What is my least favourite genre of philosophy writing?
Many analytic philosophers despise the obscurantist, vague, and unclear writing style of continental philosophers, but at least that writing style can often be entertaining and occasionally deeply insightful. But as a philosopher working in the Anglosphere, continental philosophy isn’t something I encounter much anyhow. Analytic philosophy is the law of the land.
And so, as a naturalist philosopher, I find a particularly common style of writing and reasoning among analytic philosophers far more off-putting, given how frequently I encounter it.
It is also a style of writing that is common in online philosophy, where it’s all too common to try to debunk a position in a single comment, or dunk on a view with a single short argument, as if philosophical positions could be easily reduced to a short list of premises that can easily be dispelled.
Logic-Chopping in Analytic Philosophy
The problem I have with much of analytic philosophy is that it reduces philosophy to logic-chopping.
It is the kind of dry and over-precisified writing style aimed at objectivity, but that misses the forest for the trees—effectively ending up straw-manning most of the views it is trying to debunk.
If all you have available in your toolkit is an evaluation of whether a philosophical position is coherent or not, I am not very interested in what you have to say, since that is not very interesting at all. A great many philosophical articulations of theories may have logical inconsistencies, falling far short of offering deductive proof. But why care about debunking an incoherent version of an idea that can be made coherent?
Even as an atheist, I have little doubt that one could offer a logically coherent worldview that includes a God. It’s not that hard to add extra variables to a model. Even as a staunch materialist, I don’t doubt that someone could give a logically coherent account of panpsychism. I just don’t care much for the straw-manning of an entire position, declaring it logically incoherent because one might succeed at showing that one version of a theory is incoherent. Not to mention that many such philosophy articles, or blog posts for that matter, create a straw-man version of a view. Like Dan Dennett, I think we went too far in turning philosophy into mere logic-chopping:
I like to think I’m drifting back to what philosophy used to be, which has been forgotten in many quarters in philosophy during the last thirty or forty years, when philosophy has become a sometimes ridiculously technical and dry, logic-chopping subject for a lot of people — applied logic, applied mathematics. There’s always a place for that, but it’s nowhere near as big a place as a lot of people think. – Daniel C. Dennett
Naturalist Approach
As a naturalist, I prefer to think about philosophical theories as just another species of scientific theory. Logical analysis, of course, does have a place in the sciences. But vagueness is an inherent element of science itself. Many of the attempts to debunk Darwin’s theory of evolution through dry logic-chopping amounted to little more than providing effective proof that logic-chopping isn’t all that conducive to evaluating whether we should endorse a theory or not. Even if a particular specification of a theory has inconsistent assumptions, these can easily be fixed. Pointing out such problems is no proof that an entire theory is misguided.
The same applies to conflicts between views like atheism versus theism. The scientific philosopher compares the various theoretical virtues of the best versions of alternative theories, which are all assumed to be capable of being made logically coherent. The geocentric model of the world was not discarded because it was logically incoherent, but because its theoretical virtues diminished compared to those of the heliocentric one.
Much of analytic philosophy has become entirely dry by restricting itself to uninteresting logic-chopping alone. The same goes for much philosophical argumentation online. While this approach may succeed in showing particular versions of views or particular authors to be mistaken, it adds little value to the grand scheme of evaluating the very best versions of theories we can and ought to articulate to make serious attempts at understanding reality.
Philosophy Essential Reads
Unfortunately, this much more important work does not easily lend itself to online comments, tweets, blog posts, or often enough even journal articles. The very architecture of our modern engagement with philosophy encourages logic-chopping and the straw-manning of positions, reducing philosophy to single arguments. As if one argument alone could undermine or prove a particular position… (sometimes it can, but don’t just confidently proclaim that your argument is the final nail in the coffin).
Once we try to steel-man, rather than straw-man, philosophical or scientific theories, logic chopping has little value left to add, since we already work on the assumption that the best theories are logically coherent. But for some analytic philosophers, logic-chopping has unfortunately become their only tool of the trade. All in the hope that all theories but one will eventually show themselves to be incoherent.
But that is a vain hope indeed.
If we have to choose between a vision of philosophy as applied logic versus philosophy as abstract science, we should choose the latter—vastly expanding our toolbox to answer philosophical questions.
That’s why I consider myself a naturalist (scientific) philosopher. Not an analytic philosopher. (See this blog post.)
If you really want to convince someone to change their mind, or if you really want to evaluate alternative philosophical views in an objective manner, you should engage in a discussion about the theoretical merits of alternative views on the table. What are the trade-offs between them? What are the methods we should use to decide between these views? Don’t quibble about the details of how the views are articulated too much. There is a time and place for that, but let’s not miss the forest for the trees. Philosophy has much more to offer.
