What do you do with a degree in Philosophy?

Our exploration of misleadingness brought us into insightful conversations with philosopher and PhD student, Kyle Adams, from the University of Waterloo. Together, we revisited and refined our understanding of misleadingness. In our latest guest blog, Kyle shares his experiences and perspectives from the past year working with us on this intriguing topic.


My name is Kyle Adams, and for the last two (and a bit) years, I have been a graduate student in the University of Waterloo’s Department of Philosophy. Even after a few years of practice, it’s still strange for me to write it out explicitly like that. I, like most people, spent much of my life with a very particular image of what a philosopher is: an old man, probably with a big bushy beard, almost certainly somewhere in Ancient Athens.

I am a man with a beard, but I’m young, and my chances of travelling back three thousand years to chat with Socrates and Plato in the agora are probably not very good. My apparent distance from the popular idea of a philosopher invites a question that I must have heard a thousand times since starting my schooling: what do you do with a degree in philosophy? It’s a question that working with the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) has helped me to answer.

Asking Questions

Remember our imagined philosopher from the first paragraph? When he was walking around Ancient Athens, he was probably asking a lot of questions. An essential part of any philosophical method is to question what we are presented with. Sometimes this means the evidence of our senses, and sometimes it means the nature of some important quality—wisdom, or justice. At OSR, I asked a ton of questions. Why is this definition about using statistics instead of producing them? Can we even separate the use of statistics from their production, or are the two practices too interwoven for that? What counts as an audience for the purposes of a statement? What happens if different people believe conflicting things on the basis of shared evidence? How can we avoid going beyond our remit?

Some of these questions are more obviously philosophical than others, but they all count in my books. Sometimes, working with a philosopher can feel like talking to an especially curious child: we are both equally happy to keep asking ‘Why?’ until somebody cuts us off. But despite the occasional frustration (and believe me, philosophers sometimes feel it too, when we talk to each other), offering this series of explanations is helpful.

Every question you answer, especially if it makes you sit and reflect for a while, gives you a better understanding of what you think. If you find an answer, excellent! If you don’t, even better. Now, you’ve identified something that you don’t yet understand—this might be an unsupported belief, or something you just hadn’t thought about yet, or sometimes something you’ve taken for granted that could be improved. This practice of questioning is a skill that philosophers train and develop, but it’s something that everybody can employ in their own lives, both personally and professionally.

“Test Our Thinking”

Working with OSR has been a very rewarding experience for me. When my supervisor, Jenny Saul, first introduced me to Ed Humpherson and OSR, we talked about me consulting on the working definition of ‘misleading statistics’ they had developed. Over the last few years, Jenny, along with a handful of other philosophers of language, had been working with OSR to help develop a definition of what it means for a use of statistics to be misleading. This work resulted in a thinkpiece exploring various ways that it might be helpful to think of misleading, and later, a follow-up expanding on and refining the original ideas. These thinkpieces contained the definitions that Ed and Jenny thought it would be helpful to have me consult on. “We’d like someone to test our thinking,” is a phrase that Ed employed frequently, and it became, I think, the motto of this research placement.

As the weeks went by, it turned out that OSR was doing an awful lot of thinking for me to test. That one specific consultation turned into a multi-faceted research program: I had the opportunity to consult on specific cases of potential misleadingness, to collaborate on research into the meaning of ‘serving the public good’, and ultimately, to organize a workshop for a group of philosophers to discuss new challenges posed by shifting communication media, and they even let me write this blog!

Through all these avenues of research, the original question—what it means for a use of statistics to be misleading—remained a major focus for me. Through many gradual revisions, and lots of collaboration, we identified some areas where it seemed possible to improve upon the existing work. We looked at the work we wanted a definition of misleadingness to be able to do, and concluded that it should be action-guiding for OSR. We clarified some ambiguities about what kinds of beliefs OSR should be concerned about, and how best to identify and distinguish the audiences of statements.

We also spent a lot of time addressing a shortcoming of earlier versions of the definition—how to distinguish between a use of statistics that’s misleading, and one that is more straightforwardly incorrect. For instance, if I just make up a completely wrong statistic to tell you, I have done something more than merely mislead you. Both of these cases fall within OSR’s remit, but they require us to consider different factors, and approach regulatory responsibilities in different ways. The team at OSR has been wonderfully supportive and collaborative in diving into these problems, always welcoming my questions, even those about the pickiest philosophical technicalities.

OSR has been a fantastic place for me to put my work to the test in the real world. As often as I was testing OSR’s thinking, OSR was testing mine—many of my questions were met with answers that forced me to adapt my own thoughts on the matter at hand. My work with OSR has been hugely informative for my research moving forward, and has also been quite a lot of fun!

My thanks to OSR across the board, and especially Elise, Kirsty, and Ed, for welcoming a philosopher into your midst to poke and prod at your thinking and see what happens. You have given me a lot to think about, a thoroughly enjoyable research experience, and also a brand-new, and unexpected, answer to an old question. What do you do with a degree in philosophy? Apparently, if you’re lucky enough to find the right people, you work in statistics regulation!


Related reading:

What do we think about Misleadingness? A follow up thinkpiece (coming 09 September 2024)