I like your point about Socratic humility, that good Philosophers know the limits of their knowledge, so know when to refrain from weighing in. I can't help but wonder if you're strawmanning Continental Phil, though. The worst of it probably fits your description well, and I agree it's not as focused, even at its best, on rigorous pursuit of the Argument. Perhaps that means it's not Philosophy, by your def. Whatever "it" is, it can be awesome. For example, Sartre's Saint Genet may be the most incisive psychological portrait of an artist I can think of. That, I agree, doesn't sound like Philosophy. But I think Sartre's training in Phil helps him see to the essence of his subject.
Deleuze & Guattari (the ultimate continentals) wrote a book called "What is Philosophy?"
Their answer is "philosophy is the construction of concepts". Just building and then elaborating consequences within some abstract system. There is some demand for internal consistency, but it's kind of loose. Like a non-rigorous version of pure math.
(There is a decent though still annoyingly continental description of this book on the Deleuze SEP page.)
I think this perspective makes continental phil a lot less irritating. They're just putting together systems of abstract ideas, and maybe these systems are useful for you to think with if you would like to.
The problem is Deleuze & Guattari are really good at doing this, but everyone else has to publish too, so they have a lot of bad imitators.
A legitimate philosopher's initial response to a strong counterexample shouldn't be to invoke a new term. Here's Curtis Yarvin, opposing a Bayesian analysis of pandemic risk by Scott Alexander.
"And a murder, to those of us not besotted with statistics, is a totally different thing from an accident."
But wait, aren't actions like drunk driving, or shooting bullets randomly into the air in a dense city, extremely wrong, despite any eventual harm still being accidental?
Yarvin in the *very next paragraph*: "Covid was not murder per se. Murder requires intent. No one was trying to kill millions of people. It was criminally negligent homicide—manslaughter. Still a felony, I’m afraid."
So, an accident which is very wrong by virtue of the Bayesian risk to reward ratio being well outside an acceptable range. A clear counterexample. But no worries! Yarvin's got a different term! It's not an "accident" because we don't call it an "accident".
I suspect that for most people the biggest problem is just a complete unwillingness to pay close attention to the argument that’s actually in front of them. It’s much easier to just press “play” on some prerecorded rant about a tangentially related topic, so that’s what people tend to do.
The Philosophy Department at UW-Milwaukee used to put at the beginning of its course offering book each semester, "Philosophy is unique in the curriculum in that it cannot be taught." Instead, we must be exposed to it and learn by imitation. So while logic is part of the Philosophy Department and can be taught, the ability to recognize true premises to apply that logic to is only learned by practice.
I think one helpful thing that philosophers do is they'll be more conscious of the way they're using a concept, especially abstract nouns (e.g. freedom, equality, racism). And this helps them get past semantic psuedo-debates where people just talk past each other.
Another difference between philosophers and ordinary people is that philosophers will often have more "layers" to their reasoning. I've heard in improv comedy, there's a rule of "2 whys": If you set up a scene, you'll sometimes have to justify it to make it more believable to an audience. And occasionally you'll have to justify your justification. But after that, the audience doesn't really care. I think a similar thing applies to many philosophical topics. Philosophers can continue to support their views beyond a superficial level.
Another difference is that philosophers recognize that anecdotes typically aren't good evidence. It sounds obvious when made explicit, but in practice, it seems exceedingly common for ordinary people to use anecdotes as arguments.
Ultimately, I think a big reason why I tend to sound like a big dum-dum/lunatic/silly person in the comments here is because I value the usefulness of an argument much higher than its truthfulness - which once again will be very obviously false to you. But as a sociologist, that is exactly what allows me to ultimately say something non-trivial about the cause of the Great Recession that, even if that claim is impossible to prove or disprove, still provides something that can successfully tie on to other useful arguments.
While I ultimately am a God-awful philosopher (or better, none at all), I often catch myself wishing that not only US academia, but the country as a whole, would take modern sociology seriously enough to at least acknowledge that it exists, instead of treating problems that have been solved 200 years ago as interesting and thought-provoking open-ended questions.
"Does God exist" is not one of those questions, but many aspects of our world that hinge on this (morality and religion, for starters), modern sociology as lots of things to say about, and these things are really really useful. Newtonian mechanics are clearly false, and yet they are useful enough to build the cathedral of St Peter. They are not useful enough to fly to the moon, but our modern theory of gravity is - in fact, it's useful for basically everything we want to do, despite also being clearly false.
Bemoan as much as you want that children are not taught to rigorously argue in school, there's lots of usefulness in that argument. I can say that despite being unsure whether it's true. For all I know, everything I ever said in my life is complete crap. But it got me places, and it got people around me to places (even if it's not the moon).
I like your point about Socratic humility, that good Philosophers know the limits of their knowledge, so know when to refrain from weighing in. I can't help but wonder if you're strawmanning Continental Phil, though. The worst of it probably fits your description well, and I agree it's not as focused, even at its best, on rigorous pursuit of the Argument. Perhaps that means it's not Philosophy, by your def. Whatever "it" is, it can be awesome. For example, Sartre's Saint Genet may be the most incisive psychological portrait of an artist I can think of. That, I agree, doesn't sound like Philosophy. But I think Sartre's training in Phil helps him see to the essence of his subject.
Deleuze & Guattari (the ultimate continentals) wrote a book called "What is Philosophy?"
Their answer is "philosophy is the construction of concepts". Just building and then elaborating consequences within some abstract system. There is some demand for internal consistency, but it's kind of loose. Like a non-rigorous version of pure math.
(There is a decent though still annoyingly continental description of this book on the Deleuze SEP page.)
I think this perspective makes continental phil a lot less irritating. They're just putting together systems of abstract ideas, and maybe these systems are useful for you to think with if you would like to.
The problem is Deleuze & Guattari are really good at doing this, but everyone else has to publish too, so they have a lot of bad imitators.
A legitimate philosopher's initial response to a strong counterexample shouldn't be to invoke a new term. Here's Curtis Yarvin, opposing a Bayesian analysis of pandemic risk by Scott Alexander.
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/you-will-probably-die-of-a-cold
"And a murder, to those of us not besotted with statistics, is a totally different thing from an accident."
But wait, aren't actions like drunk driving, or shooting bullets randomly into the air in a dense city, extremely wrong, despite any eventual harm still being accidental?
Yarvin in the *very next paragraph*: "Covid was not murder per se. Murder requires intent. No one was trying to kill millions of people. It was criminally negligent homicide—manslaughter. Still a felony, I’m afraid."
So, an accident which is very wrong by virtue of the Bayesian risk to reward ratio being well outside an acceptable range. A clear counterexample. But no worries! Yarvin's got a different term! It's not an "accident" because we don't call it an "accident".
I suspect that for most people the biggest problem is just a complete unwillingness to pay close attention to the argument that’s actually in front of them. It’s much easier to just press “play” on some prerecorded rant about a tangentially related topic, so that’s what people tend to do.
My advice is to immediately watch -- nay, memorize -- this video ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD5_2p-vUjs
The Philosophy Department at UW-Milwaukee used to put at the beginning of its course offering book each semester, "Philosophy is unique in the curriculum in that it cannot be taught." Instead, we must be exposed to it and learn by imitation. So while logic is part of the Philosophy Department and can be taught, the ability to recognize true premises to apply that logic to is only learned by practice.
I think one helpful thing that philosophers do is they'll be more conscious of the way they're using a concept, especially abstract nouns (e.g. freedom, equality, racism). And this helps them get past semantic psuedo-debates where people just talk past each other.
Another difference between philosophers and ordinary people is that philosophers will often have more "layers" to their reasoning. I've heard in improv comedy, there's a rule of "2 whys": If you set up a scene, you'll sometimes have to justify it to make it more believable to an audience. And occasionally you'll have to justify your justification. But after that, the audience doesn't really care. I think a similar thing applies to many philosophical topics. Philosophers can continue to support their views beyond a superficial level.
Another difference is that philosophers recognize that anecdotes typically aren't good evidence. It sounds obvious when made explicit, but in practice, it seems exceedingly common for ordinary people to use anecdotes as arguments.
Ultimately, I think a big reason why I tend to sound like a big dum-dum/lunatic/silly person in the comments here is because I value the usefulness of an argument much higher than its truthfulness - which once again will be very obviously false to you. But as a sociologist, that is exactly what allows me to ultimately say something non-trivial about the cause of the Great Recession that, even if that claim is impossible to prove or disprove, still provides something that can successfully tie on to other useful arguments.
While I ultimately am a God-awful philosopher (or better, none at all), I often catch myself wishing that not only US academia, but the country as a whole, would take modern sociology seriously enough to at least acknowledge that it exists, instead of treating problems that have been solved 200 years ago as interesting and thought-provoking open-ended questions.
"Does God exist" is not one of those questions, but many aspects of our world that hinge on this (morality and religion, for starters), modern sociology as lots of things to say about, and these things are really really useful. Newtonian mechanics are clearly false, and yet they are useful enough to build the cathedral of St Peter. They are not useful enough to fly to the moon, but our modern theory of gravity is - in fact, it's useful for basically everything we want to do, despite also being clearly false.
Bemoan as much as you want that children are not taught to rigorously argue in school, there's lots of usefulness in that argument. I can say that despite being unsure whether it's true. For all I know, everything I ever said in my life is complete crap. But it got me places, and it got people around me to places (even if it's not the moon).
Basically, you’re just calling non philosophers stupid
I don't know if I'm quite saying that.