In general, I think analytic philosophy (as in current, Anglophone academic philosophy) has a lot going for it. It’s the only subculture in the world that really tries to cultivate the skills needed to think clearly as such, as opposed to just doing competent work in one specialty. But there are also trends in it I despise, among them, the over-use of many pieces of jargon and technical concepts.

Take, for example, the concept of possible worlds. I’ve talked before about how this concept is sometimes used where it isn’t helpful, and sometimes even muddles the issue. Worse, I was recently in a class discussion where people were seriously proposing trying to use the concept of possible world while throwing out its original definition, since hey, we use it so much that of course we have a sense of what it means independent of any definition. How we could have access to the definition-independent meaning of any such piece of philosophical jargon is beyond me.

Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias recently proposed an explanation of why things like this happen–not just in philosophy but everywhere. He proposes that academia is really about credentialling impressive minds, so ideas are treated as important if and only if they’d take an impressive mind to produce. For philosophy, what this means is that since it takes an impressive mind to successfully juggle lots of technical concepts like “possible worlds,” philosophical papers that successfully juggle such concepts are the ones that get a reputation as important, and are then the ones that other philosophers try to imitate. This happens whether or not the technical concepts really aid the official philosophical goals of clear thinking and truth.

To be fair, it’s very easy to sympathize with academics who fall into this way of thinking. Robin’s former co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky one wrote a post about how elite academics and businesspeople are so much smarter than the merely competent. When I first read Eliezer’s post, it sounded right to me. But this may be an illusion created by the human tendency to want to see small gaps in human ability as large ones,