philinq VI, 2-2018, pp. 93-106 ISSN (print) 2281-8618-ETS Resisting the great endarkenment: on the future of philosophy* Heather Douglas Abstract: Elijah Millgram's book The Great Endarkenment takes philosophy to task for failing to note the kinds of creatures we are (serial hyperspecializers) and what that means for philosophy. In this commentary, I will complicate the picture he draws, while suggesting a more hopeful path forward. First, I argue that we are not actually serial hyperspecializers. Nevertheless, we are hyperspecializers, and this is the main source of the looming endarkenment. I will suggest that a proper understanding of expertise, particularly the requirement that experts (at least experts whose success is not readily assessable) be required to explicate their judgments helps to mitigate the threat of siloed expertise and endarkenment. Further, I argue that grappling directly with the institutional structures that encourage narrow and isolated hyperspecialists in academia can be a way to avoid endarkenment problems. The current landscape of academia, with its valorization of narrow disciplinary expertise, is neither necessary nor sustainable. In order to change this landscape, we need to understand how current incentives construct epistemic niches, and what we might change in order to reshape the ecology of academia. Keywords: Expertise; disciplinary specialization; endarkenment; engaged philosophy. Statements of what is wrong with philosophy today, and how to fix it, are multiplying, and rightly so. There are so many problems to address, from a lack of diversity (philosophy departments do not reflect the ethnic and gender diversity of the general populations in which they are embedded), to administrative pressures (the closure of philosophy departments or the collapse of philosophy departments into other departments), to public intellectuals wondering aloud why we still have philosophy (e.g., Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking), to scandals (need I say more). Philosophy is a discipline under siege on many fronts. To fix what ails the field, different solutions have been proposed, from efforts to increase diversity (both in terms of current participants and authors taught to * Acknowledgements: Thanks to Lije Millgram for writing such an engrossing book, for inviting me to comment on it, and for always being an excellent philosophical interlocutor. Thanks to Ted Richards for keeping me honest and on target in this essay and in all things. 94 HEATHER DOUGLAS students), to efforts to change what philosophers take their jobs to be (e.g., calls for more public philosophy), to efforts to shift what philosophers at the heart of their work understand themselves to be doing.1 In the midst of this cacophony of cures, Elijah Millgram's book provides a distinctively metaphysical analysis of what ails philosophy (in particular, analytic philosophy, the dominant mode in North America). Millgram argues that philosophers have gotten wrong what human beings are as epistemic, moral, and political agents. As a result of this widespread misunderstanding, philosophers deliver work that is seriously misguided and/or irrelevant to the human beings who actually exist. Rather than rational, autonomous actors whose preferences and knowledge are self-transparent and readily shareable through reason giving and argument, Millgram thinks we are an entirely different kind of creature. According to Millgram, humans (at least recent humans) are specialists, indeed hyperspecialists. Further, humans change their specializations as needed, and thus are serial hyperspecializers. This means that people specialize in a particular area, do that work for a while, and then, either because they become bored or obsolete, switch areas. Millgram argues that hyperspecialists can barely understand each other, and that much of what philosophers have mistaken for philosophical necessity is simply the result of the desperate need for at least partial communication across different specialties. Millgram articulates this view from various starting points throughout the book, arguing that what analytic philosophy has focused on over the past half century (at least) has been misguided as a result – that, in short, the projects of metaphysics, metaethics, moral theory, and practical reasoning have been articulated for people whom we are not. Millgram calls for rethinking the projects of philosophy for the kinds of people we actually are. In this commentary, I will take issue with some of Millgram's starting points, while remaining in sympathy with much of what he has to say about how analytic philosophy has gone off the rails. I think his general diagnosis is on target, even if some of the details are not quite right. I also think the kinds of solutions explored by philosophers can and should be broadened – and that philosophers should not just think about the cognitive conditions of human thought, but also the institutional and contextual conditions (if you will, the ecological conditions), over which we have some influence. It is particularly through work on these that we can avoid the Great Endarkenment. 1 A sampling of these efforts can be found in Dotson (2012), Kitcher (2011), Frodeman and Briggle (2016), Turri (2016) and in online forums such as https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com. RESISTING THE GREAT ENDARKENMENT: ON THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY 95 1. Are we serial hyperspecializers? The first query I want to raise is whether we are the kinds of creatures Millgram posits. Millgram notes (e.g., 98, n. 34) that his characterization of humans as serial hyperspecializers is "partial and idealized." While there are some dramatic examples of serial hyperspecialization, I suspect lots of people (most?) do not shift careers substantially. (It is difficult to find data on this, as most data tracks job changes, which is different from career changes or specialization changes.) Certainly among academics (a tiny subset of the general population), few are serial hyperspecializers. There are small shifts of focus within an academic career, but these are not the sort of strong changes Millgram holds up as exemplary of serial hyperspecializers. Academia has become structured in such a way that the topic of someone's dissertation usually needs to become the core of their research program for the next six years after the completion of their Ph.D. if they are to be tenurable (assuming they land a tenure-track job, an increasingly difficult task). If they get tenure, they have been establishing themselves in a particular area for nearly a decade, and it then becomes quite difficult to move substantially outside of their area of specialization. All that sunk cost of developing and defending positions is not easy to leave behind. (For example, one keeps getting requests to give talks or review work in one's area of specialization, drawing one back to the debate in which one's expertise is most potent.) Not many philosophers of science become ethicists or political theorists and vice versa. And that is all within philosophy. Much fewer change the field they work in dramatically (moving, e.g., from history to biochemistry), much less give up tenured jobs to try something else entirely, leaving academia.2 In general, it is hard to shift one's specialization dramatically, much less to give up the relative security of tenure. Even if we do make small shifts in our careers, our academic specializations shape much of how we think about and do things. This is partly because of the way in which institutional incentives are structured to make continuing with what you have been doing the path of least resistance. Beyond the walls of academia, I suspect that the kind of radical career changes Millgram notes are rare and resisted, even if job changes are common. Think, for example, of the social resistance one sees among coal miners to the suggestion of job retraining. Changing who you work for is not what Millgram is talking about; it is rather changing what you do. For many, this would require changing what they are. This, I suspect, is not something many do. Programmers continue 2 I know of one example of someone leaving a tenured position altogether – Alice Dreger – and she is a historian of science and still publishing in her field, which is hardly serial hyperspecialization. See Dreger (2016). 96 HEATHER DOUGLAS to work on programming, even if they shift to managing other programmers. Human resource specialists get hired to do human resources, even if they change companies. (At least, this is the case for most people I talk to – admittedly anecdotal.) But it is not clear how important it is for Millgram's argument that we be serial hyperspecialists. The fact of hyperspecialization alone is enough of a challenge. Even if we rarely change our specializations, how do we talk across them? How do we share knowledge and expertise in the complex projects that require coordination, i.e., most large projects in contemporary society? 2. Can hyperspecializers talk to each other? Even if we are not such potent and pervasive serial hyperspecializers, the fact of hyperspecialization does indeed seem to characterize human endeavors in the 21st century. So even if we do not change our specializations all that much, the fact of specialization still makes things complicated for our conception of human beings that runs underneath most of philosophy. And such specialization does pose difficulties for the Enlightenment project. The ideal of the educated (hu)man is no longer a generic ideal. There is no possible way anyone could read everything worth reading over their lifetime, much less in their youth. Encyclopedias are no longer portable in printed form, but are at their best as sprawling virtual repositories. Our store of knowledge has exploded in size over the past 200 years. Education, while having some general goals (various kinds of literacy and critical thinking) is aimed at specialization, so that we must ask what one is educated in or for. How are all these hyperspecialists supposed to talk to each other, much less work together, on the complex projects upon which our civilization depends? And how are we to evaluate the other specialists, outside of our own areas of expertise, to decide with whom to work? Evaluating and using specialized expertise is a central 21st century philosophical problem. Reliance on expertise grew in the previous century, even as expertise itself became more specialized. The expansion of advisory systems in bureaucratic governments over the past century is one symptom of this (Douglas 2009: ch. 2). No longer can an agency, much less an individual, rely upon one advisor. Entire committees of advisors are needed, with often their own network of advisors underneath them. Webs of advisors, used to funnel expert judgment to decision-makers, have become the norm (with chief advisors coordinating the underlying network). Further, over the course of the 20th century, the kind of decisions authorities (whether elected or appointed) needed to make increasingly depended on access to expertise (even if expert RESISTING THE GREAT ENDARKENMENT: ON THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY 97 judgment did not and does not determine what the right decision is). To make ill-informed decisions (whether on health policy, foreign policy, infrastructure policy, etc.) is to court failure, even if utilizing expertise does not guarantee success. And this is true as much for private businesses as it is for public governance. We are knowledge societies, and that knowledge is specialized. Can we hyperspecializers talk to each other effectively, or is the only meaningful discourse that which takes place within our specializations? Here I think the picture Millgram paints is too stark. It is true that our specializations, our domains of expertise, come with jargon and knowledge that makes the full nature of expertise impossible to completely grasp for outsiders. Training to become an expert (whether within or outside of academia) comes with learning to fluidly navigate a particular complex realm, to know where the pitfalls are (methodological, epistemological, practical), where expertise shades off into "here there be dragons" territory, and how to make judgments deploying one's expertise in the face of the new. While outsiders can become fluent enough to talk with experts in their own language (what has been labelled "interactional expertise"), only full experts can function within the field of expertise, generating new knowledge in the field and deploying that knowledge properly (what has been labelled "contributory expertise") (Collins et al 2007; Plaisance et al 2014). The entrance fee for becoming even an interactional expert, much less a contributory expert, is high. We could all train up in some areas for interactional expertise to help bridge the specializations (and I suspect that many philosophers of science do this). But even so, the problems we need to address will evolve and the projects change, and developing the right sets of people with the needed specializations plus the useful interactional expertise is a tall order. What can we do? The first thing is to take a step back and ask what grounds deference to expertise. Expertise is, in practice at least, a two-party relationship between an expert who has knowledge (or appropriately well-informed judgment) and someone who is a non-expert, unable to grapple with the complexity that the expert can. We can point to social and institutional markers of what makes someone an expert (they have the right kind of degrees from the right kind of institutions, they publish in the right kind of places), but these are not sufficient. We can all think of people who have these markers and yet are not very trustworthy in their judgments within their field. And we can all think of failures among these institutions in the past, where our institutions have validated whole fields that in retrospect were not worthy of respect, much less reliance and trust. The institutional markers can be granted without trustworthy expertise. So while such social epistemological indicators can be helpful, they are not sufficient. 98 HEATHER DOUGLAS Beyond such flawed institutional makers, how do we assess individual experts? It is helpful here to recognize that expertise falls along a spectrum, from expertise that is readily assessable by non-experts through looking at raw success, to expertise that can be at least partially assessed by raw success, to expertise that cannot be assessed by raw success in any practical framework. The first kind of expertise is exemplified by a central focus of philosophers of expertise – chess masters.3 These are experts who we can readily assess, because the experts are ones who win the matches. We don't have to debate who is worthy of the name of expert here, because anyone can tell. If they win matches, they have the expertise. And telling who wins matches is a well demarcated activity requiring little judgment and no expertise in the activity itself. But this is not a very interesting kind of expertise for thinking about the challenge of the Great Endarkenment. Winning chess matches (or any kind of game) is not going to help us grapple with the kinds of complex problems society faces. There are readily assessable experts of this sort, however, outside of games. Think of car mechanics (does the car run better or not?) or dentists (does the tooth stop hurting or not?) as roughly similar kinds of experts. Admittedly in these more applicable cases, confounders can mess up assessment. But we can usually assess the expertise of our car mechanics and dentists based on relatively short runs of success (or failure). Further along the spectrum, the range of plausible confounders increases or the time frames for assessing expertise increase (or both). When we reach the other end of the spectrum, we confront the expertise most contested in today's societal debates: e.g., climate scientists, epidemiologists, toxicologists, ecologists. These are experts grappling with complex systems (lots of confounders, hard to isolate) where it can be difficult to show in the near term (or even the medium term) that interventions in the world based on their expertise are successful. Raw success that is easy to see is not going to be a helpful criterion in these cases. For these experts (and to some extent for experts in the middle range as well), we need something other than raw success to assess expertise. I think we should expect of these experts that they be able to explain their judgments to non-experts. Experts cannot be expected to lay out all the evidence and reasons for why they think what they think, but they need to be able to say something about why they think what they think. And if pressed for further details or explanations for why they reject some views in favor of others, they must be able to explain that too. Indeed, it is the fluency of judgment in 3 See, e.g., Dreyfus's essay in Selinger et al (2005) and Selinger (2011). RESISTING THE GREAT ENDARKENMENT: ON THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY 99 the face of the complexity in their area of work that makes them an expert. As Julia Annas has written: [E]xpertise requires that the expert, unlike the mere muddler or the person with the unintellectual knack, be able to 'give an account' (logon didonai) of what it is that she is an expert in. The expert, but not the dabbler, can explain why she is doing what she is doing; instead of being stuck with inarticulacy, or being reduced to saying that 'it feels right this way,' she can explain why this is, here and now, the appropriate thing to do in these circumstances. (Annas 2001) In cases where expertise is not readily assessable on the basis of success, such accounts must be on offer. For these cases, such fluency must be on display for an individual to count as an expert. Learning to explain one's judgments to non-experts takes work. Learning to talk about one's work without the comfortable cloak of disciplinary jargon and presumed shared bases of assumptions with one's expert peers is difficult and challenging, but that does not mean it cannot be done. Further, among academics, we already do some of this work in teaching our undergraduate courses. But it is the kind of work that does not get recognized much within our academic lives. It forces one to think about the most important lines of inference, and to find succinct and elegant ways to explain key points. In doing so, it often cleans up one's own lines of thought. Done well, such accounts display a glimpse of the complexity with which experts grapple, further justifying the expertise. Rather than such explications making it seem as if anyone could do their job, explications of expert judgment do the opposite – they make it clear why expertise is so desperately needed. Whenever I talk with people who have expertise, I usually come away with the deep awareness of how little I know about their area, increasing my sense of the importance of their expertise. I suspect that the legitimate experts who gain traction in today's world are people who can do this explication well.4 I also suspect that the fact that we are not all that often serial hyperspecializers makes explication of judgment easier to achieve, given the work involved for the expert in explaining their judgments to nonexperts. Thinking about expertise in this way helps to keep us from falling fully into the Great Endarkenment trap. Even in a world of hyperspecializers, experts can talk beyond their specialization – and we should both support and require such efforts of experts. Doing so is essential to the trust in, and uptake 4 There are lots of pseudo-experts (talking heads) who gain traction by spewing easily digestible bullshit (in the technical sense of bullshit – see Frankfurt (2005) Hardcastle et al (2006)). How to tell pseudo-experts who talk a good game from real experts is beyond the scope of this essay. I think it has much to do with detecting who has integrity, i.e. who can respond to criticism and new evidence (Douglas 2014). But this point aside, we should still ask experts to explain their judgments to us. 100 HEATHER DOUGLAS of, their expertise. The question remains, though, whether our institutions will help or hinder the Enlightenment struggle against Endarkenment and whether we can salvage the Enlightenment project from the threat of Endarkenment. 3. The cognitive and the "ecological" It is here that I recommend a shift in perspective for Millgram's work. Millgram writes as if being serial hyperspecialists is just what we are, as if this is an unavoidable fate that has befallen us, a result of the pursuit of knowledge engendered by the Enlightenment. I do not agree with the necessity. Perhaps we have, either intentionally or unwittingly, created the kind of creature Millgram describes (at least the hyperspecialist part), but this is partly contingent on the way our academic culture and broader societal culture has developed. And this means there is nothing necessary about us being hyperspecialists unable to communicate across specializations. I have already argued that part of what grounds expertise should be an ability to explicate one's expert judgments (particularly for expertise not readily assessable in terms of success). We can further see that supporting this view institutionally will require incentivizing and rewarding the work this entails. That culture both matters and is malleable can be seen in the fact that currently academia is an environment that encourages us to hyperspecialize while discouraging the serial part of Millgram's description (as I noted above). Given that it is hyperspecialization that is the real challenge before us, can we design institutions to encourage us to be specialists that can share expertise across specializations, that are good at explaining the basis of our judgments to the nonspecialist? Are there institutional structures that, rather than encouraging disciplinary isolation, can craft bridges across them? In short, can we be the kinds of creatures we would like to be, or that we need to be to make key cultural projects like the pursuit of science within democracies work? Millgram is not blind to these issues of institutional incentives and "ecologies" (read metaphorically as epistemic niches shaped by context), and he takes note of them (e.g., in chapter 11). But he does not focus on them. If he included them more centrally, if he saw them as both contingent and amenable to experimental change, his story might be different. Robert Frodeman's recent monograph on what ails philosophy focuses on the ecological aspects of knowledge production. In Sustainable Knowledge, Frodeman argues that the institutional cues for academics have seriously misaligned our knowledge production practices (Frodeman 2013). In other words, the ecology of our knowledge production system is all wrong. Frodeman describes the RESISTING THE GREAT ENDARKENMENT: ON THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY 101 fundamental unsustainability of the current system, which encourages ever narrower specializations, ever narrower dissertations, and more insular research projects. Further, such a research agenda depends on an ever expanding graduate student workforce, despite the fact that such graduate students cannot be placed in the academic careers which they hope for, as academia is no longer expanding at a rate that can handle the narrowing of specialization and its concomitant growing workforce. (Narrowing of specialty requires an expansion of the overall knowledge-production workforce just to cover all the resulting territory.) The current academic system depends on a rate of growth that simply cannot be accommodated, particularly as we stabilize global population. Focusing on philosophy as but one academic discipline to which this worry applies, Frodeman argues for the pursuit of "field philosophy," for philosophers getting out there and engaging with nonphilosophers. (See also Frodeman et al (2016).) Such engagement, Frodeman hopes, will ground philosophical concerns in the real world, simultaneously demonstrating the value of philosophy and preventing philosophers from pursuing the kind of arcane exercises they sometimes find so attractive. Not all hyperspecializations are worth keeping, and an aggressive pruning of the discipline is needed. I suspect there is much in this view with which Millgram would sympathize. Millgram chastises philosophers who not only ignore problems in the "real world" but view it as a demotion to work on them, as if some sort of class stigma associated itself with doing philosophy that might be relevant and interesting to someone outside of philosophy. That we have such stigmas in philosophy is indicative of a perverse incentive system, of a distorted set of niches. What should be stigmatized is philosophical work that cannot gain any purchase on the interests of non-philosophers. As Dennett warned in his incisive essay, "Higher-order truths about chmess," philosophers should be worried about projects that they cannot convince people outside of philosophy to care about. 5 (Dennett 2006) The worry should be that such projects are idle navel gazing that will produce little of lasting value. Just because a problem is hard or intricate does not mean it is worth doing. Philosophers sometimes fall for the allure of abstraction, thinking that more abstract work is always more fundamental. Without grounding outside of philosophy, it is often just more insular and more irrelevant. Philip Kitcher has also noticed this problem: "The 5 In addition, Dennett argued that one test for one's expertise (particularly for the selection of one's projects) is to "try to teach the stuff to uninitiated undergraduates. If they don't 'get it,' you should really consider the hypothesis that you're following a self-supporting community of experts into an artefactual trap" (Dennett 2006: 40). If experts cannot teach even captive undergraduates to "get it" (and this is not imbuing students with expertise, just familiarizing them with it), we should be really dubious about the presence of valuable expertise. 102 HEATHER DOUGLAS danger that a field of inquiry will become a 'sentimental indulgence for a few' – or perhaps a site of intellectual jousting for a few – is especially urgent in the case of philosophy." (Kitcher 2011: 250, in part quoting Dewey) But this is a cultural and institutional problem, not a cognitive problem. The ecology of academia matters here. Professors don't have to impress anyone but their peers to get jobs, tenure, and promotion. There is something valuable about the protection this affords. We need academia to remain a place where people can take intellectual risks, exercise academic freedom, and pursue projects that can take a decade or two to reach fruition, well outside the time frames of the political and the capitalist systems. But having philosophers do philosophy solely for other philosophers is a mistake, one that undermines the value of philosophy itself. We can engage and encourage challenging long-term projects without the valorization of work that is only of interest within the specialty. There are real problems generated outside philosophy that philosophers can address, indeed that they have the most appropriate tools to address, in our contemporary vexed state. Here is a sampler: autonomous killing machines, dualuse research, identity politics, privacy, citizenship in a global world, happiness. These are all areas where the particular empirical details are shot through with complex normative ideas, some barely formed, some interacting in complex ways, and we need desperately to know not just what but how to think about them. The world of our making is moving so fast we need the conceptual tools to keep up with it. Philosophers are good at making conceptual tools. Conceptual work of this sort cannot be a priori. Knowing the a posteriori details is central to any of these projects. Nor can it just be left to social and natural scientists to describe (as best they can) what is happening. We need philosophers to help see how we should think about these things, an agenda entangled deeply with a sense of what is good about being human and the complex normative terrains we traverse, while those things shift underneath our feet. Neurath was right: we are always on the boat while we try to reconstruct it. But the boat is not just a descriptive account of the world. It is also simultaneously a normative account. Grappling with these entangled descriptive-normative realities might seem obvious work for the philosopher. But the ecology of academia pushes the other way. Philosophers who ignore the world and hyperspecialize do better (as Millgram notes) at professional promotion. It is also just so much easier to do solely internal disciplinary work and to evaluate such work. And it is easier to just talk to philosophers, to immerse oneself in the jargon and shared assumptions that shape our work. It is just not adequate to do so. Expertise, to be valuable, must be assessable in some way. Either expertise can demonstrate its value through raw success (an unlikely avenue for philosophers, but I will RESISTING THE GREAT ENDARKENMENT: ON THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY 103 not categorically exclude it) or through explaining the basis of judgment to non-experts. We should expect ourselves to do this, to have one eye always towards non-philosophers and whether what we do can be explicated to them, and further to be found helpful and illuminating by them. We can keep the academic freedom needed to pursue risky projects and to protect philosophy from becoming a mere tool of the current corporatecapitalist power structure. Some insulation from the predominant powers is needed, if philosophy is to properly utilize its critical and explicative capacities. But there is nothing necessary about the isolation of philosophy from general societal concerns and there is nothing good about valorizing the esoteric and apparently useless. In short, Millgram should be a bit more ecological and institutional in his thinking, a bit less focused on our cognitive design. How to change the ecology (to put the right incentives in place) for philosophy is the central challenge for the discipline. 4. Conclusion: forging a path Millgram and Frodeman are both correct in their assessment of philosophy as fostering ever more specialist discussions, usually solely among other philosophers. All the institutional cues are channeling our practices in this direction. Frodeman's arguments for de-disciplining philosophy, however, ignore too much the social epistemological value of specialization.6 There is something good to be gained from specialists who work out complex problems in conversation with each other, from the mutual criticism that such focused conversations can engender. The problem occurs when the value and assessment of such work remains based solely on those insider debates, and the grounding in the world, and the interaction with nonphilosophers to check on the direction of the work, is lost. So how do we capture the best of philosophy and jettison the worst? We need philosophers to work with people outside of the discipline – to talk to them, to see where the conceptual issues are in the world and in other fields, and to field test our conceptual work, to see when the distinctions we obsess over are in fact useful distinctions for living. We also need philosophers to continue to talk to each other, to use the discipline of specialized expertise to hone and craft the concepts and arguments with which we work. We need to 6 In private communication, Frodeman does espouse the value of disciplinary philosophy as a source of insights for the broader world, as a place of training for students, and as a place for recharging the batteries of philosophers. 104 HEATHER DOUGLAS embrace the productive tension this will produce, where we are both specialized and boundary crossing, and we need to design our institutions to foster this kind of existence. How might we do that? Let's consider both negative and positive sides of the coin, pushes and pulls in our academic culture. 1) We should not accept internal disciplinary intricacy as a good excuse if a philosopher can't explain why their work might be interesting or valuable. If they can't give an account of their work's value, there is good reason to suspect there is not much there of value. The push in grant proposals and book proposals to say in a page to a nonspecialist what the project is and why it is important reflects this. And it is a fine exercise to demand. Further efforts, like threeminute theses competitions, require philosophers to hone what they want to say to general audiences. We should support these efforts and see them as central to good work as internal peer review. 2) We should not weight disciplinary journals and conferences over interdisciplinary ones. Just because cross-disciplinary standards are impossible to articulate does not mean seriously valuable intellectual work does not take place in interdisciplinary fora. In many ways, because one must both explain one's work to those outside of one's specialization in these fora and be aware of the nature of one's specialization, such work is crucial to building awareness both of the nature of one's own discipline (and its limits) and of what is going on elsewhere. There is challenging, good work at these interfaces, and academic departments need to explicitly value it as much as disciplinary work. 3) In shaping research projects, philosophers should not just talk to other philosophers. Yes, it is more work to talk to non-philosophers. But philosophers have no idea whether the distinctions they are making are doing any useful work if they only talk to each other. People who are actually going to use the distinctions, and the conceptual tools that come with them, need to try them out. This is the ultimate test for philosophy, in the field outside of the discipline (just as Frodeman would have it). We have to field test our work, as awkward and difficult as that might be, to get a sense of whether we are on the right track. This too is already RESISTING THE GREAT ENDARKENMENT: ON THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY 105 being written into grant requirements, demanding dissemination beyond disciplinary boundaries. But more than just publishing beyond academic journals needs to happen. We have to get better at trying our conceptual work out in ongoing interaction with those who may use it. This is the big institutional challenge before us, and experimenting with institutional forms and evaluations for doing this should be tackled next. That is a start. Hopefully, these ideas will get tested, and refined (or completely reworked) in the coming years, and philosophy will not just continue its navel gazing path into oblivion. It has the potential to be too powerful and too central for us to accept such a fate. In pursuing this agenda, we can change the ecology of academia, and perhaps save ourselves from Endarkenment. Heather Douglas heather.douglas@uwaterloo.ca University of Waterloo/Michigan State University References Annas, Julia, 2001, "Moral Knowledge as Practical Knowledge", in Social Philosophy and Policy, 18, 02: 236-256. Collins, Harry, Robert Evans, 2007, Rethinking Expertise, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Dennett, Daniel C., 2006, "Higher-order Truths About Chmess", in Topoi, 25, 1: 39-41. Dotson, Kristie, 2012, "How Is This Paper Philosophy?", in Comparative Philosophy, 3, 1: 3-29. Douglas, Heather E., 2009, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh. 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