The Usefulness of Philosophy

I came across a comment on a blog recently where the author adjured the other participants to stop “philosophizing” so much and get down to the real matter at hand. This reminded me that, for many people, “philosophy” is a term of abuse. For them, philosophy is pointless blather among elitist twits with no practical consequence - the very opposite of anything practical and useful.

Given the name of this blog, you can guess that I don’t agree with this negative sentiment. I won’t deny there are some philosophers and some philosophies that I think are pointless blather, but to take them as our basic definition is to throw the baby out with the bath water.

I want to propose that philosophy is the study of mental models, and, as I said in my previous post, I think mental models are the basis of our competence. Since our competence determines how well we manage and how effective we are at realizing our goals, there is obvious practical importance in understanding how mental models work, getting used to taking them apart and building new ones.

As I explained in my very first post regarding my chosen name for the blog, I think software development is an eminently philosophical activity. It is all about constructing mental models of systems and manipulating those systems using the mental models. It doesn’t matter whether these systems are machines, protocols, teams, problem domains, programming languages, etc: how effectively you work with them depends on your ability to construct and manipulate good mental models of how they work.

Being unaware of your own mental models is a limit to your own effectiveness. We have all known people who thought they had found the perfect hammer and were busy nailing everything. Likewise, we have probably known someone who repeated the same dysfunctional pattern over and over again in spite of not getting the desired result.

Philosophy as the study of mental models can make you aware of the mental models underlying these behaviours and can give you the skills you need to improve them.

A word of warning though: as Socrates found out the hard way, people often get very upset when you question their cherished mental models, and this can happen even when we question our own. However, if you want to improve effectiveness and grow in competence, there is much to recommend the use of philosophy to take apart and rebuild our mental models.