What do philosophers talk about these days?

[koganbot]

I asked this of B. Michael over on Tumblr, so I thought I ought to ask it of you all as well:

What do philosophers talk about these days, post-Wittgenstein and post-Kuhn? I've not kept up. (Not that I ever kept up.) Kuhn's notion of "paradigms" gets rid of the need for super-deep universal foundations for the scientific enterprise, and Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" does the same for pretty much everything. So what's left for philosophy? Not that I think philosophy departments should disband, but if I were in one I'd transform it into the Department Of Roving Troubleshooters Who Have More Fun Than Sociologists Seem To Have, or something.

EDIT: Er, perhaps I should elaborate slightly, though that could end up in a tangle, since my elaborations will need elaborations. But, e.g., if you're saying as I do that people's musical tastes tend to cluster by their social class, you then (if you're me) have to explore what you mean by social class (and keep exploring). Now, one could ask a philosopher instead, "Dear philosopher, What do I mean, or what should I mean, by 'social class'?" But it seems to me that what the philosopher says is of no more import than what anyone else says, that if s/he has something to say it isn't because s/he's a philosopher but because s/he's just another person trying to figure out in certain instances what we mean or should mean by "social class" in those and related instances. And as with "social class," so with "meaning" and "language" and so forth.

Comments

[koganbot]

Ah, but now we've come full circle, since instrumentalists/pragmatists like Dewey and Rorty were accused of being relativists. So it turns out that you're a relativist! (And Rorty considered Kuhn the greatest American postwar philosopher.)

I think my lack of philosophical interest in the actual concepts within science beyond their instrumental value is what leads me to view Kuhnian paradigms with distaste

I have no clue what the relationship between the conclusion of this sentence and the beginning of the sentence is.

Surely if you and another physicist have different concepts of motion, then its instrumental value will be different for the two of you as well. Conversely, if its instrumental value is the same, you're not likely to have different concepts.

If I predict that there's a giraffe in the closet, and you and I don't agree on what a giraffe is or what it means for it to be in or not in a closet, we may well disagree as to whether my prediction is correct.

[meserach.livejournal.com]

But I don't think we actually do disagree, practically speaking, on what giraffes are. The broad success of modern engineering at achieving goals that most humans recognise as useful itself testifies to a broad consensus on the nature of observation.

You'll probably object that all observation is inherently theory laden, but I'd argue that nearly all human beings (the exceptions being mostly those exhibit high levels of psychosis) have a broad consensus on at least, the idea of perceptible phenomena arrange in a perceptual space and time.

i.e. while maybe we don;t agree on the nature of giraffeness - I will in 99.9% of cases be able to get consensus that there is or isn't giraffe-qualia perceivable "within" the closet-qualia.

If we can't agree that 99.9% of people will agree on the content of their sensory perceptions then we do inevitably fall into relativism, yes. But are we?