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As somebody who makes a living "as a philosopher" in areas that overlap with CS, decision making, logic, AI and appear to be more scientific in nature, I may fi

As somebody who makes a living "as a philosopher" in areas that overlap with CS, decision making, logic, AI and appear to be more scientific in nature, 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. 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.

_qulr 6y ago
> the majority of philosophers silently agree that 80% of all publications or more in philosophy are nonsense or bullshit > 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.
- sosomething 6y ago
  OT, but with best wishes: > //i.postimg.cc/28gH97Ly/23091-en-FORGIVEN-FORGOTTEN-LOST-CONDONED-FINAL-Mail.png (-;
- Schiphol 6y ago
  Not the OP, but well regarded philosophy journals (in my academic neck of the woods) have ridiculously low acceptance rates (2-3% often), and in general peer review is done and taken seriously.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    > well regarded philosophy journals (in my academic neck of the woods) have ridiculously low acceptance rates (2-3% often) 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.
    - Schiphol 6y ago
      It definitely looks like standards from the inside :)
      - _qulr 6y ago
        Oh yes, I agree!
    - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
      It stands to reason that most papers will not be impressive, so even if the filter is biased it likely has some sort of value. 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.
narrator 6y ago
The question that most puzzles me is who gives grants to these obviously nonsense humanities academics to do their work and why? I guess this is a pretty cheap area of research to fund, but why bother at all? 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.
- tristor 6y ago
  > The question that most puzzles me is who gives grants to these obviously nonsense humanities academics to do their work and why? I guess this is a pretty cheap area of research to fund, but why bother at all? 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.
  - Fellshard 6y ago
    Money influence, but also the allure of power.
tristor 6y ago
> 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. 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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
phkahler 6y ago
>> Calling the work pseudophilosophy will only enrage people who disagree and not help with anything. 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.
natex 6y ago
I appreciate this comment but I have some questions/comments: > 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)
- alfonsodev 6y ago
  Not OP but here, > I don't think the article was making a claim about philosophy being a science. 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.
  - harpiaharpyja 6y ago
    That was my understanding of what they wrote as well, if I may also chime in.
mcv 6y ago
> " 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..." Are you saying that philosophy in general encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking?
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  It's kind of hard when your discipline is pretty much tasked with finding out the very meaning of 'bullshit'... 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 ?)
- Netbeing 6y ago
  One of my favorite things I've ever read is David Stove's essay on this subject, "What is Wrong with Our Thoughts?" wherein a cranky old philosopher excoriates his profession. https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html 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".
  - mcv 6y ago
    That is certainly an interesting article. He bluntly declares it obvious that a bunch of leading, mainstream philosophical thought it utter bullshit without explaining why (and instead arguing that nobody can explain why), and I completely agree with him. 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.)
BlueTemplar 6y ago
> 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. 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.)
- tikej 6y ago
  The difference is, that there's very advanced mathematics behind string theory and at leas that part can be checked/verified by independent researchers.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Yeah, I guess that it's harder to check logical arguments not expressed in mathematics ?
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
I've done well by staying clear of anyone airing their thoughts about post-modernity in the past 15 years. (perhaps with the exception of some very few individuals like Zizek). 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/ https://crookedtimber.org/2020/03/04/rightwing-postmodernism... [1] https://lachlanrdale.medium.com/analysing-jordan-petersons-views-on-postmodernism-e63ef288680 https://lachlanrdale.medium.com/analysing-jordan-petersons-v...
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  peterson is an excellent example of pseudo-philosophy. Unfortunately the HN crowd appears to be an easy prey, based on all the downvotes you are getting...
- mancerayder 6y ago
  It seems that applied postmodernism takes a very anti-materialist stance that rankles left wing (old school) progressives and centrist liberals as well. Standpoint Theory and Social Constructivism contradict materialist conceptions of knowledge and power, and they contradict classical liberal ideals of progress. 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.
- jonathanstrange 6y ago
  I agree with you and don't understand why you're being downvoted. "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?
andagainagain 6y ago
It almsot sounds likes what we need is a differentiation of words. Most people that like "philosophy" disagree on what they mean. I mean, that's a layman problem. But if philosophers themselves disagree on what philosophy in general is, then perhaps it should differentiate into specific philosophies. 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?
- gmtx725 6y ago
  "Analytic" Philosophy is already a term, I think it does the job pretty well
brudgers 6y ago
To be clear, what we refer to as "science" is the discipline formerly known as "natural philosophy" in the European canon. And there was some connotation that as such, it was pseudo-philosophy for dealing with mere appearances rather than true essences and for eschewing morality and eternal truths for empirical reasoning about ordinary things.
tyrust 6y ago
>As somebody who makes a living "as a philosopher" in areas that overlap with CS, decision making, logic, AI If you don't mind answering: what is it that you do?
Bakary 6y ago
Would it make more sense to see the work of a philosopher as that of a performance artist? I do not mean this in a sarcastic sense, but in the sense of coming up with intuitive but applicable ways of considering and interacting with the world

_qulr 6y ago

> the majority of philosophers silently agree that 80% of all publications or more in philosophy are nonsense or bullshit > 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.

sosomething 6y ago
OT, but with best wishes: > //i.postimg.cc/28gH97Ly/23091-en-FORGIVEN-FORGOTTEN-LOST-CONDONED-FINAL-Mail.png (-;
Schiphol 6y ago
Not the OP, but well regarded philosophy journals (in my academic neck of the woods) have ridiculously low acceptance rates (2-3% often), and in general peer review is done and taken seriously.
- _qulr 6y ago
  > well regarded philosophy journals (in my academic neck of the woods) have ridiculously low acceptance rates (2-3% often) 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.
  - Schiphol 6y ago
    It definitely looks like standards from the inside :)
    - _qulr 6y ago
      Oh yes, I agree!
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    It stands to reason that most papers will not be impressive, so even if the filter is biased it likely has some sort of value. 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.

narrator 6y ago

The question that most puzzles me is who gives grants to these obviously nonsense humanities academics to do their work and why? I guess this is a pretty cheap area of research to fund, but why bother at all? 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.

tristor 6y ago
> The question that most puzzles me is who gives grants to these obviously nonsense humanities academics to do their work and why? I guess this is a pretty cheap area of research to fund, but why bother at all? 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.
- Fellshard 6y ago
  Money influence, but also the allure of power.

tristor 6y ago

> 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. 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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

phkahler 6y ago

>> Calling the work pseudophilosophy will only enrage people who disagree and not help with anything. 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.

natex 6y ago

I appreciate this comment but I have some questions/comments: > 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)

alfonsodev 6y ago
Not OP but here, > I don't think the article was making a claim about philosophy being a science. 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.
- harpiaharpyja 6y ago
  That was my understanding of what they wrote as well, if I may also chime in.

mcv 6y ago

> " 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..." Are you saying that philosophy in general encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking?

BlueTemplar 6y ago
It's kind of hard when your discipline is pretty much tasked with finding out the very meaning of 'bullshit'... 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 ?)
Netbeing 6y ago
One of my favorite things I've ever read is David Stove's essay on this subject, "What is Wrong with Our Thoughts?" wherein a cranky old philosopher excoriates his profession. https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html 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".
- mcv 6y ago
  That is certainly an interesting article. He bluntly declares it obvious that a bunch of leading, mainstream philosophical thought it utter bullshit without explaining why (and instead arguing that nobody can explain why), and I completely agree with him. 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.)

BlueTemplar 6y ago

> 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. 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.)

tikej 6y ago
The difference is, that there's very advanced mathematics behind string theory and at leas that part can be checked/verified by independent researchers.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Yeah, I guess that it's harder to check logical arguments not expressed in mathematics ?

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago

I've done well by staying clear of anyone airing their thoughts about post-modernity in the past 15 years. (perhaps with the exception of some very few individuals like Zizek). 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/ https://crookedtimber.org/2020/03/04/rightwing-postmodernism... [1] https://lachlanrdale.medium.com/analysing-jordan-petersons-views-on-postmodernism-e63ef288680 https://lachlanrdale.medium.com/analysing-jordan-petersons-v...

eeZah7Ux 6y ago
peterson is an excellent example of pseudo-philosophy. Unfortunately the HN crowd appears to be an easy prey, based on all the downvotes you are getting...
mancerayder 6y ago
It seems that applied postmodernism takes a very anti-materialist stance that rankles left wing (old school) progressives and centrist liberals as well. Standpoint Theory and Social Constructivism contradict materialist conceptions of knowledge and power, and they contradict classical liberal ideals of progress. 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.
jonathanstrange 6y ago
I agree with you and don't understand why you're being downvoted. "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?

andagainagain 6y ago

It almsot sounds likes what we need is a differentiation of words. Most people that like "philosophy" disagree on what they mean. I mean, that's a layman problem. But if philosophers themselves disagree on what philosophy in general is, then perhaps it should differentiate into specific philosophies. 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?

gmtx725 6y ago
"Analytic" Philosophy is already a term, I think it does the job pretty well

brudgers 6y ago

To be clear, what we refer to as "science" is the discipline formerly known as "natural philosophy" in the European canon. And there was some connotation that as such, it was pseudo-philosophy for dealing with mere appearances rather than true essences and for eschewing morality and eternal truths for empirical reasoning about ordinary things.

tyrust 6y ago

>As somebody who makes a living "as a philosopher" in areas that overlap with CS, decision making, logic, AI If you don't mind answering: what is it that you do?

Bakary 6y ago

Would it make more sense to see the work of a philosopher as that of a performance artist? I do not mean this in a sarcastic sense, but in the sense of coming up with intuitive but applicable ways of considering and interacting with the world