[FOM] "Progress" in philosophy

[Harvey Friedman]

On 3/9/07 12:02 PM, "Neil Tennant" <neilt at mercutio.cohums.ohio-state.edu>
wrote:

> To continue in the same depressing vein: you should not omit, either, to
> note that one standard technique for ensuring one's longevity in
> philosophical citations, after some initial original work, is to become an
> obscurantist, so that an industry can develop, hopefully within your own
> lifetime, of neophytes' attempts to interpret what you really might have
> meant by your unclear (hence, surely, profound?) prose.
> 

Do you construe Wittgenstein as an example of this?

I have been reading the various FOM postings on this topic (the subject
line), and I still feel that, objectively speaking (smile), the view of
philosophy that I take in my

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2007-March/011421.html

and also the related view of Einstein that Steel quoted in his

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2007-March/011419.html

are by far the most attractive. Specifically, philosophy should - and, in
fact is - judged by the general intellectual community in terms of what use
is made of the associated philosophical thinking in the emergence of, the
development of, the refinement of, the clarification of, and the exposition
of, those great intellectual structures which constitute our vehicles for
systematic knowledge. Thus on this view, philosophy is properly viewed as a
way of thinking, rather than a subject.

I found the Einstein quote so interesting and remarkable, that I repeat it
here:

EINSTEIN

The reciprocal relationship of epistemology and science is of noteworthy
kind. They are dependent upon each other. Epistemology without contact
with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is --
insofar as it is thinkable at all -- primitive and muddled. However, no
sooner has the epistemologist, who is seeking a clear system, fought his
way through to such a system, than he is inclined to interpret the
thought-content of science in the sense of his system and to reject
whatever does not fit into his system. The scientist, however, cannot
afford to carry his striving for epistemological systematic that far.
He accepts gratefully the epistemological conceptual analysis; but the
external conditions, which are set for him by the facts of experience, do
not permit him to let himself be too much restricted in the construction
of his conceptual world by the adherence to an epistemological system. He
therefore must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of
unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as realist insofar as he seeks to
describe a world independent of the acts of perception; as idealist
insofar as he looks upon the concepts and theories as free inventions of
the human spirit (not logically derivable from what is empirically given);
as positivist insofar as he considers his concepts and theories justified
only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of
relations among sensory experiences. He may even appear as Platonist or
Pythagorean insofar as he considers the viewpoint of logical simplicity as
an indispensible and effective tool of his research.

Harvey Friedman