A proposal from Boston: philosophers should collaborate with the people who disagree with them

A guest post published on Daily Nous on 2 September makes a proposal that is easy to state and uncomfortable to accept: philosophers should write their papers with the people who think they are wrong.

The piece is signed by seven researchers from the Mind and Morality Lab at Boston University — Victor Kumar, Derek Anderson, Emilia Lacy, Josh May (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Rachel McKinney (Suffolk University), Tino Themelis and Velana Valdez.

The diagnosis#

The authors begin with a claim about how philosophy is actually practised rather than how it describes itself.

Philosophers, they argue, work in soldier mindset rather than scout mindset: the borrowed distinction separates the work of defending a position already held from the work of finding out what the terrain contains. A discipline organised around the defence of positions produces a familiar set of habits.

They name them without softening. Thought experiments are cherry-picked — the case that supports the thesis is the case that gets discussed. Opposing arguments are handled uncharitably when charity would cost something. And the outcome that the practice ostensibly exists to produce, a philosopher changing their mind in the course of a dialogue, almost never happens.

The comparison with the sciences is the point. Psychology has spent a decade naming its own equivalents — p-hacking, HARKing, selective reporting — under the heading of questionable research practices, and has built institutional responses to them. The authors' suggestion is that philosophy has the analogous practices and has not named them.

What adversarial collaboration is#

The method comes from empirical psychology, where it was developed for a specific problem: two labs producing opposite results and each dismissing the other's methodology.

In its scientific form, researchers who disagree jointly design the study before the data exist. They agree in advance on what evidence would count for each side. Neither can then reject the outcome on the ground that the design was rigged, because both wrote it.

Daniel Kahneman, who pushed the method hardest, described the aim as neutralising the confirmation bias that operates most powerfully on the researcher who cannot see it.

The translation problem#

Philosophy cannot copy the procedure, and the authors say so.

The scientific version depends on a pre-commitment to empirical criteria: we agree now that a result of this kind will settle it. Philosophical disagreements rarely have that shape. If the parties could agree in advance on what would settle the question, they would usually not be having the disagreement.

Their answer is to replace the pre-committed criterion with three other things:

Shared values — trust and good faith as conditions of entry, not as pieties. The collaboration only works if each participant accepts that the other is trying to get it right.

Norms of engagement — the requirement that criticism be constructive rather than destructive. The distinction is doing real work here: the standard reward in philosophical exchange goes to the counterexample that stops an argument, not to the reformulation that improves it.

Structural rules — arrangements that guarantee balanced representation, so that the resulting text does not quietly become one side's paper with the other side thanked in a footnote.

What it would look like#

The concrete proposal is the philosophy lab: a standing group whose members disagree, producing work jointly.

Two output forms are suggested. A single-voice essay in which the internal debate has been absorbed — the argument has passed through the objection and shows it. Or a multi-voice piece in the thesis–antithesis–synthesis form, with the disagreement left visible on the page.

The criterion of success is set deliberately low, and this is the strongest part of the proposal: the aim is deepened understanding, not consensus. A collaboration in which both parties end where they began, but each can now state the other's position in a form the other accepts, has succeeded.

The objections that will come#

Two are worth anticipating.

The first is institutional. Philosophy's credit system runs on single authorship. A hiring committee reading a CV of co-authored papers, in a field where the sole-authored article is the unit of achievement, will discount them — and the discount will fall hardest on the junior participants, who have least to spare.

The second is that adversarial collaboration may select for the disagreements least in need of it. Two philosophers who share enough ground to agree on norms of engagement are, by that fact, not very far apart. The disagreements that most corrode the discipline are the ones where the parties dispute what counts as an argument — and those are precisely the ones where a shared framework of good faith cannot be assumed into existence.

Neither objection is fatal. The first is a fact about incentives, and incentives are changeable. The second suggests the method has a range rather than that it has none.

The context#

The proposal arrives in a season when the discipline is examining its own procedures unusually openly. This site reported in August on Philosophy & Public Affairs publishing an article largely drafted by a language model, and on the argument that followed about what authorship in philosophy is supposed to certify.

The two debates meet at the same question from opposite directions. If a paper's value lies in the reasoning it contains rather than in the identity of the mind that produced it, then a machine-drafted paper is not obviously a scandal — and a paper produced by two opposed philosophers working together is not obviously a compromise.

If the value lies in the accountability of a single named thinker, both are problems.

The discipline has not decided which it believes.