I think Dennett is right about 90% of the published literature in Anglo-American philosophy: that it has a significance comparable the study of the higher order truths of Schmess. And no, it doesn't matter at all. It's just Sturgeon's law and it applies to everything.

Nobody needs to read 100% of what's published, or even need to sample it evenhandedly. But there needs to a broad scope of interests being pursued, and a range of talents being allowed to thrive, in any intellectual or research community, so that promising lines of inquiries aren't foreclosed just because old beards like Dennett have convinced themselves that it's just more boring and pointless Schmess... even if 90% of the time he'd be right about it. Also, how can he judge that no variety of Schmess inquiry can be interesting or valuable just because it won't lead to a cure for cancer?

On first pass I'm inclined to dismiss it as professional solipsism of the type that aging academics always have when they see the new generation interested in something besides what they're interested in. John Searle has recently started making similar comments.

I personally am disappointed that certain philosophical threads have been abandoned. I would very much like for there to be active Husserlian cooperative schools going on, and ideally to participate in them. But they just don't exist; the field moved in another direction. I have a hard time engaging in analytic metaphysics as well, but I don't think I could bring myself to complain about it in a professional capacity if I had it like Dennett does. In other words, I don't confuse my personal disappointment with insight into questions of (in)significance.

Is it just me who thinks that being intrinsically interesting means pretty much that something need not be useful in a utilitarian sense? — Πετροκότσυφας

That's quite right. The most valuable things are the least useful. Useful things possess mainly derivative value. So, when I am asked about the usefulness of philosophy, I usually respond that it's useless, which is why it's so valuable (as are much of theoretical science, literature, music, personal relationships, etc.)

On first pass I'm inclined to dismiss it as professional solipsism of the type that aging academics always have when they see the new generation interested in something besides what they're interested in. John Searle has recently started making similar comments. — The Great Whatever

Yes. This may also be related to what Wittgenstein has identified as the "loss of problems".

"Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called "loss of problems". Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world becomes broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial." Zettel 456

Pot calling kettle black.

Surely it's because his philosophical work concerns things you think are important that you dislike him so much, no?

That's interesting. Maybe not quite what I have in mind, but I do think you can get stuck in this sort of world-wise complacency that empties any field of color and depth. Unfortunately in order to get genuinely excited or perplexed by a problem you have to grapple with it seriously, and from the outside it can just seem like everything is so trivial, and you're so above it all, that with your penetrating insight (every philosopher believes himself to be, I think, a secret genius looking at the rest of his field and the rest of humanity with a smug glassy eye) what people really need to focus on is how bamboozled they've been by their own prejudices and 'dissolution' becomes more fashionable than 'solution.' I see elements of this complacency in late Wittgenstein as well as in Dennett, and they become less interesting as a result. I could say the same about Searle, but IMO Searle has never been a very interesting or insightful philosopher.

The lesson, I guess, is don't get old, metaphorically or literally. The next generation is just going to trample your dead body though, so it doesn't matter. Dennett's opinions don't mater.

It was a gray morning, temperate, when Dennett had finished reading his third published essay. He had so looked forward to this quarter's Nous, but after the first article he knew that the only pen worth making notes with now was filled with red ink.

But even the sick pleasure of grading academics could no longer fulfill.

Sighing he looked above his mantle here the crown of philosophy sat, softly illuminated by a Fresnel placed carefully to highlight the fine etchings without drowning the crown out in contrast.

"Wherefore is thy next bearer, I ponder" sighed the old man. "Is no one serious anymore? Am I doomed to be alone in my wisdom, to take it to the grave as only fops and nincompoops take the reigns?"


:D

It strikes me as goofy. It honestly reminds me of my old "mentor" in the union world -- crusty old bitter bastards will continue to be crusty old bitter bastards, and the best contribution they give to the world is a warning to the rest of us to figure out how to avoid living like that.

Dennett's still a great philosopher and all. But he's also human, and I'd put this one in the 2nd camp at first blush. That scholars today should get off your la. . . I mean, find topics of "interest" just seems like an inane point to make.

Doesn't sound like there's much to disagree there.

However, I'm not familiar with the kind of academic philosophy that he's referring to, so I'd beseech anyone to give an example of something that Dennett would think is irrelevant and self-indulgent, but which you think isn't, and then to explain in plain english why it's not.

I tend to find what little I read of analytic metaphysics more or less incomprehensible to me. I don't say this as a value judgement on my part, I just literally and plainly mean that I don't understand 'what's going on' when I read alot of that work. I imagine that it's a similar feeling to what happens when the uninitiated read some of some of Heidegger or Derrida for the first time. The conceptual anchor points are missing, and the significance of the results are lost on me.

That said, I do find the lack of engagement with science exceedingly puzzling. With the exception of some of the philosophy of mind crowd, it seems to me that analytic metaphysics is almost entirely devoid of any real scientific reflection. I used to admire the analytics for their openness to the sciences, but that seems to have waned in favor of going crazy with formal logic instead. I also often wonder about whether there is any sustained reflection on the nature of logic itself - rather than taking it for granted, as it were. But these are considerations I pose from a position of ignorance, rather than meant as a critique.

I think Dennett exemplifies everything that is the matter with what passes for philosophy nowadays, namely, that he uses the rhetorical and polemical techniques of philosophy to argue that what is traditionally understood as philosophy ought to be abandoned. He has made a career out of arguing that humans are no different in essence to animals or computers and that what they take to be meaningful is a kind of delusion; so why is he accorded any credibility as a philosopher? If his arguments are true, then they mean nothing, because there is nothing for them to mean; if they do mean something, then his arguments are false, because there is meaning after all.

I also often wonder about whether there is any sustained reflection on the nature of logic itself - rather than taking it for granted, as it were. — StreetlightX

That's a weird thing to wonder, since analytic philosophy is positively drenched in reflection on the nature of logic, and always has been.

No, you're right, I need to explain my reservations better. Basically I've always wondered this: how does formal logic deal with individuation? I would appreciate being stopped and corrected at any point here given my relative ignorance, but to the degree that logic deals with already-individualized terms and the relations between them, formal logic seems constitutively unable to deal with questions of how terms become what they are. If, for example, one holds that individuation is a matter of process and that discrete individuals the results of such processes, formal logic always comes 'too late', as it were, to deal with it.

Thus someone like Gilbert Simondon, for example, will write the from the perspective of individuation, "at the level of being prior to any individuation, the law of the excluded middle and the principle of identity do not apply; these principles are only applicable to the being that has already been individuated; they define an impoverished being, separated into environment and individual. … In this sense, classical logic cannot be used to think the individuation, because it requires that the operation of individuation be thought using concepts and relationships between concepts that only apply to the results of the operation of individuation, considered in a partial manner". I'm being somewhat brief here because going into it would require explicating a whole metaphysics, which I'm trying to avoid for brevity's sake!

Also at the back of my mind here is Bergson's critique of the modality of 'the possible' as anything more than a 'back-formation', as it were, where 'the possible' is simply thought of as the double of the actual that simply 'lacks reality' somehow - again the implicit critique is that thinking in terms of 'the possible' is to forego thinking in terms of individuation. Anyway, it's these things that I've had at the back of the mind when I referred to 'the nature of logic'. Basically, the suspicion is that formal logic operates at the level of identity, and can't think in terms of becoming. Again, my ignorance may well mean that logicians have taken these kinds of ideas into account, but I'm kind of going off intuition here - which may be wrong. *In mathematics, the kinds of operations involved in category theory seem promising as a kind of 'logic' that would address these concerns (to the degree that category theory deals solely with relations), but again, I'm not well versed enough to speak authoritatively on these matters.

-

*As an aside, I've recently picked up an interest in the notion of analogy, which deals with the question of the 'more or less', a notion that operates 'below' the level of the 'already individuated'. The basic idea is that the nature of 'being' or whathave you is not 'logical' but analogical. As a further aside, my hunch is that 'continental philosophy' has long been averse to formal logic precisely because kinds of concerns above, but I don't want to dwell on that.

It's ironic he says this, as Wayfarer pointed out, because he's one of the chief exponents of philosophy-as-handmaiden to science and therefore the cause of increasing public opinion (especially among his New Atheist cohort) that philosophy is useless twaddle.

Dennett is quoted as saying...

Philosophy in some quarters has become self-indulgent, clever play in a vacuum that’s not dealing of problems of any intrinsic interest. — jamalrob

Isn't Dennett an eliminative materialist? He thinks the self is fiction. So what is self-indulgence?

Dennett has a point, but we also have to take what he says with a grain of salt. It's a sad day when the only way to advance your career as an academic philosopher is to spend the first 10 years of your career publishing "solutions" to the Gettier problem or its equivalent. That said, Dennett has a well-known distaste for traditional problems in metaphysics and epistemology, problems that some people not committed to Dennett's brand of anti-metaphysical pragmatism find to be of immense value. So "yes", let's broaden the path into academic philosophy, but "no", let's not let Dennett dictate what is and what is not of philosophical value.

According to the article he particularly has in mind metaphysics in analytic philosophy, much of which is, he says, "willfully cut off from any serious issues". — jamalrob

"Philosophy in some quarters has become self-indulgent, clever play in a vacuum that’s not dealing of problems of any intrinsic interest." — Dennett

Seems to me that the average person would say the same thing about philosophy in general. Who the hell cares whether or not God exist, so long as I get to go to heaven?! Who cares whether a world exists beyond our perceptions, let's go have ice cream! Who cares what the nitty-bitty details of ethics are, the important thing is to not be a dick! Who cares about the epistemology of belief, I already know what I believe! "Who cares?!" is the response I get from most people when I tell them the specifics of my interest in philosophy. They really couldn't give less of a shit.

The point is that the average non-philosophy-inclined person, just like Dennett, has an agenda, in which certain topics are more important than others thanks to a prioritization due to the agenda. To the average person, perhaps instead of philosophy, it's politics, or professional sports, or manufacturing the next salvation of humanity, or droning on video games all day, or whatever happens to fill the vacuum of boredom in your life.

Personally, I don't really care whether or not we find yet another exoplanet, or yet another species of irrelevant fish somewhere in the depths of the oceans, or who wins the Superbowl, or whether or not Trump or Clinton gets elected, or if Costco is having a sale on their nachos. They aren't relevant to me.

So in order for Dennett's claim, that much of philosophy is self-indulgent and irrelevant, to make sense, he needs to support the background view which prioritizes other self-indulgent and irrelevant disciplines and pursuits, and show why they are not self-indulgent and irrelevant and why they should be taken as of practically universal importance.

I suspect Dennett thinks much of analytic metaphysics to be like his analogy to chmess - chess but with slightly different rules as to make an entirely new game and entirely different strategies. If this is the case (which I don't think it is), what still is happening is that these professional philosophers are enjoying what they are doing. And, in fact, they are indeed discussing a portion of the world, even if this portion is not as relevant or catches the eye of Dennett.

What I think ought to change is the longevity of these pursuits. For as smart and capable as these professional philosophers are, many of them continue to focus on issues that are, in some sense, beneath them. Let the amateurs and aspiring philosophers work on these fun (legitimate) puzzles and focus on bigger, nobler and radical theories - otherwise it's like a PhD computer scientist working on a Raspberry Pi.

These analytical metaphysical questions: persistence, identity, object-hood, property theories, etc are likely never going to be solved in the way they are currently attempted to be, which is why I think they are better off being studied by undergrads and aspiring professionals as ways of honing their skills and preparing them for the bigger problems.

I think the reason this is not happening, and why professional philosophers continue to discuss these perennial and yet more amateur questions, is that it's easy. For as much as ontology and metaphysics in general has exploded after Quine (regardless of whether or not it is justified), current analytic metaphysics is rather sterile and shallow. There are much, much deeper questions to be tackled that don't require the abandonment of metaphysics entirely. Compare what is usually discussed in analytic metaphysics today with what was discussed in the past or is elsewhere, and you will see just how limited the scope of analytic metaphysics really is.

Additionally, in their attempt to be be independent of the natural sciences, analytic metaphysicians end up isolating themselves from any real contact with the natural sciences. In my opinion, analytic metaphysicians have done this not (just) because they believe metaphysics is indeed a separate branch of inquiry (the a priori study of the possible, pace E.J. Lowe), but because they are scared of what might happen if they put their theories to the test against the sophistication of those of natural science and what the public will think of their discipline. It's what Harman said - philosophy today has a severe inferiority complex. They are scared of questioning the social hegemony of science - something Meillassoux pointed out when he argued that the austere correlationist can and should inform the cosmologist and geologist that what they are studying, the ancestral, never actually happened. (Meillassoux does not actually support this view, though, as he is a realist).

Metaphysical theories rise and fall with the evidence just as natural scientific theories do, and I do believe that many of these analytic metaphysical theories can withstand the so-called threat of scientism and the hegemony of modern physics (but many will not and are only kept alive by this isolation) - however, this will require a bootstrapping relationship between the two, and more importantly will require metaphysicians to step up their game and tackle the bigger questions, the questions that contemporary philosophers of science are trying to do right now and could be helped by those with more sophisticated metaphysical background. Specifically, they should focus more on issues of grounding, perception, mathematical (anti-)realism, speculative cosmology and especially causality and the nature of Being itself (i.e. what does "physical" actually mean?) - many of these pop-scientists could learn a thing or two from what these metaphysicians have to say. Additionally, the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, although claimed to have been dissolved, continues to exist and you get a severe lack of communication between the two when much could be gained if there was.

Instead of removing/rejecting metaphysics, metaphysics needs to be improved and established as an important and relevant discipline to anyone who has an interest in understanding how the world works.

The point is that the average non-philosophy-inclined person, just like Dennett, has an agenda, in which certain topics are more important than others thanks to a prioritization due to the agenda. — darthbarracuda

If you're saying what I think you're saying, I agree with this observation of Dennett but would say it comes out in a different way. Take his free will debate with Sam Harris. Dennett has maintained that he is arguing for a "free will worth wanting", which, if you are psychologising (a practice not always wrong), is quite revealing. What I got from this debate was that Dennetts motivation for arguing for free will is that he doesn't want the argument against it to win, so we don't lose a 'useful fiction' - remember his Big Think video "stop telling people they don't have free will" (because they act more irresponsibly when they believe it). He also maintains how the free will problem is not actually about whether we have free will at all (silly!), but, he insists, it is, or should be, in his mind, about whether we have moral responsibility. He seems to want to convince people, and himself, that free will exists only so we can sustain certain 'truths' necessary to prevent people from acting irresponsibly, or to put it philosophically, to prevent them from acting on what he perceives to be the truth of a kind of nihilism (hard determinism). He wants free will because a truth otherwise will simply not do.

[edit] changed free will worth having to wanting, which makes my case even clearer.

Yes, and in general the preoccupation with social progress and exploration for the sake of exploration.

In other words, I don't confuse my personal disappointment with insight into questions of (in)significance. — The Great Whatever

Perfect.

Basically I've always wondered this: how does formal logic deal with individuation? I would appreciate being stopped and corrected at any point here given my relative ignorance, but to the degree that logic deals with already-individualized terms and the relations between them — StreetlightX

What do you mean by a term? I ask because the word has a technical meaning in logic, a well-formed string with a denotation (usually of an individual, but it could also be of something else, like a property). If this is what you mean, then terms in logic don't have to be already individuated: they can be compositionally built up from parts, and certainly can come to be organically from how the language's syntax is structured.

So for example if you have a language with a iota operator, this is going to result in an individual when combined with an open formula, to pick out the individual that satisfies that formula. This can have lots of complicated interactions with your logic: you pick out an individual, and not a priori, but rather based on a property it has, and this property might additionally then be sensitive to all sorts of things, like the world parameter in modal logic, which would result in the individual changing depending on the modal context in which it occurs. So there is a lot of room for play in how individuals get picked out of a domain.

Or, if you mean not the terms themselves but the individuals they denote, there's all sorts of apparatuses that do interesting things with individuals rather than just taking them for granted. For example, you have traditional modal logic which separates the domain from possible worlds, capturing the notion that individuals persist across possibilities and that we can talk about the 'same' thing in different situations: but Lewisian counterpart theory will instead say that individuals don't persist in this way, but are rather tied to some single logical possibility or world, and that modal claims about individuals hold in virtue of one possible individual relating to another via a counterpart relation. And more generally the notion of variable domains plays with the idea that what a thing is depends on which possibility is manifested, with individuals being tied more tightly to possible worlds.

There's also apparatuses for trying to capture the way in which the actually existent and the non-existent differ by separating differing levels of the domain, as in free logic, and creating different rules of inference for how individuals behave in the truth conditions of formulas based on which domain they belong to.

There's also tools for dealing with mereology and subpart relations, and for dealing with the complexity of individuals combined from atomic parts (like 'Mary and John'), collective individuals like teams, the way properties either distribute over them atomically, or can apply collectively (as in, 'the crowd split', twhich doesn't mean each individual in the crowd split). There is logic for temporal stages of single individuals and how they persist over time, to model different ways of viewing ordinary individuals, as four-dimensional time worms, or single time-slices, or themselves stages of larger individuals, etc.

But the fundamental problem I think is that you are treating logic as if it were metaphysics. Whether or not logic is metaphysically insightful, and I think it almost always is, it is first and foremost a formal system that combines a syntax with an interpretation procedure. Logics in of themselves are just mathematical objects of a certain sort -- it's a separate question whether they apply to certain metaphysical issues or not. Analytic philosophers I think build logics as the result of certain expressive needs, and these logics can in turn tell us a lot about metaphysical intuitions, including ones about individuation, by formally representing certain relations about statements involving individuals in their truth conditions. This can be very valuable, as philosophizing in the absence of formality gives discussion on complex matters a fuzzy sort of air that becomes difficult to resolve or sometimes even think about in any interesting way.

Also at the back of my mind here is Bergson's critique of the modality of 'the possible' as anything more than a 'back-formation', as it were, where 'the possible' is simply thought of as the double of the actual that simply 'lacks reality' somehow - again the implicit critique is that thinking in terms of 'the possible' is to forego thinking in terms of individuation. — StreetlightX

Modal logic arose out of a desire to capture entailment relations to claims about possibility and necessity, such as the old medieval dictum that must implies can, the Kantian dictum that ought implies can, and so on. In that respect it's remarkably revealing, and different modal systems can be constructed to talk about different sorts of modality. The tack seems to be to develop actual tools for talking in modal terms, rather than to abstractly speculate on notions of the possible, and this is very fruitful. Many discussions about modality are confused because they don't differentiate between modal systems, don't understand the difference between epistemic and deontic modality, and so on. Modal logic itself cannot tell us about the nature of possibility, but again, a logic is a mathematical object, not a metaphysical thesis.

As a further aside, my hunch is that 'continental philosophy' has long been averse to formal logic precisely because kinds of concerns above, but I don't want to dwell on that. — StreetlightX

I think historically speaking this has certainly been a reason given by continental philosophers themselves. But I think a lot of the aversion comes from a more mundane source, which is that continental philosophers just don't get taught it. That is a situation that I think at least Husserl would not be happy about.

I tend to find what little I read of analytic metaphysics more or less incomprehensible to me. I don't say this as a value judgement on my part, I just literally and plainly mean that I don't understand 'what's going on' when I read alot of that work. I imagine that it's a similar feeling to what happens when the uninitiated read some of some of Heidegger or Derrida for the first time. The conceptual anchor points are missing, and the significance of the results are lost on me. — StreetlightX

Ever since the legendary epic smack-down between Quine and Carnap, in which Quine objectively won and thus rescued metaphysics by placing it on the same level of meaningful-ness as the natural sciences, realist metaphysicians have taken to rehabilitating the Aristotelian being qua being metaphysics as first philosophy.

The above story is a silly oversimplification that is actually more incorrect than correct, but it continues to be used as a justification for this kind of metaphysics. Additionally, the realists are those who are most active in metaphysics and are thus the most vocal, and yet they are also the minority, as Chalmers argues that there is a silent majority looking on skeptically as the realists have their fun.

Thus someone like Gilbert Simondon, for example, will write the from the perspective of individuation, "at the level of being prior to any individuation, the law of the excluded middle and the principle of identity do not apply; these principles are only applicable to the being that has already been individuated; they define an impoverished being, separated into environment and individual. … — StreetlightX

This is important. Imagine how actually useful modern metaphysics would be if it were generally focused on the central question of individuation rather than being - dynamical development rather than static existence.

Many discussions about modality are confused because they don't differentiate between modal systems, don't understand the difference between epistemic and deontic modality, and so on. Modal logic itself cannot tell us about the nature of possibility, but again, a logic is a mathematical object, not a metaphysical thesis. — The Great Whatever

Sorry but modal logic bypasses the essential issue of individuation. It treats possibility as countable variety and not indeterminate potential, from the get-go.

This is largely due to the very nature of maths of course - being the science of the already countable. Give a man a hammer, etc.

A complaint I've heard from academic philosophers is that the field is vicious, with everyone cutting each other down, criticizing one another for their errors and pointless remarks. This remark by Dennett seems consistent with that, basically arguing that everyone is pretty much incompetent so they are forced into useless and meaningless pursuits.

My guess is that the field is producing very capable philosophers. It's hyper competitive and I'd expect that there are extremely good philosophers who can't find work so they move on to something else, not that there are a bunch of hacks finding work because of too little talent.

Sorry but modal logic bypasses the essential issue of individuation. It treats possibility as countable variety and not indeterminate potential, from the get-go. — apokrisis

I agree; modal logic is a narrow formalized conception of logic. All disciplines, even poetry, have their own logics, and there is a logic of individuation too, of course.

Regarding Dennett's remarks; the question they seem to beg are:
What does it mean to be philosophically significant?. Does the importance of philosophy consist in showing how to live well or how to think well, and if the latter, then how to think well in what modality? Science, logic, sociology, psychology, the arts; which disciplines would help us best to live well, or doesn't it matter, because philosophical significance is simply a function of what is interesting? If so, interesting to who? Is any system of thought interesting in itself or only insofar as it contributes to some practical purpose?

Questions about individuation and flourishing have an obvious logical basis in common wouldn't you say? And flourishing is a pretty practical issue too. To know what it is would be to know how to do it.

Yes, I certainly agree with all of that. That said, I think even formal logic has its place if it helps people to be able to think better; kind of a form of mental calisthenics. But then there is also the further question of what content, in terms of the kinds of enrichment I don't believe formal logic can itself provide, that the formally improved thinking should apply itself to. Is that just a matter for each individual, or should one guide one's thinking into certain avenues as opposed to others (science as opposed to mysticism, for example, but there are others of course), to develop a body of inter-subjectively justifiable content against which to measure the value of one's own thoughts? I think we agree on many points, but I suspect that this one point may be precisely what differentiates our two ways of thinking.

Honestly, this criticism is too vague to process. You'd have to say what you mean.

like the Chesire cat's grin, perhaps.