Thread by @shengokai

I would say that all philosophy is, or should be, "profoundly social" if I am to remain committed to my Deweyan and East-Asian philosophical roots. (1/n)

https://twitter.com/ADrugResearcher/status/1346739149156438017

The problem here is that philosophers generally choose not to return the results of their inquiry to the experiences of the cultures that spawned them. Philosophy is disconnected from the vital activity of culture. Dewey warned about this in philosophy specifically. (2/n)

Because folks like Leiter and Stock and their ilk do not believe in the organic connection of philosophy to the broader activity of culture, we get inane nonsense that argues for the disconnection of the effects of a given philosophical argument from the world around it. (3/n)

Now, what I would amend in your statement is that this is not solely a problem of the discussion at hand, but of the way that we're trained to do philosophy broadly: we are taught that the concerns of the world are not relevant to our research. (4/n)

To this point, I recall a question from an instructor during one of my talks in graduate school about public philosophy wherein he asked "why should I bother to do work aimed at cultural issues? what does it matter what I think," which characterizes this disconnect. (5/n)

In case, Leiter and Stock make the argument that transphobic research should be permitted BECAUSE it is not connected to the social, which parallels the arguments made by "free speech" and "academic freedom" defenders who forget the responsibility of philosophy to culture. (6/n)

Thus, people can be "just asking questions" in order to evade the responsibility for the fallout of the answers they develop on those whose existence is the subject of the question. We see this crop up in all kinds of ways, especially in things like ethics (8/n)

Which is how we get Peter Singer and the other folks who are "just asking questions" about the rights of disabled folks to live and go on living. Again, because they don't view their work is connected to the social, they view themselves as permitted to "ask questions." (9/n)

Now, this is a critique I've made of the discipline before, and it is one that William James and John Dewey have both made of philosophy, and you can find it in Dogen, Kongzi, Mengzi, and Norinaga, all of whom say that philosophy must grapple with the social to be "good." (10/n)

But this is also a critique which is interestingly ironic because these folks have explicitly social aims for the resolution of their problem. So there's this hypocrisy there that they claim to be disconnected from the social but desire to effect social change. (11/n)

Thus, they seek to take responsibility for only those social changes that support their ideological commitment. Stock rejects responsibility for transphobia in the field or violence against trans people, yet they are committed to social change in line with transphobia. (12/n)

All of this is to say that you're not wrong about your point, but that the problem you're pointing out is much broader than the social nature of the conversation of gender: it is rooted in how philosophy takes up social questions without care for social consequences. (13/n)

Which, ironically, is one of the pitfalls Dewey pointed out about science: that, in its rush to address questions, it never considered the social implications and consequences of the answers in the form of scientific progress when it is integrated in society. (14/n)

In this, philosophers are just as irresponsible: not only do we not consider the consequences of our work, most of us are trained to view these consequences as irrelevant or not worthy of consideration when we do the work, which is wrapped up in academic freedom. (15/n)

That is, many philosophers take academic freedom to mean "freedom from considering the consequences of our work," which is a dangerous position for an entire field to take, much less defend when those consequences are intensified bigotry. (16/n)

So, you're absolutely right and this is not just a Stock or Leiter or conversation about transphobia problem, this is a philosophy problem.

Philosophers are massively irresponsible with the tools they've been given. So, as I've said before: replace scientists with philosophers.