> I may find this article emotionally somewhat appealing but still don't think it's a useful view about philosophy. The first and foremost thing about philosophy laymen should realize is that the vast majority of philosophers do not consider philosophy a science.
I don't think the article was making a claim about philosophy being a science. On the contrary, it seemed make a pretty clear distinction between them and highlighted some perils of falsely mixing the two.
"Often implicit empiricist assumptions in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language are relied upon as if they were self-evident, and without awareness of the threat that those very assumptions pose to the author’s own reasoning. We can call this phenomenon scientistic pseudophilosophy."
"While pseudoscience can perhaps be counteracted by science education, the cure for pseudophilosophy is not science education but philosophical education."
> If you don't like a particular philosopher's work, you generally don't read and support it, and that's it. Calling the work pseudophilosophy will only enrage people who disagree and not help with anything.
The article wasn't about disagreeing with opposing philosophers' work, it as a critique of those non-philosophers who "fail to grasp the content of many of the philosophical claims and arguments that they criticize"
"There are two kinds of pseudophilosophy, one mostly harmless and the other insidious. The first variety is usually found in popular scientific contexts. This is where writers, typically with a background in the natural sciences, walk self-confidently into philosophical territory without realising it, and without conscientious attention to relevant philosophical distinctions and arguments.
The insidious kind of pseudophilosophy, which I will focus on here, is an academic enterprise, pursued primarily within the humanities and social sciences." (e.g. phenomenon obscurantist pseudophilosophy)
How I understood it, is not as saying the article says the opposite but as an statement to introduce the idea that people disagree on what 80% is worth reading and that all fine because is not science.
I'm fine with calling it "the mother of all sciences", though, just to annoy some natural scientists.
Upon reading the first paragraphs I thought the author was engaging in completely arrogant "my philosophy is better than yours" and "only experts can understand philosophy".
Your comment that 80 percent is bullshit explains a lot. And the idea that practitioners can't agree on which 80 percent even more so.
My impression is that philosophy is simply a means of framing our existence in such a way to reduce internal stress over the realities we face. From that perspective it makes perfect sense that one can adopt different philosophies and reject others.
Aren't all of these kind of common to all science fields ? I mean, even in physics, you can see things like string theory... (Though calling it pseudoscience would be too harsh, it's more like 'metaphysics' until we manage to find a way to empirically test it.)
> These disciplines have overall lower standards in comparison to philosophy
Given your earlier statement, may I ask what you consider to be the higher standards of philosophy?
I ask somewhat rhetorically as a former philosophy PhD student who left because I felt the whole field seemed quite indifferent to anything other than careerist journal stuffing.
This just shows that academic philosophy is a very exclusive club. It doesn't say anything about the standards involved.
If anything, an extremely high rejection rate tends to enforce intellectual conformity and conservatism on a field that you would think is least in need of those qualities.
It's always a balancing act. Become too restrictive and good ideas could get snuffed out, but too open and it's just a giant cluster of bad ideas and too much noise.
Are you saying that philosophy in general encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking?
https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html
To be fair, as the GP states, most philosophers are honest about this. How much better off we'd all be if economists would admit the same truth about their "discipline".
Well, except with the bit that numerology is to astrology as astrology is to astronomy. It seems to me that numerology is to mathematics as astrology is to astronomy, but I admit that like the philosophers he's criticising, I too have not read a book on numerology.
(I wrote that before I finished the article. I still haven't quite finished it, but he later ponders about the possibility of creating a nosology of thought; a system to diagnose these maladies of though. And then he gives up because it can never be simultaneously complete and usable. I think that's foolish; you can enormously expand the current nosology by identifying, naming and describing even just a few of these (and some of them seem pretty easy to me). And that vocabulary can grow slowly as people add more.)
Gödel's incompleteness theorem come to mind (mathematics straddling science and philosophy), but I doubt that philosophy will be so 'lucky' to solve this problem in such a concise and clear (though admittedly unsatisfactory) way. (Maybe (late) Wittgenstein is the closest philosophy can hope for ?)
Say, "scientific philosophy", which is the subset of thinking that considers philosophy as a science, with assigned true/false values. Then the rest of the philosophies can name themselves, or otherwise in aggregate consider themselves the nonscientific philosophies.
Would that work you think?
This is because of the constant efforts from conservative pseudo-philosopher's like Stephen Hicks[0] (who on his YT channel hasn't shied away from inviting neo-Nazis to talk about the subject) all the way to JP[1] who do not understand the topic yet enjoy discrediting and twist the ideas of post-modernity. The odd thing is that these ideas have not been traditionally linked to the left.
I find most people who have an opinion about the subject often have not studied them, nor have they read any (or very few) of the original thinkers, and rather form their minds by listening to condensed misrepresentations in tweet-storms, etc.
[0] https://crookedtimber.org/2020/03/04/rightwing-postmodernism...
[1] https://lachlanrdale.medium.com/analysing-jordan-petersons-v...
"Post-modernity" has become almost entirely a straw-man (for bizarre political reasons), as the debate between Zizek and JP illustrates nicely. I mean, JP tried hard, but why would a psychologist agree to participate in an online debate about a very complicated topic in philosophy about which he has read almost nothing in the first place?
Secondly I guess it's always a gamble to mention JP no matter in what light on HN since it is considered flame-bait. However IMHO it's impossible to separate the political element from the discussion about post-modernity (whether it's PM in art _or_ philosophy - though oddly those who don't grasp the philosophy also don't get the art).
c'est la vie :)
Also, we often see criticisms of social constructivism as "alt right" and the evidence for this are people who are on the right. But there are plenty of people on the Left as well who criticize applied postmodernism and it seems they get swept up unfairly in labels.
If you don't mind answering: what is it that you do?
Unfortunately, I found even the standards in philosophy as a field to be quite low, which is why I stopped pursuing its study in an academic setting. But, yes, I think many people have noted that there are particular fields in the social sciences which are mostly BS, partly because those fields are heavily based on ideas that use pseudo-philosophy as their foundational basis.
I imagine there's a delusional rich person, or academic running a foundation who wants his confirmation biases satisfied. I figure there's got to be more to it than that though.
For the same reason that academics spent a lot of time researching tobacco and producing results saying that it wasn't harmful, until that shifted, there are some fields which exist primarily because they're predominantly politically motivated and funded on that basis. It's not always an easy ride, but if you follow the money, it's very rarely altruistic how anything gets funded in any aspect of life, perhaps least of all in academia, which is one reason why rigor is so much lower outside the hard sciences where it's harder to unambiguously disprove BS. As my initial example points out though, the hard sciences are also not immune to money influence.
The first and foremost thing about philosophy laymen should realize is that the vast majority of philosophers do not consider philosophy a science. They also kind of agree to disagree about what philosophy is and what the subject matter of the discipline is. To put it bluntly, I'd say the majority of philosophers silently agree that 80% of all publications or more in philosophy are nonsense or bullshit and only the rest is even worth reading, but they all disagree about which 80% percent...
So Yes, I sometimes did also have the suspicion that some colleagues are bullshitting and obscuring intentionally, but overall this is not a helpful attitude. If you don't like a particular philosopher's work, you generally don't read and support it, and that's it. Calling the work pseudophilosophy will only enrage people who disagree and not help with anything.
Things are different in neighbouring disciplines in the humanities. After many years in the field and having to do with some of these disciplines, I believe I can say with some confidence that some of them are indeed pseudo-sciences. I don't want to mention which and why for fear of being identified later. All I can say is that there are disciplines and sub-disciplines/fields of study in the humanities that bear all the hallmarks of pseudo-science: extremely small communities, lots of jargon, few journals controlled by everyone in the communities, bouncing articles back and forth between those journals, constantly mixing empirical theses with some philosophical claims ("ideal models"), and so on. I'd be fine if these disciplines would at least apply the fairly stringent standards for publications in philosophy, but they don't even do that. These disciplines have overall lower standards in comparison to philosophy and often make unfounded empirical claims based on qualitative studies or studies with way too small sample size.