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Re:What, exactly, do philosophers do? by PeterisP on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @04:24PM (#15288462)
The problem I have with modern philosophy is exactly what you say, that for any interesting argument, it "has already been said by at least a few other people and been refuted counter-argued or otherwise discussed".

And that is a problem - what I'd expect from the practitioners of philosophy is to give a concise summary of what exactly is the current state of art answer. Given all that discussion, does the argument make sense (and thus the refutations have been found wanting) or do the refutations prevail?

Okay, there are some topics that are still highly up for debate, or it's acknowledged that the answer must be subjective (as some of the ethical debates do) - in that sense, just make a summary of the strongest currently known arguments pro and contra.

Discussion is a process for getting to results, but the discussion is not a sufficient result by itself - where are the conclusions? Such discussions are a tool for people within a field to produce the results, but the value of the field is limited to what is the outcome of the discussions that can be provided to practicioners of other fields, the final results that they can use in their reasoning. Where is the truth that has been found? Okay, it may be partial, or refuted in future as we obtain more knowledge, but up to our current knowledge, why doesn't the field provide the results of that discussion, removing all the refuted arguments (possibly moving them to a "FAQ list" of "yes, we've thought of that objection and it doesn't matter"), and summarizing (with fine-tuning, improvements and clarification, instead of expanding with more and more comments) the arguments that have been confirmed as irrefutable since Aristotle.

Instead of that, the philosophical community tends to provide all the historical discussion and pretend that that's a satisfactory result of research - it's not. We don't read Newton's Principia and comments of other authors on that to understand physics, we have resources that summarize all that's valid in Principia, that remove all that's not valid in it, that augment what could be improved, and make the original work obsolete for study unless you're a historian. The relationship between Principia and Kepler's findings is interesting from a historical perspective, but orthogonal to the actual content. Why then are we reading e.g. Kant's response to Hume instead of producing (Back then! I'm not talking about a textbook for students, but as something the research field would be expected to write for themselves right after Kant's publications) something like "Hume - revised" where all the Hume's opinions are mercilessly edited (because we shouldn't care about all Hume's opinions, but only those of his opinions that happened to be correct), removing the parts that have been refuted, leaving the parts where Kant's response was found insufficient, and replacing the parts which Kant was able to clarify with Kant's words, with a footnote to attribute authorship. If a refutation matters, then the original work should be altered (Where is the "Nicomachean ethics, 114th revised edition"?), and if a refutation doesn't matter, then you shouldn't be ever reading it in serious literature without a preface noting "this is a historically interesting but erroneous argument, counter-refutation in page xyz). The discussion is something that should matter only for those making new philosophy, but not those studying and applying ("consuming"?) the existing philosophy.

Instead https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/ states "There is no consensus, of course(!), over whether Kant's response succeeds, but there is no more consensus about what this response is supposed to be". Emphasis on the "of course" is mine, because I find that part informative, illustrative, and outrageous - if this is currently considered a reasonable state of art description, then the field seems to explicitly acknowledge that it's worthless, that it's not even attempting to provide any actual answers out of these discussions.

Re:What, exactly, do philosophers do? by mcguire on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @09:55PM (#15290166)
In 1950, Alan Turing published a rough, operational definition of "intelligence" (http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html). In 1980, John Searle published a reply (http://web.archive.org/web/20071210043312/http://members.aol...), arguing that Turing's operational definition of "intelligence" fails; it does not capture the important properties of "intelligence".

An interesting property of Searle's argument is that, if true, it means that the "strong AI" program is worthless; no discrete system that involves following rules (including neural networks and statistical models) can really "understand" anything.

The reason this came to mind is that Searle includes a large section addressing most (possibly all) of the responses to his argument by counter-counter-arguments. The SEP (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/) has a lovely discussion of the problem and responses since 1980, which seems to fulfil your desire for a "concise summary of what exactly is the current state of art answer". (Unfortunately, that isn't the case in general; the SEP page on Zhuangzi (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/) simply presents one approach, although it's one I haven't seen anywhere else.)

Unfortunately, while Searle presents counter-refutations to the refutations of his argument, and others since have added more and deeper levels of refutations, none have, to my knowledge, been universally acknowledged as prevailing. I personally don't buy Searle's argument (if you accept it, and especially his response to the "systems response", you will have to admit that no one understands Chinese), but that's neither here nor there; others do, and others find failures in his argument that I think are silly.

This is the case with most all philosophy. The only way for a philosophical point to be incorrect is for it to be logically inconsistent with other parts of the same argument, and that is almost never the case in any real arena. A similar sort of situation holds occasionally over in mathematics, say, where Euclid's fifth axiom was argued over for most of 2000 years; eventually it was discovered that you can invert it and produce a similar system that is intuitively inobvious, but logically consistent (and useful). Likewise, which philosophical points you accept depends entirely on what axioms you start with (and unfortunately, philosophical axioms are harder to pin down than geometry's).

My bottom line is that the historical discussion is the point of philosophy. Understanding complex arguments, even if they aren't "true" or if you don't agree with them, is considerably more than worthless.