I'm interested in how people form valuations of the opinions of others. One domain to study is art. We have a long historic record of how the elite arbiters of taste have decided what artists and what artworks were great.
This is more relevant to 21st century American thought than many of you probably think. The defaults we assume, the stories that are told on television and in our movies, the things taught in our colleges, were partly determined by assertions made by continental philosophers and psychologists of the 18th through 20th centuries, most of which they just made up. [1]
The process by which philosophers eventually get their views accepted into the Western canon looks the same to me as the process by which musicians or painters are accepted into or cast out of the Western canon. Neither has much to do with the quality of the product.
For centuries, artists have been judged not so much by the quality of their work as by its novelty, and by its ability to raise questions while resisting any definitive answers. As one art critic wrote, "Probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the Mona Lisa of literature."
Ironically, that was T. S. Eliot, just a few years before writing "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and writing rave reviews of James Joyce's Ulysses.
I think novelty was the main criterion for artistic greatness by the middle of the 19th century. It was almost the only criterion, in all of the fine arts, by 1925.
But there is one artist who sticks out among the desperate attention-seeking artistes like an ordinary thumb: Brahms. Brahms accomplished something that, AFAIK, no one else had in any fine art, in all of European history going back to the Middle Ages. He made art in a style that had gone out of fashion before he was born, not ironically, not nostalgically, but because he liked it. As I understand it, Brahms was still writing symphonies in the style of Beethoven after Chopin and Liszt were dead. And his work became both popular, and accepted by the elite arbiters of taste into the canon, not for introducing any new style, but simply for being enjoyable. Or, as an unsophisticated ignoramus might say, good.
That would be analogous to a philosopher's ideas being accepted just for being correct!
Is that a fair representation? If so, why was he accepted into the canon, when anyone else who tried to just make good stuff would, I imagine, be laughed at or ignored? [2]
[1] Analytic philosophers were more rigorous, so nobody liked listening to them. There seems to be a Gresham's Law effect: The presence of bad philosophers who claim to have reached exciting conclusions without any nasty logic or math, makes it impossible for more rigorous work to get a hearing within society and the arts.
[2] I'm open to the idea that Robert Frost may be another exception, though I'm not aware of poems written in 1870 that could be mistaken for Robert Frost poems. I'll also note that people tried to stamp out appreciation for his poems because he wouldn't get with the Modernist program.
I don't know of many analytic philosophers who scoff at his ethics, although there are certainly many who disagree with it. There are also many analytic philosophers who consider his ethics to be a significant advance in moral reasoning. As an example, Derek Parfit, in his recent book, constructs an ethical system that tries to reconcile the attractions of both consequentialism and Kantian deontological ethics.
Kant's discussion of the categorical imperative, especially the first formulation of the imperative (act according to the maxim that you would will to be a universal law), prefigures various contemporary attempts to reformulate decision theory in order to avoid mutual defection in PD-like games, including Hofstadter's notion of superrationality and Yudkowsky's Timeless Decision Theory. Essentially, Kantian ethics is based on the idea that ethics stems from nothing more than a commitment to rational decision-making and common knowledge of rationality among interacting agents (although with Kant it's not so much about knowing that other agents are rational but about respecting them by treating them as rational). I don't fully agree with this perspective, but I do think it is remarkably astute and ahead of its time.
In my experience, many people hold that when trying to derive the KI in the groundwork, he just managed to confuse himself, and that the examples of its application as motivated reasoning of a rigid Prussian scholar with an empathy deficit.
The crucial failure is not that it is nonsensical to think about such abstract equilibria - it is very much not, as TDT shows. But in TDT terms, Kant's mistake was this: He thought he could compel you to pretend that everybody else in the world was running TDT. But there is nothing that compels you to assume that, and so you can't pull a substantial binding ethics out of thin air (or pure rationality), as Kant absurdly believed he could.