Consider instead the following alternative metaphilosophical position (that I tentatively hold): Philosophy may be many things (including “coherent stories that help people craft shared meaning and motivation”)
This is exactly what I meant as well, in “Philosophy is a nebulous concept with multiple overlapping meanings, and as a practice, doesn’t have a single crisp functional conceptualisation, like those you enumerated in your post on metaphilosophy. It’s rather some superposition of these conceptualisations.”
Let’s first disentangle two questions: “Why people are practicing philosophy?” and “What is the (truth) status of philosophical statements?”.
The first one is the question of anthropology and (social) psychology which, I could argue, are kind of “philosophies” rather than “sciences” themselves, at this moment: they attempt to explain existing evidence (with “coherent stories”), but don’t produce mathematical models with good predictive power. Nevertheless, I agree that there are multiple explanations that we can provide, from “finding answers to difficult questions” and “by practicing philosophy, people try to increase the coherence of their world models, which is a deep ‘motivation’ of conscious biological agents, and which became imported into the domain of words 80k years ago or whenever people have acquired compositional language”, to “showing off”.
As retrospective explanation, which doesn’t inform us much to why will AI be motivated to practice philosophy. As an algorithm for finding more coherent and parsimonious sets of symbols/concepts (ontologies), it may be implemented in LM-like AI, perhaps, or there may be other, more efficient algorithms for this.
To the second question, about the status of philosophical questions, I think the answer is the following: while the essence of a scientific theory is a mathematical model which is judged by the quality of its match with evidence and coherence with adjacent scientific (mathematical) models, philosophy is text which is judged by its coherence with scientific models, internal (linguistic) coherence, and coherence with other philosophical texts (arbitrarily selected by a philosopher, as well as a scientist arbitrary selects theories why want their theory to match well with, thus advancing this or that scientific paradigm).
Internal coherence of a text and its coherence with other texts is a question of (neuro)semiotics and linguistics/philosophy of language, both of which, in my mind, are branches of cognitive science. If there is something else that makes texts convincing to people apart from their coherence, apart from external factors such as the likability and the authority of the author of the text or the orator, then the “quality” of philosophical texts also becomes the question of neuropsychology more generally.
The above story about coherence applies to most kinds of philosophy except “foundational”, such as foundations of physics or “philosophical paradigms” such as pragmatism, which perhaps serve as capstones for large sets of other scientific and philosophical theories, and the merit of these “foundational” philosophies is judged by the overall coherence of these sets of other theories being capstoned.
I don’t like using the word “truth” outside of logic, but if I’m forced to, the above implies that I go with some version of the coherence theory of truth.
Internal coherence of a text and its coherence with other texts is a question of (neuro)semiotics and linguistics/philosophy of language, both of which, in my mind, are branches of cognitive science. If there is something else that makes texts convincing to people apart from their coherence, apart from external factors such as the likability and the authority of the author of the text or the orator, then the “quality” of philosophical texts also becomes the question of neuropsychology more generally.
Before the invention of logic, someone might have said the same thing about math, that nothing determines the “quality” of a proof, aside from how convincing human neuropsychology happens to find it. I’m not saying that for sure philosophy is the same or analogous, that we’ll definitely find deeper reasons than neuropsychology for why a philosophical text is correct or convincing, but neither do I know how to rule that out, which makes me uncertain.
Plus, intuitively it seems like when trying to answer philosophical questions, I’m often aiming for some truth more “real” or “objective” than merely coherence with scientific models and arbitrarily selected other texts. For example, it seems either objectively true or objectively false that nothing determines the quality of a philosophical text aside from coherence and neuropsychology. The truth value of this statement doesn’t seem to depend on what other texts I happen to select to try to make it cohere with, or other subjective factors.
This is exactly what I meant as well, in “Philosophy is a nebulous concept with multiple overlapping meanings, and as a practice, doesn’t have a single crisp functional conceptualisation, like those you enumerated in your post on metaphilosophy. It’s rather some superposition of these conceptualisations.”
Let’s first disentangle two questions: “Why people are practicing philosophy?” and “What is the (truth) status of philosophical statements?”.
The first one is the question of anthropology and (social) psychology which, I could argue, are kind of “philosophies” rather than “sciences” themselves, at this moment: they attempt to explain existing evidence (with “coherent stories”), but don’t produce mathematical models with good predictive power. Nevertheless, I agree that there are multiple explanations that we can provide, from “finding answers to difficult questions” and “by practicing philosophy, people try to increase the coherence of their world models, which is a deep ‘motivation’ of conscious biological agents, and which became imported into the domain of words 80k years ago or whenever people have acquired compositional language”, to “showing off”.
As retrospective explanation, which doesn’t inform us much to why will AI be motivated to practice philosophy. As an algorithm for finding more coherent and parsimonious sets of symbols/concepts (ontologies), it may be implemented in LM-like AI, perhaps, or there may be other, more efficient algorithms for this.
To the second question, about the status of philosophical questions, I think the answer is the following: while the essence of a scientific theory is a mathematical model which is judged by the quality of its match with evidence and coherence with adjacent scientific (mathematical) models, philosophy is text which is judged by its coherence with scientific models, internal (linguistic) coherence, and coherence with other philosophical texts (arbitrarily selected by a philosopher, as well as a scientist arbitrary selects theories why want their theory to match well with, thus advancing this or that scientific paradigm).
Internal coherence of a text and its coherence with other texts is a question of (neuro)semiotics and linguistics/philosophy of language, both of which, in my mind, are branches of cognitive science. If there is something else that makes texts convincing to people apart from their coherence, apart from external factors such as the likability and the authority of the author of the text or the orator, then the “quality” of philosophical texts also becomes the question of neuropsychology more generally.
The above story about coherence applies to most kinds of philosophy except “foundational”, such as foundations of physics or “philosophical paradigms” such as pragmatism, which perhaps serve as capstones for large sets of other scientific and philosophical theories, and the merit of these “foundational” philosophies is judged by the overall coherence of these sets of other theories being capstoned.
I don’t like using the word “truth” outside of logic, but if I’m forced to, the above implies that I go with some version of the coherence theory of truth.
Before the invention of logic, someone might have said the same thing about math, that nothing determines the “quality” of a proof, aside from how convincing human neuropsychology happens to find it. I’m not saying that for sure philosophy is the same or analogous, that we’ll definitely find deeper reasons than neuropsychology for why a philosophical text is correct or convincing, but neither do I know how to rule that out, which makes me uncertain.
Plus, intuitively it seems like when trying to answer philosophical questions, I’m often aiming for some truth more “real” or “objective” than merely coherence with scientific models and arbitrarily selected other texts. For example, it seems either objectively true or objectively false that nothing determines the quality of a philosophical text aside from coherence and neuropsychology. The truth value of this statement doesn’t seem to depend on what other texts I happen to select to try to make it cohere with, or other subjective factors.