| 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. |