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Comments on How do we encourage answerable Philosophy questions?
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How do we encourage answerable Philosophy questions?
Philosophy is an academic discipline and also a more informal conversational pursuit. How should the Philosophy community be structured to support and encourage answerable objective questions and discourage forum-style subjective conversations?
Questions like "how does $theory define good and evil?" seem, to this layperson, to be objectively answerable, but questions like "what are good and evil?" feel broad, opinion-based, and large. What guidelines should be put in place? What would potential reasons for closing be? How can we build a strong community of people seeking knowledge?
This is not my field, so I welcome help in refining this question. It seems like the first couple questions in the incubator are struggling, and I don't know if this is because there's assumed context (that non-philosophers aren't aware of) or if the questions need to be adjusted (how?).
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The main problem isn't subjectiveness IMO - many philosophers would already object there and ask what knowledge that isn't subjective. But rather the risk of too many overly broad questions. To be reasonable, questions must have a somewhat specific scope (like on the rest of the Q&A sites). I think some of the posted questions in the Incubator struggle with this indeed and they are perhaps not good examples of questions suitable for the site.
If you just toss a broad question out there such as "what is the meaning of life?", then there are hundreds of different philosophy branches all with their own take on it. And answers can't reasonably cover all of those.
However, if every question would be enforced to poll for answers given a certain philosophy/philosopher, then maybe that's needlessly narrow-minded and too academic.
I can also easily see how debates and argumentation back and forth should have a prominent place on a philosophy site. Perhaps have a special "Discussions" category for such? Where questions need not be answerable or have one true answer. Codidact is already far more suitable for this kind of setup than SE, given categories and threaded comments. The only concern I have there is that it would probably require a lot of attention from moderators.
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