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Question Why is Philosophy research considered less respectable study than researches in the empirical sciences?

Accepted:
October 8, 2008

Comments

I can think of two reasons why you might have come across this attitude. The first is simply a form of parochialism: the members of a specific disciplinary community may well believe that their forms and subjects of inquiry are the best, the most important, the most interesting, etc. This is partly due to self-selection: why work so hard and for so long to gain the credentials necessary to become a member of a specialized community if you do not already value what that community does? There are undoubtedly other sociological factors in play too -- for example, gaining prestige within a community like this may require single-minded ambition that rewards narrow parochialism, retaining motivation to work hard to remain with such a community may require continuing to value that communities mode of inquiry, etc.

(I also note that this sort of parochialism occurs within academic sub-communities, and so there are philosophical sub-communities who view their particular sub-field as more respectable than others. This sort of tribalism is rife in academia, including of course within the various sub-fields of the empirical sciences. See John Dupre's The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science for some interesting philosophical reflections on that last point.)

Another set of issues that may lead some to view philosophy as less than completely respectable relate to the nature of the discipline. Consider, for example, that the problems that philosophy are difficult to understand in the first place, the methods of philosophical inquiry are difficult to understand, the results of philosophical inquiry rarely or never lead to consensus, etc. Factors like these can lead to a dismissive assessment of philosophy as irrelevant, insignificant, or worse -- witness, for example, Marx's quip "“Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex."

I forgot to add: There is a long and extremely interesting account of why scientific inquiry has become so valued in our culture -- an important source the thought that empirical inquiry is more respectable than philosophical inquiry is a more general attitude that treats the fruits and methods of scientific inquiry as among the most respectable forms of inquiry full stop.

So, for example, this attitude helps to explain the righteous indignation of many liberals (and, indeed, others) towards politicians who seemingly ignore the results of scientific inquiry. Likewise, according to one conventional theory the rise in the esteem of science is so important in our culture that it has "pushed out" or "subtracted away" important religious practices and attitudes and so has led to a change and diminution of religion.

Scholars who work in the history of ideas may be best equipped to explain the rise in the esteem of science over the last centuries, but one philosopher who does very interesting work in this is Charles Taylor. In his A Secular Age, Taylor constructs a fascinating and extremely rich narrative that addresses this and many related changes -- and, notably, he does no while utterly rejecting the standard "subtraction account" according to which rise in the esteem of scientific inquiry inevitably leads to the diminution of religion.

Question Why is Philosophy research considered less respectable study than researches in the empirical sciences? Accepted:October 8, 2008

Question Why is Philosophy research considered less respectable study than researches in the empirical sciences?

Accepted:
October 8, 2008