system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why do you think so many people reject philosophy these days?

I know a lot of people who reject philosophy outright these days, the only thing they'll even humour is scientism. I'm not just talking about nu atheism when it comes to God or whatever (though that's always the first thing that seems to pop up) I mean just entirely. And if you try to tell them that even scientism is a kind of philosophy they'll reject it. Do people just think philosophers sit around thinking up stoner ideas all day?
gpt
It's probably true that philosophers do a relatively bad job at PR.  At least, the public tends to have very strange ideas about what philosophy is, and while there are some significant cases of philosophers working in public media, it's still probably safe to say the discipline remains much less visible there than many comparable disciplines.

I think, however, it's easy to be too dismissive of the issue, in the sense of chalking it up merely to a want of adequate PR efforts by philosophers.  It seems to me worth considering whether there are historical or metaphilosophical reasons for the kind of skepticism that is communicated, albeit typically in a vague and unconsidered manner, by popular attitudes about philosophy.

In this vein, much has been made about the relation between postmodernism and popular skepticism or relativism, in the sense of postmodernism either giving a theoretical expression to, and/or motivating, a certain attitude presiding in these times.  There is some truth to this narrative, but it does fail in many ways.  Notably, it is unfair to single out postmodernism in this way: the challenge of skepticism and relativism has been a central feature of philosophy, or indeed western intellectual culture broadly, sense the late 19th century, and in other contexts the same sort of opposition that is aimed at postmodern skepticism or relativism has been aimed likewise at the supposed irrationalism of existential phenomenology, or, before it, lebensphilosophie.  And the phenomenon is hardly limited to the continent: we can find similar concerns expressed about the expressivism of logical positivism, or--ultimately on solid interpretive grounds or not--the relativism of a Kuhn, Goodman, or Feyerabend.

The challenge to objectivity that gets engaged by philosophers working on these historical and metaphilosophical issues is paralleled in the broader culture by a fragmenting sort of development where issues that were once seen as united in a general sort of rational inquiry with supposedly objective bases in science, philosophy, and religion, are increasingly reinterpreted as concerns that get expressed either in the independence of private life, or in its correlates in the public sphere where issues of personal identification are communicated--media and politics, largely.  People have been increasingly apt to see especially issues of value--which classically includes issues of epistemology along with those of ethics and aesthetics, and through these foundational concerns have some wide-reaching consequences--as being intrinsically matters of private opinion (or as pertaining to the public organs of private opinion communicated via things like politics and media) rather than as objects of rational inquiry.  This strikes a considerable blow to even so much as the intelligibility of philosophy, which has largely been identified as the task of conducting such an inquiry--i.e., which increasingly seems a task unintelligible to many people.

Many philosophers are likely to object to being saddled with the baggage either of these developments in the broader culture, or with the aforementioned relativist or skeptical consequences of past philosophical movements.  Philosophy has moved on from these past movements, it takes new positions on the methodology of philosophical inquiry, and in any case we can hardly take it as a reliable predication that the average philosopher today is going to be an advocate of relativism or nihilism.  On the one hand, we have to grant that this sort of objection makes a good point.  On the other hand, we may still question whether the general effort of philosophical work in the present period (since the middle of the 20th century or so) has succeeded at articulating a metaphilosophical position on the basis of which the contested issues--those of the ultimate bases of value, for instance--are more or less clearly apprehensible, let alone at the level of popular discourse, as having an objective basis constituting the object of a rational inquiry.  (There are, for instance, ongoing metaphilosophical disputes about whether a method of intuitions and reflective equilibrium is up to the task.)  Insofar as this is significantly in question, it seems the current metaphilosophical climate continues to give some considered support to popular intuitions regarding the unintelligibility of philosophy.

This is not to say, of course, that philosophy is in fact unintelligible, but only to suggest some determinate issues in history and metaphilosophy which might pertain, as either expressions or motivations, to the popular intuition of skepticism about philosophy.