Contempt for Philosophy
Having some familiarity with his thoughts, including on this subject, as expressed on other platforms I will not name, and because I at least respect the author for his strong hereditarianism, I was curious to read the following piece by Joseph Bronski’s attacking philosophy as such. I only came away from it with a dislike of the fact that it could discourage at least one or two well-constituted White men from engaging with a kind of mental activities they are, as a type, most suited for.
There is in this piece something like no argument. It seems partly on purpose; it’s somewhat comedic. The reader must piece the argument together in his mind, on his own, and this, ironically, is rather similar to what one has to do when reading obscure philosophy. Hence this response’s main interest lies in its discussion of the author’s revealed assumptions. I’ll still try to extract two arguments against philosophy.
I. First argument; philosophy is only non-quantitative because philosophers are mathematically impaired
The least interesting argument one could reconstitute is the last one of the article, which states, in essence, that ‘philosophy is for people who can’t think quantitatively, for the reason that its students aren’t as good at math as people who study in fields that require maths, and thus its non-quantitative nature can’t be anything but a simple flaw’. We see that the thesis of the article is that philosophy is bad at investigating truths; and so this argument presumes that people pick the major that will lead them to understand investigate the truth better. I suspect they don't; they pick STEMs because they’re good at maths, or because they expect better careers. I’ll take note of the fact, however, that insofar as STEMs pay better, it is indeed because they ultimately allow for reliable predictions about the natural world that are economically useful, which does imply they’re not so bad at investigating truths in this realm.
Now, it is possible that people who do philosophy do so because, endowed with an IQ of 129, essentially equivalent to the 130 of those enrolled in a mathematics major, they are specifically bad at maths; they pick this major as the closest thing they can reach to what mathematically-loaded fields provide1. I personally doubt this; I think they do something very different, they pick philosophy because they like doing it. But additionally, this argument can just as well be reversed; it could just as well be that people who enrol in mathematics majors are doing so because, sadly, at a similar IQ, they can’t quite deal with the higher verbal requirements of philosophy, despite aiming for what it would provides most ultimately, important truths. Our detractor would smirk: ‘Higher requirements as far as sophistry is concerned, fiction masquerading as truth’. Well, maybe; but then this argument, I think, rests on the petitio principii that philosophy is merely sophistry. One has to first buy into the idea that there is no way but that of mathematically-driven empirical sciences, which is why we’ll discuss it in the next section. And as I just alluded to, I suspect this in turn rests upon the deeper assumption, not entirely irrational, but treated as insufficiently strong in its implications, that what serves individual or collective interests is also the sole path towards the most important truths. ‘Only science works’.
II. Second argument; philosophy is interested in the same objects as science, and thus should use its method
II. a) Introducing Heidegger’s zymology
The piece features an extract from Deleuze which I will not address, as it does seem unreadable, at least to me; I readily acknowledge that learning the vocabulary of some philosopher and deciphering the writings of some of them can be difficult. The other extract selected to discredit philosophy as a whole is taken from Heidegger, always a favourite of people trying to paint, usually metaphysics, here in a fit of madness all of philosophy, as nothing but obscure jargon; one is reminded of Carnap’s famous attacks on the same author. The reader isn’t surprised that the opponent of philosophy doesn’t even attempt to paint Kripke or Quine as mere producers of ‘verbal spew’. The mere way the quote is cut, funnily enough, reveals a basic lack of understanding as to its subject matter. It is the following:
When, for instance, a fruit is unripe, it "goes towards" its ripeness. In this process of ripening, that which the fruit is not yet, is by no means pieced on as something not yet present-at-hand. The fruit brings itself to ripeness, and such a bringing of itself is a characteristic of its Being as a fruit. Nothing imaginable which one might contribute to it, would eliminate the unripeness of the fruit, if this entity did not come to ripeness of its own accord. [btw, if you spray fruit with ethene, it will ripen!]
The quote is then followed by the following philistine remark:
Okay, is this worth reading, or should I pay attention to the adults in the room who actually study fruits and know ethene causes ripening, can be measured, and from that the time to ripening can be predicted?
And so, an example is cited without the context of what it illustrates. Carnap at least attacked Heidegger on the very meaningfulness of the vocabulary underlying his main theses, but then again as discussed in the third part of this article, he was not an anti-philosopher and thus knew how argue in this domain. So now, what do we do with this? Heidegger having naive beliefs about biology is entirely irrelevant to the value of his works, or lack thereof. In a way, that’s the joke the author is making, and it’s a funny one; but a joke he can’t make without undermining his own view. And this is undoubtedly the other argument the piece mainly features, a deeply confused one that amounts to merely stating that ‘philosophy isn’t good empirical science, because good empirical science can only be done using the scientific method’. I’ll first attack this assumption, which as absurd as it sounds, is actually on display here; I’ll then try to rephrase this thesis in a better way, from the paragraph ‘Now let us…’ onward (subsection II. c).
II. b) What philosophy doesn’t pretend to be
First of all, it is obviously true that this confusion would be sufficiently addressed by something like pointing the author towards an introductory manual to philosophy, or maybe a good dictionary. With regards to Heidegger and to close that chapter, It's also an almost comical instance of uncharitable reading to pretend that one should rather ‘pay attention to the adults in the room who actually study fruits and know ethene causes ripening’, as if Heidegger had ever pretended to make a study of botanic; and he also didn't, as the author earlier states, ‘have something to say about physics [and] thought he knew something about Being and Time’. Sarcasm aside, to the contrary, Being and Time, the book, is concerned with being ‘as such’, a metaphysical concept, and with time as a determinant of human experience; it is, as anyone able to do as much as read a Wikipedia page ought to know, simply not a work of physics, even ‘verbal’ —an idea that would have seemed as absurd to Heidegger as to anyone else.
But this misunderstanding is interesting because it illustrates another common assumption of people who dislike philosophy; that it cannot be talking about what it is talking about. They shake their head in disbelief. ‘Surely, one cannot make chains of inferences that are valid using those concepts I cannot define, reasonably use direct introspection as data, pretend to determine that such strange presuppositions ground this or that most well-accepted beliefs’. Well, the incredulous stares of default human using his default mode of thinking disclose nothing but his finitude; and although applied rigorously they run often contrary to our intuitions, the mathematized methods of empirical sciences are at their core the brute extensions of a single, more natural and intuitive method of thinking, that of instrumentally accepting or discarding sets of propositions depending on them predicting or failing to predict sensible experiences. I should write more on this subject to make this remark acceptable to a sceptic reader however, and may in the future. It is in any case fairly easy to reconstruct what happened here; as its very content seemed strange, scanning a page of Being and Time, the author looked for what seems most similar to what he knows, a description of the natural world, written with scientific goals.
This extract, by the way, was simply saying that what comes into being in the physical world does so as determined by the intrinsic characteristics of the changing thing. You could make the example itself valid by simply saying that it is an intrinsic property of fruits to be disposed to ripening when also sprayed with ethene, and it would change nothing. What Heidegger is saying, in his own jargon, is nothing ‘continental’ and obscure, but something that as many analytical philosophers, scientifically minded and opposed to metaphysics, could accept. It may seem useless to the reader that Heidegger expressed this —in any case inherently philosophical— thesis in his strange language. But assuming this strange language is actually necessary for Heidegger’s philosophy to express other ideas, a case that would have to be made somewhere else, it is then also reasonable of him to be consistent, and retranslate more common philosophical theses in this vocabulary as he discusses them. For a study of this matter —I won’t verify if Heidegger dwells on it, the author not having specified the section of the book he quotes from— the reader is invited to simply take a look at the the SEP article on disposition.
II. c) A more precise form of this argument was possible, but even then, would at least fails to generalize
Now let us isolate a core of rationality in the author’s critique. Insofar as this piece would merely state that a section of philosophy still attempts to study the natural world without use of the scientific method, and therefore produces subpar or even totally useless research, it wouldn't be absurd and its polemical tone would be justified. Here we wouldn’t find the man of so-called common sense shaking his head in disbelief, but the actual scientist, and at people using even more intuitive and natural, but inferior, forms of argumentation. This character would say, ‘Surely, one cannot use inductive reasoning over long chains of inferences, in natural language, without even quantifying the inductive generalization’s probability, regarding objects that can also be studied scientifically, and say something worthwhile!’ This is the implied argument in the parts of the article that describe Aristotle’s physics as outdated —rightly so, obviously— and in the metaphor of philosophy being ‘low-resolution’ compared to science. I am much more sympathetic to this sentiment, which only concerns some fields and schools of philosophy; but it ignores one dimension, that of speculation. By moving fast from consequences to consequences, the essayist, the social pseudo-scientist, the writer in ‘political philosophy’ are all able to produce long, deep and complete descriptions of their objects of study. But they do so at the cost of a very low likelihood of being right. Not understanding this is how ideology masquerades as philosophy, which justifies reminding unintelligent people of what it is they’re reading when they open a volume of Baudrillard’s musings on 1980s consumer culture.
Sadly, one problem is that the author seems to think that this particular form of reasoning is the essence of philosophy. And so he condemns all philosophical investigation of objects that science can investigate, which I agree include those that today belong to the social science, although those are ideological for other reasons. But even discarding this ‘method’, or rather lack thereof, this natural and intuitive form of reasoning, we haven’t discarded the other forms of argumentation philosophers engage in, that I listed in the paragraph ‘But this misunderstanding…’ (subsection II. b), and that the author visibly cannot even grasp enough to describe and criticize.
And so for example, philosophy of physics is necessary to interpret what exactly a theory in physics says; most fundamentally I would say, it must try to determine if we ought take it as describing real entities. And this still amounts to talking about the same things as physics does. On the other hand, social sciences of any kind continuously require the summarizing of a human group's belief systems, understanding its own vocabulary, to the extent one tries to study anything that passes through the filters of either the discourse of the subjects of study, or their understanding of the researcher’s. One has to at the bare minimum interpret items on a survey as meaning this or that, and not merely catalogue what other observables the answers predict. As far as any study of complex behaviour is concerned, even at a spontaneous, naive degree, one needs some understanding of the logic of the studied group’s belief systems, if not to predict the causes of their behaviour, to at least determine the meaning ascribed by its agents to it; it always requires social science to do something like philosophy, engage in moments of purely conceptual, non-quantitative reasoning. I could go on. The author of the piece cannot but engage in such conceptualization when studying the origin of ‘leftist’ beliefs for example, both to distinguish those beliefs, and to hierarchize them in terms of logical anteriority. The strange assumption at play here is that when nearly every scientific endeavour rests upon mathematical knowledge of some kind, it’s legitimate to say mathematics are foundational… but that even if, in my view, all scientific endeavours requires moments of pure conceptualisation, it doesn’t imply at all that philosophy is similarly foundational.
And so contrarily to what the writer implies in the beginning of his piece, there is no ‘inner circle’ of scientists ‘in the know’ who reject philosophy, quite the opposite. I’ve noticed this attitude is in STEMs an undergrad assumption, with postgrad students more often gaining than losing an interest in it, as they look ‘downstream’, as it were, to the interpretation of their findings, and ‘upstream’ to the foundations of their science. I’ll insist on the fact that this is merely an observation of mine, having some experience in academia.
III. The author’s scientifically-minded critique of philosophy itself makes it impossible to reject all of it
I could at this point try to make a positive case for philosophy, and maybe I will in a future article; but it would amount to repeating old arguments, and one cannot convince people who by nature don’t care, or don’t care yet, about the questions philosophy tries to answer. I’ve instead, already in the last paragraph, started to make an old argument which I noticed is much hated by enemies of philosophy, but which is especially adequate here, which is that ‘one cannot abstain from it’. There are people who traditionally makes this same sort of case the author is making, except against sections of philosophy only; these people are philosophers themselves, this case cannot be made without defending some philosophical assumptions. The author pretends to be opposed to the whole discipline as such, but posturing aside, I think he's not, and that he knows he is not, but is rather uninterested and interested in seeming more radical than he is; historically, some have indeed opposed all of philosophy, but those people are always sceptics or religious irrationalists. I suspect the author merely thinks that philosophers shouldn't speak on the natural world, and that in addition, he denies two domains of enquiry specific to philosophy. That’s because, indeed, there are also realms of enquiries that are specific to it.
A side note before that. I’ll inform the reader that I do not define philosophy as purely conceptual non-quantitative reasoning; and perhaps he will be surprised to read that I’d define philosophy as the mere name of a set of disciplines, or even schools of thought across and within those disciplines, that I’d deny share an essential common method or property. I know which I think produce knowledge and which are, one could then say, pseudo-philosophies, but this stands beyond the scope of this article. This is easily explained by the fact that, for better and indeed for worse, philosophy has become since the enlightenment nothing but the set of rational enquiries that haven’t yet been subjected to the scientific method; but I’d argue some cannot and are still rational. If you need a definition, this may be an acceptable one, albeit negative.
I would propose the following quick listing of what I consider to be philosophy’s ‘proper’ disciplines; those that either study objects only philosophy can study, or that science is compelled to accept to ground itself. Which you now know I would personally translate as: subjects that can be studied in ways that aren’t empirical-quantitative; or subjects that need to be at least in part studied in that way to then allow for the use of modern scientific method. This map is a simple rough sketch, and only meant to make the conclusion’s point understandable.
First, metaphysics, including ontology and the study of things that aren't physical; purportedly God, the mind, the world as a totality, etc.
Then axiology, including ethics, aesthetics, the study of values in general; in my view, this domain is better left to empirical sciences unless one thinks there are objective values of some kind; and in my view again, these require metaphysical entities.
Lastly logic, philosophical semantic, and epistemology, the latter including the study of the scientific method of enquiry of the physical world, which science, on pains of circularity, cannot do; investigation in these last three fields arguably doesn’t require the presupposition that they study metaphysical objects.
Conclusion
This should clarify further my point for the reader, and this is where I’ll conclude. What the author thinks is clearly not that logic and epistemology are to be abandoned; he's just something like an early analytic philosopher, a logical positivist or someone of the Upsalla school, who specifically denies metaphysics and axiology. He surely knows he can’t ‘do without’ the last three domains I list, logic, philosophical semantic and epistemology. He may like the image of himself brazenly stating that he could, but he cannot, and could never argue it positively. The difference between this sort of article and the anti-metaphysicist philosophical schools I mentioned is the core of my point here; there is room for a rational attitude that condemns almost all of philosophy, but like it or not, it stands within philosophy itself. The philosophers of these schools admitted this, and therefore could actually produce argument against metaphysics or objective axiologies; arguments that cannot, by the nature of the subject matter, be quantitative or empirical. Even Carnap couldn’t merely scoff at metaphysics, which frequently presents logically valid arguments starting from common-sense premisses that all things equal should compel most readers to believe one thing or the other; he instead had to prove it meaningless from the starting point of a new semantic, from positive philosophical work. The reader is thus advised, if he shares the original author’s contempt for philosophy, to read these philosophers instead.
I also note the following comment under the original article:
Why're you using quantitative test scores as a measure for articulating or understanding truths, when the measure for that should obviously be g/IQ in general? That is like controlling for political ideology to measure political ideology and so on. In the GRE test (correlated with g like SAT) from which you took the scores above the philosopher majors aced the whole cohort and outdid both Math and Psyhics majors. https://pumpkinperson.com/2016/11/28/converting-the-new-gre-to-iq/
By merely quoting this, I’m engaging in a kind of pissing contest; so I won’t deny that this is what I’m doing. But I’ll prove I’m not that biased by adding that I think many students of philosophy, especially in continental Europe, are indeed lazy, low-achievement ideologues uninterested in the truth. That should be enough self-critique.