What's the difference between "ask/answer philosophical questions" and "do philosophy"?

Question

I've been told that "this site is not a site for doing philosophy. It’s a stack exchange site for answering questions about philosophy."

I just can't see any difference between asking/answering philosophical questions and doing philosophy. From the etymology of the word, philo-sophy means "love of wisdom", thus asking and answering questions regarding every area of human experience (such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind and language).

What's the strict definition of philosophy adopted here? And what's the difference between doing philosophy and asking/answering philosophical questions?

EDIT

There's a related question, but I'm not asking "which of the two is this site about", I'm asking if there's a real difference between them, and if so, what is it?

Answer 1

I would like to distinguish three layers here: The level of personal input, the level of knowledge and the voting/commenting/deleting behaviour how it should be vs. how it is actually (sometimes) handled.

personal input vs. depth of knowledge

To highlight what I mean, I want to use the example of a first-year undergrad essay compared to a master's thesis.

On a first look, they write very similarly: They write on philosophical questions, using lots of references and remarks.

But they have different tasks: The undergrad essay is supposed to show the student is able to use literature, to paraphrase and reference correctly and get what the text is saying. Critical acclaim is only but a small fraction and the difference between distinction and (very) good. So they basically first and foremost have to show that they can write about philosophy in an academic style.

The master's thesis, on the other hand, definitely has to use literature, paraphrase and reference correctly, and get what the texts are saying, as well. But it also has to substantially go beyond (existing) literature, make good points against it and develop own positions. It should not only develop a position towards the existing literature, it should develop an independent and original position, highlighting the differences to literature. This is doing philosophy and critical for a master's thesis (read: at least should be!, latest here is PhD...).

Of course, this is a continuum and there are borderline cases, but considering the design of StackExchange, any site in the framework should methodologically stick to what is asked from a first-year undergrad, as it were.

Problem: Level of knowledge

Some of the questions are going quite into depth or broad enough so that they can hardly be answered by an undergrad (which is/may be good). This means if there are people able to deliver a satisfying answer (content wise), these people are either very deep into the topic and can reference off the top of their heads (perfect case), or know the answer, but would have to put a lot of time and effort they do not have in order to find references to support the knowledge they gained over years (this is bad). E.g. this recent answer took me some good hour to complete, although I worked on that topic quite a lot and had electronic versions of the corresponding sources at hand.

So basically, we should give both knowledgeable answers with a lot of background in order to answer at all, but at the same time invest the effort a first-year has to, explicitly referencing particular papers and/or books with pages, without adding a lot of personal opinion/flavour/content. This is a lot to be asked, which I can tell as there were answers I had to invest several hours into (even without consideration of much secondary literature).

Result: Lax/forgiving behaviour in direct conflict with the rules

So we basically are caught in a dilemma: Either we are rigorously downvoting/deleting/negatively commenting valuable, correct answers (possibly losing this content and the user), or we are generous and cautious, editing in sources (suggestion by @Isaacson) or simply silently accept that it is asked a lot in some cases to answer the question in a way that it should be.

This harbours the risk of a slippery slope: Where do we stop? And this is exactly what the community as a whole has to dynamically decide on in every single case by votes. I personally, as a moderator, would condemn some of the highest voted answers as bad ones. But it is not my personal decision, it is a social one.

My feeling is, though, that the more sensible or knowledgeable a post reads, the more forgiving the community is regarding sources. I do not think this is a good thing, despite being understandable.

Personal suggestion

I would like to see a conscience of the continuum between common sense/knowledge (e.g. logic) that probably must not always be sourced/referenced and more uncommon or debatable ideas or propositions that gradually more urgently demand sourcing. In general, if I have never read a position or know that it is a minority position, I should ask for sources and/or downvote - given a certain level of knowledge in that matter (which leads us to the next problem...).

Answer 2

Regarding the definition of philosophy being used here (the easier question to answer). The second answer in this meta post gives a very good definition of what "philosophy" is according to this site

... understood broadly but generously in line with the academic discipline which traditionally includes metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics

and

We take an expansive view of what traditions to include in philosophy (Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy, Native American philosophy, African American philosophy, Greek Philosophy, Medieval Islamic and Christian philosophy, Logical Positivism, etc.) can all fall under the banner.

I don't think it could be much clearer than that.

The obvious answer to the second question is that there is no difference, asking and answering philosophical questions definitely is doing philosophy. For whatever reason though, that's not what the community here want this site to be about. What the community is suggesting makes the answer sufficiently objective is that it contains the opinion of a published author within the realm of philosophy as defined above. Preferably, it contains the opinion of several published authors representing different approaches. That much seems to me to be simple. The site is about answers that are already within the written canon of philosophical works as defined above

The trouble, I think, which causes such a problem for moderators, also some resentment from a certain class of newcomer and a considerable amount of closed questions/downvoted answers, is that it's just not that simple.

Firstly, there's a considerable amount of contrary evidence still on the site. The top voted answer to the Meta question "What is this site about?" still suggests that answers might be acceptable if they are...

... such as to be focused on abstract reasoning and widely accepted methods of argumentation and be precise in that they rigorously adhere to the demands of the original question.

more importantly, perhaps, some of our highest voted answers from some of our highest rep users are completely un-cited opinion, the last example even starts with "I think". See here, here, here, here, here. I don't think any long-term user would doubt that we could come up with dozens of further examples without any trouble.

Secondly The definition of what constitutes a 'good subjective' question is, itself, subjective, but quite often the argument "that's just not what a Stack Exchange site is for" is used to justify the community's preferences here. We prefer answers to contain only the opinion of published authors. They do not need to, to fit on a Stack Exchange site, I'd be interested to see how World-Building.SE gets on limiting it's answers to those that can be objectively supported by citation.

Thirdly, there seems some reluctance to see citation as a simple editing process, which I think may lead some people to consider their opinions unwelcome. As anyone who has spent considerable time in the world of academic philosophy will know, you can find someone within the canon who will support almost every position it is possible to hold, yet lack of citation is used too often as a means to belittle answers that are perhaps a bit outside of the norm. In the last few weeks alone I've commented on two answers where the answerer had failed to cite their (admittedly unpopular) positions. My comments added the names of the published philosophers who supported those positions, other comments simply derided the post for not fitting the "standard" model. Adding a few references to an otherwise perfectly legitimate answer should be standard editing (or commenting) practice, if it's really the lack of citations we think is the problem and yet I hardly ever see it happen.

Fourthly, there seems to be some difficulty in drawing the line between simply pointing out the logical flaws in an argument and doing philosophy. This answer here for example, contains no references supporting the notion that the argument has logical flaws, nor does it need any, but it could be argued (indeed has been) that all of philosophy is about finding logical flaws in an argument, so where do we start expecting someone to support the flaws they think they've spotted with citations from published sources. If one were to answer a question such as this one, in a similar vein to the answer I've just cited, with a logical flaw they think they've spotted, what increased justification do we then have for demanding that they reference some published philosopher who also sees those flaws?

Resolving these issues will not be simple, but I think it might reduce the workload for the moderators and improve new user retention, both of which have recently been flagged as problems.

Answer 3

For me, the biggest difference is that answers that do philosophy have no references.

But that covers over 90% of answers on this site, so hey hum.

It's frustrating, though not as bad as people using the voting system to do philosophy.