In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:
I do not have an academic background in philosophy but nevertheless have ended up spending significant time working on a philosophy book for which has required vast amounts of research and reading. (I have worked with academics in the process to challenge my ideas & check I am not totally mad).
When published, I wonder if the academic audience will treat it as 'no-good' or not give it the time of day because it does not come from someone working in an institution. I am curious, is this likely or will it simply come to the quality of ideas?
This is a good question, and I am glad that someone asked! Allow me to share some thoughts before opening things for discussion.
On the one hand, I've always been a fan of outsiders and underdogs, and as an avid reader of scientific and philosophical history, some of my favorite stories are of people who made groundbreaking contributions without academic credentials or formal training. In philosophy, Wittgenstein is obviously a prime example: he was just an undergraduate engineering student who just started showing up at Bertrand Russell's lectures and then wrote the Tractatus. Thanks in no small part to Russell and Frank Ramsey (who reviewed it in Mind), the Tractatus was noticed by professionals and became an absolute sensation in academic philosophy. Similarly, in the history of science, there are a number of fun cases: James Joule and Robert Mayer were both amateurs who changed the course of physics. In their cases, their ideas took quite a long time to gain attention (in some cases, decades). Still, because their ideas were good ones, ultimately some people in academia eventually noticed and championed them, cementing their place in history!
So, history suggests it's certainly possible for outsiders without credentials to make a real contributions to academic professions, and for them to get noticed. On the other hand, history and personal experience also suggest that it is highly unlikely. Like many tenured professors I know, I receive emails fairly often from individuals without credentials who have written something (usually a book), claiming to have solved some perennial philosophical problem. Because I love underdogs and think it's important to be openminded and kind (a good example: many professional physicists rudely ignored letters from Einstein when he was a patent clerk!), on many occasions I've taken the time to skim some of the manuscripts such people have sent me. And here's the short of it, in my experience: virtually all of the manuscripts like these that I have read would not be taken seriously by academics. Usually, in my experience, it's because the ideas the person defends aren't really new at all, but instead are in the vicinity of arguments that have been seriously debated for hundreds if not thousands of years–or, if the ideas are novel, they're obviously false (subject to simple counterexamples), logical inconsistencies, etc.
Although this may sound disappointing and discouraging, I need to be frank here: there are obvious and very good reasons to think that people working without professional training or credentials are unlikely to produce high-quality work. Academics train for 5-10+ years under other highly trained professionals for a reason: producing high quality philosophical or scientific work is very, very hard. Again, this isn't to say that it's impossible to train oneself to do excellent work (as an 'autodidact'). After all, people like Wittgenstein, Mayer, and Joule all did it. But of course they are the exceptions to the rule, not the rule. It's highly unlikely that any of us are likely to be the next Wittgenstein, Mayer, or Joule. This isn't to say that one shouldn't try, though. Indeed, let me end on a more encouraging note. Imagine how much poorer the world would be if people like Wittgenstein, Mayer, and Joule didn't try to do what they did: that is, if they 'wrote themselves off' simply because they were amateurs. I'm all for letting a thousand flowers bloom, as it were. If you're an amateur who enjoys learning about and writing philosophy–and you don't have the desire or resources to become an academic–then, as far as I am concerned, by all means: go for it! The stories of people like Wittgenstein, Mayer, and Joule (and, in a slightly different guise, Einstein) are great stories precisely because, against all odds as outsiders, they found a way. It's just important to realize, I think, that as an outside you will be fighting an uphill battle, and that the chances that your ideas will be recognized by professionals are small (though, again, potentially non-zero).
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