Editors' thoughts

David Bourget and David Chalmers

In both 2009 and 2020, we received a great deal of feedback on the survey, both positive and negative. In our 2009 document "On the Conception and Design of the PhilPapers Survey", we discussed general motivations and a number of criticisms, including both general issues (the very idea of a philosophical survey, the biases of the survey, the format of the questions) and issues about specific questions. Much feedback in 2020 covered similar territory, and many of our 2009 remarks still apply.

One quite common complaint in the 2020 survey was that the answer options we offer were often neither exclusive nor exhaustive. This is correct. For the 2020 survey we had aimed to acknowledge and accommodate non-exhaustiveness using the "Alternative answer" option and non-exclusiveness using the "Accept a combination of answers" option, both of which allowed further details to be specified. In retrospect, these options were not salient to everyone, and we should perhaps have made them more prominent.

Perhaps the most common objection to the 2020 survey was that the survey questions were strongly skewed to certain traditions and orientations in philosophy. Respondents from non-analytic philosophical traditions often reported feeling somewhat alienated by the questions, and even respondents from analytic traditions sometimes reported that the questions reflected a fairly traditional conception of philosophy that did not fully represent philosophy as it is done in 2020.

We acknowledge these criticisms as reasonable. We made some attempt to find questions from non-analytic traditions, but it was difficult to find candidates that enough of our target group would be familiar with. We also made some attempt to find questions reflecting philosophy in 2020 (for example, adding two questions each on gender and race), but often older questions were more familiar to a wider range of the group. Still, we could have done more to include a wider range of questions, perhaps by relaxing the familiarity constraints. We're especially sorry for bringing about feelings of alienation. We will try harder next time.

As for specific questions: here we'll offer a few remarks on some of the ten new main questions. Remarks on the other 30 main questions can be found in the 2009 document.

Philosophical methods (which methods are the most useful/important?): conceptual analysis, conceptual engineering, empirical philosophy, experimental philosophy, formal philosophy, intuition-based philosophy, linguistic philosophy.

This was perhaps the most controversial question. Many other methods could have been mentioned: abduction, argument, computational philosophy, contemplation, critical philosophy of race, critical theory, crosscultural philosophy, deconstruction, feminist philosophy, genealogical analysis, hermeneutics, historical philosophy, lived experience, phenomenology, reflective equilibrium, scientific philosophy, speculation, therapeutic philosophy, transcendental arguments, and many others.

(The most popular write-in alternative answers were versions of: "phenomenology" (24), "historical" (13), "pragmatism" (11), "genealogical" (5), "scientific" (5), and "theorizing" (5).)

We omitted a number of these methods on the grounds that we expected relative numbers would be low. We omitted others on the grounds that we didn't want to be seen as evaluating the importance of major philosophical traditions. Many of these options (e.g. phenomenology and pragmatism) can be construed both as a method and a tradition, and when respondents might say that X is among the less useful methods, this might be misconstrued as saying that X is unimportant as a tradition. In the end we thought that these seven chosen options provided a reasonable selection of related methods that can be compared to each other. In retrospect, perhaps empirical and formal philosophy could have been omitted as overly broad, leaving five related methods for dealing with concepts that could better have been compared under a narrower heading.

Aim of philosophy (which is most important?): truth/knowledge, understanding, wisdom, happiness, goodness/justice?

The choice about which answers to group together was somewhat arbitrary, but truth/knowledge seemed especially hard to separate, and understanding and wisdom seemed worth evaluating separately in part because of the distinctive role of wisdom in the traditional conception of philosophy.

Experience machine (would you enter?): yes or no?

Perhaps we should have asked "is it rational to enter?", but "Would you enter?" was the question that Nozick asked originally. There are also many versions of the experience machine, but we left it to the reader to fill in the details.

Gender: biological, psychological, social, unreal.

The options here are somewhat analogous to those in the case of race (below), with some distinctive issues. First, prominent identification-based accounts of gender are often taken to be psychological, and consensus was that trans-inclusiveness dictated including this option. Of course many social accounts and some biological accounts are trans-inclusive too. Second, the sex/gender distinction is often taken to entail that gender is social by definition, so that answers here will partly reflect definitions of words. Still, that is common throughout the survey, and it seemed that responses would be informative all the same.

Race: biological, social, unreal.

These options and combinations of them are fairly standard positions in the literature. For both the gender and race questions, combination-of-multiple-answer options were widely endorsed.