Resolution (2021)

I have been flip-flopping on this post every few months for 4 years. I've cracked it at last:

the median philosophy degree does nothing for the world. But the tails are heavy. Is the left tail (Herder, Rousseau, Marx, Freud, Zhu Hongdeng, Inazō, Schmitt, half of bioethics) as heavy as the right tail (Mozi, Santideva, Smith, Bentham, Ramsey, Singer, Sen, Bostrom)?

1


I think it's difficult to know your own potential, and also surprisingly difficult to know which tail one is in.

So my actual answer to the statement in the title is: because I am not confident I'm exceptional, and not confident I'm the good kind of exceptional. The rest of this post is for those like me.



Can you tell them, with a straight face, to follow philosophical argument wherever it may lead? If they challenge your credentials, will you boast of philosophy’s other great discoveries: that motion is impossible, that a Being than which no greater can be conceived cannot be conceived not to exist, that it is unthinkable that anything exists outside the mind, that time is unreal, that no theory has ever been made at all probable by evidence (but on the other hand that an empirically adequate ideal theory cannot possibly be false), that it is a wide-open scientific question whether anyone has ever believed anything, and so on, and on, ad nauseum? Not me!
– David Lewis


People are not confident [analytic philosophy] can solve its own problems, not confident that it can be modified so as to do better on that first score, and not confident its problems are worth solving in the first place... what we see is a desperate scramble to show that the skills or tools we have might find some problem space wherein their, our, worth can be made manifest… I do not think such a problem space has been forthcoming.
Liam Bright


It’s simple: The greatest nontechnical minds in history have all failed to work out the nature of the world just by thinking about it, and so would I. 2

Alright alright it’s not simple. Aside from the pursuit of truth, which it is manifestly bad at: why do philosophy?

  1. the philosopher as intellectual janitor

    The standard rejoinder to the account of philosophy implied above is that philosophy is not about adding to a body of knowledge, but instead clarifying the concepts used in other bodies of knowledge. (Mental plumbing). This is how naturalist philosophers think of their role, e.g. WVO Quine:

    ...it is scrutiny of [the] uncritical acceptance of the realm of physical objects itself, or of classes, etc., that devolves upon ontology. Here is the task of making explicit what had been tacit, and precise what had been vague; of exposing and resolving paradoxes, smoothing kinks, lopping off vestigial growths, clearing ontological slums.

    Or Wittgenstein, the radical janitor: "In philosophy we are not laying foundations but tidying a room, in the process of which we have to touch everything a dozen times."

    The standard rejoinder to this rejoinder is to ask for a single natural language concept which has been successfully "tidied" (analysed or dissolved) in this way.


  2. philosophy as justification of belief and action

    Maybe philosophy's job is giving a general "foundation" to what we do. That is, it doesn't discover new things, instead it provides pure rational backup for intuition or science. Descartes is the obvious example, though foundationalism remains extremely popular among philosophers and theologians:

    Throughout my writings I have made it clear that my method imitates that of the architect. When an architect wants to build a house which is stable on ground where there is a sandy topsoil over underlying rock, or clay, or some other firm base, he begins by digging out a set of trenches from which he removes the sand, and anything resting on or mixed in with the sand, so that he can lay his foundations on firm soil. In the same way, I began by taking everything that was doubtful and throwing it out, like sand …
    I think it's fair to regard this as a dead-end: after thousands of years of trying, we apparently can't ground much purely a priori.

    More controversially, I'm no longer sure why we need it. Many things don't seem to need (philosophical) justification - for instance, a thing's just being fun seems enough. Other things (e.g. beliefs that affect the lives of others) do seriously need rational justification, but receive this in the findings of the mature sciences. Remaining ones, like the justification of fun, or science (which we can't justify using science, say) are interesting but not pressing.

    If you pointed a gun at me, I'd answer with some blend of pragmatism ("whatever works is justified enough"), reliabilism ("if you got the info from a reliable source, it's justified") and externalism ("things can be justified even if we don't know how"). But you have to do some philosophy to get to that position - and certainly a majority of philosophers don't agree.


  3. philosophy as activity

    Another common one is that philosophy isn't a thing (e.g. a body of claims), but a process, which has idiosyncratic private value for each person who instantiates it. As Adorno has it:

    The crux is what happens in [philosophy], not any thesis or position... Essentially, therefore, philosophy is not expoundable. If it were, it would be superfluous...
    Or Fichte:
    Make no mistake about this: nothing that I or any other teacher can lecture to you about is philosophy. If we're lucky, we may possess some philosophy ourselves, but we cannot give it away.

    (This explains why we read so much old/obsolete work: we're learning by demonstration!)


    • philosophy as virtuous self-examination

      A literally classic view is that philosophy is the noble attempt to understand oneself and to rise thereby above the animals and your own mortality. And maybe this act is too personal to be a matter of facts and maxims, to be transmittable as mathematical theorems or biological taxonomies are. Or, more recently, Alain de Botton:

      Socrates compared living without thinking systematically to practicing... [e.g. pottery] without following or even knowing of technical procedures. One would never imagine that a good pot would result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one’s life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals?
      But you can't understand yourself if you're not right about yourself. Nor can you be 'authentic'. This is obviously an empirical question, and one I can't find even self-report survey data on. Seeing what strange false inferences great philosophers have made about themselves should give us pause.


    • philosophy as therapy for the human condition

      Another ancient claim: philosophy is good for your mental or spiritual health - for instance, it stops you fearing death, or envying others, or suffering as a result of misfortune. (And this is what "being philosophical about" something means.)

      Epictetus:

      A philosopher's school is a surgery: pain, not pleasure, you should have felt therein. For on entering none of you is whole... Think you to be a philosopher, acting as you do? ... Nay, you must watch, you must labor; overcome certain desires; quit your familiar friends... as the price of these things you gain Freedom, Tranquility, and passionless Serenity."
      Or again Alain de Botton:

      art and philosophy help us... to turn pain into knowledge.
      However, despite this long tradition, whether philosophising leads to peace of mind is an empirical question, and what little data we have suggests that (formal) philosophical study actually correlates with mental illness. The lifetime prevalence of depression among philosophy students is maybe 24%, compared to 5-15% in the general population. I'm not saying which causes which. (This is of course the modern kind of philosophy; maybe the ancient kind is kinder.) Here's some stronger evidence from all of graduate school, not just philosophy.

      Anecdotes abound. Plenty of people say that Stoic philosophy made their life better. But the most seriously philosophical person I've ever met was constantly miserable because of it. He was dogged by philosophy's failure to rebut the radical sceptical paradoxes (like the ineliminable possibility of you being a mere brain in a vat right this second), which failure meant that none of his perceptions could be trusted with the certainty he needed. (You can't even kill yourself, if you worry death won't end existence, and might bring something worse.)

      Real Buddhist practice seems to run similar risks of permanent disorientation and despair. The point is to remove false comforts and convictions, after all. Who's to say you will like what you find, underneath delusion?


  4. philosophy as state space search over coherent worldviews

    Maybe philosophy doesn't have to answer questions to be useful. We can read Cicero's ancient diss:

    There is nothing so absurd that it has not been said by some philosopher.
    as a compliment: we consider everything. Philosophers are then in the business of conditionally constraining logical space (e.g. "given physicalism, what could one's philosophy of mathematics be?"), not ruling on the correct path through that space. Hypothesis generation, not model selection. This extremely modest view of philosophy's scope is not so common. But you can sort of see it in Wittgenstein:

    Is scientific progress useful for philosophy? Certainly. The realities that are discovered lighten the philosopher's task, imagining possibilities.
    and Massimo Pigliucci :

    Unlike science, where we do seek answers to questions determined by empirical evidence, philosophy is in the business of exploring possibilities in logical space. There are often many such possibilities, since the constraints imposed by logic are weaker than those imposed by empirical facts.
    A priori reasoning can't tell you how the world is, but it can tell you what the world cannot be, when you find a contradiction. This is legit, but it just isn't as useful as increasing our confidence in positive claims about the world.

    We need more truths first, to help control the combinatorial explosion of possible philosophies. When people try and iterate over large spaces without empirical help, you end up with Einstein's decades of fruitless Unified Field work, or with hundreds of weak models of cosmic inflation, or the history of metaphysics. Philosophy is premature optimisation, on this account.


  5. what about experimental philosophy ?

    They've got the right idea: they don't rely solely on intuition and deduction. Millions of intelligent words have been wasted because no one thought to check up on the core 'justification': the word "intuitively..." that pops up in the middle of the paper.

    But the x-phi people aren't doing philosophy in the bit of their work that is distinctive. They're social scientists at that moment. And there's so much that they can't touch with surveys.

    Related: there are of course hybrid scientist/philosophers, with more hope. The most important current philosophers, in terms of likely moral effects, are people like Nick Bostrom, Katja Grace, Toby Ord, Amanda Askell, and Nick Beckstead . But their work could not function without mathematical argument and scientific research; they are as much speculating scientists as philosophers. (There are quite a few scientific philosophers, e.g. Julian Barbour and Clark Glymour. Two of the mainstream greats of the last century, David Lewis and Hilary Putnam both made serious mathematical discoveries too.)

    This gives the game away again: it is really only apriorism I'm disparaging, the idea that informal reason alone can solve large questions. But two-thirds of philosophers endorse apriorism, so the point's probably relevant.


  6. what about logic?

    The logic department get a lot of objective, objectively important stuff done. And there are other formalised subfields with similarly undeniable achievements.

    But their methods are quite far from the core of the field; they are castaways of a historical accident; their closest kin are in computer science or maths departments. (All of the logicians I know are into programming, for instance.) Logic is a member of that one kind of philosophy that humans are good at. (Which we don't call philosophy anymore.)


  7. philosophy as improving us for other enquiry

    Bertrand Russell:

    "Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation."
    Does the study of philosophical questions actually make us better scientists or citizens? More than studying science does? At present there is no reason to think so .

    Even if it does, this still implies that philosophy is secondary: that one should use philosophy as a means of better addressing one's main concern. It would mean you should philosophise and be something other than a philosopher.


  8. philosophy as improving our view of what the world should be

    Some ethical philosophies don't aim at discovering truths, and yet (a handful of) ethicists have improved the world greatly, via improving our view of what the world should be. This seems to me to have been mostly practical ethics - less "what are the principles of good and evil?" than "is it ok to be gay?", "is it ok to lock up and torment nonhuman animals?", "do we have responsibilities towards future people?" but some great theorists are also great practitioners and activists.

    Yes: there has been moral progress, and some of this is due to philosophy. (I know this, because I am a data point. David Pearce's essays changed my life, and they are half conventional ethics / philosophy of mind, half wild inference from scientific results.) So the above critique applies to nonformal, nonethical philosophy.

    Even then, I think the expected value of being an average ethicist is probably less than that of being an average scientist. And the mere study of ethical questions seems to have little effect on one's behaviour. (The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel is pursuing this vital and amusing avenue of scientific research.)


  9. philosophy as about truth - we just haven't had enough time

    There are hundreds of times more philosophers working now than in past eras, and they can read and argue far more widely than those before them. We could see progress from this ten-thousand-fold increase in labour and networking. Greg Lewis notes that we should expect the greatest philosopher ever to be alive today, simply on statistical grounds: there are many more people alive and no reason to think that the culture or genes of e.g. Ancient Greece was inherently superior.

    The clock time spent on philosophy is impressive: 3000 years. But the above implies that the lived time, the total years of effort, is insignificant until quite recently. Georgia Ray: "15% of all experience has been experienced by people who are alive right now."

    Sure, the distribution of philosophical workers is skewed towards the present and future. But from my (amateur) stoop I don't see us converging on any answers despite our historically awesome workforce - just frantically salami-slicing to get something out there in a journal, thousands of times a year. So we are trying to boil the ocean with 100,000 zippo lighters instead of just 1,000.

    Our sample size isn't very large for some subfields. My favourite research programmes are Population ethics and the study of existential risks, normative uncertainty, the philosophy of information and the digital philosophy. The case against newbies like them is obviously a lot weaker. They have taken at most a few hundred philosopher-years to date So suspend judgment: they each get 1000 philosopher-years starting now.

    Other reasons philosophers today should be the best:
    • Actual constraints on reality from fundamental physics.
    • Powerful logics (FOL, HOLs, modal, utility theory)
    • Free library of almost every other philosopher ever, most of whom speak the same language.
    • Computers for simulation & note-taking & word processing even

    (Constraints make it easier to find the truth, but harder to publish arbitrary things.)


  10. philosophy as defence against unavoidable philosophy

    Maybe you either do philosophy explicitly, or get pwned by a bad (or anyway unvetted) philosophy. Maybe we need philosophy to undo the damage of bad philosophy, to rid ourselves of philosophical delusions. As Wittgenstein puts it:

    What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.
    I reject this view because I don't think philosophical problems generally are just linguistic errors or ideological disorders, as they say. I just also think that philosophy apparently can't solve them. If anything can. David Pearce, a scientifically literate philosopher, believes this:

    The penalty for not doing philosophy isn't to transcend it, but simply to give bad philosophical arguments a free pass.
    True, but you don't need to be a philosopher to watch out for sneaky philosophers.


  11. philosophy as fun

    What if I just really like it? Like Hume:

    I cannot forbear having a curiosity to be acquainted with the principles of moral good and evil, the nature and foundation of government, and the cause of those several passions and inclinations, which actuate and govern me... I feel an ambition to arise in me of contributing to the instruction of mankind, and of acquiring a name by my inventions and discoveries. These sentiments spring up naturally in my present disposition; and should I endeavour to banish them by attaching myself to any other business or diversion, I feel I should be a loser in point of pleasure; and this is the origin of my philosophy.
    This is also fair enough, except that I think we have a duty to do more than please ourselves. (And anyway Hume's pleasure depends on his having a chance of hitting the truth.)

    This kind of philosophy is a game - the hardest game, yes, since the rules are themselves at issue. I love it, but that is not enough.


  12. the present work's sceptical empiricism as philosophy

    To mock philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
    - Pascal

    Isn't this essay a work of (meta)philosophy, and am I not drawing serious, useful inferences from it - "to go do something else"?

    Well, my original point was an induction from past philosophy to my philosophy career, and induction tends to be used in science, not philosophy. But I grant you that generalising hastily, like I have, is characteristic of philosophy.




Where does this leave us?

I find myself piling up many kinds of philosophy one should be doing - e.g. negative philosophy against bad philosophy, practical ethics, schemes for handling moral uncertainty, logic, population ethics, existential risk. But then I remember the left tail, of very harmful philosophers.

The relatively small active effort on many questions (at most a few hundred careers, and more often much less than one) is a good argument for it not being impossible to solve philosophical questions. (Less-likely impossible in proportion to neglect.)

Also there’s the importance of non-perverse philosophy for making a future artificial intelligence; it doesn’t need to be right or definite, but it needs to land in a non-insane part of philosophical space.

You can’t naively ask philosophers how promising their work or their field is. By selection, most philosophers will automatically be metaphilosophical optimists. You also have to ask the overwhelming majority of people who engage seriously with philosophy and leave. (The one pessimist in my department is now a therapist instead.)





A real nonphilosopher would not feel the need to write something like this.





Dedicated to the University of Aberdeen, who in a 6 year period either fired, lost, or pushed out of teaching all but one of the excellent philosophers who taught me: Gerald, Joe, Bob, Gerry, Guido, Nate, Tony, Catherine, Crispin, Grant, Russell, Aidan, Dylan, Aaron, Filippo, Francesco, Luca.


See also



Criticisms of philosophy by philosophers

Most philosophers have a good idea of what's wrong with philosophers, of course. Here's a few "philosopher's syndromes":

  • Dennett: "mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity"

  • Sosa: thinking "mere reflection the source of all intellectual virtue" (omitting perceptiveness or environmental aid)

  • Provine: bias towards explaining human behaviour in terms of cognition and consciousness.

  • Pinter: the delusion that analysis sets you above quotidian reality

Example of solving a philosophical question

In 1690 William Molyneux asked whether concepts generalise across senses - if a blind person gained sight after a life of blindness, would they be able to visually immediately recognise a sphere?

This inspired lots of very clever philosophy over the years. The answer, at least in a small clinical study (n=5), is no.

No disgrace to Molyneux; he was able to form a hypothesis centuries before it could be tested, and this is helpful work. But what did the philosophical discourse contribute?

Is philosophy technical?

  • If "technical" means 'containing precise reasoning', yes.
  • If "technical" means 'containing symbolic (mathematical or statistical or Logical) reasoning', sometimes but mostly not.
  • If "technical" means 'impenetrable to outsiders', yes - and often with the vitiating appearance of nontechnicality.
  • If "technical" means 'constraining expectations to one part of the space of possible outcomes' then no not really. (Wittgenstein: "Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language... It leaves everything as it is.")

It's possible to do maths without symbols - and so in fact we did, for most of its history. So what's the difference between informal maths and philosophy? I think it's to do with researcher degrees of freedom. By working with extremely strict and limited definitions, rather than fuzzy natural-language concepts, mathematicians remove lots of their leeway to fudge and be ambiguous. It is always possible in philosophy to just deny any particular inconvenient premise, to dispute an intuition, to substitute your own reality; but to do so of mathematical axioms or definitions is to no longer be talking about the same thing.

In philosophy the degrees of freedom are extreme, including things like denying basic logical principles. (These are I suppose technically possible for scientists to use, but you'd probably struggle to get it published.)
  1. Of course, the tails of science are also heavy. Heavier. But it's easier to tell which you're in.
  2. Technical minds sometimes manage it, but only with a lot of help from data, plus maths, plus just thinking about it. But that isn't philosophy, anymore.

    Philosophers quite often solve technical problems, but they do so only when they go past purely verbal philosophy. David Lewis, Frank Ramsey, John Broome, Hilary Putnam, John Harsanyi, Derek Parfit all made big steps forward by using decision theory or game theory or utility theory or learning theory. As I note below, logic is the most progressive programme in philosophy for a reason.

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