Free will is prescientific baggage? Why so? What do you think about the famously atheist Dennett's defense of free will? I think this is the kind of free will generally talk about whether laymen are around to listen or not.
>implying a general purpose free will that is neither well-specified or in some cases even coherent.
To the contrary, I find that it is the layman who has an airy-fairy conception of free will that couldn't possibly exist, while the philosophers are generally more down-to-earth and use "free will" that normal people use the term in a non-philosophical context.
>So I'd speculate people in STEM can smell the lack of systematic thinking in some of these discussions and unfortunately throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I'm not sure if there's any baby in the bathwater if philosophy lacks systematic thinking, if by "lacking systematic thinking" you mean something like "not thinking definitions and arguments through". Luckily it doesn't seem that philosophy does this. But maybe I'm misunderstanding you - maybe you're talking about the philosophical discussions that laymen generally overhear, which tend not to be discussions held by philosophers but by other laymen. And I do think you would be right to say that these discussions generally aren't very coherent, and reflect poorly on philosophy as a discipline.
>implying a general purpose free will that is neither well-specified or in some cases even coherent.
To the contrary, I find that it is the layman who has an airy-fairy conception of free will that couldn't possibly exist, while the philosophers are generally more down-to-earth and use "free will" that normal people use the term in a non-philosophical context.
>So I'd speculate people in STEM can smell the lack of systematic thinking in some of these discussions and unfortunately throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I'm not sure if there's any baby in the bathwater if philosophy lacks systematic thinking, if by "lacking systematic thinking" you mean something like "not thinking definitions and arguments through". Luckily it doesn't seem that philosophy does this. But maybe I'm misunderstanding you - maybe you're talking about the philosophical discussions that laymen generally overhear, which tend not to be discussions held by philosophers but by other laymen. And I do think you would be right to say that these discussions generally aren't very coherent, and reflect poorly on philosophy as a discipline.