Philosophy that can be "taken seriously by computer scientists"

Full disclosures below. *

I agree with much of Glymour's manifesto, but I think the passage quoted would have been better left on the cutting-room floor. One reason is given in the critique you link: lots of philosophy gets grants and citations and employment in diverse areas around the academy and elsewhere. Not all of it gets noticed in science or furthers a scientific project, even broadly construed. For example, John Hawthorne just won a multi-million dollar grant to do work in epistemology of religion, and a couple of years ago, Alfred Mele won a multi-million dollar grant to do more work on free will. I doubt that Glymour thinks either of these projects has the virtues of the work of his CMU colleagues. But by the "grant-winning" standard, administrators should love this sort of philosophy. By a sales or readership standard, administrators ought to be encouraging more pop-culture and philosophy schlock.

Another reason is given by Glymour in the same manifesto:

A real use of philosophy departments is to provide shelter for such thinkers [who are, at least initially, outsiders to the science of the day, people who will take up questions that may have been made invisible to scientists because of disciplinary blinkers], and in the long run they may be the salvation of philosophy as an academic discipline.

So, a good use for philosophy departments is to shelter iconoclastic thinkers who are not going to be either understood or appreciated by contemporary scientists. How are such people going to be successful grant-winners? I can see how they might successfully publish within philosophy, given a certain let-every-flower-bloom attitude in philosophy. And I can see how some philosophers might end up convincing some scientists to take their work seriously enough to fund it ... eventually. But surely, some of Glymour's iconoclasts will be missed or ignored in the grant-giving process. Better, I think, to have some places for people to think whatever they want to think and be supported in that thinking so that they do not have to panic about meeting the basic necessities of life. If that means having to put up with literary criticism, then so be it.

• Disclosures. I did my dissertation under Peter Spirtes, and I've taken many enjoyable classes with Clark Glymour. I think Clark is an excellent person, and he is one of my philosophical heroes, although I don't think I do a very good job of emulating him.

The manifesto has a nice paragraph where Glymour lists the contributions of many mathematical philosophers. This might be relevant to UDT:

Philosophers and statisticians alike want to posit probabilities over sentences, but how would that work with a language adequate to science and mathematics, say first order logic? Haim Gaifman told us, and worked out the implications for what is and what is not learnable.

As Luke recently pointed out,

As Bellman (1961) said, "the very construction of a precise mathematical statement of a verbal problem is itself a problem of major difficulty."

But many verbal restatements of verbal problems often, even typically, precede and facilitate the construction of this golden mathematical trophy. These portions of philosophy, which are the bulk of it, might easily fail to impress the computer scientists. But without them, progress in formal philosophy would be slower.

For those interested, the CMU philosophy department organizes an annual summer school in logic and formal epistemology.

Its interesting why some of the humanities -- and particulary areas of philosophy -- are constantly defending their research program or the value of the discipline as a whole. Aparently, the folks of other segments of academia want see something useful. But it's not so sad, in some cases the dialog can happen, for example, in formal epistemology, the tentative to mix Bayesianism with conceptual analysis, trying to formalize concepts like 'coherence'.

the measure of value for philosophy departments is whether they are taken seriously by computer scientists

I would roughly generalize to "scientists". There is the need of people armed with both the tools of philosophy and science to discuss the meaning of many discoveries of the 20th/21st century: usually scientists are too narrowly focused and philosopher are not sufficiently well prepared. Nice to know that there are some exceptions (trusting you on this, I till have to go through the links).