Have you considered that there may be a lot of endless hashing out, not because some people have a preference for it, but because the problems are genuinely difficult?
I’ve considered that view and found it wanting, personally. Not every problem can be solved right now with an empirical test or a formal model. However, most that can be solved right now, can be solved in such a way, and most that can’t be solved in such a way right now, can’t be solved at all right now. Adding more “hashing out of big questions” doesn’t seem to actually help; it just results in someone eventually going meta and questioning whether philosophy is even meant to make progress towards truth and understand anyway.
I’ve considered that view and found it wanting, personally. Not every problem can be solved right now with an empirical test or a formal model. However, most that can be solved right now, can be solved in such a way, and most that can’t be solved in such a way right now, can’t be solved at all right now. Adding more “hashing out of big questions” doesn’t seem to actually help; it just results in someone eventually going meta and questioning whether philosophy is even meant to make progress towards truth and understand anyway.
Can you tell which problems can never be solved?
Only an ill-posed problem can never be solved, in principle.
Is there a clear, algorithmic way of determining which problems are ill posed?
Yeah, you just need a halting oracle and you’re sorted.