42.3 Modeling Continued

I've been silent with my 42 questions for a few weeks, but that's because I got sucked into writing another publication here on Leaflet called The Daily Planet , and I'm somewhat proud to say that I've been posting daily there for the last two and a half, three weeks. But unfortunately, that's meant that I have kind of left 42 Questions by the wayside.

Here we go again

If there's one thing that irks me everyday, it is that academic philosophy feels like a total waste of time, in the lonely voice screaming into the void of other philosophers kind of way. You might be like: who cares, they are mostly smart and mostly good people doing their thing, leave them alone will you?

I want to leave them alone, but I can't. Because sometimes smart people end up wasting their lives and ruining the world for future generations. I am not worried about philosophy being too abstract or not applicable to the real world, whatever that means. I love abstraction and often find it more useful in the real world than business plans and other concreta.

Academic philosophy has few takers even within the world of theory, and the world has changed so much over the last few decades (hello Anthropocene!) that even philosophers such as John Rawls whose work has influenced policy-making are no longer that relevant. And so much of academic philosophy takes a functional liberal nation state for granted, and one glance at your newspaper or algorithmic feed should disabuse you of that idea.

I just don't see how current moral or political philosophers can get out of the tunnel that they're in. Or should I say, out of the cave that they're in, given that they are all disciples of Plato. So if I had to think of a project that I see myself ranking very high on the ladder of 42 and one that I myself hope to contribute, it would be to bringing philosophy back into the world.

Why do most people love philosophy but hate academic philosophy?

I mean literally the top ten bestseller list in every newspaper (remember those?) is filled with broadly speaking philosophical books, books like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck or Eat, Pray, Love, books that speak to philosophy in a bigger sense than what academic philosophers do, for sure. And to be honest, the academic philosopher looks down upon those books as not worth their 150 plus IQ. In fact, the analytically trained philosopher prides themselves on being smarter than anyone else. Maybe mathematicians and theoretical physicists are as smart, but even they don't think straight, while philosophers certainly do.

Turns out nobody cares. Even scientists rarely care about conceptual analysis, and when they care about conceptual analysis of their own disciplinary concepts, say a biologist interested in clarifying what gene or genome means, they may have their own procedures for clarifying the concept that don't benefit from a philosopher's conceptual rigor.

Yeah, but so what?

We live in an era of academic specialization; why should anybody else inside the academy, let alone outside in the real world, care about philosophy? It's not like we ask if historians care about chemistry or chemists care about history, at least in their professional lives. So why should philosophy matter? And yeah, from that point of view, no academic specialization has to justify its importance from how other specializations use its discoveries.

I don't want to address that retort here. I don't want to go into the evils of specialization or the virtues of interdisciplinarity. That's someone else's problem.

As a maker, I am far more interested in asking: what should philosophy do for it to actually be of practical consequence for other knowledge practices? I don't mean only other academic disciplines. Philosophy as an important contributor to software programming would have enormous consequences, both for philosophy and for software programming - if it works.

That's where modeling comes into the picture.

42 Questions, Part 2 - Ranganaut

On Models

In my last post 👆🏾, I talked about how modeling is a universal concern that philosophers should adopt in much greater numbers; it's a practice that aligns philosophy with other disciplines that model a lot: economics, mathematics, physics, all the quantitative sciences for sure, but not just those. I also want to include design and architecture and some of the creative disciplines that model by creating artifacts.

Is there an idea of modeling that philosophy can hold for all the knowledge disciplines?

IMHO, modeling is something philosophy can do - if it's done well - better than other disciplines, only because the most general account of what a model is, is best housed in philosophy. Maybe mathematics or design can be close partners, but ultimately, just as metaphysics is the most general science of what there is, the most general account of modeling will be the most general way of bringing new things into the world.

That ties philosophy directly into technology, engineering, design, , architecture etc, i.e., the maker disciplines - philosophy becomes an input to other kinds of knowledge inquiry in just the way that designers are useful to engineers.

These are very speculative thoughts and I don't even know what this most general account of modeling looks like, but if I were to put a number on it, this is somewhere in the 14 to 21 in the 42 point scale.