these kinds of quesions are asked to resolve “what does X mean” questions
Resolving the meaning of vague terms is a pointless activity/bad methodology. One should focus of seeking and answering better questions motivated by the same considerations that motivate the original vague questions instead. This involves asking “What motivates/causes the vague question?” rather than “What does the vague question mean?” as the first step, where the “vague question” is a real-world phenomenon occurring in a scholar’s mind.
Sometimes, the cause of a question turns out to be uninteresting, a bug in perception of the world, which dissolves the question. Sometimes, the causes of a question turn out to have interesting and complicated structure and you need a whole lot of new ideas to characterize them. This way, “What is motion?” points towards ideas such as time, velocity, acceleration, inertia, mass, force, momentum, energy, impulse, torque, simultaneity, continuity, differential and integral calculus, etc., which were not there in the heads of the philosophers who first wondered about motion.
Sometimes, the causes of a question turn out to have interesting and complicated structure and you need a whole lot of new ideas to characterize them. This way, “What is motion?” points towards ideas such as time, velocity, acceleration, inertia, mass, force, momentum, energy, impulse, torque, simultaneity, continuity, differential and integral calculus, etc., which were not there in the heads of the philosophers who first wondered about motion.
Isn’t this kind of a counterexample to your point?
If, instead of “What is motion?”, philosophers had turned to the question “What motivates/causes us to ask ‘what is motion’?”, the answer have been some variation on “moving stuff”, which wouldn’t have been much of an advance.
In this case the solution really did follow from a first-order process of trying to think very clearly about what the vague term “motion” seemed to be referring to, didn’t it?
The distinction I’m making with that example is between asking “What do I mean by ‘motion’?”, which looks at the person’s understanding of the word in detail (and there isn’t much useful understanding to be found in their mind if they don’t already understand mechanics); and asking “What causes me to wonder about motion?”, which points to the stuff that is moving, and motivates studying this moving stuff in detail, asking more specific questions about the way in which it moves.
And the empirical version of asking what a word means—examiining instances of usage, rather than introspecting—can give3 us a useful start on that, eg. by showing that there a usages fall intio
distinct clusters, so that there is not in fact one meaning.
“What causes me to wonder about motion?” is the better question if “motion” is a relatively natural kind. If it isn’t — if it’s plausible that I’ve made some error in how I group together phenomena — then it may be much more valuable to explain and make explicit what I mean by “motion.” See where to draw the boundary.
Philosophy is only important because our intuitions are often unreliable. We can’t trust common sense or pragmatism not to import unjustified assumptions, and unjustified assumptions can blow up in our face if left unexamined for too long. Philosophy has never been about asserting ‘that’s intuitive’ and stopping there. (If it were, philosophical theories wouldn’t be so ridiculously counter-intuitive!) It’s about testing the relationship between intuitions, and the worldly naturalness of our intuitive kinds. If we could do without assumptions and categorization and methodological decisions and intuitive thought altogether in our scientific and everyday activities, then sure, maybe philosophy would be dispensable. But as it happens, errors in our conceptual schemes can bleed into serious errors in our decision-making and in our territory-mapping.
Refusing to think about philosophy doesn’t immunize you to philosophical error; if anything, it increases your susceptibility to implicit philosophical biases.
Resolving the meaning of vague terms is a pointless activity/bad methodology.
i wasn’t aware that levels of vagueness are intrinsic and fixed. There is a sense in which “water” is now less
vague (and a sense in which “matter” is now more vague).
ETA: It seems that when Science makes a term less vague, it does so by stipulation rather than resolution.
When philosphers do that, it’s a Bad Thing called the True Scotsman Fallacy.
In any case, I was only making the point that none of the quoted examples involved philsophers trying to
deduce the nature of the external world from lingusitic behavuour.
Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change. “True Scotsman Fallacy” is about changing the question under discussion in an unhelpful manner, often in order to avoid the evaluation of the original question. If we agree that different questions have different degrees of usefulness (given some state of understanding), different ability to elicit further understanding, and are motivated by various purposes (as opposed to somehow being important in themselves), then serving the purpose of a question naturally employs developing different, more useful questions, and shifting the focus of investigation to them.
Resolving the meaning of vague terms is a pointless activity/bad methodology. One should focus of seeking and answering better questions motivated by the same considerations that motivate the original vague questions instead. This involves asking “What motivates/causes the vague question?” rather than “What does the vague question mean?” as the first step, where the “vague question” is a real-world phenomenon occurring in a scholar’s mind.
Sometimes, the cause of a question turns out to be uninteresting, a bug in perception of the world, which dissolves the question. Sometimes, the causes of a question turn out to have interesting and complicated structure and you need a whole lot of new ideas to characterize them. This way, “What is motion?” points towards ideas such as time, velocity, acceleration, inertia, mass, force, momentum, energy, impulse, torque, simultaneity, continuity, differential and integral calculus, etc., which were not there in the heads of the philosophers who first wondered about motion.
Isn’t this kind of a counterexample to your point?
If, instead of “What is motion?”, philosophers had turned to the question “What motivates/causes us to ask ‘what is motion’?”, the answer have been some variation on “moving stuff”, which wouldn’t have been much of an advance.
In this case the solution really did follow from a first-order process of trying to think very clearly about what the vague term “motion” seemed to be referring to, didn’t it?
The distinction I’m making with that example is between asking “What do I mean by ‘motion’?”, which looks at the person’s understanding of the word in detail (and there isn’t much useful understanding to be found in their mind if they don’t already understand mechanics); and asking “What causes me to wonder about motion?”, which points to the stuff that is moving, and motivates studying this moving stuff in detail, asking more specific questions about the way in which it moves.
I see. Thank you for the clarification.
And the empirical version of asking what a word means—examiining instances of usage, rather than introspecting—can give3 us a useful start on that, eg. by showing that there a usages fall intio distinct clusters, so that there is not in fact one meaning.
“What causes me to wonder about motion?” is the better question if “motion” is a relatively natural kind. If it isn’t — if it’s plausible that I’ve made some error in how I group together phenomena — then it may be much more valuable to explain and make explicit what I mean by “motion.” See where to draw the boundary.
Philosophy is only important because our intuitions are often unreliable. We can’t trust common sense or pragmatism not to import unjustified assumptions, and unjustified assumptions can blow up in our face if left unexamined for too long. Philosophy has never been about asserting ‘that’s intuitive’ and stopping there. (If it were, philosophical theories wouldn’t be so ridiculously counter-intuitive!) It’s about testing the relationship between intuitions, and the worldly naturalness of our intuitive kinds. If we could do without assumptions and categorization and methodological decisions and intuitive thought altogether in our scientific and everyday activities, then sure, maybe philosophy would be dispensable. But as it happens, errors in our conceptual schemes can bleed into serious errors in our decision-making and in our territory-mapping.
Refusing to think about philosophy doesn’t immunize you to philosophical error; if anything, it increases your susceptibility to implicit philosophical biases.
i wasn’t aware that levels of vagueness are intrinsic and fixed. There is a sense in which “water” is now less vague (and a sense in which “matter” is now more vague).
ETA: It seems that when Science makes a term less vague, it does so by stipulation rather than resolution. When philosphers do that, it’s a Bad Thing called the True Scotsman Fallacy.
In any case, I was only making the point that none of the quoted examples involved philsophers trying to deduce the nature of the external world from lingusitic behavuour.
Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change. “True Scotsman Fallacy” is about changing the question under discussion in an unhelpful manner, often in order to avoid the evaluation of the original question. If we agree that different questions have different degrees of usefulness (given some state of understanding), different ability to elicit further understanding, and are motivated by various purposes (as opposed to somehow being important in themselves), then serving the purpose of a question naturally employs developing different, more useful questions, and shifting the focus of investigation to them.