What Is the Public Value of Philosophy?
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I'd want to live in a society where people can work in all kinds of fields that study nature and the human intellect, and not just jobs that are needed because of some economical reason.
Is this because studying those creates a rich country, or because people of rich countries have a tendency to study these things?
Since most of us on Hacker News work in some form of technology, I'd say its in our economic interest not to apply terms of moral condemnation like "decadent" to forms of society that generate more demand for our skills ;-).
In general---I think there are some good ones. And I think a lot of the contribute positively through their teaching, just not their research and publications. But note that the primary focus and goal of professors at top-tier universities is research.
Also, I disagree with your dichotomy between "economic output" and "society's total productivity," but that's a separate issue.
Also, I'm not going to be dishonest for the sake of narrow economic interest, which is what you are asking me to do.
Actually, I was being ironic. I don't believe that "decadent" is really a genuine moral condemnation at all, instead merely meaning, "A society that doesn't suit my survivalist tastes because it is too civilized." Or at least, that's what I observe about common applications of the word "decadent".
Most of the comments on this thread so far feel like defenses of science, rather than philosophy (e.g. "Philosophy is valuable when it is directed to the inquiry of truth for the sake of discovering truth").
by Robert Hass
This isn't just true in philosophy. In the early 20th century physicists announced they had solved almost all of the problems in physics. One thing they hadn't got around to yet was figuring out the position of electrons at a given time. But it was popular to regard this is a trivial problem. How they bonded was a more practical issue, and they had solved that one. But those who pushed on with this seemingly trivial problem discovered that it wasn't trivial at all.
Turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns is not necessarily practical, but it is certainly valuable.
I think that if philosophy education works (a big if), then it will be very valuable in that it teaches people to recognize legitimate questions and encouraging them to think rationally about them.
Very often on HN, a story will drive a lot of comments pushing a moral point. But the supposedly moral point is usually just a popularity contest and posturing - "I hate the person doing this SOO MUCH!!!" or "I'm so empathetic for supporting this position". And any attempt to get past that to actual moral philosophy nearly always results in nothing more than ad-hominems being thrown and completely emotional (and inconsistent) arguments being made.
Other issues which often have a fundamentally philosophical element that are relevant here include many issues of measurement (e.g., job interviews and hiring).
So, take, for example, theories of truth. Last I've heard, "correspondence theories" (a sentence is "true" when it corresponds to certain states of the external world, called "facts") are actually considered very problematic, precisely because they leave little way of characterizing "truth" in such "a priori" fields of knowledge as mathematics and philosophy. Instead, what's currently popular are minimal or deflationary theories of truth (a sentence "X is true" means just X). Problem is, this theory appears to say nothing at all about truth; as Wittgenstein lambasted, it only says something about words.
So yes, if I say that "X is true" and "X" are equivalent sentences, I've said something about sentences, but I haven't said a damned thing about the contents of the statement X itself!
Mathematical statements, at least analytically speaking, are mostly actually hypotheticals conditioned on an enumerable set of axioms and a formal logic; with those, we can use a coherence theory of truth, in which a statement is true iff it does not contain an internal contradiction. But then you've thrown out most forms of mathematical Platonism, which is, and I do loathe this, the most popular philosophical interpretation of mathematics.
(I loathe it because mathematical Platonism is so often used as a starting example to support a fully general philosophical Platonism, in which statements about theories of truth or morality or knowledge are made in reference to Philosophical Abstract Objects. These have no extension inside space-time and also are not any kind of mental or computational manipulations or constructions (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/), and are taken as necessarily constituting the only correct answers to philosophical questions, thus neatly yielding a kind of unique epistemological authority for the philosophical process of arguing and analyzing sentences, which is utterly absurd from a naturalistic perspective.)
Statistical decision theory also supercedes many philosophical problems.
A number of lesswrong articles, typically addressing the nature of categories and how to reason based on them, also move into this territory and browsing lesswrong is probably worthwhile if you are interested.
To summarize, for those who don't want to archive-dive LW:
Analytic philosophy has traditionally held that concepts/categories are logical: defined by a conjunction or disjunction of predicates in a formal language. Or at least, it holds that they ought to be once we stop being silly and think clearly.
Most everything we've ever learned in machine-learning and cognitive science instead tell us that concepts/categories are statistical, and that formal logic is therefore not only a brittle framework for real-world reasoning but thoroughly incapable of describing where its own constituent objects come from in the mind.
Statistics today can answer the question of causality in many cases, especially the controlled studies, and that use to be the domain of philosophy.
I'm not saying we sholdn't do philosophy because it can be dangerous. Philosophy can also be very good. In fact, we need the good ideas to prove the bad ideas wrong. I am a big fan of philosophy.
But not at the point of a gun (i.e., not on the taxpayer's dime). Philosophers used to be self-funded or funded by patrons. As an aside, since philosophers have become primarily funded by governments and guns, we have a 10,000 fold increase in the number of philosophers, and no increase in the quality of output.
I'm uncomfortable attributing Marx to philosophy entirely...like many historical figures it seems like he's only a partial fit. Just pointing out where your reasons leads.
I don't know that for certain, maybe he's just actually curious, that's why I just answered his question instead of saying this to him.
Many people think of communism when they hear the word "Marx". Few have read his arguments.
Of course, someone who quotes Objectivism in their profile is not in a strong position to talk about philosophy ;)
The open question is if government with checks and balances is stable in the long term, or if it will fall apart and have one branch take over. Time will tell.
Second, Marx made Stalin possible by setting up the necessary intellectual framework of class struggle, capitalism as oppressive, dialectical materialism (denial of reason and free will), etc.
Also, Dan Brown sells like crazy and is easy to read. Zizek, no one can read, and no one actually buys his books AFAIK. But at the level of 'sensationalism' perhaps I could see that.
It's like someone who has only ever seen click bait dismissing journalism as pointless.
Even so Analytic Philosophy was just a reaction against British Hegelians in the later 19th century, starting with Bertrand Russell. Those distinctions get thrown around way too crudely.
This works poorly because the philosopher doesn't understand the field. A computer scientist is better qualified to talk about the ethics of Ladar Levison not cooperating with the FBI[1] than an ethicist. A chemist is more qualified to talk about the scientific method than an epistemologist. Specializations have eroded the area of expertise of philosophy to the point that philosophy is rarely relevant.
There's just no case I can think of where talking to a philosopher is likely to inform my decision-making process more than talking to an expert in the actual subject.
As for working scientists, many have brilliant insights into the practice of science and its epistemology, but very many working scientists will offer you a warmed over version of Karl Popper as their philosophy of science.
I perhaps should have worded my post differently to clarify that my post is a criticism of philosophers (academics specializing in philosophy), not philosophy as it is more broadly practiced.
> Right now, a constant conflict is that (many) non-philosophers of science think philosophy of science has gotten too empirical and too focused on particular scientific issues, to the detriment of philosophy
I know, and that's exactly why I'm disagreeing with these people. As far as I'm concerned, philosophy that hasn't specialized in this way is mostly useless.
When you say you're not criticizing philosophy, just academic philosophers, I wonder who are the people doing philosophy outside of academic philosophy that you're talking about?
I am a professor of philosophy at a public university. What is the value of
philosophy to the taxpayers who subsidize my teaching
Can you be more specific? Searching gives a bunch of documentaries about FDR the president, don't know if that's what you mean.