Great article. I mostly deal with philosophy of the mind, and I find that someone who whips out a formal argument is usually glossing over all the nuances. It is a pretty reliable marker of someone with overly rigid thinking.
This is somewhat validating to me, in my quest to not take seriously Thomistic metaphysics, which seemingly (I think!) tries to obfuscate. Ed Feser has a proof/argument for God that’s 48 premises! On one hand I feel lazy and “not philosophically rigorous” for not wanting to engage, but on another, I think any argument that long is probably obfuscating something (intentionally or not). Complex ideas are probably not understood well exclusively through logic. I think philosophers (especially philosophers of religion) like to throw around the word scientism at annoying scientists who are bad at philosophy and think they’re doing science. At the same time, I think we need a word for philosophers and theologians who similarly think they aren’t doing (subject x) when they really are, and worse off, saying things that are false in those fields. A good example of this is WLC talking about A theory of time, or Thomists metaphysics running against actual physics. They’re actually proposing things that are false (as far as I am informed)
I agree with almost all of this, but I think the vices you point out are not terribly common. When they do occur, like in the BS philosophy of religion discussions, I think most philosophers just shake their heads and walk away. Lots of philosophers think that most philosophy of religion is shit anyway, both pro-theistic and atheistic.
So, yeah: reliance on formalism definitely produces multiple cases of really stinky shit, but I don't think it happens terribly often.
The last time I had PhD and Masters students I told them that I didn't want to meet with them until they had had a year of symbolic logic. Not because I expect them to use any formalism in their work. I don't think I ever have used any formalism in my written work, in 30 years. But if someone doesn't know how to apply predicate and modal logic to philosophical issues, then they usually suck at super-careful argumentation.
Great article. A problem that I’ve noticed as well (not only with philosophy, but other academic and non-academic fields as well!) The way I think of this is - is the complexity being used a reflection of the actual complexity of the issue, or is it being artificially injected for obfuscation? The exercise is to determine which it is!
I've recently been thinking a lot about some similar ideas. That academic philosophers are limited in their potential by the incentives of academia. That much of the complexity and prerequisite knowledge of academic philosophy (and academia more broadly) exists primarily to convince other people that the author is very smart and special, and maybe to protect their special idea from dissagreement. It seems to me that this type of philosophy will always be pretty much useless because the mountain of prerequisites virtual guarantees that almost nobody will invest the time required to understand or engage. If you can't present your ideas in a way that other people can understand, you don't actually understand the idea.
If you follow math research at all, you will often see mathematicians apply probabilistic thinking to the likelihood of new proofs being true. The longer and harder it is to understand a proof, the less likely it is to be true, and the more likely it is that there is some minor error which undermines the proof entirely. This is because there are lots of people who's goal is really to prove their own intelligence.
The height of the Ivory Tower, so splendidly garbed in social acceptance, is not so tall as the Plateau of Truth reachable by the stolid plodding of ordinary common sense:
I appreciate the quality and clarity of your writing.
I don't really have anything else to add, because i have never studied philosophy in an academic context, and I just enjoy reading about things that other people are thinking about. But I appreciate this glimpse into your world, and the clarity with which you describe it.
I agree, especially with the part about the use of Bayes' theorem in philosophy. I understand it can be useful in fields like medicine, astronomy and such. And I am not saying philosophy is a worse field or that we cannot use rigour at all. But in philosophy people often just have a intuition about something and than assign it a rather arbitrary number.
An example would be someone who reflects on the claim "God would want to incarnate as a man so He can relate to us better", finds it plausible and says the claim has a probability of 0.85.
The very intuition about something such disconnected from the human experience such as God and His motivations is suspicious. Assigning numerically precise probabilities to such claims is kind of ridiculous.
Thanks for this, and I agree with your views here. I definitely endorse the positions that probability theory and Bayes can be really useful tethered to certain practices (just usually not philosophy).
Great article. I mostly deal with philosophy of the mind, and I find that someone who whips out a formal argument is usually glossing over all the nuances. It is a pretty reliable marker of someone with overly rigid thinking.
Yeah, even the idea of "argument" rather than collaboratively trying to understand a domain and model build is very peculiar IMO
This is somewhat validating to me, in my quest to not take seriously Thomistic metaphysics, which seemingly (I think!) tries to obfuscate. Ed Feser has a proof/argument for God that’s 48 premises! On one hand I feel lazy and “not philosophically rigorous” for not wanting to engage, but on another, I think any argument that long is probably obfuscating something (intentionally or not). Complex ideas are probably not understood well exclusively through logic. I think philosophers (especially philosophers of religion) like to throw around the word scientism at annoying scientists who are bad at philosophy and think they’re doing science. At the same time, I think we need a word for philosophers and theologians who similarly think they aren’t doing (subject x) when they really are, and worse off, saying things that are false in those fields. A good example of this is WLC talking about A theory of time, or Thomists metaphysics running against actual physics. They’re actually proposing things that are false (as far as I am informed)
Im unfortunately familiar with that one. You might like https://open.substack.com/pub/nathanormond/p/the-purpose-of-deductive-arguments?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1v1mzp
Hell yes, will check it out!
I agree with almost all of this, but I think the vices you point out are not terribly common. When they do occur, like in the BS philosophy of religion discussions, I think most philosophers just shake their heads and walk away. Lots of philosophers think that most philosophy of religion is shit anyway, both pro-theistic and atheistic.
So, yeah: reliance on formalism definitely produces multiple cases of really stinky shit, but I don't think it happens terribly often.
The last time I had PhD and Masters students I told them that I didn't want to meet with them until they had had a year of symbolic logic. Not because I expect them to use any formalism in their work. I don't think I ever have used any formalism in my written work, in 30 years. But if someone doesn't know how to apply predicate and modal logic to philosophical issues, then they usually suck at super-careful argumentation.
Great article. A problem that I’ve noticed as well (not only with philosophy, but other academic and non-academic fields as well!) The way I think of this is - is the complexity being used a reflection of the actual complexity of the issue, or is it being artificially injected for obfuscation? The exercise is to determine which it is!
I've recently been thinking a lot about some similar ideas. That academic philosophers are limited in their potential by the incentives of academia. That much of the complexity and prerequisite knowledge of academic philosophy (and academia more broadly) exists primarily to convince other people that the author is very smart and special, and maybe to protect their special idea from dissagreement. It seems to me that this type of philosophy will always be pretty much useless because the mountain of prerequisites virtual guarantees that almost nobody will invest the time required to understand or engage. If you can't present your ideas in a way that other people can understand, you don't actually understand the idea.
If you follow math research at all, you will often see mathematicians apply probabilistic thinking to the likelihood of new proofs being true. The longer and harder it is to understand a proof, the less likely it is to be true, and the more likely it is that there is some minor error which undermines the proof entirely. This is because there are lots of people who's goal is really to prove their own intelligence.
The height of the Ivory Tower, so splendidly garbed in social acceptance, is not so tall as the Plateau of Truth reachable by the stolid plodding of ordinary common sense:
https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/metaphysics-in-a-nutshell
I appreciate the quality and clarity of your writing.
I don't really have anything else to add, because i have never studied philosophy in an academic context, and I just enjoy reading about things that other people are thinking about. But I appreciate this glimpse into your world, and the clarity with which you describe it.
I agree, especially with the part about the use of Bayes' theorem in philosophy. I understand it can be useful in fields like medicine, astronomy and such. And I am not saying philosophy is a worse field or that we cannot use rigour at all. But in philosophy people often just have a intuition about something and than assign it a rather arbitrary number.
An example would be someone who reflects on the claim "God would want to incarnate as a man so He can relate to us better", finds it plausible and says the claim has a probability of 0.85.
The very intuition about something such disconnected from the human experience such as God and His motivations is suspicious. Assigning numerically precise probabilities to such claims is kind of ridiculous.
Thanks for this, and I agree with your views here. I definitely endorse the positions that probability theory and Bayes can be really useful tethered to certain practices (just usually not philosophy).