From my current position, it looks like “all roads lead to metaphilosophy” (i.e., one would end up here starting with an interest in any nontrivial problem that incentivizes asking meta questions) and yet there’s almost nobody here with me. What gives?
Facile response: I think lots of people (maybe a few hundred a year?) take this path, and end up becoming philosophy grad students like I did. As you said, the obvious next step for many domains of intellectual inquiry is to go meta / seek foundations / etc., and that leads you into increasingly foundational increasingly philosophical questions until you decide you’ll never able to answer all the questions but maybe at least you can get some good publications in prestigious journals like Analysis and Phil Studies, and contribute to humanity’s understanding of some sub-field.
Do you think part of it might be that even people with graduate philosophy educations are too prone to being wedded to their own ideas, or don’t like to poke holes at them as much as they should? Because part of what contributes to my wanting to go more meta is being dissatisfied with my own object-level solutions and finding more and more open problems that I don’t know how to solve. I haven’t read much academic philosophy literature, but did read some anthropic reasoning and decision theory literature earlier, and the impression I got is that most of the authors weren’t trying that hard to poke holes in their own ideas.
Yep that’s probably part of it. Standard human epistemic vices. Also maybe publish-or-perish has something to do with it? idk. I definitely noticed incentives to double-down / be dogmatic in order to seem impressive on the job market. Oh also, iirc one professor had a cynical theory that if you find an interesting flaw in your own theory/argument, you shouldn’t mention it in your paper, because then the reviewers will independently notice the flaw and think ‘aha, this paper has an interesting flaw, if it gets published I could easily and quickly write my own paper pointing out the flaw’ and then they’ll be more inclined to recommend publication. It’s also a great way to get citations.
Note also that I said “a few hundred a year” not “ten thousand a year” which is roughly how many people become philosophy grad students. I was more selective because in my experience most philosophy grad students don’t have as much… epistemic ambition? as you or me. Sorta like the Hamming Question thing—some, but definitely a minority, of grad students can say “I am working on it actually, here’s my current plan...” to the question “what’s the most important problem in your field and why aren’t you working on it?” (to be clear epistemic ambition is a spectrum not a binary)
Facile response: I think lots of people (maybe a few hundred a year?) take this path, and end up becoming philosophy grad students like I did. As you said, the obvious next step for many domains of intellectual inquiry is to go meta / seek foundations / etc., and that leads you into increasingly foundational increasingly philosophical questions until you decide you’ll never able to answer all the questions but maybe at least you can get some good publications in prestigious journals like Analysis and Phil Studies, and contribute to humanity’s understanding of some sub-field.
Do you think part of it might be that even people with graduate philosophy educations are too prone to being wedded to their own ideas, or don’t like to poke holes at them as much as they should? Because part of what contributes to my wanting to go more meta is being dissatisfied with my own object-level solutions and finding more and more open problems that I don’t know how to solve. I haven’t read much academic philosophy literature, but did read some anthropic reasoning and decision theory literature earlier, and the impression I got is that most of the authors weren’t trying that hard to poke holes in their own ideas.
Yep that’s probably part of it. Standard human epistemic vices. Also maybe publish-or-perish has something to do with it? idk. I definitely noticed incentives to double-down / be dogmatic in order to seem impressive on the job market. Oh also, iirc one professor had a cynical theory that if you find an interesting flaw in your own theory/argument, you shouldn’t mention it in your paper, because then the reviewers will independently notice the flaw and think ‘aha, this paper has an interesting flaw, if it gets published I could easily and quickly write my own paper pointing out the flaw’ and then they’ll be more inclined to recommend publication. It’s also a great way to get citations.
Note also that I said “a few hundred a year” not “ten thousand a year” which is roughly how many people become philosophy grad students. I was more selective because in my experience most philosophy grad students don’t have as much… epistemic ambition? as you or me. Sorta like the Hamming Question thing—some, but definitely a minority, of grad students can say “I am working on it actually, here’s my current plan...” to the question “what’s the most important problem in your field and why aren’t you working on it?” (to be clear epistemic ambition is a spectrum not a binary)