Comment by vovavili
4 days ago
Academic philosophical arguments are enormously wordy. A bulk of points academic papers try to convey could be cut dramatically short, but then passing peer review would be challenging. Authors are thus incentivized to signal erudition through hard (analytic) or soft (continental) obscurantism. Being educated (read - socialized) in this environment would only hurt a person already predisposed to being too wordy.
This may not be the case for historical philosophical arguments. And while these are enormously influential from the standpoint of history of ideas, from the standpoint of a contemporary observer most of them contain trivial logical mistakes.
t. majored in philosophy
I was being the term academic philosophy to mean the entirety of historical and contemporary thought, not specifically just papers published recently.
That said, I don’t agree at all that authors are incentivized to be obscure. That is a typical criticism from people that don’t have actual experience in the field, but are just repeating culture war tropes.
I also really don’t think you can just hand wave away the entire history of ideas with vague statements like “from the standpoint of a contemporary observer most of them contain trivial logical mistakes.”
This attitude is exactly why rationalism is a goofy internet thing and not an actual intellectual movement.
I also have a degree in philosophy, and IME the idea that papers published in leading analytic journals are obscure on purpose is nonsense. There is no tolerance for the kind of handwavy arrogance you’ll find in “internet thought” on blogs and social media.
>That said, I don’t agree at all that authors are incentivized to be obscure. That is a typical criticism from people that don’t have actual experience in the field, but are just repeating culture war tropes.
People like Jon Elster and Lionel Page much be culture war ideologues, I see.
Yeah I’m gonna guess 99.9% of people making that criticism against academic philosophy don’t know those names.
The LW/rationalist space, and other spheres adjacent to it, have a disdain for traditional philosophy, but have spent very little time engaging with that philosophy and giving sufficient reasons as to why it’s not important, or not even worth engaging with.
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This is pretty much what I meant above in the other comment. No particular paper, no concrete argument with the supposed logical mistake identified (and here you'd need a sample too), just an explanation of why the whole field is like this.
I wouldn't say it's a stretch that LW will largely accept a similiar comment because it fits what the in-group believes about philosophy.
You mean flawed philosophical arguments? I find antiscientist arguments usually flawed, like EAAN and knowability paradox. You can say they are written by preachers so are no true philosophy? Conversely you can say they are high quality, because they are falsifiable.
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> Academic philosophical arguments are enormously wordy.
They can be, and often they are, but not always¹. Sometimes I would be in anger over an author when I discovered that their incredibly verbose, roundabout argument using the rarest of words, with some of them redefined in their meaning, boils down to a very simple statement that could have been made in a single paragraph. As if the author wanted to obscure the obviousness of the point by making the language so complicated that the reader has to suspect there is more to it, while many of the points are just semantics. Much of academic philosophy falls into that category.
But not all of it. In some cases the reconfiguration of language, the introduction of new words etc, genuinely brings you to the edge of what is thinkable within that language with some truly novel angles as a result. This is then often very precise and rigorous thinking and the verbosity is a result of that.
The problem is then of course how to tell the two apart, since you have to follow the thought to decide into which category any given text happens to fall. With rationalist writing the issue however can be that sometimes there is no discernible train of thought to begin with.
I also studied philosophy.
--- ¹: Edmund L. Gettier: „Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?“, in: Analysis 23 (1963), H. 6, S. 121–123. This is just 3 pages long, many more such examples.