How to judge a philosophy paper without reading it

If the paper is not itself presenting new empirical results, just check its list of references. From there you can see where the author is getting his or her premises, what the input for the paper's philosophizing comes from. If the paper cites mainly other philosophers, if the input does not come from science, then the paper is probably just epistemically worthless intuition mongering and does not contain any new interesting insights about reality, knowledge, science or anything else.

Cian Dorr criticizes James Ladyman and Don Ross' Principle of Naturalistic Closure in his review of their book Every Thing Must Go:

"What is puzzling about this is that it instructs us to ignore a very large class of arguments without telling us anything at all about where they fail."

There is nothing puzzling about this. James Ladyman and Don Ross write in the book that "the input for philosophizing must come from science". It should be obvious that if a paper does not cite any science or cites very little science, it cannot contain any scientifically interesting questions, claims or arguments. And if something is not scientifically interesting, it is not interesting for a naturalist. And clearly, it is common in analytic philosophy to not cite any science. Richard Healey compared the indexes of two books on metametaphysics:

"Readers (and future historians of philosophy) may find it interesting to compare these essays with those appearing in Chalmers, Manley and Wasserman's Metametaphysics (Oxford, 2009), another collection of essays spawned by conferences in which philosophers met to ponder the nature and future of metaphysics and ontology. A comparison of indexes is revealing. Names of scientists and mathematicians indexed: over 40 in Scientific Metaphysics, 0 in Metametaphysics; references related to quantifiers: 32 in the index to Metametaphysics, 0 in the index to Scientific Metaphysics; index entries related to quantum physics: more than 56 in Scientific Metaphysics, 0 in Metametaphysics; index entries related to mereology: 32 in Metametaphysics, 0 in Scientific Metaphysics."

Philosophy cannot produce anything interesting without scientific input, as Ross points out in this excellent passage in his article A Most Rare Achievement: Dennett's Scientific Discovery in Content and Consciousness:

"though a human brain is an enormous processor as information storage-and-manipulation devices go, without profoundly novel input it will seldom generate profoundly novel output, and it can't much improve the frequency of this through mere effort. Of course philosophers read a steady stream of new work by other philosophers. As Ladyman and Ross (2007), among others, argue, however, such dialectics tend to degenerate into the intellectual equivalent of stagnant ponds. Replacing the real fuel of empirical discoveries by the merely apparent energy of other philosophers' ruminations, debates become largely semantic exercises, at their worst implicit legislation of language by a group of people whose orders have no prospect of being followed."

Gary Gutting argues that armchair philosophy has produced a body of knowledge by the power of pure reason:

"Over its history, philosophy has accumulated an immense store of conceptual distinctions, theoretical formulations, and logical arguments that are essential for this intellectual maintenance of our defining convictions. This constitutes a body of knowledge achieved by philosophers that they can present with confidence to meet the intellectual needs of non-philosophers." 

Maybe there are non-scientific intellectual needs, for example in politics, religious apologetics or astrology, but the results of philosophy certainly do not meet the intellectual needs of scientists or anybody who cares about objective knowledge. Ladyman and Ross point out the scientific worthlessness of philosophers' conceptual distinctions:

"all the observation you like doesn’t get you any science if you can not make abstract distinctions. The problem with most concept-mongering in analytic metaphysics, however, is that it is done without regard to science, yet in the expectation that scientific observations and generalizations will turn out to fit the templates it conjures. They almost never do." (Protecting Rainforest Realism, 2010)

Of course most of the debates in philosophy of science, i.e. the scientific realism debate, have also degenerated into stagnant ponds even though they contain scientific case studies, so merely citing some science is not sufficient to make the philosophizing epistemically valuable. However, with my Hume-inspired heuristic one can at least throw most of analytic philosophy into the trash bin of human thought without having to take a careful look at it.


But hey, wait a minute! Shouldn't this apply to my blog too? Shouldn't one judge my blog, too, without reading it? Well, that depends on what the aims of this blog and the reader are. If one wants to learn objective facts about reality, for example about the practices of academic philosophy or about a folk concept, then no, one should not read a blog that doesn't contain new empirical results or any input from science.


I am not aiming to make any new discoveries in this blog. Most philosophers, on the other hand, do aim at making new discoveries. If that was not their aim, then why would Gutting even try to argue that philosophy has accumulated a body of philosophical knowledge?