Distinctions

One of our current running questions amounts to this: Why is philosophy useful?

This question is a problem if we don't understand a basic part of the process, clarity of language. One of the major things I find as emphasis, that students miss, is the world of distinctions. An important element of clearing up language is drawing distinctions that people often miss.

Kant for example spent a good amount of time on the distinction between what he termed synthetic and analytic statements. They are distinct from each other by the process of knowledge applied to uncover either. Synthetic knowledge is of the world, analytic is of ideas. Synthetic is something you have go look for, Analytic you can derive by examining the premise or the question. If I want to know if a tree is a car, I can look at the implicit question and see, without much thought or effort, that it is a tree not a car and cannot be both. If I want to know how many trees are in my back yard I have to go out there and count, and the answer could be anything 0-infinity (based on how big the yard is). The latter of course is synthetic.

For our purposes, an important distinction is one between science and philosophy. To the question: What is mind? people often answer with facts about the brain. The original question was philosophical and the answer is scientific. What is the brain? is answered with science, the brain is made up of these things, that do these things, etc.

But What is mind? is asking a very different question; one about the mind as it is different from the material elements one uses to answer scientifically. It is similar to the difference between lobes and neurons (science) and consciousness (philosophy). The scientific sophist might retort: But isn't consciousness related to neurons and parts of the brain? And yes, though that might be true, what a philosopher is asking is about the unknown "thing" we can call consciousness. We might even call it the enduring identity. He is both asking about what we don't know yet through science (the link) and what we'll never know through science (where it comes from, how is it to be used, etc).

If one is incapable of understanding the philosophical question above (about consciousness) yet offers an answer (often confidently) then they are a scientific literalist. This comes from being a "thinker" who over-emphasizes rote knowledge. For elaboration on that please see another distinction - the one between rote and process.

There are many ways to distinguish science from philosophy. This is one. To learn, just examine a few of them and process it as a distinction. The greatest obstacles I've seen, as a teacher, is the predisposition to blocking out the distinction, not the inability to grasp it. Often scientific literalists refuse to acknowledge philosophical questions, esp about mind, to the extent that they don't think philosophically at all. In addition, they often dislike philosophy without reading it.