DEFINING “PHILOSOPHY”

I define philosophy as the search for decidability given an objective or set of objectives. (preferences and goods)

I define truth as the search for decidability independent of objective or set of objectives. (truth)

I define science as the use of instrumentation both logical and physical to create measurements and systems of measurement, that reduce reality to that which we can perceive, compare, decide, and act upon: reduce the imperceptible to to analogy to experience.

In practice philosophers have done as much bad (marx, plato, buddha, kant, Abraham, Muhammed) as they have done good (Confucius, Aristotle, bacon, newton, smith, hume).

So it is possible to separate the techniques of those philosophers who have caused harm from those who have created good. And that difference is in conflationary prose(fiction) vs deflationary prose (measurement). Or put differently, those people who write literature, and those people who write religion(conflating law and wisdom lit), from those people who and those people who write science – that which is simply true whether we like it or not.

If we launder philosophy of fictions and deceits, then philosophy and science differ only in that science via negative tells us what can and cannot be done, and philosophy via positive suggests how to integrate new knowledge into the current network of truths, goods, preferences, and the decidability of each, by reorganization of categories (Names), relations, and values to take advantage of that new knowledge.

Unfortunately, truth is beneficial for all indirectly, but falsehood is beneficial for many directly. In other words, we all love our comforting fallacies. (90% of people think they are in the top 10% of employees for example.) We all love to think we are good people but the truth is that a very large percentage of people are detrimental to the society that they live in regardless of their genetic, social, and economic classes.

So there will always exist a demand for religion (comforting lies), and literary philosophy (comforting fiction), as well as for scientific truth (decidability whether comfortable or not).

Because there will always be a market demand for self deception, merely comforting utility, and decidability in matters of conflict.

One of the most disturbing behaviors I find among all of us who are interested in philosophy, is the attempt to find a substitute for the deceits of religion – but in rational (kantian) instead of supernatural (abrahamic) prose.

So I suspect that while religion (mythology/abrahamism-zoroastrianism), literary philosophy (reasoning/plato), logic(justificationism/law), and science (measurement/decidability) are all included under the blanket of ‘philosophy’ (portfolio of decidability), that philosophy will forever forward be the subject of intellectual ridicule just as religion has now become the subject of intellectual ridicule. (And has become categorized with theology and unfunded by universities).

But this is because philosophers have not defended the term or the discipline from religion and literature, and preserved it as a domain of logic, science, and law.

So how does one define Philosophy? The use of a set of inflationary, ordinary, and deflationary vocabularies and grammars (I combine them into ‘grammars’) including magic, myth, literature, law(rationalism), science, logic, and mathematics, to provide decidability in the satisfaction of preferences, goods, and truths, such that we may act in furtherance of our wants and needs in a universe the causal density of which is beyond our intuition’s abilities to provide us with choice.