Philip's career spans an extraordinary range. He has written on the philosophy of mathematics, biology and scientific explanation, while also engaging deeply with democracy, ethics, and the pragmatist tradition of John Dewey. His work often crosses boundaries, drawing insights from literature, music, and the broader cultural life of science.

In this episode, Philip reflects on his intellectual journey from his early student days at Cambridge and Princeton where he studied with figures such as Thomas Kuhn and Carl Hempel, to his later public interventions in debates over creationism, sociobiology, and the Human Genome Project.

These experiences, he tells us, reshaped his sense of philosophy's role, moving it beyond the seminar room toward public engagement with urgent, ethical and political questions.

Along the way, Philip reconsidered core issues in philosophy of science, shifting from a unificationist view of explanation to a more pluralistic outlook, and broadened his perspective through close collaboration with historians and sociologists of science.

Finally, he shares his vision for the future of philosophy. How it can help us rethink democracy, reconnect ethics with politics, and ensure that science serves the common good in the face of today's global crises.

____________________

Thomas Spiteri: Philip, thank you so much for joining us today On the HPS podcast.

Philip Kitcher: You're very welcome. 

Thomas Spiteri: I'd like to start with your path into the philosophy of science, going back to your student days. Why philosophy, why history and philosophy of science? Could we go back to the beginning?

[00:01:53]

Philip Kitcher: Okay. That's very easy. I went to Cambridge intending to become a mathematician. I'd done well in mathematics when I was at school, and I went to do the mathematics tripos, and I found it actually quite easy to do the problems. I did fine on the exams, but I found it more and more boring.

One day I went to a supervision and my supervisor, who was a don at Christ College where I was, said to me, 'Look, if you go on like this, you'll end up like me,' and said, 'I'm only in Cambridge for the music'. This is true, he was actually an algebraic topologist who had a second career as a musicologist.

So, he sent me off to see a friend of his, who was a historian of science – a historian of astronomy, and I felt, well, I'm not gonna do my third year by doing mathematics. I'll do history and philosophy of science, and I thought I'd become a historian of science. But then I read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and decided that what I really wanted to do was philosophy of science.

I went off to Princeton knowing no philosophy – virtually no philosophy! And I worked with, Kuhn, a bit, although Kuhn at that stage was not really very keen on teaching philosophers. He'd had a very bad experience the term before I arrived in giving a graduate seminar in philosophy, and he basically vowed he would never teach another graduate seminar in philosophy at Princeton again. I did take history of science courses with him, but not philosophy. Hempel and Richard Grandy and Clark Glymore looked after me and sort of shepherded me through, and Paul Benacerraf trained me and I ended up doing, starting off in philosophy of mathematics. 

[00:03:40]

Thomas Spiteri:  It's quite an impressive range of thinkers to encounter as a student. Looking back, did any of them stand out as especially influential in your thinking? And at the time, did you feel pulled between their different approaches? 

Philip Kitcher: Well, Kuhn has had enormous influence on me, but so has Hempel. Interestingly, they were very, very good and close colleagues. They liked one another, they admired one another and they worked very well together. I would say those two were tremendously influential. Paul Benacerraf, my thesis advisor – well one of my thesis advisors, because Michael Mahoney, the historian, was also a co-advisor on my thesis. Paul Benacerraf really sort of got me. Taught me how to think clearly and rigorously. And I owe a lot, to both Dick Grandy and to Clark Glymore because I think they contributed a great deal to my training when I was, especially, in my first and second years at Princeton. So, a lot of these people have had tremendous influence.

Oddly, another influence was Dick Rorty, who most philosophers of science don't cite with approval. But Rorty was actually, I thought, doing very interesting things when I was at Princeton, and he has left a mark on me. And I think much of my more recent thinking about the role of science in democracy resonates with things that Dick was, I think ahead of his time on.

Certainly, the pragmatism, which I've come to see as important, as it were; I've discovered, just as Monsieur Jourdain discovered he'd been speaking prose all his life, I discovered I'd been a pragmatist all my life. And that of course also was probably one of the things that I responded to in Dick's work.

[00:05:34]

Thomas Spiteri:  You mentioned The Structure of Scientific Revolutions having an influence on you; could you unpack that a little more? Do you remember what it was about that book that made such an impression on you at the time?

Philip Kitcher: I do, I think it just struck me as an incredibly exciting book. And the idea that immediately came to me when I read it is: how can you do something like this for the case of mathematics? Is mathematics utterly different? Or is the kind of thing that Kuhn has seen, you know, the initial struggles, the pre-paradigm confusions, the starting in on a paradigm where certain things get taken for granted and other things get completely excluded.

That idea, the idea that there comes a moment in the career of some form of inquiry where you decide: no, not everything is up for grabs. We know this is the framework and we don't admit this kind of option, that we are never gonna think about that. That kind of thing struck me as an immensely powerful idea, and it seemed actually right to me from what I knew about the ways in which mathematicians and physicists – I knew more physics then than any other science – operate. And so, I found this incredibly convincing.

Later on, of course, because it was so fashionable in the late sixties and seventies to think of Kuhn as this awful relativist who was threatening scientific reason and all the rest of it; then, I mean, Princeton was very good at teaching me that that was the way to think about it. I actually think that's completely wrong now, but we all sort of tended to buy into that in the wake of those early critiques of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I think Kuhn was actually much smarter, much cleverer, and much wiser than his critics took him to be.

[00:07:33]

Thomas Spiteri:  Over your career, have there been moments — whether political, cultural, or intellectual — that made you rethink philosophy's public role? Which philosophical tools came to the fore in those moments?

Philip Kitcher: I think one of the most crucial moments for me was actually, it came from a student; and I've told this story before, so some of the people listening to this conversation may say, oh, not again! I was teaching philosophy of science at the University of Vermont and a student came into my office hours, rather timidly, and said to me: you keep using these examples from physics and occasional ones from chemistry; but most of us who are taking your class are actually, we tend to go to medical school and we're doing biology – could you possibly give us some examples from biology? I didn't tell him that I had never, ever taken any course in biology in my life! But I thought, okay, this is a perfectly reasonable request, I should do something about this. 

I went to the library and David Hull's book Philosophy of Biological Science had just been published. I took it out of the library, and I went home and I started reading it. And I said to myself, this is utterly fascinating! Absolutely, utterly fascinating! So I set out learning biology; there were some very friendly biologists who helped me a lot, and I read a lot and I went on my first sabbatical to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, and worked with Steve Gould and Dick Lewontin and Ernst Mayr, all of whom were immensely hospitable and friendly, and from whom I learned a tremendous amount.

Anyway, in the course of doing this, in the late seventies, before I went to Harvard, I'd gotten sick with the flu and there was nothing I could do except watch TV. I was flipping through TV Guide looking for something that might distract me from my miseries, and I saw this one-page ad for a book called The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth.

This was a creationist book, and you could send off for it, and they'd send it to you for free. I sent off for it, it came, I started to read it, and I had this awful moment. I said, you know, this is utter rubbish, but most of the people I know would be absolutely unable to tell why it was utter rubbish. So, I started giving talks on creationism and what was wrong with it. And then a publisher, Harry Stanton and his wife Betty, who founded Bradford books together, came to Vermont. He was working in Vermont, and we were having lunch and I was talking about creationism and they said, 'You've gotta write this, you've gotta write a book on it, you must write one right now!'. Because, in fact, Betty's daughter had actually been taken over by one of these cults, and they'd actually had to kidnap her from the cult to get her back out again. So, this was something that meant a lot to them: I thought, all right, I'll do it.

That actually was a very significant moment for me because it started me thinking that the task of philosophy of science wasn't just to answer the kinds of questions that philosophers in seminar rooms pose. It was also to do things with respect to the general public, and the seeds of my later work and my later concerns about science and the public, I think lie in that turn. It was that, and my work on sociobiology, my critique of sociobiology, which came a little bit later. That set me up, I think, to be invited to write the report that I wrote on the Human Genome Project in the 1990s. And it was writing that report, and the book that came out from it that actually got me realising that there were all of these important and difficult questions about the relationship between science and society. 

So, you can see it's a long and rambling story. It starts with complete serendipity. An undergraduate sort of gets me interested, I get sick, I come across this creationist rubbish. I then talk to somebody who's taking me out for lunch, and before I know it, I'm doing something completely different from what my mentors attended to do.

[00:12:15]

Thomas Spiteri:  I think that's a good segue into today's topic: why philosophy matters to science. It might be useful, I think, as a conversational device, not as a hard and fast distinction to speak about philosophy "of" science and philosophy "for" science. The former investigates science's conceptual underpinnings: what counts as explanation, evidence, progress, what's a real object of inquiry, these sorts of things. And the latter is concerned with the design and coordination of inquiry, so it serves human purposes. And these two strands are obviously interdependent.

Philip Kitcher: Yep, that's exactly right. That's the way I think about it.

Thomas Spiteri:  Starting with the "for" science, then. You've described philosophy elsewhere, generally speaking, as a synthetic discipline integrating insights from many fields into a coherent picture of where we stand, diagnosing problems and guiding improvement. In practice, how does that synthesis work? How can philosophers both interpret the sciences and help steer them toward shared human goals?

Philip Kitcher: One thing I want to say here is that thought about philosophy is a thought about philosophy in the largest sense. It's not really restricted to philosophy of science, and it's not particularly identified with philosophy of science. The thought is rather that what philosophy has given the general public, not scientists, just the general public, is a framework for making sense of many aspects of their experience based on the best knowledge of the time.

So, there's a sense in which there are all of these inquiries going in various directions. There are all of these areas of human life, and what philosophers have offered is a picture of how something fits to all of this stuff, or actually, not realistically all of it, but some significant part of it fits together. 

That's a very different kind of thing. I mean, I don't think that translates very easily to this question that you are posing about philosophy "for" science or philosophy "of" science. I think that in fact, those are different. There's a general approach for philosophers. They want to understand some of the features of science that works, you know, how it goes, as it were. And that's important and that can be helpful methodologically for scientists. 

But then there's also this strand in philosophy that tries to enter particular scientific debates. I think, for example, of the IQ debate that raged in the early 1970s and someone like Ned Block was incredibly good at working through that debate and helping scientists to see what was going on in it. So, a philosopher could come in there. 

I think that's the sort of thing that I did in the case of human sociobiology. My enterprise was very much like that of Dick Lewontin, Leon Kamin and Steven Rose, who wrote this excellent book Not in Our Genes. And in a certain sense that book and my book had a kind of synergy together, and I think they did a lot to affect the ways in which people in evolutionary biology and in the social sciences thought about human sociobiology. So – that's something very different. 

But the creationism thing is about trying to explain science for a broader, general public. There's a sense in which my audience, when I was writing about sociobiology, was a group of people who might have been pulled into this research program; I wanna say, 'Stop – don't do it this way!'. Whereas in the case of creationism, I was talking really to people in general, the general public. I was trying to explain why Darwinism wasn't subject to these kinds of critiques, which were very much dominant in thinking about, for example, education in high school science. So, these things are different.

[00:16:43]

Thomas Spiteri:  I see. In your book What's the Use of Philosophy, you call for a philosophy inside-out, in the Deweyan spirit of rebuilding philosophy to tackle real-world problems. If we put that vision into practice today, what specific roles should philosophers take alongside scientists?

Philip Kitcher: I think there's this explanatory role. And I think lots of philosophers are doing this, you see it in particular with respect to discussions of AI. Philosophers are stepping in and they are really, they're trying to say look, think about it this way rather than that way; be worried about this, don't be worried about that. These are really, I think, helpful interventions. So, that I think is one very important role. But there's also the important role of trying to help the practitioners with difficult debates. That's more the sort of thing I was doing with respect to human sociobiology.

It was very interesting because I think one group of people, the evolutionary anthropologists, as they then called themselves, actually got the message. Whereas I think many evolutionary psychologists thought, 'Look we gotta say a few different things'; but they didn't really understand the critique. And I think evolutionary psychology today is still a mess, precisely because some of the things that Lewontin, Kamin and Rose and I said, have not been appreciated fully. They got taken up by a very intelligent and sophisticated group of scientists, the evolutionary anthropologists, but they didn't really pass over into evolutionary psychology.

[00:18:35]

Thomas Spiteri:  On the one level, the philosopher of science is concerned with things like explanation and clarifying arguments, but there also seems to be a broader ethical responsibility in your work. How did you see the relationship between this ethical obligation and the more epistemological role of philosophy?

Philip Kitcher: In the case of creationism, there was clearly philosophical work to be done because there were all sorts of tacit assumptions about science and what it can do and what it is that were being exploited in the creationist critique, and that needed scrutiny. So, there was the, 'Well, they can't prove it' line on the on the part of the creationists. But there were also lots of mistakes in ruling certain things out, inhaling certain kinds of phenomena as relevant, that weren't. So, there was a whole sort of list of inferential and conceptual mistakes that I could expose in creationism. 

In the case of something like human sociobiology, that was much, much more subtle. There was a lot of neglect of alternative possibilities, which should have been recognised. There was a certain amount of failure to make various kinds of distinctions, which were relevant to whether our biology really formed us completely. I was able to expose some philosophical mistakes, but also to take philosophical ideas and use them in really diagnosing what count as genuine scientific mistakes in both of these cases. 

So, there was that, but there's also this issue about thinking about what science can do for humanity, what science can do for society. And that wasn't explicit in my thinking during the eighties at all. That really only came to me after I'd sort of gone to Washington, started talking to people about the Human Genome Project, and realised that there was this area in which you needed to do serious ethical work to understand how a particular scientific research venture could be developed for human good, and all sorts of ethical and political questions, which virtually every philosopher of science – I will except Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen Longino from this – but most of the rest of us are just completely, been completely, completely blind to this. You know, that's not what we do. We might write a little chapter on science and values at the end of, of some book, but we don't really do that stuff.

What was brought home to me by actually having to write a report about the prospects and the implications of the Human Genome Project was the fact that I was plunged into questions in ethics and political philosophy – that's an explicit realisation. Then, looking back at my own earlier work, I could say, yeah, but I've sort of been doing this all along. There's a sense in which that kind of imperative has been there. It's just I never recognised it before. 

[00:21:59]

Thomas Spiteri:  If we can move on to more traditional philosophy of science, in The Advancement of Science, you defended a unificationist approach to scientific explanation, valuing explanations that connect many phenomena through shared patterns. Where has this drive for unification clearly advanced understanding? And where might we need to resist it, preserving multiple models – if even incompatible, because they capture some different aspects of reality, or guide different inquiry?

Philip Kitcher: Okay. Very good question. I was a gung-ho unificationist, because I mean, originally this begins – and this will strike you, I think, as very odd. This actually begins from my work in the philosophy of mathematics. Because it came to me very early on this idea that proofs don't achieve certainty for us. That's a misunderstanding of what proofs are good for, but proofs produce understanding. And so, I wanted to just say there can be explanations in mathematics. Mathematical explanations aren't going to be in the business of tracing causes. 

What do they do if you can no longer appeal to the idea that you explain things in terms of causation; what's going on here? My work in the history of mathematics led me to the idea that mathematicians are always trying to unify things. They get terribly excited when they see ways of unifying two, what seemed to be separate domains. The great example is Euler's beautiful identity: e to the i pi equals minus one, right? All of a sudden you have this tremendous connection between the exponential logarithmic functions on the one hand and the trigonometric functions on the other. It's absolutely fantastic, you know: unification. Then I thought, well, if there's gonna be a general theory of explanation, it's gonna have to work for mathematics.

So why don't we try to understand causal connections and causal explanations in terms of unification? And there are fabulous examples of scientists in various sciences appealing to unification; unified field theory is what we want, right? Darwin explicitly says, 'My evidence for the theory of evolution by natural selection stems from the fact that it unifies the phenomena'. Lavoisier says roughly the same thing about chemical explanations – so, 'That's it, unification is the key to everything!'. 

Now, that was the gung-ho view that I took sort of about the time I was writing The Advancement of Science. But, unfortunately, it's wrong. And I came to realise it was wrong. And what I've now done is think that the problem went very deep in the theory of explanation.

It began when Hempel said way back in the early 1950s, 'One of the tasks of the philosophy of science is to provide a general theory of explanation'. There isn't any such thing as a general theory of explanation. There are lots of different kinds of explanations. Hempel saw this the wrong way around, I think. He saw it in terms of explanation producing understanding. I have come to think that what explanations do is they clear up misunderstandings. They don't take some sort of person who's in darkness and produce a condition of complete illumination. What they do is they take somebody who has a particular kind of puzzle about something and they solve that puzzle. And the puzzles are various. 

I've written a recent paper, which I actually haven't published yet, but it will appear at some point in the future, called the Theory of Scientific Explanation: An Obituary. And that's what it is: it's an obituary for this Hempelian idea. And so, it seems to me that yes, that we have to be pluralistic, and highly pluralistic about what counts as an explanation. It's not just that we might be pluralistic about different kinds of explanations for a particular phenomenon. We ought to be pluralistic about the idea that explanations are all of one type. 

[00:26:35]

Thomas Spiteri:  Philip, you've spent time in quite different institutional settings: Minnesota, with a more traditional philosophy of science culture and later UC San Diego, where philosophy and STS were closely connected. Did those contexts shape your philosophical outlook in different ways? 

Philip Kitcher: I would say that the Minnesota tradition is absolutely wonderful, and that was in a certain sense the tradition that shaped The Advancement of Science. The Advancement of Science was very much a book that tried to extend something like a historically informed logical empiricist philosophy of science into the modern context, into the context of that period, the 1980s and 1990s.

When I went to San Diego, I spent time talking with the sociologist of science, Andy Scull; we were very good friends. The two of us thought that it would be a very good idea to build a history, philosophy and sociology of science program there, and we persuaded the Dean of the graduate school about that.

We managed to hire Martin Rudwick and Steve Shapin, and that was absolutely wonderful. It was, in a certain sense, I was already going in that direction. I met Andy; Andy and I talked a lot about this possibility. We then managed to persuade two really wonderful scholars to come to UCSD, and really then, I would say that the four of us; Bob Westman also came around that time, so maybe I should say the five of us sort of started to build this. In a sense, we all sort of shaped one another.

One of the most remarkable things is that we had, from the beginning, once we started admitting graduate students into the program, we had a year-long seminar for those graduate students. Martin, Steve and I taught it the first year, and at the end of the year, we took all the students' final papers, and we took them home and we graded them. We came together for a meeting and our grades were identical: we had about 15 students, and we didn't differ in a single grade! That just completely, completely squelches the idea that philosophers, historians, and sociologists have different standards, or somehow don't have any resources for communicating.

But then, this other thing happened to me, which was the pull away from doing that kind of, basically still epistemologically oriented work with respect to the sciences, and towards the political and the ethical. It was really my brush with the Human Genome Project that did this. I realised that there were all of these fascinating questions, which philosophers had really neglected. I came to see that the struggles between sociology of science and philosophy of science to be the product of the neglect of the ethical, because it seems to me that what really moved a lot of people was that there was some kind of normativity that was not being acknowledged, because the only language in which that could be formulated was an epistemological one. 

You've got these sorts of trends within the social studies of science that tended to recast what I think as important normative value, theoretic questions, in epistemological dress. And that caused the so-called science wars I think, because these people were really onto something, but they were the only categories that were available to them; as it were, I think distorted the kind of critique that they wanted to make.

If I wanted to write a history of the interactions between history, philosophy, and sociology of science, I would try to work this out and show how it's led to both the initial various sort of programs, more or less strong programs in Edinburgh, Harry Collins and his group, and then Bruno Latour. All of this, it seems to me, then had to be rethought. When people like Collins and Latour began to think, 'Hey, wait a minute, we don't want to deprive science of its authority on the general public', you begin to see, I think, that there was a movement there in which something very important was growing up. It got miscast, and then there had to be a retraction later on because of the miscasting. So, you find Collins talking about expertise, you find Latour beginning to talk about the responsibilities of scientists to do this, that and the other thing. I think that's an interesting story; I hope somebody will someday tell the version I would like to tell. It won't be me! 

[00:32:01]

Thomas Spiteri:  I'm sure someone will tell that story! I was gonna ask you more broadly, what do you think philosophers can learn from engaging with history and sociology of science? How do you think this sort of engagement influenced the way that you were thinking about things like realism or scientific disagreement; these things that have kind of always been in the philosopher's wheelhouse? 

Philip Kitcher: Well, in a certain sense, I think that there were all sorts of challenges and things I had to think about. One thing I would say is that I don't think that when I was doing historically informed philosophy of science that I did it as well as people like Hasok Chang and Michela Massimi have done it. I think what they have done is orders of magnitude better than what my generation of historians and philosophers of science got away with. I mean, our history was much thinner and much less methodologically sophisticated than what you see in Hasok's writing and Michela's writings.

I do think both Hasok and Michela have shown that there's a real future for philosophy engaging with history, that you can learn an immense amount from deep mining of historical episodes. I think what they have shown is that philosophers can do better at addressing the sensibilities and sensitivities of historians than my generation of historians and philosophers of science did.

The interesting thing about the sociology of science is, I think, that this is something that I now see in terms of an engagement from the beginning with ethics and politics. One has to come to terms from the very beginning that we value science because we think of it as promoting the human good, and I don't think that the human good is to be identified with the pure contemplation of scientific truth. That I think was something that was a deep point that the sociologists of science saw, that what it's actually all about is the ways in which science impinges and is impinged upon by the ethical and political culture that surrounds it. 

There's this interactive process which came to me, and I started to try to theorise in the late 1990s, and this came out in Science, Truth and Democracy, which is, I think, the work that is, as it were, the fulcrum around which my career turns. That's where it all tips and starts going in a different direction and in which many, I think still many of my philosophical colleagues would say, 'That's when you went mad'.

[00:34:58]

Thomas Spiteri:  In that book, Science, Truth and Democracy, you propose well-ordered science, where an informed citizenry would choose research priorities. What principles justify steering or stopping research; and in non-ideal institutions, who should have that authority?

Philip Kitcher: I think actually we need to change the institutional structure. What, of course, that book and actually my work on sociobiology raised for me, was the question of how we think about the good. If it is indeed the case that, in the genome case, we face the question of how do we make sure that this research develops in ways that promote the human good? That was a very concrete question that those of us who thought about the genome project were asked. In the case of sociobiology, the question arose from Wilson's famous comment that, 'The time has come for ethics to be taken out of the hands of the philosophers and biologicised,' he says.

Well, I had objected to the ways in which Wilson and his followers thought about ethics. I'd argued in my sociobiology book that they were too crude. But then, I said to myself, I heard this little voice whisper in my ear, 'Okay, so how do you connect ethics and evolution?'. So, I had a completely separate project on my mind for, you know, the better part of quarter-of-a-century, which was how you make sense of ethics in light of the fact that there are ethical practices, is historical, and that our ethics has somehow evolved.

Those two things came together after I wrote Science, Truth and Democracy: really what is a naturalistic, evolutionary, historical approach to the human good? And that came in a book that I think was very important for me, and very important for my development: the ethical project.

So that then turns into something that makes well-ordered science look like the tentative first step that it is. Because once you go down the road that I went down, you come to see ethical practice as a matter of people working out together the practices and institutions that will govern them. The scientific case is just a particular case; the idea that our science be channelled in a particular direction by a democratic procedure in which people come together as equals and come to understand one another as equals and try to work out how to orient a particular form of inquiry.

That's just a special case of the way in which ethical life, as it were, at its bottom, should be. Once you've arrived at that idea, then something like well-ordered science will emerge as a special case. But the much more important thing is to work out the general framework. So, there's a sense in which having had that idea, and having seen how it fits into an evolutionary view of ethics, what I've done ever since has been to concentrate on that view of ethical life.

And my later book Science in a Democratic Society brings the evolving ideas that I had about ethical practice in. There's a sense in which I've now gone on, beyond the stage that I had when I wrote The Ethical Project. There's a much more, a much bigger and more general picture that is emerging in my work.

[00:38:56]

Thomas Spiteri:  Could you speak to how you're thinking about that these days?

Philip Kitcher: Realising that I was a pragmatist has actually helped a lot. I have three books that have begun this; the first one is about moral progress. I try to understand what moral progress is, and again, by emulating Kuhn. I mean, let's look at the moments in history where we seem to have made moral advances, and try to understand how those were made.

What was it that people did? What got in the way of those advances? So, I look at the abolition of slavery, I look at the expansion of opportunities for women, and I look at our changing views about same sex relations. All of them I think are cases of incomplete progress, and I look at the histories and try to understand what's been going on.

What comes out of that is a picture of a methodology for ethical advances, which involves the kinds of discussions that I was talking about when I wrote Science, Truth and Democracy; I was talking about also in The Ethical Project. That then leads into my work on education because part of this is to have people who are able to engage in these kinds of discussions. If we want to take this into the real world, then there has to be an institution that fosters the right kinds of discussions and the people have to be able to participate in this institution. I start making proposals about moral education and about the kind of society and societal institutions we need to make human progress.

That's articulated most recently in a book that just came out this year called The Rich and the Poor, which is about the way in which our political life has turned away from the ethical, and in some ways has become anti ethical. It's an attempt to bring it back.

This is far more general than what I was doing in Science, Truth and Democracy, and far more ambitious too. And it's pointing towards the idea of a society that returns more deeply to ethical life in ways that contribute to human progress. So, in process, and it's been in process now for about quarter of a century, is a book where I try to bring the epistemological and the political and ethical together – and I hope that in a year or two I will be able to launch that and people will then, I hope, begin to see how the whole picture works.

[00:41:45]

Thomas Spiteri:  It's an extraordinary evolution in your thinking. I wonder if you'd share perhaps your thoughts on some reforms that a democracy could adopt to make science work better for everyone. Perhaps we can put the question in the context of your more recent work, and science more generally. What would this reform look like? How do we know when we're making progress, or when that reform is working?

Philip Kitcher: Okay. Well, I'm much influenced in this by some of the experiments that have been done in deliberative democracy. So, this is not, as it were, virgin territory. There are actual people going out and doing things that attempt to restore what I think of as a deeper democracy. I'm very moved by a sentence in Dewey where he says, 'Democracy isn't just a system of government, democracy is a shared form of human life'. Dewey thinks of democracy as arising from our interactions with one another. 

The key and core of democracy for Dewey's pragmatism and for mine is that decisions are made by a representative group of all those who would be affected by them – that's an inclusiveness condition, as well-informed as possible, that meet together to seek mutual understanding that lies at the basis of their differences, and thus to find ways of crafting policies that all can tolerate.

Now, you might think that will never work in practice, and I've of course heard that objection hundreds of times. But the truth is that it has been done, it has been done in many places. It's been done quite interestingly in Canada, in British Columbia, when a citizens assembly was asked to work out a new constitution. It achieved remarkable amounts of agreement. 

Well, you might say Canadians are really nice – that's a bad example! But try the Irish. The Irish were able to reach a lot of consensus, virtually complete consensus,  on repealing the ban on abortion, and a considerable amount of consensus on gay marriage.

You might say, okay, these things work, but they're not gonna work in lots of countries. Well, in fact, they have; there are examples from the Middle East, there are examples from India, there are examples from Africa and South America. I mean, there are examples from all over the place. And one of the lovely things, there's a splendid political scientist, Hélène Landemore, who teaches at Yale, who has studied the French Convention on Climate, which is actually a reform pioneered by Macron, an attempt to see how far you can get to achieve consensus within a society.

That's a very ambitious one, and it can't be said to be a complete success, but it's had partial successes. Hélène Landemore in a recent lecture has done two, I think, very important things. One thing she's done is show the existence of lots of examples of this across various cultures. But more importantly, she's come to see something which I have been arguing for years, but haven't had much evidence for, which is the importance of emotional connections. And, she has some really remarkable examples of people not simply, as it were, forming friendships that one wouldn't have thought were possible, given where they started. So, it seems to me that this is a general thing.

Now take it all again, take it out of the scientific context, but look at this as an institution that could be developed; that we will have to experiment with in all sorts of ways, but does seem a promising way in which to reform our political lives. In my latest book, The Rich and the Poor, I have argued that we need something like this if we're to come to grips with the global problems that confront us, like climate change.

It seems to me this is actually very important. And deliberative democracy should not be dismissed as a pie in the sky idea, because there's some evidence when people try it, they, we, can make it work. How far we can go? We don't know. 

[00:46:31]

Thomas Spiteri:  Professor Philip Kitcher, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a fascinating conversation and I'm sure our audience will come away with a lot to think about. So, thank you very much for your time today.

Philip Kitcher: Well, I hope I haven't wandered too far away from the point you expected, but in a certain sense, if I have, it's really showing what's happened to me since I read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for the first time.

Thank you for listening to the HPS Podcast. If you're interested in the detail of today's conversation, you can access the transcript soon on our website at hpsunimelb.org. 

Stay connected with us on social media, including Blue Sky for updates, extras, and further discussion. And finally, this podcast would not be possible without the support of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant Scheme.

We look forward to welcoming you back next time. 

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Transcribed

Contributor: Christine Polowyj

Christine Polowyj is an undergraduate majoring in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne. She is interested in examining how knowledge is undermined or obscured when appeals to logic are made in particular social and historical contexts.