Richard Carrier vs. Academic Philosophy

[lpetrich]

A few years ago, Richard Carrier appeared on the Rational Response Squad's former Internet radio show (show #27) and explained what he thought was wrong with professional, academic philosophy today. I am not familiar with that subject, but some of what he says I can certainly agree with; I don't know of any recent academic philosopher with the visibility that Bertrand Russell had had in his day.

He summarized his case in six points, which closely parallel Mario Bunge's criticisms in his book "Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for Reconstruction".

1. Philosophers have no method - how does one know that one have the right answer? And philosophy needs objectives; once some objective is achieved, philosophers can then move on to other problems.

2. What good is philosophy for non-philosophers? Scientists are much better at explaining that than philosophers, and they are much better at popularizing their work than philosophers.

3. Debate vs. scholasticism. Philosophers are often antiquarians and hairsplitters. Philosophy students ought to debate as part of their training.

4. The need to solve problems and make progress, as opposed to doing history, sort of like what scientists do.

5. No standards for admitting or rejecting members. Philosophers need to recognize and reject quacks, the way that scientists do with creationists and the like. RC used the example of libertarian vs. compatibilist theories of free will, suggesting that philosophers dismiss the libertarian theory as comparable to geocentrism.

6. Philosophers do not take peer review seriously; they do not publish retractions of papers that were shown to be flawed, as scientists do. And it should be an embarrassment for philosophy journals to publish such papers.

Bunge's 10 points:

1. Excessive professionalization. Philosophy as a job rather than a passion, thus making most works "potboilers, boring and irritating."

2. Confusion between philosophizing and chronicling. Like RC's point about antiquarianism.

3. Mistaking obscurity for profundity.

4. Obsession with language. Writing about language instead of about real problems, while ignoring linguists and the like, thus producing very annoying and boring papers.

5. Metaphysical idealism as opposed to metaphysical realism. Philosophy journals should not be fiction periodicals.

6. Exaggerated attention paid to mini-problems and fashionable academic games, as opposed to the numerous legitimate and important problems.

7. Insubstantial formalism and formalistic insubstantiality. Papers with veryaccurate symbolic logic that do not address any important problems, and incoherent papers that do address important problems.

8. Fragmenartism. System-building and construction of world views have gone out of fashion, meaning that philosophers have been attacking problems outside of any broader framework.

9. Detachment from the intellectual engines of modern civilization, like science, technology, and ideology. RC doesn't quite agree.

10. Ivory tower. Philosophers are insular, living in their own self-contained intellectual world and not noticing anything outside of that. RC disagrees with that assessment except for how philosophers' conclusions are seldom of interest to non-philosophers.

Chaoslord, another RRS panelist, disputed some of them. The resulting conversation was sometimes difficult to follow, especially as some of the other RRS members would join in -- at least some of Brian Sapient, Rook Hawkins, Razorcade, Yellow #5, and KellyM78.


RC mentioned that some philosophy journal had published a paper that had a big logical fallacy in it, and he wrote to that journal's editor about it. He responded by saying that he doesn't want to reject something just because it has a fallacy in it. He compared to scientific journals, which issue retractions of papers discovered to have flaws.

But one of the RRS guys claimed that it is disgraceful that something as unjustified as mind-body dualism should continue to be taken seriously by some professional philosophers, and RC stated that he has similar feelings about libertarian free will, which RC and the RRS guy consider incoherent.

In question time, someone asked whether philosophy was anything more than pure thought and guesswork. One of the RRS guys said that that was certainly true of theistic philosophers of religion, who mainly guess and bullshit their way along, something that RC agreed with.

Then they talked about confusing naturalism and materialism, noting that some metaphysical naturalists believe in the existence of certain immaterial things.

Then they got into the question of what one can do to combat religion. They agreed that it would take a long time, though they pointed out that strongly-secular northern Europeans score very well in measures of societal well-being.

Kelly then asked the question of how to bridge the gap between philosophers and laypeople. One of the others responded that it would be good to have critical-thinking classes, but that governments don't like critical thinkers. Then they got into education in general, about how our grade-to-high-school education is based on memorization rather than learning skills like scientific method. RC has a whole speech on this, and he suspected that part of the problem is that it is easier to evaluate success in memorization than success in learning skills.

[Preno]

I don't know of any recent academic philosopher with the visibility that Bertrand Russell had had in his day.So?
1. Philosophers have no method - how does one know that one have the right answer?Neither do scientists, and you certainly don't need a method to know the "right answer" (insofar as there is one).
And philosophy needs objectives; once some objective is achieved, philosophers can then move on to other problems.But philosophy has objectives, in the same sense that math does - i.e. "solve this problem, explain this issue".
2. What good is philosophy for non-philosophers?Well, a lot of non-philosophers are actually interested in philosophy. And anyway, who cares? "What good is it" is an infantile criticism.
Scientists are much better at explaining that than philosophers, and they are much better at popularizing their work than philosophers.That's completely irrelevant.
3. Debate vs. scholasticism. Philosophers are often antiquariansSometimes, sure.
and hairsplitters.I suppose so, but what kind of criticism is that? Would you criticize a mathematician for being a hairsplitter?
4. The need to solve problems and make progress, as opposed to doing history, sort of like what scientists do.I don't understand this criticism. Philosophers do solve problems and make progress.
5. No standards for admitting or rejecting members. Philosophers need to recognize and reject quacks, the way that scientists do with creationists and the like. RC used the example of libertarian vs. compatibilist theories of free will, suggesting that philosophers dismiss the libertarian theory as comparable to geocentrism.Agreed.
6. Philosophers do not take peer review seriously; they do not publish retractions of papers that were shown to be flawed, as scientists do. And it should be an embarrassment for philosophy journals to publish such papers.There's something to it, but again, philosophy is not science and whether a paper is "flawed" or not is a more controversial matter.
1. Excessive professionalization. Philosophy as a job rather than a passion, thus making most works "potboilers, boring and irritating."I imagine most professional philosophers have a passion for philosophy, and anyway, criticizing a field of study for professionalization is pretty insane imo.
2. Confusion between philosophizing and chronicling. Like RC's point about antiquarianism.I highly doubt philosophers are confusing the two.
3. Mistaking obscurity for profundity.Some philosophers do that, not others. Not a criticism of philosophy in general.
4. Obsession with language. Writing about language instead of about real problems, while ignoring linguists and the like, thus producing very annoying and boring papers.Some philosophers are, others aren't. Not a criticism of philosophy in general.

Also, the opposition of "writing about language" vs. "writing about real problems" is simplistic, as analytic philosophy has shown and anyone with the slightest degree of familiarity with it would know.

And the claim that philosophers ignore linguists is just laughable. Analytic philosophy has close connections with linguistics. In fact, linguistics sometimes borrowed concepts from philosophers (such as Austin and Searle).
5. Metaphysical idealism as opposed to metaphysical realism. Philosophy journals should not be fiction periodicals.I don't understand this criticism.
6. Exaggerated attention paid to mini-problems and fashionable academic games, as opposed to the numerous legitimate and important problems.You have to deal with "mini-problems" before you deal with "important problems". That's like criticizing "physicists" for studying the properties of gallium trichloride when they could be developing a theory quantum gravity. Sheer idiocy.
7. Insubstantial formalism and formalistic insubstantiality. Papers with veryaccurate symbolic logic that do not address any important problems, and incoherent papers that do address important problems.Some "papers with very accurate symbolic logic" deal with "important" problems, others don't. I don't understand this criticism. I assume what he wanted to say is that the usage of symbolic logic is often gratuitous, but that's not really true.
8. Fragmenartism. System-building and construction of world views have gone out of fashion, meaning that philosophers have been attacking problems outside of any broader framework.That's not entirely true, and anyway, I'm sure if this wasn't the case, then he would have criticized philosophers for dogmatic adherence to ready made world view or some such non-sense.
9. Detachment from the intellectual engines of modern civilization, like science, technology, and ideology. RC doesn't quite agree.Yes, this is certainly not true in general.
10. Ivory tower. Philosophers are insular, living in their own self-contained intellectual world and not noticing anything outside of that. RC disagrees with that assessment except for how philosophers' conclusions are seldom of interest to non-philosophers.Again, not true in general.

[Celsus]

Philosophers, and I would even extend it to western secular academia generally, are too involved in a seemingly closed conversation among themselves. Not that there's anything wrong with that per se, but it leads to difficulties in dealing with the outside world, whom they once served.

There was a funny seminar I had here where a lecturer from LSE was trying to argue for virtue ethics as a philosophical base from which to promote jurisprudence in international relations. She began (paraphrased only slightly): "God is dead... therefore we need secular (in this case virtue ethics) models." And while her argument would have passed unquestioned within the halls of academia (in particular, among philosophers), someone rightly chipped in to say "Well in other parts of the world, they don't consider God to be dead - so why would they accept your imperative to employ virtue ethics?" She simply had no answer to the charge, and it leads to the question of what can she actually offer to a cosmopolitan world?

However, I don't think philosophy should try to be more like science. Sure it can learn from how the sciences work, but it is quite a different enterprise - part of the reason why a lot of philosophers are treated with disrespect by scientists and vice versa - because there's a lack of understanding in how each discipline operates. Science's methodology has learned a lot through philosophy - the death of positivism and scientism and the problematics of hard empiricism, for example.

But that didn't destroy the scientific enterprise, indeed problems with respect to instrumentalism that had been acknowledged for decades by philosophers were widely recognised only at last as we entered the atomic era. A lot of scientists like Heisenberg, Planck, Bohr, Schrodinger, Mach, etc. were very familiar with leading philosophy of their age and even wrote philosophical papers alongside their physics. Indeed, the Planck-Mach debates in the early 20th century about the role and nature of science in society was forging the path that philosophy would later play catch up itself in thinking about its own raison d'etre. On the other side of the coin, there was an urgency from philosophers to make their work more "scientific" or at least rigorous, such was seemingly triumphal results of science in its day - structuralism, positivism, analytic philosophy (exemplified by Russell and this school is ironically - given Russell's popular appeal - perhaps the most difficult to grasp), etc. - were all products of this period. However, aside from analytic philosophy, most of the other attempts foundered badly, and a certain reaction against science emerged, particularly in continental philosophy.

Today, unfortunately, the division of labour in academia means fewer scientists and philosophers are well-enough versed in each others fields for meaningful interaction. And this is a shame.

[David B]

Philosophers, and I would even extend it to western secular academia generally, are too involved in a seemingly closed conversation among themselves. Not that there's anything wrong with that per se, but it leads to difficulties in dealing with the outside world, whom they once served.

There was a funny seminar I had here where a lecturer from LSE was trying to argue for virtue ethics as a philosophical base from which to promote jurisprudence in international relations. She began (paraphrased only slightly): "God is dead... therefore we need secular (in this case virtue ethics) models." And while her argument would have passed unquestioned within the halls of academia (in particular, among philosophers), someone rightly chipped in to say "Well in other parts of the world, they don't consider God to be dead - so why would they accept your imperative to employ virtue ethics?" She simply had no answer to the charge, and it leads to the question of what can she actually offer to a cosmopolitan world?

However, I don't think philosophy should try to be more like science. Sure it can learn from how the sciences work, but it is quite a different enterprise - part of the reason why a lot of philosophers are treated with disrespect by scientists and vice versa - because there's a lack of understanding in how each discipline operates. Science's methodology has learned a lot through philosophy - the death of positivism and scientism and the problematics of hard empiricism, for example.

But that didn't destroy the scientific enterprise, indeed problems with respect to instrumentalism that had been acknowledged for decades by philosophers were widely recognised only at last as we entered the atomic era. A lot of scientists like Heisenberg, Planck, Bohr, Schrodinger, Mach, etc. were very familiar with leading philosophy of their age and even wrote philosophical papers alongside their physics. Indeed, the Planck-Mach debates in the early 20th century about the role and nature of science in society was forging the path that philosophy would later play catch up itself in thinking about its own raison d'etre. On the other side of the coin, there was an urgency from philosophers to make their work more "scientific" or at least rigorous, such was seemingly triumphal results of science in its day - structuralism, positivism, analytic philosophy (exemplified by Russell and this school is ironically - given Russell's popular appeal - perhaps the most difficult to grasp), etc. - were all products of this period. However, aside from analytic philosophy, most of the other attempts foundered badly, and a certain reaction against science emerged, particularly in continental philosophy.

Today, unfortunately, the division of labour in academia means fewer scientists and philosophers are well-enough versed in each others fields for meaningful interaction. And this is a shame.

My bold.

Dennett, among philosophers, has taken evolution on board as a fact of life, and no doubt there are others I am unaware of.

Scientists, generally, I suspect don't give a damn about the philosophy of science, taking the view that no matter what philosphers might say about it, science is what scientists do, more or less well, and sorting out the more from the less is the remit of science, not philosophy.

David (became disillusioned with philosophy when he studied it at university level, when he found that it was all about learning about what philosophers said, and nothing at all about examining whether what they said was a good mapping of life, the universe and everything)

[JamesBannon]

David (became disillusioned with philosophy when he studied it at university level, when he found that it was all about learning about what philosophers said, and nothing at all about examining whether what they said was a good mapping of life, the universe and everything)
Sometimes I think this too. We still have philosophers today who repeat exactly the same mistakes as Plato and neo-Platonists after him. E.g., Alvin Platinga insists that things like beauty, simplicity and truth are part of the fabric of the universe. Huh? Bollocks! Same with numbers and formalisms like mathematics and logic. Again, bollocks! I'm not saying this is typical of modern philosophy generally, but it is typical of a certain class of philosophers who get published a great deal.

[Celsus]

Scientists, generally, I suspect don't give a damn about the philosophy of science, taking the view that no matter what philosphers might say about it, science is what scientists do, more or less well, and sorting out the more from the less is the remit of science, not philosophy.
And this is a damn shame, because questions for example about science vs pseudoscience, or evolution vs creation, are fundamentally philosophy of science questions, and understanding and justifying things like demarcation, falsifiability, methodology, induction, reductionism, etc are ultimately not subject themselves to the scientific method (you can't analyse the 'scientific method' scientificially): They require philosophical examination and philosophical answers.

[Eudaimonist]

1. Philosophers have no method - how does one know that one have the right answer?

Of course they have a method. The method is reason. Philosophers have to judge for themselves what makes sense and what doesn't. They can identify fallacies and blind spots in arguments.

Philosophy will never be a hard science, and it is ridiculous to try to turn it into one. Carrier sounds overly scientistic to me.

And philosophy needs objectives; once some objective is achieved, philosophers can then move on to other problems.

This is a reasonable suggestion.

2. What good is philosophy for non-philosophers? Scientists are much better at explaining that than philosophers, and they are much better at popularizing their work than philosophers.

I agree with this 100%. Philosophy can, and should, say something of value to non-philosophers, or else what is the point? Philosophers tend to look down on "popularizers", which is an unfortunate attitude.

3. Debate vs. scholasticism. Philosophers are often antiquarians and hairsplitters. Philosophy students ought to debate as part of their training.

This is a reasonable suggestion.

4. The need to solve problems and make progress, as opposed to doing history, sort of like what scientists do.

Sure.

5. No standards for admitting or rejecting members. Philosophers need to recognize and reject quacks, the way that scientists do with creationists and the like. RC used the example of libertarian vs. compatibilist theories of free will, suggesting that philosophers dismiss the libertarian theory as comparable to geocentrism.

This is a seriously fucked up suggestion. This would be corrosive to free thought in philosophy, and promote fanaticism.

Of course, individual philosophers may choose to regard any school of philosophy as backward or not. However, philosophers should not be excluded from the academic community simply because they don't have the right orthodoxy. Again, Carrier shows his scientism.

I think there are already standards for admitting members, however. If you don't have a Ph.D. in philosophy from a good university, you are unlikely to be taken seriously by the establishment. And philosophers can and seem to already have standards for what counts as a sufficiently well-argued paper for inclusion in their philosophical journals. No paper should be rejected simply because it is unorthodox, but should perhaps be rejected if the writer clearly shows little skill in developing arguments, in dealing with opposing views and criticisms, etc.

6. Philosophers do not take peer review seriously; they do not publish retractions of papers that were shown to be flawed, as scientists do. And it should be an embarrassment for philosophy journals to publish such papers.

This is a reasonable suggestion.


eudaimonia,

Mark

[Preno]

David (became disillusioned with philosophy when he studied it at university level, when he found that it was all about learning about what philosophers said, and nothing at all about examining whether what they said was a good mapping of life, the universe and everything)Well, yeah, philosophy courses are obviously "all about learning about what philosophers said". How on Earth would it follow that philosophy is about that? :dunno:

It's like if you said that you "found" in high school that "maths" is "all about" memorizing a bunch of algorithms. It's not, it's just that high school math courses are about that.

[Ray Moscow]

I would agree with Preno (and Bertrand Russell) that lots of non-philosophers are interested in philosphy. Many issues of interest to the average intelligent person are not (yet) elucidated by science, but philosophy at least gives us a start on a reasonable investigation of such things.

[lpetrich]

David (became disillusioned with philosophy when he studied it at university level, when he found that it was all about learning about what philosophers said, and nothing at all about examining whether what they said was a good mapping of life, the universe and everything)Well, yeah, philosophy courses are obviously "all about learning about what philosophers said". How on Earth would it follow that philosophy is about that? :dunno:
What David B complained about is philosophy being treated as nothing but antiquarianism, one of the things that Richard Carrier had complained about.

It's all well and good to learn about what notable philosophers had advocated, but philosophy != history of philosophy.

[Quizalufagus]

David (became disillusioned with philosophy when he studied it at university level, when he found that it was all about learning about what philosophers said, and nothing at all about examining whether what they said was a good mapping of life, the universe and everything)Well, yeah, philosophy courses are obviously "all about learning about what philosophers said". How on Earth would it follow that philosophy is about that? :dunno:
What David B complained about is philosophy being treated as nothing but antiquarianism, one of the things that Richard Carrier had complained about.

Yeah, but Preno is pointing out that David and Carrier are mistaken in thinking philosophy is treated as antiquarianism. It is simply not true that most philosophy courses are primarily about the history of philosophy.