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Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

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Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#51

Post by nescioquid »

082349872349872 wrote: post #8

In the Phaedrus, it was predicted that writing and reading in general (let alone specific examples such as pseudophilosophy) would eventually encourage confused, self-indulgent thinking. > You offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, s…

There's a strand of suspicion towards literacy in Plato. Mainly I'm thinking of the dialog in which Socrates talks to a man about to sue his father (I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the name of the dialog); mainly the idea is that writing enfeebles the memory and intellect.

> In the Phaedrus, it was predicted that writing and reading in general... would eventually encourage confused, self-indulgent thinking.

We don't learn things, according to Plato, but the soul is brought to remember them again, and the remembering happens by virtue of a Socratic interrogation. If you read "x is the case", your soul hasn't been made to remember it, and worse, that proposition just might not be true which you won't discover without interrogation.

Elsewhere (apologies, can't remember which dialog) Plato offers a description of thinking: the mind asks a question and then answers it. The form of the dialog models that process nicely.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#52

Post by jonathanstrange »

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.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#53

Post by ardy42 »

> 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. 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.

This sounds similar to engineer's syndrome/engineer's disease: https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee... (which isn't limited to engineers, IIRC there's an equivalent term that I forget for medical doctors that overconfidently stray outside their area of competence).

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#54

Post by User23 »

zyxzevn wrote: post #39
ostrophonics wrote: post #10

This sort of thing is always by turns boring and frustrating to read, because there are good and interesting philosophical criticisms to be made of Foucault's epistemology, but the idea that for him facticity itself is questionable isn't one of them. Foucault is never really in doubt about what constitutes, e.g., an event, occurrence, or fact - actually his entire corpus very self-consciously relies on having a commo…

Complexity and language: It is always funny how long boring sentences are found in philosophy. I think the problem is that our language is lacking in clarity for describing the subtle nuances of reasoning and logic. And sadly it is a bit confusing. Especially if one (like me), does not know all the people listed in the paragraphs. Personally I tend to shorten the sentences and focus on the presentation of the informa…

You clearly have a pragmatic mind so perhaps you’ll find this of interest. The problem of clarity has been recognized for a while. CS Peirce took a pretty good stab at it with How to Make Our Ideas Clear[1] and even that is a little dense. Partly due to 19th century prose though.

[1] https://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/5396/5525631/docu...

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#55

Post by whimsicalism »

mrkeen wrote: post #42

> Harris’s failure to grasp the content of many of the philosophical claims and arguments that he criticises > Lawrence Krauss engages with philosophical arguments for theism without understanding them properly. Most saliently, he ends up criticising a caricature version of the so-called cosmological argument about the existence of God. Oof. Perhaps back up those drive-by-shootings with some clarification. > Usually,…

> The irony.

It's only ironic if you haven't read this so called "obscurantist pseudophilosophy." This sentence hardly holds a candle to the writings of someone like Deleuze or Derrida.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#56

Post by tgv »

coldtea wrote: post #22

> Often, it’s due to simple misunderstandings (such as confusing truth with belief or knowledge), but sometimes it’s due rather to wilful obscurity Sorry, but the pseudophilosopher here is the author of the article. He can't disambiguate between truth as some property of the universe/time-space/actual historical occurence, and truth as it matters to us, and thinks that just because Foucault doesn't spell the distinct…

How can you disagree without agreeing what "truth" means?

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#57

Post by AnHonestComment »

zyxzevn wrote: post #39
ostrophonics wrote: post #10

This sort of thing is always by turns boring and frustrating to read, because there are good and interesting philosophical criticisms to be made of Foucault's epistemology, but the idea that for him facticity itself is questionable isn't one of them. Foucault is never really in doubt about what constitutes, e.g., an event, occurrence, or fact - actually his entire corpus very self-consciously relies on having a commo…

Complexity and language: It is always funny how long boring sentences are found in philosophy. I think the problem is that our language is lacking in clarity for describing the subtle nuances of reasoning and logic. And sadly it is a bit confusing. Especially if one (like me), does not know all the people listed in the paragraphs. Personally I tend to shorten the sentences and focus on the presentation of the informa…

There’s arguments that mathematics has eclipsed traditional philosophy to become modern ontology.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#58

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

Veen wrote: post #19
ostrophonics wrote: post #10

This sort of thing is always by turns boring and frustrating to read, because there are good and interesting philosophical criticisms to be made of Foucault's epistemology, but the idea that for him facticity itself is questionable isn't one of them. Foucault is never really in doubt about what constitutes, e.g., an event, occurrence, or fact - actually his entire corpus very self-consciously relies on having a commo…

There would be little problem if his methods were confined to examining questions such as the truth of phrenology, the ideological presumptions that made it an appealing set of beliefs, and power relations that motivated them. Unfortunately, his followers (and Foucault himself) cast a far wider net than that, to the point at which power-knowledge becomes the predominant or even the only acceptable analytical framewor…

The Focaultian mindset makes you twitchy, paranoid, and hostile.

We think of it as "of the Left", but there's also nothing to stop "the Right" from buying the idea that everything is just about Power. Then if you keep at that line of thought pretty soon you turn into a Nazi. Or at the very least, you will hear all claims from "the Left" about "care" or "empathy" with knowing cynicism.

And my perception is that these ideas have begun to spread subliminally throughout the culture, particularly among people who are younger or more educated. Everyone becomes more guarded. The social anxiety ramps up. The persona you see is increasingly a mask. The wall goes up a mile high and ten feet thick.

Have you ever met a friendly dog (stereotypically, perhaps, a golden retriever), that has never been mistreated? It will walk up to you wagging its tail; it is happy to meet you, because you are a person, and people, it has learned, are friendly and good.

Next: Have you met a skittish street-dog, the kind that shop-owners kick and curse as a cur, that walks around with nimble jumpy motions, with its tail between its legs?

The dog is a social animal, and is a model for humans. I observe that we humans are turning into the second, skittish type. You could call it a process of "de-domestication". We are all going feral. Uncivilized.

Life as a social animal is difficult to tolerate when your amygdala is constantly firing around others. But that's exactly the emotional effect of these ideas. And they are infecting everyone.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#59

Post by DanielBMarkham »

Oh wow, what a topic. I have experienced this from all angles. I'm writing programming books in which I have to extend/combine the work of various philosophers[1], I am a huge fan of history, science, and philosophy, and hell, I just tweeted about this subject[2]

I agree with the general gist of what the author is saying, but I find that I have a lot of problems using the word "psuedophilosophy". If you want it bluntly, all philosophy is bullshit and trying to stick the word science in there does disservice to both. The longer version is that programming is applied philosophy: we meet, we learn, we define, we codify into a formal system, we use that system to explore the universe around us.

The longer version gives us a hint, a compass to find our way around in the bullshit maze (and I use "bullshit" affectionately. My only point is that philosophy is a terribly different thing from science). Where are we going? After all, I'd argue that philosophy is the mother of all sciences, including math. It's obviously critical to humanity. But in my formulation, coders use the process of philosophy to do something, agree, create, formalize, explore. We do philosophy all of the time, but we actually do it. We don't write books on it or spend much if any time quoting or hero-worshipping others who may have done bits and pieces of it 100 years ago or more.

Just this morning I ordered the Great Courses series "The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida" I am extremely pumped to get started on it. Because of my books and my interests, I've ran across all kinds of philosophy groupies: professors, doctoral students, fans, grads who hate the subject now, etc. My take: if you don't study philosophy you're missing out on life. Some of the smartest people on the planet have spent their entire lives thinking about tough problems. Use that work. Having said that, most all of them only had a handful of good ideas and spent the rest of their career taking them too far. You have to understand that too if you're actually going somewhere with that knowledge. Otherwise you're just intellectually self-stimulating.

If you're learning stuff to go places you can always look back and ask "Where am I now that I wouldn't have been without this knowledge?" That tracks well with this author because his core complaint, whether he states it clearly or not, is that folks pick, choose, skim, and misunderstand great philosophic works as a crutch to actually understanding or teaching something. It's either a prop they use to make rhetorical points or it's a mask they use to cover up their own lack of ability. Yup, they sure do. And you can tell because when you get through reading them you're not left being able to do something you couldn't have done before. Instead your previous opinions are validated, just with bigger words and some loose-fitting historical anecdotes.

1. https://leanpub.com/u/DanielBMarkham (see brief intro videos to both books if you're interested in diving further)

2. https://twitter.com/danielbmarkham/status/135909496939971379...

and

https://twitter.com/danielbmarkham/status/135915625272354406...

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