Do public academics help us to think philosophy doesn't stink?

Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale, recently tweeted that he would regard himself as, "an abject failure if people are still not reading my philosophical work in 200 years".

Stanley has been publishing in prestigious journals and writing successful trade books multiple times longer than I've been absent from the postgraduate market and consequently I can't claim to make any valuable assessment as to whether his worry might be hubristic. Much less does he need me - a non-philosopher whose only participation in the field in the past decade has been on twitter - to do so.

Nevertheless, as someone with a vested interest in having the philosophical qualifications on my CV taken seriously in the public domain, I do consider myself qualified to discuss the impact digital engagements like Stanley's have on the public perception of philosophy as a worthwhile enterprise.

The first goal any academic enterprise should set out to achieve when engaging with the public is a very clear statement about why a general audience should reallocate their time to pay the field any attention whatsoever.

Laypeople are busy, tired, distracted and need quick returns on their investment if they're going to spend any of the only currency that matters - their time - considering how academic discipline relates to their life.

For that reason, the primary role that any public-facing academic must play when engaging the public is rarely actually doing the academic discipline that they’re qualified in. Public-facing academics may hold a high-profile job in a university department and produce work in their field to a high level, but their public-facing career isn't their academic career. It's a communication and engagement role about their field.

One story about the general public's opinion of academic philosophy is that it's been a drastic PR disaster. Communicating why philosophy matters to modern non-academic audiences is difficult because it is often a painstakingly slow-returns pursuit. The 'wins' non-academics get from spending any effort trying to feel the force of the Frege-Geach problem are hard won, and it's often not quickly clear what practical application they have anyway.

The size of the problem is explaining away the already tarnished general impression that academic philosophy is a pursuit of the out-of-touch, privileged tweed club. This is not easy, given that our average academic output is largely impenetrable to lay audiences and, as it turns out, (P) arcane symbols ^ (Q) indexed propositions don't make for riveting bedtime reading to the untrained eye.

It seems to me that the successful public-facing philosopher earns their keep by displacing at least two catastrophic problems they face when engaging the public court of appeal:

I) The public can rarely distinguish between a philosophical discussion and a discussion of any other type, even when they're deeply engaged in the former.

What's more, very smart, rigorous non-philosophers often actively resist any implication that they are engaging in philosophy, as if philosophy is a pejorative worth avoiding in social contexts. The underlying thought is that to do philosophy is to have accidentally flipped into a mode of thinking that can only waste the time of everyone involved.

II) The public cannot identify that there are good and bad ways of doing philosophy.

I'm probably going to court controversy for saying this, but one example that scans over both problems is The God Delusion. The number of people who think that The God Delusion is a scientific book demonstrating atheism is astonishing.

One only need tweet that it's a badly made philosophical case, rather than a scientific tract, to test that claim. It's a testament to the comparative success of Dawkins' public engagement on science that general audiences simply don't believe he could be thinking about anything badly, much less could that thing be philosophy.

With its public engagement quarterbacks like Brian Cox, Mary Leakey, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Susan Greenfield, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, everyone at least knows one slogan about the kinds of thing scientists get up to when they're not stood in front of a green screen on national TV and why the enterprise benefits their day-to-day lives. We tap away on iPhones, drive electric cars, use mag-lev trains and non-stick frying pans.

Granted, many of the public aren't knee deep in the partial-differential equations of General Relativity before bed, but they don't need to be to demonstrate a successful public engagement with Einstein’s ideas. Many non-scientists can tell you that gravity is like a fabric made from space and time. They can explain to you that the mass of an object has effects on this fabric.

They can tell you things about the scientific methodology like “science is the most reliable suite of tools ever devised for working out how the world works”. That's certainly not all science is, but it sure is a punchy selling point to capture the imagination of general audiences before filling them with the kind of fact academics should want them filled with.

What non-philosophers can't tell you is proposition 1 of Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, output from allegedly one of the most important and influential philosophers in the last century. You might think this is not necessarily problematic, as Wittgenstein’s work probably isn’t the entry-point for snappy-sounding motivations to care about philosophy. But even if non-philosophers needn’t be committed to diving into philosophy’s more technical issues wholesale, its popular literature should represent a gateway into viewing the enterprise as valuable.

However, when questioned about the discipline, both non-philosophers and philosophers alike struggle to even define what it is. It can be argued that defining philosophy quickly is like trying to summarise the OED and is therefore not a good criticism. This is probably right in some sense, but there are at least two in which it's not.

First, the whole of philosophy need not be captured in a slogan attempting to motivate general audiences about why it matters. It just needs to give enough reason to start caring.

Two examples that spring to mind are Keith Frankish’s often cited paraphrase of Wilfrid Sellars – “Philosophy is concerned with how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. Whilst this, for me, captures the essence of the best of philosophy, and Frankish’s reminders are exactly the kind of public engagement academic philosophers should be doing, it’s not as terse as we might hope. Nevertheless, it gives us some real insight about the benefits of learning how to think philosophically: there are few other disciplines (or ways of thinking in public space) which train us explicitly to notice what views and positions we disagree with get right before we articulate what might be wrong with them.

Another alternative I’ve found myself using recently is, “Philosophy is the thinking we deploy when working out why anything else we think matters” – certainly not exhaustive, but more concise and exportable to general audiences than technical argumentation.

Second, no one actively resists the need for dictionaries as they do with philosophy - we all know why they're worthwhile whether we can summarise that need or not.

This disjunct in public perception of philosophy by comparison to other academic disciplines should be operating on the desktop of Stanley's Twitter engagement.

The social tightrope Stanley chose to walk was to make a statement about his philosophical ambition in response to being branded ‘self-important’, platforming his critic in the process. Whilst perhaps phrased a little pompously, a statement of one’s ambition to take up a field is not by itself obviously problematic. Stanley, however, as a high-profile public-facing academic philosopher is engaging a public audience of well over 122,000.

As an act of public engagement - which a tweet with that high a reach from an account like Jason Stanley’s is - non-exclusionary talk about ambition is a sensitive line to pursue. Given philosophy's public reputation as being of little value, the high-profile academic philosopher must always be sensitive to alienating non-philosophers by acting in ways that validate the pejorative view they already hold. Hopefully (if there's time) they might also preserve some sense of value in the discipline in doing so.

It seems that public-facing philosophy should include two goals:

i) Demotivate pejorative views of the field.

ii) Motivate non-philosophers to think the field matters.

If academics like Stanley wish to preserve these goals – and I strongly suspect he does - one response about philosophical ambition it seems he can't make is one which can be interpreted as double-down affirmation like, "Hell yeah, I'm self-important and, y'know what? I'm going to get a moustache, a pipe and a bowler hat and Immanuel Kant off to wait for my applause in two hundred years."

At least my version could perhaps be palmed off as clumsy satire.

It seems to me that, in Stanley’s haste to tweet to tweet a pithy response which defends his own motivations for engaging in philosophy he’s momentarily forgotten how important his role is for graduates without the protection of a tenure-tracked job in the field.

That is, he’s very publicly engaged with his audience without sensitivity to ways the pejorative public perception of the field as navel-gazing impacts those not protected by academic institutions. This failure, in my view, is to neglect the value of every philosophy degree on the market - particularly those held by graduates who don't pursue academic careers and enter other markets.

This is a shame, because elsewhere I suspect that Stanley allocates a tremendous amount of time and effort to support the value of the philosophy degree and I genuinely hope digital engagement is not the philosophical work he’s remembered for next year, let alone 200.