P-Sets in Philosophy

Earlier this week, I received my contributor copy of The Art of Teaching Philosophy: Reflective Values and Concrete Practices, edited by Brynn Welch.[1] It’s an exciting book, and I’m proud to have gotten to contribute to it. My chapter on advising graduate students about teaching was coauthored with an excellent teacher (and researcher), a near-former grad student, Britta Clark.

I’m eager to read all the chapters. Welch often likened the book to a series “hallway chats,” or unplanned encounters in the hallway when a colleague tells you about a new teaching strategy she’s trying out. I’ve walked away from many such chats with great new ideas to adopt, and I know I’ll get a lot out of reading this.

I also know I won’t go in order. When the book arrived, I skipped straight to David O’Brien’s chapter on “Teaching with Puzzles.” O’Brien is a thoughtful, imaginative teacher and a wonderful writer, so I knew the chapter would be great. But I was inspired to start with his chapter by something else I’d been reading. I got an early look at Anthony Laden’s new book, Networks of Trust: The Social Costs of College and What We Can Do about Them. I’ll write more about it once it’s published later this year.[2] But I’m going spoil one tiny morsel by writing about it now, because it struck a chord and—along with O’Brien’s chapter—motivated me to try something new.

Laden observes that for many of us, our research programs are underpinned by a set of convictions like this: “(1) the question I am thinking about has a correct answer, (2) we can make progress toward answering it if we start from the assumption that it has a correct answer, despite the fact that (3) no one (yet) knows what that answer is, and (4) perhaps no one knows for sure how to find the correct answer or how we would be sure we had found it if we did.” He notes, though, that when it comes to our teaching, we seem to reflect to students that there is some tension in this set of convictions. And, in part because of how we teach them, “students tend to think that if the first and second are true, the third and fourth cannot be, and vice versa.”

How does our teaching reinforce this perception of tension? Laden thinks the selective use of problem sets across disciplines is part of the answer. Students encounter problem-set-based teaching in math and the natural sciences, where they are asked to solve problems and offer a solution, often in cooperation with other students. But they tend not to be asked to do problem sets in the humanities, where the pedagogy tends to be more discussion-based and more open-ended. This gives students the impression that 1 and 2 are true in math and the natural sciences, whereas 3 and 4 are not. And it gives the impression that 1 and 2 are not generally true in the humanities, and that that’s because 3 and 4 are true in the humanities. Laden writes:

“If students think that problems with answers can be solved straightforwardly and questions that can’t be so solved have no answers, then they won’t see that there are hard problems of the sort that both require and help foster intellectual humility and open-mindedness. One way, then, for faculty to challenge and change these attitudes is by broadening out their pedagogical techniques in all subjects to bring out the aspects of their field that are hidden from view by its traditional pedagogical approaches.”

In other words, philosophy needs more p-sets. Laden offers examples ranging from those contained within a single discussion to those around which an entire course could be designed. For example, he raises the possibility of organizing an intro political philosophy class around the project of figuring out whether the US is a genuine democracy.

This idea is compelling. I confess to some unease, which is brought out nicely by Laden’s four convictions. It’s audacious to believe those four things at once! I think Laden is right that such audacity underpins academic research: We want to believe that we can contribute something new, and we think and write in that spirit. When things go well, we also think and write in a spirit of humility. The difficulty of striking that balance—and the difficulty of helping others to strike it—stokes the unease I feel when I think about bringing p-sets into philosophy. I hope for my students to come to approach philosophical questions with humility. But in inviting them to hold those four beliefs at once, I also invite them to approach philosophical questions with audacity. They need to conjoin an appreciation for the difficulty of the questions with a conviction that they themselves might find an answer worth defending. It’s no easy thing to approach a question with both humility and audacity. But the difficulty isn’t an objection. Teaching is a balancing act, and it involves helping students learn to do balancing acts of their own.

With all this on my mind, I started The Art of Teaching Philosophy with O’Brien’s chapter about his own kind of p-set assignment: the philosophy puzzle. O’Brien’s puzzle-based pedagogy begins with the setup phase: He presents three propositions, each of which seems quite plausible considered all on its own, but not all of which can be true. Sometimes, the three propositions all seem positively incontrovertible. But they don’t all fit together—one of the “pieces” must be rejected. After the setup, the students work together in groups to solve the puzzle: to develop and test a solution hypothesis. This involves moving from a vague sense about why the pieces don’t fit together to a hypothesis worth defending about which proposition is false. Last comes the reflection phase, when the students come together with O’Brien to present their solutions and discuss, sharing resources for thinking, for revising or further defending their own solutions.

This summary doesn’t do O’Brien’s description justice—he goes much deeper and helpfully illustrates with the example of a puzzle he’s devised about the repugnant conclusion. But I want to underline something he says about why he does it. As O’Brien points out, this is a subtle—and labor intensive!—adaptation of a standard approach in philosophy: reconstructing an argument, identifying support for its premises, considering objections. But compared with that standard approach, O’Brien argues, teaching with philosophy puzzles differs in pedagogically important ways. One advantage is that the puzzles prime students to think of philosophical progress as a cooperative endeavor. They also prime students to think of their instructor as a co-investigator.

Yet another (but not last!) pedagogical advantage can be glossed in terms helpfully offered by our tiny part of Laden’s book: The puzzle acts as a p-set in philosophy. O’Brien advises us to devise our puzzles such that each solution has its proponents and its detractors in the philosophical literature: Someone who’s thought hard about it thinks this is the faulty piece; someone else thinks it’s this one, and yet another someone thinks the third piece is the one to reject. Yet students are invited to work together to carefully and thoughtfully take a stand. After the issue is introduced through the puzzle, they encounter philosophers displaying that same (hopefully humble) audacity of taking a stand. This strikes me as an exciting way to help students think about the possibility of progress, and aspire to contribute to it, when it comes to our most important still-open questions.

[1] Here’s a discount code for anyone interested in buying the book: GLR AT5 (to be entered at checkout)

[2] It can be preordered now at the link above.