Customer Reviews

Undercover Philosopher

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Michael Philips has been a philosopher and taught philosophy for more than 30 years. He is also one of the modern day accessible writers of philosophy if one judges him by this book alone (I have not read his other books). The Undercover Philosopher is not a book about general philosophy regarding what is the good life, how one should live, and whether it is ethical to be a vegetarian and still put your pet down. It is a book about skepticism. Scepticism as a philosophy in itself has its adherents and detractors. This book is not about philosophical skepticism but of practical skepticism. Philips identified the opportunities and ways of the world (and of us to each other) that fool us, mislead us, and cause us to form wrong conclusions, believing we were right because they were rationally made decisions based on facts and evidence. What kind of fact and what kind of evidence? This book not only teaches us to examine all these things, but also to appreciate what it is in us that make us believe things. This understanding of self is crucial because believing involves us as subject and the target article (subject of belief) as object. The book also provides a great deal of information and analysis about information and knowledge, and teaches one to distinguish between fact and value.

How does rational being apply his senses and intellect in daily action? The four-step chain of action comprise, in the order, (1) perceive (2) record (3) analyse (4) act. In analysis we draw upon another factor - memory recall. In each of these stages errors can occur. When they do, our action and conclusion will likely be wrong (excluding instances when we do the right thing by fluke. This book draws together many topics that can be subject of intense philosophical analysis and debate individually, for example, the issue of "believing without evidence" can lead us to a long study of W K Clifford's work, "Ethics of Belief". This book also helps us understand the issue of intuitive behaviour, and once we recognize that, any attempt to rationalize such "non-conscious" thinking would be an artificial and futile exercise. I recommend this book - you'll never think in the same way again.

At the end of 300 pages author Michael Philips reaches what seems a rather facile conclusion:

"Most of us have different levels of justification for our beliefs. We can make better cases for some of them than we can for others. This is inevitable. We can't thoroughly investigate and evaluate everything we believe..... The more the lives and welfare of others depends on the accuracy of our beliefs, the higher our standards of evidence should be."

I think many of us understood this long ago. What we want to know is, are some beliefs better than others? Do some beliefs bring about more happiness and less suffering?

Philips begins with an overview of the science of the mind - the limitations of our sensory organs, how the brain filters and adapts data from the senses, the nature of memory and the process of thinking. Much of this is poorly understood, and as Philips summarizes, "there is a sense in which what we observe depends on what we believe. In particular it depends on the concepts we use to understand the world." That is, we tend to see what we want to see.

The remaining two thirds of the book is a classification and demonstration of the many pitfalls in producing and consuming accurate information, things that most of us encounter in our day-to-day lives. Philips provides a number of recent examples to illustrate his points: the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the Enron accounting scandal, recovered memory therapy, DNA exoneration of criminal convictions, and many more. If you lived through these, you are familiar with the causes. You hardly need to be reminded the Enron debacle was a result of greed enabled by deceptive accounting and poor oversight.

What's missing from the discussion is an approach to belief systems. If we tend to see what we believe, are we trapped by our beliefs? How are they acquired? Can they be overridden? How does one do that? Which changes are efficacious to harmonious relationships and contented lives?

Overall, this book was not so much enlightening as it was obvious.

It's gripping. Frankly, I expected more of a dry logic-type book (but, unlike formal logic textbooks, this is a subject I am convinced is really worthwhile, i.e. actually "immunizing" us against our natural tendencies to "get it wrong").

It is terrific; I'm so pleased and somehow more full of hope. It is a book that will make a difference.
For those of us, many, who believe that reading can help save us--, this book is very encouraging that we might just manage to get it right.

Many examples of studies of human behavior, almost every one fascinating in itself, but these are just stepping stones to a very patient, witty, and very well-thought out recipe for improving how we judge and act.

I wish there was more emphasis on how to hold true beliefs. I thought the introduction was especially helpful. It tells us that the prevalence of false beliefs is obvious from the fact that human beings disagree so much. And since we learn almost everything we know from others (parents, teachers. scientists, journalists etc.) our biggest problem in finding the truth is deciding who to trust.

There are many examples of how individuals and even scientific communities are fallible. I thought the discussion of induction was interesting. For all practical purposes the problem of induction isn't much of an issue in physics since the laws of physics are very reliable from one location to another and from one time to another. So reliable that we can use them to send men to the Moon or send a robot to Mars. But when we move from physics to history or social sciences the problem of induction becomes a practical concern. Even in biology the problem of induction makes it easy to form generalizations that do not hold for all populations at all times. For example, generalizations about healthy diets can change from location to location depending on the genetic makeup of the group being studied. And what people were adapted to eat 10,000 ago could be significantly different than it is today or 10,000 years in the future. And the final chapter summarizes the reasons to doubt a conclusion as well as that the credibility of a conclusion depends on the evidence, the arguments, the methods and the assumptions that it's based on.

A few interesting ideas mixed with a lot of obvious points and repititious filler. Nothing that will hone your BS detector. I struggled to finish it.