Philosophy : currently a pseudo-science

It had its time of glory in the past. In ancient Greece, philosophy was not yet distinguished from the science of that time, thus we might say both were comparable in quality. Then they faced many centuries of near-absence during the dark ages of Christian domination, before resurrecting together and having their glory period in the time of Enlightenment.
Enlightenment philosophy signed its good new insights of truth, by some valuable practical accomplishments (usefulness for mankind, that can be compared with the technical usefulness of science):
However, the situation is now very different, as science made a tremendous lot of progress since that time, leaving philosophy far behind. Philosophy didn't make any comparable progress of methods or knowledge, and thus became a sterile discipline.

Some attempts of reform to remodel philosophy after science have been made, such as the development of analytic philosophy by Bertrand Russel who also contributed to the new foundations of mathematics (set theory). It may be acknowledged that analytic philosophy is a bit less irrational than continental philosophy.
But, apart from a few interesting clues such as his celestial teapot and other remarks on religion, much of the length of Russel's philosophy (such as his theory of the mind) remained of poor value (long developments on pointless details that cannot contribute to the progress of knowledge in any effective way).

For example, after the good fruits of democracy produced by the Enlightenment philosophy, what further political revolution did philosophy bring to mankind ? Well, it brought the Marxist revolution.
Despite its claims, Marxism is not rational. Most philosophers did not notice the problem, and thus welcomed Marxism in their field. Only Karl Popper developed famous writings showing the discrepancy between Marxism and science, by observing the difference between the Marxist and the scientific way of testing a theory against experience (falsifiability), for example the way Einstein's general relativity made precise predictions to be tested.

Despite this, the community of so-called "intellectuals" (of humanities, not scientists) kept holding Marxism as a rational theory and valid philosophy. Of course if you measure a philosophy by its convincing power to the masses, then, Marxism is among the best, just in the same way religions previously were. In fact Marxism is itself a modern religion exploiting the newly fashionable claim of scientificity. But the success of a convincing power to the people (even to be taken as "scientific" by an unscientific class of self-proclaimed "intellectuals") hardly has anything to do with truth and rationality. 
Now you don't need anymore to study and examine it in much details to find evidence for its lack of rationality: just look at its fruits (the Soviet Union). The combination of its convincing power with its utter falsity, just means it is at the antipodes of reason: it is powerfully misleading. We shall discuss this more closely in Part IV.

The irrational character of philosophy, can be inferred from its inability to naturally converge to a consensus on given questions: many philosophers keep presenting opposite views on fixed issues, that remain unresolved for a very long time.

Paul Graham's criticism of philosophy
"When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they're nonsense generally keep quiet. There's no way to prove a text is meaningless. The closest you can get is to show that the official judges of some class of texts can't distinguish them from placebos.
And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected it was a waste of time just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy's claims. It's supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.
Because philosophy's flaws turned away the sort of people who might have corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating. "
(and many other arguments worth reading too)

Richard Feynman (physics Nobel laureate) made harsh criticisms of philosophy:
Richard Feynman wrote:
When I sat with the philosophers I listened to them discuss very seriously a book called Process and Reality by Whitehead. They were using words in a funny way, and I couldn’t quite understand what they were saying. (...)
What happened [at the seminar] was typical—so typical that it was unbelievable, but true. (...). A student gave a report on the chapter to be studied that week. In it Whitehead kept using the words “essential object” in a particular technical way that presumably he had defined, but that I didn’t understand.
After some discussion as to what “essential object” meant, the professor leading the seminar said something meant to clarify things and drew something that looked like lightning bolts on the blackboard. “Mr. Feynman,” he said, “would you say an electron is an ‘essential object’?”
Well, now I was in trouble. I admitted that I hadn’t read the book, so I had no idea of what Whitehead meant by the phrase; I had only come to watch. “But,” I said, “I’ll try to answer the professor’s question if you will first answer a question from me, so I can have a better idea of what ‘essential object’ means. Is a brick an essential object?”
What I had intended to do was to find out whether they thought theoretical constructs were essential objects. The electron is a theory that we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real. I wanted to make the idea of a theory clear by analogy. In the case of the brick, my next question was going to be, “What about the inside of the brick?”—and I would then point out that no one has ever seen the inside of a brick. Every time you break the brick, you only see the surface. That the brick has an inside is a simple theory which helps us understand things better. The theory of electrons is analogous. So I began by asking, “Is a brick an essential object?”
Then the answers came out. One man stood up and said, “A brick as an individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead means by an essential object.”
Another man said, “No, it isn’t the individual brick that is an essential object; it’s the general character that all bricks have in common—their ‘brickiness’—that is the essential object.”
Another guy got up and said, “No, it’s not in the bricks themselves. ‘Essential object’ means the idea in the mind that you get when you think of bricks.”
Another guy got up, and another, and I tell you I have never heard such ingenious different ways of looking at a brick before. And, just like it should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete chaos. In all their previous discussions they hadn’t even asked themselves whether such a simple object as a brick, much less an electron, is an “essential object.”


"philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds"
(forgetting that, in fact, ornithology has been useful to birds in some ways...)

People say to me, “Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No, I’m not… If it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it — that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it’s like an onion with millions of layers… then that’s the way it is. But either way there’s Nature and she’s going to come out the way She is. So therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn’t predecide what it is we’re looking for only to find out more about it. Now you ask: “Why do you try to find out more about it?” If you began your investigation to get an answer to some deep philosophical question, you may be wrong. It may be that you can’t get an answer to that particular question just by finding out more about the character of Nature. But that’s not my interest in science; my interest in science is to simply find out about the world and the more I find out the better it is, I like to find out…
(The Pleasure of Finding Things Out p. 23)

From this Feynman's text on science:

"...what science is, is not what the philosophers have said it is, and certainly not what the teacher editions say it is. What it is, is a problem which I set for myself after I said I would give this talk.
After some time, I was reminded of a little poem:
A centipede was happy quite, until a toad in fun
Said, "Pray, which leg comes after which?"
This raised his doubts to such a pitch
He fell distracted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.
All my life, I have been doing science and known what it was, but what I have come to tell you--which foot comes after which--I am unable to do, and furthermore, I am worried by the analogy in the poem that when I go home I will no longer be able to do any research."

From this Feynman's interview:

"Philosophers, incidentally, say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive and probably wrong. . . 
My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza--and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these Attributes and Substances, all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now, how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there was no excuse for it! In that same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions and take the contrary propositions and look at the world--and you can't tell which is right. Sure, people were awed because he had the courage to take on these great questions, but it doesn't do any good to have the courage if you can't get anywhere with the question. 
It isn't the philosophy that gets me, it's the pomposity. If they'd just laugh at themselves! If they'd just say, "I think it's like this, but Von Leipzig thought it was like that, and he had a good shot at it too." If they'd explain that this is their best guess.... But so few of them do; instead, they seize on the possibility that there may not be any ultimate fundamental particle and say that you should stop work and ponder with great profundity. "You haven't thought deeply enough; first let me define the world for you." Well, I'm going to investigate it without defining it! "

Another Physics Nobel laureate, Steven Weinberg, wrote (Chapter "Against Philosophy" of his book "Dreams of a final theory"):

"The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion—by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers.(...) without some guidance from our preconceptions one could do nothing at all. It is just that philosophical principles have not generally provided us with the right preconceptions.

Physicists do of course carry around with them a working philosophy. For most of us, it is a rough-and-ready realism, a belief in the objective reality of the ingredients of our scientific theories. But this has been learned through the experience of scientific research and rarely from the teachings of philosophers.

This is not to deny all value to philosophy(...). But we should not expect [the philosophy of science] to provide today's scientists with any useful guidance about how to go about their work or about what they are likely to find.

After a few years' infatuation with philosophy as an undergraduate I became disenchanted. The insights of the philosophers I studied seemed murky and inconsequential compared with the dazzling successes of physics and mathematics. From time to time since then I have tried to read current work on the philosophy of science. Some of it I found to be written in a jargon so impenetrable that I can only think that it aimed at impressing those who confound obscurity with profundity. (...) But only rarely did it seem to me to have anything to do with the work of science as I knew it. (...)
I am not alone in this; I know of no one who has participated actively in the advance of physics in the postwar period whose research has been significantly helped by the work of philosophers. I raised in the previous chapter the problem of what Wigner calls the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics; here I want to take up another equally puzzling phenomenon, the unreasonable ineffectiveness of philosophy.
Even where philosophical doctrines have in the past been useful to scientists, they have generally lingered on too long, becoming of more harm than ever they were of use.(...)
Mechanism had also been propagated beyond the boundaries of science and survived there to give later trouble to scientists. In the nineteenth century the heroic tradition of mechanism was incorporated, unhappily, into the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels and their followers (...) and for a while dialectical materialism stood in the way of the acceptance of general relativity in the Soviet Union
(...) We are not likely to know the right questions until we are close to knowing the answers.(...)
The quark theory was only one step in a continuing process of reformulation of physical theory in terms that are more and more fundamental and at the same time farther and farther from everyday experience.

homeschooling physicist

"But… many introductory books on philosophy take the tack that “philosophy is not so much a set of answers as a way of asking questions: the important thing about philosophy is not specific answers, but rather the philosophical way of thinking”
Yeah – that is because the answers that philosophers have come up with over the centuries have been almost uniformly bad!
(...)
Ethics is too important to be left to the philosophers.
(...)
children should also be taught not to think “philosophically,” in the manner of current and recent academic and professional philosophers. On the contrary, they should be explicitly told that, for at least the last two centuries, the philosophical enterprise as carried out by professional philosophers has been an obvious failure and that the vast increase in our knowledge of reality during the last several centuries has been due not to philosophy but to natural science."

In the same site: Is philosophy futile - more texts on philosophy
Physicists dissing philosophy:
"Science, philosophy, and religion all make claims to have a broad, integrated view of reality. But, the views of reality they arrive at differ dramatically.
It would be quite surprising if three such radically different approaches to confronting reality were to give compatible pictures of reality.
Of course, they do not.
...in some ways, both the creationists and the postmodernists deserve credit for seeing something that more sensible, moderate folks try to evade: in the long-term, science, philosophy, and religion cannot co-exist."
A quote from Cantor

One philosopher acknowledges and sums up the importance and relevance of top scientists'harsch criticism of philosophy, so as to take lessons how to consequently reform the academic practice of philosophy.But other philosophers prefer to reject such criticism and keep justifying their flaws anyway.

More debates if you wish :
Weinberg's "Against Philosophy"
Why philosophize
Does philosophy make you a better scientist
Round Table Debate: Science versus Philosophy ?
Another discussion
Science Vs. Philosophy
Very long discussion which then diverts from the subject

Other philosophers try to justify philosophy's flaws through empty arguments:

How pitiful it is to observe how philosophers are not even able to give a decent answer to a simple question.

They try to justify their inability of finding decent answers by claims such as : the value of philosophy would be to focus on asking the right questions (or eliminating the wrong questions) and eliminating some wrong answers (a sort of intellectual garbage collecting). But these are just blind unjustified beliefs, as the real effect of their work is just the opposite: to multiply and preciously accumulate wrong questions and wrong answers (intellectual garbage collectioning).
This reminds me the joke "How many Microsoft engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. They just define darkness as an industry standard." and other "It's not a bug, it's a feature".

In reply to the criticism that philosophy lost its usefulness since the Enlightenment time, philosophers often react by glorifying themselves of their uselessness, by the straw man argument that, well, optimized financial productivity is not the right ultimate value, and thus should not be the exclusive purpose of public school curricula. 
But, while I agree that numerical measure of the short-term financial profit should not be the final and exclusive criteria of value for an intellectual discipline, the trouble is that philosophers seem to have no other meaningful alternative criteria of value either, except the very negation of the usefulness criteria (together with their intimate but unjustified conviction). Namely, they seem to be raising wastefulness (uselessness) as their ultimate value, as if the very fact something brings no fruit, could serve as an evidence that it must surely be very spiritual. This reminds me the Shadoks' insights :

"I pump, therefore I am
It is better to pump even if nothing happens, than risk that something is going worse by not pumping...
their rocket was not highly developed, but they had calculated that it still had 1 chance over 1 million to work. And they hurried to fail the 999 999 first tests to ensure that the millionth works."

With wastefulness as their ultimate value, their work victoriously turns out to be universally wasteful, for whatever purpose including the development of the mind and critical thinking itself. The belief they must be good for the spirit or whatever undefinable ideal just based on the observation of their worthlessness for financial profit, is but a superstition among others. They may of course reject this criticism as straw man too, as this description is not exactly their claim, but it does not matter what they exactly claim: this is what they are doing in practice anyway.

How to explain the failure of philosophy ? Well, once cause is the general dumbness of its members as will be illustrated by below examples, another important cause (maybe a corollary, the only remaining kind of thing dumb people have the ability to think about instead of serious issues) is its traditional obsession for essentialism (focusing on the ultimate nature of everything - well, by the way, this is precisely a usual character of cranks), to be contrasted with science's non-essentialism. Science has its own care for essences when needed; it is just not an obsession. Philosophy just failed to follow this model.
We might also describe the difference between science and philosophy in this way:
Science is the practice of rationality, while philosophy has theories of rationality. And these theories are usually wrong because disconnected from practice, because, in fact, there is no better way to understand rationality, than by practicing it. Which philosophers usually utterly fail at, despite their claims.

But... is this really awful if philosophy is dominated by cranks ? Well, not necessarily. After all, in order for idiots to stop bothering scientists, they need to go somewhere else and find another public. So, philosophy can be considered useful for its social role of a huge intellectual bin where idiots can gather, while science on its own side can stay somewhat cleaner.

OK, philosophy is so diverse that it may also be possible to find there a minority of decent approaches: a possible example (I only looked briefly)

Remarks on logical positivism and falsificationism

As philosophers can easily notice, there is a flaw in the way Weinberg takes the example of logical positivism and its unfortunate consequences for criticizing philosophy. Indeed, logical positivism was rather made by scientists themselves, precisely as a movement against philosophy, and was popular among scientists but not among philosophers, who quickly rejected it. Thus, philosophers cannot be responsible for these troubles.
Let's explain this issue in more details.

Once understood well, the statement of the principles of science, including the "logical positivism" principle, is not affected by Weinberg's criticism of logical positivism: the troubles only come from a caricatural form of logical positivism not balanced by the other principles we stated (conceptual reconstruction of reality).

The difference made by philosophers between verificationism (as stated by logical positivists) and Popper's falsificationism (that was later widely taken as a reference of scientificity) is a mistake.
Once analyzed well, these are more or less two ways of popularizing the same logical concept. Well, the details of the formulation of logical positivism can have been imperfect and deserve a few corrections. But the main difference is not about what they really mean, which is the same, but a difference of "how they feel", how they might be misinterpreted by irrational people.
To the eyes of a large public as well as many philosophers, Marxism and Psychoanalysis made an impression of being "verified", thus scientific. But this impression of "verification" was a mere illusion, obtained by emptying of meaning the concept of "verification". Then, Karl Popper discovered that another phrasing, "falsificationism", was better suited and efficient to explain how Marxism and Psychoanalysis are false sciences, as they do not stand to the practice of verification used in real science. This was okay, but then he went to wrong conclusions by mistaking this difference of usefulness (for irrational people to more easily notice the lack of scientificity of some ideologies) for a deep conceptual difference. The result is that he replaced the initial misinterpretation of the nature of science, by another misinterpretation, that does not carry the same risks of misuse but can carry some too.
As Weinberg said, the main possible value of philosophy is to refute some errors of other philosophers. So, Popper was good for warning against Psychoanalysis and Marxism as pseudo-sciences, while David Stove was good for warning against the irrationality of Popper and other science philosophers (Feyerabend, Kuhn...). Among his writings see for example Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists and What is Wrong with Our Thoughts?

Now some philosophers can still feel proud about all these remarks, putting forward that this is all a philosophical debate about the foundations of science which do not seem clear, so that philosophers are needed to warn people about this lack of clarity. Sorry, I still disagree. This problem is a problem for philosophers just because they have the wrong language to approach it. As I explained there, the solution requires some mathematics, namely the concept of information entropy. This is essentially equivalent to the approach of Bayesian inference, just generalized to any amount of complex, structured data with its correlations, while Bayesian inference focuses on only one observation or a repetition of uncorrelated instances of the same observation. (Now I am aware that just a mathematical formula like this does not solve all problems about verification/induction/falsification as remains the interpretation problem commented below).
So, what is the contribution of philosophers on this topic then ? It is essentially to mislead and turn into ridicule in the eyes of proper thinkers and scientifically aware people, some amateur thinkers such as those evangelists ("Inspiring Philosophy" youtube channel - as they tried to argue to me in private conversation, sorry I have not published the relevant excerpts) who went to follow and mistake as serious the courses they attended of "philosophy of science" given by philosophers and then proudly claim in debates with scientists that logical positivism is no more a basis of science, referring for this to the current fashion among philosophers. As if in matters of the foundations of science, the opinions of philosophers mattered Wouahahahaaaaaa

The interpretation problem

As philosophers like to point out, non-trivial facts of science usually do not come naked but require some skills for properly interpreting observations. I'm just not convinced that philosophers would be well placed to bring the needed skills, which I'd rather see as more often, depending on cases, matters of common sense (which not all people have), accuracy of thinking (logical intuition), or scientific expertise (having a large enough body of knowledge in some field).

About clarifying scientific concepts

An example of a "philosophical subject" of interest for Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond (if I remember well ; but he is physicst before being philosopher) is about noticing that modern theories such as relativity and quantum physics, failed to go through a work of cleaning up their fundamental concepts and vocabulary to a comparable extent as classical physics had succeeded before. So they are still often presented inside the language, intuition and even mathematical parameters of classical physics. This conflict between the modern intended theories and the classical intuitions and language still used to expressed them, brings these theories an unfortunate reputation of being counter-intuitive.

That's right, but: what's the use of making a philosophy about it ? This is not a genuine subject for philosophy. This is just a task for science professors to clean up existing knowledge. And this is an administrative problem to pay attention to this question, and provide incentives to:
- publish better courses cleaning up each possible subject, once for all in the world (or several times, of course, but each time caring to do better again than previously);
- For each subject where such a work was already done by someone in the world, take the new view and reform teaching after it.

Unfortunately, while such works exist (as I'm caring myself to do some), the education system is so conservative that the necessary changes are not done (because professors are usually so busy repeating over and over again the same old teachings in boring old ways, and are so "the best in their fields", that they have no time to seriously care whether a better way might already have been produced by somebody else).

But hopefully, in a future time when the cleaning up will have been done, what will remain of the philosophy whose thesis was to claim that the cleaning up is not done yet ? Rather do the cleaning up, than philosophize on its lack.

About consciousness and animals

It is really terrifying to see so many philosophy teachers insane enough to proclaim that only humans would be conscious while animals would not, without even any question, while both science and common sense demonstrate the opposite (not to speak about NDEs telling about meeting again deceased pets in the beyond).

About identities

Once I visited a philosophy course which claimed to prove that no 2 objects can be identical. However this reasoning was invalid, but to find the error there it would be necessary to understand quantum physics, and how the mathematical structure of quantum physics proves that 2 particles of the same kind are absolutely identical, i.e. they do not and cannot have any hidden identity that makes them 2 different objects. But philosophers cannot understand this, because they're not good mathematicians, thus can't follow the proof. Instead they'll keep their strong faith that such a proof is impossible because they believe their little reasoning to be correct... So official philosophy keeps presenting and claiming the correctness of some reasonings, long after it was refuted by quantum physics.

Discussion on determinism

Once I saw a seminar on determinism. The possibility/impossibility of determinism or indeterminism...
The whole discussion consisted in exploring some kind of range of theoretically possible universes. i.e. laws of evolution to wonder if they can be deterministic or indeterministic... after which I had a little attempt to discuss with him and other present philosophers...
Seriously, where did that approach of the "range of possible universes" come from, if not from pure blind prejudice ? Where is the justification why we should accept that it even makes any sense to regard these presumed "possible universes" as possibilities at all, not to speak about why exclude the possibility of further possibilities beyond that given range ?
Of particular interest in this "range of possibilities", was a class of differential equations like those of classical physics. So some partial descriptions of phenomena that could be expressed in the 19th century was in this "range of possibilities", as well as a kind of invocation of statistical thermodynamics in a kind of reference, again, to its 19th century understanding (and there was no room for discussion or possible mutual understanding as their view of seemed to be fixed, as non-physicists at ease in their absolute confidence to perfectly understand this 19th century baby attempt to approach thermodynamics, while I cared to clarify the topic on a modern basis).
But at no point of the discussion did the speaker ever seem interested in the question whether modern physics, i.e. quantum physics, that is the kind of laws of physics which was scientifically found to be the case or at least somehow closer to the truth than his 19th century example, could be found to actually fall anywhere in his a priori "range of possibilities". Problem : how the fuck could I take seriously a reasoning based on some a priori "range of possibilities" where our particular universe does not seem able to fit ?

Compatibilism

What a crap ! sounds like "1=1 and 1≠1 do not contradict each other". And it is reported to be very popular among philosophers ! This "solution" to how humans could have free will if the universe was deterministic (which is known to not be the case) consists in redefining "free will" into... nothing that makes any sense, actually.

Ignorance of quantum physics, again

Quote from Quantum Mechanics and the Hard Problem by Lennart Warnemyr
When I studied Philosophy of mind by Kim (2011) during an introductory course in Philosophy of Mind I was struck by how classical Kim’s view of the physical was. He wrote things like “mere con gurations and motions [...] of material particles, atoms and molecules” , “bits of matter” and “the gray matter of your brain”. Kim mentions non-classical concepts like “electrons [...] quarks, [...] spin”, but he never uses them as they are used in the theory they belong to and thus treats them as classical physical concepts.

A famous philosopher : Wittgenstein

I once happened to visit a university course of philosophy, the teacher was presenting some views which, he said, he took from Wittgenstein, who he agrees with. And what was the claim ? It essentially meant that there does not exist such a science as mathematics with any open problems, since by nature, all mathematical propositions are tautologies (mere ridiculously useless combinations, or rather repetitions, of the same trivialities). Well, my question is : why would people believing such idiocies be worth the care to explain why they are wrong ? Just have a look at Godel's speedup theorem, for example, and more generally, all known facts about incompleteness such as Chaitin's work on randomness in mathematics... during that course I tried to mention Godel's incompleteness theorem as an illustration of the falsity of this philosophy. He dismissed my point, claiming to know the topic and denying that any point could be made there (the discussion was too short to enter any detail) so that the conversation ended without any common understanding. It turns out to be a well-known fact that Wittgenstein himself never understood the incompleteness theorem. A discussion about it.
Another example of what I see as a logically necessary but quite non-trivial fact : Communism Cannot Work. Both this logical fact and its non-obviousness had some concrete consequences...
See also the testimony of how his attitude has nothing to do with reason.
Apart from this, well, it can be true indeed as he denounced, that many people commit the error of trying to speak the unspeakable in such a way that it is not going anywhere. Nevertheless the problem is not that there is any well-defined absolute limit to expressibilility. I don't see one. Rather, what I generally see in the world is a lack of imagination in the people's thoughts and use of language to express any wise and interesting ideas. Because not only the pure language of maths is already able to express a lot of things, the ordinary use of language being not strictly mathematical, remains open to the possibility of stimulating diverse thoughts beyond pure maths, thus escaping any well-defined boundary. Here I mean not only the possibility to tell lots of sterile bullshit as so often happens, but also, eventually, to develop high intelligent thoughts as well. I experienced this myself as I found some non-standard ways of using ordinary language to explain things in diverse texts...

Postmodernism and "science studies"

A community of ideological flaws can be seen between Marxism, which dismisses its opposing theories (economic liberalism) as a mere matter of social forces rather than of truth (so as to use ad hominem as an excuse to not bother arguing rationally), and the postmodernist "science studies".

Everyone should know about the Sokal affair, an episode of the Science Wars:
"The physicist Alan Sokal submitted the article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” proposing that quantum gravity is a linguistic and social construct and that quantum physics supports postmodernist criticisms of scientific objectivity. Social Text published the article in the Spring/Summer “Science Wars” issue in May 1996. Later, in the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, in the article “A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies”, Prof. Sokal exposed his parody-article, “Transgressing the Boundaries” as an experiment testing the intellectual rigor of an academic journal that would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions”

However Sokal's hoax should not be overestimated, as it was only directed to a precise movement (postmodernism) that should not be confused with the whole of philosophy or social sciences: in this interview Alan Sokal said:

"I should make clear that I don’t think my parody article settles anything. It doesn’t by itself prove much – that one journal was sloppy. So it wasn’t the parody itself that proved it, it was the things that I and other people wrote afterward which I believe showed the sloppiness of the philosophy that a lot of postmodernist literary theory types were writing. But again, I wasn’t the first person to make those criticisms. It was only after the fact that I went back into the literature and found philosophers had made many of these criticisms long before me. All I did in a certain sense was to find a better public relations method than they did."

But he also expresses his skepticism on the possibility for philosophy of science to fulfill its goal of understanding the scientific method:

"So I guess you’re right that I’m skeptical that there can ever be a complete over-arching theory simply because science is about rationality; rationality is always adaptation to unforeseen circumstances – how can you possibly codify that? But that doesn’t mean philosophy of science is useless, because all of these attempts that have failed as final codifications of scientific method nevertheless contributed something."

Anti-Science Phenomenon
"Practitioners of the social sciences have not learned, in their own disciplines, much that is operationally indisputable, readily reproducible, and internationally agreed to; so they cannot easily conceive such a thing to be possible in any field. Knowing in their own discipline that ideology governs "knowledge" as well as theory, they presume that must be so in all fields."

Also, the end of the above quoted Weinberg's chapter "against philosophy" tells about the relations between science and "science studies" by sociologists.
Some interesting observations are without problem:

"For instance, Sharon Traweek has spent years with elementary particle experimentalists at both the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the KEK Laboratory in Japan and has described what she had seen from the perspective of an anthropologist. This kind of big science is a natural topic for anthropologists and sociologists, because scientists belong to an anarchic tradition that prizes individual initiative, and yet they find in today's experiments that they have to work together in teams of hundreds. As a theorist I have not worked in such a team, but many of her observations seem to me to have the ring of truth, as for instance: The physicists see themselves as an elite whose membership is determined solely by scientific merit. The assumption is that everyone has a fair start. This is underscored by the rigorously informal dress code, the similarity of their offices, and the "first naming" practices in the community. Competitive individualism is considered both just and effective: the hierarchy is seen as a meritocracy which produces fine physics. American physicists, however, emphasize that science is not democratic: decisions about scientific purposes should not be made by majority rule within the community, nor should there be equal access to a lab's resources. On both these issues, most Japanese physicists assume the opposite."

But other aspects present a strong opposition:

"It is simply a logical fallacy to go from the observation that science is a social process to the conclusion that the final product, our scientific theories, is what it is because of the social and historical forces acting in this process. A party of mountain climbers may argue over the best path to the peak, and these arguments may be conditioned by the history and social structure of the expedition, but in the end either they find a good path to the peak or they do not, and when they get there they know it. (No one would give a book about mountain climbing the title Constructing Everest.) I cannot prove that science is like this, but everything in my experience as a scientist convinces me that it is. The "negotiations" over changes in scientific theory go on and on, with scientists changing their minds again and again in response to calculations and experiments, until finally one view or another bears an unmistakable mark of objective success. It certainly feels to me that we are discovering something real in physics, something that is what it is without any regard to the social or historical conditions that allowed us to discover it.

Where then does this radical attack on the objectivity of scientific knowledge come from? One source I think is the old bugbear of positivism, this time applied to the study of science itself. If one refuses to talk about anything that is not directly observed, then quantum field theories or principles of symmetry or more generally laws of nature cannot be taken seriously. What philosophers and sociologists and anthropologists can study is the actual behavior of real scientists, and this behavior never follows any simple description in terms of rules of inference. But scientists have the direct experience of scientific theories as desired yet elusive goals, and they become convinced of the reality of these theories.

There may be another motivation for the attack on the realism and objectivity of science, one that is less high-minded. Imagine if you will an anthropologist who studies the cargo cult on a Pacific island. The islanders believe that they can bring back the cargo aircraft that made them prosperous during World War II by building wooden structures that imitate radar and radio antennas. It is only human nature that this anthropologist and other sociologists and anthropologists in similar circumstances would feel a frisson of superiority, because they know as their subjects do not that there is no objective reality to these beliefs—no cargo-laden C-47 will ever be attracted by the wooden radars. Would it be surprising if, when anthropologists and sociologists turned their attention to studying the work of scientists, they tried to recapture that delicious sense of superiority by denying the objective reality of the scientists' discoveries?
Relativism is only one aspect of a wider, radical, attack on science itself. (...) These radical critics of science seem to be having little or no effect on the scientists themselves. I do not know of any working scientist who takes them seriously."

A delicious self-criticism article by Bruno Latour : "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam" (archived pdf - beginning + references in web archive), questioning the field of social studies he created himself, considering how it turned out to lead to conspirationism, denialism, and endangering our planet by the way it is used by political lobbies for denying scientific evidence on global warming:

"...I myself have spent sometimes in the past trying to show the "lack of scientific certainty" inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary issue." But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument–or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I'd like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from a prematurely naturalized objectified fact. Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast?
In which case the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact–as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past–but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we have now to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices?
..."

Pathological absolutizing as a substitute for clarity, and some other bullshit

Copy of discussion in youtube comments The story of how philosophy happened to dismiss logical positivism, is another example of effect of pathological absolutizing, or straw man argument : misinterpreting an idea in caricatural ways to end up finding flaws in this caricature, then throwing the baby with the bathwater.

Related article : Politically correct fanatics by Winston Wu.

More notes

After reviewing some of the existing philosophical papers on the growing block time theory (especially those from 2017 to 2021 from this list and both articles and both videos by Vincent Grandjean in Collège de France), I wrote the following (written in 2021; added here in 2022):

The paradox of the heap

I saw this "paradox" in the list of Vincent Grandjean's paradoxes seminar. I also saw a version of it, presented as a case of "indetermination" of (the answer to a given question about) the future, in one of his articles about time. Whenever I see any philosopher mention this "paradox" as if it was anything serious, this seems to me so ridiculous, and a symptom of a more general thinking flaw typical of the academic philosophers community; explanations on this will then be used to explain some deep aspects of the contrast of approaches to the growing bloc theory of time.

So, what is this thinking flaw. Caricaturally let me describe it by qualifying a philosopher as the opposite of a physicist :

Indeed, among the common man's practices of approximations, is the possible use of the word "heap" to describe something which he may need to speak about. However, like many other words and phrases used by the common man, this belongs to the language of approximation, which the philosopher seems to have big troubles with, as he visibly, quite often, keeps desperately searching for clear and rigorous meanings to all such words and possibly utterable propositions made out of them (as well as the possible words and propositions expressed by diverse scientists across their respective fields of investigation, whose useful technical languages sometimes keep a similar kind of fuzziness to that found in the language of the common man). So, the philosopher has problems with the use of the word "heap" which he fails to understand. He may, for example, put forward the complaint that the word "heaps" is lacking a precise definition, and try to play with this word to form with it some weird sentences and kinds of story-telling so as to test the limits of its meaningfulness, just like children may like to play putting things together in ways they were not designed for, curious of what will come out of that ; with the difference that, unlike children usually aware that they are just playing, philosophers often mistake their own games as if these could be a serious and productive form of investigation on the nature of reality.
Now of course, the "paradox of the heap" has its clear and obvious solution, or rather, a natural reason why it never was a paradox in the first place, and which academic philosophers might be the only kind of people on Earth ignorant about; but which therefore I am now feeling ridiculously obliged to write down in case some academic philosopher reading this page would need it:

So, this was the clearly satisfactory, ultimate explanation of what the word "heap" really means, resolving for all practical purposes any "paradoxes" which philosophers could find in it. And the ultimate meaning of so many other words and phrases which philosophers could have troubles with can be also explained to them in the same manner.

Improper future tense semantics

Once so clarified this case of the "heap" which, I hope, could be seen rather simple (though it might still depend), we may hopefully be better equipped to address the slightly more subtle problem of trying to decipher the behavior of the common man who may happen to utter claims (predictions) about the future, and even to possibly utter some meta-claims about such claims, such as the claim that some sentence X "about the future" would be clear and meaningful, or claims that someone who previously made a given prediction "was right" or "was wrong" at the time that prediction was made, depending on whether the unfolding facts turned out to confirm or infirm the validity of that prediction.
Indeed, I see natural to classify such claims as essentially similar to claims about "heaps", namely, that the whole role of such sentences, simply and satisfactorily, is to serve as convenient tools in the practice of approximative communication. Therefore, any elaborate attempt by the philosopher to take such sentences on word by trying to systematically analyze them, may this be in terms of a logical system, or a clear semantics of any kind, would be, purely and simply, a misunderstanding.
Any ponderings on the kind of questions which may be relevant instead about such sentences, then, namely questions about their usefulness in given contexts so as to convey to their listeners some intended kinds of ideas and understandings while avoiding any wasteful cost of additional efforts that would be involved by trying to convey the same useful ideas by other means, will be here left as an exercise for the interested reader.

That was to answer the kind of wish (motivation) to make sense of claims about the future as expressed by Vincent Grandjean, namely, to fit with the common people's uses better than they themselves really meant. However there are other, more metaphysically serious discussions on the topic, which I will address.

The source of mistakes

Now will be a tentative explanation about where philosophers come from and what could lead them so astray into this kind of mistakes.

Philosophers are people in research. They are not the only beings in research, though. Other people and even animals are also, quite often, beings in research. Now of course, there are differences. A first difference is that, while animals, for example, are usually searching for food for their stomach, philosophers are often rather searching for food for their mind. But the difference of concern, here, is that the latter appear quite less successful in their research than the former. Now if we focused on reviewing the philosophers research (as they did themselves of course... with even too much focus, I would say, to have any new chance of success) it could look hard to figure out where their failures come from, and more interestingly, how it might be possible to do much better. But some insights can be pointed out by checking the other side of this comparison : where the frequent success of animals and people in the search for food for the stomach comes from.

So, how can animals and people so often succeed in their research ? Well, mainly based on their rich experience of previous success in the same research. They know how to find food because they already succeeded to find food before and they remember. Children learn how to find food as they are taught by their parents who know. Young animals also naturally find easily, guided for this by their genome which somehow represents an heritage of millions of years of experience of the same success.

Now, what are philosophers searching for ? They are searching for new knowledge. Some deeper insights on life and the nature of reality than they ever heard anyone discovering before. Plain and simple, they just don't know what they are really searching for. Because, well, if only they already knew what this knowledge on the deeper nature of reality, which they are searching for, really is, then... by definition, their search would already be over. But since they don't know what they are searching for, how could they better know how to effectively search for it ?

Consider another example : the police searching for a criminal. As they know very well, their search can be very difficult as long as they don't know what the criminal who they are searching for, looks like ; but it suddenly becomes easier once they got, hopefully a picture, or at least a robot portrait of him. But, how can they get such a robot portrait ? If they simply tried to draw a portrait themselves out of their imagination, based on their guesses of what a criminal doing some given crimes should look like, their chances to draw it correctly would be very small; now, hopefully, they are usually aware of this, which is why they do not proceed in this way. Instead, the only way is to have the testimony of someone who actually saw this person, and remembers what he looked like. Also, we need good reasons to trust that the given witness had a clear vision and memory, and also that it was indeed a vision of the criminal searched for, rather than of anyone else who might have been on the crime scene by accident.

What about a similar risk with food : how can people and animals distinguish good food from anything which might look pretty but which would not be food ? It takes not only an experience of finding things before, as examples to follow, but also the condition that the things so found were confirmed to be good food, rather than misleading experiences of having found things that looked nice but were actually not proper food. Fortunately, this risk is usually avoided for a clear and powerful reason : if anyone once tried to feed himself with anything else than proper food, he would have quickly got sick, which would have probably forced him to recognize his mistake, and from there, no more eat the same another time. Or anyway if he still didn't, and also if any other people had been tempted to follow for any long time his bad example, then by the force of things such people would have probably not survived, so that, sooner or later, such a practice would have got an end anyway.

Back to the case of philosophers. Disclaimer : I am not a historian of philosophy. I am thus not claiming to be faithful to any chronological order, but I will just use time metaphorically for what I only mean as an abstract, conceptual order.

So, they were searching for some deeper understanding of stuff than the common man. Then by lack of having ever effectively found such a thing, they tried to focus their research by putting their imagination at work to imagine some robot portraits of what such a deeper understanding might look like. So, they first undertook to give it a name : they decided to call this "the essence" of things; and, in case such an essence of a given thing would not be unique, it might become different attributes : after all, it would be nice for a concept of "essence" to also take the job of explaining what makes things differ from each other, so that, for this, we probably need a multiplicity of essences as well. Therefore, it could look like, we may need to research multiple qualities or properties which would be "essential" to these things.

Now, once having got a pretty name "essence" for the concepts we are searching for, also declined in the form of an adjective "to be essential" for properties to qualify things, something more was lacking : some definitions for what these special words could actually mean. Then, whole philosophical theories have been developed to offer candidate definitions for these words. Doing so, they seemed to neglect that this is not the usual way known to be successful how to develop concepts and names, which usually starts with a familiarity with the examples, before developing an intuitive understanding and description (way of classifying things into given kinds, which will serve as their intuitive definitions), after which a name is given to refer to these already clear concepts and definitions with their known ranges of examples. Admittedly, this usual method to coin names and concepts does not ensure these concepts to have absolutely clear sense in the foundations of reality; but that is not its purpose anyway... and philosophers seem to be the only people in the room to strangely forget this sometimes. But this should anyway warn us that a great deal of care is needed when trying to proceed the creation of concepts in a different way.

Indeed, philosophers still had no examples for what could be "essences" and "essential properties" of things (since they still had no specially deep insights into reality). They only had some more precise expectations of what these should look like. And... no real way to check for sure that these more precise expectations could really match the mysterious ultimate target of their research.
Later, a horrible news came and filled the philosophical community with dismay: their dear definition of what "essences" or "essential" meant, which had been taught to generations of students, turned out to not be possibly the right one, since some ridiculous stuff was finally discovered to fit into this definition without possibly looking like their originally intended target, which this definition was meant to describe.

Now, we can observe that this mistake with the words "essence" and "essential" is of the same kind as with with the word "heap" : a baseless expectation for words and sentences to make clearer and deeper sense than they were initially meant to. Some words and concepts from common language like "heap", and the "concrete" vs. "abstract" distinction, because they were designed and selected by experience to work for a fuzzy kind of semantics only ; some additional words introduced by philosophers for their own purposes, because, beyond pious wishes, these words like "essence" have never been properly designed to mean anything at all, i.e. may turn out to belong to the same category as what formerly respected names like "Zeus" or "phlogiston" are now generally recognized to be in.
So, what happened: starting with a world where the language and concepts did not appear clear, they dreamed of a better world where language and concepts would be much clearer and deeper. But they did not know how to get there, so all they could find to try was to dream themselves there, and voila. They did not make any big and serious trip which could be effective to reach their destination, or possibly they tried to, and might even have put a lot of energy in there, but by lack of a good compass to reliably give them the right direction in doing so, they did not really succeed going anywhere worth it.

Simply, there is a direct contradiction in this combination of attitudes or expectations which seem widespread in philosophy : to mainly keep the same language, concepts and basic experiences as the common man, and to directly and correctly give this all a much clearer and deeper semantics than the one known to fit. Indeed, if any deeper layer of reality is to be identified, then, at least, it should have a significant deal of differences from our usual one, so that any proper translation and explanation of the usual reality in terms of a deeper one, should require a deal of translation work, which would turn our familiar stuff into a more complex form than the form of its basic appearance. Such a complexity would be quite heavy to work with, if we tried to describe a lot of familiar stuff through such lenses. Since philosophers would anyway not have enough energy for such a task (ifever they had a clue how to do it right), one should admit that any reasonable hope of expressibility (to not mention discoverability) of a proper solution in any manageable amount of efforts, will at least require to discard a lot of our "familiar reality" and language, as out of subject. A condition which they seem traditionally far from being ready for. But, yes, I understand, in lack of a good compass to tell where to go, the mere request to go a long way would not have sufficed anyway.

Metaphysics in free fall

"Traditionally, quantum entities were thought to be indiscernible: two quantum entities share every property and every relation. That leads directly to a violation of the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII) in quantum mechanics. The violation of PII, on its turn, leads immediately to two distinct possibilities on what concerns the metaphysical status of its entities: they are either non-individuals (i.e., entities without identity conditions) or else they are indiscernible individuals; that is, entities individuated by some Transcendental Principle of Individuality (TI), like bare particulars, primitive thisnesses, haecceities and the like (see French and Krause 2006, chap. 4). That much seems to be uncontroversial in the traditional metaphysical analyses of quantum entities. Still according to a more recent tradition, the fact that we have at least two options leads directly to a form of metaphysical underdetermination: quantum mechanics provides no hint as to which of the previous metaphysical packages should be preferred" http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12880/1/Jonas%20R.%20Becker%20Arenhart.pdf

The Popularity Battle

Instead of an effective means to test their theories and arguments against reality, the main or perhaps only available criterion of quality they have, is their convincing ability, i.e. popularity, including peer-review, in the eyes of... other philosophers. These may be doing their best in trying to assess the quality of works from their own viewpoint, but anyway as people also ignorant of what the hoped for deeper insights on reality would look like... and even often without a strong scientific background when that would be needed : reviews by genuine scientists are not often at play there, for example. I guess even philosophy of science articles are usually reviewed mainly by other philosophers, rather than scientists of the involved fields. That is how :

- Bohmian Mechanics, for example, can enjoy a large popularity among philosophers in contrast with its general unpopularity among quantum field theorists, whose own insights can be the basis of some deep reasons for them to dismiss this theory beyond the somewhat naive perspective of philosophers.

- Philosophers of physics, or of time theory, often refer to "causal set theory" as if it was a physical theory. It isn't. It is just a dream, a wish to invent some kind of theory that might someday be made compatible with known physics. But we are still far from there. There is no good reason to believe that a theory of this kind is actually conceivable, and there are good reasons to believe the opposite. Namely, it is a kind of synomym of superdeterminism, that is a class of theories known as having no possible member. Now if someone wants to be serious in referring to science as it now stands, rather than losing one's mind into science fiction fantasies, one should not refer to "causal sets" as a part of physics : it isn't. There are much better reasons to refer to parapsychology as a part of science, than to refer to "causal sets" as a scientific theory. This may be a side effect of the terrible ambiguity of the use of the word "theory" which may be used as well to name the most well-established facts, and the most hopeless, implausible hunches.

- Some largely outdated or inaccurate elements from science do not seem exceptional among examples or references of philosophical articles.

Examples: the possibility of a Big Crunch ; the confusion between

This last mistake is committed around the note 61 of the thesis "Structure and transition: towards an accretivist theory of time"); there are genuine speculations that the solutions to both conflicts may be linked, but it is another topic.

While this relatively unfavorable condition for the development of philosophical research could be excused as an external necessity to deal with, such an excuse begins to lose validity when the issue of popularity of ideas across the philosophical community, moves from its basic unfortunate role of the only available compass driving the direction of philosophical works as a cause, into also taking this role as a target.
To be more precise, when strategical concerns towards matters of popularity (the word "marketing" would be clearer, just probably too strong here) happen to be explicitly stepping into the concepts and arguments of philosophical works themselves at the expense of purely rational concerns (the main point of Vincent Grandjean: Symmetric and asymmetric theories of time), that is starting to look quite terrible from a scientist's viewpoint.

More notes (added later)

A long quote explaining some of this

About a traditional ridiculous mistake I see as specific to academic philosophy and a few other fields, against common sense : the mistake of giving unfounded confidence in tentative strict, literal, rational categories where these are inappropriate and not actually justified on rational grounds (sorry I can't even qualify as rational anyone who goes on publishing or referencing claims of rational analysis of something without double-checking their appropriateness). I mean I do not see this trouble in hard sciences precisely insofar as these focus on specific issues where hard rational analysis can find its genuine field of validity. I mean of course, for those scientists who are not mistaking their field of research as if it was "everything" of reality ; if there are such hard scientists mistaking their field of research as if was the whole reality, or applying a priori given rational categories without proper checking, then I would say it is their personal philosophical mistake and not a trouble with hard sciences themselves, abstractly taken in their own right.

I found a nice expression of the situation expressed in William James' Afterdeath Journal. I mean that is what can be expected from a dead philosopher indeed, i.e. someone who had been familiar with philosophers fallacies, then could get out and see some of what was wrong with this (yet I would not say he sees it all). In his description he seems to dismiss all hard rationality as irrelevant, but I guess it mainly comes from two factors:
So here is the quote :
For while the physical world is operationally predictable (and then, only generally speaking), that predictability is operative only when inner components of the mind act upon physical properties in a certain very precise fashion. The physical world must be "turned on." Only then does it appear with its predictable elements. Only then do objects have reality, flowers grow, seas turn with their tides, and the splendid sun's heat warms the land.
So far, science has only examined results. By its insistence upon the priority and superiority of matter's dominance, it ties its own hands. The very focus of its beliefs leads it toward an endless categorizing in which it follows minute particles into a deepening invisibility. The hypothetical discovery of each new minuscule particle exerts an ever-deepening hypnotic effect, leading the scientist down a road that is self-defeating if he hopes to delve into those phenomena that exist beneath the world's operating reality.
The mind, so entranced by these matters, so led astray, itself possesses the abilities to perceive the inner structure of life, but in a different fashion. The old methods of measurement do not apply to a nonphysical reality; yet the mind has its own values, its own methods and measurements, and the mind's very existence is its own evidence. To that evidence, science remains blind.
The scientist often says impatiently, "I deal with the true or false world. A phenomenon exists or it doesn't. An object is, or isn't. I deal with provable facts." This attitude alone shuts out from science's province the very unpredictability, the very creativity from which the predictable world emerges.
Modern science rightly rebelled against the excesses, exaggerations, and superstitions of religion and against a rigid system of beliefs that encouraged man to interpret the natural world only in the light of its own dogmas. Yet science went overboard to prove itself, adopting many of those authoritative characteristics and denying the existence of any phenomenon that is not observable according to its own set of limited measurements, or that does not agree with its basic theories.
In whatever erroneous a fashion, however, religion did attempt to categorize inner realities, for it numbered its "species" with as much vigor and self-righteousness and determination as any scientist pinpointing the number and kinds of rocks, birds, gases, or particles. The demons, minor gods, mythological creatures, hells and heavens were all in their way the results of this same kind of specification, misapplied; for in the inner reality, such methods are ludicrous.
Both religion and science seek "truth," but the literal interpretation, physical reality is as limiting as the literal interpretation of the Bible. There are fundamentalist scientists quibbling over whether the universe is forever expanding, or is endlessly expanding and contracting—and that is as much an exercise in futility as medievals debating how many angels can sit on the top of a pin. The attitudes of mind, the childish literal interpretations are the same; equally absurd, if the greater issue of truth is to be involved.
The very definitions of truth are at fault.
Science and psychology owe their birth to religion's failure in conducting that search [for truth]. They are split-offs from religion, each with their own methods, yet they have to a large extent converged. For all of psychology's stated interest in man's subjective nature—held while still maintaining its basic objective stance— psychology is de- pending more and more upon technology and scientific instruments to measure the mind's products and behavior; a new futility also perpetuated because of limited concepts and misunderstandings concerning the pursuit of truth itself.
For what does truth mean? In scientific terms, it means a provable fact such as "Today is Wednesday" or "An apple is a fruit." These facts are operational; one categorizes time, and the other, an object. Neither tells us anything about time or objects, however.
In fact, the belief that today, Wednesday, is followed by Thursday, while operationally true, also leads to drastic misconceptions about the nature of time itself, couching it in the consecutive terms of everyday experience. This discrepancy goes quite unnoticed when you meet a friend for a Wednesday appointment, and the convenient use of time is to be maintained in any orderly physical world.
Scientists know, however, that time is relative, and if the dictum "Time is relative" is a fact or truth, then is the fact of consecutive time true or false? If false, then no day is Wednesday, whether the statement is operationally true or not. For that matter, Wednesday does not exist in the same way that our apple does. In that regard, the statement that an apple is a fruit is the "truer" of the two statements. But even the apple's fruitness tells us nothing of the origin of fruits, or explains how the apple has fruit rather than animal characteristics; and no matter how far you go with this kind of truth finding, you will ultimately be led to a point where one fact contradicts another, or another framework of facts, or where you simply run into ignorance—a point of no answers.
The reason is astonishingly simple. The overemphasis upon categorization leads to an infinitely larger and ever-increasing number of facts, each considered true; and with this multiplication, the discrepancies collected along the way also multiply. You end up with various disciplines, each with their fact-truths, and under examination the facts of one discipline too often do not apply to those of another field--a "fact" that those in all disciplines often conveniently overlook.
Within any one school of knowledge these discrepancies are invisible, and overall people operate in a fairly predictable environment regardless, eating delicious apples and secure in the knowledge that each Wednesday is followed by a Thursday. It would serve no purpose, either, to say that apples are not fruits; a statement that is false if you accept the apple's fruitness. But the truth or falsehood of such statements are beside the point of basic truth, which should deal with the innate nature of time or with the innate nature of objects rather than with their specifics. Under what conditions is an apple a fruit or a chair a chair? Under what conditions do we experience time as Wednesday, or as a series of consecutive moments, and under what conditions might time behave elsewise? Do any of these phenomena exist independently of our perception of them?

How academic philosophy is just a religion among others

Like Christianity and probably many other religions, academic philosophy fooled itself by developing and falling into its own vocabulary traps.

For example, Christianity uses the phrase "the Word of God" to mean the Christian Bible ; "knowing God" to mean having learned the Christian doctrine, having faith in it, and practicing prayer ; "testimony" to mean someone's personal story of having arbitrarily chosen to believe in Jesus without due evidence, and then arbitrarily believed this to have meant "knowing Jesus personally" no matter how baseless that belief could be, as if any other kind of story could not deserve to be seen as an authentic testimony ; "mission" to mean going to preach the Gospel, as if no other kind of mission could be a legitimate and worthy mission in God's eyes, etc.
It is by the force of such fallacies that Christians made it inconceivable for themselves how anyone could make sense of life and fulfill its deepest purpose otherwise than by being Christian and dedicating their efforts to their religion.
So doing, they completely miss the fact that they are far from the only ones, since so many other religions equally lead their followers to believe their other religion is the only one that can be followed when caring about the sense of life in the right way.
One of the crucial tools of this delusion consists, for each group, in forming its own bubble of collective thought, inside which unanimity appears to be reached. They only admit like-minded people inside their own bubble, or, even if they are not aware of doing it, it automatically happens anyway by nature due to the fact they have a specific label under which they believe that proper thinkers should join, after which they only consider those people who endorse this label, as voices to be counted in the consensus to be formed. Then, they use the consensus reached inside it as an implicit argument to consider their religion as the necessary conclusion of "all serious people", at least in good approximation, and thus dismiss as insane, hubristic, extremely insulting and thus not deserving any consideration or reply, any view which strongly diverges from this "consensus". I have commented elsewhere about the deluding sport of humility contests and complaints against the perceived "insulting" attitude of one's opponent, and so I will not repeat here all what still applies here from there.

So, the followers of every given religion are usually mainly familiar with the arguments for their own specific religion, rather than those for another religion, or those against their own; and it is based on this context that "everything objectively looks as if" this clearly was the one possibly serious religion, and it would have to be a conspiracy of God or the universe if reality turned out to be otherwise. Now, who would care spending one's time criticizing a specific religion, and why ? Few people care for such a dirty work, but if someone cared, those targeted by the criticism would just wonder what is wrong personally with him, instead of trying to understand the actual arguments (which will be hard to understand anyway).
Consider this : if the rest of people are not criticizing your religion, but just stay away from it and keep silent about it, then this silence is objectively the worst possible insult against it, since it means they regard it as not even worth any attention or reply. If you really understand this, then you should welcome and praise as one of the most respectful and generous acts in the world, anyone's devastating criticism against your view, because doing this means considering you worth their care to explain to you what a really different viewpoint looks like, and why it is that not everyone is following you, an explanation which you might waste your life missing otherwise. But, things are more often perceived quite differently : an attitude of silence and avoidance towards a given religion, feels like the polite way (unlike explicit criticism), because it is the way to leave the devout members in peace with their solipsism.

Now, academic philosophy is just a religion among others in the sense just described : it starts with an abuse of its holy word "philosophy" to confuse itself (the study of its specific literature) with, well, just the same general care for the sense of life which is the obsession of any other religion, making it inconceivable for them that anyone else might try to distinguish both.

Of course, it has it excuses to "justify" this confusion it makes. Namely, it may insist that its own approach would be the rational approach to the sense of life, as if this sufficed to make it the only valid one.
You know what ? Every other religion also sees itself as the rational approach to the sense of life. And they have their own respective excuses to see themselves that way. For example, Muslims insist that there would be scientific evidence for the truth of Islam... Buddhists or similar teachings like to insist that they are not teaching any doctrine but just inviting their followers to make their own "scientific research" about the effects of meditation... fundamentalists Christians have their "logical proof" of the resurrection of Jesus, so that one cannot deserve to be seen as a rational thinker unless one devoutly follows and accepts the validity of their argument.
Even if you try to strengthen the requirement in terms of the concern for a rational approach so as to exclude most religions, this remains unlikely to exclude another competing ideology with its different literature and many followers : the so-called "scientific skeptics" (who are not always friends with academic philosophy, especially as they usually support logical positivism unlike philosophers), claiming to combine the authority and reliability of science (which was itself not a real threat for philosophy due to the division of topics), with a concern for topics close to human life (which philosophy was supposed to be the voice of). Now, how do philosophers respond to this challenge ? It seems, they often ignore it: unless I missed something, they are objectively direct competitors, yet they managed to ignore each other just by the magic of using different holy keywords to virtually separate their agendas. What I could see from philosophers often looks like the story of "skepticism" started with Xenophanes and Pyrrho of Elis, and almost ended with Hume. The modern movement of scientific skepticism almost did not seem to appear on their radar screen, despite its recent huge impact on society as an ideological basis of health policies. The concern seems to have been more often expressed by the keyword "scientism"... which seems to be often confused with experimentalism as opposed to theoretical and deductive approaches, a confusion promoted by the "scientific skeptics" themselves... but unless I miss something, the arguments appeared to be quite superficial; in particular, distinctions between scientific skepticism and genuine science may have been often overlooked.

Social observations show the simple and devastating reason why the "most rational approach" argument has no weight : who is the judge of what is genuinely rational and what isn't ? Anyone can always qualify himself as following the "most rational way". Thus, as long as philosophers are their own judges, their argument from how rational they think they are, remains void.
This can explain why science and technology could progress, while philosophy didn't : science and technology (as well as most fields of human work, including arts), have some verdict/feedback from an external reality to decide what works and what doesn't, what is effectively valid and useful and what isn't; math has its rigorous validity criteria; in arts you cannot meaningfully dismiss the public as mistaken about whether something is good for them or not. These do not remain hopelessly subjective and fanciful as happens for philosophy, whose only feedback, that is peer-review, can well be completely misguided.

Academic philosophers keep observing and complaining that their works are not taken seriously by scientists, but visibly could not decipher the real reasons for this fact, since they keep absurdly trying to defend their discipline out of the point, never questioning their basic ridiculous misuse of the word "philosophy", trying to argue that scientists "need philosophy" or "are trying to do philosophy anyway", and therefore should need the works of philosophers for this reason. No, of course, the claim (rather, the ridiculous presupposition) of academic philosophers for having their favorite literature being taken as the necessary reference for any act of serious thinking and exploration on the sense of life or other big questions, is not legitimate. However, they keep forever keeping their defense out of the point, since maybe scientists did not waste their time insisting on the exact terms of the disagreement (or even, some of the most visible ones did not provide the proper explanations), and anyone who would dare expressing the divergence in the correct way would be dismissed as insane, ridiculous, arrogant, insulting... and thus not deserve any reply.

What else ? That scientists would owe something to philosophers because historically, science was born from philosophy. Well, humans descend from apes also, but this does not mean that apes have lessons to teach to humans about how to live.

So, it is possible to express academic philosophy as a specific belief or faith like the faith of any religion : the belief that its specific literature is, in average, the best available literature which anyone needs to study, and will then hold as relevant, to properly try to explore the sense of life. Obviously, this statement of the philosophers faith, is only believed by less than 0.1% of the world's population, and thus rejected by more than 99.9%. Yet this definition of the point of the value of philosophy has largely been missed, with philosophers focusing on claiming to defend their jobs by ruminating trivialities of the form "it is better to try thinking about the sense of life than not", just like Christians trying to defend their faith by ruminating arguments of the form "it is better to follow God's will than not", and remaining clueless about why this does not suffice to get the rest of the world to run up and say Amen !
I would even suspect this mistake to be linked with the above mentioned mistake of denying the consciousness of animals : a kind of confusion between the experience of consciousness and the practice of academic philosophy. Indeed how is it possible to determine whether animals are conscious if not from the observation whether they are able to read and write some philosophical literature ?
If you ask : if that literature is not the best, then, what can be better ? This is out of topic, as the point here is not my own suggestions, but the general fact of the unpopularity of the philosophers references; different people would bring their own references (or a denial of the need to refer to any specific literature), and that is what philosophers fail to address. Yet, out of topic thus, I would suggest the literature on Near Death Experiences (though of course some fraud or nonsense may also exist there sometimes such as Eben Alexander and the Urantia book) and the channeled books from Jane Roberts. Indeed after a lot disappointment and debunking of fallacies from diverse religious teachings I happened to find and see these as globally good, though I do not mean the study of this specific literature to be necessary either : as this literature itself states, there is no necessity to study any specific literature at all for finding the sense of life, as the experience of life itself with its endless diversity, is its own purpose (and it is up to everyone to find the sense of one's own life, which may differ from that of others) with no general need of doctrinal expression.

One of the worst possible arguments : that academic philosophers should be held as the reference because they are the ones having jobs in academia, unlike religions. This would be taking things upside down. There were times and places (and there still are) where theologians of specific religions were the ones having jobs in academia, and so they assumed having the right for their respective teachings to be held as the truth reference for this reason. Then it happened to require bloody revolutions for taxpayers to kick these out from their positions and declare that "The Republic does not recognize, pay, or subsidize any religious sect". Now how much blood may it require to manage similarly putting back "philosophy" to its right place ?

More concrete examples of philosophical bullshit, analyzed in other pages

In response to an article defending the relevance of philosophy, I wrote a long reply in another page : On the philosophical treatment of dualism.

A mathematician's response to the philosophy of mathematics

My own metaphysical article, showing by contrast the pitiful state of affairs which prevailed in academic philosophy on the concerned topics.

So wanna bring a philosophical view over scientific activities ?

Great, let me answer by bringing a techno-scientific view over metaphysical research, and let us see which one is deeper and more far-reaching !

More external links

Sinking into life: the tragedy of our lost philosophy
Quora question : What are some criticisms of philosophy?
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