Cuthbert wrote:


Suppose there aren't any.

Why would that be depressing?

Thinking outside of philosophy, I don't think there are any arguments why you should vote for candidate X rather than Y that are 'just true, no matter how you look at it.' Should you live in the city or the country, assuming you could choose? Should you fly or drive to Boston? None of these questions have answers that are true no matter how you look at them. But they are still interesting questions. And they may well have good answers, even if not infallible, cast-iron, must-be-true answers.

On the other hand, questions in maths often have must-be-true answers. Either a conjecture is true or it isn't. If and when somebody finds the proof there won't be centuries of debate about it afterwards. The proof will be accepted, there'll be a new theorem and we'll move on. Similarly in at least some science. Either infection X is caused by virus Y or it's not.

Suppose most philosophical questions are more like the first examples than the second. Then we shouldn't expect cast-iron answers and irrefutable arguments. We should expect debates, trade-offs - 'if you believe X, then you'll have to give up believing Y' - personal preferences, use of intuition, people revising their views throughout their lives, opposing schools of thought co-existing in one culture or institution etc etc. But that needn't show that philosophy is depressingly unproductive of truth or good argument. It may just show that it's dealing with questions that don't have cast-iron answers.

There's one view that says once philosophy develops questions that have straightforward answers, then those questions cease to be philosophical and are subsumed in other disciplines e.g. physics, maths or psychology.

So that's my 'cast-iron-strong' argument why philosophy doesn't offer cast-iron-strong arguments for what it's worth.

keda wrote:
For there to be a positive conclusion, at least one of the premises must be positive. Non obvious conclusions are either derived from a non-obvious premises or from obvious ones, but for some reason the conclusion is not obviously drawn drom the premises. Since the former are of no use without the latter to back up the non-obvious premises, the type of arguments you are looking for, are the latter. I do think there are such arguments, but they are hard to come by. They tend to be lurking at the fringes of language where the extension of subtle concepts have profound implications unlocking the powers of humanity, yet do not penetrate into the mainstream, for political reasons.