relevance, part 1

There's this letter to the editor in the most recent proceedings and addresses of the American Philosophical Association in which an argument is presented for the opening the association to more inclusive goverance procedures.

Part of this argument depends on the assertion that philosopy is not a practical activity. I won't be arguing this point. However, the writer does seem to think that this is somehow a unique quality of philosophy as opposed to other human activities. That's the part that I'm not so sure about.

At various times I've been told that most of mathematics, 80-90% sometimes (these are mathematicians we're talking about, it would be discouraging if they couldn't quantify their own self-deprecation). My own experience leads me to believe that this is true. There's a good case to be made that, on average, mathematics is less useful than philosophy. And I'm not talking about the applied ethics part of philosophy, I'm talking about the "if a tree falls in the woods and there's no one around to hear it" sorts of philosophy. At least the tree falling in the woods can be used to amaze someone who isn't paying much attention.

Astronomy used to be very practical back in the day when Europeans were trying to find a reliable way across the Atlantic. But current astronomy doesn't offer much in the way of pratical use.

Not that I'm opposed to astronomy in any way, and unlike pure mathematics, it scores more hooks than philosophy.

Theoretical physics makes some pretensions to usefulness, but I believe that there's some truth to that old saw that engineers only needed Newtonian Mechanics to design and fly the space shuttle. Most of the content of current physics is too far removed from the world of experience (ie medium sized dry goods close to sea level) to be of much use. Less precise, but more effecient, methods answer questions with useful answers.

Now these are just the hard sciences I'm discussing. The social sciences are often accussed of being the sciences of the painfully obvious.

Most of the humanities shares philosophies general reputation for irrelevance, for pretty much the same reason. One might object that the impracticality of the sciences are much different than the humanities. OK, but at least the way I do it, philosophy is impractical in both the humanities style and the sciences style, so its twice as irrelevant as anything else on the market. So there.

Of course, that may have been part of the letter writer's point.