However, recent complaints about the specialisation of philosophy seem not to have professionalisation as their target, but rather the inaccessibility of what the professionals are doing from the point of view of outsiders. Professionalisation and inaccessibility may be related. Is it because professional philosophers are so specialised that they are hopeless at helping people live and at engaging with the lay population’s search for meaning and an understanding of philosophy?
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I do not see why every philosopher, or even most, should be interested in communicating their thoughts about these matters to the world. I have no burning desire to compete with people who have made it their business to popularize philosophy, and even if I did I might well not be very good at it. There are a large number of popular books on philosophy, and there is a thriving market for them. There are many excellent people who mediate between academia in general and the rest of the population. I am baffled as to why people are calling for all academics to do these things. The case of philosophy is in this respect no different than that of pure mathematics or microbiology. The idea that every scientist should be a part-time science journalist and public speaker is absurd.--James Ladyman "In Praise of Specialisation" @Philosophersmag.
At the core of Ladyman's argument are two sensible thoughts:* first, philosophy, at its best, is about and often engages with highly technical forms of knowledge (in the sciences, society, etc.). ["Many philosophers work in areas that overlap with the most theoretical parts of science or with the history of science. [etc.]"] So, philosophers will need to be in command of specialist knowledge of a sort that is highly technical. Moreover, their target audience will be, in addition to fellow professional philosophers, often fellow academic specialists. Ladyman does not say so, but here he is echoing Williamson's point on the need for philosophy to be disciplined by other technical subjects (recall my criticism here and here).
Second, the intellectual division of labor is itself a good thing for professional philosophy understood as an academic enterprise. (He suggests, oddly, that "The position of academic philosopher is a relatively recent innovation," but philosophy (in a sense not unrelated to the modern one) has often found a home in the academy/schools in the ancient world and later [cf. the school philosophy of the scholastics]). This specialization generates specialist jargon and generates, in part, "the inaccessibility of what the professionals are doing from the point of view of outsiders." He is right that within the academic division of labor, we should not expect that each of us also mediates between the specialists and non-specialists (and non-academics).
But Ladyman also makes it a bit easy on himself by suggesting that the main (to be rejected) reason for keeping things accessible is the "lay population’s search for meaning." Now, to be sure, I deny that professional philosophy should cede 'wisdom,' including the search for meaning, to other enterprises (outside the academy). But here that would be begging the question against Ladyman.
Rather, there are other reasons for caution in promoting esoteric philosophical discourse(s). Quite a bit of philosophy has, in principle, an indirect and ultimate impact on public policy, people's ethical frameworks, and people's self-conceptions. The claim in the previous sentence is more intuitive for political philosophy and ethics (including applied forms), but it is also true in the philosophy of sciences and linguistics/mind (examples that Ladyman uses). This entails that philosophy makes claims and offers ways of conceptualizing the world that can (and sometimes do) generate inductive risk for others in society (on inductive risk, see Heather Douglas' book). It's just not lay people, but also fellow academics that need to be able to check our claims and figure out what the consequences of application might be; so too much esotericism generates genuine moral and political concerns.
To put the previous paragraph in historical perspective: when we analytic philosophers mocked the jargon of continental philosophers (pick your favorite example) we were also making an intellectual point about responsible speech. Our claim was not just that they are were speaking -- let's stipulate -- gibberish, but that their esotericism facilitated illiberal thought and politics.++ Yet, within analytic philosophy, there is a tendency to think that when we generate technical language, there are no political problems. But when we embrace a kind of tacit technocracy, in which our specialist speech is inaccessible, we shouldn't be surprised that at least some folk in society have second thoughts.
So, what's the upshot here? Ladyman is too sanguine about the role and existence of "mediators" between esoteric realms of philosophy and the wider intellectual world. The role of mediators is not just about popularization (as Ladyman seems to think); as Merel Lefevere and I have argued, we also need informed mediators (we call them "aggregators") to keep an (informal) eye on the specialists and, ideally, intervene in ongoing debates (as fellow specialists): do the specialists have epistemic and axiological diversity? Do all important objections that folk may have really get discussed among the specialists? Does the technical language itself hide further (axiological or political) assumptions? Are down-side risks of consequences being pushed on non-participants?
*In this post I'll ignore his many other allusions to the technocratic mindset that academic managers and grant agencies bring to the table; I wholeheartedly agree with Ladyman's concerns.
++ Now that I know better, I recognize that Derrida also practiced a form of responsible speech. (But I have written on that elsewhere.)
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