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In the vernacular, "philosophy" might often connote ethereal or even random thoughts and "word games" about existence and knowledge and the like, but in academia, it is a word that refers to papers...
#2: Post edited
Would a dedicated philosophy Q&A zone be a viable/valuable addition to the Codidact project?
- Would a dedicated philosophy Q&A zone be a viable/valuable addition to the Codidact project? [duplicate]
#1: Initial revision
Would a dedicated philosophy Q&A zone be a viable/valuable addition to the Codidact project?
In the vernacular, "philosophy" might often connote ethereal or even random thoughts and "word games" about existence and knowledge and the like, but in academia, it is a word that refers to papers with creditable and peer-reviewed citations just like any other academic subject. My experience on the PhilosophySE has been an uphill battle worthy of Sisyphus: I base most of my questions and answers on material that I either directly cite or (often incorrectly!) expect should be familiar to other posters. This expectation came from my belief, again, that the SE network as a whole is embedded into academia. I got this impression from, among other things, the participation of many and varied professors on the site, as well as the fact that even a subsite like the WorldbuildingSE seems geared towards providing references for answers. Now a recurring complaint over there is that a question is "not philosophical" or otherwise of low quality. I haven't seen that anywhere nearly so much as I have seen low-quality answers: they have this status both because of how few outside, peer-reviewed sources are used to support them and because they are based on sometimes extreme misinformation about a topic. For example, one new moderator there has a history of denigrating modal logic/possible-worlds semantics as a form of abstract magical thinking, of "superstitious" belief in full-blooded alternative universes. While such an interpretation of PWS is not alien at all to either the literature at large or the work of very prominent contributors to that literature, i.e. David Lewis or "modal dimensionalists," it is not the only interpretation of PWS and Lewis himself did offer a "bog standard" quasi-empiricist or quasi-naturalist ground for his theory. So that moderator's prior lambasting of PWS as part of his silly "culture war in defense of science against magical and religious thinking" is just that: silly, or even offensive and stupid, ultimately. So again, the problem there is much less that "bad" questions run rampant and more that bad *answers* are so common, and even worse, commonly upvoted to a high degree (relative to the average). Some of these weak or counterproductive answers get dozens of upvotes! I realize I'm rambling some, my apologies for that if it doesn't help my case, but what I would hope for from Codidact in this connection is that we might make a PhilosophyQ&A zone here, one explicitly and strictly based on the expectation that answers include at least one clear and emphatic citation of material from the SEP, the IEP, some other well-vetted online philosophy encyclopedia, or best of all a paper that can be found on philpapers.org. (Sidebar: another problem on PhilosophySE: you can base a question on an SEP article, say, and still get told that you're not asking a philosophical question, and hardly anyone bats an eye!) I myself don't have institutional access to JSTOR (for example) so I often post questions on that SE while wishing that people with such access might be already familiar with a relevant paper or willing to look for it and go on to cite it in their answers. This wish is rarely granted. (Reason's greatest champion there, until his enigmatic "disappearance," Conifold, was extremely good at providing us with the information we needed. But he did disappear, ergo...) Well, then, that's enough rambling. Would a dedicated philosophy zone here on Codidact, with a strong policy of citation-based answers, be of value to the Codidact project overall? Maybe, maybe not; I don't know yet; you'll know, though! So thanks for reading this and I hope to hear from whoever decides these matters soon. ✅
