Why this book was written

The original motivation

In the summer of 1993 I'd been away from academic philosophy for eleven years, having left my tenured Associate Professor post at Loyola University of Chicago at the end of the second semester in 

1982. I'd worked at Bell Laboratories for a couple of years, and then at Lattice, Inc. for three years before moving to head up the Language Features and Environments department at SAS Institute in Cary, NC.  During that period, I thought of my work at least in part as "applied logic and philosophy of language." While I hadn't done any philosophical research or publishing in that time, I maintained an ongoing interest in philosophy and was a moderately active participant in several of the Usenet newsgroups that passed for the social media of the day. These included sci.philosophy.tech (technical, or "analytical", philosophy) and sci.meta (metaphysics).

There were a significant number of threads and postings on topics related to Ayn Rand and her philosophy — virtually entirely by people who had very little, if any, experience or formal training in philosophy or the history of philosophy. As a result, arguments and "flame wars" raged between the Rand supporters and the Rand critics; and a common point of complaint from the supporters was the "prejudice" academic philosophers showed towards Rand because she "wasn't a member of the club," didn't have a PhD, and didn't publish in "accepted" philosophy journals.  The Rand critics pooh-poohed this idea and insisted that their judgements were based on more rational and objective grounds — but they rarely were very clear about those grounds.  Confusion reigned, and there was no common ground on which to resolve the (often quite emotional and acrimonious) disputes.

I'd never read much Rand myself, but got interested because of the arguments; and so I decided to look at some of Rand's philosophical works. When I did, I thought that I might help with the kinds of arguments and misunderstandings I was seeing in those Usenet discussions; and so I made two postings. The first was focused on Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness and is now lost in the mists of time (at least I don't have a copy of it any longer, and I can't find one on the Web); but the second ("Rand's work: style and quality") stimulated some good responses from both sides and took on a life of its own for at least a couple of decades. Although it seems finally to have disappeared from the Web at some point in the past 10 years, there are still references to it that can be found, and it was cited in Scott Ryan's "A Randian Roundup" (Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. XXXIX, No. 3) as one of the "better"critical comments on Rand appearing as of 2003. It was, however, quite short (only about 3 1/2 pages) and didn't approach the detail or rigor that would have been required of a peer-reviewed publication.  Still, I felt it did at least draw the lines more clearly and stimulated somewhat more rational discussions. Otherwise, in general, the Rand critics loved it and the Rand supporters loved to hate it.

Even though my limited goal in that little posting was simply to lay out why academic philosophers had difficulties with certain aspects of Rand's philosophical presentation, I did say of her work that "If there is such a thing as pseudo-philosophy, this is it." There were, however, two problems with this. First, I wasn't at all confident that there was such a thing as pseudo-philosophy. And second, I had no clear criterion for distinguishing pseudo-philosophy from "real" philosophy or from "not philosophy at all." This bothered me at the time, and it continued to puzzle me in the subsequent years. It became a question (and a problem) that I wanted to address: not one specifically concerned with the philosophy of Ayn Rand, but a more general question in metaphilosophy.  Indeed, this question is fundamental not only in understanding what pseudo-philosophy may be, but in understanding what philosophy is and what philosophy can do for us in science and everyday life.

A renewed interest

For years, I was unable to devote time to a purely philosophical investigation and project. But in 2009-2011 I returned to publishing some philosophy-oriented papers in conjunction with my work at GlaxoSmithKline — which I often thought of as "applied metaphysics and epistemology" — in the areas of drug discovery, drug safety, and the use of formal ontologies for data mining and knowledge discovery in the empirical sciences. If you look at those papers (Applied Ontology 2009a, Applied Ontology 2009b, Topoi 2011, you'll see me expressing a serious concern that certain writers were employing pseudo-philosophy (though I didn't use that term explicitly) to sway views and policies being adopted by the scientific research community — views and policies that had effects on the direction of research, technology development, and grant funding. This was serious stuff, and those papers stimulated a fire-storm of debate in the biomedical research communities.

One thing that became clear was that even highly educated people, well-trained in a variety of different areas, could still be susceptible to what I continued to think of as pseudo-philosophy.  But beyond that, virtually anyone not familiar with certain quasi-philosophical or pseudo-philosophical presentations and tricks can be swayed to one degree or another by the Pied Pipers of fake philosophy.  The time had come to address this problem, to provide a clear and useful characterization of pseudo-philosophy, if this was possible, and to provide people — from the "average reader" to professionals in a broad variety of fields — with tools and abilities to identify pseudo-philosophy and respond to it effectively.

The focus and goals

As the idea, and then the reality, of False Wisdom evolved over several years, three goals and primary points of focus appeared and are represented in the three Parts of the book. My ultimate goal was to provide a careful — and useful — account of pseudo-philosophy that could be understood even by those readers with little or no experience or training in philosophy, and whatever their degree of formal education.

Accordingly, Part 1 of the book, "History and Introduction", is addressed to this goal, and it seeks to provide a sketch of the nature of philosophy (its goals, its areas, its tools and methods, and its assumptions) sufficient to proceed further in an investigation and account of pseudo-philosophy.  Even though Part 1 is of a very introductory and illustrative nature, and easily read, there are parts of it that may be of significant interest even to advanced students of philosophy.  Two of these are, first, the view of philosophy as a trade or craft (rather than as an esoteric academic discipline), and second, an emphasis on asking the question "What is a philosopher?" rather than the usual "What is philosophy?"

Part 2 develops models of the genuine philosopher and the pseudo-philosopher, providing careful distinctions between the two and making use of markers of philosophy and markers of pseudo-philosophy in addition to carefully described personas of the genuine philosopher (called "Philo") and the pseudo-philosopher ("Pseudo"). The concepts and uses of markers and personas are illustrated by comparisons to their use in biomedicine, forensic science, and business and finance. Part 2 also includes a chapter on "Philosophy, Its Relatives, and Imitators," which shows how philosophy is to be distinguished not only from pseudo-philosophy, but from "non-philosophy" (respectable disciplines that just aren't philosophy — such as science, religion, theology, literature, etc.). From a more formal metaphilosophical perspective, Part 2 develops a detailed, but easily understood, theory of pseudo-philosophy that even philosophical novices can apply to real-world situations.

Part 3 provides five simple guidelines for applying that theory, and then three detailed examples of how those guidelines are applied in order to determine whether a writer (or presenter or instructor) is pitching pseudo-philosophy at you, and how you should respond to that. The final chapter is on the philosophy of Ayn Rand (of which I came to have a much deeper understanding throughout this entire process) — which ties everything back to how it all began.