Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking
As somebody who makes a living "as a philosopher" in areas that overlap with CS, decision making, logic, AI and appear to be more scientific in nature, I may find this article emotionally somewhat appealing but still don't think it's a useful view about philosophy.<p>The first and foremost thing about philosophy laymen should realize is that the vast majority of philosophers do not consider philosophy a science. They also kind of agree to disagree about what philosophy is and what the subject matter of the discipline is. To put it bluntly, I'd say the majority of philosophers silently agree that 80% of all publications or more in philosophy are nonsense or bullshit and only the rest is even worth reading, but they all disagree about <i>which</i> 80% percent...<p>So Yes, I sometimes did also have the suspicion that some colleagues are bullshitting and obscuring intentionally, but overall this is not a helpful attitude. If you don't like a particular philosopher's work, you generally don't read and support it, and that's it. Calling the work pseudophilosophy will only enrage people who disagree and not help with anything.<p>Things are different in neighbouring disciplines in the humanities. After many years in the field and having to do with some of these disciplines, I believe I can say with some confidence that some of them are indeed pseudo-sciences. I don't want to mention which and why for fear of being identified later. All I can say is that there are disciplines and sub-disciplines/fields of study in the humanities that bear all the hallmarks of pseudo-science: extremely small communities, lots of jargon, few journals controlled by everyone in the communities, bouncing articles back and forth between those journals, constantly mixing empirical theses with some philosophical claims ("ideal models"), and so on. I'd be fine if these disciplines would at least apply the fairly stringent standards for publications in philosophy, but they don't even do that. These disciplines have overall lower standards in comparison to philosophy <i>and</i> often make unfounded empirical claims based on qualitative studies or studies with way too small sample size.