[jfengel]

Yes, philosophers love the mud. That's why they're philosophers.

Everything we call "science" is something that has been separated out, cleaned up, and polished. Darwin and Newton both considered themselves "philosophers", because they looked in the mud and took out a nice, separable piece of it.

What's left as "philosophy" is the mud, the stuff that we haven't taken away from the philosophy department by giving it a new name. We continue to take philosophy's successes: linguistics, economics, even cognitive science were originally done under the remit of a philosophy department.

You can't tell the serious work from the people just being self-indulgent until after the fact. Especially from the outside: a lot of the serious work looks ridiculous until it's successful. Getting to the point where you can tell requires more effort than most people are willing to put out -- which is fine, because it's not actually important whether you judge it well or not.

But in the interests of intellectual honesty, you'd do well not to judge a discipline with only a cursory understanding of it. And before you object to me describing your understanding as cursory, let me assure you that questions like "do we REALLY see the same color" are precisely not what real philosophy looks like. It's the same kind of red flag that "Can we use dark matter to go faster than light?" signals as not serious physics.

[NikolaeVarius]

I'm having a pretty hard time trying to figure out why people are so quick to toss out philosophy without trying to understand it.

The principles of liberal democracy, separation of church and state, and all that feel-good stuff is not something that "really exists". Its a bunch of stuff that a bunch of philosophers spent years observing society to create stuff to try and make a coherent framework for humans to live by.

I still think to this day that my philosophy of science course in college was one of the most defining classes of my life. It really changed how I look at existence and modes of thought

[jfengel]

A ton of it is plain Dunning-Kruger. They spend two minutes looking at something they don't understand, dub it stupid, and feel smug about being smarter than the people who do it.

That said, philosophy seems to practically beg people to do that, and I've spent some time trying to figure out how and why. Scientists flood the Internet to challenge bad science. Especially physics, which a lot of people practice in exactly the same way they approach philosophy -- without doing the math, or doing the experiment, or having any applications.

Philosophers don't do that, and I struggle with that. There may or may not be such a thing as "bad philosophy", but it's certainly true that people mis-represent the state of the art of philosophy. The most visible philosophers are rarely the ones doing the most important work.

People are quick to jump on the Sokal Hoax -- as if they had any idea what the journal Social Text was actually for. Who's out there to explain it? Science won the Science Wars -- but did anybody actually show up to fight against them?

Sciences aren't immune, either. A field like sociology is barely separated from philosophy, and gets a lot of derision -- as if it would be so much better if it would just realize that human beings are billiard balls with no more than three dimensions of freedom, and we could gin up experiments with N=10^20 every afternoon the way the LHC does. But if you were offered the answer to the question "How can we end homelessness?" or "What is the real nature of dark energy?", which one actually matters more?

It's easy to feel smug about the simplicity of physics and the tremendous power we can get out of that. A lot of people get a cheap thrill out of that. But it's lazy, and I really wish there were a way to talk about it.

[BlueTemplar]

Case in point, these days the question "Do we REALLY see the same color ?", is much more one about physics, signal processing and (neuro)biology.

[yesenadam]

> Darwin and Newton both considered themselves "philosophers"

The word "scientist" was only coined in the 1830s. Science for the vast majority of its history existed as a branch of philosophy called natural philosophy.