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Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

psyche.co

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Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#111

Post by denton-scratch »

Veen wrote: post #29
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…

> It's the century plus old distinction between analytical and continental philosophy The article's claim is not that this distinction doesn't exist or that it is not a useful distinction, but that "pseudophilosphers" tend to equivocate between "truth as some property of the universe" and "truth as it matters to us". That seems to me to be an interesting position that is worth considering. (btw. the claim that "The d…

> It's the century plus old distinction between analytical and continental philosophy

Hmmm. Kant, Frege, Hegel: these Germans laid the foundations of anglo-saxon analytical philosophy. Frege (who I struggle to understand) was a towering figure in language and logic, as well as maths. And wasn't Descartes from the continent?

Sartre had never heard of postmodernism. His work was of a literary kind, which I associate with Nietsche. He's considered an existentialist, par excellence (and 'scuse my French).

FWIW, I think it's the study of logic that has the power to immunise you against bad reasoning (you also have to be bright). In one of the Enid Blyton books, the kids visit an academic uncle who bemoans the fact that "they don't teach logic in schools any more". Dammit, that was in the 1st half of the 20th Century.

You still can't learn logic at school. I went to a good school; logic was not on the curriculum. I had only the vaguest idea of what it was, until I started a philosophy degree.

I've never read a book by a postmodernist. So I don't have standing to attack postmodernism. But it doesn't interest me much; nor do bodice-buster romantic novels.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#112

Post by mcv »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #52

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 a…

> " 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?

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#113

Post by tristor »

narrator wrote: post #78
jonathanstrange wrote: post #52

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 a…

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.

> 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.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#114

Post by baron_harkonnen »

whimsicalism wrote: post #63
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…

I agree that this article is rehashing the age-old continental vs. analytical debate, I disagree that because the debate is old, it is thus worthless. I see many defending the "perfectly clear" meaning of continental philosophers, even if they don't obviously build up a clear argument from assumptions like a "10 year old" analytic philosopher might do. Many, in my view, are forgetting just quite how obscurant many of…

> is close-to-incomprehensible to me

Because it's written for an audience of people who are very familiar with structuralism, Althusser, and the general development of Marxist philosophy over a 200 year period of time.

This is no different than a paper like "Attention is All You Need" expecting you to have a background in neural networks, recurrent neural networks specifically, neural-language models, and the transformer architecture.

It's strange to me that philosophy is presumed exempt from having technical language and expecting a prepared reader where nearly all other fields are not.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#115

Post by Fellshard »

tristor wrote: post #113
narrator wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 p…

Money influence, but also the allure of power.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#116

Post by BlueTemplar »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #52

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 a…

> 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.)

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#117

Post by maze-le »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #77
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…

You gave some examples of what this kind of truth doesn’t cover. Fire is hot. Australia exists. This table is wooden. The sun is hot. Could you give some examples of what it does cover?

Currency XYZ is stable.

This sentence reflects a socially constructed truth (or falsehood) insofar as we have to agree on what the symbol XYZ stands for, what a currency is (is bitcoin a currency, are apples -- depends on the context) and what criteria of stability we have.

We can measure the exchange rate of a currency compared to others and we can define criteria for what we call stability in this context -- and we can make propositions based on that model, but only if we agree on the model. But all of that comes down to our socially constructed definitions. We cannot objectively measure the value of a currency like we measure the wavelength of a photon.

Other examples: "A Tough stance on crime works" (or has a lower crime rate other possible explanations). "Tomorrow there will be a traffic jam on intersection XYZ" (or won't there be a traffic jam because people assume that there will be and avoid that intersection).

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#118

Post by denton-scratch »

whimsicalism wrote: post #63
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…

I agree that this article is rehashing the age-old continental vs. analytical debate, I disagree that because the debate is old, it is thus worthless. I see many defending the "perfectly clear" meaning of continental philosophers, even if they don't obviously build up a clear argument from assumptions like a "10 year old" analytic philosopher might do. Many, in my view, are forgetting just quite how obscurant many of…

Wow! As far as I can see, that "passage" is a single sentence. I haven't managed to parse it, so I could be wrong.

It's possible to discuss difficult subjects using plain, sinple language. Not everyone that writes sentences like that is a charlatan, but my instinct on encountering something like that is to ask: what is being concealed?

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#119

Post by BlueTemplar »

mcv wrote: post #112
jonathanstrange wrote: post #52

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 a…

> " 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?

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 ?)

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