On "The Goal of Philosophy Should Be To Kill Itself"

Luke, at the blog "Common Sense Atheism", has written a post that would be utterly unremarkable if it were not for the fact that it (1) is quite popular, and (2) contains some ideas that are themselves quite popular.

In essence, his contention is this: philosophy gives "vague and mysterious" answers to its questions.  If it is dealing with questions of fact, these questions should be handed over to science.  If it is dealing with conceptual questions, these questions should be reformulated so that they can be handed over to scientists and computer programmers.

He thinks that precision is what is at issue here: philosophical questions can be answered if their constituent parts are made precise.  And, if they are made precise, they can be answered by very smart computers:

Do you know, precisely, what you are talking about? If so, show me precisely what you mean by programming it into a computer. If you know precisely what you are talking about, you will be able to explain it to a computer.

Any question that cannot be formulated in this manner is just not a real question.  Philosophy should make its questions precise, hand them over to scientists and programmers, and then exit stage left.

Now, these contentions are of course stupid, indeed, they are so monumentally stupid that it is hard to imagine that someone actually believes them.  One suspects that Luke is playing the provocateur, here, you know, just a bit. For as soon as we engage with this position, we find it quickly self-undermining: hordes of concepts used in various sciences are vague and imprecise, yet scientists find ways to approximate them in order to get results.  Take climate science: "Mean Global Temperature" is not a measurement of the average kinetic energy of all of the molecules in the atmosphere.  Other concepts (think about species, for example) are equally "fuzzy", and necessarily so.  If precision is the standard, then very few scientific endeavours will pass the test.

Yet, as much fun as it would be to continue in the substantive vein, I want to launch a different critique, one which is slightly more fun.  It proceeds as follows.

Let's (hey!) start with some science.  Every year, tens of thousands of applicants take the Graduate Record Exams, which are generalized, high-level tests of analytical writing and verbal/quantitative reasoning.  Every year, with alarming consistency, philosophers achieve the highest combined score, by a statistically significant margin.  This is pretty strong evidence that the people we call "philosophers" are, in general, some of the smartest people on the planet. 

It is not unlikely that this state of affairs is historically stable: as a matter of fact, philosophy has traditionally been the field that the most learned, most accomplished scholars have undertaken to study.  It's not unreasonable to conclude that given, say, the total human population since 1800 or so, the tens of thousands of active, trained philosophers have been among the smartest people on the planet, generally speaking of course.  This does not necessarily mean that they are right about everything, but it does mean that we are talking about some pretty sharp pencils.  (I don't count myself in this group, my GRE score was pathetically low: around the average for, ugh, chemical engineers)

Now, let's take a look at Luke.  He is, according to the internet, educated in computer and cognitive science, and his blog only occasionally references philosophical works.  So, we can reliably conclude that the following has happened: one guy, with no special philosophical training, has claimed that tens of thousands of the smartest people who have ever lived have been wasting their time, because it's just occurred to him that all their talk of, quote "ontology and meaning and truth and free will" is not precise enough to be of any use to anyone.

I doubt that many of us have the imagination to fully appreciate the magnitude of this event.  One guy, who does not even know enough about philosophy to know that a more sophisticated version of his own position rose and fell 75 years ago, has suddenly realized, on the internet, that Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Immanuel Kant, JS Mill, John Searle, Gottlob Frege, Philippa Foot, GWF Hegel, Rene Descartes, G.E. Moore, Edmund Husserl, WVO Quine, Elizabeth Anscombe, Derek Parfit, Donald Davidson, Bernard Williams, and, oh, one or two or ten thousand other geniuses have all largely wasted their lives because of this idea he just had about precision.  Astounding, eh?  If he's right, that means that his idea about precision has occurred to none of these thinkers, and that none of them has ever subsequently given good reasons to reject it.

I mean, we can forgive them, I suppose, because very few of them knew how awesome computers could be.  How lucky for us that we live within sight of that glorious age, when all the difficult problems those geniuses wasted their time on can be safely moved to the recycle bin.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about that.  I'd love to write more, but I have a new post to work on, one that's going to blow the roof off the science world.  You see, it just occurred to me the other day, as I was playing "Angry Birds", that global warning can easily be explained by the Earth's crust getting thinner.  Obviously the Earth's crust is getting thinner, 'casue magma is hot and it will slowly melt the rock just above it.  So you'd expect to see a slow, global temperature rise, right? 

I can't believe I've never seen anything about this!  I mean, I check my facebook and twitter every day, and there's been nothing about my hypothesis.  Clearly, this "crustal thinning" post of mine will radically remake a centuries-old research programme full of people who are way smarter and better-informed than me about their field.

My god, these are exciting times to be a blogger!