Topics Language

Question I'd like to hear what you - dedicated to answering questions - have to say to the following: 1) Philosophers and scientists seem to believe that a) problems are shared (by people), i. e. are the same (identical?) for every man b) each attempt to solve a problem produces its own solution. Here's my first question: If we think there are as many solutions to a problem as there are written papers, what makes us believe it's different with the problems? What are the criteria for the interpersonal identity of a problem? 2) Relating to the first: If two people refer or at least pretend to refer to the same problem (in solving or just discussing it), and given the thesis that in some way we must understand the problem or at least its verbal expression: What is it, that we know, when we understand a problem? Or, a bit less heavy-weighted:What kind of semantics of questions would enable us to understand how it comes that the problems questions articulate are real and shared by people, while the answers and solutions differ relating to the person giving them? Looking forward to your answer Peter R. from Munich, Germany

Accepted:
October 8, 2009

Comments

An extremely sophisticated question, and one I'm not sure I could address in its entirety. However, I will start and perhaps one of my colleagues can take things much further than I can. I take it that the core of your question is this: why do we assume that problems are 'one' while answers are 'many'?

Is this in fact the case? Although as a matter of fact, there will be hundreds (maybe thousands) of papers addressing a particular problem, is there not also a working or regulative assumption that all of these are contributions to an answer (that is, a single answer)? If it turns out that one answer cannot be arrived at then so be it, but I do not believe that is the starting assumption. Also, if there is an irreducible variety of answers then this suggests that the problem itself has been misstated, or perhaps there is more than one problem.

Which leads nicely to the second part of my answer. Is it the case that philosophers tend to assume that a problem is the same problem, intersubjectively shared? There are plenty of instances of philosophers whom often speak as though sorting out what the problem actually is comprises half the battle (Aristotle, Locke); or who argue that a major part of philosophy is re-conceiving problems (Kant); showing that problems are actually non-problems (Hume, Kant again, Wittgenstein); that apparently single problems are actually multiple (Nietzsche).

Perhaps the issue is that we tend to think of problems and answers as being different. In science, when a problem (a mismatch between theory and observation, for example) is solved (either by correcting the observation or the theory, or both) what tends to happen is that a whole new line of enquiry is opened (new technique for recording observations opens up new things that can be observed; new theories lead to new tests or implications; new technologies need to be applied, improved and so forth). In philosophy, I suspect, the relationship is often as not even tighter: a problem is the appropriate way of analysing an answer and an answer is a better way of posing the problem.