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by werpon 3367 days ago
Is philosophy knowledge? Can I use it, for example, to take an informed choice about the real world? Does it at least contain a set of verifiable, falsifiable statements that every practitioner can and has agreed upon?
3 comments

Surely philosophy of science helps you build your framework of verifiable, falsifiable statements (after all, you need to have a logical framework for choosing which statements can be falsified or verified)!
> Can I use it, for example, to take an informed choice about the real world?

I might remembering it wrong, but I think one of the main questions asked by Socrates was "how can we be good persons?". And "what does 'good' mean?". That question absolutely does inform my every-day choices about the real world, because me not being a religious person and not believing in the after-life and such I base most of my every-day thingies on thinking if what I'm actually doing is "good" or not. Asking yourself that is a philosophical question. That and a little bit of Kant, and his "people should never be means to an end".

One could argue that it is because of philosophy (of science) that you even consider "a set of verifiable, falsifiable statements that every practitioner can and has agreed upon" as a litmus test (or demarcation criterion) for what science is supposed to be.