I’ve been working in the field of philosophy for decades. It has literally been my religion. I spent half my life researching it and developing my own comprehensive, coherent, evidence-based philosophy, which became my 2005 book Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. I’ve improved it since, although in bulk it holds up (see Revisions to Sense and Goodness without God). I’ve also engaged scores of debates in the field of philosophy, and with bona fide philosophers. My Columbia University PhD is in history of philosophy. And I’ve published numerous peer reviewed papers in philosophy (example, example, example, example, example, example; even my chapter on moral theory in The End of Christianity was peer reviewed by four professors of philosophy). And that includes entries for standard academic references, and even a book, since I required in my contract that Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus be peer reviewed by professors of mathematics and biblical studies. I have also done a lot of work studying philosophy as a discipline and its methods and failures (see Is Philosophy Stupid? and, for example, my series on Bayesian analytical philosophy). And I publish researched articles on it a lot here (see my new philosophy category and my old one).

Fifteen years ago I wrote an article How to Be a Philosopher that was about how to be a philosopher—not methodologically, but as a life avocation. The “four tasks” I recommend to that end were (and still are) “spend an hour every day asking yourself” philosophical “questions and researching the answers,” “read one good philosophy book a month,” “politely argue with lots of different kinds of people who disagree with you on any of the answers you come to above,” and “learn how to think,” which touched on logic and critical thought. But over the last five years I have shifted my focus across all my disciplines (since my PhD is also in history, and I am well published in that field as well, even across subject fields). Now rather than only debunking bad arguments and ideas, I aim to also analyze and explain why they are bad—what methods their advocates were relying on to get all the wrong answers. Because in my interdisciplinary work I started seeing something spanning all disciplines: they all use the same false logics, whether arguing for veganism or a flat earth or Jesus or Libertarianism or even naive memory realism. In result I have been working on developing a methodology of error.

I’m not ready to systematize my results there yet. You can find examples in pretty much every debate and critical article I’ve written up here since at least 2018. But as part of that project I wanted to nail down one important question that often comes up: what exactly is it that makes someone a bad philosopher (and conversely, what makes for a good one). I have often noted that formal academic philosophy is full of bad arguments; and lousy philosophers get fallacies and pseudoscience through peer review far too often (I’ve published too many examples here to list them all, but I give a general assessment in my conclusion to my Bayesian analysis series on philosophy, and delve into the principles of it even more in Is Philosophy Stupid?). This began to dovetail with my methodology-of-error project, enough to put some thoughts down.

The Five Essential Metrics of Good/Bad Philosophy

The essential features of quality in philosophy can be divided into five categories…

Logic

A professional philosopher must be a bona fide expert, first and foremost, with logics. If they can’t spot (and thus avoid) a fallacy of reasoning, they should burn their diplomas and flip burgers or dig ditches or answer phonecalls or sew buttons, or some such thing actually useful for society. I should not even have to say this. But alas, it’s where we are: peer reviewed philosophy is rife with unchecked fallacies (example, example, example, example, example, example, example, example, example, example; and this is entirely apart from the problem of fake journals, which are plaguing all fields of knowledge now). It’s as if astronomy journals started abundantly publishing studies in astrology and stopped telling the difference between them.

But this has to be the first metric: you have to be skilled at spotting and dodging logical fallacies. If you can’t do this, you can’t do philosophy. This does not mean a good philosopher will always nail it. My point is not that good philosophers will be “immune” to fallacies of thought, but rather, it will be for them only an occasional error, and not something typical of their performance; and their errors in this respect will be work to discern, not glaringly obvious. If you’re a professional basketball player, and you can’t catch a ball tossed to you in the clear from two feet away, you need to find another job. But the same doesn’t follow if you miss a freethrow or lose a game—unless you’re missing and losing a lot more than the pro average.

And this correct grasp of logic cannot be limited to deductive logics (a serious problem in the field). It must also include inductive and mathematical (probabilistic) logics. A correct grasp of Bayes’ Theorem and its application to epistemology is, honestly, essential now. If you can’t even do sixth grade arithmetic, you can’t argue anything is probable or not—and that’s half of everything a philosopher does. The other half is analytical (extracting meaning from words and sentences), and that requires a basic grasp of semantics. See Less Wrong’s 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong as a veritable list of ways philosophers can mess this up. You need to not make such frequent mistakes if you want to be a good philosopher; and any philosopher you catch commonly making these kinds of mistakes you can safely classify as bad at it.

Science

A professional philosopher must also be versed in the sciences. They don’t have to be an expert in any, much less all; but they do need to have the basics down (at least what an A-level, or in England first-level, student would walk away with after completing a college intro course in any given science). And they do need to have the honed skill to research scientific findings, to read a scientific paper critically and competently, and take the findings of the sciences correctly into account in any philosophical argument they ever make. Because the sciences must always be the foundation of any philosophical argument they make—not something to ignore or bypass. Scientific findings do vary in how certain we are of them; but how to tell the difference between a poor or tentative scientific finding and a thoroughly established one (or anything in between) is an indispensable skill for a philosopher. If you can’t do this, you need to pack it in.

And this includes sciences people tend to forget are sciences: like economics, juridical science, political science, sociology, moral psychology, cognitive science, and cultural anthropology (and, of course, history). If you haven’t read at least one quality introductory book on each of these sciences (as well as the other main subjects, from physics and geology and chemistry to biology, physiology, and ecology), you won’t be a very good philosopher. You will make abundant mistakes. There is a reason centuries of accumulated scientific knowledge must define and constrain our thoughts and findings in philosophy: science is just philosophy with better data. And it would be a fallacy to ignore the highest quality results when coming to a conclusion. And this includes sciences you can’t be expected to have read-in yet, but need to as soon as they become relevant to something you intend to argue or explore—like sports science, educational science, police science, etc. Wikipedia now has massive lists of applied sciences and theoretical sciences—hence a good philosopher will always know: if there is a question of fact, there is probably a science of it. And if you want to talk about it, you’d better start there.

To illustrate what I mean, consider the subject of free will: you don’t have to already be an expert in physics or neuroscience and jurisprudence, but to be a good philosopher, you had better know not only how to check any claim you make within those scientific fields, but also that you must do so. Of any claim you make in philosophy, premise or conclusion, you need to be able to ask, “What do the pertinent sciences say about this, and how can I find out?” But you also have to know how to answer that question. Which is what I see most commonly failed at: philosophers all too often (like the string of examples I linked above) don’t think to check what the appropriate science is on any given subject they study or argue about, or are too incompetent to understand it and get it right (for a recent glaring example, see my entire debate with Carlo Alvaro on cosmology, and how it ended).

On the subject of free will, you are a bad philosopher if (before declaring confident opinions on it) you have not researched its real-world analysis in, for example, relevant U.S. Supreme Court decisions and legal edge cases (like Battered Spouse Syndrome: see Free Will in American Law: From Accidental Thievery to Battered Woman Syndrome). And you are a bad philosopher if you don’t check the neuroscience—or misunderstand it (see Was Daniel Dennett Wrong in Creative Ways?). Conversely, scientists can be really bad philosophers even when they get the science right—because they hose the logical analysis of it that is required for arriving at a reliable conclusion in philosophy. As I note in my discussion of Dennett’s work on free will, Libet experiments do not disprove free will: they merely prove the obvious fact that conscious awareness is a computation, which, being such, takes time to run. To fail at the analytical task of distinguishing the “person” who makes a decision and their “awareness” of being a person who made a decision is to be really bad at philosophy. Your consciousness of you is not you. You are a physically stored network of skills, character, and memories—which is why you do not cease to exist when you are unconscious. And yet even renowned experts in philosophy mess this up. So the other four of these five criteria still must be met. And here, scientific facts must be distinguished from philosophical conclusions.

Getting good as an interpreter of science is thus a big part of what it means to be a good philosopher. And getting there doesn’t require college (though community college intro courses abound affordably to take). You can read a textbook on a subject, for example, and whenever you encounter something there that you don’t fully understand (or perhaps are having trouble even believing), you can pause and research that one specific thing until you do grasp it (and what evidence it’s based on, for example, or how confidently it is actually known). You can start with popular source material (even Wikipedia), but you should end with something professionally academic (even a conversation with an actual scientist), until you’ve “got it,” at least as well as you need to for the task at hand. Philosophers who live like this (and thus accumulate at least undergraduate knowledge in a broad range of scientific fields) tend to be the best philosophers; and philosophers who eschew this, the worst.

Reality

The third metric for a good vs. a bad philosopher is whether they ground their philosophy in reality or fantasy. This is why almost all theology is bad philosophy. Grounding in reality does mean empiricism—evidence first. Evidence forms the data, the fundamental premises, on which any conclusion in philosophy must be built. But that means more than just science. To return to the subject of free will: a reality-based philosophy would not stay in the ivory tower and respond to high-brow literature on the subject; reality-based philosophy would go outside and look around and ascertain how free will is employed as a concept in the real world—that is, the actual world, the one that actually exists, and actually impacts the lives of actual people (see Free Will in the Real World … and Why It Matters). What does the term mean—how is it ascertained to be present or absent—in courts of law? Not hypothetical courts. Real courts. What does the term mean—how is it ascertained to be present or absent—in medical and sexual consent decisions? Not hypothetical ones. Real ones.

One of the most common failure-modes of modern philosophy is its divorce from reality. This manifests in a number of problematic ways, as once laid out by the philosopher Mario Bunge and summarized in my article Is Philosophy Stupid? But one respect that is worth reiterating here—beyond the one I already noted, of the difference between ivory-tower and real-world investigations of humanity’s nature and environment—is that abstractions and generalizations should always begin with particulars: and that means real-world particulars. Sometimes analysis leaves none to consult and we have to analyze hypothetical particulars, but even then there is a skill at doing this well or doing it poorly that too many philosophers fail at, either by being bad at analyzing the hypotheticals they create, or by ignoring the real-world examples they could be consulting instead (see On Hosing Thought Experiments).

I often state this as, “Always begin with particulars.” Rather than begin at an abstract assertion about all of humanity or reality, like that “human women are innately hypergamous,” and then “interpreting” all data through the lens of that assertion (and then confusing that for having proved it), you need to start the other way around: gather actual specific and real examples of what you want to talk about—and scientifically, which means, not cherry picking, but taking as close to a random or representative sample as possible (and if you are making claims about human nature, that means from cultures other than the ones you are familiar with)—and then building abstractions or generalizations from those particulars. Because only then, for example, will you find that “hypergamy…varies by degrees, varies across societies,” historically and globally, “and varies even within a society” because “trends are an average, not a universal description of all or often even a plurality of women,” and therefore the proposed generalization, it turns out, doesn’t really hold up very well; especially in the particulars (like what hypergamy is even measured by), which forces a re-think of what one is supposed to even mean by the term.

That is what it means to be a reality-first philosopher, and this is one of things that defines a good philosopher from a bad one. For a solid example of why reality-based and particulars-first philosophy distinguishes good philosophy from bad, see my example of how to correctly investigate and analyze the concept of “gay pride” in Peter Boghossian on Gay Pride and Hobnobbing with an Online Misogynist.

Objectivity

Too much philosophy is motivated reasoning—a philosopher wants a particular conclusion to be true, and then just finds a way to “argue” that it is true. This is contrary to the scientific method—and lest some philosopher scoff at being told they need to embrace a “scientific” method, this is the point of the previous three metrics: they already establish that an un-scientific method is unreliable. In fact, the less scientific your approach, the less reliable its results. That is why science has come to reign supreme: it reflects what happens when you increase the reliability of an approach, with more evidence, better evidence, and better analysis of that evidence. Its simply good philosophy. In fact, the best. At least on the one thing that it applies such methods to. After all, scientists become bad philosophers the moment they drop off-script and stop using the scientific method, but still think they are, simply because “they are scientists.” This is when empirical science slides into fallacious arguments from authority. But that circles back to metric one: getting logic right (as illustrated in my previous example of how to interpret Libet experiments).

Much ink gets spilled on what “objectivity” is and whether its even possible (see Objective Moral Facts for some analysis). But what I mean by the term here is simply this: having the desire and means to control for bias. That means the realized desire and mission to check yourself and avoid motivated reasoning. For a full discussion see The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking and Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning. The nutshell of it is this: you must always try to prove yourself wrong. This is the essence of the scientific method. It is literally the function of experiments and field observations and every properly scientific approach in every field of study. And of course that does not mean “pretend” to try. Pseudoscientists pretend; real scientists do it. Hence many a bad philosopher will give a show of doing this, but in fact won’t choose any hard falsification tests at all, but will game their tests to make them easy to pass. This is motivated reasoning; the absence of objective reasoning. A genuinely objective reasoner will take seriously that they could be wrong, and try genuinely hard to disprove their own premises or conclusions.

Doing that requires finding and steel-manning (not straw-manning) contrary hypotheses (alternative explanations of the same evidence or alternative solutions to the same problem). It requires getting out of the ivory tower and looking around. It requires walking across the hall and running your ideas by an actual expert in the subject. Have thoughts about economics? Better talk to an economist—or at least read them, widely and diversely, and not with an eye to “confirm” what you are thinking, but with an eye to finding the best arguments against it, if any there are. Have thoughts about cosmology? Better talk to an actual cosmologist—or at least read them, widely and diversely, and not with an eye to “confirm” what you are thinking, but with an eye to finding the best arguments against it, if any there are. And so on.

This all requires being able to take someone else’s point of view—to actually see the world, and the evidence and the problem, the way they do—so as to understand why anyone might disagree with you. Which means you have to be good at following the Dennett Rule: state an opponent’s position in your own words, and so well that they agree you got it right. Steelman, rather than strawman. People who are bad at empathizing or understanding contrary positions tend to be bad philosophers; as are people too arrogant to ever worry they are wildly wrong about something that they are sure about. Which leads me to the last metric distinguishing good philosophers from bad:

Humility

Probably the single most important quality required to be good at philosophy is the ability to admit—and thus realize—that you are wrong about something, and to change your mind accordingly. It is true that this point is sometimes used illegitimately as a browbeating fallacy. Christian apologists, as with all cultists, like to try and leverage someone’s value for humility to argue them into “considering” their completely bonkers worldview. And it’s true one should consider it. But once it catastrophically fails to check out, that approach doesn’t fly anymore. Humility must not be conflated with gullibility. But neither must arrogance be mistaken as warranted confidence.

To explain what I mean, I shall have to briefly tell my own story.

When I began my philosophical quest I fell into a hard-core Marxism. Philosophers fond of Ayn Rand then disabused me of that worldview and I became a hard-core Randroid. Then my own continued inquiry led me to realize that that was just as much bullshit as Marxism. By this point it’s the mid-1990s. And my ardent quest to work out what worldview was true (which I had begun at sea in 1991, with an old Brother word processor and a stack of books in a classified sonar space below the bow waterline) had by then led me to realize something was wrong: how could I have been so misled, and so confident, of such contrary worldviews? Clearly my methodology was broken. I then set out to focus on that as the actual problem.

What does it take to be legitimately persuaded of something? One can go on here about logic (metric one), science (metric two), objectivity (metric three), and epistemology generally. But the point I want to make at the moment is subtly different: what I found was, first, that you have to actually be serious about trying to disprove something you are being persuaded of (or confidently believe, yet perhaps can’t recall why or when you came to believe it), and, second, that this entails actually doing this. And that requires a sensible humility. I could be wrong. So…how would I know if I am? How would you know if you’re wrong? This is the single most important question any philosopher must ask—and not just answer, but actually pursue.

So anytime I think I’m right about something now, I don’t trust that, but check. I try to Devil’s Advocate against my own logic. I try to hunt down any pertinent scientific findings that might challenge it. But most of all, I try to think of credible ways things could be different, and then look to see if there are any evidences or arguments for those different ways things could be. If my theory is right, what should I expect to find? Sure. That’s something you must look for. But more importantly, if my theory is wrong, what should I expect to find? That’s what you also go looking for. This is how I was able to correct my mistaken positions on Gettier Problems, on Universal Basic Income, on Nuclear Energy, on Bayesian Epistemology—even Jesus existing, and Q being a thing (where philosophy, particularly epistemology, became essential)—and, of course, Marxism and Objectivism (and, before that, Taoism).

The single most distinctive marker of a bad philosopher is a philosopher who has been very ably shown (factually and logically) that they were wrong about something—and never admit it. Obviously, bad philosophers can make this accusation—claiming to have “ably shown” you’re wrong when in fact all they did was build an edifice of fallacies, science illiteracy, reality-ignoring, and motivated reasoning. So one does need to be able to tell the difference. For example, if you are a third party observer needing to assess who really is the good and who the bad philosopher in any cross-accusation like this, you need the skills to be able to tell which philosopher is arguing fallaciously, which is getting the science wrong, which is skipping the particulars and jumping directly to abstractions, or indeed (sometimes) which is even being dishonest. And that means everyone needs to be a good philosopher, at least a little bit—although everyone needs to be a good philosopher for a lot of other reasons, too (to be a good voter, a good citizen, a good friend, a good anything). But that means you need to hone those same five essential philosophical virtues.

Logic. Science. Reality. Objectivity. Humility.

Good at avoiding logical error. Scientifically literate. Reality-based. Objectivity-driven. Humility-motivated. That’s good philosophy; the opposite, bad philosophy.

Conclusion

Bad philosophers over-rely on fallacies, fail to check the pertinent science or get it wrong, fail to check reality or to build their abstractions and generalizations from actual particulars, fail to burn-test their own premises and conclusions, and never change their mind even when it is obvious they should. Good philosophers actively avoid fallacies and thus minimize them. They check the pertinent science and strive to get it right, and adjust their premises and conclusions to suit. They prefer to start with particulars and work their way to generalizations and abstractions; not the other way around. They burn-test all their own premises and conclusions, trying their darnedest to prove themselves wrong, even adopting the mindset of their own actual or hypothetical opponents to do it. And they correct themselves when caught in an error. They correct factual errors. They correct logical errors. They update their knowledge whenever it is found lacking. And they change their position when these corrections warrant.

And when two philosophers accuse each other of being bad at it, you need to know all this, so you know what to look for and thus discern which of those accusations is false (or if, indeed as can be, both are apt). This is an approach I have discussed before in different contexts (such as in On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus and Galatians 1:19, Ancient Grammar, and How to Evaluate Expert Testimony), but the same principles apply to anything in philosophy as in any other subject field (for example, see A Vital Primer on Media Literacy and Was Daniel Dennett Wrong in Creative Ways? and even Shaun Skills: How to Learn from Exemplary Cases). And this skill requires being able to discern legitimate argumentation from mere apologetics (for examples, see The Difference Between a Historian and an Apologist and Captain DadPool on Who Is Inventing Workarounds).

So hopefully this short discourse will be of value to you, and to anyone you need point to it.