The field of philosophy is still shaken from the fright Wittgenstein gave it. [13] Later in life he spent a lot of time talking about how words worked. Since that seems to be allowed, that's what a lot of philosophers do now. Meanwhile, sensing a vacuum in the metaphysical speculation department, the people who used to do literary criticism have been edging Kantward, under new names like "literary theory," "critical theory," and when they're feeling ambitious, plain "theory." The writing is the familiar word salad:
Gender is not like some of the other grammatical modes which express precisely a mode of conception without any reality that corresponds to the conceptual mode, and consequently do not express precisely something in reality by which the intellect could be moved to conceive a thing the way it does, even where that motive is not something in the thing as such. [14]
The singularity I've described is not going away. There's a market for writing that sounds impressive and can't be disproven. There will always be both supply and demand. So if one group abandons this territory, there will always be others ready to occupy it.
We may be able to do better. Here's an intriguing possibility. Perhaps we should do what Aristotle meant to do, instead of what he did. The goal he announces in the Metaphysics seems one worth pursuing: to discover the most general truths. That sounds good. But instead of trying to discover them because they're useless, let's try to discover them because they're useful.
I propose we try again, but that we use that heretofore despised criterion, applicability, as a guide to keep us from wondering off into a swamp of abstractions. Instead of trying to answer the question:
What are the most general truths?
let's try to answer the question
Of all the useful things we can say, which are the most general?
The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read what we've written to do anything differently afterward. Knowing we have to give definite (if implicit) advice will keep us from straying beyond the resolution of the words we're using.
The goal is the same as Aristotle's; we just approach it from a different direction.
As an example of a useful, general idea, consider that of the controlled experiment. There's an idea that has turned out to be widely applicable. Some might say it's part of science, but it's not part of any specific science; it's literally meta-physics (in our sense of "meta"). The idea of evolution is another. It turns out to have quite broad applications—for example, in genetic algorithms and even product design. Frankfurt's distinction between lying and bullshitting seems a promising recent example. [15]
These seem to me what philosophy should look like: quite general observations that would cause someone who understood them to do something differently.
Such observations will necessarily be about things that are imprecisely defined. Once you start using words with precise meanings, you're doing math. So starting from utility won't entirely solve the problem I described above—it won't flush out the metaphysical singularity. But it should help. It gives people with good intentions a new roadmap into abstraction. And they may thereby produce things that make the writing of the people with bad intentions look bad by comparison.
One drawback of this approach is that it won't produce the sort of writing that gets you tenure. And not just because it's not currently the fashion. In order to get tenure in any field you must not arrive at conclusions that members of tenure committees can disagree with. In practice there are two kinds of solutions to this problem. In math and the sciences, you can prove what you're saying, or at any rate adjust your conclusions so you're not claiming anything false ("6 of 8 subjects had lower blood pressure after the treatment"). In the humanities you can either avoid drawing any definite conclusions (e.g. conclude that an issue is a complex one), or draw conclusions so narrow that no one cares enough to disagree with you.
The kind of philosophy I'm advocating won't be able to take either of these routes. At best you'll be able to achieve the essayist's standard of proof, not the mathematician's or the experimentalist's. And yet you won't be able to meet the usefulness test without implying definite and fairly broadly applicable conclusions. Worse still, the usefulness test will tend to produce results that annoy people: there's no use in telling people things they already believe, and people are often upset to be told things they don't.
Here's the exciting thing, though. Anyone can do this. Getting to general plus useful by starting with useful and cranking up the generality may be unsuitable for junior professors trying to get tenure, but it's better for everyone else, including professors who already have it. This side of the mountain is a nice gradual slope. You can start by writing things that are useful but very specific, and then gradually make them more general. Joe's has good burritos. What makes a good burrito? What makes good food? What makes anything good? You can take as long as you want. You don't have to get all the way to the top of the mountain. You don't have to tell anyone you're doing philosophy.
If it seems like a daunting task to do philosophy, here's an encouraging thought. The field is a lot younger than it seems. Though the first philosophers in the western tradition lived about 2500 years ago, it would be misleading to say the field is 2500 years old, because for most of that time the leading practitioners weren't doing much more than writing commentaries on Plato or Aristotle while watching over their shoulders for the next invading army. In the times when they weren't, philosophy was hopelessly intermingled with religion. It didn't shake itself free till a couple hundred years ago, and even then was afflicted by the structural problems I've described above. If I say this, some will say it's a ridiculously overbroad and uncharitable generalization, and others will say it's old news, but here goes: judging from their works, most philosophers up to the present have been wasting their time. So in a sense the field is still at the first step. [16]
That sounds a preposterous claim to make. It won't seem so preposterous in 10,000 years. Civilization always seems old, because it's always the oldest it's ever been. The only way to say whether something is really old or not is by looking at structural evidence, and structurally philosophy is young; it's still reeling from the unexpected breakdown of words.
Philosophy is as young now as math was in 1500. There is a lot more to discover.
[1] In practice formal logic is not much use, because despite some progress in the last 150 years we're still only able to formalize a small percentage of statements. We may never do that much better, for the same reason 1980s-style "knowledge representation" could never have worked; many statements may have no representation more concise than a huge, analog brain state.
[2] It was harder for Darwin's contemporaries to grasp this than we can easily imagine. The story of creation in the Bible is not just a Judeo-Christian concept; it's roughly what everyone must have believed since before people were people. The hard part of grasping evolution was to realize that species weren't, as they seem to be, unchanging, but had instead evolved from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time.