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BerryPick6 comments on Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn't - Less Wrong
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Your examples include:
(1) Any discussion of what art is.
(2) Any discussion of whether or not the universe is real.
(3) Any conversation about whether machines can truly be intelligent.
I agree that the answers to these questions depend on definitions, but then, so does the answer to the question, "how long is this stick ?". Depending on your definition, the answer may be "this many meters long", "depends on which reference frame you're using", "the concept of a fixed length makes no sense at this scale and temperature", or "it's not a stick, it's a cube". That doesn't mean that the question is inherently confused, only that you and your interlocutor have a communication problem.
That said, I believe that questions (1) and (3) are, in fact, questions about humans. They can be rephrased as "what causes humans to interpret an object or a performance as art", and "what kind of things do humans consider to be intelligent". The answers to these questions would be complex, involving multi-modal distributions with fuzzy boundaries, etc., but that still does not necessarily imply that the questions are confused.
Which is not to say that confused questions don't exist, or that modern philosophical academia isn't riddled with them; all I'm saying is that your examples are not convincing.
"What causes humans to interpret an object or a performance as art" and "What is art?" may be seen as two entirely different questions to certain philosophers. I'm skeptical that people who frequent this site would make such a distinction, but we aren't talking about LWers here.
People whoe frequent this site already do make parallel distinctions about more LW-friendly topics. For instance, the point of the Art of Rationality is that there is a right way to do thinking and persuading, which is not to say that Reason "just is" whatever happens to persuade or convince people, since people can be persuaded by bad arguments. If that can be made to work, then "it's hanging in a gallery, but it isn't art" can be made to work.
ETA:
Rationality is about humans, in a sense, too. The moral is that being "about humans" doens't imply that the search for norms or real meanings, or genuine/pseudo distinctions is fruitless.
Agreed, but my point was that questions about humans are questions about the Universe (since humans are part of it), and therefore they can be answerable and meaningful. Thus, you could indeed come up with an answer that sounds something like, "it's hanging in a gallery, but our model predicts that it's only 12.5% art".
But I agree with BerryPick6 when he says that not all philosophers make that distinction.