Philosophy is like math’s ne’er-do-well brother. It was born when Plato and Aristotle looked at the works of their predecessors and said in effect “why can’t you be more like your brother?” … Math is the precise half of the most abstract ideas, and philosophy the imprecise half. Bad math is merely boring, whereas bad philosophy is nonsense. And yet there are some good ideas in the imprecise half.
These tools are definitely very primitive. If you look at it from a “glass is half full” standpoint, that is a good thing—it means nobody else has gotten there first! :)
See cousin_it’s previous post on the formalization of mathematics. As I stated in a comment in that thread, formalized mathematics tools are still extremely primitive from a HCI standpoint.
Unfortunately, philosophical arguments are not likely to be amenable to formalized reasoning. Paul Graham has pointed this out in one of his essays:
These tools are definitely very primitive. If you look at it from a “glass is half full” standpoint, that is a good thing—it means nobody else has gotten there first! :)