In 2016, the journalist Olivia Goldhill published a short interview with the provocative clickbait title One of the most famous living philosophers says much of philosophy today is “self-indulgent”.
Famous, indeed, for the philosopher in question was the late Daniel C. Dennett. If you don’t know him, Goldhill offers a brief intro:
Daniel Dennett’s philosophical achievements cannot be neatly summarized. To some, he’s familiar as one of the four horsemen of new atheism, alongside Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. He’s known for his focus on Darwinism, and applying the evolutionary theory to ideas and cultural development. And he’s one of the greatest living philosophers of the mind, arguing that consciousness requires no magic other than the physical mechanics of the brain, that similarly complex robots would be equally conscious, and that the “self,” or ego, does not exist.
This is far from an exhaustive list given Dennett’s many contributions to philosophy, but what one should mention is that he was one of the last great philosophers, who not only contributed to a niche area of academic philosophy, but tried to change philosophy as a whole. It is in this context that one needs to understand his comments about the self-indulgence that left him “unimpressed with many of his contemporaries in philosophy”, as Goldhill paraphrased him.
“A great deal of philosophy doesn’t really deserve much of a place of the world,” he says. “Philosophy in some quarters has become self-indulgent, clever play in a vacuum that’s not dealing of problems of any intrinsic interest.”
As it happens, I agree with Dennett, but without being familiar with current academic debates in philosophy, it may be hard to understand where he is coming from. Does Dennett have an example? Yes! First, and foremost, analytic metaphysics.
Much if not all philosophical work in analytic metaphysics, for example, is “willfully cut off from any serious issues,” says Dennett.
I have criticized this literature myself previously on this blog in a post that has remained my most popular one here:
The problem isn’t that analytic metaphysicians aren’t smart, perhaps they are too smart for their own good even, for the belief that they can understand the fundamental nature of reality through pure reason alone. Almost all of analytic metaphysics remains insulated from and poorly informed about the sciences, trying to understand reality through introspection into their own intuitions about things.
While one might imagine that the philosophy of science is the least affected by this problem, work outside the philosophy of physics has also suffered greatly from self-indulgence.
To use an example without having to punch down on anyone, let me use Brian Epstein’s book The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. Published a year before Dennett’s comments about philosophy’s self-indulgence, the book was awarded both the Lakatos Award (the highest honour for a book in the philosophy of science) and the Joseph B. Gittler Award (the highest honour for a book in the philosophy of the social sciences). Epstein could hardly hope for more.
And yet, these awards are somewhat surprising… since it contains disappointingly little contact with the social sciences at all.
Worse, despite Epstein’s promise that analytic metaphysics can cure the social sciences of their problems, Don Ross offered a detailed review lamenting that Epstein “does not provide an instance where a model, explanation, or hypothesis from social science is improved by specifying grounds and anchors for types.” How could no reviewer or the dozens of Epstein’s interlocutors have flagged this before publication? Might it be more important to engage with an objection from within analytical metaphysics than to actually show how analytic metaphysics can help? What should a social scientist should take away from reading this book? Perhaps that the application of ideas from analytic metaphysics in the social sciences wouldn’t be helpful after all. And they’d be justified to think so. In the end, it’s a book of one philosopher for other philosophers. And not for anyone else, which is just the self-indulgence Dennett criticized.
Worst of all, it sends a signal to young graduate students, who are the future of our field, that deep engagement with the sciences isn’t even necessary in the philosophy of science. Not to win the most prestigious prizes in the field anyhow. “It’s excellent evidence,” Ross said, “that much of the philosophical establishment remains rooted in neo-scholastic disconnection from science.”
It is no surprise then that John Maynard Smith warned scientists not to be influenced by the philosophy of science:
Scientists who take the philosophy of science seriously and allow their scientific research to be influenced by philosophical preconceptions, are far more likely to do themselves harm than good. I mean, the classic case, I guess, is Karl Pearson, who because of his developed positivist stance - which says you mustn’t imagine hypotheses, you mustn’t hypothesise anything that you can’t, sort of, see and touch - screwed up genetics for 20 years and completely ruined himself, because he wouldn’t postulate the existence of an entity that he couldn’t pick up and weigh.
Social scientists, of course, shouldn’t blame Epstein or any other philosopher I could pull up here. It’s a structural problem with the discipline, not just particular individuals. We should try to explain this strange phenomenon with the reward structure of philosophy.
Since philosophers aren’t very familiar with empirical social science research, however, let me just use an anecdote. Despite being one of the most naturalistic philosophers among my peers, and even spending a year of my PhD in Oxford’s zoology department and Cambridge’s psychology department, I was explicitly discouraged by my university from publishing in science journals for the purposes of promotion and the UK’s Research Excellence Framework. That was an awkward revelation given that I was engaged in several joint research projects with scientists at the time.
And yet, where could real success really lie, if not in succeeding as a philosopher of science in passing peer review in scientific journals, being considered valuable enough a contribution to move their work forward? Such contributions, of course, require a much more detailed engagement with recent developments in science, and so are doubly disincentivized.
In part, this problem is caused, Dennett laments, by the modern environment of academic philosophy, which produces many PhD students, but has relatively few permanent jobs to offer:
The problem, he explains, is that clever students looking to show off their skills “concoct cute counterarguments that require neither technical training nor empirical knowledge.” These then build off each other and invade the journals, and philosophical discourse.
This “cottage industry” certainly isn’t helped by the pressure on young philosophy students to publish papers.
To get a job in philosophy, one needs to publish academic papers, preferably in a journal ranked as highly as possible in the perception of prestige. And the easiest way to do so is not to become highly trained in formal methods or to acquire empirical knowledge about an area one would like to write about, e.g. neuroscience, but to find minor flaws in existing articles to write a rebuttal — sometimes leading to a long chain of responses that are of little philosophical substance but have flooded the journals.
To use a different area of philosophy as an example, epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) has wasted decades and thousands of pages of journal space to build obscure thought experiments to test intuitions about whether an agent has knowledge about a state of affairs or not. Unfortunately, people did not even agree on the cases themselves, making the search for the one true definition of ‘knowledge’ using this method a vain enterprise.
The only good thing that came out of it should have been the realization that philosophy should not rely on ‘intuitions’ or ‘common sense’ to resolve the philosophical debates, but, of course, this literature continues to expand (and so do many others across almost all fields of philosophy) — for all one has to do is come up with a slight alteration to an existing thought experiment without needing to know much of anything about philosophy or science as a whole.
“It can take years of hard work to develop the combination of scholarly mastery and technical acumen to work on big, important issues with a long history of philosophical attention,” says Dennett. “In the meantime, young philosophers are under great pressure to publish, so they find toy topics that they can knock off a clever comment/rebuttal/revival of.”
However uninteresting such an output may be, the investment into producing an article of this sort is significantly lower than that of a philosopher trying to become competent in a particular area of science to make a significant contribution to our understanding. The result is almost inevitably one where young philosophy students producing less impactful work have the more impressive CVs since it is easier to produce such articles. After all, most PhD students in philosophy publish perhaps one article at most before they reach the job market.
I should note that neither I nor Dennett are trying to criticize graduate students here. They are, of course, forced to participate in this game. The incentive structure is stacked against them and has been so for quite a while. But that has led to its own problem for philosophy departments.
Academic philosophy departments are now saddled with many philosophers that have often little understanding of the history of philosophy or the sciences. And why would they? Such students have been selected against, if not deliberately. But unlike the sciences, where hyper-specialization in some narrow domain makes it easier to make contributions to knowledge, hyper-specialization in philosophy is in truth ignorance of philosophy itself, making it all the harder to make meaningful contributions to the literature.
As a consequence, Dennett says much of philosophy is little more than a “luxury decoration on society,” and he complains many of the questions studied in both analytic and continental philosophy are “idle—just games.” For philosophers to be of real use, they should engage with the world, he says—as he does alongside those in interdisciplinary fields, such as philosophy of biology, philosophy of mathematics, or ethics.
The games played in our journals may be intellectually stimulating, and those who play them may be individuals of the highest intellectual calibre, but they are failing to contribute to philosophy’s quest to understand reality, which most philosophers take themselves to be engaged in. Alas, those most enjoying these games, those most convinced of their value, have naturally taken up many of the scarce jobs in philosophy.
Dennett’s comments echo an argument I made elsewhere that we should recognize naturalistic philosophy as a third kind of philosophy next to analytic and continental philosophy altogether — one that does not succumb to these self-indulgent games by requiring a deep engagement with the sciences to make meaningful contributions to the discourse. (See here:)
The impression that much of analytic and continental philosophy has become a series of mere games, disconnected from reality or the concerns of ordinary people, has no doubt contributed to decreased social status of philosophy. One may well wish to criticize Dennett’s or my critical analyses of our field for contributing to a philosophy-hostile climate in which philosophy departments are being closed at many universities in the United States and the United Kingdom, but this would be misguided.
As an analogy, the replication crisis rattled the reputation of psychology, and scientists quickly moved to restore the status of the field by implementing institutional change. The psychologists who criticized their colleagues did so out of love for their field.
The crisis of modern philosophy, of course, is much worse than that of psychology. No refinement of methods ultimately reliant on intuitions is ever going to yield insights into reality. At most, we reveal features of our own idiosyncratic minds, which, I am sorry to disappoint, are of little interest to most people and can be better studied by the recent merger of psychology and philosophy known as ‘experimental philosophy’, which seeks to investigate people’s intuitions empirically.
Trying to stop methodological or metaphilosophical criticism of philosophy itself out of fear that it would play into the hands of those who seek to close philosophy departments is rather like trying to hide the lack of replicability across much of psychology to preserve its reputation among the public. Even if this could work, the reputation of philosophy is already damaged. To restore it, we will need to do the hard work of returning philosophy to a position in which it is continuous with and not detached from the sciences. That would enable philosophers to make meaningful contributions to our understanding of reality. But it will be hard work that we must demand from young philosophers. Being empirically informed can no longer be optional if academic philosophy is meant to survive.
Luckily, naturalist philosophers have slowly infiltrated analytic philosophy departments under the cloak of conducting just another very niche form of traditional analytic philosophy — a tradition whose practitioners once thought that neuroscience had little to nothing to contribute to the philosophy of mind. But that cloak has come off, revealing a different type of philosophy altogether that is here to replace what has come before. I am thinking of people like Ann-Sophie Barwich, who revolutionized the philosophy of smell by… actually getting into the lab and even doing empirical research herself (PS: here’s a great interview with her).
Dennett will always be remembered for breaking the ice and for his dedication to helping naturalist philosophers enter the field. Although I met him only once in person, at a conference, when I was an undergraduate, I ended up organizing a joint commentary reply with several authors, including him, for Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He also offered me feedback on my dissertation and even wrote dozens of reference letters for me during my time on the job market. Dozens of similar stories emerged after his death. I will always be thankful to him and hope to carry on that torch he handed over to us.
I am particularly excited to see that even some of my undergraduates show eagerness to do naturalistic philosophy. To offer another anecdote, I recently supervised a bright undergraduate student who participated in equestrian sports and was eager to investigate the ethics of horse showjumping for her dissertation. Thanks to my encouragement she delved deeply into the empirical literature. She even ended up conducting interviews. This eagerness to get into the weeds of reality would have been unthinkable not too long ago, when such ethical questions would have been judged from the armchair alone, with little attention paid to empirical facts. I hope we will one day reach the point where this kind of work will be commonplace. For it would save philosophy from itself.
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