system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Explain academic philosophy to me (science PhD)

**TLDR:** how does your committee determine you've done "enough" to achieve a PhD in philosophy? Give me some very clear, concrete examples of philosophical "rigor" (for example, submitting for peer-review...what kind of comments do you receive and how exactly are these comments not subjective and simply a matter of making a more convincing intellectual argument?). If I submit a paper to an academic journal, there is statistical significance or there isn't; the techniques were utilized correctly or they weren't; my experimental design has gaping holes or it doesn't; at the end of my PhD I've published x amount of papers or discovered novelty via scientific rigor (proving through experimentation) or I haven't. 

I have friends who are philosophy PhDs and they get very annoyed when I even suggest the notion that someone can have merit as a "philosopher" without traditional academic training. In fact, I notice several philosophy PhDs scoff at anyone outside of the strict academic bubble interpreting or laying out philosophical arguments ("they don't have the training"). Often, they will say to me: "you'd feel the same about a lay person making arguments in the context of your scientific study". Probably, but it's really not an apples to apples comparison despite how desperately a humanities PhD wants it to be. Philosophical techniques are fully intellectual. Scientific techniques are both intellectual and skill-based/hands on. I am a firm believer that any intellectually equipped lay person can ascertain the same level of knowledge in my field from reading on their own, as I can. In fact, I have met some individuals with no graduate level degree in the basic sciences, yet have a very strong grasp of all the most necessary scientific concepts as it relates to cell-bio, molecular bio, genetics...simply from reading. But, the separation point is they cannot do a western blot, perform qPCR, do survival surgeries on mice, perform techniques to alter a genome etc; they may understand all of this theoretically, but the PhD training is necessary to even have access to these techniques. A lay person can spend all of their free time after work tirelessly reading everything they can on a particular philosopher or school of thought; they can take the time to learn the mother language of that philosophy (greek, german) on their own. 

From my perspective (which, I readily admit may be wrong and why I am posting), is that many humanities PhDs need to scoff at lay people having highly nuanced, philosophical arguments of merit, because those fields are based entirely on intellectual training. If you were to concede that someone outside of the academic Philo world had a degree of mastery, you'd be devaluing your formal academic training. From a basic science PhD perspective, it's not too much a dig on my field to acknowledge a lay person with intellectual science mastery (knows biochemistry inside and out etc) without devaluing my formal training; the technical skills I have that they lack in actually performing those techniques make my formal training totally necessary.
gpt
I don't think that anyone would deny that is theoretically possible to practice philosophy at an academic level without going through formal training, and that's true of any academic field. *But it's very, very, unlikely.*

I suspect your friends scoff at the notion because philosophy in particular has the air of "anyone can do it," unlike the sciences, and this conception is based on probably a further misconception about the historical practice of philosophy. It's true that anyone can do philosophy in the same way that anyone can do science by creating a potato clock, but that doesn't count for much. The other thing about philosophy and perhaps humanities fields in general is that, when you try and do the work on your own, there's no immediate feedback from your attempts to let you know you've failed. You can carry on your whole life with some poorly constructed idea or interpretation of some philosopher without ever having it checked by someone, criticized, etc. 

And of course, philosophy attracts a lot of cranks who are really, really, really sure they got it right and all of those fancy people in their ivory towers just can't see it. Anyone who has been on a departmental email list for a philosophy, math, or physics department has gotten an email before by some rando claiming to solve this or that central problem in one of those fields, or how once you understand the world as an alabaster time conclave you'll see the ultimate truth.