“For the most part, the more successful people are, the more they've risen in their domain of profession, the more likely they are to be interested in philosophy". - Tom Morris
Philosophers often say that the subject matter of philosophy is everything.
Count the number of times you use language today in any way. Philosophers rigorously study the philosophy of language.
Count the number of times you claim to know something today, or assume you know something. One of the most ancient topics within philosophy, called epistemology, has studied knowledge for the past 2,500 years.
Count the number of times today you believe someone should or should not do something, or act a particular way, or evaluate an act or behavior as good or bad. That’s the territory of ethics.
You get the idea.
Generally speaking, philosophers have been pretty bad at communicating what we do. (I talk about this at length in the first episode of the podcast later this month, in a conversation with someone who is one of the best communicators of philosophy in our lifetime.) On the one hand, philosophers love to tell people that we study topics that people are already talking about explicitly or implicitly (language, knowledge, ethics, etc.), we just think about them more deeply.
That’s true, but it sounds gross and arrogant.
On the other hand, when someone is secure enough to get over the ick factor of watching someone self-proclaim their own depth, and reaches out for examples or for help, many philosophers then communicate using all the jargon and advanced principles of the discipline that took them years to learn. That just leaves people confused and turned off.
Philosophy has a perception problem in a few ways. One of those ways is made worse by the way philosophers communicate to others.
Take a look at this timely post from this past week:
As I mentioned in my previous Dialogue, many people have learned a few informal “fallacies” in high school or through self-study and then go fallacy hunting, when often the so-called fallacies are unhelpful, counterproductive, and inaccurately applied. The reply that Goff responds to is one example.
Goff’s main point is that philosophers, unlike scientists or economists, are rarely seen as experts in anything. That's a different, but related, perception problem. Part of the reason for this problem stems from the difficulty of demonstrating expertise when the subject matter includes areas that people take for granted all the time: truth, knowledge, right and wrong, reasoning, and so on. But I think the hard work of properly demonstrating the best of philosophy can be done on a case-by-case basis. More on that in a future post.
Learning comes with a responsibility to meet others where they are when you go beyond their knowledge base. There is an ethical component to learning. You were once in that beginner’s spot too, remember?
That ethical component should show up when you start learning logic. Logicians sometimes characterize logic as the study of the consequence relation: if you claim something, what else are you then permitted to claim, if anything? Anytime you use the word “because”, you’re probably expressing a consequence relation between at least a couple claims.
Everyone uses logic all the time, whether we realize it or not.
So when you start to look closely at logical principles, you begin to realize that most ordinary conversation and language is really messy. You’ll notice a difference in your own speech and thinking, but you will also notice the messiness in other people’s speech and reasoning.
There’s that ethical part: how will you handle moments when you notice logical mistakes or sloppy reasoning in others?
We don't want to contribute to the perception problems.
I want to talk more about this in upcoming Dialogues.
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