Philosophical Amputations: 2: Loaded Language and Reification

Perhaps the most aggravation in dealing with philosophers in person comes with their insistence that they're asking meaningful questions in virtue of the presence of a question.  That is to say this: Because philosophers have mastered a skill of constructing interrogative sentences, they prematurely conclude that the sentence as they state it has an answer to it.  I rarely encounter philosophers anymore who are outright challenging the meaningfulness of an inquiry on the basis that the person is seeking something that doesn't demonstrably exist at its outset.

I blame this on a historical misreading of linguistic philosophers and positivists, but also attribute it to the hefty exploitation of two oft-forgotten fallacies.  The first is the loaded language fallacy, which is the erroneous assumption that all previous assumptions to a sentence are true (or, of a question, satisfactorily answered).  The second is the reification fallacy, which is the fallacy of assuming that things exist because a name or definiens for such things exists.  Other fallacies play their roles in different situations with arguers, but overarching the whole assumption that questions imply the existence of meaningful answers are, I think, two fallacies that affect philosophers most.

Not too long ago, a philosopher handed me some sample questions and asked me whether empirical science could answer them better than philosophy could.  In handling them, I observed that they suffered loaded language and reification fallacies, so I figured that I could use the first case to show exactly how and where professional philosophers go amiss in the very foundations of their inquiries.

1. Are there any genuine ethical obligations beyond the obligations to maximize the happiness and preference satisfactions of present or future beings?

The first thing that we can observe about this question is that it is not just one question.  By syntax alone, we can recognize that this is a conjoined group of questions and assumed sentences.  It's not the complexity, however, which is the error.  All proficient language speakers can import details and use recursion rules quite readily.  The problem here is that each sentence contains complex details, and with them further assumptions, which are prior to the establishment of the more complex questions and statements that succeed them.  Without some training in sentence parsing, these statements are hard to see on their own, and in that prosodic murk, "the question" can seem profound.  However, what we'll see is that "the question" is just an example of loaded language under which we can find much more basic and unanswered questions and unsubstantiated claims.

The first step is to work to detect ellipses that will aid in the separation of complex phrases into simpler sentences. They usually lie around coordinating phrases, adpositional phrases, and nominalized sentences.

Are there any genuine [and] ethical obligations [which are] beyond the [genuine and ethical] obligations[, which are for something] to maximize the happiness and [for something] to maximize the satisfaction [that is] of preferences [that are] of present or future beings?

Following this, we can outline exactly what sentences and questions the philosopher is assuming by dissecting the phrases into individual sentences.

LINE	CONTENT	FROM
1	Are there any genuine [and] ethical obligations [which are] beyond the [genuine and ethical] obligations[, which are for something] to maximize the happiness and [for something] to maximize the satisfaction [that is] of preferences [that are] of present or future beings?	0
2	Are there any genuine obligations [which are] beyond the [genuine] obligations[, which are for something] to maximize the happiness and [for something] to maximize the satisfaction [that is] of preferences [that are] of present or future beings?	1
3	Are there any ethical obligations [which are] beyond the [ethical] obligations[, which are for something] to maximize the happiness and [for something] to maximize the satisfaction [that is] of preferences [that are] of present or future beings?	1
4	Are there any genuine obligations [which are] beyond the [genuine] obligations?	2
5	The genuine obligations are [for something] to maximize the happiness and [for something] to maximize the satisfaction [that is] of preferences [that are] of present or future beings.	2
6	Are there any ethical obligations [which are] beyond the [ethical] obligations?	3
7	The ethical obligations are [for something] to maximize the happiness and [for something] to maximize the satisfaction [that is] of preferences [that are] of present or future beings.	3
8	Are there any genuine obligations?	4
9	Are the genuine obligations* beyond the [genuine] obligations**?	4
10	The genuine obligations** are [for something] to maximize the happiness [that is] of present or future beings.	5
11	The genuine obligations** are [for something] to maximize the satisfaction [that is] of preferences [that are] of present or future beings.	5
12	Are there any ethical obligations?	6
13	Are the ethical obligations* beyond the [ethical] obligations**?	6
14	The ethical obligations** are [for something] to maximize the happiness [that is] of present or future beings.	7
15	The ethical obligations** are [for something] to maximize the satisfaction [that is] of preferences [that are] of present or future beings.	7
16	Are there any obligations?	8
17	Are the obligations* beyond the [genuine] obligations**?	9
18	The genuine obligations** are Ψ*.	10
19	Ψ* = We maximize the happiness [that is] of present or future beings.	10
20	The genuine obligations** are Ψ**.	11
21	Ψ** = Something maximizes the satisfaction [that is] of preferences [that are] of present or future beings.	11
22	^Are there any obligations?	12
23	Are the obligations* beyond the [ethical] obligations**?	13
24	The ethical obligations** are Ψ***.	14
25	Ψ*** = We maximize the happiness [that is] of present or future beings.	14
26	The ethical obligations** are Ψ****.	15
27	Ψ**** = Something maximizes the satisfaction [that is] of preferences [that are] of present or future beings.	15
28	^^Are there any obligations?	16
29	Are the obligations* beyond the obligations**?	17
30	The obligations** are Ψ*.	18
31	We maximize the happiness.	19
32	The happiness is of present or future beings.	19
33	The obligations** are Ψ**.	20
34	Something maximizes the satisfaction.	21
35	The satisfaction is of preferences [that are] of present or future beings.	21
36	^Are the obligations* beyond the obligations**?	23
37	The obligations** are Ψ***.	24
38	We maximize the happiness.	25
39	^The happiness is of present or future beings.	25
40	The obligations** are Ψ****.	26
41	Something maximizes the satisfaction.	27
42	^The satisfaction is of preferences [that are] of present or future beings.	27
43	Optionally, the happiness is of present beings.	32
44	Optionally, the happiness is of future beings.	32
45	The satisfaction is of preferences.	35
46	The preferences are of present or future beings.	35
47	Optionally, the preferences are of present beings.	46
48	Optionally, the preferences are of future beings.	46

'^' indicates redundant sentences.

With a quick glance, one can then pick off all of the unsubstantiated assumptions and unanswered questions that precede it, and one can see the unverified assumptions which the writer assumes in his question.

• Line 16: Are there any obligations?
  This question has not been answered in any satisfactory way by philosophers, scientists, or anyone else.
• Lines 19 and 30, 21 and 33, 25 and 37, and 27 and 40: The obligations are Lines 19, 21, 25, and 27.
  These supposed obligations are all contended philosophical battles.  They're not established anywhere beyond the assumption of the writing.  However, that may just be this individual philosopher's bias, so is not a fundamental error to all philosophers for that reason.  It's the presupposition that the obligations are specifically something without really establishing that they are that is the more fundamental error.
• Line 29: Are there obligations* which are beyond the obligations**?
  This question assumes that there are collections of obligations to be compared.  The composer of this questions just assumed that there were these things called obligations in the world.  However, as Line 16 shows, he hasn't really substantiated that there are any such things.  The former error is reification and loaded language fallacy because it is demanding a comparison of dubiously presupposed things.

Those are just some statements that the author of the question assumed or did not contend in the formation of that question.  How can he hope to establish the existence of "genuine obligations" or "ethical obligations," much less an intersect among them, without first establishing that obligations themselves exist?

This kind of reification (not just for obligations, but almost everything under philosophical inspection -- art, love, knowledge, philosophy, goodness, freedom, causality, entities, et al.) enables philosophers to claim they're really working with something that actually exists, namely "abstractions," or "concepts," or "ideas" without establishing their existence prior to the conjecture.  This assumption keeps itself afloat by carefully preaching to the already converted.  That is, people who already assume that we have minds that are clap traps of "concepts," etc., will tacitly accept this and some categorization of those things.  However, not one philosopher has proven that they existed.  They've argued at length that the claim to their existence may not imply a strict logical contradiction, but they have not remotely established the existence of those things, or that they are even things.

That assumption, too, is yet another reification fallacy.  It just exists at a morphological level.  In the case of obligation, they observe people who predicate, "x is obliged to...," to so many observed events, and then they reify that predicate into a noun obligation, which then inserts into its own argument and renders it tautological: "x is obliged to obligations."  But this is a failed route in the establishment of the concept, since, "x is obliged to obligations," just states, "x is obliged to the y to which x is obliged," and so says nothing more than other definitional truisms do.  The empirical fact, whether people are obliged to anything, is not established in this manner, and perhaps it isn't established at all.

My current hypothesis is that people avail themselves of this trick because it allows a language user to assume that their newly coined variable y somehow inserts into their universe of discourse as more than just reification, while freeing them from the harder burden of demonstrating that assumption.  This allows philosophers to forego the real empirical work of proving or demonstrating that obligations (or other things) exist and go straight to the conjectures in which they wonder about obligations in more complex questions and sentences.

Philosophers, by in large, just get it backwards.  They're drawing elaborate maps of assumed territories that they don't prove exist.  They assume that the ability to produce a sentence or question implies that the sentence is meaningful or that the question has a means to its answer.  They incorrectly derive an 'is' from a 'what'. These are linguistic errors.

Empirical scientists' greatest wisdom was in their inversion of the philosophical method: to do the experiments, to demonstrate the existence of things to every human's satisfaction, and to build their terminology from the breadth of their discovered territory.  That's the direction real knowledge takes, and which conceptualism abhors.

Philosophical Amputations: 1: "Brute Facts" and "Institutional Facts"

For those readers who I have, I should start by apologizing for not providing much content over the previous months.  I have focused most of my attention on linguistic projects (think Khan University for foreign languages), and the time that I've spent in philosophical dialogues occurred in Warp, Weft, and Way (specifically here, here, and here) and some other places.

But a new year is upon us, and in efforts to keep my New Years resolution (as I said I would last year), I decided that I would force myself to dedicate at least a certain amount of time to some philosophical topics.

But more still, my exposure to the philosophical literature and lectures has left me disappointed by the very nature of the philosophical venture, and so much of my attention has turned from doing philosophy (attempting to answer philosophical problems) to doing what I'll call an amputating approach to philosophy -- telling philosophers that the distinctions, definitional underpinnings, and other groundwork for the explanatory models that they aim to provide or address are themselves incoherent nonsense.

That said, I don't get invited to many philosophers' parties.  They don't like much being told that their salaries are won by sophisticated con artistry.  It's a heavy sword.  It's hard to swing.

Thus, for filler between talks about Yang Zhu and most of my "hardcore" Analytic stuff, I decided that I would open a subtopic -- Philosophical Amputations -- to outline some of those terms which exist in philosophy, but which fizzle to nonentities upon some basic logical inspection.

This first one came from John Searle's lecture series on the philosophy of language, specifically his discussion of "brute facts" and "institutional facts."

I think most people, even without much investigation, could shoot down most of what Searle has claimed here.  But let's take it piece by piece.

1. "The brute fact doesn't require a human institution in order for it to exist."
• Searle's own example does not exemplify this claim.  Take the sentence, "The Sun is [about] 93,000,000 miles from the Earth."  First of all, that fact only exists because of an institution -- measurement.  The decision to define an arbitrary length as a unit (say, a centimeter, or a league, or a li), demands the institutionalization and standardization of that length as that length and not any other.  The fact follows from the institution of that measuring system.
• But can there by any facts that are not institutional?  No.  The entire delineation of facts versus non-facts is a "human institution."  It's a distinction between the observations that we make and, more or less, its "agreement" with the sentences that one uses to code that observation.  Those sentences are built on a lexicon of terms and predicates that are the institution of a certain language, and thus the fact is just the comparison of a decoded sentence and our observed knowledge.
• But this has an interesting consequence.  It means that all facts are merely tautologies of a given language.  Consider the measurement example that Searle gave.  We could, at any time we chose, make a neologism for a unit between the Earth and the Sun.  Let's call it a "solarterron."  Now, if someone asks, "How far away from the Sun is the Earth?" I can now respond, "It's one solarterron away."  But what have you really learned about the distance?  Well, unless you know what a "solarterron" codes, you have learned nothing.  The answer isn't contained in the sentence, alone, though the truth-value of that sentence is true by definition, and as such is tautological.  The answer is contained in the empirical observation which is independent of the way in which we describe it.  The sentence is merely a code which a person must decode and compare to his observations and experience.  If the code says something that doesn't match the empirical data, then it's false, and it's true otherwise, and those true facts are ultimately definitionally true for that given language, and so are tautological (or conversely, are contradictory).  There is no "bruteness" to the relation.  There's the observation, which is independent of language, and then there's a description which can match the observation and be true or fail to match it and be false.  All facts, truth, and the rest depend the language, and they follow from the language's underlying definitional foundations for their establishment.
2. "The Sun and the Earth are that far apart no matter what anybody thinks."
• That's not true, either.  The Earth and the Sun are that far apart because we observe it to be that far away, and so think it is that way, and the statement is true because we have an institution that makes it true by definition.
3. "They [regulative rules] regulate behavior that can exist without the rule, whereas some rules not only regulate behavior, [...] but they constitute the very behavior that they regulate, in that isn't even behavior of that kind unless they are following a certain number of the rules."
• Searle's example of the regulative rule: "Drive on the right side of the road," can just as well be a constitutive rule if we reinterpret his statement.  Is it really driving in any conventional sense if the people don't agree on an institution for driving on certain sides of the road?  Well, what we want most out of this rule is to avoid collisions, which impedes driving in the sense that we normally would mean it.  If by "drive," Searle only meant, "Travel any distance by operating a motor vehicle," then the rule really is regulative in that sense.  However, if Searle meant by "drive," "Travel to destinations safely and securely by operating a motor vehicle," then the rule actually constitutes the behavior, since it is decidedly unsafe to drive on the wrong side of the road that we've institutionalized.  A behavior that we may read as regulative in one sense is equally constitutive in another sense.
• One can see the explanatory power of constitutive rules over a falsely distinguished class of regulative rules in other contexts.  "Do not kill another human unless you must do so to defend yourself."  Why then, do you suppose that slave-owning societies try so hard to dehumanize their slaves?  Why do many wars receive a propagandist's spin that the enemy is a threat to personal safety?
4. "In the case of driving, people had to make up their minds."  In effect, they institute a lane directionality rule.  But this is not the case with the game of chess.
• Actually, that is exactly the case with the game of chess.  In order to constitute the game, people had to assign movement roles to pieces and relevant protocols for play and end of play.  Those can be changed at any time upon agreement of the players.  A game called "Knightmare Chess" does exactly that.  Any "official regulations" of chess exist only within the officials' dominion (e.g. "official tournaments").

Often in philosophy, we find jargon that muddies the waters to make them seem deep.  The "brute fact" and "institutional fact" are two such junk terms, since we have no definitive criterion by which one could substantially categorize a fact under the former heading, but not the latter heading simultaneously.  We can handle all of our descriptions of rules and so forth without this extra contrivance, and in the interest of accurate and parsimonious understanding of the matter at hand, we should pluck it from our brains and cast it into the fire.

Speaking of Folk Language vs. Empirical Science...

Alice Dreger mentions a handful of challenges to the macroscopic, anatomical distinctions that we assume in our natural languages. One challenging implication of her talk is that we could end up eliminating much more law (which, like philosophy does, operationalizes on our natural language's presumptions, often distinguishes by "intuition," and makes an ad hoc legitimization of its own previous stances and practices) than we would expect and than many people are comfortable pursuing.

Arguing the Inferiority of Philosophical Methods to the Methods of Empirical Science to Philosophers

It obviously meets some resistance from people who identify themselves as professional philosophers, but I managed to spin a sausage metaphor into an issue about the efficacy of philosophers' methods to arrive at empirically relevant claims.

"I took it to be a reference to a principle you clearly do accept, according to which if a subject S is immune to empirical study, then it is not possible to know claims involving S, nor to fruitfully study S."

-- Mr. Zero (of The Philosophy Smoker)

Actually, my claim is more along these lines: If you claim that any statement S is immune to empirical verification, then it is no more likely to report true, falsifiable statements than random guessing would (because soundness and consistency are indistinguishable in such models), and thus is not a fruitful study.

The issue is the disconnect between using and coining words to describe the world and using words, alone, to “explain” the world. “Happiness,” or “goodness,” for instance, may be total misnomers under empirical scrutiny and may only be meaningful as an array of stimuli responses that people would call “being happy.” However, there is no reason to appeal to the natural language, which we can revise or contrive to fit more specific empirical results. The specificities of Alexander Shulgin, for instance, would have more interesting and empirically testable things to say on happiness and he didn't get them by considering the philosophical history from the Aristotelian age to the present.

My bulk criticism is actually an empirical problem. It comes from my actual dealings with hippies (“Daoists,” “Ayurvedics,” “polarity therapists,” and tons of other people who I met in the lot of “alternative medicine” while I was studying manual therapy) and other philosophers. I learned that my disgust was similar to an observation from scientist and Sinological historian Joseph Needham, who evinced that empirical sciences failed to come to fruition in the East (and were similarly stifled in the West) because their approach was to force empirical results to conform to purely linguistic contrivances. That's a square-peg-to-round-hole problem. The less intellectually impeding thing to do is to conform our language to the demonstrated results, and then to have a means of factual dispute from there. This is the kind of progress that moves us from phlogiston-talk to oxidation-talk, from four-humors-talk to bacterial-and-viral-talk (in China, for instance, it was “五行說”). It doesn't come from philosophers.

Philosophers are a strange bunch in that they can coin terms on a whim so long as they are “philosophically interesting” or “bug our intuitions” about things, while they consider a sufficiently common term in our lexicon (however remotely, e.g. be, have, good, know, think, believe, make/cause), and thus they appear quite relevant to laymen. Conversely, they could be straightforwardly demonstrating via their own method of coinage, self-imported distinction, and argument, that philosophical criticism, itself, is critiquing the inadequacy of its own methodology. This is why I suspect that there can be so many more rival schools of philosophy than there can be of most empirical science camps.

"It seemed to me that [Anonymous] 6:11 was pointing out that this principle is itself immune to empirical study, and so is self-refuting in the manner of the verification principle."

-- Mr. Zero (of The Philosophy Smoker)

I think that philosophers can be empirically scrutinized. I think that empirical method can explain their methods of making themselves seem like they're doing relevant discourse on abstract topics, and I think that such studies would confirm many of the criticisms that I've made here.

Now, you may think that my claim on S above is not empirically verifiable, but I think the empirical test for such a statement seems pretty straightforward.

---

This was a final post to a couple of responders at the end. They probably will still think that I'm deeply misled about my dependence on non-empirical principles, and I'll probably still think that they're deeply misled about their dependence on empirical grounds to make those "non-empirical" principles into relevant claims to fact.

Nevertheless, a pretty good example that predicts the sort of empiricist takeover of philosophical questions is in a 2005 MIT talk with the aforementioned Alexander Shulgin, Christof Koch, and Patricia Churchland. You can view the entire video on MIT's web site, or you can view it part by part below. And yes, I know that Churchland is a professional philosopher, but what she says might pin many philosophers' ears back.

Why Science Conforms to Mathematics

...in four premises.

1. All mathematical truths are definitional facts and their inferences. (They are axioms and theorems.).
2. Their truths are pan-empirical.
   
3. If an empirical statement contradicts a mathematical truth, then it is a falsehood.
4. Causation is the correct identification of two portions of an identical empirical event. (Causation dissolves the myth that two distinct events were actually two distinct events at all.)
   

In other words, conformity to tautology is the gold standard for truth in any epistemic endeavor, and if an empirical statement conforms to that standard, then it is defensibly a fact until (a) another defensible fact falsifies the initial statement or (b) the empirical predictions follow with mathematical regularity (they are sufficiently proven as premise (4). Falsifiability still holds for (b), since non-falsifiable pseudo-science (simply, but more elaborately stated in tense-logical terms) claims the nonsensical (A ∨ ¬A) ⇒ B) ∧¬(∅ ⇒ B).

Of these four premises, the first needs the most unpacking, since definition is a result of use of necessary empirical divisions, and the axiomatic statements of logic and math are statements about how all languages operate and the bare transformations that one can perform once those operations are clear.

Liezi Speaks (列子說) on YouTube

There's a full series of "Chinese Thinker Speaks" videos that seem to cover a broad range of topics. This one, which apparently aims to discuss the Liezi, actually takes a famous parable from the mouth of Yang Zhu (though not from the Yang Zhu chapter).

You can read the original Chinese at the Chinese Text Project, and I have copied Graham's English translation below:

"When Yang Zhu was passing through Song, he spent the night at an inn. The innkeeper had two concubines, one beautiful and the other ugly. The ugly one he valued, the beautiful one he neglected. When Yang Zhu asked the reason, the fellow answered:

"'The beautiful one thinks herself beautiful, and I do not notice her beauty. The ugly one thinks herself ugly, and I do not notice her ugliness.'

"'Remember this, my disciples,' said Yang Zhu. 'If you act nobly and banish from your mind the thought that you are noble, where can you go and not be loved?'"

-- Liezi, 2:16 (trans. Graham)

The Job of a Philosopher is Nothing Special

This may is a big pronouncement, but do philosophers generally acknowledge that they're actually doing nothing in their own departments that couldn't just as easily be a side-project whilst they work in a different capacity in another department? I think that many philosophers don't, but don't really take the time to justify their own existence convincingly to the lay public, to academic boards, or to many domains of the academic community at large. Worse yet, I think that they, not the philosophers, are right not to be convinced.

Despite my being entrenched in certain problems that relate to "philosophers," per se, I never really thought that the title itself meant anything beyond "professional arguer," someone who has an encyclopedic knowledge of a narrow subcategory of some other profession's work, and whose role is largely that of a handmaiden's: We pinpoint the inconsistencies in that profession's work, or conversely, solve problems by formal inference that they hadn't yet done for themselves.

The problem that I often found in practice and interaction with other philosophers, either in texts or in face-to-face discussion, is that philosophers have this horrible habit of "system building," of musing on a topic so independently that its conclusions either lose relevance to the actual data that they're supposed to survey and assess for clarity and coherence. "System building" is that pretense that laymen feel once they see the philosopher's dastardly habit of trapping themselves in their own neologisms, and then condescending people whose "expertise" (which one can fake with a masterful use of specialist jargon) doesn't assume a full knowledge of the same neologisms.

The heart of the futility of the study and practice of "philosophy" (whatever philosophers themselves dispute that it means) become clearer when you tug at threads that are uncomfortable for philosophers. This is something that no appointed philosopher would sanely do in his own interest. Who would make the academic career move of outlining the logical incoherence of his own profession as a substantial independent study, that is, philosophize "philosophy" away by equating it with its rather dull synonym -- argument, and then show that argument is not really much to squawk at? (Surprisingly, the answer is, "A few..." Wittgenstein, Rorty, and members of the Vienna Circle and Berlin Circle were among them.)

The first is a puzzling paradox. Some philosophers deal in paradoxes, but I've not yet met a philosopher who presented me with a philosophical paradox that, if found to be a mere incoherence (as, say, Russell's or Curry's are), would de-legitimize their profession as a standalone institution. This one, I think, does exactly that.

Philosophers are very keen on taking an area of philosophical or scientific concern, and then appending the prefix meta- to it to expound ideas that would not be acceptable claims within the study itself, but still present themselves as relevant discussions on the whole practice. For instance, metaethics attempts to examine the statements that are made within ethics, without actually doing plain old descriptive ethics. Metaphysics attempts to examine the statements that are made within physics without actually doing plain old descriptive physics. Metalogic...the same.

Every meta-study comes with its own "metalanguage," perhaps none more conspicuous than the metalogic's next-level fabrication of operations (on which I could rant volumes) that clarify the problems no better than the object language of the study already intends.

However, the most paradoxical practice extant in philosophy is "metaphilosophy." I should remark that this is a departmentally productive area. Many philosophers will list metaphilosophy as a specialization on their CV's. Metaphilosophy has a philosophical history and productivity (if this essay isn't an example). If your instincts were to laugh at the entire concept of "metaphilosophy" as a legitimate study, you're actually more justified in that laughter than you might think.

I want you to imagine a man. His job is x. He doesn't know that, though, but he is paid a middle class salary to attend office hours, give lectures, and so forth on topics about which he does have some claimed expertise. Ironically, these are all sub-disciplines of x. Well, like any good academic, he wants to know what x is, so he'll ask himself, "What do I do for a living?" And, amazingly, he'll struggle with the answer. Only in a philosopher does this kind of conundrum hit people. Ask a mechanic what he does, and he'll answer, "I fix cars." Ask what a homeopath or chiropractor does, and he'll give you an answer (again, the practice doesn't have to be legitimate, just provide a coherent answer). Homeopaths dilute stuff in water and call it medicine. Chiropractors crack your back and then scold you for having a cracked back.

Imagine, then, a conversation with a philosopher on this very matter:

• Inquiring Mind: "What do you do?"
• Philosopher: "I'm a philosopher."
• IM: "Oh, I see, and what does a philosopher do?
• Phil: "Well, we argue about things."
• IM: "I see, so what makes you different from any other study of anything?"
• Phil: "Let's see if I could differentiate my role a bit. Studies argue with certain tools. Some are empirical, others are conjectural, and others are formal. Our study is different namely in that we wait for other studies to use their tools to collect reliable data, and then we use just one tool, logically stiff-nosed rhetoric, to outline the coherence or incoherence of the views that such data reasonably imply."
• IM: "I see, so your job is to take other people's work and sniff out possible problems or solutions that they, themselves, may not see."
• Phil: "Partly, yes. Our work is also to relate the conclusions and implications of that data to the work of other academics who did our exact jobs in philosophical history."
• IM: "But don't professionals in those other studies use logically stiff-nosed rhetoric in their own efforts to verify and justify the claims that fall within their domains?"
• Phil: "Yes, regularly."
• IM: "I see, so a physicist, for instance, could reasonably do the work of a philosopher. Could a philosopher do the work of a physicist?"
• Phil: "I guess that would depend on one's training. A physicist could be a philosopher if he had a great knowledge of his study and the implications of his study."
• IM: "I don't think that would be a problem for a professional physicist."
• Phil: "Also, a philosopher could be a physicist if he acquired a sufficient speciality in physics."
• IM: "I see, so it's a downhill climb, academically speaking, for a physicist to be a philosopher, but an uphill climb for a philosopher to be a physicist. It sounds like physicists do harder work than philosophers do."
• Phil: "It's not that one is harder or easier. They're just different."
• IM: "Does that mean that a physicist, assuming that he were interested in philosophizing, would lack some knowledge that is fundamental to good philosophy?"
• Phil: "Most physicists, for instance, don't read much other philosophy. They would have a harder time relating their findings to the thoughts of others."
• IM: "What about Aristotle, or Galileo, or Newton, or Mach, or Reichenbach, or Einstein, or Heisenberg, or Feynman, or Krauss, or...?"
• Phil: "Okay, okay! Physicists may very well have tools to offer insight into their own disciplines, but philosophers branch out into many different sub-disciplines."
• IM: "Right, but couldn't I always produce a list of names of noteworthy professionals in a field that you mention whose work contains significant philosophical merit?"
• Phil: "The problem, I'm afraid, is that all good arguments have philosophical merit."
• IM: "Do philosophers know that there are already professionals in their fields who are doing the work that they want to do?"
• Phil: "If they're worth reading, yes."
• IM: "Okay, then I'm back to my original question. How is philosophy different from any other study, besides its use of fewer tools than other disciplines use to arrive at their conclusions?"
• Phil: "I'll have to think on it."
• IM: "You also mentioned that philosophers compare their data or thoughts with the thoughts of other thinkers in history. What, then, makes him any different from a historian?"
• Phil: "Well, a historian's main interest is to prove the facts of the occurrences of events, while philosophers would be interested in associating the thoughts of figures to each other."
• IM: "Doesn't that assume that thinking thoughts aren't events?"
• Phil: "One could say that."
• IM: "Well, are they?"
• Phil: "I think that our intuitions would tell us as much."
• IM: "A historian then could reasonably do the comparative work that a philosopher does, and then track the development of those thoughts throughout intellectual history."
• Phil: "Yes, I suppose so."
• IM: "Would it be an uphill climb, academically, for philosophers to do that job?"
• Phil: "No, not really. Philosophers are particularly keen on doing this, especially when their own expertise is on the thought of a famous figure in the history of philosophy."
• IM: "Doesn't that present a problem, though? Philosophers await other thinkers' results, and then they evaluate them rigorously."
• Phil: "Right."
• IM: "The problem with that is that philosophers from history are using outdated data from older periods in intellectual history, so their problems may be solved by contemporary developments in those fields, or the philosophers themselves may have used comparatively less reliable data (by contemporary standards) to reach their conclusions, and so have less reliable conclusions."
• Phil: "This can be the case sometimes."
• IM: "Why, then, would we care about what they thought outside of mere historical curiosity?"
• Phil: "Sometimes their conclusions are still true, and we still haven't solved the problems that they've presented. Take the problem of induction. It's a problem that is reserved for philosophers mostly, yet the conclusion affects all natural sciences."
• IM: "And yet the natural sciences have a method that reliably curtails that problem: falsifiability, abductive reasoning, and fallibility principles."
• Phil: "I guess they are doing well for themselves."
• IM: "Are there genuinely philosophical problems, then, or are all philosophical problems hijacked from other areas' problems?"
• Phil: "I'm afraid that answer would take more time to answer, but feel free to take a few courses to become more acquainted with the study."
• IM: "I would, but from what you've presented, I could get the same training if I studied anything that interested me outside of philosophy."

Therein lies the paradox of the metaphilosopher. A metaphilosopher is doing is job if, and only if he assumes that he isn't sure of what he does, but assumes that it's more than what he really does. It reduces to a logical error of attempting to argue on something before giving some a clear definiens for that thing that the argument is supposed to address. The metaphilosopher must forge his argument under an indeterminate universe of discourse, which makes his claims arbitrary.

The fact that a person can be paid to ask himself what he does for a living is laughable, namely because it shows exactly how narrow his role of a mere arguer is. The only problem is self-overestimation, which is widespread among philosophers. They "do more than just argue," or so they think. If that were the case, they would already know what those extra roles might be, and they wouldn't have to appeal to their sole tool, argument, to decipher those roles for themselves. Mechanics know that they're mechanics precisely because they fix cars and are paid for doing so. They don't use the act of fixing a car to learn that their job description is auto repair. They don't assume that they "don't just fix cars" (no matter how much Pirsig would want to over-inflate the task). They're clear about their role, and thus work in a sane and sustainable profession. Philosophers don't, and their obsolescence becomes clearer with every leap that every discipline makes and upon which other philosophers feed.

This is why I would prefer not to be called "a philosopher" in any sense more than I'm "a good arguer about certain topics." That's all there is to it, and that's all there is to us.