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> I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the mud, not the clarity. As in programming, there's some truth to this, in that needless complexity can afford a certain job security. But you've ignored another possible interpretation, which is that the subject matter is muddy. Until Frege, Russell, et al, not even mathematicians had a clear notion of "inference" or "proof"; it was always a case of "I can't define it, but recognize it when I see it". Until, suddenly, we did define it, and all the muddy conversations that came before now seemed misguided. We see this movement very clearly in all sciences, but I especially like examples from the history of mathematics, e.g. when Paul Gordan said, of Hilbert's finiteness theorem, that "This is not Mathematics. This is Theology." John Searle once said that "philosophy is the asking of questions that come naturally to children, and answering them with methods that come naturally to mathematicians". Once those methods are sufficiently formalized, the problem domain simply leaves philosophy and becomes some part of mathematics, or a new empirical science. This comes off as extremely self-indulgent, because it is, since almost every school of philosophers is trying to take some muddy conceptual domain and give it shape and structure, to help the subject along the path towards quantitative inquiry. Think of philosophical schools as analogous to systems architectures: with an eye towards certain desiderata, they're laying foundations for the rest of the system as it is likely to eventually exist. |