Summary: a large chunk of the history of Western philosophy is about finding out by what kinds of less conscious algorithms does the human mind arrive to certain intuitions.
In Plato's Republic, Socrates runs around Athens talking with people, trying to find an answer to the question: "What is justice?" Two and half thousands of years later we still don't have a truly definitive answer. We can spend another thousand year or two pondering it, but I suspect it would be better to reformulate the question in a more answerable way. So let's look at what Socrates is trying to do here, what his method is and what is actual question is!
It is not an empirical, scientific question that can be answered by observing something whose existence is independent of the human mind. Rather the question is about a feature of the human mind, not of a feature of the external reality out there.
However Socrates is not simply conducting an opinion survey. He is not content simply finding 74% of Athenians think justice means obeying laws. Socrates also argues against definitions of justice he considers _wrong_.
So, apparently, justice in this question relates to something that does not exist outside the human mind, but we can still have wrong opinions about it.
The method Socrates is employing is the following. He assumes when people see an actual action, they can intuitively judge it just or unjust and that judgement will be seen as _correct_. Well, not always, but at least when they are dispassionate, and have no vested interest either. So according to Socrates, any definition of justice can be tested by thought experiments that are sufficiently dispassionate and disinterested for the audience that they will actually use their Justice Sensors to form a judgement about them, and not, say, their passion like anger or greed, or their interests.
What Socrates is doing here, then, is asking people to make an algorithm that predicts what acts will a dispassionate and disinterested observer find just or unjust.
Example: "I think justice is paying debts." "Okay dude, but what if you borrowed a sword from a friend and now you see he is really mad at people and wants to go on a murderous rampage. Would it be just / righteous / correct to pay the debt and return the sword now?" "Uh, no."
This means: "I propose this algorithm." "This algorithm predicts you would find hypothetical situation X just. Would you?" "Uh, no."
The big question: is he looking for any algorithm that _happens_ to predict human intuitions of justice, or looking for the algorithm the human brain _actually_ uses? Well, they probably did not know much about algorithms back then, and they considered the brain an organ for cooling the blood but from our own angle, since we know the brain uses algorithms, any algorithm that predicts really well what another algorithm does is more or less the same algorithm.
So, "What is justice?" roughly means this: "What algorithm does our brain use when we intuitively consider something just or unjust?"
I am not claiming you can reduce all of philosophy to this, but apparently a significant chunk of Western philosophy ("footnotes to Plato") you can.
If we see philosophy this, we can also see better how does it overlap with yet why is it distinct from science. The basic ideas are the same: propose hypotheses, test them with (thought) experiments. The difference is that science is focused on looking outward, on the observable reality outside the mind. When science wants to learn about the brain, it invariably treats it as an external object and manipulates and observes it so, for example, looking at what areas of neurons light up under an fMRI scan.
Philosophy is, apparently, a form of cognitive science, a way of learning about the brain that looks inward, not outward, here the experimenters observes his own brain from the inside, and generally tries to consciously notice the subconscious algorithms his brain works with.
This is also why philosophy can feel so "truthy" on the gut level. You can have these kinds of "I knew it! I knew it all along, dammit, just did not connect the dots!" types of euphoric heureka experiences (or: "how could I have been so stupid" types of experiences) far more often in philosophy or math than in the empirical sciences such a biology, because here you study how your own brain works and you study it from the inside. It is about one part of your brain learning how the other part works. (OK, phyiscs is empirical enough and yet it happens. But the point is, it does not really happen in the empirical part of physics like measuring the weight of a particle. It happens in the mathemathical parts of physics.)
By the fact that it works, where works defined as getting goals reached?
I didn't mean to discount or disparage philosophy by it, I meant to improve it. Once we know what philosophers are trying to learn, we can try to find better methods to achieve the same. Whether that would be called philosophy or cognitive science is beside the point: the point is it would deliver what philosophers want to get delivered.
What kind of meta? "How to recruit recruiters who can recruit the kind of recruiters who can recruit the kind of recruiters who can recruit a lot of people?" is very meta, but not philosophical.
"What is music?" is philosophical. But it reduces to "By what algorithm does our subconscious hindbrain to find a sequences of sounds musical or not?"
The point is, once we know philosophy is largely looking for this kind of meta, we can try to propose more efficient methods for finding them.
But he was doing precisely that, consider the example of the guy with the borrowed sword. He designed thought experiments to test people's intuitions about justice. To be more precisely, to test people's intuitive proposals for an algorithm of justice against their intuitive judgements of examples which the algorithm was supposed to predict. He was looking for an algorithm that predicts intuitive judgements of examples, and tested all proposals. This is scientific enough. He was trying to arrive to a universal truth - could not find it, but science cannot always get a final answer at the first try. He managed to at least dispel some commonly proposed bad algorithms, such as justice is obedience to rulers, or paying debts, or similar ones, and proving some common ideas are misconceptions is an important part of the work of science.
Given that his experiments were not fully succesful at finding the final truth, of course it was not the universal truth yet, but going that direction by dispelling some myths.
To make it clear: it would be a truth about how, by what algorithms, does the brain arrive to these kinds of judgements.
It is all prediction, just aimed differently. Science is the kind of prediction that tomorrow there will be a lunar eclipse. Philosophy is the kind of prediction that if you take this algorithm and plug a situation into it, you will know how people will feel about it: they will find this act just or this sequence of sounds musical and so on.
Of course, so far philosophy is highly unsucessful at settling any question, only negatively (i.e. something is probably not true), but this is where I think it could be helped if we define it as the discipline for looking for the less-conscious algorithms in the human mind.
My larger point is that the most fundamental "what is" questions may relate to the world or the mind. And philosophy is the subset where they relate to the mind. What is music is philosophical, we are trying to find out what the mind is finding musical. What is an electron is scientific. But they overlap a lot.
The problem is that philosophical questions tend to presuppose existence. What is justice or what is music presupposes justice or music just exists like an object out there. If we understand they are questions about the mind we should rewrite them as what does the mind find just or what does the mind find musical.
Progress in philosophy was probably hampered by the "what is X?" type of formulation, instead of the "what and how our minds consider X?"
Is that a fact? What's your track record?
If you could cash out the working thing in a rigorous way, you would be in to something. But the world has long been full of STEM types who can announce the two word version of "it works"....that does not change anything.
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