What good is philosophy?

Hello again Steemit! In my debut post, I introduced myself as a philosophy professor, and invited commenters to ask questions about philosophy I might be able to help with.

I thought a question from @alexgr was a great place to start for my first substantive philosophy post. The question was worded very politely, but I suspect @alexgr was really asking a kind of question we philosophers get a lot - with a wide range of directness and politeness. Namely, questions like:

What good is philosophy, anyway? What's the point? There are no real right answers, are there?!

Anyway, even if that's not @alexgr's actual question, it's one I'd like to address some. (And if this post earns any SBD, I'll transfer 10% of my first payout to @alexgr for prompting it. I'm thinking of making that a blanket policy.)

Philosophical "achievements" and scientific "achievements"

The phrasing of @alexgr's actual question is a good place to start. The actual wording was

What is your greatest philosophic achievement? Has your mind ever "produced" something that the world should know about, or that the world heard but has underappreciated it?

Well in one sense, I have not "produced" any great philosophical achievements: I have not revolutionized philosophy, stunning the profession with a knock-down argument that no one could refute. Nor do people throng at my door to receive my wisdom, and leave feeling they finally have discovered what life is all about.

In a much more mundane sense, though, of course I have "produced" some philosophy, and each such production is an achivement. The first thing that leaps to mind is my papers - in theory at least, they got published in peer-reviewed journals because I had new arguments that helped make progress on some philosophical issue. And of course there are ways to produce philosophy besides publishing, such as simply having productive discussions with colleagues. Even just reframing an old argument in a new way, maybe to help teach it, is a kind of philosophical production.

Which "production" would I say is my "greatest?" Well I usually like the thing I'm working on most recently the best. I'm especially pleased with what I'm cooking up now - it's not published yet (though it's gotten great feedback so far), so I can't link to it or anything. But more to the point: the technical specifics wouldn't be of much interest for any but a few other professional philosophers in my narrow subfield. (The general question it addresses in the background, on the other hand, is a fun and important puzzle that Steemers may find interesting - and I'll try to write about it later.)

Which brings me to my next point: you can think of a philosopher's day job like a biochemist's day job. A biochemist might start out hoping to do something huge, like cure cancer. She soon discovers that lots of smart people are already working on that problem, and therefore that all the obvious attempts, and sorta-obvious attemps, and actually-quite-clever-but-natural-to-consider-next attempts, have all been tried already. She sees it's a way harder problem than any one person is likely to solve, and to make any real progress she needs to carve off some tiny portion of that problem. I don't know much about medicine or cancer, but maybe (for example) she decides to work on a specific mutation that maybe will lead to a novel delivery mechanism which maybe will lead to a potential targeting of cancerous cells which maybe will help actually eliminate the cancerous cells, when combined with other some speculative research.

Often enough the biochemist's work is a dead-end; unexpected complications mean the mutation won't do what they hoped after all. So here's a weird question: what progress was made here? People are still dying of cancer. But there was a weird kind of "negative progress", as we might call it - science found out something didn't work. And probably along the way the biochemist streamlined some mutation techniques or discovered something odd about an interaction or some other such small incremental change that could help other biochemists in their methods.

So has she produced something the "world should know about"? Well, it's good some other specialists in her field know about it. It's good this information is available to the world. This does not mean that it's good for everyone in the world to know it. Most of us wouldn't understand it, or would be pretty bored by it even if we did.

The day-to-day work of philosophers is similar: a philosopher might start a career dreaming of "solving the probem of free will", for example, only to discover that it's way harder than anticipated. A typical philosophical paper - or even a typical philosophical career - will do something much more specific, like try to respond to a variation of a standard objection to one form of an argument that tries to show we must have free will. And often enough once it is published, some other clever philosopher comes along and points out deadly flaws in this response. So what progress has been made? I would say: just the same kind of progress the biochemist made.

What could philosophy even hope to "produce"?

But, you might say, at least the chemist had a chance to help cure cancer. Real tangible goods come out of biochemistry research. What has philosophy ever done for anyone, or what could it do?

Before I get to my own take on this question, let me first emphasize one answer that I think most philosophers would agree with (something rare in philosophy!): philosophy hones critical thinking skills, arguably more than any other discipline. (Here's one gesture at some of the facts to back that up.) Students come out of a good philosophy class with an awareness of potential complexities, and realize that just because a question is difficult to answer definitively does not mean that any answer is as good as any other, or that the answers do not matter. Philosophy students are especially well-trained in asking the right kinds of questions, and trying to answer them rigorously without falling prey to the various biases that infect us. So this is one "product" we like to think we produce in our classrooms: better critical thinkers. This means in turn (I think) better workers with more fulfilling jobs, and citizens better able to participate in a democracy.

But my own view is that the ideas of philosophy - and not just its methods - contribute to society. I even think philosophy makes progress, though slowly. (Here's a good free talk on this question.) There are two important ways the ideas of philosophy contribute to our global well-being.

First, philosophy makes us consider our values. Philosophy isn't straightforwardly a science that gives us better technology and so improves our ability to do what we want. Instead, it's ultimately about helping us figure out what we should want in the first place. We all know people who worked hard to achieve goals that they later discover were not what they really wanted. What really matters, at the end of the day? This is not something a straightforward science can answer.

Second, the ideas of philosophy serve as a kind of advance scouting unit for the sciences. Philosophers like to remind people that famous figures like Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and William James considered themselves philosophers - because the separate fields of physics, biology, and psychology hadn't really been born yet. It takes philosophical work to sort out the methodology required to even begin tackling the kind of questions they helped tackle. Much more recent examples of this phenomenon are computer science and cognitive science. Computer science arose out of the formal logic crafted by philosophers like Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. And treating the mind (rather than simple behavior, for example) as a scientific entity that could be replicated in machines was unthinkable before the philosophical view of functionalism gave birth to what we call cognitive science today.

Philosophy does not immediately result in real-world products in the same way theoretical math doesn't. But theoretical math informs applied math which informs engineering which helps make better bridges. And theoretical philosophy informs ethics which informs applied ethics which becomes reasoning in courts of law and senate chambers.

So believe it or not I'm in philosophy not just because it's fun to ponder these crazy puzzles, though that is definitely a plus. I actually think philosophy provides powerful leverage for making a long-term positive impact on the world. Ever since high school I've loved this quotation (which I think I first saw on a fortune cookie!):

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.

I think it's no coincidence that its author, Henry Ward Beecher, was an abolitionist. It's incredible to think that at one point the ethics of slavery were hotly debated the way some philosophers debate the ethics of abortion today. But it's hard to believe because the winning philosophy of that day - the idea, rooted in John Locke, that all people are created equal - eventually became the common sense of today.

PS Yes I know this post has no images, and yes I know it's standard to include images on Steemit, and yes, I know how to include images. Let's call it a quirky stylistic choice, at least for now.