Why Philosophy Is in Such a Dismal State

Philosophy wants to tell us things about the real world. Philosophers sometimes pretend otherwise, posturing as though they worked in the realm of pure logic like mathematicians. They do not, because their subjects are morals, life, happiness, the good state, and language — every one of them a practical matter concerning the world we live in. Even language is ultimately a tool for use in that world.

And that combination is fatal. If your conclusions are meant to apply to reality, you must handle real-world subject matter. But in the real world we know almost nothing with certainty. So you cannot deploy logic with the rigour available in mathematics, because your premises will not bear the weight.

The Kalām as a Worked Example

Take the cosmological argument's first premise: everything that begins to exist has a cause.

What is it to begin to exist? When does a person begin? At the first memories, at two or three? At birth? At conception? If the world is deterministic in the relevant sense, was the child's existence settled long before any of these?

These are genuinely hard questions. Sweeping them aside to assert the premise is not philosophy; it is haste dressed as rigour.

And it gets worse, because the terms are contested in the sciences that actually study them. Causality is an open question in physics — what it means, whether it is fundamental, how it survives relativity. Existence likewise: does an electron exist? It is a wave function, spread across space, with no definite location until measured. Can a thing exist without a location? That is a real question, and it belongs to physicists. And randomness: does everything have a cause? Not according to quantum mechanics, where some events appear to be uncaused full stop.

Philosophers were allowed to hold these questions only because there was no physics yet. There is now, and they should clear the field.

The Contrast With Mathematics

Mathematics is rigorous precisely because it is explicitly theoretical. It makes no claim that its conclusions apply to the world; that they so often do is a happy accident that later required explanation.

Because it never has to touch reality, its premises can be stipulated exactly, and deduction from exact premises is reliable. Philosophy wants the rigour of mathematics and the relevance of science, and the two requirements are in direct conflict. The moment your premises describe the world, they inherit the world's uncertainty, and long chains of deduction from uncertain premises accumulate error rather than truth.

The Empiricism That Is Not Practised

Here is what I find hardest to forgive. Philosophers avoid empiricism while maintaining an entire branch called empiricism.

They try to deduce the world from the armchair. That is the single most unscientific posture available, and the whole content of the scientific revolution was the discovery that the armchair is worthless — that the phenomenon is everything and the reasoning about it comes second. Philosophy has had four hundred years to absorb this and has not.

A Survey Worth Writing

Somebody should go through the canon and set out, case by case, where each of them was wrong.

Plato's Republic is a design for an authoritarian state, and its arguments for that design do not survive contact with anything we have since learned about how people behave in groups. The atomists were catastrophically wrong about atoms — modern particles are wave functions, smaller by many orders of magnitude than anything they imagined, and not remotely the indivisible little balls of the theory. Kant's categorical imperative is a pre-scientific attempt at a question that game theory answers properly, and it gets the structure backwards.

The Comparison That Settles It

Here is the sentence I keep coming back to.

A 2×2 payoff matrix, from the first lesson of game theory, teaches you more about how the world actually works than the collected works of Kant on morals.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. The payoff matrix explains why cooperation is unstable, why individually rational choices produce collectively terrible outcomes, why punishment mechanisms evolve, and why a rule that would be excellent if universally followed is not a rule anyone will follow. It is four numbers, and it does real explanatory work.

Kant produced a system of enormous sophistication that gets the underlying structure wrong. Sophistication is not the scarce resource. Contact with the subject is.