Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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Friends, we are not philosophers
I wanted to try to make something of a positive statement about our definition and scope, since admittedly it can be somewhat difficult to get your arms around. It was certainly difficult enough for ...
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Is this site for doing philosophy or discussing philosophy? [duplicate]
Does this community intend to support and engage in potentially original philosophical inquiry, or are we going to limit ourselves to discussing previously published philosophies and/or philosophers?
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Friends, how could a question about an idea with its own article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy be closed as off-topic?
1) Why was the following post closed?
What does "disposition" mean in a philosophical context?
It's clearly a question of analytic philosophy related to the philosophy of mind and indirectly ...
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Should we restrict this site to academic questions only, or target a more casual audience?
One of the issues that other Stack Exchange sites (such as Mathematics and Computer Science) have faced in defining the scope of their site is whether to allow questions from the casual reader/...
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Subjective answers and questions stimulating subjectiveness
(Scroll down for a short version.)
I'm wondering how we should deal with clearly very subjective answers. An example. Most of the time, you can't really blame the answerer: the question asks for an ...
user2953
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Must every answer contain a source? Which kind of sources are accepted and why? [duplicate]
On this answer, I received a comment from virmaior that it should be "sourced in philosophy (roughly as defined in academic philosophy)".
Other answers involving the subjectivity of morality were ...
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How can we get mathematical formatting on Philosophy Stack Exchange?
I think Philosophy.SE ought to have LateX availability in text input, because there are going to be a lot of formal logic questions. How can we get LateX, or a comparable math typesetting feature, on ...
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FAQ for Philosophy.SE
Community FAQ
For Philosophy.SE, a site in the Stack Exchange 2.0 network
You may also wish to review the community FAQ for all sites in the StackExchange network.
Content
Asking questions
What ...
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Subjective Questions: Deciding what we want as a community
Introduction
Greeting, fellow lovers of wisdom!
I apologize for the length, but this is an important topic that has come up repeatedly, one that has never been completely addressed, and I feel the ...
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Should we explain downvotes?
I know that downvotes are anonymous, but I wonder if it would be good practice for people who downvote questions or answers to provide some explanation or suggestions for improvement?
I ask because ...
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The Official Vote Regarding Subjective Questions
Greetings All,
It's time to officially vote on some of proposed solutions we discussed to handling Subjective questions here. Whatever YOU, the community, decides on this matter is how we will proceed ...
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Are amateur users that have little knowledge about philosophy not "ideal" for philosophy.SE?
After hanging out in philosophy.SE I can easily tell the expectations of the community. Generally sophisticated questions and answers are the ones that are wanted rather than shallow, mediocre ...
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Custom Philosophy SE design and logo - Information gathering
Congratulations Philosophy SE community! We’re going to be creating a custom site design for you that we hope will represent your subject and we want you all to really love it. You’ve been waiting ...
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Your new site design is live!
As you can see, the new design just went live! At this point, we are done with major revisions to the design (although you can still report CSS/styling bugs by starting a new post and tagging it with ...
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What is considered off topic?
What is one domain or example question that you consider to be off topic? (Please post just one per answer.)
Return to FAQ index
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"Not in comments please" -- How to handle interesting discussions
I see a lot of parenthetical "discussions" taking place in comments section of this site. That raises an interesting question — Comment-discussions are typically deleted as off-topic, but how ...
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Friends, what are the criteria for marking answers as correct?
The Stack Exchange network suggests, as one of the criteria to determine the health of a beta site, that you should have answers accepted with a good frequency.
I worry that this may not happen much ...
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Friends, Are We Not Philosophers: Is This Place a Bazaar or a Cathedral?
Ladies, Gentlemen, and everyone in between, but particularly PhilSE: Moderators,
I have now been gleefully contributing for a year, experimenting with the psychology and technology at play in this ...
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Should this site be restricted to academic answers only?
If this site is intended for discussion of philosophy, then perhaps it would be appropriate to strive for academic answers to questions, even when the questions are not academic themselves. However, ...
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How should we tag questions?
How should we tag questions? What tags and tagging strategies might be useful? What tags are specifically unhelpful for this kind of site?
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Is free speculation, original thinking, and involved discussion disallowed on this philosophy site?
I've been informed that I've been laboring under a mistaken presumption about what people think they're doing here. I thought that it's a site for thinking about and discussing philosophy, but I've ...
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Should opinion-based questions always be allowed on the philosophy board?
I understand why opinion-based questions are not allowed on most of the Stackoverflow boards, however it makes no sense to me that questions can be put on hold or closed for being opinion based on a ...
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Vote early, Vote often
I would like to echo a post that Scott Morrison made on Meta.Tex.SE:
I'm a moderator from MathOverflow, and this "question" is actually unsolicited advice, based on our experience from the initial ...
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An Easy Guide to Earning Downovtes
I would like to suggest forming an easy guide to earning downvotes.
I'm not super familiar with meta, but I'll give one answer and hopefully others have some too.
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Would it be better to show some amount of humbleness considering close votes?
It occured to me that there is a tendency to close questions rather fast. The two cases I think of are here and here.
My own view is introduced in the comments to these questions. I think that there ...
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What can be done to get less rubbish answers?
I have the impression many low quality questions don't get closed or not fast enough. I'm talking mainly about primarily opinion-based questions, as they attract a load of low quality answers, ...
user2953
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How can we promote our apparent goal of getting well-sourced answers?
I've been away from Phil.SE for a while, aside from the occasional lurking, and I recently noticed something. There are (more than I remember) a large number of answers that don't attempt to provide ...
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How can we encourage asking questions and increase the rate of new questions?
Well, it appears that our visitor stream is gently ticking upward from the early days of the public beta.
I implore everyone to remember that welcoming new users into the community is a critical ...
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Why are comments not for discussion?
Comments are often used on this site for discussion, quick hints and even sometimes even more-or-less fully-baked answers. But this is not actually great!
In fact, comments are not for discussion. ...
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Friends, what is our mission statement?
What is the core mission or "elevator pitch" of this site? What is a concise statement of what it is about?
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Moderator Pro Tem Announcement
Throughout the beta, we need members from the site whose focus is to engage the community, both in community-building issues and site management. That's why we select a few members from each community ...
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Professional philosophers on Philosophy SE
I have a feeling there is lack of professional - academics - philosophers on this web site. Is anything being done to invite those people to use this web site?
user19479
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Is this site dying?
OK so the title is obviously way too serious, but hear me out.
I've joined Phil.SE about 2 years ago, and had a whole lot of fun learning philosophy through it, with some very well-educated and fun ...
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It's Plato week! [closed]
Plato week has ended, but you can still see the details below if you're interested.
A couple weeks ago, we kicked off a series called "Philosopher Week" in order to build up the content we have about ...
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How can we promote Philosophy Stack Exchange?
Now that we're out of private beta, it is very important that we "hit the ground running", so to speak, and increase participation on the site as much as possible.
I've emailed my former classmates ...
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Do we do peer reviews here?
In light of this meta-question: Do the people that closed this post totally understand the subject matter of formal proofs of mathematical logic?
I think it might be a good idea to spell out our ...
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Add a close reason for zero effort homework?
It's pretty common for us to get homework questions here. I don't see anything automatically wrong with that per se.
But sometimes there's no demonstrated effort whatsoever.
I think we should add a ...
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Introducing the Stack Exchange Research Support and Fellowship Program
The mission of Stack Exchange is to make the internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions. The Stack Exchange Fellowship Program aims to support students conducting research in ...
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Are basic philosophy questions "primarily opinion-based" (and therefore we close them)?
My question is in relation to close votes on the recent question: What created the universe? The question presently has three close votes on the basis that it is "primarily opinion-based". At the ...
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Philosophy Question Challenge: Ethics
This challenge was over on 9/5/2014. But you can still read about it below if you like!
It's time for the second in an ongoing series of question challenges! Please consider joining us for a midweek ...
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Friends, what exactly is the difference between 'being a philosopher' and 'being a philosophy SME'?
Much as the synthetic-analytic divide, which is certainly a stroke of metaphysical genius entreats us to take propositions and dichotomize them, so too do Quine's attacks on that distinction force us ...
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Is this the right attitude to asking questions: teach the reader something?
I've been puzzled by a slew of downvotes, and I think the issue is that I am writing to someone who might be able to answer the question. Rather than to a reader who doesn't know the answer, but might ...
user6917
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Can we allow more space and possibly a larger font for comments?
(Good) Philosophical arguments are essentially back and forth exchanges of long, coherent and self-sufficient arguments. Thus, I think the character limit on comments is not enough for proper ...
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Congratulations, Philosophy is graduating!
It's a big day. You've been cleared for graduation by the Stack Exchange Community Team! Philosophy met our threshold for graduation-worthy sites and after a review, the Community Team determined that ...
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Is Philosophy SE being trolled, and why exactly aren't these questions closed?
So I went onto Philosophy SE main looking for good substantive questions, and Instead I find:
Is Gravity The Fundamental force?
The question seems like an obvious joke, so I said, and scrolled down....
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Mystified at why a bunch of my questions have been closed
OK guys I know it's fashionable to close stuff aggressively now, especially in the early stages of a site, but frankly I can't see why a bunch of my questions have been closed (the reason given is ...
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Do we have the best tagline for this SE?
The tagline for this SE is "For those interested in logical reasoning".
Could we come up with a better one, or is the current one ideal?
TFD defines philosophy as "The study of the nature, causes, ...
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More specific tags needed to cover questions in logic
The comments posted are pretty useful, I think. I refactored my question to better reflect the problem I see with the current logic tag. I like the feature request linked, it could be elaborated as an ...
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Do questions have to be answerable?
If one were to post a thought-provoking question which there might not be an answer to, other than "there is no answer and could never be and here's why", should this question be seen as off-topic?
I'...
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Are questions about literature on-topic?
The community was recently asked an interesting question about the meaning of a line from Joyce.
Is this question on topic?
How about questions on literature in general?
So more generally, do we ...
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