| Consider any "vocalizable concept" X. There are 4 directions you can move from X. "Meta" - you can ask the set of questions "what can we say about claims about X?" "Anti-meta" - you can ask the questions "what can X say about other things?" (make X a meta-concept of some other concept) "General" - you can ask the question "do there exist generalizations of X?" (commonly known as abstraction, although the term is ambiguous - generalization is more precise) "Specific" - you can ask the question "do there exist instances of X?" Answering questions in these 4 directions gives you information about what you really want to know - what is X? What is "true" of X? Philosophy is exploration and characterization of this "idea space." Nothing more. Nothing less. Very useful, if people would only do it once in a while. --- Quick example: "What is free-will?" = X Meta: Does free-will correspond to a thing? What classes of things is it in? What are our intuitions? What can we meaningfully say about free-will? Anti-meta: Suppose we define free-will well. What concepts does it enable? Are those concepts meaningful? General: Are there generalizations of free-will? How about just plain old "will"? What can we say about "will"? How about "freedom?" What's that? Specific: Are there any hard-and fast examples of free will? Are there any "thought-experiments" we can perform to try to shake out our intuitions? For instance, if everything were systematic/deterministic, what would this imply? --- My claim is that this method is useful for getting terms to be well-defined in the way that PG requires of math. You just keep doing this sort of analysis over and over until you get down to essential definitions. Best to start from the bottom, though. |