Social Epistemology

A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy

ISSN: 0269-1728 (Print) 1464-5297 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tsep20

Field Philosophy and Social Justice

Evelyn Brister

To cite this article: Evelyn Brister (2020): Field Philosophy and Social Justice, Social
Epistemology, DOI: 10.1080/02691728.2020.1757176

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Published online: 03 May 2020.

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SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY
https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2020.1757176

ARTICLE

Field Philosophy and Social Justice

Evelyn Brister
Department of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Field philosophy is a method of philosophical practice. As such, it is open Activism; advocacy;
or neutral with regard to topic and content, to the social location of comparative philosophy;
collaborators, and to the type of outcome or product that is its aim. field philosophy; social
justice
With regard to its criteria, field philosophers may pursue philosophical
collaborations in government, business, entertainment, religion, science,
or other areas. In this paper, I respond to critiques of philosophers doing
politically engaged work and then show that there are several reasons
that field philosophy is strongly suitable for the pursuit of social justice.
First, researchers with an existing interest in civic engagement and social
justice will find field philosophy effective for achieving concrete goals.
Second, social justice depends on ethical arguments, so there is an exist-
ing interest in incorporating philosophical perspectives. Third, field philo-
sophers can draw on resources developed by feminist and racial justice
scholars who have long theorized the association between academic
practice and political engagement. And fourth, feminist and progressive
inquiry develops insights into the functioning of social institutions. Cross-
culturally, field philosophy is a research method that develops reflective
participation in knowledge production and that supports academic
engagement in decision-making for positive social outcomes, however,
those are locally construed.

Philosophical Fieldwork: Its Subject Matter and Methods

Field philosophy is philosophical practice for the sake of collaborative problem-solving. When
philosophers pursue fieldwork, they may be collaborating with community groups to address
a social or environmental problem, advising policy-makers or professionals, or contributing to
academic research projects outside the discipline. What these projects have in common is that
a theoretical or critical perspective is needed, and the analytic, interpretive, or facilitative skills of
philosophers are directly useful. But to be a field philosopher is not merely to be a philosopher-for-
hire – it should also be understood as a form of research since fieldwork undertakes to study
philosophical problems as they emerge in real-world settings. It then brings insights from the field
back to the academy.
Field philosophy is a way of pursuing philosophical inquiry that prioritizes direct engagement
with non-philosophers. It has no unique content, since field philosophers may be specialists in ethics,
aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics, or whatever theoretical approach is relevant to a particular
inquiry. Neither does it have a unique method in the sense of exclusively using, for example, logical
analysis, ordinary language analysis, phenomenology, or hermeneutics. There are also no constraints
on the kinds of problems it addresses. Consider some real-life examples: field philosophers have
included bioethicists working with health care professionals to develop surgical protocols,

CONTACT Evelyn Brister elbgsl@rit.edu Department of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, USA
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 E. BRISTER

environmental philosophers working with land managers to articulate priorities for wildland pre-
servation, and logicians working with programmers on applications in computational mathematics.
This paper argues that although field philosophy is wide open with regard to philosophical
content and methods, there is a distinct and strong affinity between field philosophy and the aims
of social justice. This affinity rests on what field philosophy gives and what it gets. Namely, field
philosophy provides philosophical resources that are valuable to groups working toward justice, and
at the same time, real-life struggles for social justice motivate and direct philosophical practice.
Before supporting this positive thesis with an enumeration of particular ways that field philosophy
relates to social justice concerns, I will evaluate three alternative views: first, that field philosophers
are ill-suited for working with communities toward social justice; second, that field philosophers
violate a professional code by working toward social justice; and, third, that philosophers are morally
bound to conceive of their role vis-à-vis real-world injustice as revolutionaries, not reformers. I will
end by testing the strength of the affinity between philosophical fieldwork and the aims of justice by
considering how field philosophy can be practiced in different parts of the globe.

Philosophical Expertise and Social Problems

Field philosophy, or philosophical fieldwork, is philosophical scholarship that makes ‘timely and
effective contributions to contemporary discussions,’ carried out through ‘actual presence in the
field, engaged in an ongoing, day-to-day or week-to-week fashion with non-philosophers’
(Frodeman and Briggle 2016, 24). Field philosophy is different from applied philosophy. Applied
philosophy generally offers commentary or guidance that applies a philosophical framework to
a real-world problem; applied philosophers use philosophical or professional journals as the primary
means of communicating their expertise to each other and to practitioners in their field of applica-
tion; and applied philosophers may make contributions through journal articles or lectures without
working directly with people in their field of application. Field philosophers, on the other hand,
approach social, technical, and policy problems from the perspective of their collaborators, rather
than starting with a framework that has been hammered out in the philosophical literature; their
work results in knowledge or an intervention that is not primarily an academic philosophical
publication; and they typically engage with collaborative partners in inquiry over a longer period
of time (Brister and Frodeman 2020a). Thus, although field philosophy and applied philosophy both
involve integrating philosophical understanding with real-world problem-solving, they have differ-
ent starting places (philosophical frameworks versus non-philosophers’ concerns), different outputs
(disciplinary journal articles versus a wide array of non-disciplinary creations), and different expected
levels of ongoing engagement.
These differences between applied philosophy and field philosophy are significant. That is,
working as a field philosopher is not just proceeding with applied philosophy plus being especially
well informed about the social issue at hand. Although the same person might conceivably pursue
different kinds of output by working on an issue in different ways and approaching it from different
angles, applied philosophy and field philosophy (or ‘engaged’ philosophy, as it is sometimes called)
have fundamentally different goals and approaches. As Jonathan Wolff describes the difference,
applied philosophy aims to provide philosophical foundations for public policy, while engaged or
field philosophy starts with questions about the nature of the social problem and then helps
stakeholders and policymakers generate possible solutions and the means of assessing them. For
Wolff, ‘deducing policy conclusions from a philosophical theory can, at best, be just one input into
the argument’ (2018, 17). While applied philosophers maintain a distance from the issue they are
addressing and often assume that moral pronouncements have a privileged position, field philoso-
phy is pluralist and pragmatist.1 Field philosophy, then, is the collaborative method of working with
partners on their problems, and the output of field philosophy includes a policy recommendation or
other non-disciplinary product. Fieldwork may also feed into traditional scholarly work, but tradi-
tional scholarly production is an ancillary goal, not the primary goal.2 Many bioethicists, for instance,
 SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY 3

pursue clinical work in which they collaborate on formulating healthcare policies locally or nation-
ally, while at the same time writing scholarly articles on related topics in bioethics. Field philosophy
does not require giving up traditional modes of research, but the mindset of fieldwork does require
that its practitioners see the relationship of philosophy to problem-solving as not merely academic.
Since field philosophy is scholarly activity undertaken in collaboration with non-philosophers,
often in non-academic settings, and since it may take place alongside disciplinary philosophy
without replacing it, fieldwork raises questions about where philosophers’ professional pursuits
end and their personal pursuits begin. This question is particularly apt when a philosopher’s pursuits
have social or political ends. For instance, I might become involved in activities aiming to achieve just
educational opportunities in the city where I live, a city where the childhood poverty rate is the third
highest in the nation. As a philosopher of science, this work may not be directly relevant to my
disciplinary research, but I can contribute my academic skills, such as writing, editing, data analysis,
public speaking, and organizing educational events. I might also contribute skills and knowledge
that are specific to my philosophical training – drawing distinctions, constructing clear arguments,
evaluating policy responses using concepts of moral obligation and theories of justice, and facilitat-
ing civil discussions about values. I might even find a role for expertise derived from philosophy of
science – for example, by identifying how value assumptions have shaped the interpretation of data
concerning the problem’s causes and possible solutions.
Were I to undertake these activities as a concerned citizen merely, that would be my social or
political prerogative. Collaboration to address these problems also seems relevant to my role as an
educator, and outreach in communities and schools is often encouraged by universities as a form of
academic service.3 Field philosophers hold that, in addition, such work may constitute professional
scholarship, since it produces and shares knowledge with a community that needs it while also
producing insights that may in turn be incorporated into academic philosophy.
One might be concerned that, while work in the public sphere is permissible as a private citizen, it
is inappropriate to combine work in the wider, non-academic, political world with professional
scholarship. Agnes Callard has recently argued that not only are philosophers ill-suited to engage
in activities that produce political debate and have practical consequences – I take the fight against
poverty and the fight for equal educational opportunities to be among these – but there could be
negative consequences, since such activities ‘could provoke a misological backlash.’ (Callard 2019).
This is because, on her account, philosophers tend to enter political debates with a set, pre-formed
perspective. As a result, they are likely to appear hypocritical when they advocate for ‘rational, fair-
minded, and calm arguments’ while exemplifying loyalty to what might in retrospect seem foregone
conclusions. Callard argues that, in betraying the virtue they profess, philosophers will tend, first, to
suffer decreased credibility, and, second, to harm the reputation of logic and reasoned argument
itself.
On Callard’s view, the reason philosophers should not do engaged, activist work is that philoso-
phers may be less open-minded than other citizens and less able to draw practical conclusions from
the questions they adeptly generate. This means philosophers are likely to be ineffective at pursuing
their social and political goals. If this is true, then she could raise an even more serious concern: that
philosophers commit a form of malpractice when they present themselves as possessing profes-
sional expertise they do not, in fact, have. There is potential for harm when presenting oneself as
a professional with expertise relevant to addressing social problems if that expertise is in fact
inappropriate or inadequate.
Does Callard have a legitimate concern? Is it true that philosophers do not possess relevant
expertise or that, if they do, they are inept at delivering it? As evidence, she points to the bickering
and partisan small-mindedness that she has observed at faculty meetings. Such behavior is certainly
regrettable – but in the context of this argument, it seems analogous to pointing to physicians who
continued to smoke after the US Surgeon General’s warning was issued. While such behavior may
have undermined the credibility of some physicians, it certainly did not undo the medical profession.
4 E. BRISTER

The questions that need settling are these: do philosophers have expertise that is relevant for
engaging in political advocacy? And if they do, have some philosophers had positive social effects?
Field philosophy is committed to the view that philosophers do have expertise relevant to
collaborative problem-solving. First, field philosophers often have subject matter expertise. Here
are some examples: environmental philosophers Kristin Shrader-Frechette and Bryan Norton have
worked with government agencies, including the US Environmental Protection Agency, on environ-
mental issues concerning ethical values, democratic decision-making, and justice; Randall Curren has
contributed expertise on philosophy of education to the development of UNESCO guidelines on
education for sustainable development; and Ryan Muldoon contributed philosophical expertise on
social norms and social science methodologies as a co-author of the 2015 World Development Report
issued by the World Bank. There are many other examples of philosophers whose subject matter
expertise has been useful for real-world problem-solving at the international, national, and local
levels. However, since fieldwork does not always lead to the kind of scholarly output that is tracked
on academics’ CVs and in publication databases, such work is not as visible as it should be.
Second, philosophers have uniquely developed skills that are useful for addressing social pro-
blems. They are closely attuned to attending to criticism, facilitating discussion, and expanding
options. Philosophers are trained to focus on unspoken assumptions, neglected viewpoints, equi-
vocations that camouflage divergent commitments, and ways of expanding or contracting the scope
of an inquiry in order to best achieve its intended goals. These skills can be used to further practical
as well as philosophical inquiry.4
Callard is concerned that, in general, philosophers tend to be less open-minded and less
practically minded than is required for engagement in practical, political problem-solving. In other
words, she is concerned that insofar as the discipline abides by a norm for defending predetermined
views and a preference for an exclusively theoretical orientation, philosophers will be inept. But
I remain hopeful, based on the examples cited above as well as the many case studies collected in
Brister and Frodeman (2020b). It is likely that Callard’s pessimism – and my optimism – about the
abilities of philosophers to productively contribute to pluralist and pragmatic deliberative inquiry is
related to the above distinction between applied philosophy and engaged philosophy. Philosophers
who see their role as facilitative and interpretive, and who are committed to understanding
a problem from the perspective of stakeholders rather than approaching it from a received theore-
tical framework, are more likely to avoid the dogmatism that concerns Callard than philosophers
who see their discipline as concerned with an abstract, universal discourse from which conclusions
can be deduced (Norton 2002).
Callard’s concern does, however, serve as a useful reminder: to the extent that some philosophers
cleave to a strategy of defending their expressed views without compromise and cultivate contempt
for practical problem-solving, they are indeed poorly suited to pursue field philosophy. Field
philosophy requires open-mindedness, a spirit of collaborative and shared inquiry, and determina-
tion to connect theory with practice. These are traits that may be cultivated and supported by skill
building as a part of professional training, and these professional skills can be recognized and
rewarded by universities. In sum, while Callard is surely right that philosophers can be inept –
especially when they fail to engage collaboratively and self-consciously – there are many counter-
examples to show that field philosophers are capable of achieving noteworthy success.

Philosophers and Social Reform

I have argued that philosophers can contribute in effective ways to non-philosophical inquiry, social
change, and, more specifically, social justice. Field philosophers actively engage with groups addres-
sing social and political problems, and they do so in their professional identity as philosophers.
Namely, the professional credentials and reputation of field philosopher are known to collaborators,
and these make a difference. Field philosophers contribute professional skills or knowledge, and they
may also approach a joint inquiry with an expectation of learning something that will inform
 SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY 5

philosophical research. Thus, when doing field philosophy in an area that affects social problems,
researchers are doing scholarship with the intent that their professional work will serve beneficial
political ends. Well-known public intellectuals often do this kind of work when they become involved
with stakeholders and activists – consider Martha Nussbaum’s legal and human rights work in India
or Peter Singer’s career-long engagement with animal rights activists and his role in establishing the
effective altruism movement. But it is not only high profile public intellectuals who do politically
engaged fieldwork. Philosophers also become engaged in local community problem-solving without
achieving the celebrity status – or raising the types of controversy – that these figures have.
When philosophers become engaged in collective action on issues of strong personal interest to
them, does the potential for bias undercut their credibility – and their rationality – as professionals?
Philosophers, like other citizens, might be civically engaged in their private lives, but is it proble-
matic, from the perspective of professional ethics, if they engage in civic pursuits in a way that
intersects their professional role?
Field philosophers may work with activists, community or stakeholder groups, non-profits, policy-
makers, or government agencies, and much of the time their work can be considered advocacy. In
fact, I would say is impossible to be socially engaged without advocating for a particular viewpoint,
position, or policy outcome: concrete change is the point. What is being advocated need not be
politically radical, however – field philosophers have most commonly worked on issues such as
fighting childhood poverty, improving human health, supporting scientific research, and encoura-
ging civility in public discourse. But even when work is aimed at achieving widely shared aims, it may
require, at times, advocating for a position or policy that elicits controversy due to trade-offs with
other aims or because there is disagreement about how best to achieve an aim.
Philosophers have a long history of becoming engaged in social reform movements. In the
nineteenth century, for instance, political theorists in both Britain and the United States were active
in the movement to abolish slavery. By the Progressive Era, academic philosophers, notably John
Dewey, supported social and educational reform. More recently, as with Peter Singer’s catalysis of the
animal rights movement, philosophers have continued to provide an ethical grounding for social
change. Their arguments persuasively link rational analysis with a moral duty to provide motivation
to pursue social improvement. There is no doubt that philosophers have contributed to many world-
changing social reform movements, including the abolition of slavery, the women’s rights move-
ment, universal education, an international framework for human rights, civil and voting rights, as
well as movements to end poverty, support immigrants, protect religious practice, end the prolifera-
tion of nuclear weapons, protect the environment, and extend marriage rights. In all these cases and
more, reasoned argument laid out the case that the values of a society and its actual practices were
incoherent.5
Occasionally, someone argues that philosophers should, for the sake of maintaining objectivity,
avoid practical or political activity. Such arguments typically revolve around the idea that practical
concerns pollute the purity of philosophy. Whereas Callard is principally concerned that philoso-
phers who attempt to contribute in a practical way to social justice initiatives will likely be inept, and
their blundering will do harm to social movements or the credibility of the discipline, this next
concern is that philosophical inquiry will be corrupted by involvement in political struggles.
According to this argument, the primary harm is to philosophical inquiry itself, not to social reform
movements or to philosophers’ reputations.
A recent version has been presented by Bas Van der Vossen (2015), who demonstrates how this
concern follows from two key premises: that the ‘task of political philosophers is to seek the truth
about political issues’ and that being ‘politically active predictably makes us worse at seeking the
truth about political issues’ (Van der Vossen 2015, 1054). Since we ought to do as well as we can in
our professional truth-seeking role, it follows that political philosophers should not, in their profes-
sional roles, take on roles or tasks that diminish their truth-seeking ability. Van der Vossen equates
political activity with partisan activity and supports his argument with empirical evidence from social
psychology and behavioral economics showing that when people feel they belong to a group, their
6 E. BRISTER

beliefs are swayed to become more in line with the group’s beliefs. This predictably introduces the
possibility of bias.
The solution, according to van der Vossen, is for political philosophers to avoid political engage-
ment – and not just in their professional roles but also as private citizens. They should not, for
instance, put up political yard signs, make political contributions, or root for a political candidate
because these activities encourage theorists to think in partisan terms, which is incompatible with
their responsibility to seek truth with regard to political theory. Van der Vossen’s injunction applies
not just to political theorists but also to others who have a professional duty to objective political
inquiry, such as economists and sociologists. The argument extends as well to similar types of
activities which might bias those who seek truth through inquiry (Van der Vossen 2015, 1046).
Therefore, though van der Vossen is speaking specifically to political philosophers, his conclusion
seems to apply to anyone who is pursuing field philosophy, whether for the sake of social justice or
some other aim.
Van der Vossen holds that the only appropriate way for philosophical insight to affect how the
world works is via something like a trickle-down model: academics work out difficult ideas through
debate among specialists, all of whom study real-world problems at a remove in order to keep their
own inquiry pure and solely focused on identifying the objective truth. They then publish their
results in academic journals or in more popular venues, and the people who work in the trenches –
the activists, practitioners, policymakers, and community volunteers who address childhood poverty
and similar issues directly – should seek out these specialist views and incorporate them into their
theory and practice. If they fail to do so, then the failure lies with them. It’s not our concern if
philosophy is ignored, or if our attempts at communication through paywalled academic journals
systematically fail to reach the intended audience that could put them to use.
Van der Vossen applies a positivist view of empirical science to philosophical inquiry. He sees the
goal of philosophical inquiry as identifying the objective, true nature of a stable social world.
However, many philosophers reject this positivist view of inquiry even in the case of empirical
science. They don’t see the social world as something awaiting our discovery, in need of description
from a removed vantage point. Rather, our political institutions – and social reality generally – are
a dynamic product of actions and choices. What we know, or think we know, contributes to how
these institutions develop. Thus, being close to the action may provide a superior vantage point for
understanding political institutions and issues. Moreover, social inquiry is collaborative, and philo-
sophers contribute by asking questions, facilitating discussion, widening the bounds of moral
imagination, offering critique, and assisting their partners in inquiry. Collaborative social inquiry
may take place by reading and writing published works, but it can also be pursued through face-to-
face interaction, in the mode of field philosophy. According to a postpositivist view of inquiry, the
sort of individual biases that concern van der Vossen are best evaluated and handled at the level of
epistemic communities (Longino 1990).
Even though van der Vossen acknowledges the shape of this objection, he underestimates its
force because he does not see the possibility of alternatives to individualistic, positivist, inquiry. He
does not accept working with non-philosophers in the field, learning to see problems as they see
them, and inventing new ways of addressing those problems, as a truth-seeking enterprise. Thus, he
sees only two alternatives to studying social and political problems from an isolated ivory tower:
either political philosophers can prioritize the need to make the world a better place over truth, or
else they can abandon truth and substitute ‘therapy’ instead, where ‘therapy’ is, presumably,
conversation that aims at good feelings rather than truth (Van der Vossen 2015, 1057). In other
words, the alternatives to the isolation of the ivory tower that he considers involve either devaluing
truth or abandoning it entirely. Perhaps a pragmatic theory of truth would help resolve these
differences (Capps 2019). But I suspect that the most significant difference between us does not
concern the nature of truth but rather how best to pursue truth. Is it through a process of
investigation that keeps its subject at arm’s length, or is it through social inquiry that proceeds as
scientists do: by tinkering, measuring, testing, manipulating, and closely observing from many
 SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY 7

perspectives? In this regard, I would recommend we proceed as scientists actually do, and not as
some idealized models of scientific practice imagine.
Van der Vossen’s critique of philosophers who engage in advocacy and my defense of their
advocacy do converge on a shared concern. Namely, it is certainly possible for philosophers to
become so involved in partisan disputes that the political end dominates and spoils the professional
end. I do not agree with van der Vossen that any direct involvement in social and political work will
result in such biased inquiry, but it would be naïve to believe that philosophers who become
engaged in political activism will always resist the seduction of putting revolution first. There is
a history, which I need not dredge up here, of philosophers being on the wrong side of political
movements. The key distinction here is between philosophers who simultaneously pursue philoso-
phical inquiry and the ends of social justice, and those whose primary goal is political change, even at
the expense of violating professional norms.
This brings me to a third issue: whether a moral call to defend social justice supersedes duties to
pursue philosophical inquiry. I have argued above that the virtues of intellectual inquiry tend to
coincide with the aims of social justice, and, thus, inquiry does not require a detached perspective (if
a view from nowhere is even possible). Key tenets of field philosophy are that our philosophical
preconceptions should be tempered by what we can learn from our non-philosopher partners in
inquiry, and that inquiry benefits from honest critique. It follows from these tenets that field
philosophy requires a trait of intellectual humility that is at odds with a revolutionary attitude,
where by revolutionary I mean an intention to pursue political change over other duties, without
regard to established academic norms and restraints on professional behavior. Field philosophers
keep in mind that they might be wrong, and they seek to cultivate this attitude of intellectual
humility in their collaborations because it is a precondition to seeking truth rather than spreading
dogma. The priority of field philosophers is to further philosophical inquiry, though they do so
in situations where they can simultaneously put philosophical knowledge and skills at the service of
achieving social justice or other problem-solving goals.
On this view of doing philosophy in service to others, philosophers may produce theory that is
relevant to public ends (see Dotson 2015) or they may interact with practitioners, policymakers, and
communities to encourage critique and reflective action (see Alcoff 2002). There remains the
possibility, however, of sliding into intellectual habits that are more focused on a predetermined
political goal than on maintaining the integrity of inquiry. For this reason, field philosophers should
be engaged in a robust discussion of the ethical constraints on advocacy, similar to the discussions
that have shaped the professional ethics of anthropology and conservation biology (for respective
examples, see Caplan 2003; Shrader-Frechette 1996). Such discussion should lead to guidelines for
professional practice.6

Affinities between Field Philosophy and Social Activism

I have addressed three alternative views of philosophical engagement (or nonengagement, as they
case may be) and have described what field philosophers do and why. I shall now present additional
reasons to encourage – and engage in – field philosophy. The following connections between
philosophical fieldwork and engagement with diversity, inclusivity, and community problem-
solving are sufficient to conclude that philosophical fieldwork has the potential to contribute to
social justice and that, in doing so, we can strengthen our profession. In the first place, philosophy
can be useful to people who are working toward social change because field philosophy places
useful conceptual resources in their hands. Secondly, field philosophy can improve philosophical
inquiry. And finally, it has the potential for a positive effect on diversity and inclusion in the
profession.
The best argument that can be made for the potential of philosophical fieldwork to make
a positive impact on social affairs is seen through particular accounts (Brister and Frodeman
2020b). Some examples are Roksana Alavi’s fieldwork with human trafficking victims and the church
8 E. BRISTER

groups and law enforcement officers who encounter them (Alavi 2020), and Peg O’Connor’s field-
work with addicts, psychologists, and drug courts (O’Connor 2020). In both these cases, philosophical
discussion has provided victims of injustice with valuable resources for self-understanding, and it has
also improved policymaking and delivery of services by demonstrating the relevance to practitioners
of recently developed philosophical and scientific frameworks for understanding agency, victim-
hood, and addiction. Though such concepts have become commonplace in academic journals and
have been incorporated into policymaking and professional training in some places and at higher
levels, their incorporation into the local delivery of human services is incomplete. Thus, the work of
philosophers in their local communities can make a tangible difference in people’s lives.
The subject matter expertise that can make field philosophers useful to non-academic collabora-
tors may not, at first or on its surface, be in the domain of social justice. Some philosophers have
become involved in fieldwork projects because they were able to offer a specific form of philoso-
phical expertise, but they found the project expanding into a domain that raised social justice
concerns. In such cases, philosophers’ general disciplinary expertise and access to relevant concep-
tual frameworks may be put in service of the social good even when it is outside their primary area of
disciplinary research. My own fieldwork, for instance, initially focused on park management priorities
and ecological restoration but expanded to include consideration of ways to expand local access to
parks and outdoor education (Brister 2018).
Subject matter expertise is not the only contribution that philosophers can make to groups who
are pursuing social justice aims. Philosophers have developed tools, skills, and exercises that are
useful in fieldwork. These range from drawing careful distinctions and analyzing assumptions, to
discussion methods and consensus decision-making models, to developing imaginative scenarios
and thought experiments, to insight into how power is distributed in social institutions and how to
organize groups to support marginalized members.
Real-life problems do not come neatly packaged along the lines of inquiry that have developed in
our subdisciplines. When doing fieldwork, our area of interest often expands, and problems need to
be addressed in their full complexity without the convenience (and risks) of reducing them to
thought experiments in order to isolate relevant features. But this expansion and complexity can
itself become fruitful material for philosophical consideration. Field philosophy often raises ques-
tions for non-ideal philosophy, and it demonstrates how considerations of justice affect areas of
practice that practitioners may be accustomed to treating as distinct from social and political inquiry.
There are several examples of this in Brister and Frodeman (2020a). In one case, bioethicists Sara
Goering and Eran Klein found that working with engineers on neural implants required advocacy for
the needs and perspectives of people with disabilities. In a very different example of fieldwork,
philosophers of technology, Tsjalling Swierstra and Merel Noorman, worked with an energy distribu-
tion company to evaluate policies on privacy and democratic participation. But they found that in
their case, the ability to establish a substantial normative agenda was limited by their designated role
in the project. These two cases, as well as others, demonstrate the need for philosophers to theorize
further about the problem of dirty hands – namely, which criteria to use when deciding when to
collaborate (or halt a collaboration) with partners who fall short of ideals of justice. When is it right to
continue with an ethically compromised collaboration for the sake of moving research partners to
make stepwise improvement toward more just, inclusive, and ethical practices?
The many existing examples of philosophers who work collaboratively with policymakers, acti-
vists, practitioners, and community groups demonstrate that philosophical fieldwork can be effective
for creating beneficial social impacts, and even philosophical fieldwork that is focused on addressing
problems that are not primarily issues of social justice may confront questions of equity, inclusion,
and social opportunity. These are common features of complex problem-solving, and philosophers
are attuned to identifying these issues and able to articulate them to groups who may be less aware
of how social and political disparities are structured. But the benefits accrue not just for our partners
in inquiry – fieldwork also leads to better philosophy. It can improve philosophical inquiry by putting
philosophers in situations where we discover new uses for theoretical concepts and analytic tools
 SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY 9

and where we explore the constraints of application. Our projects become places to field test
philosophical concepts and approaches.
In addition to how field philosophy can benefit both the pursuit of social justice and philosophical
inquiry, I believe it has the potential to ameliorate the effects that social injustice has had on creating
skewed demographic conditions in the profession, such that women continue to make up less than
a quarter of researchers, racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented, and there is a powerful
dominance of a small number of elite American and UK university departments. Positive effects
might occur through both recruitment and retention. Field philosophy has the potential to recruit
women and minorities to philosophy. Educational research in similarly abstract fields, such as
computer science, has found that women students are attracted to the prospect of using their
knowledge to solve problems, particularly social problems (Margolis and Fisher 2001). Corroborating
evidence can be found in a survey of the philosophical community conducted by Valerie Tiberius,
which found that women were more likely than men to endorse the value of philosophical research
that is interdisciplinary, socially relevant, and engaged in problem-solving (Tiberius 2017). Field
philosophy also has a clear potential to raise the profile of philosophy outside the academy, another
potential route for student recruitment.
If field philosophy gains proper support from the profession, it also has the potential to improve
retention of minority professors. Linda Alcoff describes how minority professors sometimes get
requests to serve their communities of origin from inside the academy, and she examines how
and why it is a problem when professors are denied tenure despite developing a profile of
intellectual leadership in the community. Too often, engaged work is not considered intellectually
rigorous or treated as a form of scholarship. The profession should develop guidelines for evaluating
fieldwork, a task that she is optimistic should not be much of a challenge, since ‘we can judge the
integrity of intellectual work in the public domain just as we judge intellectual work in the academy’
(Alcoff 2002, 533). This seems right, and field philosophy provides a framework for explaining the
purpose and criteria that guide philosophical scholarship when it takes place outside the academy.

Field Philosophy outside North America: Reflections on East and West

My evaluation of field philosophy as a means of effectively improving real-world social conditions
while contributing to philosophical inquiry has been situated in a Western context, primarily in the
United States. I will now consider the prospects for cross-cultural adoption of fieldwork methods in
philosophy. Fieldwork will raise different methodological concerns and require attending to different
practical and academic considerations depending on the political and academic structures in
different nations.
There are considerable differences between incentives and constraints in the academic systems of
the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, and the United States. In the United States currently, philo-
sophers of science, technology, and medicine, as well as bioethics, can access funding streams that
are less available to researchers in more traditional areas, such as meta-ethics and history of
philosophy. These funding streams clearly encourage work that is oriented to scientific and medical
practice, to interdisciplinary collaborations, and to technological applications. This has been a recent
source of support for field philosophers in the US, and it has contributed to higher visibility for
projects in these areas. Funding in Canada has been similarly oriented toward collaboration with
scientists and medical researchers, and philosophers in Canada have been especially successful at
collaborating with social scientists, for instance on grants to support human rights research. Such
academic collaborations are an important subset of philosophical fieldwork. But, as in the US, the
Canadian government has not been offering strong support to the humanities. In both countries,
one goal of philosophical fieldwork is to increase awareness of the direct relevance that philosophy
has to achieving desirable and concrete social goals.
Philosophy of technology is more strongly established in Europe than in the United States and
Canada, and it has been influential enough to lead to collaborations between philosophers,
10 E. BRISTER

government agencies, and private technology companies. Indeed, this area of research has provided
an impetus for the formulation of field philosophy. However, in other areas of research, European
philosophy has only recently begun to place an emphasis on practical implications of philosophical
concepts. Philosophy of science is a good indicator of where academic philosophers are in terms of
their orientation to investigating and contributing to social change, and in these areas, Europeans
took the lead in the early and middle twentieth century but have been less inclined in recent decades
to investigate how moral, social, and political frameworks intersect with science (Radder 2015).
The story in the UK is more complicated. For over a decade, the UK, like the US, has required STEM
researchers who are applying for federal funding to identify how their research will have beneficial
effects on society, and this has incentivized public outreach and the attention paid to connecting
research findings with policy and practice. Beginning in 2014, philosophy departments in the UK
were required to participate in the Research Excellence Framework (REF), a research evaluation
exercise, and some of the most notable results were the activities of philosophers who engaged in
various forms of field philosophy (Hicks and Britt Holbrook 2019). However, as of this writing, there is
some question whether the UK government will drop the analysis of social impact from their
research system.
Academic philosophers in China have given strong arguments for the potential of field philoso-
phy to improve social life in China by putting philosophical inquiry to practical use (see essays in this
volume). Public universities in China are more strongly directed by the central government than are
universities in Europe and North America. For this reason, philosophers in China may also find their
work strongly supported when it contributes to government-initiated social change, and they may
have an easier time than Western philosophers in developing non-academic research partners. In
addition, as Wei argues in this volume, field philosophy’s understanding of the role of the philoso-
pher in society is congruent with the history of Chinese philosophy: Confucianism is a guide to
action, while the Western tradition often takes philosophy to be a form of cultural commentary
(Zhang 2020).
Western philosophers have seen reports that Chinese scholars lack the full range of academic
freedoms enjoyed in the West, and they may wonder how this impacts field philosophy and the
particular connection I have examined between field philosophy and social justice. This concern
compels a more careful consideration of what is meant by social justice, both at a minimum and in
specific cultural contexts. At a minimum, I have discussed social justice with regard to philosophy as
a way of highlighting philosophy’s potential to contribute to concrete changes in policy and practice.
Field philosophers see philosophy as more than an intellectual pursuit for the sake of personal
edification (which is an important goal of philosophical inquiry, but not its only goal), as more than
the pursuit of logical distinctions for the sake of play or the edification of experts, and as more than
a source of positivist knowledge about the social world. Field philosophy emphasizes the beneficial
role that philosophers can play in helping non-academic groups to understand and articulate the
theoretical assumptions that motivate their goals and to formulate plans for making concrete
changes that are in line with a group’s shared values. Stated in this way, Chinese scholars have the
same ability to pursue field philosophy for the sake of social improvement that European, Canadian,
and US scholars do.
The current cultural context in the U.S. places a strong value on increasing diversity and the inclusion
of marginalized social groups into public decision-making. This is a priority following a century of
increasing awareness of how academic and public institutions have fallen short of American ideals of
equality and inclusivity. In the U.S., therefore, the contributions of field philosophers to public decision-
making often involve expanding access to services, increasing democratic participation, and supporting
marginalized communities. But there are other aims of social justice, too, and how we prioritize them
depends on cultural traditions and on historically and geographically contingent assessments of threats
to human well-being, such as war, poverty, violence, illness, and insecurity. Improving people’s lives
includes the relief of poverty, the provision of educational opportunities, the preservation of environ-
mental services, and the cultivation of aesthetic appreciation. These are certainly goals for social
 SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY 11

improvement that are shared across cultures and that are amenable to philosophical support. How to
improve the lives of people living in a society depends very much on the society, the problems that
afflict it, and the values the society shares. Field philosophy can play a role in making a society more just,
in general, and it can do a lot of good at the small scale, in local communities. In both the U.S. and China,
we expect field philosophers to calibrate their engagement to the available opportunities and to share
philosophical insight and opportunities for discussion with their partners in culturally appropriate ways.
Field philosophy opens up a wide range of opportunities for academic philosophers to affect
society outside the university, in cultures East and West, South and North. Writing in 1941, George
Geiger, a student of John Dewey, championed the critical function of philosophy in helping
members of society to consciously and carefully discuss values and design social policies to attain
the consequences desired by a particular society, in a particular place and time, ‘a work as pedestrian
yet as shattering as any intellectual revolution’ (Geiger 1941, 77). In its pursuit of social justice
through collaborative inquiry, field philosophy demonstrates its commitment to this pedestrian yet,
in its own way, revolutionary work.

Notes
1. For an example of a debate about these methodological questions between an applied philosopher and a field
philosopher, see Norton (2002).
2. See the essays in Brister and Frodeman (2020b), for 22 case studies reflecting on the relationship between
fieldwork in philosophy and other forms of scholarship, teaching, and academic service.
3. A recent local news site wrote that in response to the question, ‘What is the biggest challenge our region is likely
to face over the next 10 years?’ RIT President David Munson responded, ‘improving Rochester city schools and
reducing poverty’ (https://rochesterbeacon.com/2020/01/09/the-decade-ahead/). My university is actively
involved in outreach programs to support quality education in public city schools and views these activities
as consistent with its educational mission.
4. A description of the role of philosophical skills in supporting non-philosophical inquiry can be found in O’Rourke
and Crowley (2013).
5. There is also a history of articles like this one, debunking arguments holding that philosophy’s appropriate place
is at a remove from social issues (Geiger 1941) and urging philosophers to take action against social wrongs
(Chomsky 1968).
6. The 2019 version of the American Philosophical Association Good Practices Guide sidesteps this issue: ‘We have
not attempted to discuss the role or responsibilities of philosophers as potential agents in the public or political
sphere, and how these relate to their professional and pedagogical roles and responsibilities’ (American
Philosophical Association 2019, 5). The time is ripe for the profession to undertake this discussion.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Evelyn Brister is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Rochester Institute of Technology. She has a PhD in
Philosophy (2002) and an MS in Environmental Science (2012). Her research in philosophy of science is on the
identification of priorities in land management and philosophical issues raised by the use of genetic technologies for
conservation purposes. She is also involved in research on how best to promote interdisciplinary collaboration between
social and natural scientists and between philosophers and scientists. A book co-edited with Robert Frodeman, A Guide
to Field Philosophy (Routledge 2020), collects narrative accounts of philosophers who have engaged in fieldwork with
scientists, engineers, and others outside the academy. She is President of the Public Philosophy Network and serves on
the APA Committee on Public Philosophy.

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