Comment by keiferski
4 days ago
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.
> Yeah I’m gonna guess 99.9% of people making that criticism against academic philosophy don’t know those names.
The majority of people who hold just about any viewpoint are going to be uninformed, so arguing against the average holder of any idea is going to be pretty trivial as long as you know a bit of the subject matter. The value of an idea is surely roughly proportional instead to the strongest argument for it.
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You are explicitly responding to a person who is not in that 99.9%.
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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.
I'm not a specialist in either, though I know of Plantinga and don't dismiss him as a preacher. From what I was able to find, there's engagement on this topic with back and forth, so I'm not sure it's settled. I'm not sure how much LW posts are discussed by an out-group.
https://fitelson.org/plant.pdf
On knowability, the SEP says: "There is no consensus about whether and where the proof goes wrong", so I'm not sure this is a good example of a trivial issue either.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fitch-paradox/
And I wasn't claiming philosophy contains no flawed arguments, but dismissing the entire corpus rather than peacemeal attack seems reactionary rather than reformative.