As a person with a scientific background who suddenly has come into academic philosophy, I have been puzzled by some of the aspects of its methodology. I have been particularly bothered with the reluctance of some people to give precise definitions of the concepts that they are discussing about. But lately, as a result of several discussions with certain member of the Faculty, I have come to understand why this occurs (if not in the whole of philosophy, at least in this particular trend in academic philosophy).

I have seen that philosophers (I am talking about several of them published in top-ranked, peer-reviewed journals, the kinds of articles I read, study and discuss) who discuss about a concept which tries to capture "x" have, on one hand, an intuitive idea of this concept, imprecise, vague, partial and maybe even self-contradictory. On the other hand, they have several "approaches" to "x", corresponding to several philosophical trends that have a more precise characterisation of "x" in terms of other ideas that are more clear i.e. in terms of the composites "y1", "y2", "y3", ... The major issue at stake in the discussion seems to be whether "x" is really "y1" or "y2" or "y3" or something else (note that sometimes an "yi" is a reduction to other terms, sometimes "yi" is a more accurate characterisation that keeps the words used to speak of "x", that does not matter).

What is puzzling is this: how come all of them agree they are taking about "x" while actually, each is proposing a different approach? Indeed, those who say that "x" is "y1" are actually saying that we should adopt "y1" in our thought, and by "x" they understand "y1". Others understand "y2" in "x". Why don't they realise they are talking past each other, that each of them is proposing a different concept and the problem comes just because they want all to call it like they call "x"? Why don't they make sub-indices for "x", therefore managing to keep the word they so desperately want, but without confusing each of its possible meanings?

The answer I have come up with is this: they all believe that there is a unique, best sense to which they refer when they speak about "x", even if it they don't know which is it. They agree that they have an intuitive grasp of something and that something is "x", but they disagree about how to better refine that ("y1"? "y2"? "y3"?). Instead, I used to focus only on "y1" "y2" and "y3" and assess them according to whether they are self-consistent or not, simple or not, useful or not, etc. "x" had no clear definition, it barely meant anything to me, and therefore I decided I should banish it from my thought.

But I have come to the conclusion that it is useful to keep this loose idea about "x" in mind and believe that there is something to that intuition, because only in the contemplation of this intuition you seem to have access to knowledge that you have not been able to formalise, and hence, the intuition is a source of new knowledge. Therefore, philosophers are quite right in keeping vague, loose and perhaps self-contradictory concepts about "x", because this is an important source from where they draw in order to create and refine approaches "y1" "y2" and "y3", hoping that one of them might get "x" right. ((At this point, one might claim that I am simply saying that it is useful to have the illusion that the concept of "x" really means something, even though it actually means nothing, simply because having the illusion is a source of inspiration. But doesn't precisely the fact that it is a source of inspiration suggest that it is more than a simple illusion? There seems to be a sense in which a bad approach to "x" is still ABOUT "x"))

I would be grateful if I got your thoughts on this.

P.S. A more daring hypothesis is that when philosophers get "x" right in "y", this approach "y" becomes a scientific paradigm. This also suggests that for those "x" where little progress has been made in millennia, the debate is not necessarily misguided, but what happens is that the intuition is pointing towards something very, very complicated, and no one has been able to give a formal accout of the things it refers to.