I agree: both. There seems to me to be a false dichotomy between "the world" and "our concepts and the way we use them": our concepts and the way we use them are surely part of the world.

To be candid, your question seems to embody some confusions. I'll try to address them in this reply. 1. I think it's fair to regard philosophy as the analysis (if you like, the logical manipulation) of concepts , although that view of philosophy is rejected by some philosophers. In any case, concepts can be expressed in any number of languages, so I wouldn't regard philosophy as the manipulation of words as such. 2. Scientists, as far as I can tell, don't in general examine the relationship between language and extralinguistic observations. Instead they try to explain or predict patterns of observations in as unified and elegant a way as they can manage. 3. I don't see how it follows ("Thus") from your first sentence that "truth [is] primarily a language concept according to which consistency between words would exist." First, what does "consistency between words" mean? Are "red" and "colorless" mutually inconsistent words because red and colorless are...

Scientists who write obituaries for philosophy forget that science depends on philosophical assumptions. When some lab results or observations of the visible universe confirm or disconfirm a prediction in physics, Hawking and colleagues draw conclusions about the whole universe. But does any set of observations justify conclusions about unobserved cases? Is "elegance" an objective feature of a theory, and does it make a theory having it more likely to be true? And so on. Philosophers grapple with these questions; scientists just presume answers to them. Unless we ignore such questions, philosophizing is inescapable.

Just for the record, neither Prof. Smith nor I bemoaned the quality of thinking in philosophy chat rooms, having made it clear that neither of us had ever visited any. But we both have serious doubts about the quality of philosophical conversation to be found there, if any exist. My doubts stem from seeing non-philosophers post and comment on philosophical topics, as I said. With your own training in philosophy, you'd find those threads deeply disappointing too, I'm sure. Prof. George suggested you might find the philosophical give-and-take you're seeking on blogs run by philosophers, but naturally those focus on whatever topics the bloggers currently find interesting. If your interests happen to match theirs, and if they allow comments, you'll find something on which to comment. David Chalmers maintains a long list of philosophy blogs here . I myself like the way AskPhilosophers functions. You wrote, "[T]he responders seem to imply that, at their level of philosophical accomplishment,...

I second Professor Smith's reply. I haven't participated in philosophy chat rooms either, but I've commented on blogs by non-philosophers who post on philosophical topics. I've found the quality of thinking in those totally unregulated forums to be so bad it's scary. There are people in the blogosphere who are allowed to drive and vote who couldn't reason their way out of a wet paper bag. Philosophy is a discipline, one that takes hard work to acquire. Would you want to discuss medieval history, or quantum mechanics, or set theory in a dialogue format with just anyone out there? I wouldn't. Philosophy is like those other disciplines except that its problems are harder and more fundamental to our intellectual lives. Why do so many people think that being competent at it takes no training at all?

As hard as it was for your friend to explain his dissatisfaction with philosophy, it's even harder for me to be confident that I really understand just what his complaint is. But I do think that a philosophical work fails to a significant degree if an intelligent reader comes away feeling that the author missed the boat or can't speak to anyone but specialists. Indeed, I support this website because I think philosophy is far too important not to be better understood by the general public. I'd encourage your friend to try harder to articulate the reasons he came away dissatisfied by this or that particular work of philosophy: to translate his feelings as carefully as he can into reasons and examine them. That exercise by itself very much counts as philosophizing. From time to time (although not as often as the public probably supposes), contemporary academic philosophers take up an age-old human concern like the meaning of life. An outstanding example, if by no means always easy reading, is...