"But let us never forget, either, as all conventional history of philosophy conspires to make us forget, what the 'great thinkers' really are: proper objects, indeed, of pity, but even more, of horror."
David Stove's "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts" is a critique of philosophy that I can only call epic.
The astute reader will of course find themselves objecting to Stove's notion that we should be catologuing every possible way to do philosophy wrong. It's not like there's some originally pure mode of thought, being tainted by only a small library of poisons. It's just that there are exponentially more possible crazy thoughts than sane thoughts, c.f. entropy.
But Stove's list of 39 different classic crazinesses applied to the number three is absolute pure epic gold. (Scroll down about halfway through if you want to jump there directly.)
I especially like #8: "There is an integer between two and four, but it is not three, and its true name and nature are not to be revealed."
Stove himself concludes that his "nosology" is probably not worth compiling. I think he's actually just using it to make the same point you've made by mentioning entropy. He considers it in order to justify rejecting it.
He then does something similar with the possibility of figuring out individual cases, rejecting it because the findings won't be generalizable.
Then he gets to what seems like his main point: getting rid of almost all philosophy because it's crazy.
(I thought the piece as whole was much funnier than the list. It's a tongue-in-cheek version of bending over backwards to avoid accusations of dismissing something crazy out of hand.)
Possibly Stove intended this only as an extended Take That to philosophers he dislikes; but it seems to me that he is a bit too dismissive of his own project, the 'nosology'. Without wanting a Fully General Counterargument, I think it might be useful to have a set of, say, five or six different classes of erroneous statements; and I also think Stove is too eager to insist on the singularity of each of his examples. For example, he states that the objection "not verifiable" cannot be applied to his example 8; I don't see why not. Anything whose &q... (read more)
I have to say that the positivist critique that "it's all meaningless" is seductive and it may well be correct - it feels like the words have meaning, but when you try to parse the sentence the feeling quickly disappears.
The problem is, this isn't very useful for talking about specific errors and how to avoid them. Many of the statements on that list looked rather meaningless to me, but to someone who believes in one of these statements, there are some underlying beliefs or confusions that need to be addressed before the "meaningless critique" will have any effect. At this point, pointing out the meaninglessness of their pet statement becomes entirely superfluous.
The history of philosophy can't really have been one of thousands of years of nearly unrelenting adoration of stupidity. What probably happened is that philosophers became popular only if their ideas were simple enough and appealing enough. There is a bandpass filter on philosophy, and it has both a low and a high cutoff.
We propagate knowledge by collective judgements about it. In fields where we can't eliminate bad ideas by experiment, both the very worst and the very best ideas must be rejected. The requirement that an influential philosopher appeal ... (read more)
While I mostly agree with the article, I don't think the Foucalt example given at the start is entirely bad - it just seems like a long-winded warning against confusing the map with the territory (or more specifically against trying to hammer a square territory into a pre-conceived round map).
Asking the big question!
I often see statements like that. "This couldn't possibly be the case", "that can't really happen", etc.
The first question we should ask ourselves when we see such statements: Why?
Usually, the person speaking is dismissing possibilities and potentialities out of hand for one of a variety of reasons, rather than having a valid and justifiable reason for discarding the contingency.
And even when there are good reason... (read more)
That's the same argument against rationalist winning that has been seen many times on LW. However, it is based on hopelessness and fear, rather than on knowledge... (read more)
I've long loved this piece, but today would file most of its examples simply under "getting carried away".
Items on the list that reminded me of Eliezer's writings: #19, #22, #32, #35. Indictment not intended.
I don't like this paper. It's wholly scathing for no reason other than to justify ignoring all of philosophy. Some philosophy is valuable and some is not, and of his 40 statements about three, I'd say 6 of them are claims I would take seriously and would hear arguments for, were I interested in the nature of three.
Generally, continental philosophy is trash, but I wouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Your link is now broken. Is there some other web archive of the chapter? I've saved a copy from the google cache, in case it matters to anyone.
does #23 have a quick explanation or does it require a serious delve into abstract math?
Regarding most of the lengthy examples of "philosophy" given by Stove:
Reading a text takes time, time can be spent acquiring utilions. Hence reading a text is only worth if the expected utilion win due to additional knowledge is grater than the expected utilions when using the time differently. This approach kills most of his examples dead in their tracks for me. This also implies positivism, if a text does not either generate utilions directly, i.e. fun reading fiction, then it needs to provide knowledge (in form of testable statements about the... (read more)
Interesting, but too verbose.
The author is clearly not aware of the value of the K.I.S.S. principle, or Ockhams razor, in this context.
David Stove's "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts" is a critique of philosophy that I can only call TL;DR.