Chloé de Canson

PLM: That leads on nicely to my next question. So, for a lot of people with a formal background in philosophy who go and do something publicly-engaged it often times, not necessarily radically, but it can have some metaphilosophical implications. It starts to change the way they think about philosophy, especially whether and how they think of it as an activity, but also what a philosopher's role is and so on. With both of your experiences, did you feel those effects afterwards at all? Or did it have no effects at all either? Did you go back to the LSE and think, "Okay, this is something else now"?

Chloé: I think the effects, though definitely very big, came kind of slowly. At first it was very separate: I had my academic work and there I had to do the things that PhD students do, like write good papers, and try to get them published, and give talks. You want to do the things which are popular which will give you some kind of recognition because that's the game, and you need a job, and who gets jobs? Well, the people who publish in good journals, people who write about things which a lot of people are interested in. Maybe that's a bit controversial, I'm not sure that's true, but anyway that was the kind of way I was thinking about it. And how do I write good papers? Well, you know, what I should do is just stay on my own and think very hard! And then write, and then once I have a perfect paper I'll just send it off and everyone will be impressed and it will be great.

But, of course, it didn't work out that way. So, you know, I'm there on my own trying to figure out what my great paper's going to be and... you know, it's kind of hard. I started feeling isolated in my work. We'd have these great seminars, which I'd be really excited to go to, but my own research always happened with myself, in my corner, you know, writing the thing and, when it's ready, sending it off. Kind of like what I did when I was an undergrad, but there the stakes are much lower and what you need to write is much easier; they're just like "well, here's a topic, write an essay about it", you do it in your corner, you send it to your teacher, the end. And so, basically, I kind of carried that way of doing things over to graduate school, but it doesn't work like that there, because what you're asked to write isn't a small 1,500 word essay but something much bigger, much more substantive, and of much greater quality.

​

Recently, maybe in the past year, maybe the past six months, more than before, I've started to realise that actually the proper way to do philosophy and the things I love about philosophy are conversation. I’m the kind of person who has lots of ideas all the time, but it's really hard for me to channel them through to a completed paper. So, I realised that what I should do is the same thing I ask my students to do: try out things, talk to people, or email them, and say "I've just had this thought, what do you think?" And then they'll say "no, you're idea sucks, here are seven counterexamples" and then you're like "oh yeah, that's a bad idea"! But that's fine, it was just one idea and then you'll have another, and then see where it goes. And then sometimes you stumble upon a good idea and people are really helpful, because they point to which are good bits, which bits need improvement. And then it becomes much easier to make progress.

So when you view philosophy as a conversation in this way you can actually produce much better work, with a lot less labour, and it's much more enjoyable. So I've really tried to learn from what I ask of my students, especially the primary school students, which is like, just tell me what you think about this thing and then we'll see what happens. I've tried to really do that with myself. To talk to people, like philosophy friends or teachers, and try out things and follow them through if they're good. And, on top of being better for my work, this also has the added advantage of being better personally. It really helps to feel like part of a community.

PLM: That's interesting because there are avenues for more formal feedback - your office hours with someone, the talks you give, and so on - but it sounds like something expanded for you after your experience with your students. Was it that you felt "I can talk to people whenever I like", or perhaps "I can talk to different people"? What changed in this respect?

Chloé: When students come into their first philosophy class and they're like, "oh I need to get the right answer", what I try to show them how to do is to view the process completely differently. When the teacher asks you a question, the point isn't to give the right answer, rather the point is to use the teacher's questions and the way the teacher is leading the class as a helpful tool to improve for themselves. When a student proposes an idea, the teacher’s questions aren't there to challenge the idea in the sense that the teacher's showing the idea to be wrong, but rather to help the student. So one of the aims of these philosophy sessions was to get the children from thinking "I was wrong" to "Ah! Now that I've got this I can improve my idea”. 

I think that's the shift that took place with me. It's not that any of the structure's changed - I've always had philosophy friends and teachers who are willing to help, and given talks et cetera - but the shift went from viewing these as a kind of performance - so I would give a talk to showcase my work, or something like that - to a kind of discussion. I now try to see giving talks as primarily an opportunity for feedback. It's a great opportunity, you know, you've got a lot of people in a room listening to you, who can help you improve your paper, by asking good questions. So I think that's the most crucial way in which teaching philosophy in schools has helped my academic work.

PLM: So I want to shift the questions slightly now. What led me to start these interviews was a recognition of what I think are two developments which are really getting going now. One is the recent push for greater engagement by academic philosophers with the public, which I think is really coming to a head now in a good way. The other development is in response to the despair people have had about the public sphere, and the decline of traditional forums - decreased trust in the press, people being more atomised - and the hope that was invested in the internet and social media as public fora which has been dashed. There's starting to be real efforts to rejuvenate the public sphere in various ways despite all of this.

So this is why I am doing these interviews now, because if it is true that these two things are happening, I want to understand the experience of people at the fore of this. There's this desire for the public sphere to improve, and at the same time there's this whole area of academia that's going "we're kind of suited to that, and we wanna do it, and we're gonna try and do it now". So I'm interested to know the experiences of people in the midst of this, right now. So, with that in mind, how do these two developments play a role (If they do at all) in how you've thought about the public philosophy projects that you've engaged in?

Chloé: So, I feel that there's a number of things that philosophers could bring to the public sphere that would be helpful. One is methodological: philosophers have tools for thinking in a way that's clear and concise, for making valid arguments, et cetera. The other is more to do with content: often, the questions in public debate are questions about which some philosophers have thought, and so they might contribute in the debate by sharing their thoughts on the issue.

PLM: For yourself, was the academic climate and the broader one concerning the public sphere in your mind - not necessarily as a motivation - when you thought about your public philosophy work?

Chloé: It was. I'm optimistic that through education we can help people think better, so this is why I'm particularly interested in children and doing that kind of public philosophy, rather than maybe trying to, I don't know, reach out to companies. I know that there are groups of people who run philosophy workshops in companies et cetera, but I'm pessimistic about getting a 40-year old accountant to engage with philosophical ideas in a way that's actually going to make a difference to that person's engagement with public debate.

One of the reasons I was drawn to this kind of thing was because it would have an effect in the long term. I think a lot of philosophers don't expect to have an effect in the short term on anything, though a lot of them think that in the long term they might actually be able to influence things in some way or other. So, of course, it's much more difficult to see... Doing something because it might maybe have some effect in the distant future isn't really good enough motivation, but I think it was one of the motivations for me for being engaged in education. Even at the undergraduate level, a lot of students are not going to go on into academic philosophy and last year, for instance, I was teaching on the LSE's Philosophy, Politics and Economics course where a lot of these students will maybe go on to work in policy, or something which has a public relevance, so the idea is we can at least try and give them some good tools for becoming better thinkers. So that's definitely one of the things that's drawn me to teaching.

But, maybe one of the reasons that philosophers don't get involved that much with public debate - I mean, they don't really; some of them, very few, most academic philosophers don't talk to non-academic philosophers, except when they're friends with them - and I think one of the reasons, maybe this is a false generalisation, but it just seems to me that a lot of people don't really care about, or don't feel like it's their place to have an impact on society, and that what they're doing is trying to figure out what the correct answer to some question is, or what the truth is about a certain topic, not to steer public debate in some way. This is especially true if they're working on a field like epistemology or metaphysics, which doesn’t obviously bear on public issues. And I think there's something a bit cowardly about that, because it seems to me that there's lots of ways in which I could participate and which I don't. So, education is nice, but there's a lot more that could be done, I think, and a lot of skills that I have and that I've gained in my training as a philosopher which I could use to benefit society in a wider way.

But, as with everything, you have to make a choice about what it is that you do and I think doing academic philosophy is comfortable in certain ways. You've got your project, you're writing your papers, they don't really matter - I mean, of course, they matter in the sense that they're really interesting and I also think that there's value in figuring out certain things in theoretical philosophy, and in their long-term value. I think it's a nice thing that it might have an impact on longer terms things. So currently I'm working on a bit of decision theory - when we can apply certain decision-theoretic principles to recommend courses of action - and decision theory is widely used in policymaking. So there's a possibility that it could have an impact on people who are making policy decisions, but that's not why I do it. I think that would be nice if there were practical implications, but I do it because I'm interested in what's the correct way to reason. Once I figured it out, if people reason in a bad way, my temptation is to think "too bad for them!". And I think that's a cowardly thing to do, right, because convincing people is an extra thing to do and you're inclined to just think "well, that's not really my problem". In a sense, I think a lot of people are pulling away from these public engagements.

PLM: I'm interested by this notion of philosophers' cowardliness towards engaging with non-philosophers. How do you think about this in relation to efforts to rejuvenate the public sphere?

Chloé: Well, several things make discussions easier: shared opinions, shared goals, and shared methods. The first of these things has been discussed extensively in the press, especially after Brexit and Trump’s election. People seemed particularly worried about the “echo chamber” effect, especially on social media: the idea that everyone on one's Facebook newsfeed has the same opinions, and so these opinions are never challenged. But I think the other two are also very important. If people have a shared goal, maybe to figure out what to think about an issue, or to mount a good argument for a specified view, discussion is easier. Similarly, if all the people engaged in the conversation take a very analytic approach, or any other kind of approach, everyone will have an easier time. I think that philosophers don’t consider disagreement particularly difficult. But, many philosophers I know - myself included here - struggle a lot when there isn’t a shared method, and a shared goal.

Now, when I work in classrooms, I set the goal (“this is going to be a joint exercise, where we all work together to try to answer this question”), as well as the method; this may not be as explicit, but most of my input is to help them think analytically by asking guided questions. But obviously, you can’t set goals and methods in the same way when you’re having a conversation with a distant family member or with another member of the public. I think this is what makes public conversation really hard for me. And it’s so hard that I don’t do it. It’s very cowardly because I know it’s important. I know it would also teach me a lot: it’s a fundamental life-skill to know how to talk to people who reason in different ways and who want different things. My sense is that this is the main reason why I shy away from discussion. I'll be thinking,“He didn’t even see the problem with his views entailing a contradiction! How am I meant to talk with someone like that? I'll just walk away". It’s something I’m planning on working on, and we’ll see where it leads me.