Philosophy

The working criterion is in the second sentence. Foundational principles that hold across diverse situations are what makes a framework a philosophy, so the test is transferability rather than depth or subject matter. A set of principles working only where they were devised is something else. The two examples are chosen to make the point uncomfortable. Mechanism, the view that things are to be understood as machines with parts, and animism, the view that life is a force flowing in and out of objects, are both philosophies by this standard, which places the position underlying modern science and the position it displaced on the same footing as frameworks. Marsh's complaint is that one of them stopped acknowledging that it is one. Science was created in opposition to animism, and the resulting arrangement leaves all institutions built according to the dictates of an inconsistent definition of life, with academics debating contradictory attributes and reaching no consensus while the framework beneath the debate goes unexamined. The contrast with ideology is the operative distinction. An ideology lacks completeness, consistency and stable principles and exists within an endoreality, often to create one, and Marsh names psychology and economics as ideologies rather than sciences or philosophies. The classification is not decorative. A philosophy can be argued with on its principles, and an ideology cannot, because its principles change when they become inconvenient.

Philosophy defines itself variously as conceptual analysis, as the examination of assumptions other disciplines take for granted or by its historical canon, and there is no settled account. Thomas Kuhn's paradigms describe frameworks within which normal science proceeds without examining them, which is close to Marsh's complaint about mechanism. The philosophy of science debates realism and instrumentalism about exactly the assumptions she names. Her contribution is the sorting criterion rather than a new position, since defining philosophy by transferable foundational principles supplies a test that distinguishes it from ideology and applies to both without deferring to who is holding it.