I am a bad philosopher. I admit that I don't have a philosophy degree. I don't write philosophy papers. I don't keep up with philosophical trends. I get paid to write business software.
Yet it is philosophy's method the one that use the most to understand the world. It is what I do. We are what we do.
I am somewhat surprised by this discovery. I should be saying "engineer" since that is closer to what I get paid for. Yet I couldn't explain what the engineering method is, beside of having to build software with money, time, and quality constraints. I admire mathematics, but I am a latecomer to the discipline, still struggling with it. I was exposed early to sociology and anthropological methods. I admired both; I don't practice either.
Economics is an emotionally hard discipline for me. This is because of its close connection with propaganda, from its beginning to this day. In the twentieth century, it was used by both the USSR and the USA. Among the social sciences, it is one that attempts to apply mathematics the most, trying to gain from mathematics its prestige. It has worked to some extent: there is no Nobel prize for psychology, but there is one for economics.
For all of its desire to be rigorous, economics feels shaky and wrong to me. I don't objects to its use of mathematics; I don't know enough mathematics to know whether they are used correctly or incorrectly. It is the foundational premises of the discipline and how it is used in politics that I found sloppy. Furthermore, I feel that mathematics are the sheets that conceal the shakiness of its foundation.
For a discipline that prides itself in rigorousness, it plays fast, loose, and reckless with its basic premises and assumptions. In fairness, it admits that it is a grossly simplifying the world. Economics creates a simple abstraction that is easy to comprehend. And for all of its thick sketches of reality, it is amazingly useful.
What bothers me deeply is how from such a self-admitting shaky foundation they end up making such strong predictions. What starts as simple models become strong pronouncements on how society should be run. How we can justify complex real estate speculation because we have a model showing that it will be okay. That magically dictatorships will become democratic if we let people become rich without government supervision. If it were mere intellectual exercises, it would be fine. Yet people suffer because of these faulty intellectual exercises.
This is not an attempt to show the deficiencies of economics. I don't know enough about economics to pursue that project.
I am sharing this because this is how I realized that I am a bad philosopher. My objections are based on the philosophical method. There is a paper about how mathematics works ridiculously well when it shouldn't. Same with philosophy. For a method that is looser than mathematics, it does surprisingly well.
What am I calling the philosophical method? When you find out reality by making definitions and following their consequences using deductive logic. Looser than mathematics because we cannot start from absolute certainty. Stronger than social sciences in that it attempts to get as close to mathematical-inspired logic as possible. And yet it still is something of a genre of literature.
I never intended to become a philosopher; less so to be a bad one. I somehow stumbled into it and made a habit from it. I am a bad philosopher because that is what I do. I am bad at it because that is the quality of my philosophizing. I am fine with this limitation, even when I strive to become better.
I do bad philosophizing. We are what we do.