Donald Trump is the end result of philosophical thinking

Just as I thought I would be done with metaphilosophy, the election of Donald Trump made me realize how much intellectual hygiene and epistemic responsibility actually matter.

Philosophy should be about rational persuasion. But it isn't. In philosophy it is impossible to rationally persuade anybody because no genuinely philosophical proposition can be rationally justified. Therefore, whenever someone becomes convinced of a philosophical position, irrational thought processes must have played a key role.

Philosophy is the art of intellectually dishonest persuasion. It is to academia what post-truth is to politics. Donald Trump is what happens when voters and pundits start thinking about politics philosophically. The bubble of analytic philosophy is just as detached from reality and just as full of bad reasoning as the bubble of Breitbart-reading Trump voters.

Teaching scientific illiteracy (in the form of non-naturalistic or pseudo-naturalistic philosophy) and arbitrary and intellectually dishonest thinking (arguments based on untrustworthy intuitions, etc) to our brightest young minds is a great disservice to democracy. As the election of Trump shows, bad reasoning has real consequences.

The end

What every philosopher, including metaphilosophers and me, should do is follow this advice:

"what Philosophical Investigations says is that when you’re doing philosophy, you’re not going to find out anything. You find out some trivial things, you’ll be under the delusion that you’re doing a great deal, but what you should do is stop and do something more productive. 

But you didn’t stop.

Neither did Wittgenstein. He kept scribbling away! What stopped him from doing that was terminal cancer. Only cancer had that desired effect.
...
nobody really pays attention to his main conclusion: you can’t really do anything when you do this stuff, you should stop it. He basically said you should try to be a therapist for young people who are starting out in philosophy, to get them away from the field and turn them into something more useful. No more of of this fruitless, self-deluding endeavor. 

... 

Do you think people are going to follow your advice and stop philosophizing?

No, of course not. No more than I think that people are all of a sudden going to stop it from being the case that many thousands of children needlessly die in Africa everyday."

 Just stop.

An improved version of The Principle of Naturalistic Closure

Here is James Ladyman and Don Ross' Principle of Naturalistic Closure presented in their book Every Thing Must Go (2007):

"Any new metaphysical claim that is to be taken seriously at time t should be motivated by, and only by, the service it would perform, if true, in showing how two or more specific scientific hypotheses, at least one of which is drawn from fundamental physics, jointly explain more than the sum of what is explained by the two hypotheses taken separately, where this is interpreted by reference to the following terminological stipulations: 

Stipulation: A ‘scientific hypothesis’ is understood as an hypothesis that is taken seriously by institutionally bona fide science at t. 

Stipulation: A ‘specific scientific hypothesis’ is one that has been directly investigated and confirmed by institutionally bona fide scientific activity prior to t or is one that might be investigated at or after t, in the absence of constraints resulting from engineering, physiological, or economic restrictions or their combination, as the primary object of attempted verification, falsification, or quantitative refinement, where this activity is part of an objective research project fundable by a bona fide scientific research funding body." (I omitted one stipulation)

The principle is supposed to rule out non-naturalistic metaphysics so I applaud the intention. However, it still leaves too much room for unscientific speculation, as long as the speculation takes science as its starting point. The parts of Every Thing Must Go where they present their positive metaphysical claims still resemble typical analytic philosophy. The style of reasoning and presentation is not very scientific. There isn't any detailed empirical evidence or complex mathematics. If Ladyman and Ross really are following their own principle in their book, then the principle is not constraining enough. Therefore, I now present to you an improved version of the principle:

Any new metaphysical claim that is to be taken seriously at time t should be a specific scientific hypothesis that might be directly investigated and confirmed by institutionally bona fide scientific activity at or after t as the primary object of attempted verification, falsification, or quantitative refinement, where this activity is part of an objective research project fundable by a bona fide scientific research funding body.

Notice the difference? Now the metaphysical theorizing must itself take place in a science journal instead of a philosophy journal. This should automatically rule out excessive speculation and philosophizing.


Does this leave any room for unification? Yes, because unification is already part of ordinary scientific inquiry (for example when scientists use both ecology and population genetics simultaneously to explain some facts), and the unifying hypotheses, or at least the properly scientific ones, will themselves make it through the institutional filters of science.

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?

Who needs therapy when we have science? (Or, why 100% of philosophy is a waste of space)

To me it has always seemed that Wittgensteinian metaphilosophy relies on empirical claims about language and psychology, and should thus be based on actual empirical, scientific results and theories. It should be thoroughly naturalized, and what would be left should not be called any kind of philosophy any more than sociology of physics should be called physics. It would be just linguistics and cognitive science.

According to Paul Horwich's interpretation of Wittgenstein's later metaphilosophy, Wittgenstein thought that philosophical puzzles are mere pseudo-problems that should be dissolved by loosening the grip of certain over-generalized linguistic analogies and metaphors that generate those problems, rather than solved by developing theories in response to them. Thus even attempting to develop first-order philosophical theories is irrational. Useful philosophy would then consist of "therapy" that would cure the confused philosophers of their philosophical pathology.

An excerpt from Horwich's book (which, by the way, is exceptionally clear for a work on Wittgenstein):

"Traditional philosophical questions about the nature of numbers, time, knowledge, truth, justice, beauty, free will, and so on, derive from their fascination, according to Wittgenstein, from conceptual tensions (paradoxes) that stem in turn from a perverse exaggeration of linguistic analogies. So in his view the aim of reasonable philosophical methodology should be to dissolve such puzzles - to expose the irrational over-generalizations from which they emerge. 

In contrast, attempts at theory construction are not the proper response. ... theoretical responses to our puzzlement are irrational. What we should be doing, rather, is trying to expose and remove the various language-based confusions that engendered it" (Wittgenstein's Metaphilosophy, 2013)

Timothy Williamson correctly points out in his review that if this is really the right account of philosophy, then most philosophers are just wasting resources on a worthless endeavor:

"On the picture that emerges, 90% of philosophy is a waste of space, while the remaining 10% consists of praiseworthy demolitions of the 90%. Horwich does not explain why taxpayers should be expected to fund a branch of the academy with that structure. Would it not be cheaper and more effective simply to abolish philosophy altogether?"

My question is: why should we call the remaining 10% philosophy? After all, it wouldn't consist of philosophical theses, it would just take philosophy as its subject matter and target of investigation, and then make observations about how people use words:

"In so far as theses are propounded in philosophy, they should be barely more than observations about the use of words - reminders offered to help loosen the grip of over-stretched analogies." (Horwich)

It seems like these would be empirical claims and thus amenable to scientific investigation. Should we blame Wittgenstein for not doing empirical science himself or not relying on scientific findings about language and psychology in his books? No, because it wouldn't even have been possible for him. The relevant areas of linguistics and psychology were simply underdeveloped back then.

Now things are different. We can finally replace Wittgenstein's protoscientific armchair speculations with actual science, as Eugen Fischer argues we should do:

"Wittgenstein did not yet have at his disposal the resources to establish the truth of claims about the pertinent unconscious cognition, such as the - empirical - claim that a particular thinker actually is in the grip of a philosophical picture. These resources have been made available by rather more recent work in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, whose results allow us, first, to identify relevant analogies and, second, to explain how they are 'at work in the unconscious'. ... This will allow us to show that, and how, an experimentally documented cognitive process interlocks with an empirically documented linguistic process and results in systematic mistakes in non-intentional reasoning." (How to Practise Philosophy as Therapy, 2011)

"[Philosophical] problems of the kind at issue are systematically generated by inferential urges that involve phenomena identified and examined by different branches of cognitive science: attention and belief bias effects, prototype effects, metaphorical and inadvertent analogical reasoning." (Wittgenstein's 'Non-Cognitivism' - Explained and Vindivated, 2008; references omitted)

Wittgensteinians have no excuse anymore to keep writing in philosophy journals. They should start presenting their ideas as scientific hypotheses supported by scientific evidence.


So it turns out that Horwich's picture, as presented by Williamson, was too optimistic. Actually 100% of philosophy is a waste of space.

Why metaphilosophy should always come before philosophy

Most philosophers just dive straight into first-order philosophical theory-construction and argumentation without paying attention to metaphilosophy. This is probably partly because thesis supervisors etc. advise young philosophers to learn how to do philosophy by just doing it instead of wasting time thinking about doing it. This may be acceptable if one's goal is to get published in a philosophy journal or find a job in a philosophy department. But if we care about getting something right or doing something actually worthwhile, however, then this approach carries at least two big risks.

First, there might be something wrong with the philosophical questions or disputes themselves. Perhaps they are mere pseudo-questions arising from linguistic confusion, in which case the aim of constructing theories to answer them would be irrational. Or perhaps a dispute, i.e. the Special Composition Question, is merely verbal and can be resolved by semantic decision. Or perhaps a question can be answered too easily to be worthy of prolonged debate. Or perhaps - and I think most likely - a dispute arises from assumptions so misguided or scientifically unwarranted (as is often the case in analytic metaphysics) that it would be better to just forget about it completely.

Second, there might be something wrong with the methods that philosophers typically use to achieve their aims. In this case it would be foolish to just blindly emulate mainstream philosophy and pick up its methods (philosophers are supposed to be good at critical thinking, right?). A priori stipulation, conceptual analysis and intuition mongering are not likely to reveal anything about the objective character of the world (every aspiring metaphysician should read this book), so perhaps philosophers should just do science instead of philosophy if they want to achieve something epistemically or practically valuable.

One of the best things about naturalistic metaphilosophy is that one doesn't have to do philosophy at all (or at least not after the necessary metaphilosophical reflection if it counts as philosophy). Imagine how much resources (more time and brain power than money since sitting and scribbling in an armchair is relatively cheap) we could save by accepting naturalism! Imagine how much more we could achieve if the most talented philosophers switched to science and started generating actual knowledge and understanding:

"at the very least, some of the most intelligent and philosophically talented young people must become serious scientists, contributing a great deal to the science in which they are involved and, what's more, contributing at least about as much to science as they contribute to philosophy. ...  short of that, there is no realistic chance, at all, for there being offered, during the next century or so, any new concretely substantial philosophical ideas that amount to anything much more than idle speculation" (Peter Unger: Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy, 2014)

Never questioning the value of philosophy is unphilosophical

Philosophers are supposed to be asking fundamental questions and examining background assumptions that are usually taken for granted. Why do most philosophers then avoid asking inconvenient questions about philosophy itself? Stefan Schubert finds the general lack of metaphilosophical reflection unfortunate:

"What is the role of philosophy - a discipline that inherently has a rationalistic bent - in an academia dominated by empirical ideals? ... After the demise of logical positivism and linguistic philosophy, analytic philosophy has unfortunately mostly avoided metaphilosophical questions of this kind. ... [M]ost analytic philosophers still seem happy to carry on discussing small bite-sized problems without worrying about methodological questions. This in my view is most unphilosophical." (Schubert: Ernest Gellner's Words and Things: A Case Study of Empirical Philosophy, 2015)

Philosophers have never been afraid to attack sacred cows and common sense or take extreme positions on issues. For example, they have denied the existence of qualia, beliefs, desires, tables, baseballs, free will, objective moral facts, knowledge of the external world, and so on. Peter Unger even denied the existence of himself! But when it comes to metaphilosophy, questioning the value of philosophy as a whole is suddenly out of bounds. At best, philosophy is just assumed to have some value.

Philosophers have of course criticized other subfields or movements of philosophy, such as metaphysics or phenomenology. But I'm talking about across-the-board anti-philosophy. Not even naturalists oppose philosophy as such, just the parts that are too far removed from science. Similarly, Wittgensteinians who think that traditional philosophical questions are just pseudo-questions still leave room for their own brand of philosophy.

This is puzzling and cries out for an explanation. After all, radical, all-encompassing anti-philosophy is just another metaphilosophical option on the table, and it follows quite naturally (pun intended) from already popular positions such as naturalism. It is not obviously incoherent either (this and this). But I will leave explaining this glaring metaphilosophical blind spot for another day.