Philosophy students should be taught statistics

Logic is an essential part of a philosophy curriculum.

These are two main things that I learnt from logic:

1. Using logical systems like propositional logic and predicate logic to analyse the validity of arguments. This involves learning how particular logical systems work, learning how to translate arguments from natural language into the logic and checking the formal validity of the translated argument.
2. Analysing logical systems to understand what properties they have – soundness, completeness, compactness, etc. This is also helpful in designing new logical systems that can capture more subtleties within the logical system.

Why do philosophy students learn Logic?

One reason is historical. Prominent philosophers have cared about logic – Aristotle, Leibniz, Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein to name a few. Their use of logic in philosophy and their insistence on its usefulness is probably how logic secured its place in philosophy departments.

Let’s assume that we want to design the philosophy curriculum by appealing to some principles rather than appealing to history.

We might say that Logic is taught for the following reasons:

1. Logic trains one to be rational – it trains one to see which conclusions follow from which premisses and which do not.
2. Logic is needed to understand philosophy – since philosophy has historically involved Logic, philosophers have assumed knowledge of it in their writings, and so to ensure students can understand philosophy, they need to be taught logic.

I argue that Statistics teaches one very similar skills:

1. Statistics trains one to be rational – Where logic trains one in determining which deductive arguments are valid, statistics trains one in determining whether a given dataset justifies a conclusion. If Logic helps us with our analytic knowledge, Statistics helps with our probable knowledge. Moreover, arguments from data to conclusions are perhaps even more prevalent than logical arguments, so this skill would be much more useful for philosophers to determine good and bad arguments. It is true that logical arguments are present in philosophy so Logic helps directly with philosophy, whereas there aren’t arguments from data to conclusions in philosophy. I bite the bullet on this.
2. Statistics is needed to understand science – Science is now a large slice of the human endeavour of knowledge pie. Understanding science is crucial to understanding many philosophical debates. While science cannot completely resolve many philosophical debates, it can inform them. Philosophers who can understand whether claims made in sociology, linguistics, psychology or economics genuinely follow from the data collected, will be more informed philosophers better equipped to answering questions in Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Social Science, Political Philosophy, etc.

I have argued based on principles why Statistics should be taught to philosophy students. I haven’t accounted for whether this is feasible in practice. There are probably a few other things that we might think philosophy students should be taught, but time and attention are limited. How should statistics be included into the philosophy curriculum?

I think it should be available as one of the options to choose from when philosophy students are given optional courses. Minimally, philosophy students could take the statistics course that is offered at the maths department but such courses usually have different goals – mathematical rigour, understanding the details of the mathematics and ignore aspects of statistics important to philosophers – questioning the definitions and primitives involved in statistics; and semantic, epistemological and metaphysical issues. So we’d need a new course, something like: “Statistics for Philosophers”.

I would take such a course in a heartbeat.