Let’s make this testable. Tell me what percentage of technical people, defined however you like, generally view philosophy as a waste of time. (This could even be a thought experiment for now.)
Of these people how many of them come to their conclusion based on careful reasoning? Based on broad knowledge of philosophy?
My prior expectation would be that these numbers are very low. I would expect that people who dismiss philosophy do so from a position of relative ignorance.
This is not blame; the broader context matters: educational curricula, teaching quality, life experience, curiosity, competing interests, etc.
Let’s put the shoe on the other foot. How much applied computer science is worth reading? If you put a typical example of it in front of me (the code professionals write for example), I’m probably going think it is a hot mess. It becomes more bearable if I interpret it as a sequence of economically and culturally constrained suboptimal decisions. The same goes for philosophy.
> I would expect that people who dismiss philosophy do so from a position of relative ignorance.
That's entirely possible. It's even possible that my assessment is based on ignorance. I am certainly not an expert in the philosophical literature, and even more certainly not an expert in it recently. The last time I looked seriously at the philosophical literature at all was decades ago and maybe things have changed. But I am an expert in science, and computer science in particular (I have a Ph.D.) and so I can say with some authority that the philosophy literature that I looked at back in the day exhibited a profound ignorance of basic results in CS and math, and also a pretty profound lack of common sense. I found a lot of papers that were tackling non-problems that were based on false assumptions, the moral equivalent of fake proofs that 1=0 where the object of the game is to spot the flaw in the reasoning. And spotting the flaw in the reasoning wasn't even challenging. It was just obvious.
It also seems to me that a lot of what is nowadays called philosophy is just pretty transparent cover for religious apologetics.
Now, as you say, I could be wrong. I'm not an expert. If I'm wrong, I welcome being enlightened. But if you want to take that on I think you will find that I am not completely clueless. I suggest you start with citing an example other than Dennett or Maudlin of someone you think is doing good work in philosophy nowadays.
Shouldn't you be aware that mathematics and computer "science" are closer to philosophy than actual (empirical) sciences ?
Yours sounds more like the now very tired "two cultures" argument, sounds like you are discussing more the sociology side of things than anything ?
(Would you throw out the baby of science with the bathwater of non-replicating papers ?)
And wasn't Wittgenstein (et al.) the one that specifically recentered philosophy around the questions of language, trying to prune the accumulated historical bullshit that philosophy has a much harder difficulty to get rid of than (empirical) sciences ?
> Shouldn't you be aware that mathematics and computer "science" are closer to philosophy than actual (empirical) sciences ?
OK. So what? The problem is that as philosophy moves closer to math it moves into the math department, and as it moves closer to empiricism it moves into the various sciences. The philosophy department is left with the dregs. That is what I claim results in a lot of pooh-pooh-able work.
> Yours sounds more like the now very tired "two cultures" argument, sounds like you are discussing more the sociology side of things than anything ?
Perhaps, but my focus here is much narrower. Snow was talking about everything that isn't science, and I'm talking only about those things that are commonly labelled "philosophy" for the last 300 years or so. Before that, science had not yet broken away from "natural philosophy" as a field in its own right. I'm not questioning the value of the arts.
> And wasn't Wittgenstein (et al.) the one that specifically recentered philosophy around the questions of language, trying to prune the accumulated historical bullshit that philosophy has a much harder difficulty to get rid of than (empirical) sciences ?
Maybe he was, I don't know. It's possible that I'm being unfair to him by focusing on the Tractatus, which has always struck me as just such obvious bullshit that it astonishes me that anyone can read it as anything other than some kind of practical joke.
But what I do know is that I don't see a lot of references to Wittgenstein when I read modern papers about natural language processing, and so his work doesn't seem to have had much impact. It's possible that this is because his work had so much impact that it's considered common knowledge, kind of like Turing doesn't always get referenced when the halting problem gets mentioned because everyone Just Knows.
And it's not just Wittgenstein. I don't see any philosophers having much impact on the world outside of university philosophy departments. That is what I am criticizing, not Wittgenstein per se. Tractatus was just an example.
What kinds of papers made silly errors like that? Do you have any examples? I guess it was a long time ago for you - but maybe you have some ideas of some keywords to search up? I actually am genuinely curious.
>religious apologetics
Most philosophers in the west are atheist, unless you mean they're secretly theist? What kind of undercover religious apologetics do you think is going on? I'm curious what you mean.
> What kinds of papers made silly errors like that? Do you have any examples?
Good heavens, where to begin? Just about anything about natural language that came out of a philosophy department in the mid-80s. For that matter, a lot of what came out of CS departments in the mid-80s was bullshit too, but that's because people back then were basing their work on what turned out to be a false premise, that language and human reasoning could be effectively modeled by formal logic.
Two specific examples stick out in my memory as things that struck me as BS back in the day:
The second example is a whole book pointing out that the meaning of a sentence depends on the context in which it appears. Well, duh!
> Most philosophers in the west are atheist, unless you mean they're secretly theist? What kind of undercover religious apologetics do you think is going on? I'm curious what you mean.
One of my hobbies is studying points of view with which I radically disagree, so I've spent a fair bit of time talking to religious fundamentalists and young-earth creationists. A lot of their foundational rhetoric is philosophical. It's actually pretty impressive how much thought they've put into it. These people are wrong (IMHO obviously), but they're not stupid.
On religious apologetics, that fundamentalists use philosophical arguments to justify their positions doesn't mean philosophy is largely transparent cover for religious apologetics, does it? I imagine fundamentalists are only using a small sliver of philosophical arguments. Most philosophers today don't think they're providing cover for apologetics, anyway.
> that fundamentalists use philosophical arguments to justify their positions doesn't mean philosophy is largely transparent cover for religious apologetics, does it?
Not in and of itself. But I don't see many other applications. Do you?
Philosophy finds application as cover for religious apologetics to make it seem more intellectually respectable than it otherwise might. I don't see many other areas where philosophy has an impact outside academia.
It finds application for atheists making arguments against religion as well. It finds application in defenses of free will. Scientists seem to subscribe to a Popperian falsifiability. Logic, part of philosophy, has found widespread use, as I'm sure you know.
What are you expecting exactly? Most people aren't going to have a massive effect on the world, whether in philosophy or not. Philosophy is far from the only academic discipline in which most practitioners don't have a significant impact on the world.
I don't know -- something. And it's not about the individuals, it's about the field as a whole. Classical music is not something I particularly enjoy, but I get that some people do, and so the efforts of all the composers and conductors and musicians who produce it have value for that audience. I can appreciate that even if I don't particularly care for the music myself. Likewise for Domino's pizza. Nascar. Cricket. Truck pulls. Rodeos. I don't get it, but I get that some people do.
Philosophy seems to have no audience beyond its own practitioners. That puts it on a par with things like yoga and homeopathy, and does not justify having entire departments at universities studying it.
God help us, it turns out that you can actually get a Ph.D. in both fields:
Wait, I'm sorry - philosophy has no audience beyond its own practitioners? Just look at all the people interested in philosophy in this thread. I'm willing to bet a large sum of money that the majority of people who have implicitly expressed interest in philosophy here are not practicing philosophers. I'm quite surprised by your reference to music; music is something I usually bring up when people tell me that philosophy is useless.
You yourself like Dennett's work, don't you? I know you think that most philosophers haven't produced anything that interesting to you, but I think it's often the case that impact is Pareto-distributed across practitioners of a discipline, certainly not unique to philosophy. Like, I imagine a lot of people are only interested in a select few musicians/bands.
> Wait, I'm sorry - philosophy has no audience beyond its own practitioners? Just look at all the people interested in philosophy in this thread. I'm willing to bet a large sum of money that the majority of people who have implicitly expressed interest in philosophy here are not practicing philosophers.
That depends on how you define "practicing philosophers". The vast majority of people who do yoga are not yoga masters. But no one gets value from watching yoga. The only value in yoga is doing it. This is not true for e.g. music. You can get value from passively listening to someone else play an instrument. It's not necessary for you to to it yourself.
I would claim that the vast majority of people participating in this thread fancy themselves armchair philosophers. It is indeed fun to argue about this stuff. But that doesn't justify paying anyone to do it as a profession.
> You yourself like Dennett's work, don't you?
I've already said that Dennett is a notable exception, and one of the things that sets him apart is that he bases his work in science more than what is traditionally called "philosophy". He's more like a massage therapist than a yoga instructor.
I mean, there are plenty of people who read philosophy and enjoy it but don't publish papers in philosophy conferences or journals, discuss topics with academic philosophers, etc. Reading a work of philosophy without writing a work of philosophy is something that a lot of people do and enjoy.
I'm sure there are some people who do. But books for popular audiences like Consciousness Explained are taken seriously by philosophers too. I don't see why there's any relevant difference between philosophy and music here.
Fine, I'll just pick some random books: Feyerabend's Against Method, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Nietzsche's The Antichrist, Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Descartes's Meditations, Spinoza's Ethics, Plato's dialogues, I could go on and on. Maybe you don't like all of these, but there are plenty of people who read these for fun, and all of them are taken seriously by philosophers.
> there are plenty of people who read these for fun
I really doubt that. I think you'd find it quite challenging to find people who have read these books who do not also enjoy engaging in philosophical debates.
But given the effort it would take to test this I think we should just agree to disagree.
> It also seems to me that a lot of what is nowadays called philosophy is just pretty transparent cover for religious apologetics.
Yeah. There is an ideal notion of a "love of knowledge" and following it where it leads, but almost everyone fails at some point. But it is a shame when a deeply flawed published work gets more attention than it deserves. In my opinion, teaching philosophy as a historic progression should not be the only nor default way. Sometimes it really is better to start afresh.
Of these people how many of them come to their conclusion based on careful reasoning? Based on broad knowledge of philosophy?
My prior expectation would be that these numbers are very low. I would expect that people who dismiss philosophy do so from a position of relative ignorance.
This is not blame; the broader context matters: educational curricula, teaching quality, life experience, curiosity, competing interests, etc.
Let’s put the shoe on the other foot. How much applied computer science is worth reading? If you put a typical example of it in front of me (the code professionals write for example), I’m probably going think it is a hot mess. It becomes more bearable if I interpret it as a sequence of economically and culturally constrained suboptimal decisions. The same goes for philosophy.