Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking and wastes our resources. The cure for pseudophilosophy is a philosophical education. More specifically, it is a matter of developing the kind of basic critical thinking skills that are taught to philosophy undergraduates.
(https://psyche.co/ideas/pseudophilosophy-encourages-confused-self-indulgent-thinking)
posted on March 02, 2021 08:25 AM by
u/-rid-
30
u/dgerard21 pointsat 1614682956.000000
This subreddit is not in the business of one-liners, tangential
anecdotes, or dank memes.
this is like having an auto-mod message that begs the readers
please don’t fuck any sheep this time.
Yeah I very much doubt he’s actually read Foucault, that reads like someone who read a Dawkins tweet about Foucault, and then pulled up the quote on google
Philosophy is institutionally weird, there’s a lot of leeway for just having opinions and calling it critical thinking. Which is to say that you meet a lot of people who don’t do much than have opinions and call it critical thinking. While on the other hand you meet a lot of people who actually do think carefully about things, and sometimes they’re the same person.
When I was studying for my MSc I had a Dutch friend who identified as a conservative. One afternoon I was drinking with my anarchist Turkish friend and he and his friends showed up at the student union bar, and for whatever reason the conversation turned to Roger Scruton. Now, I despised Roger Scruton and I’m glad that he’s dead.
Anyway, my conservative friend turns out to be a fan of his - being four pints in when he arrived my banter is less friendly and more honest than it could have been. I mocked him relentlessly for like an hour because *unlike* this Dutch motherfucker I’d actually read quite a lot of and about Scruton, while he just had a handful of opinions about how Burke is good that were cribbed from half-remembered opinion pieces and so on. It’s funny how in philosophy you can get by on that way of thinking and call it thinking.
> This is just false, in general these sort of pseudo-scientific people are extremely attentive to evidence, as we see often from SlateStarCodex and /r/TheMotte, they’re just bad at analysing it
Being bad at analysis is exactly what he's talking about?
That can apply to the reasoning itself, just like to "data selection".
> it’s possible that the author is drawing on the epistemology of testimony literature to say that pseudo-scientific beliefs emerge when people don’t place their trust in expert opinion
I'm not sure how this would be charitable, given nowhere authority is mentioned in any shape or form.
> which views every problem as if it is sui generis a mere critical thinking problem, without acknowledging context
What do you mean here?
Starting from the bottom:
In my time as an aspiring analytic philosopher of science, I encountered a number of people who saw academic writing in analytic philosophy as not requiring some kind of historical perspective. The Latin phrase *sui generis* here refers to an idea that comes from nowhere, rather than from somewhere. So in the criticism I’m making I’m accusing the author of thinking they can just come up with a clever idea and make hay out of it.
The reason I call it “charitable” is to be a bit sarcastic. In the philosophy of testimony literature, a common theme is that important beliefs rely not on independent verification by independent agents, but on their ability to trust others. The argument I make is therefore that when flat-earthers make their point (see the previous comment for context) they aren’t doing so through a pure lack of critical thinking skills, they’re doing it from a context which is alien to trusting the scientists they’re supposed to trust.
Finally, getting to the top: critical thinking includes the sort of stuff being talked about in the article. Trusting testimony in the flat-earther case would be nonsensical for somebody with the conspiracy theorist slash weird Christianity that characterises flat-earthers. Being bad at analysis is conceptually different in that it’s a simple failure of nous: the ultimate idea is to critique analytic philosophers for using cast-off bits from the so-called “Science Wars” which don’t actually reflect the history of the flat-earth wars.
> So in the criticism I’m making I’m accusing the author of thinking they can just come up with a clever idea and make hay out of it.
That sounds a lot like recycling the good ol' ordinary language philosophy criticism.. but I think he actually added a slightly new contribution on top of it. It's not just "you are no good because you write in quatrains", but "you are no good because you don't actually seem to pursue any genuine transmission of knowledge".
I guess it's quite arguable where "the line not to be crossed with circumlocutions" has to be set, but the author wasn't really this pretentious.
> they aren’t doing so through a pure lack of critical thinking skills, they’re doing it from a context which is alien to trusting the scientists they’re supposed to trust.
That's definitively an interesting take on the matter, but.. how can I say it? I can hate hitler as much as I want, but I won't shoot dogs just because he liked them.
"Enemy of my enemy" reasonings still sound quite the fallacies.
> Being bad at analysis is conceptually different in that it’s a simple failure of nous: the ultimate idea is to critique analytic philosophers for using cast-off bits from the so-called “Science Wars” which don’t actually reflect the history of the flat-earth wars.
I guess like you can trace flat-earthism back to some protestant/creationism idiot ball, but authorial intent seems irrelevant to the *evolution of a meme* (as also evidenced by the fact people embedded in atheist or catholic environments can be too).
Maybe you can argue that if you are born a mormon, if you are grown inside the emblematic cavern, it's not really "your" fault, or there's really a problem with your "logic"... But I don't believe this applies to the great majority of flat-earthers. Choosing which experts to trust, or whose data to believe, is also an active process of thought.
None of what I said is supposed to be exculpatory in any way whatsoever, which seems to be part of your interpretation of what I said. It’s purely descriptive. If anything, what I’ve detailed above makes things worse: it doesn’t do what the article does which breaks the link between bad critical thinking and bad ideology.
Exculpatory? I would have said accusatory.
I would say instead that as long as you can even half-way accept the premise that some philosophies are ill-posed, everything seems to follow.
I get that individuals are culturally situated and cognition is social too, and the author offered quite the romanticized view of science and reasoning, but thinking can be seen at the core of just about anything.
I think both of you have valid theories. And I think both explanations hold for different kinds of pseudoscience/conspiracy theory believers.
There absolutely seem to be people with good critical thinking skills that, because of social circumstances, become extremely skeptical of testimony and authority. Some of the rationalists fit this profile indeed. Since you can't conduct the entire scientific process yourself it matters what kind of people you listen to. My bet is a lot of people who are pseudoscience/conspiracy theory-minded get it from abusive experiences: authoritarian parents, bullying, different kinds of alienation: things that poison their starting assumptions.
But there are also people who fall for pseudoscience simply for a Iack of critical thinking training. Because even if you can't do all the steps of the scientific process yourself, you can learn to sample small bits of other people's reasoning and check for missteps, inconsistencies and so on. You can learn about and be inocculated against common tricks of impostors. This is ideally what a good education would enable you to do.
I agree with the content of what you’re saying, but I think that *what* you’re saying skews in my direction anyway. My point is that te rhetoric of “critical thinking” as presented in the article posted here is characteristic of a particular way of doing philosophical or indeed scientific thinking. The fashion in this case of being educated away from a style of critical thinking which includes serious historical study - be it formal, informal, or just growing up - is deleterious to getting things *right*.
As an aside: I should rephrase my original point about critical thinking within particularly analytic philosophy. Philosophers talk a good game about teaching critical thinking skills, but without reading the history - and this is a common theme - those skills go to waste.
On the continent this lands you with Heidegger and the Black Notebooks, and we know where that went...
Hegel or freud being linguistic clusterfucks doesn't really seem a crazy new position to justify.
On the other hand, the concept of *epistemic conscientiousness* is a nice thing, that I could pretty much see being applied to the Scotts.
As I was arguing [the other day](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/lo6g1g/the_beigeness_or_how_to_kill_people_with_bad/), how can you even refute monstrously long-worded posts, without giving the impression of pedant nit-picking?
And I guess this could be it. Calling their disingenuity out, not by appealing to more or less real "individual facts" (let alone *morality*), but "logical integrity".
Because you can craft as good an illusion of a cogent and accurate train of thought as you want, but if when discussing social groups you sneakily end up talking about a buddhist story (with a completely plundered meaning nonetheless) that's clear evidence of being a wilful swindler. An half-way intelligent person that wants to convey a genuine point wouldn't do that in a thousand lifetimes.
I vaguely said clusterfucks for a reason :)
They are at the opposite extremes of linguistic pillaging, but at the end of the day they are still trying to exploit the form of language to hide underdetermination in substance.
A characteristic trait is a deferential attitude toward some
supposedly great continental European thinker or thinkers, such as G W F
Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger or
Jean-Paul Sartre (who might or might not have themselves been guilty of
pseudophilosophy). Usually, the prose is infused with arcane terminology
and learned jargon, creating an aura of scholarly profundity. We can
call this phenomenon obscurantist pseudophilosophy.
And by refusing to engage with what’s actually going on among those
philosophers above - “(who might or might not have themselves been
guilty of pseudophilosophy)” is clear evidence that the author doesn’t
take any of this seriously enough to do the work - all the author can
provide is a superficial bulverism.
I’m no fan of “they came before therefore they’re wiser” types, but the idea that you can just ignore a century or two’s worth of philosophical thought and strike out on your own to any meaningful effect seems extremely narcissistic to me.
this is like having an auto-mod message that begs the readers please don’t fuck any sheep this time.
A swing and a miss at Foucault, there. Embarrassed for the guy tbh.
[deleted]
Not a good article. Ironic that most of his claims aren’t really substantiated.
And by refusing to engage with what’s actually going on among those philosophers above - “(who might or might not have themselves been guilty of pseudophilosophy)” is clear evidence that the author doesn’t take any of this seriously enough to do the work - all the author can provide is a superficial bulverism.
Can’t teach the internal contradictions of capitalism away.
Foucault can’t catch a break lmao
Haha I saw this and “self indulgent thinking” brought this sub to mind. However the article seems to do poorly by its own standards.