The PhilPapers Fallacy (Part 8 of 9)
The PhilPapers Fallacy (Part 8 of 9)
Table of contents
Part 2: Relevant expertise matters
Part 4: Selection effects matter
Part 5: How PhilPapers respondents interpreted the survey questions matters
Part 7: Philosophical fashions matter
Part 8: Demographic, social, and cultural forces matter
2.7 Demographic, social, and cultural forces matter
Analytic philosophy is a distinctive and insular subculture. Cultural differences can already shape the way one thinks. Yet analytic philosophy is not like a typical culture, where one is born into a particular family or community that will pass on the cumulative cultural influences of their past in a broad and diffuse way, from holidays and customs, to styles of dress, to influences on language or culinary practices, many of which may have little direct influence on one’s thoughts, beliefs, and way of thinking.
Philosophy is, first and foremost, an elective subculture. One isn’t born into it. One opts into it. As such, a disposition to share in its values, methods, and preconceptions is built into the field from the outset. But as a subculture, it exists as an auxiliary to one’s overarching cultural influences. Its members are unified not by sheer osmosis or historical accident, but by actively working to cultivate a community based on shared goals, interests, beliefs, and values. In that respect, a more apt comparison would be a religion.
I am not suggesting that analytic philosophy is “like a religion” in any or all respects, but it is similar in at least some ways likely to be relevant to the beliefs of its members, including its reliance on a core canon of texts and it even has its myths, martyrs, and saints. I find it difficult not to draw comparisons between the trial of Socrates and the crucifixion of Jesus: one a martyr of the Christian God, the other a martyr for truth and wisdom.
The philosophical subculture is saturated in mythos, motifs, and tropes, from trolley memes to depictions of Nietzsche’s mustache to jokes and puns that don’t make one laugh so much as get that little warm glow of knowing that we “get it,” because we’re part of the club (using “Kant” for “can’t,” “Hume” for “whom,” and so on).
Philosophers love their quotes, love their depictions of the titans of philosophical history, love to show off their book collections, love to engage in endless exegesis of the same historical figures, and on, and on, and on. I’ve seen philosophers sporting T-shirts with quotes or depictions of famous philosophers. Or mugs. Or silly comic-like depictions of Socrates. Philosophy is brimming with celebrities but unlike e.g., the arts, its “celebrities” are less well known outside the ivory tower. They’re our celebrities, our private references and means of signaling our affiliation with an elite club. Nietzsche might have gone mainstream, but I doubt too many of “the folk” are going to recognize Lewis (they won’t even know who “Lewis” is from that name alone, but if you’ve studied analytic philosophy, I bet you will). The odd mix of reverence for dead luminaries and the tacky, commercialized memeification of philosophy I encountered on campuses strikes me as a uniquely American pastiche of the profound and the corporate. There’s something decidedly WEIRD about that.
Philosophy is not merely a dry method whose practitioners employ with a cold and calculating eye towards solving a problem, nor are its methods employed like a bland instruction manual that is valuable only insofar as we use it to arrive at a particular destination, like an Ikea guide to putting together a desk or a chair or whatever. We don’t like the instruction manual for its own sake, we just want our damn table to not immediately fall apart. Philosophy is, for many, a “way of life,” and something philosophers do as an end in itself. Doing philosophy is, for many philosophers, as much or more a terminal goal than an instrumental one. Perhaps this is true of other disciplines: an engineer may find fulfillment in building a bridge, but the end result is still… well, a bridge. Philosophy is often done for its own sake, rather than to serve some end. Philosophers often reject the necessity of philosophy serving some practical end with a palpable sense of disdain, as though there is something vulgar and uncouth about expecting philosophy to yield something of practical benefit. So much so that Wittgenstein stands out for suggesting a contrary attitude towards the field:
My father was a businessman and I am a businessman: I want my philosophy to be businesslike, to get something done, to get something accomplished. (Wittgenstein, 1930, as quoted in Horwich, 2012, p. vii)
But philosophers don’t do philosophy because they want to get something done, like a doctor who wants to cure cancer, but takes little intrinsic delight in testing this or that medication (granted, they might enjoy research for its own sake, but one would hope that if they could press a button and be given a cure, they’d happily do so).
Philosophers (often? usually?) do philosophy because they like to do philosophy. To invoke the cliche, it’s not just about the destination, but the journey itself. Many philosophers revel in the fact that the issues they grapple with are difficult to solve, and some seem to tingle with delight at the notion that a particular problem is so juicy that we may never solve it or even reach the conclusion that it is irresolvable in principle. Oh frabjous day! A mystery for the ages! Philosophy could perhaps be better called the love of mystery than the love of wisdom.
This brings me to yet another point of comparison: in many ways, philosophers engage in philosophy as if it were a game that one plays for its own sake. Philosophers want to do philosophy because it is enjoyable and rewarding for them. I suspect many philosophers don’t want to solve problems so much as engage in endlessly clever displays of exegesis and argumentative formalism.
For comparison, would chess players really want to know the best possible chess move in every situation? Would they want (however impossible in practice) for the game to be “complete”? I doubt it. That would be the end of the game. There’d be no point in playing. Just the same, I suspect for many philosophers, there is a strong undercurrent motivating them to avoid whatever methods or ways of thinking would cause the field as a whole to arrive at definitive conclusions. Oh, they might arrive at definitive conclusions themselves, but I suspect philosophers, in some ways, like having opposition to their views. One can spew all the vitriol they want at their rivals, but at the end of the day, nobody would enjoy sports nearly so much if they didn’t have any rivals, or at least if they didn’t have any serious competitors. They have an even greater motivated interest in insisting that perspectives like Wittgenstein’s or my own can to be dismissed outright: if we’re correct, they’re not just failing to get anything done, they’ve been engaging in futile projects from the very outset, toiling away at pseudoproblems that have no solutions because they aren’t real problems to begin with.
If this is the case, I find it extremely plausible that philosophers would have an incredibly strong bias against considering this possibility. They would have to face up not merely to the realization that their prized solution to a given puzzle isn’t correct, but that they had completely wasted their time, and in many cases, wasted their careers or their entire lives on fruitless endeavors. Are we to take the consensus among those with so vested an interest in resisting quietistic objections to the entire foundation of the field at face value, and not consider the possibility that these objections are motivated, at least in part, by factors other than a sober assessment of the plausibility of such criticisms? I’m not inclined to do so, any more than i’d take a Catholic clergy conference’s dismissal of objections to its doctrine as a strong indication of that Christianity is true. Just as devout priests have a great deal to lose if foundations of their faith are threatened, so too do analytic philosophers have a great deal to lose when the foundations of their discipline are challenged.
Why should I trust people with these motivations to deliver the goods and get something done? Why should I trust people who have internalized, in every fiber of their being, the deepest desire and fulfillment that the game goes on, when I don’t want the game to go on, because I don’t care about the game for its own sake. That is not to say I don’t enjoy a debate, or the feeling of making a compelling argument. I do, and I do enjoy philosophical conversations. It’s just that I enjoy them insofar as I feel at least some confidence that these discussions are productive, that they’re getting somewhere, that I am moving towards some goal or target. If I thought philosophical discussions were futile and that we were spinning in circles, I’d have quit a long time ago.
This is only compounded in the case of moral realism, since not only am I challenging the foundations of philosophy itself, I am also challenging a view whose proponents often insist provides the only sound foundation for life to have any purpose, meaning, or value at all. Analytic philosophers who endorse moral realism have a lot to lose if I’m correct: their entire world view would be nothing but smoke and ash. Maybe that’s irrelevant. But those observing this dispute from the outside should consider the possibility that it isn’t, and that there is an enormous asymmetry in stakes here: I have far less to lose if I’m mistaken than analytic moral realists do if they’re mistaken. At worst, I may find myself grudgingly donating extra money to charity. But I’d hardly have to give up torturing babies or stealing, since I wasn’t disposed to do so in the first place. Moral realism isn’t necessary to furnish me with a sense of obligation or to induce guilt. My values are enough to do that all on their own. The realist, in contrast, would face a nihilistic abyss where, by their own lights, life would have no purpose, meaning, or value at all.
What I observe in most discussions is a sense that much of analytic philosophy has misdirected philosophers. It's as though they’ve been led astray by hopes and words. Rather than adjusting their flight by the light of the moon, they circle the flames, endlessly, with the quixotic conviction that they’re making progress. Noticing they’ve passed the same tree for the thousandth time, some small part of them may have an inkling that something isn’t right, but they console themselves that it's all about the journey, and not the destination.
There is some consolation in the belief that I may be able to steer some people away from the endless tangle of words towards something more productive. In that respect, I feel drawn to Wittgenstein’s sentiments on the matter. I want philosophy to serve as a tool for achieving one’s objectives. I want to resolve questions, settle matters, and achieve something in the actual world. I have no interest in the ghostly enterprise of a priori truths that make no difference. Philosophers flatter themselves in the hope that their “theories” matter, but if one can’t do anything with one’s theories, then I’m simply not interested. All the insistence in the world of “but it’s true…” amounts to nothing if the truths aren’t actionable.
This isn’t about my animus towards the futility of much of analytic philosophy, though. That’s a motivating drive in producing this writing, but what I aim to do here is to direct your attention to the motivations of philosophers, and the practice they’re engaged in. It does not look to me like a healthy enterprise centered on making substantive progress. It looks far more like an elaborate game of chess played, where syllogisms and rhetoric stand in place for rooks and bishops. I am not suggesting that analytic philosophy is exclusively a game, and that nobody engaged in it is serious about getting something settled or figuring out what’s true. What I am saying is that this is one of the motivating factors behind many analytic philosophers: that doing philosophy is an end in itself, and that this motive is misaligned with the pursuit of truth and progress.
Another factor amping up the homogeneity of philosophical thought is that philosophers become embedded in a shared social network with its own culture and customs. Philosophers adopt a distinctive manner of speaking and interacting with one another, they read the same books, they go to the same conferences, and they are probably disproportionately likely to have friendships and romantic relationships with one another.
Yet philosophy differs from religions, cultures, and subcultures in that it also aspires to be a formal academic discipline, at least in modern times. As such, it has fused its religious and subcultural elements with the trappings of a serious academic pursuit. Yet Western philosophy isn’t even depicted, historically, as a formal academic discipline so much as a way of life. When someone says they’re a philosopher, this doesn’t simply mean they put on their robes for work, but are otherwise indistinguishable the rest of the day. Philosophy seeps into every crevice of one’s mind, fundamentally altering the way the philosopher thinks about many, and in some cases most or even all things.
What psychology changes accompany studying philosophy? I don’t know. But philosophy differs from many other subcultures in that, by its very nature, it shapes the way that we think in deep and pervasive ways. Philosophers study formal logic and epistemology, and, perhaps most importantly, are inducted into an approach that centers on linguistic analysis and the consultation of one’s “intuitions.” Analytic philosophers may see themselves as refining the way ordinary people think. Indeed, analytic philosophy often presents itself as a means of vindicating “commonsense.” Yet analytic philosophers have reliably failed to determine how common the “commonsense” they draw upon actually is, mistakenly imagining that nonphilosophers more or less think in the same way as one another and the same way as philosophers themselves.
There is a deep, pervasive, and catastrophic failure on the part of analytic philosophers to appreciate the importance of culture in shaping the way we think. They purportedly analyze ordinary thought and language without a shred of actual empirical evidence. Theorizing about what other people think when they say things by consulting what you think they think makes doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. We have the tools and resources of empirical psychology, why not directly study actual instances of people’s speech, or evaluate how they think in the lab or in the field? It would be one thing if philosophers weren’t doing empirical work, but their claims routinely cross over into empirical territory, yet they have historically made almost no effort to actually directly engage in empirical research. I can’t go a week without hearing yet another person insist that most people are moral realists. That’s not hyperbole. Here’s one from yesterday (at the time of writing, 4/21/2023). There is no substantial empirical evidence that all or most people think or speak like moral realists. How people think is an empirical question, yet philosophers just go around repeating that everyone’s a realist like a mantra without appealing to the empirical literature actually designed to assess this question. Instead, they rely on armchair analysis of decontextualized English sentences. Do you remember those awful drawings from the middle ages where artists depicted animals in all sorts of weird ways? Like this “elephant”:
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Nobody would take anyone seriously if their method of studying elephants was to recall their childhood experiences seeing one at a zoo, draw the elephant from memory, and then study its behavior and physiology by examining the picture they drew. Yet this is not that different from how philosophers analyze the meaning of “sentences.” They don’t actually locate anyone using a sentence in a real-world context, where the use of the sentence is an actual instance of ordinary language, then ask the person what they meant, or conduct some field experiment or behavioral study or observational research to figure out what practical goals were achieved by the person’s utterance, or to assess multiple cases in different contexts, or to gather immense corpuses of data on written and spoken language and examine them for patterns using the best available tools to do so. Instead, they sit around in their office and think about sentences that they take to be paradigmatic of the sorts of things ordinary people would say, like:
It is morally wrong to torture babies just for fun.
The first thing to note about these “sentences” is that they frequently aren’t very similar to how ordinary people speak or think. Moral language may not be as common as people suppose, either (Atari et al., 2023). The sentences are often stilted and overly formal, or use very precise locutions. They’re a bit too cleaned up, but in an awkward way, like someone wearing a suit that doesn’t fit well. They also often involve ridiculous and over-the-top content like baby torture or setting cats on fire or tossing people off of bridges: these are not the typical moral dilemmas people encounter. I’ve never met a single person in my life that was deliberating about whether to use corpses to stop runaway trolleys or felt compelled to contemplate the moral status of incendiary felines.
Second, note that the sentences are almost always in English. Philosophers analyze how people use English sentences and then extrapolate from these to how everyone thinks about everything in every language. This is ridiculous. Why should we think that what philosophers think people think when those people say things in English reflects how literally everyone thinks about everything in any conceivable language? If that isn’t what these philosophers think, then why aren’t they doing comparative linguistics and cross-cultural psychology research to evaluate what people mean in the sentences of other languages? It’s one thing to think you can unlock the mysteries of the universe by studying sentences. It’s quite another to think you can do so by exclusively studying contemporary English. That makes about as much sense as supposing one can understand the world’s culinary practices by exclusively studying British cuisine.
Third, note that the “sentence” above is totally removed from any context. It is completely decontextualized. It’s not that we don’t know who uttered the sentence, but that nobody uttered it at all. It’s fictional. It is no more an instance of an actual moral utterance than a description of a table is a table. Yet one would think that understanding actual statistical patterns about the contexts of utterance for any given sentence would be relevant to assessing the function those sentences play in real world situations. All the grammatical analysis of made-up sentences is moot if we don’t have solid data on how people use sentences of the same form.
I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of assessing the weird notions about language that typify analytic philosophy. Rather, what I mean to highlight here is that philosophers (a) do appear to study how nonphilosophers think and speak but (b) they don’t even empirically study how members of their own cultures think. Indeed, they don’t typically study any actual linguistic events at all. Instead, they study hypothetical sentences people might say, and usually don’t even bother to construct sentences that look all that much like ordinary language, but instead present stilted, artificial, and overly formal quasi-ordinary language, and then analyze that. It’s the equivalent of a psychologist studying human psychology by analyzing clips from a soap opera. If you want to make claims about how people think, philosophy does not have the methods or resources to get the job done.
This isn’t to say one can’t achieve some limited insight into the human mind via armchair methods, but even if you could do so by drawing on your own way of thinking, along with your knowledge of the people you’ve interacted with, those experiences may form a shallow, narrow, unsystematic, highly biased, and unrepresentative selection of the world’s population, such that whatever insights you obtained have extraordinarily low generalizability. Even aggressive efforts to empirically study how people think using the social sciences face nearly insurmountable challenges to generalizability (see e.g., Yarkoni, 2022). It’s absurd to think you can generalize from your personal experience to how humanity as a whole thinks.
That analytic philosophers are ill-equipped to extrapolate from their personal experiences to human psychology as a whole is not idle speculation. We already have considerable and growing evidence not only that the populations analytic philosophers come from are unrepresentative of the rest of the world’s population, but that they are one of the least representative populations. While some philosophers have argued that philosophical intuitions are fairly consistent across cultures (e.g., Knobe, 2019), I side with critics of this claim who maintain that we’ve identified considerable cross-cultural variation, most notably in Stich and Machery’s (2022) reply to Knobe, where they cite a hundred studies reporting cultural differences in philosophical intuitions. Note, too, how Stich and Machery both echo many of the concerns laid out in this post:
The branch of experimental philosophy that explores demographic differences in philosophical intuition was inspired, and guided, by the founders of contemporary cultural psychology, most notably Richard Nisbett. A central concern was that much of analytic philosophy relies on the intuitions of professional philosophers who were (and still are) predominantly WEIRD, white and male, and have all spent long periods in what Starmans and Friedman describe as an “echo chamber of intuitions disconnected from how concepts are used by others.” The current situation in philosophy is similar to the situation in the early years of cultural psychology. There is some evidence that there may be important demographic differences in a broad range of philosophical intuitions. And there is a growing recognition that if there are demographic differences, this may pose a serious challenge to familiar philosophical methods. But at this point, we know very little about the scope of these demographic differences, and we know next to nothing about how stable they are or about the processes that bring them about. And if Professor Knobe’s cherry-picked portrait of the literature, and his well-deserved reputation as the leading figure in experimen- tal philosophy convinces other researchers that philosophical intuitions are robust across demographic differences and that they may well have an innate basis, we may never find out. (Stich & Machery, 2022)
I must emphasize again that the criticisms I raise are not unique: similar objections are made by some of the most prominent contemporary philosophers working in some of the most respected philosophy programs in the world. My conclusions are not based on a completely rogue characterization of the state of philosophy that is utterly disconnected from contemporary metaphilosophical discussion. Quite the contrary: my views developed as a result of studying and engaging with that literature. Stich thinks there is no moral domain. Machery believes morality is a historical invention.
We can begin to get a sense of how different populations think by examining recent research in psychology. Since its inception, almost all psychological research has focused exclusively on people from WEIRD populations (and on college students in particular). As Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010) have shown, people from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies tend to anchor one or the other end of distributions with respect to a variety of psychological measures. That is, people from such populations tend to be the least psychologically representative of the rest of the world’s population. This alone should be cause for concern about the degree of independence among philosophers. We can also directly assess cross-cultural variation with respect to philosophical issues.
Analytic philosophy isn’t simply a contemporary branch of Western philosophy; it is a branch of philosophy that arose recently (around the turn of the 20th century) primarily in the anglophone academic world; indeed, the very basis of the division between analytic and continental philosophy is based on geographically demarcating the former from the latter’s closer association with continental Europe. Not surprisingly, then, most of the people in the PhilPapers survey are from the United States, the UK, or Canada.
A majority of the respondents share similar cultural and linguistic influences, and reflect a slice of the population of philosophers at a specific period in history, where they will share even more in common with one another. People from WEIRD populations are psychological outliers. Most analytic philosophers are from WEIRD populations, and are therefore already psychological outliers with respect to most of the world’s population. Yet analytic philosophers aren’t merely any random group of WEIRD people. They are themselves a highly distinctive, idiosyncratic, insular, and demographically narrow population who self-selected into an extremely unusual subculture that actively cultivates a distinctive way of thinking about the world that consists of an almost exclusive focus on exemplars of Western thought, further amplifying central characteristics of WEIRD populations that cause them to differ psychologically from other populations. Philosophers are, in other words, outliers among outliers, and extreme outliers at that.
And we’re supposed to take the way a few thousand highly idiosyncratic people think to be representative of the way the rest of the world thinks, or representative of how they would think if they thought about the issues properly? To what extent, under counterfactual considerations in which philosophers formed different historical traditions, would we converge on the same philosophical conclusions? I have no idea. Nobody does. And we’re not going to find out by doing philosophy from within the vantage point of one of those philosophical trajectories. There is no way to know whether one has escaped the influence of the distinctive cultural, historical, and personal influences that have shaped one’s way of thought unless, and only unless, we had a well-developed psychological theory that would allow us to estimate the strength of such influences and the likelihood and extent to which, in any given case, one’s conclusions are the result of some shared, convergent line of thought, rather than the amplification and entrenchment of parochial ways of thought elevated to the same level of confidence as the sciences, despite the total absence of external means of corroboration.
Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the success of our scientific theories is checked against the world. If we get the math wrong, our spaceships crash, and people die. If we get medicine wrong, people die. If we build bridges wrong, people die. If we get nutrition science wrong, people die. No philosopher has, to my knowledge, ever died as a result of their views on mereology or the quality of Kant’s writing. My point here is: if philosophers insisting moral realism “is true” were not only wrong, but saying something that was complete nonsense, how would anyone who doesn’t adopt their ways of thinking be able to check? It doesn’t seem that they could. That doesn’t mean moral realists must be wrong, but it means that their conclusions aren’t, in the way the sciences are, subject to the kinds of empirical verification one might expect of claims in medicine or engineering. The realist may point out that they never said otherwise, and that’s just the point. There are facts that fall outside the scope of empirical inquiry, so it’s foolish to point out that we can’t empirically verify a given philosophical account, just as it’d be foolish to point out that we can’t see numbers or hear the taste of chocolate. One needs the right epistemic tool for the job.
But I’m not questioning whether we have a method of checking whether moral realism is true or false. I’m wondering how we check whether philosophical methods that purportedly aren’t subject to empirical scrutiny work at all. If this seems like a bunch of conceptually confused nonsense to me, how could I discover I was mistaken? Do I have to take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith and just consult my intuitions? What the hell are those? I don’t get magic “intellectual tingles” directing me to the truth, and I don’t think philosophers do, either. If I had to speculate, I think philosophers are simply having the phenomenal experience of noticing they have beliefs or inclinations to believe things, but lack introspective access to the mechanisms and causes of those beliefs. Sure, some of my beliefs appear to emerge from the void in my mind, but I don’t take that to be an indication that in such cases, they’re the output of a single, reliable psychological system.
No, I just think we lack access to most of what our brains are doing, and I have no idea what’s going on behind the hood. Neither, for that matter, do philosophers, nor pretty much anyone else. It’s not as though the cognitive science of philosophical intuitions is a well-developed area of research, such that we can point to the distinctive mechanisms associated with, e.g., epistemic, ethical, and metaphysical intuitions with any degree of confidence, nor that we’ve even decisively identified that there even are mechanisms of this kind in the first place. Philosophers are trusting the output not of a single blackbox, but a box of boxes. They not only don’t even know how any of the boxes work, they don’t even know which box’s output they’re receiving on any given occasion, nor do they know how the larger system chooses which box to draw on.
Philosophers are effectively passing snippets of decontexualized language into Searle’s Chinese room, receiving outputs, and trusting the outputs, without knowing what’s going on inside the room, nor, as far as I can tell, even seeming to care what’s going on. The whole process is one the efficacy of which is intimately bound up in and dependent on our understanding of how human minds work, yet few philosophers seem to agree, or to show much interest in considering the details of how their minds work. They’re using a tool, but don’t know how it works, and don’t seem to want to know, nor even to think that how it works is relevant. They seem to extrapolate backwards from the mere fact that our “intuitions” (whatever those are) are “reliable” to the fact that their intuitions in any given case are reliable, a conclusion that doesn’t follow, or at least would only follow if one provided empirical evidence that establish that whatever is causing reliable intuitions in other cases generalize to their cases in particular.
It would be one thing to loosely gesture at cultural and linguistic similarities. But the similarities in how philosophers think aren’t merely due to the indirect impact of growing up in similar cultures and sharing similar languages. A random person from Kansas and another from Chicago are already going to be culturally similar in ways that make them psychologically more similar, all else being equal, to one another than to the rest of the world. Yet philosophers aren’t random people in the same nation or culture.
The very act of studying analytic philosophy involves diving deeply into a distinctive canon of thought that was itself produced by and has subsequently served to shape Western culture more generally, Western philosophy in particular, and, even more narrowly, analytic philosophy. Most people educated in analytic philosophy are steeped in the same, or a very similar corpus of readings: from Plato’s Republic through Descartes’ Meditations through Kant’s Critiques, and more recent times in the work of Frege, Moore, Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, and so on. Philosophers aren’t merely introduced to the same thinkers and the same ideas, but a shared narrative, a shared canon of what amounts to the functional equivalent of sacred scriptures and, by their very nature, philosophers tend to read such works with the enthusiasm of seminary students high on religious convictions.
What we are dealing with aren’t simply people who share the same cultural background, with whatever diffuse influences ambient exposure to a shared zeitgeist may have. They are the curators of a narrow set of intellectual traditions that reflect an idiosyncratic and concentrated slice of Western, anglophone thought. And even these traditions aren’t independent of one another, but instead reflect an ongoing conversation, with philosophers building and responding to prior works, also from the Western canon. We aren’t dealing with a bunch of independent structures, but a single building, with each generation laying bricks where the last left off. And each bricklayer tends to add to the structure only after they spend all their time studying it and its construction. Whether they come to identify with, or revolt against previous builders, their own contributions to the structure are invariably shaped by their interaction with it.
Induction into analytic philosophy represents one of the most narrowing, blinkered, and idiosyncratic ways of thinking one can voluntarily opt into short of joining a religion. This isn’t obvious. Philosophers are renowned for developing divergent positions on a wide variety of issues, and whenever any distinction is drawn, one is bound to find endless efforts to draw yet more fine-grained distinctions. Yet what makes analytic philosophers isn’t what they think, but how they think. For comparison, we could imagine a group of artists religiously devoted to painting. They may all strive to distinguish themselves from one another, but they share a common religious dedication that they creatively express themselves through art. What makes them similar isn’t what they paint, but that they paint and why they paint.
Just the same, philosophers are all, in effect, playing the same game by the same rules. The game analogy may even be apt in other ways. Philosophers love to endorse various -isms, to label themselves, take a side, and argue it out. Still others are more like sports commentators, staying above the fray, refusing to take sides, but calmly pointing out the merits and faults of rival teams. Philosophers are constantly drawing up new labels and new distinctions, and finding new ways to mix and match old ideas. That philosophy is characterized by argument and disagreement may give the impression of a field of open thought, in which all ideas are welcome, and which is, for better or worse, wildly heterogeneous. Yet this is only true at the proximal level: while philosophers may have very different views on philosophical matters, they tend to confine themselves to the same background set of rules, presuppositions, and aims. They are quite homogenous at this second-order level. Philosophers will tend to endorse one or another of various competing categories and distinctions within some well-trod area of dispute, e.g., internalists and externalists, realists and antirealists, skeptics and anti-skeptics, deontologists and consequentialists, and so on. And while an undercurrent of dissent exists within the field, those who rail too hard against the status quo are, at best, politely ignored, or worse, acknowledged to have fair points, then philosophers go right back into the fray.
On many, if not most philosophical issues, I’m a quietist: I think the disputes in question represent false dichotomies (or trichotomies, etc.). At the first-order level, this leaves very little for me to do, much as one would have little to say on the matter of whether unicorns prefer sparkle berries or rainbow tarts. If I’m so convinced unicorns aren’t even real, why don’t I pack up my shit and leave? I have had people on occasion ask me why I bother to study philosophy. I’m not really sure. This is what I’ve decided to do, for better or worse. I had initially pursued academic philosophy because I thought it would be the ideal place for someone to explore the most abstract and fundamental questions. In some ways, perhaps, it is. But in others, I’ve been disappointed. The field has riddled with entrenched dogmas, unstated presuppositions, and a penchant for elitism, gatekeeping, and credentialism.
In short, analytic philosophy is a distinctive culture of thought. It shares a broad set of presuppositions about how to think, what to focus on, whose insights to appeal to for knowledge and wisdom, and so on. Yet it is also an unhealthy one. As the sciences have advanced, philosophers have increasingly cut themselves off from other disciplines, whether out of envy, or because all the juicy ideas were handed off to scientists, leaving philosophers with the most abstruse of scraps as consolation prizes, I don’t know. Following the linguistic turn, analytic philosophy veered ever deeper into strange seas, where words are treated like incantations, where an aggressive focus on analyzing language, but in a way that seems utterly alien to how language actually works, has taken hold, and has yet to let go. Analytic philosophers fail to appreciate how incredibly new contemporary approaches are.