on robocritique and critbots

The more reviews I read, the more I see examples of “robocritique”– people making insincere criticisms that they don’t really believe, just for the sake of proving that they are critical. Let’s call such people “critbots.”

The problem is not that they ought to stop criticizing and start flattering instead. These are obviously not the only two options.

Consider a work of literary criticism– on a Shakespeare play, just to keep it simple. Such a work would be justified in being critical (“In Act II we find a few patches of Shakespeare’s weakest verse…”) and even flattering (“This little twist is something that no other poet, not even Homer or Dante, could ever have pulled off; it establishes Shakespeare’s transcendent greatness beyond all possible doubt.”)

But in a good work of criticism, both of these would be fairly minor aspects. A good critic would not miss the point. The critic would cut to the heart of what is most relevant about the play, would weigh its strengths and weaknesses compared with other plays of the same basic magnitude of importance, would try to offer new insight into the role of some of the characters, and so forth.

This is why criticism makes for such wonderful reading in so many fields. I’ve already mentioned theater and restaurant criticism. Wine-tasters, though often mocked for pomposity, often write wonderfully as well.

But we don’t get enough of this in philosophy. Rarely do we read first-rate critics in our field. Instead, we get too much “critical thinking”– too much “devil’s advocate” or raising insincere questions or poking holes for the sake of poking holes. And I fear it’s because we’ve wrongly decided that our profession primarily consists in finding logical gaffes in the works of others.

It would be the equivalent of a restaurant critic going back into the kitchen and heckling how the chef handles salt and butter. Let’s just assume that a chef knows how to handle the ingredients, and confine ourselves to the critic’s proper role– a subtle weighing of the ambiguous strengths and weaknesses of any given cuisine.