ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY – EVENTUALLY, IT WILL LOOK LIKE THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD Academ

ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY – EVENTUALLY, IT WILL LOOK LIKE THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

Academic philosophy is pretty much a zombie profession. It’s actually humorous to read how bad the papers are. Every few months I just grab a dozen or two and read through them.

And the consequences speak for themselves: the funding for philosophy departments, and administration’s tendency to group them in with religion has led to the progressive decline of departments.

Conversely, economics and psychology together have pretty much taken over the social sciences. And that was probably a deterministic outcome, when late in the 19th century the analytical movement made the choice to try to make philosophy into a science, it was a pretty sizable bet that failed. And it was followed by a flurry of attempts to justify socialism in an effort to stay relevant. That failed too.

It’s not that the study of philosophy has no value, it’s that except for very notable exceptions (Dennett) where philosophers are trying to integrate ethics and the product of scientific investigation, it’s pretty barren – like the study of medieval and ancient literature.

**And given what I’ve learned from my own work, I’d argue that we can, within at most two generations, solve the problem of the logic of the social sciences. And when we do, I suspect that philosophy will, in practice, look not very much different from the scientific method, with each of the logical systems we have developed: language, logic, math, physics, and economics (cooperation), merely specializations for isolating one property of the universe or another, so that we are capable of reducing it to analogy to experience and therefore understanding it.**