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A field you yourself have omitted is philosophy. Not that I can blame you -- it's seen as inaccessible and/or without progress, and/or subsumed into other field

A field you yourself have omitted is philosophy. Not that I can blame you -- it's seen as inaccessible and/or without progress, and/or subsumed into other fields. There's two things you mentioned I want to touch/speculate on. The first is the idea that there's a loss or shame in the dearth of new papers with few references. I think this is a function of the growth of disciplines: as the network adds neighbouring nodes, it becomes increasingly important to make your usage of terms and suppositions continuous with the rest of the relevant field. This way you avoid saying something important only to talk 'past' the readers. Where it does become a problem is in 'referentialism': the notion that what is being pulled out from a concept can only be described in the original terminology or via quotations. It's a serious problem in the humanities, but not exclusive to it. Ideas really are multiply realizable -- that's the beauty and creativity of analogies. I have a pet theory that this is a tension implicit in paradigm shifts, but one that isn't focused on enough in the process of academic 'meta-cognition'. My guess is that when it comes to 'standing on the shoulders of giants', it's all too tempting to marvel at the giants themselves than look to the expanded horizon. Perhaps that relates to the other posters' point about the Mycenaean age. When it comes to Romer's paper, though I haven't yet read it all, I think there's an analogy in 'compsci-ness'. I suspect his observations work just as well with other epistemological (knowledge-kind) combinations and their tensions. It seems that what both highly abstracted fields do so well is further what we can do with the perceived objects and kinds in the world and how they relate. This kind of advancement seems it should improve our critical methods, and how we pin down the qualitative questions -- but it seems we are hard-coded to prioritise arrangement, not inspection. Perhaps it's that there is just too much for the potential Socrates archetypes to effectively 'Socratise', or perhaps they've been swallowed by Python.

igravious 9y ago
Wasn't there a US university that shut down its philosophy department in recent times? Can there be any surer sign of mathiness than that? 'referentialism' is a problem but at least we have digital tools to help us now. I suppose we're in a more honest situation now than in the past. But it is indeed a problem. Why? Because now we'll be ranked by our citation scores. > I suspect his observations work just as well with other epistemological (knowledge-kind) combinations and their tensions. Yes, jargon-heavy humanities papers work in the same vein as math-heavy economics (for example) papers. They are both, ultimately, bullshit.
- rwnspace 9y ago
  Good point re: citation scores. I like to imagine that people who think critically about data and measurement a lot don't take such things at face value. But maybe not. Univ of St Thomas Houston & Univ of Zagreb seem to be 'reviewing' their Philosophy depts (though both cases have their nuances). Middlesex University (middle-of-the-pack Uni in UK) already closed theirs. Only couple mins of searching, I guess there's more. It's almost definitely mathiness from those who hold the purse strings. I think it's regrettable we have degrees for every job under the sun, it makes cross-pollination that much more difficult. Maybe something to do with the rise in total sum of bullshit. It might be because I like to get an overview of things and read around, or because I find it difficult to commit attention for very long... But it seems to me like there's plenty of room for exactly the kind of thinking philosophical training is great for: fruitful interdisciplinary stuff between the humanities and sciences. Instead we seem to be getting profit-motivated consumption of the former by the latter, and filling the space with bachelors that stand in for what once was training in the workplace.

igravious 9y ago

Wasn't there a US university that shut down its philosophy department in recent times? Can there be any surer sign of mathiness than that? 'referentialism' is a problem but at least we have digital tools to help us now. I suppose we're in a more honest situation now than in the past. But it is indeed a problem. Why? Because now we'll be ranked by our citation scores. > I suspect his observations work just as well with other epistemological (knowledge-kind) combinations and their tensions. Yes, jargon-heavy humanities papers work in the same vein as math-heavy economics (for example) papers. They are both, ultimately, bullshit.

rwnspace 9y ago
Good point re: citation scores. I like to imagine that people who think critically about data and measurement a lot don't take such things at face value. But maybe not. Univ of St Thomas Houston & Univ of Zagreb seem to be 'reviewing' their Philosophy depts (though both cases have their nuances). Middlesex University (middle-of-the-pack Uni in UK) already closed theirs. Only couple mins of searching, I guess there's more. It's almost definitely mathiness from those who hold the purse strings. I think it's regrettable we have degrees for every job under the sun, it makes cross-pollination that much more difficult. Maybe something to do with the rise in total sum of bullshit. It might be because I like to get an overview of things and read around, or because I find it difficult to commit attention for very long... But it seems to me like there's plenty of room for exactly the kind of thinking philosophical training is great for: fruitful interdisciplinary stuff between the humanities and sciences. Instead we seem to be getting profit-motivated consumption of the former by the latter, and filling the space with bachelors that stand in for what once was training in the workplace.