What Is a Philosopher?

• What is a philosopher?
• Why be a philosopher?
• What skills are needed?
• What are the goals of philosophy?
• How do you tell good philosophy from bad philosophy?
• Is philosophy for everyone?

Regarding whether philosophy is for everyone: it could be in a better world. It used to be that only a few people learned math, but now in USA we try to teach arithmetic to everyone in elementary school. We’re not very good at teaching it, but a lot of people become competent at it. Not many people become specialist mathematicians who learn really advanced math. Philosophy could be the same way: ~everyone learns the basics, but only a few people become experts on more advanced parts of the field. Like we’re trying to make ~everyone literate but only a few people write books, are grammar experts, or are great at analyzing and understanding text (which gets into philosophy skill too).

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Philosophy is the field which takes on big, fundamental, timeless, impersonal and abstract questions which aren’t covered by the hard sciences. To some extent, philosophy covers anything which isn’t parochial and isn’t covered by another field. Philosophy also has some specific topics it has claimed like epistemology (the study of knowledge), rationality, morality, metaphysics, ontology, scientific method, political philosophy and some stuff related to logic, aesthetics and theology (but logic, art and religion are major topics outside of philosophy, too).

The origin of the universe is a big question, but the “big bang” theory is part of physics not philosophy. Philosophers don’t do a lot of measuring or experimenting like scientists. (In the past, there wasn’t a clear distinction between philosophers and scientists, and “natural philosophy” meant things like physics, chemistry and biology.)

Philosophy is also used in all other fields because it provides part of the foundations of all other fields. Philosophical ideas can be applied to help with other fields. Philosophy includes topics like how to think rationally or how learning works (conceptually; various specific learning or teaching methods can be outside of philosophy), so that’s useful in every field.

Philosophy generally doesn’t deal with the details of psychology or current events. It sticks to more general principles like political philosophy deals with broad, timeless questions of how society can and should be organized. Economics is relevant there but is its own separate field.

On average, philosophers are more willing to be unconventional and potentially offensive, in pursuit of truth, than other people.

Debate and rhetoric are partly separate fields from philosophy. Debate clubs with score systems do things that aren’t very philosophical or rational. But how to actually debate issues to a conclusion is a philosophical matter (as opposed to how to bicker with others in ways our culture current considers effective or persuasive).

Philosophy deals with some very hard questions which is one of the reasons it’s not very popular. People often get pretty stuck and come up with several plausible answers and debate those answers for centuries without reaching conclusions. Philosophy has been overshadowed by science because scientists, in the last few centuries, have made a bunch of clear, objective progress. They’ve settled a bunch of disagreements using experiments and more conclusive modes of debate. Also, successful technologies have been pretty convincing. You generally can’t build a machine to demonstrate that your philosophy theory is correct as you can with many scientific theories. And machines can provide a lot of practical benefit to people. Electricity and motors come from science. You can see that light bulbs work and they’re very useful. Whoever invents or manufactures light bulbs must genuinely know something since they do work. People don't go around claiming that light bulbs are impossible; they aren't controversial; while there must have been skeptics about whether light bulbs would work before they were invented, the issue has now been settled.

Philosophy is pretty fractured with varied opinions. Even when many people appear to agree on something, like induction or justified, true belief (JTB), it’s often not really much agreement. There are many different views on induction or JTB. Advocates of these ideas continue to debate amongst themselves. They haven’t settled the issues and moved on to more advanced issues. Physicists and chemists have a bunch of ideas which weren’t known 500 years ago but which are pretty uncontroversial today, which they can build on instead of continuing to debate the same old topics.

I believe philosophy is very important today partly because it’s neglected and unsuccessful. There’s lots of room for improvement and more need to improve. Philosophy is more broken than science, so fixing it could provide more benefit.

Scientists use philosophy (“philosophy of science”). If philosophy were improved, then scientists could invent more. Philosophy could also help with political improvements, moral improvements, and people having more rational, effective, unbiased debates.

Scientists use the “scientific method”. How does that work? What thought processes should scientists use and what should they avoid? How can scientists be unbiased? These are philosophical questions. The detailed methods of experiment, like how to use specific tools or chemicals, are scientific matters. But questions like “How do you know when you have enough evidence to reach a conclusion?” are philosophical questions that scientists must deal with. “How can you know anything at all?” is another question that’s relevant to scientists who are trying to gain knowledge.

Scientists all have philosophical ideas. They have opinions on what knowledge is, how it’s acquired, and what makes it reliable, high quality or true. Scientists have opinions on whether we live in an objective reality which actually exists or whether our planet and lives are all one alien’s dream or a simulation on an alien’s computer. If scientists have incorrect ideas about these philosophical issues, then they do a worse job. For example, there are ongoing problems with scientists confusing correlation (which is easier to find and study) with causation. There are widespread confusions about what correlation is, how it does and doesn’t matter, what it means, what it hints at, etc. And correlation is an abstract, philosophical issue about knowledge and how to learn things and seek the truth. It’s covered by philosophy. When scientists study it, they are branching out into doing some philosophy. How correlation works is the kind of thing which has to be (hopefully rationally) debated. You can’t do experiments to figure out the right perspective on correlation.

Sometimes scientists work on philosophy without realizing it. This can go poorly because they don't know what field their in, don't learn an overview of what's already known about philosophy, and try to use scientific methods that are a poor fit for philosophical jobs. Not having all the biases and misconceptions of typical philosophers could also be a helpful advantage, but so far I haven't seen scientists come in and solve major philosophical problems while mistakenly thinking they're still working within their own field. I have seen scientists write stuff that is over 50% philosophy and then tell me I can't possibly understand it and evaluate it myself because I don't have training as a scientist. They don't realize they're working more in my field than theres, and they missing more relevant background knowledge than I am. (I've also studied science and math more than most scientists or mathematicians have studied philosophy. While I'm not an expert, I do know a lot of the basics, know a lot of general overview/summary information, and know some specific details. I also have fairly broad knowledge about science covering many topics, for example I know more about physics than most nutritionists and more about nutrition than most physicists. Many scientists working on philosophy know much less about it than I know about science; sometimes they know so little they don't even know which topics are part of philosophy not science.)

Should we gather evidence to support our hypotheses, and then decide they’re true when we have a big enough pile of evidence? That is one methodology. There are alternatives, like believing that some pieces of evidence matter more than others. Or maybe evidence can’t actually be weighed up to see how good a theory is. Maybe evidence has to be interpreted by theories rather than telling us about theories.

Another methodological issue is p-values (probabilistic confidence values for scientific experiments). People claim that if certain statistics show over a 95% chance that their experimental results aren’t due to random chance, then their results are “significant” and any lesser result (e.g. 93%) is “insignificant”. That is confused and contributes to lowering the overall quality and effectiveness of science.

Worse, an experiment might get 98% confidence and be considered significant. But what assumptions does that result rely on? Taking a step back and thinking about the bigger picture is one of the things philosophers do. Many of the assumptions that scientific results are based on are actually philosophical issues, not earlier scientific theories or experiments.

Experiments with 98% confidence have premises like “There were no relevant factors that we didn’t control for.” How do you know that? Maybe there were. Evaluating that issue requires philosophical debate. Trying to come up with relevant stuff that you didn’t even consider is the kind of task philosophers deal with. Philosophy can be hard and many philosophers aren't very effective, but at least philosophers try to do this kind of thing and they are on average better at it than non-philosophers (people who don't study philosophy and aren't trying to be good at philosophy).

Judging which of two scientific theories is better or should be tentatively believed and acted on (or concluding that we don’t yet know an answer) is a philosophical issue. Deciding whether we need more experiments or we should move on is a philosophical issue. Those involved methods of truth seeking and evaluating ideas.

Philosophers deal with arguments and explanations a lot. Those are part of how we seek the truth and try to understand the world. And being good at those techniques is more clearly necessary for philosophical questions (where it's common to make no progress at all without good arguments and explanations) than for scientific or cultural questions (where people figure some stuff out despite being pretty poor at explanation and argument).

What is an argument? What categories of argument are important? E.g. there are positive arguments (supporting ideas) and negative arguments (criticism). There are decisive arguments and indecisive arguments (partial support or weak criticism). How does an argument differ from an explanation? Do all arguments have to be explanations, but some explanations aren’t arguments? What makes some sentences explain an issue while others don't?

Philosophers also deal with the nature of ideas, e.g. what does it mean for an idea to be fallible or infallible? Tentative or not? Absolute or not? Biased? Meta?

Meta ideas are ideas about other ideas. Philosophers deal with meta ideas a lot, while other fields don’t use them as much. Meta ideas let you take an idea, take a step back, and analyze it or talk about it. They’re crucial for not getting too caught up in details and instead seeing the bigger picture, as philosophers strive to do.

Philosophers don’t look at only the big picture. They’re also somewhat known for detailed debates over the meanings of words and sentences. They can try to get details right so they can be precise. Philosophers focus on conceptual and linguistic details (language is one of the main tools of philosophy). Scientists often focus on other types of details such as doing very precise measurements or cleaning laboratory equipment very thoroughly.

Philosophers try to use their big picture view to figure out which details matter and then pay attention to those. They especially try to pay attention to details that matter to figure out big picture views correctly.

Philosophers often fail. They deal with hard stuff so the failure rate is higher than in most fields. Sometimes they advocate wrong ideas. Sometimes they debate details that aren’t important. Whole philosophical movements or schools of thought have gone wrong (but perhaps so have some whole scientific research projects like string theory).

In general, it’s harder to tell when a philosopher is doing a good job than when someone else is. Philosophical ideas are harder to evaluate. It takes a lot of skill to work with them. But it’s worth trying, even though it’s hard, because they’re important.

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Here are some additional thoughts that partly repeat the above:

Philosophers take on the deepest, hardest questions. As we get better at dealing with some questions, such as natural science, it becomes its own field and stops being part of philosophy. Philosophers don’t deal with settled, solved, uncontroversial easy stuff. They push boundaries. They work on problems that aren’t well defined yet. They work on issues where it’s hard to tell even when you have a correct answer. Many philosophical problems have been debated for millennia or centuries without reaching a clear conclusion.

Are philosophers the deepest, smartest thinkers? No. There’s lots of low quality philosophy work. Also academia tries to commoditize philosophy into specific specialties where people can make steady progress (or just teach and talk about existing ideas while making no progress) doing certain types of less creative research. Academia tries to get philosophers to fit into some predefined types which is contrary to the nature of a philosopher. Philosophers should be seekers of truth who explore widely instead of each philosopher staying under a particular lamp post (with some lamp posts having thousands of philosophers crowded under it).

Philosophers do the most big picture and meta thinking. They think about principles and methods. There’s confusion because many scientists try to understand the scientific method, while many philosophers don’t. But it’s a philosophical topic because you can’t measure it. It has to be debated with abstract reasoning. Scientists often spend some time working as untrained philosophers, and sometimes do better than trained philosophers (the philosophy training in school has upsides and downsides rather than being clearly good), which gives philosophy a bad reputation and confuses people about what philosophy is and isn’t.

Many famous philosophers were wrong, bad, ineffective. Studying them won’t teach you to think effectively. Not many philosophers had very useful things to say about the methods of rationality, how to be less biased, how to reach conclusions in debates, etc. But those things are necessary tools for analyzing all the other philosophical questions.

Philosophy is important but humanity hasn’t done very well at it so far. The ancient greeks did well for the time period, but it’s not clear that we’ve improved much since then. Certainly the progress in science and math has been far, far better.

What do philosophers do?

• hard problems
• bigger picture
• meta
• methods
• principles
• problems not addressed by other fields
• foundations and fundamentals
• asking “Why?” more than other people
• questioning stuff
• timeless ideas
• non-parochial ideas
• questioning intuitions, not being satisfied by intuitions (not just rejecting intuitions either)

Fields of philosophy include epistemology, morality, ontology and political philosophy.

Epistemology is a prerequisite for the others.

Many philosophers try to look at epistemology as vague stuff like “What is the nature of knowledge?” They don’t see philosophy as practical. They aren’t trying to figure out how to be rational, how to be unbiased, how to reach conclusions in debates. You need that stuff to do any kind of philosophy effectively. All fields of philosophy (and all other fields) require some skill at judging ideas. Philosophy requires that skill more because you get fewer practical hints about what works or not because it’s more abstract and deals with questions/goals that are harder to define. You can get by as a barber, dentist or experimental scientist with less knowledge of how to judge ideas than a philosopher needs. Knowledge and skill at rationality helps, particularly when trying to make progress (which many barbers don’t even attempt), but a philosopher is in more trouble without skill at rationality. Or put another way, a barber might get by with mediocre knowledge about judging ideas (not none) while a philosopher needs higher quality knowledge to be effective.