Philosophers are free to do whatever they please, because they don’t have to do anything right.
I just realized he was wrong, though. He’s right that they don’t have to do anything right, but they’re only free to do what gets them tenure. It needs to be an area that allows for a lot of publishing. If you’re the type of philosopher who dissolves problems, you’re likely out of luck. When a problem is dissolved, there’s nothing left to write about. The more your theories promote and enable an intellectual circle jerk, the better your career prospects. Not only will you have a lot to write about, you’re enabling others as well, and so will have allies in asserting the value of the topic.
I think you’re overstating your case. Successfully (persuasively, accurately, etc.) dissolving questions is a fantastic way to get tenure in philosophy. The problem is that it’s a lot of work. (And justifying putting so much work into something is really hard to do when you’re in a feedback loop with other philosophers’ arguments more so than with independent empirical data.) Dissolving questions like this is not an afternoon’s affair; in many cases it takes months, years, decades to complete this project, even when it’s intuitively obvious from the get-go that some dissolution must be possible. (Remember, dissolving questions requires that one be able to understand and explain where others went wrong.)
It’s also a mistake to think that rejecting the terms of debates is a novel or revolutionary notion somehow foreign to philosophy. Almost the opposite is the truth; in many cases philosophers have failed to make progress precisely because they’ve been too quick to flatly accept or flatly dismiss questions, rather than trying to take questions apart and see how they work without rushing to assert that they Must Be Meaningful or Must Be Meaningless ab intio. The history of the 20th century is in many ways a war between academics trying to dissolve one anothers’ questions, and I think a lot of the recent mistakes we see in philosophy (e.g., the overreliance on Quine over Bayes, the insistence on treating philosophy and science as separate disciplines. . .) are in fact a byproduct of how crude, lazy, and simply unconvincing historical positivists’ treatment of these issues was, often relying more on whether views sound Sciencey than on whether they’re well-defined or true.
Tenure usually happens early on, so it is hard to detect if that person planned on dissolving questions beforehand.
If you think about the highest h-index philosophers, David Lewis, Daniel Dennet (67 and 66 respectively) you’ll see that to spend one’s lifetime dissolving questions gets you loads of impact. Parfit was awesome from the beggining (earning a special scholarship granted to four outstanding kids per year maximum) and is world famous for dissolving personal identity, and mathematizing some aspects of ethics. His H-index is lower because his books are unbelievably long.
Even if you publish a lot of papers, contra whomever said the opposite in another comment, you still get impact by dissolving. Pinker’s is 66. Nick is 28.
Notable exceptions would be chalmers, searle and putnam I suppose.
Someone outside philosophy of mind may speak for other areas. From what I recall, in philosophy of Math you really only go forward by not dissolving stuff.
When John Searle and Jerry Fodor spoke at U. of Buffalo, they each gave me the impression that they were trying to be talked about. Fodor began with a reasonable position on the existence of faculties of the mind, and turned it into a caricature of itself that he didn’t really seem to believe in, that seemed intended to be more outrageous than what Chomsky was saying at the time about universal grammar. Searle leered gleefully whenever he said something particularly provocative or deceptive, or dodged a question with a witty remark. Judging from what made him smile, he was interested in philosophy only as a competition.
I’ve had bad experiences of this kind with a bunch of famous philosophers, though the problem doesn’t seem to extend to their writing. I think being famous, especially when you’re in the presence of the people with whom you are famous, is really, really hard on your rationality.
Judging from what made him smile, he was interested in philosophy only as a competition.
As a display of virtuosity. An instrumental value (verbal dexterity) becomes an end in itself. Technique for technique’s sake. Cleverness for cleverness’ sake. Not necessarily competition against anyone in particular, but evaluation versus a standard and the general population distribution of those evaluations.
Time to trot out Jaynes:
He quoted a colleague:
I just realized he was wrong, though. He’s right that they don’t have to do anything right, but they’re only free to do what gets them tenure. It needs to be an area that allows for a lot of publishing. If you’re the type of philosopher who dissolves problems, you’re likely out of luck. When a problem is dissolved, there’s nothing left to write about. The more your theories promote and enable an intellectual circle jerk, the better your career prospects. Not only will you have a lot to write about, you’re enabling others as well, and so will have allies in asserting the value of the topic.
I think you’re overstating your case. Successfully (persuasively, accurately, etc.) dissolving questions is a fantastic way to get tenure in philosophy. The problem is that it’s a lot of work. (And justifying putting so much work into something is really hard to do when you’re in a feedback loop with other philosophers’ arguments more so than with independent empirical data.) Dissolving questions like this is not an afternoon’s affair; in many cases it takes months, years, decades to complete this project, even when it’s intuitively obvious from the get-go that some dissolution must be possible. (Remember, dissolving questions requires that one be able to understand and explain where others went wrong.)
It’s also a mistake to think that rejecting the terms of debates is a novel or revolutionary notion somehow foreign to philosophy. Almost the opposite is the truth; in many cases philosophers have failed to make progress precisely because they’ve been too quick to flatly accept or flatly dismiss questions, rather than trying to take questions apart and see how they work without rushing to assert that they Must Be Meaningful or Must Be Meaningless ab intio. The history of the 20th century is in many ways a war between academics trying to dissolve one anothers’ questions, and I think a lot of the recent mistakes we see in philosophy (e.g., the overreliance on Quine over Bayes, the insistence on treating philosophy and science as separate disciplines. . .) are in fact a byproduct of how crude, lazy, and simply unconvincing historical positivists’ treatment of these issues was, often relying more on whether views sound Sciencey than on whether they’re well-defined or true.
Can you give examples?
Wittgenstein? The arch-dissolver.
Would you count Gettier?
Derrida was a famous dissolver.
Tenure usually happens early on, so it is hard to detect if that person planned on dissolving questions beforehand.
If you think about the highest h-index philosophers, David Lewis, Daniel Dennet (67 and 66 respectively) you’ll see that to spend one’s lifetime dissolving questions gets you loads of impact. Parfit was awesome from the beggining (earning a special scholarship granted to four outstanding kids per year maximum) and is world famous for dissolving personal identity, and mathematizing some aspects of ethics. His H-index is lower because his books are unbelievably long.
Even if you publish a lot of papers, contra whomever said the opposite in another comment, you still get impact by dissolving.
Pinker’s is 66. Nick is 28.
Notable exceptions would be chalmers, searle and putnam I suppose.
Someone outside philosophy of mind may speak for other areas. From what I recall, in philosophy of Math you really only go forward by not dissolving stuff.
When John Searle and Jerry Fodor spoke at U. of Buffalo, they each gave me the impression that they were trying to be talked about. Fodor began with a reasonable position on the existence of faculties of the mind, and turned it into a caricature of itself that he didn’t really seem to believe in, that seemed intended to be more outrageous than what Chomsky was saying at the time about universal grammar. Searle leered gleefully whenever he said something particularly provocative or deceptive, or dodged a question with a witty remark. Judging from what made him smile, he was interested in philosophy only as a competition.
I’ve had bad experiences of this kind with a bunch of famous philosophers, though the problem doesn’t seem to extend to their writing. I think being famous, especially when you’re in the presence of the people with whom you are famous, is really, really hard on your rationality.
As a display of virtuosity. An instrumental value (verbal dexterity) becomes an end in itself. Technique for technique’s sake. Cleverness for cleverness’ sake. Not necessarily competition against anyone in particular, but evaluation versus a standard and the general population distribution of those evaluations.