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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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I have slowly been influenced by this question as a new perspective has crept into my mind. It could be interesting if Codidact had higher standards for “answerability” than Philosophy SE. It would take time and experience to codify new moderation principles, but working with a few specific examples can help us greatly to extrapolate from that data.
For example, here is a question I asked: Could a philosophical zombie verify that it is a philosophical zombie?
I think this is a good question to embark on some philosophical cogitation with, but one can imagine it would invite varying answers, vying with each other. It would be dialectical, an excellent philosophical exercise, yet perhaps not truly meeting the bar of an impartial informational reference material that Codidact could be.
For now, I can only brainstorm variations on this question that are more objectively answerable:
- Who first coined the concept of a philosophical zombie?
- What is a philosophical zombie?
- What are competing definitions of a p-zombie?
- What properties of p-zombies are contested amongst philosophers?
Still, when attempting to make philosophy questions purely objectively answerable, it may become too dry—as if the only valid questions are about the history of philosophy, “Who said X when?”, “What did person Y think about Z?”
Here is one possible criteria to put forward. It is ok to put forward an open-ended question, like, “What are qualia?”, but your answer, and the question, should be similar to a publishable academic research article in a philosophy journal. Not in length, but in (attempted) completeness of argumentation.
This could be a first step in trying to develop a criteria to fulfill, to be revised with time.
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