[Bups-dis] On the nature of philosophical problems

[Edward Grefenstette]

I'd like to address two points here. First in relation to what Ron said:

> It looks to me as if all paradoxes are philosophical problems. How  
> about the problem you have set us? Must all philosophical puzzles  
> take the form of a paradox? This has no contdadictory content  
> therefor it is not a paradox.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit of a Wittgenstein-fan (and  
ironically probably very wrong about what he actually thought), and  
would be tempted to adopt a dismissive stance on the issue (which  
would most likely involve mistakenly dismissing something  
philosophically relevant). However I don't think we need to adopt  
something as strong as his stance on ALL philosophical problems being  
linguistic issues (show the fly out of the fly bottle), as there are  
cases of paradoxes – thus of some "philosophical problems" if we are  
to treat all paradoxes as philosophical problems – such as the leap- 
year case from G&S's Pirates of Penzance, that are the result of  
forcing linguistic confusion from the formulation of the question. I  
think it would be unfair to consider these issues of language as  
philosophical problems, not specifically to please Wittgensteinians,  
but also because these differ from some other paradoxes as they do  
not naturally follow from everyday reasoning, or commonplace  
linguistic practices (i.e. we don't go around estimating people born  
on the 29th of February of a leap year to be much younger than we  
would consider someone born the day before or after, nor do we have  
any obvious intuition that we should develop such a linguistic  
practice).

Consider, on the other hand, other paradoxes such as vagueness  
paradoxes, or logical contradictions which follow from specific  
positions (i.e. verification-transcendence in Dummett's R/AR  
framework). I would be more inclined to call these philosophical  
problems (although we could still be in the fly bottle, but let's  
leave that discussion to the side for now) because the clash of  
conclusions and premises, or the logical contradictions to which we  
arrive, are surprising because they do not correspond to our  
intuitions on the matter, or what we expect from an evidence, or do  
not match our linguistic practices relating to the matter. The  
paradox is observed when we attempt to formalise the linguistic  
practises in question, not artificially construed from a certain  
interpretation of common linguistic practices.

Therefore, as abhorrent as the following terminology may seem, I  
think we should distinguish 'playful' (ie fairly useless) paradoxes  
from those which tell us something about the relation between logic  
and language (or at question it). What do you think?

Regarding Lishan's question (good to hear from you again, by the way):

> So to clarify, my question isn't so much whether or not paradoxes in
> general are philosophical problems, but whether or not philosophical
> problems must inherently be cast in terms of paradoxes, to indicate
> the problematic nature of the philosophical problem.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "philosophical problem" within  
the context of this question. Are they philosophical questions, or a  
specific type of philosophical question that requires resolution  
rather than definition or expansion of concepts?

- Ed.