There once was a time when there was no distinction between the study of philosophy and the study of science. I read this letter to the editor in the NYT:

To the Editor:

Re "The Hubris of the Humanities" (column, Dec. 6):

Nicholas D. Kristof correctly argues that Americans need a better diet of science to meet the complexities of civilization. His argument rests on a division between a liberal arts education and one based on science. But one domain that encompasses both, and Americans desperately need, is critical thinking.

Critical thinking skills include knowing how to solve and represent problems, make decisions, evaluate arguments and reason about everyday and scientific topics. They also include having knowledge of the mind, monitoring our understanding and most important, knowing when to think critically.

Unfortunately, only a few universities offer courses in critical thinking and probably even fewer secondary schools. Having Shakespeare and biology under your belt are both important, but applying critical thinking skills to any content is the most effective path to desired outcomes and an enlightened citizenship.

Keith Millis
Shorewood, Ill., Dec. 6, 2005

And I thought to myself, thank God I studied Philosophy. When my boss asks me to write some code that solves a problem, I have to engage with the problem. It is critical thinking as discussed by Mr. Mills above.

The crime of the century is that professors in Philosophy departments take philosophy too seriously. There really is critical thinking, and then there is the history of critical thought. Most Philosophy curriculums are neither: they are just an overview of how someone else thought, and you are marked on your ability to regurgitate someone else's ideas, rather than to engage in a truly critical manner and come up with your own. Exegesis rather than analysis.

That is why I am glad I studied Michel Foucault so in-depth. He turns Western thought, western institutions, and more or less everything we hold to be sacred, on its head. When I got my Dad to read "The Foucault Reader", he asked me, "They're teaching you this in school?" He couldn't believe it, because it was so incendiary, and so cleverly deconstructed the bureaucratic factory of regurgitation that encompasses most universities. I could go on and on about how awesome Foucault is, but the point is that by studying Foucault, you learn to look at things sideways. You don't learn how to think critically. It can't be taught. You have to do it.

Foucault doesn't pontificate. He walks you down the alleyways of his mind, of his thought. He takes you on a walk, and at the end of the walk, you realize you have grasped an incredibly interesting idea. It then becomes possible to apply this technique, which he calls genealogy, to almost anything. You learn to look behind the curtain of almost anything.

One of the great weaknesses of Science and Scientists is that they are amongst the least capable of critical thought. In the sense that they are only capable of using the language and tools (the apparatus perhaps) of Science. They don't realize that they are playing a language game, or a game of truth, as Lyotard might put it. The game has rules and a winner. Which is not to disqualify the fact that "you can blow things up with physics," as my Dad used to say. Yes, you can. The game of truth played by physics is real and has a real impact and effect in the world. But it has no morality or ethics, and it does not provide a mode of thought that is useful for anything other than "blowing things up."

Nicholas Kristof has been consistently writing about the poor quality of the American mind is leading to the decline of the empire. I couldn't agree more. But I think as much as need to foster a climate of technical innovation for its own sake -- outside of the useless future weapons systems and other fantasy robot war game toys -- we need to foster an environment of thought, period. If Americans had any kind of critical faculty, we would not have the Government we have. Actually, you would probably have something like what we have in Seattle: a bunch of smart people bitching and moaning while nothing gets done.

No but seriously, I'm actually in a good mood, and I think that critical engagement is one of the keys to innovation and survival. An example of how I use my critical faculty at work, as I started mentioning above, is in the selection of something called a design pattern. You have to have what is essentially a philosophical discussion where you evaluate the merits of different ideas. You then marshal the well-known and proven ideas into your own argument, or implementation. You might use the Factory pattern, but you will still have many choices to make about the specific nuts and bolts of your implementation. A lot of your decisions will be driven by your goals, one of which is almost always, "can someone else (including myself in 6 months) understand what I'm doing here?" Code can be easily read and understood even if it is deep or complex, just like Foucault's writing.

Apparently philosophers love perl. I think the reason is that perl is a language construction kit. It provides you with very expressive and easy to use tools -- hashes and arrays, basically -- and lets you do all kinds of cool things with them in the manner that appeals to your sensibilities. Eventually you come to find that a little order in the world is good, and you move towards python or ruby. Just as one might start with Derida or Deleuze for the fireworks and lack of rules, but graduate to Foucault once you actually want to make something.

"[E]ven before we know to what extent something like Marxism or psychoanalysis is analogous to a scientific practice in its day-to-day operations, in its rules of construction, in the concepts it uses, we should be asking the question, asking ourselves about the aspiration to power that is inherent in the claim to being a science. " --Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended

Addendum

My co-worker has pointed out that all I was trying to say was that I was trained in the art of rhetoric.