Topics Philosophy

Question Why do philosophers make seemingly simple questions completely complicated and confusing?

Accepted:
November 16, 2005

Comments

Many seemingly simple questions are, in fact, complicated. That is, they only seem simple. Typically, philosophers don't make questions complicated and confusing, they show how complicated and confusing they actually are.

There is no reason to think that a simple question must have asimple answer. The question "Why are there tides?" is very simple; agood answer to it is very complicated.

But maybe you think thequestions philosophers give complicated answers to can be answered verysimply. In which case, you should write up some of those simple answersand post them on the Google group associated with this site. Let's seewhat people think of them!

You might also be wondering why simplequestions often tend not to be amenable to simple answers. Well, that'sa good simple question and I suspect it has no simple answer! Often,questions in philosophy ask for an explanation of some notion. Andoften, a philosopher's conception of what a good explanation looks likeis similar to that of a scientist: a general account that makes use ofa few notions in terms of which a few basic claims are formulated fromwhich a wide range of phenomena follows. In other words, philosopherslook for theories. And theories, because they seek to squeezea lot of juice from rather meager assumptions, tend to be complex in that they exhibit rather intricate chains of reasoning.There are other reasons for the difficulty you detect. To mention onemore, philosophers (again like scientists) tend to think that unlessthey simplify what they're trying to illuminate, the whole problem willbe so complex that no progress will be possible at all. This leads to acertain amount of idealization and abstraction, which some people actually find confusing or difficult.

Question Why do philosophers make seemingly simple questions completely complicated and confusing? Accepted:November 16, 2005

Question Why do philosophers make seemingly simple questions completely complicated and confusing?

Accepted:
November 16, 2005