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From: tmoody@sjuvax.UUCP (T. Moody)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Decline of Philosophy
Message-ID: <136@sjuvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 15-Sep-86 10:29:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: sjuvax.136
Posted: Mon Sep 15 10:29:08 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 23-Sep-86 02:09:54 EDT
References: <5155@decwrl.DEC.COM> <11700379@inmet>
Reply-To: tmoody@sjuvax.sju.edu.UUCP (T. Moody)
Organization: St. Joseph's Univ., Phila. PA
Lines: 67

In article <11700379@inmet> janw@inmet.UUCP writes:
>
>Those philosophers whose work is esoteric and  unreadable  cannot
>do  it, but that's only fair.  Why should laymen pay, directly or
>through taxes or through tuition fees, for someone else's hobby?
>
>The customer is the boss. Educate your bosses - but don't
>ignore them. 
>
>		Jan Wasilewsky


I tend to agree that so-called "professional" philosophers, like
myself, have a responsibility to maximize the intelligibility of their
work to the intellectual public, but there may be natural limits to
that intelligibility.

Scientists, for example, tend to write for other scientists.  What
this means is that they use convenient jargon and presuppose of their
readers a fairly detailed background knowledge of the matter at hand.
And the intelligent layman is seldom heard to complain that scientific
research journals are "too technical"; instead, he looks for digests
and respectable popularizations.

But even the intelligent layman *does* complain about the technical
thickness of philosophy, as it is practiced these days.  The
implication is that philosophers should *not* write for other
philosophers.  Why?

I think that mosty people believe that philosophy is *for everybody*,
in a way that science is not.  That is, the layman may well feel that
he is not really entitled to an opinion on cell membrane diffusion or
high-energy particle interactions.  But the same layman is likely to
feel that he *is* entitled to an opinion about, say, free will or the
nature of knowledge.

There may be many reasons for this, but part of it is the sense that
while science is about *facts*, philosophy is about *positions*.
Thus, expertise in science consists of the internalization of a great
deal of information, and the mastery of the relevant problem-solving
techniques.  And we all understand that these things require a great
deal of specialized training.

The practice of philosophy, on the other hand, is more like staking
out a piece of territory and defending it.  And the overall
battlefield is a place where anyone has a right to be entrenched.  And
so, when philosophy becomes too technical, the layman feels that an
attempt is being made to make this battlefield inaccessible.

To some extent, the layman is right.  By making philosophy
unintelligible to the layman, philosophers can hope that it will
appear more "scientific" and thus more respectable.

On the other hand, the only progress there is in philosophy is
negative: adding to the necrology of failed arguments and positions,
as the inadequacies of this or that position are exposed.  In this
atmosphere, understanding requires a fairly detailed familiarity with
what is often a long and cmplex fugue of arguments and
counterarguments.  And so, philospohers begin to presuppose this
familiarity, in their written works.  To the extent that they do so,
what they write becomes less and less accessible to outsiders who lack
this familiarity.  And so it goes.

There is an interesting article called "Philosophy as Ideology" in the
Winter, 1986 issue of _Metaphilosophy_.  And though I blush to mention
it, there is a piece called "Progress in Philosophy" by yours truly in
the last _American_Philosophical_Quarterly_.