1 – Philosophy has not kept up with developments: in particular, the universe is saying pretty consistently “I am simple”.

2 – But it is much, much, more than this. It’s that:

…… While undergraduate, graduate, and PhD physics programs improves the general understanding of the body politic, undergraduate, and graduate, and a very substantial part of the phd philosophy programs cause HARM to the general understanding of the body politic, second only to the pseudoscience of psychology, and third only to the pseudoscience of social science.

So the issue is the HARM done by teaching philosophy as the literature of justificationary utopias, rather than the incremental knowledge we obtain in testifying (ensuring we are stating truth).

As far as I can tell, philosophers have done far more harm than good in the past two hundred years. And before the past two hundred years, the list of philosophers that did good (Smith, Locke, Hume, Jefferson) is quite small, while the list of scientists and mathematicians who have done good (too many to list) quite large.

And the list of philosophers who have done terrible harm (Rousseau and the entire french school, Kant and the entire german school, The entire cosmopolitan school: Boaz, Marx/Keynes, Freud, Cantor, Mises, Rand/Rothbard, Adorno in particular) is nearly endless.

3 – Why are philosophers of my generation bashing philosophers as in need of the same Operationalist revolution as has been forced on Physics and Psychology?

3.1 – Does not incorporate costs.

3.2 – Does not preserve

3.3 – Does not incorporate actionability.

3.4 – Meaning (verbalism) not truth (elimination of error)

3.5 – The unknowable communal Pareto ‘Good’, rather than the knowable interpersonal Nash Optimum.

3.6 – False understanding of Truth as Binary, logical, platonic rather than as a sequence of sufficient for given purposes: True Enough For:

… – Understanding/Meaning, (Learning)

… – Communication of Meaning ( communication, teaching)

… – Opportunity Discovery, ( what most of us desire from learning )

… – Actionability, (domain of science, how is this possible)

… – Voluntary Contract/Cooperation, (economics and ethics)

… – Dispute resolution(decidability) (conflict and law)

 

Curt Doolittle

the Propertarian Institute

L’viv Ukraine