Philosophy is notorious for not answering the questions it tackles. Plato posed most of the central questions more than two millennia ago, and philosophers still haven't come to much consensus about them. Or at least, whenever philosophical questions begin to admit of answers, we start calling them scientific questions. (Astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology all began as branches of philosophy.)
A common attitude on Less Wrong is "Too slow! Solve the problem and move on." The free will sequence argues that the free will problem has been solved.
I, for one, am bold enough to claim that some philosophical problems have been solved. Here they are:
- Is there a God? No.
- What's the solution to the mind-body problem? Materialism.
- Do we have free will? We don't have contra-causal free will, but of course we have the ability to deliberate on alternatives and have this deliberation effect the outcome.
- What is knowledge? (How do we overcome Gettier?) What is art? How do we demarcate science from non-science? If you're trying to find simple definitions that match our intuitions about the meaning of these terms in ever case, you're doing it wrong. These concepts were not invented by mathematicians for use in a formal system. They evolved in practical use among millions of humans over hundreds of years. Stipulate a coherent meaning and start using the term to successfully communicate with others.
There are other, smaller questions that I think are solved, too, but for now I'm curious: Which philosophical problems do you think are solved, and what is the answer?
I'm not sure I follow your objection. In natural language, the meaning of 'cat' is fixed by ostention, not descriptive stipulation. We (most of us, at least) mean something like "that cat-like thing I see". If it turns out that the cat-like creatures of our worlds are cleverly disguised robots, rather than animals, we would conclude that cats are robots, not that our world contains no cats. Hence the meaning of our word 'cat' does not include their animality.
You could, of course, introduce a new term 'shcat' which you stipulate means "cat-like animal". So then the situation I've described above would be one in which we learn that our world contains no shcats. But the English word 'cat' does not function like this. And the interesting Kripkean point is just that we can (and often do) define words by ostension, which can then display this interesting behaviour of featuring in claims that are metaphysically necessary but not analytic. That is: it's the possibility of such a distinction, rather than any particular instance of it, which is the really interesting thing here.
I agree with this. I do not know much about the philosophy of language, so I did not know that this was the consensus on the definitions of words like 'cat'.
I am not sure that there is a possible distinction in this case. It is metaphysically necessary that cats are necessary, but we have not proved it to be synthetic.