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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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Historically, philosophy is broadly scoped and does not exclude any particular domain of knowledge. Most branches of formal knowledge today started out as discussions between philosophers. I think that a good student of philosophy should be able to produce good answers to a very broad set of questions - this was certainly true in ancient Greece, and it should be true to some extent today.
It's hard to exclude a type of question in principle. But in practice, I can see some specific things worth excluding:
- If it's not clear what's being asked (due to poor grammar, poor phrasing, multiple unrelated questions all lumped together) - in this case, users should explain in comments why it's unclear, and encourage the asker to edit and/or delete and ask better new questions
- If it's not possible to provide a real answer of a reasonable length - users should say in comments why the answer would have to be so long, and suggest ways of narrowing the scope or breaking down the question
- If the question is extremely localized, and the analysis of it cannot be generalized - for example, "what should I have for breakfast" is not a good question because it applies only to that person for that day. But reframing it as "how should I decide what to have for breakfast" would, IMO, cleanly bring it under the scope of proper philosophy (and in fact famous philosophers like Sartre contemplated this very question). When asking about a specific situation (deliberate thought experiment aside), questions should be concerned with how the answer can be decided rather than what the answer is.
- If the question is a matter of fact - for example, "how do we know the capital of France?" is IMO on topic, but "what is the capital of France?" (expecting an answer of just "Paris") is not.
- If the question falls firmly under some other discipline already. For example, questions about the nature of the atom were once a major interest of philosophy, but now we have physics to cover much of that, so they should be asked there unless the question is about an aspect of particle theory that is not addressed by physics.
I would caution against banning subjective questions or those which appear undecidable in our reality. It can be argued that all knowledge is ultimately subjective. There are areas of philosophy that happily investigate subjective topics (aesthetics) and those that are out of reach for our experience (metaphysics). Further, many topics appear undecidable, but on closer (philosophical) inspection prove to be not so. We can hardly expect askers to be able to predict whether that is the case when asking, since usually people ask because they recognize their own ignorance.
That said, subjective questions that merely poll the userbase should not be allowed. So, "what does philosophy say about what color is prettiest" is IMO on topic, while "what do you guys think is the prettiest color" is not.
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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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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.
I think even the broadest questions like "What are good and evil" has to be deemed a valid question to philosophize about. The answers will have all kinds of flavors. Maybe even bringing in aspects of religion and not only of one but many.
You can argue there has to be "an" answer or even a "best" answer or "objectively qualifyable" answer. But those are criteria that do not match any philosophical discipline. There is only the discourse.
Questions are key. Answers are key.
Any assessment what the quality of an answer is can be deemed censoring or opinion based exertion of power over other opinions, which is detrimental and unwanted in philosophy. Because if not all answers are equally worthy to be considered, there is no fair and open philosophy happening.
I can also not see to either favor "philosophical" questions or "factual" questions, if they touch the topic of philosophy.
Certainly, asking "What is the capitol of France?" might result in "Paris". But it can also excite others to find a more suitable, philosophical approach/answer to this. If not, the answer count will stay at zero anyway.
I think in philosophy (and other fields), we should not pursue to find "the best" answer. Instead yes, collect honest/genuine/serious answers. Because there are always more perspectives to a given situation than only one or only one best.
Even if questions are able to generate infinite interpretations, in common practice this will not be happening. At some point, after maybe 5 or 10 answers, the "answer space" is depleted more or less, the votes are made, the badges are given. After a year nobody will post there anymore anyway. And an auto-close could be issued after a question lays dormant without answer for a few months or so.
But many might later find to this question and just read the answers without posting and be amazed by the multi-faceted picture the answers present. Neatly sorted by votes which indicate a kind of "importance sorting" (but skewed by the time of posting; later posts tend to get far less votes than the first one).
I can only see advantages.
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