Perhaps individual philosophers honestly seek answers, but academic philosophy as an institution has evolved to not really seek answers. That is, mechanisms that promote the spread of true ideas have atrophied or were never built, while mechanisms to promote diversity of positions have proliferated, without anyone consciously wanting these things to happen.
(This is just a guess as I’m not really familiar with the inner workings of academia.)
A priori it seems like a good guess. In any academic discipline, at the thesis level and above, originality is necessary for your work to be perceived as having any value, But most complicated questions with one true answer have a thousand false answers. Once people have beaten you to the true answer, it’s going to be easier to be original if you go for one of the false ones, so long as you’re in a discipline where verifying truth or falsehood is harder than obscuring it.
I suspect a good bellwether for identifying such disciplines is the way they treat repetition of existing truths. A lemma in a math paper might be “obvious”, a paper with too many obvious lemmas might be “too verbose”, but there’s never any suggestion that the lemmas are “trite” or that the reviewers would prefer to read their converses instead.
Then what I’m wondering is what these mechanisms are, how they caught on, and how we can identify them in philosophy in other disciplines so we can be on guard.
I think the main mechanisms are probably journals that publish only original ideas, and hiring based on number of publications. These mechanisms have to be counteracted by equally strong mechanisms to spread truth and suppress untruth, but unfortunately in philosophy there is no simple and uncontroversial way to distinguish between these, so the former mechanisms tend to overpower the latter ones.
One idea to fix this is maybe universities could start hiring philosophy professors based not on apparent research progress (i.e., number of publications) but on tests of intelligence and rationality.
Perhaps individual philosophers honestly seek answers, but academic philosophy as an institution has evolved to not really seek answers. That is, mechanisms that promote the spread of true ideas have atrophied or were never built, while mechanisms to promote diversity of positions have proliferated, without anyone consciously wanting these things to happen.
(This is just a guess as I’m not really familiar with the inner workings of academia.)
A priori it seems like a good guess. In any academic discipline, at the thesis level and above, originality is necessary for your work to be perceived as having any value, But most complicated questions with one true answer have a thousand false answers. Once people have beaten you to the true answer, it’s going to be easier to be original if you go for one of the false ones, so long as you’re in a discipline where verifying truth or falsehood is harder than obscuring it.
I suspect a good bellwether for identifying such disciplines is the way they treat repetition of existing truths. A lemma in a math paper might be “obvious”, a paper with too many obvious lemmas might be “too verbose”, but there’s never any suggestion that the lemmas are “trite” or that the reviewers would prefer to read their converses instead.
Then what I’m wondering is what these mechanisms are, how they caught on, and how we can identify them in philosophy in other disciplines so we can be on guard.
I think the main mechanisms are probably journals that publish only original ideas, and hiring based on number of publications. These mechanisms have to be counteracted by equally strong mechanisms to spread truth and suppress untruth, but unfortunately in philosophy there is no simple and uncontroversial way to distinguish between these, so the former mechanisms tend to overpower the latter ones.
One idea to fix this is maybe universities could start hiring philosophy professors based not on apparent research progress (i.e., number of publications) but on tests of intelligence and rationality.