One of the great challenges of learning philosophy is trying to understand the difference between different schools of thought. Often it can be almost impossible to craft a definition that is specific enough to be understandable, whilst also being general enough to convey to breadth of that school of thought. I would suggest that this is a result of trying to define a school as taking a particular position in a debate, when they would be better defined as taking a particular approach to answering a question.

Take for example dualism and monism. Dualists believe that there exist two substances (typically the material substance and some kind of soul/consciousness), while monists believe that there only exists one. The question of whether this debate is defined precisely enough to actually be answerable immediately crops up. Few people would object to labelling the traditional Christian model of souls which went to an afterlife as being a Dualist model or a model of our universe with no conscious beings whatsoever as being monist. However, providing a good, general definition of what would count as two substances and what would count as one seems extraordinarily difficult. The question then arises of whether the dualism vs. monism debate is actually in a form that is answerable.

In contrast, if Dualism and Monism are thought of as approaches, then there can conceivably exist some situations Dualism is clearly better, some situations where Monism is clearly better and some situations where it is debatable. Rather than labelling the situation to be unanswerable, it would be better to call it possibly unanswerable.

Once it is accepted that dualism and monism are approaches, rather than positions the debate becomes much clearer. We can define these approaches as follows: Monism argues for describing reality as containing a single substance, while dualism argues for describing reality as containing two substances: typically one being physical and the other being mental or spiritual. I originally wrote this sentence using the word ‘modelling’ instead of ‘describing’, but I changed it because I wanted to be neutral on the issue on whether we can talk about what actually exists or can only talk about models of reality. If it was meaningful to talk about whether one or two substances actually existed (as opposed to simply being useful models), then the monism and dualism approaches would collapse down to being positions. However, the assumption that they have a "real" existence, if that is actually a valid concept, should not be made at the outset, and hence we describe them as approaches.

Can we still have our dualism vs. monism debate? Sure, kind of. We begin by using philosophy to establish the facts. In some cases, only one description may match the situation, but in other cases, it may be ambiguous. If this occurs, we could allow a debate to occur over which is the better description . This seems like a positional debate, but simply understanding that it is a descriptional debate changes how the debate plays out. Some people would argue that this question isn’t a job for philosophers, but for linguists, and I acknowledge that's there's a lot of validity to this point of view. Secondly, these approaches could be crystalised into actual positions. This would involve creating criteria for one side to win and the other to lose. Many philosophers who belong to monism, for example, would dislike the "crystalised" monism for not representing their name, so it might be wise to give these crystilised positions their own name.

We also consider free will. Instead of understanding the free will school of philosophy to hold the position that F0 exists where F0 is what is really meant by free will, it is better to understand it as an general approach that argues that there is some aspect of reality accurately described by the phrase “free will”. Some people will find this definition unsatisfactory and almost tauntological, but no more precise statement can be made if we want to capture the actual breadth of thought. If you want to know what this person actually believes, then you’ll have to ask them to define what they are using free will to mean.

This discussion also leads us a better way to teach people about these terms. The first part is to explain how the particular approach tries to describe reality. The second is to explain why particular situations or thought experiments seems to make more sense with this description.

While I have maintained that philosophical schools should be understood as approaches, rather than positions, I admit the possibility than in a few cases philosophers might have actually managed to come to consensus and make the opposing schools of thought positions rather than approaches. This analysis would not apply to them. However, if these cases do in fact exist, the appear to be far and few between.

Note: I'm not completely happy with the monism, dualism example, I'll probably replace it later when I come across a better example for demonstrating my point.