Tim Williamson's unpopular psilosophy

A leading Astrologer writes-

Every intellectual discipline needs to speak to others as well as to itself, both to learn and to teach. If it is getting anywhere, it has something new to say to neighbouring disciplines, but also to the general public.

Surely, Astrologers are very good at telling people- disciplined or undisciplined as the case may be- something new about themselves and the wonderful things which could happen to them quite soon? Indeed, Astrology can also make charming predictions about the future of Nanotechnology and Quantum Cryptography and how they're going to find their soul-mate very soon and then have the cutest itsy baby in the world together. 

Sadly, the blog post I am quoting is not by an Astrologer. It is by a Professor of Philosophy- Tim Williamson- who used to collaborate with the cretin Jason Stanley who has now gone completely mad and sees Fascists everywhere. 

If a discipline has practical applications, it should communicate them where they can help.

Philosophy does not. It had theoretical objections to stuff that worked in practice but this turned out not be helpful at all because Astrologers could make the same point by puckering up their brows and saying 'I don't know. This just doesn't feel right. Mars must be misaligned with Jupiter once again. Tell you what, try rewriting your equations without a cosmological constant. That could realign your chakras.'  

It should also provide points of entry to the curious. Its survival depends on that: if it can’t explain to the uninitiated what it is up to, how will it recruit new members? Politically, it is unwise to tell the taxpayers who fund it “Shut up and give us the money; never you mind how we spend it”.

Actually, this is the wisest course. We only turned against funding non-STEM subjects when cretins like Jason Stanley started foaming at the mouth about Nazis under the bed. 

All that applies to philosophy in particular. A civilized society has popular philosophy just as it has popular physics, popular psychology, popular history…

Philosophy could, as it does in France, concentrate on applying a veneer of 'civilized' paideia to middle managers. Its mistake was to think it could intervene in high I.Q subjects like Maths and Physics. 

So, one might expect the relation between popular and academic philosophy to resemble the corresponding relations for other disciplines. Thus, popular philosophy would communicate recent research in academic philosophy to a wider audience.

But there is no 'recent research' worth the name in non-STEM subjects which can't be communicated by amending slightly a Wikipedia article. On the other hand, there is a lot of virtue signaling bullshit. Meanwhile Category theory has moved onward and upward leaving people like Tim Williamson- or even the late David Lewis or Hilary Putnam- looking decidedly de trop.  

In my experience, a surprisingly high proportion of popular philosophy is not like that. Instead, it sets itself up as a rival to academic philosophy, which it portrays as trivial, sterile, pedantic, irrelevant logic-chopping.

More importantly, it is way behind the curve w.r.t current developments in mathematical logic. 

This popular philosophy claims to be the real philosophy, the true heir to what was done in ancient times. It asks and answers the questions that really matter, going straight to the point by arguments that can be understood with no previous training. It speaks over the heads of the scholastics to laypeople who approach philosophy fresh and unprejudiced.

If it is a philosophy, then, surely, it must have a 'popular' representation? If it does not, it must be the case that its 'Tarskian primitives' are outside empirical or lived reality. But, in that case either Philosophy is Theurgic or has a Technological representation. But, if that is the case, what really matters is Magic or some arcane discipline which produces machines which appear magical to the common herd.  

The message that with little effort one can do better than the professionals is naturally gratifying to non-professionals; it finds a ready audience.

One reason we don't greatly respect 'Mentalists' and palm-readers and so forth is because we know that with a little training we could do as well as them- but we don't want to because the thing is fraudulent. It needn't be done at all unless you are in a dimly lit bar and trying to chat up someone who is happy enough for you to buy her drinks while she waits for her boy friend to get off work.  

One might call that populist message the Michael Gove view of philosophy, in honour of the British politician who, when asked during the 2016 referendum campaign which economists favoured leaving the European Union, replied “people in this country have had enough of experts”—though Covid-19 has changed his public attitude to experts.

The problem here is obvious. Experts were saying different things about Brexit and they said different things about Covid. One might as well adopt a regret minimizing strategy where Knightian Uncertainty obtains. That means hedging your bets and making up your own mind. 

Like Gove with economic expertise, populist philosophers are uncomfortable with the idea of genuine expertise in philosophy.

How does Williamson know? Gove is probably very comfortable with a type of 'economic expertise' which tells him what he wants to hear. As for 'populist philosophers', why would they object if Williamson himself endorsed their work and hailed them as the successor to Aristotle or Kant?  

They may admit that there are experts on the history of philosophy, who understand numerous difficult texts hardly anyone else has even read. They may also accept that there are experts on formal logic, and expert teachers of philosophy. But such concessions are consistent with the populist idea that the apparatus of academic philosophy—all the to-and-fro of point-by-point discussion in conferences and refereed journals—contributes nothing of significance to answering central questions of philosophy, and should be bypassed.

The problem here is that there are too many apparatuses distilling a moonshine which merely blinds its manufacturers. Nothing is commodified. The thing does not travel. Indeed, even the moonshine is dispensed with. Academic Philosophy is an advertisement for a product that does not exist.  

Sometimes I encounter people who take a similar attitude to modern natural science. They say that science went wrong after Aristotle, or send me their theory of ‘qualitative physics’, which bypasses all that boring mathematics to go straight to the secret of the universe. But such ideas are not the stuff of most popular science, which has better things to do.

Why mention what are clearly 'New Age' or Rosicrucian or other such manuscripts in this context? This is old fashioned 'Metaphysics' which bade farewell to the Natural Sciences at the time of Paracelsus.  Some philosophers may find stuff of that sort interesting. Deleuze was fascinated by Malfatti. There are some 'Philosophers of Science' who are into Zen or Vedanta or Guenon and djinnis or Alchemy or whatever and they have their own coteries. 

Philosophy is more vulnerable than natural science to the populist belief that laypeople are just as qualified as professionals.

Williamson understates the case. As with Sociologists and Mathematical Economists, we believe Philosophers know less than we do because their 'Tarskian primitives' are what we use to make a living while they get a salary for repeating some stupid fustian written by a long dead bore.  

This belief derives from the ideal of the radically autonomous inquirer, who takes nothing for granted and uses nothing second-hand.

Nonsense! This belief derives from movies about the private eye or investigative journalist who solves the mystery and gets the girl by the time the credits roll.  

In other words, such a thinker refuses to learn anything from other people.

No. He interviews them but remains skeptical. 'Wittgenstein admitted readily enough that he had no atomic propositions. But he glanced towards the quad where Frank Ramsey used to prance around with a radish up his bum. Who killed Frank? Was it Keynes? Or was it the mysterious Countess Orlova? What was certain was that so long as the Apostles continued their hunt for an atomic proposition, there would be more mysterious deaths.' 

That’s a recipe for the endless repetition of the same elementary mistakes, generation after generation. Anyway, the instructions cannot be carried out; all thinking takes much for granted. The ideal of the radically autonomous inquirer is itself stale and nth-hand.

Ideals can be Schelling focal without being computable. When we find a guy working in Quantum Cryptography or knot theoretic anyons who has a lemma or a theorem which closes a previously open problem, or which re-opens a problem we thought closed, then that guy corresponds to the ideal of the 'radically autonomous inquirer'. He may deny it because he doesn't want anything to do with philosophers- who are widely believed to be shirt lifting cretins- but if you send in the mysterious Countess Orlova and she butters him up properly then, sure, you may get yourself an article which is excellent philosophy.  

A less arrogant attitude is that we all have much to learn from other people, in philosophy as everywhere else. Philosophy is even harder than it seems; the right response to its difficulty is not to trash all the work already done by thousands of highly gifted and knowledgeable men and women. Compared to the size of the task, their contributions may have been small, and often mistaken, but that does not mean you can do better by ignoring them.

There is an obvious problem here. One can survive in a profession by not doing worse than others. If this involving ignoring lots of your colleagues- do so by all means. Only if doing better than others attracts some substantial reward should you try another tack. But, if that involves increased specialization then, in effect, you are ignoring wider and vaster swathes of the profession so as to concentrate on the few who are up your alley. Assuming low barriers to entry, you end up with 'monopolistic competition'- i.e. lots of product differentiation but also plenty of 'spare capacity'. But that 'spare capacity' drives down admission standards which in turn erodes barriers to entry yet further. The thing becomes a repugnancy market. So those at the cognitive top-end feel they have to move to some more prestigious field or else re-invent themselves as 'public intellectuals' pushing middle brow shite with some soi disant 'ideological' edge. But this soon cashes out as paranoid ranting -a la Jason Stanley. Why ridicule Gove when you can call Trump a Nazi?