So... Who Is Your Audience?
Philip Kitcher,
Aug 07, 2018
Note: 20 page MS-Word document. I've long considered Philip Kitcher's The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge to be required reading for those in the field, and more recently he has done work in the domain of science and society. So this question directly concerns him. And me. There are really two parts to his answer. One is practical: "The need to present scientific issues clearly to people who are not scientists seems to me the most crucial task of all (and perhaps it is especially important to reach journalists and policymakers)," he writes. The other is methodological. "The real achievements of the western philosophical tradition lie in the magnificent syntheses provided by thinkers who reflected widely on the achievements of the past and the conditions of life as they encountered it. Philosophy at its greatest is synthetic. It doesn't work beside the various areas of inquiry and culture and practice. Instead, it works between and among them." And - yeah. That's me.
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