The naturalist as a night watchman

If radical metaphilosophical naturalism (scientism, basically) is true or, if we do not want to use the word "true", the most reasonable policy or stance to take, then doesn't that mean that philosophers should just quit their jobs since there would be nothing left for them to do? Not necessarily. It could be that naturalistic philosophy, consisting mostly of criticism instead of positive contributions to philosophy, is needed to keep people on guard against non-naturalistic philosophy (that is, almost all research that is being done in philosophy departments).

Here is a quote from Ernest Gellner. He talks about linguistic philosophy, but it could be applied just as well in the context of naturalism:

"The theory of philosophy runs: past philosophy has been mainly abuse of language, future good philosophy will be the diagnosis and elimination of such abuse. (It is admitted that some past philosophers did good work without understanding what they were doing.) This lends itself to various conceptions of the good work left for philosophers to do in the future: Euthanasia of philosophy. Or autopsy. Or endlessly protracted prophylaxis. Or others still, including l'art pour l'art.

These possibilities must be explained more fully:

Linguistic Philosophy can conceive of its own activities as the euthanasia of philosophy. There is, in its view, no room on the map of knowledge for the kind of special insights that past philosophy claimed, or indeed for the kind of special, strange questions with which it was preoccupied. But those alleged questions and putative insights are not to be simply outlawed, but gently, so to speak comprehendingly, eliminated. Only such understanding, "therapeutic" elimination is truly effective, and as a by-product of it we get some understanding of how we use language. Simple proscription was ineffective.

The question arises whether there is not a danger that, the euthanasia being completed, the linguistic philosopher may find himself out of a job. This disagreeable possibility is countered in a number of ways:

Linguistic Philosophy is conceived not merely as a therapy or euthanasia, but also as prophylaxis, and as a prophylaxis against a necessarily ever-present danger. The disease it wards off is inherent in language: all language users will ever be tempted to misinterpret the various uses of their language in terms of each other. . . . This is the Night Watchman theory of philosophy: it has no positive contribution of its own to make, but must ever be on guard against possible abuses that would interfere with, confuse, genuine knowledge." (Words and Things, 1959)