Carnegie-Mellon's Clark Glymour interviewed...

...at 3AM.  Funny and opinionated, as we've come to expect.  An excerpt:

Compare Plato and Aristotle, superficially. Plato made no effective contributions to how to acquire true belief. Plato had analyses and counterexamples (The Meno) and a huge metaphysical discourse; we still don’t know necessary and [sufficient] conditions for virtue, the subject of the Meno. Aristotle had axioms for logic, a logic that was pretty much the best anyone could do for 2300 years. He had a schema for conducting inquiry (albeit, not a terribly good one, but it wasn’t bested until the 17^th century). Euclid was not a contemporary of Plato or Aristotle, but he systematized the fragments of geometry then current. The result was a theory that could be systematically investigated mathematically, applied in a multitude of contexts, and that constituted a stalking horse for alternative theories that have proved better empirically. Euclid has no formal definition of “point” that plays any role in his mathematical geometry. Just imagine if instead the history of geometry consisted of analyses of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be a point, which is McGinn’s ideal of philosophy. Or look at Newton’s Principia, axiomatic if anything is. Many of the ideas Newton put together were in the air in the early 17^th century. Combining them into the three laws, and relating the variables in specific conditions to observed quantities, created modern physics. McGinn would have preferred a litany of necessary and sufficient conditions for “quantity of matter” which Newton does not define. (Of course there is an interesting question of how, given the theory, “quantity of matter” can be estimated, on whatever extra assumptions.) Or look at von Neumann’s foundations of quantum theory, the best work in philosophy of physics in the 20^th century...which put to rest the disputes over what were taken to be different theories. Or look at Frank Ramsey’s brief formulation of behavioral decision theory, derivatives and developments of which still run a good deal of economics, or Hilbert and Bernay’s axiomatization of first order logic, which was a critical step towards computation theory, or David Lewis’ and others’ axiomatizations of the logic of counterfactuals, which run through contemporary philosophy and much, much else. Socratic thinking has no comparable fruits.

I don’t claim that the back and forth of Socratic philosophy is entirely useless. The canon of proposals and counterexamples is, or could be, a caution for superficial definitions and neglect of subtleties. Philosophers are good at subtleties.

McGinn and Giere and their like can botanize the world of thought into “philosophy” and “not philosophy” and corral the mostly fruitless into the former, as they wish. Universities make those sorts of separations an invitation to triviality and sometimes, outright stupidity. I think the basic motivation is pretty simple: most philosophers can’t do any mathematics, certainly not original mathematics; they are trained not to know statistics or computation. They treasure playground and rewards for the skills they have, and want to make sure the playground is well-guarded. Sometimes that reaches to ignorance as a policy, as in Tim Scanlon’s recent book, Being realistic about reasons, which insists (argues would be too complimentary) that ethics and metaethics need take no account of any other subject in the intellectual universe (save possibly logic) and the theories of that enterprise cannot be assessed or assailed from any other discipline; no new knowledge about the human condition can or should touch the metaethcists’ arguments. John Rawls opened that trail in his Theory of Justice, using the “veil of ignorance” as a conceit to pick and choose what facts of the human condition can be used in deciding the political constitution of society so as to get his conclusion, much like a prosecutor working a grand jury.