Can one list philosophical questions that have been answered?

If what you are what you eat…am I a can of soup?

My husband is impotent…since spreading one genes is why we are on this planet….would sleeping with a relative to have a baby be OK?

You and your family are starving…would you risk your life to steal a salmon from a bear

Does Your Chewing Gum Lose it’s Flavour?
Lonnie Donegan

Unanswered:

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?

Is it nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or by opposing, end them?

Is it wiser to stick with an evil clown president, or toss him and have to deal with his more competent evil replacement?

Answered:

If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? (yes)

Have you heard that the bird’s the word? (yes)

If an immovable object meets an irresistible force, what would happen? (a bad hit pop song, which reveals who doesn’t get that it’s just a meaningless self-contradictory question used as an annoying metaphor)

I guess I’ll buck the trend and give a serious answer. But first, we have to establish what we mean by “answered.” I take it you mean something like “definitively answered,” but then we have to ask what “definitively answered” means.

In mathematics, for instance, problems are solved and questions are answered by proofs that leave little to no room for questions among competent mathematicians. Given that logic is a branch of philosophy, and that formal logic is itself largely composed of such proofs, there is in fact a long list of questions here that have received answers even according to this stringent standard. I will not go into these, however, as they are generally not the sort of philosophical question people are interested in unless they are themselves logicians.

So let us look at a less stringent standard. Few people would argue that no scientific questions have been answered, yet scientific evidence is always open to further questioning. This sort of fallibilism is simply a bedrock principle of the modern scientific method, but does not undermine the acceptability of its findings. Using this standard, then, there are several philosophical questions that have been answered to the satisfaction of all or most people working in the field.

The scientific method, in fact, is itself an excellent example of an answer to a philosophical question (the question being “what is the best way to study the natural world?”). Indeed, coming up with this method was what transformed natural philosophy into natural science. Without philosophy, there would be no science.

And speaking of science, that fallibilism intrinsic to the scientific method is another result of philosophical thinking. Fallibilism is the view that knowledge does not require certainty, and that human knowledge is always (or almost always) open to further questioning (in part due to the ineluctable possibility of error). It is by far the dominant epistemological viewpoint and has been for a long time (thus how it got itself embedded into the scientific method).

Speaking of knowledge, Edmund Gettier more or less convinced everyone that knowledge has to be more than simply justified true belief. Exactly what else is needed is not yet widely agreed upon, and there may be an augmented version of the JTB account that could withstand Gettier’s analysis, but the traditional version is down for the count.

This last example might not be immediately accepted since it is a case of a view being eliminated from consideration rather than being generally accepted as true. However, ruling out views that previously occupied a lot of our cognitive labor is essential to progress. And since I am using the less stringent standard that is analogous with scientific progress, it bears mentioning that science largely progresses by eliminating false ideas. Indeed, rejecting false ideas and coming up with true ones often go hand in hand. Rejecting the theory that heat was a substance, for example, was an essential part of proving that heat is a form of energy.

So if we’re willing to include some widely agreed upon refutations, then we can add the rejection of psychological egoism (the view that we always and only act in what we believe is our own self-interest), rational egoism (the view that reason requires us to act always and only in our own self-interest), and ethical egoism (the view that we morally ought to act always and only in our own self-interest) to our list.

And if we want a positive view in the area of ethics, there is near universal agreement that one can be harmed by events that occurred prior to our existence (though much less agreement over whether one can be harmed by events that occur after we cease to exist). This used to be controversial in part because of disputes over the nature of temporal relations. But it turns out that all of the dominant views here can accommodate temporally distant causes of harm (though they do so in different ways).

If we want to get really detailed, there are a whole bunch of paradoxes that have been resolved as well as a slew of intermediary questions that might not seem particularly philosophical anymore. But I’m not really interested in getting into those.

@Zaku: according to my fifth grade science project, with a sample size of 100 pops and control factors of licks only (no sucking) and color/flavor (orange) and angle of access (the top, thick part, not the thin sides) it takes an average of 318 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

The philosopher Hume pointed out that all knowledge is arrived at by induction. You see things fall to Earth and develop a theory of gravity, but you cannot be sure that it will always hold. There is no way of knowing anything with absolute certainty. Why then bother doing science?

The philosopher of science Karl Popper said that the defining characteristic of science is that statements in science can be falsified. This does not mean that they are false, but that they are subject to an experiment that, if it does not produce the required result, would show the associated hypothesis to be false. If the experimental hypothesis is satisfied, it increases our confidence in the hypotheses, but we can never say with absolute certainty that it is true.

Once a hypothesis has been tested to our satisfaction and has not been contradicted in any case, we provisionally hold on to it until there is evidence to the contrary. It only takes only a single case to falsify a hypothesis. For example, observations contrary to Newton’s laws led to the refinements of 20th century physics.

There have been objections to Popper’s characterization of science. People have pointed out that an experiment makes many assumptions. While this is true, I think Popper’s characterization still holds, though it may need to be augmented.

Another type of question is a logical or mathematical question. All true mathematical and logical statements are tautologies. They must follow from an assumed set of axioms.

Philosophical questions are not falsifiable. Otherwise they would instead be scientific or mathematical questions. That means they cannot be answered definitively. People are still debating ideas dating back to Plato.

If a tree falls on a human alone in the woods is there a scream?

@LostInParadise “The philosopher Hume pointed out that all knowledge is arrived at by induction.”

Not exactly. Hume did not deny the existence of deduction, nor did he discount the possibility of it getting us knowledge. Hume’s problem of induction is not about all knowledge, but rather the knowledge that we attempt to gain through inductive means. But since so much of our knowledge is acquired inductively, the problem is quite serious.

“Philosophical questions are not falsifiable.”

No question is falsifiable. Falsifiability is a characteristic of (potential) answers. And once we understand that, I think it becomes fairly clear that philosophical answers are falsifiable. Indeed, just as the scientific method comes from philosophy, the emphasis on falsifiability comes from the philosophical method. Both, after all, operate on proof by contradiction. We start with a potential answer or hypothesis, test it, and find out whether it can stand up to scrutiny. The nature of this scrutiny varies by discipline, but the principle is the same: prove that the answer on offer cannot be true, and it will be discarded. The enduring nature of philosophical questions is not due to them being unfalsifiable. It is due to the fact that philosophy is much harder to do than science or mathematics.

What Hume showed was that the origin of all knowledge is induction. Once you have gathered inductive knowledge you can apply deduction to it. After using induction to determine the laws of motion, this knowledge can be used to determine the motion of the planets.

I mean no disrespect for philosophy when I say that it is not falsifiable. Questions on what we mean by truth or ethics, for example, are of great importance and need to be discussed, even if they do not have definitive answers.

I stand by my claim that philosophical statements are not falsifiable. Kindly give an example to the contrary.

@LostInParadise “What Hume showed was that the origin of all knowledge is induction.”

Hume never claimed to have shown this or even tried to show it. If you think he did so despite himself, could you explain to me how you think it follows from his other ideas? When answering, please keep in mind that gaining knowledge via induction and gaining knowledge via empirical observation are not equivalent.

“I mean no disrespect for philosophy when I say that it is not falsifiable.”

I know you don’t. I just think that it is false to say that philosophical claims are universally unfalsifiable. Some philosophical issues are surely matters of coming to an agreement on something rather than finding out what the objective answer is. But it does not follow from this that philosophical answers are universally unfalsifiable.

“I stand by my claim that philosophical statements are not falsifiable. Kindly give an example to the contrary.”

Sure. Let’s use the verification principle of early logical positivism, which said that “a statement is meaningful if and only if it can be proved true or false, at least in principle, by means of empirical investigation.” This is actually a slightly revised version of the original principle (which left out the “at least in principle” clause, thereby making it impossible to make universal generalizations of any kind due the the impossibility of any individual person completing a search of everything in the universe within their lifetime).

Logical positivism is a philosophical position, and the verification principle is the central claim of its early form. But here’s the thing: since it cannot be proved true or false—even in principle—by means of empirical investigation, the verification principle is self-defeating. This is true even if we allow the standard exemption for logical necessities (since the verification is not logically necessary). In realizing this, we have thereby falsified the original claim by demonstrating that it is internally inconsistent. QED.

I don’t have the time to read through Hume, but my understanding was that what we know is based on our observations. What is the alternative? Rationalism? Any deductive thinking is a deduction derived from experience.

The logical positivists got caught up in a word game equivalent to saying, “This statement is false”. What they said was invalid, because it was paradoxical when applied to itself. That is not the same as being false. Popper got around the problem by saying that a statement is scientifically meaningful only if is falsifiable. Since his reformulation of the positivist statement is philosophical rather than scientific, he avoids the trap of self-reference.

@LostInParadise “I don’t have the time to read through Hume, but my understanding was that what we know is based on our observations.”

Yes, but “all knowledge is based on our observations” and “all knowledge is induction” are not the same claim. That’s why I asked you to be mindful of the fact that gaining knowledge via induction and gaining knowledge via empirical observation are not equivalent. Empiricism and rationalism are approaches to data gathering. They are ways of engaging with the world. Induction and deduction are approaches to data manipulation (in the non-pejorative sense). They are methods of reasoning about the world.

“The logical positivists got caught up in a word game equivalent to saying, ‘This statement is false’. What they said was invalid, because it was paradoxical when applied to itself.”

I don’t want to get into a long tangent about the liar paradox because I have a particular view about it on which the comparison you are attempting to make becomes meaningless (in short, I don’t think that liar sentences are actually special or difficult to handle). Regardless, the verification principle is not self-referential, so it cannot be lumped into that debate. What the early logical positivists said was not paradoxical. It was self-contradictory. And contradictions are always false.

All the stuff about Popper is irrelevant since (a) he was not a positivist, and (b) I explicitly focused on early positivism to avoid the complications of later developments. The simplest examples are the best, after all, so looking at Popper’s reaction to positivism is just a distraction.

Concentrating on the second point, a contradiction is not falsifiable because it is already false by logic (sorry for the change in my previous view), which makes it a part of mathematics and not philosophy, The statement A and not A is logically false. There is no need to apply scientific method. Falsifiable implies that the truth of a statement hinges on external circumstances. That is the realm of science, not philosophy and not mathematics.

Popper was opposed to the logical positivists, but what he did was in the same vein. He just limited himself to scientifically meaningful statements being falsifiable instead of all meaningful statements being falsifiable. The logical positivists could have used a similar dodge. They could have said that type 2 statements are statements about other statements and type 1 statements are not. Then they could have made the type 2 statement that all type 1 statements are meaningful only if they are falsifiable.

In one sense philosophy is all about categorizations. What does it mean to be moral or just or beautiful? There is no external set of criteria you can use to determine the truth of such statements. With regard to morality, for example, Hume pointed out the distinction between is and ought statements. Is statements are the domain of science and ought questions are in the domains of philosophy and theology,

@LostInParadise “a contradiction is not falsifiable because it is already false by logic [...], which makes it a part of mathematics and not philosophy.”

Logic is a branch of philosophy, so I’m not sure why you think something being false by logic would make it part of mathematics. In any case, all that falsifiability requires is that the statement in question be open to being proved false. Sometimes this is easy, as in the case of blatant contradictions like “A & ¬A.” But showing something to be self-defeating is not always easy, and the contradiction is not always obvious. The problem with the verification principle is perhaps obvious in hindsight, but its first proponents clearly didn’t notice until it was pointed out to them.

“Falsifiable implies that the truth of a statement hinges on external circumstances.”

No, it does not. That might be what falsifiability amounts to in scientific contexts, but that does not mean that falsifiability itself—as a general concept—requires external circumstances.

“Popper was opposed to the logical positivists, but what he did was in the same vein.”

Positivism is more or less defined by the verification principle, and the stages of positivism are more or less defined by the various attempts to refine said principle into something defensible. Popper was an opponent of positivism from the beginning, and the notion of falsification was designed in direct opposition to verificationism.

On a side note, historians of philosophy have often lamented the way in which Popper is sometimes lumped in with the positivists just because he was writing around the same time. It’s like calling Richard Dawkins a Catholic because he has written about Christianity.

“In one sense philosophy is all about categorizations.”

I don’t think that even a strict Platonist or Kantian would say that, and they’re the most likely to be interested in categorization these days. And of course, science is heavily involved in categorization, too. Just look at biological taxonomy, for example. Perhaps the most general thing that philosophy can be said to be about is arguments. Giving arguments and reasons for their views was how early philosophers distinguished themselves from those who went around spouting off their putative wisdom without presenting any sort of justification for it.

“What does it mean to be moral or just or beautiful? There is no external set of criteria you can use to determine the truth of such statements.”

To determine, no. But empirical data is still relevant to deciding such issues, even if it is not fully dispositive.

“With regard to morality, for example, Hume pointed out the distinction between is and ought statements. Is statements are the domain of science and ought questions are in the domains of philosophy and theology,”

No, that is not Hume’s point. While the is/ought distinction separates descriptive statements from normative ones, it is not even intended to be an answer to the demarcation problem.

Logic started out as a branch of philosophy, but much of it has moved to mathematics. I don’t know where the line of separation is, but saying that a contradiction is false is pretty low level, and I would think that it would be covered by mathematical logic. In any event, the statement A and not A is false regardless of what A is. It is no great philosophical achievement to point out that any particular instance is false. You will have to give a better example.

What does it mean to be moral or just or beautiful? There is no external set of criteria you can use to determine the truth of such statements.

To determine, no. But empirical data is still relevant to deciding such issues, even if it is not fully dispositive.

Is it ever dispositive? Is it ever falsifiable. How is the issue decided? How do you cross the line from empirical truth to philosophical truth? I don’t know if this is what Hume had in mind, but it is said that you can’t derive ought from is. Do you agree? Where does the ought come from?

Here is a nice discussion of the difference between science and philosophy. Note that Pigliucci says that science, but not philosophy is testable.