MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--MANY INTERESTING COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME
Friday's poll generated a lot of interest--nearly 850 votes! Here, in the opinion of readers, were the "top five" current "fads" in philosophy to which readers were plainly not sympathetic:
| 1. Epistemic injustice (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices) |
| 2. Experimental Philosophy loses to Epistemic injustice by 379–302 |
| 3. Critical Race Theory loses to Epistemic injustice by 326–308, loses to Experimental Philosophy by 340–328 |
| 4. Effective altruism loses to Epistemic injustice by 401–280, loses to Critical Race Theory by 349–261 |
| 5. Grounding loses to Epistemic injustice by 395–268, loses to Effective altruism by 326–299 |
I confess that apart from "effective altruism" and "grounding," this doesn't look much like my top 5, which also included "formal epistemology" (I've yet to see a paper in this genre that did not involve preposterous idealizations and assumptions with the result that it was useless for epistemology), and non-naturalist normative realism (naturalistic normative realism failed, but true to their conservative nature, analytic philosophers then went for a position some of us had thought was, deservedly, dead and buried). I forget my 5th! It is probably true that people are overplaying the "epistemic injustice" meme (as injustices go under capitalist relations of production, it's far down the list), but the core idea is an interesting one, or so I thought. Hostility towards experimental philosophy is not surprising, but I'm optimistic it will stick around, given its close ties to the cognitive sciences.
Reader comments on "fads" welcome, including possible fads not in the poll. Feel free to explain your own choices (or to defend some of the possible "fads" against the charge).
