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.
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.