Topics Philosophy

Question Aside from saying that the questions that they concern themselves with are difficult, how do philosophers make sense of their difficulty discovering consensus truths about the world, in the way that scientific communities do? And what would a philosopher make of the idea that philosophers are trying to understand the world through natural language, and not through enough of an observational component, and method (e.g. scientific method). It seems to me that philosophers are only using a small part of their brain when trying to answer questions, and that primarily, their inability to discover things about the world is due to this getting stuck up with language.

Accepted:
April 20, 2008

Comments

What I'd "make of the idea that philosophers are trying tounderstand the world through natural language, and not through enoughof an observational component, and method" is that this generalization is just plain false. Philosophers throughout history have drawn upon science, mathematics, literature, art, theology, and whatever else they can get their hands on in an attempt to deal with the questions that perplex them.

Once philosophers have achieved enough of an understanding of a question to make it susceptible to serious scientific investigation, what happens is, well, that the question starts to receive serious scientific investigation, and at that point its no longer a question for philosophers but a question for some often new branch of empirical science. This has happened time and again throughout history. So philosophers often aren't in the business of answering questions but rather in the business of clarifying questions: clarifying them enough that empirical work can then be done.

As a result, philosophers at any given time are always worrying about the questions that still need such work to be done on them: the ones that aren't yet ready for scientific study, and perhaps may never be ready for scientific study. Some of the questions that trouble us may not even have answers we could understand. That's possible.