The Poverty of Philosophy: Philosophical Methodology and Semantic Indeterminacy

Popular culture is increasingly influenced by ideas from academic philosophy (or its close cousins: such as critical theory). But philosophy's purely discursive approach renders it into a formalized 'private language' with an indeterminable semantic relationship to the organic, natural languages (such as everyday English or German) that it claims to be continuous with. As a result, philosophy is unable to demonstrate that it uses key terms such as 'mind', 'truth', 'equality', 'justice' or 'meaning' in the same way they are used outside the discipline, a requirement if philosophers aim to improve on our 'ordinary' understandings of what those words mean, as opposed to fighting a straw man.