By appeal to the professional standards of those who DO self-identify as professional philosophers: no.
By social construction (if enough people think it is philosophy, it is): maybe, and it can vary over time.
It seems you hope that by appealing to self-identification and professional standards, you will convince enough people that you are not doing philosophy that, under social construction, you won't be.
I don't think you are doing philosophy. Time will unfold (perhaps even beyond the time of our deaths) where the long arc of social construction of "philosopher" takes you...
Friedrich Nietzsche unfolded as a philosopher against his protests.
Mary Wollstonecraft unfolded as a philosopher as a cultural phenomenon after her time (Wikipedia lists her as "English Author and Philospher"
Francis Bacon and Herbert Spencer thought of themselves as philosophers, but their material became part of other disciplines, and few think of them as philosophers today.
Ayn Rand thought of herself as a philosopher, and the debate rages on forty years after her death, with academia largely saying "no", with still a core cadre of supporters in the "yes" camp.
It seems to me that most people say that David Chapman does philosophy. You have amply explained the reasons why this isn't entirely correct, but I predict that the situation will not substantially change. Why do I think this?
>These are meta-rational styles of explanation.
Because, basically nobody except you uses the phrase "meta-rational explanation", and they instead round this off to "philosophy". Is this the central example of philosophy? Clearly not, as, again, you have exhaustively shown, but getting people to adopt your idiosyncratic terminology is altogether a different task, a much more difficult one.
I sympathize with why you're doing this, but it seems to me that your understanding of the situation is largely mistaken. We non-philosophers neither hold philosophy as sacred, nor do we intensely dislike it, like you do. So we without a second thought use the word "philosophy" for non-central examples of intellectual work that deals with stuff generally considered to be within the domain of philosophy, which is neither intended as an insult nor as sacralization. Perhaps this is bad, for the reasons you mentioned, but changing the status quo won't be easy or simple.
Ah, I see that I have failed to communicate, and how. Thank you, this is helpful!
> We non-philosophers neither hold philosophy as sacred
A small number of enthusiastic amateurs do. Initially, I just found this an interesting anomaly, because I find offbeat quasi-religious subcultures interesting in general. Later, I came to suspect that they may be an important link in transmitting bad ideas from academic philosophy to the general public. I don't (yet) know how significant this is. I'm curious about it.
> round this off to "philosophy"
The point is not that some people are using a word "wrong". That, of course, doesn't matter.
The overall point of "Undoing Philosophy" is that actual philosophy is extremely harmful, and we should counteract it. (I have not yet made a case for this! It's what's supposed to be in Chapter 3.)
One reason this harm goes unnoticed is vague use of the word. But that's not the main reason!
The point of Chapter 4, "I don't do philosophy," is that there are alternatives to philosophy for serving the purposes people want philosophy for. For example, the sorts of things I do.
Chapter 5 will make the positive case for that: how you can do the thing most people actually want to do: which is not philosophy, but understanding meaningness. Understanding how and why that is not philosophy will help readers do it more successfully. I hope!
>actual philosophy is extremely harmful, and we should counteract it
Right, you have basically convinced me on this, but, well, the unfortunate reality of the David vs Goliath (pun not entirely intended) situation here has to be acknowledged. It's even worse here - at least the biblical David wasn't taken for granted by pretty much everybody to be a slightly eccentric acolyte of Goliath.
>there are alternatives to philosophy for serving the purposes people want philosophy for. For example, the sorts of things I do.
This is a very subtle point, though. My impression is that non-philosophers consider the sorts of things you do to be 'good philosophy'. They also aren't aware of the bad meta-aspects of 'real philosophy', but do know that every philosophical school condemns its philosophical opponents as harmful/nonsensical. So it seems difficult to make your subtle meta-anti-philosophical case to outside audiences who would likely by default see your opposition as a just another intra-philosophical squabble. Do you have ideas on how to overcome this problem?
Yeah, I'm some random guy with a substack and not much time to feed it. I do what I can, and hope to do more and better, and accept that it's limited.
> it seems difficult to make your subtle meta-anti-philosophical case... Do you have ideas on how to overcome this problem?
Well... I try to be as clear as I reasonably can. And some people understand some of what I write, and some don't understand some of it.
I'm actually tentatively planning to be less clear, because it's very time-consuming. I may be able to communicate more of what I want to say if I accept that fewer people will understand it.
>Well... I try to be as clear as I reasonably can. And some people understand some of what I write, and some don't understand some of it.
And also, people here at least have a context on what "the sorts of things you do" are, which contrasts with 'real philosophy'. Countering it without this context would be even more difficult, is my point...
I appreciate your engaging with this topic as much as you have. I know I have been at the forefront of the "content-free outraged replies" and it's nice to at least get a sense of what you mean and to see you thinking out loud.
Thanks! To be fair to the outraged, I have done a lot of mostly-content-free derogation of philosophy. I've explained only a small part of my overall criticism.
Chapter 3 is supposed to get specific about why philosophy is harmful, and I haven't written that yet! (And maybe never will, who knows. It's difficult because the ways it distorts our thinking, feeling, and act are so pervasive that they're invisible.)
And Chapter 5 is supposed to explain what I recommend instead, and that's also unwritten. (Although Meaningness and Vividness are, in a sense, explanations of the same material in a different form.)
Thank you for a wonderful post. I’ve appreciated this series a lot: Sometimes people ask me what I’m reading and I say “oh, philosophy” because I didn’t know what else to say, but it always felt wrong.
I have two questions about the opening example, where you write that relying on intuitions without empirical basis leads to disagreements about what the data actually is (whether such-and-such a sentence is in fact grammatical) and that “this made most of the field nonsense for half a century”. First question: Do you have examples of this disagreement/back-and-forth? I’ve been collecting them and have found very few, despite having read * a lot * of nonsense. Relative to the number of researchers and amount of nonsense, it seems to me that this can’t be the main problem for formal linguists.
It seems to me that the main driver of nonsense in linguistics is a kind of eternalism, a commitment to fixing meaning and grammatical systems. There’s no room for nebulosity in the categories or the structural relationships we try to define; because language is in fact nebulous, this leads to an impressively convoluted theory as we try to account for the nebulousness with more and more dubious theoretical devices.
If I’m understanding you correctly, this is what you are getting at by
> feel the texture of what you find; the patterns in it. That’s where most of the book Meaningness comes from! It just points out typical things people say about meaning, and what the observable effects of those ways of talking are.
But, I don’t understand how this point relates to the role of intuition over some other way of gathering data. So that is my second question: Are those two things (intuition as a data source/object of study and eternalism) related in some way, which I’m missing?
Suppose every syntactician had a way to magically query the grammar of every speaker in the target language, giving them a perfect source of empirical data. I think this would produce no reduction in overall nonsense, because the commitment to eternlism would remain. If anything the nonsense would get worse, because the theory would be forced to account for even more nebulous behavior, necessitating even more epicycles. It would only help if somehow the vast quantity of data would make the nebulousness obvious.
Thanks again for all the clear and thought-provoking writing.
Thank you for the long, interesting comment, and sorry to take a week to reply!
> Do you have examples of this disagreement/back-and-forth?
I don't! I was relying on oral tradition here. I've never studied linguistics formally, but I had two girlfriends who were linguistics graduate students, in the mid-1980s. They did both talk about this being a thing. I am guessing that it may already have stopped being a thing by then, and that they'd observed it when they were undergraduates in the 1970s. (Becker's paper was 1975.) Purely as a guess, maybe the field decided to drop grammaticality arguments around the end of the 1970s, because they realized that wasn't working?
> it seems to me that this can’t be the main problem for formal linguists.
Oh, I agree, and my writing there was sloppy. I was explaining a relatively minor but funny (and infuriating) consequence of the main problem, because it came up in Becker's paper.
> It seems to me that the main driver of nonsense in linguistics is a kind of eternalism, a commitment to fixing meaning and grammatical systems.
Yes, exactly. This was primarily Chomsky's program. Although, you could take it back to Panini, who Chomsky acknowledged as a direct influence.
> There’s no room for nebulosity in the categories or the structural relationships we try to define; because language is in fact nebulous, this leads to an impressively convoluted theory as we try to account for the nebulousness with more and more dubious theoretical devices.
Yes, very nicely put!
> Are those two things (intuition as a data source/object of study and eternalism) related in some way, which I’m missing?
Ah, interesting, I hadn't quite thought of it that way. I think the issue here may not be intuition as such, but rather the ontological status of what the supposed intuitions supposedly concern, namely grammatical rules. The difficulty is that those are metaphysical entities (at least in Chomsky's understanding) that don't actually exist (at least not in the sense Chomsky wants them to), so intuitions about them are inherently meaningless. And this does connect with eternalism, as you suggest, because Chomsky wants them to be crystalline eternal Ideal Forms. Whereas, in my view, to the extent they exist at all, it's as patterns of pragmatic use in situated communications.
> If anything the nonsense would get worse, because the theory would be forced to account for even more nebulous behavior, necessitating even more epicycles.
Yes.
> It would only help if somehow the vast quantity of data would make the nebulousness obvious.
It seems to me that LLMs are doing this, which (as an amateur linguist) I find extremely interesting. The most recent Anthropic investigations of how LLMs produce text seem consistent with the ways that Becker, and my ex-girlfriends, and I expected people do.
> Whenever I casually mentioned on Twitter that philosophy is bad, I’d get a slew of content-free outraged replies.
What kind of philosophy were they into? I've met two different kinds of people like this. The first are humanities students into continental/European philosophy which is, you know, pretentious but gives you the feeling that understanding it will let you sleep with humanities students. The second are guys who are too into Plato.
The analytic philosophers I know also think it's nonsense which might help. I think they're doing some useful work insofar as they're actually doing sociology; it's like how economists do everyone else's fields but with better statistics.
One I know characterizes the well known ones between "basically pleasant bureaucrats" and "sexy murder poets". (which I think is boring vs evil)
Yes... generally I suspect professional philosophers, including the Continental ones, mostly understand that their field(s) are dysfunctional. But, they got sucked in by false promises, and they feel it's too late to get out, and it's been a reasonably pleasant profession so long as you accept the bogosity.
> actually doing sociology
Philosophy of science is the subfield that seems most functional to me. And that's because it's mostly actually sociology and history of science, conducted in the philosophy department due to random historical accidents.
Did you have other subfields in mind, that also may be doing sociology?
> "basically pleasant bureaucrats" and "sexy murder poets"
Yes, this is very funny! I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it's certainly fun.
Right, I meant philosophy of science, but IIRC a grad student was mentioned who's doing philosophy of software engineering. Which sounds unusually useful too.
I think the last section here is right and expresses something clearly.
As to why people who cherish open-ended curiosity, might care so much about "philosophy", I think there are two reasons.
One is that a lot of the philosophy canon has literary merit. Plato's dialogues are a great literary depiction of friends (and enemies) practicing open-ended curiosity as best they can. As are the Mengzi and Zhuangzi. At least some writing by most famous philosophers down the centuries also conveys this feeling. Even the 20th century analytic philosophers, as weird and bad as that field can be, manage this sometimes.
The second is that if you are bothered by metaphysical questions, reading a bunch of strong philosophical arguments for mutually contradictory ideas can cure you, which is a positive and relaxing experience. (And in fact there were even ancient Greeks who thought at the time that this is the main purpose of studying philosophy.)
> "Maybe a philosophy class is, for many people, the first in which the teacher says that there are no established answers."
Guess what my first such class was? Critical Thinking in public high school. I remember a pen-and-ink drawing in the textbook, of Moses coming down from the mount with tablets labeled "TRUTH" in all capital letters. I went on to eventually identify positively with the skeptics movement, secular humanism, and atheism, and still do.
Also Astronomy. I had spent my whole childhood alternating between homeschool and a private school run by a fundamentalist church. For the last two years of high school, I went to a public school. The only one in Michigan with a planetarium. The Astronomy teacher, Mr Toll, changed my life. He was a secular atheist, and a member of CSICOP. He said we could believe whatever we wanted, but he was not going to withhold any teaching about the universe just because of its implications. He just explained what conclusions he draws from it and invited any other explanations. It helped that he very clearly really cared about his students and tended to take them on very fun trips.
I wonder what would have happened if there had been a Philosophy class and I had taken that instead.
I'm not familiar enough with your main work to have a strong opinion on whether it counts as philosophy. This series doesn't give enough detail about what you do do to enable such a judgment, but the more I read the less I feel inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Your previous post was right about philosophy being a nebulous category. Nietzsche's philosophy is very dissimilar to Aristotle's in style, subject matter, sociological context, and genealogy. Yet no one would hesitate to call either of them a philosopher. Like you, and like many other philosophers, Nietzsche was scornful of the tradition and preferred to think of himself as appearing at the dawn of something new -- something *useful*, even. Too bad! He lives on in philosophy departments now. You can only discuss philosophers and the fields claimed by them so much without becoming one. Those who criticize philosophy while remaining more credibly aloof from it, like, say, Theodore Roosevelt, don't get called philosophers.
You've gestured at nominalist metaphysics several times in this chapter. This too is a reason why you get lumped in with philosophers. Non-philosophers don't generally have to stipulate their metaphysics to make their non-philosophical points, let alone doing so like it's second nature. You wouldn't be the first nominalist philosopher, but you would be one of the first non-philosophers to have nominalism as such a core part of his worldview that he keeps spontaneously invoking it.
The more nebulous a category is, the more you should adhere to your stated nominalism/linguistic descriptivism -- that is, the more content you should be to defer to common opinion (unless you think the category should be abandoned.)
Instead, for you, philosophy is whatever philosophers produce that you don't like. So for example, "the philosophical theory of categories", i.e. comprising necessary and sufficient conditions, is philosophy, whereas Wittgenstein's family resemblance theory (repackaged as prototype theory) is not. And don't tell me the difference is that "the philosophical theory of categories" is metaphysics, and therefore philosophy, and family resemblance/prototype theory is psychology, and therefore not. Family resemblance was first articulated in a definitely philosophical context (textually and institutionally) and idiom. Indeed, for all his reliance on introspection, Wittgenstein's writing style screams philosophy more than most philosophers'. Your own writing style is not innocent of this association. The coinage "meaningness" is very philosophical -- a verb with an abstract nominalizing suffix, with another abstract nominalizing suffix for good measure. Where would you find that outside of philosophy?
I don't think that a definition of philosophy is possible, but your arguments against particular definitions having to do with conceptual/abstract reasoning are weak to the point of seeming disingenuous. Do you really think "pet" is a fair example of an abstract category in the sense in which philosophy is abstract? By that standard, literally everything is abstract, except maybe proper nouns. No, philosophers talk about abstractions like the nature of reality, logic/reason, and so on -- like you, in this series of posts. You know, abstractions that are abstract, leading people to describe philosophy books and not books about pets as abstract. Do I need to invent a philosophical argument to explain the difference? Come on.
Lastly -- it should be clear by now that your detractors (at least this one) aren't motivated by wanting to white-knight for philosophy, but by the presumptuousness with which you demand to be thought of as fundamentally different and better than your predecessors, many of whom also demanded to be thought of as fundamentally different and better than their predecessors. It's the narcissism of small differences. And it takes up a good chunk of your output from what I've seen on Twitter. It's just irritating, like a rapper whose songs are mostly about how much he excels his rivals. Leave us out of your status games. Show, don't tell.
(I'm no Chomsky acolyte, but the Becker article is trash that automatically precludes even theory-neutral, empirical observations about language. But this is enough for one comment.)
>That’s where most of the book Meaningness comes from! It just points out typical things people say about meaning, and what the observable effects of those ways of talking are.
That’s exactly what contemporary moral philosophy does! The whole point of thought experiments is to tease out how the reader would, in fact, use moral terms like “right” or “good”.
A stronger argument you’ve gestured at elsewhere is that philosophical intuition is unreliable. But that’s fine and also accounted for in the predominate methodology used today: Reflective Equilibrium. It’s perfectly possible that multiple islands of internally consistent beliefs about how and when to use certain terms apply.
Are you doing Philosophy?
By self-identification: no.
By appeal to the professional standards of those who DO self-identify as professional philosophers: no.
By social construction (if enough people think it is philosophy, it is): maybe, and it can vary over time.
It seems you hope that by appealing to self-identification and professional standards, you will convince enough people that you are not doing philosophy that, under social construction, you won't be.
I don't think you are doing philosophy. Time will unfold (perhaps even beyond the time of our deaths) where the long arc of social construction of "philosopher" takes you...
Friedrich Nietzsche unfolded as a philosopher against his protests.
Mary Wollstonecraft unfolded as a philosopher as a cultural phenomenon after her time (Wikipedia lists her as "English Author and Philospher"
Francis Bacon and Herbert Spencer thought of themselves as philosophers, but their material became part of other disciplines, and few think of them as philosophers today.
Ayn Rand thought of herself as a philosopher, and the debate rages on forty years after her death, with academia largely saying "no", with still a core cadre of supporters in the "yes" camp.
>Or, listen to what people say
It seems to me that most people say that David Chapman does philosophy. You have amply explained the reasons why this isn't entirely correct, but I predict that the situation will not substantially change. Why do I think this?
>These are meta-rational styles of explanation.
Because, basically nobody except you uses the phrase "meta-rational explanation", and they instead round this off to "philosophy". Is this the central example of philosophy? Clearly not, as, again, you have exhaustively shown, but getting people to adopt your idiosyncratic terminology is altogether a different task, a much more difficult one.
I sympathize with why you're doing this, but it seems to me that your understanding of the situation is largely mistaken. We non-philosophers neither hold philosophy as sacred, nor do we intensely dislike it, like you do. So we without a second thought use the word "philosophy" for non-central examples of intellectual work that deals with stuff generally considered to be within the domain of philosophy, which is neither intended as an insult nor as sacralization. Perhaps this is bad, for the reasons you mentioned, but changing the status quo won't be easy or simple.
Ah, I see that I have failed to communicate, and how. Thank you, this is helpful!
> We non-philosophers neither hold philosophy as sacred
A small number of enthusiastic amateurs do. Initially, I just found this an interesting anomaly, because I find offbeat quasi-religious subcultures interesting in general. Later, I came to suspect that they may be an important link in transmitting bad ideas from academic philosophy to the general public. I don't (yet) know how significant this is. I'm curious about it.
> round this off to "philosophy"
The point is not that some people are using a word "wrong". That, of course, doesn't matter.
The overall point of "Undoing Philosophy" is that actual philosophy is extremely harmful, and we should counteract it. (I have not yet made a case for this! It's what's supposed to be in Chapter 3.)
One reason this harm goes unnoticed is vague use of the word. But that's not the main reason!
The point of Chapter 4, "I don't do philosophy," is that there are alternatives to philosophy for serving the purposes people want philosophy for. For example, the sorts of things I do.
Chapter 5 will make the positive case for that: how you can do the thing most people actually want to do: which is not philosophy, but understanding meaningness. Understanding how and why that is not philosophy will help readers do it more successfully. I hope!
>actual philosophy is extremely harmful, and we should counteract it
Right, you have basically convinced me on this, but, well, the unfortunate reality of the David vs Goliath (pun not entirely intended) situation here has to be acknowledged. It's even worse here - at least the biblical David wasn't taken for granted by pretty much everybody to be a slightly eccentric acolyte of Goliath.
>there are alternatives to philosophy for serving the purposes people want philosophy for. For example, the sorts of things I do.
This is a very subtle point, though. My impression is that non-philosophers consider the sorts of things you do to be 'good philosophy'. They also aren't aware of the bad meta-aspects of 'real philosophy', but do know that every philosophical school condemns its philosophical opponents as harmful/nonsensical. So it seems difficult to make your subtle meta-anti-philosophical case to outside audiences who would likely by default see your opposition as a just another intra-philosophical squabble. Do you have ideas on how to overcome this problem?
> the unfortunate reality of the David vs Goliath
Yeah, I'm some random guy with a substack and not much time to feed it. I do what I can, and hope to do more and better, and accept that it's limited.
> it seems difficult to make your subtle meta-anti-philosophical case... Do you have ideas on how to overcome this problem?
Well... I try to be as clear as I reasonably can. And some people understand some of what I write, and some don't understand some of it.
I'm actually tentatively planning to be less clear, because it's very time-consuming. I may be able to communicate more of what I want to say if I accept that fewer people will understand it.
>Well... I try to be as clear as I reasonably can. And some people understand some of what I write, and some don't understand some of it.
And also, people here at least have a context on what "the sorts of things you do" are, which contrasts with 'real philosophy'. Countering it without this context would be even more difficult, is my point...
I appreciate your engaging with this topic as much as you have. I know I have been at the forefront of the "content-free outraged replies" and it's nice to at least get a sense of what you mean and to see you thinking out loud.
Thanks! To be fair to the outraged, I have done a lot of mostly-content-free derogation of philosophy. I've explained only a small part of my overall criticism.
Chapter 3 is supposed to get specific about why philosophy is harmful, and I haven't written that yet! (And maybe never will, who knows. It's difficult because the ways it distorts our thinking, feeling, and act are so pervasive that they're invisible.)
And Chapter 5 is supposed to explain what I recommend instead, and that's also unwritten. (Although Meaningness and Vividness are, in a sense, explanations of the same material in a different form.)
Thank you for a wonderful post. I’ve appreciated this series a lot: Sometimes people ask me what I’m reading and I say “oh, philosophy” because I didn’t know what else to say, but it always felt wrong.
I have two questions about the opening example, where you write that relying on intuitions without empirical basis leads to disagreements about what the data actually is (whether such-and-such a sentence is in fact grammatical) and that “this made most of the field nonsense for half a century”. First question: Do you have examples of this disagreement/back-and-forth? I’ve been collecting them and have found very few, despite having read * a lot * of nonsense. Relative to the number of researchers and amount of nonsense, it seems to me that this can’t be the main problem for formal linguists.
It seems to me that the main driver of nonsense in linguistics is a kind of eternalism, a commitment to fixing meaning and grammatical systems. There’s no room for nebulosity in the categories or the structural relationships we try to define; because language is in fact nebulous, this leads to an impressively convoluted theory as we try to account for the nebulousness with more and more dubious theoretical devices.
If I’m understanding you correctly, this is what you are getting at by
> feel the texture of what you find; the patterns in it. That’s where most of the book Meaningness comes from! It just points out typical things people say about meaning, and what the observable effects of those ways of talking are.
But, I don’t understand how this point relates to the role of intuition over some other way of gathering data. So that is my second question: Are those two things (intuition as a data source/object of study and eternalism) related in some way, which I’m missing?
Suppose every syntactician had a way to magically query the grammar of every speaker in the target language, giving them a perfect source of empirical data. I think this would produce no reduction in overall nonsense, because the commitment to eternlism would remain. If anything the nonsense would get worse, because the theory would be forced to account for even more nebulous behavior, necessitating even more epicycles. It would only help if somehow the vast quantity of data would make the nebulousness obvious.
Thanks again for all the clear and thought-provoking writing.
Thank you for the long, interesting comment, and sorry to take a week to reply!
> Do you have examples of this disagreement/back-and-forth?
I don't! I was relying on oral tradition here. I've never studied linguistics formally, but I had two girlfriends who were linguistics graduate students, in the mid-1980s. They did both talk about this being a thing. I am guessing that it may already have stopped being a thing by then, and that they'd observed it when they were undergraduates in the 1970s. (Becker's paper was 1975.) Purely as a guess, maybe the field decided to drop grammaticality arguments around the end of the 1970s, because they realized that wasn't working?
> it seems to me that this can’t be the main problem for formal linguists.
Oh, I agree, and my writing there was sloppy. I was explaining a relatively minor but funny (and infuriating) consequence of the main problem, because it came up in Becker's paper.
> It seems to me that the main driver of nonsense in linguistics is a kind of eternalism, a commitment to fixing meaning and grammatical systems.
Yes, exactly. This was primarily Chomsky's program. Although, you could take it back to Panini, who Chomsky acknowledged as a direct influence.
> There’s no room for nebulosity in the categories or the structural relationships we try to define; because language is in fact nebulous, this leads to an impressively convoluted theory as we try to account for the nebulousness with more and more dubious theoretical devices.
Yes, very nicely put!
> Are those two things (intuition as a data source/object of study and eternalism) related in some way, which I’m missing?
Ah, interesting, I hadn't quite thought of it that way. I think the issue here may not be intuition as such, but rather the ontological status of what the supposed intuitions supposedly concern, namely grammatical rules. The difficulty is that those are metaphysical entities (at least in Chomsky's understanding) that don't actually exist (at least not in the sense Chomsky wants them to), so intuitions about them are inherently meaningless. And this does connect with eternalism, as you suggest, because Chomsky wants them to be crystalline eternal Ideal Forms. Whereas, in my view, to the extent they exist at all, it's as patterns of pragmatic use in situated communications.
> If anything the nonsense would get worse, because the theory would be forced to account for even more nebulous behavior, necessitating even more epicycles.
Yes.
> It would only help if somehow the vast quantity of data would make the nebulousness obvious.
It seems to me that LLMs are doing this, which (as an amateur linguist) I find extremely interesting. The most recent Anthropic investigations of how LLMs produce text seem consistent with the ways that Becker, and my ex-girlfriends, and I expected people do.
> Whenever I casually mentioned on Twitter that philosophy is bad, I’d get a slew of content-free outraged replies.
What kind of philosophy were they into? I've met two different kinds of people like this. The first are humanities students into continental/European philosophy which is, you know, pretentious but gives you the feeling that understanding it will let you sleep with humanities students. The second are guys who are too into Plato.
> will let you sleep with humanities students
Oh! I hadn't thought of that! Yes, that explains a lot :)
Yeah, the three pop philosophy types seem to be Ancient Greek, existentialist, and pomo. Plus a few are into the German Idealists.
I wonder if these schools of philosophy appeal to different sorts of people?
Analytic philosophy does appeal to STEMish people, but they are much less likely to take offense when you say it's nonsense.
The analytic philosophers I know also think it's nonsense which might help. I think they're doing some useful work insofar as they're actually doing sociology; it's like how economists do everyone else's fields but with better statistics.
One I know characterizes the well known ones between "basically pleasant bureaucrats" and "sexy murder poets". (which I think is boring vs evil)
Yes... generally I suspect professional philosophers, including the Continental ones, mostly understand that their field(s) are dysfunctional. But, they got sucked in by false promises, and they feel it's too late to get out, and it's been a reasonably pleasant profession so long as you accept the bogosity.
> actually doing sociology
Philosophy of science is the subfield that seems most functional to me. And that's because it's mostly actually sociology and history of science, conducted in the philosophy department due to random historical accidents.
Did you have other subfields in mind, that also may be doing sociology?
> "basically pleasant bureaucrats" and "sexy murder poets"
Yes, this is very funny! I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it's certainly fun.
Right, I meant philosophy of science, but IIRC a grad student was mentioned who's doing philosophy of software engineering. Which sounds unusually useful too.
I think the last section here is right and expresses something clearly.
As to why people who cherish open-ended curiosity, might care so much about "philosophy", I think there are two reasons.
One is that a lot of the philosophy canon has literary merit. Plato's dialogues are a great literary depiction of friends (and enemies) practicing open-ended curiosity as best they can. As are the Mengzi and Zhuangzi. At least some writing by most famous philosophers down the centuries also conveys this feeling. Even the 20th century analytic philosophers, as weird and bad as that field can be, manage this sometimes.
The second is that if you are bothered by metaphysical questions, reading a bunch of strong philosophical arguments for mutually contradictory ideas can cure you, which is a positive and relaxing experience. (And in fact there were even ancient Greeks who thought at the time that this is the main purpose of studying philosophy.)
Thanks, that's helpful for me!
> "Maybe a philosophy class is, for many people, the first in which the teacher says that there are no established answers."
Guess what my first such class was? Critical Thinking in public high school. I remember a pen-and-ink drawing in the textbook, of Moses coming down from the mount with tablets labeled "TRUTH" in all capital letters. I went on to eventually identify positively with the skeptics movement, secular humanism, and atheism, and still do.
Also Astronomy. I had spent my whole childhood alternating between homeschool and a private school run by a fundamentalist church. For the last two years of high school, I went to a public school. The only one in Michigan with a planetarium. The Astronomy teacher, Mr Toll, changed my life. He was a secular atheist, and a member of CSICOP. He said we could believe whatever we wanted, but he was not going to withhold any teaching about the universe just because of its implications. He just explained what conclusions he draws from it and invited any other explanations. It helped that he very clearly really cared about his students and tended to take them on very fun trips.
I wonder what would have happened if there had been a Philosophy class and I had taken that instead.
So, you're doing the thing that beginners expect philosophy to be, rather than the unfortunate mess that it's become? Yeah, I can agree with that :-)
Well put :)
I enjoy the subtle visual reference to the barber paradox :-)☺️
That's really funny, I hadn't thought of that!
I'm not familiar enough with your main work to have a strong opinion on whether it counts as philosophy. This series doesn't give enough detail about what you do do to enable such a judgment, but the more I read the less I feel inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Your previous post was right about philosophy being a nebulous category. Nietzsche's philosophy is very dissimilar to Aristotle's in style, subject matter, sociological context, and genealogy. Yet no one would hesitate to call either of them a philosopher. Like you, and like many other philosophers, Nietzsche was scornful of the tradition and preferred to think of himself as appearing at the dawn of something new -- something *useful*, even. Too bad! He lives on in philosophy departments now. You can only discuss philosophers and the fields claimed by them so much without becoming one. Those who criticize philosophy while remaining more credibly aloof from it, like, say, Theodore Roosevelt, don't get called philosophers.
You've gestured at nominalist metaphysics several times in this chapter. This too is a reason why you get lumped in with philosophers. Non-philosophers don't generally have to stipulate their metaphysics to make their non-philosophical points, let alone doing so like it's second nature. You wouldn't be the first nominalist philosopher, but you would be one of the first non-philosophers to have nominalism as such a core part of his worldview that he keeps spontaneously invoking it.
The more nebulous a category is, the more you should adhere to your stated nominalism/linguistic descriptivism -- that is, the more content you should be to defer to common opinion (unless you think the category should be abandoned.)
Instead, for you, philosophy is whatever philosophers produce that you don't like. So for example, "the philosophical theory of categories", i.e. comprising necessary and sufficient conditions, is philosophy, whereas Wittgenstein's family resemblance theory (repackaged as prototype theory) is not. And don't tell me the difference is that "the philosophical theory of categories" is metaphysics, and therefore philosophy, and family resemblance/prototype theory is psychology, and therefore not. Family resemblance was first articulated in a definitely philosophical context (textually and institutionally) and idiom. Indeed, for all his reliance on introspection, Wittgenstein's writing style screams philosophy more than most philosophers'. Your own writing style is not innocent of this association. The coinage "meaningness" is very philosophical -- a verb with an abstract nominalizing suffix, with another abstract nominalizing suffix for good measure. Where would you find that outside of philosophy?
I don't think that a definition of philosophy is possible, but your arguments against particular definitions having to do with conceptual/abstract reasoning are weak to the point of seeming disingenuous. Do you really think "pet" is a fair example of an abstract category in the sense in which philosophy is abstract? By that standard, literally everything is abstract, except maybe proper nouns. No, philosophers talk about abstractions like the nature of reality, logic/reason, and so on -- like you, in this series of posts. You know, abstractions that are abstract, leading people to describe philosophy books and not books about pets as abstract. Do I need to invent a philosophical argument to explain the difference? Come on.
Lastly -- it should be clear by now that your detractors (at least this one) aren't motivated by wanting to white-knight for philosophy, but by the presumptuousness with which you demand to be thought of as fundamentally different and better than your predecessors, many of whom also demanded to be thought of as fundamentally different and better than their predecessors. It's the narcissism of small differences. And it takes up a good chunk of your output from what I've seen on Twitter. It's just irritating, like a rapper whose songs are mostly about how much he excels his rivals. Leave us out of your status games. Show, don't tell.
(I'm no Chomsky acolyte, but the Becker article is trash that automatically precludes even theory-neutral, empirical observations about language. But this is enough for one comment.)
>That’s where most of the book Meaningness comes from! It just points out typical things people say about meaning, and what the observable effects of those ways of talking are.
That’s exactly what contemporary moral philosophy does! The whole point of thought experiments is to tease out how the reader would, in fact, use moral terms like “right” or “good”.
A stronger argument you’ve gestured at elsewhere is that philosophical intuition is unreliable. But that’s fine and also accounted for in the predominate methodology used today: Reflective Equilibrium. It’s perfectly possible that multiple islands of internally consistent beliefs about how and when to use certain terms apply.