[spitx]

Perhaps I haven't followed you to a T.

What specific problems or arguments in philosophy are not easily illustratable, using plain language?

I do understand that some thoughts and experiences of the human order may not be easily captured or made intelligible by language.

I guess you could slot the experience of a color-blind person in that category. Especially in the past when testable apparatuses have not yet been developed to even diagnose that such a medical condition does indeed exist.

However I fail to understand why most philosophical arguments cannot be made intelligible to laymen.

René Descartes' "Brain In The Vat" argument is quite easily comprehendable.

It is my opinion (and very often found to be true) that most obtuse arguments (philosophical or otherwise) are indeed "highly technical stuff that doesn't matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn't fully understand."

In fact I think PG is being charitable. I wonder if the "highly technical stuff" that doesn't lend itself to the peer review of more than a handful of scholars is even valid and credible in the first place.

I know that I am going down the slippery slope of If-I-and-most-non-scholarly-people-of-above-average-intelligence-cannot-grasp-an-argument-then-it-must-be-patently-invalid-and-thus-hogwash.

However at times I wonder if it is indeed possible that the scholarship of even a fraction of the world's most esteemed scholars (in various fields) actually has some validity and truth value associated with it.

Since nearly all of it is produced in academia and thus only subjected to the scrutiny of academic peers.

I wonder if it is just a nice formal product of a large volume of essentially meaningless cogitation that passed the consensus of equally unworthy peers.

This has to be true especially in the more arcane disciplines where there is little oversight or cross-disciplinary activity.

I'm sure there is a name for this phenomenon. Something on the lines of "legitimacy by consensus".

[stiff]

I simply get very tired very quickly when reading philosophy, not because I find the arguments difficult but because those works never seem to get to any conclusion regarding the problems being considered and there is anyway no way to validate what is being said with the external world or apply it to anything. It's a bit like closing your self in a room and talking to yourself for prolonged amounts of time, there is something unhealthy to the human psyche and from observing other people I see that the more someone contemplates things like "meaning of life" the more unhappy they become. Now with this observation in mind I try to come up with some explanation of this phenomena.

Imagine a neuroscientist watching a person contemplating a so-called philosophical problem, like "what is beauty?". You have a part of your brain that is responsible for language and discourse and inner dialogue and most likely a completely separate part that is capable of the emotions you experience when seeing what you personally call beauty. Now that language part is capable of creating a great number of the most wild hypothesis about what beauty is, but the part that really perceives beauty and creates the associated emotions operates completely unconsciously so you have no chance to capture with your conscious self what beauty "really" is to you. So all this "philosophizing" is just your brain chatting random things somewhat related to the concept of "beauty", but there is no purpose to it, no conclusion, no validation and all this you could just experience some beauty somewhere instead.